Life Beyond the Briefs

How to Build a Firm That Can Handle a $100M Case | Ryan McKeen

• Brian Glass

Share episode

Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.

0:00 | 45:13

Most lawyers say they want to “scale.”

Ryan McKeen has actually done it. The real kind. The kind where you build a firm that can take the punch of an eight year case, fund experts and animations, and still keep the lights on. The kind where a $100 million verdict is not a lottery ticket. It is the result of building the machine behind the scenes. 

In this conversation, Ryan tells the story of chasing an eight figure goal when he did not even have a case worth six figures. He talks about what had to change to make that goal even possible, from the team, to the systems, to the way he approached learning trial work. Then he shares the part nobody tells you. Even after the verdict, the case is not “done.” He is still waiting on the appellate ruling, and the clock is ticking at about $9,000 a day in interest. 

But the episode is not just a victory lap. It is a behind the scenes look at what it takes to build a firm that can handle big work without falling apart. We talk about why you cannot skip the reps, why “gut feel” is a terrible hiring plan, and why investing in your team is the highest leverage move most law firm owners refuse to make. 

Then it gets spicy. Ryan breaks down what private equity is doing in legal, why the middle is going to get squeezed, and what smaller firms need to do to stay strong and stay different. Think local pizza place versus Domino’s, but with your clients and your career on the line. 

If you want a clearer path to building a firm that can handle real cases, and still leave room for a real life, this one will hit.

Connect with Ryan

____________________________________
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

Hiring For Always-Learning

SPEAKER_00

I think I think it starts with hiring. I don't think you get there without hiring. So in our job ads, one of our core values was you are always learning, right? And so then when you're interviewing them, you're looking for what they have done in their life to always learn. And it it you know, it doesn't need to be like they were super into being a paralegal, but it's the kind of thing where it's like, hey, you're 30 years old, you never played guitar, you pick up a guitar and you take guitar lessons, or you were like, hey, how'd you learn to play guitar? Well, I watched a lot of stuff on YouTube. Okay, like like that to me tells me that this is a person who is fluid in their their growth and progression as a human being. They're not like they stopped at age 22 and they're frozen all the time. They're trying new things, and it could be cooking, it could be a sport. Uh, but you know, look for those people who are invested in learning.

Show Intro And Ryan’s Background

The $100M Verdict And Appeal

SPEAKER_03

Hello, my friends, and welcome into Life Beyond the Reefs, the number one podcast for lawyers choosing to live lives of their own design and build the kind of practices that they actually like showing up to on Monday. Now, listen, everybody talks about scale, and I think very few people actually know what scale means in the lawyer community. Scale has become one of these words that's like culture, where everybody wants to build the thing, but nobody actually knows what it is. Today's conversation is with my friend Ryan McKean, who has built the thing, and having built a law firm from very small up to 40 employees and a hundred million dollar verdict, Ryan has moved on to his next calling, which is coaching and consulting. He's a professor at University of Connecticut's School of Law, and he operates a company called Best Era Consulting, where instead of attempting to scale, Ryan has put an interesting constraint on the business trying to achieve the goals that he set out while not scaling beyond 10 employees. We talk about how constraints, either time or money, or number of employees, or days worked, or hours, it really feeds the creativity and forces our mind to find different ways to find solutions. This is really like a wide-ranging conversation between two friends that I think you're gonna enjoy. We talk about everything from his$100 million verdict to how do you prepare a case for$100 million to the goal that Ryan had set, uh, which actually was to get a eight-figure verdict and then building the kind of firm that can support that, as well as private equity's influence on the law and all the things that Ryan is doing now to teach the next generation of law students how to grow up in the world of AI, private equity, all digital everything, and still make time for their families. So without further ado, I hope that you enjoyed this conversation with my friend, Ryan McKean. Hey guys, welcome back to Life Beyond the Briefs, the number one podcast for lawyers choosing to live lives of their own design and build the kind of practices that they actually like showing up to on Monday. Another repeat guest from the from the very early days of this podcast, Ryan McKean, who I think our first interaction was you had your hundred million dollar verdict. I I came across you talking about that on LinkedIn, and I reached out and you said, Do you want to I I reached out and asked you to come on the podcast to talk about that? And now we're like, I don't know, probably a year and a half, maybe almost two years later, and you've uh moved on from your law firm, you've started Best Era consulting, and I still see you everywhere on social media. So welcome back to the show.

SPEAKER_00

Well, Brian, and in proof that like, you know, time goes by way faster than we any of us hope or can comprehend, especially those of us who have younger children and spouses and sports games for their kids and businesses and consulting companies. Like things go things go really fast. That verdict was three and a half years ago. Three and a half years ago. And we are still, just today, um, still waiting for a ruling for an appellate court. Uh in Connecticut, they release their rulings every Friday. The appeal was argued like 16 months ago at this point. Yeah. And still they'll they'll get to it when they get to it. Uh the good thing is it accrues$9,000 a day in interest, but it would be really nice to have that closed uh both uh for me, but more importantly for the clients.

SPEAKER_03

It's funny because the when we talked, I said, are there any appellate issues? Because this was right after the verdict. Yeah. And uh and you said, well, there might be, but the interest that it's gonna accrue makes it cost prohibitive for them. And it that turns out maybe to not have been the case.

SPEAKER_00

You know, I mean, I, you know, look, I'm I'm a simple middle class guy, and you know, 20 bucks still feels like a lot to me. And but uh, you know, look, when you're a multinational conglomerate, I guess$9,000 a day just uh you know, it's a rounding error or something.

Scaling A Firm To Support Big Cases

SPEAKER_03

Yeah. So you um you've been small and you grew your firm and scaled the firm. I don't know, at the height, how many people did you have working there? Roughly 40 people. 40 people, and now you're small again with best air consulting. And I've seen you see all over social media, and we were talking just before we um just before we hit recording, about the joys of being small. And so I'm curious, like from the beginning of the firm when you were small through the growth, where where did you think you were going and and where were you planning to go um with the growth of the firm?

SPEAKER_00

Well, what happened was we look, we we were doing I was doing EOS and and traction, and I set the goal of you know a$10 million jury verdict. And I didn't have a case worth$100,000, I didn't have the bank role to do that, I didn't have the the financial bandwidth, I didn't have a litigation parallel, I didn't have anything that I needed, right? And so I set out in March of 2017 to do that. And truly, like it's one of those things where it's like, yeah, let's let's do that. But the practical realities of how do you build a business to actually support that? How do you grow a team? How do you make money while you're working on a big case that you know takes eight years to pay, even though it can pay a lot of money for you? So all of those challenges led to growing a firm that was going to support that outcome. And so initially it started with us in 2017 implementing Filevine, hiring uh a litigation paralegal, hiring an intake person, starting to really think about marketing in a very specific way that we just had not before. That, you know, like like when you're intentional and you listen to smart people, like you're I I mean, I read your dad's books and you know, it worked. But, you know, the intention was that vision, and it truly took a lot more to support that than I think I had understood. So it wasn't like, hey, I want to grow a firm to a hundred people or I want to grow a firm to, you know,$30 million in revenue. Those things sort of became later because it was sort of a thing like, hey, we can, we have the marketing, we have the talent, we have the cases, we have the infrastructure, the machine in place to sort of do this. But, you know, it was not my intention to go out and to grow the team. Now, with Best Era, you know, from the jump, I was like, you know, five-year vision for this company is we're not gonna be more than 10 people. Like I set that constraint because without it, the natural sort of thing for somebody like me is just foot on the gas, foot on the gas, foot on the gas. And I just think for me, it was personally not what I want at the moment or wanted uh when I set out to do this.

SPEAKER_03

Did did the uh did the goalpost move at any point after 2017 from$10 million verdict to something else? No. The goalpost that's such a unique uh EOS five-year, 10-year goal.

Setting Audacious, Measurable Goals

SPEAKER_00

Well, the you know, our goal, you know, look, our you know, goal was just to be the best trial firm in Connecticut, which was audacious enough. As you know, through all the business stuff, you have to have smart goals. Like there's no way to know whether or not you are. So being the sort of simpleton that I am, I looked at other best firms' websites and I was like, you know, in Connecticut, it's a very conservative state in terms of jury verdicts. An eight million, a ten million dollar verdict is like that's what the best firms have. And I'm like, oh, I'll get that, right? Like that'll put me in the conversation. And so it was that that vision working backwards. So it was things like doing a lot of Kenyan Trial Institute, listen, reading, you know, every book I can by you know David Ball and Rick Friedman and Nick Rowley and everybody else to sort of build to that goal.

SPEAKER_03

And um was the hundred million, was that your first eight figure, or were were there eight figures that you'd hit before that?

SPEAKER_00

No, no, all all prior verdicts were under six figures. So there's a there's a twenty-four thousand dollar one, there's a forty thousand dollar one, I think I got an eighty thousand dollar one. But yeah, no, there were there was nothing. I don't think that there was, I don't think that I think I got no, you wanna know what I got a dog bite verdict that was like a hundred and fifteen thousand. Uh-huh. Uh, but I think that was that was the prior high.

SPEAKER_03

It's very similar to um Kimball. Is it Kimball Jones at Bighorn? I don't know if you saw this.

SPEAKER_00

At at least I love I love Kimball. I love Jaggy Britel and Kimball. Yep.

SPEAKER_03

Where he yeah, he had talked about um his first seven trials were all losses, including like a million dollar offer that he walked away from and then lost, and then all of a sudden, like big, big, big, big. And I think I think what young lawyers don't appreciate is everybody wants to work on the big cases, right? Everybody wants to work on the good cases. Well, you you don't become like when a seven or an eight-figure case walks into your office and you've only been settling five and low six-figure cases, you don't all of a sudden become worthy of the seven or eight because you haven't put in the reps, you haven't built the skill set. I think so many people want to skip the step of trying the shitty$20,000,$30,000,$40,000, you know, dog bite or disputed liability car crash case and just wait for the big one to come in, but it doesn't work like that. You have to do all the work in in between. You have to build the maybe build a 40-person firm that supports all of the uh all of the infrastructure.

Reps On Small Cases Build Big Wins

SPEAKER_00

It doesn't work like that at all. Um and, you know, I think, you know, in two things. One of the things like I'm most proud of actually was Kimball went to our$100 million day event, and I saw him at Lex Summit last September, October, whenever that was. And he said, you know, going to that event, like that changed my perspective on what I should be doing, and it helped fuel this run of verdicts. And I think if you're out there and you're looking for that, you know, look at the people who have done the thing that you want to do. And none of it, it's all incredibly hard work, and you have to be very smart about what you're doing. But the truth is that you can do it. You're you're not just gonna go in and wing it. Like it never ever happens by accident. Like that that that's that's true, but you can do it. These things are learnable, they are teachable, and you know, you have to have the wherewithal and all ultimately the confidence and courage to fly that plane, to take that verdict, to say no to good money, to believe in your case, believe in your clients, know how to interpret focused group data, know where the pain points are, and really push on those things.

SPEAKER_03

This is the thing that that's really hard to do because you get so few reps at these, and everybody's, including mine, bias is that when one of these cases comes into your office to keep it to yourself and then not not go out and associate with the great trial firm. I know Sharif Gray in Virginia is somebody who's starting to get that reputation as somebody who go in and swing the bat, and he's starting to, like when these cases come into your office, he's somebody you think about. I should call him up and I should, I should associate with them, so that I can learn. I should do a focus group, but I don't know actually what that means. And I think with fewer and fewer trials, like there's just fewer opportunities to build those cases and learn how to do that.

SPEAKER_00

You know, that's where the real, that's where the power of the vision was for us or for me, because it was like one of these things where that's what I wanted. And so when that case comes in, I'm like, I'm not referring it out. Because we had no, I had no shortage of people who were willing or wanted to co-counsel it. But I needed to be able to look my client in the eyes and know that I was providing them with the best representation possible. And it involved a lot of work, it involved a lot of studying, a lot of reading. And, you know, had I come to the conclusion that I was in over my head, I absolutely would have figured it out. But the the pull to do this was like, that's what I'm here for, that's what I'm doing. This is my shot, and I'm going to take it. And I'm and I'm and I'm not doing it foolishly. Like this is this is tens of thousands of hours, like millions of dollars into into pulling this thing off. And frankly, having like an advocate capital line that could fund the experts and fund the animations, and also the generosity of so many people uh was was uh stunning uh to the point where Andrew Finkelstein, who we worked with his total trial solutions to do some animations, Andrew Finkelstein says he sees me at a conference in Vegas and he's like, you know, how's how's the trial going? I said, It's going really well. We're gonna we're gonna hit him. I think we're gonna hit him for a hundred million bucks. And Finkelstein says, Well, you're not because you don't know how to ask for it. I go, yeah, fair. And he said, I want to call with, I want to call with you and your lawyers on Saturday morning at eight o'clock, and I'm gonna tell you how to ask for a hundred million bucks. Finkelstein lays it out for us like on a Saturday morning as I'm on a plane, taking notes, do this, do this, do this, do this, ran his playbook, and it like it worked. I mean, but we had done all the pieces before that, but you know, some of it is the amazing generosity of some really great people.

SPEAKER_03

And then having done that, right? So having checked the eight-figure box plus one and having gotten the largest verdict in the state of Connecticut, do you feel like that trial lawyer chapter of your life is done? Are you are you moving on? Are you maybe coming back to it? Like, how do you feel about what you're doing next?

Vision, Focus Groups, And Asking Big Numbers

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, I I think of my career sort of in 10-year spans. And I'm I'm 20 years a lawyer. So first 10 really learning how to be a lawyer, figuring that out. Second 10, really figuring out how to be a run a business and you know the combination of those two things. And this phase really feels like a teaching phase to me.

SPEAKER_02

I was gonna say that, yeah.

SPEAKER_00

So I'm doing an adjunct professor at University of Connecticut School of Law. I have a really small PI firm of like five cases thereabouts. Sometimes sometimes these cases settle. Um, I have to check my file line, but it's it's very small. And I take cases that I want and I refer out other cases. And I spend almost all my time doing consulting with uh Bassera. I love that teaching, love engaging in that way. And some of it, honestly, is working with uh trial firms. I did focus group uh for a firm out of New York on a no-offer medmal case, helped them identify some of these issues that I thought were favorable to them, some of the problems in their case, and they took it for a$1.25 million verdict. So I'm still sort of involved in it. And I don't want to say never because trying a case is really, really fun. I think it's I think it's a lot of fun. I think it's exciting. So I'm not saying like I'm never doing that again, but it would have to be under the sort of right circumstances, and I don't think I have any real interest in litigating cases. Like that's that feels like too much of a grind for me, not how I want to spend my energy. So the answer to that is most likely I am done with it because you know it's just and I think some of it is just like that's what I wanted to do, and I did it, and I started asking myself, like, well, what do I want to do now? And the answer for me wasn't like I want a$200 million verdict. Like like like the like okay, you know, I did it, I did it again, great, it feels good. The answer was like I want to uh pursue some happiness and some things that really energize me, and it was the teaching aspects of it that I was drawn to more.

SPEAKER_03

Sounds like probably came to that conclusion with the help of a good therapist or a good coach. Maybe not.

From Trial Lawyer To Teacher

SPEAKER_00

No, I don't I don't really think that this was the product of uh therapy or coaching. It's just that look, I've I'm 40 uh 46 uh in a in a few weeks, and it's just like, well, like what do I want the next phase of my career? And as I think about things, it's like I I did the things I had to do, right? Which was, you know, represent slum lords and doing evictions to to learn how to be a lawyer, to selling people's houses on their front lawn on foreclosures and everything sort of in between. And it's like, well, I feel like with what I've been able to do, I have a chance to sort of pick for the first time, like this is what I want to do. And it was just like I was doing a lot of speaking, I was doing a lot of writing, and I it just felt like that's where my energy was going. Like it didn't feel forced, and that's where I am.

SPEAKER_03

You when we were talking about best era earlier, you used the word constraint, putting the constraint of no no larger than 10 people. And I love that exercise of like trying to solve a problem. Here's here's the thing that we're trying to do. But the constraint is either people or I'm giving myself a year to do this, or I won't spend more than$100,000 doing this thing. Within that constraint, like how how have you had to pick and choose the kinds of things and projects that you can work on, knowing that what what do you have, four, four or five people right now? Yeah, we've got five people, yep. Yeah. And uh and will not more than double in size the company.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, so you know, because I know what the impetus in this is going was going to be. The impetus was gonna be I was gonna create 80 hour jobs a week for me and my team. Um, and it would be very easy for me to be on a plane twice a week, every week, 50 weeks a year and making good money doing that, right? But we said, look, we want to try uh as best we can a one-to-many model to at least support some of the higher level work that we're doing, which is sort of no different than I had to do in personal injury. I had to take$20,000 car accident cases to pay the bills while I'm working on, you know, cases that are worth uh a hundred million dollars, right? And so it's sort of like I want so we set two goals, one of which was we want to help 15,000 lawyers in five years, and we also want to not have a team of more than 10. And so that's not going to lead to us doing one-on-one consulting all the time. There's not enough people. It's so it's a constraint. So as we think about developing things, like whether it's educational materials, courses, events, communities, it forces us into those, it forces our energy into doing those things that will help us uh become, I think, what we are, what we need to become.

Designing A 10-Person Consultancy

SPEAKER_03

So you have a paralegal uh Slack community now that we were talking about before we got on, and you said you wouldn't pitch it, but I will pitch it for you. Slack channel. And we're talking about the difficulty of getting lawyers to invest in their people. Uh I talked to Conrad Som yesterday about the difficulty that he and Ghee had getting lawyers to send their marketing directors out to Las Vegas for a conference. And what's interesting is, you know, we'll spend all this money acquiring cases or buying new software or buying the latest AI tool, right? But really the most important thing is how good is the person in your office at operating that tool, at de-escalating a client conflict, at providing you with the right information at the right time. But for whatever reason, we're just really reluctant to invest in anybody who's not ourselves. Do you have a sense for why that is for lawyers and law firm owners?

One-To-Many Models And Impact Goals

SPEAKER_00

Yeah. I mean, I think w one part of it is just ignorance. Like I don't think that that message is is truly out there. And one of the things that I did, and and I I mean I learned this lesson in the firm. I hired Brittany, who has been my right hand for now probably the past almost six years. And Britney was with me at Connecticut Trial Firm as our marketing director and is with me as a co-founder of Best Era and a partner. What would she was very smart, she's a former math teacher. She worked as she was underemployed as a receptionist at a hair salon, and she would also just do their social media. And I was like, but I see somebody who's bright, who wants to learn, who gets it, and I started investing in bringing her to things like NTL and other conferences and events, and you know, I want you to listen to the lunch hour legal marketing, and I want you to read, you know, Brian Glass's book, and I want you to read Ben Glass's book, and I want you to do these things. And Britney did them. And the benefits that came from that for both me, the firm, and her were just so significant. Because the truth is, like, look, most small law firms are undercapitalized, and what they don't realize is that they are competing with Amazon and Google and everybody else for talent. They don't they don't they we don't like to think of it because but but think about it as somebody who's really skilled at marketing, like they they have an option maybe to go work for Google or you know, Coca-Cola or whatever, right? And so and and with paralegals in particular, that was a a tremendous pain point for our firm because look, when you're really small, the great efficiency is hiring really experienced people, and then you don't have to train them as much. And it's very hard for small law firms to train. But what we were finding with paralegals is we We were a very tech forward firm, as you can imagine. And those experienced paralegals did not fit because it was like, no, I I use my binders and I do this and I have a paper file. And they were resistant to using some of the technology that I knew was necessary to use. And so we really shifted an approach to hey, I don't want 25 years of experience with a paralegal. I want somebody like Britney who's willing to learn, who I can train, who is not resistant to the way we want to do things. And those were our best hires, right? But in order to make that effective, you have to give them the support necessary, which is challenging for a busy law firm. So building out training, we built out Connecticut Trail Firm University. We tried to do different things, but it was it was it was a pain point. So we decided when we launched Best Era that Paraera was going to be a thing because it was something that we knew that we wish we had we wish we had existed. And had I known about, I would have invested in.

SPEAKER_03

I think, you know, one of the things that seems to me you're you're probably pretty good at is identifying the next generation of leaders and the people who like Britney who you can bring along and bring back an exponential amount of information from something like National Trial or And I have found that that's the highest leverage point that lawyers can get in their law firms. You find somebody who's a technology champion who helps you build out your file line, who pays attention to when HONA runs rolls out new features, right? So that you're not buying a new subscription that already does something that your old subscriptions do. Um how do you best identify the people in your firm or in your organization who have that trait, who are learning and bringing things back and are eager to train everybody else? As I'm asking that question, I'm like, well, duh, you just look around and see who's doing it. But is there anything deeper than that?

Investing In Paralegals And Training

SPEAKER_00

I think I think it starts with hiring. I don't think you get there without hiring. So in our job ads, one of our core values was you are always learning, right? And so then when you're interviewing them, you're looking for what they have done in their life to always learn. And it it, you know, it doesn't need to be like they were super into being a paralegal, but it's the kind of thing where it's like, hey, you're 30 years old, you never played guitar, you pick up a guitar and you take guitar lessons, or you were like, hey, how'd you learn to play guitar? Well, I watched a lot of stuff on YouTube. Okay, like like that to me tells me that this is a person who is fluid in their their growth and progression as a human being. They're not like they stopped at age 22 and they're frozen in time, they're trying new things, and it could be cooking, it could be a sport. Uh, but you know, look for those people who are invested in learning, okay? And then, you know, the second thing is is that when you do these things, like look, if I if I I used to love to buy books for my team and I and I stopped because people just didn't read them, uh, and it's just frustrating. I get excited. I'm like, oh yeah, I've got uh unreasonable hospitality and it's a great book, and you should read it, right? I got kids, I got a I got I got uh legal work to do, and you're trying to give me this uh this book, right? And but the thing if it is is that you want to be exposing your team to relevant resources and you want to be paying for that, paying it for them, paying for it for them, right? So if you're like this hour of lunch hour legal marketing is really important, and I want you to listen to the podcast and take notes and do this, you know, you you task that to people, and believe it or not, like people will not do it who are bad. And the people who the people who get excited about it, the ones you really want, they're not only listening to that episode, they're listening to every episode that they've done. And then they are like, hey, they're having a conference. I want to go see Conrad and Ghee and and learn from this. So look for the people who are raising their hand and doing the thing and and just sort of have that vibe. And they're they're really constant learners.

SPEAKER_03

They're the most frustrating thing is buying a book, handing the book off, and then discovering three months later that it wasn't open.

SPEAKER_00

Well, you know, it's the same thing with uh, you know, I did the same thing with trial lawyers. It was like, here's this Don Keenan book. I need you to understand it, you know, and the great ones would take it and read it and understand it. And the ones that really weren't great fits, they just never did that. I don't know if it's arrogance or resistance, but as you know, like I don't believe, and I know you don't believe this, where it's like time is not the limitation. Everybody's busy, and if it really matters to you to be great at this thing, you're gonna read the Don Keenan book. Or if that book doesn't work for you, you're gonna find another book. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03

What are you getting great at now?

How To Hire Constant Learners

SPEAKER_00

What am I getting great at now? Great question. I think I am getting great at teaching. I think like I think I've I've looked I when I originally went to college, it went to first teacher's college in the country, Framingham State College, now Framingham State University. Krista McAuliffe was our most famous graduate, the uh who's supposed to be the astronaut in space from the Challenger. And but it's a teaching school. And I got derailed and I ended up in law school because I was like, this is not, I don't think, I don't think I want to be teaching high school. Uh I think I have too much ambition. And I don't mean that teachers aren't ambitious, but like the thought of going to a classroom every day and doing things was not uh fulfilling to me. So I went to law school and I wanted to to help people, but you know, the the thing I think I've really focused on is teaching and communicating as uh a discipline and as an art, and doing that through reading and listening in my UConn uh law, legal entrepreneurship class, and also speaking and working with law firms um and trying to develop that skill. And I think I've gotten to the point where I I feel good about what I'm able to do and how I'm able to do it. Are you teaching that class every semester now? No, I teach it every uh fall. They would have me teach it every semester, but adjunct work does not pay. Um and I I I I I when I Brian, I say I have uh two gears, which is like whole ass or nothing. And so when I when I want to do something, like I I throw myself into it, and you know, that class takes up a lot of space and time. I don't mail it in, and to do it for two semesters would just be I I have too many other things to do that I need because I need to make money.

SPEAKER_03

Well, yeah, and I I you know I've seen you do an exceptional job of going out of your way to email Mark Cuban or bring in Jason Hennessy to talk to your class and you've inspired.

SPEAKER_00

You got Will Gardera to come in. I had Will Gardera come in. I cold emailed him and he showed up for 30 minutes to my law class on Zoom, and it was amazing.

SPEAKER_03

That's awesome. And you've inspired kind of the next generation of trial lawyers come teachers, right? And Jason Epstein and Tim Semarov and and a couple of other names who are who are friends of mine who told me, you know, they they have picked up a legal entrepreneurship, and Jason told me he just ripped off your whole syllabus.

SPEAKER_00

Well, I gave uh, you know, I I I love Jason and Tim and I gave uh I gave Jason not only my whole syllabus, I gave him all of my lecture notes, all of my class plans and materials. And I'm actually, do you know Ruby Powers? Yes. Ruby's awesome, and her and I are working on putting together like a collective and look with people like Jason, like trying to find like the others where we freely share information and like there's no charge to join us, but you just have to be willing to share and be doing this thing. And you know, whether it's speakers or books or lesson plans or materials or ideas. So, you know, we see a giant need in it in law schools, especially given all the disruption that is uh going on in this space. What for this?

SPEAKER_03

What a great segue. What a great segue. Because I just saw the news come across the transome this morning about Dudley DeBeauzier. Yeah. And their private equity venture acquisition. And I saw two days ago, maybe Seth Price and Blue Shark got acquired by the same company that acquired a Hennessy Digital. And and I don't know enough about Chad Dudley's transaction to talk intelligently enough, but maybe you do. So can you do do you know enough about the outline of that?

Teaching As A Craft

Building A Teaching Collective

SPEAKER_00

I only know what I've read, which is which is the Financial Times deal. I mean, look, this has been a I mean, I've read a lot about this in the medical space and the dental space. This is the tried and true playbook, right? Which is just like we're gonna get around regulatory constraints by saying, like, hey, look, we're gonna run everything. You're gonna independently practice law in our systems, like that kind of fiction, right? Like, I mean, lease backs, like just this, this is this is not an original playbook. It's just sort of new and bigger into this space, right? And for the past few years, I mean, there's been lots of grumblings of attorneys opening up MSOs in uh San Juan, um, and uh because of tax issues. So like I feel like this has been in the works, and and certainly Dudley uh Debassier's pro, you know, they're a big fish. Um so that's that's sort of big news. Um and I don't know uh the constraints of the deal, but I mean it's also interesting. I do know that Chad sits on the uh board of Herringbone, which again they bought Blue Shark and Hennessy Digital, right? So you're starting to see what I call convergence in the legal space. And I think for private equity, if you own the marketing channels, you own the data, and you own the operations, right? You're really able to charge lawyers rent and run around regulatory framework, right? And it makes sense to me that it's coming hard in the PI space. And I think that this is the start. It will continue to accelerate. I think companies, whether it's herringbone or others, will continue to acquire other legal marketing companies and other law firms. And ultimately for private equity, what they do is they look for an exit at some point. So it's like, hey, five years, we've bought all these things, we've, you know, cut staff, we've cut overhead, we've uh, you know, we have the most optimal software in the world to run efficiently, we've got all these metrics, we've got all this knowledge. And they ultimately look for a buyer, right? And so who's that buyer going to be in this space, right? It could be something like another hedge fund that uh you or I don't know, could be Blackstone, could be some Saudi Arabian fund, who knows? But like the point is, is like the whole game is like small, gets eaten by big, gets eaten by bigger, right? And sort of an interesting endpoint to this is like Thompson West. And it's like, well, they own a moat in sort of legal data, they own legal marketing with their various acquisitions of fine law. I don't know if they're Thompson West, but you you understand what I'm saying. And you're starting to see them invest in companies like Supio. Uh and so you can see again like the convergence aspect of we've got the law, and it's it's exactly what happened with Clio, which is Clio and VLEX. And what what what you're seeing is that private money, I I think the best way to think of it is like you have a restaurant and they're the landlord. And if your restaurant is successful, they're upping the rent on you. Okay. They own the prime real estate uh in this space. So sounds like you think this is not a good thing. That that's a that's a loaded question. For some people, it will be a great thing, okay? Sure. So for people who it'll be a great thing for are people who are have things to sell early and sell, like they will make a lot of money. Uh it will be good for some lawyers. Um, as you know, there's no shortage of lawyers in the space who sort of very struggle with business. They struggle with marketing, they struggle with finance operations. So you can sort of think of imagine them, at least when I was growing up, you know, my local town had five local pharmacies, like, you know, for each of the sort of districts in the town. And, you know, CVS pushed over all of them, is what happened. And and so what you're going to see is like, you know, lawyers who are just plugged in, like they're like pharmacists at CVS. Like that's that's that's the future for a lot of lawyers, and perhaps fewer lawyers, because now you go to CVS and it's like, I don't know who's a pharmacist. They've got like eight 20-year-old kids working there.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah, everybody's wearing a white coat.

Private Equity Convergence In Legal

SPEAKER_00

Everybody's wearing a white coat. Like, I I don't know. I, you know, and I think like that is the future. And honestly, for some folks, like that's not a bad that's not I think it's ultimately bad for consumers because I don't buy that, you know, you do like there's still gonna be some gap between the legal work and the marketing and operations. No, money is going to say settle this case, drop this case, it's not profitable. Um, and and I think that flies in the face of professional obligations that lawyers have that have served us well. Um, and I think it's ultimately bad for consumers. I also, you know, and also a thing I look to, I don't know if you have it in your state, but I assume so. We have had longtime captive firms in Connecticut. You have Oh, like the uh like uh insurance defense, all state staff counseling firm. Yeah. Exactly. Used to be, Brian, way back in the old days that I practiced, like the lawyers had ability to do things.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00

Settle cases, make recommendations. And, you know, in the last 10 years, they've had none of it. They just show up and take the deposition and they go home. Like you don't even negotiate with them anymore.

SPEAKER_03

That that has been a really interesting development to watch in in part because um those firms, at least in Virginia, they tend to handle the cases that are worth um, we call it 300 less than$300,000. Your multimillion dollar case, even if there's a Geico umbrella, is not going to GEICO style counsel. And so I always kind of thought, well, worst case, it's a great low-risk job if you're a young lawyer. Because worst case, you screw up a case and the insurance company just pays the excess, right? Amazing. But you're right, there is very little incentive to negotiate because there's really no adverse consequence to your actual client. But and I'm I'm just now thinking about this for the first time about what that consequence now means if it flips and it's and it's the cap the lawyer is told what to do by the VC mothership and you have the in client. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00

What it is, what it is, Brian, is you get to take this deposition, and here's your deposition script. And what what happened is, you know, I initially started like there were really good defense lawyers who were doing this stuff, who understood a lot of things. And towards the end, I mean, they showed up and they had their script and they read their script. They never asked follow-up questions. They just they checked the box and then they went home and they wrote a report, and like that was it. And you're going to see that on the plaintiff's side. You're going to see you have a deposition, here's your script, here's the court reporter service that you're gonna use. And I think it's gonna be a reductionist, it's gonna be reductionist, like that will be the reduction. Um, because that's like look, ultimately, these people are looking to invest money and get back, you know, multiples, 20, 30 times what they have invested in five years. And you don't do that by um that's not aligned with how I think most of us think about practicing law.

SPEAKER_03

Is there any indication from what you've seen that there's VC interest in firms that look like firms that look like mine, five lawyers, 20 people, you know, we'll do about five million dollars in revenue. My sense is we're too small to be of interest to anybody. But I I go to these conferences and all I hear is VC and roll up and blah, blah, blah.

Who Wins And Who Gets Squeezed

SPEAKER_00

Here's here's the here's the thing. I think that the the like the easiest thing for them to do, especially in PI, is mass marketing. So larger firms are going to be more attractive, just just uh just in general, right? And so the consequence to that becomes and and you know, sort of like think of it like CVS, right? And so you're like, hey, we're gonna open a CVS and we're gonna open it in, you know, you're down in Virginia, we're gonna open one in Fairfax, right? And then you're gonna open another one in the town next door, and then you're gonna go out and out and out, but you're gonna start most of the time if you have some money in a place that has a population density. Sure. And so I think what you're going to see is that. Um, and then what's what's going to happen is, you know, ultimately the squeeze play for them. And that's why, you know, I said, you know, this sort of nexus of herringbone. And I look, I love people there. Like, I don't, I don't want to come up, I don't want this to be like Ryan, what the hell were you saying? But but when you start to see the merger of the marketing and this, right? So you're gonna have, I think, choices. And I think, you know, you and your dad are super smart about doing the marketing that does not scale. And like, like that is that is a hundred percent what lawyers should be doing. A hundred percent for lawyers in your position. Or they should just be like, okay, I'm gonna sell, and that when they come to knock on my door, I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna fold. Because ultimately, you're not going to be able to compete with them in the ways that they compete. You're not gonna be able to outrank them in SEO, you're not gonna be spending more money on AdWords, in part because you're actually going to be doing legal work in a way that cares. So you're gonna sit down and prep the depot. You're not just gonna send the first year with a script out. That's not who you are. And so as you're doing that, I think it's like you need to. I think that there's a I think look, what happens in the next three years is the middle gets eaten, big gets bigger, and small's okay.

SPEAKER_03

And small gets better at the craft, or has to get better at the craft.

SPEAKER_00

Small, small is okay. Just like your local pizza place and Domino's, small is okay. Okay. But you need to be intentional about what you are, what you're doing, who you serve. You need to be visible in your community, you need to draw some motes, and you also need to be educating the public about the difference between you and them. And I sort of think of it in sort of like like a food space, right? Uh, you know, hey, look, we we are the organic uh bread company and we pay, you know,$20 a pound for flour. Meanwhile, like the other companies buy a dollar flour from China or something, you know. And you they're both you both make bread, but the consumer has to be aware of why you're a better choice. Um, and so I think really getting out there, talking about the rule of law, expanding access to justice. I I mean I write about this, which is I think that our professional ethics are our moat.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah, well, uh, you know, what what strikes me is like for a long time you could be average and be okay. And I think there are years coming where if you're not average and you and you're not different than than the commoditized pharmacist, you're you're gonna be in big trouble.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, or or yeah, and I think I think to me the key is to like realizing where you are and being honest with it. So if you're just like, I don't, I don't, I'm not I'm I'm if you're like, look, I'm average at it. I can admit that I'm average at a host of things, many things I'm average, right? By definition, that's true for all of us. But if I'm that, I'm like, maybe I just go to work for Morgan to Morgan. I get a paycheck. I do work. Would I?

SPEAKER_03

Would you go to law school in uh 2027?

Strategy For Small Firms To Thrive

SPEAKER_00

Yes. Yes, yes, I would. Why? Because I I I I two things. One of which is I still think a law license is valuable from if nothing other than a business perspective, right? It's something that there will be things. I mean, it's not going to eat everything. There will still be things that only lawyers can do. And that license will be valuable. And the fact that it is difficult and challenging to obtain is worth doing. So sort of like Ryan Anderson taught my UConn law class, and he was just drew like quadrants, right? And it was like, look, if it's easy to do, easy to execute, like there's no value in that because everybody can do it and it's easy, right? And you want to do things that are hard to do, hard to execute. And like that's the upper right quadrant. If I if I can find this picture, I'll send it to you after this. But I think law school in that way is in that upper right quadrant, right? And if we're talking about sort of moats, like, you know, I think that that is that is a moat. Um and I don't see like courts, you know, giving up, you know, having non-lawyers appear for them. I like lawyers aren't gonna going to go away in that regard. There may be fewer of them. There may be jobs that we think of right now at that lawyers can only do that are not done. But at the end of the day, like there's still going to be that need because that is hard work, hard to do, hard to replicate, and I think that there's value there. Now, that said, like, look, I would not go to law school if, you know, my wanted to do transactional work that was like highly automated. Like, I think that that's that's like wills and things like that, I think are ripe. Form-based practices, I think, are very ripe for high degrees of automation. But you know, you're still gonna need a lawyer uh even then, even if you are a private equity company and you automate and you have staff, you're still ultimately going to need uh need some lawyers. So I think I think it in in in the in the look to the degree a lot of white collar work is going to be eaten by some of the technological advances. I still think that license is emote and uh probably worth obtaining if you really want to obtain it.

SPEAKER_03

Brian, thank you for coming on today. We're gonna have to do it again before three and a half years runs out.

SPEAKER_00

Well, Brian, thank you so much. It you know, and for anybody out there, I mean, Brian and his dad, Ben, are just you know, as good as they come. They're true advocates of lawyers doing great work and they want to help them. So read their materials, go to their conferences, talk to them, listen to them speak, um, because they add and they have added for as long as I've been doing this a tremendous amount of value to this space. Be kind. Thank you, Brian. Thank you, Brian.

Head Shot

Brian Glass

Host