Brandon Yosha

That’s the only way to be a plaintiff’s lawyer. You have to go in their living room, you have to go to their house, you have to break bread with them. You have to spend time with them. You have to understand their story their pain, their suffering, and not just the client, not just the victim. It’s the family.

Chris Dreyer

Genuine connections between attorneys and plaintiffs translate into true empathy in front of a jury.

Brandon Yosha

So you want to get the stories from all of those folks and help tell that story to a jury. And when you go into a courtroom and you can stand up in an opening statement and say, I’ve sat in Wayne’s living room, I’ve sat in Amy’s living room. I’ve had dinner with them that is such an advantage for a lawyer. And our job is to help them relate.

Chris Dreyer

You’re listening to Personal Injury Mastermind, where we give you the tools you need to take your personal injury practice to the next level. Brandon Yosha’s first case was this stuff of legends. Just five weeks after graduating from law school, he was entrusted to deliver the opening statement and try a case against a true Goliath, Indianapolis Power and Light the verdict $20.3 million. Brandon is a rising star, he has served over a hundred clients since passing the bar in 2019. On today’s episode, Brandon and I cover making deeper client connections before trial and the importance of building relationship equity. We also dive into the often overlooked marketing tactics, like Tik TOK, and newsletters that have high potential for huge impact. I’m your host, Chris Dreyer, founder and CEO of Rankings.io. We help elite personal injury attorneys dominate first page rankings with search engine optimism. Being at the forefront of marketing is all about understanding people. So let’s get to know our guests. Here’s Brandon Yosha attorney at Yosha
Cook & Tisch on the mentors that helped him navigate his first case. Just five weeks after graduating from law school, you were entrusted deliver an opening statement for a case that would result in a damage amount of $20 million, $20.3 million against a true Goliath, Indianapolis, Power and Light.What did you think it would be like, how is it different from your actual experience? Tell me about that.

Brandon Yosha

Chris. First of all, it was beginner’s luck. I, I had a lot of support and so many mentors who helped me prepare for this first case. I watched my dad growing up in the courtroom and I saw. His delivery and his connection with a jury and how he was able to tell our client’s story to a jury. And I, I got a general sense of things how to be the best advocate for your client in the courtroom at a young age, but it’s a little bit different when you’re the one standing up there and delivering the message and. Being the advocate. one thing that really stuck out to me was just how much the defense attorneys throw mud at you and at your clients and how difficult they make your lives. And I learned that for the first time in that trial, because it was a two week trial.

Chris Dreyer

Fantastic. let’s talk about you, you connecting with clients and like a human and genuine way, so how did you make this connection to your clients? How did you tell that story to the jury? What did that process look like when you’re thinking about it? When you’re approaching it?

Brandon Yosha

You want to always or place yourself in your client’s shoes. And when you can do that, magic happens for the client. And magic happens for you as a plaintiff’s lawyer, a trial lawyer. You have to ask yourself if that were me, if that were my wife, if that were my child, if that were my brother, my sister. If that were me, what would I want? And what would I think is fair and reasonable and just, what’s just compensation for what I’ve gone through, what my family’s gone through. And I wouldn’t expect discounted justice. I would expect full justice and I try. To place myself in their shoes as best I can. That’s the only way to be a plaintiff’s lawyer. You have to go in their living room, you have to go to their house, you have to break bread with them. You have to spend time with them. You have to understand their story their pain, their suffering, and not just the client, not just the victim. It’s the family. It’s the brothers, the sisters everyone’s affected by this catastrophic injury. It’s not just the name plaintiff. So you want to get the stories from all of those folks and help tell that story to a jury. And when you go into a courtroom and you can stand up in an opening statement and say, I’ve sat in Wayne’s living room, I’ve sat in Amy’s living room.  I’ve had dinner with them that is such an advantage for a lawyer. And when you can say that it helps you connect on a human level and in human beings, naturally human beings are good people. No there, there’s not a lot of people that are just evil minded. Like anybody can relate with another human being on some level. And our job is to help them relate. So I know I, that was a long-winded answer.

Chris Dreyer

I I was hanging on to every word you said. I think even how you delivered that to me may, it felt like. It felt real. It felt like you really cared. And I got that sense just from you telling it, that, that emotional intelligence, that true empathy. I think that’s a lost art too. I think with. Now with digital marketing and we’re just disconnected, right? We’re on our devices and technology. And I think that there’s more value in communication and empathy and EEQ more so than ever before. And I think that when you’re trying to convey that to the jury and know, they’re going to trust you more when Hey, I’ve been in their house, I can speak to this very confidently.

Brandon Yosha

Absolutely.

Chris Dreyer

So let’s talk about, mentorship and values. I’d like to go even further back, at a time where we talk about the importance of mentorship and shared values. You were thrown into the ring, a trial by fire. Luckily you had some incredible mentors from the team at trial lawyersfor justice, and you had other mentors. So tell me about mentorship. how it’s developed your skills and your approach to being a personal injury attorney. Yeah,

Brandon Yosha

Chris, I’m extremely fortunate because I’ve had some tremendous mentors in law school. I read. Running With the Bulls which is a book that Nick and Courtney Raleigh wrote. And my first year of law school, I was introduced to that book and I was preparing for a moot court and I wanted to be a trial lawyer just like my dad. And I read Nick Raleigh’s book. And I was like, gosh, this guy. He is amazing. I want to be just like him. I want to be just like, my dad and I want to learn from these guys. I read his book and after I’d get admitted to practice law I think it was two days after I got admitted. My dad told me Brandon, you’re giving the opening statement on our trial that said six weeks from today. Five and a half weeks from today. And I had worked on the case a little bit in law school and met with the clients in law school. But I, I’d never given an opening statement in a courtroom. So I reached out to Nick. I sent him an email. I never spoke with him before. And I said, Nick just got admitted two days ago. I’ve read your books. I followed you and your philosophy and I need your help. And he responds, I think within 10 minutes and he says, call me. So I call him, I tell him the entire story and he says, we’re going to fly out to Indianapolis. And we’re going to help you prepare for this one. And. Sure enough, two days later they fly in Indianapolis and help me. And he critiques my rehearsed opening statement. He looks at the visuals that I was going to show the jury. He was like, I don’t like this, and I don’t like how you deliver this. And he’s hard on me too. He was very hard on me and he was very critical, but he’s the reason why I understood and why I understand the value of going to someone’s living room, going to someone’s house, spending the time with the family, gathering the human stories, understanding what their childhood looked like, understanding what it looked like five years before, understanding what it looked like at their wedding and their happiest moment. And trying to convey that and connote that happiness to a jury. So Nick was a tremendous influence on my life.

Chris Dreyer

That’s incredible. In, first of all, I got to applaud you that the book had an impact on you. And then you reached out.. most individuals that would have never even replied to the email much less said, Hey, call me. And then they fly out to visit you. And then truly like what, what a, what an amazing act. I think that there’s a lot of power there, you’re in a unique position here. You get to practice with buddy Yosha, who’s nearly 60 years of experience in personal injury law, and a stellar reputation who also happens to be your father, so let’s talk about that dynamic. What values has he installed in you to make you a better attorney?

Brandon Yosha

Yeah, big shoes to fill. He he pushes me every day to listen Nick critique, my opening statement, but Buddy critique even harder. he is shaped my character as a person. And he’s always been an advocate for the little guy for the Davids of the world, going up against Goliath and buddy show me at a very young age that it doesn’t matter what you look like. It doesn’t matter what your. Background is your education. We’re all human beings. And we all have we all have human suffering and human, human experiences and pain. And empathy. He’s always instilled empathy into me. And I think he’s represented probably Chris 3000 clients over the course of his career. In central Indiana and we’ll get phone calls from people. And they’ll say, I don’t want a lawyer. I just wanted to tell you guys that buddy Yosha helped me 15 years ago when no one else would. And he was an amazing lawyer that, that, would take my call and he got me justice or 30 times what the insurance company was offering. And a 10 minute phone call and we’ve had multiple people call in like that because we started to push our marketing a little bit more and had to have a stronger presence on social media and people see it on social media. And they’re like, I’m going to call it just to say, Hey, buddy helped me when no one else would. So I have very big shoes to fill. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to fully fill them, but all of my empathy that I have in my life comes from, my dad.

Chris Dreyer

The attorneys at Yosha Cook & Tisch have touched thousands of lives and has a combined 120 years of experience. I wanted to know the most important lesson Brandon has learned from his colleagues so far.

Brandon Yosha

Just understanding that, you’re not a, another number in a spreadsheet. Like the insurance companies view you as you’re a human being. And I think there’s a system that these insurance companies use it’s called Colossus. And the system is that there’s a calculation that inputs, your medical specials and your medical bills and what type of injury you had and they mark up your file literally as a number, not as a human being with a photo and all of our clients. In our case management software, they have a photo and that their family members are in that photo. And it’s a fam it’s a human. It’s not a number in a spreadsheet. And I think that’s the biggest lesson. With the 120 years of combined experience, all of those years are representing the humans.

Chris Dreyer

I think a lot of times in business, we talk about, lead generation and all these marketing tactics, but to some degree that those relationships have relationship. And it’s not from a deceptive or bad way. It’s like a good way. Like it, it compounds like this individual had a great experience and maybe he never gets another accident his life, but then he knows someone that does, and he can strongly recommend your firm. And I think that kind of doesn’t get touched on a lot. We had Lewis Scott on from Bader in a few, several episodes ago. And one of the things that he talked about was, Hey, they just try to break, even because if they get the case, they know they’re going to get more referrals in the future. And I think with your, the way that you’re bonding and connecting with these clients I imagine when you go to ask for a review, it’s not like breaking their arm. It’s they’re happy and more than happy to do that, to give that.

Brandon Yosha

Absolutely. And I would say 40% of our client generation is from referrals. Whether it be client referrals or professional referrals. And we’ve, since we’ve represented, Buddy has represented thousands of personal injury victims in Indiana. We’re sitting on a gold mine, essentially when we have all of those emails and phone numbers and addresses of past clients, we send out a newsletter to keep them informed and let them know we’re still alive and we’re still here and we can still help. And a lot of our new intakes mentioned the fact that Buddy or our firm has represented a relative of theirs, a family member of theirs. And you’re exactly right. Referral equity is huge. I mean pay-per-click, and local service ads and all of those lead drivers are great, but you’re going to have sustainable ROI. Long-term ROI. If you can deliver exceptional experiences for the client, and then they tell their friends, their relatives in the word of mouth communication of your reputation procedures.

Chris Dreyer

Yeah, that viral word of mouth. I That’s strongest marketing. There is. And when you, when we talk about cost per acquisition and things like that, you’re just not going to beat referral. It’s the best there is. the newsletter, do you send it weekly? Do you send it monthly? How has the newsletter impacted

Brandon Yosha

Yeah, we send it once a month. And we send it via email. We send it a printed version to all of our past and current clients and people always say, Hey, I saw the newsletter. I, I love getting the updates and we try to, provide updates on new laws that are being incorporated or Results that we had recently got for a past client that might be in a similar situation to a current client. And it helps a lot and they get that newsletter I’m sure. And then they say, when they go to dinner that night, Hey, I just got a newsletter from the Yosha law. You were in a car accident, you were in a you were in a, you had a slip and fall. You should call Yosha law. I just saw that newsletter and, they helped us a long time ago and it’s that top of mind awareness. And my cousin is Jay Abraham who is a guru, a marketing guru who’s one of the brightest minds out there when it comes to marketing and he talks about preeminence and the theory of preeminence and being. Top of mind all the time. And even if it’s subconsciously, when you’re sending out a newsletter it’s more about the subconscious than it is the conscious, because you want to establish your preeminence and you want people to, whenever that moment comes where they need a lawyer and, they’ve been involved in an act of negligence. And they don’t know who to trust. They don’t know what to do. And the insurance company is treating them like crap. Then in that moment they will connect, the subconscious mind will connect to Yoshua law. And that’s what Jay has taught me. And he’s very generous with his time. I think. Hourly rates, $50,000, but has my cousin he gives me the family discount of $0 and I’m grateful for that. But yeah,

Chris Dreyer

That’s fantastic. And you knew I was going to bring up Jay Abraham and. Yeah, last time I checked because I went to his website before I even knew that you had a relationship with him. And I was checking on his coaching program and I think it’s $60,000 now for that discovery session. And I was like I’m sure it’s worth it. He coached Tony Robbins. He coached Damon John numerous high profile. I think he was the individual. Did the Oxyclean I believe I know he’s just done some monumental that’s the one I was thinking of. I see. I just monumental campaigns. And he had, he was one of the pioneers on those newsletters as a distribution strategy, utilizing other individuals newsletters. So I think that’s great that he pass that on. And I think that, jeez, any PI firm that’s listening, that’s not doing a newsletter letter. It’s you can go to constant contact or MailChimp and you can do it for practically nothing. You already got the material out there and you just stay top of mind. I think it’s just phenomenal. It’s one of the best. marketing tactics you could do. I do applaud you though. Do the print version too, that little extra step and

Brandon Yosha

yeah, it’s $1 to print out. So we have a vendor we work with and it’s $1 per newsletter, one dot. So if you send it out to 500 people, it’s $500, but it’s literally $1 to print out the newsletter and it’s professionally done. And it arrives at of their house for one dollar.

Chris Dreyer

Yeah. And for those of you listening and Brandon yourself don’t be surprised if you start getting a newsletter in your . Inbox because I talked to Brandon about this afterwards. Yeah, so let’s hit the digital marketing a little bit too. So the one thing that I see your firm doing incredibly well is you’re doing really well on video particularly on YouTube and then social media and you guys are doing Tik-Tok too. So let’s. YouTube your channel has nearly 70,000 views across dozens of videos. You know what, some top level, just general advice on video marketing, how do you see that make an impact for your firm? Oh,

Brandon Yosha

it’s the future. YouTube and I think YouTube for more than any other is the future of digital marketing. We, have seen so much traffic come in to our site from YouTube. Like you said, we have 70,000 views but they, every video has, if you do it correctly, has a link in the first line or the second line in the description, which the viewer can click on. And if you’re creating videos that are related to the link it’s an excellent way to drive new traffic in. And once they subscribe, they’re going to see your face. You’re going to be on their feet a lot. And YouTube has been great.

Chris Dreyer

YouTube, second only to the parent company Google, is one of the largest search engines and an obvious choice for exposure, but the true advantage of video content for law firms over blog posts or articles is this: video helps build rapport with potential clients and increase trust and added bonus? Longer videos on YouTube can be cut down and repurpose for other social platforms like Instagram and Tik TOK. I wanted to hear more about Brandon’s experience with marketing the firm on Tik TOK.

Brandon Yosha

But yeah, we tried on Tik TOK. We try to post a combination of educational content. Informative content and then, entertaining content, funny content and having a good time with creating these videos. And we just recently started doing Tik-Tok one of our new brand managers who just joined our firm. She’s a former actor and she has, a production mind, and she’s very creative and she’s helped with producing our Tik Toks. And w we’ve the office morale is up by doing it. It’s just fun. It’s something that helps us, in a tough day when we’re in the middle of trial prep to be able to create something funny and lighthearted.

Chris Dreyer

Yeah. And I think tech talks specifically, I think it’s, there’s a misconception. Like it . Started off with musically, being acquired and it had a younger demographic, but it’s starting to expand. I think personally, I’d love to talk. I, it can just consume your time, but I think the algorithm is better than practically any social media network out there. When you go to Instagram or you go to Facebook, you’re going to see who you’re following. And maybe some of their activity that’s been engaged upon. But what I like about Tik TOK is it will show you. Information about what your interests. So if you do a search for say law, you’re going to see more law tech talks in it, you to do one on sports, you’re going to see more sports. And it’s a bit different than Instagram and how Facebook’s algorithms work. So I think it could be the future. I think it’s one of those early channels that, you could be an early adopter and really get a lot of. Visibility there before it gets just so saturated, like every other marketing channel. Yeah.

Brandon Yosha

My, my position on it is why not? It’s just, it’s another opportunity to get in front of people and seem approachable. And especially in light of COVID you don’t have as much interaction with clients interaction with, people you have to adopt to those different channels and whatever people are using it. And I realized sick, toxic, younger, target audience, but we’ve got clients that are younger. We have clients that are 15, 16, 17, who get hit by a car, hit by a truck. And when they see on their TikTok a lawyer that’s informing them and a lawyer that is authoritative while also having a good time and, providing some entertainment that they’re going to call you instead of the guy they see on the billboard or, the settlement mill on TV at all hours of the day.

Chris Dreyer

Yeah. It’s the epitome of the know like trust, right? They’re like, oh he’s I could like this individual he’s on this channel. He’s, he’s funny. They’re entertaining. And it’s the thing I think about marketing just in general is like, where does attention? Where does attention live? It’s where does it congregate? There’s a lot of attention on Tik TOK, so maybe they don’t have the monetization and the ads, down. 100%, but there’s a lot of attention, a lot of visibility there. So I think it’s a great channel, brain and this has been fantastic. I got two final questions here, for, so first the big one, what does success as an attorney mean to you?

Brandon Yosha

Just never settling cheaply and not taking the quick buck for somebody or for a client and always golden rolling yourself and saying, if this were me, what would I want? What would I expect? And I can’t do it. Like I have so many cases that get into litigation because the insurance company, that. They treat our clients horribly and the value they place on their injuries. In that’s one thing is the insurance industry that there’s the core backlog from COVID is starting to catch up to them. And courts are opening back up and we’re getting to the point now where, okay, they’re going to have to pay the Piper and. For me to answer your question. Success to me is to hold them accountable and make sure we’re getting full compensation for our clients. No matter how long ago.

Chris Dreyer

No, the thing I hear, it’s selfless. I heard that at the very beginning of our interview, it’s them and it’s, if they succeed, you succeed.
So I love that. First of all, that’s that shows a lot of integrity that shows that you really care. And what is next for you and Yosha Cook, & Tisch?

Brandon Yosha

We are in the process of expanding in Indiana. We want to have a, an office set up in Fort Wayne permanently. So we have a satellite office there now, but we also want to have two attorneys there full-time and south bend as well. Basically expand throughout the whole state of Indiana and not just Indianapolis maybe one day, move into some other states, but Definitely expanding beyond central Indiana.

Chris Dreyer

I love that the values of empathy and connection instilled in Brandon from such a young age, continue to guide his practice. A few takeaways from Brandon: Ask for help and seek out mentors. See clients, not just as a case file or a number, but as a whole person, get to know their family and friends learn their stories. In an ever distracted world, making the genuine connections sets firms apart. Maintain the relationship, even after trial and ask for referrals. Keep your firm top of mind through inexpensive social and traditional channels, like YouTube and printed newsletters. I’d like to think Braden Yosha from Yosha Cook & Tisch for sharing his story with us. And I hope you gained some valuable insights from the conversation you’ve been listening to Personal Injury Mastermind. I’m Chris Dreyer. If you liked this episode, leave us a review. We’d love to hear from our listeners. I’ll catch you on next. Week’s PIMM with another incredible guest and all the strategies you need to master personal injury marketing.