The Art of War for Law Firm Owners, with Ben Gideon and Jeff Wright

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.

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I just spent an hour doing a webinar

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We had the head of business development

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models of how you use Supio to

put a case together. It was very,

very impressive.

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find seconds in command. You know

any seconds in command, Jeff?

That would be me.

No.

It's exactly where I want to be.

Yeah. When I think of number

two, I always think of Jeff.

Thank you, Ben. I appreciate that.

We have VisionSpark to credit for the

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Welcome to the Elawvate Build & Grow

Your Law Firm podcast. I am Jeff Wright,

chief operating officer at Gideon Asen

and as always joined by our host, owner,

attorney, Benjamin

Gideon. Ben, how are you?

Hey, Jeffrey. I'm doing great. I

was just commenting on your attire.

Do you want to enlighten our listeners

as to what you're wearing today?

Yeah. For those of you, anyone watching,

we have a sweatshirt post successful

trial, the Meryl Poulin here,

where we got a positive outcome for

our client. During Ben's closing,

there was a very quick objection that

was very quickly sustained that I don't

think anyone saw coming,

but Ben pivoted quickly and

professionally and kept his closing along

the exact same lines just

using some different words.

So we memorialized it with a sweatshirt

for everybody here at the firm.

It's become a tradition that after a

trial win, we're getting little gifts,

swag gifts for everybody.

There's always a bison theme that's

sort of a bison wearing a suit.

It's a long story, which we don't need to.

We don't have time for that.

We should devote a whole episode to

the American bison and its influence on

Gideon Asen.

Yeah. Somehow we're a firm in Maine,

but we've adopted the American bison

from out west as our firm's spirit

animal.

Not to be confused with the buffalo.

No. We're.

Talking about the bison here.

Exactly. We don't have time to

discuss the difference either.

Nor do we know the

difference, but it's an.

Excellent point. We should

probably look into that.

Well, I was just telling Jeff, just

before we got on the air today,

I came from my daughter's senior project,

which was great because

she was job shadowing.

The aforementioned Meryl Poulin and

lawyer extraordinary Gideon Asen and great

role model for a young woman who may

someday want to go into the law and

watching my daughter present about a

couple of the cases that she observed and

some of the activities she participated

in was really cool to behold because I

can see the future.

You're not forcing her, are you? No.

I'm not forcing her, but there'll

be some carrots and some sticks.

So this is your last child heading off

to college. How you feeling about that?

Going to be an empty nester?

I'm not looking forward to it.

No.

I like having the kids around.

Well, she's not going too far.

She's heading down to Boston.

So I'll be driving down for the bean

pot tournament and other random events

where I'll show up at her dorm

room unannounced. It'll be great.

With a bison sweatshirt on, I'm

sure she'll be thrilled to see you.

All right. Well, I guess we should

transition into something more.

Well, the aforementioned daughter

just peaked in your room.

Oh, she did. Nice.

Yeah. So obviously we've

had a busy couple weeks.

Last week we onboarded a summer intern

from Maine Law who's going to be with us

for the summer and we onboarded a brand

new litigation attorney to fill out

our litigation teams.

So a lot of work last week and going

to be a lot of work going forward.

Obviously getting the litigation attorney

up and running and acclimated to our

current cases and involving our

intern to get him as much exposure

as possible while he's

here for the three months.

So it's been a good couple of weeks.

So why don't I introduce the topic today

since I'm the one who suggested it,

thought we could kind of have a little

bit of fun and just depart from marching

through different operations

and systems things.

And this is an idea I've had that I

wanted to do for a little while because

probably like everybody way back,

I read Sun Tzu's Art of War,

didn't really understand why I was

reading it or what its application was to

anything.

But there were a couple of concepts there

that lingered with me over the years.

And then more recently I found a book

called Sun Tzu in The Art of Business,

which kind of takes the

concepts from the original text,

which is about 2,500 years old at

this point and applies it to the

modern world of business. And

when I went back and read that,

it was just amazing to me how many of

those concepts resonated with what we're

doing and probably what every

small business encounters

as they're building out

a business and trying to

figure out what's the strategy,

what battles should be fought,

what's the territory you want to dominate

or occupy and so forth. So I thought

we could kind of,

I've distilled down six or seven of the

core principles from the two books and

wanted to talk about how it applies

to building and growing a law firm.

And hopefully folks will

find some translatable

principles here no matter what

kind of firm, whatever stage of

growth or development you're in.

I think a lot of these principles are

timeless and universally applicable.

So hopefully there'll be some value

there. So just we can launch in,

why don't we introduce each

principle one at a time,

then we can have a little

bit of discussion around

it and apply it in the way

we've seen it apply and more generally

how it may apply to those building and

growing a firm.

So kind of the first principle that's

the one that I think Sun Tzu is if you

asked anybody who read the original

book what the big takeaway from it is,

it's this first principle,

which is that a great warrior,

great champion wins the battle without

having to fight. And the concept there is

that would seem fairly

obvious in a couple ways.

One is that the goal of being

a general or warrior or in this

case entrepreneur or a law firm owner,

the goal is not the conflict.

The goal is what you're trying to achieve

that occasionally requires some amount

of conflict in order to accomplish.

Similar to if you were a

general leading an army,

you might want to take some territory,

you might want to develop a sphere of

influence and one way to accomplish

that might be to engage the

enemy and battle on the field.

But Sun Tzu's point is that that

process of conflict and fighting is

enormously draining. It saps your

resources, it saps your energy,

it leads to attrition. Obviously

in the real world of real combat,

it leads to death and all

the things that go with that.

So his big kind of insight in the

book is the Supreme Art of War

is to subdue the enemy without having

to fight. And it's worth thinking about

that in the context of a business.

The idea of that is that there

are different ways you can

accomplish the same goal and one way

of course is to go head on against

the enemy and engage in battle.

But other ways of doing the same

things are positioning yourself so

that the enemy backs down or doesn't

see any need to fight or doesn't

want to fight or is convinced before

the battle starts that they can't win

and therefore they choose not to fight.

And so then you get to take the territory

without a fight and save yourself all

the resources,

all the battles and potentially marshal

those resources for other battles that

need to be fought. There's a lot

of cliches in there, but Jeff,

just before we get into the applicability

of that to the business world and what

we're trying to accomplish, what's your

top line takeaway from that concept?

I think that there were two big takeaways

when I was reading your blurb on that

and I think we practice this well here.

I think the first thing was one of our

core values really equates to this where

we make decisions based on

science and data and not ego.

And I think wanting to fight,

wanting to get in the courtroom,

wanting to quote unquote destroy your

opponent in a public place and show your

skillset to a jury, a lot of that

is ego driven to a certain extent.

But I look at a recent case that we

had here. We had an attorney, Trevor,

one of our extremely good attorneys

who did such a good job with a case

and depositions and everything else.

And as much as he wanted

to take that case to trial,

they were doing everything in their

power to settle and which was the right

decision for the client.

So in some ways they were completely

subdued without going to that

final battlefront, I guess,

if we're using that terminology of

having to litigate the case in front of a

jury.

So those were kind of my two takeaways

and translations for how this pertains to

us.

I think there's a lot of applicability

to these concepts to the trial practice

side of our business apart from the

business growth side of the business and

what you just identified

as one of them. I mean,

there are people that would make the

case that if you have to try a case,

you've already lost in a sense

of your optimal outcome would

be to get a significantly outsized

settlement for your client because

A, that eliminates the risk. B,

you've already recovered

multiples of case value and C,

you don't have to expend

the resources, time,

money that it takes to try a case,

which we all know is extremely

burdensome for everybody.

But back to the business

side of it, I mean,

the ways I've thought about this a lot

in building our business are if you look

at each different sector

of law firm businesses,

but we're mostly familiar obviously

with the plaintiff's personal injury,

medical malpractice type of practice,

but I'm sure this aplies across the

board to every kind of law firm business.

There is a race to the bottom

in terms of people that are

competing in a cutthroat

way for clients and doing

so primarily based on price and

based on volume in the sense

of mass marketing,

trying to build high volume

factories with a cookie cutter

system to handle routine

cases for clients.

And the issue is that when you

have that kind of competition,

when everybody's fighting

the battle in San Su's terms,

what happens is that your

resources get sucked up into case

acquisition costs because it becomes

more and more expensive to acquire the

case. Because if everyone's

advertising on Google,

the AdWord price goes up.

If everyone's marketing on television

or just pick whatever venue you're

marketing in, if there's demand

fueled by lots of lawyers competing,

the price of acquisition of the

cases goes up. And as that happens,

Google gets richer,

Facebook Meta gets richer and the

lawyers get poorer because their

margins go down. And we made a very

distinct decision that we never

want to be competing on that battlefield

where there's a lot of lawyers fighting

over price and volume. So we

defined our territory differently,

which is we're competing on quality,

we're competing on performance,

we're competing on value added.

So that allows us in a large sense

in many of the areas where we are

acquiring cases,

it allows us to avoid that cutthroat

competition that drives down

margins and makes Google richer

and all the lawyers poor.

So just one way that that

principle of not fighting

the battle applies to

the law firm practice.

The other ways we think

about it are, I mean,

if you think of Sun Tzu's point that the

Great Warrior doesn't have to fight the

battle because the enemy

sees that it's futile,

that they're so overwhelmed

and overmatched that they

just don't want to take

the field. And so they seed the

territory without the fight.

That happens for us all the time.

I mean, after we started our firm,

we acquired a very high percentage

of our local market share in

medical malpractice cases really without

any fight because there was no battle

for that. Generally,

it's a niche practice

that's very difficult to

manage. It's expensive.

Most lawyers don't want to enter into

that field and so there's very little

competition for those cases. And so again,

we were able to take that territory

without the battle and then we then were

able to spin that off into

other complimentary practice

areas that are also resource

intensive capital and

knowledge intensive where once

we accumulated an advantage,

a competitive advantage, it's very hard

for other lawyers to compete with us.

And as we continue to grow, develop

more resources, better internal systems,

it just becomes increasingly hard for

anybody to compete. And so most of the

territory, again,

market share that we've acquired

has been done without any fight.

There's been no competition for it and

that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy

the more we consolidate

our lead, so to speak.

And I think it's just a great lesson

for any law firm business that the

key is to find that area where

you can bring a unique competitive

advantage with unique value

added right from the outset,

even if it's a very small niche, even

it's a niche that nobody really wants,

but as long as there's enough to fuel

your small firm at the beginning,

it's a great foothold or a

beachhead to then build from.

And then once you get that advantage,

find ways to perpetuate your advantage.

And then like Sun Tzu's point,

you don't have to fight with anybody

because people realize it's not worth

fighting.

You've already got such a distinct

advantage and knowledge and experience and

resources or whatever the case may be

that they're going to let you have that

territory for free.

Yeah. I think one of the things that

everyone has to keep in mind with that,

even though they might

give it to you for free,

you have to build your reputation and

you have to build your results. I mean,

part of the reason why we're

dominating the med mal practice in

our area is the reputation of you

and Taylor and the firm as a whole,

but also the results is the proof

in the pudding, as they say.

We have no problem seeing a case

all the way through and taking it to

litigation and have been lucky enough

to have a strong history of outsized

results and in some cases, record

setting results in multiple states.

So you have to maintain the reputation

and you have to get the results in

addition.

Yeah.

There's a way in which there's an internal

conflict in this principle because

one way that you acquire the reputation

of being a great warrior that nobody

wants to fight in the Sunsu language or

a great lawyer in the trial world that

nobody wants to fight against is

to have some proven victories,

some wins in the battlefield. And so I

do think that's really important. I mean,

we try cases,

we're not afraid to try cases

and it's that record of having

verdicts, which no one can

really question. I mean,

a verdict is a black and white thing

that you either get it or you don't.

It's not spin. It's an actual

accomplishment that no one

can take away from you.

So there's a countervailing principle

in the never fight the battle

principle of sometimes you do have to

fight a battle or two to burnish your

reputation to get those seminal

accomplishments. And again,

it's not just in the trial

world, but in any law field,

those actual real world results and

accomplishments that are recognizable in

your industry, both to consumers and

to your peers, those are priceless.

And I think for lawyers that

are getting there starting out,

getting those under your belt early

in your career is so critical because

there's a compounding

interest effect of that,

which is you get that verdict or

you're known for putting together that

big merger deal or you've

argued the seminal immigration

case to the Supreme Court in your state,

you made a name for yourself that is going

to carry through for the rest of your

career and allow you to build off of that.

Whereas if you're shying away from those

opportunities and you wait and don't

seize the opportunity to obtain those

kind of accomplishments until later in

your career,

you're postponing that ability for that

to continue to pay dividends for you. So

you do have to strategically fight a

battle or two here and there for sure.

So moving on to the next principle,

Sun Tzu says you should avoid

strength and attack weakness,

attack where your opponent is weak,

do not attack strength directly.

All of these things kind of

in reflection seem obvious,

but if you could think about 2,500

years ago armies on the battlefield,

probably the conventional approach

to warfare was just to find where the

armies had massed and to go get

them right, launch a head on attack.

It wasn't necessarily to

creatively identify weaknesses in

supply chains and work backwards

from there. I wasn't around then,

but this is what Sun Su is

commenting on. And frankly,

I think that tends to be a guiding

philosophy that a lot of people in

business still follow, right? They

see a competitor, their mindset is,

"Well,

we're better than they are at that. We

should be able to beat them at that game.

Let's just go head on and take them on

there." And what Sun Tzu is saying is

that's generally not a good strategy.

If you want to build out

your practice in, let's say,

Philadelphia or Tampa, Florida,

the idea of going head to head

with Morgan & Morgan, for example,

is probably not a very

smart business move.

What you want to be attempting to identify

is where are those vulnerabilities,

those areas of weakness where we

can find an opening that allows

us to break through and succeed.

So that's principle too,

avoid strength, attack weakness. So Jeff,

let's apply that to building

and growing a law firm.

Yeah,

you had made some notes here and I was

going to hit on the marketing first.

When we brought in a marketing director

and we looked at our landscape,

a lot of the firms doing marketing were

the more volume PI firms that have been

around for a long time, but

looking for the volume type cases,

more gimmicky type advertising

and we made a conscious effort to

kind of find a niche and go in a

different direction with a very

straightforward authentic

Ben and Taylor front

facing firm in all of our advertising.

So we didn't do anything to go head to

head with them where we really took a

different avenue and immediately out

of the gate differentiated ourself from

our competition as opposed

to being lumped in with them.

Right. I mean, even beyond that,

fairly explicitly part of our messaging

is that we don't want every case.

We're not the right lawyer for everyone.

And part of our advertising

language is that we're

careful about the cases we choose because

we want to make sure every client has

our full attention and so

forth. So we very distinctly,

maybe not as directly,

but certainly contextually are

saying we're not a volume business.

We don't want to be a volume

business. We want to be different.

I think beyond marketing,

we know where other firms struggle

because I think this firm has struggles,

has had the same struggles as other

firms, response time to intakes,

response time to referring attorneys,

keeping referring attorneys in the loop

once they've provided a referral are

things that most firms are not good at.

I can tell you working very

closely with our intake team,

we hear multiple times a week when

we call a potential client back,

they say,

"I've called eight firms and you're

the only one that's gotten back to me.

" And even if we're unable to help them

and we decline them because it's outside

our expertise or whatever it is,

they are thrilled just to

have a conversation with us

and they remember our name

and everything else, but firms

are not very good at that.

We get a lot of referrals from attorneys

and we treat each and every one

of those very gingerly. We take the time

to reach out to the potential client.

We take the time to circle back with

that referring attorney and let them know

what the outcome was. Even if we're not

taking the case on, we let them know.

We thank them for thinking about us.

So those little things that are

differentiating us because every firm

struggles with those, especially

on the intake side, I think.

No, 100%. And I mean,

applied to that Sunsup principle of

avoiding strength and attacking weakness,

what you're identifying

here is that many law firms,

one of their weaknesses is

their back office management.

So they're not good at the blocking

and tackling and they are alienating

clients,

they're alienating referring

attorneys because they're not able,

not because they

necessarily don't want to,

but they don't have the systems and

the personnel that make them capable of

timely responses,

professionalized assistance.

And a lot of lawyers who

refer cases to us do it

because they know as soon

as they send the case over,

whether it's a phone call or an email,

that we're going to jump right on it.

So they feel confident, number one,

that if it is a viable case and it has

value that we're going to be able to

capture that value for them. And secondly,

they're able to confidently tell their

clients that they're going to get good

service,

which in many cases is more important

to them. If a client calls and they want

to talk to an experienced med mal

lawyer, for example, and they say, "Well,

we're going to refer you over to this

firm," they want to know that that firm is

going to close the loop and

actually talk to this person.

They're not going to get a call back

three days later from that person saying,

"Hey, that lawyer you referred

us to, they never contacted me.

" And so we made a conscious effort to,

in terms of attacking weakness,

we perceived there being a weakness in

the management side of the businesses and

that we would have a competitive

advantage if we could do better by having

better systems and structures.

And really that's been a

real distinguishing feature.

I actually think many of the referring

lawyers refer to us regularly just

because they have confidence that

they know once that referral's made,

it's 100% taken care of. And then

part of that is also just the entire

culture of what we've

built that the staff,

when our intake staff

does speak to that person,

we know we have a high degree

of confidence that that

phone call is going to be

empathetic, that it's

going to be professional,

that the person on the other end of

the phone is going to have a good

experience. And if they do report

back to the referring lawyer, "Hey,

thank you for sending us over to Gideon

Asen because they couldn't take my case,

but they got right back to me. They

treated me with respect. They were great.

Appreciate that.

Need help on a complex personal

injury or medical malpractice case?

Gideon Asen accepts case referrals

and regularly co-counsels with lawyers

nationwide on high value claims.

The firm has recovered millions of dollars

in cases that competitors turned away

because they dig deeper.

Ready to learn more?

Email bgideon@gideonasenlaw.com

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So looking at the next Sun Tzu

principle is choose your battlefield.

The best generals choose

favorable terrain. So do

you want to talk about that,

Jeff?

Yeah. You had mentioned before,

I think we're lucky enough to kind of be

in Maine and the environment we're in.

I think we would do things differently

if we were in Los Angeles or Philadelphia

or New York,

because it's a completely different

environment with different competitors.

But our goal out of the gate with

marketing with everything else was to

dominate our area of Maine and

our geographic area where we're

headquartered or located in

very particular areas, med mal,

catastrophic personal injury. We don't

stray very far from those. I mean,

obviously there's some premises

liability, some product liability,

but we don't strain overly far from those.

And then when we're looking to expand,

we're looking at neighboring states,

we're looking at New Hampshire,

we're looking at Vermont,

we're looking at areas where we feel

there's a need for our services,

an area where we can add value

to maybe an underserviced

population of higher end,

more complex med mal attorneys and

we're doing it methodically. All of

our marketing,

all of our spend right

now is centered in Maine,

but we're almost using that as a testing

ground and perfecting it and it's going

to be very easy to replicate out of state.

So this is some of the things that we're

obviously working on and about choosing

your battlefield wisely.

Sun Tzu makes the point that,

again, seems quite obvious,

but that it's easy to expand

into undefended territory.

If you want to take territory

and it's undefended,

you can just march in there and take it.

If you're trying to take areas

that are heavily defended,

that's going to require battle. It's

going to acquire expenditure of resources,

attrition, all the things we talked about.

And so it's kind of the blue

ocean business strategy,

but we've been very intentional

about identifying areas

of undefended territory and you

mentioned Los Angeles and Philadelphia,

I'm sure that it is extremely difficult

in the highly competitive market

areas in this country to

find undefended territory.

But if you are creative

and look carefully enough,

I'm confident that no

matter where you are,

you can find areas of

undefended territory.

Let me just give you some kind of examples

of that that might trigger your own

thinking to figure out undefended

territory where you are. So one is

thinking about geographic

as you alluded to.

We are embarking on a plan to work

closely with a Vermont firm that

we've worked with closely for

years. And as part of that,

we've learned that in some of the

areas where we regularly practice,

there are very few lawyers in Vermont

that are taking those kind of cases.

And so we've identified potentially

great opportunity there to

expand our geographic reach in

an area where there's undefended

territory geographically. Here's

another example of undefended territory.

It's not necessarily geographic precisely,

but we get a very substantial

percentage of our best cases

referred to us from lawyers all

over the country in states far

outside of Maine.

Some of those cases are actually

located in those other states.

We just had a very significant case

out in California, for instance,

that we did, and some of those cases

are actually in Maine, New Hampshire,

or Vermont,

but the lawyers know us in other

states and that's completely

undefended territory. We're really

the only law firm in Maine or Northern

New England that has

a national reputation.

And so all of that category of case,

which tends to be really high value

cases because What happens is someone in

May, New Hampshire,

Vermont, they need a lawyer.

They have a brother-in-law

who's a lawyer in Chicago.

They call their brother-in-law and say,

"Hey, I've got this really big case.

I need the best lawyer Maine

or New Hampshire, Vermont.

Who do you recommend?" They reach out

to their colleagues in Chicago and they

get our name and that just happens

repeatedly over and over again.

And so that's another example. That's

completely undefended territory.

There's nobody else we're competing

with for those type of cases.

Another example of undefended territories

we've alluded to is just the type of

practice. In our case,

medical malpractice as a case type

tends to be fairly undefended because

people,

it's a very niche area that many lawyers

don't want. But then as you build out

from there, you can identify other types.

We've had great success in trucking cases,

which lawyers all want those cases,

but very few have positioned themselves

with specialized expertise and

have enough reps doing those

cases in a high value way to be

able to make the claim that they do

have specialized expertise in trucking

litigation. So that's an

example. Industrial cases,

we've had big verdicts

in industrial accidents.

We are handling some of the

most high profile industrial.

I'm talking about explosions, fires,

electrocutions, workplace issues,

not workers' comp, but third

party workplace incident claims.

That's another area

that's largely undefended.

There's no really very few lawyers

who have specialized expertise or hold

themselves out. And I think

that whatever area you're in,

if you can define down

the practice type or the

referral base you're talking about,

lawyers around the country that are

part of this different organization,

this specific subspecialty

of this subspecialty,

you're always going to be able to find

some undefended territory that you can

move into effectively first. It just

takes a little while to figure that out.

Okay. So let's move on

to the next principle.

And this is the principle that

intelligence is what wins wars.

Fore knowledge is the

foundation of victory.

And Sun Tzu's book talks a lot about

the importance of the general having

great networks of informants, spies,

or intelligence capabilities to

understand the enemy and what

makes them tick. And not just enemy

strategically, but the enemy mindset,

enemy's emotional state. What

are your enemies, generals,

trigger points? What is their ego?

How are they likely to

respond to different types

of stimuli or different types

of actions? And it's a fascinating

thing and think in our line of work,

something that we maybe

in corporate America,

there's more of a effort to do opposition

research on your competitors and to

really fully understand where they're

coming from and what their next move might

be. I've not really heard a lot

about that in the legal space.

I don't know what your thoughts ... I

mean, you come from a banking background.

Was that something that people thought

about? What is the competitor bank?

Who's the founder or the owner or the

CEO of that other bank? If we do this,

what are they likely to do in response

and all that kind of gaming it out?

Yeah. I mean, on the banking side,

we saw that a lot and banking

Maine was very different. I mean,

Maine from population

standpoint, very small state,

but it's extremely overbanked. A lot

of banks, a lot of credit unions,

a lot of competition. And we did.

We kept an eye on all our competitors.

We kept an eye on their rates.

We kept an eye on where they were opening

new branches and trying to understand,

okay, they're opening a branch

in this area for a reason.

What are they seeing

that we're not seeing?

And every time a new

competitor came in, I mean,

JPMorgan Chase came to Maine I think four

years ago and I think Maine was one of

the last states that JPMorgan Chase

came into. But when they came in,

they opened four branches and four

of the wealthiest areas of Maine.

They obviously have a lot more money

than probably every bank in Maine put

together. So everyone said, "Well,

they know what they're doing.

We need to do better in

these areas." Unfortunately,

being in the smaller bank world,

most of the things we did were

reactive and not proactive,

which isn't the best way

to deal with competition.

I would much rather be the one

out in front and force your

competition to make

moves to counteract you.

I feel like we're doing that here where

we're doing a number of things that I

feel are forcing our competition's

hand to try and play catch up.

I think that's important.

Yeah. I mean,

on example of this concept in

action was when we made the

decision to launch our

direct to consumer marketing,

which included television,

radio, Google AdWords,

pay-per-click and other modalities,

we knew that that was going to

likely ruffle some feathers,

particularly among some of

our most reliable referring

partners because some of

them do market and that they

may see that as competing with

them for the valuable cases

and undercutting them.

And we actually gamed

out specifically what are

various competitors likely to

do when we launch our marketing.

Are we going to lose this

element of our referral business?

And knowing the individual personalities,

we were able to have a pretty good

sense for what they would do in response

and we were very proactive. We

weren't waiting to see what happened.

We actually made a plan that

before we launched, Taylor and I,

the two partners were going to go

and meet individually with each of

our best referring lawyers and to tell

them we were about to launch a TV ad

campaign and because we didn't want them

to see it or hear it from somebody else

first and we wanted to make sure

that the relationship could withstand

that in the instance that we cared enough

about that referral relationship to

think that that had value.

But at the same time,

the other thing we recognized was

that when we started to acquire

cases through the direct

to consumer marketing,

because we were not going to want

a whole category of those cases,

the volume cases for our own practice,

that that was going to give us an asset

that we could then use to become a firm

that would be referring those

out to other firms ourselves.

And that asset itself gave us the

opportunity to develop relationships.

So there were firms that had never

sent us a case or not many and

we developed great alliances with

some of those firms to refer cases to

them and now they refer

all their cases to us.

And so not only did it end up

not being a detriment to us,

but we actually developed some better

relationships from that marketing

effort, but only because

we had gamed it out,

thought very intentionally about what

effect will this have and how can we

mitigate or capitalize on the

new landscape once that happens?

And one of the things we thought was,

what will our other

competitors who don't market,

how will they react to our marketing?

And on way they could react is by

marketing themselves and trying to compete

with us. And we expect that would

happen at some point. It hasn't yet,

but we fully anticipate that it

would and had planned for that.

But really we thought that the first step

would be that they would then use our

marketing to try to go and interfere

with our referral relationships by

suggesting to those attorneys

that refer cases to us that, "Hey,

these guys aren't really

your friends anymore.

They're trying to take your business or

trying to undercut." And because we did

the hard work of going and talking to

folks and making them comfortable with

what we were doing, that didn't pan out.

But actually that exact thing happened.

We heard from lawyers that had

traditionally referred cases to us

that competitors had gone to them and

made exactly that pitch.

And so we knew that that was going to

happen because we know the personalities

involved we could predict how they

would react and we predict 100% correct

in our predictions and we had already

prophylactically addressed the

problem because we went through that

exercise of thinking it through and

using our intelligence about the legal

industry to make smart choices there.

So just a good ... I should

say this idea of intelligence,

I give my partner Taylor a lot of

credit because Jeff, as you know,

he tends to be kind of a hub of gossip.

When anything's going on in our world,

for some reason everybody feels like

they can reach out to Taylor and kind of

tell him about it.

And Taylor's always on the phone with

everybody talking about things, wheeling,

dealing,

gossiping. And so it would be rare in

our state for anything to be happening

without Taylor knowing about it.

And he always knows about it way before

I do and then I'm hearing it from him.

And it's extremely valuable. Yeah.

It is.

He is. He's like the hairdresser

or the bartender of the firm.

The people tell him everything.

It's great and it gives us an

opportunity to discus things as a

leadership team that may

be coming down the pipe.

Yeah. And I mean, if it were me

without Taylor as my partner,

we wouldn't have a lot

of this information.

And I think it's worth thinking

about in your organization.

Do you have somebody like that

who just likes to talk to people

and is kind of a conduit for information?

Because if you don't have somebody like

that at a real disadvantage and you

might want to either thinking about

doing more of that yourself or finding

somebody who is good at those skills

of reaching out to people, talking,

gossiping, getting information, because

it is a real skill. I mean, Taylor,

he just is good at ... It's two things. A,

he's unafraid to reach out to anybody at

any time to have a conversation. And B,

he has the kind of personality

that other people like talking to.

He's not argumentative or

judgmental toward them.

He's a listener and just doesn't let

his ego interfere with that. And so

I think people are comfortable calling

him and talking to him and sharing

things with him. It's a real skillset.

Sometimes it's not something that

is obvious or so easy to value,

but when you see over time the power it

gives you because of the knowledge you

have, it's extremely valuable.

It's invaluable. I mean, it translates

well beyond a referral network.

I mean,

the relationships that Taylor has

and the groups he belongs to and

the groups he participates in that

allows him to be part of those

organizations and give speeches

and everything else just further

getting the Gideon Asen name out there

and lending more credibility to it. Yeah,

it's invaluable the

relationships that he creates.

So let's move on to the next principle,

which is speed is a competitive advantage.

Sunseus says speed

substitutes for strength.

And the obvious point here is

that if you can act swiftly,

take decisive action early

before the enemy is able to erect

their defenses, there's

territory you can take,

things you can accomplish simply because

you can act fast that you wouldn't be

able to if you dragged your feet.

This is something that's very personal

to me because as folks who listen know,

I was at a different firm for the better

part of my career and it was a terrific

firm. At this point, it's

more than a hundred years old,

but we were somewhat hamstrung

by our governance model, which

was a decision by committe approach.

And because there were no

living founder owners that

had the ability to make decisions on

their own and things had to be made by

committee by consensus of

a bunch of lawyers and we

all know anybody who's tried

to manage a law firm knows how difficult

that can be. It was very hard to make

decisions quickly or to take decisive

action quickly. In my feeling,

there were many lost opportunities there

for that firm to have more aggressively

consolidated there with

the time huge advantage,

competitive advantage in the market

share and the space they were in simply

because they just couldn't get

out of their way to do things.

And it's just been so liberating

to be at a firm where as a

founder owner,

we have a small group of people and

we have the capability of making

decisions quickly and taking decisive

actions. They may not always succeed.

We recognize that there will be

failures and we want to fail fast,

learn from failures, iterate

and grow and continue to adapt,

but we are not unable to do things

and do them quickly. I mean,

if anything in our business and our firm,

we suffer perhaps a little bit from the

opposite problem of sometimes moving

too quickly in too many different

directions, but I would definitely,

having experienced the

opposite for many, many years,

I would definitely take this over

that any day. Your thoughts, Jeff?

Yeah. And I think I've used this quote

on a previous podcast, John Wooden,

the great UCLA coach, used to

say be quick but don't hurry.

And I think it translates to us where

we have a small group of decision

makers. We meet often and

if something comes up,

we try and methodically execute on

whatever the outstanding question is or

whatever the task is in a very

quick manner, but without hurrying.

I think we give its due attention. We

give it thought. Everyone has a voice.

We come to a unanimous decision

virtually every time and then

we decide to execute. We leave that

meeting. Once we've made a decision,

it's in place and we start

to execute on it immediately,

whether it's later that day or first

thing the next morning there's a project

plan in place or steps being

taken to put our decision into

action.

Right.

And then we have a well-developed

process to ensure that the execution part

happens,

which involves weekly meetings where we

go through what we call our rocks or the

big items we're attacking and then our

pebbles or the smaller tasks that also

need to be done.

The bigger problem we have is getting

enough things on that list to keep Jeff

busy because by the time

the ink dries on our list,

Jeff has already done it or gone a long

way towards doing it and then he's like,

"Well,

what am I doing next?" And so we're just

trying to constantly dream up things

for you to do so because I mean,

we want to hire somebody staff

that goes on the list and I mean,

usually within a week the job is

posted, the applicants are coming in.

In the case of our lawyer

hire, it took us four months,

but we had jumped on that immediately.

And one thing I really appreciate, Jeff,

is when something gets on that list,

I almost assume it's already done even

though it isn't because I know that once

it's on the list, it will be done. It's

not going to slip through the cracks.

We've been good at that and it's a part

of our reason we've had good success

is we try and identify the areas that

are important enough to make that list.

I mean, don't make a list with 50,

60 items that you want to work on

because it means you're not going to get

anything done. Pair your focus

down, be very vigilant and be quick,

but don't hurry.

This one is particularly important

actually in light of the last it's feed

success starve failures.

The concept is try to figure out quickly

what's working and what's not working.

Sun Tzu's point I think is that

where there are areas of weakness,

on instinct is to reinforce the

area of weakness so that because you

feel bad about being weak somewhere and

you want to turn that weakness into a

strength, but actually

that's the wrong thing to do.

What you want to do is identify areas

of strength and double down on that.

So if your immigration practice is going

gangbusters but your criminal defense

practice is withering on the

vine, some may say, "Well,

we've got to devote more

resources to criminal defense,

bring in some more lawyers,

put in some more marketing dollars

behind that so we can even it out.

" But what Sun Tzu would say is that's

a huge mistake. You should devote extra

resources to the immigration

practice where you're killing it and

drive that to even greater success.

And I think that's something

it's still in the works for us,

but it really does ring true. I mean,

on example we have is our intake

standards. We've made a decision,

there's whole categories of cases

we don't want. We don't want the 25,

$50,000 car accident. We don't

do premises liability cases.

There's dozens or hundreds of cases

we see we simply don't want to do

them and we could do those cases,

eke out a few bucks doing

different categories of cases,

but it's not where we add

value. It's not our brand,

it's not where we've had our high

level of success and what generates our

revenue and profits for our firm.

And so we've doubled down on putting

more resources into the areas that we're

good at and really almost every year we

have tightened up our intake standards

and been more and more selective. And

that's a way of feeding our success and

starving the failures,

not trying to go beyond the

areas where we are good.

On the marketing side, this

remains to be seen. I mean,

one of the things we want our marketing

person to do is be able to eventually

come to us and tell us what's

working and what's not working.

And if there's something

that isn't working,

that's not an area where we're going to

want to spend extra dollars to make it

work.

We're going to want to figure out what's

working and then double down into that

area, right? I mean, if Google

AdWords are not producing,

we're not going to start bolstering

our budget for that to try to make them

work. We're going to say,

let's take that money and put it into

radio or put it into television or

something that is working. So that's

the feed success star failure principle.

And the very last principle is

don't create unnecessary enemies.

This is one that again,

rings true to me because a lot of

lawyers when they leave a law firm and

there can be fights about which cases

or clients are coming with you and which

staff might be joining you or

you can get mired down into

fighting with people. And

again, that just saps energy,

saps resources. If you're out there,

we're competing with people by marketing

in a certain way, they don't like it.

We went to lengths to smooth that over

to go and meet with people to try to make

sure the relationship was still good

because every enemy we create through any

of actions that we're taking creates the

potential for another battle or fight

that we have to expend resources in

that we don't want. What we try to do,

as I've alluded to it before,

is try to use areas of goodwill or

things where we can help other people to

ensure that relationships

stay strong. So for instance,

we are very generous about if

anybody asks us for work product,

no motions that we filed,

they want help on their case,

they want anything that we can

do to help, we always share that.

No questions asked.

I sent our operations manual to

a firm a couple of weeks ago.

Right. And we're 100% open

book. We're 100% sharing.

And that's what this podcast

is about too. I mean,

we just sat here and shared many

of our own insights and competitive

strategy,

which many firms might think would be

crazy to do because someone could just

listen to this and see what we're doing

and then try to find a way to out flank.

But we don't think of the world that way.

We think of it as we just want to be

the best that we can be and we will

be more successful by being an open

book by sharing with others and

collaborating with others than if

we try to be underhanded or look

like we're hiding the ball from

people. That has gone a long way.

A lot of the lawyers that we compete

within Maine, we do compete on some level,

but we're also helping many of those

lawyers by referring them cases,

by giving them work product,

by talking to them. If they have a case

that's coming up for trial and they want

to brainstorm on ideas,

we help people like that all the time

and that goodwill can go a long way

towards avoiding creating enemies.

And every enemy we don't create again is

just additional battle we don't have to

fight.

I was going to say it's funny, Taylor's

heading ... Where's he going AAJ?

Is that what's out in Los Angeles?

No, he's going to Trial Lawyer

University out in California right now.

And maybe AJ too.

Maybe,

but he's speaking out there and his

hour long speech is on negotiations and

he ran it by me last week

and a big thing was that

negotiations don't have to be adversarial

and don't make enemies with the

individual that you're negotiating with.

And it doesn't always have to be that way.

And a lot of these that

you just talked about,

Taylor's going to be talking

about in his negotiation talk.

It's interesting how it translate

to so many different areas.

Well, great. I think we've covered

all the Sun Tzu topics. That was fun.

It's a great reminder of some of the

kind of core foundational strategic

principles that I think

many of us can benefit from.

So hopefully everyone will and we'll look

forward to talking to you again soon.

Appreciate it. Thanks, Ben.

Thanks, Jeff.

Thanks for listening to Elawvate,

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