Life Beyond the Briefs

Growing a Profitable PI Firm with Pods and KPIs | Hunter Garnett

• Brian Glass

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When your intake gets sharper, everything else gets easier. In this episode, Brian sits down with Alabama injury lawyer Hunter Garnett to unpack how he builds teams that own outcomes, trains intake to convert without sounding scripted, and uses pods and clear scoreboards to drive profit. We get into hiring your next lawyer at the right time, ramping super-green assistants fast, onboarding experienced staff without chaos, and writing SOPs that people actually follow. Then we talk spend that makes sense. PPC, LSAs, and SEO. What to track. What to pause. How to match your marketing “spigot” to your capacity. Along the way, Hunter shares how community involvement brings better cases and how simple nurture turns past clients into superfans. Practical, candid, and built for operators who want results that last.

What you’ll learn

  • The intake roles and training that move conversions
  • How to structure pods, set scoreboards, and measure profit by team
  • A simple way to time your next hire and onboard to speed
  • The real-world economics of PPC, LSAs, and SEO for PI firms
  • Community and client-nurture plays that compound

Connect with Hunter

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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.

Want to connect with Brian?

Follow Brian on Instagram: @thebrianglass
Connect on LinkedIn

SPEAKER_00:

And know they want to hire you. That's how I think about attracting talent is I want to have a brand affinity that attracts like-minded people that believe in the mission and they come there and it's not I mean part of it is yes, I'm interviewing is this the right person, but you know, the second stage of an interview is oh, I found the right person. Now how do I convince them that I'm the right place for them to work? The best candidates have options. And I want them to know before they ever meet me, like to be nervous, like I'm getting to meet this guy that I've been following on LinkedIn for two years that like takes great care of his team.

SPEAKER_01:

Hey friends, welcome to another episode of Life Beyond the Briefs, the podcast that helps you run a law firm without it running your life. Here's the promise. By the end of this conversation, you'll know how to tighten the first five minutes of a client journey, build pods that actually own outcomes, and turn your scoreboard into profit. We'll break down intake roles and scripts that convert without sounding robotic. We'll show you the difference between an intake specialist and an intake manager, and when to hire each. You'll hear how to onboard brand new assistants and experienced staff so they hit numbers fast. We'll talk SOPs that move cases forward instead of gathering dust. We also get real about spend, PPC, LSAs, and SEO. What to track, what to pause, how to buy back your time, and fuel the pods you already have. Plus a few levers most firms ignore. Community involvement that brings better cases, simple nurture that turns past clients into super fans, incentives that keep the team aligned. Our guest is Hunter Garnett, operator, builder, straight shooter. Grab a notebook. You're about to get a practical playbook you can use this week. Let's dive in. Welcome into the show. Today's guest, another repeat guest. Hunter uh Garnett and I recorded an episode like must have been two, two and a half years ago, early, very early days of this podcast, and actually back when it had a different name. Hunter is an injury lawyer in Alabama at Garnett Patterson Injury Lawyers. He's I mean, you tell me. Tell me how how many years you are into the practice, into your practice, and then kind of size and scope of your firm.

SPEAKER_00:

Eight and a half as a PI lawyer, open my whole legal career. Then four, almost four, basically on my own. I have a I have an older law partner.

SPEAKER_01:

So four and four and a half or so years working for somebody else, and then busted the doors and went on.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, I had a residency with like the two best trial lawyers in Huntsville, where I wrote all the briefs, tried second chair on all the cases, big stuff, took a bunch of depots, tried a bunch of stuff on my own, started to acquire cases on my own, and then one of the things that impresses me about you is that you you seem to be one of these people that you do all of the things, right?

SPEAKER_01:

You'll go in and you'll try a five, ten thousand dollar case, you'll settle a million dollar death case, you're also doing all the marketing, you're also writing the SOPs and doing the recruiting of these folks who were overseas by some some pretty interesting gorilla like LinkedIn marketing. So we'll talk about all of that today. But but you make it all look pretty easy. And by the way, you're also like investing in real estate, playing basketball and raising a young son. So how are you splitting your time with all of these things?

SPEAKER_00:

I'll tell you one, I think I like Tim Ferris' mindset on like kind of working in seasons. So I try to pick one thing every quarter to crush, whether it be fitness, whether it be marketing at the law firm, operations at the law firm. Sometimes I can pick two things to crush, uh, and I try to pick things that like I enjoy. Like right now, it's fitness is not it for me. Like I can't make myself go to the gym for an hour a day, six days a week. But second quarter of this year, fitness was my thing. Like I went every day and enjoyed being there. Um, so I tend to work in seasons, pick like two or three things I want to crush, pick two or three things I want to improve on. And then the rest I'm maintaining or maybe leveling up percent or whatever it is.

SPEAKER_01:

Do you have a hard time moving from that season of crush to the lead the season of either maintenance or I mean, if I think we're being honest, like most of us, when you get past the crushing season, you're letting something slip because you can only spin so many plates at a time.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, I mean, that's having a good team helps a lot, right? Like my team kind of know like my my firm, I've built a foundation where it can do all the table stake stuff and keep us alive and we can grow 10% a year just organically and we can move cases along without it being super taxing. And so I just kind of pick one of these pillars that my whole life is founded on to really build up. The rest of it does a pretty good job of staying stable and then you just you just never slip. So like I don't have really bad periods of life where I have a terrible diet. For example, like if I go, we went to Disney last week, bad diet for a week, I'm not gonna do that for a month or two months or three. Same thing with fitness. Like I haven't been to the gym in a month. I'm not gonna do that two months in a row. I'm gonna at least do the bare minimum once a week to maintain what I've got. My law firm's the same way. You know, like I'm gonna still touch, I'm gonna still touch every case every 30 days. I'm gonna still meet with my people as often as I need to. I'm gonna still grow the firm just kind of organically, but I might not have my foot on the gas from knocking on chiropractory doors or mailing old letters or every client up personally for a Google review. You know, you just gotta kind of got a VIC.

SPEAKER_01:

What is your operational rhythm with your team? So you told me about 350 cases. I know you got people in-house, you have a new lawyer, you have people overseas. We could talk about that. You're hitting every one of those cases every 30 days. Is there a a system or is a case management system that's pinging you? Like how does that work?

SPEAKER_00:

We're implementing some technology that's gonna be pretty cool, but right now it's just old-fashioned hard work touching them, right? And so we have every other month, every other week, I have case management meetings where I meet with the case managers one-on-one and we go through the things that they want to go through. Okay. And and they have their they have their priority cases that we go through every other week. And then once a month, we go through and touch every single case and they tell me every detail. I know a lot of these cases kind of front to back, have a high capacity for remembering. I mean, there's a lot of information about cases, and that's a blessing. So, like my Monday last Monday, it was that day. It was my first day at Disney. My wife went to like Disney Springs or something with the in-laws, and I just crushed through 380 cases in a day, touched them all.

SPEAKER_01:

Are these one-on-one meetings with the case managers?

SPEAKER_00:

Yes. They're one-on-one with my EA in the room and with usually the newest case manager. If we've got somebody that's kind of training just for her to learn throsmosis, yes. Are you still doing the intake and the sales, or you have somebody handling that for you? I'm doing the intake and sales. I'm trying to get that off my plate. ASAP, that's my first quarter main project is having a legitimate intake department.

SPEAKER_01:

So here's here's what I will tell you, having done that about a year ago, is it really will challenge your ability to remember all of the cases by name, right? So about a year ago, I got almost all the way out of intake and said, I'll I'll still hop on if there's a you know, seven-figure case on the line. I'm like, just transfer it to me right now. But everything under that is being handled by our intake manager now. And we have cases in our system, not necessarily that I'm working on, but I could not go through and pick up and easily look at every single case because I just don't know these people's names. And it's a weird, it's a weird place to be in because, you know, this is this is what we talk about, right? We want to grow to the place where your people have the ability to operate on the cases and you can make money while you're not uh doing it. But I think for somebody like me, and and I suspect for somebody like you who actually gets a lot of value out of doing the work in the cases and enjoys going and trying the$5,000 case where no money was offered and winning it, right? There's um there's kind of this next level challenge that comes with not actually knowing the name of everybody who's a client of your firm. So that's that's the thing that you need to mentally prepare for as you shift intake and sales off of your plate to somebody else.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, it makes sense. I found though when I hit like 250 cases, they started running together regardless. You know, I can remember 100 of the really good ones, right? But I still want to, because I enjoy it, I still want to do, I think, a lot of the in-person somebody wants to come to the office and meet me, like I'm gonna meet them. Like I'll make time.

SPEAKER_01:

Well, what in in Huntsville, like, what is that metropolitan area like? Is it in other words, like, are most of your clients within easy driving distance, or is somebody driving 45 minutes in to come and meet with you?

SPEAKER_00:

Sometimes they are coming 30, 45 minutes in. I have two offices. I have one that's like centrally located to the Tennessee Valley, cut to the state of Alabama in thirds, north to south. It's right in the middle of the top third. That's where I've just recently moved. It's kind of my home community. So I meet over there a lot. And then Huntsville's kind of in the corner. And yes, it's not unusual. You drive 30, 45 minutes, uh, you know, 15 to 45 is kind of the radius until people drive.

SPEAKER_01:

And I meet almost nobody, right? You know, this is a uh COVID fallout thing. It's like we stopped inviting people into the office and we offered Zoom for a while, but nobody actually really wanted to do Zoom, especially not in Northern Virginia. And so almost everybody's just phone only. It's not that I don't want you to come in. It's just I I my bias is I would not want to go into the office if I didn't have to. And so I just assume nobody else is. But that yeah, that also is a disconnect. Like it makes it challenging to remember much about the file if you can't even picture the person's face.

SPEAKER_00:

Really challenging. And you know, handsome young lawyers like us, like we're more memorable too when the client comes in. Like, like seriously. So I tell people whenever I get on the phone with them, I say, hey, you got a good case. I can get started on it today. I can send you paperwork over the phone, you sign with your finger, and you know, but I'm a little old-fashioned. I would like to meet you. You know, I'm gonna be working, I've got a newborn at home. There's gonna be a night where I'm working on your case and it's late and I'd rather be home with you. And if I have a face with a name and not just a name on a piece of paper, it's gonna make it a little easier to stay till seven or eight o'clock to work on your case. And then but we're close to all the doctors' offices. I just tell them like, hey, next time we hit the doctor, like, call us when you get done, see my men, like pop in. We'll chop it up for five minutes, be glad to meet you.

SPEAKER_01:

I like that. Maybe we'll maybe we'll start implementing that. Although I am out of the office most days by four o'clock to go coach something. You're you'll you'll hit that stage now. You're in the no sleeping at night stage. Uh, there is another stage where it's like, man, where did all my time go? Let's talk about finding finding people overseas. So you shared before we hopped on here that you've got like this portfolio of future employees of your firm who are what'd you what did you say, in Columbia? A lot of Colombian attorneys, yeah. A lot of Colombian.

SPEAKER_00:

So tell tell tell everybody else that story. Okay, so I'll back up a little bit. I don't know if you've heard this whole story. So I hired my first VA through Ethan Allstroff's entity. Okay. I can't remember what it's called. Now it's attorney assistant. Attorney Assistant, yeah. Yeah. She was in the Philippines. She cleared our medical records bottleneck, and it was sweet. Yeah, we were growing fast. She was a big help. And then I hired my senior paralegal's first cousin. It was in Mexico. He was driving a cab at the time and to work through a bunch of leads that I had, mass swart leads, and he did a great job. He did a better job than I can find somebody here in my city. Started to pay him good money, like life-changing money, and he's very appreciative. So that was kind of the full circle for me of like I can hire cheaper, better, and I can change people's lives. I decided then I wanted to really dig into it. I found that Colombian attorneys were the best fit for the eye, just because the laws are similar, their English is good, their infrastructure is good down there internet-wise. So I started to post on LinkedIn. Well, I added a bunch of Colombian attorneys on LinkedIn, like hundreds. Then I started to add, I added them, I started to post just my values. Like just telling, like, here's my mission, here's what motivates me, here's the type of person I am, here's how I treat people that work for me for the purpose of attracting candidates. And it worked. And so now we have really good people that work for us who um and then now we're working on the next stage. I'm talking about this on LinkedIn a bit, training. I've supported this mission in Guatemala for like forever. And those kids are starting to graduate, and I'm starting to train them to be legal assistants. They're not case managers yet. I mean, they're 19, 20 years old. And so, you know, it's working for us. That's kind of what that's how I see us grow in the next couple of years in terms of staff. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

Pipeline of of high school to legal assistant to maybe case manager. Is the uh technol technology and the internet infrastructure as good in Guatemala as it is in Colombia?

SPEAKER_00:

It's it's pretty good. Um, I haven't had any issues yet at all. I mean, my Colombian attorneys, like, they never are down for internet issues. Guatemala I haven't had any issues yet, but it's pretty new.

SPEAKER_01:

I had an EA briefly in he was either Colombian and living in Venezuela or the other way around. The other way around. But it seemed like every other week he was having to go down to Walmart and hook up to Walmart's Wi-Fi to lock in because the power was going out at his apartment.

SPEAKER_00:

That's unusual. That's something we test though. It's part of the hiring process. It's like I want to know what you're in that. How do you test that? Well, they have those like you know, speed tests. Oh, speed tests, yeah. Yeah, speed tests usually. Now, power. I mean, I've got a guy in Mexico that like finally he got a raise. I was like, go buy a generator because I gotta have you. Like when your power goes out for four hours a week, like cut this thing on my phone.

SPEAKER_01:

But I just want to hit just come back to that re recruiting pipeline that you've set up. Because I think most lawyers, and I I wouldn't even have really thought to go and reverse engineer it in this way, like you grabbing the LinkedIn Premium account and just adding lawyers, young lawyers, I assume, from the top schools in a in a country where there's a pay rate arbitrage, but where the culture is in the system is similar. Where did you get that idea?

SPEAKER_00:

I don't know. I mean, it just made sense to me. Like that's what I mean, if I was gonna hire an attorney here at a law school, I would go to the three law schools in my state and I would add I mean, I'm doing that right now. Like I'm trying to attract lawyers, U.S. lawyers now, and I'm adding first, second, third year lawyers all the time. Yeah, I want them to know me. Because it's just like this, like it's just like when somebody walks in your office, if they found you on Google and you're a commodity, I can sell them. Like I can sell people face to face. But when they walk in and they have an affinity with you and they've seen you at the ball games and they've seen your hometown billboards, whatever it is, like there's no selling. Like they walk in, they know they want to hire you. That's how I think about attracting talent, is I want to have a brand affinity that attracts like-minded people that believe in the mission, and they come there and it's not-I mean, part of it is yes, I'm interviewing is this the right person, but you know, the second stage of an interview is oh, I found the right person. Now how do I convince them that I'm the right place for them to work? The best candidates have options. And I want them to know before they ever meet me, like to be nervous, like, I get to meet this guy that I've been following on LinkedIn for two years that like takes great care of his team.

SPEAKER_01:

This is one of the things that we candidly did poorly over the last few years. So I just hired a lawyer. It took forever, and it took way longer than I felt like it should have taken. But I think that the reason it took so long was uh we've done a poor job in our own community of keeping our brand in front of young lawyers. Um, because I haven't been going to like the lower level court and I haven't been hanging out in the hallways where the young lawyers are, and I haven't done any kind of recruiting events at uh at law schools locally. And so in the back of my, like when we got to the end of this hiring cycle, I'm like, I gotta make sure we don't end up in a position where we don't have that roster again the next time we need to hire because I can't wait nine months from like, okay, I need somebody to finally have a butt in a seat.

SPEAKER_00:

Right. Yeah, I agree. I'm doing the same thing. I mean, I'm I would love to have an I think that's the biggest advantage of an internship program, right? Is to build your brand, not just with that one intern that you hire for the summer, but the 10 that you interview with and the more that you didn't select for the interview and the 50 more that didn't even apply because they've already got something or whatever it is, but they see it come across.

SPEAKER_01:

And and the trial ad professor at the law school, the going again, going upstream of the people who are actually, you know, your your target market to the people who are advising your target market about where they should they should take a take a job.

SPEAKER_00:

And it goes this is something too. Like I sponsor our local paralegals chapter for whatever I don't even know the acronyms. I think there's like two or three. Yeah. They meet once each, I don't know how often they meet. We were gonna have a cookout at my farm, actually, but my little boy kind of took his birth to mess that up a bit. But like, hey, then they want 500 or a thousand bucks to go to Top Golf. I'm like, I'm glad to give it to them. And I just will go over there and chop it up with them for 10 minutes. And I know that I mean, I had a paralegal here yesterday interviewing that just reached out. I'm not hiring, but she wanted to meet. And guess what? Like, if I post a job, those 20 ladies that I've been buying golf top golf tickets for every quarter, like it's gonna pay for itself a hundred times over. That's interesting.

SPEAKER_01:

That's right. We yeah, we do the same thing. We host uh the Northern Virginia Paralegal Association. Like we let them use our our training center for meetings. We make sure the stacks are the stacks are fully stocked anytime they're in the office. You know, whatever, whatever drinks um they've requested before are like there, so that when we need to hire another paralegal, we have that warm pipeline. And where I always tell my team, like, be on the lookout for somebody who's good at their job and hates their boss, right? Because that's that's your next teammate.

SPEAKER_00:

I tell I tell my team, like, hey, every time you deal with a lawyer that's an ass, like like let's remember him. Like it'd probably be pretty easy to steal his paralegal one day if we really need somebody.

SPEAKER_01:

All right, so that's the employee attraction formula. What are you doing to attract clients now? Same kind of thing?

SPEAKER_00:

It's the same formula. It's just it's even really similar tactics, but it's, you know, the formula for attracting employees or cases is about the same. It's you're a good person and you get comfortable with self-promotion, and then you learn some tactics to leverage that and get as much generate as much attention as possible. Like that's the formula. What is the the Huntsville, Alabama self-promotion? Well, so I do we do I I think I think you got I'm 33, right? I'm not even from Huntsville, Regional, I'm from a rural community. Can't bull the ocean. I think you pick as small of a viable market as possible. And so my first one was my home county. It's like 120, 130,000 people, you know, candidly. I think we own that county now. I think we get all the good, not all, but we get most of the good cases. We're gonna continue to grow market share, but we're gonna go from 50 to 75. And so now we're looking for other little niche markets. Spanish speakers in the Huntsville area. Huntsville attracts a lot of people moving from out of state, a lot of people from Northern Virginia, actually. So tr transplants, like that's somebody that I'm interested in on a brand with. So I like to pick as small of a niche as possible and then just try to put myself in front of them.

SPEAKER_01:

Then um, are you doing PPC, LSA, SEO spend, anything like that?

SPEAKER_00:

That's pretty new. So I've been doing just super bare bones SEO, just basically paying a web developer. Maps have been king the last five years, you know, and so maps, you don't I don't think you need to pay tens of thousands of dollars a month. You just get reviews, make sure profile set up right, and answer your phone calls, like, and you're gonna get some some cases in my market anyway. That's changing some. Huntsville's now, we're one of the testing grounds for AIO, like AIO. It's our maps are totally gone. So I've seen a dip in that. Interesting. Yeah, we're yeah, it's new. Like all the surrounding communities still look the same. Huntsville uh is different. And actually, if you Huntsville, if you do personal jewelry near me, it looks like it used to. If you do just personal lawyer and you're here in Huntsville, it looks normal. But you add in Huntsville, it looks different. So adjusting to that uh somehow, but I am running some PPC now. I'm running some LSAs for the first time. I have a really good fractional CMO. It's a good media buyer. So I trust him. I'm gonna turn him loose for six months, and I'm not looking at the numbers. The calls are way up though. I don't know what our average cost per case is right now, but we're getting a bunch of phone calls. And I want to spigot that I can kind of turn on and off. You know, SEO is a snowball, like you just kind of keep rolling, can't really pick a lot. I want to spigot where like if I find the right lawyer and I want to hire him, just turn that spigot wide open for a year, you know?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, right. What are man? The question just the question just left me. Yeah. What so when you're talking to your your PPC and your LSA person, and you say you don't know currently like what it's costing you to acquire a case, but you're gonna wait six months and see what happens. How have you either with him or in your own mind defined what success is gonna look like in six months when you're looking back?

SPEAKER_00:

Well, we talk a lot about he comes, he originally came from a big marketing firm. And their goal was to maximize impressions um and maximize the number of cases. That's not my goal. My goal is to maximize ROI, you know, whatever I feel comfortable. Basically maximize ROI compared to my capacity. Two months ago, he had a hard job because I was like at capacity. I didn't want more cases, but I wanted to know if I could get more cases. Uh so we tested and it was not easy. We didn't really have enough of a budget to have good reliable data. But I went with my gut, it seemed to be working. We hired a lawyer, bumped it up. We're spending like$12,000 a month, 10, 11, 12 a month on PPC mostly. Feels like cases, I know cases are coming in. I just don't know if they're$1,500 cases or$3,000 cases. I know my numbers on the operation side, and so I know that they're profitable regardless. So that's where we're at.

SPEAKER_01:

That's interesting. And and one of the problems that you have down in Alabama is you you relatively low or really low um minimum liability limits. So you could ten thousand dollar for liability, is that what it is? No, we're$2,515.

SPEAKER_00:

Oh, you are? Okay. We have good stacking too. The trouble actually is in the quality of I got spooled with like really, really, really good clients. And so my average case value, like for litigation, for example, is$38,000. And for pre-fee or case value? Fee. Yeah. And that's healthy. Yeah. Yeah. And and even across the board, we're at like 18,000. Prelit's about 11.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

And so that's a product of having really the when you have a spread from 11 to 38, that tells me I got a client that like insurance lawyers are sitting in the ring with them, they believe them, they know a jury's gonna believe them. My case values are increasing. My client, my ideal client's not a typically a very litigious person.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, so that's so Oh yeah. Finish finish that thought.

SPEAKER_00:

And then I would just Google leads, it's not like that. Like people that don't do research typically they don't have you know word of mouth type stuff going on. You know, they call a crucial lawyer that pops up. This is anecdotal. I don't have empirical data for that. Well, I do actually. Our average prelit, I have some empirical data, but I think it's gonna be really strong where it's like probably half of the average case value digital leads versus word of mouth.

SPEAKER_01:

Well, that's that's been exactly my experience. Slightly less anecdotal. But for instance, like we ran a non-branded lead gen campaign, and the average fee that that thing produced was$4,000. Now, it only costs us$1,000 to acquire a case under that campaign. And so when I told the guy to turn it off, he's like, Well, you're getting a 4X ROI. I'm like, well, yeah, but my average case value, if it comes through any of my other channels, is$18,000 fee. And so when I'm working on your cases, we're making less than a quarter of the money, even though it didn't cost me that much money to acquire. And there probably is a way, if I thought about it, probably is a way to, you know, offshore those cases where it costs less to produce it. But even that is like it's hard to make that profitable and interesting enough problem to solve when the average fee is 4,000, because the people that respond to those digital ads tend to be like I was in a crash 48 hours ago and I haven't seen a doctor yet. What already you know?

SPEAKER_00:

Well, and I'll tell you, I got my spreadsheet right here. And this is my soft tissue case manager, you know, offshore completely. And this is before attorney time. It's about it's about 3,000 bucks to run my pre-led offshore team to settle a soft tissue, you know, like at the minute that's the average hole in these small cases. Is this per per case? Is your cost of production per case? Yeah. And then you pay a lawyer a thousand dollars to do it and you've eaten up the full 4,000, and you're really in the hole. You know, your ROI is negative.

SPEAKER_01:

No, exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Um, and so the the thought that occurred to me is like if your average fee in litigation is 38 and your average prelid is I think you said eight, either 18 or 11, why not just toss everything into litigation? What what do you think causes that disconnect?

SPEAKER_00:

Well, I litigate my big cases. So I'm cherry picking a bit because like a case comes in and I got a million dollars in coverage and a surgery, like hey, I mean I know my prelid offer is gonna be 100, 150, 200. I just file them. Go ahead and get mine in line. It takes me about a year to get a case ready for trial in my in Madison County, which is where Huntsville is. Takes like two years in my home county. Oh that's part of it. But also, you know, we look at it some some of that$11,000 legal fee is like cutting our fee a little bit to like make it work for the clients where we got a case that it's worth, you know, say it's worth$30,000, the offer is$25. I'd rather reduce my fee a little than litigate it for. And the client would too.

SPEAKER_01:

The rest of your team understand all those economics. Do you explain that to them? You try to teach that?

SPEAKER_00:

That's go we're going through that. I use my soft my soft tissue case manager is like my low, that's my train ground. Okay. So that's where I t that's where my testing ground. So he's really good, so I can throw stuff at him and do different things and he adjusts well. And so he's seeing the numbers now and he knows exactly how it's being measured. And if it works for him, we're gonna expand it to everybody. And I think it's gonna work. I think Q3 of next year, everybody on my team has a spreadsheet and they see the exact numbers that their pod is doing. And that's from that's from big heavy litigation stuff, you know, the 10, 20 cases that me and my senior peerly were working on, that's our pod, down to the pre-lit chiropractor, ER treatment cases and everything in between. Probably about five or six pods. So what wouldn't have happened. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

And um, have you thought about the like how somebody moves up or across a pod from a soft tissue pod to like the next, you know, whatever the next level of case might be for you? I mean, to be candid with you, you know. I would I want to work on the litigation. Like, well, you're not that good at soft tissue pre prelit, so I'm not gonna put you on litigation, right?

SPEAKER_00:

I I am I'm a very open-minded dictator at my law firm. Okay. So I listen to concerns, I listen to everybody, but it's ultimately it's like, hey, you're the soft, you're the slip and fall guy now. Like, you're the slip and fall guy. And I'm gonna set you up to succeed and we're gonna try it. And I've moved people, I moved people around all the time. Sometimes they fail because it's on them, sometimes it's on me, sometimes it's on both of us. A lot of people succeed. And so that's part of it. But then also the incentives matter. So my soft tissue guy, he has more, he adds more value to a case than my Paul. I got a guy that all he does is pause and lens cases. Okay. Most of his job is reducing medical bills. We go like above and beyond to reduce sobro and lens as much as possible, fight tooth and nail. So he's got a different job, he's got different incentives. My soft tissue guy, because those are marginal cases, he's got more upside than anybody, to be candid with you, because he can I mean, if he if he turns a$12,000 case into a$13,500 case and he does that a hundred times, he's made the firm a bunch of money.

SPEAKER_01:

It's a really sophisticated system that you've mapped out in your your short time running this firm. Where do you see the firm going in five years?

SPEAKER_00:

So I have a 12-year kind of that's my big EOS you set like a long term. Sure. My my 12 years to be in a position where my little boy is big enough to like help on a farm that we have like a working farm. Okay. 20, 30 hours a week of like farm work, 20 or 30 hours a week in the office. You know, we're doing some kind of type of work at most. Okay. So that's what we're working towards. And everything from here to there is super fluid. Like, I'm just having fun right now, growing them is fun. I think if I had to guess five years from now, we're at a dozen lawyers, that may be too many.

SPEAKER_01:

Is there capacity in your local market for half a dozen lawyers? Is that a larger Alabama firm now?

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. I mean, well, listen, I am doing the work of like four lawyers right now. So, like, yeah, we just if I just replace myself, we're at six lawyers. Yeah, I mean, there is a ceiling, you know, you don't really see plaintiff's firms bigger than about that here in North Alabama, but it's changing. We're the fastest growing city like in the country. And the traditional partnership model, right, is like, and so I think that if you understand incentives, I think a couple things. If you are like a good person that that people want to work for, and then you understand how to incentivize people and make sure that y'all's goals align, I think you can have as big a firm as you want and you just attract like this guy. Maybe he's got a time and a half as many cases as he can work by himself and he's making good money. Well, I'll pay him really, really good money, plug him into my systems that I've been refining that'll make him way more profitable. He gets to not deal with any of the headaches of operations. He gets to just he's got his personal brand, he's getting half of the legal fee on the cases that he brings in, whatever it looks like. And then on the other end of spectrum, we got a guy that doesn't have many cases, he gets just stuff handed off to him. And obviously the percentages are drastically different, but you could be fluid everywhere in between and you can have formulas that make sense for whatever it is. Now, the tricky thing's gonna be building a firm where people don't view each other as competitors. Like my mindset from the top down, though, is like, I mean, I don't even view my real competitors as competitors. Like Bart Senior and I are pretty cool. Yeah. Start our firms about the same time. Like, you know, if Bart crushes it and doubles his firm the next two years, like I don't view that as, oh man, he's taking market share from me. I'm like, dude, my friend just is crushing it. Good for him. You know, maybe it hit me one or two percent of my top-line revenue or whatever. And so I'm hoping to have that mindset with everybody that's on my team. Like, let's build our personal brands, go acquire cases, pick your niche. You know, like, hey, you're probably not gonna be successful if you pick, if you want to market yourself to blue collar workers in Morgan County, like pretty saturated market. Like, I I I own that. But you want to go to, I don't know, the other side of the Tennessee Valley and go after doctors and their family members as your Ideal clients, great. Like we're not competing for those cases.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. And and the hard part, you know, will be like uh when I used to work in a restaurant, there was always this feeling that um on a Thursday night I got all the two tops and somebody else got the sixes, right? That all the good cases are going to our to somebody else who's not me, right? And there's there's never really any recognition that like, well shit, maybe it's because I'm a B minus lawyer and the other lawyer is an A plus lawyer. But managing those egos as as you grow the firm is is the challenge of like why are they getting all the good cases? Why is it all going over here?

SPEAKER_00:

You know, the Richie Law From and Jason Krims, the COO there, and and they've got like some type of floor, like I this is what I'll do where like, hey, here's the it's transparency. Here's how you climb the ladder. How you want to step to figure cases, like it takes 10 years to get there, and here's each step of the way. Okay. I think something like that makes sense.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, although that is it inspires exactly the competition between your team, right? Because when you describe it as a ladder, if I if I'm gonna move up a rung and there's somebody on that rung, like e either Hunter's gotta double the amount of cases that are coming through the door, or I gotta like knock this person off the rung. So that's that's the mentality, because you you have the abundance mentality, but not all your employees are going to.

SPEAKER_00:

Well, and my law partner doesn't actually like so he's got a son in law school, it's halfway through law school, and like I'm ready to hire another lawyer. First hire is working out great. Let's hire another one. And he's I know he's like, Well, what do we don't have enough cases for my son in a year and a half? And it like never crosses my mind. I told him today, I was like, listen, like we will have twice as many cases two years from now when he's ready, he might clerk for a federal judge. So three years from now, there will be plenty of cases. That's but that's my mindset. And you're right, and I appreciate you identifying that's not true.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, and and you know, our pra the thing about our practice area is there probably are not going to be more car crashes in three years than there are today. There probably will be less. And we can't create additional um, you know, in in any many businesses, you can create a larger market or drive the market larger. In in ours, it really is like it's taking more of the pie that already exists. And it's probably a a pie that's decreasing in size if we're being honest about self-driving cars and where that's going. Although Virginia has more fatal crashes this year than it has had in like five years. So who knows where where all of that is going. I am supposed to ask you about a legless uh Elvis impersonator. That's my favorite former client story.

SPEAKER_00:

I don't think it's appropriate to tell detail. But like my favorite client ever, he actually texts me like two nights ago, and I just remembered I forgot to text him back. So I'll do that today. Last time I talked to him, he was not comfortable with me. I was like wanting to make a video of it because it's such a funny story. So I'll follow up with you if I I'll get that one.

SPEAKER_01:

Okay. All right, man. Well, listen, I've enjoyed catching up with you. Hunter is uh one of the newest members of our mastermind group in great legal marketing. So if you enjoyed this conversation, if you enjoyed being around guys that think like Hunter is a group maybe you should check out, you can send me an email at Brian at greatlegalmarketing.com. Hunter, where can people find out more about you? And if you have a case in Huntsville and they don't want to refer it to BART, how can they find you?

SPEAKER_00:

I mean, LinkedIn, Facebook, you know. One of the secrets to success is making myself easy, easily findable. You know? All right, man.

SPEAKER_01:

Thanks for hanging out.

SPEAKER_00:

Okay. Thanks for having me.

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Brian Glass

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