Josh and Aaron discuss how to consider the type of lawyer you choose to hire, and why that decision is so important.
Listen here or read the transcript below. FVF’s podcast is available wherever you listen to podcasts including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, and more.
0:00:00.0 Aaron Von Flatern: Hey, Josh.
0:00:00.0 Josh Fogelman: Hey, Aaron.
0:00:02.7 AF: Finish this sentence for me. A gentleman knows how to tie a Windsor knot…
0:00:07.9 JF: That was a complete sentence. There’s no need for me to finish it.
0:00:13.1 AF: There’s an implied comma, sir.
0:00:14.0 JF: I don’t see the implied… A gentleman does in fact know how to tie a Windsor knot, period.
0:00:22.0 AF: Comma, but doesn’t. [chuckle] All right. That’s the phrase that my dad used to say to me, and I’m sure he is listening right now. Dad, thank you for this segue into a personal injury law firm sometimes can afford TV commercials, but the good ones don’t.
0:00:43.8 JF: Comma.
0:00:45.6 AF: Comma. But the good ones don’t.
0:00:46.0 JF: But the good ones don’t.
0:00:47.8 AF: Is that true?
0:00:49.8 JF: That’s a good question. I think we wanted to sit down and talk about why don’t you see FVF Law TV commercials and billboards all over the place wearing you down, and why do you see so many other personal injury lawyers advertising so aggressively. And I guess the overarching question is, are those personal injury lawyers or personal injury law firms who do spend so much of their resources on advertising and getting in your face, are they any good? Are they worth hiring?
0:01:30.4 AF: Yeah, short answer sometimes.
0:01:33.0 JF: Right.
0:01:35.5 AF: There’s a time and place. And the difference between a law firm’s top lawyers who are doing the thing, they’re in there doing the trials, they’re creating the scaffolding on the case upon which the proof is set, upon which the arguments are made that sway the insurance companies to pay all the money, those lawyers who have spent time honing their craft, they’re totally separate from the marketing departments of these law firms most of the time. But sometimes, they are the founding lawyer and they’re like, “Yeah, I think people need to be blasted with my name really loudly until they’re tired of it but they can’t help but call me.” That’s the strategy.
0:02:29.5 JF: And it works for some.
0:02:31.7 AF: For some. But for me as a consumer, it kind of calls into question their judgment. I’m like, “Well, I don’t know what kind of strategy you’re gonna perform on my legal case if that’s your strategy for getting me to call you ’cause where I’m at is if I hear one more personal injury law commercial, I might just drive my car off the road and create an accident ’cause I’m tired of it.”
0:02:53.7 JF: It’s a lot.
0:02:54.8 AF: Yeah. So if that was your approach to me, I’d be like, “I’m not hiring you. I wanna hire someone that’s more thoughtful. I’m gonna go read some reviews online.” And so I think that’s just the nature of it. We founded this law firm and we do the marketing for people that are like us, And so we haven’t really gone the TV route. And I think there are some lawyers who have gone the TV route, and maybe that’s just how they like to receive their… Maybe they gravitate towards that themselves.
0:03:24.7 JF: Yeah. And I think people ask, when they ask what our law firm’s all about, this is because everyone has this association with personal injury lawyers as being the ambulance chasing TV commercial lawyers or the ones who have billboards placed everywhere. So I find myself, not all the time, but I find myself frequently having to overcome the bias against me immediately when I answer that I’m a personal injury attorney, we run a personal injury law firm. And as part of overcoming that hurdle, I find myself frequently explaining to people why I believe certain law firms are so aggressive in their advertising strategies and what in many instances the outcome is for the clients that choose to call and hire those personal injury law firms. And I think what it all boils down to is money.
0:04:33.8 JF: So in the personal injury world, unlike any other area of practice of law, the personal injury law firm partners with their clients and take on a lot of risk and do a lot of work with no guarantee of getting paid. But sometimes when a case goes really well and you do an outstanding job for your client, you do end up getting paid a pretty good amount of money. And so but it’s hard to know at the beginning of a case which ones are going to yield a good result and which ones are not gonna yield a good result. And so for a lot of these law firms, it’s just a volume game to get as many of the cases in the door as you possibly can, and in many cases, more than your firm can possibly really competently handle.
0:05:30.5 AF: That’s a good word.
0:05:31.3 JF: Ethically handle.
0:05:32.1 AF: That’s another good word.
0:05:32.9 JF: And hope that you can polish some percentage of those cases into the ones that produce a good yield for the organization. Unfortunately, in my experience in talking to a lot of lawyers who have come from some of those types of organizations, that process is done at the expense of many of the clients. What I’ve perceived is, and this is also something that we’ve perceived in hiring attorneys and having had some turnover in the past and really finding out who we are as an organization and getting a great team assembled, is there is arguably a shortage of talent in the personal injury law space of personal injury attorneys or inadequate training that goes in to a lot of the attorneys that get hired at the lower level of some of these large organizations. But the clients who hire these big firms on TV think that they’re gonna get these high level attorneys that you were talking about, the ones who have this high level of competency in court, and end up getting stuck with a lower level attorney that has little experience or no experience. And unfortunately, the client doesn’t even really know the right questions to ask. They don’t even know that they’re getting taken advantage of because they’re so vulnerable. It’s just happening without them ever becoming aware.
0:07:09.2 AF: So I think to illustrate that, a lot of clients believe… That they’re making a phone call to hire a law firm, they’re searching for a law firm, and they believe at that very moment they’ve got an injury that’s worth a certain value and they don’t realize that it’s not a fixed value, that it can, unlike a house, right? You go to sell a house, you could hire the worst realtor on earth and probably sell it for about what it’s worth because the market’s gonna clear at that number probably. Whereas with personal injury law, you can see a multiple of 10 or more based on not just the lawyer you choose, but that lawyer’s approach to getting you the help, especially the doctor input that’s required to get the case proven. So it’s kind of a it’s a yes or no. It either got proven as a permanent long-term structural injury or it didn’t.
0:08:09.3 AF: And that difference is there’s just a gulf, a chasm between those two types of cases. And what happens with large volume firms is they get everybody into a process, they have to. I’m aware of certain firms around here that have a requirement that the demand be made upon the insurance company within 90 days of signing the case, which is absolute insanity to me because I don’t know how you can know for sure what that client’s future is going to look like. I don’t know how you can be accountable to the 80 or 90-year-old who’s one day gonna wake up still feeling the impact of that injury and looking back at the year, whatever it is, 2024, and saying, “I can’t believe I settled for that number on that day when I had to live with this my whole life and my lawyer just didn’t really bother to figure it out.”
0:09:06.7 AF: And part of that is they don’t really know that it’s the lawyer who’s failing to ask questions that they don’t know to ask. So from their perspective, they just got whatever the case was worth. In reality, there were questions that could have been asked of the doctors, there were probably diagnostics that could have been pursued further, and there were therapies that they could have pursued. And so it’s interesting to watch people walk into the sort of factory, so to speak, walk out with an outcome and not know that it’s bad and have some sort of vague resentment about it, but not really understand what they left on the table. And that’s not to scare people and say, “Oh, you gotta call us or you’re gonna be out of money,” or anything like that. It’s just how I feel. I feel that way when we interview people from other law firms and they describe the processes that they go through, and it just disturbs me to think that people don’t really realize what they’re leaving on the table.
0:10:08.2 JF: Yeah. One of the things that I explain when I’m having these conversations with people is you don’t wanna find yourself a random number in a mill personal injury law firm where the associate that’s handling your case might be handling a 100 other cases or 200 other cases, where let me just tell you there is no possible way to handle a docket of that size and do right by your clients. You cannot do that. It is not possible. Not enough hours in the day, period, end of story. And I think a lot of people who are shopping for attorneys, which is a smart thing to do, getting educated and getting to know who you’re gonna hire for something that’s probably a pretty big deal don’t even understand that there can be such a difference in philosophy between lawyers. A lot of people, I think, believe that a law firm is a law firm is a law firm. “Well, I saw this person advertising on TV or I saw this person’s billboards everywhere therefore they must be really successful.”
0:11:19.0 AF: You can’t blame them, right?
0:11:21.5 JF: No, you can’t blame them.
0:11:22.3 AF: They don’t know any difference. They’re probably thinking, “Well, they’re all gonna take advantage of me, so why does it matter which one I call? This guy gave me his number. I’ll call that number.”
0:11:30.5 JF: Sure. Yeah.
0:11:33.0 AF: And it’s an unfortunate state of affair. It’s kind of like if you met a jellyfish and you’re like, “Hey, nice to meet you. I assume that you have been at the beach stinging little children.” It’s like, “No, there’s a giant ocean out here. I’ve just been floating around being a jellyfish.” I think most personal injury lawyers are not taking advantage. I think there are quite a few diligent, dedicated professionals here in our town of Austin, Texas.
0:12:03.1 JF: We know that for sure.
0:12:04.1 AF: We know that for a fact. And not just in our firm.
0:12:08.7 JF: Sure.
0:12:08.8 AF: We kind of pride ourselves on trying to lead some of the changes in the way personal injury is marketed and branded. But there are already a lot of good diligent lawyers doing this, unfortunately, most people only experience this field through those TV commercials. And so from their perspective, they’re all jellyfish stinging kids at the beach.
0:12:34.0 JF: And we’ve tinkered with… We started a firm, we grew it to a certain size, and we were very reflective about that growth, and we were very thoughtful about that growth. We continue to be very thoughtful about that growth. And I think we’ve ultimately come to a conclusion that at some point you can hit a critical mass where the quality can start to decline and you have to make a philosophical decision about whether as a business you’re going to allow that to happen, or instead if you’re gonna adhere to your values of providing the best service that you possibly can to every single person who chooses to pick up the phone and call you, and make sure that every person who hires you gets a dedicated amount of resources to their case to avoid an outcome where they’re getting taken advantage of.
0:13:31.0 JF: And obviously we chose the latter, but during that process, we kind of… We’ve gone through a lot of discussion internally about what would the benefits be of us doing a heavier amount of TV advertising, or any really meaningful amount of TV advertising or billboard advertising. In fact, we did put some billboards up just to highlight our partnership with Austin FC for some period of time, and ultimately decided that it just wasn’t really who we were as an organization and opted out of that and turned our focus back to involvement in the community and supporting… Continuing to put those resources towards supporting our community partners and supporting our whole team because that’s what we felt was the right thing to do. But I can tell you, it’s hard to be in this industry as a boutique sized personal injury law firm in a city that’s experiencing the type of growth that Austin is, where you’re having these larger firms come in from out of town and advertise the community to death and not feel like you have to buck up and defend yourself and become a part of the fray just to preserve the business. But ultimately, we’ve decided that that’s just not our path. We’re not gonna go down that road. We’re gonna continue to have the amount of dignity that we expect of ourselves, that our clients expect of us.
0:15:08.0 AF: Yeah. Real investment in the real people that are doing real things in our community; Austin Humane Society, Health Alliance for Austin Musicians, Central Texas Food Bank, The Christi Center. Just getting out there and connecting with our community on a real level, and then having faith that the city of Austin is going to keep supporting us. I think that’s the direction we’re headed into deep into the future.
0:15:36.8 JF: Yeah. And as to whether or not all the TV lawyers and all the billboard lawyers are bad, there’s not a yes or no question to that. It’s not to say that it’s per se a mistake. We’re not here to disparage anyone. It’s just our whole… One of our major core values is education. And that’s not just educating people about the law or their rights, it’s educating people about the industry and what their expectations ought to be, what questions they should be asking, what red flags they should be looking out for. And your case begins with who you hire, who you’re talking to. And I think we would just encourage people to be thoughtful about who they’re choosing to be their partner in their case because who they choose can make a big difference.
0:16:29.0 AF: It matters. It definitely does. Good talking To you.
0:16:31.2 JF: Good talking to you too.