James Grant:

If I truly want to help you, I can’t also be your competition.

Chris Dreyer:

Team up with attorneys you can trust to maximise the revenue at your firm.

James Grant:

We are in the business of helping other personal injury lawyers make more money faster and with less stress by operating as their outsource litigation department.

Chris Dreyer:

Welcome to Personal Injury Mastermind. I’m your host, Chris Dreyer, founder and CEO of Rankings.io, the preeminent personal injury marketing agency.
Before we get started, if you like what you hear, head on over to Apple or Spotify and pound that five-star review button, and if you don’t like what you hear, tell me about it in a one-star review. I got a big hug for all my haters too. Each week we talk to the best in the legal industry. Ready to dominate your market? Let’s go.
It’s easy to understand why a firm would focus on pre-lit cases. The potential client base is massive. The service can be productized and the throughput accelerated, the majority of cases get settled. All of this is a great recipe for phenomenal margins. But what about the cases that need to go to litigation? Once a case needs to go to court, it’s like the firm needs to create an entirely new arm of the business.

James Grant:

The example that I kind of use is it’s kind of like football and baseball.

Chris Dreyer:

That’s James Grant, co-founding partner at Georgia Trial Attorneys.

James Grant:

You can’t play baseball with a football team and you can’t play football with a baseball team.

Chris Dreyer:

You may have two teams of skilled professionals, but just because you’re great at one doesn’t mean you’ll be great at the other. James saw this problem faced by many firms is an opportunity. He decided to go all in on litigation. He partners with firms to tackle the cases that go to court. Today, James explains the importance of eliminating conflict, why you need to measure what matters for success and how he uses cutting edge AI integration to boost revenue. Here’s James Grant, co-founding partner at Georgia Trial Attorneys.

James Grant:

I was a civil engineering student at Georgia Tech that all of a sudden just decided randomly to go to law school. I don’t honestly know how it happened, but I was just like, hmm, let’s try law school, and that’s really how it started, but there wasn’t some crazy defining or life-changing moment. It was just like, hmm, this may work.

Chris Dreyer:

My dad’s a civil engineer and he always pressured me on the math side. So who knows what your life would’ve been like if had you went that direction?

James Grant:

Everybody looked at me like I had two heads and I was crazy because I was literally in my last year at Georgia Tech and I already had two job offers from different companies lined up and I was ready to go into the working world and I was just like, hmm, maybe if I took my engineering degree and put a law degree together, I could do something cool work for EPA and save the world. And I mean that’s obviously not how things worked out, but that’s what I thought and that’s what got me on this road. So be careful with me and random ideas, you never know where we’re going to end up.

Chris Dreyer:

Right, right. You opened a law firm pretty quickly out of the gate, so tell me about that. When did you make that decision? What was the strategy behind it? There’s a security blanket when you work for someone else because they have some form of business development, and then when you go to hang your own shingle, it’s like, no, that’s on you. So tell me about that experience.

James Grant:

Yeah, there was no strategy, that’s the thing that was absolutely ridiculous looking back, is we had no plan, no clients, no referral sources. We had nothing other than just two dudes in Mark’s basement. Mark, my business partner and I, we were just these idealistic attorneys that had this grand plan in our heads that we didn’t write down on paper nor communicate with one another. So I mean, it was astonishing looking back how far that we’ve come. We just literally looked at each other one day at our jobs that we were working together at and we’re like, we can’t do this here much longer. We can probably do this ourselves, so let’s give it a shot. Why not? What can go wrong?

Chris Dreyer:

Clearly, it went very well. You had ranked 75 on the 2020 Law Firm 500 a growth of 124%. So you have a strategy that’s developed and you have methodologies. Tell me a little bit about how your practice has evolved from a marketing standpoint, a positioning standpoint first, because I think in the PI space specifically, it’s just so saturated. There’s just so many attorneys and you need a method to stand out.

James Grant:

When we started the firm, we kind of did a little bit of everything just because when you start a new business, it’s kind of like, how am I going to pay the bills? How do I make this work from a financial standpoint? So we took a lot of different cases from several different practise areas just because it was kind of the necessity of this is how we have to support ourselves and our families. Shortly thereafter, we realised, kind of like you said, you have to niche down. You have to pick one practise area and then within that you can even niche down further. Mark and I were both very good at personal injury, we enjoyed it, we understood it, we had some really good success with it early on. So we’re like, you know what? We can help a lot of people. We can do a lot of good for ourselves and our families, let’s stick with personal injury.
There’s thousands of other personal injury attorneys in just the State of Georgia. Even within the field of personal injury. We’re like, well, we kind of need to pick an area where we want to focus. And we definitely have done that because we don’t really have a lot of competition in our new market share that we’re in.
In the personal injury field there’s two types of cases. You have your pre-litigation cases, which is are your cases that originate. Somebody was injured in an accident, they needed a doctor, they need an attorney, they need somebody to handle the case, and that attorney is going to get them through the initial process and probably 85% of the time they’re going to negotiate a successful settlement and not need to file a lawsuit. There’s another portion of cases where those cases need litigation. The example that I kind of use is it’s kind of like football and baseball. You can’t play baseball with a football team and you can’t play football with a baseball team. You can have two highly skilled sets of professionals on both sides, but just because you’re a professional with one side of things does not mean you’re a professional with the other.
And the law firms that we’ve found that we work with that are very good at pre-lit, they need to stay good at pre-lit because you really can’t do both with the same team. So what we found is, well, there’s a whole side over here in litigation that no one really wants to be in that space because the margins are phenomenal, in pre-lit. So we decided, well, if we can grab a large portion of the market share and we have experience, we’re really good, we have a solid track record of processes and procedures and running a business model in the litigation space, why don’t we just go all in on litigation? And that’s exactly what we’ve done. We are in the business of helping other personal injury lawyers make more money faster and with less stress by operating as their outsource litigation department.

Chris Dreyer:

I love that positioning, first of all, and I think you’ve articulated what I’ve heard. I see so many, even of our own clients, they have the negative names, the settlement mills, and there’s a lot of negative connotations, but there’s a model that works, it’s very productized and it’s good for cash flow. And then you have the litigation, and I’m agreeing, I’ve never seen it work where they did both successfully. Why do you think that is? Is it because on the settlement side you’re marketing more the consumer and maybe the marketing’s adjusted more to your peers on the lit side, why do you think it’s difficult to do both so to speak?

James Grant:

I think it really starts with how the firm is run because you effectively have to run two entirely separate law firms. You’re running two separate business models that really don’t have anything to do with each other. If you want to do it well, and there are some that do it very well, but you have to have entirely separate pre-litigation team that is run entirely by a separate either set of people or individual, and then the same thing for litigation. They don’t need to have any overlap. You don’t need to have the same manager handling both. It needs to be entirely separate departments that have different skews, that have different metrics and everything because one has one function and another has another. So if you can run two separate law firms through one at the same time and that’s what you want to do, then by all means I think you can do it and you can do it very well.
But a lot of the law firms that we service, because currently we work with 17 other law firms across the Southeast, if you’re really good at hustle, market, sell and you have a marketing machine, you don’t need to spend your time with lit, you need to spend your time in pre-lit. Because if you dump more cash into that cash register and it keeps spitting it out, don’t waste your time with the significant overhead and training and retraining and expense that’s associated with litigation. Let me help you make more money and make it faster so you don’t have to have that expense and that caseload and that cash flow where you can just dump it back into your marketing machine.

Chris Dreyer:

Do you find though that now it just seems like due to the digital age and how connected we are through mobile, through Slack, through all the CRMs and project management tools, that the value of being a good litigator is actually increasing because now there’s a lot more of these companies that can’t originate cases that are doing the marketing or sales or am I off on that and maybe there’s just still kind of a balance here?

James Grant:

It really depends on the firm and how they’re running and how the insurance company sees them and reviews them and audits their cases. Because I mean, these insurance companies, they know every single one of us, they have so much data on all of us that we don’t even really comprehend it. If you have a pre-lit department that’s working very well, it’s getting good results where the clients are happy because really that at the end of the day, that’s what matters. We are serving the clients. And if the clients are happy, they may be getting a little bit less than they would in litigation, but then you’re thinking of, well, when you go to litigation, there’s increased fees, there’s increased costs, there’s increased time. There’s a lot of factors that you have to consider as well from a client’s perspective of is this worth it to gamble with my money? Because in pre-lit, the money’s certain, you know exactly what you’re walking away with because we can run the numbers. Whereas in lit, you’re chasing something.
Everybody’s a little bit different, but a lot of people fall into the conservative category of they would rather have this set amount right now as opposed to possibly more later on. I mean, sometimes the insurance company makes the decision and they deny liability. They’ll say, here’s $1,000, go be about your business. In those cases, I get it, you have no choice. But it just really depends on how the firm is run and what the metrics show and really how the clients rate their experience with the firm.

Chris Dreyer:

One thing you kind of touched on was the delivery side, the operations, the training, and it seems like the pre-lit have more, I would say, technician, like base level, probably lower labor, just being transparent with the audience costs, those paraprofessionals. And it seems like the litigating, that’s where you get into, hey, you got your high dollar attorneys that are getting maximum value. How does the delivery side look on a litigating side of a firm? What’s it composed of? What makes it the core components that you think?

James Grant:

What works for us may not work for everybody, but what will work for everyone that’s out there that’s in business is first you have to write it down. If you don’t have a plan, then you can’t follow something, you can’t measure your success, you can’t review, you can’t amend, you can’t do anything because you’re just going based on your gut. So step number one is set a goal, write down how you’re going to get there and what you’re going to need to accomplish those things.
And then review it weekly. What you’re doing, how your progress is, how you need to adjust, how you need to change course? Because the things that you can measure and the things that you can review, that’s what matters. Everything else is just noise. So it’s all about numbers, and I know attorneys hate numbers. Most of us didn’t go to math school for business. But at the end of the day, if you are running a law firm, you’re running a business and you have to run your business just like a business. So when it comes to us and our firm, we’re set up with a pod system. Every attorney that we have has their own paralegal, has their own administrative assistant, and that team is responsible for generating a certain fee revenue and handling a certain number of cases. We’re very big on automation and AI workflows, things to automate so many processes that take a human element out. Simple things where mail gets scanned in, document gets named a certain way based upon the first few words within the page, and based on that then gets uploaded to a certain file and then a notification goes to the correct person. I mean, just simple things. We have the ability with Microsoft to build in workflows and automation that really make things more efficient.

Chris Dreyer:

I’ve had a question about the pod system because we’ve had our other individuals, we had Greg Ward talk about successfully implementing pod. We had Mike Morse talk about his pod system and the benefits, with collaboration, managing their own P&L and looking at those as a unit. As opposed to a hierarchy that’s top down, when I need another paralegal, you add it, you can track your utilization, boom, but when you need another pod, we’re talking multiple people. How does that function? Do you hire one at a time and maybe that extra paralegal assists an existing pod before they break out to their own? What goes into that? I’ve always been curious about that in terms of forecasting the growth and how you should approach creating that next pod.

James Grant:

If you are tracking your metrics, you’re going to see this coming. You’re not just going to sudden arrive one day and be like, oh no, I have an extra 100 cases. I need a new pop. You’re going to see it in the numbers. If you’re tracking your numbers and you’re reviewing them regularly, you’re going to see, oh, okay, if we continue on this trend in six months approximately, I’m going to need a whole nother pod. Well, all of a sudden now if you have six months to hire, you’re going to be able to do that. You’re going to be able to do that well.
So it’s not something where all of a sudden you have to throw up seven job ads and just blast everywhere to try to get the first person that’s walking and talking into the door. You have time. You need to take your time and be deliberate with your hires to make sure, number one, that they have the technical skills and then move into your cultural interview second, you never want to flip those. And then you’re going to be able to bring on the right people to then have the system run as opposed to just scrambling to make it work last minute.

Chris Dreyer:

I love that because then you’re not forced to make a bad hire. You can take your time and find someone that’s the right fit and through that data and you can also see which pods are underperforming and which ones are doing well, or maybe there’s that diminishing returns where they just can’t take on any more work.
So accompanying that, you mentioned technology, so just what are some of those? It seems like AI is the discussion topic of the year, but since you open the door there, what are some of the AI, some of the tech that you’re using to enhance your operation as your delivery?

James Grant:

ChatGPT is the craziest thing I have ever seen, and at least from a legal industry perspective, I don’t think many of us truly understand how amazing ChatGPT is and it integrates with Microsoft. I don’t think most people even know that. And you can get integrations and workflows to where ChatGPT can reach out to your clients and answer your client’s questions based on information that you train it on receiving. We’re building a chatbot with ChatGPT, not just like the chatbots that you see on a website that just pop up and you can chat in the browser. I’m talking a chatbot to where when a client sends an email that says, hey, what’s going on with my case ChatGPT can look at the file and then formulate a response that is accurate to the client based upon the information that it received.
I mean, it’s literally mind-blowing how much stuff that’s out there. And we’re big Microsoft subscribers. Microsoft is again a whole nother world of untapped knowledge and potential for businesses out there because you have Power BI, Microsoft Power Automate. And there’s all these workflows and checklists and things that Microsoft has already built that work that if you just piece and cobble together can be a whole new tool for your team. The options are endless and it can seem complicated and overwhelming, but if you just start and dig in and even take some of these free training courses that Microsoft offers, you’ll just learn how to maximize the simple tools that you have.
And this is just the tip of the iceberg. We don’t even know what AI is going to look like in six months, but I think some of those products like Engage and Apex and all these different chatbots that are out there, I think that’s one of those things where the market’s going to have to shift to adjust because ChatGPT and other AIs that I don’t even know about are going to be coming for those things to make it even more streamlined and more realistic.

Chris Dreyer:

Pre-lit marketing is business to consumer, B2C, but James is next even further in the personal injury space to only serve other law firms. This firm is business to business, or B2B. This means a whole new set of opportunities and challenges for marketing and business development, but it has come up with a solution to eliminate conflict and increase revenue.

James Grant:

When you do B2B marketing you really have to focus and set yourself apart because now in addition to effectively losing a market share where there’s millions of people to go after, maybe you’ve got a thousand or less in your state. So you have to set yourself apart. And one thing that Mark and I realize is we need to niche down further. There are other law firms out there that do referral work and help other law firms by litigating their cases. However, one of those things that they do is they take profits from those cases they litigate and then they reinvest it into their pre-litigation marketing campaign. That’s okay, but from my perspective I see that as a bit of a conflict because if I’m in the business of helping other people and helping other law firm owners do better, I can’t also be your competition.
So that’s a commitment that Mark and I have made with our firm is we don’t do Google Ads, we don’t do digital ads, we won’t do billboards, we won’t do radio. You’re not going to see us competing for those same cases and effectively operating in the pre-lit space. If I truly want to help you, I can’t also be your competition. So that’s where we further wanted to step out and set ourselves apart and say, we’re just going to do litigation so that way you have the confidence that we’re going to grow together and we’re not going to get to a point where I’m also competing with you.

Chris Dreyer:

That’s the first time I’ve heard that. And it really is a conflict of interest because if they take the revenue, then they can take that revenue and then compete against those individuals that are referring cases to them. From a niche perspective, it helps you isolate and dial in where you’re going to choose to market yourself as opposed to trying to go in and do TV and saturate a market. I guess it helps from maximising your marketing dollars. Could you speak to that? What are maybe some of the channels and that you would approach from a B2B perspective, and you already said, hey, I’m not going to do billboards on TV, but what are maybe some that if you’re trying to get those referrals that you would look into?

James Grant:

So when you think of B2B, it’s different because no one’s really going to Google and being like, is there another personal injury lawyer in my area that can help me litigate my cases? There’s not a search term for that, there’s not search volume. You have to think about, well, how are people going to get to know you and how are they going to do business with you? And it really goes back to just old school business development, to networking and building relationships. That’s really what matters. Because people do business with others that they know, like, and trust, and those three things don’t happen quickly. So you have to build a relationship with another person and show them who you are and what you stand for. And then once you establish that, you have credibility and that really can lead to a profitable business relationship for both.
Whereas I can’t just walk in the door of a offer firm and be like, hey, I’m going to give you a bunch of money and let’s do some business together. It’s not going to work like that. You have to really get to know them because everybody has different perspectives, everybody has different goals. Some people want to grow their law firms, that’s where they want to focus. Others are very happy where they are, and they want to keep the work-life balance that they have. So it’s all about figuring out where you are, where you want to be and how we can work together to accomplish that.

Chris Dreyer:

When you’re trying to develop trust and relationship, the high touch, the shake someone’s hand, I’ve heard other people say belly to belly, go to lunch, go to breakfast with them, get to know them because it is like a relationship where they’re trusting you to do a good job on the case that they created. And because we all know the rising costs of marketing and how much more difficult it is to get cases these days because of the competition. And I just got to ask about this is because this is a bit random. I’m going to have you explain this. You say, I’m not saying it’s your fault. I’m saying I’m blaming you. There’s a difference. Can you explain what that means?

James Grant:

It’s a conversation that we end up having with a lot of people that are clients, whether they’ve come to us from one firm or this firm or that firm. A lot of the clients end up in the same position where they made a choice. It’s not necessarily that they made the wrong choice, they made the right choice for them in that moment. But I also have to blame you for the consequences because now this position that you’ve put yourself in for what it was invariably a right reason in the moment now affects this thing over here that either you knew about or you didn’t know about and we just have to kind of go with it.
One of the simple examples is I have a case I’m dealing with right now where the client was recommended for a cervical fusion and they didn’t get it. They don’t want the risk of surgery, and I understand that. They’re dealing with some pretty debilitating pain and going through a lot. So it’s kind of one of those things where you are putting yourself in a difficult situation because all the medical evidence really shows that you probably are going to need this surgery, and yes, it has the potential to lead to future surgeries as well, but is it also worth dealing with this debilitating pain for effectively the rest of your life? I understand, I can’t put myself in your shoes because I’m not you. So if this is a decision that you are comfortable with, you also have to be comfortable with these consequences over here as well. And it’s not necessarily anybody to say is right or wrong, it just is what it is.

Chris Dreyer:

Well, and I guess in the future too, after they do come to some agreement, then it’s off the table. Whatever’s done is done if they need the surgery in the future. Yeah, I see where you’re going with that too. And I just have one final question, James. For the attorneys that are listening that are on that pre-lit side, they want to partner with your outsource litigation department. Where can they go to connect with you and get to know you?

James Grant:

The easiest place to get ahold of me is through our website and it’s also our phone number it just so happens. It’s 8334thewin.com, 833, the number four, the win. You can put it in your phone, you can put it in your browser. It’s going to get you to our website, and that’s generally the best way to get in touch with me. You can send messages through our website, you can check out our free resources. We give away a lot of our template complaints and discovery and all sorts of things because the way this works, a rising tide lifts all ships. So if you can benefit based on something that I’ve created and seen success with, it’s going to benefit the industry, it’s going to benefit our clients. It’s going to hold these greedy insurance companies accountable. So we’re all in this together.

Chris Dreyer:

Thanks so much to James Grant for everything you shared today. Let’s go through the key takeaways. It’s time for the PIMM Points.
PIMM Point number one, measure what matters. What works for one firm might not work for yours. Guesswork won’t get you there. Accountability is necessary to achieve success.

James Grant:

The things that you can measure and the things that you can review, that’s what matters. Everything else is just noise. If you don’t have a plan, you can’t measure your success, you can’t do anything because you’re just going based on your gut.

Chris Dreyer:

Up next with PIMM Point number two, understand your incoming caseload. Use projections to forecast the growth of your firm and create positions accordingly.

James Grant:

You’re not just going to sudden arrive one day and be like, oh, no, I have an extra 100 cases. If you’re tracking your numbers and you’re reviewing them regularly, you’re going to see, oh, okay, if we continue on this trend in six months, I’m going to need a whole nother pod. You have time. Be deliberate with your hires to make sure, number one, that they have the technical skills and then move into your cultural interview second, you never want to flip those. And then you’re going to be able to bring on the right people to then have the system run as opposed to just scrambling to make it work last night

Chris Dreyer:

And PIMM Point number three, every task that you can automate or hand over to AI is an opportunity to increase your efficiency and throughput, help your teams be more productive. This freedom means that they can spend more time on what really matters. Leave the mundane low value task to AI like ChatGPT and Microsoft.

James Grant:

This is just the tip of the iceberg. We don’t even know what AI is going to look like in six months. I think some of those products like Engage and Apex and all these different chatbots that are out there, I think that’s one of those things where the market’s going to have to shift to adjust because ChatGPT and other AIs that I don’t even know about are going to be coming for those things to make it even more streamlined and more realistic.

Chris Dreyer:

I’m Chris Dreyer. Thanks for listening to Personal Injury Mastermind. If you’ve 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 or Spotify. Leave me a 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. Catch you next time. I’m out.