The Sterling Family Law Show
The Sterling Family Law Show is where successful family law attorneys share the exact systems they used to build million-dollar practices.
Host Jeff Hughes scaled Sterling Lawyers from zero to $17M with 27 attorneys.
Co-host Tyler Dolph runs Rocket Clicks, the agency in charge of supercharging Sterling and other family law practices to success using revenue-first marketing strategies.
Together, they share the playbook for building the law firm of your dreams.
If you're looking to grow exponentially, generate revenue, and get good at business, this podcast is for you.
The Sterling Family Law Show
40 Years of Law Firm Growth Lessons You Need to Know - #154
Law firm growth isn't always about getting bigger. Here's what 40 years of practicing law taught Jeffrey about smart scaling.
Most lawyers think law firm growth means taking every case that walks through the door. Jeffrey's small law firm scaling approach proves otherwise. His boutique law firm management strategy focuses on legal practice sustainability over quick wins, showing why attorney firm size optimization beats cookie-cutter expansion.
📲 Subscribe Now: https://www.youtube.com/@TylerxDolph
📝 Schedule a FREE Family Law Firm Audit: rocketclicks.com/schedule-a-family-law-quick-audit
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📄 CHAPTERS
0:00 - Law Firm Growth: 40 Years of Hard-Won Lessons From Jeffrey
1:44 - Small Law Firm Scaling: Why Size Isn't Everything in Daytona
3:51 - Attorney Career Progression: From Wall Street to Wilson Elser Partnership
8:58 - Law Firm Capacity Management: Choosing Quality Over Quantity
11:46 - Legal Practice Sustainability: The Brain Trust Decision-Making Model
18:14 - Attorney Business Development: The $180M Case That Changed Everything
24:17 - Legal Practice Specialization: Why Preparation Beats Everything Else
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Jeff has over 40 years of law experience and now is a partner at the Daytona law firm practicing insurance law. He has a wealth of knowledge to share with you and I hope you enjoy this episode. My name is Tyler Dolph. I am the CEO of RocketClicks, which is our partner agency. We exclusively work on family law firms nationwide, built from the success of our own family law firm called Sterling Lawyers, which has grown to over 30 attorneys and 25 offices across Wisconsin and Illinois. Today we are interviewing Jeffrey from the Daytona Law Firm. Jeffrey has over 40 years of experience. He works and focuses on insurance law and the PI side of things, but his firm is multi-practice. He shares valuable insights with us over the span of his career and I really hope you enjoy the episode, jeffrey. Thank you so much for being with us today. We really appreciate your time.
Speaker 2:Nice to be here.
Speaker 1:Love it. Give us a little introduction to yourself and your firm, and then I'd like to start way back at the beginning, when you first got started in law.
Speaker 2:Sure, so I'm a partner at a law firm, really a shareholder. We're a limited liability company at what I call a small firm in Daytona Beach, florida, although for Daytona it's like the second largest firm. So it's more of a big fish in a small pond these days, and ever since 1996. Ever since 1996. The firm itself, smith Bigman Brock, got started in I think it's 1988, by some folks that left another law firm locally and started up their own practice and I joined it, coming from New York, in 1996. It's a multi-specialty practice. About half of it is insurance defense-based, which is what I do. I'm a board-certified civil trial lawyer. I'm also certified by a BOTA. I've tried a lot of cases over the last 42 years.
Speaker 2:I started out in New York City, new York City, born and raised you can see a lot of New York stuff in the background of my home office here and I graduated from Fordham Law in 1983 and went to work for a firm that I had worked with as a law student on Wall Street doing commercial litigation and it was not for me because I was not going to get into court doing that. I saw that there were lawyers there for six years that hadn't really taken a deposition. A lot of it was preventative law for ABC, the network, and it was just. I wanted to get into court and I switched after a year to a medical malpractice defense firm and then spent the next 12, 13 years defending doctors, hospitals, podiatrists in court and started trying cases. I think I second chaired cases.
Speaker 2:The first year I was at the firm that I went to and then switched firms a couple of years later to go with a bigger firm that needed trial lawyers, called Wilson Elser. At the time Wilson Elser was, I want to say, 90 lawyers. When I joined them in 1987 when my daughter was born, and by the time I left at the end of 95, they were 450 lawyers. Wow, and now I looked it up this morning just to see what the current was, because the last time I looked they were approaching a thousand.
Speaker 1:There are 1300 lawyers now, that is a mega firm.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so they're one of the largest insurance defense firms in the world. I don't know. I think they've said they are the largest at a few times, but I've seen others that have grown tremendously over the years too. And what was interesting was I made partner there after seven years of practice, which was the fastest track you could have in that firm, which was nice. But I walked in there trying cases and was part of a team of. When I got there they had, I think, about 15 MedMal lawyers with only two of them trying cases at the time, and I became the third.
Speaker 2:When I left there, we had about 50 MedMal lawyers with about 10 of them trying cases, and so it really was a growing practice and as long as you had the capability of doing the trial work, you were a valuable commodity.
Speaker 2:As a matter of fact, they've reached out to me a couple of times to come back to New York, but I got dragged to Florida by my ex-wife and settled in here quite nicely. So I learned trial law in New York and it was a little bit of a different animal there too, because it's and I still this way talking to my friends at Wilson, elster and other firms in the MedMal arena. There it's still trial by ambush, you don't identify the experts and you don't take expert depositions, and so it's kind of like almost like the old West, a little cowboys and Indians style, and so and it's solely in MedMal, because in other areas of specialty they find out who the experts are, they take depositions. It's more like federal court and more like Florida. But when I came to Florida, somewhat kicking and screaming, I and did you leave the firm Like you couldn't work.
Speaker 2:I proposed to Wilson Elster that they open a Daytona office and they had had a bad experience with the Miami office at that time and they thought that Daytona was a small town which it is, and that Daytona that their clients wouldn't pay their rate structure in Daytona. So they said you know, go with our blessing, but we're not going to open an office there. And I ended up landing in a place where I still am. The lawyers that were operating this firm my ex-wife was a physician and the people that recruited me were friends with people at the firm gave me the introduction. We had a mutual need. They wanted to continue to grow their practice. I wanted a place to grow my business. I want to try to establish med mal.
Speaker 2:There wasn't a lot of uh med mal in florida still isn't um the way it's developed here.
Speaker 2:The doctors mostly have $250,000 policies which are like really small and it kind of discourages lawsuits.
Speaker 2:There was tort reform years ago which discouraged a lot of med mal lawsuits from the plaintiff's side and there's just a lot of other very lucrative areas here and it's much more favorable for bad faith for the plaintiffs here. We have a lot of advertising firms here that have really driven up the car accident business and the firm I joined was already doing some insurance defense mostly motor vehicle and some slip and fall and things like that. So I ended up, after a few months of settling in joining that practice area and ended up sharing the insurance defense group with a partner of mine that ended up going on the bench back in I think it was 2009. And then it became mine and now I have one junior partner and one person of counsel that really should be a partner. She was a partner and decided to have some more quality of life left, came back, so she'll probably end up being a partner again, but in the firm of 15 attorneys there's seven of us doing insurance defense.
Speaker 1:And how big was the firm, how many attorneys, when you came over.
Speaker 2:It was about 10 or 12 attorneys. We're still pretty much on the same blueprint and we're not looking to grow to be a big, mega firm. Matter of fact, we turned a lot of work away over the years to stay the size that we are. We have decent leverage because, you know, for the 15 attorneys we have about 15 paralegals and like 15 legal assistants and three administrators, you know. So it ends up being about 50 people to support, you know, 15 attorneys altogether and I think it's a good model.
Speaker 2:The big difference that I saw coming from Wilson Elser and going to a small firm was you know everything. You know, in the big firm it's more like a corporation. A big firm it's more like a corporation. And even the compensation, you know. It was like you'd be going step by step, even as a partner, and if you were within a certain class of people, you would have this established amount and then you'd get bonused at the end of the year and you really they would tell you that there were different factors, but it would be some executive committee making a secret decision about how much money you got at the end of the year and you know how much money went into my defined benefit plan, the you know the pension aspect of it. So I mean I don't think I would have left if right away, if my ex didn't want to move to Florida, but at the same time I'm pretty sure I would have left with one of two waves of people that defected from Wilson-Elser, because two of my fellow trial partners left like one year later and another one left two years later to form their own firms, and I probably would have gone with one of the two of them and then been part of, instead of this mega 1300 lawyer firm, a hundred lawyer firm or 50 lawyer firm that they they have presently and it just the corporate structure was a was a bit too much, I think, as they grew and grew.
Speaker 2:But what I like about the smaller firm is that while there's enough people to bounce things off of because we always we call it our brain trust when we have something that you know we want to make a you know decision on a case or even a personnel matter, we'll just we'll kind of run it up the flagpole with everyone. There's people to bounce it off of but at the same time it's not so big that you get lost in the weeds. I think that I know that you know part of the purpose of your podcast is to teach young people how to run law firms, and one of the things is, I think that you don't exceed your capabilities. One of the things is, I think that you don't exceed your your capabilities, so you have to realize how much you want to grow. You know, while continuing to give the same quality of work, you need to know when to turn work away, whether it's outside your specialty or because you have just too much work.
Speaker 2:What we ran into here in Florida was during the pandemic, the work just kept coming in and we had a crisis here in Florida on first party property and we started taking some of that and then it got almost overwhelming and we just had to say, hey, stop, we're at capacity and we need to also service the clients that we've had for 30 years.
Speaker 2:And then, once the courts reopened, we had another kind of crisis here in Florida where there was tort reform and just ahead of the tort reform, all the plaintiff's attorneys dumped all their inventory into the system in order to avoid the ramifications of the tort reform, and so we had I think it was like three times the normal filings for that year of 2023, this tort reform happened and we turned a lot of work away. And we turned a lot of work away and you know a lot of the insurance company clients that we have. They had to expand their counsel base. But I think they respected the fact that we weren't going to just try to grow without good reason and that we would just do quality work on the number of cases we felt we could accept.
Speaker 1:I think that's such a huge point, especially for young attorneys starting out and maybe hanging their own shingle or working at a smaller law firm. The tendency is to take on as much as you can right Because you're like revenue is oxygen at the beginning and if you overdo that and then you sacrifice service, you're almost setting yourself up for disaster long term.
Speaker 2:I think I've watched more. So the well I guess both sides really. Plaintiffs and defense firms in the personal injury arena grow so fast here in Florida and, without naming names of firms, the quality has gone down tremendously at a lot of the larger firms and while they have a lot of quality at the top, they're not giving good training to the people at the bottom. The people at the bottom are just kind of running a formulary type of practice where they get told okay, this is what you do. You do X, y and Z on a case and you just do that on every case. And that's not the way to practice law.
Speaker 2:Law was not meant to be a cookie cutter type of thing. Or you know, just take a recipe and you follow it on every single thing. You'll you'll eat the same bland food every time it's. You've got to look at every case individually on its own, treat every client like they're an individual and, you know, an insurance defense.
Speaker 2:We always have to keep it clear in our mind in third party cases where an insurance company is hiring us to represent someone, that that someone is our client, not the insurance company, and that's a distinction that it seems to me a lot of the larger insurance defense firms don't get. Larger insurance defense firms don't get. I've seen them even say in court my client meaning the insurance company, when that's not their client, and sometimes the judge or the plaintiff's attorney will say, hey, that's not your client. Your client is this individual that I sued and they're absolutely right and I never lose sight that it's that individual and I think that the client preservation and you know you're doing a good job keeps the business that you have, which is the most important thing thing. You know it's that old bird in hand worth two in the bush. Well, you can go out and get new business. Never sacrifice trying to get new business for keeping your current clients happy 100% agree.
Speaker 1:It's so interesting to watch the personal injury space being in marketing. We have, you know, the agency as well. We see so many personal injury attorneys focus on branding and building brands, which I think you have to do in that space because that's how people buy in that space. But they become almost like just churn factories, these PI firms that just want to get settlements and they want to process as many cases as they can.
Speaker 2:And really the only person that loses there is the person that signs up. The firm decides, hey, this is a valuable case and they take risks for that client, that the client, I don't think, goes in sometimes with completely open eyes and when they could get a good settlement, but this firm decides this is a case to try and then they end up trying it and if they lose it, the client goes away with nothing. And I see that all too often, you know, on the flip side, I also see, you know, especially with larger firms on the defense side, where, like I said, it's this cookie cutter practice and they're doing things that seem to aim more at billable hours and, you know, just following a checklist rather than doing what's going to aid the case in its defense. I inherited a case a few years ago, a terrible case, and I really felt that the lawyer who had handled it before me created a conflict to get out from trying the case lawyer who had handled it before me created a conflict to get out from trying the case. The case was on the eve of trial. It was in Ocala, florida, which is about an hour and a half from me, and a mother was driving her four sons home from school and got rear-ended by my client at a traffic light where he was going about 70 miles an hour, high on cocaine, with his stepdaughter in the car. When you looked at the vehicle and the vehicles you wouldn't know how anyone would have survived in this car and it looked like an accordion and the plaintiff's attorneys actually brought the car to the courtroom for a view by the jurors.
Speaker 2:And the mother in the front seat suffered a broken back and a mild traumatic brain injury. The three boys in the back, one was a one and a half year old. He ended up becoming a brain damaged paraplegic. Another boy in the back broke both his femurs, the hardest bone in the body to break. And the other boy in the back suffered terrible degloving injuries from the middle of his back down to his ankles and he ended up with about 13 surgeries as of the time of trial and would always walk with an altered gait and had basically been homebound in the years before the trial. And then the boy in the front seat was almost unscathed but had emotional injuries from seeing all this happen to the family and the mother got taken to one hospital and the little boy was on life support taken to another hospital and the father, who was not in the car but was a consortium plaintiff, had to go back and forth to tell the mother how the little boy was doing for weeks as they were both in different hospitals. And it was probably the most sympathetic case I've ever tried.
Speaker 2:And when I looked at the workup that had been done that the lawyers from one of these big firms had had all these plaintiffs examined by like multiple specialists and they were all really injured and there was no way I was going to use those experts in the trial that they had hired like five experts for each plaintiff, and to me it was what was the purpose of all that? And that's where you know the difference between thinking about what you actually need for a case and you know what you're going to do to make money. And that was not the case to do all those things on, and I ended up basically putting on almost no witnesses, being very gentle with everyone. The plaintiffs asked for $180 million. I told the jury to give them what added up to about $20 million and they ended up giving $50 million and everybody was happy on my end with the result. Now there wasn't enough insurance coverage for that, but there was subsequent litigation over bad faith and that I understand resolved for some confidential amount.
Speaker 2:But it was a case where so much was done that didn't need to be done on the defense side and I use that as an example to my associates and to you know people in my industry when I go to conferences. This is not the way you work up these cases. You need to look at each case individually, see what. What are you going to want to put on at a trial. And a lot of people just don't try a lot of cases and so I think they they lose sight of what is actually needed and what's going to happen at a trial.
Speaker 2:And I will say that over the years trials have evolved so much and I think that at least here in Florida, the plaintiff's bar has often been one step ahead of the defense bar in their tactics and they just keep.
Speaker 2:You know you have to really stay on top of it. You know, in the last decade we've seen a rise in these nuclear verdicts and all these plaintiffs' attorneys are following the reptile theory and you know they're doing it to a T. Now it's the use of AI and now there's webinars out there. I see it on both sides and I get the Abota side, so I get kind of both. You know, it's use of AI at trial is like the most popular webinar that there is now, and I've got to tell you I've dabbled in it a bit. You know, and it's hard to teach an old dog new tricks. But it's amazing what you know, chat, gpt and the Google genius how they can reword something for you, even, even even a complaint to an airline or a hotel. They could say a lot better than than you can if you just give them the basics. It's amazing.
Speaker 1:It's been unbelievable, I mean for us both at our law firm and our consultancy being able to leverage AI, I think, in an ethical like. We think about it as thought starter right. It's an opportunity to create a draft or to open a discussion and create a thought to really polish it. But it'll be interesting to see how it affects law firms nationwide and we're going to actually do a whole series on AI, so make sure to stick around for that. But, jeffrey, I'd like to as we're kind of concluding here, given the fact that you've been practicing for over 40 years.
Speaker 1:You've had so many experiences and I've loved your narrative as it relates to really thinking about each case as an individual one, especially in the insurance space, going to trial and being okay with that. Is there any additional learnings that you could impart on our listeners as it relates to being successful in your role? You know you've been, you've had to work hard and you've made partner at now two different firms, and I'm sure that wasn't by accident. So give our listeners a little perspective on what it really takes to be successful in a large firm.
Speaker 2:You know, I think in a large firm or a small firm or even as a sole practitioner, the most important thing you could ever be is prepared, if you just try to master your craft and continue to get better it's so important and also to be a well-rounded individual. We always encourage our folks to get involved in the community in whichever way they have a passion. So like when my kids were growing up, I coached baseball and softball from when they were four years old till they were 12. I've always been involved in organizations locally and I've always been involved in organizations locally, mostly on my side. I'm Jewish and I've been temple president. I was on the temple board for 30 something years. I just finally resigned and said let's stay my place, but I continue to be on the board of the Jewish Federation locally and I chair a Jewish Heritage Festival that happens every other year. So you know, first started out being on committees, then being the chair of a committee, then being on the board and working my way up through the leadership until I was president, and now, you know, as part of a past president's council, and you just have to continue to. By giving back, you also learn. Uh, so many things that helped you in the practice of law.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and you know you reach out and you know, just like the plaintiff's bar, we have chat boards and you know, I think when you see someone that's been through it all on the chat board answering, it encourages the younger lawyers to say, hey, I want to share too. And when I was actually president of the FDLA, my biggest thing was trying to get us to share more, like the plaintiff's board does, and be open to it. Don't treat your deposition transcripts as trade secrets. Don't treat your experts as trade secrets. When one person helps the other, when one person helps the other, we both get helped in the long term and that's always important.
Speaker 2:So I think you need to be well-rounded, you need to get involved both in law and outside law, because it opens your mind, it opens your network. Like you say, you just never know. Uh, you know and you know, on the insurance defense side, treat the, the insurance adjusters, as well as your clients, like human beings, not just feeders. You know, I I count some of my best friends that I've developed relationships with for over 25 years here in florida. Um, there are people that have retired that I still talk to on a weekly basis that I worked with because they were an insurance company representative that I dealt with a lot. So there's, you know, there's a lot of. You know the interpersonal relationships are most important and they really help you grow your business and keep it where you want it to be.
Speaker 1:Well, said To that point quickly. I mean we were just touching on AI for a second. It'll be so interesting to watch how important relationships and human-to-human connection becomes as everyone ventures into AI.
Speaker 2:I'm both anticipating in a good way, but also, at the same time, I'm really worried about AI. And I was my my son and daughter-in-law in New Jersey with my first grandchild and I was just visiting there last week and we were there talking about AI and my son goes. You know, dad don't talk to me about AI that's out to take our jobs because he's a film editor and she's a graphic artist and and you know that's, it's a scary, scary thing. And you know, same thing with lawyers. I mean, I could see us, you know, needing a small fraction of the lawyers that we have, especially, if they like, put some systems in place to replace the way we evaluate cases, the way we try cases or resolve cases within a state system. I could see them coming up with something as an alternative to jurors. It's, it's, it's kind of scary, you know, plug in the parameters and you have the resolution.
Speaker 1:It's uh there's still gotta be the human element, though, right At the end of the day.
Speaker 2:Uh, you know.
Speaker 1:I truly believe that, and I believe that the human connection and building relationships and having a strong network are going to mean even more as AI continues to be prevalent but obviously a conversation for a different day. Jeffrey, I really appreciate your time. I appreciate your insights. I hope you have a wonderful day back there in Florida and we'll look forward to talking to you very soon again.
Speaker 2:Thank you very much.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. Have a wonderful day If you enjoyed this video. We have many law firm interviews that we are doing. This is a series that we love. It's an opportunity to learn from incredible business owners that are building firms all over the country. Make sure to check them out today.
