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Are you a law firm owner looking for ways to make your firm more efficient? At the Maximum Law Conference, Rachel McGarry shares practical strategies for law firms to move from constant chaos to efficient, proactive operations. Drawing on her experience in estate planning and legal tech, Rachel emphasizes identifying root problems before adopting new technology.
As a law firm, it is important to understand the recurring problems that occur before you implement solutions. Law firms are busy and chaotic places, with fires starting up everywhere. It is the nature of the field. As an owner, you need to shift your mindset to that of an engineer. You need to create sustainable solutions that will provide predictable success and growth without all the overwhelm.
Doing this involves a few things. First, you need to create a blueprint to figure out what your firm needs. This will allow you to create a framework that will help form your vision. From there, you will find out what your frictions are that are causing fires for your firm which will lead to designing your solution.
Rachel provides listeners with steps to take to see immediate results. One thing is to track the fires happening in your firm for 2 weeks. Get the whole team involved where everyone tracks the fires they are dealing with. You will be able to determine the patterns that are happening and can set one, measurable goal to overcome them.. Another step to take is auditing your clients at least once a month. This is a way to ensure there is good client communication frequently to update them on their case.
Take a listen to learn more!
Creators and Guests
Host
Tyson Mutrux
Tyson is the founder of Mutrux Firm Injury Lawyers and the co-founder of Maximum Lawyer.
What is Maximum Lawyer?
Maximum Lawyer is the podcast for law firm owners who want to scale with intention and build a business that works for their life.
Hosted by Tyson Mutrux, each weekly episode features candid conversations with law firm owners, business experts, and industry leaders sharing real strategies and lessons learned in the trenches.
If you're ready to grow your firm with less stress and more support, this is your next must listen. Subscribe today.
Rachel McGarry 00:00:02 This is maximum lawyer with your host, Tyson Matrix.
Rachel McGarry 00:00:11 Welcome back to the Maximum Lawyer podcast. I'm so glad you're tuning in, because today you're about to hear one of our speakers from Max Law con 2025. Today's talk comes from Rachel McGarry, CEO of Amy McGarry law firm and founder of cloud 925. If you've ever felt like you're constantly putting out fires in your firm or reacting to problems instead of preventing them, Rachel is going to help you shift out of chaos mode. This is stop being a firefighter. Start being an engineer with Rachel McGarry.
Rachel McGarry 00:00:42 I can get up here and talk about AI, technology, all of those things. Vibe coding like Tyson mentioned for hours. But I think the beginning of all of that is actually knowing where your problems lie before you bring in all that technology. So something that I learned growing up in a law firm literally is that there is constantly chaos and fires everywhere. So once you actually figure out what those fires are, then you can figure out how to fix them from the beginning, instead of just constantly running around in chaos all day long.
Rachel McGarry 00:01:15 So if you feel like your law firm is running on duct tape and panic, you are not alone. Maybe it's Monday and you have a client file missing, and then it's Tuesday and all of a sudden you have three intake forms completely disappear. Then you get to Wednesday and you can't find any of your notes from your meeting. Then it's Thursday and you're chasing old invoices from four years ago, and then it's Friday and you're stuck at your law office or at home in your, you know, in your home office, and you're just fixing up documents from an associate or a paralegal or something. That is another fire. So and this might not mean your bad technology, actually, you can be really good at technology, but you're just not. You're reacting always to the problems like a firefighter and not fixing the solution. Fixing the problems themselves like an engineer would. So it's a big mindset shift in the beginning. So you have to get out of firefighting mode. So you want to stop racing from crisis to crisis, fixing things with duct tape, letting stress control your life, making everything feel like chaos because eventually you will lead to burnout.
Rachel McGarry 00:02:24 Switching over to the engineering mode helps you prevent these fires. Get sustainable systems, and it calms you down with predictable success and growth without so much overwhelm. So. And probably something that you wouldn't expect me to hear is you probably don't need more apps. You probably don't need more tools just yet. You probably need a blueprint originally to figure out what you need. So a framework that kind of flips the script here is you need to figure out your vision. You need to figure out what is your destination first, where do you want to be. And then you want to find out your friction, what's actually breaking in your firm, and then workflow design the system on paper. Probably one of the only times you'll hear me say to write something on paper, and then tools figure out the technology last, not first. So the first step is defining that finish line. So you want to make sure that, you know, you can build the system and know exactly where it's headed. So you a lot of firms will skip this steps and then wonder why every new tool just feels like a Band-Aid.
Rachel McGarry 00:03:32 I mean, there's a lot of great vendors here. And you talk to them and you're like, oh, that sounds great. And you hire them and then you might not even ever set it up. Or maybe it's set up, but you don't really know why you needed it. And then it doesn't work exactly how you want. But if you go to one of the vendors or get a new app or something and know why you're getting it, then it's going to work a lot better. So you want to pick one clear goal, because if you try and fix everything in your law firm at once, it's not going to work out the way you want it to. And you want to make sure it's measurable. So even something I talk about with our team at the firm is when we're figuring out goals, is it measurable if they just want to have happier clients? Well, how do I measure that at the end of the quarter with them? You need something that you can actually look at.
Rachel McGarry 00:04:15 Like Stephen, just talk about with KPIs, something that you can actually look at and have measurable outcomes at the end. And then you do want to start small, especially if there's lots of things that you want to start changing. Next is you want to map those friction points. So something that you can do is for the next two weeks, when you go back to your law firm, is figure out every time there's a fire and then write it down anytime someone's like, where is this? Where's the process for that? I can't find this. We forgot to do this. I've lost my notes. This client's mad because of blank. Write them down. Then you want to start designing the system? Oh, wait. Sorry. And then map these friction points, and then you want to start looking at them and looking through all of the patterns. So if you realize that over two weeks you've lost your notes because they're handwritten ten times. Maybe you should start using electronic notes, right? So you want to start looking at that.
Rachel McGarry 00:05:18 Another thing that I do with my firm is that every time there's a client complaint, they tell me. So even if it's from there, even if it's someone calling in and they're not even a client, they're a potential client, and we're booked out way too far. I want to know that even though I might not be able to squeeze them in, I still want to know. You want to know what any of your complaints issues fires are so you can start looking at them, because maybe a fire happens once a month or every hour. Obviously, the ones you want to start off with are maybe the ones that happen every hour, instead of just the ones that happen once a month. So next you want to design the system. So next comes kind of more of the fun the magic. What I like and that's designing the workflow and you're still not touching the technology. So this is kind of where firms start going the other way. They might know that they might still know the problem. Right.
Rachel McGarry 00:06:12 But they're just going to the next app, the next AI thing, the next automation, without still actually writing it down and figuring out what's the best way to do this. And so you want to actually sketch out your ideal flow. What would happen in your perfect world? What would a perfect law firm day look like? What would a perfect process look like? These are all things to think about. And then you want to define the rules clearly. So who does what, when and what's expected at the outcome of each step. And then you want to build in some checkpoints. So if you design a whole process and then start testing out with your firm, and then you don't look back on that process from a month from now, it could even be causing more fires. But if you have some checkpoints built in, maybe, you know, every week you check with them, you look at the KPIs, you look at the tech, you look at client satisfaction, then you can actually start seeing if things are working and then tweak obviously if needed.
Rachel McGarry 00:07:06 So now you finally get to grab the big new shiny object of your tech. So now this is after you know your goal. Understand your friction points and design your ideal workflow. Now you can start looking for technology. The ultimate the ultimate filter question is, is this actually going to reduce friction and serve your goal, or is it just going to create more chaos? Is it something so complicated that maybe your firm, who's not very tech savvy, is going to know how to use? Or is that actually just going to cause more chaos in your firm? If the last time you did a tech audit was either never or even last year, you need to be doing a tech audit again, every tool that's not supporting your system is probably just creating more noise and chaos in your firms, and probably even more fires. And then you want to start simple. So you want to make sure they support your firm before going to a whole new CRM. Like you hear everyone keep talking about going over to Airtable and building your own CRM and dropping your current case management system.
Rachel McGarry 00:08:08 Make sure you actually know that it can support, maybe even start smaller. Maybe start integrating with your current case management system if you're not a case management system. Hopefully you're using some kind of spreadsheet. Maybe see what can be integrated with your spreadsheet work from within at first. So we'll go over some examples of some different fires. So the first one is that client falling through the cracks. A client calls after three months of not hearing from you. And they said I haven't heard from you what is going on in my case, the reality is your entire firm has been working on their case relentlessly, and you guys all know what's going on for the last three months, but no one's alerted the client, kind of like what they talked about before with the client happiness coordinator. Your client doesn't know what's happening behind the closed doors of your office every single day. And how do you get that information to them? How do you remind them that you have been working on it, instead of just every time you get that call, sending them an email or picking up the phone, or scheduling a phone call and getting that done, you can actually take a step back, look at what the actual problem is.
Rachel McGarry 00:09:18 It's the fact that you're not giving better updates to clients, even if nothing's happening on their case, right? I mean, we do Medicaid, and sometimes we go months without any kind of update for our Medicaid clients, but they still call all the time and wonder why. So you can be sending them weekly emails every Friday that says, hey, there's still no status change. We're still here to help you. Then you can get less calls, and then they at least know that you're thinking about them and that there's no status change in their case. another thing you can do is to fix this is client audits. So something that we do in our firm is that every case needs to be touched at least every month. I mean, at least every quarter at least. If not, then every month, whether that's communication, a log or something like that, to let them, to let us know and to let them know what's going on. And then now you can add in the tech layer at the end.
Rachel McGarry 00:10:14 So maybe that's some CRM reminders, some automated flags, or even again, just a simple spreadsheet to let you know what's going on. The next one is the communication chaos. So maybe your client texts you at 10 p.m., maybe then immediately later they email your assistant, and then maybe an hour later they call your front desk cause they still haven't heard from your text or your email. And that's okay. But it's not okay that now they keep thinking that they can keep calling. They're all they're trying to figure out is their appointment time for next week. Everyone's confused. Everyone's getting interrupted. This is just adding to the chaos in the fires in the office. The fixes not just texting them back their appointment time or texting them back at 10 p.m. off your personal cell phone. The fix fixes, establishing clear communication guidelines when they first come into your office when they first come in. Let them know how long it usually takes for you to get back to them. Obviously this differs practice area by area, but if you if you have your standard that you know, we get back to you within 12 hours, 24 hours, 48 hours, whatever it is.
Rachel McGarry 00:11:23 Just tell them so they know. Because if it is 48 hours, then maybe they won't bug you as much. Or maybe they'll send out that email, but then not follow up again until you've reached out within that 48 hours. And then you can also tell them how you want to be, how you want to be reached, whether that's like a client portal or emailing you and seeing your assistant something like that, that you can tell them what to do, can actually help them, because they might have never even worked with a lawyer before. But also all of our law firms run different. You might have a client portal, I might have a different client portal. You might have a text messaging system. How are the clients supposed to know if you don't tell them? And then the tech layer is you can use some email templates and intake package with those communication guidelines put in that you actually give your clients when they sign on a autoresponder reminding them of the expectations and then a client portal. So the fire three is the loss case notes.
Rachel McGarry 00:12:25 So you're preparing for your important client meeting, and you realize that your handwritten notes are somewhere in your office. Your desk is a mess with handwritten notes, and they're not scanned into the file. You have no idea whether you're, you're searching through every handwritten note you can find from 2013, and you have no idea where this client is because you might not even put their last name on it. So meanwhile, your clients are already in the conference room. They're waiting for you. They're probably stressed out because they're meeting with an attorney, and you're trying to figure out what to do. the fix. Take your notes digitally. There are so many different ways to do this. Now. The fix is obviously now kind of adding in that tech layer during the fix. But I mean, there's so many different ways, whether it's on an iPad or remarkable, there's so many different ways to do it. If you don't like taking notes, then record it. You can now have, you know, the little plod bracelets you can just walk around with, or you can have it as a pin record all of your meetings, then they never get lost.
Rachel McGarry 00:13:31 You can have them go right into the client file system, and you never have to worry about not finding that client file ever again. So your action plan that you guys can actually do right now, when you go back to your firmware later, is start tracking the fires for two weeks, get your entire team involved because something that you might you might not realize is maybe fires that are happening that you don't know about. Maybe your paralegal is handling fires for your receptionist. Maybe your executive assistant is handling fires for your paralegal. You have no idea. So get with your team. Ask them. Ask them to track the fires that they're noticing too, and start looking at them. And then look at the patterns. Define the one clear, measurable goal that you can start with. Then you want to use. You want to reverse engineer one complete system that you can begin implementing in your firm. Some of the quick wins you can start doing in your office when you guys get back to, is making sure that you're auditing every open client at least every month.
Rachel McGarry 00:14:34 making sure that you're ensuring contact with them within every 30 days, even if it's just an email saying, hey, your status is on hold. draft a one page client communication policy that you send out with your retainer agreement. Maybe you want to add it into your retainer agreement and have them initial it so they even look at it and make sure that they know it's there, and then maybe even just move one area of your notes digitally, or maybe by a plod and start wearing that around and see how that goes. And then something great that we do with our team is every quarter we spend around half a day or a full day going through, like what is going on? What is the chaos? What are these fire logs? What can we do to design better systematic processes in our firm? So you can make it a reoccurring calendar event to prevent the regression of going back into firefighting mode. So overall, you just really want to stop the fires, look back and build a foundation. It's not as complicated as it seems.
Rachel McGarry 00:15:36 You really just need to be intentional and thoughtful and really just take a step back and look at your firm as a whole. You want to start with clarity, understand what's actually breaking, design the systems and then choose the tools that will help. Thank you.