Applying Business Strategy to Your Law Firm with James Grant

This isn’t going to be another theoretical sermon on the business of law, but how two partners  – with the help of a business expert – re-envisioned their practice, throwing out traditional models and transforming their firm into something unique.

First, we’re going to talk about looking strategically at your law firm as you would any business. The goal here, being tweaking or adjusting your practice in a way that has the most impact on your bottom line. 

Second, we’re going to talk about one litigation firm’s journey through that process, where they basically took their practice apart, examined each piece, and put it back together again. They rebuilt it with parts based on their strengths as attorneys and on activities that were most profitable.  

My guest is James M. Grant, an attorney who has embraced the idea of applying strategic business thinking to the practice of law.  In that spirit, we talk about how and why he and his partner, Mark Kirchen, tried such an exercise and what he learned from it. Then James talks about a pretty profound transformation of his firm, developing a unique offering that is demonstrably different, as you will see. 

James is co-founding partner of Georgia Trial Attorneys at Kirchen & Grant LLC.  He's an experienced personal injury litigator and trial attorney, whose list of defendants include insurance companies. James started off as a state prosecutor before getting into personal injury law. He has a B.S. from Georgia Institute of Technology, and received his J.D. from Faulkner University (J.D., 2011). 

I hope you enjoy the episode. If so, give us a rating!

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This podcast is the audio companion to the Journal of Emerging Issues in Litigation. The Journal is a collaborative project between HB Litigation Conferences and the vLex Fastcase legal research family, which includes Full Court Press, Law Street Media, and Docket Alarm.

If you have comments, ideas, or wish to participate, please drop me a note at Editor@LitigationConferences.com.

Tom Hagy
Litigation Enthusiast and
Host of the Emerging Litigation Podcast
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Transcript

Tom : 0:05

Welcome to the Emerging Litigation Podcast, a co-production of HB Litigation and critical legal content, custom content for law firms and litigation service providers, and the newly formed VLAC's Fast Case, your World of Legal Intelligence and our friends at LawStreetMedia. I'm your host, tom Hagee, litigation Content Producer and enthusiast and an average bongo player. Contact me if you have an idea for an episode. In addition to often being polite, I'm always looking for new twists on the law, whether it's a new regulation, legislation or an important new opinion, or it could be a development in the world that will test existing law or anything you're dying to share with other litigators, organizations or individuals. And, if you like what you hear, give us a rating. That always helps. And now here's today's episode.

Tom : 0:57

Today we're going to talk about two things, and these two things are related, of course. What kind of podcast do you think we're running here? First, we're going to talk about looking strategically at your law firm, as you would any business. The goal here would be to tweak or adjust your practice in a way that has the most impact, also on your bottom line. Second, we're going to talk about one litigation firm's journey through that process and where they basically took their practice apart and examined each piece and put it all back together again, and usually when I do this, there's always parts left over, but I just keep moving. You don't need all that stuff in there. But in this case, though, the spare parts were intentional. They rebuilt it with the parts based on their strengths as attorneys and on activities that are most profitable for them. So this isn't going to be another theoretical sermon on the business of law I'd be champing at the bit to hear one but this is how one firm, with the help of a business expert, re-envision their practice, throwing out traditional models that they and everyone else follows. And maybe this will get you thinking, especially if you feel your practice is stuck, or if you feel stuck in your practice, and I'm certain those are two different concepts, because what kind of podcast do you think we're running here? Maybe this will be the equivalent of rapidly spinning yourself around for several minutes than trying to walk straight. It's nothing like that, of course, but way better. And it's way better because my guest is way better. He is James M Grant. James has embraced the idea of applying strategic business thinking to the practice of law, and in that spirit, we talked about how and why he tried such an exercise and what he learned from it. Then James talks about a pretty profound transformation of his firm, developing a unique offering that is demonstrably different, as you will see. So he went through this exercise of strategic business thinking and planning and we're going to talk about the results so you can hear it here Probably not first on the emerging litigation podcast.

Tom : 3:01

James is co-founding partner of Georgia Trial Attorneys at Kirchen and Grant LLC. He's an experienced personal injury litigator and trial attorney whose list of defendants include insurance companies. James started off as a state prosecutor before getting into personal injury law. He has a BS from Georgia Institute of Technology and, yes, I learned what the rambling wreck from Georgia Tech means. It's nothing like what I thought. I did think it was an unusual kind of slogan for a football team. Anyway, he received his JD from Faulkner University. He's a family man, a golfer and an amateur strongman. So, unlike me, you can ask him to help you move to the couch With that. Here is James Grant of Georgia Trial Attorneys at Kirchen and Grant LLC. I hope you enjoy it. James Grant, thank you very much for talking to me today.

James: 3:55

Thanks for having me. I'm excited about today's episode.

Tom : 3:58

Good, well, so we talked about a couple of things. You're in a unique situation with your firm. You described a bit about how you got to where you are. So, in that spirit, talk about two things. One is business acumen or business skills for attorneys. So talk to me about that, why you think attorneys should embrace the business skills. Just tell me what your kind of philosophy is about business and law.

James: 4:32

Yeah, I mean this has got to be one of my biggest gripes when it comes to the state bars and the law schools really just across the nation.

James: 4:40

Because as lawyers, as people in the service industry and this transcends whether you're a lawyer, whether you're a CPA, anybody that's in the service industry we are trained on our craft, but most of us end up either owning our own business or our high level decision makers in somebody else's business and we have no business skills. We're not educated on any of this stuff, and when you think about all of the bad reputation and bad things and jokes people make about lawyers, most of it boils down to bad business skills, and it's one thing that my business partner and I, mark we had none. When we started our business. We were just of the mindset well, we're just going to deliver a great legal service and things are just going to be great, but that's really not how a business works and we failed our way to success and then realized that there's so much out there from a coaching standpoint, where it just opened our eyes to personal and professional development and how running a business that just so happens to practice law will transform everything.

Tom : 5:44

Right, yeah, and I think you could say that, for you know, my background was journalism and so you kind of you get good at it. You use somebody say, okay, well, now you're going to manage a team like what, okay, I'll do what I think that might be, and off you go and you kind of stumble and fumble your way. But but yeah, I think that that can go for a lot of professions, especially, especially lawyers. So what? So what skills, business skills, do you see attorneys most often lack.

James: 6:16

Probably the biggest hurdle that every lawyer has to overcome if they're running their own business or running someone else's business at a high level is they have to realize that they don't have to do everything. They don't have to be good at everything. Delegation and hiring is one of your greatest assets and tools as a business owner, Because you always have to step back and look at it and say what would Elon Musk do? What would Jeff Bezos do? What would these individuals that are running these multi-billion dollar corporations are they picking up the phone and making sales calls? Are they the ones that are in production doing the actual work? Or are they bringing in highly skilled, highly intelligent, highly qualified people in their given field to fulfill a specific role and giving them metrics for success? That's probably the most foundational, groundbreaking thing that's gonna explode every lawyer's mind that's listening to this of you don't have to be the best. You don't know how to do everything. You just need to hire really good, skilled people so they can be better than you and you just learn how to manage them.

Tom : 7:25

Right, yeah, and I guess something too with managing people, I think, getting out of their way when you do hire these people right and trusting them to do what they do. Have you had that experience?

James: 7:42

Oh yeah, and that goes back to generally when we hire, we hire cheap and, as the old adage goes, cheap is expensive.

James: 7:51

When you hire an amateur, you're going to have to micromanage them and that's going to suck a ton of your time and it's going to jade you when it comes to the hiring process, because that's how most are operating.

James: 8:03

So when you get in a room with other people who are business owners, but they're really just running a hobby, they're not running a business you're all commiserating about the same thing, while hiring is just so difficult and training so tough, and no one wants to work and no one does a good job, and I have to micromanage everything.

James: 8:19

Whereas if you just hire professionals, people that actually are good at it, better than you, and you give them those key performance indicators of, say, these are the three or four things you are going to deliver every week and we're going to judge you on, I may not necessarily care how you do it, but this is what I want you to accomplish. You went to school for this, you trained for this, you have the expertise for this. Necessarily, you figured out, but this is what I want you to deliver at the end of each week and that opens the floodgates to being able to sit back, manage based on objective numbers and not how you subjectively feel about this person, and then gets you out of working in the business and working on the business.

Tom : 9:04

Yeah, so managing by numbers. They say you can't manage what you can't count, or something like that.

James: 9:10

You can't manage what you can't measure.

Tom : 9:12

That's right. It's a literation In your world. So you did a lot of personal injury work or you do personal injury work. What would be that professional the first professional you would hire or you did hire, and then the second one? What professions are you looking expertise were you looking to bring in?

James: 9:33

My opinion is different than a lot of others. I think, especially for the new, the starting out, the smaller firms that are dipping their toes into the employment realm generally, it's easier to start small because you're going to make a lot of mistakes. This is a new territory for you and you can have all the coaching in the world, but you're going to make mistakes in your first series of this process because hiring it's really difficult. To do it the right way. You can have all the best job descriptions, the best ads, the best scorecards, the best hiring plan. You can have everything mapped out, but then, once you start, you also have to have the ability to pivot and adjust and measure as you're going, and when it's something that's new, you're going to struggle with it.

James: 10:19

And one of the easiest things that every business owner can delegate is they can delegate their email. So hiring a virtual assistant to come in and just manage your inbox, that gets you warmed up to the idea of employing someone and giving them objective metrics of how they're going to be able to deliver. And all of a sudden then you know I knew that I was getting hundreds of emails every single day. When you take that out and you train someone and give them the ability to answer the majority of your emails or sort them to the right person or handle them, and you only have five, 10, 15 emails a day that you truly need to handle. Now you have a ton more time back to actually devote to the higher functions that you really need to be doing as the owner of a business.

James: 11:08

So that's always my advice is to start small, to reclaim your time, to focus on the things you want to and then gradually build up, because then you can build into those positions and you have the support staff as well to then accommodate those higher level functions. To go on another side tangent when it comes to lawyers and hiring lawyers, you only need a law license to do very few things. You need a law license to argue in court, attend depositions and mediations, to sign documents and to give legal advice. Well, signing documents is all done by e-file now, so you really only need a law license at this point to do two things, and if your lawyers are doing anything else other than that, then you're overpaying for their job functions. So, having that strong support staff and building from the bottom up when you do bring on that lawyer, then they have a team around them that they're not doing so many administrative things. They're actually moving cases forward.

Tom : 12:02

Besides support staff, what other professional would you recommend? Say, you know a firm with 10 to 20 attorneys, or even smaller, 5 to 20 attorneys. What professional would you bring in? You're talking about business management or you're talking forecasters. I mean financial folks. What do you think there?

James: 12:22

Yeah, I mean. So every firm needs their professional legal administrator. It can be called different things, but you need someone who is under the CEO, someone who is running the firm, again based on those metrics. You may not need a CFO at that level. You may need a CFO at that level, but you need to have a very strong bookkeeping. You need to have someone that's managing your books. The bookkeeper is not the CFO. Those are two separate functions.

James: 12:49

But before you even get to being able to measure and have those financial controls, you need to have really really good reports. So, when it comes to your bookkeeping, your bookkeeping needs to be done by the 15th at the latest, every single month. It needs to be correct. You need to have all your reports as far as your profit loss statement, your balance sheet, your budget variance reports. You need to have those things that you're looking at regularly and they're accurate, so that then you can hand off to your CFO, who can plug into the modeling, Because hopefully, again, you have your pipeline reports, you're having all this data that's coming in where they can build a further pipeline report based upon your capacity, based upon what you're bringing in, what your attorneys are handling the forecast and say, okay, I see, in six months we're going to need a new pod, so let's start now, because we know it takes three months to hire an attorney and then we're going to have, you know, 60 and 90 days of onboarding.

James: 13:43

Hey, let's start doing that and that's, you know, a great function from a CFO. If they can do so much more than just financial. They can actually help with the hiring process and teaming with your HR team. So there, I mean there's all different ways that you can go, but having those, you know, c-suite level functions either outsourced or at least accounted for in some way by someone, so that you can focus again on the things that you want to and need to, as opposed to having to dive into stuff that you may not be good at.

Tom : 14:12

What would you say about business development? Is that something that you delegate or you actively participate in, or what?

James: 14:20

So my thought when it comes to marketing is I think every owner needs to have a very, very, very strong tie in. I mean, they need to have their finger on the pulse when it comes to their marketing. That's one thing where I really don't like to let go a lot of that, because your marketing is everything you know. You can have a great sales team, but if you're not delivering leads to your sales team, that's a big problem. You can always work with sales, but like if your marketing message all of a sudden drastically changes because you bring in a new vendor who's handling everything wholesale, that's going to take a long time to fix that. My business is B2B, so business development that's what we do. That's what I do. Number one I'm good at it, I enjoy it, but that's where I focus a vast majority of my time, because that marketing portion of the business is what drives the business for the next six to 18 months. So I think having a big handle on that and a strong influence there is super important. Yeah.

Tom : 15:23

I do see those as pretty separate functions. They do get lumped together, I think, when you have a smaller shop marketing and business development. But, like you said, the way I look at it is it's good to have somebody paying attention to the activity that goes on to develop business. But, like you said, there's nobody better than you to talk to somebody about what it is you do, because you're also selling yourself and that you can't delegate yourself to somebody else necessarily.

James: 15:53

I think it very much depends, too, on the industry that you're in, with me being a B2B business model attorney to attorney, it's hard for me to outsource a business development position to a non-attorney Generally, and another attorney is not going to speak with a paralegal about handing over their litigation work to another law firm. They want to speak with the attorney because, again, that's how a lot of relationships in the legal community are built. So you have to look and see where you are, who your avatar client is and how you can get in front of them, and then who's going to be able to be persuasive and receptive for them. So how?

Tom : 16:29

did you develop? How do you would you recommend to say, a young attorney who's coming up? How would you recommend they get these business skills?

James: 16:37

Yeah, I mean a lot of it is you first have to make the decision that you want it. You can have. You can read all the books, you can have all the coaches you can. You can say that you want to do it, but if you really don't believe it, if you don't play all in, that's going to be tough. When you go from working in your business to then learning how to work on your business, it doesn't get easier, it actually gets harder.

James: 17:04

You know, let's from just a metric standpoint. Let's say that before you make this decision, you're working 60 hours a week. That's what a lot of new entrepreneurs are doing at a minimum. Well, once you learn that you have to acquire these new business skills, well, the 60 hours a week doesn't go away. So if you have 20 hours now of working on your business that you have to learn how to do and start doing well, now the requirement goes up to 80. Thank you, that's a lot. So you've got to get your buy-in. You've got to get the buy-in of your family, those that are around you, because you're going to need support through that and it's not going to be easy. If it was easy, everyone would do it. But if you want to be a true entrepreneur, you want to be a difference maker, you have to do the hard things, because no one else is going to do that.

Tom : 17:50

Yeah, I do think that you said it. I forget how you said it already, but you have to kind of commit to yourself to doing it and I find in life when you do that, when you say I'm going to be good also at this aspect, then you start paying attention to people who are good at it, things you hear opportunities to learn. So, yeah, just getting a mindset that, okay, I'm also running a business. I need to know more about that aspect of it. They did not teach it in law school and maybe they should. Maybe they will. I do see people that have JD MBAs.

James: 18:22

I think that has its place. I also think that there are other ways to do it. I mean, you can go get an MBA. You can hire a business coach that's something that we did. You can go out and get several different mentors. It all depends really on your personality and how much you're going to be able to devote and hold yourself accountable. If you are great on personal accountability, you can go out and find mentors and schedule it out and say I'm going to meet with this person regularly on a weekly or monthly basis and schedule that out over a year or two. That's great. Most people aren't going to be able to do that. You need some rigid accountability. Number one by paying someone, you have to be all then and then given the accountability of their weekly meetings or monthly meetings or however you schedule it. So it's just it's number one figuring out what works for you and then holding yourself accountable.

Tom : 19:15

OK, Well, technology I was on your website and I saw you had something about AI and chat GPT. What about lawyers and technology? What would you tell them?

James: 19:25

Learn it now. I mean, if you don't learn it now, it's going to take so much longer because your competition is going to fly past you from an efficiency, from an operational, from a customer service, a client satisfaction, client retention. I mean everything is going to get better because of AI and so those of us that are kind of like on the fence about it, I see this as even more industry defining than the internet in the 90s. This is going to catapult people that adopt it now, light years ahead of their competition, in just a few years.

Tom : 20:03

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I agree, dive in. I mean it's what you're right it's going to be. It's going to have more impact than the internet, both good and bad, I think, because you know, when you talk about using it to code or using it to develop drugs, if you can accelerate, kind of the thinking process, I think it's very powerful. And also, of course, in the wrong hands it can also be more diabolical. So there's a lot to be concerned about. But, yeah, I agree, jump in and use it. I started using it just like to do background and you know, I mean you'd be a fool Anybody would be a fool just to use it and present it as your work. I mean I think that's just ludicrous. But the more I think that when you ask it to do something, the more it can cite its sources, I think the better. Better it'll be.

James: 20:51

But but I mean, even in the last three or four months, we've seen drastic advances in the AIs that are out there. I mean there's GPT, there's Claude, there's Poe there. I mean there's so many different tools that are out there. You can build your own bots as well to do different things, take different perspectives and have all sorts of you know preconditions that you have already built in place, waiting for either the, the bar or the legislator or the law schools to you know, adapt and start training on this. I mean we're talking maybe a decade down the line before that actually happens and by that time that's going to be like kids now trying to use Facebook. It's just not going to happen.

Tom : 21:30

Yeah, get on the bus. Yeah, you talked about delegating and technology. I did have somebody on the podcast and he was the director of technology at a law firm, which meant he actually would do coding, he would create interactive maps, he would create special tools for presentations and stuff like that. So I thought that's you know, that's very much what you're saying. You know, embrace what you're good at, hire. You know, hire and delegate what you're not, or that will enable your business to grow. So I thought that was. That was a unique, unique situation.

James: 22:04

Oh yeah, I mean, technology is wonderful and obviously having a you know chief informational officer is wonderful, having chief security officers, those those are positions that will just do so much good for your business. Not everybody's there, but even the simple stuff and the changes that they're making with Microsoft to allow you to code your own forms, to build your own workflows, to have Power BI and Dynamics to do things for you simply, or to pull things off a shelf and say this workflow already works, microsoft they've already sanctioned it, but I just need to code it to work for me or tinker with it a little bit. The everyday person, the everyday business owner, can now use a lot of the stuff in the Microsoft suite to build their own workflows and not have to worry about having a $200,000 salary and employee doing this for them.

Tom : 22:55

I like something you said earlier. I don't know where you said it, I think it was when I was reading about you. You talked about building a business with the intention of enabling, but not running, your life.

James: 23:06

It goes back to number one hiring amateurs versus professionals, because you have to decide what you want. Do you want a hobby? Do you want your business to revolve around you and you're the value to your business, or do you want the opposite? Do you want a business that works for you, that provides for your family and runs in spite of you or outside of you? I think practically a lot of people want that, but when it comes down to actually the implementation, most people live it like a hobby. So you really have to make sure again that through your personal and professional growth, that you're having an alignment and integrity with yourself and what your goals are and what you're telling others. Yeah, okay.

Tom : 23:54

At this point in the podcast we both learned that we like to talk. It was kind of a self-confessional, sort of a sharing moment, and so it led to a little bit of a digression and I'd asked him when was the first time somebody told you you like to talk? And here we go.

James: 24:13

I like talking with people, I like sharing, I like having a good time. So when you're doing those things generally, you can have conversations that last hours. I'm sure your listeners would probably not appreciate a two and a half hour long podcast. Me and you, we're probably going to have a great time, but no one else no we could.

Tom : 24:27

No, I want to come down to Georgia. One of my favorite trips was to Georgia doing visiting law firms when I worked for LexisNexis, and they said, oh, we need an executive. You know, that means I had a suit and to come down with salespeople and go around to small law firms, and what an experience it was. But I went to Athens because I like music and there's a lot of good music in Athens, so I jumped at the chance to go to Athens, georgia. Who wants to go to Athens, georgia? I'm like I do, I do and I want to go. Now.

Tom : 24:57

I had a ball and I was with the sales guy who was so aggressive I think it was 530. We still hadn't. He hadn't made a sale that day. For some reason, I don't know, he had to make a sale every day, james. We ended up looking in the windows to see if anybody was still in the law office, right, and then he said, ok, well, they have a second and third floor or something. We were on the fire escape in the back of the building, going up to see whether any attorneys were still working, like, is this safe? I don't know. So I'm going up in a suit up the fire escape anyhow, but that's dedication right there.

James: 25:36

I'm telling you, he that's. That is a trait that you can't teach.

Tom : 25:40

No, you cannot, you cannot, and I'm like, ok, wow, this guy's, he's very successful. Now, at this point in the interview, we talk about what James and his team did with all this thinking about their law firm as a business and applying business concepts to it, and how he turned a firm into something very different and a differentiator and playing to their strengths. And here it is. Well, let's move on to your firm. So talk about delegating and and and things like that.

Tom : 26:19

You know, I was thinking there were these ads playing all the time, for it was like your outsourced CFO or something, and I just heard it over and over again and I thought, well, that's interesting, you can go outside, because people can outsource their being a general counsel too, but your your thing is, is is unique, and I don't know that any firms are doing it. What you do is you take on a very certain, very certain segment of the workflow and the life of a case. So there are some firms that go out and find clients and then they take the matters to the point where it's time to litigate them, but you do something different. So you talk to me about that.

James: 26:58

Yeah, I mean. So. Our job at Georgia trial attorneys is to help other personal injury lawyers make more money, faster and with less stress by serving as their outsourced litigation department. We found through a lot of our research and our data and analytics that most law firms there are some that are actually very, very good at this, but most law firms try to do both aspects of a personal injury case from a mediocre good standpoint.

James: 27:26

And what I mean by that is you've got your pre litigation side and then you've got your litigation side, and generally both of those departments are run by the same people and you can run into several issues from a business and a metric standpoint. You know, if you have a very good pre litigation team and that team is great at pre litigation but they're also running their litigation cases, you're probably not maximizing your litigation cases. Because you're a litigation case is because they're specialists in pre litigation. Well then, on the flip side, if you have a really great litigation team but they're also handling pre lit well, you're probably overpaying from a business perspective for the results that they're delivering because the litigation team, the time, the training, the management, the oversight, the cost, the expense is so much greater for the litigation team compared to the pre litigation team. So when they're running your pre litigation cases, your business model is so much more less efficient and really, at the end of the day, efficiency is the name of the game. That's what's going to set you apart.

James: 28:29

So we realize that there is a large market share opportunity for us to help the law firms that are great at pre litigation.

James: 28:37

If you've got a great marketing, sales, onboarding and process to get them through the pre litigation process, stay there. You found a gold mine. Maximize your time there and then, if we can help you with the litigation and then just give you more money to dump back into your marketing machine, you're going to actually significantly scale your law firm as opposed to trying to do both things. So that's where we've seen a great difference maker, and then we've been able to offer a unique value proposition, because there are other law firms that do what we call referral work. But our commitment to our partners is well, we're not going to take any of the money and invest in digital ads, billboards, buses, TV, radio. We're not going to market B to C. We're not going to go after your clients, because we only want to work with other law firm owners like you to then help you. So that way we're not competing, we're actually complimenting one another and growing together.

Tom : 29:34

Where did this come from, this idea? Because it's unique and it sounds very much to me like I know we keep going back to running it as a business. But it really reminds me of like looking, doing a strategic review of your strengths and weaknesses and your goals for your firm and all this stuff, and say you know, what are we good at and what could we do differently? What was? Where did you get the idea?

James: 29:59

Well, we did do the SWOT analysis. You're talking about streaks, weaknesses, and opportunities and threats, but unfortunately, I can't take any of this as my own idea. It all comes from a VIP day that we had with the owner of the business coaching organization that we've been with since October of 2018. Arjan Robbins is the owner of how to Manage a Small Law Firm, and we had a VIP day with him and he pretty much sat us down and looked at our model, looked at what we had done. We had always done referral work, but we were doing the pre-lit stuff as well. And he was like well, let me get this straight. You've been doing referral work and litigating other law firms' cases for years. You've got good processes, procedures, financial controls, metrics, marketing, sales, production. Like you have all this great stuff, but you want to leave it to go to pre-litigation, where you don't necessarily have all those things, but the margins are better and you think it's going to work.

James: 30:54

And I was like well, when you say like that, that sounds kind of dumb. And he was like because it is. And we were just, you know, starry-eyed looking at him because that's what so many other lawyers do, that's how so many law firms start out, and when we asked him what he suggested, he suggested the model that we've now implemented, and we were like that's crazy, no one does that. And he was like aha. We started thinking we're like, oh, no one does this, no one's willing to make this commitment. So now we have entirely an opportunity to take all of the market share, and so that's what we've done. We implemented it about two years ago. We now work with 23 law firms across the southeast to litigate their cases and it's been great and we're able to build true partnerships and we're we're not competing. Good for you.

Tom : 31:42

That's brilliant. But that is also such a business approach to things is to get a guy like RJ Robbins. You said RJ yeah.

Tom : 31:52

RJ I'm sorry, rj Robbins and you know, and look at your, look at your business, look at it as a business through a completely different lens and shake it up. And he had you. He made you question like, why are we doing it this way? And what you ended up finding was blue water. You know, nobody, nobody is splashing around. It's well mixed, the metaphor, but it's. You know, a lot of times you're in a horse race with other firms and horse races are fine, but you know, if you can go, if you can be the one out there running, running on your own, that's, that's better, that's way better. Or with a lot less competition. We talked about reducing costs through economies of scale. So how are you able to scale up? And do you have and do you use subcontractors for different functions and litigation yourself?

James: 32:41

When it comes to being able to scale you, you have to first realize that you're running a business, because you can't scale yourself. If you are your business, you're not going to be able to scale. So that's where you know, when it comes to your, your processes, your workflows, your automation, you have to have a streamlined, consistent, written down process of how every case is going to flow, because once you start building something like that, that becomes an asset. You know your firm is operating based upon strategic inputs and outputs. It's not just centralized on one or two people. And when you do that, then you can fill in people on the stages as you scale, whereas if you are the Lynch pin, you can't make more of you.

James: 33:28

So that's where, when it comes to scaling, it's really all about the process and workflow and procedures that you have in place. Now they're going to change every single time Because as you grow, the way you run a $500,000 business is not the way you run a million dollar business, is not the way you run a $5 million business, and on and on and on. So as you scale, you have to understand that there's going to be some essence of creative destruction where you tear everything down and you rebuild it, but knowing that going in really helps you to then start to scale, because you know those changes are forthcoming. As opposed to well, it works perfect. Then why doesn't it work perfect now? It's going to be a different system.

Tom : 34:09

Right, all right.

James: 34:10

And then to answer your other question about subcontractors we do everything ourselves, so we bring in our own team members. We're very big on virtual. I love virtual employees. When you all of a sudden open yourself up to a global pool of candidates, then you can really do a lot, because, I mean, you're talking about billions upon billions, upon billions of people that are potential workers and team members for your firm, especially when the vast majority of really all legal stuff it's really administrative in nature. So the more you can delegate things to the most competent but then lowest pay scale employee, that's again where your business starts to thrive, because you become more efficient, client satisfaction is better and cases move quicker.

Tom : 35:00

I was curious too if you saw this sort of application in other situations, like I guess some people specialize in discovery, but also that some lawyers are strictly appellate lawyers.

James: 35:14

Yeah, I mean there are firms that do those things, that specialize. They'll specialize in appellate work. I don't know. To your question, though, I've never seen a firm that just specializes in discovery. Right Now I will say our process for discovery a lot of people thumb their nose at because we don't really use our attorneys. Discovery is not something that requires a law degree. You're answering questions and we have workflows where we have automated questionnaires sent to our clients before we even file, because we know half the time we can boil it down to 40 questions of what's probably going to be asked every single time. Get that information early, have then AI help you to build the responses based on what comes in, what you already have, and then your paralegal is only having a finite amount of time to then follow up on certain information and questions, as opposed to our two hour phone call with the client to ask them questions that really the client could have helped you answer and that you could have used a lot of different technology and tools to automate the process.

Tom : 36:17

So how long did it take you to ramp up? How many clients did you say you had?

James: 36:22

So we have about 535 active cases in the firm today. Wow.

Tom : 36:25

Okay. And then you mentioned clients. When I say client, I mean your law firms that come to you. How many of those do you have? 23 right now, 23. Okay, all right. So how long did that take you to get there?

James: 36:42

So we started in 2015. We really changed the model two years ago, and back then we probably only had eight or nine maybe, so not very long, didn't think long to get there. So in a few years. We've ramped up and through this process we've still been figuring out our plan and how we're doing things, especially from the business development and marketing standpoint. But now it's to the point where we really want to start throwing some gas on the fire.

Tom : 37:08

What is the downside to only specializing litigation? I feel like there isn't one.

James: 37:14

Well, I mean, obviously that's going to seem selfish and cliche at the same time, but it really depends on the law firm, because the firms that we work with they have to see it from a business perspective. If you see it as well, I'm just losing money. I'm losing a portion of my fee. There you go.

James: 37:34

Yes, that's going to be tough, but that's more of conditioning through the marketing plan and the marketing funnel and then, in the sales conversation, being able to let's talk about this from a metric standpoint. What if you lost all of your overhead, all of your litigation costs and expenses, all of the time that you would spend managing and training those employees and retraining and keeping up to make sure that they are constantly implementing and not going off on their own for your policies and procedures? And then we just handed you a truckload of cash every year? Would you be able to do more with $300,000, for instance, how many new cases could $300,000 generate? And generally, when you look at the numbers from a pre-litigation standpoint, the vast majority of the cases are going to settle. The margins are significantly better. So if you can go get more of those and you have a marketing plan that works, just go dump more cash into that.

Tom : 38:30

I want to say thanks very much. I really enjoyed this and, as a business owner, it was inspiring as well. So I can see why you're good at what you do, no.

James: 38:38

I mean again, I really appreciate the opportunity to have a fun conversation with you today, whether you're an attorney, whether you're a business owner that's listening, and if you just want to talk about business. I love talking about business and I talk with business owners all across the nation several times a week. It's something that you know. It's just fun to me. So if you want to do that, you just want to talk to me. If you're an attorney that's practicing in another state and want to ask me about this, or if you're an attorney in Georgia that sees the need, I'm happy to talk with anybody. I'll take you out to lunch. You know, we'll start building a relationship because people do business with those that they know like and trust, and that's something that I really want to develop with as many lawyers as I can.

Tom : 39:16

That concludes this episode of the Emerging Litigation Podcast, the co-production of HB litigation, critical legal content, vlex fast case and our friends at LostG Media. I'm Tom Hage, your host, which would explain why I'm talking. Please feel free to reach out to me if you have ideas for a future episode and don't hesitate to share this with clients, colleagues, friends, animals you may have left at home, teenagers you've irresponsibly left unsupervised, and certain classifications of fruits and vegetables, and if you feel so moved, please give us a rating. Those always help. Thank you for listening.