Join hosts Jay Rathman and Judith Goldberg as they dive into the inspiring story of John Brooks Cameron, a young attorney who started with just $235 and built a thriving law firm from scratch. In this episode, John shares invaluable insights on building a successful firm, from humble beginnings to scaling operations remotely. Discover how John's determination, strategic focus, and commitment to excellence propelled him to the top of his field. Whether you're a budding attorney looking to hang your own shingle or a small firm owner aiming to grow, John's story offers invaluable lessons on the power of perseverance and strategic planning in the legal world. Tune in to the Legal Authority Podcast and learn from the best in the business.
Join hosts Jay Rathman and Judith Goldberg as they dive into the inspiring story of John Brooks Cameron, a young attorney who started with just $235 and built a thriving law firm from scratch. In this episode, John shares invaluable insights on building a successful firm, from humble beginnings to scaling operations remotely. Discover how John's determination, strategic focus, and commitment to excellence propelled him to the top of his field. Whether you're a budding attorney looking to hang your own shingle or a small firm owner aiming to grow, John's story offers invaluable lessons on the power of perseverance and strategic planning in the legal world. Tune in to the Legal Authority Podcast and learn from the best in the business.
Hey, Judy Goldberg, I'm Jay Rathman, your host. Judy's our fabulous co -host and we've got a really cool episode today. John Brooks Cameron has been a client of ours for about six or seven months. Really fun guy, really smart, and is going to have a lot of insight on how to build your firm, like starting from scratch.
Like he literally started with nothing and has been super successful, built a big firm, then wanted to scale back a little bit, and now they're going a little bit more remote, but it's been all the way up the whole time.
So Judy, this is going to be fun. Oh, fabulous. I'm so looking forward to it. All right, cool. Let's let it roll. Welcome to the latest edition of the Legal Authority podcast presented by thelegalauthority .com.
Here are your hosts, Jay Rathman and Judith Goldberg. All right, welcome to another edition of the Legal Authority podcast with the beautiful Judith Goldberg as always. How are you, Judy? Glad to be here today.
Very excited with John Cameron. Yep. We have John Brooks Cameron with us and he's a fantastic attorney. He's a client of ours. Been with us for, I think, what, seven or eight months now, John? Something like that.
And you're in Ohio. I don't remember specifically where in Ohio. Outside of Cleveland. Outside of Cleveland. Got you. So, oh, so you're bummed out about the Browns. I can imagine that. I was kind of hoping that you guys would win against Houston so that you could go beat Baltimore.
That would have been nice, but my bill's lost anyway, so it didn't matter. That would have been nice, but it wasn't the way it was. That's true. That's true. So, you know, what we like to do on our podcast, as you know, John, is we like to talk about how successful attorneys have built their own firm because, you know, we're really trying to teach and just give inspiration to younger attorneys that are just getting ready to go out on their own and hang out their shingle or, you know, even.
you know, attorneys that have small firms that want to grow and scale them. And, um, you know, obviously things have been really fantastic for you lately. So I kind of want to go back a little bit to, when did you know you wanted to be a lawyer?
What was the aha moment when you said, you know what, I want to be an attorney. I think when I was about five years old. Oh goodness. Okay. So you knew right away. The attorney is a child. Gotcha. Was it your parents telling you you argued too much so you should be a lawyer?
Yeah, I think it was. I think I did have some encouragement from my father. Okay. Now, did your, were your parents lawyers as well or? No, my, uh, my father was a, uh, was a, uh, bomber pilot in World War two.
And, uh, then went into being a salesman, but he always encouraged me to, to go into the law or something. That's awesome. That's awesome. Well, it was obviously a good choice. So when you graduated from law school, did you kind of go the route that a lot of attorneys go and work for the prosecutor's office or clerk for a judge?
Or what did you do after law school? Well, I did an internship for an Ohio State Supreme Court justice when I was in law school, which was closest to judicial route that I went. No, I went a very unusual route, which is I went to work for a local attorney here in my hometown.
And him and I, I worked for him for probably around nine, 10 months. And him and I came to a non -meeting of the minds.
We came to a disagreement and ended in a not nice discussion where it was kind of, I quit.
No, you can't quit because I'm going to fire you. Kind of thing. One of those things. It was not a pretty day. Got it. And I suppose in retrospect, calmer minds probably could have worked things out.
But so anyways, at the time I was married and had two small children and no job and $235 in my checking. Oh. So I did the only logical thing I could think of, which was to immediately open up my own wallets.
There you go. With $235. $235. That's awesome. A gutsy move. Absolutely. Absolutely. So did you have any idea where you did you have some clients that you could go to or that you brought with you? How did that work?
I did not solicit any of the clients. that I had at the other attorneys, but they all seemed to track me down. That's awesome.
Ken with me and at the time, I basically another attorney in town who's passed, but was just a wonder who's human being said, I have an office upstairs here that nobody's using.
You can move in there and just pay me rent once you start making some money. That's awesome. So I bought two used desks. This was back when computers cost thousands of dollars, something that basically our phones all do much more than today, so I couldn't.
So I bought two used desks and a typewriter and hired a reception secretary, house cleaner, power washer. There you go.
Everything in the world that one could do, and she did it all. And I stayed really busy.
I from the very beginning, I just kind of, I was just kind of a sociable guy. I'd go into local restaurants and I'd sit at the counter and just strike up conversations with people. And we're a really home towny kind of place.
It was really easy to meet people and to find clients. And I would do anything. Someone said, I've got this Admiralty lot. Problem, I would have been, I'm here. I mean, that's awesome. So like the jack of all trades, right?
I was a jack of all trades. That's awesome. And then you just continue to grow and grow and grow. And that's kind of how you got to where you are now. Well, actually, I grew for a while, but at one point in time, I was doing a general practice and I think I had four attorneys working for me, a bunch of staff and just didn't really like it.
And I kind of cut back from time. And somewhere in the process of all this, I decided it was a whole lot easier to be really good at a few things and to try to do everything. So you niche down a little bit.
And it's down exactly. Basically, niche into personal injury and try to become really good at personal injury. What is your firm and your practice look like today? Well, my firm and my practice looks like today is we're rebranding from John Brooks Cameron Associates, which I wanted to take me out of the picture and rebranding something that can carry on after I'm out of here.
I'm trying to build a practice that will sustain itself without me. So we are empowering people to do everything around here so that ultimately I really want to spend my winter working remotely. I love doing, but I kind of want to come down and hang out with you guys.
Absolutely. That's the year. I mean, every day, I got room for you. I got a big house, man. No problem. Secretly snowbird come this time of year. Everyone wants to get out of here for three months. So, Hey, I grew up in Buffalo.
I know what it's like up there. I get it. Like effects. No, it sucks. John, those kinds of arrangements are doable. What I did for about 10 years before finally leaving Danbury, Connecticut, where I was practicing at the time for over 20 years, closer to 30 years in a divorce and family practice.
I came down south. Did another website. Yeah, Jay, who was, you know, pumping the gold for me up in Connecticut. And I took an annual rental and I came here Certified did everything necessary to continue mediation as well.
And because I had no intention of sitting for the bar came here, meaning Florida, South Florida. And for about 10 years, every four to six weeks, I came down for 10 days and my staff just operated it beautifully.
I could still work remotely, but it was a time for me to chill. Because other than that, I was a litigator as I'm sure you are as well and running the office. So you're working 24 seven. So that is the way I did it.
And then eventually came down completely. Yeah. And I think that is very wise way of doing things. My what I've been doing for the last two or three years, probably about two years now, is just really trying to build my procedures, my processes, procedures, my KPIs.
Yep. Very smart. And so to get everything is just down to an absolute routine so that we do it all the same way over and over and over again, which leads to a whole lot more efficiency than just having everybody doing the wrong thing.
Learn how to do it. They do well, but what happens when they leave? So now it's just my first priority was to build my internal processes and procedures, which I pretty well succeeded in doing. And then I really wanted to scale up.
Yeah, but you got to have a solid staff to do that. And we work with your staff all the time. And you have an awesome group. So I mean, I see how you can get here. And I think now after the pandemic, the whole world kind of shifted that remote work
is OK.
So like you could be here in Florida and meet with a client via Zoom, like we are right now, sign them up. They could go into your office, meet with your paralegal to bring whatever paperwork that they need and yada, yada, yada.
And, you know, I think. it's perfect. Absolutely. Because zoom totally revolution lies how I do business, how our office operates because when you do litigation, pre -zoo or pre COVID, everything was go to the court and sit around for an hour or two, waiting for some of the grand shouldn't audience.
And then you have to drive, walk up to the court, sit around and just kill so you've wasted half a day sometimes. Now everything is if you have a pretrial, you have a status conference at one 15, you're going to be done by one 30.
It's made it so much easier. More efficient. More efficient, easier, easier to be anywhere in the world you want. Work remotely. Yep. Absolutely. And the clients like it. Is that your experience? Absolutely.
I mean, how many clients really want to go down to a courthouse for a free trial? How many clients would much rather come to your office if the court assisted the president and be sitting, sitting inside you in front of a computer?
Sure. Or even in some courts be able to do it from their home as long as they're on the zoom. Absolutely. We've actually had zoom hearings where our client was home. We were at the office and the court was obviously in the court and everything seated.
So, you know, obviously now that you're looking to scale, but at the same time do it without adding people and more problems and being able to travel and so forth. Obviously, it's important to keep getting clients.
So, I think you've been with us for seven or eight months and I have seen and I've talked to Steven a bunch too about what's happening with your account. And you guys are just number one all over the place in terms of where you're ranking and all of that.
You're getting calls. Talk to me a little bit about how that is on your side. Well, from my perspective, as far as marketing, I just kind of wanted to start with the basics. And to me, what is the point of doing social media, doing any other kind of advertising billboards if you don't have a great website and we don't have great Google standing.
All of that's just to drive someone to my website when they get to my website. I want them to like what they see and convert. And convert. Exactly. And I also want to show that I have, you know, I'm popping up at the top of the list in Google.
Organically. I mean, we're not running ads for you. This is all organically. This is all organic, which is what I want to do. want it because that scene, yeah, I can do the local service ads and I can buy my way in.
And I am not opposed to that. But I'm so much happier with just having a salad base of popping up organically, whether or not I'm doing anything else is you guys are killing it. I appreciate that. I mean, we we work really hard.
I know that you're one of Steven's favorite clients. I know you guys, you don't talk to Steven as much as he talks to Ian, I believe. But you know, he when he said that that you were going to be on the podcast today, I'm like, Oh, this is gonna be fun.
Because I remember our initial conversation and we connected right away. And things just progressed. And we got you signed up, got you going, built you a new website, did all the new content. And absolutely.
And now all the work over the last six or seven months put you in an interesting position because you're ranking organically for everything. So it's only going to continue to get better and better and better.
So For those of you that are listening that would be thinking, well, if you're already ranked number one, how can you get any better? You can't in that specific area, but what can happen, and especially now that you're going more remote, your staff can even be remote.
You could have clients on the other side of Cleveland or in Akron who you still could sign up via Zoom. They could meet with your paralegal via Zoom, meet with you via Zoom. DocuSign's a great thing now, right?
And so what our focus has been for the last couple months for you now that you're ranking number one in your whole
service area, which is a pretty large service area, is now expanding that radius, right?
So if all of a sudden you start showing up for local searches organically in Cleveland, what a huge win that is, right? So that's kind of where our focus is for you right now, is to just grow your geographical footprint, but ranked number one.
And you're so right about the fact that we can sign people up via Zoom meetings, we can DocuSign. I like having human interaction with people. And once the client's signed up, if I have to, I will go visit them at some point in time before the case is over.
Sure. And then especially if it's a larger case, I'm not gonna let it go just totally remote, but it's, I mean, getting the client to hire is everything. What opportunity do you have to show what you can do if the client doesn't hire it?
To hire somebody else who's got a Ritzier website? So we make sure that nobody has a Ritzier website, John. So talk to me about how important do you feel organic searches? I know you touched on it a little bit earlier, but how important is it for somebody that's either trying to scale their firm or start their firm?
I mean, I'm a little biased. because this is what I do. I believe that you have to have a strong website. You have to be able to promote it properly so that it ranks organically because when all else fails, people still search for everything online.
If billboards aren't working and you try TV and that doesn't work, organic search will always be consistent. There will always be your best leads and there will always be the most consistent leads. You agree with that?
I absolutely agree. And that was kind of my premise when I first started with you was just to achieve that because that's there. That doesn't go away as long as I keep doing what I'm doing. And I don't have to spend, I don't have to have huge marketing budget to get a salary base because I actually am trying to add people to scaling further up but I wanted to have a salary base.
in every way I could. Because the last thing in the world I ever wanted to do was to suddenly get a bunch of business and then not be able to handle it. Right. Well, I think what you experience too, and when I talk to attorneys, sometimes they're afraid of this.
They're like, well, if I get as busy as you say I'm going to get, I can't handle it. And what I tell them is, it's not like you're going to walk in one day, and Judy, you know this, it's not like you're going to walk in one day and have 20 new leads on your desk, and then the next day have 30 new leads on your desk.
You don't walk in and just get smashed. It gradually grows. Well, Jay, my experience with you, when we first met, that, and that was what, 20 years ago? Yeah, something like that. That when you started, I started in a small little way, I saw an exponential growth.
Immediately, 24 hours, the amount of calls increased significantly. And over time, not only was there a greater number, but I found that there was a better client, a better case. Yeah, organic leads will do that.
Yeah. And I had more of a choice. I didn't have to take everything that came at me because I was looking to build a business. I could be, and that could be sad. Exactly what I want to say. Tell me about your experience.
Fill us in on that. Exactly what you're saying is so true because it gives us the ability to be a little bit choosier. We can't help everybody and we don't have to take everything that comes into the website.
Every phone call, we can pick and choose who we can really help and who it is that we want to help. And that just, it's great to have the choice, to have the ability to basically get better clients. I agree.
So as we're wrapping up with John Brooks Cameron again, and it's JC I believe is your domain, right? JBC. JBC Law. JBC Law .com. So if anybody listening wants to see the website that we built for them and kind of see how this all came together, you know, the website, the content, I mean, it all is one big, it's one big item, but you have to do it both, right?
You can't just build a great website and no content and so on and so forth. In closing, what advice would you give about, you know, building your firm, scaling your firm, taking the shot to go out and open your law firm with 235 bucks in your pocket?
What would you give for advice to a young attorney who either is getting ready to hang out their shingle or, you know, somebody that was in a position that you were that had a small firm that wants to grow it?
I would have two pieces of advice. One is try cases. Just try cases. Not that people are trying cases. And two is spend the time on building your infrastructure. Don't just wing it. Great advice. To get your processes and procedures to get your operation fine, too.
Because that's what's going to give you the freedom to be able to go out and try things. It's to be able to do what you want to do. In scale. In scale, exactly. Awesome. John, it has been a pleasure.
I really appreciate you coming on the podcast. I know that it's been a little bit to get all the schedules lined up, but I'm really, really happy that you're with us today. And, you know. Happy to be.
Thank you for joining us, John. Thank you. Absolutely. I look forward to seeing you here down in Florida. Yeah. Hey, Judy's going to buy that expensive dinner. You're going to buy these. I love it here.
Love it here. Great opportunities. All right. So once again, John Brooks Cameron, JCBlaw .com, one of our favorite clients. We really enjoy working with you. And I'm so glad that it's working as well as it is for you because, you know, you're one of the guys that deserves that, right?
Good things happen to good people. And this time it did. So, John, I appreciate it. That wraps another episode of the Legal Authority Podcast. Judy's Goldberg. I'm your host, Jay Rathman. And we will see you again soon.
See you soon. Thank you for listening to the Legal Authority Podcast. As always, you can hear us wherever you get your podcast. Please also make sure that you subscribe so that you're notified for each new episode.
If you have a question that you'd like answered on the show or to talk directly to Judy Goldberg, just go to thelegalauthority .com slash podcast. Until next time.