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The Chicago YouTube Accelerator is coming up and it's about actually getting it done. We've got our friends Jeff Hampton and Ryan Weber joining us to lead it because they're doing the thing. Ryan's biggest client, who happens to be his wife, is known as the real estate lawyer on YouTube and has over 95,000 subscribers. And Jeff's law firm, Channel Hampton Law, is sitting close to 600,000 subscribers. These aren't people guessing at YouTube. They're in it and they're laying out exactly what's working and, and how you can apply it to your firm. You'll dial in your niche, map out your content, script and film your first video, and build the backend so it actually turns into a system. We're in the last month before this event. If you want YouTube figured out this year, this is the place. Grab your ticket to the Chicago YouTube Accelerator at Maxflot events.com.

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This is Maximum Lawyer with your host, Tyson Mutrix. Welcome back to Maxim Lawyer, and today I've got a fun one for us conversation. I want to talk about when it comes to tracking the right numbers. So just this morning, so I get on the scale and I've been in this cutting phase where I am dropping weight because I'm trying to trim down and then I'll start building again. So the way we kind of do with my training is I'll, I'll go through a phase of, I mean, eating as much as I can so that I can, you know, build muscle. Build muscle, build muscle. And then as a part of that, you will, just by necessity, because you got to put in more calories than you burn, you will put on a few extra pounds. And so now I'm in the cutting phase where I'm cutting that weight down. It's all intentional, right? I'll, I'll be a little heavy at times and I'll be a little light at times. It just, that's just how it works. And it's interesting because I'm down ten pounds. So I've done a really good job of cutting. But. And I guess I'll say now I'll get to the but first. I, I'll do that. The but is I get on the scale, I weigh myself, and then I've got an app that tracks things for me, and it says that my weight is, quote, unquote, slightly high, and my BMI is, quote unquote, slightly high. And remember, I am, I'm ten pounds down, right? So I'm pulling up my, the app now, and it, it has me at a BMI of I think 24.41 is what it is. So. Which is just kind of silly, that number because it has me as like, basically I'm overweight. And it's, it's, it kind of led me to what I want to talk about today, right? Where sometimes I think what we do is we will look at these numbers and they'll guide us in certain ways. But here's the, here's what you got to know. Here's a really important number you should know about my weight. My body fat's right around 12% right now. Okay, so. Which is phenomenal for a 43 year old. Okay, that's phenomenal. And so it's, it's one of the things where like we are sometimes in our firms we're guided by these numbers where they, we think they say one thing and they say, they, they actually probably say something else or, or more likely they tell you nothing at all. That's, I mean, for example, you know, revenue is a number. Now that I think that is a number. That is, it is a relevant number. But having just the revenue number tells me such a small amount about your firm. Okay, if you're making zero, that tells me a lot. And if you're making like 10 million, that tells me a lot. But if, let's say you're making a million, that doesn't tell me a whole lot. You could be, you could make a million a variety of different ways, many of which are unprofitable. Okay, that is, that's the key. You. So in, in that instance, profit is really, really important. But we have all these different numbers that we look at that really don't tell us a whole lot. That's the whole point. And it, I really, I got me thinking about this quote. So there's that quote that what, what matters gets measured. I don't know if you've. And I, I can't tell you who that's attributed to, but that's not the quote that I actually want to talk about. But I was thinking about that one. But then I was also thinking about this other one that's often attributed to Albert Einstein. But I, I went down this rabbit hole and looked this up and here's the quote and it's actually got a few different people that might be attributed to. It's not everything that is measured matters and not everything that matters can be measured. I think that that is very true too. And so here's the interesting part about this is that there is, I pulled this Up. It could be. Sounds like most likely William Bruce Cameron instead of Albert Einstein. There are a few other people or maybe one or two people. Others. Hilliard, Jason, Steven Ross, Lor Platt, George Pickering. All of those people are potential suitors for that quote. But that's not the point of this episode. I thought it was kind of an interesting, Interesting fact, but. So there's a. There's part. There's multiple parts to this quote that I kind of want to talk about. Not everything that me that is measured matter matters. I do think there's a lot of data that we track in law firms that you either do nothing with or mean nothing. Okay. So you really got to figure out, like, what is this telling me about the firm? If it doesn't tell you about. At the firm, either stop tracking it or quit caring like, I know the most important number in our firm. Average fee. It tells me so much about the. About. About what's going on. It could tell us, okay, maybe the case is taking too long. Um, maybe the cases are. Actually, we're. We're on track when it comes to how long the cases are. Maybe we need to tweak our hammer letters. There's so much information we can take from that. We can analyze it from a lot of different ways, and it's a very, very valuable number for us. Quality of leads, all that. Like, there's so many different things that we can dissect from there, and that's why we track those other things too. Right. But there's also that not everything that matters can be measured. All right? So, for example, I talked about my weight being down. I feel great. Other than the allergies right now. The allergies have got me. You can probably hear my voice. That part has me. That part sucks. But other than that, I feel good. I can. I can run. I can jump. I can lift weights. I can do all the great things, you know, throw a football around. Even after having my shoulder surgery at the end of 2024, I think is what it was. 2025. Yeah. 20. End of 2024, you know, I can throw football again. I can throw a baseball. So, like, all these things that, you know, are. That limit a lot of people, I can do all those things, right? I can. I really put a number on feeling good. I don't. I don't know. I mean, I guess I could try to maybe put a scale on it every day. How are you feeling today? Between 1 and 10. I guess you could do that, but it's such a subjective thing. It's it's affected by so many different factors, but from a health standpoint, you can't quite measure that part of it. Right? You just can't. So not everything that you try to measure or not, not everything that matters really can be measured. But I do want to try to figure out what are some things that we can look at, because I, I really want to, really want to convey to you, like, how important is to have, like a number, if you can, for your firm to focus on. For us, average fee means a lot. It's really important. Part of it we've gotten. I remember my first. Here's a. Here's how big of a deal this is. Okay. When I first started tracking this number, it was about 7, $400 per. Per case. That's what our average fee was. And now we're up around 25,000 per case. That is a significant difference in a matter of, you know, 15 years. I mean, you're, you're talking about. There's lots, excuse me, lots of things that went into that when it comes to the quality of the leads that you bring in. So your marketing changes. You're talking about how you manage the actual cases themselves. You know, whether it comes to filing suit on cases, getting rid of cases at the right time, there's so many different things that go into it that helps build that number or make the number collapse, because there have been times where that number's gone down, and it's really worried us. And so we adjusted things so we know that that's, that's why that number is so important as that as time goes by, if the numbers keeps. Number keeps going up, and in theory, it should keep going up or at some point stay pretty steady. And it's, it stayed. We've had a pretty significant, significant jump over the last two years. But other than that, it's, it's. It's steadily gone up. We had. For a while, it stayed at 18, five couple years. It actually was pretty steady. We had some big jumps. And that's typically how it's gone, is we've had some big jumps and then it's. It stays steady and then big jumps and stay steady. It's kind of interesting how, how that's kind of worked. But. All right, so let's talk a little bit about the illusion of progress, because sometimes you'll have good numbers, but they're really just hiding behind bad incomes. Okay. Because there's a lot of firms that they will celebrate these vanity metrics like revenue, like lead volume. That's a vanity metric. I don't. I. I'm sure I'm gonna get some pushback about this. But lead volume, there's a person that is in the association, you know, when it was. When it was the guild, there was. That was getting a ton of leads. I'm talking so many leads. She was getting a. Just. Just pummeled with leads. And that was the keyword she was getting pummeled with. With leads. 90% of them, 95 of them were garbage. And it was just depleting the firm's resources. It's a vanity network, a number. That's all it is. It's just a metric that is for vanity only. Sign cases is. Sign cases can be a vanity network metric. Sorry. Now, the way to filter for that is if. As long as you're getting quality leads. So getting quality leads will help you filter for sign cases being a vanity metric. And so you need to make sure you are tying these to. If you have a metric like that, you need to tie them to realistic metrics that actually tell you things. Number of employees. Another vanity metric I've talked about a lot. I don't know why anyone would. Would decide to say, oh, y. 60 employees. That's. That means we're successful. No means nothing. If you're still working 80 hours a week and you have 60 employees, well, you're still doing something wrong. Yeah. Doesn't make a whole lot of sense. So. Which kind of leads me to something else I wanted to talk about, like, what if. What if growth for your firm, like, what if success was actually like, less chaos. What if. What if that's what it was. Where less fires are put out, less pressure. Things like that. That. That's an interesting kind of a thought. That's one of those ones. It Can. Can you measure that? And probably not. But here's what you probably can measure. And here's a number that I'm gonna throw out there. A metric that maybe some of you might want to try out. And especially if you have problems with this number of hours at the office or number of hours work per week, I think that that's a number you can play with a little bit and help you decide whether or not you're getting from your firm what you want. I remember Jason Selk at maxlocon last year, which I guess before I tell this story, I'll go ahead and remind everyone. Maxalcon.com get your tickets for 2026 in Atlanta. That's. It's going to be a banger. It's Going to be so much fun. Really, really excited about Atlanta. We've got some amazing speakers coming. So Maxwell Condeched. But Jason, he had, he had pushed, he had really encouraged people to, okay, how do you leave earlier from the office and how do you get to the office a little bit later? And I thought it was an interesting thing, really interesting to try to change the way you're looking at success because that's, that's essentially what he was doing. He was saying like, okay, is success really being the first one of the office? You know, 6:00am staying there till 9:00 clock at night and my first boss out of law school, that's, that's what, that's the way he valued metric. That was his value metric was how much time you spent the office. Not a healthy way of doing it. That's why he had a lot of personal issues, just a lot of personal issues directly attributable to that. Now I also do think that there are times where you need to be at the office late or be at the office early. Maybe you have a trial and you're in the middle of a trial. Yeah, things like that. Absolutely. But if you can, whenever you don't have something, some big event like that happening like a trial, if you can work on number of hours at the office at a minimum, that is a pretty good signal that you're doing all right. And you're, you, you have to be able to do this with the firm still succeeding, still everything, all, all the other metrics that are, that matter to your firm. You have to be able to do it with those things still improving. So that's the key too, because there is a, I've talked about this before. This isn't, this will not be a surprise to you. You still have to work hard. You still have to work really, really hard, especially early on. You have to put in the investment early on into the firm so that you can start to chisel away at, at the, at your number of hours that you work every single week. So don't, please don't confuse this. Especially if you're just starting out. Don't think that, oh, this is going to be the metric that you're going to focus on when it comes to the number of hours at the office. I'm really more talking about the people that have been doing this for about a decade. That's now can you still do it? Sure. Is it? But don't expect, expect that hockey stick growth. If you're not going to put in the work. Okay, you gotta put in the work. So. All right, so let's talk about some, some metrics that in my opinion actually matter because you do for some people have to redefine the scorecard a little bit. Some of these, I, I don't really want people to focus on the surface level metrics. I want them to more focus on the ones that matter, the ones that are more for high performers, high performing firms, because that's where you're going to leverage that efficiency and the outcomes that you're looking at. And a lot of times it, it's just firm dependent. Right? Like for us, average, average fee is a really important number that's not going to work for everybody. Okay. It's just not. And so just like BMI is not the right metric for me, the BMI might be a good metric for other people that are trying to lose weight might be a really good metric. But for me, wrong metric does not work for me. Not at all. So. Because it doesn't take into consideration like muscle builds and there's lots of things. And there's so many things that just doesn't take into consideration. So not, not the right one for me. But. Okay, so here's some metrics that you might want to play around with. So profit per case. So instead of focusing on revenue, profit per case or profit per team, those are some really good metrics to see how things are going. Especially anyone that does litigation, you can, well, I guess really anything but what's really interesting about profit per team, so you can look at, if you're doing litigation, pre litigation versus litigation, is going into litigation profitable for us? Is this something that it's actually working for us? And that's, that's an interesting number to look at when it comes to your pre litigation versus your, your litigation teams. Where, like, where's the profit coming from? Where are you getting the most profit? And then also if you can, if you can chisel down a profit per case, also a really good one, that's, that's another one you can look at a little bit tougher to look at. You're, you're looking at a lot of averages and all that, which is, which is completely fine, but it's also something you play around with qualified leads. So if you can, instead of focusing on leads and focus on qualified leads, these are the ones that you actually want. Okay. See, these are the cases that you actually want, the matters that you actually want. That's a really important, important one. Okay, so this next one is. I kind of talked about this a little bit but cases that align with your ideal client. Right. So these are. Because I'm sure that a lot of you, you have matters or cases that you've signed, you put sort of in one bucket, the ones that you really want and then the ones that you sort of begrudgingly took. So if you can focus more on the ones that you really wanted, that's, that's a pretty important metric. So, and I'm not saying that we don't, we, we take cases sometimes that we, you know, didn't end up really liking. And so we end up either withdrawing or kind of pushing it all the way through begrudgingly to something to some extent. You, if you've got as long as the, the cases you want pile is increasing percentage wise and the cases you don't want is, is decreasing over time, you're, you're heading in the right direction. And then the last one is, this is the one, the work hours. So this is how much is the owner dependent here? How, how much, how dependent are you or is the firm of you at the office? So if you can minimize your time at the, and this is one of those ones where it's just a challenge. I'm sort of challenging you on this one. Where can you find a way to work less at the, at the office so you can do the things that you want to do. You know, go to soccer practice, coach your kids, going to their, any of their athletic events or any of their extracurricular activities or visiting them at school. Things like that. That to me is where the value is. I'm sure I'm not, not like I am certain. I am certain because I've talked to these people that have, that found maximum lawyer late in their careers and they regret not having the ability to have those moments with their kids. And what I don't want for you, especially if you are, if you've not reached that point later in their career where you've missed all these events with your kids. What I want for you is that you build, you be able to actually go to those things and spend time with your family and have a good marriage, be healthy. All these things that you need to make time for working out, you've got to make time for these things. I want those things for you so that you can have a better life. And part of that is being able to get the system set up in, at the firm that you, that you need, make sure you have the mark, the, the marketing on point. All of these things that you should be focusing on. That way you can actually spend time, less time at the office. So you can do these other things. Okay. These things that will help better you as a person, but also better your family, allow you to live longer. All that, all that is really, really important. So there's the quote, the reason why I like the average fee is there's that Stephen Covey quote. The main thing is to keep the main thing. The main thing. And so we, that's why we have like a number. I do really think it's important that you have. Try to have a number that you can focus on so that everyone can sort of keep focused on that and keep the main thing. The main thing. And you can, you have like, it's sort of like a unified effort. So I would really encourage you to do that because it helps you with the scoreboard. Having a scoreboard of sorts is really, really important. So. All right, that's all I have for this week. Hopefully you got something from this. Make sure you start focusing on some numbers that truly matter to your firm. It doesn't matter. The numbers that I said today to you, I gave some examples. None of those may work for you and that's completely okay. Completely fine. You have to figure out what's. What works for your firm. And some of that takes some, some digging with your team and so figure that out. Focus on those things and ignore the rest. But all right. Remember to check out Becca's list. Becca's list co make sure you get your Tickets to Max Lawcon Maxlocan 2026. Go to Maxlocan.com and we will be seeing you all next week. It's your buddy Foreign.