Maximum Lawyer

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

Tyson Mutrux 00:00:11 All right, so, Becca, in January, you and I had a conversation. We recorded it, and we were talking about vendors. Do you remember that? Yes. And I thought was kind of interesting because I get a lot of, like, texts and comments from people about how worked up you were over it. You got some beef with just generally with vendors. I do you want to talk a little bit about that, what we talked about in January?

Becca Eberhart 00:00:33 Yes. So one of our guild members had made a post about them spending money and essentially not getting the service that they were told that they were going to get if they spent that amount of money. And so it was at that point that I just felt like there was had to be something that we, as a maximum lawyer, could do to help that situation, because that's not the only time that we've heard of it. We've heard plenty of people in the past say the same thing.

Becca Eberhart 00:00:58 We continue to see those posts happen in the group, in the big Facebook group. And so it kind of stemmed from there that we came up with a solution.

Tyson Mutrux 00:01:08 I think it's interesting how worked up you got over it. And like rightfully so. And I think all iPhone owners at some point have probably gotten super worked up and then like, but we're just kind of like just take it at this point. You know what I mean? And so I feel like we all should be more frustrated. Agreed. On a regular basis. And so what's cool is you had an idea that we've done something with. So what was the idea?

Becca Eberhart 00:01:30 So what is it or what did we call it.

Tyson Mutrux 00:01:34 Well what's the idea. And then we'll tell people what we call what we're going to call it. Okay.

Becca Eberhart 00:01:38 So the idea is a review website for product and service providers that law firm owners use. And it's just a centralized place where everybody can go to see what our experiences that other law firm owners have had with this service provider.

Becca Eberhart 00:01:55 Before you get into a contract or give them money and then have your own bad experience if someone else can just tell you about theirs.

Tyson Mutrux 00:02:04 Yeah, it's really interesting and I think it's a brilliant idea and I think it's interesting. It's nothing. There's nothing that exists at this point when it comes to this. And I like yeah, sure, there's Google reviews, but they're not like all in one place. It's not consolidated into like one place where everyone can go look. And that's not obviously not specific to legal vendors. Also like lawyers and attorneys we've been getting reviewed for, I guess, a couple decades at this point, like why there has not been something that existed up to this point is crazy to me.

Becca Eberhart 00:02:34 I agree with that. I do think that it's crazy that it took this long, and that it's really enabled the service providers specifically to operate in the way that they have and make the money that they have on false promises and things like that. So it is very interesting. It's going to be a big change.

Tyson Mutrux 00:02:52 Do you want to tell people what we're launching? And it's it's coming out of beta. It's free to users forever. So just start with that. So people don't think we're trying to pitch them something because we're not. Yeah. This is truly because out of your frustration, because of what you've seen in the guild. So what do we call it?

Becca Eberhart 00:03:08 So we're calling it Becca's list. So that's the website. Pretty cool. Yes. Becca Lesko.

Tyson Mutrux 00:03:13 That's right.

Becca Eberhart 00:03:14 Yes.

Tyson Mutrux 00:03:14 You can also get through Becky's list. Oh, but we're not going to get into the development and all that, because that was a little bit of a frustrating thing that we went through, but we got it done.

Becca Eberhart 00:03:22 Yeah, absolutely.

Tyson Mutrux 00:03:24 I love how you just kind of just you just nod and smile. That's that's right. Because we we gotta went down one path and then I pulled a left turn and just kind of went the other way.

Becca Eberhart 00:03:34 Just standard.

Tyson Mutrux 00:03:35 Just pretty, pretty normal. But it's done. It's out of beta.

Tyson Mutrux 00:03:40 And what are you most excited about it.

Becca Eberhart 00:03:44 The ease of use that that especially okay. So I will say more. Anybody can use this but more the solo to small law firm owners, especially people just starting out. You're not going to have a big budget, but maybe you're like, well, should I invest in this thing or this company or this thing to really just start up, you know, ramping up that either intake, whatever it is that you want to do or change. I feel like this is the number one place you can go and trust that you're going to get real experiences from people. I think it's a little different to, if you think about it. Google reviews are solicited by the provider. Sure. Right. Especially I mean, even law firm owners do it like, hey, we're done working together. Such a great experience. Please leave me a great review. Which is necessary, but it's also necessary for the people that you're paying to do the exact same thing that you're doing.

Tyson Mutrux 00:04:32 Absolutely.

Becca Eberhart 00:04:33 And this isn't going to be that it's unsolicited and it's everyone freely sharing their experiences so that you don't have to learn on your own.

Tyson Mutrux 00:04:42 Yeah. I thought one of the really good ideas that you had was to to make sure, which was created a nightmare for me, but insisting on the LinkedIn login.

Becca Eberhart 00:04:50 I.

Tyson Mutrux 00:04:50 Do, yes. And I think that that was great. It was a brilliant idea. Yeah, that created a lot of problems getting that to work, the integration to work. It was way more effort than I thought it was going to be, but we had to get it done. What was the thinking behind that?

Becca Eberhart 00:05:05 I just think that it validates that there's a real person behind that review. I think there's nothing to hide behind. I mean, just in a world where reviews can be left under usernames that are like A16, 2008 at whatever, and you're like, okay. And then there's no, no profile picture, no nothing. It's just. Is that a valid review, whether it's positive or negative, to be honest, because I also don't want fake positive reviews either.

Becca Eberhart 00:05:29 That defeats the entire purpose of this. So linking it to someone's LinkedIn account, if you leave the review, it just it does tie it back to you as a person and as a business owner. And that's what I really wanted.

Tyson Mutrux 00:05:41 Yeah. One of the things we talked about too, is the inability of vendors to be able to get reviews changed and all that, and like, they can't pay to to get anything changed. You know, what's going to happen. There's going to be a point where someone's going to come to us crying about a review and like, I guess, how are you going to handle it? Because I know two sides of Becca. Okay? And I, I, part of me thinks like, Becca is going to be like the shoes on the other foot back.

Becca Eberhart 00:06:09 Wait, which one do you think is gonna happen?

Tyson Mutrux 00:06:10 I think you're gonna be more of the shoes on the other foot. Now you're the vendor. You need to suck it up and accept the fact you got a you got a negative review.

Tyson Mutrux 00:06:17 You'd get better at it.

Becca Eberhart 00:06:18 What's the what was the other version?

Tyson Mutrux 00:06:20 I guess they're both kind of similar, but you are a very reasonable person. So I think that sometimes you can be a little reasonable and or you're always reasonable, but maybe budge a little bit, but not much. You don't budge much.

Becca Eberhart 00:06:32 So I'm not budging on this. Yeah. Because the why behind it is stronger. I feel like I maybe know where you're going with this. I think you're more talking about the way that I do customer service. I think that might be where that's actually.

Tyson Mutrux 00:06:45 Yeah, I think that's what it is.

Becca Eberhart 00:06:46 Yeah. And it just feels a little different. Yes. When it comes to customer service, I might budge on things because I feel like it helps with better customer service. Right. That's not the idea here though. So I could look at it this way. If I were to remove a review that a vendor got just because they email us and they say, hey, we really don't want this up on your site, like everyone's seeing it, it's impacting us.

Becca Eberhart 00:07:09 The good customer service is that I leave it up because the customer service is for all of the users, not for the vendors, right?

Tyson Mutrux 00:07:16 I think it's a great, great way of pointing it. And now, not to say if it's a fake review of someone, let's say that someone was just going on just a bash because they're a competitor or something like that.

Becca Eberhart 00:07:25 We will that will be very a very different situation. But again, we have accountability with if I can tie your LinkedIn account to a competitor and I can, you know.

Tyson Mutrux 00:07:35 That's what's great about it.

Becca Eberhart 00:07:36 Yeah.

Tyson Mutrux 00:07:36 That's part of the brilliance.

Becca Eberhart 00:07:37 Exactly.

Tyson Mutrux 00:07:38 Yeah. A little bit of my concern is that people that don't maybe have a LinkedIn account, but at this point you don't have a LinkedIn account. That's kind of crazy.

Becca Eberhart 00:07:45 I will say that you should go get one so that you can be on this list. That's going to be my answer. I feel like if you're a lawyer and a law firm owner and you don't have a LinkedIn account, I would say that you should just go get one anyways.

Becca Eberhart 00:07:57 I'm not going to lie. I mean, you should be networking as a business owner even like locally. And then when you come to events like Max Lokken, things like that. And I feel like LinkedIn is the perfect way to stay connected to someone where it's not like you're not seeing pictures of them, you know, on their beach vacation or with their dog or anything like that. I think that LinkedIn has a really great purpose for you and for your law firm. So I don't think we'll run into many issues.

Tyson Mutrux 00:08:25 It's true. Do you want to talk a little bit? I think this might be beneficial to people just talking about like the development process in big, like just generally big picture. Okay. You know how like, how that kind of played out. Now we don't get into specifics about like what like platforms. We switched all that kind of stuff. But maybe just like from idea to developing the idea to then implementation of it and then like going through and like launching features, testing out features, changing things and all that.

Tyson Mutrux 00:08:49 Because the reason I wanted to ask is like, we started with smiley faces instead of stars.

Becca Eberhart 00:08:52 Oh, okay.

Tyson Mutrux 00:08:53 Yes. Yeah. You know what I mean? So. Okay. Just the iteration of it there.

Becca Eberhart 00:08:57 Yes, there was definitely iterations. You might have to leave this. I feel like you really took on the technical development of this, and I was more honestly looking at it from a user perspective when both when we were coming up with ideas and when we would create it and then attempt to look at it and review it and be like, oh, this isn't it. We did. We did have a big play on smiley faces, so we thought our rating system was going to be maybe a happy face, a sad face, and maybe a neutral face or an angry face when you go in to use something like that. There was a lot of faces. There was just a lot of faces everywhere.

Tyson Mutrux 00:09:34 There's so many different kinds of emojis.

Becca Eberhart 00:09:35 We incorporated faces into the logo initially, which as you can see now, there's there's no smiley face.

Tyson Mutrux 00:09:41 And the color was different. The color.

Becca Eberhart 00:09:43 The colors went from two tones to two.

Tyson Mutrux 00:09:47 Different purple, and I'll call it purple and orange. You probably use different colors.

Becca Eberhart 00:09:50 No that's fine.

Tyson Mutrux 00:09:50 The purple and orange to blue and yellow.

Becca Eberhart 00:09:52 Yellow. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. No. So we switched from the smiley faces to your typical five star review. We also thought that that's something that you don't have to explain to anyone. I think it's used in enough places that when you go on to a site, if you're leaving a review, you just know how to leave a star review. And we thought that the smiley face is kind of left for some interpretation, maybe. And so that's why we made that switch.

Tyson Mutrux 00:10:17 Yeah. So I thought I thought that was interesting. So it changed a little bit. Like the frustrating thing was developing with or dealing with the developer. And because you had created a really thorough Google doc and we would go implement or we would go create like put our notes in it, it would get implemented.

Tyson Mutrux 00:10:32 It was just I felt like that was a very frustrating process. But I felt like that part was really frustrating. Yeah. Like, I guess I was I was showing my frustration by hitting the you were.

Becca Eberhart 00:10:42 No, absolutely. I feel that I agree, I do, and I am in no way a developer or even an expert in just our regular site that's hosted on WordPress. Yeah, but I do have this issue. I do love to have that manual control behind the site. And when you're working with a developer, it's mostly on them. And then you're you're solely just communicating by giving feedback. And that's been a process for sure.

Tyson Mutrux 00:11:07 Yeah I yes, give me the login so I can go in and change the text. Yeah.

Becca Eberhart 00:11:12 Just right now right this second I just want to change it now.

Tyson Mutrux 00:11:15 That because like there's also like the delay. It's not just the delay but like and then sometimes things are lost in translation. And that part was really, really frustrating. Like, I wanted to pull my hair out so many different times.

Tyson Mutrux 00:11:27 No we didn't I didn't mean that I meant this or.

Becca Eberhart 00:11:30 Yes, exactly.

Tyson Mutrux 00:11:31 Wrong color there. But that was interesting part of the process. But things did. It flipped at some point where we did well. We've gone through a couple different developers, and then we switched over to a completely different platform, which made it, I.

Becca Eberhart 00:11:43 Think.

Tyson Mutrux 00:11:43 That.

Becca Eberhart 00:11:44 Made the change the platform.

Tyson Mutrux 00:11:45 Yeah. Much. Yeah. The platform we were using before just I don't think it had the capabilities of like, I think just the style of it, it could create the type of website that we wanted. Yeah. Yeah. It was just an old I feel like it was an old looking early 2000 website almost. Yeah. It was funny because we were kind of going for something kind of in a way, not like that, but like a simple design, though. Yeah. I mean, I don't think we quite did achieve your initial goal for it.

Becca Eberhart 00:12:13 And I think that's okay. But yeah, there was a much simpler version.

Becca Eberhart 00:12:17 I do think that that could come from my MVP. So my minimum viable product is very different than yours. And I think that that might.

Tyson Mutrux 00:12:26 Be very different.

Becca Eberhart 00:12:27 Yeah. So I think that's probably where that comes in. Like this is more of that happy medium where I would have been, okay, I think we could have launched with much less. And I think it's totally fine that we didn't.

Tyson Mutrux 00:12:36 Interesting. Because. Yeah. Yes. Yeah, I think we are our MVP's are way different. Yeah. Like I'm still the point where like like this little here, this little there. Oh. Which it's a lot of it just comes down to the user. Part of it is from the user. Does this make sense. Like there's, there's some features right now that I'm working on that it drives me nuts that it's just from the coding standpoint it's not working. Because sometimes what's interesting to me is like I'm learning all these things about the coding. Like you'll do these small things that will break the entire site and not fun, not fun at all.

Tyson Mutrux 00:13:07 No. It's like some of the screws up a case. You know, they're tinkering with their own case and screw up the entire case. Yeah, that could happen. Absolutely. But it's it's been interesting. I found it very interesting going through this process, because it's not like designing your website for your law firm. It is complete. Like this is a pro. This is an actual product, you know.

Becca Eberhart 00:13:26 Yeah, I agree with that. A website for a law firm, for example, is even the Maximum Lawyer website. Right. It's mostly just there for information. Right. Brand recognition I mean that's what it's there for. This is very different. This has to be usable by someone else. And I had never done that before. I don't think you had ever. Not to this extent.

Tyson Mutrux 00:13:47 Right. Yeah. Well and we have and I had some experience when it comes to like when we build out the case management system and understanding the user part of it to, to a certain extent.

Tyson Mutrux 00:13:57 But this was a completely different level. This was like times ten. Yeah. Like so this was that on steroids. And that was that was kind of an interesting thing. I it was kind of a fun process because you are you're seeing something the like your initial idea come to, to fruition and it turns into an actual product that people can use. That was kind of neat.

Becca Eberhart 00:14:14 No, it's it's awesome.

Tyson Mutrux 00:14:16 Yeah. So it is it's like it's officially launched. Yeah. How do people find it? How do you how do they access it.

Becca Eberhart 00:14:21 So you go to Becca's list Co and then you create your account and you're free to leave your reviews. Check out the reviews that are already in there. I don't think we had mentioned this, actually. You said that we did do a beta version, but I don't think we mentioned that we did that inside the guild.

Tyson Mutrux 00:14:36 Yes. That's correct.

Becca Eberhart 00:14:37 So the the reviews that you'll see in there are actually from guild members because we launched it to them first.

Becca Eberhart 00:14:43 So again, those are not fake reviews. We didn't front load anything. Those are real reviews from other law firm owners that we just launched inside the guild, and let them kind of go in and give us feedback before we did the public launch.

Tyson Mutrux 00:14:57 Yeah, that's pretty cool. I'm excited about it. Yeah. Kudos to you for the idea. The initial feedback that we've gotten from the Guild is pretty cool. It's just like it's it's like the thing when you hear about like, duh, why didn't we have this before? Yes. That's pretty cool about it. It is Becca's list. No, not.io. Even though both. Wilco. Becca. Lesko.