Rex Parris:

Seven years, nobody advertised but me and by the time they all started advertising, it was too late. I had the market.

Chris Dreyer:

So many firm owners, they talk about moving from needed to necessary to optional. In terms of running your practise.

Rex Parris:

What I strive to be is the kindest person in the room, not the weakest, the kindest.

Chris Dreyer:

Welcome to Personal Injury Mastermind. I’m your host, Chris Dreyer, Founder and CEO of Rankings.io. The no excuses, no BS legal marketing agency that works harder than the competition. Each week you get insights and wisdom from some of the best in the industry. Before we get started, hit that follow button so that you never miss an episode. All right, let’s get it. Rex Parris made waves by diving headfirst into blue oceans of opportunity many deemed too risky. With relentless persistence over 30 years, Rex saturated the Antelope Valley.

Today a staggering 97% of individuals recognize his name. Becoming a household brand doesn’t happen overnight. It takes years of calculated gambles and consistently delivering results. Rex understood he couldn’t go it alone. By building a powerful team anchored by his wife, Carol’s steady operation leadership, Rex created a foundation of complete trust. This freed him up to perfect his craft and become one of the nation’s most innovative trial attorneys. Blending neuro-linguistic programming, humanity, and cutting-edge technology, Rex has secured billions of dollars for injured clients. His pioneering spirit constantly pushes him to refine his skills and build creative new bridges with jurors. Today, Rex shares priceless insights on stepping into those uncontested markets, how brand recognition compounds when given time and consistency and why surrounding yourself with people you fully trust empowers you to reach new heights. Here’s Rex Parris, partner at Parris Law Firm.

Rex Parris:

When I was 18, I had accumulated about 10 tickets and they sentenced me to jail actually. It was absolutely mind-numbing terror standing in front of that judge.

Chris Dreyer:

Wow.

Rex Parris:

I was able to keep from going to some alternative sentencing. I guess that’s what I decided then that that’s where the power was. That’s where I wanted to be.

Chris Dreyer:

That’s so tricky. Did you like going fast? Was it parking tickets?

Rex Parris:

I was just a smart ass kid and I did like to go fast and quite frankly, I don’t know what I was thinking.

Chris Dreyer:

Your son is involved in the firm and-

Rex Parris:

Two of them.

Chris Dreyer:

Two of them. So what’s it like having family follow in your footsteps? What’s some of the dynamics of working with family?

Rex Parris:

Most of it’s positive. I can’t tell you the joy I get when I’m in a trial and there’s a break and I see them walking down the hallway, it’s indescribable the feeling you get, when they do something really spectacular in the trial and they take an expert down or do a great closing or something like that, I highly recommend it. I have three children that are lawyers and one who is in the state department, but I wish all four of them were in the firm.

Chris Dreyer:

So does that make you think differently of balancing family and professional life?

Rex Parris:

That’s something we just never did. I mean, my wife and I can’t think of a day or a night or an hour that we haven’t had some reference to the firm. The two of us started it from nothing and had no money. I’d bring in a case and I didn’t have the money to do the filing fee and the kids grew up in it. It was constantly, we recognized that the most important thing was the office because the office fed us and so they grew up in it.

Chris Dreyer:

Talk to me about the business development side. We know attribution for say branding can be murky and of course with your reputation now the game’s changed, so in terms of referrals and being co-counsel, but so many attorneys that are listening are struggling to get cases. So what’s your approach to business development and the marketing side?

Rex Parris:

Well, it was a different time back then. I came back to the town I was born in, which is Lancaster. I’d worked for an insurance defense firm for about five years, and every time I took a plaintiff’s deposition I’d always ask, “How’d you find your lawyer?” Doing market research. But it was before everybody was really advertising so much when I started. We come back to Lancaster and we sent out in what was called the Desert Mailer, it was a throwaway newspaper every Wednesday it came out, mostly just ads, and I had a little announcement that we were opening a personal entry firm.

It wasn’t too long after that, I mean days, that I ran into the partner of the largest firm up here at the time in a parking lot and I was with my wife and kids, we were going in to eat to this restaurant. And he says, “You know Rex, the lawyers here have an unwritten understanding that none of us advertise, and if you keep doing that, you’re not going to have very many friends.” To which I replied, “I didn’t come back to town to make friends with lawyers.”

Chris Dreyer:

Right.

Rex Parris:

He never talked to me again.

Chris Dreyer:

It’s such a different time. What was that around ’78?

Rex Parris:

Well, they gave me seven years. Seven years, nobody advertised but me and by the time they all started advertising it was too late. I had the market.

Chris Dreyer:

So secured the market and was that a mix of traditional radio?

Rex Parris:

Back then it was mostly radio. Then we went to billboards and we really debated going to billboards, but it’s the smartest move we made and like I said, for seven years they just let me have the marketplace. It was-

Chris Dreyer:

Unreal.

Rex Parris:

Quite interesting. Yeah. Now the difference was most guys who did billboards and all of that, they don’t actually try the cases, they farm them out if they can’t settle them, but we didn’t do that, we tried our own cases. And up here I have a 97% name identification, but that comes from 30 years in millions and millions of dollars and advertising to develop that brand.

Chris Dreyer:

Yeah, and tell me about that because that’s something that most people don’t talk about. So is that from focus groups? You do like aided and unaided recall, how did you come up with a percentage like that?

Rex Parris:

Oh, that was from polling because I’m also the Mayor of Lancaster, so I do polling.

Chris Dreyer:

Right.

Rex Parris:

And the first time I ran, we were shocked, better name ID than anyone, anyone, but it was 20 years at that point and it’s a different environment when I try cases up here. A lot of research on celebrity and the effect it has on people’s decision making. It’s not a bad thing to have.

Chris Dreyer:

I thousand percent agree and trust being that psychological element and authority, and I’d kind of like to hear your opinion on this is you got these typically I see the pre-lit settlement bill, “settlement bill” I know it’s a little derogatory. There are some good pre-lit firms, and then you’ve got the litigating firm who’s getting maximum value and you have so many incredible results, right? 7, 8, 9 figure results. And does that change your approach to marketing? Because a lot of times when I see the litigating attorneys, they don’t have to worry about volume. They can take the top 5% and they can get maximum value. So does that change your approach or is it still you need the attention to originate those yourself and maybe you don’t want to give away that referral percentage, so how do you think about that dynamic?

Rex Parris:

We constantly are talking about do we really want to take referrals because for us to try a case, it’s going to cost anywhere from a half a million to $2 million. That’s what they cost. By the time you do all the experts, all the focus groups, all the models you got to build to do all that stuff and to split the fee, it’s sometimes difficult for us. So we’re very, we say no a lot more than we say yes, but then every now and then I start believing my own press and thinking I can beat anything and I go in and I get my ass kicked, but you still need a case. You still need the facts.

Chris Dreyer:

You are at the cutting edge in terms of science and persuasion.

Rex Parris:

I think that’s probably accurate. Yeah.

Chris Dreyer:

Give me the top level on this idea of science and persuasion.

Rex Parris:

Well, it started out as just a recognition that I had terrible social skills. I tend to be reclusive even to this day. My personality is such is that I can come out and do it, I can do the dance, I can do the socializing. I’m the Mayor of a city for heaven’s sakes, I can do it, but it’s exhausting to me. COVID was heaven for me. I didn’t have to see anybody.

It was because of that inability to understand the world around me, I guess, that when I realized there was a lot of science to this, I just dove in and still dive in every morning. I can’t wait to read it, can’t wait to understand it more, and when I read the Illusion of Free Will years and years ago, then it started all making sense to me that we really don’t have free will. It really is just a chaotic cause and effect storm that goes on in our head and if I can affect and it required that I even read, try to understand what chaos was, chaos theory, theory of chaos to understand just what we’re able to do is we’re able to push it towards a direction that would be beneficial.

There’s still a lot of variables that we can’t control, but the more we can influence, the more likely we are to hit. So much is the word selection we use. Most of what I do in a courtroom is very different from what other people do because it’s all based around the persuasive science or the science of persuasion. It is a chaotic environment, so there’s just a lot of things happening. It’s a dancing landscape is what we call it, and complexity with complexity theory, it’d be a dancing landscape, but it’s more chaotic than that. Learning individual skills, you can push it, you can move it into the direction you want it to go. Just focus grouping, now you can focus group on the internet and get incredible results, incredible data back, but just by changing the words sometimes, just a few words will have a dramatic impact on the verdict.

Chris Dreyer:

Could you give me an example on that?

Rex Parris:

Yeah. Years ago we tried a case. It was a bad crash, no question about that. It had a pretty good recovery. It was against the county of Los Angeles, so you never know how that’s going to go with a jury. Her family were affluent. They owned about 15 McDonald’s, doing quite well. There was no way we were going to keep that affluence out, and so we did a lot of work on what do we use instead of affluent because I couldn’t get the focus group over 8 million bucks. That’s the highest I could get after several focus groups. As soon as we changed it to hardworking family, the verdict was 15. Just those little word changes.

Chronic pain cases, you want to triple your chronic pain cases, call it chronic pain syndrome because that’s what it is. A syndrome is a constellation of symptoms. You can’t have chronic pain without a constellation of symptoms, but just by changing it to, just making sure your experts use the word chronic pain syndrome has a huge effect on the verdict. We do a lot of testing for that, a lot of work on that. Put it in the, we do what’s called horizontal segmentation. Depending on what jury we end up with, we know which words to use or which words to stress. There’s just a lot of science that goes into it.

Chris Dreyer:

Take me down this path further. If someone was going to dive into this, where do they go to learn more about this? What resources? This isn’t the Carnegie Path, is it a different direction?

Rex Parris:

Yeah, it is. The thing with just word selection, the impact of the words change over time, so you got to keep polling, you got to keep doing stuff on the internet to find out which words are resonating, which age group, which demographic. Although demographics are usually not the best way to predict outcomes, but you have to know what you’re doing. But there’s a lot of, when I first started, there was very little, very little. It was neuro-linguistic programming was about it, and that is about 60 to 70% valid.

Chris Dreyer:

Neuro-linguistic programming or NLP is a way of guiding thoughts and behaviors to get a desired outcome. In short, harnessing NLP can make you better at influencing others. Rex is on the cutting edge of using NLP in the courtroom.

Rex Parris:

If I mirror your body posture, that’s a sign of affiliation and alignment and it pulls you in my direction if I do it. What I’m really looking for is who’s the leader in the jury by who adopts a body position then others follow it. That goes a long ways. You start out with the assumption that most of your persuasive skills are visual, not auditory, but auditory is essential. When to drop your voice, when to raise your voice, that range of voice is incredibly important. When to sit down, if it’s really serious and you sit down, that’s a signal that it’s serious. There’s just a lot of those different gestures you make.

That NLP, I think started, that neuro-linguistic programming, started with Grinder and Bandler and I spent a lot of time in seminars for NLP and like I said, 60 to 70% of it’s valid. Just gestures, gestures of affiliation, incredibly powerful if you use them correctly and you don’t overuse them. How to bond with people is really a six step process. It’s not magical. I got to smile, I got to make eye contact, then I got to smile. I like to go into a bar and watch people hook up because I can predict it. I can predict who’s going to leave together because it’s the look, it’s the look back, it’s the touch. You don’t get the touch, you’re not going home. We’re not that complicated of animals in many respects.

Chris Dreyer:

Does technology compliment this because I’ve had some great trial attorneys and some use limited tech, some are very, utilize a tonne of technology. What’s your emphasis on tech in the courtroom?

Rex Parris:

We use a lot of it. The last four or five trials, we don’t put up any medical records. What we do is we put up pictures, put up the different companies that do your illustrations for you of the surgeries, every procedure, what procedures they expect them to have in the future. It’s all graphic. Some of it’s hard copies on foam boards, some of it is PowerPoints, but it’s all graphic and we just stumbled into that. One time we had a trial and somehow we forgot to reference any medical records and because we had such great exhibits, it wasn’t by design, but the verdict was much greater than we had hoped for and we realized that, yeah, it’s just the science. There’s Brain Rules, which is a great book that kind of puts it into bite-sized chunks. Whenever a new book that has good references from cognitive scientists, I study it and I try to figure out a way, how do I make this applicable to a courtroom? And so far it’s been working out quite well.

Chris Dreyer:

Let’s turn this over. So it’s obviously very effective in the courtroom. Did it impact your messaging when you started to learn more? Did you see the messaging that you were putting out on TV or billboards and you’re like, “Hey, we need to make modifications here.” Did that kind of transfer over to the messaging?

Rex Parris:

Yeah, but it’s pretty basic. Most of our advertising, our billboards and social media, if you’re going to do a picture of people, you want three people and you want them smiling, you don’t want them looking like mean lawyers. What we’re attempting to do is we’re attempting to break down the fear people have of coming into a new lawyer’s office. I mean, think about it, it’s really quite threatening and especially when you’ve got people pursuing your case, who do you choose? So yeah, we always put it into the messaging. Right now what has occurred, at least in the Antelope Valley where I live, there’s us and then there’s everybody else.

Chris Dreyer:

Switching over to kind of a fun topic here, and you mentioned that I was going to lean into being the Mayor of Lancaster. What led you down that path? Was it, “Hey, they’re not fixing my city. I’m going to get involved and actually I’m going to take action.” You said previously that you had some of these introvert type tendencies and you’re like, “I’m going to go be the Mayor.” So what led you down this path and tell me about that.

Rex Parris:

Local politics had always pretty much been a hobby. I wasn’t getting anything out of it. My friends were, one was a developer, another one was the city manager, and another one was the state senator, went up to be a state senator, but I was just along for the ride and our practise took off pretty early, and so I was able to write checks. At one point I had told my wife I’d like to be Mayor someday, and she said, “Not until the kids are gone, not until the kids go away to school.” So when Kale was the last one went off to college, I ran for Mayor and she was livid. I didn’t talk to her about it. I go, what do you mean? We did talk about it 20 years ago, you said…

Chris Dreyer:

Perfect.

Rex Parris:

She wasn’t very appreciative of that, but she also gets that’s how I think. She’s used to it. But there was a lot of reasons. One is we put a lot of resources into the city and we didn’t like the person that was going to take it over if I didn’t run, and the assumption was that I was probably the only one who could beat them because of the name ID. The other part is I wanted to practise all of these skills I was learning because it’s the same skillset, except you don’t get to poll the jury. You can poll the populace and-

Chris Dreyer:

Intriguing.

Rex Parris:

Also, a lot of it is I’ll walk into a room where it’s very negative and then have to turn them. I’m getting pretty good at it, but if I didn’t have the experience of being Mayor, I don’t think I would be very good at it.

Chris Dreyer:

So many firm owners, they talk about moving from needed to necessary to optional in terms of running your practise, so is it now you’ve got the team behind you, you have your trusted team that you can delegate, and then you can manage your time a bit more, a bit better as well? Talk to me about that in terms of managing your time because you’re being pulled in so many directions.

Rex Parris:

Well, I was always blessed with an incredibly smart wife. I mean, she is wickedly smart and she runs the back office and always has. She runs the money. I don’t even know the bank we use and nor do I want to know. She gave me the ability to get up at 4:00 and study every morning and just had the faith that eventually this would pay off, and it did. It’s shocking to us the verdicts we get, but the success is that one, we have absolute trust and now that my sons are in it, there’s a core group of people we trust completely. When we’re in trial, we usually go in with a four or five person team, but everyone on that team is trusted absolutely. They’ve gone through the vetting process that we know whatever they’re doing, they’re doing for the same goal that we have. They’re not doing it to show off. They’re not doing it because they got their feelings hurt because of something I just said or didn’t say, and there’s a lot of emotions that are going on in a trial, and so you need that.

And they’re also pretty well-trained. All of them are trained on facial expression recognition, micro expressions, how to recognize them. They’re able to tell me if I got a juror that’s turning away from us. One of the things we did, we were working with a company that the computer reads the facial expressions. You can do a group of 500 people. In fact, the more people you’re doing it with, the more you’re able to filter out the noise, and we’ve done that. We were doing that for jury focus groups until we got to the point we pretty know what it is now. It has more to do with the choreography of the case when you present certain issues, when you don’t present them.

But then, like I said, it’s chaotic, so if it was just the jury, I want to tell them as soon as possible that I’m asking for a billion dollars. What I’ve learned is you can’t do that because the judge will come after you. These judges, they go to judge’s school and they’re told that if you have a nuclear verdict, it’s because you didn’t control your courtroom. It’s insane, but that’s the environment we’re having to deal with. But what we have found is the timing is far more important than the number itself.

Chris Dreyer:

I imagine too that you would not be the person that I would want to play a game of Texas hold’em or poker with.

Rex Parris:

My boys like to play, and so I started playing with them and it’s not hard. Mostly what’ll happen is you leak through your feet, watch your feet and your hands.

Chris Dreyer:

Wow.

Rex Parris:

Yeah. Anybody who plays poker very much at all is able to control their facial expressions.

Chris Dreyer:

Right.

Rex Parris:

But it always leaks.

Chris Dreyer:

You mentioned that all of my team is trained in facial expressions in these different aspects. Is that all internal where you’re leading or it’s like-

Rex Parris:

No, no, you just go. You just type in Ekman, Paul Ekman, right? He’s got a training course. There’s another guy that Humintell is another training course. They’re on their subscription services and anybody can do it. You spend 20 minutes a day, every morning, 20 minutes a day, three months from now, you’re going to be amazed yourself how well you can spot it. When I first learned it, I didn’t realise it’s the number of signs of contempt. It’s the number of signs of anger. It’s not one, I would get all upset when my wife’s nose would crinkle up. It’s much more dynamic than that, but like I said, now you can do focus groups with it. I think it’s EmotionTrac is a company we’re using where you just tell the story and it’s over the internet and the computer reads their facial expressions, and what I’ve discovered is in the closing, I want them happy, I want them joyful. I want to paint a picture of hope, and they’re the hero. In order for that hope to come to fruition, it’s up to the jury.

What I don’t want to do is ever be the causative factor for anger or sadness. Some witnesses can do that, but it can’t be me. People don’t like to be sad. They don’t like to be angry, so what they’ll do is they’ll turn to the other side if you’re the one they’re mirroring because they will mirror you. I’ve changed a lot as to how I want to appear in front of a jury. What I strive to be is the kindest person in the room, not the weakest, the kindest, and it’s not that hard, but if I am, the only thing I worry about is a [inaudible].

Chris Dreyer:

Yeah, that’s a natural rapport building element. When you see someone being kind to someone else and they’re like, “Oh, I would like to be treated like that as well,” in that same scenario, even if it’s pulling out someone’s chair for them to sit down.

Rex Parris:

Yes, yes, and what’ll happen is sometimes there’ll be a technological failure or something will happen, it always happens, and what you can’t do is have that flash of anger because now you’ve betrayed them. I’ve seen cases lost that way. Another thing I’ve learned in a recent trial that I lost, every graphic you use, whether it be a picture, a video, make sure you see it in the medium that the jury’s going to see.

Chris Dreyer:

Rex, this has been incredible and I could pick your brain for a long time about going deep into this because I’m an avid, my biggest passion is learning, which is why I enjoy the podcast so much. One final question for the attorneys listening, for the audience listening, where can people go to connect with you or to learn more?

Rex Parris:

They just send me an email, I’d be happy to answer any questions, give them a reading list, whatever they want, but it’s rrex, rrex@parris, p-a-r-r-i-s.com, and then it’ll go right to me and Brittany will probably respond with whatever you want.

Chris Dreyer:

Thanks so much to Rex for sharing his wisdom today. Let’s hit the takeaways, time for the pinpoint. Don’t hesitate, blazing a trail in the unknown carries risks, but those who have the courage to leap will see some major rewards. Where others hesitate, have faith in the potential that you see and charge ahead.

Rex Parris:

We really debated going to billboards, but it’s the smartest move we made. Seven years, nobody advertised but me, and by the time they all started advertising, it was too late. I had the market.

Chris Dreyer:

Stay the course constantly investing in marketing pays dividends in the form of brand recognition. Compounded over time the firm takes on a level of celebrity until it’s a household name. Rex put in millions of dollars over 30 years and now has a 97% name ID rate.

Rex Parris:

I’m also the Mayor of Lancaster, so I do polling, and the first time I ran, we were shocked. I had better name ID than anyone. A lot of research on celebrity and the effect it has on people’s decision-making. It’s not a bad thing to have.

Chris Dreyer:

Build a rock solid foundation. To reach your full potential surround yourself with people you can trust. Rex leverages trust in a small team to focus on honing his strengths as an industry leading trial lawyer rather than getting bogged down in the details of running a firm.

Rex Parris:

I was always blessed with an incredibly smart wife. She runs the back office and I don’t even know the bank we use, and nor do I want to know. She gave me the ability to get up at 4:00 and study every morning. We have absolute trust and now that my sons are in it, there’s a core group of people we trust completely.

Chris Dreyer:

For more information about Rex, check out the show notes. While you’re there, hit that follow button so that you never miss an episode of Personal Injury Mastermind with me, Chris Dreyer, Founder and CEO of Rankings.io. All right everybody, thanks for hanging out. See you next time. I’m out.