The Entrepreneur’s Top 10, 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.

This is a podcast for lawyers by lawyers.

Welcome to Elawvate: Build

and Grow your law firm,

produced and powered by LawPods.

Today's episode of the Elawvate:

Build and Grow Your Law firm

podcast is brought to you by Supio.

I just spent an hour doing a webinar

with the Supio folks. It was great.

We had the head of business

development and also one of the lawyers

from Texas who's been an early adopter

of Supio and walked through some case

models of how you use Supio to

put a case together. It was very,

very impressive.

I would encourage everyone who doesn't

yet have an AI platform for their law

firm. If they're a plaintiff's

side, personal injury,

medical malpractice type of law firm,

check out Supio and get the demo.

Our podcast today is also

brought to you by Vision Spark.

Vision Spark.

It's the company that helps law

firms and other businesses find

seconds in command. You know,

any seconds in command, Jeff.

That would be me.

Now.

That'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 vision sparked to credit for

the search process that led us to

Jeff and then Jeff has led us to

the holy grail of it appears to

doubling our revenues in less

than a year of your time at our

firm. So it's all paid off very well.

Anybody who needs a second

in command like Jeff,

I would encourage you

to talk to Vision Spark.

Our podcast is also brought

to you by 1% for Planet.

1% for planet folks is the

organization that allows you to

contribute 1% of your gross

revenues to environmentally

conscious nonprofits.

Our firm has done that.

It's a great organization that's allowed

us to partner with some really terrific

nonprofits in Maine and

throughout Northern New England

and we really would love

to have other firms join us in

that. And if you do join us in 1%,

please reach out to us and we'll

give you a plug on the show.

Good morning, everyone. It's like

Rachel was saying, thank you very much.

This is the first time they're doing it.

The first time we're doing a live podcast,

so keep your fingers

crossed and we're excited.

So welcome to a live

taping of the Elawvate:

Build and Grow Your Law Firm podcast.

We're coming to you from the main State

Bar Association winter Bar conference,

and the fantastic Western Portland,

Harborview and Portland, Maine.

I'm Jeff Wright,

chief operating officer at Gideon Asen

and I'm here with Ben Gideon, owner,

partner, founder of Gideon

Asen. How's it going today, Ben?

It's going well. Jeff, are you nervous?

You were commenting that the lights are

awfully bright and I know you're now

entering the big time here.

Yeah, big time. It's one way

to put it. I would like to.

Point out Jeff has humble roots.

Yeah, I'd like to point out that

Ben said we were dressing down today

and so I wore jeans and a pullover

and Ben showed up in what looks

like a brand new suit. So

apologies for my appearance.

I was duped.

This is a common theme in our

business, but as I pointed out,

since you're not a lawyer, you

don't really need to wear a suit.

You're not expected to wear a suit.

I do love how you point out how I'm not

a lawyer all the time, but that's okay.

I consider.

That an advantage. It is,

but we won't go there.

Before we get started, we've

had a busy couple weeks,

so I don't know if you want to talk

about what we've been doing as a firm and

then we can introduce.

Yeah, sure.

So we just got back from our leadership

retreat three days out in Denver,

Colorado where the leadership

team focuses on our

goals that what we've achieved for the

past year and then what our plan is

for the future year.

Very productive meeting.

I think we identified some important

goals in keeping our progress

moving towards our four year

vision. What did you think?

Yeah, I thought it was very

productive out in Denver.

And then one of the things,

and what we'll talk about it later is

at the firm we try and have as much

transparency as possible

with the entire team.

So a week after we got back from our

senior management retreat in Denver,

we had an all day offsite

retreat for all staff and covered

our strategic plan, our goals,

our plans for not only

first quarter of 26,

but for the year up through our

strategic plan end date at the end of

2028. It's nice. It's been

a busy couple of weeks.

I think you left out that you were

skiing in Austria before that.

I was, but that doesn't have

anything to do with our business.

No, it doesn't.

No. We did manage to get to a rodeo

in Denver, which was interesting.

I don't know if anyone here has

been to the rodeo in the west,

but they have something called

mutton busting. Anyone aware of that?

It's where they take little kids and

they put hockey helmets on them and put

them on sheep and then they go

and it's like a bucking bronco.

But for infants and children it

seems like child abuse to me,

but they love it out there. We're going

to introduce that in Maine I think.

Okay. Alright, let's move into the

program substance of the program here.

Alright, so we have a

pretty truncated timeframe.

So we have 10 topics we want to

get through in less than an hour.

Each one of these topics would

be a full hour unto themselves,

so we're going to be as quick and

concise as possible. As Rachel said,

this program today is the top 10

proven strategies every lawyer

entrepreneur needs to know to

build a financially successful law

firm. At the end of this,

they have allotted us time when we're

done with the podcast to do a q and a.

So I would welcome anyone that

has a question or anything or

needs more clarity on

something at the end.

We will do a q and a

if anyone's interested.

I know it's the last session of the day

and most people will be running for the

hills, but we are available.

Yeah,

you can come up and sit at the table

with the mic and you can join us on the

podcast and introduce yourselves and

if you have a question or want to take

issue with anything we've

said or any discussion point,

we're happy to do that

at the end. So Jeff,

I thought before we covered the topics,

can you just give us maybe

the 32nd summary of where

we are as a firm so people

will understand the context from which

we're discussing the points we're talking

about today?

For those of you not

familiar with Gideon Asen,

I'm going to give you kind of the Reader's

Digest version and paint a picture on

what makes these guys think they can

get up here and give their opinions and

advice on what makes a financially

viable successful firm.

So Gideon Asen, as most of you know,

is a plaintiff firm focused

on complex medical malpractice

and catastrophic personal injury.

The firm was started in 2020

by Ben Gideon and Taylor Asen,

the other founder partner,

and really it started in

2020 with three of them.

Since 2020,

the firm has grown not

only in staffing but

also in revenue where

the firm from 2020 to

2024 added more than a million

dollars in revenue every year in

existence. At the end of 2024,

Ben and the leadership team

met and they said, well jeez,

we've met all our goals from what we

wanted to do to start the firm. And

somebody said, so what's next?

And so the team took that to heart

and wrote a very detailed four

year strategic plan and one of the

first things on that plan was to bring

in a chief operating officer,

preferably a chief operating officer

that did not have a legal background that

could look at a firm from a business

standpoint and not through the eyes of

an attorney.

That chief operating officer happens to

be me and I started in the jury's still

out, the jury's still out. I

started in January of 2025.

So I've been there roughly, well

a little over 12 months now.

In 2025, which we just ended,

we were able to increase

our revenue by 100%

and we've increased our staffing by 50%.

We've gone from 12 full-time to

18 and our revenue doubled this

year. Coming off of our strategic plan,

we plan on adding two or three

more positions this year and we

are projected based upon our pipeline

and everything to double our revenue

again in 2026.

So we want to talk about some of the

strategies that we've implemented and

that we think firms that are

looking to grow and expand

or people that are looking to start

their own firms could have some benefit

from. Alright, let's

jump into it. Alright,

so number one,

everyone should have a handout

on their tables. If you don't,

we do have more back there.

And the first one, Ben,

I guess my first question, Ben,

is how did you come up with these 10

things and kind of the title of this

program?

The 10 items here are all.

So my process in trying to understand

how to build and grow a law

firm,

I started probably like many of

you as a lawyer only for many

years. I had a job at a

firm and I practiced law.

That was my primary work and I didn't

really spend a lot of time focused

on learning much about running a

business or running a law firm.

When we started our business,

I've invested a lot of time and I've

become very interested in the topics of

the business issues relating

to building and growing a firm.

And part of that has been reading.

So I've read a lot of books,

I listened to podcasts,

but some of the books that were most

informative and influential for me are

listed here under each topic.

And what my process is,

I'll read one of these

books and as I do it,

I take notes and then I

consolidate those down and then

over time I've moved those

into different categories.

And so that's sort of how

the 10 categories came to be.

It's a distillation of my learning,

I would say both from my reading

but also from our own experiences

that we've gone through. Mostly

learning by trial and error,

making many mistakes, fixing problems,

and coming to understandings

about different things.

Well, kicking into number one,

the crux of your thing there

is being a great lawyer doesn't

necessarily translate to being

a great owner of your own firm.

And I guess why do you feel that

way and why do you use the word

entrepreneur kind of in the title

of this, which I think is important?

Yeah, I mean this is something that

took me a little bit of time to come to,

I don't know, has anyone here read

Michael Gerber's book, "The E-Myth"?

The central concept of the book

is that you can either work in a

business or you can work on a business.

If you're working in a business,

you are doing the tasks that are necessary

to make that business successful.

So as lawyers,

typically what we're doing every day

is legal work and practicing law and

serving our clients. That's

great. I did that for a long time.

I got a lot of joy and satisfaction out

of it and I still do to some extent,

if you want to build a business though,

you can't just work in your business,

you have to work on your business.

And that's a different skillset

that involves, in fact,

it means you have to give up a fair

amount of the day-to-day legal work and

focus on the business issues relating

to building and growing the business,

which we'll get into. So it's sort of

that core insight that to some extent

by training yourself to focus

only on doing legal work,

you're not in a great

mindset to build a business.

We have a whole episode just on this

topic and it can consume an hour or more,

but I do distinguish between there

are many lawyers who very successfully

translate their legal skills to a

very successful practice building a

solo or a small practice with

a couple of lawyers and a few

staff. That's not what I mean.

I think that that's very doable

even if you're not really focused

on the issues relating to

business development and scaling.

When I'm talking about

building a business,

and that's why the word

entrepreneurial is important to me.

I'm talking about building

an entrepreneurial business

that's designed for

growth because those are

two very different things.

Having a platform where you're

just using a business as a

foundation to sell your

own personal services,

that's not what I mean by growing a

business because there's very limited

business related skill sets you need

to do to accomplish that successfully.

And I don't mean to minimize that.

I think that can be a very successful

career and practice and many people do

very well like that and that's fine.

There's no reason you need to change.

But the goal if somebody wants

to build and scale a business.

Right. And I guess I would ask you, Jeff,

since you've been here a year now and

you came in midstream from a different

sector, brand new to legal business,

how do you see your role and

your past experience in business

integrating into a legal setting?

I was surprised how you should tell

people what you used to do before this,

just so they know. Well.

They're probably going

to hold it against me.

I was a banker for 25 years.

We don't like bankers. You like bank,

you figured that it's the way. Oh geez.

I've tried to shed the look, but

so I was in banking for 25 years,

kind of climbed the ladder in my last

role as the chief operating officer of a

billion dollar bank. And long story short,

I got sick of banking and wanted to

change, but thought my operational skills,

my project management skills and

everything were translatable to another

business. Didn't know what business

it was, saw the opportunity.

A recruiter reached out to me at Gideon

a and I was trepidatious because I'm

like, okay, it's a plaintiff firm. What

does that mean? I was literally like,

how does that differ from a defendant's

firm? Well, what do they do?

And it's personal injury. And I'm like,

how is it going to translate?

And do they really want a non-attorney?

And I think this might sound arrogant,

but I think it's probably one of the

better decisions they made is to bring in

somebody that knew nothing

about the legal world.

I look at everything through a

completely different set of eyes

and the skills are very

translatable to building and

scaling a business and working with

business owners over the last two

decades.

It doesn't matter whether it's an

attorney or whether it's somebody

starting a carwash business,

the scale and the concerns

that every small business

owner has are translatable.

And Ben had said to me during

the interview process, he said,

most law firms are run by attorneys

and they run law firms, Jeff,

they don't run like businesses.

We need to translate

this into running like a

business.

Does that mean, does that mean growth?

Is that what we're talking about here?

Nothing but growth. We're

supposed to repeat the questions.

They won't pick up on the mic.

So the question from the audience

is does that mean growth? Jeff,

why don't you take that?

I don't know if it necessarily means

growth. I mean I think first of all,

you have to look how the business is run,

whether your ultimate goal

is going to be growth.

One of the first things we

worked on was the firm's mission

and the firm's culture. What

type of firm do we want to be?

What do we want our

attorneys and our staff to

represent? How do we want

our day-to-day to be there?

And once we kind of solidified the

culture that we wanted and the core

values,

that has really translated into

virtually every decision we've made,

every hiring decision, yes,

we look at resumes, yes,

we look at experience and everything else,

but it comes back to do

they fit the firm's culture?

Do they fit the firm's core values?

So I think it's a lot more

than profits and scaling and

growth. It's what do you want

your business to represent?

And to Ben's point at the beginning,

if you want your business to be

your sole practitioner and you're

not looking to scale,

you're looking to just provide good

services under your own umbrella,

great. But what do you want those services

to be? What's your niche going to be?

Are you going to try and go head to

head with a Goodwin Proctor as the sole

practitioner? You're probably going

to lose. So what's your niche?

What's your value that you're going

to add to those clients and to be

able to make those decisions

and look at them internally?

Long answer to your question, I

apologize. It's more than profits,

it's more than scaling.

It's developing the business

that you want to be in every day.

You moved into topic eight hiring for

values and reinforcing the culture.

So I think we should cover that because

we're going to run out of time to cover

everything. So I would say, first of

all, we have to be practical about it.

You have to get to a certain size and

scale and revenue before you can afford to

hire somebody full-time As

a chief operating officer,

that's not available to everybody and I

don't recommend that if you're a one or

two lawyer firm with a couple of staff.

But what happened for us was we got to,

when you start an entrepreneurial

endeavor at the beginning,

you're doing everything. You're wearing

all the hats. And that's my partner.

Taylor and I were doing that

initially. We were doing the finance,

we were doing the hr, we were

doing the legal services,

we were doing the marketing,

all of it.

And what we found as we grew over time

was we weren't capable of doing

all of those things and at least,

or doing them very well.

And so there got to be a point where

our highest and best use was no longer,

for example, doing hr. What

happens is, and I think,

and this goes to the core values

point and topic eight and the culture,

we kept running into growth

problems and ceilings in

our business because of

internal conflict and culture.

We would have staff that were not fully

bought into our mission in certain

ways. There was internal

conflict at times between staff.

It made for a difficult environment.

My partner and I would then get into

policing internal disputes where someone

would come to me with a criticism or

complaint and then they would go to my

partner and there would be.

So just got to be that

navigating the people part of the

business became emotionally

draining and distracting.

And once we got to a

certain scale of people,

more than a dozen employees,

that became an overwhelming problem and

one that was distracting us from our

mission. So hiring Jeff

allowed us to offload that.

I think the thing that Jeff brings to

our organization more than any other

single value is that

he's extremely good at

interpersonal relationships and

making everyone on our team feel

100% supported and valued and

bringing out the best in everyone.

And since Jeff has come,

we've had some people that didn't

fit into our culture that left

and had to leave.

And we've hired many new people and we've

been very careful about vetting people

to make sure they are a good cultural fit.

So we don't go back to a world

where we have internal conflict.

But I think anybody who runs a business

would probably agree that the people

part of the business is the hardest part

and particularly when you're dealing

with law firms,

because lawyers tend to

have very big and well

not present company.

But yeah, no,

I mean the reality is law firms generally,

and I started my career at a big

firm in New York City then I was at a

relatively good sized firm in

Maine and then started my own firm.

So I've seen it at all different levels.

Law firms tend to have a model

where there's two sets of rules,

one that lawyers get to play by and then

one that everybody else gets to play

by. Of course the staff sees that right

away that they have to follow the rules,

but the lawyers don't.

And that already creates a toxic

internal culture if you ask me. Secondly,

you then tolerate people because

let's say they're good or they're very

exceptional at their

craft of practicing law,

but they're frankly assholes or

they treat the staff poorly or they

don't represent your firm to the external

world in a positive way that you want,

but they're generating a lot of revenue

and most firms tolerate that because

the bottom line is revenue. If you

value culture, you don't tolerate that.

And I should say we have one of our core

values and we talk about core values is

one of our things here is making

decisions based on science and data,

not fear or ego.

And we have incorporated science

and data into our hiring process.

When we hired Jeff,

every candidate for his position

took a psychological test.

All of our leadership

team took that same test.

It was extremely valuable in identifying

characteristics of people that you

might want or not want.

And it surprisingly difficult

to ascertain that through just a

typical interview process.

We've now created a tailored

psychological profile

for a trial lawyer that we had

the company make just for us,

that we are now able to use to get science

and data before we hire a lawyer for

our firm. And that if anyone's

looking for a job, we're hiring.

But you have to pass the

psychological test first,

which means you can deal with Jeff mostly.

Do we want to move on

to another topic here?

Yeah, we're all over the map,

but it's good. Well, we covered.

Topic eight now. It's.

Alright. So we've done one and a's

we only got eight more, it's good.

That's exactly how I knew

this would go. Number two,

treat business decisions with the

same rigor as legal decisions.

What do you mean by that?

This one's very simple and I think it's

something that gives me confidence in

building a business because as lawyers,

we're all really good at doing

analytical work and problem

solving. That's after all, that's what

lawyers, that's what we're there for,

right? Clients, whatever.

They're transactional,

commercial, criminal defense,

whatever. Somebody comes to you for

a problem, you help them solve it.

And fundamentally that's

all running a businesses,

it's a different set of problems.

But the issue is that I

found is that as lawyers,

we employ a lot of rigor when it comes

to solving the problems for our clients

in the legal setting.

But then when comes to running the

business part of what we're doing,

we don't employ the same amount of rigor.

So we've tried to impose those kind

of systems of rigor onto our business

decision part of the business

in addition to the trial part.

It's been really great because

that's what I'm used to anyway.

For every case I do, I

impose that kind of rigor.

So it's very natural to do

it in the business setting.

And some examples of that are there

have been a lot of really bad decisions.

We've almost made.

Yes.

We've made some really bad decisions,

we've made some really bad decisions,

but we've also avoided making

some because we have a system for

decision making which involves

multiple people that all have

strong personalities and

points of view that weigh in.

So there's a vetting process

where if Ben has an idea,

it doesn't within 24 hours

translate into execution.

There's a process that's

discussed, vetted,

and then decided upon by smart people

that are all willing to speak their mind.

Part of that is having people that

are willing to speak their mind.

So one of our values is truth and

communication, openness and transparency.

As Jeff said, I come up with a terrible

idea, hopefully Jeff will tell me, Ben,

that's a really bad idea. And that has

led to a lot of near misses I would say,

where we were about to buy very expensive

buildings or hire people that we

shouldn't have hired or you can go down

the list of things where we almost made

bad decisions. That more or less covers

that topic. The books that I cite there,

Ray Dalio principles,

great book that talks a lot about this

and the need to confront reality where it

is to be very honest about the reality

that you're dealing with and not

characterize the reality in

the way that you want it to be.

You have to deal with the reality

as it is. Second book there,

the Daniel Kahneman book,

thinking Fast and Slow,

that's all about cognitive bias

and we all make so many decisions,

not even aware of it

based on cognitive bias,

whether it's group think

because everybody's thinking

the same thing and you're

not having a contrary position

or a bias towards a risk aversion

or the bias towards sunk cost fallacy

where you started down a path and you

continue down the path because you've

already invested in it without realizing

you're just putting good money after bad.

So many things like that that affect

decision making have to be avoided to

make the best decisions.

So do you want to add to a

topic too about decision making?

No,

I mean there's a great quote that

I try and abide by when it comes

to decision making. John Wooden,

the legendary basketball

coach at UCLA said,

be quick but don't hurry.

There's a lot of truth to that where

you have so many decisions every day,

whether you're trying a case or whether

you're running your business that you

need to be decisive and you need

to be focused, but be quick,

but don't hurry because hurried

decisions usually lead to bad decisions.

We try and avoid that wherever we can

and we put things in place like Ben said

internally to avoid it. We're

going to make bad decisions,

but we have metrics and processes to

minimize those as much as possible.

And that's a good segue to topic

three design before you execute,

but don't over-engineer early.

So there's a good quote I've

heard from many sources,

I don't know who quoted it initially,

but something to the effect of if you

have no plan, you'll certainly get there.

That's really been a driving force for us.

When Taylor and I started this firm

before we even began, we sat down,

we wrote a business plan and it's really

apocryphal because if you look back at

that plan, even our year

to year revenue goals,

we literally met them

within a short range of 50 a

hundred thousand dollars year to year,

which just demonstrates the power of

having a goal and having a clear idea of

what you're setting out to accomplish.

But the concept of don't over-engineer.

I don't know if any of you're familiar

with the lean startup concept. This is

sort of the stuff that is very hot

and Silicon Valley with especially

tech startups, AI startups.

There's an author named Eric

Reese who wrote that Lean Startup,

but the concept is minimal viable product.

Now this is how tech startups

and software companies work,

and the idea is that you don't

want to spend inordinate amount of

time early on in design because without

having enough feedback to

understand if your design is really

salient to your consumer, to

the public and the market.

So what you want to do is put out,

and this is the software concept,

you put out the minimum viable

product and then you iterate.

You're constantly refining, you're

constantly improving with feedback.

And so that's what we've tried to do

in our service sector type of business.

We don't want to get paralyzed by

trying to design the perfect system.

We want to design something that

we want to have large vision

and goals and then just start

moving forward on that and then

getting feedback loops to help us iterate.

I mean,

one example is we recently launched

a television radio ad campaign.

We've never done that before.

I've been doing this for almost 25 years

and have never done direct to consumer

marketing. Now how do we do that?

What's the perfect ad campaign?

You could spend years

designing a perfect campaign.

There probably is no

definition of perfect.

We used our core value

of science and data,

so we designed a messaging campaign.

We actually did survey data where we put

that out there and compared it to other

competitors on the market and got

real world information for that.

70% of the people who took the survey

said they would hire us based on our,

compared to our competitor commercials

if they were only basing their

buying decision on the commercial.

So that was some data point.

It wasn't a ton of data,

but it was good enough. Then we launched

it and now we have a feedback loop.

So every client who contacts our office,

our staff takes very detailed

information about how they found us,

what they're looking for lawyers,

what the characteristics are in

a lawyer that they want to hire,

all of that and that we

have our marketing director,

Matt over there is shaking his

head and he's fantastic by the way,

but so now we're iterating,

we've got a feedback loop,

we've got data and we can

make smart decisions on that.

We could have spent years designing the

perfect campaign and we still wouldn't

be doing anything right now. So that's

just one example of that concept.

So understanding the topic four,

understanding which risks

to take and which to avoid.

This is kind of risk management.

I've got a spiel on that,

but I'm interested if there's one

main difference I would say between

banking and trial law

on the plaintiff's side,

it's going from a highly risk averse

culture to a highly risk tolerant

culture, right?

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So what have you noticed about that,

Jeff? I mean to a certain extent,

but at the end of the day there were

so many parallels to banking because

you assess the risks

of a case and you look,

see maybe what the insurance caps are,

and if you take it to trial, you

might get X number of dollars.

If you settle it, you're going

to get X number of dollars,

what's right for the client,

what's right for the firm,

how long is it going to take,

how much case costs are you going to

carry for two or three years before it

settles? So you're assessing your risk

virtually every day with your cases.

And it's the same thing on the bank side.

I mean especially on the lending side.

You could do a $40 million

loan for a commercial customer,

but what's your risk and how

are you going to hedge it?

And so there's a lot of

parallels to it and I think

every firm has to make a

decision or there has to be

tactical times when you want to take

risk and when it makes sense and

you have to be very clear

on your risk tolerance as a

firm, but also on a case by case basis,

which I'm sure is what you're

going to lend your wisdom to.

I'm very interested in this concept of

risk because it permeates everything we

do.

We always have to counsel clients

on what are the risks of taking a

case to trial versus

settlement. In the past,

you were always operating on very

limited data because it was largely past

history and intuition, which

isn't notoriously unreliable.

We now do big data studies

on every significant case,

which really in our practice is really

every case and that gives us at least

more, it's not perfect,

but it gives us more data we can work

with in order to do this kind of risk

assessment. I've read two books recently,

which I think are phenomenal

on the topic of risk.

One is the Nate Silver

book called On the Edge.

I dunno if anyone here read that book.

It's Nate Silver was known

for five 30, was it 5 36?

5 38.

The political prognostication website.

He's also a quasi

professional poker player.

So the book is kind of talking

about the risks involved in poker,

how people in Silicon Valley with the

startup culture evaluate risk and then

how the rest of the world looks at

risk and it's pretty fascinating.

There's another book called

The Black Swan by Nasim Tale,

which is also a take on risk. Most things,

there's inconsistent and

contradictory concepts involved.

The concept of this black swan is

that there's a lot in the world that's

inherently unpredictable and

yet most things that we deal

with relating to risk,

like if you're going to invest

in the s and p 500 index,

well you're told that that's

low risk, but it's not low risk.

When some macroeconomic force occurs that

causes everybody to go

down and lose their shirts,

which happens more often than you'd

expect once every decade that basically

happens.

The concept he came up with,

which made him very successful

in financial investing,

was you have to identify

asymmetric opportunities for

asymmetric returns where

the unpredictability works

in your favor and not

against you.

And there's no better world

where that exists than trial law

because when we tried a case recently

where the offer on the table was

$300,000 and our verdict was 25 million,

so there's an opportunity

for asymmetric returns.

So that's a black swan working

for you. Now in another case,

we had recently there

was an offer in excess of

$30 million on the table. We could

have taken that case to trial,

but if we did,

the unpredictable result

would've worked against us there.

The asymmetric return probably

would have worked against us.

So trying to figure out

whatever your business is,

where are those opportunities

for asymmetric returns based on

unpredictability that you can

take advantage of and other

people aren't seeing.

And so we've really tried to do that and

it's always a challenge to identify

where the tipping point is there,

but I would say that back to

that so many decisions that

we make are not based

on objective criteria

or expected value calculations of actual

results. They're based on things like,

I'm really worried that I won't be

able to make payroll this month,

or somebody told me about

something that happened to them,

so this is probably going to

happen to me. Or like we said,

I've already invested so much money

into this, I have to keep going.

Those are all the kind of cognitive

biases or individual fears that

cause you to make decisions that are not

objectively maximizing your ability to

manage risks.

So we really have tried to reduce

the number of decisions we make

on those kind of anecdotal

knee jerk thinking. And one

example is we've developed a very complex

settlement matrix where like Jeff was

describing earlier, we can plug in there.

So we are thinking about advising our

clients about the risk of settlement

versus trial or continuing down the

path for a while before we settle

or so other things.

And I think lawyers often think

about that as what's either A or B,

but you're forgetting about things

like, well, what's the opportunity cost?

Because you're employing staff and

resources to litigate this case.

They could be spending time on something

else that may have a higher upside.

You're also forgetting about,

so you think about the first order benefit

of a settlement money in the pocket

of your client or money in

the pocket of your law firm,

but there's second order consequences.

What is the social value

of that public trial to

getting the word out about certain

conduct that your client wants to shine a

light on? What is the downstream value

to your law firm or the reputational

value of winning a big verdict and getting

the next big case because you've been

willing to do that.

If you're only looking at first order

consequences and not second and third

order consequences,

you're missing a lot of the value

in your decision-making process.

So let's move on to the

next. So that's topic four.

We've covered eight already,

so we've got 15 minutes.

Let's do topic five.

Financially unbreakable systems.

You want to talk about that, Jeff?

We were just ironically talking to our

accountant about those kind of things

this morning.

Oh, financially unbreakable

systems. Yeah. So yeah,

you kind of need money to do

everything that we're doing.

But along the lines of

you want to build, I mean,

and Ben puts it financially

unbreakable systems,

but you have to try and look

holistically at your firm.

You can't look, although you're

looking on a case by case basis,

you have to look at again,

the second and third tiers of what

your decisions are going to make,

what's your cushion,

how much do you want for a cushion at

your firm and how your decisions are made

from that. We spend a lot of time,

we have a finance meeting every week.

We met with our accounting firm

an hour ago right before we

came into this meeting to already

project and plan ahead for 26 and

quarterlies and everything else

and made some decisions as a group

on how we're going to make the changes.

But you have to be very deliberate.

And I think part of that also is what is,

and Ben alluded to it before

and it may deviate from this,

but I think it all goes the same,

but what is the best and

highest use of your time?

Because having Taylor Asen or

Ben Gideon opening the mail or

doing intake calls is not the

highest or best use of their time.

It's something that had to be done when

the firm was first started because they

didn't have the financial systems

in place to have other people

doing that.

You can't run out and hire eight people

when you first start unless maybe your

trust fund person or something

or somebody's gifted you.

And then your goals have

to be centered around being

financially viable and

understanding. I mean,

case costs a perfect example.

I think we fund our case costs

internally right now and we talk and it

revisits we probably every quarter,

should we finance these?

Should we do this? Should we do that?

Should we charge interest? And we

throw around all these other things.

But when Ben was talking about

that matrix we put together,

a big part of that is the carry

costs of those case costs and

you have $500,000 worth of case costs

that have been out there for three

years. You better factor

that into your decision.

And when you have a pipeline of cases

that are on your books that are getting to

the point where those case costs and

the experts are starting to ramp up,

where are those funds coming from

and how is it going to be allocated

appropriately?

And having those systems

in place to help drive your

decisions is critical. Yeah, I mean.

The core insight in financially

unbreakable systems is that

durability is critical.

If you can't survive,

you're not going to

accomplish anything else.

So your first order of

business has to build a

strong foundation that

allows you to survive.

And that includes through

weathering storms when

not all of your projections

come to fruition. Where, I mean,

we have to assume everybody knows me well,

knows that I've lost a

lot of trials and I lost a

very big trial a year ago that we had a

huge amount of money in and a huge offer

on the table,

and we were able to weather that

storm and it didn't really even

impact our bottom line

materially because we had a

strong financial footing. If we

didn't have that a single case,

this could have bankrupted our firm and

meant we wouldn't have been around any

longer to do our further cases.

So you've got to earn,

I feel like you've got to earn the right

for that. If I want to go try a case,

I've got to earn the right to do it by

making sure I'm doing it from a position

of strength, not I need to win that case.

If I go into trial and I need to win,

it's going to be desperate.

It's like when you need to have a date

and you're going up to every girl in the

bar to asking her for a number,

there's a smell of desperation that

everyone senses and you don't succeed in

that setting. You have to be coming to

it with a, I'm not talking from personal.

Experience, I just didn't know if you

had firsthand experience with that.

Sounded. And anyway,

that doesn't apply in the modern

world with the internet anyway,

but I've been married for 25 years,

so I don't know how any of that works

these days. I think the other point.

There, and one thing.

The other point is we

need a good HR person.

Which we have. I'm the HR person as well.

But I think another point, Ben,

we talk about it a lot when it comes

back to culture and core values is you

can't make case decisions based on your

finances because they're

going to be bad decisions.

And what I mean by that is you

decide to settle a case maybe

prematurely because it'd be

nice for that firm to get that

$700,000 in the bank

and you can't put your

clients in that position and

you can't have your firm in that

position. And building

that financial durability,

so you never have to make

that decision is critical.

Alright, moving on. Topic six,

dominate a niche instead

of fighting market leaders.

So one of my favorite books on that is

Seth Godin has written a lot of books on

marketing. The one I thought was the

best is called, this is Marketing.

His sort of core insight is that your

initial foray when you're starting any

kind of an entrepreneurial venture is to

identify the smallest viable market.

Because by identifying the

smallest market for your services,

what you're doing is

mapping what you do best,

what you bring your highest and best

value to a niche that is going to benefit

from that service.

So if you were starting a small firm

going head to head with Pierce Atwood

and being a full service

law firm that offers m and

a and bankruptcy and whatever

immigration so forth,

you're not going to compete effectively

with Pierce Atwood doing that,

right? But if you are really

good at one niche thing and can

make a name for yourself in that,

you will grow rapidly by

reputational value and word of

mouth and so forth. And so we did

that when we started our firm.

We were very deliberate about

focusing like a laser on.

We are the best at doing complex

medical malpractice cases.

And for the first several years,

I would say the lion's share of our

new cases were in the field of medical

malpractice.

It's a good niche because very few

lawyers want to do those cases.

They're expensive, they're complicated,

there isn't a lot of room for mistakes

there because you can quickly lose

your shirt on them and so forth.

So we did that and all of our

marketing was very targeted on

that. We would write articles focused

on that. We wanted to establish

being industry leaders in that area. And

I think that was very effective for us.

Since then,

we've now expanded out into

other areas of complex civil

litigation and personal

injury cases beyond that.

But if we had tried to

do that at the outset,

I think we would've been

much less successful at

building our business because

there's a million lawyers out there

who want to do garden variety personal

injury cases. So that's just one

example. Whatever niche you are in,

you want to simplify and narrow it to

the thing you do the very best and then

put all of your focus and eggs

into that basket initially,

develop those relationships,

build that business,

and then gradually concentric

circle out from there.

I think you'd be great to talk

about Jeff. Building systems,

metrics and accountability.

We build a lot of systems,

metrics and accountability.

So part of our strategic plan

was we tried to narrow down

and focus on what our biggest metrics and

measurements are going to be,

KPIs, key performance indicators.

And there are so many different things

that you could try and point to.

We've really narrowed it down to

less than a handful of things that we

think are the most important

things to our firm.

And then we back it up

with data and we track it.

And it goes back to, again,

one of our core tenants that we

try and do everything as data

driven as possible, which I think

for attorneys, what I've learned is,

especially for trial attorneys,

a lot of it is your past experience

and your gut instinct and how you

can react in real time and in front

of a jury or given an opening or

giving a closing. But those may

serve you very well in that role,

but they may not serve you

great if you can't reel those

things in and have the metrics.

And one of our biggest KPIs is

what we call qualified cases.

And we look at it and we

decided what we felt were

qualified cases for our firm,

what were cases that to the niche part,

we weren't expanding beyond our

reach. We had the expertise,

we have the systems and we

have the ability to handle this

case and add a lot of value to it.

And we found out that

in order for us to get

qualified cases,

we probably have to talk to

anywhere between 500 and a thousand

potential clients to get

those qualified cases.

So everything else that we're doing

is really trickling down from that

KPI. If we have to talk to

that many potential clients,

how does that impact our marketing?

How does that impact our intake team?

How does that impact our onboarding team?

How do we get the data so that

we are more focused from a

marketing standpoint,

from an intake standpoint to

try and drive more qualified

cases? So I mean, Ben, I can

kind of kick over to you.

And the other part of it is we try to do,

we have a Monday meeting every meeting.

So I don't anybody here run

their business or follow

the EOS model entrepreneurial

operating system.

It was kind of discussed in this

book called Traction by Gino Wickman,

which I've listed here. But there's

some different systems like that,

businesses entrepreneurial businesses use,

and we use many of the

tenants of EOS in our company.

Part of that is having

regular meeting pulses,

but one of those is we have a Monday

meeting every week where everyone in the

firm is there for the

first hour of the meeting.

We have a defined dashboard

that lists out our

KPIs and key performance indicators that

apply to each different segment of our

practice.

So every week we're looking at what

are the number of intakes that came in,

how many phone calls were answered,

how many cases were accepted,

rejected? How many are in this

category, how many are in this category?

What is our settlements, revenues,

how many case reviews were completed?

So the thing about that is there's

really at least one or two metrics that

applies to every different

department in our firm.

So the intake department has metrics,

the litigation teams have metrics,

and it's a way to kind of impose

some level of accountability,

public accountability

at the weekly meetings,

public shaming and public

shaming to some extent,

although we try to do it with good humor

most of the time. Most of the time.

So we do that, and that really

drives everything we do.

And those KPIs are not arbitrary.

They were developed because they all

tracked to something we're trying

to accomplish in our

mission. So as Jeff said,

we need a certain number

of qualified cases for us.

That's the key metric. Because for

instance, if we looked at revenue,

revenue in a plaintiff's

firm goes like this,

because you might have a big settlement

and a big case all of a sudden your

revenue looks really impressive,

but that's not really an indicator of

the health of your business because you

may not have another case like that

coming in the pipeline anytime soon.

And so if you were basing your decisions

only on revenue or your health of the

business, that would

not be a good indicator.

So what we've come to is qualified cases

because we know if we have a certain

number of qualified cases in our pipeline

that will translate into a certain

number of revenue over a certain period

of time and whatever kind of practice

you have.

I think a good first step is to identify

what are the two to three or one key

metrics that you really want to track?

And it's going to be different.

If we were an hourly rate practice, it

would be a totally different metric.

And then the systems part is just having

replicable systems that once you've

figured out how to do something well,

you continue to do it the same way every

time and train people to do it that way

so you're not constantly reinventing

the wheel and you have consistent high

quality standards across the

board. And when we started,

we would have multiple paralegals and

they would all be doing things their own

individual ways, and one way would be

better and the other way would be worse.

And at some point it occurred to us, well,

why aren't we just taking

the best practice and having

everyone do it that way?

We've really tried to do that across

the board and systems that define what

we're doing. We covered eight.

Let's move quickly on to nine in our

last three minutes and we'll cover.

Ten nine scale without

diluting identity or

quality. This is kind of the

stage we're at right now, Ben.

We've laid our foundation. We

had a fantastic year last year,

and now we're in our scaling

phase. What's our next step?

We're filling out our litigation

team, we're increasing our marketing,

we're increasing our intakes.

How do we scale without losing

all the things that we've put in

place that have been

successful up to this point?

And a lot of that is very simple things,

but the service you try and give

every potential client that calls in.

If we all of a sudden go

from 60 intakes a week to 250

intakes a week, are we going

to lose that personal touch?

Are we going to lose that ability to

be able to decipher on whether it's an

appropriate or qualified case or can

we refer it out to another attorney?

So to be able to scale and not

lose your culture, not lose,

what made you successful to begin with,

I don't want to say is what

we're struggling in, but

that's this year for us.

That is 2026 and we're

three weeks into it. And.

Yeah, I mean for me,

this is very personal to me because

I'm getting older as the days and years

go by and there comes a

point where want to do less,

I want to have a firm where the

firm isn't about the individuals,

it's about having the firm

and the firm comes first,

and we have a powerhouse firm, not

just people that have good reputations.

And so now, I mean,

I no longer do most of the

legal work on most of the cases,

which I did for years.

I've very intentionally

taken myself out of,

I'm not lead counsel on any case

in our office now, which I love.

It doesn't mean I'm not

intimately involved in every case.

I am just in a different way.

But that's been critical to

scaling in order to scale.

But you have to take yourself

out of being indispensable

for everything. Otherwise you can't

scale. You have limited amount of time,

you have limited time horizons.

So there's things where I can

add value and strategy and input

into some of the critical

junctures in cases.

I'm still going to probably be first

chair in every trial we do for the

foreseeable future, which

I'm happy and excited to do.

But if I don't take another deposition

in my lifetime, I'll be very happy.

I'm doing two next week. But the

reality is I'll still do a few,

but for the most part, not doing

depositions, not doing the briefs,

and I'm trying to take

myself out of most of that.

This is how I know we're

on the right track.

It's very easy for the Bens

and Taylors of the world to

give up things that they don't enjoy.

They gave up facilities and

buying office furniture.

They gave up dealing with our IT vendor.

Taylor really enjoyed the

office furniture he did.

I had to pry it away from him,

which was, he likes a good deal.

We hired a marketing person and

brought him, so they gave up marketing.

So all those things were the easy things

for them to give up, the hard things.

And I know we're on the right path because

Ben and Taylor are starting to give

up things that they've been doing for

the last two decades and been doing very

well.

And they have the confidence

in the team that we've

built to hand over those duties

that in the past they would,

if I want it done right,

I got to do it myself.

And so that's the exact

trajectory we want to be on.

And I don't know, it's good.

So we sort of at the end, but lemme

just comment on the very last topic.

One of our goals in addition to our

financial goals and client services

related goals is we actually

have an internal goal.

We call it building the

law firm of the future.

And I think mean we all

probably use AI in different

capacities. Currently,

I am a huge user of ai.

I'm probably on chat GPT much to

my wife's dismay like five hours

a day.

But it has enormous

power to leverage what we

currently do and to make us

more efficient and productive.

It also has the power to

distract and be useless.

So we have to use it in a very

deliberate and intentional way.

But I think it's fair to

say that what a law firm

looks like even two or

three years from now,

let alone five or 10 years from now,

is going to be totally different.

There will no longer be teams of

people answering phone calls. That will

almost certainly all be handled by ai.

A lot of the things that paralegals

currently do will be done by

AI. A lot of things that young associates,

I mean in our medical malpractice cases,

getting a lawyer competent to

review a complex medical record and

make decisions about even whether

that is or isn't the case would take

years in the past and hours

and hours or days of time.

It can be done for the most part in

about an hour now utilizing AI and

training somebody on how to

issue spot through that process.

So there's just so many ways in

which whatever industry you're in or

practice, AI is going to revolutionize it.

I think in terms of being a

law firm owner and a leader,

the goal now is to start building

your practice with that in mind.

Not to use AI to substitute

for anything right now,

but to be thinking about how that might

be done in the future and creating

systems that will enable you to do

that as the time becomes ripe for

it. So we could talk a lot more

about that, but we were out of time.

So with that as we set at the outset,

we'd love to have anybody who has a

thought or questions or wants to continue

the conversation, feel free to

come up. You can use this mic,

you can join us on the

podcast if you want.

Otherwise It was great to see everybody.

I hope you enjoyed the conference.

Rachel, thank you for

inviting us. Have a nice day.

Thanks for listening to Elawvate:

Build and Grow Your Law Firm.

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