12. The #1 Thing Every Personal Injury Law Firm NEEDS to Succeed

[00:00:00] Greg Ward:
On at least a weekly basis, I’ll talk about our core values and we’ll talk about one core value a week and give some examples and shout outs to people who exemplify that core value. It’s constant in our firm. It’s really just, you know, emphasizing core values.

[00:00:17] Bobby Steinbach:
Welcome to Hot Docket, the show where we talk about winning marketing strategies that have built the most successful law firms.

[00:00:23] Bobby Steinbach:
Join us every two weeks

[00:00:24] Andrew Nasrinpay:
for the latest trends and tactics to grow your law firm.

[00:00:29] Bobby Steinbach:
Everybody, welcome to the hot docket podcast today. We’re going to be talking about the power of core values in a personal injury law firm with our special guest, Greg Ward. I’m excited.

[00:00:40] Andrew Nasrinpay:
So am I. And I think as you scale your firm, uh, those values become more and more important because there are more people who will be doing things that aren’t directly something that you see.

[00:00:52] Andrew Nasrinpay:
So instilling those values is incredibly important.

[00:00:54] Bobby Steinbach:
Yeah, agreed. Not just on like your internal facing, uh, company culture side, but also probably externally. So clients understand what to expect. Um, so with that, I’d like to introduce today’s guest, uh, Greg Ward.

[00:01:13] Bobby Steinbach:
Hey Greg, thanks for joining us.

[00:01:14] Greg Ward:
Hey, thanks for having me guys. I appreciate the time.

[00:01:17] Bobby Steinbach:
Yeah, of course, of course. So to kick things off here, uh, I just want to ask you about today’s theme. So today’s theme, we’re based on the power of core values in a personal injury law firm. I know you’re like a strong believer in the power of values.

[00:01:30] Bobby Steinbach:
Can you walk us through some of your core values and how these values have helped your firm scale?

[00:01:35] Greg Ward:
Sure, absolutely. Uh, again, thanks for having me here. Our firm has seven core values. And I really drill these into our, our team. We, our most important core value is service to our clients. And then the second core value service of the team service to the communities are third.

[00:01:52] Greg Ward:
And then we have four more faith, leadership, accountability, and loyalty. Uh, and those are kind of in no particular order. But what I say to my team is, you know, the service of the clients is always our most important core value. I really want to keep them focused on that, that every decision that we make.

[00:02:08] Greg Ward:
is based on how can we give the best service to our clients. And that, that’s kind of like, you know, that’s Ward Law 101 is service to the clients and everything else kind of flows out of that.

[00:02:20] Bobby Steinbach:
And how do you instill that? Like, is it part of the onboarding process? You just have like a bake it in to your new employees.

[00:02:26] Bobby Steinbach:
These are what we do. Do you have any material that you distribute? Kind of what’s the onboarding process around these values?

[00:02:32] Greg Ward:
Yeah, I use a jack hammer. Okay, so, so, uh, great question, you know, um, and, and we should probably talk about how these came up and I’m sure we’ll get to that, but how do we use it in our process as well?

[00:02:47] Greg Ward:
When we’re hiring, we have interview questions that are geared around each of those core values. And so we ask people for, you know, their experiences and we kind of rate them on their demonstration of the core values throughout their lives. And so if somebody says, you know, service to clients is. Uh, a core value that they, that they, that they like, or we’ll flesh that out a little bit.

[00:03:07] Greg Ward:
We’ll say, what are some experiences you’ve had where you’ve gone above and beyond with service to the clients? One of the ones I love to really jump on is service to the community. At this point in my life, you know, I’m 52 as I mentioned. Um, I’m really more about giving back so you can give back through service of the clients.

[00:03:23] Greg Ward:
But our work and activities with the community supporting, you know, people were socioeconomically challenged people offshore. You know, my wife and I, we have built an orphanage in Nicaragua, a school. We support churches around the world, which the church in many places is the place where the food distribution is and and learning things like that.

[00:03:40] Greg Ward:
So we are really passionate about giving back to these communities. And when I say that, You know, we draw some of our staff is from offshore. And so we want to give into those communities as well. And so, so for me personally, service of the community, I think is the one that gets me up in the morning, but we, we really, we, we hire around it.

[00:03:59] Greg Ward:
We train and we have videos on it in our onboarding process and we reinforce it basically every day. Our managers talk about it and then, you know, on at least a weekly basis, I’ll talk about our core values and we’ll talk about one core value a week and give some examples and shout outs to people who exemplify that core value.

[00:04:17] Greg Ward:
And I try and change the core value we talk about every week to focus on something. Uh, unique about that core value as we go forward. So it’s constant in our firm is really just, you know, emphasizing these core values.

[00:04:28] Bobby Steinbach:
And not that everything has to be about marketing, but like service to community also has a marketing angle, right?

[00:04:35] Bobby Steinbach:
Like legal is a local SEO play in many ways. You’re, you’re trying to capitalize on local intent. So getting back links from community. Uh, websites being in the community and having folks recognize your name is also probably strong.

[00:04:49] Andrew Nasrinpay:
Yeah. It also makes your branding a lot more authentic. So I, I think it’s pretty cool.

[00:04:55] Andrew Nasrinpay:
Yeah.

[00:04:55] Greg Ward:
You hit on it. You hit on a great point. Let me, I might want to talk to that is, you know, if you ask me, Greg, what’s the, what is the first thing you got to do for your core values is you got to get authentic with yourself. That’s a great word. Authenticity. And that’s a great word about marketing, too.

[00:05:08] Greg Ward:
Like it’s got to be authentic. You know, no one ever accused me of being authentic because because I’m doubling down everything I say, right? And once you figure out who you are, the big problem with people today is we’ve almost been taught to be inauthentic, right? You look at the Instagram culture, you know, they look at the highlights of Facebook and everything.

[00:05:25] Greg Ward:
Everybody has this shiny persona that they put out there, and there’s not a lot of authenticity. And then when you challenge people on the authenticity, they get defensive. Right? So we’ve got to figure out who the heck we are first. And I didn’t figure out who I was until I was 40. Right. Like I, like I thought I knew who I was, but I had a kind of a spiritual shift at 40 and I realized, Hey, wait a minute.

[00:05:45] Greg Ward:
You know, this is who I really, really am. And when you get that authenticity in your marketing, like my wife, too, like my wife is the same way on TV as she is off TV. I talk like this to my kids. So you’re like, and my, and my daughter, like my oldest daughter will tell you like how we have conversations.

[00:06:00] Greg Ward:
It’s like, Here it is, Elizabeth. And, uh, you know, and, and she’s learned to deal with that. But, but, you know, you, you, of course you treat people differently depending on what they can receive. But when you figure out who you are, your core values just bubble right to the surface. I mean, you know what they are and then, then it’s much easier to use them as a guide post.

[00:06:17] Andrew Nasrinpay:
So you brought up something interesting about having a global workforce, and it seems like you employ hundreds of professionals. How did you decide that you were going to hire globally, and how do you think that the core values and having all that aligned, uh, works out for you?

[00:06:34] Greg Ward:
Well, the answer, it works out great.

[00:06:36] Greg Ward:
Um, how do we decide to go offshore? Well, you know, the, the, the demon of Covid made it possible. Right. Because I would not, I would not be doing this, but for COVID. So I guess there’s some silver linings of COVID when COVID hit. I remember I saw it coming out of China. Dade County was not well prepared for this.

[00:06:55] Greg Ward:
I saw the numbers in China and I said, this is going to be absolutely awful. Something’s going to happen. They’re going to shut us down. Like I knew that was happening weeks before it actually happened. And so, uh, we started preparing to go have everyone work from home. And, uh, and I’m proud to say that we had our last person leave the office the day before Dade County shut down because you guys aren’t in South Florida, but It was like one day it was, yeah, we’re gonna shut down sometime the next 24 hours and then no, it’s going to be a week.

[00:07:22] Greg Ward:
Then it was a day, then it’s a week. And then boom, it just happened with very little notice beyond that oscillation. So we were ready for it. And once we had people working from home and I’m not a work from home fan, you know, if you guys want to come work with me, it’s not going to be from home, not people, but people in general, it’s not going to be from home because I do believe there’s a huge benefit to being in person, at least for me.

[00:07:41] Greg Ward:
Most the majority of her time that said I just couldn’t draw enough talent from Miami Dade County where I’m located To staff my clients needs and so I had to do something and so I look at offshore the VA’s in particular as an opportunity to get the very best that the world has to offer and it happens to be it’s somewhat of a cost savings and And then we use the core values that we’re talking about to screen those those folks as well that becomes You You know, part of our interview process is looking at core values to make sure that they really are 100 percent committed to giving back to clients right in their communities So, but we couldn’t do our growth if we didn’t have VAs.

[00:08:18] Greg Ward:
We just couldn’t do it. Um, because it’s, it’s just, we, we grow too fast and there aren’t enough people in Dade County to fill my firm up that fast. This qualified, skilled, you know, group of people that I need.

[00:08:29] Andrew Nasrinpay:
That’s super interesting. So, on, on one of our previous episodes, someone was saying that, uh, they do a four day work week.

[00:08:37] Andrew Nasrinpay:
And that was another incentivization to getting top cal, or talent. So, And it seems like most service industry, uh, companies. need to compete for top tier talent. And I think opening up the pool to a larger geographic area is a really smart way to do it.

[00:08:57] Greg Ward:
Thank you. That’s one way. And, and, you know, you, you touched on this.

[00:08:59] Greg Ward:
I, I, I don’t know how much you guys want to be controversial, but I’ll take the four day work week and working remote is BS camp all day long. Right. And I know I’m sounding hypocritical because I got, you know, 80 something VAs offshore. Um, but again, those are the top of the top of the top in those countries.

[00:09:16] Greg Ward:
But, you know, and I see the studies, I see the studies that say 15 percent improved productivity working from home and coincidentally another 15 percent Oh, with a four day work week. So you mean to tell me that if somebody works from home four days a week, they’re going to be a 30 percent more productive.

[00:09:29] Greg Ward:
It’s absolute. What’s the word that Biden uses? Uh, malarkey. It’s a malarkey. Total malarkey. What I think is happening is you see. that there is a certain enthusiasm right now with these ideas and people are working a little harder. And then when that becomes the new normal, we’re going to slide back into our, our, into our routine.

[00:09:47] Greg Ward:
It just is and we do need each other. They’re encouraging each other, you know, pushing each other on and training and learning and learning from other people. And that’s, you know, we’re a community, man. Like we’re a community here in my organization. We work in a bigger community. If you’re sitting in your bedroom in your pajamas, There’s there’s no community there.

[00:10:05] Greg Ward:
You know, you’re part of what a digital community that doesn’t inspire anybody, you know, nobody’s ever inspired on their bed, right? It just, you know, at least relaxing. So, you know, I’ll take that camp all day long. And I know I’m not it’s not a popular position, but but I believe it and in my heart and I also remember, by the way, during COVID COVID.

[00:10:20] Greg Ward:
We were working from home. Our productivity went down 30%. It was down 30 percent after three months. Everybody was terrified the first three months, but then after, after three months, it just started going and I tracked it. It was down 30%. So I don’t know how it works with those of those metrics, but circling back to the core values for a second.

[00:10:36] Greg Ward:
Um, and with the, with the VAs in particular, kind of jumping back to an earlier topic, the service of the team. Uh, I feel like our VAs, when we onboard a VA, once, the first thing we do is we send them a package with like a Ward Law Group sweatshirt, t shirt. We send them like a, you know, some branded merchandise.

[00:10:55] Greg Ward:
And then if they’ve been with us for a period of time, we ship them some other equipment, you know, that they really feel like they’re part of our team. And we include them in the huddles. Like we have these zoom huddles, uh, and we make sure we support them and give them shout outs for their productivity, um, goals too.

[00:11:10] Greg Ward:
And are there, there, there are milestones. And, uh, we, one of the big things about managing offshore staff is they don’t feel like they’re part of an organization as much because people just use them for the, like the, the, the lower jobs. We, we train our people like we train our domestic employees too. And it’s, uh, you know, I, I found that we have a lot of, I get thank you letters from my VAs.

[00:11:30] Greg Ward:
If you can, if you’re a boss and you can imagine employees sending you a thank you letter or the mother of one of our employees sent me a thank you letter, like it’s never happened, right? Now, none of my domestics have ever said, Hey, thank you for, they wouldn’t say thank you for the job, right? But my VA’s letters, thank you for this, for this opportunity.

[00:11:48] Greg Ward:
And I’m like, it makes me cry a little bit. I’ll be honest. I’m like, I’m really happy that I could help, you know, help somebody meet their potential too.

[00:11:55] Bobby Steinbach:
Yeah. I think like, If you’ve ever tried to hire a VA, you know, it’s going to be terrible or amazing. Like it very rarely kind of fits middle of the road.

[00:12:05] Bobby Steinbach:
And it sounds like you’ve built a process which allows you to onboard a VA. Like you would a domestic. And that’s what sets you up for success. Like if you just say, Hey, go do this with no instruction. Of course, it’s not going to work.

[00:12:17] Greg Ward:
Yeah. I, in fact, I have a, I have this, uh, one of my, you know, don’t tell anybody about this, but I have this idea that I want to do an offshore recruiting agency, a little more like the American recruiting agencies where, you know, you can purchase the temp, the perm type, and not a lot of agencies have that.

[00:12:32] Greg Ward:
And I’ll be honest with you. I used to use the, um, I used to use some of the staffing companies that do this, and I remember one company, I had 80 turndowns, because we screened them, 80 turndowns, we didn’t have a single successful candidate, and they get mad at me, and they’re like, well, you know, everyone else, and by the way, everyone else they talk about are all people I know, because, you know, at this level, when you’ve got a couple hundred people, you know everybody nationally, well, so and so is doing it, I’m like, I told so and so to use you, so don’t tell me that, you know, that guy’s proven me wrong.

[00:13:00] Greg Ward:
He’s following my lead, you know? So it’s kind of funny with that, but I just feel like this is still the wild west of VAs. Um, we don’t have systems and so we’re building our own systems and, and I may take that to the market because I just feel like, you know, there’s just such a lack, as you say, there’s a lack of, you know, You know of accountability with providing qualified candidates, you know, you just don’t chuck a body at a position You’ve got to do some, you know Some some screening and you’ve got to do some fitting and you’ve got to do some training And I don’t feel like that’s being done in the market.

[00:13:29] Greg Ward:
So if you had a bad experience with vas I think it’s cause you don’t know what you’re doing as far as screening and onboarding. You know, it’s not the same as hiring somebody domestically because you need somebody who can work from home efficiently.

[00:13:42] Bobby Steinbach:
I personally hope you take that VA idea one step further and build a call center for legal.

[00:13:47] Bobby Steinbach:
That works really, really well. Because if you do that, well, I’m sure we’re not the only ones who would throw money at it.

[00:13:54] Greg Ward:
Yeah. And, and, and so interesting, you know, because, because the point about VA is they’re decentralized. Right. One of the things I’m looking at is I want to keep my VAs in different countries.

[00:14:03] Greg Ward:
Like if one country shuts us down, I want to make sure it shuts down. For example, in Ecuador, I’ve got people in Ecuador. Ecuador became destabilized. You know, I don’t know how much longer that’s going to last. Uh, you know, if, if, you know, one regime gets a, a, you know, a bug in their nose about something and they, they, so I want to make sure I have VH from all over the place.

[00:14:20] Greg Ward:
So when you say a call center, it would be a virtual call center, right? It couldn’t be a hard, cause I’ve got buddies who’ve got call centers in Costa Rica and Columbia and they’ve got the same problem I got, you know, how many qualified people can you pull from one village or one city in Columbia? Right.

[00:14:36] Greg Ward:
And so it would be like a decentralized or virtual call center. I just coined that registered trademark pending virtual call, whatever the,

[00:14:43] Bobby Steinbach:
you

[00:14:43] Greg Ward:
know, but if, if, if anybody ever does it, it came, you heard it here first. Uh, no, but, but it would be like a virtual call center. You know, I do think that that’s a, that’s a, that’s kind of the next generation of things.

[00:14:53] Greg Ward:
And when you say that call center, that’s, I mean, that’s essentially what we do here. We’ve got, we’ve got virtual people and we have more answering phones. Internet connectivity is sometimes an issue with that, but we’ve got some workarounds for that as well.

[00:15:04] Bobby Steinbach:
Amazing. Um, so I want to circle back a little bit on values and something a little bit tangential to that from the things I’ve heard you say, both in like appearances and just like our discussions, it sounds like you believe that personal injury lawyers tend to be more empathetic while other practice types, what big law for sure, tend to be more cerebral.

[00:15:23] Bobby Steinbach:
Can you walk us through how being empathetic can lead to better results for your clients or has led to better results for your clients?

[00:15:30] Greg Ward:
I mean, yeah, that’s, you know, I’m trying to remember when did I say that, but that’s really something I would say. So I, I validate it if I, if I said it in that exact way.

[00:15:39] Greg Ward:
Um, I do believe that. And by the way, because we do test for empathy as one of our hiring criteria, we see how much empathy they have, because I do believe that, you know, it’s cerebral spine, you know, and, and, and cerebral is good. When I need somebody to be a nitpicker, to take a part of project and see where all the problems are.

[00:15:54] Greg Ward:
I get somebody who’s very, you know, Black and white, right? But let’s talk about the empathy for a second. I mean, I can tell you that my empathy I’m a very highly empathetic person It, it helps me really understand the nature of my client’s suffering, right? And so, you know, it’s, it’s a plus because I, I won’t take less than what the client deserves.

[00:16:17] Greg Ward:
Assuming the client agrees, obviously. And I try and emphasize that to my, to my client. to my attorneys. Let me give you an example from law school. Like, I have a couple of my, um, parent legals are now in law school, and they’re doing a demand letter project. And, and these paralegals are, I’m telling you, top shelf, best paralegals I’ve ever had.

[00:16:34] Greg Ward:
Um, you know, they’re really, really, really great paralegals. And, uh, they, so they send a demand letter, they draft a demand letter for their project, and the professor comes back and says, you need to be reasonable in your demand. And so they brought it back to me, and I’m like, let me tell you, those paralegals have been on some of the biggest cases you could ever imagine.

[00:16:50] Greg Ward:
And when you say, what you think is reasonable, Mr. Professor, is Patently unreasonable when you consider the full scope of damages because I’m empathic and I understand what the full scope of harm in my client’s life is, right? So it’s not an academic exercise is real. So when you say like the empathy, I try and find people who are empathic to the client.

[00:17:08] Greg Ward:
Now you’ve got to not let that empathy interfere with your judgment. You know, if you’ve got a client who, you know, you can’t make the case, then you know, it is what it is. But I really want to impart that empathy because we’re skeptical as human beings. And they’ve done studies on this with jury bias, for example.

[00:17:22] Greg Ward:
Like, somebody could get really hurt in a crash, and the jury is going to naturally believe that it wouldn’t happen to them. And that will devalue the client’s case. And we have something in law called the Golden Rule, which says you can’t say to the jury, put yourself in my client’s shoes. But the truth is, the jury system is to deter this kind of bad conduct by a negligent defendant.

[00:17:41] Greg Ward:
And so it really does affect them and you know, you want to be able to sell that story without crossing the lines of rules, but you got to get in your client’s shoes first, you know, Chris, seriously, great trial lawyer said this. He’s like, you know, the great thing about empathy is you really understand the nature of your clients harms.

[00:17:58] Greg Ward:
The problem is you can only do that so many times. I mean, how many times have I lost my dad in a car crash, right? 50. I’ve had 50 cases where the guy comes in. Now, my, my father passed away from cancer. So when I relate to my clients, I say, listen, I remember what I went through with my father when I lost him and I can help you a better counselor, a better advocate for them.

[00:18:18] Greg Ward:
But the truth is, is as a lawyer, you take all that on yourself when you have empathy. And that can be really draining. So that’s like the other side of it. But empathy is important to really get in the shoes of your client so you can understand the full scope of harms and losses and not give up when you know, the insurance adjuster tells you it’s only worth 10, 000 when you know the person’s life is ruined.

[00:18:37] Bobby Steinbach:
And this putting yourself in your client’s shoes and it being so draining. I think it was Eric bomb who we had on earlier who said something like the levels of depression and alcoholism in legal is just like standard deviations higher. Than it is in other professions, probably for this very reason.

[00:18:53] Greg Ward:
And, and, and by the way, this is not to, to poo any defense lawyers, you know, I mean, obviously we all are doing a job here.

[00:18:59] Greg Ward:
I feel like they’ve got the opposite problem. I do feel like they have some empathy and it’s probably hard for them to understand it in a dollars and cents way. Um, you know, I, I mean, at least I have to imagine that like, we’re not, we’re not robots. We are human beings. And so they, they probably have to struggle with, you know, the, the, the valid really strongly valid cases that they’re devaluing.

[00:19:17] Greg Ward:
Versus us where we’re like, we’re trying to give everything we have for those clients. And it’s, and it’s just, it’s just exhausting all around. It’s not easy. And so you’ve got to be really fit mentally, physically, spiritually to deal with this work and not resort to alcohol. Cause that’s or drugs or sex or porn or whatever it is that all the vices that we use, you know, if you’re dealing with those things, you know, if you’re struggling with those things, it’s because you’ve got an unmanaged stress issue.

[00:19:42] Greg Ward:
In your life and you haven’t really got yourself integrated with dealing with, you know, what, what, what your practice is.

[00:19:47] Andrew Nasrinpay:
Yeah. So I wanna shift gears for a quick second. And because you’re a firm that’s been successful in several markets and you’ve been able to scale up, uh, I want you to just go over kind of your strategy, how you started as a firm, how you were able to scale.

[00:20:02] Andrew Nasrinpay:
You could go into some different channels that work for you, some that didn’t, and uh, kind of give us, give us your thought process on marketing for personal injury cases in general.

[00:20:13] Greg Ward:
Sure. Great. I’d love to do that. Um, so, you know, we didn’t have our official core values written down until like year five, I want to say, but what we did is we look back on what the values that we were espousing every day.

[00:20:25] Greg Ward:
And then we kind of distilled them into into one thing. But when we started, it was my wife and myself. We had a little fold out table and a little laptop computer. We’re a little closet office. I mean, it was, I was, I was basically bankrupt back then too. So it was, we started where we really couldn’t afford to make any mistakes.

[00:20:40] Greg Ward:
And I do look at business as a spiritual experience for me. And, uh, you know, kind of a spiritual, mental, physical transformation that, you know, you go through, you know, it’s your hero’s journey, if you will. So we started off and, uh, you know, I settled a big, uh, insurance coverage case. I say big for me at the time, the fee was a hundred thousand dollars.

[00:20:59] Greg Ward:
That was a lot of money for me back then. And, uh, my wife said she wanted to do personal injury. And I was a white shoe lawyer. I worked at steel Hector, big law firm, you know, 20 years ago. And I was kind of laughing at the personal injury side. And I said, okay, you go do your little PI practice. I’m going to keep doing my, you know, complicated commercial practice.

[00:21:17] Greg Ward:
And my wife’s first case, she got a 50, 000 tender with a letter. And, uh, I was like, are you kidding me? Crap. This is a, this is amazing. Client was super happy. She was super happy, you know, And I said, well, let’s, let’s try this out. And so we started very, very small. And when I say being authentic, I’m a born again, Christian.

[00:21:34] Greg Ward:
My wife was born again, Christian. Um, I’ve been a born again Christian for 12 years. My wife has been for, for longer than that. And we said, listen, we’re going to start where we’re at. We’re going to go to the churches. You know, we’re gonna get people to know us and, uh, and really just be as honest, you know, as, as in, in, in practice as we could possibly be.

[00:21:51] Greg Ward:
We were always honest with the clients about the strengths of their cases. And so word of mouth started and then we started doing a little advertising on radio and it worked for us. And, uh, then we scaled it. And so what I learned early on, of course, is you have to really track, you know, your ROI and to this day, there’s, there’s really two schools of thought on this and I’m very, uh, I guess, uh, I’m on the one strong side of this, you have to track everything.

[00:22:15] Greg Ward:
Like this symphony of leads. I just don’t buy that at all. And I had, I remember my first marketing guy was like, you can’t track your leads. I was like, of course I can track them. I’m not doing any other advertising. I know what my leads are coming from this radio station, right? Like I have one radio station.

[00:22:29] Greg Ward:
He’s like, you can’t track it. I’m like the F I can’t. I it’s, it’s right there. Like, you know, every call I get is from this radio station. Of course I can track it. And I can work on my ROI. It got trickier with two, and then ten, and then other radio stations and TV. Um, what I can tell you that, that I, I’m not that good at is, uh, I think we’re not as good at digital as we need to be.

[00:22:48] Greg Ward:
Uh, that’s a very tricky area. Um, and you can spend a lot of money and get no results, so you gotta always be monitoring that. If you’re gonna get in the digital realm, I do feel like it’s the future, but I don’t know how to, how to do it yet as well as I, as I need to. Um, and billboards just don’t work for us.

[00:23:02] Greg Ward:
It’s, I’m in the South Florida, the cap, the billboard capital of the world. Every billboard is a PI lawyer. And, uh, you know, it just like we’ve, we’ve done billboards and noticed no discernible uptick. Like, well, we try and hold everything consistent for a month or a couple of months, and then we’ll do billboards and it just, nothing goes up.

[00:23:19] Greg Ward:
And billboards are expensive. So I just, you know, if, you know, if, if it’s, if it’s name recognition, I guess, but it’s like, I want to get into the ads that have an immediate return and by immediate return, usually it does take a few months for an ad to start working, but. But you know, you can see some trends and things.

[00:23:35] Greg Ward:
And so maybe I haven’t done billboards long enough. I don’t know. I’ve got, uh, you know, Rubenstein and Steiger and trying to think of those are the two big billboard companies down here. Maybe Corden and, uh, partners, they’re up in Palm beach. Um, Morgan, John Morgan’s got an ad right at the exit of my,

[00:23:52] Bobby Steinbach:
what about new ones?

[00:23:53] Greg Ward:
Uh, he’s up in Orlando. I, maybe he stops at West Palm beach. Um, I haven’t seen his ads down here or his billboards down here. But, uh, all those billboards, and let me tell you, they’re great. But here’s another, here’s another little wrinkle to this. Rubenstein, FL legal, right? I’m advertising for my competitors now.

[00:24:11] Greg Ward:
24 hour FL legal, right? Um, you know, Morgan, bigger is better, right? Uh, Steiger was the first, I think. I don’t know if it was Steiger or Newland who did it first, but I love my lawyer, and then there’s just a settlement amount. I, and I did a focus group one time on Steingers billboards and all of the focus group people were like, it’s horrible.

[00:24:32] Greg Ward:
It’s terrible. And then I asked them, would you hire them? And they all said, yes. So it’s like, you know, we all poopoo the billboards, but they, they at least put in someone’s mind that if you want a big number, you know, that’s, that’s the law firm you call. Now, for me, I don’t necessarily want that. Because I want serious cases, but if somebody has a scratch in the bumper and they think they’re going to get a million dollars, I do not want them to call me.

[00:24:55] Greg Ward:
I’m never going to make them happy, I’m going to do a lot of work, and they’re going to end up giving me a bad review. So, you know what I’m saying? So like, just the numbers alone, it’s hard to, you know, and when you just see the billboards with the numbers, I feel like that’s what the clients think, is they’re going to get a lot of money.

[00:25:09] Greg Ward:
I want my clients to understand that there’s a lot that goes into a case. And so I don’t know, maybe I’m, maybe I’m too intellectual. Maybe I, I still have the old white shoe law firm in me that billboards are wrong, but for me, billboards just, just haven’t worked. And we’re testing different stuff now to see what does work.

[00:25:24] Andrew Nasrinpay:
I think you brought up a really important point on the distinction between branded ads and direct response. So you seem pretty firmly in the direct response camp. Where you want to run your ads, see the calls come in, see the value of the cases, calculate your cost per case, and kind of call it a day. So it’s money in, money out.

[00:25:45] Andrew Nasrinpay:
It’s kind of like a safer way. Um, then there are the advertisers that are in the other camp where it’s branded. And the timelines that they look at for the ROI are going to be longer. Right. The math needed to make it work is a lot more complicated. Um, and billboards falls pretty squarely in that camp.

[00:26:07] Andrew Nasrinpay:
Where they do media mix modeling to see by adding a percentage of billboards into their marketing mix. Will they see lift overall? Because you’re going to get very little direct response from it. Well, I say that, but then there There are other firms that are somehow able to make it work. If you look at someone like, uh, Shannara in Alabama, it’s got like every billboard in the state.

[00:26:28] Andrew Nasrinpay:
And, uh, you know, there’s more than one way to skin a cat, but I think that, uh, you know who you are, you know that you want direct response and you’re doing a strategy that’s worked really well for you.

[00:26:41] Greg Ward:
Yeah, right, right. And that’s, and that’s what I want to emphasize to your audience because you’re going to have different people of different sizes.

[00:26:46] Greg Ward:
Greg Ward is not the master of all things, right? I don’t know. I have a very unique thing because we target a higher percentage of Spanish. My wife is a beautiful woman who is extremely articulate in Spanish on TV and we have kids that we raise speaking Spanish. Right. So, and my kids will go on TV, you know, and, and, and so, you know, it’s so hard to compete with that with my biggest, our, we’ve already seen our direct responses, women in my wife’s demographic age range, or, you know, uh, older women who are telling their, your younger families to call us, but that’s, we resonate with to, to get to your point though, talking about the direct response, I want my clients to feel like they are, they are entering a conversation with me with our advertising.

[00:27:27] Greg Ward:
You know, and so when I say that like our clients feel like they already know us when they walk in the front door If they ever have a car accident and you can’t do that with the billboard, you know And so you do radio you do tv you do some internet some ott maybe um, you know some some Instagram stuff they feel like they’re in a conversation They feel like you’re their friend and they know you and they trust you and that’s something that I want I i’m not i’m not gonna say i’m the aggressive lawyer, right?

[00:27:54] Greg Ward:
I just not gonna do that now. We settled a case last year for over 100 million dollars I’m pretty freaking aggressive because I walked away from several settlement offers that were Enough that everyone else would people were telling me i’m crazy walk away from the settlement offer and i’m like no we can get More the case is worth more, you know, we walked away another we have another big case this year Same thing, a really bad burn case.

[00:28:13] Greg Ward:
We walked away from some pretty significant numbers, right? Because I know that that family is ruined and they need to, they need the compensation to be able to take care of education and everything else. So, but for me, Oh, by the way, I’m going to tell you two things that are fascinating, not fascinating, but I mean, like the one, the big case we have right now.

[00:28:32] Greg Ward:
This is for all of you guys out there that think, you know, only the good cases are the good cases. The big case we have right now, that was a, that was an advertising case. They, they, the guy was in the ambulance saying, call Hani, my wife’s name, call Hani, right? And that was, and, but, because I know that somewhere along the line, he felt that he was in a conversation.

[00:28:48] Greg Ward:
The guy was an Uber driver. And so he really, he listened to the radio a lot. It was in a conversation, you know, my wife is really good on the radio. The other case, the over a hundred million dollar settlement we got came from a discharge. We had fired the guy’s sister in law, right? And it was a huge case, but we had discharged her.

[00:29:05] Greg Ward:
She, there wasn’t a claim. It was, it was no insurance. And we said, I’m sorry, we can’t help you. And when this awful, awful, awful catastrophe happened to this family, she said, call honey because she’s honest. She’ll, she’ll do what’s right for you. And let me tell you the number of runners who went to that guy’s place.

[00:29:20] Greg Ward:
I mean, it’s disgusting, right? Cause they knew it was a big case, but they said, no, this is it. Cause we knew you’re honest and, and praise God for that. For me, I’m a Christian. Thank the Lord for that. Because you know, it’s, it really means a lot to me that I could help these people with, with this, the worst situation of their lives.

[00:29:35] Greg Ward:
And, uh, and you know, but that, but every case has some, has value in the sense of they’re human beings. You need to treat them like they’re human beings and be honest with them. And, uh, as I say, advertising for me, you guys said this, uh, you know, it’s giving back to the community. It’s, it’s branding, but it’s also educating people.

[00:29:50] Greg Ward:
We do education based marketing, and we just want people to know that we’re here for them when they need something.

[00:29:55] Bobby Steinbach:
Yep. And that’s that authenticity, like honesty, authenticity, just working out. It sounds for, um, Let me

[00:30:02] Greg Ward:
say one other thing. My wife has got a great story. When she was in law school, my wife was very poor growing up.

[00:30:06] Greg Ward:
She came from Cuba as an immigrant, walked across the border at 14 with a backpack on her little baby brother with her. She was in law school. She got all the way to law school and she went to a gas station one time and she was driving back and she just wanted to get a Diet Coke. She was really thirsty.

[00:30:19] Greg Ward:
And she went in to the, to the, to the service station and tried to buy Diet Coke. She was a penny short and the cashier would not sell it to her. She was one penny short. If you can imagine this. And my wife, like I still get choked up about this. My wife was like, you know what? A penny matters. For some people, a penny matters.

[00:30:37] Greg Ward:
You know, and it’s such a small issue, but like we’re all fine with our Rolex watches or whatever it is You know, but the truth is a penny matters to some people and we’ve got to put ourselves in their shoes Not our shoes, you know, i’ve got attorneys here like oh the adjuster didn’t have another 500 I’m, like it matters to your client I don’t, I don’t need another 500, but it matters to your client.

[00:30:57] Greg Ward:
So don’t you put your head in that equation where you’re making six figures. You need to ask them if it matters to them. Cause that 500 matters. And my wife was in a position I was to at one point in my life where a penny mattered. And so I never forget that when you talk about service to the clients, man, like that empathy, like I know what it’s like to be poor and it matters.

[00:31:18] Greg Ward:
So I want to try and get that in my, in my attorney’s heads too when they’re negotiating cases.

[00:31:22] Bobby Steinbach:
Yeah. And I can’t, I can’t think of a better transition than a petty matters to the next question we have here, which is talking about scaling. So you’ve managed to build this successful firm and, and obviously in and of itself, very impressive.

[00:31:36] Bobby Steinbach:
But many times we hear of firms that have built what we would call like a volume shop or a mill. How have you maintained the quality of your legal operations as the volume has increased? So that your clients are getting top dollar because like you said, a penny matters.

[00:31:51] Greg Ward:
Sure. So I, I mean, I’m absolutely fanatically focused on settlement per case value.

[00:31:59] Greg Ward:
So what that means is every year, and I exclude the outliers for this, right? So I’ll, you know, I take out obviously all the, all the no coverage discharges. And I take out, you know, the top three or four big outlier cases. And I just, and I figure out as our settlement value is going up or down, if they begin to go down, I mean, the carriers could be paying less money.

[00:32:17] Greg Ward:
And we’re in an anomalous situation now with a law change in Florida. So we’re gonna have to work through this a little bit, but generally throughout the years, our settlements have gone up. And that may be something we’re looking at cases more closely, but generally speaking, I can make sure that my clients are putting more money in their pocket now than they were 10 years ago when I started doing this.

[00:32:35] Greg Ward:
And I think what, you know, the trend that you have to avoid is just closing cases out for whatever they, whatever the carrier may be offering without putting any value into the case. So, so we really look at those metrics and there’s some other metrics you can look at for that to make sure you’re, you know, you’re maintaining high quality.

[00:32:49] Greg Ward:
I mean, another, another metric to look at is time on desk. That mean there’s a carrying cost for cases. You know, if you’re dragging the case out, you know, you’re losing money on that case too, but you’re probably not adding any value to it if you just have a case is dragging out. So you need to know what your median time on desk is and things like that.

[00:33:05] Greg Ward:
We have got a lot of formulas. We use litify as you guys are aware. It’s a really robust program. We’ve done a lot of customization for litify so I can run some reports and get some pretty accurate data on that. But you’ve got to be disciplined with that because it’s not how much you’re taking home.

[00:33:18] Greg Ward:
Really. It’s how much your clients are taking home. That’s got to be the standard that you’re using to guide, to make sure you don’t fall into the, into the middle trap that, you know, it’s just too easy to just settle the cases. And then of course I talked to the community because I’m in plugged into a lot of groups.

[00:33:31] Greg Ward:
I’m in a lot of, uh, networking groups and things. And we talk about what our settlements are, you know, and are they trending up or trending down and what are we doing to make sure that clients are getting the best benefits? The best value what I think one of the exciting things is like, you know, the evolution of medicine is coming along that You know, we’re able to learn more things especially in the tbi space like the technology isn’t quite there yet But I mean, we’re going to see that there’s an even bigger impact in a lot of these, uh, crashes of what’s going on inside the brain and inside the, inside the, the, the, uh, neurological system.

[00:34:03] Greg Ward:
And that’s going to be, that’s going to be a big change in cases because it isn’t just broken bones. I mean, many times the impact is, is mental or neurological and we’re starting to, people are paying attention to that now. And I think in the next 10 years, we’re going to see some big, uh, changes.

[00:34:16] Greg Ward:
scientific breakthroughs that it will talk about or will allow us to talk about, you know, the real nature of the injury with the client and what the real loss was.

[00:34:24] Andrew Nasrinpay:
That’s super interesting. So I, I love that you’re a numbers guy and that you’re tracking everything on that front and when you were talking about, uh, the average settlement value, um, going up year over year, I’m curious if you’ve looked at that relative to the policy value on those claims.

[00:34:45] Andrew Nasrinpay:
So just if, if the, Case values are going up. It’s not just you’re getting better quality cases from your marketing. So let’s say you’ve got this authentic marketing that rings true and you just get more high policy cases relative to the minimum policy in that particular state. Is there any metric that y’all track that looks specifically at the settlement relative to the policy limit?

[00:35:11] Greg Ward:
Yeah, now I gotta go back and look at all my data. I don’t I don’t track that. I gotta look at that now because it is possible, right? That’s definitely, uh, you know, a possible, um, uh, that could swing the numbers, right? I feel like whenever I factor out the high end cases that that kind of takes out the outliers.

[00:35:30] Greg Ward:
But, um, but no, I, I don’t actually look at that and I probably should. So now next year I’m going to look at that.

[00:35:36] Andrew Nasrinpay:
All right. Yeah. I’d be curious, um, when you look at it, uh, give us a call because I, I’m super curious.

[00:35:43] Greg Ward:
Let me be totally transparent. I mean, we, there are some case, we probably turned down some of the cases we may not have turned down in our early years.

[00:35:49] Greg Ward:
So you’re probably right. But you know, tracking that mathematically, I really do need to look at that. Um, you know, now that said we get enough cases where there’s, you know, where I have a good statistical sampling. You know, I know of the extra hundred cases we get a month. I know, you know, X, Y, Z are going to be required surgery and those kinds of things.

[00:36:08] Greg Ward:
Um, and we, when we have the outlier cases, the big ones, like those are, those are fast tracked. Like we automatically, like we, cause we have to go in and do the investigation, get the body cam footage from all the cops. And we’ve got to look for, you know, cameras and things like that. So if you’ve got some of the big, you know, big things that make a case a big case of value driver, we’re going to move that right to our, to our team that handles that properly to make sure we preserve all the evidence.

[00:36:32] Greg Ward:
front. So, so I look at it, I’ll look at it. I, you know, I hadn’t thought that the quality of the cases going up would be, uh, as much, but, but I guess the question is, you know, the, the quote, the moniker of a mill is a continuum, right? And so the, the issue is I’m trying to avoid is not becoming a mill. And I can tell by the analysis I do, I’m not going to becoming a mill.

[00:36:51] Greg Ward:
Am I as efficient as, as I possibly could be? No. And, and I honestly, I’m not that smart. And, you know, I don’t have that much time to figure out all the metrics I can look at. Yeah. So what works with me now is good. The next generation of our firm, in other words, where we’re growing to probably be able to do that even more.

[00:37:07] Greg Ward:
I could probably get the data. I just, I just haven’t done it. Cause I’m running other reports, you know, and there’s the business side of things too, is like, are you being efficient with your labor pool? You know, there’s our average revenue per employee. That’s a big driver with the, with the VAs that skews the number because you’re paying less for a VA.

[00:37:24] Greg Ward:
They’re improving productivity. You know, people, one of the answers in my firm has become, let’s hire a VA for that. Well, I’ll wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, because the VA still counts as head count. And I’m dividing my revenue over this, even though they’re not employees, they’re contractors. It’s still, I use that to see if we’re being more or less efficient.

[00:37:39] Greg Ward:
So that’s, I’m really looking at efficiency right now in my firm this year. I’m really trying to tighten it up and make it more efficient. Um, but you’re right. It is possible. We could have that, but I definitely want to stay away from the mill trap, which is what my analysis is keeping us out of. Is that, that becoming the mill, right?

[00:37:53] Greg Ward:
Yeah.

[00:37:54] Andrew Nasrinpay:
Definitely. It seems like you spend a lot of time, uh, making sure clients get the best value they can for their case. And, um, I think that if you think about it in terms of all the firms out there, most firms haven’t even onboarded with like an intake or case management system. So they couldn’t even look at the data if they wanted to.

[00:38:16] Andrew Nasrinpay:
It’s all kind of like licking their finger, putting it up in the air and thinking they’re doing a good job. So I love to see that you’re always striving. Uh, to make your firm better and make the process better and make everything better for clients.

[00:38:29] Greg Ward:
And by the way, it’s not just me. I have, I have people here who are really good at that.

[00:38:33] Greg Ward:
Um, you know, my brain power capped out about four years ago, you know, I got to get the best team around me to, to help us inspire each other to get to that next level. The case management software is critical. I mean, I’m not a, I think I, I criticize a lot of the case management softwares out there.

[00:38:50] Greg Ward:
Littify was the best of that batch. And I don’t want to say anything bad about Littify, but we did have to spend a lot of money to customize it the way we wanted it. And I feel like, uh, John had still owned it back when we were doing this. I feel like they got a lot of good work out of us. Cause we kept coming back and saying, you could do this better.

[00:39:04] Greg Ward:
You could do this better. You could do this better. You could do this better. Um, and I feel like we did a lot to make Littify a great project. I don’t know if they’d agree with that, but I feel like we did. Cause we were always on the phone with them saying, Hey, this is wrong. This is wrong. This is wrong.

[00:39:15] Greg Ward:
And then we customize it for ourselves. And then we even have a Salesforce developer here who can run the reports that we need, which is critical to that. So, I mean, look, if you want to be a 10 person shop, you know, you get your litigation management software, that’s fine. But if you want to be able to handle.

[00:39:29] Greg Ward:
more than, you know, 50 cases a month or even less than that, honestly. Like, I got my buddy who’s the opposite of me. He’s a trial firm. You know, he’s got maybe 100 cases in inventory, 200 cases in inventory, and we’ve got several thousand. So, it’s just two different sides of things, you know? It’s how you want to run your practice.

[00:39:48] Andrew Nasrinpay:
Circling back to values, in your opinion, what are the five universal values you believe every lawyer should hold sacred?

[00:39:56] Greg Ward:
So that’s a trick question because if I have one of those values that isn’t in my values, I would look like a hypocrite, right? But I definitely think service to the client has always got to be the very first core value of any firm.

[00:40:08] Greg Ward:
Any firm has got to have service to the client. Uh, I definitely think service to the team needs to be a core value too. That’s really, really universal. Um, I have a core value. accountability, and I think that’s a core value for lawyers. We’ve got to be accountable to ourselves and the legal profession and, you know, ethics rules and judges, and that also means being honest.

[00:40:28] Greg Ward:
So I would say accountability is kind of an honesty and honest with yourself and honest with the world around you. That’s really, really critical. I think you’ve got to have one of my core values is faith. I think you’ve got to believe in something bigger than yourself. For any, any lawyer, you’ve got to believe that this is, this is valuable, that it isn’t just about making money, that this is important.

[00:40:47] Greg Ward:
What we do, our work is important for people and for our community. So I think that’s that’s absolutely critical. And then for me, obviously, a sense of, I say service to the community. You know, giving back to the community, uh, is, is really critical for us. I mean, we’re, you know, we’re, we’re public servants in many ways, and we do have to give back and lead to giving back, like show other, be demonstrating, because I think it’s easy to put lawyers in a box of saying, okay, they’re just greedy or, you know, they’re just sticks in the mud or whatever it is.

[00:41:17] Greg Ward:
The public perception of lawyers is not great. And I really feel like we’ve got to do a lot more serving our communities in an intentional way to, to kind of cut against that, that mentality that, and by the way, that mentality isn’t new. You know, the Shakespeare, right? First thing we do is kill the lawyer, kill all the lawyers, you know, because lawyers were doing a valuable function of, uh, hedge against, uh, unchecked government authority.

[00:41:39] Greg Ward:
But the truth is, is that we could do so much more for our communities. And I think, and I think if you have those five, I think you’re going to be good. I think you’ll be good as long as you remember those and, and, and guide your actions by those five core values. I think you’ll be pretty happy and pretty satisfied with your career.

[00:41:55] Bobby Steinbach:
Great answer. And I’m going to tag onto that with our final game here with you. We’re going to call it good value, bad value

[00:42:11] Bobby Steinbach:
in sticking with the theme today. Let’s play a game where I’m going to give you five values. And I want you to tell me if you think it’s a good value or a bad value for a firm.

[00:42:20] Greg Ward:
All right, let’s do it.

[00:42:22] Bobby Steinbach:
All right. Number one, when it all costs, there’s nothing more important than beating the other side.

[00:42:27] Greg Ward:
Bad value.

[00:42:29] Andrew Nasrinpay:
Okay. Easy one. Family comes first, no matter what.

[00:42:35] Greg Ward:
That’s tricky, but I would say that’s a good value, but that’s as stated. That’s a tricky one.

[00:42:41] Bobby Steinbach:
Very lawyerly response. Uh, number three, always file the lawsuit and go to trial. It’s the only way to get top dollar result for the client.

[00:42:49] Greg Ward:
No, that’s a bad value.

[00:42:50] Greg Ward:
Cases change trauma, not getting the right answer for your client. It’s, it’s the right answer more times than we do, but it’s not the right answer all the time.

[00:42:59] Andrew Nasrinpay:
Prioritize cases with bigger potential fees. These will net the firm more income and allow us to grow faster.

[00:43:07] Greg Ward:
Obviously that’s a bad value as stated.

[00:43:11] Bobby Steinbach:
And the last one here, be transparent with clients about all things related to their case.

[00:43:16] Greg Ward:
That’s a good value. Obviously, clearly a good value. You want to be transparent, authentic, right? And honest.

[00:43:22] Bobby Steinbach:
Awesome. All right. Well on that note, transparency, honesty, thanks for joining us today, Greg. Oh, a great conversation.

[00:43:29] Greg Ward:
Thank you guys. I appreciate it.

[00:43:37] Bobby Steinbach:
Cool. Well, let’s, uh, wrap it up here. We’re, this is a long one, long episode. I love it. Um, I learned a ton today. I love the idea of having like core values in your firm or core values in your company, whatever it may be. I think like it’s something that’s sorely missed. Usually you just, you know, Kind of want to press go, like press the pedal down and you don’t think about those things, but it really can kind of influence everything you do in your day to day operation.

[00:44:00] Andrew Nasrinpay:
Yep. Most people start their firm and just start running without having a plan in place first. And making those values is important even for your marketing and important for your brand as a whole. Like how are you going to run TV, radio, billboards, doing any of these things when you don’t know your values as a firm?

[00:44:18] Andrew Nasrinpay:
It puts you in a really tough spot. So I think getting that sorted early. We’ll do any lawyer like a lot of good if they’re able to sort that out earlier in their career.

[00:44:29] Bobby Steinbach:
Yep. And just like a tag on the idea of VAs and bringing cheaper labor into the workflow when it makes sense. I think of that in a lot of industries.

[00:44:37] Bobby Steinbach:
I don’t think of it in legal so much, but I think. It makes a lot of sense. It’s something that probably more firms should look into. Um, cool. And with that, I think it’s time to close out the episode. It’s already crazy long. So, uh, we’ll see everybody on the next episode. Thanks again, Greg, for, for joining us today and we’ll put all his info in the show notes.

[00:44:55] Bobby Steinbach:
See you on the next one. We hope you’ve enjoyed this episode of Hot Docket. We’re your hosts, Bobby and Andrew, founders of Mean Pug, the marketing agency for ambitious law firms.

[00:45:05] Andrew Nasrinpay:
Have questions about marketing or anything we covered today? Email us at bark at meanpug. com.