Life Beyond the Briefs
At Life Beyond the Briefs we help lawyers like you become less busy, make more money, and spend more time doing what they want instead of what they have to. Brian brings you guests from all walks of life are living a life of their own design and are ready to share actionable tips for how you can begin to live your own dream life.
Life Beyond the Briefs
Five Takeaways from the National Trial Lawyers Summit
The podcast episode offers actionable insights from the National Trial Lawyers Summit, emphasizing a tailored approach to law firm practices. Key takeaways include the importance of running your own race, establishing effective case processes, and fostering authentic client relationships amidst evolving marketing trends.
• Reflections on personal journey post-conference
• The necessity of individualized strategies in law firms
• Importance of structured case processes and follow-ups
• Concerns around AI and maintaining connection with clients
• The impact of marketing strategies on client acquisition costs
• Emphasis on personal growth over day-to-day case management
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Brian Glass is a nationally recognized personal injury lawyer in Fairfax, Virginia. He is passionate about living a life of his own design and looking for answers to solutions outside of the legal field. This podcast is his effort to share that passion with others.
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Happy Friday and welcome to another solo episode of Life Beyond the Briefs, the number one podcast for lawyers choosing to live lives of their own design and create legal practices that they actually enjoy showing up to. On Monday, I'm your host, brian Glass, and this is a remote episode being recorded in Miami, florida, just after the conclusion of the National Trial Lawyers 2025 Summit, and I'm doing, or just finished doing, the most important thing that I think you can do after any conference like this, and that's sitting down with your notes. I have 25 pages of notes, and then I have all these pictures of people's slides and I've just gone through that to pull out what are the three to five actionable things that I can do in my law firm next week. Either I can start doing the project or, better yet, I can delegate the project to somebody else. And so what I've done in the hour and a half between the last session and the last happy hour and my God, are there a lot of happy hours at these big conferences, which is another topic but what I've done is gone through and highlighted for myself what are the most important things, and I don't have to create the project or even wireframe the project, but I've got four action items that I've got now for my team and I may share those in a future episode, but what I want to share with you is the five or six takeaways, and some of them are like psychological takeaways, some of them are actionable takeaways, but just the big things that I pulled out of this conference, and so that's what this episode is about. If it's your first time ever finding this episode, welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 0:I'm a trial lawyer in Fairfax, virginia. I've been trying cases for 16, 17, 18 years. I graduated law school in 2008 into the teeth of the great recession, thankfully never worked in big law, never for more than four months, had to build by the hour and discovered this contingency fee practice, transitioning my practice now to do less of the day-to-day stuff and more of the stuff that actually comes with the ownership of a law firm. Now I say often that your mileage may vary in this, because you may decide that for you, owning a law firm means you want to try more cases and you want to hire and delegate all of the other things. I don't really want to try that many more cases right now, or I'm. I do want to try cases, but I don't want to do any of the work leading up to the case, and so this year I've been working more on structuring my work and my delegation around not being the one who has to be at the center of any given case, and I think I'll start there. I hadn't intended to start there, but one of my takeaways is run your own race, because you can go to events like this and you hear the people who are on panels and if you're like me and you're running a practice that's in the seven figure range low to mid seven figure range you're probably not speaking on a panel at a national trial or summit. Most of these panelists are running eight-figure firms, or they're.
Speaker 0:Mike Morse must have spent an unbelievable amount of money because he and the Fireproof program really dominated the business of law track with their members and he's running a firm that probably things that he's doing in his advertising and hear him talk about how he has a million dollar a week payroll and hear him talking about how. Hear John Morgan talk about how they spent 400 million last year on marketing to generate $2 billion in fees and it's holy shit. The tools and the tactics that they're using in their firm are not the ones that I need. Next, in my firm and I'll give you an example One of the vendors tried to sell me towards the end of the program, one of these repeater numbers like 703-333-3333. And he's pitching me on what a great deal this thing is at $20,000. And I don't know, maybe it is a great deal to get a repeater number for $20,000. I have no idea. I've never looked before. But I also don't do any branding and I don't do any billboard. I don't do any TV advertising where that thing would be helpful For the most part, when people are finding my phone number, they're finding it on Google and they're clicking to call, and so you wouldn't even need to know the number to type it into the thing.
Speaker 0:And so that's just one small example of the next shiny widget probably doesn't have anything to do with the race that you're running, and your job after you go to a conference or a seminar or listen to a podcast or read a book, is to figure out do the takeaways from that thing have any application at all in my practice or not? And if they do, we slot them for doing, and if they don't, we're like, hey, that's a cool thing and I enjoyed learning about it, but I'm not going to dedicate any dollars or any of my precious time towards working on that thing. Number two takeaway, which is the next step, for me and my firm, is that case processes really matter. There was a lot of good stuff from the stage in an injury firm about the things that you want to do in the first 30 and 90 days to make sure that a case is on a right track, and everybody is quick to follow that up by saying we're not manufacturing injuries, we're not making people go to treatment that they don't need, but we are making sure that they go to treatment if they need it. How many people are out there running injury firms where you have the client who goes to the emergency room, goes to their primary care doctor, goes once or twice to physical therapy, misses the next three weeks and then the case is for lack of a better word done and over with right. There are ways to prevent that, and that includes constant follow-up with the client early on, probably from an executive assistant, a virtual assistant, case manager, whoever, to make sure that they're doing all the things they need to be doing Instituting checklists, brain injury checklists, to make sure that people aren't trying to tough through things like dizziness, headaches, light sensitivity, and that we get them to neurologists if they need to go and see neurologists.
Speaker 0:Having conversations actual conversations with clients at least every 30 days to make sure that we are mining the case for important information about their wage loss claim or the fact that they couldn't go and take their kids to all of their activities All of these things that build the damages later in the case are really developed by our team having conversations with the client early in the case and putting those notes in the file and making sure that the client gets the help that they need. And the thing is that, as a small firm, we love to talk about our personal touch and every case is different, and that is true and we love to put on a pedestal our own legal thinking and ability to craft the right argument in any single case. And that might be true. But the lack of processes is what keeps us from scaling, because we're the ones who have to do it all and the more that you can get better at creating processes that your team can execute, to put that data in some place where you can then come back and apply the personal touch and make the case different and add value to the case, the better off you're going to be. So one of the things that's very high on my list of priorities is making sure that in the first 90 days, we are excellent at client follow-up, we are excellent at gathering all the information that we need and then at the end of that 90 days, we've ranked the case as an A case, b case or F case, and that we get rid of the F cases right. We're going to take a certain number of cases where the liability is bad or where the injuries are not sufficient or where there's not much damage to the back of the car, and the better that we can get about telling that person early on, within 90 days, that we can't help them, the better off everybody is going to be. Those cases tend to stick around, they tend to drag on, they take up an inordinate amount of staff time and then they turn into client complaints when you finally get around to telling the client at 12 or 18 months that you can't help them. And so we want to get really good this year in 2025 about after 90 days saying you know what? I don't think I can help you. Let me try to find a different lawyer for you.
Speaker 0:Number three AI Dude. I am sick of hearing about AI and it seems like every other vendor in this conference had white labeled an LLM slapped it onto a product that already existed and now they are the AI case status. I'm not picking on case status, but the AI vendor, the AI case management system, the AI intake team, and the thing is that when you notice that everybody else is trying industry leaning heavily into AI for speed and AI for efficiency, then you got to start thinking about how do we maintain authenticity and do something different. So it's for me coming back and looking at the places where we are utilizing AI and automation and making sure that those are augmentations to the things that we already are doing very well, which is the personal touches within the team, which is what turns cases into referrals. It makes your clients referral engines for their friends, for their families, for the next case that they have, because every lawyer has handled a case where we have a client from five years ago who had a lawyer but can't tell you who they are, and they can't tell that because the lawyer wasn't authentic and didn't make an impression on the client, and so when everybody else is pivoting towards AI, automated phone calls out to the client, ai texts, whatever let's not do that at least. Okay.
Speaker 0:So that was number three, and number four comes on the heels of that, which is that, as big firms are finding improvements in their labor ratio which means, as big firms are moving away from US-based paralegals and case managers towards AI and automation or towards overseas virtual assistants in the Philippines or in Latin America they are spending less and less money on their labor ratio. Usually, that's a good thing. What they are not doing. They are not doing is taking more of that money home as profit. For the most part, what they are doing is plowing more and more of that money back into their marketing to continue to grow. That is why your Google pay-per-click and your Google LSA ad costs keep increasing, because they're taking all of their excess capital and flowing it back into case acquisition, which, of course, because the laws of supply and demand, drives up the cost of acquiring a case. That is only going to get worse as they go to more automation and more overseas help. They go to more automation and more overseas help, and so it is more important than ever for you to have a boots on the ground, guerrilla marketing, referral-based engine that doesn't rely on paid advertising. I've been saying this and Ben has been saying this in Great Legal Marketing for years. Our new book, renegade Lawyer Marketing, talks about all of the guerrilla tactics that we use in our firm to generate interest in our clients and become centers of influence in our community. If you don't have that book, you can pick it up either from Amazon or from the Great Legal Marketing Store. Acquisition costs digitally, because your competitors are spending less and less dollars on their labor ratio and sending that money back into growing their firms and coming to take you over. And, by the way, it's only going to get worse as venture capital comes to state after state.
Speaker 0:Okay, I think that was four, and so the last one for me is a mindset shift. At least one speaker said some version of you can't take depositions and do trials and also grow your firm, and that's a message that I'm getting hit over the head with again and again. My goal for 2025 coming out of our law firm annual retreat was not to take any new cases, which I am the primary day-to-day doer, and this reiterated that for me. Day-to-day doer, and this reiterated that for me. I did attend several courtroom track and I will miss trying cases. My real goal is to sit second chair on a million dollar result. I want to grow somebody in my firm that is capable of getting a million dollar result at trial and I want to sit second chair, help where I can or where I need to and be proud of the result that we've grown as homegrown talent. So that just reiterated to me you can't be everything to everybody. Run your own race and I need to be really diligent and deliberate about not getting involved in depositions, trials, in the day-to-day case handling, because we have made a commitment to grow our firm to a $25 million firm over the next 10 years.
Speaker 0:I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you did and you want to hear more about the tactical things that I'm going to be doing in our firm, shoot me a message. I may turn that into another episode. It may turn into a GLM email. I'm not entirely sure If you've never been to a National Trial Lawyers event.
Speaker 0:These are really good. I try to make it a practice once a year to get out to a big ass event. You can see all the vendors in one place. At one time you can sample many different versions of case management software or client connectivity or answering services. It's good to have all that stuff in one place at one time, and for me this has become something of a reunion, as I see my friends from across the country year over year and it's really nice to do it at an event. That's not great legal marketing because I don't also have to be on stage and run the event. I can just sit back and enjoy and enjoy the happy hours which I am going to right now. So plug for National Trial Lawyers events. They have eight this year. You should make an effort to get out of your state local CLEs and get your ass to one of these events. Have a great weekend and talk to you guys later.
