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- [00:02]
Becca
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- [00:46]
Tyson Mutrix
This is Maximum Lawyer with your host, Tyson Mutrix. Welcome back to Maximum Lawyer Live. I am Tyson Mutrix. Today we're going to be talking about kind of a disaster, to be honest with you. On Monday we rolled out a new system. We actually launched it on Friday, technically at the end of the day after everyone was had left and it's been a complete failure up to this point. We, what we did is we did, we had a complete system upgrade and it's one of those things where everything has been breaking, nothing is working properly, things aren't where we thought they were going to be. And so I, I, I've made the decision, I've not announced it yet to the team, but we, so this would be our third day. Luckily today is our quarterly meeting day and we're going to pivot. I mean I, I think it's one of those things where the, there and I'm gonna get to get into a lot of this when it comes to kind of my reasoning. But it's just we have to make a decision. We can either keep going down this road or we can pivot and just go back to what we had before. And until we can get to the point where this one is ready to go. I think we rushed it a little bit. I think that's part of the problem. We did, we did do testing and all that, which is kind of weird because a big part of last week was testing and things were going just fine. There were a couple things that were breaking when we were testing last week, but they were fixed. And it's just, the reality is some things do not work the way you expect them to. That's just how it is. It's, we will all face some sort of failure in our careers and if you don't, then you're not trying. You're not know some of those, you can do what's easy, you can Go along and do what's easy, and that's fine. But really, what. You got to push yourself a little bit. And we were pushing ourselves a little bit with this one. That's. And I. I think whenever, especially like a. There's a system failure, I think a lot of people, what they do is they hesitate and they. They kind of hope it stabilizes. And I think that that's where, like that the hesitation is where the damage happens. It's. It is not in the actual failure itself. It's in the hesitation to act. All right? And I, I had this sneaking feeling that this might happen. I just. I. I should have gone. Becca and I were talking about. We're. We're. We're picking a place to have max lock on 20, 27. Okay. So we're trying to pick a place to do it. And she. She asked me the question about, you know, about this particular place. Just her gut was. She's like, I don't know if you believe in intuition, but I just. My gut is just. It's not the right place. And I was like, I'm good with that. I'm. Let's go with your gut. I'm completely fine with that. And I kind of. My gut, I kind of was thinking, this isn't going to go well. I was losing sleep over, to be honest with you, over the weekend, because I was. From the get go, the signs were not. Were not that it were not good. They just weren't. And we have to be really careful about the law of unintended consequences, because actions, they can really have effects on things that are unanticipated, things you don't really intend. And it's. So it's not just a system failure where, okay, it breaks and maybe. Maybe you lose a note. I. It has bigger effects on the team. In, in general, it's. Think of it like, as ripple effects throughout the team. And that's kind of what we're seeing. And I, I want to put a stop to that right now, is what I want to do. Like, failure. And it's. What's kind of interesting is like the whole thing about, like, failure isn't the surprise usually. It's usually the timing of the failure. So I want to make sure I say that again. It's usually like, failure is not the surprise. Okay. So it's one of those things where, like, we should all expect failure. It's. It's usually the timing of it that it is the. It's the worst. And I will say this was not the the best week for this to happen. It really, really was not. I was supposed to have a trial next week. Luckily, the case just settled yesterday. We have the quarterly meeting today. So this is gonna be a little bit of a shorter episode because of that. Cause it's right after this. And so the timing, I think. I think I might have a little bit more patience for it if we didn't have such a. A busy trial schedule coming up. But I. We don't have the luxury of. Of waiting and trying to figure out if this thing's gonna balance itself out. The best thing to do, because we are so early and into it. Pull the plug, pivot, make. Go back to what we had. Okay, we can still do that. That's still an option. And then fix what we have, and then don't, don't. Don't botch the launch like we did on this one. It's gonna be a pretty simple thing to do at this point because we are so early on. And that's part of my point, too. I want to pass on to people. If you're gonna pivot, pivot quickly. Do it fast. Cause the deeper you get into it, the harder it is to extract yourself from it. Cause you. You. There's the whole sunk cost fallacy. This is. This is something I think that we. We should talk more about. Because just because you dump a bunch of money into something does not mean that you should still do that thing. Okay. If it's not the right thing, right? If it's. If it's costing you more in the long run, you should not be doing that thing. And I do also think the same thing should be for people that are unhappy in their careers when it comes to being a lawyer. It's just one of the things where I've never understood the unhappy lawyer in that. This. I understand why some people are unhappy in the role they have. I've just never understood, like, sticking with it. Because you can either stick with your thing that you're doing, or you can pivot and be happy. You know, like, just because you went to law school and you do all these things and people have these expectations of you. Do you really want to go 30, 40 years, 50 years into a career and be unhappy that whole time, or would you rather pivot? So. So I've never really understood that this is the same concept. Just because you invested into a. Just because we invested into a system. Like, this wasn't a cheap upgrade for us, by the way. This was something we have spent a ton of time and effort we have the complete dev team on. On standby to fix. To fix things right now. So this has not been a cheap thing, but it. That doesn't matter. What matters more is, okay, what is the best thing for the team right now and in the future? Best thing for the team right now is. And in the future, both of those things is pivot. Is pivot out of it because people are not happy people are. We on our huddle yesterday, people were freaking out, but they are freak. They. They were freaking out. And we've been, we've been working hard sort of remedy things. It just, it's not working out. It's just not. And, and I don't think going back to the old system or it's not even the old system. It's the system before the upgrade. Okay, same system, just this one was an upgrade. I don't think it's failure. I really don't. And I, I think this is the right leadership decision. Is. Okay, hey, it's one of those things. My bad. Screwed up. Shouldn't have done this. We, we. We rushed it. We're going to pull it back. You all can just take a deep breath. Everybody, we're good. We're not going to delay the decision because of ego. We just. I'm going to own it doesn't matter how much time we invested in it doesn't matter how much we love the upgrades that we were going to roll out. You know, it's. We're going to. Let's just pivot. Let's just get out of this. Because extracting ourselves from the situation is the best thing for the, for the entire team. So the risk is not making a bad decision. Cause I want to make sure that people understand like you need to make. Take risks like this and you need to make decisions like this and sometimes you're going to make bad decisions. You also need to realize that you need to be able to identify whenever it becomes a bad decision and then get out of it and make another decision. That is, that is the key. The, the where it becomes a bad choice is whenever you're sticking with the bad decision too long otherwise it's not a bad decision. It's just a, it's just a lesson learned. Just a data point is all it is. Okay. That part's really, really important about the whole leadership decision thing too. We are trained as lawyers to defend positions. So it is, it is almost in us. And I'll. I kind of find this in our marriage, right with. So whenever. Sometimes I will be in a Position where I will know I'm wrong or I'm pretty sure I'm wrong. When I'm. Whenever Amy and I are having a disagreement and I will. I will kind of dig in because I feel like that's just kind of in our nature, especially when it comes to litigation. And I've. I've had, over the years, kind of like, temper that and be like, okay, come on, dude, you just gotta talk to myself. Hey, you're not. You're not defending a client here, right? This is your marriage. Leadership's like that, too. I think a lot of people in the same position might dig in. I think the older me probably would have dug in on this. No, we're doing this. We are. We are going to push through on this. I don't care how long it takes to make this thing right, we're going to push through. And that is not the. It's not. It's not the right call. Always. Sometimes it is. I think sometimes sticking, staying the course is the right decision. But this is that leadership muscle that you really need to exercise. And it's judgment, right? It's a complete judgment call. It requires detachment from the decision and attachment to the outcome. Okay, so detach yourself from the decision itself and attach your. The whole. Your whole judgment to this, to the outcome. Okay. What's the outcome here that we're looking for? Okay. We are looking for a good system that helps us help our clients. It's easy for our team to use that, you know, they're not. They're not struggling with things, yada, yada, yada. Right? And so when you. When you're looking at that as the outcome, not. Not the decision itself, it makes things a lot easier, allow. Allows us to pivot a lot faster. So if you find in some of your leadership. Leadership decisions that you're kind of defending a position because of, you know, you are an attorney, and so you're kind of trained to that, and you're not. You're not really focusing on the outcome itself. You're focusing just too much on that. That one point or that one decision might want to step back a little bit. The other part. So part of my analysis on this, too, is that every extra day that we are in this broken system, it compounds the damage. Okay, Think about this. It's. Because it's not just inefficiency. You're talking about lost opportunities. When it comes to variety of things, like opportunity, cost is massive. Right. Right on. Okay. I can do this or I can do this. It's Massive. The team gets frustrated and because of that, the client experience is degraded. That is a big deal because think about like, okay, imagine you're on a, you're happy, you answer the phone, you talk to a client. That's that, that interaction goes one way. You're pissed off and frustrated because your system's not working and you're talking to a client. How's that client experience? Not very good. Like, I'm sure we've all been on that phone call where, oh, the system's not working or the system's slow. We've all had that person on the other side. Okay, I, and if you haven't, you're, you're not on the phone enough. That is, that is a, a real thing. And the more you're frustrating to the team, the more you're going to be frustrating your clients. Okay, just how it works. There is also, I've thought about this too and I, I, I've kind of wondered if this, is, this applies or not. But like the whole idea of the law of diminishing returns and the whole idea about that is that after a certain point, the more you put into something, so the more inputs, the more you put into the inputs, you actually get decreased outputs at a certain point. So I do, I do kind of wonder, okay, are, are we at, is this kind of what we're facing too? So throwing more effort at a broken system, it's not really going to fix it. It's, it's really just going to drain the team. So the, the net output is going to be less. So that's, that's kind of what I was thinking about the law of diminishing returns a little bit. That's a real problem. I, the whole, the whole, whole cultural cost too is a big deal. But I've also, culture is one of those things that to me is, I think it's important, but it, I think it is a, I think the way people view the culture is mistaken. Almost like the people, the way people view visionaries and integrators, it's very like they view of visionary as like this unicorn kind of a thing because, like that's what they want to be. And it's not that at all. It is not that at all. Which I talked about that in another episode that's going to be coming out with Brooke Lively soon. So you'll, you'll get my thoughts on that. So I talk a little bit to Chad Burton on an upcoming episode too about that too. But so you can get my complete thoughts on on that. I think culture is the same way we, we view cultures like this thing. That's this magical thing. But the reality is that culture is. It can easily be created if you have the right systems, the right levels of accountability. Everyone knows what their job is. Everyone knows what the goal posts are. All like, all of that can be. That's. That creates a good culture, okay? It's not this magical thing because you have this beer fridge and that you all can, you know, access it on Friday afternoons. Like, that's not culture, okay? That's something different. That is a nice little perk for benefits that they. That, that, that employees can have. And I think that, that things like that are fun. That's not what makes the culture. Not at all, okay? It's. That's everyone having each other's backs. Is everyone. That's, you know, being. Being willing to be accountable to their own roles, their own tasks, their own actions. You know, the firm holding them accountable, you know, everyone willing to. To work together on things as a team. Like there's anyone that's been on a team, you kind of. You. You get what I'm talking about. There's that comradery there. But it's all built on a level of accountability, really. It's built on a whole level account of accountability. Because when you don't have that, it turns into the, you know, it can be turned into easily a toxic environment because, you know, you know, Jane over here, she is not doing her job. She's not, you know, pulling her weight. And then so Bob over there, he is, you know, having to do more work, more work. So he's getting bitter about it. And then people talk, start talking about things. But when you have the level of accountability, that is the key to everything. Now, why. Why is. Why am I talking about accountability when it comes to a system failure? If I continue to push through with this system the way it is, they are going to. It's going to show to the team, oh, the firm accepts mediocrity. The firm is okay with dealing with this garbage system. And so what else would they put up with? I. Part of this is demonstrating to them that I'm not willing to do that, okay? And I'm not willing to sacrifice the team just because of my ego. That's part of this too. So that's why accountability. I mean, I've got to hold myself accountable to the decisions we made when it comes to the system rollout and show the team, hey, I gotta hold myself accountable too. And because of that, we gotta pivot Okay, I do wanna say this too. I really wish some of the stuff we're hoping to implement that has to do with AI and all that. And we have a training today with the Swans guys, Martin and Max, they're going to be doing a training in the association at noon. I really wish I could make it, but we got our quarterly meeting, so I have to record that. But if, if you're watching live in the association, make sure you're going to want to hit that. We've got some other announcements coming soon when it comes to the conference itself, so we'll talk about that. But I want to make sure I just mention that because I think some of the things that we. That are breaking are like, maybe I may be able to get solved today if I were at that trading. But anyways, so there's nothing. Part of this too is. You gotta, you gotta. Pivoting quickly is part of, part of what the firm should be, has. Have that ability. It needs to sort of be built into the DNA of the firm. So, you know, through communication, testing, decision making, frameworks, all that feedback loops, all that is really, really super important. It reminds me of this article or not an article. It's a chapter of Malcolm Gladwell's books about this. It's. It's a girls basketball team and this guy had never coached before and he never. I think he was more of a soccer fan and he didn't understand why they didn't do full court press. I'm going to tell the story improperly, I'm sure, but I'll do my best. It's been a while since I've read this chapter, but. But what he did is. And there was no rule against. He asked the, he asked them is there a rule against full court press? And. No. And they, they end up either winning their league championship or like a state or national championship or something like that. It was. They end up going really far because they were like the whole. They just, they weren't following the normal rules. And I, I kind of relate that to like almost feel like the culture, not the culture. The DNA refer more like a startup than anything else where like you're moving quickly, like the bigger you are, the harder for you. Not, not, not the, the bigger your mindset is about it where like you are. You are like this big ship trying to turn right. You want to be able to maneuver more like a speedboat when it comes to your decision because your firm, you don't want to get too bogged down with red tape and all that. So you really want to have that kind of built into the DNA of your firm so you can make these quick decisions and not get stuck in this, in a bad decision and not be able to pivot for several weeks because, you know. Cause you got to run it through all the different channels. You got to have this communication going on really, really quickly. I think that that's a big part of what with this rollout. The big part of what Amy did in the firm. Amazing. Was like in the huddle, hey, how are we feeling? What's going on? Like, just constantly getting feedback whenever the rollout was coming. Hey, here's what's coming. Here's what we're going to do. Here are these training sessions, all that kind of stuff that allowed us to get the feedback very, very quickly. And then, okay, this isn't working. We need to make a decision. Let's, let's. Let's do something else. So what's going to change after this? I'm going to start to kind of wrap things up. I want to talk about what we're going to do a little bit differently, but then I think what we're going to do is we're going to probably do some more controlled rollouts to maybe select teams the next time. Maybe do some. Some different test groups than what we did before. Have maybe more of a clear rollout plan for the, for the team. They not super clear for them. It was clear for us, but not for the team. And then I think we could probably still, even though we had some pretty fast feedback loops, maybe have be a little bit more tapped into it. And I, and I. So that's another thing we could probably do a little bit better. But I think one of the big lessons here is this. It's a data point. Failure is a data point. Okay. It gave us this. Failure gave us something, extremely valuable information. Okay. It told us what's breaking, where it breaks, and then how the team responds to it. That's really good data. Okay. That's some of the best data you can get. It really, really is. So we're learning from our lessons. We're going to make our decisions when it comes to pivoting. We're going to make our improvements when it comes to the system, and we'll be fine. Yeah, it's going to be just fine. So that's all I have today. If you have something going on in your firm, you need to pivot, make the pivot, make the decision. The longer you wait, the harder it is to pivot. So remember, if you are interested in the association. If you're listening to this as a recording, not live, check us out@maxmuller.com we'd love to have you in the association. We have this is a live episode every Wednesday. We also have live trainings with awesome experts. Like for example, today we got the Swans guys coming in to teach about Claude, which is going to be just absolutely amazing. I'm sad I'm going to miss it, but I'll be there for the recording and then Check out Becca's List for the Best Vendors Beckaslist Co. A great place to go to find out who the best and the worst vendors are. Hopefully you're looking for the best, but you can avoid the worst by going to BeckyListic Company. But thanks for watching, thanks for listening and have a wonderful day. See you, buddy.
- [22:18]
Becca
Before you go, quick shout out to Becca's list if you've ever hired a vendor for your law firm and immediately thought, yeah, that wasn't it. This exists for you. BecasList 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 becaslist to the largest place for law firms to find trusted Answers, head to BeccasList Co and leave your first review today.