Maximum Lawyer

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Are you a leader looking for ways to improve your business? In this episode of The Guild Live Show, Tyson leads a dynamic discussion on leadership, marketing, and AI trends in professional services. Tyson shares actionable frameworks for making tough leadership decisions and introduces Gamma, an AI-powered tool revolutionizing presentation design. 

Leaders are always faced with needing to make impossible decisions. Tyson provides some insight on how to do this effectively. One thing to do is to map your trade offs. This involves looking at what you give versus what you gain, which is similar to writing down your pros and cons. What this does is pressure test your plan and allows you to challenge your assumptions. You are able to find out what needs to be re-evaluated or changed to make your business stronger.

Tyson shares new features of the AI-powered tool, Gamma. With $2.1 million is valuation, Gamma is up in coming in the creative space. Gamma creates presentations, websites and PDFs that are interactive. The great part about it is it is extremely user friendly and does not require someone to have good design skills. Give Gamma information through prompts and it will pump out slides or a full website ready for use. It is a great tool for any business owner!

Listen in to learn more!


  • 0:14 Impossible Leadership Decisions & Values 
  • 6:00 Marketing & AI Trends: Neil Patel Insights 
  • 9:25 AI Search and Community Platforms
  • 13:19 Gamma: The Slide Killer 
  • 22:47 Building a Company to Run Forever


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.

Tyson Mutrux 00:00:14 Welcome back to the Guild live show. I'm Tyson Matrix, and today I've got a really good one. We're going to talk about values first. You can be talking about got about getting discovered online which is really important to people. Slide killer. We've talked about it before but it's been beefing up quite a bit over the last few months. Leadership mastery is another one we're going to be covering. And then I've got a little video that we're going to cover as well. So we are going to get started here first with values first. And this one is how to seemingly make an impossible leadership decision. This is one from Harvard Business Review. And I wanted to bring this one up, because we are always being faced with what seems like impossible decisions. Sometimes it can be really, really difficult. And whether it comes to you, no decisions on a case, it could be a decision on, you know, just with staff, you know, whether to hire someone, marketing, you name it.

Tyson Mutrux 00:01:16 We're being faced with decisions on a regular basis about what we should and what we should not be doing. And so I wanted to make sure that I covered that today. And in this article they talk about really how to how to do the different things. And the, the first thing that they talk about doing is mapping the trade offs. That's the first thing. So mapping trade offs. And because this is what you where you kind of figure out, you understand what you give versus what you gain. So you're you're mapping these trade offs. And this is very similar to any if you've ever written out like pros and cons. That's really what we're talking about. Writing out the the pros and the cons. If you've ever done that before. And then the next thing is you want to pressure test your plan. I think this is a really interesting idea. I can't say we've done this a whole lot, but pressure testing the plan is really good, and this is where you want to challenge your assumptions and what you.

Tyson Mutrux 00:02:14 What happens is, is that you kind of everything that could go wrong kind of comes to the surface. This is something that I have done. And I find that this is a really important exercise whenever you're doing something big. One of the things that we do when whenever it was the conference, as I had asked Becca, I was like, well, what are some things that could go wrong? Asking that question really, really important because then you can plan for those things. So what are some things that we what are some things that we think we could that could go wrong. And then you figure out what to do about those things in case they do they do pop up. So it's a really, really valuable exercise. Third part of this is is using guiding principles rather than rigid policies. Is. So this is more where your core values come into play. And a lot of times people say, oh, we make all of our decisions, decisions based on core values. That can be a little trickier than what it sounds.

Tyson Mutrux 00:03:06 Your core values don't really address everything, but if you can, right? If you can use your values generally to help guide your decisions, it's usually a lot more effective than just using rigid policies. Well, this is the policy. Well, if you can talk about well, we prepare every case for trial to make sure we maximize the value of every case. That's one of our core values, right. We're here's why we're doing this okay. We do this thing and here's why we're doing it. That's why this policy is in place. It's not just a policy. This is one of our values. That's why where that could be really, really valuable. And then you name the change so you articulate what you're doing okay. And that helps clarify direction and bring people along okay. And that's where I think that that's a really important thing. It reminds me of in the book Never split the difference, like naming the emotion. It it very much reminds me of that. But I think that that's a valuable tool.

Tyson Mutrux 00:04:08 It really is a valuable tool where you name it, that's really good. Now it's used for different purposes, but I do, I think naming it, it's important. So just some some key takeaways from this. High stakes decisions that are inevitable. They're going to happen. That's just how it happens. So leaders face these tough choices. That's why you're the that's why you're the the leader of the firm of the company. And you're going to be facing these choices. It's inevitable. So you have to make sure how to do this, how to make these decisions so you don't have that decision paralysis. Another key takeaway use values to guide your decisions okay. So you take the policies that you have, the rules that you have. And you couple those with your values to help you make your decisions. Communicate the changes transparently. That helps a lot when it comes to Here's what we're thinking, here's why we're thinking we're going to do it. We're going to make this change and be very transparent. Don't try to hide the ball from your people.

Tyson Mutrux 00:05:02 It just it's it's not a good idea. It doesn't make a lot of sense. And then one of the other things they mentioned is, you know, acting with integrity and courage. So even it might be tough sometimes these seemingly impossible decisions, they can be made. Just make sure that you're making those things, making them ethically, making sure you're making them with integrity. Because if you don't, and then you have to have the courage to actually make the decision. But if you don't, that's really going to weaken you from a leadership standpoint down the road. I know that that may seem obvious, but I think it's a nice little reminder that sometimes people I've seen this a lot with law firm owners, they'll make a decision. It's a very short sighted decision. It's probably not the best decision they should have made from a I wouldn't say an ethics standpoint, but from an integrity standpoint, it's shaky at best. And they don't think about the ramifications down the road as how it's how you're going to be viewed by your employees that stick around.

Tyson Mutrux 00:06:00 That's where you've got to be very, very careful with the decisions that you make. So all right, that's all we have when it comes to that story. Next thing we were talking about is a little bit of some marketing slash AI from Neil Patel. And these are five AI trends that will change how you get discovered online. This is I figure this was one really, really valuable for people because he's talking a lot about 2026 and how AI is transforming SEO, and how it's really replacing traditional strategies that we were using before. Like a bunch of where we're using keywords and, and, you know, really going with backlinks and all like all of that and how it's really being replaced with things like brand authority and contextual relevance and trust signals. These are the buzzwords that you're going to be hearing now. For those of you that were around for the beginning of SEO, when it's sort of like, you know, keyword stuffing and black hat SEO, those were more bad terms, more negative terms, more of the the positive words that you're gonna be hearing are the brand authority, contextual relevance, trust signals.

Tyson Mutrux 00:07:13 So some of the key takeaways from this, you're going to see that brand citations are going to be more and more more important than backlinks. Okay. So and this is something we've been on for I'd say close to a year now when it comes to the shift from the traditional search to the LMS. And it's effective. Guild members have been taking the things that we've been doing. We've been talking about the guides that we put together for one of our trainings, and they're getting great results. This is something that we're ahead of the curve. I promise you, we are ahead of the curve. We I mean, all of us when it comes to maximum lawyer and people are listening. We're ahead of this. So I want you to be on the top of the mountain when it comes to searches. And the way you do that is it's brand citations over backlinks. So AI they're evaluating mentions, credibility, context when it comes to the topic. And that is much more important than just links these days.

Tyson Mutrux 00:08:17 Okay. So I'm not saying links are not relevant or that they're not important. Okay. But building authoritative citations and and managing your brand sentiment is crucial. It's going to be crucial because just think about your searches now, okay? You're not just getting a link, okay. And whenever you're doing a search in an let's say ChatGPT, let's just use Gemini or ChatGPT. So we'll say Gemini. I'm always using ChatGPT as an example. Let's use Gemini as an example. The link that you get in the results. It's not just a link, right? It's not just someone that stuffs a bunch of keywords. They are referencing the information inside of that site. Okay, so it's you're taking it's that contextual search. They've not just they've just not, you know, fed you something with a bunch of keywords. They've actually looked okay. How authoritative is this brand. Okay. So this person clearly knows what they're talking about. And they are pairing that with the link. Right. There's there's more juice to it.

Tyson Mutrux 00:09:25 Right. And that's why whenever you were laying out, we have a very specific strategy with how we lay out all of our, our pages now. So you've got, you have to make sure that you build in the authority to those pages. Otherwise the LMS will just skip right over it and they're not going to reference you. Another key takeaway is community platforms. They're losing influence. Okay. so sites like Reddit, which is funny because Reddit for about a nine month period was really big. Everyone was on Reddit, right? Everyone was. What I mean by on Reddit was everyone was on this Reddit game. Even we were trying to develop some sort of strategy where we were, you know, putting posts into into Reddit and Quora also, which Quora, to a lesser extent, those are less impactful. They're not very authoritative. They're not expert driven content. They're not expert driven content from like lawyer websites. Right. Those will dominate AI search. And they are they're already dominating AI search okay.

Tyson Mutrux 00:10:27 So you're not going to be getting a bunch of citations from a Reddit article okay. You're not because they're not they're not expert driven. All right. That does to some extent worry me a little bit about the avos of the world that could those could pop back up and become the leaders. I'm just saying it could happen. I don't I hope not, I really hope not. But just know that's something that's completely possible. Another key takeaway LMS their like transaction endpoints. So things like ChatGPT Gemini they're going to be able start to handle those purchases. I talked about this last week. And they can schedule appointments right. And they're going to be able to make that. They're going to make that website traffic less critical. So as you see all your traffic go down, you're going to have to optimize for the on platform conversations that the the potential clients are having with themselves. Okay. That's what you're going to have to address. Don't fully have that developed yet. I don't think anyone does at this point.

Tyson Mutrux 00:11:22 But that's something you have to start thinking about, right? Really, really important. You're not going to have the ability to design. I mean, you have the ability all you want and design how you convert from your website and all that. But is it really going to matter? It's going to matter a small amount in the next five years, very small amount. You're going to have to figure out how are you going to convert from the platform that they're finding you in? Okay. Really, really important for Fourth thing, AI ads are going to disrupt organic visibility substantially, so paid placements are going to increasingly dominate AI search. It's just going to happen. Okay. So you have to you have to test early and and set aside your ballot budget for that. And then last thing is voice AI. It's going to be what he says is it's going to create this winner take all market. So only the top brand in voice search gets recommended. Dominance and category positioning is critical. I'm less convinced about this one.

Tyson Mutrux 00:12:21 This is one I mean, Neil Patel knows a lot, so he's probably right. So if you're going to take my opinion versus his take his I'm just saying it's one of those things where we've been hearing about AI voice for now, I think probably a decade or at least close to oh yeah, it's been a decade. I bet we've been hearing about it and it's not what we thought it was going to be. It's just not. So I'm not. It's one of those things where I'm not super convinced that that's what's going to happen. All right, let's go to our next one. Though I do want to I spent a lot of time on that one. I need to move things along. So we're going to get to the slide killer gamma. And so what's important about this is I, their founder, made a post on X this week about all of these new features that they have. There's an article that came out on Monday from TechCrunch and gamma. They just hit a 2.1 billion valuation, which is pretty astonishing.

Tyson Mutrux 00:13:19 There's money flooding into it. And if you've not used gamma before, what it does is, is it creates presentations, websites, interactive content like PDFs that are very interactive, phenomenally well. And without it, you don't need any design skills. You put in the information. You could even just prompt it. By the way. So this is. This is where it's really scary. When I've used it. What I use. I put the content into it. So I say here's all the information and it will design all the slides for me. Really incredible. I'll use this as a plug for the survey. So Maxwell survey.com. So the state of the firm survey, we did it last year for the first time. This is the second year we're going to do it. I took all that data and I plugged it straight into gamma and gamma ray. The slides for me all the tables, the charts, everything. Boom. Click of a button. Done. Matter of seconds. Really impressive.

Tyson Mutrux 00:14:17 If you don't have data, you could just say, you know, create a presentation on how to do SEO in an LLM world. I don't know whatever you want to call it, and it would create the slide with all the content, everything you need to teach it. It's very, very, very impressive. It is the position itself where it's going to overtake PowerPoint. I'm just telling you, my Microsoft has a very, very deep, deep hold in the market. However, what it can't do and what Canva can't do. Canva was the early one on this where Canva, you know, docks, decks where you you put an outline in and it creates your decks. Not great. It was not great. It was okay. It was not great. Gamma, I'm telling you, with zero editing, it could have it done for you. And you can have your own brand templates, all that kind of stuff. Zero editing. You could plug it in. Good to go. Microsoft can't compete with that right now.

Tyson Mutrux 00:15:14 What you might see happen is Microsoft by gamma. If they were to if gamma was interested. If I were gamma I don't think I would sell to Microsoft. I would be very disappointed if that happened. But that's where I think that's where Dexter slide decks are headed. So they've got a massive user base already. So they ever get 70 million users okay. Which is pretty pretty impressive. They've got investor confidence right. So they just went through a series B round I think 100 million. I don't know what it was. A hundred. I think it's hundreds of millions of dollars, maybe $100 million, but a lot of money. And then I think there's a lot of business implications for this. When it comes to community business communications, the traditional presentation tools that we have are pretty boring. They're not very good. This solves a massive, massive problem. And that is it's massive, massive pain. Like think about any presentation that you've ever given any if you just plug in what you have, the materials that you've created for it, and then it just does all that design work.

Tyson Mutrux 00:16:12 I know that I've done presentations before where I spent more time on the actual slide deck than I did on the actual presentation itself. So this is this solves a massive, massive pain point. So there's a great amount of efficiency gains when it comes to this. You have a competitive edge when it comes to how your slides look versus others. My concern would be is that everyone that creates a slide deck through gamma is everyone's just going to look the same. I guess that could happen, but I'm sure that that's a problem that they're going to solve at some point with all the money coming in, but really, really great tool. So I highly recommend it. We don't get paid for that. We don't get. It's not like we get any affiliate links from that or affiliate money. We just I think it's a great product. So all right let's get into Leadership Mastery. This is a fun one. I don't know who this person is. I've never heard of this person. But it's a cool article that we found Wes cow.

Tyson Mutrux 00:17:04 So it's Wes. It's cow. How West cow coaches founders to influence lead and get what they want. I think all of those are very important. If you are a law firm owner or if you're just a lawyer in general, I think those are super, super important. So this is one it's really good because what they do is talk about how to make decisions, influence your people, and really lead people in ways that don't have as many of the negative side effects. So in this one. It's going to allow you to navigate a lot of those, you know, complex business dynamics. And so some of the key takeaways you've got influence over authority okay. That's a really important part of this whole thing is so they talk about how successful leaders they rely on influence and not just positional power to lead their team effectively. Right. So just because you're a senior trial attorney or just because you are the owner of the law firm, whatever it may be, it means nothing means little, means little, I would say means nothing.

Tyson Mutrux 00:18:12 Just because you're in the position doesn't mean that you should automatically assume that they're going to listen to you, right? You have to. They're watching your people or watching you. They're seeing how you work, how hard you work. And you have to use influence, right, as opposed to your power. So you have to get to understand your people. You can't just you must do this because I am this. You know, that's not how it works. You know, you get to understand your people get to know your people and then they will follow you, right? So you're going to use your influence as opposed to just just your position in the firm. Strategic communication. This is my favorite part of the entire article. And it talks about how you frame ideas and present opinions directly impacts whether others are going to buy in. Okay, so I'm gonna say it again, how you frame your ideas and how you present the different options directly impacts whether others buy in. This is really, really valuable.

Tyson Mutrux 00:19:10 This is something we talk about on the leadership team quite a bit when it comes to okay, how do we present this. How how is it that we're going to present this idea to people? Because sometimes you have to, you know, present it to influence the more the influencers in the firm. Right. You want to you want to introduce those people to it first and then let it kind of roll out from there. Sometimes you want to present it to everybody at one time, it's okay. It's okay to do that. You have to be strategic about it. Okay. You have to be very, very strategic. How do you frame it? I'll just give you a very simple thing that we do. We don't call them issues. We call them opportunities for growth. Okay. That's a framing. That's just a very simple framing thing. There's nothing. We talked about this before. On the show I've talked about with other people in the guild is priming. Okay. So when you are speaking to someone, maybe you have a team member.

Tyson Mutrux 00:20:04 I'll, you know, I'll use myself as an example. And I will never forget this, and I don't I don't know if this is what he intended. I think looking back, I think he he did intend it this way. I remember I was on student government at in law school, and the dean, I was supposed to meet with someone in the law library, the head of the law library, and the dean introduced me via email and said, you know, Tyson would like to discuss this. He always brings a lot of ideas to the table. And I always, I always think about it. I was like, well, how does he know that about me? Thinking back, I think he was just priming me. So you go in and let's say you have an employee that's really kind of difficult on on certain things. You say, you know, I just really love how you have an open mind. It's just a simple priming technique. And it's just, it's it's strategic communication.

Tyson Mutrux 00:20:50 That's what it is. And it's very effective. The third takeaway from this one is decision making clarity. So the successful owners, they have to make very clear decisions quickly while balancing input from the the team okay. So they have to make a very clear decision. This is what we are doing. You make it quickly okay. And you are also at the same time you're doing it while also balancing the input from your team. Okay. And they specifically talk about stakeholders, not just your team as a whole. So the more influential people in your team, those are the stakeholders. Those are the people that you are. You're really going to focus on okay, fourth part of this negotiation and persuasion. So the the effective leaders, they can negotiate the outcomes that serve both the business and its people. This is a very I. It's interesting because I had this conversation with a a team member yesterday about, you know, kind of balancing my time versus the, the team. Right. So it was kind of a negotiation to a certain extent.

Tyson Mutrux 00:21:51 Many times we're in negotiations and we don't realize it. You have to realize that many times, usually you are in a negotiation. So you have to be very, very careful about that. And then self-awareness. So this is this is really, really important. And this is probably one of my weak points. Probably it's just self-awareness. Leadership starts with understanding your own tendencies your own biases, your own triggers. Sometimes I can I can avoid that. I'll use the word avoid. Sometimes I will avoid that. And I should probably do a much better job about the self-awareness part of it. I think we all can improve on certain things. That's definitely one of mine I can improve on. All right, so let's get into the last topic. We only have a few minutes left. So this is one. I picked a part of this out eating glass because it's something that they talk about embracing. In this particular article it's from first round Review. I don't I'm not really familiar with that one, but I thought the idea was I'll tell you the article.

Tyson Mutrux 00:22:47 This is why I found it interesting how to build a company. You'll you'll run forever. It's by Zach Kantor. And so he's the founder and CEO of Steady steady how to build a Company. You'll run forever. I think that's really just an interesting idea. And Zach Cantor, he. So he built a profitable sub parts business, then sold them to found steady and API first health care clearinghouse company. His philosophy design his philosophy design your business from the start to be something you live in long term, not just build and exit. So run forever. The key parts of this so maintain control, not just ownership percentage. It's not what he's talking about. Maintaining control. There's a lot of founders that have given up. Majority. I don't know how this really works, but majority share. But they still maintain control. So always maintain control. Really important embrace eating glass. So doing hard foundational work repeatedly I find that beautiful. So embrace eating glass doing hard foundational work repeatedly. This is the part where, you know, rolling the sleeves up, getting in the dirt a little bit and doing those things very, very powerful, very verbal.

Tyson Mutrux 00:24:06 I have it, I can tell you from when we, you know, did our transition with the all the top grading and all that, it getting, you know, rolling the sleeves up had a very powerful effect. So highly, highly encourage that third part. Execution alone isn't a true moat okay. So solve difficult problems that others ignore, right? So just because you're executing doesn't mean that that's going to give you that buffer that you think you're going to have solve the difficult problems in the firm that other people are ignoring. Okay, you do that. You're going to win a lot, a lot of followers for hire, for high agencies, employees who treat everything is your fault now and take ownership. So employees who treat everything is your fault now and take ownership. So this is not your fault. Everything's basically my fault. Okay. When it comes to the employee, they take ownership over it. So that's the high agency part of it. So finding those types of people, those was something that we did.

Tyson Mutrux 00:25:09 I did a dual class at State Farm years ago, and we it was about ownership. And that was a really, really big thing with that they talked about in their culture was taking ownership over every decision. It is very powerful. And if you can communicate that to your team, really important. Speaking of communication, clear communication is the fifth part of this clear communication with investors. So so share bad news early. Good news after it happens okay. So share bad news early. Good news after it happens. Okay. So I think that's really important. So you get the bad news. You share right away or early. And then the good news. So wait for the good thing to happen and then share it after it happens. Right. To be honest with you, I don't know how they were differentiating the two. They sound very, very similar. But those are the key takeaways. If I'm being out of business, it's. That one's a little confusing to me, but all right, that's all I have for this week.

Tyson Mutrux 00:26:06 Thank you Amy Maxilla Amy again for running overlays and everything for me and getting this going because it makes it a lot easier. But have a wonderful week everybody. We will be seeing you here, buddy.