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
Let Go to Grow: The 'Price' from 2 to 40 Lawyers | Seth Price
What if the thing capping your firm’s growth is you?
Seth Price scaled from 2 to 40 lawyers by making the move most founders avoid. He let go, then replaced himself with systems, A players, and data that compound.
In this episode, Brian and his friend Seth get specific about what actually works, not theory.
You’ll learn:
- why speed to lead wins cases before your coffee cools
- the first two hires that free your week and raise the bar
- the core systems that run without you
- what to automate and what should stay human
- how local SEO and Google Business Profiles turn clicks into clients
- the data rhythms and KPIs that keep a firm honest
- where the legal market is shifting and how to position your practice
If your firm feels busy but not bigger, this is your blueprint to scale with less stress and more control.
Connect with Seth Price:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sethprice
Price Benowitz LLP: https://pricebenowitz.com/
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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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And again, I joke a lot with Jay on our podcast that like the rule of threes, when you hire somebody for a new position, likely the first person is not going to work. The second person may not work, it's very often the third person. But part of that is we don't know what we really want. We think we know, we tell ourselves that, but somebody comes and they're like they're really great at big picture but you know you really need attention to detail because that's the piece that's getting lost or whatever it is. You sort of figure out what that skill set is.
Speaker 2:Hey friends, welcome back to another episode of Life Beyond the Briefs. I'm Brian and today we're going straight at the bottleneck. Every growing firm hits. Seth scaled a firm by doing the unlawyerly thing, letting go, then replacing himself with systems A players and smart tech. In the next few minutes you'll hear the playbook, the first hires that change everything. The one response time habit that wins cases before coffee gets cold, what to automate versus what must stay human, and how local and SEO and data can turn clicks into real clients. We'll also hit the hidden mistakes that look efficient but quietly cap your growth. And if you've ever thought I don't have time to step back, this is your sign Grab a notebook, park the billable for a beat and get ready to scale without burning out. Let's get into it. Hello everybody, welcome back to the show. Today's guest is Seth, price of Price Benowitz and Blue Shark Digital. Seth is a longtime friend and sometimes competitor in the Northern Virginia personal injury market. Seth, welcome to the show. Thank you Great to be here, brian. First things first happy birthday.
Speaker 1:Thank you, I appreciate it. When I saw this pop on the calendar, I had a pretty light day, so it was like, hey, I got to do some work today.
Speaker 2:Well, thank you for taking the time out. My birthday is in five days.
Speaker 1:I'll be one year older, so good to have another Virgo on the show, I'll try to get you on a podcast for that day, just as a new tradition.
Speaker 2:So, seth, you run a super successful law firm in Northern Virginia and DC and Maryland, as well as one of the premier SEO and digital marketing firms. But one of the things that you told me at a conference once is that it almost never would have happened this way had you gotten into real estate at a more successful time in the cycle.
Speaker 1:Yes, you know, price battle it's a blue shark might not have existed had there not been a tough run in real estate. You know I had been a practicing lawyer. I did the entrepreneurial thing in the late 90s, during the first dot-com bubble, similar to what we're seeing now with the AI bubble, and you know was doing a bunch of real estate and had a, you know, had a fantastic run there. But the world and if you remember was 6 to 08, really took a turn and so at the beginning you know that was sort of not an option to make a living. We had about 500 doors. At one point Dave and I Dave wanted to practice, I didn't, and the law firm came out of him wanting to practice, I didn't. We needed to make some money and built a website it's famous words where nobody will ever find their lawyer on the internet. 50 lawyers later, greater clients at Blue Shark. I beg to differ.
Speaker 2:That's like you took the other side of that bet and then just never let it go.
Speaker 1:You know, and it's funny, I'll give you a piece that, the new version of that discussion which I don't know if you see this at all, but whether both at Price Benowitz with my partner, dave, or at Blue Shark with clients around the country, very often there's discussion. I'd say 90% of lawyers get the game, get some content, make sure the law is not wrong, make sure they don't hate it. But we get a percentage of lawyers that, like all web content sucks. I'm like, can you tell me a site that you do like? No, no, no, I just know I don't like this. Look, we have we've studied this as much as we can we have former lawyers, we have present lawyers, we have people writing web content.
Speaker 1:It is so difficult to scale original content Right now. We can't rip chat GBT. We can use it as part of our outlining process, editing things like that, but getting content. So Dave is ah, I don't like this content. I'm like Dave, stop it. The content's there to make you money. It can't suck, but is it going to have the exact tone you want all the time? And it's one of those things which I think goes to sort of the question you started with that. Like you know we talked about off camera, which was scaling Okay With imperfection, because everything has to be perfect as well as you can do it. Probably not going to get that much larger than you are because, uh, I don't know if you know Chad Dudley, one of my friends and mentors in the space, dudley DeBosier he, you know, he has a pretty large firm, 50 plus lawyers, a lot of staff.
Speaker 1:He says at any one time somebody's screwing something up and you know what, I'm okay with it. Now, do you want to screw it up? No, of course not. But if you are, want to be more than just yourself, every extension beyond you has a percentage that it's not you doing it. Sometimes you get better, you know, as you build and you have systems and you hire.
Speaker 1:Well, you can do get to the point where people do things better than you. But there's going to be a lot of stuff in the middle that we see. I mean I talked to my buddy, jerry Wayne's thing, just from a cost savings point of view. You have a firm in Northern Virginia, across the river from us. We had a farewell party that was to be attended by six or seven people. They bought $500 worth of chicken wings on some. You know web, you know delivery service, I mean so every time you don't touch it. If you or I, you want to sit there and spend your days writing prose, god bless. But you're not going to be signing clients, you're not going to be moving the cases along, you're not going to be thinking about how to build the firm macro. So I think there's always a given tug between what could be done as a solo and what's possible when you scale.
Speaker 2:Is that something that comes naturally to you, or is that a the blinders or the? The acceptance of somebody who's not going to do it as well as I could do it Is that? Is that a mindset that you've had to hone over the years?
Speaker 1:Um, I, you know it's a great question. Um, I would say in one respect, I think it's probably the personality testing. If you see, I'm a quick start, I get the idea out. I'm less fact-based, I know where I want to get to and then we'll have other people help me figure that out along the way. I also, you know there are a lot of people now. We talk so much in the legal community about data and the numbers and how building based on that.
Speaker 1:When I started, we just threw spaghetti at the wall and hope stuff stuck, and so there's a certain mindset. When we started Blue Shark, we did it for price benefits let's see if we could do it for somebody else and it was like a way of retaining people. So it wasn't like we went in there saying, hey, we want to have X number of clients, we want to do this, this and this. There's a certain amount of pushing forward. What I would tell you is when it gets closest to home, because I'm not in the courtroom first it was easier for me to let go of that Because if there was a cringe, we have a lot of amazing lawyers who've been with us 15 plus years. That said, when you have a junior lawyer and something cringe happens in court. That is not my space when I see stuff on the marketing side. We just won.
Speaker 1:We went from one lawyer being picked for best lawyers to 15, right, and two things happened that I learned from this. One our marketing team put out the social media stuff. It's nice to win it, but a bunch of the junior people got the ones to watch and had ones to. What the hell is ones to watch? All I cared about is the big red best lawyers. We can't say it ethically. We can say it here, for whatever reason, this private equity company has this marketing scheme, gets to use best lawyer Right, despite the fact that it's a marketing company, is randomly picking people and that we are in a position where I'm like you know. So that makes me crazy, the stuff that I know and care about. But as it moves beyond whether you know in the other areas, I think that if you want to scale, there needs to be a certain amount of being willing to let go, and I think it is harder for certain personality types, particularly certain practitioners, than others.
Speaker 2:And that personality type that is hard for me to let go Right. And so I know that you're very active in the mastermind space and you and John Fisher, I think, are putting on an event in DC, maybe in September, and so I know that you have have seen lawyers stand up in front of the room and everybody goes. If you want to scale like you've got to stop doing intake or you've got to stop taking depositions Lawyers well, I'm the best at doing that, and there's there's certain arenas where I'm like I can think of the idea and I can give you the idea, but I'm going to want to come back and check all that data and that's why I asked you if it's something that you've learned or something you've seen lawyers learn in other way in in in another way than like, if I go and stick my head in the sand and I never look at it again, I'm probably fine with it, but if I become aware of it, I'm going to be pissed at somebody who ordered $500 of chicken wings for the seven people.
Speaker 1:Right and I think that, like everything it's like as we've learned over time, it's systems. It's putting systems in place with checks and balances. Something I know we've talked about is you know how can you scale two organizations? You know 300 people plus wake up every morning getting a paycheck based on stuff that is under my purview. That's a scary, scary concept. I think part of it is hiring in the you know, creating that org chart as you grow. It's not going to start with you. You know, one of the things I love about EOS the Entrepreneur Operating System-Based Attraction that I love is you start with that org chart and you may be in five of those seats when you start. But knowing what are those things? You're doing intake, you're doing accounting, you're doing this, you know, and that over time, as revenue is appropriate and as it's the right place, you pull somebody out, you put somebody in there and that allows you to get to the point where you can extract yourself from those things you know and and move on.
Speaker 1:And it's tough because I know that with intake, there's a point where I was better than anybody else doing it. I know that at the same time, it would be. At the same time, it would be limited to me. And the second thing is life gets in the way. I was better at it than anybody else pre-kids. Once they were kids, I was less focused and had other distractions. I was 24-7 with a cell phone. So your life changes over time, both external as well as just age. Birthday is sort of one of those days. You take stock of that and that those putting those pieces in place when done right it's big if, but when done right can actually get you a consistent return on investment over time.
Speaker 1:Every lawyer you know from your masterminds has probably said I get all the cases I should be getting that I want, and it's not until you start listening to recorded calls and understanding that whoever sets the denominator may be gaming it. I had this issue myself. We had an intake lawyer who had this crazy close rate and I was like what's going on? How is this possible? And it turned out that we were in a position where they were. Basically it was sort of like my dating life in college.
Speaker 1:If somebody rejected me, I never really wanted them anyway. So it was like we were getting these cases that were like, oh, we didn't really want that case and it changed our numbers. So, as we got better with systems and with numbers, making sure that you're measuring, because that's when you can really see. The magic is when you actually the data is going to say, hey, this intake person is better than this person is better than this person, and you start, you know, say okay, these people need to find something outside of intake because they're not best for that, and really focusing on pushing up the quality level. And then the biggest issue, which I'm sure you guys deal with all the time, is okay, now you have your best person, is that person to become manager of these people, and do they have the chops for that? Or do you let them be that rock star and find other people to manage?
Speaker 2:It's funny because when you started talking about the accountability chart like the two things that we have struggled with as we've grown from about a million dollar firm to we'll do around five million this year and from about I don't know 12 people to 20 low 20s right now is is extracting ourselves from those seats and then installing somebody who can then take ownership and do it slightly different than you did, without like fitting in the box if this is the way that brian always did it, and so I've got to continue to do it this way.
Speaker 2:But then also, when you have somebody who can do that, and then they hit the ceiling at the next level and they're not ready to go themselves from the operator to the manager of people and we see this a lot in marketing right? Marketing is, I think, the easiest place in a law firm to see it. You have somebody who has done your social media for you and has done your in-house SEO years and years ago and did the PPC, and now you scale to a certain size and they just physically can't do all of that within 40 hours, and so you start outsourcing to vendors and you expect the person who is good at doing the thing to be good at managing the vendors who are doing the thing, and it's just a totally different skillset. It's funny.
Speaker 1:It brings back a memory from way back when this is pre-Blue Shark when Price Boundout just had its own in-house team and every two years I'd hire a person. Some guy or girl would come along. They'd work with me for two years and they'd spin out and at one point there was a woman who was sort of like my senior right-hand person, but the team started to scale and she was pretty good at what she did, but she couldn't manage, and so as we grew, I actually had this legendary conversation with her where I'm like I've got good news and bad news. The good news is you keep your job and you keep your salary. The bad news is the guy who's been reporting to you is now in charge, and it was what made our business.
Speaker 1:That person was David Breton, who's the president of Blue Shark and has grown into a 100-person organization managing 300 law firms nationwide. It would not have happened with that other person. So some of it's luck, some of it's timing, some of it's a bunch of stuff, but I think that this is for an audience that is looking at that. When you sort of say, okay, I have this admin, I'll make them the office manager, and all of a sudden they're, they're causing fight and drama with other people. You're like, okay, I can have you doing work, but I can't have you interacting with others. And those are those life moments where you got to figure it out, where you don't want to see culture collapse because you were trying to, like, get through the day and have somebody manage people when that wasn't their sweet spot.
Speaker 2:Did she stay with you or did she move on after that conversation?
Speaker 1:She actually stayed for about two or three years and in fact, the person you know, David Brent, ended up at her wedding, which was overseas, and it was a nice run Like again, it doesn't always work that way.
Speaker 2:I know other people where you flip it and somebody's like thank you very much.
Speaker 1:Credit to you as the business owner for having that conversation and to her for saying because most people would not have survived that ego blow Right and I think like part of it's luck, part of it's knowing who the person is and part of it's it wouldn't matter, like if you don't, if you are putting somebody in charge, you can't build a team if the person up top is not capable of leading it.
Speaker 1:Because, frankly, that's when you get your $500 chicken wings. You know is when you have somebody who you know and it's those gaps that are there. It's also, I think it's not a solid foundation to build on, but those are those life moments and I think that when I go to masterminds and I know you guys do a great job you know, especially in that zero to $3 million range, that one of the biggest issues that I see over and over again is when do I get and who do I get, as that non-lawyer operator person. To me, when I look back on what revolutionized our firm, it was when Brian stepped in. We were way late to the game. We came in way later than we should have. We had other managers, but it's when you can get somebody who's rowing in the same direction as you, that's when the magic happens, because you get, you're just getting shit done.
Speaker 2:We we get that question a lot, uh, especially after we started using us four or five years ago and calling me the integrator is when do I need an integrator, and does it need to be a lawyer and do they need to be an owner? So for for, from your perspective, when do you think revenue wise, people wise that a law firm needs to bring in somebody to be in that integrator capacity in order to continue to grow to the next level?
Speaker 1:I think the integrator like I almost would take it backwards, Like the integrator is a step beyond what I'm even focused on. It is an integrator of sorts, right, You're not even in the OS, You're not ready for EOS. You're there. You probably have an admin, right, that's the first person who's there and it's like that admin to office manager to you know, either manager, director of ops or law firm administrator. There's a continuum, it's the same role that sort of grows based on how much management is there and then that piece, I think, eventually morphs into, could morph into the integrator if it's a non-lawyer. But for most people when they start, sadly they have to sit in that integrator seat because they're not paying enough to have a true integrator, right, and that you're sort of like you may have the administrative component but at the end of the day it's still you in that seat until you're willing to invest enough to have somebody who you could call an integrator but really is a true integrator.
Speaker 2:What do you think is the background and maybe, like in a major metropolitan area, the pay and the salary that you'd be giving to somebody who's coming in and being able to run that seat?
Speaker 1:I'm still stuck 20 years ago, like as far as what salary should be, yeah, okay, and I think that, given it's a national audience, it's so variant based on where you are. You know, we see stuff in the DC bubble historically with a little bit of softness now but historically you could go to AARP and get a job for $1.20 just with any experience and now you know so whereas my friends in, you know, middle of Florida could get a rock star for 65,000. And so it really varies. But what I would say is it's thinking about what you're doing and what could be done by the non-lawyer and making those lists and then and then finding it. You know, finding that right person based on what's on that list.
Speaker 1:And again, I joke a lot with Jay on our podcast that, like the rule of threes, when you hire somebody for a new position, likely the first person's not going to work. The second person might not work, it's very often the third person. But part of that is we don't know what we really want. We think we know, we tell ourselves that, but somebody comes and they're like they're, they're, they're really great at at big picture. But you know you really need attention to detail because that's the piece that's getting lost or whatever it is. You sort of figure out what that skillset is and that I find that a lot of people are you know.
Speaker 1:Again, it goes back to the point we were talking about before. They're holding onto stuff themselves, what can be outsourced, and then, once it is and you let somebody else run with it, the more the better. No-transcript, whatever it is that you need to do, like if you're at the point where you need to be in court, because that's what's making the money. Great. If you're able to then get trial lawyers where you're not in court, you're making the phone ring more. Whatever you can do.
Speaker 1:I think it's probably the best book on the topic might be Buy Back your Time, dan Martell's piece, and just I mean, he's maniacal on this, but it's a great exercise. What is it? And I think you take it too far. There are pieces where it goes too far, but the idea that as a business owner, what can you do? That costs tens of thousands of dollars. Don't think of it as an annual salary, think of it as quarterly or six months, you know, to get yourself to the point where that's not on your, and then what can you do with that time that would allow you to excel further, how maniacal do you think you need to be about doing the calculation of the ROI?
Speaker 2:of what else I would spend my time on?
Speaker 1:right.
Speaker 2:So if I had somebody to come in and run, payroll for me, or if I had somebody to come in and do the marketing for me? How deeply do I need to think about what would I do with those other five or eight hours before I make that decision?
Speaker 1:I think it's. That's the key. That's when you say where are you? How are you going to get from A to B? It's those decisions, like in a perfect world. If you look at your clients that go from zero to 3 million, they're not doing bookkeeping. By 3 million they're probably not doing. They're not answering the phones, they're not the person who's running the team, whatever team that is.
Speaker 1:So I think that each of those things are, as soon as you can find somebody who does it at a price that makes sense within your budget, the sooner the better. You might start fractional. You know you don't need most people don't need a full-time in-house bookkeeper to begin with, but for a couple hundred dollars a month. If you can stop doing that and stop cutting checks and use an online bill paying $100 a month, if you can stop doing that and stop cutting checks and use an online bill paying billcom or wherever your, your bank's version is amazing because it allows you the the freedom to do one less thing and it's not like you're forgetting about it. You're still going to. You may still be the guy who goes in a cruise all that you should be but the sooner you can get those pieces off. Those are cheap. To me those are the easy ones. Right? That's not hiring $200 for a bookkeeper, that's not an associate, right, hiring a person to be there.
Speaker 1:You know, gary Falco is one of my mentors on the intake side. You know, anything is better than outsourced answering service. So the sooner you get to the point and he ran one, I mean my point is, the sooner you can have somebody in-house trained. The first thing you'll do is listen to their recorded calls. The second thing you'll do is have somebody listen to their, not you listen to their recorded calls. So it's with each of these steps giving you that opportunity. You know, if you're by the hour person, it's pretty simple to figure out what each of these things are. If you could pay $200 a month for your outsourced bookkeeper and that's going to save you eight hours and you're billing at $40 an hour, that's kind of a no-brainer, assuming you have the work to bring in.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's funny that you know having the in-house intake has really took us to the next level within the last 18 months or so, because if nothing else you know, you cut out that step of having to listen to the recording because you can hear the person through the wall or somebody can hear the person through the wall.
Speaker 1:Okay, but I'll challenge you on that For a mistake I've made. Gary always told me to listen to recorded calls and I didn't. And then we had an pre-COVID. We had 12 people in the basement of the law firm and I remember we didn't listen to recorded calls and I would walk down. I'd walk around. Everybody sounded great and one day like we got the recorded call file and this woman was having a bad day and some lady is bawling her eyes out on a PI matter and she's going uh-huh, uh-huh. So it sounded good to me but it wasn't responsive to what was on the other end. So I think if there's one thing that you should be doing is ignore recorded calls at your peril. This doesn't mean every call. Start with three a month. God forbid three a week. It would take you. If you sort of use the mouse and bounce around, it'll take you all of five minutes.
Speaker 2:You mentioned AI Bubble earlier.
Speaker 1:Yeah, is there an AI recording product or something of the like. That's a shortcut for lawyers that you like. At this point I can't advocate for any one. We're testing a ton. You know, I have friends as frugal as Jay Ruane who have written their own scripts in ChatGBT. There are third-party softwares.
Speaker 1:So I don't want to say what's right for you in a particular firm, but the answer is it's there for some, but it's coming. And if it's not there already, you know it's there for some, but it's coming. And if it's not there already, you know the difference. May be you only listen to a couple of calls and the rest are AI. Ai is getting to the point where it can tell tone. It can. You know it's going to be. It won't be long before Salesforce or whatever you know, whatever CRM you're using is popping up suggestions for the intake person. I've already seen it like. I've already seen it like where on the just the otter that might be running parallel to even this recording now where it's suggesting questions. It's crazy. So again, I don't know which brand to recommend, but it's there and getting better by the day.
Speaker 2:Have you seen those videos of somebody doing like a MIT entrance exam online and it's reading the question from the examiner and it's suggesting the answer to them. He's just reading the script back to them.
Speaker 1:I mean it's magical. Is it perfect? No, but it's pretty amazing. I think that when I say bubble, this isn't basing, that it's not real. The internet was real. It's just Wall Street valuations when stuff's going for you know 50 times earnings like that's not how business is done and the question is, what will it be and what's just like we saw at the dot-com bubble. I'm sure the major players you know, chad, chibiti and Jen and I aren't going anywhere. But what are these third parties that are sort of the intermediaries that law firms are onto? You know I, hopefully they adapt and they find that home. But is there a point where you won't need third parties because the actual? You'll be able to build it yourself.
Speaker 2:So you got a book coming out sometime this fall.
Speaker 1:We do Very excited, you know. I know I saw your dad speak about this probably 17 or 18 years ago. I, you know, I've been part of the book, We've done some collaborative books and things like that, but finally putting pen to paper for a local SEO book it's what's built my book, it's what's built my firm, it's what's built Blue Shark and local search, chatgbt and all is still king when it comes to finding buying units and, very excited and proud Hopefully not too soon after this airs we'll be able to get one in your hands.
Speaker 2:You, locally, are the king of the Google business profile. You guys have what like 65, 67?.
Speaker 1:Crazy, you know. You know our, our model had been that we used we used one for each lawyer, you know, and Google following Google's rules the Google business profile. So certain stuff is branded with the firm where we have offices, but having practitioner profiles is one of those things that was tremendous. Like buyer beware, as a law firm owner, know that if you do that you have risk when people leave. That said, it allows you to scale and expand and again, over the years, a lot has changed. We used to think multi-websites, having different websites for different things, was best. Over time, Google's pushed us back towards a single website. But the multiple Google business profiles can say hey, we service this whole area and, based on the fact that we're in a world that's post-proximity update, where Google adds near me to practically every search, it might be you, you know, you and your dad may be the right answer for people for a hundred miles around, but from a Google point of view, they're not giving you that unless there's a closer nearby office.
Speaker 2:How are you managing your time now? You got two businesses. You have a ton of employees. I see you at every conference in every city. How are you? And then you have family, right. How are you splitting your?
Speaker 1:time. So I think partly I think I am travel a fair bit, but like probably less than people would think, based on the fact that the socials, the interwebs, these conversations end up amplifying who you are and where you are. But I'm pretty lucky We've been able to sort of use the EOS model, put me in the visionary seat, which allows me to sort of be out there, be on the road, speak where somebody that's how I started the business, I was cheap, I didn't like buying conference tickets Invite me to come and speak. Two things happened. One, it was free and two, the most interesting people were in the green room before you spoke and I really enjoyed that. And I didn't have a product then and I looked around and everybody else had a product they were selling. I'm like, why don't I have a product? And then Blue Shark came to be. So that became. You know it was a double whammy. You know sometimes you might get a referral for price bettowets and sometimes it might be a connection that led to a Blue Shark retainer.
Speaker 1:And so I spend my days trying to elevate I'm still in the weeds on management more than I would like to, but trying to take that seat. I mean I never thought of the term form. My colleagues at the firm sort of laugh at the visionary title. But the idea is what's next? How are we pushing the needle, bringing it full circle Now that we have intake and we have good data to look at? We have certain attorneys in certain areas that close their own cases and there's one differentiator between who makes money and who doesn't, with people signing cases and it's not the law school they went to or how compelling they are on the phone.
Speaker 1:Those are very important I mean the law school but how compelling on the phone? Very important but it's response time. And if you shit the bed and take your time and we're talking about different stages of life you have kids, you're sort of distracted. If you have different stages of life, then that person is distracted, that response time goes down, you're making less money, and so to me it is really important that as you scale, those systems are in place and that my job is to make sure that those people get what they need.
Speaker 1:I remember when I was a baby lawyer, the partner I worked for, legendary guy in the transaction space, and I work for you, and I didn't really understand it. Now I get it. My job is to make sure that each of the people have what they need to do their job and then, if that's the case, then they're performing at their highest level. I don't have to sit in that seat and I can go off and attend conferences and have nice cocktails with you and think about how you know, winding up here in 2025 with 67 locations and 300 people, 150 people, whatever the number is within the firm?
Speaker 1:Not at all.
Speaker 2:What was the original idea?
Speaker 1:No, it was just to see if we could monetize a criminal practice. At the time we started there were lawyers that had scaled modestly and were usually shitty, shitty lawyers in law firms and they were amazing solos. So I took Dave, who was like the lawyer's lawyer, you know he's done in the intervening years he had two innocence project cases, walk guys out of jail, teaches at Harvard for a week a year. I wanted to scale that level of legal acumen. That was my goal and that's why it was fun.
Speaker 1:And even at Blue Shark you know again, we don't choose our clients a hundred percent, but like when we get somebody who's a lawyer's lawyer, where you're getting that guy that you're lucky to find for there's nothing better. That's the, that's the home run, because then you're connecting people with the right person to be doing it. We know enough we can take the guy who's a second year living in his mom's basement and make him look like a rock star, but it's a. It's a hell of a lot more rewarding when you have somebody who's the right answer, who should be doing the work Awesome.
Speaker 2:And so what's next for you guys? Other states, other practice areas, what do you think we're going to work on now?
Speaker 1:You know I look at it this way. We've seen what's worked. We've tried to prune what doesn't, sort of. You know, I went a little bit crazy pre-COVID. We had immigration. We had a bunch of other areas saying, okay, let's curtail that. I've seen, you know, criminal.
Speaker 1:I think it's gotten tighter in a lot of ways, especially as they, you know, because it's up and down with the economy. Our PI department's been really very blessed and you know it's growing to the point where it's going to be half the firm for the first time ever, which is pretty, pretty incredible. The area that I sort of talked to a lot of baby lawyers about that the fastest way to coin in this space to me is family law, in the sense that there's so much demand, people squeeze in order to be able to get out of a bad situation and very often it's people spending irrationally, which is, as a business, a good place to be. I love the fact that we have practitioners that are not looking to milk it but rather provide zealous representation. But to me that's sort of an interesting space I think is undertapped at the moment comparatively to a lot of areas.
Speaker 2:And that seems to be the space that is tailing very quickly on the heels of personal injury. So you see, the personal injury lawyers tend to be on the bleeding edge of marketing and business operations and family law seems to be right behind it. I think for that reason and also, in my view, is because you know there are kids involved it's a long tail relationship, right, it's all. All of the wonderful young lawyers who are great at arguing are getting a ton of experience doing it in family law. It's true, very cool. Well, thank you so much, brian. This has been awesome. All right, man, this is great. Where can people find more about you? What?
Speaker 1:conference. You know that I'm pretty easy to find Facebook if you're middle-aged, like me, if you hit the other ones, linkedin if you're more business-minded. But any of these places love to talk shop and appreciate the opportunity and the forum here. Thank you, happy birthday, thank you.
