He’s not a lawyer – and that’s exactly what gives Shawn Lehocky a unique perspective on law firms. “I get to see a lot of different aspects of running the business of a law firm,” Shawn explains to host  Paul Bamert. As the CEO of Pond Lehocky Giordano, Pennsylvania's largest workers' compensation firm, Shawn breaks down two key elements that drive the firm forward: the client and an operational focus on client service. He dives into how scaling client service has created opportunities outside the practice areas of the firm - an  expansive referral network that allows the firm to service legal needs beyond geographical boundaries and their primary practice area.  Tune in for his insights about marketing, AI, and common sense. After all, clients expect law firms to behave with common sense – just like any other industry. “At the end of the day, we are in a client service business,” he observes.

Learn More and Connect

☑️ Shawn Lehocky | LinkedIn

☑️ Pond Lehocky Giordano | LinkedIn | Instagram | Facebook | TikTok | YouTube

☑️ Paul Bamert | LinkedIn 

☑️ Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music

Produced and Powered by LawPods

Sponsored by Case Status

Bad lawyer Jokes are an old genre, but if you're a consumer, finding a client-focused practice is serious. If you're an attorney, understanding today's ethical duty of care is critical, anchored by current headlines and showcasing major legal minds. Ethical-ish speaks to consumers and attorneys about the modern transparent law practice sponsored by Case Status, powered by LawPods.

Hello everyone and welcome to Ethical -sh. Glad to be back. It's been a little bit of a hiatus at the end of 2025 coming into 2026, but Paul Bamer here with the case status team and ready to report in for a bunch of really cool discussions this year, 2026, and I'm starting with my friend Shawn Lehocky. I want to say hello.

Hey Paul, thanks for having me.

Yeah, thanks for making the time. I know we're eating into your breakfast and lunch and all of those things, and you even moved to desks to get a little closer to the mic, so we appreciate you. But let's dive in. We're going to cover a couple things. I'm going to share a little bit of my findings from last year in this podcast, what we set out to do and what we learned, what I learned along the way, but maybe give a little bit of overview. I'm not a lawyer imt, think you're a lawyer either, but you're part and a leader of the most innovative law firms that I've come across. So I'd love to get a little bit of insight into who you are and who the hockey Giordano is.

Well, thank you. I appreciate it. I'm lucky to be a part of a great team in Philadelphia, a law firm called Pond Lehocky Giordano. I am the CEO. We are primarily a Pennsylvania workers' comp firm. That's where our roots started. We're the largest work comp firm in Pennsylvania. We have a national social security disability practice, a national long-term disability practice. We have a national referral department, which is probably our biggest by volume of number of clients that we're interacting with. That's our biggest department now. We have some new startup practice areas, emerging whistleblower wage and hour key TAM cases. We also have some software companies that we work with one directly that we just launched called Case Exchange. It's been an interesting venture from being on the other side of the table and being a vendor now and learning about what it takes to run a software company.

And thank, luckily we have friends like you guys that have guided us along the way. Part of my role is being a non-lawyer, I get to see a lot of different aspects of running the business of a law firm, which I think is unique from most law firms. We're lucky, our C-suites lucky that our lawyers and our equity shareholders believed in having a non-attorney C-suite over 10 years ago. Most of us, myself, our CFO, we started a long time ago as interns in various departments here and have seen every aspect of the firm over the last 15 years. So great team. A lot going on, exciting times and in an industry that's ever changing and evolving. So it's a very unique spot to be in.

Yeah, absolutely. No, I appreciate that. So we're going to unpack a few things. I'm going to start with a little bit of my learnings from last when we go into ethical ish, right? We're trying to understand what makes a modern law firm ethical or not, and especially against the tapestry of the modern consumer. I kind of went down the path, Shawn, of the A model rules, which are alive and well at every state bar level and tried to understand where that gray area was and really some awesome episodes last year. It wasn't just about communications. We like to hit on communications being the number one bar complaint, but there were a lot of other things we hit on. We hit on competency, we hit on confidentiality, we hit on finance, billing, those sorts of things. And so one of my conclusions though, you talk about interesting place to run a law firm run software, but one of my conclusions is I think communications is going to persist as the number one bar complaint because nobody gets disbarred over communication.

People get a hand slap and they get sort of reprimanded, but it's sort of like, go back in, don't do it again. And I'm not sure what to make of that. But what I learned as I went through was every guest I had, Shawn, it wasn't about a b, A, it wasn't about the bar. They all said, this is just common sense. This is just good business practice to treat the modern consumer they expect to be treated. So maybe let's start there. That's my takeaway from 12 dozen plus episodes. But as a non-lawyer leading, again, one of the most innovative law firms that I've come across, what do you take away on that? Do you see it as a competitive advantage that there's a lot of law firms out there that are just not figuring out how to get in front of this client communication challenge?

Yeah, I think there's a lot of aspects to it. You said a very important phrase, and that's common sense. Take away the name of being a law firm and what we really are, we're a professional services business dealing with human beings that are at a tough point in their life. Could you imagine having cancer and not being able to get ahold of your doctor and not knowing what's going on? You imagine worrying about paying your bills and not being able to talk to your bank. So our clients have interacted with businesses for the last 15 or 20 years that have had apps that have had modernization, that have twenty four seven call centers, and they expect us to behave like every other industry that exists, which is common sense. And I think the moniker of being a law firm complicates what our ethical duties really are. And at the end of the day, we are in a client service business.

You can be the best lawyer in the world. You don't have clients coming through your door, clients that want to be in your house, your skills don't really matter. So we really have to take care of the client. We have painted on our wall, take care of the client and everything else, take care of itself, focus on the client, keep them engaged in the journey, the financial side of the case will take care of itself. That's a mantra that we live by now. I think what complicates that, if we're being fair to the law firm business is the way the marketing and advertising world has changed what it means to be a law firm as well, and the amount of money firms are having to pay, whether it's increased referral fees or increased cost per case, or increased clicks or increased competition with national advertisers coming in.

I think firms are sitting back and trying to decide how to survive. What does the next five years look like? And I think oftentimes what's overlooked is the trade off between advertising and operations. And I think it's a tough decision to say, yeah, I have to reduce my marketing budget. I am not staffed correctly and my client services is lacking because of it. And I think that trade-off discussion when you're in survival mode is a tough conversation to have. What I always say is the best case that you can ever have is a client referral, the organic side of your business. No advertiser could ever take that away. So if you are engaging your client base and not just your existing clients but your previous clients, keeping them engaged, that's a marketing channel that can never be stripped away from you. No one can come in and steal those clients.

So I think in the world of advertising dollars and the cost rising client service becomes your number one marketing tool if you're trying to survive. And yeah, we can put more billboards up, we can put more ads online, whatever the case may be, but engaging organic client base is the number one market priority that every law firm should have regardless of size. And that starts at client service. And that should never end when the case is closed. Should be constantly reengaging the people in your database, they're not clients, they're human beings. They're human beings that are going to have issues in six months or in six years. Some percentage of your database has an issue every month. Just do they know to call you. And I would tell you the firms that communicate with their clients better are more likely that their clients will call 'em in the future.

Yeah, I love that. You've given me a lot of openings into my next wave of questions, and I'm going to build into it because I think there's enough recordings of you and me and you and Andy and others talking about how you have maximized that idea of client service to the benefit of your direct law firm. So I'm going to jump outside of that and I'm going to give you my epiphany with your approach. And so you mentioned physicians earlier, right? If you've got cancer and you want to have that bedside manner and have that connection with your doctor, so my tie in there is going to be this idea of primary care physician. The thing that's dawned on me as I'm a legal consumer that works for a software company and there's a lot of folks we work with, I hope I never have to work with, but I know that in that time of need, you have to find the right folks and you don't know anything.

I've gotten educated, I've gotten to talk about the nuance of everything, and I wish that I could get more everyday consumers to listen to this podcast because we learn a lot of things that benefits the consumer side of it. There is no primary care physician attorney in my world. Maybe if I lived in a really small town in rural America, and maybe if I lived a long time ago where you had kind of that one attorney in your town that maybe did everything. But I think one of the things we're missing as a society is this trusted individual or team where you can go to basically get routed to the right place. And so the thing I've noticed with your, it's part of your marketing tagline and you see it all the time. You see a billboard, it's specific. You've got an injury call me, right?

That's specific to knowing you have an injury, your advertising has a different question, tell me your story. And that's a very open-ended invitation, which I think is amazing. And so it could be a new person that doesn't know your firm. B, it could be somebody that you serviced well before who now has a different need. It's not social security disability. Maybe I have a family need, maybe I have an immigration need. And so what do they do? They treat you. You've given them that open invitation, so they call you and you've now got this referral network. Not only that, you're working in software that helps find like-minded firms who put client service first and connect them so that they can more easily share that information. So I want to talk about that idea of is Pond Lehocky Giordano intentionally trying to be this primary care physician? How I look at it, and I think it's a beautifully innovative idea because there's a huge need out there to find out where do I need to go, even if it's not you can help me find the right service where I need to land.

Oh, it's a great point. I think we should talk about it in two contexts. We should talk about it from a client standpoint and then we should talk about it from a business standpoint. From the client standpoint, you have to look at a person holistically. If somebody walks in the emergency room with a bandage wrapped around their head and they say, my head hurts. Clearly there's an issue with their head, but you look at their arm and their arm is clearly broken with a bone sticking out of their arm, you're not going to only treat their head right? And I know that's a crude analogy.

No, I like the analogy. It's very visible.

If somebody walks in our front door, we can't just look at their head wound. They can't just look at their work comp case because what holistically is going on in that person's life? Were they at work but hit by a third party? Are they not able to work for the next four years because of the severity of their injuries and they need social security disability? Are they wrongfully terminated because of their working? You can't give somebody a diagnosis and a prognosis going back to the medical world without looking at them holistically. Where are they at in their career? Do they have a pension? What money do they have to fall back on? Do they have private insurance? Are they married? Do they have children? You have to guide somebody through a legal journey. And the more you can help somebody, the better off they're going to be, the better off your case is going to be.

And then you're going to have to know how to interact with all these different types of cases or their offsets. How can I explain from them from like I'm their financial advisor that how these cases interact with each other, and if I'm only dealing with their comp case and I'm letting that third party case go out to somebody else and there's no interaction, that client's not going to maximize the benefits as if everything was collectively brought under one roof. So tell us your story is exactly that. It's not every citizen in America is educated on the civil system or what their rights are. Civics courses, we all pay a F tax of 6.2% of every paycheck. The three things that you buy with that 6.2%, how many people in the country know that? Well, one of 'em is a social security disability. You're a trust fund baby to the federal government in your name.

It's amazing to us how many people don't know the rights and benefits that are available to them. So it's our mission to never say no to somebody. Maybe I can't help you for this type of benefits, but let me learn about your life and see if there's other benefits happening. And from a client service standpoint, we think that that is the best approach of just maximizing the amount of people we can help from a business standpoint in putting a business hat on, which again, we're talking about human beings, so it's a different type of conversation, but we're spending marketing dollars and you're getting a hundred leads to fill out a form on a website. And if you're focused on just a primary case type, those conversion rates can be 5% to maybe 30% at best from that standpoint. So if you're only worried about the primary case type, it's very hard to get a return on investment on marketing dollars from internet campaigns.

If you bring in the fact of the spinoff cases that come from it, maybe it wasn't a complete but there was a car accident there, now you're opening the pool of revenue that you can maximize. And then it's not just my cost per case was $3,000, my average fee was 5,000. Yeah, that might be what it was for a work comp. But when you factor in the 15 other cases that spun off of that campaign, now you're reducing your cost per case across the board on more cases and you're increasing your revenue across more cases. So from a business standpoint, you already have a huge funnel of leads coming in, and a lot of firms try to cherry pick. We've taken the approach of let's maximize everything that can come out of this funnel. We call it dredging. We build a software called Case Dredger that works with our case exchange referral platform that helps other firms analyze.

Yeah, this is the primary intake category that you thought we built an AI that can analyze and say there might be a second or third case type in this category. So that's why we started building a referral department. And I think the key thing for us is we know that objectively our numbers stand out as the best Pennsylvania work comp firm. I don't know if we'd be the best Ohio work comp firm or West Virginia work comp firm or North Carolina work comp firm. We know what we're good at and we know what we're not, and we're not going to try to be the best of everything because it's not reasonable. There's really good law firms around the country that have specialties, and whether it's this type of trucking case or a slip and fall case, or maybe it's a case against this ladder company, they've established themselves as really good lawyers and instead of trying to compete with everyone, we can step back and say, what is best for our client?

What's best for our client is get them in the best hands of a lawyer for their case. And you have to be humble in being able to say, maybe that's not me all of the time. And we've spent the last 10, 15 years building a referral network around the country of firms that fit that specialty. Now coming out with case exchanges, our referral technology is, why is that necessary? Well, I know how I manage my internal inventory and what do I expect out of my lawyers? Are they moving cases? Are they calling our clients? I needed that same level of visibility with our referral cases. We have tens of thousands of cases signed with other law firms around the country. My responsibility is to make sure they're handling our client's case the way we would handle it if it was done internally without the visibility of a platform like we have built, and we're continuing to iterate on, that becomes challenging.

But I need to make sure that we're constantly working with the best firms. Our clients are getting serviced correctly. The firms that we're sending 'em to are using technology to assist them. They're trying cases. They're actually filing lawsuits and not just taking settlements. So it's a very unique part of the industry for sure, but I think it's something we're most proud of. Number one, maximizing the number of people that are being helped and making sure that the right law firm, the right case, goes to the right law firm. As much as we can do that,

Very innovative thinking. Again, from my vantage point, it's a clear win-win. And when you can find those in a business setting, you started out with the client, the human side, the caring, the servicing to be able to then maximize your output on marketing. It's a great point. It's back. I think about pharmaceutical commercials. I'm always blown away by pharmaceutical commercials like shouldn't be my doctor that tells me I need this drug. Instead, you're advertising to me to go ask my doctor that, right? I don't know anything about this. So same thing happens when I have, I know I need legal help. I don't really know who to call in a given situation. To your point, I have a legal intent and therefore I get picked up in somebody's marketing and so I show up. So the fact that you can service that inquiry, right? Show care, not just say, yeah, you're not my ICP, I'm going to send you to the street, but then also get it to a referral. So to me, the client service now has gone beyond your brick and mortar, right? You've gone into this network, which is you can't do it by yourself, right? Shawn, you've established, I mean, if you're doing tens of thousands of referrals, you've established a pretty good network. I don't know if you're willing to share how big that is, but it's got to be hundreds of firms. No,

Yeah, definitely hundreds of firms. It's probably been thousands of firms over the last five or six years. Again, you have to bet that network as if it was you were hiring that lawyer to work in your own law firm because we're trusting our clients. Literally, most of our clients have a case with us and with that firm. So the direct feedback we're getting is full funnel. We understand what the pains are, what the challenges are, who's calling our clients or not. And sometimes it's strictly about the referral fees or firms not wanting to pay a fee or that we don't necessarily judge the network by who's willing to pay us the most. We judge by where do they fit in the mosaic of our network and which type of cases should they be receiving from us and which ones should they not be? We've had to build tools out of necessity to evaluate that network, and it is the same case across multiple firms who's doing what with it, and then understanding every case that comes in is not the same.

So we have to grade the intakes as they're happy tier them, and we make sure that the case goes with firms that fit the tier of that case. So from an operation standpoint, it's good. Now, clearly firms are moving in and out and things like that. Yeah, it's been a unique asset that from a periphery, you wouldn't think a law firm would have to build tools to judge other law firms that may appear as competitors. But over the time, it's been more of a collaborative effort than anything. We learn as much from our referral firms as we can provide to them, even though they might not be at our scale or size of clients. There's some really great law firms around the country. What I like most about our industry is the size of it. There's so many cases available that, like I said, there's more collaboration that happens from an outsider perspective than one might think. And this has been a great opportunity for us to really have upon hockey mastermind network, it's collaborated. Our firm in North Carolina has a case in Wisconsin, and we can help connect those bridges and now we're seeing other firms in our network start to work together, and it's an amazing thing to see.

I won't trademark the primary care attorney, but that to me is basically what you're building out. And it's easy to say, but it's not easy to build out. And I think that, again, you have to make sure your own bed is made first. Hold yourself to that high standard, which you guys have obviously done for a while there. You're building a network based on holding everybody else to the high standard. I think it comes full circle to the idea that you sourced the lead, you've got the brand recognition, you're the primary care attorney. So after that is done, they're going to think about your brand for that next legal need when they come back through. So back to common sense ethics or not care, we want that to be, but we want to make sure it's good business. But again, I think you're by putting the client first, it's amazing how good business works itself out.

Yeah, a lot of stuff takes care of itself when you do that.

Yeah, that's true. And I've heard Sam Pond talk on several times and he's clearly passionate. I'm sure all of your leadership is there, not just your jds, but also those of you on the C-suite. So really cool. Alright, one more question. We've got to put you on the hot seat because it's always hot. We're in the intelligence era as we like to talk about it. We're doing a little bit of research, we'll be talking about it at CX Summit later this year. We're doing our second CX report and really trying to dive into that relationship with clients. We talk about how human we both are in that side of the relationship and AI starting to show up more and more, not just in how we do the work inside the law firm, but in maybe how we handle that marketing motion. Maybe it's the intake. There's even some buzz around about potentially having your client on paid retainer or with a paid case engage with bots and voice and whatnot. I'm curious where you guys are seeing that sort of idea of augmentation versus automation when it comes to AI. Any big findings since you and I last spoke a couple of months ago, or any big developments that you're seeing out there?

It's clearly evolving rapidly, and I think firms are taking different approaches. Our approach, our philosophy is there's two main functions that a law firm should be doing, and that is being strategic in litigation, being aggressive in litigation, being an advocate in litigation, winning cases, developing cases. So I'll put that into kind of being a maverick litigator and all of the functions that come under that. And then having white glove customer service. And our approach is any task that don't fall in one of those two categories, whether it's data entry, paper pushing, is ripe for automation. I don't look forward to the day where AI talks to our clients. I look forward to the day where our staff members don't have to do mundane tasks across the board or search for data because AI is compiling and summarizing our data quicker, providing it to them, and then all our staff is doing is on the phone with clients all day. Because back to the, tell me your story.

I think AI can probably know context. I know it can know context. I know it can know empathy and sympathy, but we believe in the human connection. We believe in that. Tell us your story motto, and we are going to lean more into human customer service than not over the next few years. And that's the path we're going. Now, that doesn't mean we won't lean into AI and we have leaned into AI and automation and technology, but we're not looking forward to replacing the human essence of being a law firm and dealing with clients. We think that could be a differentiator for us.

So this is awesome, Shawn, and I think, again, I got to get you back to all that hard work that you're doing there in Philadelphia. It looks kind of warm outside, but I know you're at gunning for spring. Real quick, just to kind of close out, we appreciate the time, but how can somebody learn about being in your network, maybe getting in with, sounds like Case Exchange is a great network. It's not just based on who you know or a listserv from the old days where everybody's emailing on a listserv. Hey, do you know an attorney that is in North Carolina doing family law instead, you're raising the bar on what you do. So what should folks do if they find you piqued their interest and they want to learn a little bit more about these ideas?

Yeah, anyone can shoot me an email. SLehocky@pondlehocky.com or LinkedIn case Exchange has a website case exchange.com without the second E. So it's C-A-S-E-X change.com. Go there, schedule a demo, feel free to reach out either LeHocky Case Exchange guide you through that process.

We'll make sure to tag you on our blog posts and the podcast posts. So Shawn, again, appreciate you spending a little bit of time. I'm a huge fan. The innovation is clear. Welcome to being a baron of software entrepreneurialism. It'll be a lot of fun. So you got a lot of hats there and look forward to hearing more about all endeavors in your world. So appreciate the time. Again.

Thanks, Paul.

If you've enjoyed this episode and want to check us out some more, you can go to anywhere where you listen to your podcast and search for ethical ish, subscribe if you will. Make sure you hear about these other topics like this and any other topic that we bring in the future. So we hope you've had some good value and we'll see you on the next episode. Thanks so much.

Lawyers and legal consumers. You are our audience and our biggest strength. If you find ethical ish a good investment of your time, please spread the word until next time. Sponsored by Case Status, powered by LawPods.