Behind every successful lawyer is a blend of expertise, adaptability, and a knack for storytelling—and Andre Regard exemplifies all three. Today I am joined by Andre, whose journey spans from the horse tracks of Kentucky to bourbon distilleries and high-stakes litigation. He shares insights on building a versatile legal career, the art of client service, and the intersection of passion and profession. Andre’s approach to blending personal passions with professional expertise will leave you inspired and ready to think differently about your own legal practice.

Key Topics

03:09 - Andre shares his unique journey from Louisiana to Georgetown University and the Navy.

06:27 - Transitioning into equine law and balancing passion with legal expertise.

07:15 - Inside the world of thoroughbred racing, syndications, and high-value horses.

09:07 - Stories from representing some of the most prominent horse owners and breeders.

11:02 - The remarkable case of Curlin, a $75 million horse.

11:51 - Unique legal challenges in the equine world, including genetic anomalies in breeding.

14:51 - Andre’s evolution into complex business litigation and contingency cases.

16:46 - How Andre tackled COVID-era litigation, from FMLA cases to tuition disputes.

18:30 - The story behind Kentucky Senator Bourbon and how the brand was born.

20:31 - The unique three-tier structure of the bourbon industry.

22:31 - Plans for expansion, including upcoming bourbon releases in Louisiana.

23:23 - How bourbon law became a niche practice area for Andre.

26:53 - Advice for young attorneys: customer service is your greatest asset.

29:32 - How Andre leverages third-party legal providers for efficiency.

32:07 - The crucial role of intake in law firm growth and success.

34:59 - The financial math behind investing in intake staff.

38:33 - Breaking down the four pillars of a successful business: sales, production, administration, and leadership.

39:01 - Andre’s productivity tools: Teams, Monday.com, and his iPhone reminder app.

40:07 - Personal wellness: Andre’s daily one-hour morning walks.

44:47 - How to contact Andre and why he’s always ready to share a bourbon over conversation.

Resources Mentioned

Technologies & Apps:

• Microsoft Teams – Collaboration and communication platform.
• Monday.com – Project management and task tracking tool.
• iPhone Reminder App – Personal productivity tool.
• Zoom – Video conferencing platform.

Books:

• The Art of War by Sun Tzu - https://a.co/d/fYbDvUC 
• On War by Carl von Clausewitz - https://a.co/d/cHUcQj0 
• Blue Ocean Strategy by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne - https://a.co/d/eQgSiu8 

Other:

• CallRail – Call tracking and analytics software. - https://hey.callrail.com/ 
• LegalSoft – Remote legal services provider. - https://www.legalsoft.com/ 

About Guest:

Andre F. Regard has practiced in various state and federal courts since 2000. He is a seasoned litigator and business transactions attorney. Andre has prevailed in complex business cases for clients in both state and federal courts.

Andre F. Regard grew up in Louisiana and attended Georgetown University for undergraduate and law school. He served in the Navy for 8 years as a Supply Corps officer with the Nuclear Navy. Andre lives on a farm in Kentucky with his wife Jennifer and their seven children. Andre has been an active thoroughbred horse owner and breeder since 1996.

https://www.regardlaw.com/ 

https://www.linkedin.com/in/andre-regard-5057b83/ 

https://www.instagram.com/andreregard/ 

About Jay Berkowitz:

Jay Berkowitz is a digital marketing strategist with decades of experience in the industry. As the CEO of Ten Golden Rules, he has helped countless law firms and businesses harness the power of the internet to achieve remarkable growth and visibility. Jay is also a renowned keynote speaker and author, sharing his expertise at various industry events and publications worldwide.

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Your path has taken a number of interesting twists and turns. What advice do you have for a young attorney? Does it follow your heart and your passion?

I think my advice would be one, you have to work hard. I think people, there's a lot of lawyers that are very successful, that do very well for a variety of reasons, summits, luck. They happen to be in the right place at the right time, but to practice law, it's hard work. Do you have to be diligent, and you have to keep in mind, if you want to own your own practice, you can be a very technically competent lawyer and do very well as an attorney. But if you want to own your own law firm, it's all about the customer experience. It's all about knowing your customers, networking, having the technical expertise, but it's customer relationships.

Good morning, good afternoon, good evening. Welcome to the 10 Golden Rules of Internet Marketing for Law Firms. Podcast my friend Andre Regard is here today, and you're going to learn all about his lawyer business, his bourbon business, the horse business, very interesting, guys. So today's going to be a lot of fun. I'm looking forward to it. I just want to take two minutes and tell you all about tgr live growth strategies for law firms, our live event happening this year in Delray Beach, Florida, March, 10 and 11th. It's at the beautiful Opal grand resort right on the beach in Delray Beach. If you don't know where that is, it's right in between Palm Beach Boca Raton, where our head office is, and it's a beautifully redone Hotel. Really, really awesome. So the event's going to be amazing. Two days of experts in the legal space with growth strategies, marketing strategies. Of course, I'm going to be sharing some of our latest and greatest case studies and marketing tactics. Mike Morris, the famous Michigan based pi attorney, has a $200 million firm, and he wrote a book called fireproof. He's going to talk about how to fireproof your law firm and his systems and EOS operations. Great guy, a new friend of mine. Ben leader, has an amazing case study. His firm went from 230 assigned cases a month to over 500 mostly from improving their intake processes. So he's going to be doing the intake playbook. Charlie Mann's going to talk about his Referral Engine and strategies for building your referrals. We've got Andy Seaver, the CEO and founder of case status, is going to talk about the number one new legal software. They won the award at the recent Clio conference. Another guy really looking forward to hearing from Jeff Hampton. He's an attorney out of Texas with 18 million YouTube views, and so he's going to share his strategy for building up his YouTube so we've got amazing speakers, great location, and maybe, just maybe, Andre and I are trying to work out the details. There might be a bourbon sampling of the new February release, but he'll tell us a little bit more about that. But with all that said, Andre Welcome to the 10 golden rules podcast.

Well, Jay, I really appreciate you having me on your podcast. I'm excited about our conversation today. Great

to be here. So first tell us a little bit about your journey where you're from, and get us to law school, and then we'll get into the other stuff after that. Sure,

sure. So I have kind of a long journey, like everybody usually does. I grew up in South Louisiana, New Iberia, Louisiana, which is right near the Gulf Coast. My father was an attorney. He was also a farmer, so I spent a lot of my life on a pecan farm. When I was a kid, my dad was in charge of the harvest as his brother ran the the growing of the crop. So I kind of grew up in that atmosphere. And then when I was 18, going to college, I decided to leave Louisiana. I wanted to go to Georgetown University in DC. I visited DC when I was nine years old, and fell in love with the school, and that was always my goal, but I had to figure out how to get there and how to pay for it. So I got a navy scholarship. So I went to Georgetown on a Navy ROTC scholarship, and I always knew eventually I would go to law school, but when I graduated at Georgetown, where I had an accounting degree and the Navy program, I went to the supply School, which is like the business side of the Navy, and then the Navy sent me back to DC, so I was only out of DC for about eight months, and I went and worked for the nuclear reactors program. That's the program that's in charge of the acquisition and development of nuclear reactor systems on aircraft carriers and submarines, predominantly these cruisers a little bit, and that gave me an opportunity to start going to law school in the evening at Georgetown. Georgetown, which wasn't my plan. My plan was to go to the Navy, go back to Louisiana, go to LSU, probably, or maybe Tulane. But because I was in this navy program in DC, Georgetown has a very active evening program. A lot of people from the Pentagon, from the hill business people that are in DC for a variety of reasons. So I would do Navy stuff all day long in law school at night, and after a couple of years, I was sent to upstate New York to be the government procurement officer at a large nuclear research facility. So I did that for. A couple of years, and then went back to DC when I got out of the Navy, finished law school. Somewhere in there, I met a young lady and married her. Her family was in the horse business. We we say the horse business, we mean thoroughbred race horses. Yeah, and they lived in Kentucky, so she convinced me to move to Lexington. So I moved here in 1999 I had just finished law school, started working in Lexington as an attorney, and also got more and more involved in the horse business. And then, actually, after a couple of years of practicing and doing horse related stuff, I retired from practicing law, and for about 10 years I was just in the horse business. So I ran a large horse operation with my now ex wife, but we're still quite friendly. We have four children together, and she did all the husbandry aspect, and I ran all the business side. And we would raise money and buy horses and breed them and sell the offspring. And that was all great until the financial crash of 2008 and nine. So I guess I was full time for eight years at that point, and then took me a couple of more years after that to work it all out. But I knew all these people in the horse business, and they were all in the same situation I was in, which were the challenges of the financial crash, and they all needed a lawyer. So I started actively practicing again, and my practice initially was almost 100% equine related. Had

you kept your CLE dump and everything like, Were you still licensed? I kept

my license up, my CL ease, I have not kept up my CPA, clees. I got my CPA when I graduated from college, but never practiced. And I did keep I kept up my law. I just didn't practice because

you were still doing contracts and deals. Well,

I would go to the equine law conference every year. So I went to that one conference which was necessary for my horse related stuff. I would get my 12 or 14 hours, two hours of editing. So that all worked out well, certainly wasn't going to any marketing conferences like yours at that point. So I started practicing law again, mainly doing equine and then from there developed,

before we leave, that you were hanging out with the king at a race King of England. Yeah, tell us that story. And a few of the interesting things that came up in the horse business, sure.

Well, the equine industry is fantastic. I mean, next to dealing in art, it's one of the coolest things in the world. You have such a group of people. You have extremely wealthy international business people who have money to spend. You have people who've been involved for generations in the business. You have mom and pops who are running outfits. You've got racing and breeding and races around the world, and royalty and the Queen of England, now the king of England, the sheiks from the UAE and Dubai, the princess from Saudi Arabia. Lexington, Kentucky, has the biggest horse yearling horse sale in the world. Over the course of about 18 days, they'll sell over $500 million worth of horses. Wow, this year, they had 38 horses that sold for more than a million dollars. So when people say, what does an equine lawyer do? There's a variety of things we do. We devise horse farms on how to do their operations, risk management. Kind of your typical business advice is just, we know what they're doing. And because I ran a breeding operation for almost 10 years, I have real innate knowledge about that. We also do stallion syndications. When a horse wins, the derby becomes real, very valuable. You'll, you'll normally that horse will go to a stallion farm and it'll be sold in shares. So how to structure that deal and put that deal together? I don't represent any of the large stallion farms. I normally represent the owners of the horses, particularly when they're kind of one offs. And then we have disputes of vet malpractice, care and custody, malpractice and those sorts of things. So it's really kind of a wide variety of issues that if you just know about the horse, you have a certain expertise that other people don't have. And it's not just thoroughbreds. I've done thoroughbreds, I've done Olympic horses, I've done standard bred horses, I've done backyard horses, I've done quite a variety of them, but, but it's brought me to some great places. So this June, I was,

oh, those Olympic horses that dance to the music. I love that one. Yeah,

those are neat, though. I haven't done one of those yet, but I've done the hunter jumpers in the cross country horses. So what you were referring to earlier is, in June every year in England, there's a five day race meet called Royal Ascot. And the Queen always went for the whole time she was Queen, except for in 2020, during the height of COVID. Yeah. And of course, nobody really knew if King Charles was going to pick up where she left off. But he's a bit an equestrian as well, and he's more polo the Queen Consort is big in the thoroughbred. So every day the royal family does a procession and comes out for the races. King Charles was there twice this year of the five days, but every day I think, I think Queen Camilla was there every day. And then they usually have three carriages. And this year I was able to get 15 feet from the King during one of the trophy presentations. And in 2019, When I was walking out a hallway and the elevator opened up and the Queen was standing right in front of me. So this was my second time this year, and I intend to go every year. Better security that should, yeah, but she had two pretty big guys behind her. I'm sure not they were gonna we were kind of in a cool area. If you have the top hat on, they assume that you're probably not there to, yeah, hit her with a shovel or anything. But it's really neat where the horse industry try and get a selfie or anything. No, I did get a picture of her, but not a selfie, yeah, but I do remember when I was I was near one of the trophy presentations, and there's a jockey from to Troy who is Italian, but rides in England, and he was getting a trophy from her, and she made some comment about he was one of the people that she knew the best, that she saw the most, because she had presented so many trophies to him, which was kind of neat. And I really knew the game Exactly, exactly.

And what's the most famous horse that you've represented, or the most famous stallion so Curlin,

who's currently one of the most prominent stallions in the world. At the time that he was running, he became the largest purse earning horse in the history of US racing, and I was very involved during his racing career and subsequent staffing career. There was a big ownership dispute among the owners, and there were some other issues that had taken place, and at one point, curling was valued at $75 million so these horses can become pretty valuable. I've had crazy, crazy cases. I had one this year or last year with a breeding prospect that had been purchased. They couldn't get her pregnant, and it turned out that while she was anatomically female, chromosomes were male. She had no female chromosomes. Well, then you get her pregnant. So just really weird things. I'm not going

to go, there's a lot of one Lacher. There's a lot that can try and write any of them. No, it

was very it was very timely for what's in the news these days.

And I mentioned I did some work. We worked with the Woodbine race track in Toronto. When I was a young man. I was worked with an ad agency, and I got to work on that account for a couple years and do the Queen's plate. And, yeah, that's the big Kentucky Derby of Canada, if you will. Right,

right? I have a friend who has a two year old Philly that just won first time out at fairgrounds going a mile, and she's Canadian bred by justify who is a Triple Crown winner. And now they're all about the Queen's plate. It's not about the Kentucky oaks. It's not about the Alabama it's like, this is going to be our Queen's plate horse. Because if you got the derby every year, I'm sure, yep, I go a lot. I go a lot. It's It's a big day when you go to the Derby, it's football games. Can be long because you're there for four hours and you go to the Derby, it's a solid 12 hour type day. Yeah, there's races all day. It's a lot of fun. There is, and it's an hour and a half between the race before the Derby and the Derby, which is about half of a football game, right? So the lot of mint juleps that are drunk around that hour and a half, it's exciting. It's a little rowdy, right? It gets a little rowdy. But boy, when I have a lot of friends who are jockeys that have ridden in the Derby, and they say, and they've written a lot of races, and they're like, when you're in the Derby and you're on the horses, and you come around that turn into the top of the stretch, and there are 180,000 people that start yelling, screaming. They say, it's like hitting a wall. They say, unbelievable. All the jockeys feel it. All the horses feel it. It's just an incredible energy.

Well, so part of winning is the jockeys got to keep his wits together and the horses got to keep his weights together. There's

those jockeys don't get enough credit for what they do. They're not just along for the ride. They're not quite race car drivers, but they're pretty close to it. You're and

you're riding on a race car, and it's volatile, and it's full contact. Sometimes it's crazy. It is. It is. Those guys are about 100 pounds soaking wet, right?

Exactly, exactly those. Those guys work hard and gals at what they do, and they deserve the credit they get, and they're great people. So where I'm from, in Louisiana, South Louisiana, there's a history of jockeys from there, which is really interesting. I mean, I grew up in a place where people were like, Hey, are you going to be a jockey? And they really meant it. So there's, there's a lot of jockeys from that area. And I wasn't really involved with courses before I moved to Kentucky, but when I got here and started meeting people in the industry, and then started meeting the jockey meeting the jockeys, and realized how many of them were from South Louisiana, I started representing a lot of them, not as not as jockeys agents, but just when other legal issues would come up. So Shane sellers and Robbie Alvarado and a variety of other jockeys I've helped through the years. So that's

still a lot of fun, and now you've transitioned to more full time legal business and really building up the firm over the last five to 10 years, right, correct.

So, as I mentioned earlier, started mainly focused on equine slowly expanded into more of a business litigation practice, which is what my background is, as an accountant and a business guy. One of the things. Things I enjoy doing are contingency business cases, which a lot of people won't do, taking a business dispute on a contingency, and I've had some good success with that. And then after COVID happened, I kind of episodically would have a personal injury case. And then in the last couple of years, I've decided to try to build that aspect of my practice. So what we really are trying to focus on at regard Law Group are complex business litigation and contingency business litigation and personal injury cases. So that's that's really our focus, no criminal or family or things like that. And I've done some consumer protection and some class action work as well. We got really involved in COVID related litigation when COVID happened, and by COVID related litigation, we immediately got involved in emergency FMLA cases, because everybody got sent home, or all these issues were coming up on whether or not you got a vaccine, did or didn't get it, or or how do you take care of your family? So we got involved in a lot of those types of employment cases. We also got involved in business interruption cases, and then we also got involved in university tuition cases. Matter of fact, the Kentucky Supreme Court was the first and one of the few Supreme Courts in the United States that have said that the students at the public universities have a contract with the university related to the tuition that they pay and in classroom instruction, and that was a case I had argued in front of the Supreme Court myself. There's eight public universities in Kentucky. We have cases with all eight public universities. It's slow going, but we were pretty happy when we were able to get that ruling from the state Supreme Court. Yeah,

it makes sense to me, because you can take courses from several the Ivy League on online for free, and the content is accessible, but it's the experience and the networking and the relationships you make in college. It's probably worth 10 times its weight in gold, right? Well, sure. I mean,

Elon Musk recently said, to be educated, you don't need to go to college any longer. You can take every course that MIT offers they make available for free online right now. So you can get an MIT engineering degree equivalent. You won't say MIT, but you can get the equivalent skills and education, but you won't get that network, and that's why you go to what we call a high touch residential university, and that's what they advertise. You go because you're trying to get that collaborative experience, which really is what life's about. Because we don't live in pigeon holes. We deal with one another. These universities are like, Hey, we didn't promise you that. We just said you could take a class. It doesn't matter how we deliver it to you, and it doesn't matter where we deliver it to you, and the reality is, they kicked all the students off campus, and they should give them back some of their money. Everybody else does it. If you're a business person, and you charge somebody for a service up front, by the way, it's not even a restaurant where you pay before you leave, charged up front and the service isn't provided, then you, in good faith, ought to refund portion of that fee, and that's all the students are asking for.

Makes a lot of sense. Now I do want to talk about the lawyer business and the Internet Marketing for lawyers podcast, but sure, we definitely got to talk about the bourbon business, and that's super interesting. And we recently had Bob Simon on that. Did I mention that who has been approved podcast, and I recommended you to him, and he'd heard of your your product, so So tell us about the bourbon business. Sure.

Well, real quick about Bob. Bob's a great guy. I've had a chance to meet him a couple of times. I was not able to go to his event. I wish I really didn't know him at that point. I wish I had known about it,

and it happens in San Diego every

every I meant his bourbon on proof of that he actually did where they came into That's right, yeah, came into Louisville, and they rented the busses and drove to to the distilleries. I'm big on experiences. Jay, I like to tell my kids, if I lived in Idaho, I'd probably own a potato farm, because that's what you do in Idaho. But if you're going to live in Kentucky, you might as well be involved in horses. And then eventually I started drinking bourbon like a lot of people do, and I really got involved. And then one day, I had a client that came to my office, and he said he wanted to start a bourbon company. And it was just kind of a little idea that he had. And we started talking, and I said, look, let's just do it together. So we each put in about $5,000 and we got a couple of other friends to put in some money and we bought some bourbon. There's three ways to be in the bourbon business. You can own a distillery, which is pretty big investment. You can buy bourbon directly from a distillery under contract, distillation, or there's a wholesale market of bourbon that's available for a variety of reasons. Woodford Reserve has great bourbon, but they're tasting it constantly as it ages, because bourbon ages for at least four years. Most bourbon that people drink that's kind of your premium bourbons or age six to eight years, and that flavor of that bourbon is constantly changing, and sometimes it gets out of their flavor profile. Doesn't mean it's bad bourbon. It's just not their flavor profile. It's. So they'll sell it on the open market. So we went out and bought some bourbon, and we were lucky that we were able to acquire some 15 year old bourbon. So our first release was a 15 year old bourbon, and it was really successful, and we sold out immediately. So then we kind of parlayed that into what's the brand? What's called Kentucky Senator bourbon. So each of our bourbons are named after a different US senator from Kentucky. It's always going to be at least six years old, because that's the term of a US senator. And we always bottle our bourbon at 107, proof. But our goal is for all of our bourbons to be different. So we're not looking for one consistent flavor profile. We're actually looking for variations and variety. Our commitment to our clients or our customers are that we're going to have great bourbon with a little bit of history, but it's going to be good bourbon. Now, you might like last year's better than this year's for a variety of reasons, but they're not going to be bad. They're just going to be different. So we're really, really focused on sourcing really good bourbon. We also have developed some distillery relationships now, so we're doing some contract distilling to recipes that we've created. They're called mash bills. And I thought the horse business was a long profile, because in the horse business, you breed a mare and that offspring is not going to run for three and a half years from the time of the breeding. Yeah. But then I got in the bourbon business where you're going to distill bourbon and you're not going to sell that for us, because we're not selling it less than six years old. It's going to be six years before we sell that bourbon. So we kind of moved the company forward over three years. We did five releases, and then we were able to recapitalize the company. We did a cap raise, sold off about a third of the company, and got a fair amount of cash in hand. So now we're expanding, and as we go into 2025 we're going to do two Kentucky releases in our first out of state release. So it's going to be called the Louisiana senator, the Huey Long because I'm from Louisiana, so I'm partial to Louisiana. And our game plan is, as we grow, we'll do these special releases in other states and continue to grow our main brand, which is Kentucky Senator bourbon. And maybe down the road, have a have what we call a shelf brand that would just be no always the same. But right now, we're focusing on special releases. Our next release will probably be about 2500 bottles, not huge, but big. Move up from 1000 and then eventually we want to get up to about 770, $500 bottles of release building

out the business. And if they can get the batch approved for Florida, we'll definitely have a bourbon batch release party at tgr, live, yeah, if not this year, 10th and 11th in Delray Beach, Florida. Our law firm, growth strategies event, sorry, just dropping a little live commercial in there, but no, at a minimum, we'll do a little tasting. Andres promised to bring a couple bottles at a minimum from the new batch in February.

Absolutely, absolutely, we're definitely going to have some no matter what. So it's been fun. And then, because I got into the business myself, kind of similar to the horse story. I then started representing other people in the bourbon business and doing licensing issues, not so much dispute related stuff, but to licensing issues and acquisition issues and M A issues related to the bourbon industry. So in Kentucky, we've got horses and we've got bourbon, and it's great, right?

That's awesome. So if you're a young attorney, I always like to ask this question, and you're starting out. I mean, your path has taken a number of interesting twists and turns. What advice do you have for a young attorney? Does it follow your heart and your passion and do good work and it comes to you or

Well, I think my advice would be one, you have to work hard. I think people, there's a lot of lawyers that are very successful that do very well for a variety of reasons. Some it's luck they happen to be in the right place at the right time, but to practice law, it's hard work. Do you have to be diligent, and you have to keep in mind, if you want to own your own practice, you can be a very technically competent lawyer and do very well as an attorney, but if you want to own your own law firm, it's all about the customer experience. It's all about knowing your customers, networking, having the the technical expertise. But it's it's customer relationships. If you're a lawyer, you're expected to be available. And that's the reality of it. I had a client. It's kind of a harsh story. He owned a Big Short Line trucking business in New Jersey. He had the UPS contract for everything that went at JFK and LaGuardia to get to the UPS. So that short, short haul, great contract. And it was a great, great guy. And he was really, really prominent in the horse industry. And you know, he called me one day to do something on a Sunday, which is when a lot of horse deals take place. Horses run on Saturday in the big races, then on Sunday, there's a lot of trading that takes place. And I asked him if he could wait, and he's like, but you're the guy who chose this profession. Transaction, you chose to do equine transactional work, and if you're going to do equine transactional work, then you have to do it when the transaction takes place. And I think that's true about law. If you're going to do personal injury law, when the client calls you, you need to be available, and we need to be responsive to our clients, because you're not always going to get a great outcome. But I think if you provide good customer service and you make yourself available, even if you don't get the outcome that you want, meaning monetarily for your client, they're going to appreciate that you tried and that you communicated and that you kept them abreast of what's going on, and technology today has made that a lot easier. I mean, there's so many in the last two years, so many services that have become available that gives you those touch points. But there's no better touch point than picking up the phone once in a while. I think one of the things that's happened in the last 10 years is we've gotten addicted to our iPhones and our other types of phones that we carry around our smartphones is we forget that the human voice is so important and valuable and impactful. So pick up the phone and call your clients every once in a while and just give them a little update. If you call a client and just say, look, Jim, I'm calling you. I don't really have anything to report to report to you. I just wanted to let you know we're in the middle of discovery. This is what discovery is. We're going to be doing this, this and this. It takes 3045, seconds that client will appreciate that so much. And even if you don't get the outcome, they're always going to remember that you took the time. So a long answer to your your question, I guess the short answer is, customer service is, what is? What you need to learn. You're going to learn the technical aspect. What's going to differentiate you is customer service.

And you know, you mentioned you've been able to parlay the horse business into legal work and the bourbon business into legal work. What's a advice for someone who's got a passion they're involved in something that's whether it's their hobby or even more so, how do they turn that into legal business?

Well, it's networking and customer service. One, there's a lot of people in the horse business. I make sure that I tell the people that I meet in the horse business that I'm an attorney that does horse work. A lot of young lawyers. It's interesting. There's a lot of lawyers who don't want to tell people their lawyers. Well, if you're a lawyer, you better tell people you're a lawyer. There's no nothing more frustrating than when something happens to somebody you know that you could have helped them resolve. And you tell them, hey, I do those types of problems. And they say, Well, I didn't know that. That means you fail. You fail to let the people around you know what you do. So, you know, as it relates to horses and bourbon, as I'm dealing with distilleries or dealing with retailers or dealing with distributors, vendors in the industry, I always make sure I also tell them that I'm an attorney and I ask for the business. I say, look, by the way, not only am I involved in the bourbon business, I'm a lawyer. If you ever have any issues, disputes, transactions that I can help you with, please let me know I know your business. You're a vendor of mine. I know the business. Be happy to help you just and that gets around. Yeah, because you're talking, you talk to the guy who makes the labels. Well, he's talking to a new startup guy. The new startup guy is like, Oh, I'm just doing this, and I've got some partners. And then the label guy says, Well, call regard. He can help you set up your structure. And it just goes around. And it's also true about the horse business. So then, because of the liquor business, any restaurant you go to, any every restaurant in the world is selling liquor. I mean, the liquor business is everywhere. It touches everybody, almost everywhere. So there's always an opportunity to kind of tell people what you're doing. And then with the horse business, I'm in the center of the horse industry. It's just innate. In Central Kentucky, I have to let people know when I go to the sales or I go to the races. I make people, make sure people know that I'm in the business cards. I have a couple of business cards,

yeah, so include the lawyer business card. I love it exactly, all right. And so tell us a little bit about the firm. We're Thank you. Happy to be working with you and providing some marketing services. Got a nice new website, and yeah, SEO is responding. You're getting a few more cases, and the local service ads are going pretty good. Tell us a little bit about the law firm and some of your marketing initiatives, sure.

Well, as I mentioned earlier, I didn't really start focusing on personal injury type work until the last couple of years. So before that, my website was always more of what I would call a calling card website. Just presence give you some legitimacy. Most of my work has historically been based on referral based from the other people in the horse industry, our bankers, CPAs, financial advisors, who clients would get into business disputes now doing more personal injury, which is what we're trying to. Focus on with our website and our social media, that's much more of a consumer facing business, in my opinion. So we have a little bit of a dichotomy, because we still want to make sure people know we're not exclusively personal injury. So we want make sure people still know that we do this other type of work, but our marketing is very much geared now towards the personal injury and those types of cases, injury cases, it's been a good experience, but talked to a lot of vendors, went to a lot of conferences, spoke to a lot of people, have tried various things. I have a pretty small, compact firm. I have a couple of three lawyers that work here, in addition to me, couple of paralegals I have always used, even before services like legal soft came out, everybody talked about VAs I've always used a lot of third party legal providers. A lot of those services have been around for a long time in different capacities, and I was an early adopter to using, I don't know if I wanted to use the phrase contract attorneys, but off site attorneys to do specific projects. My job is to bring cases into the firm. My job is to bring clients in because a business practice can be pretty diversified. A lot of times, I didn't have the technical skill set. I had the technical skill set to be a litigator. That's what I am. I'm a litigator. I go to court so I understand civil procedure and process and how to run a case, how to run a project. I may not know the ins and outs of that particular issue, and that's where I find that using third party lawyers can be helpful, because you can find a subject matter expert when it comes down to certain motion practice and things like that. So I've always been a big promoter of using that, I think it really allows a law firm to leverage itself, and I think that's also true when it comes to marketing, and I also do it with bookkeeping and accounting. A lot of law firms are like, Well, I'm a small law firm, and I'm going to hire somebody to sit at the front desk who's also going to be also going to answer the phone, and they're also going to do the books, and they're going to write the checks and they're going to deal with the vendors. Well, those are all different skill sets. Yeah,

they're probably good at one of the four things, exactly. And it's the same thing with marketing. Like, people always ask me if we could hire 10 golden rules, or we could hire one person, and my answer is always, I'm supposed to be an expert at all these things, and I am, on a very, you know, high level, but like when I log into Google Now, they're changing things every day. That's so complex for pay per click and Facebook pay per click and the Google SEO is is changing every single day. So our team that's full time on it knows exactly what's going on. But good luck to one person trying to be an expert in all these different areas.

I learned that I used to hire a lot of young associates coming out of law school, and when you're a small practice, the reality is they're inexpensive, that's the reality. So you figured you're going to hire somebody and you're going to educate them and teach them and train them. The reality is, they don't know anything, and you end up wasting a lot of time trying to get them up to speed so they can go hang their own shingle, or they can go work at a large, large law firm that has a training program that's not going to help me. If I have a subject matter problem, I need to find a subject matter expert. And what I've learned over the last couple of years is, as you go into trying to do more consumer faced marketing, particularly personal injury. You're spending all this money on marketing, and it's taken me a while. I've heard this, and I'm getting my head wrapped around it, but I think the biggest bottleneck that happens in a law firm, if you're going to start marketing your law firm is your intake. It's all about the intake, because if the phone rings and you don't have adequate intake, you're not going to get the case. Yeah, I'm happy to give my cell phone. I always will answer my cell phone. I will text somebody back, but there are going to be potential clients that call when I'm in court or I'm doing something else and I simply can't address it, and if that person who's answering the phone is not a skilled salesperson, yeah, you're not going to get the client. And when I say salesperson, I don't mean use car lot sales. I mean understanding what their role is, which is their role is to get an adequate amount of information from the client to determine whether or not the law firm can provide them a service that's going to be helpful. That's kind of the deal, right? What are the five or six questions you need to ask to know whether or not we can help them, and once we establish that we can help them, we have to make sure they know that, and then we have to secure them as a client. You have to have empathy. You have to know enough about what's going on with their case and what's going on in the market, and you have to secure that client, because there's nothing more frustrating than spending 1000s of dollars a month to get the phone to ring to not secure the client. So

yeah, your intake, if your intake is 50% as effective as it could be, you. You're going to sign half as many deals. It's really simple and

and I think one of your previous guests, and you mentioned them earlier, Ben, yeah, I listened to that program. As a matter of fact, after that program, I haven't called Ben, but there were a couple of vendors that were on that program. Think Adam and Chad maybe, yeah, and I've contacted both of them, so that was a great program.

Yeah, we do a monthly live event, if you're new to the podcast and our live streaming event, I believe, in November, we had Ben leader and and three other experts on intake and talking all about Ben has this case study of how he went from 230 cases a month to 510 and the guys all talked about the different strategies. And, you know, you mentioned one of the simplest things, and people always tell us over and over and over, oh, we're great. On the phone, we answer, we never miss any calls. And then as soon as we turn on Google's local service ad program or add call rail, call tracking, 10 or 20% of calls are missed. And the law firm shocked, and they can't believe it, but it's as simple as the receptionist goes to lunch and the second person is supposed to be answering the phone is on a call, and you miss a call? Well, Google's tracking everything now, so you can't miss calls. And that's just the starting point. And like you said, then you have to show the empathy and the expertise to convert those opportunities. When

you sit down, you try to figure it out. I mean, if you're a small firm is getting into the marketing arena, may not a Darryl Isaacs or John Morgan. They're spending millions of dollars. But, I mean, you're just going to kind of get your feet wet before you know it. You're spending between Google and a vendor and this and a that phone systems. You're spending 1213, grand a month, right? So you need to hire a dedicated person, because if you get one more secured case a year a month, 12 cases a year. And once you figure out your average fee, and if you're in a state like Kentucky, where we have $25,000 minimums, and even if the other person doesn't have insurance, you've hopefully got who I am, so a case that comes through the door that has an injury has $50,000 of potential value, which is an $18,750 fee to a law firm. I mean, you multiply that by 12, that's $250,000 a year. And you don't want to hire an intake person for 50 grand and give them some bonuses. I mean, that person will pay for themselves. And that's one case, that's just one more case a month. But lawyers have a hard time wrapping their head around that people that are listening to this podcast and listening to your program are more business oriented by nature, but folks go to law school because they didn't go get an MBA. It's a different mindset. But if we're going to be doing this, we gotta run businesses, and that's what it comes down to. Every business has four parts to it. Every business has sales, production, administration and leadership. It doesn't matter what the business is, sales, production, administration and leadership. Our job, the law firm, owner's job, is the leadership. You can hire production. You have to have sales. If you don't have sales, who cares? And then you gotta do your back office stuff. And that can all be sourced out too. The reality is, you can source it all out to a certain level. It's hard to do that because most lawyers, by nature, are OCD. That's why we do it. So it's hard for us to turn over and delegate responsibility to somebody else, because all we're taught the whole time is trust and verify, but you gotta delegate.

Yeah, it's funny. You mentioned that their OCD to just to play on words there, the DISC profile of most lawyers is a CD and dominant. And you're, by the way, you're a high D CD. Now we come to the time of the podcast for the regular listeners that I do some quick one line answers, and hopefully you're prepared. I know I gave you the questions in advance. What are some apps or techniques you use for personal productivity?

I use teams. I use my reminders list on my iPhone a lot. Teams is what we use within the office, and I'm never going to expand my footprint again. As far as my physical footprint, I'm only going to let people work remote. I mean, as lawyers, we lock ourselves in our rooms anyway, so I don't care whether you're here at your house. Who cares? But so I think teams is pretty important. Zoom and a reminder app, right? Something else we use, we're starting to use something called Monday, yeah, which is a, which is kind of a work, a collaborative work list, yeah? And we're kind of dipping our toes into that a little bit

right now. Yeah, we use clickup. That's a version of that. It's great for agencies. Do you have a personal wellness and fitness routine?

I walk every morning. I get up at about 545, and I take a one hour walk. I kind of live about 10 miles outside of town in a fairly rural area. I live on a farm, and it's just a great opportunity to I do it at the same time. So this time of the year, it's very dark, but it's about almost a four mile walk the sun comes up. You. To think about what you're doing. Get to think about your day. So I do that almost every day,

you listen to podcasts, or are you just walking? No,

I sometimes I listen to podcasts. I've listened to yours. I listened to of legal ones, and then I'll listen to non legal stuff too, but only one earphone piece, because I don't want to get hit by a car. There's not a lot of traffic. No, that's smart. I do that? Yeah, yeah. The traffic we do get the pickup truck. It's got a trailer behind it, so it's not just the truck. You got to make sure I get hit by the trailer. I wear blanket lights. So it's good segue to

the next question is, blogs, podcast, YouTubes when, when something hits your feed, what's your favorite that you subscribe to, that you stop everything else and either tune in or read it, read the blog. Oh, well,

that's, that's a good question. On the podcast side, I listen to yours. I listen to wall rank. I think she does a nice podcast. I listen to Ken hardinson's podcast. I listen to a few kind of philosophical podcasts. So it's a variety of things. And then sometimes I just listen to nonsense. Yeah,

I love podcasts. Best business books.

I would say the Art of War is a great business book. It's Chinese philosophy on how to approach war. I was in the Navy, so I have a military background. Clausewich on war. And, you know, it sounds too militaristic, but the reality is, they all deal with the idea generally, of how to take your strengths to your advantage, to use your opponent's strengths to their disadvantage. But I think the most important thing you learn in all those both of those books, is you're never going to have all the information you need if you wait until you have 100% of the information before you do something, you will never do anything. So I'm a big believer in the 80% rule. 80% of your business comes from 20% of your clients. I mean, that's kind of a big business model, but the other 80% rule is that 80% if you know 80% of what you want to do, and you're 80% of the way they are. You have 80% of the information, you just do it and

get 100% started. But don't wait for the 100% or you'll never get

there. You'll never get there. So if you've got 80% go for it and then see what happens after that. I also like the book big ocean strategy, which I'm involved in some other businesses, other than the ones you and I have talked about, so kind of looking out there and seeing, well, what are the opportunities that other people may not have realized? That's kind of the big ocean. And I don't know what the book is, but I think as business owners, we always want to provide more services. And I've come to the conclusion in my career to try to narrow down what you provide, I think it's easier, it's easier to penetrate new markets than it is to provide more services. More services are complicated, more skews if it's a retail business. So narrow your services and then try to penetrate more markets.

Fantastic. Who's your NFL or sports team? I'm

from Louisiana, so it's the saints I grew I grew up in here, but, you know, it is what it is. I grew up in Archie Manning fan. So to watch arch Manning at Texas now and and Peyton and that whole family. I mean, it was pretty cool. I'm an LSU the

guards will be starting next year one way or another, right?

Yeah, he will. I'm a LSU football fan, and then I went to Georgetown. So I'm a Georgetown hoy basketball fan. Now live in Kentucky, so by default, I've become a UK basketball fan, and they're doing pretty well this year.

So we've covered some of the different business areas, but what's a great introduction for you? For some business,

that's a good question. I was thinking about how to answer that question. I think the introduction is, hey, I want to, I want to introduce you Andre regard. He's a lawyer, he's a great storyteller, and he's just a great guy. I mean, he's somebody who cares. I think that's the part about practicing law that I find the most rewarding. Is law provides an opportunity for us to give one to one benefits and services to people who are in need. When people come to lawyers next to being in a doctor's office, not for a checkup, but for like the ER lawyers are the E or the ER doctors for everything that's not medical. When you have a crisis, you go to an attorney, and that attorney takes that entire problem on to resolve that crisis. So I like for people to know me as a guy that's got a nice ear, likes to listen and is willing to help.

Last question, Where can people get in touch with you? Well,

you can call me on my cell phone, which is 859-533-0781, or shoot me an email at a regard a R, E, G, A r, d, at regard law.com be happy to talk to you about anything I love. Chat. In with people. I love knowing people. I'm kind of a extrovert that way. And you see me probably going to buy you a glass of bourbon.

Andre thank you so much. This was a lot of fun. Yep. Thanks for

having me, Jay. I appreciate it. Good luck. Bye.