The Renegade Lawyer Podcast
The root cause of all lawyers' problems is financial stress. Financial stress holds you back from getting the right people on the bus, running the right systems, and being able to only do work for clients you want to work with. Financial stress keeps you in the office on nights and weekends, often doing work you hate for people you don't like, and doing that work alone.
(Yes, you have permission to do only work you like doing and doing it with people you like working with.)
The money stress is not because the lawyers are bad lawyers or bad people. In fact, most lawyers are good at the lawyering part and they are good people.
The money stress is caused by the general lack of both business skills and an entrepreneurial mindset.
Thus, good lawyers who are good people get caught up and slowed down in bringing their gifts to the world. Their families, teams, clients, and communities are not well-served because you can't serve others at your top level when you are constantly worrying about money.
We can blame the law schools and the elites of the profession who are running bar organizations, but to blame anyone else for your own woes is a loser's game. It is, in itself, a restrictive, narrow, mindset that will keep you from ever seeing, let alone experiencing, a better future.
Lawyers need to be in rooms with other entrepreneurs. They need to hang with people who won't tell you that your dreams are too big or that "they" or "the system "won't allow you to achieve them. They need to be in rooms where people will be in their ear telling them that their dreams are too small.
Get in better rooms. That would be the first step.
Second step, ignore every piece of advice any general organized bar is giving about how to make your firm or your life better.
The Renegade Lawyer Podcast
Building a Sustainable Law Firm with Darl Champion: Strategies for Success
Join us on The Renegade Lawyers Podcast as we dive into a powerful conversation with Darl Champion of The Champion Firm. Discover how he's built a thriving practice in the highly competitive Atlanta region, focusing on exceptional client service and strategic marketing.
Learn from his journey, the lessons he's learned, and the innovative approaches that have led to his success. Don't miss this episode filled with insights for any lawyer looking to make a real impact. Tune in now!
Ben Glass is a nationally recognized personal injury and long-term disability insurance attorney in Fairfax, VA. Since 2005, Ben Glass and Great Legal Marketing have been helping solo and small firm lawyers make more money, get more clients and still get home in time for dinner. We call this TheGLMTribe.com
What Makes The GLM Tribe Special?
In short, we are the only organization within the "business builder for lawyers" space that is led by two practicing lawyers.
One thing we're sure you've noticed is that despite the variety of options within our space, no one else is mixing
the actual practice of law with business building in the way that we are.
There are no other organizations who understand the highs and lows of running a small law firm and are engaged in talking to real clients. That is what sets GLM apart from every other organization, and it is why we have had loyal members that have been with us for two-decades.
While I was in law school I interned at a great plaintiff's firm down in Macon and so while I was clerking after law school I was wanting to make that jump to the plaintiff's firm or the plaintiff's side. But it's really hard to get a job at a plaintiff's firm. It's a lot easier now than it was 15, 20 years ago. Just because of how many it seems like more plaintiff's firms there are and that are running themselves like a business. But back then it was like if you want to get hired, unless you want to wait until the last minute, you need to go ahead and hire somebody that's recruiting early. So that's typically defense firms. Spent six months at a defense firm before I switched to a plaintiff's firm.
Speaker 2:Hey there. I just want to take a quick break from today's podcast to tell you about an event that we're hosting August 1 and 2. I'm going to be hosting a small, intimate event for solo and small firm lawyers here in our offices in Fairfax, virginia. If you've never been to a great legal marketing event before, or even if you have, this is going to be the place for you to start. If you're running a small law firm and you're looking for ways to attract more clients without spending a lot more money, we're going to be diving deeper over those two days into all of the little DIY things you can do, even if you have a small team. This is going to be perfect for a law firm that's doing between about $500,000 and $1 million in top-line revenue. If you're making more money than that, good for you. You're doing a lot of things right, but this event isn't for you. If you're making more money than that, good for you. You're doing a lot of things right, but this event isn't for you.
Speaker 2:Let me tell you what this is not. This is not an event where, under the guise of a seminar, we're going to be selling you websites, pay-per-click ads or other digital marketing media. That's not our space in the market. This is where you're going to learn how to effectively use your next hour and your next dollar in growing your law firm. We'll be part lecture and part workshop. There'll be some prep work to do before the event and some post-event follow-up so we can answer lingering questions and keep you motivated to building a better life for you and your family Together. Let's figure out why you're not making more money, getting better cases and converting more of your leads. Again, this is August 1 and 2 in our offices in Fairfax, virginia, and if you want to be on the early list of people who are getting up-to-date information, just shoot me an email at ben at greatlegalmarketingcom.
Speaker 3:That's ben at greatlegalmarketingcom, and I'll make sure you're one of the law firm Ben Glass Law in Fairfax, virginia, and great legal marketing, an organization that helps good people succeed by coaching, inspiring and supporting law firm owners. Join us for today's conversation.
Speaker 2:Hey everyone. This is Ben. Welcome back to the Renegade Lawyer Podcast, where each episode we get to speak to, I get to interview people who are inside or outside of legal who are making a ding in the world. Today I've got Darrell Champion, the Champion Law Firm. We've got to talk about that because that is the coolest name for a law firm. Out of Marietta, georgia, the Atlanta region. Darrell's a highly esteemed trial attorney. For those of you that may follow him on various social media platforms, he's got a real reputation for making sure the client is really held up as the number one. He and his firm work tirelessly for the client. He's helped obtain over $100 million in injury cases throughout Georgia. National Trial Lawyers has consistently selected Daryl as a top 100 trial lawyer in Georgia and a top 40 under 40, so that's cool. So he's a young'un still.
Speaker 1:Just passed 40 last year, though I'm no longer on that one.
Speaker 2:Well you passed 40 at the same time. I passed 40 years in practice, my friend, so we've got the ends of the spectrum here. Anyway, I wanted to get Daryl on the podcast because he has built something very neat His firm in a highly competitive area. Before we went live, I said look, every time I fly into Atlanta, I get on the highway that leads out of the airport and it just seems to be filled with plaintiffs, personal injury lawyers, advertising on billboards, and so from the outsider it looks highly competitive. I know a lot of other, a handful of other fine trial lawyers and great marketers in your region, and so glad to get you on to really talk about things that you and I are passionate about, which is building firms that are sustainable, that have great teams, so that the clients are well-served, and we know that the happier the owners are, daryl, the happier the team members that come in to work for you, then the happier the clients are going to be and the better experience and results they're going to get. So welcome to the program today.
Speaker 1:Thanks for having me on. I am a huge fan. I actually started reading a lot of your materials before I even made the decision to start my own law firm, so I think that you know a lot of my success and a lot of the things that I've been able to do have been because of you.
Speaker 2:Well, that's very kind. You know, when I started in this space 20 years ago, it was really showing fire to a caveman, in that there were not a lot of books or resources or other people telling lawyers that they could build a life and a practice that they wanted. It didn't have to be what their mom or dad wanted or what law schools want or anything like that what law schools want or anything like that and that if we lawyers would start to learn some business skills like marketing and developing systems and hiring and developing culture and these sort of things that are foreign to most lawyers as they come through law school and early in the profession, we could just make the world better, because it'd be better for us, better for our teams and ultimately, better for the client. So thank you for that. So give us a little bit of background about that, because you said before you started your own firm. So tell us a little bit about yourself.
Speaker 2:You've crossed 40 years old at the same time. I crossed 40 years in practice. So who are you and where have you come from?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so originally from North Carolina, moved to Georgia to go to law school at Mercer. After I graduated I clerked for a federal judge there for two years. I originally went to law school because I wanted to be a criminal defense attorney. So I grew up in Fayetteville, north Carolina, and so not a huge city, and the lawyers that I saw growing up they all had kind of consumer-facing practices huge city. And the lawyers that I saw growing up they all had kind of consumer facing practices. The whole idea of like representing businesses and being a corporate attorney. I just didn't even know what that was. But I interned at the DA's office when I was at Mercer and quickly realized I like the theory of criminal law more than I like the day-to-day practice of it. So while I was in law school I interned at a great plaintiff's firm down in Macon. So while I was in law school I interned at a great plaintiff's firm down in Macon.
Speaker 1:And so while I was clerking after law school I was wanting to make that jump to the plaintiff's firm or the plaintiff's side. But it's really hard to get a job at a plaintiff's firm. It's a lot easier now than it was 15, 20 years ago, just because of how many it seems like more plaintiff's firms there are and that are running themselves like a business. But back then it was like if you want to get hired, unless you want to wait until the last minute, you need to go ahead and hire somebody that's recruiting early, so that's typically defense firms. Spent six months at a defense firm before I switched to a plaintiff's firm. I tell people this all the time. If I could have quit my second day on the job at the defense firm, I wouldn't.
Speaker 2:It just wasn't for me I didn't like what I was doing. What is it that you immediately saw that you didn't saw or felt that you didn't like? Because I started a defense firm and that gave me the opportunity to take lots of depositions, hang with lawyers who were more experienced than me, actually have a decent amount of trial experience in fairly substantial defensive medical malpractice cases where I was the youngest one at the table but got to watch really good lawyers on both sides operate. So you saw something different.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So for me it was. I felt like I wasn't doing what I wanted to do, which was to be a plaintiff's lawyer. I knew that's what I ultimately wanted to do and I thought I could suck it up and do it for a few years on the defense side before making the switch. And just every day I got up and I felt like I was doing something that I was not meant to be doing.
Speaker 1:And that's not a knock on defense lawyers at all. The firm I worked at it was fine. I'm still friends with some people that worked there but if I was in a different environment I may have been able to last a little bit longer. I think a lot of it comes down to just kind of the overall culture of the place and who your mentors are and who's training you. But I leaped at the opportunity to go work at a plaintiff's firm and I did that for four years and while I was doing that I knew I wanted to start my own firm. If I didn't go to law school I would have some other kind of business. I've always wanted to have my own business. I like working for myself. I don't like doing what other people tell me to do. Anybody that knows me well will be able to verify that.
Speaker 1:And so what did I do? I started planning, and the way I started planning was I started reading some of your books. I think Renegade Lawyer Marketing was one of the first books that I read. I started following some of the stuff you would post online about marketing and running a law firm and I knew that when I started my firm I was going to implement a lot of those strategies.
Speaker 1:So fast forward to 2014 and opportunity arose where it was a good time for me to start my own firm. I had a couple referral sources. I had a one-year-old child at home thinking about having more kids. It's like if I don't do it now, I'm never gonna do it. So made the leap, joined and I know this wasn't intended to be a plug for you and your services, but that was a huge part of what I did. I mean, I signed up for great legal marketing right away. I started getting the newsletter, started implementing a lot of the stuff, particularly the monthly mail newsletter, marketing to my herd, building my herd building that list, and the firm just kind of took on a life of its own and it's been an interesting journey. On my own podcast. I cover in our very first episode kind of the evolution of the last 10 years of how we went from being just me to now we have like 25 employees, which is a little scary sometimes.
Speaker 2:Well, so there's a lot packed in there. So, first of all, yes, most of us are generally unemployable, which leads us, in part, to running our own gigs. However, there's learning at every stage. So when you ended that by saying like 25 employees and that's really scary is, yeah, because there's things that you have to know and do well at 20 and 25 or 30 that are different when you had two or 10 and will be completely different if you ever have 50 or 100 or more employees, and so that's one of the challenges here is, I think, finding mentors and finding groups who can teach all of us at that next level of leadership as our firms grow.
Speaker 2:Daryl, one of the questions that people who are listening will ask. So we have a lot of lawyers who reach out to us that say I'm in a firm, but I know that I'm going to go and start my firm at some point in the future. Sometimes it's like next week, sometimes it's three years. What are some of the things that you were doing while you were still at the firm, but the idea was crystallizing that I am going to start my own firm? And particularly, I'm curious about other sources, gurus, business materials that you started to perhaps introduce yourself, if not immerse yourself in, as you prepared for that change.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So for me, the firm I worked at worked on really big cases and so that the disadvantage for a less experienced, younger lawyer there is it can be harder to build your referral network because when you're you know, five, six years out of law school, people may not want to refer you the the huge case. But you know that developing relationships and doing a great job on small cases is what's going to ultimately build those relationships and build those referral sources. So I started doing some of that. I was able to take some smaller cases that the firm may not have been crazy about taking but allowed me to do it, and I think it's also great for lawyers to get experience on smaller cases and just running it and seeing the open and conclusion of a case, instead of working on one piece of one big case for five years. So that was a huge thing was being able to develop referral sources, putting my name out there. I tried to get involved in Georgia Trial Lawyers Association, networked a lot, stayed in touch with people that I knew through my clerkship through law school.
Speaker 1:In terms of reading business books, I honestly didn't read a lot of business books. I read some on the lawyer marketing front, like your book. I don't remember reading much else. I've read a lot since I've started, I think one book that I'm a huge fan of is the Slight Edge the idea of making small, incremental improvements every single day. One of my favorite books is Mindset by Carol Dweck the idea of having a growth mindset instead of a fixed mindset. I would have been better served if I had read that right when I started my law firm, for a variety of reasons.
Speaker 2:You don't know what you don't know when you start things.
Speaker 1:Absolutely, absolutely so.
Speaker 2:I'm curious now, if you can. So you started your firm in 2014. If we were to go like 12 months into your firm, if you can think back, what is it? That was the most surprising thing you learned, or maybe the biggest challenge that you didn't really expect to have, that you had to figure out in that first 12 months.
Speaker 1:I think the biggest thing was planning for the future and actually having to hire people, because when I left my old firm, it was well, I got a couple cases. This will hold me over until X. This will hold me over 6 months, 12 months, whatever. So I'm not thinking about 3 years, 5 years, 10 years, all that stuff. I'm just like. I need to eat, I need to survive. I don't want to have to move back in with my parents, and having to make hiring decisions was really tough, and that was something that I've really struggled with for a long time, and something I've talked about on other podcasts too, is I thought that you just hired somebody that had some experience on a resume and you're like, oh well, they worked at a law firm, they can breathe their heart's beating, they're a warm body. Put them in the role and they'll succeed. And that does not work.
Speaker 2:Well, that was. If you had asked me that question, I would say that was the biggest challenge. If you had asked me that question, I would say that was the biggest challenge. Again, when you have zero experience hiring people, number one and when you're starting a small business, and even now when you're in your business at 20 or 25 in the firm, you're not hiring that frequently. We're not Amazon onboarding thousands of people at a time probably, and I just made horrible mistakes because we would wait too long to take the quote risk to bring somebody on. Didn't really have a clue about onboarding and even vetting so much. Like you said, dara. Like hey, it says here on the resume you're a lawyer or you've worked in a support role at a law firm. You must be good. There's not a long line of people trying to get into work for me back then, and so those are some big learnings here about that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think the one thing, the one big mistake that I made early on was, you know, in addition to just hiring the wrong people, some of that stems from not allocating enough resources to it.
Speaker 1:You're like what is the least amount I could pay? Because you're terrified when you're in a contingency fee practice and it's just you and you're already thinking, hey, I just want to survive myself, I don't want somebody else to starve with me. And so you then hire somebody, but you hire them and pay them a low amount, and so then it's like the worst of both worlds You've actually got the money going out and you're not getting the return on investment. And so that word investment was a big changing point for me, a big turning point in my evolution of my firm. I stopped thinking of expenses as expenses and started thinking of them as investments, so hiring people and viewing them as adding value to my firm and investing in them and getting the right people that can add value to the firm, instead of like the money's just going out the door. Because if you're just spending money, then without getting a return, then you don't need that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and so how did you so? You said that you discovered that and you got over that hump. But if you can reflect back, how did you get over that hump? Was it taking? Was it having? Did you have mentors that said, hey, this is really the funnel through which you need to think about this problem, or did you just accidentally discover it? Because one time you overpaid quotes air quotes overpaid and it turned out to be really good, because that's a big spot a lot of lawyers face. You know we have in our heads if you're going to pay someone $80,000, like it's all due tomorrow, but it's not, what was it for you? Because that's a big hurdle.
Speaker 1:Years of painful mistakes.
Speaker 2:That's really it.
Speaker 1:And I think some of this comes back to me being stubborn. That's why I'm unemployable and work for myself. I don't do so great when other people tell me things. It's like I got to learn it myself and sometimes I have to have the lesson reinforced like 10 times. I just made a lot of bad decisions and finally I just started looking back and thinking about things and I'm like there's a common thread here. One is that I made all these decisions and number two, a lot of it stemmed from that viewing it as a cost, not putting the money in it, thinking short term instead of long term, not being intentional. And once I shifted that it was really a mindset shift. Things started to improve and I will say this too I do understand that when you're in survival mode like I was the first few years of my practice it is hard to get in that longer-term mindset. But the sooner you can get into it and shift, the better.
Speaker 2:Did you have any issues inside your own head with delegating or letting go of the vine or thinking, geez, nobody could do this as good as I could, so it's impossible to find someone who can take a deposition or cross-examine, an expert or something. Did you struggle with that at all?
Speaker 1:I still struggle with it. I'm a lot better than I was five, six years ago. I'm a lot better than I was probably a month ago. It's a constant struggle for me because, again, I think when it's just you and you start the firm, it's like you're the chef who opens the restaurant and you're cooking every meal like you want it to be that high quality. And then, as you grow and you got to hire other people, it's hard to give that up and worry about sacrificing quality.
Speaker 1:But I realized that you know there are a lot of things that other people can do. I'm not the only one that can do a lot of these things, and so when I started hiring other people and paying them to do things, amazing things happened. And that again gets back to the whole investment thing. Hiring good people and paying them well can pay dividends. But I will say this too if you pay people cheaply and get the wrong person, it's gonna reinforce to you that you are the only person who can do those things and then you just end up in like this death spiral where you're scared, you never want to hire anybody again and it just leads to more problems.
Speaker 2:It is one of the things you know.
Speaker 2:Going back to your reference to the slight edge, our experience has been that when you do start to let go and you discover, oh my gosh, there's things that the other can do better than I can and, oh look, it makes them happier.
Speaker 2:Like it may be something that you're good at but it doesn't make you happy and you find someone else that they're good at and it creates energy for them. Like that can become addicting. Then you start to find more and more things that you can get off of your plate, because each of us has the same amount of time every single day and every single week, but freeing ourselves up to do what our combo of gifts and talents and interests like why we were born and to be able to do that's really magical. So, going back then to those first couple of years, was there a moment, either a big case, or kind of a discovery, or maybe another person who came into your life in some fashion that really supercharged this? Or has this the 10 years from 2014 that we're recording this in June of 2024, it was like incremental growth. Oh my gosh. Now look where we are.
Speaker 1:This will be a long-winded response, so forgive me and you can cut me off anytime you want. So about a year into opening my firm, I started getting a lot of litigation referrals from an advertising firm here that I still have a relationship with. They send me some cases occasionally, but that one sort of took on at the time. It led to a lot of litigation cases. So for several years in the early part of my firm, I was very attorney referral driven and, in particular, with one source, and so I wanted to get away from that and it really started. So my son is six and a half. I have a daughter who just turned 12, but my son's six and a half. When he was born, I started thinking about these bigger picture things. So we're, you know, 2017. I'm like you know, is this really what I want to be doing? What do I want the next five years to look like? And that was really when I decided to make the shift to become more self-sufficient, trying to originate more cases directly.
Speaker 1:In 2019, we signed a case that ultimately settled in 2020 for a little bit over $10 million. That was a direct hire case. It's a very interesting story how I got it. I can actually trace it back to a B&I group that I joined when I first started my firm, but the infusion of cash from that case helped a lot and allowed us to buy a building. It's the building we're in now. That really gave me the luxury of shifting that thinking towards more long-term and something more sustainable. But as I look back, though, I do realize I didn't need that to do it. I could have done it much earlier. It was just. That really is what the turning point was for me. So for anybody listening, you don't need a $10 million case to shift your mindset and to start thinking. That just happened to be my personal turning point. Really was that point.
Speaker 2:Do you think it was? You said you could have done it earlier, but obviously you hadn't. Do you think that having this push-in bolus of money that came in from that case just made it easier to make the leap?
Speaker 1:That's 100% what it was. It gave me the chance to kind of think about what I really wanted to be doing. You know, the other part of it is too. I mean, we have a variety of cases. We have everything from huge wrongful death cases, complex medical malpractice cases to soft tissue car wrecks.
Speaker 1:But what I realized, especially with that case and I had worked on other big cases too since starting my firm was I really got a lot of value and benefit from working on those kinds of cases, and so I wanted to build a firm where I could work on those kinds of cases. And so really starting around 2020, which was also during COVID, right, so that's another thing, I've got the money coming in COVID's causing everybody to evaluate what they want to do in life I really tried to build the firm in a way at that point where I could work on what I really got value out of doing, which is working on the biggest cases and then providing some oversight and strategic direction on other cases. And so that's kind of what I've been focused on over the last few years is how can I narrow the scope of things that I'm responsible for and that I enjoy doing?
Speaker 2:Well, that's exactly the filter through which we try to get lawyers to think. And as they think through that, you know, the natural human reaction is I'm not smart enough, I don't have enough money, I don't know the right people. And getting people to just put those thoughts aside, fun with it and do well with it, the more the universe just starts sending you opportunities and you start to see things that will help you get there. Now, yes, you're right, it helps to have a large case, but most of us who are having fun practices, we didn't do it on the back of a large case. But most of us who are having fun practices, we didn't do it on the back of a large case. Some people have, but most have sort of grabbed it out case by case, week by week, hour by hour. But it's just thinking, it's getting really clear and giving yourself permission even to think that way, which is so important. So it's mid-year, almost 2024. What does the firm look like now in terms of? I think you said 23 or 25 under roof?
Speaker 1:Yeah, we've got five attorneys, five other attorneys We've got. I can't keep track. Sometimes I have to go through the office.
Speaker 2:I do too. Yes, I have to go on the website.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we've got a team of paralegals. We've got five or six paralegals, maybe more a few legal assistants operations director, legal operations manager. Marketing director digital marketing manager. I hired a person who just does video for us and edits it about a year ago. We have a legal nurse consultant who helps triage MedMal cases. So you know, in talking about the team structure and the way that we're built, one of the kind of hiring things that I noticed was it's really important to hire for fit for your firm over experience. But then also when they're within the firm, people do a lot better when they work in teams Instead of having all five paralegals or all six paralegals working with all five attorneys.
Speaker 1:That drives them nuts, that drives the attorney nuts, it drives the paralegal nuts. So we've really tried to. It's not a true one-to-one pairing in most cases, but it's pretty close to it and we found that works really well and then trying to compartmentalize things. So, although we do work on a variety of cases, I don't have, like the person who's working on complex med mal cases with me isn't doing soft tissue car cases right, like they may have like one or two that's referred to them from somebody at the church or something. But the skill sets are very different.
Speaker 1:So we've tried to almost build like departments. So we've got the people that kind of work on the midsize cases, the people that work on the smaller ones, people that work on the big ones, and then, you know, the nurse. The reason we hired the nurse was we were getting inundated with a lot of medical malpractice cases and they're, as you know, because y'all handle medical malpractice cases very fact specific and it's easy to turn down a case that could actually be a case If you're just busy and you're the attorney that's got to do it and you need to get home and somebody's on the phone and you just do a quick dismissal of the case and that's it. But I wanted to make sure that we could thoroughly vet them but then also not interrupt the attorney's time. So that was why we ultimately hired the nurse. And then she also does some medical record reviews for just our general liability cases in terms of preparing chronologies helping us identify causation issues.
Speaker 2:And having that talent in-house is tremendous leverage because you could outsource each individual MedMau claim review to any number of services or people, but having somebody who's under roof either virtually or for real you can chat with all the time.
Speaker 1:It's great marketing too. I mean when you're talking with referral sources and they say, hey, I've got this case. Oh well, I have an in-house nurse, send the records over, I'll have them review it. People are like man, and then the next time they get one, it's easy for them to get that review. They're not having to do this and jump through hoops, just pick up the phone and call me and we'll get it reviewed quickly.
Speaker 2:What are your processes or best tips for hiring for fit? That also is a challenge to many small firms again, because we don't hire frequently and so each experience is almost a brand new experience, especially when you're at the, say, five people under roof to 15 people under roof. It's just a skill set that we don't exercise. Don't get a lot of reps doing.
Speaker 1:I feel like it's like the Supreme Court's definition of obscenity. I don't know how to define it, but I know it.
Speaker 2:Are you in the middle of it? Are you in the middle of the hiring process?
Speaker 1:On the attorneys yes, if it's going to be a paralegal that's working directly with me which the one I have has been with me for several years, so we haven't had to do that I'll get heavily involved. If it's a leadership role within the firm, I'll get involved, but most other ones it's not. But I feel like our team has a good feel for who's going to be a fit. I can tell you one interesting thing that's happened is I got really active on LinkedIn a few years ago and I was like I don't really have anything to say, but I just started saying what I felt, like this is just me and this is these are my beliefs and values and people actually liked it, which still surprises me, but it actually has led to.
Speaker 1:Several of our hires are people that reached out to me because they identified with what I was posting on LinkedIn. So I think if you're putting out like if you've got a way of doing business and in the personal injury world don't know how it is in Virginia, but in Atlanta there are some seedy characters and people that aren't really doing business the right way that employees want to stay away from, and then you've got other people that try and do things the right way, and when you put that out there, people can tend to gravitate towards that. And we've got, I think, three of our employees now are people that reached out to me on LinkedIn. I didn't even have a job list, they just said, hey, I really like the stuff you're putting out. If you ever have an opportunity, I'd love to come work with you.
Speaker 2:Several of our most recent hires have come because we have a training center here, which you may have seen on some of our internet properties. We host paralegal events and we show them what a cool place this might be, and our paralegals are always out when they go to events talking about what a cool place it actually is. And, yes, people raise their hands and say can I get in, can I get in the line? And so now the principle is lots of sharing on LinkedIn, but the foundation below that is you have to be congruent Like. It has to be real.
Speaker 2:It can't be saying one thing and acting like you are one thing, because that's you will be discovered and you know and found out to be a fraud. And so you know, we feel like Brian made a commitment a year or so ago to post every day on LinkedIn, and you know it's been attractive for both cases and people and it's okay as long as it's authentic, as long as this is the real. You yeah. So let me ask you are you the sole owner or do you have other equity partners in the firm?
Speaker 1:So I'm the sole owner. I did try the partnership thing for a year. I think it was the start of my third year. I had a partner for one year and that was again a result of me not being intentional, because I was getting a lot of litigation referrals, particularly from one source Needed somebody that could work on cases at a high level. And I'm looking around and I'm thinking do I pay somebody a lot of money or do I just get a partner who I don't? Have? That fixed cost They'll just get a percentage of what we worked on. So that was not a good idea. It's actually a lot better to think things through and be intentional and that sort of thing. So that only lasted a year and ever since then it's just been me. I think you know.
Speaker 1:People have asked me and I don't know if any of my attorneys that work on the firm will listen to this episode but they say you know, would you ever make one of your attorneys partner? And my response to that is always you know one, I don't know. But two I have found that a lot of people don't necessarily care about the title. Some people do, but a lot of it is do they feel like a partner? Do they feel like they're being compensated, like they have skin in the game, like if they're originating cases, they're getting a benefit from originating cases, that they're getting a benefit from the cases they work on? Because if somebody's originating cases and you're not giving them a cut, they're just going to leave. They would just go and start their own firm. So we've tried to build a structure in the firm where people can really do well and build their own practice in the context of it and feel like they've got a vested interest in the overall outcome of the firm.
Speaker 2:I think another principle from that is that just because you or I may think of the lifestyle of an attorney in one way, or what our goals are, there's so many different flavors of what people want. There are lawyers who have no interest in owning, no interest in managing. They just want to have a steady stream of work to do, be at home on the weekends, be at home on the weekends, be at home on the evenings, all that stuff and so like, just because we think of like what makes us happy and drives us. That's just not true for everybody. So so good for you. Talk to us a little bit about the marketing you have. Kayla and leticia are listening in today and they're part of your team, and kayla, I learned, is actually up near me.
Speaker 1:I guess she works for you remotely yeah, don't try and steal her from me, ben no we have a no poaching rule by kayla.
Speaker 2:If you ever want to come have lunch at our cool uh and see our snacks like, come, drop by and next time we have any sort of, you actually ought to come meet uh, lauren, our marketing kayla and lauren is actually remote from norfolk, Virginia, and that's a connection that we can help you make in any event. But you said in the early years, a major source of new cases was it sounded like one major referral source and advertising firm that brought in cases and they couldn't get settled. They sent litigation cases to you advertising firm that brought in cases and they couldn't get settled. They sent litigation cases to you.
Speaker 2:By the way, when I was in Atlanta a year and a half ago, I had dinner with a table full of lawyers and I said how do you guys survive? Every billboard has got a lawyer on it and the guys at my table the guys at the table said, yeah, they all send their cases to people like us who are trying the cases. So what does it look like today in terms of where your work is coming from? If you could divide it between sort of the pure advertising? We talk about 80% of our dollars originating from a human being who knows us. The client may then pass through our digital properties, but in terms of where they're originating because somebody knows Ben or Brian's name or someone else in the firm what's it like for you?
Speaker 1:Yeah. So it's sort of a three-way split a third attorney referrals, a third online, a third client referrals and that's really intentional. In 2020, when COVID hit and I'm sitting at home and I don't think the big case had resolved yet, but I knew it was coming I decided to hire a full-time marketing director with that goal. It was the person whose role LaChesia filled after the prior person left. But I quickly realized, too, that having responsibility over intake and marketing, that's a full-time job, just supervising it. You need somebody that can manage the SEO vendor, your social media properties, all that other stuff. So we hired Kayla, who's our digital marketing manager Think a little bit about it Over a year ago it was probably over a year ago, kayla, don't get mad at me if I got that wrong and then about a year ago, I hired Corbin, who's a full-time video person, and people ask me they're like do you really need somebody over 40 hours a week to film videos?
Speaker 1:No, I don't. But here's the thing. One, it does take a lot of time to edit them. And two, to me it's about what is the value I'm getting from that investment, not are they sitting there filming for 40 hours. Because when I looked at what we were paying an outsourced vendor to film just a small amount of videos and it was a pain in the butt. We had to coordinate, we had to send our clients there for the testimonials and do all this stuff and we were still spending like 40K a year, I think, on this contractor. I'm like why don't I just pay more than that, have essentially unlimited videos, have a person here who can film them and yeah, I mean, are they gonna be 40 hours a week filming? No, but there's gonna be editing. We started a podcast so they've gotta edit that and that's been a huge benefit. And for anybody listening, whether they hire a videographer or not, I think that video and being able to put it out on different platforms through email marketing, social media is just a huge way to take ownership of your marketing and get your messaging out. And so now we've got a three-person team. We've got LaChesia, who's the overall marketing and intake. Up at the top, we've got Kayla, who's digital marketing, and then we've got Corbin, who is our videographer. We have an outsourced SEO agency.
Speaker 1:I've been investing a pretty decent amount of money in SEO for about 5 or 6 years. We're in Marietta right now, but we were in Atlanta until 2020. And it was not Atlanta city limits, it was like right on the line, but it was an Atlanta address and it's. That's a tough, really tough place to be because you're like not really in Atlanta, but you've got this Atlanta address, you're competing with all these people and so when we bought the building in Marietta it's a great building. That was one of the things that attracted us to it.
Speaker 1:But the other idea was, hey, maybe this is an area where we can compete on local search a little bit better than we could in Atlanta, and I think that's definitely paid off over the last several years. So we get a decent amount from SEO. We'll get the occasional elusive LSA unicorn that'll come in. We actually settled a case earlier this year for this $4 million medical malpractice case that came in on an LSA like three years ago. People are like, oh, lsa must be great. I'm like that's the only case I've gotten in three years. My ROI is literally been nothing since.
Speaker 2:What's your digital strategy? So in in a week or a month, what are you all besides the podcast and we'll talk about that in a second, but you have the video. You have corbin working for you taking and editing videos, but what's the overall strategy? You mentioned client testimonials, so that's a part of it. What else are you all looking to create and produce and output in a given month?
Speaker 1:Yeah. So I kind of think of it as we're marketing to our herd, which are the people that follow us, that know us, like us, and they follow us on social media. So we've got them so constantly reinforcing to them. We put out our case results, no-transcript community partners but then some of it is also focused on people that don't know us, because we do have people on social media who don't know us. We do occasional giveaways. So we had a giveaway for Taylor Swift concert when she was in Atlanta. We've given away Beyonce tickets when she was here. We've given away Braves tickets. That's always a big item Building followers through that. We actually had somebody that won one of our Braves giveaway get involved in a bad wreck and ended up hiring us a year later because she started following us on social media after that. Very active in the community. My kids go to a local public elementary school.
Speaker 1:My kids go to a local public elementary school. We donate to their efforts, both to the PTA and the foundation, so our name is sort of everywhere at the school. My friends joke with me that they're trying to be everywhere. You're going to lose that to your Morgan Morgan or your big advertisers, but it's trying to identify places you already have a connection with, like the local elementary school or these other places where you're going to stand out. We don't do paid pay-per-click ads. We have a limited budget for our name, just for a branded search campaign so that other law firms don't show up above us. Just for a branded search campaign so that other law firms don't show up above us. But almost every case we get from online is essentially organic SEO. We've tried pay-per-click and it is very expensive.
Speaker 2:Yeah, a, you've got to have someone who's looking at it 28 hours a day and who then knows what they're doing, right?
Speaker 1:You can burn through money so quickly with pay-per-click, so we've tried to really avoid that. I think of our marketing strategy more as farming instead of hunting, and I think that people that adopt that mindset are going to be better off.
Speaker 2:I think you're exactly right in that.
Speaker 2:What you're talking about is being authentically embedded in the community really by looking at things you and your family or your team may already be connected to. You know, for us it includes, like the CrossFit gym and youth sports and, of course, the schools. Brian's got kiddos in elementary school, I had them in elementary school for many years our places of worship, and then for us it's like saying, like, what can we do for you? How can we make, how can we help make the gym famous? How could we? Hey, I've got a videographer, corbin, like you've got the. It's at the end of the school year here so they all have field days and stuff like that.
Speaker 2:Hey, you know, I got a videographer can help, you know shoot your school stuff or your kindergarten, graduation or something, because they don't have that and they're usually unwilling and they don't have a budget to go and hire some of the professionals that you have inside the firm. So there's a couple other opportunities there for you. Tell us about your print newsletter. We have obviously been huge fans. We're huge advocates. We're huge advocates. We publish eight pages. I was telling we have a new paralegular and I was telling her today, like when it arrives at my house, I dig into it because it's the first time I've seen it. Besides the article that I wrote and the photos I submitted, we've got eight pages of our team writing articles which I have not seen until it actually shows up. What's your process? What are you all writing about? And then, how does it get assembled and produced?
Speaker 1:That's a great question. So it's changed a lot and we've gone back and forth between using outsourced vendors. There's definitely some benefits to using outsourced vendors. I know that we ship it out using an outsourced mailing company and printing company, but in terms of writing it and preparing it, we do that.
Speaker 1:The process I am completely hands-off. That is something that I have. I used to be heavily involved in. I mean, I used to like come up with the articles and I was proofreading everything and I became a huge bottleneck for the process. So I said you know what, I'm going to trust y'all to come up with some good stuff and just let y'all run with it. We do like to feature case stories, you know. Again, just reiterating to people like hey, this is the type of case we handled, so that if it's that, it's stay on top of mind because you know, in our industry it's you don't have somebody that always has a pressing need for a personal injury lawyer, so you wanna be there in the event that need comes up. And if they can kind of make that connection like oh, I just saw that Darrell handled this trip and fall case involving Walmart or whatever, it just kind of sticks in their mind a little bit better.
Speaker 2:We're getting near the end. I do wanna talk about your podcast, but before I get there, if I followed you around for a couple of weeks, is most of your time spent in cases running the firm? Being creative with the marketing? How would you describe that?
Speaker 1:I spend a lot of time working on cases. I love being an attorney. I love working on digging into a case and feeling like I'm adding value. It looks a little bit different than it did probably five years ago. I've done a much better job of delegating depositions and things like that. Unless it's a really big or important deposition, I try to provide strategic direction to cases. So I'm making myself available. From a marketing standpoint. I really let our marketing team run with a lot of the meetings that we have with, like, our SEO vendor and other people. If I've got an availability on the calendar, I'll join the meeting. If not, I just let them handle it and they can fill me in later. You know I do a lot of the attorney networking, so building attorney referral relationships is huge for us.
Speaker 1:I'm a big believer in doing things from a networking standpoint that fit with things you already like doing. So, instead of doing like a lunch every day, which is taking up time to drive there and doing all this stuff. I take people to sporting events. So we have Braves, hawks, falcons, atlanta United We've got every sports team. We've got, you know, get all the concert tickets and everything, and so taking people to that is enjoyable for me because I like being there, I like sports, I like music, but then I'm able to build relationships with people through that, and so I, from a marketing standpoint, that's probably where I spend most of my time is on that relationship again it's neat because you don't have to invent anything.
Speaker 2:You're just leveraging other parts of your life that make you happy and using that for opportunity. Tell us about your podcast. What are you trying to accomplish with it, and are you all running it totally inside? Do you have an outside group that's helping you solicit guests and republish the podcast?
Speaker 1:So our podcast started literally a year ago. I think last June was we filmed our first episode and it was the title of the name of the podcast is Championing Justice, and my last name really is Champion for people that don't believe me, but that is my last name. In the first episode I cover the origin story of the firm and all the mistakes I made over at that time nine years and the goal for my firm is, as I've been an observer of the industry, I've noticed two things that I see a lot of. One is people trying to tell people how they have to run their firm, the gurus and the coaches you have to do it this way, skill, which is fine if that's what you actually want to do and makes you happy, but isn't fine if you feel like you need to do it because that's somebody else's vision for how you should live your life. But then the other thing is just the proliferation of advertising in our industry. Again, not going to knock advertising in general, I think a lot of it comes down to messaging and how people put their messages out on billboards, tv and radio. But at least in the Atlanta market there's a huge proliferation of people on billboards and other forms of traditional media, and so I wanted to kind of try to be a voice for somebody that's not that, who's tried to build a firm, that wants to do things a different way, because that's just the way I like doing it, and that was kind of the whole idea for the podcast.
Speaker 1:We have a variety of topics so I've covered, you know, marketing in general. I've covered SEO in particular. I've covered financial issues. Yesterday I had one of my attorneys who worked for several years doing trucking defense, talk about trucking cases, cases and kind of strategies for maximizing value and what's really going on at the defense side that plaintiff's lawyers are always wondering about. I've done in the last year I did an episode with a friend of mine who does a lot of appellate work on the most important Georgia appellate decisions of 2023. So we cover a wide variety of topics.
Speaker 1:It's actually again it gets back to it's fun for me. I enjoy doing it. It's not like, oh my God, I have to do this. But this also kind of gets with a lesson that I hope everybody can adopt, and that is to take ownership of your marketing Instead of just shipping out money and sending it to somebody else and trusting they'll do the right thing. You can actually do a lot of things in-house, especially with social media and other stuff, to get your message out, and as long as you're genuine and authentic and just being yourself, you'll get some benefit from it for sure.
Speaker 2:That's 100% right. And even when you're outsourcing, you still have to take total control. You have to be the leader, and you've got a couple of great leaders on your team who are helping manage to the extent that you are outsourcing any of that. Look, this has been a tremendous conversation. What's next? If we're chatting three years from now? What do you think's changed?
Speaker 1:I think we're going to continue on the same trajectory. I'm not somebody that wants to have 50 employees or 100. Again, not that there's anything wrong with that. It's just not my goal. I don't have revenue goals. My goal is to do really high quality work and provide really good customer service for our clients and great client service. So we're always looking at ways to do that. Hopefully, in three years my sphere of involvement in things will be more narrow and I can really hone in on even fewer things. But for right now I'm having a great time. I really love being a plaintiff's lawyer and working on-.
Speaker 2:You're playing the endless game, which is a fun place to be If folks want to, if folks want to check out the firm. What's the website address?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so the champion firmcom. You can check us out there. You can find me on LinkedIn. My name just Darrell champion. Our social media handles on different accounts are win with champion. Feel free to reach out. I talk to a number of people from around the country, you know, a few times a month who just want to pick my brain on out. I talk to a number of people from around the country a few times a month who just want to pick my brain on things. I love talking about it Because, again to me, I'm still amazed that I'm not back living with my parents after 10 years. That I made it, especially when I think about all the stupid things I did early on. But again, my lessons came from actually doing so. When I give advice to people, I'm not trying to sell anything. I'm not trying to tell people to do something. It's hey, I tried this and it really didn't work and it was a really painful lesson. Maybe you should try something.
Speaker 2:Your parents invested you with a terrific last name. I mean, how could you have ended up anywhere else but living a great life? I don't know if you probably did some athletics and sports when you were younger.
Speaker 1:My nickname is Champ, because my dad is Darrell Sr and nobody could pronounce Darrell, so Champ Champion was like what I went by. Some people still do call me Champ, but it is a great name for a plaintiff's attorney. We've tried to think of some ways to leverage it into a catchy slogan without being too cheesy, but I haven't been able to come up with one yet.
Speaker 2:Oh, you'll probably wake up one morning and go, wow, why didn't I think about that any earlier? Well, darrell, thanks so much. Kayla Leticia, thank you so much for helping coordinate this. Hang on for a moment. It's been wonderful having you on the program today. Good luck to you.
Speaker 3:Thanks for having me. If you like what you just heard on the Renegade Lawyer podcast, you may be a perfect fit for the great legal marketing community. Law firm owners across the country are becoming heroes to their families and icons in their communities. They've gone renegade by rejecting the status quo of the legal profession so they can deliver high quality legal services coupled with top notch customer service to clients who pay, stay and refer. Learn more at greatlegalmarketingcom. That's greatlegalmarketingcom.
