Run Your Firm. Build an Asset, with the Injury Board

Great lawyers don't always know

how to build great law firms.

Let's change that.

Join Ben Gideon as he shares hard won

lessons from building his own financially

successful law firm and practical

insights from top law firm entrepreneurs,

business consultants, and more.

This is a podcast for lawyers by lawyers.

Welcome to Elawvate, Build

and Grow your law firm.

Produced and powered by LawPods.

We have some wonderful guests

here today. Before we get to that,

we want to spend a little time

talking about our sponsors.

We're very pleased to work

with 1% for the planet, Vision,

Spark and Supio. Ben, I don't know if

you want to talk about Supio first.

Yeah, we'll keep it brief,

but I would encourage folks to listen to

the episode we did with the founder of

Supio, Jerry Zhou,

who's also known well to our guests

today because the Injury Board was highly

supportive and influential in

helping to develop and build Supio,

which is an AI platform

designed specifically for

plaintiff's trial lawyers,

very thoughtfully designed by folks who

are former Google software engineers and

listen to the episode we did with

Jerry and learn more about it,

but I would encourage folks to

check them out at supio.com.

Our firm, Gideon Asen,

are proud participants with a global

environmental nonprofit known as 1%

for the planet.

Our hope is that every firm listening

to this or every attorney has some

semblance of giving program back to

your communities or at least looking to

develop one. We've landed on

1% for the planet, like I said,

a global environmental nonprofit.

Businesses give 1% of their

annual sales and they pledge that.

Every nonprofit that is

part of that is trustworthy,

has been vetted by 1% for the planet.

It's a very easy way to make sure

your money gets to appropriate

environmental causes. If anyone

signs up for 1% for the planet,

please contact Ben or I and we'll

give you a shout out on the show.

And finally, we're brought

today by VisionSpark.

VisionSpark is the search firm,

executive search firm that as

our listeners already know,

helped us find Jeffrey Wright, one

chief operating officer at Gideon Asen.

They also do other types of

high level administrative staff

positions. Could probably

work with them to find a CEO,

director of marketing,

maybe an HR director.

We work with them on an ongoing basis

to do all of our psychological profiling

and vetting of all new attorneys.

We've actually developed a particular

profile for plaintiff's trial attorneys,

which I'm sure they'd be willing to use

if you wanted to have them do that for

you if you have that kind of a

business. So great company to work with.

Highly recommend that you check them

out if you have any vision spark.

Hello everyone and welcome to

Elawvate Build and Grow Your Law Firm.

I am Jeff Wright, chief

operating officer at Gideon Asen,

and as always joined

by Ben Gideon, founder,

owner and partner of Gideon

Asen. Good morning, Ben.

Good morning, Jeff. How

are things today with you?

We're starting off a wonderful

heat wave here in Maine.

We're going to have four days of

90 plus degrees with a hundred

plus degrees heat index.

So a little odd for Maine weather this

early in the year. Other than that,

I'm fine.

It makes me thankful that my wife forced

us to put in heat pumps at the house.

I noticed the dog only stays in the one

room in the house that we cool. Well,

I hope our listeners are

enjoying the World Cup.

I've got the Paradiguay shirt on

from the Paraguay-Germany game

went to the other day, which was super

hot at Gillette Stadium, but very fun.

US plays today. So by the

time you're listening to this,

we'll already know what the outcome of

all that is, but go US. So with that,

Jeff?

Very proud to work with

all those sponsors.

Pleased to say today we

are joined by Mason Alley,

Jess Spino and Carla Cornish

all representing the Injury

Board today. I don't know if

you want to introduce yourself,

talk about your particular

role at the Injury Board,

and then get into the particulars

of exactly what the Injury Board is,

especially for our listeners

that aren't familiar.

Sounds great, Jeff. Maybe we'll just

go in the order that you called us out.

So first of all, Jeff Ben,

thanks so much for letting us

be on here with y'all today.

What a great idea that this podcast

is and such a valuable service.

Just by sort of means of introduction,

the Injury Board is a kind of

a small close-knit community.

It's an invite-only network.

We've been around for about 25 years and

I've been personally working on and off

with the group for about 20 years.

Two of my high school classmates were the

founders actually way back in the day.

And so you can tell that's been a while

since we've been there. But at any rate,

one of the things we've seen,

we've got a national network,

actually an international network

because we're through the US, Canada,

Caribbean, and the UK. And we've got

about 130 firms that we work with,

represent probably about

2,000 attorneys in total,

all plaintiff's personal injury law.

Again,

invite only Ben and Taylor

are members of this group,

and so we're really thankful for that,

but that's the kind of quality

members that we're looking for.

It's a very select group of litigators

and I would say leaders. By definition,

they have to be elected leaders.

And so what we're trying to find

honestly is kind of saturation.

If you can go and if you have a need,

if you're injured and injured

seriously and you have a need,

who is the best attorney,

the best litigator,

not maybe the best known because it's

not necessarily the biggest marketers,

but the best litigator in your area.

And that's really our goal is to

help create a network of that.

And what it's become is

kind of a neural network.

And so from a background standpoint,

I've been working with these folks

for about 20 years, family of lawyers,

never made it myself. I took a left turn

and went out to Hollywood and worked in

the entertainment industry,

but I ended up back here from a consulting

standpoint first and then I'm sure

more of the story will come out.

We're just really thankful to be

here with you guys. And again,

I think what you're doing,

this idea of moving into

really treating your firm as a

business that puts clients

first is the future.

And you have to think of

it in those two terms,

clients first and then how do

you run your firm as a business?

So I really appreciate

what you guys are doing.

Mason, before we move

on to Carla and Jess,

just because I had an opportunity to

meet and spend some time with you out in

Oregon and I really

enjoyed that by the way.

But I know you have a very interesting

background working in other fields and

business and entrepreneurship.

Can you just give the listeners

a little bit of a sense for that?

Sure.

So I had this kind of weird career where

I was actually in the entertainment

industry as a writer.

And so I ended up writing for a CBS

Primetime show back in the day and then

movie with 20th Century Fox.

And then I ended up back on the East

Coast for some family things and started

working primarily in consulting and

helping firms grow, small businesses grow.

I had a background in law, so

I was familiar with that area.

Then I ended up in the technology space.

And so I've spent some time

there in EdTech in particular.

And so came into a company

that had probably about 40

employees and then helped

them grow to about 220

employees and exit and kind of a

great exit for everybody.

And that really made me think a

lot about a business as an asset.

How do you increase the value of an asset?

And so having been

working with Injury Board and Tom and

Patrick for an extended period of time and

seeing that many firms,

and I think that's why I really appreciate

what you guys are doing because many,

many firms I think are not looking at

their firm as a business and few of

those are really thinking of it as

an asset that can grow over time.

It's not to deprofessionalize it at all,

but it's to actually keep

your hands in the profession.

So as an attorney leader,

you want to do it.

And then as maybe a non-attorney

operations lead as we've got with Jeff,

this is a very powerful combination.

And I think this is what we're seeing

in the business community and the

technology community. And to me,

it's exciting that lawyers are doing

it because if you think about the need,

the clients who are actually in need,

how do you produce the best results,

give them the best possible service?

It's going to be by putting in sort of the

best known practices of what's going

on and maybe not even in your field.

I think it's great. I mean, I really do.

And I think you educating

folks is super powerful.

I'm used to following Mason.

I think we're kind of in this place

where we're kind of a little bit of a tag

team these days. I'm Jess Spino.

I am working currently in Injury

Board in sort of an interesting role.

I'm in a split role right now,

so I'm working as our director

of operations as well as

a member of the Member

Success Team with Carla.

So I really get to see things

from this holistic perspective,

both the overall vision of Injury Board

and where we're headed as a company,

doing everything from, to Mason's point,

really helping us grow the business

and scale Injury Board as a business.

Everything from building out

procedures, tracking KPIs,

and really just figuring out what

we teach our member firms is to

make their businesses,

that part of what they're doing

systematic and scalable in a way.

Because at the end of the day,

the goal is to be able to transfer that,

what I call institutional or tribal

knowledge to whoever is going to come up

after you in the event that

you do eventually exit your

practice. So what would

that look like?

And if you could create this replicable

sort of system and transfer everything

that you've grown in your practice to

somebody else, what would that look like?

And even if that's not your intention,

my background really has been in the

virtual space where the whole idea is to

build businesses to scale. That's

the sort of operations piece.

And then with Carlo,

we've been working together through

building member success. And again,

in that role,

a big piece of what we're doing and

speaking with our members is that sort of

systematic approach to helping them do

what we're trying to do and what we're

doing at Injury Board, but

then within their own firms.

So creating this sort of systematic

approach to how they're going to

strategize around growing their business.

I come to Injury Board with about 10

years in my own consultancy where I was

working in the primarily virtual space,

but I have a few brick and mortars,

but primarily in the virtual

space as a fractional COO and CMO.

So my background does span marketing

and operations. It's always exciting.

It's definitely being sort

of a small organization.

It is amazing to be able to

have, I guess I would say,

the ability and the freedom to do what

we know works without a whole lot of red

tape,

which is always what drew me to having

my own consultancy and now I get to do it

with these amazing

member firms and people.

So it's been a really exciting ride

here over the past two years and I look

forward to continuing to add

lots of excitement to the firm.

Hopefully I bring excitement everywhere

I go. So that's my contribution.

Carla's catchphrase is always like, Jess

is jumping out of her chair right now.

I'm like, let me fix it.

Let me fix it, please.

You're making me excited as we speak.

Maybe that's a story

for another time, Ben.

I didn't know anybody

was paying attention.

You're the one who grabs the mic on

the bus when you go to events and does

karaoke, right?

Yes.

Every business needs one of those. So

Carla, you're the more subdued version.

Only outwardly,

I am Carla Cornish and I direct

member success for the Injury Board,

which to me means that my love

languages are engagement and retention.

And what that means to me is I look

across the landscape of this incredible

neural network as Mason described

and look for connecting points.

We are a network of

amazing plaintiff firms,

very accomplished in their own rights,

full of staff that are motivated

and want to be inspired.

And I get to know those firms. I

get to know how they find success.

I get to know how they've met with some

challenges and really understanding

where they are in their journey as a firm.

And then what we try to do is we try to

step back and look at the network as a

whole full of firms who have a story

to tell. They have an approach,

they have a point of view on how you

should bring in clients and how you should

run your operations and maybe how you

should seek leadership in your career. And

really the goal for me is to make those

connections to the best benefit of our

members, whether that's

exploring their strategy,

understanding their operations,

or just understanding what kinds of

cases are really important to them and

knowing that making connections with

other professionals in that arena would be

really beneficial for them. So we

do an awful lot for our members,

but really that's what undergirds

what we're trying to do.

We're a mission-driven organization

that puts clients first and we want to

empower our members to do that.

I don't know. I think you might rival

Mason for an interesting background.

I mean, military intelligence, raising

a family, therapists, MBA. I don't know.

That's pretty good, Carla.

So we've got an enormous amount

of collective knowledge here.

So one of the advantages I think you guys

have is that you see so many different

law firm businesses,

you have transparency and insight into

those businesses and the individuals that

run them. Obviously in order to

be invited to join Injury Board,

the firm would have to be

accomplished and successful,

at least in terms of their capabilities

of providing legal services,

but that doesn't always translate

into business acumen or know - how.

So my first question for you guys is

what are the biggest challenges you see

lawyers have in running businesses and

what are the struggles that seem to be

common to member firms that you're often

helping them with and dealing with?

I come to the Injury Board about

three years ago. I joined the team.

I come by way. My journey's not as

interesting as Mason's, but I come from,

I started out in the military.

I joined the US Army.

I served five years as a military

intelligence officer. I got out,

I went back to school.

I wanted to help people.

And so I went to grad school

and learned to be a therapist.

I did that for a little bit, raised

a family, went back to school again,

got my MBA and said,

"I need to get some corporate experience."

I did that by way of the Veterans

Administration, not exactly corporate,

but I did learn a lot

about process improvement.

And then I did go on into the banking

and finance sector and did lean process

improvement for them. And then

thank goodness I found my way here.

Westpoint, Brad, by the way.

I'll start out with an idea. One of

the challenges that we see very often,

and it also tends to happen along

a stage of firm's lifecycle,

it's that period of time where

you need to get in the cases.

Everybody wants to start with

their client development.

You also need to make sure that

the business is able to keep up.

There's a tension between the urge to

just go get clients and then making

sure that the business who is running

things and making sure that you have

longevity needs to catch up.

And so that's one of the things that

surfaces quickly when we do our discovery

with firms. What do you

think about that, Jess?

I definitely agree.

And I would also add to that that I

think a lot of times it's also the

idea that people intuitively

sort of know what to do,

but they don't know how to do it or

they don't have the manpower to do it,

especially in smaller

firms we see that a lot.

So it's sort of figuring out just in

terms of the number of hours you have in

the week.

How are we going to actually execute

these things that we know we should be

doing, or I should say should be doing,

how are we going to execute those?

And then how are we going to focus

still on taking care of our clients and

taking care of our practice?

So that is also one of the

biggest problems we see.

Do you see our model of

bringing on a non-attorney

myself to run the day-to-day,

or are you still seeing the more

traditional firms that are run

by the attorneys that are run by the

partners and not really having that

non-attorney voice at a senior level?

Have you seen a transition to our

model yet or is it more traditional?

I would say that it's probably about

fifty fifty depending on the size of the

firm and depending on just what their

needs are or what their perceived needs

are. To your point,

I love the idea of having somebody that

isn't necessarily an attorney coming

in and really having that

sort of perspective on it

because I think at the end

of the day, when it comes

to running a business,

there are fresh ideas and

there are fresh applications,

but there really aren't

any brand new ideas.

So the things that make any business

successful are going to translate in a lot

of cases. I've found even just for

myself coming from the virtual space,

some of the best ideas and the most novel

ideas are taking things that are from

the virtual space and bringing them

into the brick and mortar space or vice

versa. So in the virtual

space, it was all day webinars,

virtual courses, webinars,

virtual courses. And a lot of times in

the brick and mortar kind of businesses,

people don't think of that as they might

do an in - person lunch and learn or

they might lean on sending paper

postcards or things like that.

So when you flip-flop those,

now you get a novel approach that the

sector hasn't kind of exhausted yet.

So I love the model of having somebody

come in from just a general space and

looking at it with fresh eyes. Because

I think sometimes as attorneys,

we may get maybe too close to our

practice sometimes and it's nice to have

somebody come in from the outside and

look at it with that frame of reference.

I jump in too and just say that

I think our firms may be a little

forward-thinking too because of just the

ones that we've been able to associate

with and then maybe some of the education

that they've gotten over the last few

years because I still think having

a non-attorney operator is probably

at the most an early majority decision.

I think it's probably earlier than that.

And I think that what

we're seeing is overall,

if I had to think back when we're the

first firms really thinking about getting

an operator in, we were

having those conversations

maybe five and six years ago.

We've helped hire a couple

of them for our firms.

And I think that the fact that you all

have actually is it VisionSpark that

is really specialized in this is a

very powerful idea because there's a

consistency to it after we've done it a

couple of times. We really looked at it

and we were like,

there's a kind of a personality and a

type that we're looking for as well that

can make that transition and

not everyone's ready for that.

And I don't think every firm is

necessarily even ready for it.

Some of them are in - house and

they're grown up and they've kind of

transitioned from being an office manager.

That can be kind of a dangerous

slope too, to be honest with you,

because many times they have

sort of an administrative gear.

And this is not to say all office managers

are like this by any stretch of the

imagination,

but sometimes when you just inherit

more and more responsibility in a firm,

you're looking for somebody who may be

a really good administrator and they get

stuff done and out the door.

But where is that strategic gear that

operators are bringing that kind of brings

it to a different level?

I still think we're early,

but I think we're catching up

quickly. I think one of the drivers,

to be honest with you,

is legal tech and this

wholesale adoption of AI that

if you think back over 20 years,

the running joke was the law firms,

you could just feel like you're beaming

back to the early '90s or something like

that.

Yu could bring any idea and just feel

like you're from Star Trek showing up.

These days, the adoption of AI in

particular has been so fast and so

wholesale throughout all of law really

that I think it's making people think

differently about all the other

pieces of their firm as a business.

One thing I like about Injury,

I like a lot of things about

Injury Board obviously,

but I think one of the things that makes

it different is a lot of organizations

when firms join, they join and it's

like one or two attorneys join.

And correct me if my rationale's wrong

here. When a firm is invited to join,

it is a membership is firm-wide.

And what I like about that is you

have a number of operational groups,

marketing groups.

So it's a way where it's not just

the attorneys being involved with the

injury board, it's our marketing

team, it's our operations team,

it's our finance team that

are all touching the various

things of injury board.

It's really a firm-wide membership

that everyone can take advantage of and

benefit from. Did I

spell that out correctly?

Yeah, that's 100%.

I'd love Carla and Jess to jump in and

talk about maybe some of the mechanics of

it, but I'll tell you the why or

how it evolved with our group.

If you're going to grow your law firm,

you're going to have more than

lawyers play the game with you.

And if you're going to actually

invest in a firm itself,

then you have to start thinking about

who are the players in the firm.

And it's specialized roles and

their specialized needs and

education opportunities.

And I think what has been so exciting is

what started out as kind of a kernel of

an idea, which is plainspoken ways, well,

how do we give our members

enough to make them want to stay?

I mean that's kind of

retention in a bottle.

And so the technology world would say,

we'll build customer success. Well,

we don't have customers,

but we have members.

And so that's how member success started.

And quite honestly,

it was just a kernel of an idea that

we kind of planted in the organization.

Carla and Jess are the ones that actually

turned it into what it is and what it

will be.

You do want to unpack a little bit

about what you all are doing in terms of

working groups and how we really reach

out to different members of the firm.

Yeah, thanks, Mason. Our working groups,

Injury Board is like a microcosm

of networking on steroids.

And if we're going to set out to

optimize all of this potential

opportunity to share and learn,

then what better way than to bring

people of like mind together?

And so what we did in the

beginning was to say, okay,

what are the roles that other than

the main attorney that may join the

organization, we have

everyone as a member,

what are the roles that would

benefit from something like this?

And so we started with the operations

group and then we built out the marketing

and paralegal.

And so I look at them as our core groups

because those are the core roles within

a firm. We then built out other sort of

specialty groups. We have an AI group,

for example,

bringing together members who

are involved in AI-related

cases. There's a great need to understand

how to implement AI in a law firm and

we also try to address that.

But with this working group,

we're trying to bring members together

in their craft around AI-related cases.

It's pretty new in that realm,

the AI-related casework.

It's really a prime time to be able to

bring folks together and learn together

as that is evolving. We have an auto

truck motorcycle group as well. Again,

MVA is the largest case

specialty in the aggregate across

plaintiff firms like ours. And so

it's an effort to say, okay, well,

let's really drill down into what it

means to work a case like that to the

best outcome for a client.

We also have a women's group.

We really value diversity and inclusion

here at the Injury Board and within the

network.

And so that's a preliminary measure to

put our arms around that idea and bring

together women in the industry. I think

they're an underrepresented group across

the board, and so that's something

that we try to focus on here.

Jess runs that group with great success.

We also have a NEOS user

group at the Injury Board.

We have members that others

would call maybe a vendor.

They're corporate members for us

and we value them very, very much.

One of those is assembly software and

we run a working group dedicated to

the case management system

that they promote. Again,

bring like - minded people

together to say, "Hey,

how can we help each other leverage this

platform better together?" You'll hear

everybody here at IB say that

quite a bit. We're better together.

I was going to just jump

back to Jeff's core question,

which is going back to

it, how do you think,

and I'd be interested in

what you guys are doing too.

It's like how do you think about the

different players on your team and how do

you help them level up? What are

you all seeing as best practice?

Because this will be a chance that we can

mine your brain a little bit too while

we're on here for your

viewers. And listeners,

when you think about the different

functions that are represented

in your firm,

how are you thinking about what they

need to level up either career-wise or to

serve that function well?

Attorneys are different.

We think about actually

young associates too.

So we have work that we're

doing specifically with

them because they're in a

different part of their career.

How do you guys think about it?

It's such a valuable point that I

think is often overlooked in most

firms.

I think there's so much

value to be had by getting

exposure to other people that are doing

similar things to what you're doing

outside of your small area

of sphere of influence,

whether that's geographic

or substantive-based.

Being in a firm in a state like Maine,

which is a small rural

state that's out of the way,

it's hard for us to find good

examples for best practices

here in our home state. We're

kind of the leaders here,

the cutting edge on the

front end of the industry,

and so there's nobody here

to look to. For lawyers,

there's lots of opportunities for that.

I'm part of a couple different groups,

including the Injury Board,

where I go and I get a lot of inspiration

and motivation from hearing what

my colleagues are doing around

the country. But to your point,

for other subsets of

employees within a law firm,

there has not historically been that

opportunity. For example, Jeff as a COO,

I think from the beginning, Jeff,

I've encouraged you to try to find

peers to join mastermind groups.

Now you do that through Injury Board.

I think you've had a great experience

with that and you're able to network with

people that are like - minded

working on similar issues.

And there are obviously other COO

devoted groups that are just for

COOs. We had a guest, Cameron Harold on

who was running one as you may recall.

But when it comes to paralegals or

marketing directors, whatever that may be,

they're all on an island,

especially because when you're

doing that function in a law firm,

you typically are not with a group of

peers that are doing similar things.

You're working with lawyers who don't

know anything about what you do. We don't

know much about what our

marketing director does,

just enough to be dangerous.

So it's such a valuable

insight. And I think for every,

and we just did this

with our finance person,

but she's now working with somebody

who's mentoring and working with her

specifically,

but it's such a valuable thing and I

think overlooked element of building

a practice to have those resources

for the non-lawyers. Agree with it.

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You guys have mentioned AI a couple times.

Obviously I think if we were

to talk about hot topics,

AI is the hot topic across not just

law firms across everywhere and the

usage and how ethical everything is

and how safe and everything else.

I guess aside from AI,

is there another hot topic that

you're seeing consistently throughout

your membership that

people should be aware of?

I hesitate to even dip a toe into

this water, but I'm going to.

And then I think there might be some

other more practical things that are

happening as well.

And I'd love to hear what Carla and

Jess are thinking because I think it's a

great question.

But the one that's sort of on our early

radar when we think about the network

and firm-wide is the whole entrance of

private equity and circling around what

does this look like to get involved with

firms and will law be the next

thing that's sort of private

equitized? For us, it was a very

organic conversation because we have,

as you can imagine, after

a 25-year network and we

have unbelievable retention.

And so people tend to be around for a

really long time with us until they get to

the end of their career and some folks

haven't thought about their firm as

necessarily an asset. It's almost

like a job. It's a really well-paying,

high-positioned job.

And so what do I do when I quit my

job or how do I just shut the doors?

We've had some early questions about

probably two and a half years ago,

which is I'm getting to the end of

the career. Have you ever sold a firm?

Does anybody ever buy a firm?

And then once that sort of happened and

our listserv and discussion happened,

we did kind of an informal

survey. And Carla, I think,

led that effort and we found a

limited number of respondents,

but we found probably about 10 or 15%

of our firms were saying that's where

we're going to be in the next

10 years. So now what do you do?

And how can we really help our members

think through that? And meanwhile,

as you guys have watched happen,

the whole MSO model has sort of really

come onto scenes. And I think as an

operator, Jeff,

I'd be very interested in your

perception of it because I think most

non-attorneys are business

leaders are probably much more

familiar with this world and the attorneys

have been very protected from it and

I think they're fighting it in many

ways and in many states to do it,

but some version of it seems

like it's coming. Again,

it's a big topic and I don't know

if y'all want to go down that road,

but it's out there and our

folks are talking about it.

It's funny because that was actually

what I was hoping you would say because

private equity and venture capital money

has been everywhere and I feel like due

to the ethics rules,

law firms are kind of their last bastion

that they haven't been able to dip

their toe in with their bags of money.

The way they're obviously getting around

those rules is to be able to handle the

operational side of the firm and not

technically own a firm as non-attorneys,

which they're precluded from.

But I think we're going to see more of

it with the amount of private equity

that's out there.

I'm curious how many of the larger

firms or firms that you've worked with

have been approached

by the private equity,

by the VC companies to make that offer.

And I think it's something that

people need to be prepared for those

conversations.

They're going to happen a lot more

in the coming years. We haven't given

it a lot of thought here and

whether I'm for it or against it,

I haven't a clue at this

point to be honest with you.

A couple of thoughts and then I'd love

to hear actually Carla and Jazz because

they are literally on the front line.

So we have at a minimum of quarterly

check-in with all our members.

So if you can imagine trying to check

in with 130 firms, first of all,

just try and do it on the calendar

with 130 firms every quarter is almost

Sasifian, I guess,

roll the big rock up the hill and let

it roll back on you over and over again,

kind of task. Where I think a fair

way of representing our members are,

they're very intelligent people, right?

That's how they got to where they are.

And so they are going to listen and

often dispassionately to what's going on.

But I think my sense is, it'd

be interesting to hear Ben,

my sense is the attorneys who are very

hard for the profession and to keep a

level of professional discipline and

represent their profession as leaders are

saying,

"We would like the profession to run

the profession." And so we don't want to

see maybe necessarily what happened

where business people came in and started

telling doctors how to practice medicine.

They don't want to see that.

We've heard that. We don't want

somebody telling us how to practice law.

And there's a lot of the MSO things

that are happening. They say, "Well,

we're going to put those bright lines in,

" but that's a really hard line to walk.

And so I think what we're trying

to figure out is two things. One,

how do you keep the lawyers at the

forefront of the whole decision making

process and potentially the acquisition

process? They should be leading.

This is their profession they should lead.

And then the second part is how do you

position your firm to be as valuable as

possible for whatever ends up happening?

One, it's a good business practice.

If you're running a great business,

it should have the material effect

of being great for your clients.

You should be delivering great results

and great client experience and really

taking care of people and their biggest

points of need. And so if you're doing

that and then you're putting

that business layer in,

hopefully you're creating a lot of

value. So no matter what happens,

whether there is no sort of big

push into this world or there is,

you're well positioned.

Does that make sense?

You were going where I was going to

head, Mason, which was with our group,

we are pretty far whatever

direction towards client centricity.

And so for this group,

this notion of the big money non-attorney

organizations coming in and

acquiring, consolidating,

those are the words we're hearing,

is naturally not going to fit well.

But at the same time, we feel that our

responsibility is to say, "Yeah, well,

just like when AI was coming onto

the scene and folks kind of rebuffed

it, no, it's not going to,

no, I'm not going to do it.

" You either got on the train or

you didn't. It didn't wait for you.

So I believe that in the

same way this phenomenon,

whether you are for it or against it,

it's here and the train's going to leave

the station and how are you going to

position yourself to the best outcome for

yourself? That's some of the work that

we're doing is bringing to light

the landscape because some folks,

not necessarily just IB, but

they have some blinders on.

I don't want to look at it. It's

not there a little bit literally,

but metaphorically they're just going

to keep going and hope for the best.

And what we bring to the table is to say,

"That's not really a strategy." That

survey that Mason mentioned a couple years

ago, we're like,

"What's your plan for your end of your

career?" And one person was going to fall

over dead at my desk. So that's an extreme

example of what we're trying to say,

probably not the best thing for

you or anybody else at the firm.

Let's take a look at that because whether

you like it or not, this is happening.

And so we need to make the biggest

swing right now attorneys can retain,

this is our profession, your profession.

I'm not an attorney.

You can retain that sort of

agency in your own profession.

You're in some very interesting networks

beyond injury board where you roll in

with some influential folks

in the legal industry.

What's the pulse from your standpoint?

It's very thought provoking. When

we talk about trial lawyer industry,

we tend to lump it together as

one kind of homogenous thing.

There's at least two entirely

different professions within it.

An Injury Board really only, I shouldn't

say only, it has both to some extent,

but primarily it's

skewed in one direction,

which is the sort of

true classic lawyers who

are adding value added services

and making their living

based on their professional reputation

and the high value services they provide

to clients,

which because of all of these proprietary

and ethical rules designed to guard

the profession has a very high

profit margin relative to almost

any other industry. You can say, well,

lawyers are trying to protect

against outside influence.

Some would hear that as lawyers are

trying to protect their own profit margin

against outside interference.

One can argue which system is better

for clients or not better for clients,

but I do think we have to be honest about

what's driving it for them. It's such

an interesting sort of balkanized

industry because it's very hard to

scale a law firm compared to other

types of industries because number one,

you can't take capital investments of

the type we're discussing for the most

part. Number two,

you can't practice across state lines

for the most part and there's all

kinds of things that flow from that.

That's the one category of lawyer.

This other category of lawyer is

really the aggregator of marketing and

volume and low price, low service,

high volume practice. Those

people really aren't lawyers,

they're business people that are

using the legal industry as a

platform for running a business,

but they're not principally lawyers and

they're not making their money out of

adding value from their legal

services or legal reputations.

Those are two viable businesses.

One is a low margin business like

the volume aggregators with high

volume, low price,

spending a lot of money

on case acquisition and

marketing and making money on

volume. The other are the

low volume, high value firms,

which are the type that are generally

in Injury Board where they have high

profit margins and are trying to

protect those from interference.

But that doesn't scale very well

for all the reasons we discussed.

So this interesting tension and then

where that could potentially work

out or there may be some opportunities

is what Jeff was alluding to,

which is the segregation off of the

back office administrative components of

the business as separate businesses

that can have capital investment

and can be optimized in certain ways.

That will probably eventually

come in and change the industry,

but who knows whether it will change it

for good or bad. Like everything else,

it will move towards some

kind of mean probably.

But those are just top of mind thoughts.

Jess, I know you want to jump in here,

so I'm going to turn it over to you.

I would totally say I agree with you that

there are definitely those sort of two

camps. What I think is

really interesting though,

and we see this with the clients a lot,

is that we sort of generalize

marketing is this sort of

idea and it's almost there's

an otherness about that,

like marketing is this entity.

And what I find really interesting

is that marketing is inevitable.

Whether you are type one or you're

type two of those attorneys,

you are still part of your business

will always be marketing or

marketing as a whole.

But there are different tactics or

sort of things that you can do within

marketing and I don't think marketing

as a whole is like an evil thing

and the expression I use, although

it's kind of like a gross expression,

is like, there's many ways to skin a

cat. So I tell people all the time,

they say, "Well, I hate social media."

Okay, fine. You hate social media.

Maybe what you hate is TikTok.

You don't want to point and dance because

that feels inauthentic and I get that,

but maybe the social media for you

is LinkedIn because that's your

audience.

It gives you a forum to build

authentic relationships if you are

approaching it in that way.

So I really hesitate to kind of make a

blanket statement so when people feel

averse to marketing or marketing

as I'm going to call it,

what they mean really is I'm

averse to selling my soul and

presenting an image that to me for

whatever reason feels inauthentic.

But even if your business is driven

on by relationships and referrals,

you are still marketing yourself

and you have to accept that is the

awareness of your business. However

you slice that is marketing.

Really the goal is to talk about what

you do and share it with others. So

however you look at that and

sort of wherever you fall on,

I want to stop perpetuating

this idea that marketing is like

this bad thing because

it's a necessary evil.

What we need to surface is the

conversation in our network,

in our working groups about what kind

of marketing feels aligned with your

goals as a business, as a practice.

And that's part of the conversations

that we have with clients as Carla and I

sort of step through this sort

of effort map process is like,

what are your goals?

What are the buckets of the things

that most people want to accomplish?

And then what are you doing in those

and what things do we maybe want to turn

the volume up on a little bit and say,

okay, this is working and I like it.

It feels aligned. So let's

optimize that. Let's grow that,

let's scale that and let's systemize it.

So down the road I can pass on that

procedure to somebody else

of how to execute that.

And what are the things that maybe we

want to take a better look at because for

whatever reason, either they're not

working or they don't feel aligned,

it's okay to say, "Hey, you know what?

I'm not going to do that. " That's okay.

That's fine.

Let's find something else that is

working and that you feel strongly about.

That's the place where the conversations

that we have with members and the

groups we have become really important

to share ideas and say, "Hey,

what's working, what's not,

and what feels good to us?".

I'm interested in marketing because

it's one of many business type

areas where lawyers don't necessarily

have any inherent background or

proficiency and we know there's tons of

vendors out there that want to take your

money and make all kinds of grandiose

promises about case delivery and

marketing.

How are you finding people are navigating

through that to find what in your

words just works is the right and

authentic and works best for them and not

being just kind of sold a bill

of goods that is hard to verify

where there's little accountability on

the side of a vendor who's taking your

money and maybe under delivering.

Marketing is inevitable.

Whether you are type one or you're

type two of those attorneys,

you are still part of your business

will always be marketing or

marketing as a whole.

But there are different tactics or

sort of things that you can do within

marketing and I don't think marketing

as a whole is like an evil thing.

I think it's, and the expression I use,

although it's kind of like

a gross expression, is like,

there's many ways to skin a cat. So I

tell people all the time, they say, "Well,

I hate social media." Okay,

fine. You hate social media.

Maybe what you hate is TikTok.

You don't want to point and dance because

that feels inauthentic and I get that,

but maybe unfortunately that does happen.

And I'd like to think that Carla and I

are sort of one of the sort of secret

weapons that firms have.

We do perform a really detailed strategic

content gap analysis where we actually

will use tools to scrape their

keywords and find out is there a gap

between what people are searching for

and the content you have on your site?

For the marketing firms that are doing

a great job and delivering what they

promise, they probably love

that because we say, "Hey,

here's some stuff that we think you

could be doing." And we encourage our

members to go hand the report that we

produce to their marketing vendor and say,

"Hey, here's their ideas for the next

six months on content they can develop.

We've kind of done that work for them.

Here it is. Here are the keywords.

Here are the way the types of blogs

that you should be writing and go.

" Some marketing vendors probably hate

us because we're exposing places where

maybe some of our firms might be a

little bit taken advantage of. So that's

something that we can do for them and

we can sort of serve as that mouthpiece

that can say we're sort of translating

some of that reporting and the

analytics for them and saying,

"What does this actually mean

in real English in real speak?

What does this mean and are you getting

your money's worth?" And I especially

think in the world of AI and all this,

it's much easier to generate content

than it used to be. Going back,

I remember starting in the virtual space

and having a VA that I would pay to

write blog posts for me.

That's gone. It's like, "Hey,

here's the blog I want to create.

ChatGPT can learn your voice and it can

do all these things and just crank out

content just like that. " So it's

really not just the content generation,

but it's the analysis of what's working

and is it reaching? You're achieving

your desired goals with that marketing.

I think that's the larger question.

So that was kind of a roundabout rabbit

holy way of answering your question if I

did,

but does that sort of answer the question

that you asked around marketing firms

and what we're doing to combat that?

Carla's got something to jump in with.

I just wanted to add that while we're

doing this with our members also in

parallel in the background,

they're leveraging the network or we're

leveraging the network for them because

like Jess referred to earlier,

there's nothing new under the sun.

There's just different

ways of doing the things.

And so we're making those connections.

Who else in the network at my size,

my practice area, my market, what

are they doing? Who are they using?

Who are they talking to?

Where are they going?

And that's the beauty of networking and

that's something that we're also doing

with them in parallel

actually all the time.

We're always trying to

promote that aspect. Mason,

you're trying to get in there.

The overall message I think we

want to send all the listeners are,

we had talked to Injury

Board as invite only,

but the benefit to belong to

organizations, to belong to groups.

Every state has an Association of

Justice or Trial Lawyer Association

or what they all use different verbiage.

There were just so many organizations

and keeping yourself siloed and just

your head down and working on your

business and not getting out there,

you're not missing out. It's

not the things you're thinking.

It's not just CLEs and stuff.

It's building your reputation,

it's building your networking group,

it's building your referral pipeline.

There are so many reasons to get involved

in the organizations within your state

and your organizations nationwide

that will just pay you dividends

year over year.

I'm so glad you brought that up, Jeff,

and this is a great place to

land on if we're going to land.

I think that when we were getting ready

for the talk yesterday and we're just

having kind of an informal chat pulled

together a list of probably 25 different

organizations that we have on file and

that's not to include the exhaustive

list of the TLAs and the state and

the national levels that we look at as

kind of the feeders for this

network. But the organizations,

they're ones that you can

simply join, you can belong to,

you can pay to belong or you can

professionally qualify to belong.

And so I think no matter what,

you need to be building network

because for the listeners,

I just want to encourage them to know

that out of all the members that we've

talked to, probably the one with

the most enviable economics,

it's extraordinary how capital

efficient this firm is,

how valuable this firm is on

paper and how much sort of

any future world,

whether it's an attorney looking at it

or a firm to potentially buy it or merge

with it or somebody from an MSO

standpoint coming into capital infusion,

this firm is positioned where you want

it be and spends almost no money in

traditional marketing because all of

their work is going back to what Ben said,

this sort of two versions of the universe

where you have these really strong

litigators that are producing

outsized results for their clients,

which we think is the most important

thing possible. And then you have sort of

more higher volume practices that may

be getting lesser results for their

clients, but they're just doing so

much volume that it makes up for it.

Those firms will often

look to the high producers,

especially in a specialized area

of practice and say, how can we,

the economics are just much better if we

just refer the case to them instead of

trying it ourselves. And to me,

that's the most powerful place

for a great litigator to be.

If you've put that much energy

into your professional acumen,

you're able to actually produce

great results for your clients,

then how can you position to benefit

from that are out there to have?

That's meaning the cases that need the

best minds to get the best results.

And the way that you do that

is you build relationships.

And so ultimately all these networks are

hopefully their relationship factories.

And as you're going in,

I think what's important and

what we really try to filter for,

but we also try to reinforce during

our times together is that if you go in

transactionally, you're going to miss

the real opportunity in the room.

If you go in and your main driver is,

"What am I going to get

out of this room today?

Or what am I going to get out of this

person that's standing in front of me?

What can I get? " I think you're

going to miss that. If your goal is,

how can we build a relationship?

What do I have that action share with

this person that makes them better,

that makes this network

that I'm part of stronger,

that makes our profession better? Those

people have a great degree of influence.

And how do we know that?

Because our members are these leaders who

have invested their time and effort to

grow their profession,

to do the service work. You can either

look for those people because you know

they're going to be influential.

You can start to be one of those people

by adopting a mindset of service.

And I think that relational

piece, it's economically smart,

it's professionally smart, it's

smart from a human standpoint,

that would be a great thing that we would

love to share with everybody is after

25 years of a member organization,

what really works is relationship and

what really works is influence that comes

as a result of service, of looking to

give more than you get. And ironically,

as you do that, fruit of that work is

that you get plenty, you get so much.

There's stuff to share, which actually

just reinforces the network itself.

I was just going to say that's

just such valuable advice.

It may sound a little bit old fashioned,

but it's the reality and it's been

entirely aligned with my own experience in

that if you look back at all of our,

in many, many of our best cases,

they come from personal relationships

and their relationships you build over

years.

And the on piece you didn't reference

in that litany of good reasons

for doing that work, Mason,

is that it's also just rewarding

and gratifying and enjoyable,

developing relationships

with other human beings.

I know it's not in fashion these days

because we spend most of our times with

our head down and our devices,

but having relationships

with actual humans where you

share your life's work and

stories and doing activities that are fun

is actually the enjoyable part of life

too. So it's a win-win really if you can

do it. And I think the thing lawyers,

I think too often one of the factors

that provides a barrier to that is

the time it takes because

jetting off... I mean,

I'm about to go to London for the inner

circle meeting and that's going to be a

week. I'm traveling at overseas.

It's going to be expensive.

But every event like that, I mean,

the Inner Circle has Injury Board has

multiple meetings a year in very nice

places. It takes time and

you have to commit to it.

I always think that the return

on that investment is worth it.

You just have to get your mindset to a

point where you accept that and do it.

Thank you guys so much for joining us on

the podcast this hour just flew on by.

And Jeff, thanks so much.

Thanks for listening to Elawvate,

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