Maximum Lawyer

Watch the YouTube version of this episode HERE

In this episode of the Maximum Lawyer podcast, host Tyson shares his presentation from the stage of MaxLawCon 2025 earlier this fall. In his presentation he explores how law firm leaders can break through self-imposed limits by embracing speed, clarity, and confidence. 

Drawing inspiration from Roger Bannister’s four-minute mile, Tyson talks about the importance of overcoming psychological barriers, the power of setting tight deadlines, and the importance of decisive action. He shares practical strategies for increasing efficiency—such as eliminating unnecessary tasks and meetings—and emphasizes building a culture of urgency. Tyson encourages listeners to act quickly on new ideas, leveraging technology to drive growth and outpace competitors.

Listen in.

  • 1:56 Breaking Psychological Barriers in Law Practice 
  • 3:22 Three Keys to Moving Faster: Clarity, Constraint, Confidence 
  • 6:02 Perfectionism vs. Action and the Maximum Lawyer Origin 
  • 7:17 Lessons on Speed: Subtraction Bias and Task Reduction
  • 11:36 Maximizing Time: Attack Lists and Executive Efficiency
  • 14:03 Striking Faster: Decision-Making and Revenue Growth
  • 16:10 The Era of Idea Execution and the Power of Speed
  • 17:19 Challenge: Take Immediate Action and Compound Speed 


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


Resources:

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

Tyson Mutrux 00:00:11 Next, we have our fearless leader, private pilot, jiujitsu aficionado, man of many talents, and the husband of Amy Matrix. Tyson matrix. Come on back to the stage, and Tyson is going to share with us, his wisdom. Thanks, Tyson.

Tyson Mutrux 00:00:34 Thank you.

Tyson Mutrux 00:00:39 So for decades, scientists, doctors, coaches, they said it couldn't be done. Not possible. The four minute mile could never be broken. Some doctors thought that your heart would explode. Other doctors thought that the lung capacity just could not take it for someone to run a four minute mile. And so what happened was, is that the. The whole running world, they stopped trying. And then one day in 1956, 1954. August 6th, 1954, a man by the name of Roger Bannister. He put on his running shoes. He walked onto Oxford's track and he ran three minutes, 59 seconds, 59.4 seconds, so barely broke that barrier. And what's really interesting is just like the running world, how they stopped trying up until that point.

Tyson Mutrux 00:01:56 We do the same things in our practices. We we think, oh, it's not possible to achieve X number of dollars in revenue each year. Oh, I can't bring on a CEO because this, this, this and this or I can't do that marketing campaign because it will never work. But what he did was he broke a psychological bearer barrier. It was not a time barrier. It was a psychological barrier and was really, really interesting. The reason why I love that story is that in all of human history, no one had ever broken that record, ever. And you know how long it took to break his record? Six weeks. Six weeks. And the two of them broke that record the same year. And in the next four years, 20 people broke the four minute mile barrier, and hundreds and thousands have broken it since then, and no one thought it was possible until one person did it. It's really incredible. And we do the same thing in our practices every single day. We tell ourselves, we can't do this.

Tyson Mutrux 00:03:22 We can't do that. And in the reality is, is that we can't. You just have to get past that psychological barrier. And what I want to do is I want to encourage you to take those risks. Go out and take that leap. And many times it's just as simple as going faster, striking faster. And I'm going to talk about that over the next few minutes. But what's our four minute mile? What is it as attorneys, as law firm owners, it's that we set these artificial limits on ourselves. We do it every single day. So I want to give you a few things to focus on that are going to help you move faster. And it's really I've simplified it into three things. One. Just clarity. Know what the goal is. It's really, really simple. Know what the goal is. Number two constraint. Shorten the time period we had in our firm. We had this goal of a five year plan of building our own case management system. And then one day I had this really harebrained idea.

Tyson Mutrux 00:04:44 I said, hey, what if we did it in 18 months and then said, well, what about six months? And we did get it done in six months. But it was a pretty crappy version, but now we've got a really damn good version. It's just because we started to take action on it. And the third thing is, is having confidence. So you have the clarity. You know what your goal is. You have the constraints. You shorten the time and having confidence. And it's not just having confidence in you, although that is extremely important. And Jason Selke always talks about that as having that confidence. But it's having that confidence in your team to go out and achieve that goal. And that's something that we do all the time where we don't rely enough on our teams. And I had mentioned, you know, Jim, we started the podcast in 2016. Jim's right back there, one of my best friends. So. A lot of times people, they focus on perfectionism, and they want to get a perfect thing done before they do anything.

Tyson Mutrux 00:06:02 And I quote I saw the other day was perfectionism is the slowest way to fail. I was like, that is so, so true. It's a very, very slow, painful death. But Gemini, we we're dumb enough to think we're going to look into this computer. We're going to start recording on Skype, and maybe some people will listen to it. We knew we wanted to help attorneys, so we had we had that clarity. What the thing we didn't put on it was constraints. We had no idea what was going to happen after that. And but we did have we were dumb enough to have the confidence to do what we did. When it comes to maximum Lawyer and we we we have a global community. There's people from all over the world that listen to Maximum Lawyer. When when it started, it was probably just Mo and Big Mike. That's probably all it was, and it just kind of snowballed from there. The really, really great thing that I've gotten from Maximum Lawyer is over the years, I've learned a few really, really important things about speed.

Tyson Mutrux 00:07:17 The first is, and what's really interesting is when you have an issue in your firm, what do you normally do? You usually try to add something to it. So let's say you're having a communication problem. Maybe we need to add an answering service to it. That's what we need. We need an answering service. Or you know maybe maybe the team is really overwhelmed. We need to add more people. That's what we need to do. We really need to add more people or we, you know, let's automate things. Let's add another system. Let's do that. We need to add another system. And in the process, what you do is you slow your firm to just a crawl and you don't even realize it because you're adding all of these things. There's actually a scientific term for this. It's called subtraction bias. And the truth is the reality is, is that scientifically proven that if you take things away, you will move faster? Like, imagine I was thinking about this. Let's say Roger Bannister want to run faster.

Tyson Mutrux 00:08:23 So he's like, you know what? Maybe I need to I need to get some some thicker shoes. That's what I need. I really need some thicker shoes. Let's add some weight to my feet. Maybe I'll put a backpack on. Maybe I need a I need to drink more water during the run, so maybe I'll put a backpack on. Makes no sense. And that's what we're doing to ourselves every single day when it comes to our firms. But the reality is, what you need to do is you need to start subtracting. One thing that we did was really kind of interesting Over. And this is something we did over the last year is. A little dry mouth is. We went through all of our tasks in the entire firm. So every single one. And we audit it. And we said, what are the ones that are absolutely necessary, absolutely necessary. And we went through and we probably cleared out two thirds of all of our tasks that were automatically populating for every single case.

Tyson Mutrux 00:09:26 And what we realized is we were overworking files by tens of hours, okay. Every file, tens of hours. Just think about how much money that saves us for not doing those. Now, that doesn't mean that a case manager can't decide to go out and, you know, complete different tasks for that file because the file calls for it. They can still do those things, but only when the file calls for it. Another thing that we did, and this is one of my favorites. Some of you have probably heard me talk about it before, is we took all of our meetings and cut the time in half. We've been doing that for the last two years. We cut the time in half and you know how many complaints we got about that? Zero. Do you do you know how much less work we got done? None. We're we're doing more with in less time because you spend most of your time just wasting time in meetings. And here's what's really important. I mentioned this yesterday during the hot seats.

Tyson Mutrux 00:10:31 If you have ten people in a meeting, a one hour meeting, okay, it's not a one hour meeting. That's a ten hour meeting. Think about it. It's a ten hour meeting. You cut that in half and you've saved five hours of work time. That's a massive amount of work. Now, those of you that maybe might be able to bill for that, maybe that's a little bit different, but. So maybe you want to double those time. Just kidding. Don't do that. But start thinking about subtracting when it comes to your firms. The second thing that I learned is that you don't need more time. You don't need more time. What you need to do is you need to do more with your time and stop focusing on the less important things. And I one of the I had a meeting with Jason Silk, and I meet with him every single month, and there's a couple times where I've been like, oh, I'm out of time, I don't have enough time. And we've kind of gone through everything and we've cut things from the calendar and removed this.

Tyson Mutrux 00:11:36 And he calls me on my BS and he says, well, you know, what do you do when you have, you know, you know, a couple of minutes? Well, I just I don't know, I just kind of, you know, I use that time just to kind of catch up on email or I'll, you know, maybe I'll just move on to the next thing. He's like, no, no, Create an attack list. Create an attack list. So what we did is I went and I created an attack list, and he told me that the best executives in the world, what they do is they focus on one minute tasks, two minute tasks, five minute tasks. So if I've got a minute, I go knock out a one minute task. I've got two minutes. Go knock out a two minute task. If I got five minutes, go knock out a five minute test, because that's what the best executives in the world they do. They do more with their time.

Tyson Mutrux 00:12:26 They're way more efficient with their time. So if you want to be a not just a wonderful law firm owner, that's a great leader of your people. If you want to be a great executive, you're going to find a way to do more with your time. That is, I can tell you, one of the most important and the most valuable things that I have done when it comes to my practice. And the third thing that I've learned, and this is one that is the hardest, but it is maybe the most important is that speed is culture. It's actually something that you can teach to your team. Okay? It's not just something that you do yourself. It's that something that you teach to your team. It's something that you have to build into your culture. How many people here raise your hands if your if your people waste time. Okay. That's your money out the door. But if you can build a culture of speed that will save you tons of time and tons of money. One of my favorite parts about our last quarterly meeting was that everyone was talking about, and one of the most common things we get is, can we get rid of this task? Can we get rid of that task? Can we get rid of this software? Can we get rid of that software? But my one of my most my favorite parts of the last quarter of the meeting was can we use AI for that? Can we use AI for this? And there's gonna be plenty of AI.

Tyson Mutrux 00:14:03 So I'm not going to talk a lot about AI today, but. We have built a culture where everyone is looking to speed up the process. No one wants to slow things down. No one's looking to waste time. It's a culture that we have built internally where everyone's looking to speed up the process. And that's incredible. So what I want you to think about when it comes to striking faster, you have to make faster decisions. Here's a really interesting statistic. And I've seen multiple statistics, but this is the one that this one caught my attention. Where this law firm owners or company owners that make decisions faster than their competitors, they increase their revenues by 16% just by making faster decisions, and I found that to be a really, really interesting statistic. It doesn't even mean that they were making the right decisions. They were just moving faster. They were striking faster. So it makes me think of we we actually have a trademark strike fast strike often because we think it's really, really important that we get to Leeds fast.

Tyson Mutrux 00:15:15 You know, we follow up, so we strike fast, we strike often, we send demands out fast. We follow up on those demands. We we file lawsuits fast when we have to. We we follow up, we get service. when it comes to depositions, discovery. Fast fast fast. Follow up, follow up, follow up. But when everything's. When I was thinking about a strike faster, it makes me think of lightning, right? Lightning bolts and a lightning bolt doesn't ask for permission. Right? It just strikes right. It doesn't go out into a committee and say, hey, is this a good time to do a lightning strike? No, it just strikes. So when you think about striking faster, think about a lightning bolt, right? When you have an idea, you have. When you have an idea, don't go out and ask for permission. Don't run it through a committee. That's where everything goes to die. When you have these ideas that you know, deep down, I'm not talking about some harebrained idea.

Tyson Mutrux 00:16:10 I'm talking about, like, this is. This is what I believe is is this is going to work. Strike on it and move fast. There are so many tools. The earth is moving beneath our feet. But these, the earth, these, this, these movements. When it comes to AI and technology, we can use those to to our advantage. Vibe coding. I don't know if you've ever heard of vibe coding. Most of you probably have, but you can go out and build up, build pretty much anything that you want these days in a matter of minutes, in a matter of minutes. And so go out and build the things that you're wanting to build. We're in the era of the idea people, we are in that era firmly because you can go out and build whatever you want in the matter of minutes and hours, you really can. So here's my challenge. You're going to have a lot of great ideas over the next couple of days. We have incredible speakers that are going to give you so many things that are working, so many things that are not working, and you're going to want to go out and implement all of these changes.

Tyson Mutrux 00:17:19 Let's say you get an idea about that. Or maybe it's an idea that you've been sitting on for the last few months. What I want you to do pick one thing before tomorrow. And I don't care if you leave a session. The speakers may look like this, but I don't care if you leave a session to go up to your room to build it. Go do it before tomorrow. Pick that one thing. Maybe. Maybe you're. You know you're supposed to fire that person. I don't like that. I hate firing, it's the worst. But sometimes it's the best thing for your firm. Or maybe you know that there's is this a wonderful lead magnet that you know you need to do, and you've been sitting on it for months. Go do it here. Here's the time you're going to put in the work, and you're going to do the work this the next couple of days. Get it done. Go out and then you can move on to the next thing. Because what's so valuable you got to know this.

Tyson Mutrux 00:18:08 You have to understand this. Speed compounds. It compounds. If you take action this week, next week you can go to the next thing. And the thing that you built this week is working for you already. Next week you build that that's going to start working for you. And the next thing and the next thing and the next thing it compounds. It's like interest. So go do those things. Quit sitting on them and go take action. And I promise you, when you strike faster you will start to see the results.