Ed Bernstein:

Whatever your niche is, you need to figure out who you are, genuinely who you are and then stay that person when you market.

Chris Dreyer:

Niche on how you market and the type of law you practice.

Ed Bernstein:

The more narrow the area you have, I think the more protected you will be.

Chris Dreyer:

Think back to the last time you were in Las Vegas. How many billboards did you seen? How many of those were personal injury attorneys? If your memory is anything like mine, they were everywhere. It’s almost impossible to imagine the city of lights without them. But 50 years ago you couldn’t find an ad for an attorney if you tried. Before 1972, advertising a law firm was illegal and even after it was considered protected first amendment right, the stigma remained. Then in the mid-eighties, the courageous man flipped the script and placed a TV ad for his Nevada firm.
Ed Bernstein, owner and founding partner of Edward M. Bernstein & Associates is now one of the most recognizable people in Nevada. He has served the Las Vegas community for decades and hosted the Ed Bernstein Show for over 30 years. Today Ed shares his wisdom he has collected over decades in the industry. He explains why the riches are in the niches, the importance of repetition and when to consider a line of succession. Ed proves that you have to be willing to take some arrows when tapping into markets and going against the grain. Here’s Ed Bernstein, owner and founding partner at Edward M. Bernstein & Associates.

Ed Bernstein:

I really didn’t know what I wanted to do, but I knew enough that or maybe I should go to law school because the education is just invaluable. So I worked three jobs during the day, went to law school at night, started a couple of my own businesses while I was in law school, finished law school and I still didn’t have a passion for the law even when I finished law school. And some of the businesses that I had started had done very well. Lawyers that I had graduated with were still trying to get jobs at that time, is a long time ago.
So for the first year or two, I did not practice law. I kept doing the businesses I had and then I got really fed up managing these businesses and the bug hit me. I wanted to be an attorney, I want to practice law. I grew up in Philadelphia. I was living back there and we moved out to Las Vegas where I kind of was on my way to LA but I saw the opportunity here in the mid-seventies in Las Vegas. And I saw the wonderful blue skies. We had maybe 300 lawyers here at that time and I just put out a shingle and started practicing law.

Chris Dreyer:

Got to say that the focus definitely changed because you’ve been in practice for 40 years, have been quite successful. What would you say for those individuals running a practice and being very successful, just big picture, what it takes to actually compete in a market like this?

Ed Bernstein:

Well, of course the market today, particularly in Las Vegas, is a lot different than it was 40 plus years ago. When I started advertising, there was no competition. I was the only competition. And I have an interesting story, Chris, on why I started going on TV. In the very early eighties, must have been 1981. And one day I was watching TV and we have a hospital here called Sunrise Hospital, and one day I’m watching TV and there’s an ad for Sunrise Hospital came on. Now, flashback 45 years ago, you never heard of a hospital advertising. And the first thing I thought was why would a hospital have to advertise for business? It’s a necessity, when people need medical care you go to a hospital. Well, sunrise Hospital did a study and in certain instance, hospitals are nothing more than, very similar to hotels.
They have vacancy factors. And Sunrise Hospital realized that their rooms were full from Monday to Friday. The vacancy was significant on the weekends. In those days, of course there was very few people who were admitted directly into a hospital unless you were a super emergency. What would happen is a doctor would admit you and then doctor would discharge you, preferably your family doctor. And they realized that the doctors waited for the weekend to end to admit patients. So they would admit them on Monday and they wanted to get them out of the hospital by Friday because the doctors didn’t want to be on call on the hospital and the weekends.
So Sunrise recognized this as a vacancy issue and they did a promotion on TV that if you had an optional procedure to be done in a hospital and you checked in on a Friday and had the procedure over the weekend and stayed till Monday, they would send you on Hawaiian Air to Hawaii for a trip. And I was flabbergasted. I mean, first of all, I thought it was a brilliant way to fill the rooms. But secondarily, the idea of a hospital advertising and doing a giveaway to get business gave me the incentive and the strength and the courage. Because you needed courage in those days to market with lawyer advertising because you got a lot of criticism from all the existing bar associations, that really helped me have the confidence to do it.

Chris Dreyer:

Ed was one of the first to gamble on marketing for a law firm and he came out on top, but the landscape has changed since he placed those first bets.

Ed Bernstein:

It used to be all you had to do was put an ad on TV and the phone rang. It was the easiest thing in the world. Maybe you tried newspaper. Didn’t work so well, maybe you tried a little radio. It wasn’t as good as TV. Internet wasn’t around yet. Then the internet came and the last 20 years or so, everybody’s been trying to figure out how to do the internet and the competition is so fierce now. And the younger attorneys are so accustomed to marketing and advertising. So it’s kind of expected that you’re going to have to market at some level and it’s much more acceptable by younger attorneys. And they come into a market and they go into a private practice and they are going to advertise. So as you said, everything is so fragmented. You can no longer just put an ad on TV and do well. My opinion and my advice is you really have to be everywhere. And I don’t know how to do that as successfully as I did it on TV a long time ago. Quite honestly.

Chris Dreyer:

Yeah. And even then, even the TV audience is now shifting, the younger, I guess the Gen Z are now shifting to more streaming. So now you’ve got people that watch Netflix, you got people who watch Hulu, some watch Amazon, some watch Disney and all of these different apps. So then that’s shifting. So like you said, the omnichannel approach. I do want to kind of shift though, because you’ve had one huge advantage and it’s just so different because you’ve had the Ed Bernstein show, it’s one of Las Vegas’s longest running shows. And I got to imagine that just the experience, the attention, how did that opportunity come about and let’s talk about that a bit.

Ed Bernstein:

January 1989, I had an idea about doing a television show and it started out as a consumer-oriented TV show. The original idea that I had was I want to do consumer reports for TV. So if there’s a recall with an automobile with a product, I wanted to inform people about the recall. So we set up a kind of a magazine type of show where I did a quick informational piece about products that had been recalled. I had a political pundit come on, I had a doctor come on and do a segment and I had a fitness person come on and do a segment and it was just a bunch of little segments. Well, after about six months of working it that way, I realized that I started to really enjoy the interview part of it. And for selfish reasons, I was meeting incredible people. Sooner or later, everybody comes to Las Vegas.
With the conventions we get every noted author, every rockstar, every entertainer, every politician, every sport’s figure, everybody is here. So my access to talent was unlimited and I started doing interviews and interviewing people from the president to Jerry Springer and everybody in between. And it’s been just great fun for me to network and meet people. And I don’t really have a handle on what it means in the big sense of my marketing. It’s probably impossible to measure. It’s been 34 years that I’ve done this every week for 34 years and we’re on the NBC Affiliates on Sunday afternoon. Sometimes we get lucky and we’re right after a Sunday afternoon football game and have a tremendous audience sometimes. I really do enjoy meeting the people that I meet, a lot of my heroes from my childhood that are ageing rock stars today and authors, and I really like to learn what I can from authors.

Chris Dreyer:

You mentioned a few that are quite memorable for you.

Ed Bernstein:

I grew up in music in the sixties and seventies, so all those Motown heroes from Little Richard to Stevie Wonder to Temptations people to English rock and roll people like the Moody Blues, the Monkeys, Duran Duran. I interviewed all those groups and for rock people. I was just rewatching the other night, Silence of the Lambs because I had interviewed Anthony Hopkins and I had forgotten that I had interviewed him and he was a remarkable guest. And I did spend an afternoon with Anthony Hopkins. Only because I had a TV show, otherwise I never would’ve encountered this man. He’s by the way, a lovely man.

Chris Dreyer:

When we’re talking about marketing and I’ve got my marketing hat right on. You’ve got the no like, trust and it seems like that show hits a lot, right?

Ed Bernstein:

It helps segue way me into politics at one time in my life. Because I also do a lot of political figures. I also use the show to highlight candidates for judges in Nevada. Because I think we really need that. Most people who vote in an election for a judge, we have elected judges here in Nevada, they’d have no idea who they’re voting for. So I’d like to get judges out on our show and do interviews with them to familiarize electorate with them. I had a situation, a personal situation in my life in near 2000. I had a daughter who was severely ill who had very, very severe Crohn’s disease. She ended up having ostomy bags and catheters and she had a hookup every night to an IV for 10 hours a night to get nutrition just to survive. She ended up passing about five years ago.
But when I went through this experience with her, and she was diagnosed at three years old in 1992. So for the following 10 years I lived hospital to hospital with her going through experimental treatments and fighting with our insurance company to get these treatments approved by the insurance company. And I realized how bad the insurance companies were treating some of these illnesses, particularly when there was biologics that would help people, but they were so expensive the insurance companies weren’t covering. So I decided to give up my law practice for her and I did for two years. I ran for the US Senate and I was a democratic candidate for the US Senate in Nevada.
Ended up losing to a guy who subsequently resigned for marital reasons, let’s call it that. But it was an incredible experience for me because I got to then meet and travel with US senators from around the country, cabinet members. When you’re campaigning for the US Senate you meet those kind of people and it was an incredible experience. Probably wasn’t the best deal for my marketing because FEC regulations and FCC regulations require that if you’re a candidate for national office, that you cannot be in a commercial for another business because it’s considered a campaign contribution to your campaign. So I had to go off the air with my face for a year and a half. People like Glen Lerner, others moved into the market.

Chris Dreyer:

First of all, so sorry for your loss. And I got to imagine that was a really trying time and I can’t imagine that I would do anything differently to be next to my son and thank you for sharing that. And you’re right, everybody goes to Vegas. I’ve been to Vegas. When I go to Vegas it’s unlike any other place in the world with just the amount of advertisements there are. I mean everywhere you look, it could be a bench, it could be a billboard, it’s just everywhere. So I kind of question that, I know you have billboards and you’ve done the billboard advertising. Does it come a point where you just don’t get enough repetition or just that there’s just so much saturation? Like how do you weigh those decisions?

Ed Bernstein:

Very complicated, complex decisions to make. I had a friend who I was chatting with the other day who told me he rode up and down the freeway counted 160 billboards from point A to point B that he was driving. And 130 of them were lawyers of 160. I’m sure we have more attorneys on billboards and on TV probably than any other market in America. And now with digital boards, which makes it much harder because the price, instead of having your full minute on a board, you have seven seconds and the price didn’t change. You’re paying for what I used to pay for a stationary board for a digital board and billboard companies have done quite well with that.
But yes, there’s a point of diminishing returns. I think in Las Vegas we’ve hit that saturation point and it’s time to look at no other modes of marketing. I do think that a niche is important, whatever your niche is, if you’re speed and greed, that’s one niche. If you’re the conservative traditional lawyer, it’s another. If you’re the female, if you’re old, you’re young, whatever your niche is, you need to figure out who you are, genuinely who you are, and then stay that person. When you market.

Chris Dreyer:

In areas where the saturation of attorneys is high, I wanted to know if Ed saw any value in a firm purchasing or building billboards and then selling that ad space to attorneys.

Ed Bernstein:

Short answer to your question is can you do it? Sure. You have to secure the leases on the land and of course today when you do a digital board, it’s a lot more, it’s well over $200,000 to put up a digital board. Then it has to be maintained. Then you need sales force to go out and sell them, and then you got to deal with all your customers who are difficult lawyers to deal with. When I look back at some of the businesses that I’ve been involved in my life, unfortunately the only one I’ve really consistently made money in has been the long world. When I venture outside of things that I know I run into trouble.

Chris Dreyer:

I hear you. Those shiny objects are always there though, right. I wanted to talk also about retaining top talent. You hear the negative connotation of a golden handcuffs. How do you approach, because you were heavy volume, your practices evolved and went through different milestones and phases. What’s your approach to hiring and retaining the top talent?

Ed Bernstein:

Top talent is the most important thing that you can have. Now there’s some advertising law firms that don’t litigate cases we do. So that changes the type of talent that you’re looking for. But even if you are not litigating cases and you’re just accumulating cases, you still need great customer service people and people knowledgeable, it’s a law. When you add in the litigation component, then you’re also looking for, “Okay, I need people who can protect the client, protect the law firm, get the job done.” You don’t want to have to worry about malpractice and ethical issues.
So you need people who are very careful and it’s a very competitive market. Right now I don’t know how it is in your market, but in Las Vegas we have difficulty hiring a lawyer at any level, whether entry or very experienced. The buyer’s market here is very, very strong. And it’s true, look after post covid, it’s true with everything. It’s true with legal secretaries, receptionists, intake people, everything. The world is changing. I wish I was smart enough to know how to deal with younger people that are entering the workplace and their work ethic and their requirements. Quite honestly, I’m happier that I’m more on my way out than in my way in.

Chris Dreyer:

It is so interesting on the talent as you’re exactly right. The high skilled top, top of Blooms taxonomy, your trial attorneys are just lawyers in general. They’re more scarce and I’d imagine significantly more people are offshoring for that pricing arbitrage for a lot cheaper labor on the more technician level duties, the more repeatable duties, that low skill. And then that way they can pay the in-house attorneys more. And I guess just because we’re just so connected with the mobile device and Zoom and Slack and all these different features, it kind of pushes you that way when you can’t find the labor.

Ed Bernstein:

Yeah, yeah. You have to work it out any way you can. I’ve never had good experiences offshore with people doing medical records for instance, or form letters and that type of thing. I do think that eventually it’s going to get into the higher levels zone. I do think that you’re going to be able to have greater communication and greater flexibility. Let’s say if I’m in Las Vegas and I want to hire an attorney from New York, somebody may, whatever the relationship is of council or whatever relationship is, that type of talent I think is eventually going to work its way through the system. As law firms are starting to be bought and sold and non-lawyer ownership in law firms, I think that’s inevitable.

Chris Dreyer:

So you got consolidation occurring, there’s all the pressure in Arizona and the non-attorney owners and what that brings from the private equity. And I kind of want to circle around, and you said this as just succession planning. Have you thought about that because it’s significantly more challenging in your space to sell a firm than MySpace, for example.

Ed Bernstein:

It’s always been a topic of conversation. I do think that there are people who have successfully do it. I’ve a friend in Pittsburgh, Edgar Snyder, Edgar successfully has done that by transitioning over a period of time to partners in his firm. And they’ve kept the name Edgar Snyder and he has a little bit of commitment into doing some of the advertising over there, but none of the responsibility. He’s got partners that handle all the legal work. That’s one way to do it. I have a managing partner that has a small interest in our firm and every year she has the right to accumulate more interest. I thought that would be a good way to get out. There’s a lot of firms like Sam Bernstein firm in Detroit. He’s got three kids that are attorneys that he can pass it down to. If you have a child that’s an attorney, that’s a great way to do it.
Then you’re dealing of course with the complications of having a family business. An exit strategy is important. I remember years ago when Jim Sokolove first started practicing law and we got together with a small group of about six or eight of us. And I remember our first meeting in Boston, must have been 35 years ago, and we were talking about succession planning. And Jim always had the idea, “Hey, let’s put some commercials in the can so when I’m dead I can run these commercials.” I don’t know if you ever did it or not, but a lot of us that grew up with attorney advertising are now at the stage of retiring. So I think that we’re dealing with this issue now and we’re creating segues on how to do it and ideas on how to do it. And I do think the private equity issue is inevitable. It happens in every industry and you can’t say that law is any different or more important than medicine. And you have these investment firms all running hospitals and doctor’s offices.

Chris Dreyer:

I was getting on the census and looking at other industries and I saw the funeral homes were all consolidated into major holding companies. And then I looked at dental and then all the dental practises are, and it just seems like legal is one of the last that hasn’t went that direction into the consolidation. And then who knows what will happen in regards to economies of scale and how advertising will change when that happens.

Ed Bernstein:

And there will be an additional consolidation going on. I don’t know what it’s going to do to its whole practitioner. I do think it’s important to not only get a niche on how you market, but get a niche on what type of law you practice. The more narrow the area you have, I think the more protected you’ll be.

Chris Dreyer:

I couldn’t agree more. I got my book over here if you can see it on niching. So you’re doing a great job for me here. I want to circle back just a little bit of fun, Ed, on some of these other businesses that you had. You wouldn’t mind sharing just some of these others that you enjoyed doing.

Ed Bernstein:

Well, I grew off my dad. My dad was in the restaurant business in Philadelphia. He had a little deli across the street from the University of Pennsylvania. Going back to the sixties and seventies we had a cigarette machine in this restaurant, which made a lot of money. So I approached my dad and said, “Hey, I’d like to take over the cigarette machine and go into the vending machine business,” which I did. And we started getting different accounts, vending machines, whether they be candy machines, cigarette machines, pinball machines, jukeboxes in nightclubs, that type of thing. And then I got the idea of opening up a laundromat two doors down from my dad’s restaurant. So it was across the street from the dormitories at the University of Penn. The air hockey games had just gotten popular at that time. So they built a back room and we put air hockey games and pinball machines in the back room.
So while people were waiting for their clothes to be washed and dried, they’d go into the back room and spend money in the back room at the air hockey games and the pinball machines, they were doing quite well. Because I was kind of a one man operation and I would repair the machines when they broke down and one day our business count busiest account in downtown Philadelphia was at nightclub in downtown Philly. Every Friday night at nine, 10 o’clock, the machine would malfunction and break down. I’d have to wake up, go down 1:30 in the morning to repair the machine, and I realized I was being sabotaged. Last thing this guy wanted to be in involved in was me be in the vending machine business in Philadelphia, which at that time was very mob connected. So I realized that this is not the way I want to live my life, that I need to get out of this business and go do what I really had a calling for was practicing law.

Chris Dreyer:

What a coincidence. It broke again this damn machine. I need a new one. Oh, well, I think strategically though, that was really smart and you probably did bring a lot of attention there. Geez. What’s next for Ed Bernstein and Associates and where can the audience go to learn more?

Ed Bernstein:

Well, edbernstein.com is our website. Most of our TV shows are on YouTube. If you go on YouTube and you just search Ed Bernstein’s Show, a vast majority of our interviews are there, at least the ones from the last 25 years. And what’s next for me is working with guys like you and trying to understand what’s going on on SEO and the internet and digital. And I’m trying to rely on guys like you that are younger and a little bit more experienced in those genres than I am.

Chris Dreyer:

Thanks so much to the legendary Ed Bernstein for everything you shared today. Let’s go through the key takeaways and it’s time for the PIMM Points. PIMM Point number one, the riches are in the niches. One of the most competitive markets in the US is Las Vegas is saturated. Wherever you are, niching is a good way to do just that.

Ed Bernstein:

I do think it’s important to not only get a niche on how you market, but get a niche on what type of law you practice. The more narrow the area you have, I think the more protected you’ll be.

Chris Dreyer:

PIMM Point number two, be consistent. Ed has been on the air for over 40 years. The Ed Bernstein Show is one of the longest running TV shows in Vegas history. That repetition means tons of impressions. Impressions means that you become sticky in individual’s minds, but it can’t happen overnight. You got to put those reps in.

Ed Bernstein:

Done this every week for 34 years and we’re on the NBC affiliates on Sunday afternoon. Sometimes we get lucky and we’re right after a Sunday afternoon football game and have a tremendous audience sometimes.

Chris Dreyer:

And PIMM Point number three, start with the end in mind. In succession planning, consider utilizing a form of equity. When the employee becomes an owner, their mindset can shift and become more invested.

Ed Bernstein:

I have a managing partner that has a small interest in our firm and every year she has the right to accumulate more interest. If you have a child that’s an attorney, that’s a great way to do it. An exit strategy is important.

Chris Dreyer:

I’m Chris Dreyer. Thanks for listening to Personal Injury Mastermind. If you made it this far, it’s time to pay the tax. No, I’m not talking about taking your cash like Big G. I’m asking you for a five star review on Apple. Leave the review and I’ll forever be grateful. If this is your first episode, welcome and thanks for hanging out. Come back for fresh interviews where you can hear from those making it rain. Now get out there and dominate.