The following is a transcript of Episode 25 of Championing Justice. You can listen to the full episode here, or watch it on YouTube.

Darl:

Thank you for listening to the Championing Justice podcast. My name is Darl Champion. I’m the founder and owner of The Champion Firm. We’re a personal injury law firm in Marietta, Georgia, just right outside Atlanta.

On this month’s episode, I have my good friend Steve Litner, who’s here to talk about all the lessons he’s learned, starting, growing, and managing a successful personal injury law firm. Thanks, Steve.

Steve:

Thanks for having me, Darl.

Darl:

So tell us a little bit about yourself, how you got into the law and how you went about starting your law firm.

Steve:

I grew up in Boston, Massachusetts. I’m Jewish, so I was given three options: doctor, lawyer, and accountant. I can’t stand blood.

Darl:

The Jewish trifecta.

Steve:

Yeah, right. It’s funny, we get a gruesome case with really gnarly pictures and I don’t look at ’em and I send ’em to my partners and they laugh at me because I won’t look at any of the pictures. So I couldn’t be a doctor. I can’t do that. And I didn’t know I was good with numbers until later in life. So being an accountant didn’t really make a whole lot of sense, and my mom said, I like to argue.

So being a lawyer was natural. I moved here after law school. I went to UNC Chapel Hill for law school.

Darl:

Got a Tar Heel here.

Steve:

And I moved here and took a job with one of the big corporate firms doing securities litigation. It was never…

Darl:

Dovetails nicely with personal injury.

Steve:

Oh, yeah, yeah. It was never my intended path. I didn’t want to represent corporations, I wanted to represent people. So I found my way over to personal injury, started doing this work in 2010, worked for a couple of firms.

I’m not a good employee. I’m not easy to manage. I’m opinionated, and I determined that I’d be better off doing it on my own. So in 2012, I set up my own shop and left to do it the way that I wanted to do it and to follow the path that I wanted to follow.

Darl:

So when you started your firm, was it just you as the only attorney?

Steve:

Yep. So I left the firm that I was at with a whole whopping three or four cases, most of which were magistrate court cases had already been filed, and I was just going to try. I worked out a deal with the lawyer that I had been working for, but I started with essentially nothing, no staff, no real nest egg. I had already tried to start my own practice in 2010 before I really knew that personal injury was what I wanted to do and I failed and I went back to work for someone and I can tell you all about that.

But when I went out on my own the second time, I had a very clear vision of what I wanted to do, who I wanted to do it for, how I wanted to do it, and my wife thought I was crazy and she said, okay, you don’t have to take a salary. You can use $15,000 from our savings account, but if you go broke, you’re going to go get a job somewhere.

I said, okay, I’ll make that deal. I think I can make it work this time. So it was me, a laptop, a printer, a scan snap. I licked my own envelopes, I made my own bank deposits.

I rented a internal office with no windows from Jeff Shiver and Alan Hamilton, and I was in their office in Buckhead for about a year. And I didn’t hire my first paralegal until probably about 11, 11 and a half months into my practice. And I realized I needed to hire my first paralegal because I was working 12 hour days, seven days a week.

Darl:

That is a good sign that you need to hire somebody. So you talked about this vision that you had where you kind of figured out what you wanted to do. Tell us about that and what were your plans?

Steve:

So I went to law school thinking I wanted to do divorce work. I wanted to do child advocacy, amicable divorce, and serve as a guardian ad litem. I have some personal experiences as a child of divorce that sort of led me down that path.

In my first foray on my own, I handled a couple of those types of cases and I found out that they were too close to home for me. They were too emotional. They brought up too many things in myself that I didn’t want to be dealing with, and I couldn’t help them and still be unbiased and not let my emotions kind of drive me through the representation.

And when I was on my own the first time I took whatever came in the door, I mean, I wrote a prenup. I served as a guardian ad litem. I handled a case about the 400 tolls against the Georgia DOT.

Darl:

So wide variety.

Steve:

Yeah, I did DUI defense, I did bankruptcy. And in that I handled a couple of personal injury cases. I gravitated towards that because it was helping people in a time of need putting the pieces back together. It is communication, it’s teaching, it’s counseling and its advocacy.

And a lot of putting a deal together is a bit of a logic puzzle. How much money are they going to give you? How much money is your client willing to take? What are the moving pieces and how can they shake out so that you can get your client the desired outcome that they want and what are the risks and probabilities of going forward and pushing the case along? And so I really enjoyed the couple of personal injury cases that I had on my own the first time.

Darl:

Was that your first time handling a personal injury case?

Steve:

Yes. Okay. Yeah. So I had never done that. I had left securities litigation and done some consumer bankruptcy. So I lost my job in 2009 when the market just economic collapse during the downturn and the economic collapse. And the only firms hiring were bankruptcy firms.

And so I went to work for a high-volume bankruptcy firm for about six months. I departed that firm abruptly on a, I left on a Sunday after we had had this disastrous holiday party that resulted in the managing partner getting punched in the face by the boyfriend of another associate and one of the other associates telling the owner of the firm that the owner’s wife, that the owner was scum and her getting fired the next day.

Darl:

Sounds like a great place.

Steve:

It was a fantastic holiday party. And I went home and I was like, I got to get out of here. It’s a good sign.

So I left and started my own practice. I had a few bankruptcies that I picked up right away, and then I was like, I’m going to do whatever else. If you’re willing to pay me, I’m going to figure out how to do the work that you’re in survival mode paid for. Exactly. And I learned a lot and I got to do a variety of things. But that doesn’t bode well for ongoing success as a business.

Darl:

Correct. Yeah. And I think a big thing that I’ve learned is even starting my firm and doing just personal injury from the get-go, I was in survival mode too. And so there’s a lot of things that have to change over the course of your law firm ownership, where you get out of that survival mode and need to start thinking long term.

It’s like, okay, well now I’ve made it this far. I didn’t have to move back in with my mom and dad yet, which was like my biggest fear. I told my mom, I told her, I’m like, if this doesn’t work, I’m moving back in with you guys. Half joking. I definitely told her that I’m half joking about whether I actually would’ve, but yeah, I mean, that’s a big deal.

What about the time from ending your first foray into law firm ownership, going and working at other personal injury firms? What about that experience led you to kind of have this clear vision?

Steve:

So in my first foray, I took on a couple of personal injury cases. I found out that I really enjoyed those cases, really enjoyed the client interaction, really enjoyed the substantive law, and I sought out a job with a personal injury firm so I could learn the ropes from someone who’s been doing it longer than I have.

And I went to go work for a TV advertiser, billboard advertiser, and I actually really enjoyed my experience there. I learned a lot about the process of a personal injury case, how from intake to settlement, how it works, what steps should be taken, what best practices can be met. And I really enjoyed the experience there and I learned a lot because when you’re handling a higher volume of cases, you’re seeing a lot of issues with more frequency that people don’t see.

You’re seeing the tax liens, you’re seeing the child support liens, you’re seeing the bankruptcy, you’re seeing how these things intersect with personal injury in a way that you don’t see if you’re a solo handling a fourth or a fifth of the cases that I was handling at that time, obviously with a bigger team.

Darl:

So you went from 12 years ago, just Steve to now the firm is Litner + Deganian. You have how many partners?

Steve:

We have eight lawyers, including myself. We’ve got four partners. We have an office. Our main office is in Atlanta on Briarcliff just south of Clifton, near Emory University. We have an office in Columbus, Georgia. We have an office in Rankin, Georgia, which is, I think I pronounced that right.

Darl:

Yeah.

Steve:

Effingham County.

Darl:

That’s right outside Savannah.

Steve:

Right outside Savannah.

Darl:

How many employees total do y’all have?

Steve:

Oh man, I’ve lost track. We probably have about 30, if I had to guess. I think it’s about 20 to 22 additional staff members that are non-attorneys.

Darl:

Okay. And tell us how you went from Steve, to Steve and 30 other people.

Steve:

So there’s a couple of things.

Darl:

By the way. Just a lot of people that listen won’t know who you are. I mean, we have a lot of people that listen from other states. You guys aren’t on billboards, you’re not on tv, commercials, radio. You’ve built this very successful practice. So I think that’s important for everybody to understand.

Steve:

I think we fly under the radar a little. I’ve always said that I don’t want to get any bigger. I don’t want my firm to get any bigger than if we can’t service people the way that I want to service them.

If we can’t provide the level of representation that we think should be provided, I don’t want to grow past that. And that’s been a driving force for our practice that includes being accessible to clients. Our clients get our cell phones, they call all hours of the day and night. They get to know the attorneys.

Darl:

When they say Get your cell phones, each attorney gives their cell phone to…

Steve:

And I think every client at the firm has my cell phone.

Darl:

Oh, interesting.

Steve:

Yeah.

Darl:

We’ll talk about that in a minute.

Steve:

Yes. And it goes for Arman too. They have Arman’s cell phone, and people joke about Arman traveling all the time. He has picked up calls in India up on ski lifts, and he’s great about it. That basic tenet of our firm has never really changed: the communication, being able to be in touch with being able to know what’s going on with your case during the pendency of your case and then moving it along aggressively towards a resolution. Those have been basic tenets of the firm.

And what it’s created for us is a snowball effect of referrals from former and current clients. And so most of the business we get is from a network that we’ve created through doing good work. And then we do a lot of remarketing back to our clientele, back to people who know us, there are a few lawyers and law firms that do refer us cases, but not many.

But the ones that do have been doing it for years, and they know us and they trust us and they view us as basically a partner and really a good synergy with their firm.

Darl:

What percentage of your, we’ll talk about revenue in a second, but just in terms of overall cases, what percentage of overall cases do you think come from client referrals?

Steve:

So it’s interesting. So we talk about the evolution of a law firm and what you have to do to survive. So when I started my practice, one of my basic tenets was I’m not going to be beholden to anyone, but my client comes first. Always in this industry, there’s a lot of relationships. There’s a lot of external factors that can lead people down the wrong path.

And I didn’t care who I was going to piss off, what relationships I was going to lose if I couldn’t do right by my client. I wasn’t going to mess around and put myself in a precarious position. When I started the practice, I had, one of my strategies was to take cases from people who were not filing cases. And so I was doing a lot of litigation for people who were not filing cases, were not filing all their cases, were not filing any of their cases.

And in the first 12 to 18 months of my practice, I lucked out because one of the attorneys that I worked with at my TV advertising firm went to go work for another TV advertising firm that was not as established, that was not as well run. And she called me and she said, Steve, the partner of the firm needs someone to litigate his cases. He doesn’t really have any relationships. I suggested that you could do it. Would you be interested?

And this is, I think, one lesson that I’ve learned from business, which is you have to take opportunities when they come to you. You have to. I mean, if they get presented to you, you don’t hem and haw, you don’t overanalyze them. If you get a window into something, if you get an opening, you say yes and you figure it out later. And so I said, yeah, I think at this point I either had one paralegal or I was thinking about hiring a paralegal. I was not staffed for what was to come.

She said, okay, I’m going to schedule a meeting. And I walked into the guy’s office and he leads me to the conference room and he was in complete disarray and shambles and he’s no longer licensed to practice law, so it kind of all makes sense now. And he leads me into the conference room and there’s boxes upon boxes of files. And he goes, take whatever you want.

I’m like, okay, alright. I sat there for three or four hours flipping through files and I was like, I can make money on this. I can make money on this. I can make money on this. And I walked out with boxes of cases. I walked out with about 50 cases.

Darl:

Wow.

Steve:

I think I said no to maybe 15 of the files that were in the conference room. I took everything else. And that was the start of my growth because it essentially doubled my caseload overnight and I slogged along through those.

But in doing so, I got to create a lot more relationships with people. I got to show them what good quality representation looks like. These were people who were starving for communication. They were showing up at the office to a locked door and unable to get in.

Their phone calls were not being returned, their emails were not being returned, and their files were in shambles. They were in really bad shape, and sometimes it was just putting the file back together in a way that made it presentable for a settlement posture. And so I grew that way.

And so your question is what percent comes from former and current clients? Now, in the beginning of my practice, it was probably like 30% direct in what I call direct in meaning it’s not attached to another lawyer and like 70% lawyer referral that has flipped. We are probably 80% direct in and 20% lawyer referral. And that’s because we’ve done a good job and we’ve marketed back to the people we’ve done a good job for.

Darl:

So let’s talk about the differences in case count versus revenue. I’ve noticed myself a big difference in the average case value of an attorney referral versus a client referral. Do you think that that 80/20 division of number of cases kind of lines up with your revenue as well, or do you see any kind of difference?

Steve:

No, I mean we’ve had big and small cases come from both buckets. I think it depends on the relationships that you establish. So when you get direct in referrals, I’ve noticed that some clients refer some types of cases.

Sometimes you have a former client who always happens to know people who get really seriously injured, and that client ends up referring you one or two or three big cases just because they have a network and that’s the cases that they’re hearing about in their network. I have other former clients who refer me every car crash that they ever see with without really knowing anything about what the case is or what it could be worth.

I think the same goes with attorneys. There are attorneys that bring us in for bigger cases, and there are attorneys that send us cases that they’re below their threshold. They don’t think they’re going to be big cases, and a lot of times they aren’t and sometimes they turn out to be bigger than what was initially anticipated.

Darl:

Building client referrals is a great way to grow a law firm. You mentioned doing good work, which is very, very important.

And I want to talk about that because that’s a struggle I think any law firm owner has as you grow and you grow beyond just you and you’ve got other people, but what do you do to get those cases in the door in the first instance? Again, other than doing good work, what are you doing to market to your clients?

Steve:

So we do newsletters, we do blogs, we do birthday cards. We do an event called the Fall Family Fun Fest where it’s essentially a carnival.

Darl:

I’ve been to that. That’s very fun.

Steve:

It’s very fun. It’s in October. It’s a great time. Everything’s free. And our clients will come, our former clients will come and they’ll bring their families, our employees, other people that we have relationships with in the industry, other lawyers, other medical providers or people from their staff. We do an annual calendar, which has been quite goofy. We’ve had pictures of Arman and all different sorts of outfits on it. You’ll have to look out for the 2026 calendar. I heard it’s going to be a hoot.

We also, for every case that we settle, we pay for the full adoption fee for a dog or a cat through Lifeline Animal Project. That’s something we started about a half dozen years ago. And so we’ve had this relationship and collaboration with Lifeline for five or six years now, and that’s one of our ways of giving back. But it also helps because to me, it is part of who we are and it’s part of our brand. And I think it results in people gravitating back to us.

Darl:

A lot of times what I hear people so focused on in the personal injury industry is the chase getting the case in the door and the case comes in the door and then they just, they’re sloppy with how they manage their firm. The way the case is worked on is not appropriate.

In my experience, getting the cases is actually easier than working on them from a standpoint of having other people to work on them, like managing people, hiring people, managing them, training them, reinforcing your standards is just incredibly difficult.

And I think you add into that one, we’re not taught that in law school. Number two, most people that go to law school, it’s because they want to be a lawyer. And the skill sets that are good for being a lawyer and working on the case are very different from managing people.

To me, it’s kind of like if you were a great athlete, football, baseball, basketball, whatever, and then switch to being the coach, there’s not necessarily crossover there. And then sometimes the great coaches never even really played at a high level.

So as somebody who’s experienced this firsthand, and I know we’ve talked about some of my challenges, what are some of the lessons you’ve learned about, let’s just start with recruiting people, just finding the people to begin with to come and work at your firm.

Steve:

Before I get there, I want to touch on one thing you said, which is the first few years of your practice versus what I call a saturation point. You talked about it’s easier to get cases than to do the work. I think a lot of people see starting a firm as, oh, I can do it. It’ll be easy. I’ll find business. And to some extent that is true.

You can start a law firm with a very low barrier to entry. It doesn’t cost a lot of money, and you can go hunt for business and you will find no shortage of business. A lot of what you find in the beginning might not be very good. It might be what I worked on in my first two years, but you can find work that will create revenue.

The first couple of years of a personal injury practice to me is not the hard part. The hard part is when you hit the saturation point and you’ve got a full load, you can’t do all the work. You don’t have the time to go out and search out more work, and you hit this treading water stage where you’re just like, I’m just trying to stay afloat. And a lot of people never transition from that stage. They just live in it for years and years and years until it eventually swallows them up and they drown. And that is something that I decided very early on that I wasn’t going to let happen to me.

So it was either I was going to say no to work or I was going to structure myself in a way where I could continue to say yes to work, but still provide what I wanted to provide. We probably operate our firm at a lower profit margin than what a lot of firms operate their firm at. In part because of the way we staff the vendors we work with, the money that we spend to make sure that we’re doing a good job, whether it’s paying an annual subscription so that we can get videos from GDOT cameras that can sometimes make or break a client having a case.

Darl:

It’d be a good sponsor for our podcast.

Steve:

It costs money. It would be. It costs money to have that annual subscription and a lot of people don’t want to pay it, but getting that evidence is crucial.

Darl:

Here’s the most expensive thing, and this is something you and I have talked about a lot. The most expensive thing is the way you staff the cases.

Steve:

I was going to get there. Yes. So the staffing part of it is you can choose to go lean on staff, you can choose to underpay people. You can choose to put a lot of cases on one person’s head that they can’t keep up with, and you can deal with high turnover or maybe you don’t deal with high turnover and your cases just aren’t being worked in a way that are going to really maximize value or are going to make that client feel a certain way about your firm.

And so one thing that we’ve tried to do is figure out what’s a reasonable number of cases for any one role in the firm? What’s a reasonable amount of cases for a pre-suit paralegal, which we call a case manager? What’s a reasonable number of cases for a litigation paralegal? What’s a reasonable amount of cases for attorneys, whether they be pre-suit or litigation attorneys?

And when I say reasonable, it’s what can they work on without feeling like their hair is on fire or they can be proactive and not reactive, or they can have time to dig into the details, pay attention to the case, and get on the phone and educate the client so that they know what’s going on.

And that has led to lower case counts than, I mean, our case managers probably operate at half the cases in some instances a third of the cases as what you’ll find at some firms.

And it gives ’em the opportunity to get to know the client. And if you look at our Google reviews and you read through our Google reviews, a lot of it touches upon how we made the client feel and how we kept them informed during the process. And the outcome is the outcome. A lot of the times

A case that’s worth 30 grand is likely going to settle for 30 grand at the majority of firms in the city. Some firms are going to screw it up royally and it’s going to be worth a lot less. And some firms might eek out a little bit more. But the way you get to the outcome, the way the client feels, the client experience, the way the client feels about how you get to the outcome makes a huge difference in the longevity and the growth of your business.

Because if you get to the $30,000 outcome and they sign off kicking and screaming and they feel like they’ve been taken advantage of or that they didn’t know what was going on and they’re just figuring it out at the end and you are not getting a call back from that person, the next time they get in a crash, they are not going to call you.

Darl:

And they’re not going to refer anybody.

Steve:

And they’re not going to refer you. They’re going to give you a five star review, and you’ll be lucky if they don’t say bad things about you either. But when you get to negotiations and you have a client that says, I trust you, I wholeheartedly believe everything you’re telling me and I am going to go with what you’re telling me, and they sign off and they’re happy and it’s full disclosure, and they’ve seen the process play out.

They’ve been educated, they’ve seen the numbers, they understand the risks. They understand what their options are for going forward, what their options are for resolving a case now and they can get comfortable with it on their own. That makes a big difference. Makes a big difference.

Darl:

Yeah, and let’s talk about that some more because this is, I think, again, an overlooked area of owning and running a law firm.

So much of what I see on social media and online is about getting the leads, these lead generation companies, these mastermind groups about getting the leads or these conferences about getting the leads.

How have you structured your firm? You talked a little bit about the difference between pre-lit and lit. Can you just walk us through how your cases are divided between pre-lit and lit, and then even if there’s classifications within those two broad categories, maybe based on case size or case type?

Steve:

Sure. And one thing that I wanted to touch on before I go to the division of cases is as you grow, you have to surround yourself with people that are like-minded, that understand your culture and are willing and want to thrive within it, and that have complimentary skills to you.

So whether it’s a partner or an employee, an attorney or not an attorney, a vendor, aligning yourself with people that see the world the way that you see it, who want to be a trusted partner, that for me, that’s a win-win relationship.

I’ve got to be with someone who sees the world in a way where if they do well, will do well and they’re happy with that, and it’s enlarging the pie and it’s not for me to win. You have to lose, and I think I’ve talked to you about this before, it’s abundancy versus scarcity.

Darl:

Have you read Growth Mindset? I think it’s called Growth or Growth Mindset. It’s about, it’s a book by Carol Dweck. It’s a great book, but it talks about the difference between that growth mindset and that fixed mindset. The fixed mindset. People view everything as a zero sum game.

They get jealous of other people’s success because they see other people’s success as a character trait that they may not have instead of having the opportunity to actually grow and get to that point. And I’ve found that to be true as well with employees with my own personal development, how I view the world as incredibly important firm culture hands down is more important than just about anything when it comes to how you staff your law firm and how you run it.

What have you done to find those people? Because everybody that I talk to across the country, not just Georgia, but they say, I can’t find anybody. I can’t find a good paralegal, I can’t find anybody that wants to come and work that kind of fits that mold of exactly what I’m looking for. Do y’all get people through word of mouth? Is it job listings?

Steve:

A lot of our hires have been through word of mouth when we’ve posted, we’ve posted on Indeed, and we’ve gotten resumes that way.

I don’t know if we’ve just gotten lucky with the people that we’ve brought on, but we’ve got some tremendous people working for us that really do care. They’ve got great work ethics, they’ve got great hearts, they’ve got really great empathy for clients.

I look for people who listen, who have relationships in their life that matter. They ask pointed questions. So if I interview someone and they’re not asking me questions and wanting to learn more and they’re not interested or intrigued, I won’t hire them because that’s part of, for instance, being a good paralegal is asking some questions to learn more.

One question I ask in every interview is, what’s the biggest adversity you’ve faced in your life? And if someone cannot tell me that they’ve faced adversity and they cannot tell me a story, they’re disqualified. I’m not taking them. I’ve had people tell me that they’ve never faced adversity. I mean that interesting. That to me is it’s always a disqualifier for me. If you can’t tell me that you’ve been through something and come out on the other side, if you can’t just give me something.

Darl:

My adversity is starting a law firm.

Steve:

Yeah, right?

Darl:

I have others. You have other adversities. Yeah. We’ll talk about those on a later date. Going to Beyonce, three nights out of four, that’s a lot of adversity. I dunno how you survived that.

Me and Steve went to Beyonce the other night, by the way, we were not the only two. We did not go as dates. We took other people, but we had a great time.

Steve:

Darl got to see my daughter dancing her face off for three hours.

Darl:

And she’s got some good dance moves. She could be a Beyonce, backup dancer.

Adversity is a big one. And that comes back to the whole growth mindset too. The whole idea behind having a growth mindset is that my skills are not fixed, my traits are not fixed, my success is not fixed. I can actually develop these things and the people wanting to develop, I think it is hard to put my finger on it, but I know it when I see it.

It’s like the definition of obscenity and the Supreme Court decision. But there is a certain mindset I have found to be incredibly toxic, and it’s sort of the what can you do for me? type mindset employees that have this mindset of not what can I do for you and how can I add value to the team, to the firm, to the clients.

They’re only thinking about themselves and what are they going to get? Those are the takers. You need givers in your business that want to give because they actually get more in return. The takers just take, and they may survive for a little while, but then ultimately they’re burning out, they’re getting fired, they’re leaving. They’re the ones that jump around from job to job.

I want to come back to this idea of how you’ve structured your firm though, because I think you’ve done a great job and you give me great advice every time we talk about things.

Steve:

Thank you.

Darl:

Yeah. Steve is like the law firm owner whisperer, so you’ll probably get a lot of calls after this podcast goes live.

One of the things too, just to give you a couple compliments, hopefully your ego doesn’t get too big. One, you’re incredibly patient when it comes to challenges that you may be facing in your law firm. I’ll tell you about an issue that I’m facing and you’re like, well, have you tried this? Have you done this? Have you done this?

The other thing is Steve has a really good handle on numbers. I think he mentioned at the beginning, he didn’t think he was good with numbers. But it’s fascinating to me when we sit down and talk about stuff, how much you kind of know what’s going on in your firm.

So now that I’ve gotten that out of the way, let’s talk about how you’ve structured your firm. So you’ve got a pre-lit versus a lit division?

Steve:

So we have divided responsibilities, and so we have some attorneys who really, they are pre-lit focused. It doesn’t mean that they never litigate a file or that they ever file suit, but the majority of their caseload is working up the pre-lit side of a case and then negotiating and trying to settle the pre-lit cases.

Same thing for non-attorney staff. We have staff members who that is what they do. They don’t do both. We have some attorneys who are mainly focused on litigation. That doesn’t mean that they don’t handle some pre-lit cases, but their focus is litigation cases, driving cases through that process, driving cases to trial. And they are staffed with litigation paralegals.

Again, the litigation paralegals, they may have a couple of presu cases that have snuck into their load or maybe they’ve got some issues to deal with that are more complex that we want them there and that we think they’re going to end up in litigation eventually anyway. But their primary focus is the litigation cases, the cases that need to be filed, need to be served, have to go through discovery, have to go through depositions, have to go to trial.

It’s a different skillset and it’s a different focus. And what we found is it’s hard. It’s hard to be a hybrid. So my, you talk about the evolution of the firm and the growing and learning from your mistakes. I hired in 2016, I hired two or three people, one of which I put in a hybrid role. And the hybrid rule never worked.

Darl:

Was it an attorney?

Steve:

It was a non-attorney.

Darl:

Okay. And they were doing litigation. And…

Steve:

Yeah, I noticed through the work that they were doing that they were good at one but not the other. And the light bulb went off. It was like, huh, if you’re a paralegal, you should be able to handle and should is one of those logical fallacies, right? You can’t, should doesn’t really exist.

But I sat there looking at he should be able to handle this and he should be able to handle this, but he’s not able to handle these things and what’s going on and what skillset is he missing here that he doesn’t have here? So spending time analyzing that and then ultimately moving him to a litigation paralegal role helped me also develop what I was looking for in a case manager. And they’re different. They have some overlapping qualities, but they’re different for a case manager.

I want someone with a warm heart, a teaching mindset, really high communicator, likes calling people, likes, listening to stories, likes making them feel better, kind of soothing your nurses, your teachers, that kind of a personality with the attention to detail and with the self-driving, I mean, every employee has to be self-driving. They have to be someone who’s willing to take ownership of what they’re doing and take the ball and run with it and holds themselves to a high standard.

The litigation paralegals, maybe client communication isn’t as important. Litigation process moves slowly. They do have to communicate with the client and they do have to drag information out of a client. But it’s a different way of communicating. It’s more of an interrogation.

Sometimes it’s techniques on how to ask questions to drag information out of people, but less of the warm and fuzzy sometimes. But it’s a mastery of technical skills and procedural knowledge and being able to drive yourself by strict deadlines, whereas maybe these people aren’t living in that strict deadline world and they’re not as good at calendaring and keeping up with the strict deadlines and all the rules and regulations that go along with litigating a case.

And so it’s different skill sets. They overlap, but they’re different. And it’s the same thing for attorneys, I’ve found.

Darl:

Yeah. Well, you mentioned the word should, right? I spent a lot of time in the first, I mean, I’m probably embarrassed to admit that it took me this long to kind of have the light bulb go off, but at least maybe the first six or seven years in my firm where I would keep saying, they should be able to juggle both. They should be able to do this.

And I realized that it doesn’t matter what I think people should be able to do, it matters what they can actually do. And how can I practically structure the law firm? We don’t have a pure pre-lit lit split at our firm necessarily. We may end up going that direction, but we have people that are good at certain things and we kind of lean into those tendencies.

So the attorney that’s going to be working on the complex medical malpractice case should not be working on a pre-suit car wreck case.

Steve:

Correct.

Darl:

But because I was the one doing that when I started my firm and I had experience doing that, I thought other people could do it.

And likewise, the person handling the high volume of cases doesn’t need to be writing the summary judgment brief in the premises liability case. And so when that light bulb finally went off for me, that’s when we kind of moved to, okay, we’re going to have people in these kind of different roles where maybe somebody’s got more moderate caseload with kind of a mix of moderate value cases across a variety.

We’ve got maybe the person that’s going to do more of the lower value high volume. And then we’ve got a few people that do this more complex litigation type role. And the caseloads vary. You mentioned earlier what’s a reasonable caseload? And that’s, I think, important to structure a firm.

Steve:

I want to tell you a story about one of my early staff hires because I think to me, it reflects the culture and personality of our firm. And it’s also something that I think more people should strive to do and live by. And it’s one of these things that maybe it’s not the most profitable business practice, but it made me feel really good about where we were going. And it showed compassion and humanity to not only the employee that I was striking a deal on, but also to the other people that work for me.

And I think that’s important. When you’re running, when law firm, whether it’s five people or 50 people, what we do is hard. And the people that work for you have to know that you care about them, and they have to know that you do have their best interests at heart, and you’re not just going to rip the rug out from under them. And so having a steady hand and being compassionate when they have things pop up in their life, I think is important.

We had a paralegal, she was an older woman. She had worked in a med male practice. She was not suited for a higher volume of cases. She was a drill deep, work on just a small number of matters and go really, really deep. She would’ve been much better suited to stay where she had been at a medical malpractice firm or go to another more complex type of practice where her skills matched the work being done.

And I recognized it and I recognized that she was becoming unhappy working at our firm. The work was good, but she was unhappy and it was getting worse, and it was impacting other people around her. And it was turning very negative.

This was about 10 years ago. And so I called a friend of mine who was looking for a paralegal, and I said, I know this is going to sound very crazy, but I have a paralegal that works for me. She’s a very good paralegal who I don’t think is a good fit at my firm, but I think she’d be a great fit at your firm. And he’s like, Steve, really? You’re trying to pawn off a paralegal. And I said, I know this is crazy. I know it sounds crazy.

Darl:

It sounds like me when I refer a case to you.

Steve:

I said, how about this? I will pay her salary for a month. You get a 30 day trial period for free. If you don’t want her after 30 days, I’m going to eat the cost.

If you do want her after 30 days, reimburse me half of what it costs me and take her over. He called me three weeks in. He said, she’s great. I’m going to hire her. I’ll send you a check. Send me an invoice. I didn’t have to let her go.

I didn’t have to hang on until she quit. Out of frustration, I didn’t have to let my clients suffer with declining work, which is if you have an employee who is low morale, they’re probably low productivity, and your clients are getting kind of screwed by that. And I recognized it, and I was able to work out a win-win deal that put her on a better path, helped out a friend, and also helped us out.

And I ran into him at a concert three years later, and I said, how’s she doing? Great. She’s still working for me. She’s my head paralegal. And I was like, that’s awesome. That’s great.

In the moment, I’m sure she didn’t feel the same way that I felt about what I was doing, but hopefully in time she looks back and says, wow, that was really thoughtful and really nice.

And that to me was, it’s one of those things, I’ve done the same thing over the years, two or three different times, and it’s always worked out. And for me, it’s a lot better than saying, you got to go get out of here. I don’t want you anymore. That’s hard.

Darl:

And that assumes the person’s good at their job. They’re just not a good fit. I mean, I think we’ve all had the people that are just not good at their jobs.

Steve:

Yes. Yeah. I mean, sometimes you just have to cut the cord and let people loose for other reasons. But I want to talk, I’ve got those crazy stories too.

Darl:

Yeah, great story about showing humanity to an employee and ensuring they get in the right position. And sometimes I’ve gone too far in that direction with maybe letting people stay that I should have been firmer with about letting go or having firmer discussions with them.

How do you balance that, that need to not appear that you are a drill sergeant, that you’re not just going to be brutal with how you run your law firm and balance that with showing the humanity, but not letting people stay if they are toxic, because a toxic employee can absolutely crush your law firm.

Steve:

So one of the things that we put in place, and I think I talked about it earlier, about surrounding yourself with people better than yourself. So throughout my entire law firm, I’ve always worked with someone who has a business background.

So about a year into my practice, I hired a law firm consultant. His name is Justin Miller on a part-time basis. And Justin helped me, helped me grow, helped me understand, helped, helped teach me some things that I wasn’t familiar with because I didn’t have a business background.

And when we reached a certain point, when we reached a certain size, he actually came on full time. So he is our chief operating officer. And one of the things that has been instrumental for us from a staffing perspective is we’ve put in place semi-annual staff reviews.

We have case counts where people should be able to perform the job and going back to the word should. And if they’re not, we can usually flesh that out quicker and they can’t blame the, you just give me too much work. How often do you do these reviews?

Darl:

Is it monthly? Quarterly?

Steve:

So we do semi-annual reviews.

Darl:

Okay. So twice a year?

Steve:

Twice a year. But we’re always looking at, we have lots of reporting that we run. It’s one thing that I’ve learned from baseball, from the metrics and watching people like Theo Epstein and Billy Bean, and…

Darl:

You’re a Red Sox fan.

Steve:

I am a Red Sox fan. The Celtics coach, Brad Stevens, running things somewhat from statistics, running things from filling needs with people who fit that role, even if they’re maybe not the best star player.

I was texting with my friends last night about the Red Sox and the Red Sox traded Raphael Devs. That’s a great point. I’ve been thinking about that. They’ve won 10 games in a row. I mean, he was a problem in the clubhouse, and they got rid of him. They sent him off. Maybe they didn’t get, people were giving him such a hard time. You didn’t get this. You didn’t get a great prospect. You didn’t get enough in return. But they got in return is they cut out a problem and now they’re winning. And he’s on the DL, right?

Darl:

I think Red Sox fans still have PTSD from Mookie Betts.

Steve:

That was a bad trade. Yes.

Darl:

That was horrible. But I’m with you. I mean, letting go of that toxic person is incredibly important because they could be the highest individual performer. They will crush your team.

And if it’s just you and the toxic person, it’s like a small firm, three or four people may not be as big of a deal, but as you grow it becomes a major, major issue.

Steve:

It rubs off on everyone.

Darl:

It does.

Steve:

So we run reports, we look at data, we look at what’s overdue. We look at who’s getting five star reviews, who’s not, who’s getting, we use, again, going to vendors, we use a vendor case status that allows for net promoter scores.

And so we get to see which clients are saying really good things and which clients are ranking us poorly. And if they’re ranking us poorly. And then there’s a trend and it matches an attorney or a paralegal, and there’s a few of those.

You see the trend, why is this attorney getting fours and fives? Why is this case manager getting fours and fives while this one is getting eights through tens and is getting really glowing? Things said about ’em, do they need to be taught? What do they need? Or do they just not have it in them to do it? Are they in the wrong role? Are they in the wrong firm?

But if you don’t have the data behind it to see what’s going on, it’s hard to tell. It’s hard to tell on feel. Who’s doing a good job and who’s not doing a good job.

Darl:

Yes, we do the NPS as well. The net promoter score, that’s incredibly important. And again, talk about going from survival mode to long-term thinking and planning. When you are small, you do kind of go on your gut reaction, and there comes a point where you’re like, okay, I actually need to make decisions based on data.

I got to talk about how you staff your cases though, because this I think is important for everybody to know.

Stay tuned for more of our conversation with Steve Litner in Part II. To be continued…

 

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