Landing Big Cases on a Budget

Speaker 1 (00:09): 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. Speaker 2 (00:22): Welcome back to another edition of The Effective Lawyer Podcast. My name is Kevin Tully, I'm the Chief Marketing Officer at Zinda Law Group. With me as always, is Jack Zinda, our lead trial lawyer and founding partner at ZLG. Today we're gonna be talking about how to get the big case without having to spend for it. So Jack, kick us off. What do you, uh, what comes to mind for you when you think about what is a big case? Speaker 3 (00:48): Yeah, well, thanks Kevin. Well, you know, I think the first thing you want to do is define for your practice area what a big case is. And for me personally, at our firm, a trucking case is typically a larger case and one where there are serious injuries or a death involved. And so for us, that is what we've lined up as being a, a big case, and you want to try to define a big case as specifically as possible. Um, and that comes from the idea of there is so much competition out there in the world. Now, as an attorney, um, you have new attorneys that are coming out every day. I think there's more law schools than there's ever been before, and you have more and more people trying to market and advertise. So the narrower you can go and the more of a specialist you can be, the better off you can be on that type of case. (01:41): So that's the first thing is you wanna try to define what a large case is. And for us, for example, it is a trucking case, uh, for if you're a family attorney, it might be a multimillion dollar divorce involving an executive. Uh, if you're a criminal defense lawyer, it might be a white collar, uh, crime case or maybe a capital murder case, or maybe it's a DWI case. But try to get as specific as you can with identifying what your type of case is that you're targeting. That's step one because I find a lot of attorneys just want everything and couldn't even tell you what a big case is to them. I got a letter recently from an attorney that focuses solely on Dr. Shop wrongful death cases. And for those of the you that don't know, a dream shop is when someone was killed due to a drunk driver in an establishment, typically a bar overserved someone knowingly, and that person died. Now that's a very narrow niche. It's first they are a litigator, then they represent consumers or injury victims. Uh, then they represent people that were, had a loved one killed involving a drug driver who was overserved. So that's a very narrow niche, and they knew exactly what they were targeting. Speaker 2 (02:54): What, um, what percentage of cases do you identify as a big case, roughly speaking? Speaker 3 (03:01): So over time, we've looked at this data over the last 15 years, and in general, about one out of every 50 cases we consider a, you know, a what we'd consider the top 10% of the cases we want as a firm. Yeah. So very large case. And then about one out of every 200 is going to be a game changing case for the organization, and that's carried true, uh, over the last 15 years in general. Speaker 2 (03:29): So one thing that an attorney could, uh, think about when trying to identify what is a big case is, uh, you don't wanna find yourself in a place where you're identifying all of your cases as big cases, right? You wanna take that top 10%. And, uh, and when we say big case, we're talking about potential value from the case, right? Not workload or, or anything like that, but the, the revenue that would come from this case, right? Speaker 3 (03:53): That's right. I think, yeah, I think you could define it as in this instance as revenue. Okay? If you, if you were in an area where it wasn't about revenue, say you're, you know, doing pro bono work, it could be, uh, some other metric, but I think most attorneys, nine times outta 10 is gonna be defined by revenue generated proportion to the amount of work you're putting into the case. Speaker 2 (04:12): Okay? So now that you've identified what your big cases are, uh, how do you start to think about acquiring those and, and, and doing so at a reasonable cost? Speaker 3 (04:22): So step one is become an expert at that area. Okay? I see a lot of attorneys that want a massive case, that want a big personal injury case, that want a trucking wrong death case, but frankly, if they got the case, they wouldn't know what to do with it. And it also prevents them from really being aggressive about going out and getting them because they don't really trust themselves. If it came in the door, I believe there's a little bit of kind of like, they feel like an imposter almost even trying to market for those. So at first, become an expert and become competent. Now, if you are a solo practitioner in a small firm and you don't have the cases already, or someone within your firm doesn't to work off of it, go find a mentor that you can learn from, you know, offer to go to trial with them, uh, and work for free. (05:12): Go to CLEs, um, try to really master your craft and understand what this case involves and how you would work it up when it came in the door. Uh, that's really critical because you don't want to not understand what you're doing. That's also gonna help you in marketing yourself as we'll see later as we're talking through the different steps in the process. So one thing you want to think about is creating the profile of your ideal client that's in the situation that you're looking for, okay? You want to think about what have they gone through, what questions would they have? And I would actually write this out. So if I'm dealing with a wrongful death case where someone say, and it's a tragic situation, they lost their husband or wife, you know, who's gonna pay for the funeral expenses? Who's gonna pay for the lost income that this person was entitled to? (06:06): What type of demographic would look for an attorney that needed help? Typically, in our profession, a lot of people that are wealthy don't look for a personal injury lawyer because they have the means to overcome the issue that they're dealing with. Now, we've had a lot of wealthy clients, but in general, that might be something they look at, you know, 5, 6, 7 months, a year after it's happened, if at all, where someone who is working, you know, in a factory and, you know, they make $40,000 a year and their spouse needed that income to pay the bills, they need to figure out what the next steps are. So I'm putting myself in the potential client's shoes and I'm thinking about what do they do for a living? Where do they live? If I was, for example, looking at a DWI case, I might think, okay, I'm looking for high earners that live in this part of town, and so I'm building a profile of the ideal client and I'm writing that out. (07:00): Then you want to build the profile of the ideal case, like we talked about before, in as much detail as possible. So for example, I might say I want to look at trucking cases involving, uh, 18 wheelers that travel interstate that cause a catastrophic injury, uh, somewhere in central Texas. Uh, and so now I'm narrowing the profile of what I'm looking for for that ideal large client. And so I've got a profile of the ideal client and a profile of the ideal case. Okay? And then I'm laying those things out on the table so I can see what I'm trying to target Speaker 2 (07:40): From there. Uh, you've built your target audience, almost it's marketing, marketing parlance, but, uh, you've got your target audience, you've got your target case. Um, I'm imagining now you can start to think about some strategies of, of how to go out and find that Speaker 3 (07:55): Exactly, you know, in back to becoming an expert for a second. This is why it's important to understand how these cases work. So go see what other large cases are like, what are the fact patterns? What are the results? You can look at appellate cases, you can look at jury trial verdicts. You can look at verdict search, but try to pick up a fact patterns if you don't have a lot of these. So you can kind of get a sense from other cases what the types of cases that you're looking at are. We have a, a software program we created called the Vault, where we store all of our results and then we can search to see fact patterns that may pop up in other cases that we're looking for. But you can do that on your own by going out and researching through online databases like Verdict Search or Westlaw or looking at appellate cases or checking your local trial lawyer listerv. (08:42): Now, once we have that information, you want to create a budget. Now, we talked about at the beginning, this is a way to get these cases without spending a fortune, but you still need to create a budget for how much time you're willing to investigate this case, and then how much money you're willing to spend. And you need to put a value on your time. Your time is not free and your time is not limitless. Mm-hmm. , um, even if you work, you know, 18 hours a day, you still need to sleep and eat for six hours. So you've gotta put a value on that time. And then you wanna figure out how many of these do I want to get in what timeframe? And be aggressive, but be realistic. You know, if you're just starting off, it's not realistic. Say I want to get 10, 18 wheeler cases in the next three months, and I don't have any way of getting those, I haven't come up with a plan I haven't proven I can get. (09:29): In the past, you might say, Hey, I wanna get one of these in the next six months. That's really critical. So I've got my budget of what I put together, and I put a value on my time and how much money I'm willing to spend. When I first started practicing, I had a, a policy where I would do at least two networking events a week with someone I'd never met before. And that was my marketing strategy. I didn't, I didn't have a big marketing budget, but I did have time available. So every week I would spend an hour researching people to go network with, and then three hours per week actually networking with them, and then an hour a week following up with the people I networked with to make sure I stayed in contact with them. So I've got those things. The next thing you want to do is put together an action plan. (10:12): So now we went from ideal client budgets and now we're putting together how do I actually want to go out and get this business? Uh, and I break these things into two different buckets. One is advertising and the other is referrals. Now these overlap quite a bit, and frankly, when you're getting referrals, that's a form of advertising. But just the way my brain works, I think if something where I'm getting a case from a person, uh, that I know or have a relationship with versus someone that I'm marketing towards on the referral front, again, you want to think about what is my ideal referring attorney or referring person? What sort of clients would they interact with? And for us, we want to interact with other attorneys that either practice personal injury law, that may not want to handle the type of case we want to handle, or people that interact with the general public. (11:05): So divorce lawyers, criminal defense lawyers, probate attorneys, bankruptcy attorneys. We typically don't network a lot with corporate lawyers that may deal with Exxon or you know, Liberty Mutual. Um, although we do get referrals from those attorneys from time to time, typically we're gonna have a better luck with ones that interact with the general public more often, right? So I've got my list of ideal people that I'm going to get referrals from, and then I'm gonna create a plan for how to go meet them and then how to network with them. And then have some elevator pitch that explains here's how, here's the type of case I handle, here's why I am really good at it, and here's why you should refer it to me. Speaker 4 (11:55): This podcast is presented by Zin Law Group, a nationwide personal injury firm. For over 10 years, the experienced lawyers at GLG have been partnering with outside counsel across the United States on all types of personal injury and wrongful death cases with over 30 attorneys. Zin Law Group has paid out millions in referral and joint venture fees since 2015. To learn more about partnering with Zin Law Group, please email us@referralszinlaw.com. We'll schedule a time for you to meet with Jack Zin or one of our trial lawyers to discuss your case. Speaker 2 (12:33): So, Jack, I, after you've identified a typical fact pattern for your target case, how does that, uh, lead you to the proper sources that could refer you that type of case? Speaker 3 (12:49): Great question. You know, the first thing that I would do is try to get as much information you can on the types of cases that you're looking at and talk to people and see if you can backtrack where that case came from to that law firm. So again, we talked about trying to find results similar to yours. You could also talk to mentor lawyers, say, Hey, I want to be like you someday. Where do you get your typical large, you know, divorce cases? Where does your typical trucking case come from? And then trying to see past history and how those cases ended up on the attorney's docket. If that isn't super successful or you don't know where to start there, I would think about your ideal client and what other sorts of legal problems they might have. For example, we get cases from workers' compensation attorneys to where the person was hurt by a third party that is not immune from workers' comp. You know, so it's adjacent, someone was hurt on the job. Uh, it's gonna be someone who needs legal help already for that injury. And so there's a connection there to us because of that. And so that's just one way you can draw a dot from here to, to there. Probate lawyers, you know, if you're looking for wrongful death cases, well, a probate attorney's gonna deal with people that had a loss, so therefore they might have potential clients that had wrongful death cases and therefore they could refer you that type of case. Speaker 2 (14:18): Yeah. So all those steps you talked about in the beginning lead up to this moment where you're making this pitch, you've become an expert, you've identified your case type, you know what these other cases look like that you're trying to find. Um, and it seems like it's all coming together at this point. Speaker 3 (14:34): A hundred percent. And this frankly is where most people give up. I, and one reason I don't have any problems sharing this information to the world is a lot of this is elbow grease. Mm-hmm. and being willing to put in the time and energy to make it happen. Right? And, you know, so that's one reason why some lawyers get really great cases and others don't because you have to go out there and do the heavy lifting to understand that, become an expert in the practice area to figure out what type of case you want, and then to go out and interact with people. And I will tell you, it is a grind networking at first until you build that group of people you're networking with, it doesn't feel comfortable. As a young attorney, I remember kind of feeling slightly embarrassed, you know, calling up a more experienced lawyer and say, Hey, do you want to go grab lunch or go grab dinner or go grab drinks? (15:23): Um, but you've gotta get yourself out there if you're going to get referrals in a way that's not gonna cost you an arm and a leg, right? And you've gotta be willing to say that you're an expert in that area to get those cases. Now don't be afraid if you know how a case works to, to say you can handle that type of case. Uh, a lot of people, especially in their career, have a lot of, you know, they're worried about saying that I can actually handle it. Um, and that can be an impediment to people actually referring if you don't seem confident in that pitch. Speaker 2 (15:54): For sure. Anything you wanna hit on, on the referral side when it comes to non-lawyers? Speaker 3 (15:59): Yeah, so I think one of the biggest ways you can market relatively inexpensively is doing educational marketing. This isn't something that you would buy from a marketing company. This isn't something that you would, um, you know, go to an SEO agency to do. This is you putting out helpful, meaningful material to your ideal client and your ideal referral partner. You say in this podcast, we're kind of doing a form of that now, right? So I'm offering free information to other attorneys out there that might think of us if they have a need on a case. So you can do the same thing with the, the niche that you're focused on. This is also where having a more narrow niche helps you do that. So if you are wanting to be a world class divorce lawyer, you know, if you just focus on divorce, that may not be as helpful as international custody cases. (16:46): Mm-hmm. , you know, divorce is involving professional athletes, right? Or if you're a personal injury, Lord, Dr Shop cases, trucking cases, um, things like that, you can do blog articles, you can do videos, you can try to get out there and do speaking engagements. You can put out white papers on your website, you can do op-eds. You know, it's amazingly easy to get published in a local bar association or a bar journal, a statewide one. You just have to be willing to put in the time to draft the materials and this is where you're trading your time instead of the money you don't have. Yeah. But again, you gotta put yourself out there and you gotta do the hard work and you have to treat this like a case. If you treat it like, you know, something that is an afterthought that you'll get to after do all your real work, you will never get the case that you actually want. And I see attorneys on that cycle for years. You know, they never get the big cases because they don't put in the time and think, okay, I need to be intentional about actually getting this case. Speaker 2 (17:44): What I really like about Kneeing down and focusing on a particular, uh, aspect of, of this practice area, for example, trucking, is that when a, when another attorney hears that someone has a trucking case, you're much more likely to be the first person that comes into their mind in that moment because you are, you're helping them make the connection between the trucking case and Jackson who's a specialist with trucking cases versus saying I'm a personal injury attorney. And then you're just one of many and you may not be the first one, two, or three that come to mind because it's a broader category that you've associated with. Speaker 3 (18:25): Yeah, I think that's a hundred percent right. Um, you can't be everything to everyone and the quicker you can figure out what is it you really want to be and what's the best case for you to work on, the more successful you're gonna be in acquiring Speaker 2 (18:40): It. Yeah. Anything else on referrals before we go to paid ads? Speaker 3 (18:47): No, I mean, I think that's, that's the big thing I would hit on referrals. Um, you know, when it comes to paid advertising, I think, you know, without going too deep into this topic, I just think you wanna be really careful in chasing marketing agencies or chasing people that are telling you that you can spend a little bit of money to get that big case. If that was true, the smart players in the market would be doing it. So one thing I just wanna note is if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Um, and you want to be really intentional about how you are picking people to work with and what vendors to do. Now you can do tv, you can do billboards, you can do online, um, and there's a million different ways to do paid advertising. The only thing I wanted to hit on this topic was be careful. (19:34): You know, if someone says they can get you something for less than you think it should be, have them verify it, vet it, and try to get short term conditions to see if it actually proves out. I would be very hesitant to ever do a year long commitment to any marketing company, um, because you just don't know what you're gonna get. And I've gotten burned tons of times early in my career cause I wasn't really thinking, I didn't understand how it all worked. But if you just remember, if it's too good to be true, it probably is, and have them prove that they've had past results, you can avoid a lot of issues in that situation. Speaker 2 (20:09): Awesome. So to recap, we're creating a plan, identifying, uh, our case types and our ideal profile, creating a budget, making that action plan, and then measuring our results. Is that right? Speaker 3 (20:25): That's right. I think, uh, if you do all that in work really, really hard, uh, for 15 years, you'll get a lot of big cases. But, but seriously, it takes time. Be patient, don't give up. Most people that aren't successful, it's because they gave up. They could have gotten there, but they just gave up too soon. So you gotta push through. Speaker 2 (20:45): So if any of our listeners wanna set up a networking lunch with you, how do they reach you? Speaker 3 (20:50): Uh, reach me at uh, zin law.com. You can also email me@jackzinlaw.com or gimme a call at (512) 246-2224. Always happy to meet new people and, uh, go out on a network lunch. Awesome, Speaker 2 (21:04): Jack, thanks so much for your time. Speaker 3 (21:06): Thank you. Speaker 4 (21:12): Thanks for listening to today's episode of The Effective Lawyer. You can learn more about our team and find other episodes of our podcast@zinlaw.com. As always, we'd appreciate that you subscribe, rate and review the pod. Thanks.