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If your firm feels one good decision away from a breakthrough, then this is for you. We're hosting our first mastermind of 2026 in Phoenix on February 26th and 27th, and it's two days designed to actually move your firm forward and grow who you are as a leader. Day one is a full day of hot seats where you break into groups and work through the real problems in your business. Day two is our wellness workshop, featuring sessions that help you boost your energy, lower stress, and think more clearly. We have Jocelyn and Erin Freeman, host of a top 10 marriage podcast and masters in psychology, teaching relationship skills that you'll use at work and at home. A lunch and learn on habit formation with Tyson and more. View the full event details and grab your seat@maxwell events.com.

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This is Maximum Lawyer with your host, Tyson Mutrix. Foreign.

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Welcome back to the Maximum Lawyer podcast. Today we're sharing another session from MaxLawCon 2025. Today's episode features Jim Hacking, immigration lawyer and law firm owner who has been in the game long enough to tell the truth about what it really looks like behind the scenes. In this talk, Jim breaks down why failure is not the thing that derails you. It's how you respond to it. He shares stories from his own journey, the lessons he's learned the hard way, and a framework for using setbacks as feedback so you can build stronger systems, lead better, and keep moving forward when things feel heavy. This is falling how our failures paved the road to success with Gym Hacking.

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Bill Gates said, success is a lousy teacher. It teaches most people. It seduces most people, smart people, into thinking they can't lose. So I want to talk about our failures. You know, I went around the room last night talking to me, how you doing? Oh, I'm good. I'm good. How you doing? Oh, I'm busy. I'm busy. We love to talk about how busy we are. I think that we need to be vulnerable. We need to be honest. So this talk is for those of us who aren't doing great, who are struggling, who are having a hard time. Maybe their dad passed away. Maybe their best employees quit. Maybe their associates started their own firm. You know, So I want to talk about that. I want to talk about my failures, your failures, and what we can learn from them. So this is Reggie Jackson, Mr. October. He's in the hall of Fame. He was named MVP twice. He was the World Series MVP. They called him Mr. October because he was clutch. In the playoffs, he had over 500 home runs, 1,700 RBI 2,500 hits. He also has one more record. Does anybody know what it is? Most strikeouts. That's exactly right. He has more strikeouts than hits. And he's one of the best baseball players of all time. So we're not going to hit a home run every time. Why do we talk about failure? Failure is universal. You can't get away from it. You will have highs and lows, you will have problems. You will have issues that you have to deal with. That's part of owning a law firm. This is why we own a law firm. So my sister works at a big company. She got reorganized. She got a new boss that she doesn't like. And I said to myself, that's why I own my own law firm, so I don't have to have a boss that I don't like. So it's a trade off, right? We think that everything's going to be perfect. We come to this conference, we have all these great ideas, we're going to put all in the place, and everything's going to be golden. It's just not true. But every failure inside of it has the roadmap to success. So my first failure that I want to share with you was when I was a young man, before I went to law school, I worked at a law firm for two years in the mailroom. It was the best job I ever had. I was a runner. I went out and looked for cases. I did research. We didn't have the Internet back then, so if we had to find out about a defective product, I had to go to other law firms. It was great. And while I worked there, the fellows that I worked for as a plaintiff's firm, they wanted to file a class action against Blue Cross Blue Shield. And they said, well, because you work here, you have Blue Cross Blue Shield. So we want to make you the plaintiff in this class action. So they filed a class action. James Oliver Hacking III versus Blue Cross Blue Shield. Two years later, I'm sitting there talking to my future wife, and I tell her, hey, you know, I'm the plaintiff in this lawsuit. She goes, what are you talking about? I didn't give a deposition. I didn't do discovery. I didn't do anything. She goes, that's a really bad idea. St. Louis is a small legal community. You never know when that might come back and bite you in the ass. And I said, oh, no, those guys that I worked with, they'll protect me. Nothing bad will happen. Famous last words. So a year and a half later, we graduate law school. I get A crappy job at a crappy firm making $40,000 a year. And after about a year and a half, the biggest, most prestigious, one of the biggest, most prestigious law firms in town calls and wants to hire me as a lateral name of the firm's Lewis Rice. That's their conference room, if you can believe that. So I had it all worked out perfectly. We got married on Saturday. I quit my job on Friday. I was going to double my salary. I was going to go from 40,000 to 85,000. I would be working 200 hours a week. It would be crazy work hours, but I was going to make a lot of money. And I got married on Saturday, went on our honeymoon on Sunday, went to Bermuda, came back. And when I got back, there was a message on the voicemail. Hey, Jim, come in tomorrow. There's a problem. And in between the time that they had hired me, they had brought on a new partner. And that partner's biggest client was Blue Cross Blue Shield. And that partner's biggest case was James Oliver Hacking III vs Blue Cross Blue Shield. So I started off my marriage unemployed, right? And so I thought it was the worst thing ever. I thought, oh, my God, I'm never going to find another job like that. I'll never be happy. I'll be living in a van down by the river. That's what I thought. And so eventually I found another job. And here's the thing. If I had gotten that job, my life would have been extremely different. I wouldn't be here right now. If I'd gotten that job, I wouldn't be here right now. And I wouldn't have these four kids. I would have probably one kid, and they'd probably be neurotic, and I would make them way too anxious. So I wouldn't know these beautiful people in my life. It would have been a completely fundamental thing. So here I thought, it's the worst thing ever. I'm not going to make that money back. And it turns out that I would have had a very different family in life. So I'm very grateful that I didn't take my wife's advice and get my name off that complaint. All right, so the limits of success. Success feels good, but it teaches little. Success can mask man these strings weaknesses in systems failure is the sharper teacher for sure. Okay, so this is just a picture of the Red Sox losing 28 to 5. It's only because I hate the Red Sox. So I just. No real lesson there other than the Red Sox lost 28 to 5. So a lot of this comes from a book by John Maxwell called Failing Forward. I highly recommend it. The difference between average people and achieving people is their perception of and their response to failure. So we have to be resilient. Resilience is something that's very important for law firm owners. And the lessons from failures. That failure is feedback. It's not final. Failure is not an event. It's how you respond to it and how you react to it that determines your success. Mistakes are data, so use them. Learn from your mistakes. All right? So the next time that I made a really, really big mistake was I was a lawyer for everybody. So when I opened up my firm in 2008, When I opened up my law firm in 2008, I was doing whatever walked in the door. Law, right. I wasn't specialized. I wasn't doing immigration only. It was very, very. Whatever I did, needed to do to pay the bills. And I got referred a case for the man on the left. His name's Cedric. And Cedric was an African American man who ended up sitting in the St. Louis City Jail for five weeks because they said he was Cory. And he said, I'm not Cory, I'm Cedric. And they said, no, you're Cory. So they locked him up for five weeks. And this was before Ferguson, before George Floyd. And I thought that he had a good lawsuit. Apparently, the St. Louis Sheriff's Office had a big problem with this. And I worked on a class action. I spent about 250 hours on that case, and I lost on summary judgment because of sovereign immunity. The judge basically said, yeah, these two black guys do look sort of alike. So the cops get a passenger. Well, during that, that case got some publicity. And the man on the right was wrongfully charged with armed robbery. And I had no business taking that case. But I did take the case and we lost. Right? So those are bad things. Those were bad outcomes for sure. Cornell eventually got out. We got his case overturned on appeal because the judge wouldn't let me put in evidence of who really did it. But in any event, that was the price I needed to pay. Well, so what happened was while I was litting those cases, I wasn't signing up anything, right? So I was just working nonstop on those cases. And when you're a one person show and you're not signing up cases, guess what? Cash dries up. So cash was drying up. If you guys came to Max All Kahn at Del Mar hall, that was where I told the story of how I was broke and I. And I had been untruthful to my wife about the fact that we were broke, she was not living or she's not working with me at the time. And I basically had to come to her and say, hey, I'm out of money and I'm not sure what we're going to do. So I liquidated my 401k from my old firm, and that's what kept us going. So I had to deal with issues about not being honest. I had to deal with issues about money. And most importantly, I had to deal with making a decision about what my law firm was going to be. And it was after getting my teeth kicked in, in those two cases, which were about six months apart, that I said, I'm just going to do immigration because that's what people want. That's what the need is. So from that loss, those losses, I learned what I needed to do. I was able to focus. It was painful. Everything became very clear. But it was only because of the loss. If I had won those cases, I probably would have thought, oh, I'm a criminal defense lawyer. Oh, I'm a class action lawyer. Right. So, again, I wish Cedric would have won. I wish Cornell would have won at trial. But at the end of the day, it was the cost of admission to my new future. Right. And so that's what all these lessons are. They're all pathways to a better future. If you take it. If you just fold up shop and say, oh, I'm never going to be in a courtroom again, or I'm never going to litigate again, or I'm never going to, you know, it all takes, it all depends on how you interpret what happens to you. Right. That determines your success. And so, like I said, so that made me go immigration only. And that's. That's been. We've, you know, we've. We've become huge in immigration. That's all that we do. My decision at that point was, I was reading Seth Godin and he said, americans attention spans are so short that if they think of one word, you want them to think of you. And if they think of you, they want you. You want them to think of one word. So immigration is my word, and that's how I got there. So a lot of times you'll hear motivational speakers, not Matt Foley, but other motivational speakers will say, if the possibility of failure was erased, what would you attempt to achieve? If the possibility of failure was erased, what would you attempt to achieve? It's a good question. But it's impossible to do away with failure. You can't do away with failure. So a better question is, if your perception of response to failure was changed, then what would you attempt to achieve? So can you guys be easy on yourself? Not so hard on yourself. Can you give yourself some grace to say, I took a chance. It was an experiment. I learned. Maybe it was a costly experiment. Maybe you put a bunch of money into a software that ended up not working for you. Whatever it is, it's just a lesson. It's just part of the path. You got a long way ahead of you. A lot of more opportunities to make mistakes. So when an error occurs, one of my favorite things to do in the office is to ask questions. Why? The question? Why? So can somebody tell me a mistake or issue that they had come up in their firm recently? Anybody? Is that Nick? Yeah, Nick. Okay, so let's talk about the associates starting their firm. Why did that happen? Why did you do that? This is an insidious test. It's not fun. Why? So why do you do that? One more time. Why didn't you want to deal with it? I think fear is a lot at the core. I mean, you can see it's sort of like those Russian nesting dolls. You know, you get to the core issue. But I learned that from Tim Ferriss, and I think it's really, really helpful. It doesn't have to be that big. It can be something like, well, the FedEx went out too late. Well, why did it go out too late? Because the person was doing other things. Well, why are they doing other things? Because you gave them too much to do. So a lot of time it's going to come back to you. It's going to come back to your fear. And that brings up one of the points that I make all the time. It's in another slide, which is everything is our fault. Everything is because of us. We're responsible for everything in our firm. So you can get mad at the people that work for you, but ultimately it's a failure of systems. Right? All right. So let's talk about what failure is and is not. What failure is not avoidable. A single event. It's not objective. Truth. I think that's really important to understand. It's the enemy. No, we think it's the enemy. It's not. It's not irreversible. It's not a stigma, and it's not final. What failure is, is inevitable. It's a process. It's objective. It's a teacher. It's temporary. It's an opportunity. It's a chance for a new Beginning, just like for me. So owning our team failures. Like I said, in a law firm, mistakes are inevitable. It's ultimately a failure of your systems. Whatever fail problem you're having, it's a failure of your system. So when you hear people like Rachel or other people talking about the importance of building out systems, you listen to them and you do what they say and you follow their advice. You can't do everything. You can't know everything. There are people who know things better than you. Responsibility means we own it and we fix it and we prevent it. So the buck always stops with the law firm owner. So Amani's really good about this. When a mistake happens, she wants to dive in and fix it. Usually she wants to do that too much, but then after it's fixed, then you have to do the post mortem and figure out those five whys. Why did it happen and what can we do to make sure this doesn't happen again? It might happen again, but what can we do to lower the chances of it? So being content. So you have to understand that these things are always going to be happening. The bigger you get, the more problems you have, the more issues, the more things flying over your head. And you got to be content. You got to find some peace in that. And so I heard an analogy the other day. If we're centered, think of a big wagon wheel on a wagon train going to Portland. And think about if you're in the center of that and you're centered, you're spending time meditating, doing things to take care of yourself, going to the gym, doing all the things you need to do, you're going to have a lot less momentum to what's disruptive to you than if you're on the outside of the wheel, Right? So taking the time every day to find contentment in the chaos is key. So I love this quote from Daisaku Ikeda, start from today. Nothing is irredeemable in youth. Rather, the worst mistake you can make when young is to give up and not challenge yourselves for fear of failure. The past is the past and the future is the future. Keep moving forward with a steady eye on the future, telling yourselves, I'll start from today. I'll start fresh from now, from this moment. We talked about content in the firefight. So one tool that I came across that I really liked is you can list while you're here, list some of your difficulties. Then ask yourself, is this something that's not fixable? Is this something that is completely outside of my control as a Law firm owner. I rely on the serenity prayer all the time. God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change. Donald Trump. The courage to change the things I can, but my systems and the wisdom to know the difference. Right? So go through this. Write down what your difficulty is. Write down whether it's permanent, and then, as Jason Suk would say, what is one small step that I can take that might make this a little bit better? My last mistake. I committed legal malpractice. I had a legal malpractice claim brought against me. I screwed up. A woman who came to the United States from Bosnia, she had a bad habit of putting shit into shopping carts and running out of the store. She got arrested and she got put into deportation. And I had. And she had a defense available to her that I missed. Right? I missed it. And so that meant she ended up staying in detention longer than she should have. It meant that she filed a bar complaint against me, and it meant that she settled with my insurance company for lots of money. And it was very, very stressful. Made my life hard for a long time. And I'm certainly not happy that that happened. I'm certainly embarrassed to even tell you that story, but I do that to encourage you that there's nothing that's too scary or bad. And a lot came out of that. Right? A lot came out of that. I stopped doing deportation for a while, but we also were able to help a lot of people. And this is a young man that I was able to help. After that, we've perfected our systems. We've made sure that we have ways to never make that mistake again and to make other mistakes, because removal is different. Deportation is different. And that fellow right there who I. With my law degree and my research, I figured out a way to keep him in the United States, to keep him from being deported. And last month, he became a US Citizen. So, you know, from pain comes power, right? From pain comes power. So own your failures as leaders. Analyze with the five whys. Build stronger systems. Fail forward, not backward. And I'll end with a quote from Nelson Mandela. The greatest glory in living lies not in never failing, but in rising every time we fail. Thank you, everybody.