Live from Portland, Maine, it’s Ben Gideon and Jeff Wright, the team from Gideon Asen taping a special edition of “Elawvate: Build and Grow Your Law Firm.” Ben and Jeff walk through 10 proven strategies for building a financially successful law firm, covering everything from dominating a niche and making data-driven decisions to scaling without losing your culture and building systems designed for the law firm of the future. They also take audience questions. If you’ve had a question about being a law firm entrepreneur, tune in; someone else may have wondered the same thing – and Ben and Jeff may have answered it on the air.

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Welcome to Elawvate, the

podcast where trial lawyers,

Ben Gideon and Rahul Ravaputi talk

about the real issues that come with the

fight for justice. So let's

find inspiration in the wins.

Let's learn from the

losses. But most of all,

let's keep learning and getting better

and keep getting back in the ring.

Are you ready to elevate your own

trial practice, law firm, and life?

Let's get started. Produced

and powered by LawPods.

Hey, it's Ben.

Rahul and I started this podcast because

we love hanging out with fellow trial

lawyers and sharing ideas

that can make us all better.

And both of our firms also regularly

collaborate with other lawyers across the

countries in cases where we can add value.

If you're interested in collaboration or

even if you just have a case or an idea

that you want to bounce

off us or brainstorm,

Rahul and I are going to be hosting

confidential case workshops the

first Wednesday of each

month. So here's how it works.

If you have a case or an idea that you

want to talk about or brainstorm with us,

just send me an email to ben@elawvate.net,

E-L-A-W-V-A-T-E. Net,

or go online to elevate.net and

submit a case workshop request.

We will schedule you for a confidential

30-minute Zoom meeting where we can talk

about your case to see if we can help.

If you feel like there would be good

value in collaborating on the case

further, we can talk about that. If not,

that's okay too.

We enjoy helping other trial

lawyers because we know

someday you'd be willing to

do the same for us if we

needed your help. So again,

if you're interested in

workshopping your case with us,

just send an email to ben@elawvate.net

or fill out a case workshop request at

elawvate.net, and Rahul and I will

look forward to chatting with you soon.

Today's episode of the Elawvate

Podcast is brought to you by Filevine.

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So check them out at Filevine

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We're also brought to you by Steno.

Rahul, you guys work with Steno.

Steno is the best in

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Genius, where they can summarize and

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Now we're brought to you by Hype Legal.

Hype Legal does digital marketing

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They recently redeveloped our firm's

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If you like it, give them a call and

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we're brought to you by Expert Institute.

Rahul, you guys work with them, right?

We both use Expert Institute because you

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Going to the repeat experts every single

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the best way to do that is with Expert

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For more than four years, you've helped

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Say hello to the new podcast

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build and grow your law firm.

Enjoy this special preview episode.

It's like Rachel was

saying, thank you very much.

This is the first time they're doing it,

first time we're doing a live podcast,

so keep your fingers

crossed and we're excited.

So welcome to a live

taping of the Elawvate:

Build and Grow Your Law Firm podcast.

We're coming to you from the

Main State Bar Association,

winter bar conference and the fantastic

Western Portland Harborview in

Portland, Maine. I'm Jeff Wright,

Chief Operating Officer at Gideon Asen,

and I'm here with Ben Gideon, owner,

partner, founder of Gideon Asen.

How's it going today, Ben?

It's going well, Jeff. Are you nervous?

You were commenting that the lights are

awfully bright and I know you're now

entering the big time here.

Yeah, big time. It's one way to put it.

I would like to.

Point out-.

Jeff has humble roots.

Yeah. I'd like to point out that Ben

said we were dressing down today.

And so I wore jeans and a pullover

and Ben showed up in what looks like

a brand new suit. So

apologies for my appearance.

I was duped.

This is a common theme in our

business. But as I pointed out,

since you're not a lawyer, you

don't really need to wear a suit.

You're not expected to wear a suit. I.

Do love how you point out how I'm not

a lawyer all the time, but that's okay.

I consider that an advantage.

It is, but we won't go there.

Before we get started, we've

had a busy couple weeks,

so I don't know if you want to kind of

talk about what we've been doing as a

firm and then we can introduce for sure.

Yeah, sure.

So we just got back from our leadership

retreat three days out in Denver,

Colorado,

where the leadership team

focuses on our goals,

what we've achieved for the past year,

and then what our plan is for the

future year. Very productive meeting.

I think we identified some important

goals and keeping our progress

moving towards our four-year

vision. What did you think?

Yeah, I thought it was very

productive out in Denver.

And then one of the things, and we'll

talk about it later, is at the firm,

we try and have as much transparency

as possible with the entire team.

So a week after we got back from our

senior management retreat in Denver,

we had an all day offsite retreat

for all staff and covered our

strategic plan, our goals,

our plans for not only

first quarter of 26,

but for the year up through our

strategic plan ended at the end of

2028. It's nice. It's

been a busy couple weeks.

I think you left out that you were

skiing in Austria before that.

I was, but that doesn't have

anything to do with our business.

No, it doesn't.

No, we did manage to get to a rodeo

in Denver, which was interesting.

I don't know if anyone here has

been to the rodeo in the West,

but they have something called

Mutton Buston. Anyone aware of that?

It's where they take little kids and

they put hockey helmets on them and put

them on sheep, and then they go in

like ... It's like a bucking Bronco,

but for infants and children.

It seems like child abuse to me,

but they love it out there. We're going

to introduce that in Maine, I think.

All right, let's move into the

substance of the program here.

All right. So we have a

pretty truncated timeframe.

So we have 10 topics we want to

get through in less than an hour.

Each one of these topics would

be a full hour unto themselves.

So we're going to be as quick and

concise as possible. As Rachel said,

this program today is the top 10

proven strategies every lawyer,

entrepreneur needs to know to build

a financially successful law firm.

At the end of this,

they have allotted us time when we're

done with the podcast to do a Q&A.

So I would welcome anyone that

has a question or anything or

needs more clarity on

something at the end.

We will do a Q&A if anyone's interested.

I know it's the last session of the day

and most people will be running for the

Hills, but we are available.

Yeah, you can come up and sit at the table

with a mic and you can join us on the

podcast and introduce yourselves.

And if you have a question or want to

take issue with anything we've said or any

discussion point, we're happy

to do that at the end. So Jeff,

I thought before we covered the topics,

can you just give us maybe the 30 second

summary of where we are as a firm so

people will understand the context from

which we're discussing the points we're

talking about today?

For those of you not

familiar with Gideon Asen,

I'm going to give you kind of the Reader's

Digest version and paint a picture on

what makes these guys think they can

get up here and give their opinions and

advice on what makes a financially

viable, successful firm.

So Gideon Asen, as most of you know,

is a plaintiff firm focused on

complex medical malpractice and

catastrophic personal injury.

The firm was started in 2020

by Ben Gideon and Taylor Asen,

the other founder partner. And really

Since 2020,

the firm has grown not only in staffing,

but also in revenue where

2024 added more than a million dollars

in revenue every year in existence.

At the end of 2024,

Ben and the leadership team

met and they said, "Well, geez,

we've met all our goals from what we

wanted to do to start the firm." And

somebody said,

"So what's next?" And so the team

took that to heart and wrote a very

detailed four year strategic plan.

And one of the first things on that

plan was to bring in a

chief operating officer,

preferably a chief operating officer

that did not have a legal background that

could look at a firm from a business

standpoint and not through the eyes of an

attorney that chief operating

officer happens to be me.

And I started in- The.

Jury's still out. The.

Jury's still out. I

so I've been there roughly, well, a

which we just ended,

we were able to increase

our revenue by 100%

and we've increased our staffing by 50%.

We've gone from 12 full-time employees

to 18, and our revenue doubled this year.

Coming off of our strategic plan,

we plan on adding two or three

more positions this year,

and we are projected based upon our

pipeline and everything to double our

revenue again in 2026.

So we want to talk about some of the

strategies that we've implemented and that

we think firms that are

looking to grow and expand

and/or people that are looking to start

their own firms could have some benefit

from. All.

Right. Let's jump into it.

All right. So number one,

everyone should have a handout

on their tables if you don't.

We do have more back there.

And the first one, Ben,

I guess my first question, Ben,

is how did you come up with these 10

things and kind of the title of this

program?

The 10 items here are all ...

So my process in trying to understand

how to build and grow a law

firm,

I started probably like many of you

as a lawyer only. For many years,

I had a job at a firm and I practiced

law. That was my primary work.

And I didn't really spend a lot of time

focused on learning much about running a

business or running a law firm.

When we started our business,

I've invested a lot of

time and I've become very

interested in the topics of the

business issues relating to

building and growing a firm.

And part of that has been reading.

So I've read a lot of books.

I listened to podcasts,

but some of the books that were most

informative and influential for me are

listed here under each topic.

And my process is I'll read one

of these books and as I do it,

I take notes and then I

consolidate those down. And then

over time, I've moved those

into different categories.

And so that's sort of how

the 10 categories came to be.

It's a distillation of my learning,

I would say both from my reading,

but also from our own experiences

that we've gone through,

mostly learning by trial and error,

making many mistakes, fixing problems,

and coming to understandings

about different things.

Well, kicking into number one,

the crux of your thing there

is being a great lawyer doesn't

necessarily translate to being a great

owner of your own firm. And I guess,

why do you feel that way and why

do you use the word entrepreneur

kind of in the title of this,

which I think is important?

Yeah. I mean, this is something that

took me a little bit of time to come to.

I don't know. Has anyone here read

Michael Gerber's book, The E-Myth?

The central concept of the book is that

you can either work in a business or you

can work on a business. If

you're working in a business,

you're doing the tasks that are necessary

to make that business successful.

So as lawyers,

typically what we're doing every day

is legal work and practicing law and

serving our clients. That's

great. I did that for a long time.

I got a lot of joy and satisfaction out

of it, and I still do to some extent.

If you want to build a business though,

you can't just work in your business.

You have to work on your business,

and that's a different skillset

that involves ... In fact,

it means you have to give up a fair

amount of the day-to-day legal work and

focus on the business issues relating

to building and growing the business,

which we'll get into. So it's sort of

that core insight that to some extent

by training yourself to focus

only on doing legal work,

you're not in a great

mindset to build a business.

We have a whole episode just on this

topic, and it can consume an hour or more,

but I do distinguish between ...

There are many lawyers who

very successfully translate

their legal skills to

a very successful practice,

building a solo or a small practice

with a couple of lawyers and a

few staff. That's not what I mean.

I think that that's very doable even

if you're not really focused on the

issues relating to business

development and scaling.

When I'm talking about

building a business,

and that's why the word

entrepreneurial is important to me,

I'm talking about building

an entrepreneurial business

that's designed for

growth, because those are

two very different things.

Having a platform where you're

just using a business as a

foundation to sell your

own personal services,

that's not what I mean

by growing a business,

because there's very limited business

related skillsets you need to do to

accomplish that successfully.

And I don't mean to minimize that.

I think that can be a very

successful career and practice,

and many people do very well

like that, and that's fine.

There's no reason you need to change.

But the goal, if somebody wants

to build and scale a business ...

Right. And I guess I would ask you, Jeff,

since you've been here a year now and

you came in midstream from a different

sector, brand new to the legal business,

how do you see your role and

your past experience in business

integrating into a legal setting?

I was surprised though-.

You should tell people what you used

to do before this, just so they know.

Well, again, probably going

to hold it against me.

I was a banker for 25 years.

We like bankers.

You like bank? You figured

that? It's the way ... Oh, geez.

I've tried to shed the look. So

I was in banking for 25 years,

kind of climbed the ladder on my last

role as a chief operating officer of a

billion dollar bank. And long story short,

I got sick of banking and wanted to

change, but thought my operational skills,

my project management skills and

everything were translatable to another

business. Didn't know what business

it was. Saw the opportunity.

A recruiter reached out to me at Gideon

Asen and I was trepidatious because I'm

like, "Okay, it's a plaintiff firm. What

does that mean?" I was literally like,

"How does that differ from a

defendant's firm or what do they do?

" And it's personal injury. And I'm like,

"How is it going to translate and do they

really want to know an attorney?" And

I think this might sound arrogant,

but I think it's probably one of the

better decisions they made is to bring in

somebody that knew nothing about

the legal world because I look at

everything through a completely

different set of eyes and the

skills are very translatable to

building and scaling a business

and working with business owners

over the last two decades,

it doesn't matter whether it's an

attorney or whether it's somebody

starting a car wash business.

The scale and the

concerns that every small business

owner has are translatable.

And Ben had said to me during

the interview process, he said,

"Most law firms are run by attorneys

and they run like law firms, Jeff.

They don't run like businesses.

We need to translate this into

running like a business.".

Does that mean growth?

Is that what we're talking

about here's nothing but growth?

We're supposed to repeat the questions

because they won't pick up on the mic.

So the question from the audience

is, does that mean growth? Jeff,

why don't you take that?

I don't know if it necessarily means

growth. I mean, I think first of all,

you have to look how the business is run,

whether your ultimate goal

is going to be growth.

One of the first things we worked

on was the firm's mission and

the firm's culture. What type

of firm do we want to be?

What do we want our attorneys

and our staff to represent?

How do we want our day-to-day to be there?

And once we kind of solidified the

culture that we wanted and the core

values,

that has really translated into

virtually every decision we've made.

Every hiring decision, yes,

we look at resumes, yes,

we look at experience and everything

else, but it comes back to,

do they fit the firm's culture? Do

they fit the firm's core values?

So I think it's a lot more than

profits and scaling and growth.

It's what do you want your

business to represent?

And to Ben's point at the beginning,

if you want your business to be,

you're a sole practitioner and

you're not looking to scale,

you're looking to just provide good

services under your own umbrella,

great. But what do you want those services

to be? What's your niche going to be?

Are you going to try and go head to

head with a Goodwin Proctor as a sole

practitioner? You're probably going

to lose. So what's your niche?

What's your value that you're

going to add to those clients?

And to be able to make those

decisions and look at them internally,

long answer to your question, I

apologize. It's more than profits.

It's more than scaling.

It's developing the

business that you want.

To be in every day. You

moved into topic eight,

hiring for values and

reinforcing the culture.

So I think we should cover that because

we're going to run out of time to cover

everything. But so I would say, first of

all, we have to be practical about it.

You have to get to a certain size and

scale and revenue before you can afford to

hire somebody full-time as a chief

operating officer that's not available to

everybody.

And I don't recommend that if you're a

one or two lawyer firm with a couple of

staff. But what happened

for us was we got to ...

When you start an entrepreneurial

endeavor, at the beginning,

you're doing everything, you're wearing

all the hats. And that's my partner,

Taylor and I were doing that

initially. We were doing the finance,

we were doing the HR, we were

doing the legal services,

we were doing the marketing,

all of it.

And what we found as we grew over time was

we weren't capable of doing all of those

things and at least we're doing them

very well.

And so there got to be a point where

our highest and best use was no longer,

for example, doing HR. What

happens is, and I think,

and this goes to the core values

point in topic eight and the culture,

we kept running into growth

problems and ceilings in our

business because of internal

conflict and culture.

We would have staff that were not fully

bought into our mission in certain ways.

There was internal conflict

at times between staff.

It made for a difficult environment.

My partner and I would then get into

policing internal disputes where someone

would come to me with a criticism or

complaint and then they would go to my

partner and there would be ...

So just got to be that navigating

the people part of the business

became emotionally draining

and distracting and

having us, once we got to

a certain scale of people,

more than a dozen employees,

that became an overwhelming problem and

one that was distracting us from our

mission.

So hiring Jeff allowed us to offload that.

I think the thing that Jeff brings to

our organization more than any other

single value is that

he's extremely good at

interpersonal relationships and

making everyone on our team feel

100% supported and valued and

bringing out the best in everyone.

And since Jeff has come,

we've had some people that didn't

fit into our culture that left

and had to leave and we've hired many

new people and we've been very careful

about vetting people to make sure they

are a good cultural fit so we don't go

back to a world where we

have internal conflict.

But I think anybody who runs a business

would probably agree that the people

part of the business is the hardest part.

And particularly when you're

dealing with law firms,

because lawyers tend to

have very big egos and Well,

not present company, but ... Yeah, no,

I mean the reality is

law firms generally ...

And I started my career at

a big firm in New York City,

then I was at a relatively good sized

firm in Maine and then started my own

firm. So I've seen it

at all different levels.

Law firms tend to have a model

where there's two sets of rules,

one that lawyers get to play by and then

one that everybody else gets to play

by. Of course, the staff

sees that right away,

that they have to follow the

rules, but the lawyers don't.

And that already creates a toxic internal

culture, if you ask me. Secondly,

you then tolerate people because let's

say they're good rainmakers or they're

very exceptional at their

craft of practicing law,

but they're like frankly assholes or

they treat the staff poorly or they don't

represent your firm to the external

world in a positive way that you want,

but they're generating a lot of revenue.

And most firms tolerate that because

the bottom line is revenue. If you

value culture, you don't tolerate that.

And I should say, one of our core

values, and we talk about core values,

is one of our things here is making

decisions based on science and data,

not fear or ego.

And we have incorporated science

and data into our hiring process.

When we hired Jeff,

every candidate for his position

took a psychological test.

All of our leadership

team took that same test.

It was extremely valuable in identifying

characteristics of people that you

might want or not want.

And it's surprisingly difficult to

ascertain that through just like a

typical interview process.

We've now created a tailored

psychological profile

for a trial lawyer that we had the

company make just for us that we are

now able to use to get science and data

before we hire a lawyer for our firm.

And if anyone's looking

for a job, we're hiring,

but you have to pass the

psychological test first,

which means you can deal with Jeff mostly.

So you want to move on

to another topic here?

Yeah, we're all over

the map, but it's good.

Well, we covered topic eight now. All.

Right. So we've done one and eight,

so we only got eight more. It's good.

That's exactly how I knew

this would go. Number two,

treat business decisions with the

same rigor as legal decisions.

What do you mean by that?

This one's very simple,

and I think it's something that gives

me confidence in building a business

because as lawyers,

we're all really good at doing

analytical work and problem

solving. After all, that's what

we're there for, right? Clients,

whatever they're transactional,

commercial, criminal defense, whatever,

somebody comes to you for a problem, you

help them solve it. And fundamentally,

that's all running of businesses.

It's a different set of problems,

but the issue is that I

found is that as lawyers,

we employ a lot of rigor when it comes

to solving the problems for our clients

in the legal setting,

but then when it comes to running the

business part of what we're doing,

we don't employ the same amount of rigor.

So we've tried to impose those kind

of systems of rigor onto our business

decision part of the business in addition

to the trial part. It's been really

great because that's what I'm used

to anyway. For every case I do,

I impose that kind of rigor.

So it's very natural to do

it in the business setting.

And some examples of that are,

there've been a lot of really

bad decisions we've almost made.

Yes.

We've made some really bad decisions.

We've made some really bad decisions,

but we've also avoided making some

because we have a system for decision

making, which involves multiple

people that all have strong

personalities and points

of view that weigh in.

So there's a vetting process

where if Ben has an idea,

it doesn't within 24 hours

translate into execution.

There's a process that's

discussed, vetted,

and then decided upon by smart people

that are all willing to speak their mind.

Part of that is having people that

are willing to speak their mind.

So one of our values is truth and

communication, openness and transparency.

As Jeff said, I come up with a terrible

idea. Hopefully Jeff will tell me, Ben,

that's a really bad idea. And that has

led to a lot of near misses, I would say,

where we were about to buy very expensive

buildings or hire people that we

shouldn't have hired,

or you can go down the list of things

where we almost made bad decisions.

That more or less covers that topic.

I mean, the books that I cite there,

Ray Dalio Principles,

great book that talks a lot about this

and the need to confront reality where it

is, to be very honest about the reality

that you're dealing with and not

characterize the reality in

the way that you want it to be.

You have to deal with reality

as it is. Second book there,

the Daniel Kahneman book,

Thinking Fast and Slow,

that's all about cognitive bias.

And we all make so many decisions,

not even aware of it

based on cognitive bias,

whether it's group think

because everybody's thinking

the same thing and you're

not having a contrary position

or a bias towards a risk aversion

or the bias towards sunk cost fallacy

where you started down a path and you

continue down the path because you've

already invested in it without realizing

you're just putting good money after bad.

So many things like that that affect

decision making have to be avoided

to make the best decisions.

So do you want to add to a

topic two about decision making?

No, just, I mean,

there's a great quote that I try and

abide by when it comes to decision making.

John Wooden, the legendary

basketball coach at UCLA said,

"Be quick,

but don't hurry." There's a lot of

truth to that where you have so many

decisions every day,

whether you're trying a case or

whether you're running your business,

that you need to be decisive

and you need to be focused,

but be quick,

but don't hurry because hurried

decisions usually lead to bad decisions.

We try and avoid that wherever we

can and we put things in place,

like Ben said internally to avoid it,

we're going to make bad decisions,

but we have metrics and processes to

minimize those as much as possible.

Yeah. And that's a good segue to topic

three, design before you execute,

but don't over-engineer early.

So there's a good quote I've

heard from many sources.

I don't know who quoted it initially,

but something to the effect of,

"If you have no plan,

you'll certainly get there."That's

really been a driving force for us.

When Taylor and I started this firm

before we even began, we sat down,

we wrote a business plan and it's really

apocryphal because if you look back at

that plan, even our

year-to-year revenue goals,

we literally met them

within a short range of 50,

$100,000 year to year,

which just demonstrates the power of

having a goal and having a clear idea of

what you're setting out to accomplish,

but the concept of don't over engineer.

I don't know if any of you are

familiar with the lean startup concept.

This is sort of the stuff that is very

hot in Silicon Valley with especially

tech startups,

AI startups. There's an author named

Eric Reese who wrote that lean startup,

but the concept is minimal

viable product now.

This is how tech startups

and software companies work.

And the idea is that you don't

want to spend inordinate amount of

time early on in design

because without having

enough feedback to understand if your

design is really salient to your consumer,

to the public and the market. So

what you want to do is put out,

and this is the software concept,

you put out the minimum viable

product and then you iterate,

you're constantly refining, you're

constantly improving with feedback.

And so that's what we've tried to do in

our service sector type of business

Because we don't want to get paralyzed by

trying to design the perfect system.

We want to design something that

we want to have large vision and

goals and then just start moving

forward on that and then getting

feedback loops to help us iterate.

I mean,

one example is we recently launched

a television radio ad campaign.

We've never done that before.

I've been doing this for almost 25 years

and have never done direct to consumer

marketing. Now, how do we do that?

What's the perfect ad campaign?

You could spend years

designing a perfect campaign.

There probably is no

definition of perfect.

We used our core value of science and

data. So we designed a messaging campaign.

We actually did survey data where we put

that out there and compared it to other

competitors on the market and got

real world information for that.

70% of the people who took the survey

said they would hire us based on our

messaging compared to our competitor

commercials if they were only basing

their buying decision on the

commercial. So that was some data point.

It wasn't a ton of data,

but it was good enough. Then we launched

it and now we have a feedback loop.

So every client who contacts our office,

our staff takes very detailed

information about how they found us,

what they're looking for for lawyers,

what the characteristics are in a lawyer

that they want to hire, all of that.

Our marketing director, Matt, over there,

is shaking his head. He's fantastic,

by the way. So now we're iterating.

We've got a feedback loop.

We've got data and we can

make smart decisions on that.

We could have spent years designing the

perfect campaign and we still wouldn't

be doing anything right now. So that's

just one example of that concept.

So understanding the topic four,

understanding which risks

to take and which to avoid,

this is kind of risk management. I've

got a spiel on that, but I'm interested.

If there's one main difference,

I would say between banking and

trial law on the plaintiff's

side,

it's going from a highly risk averse

culture to a highly risk tolerant

culture.

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So what have you noticed about that, Jeff?

I mean, to a certain extent,

but at the end of the day,

there are so many parallels to banking

because you assess the risks of a case

and you look and you see maybe what the

insurance caps are. And

if you take it to trial,

you might get X number of

dollars. If you settle it,

you're going to get X number of

dollars. What's right for the client?

What's right for the firm?

How long is it going to take?

How much case costs are you going to

carry for two or three years before it

settles? So you're assessing your risk

virtually every day with your cases.

And it's the same thing

on the bank side. I mean,

especially on the lending side.

You could do a $40 million

loan for a commercial customer,

but what's your risk and how are you

going to hedge it? And so there's a lot of

parallels to it.

And I think every firm

has to make a decision or

there has to be tactical times when

you want to take risk and when it makes

sense.

And you have to be very

clear on your risk tolerance

as a firm, but also on

a case by case basis,

which I'm sure is what you're

going to lend your wisdom to.

I'm very interested in this concept of

risk because it permeates everything we

do.

We always have to counsel clients on

what are the risks of taking a case

to trial versus settlement. In the past,

you were always operating on very

limited data because it was largely past

history and intuition, which

isn't notoriously unreliable.

We now do big data studies

on every significant case,

which really in our practice

is really every case.

And that gives us at least

more ... It's not perfect,

but it gives us more data we can work

with in order to do this kind of risk

assessment. I've read two books recently,

which I think are phenomenal

on the topic of risk.

One is the Nate Silver

book called On the Edge.

I don't know if anyone here read that

book. It's Nate Silver was known for 530,

was it 536, 538,

The Political Prognostication website.

He's also a

quasi-professional poker player.

So the book is kind of like talking

about the risks involved in poker,

how people in Silicon Valley with the

startup culture evaluate risk and then

how the rest of the world looks at

risk. And it's pretty fascinating.

There's another book called

The Black Swan by Nasim Taleb,

which is also a take on

risk. Like most things,

there's inconsistent and

contradictory concepts involved.

The concept of this black swan is

that there's a lot in the world that's

inherently unpredictable.

And yet most things that we

deal with relating to risk,

like if you're going to invest

in the S&P 500 index, well,

you're told that that's low risk,

but it's not low risk when some

macroeconomic force occurs

that causes everybody to go

down and lose their shirts, which

happens more often than you'd expect.

Like once every decade, that basically

happens. The concept he came up with,

which made him very successful

in financial investing

was you have to identify

asymmetric opportunities for

asymmetric returns where the

unpredictability works in your

favor and not against you.

And there's no better world

where that exists than trial law

because when we tried a case recently

where the offer on the table was

$300,000 and our verdict was 25 million.

So there's an opportunity

for asymmetric returns.

So that's a black swan working for you.

Now, in another case we had recently,

there was an offer in excess

of $30 million on the table.

We could have taken that

case to trial, but if we did,

the unpredictable result

would've worked against us there.

So the asymmetric return probably

would have worked against us.

So trying to figure out

whatever your business is,

where are those opportunities

for asymmetric returns based on

unpredictability that you can

take advantage of and other people

aren't seeing?

And so we've really tried to do that.

And it's always a challenge

to identify where the

tipping point is there. But I

would say that back to that,

so many decisions that

we make are not based on

objective criteria or

expected value calculations of

actual results. They're

based on things like,

"I'm really worried that I won't be

able to make payroll this month," or,

"Somebody told me about

something that happened to them,

so this is probably going to

happen to me. " Or like we said,

"I've already invested so much money

into this. I have to keep going.

" Those are all the kind of cognitive

biases or individual fears that

cause you to make decisions that are not

objectively maximizing your ability to

manage risks.

So we really have tried to reduce

the number of decisions we make

on those kind of anecdotal

knee-jerk thinking. And one

example is we've developed a very

complex settlement matrix where,

like Jeff was describing

earlier, we can plug in there.

So we're thinking about

advising our clients about

the risk of settlement versus

trial

or continuing down the path for a while

before we settle or so other things.

And I think lawyers often think

about that as it's either A or B,

but you're forgetting about things

like, well, what's the opportunity cost?

Because you're employing staff and

resources to litigate this case, right?

They could be spending time on something

else that may have a higher upside.

You're also forgetting about,

so you think about the first

order benefit of a settlement,

money in the pocket of your client or

money in the pocket of your law firm,

but there's second order consequences.

What is the social value

of that public trial to

getting the word out about certain

conduct that your client wants to shine a

light on? What is the downstream value

to your law firm or the reputational

value of winning a big verdict and getting

the next big case because you've been

willing to do that?

If you're only looking at first order

consequences and not second and third

order consequences,

you're missing a lot of the value

in your decision making process.

So let's move on to the next,

so that's topic or we've

covered eight already.

So we've got 15 minutes. Let's do topic

five, financially unbreakable systems.

You want to talk about that, Jeff?

We were just ironically talking to our

accountant about those kind of things

this morning.

Financially unbreakable

systems. Yeah. So yeah,

you kind of need money to do

everything that we're doing,

but along the lines of

you want to build, I mean,

and Ben puts it financially

unbreakable systems,

but you have to try and look

holistically at your firm.

You can't look ... Although you're

looking on a case by case basis,

you have to look at, again,

the second and third tiers of what

your decisions are going to make.

What's your cushion?

How much do you want for a cushion at

your firm and how your decisions are made

from that? We spend a lot of time,

we have a finance meeting every week.

We met with our accounting

firm an hour ago,

right before we came into this meeting

to already project and plan ahead for 26

and quarterlies and everything else

and made some decisions as a group

on how we're going to make the changes.

But you have to be very deliberate.

And I think part of that also is what

is, and Ben alluded to it before,

and it may deviate from this,

but I think it all goes the same.

But what is the best and

highest use of your time?

Because having Taylor Asin or

Ben Gideon opening the mail or

doing intake calls is not the

highest or best use of their time.

It's something that had to be done when

the firm was first started because they

didn't have the financial systems

in place to have other people

doing that.

You can't run out and hire eight people

when you first start unless maybe you're

a trust fund person or something

or somebody's gifted you.

And then your goals have

to be centered around being

financially viable and

understanding ... I mean,

case costs are perfect example, I think.

We fund our case costs internally

right now and we talk and it

revisits probably every quarter,

should we finance these?

Should we do this? Should we do that?

Should we charge interest? Should we ...

And we throw around

all these other things.

But when Ben was talking about

that matrix we put together,

a big part of that is the carry

costs of those case costs.

And you have $500,000 worth of case

costs that have been out there for three

years, you better factor

that into your decision.

And when you have a pipeline of cases

that are on your books that are getting to

the point where those case costs and

the experts are starting to ramp up,

where are those funds coming from

and how is it going to be allocated

appropriately?

And having those systems

in place to help drive your

decisions is critical.

Yeah. I mean, the core insight in

financially unbreakable systems is that

durability is critical.

If you can't survive,

you're not going to

accomplish anything else.

So your first order of

business has to be to build a

strong foundation that

allows you to survive.

And that includes through

weathering storms when

not all of your projections come to

fruition where, I mean, we have to assume,

everybody who knows me well knows

that I've lost a lot of trials and

I lost a very big trial a year ago that

we had a huge amount of money and a huge

offer on the table.

And we were able to weather that

storm and it didn't really even

impact our bottom line

materially because we had a

strong financial footing.

If we didn't have that,

a single case like that could have

bankrupted our firm and meant we wouldn't

have been around any longer to do our

further cases. So you've got to earn ...

I feel like you've got to earn the right

for that. If I want to go try a case,

I've got to earn the right to do it by

making sure I'm doing it from a position

of strength, not I need to win that case.

If I go into trial and I need to win,

it's going to be desperate.

It's like when you need to have a date

and you're going up to every girl in the

bar asking her for a number,

there's a smell of desperation that

everyone consents and you don't succeed in

that setting. You have to

be coming to it with a ...

And I'm not talking from

personal experience.

I.

Just.

Didn't know if you had firsthand.

Experience.

With.

That. And then anyway,

that doesn't apply in the modern

world with the internet anyway,

but I've been married for 25 years,

so I don't know how any

of that works these days.

I think the other point

there, and one thing-.

The other point is we

need a good HR person.

Which we have.

Right.

I'm the HR person as well. But

I think another point there,

and we talk about it a lot when it comes

back to culture and core values is you

can't make case decisions based on your

finances because they're

going to be bad decisions.

And what I mean by that is you

decide to settle a case maybe

prematurely because it'd be

nice for that firm to get that

$700,000 in the bank

and you can't put your

clients in that position and

you can't have your firm in that

position and building that financial

durability so you never have to

make that decision as critical.

All right. Moving on. Topic six,

dominate a niche instead

of fighting market leaders.

So one of my favorite books on that is

Seth Godin has written a lot of books on

marketing. The one I thought was the

best is called This Is Marketing.

His sort of core insight

is that your initial

foray when you're starting any kind of

an entrepreneurial venture is to identify

the smallest viable market because

by identifying the smallest

market for your services,

what you're doing is

mapping what you do best,

what you bring your highest and best

value to a niche that is going to benefit

from that service.

So if you were starting a small firm

going head to head with Pierce Atwood and

being a full service law

firm that offers M&A and

bankruptcy and whatever,

immigration, so forth,

you're not going to compete effectively

with Pierce Outwood doing that,

right? But if you are really

good at one niche thing and can

make a name for yourself in that,

you will grow rapidly by

reputational value and word of mouth

and so forth. And so we did

that when we started our firm.

We were very deliberate about focusing

like a laser on we are the best at doing

complex medical malpractice cases.

And for the first several years,

I would say the lion's share of our

new cases were in the field of medical

malpractice.

It's a good niche because very few

lawyers want to do those cases.

They're expensive, they're complicated,

there isn't a lot of room for mistakes

there because you can quickly lose

your shirt on them and so forth.

So we did that and all of our

marketing was very targeted on

that. We would write

articles focused on that.

We wanted to establish kind of industry,

being industry leaders in that area,

and I think that was very

effective for us. Since then,

we've now expanded out into other

areas of kind of complex civil

litigation and personal

injury cases beyond that.

But if we had tried to

do that at the outset,

I think we would've been

much less successful at

building our business because

there's a million lawyers out there

who want to do garden variety personal

injury cases. So that's just one

example. Whatever niche you're in,

you want to simplify and narrow it to

the thing you do the very best and then

put all of your focus and eggs

into that basket initially,

develop those relationships,

build that business,

and then gradually concentric

circle out from there.

I think you'd be great to talk about,

Jeff, building systems, metrics,

and accountability.

We build a lot of systems, metrics,

and accountability.

So part of our strategic plan was we

tried to narrow down and focus on what our

biggest metrics and measurements

are going to be, KPIs,

key performance indicators.

And there are so many different things

that you could try and point to.

And we've really narrowed it

down to less than a handful of

things that we think are the

most important things to our

firm. And then we back it up

with data and we track it.

And it goes back to, again,

one of our core tenants that we

try and do everything as data

driven as possible, which I think

for attorneys, what I've learned is,

especially for trial attorneys,

a lot of it is your past experience

and your gut instinct and how you can

react in real time and in front of a

jury or giving an opening or giving a

closing. But those may serve

you very well in that role,

but they may not serve you great

if you can't reel those things

in and have the metrics. And one

of our biggest KPIs is what we call

qualified cases.

And we look at it and we

decided what we felt were

qualified cases for our

firm. What were cases that,

to the niche part, we weren't

expanding beyond our reach.

We had the expertise, we have the systems,

and we have the ability to handle

this case and add a lot of value

to it. And we found out

that in order for us to get

qualified cases,

we probably have to talk to anywhere

between 500 and a thousand potential

clients to get those qualified cases.

So everything else that we're doing

is really trickling down from that

KPI. If we have to talk to

that many potential clients,

how does that impact our marketing?

How does that impact our intake team?

How does that impact our onboarding team?

How do we get the data so that

we are more focused from a

marketing standpoint,

from an intake standpoint,

to try and drive more qualified cases?

So I mean,

Ben, I can kind of kick over to you.

Yeah. And the other part

of it is we try to do,

we have a Monday meeting every meeting.

So anybody here run

their business or follow

the EOS model, entrepreneurial

operating system.

It was kind of discussed in this

book called Traction by Gino Wickman,

which I've listed here,

but there's some different

systems like that businesses,

entrepreneurial businesses use,

and we use many of the

tenants of EOS in our company.

Part of that is having

regular meeting pulses,

but one of those is we have a Monday

meeting every week where everyone in the

firm is there for the

first hour of the meeting.

We have a defined dashboard

that lists out our

KPIs and key performance indicators that

apply to each different segment of our

practice.

So every week we're looking at what

are the number of intakes that came in,

how many phone calls were answered,

how many cases were accepted, rejected,

how many are in this category,

how many are in this category?

What is our settlements, revenues,

how many case reviews were completed?

So the thing about that is there's

really at least one or two metrics that

applies to every different

department in our firm.

So the intake department has metrics,

the litigation teams have metrics.

And it's a way to kind of impose

some level of accountability,

public accountability

at the weekly meetings.

Public shaming.

And public shaming to some extent,

although we try to do it with good humor

most of the time, most of the time.

Yeah. So we do that and that

really drives everything we do.

And those KPIs are not arbitrary.

They were developed because they all

track to something we're trying to

accomplish in our

mission. So as Jeff said,

we need a certain number of qualified

cases. For us, that's the key metric,

because for instance,

if we looked at revenue,

revenue in a plaintiff's firm goes

like this because you might have a big

settlement in a big case, all of a sudden

your revenue looks really impressive,

but that's not really an indicator of

the health of your business because you

may not have another case like that

coming in the pipeline anytime soon.

And so if you were basing your decisions

only on revenue or your health of the

business,

that would not be a good indicator.

So what we've come to as qualified cases,

because we know if we have a certain

number of qualified cases in our pipeline,

that will translate into a certain number

of revenue over a certain period of

time. And whatever kind

of practice you have,

I think a good first step is to identify

what are the two to three or one key

metrics that you really want to

track. And it's going to be different.

If we were an hourly rate practice, it

would be a totally different metric.

And then the systems part is just having

replicable systems that once you've

figured out how to do something well,

you continue to do it the same way every

time and train people to do it that way

so you're not constantly reinventing

the wheel and you have consistent high

quality standards across the

board. And when we started,

we would have multiple paralegals and

they would all be doing things their own

individual ways. And one way would be

better and the other way would be worse.

And at some point it occurred to us, well,

why aren't we just taking

the best practice and having

everyone do it that way?

So we've really tried to do that across

the board and systems that define what

we're doing. So we covered eight.

Let's move quickly onto nine in our

last three minutes and we'll cover 10.

Nine,

scale without diluting

identity or quality.

This is kind of the stage we're at right

now, Ben. We've laid our foundation.

We had a fantastic year last year,

and now we're in our scaling

phase. What's our next step?

We're filling out our litigation

team. We're increasing our marketing,

we're increasing our intakes.

How do we scale without losing

all the things that we've put in

place that have been

successful up to this point?

And a lot of that is very simple things,

but the service you try and give

every potential client that calls in,

if we all of a sudden go

from 60 intakes a week to 250

intakes a week, are we going

to lose that personal touch?

Are we going to lose that ability to

be able to decipher on whether it's an

appropriate or qualified case or can

we refer it out to another attorney? So

to be able to scale and not lose your

culture, not lose what made

you successful to begin with,

I don't want to say is what

we're struggling in, but

that's this year for us.

That is 2026 and we're

three weeks into it.

Yeah. I mean, for me,

this is very personal to me because I'm

getting older as the days and years go

by and there comes a point

where I'll want to do less.

I want to have a firm where the

firm isn't about the individuals,

it's about having the firm.

And the firm comes first and

we have a powerhouse firm,

not just people that have good

reputations. And so we're now, I mean,

I no longer do most of the

legal work on most of the cases,

which I did for years.

I've very intentionally

taken myself out of ...

I'm not lead counsel on any case

in our office now, which I love.

It doesn't mean I'm not

intimately involved in every case.

I am just in a different way, but

that's been critical to scaling.

In order to scale, it's self-evident,

but you have to take yourself

out of being indispensable

for everything. Otherwise, you can't

scale. You have limited amount of time,

you have limited time horizons.

So there's things where I can

add value and strategy and input

into some of the critical

junctures in cases.

I'm still going to probably be first

chair in every trial we do for the

foreseeable future, which

I'm happy and excited to do.

But if I don't take another deposition

in my lifetime, I'll be very happy.

I'm doing two next week. But the

reality is I'll still do a few,

but I'm for the most part not doing

depositions, not doing the briefs.

I'm trying to take myself

out of most of that.

This is how I know we're

on the right track.

It's very easy for the Benzen

Taylors of the world to give

up things that they don't enjoy.

They gave up facilities and

buying office furniture.

They gave up dealing with our IT vendor.

Taylor really enjoyed the office version.

He did. I had to pry it away from, which

that's because he likes a good deal.

We hired a marketing person and brought

him in house, so they gave up marketing.

So all those things were the easy things

for them to give up. The hard things,

and I know we're on the right path because

Ben and Taylor are starting to give

up things that they've been doing for

the last two decades and been doing very

well,

and they have the confidence

in the team that we've

built to hand over those

duties that in the past,

"If I want it done right,

I got to do it myself." And so

that's the exact trajectory we want

to be on. And I don't know, it's good.

Yeah. So we sort of at the end, but let

me just comment on the very last topic.

One of our goals in addition to our

financial goals and client services

related goals is we actually

have an internal goal.

We call it building the law firm

of the future. And I think, I mean,

we all probably use AI in

different capacities currently.

I am a huge user of AI.

I'm probably on ChatGPT,

much to my wife's dismay,

like five hours a day,

but it has enormous power to

leverage what we currently

do and to make us more

efficient and productive.

It also has the power to

distract and be useless.

So we have to use it in a very

deliberate and intentional way.

But I think it's fair to say

that what a law firm looks

like even two or three years from now,

let alone five or 10 years from now,

is going to be totally different.

There will no longer be teams of

people answering phone calls that will

almost certainly all be handled by AI.

A lot of the things that paralegals

currently do will be done by AI,

a lot of things that young

associates ... I mean,

in our medical malpractice cases,

getting a lawyer competent to

review a complex medical record and

make decisions about even whether that

is or isn't the case would take years in

the past and hours and

hours or days of time.

It can be done for the most

part in about an hour now,

utilizing AI and training somebody

on how to issue spot through that

process.

So there's just so many ways in

which whatever industry you're in or

practice, AI is going to revolutionize it.

I think in terms of being a

law firm owner and a leader,

the goal now is to start building

your practice with that in mind,

not to use AI to substitute

for anything right now,

but to be thinking about how that might

be done in the future and creating

systems that will enable you to do

that as the time becomes ripe for it.

So we could talk a lot more about that,

but we were out of time. So with that,

as we said at the outset,

we'd love to have anybody who has a

thought or questions or wants to continue

the conversation. Feel free to

come up. You can use this mic.

You can join us on the podcast

if you want. Otherwise,

it was great to see everybody. I hope

you enjoyed the conference. Rachel,

thank you for inviting

us. Have a nice day.

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