Episode 25: Starting, Growing & Managing a Law Firm (Part 2)
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:
So this is the first time this has ever happened. We had to divide up our podcast with Steve Litner into two episodes. So now we’re going to do part two.
I got to talk about how you staff your cases though, because this I think is important for everybody to know. You talked about this reasonable caseload. How do you balance that with profitability?
Because I have interviewed people for attorney roles at my law firm that work at some of the TV advertisers. I’ve talked to one guy who was 400 to 500 cases at a time. I’ve talked to other people that have between 200, 250, just no way to handle it properly.
Or maybe they’re a litigation attorney and they have a hundred litigation cases. Those firms from just a metric standpoint may be profitable. They’re probably leaving a ton of money on the table though, and giving terrible client service.
But how do you, I mean, we’re not really competing with that necessarily, but one of the challenges I found though is then when you hire somebody at a firm like yours and like mine, and they’re not going to have 200 to 250 cases, they’re going to have maybe 50 or 60 and their pay is based on performance.
They’re going to make less money and they’re like, oh, I could go over here at this firm and just sign demand letters that the case manager’s drafting and leave at four o’clock every day and not have any stress. Not have to think, but I’m going to make $300,000 to $400,000 a year, but if I come work at the small boutique firm, I’m going to make less.
How have you balanced that with maintaining profitability and finding the people to actually work on the cases who can earn money as well and want to do that work?
Steve:
And I think it’s different for attorneys and non-attorneys, right? So talking about the paralegals and the case managers for a second. When you run people hot all the time, you might be maximizing revenue in the short term, not maximizing revenue per individual case because you’re losing money on cases because things are being missed and left on the table.
You’re losing value because this person had a positive MRI and didn’t go back to the doctor to get it reviewed, or this person, they missed a tear in their shoulder and so they missed chance for surgery. The overload of cases might maximize revenue in the short term for the firm, but it doesn’t maximize revenue on the individual cases.
So when we staff with lower case numbers, I’m not focused on maximizing revenue in the short term. I’m focused on a sustainable model that leads to revenue in the long term. So we might make less money on any given cohort, any, the return on investment might not be as high for us on any given case manager or any given paralegal than it is at let’s say the firm over here that’s churning and burning.
But what we’re getting from that is we’re getting the relationships and the relationships drive future business. And in my experience, it drives better future business than what you could just find trying to advertise and market to the general public. And so it pays for itself tenfold down the road.
And so I try not to focus on maximizing in the short term. I try to focus on where does this lead us a year from now, three years from now, five years from now, 10 years from now. In terms of our non-attorney staff, I think we pay commensurate with experience and I think we pay commensurate with the market. I’ve always been a big fan of fixed versus variable compensation.
So while our fixed compensation may not be as high as the firm over here that’s putting three times the amount of cases on their head, the variable compensation can get them either close or get them to surpass what they’d be getting paid. Over here we have a…
Darl:
Is that for staff and attorneys?
Steve:
Yes. So we have a semi-annual bonus pool for our non-attorney staff, and it’s essentially, if the firm does well, we share, right? It’s essentially like a profit sharing plan for our attorneys. They’re incentivized on origination and production.
If you bring in cases, you’re going to get a piece of the cases you bring in. If you produce, if you create revenue by driving your cases forward aggressively, you’re going to make a percentage of the work that you’re producing. And so they’re not capped. I’ve seen plenty of bonus structures where attorneys are capped, they get a fixed and then they get a fixed bonus. Maybe they’re getting paid a hundred grand and then they get 10% of everything they resolve. And if they originate, they get an extra 10%, they’re capped. They can work as hard as they want, they’re eventually going to make less money per hour as they’re working harder. And this is something I noticed when I was working at one of my prior law firms.
The bonus structure had a floor, and then once you hit the floor, you started making a percentage, but the percentage was fixed. And so if I had already hit the percentage for the quarter, I’d be like, what’s keeping me working really hard? I’m going to have to hit the floor in the next quarter. I’m not getting any additional money.
The percentage is capped. What’s going to keep me driving forward? And so one of the things that we put in our bonus plan is a ladder up. So we have a very similar structure where it’s a floor and it’s percentages, but it ladders up. So if they hit the next floor, it goes up a certain amount of percentage points. If they hit the next floor, it goes up a certain amount of percentage points. And so again, it goes to the win-win.
If they do well, we do well. If one of my attorneys settles a case for a good six figure or seven figure recovery, they do very well and we do very well, and they’re driven to continue going along in that quarter and continue trying to drive towards higher numbers. I actually think that in the right model, in a small firm, attorneys can make the same or more as what they can make in those firms where they’re just churning and not really doing what they went to school for and not really being fulfilled.
Again, this is if you go to the things that aren’t compensated by dollars, how many of those employees just signing the letters are fulfilled with what they’re doing? How many are…
Darl:
I mean, I’ll be honest with you, Steve, in my experience, some of them don’t care. They get so used to the paycheck. And I think the challenge for us as a firm, what I’ve seen is the people coming from those firms have so much predictability because of the volume.
When you’ve got that much volume, there’s so much risk to spread around. But if you’re saying, Hey, you’re going to have a lower caseload with higher value cases, they’re like, well, I get this question a lot. What am I going to make my first year? What do you think I’m going to make? And I’m like, well, I don’t know. I mean, if you’ve got a $2 million case that settles this year, that’s going to have a big swing on your income. But if it settles next year, that could affect next year.
And that’s something I’ve seen. But I’m with you. I mean, I think that ultimately though, you want to find those people that don’t want to work in that model. And so they should sort of self-select themselves out.
Steve:
When I hire attorneys, I’ll tell you a couple of stories, but when I hire attorneys, I always get that same question. What am I going to make in my first year? And you have to show them, especially in personal injury, you have to show them a path to what the three to five year mark means.
Because any attorney changing firms at a personal injury firm is never going to make what they were making. They’re leaving a saturated caseload where their wheel was spinning and they were making money. It doesn’t matter whether they come to my firm, your firm, another volume firm with a similar model.
When you change jobs in personal injury as an attorney, you are never going to go straight back to making what you were making there is going to be a slowdown and a decline and a ramp up period. It’s because of how our fees are earned. You come in, you don’t have a full caseload, you maybe get new cases that are not ripe for settlement, you’re not going to earn unless you go work for someone who’s just like, I’m willing to pay you X, and it doesn’t matter what you do, which is not our industry, right?
You’re never going to earn in the first six to 12 or 12 to 24 months what you were doing previously. One thing that I do when I talk to attorneys thinking of switching or thinking of coming to us is I’ll lay out blindly what people have done in that role in the past.
I did this with someone that we hired a few years ago, and they were asking the question, what do I stand to make? I said, let give you, I took out all the names, lemme give you an example. This person started around this date in the third quarter, they hit this bonus. They didn’t get a bonus. Q1, Q2, Q3, they got this Q4, they got this from Q3, Q4 from the time they started Q five, Q six, Q seven, Q eight Q, Q nine, Q 10. And they could see how they were doing a year or two, three years in. And they got to see, kind of pull the curtain back. Here’s how it works.
When we hired Shea Schulman, who was one of our partners, and he was our first associate, when we hired Shea, he was working at the firm that I took the litigation files from. And he was looking, he knew he needed to leave. He could kind of tell that it was a sinking ship and I wanted to bring him on, but I didn’t know if we could afford an associate. I didn’t know how to compensate them correctly and how to not put myself under water.
And so Arman and I had breakfast with him at the original Pancake House, on Cheshire Bridge Road, which is no longer there, but we do a lot of our meetings over meals.
And I remember saying something along the lines to him where I said, I can only pay you half of what you were making by the end of the first year. I think you will make roughly around the same as what you were making between the fixed and the variable comp, but by year two, year three, year four, you’re going to surpass the fixed income that you were being paid. You’re going to have to take a little bit of a risk. We’re taking a little bit of a risk, but I’ve run the numbers. I think this will work, and you kind have to take a leap of faith and we do too.
And he took a leap of faith and he’s, it’s worked out. It’s worked out.
Darl:
He did not stay on the sinking ship.
Steve:
He did not stay on the sinking ship.
Darl:
And I don’t even know the lawyer, I think you may have told me before, but I know just based on the descriptors, I know who you’re talking about. What are some lessons you can give to law firm owners on managing growing a law firm?
You mentioned already the kind of light bulb moment you had about putting people in positions of strength, but do you have any other kind of similar lessons you can give maybe 2, 3, 4 lessons that you can share with us?
Steve:
Yeah, so I think a lot of people start firms without thinking about who they are and what they want to be. And so one thing that I always encourage people to do when they’re thinking about starting a practice or they’ve just recently started a practice, is write out your plan.
Go find a business plan model template and write down everything that you want to be, how you’re going to do it, how you’re going to succeed. What are your strategies? What are your tactics within those strategies? I’ll give you one of mine from my original business plan. When I started, when I started my firm the first time: no plan. When I started my firm the second time I wrote out a 15-page business plan.
One of the things that I touched upon was how am I going to find cases? And I broke it into four buckets. One bucket was I was going to approach lawyers who didn’t litigate, and I was going to seek out those cases. And I wrote out why I’d be a good fit for that. And I wrote out four to six names of people who I thought I could target.
The next bucket was lawyers who didn’t handle cases like I wanted to handle. They were not big enough on their face. I call ’em threshold lawyers. They’re not going to take a case unless there’s a broken bone or someone was knocked unconscious. But there’s still a lot of value to those cases. And I like working on those cases where someone has been hurt and has a hospital visit and they don’t know what comes next. So I approached them and I wrote down four to six lawyers, four to six firms, and I wrote down my pitch, and that was my strategy, my tactics.
My third one was medical providers approaching them, how I’d approach them, what I’d ask for. That one never panned out for me for reasons that I could go on and on about, but it goes back to what I said before, but always being beholden to my client. The one-for-one model, the things that get asked of you never really worked for me. So we don’t get a lot of business from providers. And the fourth was word of mouth. How am I going to get cases from word of mouth? Who can I look to be? I call ’em walking billboards. Who can I get to become a walking billboard for my firm who can be a connector?
Malcolm Gladwell’s book Tipping Point is really, really good. And it talks about how things become phenomenons, epidemics. And when I read that and when I read that, the light bulb went off and that went into my bucket on word of mouth. And I lived by that for a few years.
And then I went back and said, okay, this was my first few years. How am I going to revise this? Where am I now? What do I want to do? But writing out your plan of what you want to be, what kinds of cases you want to work on, how you want to manage if you’re going to take people on is really, really important.
Being deliberate and intentional is the other one. So not only writing out your plan, but sticking to it. What you do should not be, oh, I’m just going to take a flyer on it. I don’t know, figure it out or this doesn’t really fit, but I’m going to take it on.
I got a call this morning. The lady said, this could be a really big case. And then she went on to describe a malicious prosecution matter. I don’t take malicious prosecution matters. I had no interest in this case. I stopped her. I said, I’m sorry, this does not really fit with our firm. Let me connect you to some people who it might, and I gave her three to five law firms.
I’m not going to reach out to them. I’m not going to try to refer it. If one of them picks it up and makes a lot of money on it, great. This lady needs help. I’m going to send her down the road to people who might be able to help asking nothing in return. I bet you she calls me back six months from now with a car crash or refers someone to me with a car crash because I took the time to help her out and connect her to people and not ask anything in return.
But being deliberate and intentional about who you are and what you want to be and making decisions based on that, I think, is important. Taking calculated risks. I talked about it earlier on, so don’t be afraid to try something. Don’t be afraid to lose money. I don’t stick with something that’s not working just because you spent money on it.
When I started my firm, I signed up for a case management software and I spent like $2,500 bucks and they put it on my computer and it stunk. It wasn’t going to work for me. And I was less than 30 days in and they wouldn’t refund me.
And I called a guy who I was looking at, he was sort of my mentor at the time, and I said, well, what would you do? He said, did you learn a lesson? I said, yeah, I learned a lesson. He goes, good. Don’t make another mistake like that, but stop using it. Go get something that works. He goes, if you make a $2,500 mistake, that’s okay. You got an education out of it. Don’t make a lot of those. You’ll be out of business.
Darl:
Right. Well, as you grow, the mistakes become more expensive as we’ve learned.
Steve:
Yes, they do. But it’s okay to make a mistake. It’s okay to screw something up. Most mistakes are fixable.
Darl:
Yeah, I mean, my entire first podcast episode was about all the mistakes I made in the first, at that time, I think it was nine years that I had had my firm and I kind of walked through each year of every mistake I made. First one being hiring a paralegal off Craigslist for $12 an hour. You can imagine how that turned out. And that’s kind of a funny story, but I have some really good stories.
Like Drew Ashby, great lawyer, co-owner of the building with me. We were talking about this and I’ll kind of go to him and be like, you can’t believe what just happened. He’s like, darl, I’m sorry you were going through this, but you have the best stories, so it’s good.
But I will say this, talking about taking calculated risks, you touched on this at the beginning where you talked about when the window of opportunity opens going into it, too many lawyers I think when they start their firm, are too afraid to do anything. They’re like this paralysis by analysis. I’ll try and refer a case to them. And I’m like, it has value. It’s not the greatest case in the world, but it has some value. And they’re like, no, I don’t want to take it.
And there was a lawyer like that who I tried to refer several smaller cases to and they wouldn’t take ’em. And that lawyer is now working for somebody else. And we talked a little bit about baseball earlier. The saying, and baseball is good. Things happen when you put the ball in play. When you take on opportunities, you get to meet people, they get to see the work that you do, they then come to you with other problems that you may not handle. Divorce, criminal, DUI, whatever it may be. And then it gives you an opportunity to be the connector.
And then when other people realize that you’re the connector, they start referring business to you and it creates this flywheel effect that happens over time. And you mentioned the threshold lawyer. I worked at a firm when I was there for about four years, and they very much in a threshold. I mean it was like case needs to be this certain criteria, these injuries and damages.
Steve:
You’re not expanding your network. You’re not expanding the sphere of people that know you.
Darl:
Think about 225 people versus five, right? Each one of those 225 people know all these people. And then that expands and then that expands. And then next thing you know, you’re at year 9, 10, 11, and you’ve got this great network of people who can refer you business. And we’ve often struggled with kind of case selection criteria and trying to ensure that we are taking good cases.
But I’ve always tried to avoid that kind of pure threshold model because the other thing for me, and I think you and I are very aligned on this, it doesn’t fit with my personality. The threshold mindset is to me, what can your case do for me? I’m only going to do this. It’s very pretentious, I think.
Steve:
It’s got to be worth my time.
Darl:
Got to be worth my time.
If you have this mindset of how can I help you and be of service to you, great things happen. Now, what does happen over time though is you realize you can’t take everything. And so you have to hire people to work on those things, which then leads to all these other problems we’ve been talking about.
Steve:
So you talked about how can you be of service like serving people, and that is we talked about what are the principles of running a firm that can be successful. That to me is also one of the things that we have kept in mind over the last decade. How can you serve people? We are lawyers. We are meant to serve people. We are not meant to maximize our profits. We became lawyers for a reason to fight, for causes, to represent people, zealously, all the basic tenets that the one for doctors is first do no harm.
The servant leadership idea of how can I help you? How can I make things better for you is something that drives through my thinking on who we represent, how I manage the firm, how I interact with people. I had lunch with someone who started a work comp firm in the last six months, and we had lunch and she said, thank you at the end of lunch. And I said, I’m going to send you some work. I want you to be successful.
And I think she walked away from it thinking, that’s probably not going to happen. I was like, here you go. Started sending her some work and helping her out and not really asking anything in return. And I think that idea of how can you help the people around you, whether it’s your clients or your staff or people in your community and driving yourself by it.
I was telling you a story this morning about, I was talking to an attorney who wanted to withdraw from a case in litigation and file a lien against the case. And I said to him, I said, it’s the wrong thing to do. Give her the opportunity to take her file to other people and find substitute counsel. Give her the opportunity to find someone who sees the case the way she sees it. You don’t. And because you don’t, you’re not going to be able to provide her with the representation that she deserves because she still deserves quality representation and you don’t see the world, you don’t see the case the way she does.
And that’s okay. Sometimes we’re going to see cases differently. Sometimes I’m going to see a case and say, I can only accomplish this. Client wants this. It’s never going to happen. And instead of continuing to beat my head against the wall, I’m going to give that person the opportunity to go seek out someone who sees the case the way they do and thinks that they can provide the outcome that that client wants.
When you’re talking about serving people, as you serve more people, your zone of influence gets bigger. So your world gets bigger because the circle around you starts to expand and it gives you more opportunities to meet people. And I want to touch on that. This all comes back to the taking the opportunities when they get presented.
So you and I do a lunch every month. We have a group with fellow minded attorneys, probably six or eight of us, and we do lunch every month and we talk about cases or what it’s like to run a business. And when that opportunity came around, I could have said no. I could have said No, these guys are mostly in Marietta. It’s like a 30 minute drive from my office. I’ve got two young kids. I already have a busy enough life as it is. We actually invited someone who backed out, backed out. It declined the invitation for those reasons.
And I said yes, in part because I wanted to be around like-minded people who run their practice the way that I do and see the world the way that I do. And it’s been great. I’ve made new friends, I’ve made new business contacts, and I try my best to make that lunch. And every time we confirm the lunch, it’s like, Steve, can you make it? I think so. Maybe I’m leaning towards yes, but I’m always trying, right?
I’m always saying, how can I move my schedule around so I can actually be there for that hour, hour and a half? Because it was an opportunity that I didn’t want to pass up. And I don’t know that I’d know you the way that I know you now if I didn’t take that opportunity. You were a name. You’re a respected lawyer in our community who I knew of by name, but I don’t think I’d really run into very often. And until we started doing the monthly launches and I got to know you, I don’t know that I would have had I not gone to lunch with you.
So the story I’ll tell on that just to tie that together is I was reading something from Jesse Itzler, Sarah Blakely’s husband. And he posted this whole thing about buying tickets for the Lakers court side seats for the Lakers, and he bought ’em when he was broke, he got an opportunity to come in to a group of people and they said, do you want a fourth of these tickets or whatnot? And he really stretched. He took out a loan, he borrowed money from people so that he could buy these tickets. And he said it wasn’t to go to basketball games, it was to be around people that I could then do deals with.
And then he went on to, I met this person, it led to this deal, I met this person. It led to this deal, and it was an opportunity that he saw within the model that he was driving towards. He’s like, I can’t pass this up. I can’t pass up this opportunity. And had he, who knows, maybe he’s not successful, maybe he doesn’t become a successful business person, he recognized the opportunity for himself and snatched it and went with it.
And I think for lawyers who are running their own firms, I’m not saying go buy courtside seats. There’s enough people that do that, but do it if you can, it’s really fun. They’re fun, they’re great. I would not buy quart side seats. It’s not, I like going, I enjoy when people give me tickets when the Celtics are in town. It’s not a good, it wouldn’t fit my personality of how I like to, I’m better in one-on-one settings. I’m better when it’s not the group social setting and the flashiness.
And if I can take one person to a game and hang out with them and get to know them, I’m a lot better in that than I am the shaking of hands and kissing babies and all the things that come along with being at the Hawks Games. I also am not that pretty and photogenic. So I can’t stand out the way two chains does when he is down there, but it’s important to take opportunities when they come about.
Darl:
No, that’s great.
And before we go, Steve, I want to ask you a question that I ask everybody, and that has to do with the future of the personal injury industry and some trends that maybe you’re seeing or where you think things are heading and how your firm might be adjusting to that or making plans to deal with that.
And the one thing that inevitably comes up is sort of the growth of the mega firm that we’re seeing, and whether it’s infusion of private equity or something else, but what are your big things on your radar for where things are heading?
Steve:
I think the consolidation of firms and the growth of the mega firm is definitely something that has been happening and will continue to happen. I’ve said it a lot of times to people that I’m amazed that the old fashioned model still works. Do a good job and make sure people know that you’re doing a good job, still works.
It’s not sexy, it’s not flashy. It takes a long time. It takes a long time. It’s organic and it’s controlled growth it, but steady wins the race and it still works. I think getting harder.
It’s a very competitive atmosphere for personal injury cases in Atlanta. There’s no shortage of them because Atlanta is Atlanta. There’s no shortage of personal injury cases, but there’s a lot of competition for ’em.
One of the things that bothers me the most about our industry is the lack of policing. The bad tactics, right? The illegal tactics runners, the unscrupulous people out there who are taking advantage. I can’t tell you how many phone calls I’ve had in the last six months where people have been taken advantage of and they figured it out too late and they can’t be helped.
I woke up to a text this morning, I got a call last week from a woman whose 20-year-old son had hired a lawyer. The lawyer’s not doing a very good job, didn’t, I could go into a number of things, but sent him to a doctor on a lien when he had great health insurance, not calling him back. He’s never talked to his lawyer. I mean, all the things that make up the marks of a settlement mill volume practice, and he wants to let them go and hire someone else.
And so I walked her through, I said, he can do that if he wants. Here’s how it works. He went to fire them and they sent him a big bill and threatened him and told him that if he left, they’d sue him. 20-year-old kid freaked out.
He’s staying with this firm that’s not about helping someone. That’s about you. That’s greed. This kid clearly isn’t comfortable with who his lawyer is and wants to change and is being threatened with litigation and sent a big bill, which by the way, I think is against the bar rules to take some of those tactics and say, you can’t leave. I’m going to do these things to you, and to not advise them on what they can and can’t do.
Darl:
By the way, those tactics are going to get worse, right? Yeah. I mean, this idea of expansion of the mega firm and the consolidation of firms is going to lead to more of that because so many of those firms are just businesses.
They’re focused solely on profit, and the firms like yours and mine that want to focus on doing a great job and doing things the right way. There aren’t going to be as many of those from my perspective.
Steve:
No, you’re right. Mean, so we just signed up a case this past week where it’s a very interesting story. This woman had formally been represented by another firm, a firm like yours, like mine. They had done a good job for her. She signed up with them for a subsequent crash. They started doing the work, and then she terminated them, and the partner called and he said, we’ve had a great relationship. We helped you before. We’ve helped your family members. Why’d you terminate us? She said, oh, I was contacted by this firm out of the blue that offered me a $300 cash bonus and a 27% fee.
And so that partner at that firm basically said, here’s what that is. That’s illegal, that’s unethical. If they don’t care about you now, they’re not going to care about you later. They’re not going to care about themselves. They care about the money they’re going to make. They’re not going to do a great job for you and they’re not going to look out for you.
At the end, she decided to terminate them, but then that firm wouldn’t take her back. And so she signed on with us. They sent her our way.
Darl:
So she left the firm, the good firm, hired the shady firm, got upset with them because they weren’t doing a good job. She should have known as anybody who’s willing to resort to legal tactics to get a client and then end up with you, right?
I mean, I will tell you, I mean, that’s an example of an illegal tactic of somebody doing, and we have clients who that happens to where they get called. I mean, we had a client recently, and this is a case, it’s a disputed liability premises case where the client went to a particular medical provider and the medical provider tried to get her to fire us and hire them. Why? I can’t believe your case is taking this long, your lawyer’s doing this, this and that. And it’s like way out of balance, way out of balance. And we addressed it with the medical practice. But that kind of stuff happens all the time.
But what is happening now is people are also just seeing the advertising. They’re seeing the social media ads, some of which are just false statements. They’re seeing just the constant billboards. I’ve told this story on a few podcasts about the client who I had represented and done a great job for who had a subsequent crash hired Morgan and Morgan, and in her Google review from the first one, she gives us a five star review and talks about how, I hope I never need a lawyer again, but if I do, I’m hiring this firm.
Well, guess what? And then, but then had a bad experience with ’em because they wouldn’t call her back. She couldn’t get in touch with ’em and then wants us to take over the case. And we did. But I asked her, why did you hire Morgan and Morgan? And it was, well, I see their ads everywhere. I thought they must, I wanted to try ’em. Like, what’s this about?
And that’s what we’re up against, right? I mean, that’s what we’re up against from the client referral standpoint. I think one of the things, and this has been a great podcast, I know this will probably be the longest one ever. My theory on this is it was easier to get client referrals 10 years ago. And why? I think that is one, people were less likely to want to hire an advertiser. There was sort of still that kind of generational stigma in that division between advertisers versus non. But the other thing was people wouldn’t hire a lawyer as quickly.
So there was more of an opportunity to pass a referral along. So the person could be talking to a friend or somebody or that connector and say, Hey, I know Steve. He did a great job on my case. Or I know Darl did a great job on my case. Go hire them. Well, by that time that happens, they’re already with this advertising firm that they’re signing them up on their phone sometimes in the hospital or sometimes in the ambulance, which is crazy.
So what we’re seeing more of is the referrals coming, but the person is already represented.
Steve:
I think the other thing that plays a role in all of that is the social media that you’re seeing that is from out of state, that is not from law firms.
Darl:
Some of it’s driven by private equity.
Steve:
Some of it is driven by private equity. Some of it is driven by law firms outside of Georgia. Your crash calculators, some of the stuff that you’re seeing pop up that by the way, is supposed to be registered with the bar as a referral service, and there’s supposed to be rules around it. They’re not policed.
Darl:
By the way, you want to know what happens when you report that?
Steve:
Nothing!
Darl:
Nothing happens! And here’s why. You’ll tell the bar like, Hey, this person is doing this. This is a bar violation. Oh, this appears to be the unauthorized practice of law. We’ll send it to the unauthorized practice of law division.
They’ll send it to them and they’ll say, oh, this appears to be this. And you’re like, what the hell? Who is in charge of things? And you look at some of these ads. I mean, one of that, I dunno if I sent you this one. I got to pull this social media ad up…
Steve:
By the way, while you’re looking for it, don’t you love when you get a call from a law firm in Iowa that says that they signed a client in Georgia that they want to refer you.
Darl:
Yes.
Steve:
Because of this.
Darl:
Yes. It’s crazy. I will tell you. I mean, we’ll occasionally get the like, Hey, the person was in town type wreck, but they live in California or whatever. But I’ve been contacted by people who sign up with a California firm for a Georgia slip and fall. I’m like, what the hell are you doing?
But here, this is a social media ad:
New Georgia legislation. Were you involved in a motor vehicle accident? Georgia residents now able to get double standard payout through legal loophole. Georgia Code of regulations increases personal injury claim payouts by 30 to a hundred percent. Over 800 individuals have already claimed under new GCR.
The good old Georgia Cod of Regulations that doesn’t exist. We talked a little bit about these challenges and the social media ads and kind of the big advertisers and those sorts of things. You talked about doing a great job, right? Stay top of mind.
Any things you’re planning to tweak in the future to kind of address this kind of hyper competitiveness or anything y’all are doing differently or plan to do differently?
Steve:
No, I mean, everything we’re doing is essentially trying to lean into our relationships that we already have. I don’t know that it’s doing things differently. I’m always harping on our team about increasing our number of people on our lists for that actually get our emails that actually see our social media, I mean. You can put out…
Darl:
I’m going to pull up some of your numbers by the way.
Steve:
You can put out the best content in the world. If you have two people that see it, it doesn’t really matter. One of the things, and Arman and I talk about this a lot, Arman’s personal Facebook page pulls in a lot of views, whereas maybe our law firm stuff, but increasing that zone of influence, getting to know more people.
One thing that I’ve figured out is when you get to have a firm that’s a bit more mature, we’re about to celebrate our 10 year anniversary together, and I started Litner Law, which was the predecessor to Litner + Deganian in 2012. You grow up you age, and unless you’re hiring young people who are still young lawyers who are still going out and being social, you lose some of the touches and connections that you might’ve had at a younger age.
So I don’t go to as many events. I don’t go to as many lunches. I don’t go to as many happy hours. I’m married. I got two kids. They keep me busy. So the people that I met in my thirties, in my early thirties, when I started my practice and made connections with, I’m not meeting as many people. And so the idea of staying current with relationships as your firm grows and actually getting out there and getting to know people, I think makes a difference.
And so we have partial season tickets to the Braves. We’ll invite people to go to a ball game with us. I took a lawyer who just switched over from the defense earlier this year. Arman took a lawyer from a real estate firm who we’ve become friendly with. But when we take someone, we’re looking for connections. We’re looking for relationships, not just a one-off, right? Someone that we can actually have some synergy with. And so it’s making the effort to not go stale and not get complacent and to continue to drive to meet new people and understand the changes in people, the changes in providers, in lawyers, in vendors.
And that’s something I noticed when I started my practice. I would get referrals from older lawyers who were using the same providers that they had been using for 20, 30 years. And in some instances, these were providers who, I will not name them, but they’d been suspended from practicing medicine. They had done bad things to a patient, and yet they still had records that was their treating physician for their case.
And you’re sitting there going, what am I going to do with this? How can I work with this case when my treating physician is this doctor who’s been twice suspended and has all these bad things associated with him? And so continuing to learn the evolving landscape I think is important.
Darl:
So one of the things I think it’s important for people to know too, is just how successful your firm is. So I was on your Instagram page. I couldn’t find your annual numbers for 2024, but do you know roughly how much I’ll recovered for clients in the total year of 2024?
Steve:
I think it was like $35 million, something like that.
Darl:
And then I’ve seen multiple ones. I mean January, almost $5 million. February over $6 million March, almost $6 million again. And you guys have just continued that success. So I think it’s an important lesson for listeners, and I think a lot of people that do listen to this podcast are people that I’ve made connections with on LinkedIn who kind of subscribe to my way of doing things, which again, is very similar to yours.
They want to know, can I be successful and not be paying for a bunch of pay per click and lead gen stuff with misleading ads? And I would submit that not only can you be successful, but that’s probably the only way you are actually going to be successful. So much of what gets lost in the legal world now is actually doing the work.
I’ve kind of jokingly referred to some of these advertising firms is basically just being marketing departments masquerading as law firms, and then they get the actual case. It’s like, I don’t know what to do. Well, I mean, anybody can get $300,000 on a $3 million case. But I mean, that’s where I think you can set yourself apart as that smaller firm is doing that great work, staying top of mind with your clients and building relationships and connections.
So Steve, before we go, where can people find you if they want to reach out to you? Are you on LinkedIn? Are you anywhere where they can go and make a connection with you and maybe get your personal cell phone just like your clients?
Steve:
I was going to say, should I give it out on the podcast?
Darl:
If you want to.
Steve:
I would encourage people to email me. It’s Steve, steve@litnerlaw.com. L-I-T-N-E-R-L-A-W.com. That’s probably the best way to reach me.
If you do want to give me a call, my cell phone is (404) 803-6416.
Like I said, my clients get it. Plenty of other people have it. Feel free to text me. Please don’t call me. That’s one thing I’ve learned as we were just talking about evolving. I don’t call people blindly anymore. I text them and ask them, are you available for a call? Can we talk?
Darl:
Well, also, I do that with people I know, but especially with people you don’t know, right? Because if I don’t recognize the number, I ignore it.
Steve:
You send it to voicemail. And then who leaves a voicemail?
Darl:
And then the first few times I see something now too where it doesn’t say potential spam, and I’m like, oh, maybe this is somebody I’ve been waiting on. I answer it. I’m like, shit, why did I answer this? I regret it.
But thanks for coming on, Steve. This has been a very fun podcast. I learn a ton every time I talk to you. Looking forward to going and grabbing lunch, taking you to one of our favorite diners here in the Marrietta area.
Steve:
Cool.
Darl:
For our listeners, make sure that you like and subscribe. Thanks, Steve.
Steve:
Thank you.