Life Beyond the Briefs
At Life Beyond the Briefs we help lawyers like you become less busy, make more money, and spend more time doing what they want instead of what they have to. Brian brings you guests from all walks of life are living a life of their own design and are ready to share actionable tips for how you can begin to live your own dream life.
Life Beyond the Briefs
Farming vs. Hunting Methods for Law Firm Marketing | Darl Champion
Ready to shake up your law practice? Join us on this episode of Life Beyond the Briefs as we chat with Darl Champion, a personal injury lawyer who turned challenges into triumphs when he launched his own firm. Darl's journey is packed with lessons on how to market your law firm effectively—think of it as farming vs. hunting for clients!
Discover why building genuine relationships with fellow lawyers is your secret weapon for referrals in today’s cutthroat personal injury landscape. Darl shares how he navigated the Great Recession and the risks of starting his firm in 2014, all while keeping his family life thriving with epic trips.
We dive into the evolving world of personal injury marketing, where big players like Morgan & Morgan are changing the game. Learn how to balance your caseload while managing your firm, hire the right talent, and focus on the cases that truly matter to you.
Plus, we’ll explore the power of online marketing—especially on LinkedIn—where authenticity and bold opinions can set you apart. If you're tired of the “busy lawyer” stereotype and want to take control of your future, this episode is for you.
Tune in and start designing the life you want, one strategic relationship at a time!
Get ready to learn:
- Farming vs. Hunting: Discover how to cultivate relationships like a farmer while strategically hunting for clients. It’s all about balance!
- The Referral Revolution: Learn why connecting with other lawyers is your golden ticket to a steady stream of referrals in a market flooded with big advertisers.
- Case Management Mastery: Find out how to juggle your caseload and firm management without losing your mind. Hiring the right people is key!
- Authenticity in Marketing: Uncover the power of online platforms like LinkedIn to showcase your true self and attract clients who resonate with your vibe.
- Long-Term Vision: Darl shares his journey from law school to launching his firm amidst the Great Recession, proving that a clear vision can lead to success—even in tough times.
Ready to ditch the autopilot lifestyle and design a law career you love? Hit play and let Darl Champion guide you to a thriving practice where you can truly shine.
P.S. Want more insights? Connect with Darl and tap into his wealth of knowledge!
- LinkedIn: Darl Champion
- Website: thechampionfirm.com
- Podcast: Listen to his podcast, Championing Justice, available on Spotify and other major platforms. The first episode covers the evolution of his firm and valuable lessons learned along the way!
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Brian Glass is a nationally recognized personal injury lawyer in Fairfax, Virginia. He is passionate about living a life of his own design and looking for answers to solutions outside of the legal field. This podcast is his effort to share that passion with others.
Want to connect with Brian?
Follow Brian on Instagram: @thebrianglass
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In a saturated market like Atlanta, farming is getting more and more expensive and it's going to continue to get more and more expensive as more and more people are out there hunting that is, hunting is getting more expensive. Farming is way more sustainable. It will allow you to be self-sufficient. But here's the thing If you get to the point financially where you have the resources to try and hunt while you farm, you can try and do both a little bit, and so that's kind of the analogy that I use when I talk about hey, we're putting some money into SEO because we have the resources to do it. We've been very fortunate and I've got the people that can manage that and can handle the cases and all the rejections that we have to get, because you do have to deal with a lot of things that aren't cases.
Speaker 2:My friends, are you tired of being just another lawyer in the crowd? Today, it's time that we sit down with the one and only Darrell Champion, a personal injury lawyer from Atlanta who's mastered the art of building a thriving law firm, even in a crowded market like the Atlanta metro area. Darrell is not just a legal whiz. He's a marketing mastermind who knows how to attract clients like a magnet. So if you are ready to learn how to build a referral machine without breaking a sweat, how to master the art of online marketing and how to attract the clients of your dreams, then this is the episode for you, because Daryl is spilling all the beans.
Speaker 2:This episode is a must-listen for any lawyer who wants to take their practice to the next level. So buckle up and let's dive in to Daryl Champion's Playbook. Hey guys, welcome back to the show. Today's guest is Daryl Champion. Daryl is a personal injury lawyer down in Atlanta, georgia, competing in the hyper competitive metro Atlanta market, and so today we're going to be talking about how do you acquire more cases, run a better law firm, but then also operate the kind of firm that lets you do what Daryl does and take off to Costa Rica for weeks at a time with his family and live the kind of life that we were promised when we went to law school. So, daryl, welcome to the show, thanks, for having me, brian.
Speaker 1:I've been a big fan of great legal marketing and the work that you guys do and, as I told Ben when I was on his podcast, a lot of the foundations of my law firm were actually built from things I learned from y'all.
Speaker 2:I appreciate that. I appreciate that. So you started your firm in 2014. So, banging on 10 years, or maybe you just had the 10-year anniversary. We had our 10-year anniversary. Yeah, awesome. So give me the background of how you got from law school to launching your own firm.
Speaker 1:Sure. So went to law school thinking I wanted to be a criminal defense attorney, interned at the DA's office down in Macon where I went to law school for a year, realized that that really wasn't for me. But I knew I wanted to have some kind of consumer-facing practice, and so I always thought that I would also do plaintiff's work. Even if I was a criminal defense attorney, I'd be doing plaintiff's work. So I got a job at a plaintiff's firm in law school and really enjoyed it. Sp spent two years clerking for a federal judge, district court judge, right after law school. Loved watching the trials, loved learning everything about trial practice. But when I was finishing up my clerkship it was 2009. And that's when the Great Recession was hitting. I just needed to find a job, so I took a job at a defense firm. As I joke with people, I wanted to quit my second day, which is not totally far from reality.
Speaker 2:What was it about day two, or maybe day one?
Speaker 1:Well, because day one was just orientation. If day one involved actual work, I wouldn't have liked it. I didn't like the billing the hours. I didn't like the keeping your time. I just didn't like the billing the hours. I didn't like the, you know, keeping your time. I didn't. I just didn't like the psychological aspect of it and the way it made me think about my day and my life. And so I was like having this existential crisis which friends of mine joke that I frequently have, existential crisis. But I was having this existential crisis Like this is not where I want to be.
Speaker 1:I thought I could do it for a little while while the economy rebounded and then go get a plaintiff's job. But I wanted to leave right away. And so six months into that job, an opening came available at a very successful plaintiff's firm in Atlanta. They just did catastrophic injury and wrongful death cases. Their business model and this is something I'm sure we'll talk about today is the types of business models that exist was you don't have a large client base, you don't have a lot of clients you're working on For me as a young associate, maybe 15 cases and there's, you know, some mid miles in there, some products, some, you know, car trucking but, but just bigger cases. And so I did that for four and a half years a little bit close to four and a half years and I knew I always knew I wanted to start my own law firm, and so the time was just right. There was something that just hit, kind of in the beginning of 2014, where I was like you know what, I just need to do this, and I started having a few cases in the pipeline I had generated that I knew I could take with me, and I knew, hey, if I take these with me, you know, work up some kind of fee split with the firm I'm leaving. This can provide the seed money to take off. And so it's funny to think back how naive I was, because you do have to be a little naive to some extent to open a contingency fee practice.
Speaker 1:I tell people all the time just how many mistakes I made. I didn't have a lot of money in the bank. I had like $15,000 or something like that in the bank. I had a credit line that I was able to get based on the cases that I had, and it was like I knew that I just needed to do it and then figure it out, and that's what I did, and over the last 10 years I've worked on figuring it out. I'm still working on figuring it out. As people call me for advice, I'm like, look, if you're calling me because you think I've got it figured out, you're talking to the wrong person. I don't know if anybody's got it figured out, but I can tell you all the mistakes I've made and how to avoid them.
Speaker 2:There's a certain level of sophistication there, because my mind would never have gone to like, let me take my portfolio and go get a line of credit against that. So either was that going on at the firm that you were at.
Speaker 1:So funny story. I didn't know that was possible. I had lunch with a guy who's an attorney here in Atlanta. We went to law school together. We were in the same law school class and I just was like hey, you've had your own firm for a few years. Talk to me. He's like you need a credit line. I'm like why would anybody loan me money? And he's like no, they give it to you based on your cases. Now, my old firm had a credit line but I thought it was just because they were a successful plaintiff's firm and the owners had money and resources. I'm like this is like the worst financial decision for a bank to ever make to loan me money. And so I got the credit line. Fortunately, I didn't really have to use it a lot, but what it was good for was to provide kind of a backstop and a safety net to allow me to make some decisions about hiring people that I may not have otherwise made if I didn't have that there as a safety net.
Speaker 2:So I have a very similar origin story and I didn't know that yours started at an hourly firm also, but I graduated in 2008,.
Speaker 2:Right, so I was a year ahead of you in the great recession.
Speaker 2:I guess you were a year ahead of me out of law school, which is probably why you stayed in the safe clerkship space for two years.
Speaker 2:But I ended up at this general practice firm and billing by the hour, and my existential crisis was trying to figure out what actually was billable, because they were small enough that nobody really taught me what an appropriate way to bill was.
Speaker 2:And so you know, I'm sure there were times where I spent five hours on something that was actually worth a half hour and I billed for that. And then there were other times when I spent five hours on something that was worth a half hour and then I got in my head and said, well, that was only a half hour's worth of work, so I should bill for a half hour. So I lasted there about six months also, before going and finding a personal injury space where you don't have to track your time Although some firms do and where the game you know effectively the game is how can I find larger and larger cases and make them more valuable in an efficient manner, which I know that you've done really well. As a side note, that plaintiff's firm that you went to, I think my friend Bill Atkins is there now.
Speaker 1:Warshower. Yeah, it was Warshower Law Group at the time. Now it's Warshower Woodward Atkins. How do you know, bill?
Speaker 2:Bill and I tried a medical malpractice together in 2019 up here. We were local counselors at Georgia Family. That had hired his firm um from an aspiration under anesthesia case up in fairfax hospital. So I came on as local counsel, again totally naive, didn't know anything about trying a medical malpractice case, never really told bill that, uh, we got a 3.4 million dollar verdict over over an 11-day trial with by far the longest trial that I've ever tried and that was for me.
Speaker 2:It was like all right, I'm never doing a MedMal case again because that was too hard. But I know that you do that kind of work and I know that your firm now attracts very large cases, primarily I think and correct me if I'm wrong as referrals from other lawyers.
Speaker 1:Right, yeah, so when I started my firm, I knew that I couldn't compete in the direct-to-consumer marketing space. It's just one, it's so saturated. But two, the amount of money that people spend in it is just insane. And I'll give you an example, and I'm sure most of your listeners may be aware of this. But Morgan Morgan, I was looking at their ad spend. I'm sure most of your listeners may be aware of this. But Morgan Morgan, I was looking at their ad spend. I want to say it was like seven years ago their nationwide ad spend was like $25 million. Now it's like 10x that, it's like $250 million.
Speaker 1:Yeah, even back in 2014, I knew like, hey, I can't play with the big boys and I don't have any interest in doing it. So let me focus on attorney referrals, and that was kind of the way that the firm I worked at worked on their. You know how they got their cases. The challenge for me was I mean, I was I think I was 32 at the time, I had been at a law school seven years, but two of those were clerking, and so I mean I just didn't have a ton of experience, and so you do have to kind of work your way up to bigger and better cases and a lot of that just comes down to building relationships with other lawyers and doing a good job and then ultimately, when you demonstrate that you're able to do that, they'll continue to trust you and refer you more cases and then it just kind of has this like compounding effect.
Speaker 1:But I will say the one thing about my business model that I wanted to make a change from, from the firm I was at, was I didn't want to be the catastrophic injury firm. I didn't want to be the wrongful death firm because it's feast or famine. I mean, if you've only got 10, 15, 20 cases, in some of those cases you're working on for years at a time, there's going to be some dry spells. I'm also I have really bad ADD. I'm not clinically diagnosed but self-diagnosed. I can't just work on like four cases for two years. I like bouncing around to a few different things.
Speaker 1:So I started my firm with the intention of handling a variety of cases small, big, medium, whatever with the idea that this is something I learned from Glass marketing to my herd. I figured you know what, if my herd is only like 10 people, I don't have any people to market to. But if my herd is like 200 clients a year, which is about what we have at any given time at our firm, I think now we may have like 250 or so, but we've got seven lawyers. So we try and keep a small caseload per lawyer, but you have more people you can market to, and so that has been my goal over the last 10 years is to build that client base, do a great job and try and attract referrals. I could go on and on about that, though, because I do think that's changed somewhat. My perspective on that has changed a little bit.
Speaker 2:Tell me about that. What's changed?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so I think that the personal injury industry is very different now than it was in 2014. There's been a huge proliferation of advertisers, at least in Atlanta, and I can tell you driving up 85 through North Georgia, south Carolina, then up to Charlotte recently to visit my sister.
Speaker 1:There's billboards all along 85 in South Carolina where I'd never seen any before. And so 10 years ago, through maybe the first three or four years of my firm, when there's not as much advertising, I feel like there's more opportunity for clients to make referrals. People are waiting longer to hire a lawyer. They're not rushing out as quickly to hire a lawyer. Now what I have seen is I've seen I think people are seeing that name recognition whether it's Morgan, morgan or some other big advertiser and they're just instantly calling and so the opportunity may not be there to make a referral to the same level that it was before.
Speaker 1:But the other issue that I'm seeing is it's getting harder to even convert referrals. We still convert very, very high percentage of referrals but it used to be like 100%. If a client referred me somebody, I was closing that deal. Now it's like they're calling me and they're talking to like three other law firms Interesting. We're also getting clients who are calling us because they're a client referral but they rushed out and hired the big advertiser immediately after and they're unhappy and they want to terminate them.
Speaker 1:You know, again, that's not a attack against big advertisers in general, it's just the ones that we get in that scenario. It is typically one or two firms in the Atlanta metro area that don't provide great customer service and the clients kind of feel lost and then they call us. So my perspective on that has shifted a little bit, because I do think it's getting harder and harder to generate client referrals.
Speaker 2:I think that we maybe in Northern Virginia we're stuck a few years behind you Because we honestly we don't have the mega advertisers up here. Morgan Morgan is kind of sort of here they have a. They have quote a DC office which at one point had a Virginia lawyer, but at one point we got like three cases off of them because the only Virginia licensed lawyer that they have left and she told everybody you got to go hire a new lawyer because your case is in suit and so we don't really have another mega firm. Like I look at other metropolitan areas and I see you know 40, 50 lawyer plaintiffs firms and that just doesn't exist in Northern Virginia.
Speaker 2:Now it may be that we're a contributory negligence state, it may be that you know we don't have a lot of like tractor trailers coming through here and so it doesn't lend itself to the tractor trailer kind of practice. But for whatever reason, we don't have that issue where there's we don't have billboards, where you have mega advertisers who are sucking up all of the clients and there are clients that call immediately after their crash. My experience has been that the sooner you are calling after a crash, the more minor the injury typically and the people who are actually seriously injured. They tend to wait longer, and that sounds like that may have been the case in Georgia several years ago, but not anymore.
Speaker 1:It varies. I mean I just signed up a lady yesterday who was a pedestrian and was hit by a car and just very, very severe injuries, and it was a referral from an attorney who was actually on the other side of a case, like 12 years ago, Mm-hmm, and it's been about two and a half weeks since the incident and she waited. So it does vary. I think the ones that are rushing out quicker are the kind of car wreck cases where there's a decent impact, like no broken bones, but it could be something where there's a herniated disc and you just got to kind of let the treatment play out. I mean, I'm with you If somebody's laid up in the hospital with broken like this lady who she was in the hospital for a week, she's now in inpatient rehab You're probably not rushing out right away and hiring a lawyer.
Speaker 1:I do think that the name recognition, I think one, I think the quote stigma associated with advertisers has gone down dramatically because it's so commonplace.
Speaker 1:I think the younger generation is, you know and I'm not trying to make myself sound like an old guy, but like I, where I grew up in North Carolina also a contributory negligence state with all sorts of bad laws for plaintiffs. There's some billboards but not a lot, and I just didn't grow up with that, that kind of environment. But people now that grew up, especially in the Atlanta metro area, it's commonplace, they see it everywhere, so there's no stigma with it. We have a major problem in Georgia, particularly metro area, with runners, so people soliciting right after an accident. That's a major problem too. So you know, I think a combination of runners and marketing firms and the proliferation of that does shrink the pool of potential people you can get referrals from. So that is a little bit different and I'm still trying to process what that means for the next 10 years for me and our firm. But it is an observation that I've made, you know, and we'll just see how it plays out.
Speaker 2:Sounds like you do not subscribe to the school of. If they're in a crash where nothing is broken, get an MRI to every single part of their body and chase down the policy limits as fast as you can.
Speaker 1:You didn't see that. It sounds like you saw my Facebook post or my LinkedIn response to somebody I saw that.
Speaker 1:Well, here's the here's the issue that I see, and I think this is relevant to anybody looking to build a practice. You can follow that model of I'm going to churn and burn a high volume of car wreck cases by essentially directing their treatment, which I do not do. I don't think it's appropriate, but it also looks really bad in litigation. And, yeah, you're going to get your 25, 50 policy limits cases. But is that the kind of lawyer that you really want to be? I mean, I don't even think that's practicing law.
Speaker 1:And for me, what really gives me energy and what I like doing is adding value to cases. I love taking a premises liability case and doing the digging. I saw you had a post on LinkedIn about this recently the one where y'all filed suit and got a great recovery. I love stuff like that. You just stick it to them. You feel like you've done something. Anybody could run up medical bills and send a policy limits demand for 25K with 50,000 in bills Big deal, right. That is not anything special. I want to add value to the case.
Speaker 2:So take me through how you do that. So you have 200 cases, 250 cases in-house, you have seven lawyers and then you have a finite amount of time right, because you are managing the firm directing the marketing. I assume you're managing at least some of the people. Do you have a caseload that you in particular are carrying, or are you just advising the other lawyers?
Speaker 1:Great, timely question. I have a caseload that I'm on. I would say every case I have now has at least one other lawyer on it with me, though, which has not always been the case when I first started my firm. As a lot of things, it's an evolution. It was me on these cases, so-and-so on these cases, another attorney on these cases. I've realized that that's not the best model. There's a few where maybe I'm the only one on it, or we're just going to try and see if it settles early, because it might be a clear policy limits case. But I have shrunk the number of cases that I am primarily responsible for.
Speaker 1:I know a lot of advice for in the business coaching area is spend more time. What is it on the business? Not in the business? Yeah, and that's fine if that's what somebody wants to do. I just like working on cases, so what I've done is, instead of hiring even more lawyers, so I have to do nothing practicing law. I've hired people to help on the business side, so I have a full-time marketing director. I have a do nothing practicing law. I've hired people to help on the business side, so I have a full-time marketing director. I have a digital marketing manager who actually lives in Northern Virginia. She's our only remote employee I've got a. She's like an operations director, but it's more of like a firm administrator type role A lot of the HR, big picture processes and procedures, manages the building that we own. And then I have, like the legal operations managers responsible for case setup, file reviews, managing the paralegals.
Speaker 2:It sounds like that person that legal operations manager, not a lawyer.
Speaker 1:Not a lawyer. So we had a debate about that on whether to hire an attorney in that role, and so we decided collectively that that really didn't make sense for us, at least not right now. I think there may come a time where we need, like, a managing attorney, but that person is not a lawyer. She's got a lot of experience training people in the personal injury world and so you know a lot of the things she's doing is ensure auditing files, making sure that the things that should be done are being done, making sure that the clients are getting called according to how often we want there to be client contact, things aren't slipping through the cracks, that kind of stuff.
Speaker 1:So I've tried to take advice and kind of fit it in my own firm. Even the stuff I get from great legal marketing, I mean and I've read a lot of content I don't take everything and do it exactly like it's written. I borrow the things that make sense for my firm and that's been good for me. So I've tried to set up a firm where I'm able to work on the cases that I wanna work on, but I'm also not the person that's gonna have to go and take like two weeks straight of deposition after deposition, after deposition. It's like, hey, I may have a day of depositions, then a couple of days where I'm doing other stuff, maybe working on the cases or marketing or whatever and then maybe another deposition. So, yeah, I have a lot more flexibility in that regard, but it's an ongoing struggle to balance all of it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I'm in that same transitionary period, right, where I really don't want my own personal caseload, but I do want and I think I'm very good at adding value to a specific number of cases, right, and the struggle that we're having is figuring out the right cadence of meeting and information gathering and saying, okay, that case that we thought was hard, that became an easy case and now doesn't require me anymore, right?
Speaker 2:And so now I need to go over here and focus on like without having to dive in and review everything that's in the file, like how can I extract enough information out of the person that's handling it who hasn't had the experience in, like a high stakes, a high leverage case that we can, you know, apply a little bit of knowledge and improve the value of the case? So that's the thing that we're kind of fumbling with right now. And so, do you have a weekly or a monthly or quarterly cadence of like? We're going to review all the files and I'm going to decide how I'm going to spend my time for the next week or month or quarter.
Speaker 1:Sure. So what we've really focused on, we used to do and when I say used to, I mean like maybe years ago I would sit down with the attorneys and review every single case they had, and the problem is that takes so long and you have to set aside so much time that then nothing gets done. So what we decided to do instead is have more regular file reviews, but keep them shorter, like an hour, and bring to me the cases that you have questions about. And, of course, if there's something that comes up between, come talk to me, let's set up a meeting, let's email whatever, and we'll talk about it If there's a problem you don't know how to handle. But for the most part, we've been really good about having those regular meetings. Having the legal operations manager helps a ton, because she keeps me on task and it's like this meeting is going on your calendar, you're doing it, and it's one of those things where there's so many ways to spend your time and if you don't make it a priority, it's just not going to get done, and so that does help, but again, it's a constant struggle. It's a constant balance.
Speaker 1:Buy Back your Time is a book that I've been reading for way too long, primarily because I pick it up, put it down and then I don't pick it up again for like three weeks. But one of the things I've been doing that I was unconsciously doing is that I think it's the 10-80-10 rule that they talk about in the book, where even if you want to have your hands in something, you don't have to do everything on it. Start the project, that's the first 10% of it, let the other person do the other 80%, then you come in and do the last 10%. I think of it and I hate going to the dentist. So I don't know why I think in this dental analogy, but I think of it like when you go to the dentist, the dentist isn't there cleaning your teeth right away.
Speaker 1:The dental hygienist is. The dentist comes in at the end and like scrapes all the stuff that the dental hygienist missed, and hopefully the dental hygienist caught most of it and did a good job. But you know there's still something there for them to do, and so you know like, hey, let's sit down and talk about this complaint that needs to be drafted, here's kind of big picture stuff that needs to be included. They do it, I don't need to be the one typing it and doing it, and then they send it to me. Same thing with, like drafting discovery requests.
Speaker 2:Here's where I think and I love that analogy, but here's where I think most lawyers struggle to meet. That right Is that for a long time we were performing both the dental hygienist and the dentist role and then, as the practice gets bigger, we only want to do this dental work. Well, we've got the long-term employees. We've got to go back and explain to no, no, no, like my time is best spent up here and that's better for everybody else, even if it means you're quote doing more work or bringing other people to do more of the hygienist work. To use your analogy, did you struggle with that transition as you went from just Darl to Darl and seven other lawyers?
Speaker 1:For sure I think you know again, I was thinking analogies but I think of, like my, a firm, especially when you start it without a bunch of resources and a long-term plan, because I had no long-term plan. My long-term plan was to survive to the end of the year. I started in the middle of the year. I want to survive and not have to move back in with my parents. And so if you think of like a house that you're building from scratch, if you already have the plan and all the architecture done and all the work, you can build it perfectly and it's going to be pristine and it's going to be a lot easier to build. But when you start one way and then you're adding on, I think we've all seen these houses where there's like the master bedrooms off the kitchen or something and you know, then there's like this weird room over here and that's because they started this way and built on these additions. That is a challenge.
Speaker 1:That has been the evolution of my firm, that we've gone from people doing certain things Like, for example, we used to have every paralegal worked with every attorney. There was no like pairing or pods, and that is a terrible way to run a business because every paralegal and attorney do things differently and if they're working with five different people it's a problem. But, like, that was an adjustment when we switched to that. Hey, we just got to make a decision. Today we're going to make that change.
Speaker 1:I will tell you the one thing, too, that happened. There are people who started with me at the beginning who are not here anymore, and that's a big change. Because people start with in a firm a certain way and maybe they're a good fit at the time, but as the firm grows, they're not willing to adapt as well to hey, we actually need to formalize some of this stuff. We actually need to have more policies, procedures, sops, things like that. You just got to kick the people off the bus sometimes and I you know I hate to sound crass by saying it, but it it's an absolute necessity to you know, if you've got people that are not willing to grow with your firm and evolve, you've got to let them go.
Speaker 2:No, this is the old like what got you here won't get you there thing. And we've we've had that in both ways. Right, we've had people who we say this is what we're going to do, and then they self-select out. We say this is what we're going to do and they say okay, but then they undermine that and then you, then you have to let them go. So that's challenging, but it is. It's a requirement of growth. So, as you sit here now, you have a long-term vision.
Speaker 1:I saw you posted the vivid vision thing today, which was very timely to me. I actually was at Barnes and Noble the other day and tried to buy the book and they didn't have it. Which, yeah, I'm like, yeah, I'm going to get on Amazon. You know, I I try to think long-term. You know, I posted something the other day that I had this kind of nightmare that I was blowing out the birthday candles on my 55th birthday and I think that was legit. That wasn't like some made up thing. Like I woke up in a panic like, holy crap, like I need to start thinking about these things For me. I think of my firm, as I want to help. I want to help people, I love helping people. That's why we do what we do, and so I've never had like, hey, we're going to have a value threshold, we're going to have this Again. That thinking has evolved somewhat, though partly having to do with my view of client referral.
Speaker 1:So I used to think, hey, this case by itself isn't independently valuable, but this is part of the big picture of growing the business having that group of people we can market to, and so I would take people, take on clients that wouldn't make any financial sense on their own, with the idea they would fit into that business model. Now I'm revisiting that because, again, I've seen a change in client referrals and the types of cases we get. So you know, I would say our long-term vision is a work in progress. I think the one thing that I've realized as I've gotten older is I'm able to identify the things I want to work on.
Speaker 1:I have less tolerance for working on things that I don't want to work on. Like when you start now, like you'll just work on all sorts of things, you're like, yeah, this is part of it, I got time. Yeah, I got time. Now I have like zero patience for things that I don't want to work on. I'm like I don't want to work on this, somebody else go do it. So you know I've done a better job at identifying the things I want to work on. I think our goal is to continue to build relationships with attorneys and clients and try and grow that. The one thing that we've tried to do, to varying degrees of success, is online marketing. Man, it's so hard here.
Speaker 2:I think your organic LinkedIn stuff is really really good. If I got a call from Georgia, you would get the case right.
Speaker 1:Thank you.
Speaker 2:Because I think you come across as authentic and I think that you take positions which are not always popular and you're willing to stick up for those positions. And in the crowded market that you're in, when you have Jen Gore and Shannara and Ali Awad and Morgan Morgan, like you know, either you or Bill would get the case.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean Morgan Morgan's everywhere now. So you know, I think that one thing about LinkedIn it takes a long time to see any results from LinkedIn. People get really impatient, and it's lawyers' natural tendency to get impatient, regardless of the marketing tool. But it's great and I'll tell you, the thing that kind of clicked for me was when I stopped caring what people thought about me. As soon as you stop caring what people think about you and you feel like, hey, look, I'm just going to say what I think, you actually attract the people that you want to work with anyway, and so it's important.
Speaker 1:I mean, everybody's got their own voice and business model. You know, again, ali Awad has his own business model. He posted the thing that we had the discussion about and that's his way of doing things and he's going to attract people that that's their way of doing things. That's not my way of doing things. Things that's not my way of doing things. I'm going to say that, look and I do it in a polite, respectful way. I don't do it in a confrontational way, opposed to something on a person that works with morgan and morgan about how I would never refer a case to them polite, respectful way, but I want my position to be known and that has been a real game changer for me.
Speaker 1:So what I would encourage anybody to do, and I think this you got to take control of your marketing. So we have a marketing director, the digital marketing manager. We have an in-house video person. Too many people say I'm just going to throw money at this thing, I got a big settlement, I'm just going to stroke a check and expect cases to come in, and that is a recipe for disaster. Yeah, there are tools available to you LinkedIn, facebook, instagram where you can build relationships and connections with people. You don't have to have a million followers. I mean, it may take two or three attorneys seeing your stuff and developing a genuine relationship with them and then building a great referral relationship. That could be very valuable. Relationship Like that could be very valuable. So I would encourage anybody to use the tools available to you and just share your opinions with the world.
Speaker 2:There's so much good stuff in there. I mean number one. Yes, stroking a check and expecting cases to show up as a recipe for disaster because most people don't think about installing the infrastructure to answer the phone every time it rings before they stroke the check for the marketing dollars right.
Speaker 2:Number two yeah, you have to stop caring what people think, because the people who disagree with you, they were never going to buy your shit anyway. Okay, so who cares? Well, yeah, like you were, they dislike you. Now that you've opened your mouth, they weren't going to give you any money. Morgan's not referring me cases.
Speaker 2:They actually want me to refer them cases. I know We've several times met with their marketing people about that, right, because it's always hey, we have a huge referral network. I'm like, great, we do these Arisa, long-term disability cases. You guys don't seem to do them. There's very few other people that do them. How about you send us some like disability cases? No, no, no. We would rather you just give us all your auto cases. Well, that's my practice, right?
Speaker 1:Well, and I will say that too, I mean the whole idea of that business model to me is just bizarre. If I'm a small firm owner, like I am, I mean we have over 20 employees, which you know. If you asked me when I started my firm, I'd say, oh, that's a massive firm, but relatively speaking, I want to refer cases to the little guy or gal. I want to refer cases to the small firm where I can one, help them and feel like, hey, I'm actually making an impact in this person's life and their growth of their firm and, two, develop that relationship and connection. I don't do that by sending it off to some anonymous person and dealing with somebody through a client portal.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and also you don't want to be embarrassed by the failure to do a good job on that case right, yeah, exactly, you don't know you want to have good feedback.
Speaker 2:Hey, I've referred Steve a case and Steve did a shitty job. Well, now Steve's off the list, right. But so much of it comes down to who in the firm is actually handling your case, with all the systems and the processes that you have. Like it really comes down to who's a paralegal and the lawyer team that's actually working on the case, and at a big firm you have zero control over that. So I'm a hundred percent aligned with, like I just want to.
Speaker 1:If it's a case that's too small for me, for whatever reason, I want to give it to the version of me that's five or 10 years behind, where I am A hundred percent, and because that's five or 10 years behind, where I am 100%, because those people need the work, they're appreciative for the work, they're going to do a great job, they're going to give the client individual attention and then when they have cases that are maybe beyond their bandwidth, they're going to refer them to you and so it becomes this reciprocal referral relationship, which is great. But that's really what I've discovered from the SEO side, and we spend a lot of money on it every month. Again, we've had some mixed success with that. We had one big MedMal settle earlier this year from an LSA ad settled for $4 million, which is great for a direct hire case, but I haven't gotten an LSA case in like three years. I think that case was the last one.
Speaker 1:You know, the things that work are relationships and connections with people. The things that make me nervous are things like Google, which, if you have the resources and can devote the money to that and it's not going to break your firm, try and make it work. And that's what you know. Again, we've had varying degrees of success, but I would not put all my eggs in that basket because, as I refer to it as the Google gods, you don't want to be subject to the whims of the Google gods, because it could change overnight.
Speaker 2:I think about this like assets and liabilities. Right, if you are building a firm that relies on you paying Google 20 or $25,000 every single month, it's just a line item liability on your P&L, right. But if you've actually built up a referral network of people that will remember you, even if your website isn't showing up on the first page of Google like that, becomes an asset. And so you know, in the scope of you have this firm, you have 20 people. You have these cases, although a diminishing personal caseload for yourself. What are you doing and how are you making time to maintain the relationships that are already working for you?
Speaker 1:So I am a big believer in combining things you like with your marketing. So I like sports. I've got my Brave shirt on today. I've got Brave season tickets. I've got Falcon season tickets. We just got a suite at the falcons. Last year we got a suite for atlanta united, which is soccer, and we have hawk season tickets.
Speaker 1:I don't go to every game, but that is great networking one. Just giving them away to people so they can go is great. But when I take people, it gives me the chance to build that relationship and connection with people. It's not in the middle of of the day other than football, but that's a weekend event. You're not spending two hours out of your office in the middle of the day to go meet somebody, so I'm able to get my work done.
Speaker 1:Some of these things I take my kids to too, and my referral partners take their kids too, so we're there with our families. That's a great way to build relationships and for me, some of my referral partners are some of my best friends. Like it's just, that's the way it is, and so we get together with kids and do things and it's it's easy to blend then my personal life with my work life and have it be more viable, so that I'm not having this clear delineation where, oh, I have to go over here and I have to go over here and speak at this conference or go and do this. That is by far. We spend more money on sports tickets than any other thing for marketing.
Speaker 2:I love that. I'm going to go home and send my wife on a season tickets package.
Speaker 1:Man, I'm telling you. So here's what we did. I started with four Falcon season tickets and we have them now. They're second row from the field, great seats, they have access to a private club with food and drink and all that. But we opted into the suite two years ago. But I kept my Falcon season tickets. People love them, they're great to give away. And then we added two, four more this year in an entirely different section.
Speaker 1:So you're looking at all the different people that you're going to get to send those tickets to that can take their family and go to games. They're going to remember you. It's a great way to market to clients. You know we're not allowed to give clients, there's not allowed to be a quid pro quo for referrals, but you can absolutely just randomly give away tickets to people. And there's certainly clients that you know are sort of like your favorite clients that you remember that were like, hey, they went out of their way to leave a Google review and come to your office and film a video testimonial. I got hey, I got Falcons tickets available this Sunday. I just want to know if you wanted to use them. And it's again. It's a way to keep that relationship going with them and the same thing with the attorney. So that also gets into work-life balance, which I know is what you know. Another topic you wanted to cover because that's very important to me I have two young kids, so yeah, I love that.
Speaker 2:And you know, one of the things that we did coming into this year is we turned off all of our PPC and LSA spend, which is probably $80,000 or $90,000 a year, and we plowed that back into a referral relationship manager position. But could just have easily have bought season tickets somewhere. And so you know, I think the hesitation is to say, well, I don't have the budget to just go buy season tickets. Well, you probably do if you cut something that's not working as well.
Speaker 1:Well, let me give you an example Falcon season tickets. I got four season tickets for $5,000. Now, those are upper level, but their first row. It's not a bad investment for your money. I was looking at when the Lakers are coming to town. I was like maybe I'll get some more Hawks tickets for the Lakers game. Lower level Hawks tickets Hawks versus Lakers is like $5,000 for one game. So you can look at the trade-offs. You can get brave season tickets. They don't have to be great.
Speaker 1:A lot of our clients. I gave my really good Falcon seats tonight to a client and it's a pre-season game. She cried when I gave them to her because she said she would never be able to afford that. I think that we think as lawyers oh, we've got to give them some great experience, do this, and it's got to be like this. It's got to be the Chiefs versus the Falcons. It's a preseason game and she is beyond grateful and she is going to remember that for a very long time. And so don't underestimate the power of little things that you can do for your clients. I did want to mention one thing. I know you wanted to talk about work-life balance but, I have to say one thing before you go.
Speaker 1:You mentioned assets and liabilities. The analogy I've used for marketing is farming versus hunting.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:Farming is way cheaper than having to go out and hunt every single time you need a case. And the other problem is, in a saturated market like Atlanta, farming is getting more and more expensive and it's going to continue to get more and more expensive as more and more people are out there hunting that is, hunting is getting more expensive. Farming is way more sustainable. It will allow you to be self-sufficient. But here's the thing If you get to the point financially where you have the resources to try and hunt while you farm, you can try and do both a little bit, and so that's kind of the analogy that I use when I talk about hey, we're putting some money into SEO because we have the resources to do it.
Speaker 1:We've been very fortunate and I've got the people that can manage that and can handle the cases and all the rejections that we have to get, because you do have to deal with a lot of things that aren't cases. So that was all I wanted to say about that, because I do think that that part is a good mindset for people to think about.
Speaker 2:You definitely don't have to pick one right, and I think that's an important point. All right, let's talk work-life balance. Other than spending 200 days a year watching sports, what are you doing in your free time?
Speaker 1:I'm watching sports. What are you doing in your free time? Yeah, so travel. You know we we were talking before we went on the air about all the breaks that we get here in Georgia. We've got like a fall break and a winter break and a spring break. My wife's from Costa Rica, so we go to Costa Rica a few times a year. We went there for about two weeks this summer, went there for winter break earlier this year. My wife's got family in Florida, in Clearwater Florida, right on the beach. Sometimes we go down there, sometimes they go visit my family in North Carolina, sometimes we go other places. So I really like going on vacation with the kids. My kids are getting more active in sports and I'm realizing what a time commitment that is. My daughter just started softball so she's got that practice two nights a week. So I take her to that and I sit there and you know again, it's a good way to blend personal life and professional life. So I was reading like a book on medical malpractice cases yesterday while sitting there watching her hit.
Speaker 2:Yeah, funnest dad on the field.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, exactly. So I mean it's a lot of my stuff revolves around family time because I you know again my kid they're 12 and six. I don't want the, I don't want to be in a position where they're older and I'm regretting that I didn't spend enough time with them because I can work late. I can work even more later, right. I mean, when they're out the house I may want to work a bunch, but right now I want to spend time with them.
Speaker 2:That's right. Yeah, mine are 11, nine and six and six exact same thing. It's like I mean, the mental hurdle again is the stuff that got you here Won't get you there, right. Working hard and hustling is what allowed us to be successful until and get us to here. But now there's a window, right, and it's a small window to be present in your kid's life before they go off to college and out of the house.
Speaker 2:And we can talk about whether an 18-year-old is coming back during the summer and what they're doing right, or whether they're actually out of the house and your time is gone.
Speaker 2:But when they get to the point where they're not occupying all of your time and you don't have those demands on your time to get them to practices and to get them to games on the weekend, like you can always come back and make more money, right, it's not like you have to retire when you're I don't know. That would make me like 55, 50, 55. It'd be you blowing out your candles in your dream. You can always come back and do that, and so taking these windows of time where maybe you make a little bit less money, you just restructure your day to spend time with the kids. I think is really, really important, and so you were telling me that, the way Georgia's school system is set up, you have all these week-long breaks throughout the course of the year. It sounds like you guys are doing a ton of travel. Do you do any work when you're in Costa Rica for a week or two weeks?
Speaker 1:It varies. I mean, I try and make sure my email inbox doesn't get just absolutely insane, but a lot of that is just kind of swiping and marking it as red because we get one a lot of junk mail to just a lot of like notice. We have electronic filing in Georgia, statewide now, and state courts so like an attorney files a leave of absence and it's like that's probably like the most thing I see those are easy to check. So I don't consider that leave of absence and it's like that. That's probably like the most thing I see. Those are easy to check, so I don't consider that. What's the leave of absence?
Speaker 1:so in georgia, well, I guess this is one difference from virginia's right, so y'all get set on like you know when your trial week is right yeah we don't do that like you're like could be one of a hundred cases on this calendar and they put you on a two-hour call and you don't know if you're going Now. Some cases get specially set. But the idea of a leave of absence is and this is important for work-life balance for any lawyer in Georgia beginning of the year. I identify okay, I know I'm going to be gone this time. You file your leave of absences with the court. They can't schedule you during those times.
Speaker 2:That is a crazy way to run a judicial system.
Speaker 1:Thank you. It's insane. I mean, I will tell you, I've had REC trials, especially where there was one where I was on a trial calendar every month for a year and they're like you have to be on like two hour notice to be able to go. So I had, like, all my binders, everything ready, I was ready to go.
Speaker 2:And so are all your doctors, by videotape.
Speaker 1:That, yes, yes. So so are all your doctors by videotape. That, yes, yes. So we typically don't bring doctors live in Georgia unless it's a MedMal case experts, which is why MedMal cases are normally specially set. So they'll say, hey, you've got a specially set trial in November, december, whatever.
Speaker 2:You can get your people here Rarely are doctors coming and testifying live, so I'll tell you I have been spending too much time watching this young thug trial.
Speaker 2:That's going on in Georgia, fascinating with, oh my god, it's been going on for a year. You got one lawyer almost gets thrown in jail. The judge comes off the case, they appoint somebody else to represent the um, the witness, and then his lawyer gets his license suspended. Like what a place to practice law. And you never know if you're actually going on a civil trial until two hours before.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so we have an interesting court. We have state and superior courts in Georgia. So the superior court is what handles your felony, criminal and divorce cases. State is a misdemeanor criminal and civil. So most people file in state court to avoid having to deal with the felony criminal. But only counties with a certain population have state courts. Most of your rural counties just have your superior court. So you're just kind of there and some of them only have a few trial calendars a year and the court will publish a trial calendar and it'll list you know the how many ever cases are on it. You'll kind of see where you're at on that list. And then you know a lot of times that you're working the phones calling the lawyers ahead of you hey, is you know what's the chances of your case settling or getting continued and you just never know that. That is a little unsettling.
Speaker 2:And this is interesting probably to nobody at this point, but what's the life cycle from like cases filed in 2024? When will it go to trial?
Speaker 1:Definitely not 2024. If you're lucky, 2026.
Speaker 2:Okay, so two years, and then how do you manage client expectations? I guess you just say, hey, this is the system, like maybe we'll go, maybe we won't.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's tough and that's you. That's. One of the things we were talking about was how to manage car wreck cases, and there's some people that try and just build them up to be a pre-suit settlement. One of the challenges with that category of cases now is we get a lot of lowball offers and I say we, that's not because of the way we handle our cases, it's everybody gets lowball offers. And I say we that's not because of the way we handle our cases, it's everybody gets lowball offers and so we end up in litigation a lot, and so that is frustrating for clients.
Speaker 1:It makes the decision on whether to accept those cases challenging. Because we talked about a few ideas. I want to have a great, happy client so I can build it into a client referral. If their case is going on for two years, they may not be so happy, and so it is a challenge. One of the things that we do we have an offer of settlement statute where if they don't pay the demand by a certain date and we get a certain percentage above it, they may have to pay our fees. That can put some pressure for an early settlement, but it's really about managing client expectations.
Speaker 1:If I tell like State Farm right now is terrible. In Georgia, medical bills would be $20,000. You're getting a $10,000. I just tell the clients that look, state Farm is terrible, this is what's going to happen. And then when it happens, they're like yep, darrell said that's what's going to happen. And so if you have that trust and relationship with your clients, it's easier to manage and then updating them, not just letting it sit and saying, hey, there's no update, so I'm just not going to call them. Call them and tell them there's no update. Check in on them, see how they're doing. That's just good, old-fashioned working the phones and building relationships with clients.
Speaker 2:Well, and that's what's going to separate firms over the next five years is, with the proliferation of AI and the automated everything, there's the ability to not do that for clients or to do it in an automated fashion, and I think the firms that recognize that really what you're offering is peace of mind, compassionate ear and personal update on the legal system are the ones that, from a client's customer service perspective, we're going to separate from the rest of the pack, and that'll become apparent in Google reviews and then, of course, in the client and the attorney referrals that are coming back to you or that aren't.
Speaker 1:I totally agree with you.
Speaker 1:I'm glad you mentioned that, because I've been a big critic of AI internally and with others, because I think that it takes a lot of the human connection away, depending on how you're utilizing it, of course.
Speaker 1:But if you're depending on automated case updates or I know a lot of firms are using these programs where the client can go and log in, and it's not a bad thing to have it but if you're using it as a substitute for client communication, I think it's going to harm you long term, because people want to deal with people. I mean, how many times have you wanted to just get somebody on the phone to fix a problem? Right, and then you're routed through a phone tree and then you get somebody in another country and you know you're having to explain the problem to them and then they're having to get you the right person. That's the way it is when dealing with certain law firms, and so goal is to be the opposite of that, and I think there is an opportunity for firms to differentiate themselves in the future by saying okay, a lot of these businesses are going towards impersonal things where it's client communication, whatever, nobody talking to the lawyer do the opposite of it.
Speaker 2:That's exactly right and so, yeah, we use some of that automated case status update. We use HONA to update status, but it's not a substitute. What you said is exactly right. It's a nice add-on because when you call clients and you tell them what's going on in the case, they don't always hear you because a call from a lawyer is stressful. So it's nice to have that push with here's the frequently asked questions in your stage of the case that they can then go and read on their own time and then call you back if there's a question about that. But it's certainly not a substitute and some firms are using it as a substitute for real live in-person client communication.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and a lot of other tools they're using as substitutes. I mean again, AI demands, I think, is one example. I think AI demands have a tremendous potential to help facilitate working on demands, but I've seen especially sometimes I'll get a referral from somebody and I can tell the day I wrote the demand and there's a lot of problems with it, and so you've got to use it as a tool, not as a substitute for what you need to do as the lawyer.
Speaker 2:All right man, so much good stuff in this episode. But I do want to be respectful of your time and try to land the plane here. But I think you know it would be hard to listen to this episode and not like be like I got to go back and take some notes and listen again because there was so much good stuff that you shared in this episode. Daryl, where can people find out more about you and how can? More broadly, how can they refer you cases in Georgia, sure?
Speaker 1:So I can easily be found on LinkedIn. My name, daryl Champion. Our website thechampionfirmcom. You can go on there.
Speaker 1:I have one or two lawyers a week will reach out to me on LinkedIn. Hey, I just started my firm and you know, will you talk to me? Yeah, I talked to a guy yesterday from South Carolina. Reached out to me because I was driving back an hour from somewhere. Reach out to me. I'm happy to be a resource to people. I've also got some. I have a podcast, Championing Justice. It's on Spotify and some other major platforms. If you're interested in starting your firm or have your own firm, listen to the first episode, because I walk through, year by year, the evolution of the firm and everything I learned along the way, and hopefully by doing that, you will avoid some of the mistakes that I made and they won't be as costly as they were for me.
Speaker 2:Awesome. I really appreciate you coming on. We're going to link to all of that in the show description and people can check you out. Thanks a lot, awesome. Thank you, brian.
