Expanding Your Practice Across States

00:03 Speaker 1 Welcome to the Effective Lawyer, a podcast for ambitious attorneys who want to improve their practice. My name is Jack Zinda and I'll be your host in today's episode. We are teaming up with our good friends at Simon Law Group on their Justice Team podcast. We talk about what it takes to run a nationwide practice, how to scale up a law firm, and some of the tips for practicing in multiple states. For context, this conversation took place pre Covid at the American association for justice convention in San Diego last year. Enjoy. 00:43 Speaker 2 We have Jack Zinda with us today. He is a Texas based lawyer, but as you'll find out, he's pretty much in every state in the union. He's everywhere. 00:53 Speaker 3 Jack's in the house. Don't mess with Texas. 00:55 Speaker 1 Great to be here, guys. Thank you. 00:56 Speaker 2 Sorry you had to fly into this shitty weather and leave beautiful Texas for San Diego, but this is awful. 01:02 Speaker 1 I'd much rather be back in 110 degrees. 01:05 Speaker 2 So Evan, we got Evan with us today. Evan Garcia. 01:09 Speaker 1 Yep, yep. 01:09 Speaker 4 Fellow Texan. But out here, I saw the light. I'm out here in. In California and. 01:15 Speaker 2 And with the Justice Team and Grayson Goody. 01:18 Speaker 1 Hey. 01:18 Speaker 3 Good to be here. Wyoming all. All from Wyoming. We were just actually discussing how Wyoming is a much better state than Texas. You know, you don't mess with Texas, but Texas Wyoming Union is so much more. 01:29 Speaker 1 Right? 01:29 Speaker 2 Is Texas the union? 01:30 Speaker 1 No. Is it? I mean, I believe it's. It's its own country. 01:33 Speaker 4 Yeah, exactly. 01:35 Speaker 3 Going to be seceding from the union. 01:37 Speaker 2 And I don't think I introduced myself. I'm Brandon Simon. Thanks for tuning in, Jack. Welcome to the podcast. 01:43 Speaker 1 Thanks, man. It's great to be here. 01:45 Speaker 2 You're based out of Texas. Tell us a little bit about what you do. 01:48 Speaker 1 So, yeah, our firm is based out of Boston, which is. We also have an office in Denver and one in Dallas as well. We do exclusively personal injury cases, just like you guys. Primarily trucking, catastrophic injury. And we handle cases not just in Texas and Colorado, but throughout the US Now. 02:05 Speaker 3 What's the saying? What's the saying about Austin? Is it keep Austin weird? 02:08 Speaker 1 Keep Austin weird? 02:09 Speaker 3 What's so weird about Austin? 02:11 Speaker 1 It's not so weird. 02:12 Speaker 2 You ever been to Austin? 02:14 Speaker 1 It used to be weird. Now it is like now it's like. 02:17 Speaker 2 Too cool to be weird right now. It's very normal. 02:19 Speaker 1 It's very hipster. Austin hipster. 02:22 Speaker 2 So we have a common link here. Like Evan said. Evan's a Texas boy. Houston. 02:25 Speaker 1 Born in birth. 02:26 Speaker 4 H down. 02:26 Speaker 1 Yep, yep. 02:27 Speaker 2 A big A and M fan. Right? Gig. 02:30 Speaker 1 Em. 02:30 Speaker 4 Negative. Negative. My dad would, you know, disown me. 02:36 Speaker 2 Jack, are you born and bred Texas? 02:38 Speaker 1 Yeah. I was born in a small town called Longview in East Texas. It's about two hours east of Dallas. You really have no reason to go there if you were going to Texas. 02:46 Speaker 3 Well, how's the high school football team in Longview? 02:48 Speaker 1 Actually, we're pretty. Pretty good. Number three in the country. A few given points. Yeah. 02:54 Speaker 2 There you go. 02:54 Speaker 3 There's a good reason to go. 02:55 Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah. So your main office is in Austin. How many offices do you have right now? 03:03 Speaker 1 We have three main offices. One in Austin, one in Denver, and one in Dallas. And we have satellite offices throughout Texas, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico. We've got 26 attorneys in the firm. One of them, Neil Solomon's over there. 03:17 Speaker 4 Yeah, there he is. 03:17 Speaker 1 Hey, Neil. Hey, guys. How's it going? 03:19 Speaker 4 You're kind of hidden from view there. 03:20 Speaker 1 Yeah, that's it. 03:21 Speaker 3 I can't see you, Neil. I can hear you, buddy. 03:24 Speaker 4 So, Neil, you're with Jack as well? 03:26 Speaker 1 That's correct. Yeah, I'm in the Austin office with Jack. 03:28 Speaker 4 Okay, right on. So one of the 28. 03:31 Speaker 1 That's it. 03:31 Speaker 4 Okay. 03:32 Speaker 3 Can I ask a question real quick. 03:33 Speaker 1 Jack. 03:35 Speaker 3 Why are you having your offices all over the country? I mean, you're in how many different states now? 03:40 Speaker 1 Well, right now we are in Austin or Texas, Arizona, New Mexico and Colorado. Wow. And a lot of it is by necessity. So Texas is one of the most anti consumer, anti plaintiff states in the country. This is an outdated statistic, but at one point, the Texas Supreme Court was ruling against consumers 89% of the time. 03:59 Speaker 2 Wow. 04:00 Speaker 1 And I came into my practice in 2006 just when the biggest tort reform had just been passed in legislature. So over time, by out of necessity and just good fortune, we've had cases outside of Texas, and we decided to make a move to look for business where it's a little easier to practice law. 04:23 Speaker 2 Right. 04:24 Speaker 4 And I got a quick question on that, though. When you're looking elsewhere and you're looking for, I guess you could say just different jurisdictions. I mean, in your experience, what does your team look at? I mean, what are the pros and cons? I mean, obviously, I'd imagine jury pools, but I mean, do you look at caps? I mean, what else is at play there? 04:41 Speaker 3 Good question. 04:42 Speaker 1 I mean, I think the first thing you have to look at is why are you looking at taking a case outside of your home state? And for us, it's can we add value in some sort of specialization, whether it's A construction case or a trucking case. Do we think we can add value, or is it better to be with a local attorney there? Secondarily, a lot of times it is advantageous to look at what are the different laws in that jurisdiction. So if you have a case where someone's hurt in Texas, but the defendant's based out of Florida and the driver is based out of Minnesota, if you kind of expand your mind and look at all those different options, it allows you to figure out what's best for the client. Right. 05:20 Speaker 4 Awesome. 05:21 Speaker 2 And so you have attorneys barred in each of those states, or how does that work? 05:26 Speaker 1 I'm licensed in Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado. Burgess Williams, who's off to the side over there, is licensed in about 15 states. 05:35 Speaker 2 Wow. Wow. 05:37 Speaker 1 One of the things is once you get past the five year mark, it's not that difficult to get licensed in other jurisdictions. You know, as long as you stay on the good side of the bar. 05:45 Speaker 3 That sounds easy, doesn't it? 05:47 Speaker 2 Yeah, that's the. I mean, in California, there's no. They call it reciprocity. There's. You can only practice in California. You get. You don't get. You don't get reciprocity in any other states, which seems strange, but I guess they want to keep your property taxes here. Right. Or you're not your property taxes, but your income taxes. 06:03 Speaker 3 Income taxes, yeah. But I feel like, I mean, in Wyoming, it's the. You can be in any state, as long as you're practicing for five years and you're in good standing, you can wave right into Wyoming. So I take it that's probably the same with the states that you guys have been into. 06:16 Speaker 1 That's exactly right. And also, we've been intentional about asking our new attorneys to get licensed in other jurisdictions. 06:22 Speaker 2 Smart. 06:22 Speaker 1 You know, and so I think now we have Minnesota, Illinois, New York, New Jersey, D.C. florida. And so it gives us more options. 06:30 Speaker 3 So say you got Burgess over there and you have a case that, you know the drivers in Minnesota. You file that case in Minnesota because you think that's advantageous to file there. Do you just send Burgess out there to litigate it, or are you getting local counsel or how does that work? 06:44 Speaker 1 Well, I think first you got to make sure you know what you're doing. I think that is key. You got to know the. What the rules of civil procedure are the rules of evidence in that jurisdiction. And then you got to think, does it make sense from the client's point of view to file that case there? And does it make sense from the case point of view and from the firm point of view, you can't take a small case, you know, several thousand miles away. It just doesn't justify it. 07:08 Speaker 2 So I want to talk a little bit about your practice. You are the namesake of your firm, right? Zinda Law Firm. 07:16 Speaker 1 Zinda Law Group. 07:16 Speaker 2 Zinda Law Group. Okay. And I'm Simon Law Group. I'm part of the Simon brothers. And I know how much time is taken up by running the practice and the business side of a law firm. How much of your day is spent actually being a lawyer, and how much of your day is being a manager, an owner of the firm. You know, administrative stuff. 07:38 Speaker 1 You know, I consider it a victory if I'm able to spend 25% of my time practicing law. And I feel like that is very difficult at times. You know, we have nearly 80 employees. And so there's always some fire going on somewhere. And over time, I've had to really narrow the scope of the cases that I handled. Two years ago, I was working on probably 15 cases at a time. Now it's down to three. And that's just out of necessity. You know, there's always something popping up. But I think it's also about being intentional and making sure you're carving out the time to actually practice law or you find yourself, you know, doing interviews and reviewing spreadsheets all day. 08:14 Speaker 2 Yeah, so that's a great point. Assignment logger. We have offices up and down the coast. We're all in California. We're all relatively close to one another. You have offices thousands of miles away. How, when a fire goes up, you know, you have to put out a fire. How difficult is that when you're managing cases that are literally another state away? 08:32 Speaker 1 You know what's great? With technology now, we can get around a lot of those issues. So we use attorneys in other jurisdictions or locations that can have individual client meetings, and we'll talk to the client via Skype and have someone on the ground to help the client there. We do a lot of travel. I mean, we probably have more Southwest points than just about anybody. 08:55 Speaker 2 A lot. Probably Phoenix a lot. 08:56 Speaker 1 But in a weird way, you know, before, when were handling cases just in Texas, going to Midland is a lot harder than getting to Denver, you know, and so there's a lot of things that if you practice in a big state like California, you're used to driving, you're used to being on the road. And if there's a direct flight, it makes it a lot easier. Right. But we've had to really adopt technology to make that a lot easier. I'm sure as you guys have doing things like DocuSign, video conferencing and those sort of things. 09:22 Speaker 2 Yeah, video conferencing is big. I mean, I imagine if you're. You're handling cases in other states, you're going to have to do a lot of video depositions. I mean, we only handle cases in California, but we have, you know, as we've gotten bigger, Grayson, you're doing depots in Pennsylvania or something. And the beauty is you don't have to go to Pennsylvania to go take a deposition. 09:39 Speaker 3 But I would prefer going to Pennsylvania to take the deposition. I'd never been to Philly. I went to Philly a couple months. 09:44 Speaker 1 You don't want to go to Philly. 09:45 Speaker 2 You can go to Pittsburgh. You don't want to go to fill. 09:46 Speaker 3 Well, Pittsburgh, Come on. No. You know, we had a. We had a depo in Switzerland. 09:51 Speaker 2 Switzerland. 09:51 Speaker 3 We had a. I'm like, I'm looking at Bob. He didn't even catch it good. We had a depo in Switzerland, and Bob had the opportunity to take it via Skype and he was like, I think I'm gonna go to Switzerland. 10:00 Speaker 1 Yeah. 10:00 Speaker 3 So there's places you want to go. 10:02 Speaker 2 I don't even think that was his case. He just. It was. It was partner. I'm. Yeah, I'm pulling rank. I want to go Switzerland. 10:13 Speaker 5 Zynda Law Group is a plaintiffs personal injury law firm made up of over 30 lawyers that handle catastrophic personal injury and wrongful death cases throughout the United States. We regularly counsel and joint venture with firms across the country. Over the last several years, we have paid millions of dollars in joint venture counsel fees to the law firms we work with. If you are a law firm or attorney and have a catastrophic personal injury or wrongful death case you would like to joint venture or work with Zinda Law Group on, please reach out to us at 800-863-5312 or email us@infodferm.com and we can set up a time to discuss your case. 10:54 Speaker 2 So, Jack, let's get to know you a little bit more on a personal level. Born and raised. Texas boy. Baylor undergrad. 11:00 Speaker 1 It's a Southwestern for undergrad. 11:02 Speaker 2 Okay. 11:02 Speaker 1 It's a tiny school of about 1200 students. We actually didn't even. 11:05 Speaker 2 And you were an athlete, right? 11:07 Speaker 1 Supposedly. I think it was Division 3, so it barely qualifies as being better than Division 0. 11:13 Speaker 2 Yeah, that's Division 0. Basketball. Yeah. Baseball. Baseball player. 11:18 Speaker 1 Basketball. 11:18 Speaker 2 Basketball. 11:18 Speaker 3 What's Division 0? Is that it? Like intramurals where we. 11:21 Speaker 2 Yeah, San Diego City League. 11:22 Speaker 1 Yeah, that's. 11:23 Speaker 3 Yeah, were on the same team. 11:25 Speaker 1 When I was in law school, I was known as the good basketball player, which is not what you want to be known for in law school. You want to be known as the gal Review. 11:32 Speaker 2 Grayson was the good basketball player. 11:34 Speaker 3 Yeah, I was on law review, too. 11:35 Speaker 1 So you gotta leg up on me. 11:38 Speaker 3 What position do you play? 11:39 Speaker 1 Two guard. 11:40 Speaker 3 Okay, so. 11:41 Speaker 1 And I've got a. I love that. 11:42 Speaker 4 That's awesome. 11:43 Speaker 1 Yeah. And two kids, eight and six years. 11:45 Speaker 2 So how. I mean, how. How stressful? I mean, I know I get yelled at by my wife a lot, always on the phone, working. I mean, how. How do you manage managing a firm? And then also time with. With family. 11:57 Speaker 1 You know, I think with everything in life that's important, you've got to be intentional. I think that is one of the big takeaways that I've learned the hard way over the years. And I used to work, you know, seven days a week, every waking minute. But now with kids, I've found ways to manage my time by saying, for example, you know, Saturday is off limits for work unless just absolutely necessary. And then I usually pick things back up, you know, Sunday evening. But if you don't do that, if you don't carve out that time, it. The law and your business will consume everything. You know, I've also found that I'm a better lawyer. If I take a break, you know, going for a run, playing with my kids, my mind gets refreshed. And I tell that to the new. The younger associates, too. 12:38 Speaker 1 I think there's a diminishing return on working, you know, so many hours if you're working. And by the way, I know very few people that actually work 80 hours. You know, you hear that a lot. I worked 80 hours this week. How much of that was actually productive? How much of that did you actually get stuff done versus you just sat at your desk stressed out about all the work you had to do. Yeah. 12:58 Speaker 3 Balance is so important. Balance is so important. You know, I've found, and I've forced myself to do this is. After every trial, I'll try to get out and take like three or four days where I'm just like, you know, take care of the things that need to be taken care of. Laundry, hanging out with my wife, the cat, going to the beach. Don't forget about the kitties, you know, going shooting hoops or something like that. You know, having that balance is so Important as an attorney. And it's good that you're telling your, you know, your younger attorneys that. 13:24 Speaker 4 And Jack, I think, to follow up on that, I think you've said it a few times, and I think it really resonates is this idea of being, you know, intentional. So either intentionally hang out with your kids, separate work from real life, or family time. And then likewise, if you're at your desk, I mean, are you really being productive? Are you really being good and smart with your time? 13:47 Speaker 2 Or is Evan coming into your office and playing your arcade machine? 13:50 Speaker 4 We call that arcade machine. 13:51 Speaker 3 Who's got an arcade machine in their office? 13:53 Speaker 2 We call it the malpractice machine. 13:54 Speaker 4 Yeah, but is it something that, I mean, do you share with Neil, you know, some of this insight as far as, you know, being intentional? I mean, is this something that. Is that like, part of your firm values? 14:06 Speaker 1 I mean, I think one thing we try to do is take things that work throughout the firm and create processes and systems that we can give to the other attorneys. You know, I'm sure you guys have seen this. You know, one of the most expensive, important decisions you make in a case is hiring an expert witness. Right? And so how do you train a three to five year attorney to make a good decision that could be a $50,000 investment? So we've done things to create processes to make that possible. And I think with everything, it's about creating systems and being intentional in that standpoint. 14:37 Speaker 2 Actually, I just got handed a viewer question live. I think we got a live viewer question. 14:42 Speaker 1 I'm looking at Burgess over there. 14:44 Speaker 2 It's from Dina Joseph. So shout out to Dina. Her email is. Well, she's unoceanskies. So Dina josephunoceanskies interested in specializing in catastrophic personal injury tbis. So any specialized courses, seminars, organizations, anything that they could consider doing while they were in law school to kind of shift their way towards that area of the law? 15:08 Speaker 1 I mean, I think one getting involved in organizations like AAJ early is helpful. But also if you want to be involved in, for example, traumatic brain injury, learn the medicine. I think that is one of the most undervalued areas of being a personal injury lawyer is figuring out what's the latest on how brain injury cases work. If that's an area of focus that you want to go into, then do clerkships, get to know PI laws, make sure that's what you actually want to do. I think when you come out of law school, you need to have a plan. Where do you want to see your practice? You Know, at least two, three years and not just let it, you know, come hit you. But I'd say local trial lawyers associations are great. AJ Is great. 15:43 Speaker 1 And then if traumatic brain injury is where you want to be, learn the latest, you know, information on diffuse tensor imaging, the latest studies on concussions, how those things work, if that's really where you want to have your focus. 15:56 Speaker 2 And before we get you get out of here, I want to ask you, I mean, you're expanding constantly. Is there another area of the map you're looking to conquer? 16:06 Speaker 1 What we've really focused on recently is focusing on types of cases opposed to geography. So when we say nationwide practice, it's not specifically saying, okay, we're going to take 100 cases in New York or 100 cases in California. It's more of a. For this particular type of case, trucking, for example, where's the best jurisdiction? Where does that make sense? And looking at the US as the map opposed to just whatever state you're in. 16:28 Speaker 2 Interesting. Smart. Just curious, is there a particular area of the country that is more prone to say paraplegia cases or anything that's worth eight figures? 16:38 Speaker 1 Just curious. 16:40 Speaker 2 Not that we're looking to get came. 16:42 Speaker 3 Into my area of the country, but. 16:44 Speaker 1 Unfortunately I don't know of one. 16:45 Speaker 2 Where are the most airplane crashers? 16:50 Speaker 1 Cool. 16:51 Speaker 2 You guys have any other fun Texas boys? 16:54 Speaker 4 Well, I got a question though, and I think this is, you know, Jack and I, we spoke about this, you know, briefly before we got on here. It's news to me. But apparently in Colorado there's a cap on the non economic damages. I mean, what is there pending legislation? Are people trying to do something about that? 17:11 Speaker 2 Is that for all personal injury cases? 17:13 Speaker 1 Yeah, it's for all personal injury cases. The cap is 437 right now. 17:17 Speaker 3 I believe it's a very specific number. It's anything above 437. 17:24 Speaker 1 It increases for inflation. And you got to keep in mind. 17:27 Speaker 3 Someone was high when they got to that number. 17:28 Speaker 1 Right. In Colorado. 17:30 Speaker 3 Should we do 420? No, let's do we got to count for inflation, man. 17:36 Speaker 1 The good thing about Colorado is there's no cap on physical impairment. So there's a way you can get. So pain and suffering is capped. Physical impairment is not. 17:44 Speaker 2 Okay. 17:45 Speaker 1 And there's no cap on economic damages. But there's also, you know, Texas, for example, we've got the collateral source issue of paid versus incurred, where you can only get whatever was paid. So for example, California, if you've got a person who is on Medicaid their case is worth a lot less, unfortunately, that someone didn't have health insurance. Right. 18:01 Speaker 2 In Texas is there. So in California we have a law now that says if somebody treats on a lien and say they forward, they just forewent their insurance and treated on a lien. The reasonable value is not based on insurance. So you're not allowed to talk about insurance. Can you do that in Texas? Can you still talk about collateral sources even though they treat it on a lien basis? Or is that. 18:22 Speaker 1 No, you can't talk about collateral source, although they're trying to chip away at that. One thing were talking about beforehand is with the Supreme Court that is very pro insurance. Our goal is to keep those cases out of the appellate courts, because that's probably where they would go next. It's typically not the legislature anymore. It's more of the courts that are turning those things over. 18:41 Speaker 3 Very conservative courts. Are we on like a time crunch here or do we have to stop sometime soon? 18:46 Speaker 2 I don't know about the producer. 18:47 Speaker 3 Well, I don't even see the producer, so let's just keep talking. Jack, can I ask you a question? So when you came out of law school, did you know that you were gonna do this type of work? Is this what you wanted to do? 18:57 Speaker 1 Well, you know, it's funny, I thought it's really cool how you guys have a family practice. My dad told me that's what I was gonna do, but I didn't believe him. 19:05 Speaker 2 Was your dad an attorney? 19:06 Speaker 1 No, he was actually a restaurant owner. And that was some of the best training to be a trial lawyer. So, you know, at age 12, 13, I'm a dishwasher at my dad's bar, working with, you know, minimum wage workers. Some had felony records, you know, and then waiting tables. And we had the only bar in town. And so learning how to deal with people, that was. That was great training. But out of law school, I worked at a firm that did family law and personal injury. And they. It was kind of a crazy situation. They hired me to start the PI section out of law school, which in retrospect is a little nuts. 19:43 Speaker 2 A little. 19:44 Speaker 3 We trust you more than we trust ourselves. Go, just run with it. 19:46 Speaker 1 That's great. We had time to figure it out. 19:48 Speaker 2 Go ahead. 19:49 Speaker 1 It worked. It worked. And I'm very lucky. The person that I worked for gave me a lot of autonomy, let me learn how to run the firm, and gave me a lot of freedom to run the marketing of the firm, the business processes. And so after doing that for a Couple years, it just made sense to branch out on my own. 20:05 Speaker 3 It's probably an unintentional training for you to start your own firm. 20:08 Speaker 1 Yeah, for sure. Yeah. And one thing I'd say, if you're considering starting a PI Practice now, I would advise you to consider teaming up with someone who's got good cash flow and hourly practice. You know, in the beginning of our practice, we had an hourly section that we phased out about three or four years ago. And that really allowed us to take some more risks on bigger PI Cases earlier, because you had that cash flow coming in opposed to having a high interest loan or. Or something like that. 20:36 Speaker 3 And speaking of risks, you know, what really made you decide to branch out from that firm? You know, I think some of our younger viewers would like to. And listeners would like to hear this. You know, they're working in bigger firms or working with other people. You know, what made you want to take that jump and go out and start your own firm? 20:53 Speaker 1 You know, the biggest thing to me was having autonomy on the types of cases I wanted to work on, how I wanted my practice to go, what I wanted my balance to be, work life, and what I thought the vision where I wanted to take the organization and those kind of conflicted to where I was at. But I was very lucky because the position at that firm, I was put in charge of a lot of those business decisions already, so it didn't seem like that much of a risk. And I grew up around my dad, who had a restaurant which is, you know, four out of five restaurants go out of business in the first six months. 21:23 Speaker 2 You don't make money until. Yeah, it takes, if you're lucky, several years, right? 21:27 Speaker 1 Yeah. And so I kind of had that risk built into my DNA. 21:31 Speaker 2 You bet on yourself, too. 21:32 Speaker 1 Yeah. And it didn't seem risky. Yeah. 21:34 Speaker 2 I'm getting a note from Teresa that we're gonna have to wrap it up. Before we go, I want to ask, who's your favorite Texas athlete of all time? 21:41 Speaker 1 Emmett Smith, hands down. Oh, nice. 21:43 Speaker 3 I love it. I got an Emmett Smith rookie card, actually. 21:45 Speaker 1 What? It's huge. 21:47 Speaker 3 I think the value's gone down over the years. 21:49 Speaker 1 Yeah, it's top late. Thank you for listening. And a big thanks to our friends over at the Simon Law Group. Please check out their podcast, the Justice Team. We hope you enjoyed the show and found some of our tips and tactics for running a nationwide practice helpful and will hopefully help you grow your practice. Until next time, thanks for listening. Thank you for taking the time to listen to this episode. Of the effective lawyer. If you enjoyed this podcast, please take a moment to rate it 5 stars and leave us a review. 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