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Before you go, quick shout out to becaslist if you've ever hired a vendor for your law firm and immediately thought, yeah, that wasn't it, this exists for you. Becca's list is a curated list of companies that work with law firm owners. No paid placements, no random recommendations, just real reviews from law firm owners who have already learned the hard way. If you want to see what's working for other firms and help us grow Becca's list to the largest place for law firms to find trusted answers, head to beccaslist Co and leave your first review today.

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This is Maximum Lawyer with your host, Tyson Mutrix.

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Welcome back to the Maximum Lawyer podcast. Today's episode is another session straight from the Maxlock on 2025 stage. This. This presentation comes from Brooks Derrick. In this talk, Brooks challenges the idea that technology, or AI is the real threat to lawyers. Instead, he argues that the real risk is forgetting what makes great lawyers great in the first place. He shares personal stories, hard earned lessons, and a powerful reminder that empathy, judgment, and human connection are the things no machine can replace. This is Brooks Dehriks Max. Lock on session. Do what the robots can't.

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I was walking in here this morning and I was thinking, oh, man, I need to start doing the things I do before Ryan Weber comes to my office and to get ready for those talks. And then he walked in, he goes, I know what you're doing. You're in your room telling you like, you fucking idiot. Let's go. You've got this. Let's go. And he was exactly. Damn right. All right, how I got to hit these clips here, right? Big green button. Yeah. All right, who is the greatest lawyer you know? I want you to pick that person up and put them in your head. Think about that person. It might be a mentor, it might be a legend. Trial lawyer legend. It might even be your dad. This is my four wonderful kids right here. I know, I know. I'm a late bloomer. It's okay. It's fine. Now, before Batman up here came on the scene and showed up and I bloomed. Things weren't exactly sunshine and rainbows. Before that. Got that lawyer in your head again. What makes that lawyer great? Shout something out, whatever comes to your head. They care. They care. Okay. What else? Fairness. I like that. What else? They listen. What else? Say it again. Preparation. I like it. What else? Persistence. I like that, too. Character. Not. Not a character, but character.

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Right.

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Tenacity. That's right. These are all amazing qualities, right? Empathy, compassion, judgment. All these things are what make us Humans, right? My guess is that none of you said in your brain, of course you wouldn't spout this out if you thought it. But man, that lawyer, that, he really can read those medical summaries really well, right? Or man, this one guy, no, he's got a really great standard objection template, right? It's not the things, right? And nobody's hiring us for that either, right? They're not hiring us because we're efficient at paperwork. They hire us for our empathy, for our ability to look at them across the table, tell them what's going on so they can feel cared for. These aren't soft skills, right? Neuroscience tells us that they are wired into us. That's what makes us us. These things that the bots can't replicate, they cannot do what we do at a consultation, or we're given advice on whether to take a settlement or not. That's what separates us from the machines. I'm here to tell you that the robots aren't the threat to us. The threat is us forgetting why we became lawyers in the first place. So let me tell you a story. Oh, shit, right? Anybody, Anybody seen one of these on your Google business profile before? Yeah. You know that feeling you got? I woke up one morning, I was hopping on the computer and I thought, wait a minute, did I just see that? I clicked it back. Oh, God, I thought the sky was falling. I thought, I'm gonna lose my bar license. We go there, right? In that moment of terror, you're not thinking reasonably. You think, oh, shit, the bar is gonna know. My current clients are all gonna call today because they've been on Google looking for pizza and they found this terrible review of me, right? And hell, my wife might even leave me because I can't get a damn good Google review, right? It's all dumb shit. And we all go down those rabbit holes, right? It is wild. This review, this. This guy said, I'm gonna read this. Really? I called this place because all the five star reviews saying they explained everything. They explained nothing to me. I don't know where these five star reviews came from, but this is not the place. Oh, God. First thing I did was I looked in our. All of our stuff to figure out, is this guy really talking about our firm or is it the Derrick Law Firm down the street? Well, he was in pipe drive, so he had called us. And so I did what I probably wouldn't have done a couple of years before that. I picked up the phone and I called the guy and he just had a property damage claim and so for you personal injury lawyers in here, you know that that claim is one we probably can't even charge for, right? But we usually would hold that person's hand through the process and let them know what else to do, right? We hadn't done that with this guy. But when I got on the phone with him, it also turned out that he had a bodily injury claim that we hadn't figured out. Because the guy was so damn stressed out about his property damage claim. He wasn't worried about the fact that his neck was hurting. The insurance company was jerking him around. He felt unseen by them and, turns out, by us. But by the end of that call, we signed him up as a client. I'll tell you what happens at the end. But what I learned in that conversation, he wasn't angry about the advice because my intake person had told him what to do. She just hadn't explained why. He was angry because he felt like a number in the system, right? And I had built that shitty damn system. It all comes back to us right now. I'm gonna rewind a little bit farther. This is 2022ish right here. I'm gonna rewind a little farther. This is where it all started. Okay. Not this exactly. This is actually. This is. Claude created this image for me, so. Thank you, Claude. We moved to upstate South Carolina in 2016. Me and my wife had a practice in Charleston, South Carolina. We moved up there when my grand passed away. I wanted to be closer to my family. We got up there. My wife, who had no legal experience at all, or my fiance at the time, was my employee. And so I was trying to manage a practice in Charleston and a practice in Simpsonville, which is about three hours away. And I developed cervical radiculopathy down my right arm. I had fallen at a club in Charleston. I'd fallen down some stairs. I was walking down the stairs. I wasn't drunk. Let the record reflect I still had my damn suit on. It was early. I had my first drink in my hand, but my feet went out from under me. I landed on my back. And it caused a cascade of crazy, crazy problems. The pain was so intense that I couldn't drive. I couldn't sit for long periods of time. The only place that had any respite was the couch. I thought this was. I kept telling it to put more stuff in there. The coffee and the wine is very important. Two coping mechanisms for me back then. I spent almost the next year on a couch managing my practice or trying to. And finally I went through all the conservative treatment hoops. You personal injury lawyers know this process. And I was able to get a epidural injection. Then I got to go to physical therapy and get through all the stuff. But as I'm crawling out of this hole, my wife that's our first baby boy. He's a joy, by the way. West Derek like Kanye. Oh, wait, old Kanye, not crazy fucking Kanye. College dropout Kanye. Okay. One night I am walking around with him in my bedroom, trying to get that little kid to sleep like a baby. And I am just distraught. And I remember telling him, I just hope you're proud of me someday, man, because there's not a lot to be proud of right now. We were financially fucked. Excuse my language. Well, not really. That's a good way to get out of the tears, right? And I did what anybody desperate would do. I just tried to gobble up knowledge. I'd been trying to figure out how to be a really good lawyer for probably the past 10 years. That's all I concentrated on. I didn't know what a damn P and L was. I didn't know what cash flow meant. Don't tell anybody. But I didn't even. I hadn't paid the irs. I was a mess. But I started gobbling up information. I read the four Hour Workweek. That was the first little like, oh, that's interesting. E Myth Traction Join Maximum Laurie about this time, 2018, I think something like that. And just devoured stuff. And we systematized everything. I tried to at least case management documents. I didn't have a lot of cases because while I was laying on the couch, I wouldn't sign anything up. I wasn't signing much up. But luckily during that time period, it wasn't all lost because I had a whole bunch of shit that was settling along the way. I just wasn't getting any new files in. So there was a big dip in lull in income for a little while. And I just had time to do all this stuff. And it started to work. We processed everything. We started to get leads, we started to sign up cases. We started to settle cases again. My notes keep flipping back to the very beginning of my talk. I'm sorry. And then towards the end of 2022, it all came together. Okay, 2022, we signed up 51 cases. In 2023, we signed up 117 cases. Same team, same people, same website, same Google, my business. We hadn't turned anything on. We hadn't done anything different except the real thing that we were doing at that point in time, we were capturing every damn lead that came through the door and dealing with it. I think this is about the time where Jim had his interview with the seven part series with Ethan's dad, and we just were nailing it. We signed up with some shitty ones, don't get me wrong, right? But we cut them. We cut them loose. All these ain't real great cases, right? But we were. We were. We were doing what Ethan's dad told us to. Catch, figure it out and release. If not. Right. But was also working on the back end, okay? That was the first time I hit a million bucks. I opened my law practice in 08, okay? After I got fired from my first job after five months. Details. But again, this was the same people, same team, same stuff. Nothing was changing. We were just making some tweaks on the back end. We were just looking at one real KPI. Are we sending demand letters out? One process goal. If you can't ask for money, they ain't gonna give you no money, right? So that's all we. That's the biggest thing we were doing. But there was a problem. One problem. I don't know how much time I got left, FYI. Do I still have 26 minutes? Is that gonna stay 26 the whole time? Cause I'm gonna fucking keep talking. Just know. I don't know how much time's left, so I'm just gonna finish, okay? Becca. What? Three minutes left. Oh, shit. All right, so. Man, I can. That's too much. All right, here's a question. What are we optimizing for? Right? When you get in the. In the weeds, when you get all this stuff, can I have five? Six maybe? Okay. Sorry, I'm telling stories too much. What are we optimizing for? Are we optimizing for a better. Another opportunity to solve a problem? Are we optimizing to be able to be a real fucking lawyer right now? Don't get me wrong. I'm not some damn Luddite. We're doing all of the things right. But what I want to kind of emphasize to you today is when you have some spare time, don't find a new zapier link, okay? Go serve on a board. Go do something in your community, right? Go visit your clients, right? And this is in our brains. I said this earlier. This is in our brains. We have these things called mirror neurons. If I move my hand like this, you know what's going on in your brains? Your brain is mirroring what I'm doing biologically, automatically. Okay? Nobody knows why we do it, but we do it, okay? That's. It's automatic empathy. That's something that the damn computer can't do for you, right? Computer can't do that. Computer don't have no mirror neurons, right? This right here, this is me podcast lawyer friends in food. One thing that I've started to do when I freed up more time, when we touch each other, when we give each other a handshake and we hug, you know what happens in your body? Oxytocin's released trust hormone. You know who doesn't have any oxytocin? A damn computer right now. I got a timer. Hey, I would have been going faster. See, this is your fault. Whoever. No, I'm kidding. This is where trust happens. Hugs. This is why when you have a meeting face to face, meeting with your client at your office, the relationship's a little bit better, right? This is why injury lawyers want the damn insurance adjuster to show up to mediation and not get on the phone. Because it's harder to say no to somebody when they're staring them in the eyeballs and they're crying versus on the phone when they can just go, eh, This is it right here. The purpose of technology is to free us to be more human, right? Not to be more machine like, okay? When you get a spare moment, when you get a free moment, when you get a free. When you get free time, go home early. Like Jason Selka said yesterday, don't try to figure out a new zap all the time or a make integration, okay? This is what we should be optimizing for, okay? Optimizing for more connection with your client, clients, with your family and with yourself. Optimize for the opportunity to have some judgment during the day, right? Don't worry about drafting that summons and complaint for the simple car crash case. That shit should be already done. Your paralegal should be able to do that. You should be meeting with your clients and talking to them about the pros and cons of going to trial. Not worried about whether or not somebody's catching a phone call or you're missing a lead or like I used to do in the middle of the night, sitting up at 3am and going, what is the statute of limitations for the Smith matter? Oh, shit, give me the phone. Right? It should be in your computers. It should be right there. Telling you there's a bottleneck, telling you the sol's coming up, telling you if you're a criminal person, you got to be in court three hours away tomorrow morning at 8:15, right? The computer get. So that you can have judgment and you can give service. Give service to your community, give service to your family, and give service to yourself. Okay? This is it. AI is not the threat. The threat is us forgetting why we became lawyers. And you didn't go to law school. You didn't originally take the LSAT because you wanted to look at a medical summary. You didn't think to yourself, ooh, I can't wait to write those requests for production, you know? No. Oh, discovery, I love it. I can't wait for more discovery. Right? We didn't do that. You went to law school because you believe in justice, right? You wanted to help people going through hard times. You wanted to be able to, maybe you're not a hugger, but shake somebody's hand, give some service, right? Right. Now, what happened to me back then is every time I had an opportunity to free myself up to do something real, I was like, let me work on filevine for a second. I think I need to tweak this. I don't like the organization of this one tab. Don't get into that trap. If you do what Jason Selk said yesterday and you set a time to come in and a time to go home, you get the fuck out of your office. At the time you said you were going to go home, okay? Don't try to solve more problems. Don't try to refine the prompt. Go home. What's this Apple Store? You can walk into an Apple Store and buy anything. Buy anything off the shelf, right? You don't have to talk to a single person. You can go in there. I need a hard drive. I'm going to go in there. You pick the thing off, scan it with your phone, pay, walk out. But Apple's got 20,000 people standing there with blue shirts on. You know why? Why do you think? Humans matter, right? Humans matter. We got questions. We need answers. Even though Google and ChatGPT and everything they probably have on the Apple app can answer the phone. I mean, answer the question for us. We want a human, right? We want to figure out how to use Apple Mail or get our grandmother how to use Apple Mail. We don't send her to a website. We sit down with her and show her how to use Apple Mail. Or we set her up an appointment at the fucking Apple Store, right? Remember this. They ain't hiring us for all the things that we're concerned about, right? They're not hiring us for our zapier knowledge, our make knowledge, our ability to make the correct API Call whatever the hell that means. Even though I did. But it's weird, right? A hook. Catch.