Live in Nashville: Notes from MaxLawCon 2025 Day One

October 9, 2025
Danny Decker

I’m pretty sure I’m in Las Vegas, not Nashville. If you’ve ever been to the Gaylord Opryland, you know what I mean. Navigating this hotel is wild. 

I’m at MaxLawCon 2025 as a speaker – if you know me, you know I’ll take every opportunity I can get to talk about marketing 😂 – and I wasn’t planning to blog about it, but this event has been so great that I wanted to get some takeaways written down.

Tyson Mutrux kicked things off with a reminder that at one time, doctors and sports scientists and the general public considered it impossible for a human being to run a mile in less than 4 minutes. This was accepted, conventional wisdom and nobody challenged it.

Then in 1954 Roger Bannister did it in three minutes and fifty-nine seconds.

The best part of this story is that after he did it, several others did it shortly afterward. Moral of the story: Why put a lid on your potential? What lids have you already put on your own potential and do they really have to be there?

Jim Hacking talked about learning from failure. Bill Gates said that “Success is a lousy teacher” and I believe that 100%. Success is awesome! But you generally learn a lot more from failure. And most people who achieve massive success had to fail a lot before they got there. One of my favorite life/business lessons is the idea that you can’t fail unless you quit. Reframe the way you think about failure and embrace it as the lesson and the data point that it is.

Charlie Mann gave a great presentation on referral marketing. Some people look at referral marketing as different than (or even in competition with) digital marketing… the reality is that smart digital marketing helps law firms drive more referrals, because we all know that the best clients typically come via referral. At Spotlight, driving & increasing referrals for law firms is a big part of what we do.

Charlie shared a simple referral system: 

Law firm owners should commit to: 

👉 One meetup per week (lunch, coffee, etc) with a potential referral source

👉 One piece of direct mail per month, to at least 25 potential referral sources

👉 One email blast per week to the entire mailing list.

I love these suggestions, and the one major addition I have is social retargeting to the entire list, as well. That way clients and referral sources see your content consistently whenever they’re browsing social media. This is super inexpensive and very effective for creating top-of-mind awareness. 

Then after lunch, Dr. Jason Selk gave a presentation that was one of the highlights of the day for me… Jason is a performance coach with some serious credentials. He was the director of sports psychology for the St. Louis Cardinals when they won their first World Series… pretty impressive!

His theme was “How to avoid burnout” and the whole thing was great, but my favorite personal takeaway came around failure, and how we treat ourselves when we fail. Basically, failure is completely normal and something we all experience all the time. But we LOVE to beat ourselves up about our failures, which is damaging and totally counter-productive. The takeaway is that we have to be very intentional about recognizing our successes and not beating ourselves up when we fail. 

MaxLawCon Day One has been outstanding so far – the Maximum Lawyer team has done an outstanding job and I’m looking forward to the rest of the event.

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Danny Decker

Daniel Decker is a co-founder and Partner at Spotlight Branding. In addition to helping lawyers stand out from the crowd, he spends his time writing, dreaming up new marketing strategies, and coming up with catchy subject lines. In his spare time, Daniel enjoys playing sports, guitar, politics, and Minnesota sports.