Maximum Lawyer

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How do you know if your associate attorneys are truly performing well—or if you’re just relying on gut feelings? In this MaxLawCon 2025 presentation, Steven McClelland shares a practical system for managing associate attorneys using KPIs and a simple scorecard. Instead of viewing associates as a cost, Steven encourages law firm owners to see them as an investment that should generate value for the firm while helping more clients.

Steven breaks down three core categories for measuring attorney performance: production, client satisfaction, and professional growth. By tracking clear metrics—such as attorney points, conversion rates, client feedback, and revenue—law firm owners can replace emotional decision-making with objective data.

The result is a clearer understanding of performance, better accountability, and stronger team development. Steven also explains how consistent tracking helps law firm owners identify whether an associate is developing into a “butterfly” who helps the firm grow or a “caterpillar” who may need more guidance—or a different role.


  • 0:02 Introduction to the MaxLawCon presentation
  • 1:18 The mindset shift from cost to investment
  • 2:21 Why KPIs should be implemented early
  • 4:24 The “zone of tolerance” and measuring performance
  • 6:35 Three KPI categories for associate attorneys
  • 7:49 Tracking attorney production with weekly points
  • 10:51 Using post-consult forms to track conversions
  • 13:09 Why revenue metrics matter for associate performance
  • 14:10 Measuring client satisfaction and feedback
  • 17:22 Tracking professional growth and team impact


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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.

Tyson Matrix 00:00:02 This is maximum lawyer with your host, Tyson Matrix.

Speaker 2 00:00:11 Welcome back to the Maximum Lawyer podcast. Today we're sharing a presentation from Max con 2025. And today's session is from Steven McClelland, a law firm owner who shares a simple, practical way to win with associate attorneys using KPIs and a scorecard so you can stop relying on gut feelings and start using facts. In this talk, Steven walks through the mindset shift from seeing your team as a cost to seeing them as an investment. This is Steven McClellan's Max law concession scorecard two success winning with Associate Attorney KPIs.

Steven McClelland 00:00:47 Glad to be here from Arkansas. Not too far of a drive over here. And I told multiple people this is the most terrifying 20 minutes of my life speaking in front of you all. I'm going to try to do my best. And as mentioned, I do have three daughters, so it's actually a joy to stand in front of people and not be interrupted and not have people fighting. So we're going to talk today about the scorecard two success winning with Associate Attorney KPIs.

Steven McClelland 00:01:18 And it's remarkable. I went from listening to podcasts to the conference to the guild, to the the masterminds, and speaking here today is just unreal. And the thing is, you can't be in Maximum Lawyer really without growing. It's just kind of a thing that happens whether you're maximizing or optimizing. And so this topic I think is helpful because many of us are hiring people to help us help more people, and that is often the associate attorney. I'm going to share some lessons I've learned. So here's what we're going to talk about. We're going to talk about how to get beyond the cost mentality. And think of your team as investment that is to earn you money and help more people. We're also going to talk about the three different categories we use for KPIs categories to help focus on and last. How do you know if you have a butterfly or a caterpillar? Okay, because you can't talk butterfly language to a caterpillar people, it just doesn't work. So we're going to talk about that. All right.

Steven McClelland 00:02:21 So if I can move this the first thing is step one you have to have an associate. And the thing about maximum a lawyer that I have loved from the very beginning is this authenticity, this vulnerability, transparency. And we've heard some of that already this morning. And when I had this topic, of course, I was planning to add a second associate. It fell through. And what happened? My associate I had was gone. So I was a solo and I had this coming up to speak and I thought, so I am such a failure, you know? And I thought, well, I'm going to just buckle down and just kind of Learn from those lessons as we do. And so some of this really comes from the hard lessons that you learn, things that you can put into place. And importantly, when you have those negotiations with people, you ask, really, are they a caterpillar or are they a butterfly, or are they somebody you want to keep or not? Right. So those are things we're going to talk about today.

Steven McClelland 00:03:18 Now I'll say with KPIs, you'll want to implement them as soon as possible. So if you have somebody back in your office probably difficult to implement them all at once. Certainly don't do that. I think it's best just to start one at a time. Okay. Especially on new folks. It helps, I think, ease them into the idea of, having some accountability. If you have a ton of accountability thrown at you all at once, it's just a little bit overwhelming. So, as, as they say, yeah. Everything you learned late in life, you want to teach your kids early. So if you don't have an associate, if this is your first time, here's some lessons to learn when it comes to KPIs early in your career. So what is a KPI? Key performance indicator key is crucial to success. The problem is a lot of times is we don't define what is the most important thing that we want our team member to do or our associate to do, knowing that on the front end solves so many problems.

Steven McClelland 00:04:24 The second is we want to know how their performance is doing. Are they progressing? Are they getting better or are they getting worse? And the third thing is we have to have some indicators, some measurement. I'm going to share with you all some of the things I do in my practice. Hopefully it'll it'll help you all out. Now the key here I put on like a little tip is if you can have a third party like a legal secretary track some of this, I think it helps better that way. They're not patting their numbers. And you have like a third party doing that. So it's kind of people holding people accountable to each other. Now it's probably my favorite slide. This is what I call the zone of tolerance. And this is a nice little box. Box. This represents many of our team members. The idea is on the bottom is adequate performance and on the top is desired performance. The problem is, if we have no KPIs, we really have no idea if they are closer to the bottom of the box or the top.

Steven McClelland 00:05:28 And truth is, if you have no adequate performance, you're just going to tolerate anything. So you have to have some zone of tolerance. And importantly, when that's violated, you got to make a decision. The caterpillar has to go or get better. And so many times I think the thing I've heard the most is the frustration we've had around, should I let them go or should I keep them right? I've heard that a lot in masterminds. And what you don't want is when you make a big decision, you don't want to rely on your feelings because our feelings are so bad, right? You want to have facts, not feelings. And I think that's where the KPIs come in. And I want you to think think of it like this. Like money is to a a bank. Your KPIs are the treasure that you hold in your vaults. You gotta hold them. You gotta have them. They're the most precious thing for you. So you're not relying on your feelings. So I have three categories we're going to talk about.

Steven McClelland 00:06:35 I think they fall into three categories. The first is production. What are they doing? The second is client satisfaction and the third is professional and personal growth. I think that's really probably the one that's even maybe the most important really to them. a lot of times this was said earlier, I'll say in a different way. I can give you a bunch of ideas, but the the key, I think, is moving from idea to execution as quickly as possible. That that was what Tyson said earlier. But the currency of success is not measured by ideas. It's measured by execution. That's the way I put it. So if you want success, you've got to implement some things. So here's what I've got. When it comes to production these are the things that we we track. So when it comes to weekly attorney points I want to know what the associate was doing for the week. There are 40 hours in a week. And if you don't track that, then you don't know if they're doing the right kinds of things, because I have found that they will often find themselves making copies.

Steven McClelland 00:07:49 They'll be sending letters. They'll be, you know, you know, trying to run other things. You. It's your job to really sit down with them and say, this is the highest and best use of your time. We talk about that as as the owners, like what's the highest and best use of our time? We also have to think about our our team members. So I have this report. There we go. This is what I call the associate attorney points. You see there's a range there between 17 and 24 desired performance, and adequate performance. And it's helpful. As you see, these are the categories of things that I want to see first. Are they meeting with people? Right. They're never going to have billable. They're never going to produce anything unless they're actually meeting with people. Second, I do estate planning and probate. And so you see on the second column there's signings. If it's a simple signing, we add a point. If it's a more like a trust or something, two points.

Steven McClelland 00:08:45 And they kind of correlate to the time that someone is spending on those activities, phone calls, others might be going to court. I don't know what you all. Maybe there's a lot more court, maybe in criminal activities, or maybe sending out demand letters. That's like what personal injury firms do. Whatever the activity is you're telling them on the very front end. These are the highest and best uses of the things that you do. Okay. And the reason the range is helpful is you have to know when your associate is getting close to burn out, okay? Because if their attorney points are 29 and yours or 35, then you realize you really need to have another attorney. Having that number ahead of time lets you know what your your capacity is. Are you like running too hot on your numbers okay? Or are they not doing enough? And it really reflects what's what's going on in their life, right. If they have travel they have sick kid or something like that. That goes on. That's what we've used.

Steven McClelland 00:09:47 And my intake person who does scheduling, she essentially looks at the calendar and fills this in every week. So it reflects what we did in the past week, and we talk about it each and every week. And many of us, we get distracted. Right. It's all about having a better focus. And the idea of this is that we help. We don't we don't want our team members, especially our attorneys, to be distracted all the time. We want to help improve their focus and say, these are the things that that you do. And if they're not committed to these activities, then they'll be too distracted by everything. Sort of like in our own world, we have to know what are the things that we need to focus on. So one of the second things I want to mention here, this is this is a hard discipline, extremely hard. But after every single initial consult that we do, every attorney does a post initial form and it takes a lot of discipline to stop and fill it out before you move on to the next person, because that's my tendency.

Steven McClelland 00:10:51 I just want to get on to the next thing. Or somebody immediately caught me after a meeting and said, hey, this email came in or a phone call, and I tell my team I need at least ten minutes after they leave to do my post initial meeting. And what is on that form is when we met with them, what office we met in, did they move forward? What kind of case? The estimated value of the case. The facts about the case. Good case. Bad case. As mentioned, the happiness calls. We have client service associate that also do does that in our firm. And so put notes in there to connect. Hey I heard you have a vacation coming up in a couple of weeks or something like that. So so much is of our KPIs are built off that form because I can take that form and I can see, well, how many did they actually convert. Right. So if my associate KPI associate is converting 90% of their appointments, I'm thinking, well, maybe we're not charging enough, right? Or if it's like under 50%, I'm kind of concerned, right? That's kind of how it plays out in my practice.

Steven McClelland 00:11:57 Others family law might have different numbers, but you got to know what that conversion rate is and so you can tweak how can we get it 10% better. And that that post initial note is is what what we use matters cycle time. They, they signed up on the first of the month. Estate planning six weeks typically is a nice range of from signing to initial meeting. So we can track those. I think the biggest one for me is the revenue. It's how much are they producing. And if you haven't heard, I think the best metric we have is are they producing three times what their salary is. And it's important because when they come to you and they and they ask you for more money or you're reevaluating their salary on a yearly basis, you really want to know, how much are they producing? And if you're if you're paying too much, that's not a good feeling, right? If you're not paying enough. You need to know what they're bringing into the firm. It's so important because when when you sit down with them and they're thinking about going someplace else based on compensation, you really have to discuss.

Steven McClelland 00:13:09 Well, let me show you what my numbers say. Okay. Track it however you want to, but we've got to have a clear understanding of what you're bringing in. Because if they just make what you're paying, then that's that's really just giving them a job. You're not really getting anything to cover overhead. So it's actually costing you money to keep them in your practice. So, I also want to mention, when we assign with our clients or after a case is closed, we also have a post signing form that the attorney does. And there's a box in that form where we, as the attorneys put anything that we screwed up, something that we could have done better. Maybe it was a typo on a name. Maybe it was a deed that wasn't ready. Maybe it's a form that we didn't have and that that little box. We look at that quarterly and say, these are the mistakes that we're doing from, you know, the initial from the design meeting. It's very, very helpful to look at those things.

Steven McClelland 00:14:10 And as we as a team can all reflect on, you know, making the process better for all of our, our clients. So next, I want to talk about client satisfaction. It's not enough that they just do the work right. You have to be considerate of like are they doing it well? Are the clients happy? So after every initial meeting, they fill out that form the next day. We send a text message to the client and say, just give us a quick feedback. Two minutes, three questions. And you know, were you satisfied? Who'd you meet with? Would you promote the firm or not? And how would you rate the attorney. And that's just a quick snapshot to see what they thought. We also give. We also have like charities. We have Arkansas charities and say pick the charity you like. We'll give a dollar for those charities. And it kind of makes it kind of something they can give back of their time. And we give to those, those charities.

Steven McClelland 00:15:03 and we also when we do those client service calls, that's also an opportunity for like my intake person to ask, were there any issues that came up in your meeting? And it allows us to resolve them before they move too far in the process. Estate planning is one of those where they nod their heads, but sometimes when they leave, things are fuzzier. Like what am I doing again? What kind of trust am I doing? What about this? What about that? And so my intake person just, well, how did so-and-so meet your expectations? Do they answer your questions? Very helpful. And then are they generating any reviews for your firm. Right. That's something in the custom form that they can click a button and send. Automatically to the client. I have a great quote. I love this quote without differential quality, without a superior total experience to offer clients customers. A company has few if any non pricing options when key competitors cut their price. Okay, and I really feel like like many of us, we have firms that are high on quality, high on communication.

Steven McClelland 00:16:12 And by tracking those net promoter scores we know that, hey, they're doing a really good job of, of connecting and not just doing the work, but also leading to high client satisfaction. Okay, next thing last thing on the categories is professional and personal. And this is this has to come up. I think we do quarterly meetings with all of our employees, and we want to know what's going on in their life. I think now more than ever You have to know. What are they? What are they looking for? Do they have a job or do they have a cause? Like, what is it? Is it? Is it? Are they trying to start a family? Are they concerned about paying off debts? Are they concerned about charities? Do they have a family issue that they're dealing with? Knowing those things and tracking how that just asking about them. You don't have to track track, but just asking how those things going go. I think goes such a far, far away, in a talking to the clients and at my quarterly, I ask that this is sad, I'll tell you, but it's sad.

Steven McClelland 00:17:22 I said, okay, we have six core values. I have $100. If you can tell me all six, you get this 100 bucks and I am not $100 less. I didn't give a single one away. It was kind of depressing, right? So that really kind of reinforces like right there in front of them. Hey, if you name it, it's 100 bucks. And, we talk about those in our weekly meetings, but asking them in their quarterly meetings, you know. Tell me about how you met some core value of the firm in the past week. when it comes to sitting down with your associate, you should check in with them. Always ask the question, how have you maximized the firm or optimized the firm? It's really a question that puts a little bit of accountability onto them, a little bit of the ownership. And asking them that question really can help. When they later say, well, you know, I think I, I need more money. And you say, well, let's we've asked a few times, about you know, what have you done to grow? And your answers are I'm just doing my job right.

Steven McClelland 00:18:29 So getting them to think you you want them to help your firm grow and you want to pay them money. We should all want to pay them money. That should be the idea that they're providing more value. They're taking care more people. We should all have that same mentality. And then how are they? How are they mentoring other people in the practice? Are they just concerned about themselves, or are they taking time to talk with some of your other team members and really having a team impact? Sometimes you get you get folks that may just want to work in a silo. Just come in and leave, right? That really hurts culture. But see how other people in your practice, what they think of your associate training. That's hard. Right? How do you track these things? I think these the last category is often the hardest when it comes to is this person a caterpillar or are they a butterfly? Really hard. But I think they all meld together to have a pretty good idea of your attorney.

Steven McClelland 00:19:28 So if you have an attorney or you're thinking about attorney, I think it's very simple. Just get a piece of paper, write their name down. Write down the three categories and three things you want to track. That's it. Don't make it too complicated and just say, hey, these are these. We're going to start something new. Okay. And make sure when you start something, you're not saying I'm not making any decisions. This is just for informational purposes only, right. Because if you if they if there's some oh, you know, if there's some issue, you know, they think you're looking over their shoulder, they're going to fire you. You know, it's just make sure that it's just I just want to know, right. Instead of being feelings based I want to be facts based. So certainly glad to be here. And if you have any questions you ever want to talk and my my number is there. As mentioned in the beginning, I do. I am a girl dad.

Steven McClelland 00:20:16 I have three daughters. And I just want to say that if you have any advice on raising daughters, please text them or email them to me because I need all the advice I can get my wife and I appreciate you the most. Thank you very much y'all.

Speaker 4 00:20:30 Great.