Do What Robots Can't

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Are you looking for some tips on how to become a better lawyer? In this episode of the Maximum Lawyer, lawyer Brooks Derrick shares personal stories and professional insights about the legal profession, emphasizing the importance of empathy, human connection, and community involvement. He discusses balancing technology with genuine client care, recounts overcoming personal and business challenges, and highlights how true success in law comes from serving people, not just optimizing systems. 

As a seasoned lawyer, Brooks speaks with colleagues live to share what qualities lawyers should have. Great lawyers are compassionate and empathetic to be able to support clients as well as show good judgement when preparing and arguing cases. Living in a world where AI is growing, these kinds of qualities are so important to develop early on so you can balance technology with client care.

With the emergence of AI, Brooks talks about how technology can be used to handle the routines of law firms. Whether it's scheduling, drafting documents or researching for a case, AI can be leveraged to get these things done. This is more so for lawyers who are constantly running around from meeting with clients to being in court. The routine tasks of law firms can become onerous, so involving AI in as many aspects of your firm can really help you focus on the important things.

Listen in to learn more!

1:36 Qualities of a Great Lawyer
12:32 Growth and Success of a Firm
16:09 The Power of Human Connection
18:46 Letting Technology Handle the Routine
22:57 The Importance of Human Judgment

Connect with Brooks:

• Website

Tune in to today’s episode and checkout the full show notes here. 

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.

Brooks Derrick 00:00:11 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, and you're like, you fucking idiot. Let's go. You've got this. Let's go. And he was exactly. Damn right. All right, I gotta hit these clickers 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.

Brooks Derrick 00:01:36 Before that, got that lawyer in your head again. What makes that lawyer great? Shout something out. Whatever comes your head.

Brooks Derrick 00:01:47 They care.

Brooks Derrick 00:01:47 They care. Okay. What else? Fairness, I like that. What else? They listen. What else? Say it again. Preparation, I like it. What else?

Brooks Derrick 00:02:00 Persistence.

Brooks Derrick 00:02:01 Persistence. I like that too. Character. Not. Not a character, but character. Right? 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. man. This one guy I know, 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.

Brooks Derrick 00:03:00 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 and I was hopping on the computer and. I thought, wait a minute. Did I just see that one? I clicked it back. I was like, oh, God. I thought the I thought the sky was falling.

Brooks Derrick 00:04:30 I thought, I'm going to lose my bar license. I mean, we go there, right? And that moment of terror, you're not thinking reasonably. You think, oh, shit, the bar is going to know. My current clients are all going to 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 going to 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. He's like, 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 Derek law firm down the street? Well, he was in Pipedrive, so he had called us.

Brooks Derrick 00:05:39 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 directing 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.

Brooks Derrick 00:06:42 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 and we'll rewind a little bit farther. This is 2022 ish right here. I'm going to rewind a little farther. This is where it all started. Okay. This is not this. Exactly. This is actually this is a 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, and we moved up there when my grandmother 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.

Brooks Derrick 00:07:55 And I developed cervical radical apathy down my right arm. I had fallen at a club, a club in, in Charleston. I felt I'd fallen down some stairs. I was walking down the stairs. I wasn't drunk. Let the record reflect. It was. 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. I 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. The 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, I went through all the conservative treatment. Whoops. You personal injury lawyers know this process, and I was able to get an epidural injection, and then I got to go to physical therapy and get through all the stuff.

Brooks Derrick 00:09:20 but as I'm crawling out of this hole, my wife. Has our first baby boy. He's a joy, by the way. West. Derek. Like Kanye. 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 ten years. That's all I concentrated on. I didn't know what the damn piano was. I didn't know what cash flow meant. Don't tell anybody, but I didn't even I hadn't paid the IRS.

Brooks Derrick 00:11:11 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. Emeth traction. Joy. Maximum lawyer about this time, 2018, I think something like that. And just devoured stuff and. We I 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. 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 that was settling along the way. I just wasn't getting any new files in. so there was a big dip in lull and 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.

Brooks Derrick 00:12:32 I'm sorry. And then towards the end of 2022. It all came together. Okay. 2022 we signed up 51 cases and 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. Now, 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 em. We cut them loose. All these aren'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 had a million bucks.

Brooks Derrick 00:14:01 I opened I opened my law practice in oh eight. 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 we were we were just looking at one real KPI. Are we are we sending demand letters out? One process goal. If you can't ask for money, they ain't going to give you no money, right? So that's all we were the biggest thing we were doing. But there was a problem. One problem I don't know how much time I got left for, I do. I still have 26 minutes. Is I going to stay 26 the whole time? Because I'm going to fucking keep talking. just. No, I don't know how much time is left, so I'm just going to finish. Okay. Becca. What? Three minutes left. Oh, shit. All right. So. Man, I can't.

Brooks Derrick 00:15:09 That's too much. All right. Here's the 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. Or we optimizing to be able to be a real fucking lawyer right now? Don't get me wrong. I'm not some damn Luddite. All right. 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 our brains. We have these things called mirror neurons. If I move my hand like this, you know what? You know what's going on in your brains.

Brooks Derrick 00:16:09 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 and food. One thing that I started to do when I freed up more time. When we touch each. When we touch each other. When we give each other a handshake and we hug. You know, it happens in your body. Oxytocin is 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. 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 is 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 at the eye, in the eyeballs and in their crying, versus on the phone when they can just go, hey.

Brooks Derrick 00:17:39 This is it right here. The purpose of technology is the freest 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 said yesterday, don't try to figure out a new zap all the time Or 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 in 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 is catching the phone call or you're missing a lead, or like I used to do in the middle of the night, sitting up at 3:00 am and going, what is the statute of limitations.

Brooks Derrick 00:18:43 For the Smith matter? Oh, shit. Give me the phone.

Brooks Derrick 00:18:46 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. You got to be in court three hours away tomorrow morning at 815. 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. 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, oh, I can't wait to write those. A request for.

Brooks Derrick 00:19:33 Production. No no, no. Oh, discovery, I love it. I can't wait for more discovery.

Brooks Derrick 00:19:39 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.

Brooks Derrick 00:19:49 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 file line 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 Selke did said yesterday and you said a time to come in and a time to go home, get the fuck out of your office. At the time, you said you were going to go home. Okay. Don't try to solve your problems. Don't don't try to refine the 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 gonna go in there.

Brooks Derrick 00:20:44 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, they have to answer the question for us. We want a human right. If 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 at the like an Apple store, right? This is. 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 our our ability to make the correct API call, whatever the hell that means.

Brooks Derrick 00:21:46 I mean, I do, but it's a it's weird, right? Like a hook catch hook, all these words. It's, Again, I'm not a Luddite. I love this shit. But they remember why our clients are coming to us right now. Some of some of our clients are going to hire us because we. We're quick. We're efficient. Right. But they want somebody that's going to look them in the eyeballs, right? They're hiring us because we're humans. They want a human. They want a human to sit across the table from them and give them advice. Should I settle this case? Should I accept the plea offer? Is this marital separation agreement? Is this the this division of property fair? Family court lawyers. How many times have you sat across the table from somebody and they're like, this is not fair. Half I've been paying my whole life. He or she ain't done shit. I sit across from a guy one time. He was in tears. I've done all the practice areas, by the way.

Brooks Derrick 00:22:57 I was a door lawyer initially, so I've done them all. but that conversation requires a human. He can't get on ChatGPT and figure out whether or not that's that's right. Or if he can. He needs somebody to hold his damn hand or her hand. Now, this is us in action. Now. This is my associate lawyer on the left. Guy in the middle is, the president of the center for Community Services. I'm a I'm a board chair there, and, we bought hams. We gave out hams Christmas time. Okay, so we're up there going to have one great story about this. One guy showed up. No shit on a John Deere trailer or a John Deere mower mower. One of them normal ones like that. You would mow your grass at a really small neighborhood, not a big giant one like a standard, you know, probably 4 or $500 John Deere lawn mower with no blade on it, with a cup holder that he had installed himself. I can't make this shit up.

Brooks Derrick 00:24:04 I'm not bullshitting. this is just one of the things that we try to do in our community because we freed up time with our stuff, right? I serve on a the the middle college, the charter school board. I serve on the wide board. I am the president or no, the chair of the solo and small firm section of the South Carolina Bar. I'm on the technology committee. All these things at the bar. I'm not doing this to be like.

Brooks Derrick 00:24:30 Dee dee dee dee.

Brooks Derrick 00:24:31 What I'm saying is, this is examples of what you should be doing because your community needs you, not inside of Make or Zapier, but in the damn community. Right? Chappie ChatGPT don't do that because they don't got no community, right? They don't have a community. They just got you. Well, they got billions of people, but you know what I'm saying? Here's what I want you to do. I'm almost done. Becca. I want you to pick one thing. You've got a lot of things to do.

Brooks Derrick 00:25:04 Everybody's going to tell you this today. Pick one thing, right. you've got a lot of automations to run. You've got a lot of, you know, prompts to work on when you get back for your AI. I know I do. but I want you to pick one thing next week that requires a human to do. Okay. Go to your client's house. Go to your client's business. Get a get a get a board to serve on. Go volunteer. Go do something. The things that lawyers did in the past to network and make money. The things that made us one of the three noble damn professions in the universe. Okay. Don't forget that we're not a banker. We're not a real estate agent. We're. We're lawyers. Lawyers who are on the same level as the clergy and doctors. Don't forget that, okay? You are damn important to everything about our world and our country, and you're going to be a lot better off serving your community than trying to figure out the next zap.

Brooks Derrick 00:26:22 Here's what I want you to do. Don't compete with the damn robots. Don't worry about that other stuff. But you gotta use them because it's going to. This is what allows solo and small firm people to step up, right? We can make $1 million and not have fucking ten employees, right? That's what the robots, right? The robots do that the robots allow you to come to work at nine and leave at four, right? Now, this is what I want you to do. I want to I want you to use them damn robots so you can be irreplaceable human in your community. All right. Thank you.