The following is a transcript of Episode 19 of Championing Justice. You can listen to the full episode here, or watch it on YouTube.

Darl Champion:

Thank you for listening to the Championing Justice podcast. This is a podcast for personal injury lawyers where we talk about how to be better lawyers and how to run better law firms. My name is Darl Champion and I’m a personal injury lawyer in Marietta, Georgia, just outside of Atlanta, I have my own law firm called The Champion Firm where we exclusively represent plaintiffs in personal injury cases.

This month I am honored to have Brian Glass on our podcast. Brian is a partner at Ben Glass Law in Virginia and also the president of Great Legal Marketing. Great Legal Marketing is a company that helps lawyers run their law firms better, helps them with marketing, but also teaches them how to have better balance in their lives.

And so I think having Brian on is important for the end of the year because I want to talk to Brian about goal setting and how personal injury lawyers can set themselves up for success in the following year. Thanks for joining us, Brian.

Brian Glass:

Dude, thank you for having me. I’m so excited to be here and I’ve looked up to you for a long time for all of the great information that you share on LinkedIn and I think you have the greatest name for an injury firm ever. And so I’m excited to spend about an hour with you today.

Darl:

Well, thank you. I appreciate it. And for those that don’t know, I have been a big follower of Great Legal Marketing. I read Ben Glass’s books, and for those that don’t know Ben is Brian’s father, I read Ben’s books before I even started my law firm. I believe one or two books were out at the time.

I joined Great Legal Marketing right away when lawyers talked to me and asked me for advice on how to run a small firm and how to compete with the, I think y’all call it the 800-pound gorilla, I always say go to Great Legal Marketing because a lot of the tools that I have in my practice came from. So this is definitely a privilege for me to have you on and to talk about things. So thank you for joining us.

Brian:

Yeah, I appreciate you saying that.

Darl:

So let’s talk about 2025. It’s the end of the year. It’s 2024. A lot of lawyers are looking back at this year and thinking, well, I had success. What am I going to do for next year? There is kind of this daunting thing where you feel like you’ve climbed the mountain during the year and then January one it’s back to zero. What are some things that lawyers can do in let’s say the next few weeks to set themselves up for success next year?

Brian:

Yeah. Wow. Where do we start? So this is the thing about running your own law firm is January 1st, everything is back to zero. Revenue is at zero, profit is at zero or maybe negative issuing payroll and whatever your cycle is. And you’re exactly right, you’re restarting your climb up the mountain once again.

And so many lawyers will just kind of arbitrarily set the 2025 goal at 10% or 15% or 25% more, or we hear like, oh, 10 x is easier than two x, so I want to do 10 x more without ever taking any time to look back and see how far have we come from 21, 22, 23. And so in the last couple weeks of the year, that’s where I would start. Take a minute and look back at your p and l and your revenue and your caseload from five years ago and just give yourself credit for how far you’ve come.

And then the second thing, Darl, before you get to setting any goals around your business is really getting dialed in on what do you want your business to do for you?

So the line that I’ve been using with some of our clients and our mastermind members at GLM has been your introduction is: my name is Brian Glass and I practice this kind of law and I’m building a business that can blank so that in my life I can blank.

And the second half of that is so much more important than the first, right? Because really the reason that we’re not working for somebody else and the reason that we’ve built our own firms is so that we can have the freedom and the autonomy to do things with our lives for ourselves and for our family and for our friends. And you really have to get dialed in on what that is before you come back to what does the firm now need to do to support the kind of life that I want to live.

Darl:

That’s a great point. I think I saw a post on LinkedIn today about sort of criticizing marketers about emphasizing your why and why that’s bad in marketing. And I don’t know if I quibble with that much. I mean, I do think clients really just want to know can you get the results for them? Although I do think the why is important in marketing as well, but where the why is incredibly to me is it sort of becomes your north star for everything that you’re going to do in your law firm. I mean, if your why is to make as much money as possible and that’s it, you’re going to set up a different type of law firm than if your why is to help people that are screwed over by insurance companies or to help people maximize value on their cases.

I think for me, one of the, I was talking to a lawyer yesterday who reached out to me through LinkedIn and said, Hey, second or third year of my firm and I’m having some challenges and want to kind of talk to you about how you wrestled with some of these. And as I was talking to him, I was reliving my first two or three years, and my problem was I was just like this lawyer, and I think many others, I was in survival mode. How can lawyers in survival mode actually be intentional and think about not only 2025, but let’s kind of do a three-year, five-year plan while still trying to make sure we can feed our families?

Brian:

Yeah, survival mode’s hard. If you’re a solo or you’re solo that has one assistant or a part-time assistant or VA assistant, it is hard and it is really hard to get out of the, I’ve got to make enough money in the next 30 days that I can pay my mortgage on the first.

So how do you get out of the same way that you got out of college and that you got out of law school and that you passed the bar by working really, really hard? And so I think I criticize often what I call hustle porn. You got to work 18 hours a day, 60 hours a week, but there is a role for that when you’re in survival mode and there is a space where you have to dig and dig and you have to go to lunch with referral sources all the time, and you have to take the case that you or I might not take.

And sometimes you got to take that case all the way to trial and hope for the best. And so how do you get out of that? I hate to say by doing good work, but by doing good work and by being vocal about it.

Darl:

A hundred percent. Yeah, I agree with you. That’s exactly what I told the lawyer I was talking to yesterday. It comes from getting results. I know plenty of smart lawyers that probably know more than I do about a lot of things and they don’t get business.

And some of it is are they being vocal about it? Are they properly marketing their firms? But one of the things that I’ve found out, I think you hit the nail on the head when you talked about building up to that point where you can be more intentional and be more selective in your cases, is I see lawyers that hang a shingle and immediately they want to be like, I’m this lawyer. I’m only taking this case and I’m super selective in this. Maybe you’ll get there eventually. That’s a really, really tough way to brand yourself. 

People, whether it’s lawyers that are looking to refer cases out or clients, they want you to solve their problems. And if they’re referring cases out, they want you to take their cases. That doesn’t mean you take every case, but there are some cases where you look at and say, Hey, this one may leave me upside down, but there’s an opportunity here to generate a steady referral source.

Brian:

We’re two weeks before Christmas and my wife’s favorite Christmas movie is Christmas Vacation. And what you just said reminds me of Cousin Eddie: Been unemployed for three years because I’m holding out her position in middle management. It’s great to say I’m only a six-figure case lawyer or a seven-figure case lawyer, but if you’re working on a seven-figure case one day a week and twiddling your thumbs for the other four, pick up a couple $50,000 cases.

Darl:

Right, right. I definitely need to see a LinkedIn post about Cousin Eddie. That’s a great, great point. I never thought of that, but that’s kind of the way that I think of some law firms and the way they’re set up is it’s what can you do for me? What can your case do for me instead of you being of service to others and thinking, what can I do for you to help you?

I think when you look at setting yourself up for success in 2025, to me that involves mining those relationships and those referral sources and continuing to develop them. One of the things that I see a lot of lawyers do at the end of the year is they start thinking about marketing, which I know you guys know a ton about through Great Legal Marketing and talking to lawyers about it. What are some pieces of advice you would give other personal injury lawyers to do or not to do with the money?

I see a lot of people, they got that nest egg, they’ve got that maybe it’s 50 or a hundred thousand dollars and they’re like, man, I’m going to have to pay taxes on it. I can get essentially whatever service for 40% off by paying this at the end of the year, but then they blow the money on something that doesn’t work.

Brian:

So we just did this, right? I just sent an email to my dad who’s my business partner, and I said, we’re doing our year end planning and distribution and taxes and whatever. And I said to me, there’s no reason to prepay anything or to invest in some other marketing channel unless you think next year is going to be worse than this year is because we’re going to have the exact same tax problem in December of 2025 if everything’s still working.

And so before you go out and invest in something that you weren’t interested in four months ago because it’s at a tax discount, I think you’ve got to take stock of where you are right now. So from a marketing perspective, there’s different levels. Let’s say you have $10,000 to spend on marketing in a month. You could spend it on SEO, you could spend it on LSAs or you could spend it on referrals, really, really nice referral gifts. And I know you do this very well, or you could spend it on lunches and dinners, right?

Darl:

Sports tickets. I know we talked about that.

Brian:

Sports tickets. Yeah, yeah. Hawks tickets. But you have to look around at where you are and where you are in the marketplace because if you are a brand new lawyer and you’re competing with the 800-pound gorilla, you $10,000 on SEO is a drop in the bucket. And there may come a time when you want to invest $10,000 a month in that, but it’s probably not your best investment right now. And so that’s what I think we are really, really good at is having a conversation with you for 30 or 45 minutes and then giving you some advice on what to do because it’s a different answer for different lawyers in different markets in different stages of their career.

So absolutely don’t go out and buy something that you weren’t interested just on sale then. But the caveat to that is if you don’t have a good CRM and tracking mechanisms so that which of your marketing is actually producing any ROI go buy that. That’s one of the first things that a mature—

Darl:

What do you recommend for that?

Brian:

Lead Docket. We use Lead Docket and what it’s done for us, we’ve been on it for 18 months and what it’s done for us Darl, is it’s helped us really really dial in exactly where our money comes from. So we know for instance that more than 50% of our cases and more than 60% of our money comes from people who have spoken with one other human being who recommended us.

And that’s in part, that’s because Northern Virginia is a really crowded SEO market and it’s tough to rank. So if we had quote better SEO, that number would probably be a little bit lower, but in part it’s because we’ve had for years a print newsletter that goes out to all of our clients and all of our past clients and all of our referral sources. And so once a month I’m showing up in your mailbox if only to remind you that I’m still alive and practicing law in the 30 seconds between you opening the mailbox and throwing my thing in the trash.

And people now in the personal injury space, you find a lawyer in one of two ways. You’re on the side of the road, you’ve just been in a crash and you are calling the first person on Google, and if they don’t answer, you’re onto the second person on Google. And so if I tell law firms, if you don’t have really, really good intake and sales and it’s almost instantaneous, you have no business spending money on PPC or LSAs, if you have to have a longer tail sales cycle because you don’t have the great intake team yet, then don’t spend any money there. Spend your money on cultivating relationships and the people who get your name via referral, they’re still going to look you up.

So you still have to have a web presence. They’re probably getting more than one name. And if they find you and you have a crappy website and the only things that you’re posting on social media are like the Memorial Day Canva graphic, then they’re probably going to go with somebody else.

So it’s important to have that. But Lead Docket has really dialed in exactly where things are coming from in our firm. And my marketing director in the last year has done a fantastic job of different tracking numbers everywhere. We utilize a tool called UTM Grabber that will actually tell us the page on my website that you were looking at when you clicked to call and the first page that you came into on the website. So we have really good tracking on all of that and we know why somebody’s come and how they’ve gotten here. So if you don’t have a good CRM, that’s the first thing I would invest in.

Darl:

Yeah, no, that’s a great idea. I think to the topic about SEO, because that’s probably the one area where I get the most questions from people, whether it’s on LinkedIn or just lawyers I know around Atlanta. And I think it’s tough because if you want to play in that SEO space, maybe there’s an opportunity there. It depends on are you downtown Atlanta? Are you in a suburb? You’re probably going to be more likely to have success in a suburb, but a lot of it depends on budget and what your capability is.

I mean, if you’re able to stomach a budget and knowing that it may take you a couple of years to see results, I would say invest in the aggressive budget. If you can walk and chew bubble gum at the same time, you’ve got to be able to do those other things.

If it’s a choice between SEO and the relationships, then I think you go with the relationships and what needs to take place. But part of what needs to happen if you’re going to develop and cultivate relationships is you have to have good internal systems in your firm. So you’re not the one doing everything.

And I think that’s a key point is sometimes investing in people is important. Looking at hiring people instead of dropping, Hey, I’m going to invest $120,000 in SEO for next year. Let me prepay. It might be better off hiring an employee.

Brian:

Yeah. So let me tell you what we did in 2024. So the two biggest changes that we made in 2024 is when we had gathered about eight months of lead docket data, we said, man, if somebody calls us from an LSA, there’s almost no chance that we want the case and even if we want it, we’re not good enough in answering the phones to sign it. And we didn’t have a dedicated good in-house intake person at the time.

So we turned all of our digital spend to Google off and we rerouted that roughly $80,000 a year into a referral relationship management person whose job is to pay attention to who’s sending us cases, send them handwritten thank you cards with a $5 Starbucks gift card, and once a quarter go through our book of cases that people have sent us and just send ’em an update.

Because I mean, it’s so rare when you refer a case to another lawyer that you ever hear anything back except, Hey, thank you, we signed the case. And then sometimes three years later you get a check, but in the meantime you never hear anything. And so we have made a deliberate effort to once a quarter go through and say the case is in litigation or the case client is still treating or whatever. And just again reminding you that I have some cases that you trusted me with and I’m still alive.

And second half of her job is to find us local small physical therapy offices and chiropractors to go out to lunch with. And I can talk about that program if you like. The other big change that we made is we hired an in-house intake person so that when somebody calls with many firms, we had moved up the chain from, you have a receptionist who schedules a call with a lawyer to, alright, we’re going to have an intake person who’s overseas through a staffing agency to we have an intake person now during regular business hours and we have rollover answering.

And the reason that I wanted somebody in-house is that when the good case calls, it’s not good enough to just blast a team’s message around, I want you to run screaming down the hall like your hair’s on fire to find a lawyer to talk to that person because I think a lot of injury clients, whether we like it or not, if they found us through some digital source, they see you as a commodity and if you can’t solve the problem or demonstrate how you would solve the problem really quickly, they’re onto the next one. And the cost of a six or mid six figure fee going out the door is the annual salary of your intake person. And so if they just save one case they’ve paid for themselves,

Darl:

This sounds exactly like the internal conversation we’ve had. We hired, we’ve had a dedicated intake person, but we hired somebody, it was earlier this year to handle that for us. There was, we had somebody previously, they left and then we brought somebody else in. I talked to lawyers about this and one of the questions I get asked is, should I have a virtual assistant do it overseas? And I don’t think so. And here’s why.

If you are trying to be the boutique law firm and differentiate yourselves from the 800-pound marketing gorilla is having an overseas call person call center consistent with that. And the answer is no one like it or not, people are going to be able to tell because of the accent. They’re going to know that they’re in a call center.

If you’re trying to brand yourself as the local law firm and the local solution, having somebody local that can engage in conversation with them and develop relationship with them is incredibly important. Not only can they help convert your case, but they might be able to help convert a decline into a five star review.

So I’m with you on the referral relationship manager. That’s an interesting topic because kind of talked internally about the best way to handle that because I think all the things that you have your referral relationship manager do are important. And what we’ve been talking about is how do we sort of allocate those tasks internally so that they’re done? Is it with existing people or not? Because it is important. You mentioned taking chiropractors and physical therapists out to launch. Has that worked and developing relationships and leading to cases?

Brian:

It is a numbers game. So for us, one of the things that I’ve heard you talk about before is there’s two ways to run an injury practice. You can maximize dollars in the client’s pocket, you can maximize dollars in your pocket.

And so there’s two ways to kind of nurture chiropractors. Hey, I will send you all the cases that come through, you run up the bill and we’ll get it as quick as we can to policy limits and we’ll both make money. Good for me, good for you, not good for the client. My practice really is not like that. And so what I do is I go to chiropractors kind of with a different pitch.

My digital marketing is not good enough that I’m going to be able to send you a bunch of cases, but I know that you have people that come in and I know that there are lawyers that you work with that are probably taking advantage of you on the back end of these cases, right? Oh, it’s a crappy case. You got to cut your fee. We can only pay you a third or half, whatever.

And so my pitch is if you have somebody who organically comes into your office and you send them here, I’ll take care of you on the back end. We have really good systems, we get cases out the door quickly. Insurance companies our respect us and they’ll pay us reasonable value. And if they don’t, we actually go to trial and I’ll always show you the settlement statement and the breakdown so that you know that if anybody’s taking a reduction, number one, it’s my firm first. I didn’t see the person 36 times. Right? You did.

And number two, in those rare cases where we are asking you for reduction, I’m showing you all of the math. I think that’s fair. And most chiropractors when they think about developing a relationship with a lawyer aren’t looking for that. They’re looking for how can I get 10 more cases in the door? Which is fine, which is why it’s a little bit of a numbers game, but when you find the right ones, they’ll introduce you to their friends, have a speaking opportunity with the Virginia Chiropractor Association.

I’ve been introduced to the pain management doctor who now does some of my consultations. So it’s about nurturing the relationship really more than it is maximizing the ROI On any of those lunches.

Darl:

I think you made a comment there about the types of chiropractors that may exist, and we have a lot of chiropractors in the Atlanta area. Life University is a big chiropractor school that is based here actually in Marietta. There are certain chiropractors that do a very, very high volume of car accident cases.

There are also some that get their cases through illegal and proper means, and those are probably the same ones that are just focused on dollars and cents and wants you to send volume. But firms like ours don’t want to do business with them anyway. I mean, I like the chiropractors that don’t do a ton of volume. They get the occasional one coming in, or it’s the person that’s been there before and then they get in a wreck and have an aggravation of a preexisting condition or whatever. Those tend to be better people to develop those relationships with.

So that’s a great point. One of the things I wanted to discuss was you mentioned planning revenue and kind of setting goals. I’m terrible at that for a variety of reasons, but I want to show you a graph, and I put this out on social media on LinkedIn a while ago, and it’s our revenue by year. And I think this kind of highlights the problem that we see in our firm. This is amazing. Yeah. Wow. So low, low, high, kind of not much growth, then a lot of growth, then super down, then kind of plateau.

And I would suspect this year we’ll kind of plateau, maybe it’ll be higher. I don’t know. I haven’t looked at the numbers yet, but this is the problem. Like 2020, we had a case settle for $10 million and a couple other big cases, but the next year it’s like our revenue went down for firms like mine. And I think your firm has kind of a similar model where we’re not doing a high volume, but you’re going to get those big catastrophic cases that can cause a spike in revenue. It’s hard to plan. So how do we take that into account?

Brian:

So two ways. So what I see when I look at your graph is relatively flat, although if you zoomed in from 14 to 17, I’m sure it didn’t feel flat going from 2015 to 16, right? That’s probably double. And it looks a lot like ours if you charted it, flat spike, flat spike, flat spike, although if you looked at ours from several years ago, you’d take one less zero. This is an amazing chart, and I can’t believe you’re asking me questions about this. Doing a $30 million in annual revenue. That’s awesome.

Darl:

Well correct. This is not revenue, it’s the amount we recovered.

Brian:

Oh okay.

Darl:

Yeah, yeah. I wish it was 30 million in revenue, but no, this is the amount that of gross settlements.

Brian:

Okay,

Darl:

So if we were looking at gross settlements here, we had this 2020 covid year, right? Hard to plan, but we had that case settled for over $10 million. Next year kind of goes down, 2022 went up.

Brian:

Did you get that case in 22?

Darl:

Yes. I think that was when our MARTA case settled and settled for $17 million, which was also like, Hey, I don’t have another $17 million case something in 2023, but we had more lower seven-figure cases that were still big cases, but they didn’t reach that level. And I do think this year was a really good year, and it could be higher than 2023. It might be about the same, but I think next year, again, I could be wrong. I always think next year’s going to be lower. I could definitely see next year being lower.

Brian:

So here’s what I’ve found is that as I dive into our numbers, 2% of our cases are six-figure fee or higher cases. And so when I joined this firm in 2019, if I think back in one year, maybe in 17 50% of the revenue came from one case and in another year 70% of the revenue came from one case and it was a medical malpractice case that went to trial. That’s scary.

And so what I did when I joined us, I said, we got to find some ballast. We got to bring in the volume practice that smooths it out month over month. As you transition into that kind of practice, it can be hard to figure out what your average case value is because you really do have your average soft tissue case. Then you have everything else. But what I’ve found now, if you look back at maybe five years of data, is that every year, 2% of our cases have a six-figure fee or higher.

And your mileage may vary on whatever that threshold or whatever big case is for your firm and for Atlanta, but you roughly have this 2% outlier cases. And so you could do one of two things. You can say, I’m going to exclude those cases when I’m budgeting for next year. I don’t know, am I going to have a $5 million case or a $17 million case or you can do what we do now, which is like I just wrap it in. I know that for every a hundred cases that we take, two of ’em are going to be larger cases.

And so we budget conservatively on the spend, although as I look at our 2025, what else? If we were going to invest more money in 2025, it would be in high-end digital SEO or technical SEO. That’s the only other thing that I really want to buy right now. We will get to—

Darl:

What do you mean by that? What do you mean by high-end?

Brian:

Yeah, so right after we get off, I got a call with Jason Hennessy who we’ve been coaching with for the last five months about whether I just want him to just take over our SEO and we’ve always done it. We had a foster web marketing site for a long time, and Ben and Tom had a couple of JV deals in the early days of Great Legal Marketing. And so we’ve done it in-house forever and ever and ever. And then we burned through three agencies in the last two years kind of frustrated. And then we’ve been coaching on a monthly basis with Jason.

Darl:

This is every law firm’s experience.

Brian:

And I’ll tell you the last five months we’ve been spending $2,000 a month, 90 minutes for Jason’s time. But I look around and I’m like, well, it’s me and it’s Ben and it’s my marketing director on that call. And then my marketing director spends probably a third of her hours working on projects that we have from that call with a full-time VA in the Philippines helping her.

I’m like, well, shit, for the amount of dollars and hours that I have invested in this thing, I had to just pay you. So that’s the next call you were having. But the problem that you have, and you said it I think earlier about having the in-house intake person, it’s like it’s a cashflow issue. This is a good investment and it’s going to return, but it’s not going to return in our industry for nine to 18 months.

And so you’ve got to have that cashflow outlay for a long time before and be patient for before it starts coming back to you. And so that’s I think the hard part about budgeting.

I asked Bill Biggs this. Bill consults with all these enormous law firms. He works for the 800-pound gorillas. And I said, how does somebody who’s running a firm like mine with five lawyers become one of those? Do I have to hit a $50 million verdict and just say, I don’t want any of that money. I’m going to reinvest all of it into advertising and all this, or can you kind of gradually build up? And he didn’t think that in a short period of time you could gradually build up.

It’s a long horizon from reinvesting 15 or 20% of your annual revenue back into marketing to get to that space. And this is all back to what we talked about at the beginning of the call. It’s like, I don’t know that I want to run a firm with 50 lawyers, right? It feels like I would have a lot less autonomy in my life if I had 50 lawyers.

Darl:

Right. Well, I think talking about end-of-year planning and marketing and that sort of thing, one of the things that we’ve started doing a better job of is, and it’s still not perfect and it’s still an inex exact science, but trying to determine case values for cases we already have signed up and expected resolution date.

Now that is super difficult. I’m mediating a wrongful death med mal case next Friday. No idea if the case is going to settle, could settle next Friday, could settle next year, could go to trial in four years. No clue. That is difficult. And I think one of the things, so I came from a firm that only did catastrophic injury cases and wrongful death cases. We weren’t taking a small soft tissue case, but one of the reasons that I started taking them when I started my firm was to stabilize income, like you mentioned, having try to minimize the peaks and valleys.

Brian:

Yeah.

Darl:

There problems with that though. One of them is you got to pay people to work on ’em and then you got to provide oversight. So it’s not perfect. You mentioned the mail newsletter, by the way. That’s gold. I’ve used a mail newsletter since I started my firm because I’ve read about it from Great Legal Marketing and it’s a great way to stay top of mind.

I think one of the things that I see a lot of lawyers do is because they are starting from scratch at the beginning of the year and we are kind of conditioned to think in quarters and years, they’re incapable of thinking in three to five year time periods.

And again, I was guilty of that. I was in survival mode. When lawyers are doing the end-of-the-year planning, sounds like what you’re suggesting is don’t just start with some arbitrary financial goals. Start with what do you like doing? What want your life to look like? And then reverse engineer that.

Brian:

So I’m running a group right now, a small cohort of lawyers through what I call the 2025 escape, the drudgery of law blueprint. I’ve called it eight different things from the time I ran a webinar to the time I’ve run this program, and I’m going to do it again in January. It’s been a lot of fun and it’s a four-week program, and I won’t give you the whole commercial for it, but the two exercises that people really like are, you’ve heard Marco Brown talk about the 300 list on LinkedIn, right? The list?

Darl:

I haven’t.

Brian:

You don’t know that? Oh, okay, cool. So I won’t take credit for this and neither will Marco because it’s a Steve Harvey thing, but write down the 300 things that you want out of your life right’s a lot and you a lot. Well, it’s a ton. You’ll get to about 75 and then you’ll run out and then you’ll start stretching about legacy kind of goals and things like that. And then you’ll get into the realm of the impossible and it becomes really cool.

So most of the lawyers that were in this group landed somewhere between a hundred and 125. Very few people got all the way to 300. And then the next week we did this exercise where you write down in all of the realms of your life that are important to you, family, fitness, law practice, faith, community service, charity, whatever, what would perfect be? What would your 10 out of 10 life look like in the next 12 or 18 months with that boundary?

And people love this because nobody ever does it. And because when you get to the end of the year and you’ve done well, you reset the goalposts and you never go like, oh, that’s actually, I’m very, very happy with where I am. But writing down with real particularity, what is your 10 out of 10?

And it might be, I don’t want to practice law anymore. Or it might be I only want to work on this kind of case. And then your goals need to be aligned to how do I get closer to that rather than chasing more cases, more clients, more money, more TikTok followers, whatever, what actually is your 10 out of 10 and have somebody who’s important to you, COO, spouse, friends, whatever, check, here’s my 10 out of 10 and then here’s what I think my goals are. And if they’re not aligned, you’ve got to fix that. And you’ve got to focus on different things in the beginning of 2025.

And if all of your goals are about taking the areas of your life that are like eight out of 10 and making them nines and none of your goals are about this, three or two makes me really miserable all the time, you have a problem.

Darl:

Yeah, no, that’s a great point. I think as a law firm owner that has employees, a number of employees, I mean, I’m not running a solo practice here. I kind of think of it in two ways. There’s the sort of personal goals and the personal things I want which require introspection and some time away. I mean, before we hopped on the Zoom, we were talking about how busy my December’s been with pretrial conference, depositions, mediation, all sorts of stuff.

And I was kind of hoping to coast a little bit because I do like to spend the last few weeks of the year kind of thinking about those big picture things. But then the other part of that is like me and my leadership team, we all get together and have an end of the year meeting and talk about how the year went, talk about issues, concerns, and then 2025 type issues. And so I think it’s important for everyone to be on the same page with that. But you’re right. I mean this all starts with the law firm owner because the law firm is there because they started it.

And so what do you want out of it? I think there’s, there’s been times where I talk to other lawyers and they seem like they’re more employees than they are owners. And so I think you’ve got to ask yourself that question, do you want to practice law? Do you want to just be a business person? Do you want to just market? I love practicing law. We were talking earlier that I had a medical malpractice trial recently. I loved it. I had a great time. I loved working the case up. I loved going to trial.

I’ve got another trial coming up in January that again may or may not settle, I don’t know, but we’re preparing for trial. I love that process and I love adding the value to the case, but I also know lawyers that don’t like that, and that’s okay, but don’t try to live somebody else’s version of what you think success looks like or happiness looks like.

Brian:

And then we go to conferences and we’re like, oh, that looks like fun. I should buy that thing. I should also have 50,000 TikTok followers. No, stay in your lane. Do what you’re good at because there’s somebody in that room going, man, I really want what DAR has. And the more that we get distracted by everybody else’s shiny objects and goals, the more unhappy we are.

Darl:

Comparison is the thief of joy. I think the other thing too that a lot of people don’t see, and this is just social media in general, whether it’s in your personal life, seeing stuff on Facebook or Instagram or seeing stuff on LinkedIn is you’re not seeing all the challenges behind the scenes. You don’t know all the things that go on.

I will tell you, I’m not naming any names, but you may have perceptions of certain law firms in Atlanta based on what you see on social media that I know from people is not accurate. It’s not the way that things are going. And I see other people posting stuff on social media about how many people they’re hiring or how many cases or this or that, but what you’re not seeing is they’re not good cases or they’re terrible clients or the lawyers have 400 cases each and they’re not able to accurate adequately do what they want to do.

Again, this all comes back to why are you doing what you’re doing if it’s to make as much money as possible and you want to run a sweatshop, I don’t agree with that business model, but you’re going to run your firm differently than if your idea is, Hey, I really want to develop personal connections with people and that sort of thing.

You mentioned percentage of cases y’all have that are big cases. You also mentioned that 50 plus percent of your cases come from people that have been referrals. Have you found that the big cases typically do come from referrals?

Brian:

Always. Always. Because the big cases are not the people who are finding a lawyer 48 hours after the crash. Sometimes the family member is looking for them while they’re in the hospital bed, but usually they have bigger problems to solve than who’s going to get me a rental car. You know? So cultivating the referrals does two things. Number one, it buys you more time to call people back. If you’re intake and sales is not very good, you’ll get a little bit more grace if they’ve gotten your name from somebody else. And number two, they do tend to be larger cases, and this is especially true if you can develop your practice into a niche. So you mentioned FTCA trucking is another one. Nursing home abuse is another one.

Darl:

Medical malpractice.

Brian:

Medical malpractice is one. Virginia, we have a cap. So we got out of med mal, we closed our last med mal case four years ago. Our cap is like two and a half million, and we were routinely spending 150 on a case, and I just hated the risk profile. There’s no incentive to settle those cases on the defense side, on your worst day, you’re paying the policy limits and they’re really hard. So I started looking for other stuff to do.

Darl:

Yeah, no, I think talking about referrals, so this is not based on any scientific study, so I’m going to caveat that, but this is the way that I think of the client journey. I think of you’ve got a group of clients who if they have a big case, they don’t know lawyers, they don’t have access to lawyers, maybe nobody in their family knows a lawyer has ever hired a lawyer, those firms are more likely to hire the advertiser. And if they’re likely to hire an advertiser, you’re not competing with that, right?

They don’t want to go online and hire the small firm. They just don’t. To them it’s risky. It’s like, well, this name is associated. I see their billboards. They must be good. They’re going to hire that person. Then you have another group when they’re catastrophic injury or wrongful death cases, they’re going to ask for the referrals. They’re going to spend their time and do their research, but they’re going to your website for validation. They’re not just hiring a person they don’t know off the website. Now, I will tell you the one exception to that is medical malpractice cases because it is so hard to find somebody to take medical malpractice cases.

Now, I think that depends on your venue. You mentioned Virginia’s a tough venue for that. I’m licensed in North Carolina, that’s where I’m from. They have some tough caps there and the law is not very favorable. But if you’re setting up to do medical malpractice cases, there is an opportunity there to get some serious injury, wrongful death cases, but you got to have the intake infrastructure because you may have to sift through a hundred plus calls to get that one.

I went back and looked at all of the seven-figure cases we’ve had since I started the firm in 2014, and we’ve had, I want to say as of now, earlier this year, it was around 27 or 28 total. Maybe now it’s like 30. All of them, one or two came from a referral. Most were attorney referrals. A couple were client referrals, A few were people that people in the firm knew, but we had one from an LSA. It was a medical malpractice case we signed…

Brian:

Paid for itself for three years.

Darl:

Oh, I know, I mean it was a $4 million case direct hire case, but we got that case in 2021. That was three years ago, and we haven’t had an LSA case. So I think that the SEO game is kind of like bulls gold a little bit that I think there’s a lot of false belief about what it can actually do for your law firm. I think if you’re realistic about it and you understand, hey, I may get some decent six-figure cases, I may get some mid-five-figure cases, but if you’re looking at that as a way to rely on it, you’re going to have a tough go at it.

Brian:

For sure, because Google might change the algorithm or anything. I think there is a lot of value to being in the top, call it three, no marginal utility being five rather than 14.

But back to the referrals, the first million-dollar case that I ever handled was referred to me by a former client of mine whose case I’d settled for $7,000 and I took a $500 discount on the fee. He didn’t have health insurance and I wanted him to get more money. And a year and a half later, his friend was in a DUI crash. She was a passenger and she had, I don’t know, six broken vertebrae and two fusions in her back and he made her call me.

But I’m kind of doing my mental Rolodex of million-dollar cases, and I think you’re probably right. I think all of ours have come from either referrals from past clients or members in our community who knew us, liked us and trust us.

Darl:

Yeah. One of the things, and I may have discussed this when I was on your podcast, my view on this is constantly evolving, but the chances of getting client referrals and the number of client referrals seem to have not grown at the rate I thought they would.

I think some of it has to do with our market though, and I think this is going to be a market by market thing. Atlanta is so competitive, there’s so much advertising. I think the opportunity for clients to make referrals is decreasing because I think people are so inundated with advertising now that they’re more likely to just hire the advertiser right away, and then when their friend finds out they were in a wreck a week ago, they’ve already hired the big firm.

 So what we see more of is people hiring the advertising firm, telling their friend, family, whoever about how unhappy they are. They never get to talk to a lawyer their case has taken forever, and then they fire that lawyer and hire us. Do you see something similar to that in Virginia or is the market different up there?

Brian:

So we actually do not have major players with market share up here. Morgan and Morgan has an office in dc. They don’t have a market share. Ashcraft and LL sort of is around here, but personal injury law firms in the Northern Virginia area seem to kind of cap out around five or seven lawyers. For whatever reason, price Menowitz is across the river in Maryland. They’re larger, but they don’t really do very much Virginia stuff. So we don’t have that issue.

But what I was thinking as you were talking about fewer referrals from past clients or that base not growing as much is I think people more and more often are going to affinity groups in Facebook like the local moms group or we have a Living In Burke, which is a little city by us, group where people are constantly asking, and if you can develop amongst your list of former clients, your real evangelists who are willing to go onto social media and every time there’s a car crash and somebody’s looking for a lawyer, say your name.

I think that’s the referral source more than people post-COVID or whatever. In the digital era, we don’t seem to be getting together as much, and so I think there’s less maybe one-on-one or I got your name from a friend and a whole lot more of, I got your name from a Facebook group.

Darl:

Yeah, no, that’s a great point. There’s a few Facebook groups that some of members of our team are members of, and the downside is sometimes when, and one of them in particular, when anybody’s recommended, there’s like 30 law firms thrown out. I mean it’s insane.

And some of them are advertising firms that get thrown out. So I think that that is a great point though, because we actually just got a case I think a week ago from a social media group where it was actually a lawyer that referred us that recommended us. Well, Brian, we’ve been talking about an hour, so before we go, tell us what is the one thing you think lawyers should absolutely do in planning for 2025 that if you’re not going to do anything else, at least do this one thing and maybe you can give us three things, but what are just the core things where it’s like, look, if you don’t have the time to do all this, or the ability just at least do this

Brian:

At a really high level, go sit somewhere quietly for a morning and figure out what the hell you want. That’s the really meta level of this is the one thing that you should do. I mentioned CRMs. If you don’t know where your leads are coming from, I would start there and then building out within your practice CRM, like all of your systems and procedures so that it’s not all in your star paralegal’s head, which is how most small law firms have built.

You have this key player who is absolutely indispensable and you can never part ways with them because they know everything and they’ve never written it down. So those are kind of the two things.

Let’s say on a marketing, the thing that few people are doing is kind of getting back, and this has been on my list and I haven’t done it yet, but getting back to this gathering and meeting people you don’t know, and I don’t mean go to a networking lunch and introduce yourself and have an elevator pitch, but I mean find seven lawyers who are in your geographic region, who are in different practice areas who you don’t know, and just invite ’em all to dinner together, pick up the bill and talk about the unique challenges of their business and their practice.

You will learn so much more, and they have not in the 20 years that they’ve been practicing, ever been invited by somebody they don’t know who wasn’t trying to sell them something out to dinner. So that’s great. The thing that nobody’s doing, I would do that and it’ll cost you less than two calls from local service ads.

Darl:

Great point. I’m going to give one piece of advice to the listeners on one thing. I think that’d be really important, and this isn’t as much goal setting, but I think it’s important to do at the end of the year, sit down and talk to your employees.

To do a one-to-one meeting with them. And for us, that typically involves me talking to the attorneys and it involves other members of our leadership team talking to the people that they supervise directly. But it’s important to have a pulse of your firm and what’s going on.

This is the time of year a lot of people start thinking about changing jobs, and you want to know if somebody’s unhappy and you want to know if somebody’s thinking about leaving. It’s also a good time to be proactive about raising people’s pay. If you’ve got a star player that is making you money and you’re paying them below market, don’t wait for them to come and ask you for a raise and don’t wait for them to tell you that they’re turning in their two week notice. If you do it affirmatively, you’re going to also build a lot of goodwill with them and a lot of trust with them. So those are the things I would say.

Well, Brian, thank you so much for joining us. This has been an awesome conversation. For our listeners who were wondering about why you can’t see the graph, if you’re listening on a podcast, this is video recorded, so it is available on YouTube you like and subscribe on YouTube, on our YouTube channel and get this podcast as well as other videos that we put out there. If anybody wants to reach out to Brian, what’s the best place for them to find you to either join one of your coaching groups or to talk about Great Legal Marketing and the service that y’all provide?

Brian:

Best place to find me is on LinkedIn.

Darl:

Awesome. Awesome. Well, thanks Brian. Happy holidays to you and your family. I appreciate your time in joining us, and I hope you have a great rest of the year.

Brian:

You too. This could have gone for three hours. Thank you.

Darl:

Awesome.

 

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