Smart Tips for Personal Injury Success

00:00 Jack Zinda Foreign welcome to the Effective Lawyer, a podcast for ambitious attorneys who want to improve their practice. My name is Jack Zenda and I'll be your host. Hey everyone, Jack Zenda here. Welcome to another episode of the Effective Lawyer podcast. Today we're going to be taking some listener questions and hopefully the answer to some of these will help you out. And you can use some of my experiences, some of my scars to help your legal practice. 00:36 Narrator I still feel like I have to be involved in every case. How do I create a self managing law firm? 00:41 Jack Zinda Great question. So, you know, I get that a lot because as your practice is scaling or even as you become a more experienced attorney, it can get pretty stressful when you start growing because you go from, you know, a few cases to 10, 20, 30, 40 cases, and all of a sudden you find yourself not only you're drafting, talking to clients, going to depositions, going to mediations, going to hearings, and your time gets exhausted very fast. So the first thing I would do is break down what it is that you're currently doing and circle the parts that you really like to do. What are the parts of your practice you really enjoy? 01:16 Jack Zinda And then the parts of the practice that you don't like doing, you want to slowly start handing those off to other people either employees, part time employees, contractors, people, maybe companies are doing that for you. So for example, if I'm an attorney and let's say I'm a solo practitioner and I open my practice and it's me, myself, and I have five cases, so you know what, I'm answering the phones, I'm e filing, I'm drafting stuff, I'm paying the bills, okay, I start making a little bit of money. You know, I really hate e filing and I really hate, you know, paying the bill. So maybe I hire administrative assistant and I train them how to do e filing and pay my bills. Okay, so now I have a few more cases made a little bit more money. 01:58 Jack Zinda Maybe there's some more paralegal responsibilities I don't like doing, such as drafting discovery responses, the first draft of those, and then I'm working my way down until I'm only working on the things that I really enjoy doing. I think the biggest step though is to figure out what it is that you want to do and what you could hand off. And you can even put a dollar value for the type of work that is being done. For example, let's say you make $200,000 a year as an attorney. Take home after, you know, paying your salary and profit, all that Good stuff. 02:31 Jack Zinda So if you take that amount of money divided by how much you would earn per hour at a 40 hour week job, that's how you know if you're doing something that someone else should be doing instead of you, because you're using it for time that could be served in a better way. 02:45 Narrator How can I strengthen my referral pipeline with other attorneys? 02:49 Jack Zinda So the question how do I strengthen my referral pipeline? Well, I think as with anything, you have to start with the end goal in mind. Okay, so first you have to figure out how many referrals do you want to get and work your way backwards. And you want to figure out where do I get my cases from currently and where do I want to get them from in the future. It could be from clients, it could be from people in the community, it could be from other lawyers. Okay, so once you identify those, then you have to go where those people are or interact with those folks. There's a lot of different ways you can do it. You could interact with them on social media, you could send them email flyers, you could go do speaking engagements, you could go to networking events. 03:25 Jack Zinda But the key is you have to have a plan and you have to have a way of measuring the success before you get to that referral, because the referral is the final piece of the puzzle. We have an incredible team that helps us generate referrals. But when I first started my practice, I had a rule of making myself go to at least two networking events a week with different lawyers. So it could be a lunch, it could be a coffee, it could be a bar event. And just no matter what, always do to, even if I'm tired, even my exhausted, even if I have so much other stuff to do. Because if you don't, you'll never get that place where you have a referral. 03:55 Jack Zinda So then once you do that, for example, if I'm going to go to a happy hour with other lawyers, I would say, okay, the first half hour I'm going to spend getting names, talking to people, introducing myself. I go around the room, meet folks, get their business cards, and then I would decide, am I going to stay or I'm just going to relax because you know you're busy. You don't have to stay there the entire time. You've already got your five or six names that you want to interact with. Then I would come back to my office, email those five people and ask them to go to lunch. I had an email template. They'll say, hey, so nice meeting you. It was so interesting to Hear about your blank practice, you know, criminal law practice. I get calls for these all the time. 04:35 Jack Zinda I would love to refer you cases. Let me know if you want to grab coffee sometime in the next couple of weeks. Here's some dates that work for me now. I have a process in place, then I save the person's information in my, you know, either Excel spreadsheet or CRM or contact list and I will trigger when I'm a follow back up with that person. And if you do that process religiously, you will get a big following after a bit of time. But you can do the same process if it's going to be based on clients or people in your church or people at your kids school. The key is just being consistent, being intentional and tracking the number of interactions, not just the number of referrals you get. 05:10 Jack Zinda You also want to make sure you ask for referrals and that they know what you do. I see attorneys many times the people that are interacting with have no idea they're a personal injury lawyer or their family law attorney. And so they don't know what kind of cases to refer them because believe it or not, people are actually kind of nervous to refer you case probably they don't want to waste your time. And so I always tell people, no matter what the case is, send them to me and I'd be happy to talk to them no matter what. 05:32 Narrator How do I ensure that past clients refer to me and leave positive online reviews? 05:36 Jack Zinda You know, going from getting attorney referrals to client referrals or just getting client referrals in general. The first thing you have to do is do great legal work. Okay? And you really have to care about your clients. I don't think there's any substitute for that. If the clients don't like you, don't think you care about them and you're not doing good work. It's very difficult to get referrals or to get positive reviews. So I think that's step one, be a good lawyer. Okay? Now here's some tips and tactics to make that your clients love you if you do great legal work. The first is when you first meet with a client, you want to learn something personal about them. You know, what do they do for fun? How many kids do they have? Do they like to hunt? Do they like to fish? 06:19 Jack Zinda Are they grandparents? What college do they go to? And then every time you talk to them moving forward, you want to bring up that personal item about them. Hopefully it's something you have in common. Hey, we both have kids around the same age. Hey, my mom was a teacher. Your mom was a teacher? And you want to ask them about that? Hey, how are the grandkids? How are things on the farm? How are things on the ranch? Always start your conversations that way with something personal. I have a rule. I always call my clients by the first name. That shows friendship. And I start with something personal so I get to know them, and I train my staff to do the same thing. Another tip is I only meet with my clients by appointment, okay? 06:59 Jack Zinda Even the phone calls, unless I'm negotiating a hot and heavy case. Now, you know, you're probably saying, hey, I heard I should give my clients my cell phone number because that shows great client service. And I'm not saying that's wrong, but that doesn't work for me. Because if a client calls me on my cell phone and I'm at my kid's basketball game, I'm not thinking about their case. They may ask me, hey, what's the status of our UIM claim? And I'm. I'm like, wait, what case? What claim? And I know their case really well, but I'm in the middle of something else. So I tell them at the beginning of the case, hey, your case is very important to me. We don't take a lot of cases. 07:33 Jack Zinda And so when you want to interact, I want to make sure that I'm focused just on your case. So I want to do all of our meetings by appointment, if that works for you. But then you have to show up prepared and on time. Okay? So I have the file in front of me. I'm working distraction free. I turn off my screens, I have my notepad, and I know exactly what we're going to talk about. And I always restart with, let me tell you where we are in the case. And I'm selling what I've done so far in the matter. Because if you don't tell them what you've done, they have no idea of knowing how hard your team is working. 08:04 Jack Zinda A lot of people assume you just send a letter, you get a bunch of money back, and you're taking one third because of that. So I always resell the value we add. And then at the end of the case, I always go through in detail everything we did, the, you know, where they were at the beginning of the case, how lucky I was to work with them as an attorney, and how grateful I am for them being my client. And it has to be consistent throughout the entire case. You have to do these things consistently. We also have a one business day and a 30 day rule. The one business day rule is if a client contacts us, we will get back with them within one business day. It may not be me specifically speaking to that person, but someone on our team will. 08:45 Jack Zinda That shows you're responsive. Okay. And everybody gets an update on their case every 30 days so they know what's going on. I think if you follow those steps and do good legal work, you will get great client referrals. Now, once the clients like you and love you have to remind them that you exist. I cannot tell you how many cases I've gotten from someone who said I loved my prior attorney. I just can't remember who they were, which is nuts. But that happens all the time. So you need to get their contact information and you need to make sure there's some way you're interacting with them on a regular basis that they will see it. It could be social media, it could be email, you could send birthday cards. But it's some way to remind them that you exist. 09:25 Jack Zinda We also like to send our clients something that's memorable at the end of the case. You know, maybe a book or here's a big folder with your case information in it so they have it handy. And if something else pops up, they call us. And then finally you have to ask for referrals. Like, it's crazy to me how few people actually make the ask and they're surprised why they're not getting referrals. You have to remember from your client's point of view, they may think, man, I don't want to bother this busy lawyer with a friend's case. I mean, it's not big enough for this, their firm, or whatever. So you need to encourage them to refer you cases and say, hey, any legal matter you have, please send it my way. 10:00 Jack Zinda And I'll make sure they get to someone that can help them because they may not know if it needs your type of law. And maybe it does. They just don't know what to call it. So if you follow those steps, I think you'll start seeing a real big pickup in client referrals. If you'd like a copy of any of the things you heard about here today, or to set up a time to talk about one of our team members about a case, please go to Zendalaw IO and we have amazing resources, downloads, guides, and you can set up a time to talk to us. If you want to talk about how we handle things or any case in particular. 10:40 Narrator How do I identify and say no to bad cases that will Drain my firm's resources. 10:45 Jack Zinda Great question. How do you say no to bad cases that'll drain your firm's resources. This is the holy grail to being a successful personal injury lawyer. And I see people make this mistake all the time. Okay. You know, we're trained as attorneys and if you go into personal job or criminal law, you are probably doing it because you want to fight for the little guy or girl and you want to help someone that's in a tough spot. And I think in personal July especially, we have this notion that everyone should have an attorney because it's contingency fee. But what we don't think about is if you help everyone, you can't help anyone. So you first have to make sure that you've decided what is a, a bad case and a good case. 11:27 Jack Zinda For our firm, we have a value threshold because otherwise we'd become a volume practice if we didn't have a threshold for that. And it's increased every year of the last 15 years. It's about 10 times what it was when I started my practice. The other thing is we have some client, you know, lines that they can't cross or they will not, we will not be working with them. One is if they're, you know, violent or in a very disruptive to the staff, we don't tolerate that. And we tell the clients. And we have fired clients on good cases because of that. And you have to make that clear because that's a terrible working environment for your team, especially if they know that they could be physically harmed or verbally abused. And you cannot tolerate that from any client. 12:09 Jack Zinda The other is if the clients are dishonest in a really bad way. I mean, not they made a mistake in a deposition, but they're making things up. And we make these bright lines in the sand. There's no question, maybe, you know, these are clear. Now, how do you get off bad cases? Now let's talk about option one, where the case, you investigate it and it just isn't quite worth what you thought it was going to be. And you say, man, this is going to take a lot of time, a lot of money. We're probably have to try it. It's going to be a very low fee and the client's probably not going to be happy at the end of this. So it's not going to help anyone. 12:40 Jack Zinda Because you have to remember a lot of times in those bad cases, you can't create an outcome that's not going to, that's not possible. And so the client is Going to be upset with you at the end, even though you did all this work. And it's kind of a lose, lose. So the first thing is I sit down with the client, and this starts with the icm. I explain my process and I explain our firm is very exclusive. We don't take a lot of cases. So we have to evaluate if you first, you have a case that needs a lawyer and if we're the right law firm for your case. Okay, next, the first stage is we're going to do an investigation. We're going to look, you know, under every rock. We're going to see how hurt you are. 13:17 Jack Zinda We're going to see what, you know, if the other party's at fault. And just keep in mind, in the United States of America, it is very difficult to bring a personal injury claim, despite what you might see on tv. I practice in Texas, Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and a few other states. But if it's a Texas case, I'll say Texas is one of the hardest places in the country to pursue a personal injury case. Plaintiffs lose 88% of the time at the Texas Supreme Court, and the insurance lobbies pay a lot of money to different interests in the legislature. That made it very difficult for you to protect your rights. So you first have to know the playing field you're playing on. Now I'm investigating the case. 13:54 Jack Zinda I'm looking into things, I am sharing with them when I'm feeling like the case is not going the right direction. And we have what's called a the investigation stage that we try to get out of in the first two weeks of signing up a case. We're trying to figure out, is the case got a source of recovery, is the other side at fault, and are the damages at a level that we want to pursue it? And if one of those three things are not there, we will either refer the case out to another law firm that they'd better suited to handle, or we will reject the case and say, the client, you know, we can't help you. Now, when we reject the case, we never blame whatever the reason is on the client. 14:27 Jack Zinda That's going to create defensiveness, and it's going to make you the bad guy. So the way we explain it is, hey, you know, when you came to us, we talked about this first investigation segment. We also talked about our firm doesn't take a lot of cases. And I'm not saying you have a bad case, but from my point of view, I think it'd be very difficult for us to be Successful, there's some options that I think you could do. Now, if it's a smaller case you don't want to handle, you say, there's some really good firms that I think will do a better job than our firm could do, given the case in the size it is. And here's some names of those. And you can take all of the work I've done for free. 15:02 Jack Zinda I'm not going to charge you a penny, and you owe me nothing. Including the case expenses I spent in our situation, we've usually spent a few hundred, maybe in a couple thousand dollars on experts investigating things like that. And you can take it for free. And so you're offering that value to them, and then you reiterate how tough it is to pursue a case in this jurisdiction, yada, yada, and then you let them talk and you hear them out, but you want to frame it as if, hey, it's not the client's fault, it's not my fault, it's the circumstances. And you started this conversation early on in the process. If you do that. I find, like most attorneys are afraid of confrontation in these situations, and so they'll sign a paralegal to do it, or they'll just send an email or a text. 15:45 Jack Zinda And that's what makes people angry in general. I have found that most people are very receptive to it, as long as you explain it this way. And they're actually grateful that they got all the free legal advice. 15:55 Narrator How can I manage cash flow effectively when waiting on large settlements? 15:59 Jack Zinda You know, there's a few different areas where this could apply. One is it could be you got a big verdict. You know, our firm just got a $15 million verdict recently. It's not clear if the case is going to be appealed or not. We know what the appellate bond is going to be. And so if I was tight for cash, I would be able to technically get a loan on that settlement. Probably. You probably don't want to do that unless you absolutely have to. And the reason I'm bringing up that example is you need to plan for having breaks in between big cases in your cash flow reserves. So first you have to build that into your practice, and that starts with case selection and case volume. Okay? 16:36 Jack Zinda If I have three cases and that's it, and I'm counting one of those three cases to hit in the next three months or I'm going broke, you're in trouble, okay? Unless you have huge cash reserves. So when we talk about how much in cash reserves you should have. Every business is different. If I was a firm that just wanted to handle like 10 cases at a time total, you're gonna need quite a bit of cash reserves because you know, it may take 2, 3 years for each of those cases to resolve. You don't know when they're gonna hit. At our firm's level, you know, we have close to 20 lawyers, so we have enough cases that we know a certain percentage are going to hit if we are being persistent, consistent in doing the right things. But as I was growing, that wasn't clear. 17:20 Jack Zinda So first, on cash flow, you could either have some set aside, usually I would say at least two months of expenses minus any bonuses you pay out to folks. Some people say even more like six months. But that's really your own personal decision, depending on where you're at in your journey as a law firm. Two, you have to make sure that you're not counting on the money until you know it's going to get there. Three, if you've settled the case, you need to be very aggressive in getting it funded. We track that really diligently, and a lot of law firms don't. You know, our average time to fund a case is around 26 days. 17:55 Jack Zinda And I know some of the firms that give me 90, 120, 150, and that's so much time from the time you got the case done to when you're actually get the money in the door. Also make sure that none of the defendants or insurance companies know that you really need the money, because if they do, they may do things to try to slow it down and try to hold it up. So if I was going to summarize, like, the three most important things to do is one, plan for needing to have extra cash. When that happens, you get a big case. Two, you know, have enough volume of cases so you can have consistent cases resolving so you don't feel pressure. That also will save you from feeling pressured to resolve a case. Maybe you shouldn't, because you need the money really quickly. 18:34 Jack Zinda And if you follow those steps, I think you'll be in pretty good shape. 18:37 Narrator What are the biggest financial mistakes personal injury law firms make, and how can I avoid them? 18:41 Jack Zinda The biggest mistakes I see personal injury law firms make would be one, working with shady marketing companies. There's a ton of shady marketing companies out there that will take a fortune from you if you're not careful. And it can be 20, 30, 40, $50,000 a month. That's one of the big areas. I see huge mistakes. The other is Spending money on expensive rent before you're at a stage where you can really afford it. So, for example, let's say I just settled a big case, okay? Now I can get this really nice office space, I'm ready to go. But you don't think about, okay, what's cash flow look like, you know, three, six, nine, 12 months from now. And now you're hating that office space because it's so much money and you're not going to hit another big case. 19:23 Jack Zinda The third is, I see attorneys a lot higher, too fast or too slow. What do I mean by that? I see a lot of attorneys that are 12 attorney shops. They'll hire an associate, then the associate runs out of work and they fire the associate. Then they hire an associate runs out of work, then they fire the associate, and it's because they haven't gotten enough cases to really justify two people. Or, you know, the attorney has way too many cases, they don't hire anybody. And now the cases are falling behind. Clients are upset, your case value is going down. And so you're not making as much money as you should. So one side you're over investing, on the other side you're underinvesting. 20:01 Jack Zinda So the key is, like, knowing what you need and seeing how what the RO is going to be on that investment of employees, teams like that. The third would be doing a budget. I mean, so many law firms don't even have a budget, and that's just crazy. If you want to own your own law firm, you have to have some level of financial literacy and you should know how to do a basic budget. And if you're not great at, you should hire someone to help you. But make sure you really trust them because you're in trouble with that. 20:25 Narrator How do you keep motivation high when dealing with stressful cases and difficult clients? 20:30 Jack Zinda The first is I work out, I think exercise to me, sleep exercise, doing fun things with friends and family are critical to keeping your stress level down, period. I find the more people try to grind when they're feeling burnt out, the worse work they do and also the worst decisions they make. There's so many times I was having a really tough day the other day and it was like 2 o' clock and I think it was like a Tuesday and I just left and went for a run. And I had these three really tough problems that I could not get past. I've been staring at my computer for like four hours. I had like six, like, calls. Two were really bad. And when I got done with My run, I had solved those four problems in my head, and I felt great. 21:11 Jack Zinda And I was like, why did I wait that long to go do that? And I find getting out of the mindset you're in is really helpful for dealing with that. You know, if you have a particularly difficult case you're dealing with, either because of, you know, say it's a wrongful death or kids or something like that, you just have to make sure you are taking care of yourself and not absorbing too much of that energy. And that. That's a difficult thing to do at times. You know, when it comes to difficult clients, I try to really put them in a place where I can be the best lawyer for them. So some clients I may have to be pretty stern with if I think they're. They're being unreasonable or difficult. Some I may have to be more lenient with. 21:46 Jack Zinda Some I may have one of my associates be their go to. I have, I have a lot of times where, let's say I have a really needy client that calls every day and just, you know, they're just worried, they're nervous, maybe they don't have a job, and they kind of get borderline compulsive about stuff and like, hey, why didn't you do this? Where's this? Where's that? So one tactic I use is I give them lots of homework and I give them a list of 10 to 20 things, and I actually need these things done. Hey, go do these 10 things and call us back when you've got those completed. That could sound on a lot of the annoying calls because they sometimes will be slow to get it done. They know when they call us, we're ask, how's that going? 22:22 Jack Zinda And it kind of gets you off your back. Another tip is I'll assign an associate to be kind of that person's buddy and say, hey, you're going to be this person's go to. Anytime they call you talk to them first, and then you escalate it. To me, that can help also because, you know, it's another person that talked to. A lot of times, the difficult clients are lonely or stressed out. So having another voice can be helpful sometimes. You know, let's say it's a female client. Maybe they would respond better to a female associate talking to them because they respond better that, you know, and vice versa. I try to think, is there someone else they could deal with or help with and try to get to the bottom of what's going on. 22:56 Jack Zinda But you have to remember, if you're not Feeling healthy by yourself, you're probably not going to be the best person for your clients. 23:04 Narrator If you could go back and change one thing about how you built your law firm, what would it be? 23:08 Jack Zinda That's a really tough question. You know, I try not to live life with regrets because I look at every lesson as a. An opportunity to grow. I probably would have focused on bigger cases sooner. I kind of, in my head, thought there was a progression that I had needed to go, kind of. I always got big cases, but just focusing exclusively on those earlier on in my practice. And I also would have probably put a bigger emphasis on vetting CLI potential hires. Early on, I made a ton of bad hiring decisions. I remember one time I was on, like, my fourth paralegal in, like, six months, and I think it was because I was trying to hire experienced people, kind of cheap. And my fourth one, who'd been great the first two weeks, shows up like, day 11 drunk. 23:56 Jack Zinda And I just was like, oh, my gosh, I cannot believe this is, like, the fourth one in four months. And she was like, oh, it's the Claritin. You know, allergy medicine really messes me up. And I was like, okay, this is why this person took this job at this rate. And I finally got it through my head that you pay for what you get. And I couldn't afford a really experienced Brailler, said, okay, let me get an inexperienced one who's really smart, pay them well for an experience, barely go and train them. And that. That changed things. So that would have probably been the two things that would have changed if I could have. Thanks for listening today's episode of the Effective Lawyer. 24:35 Jack Zinda You can learn more about our team and find other episodes of our podcast at zindalaw.com as always, we appreciate that you subscribe, rate and review the pod. Thanks.