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Today Seth and Jay interview Jerry Parker of Parker Waichman LLP.

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Transcript: Maximum Growth Live! with special guest Jerry Parker

Speaker 1
welcome to the podcast edition of maximum growth live. The number one program for lawyers who want to grow their practices. Each week, our hosts Seth price and Jay Ruane tackled the fundamental questions about how to grow the profit and profitability of your law firm to watch the program live. Submit your questions and hear the latest episode tune in every Thursday at 3pm. Eastern on Facebook for our live show maximum growth live is a production of maximum lawyer media.

Jay Ruane
Hello, hello and welcome to another edition of maximum growth live. I’m your host Jay reshape CEO of firm flex social media marketing for lawyers, as well as reweighed attorneys, a civil rights and criminal defense firm in Connecticut, with me as always across the way, my good friend Seth price hanging out now in DC, Maryland, Virginia. But he is all over the world, Chile. Where else we are Bosnia, Toronto, I’m going to keep up every week, I’m going to come up with more places that you guys can be opening your firm, but Seth will tell

Peter Shankman
you Mansky has his way. Well, we’ll set offices up there. So we have a reason to travel there.

Jay Ruane
That’s a great idea. That’s a great idea. So we have a It’s a Thursday show, which means an interview show, and you were able to get a phenomenal guest. So why don’t you tell everybody about who we have here is our guest today.

Peter Shankman
Jerry Parker, one of the sort of juggernauts of the space, you know, founded Parker Wakeman, which is just one of those those insane New York firms single event as well as mass torts. And then he created his own in in house software that became it couldn’t find what you want on the market, he went and created smart advocate. So this guy’s a legend. I know for myself, you know, when I entered the business, he was still at every legal conference, I would see him sitting in the first row taking notes. And I was like, what, but you know what, he digested it all. And you know, it was always thinking outside the box, so it can’t wait to hear what he has to say.

Jay Ruane
Yeah, it’s, you know, it’s really interesting, because I can remember, you know, I grew up in New York City metro area. And I can remember seeing the commercials of first firm, you know, as as I was in high school, and then college afterwards. And then starting off my practice, I would see the partner weakening commercials. So this is a real treat for me to be able to engage with him and talk a little bit about what he was able to do. And so why don’t we do this? Why don’t we take a quick break, we’ll hear from our sponsors. As everybody knows, we are part of the maximum lawyer media family. maximum growth live is available, obviously right now as our Facebook Live show every week. But we’re also available in a podcast edition. You can find it anywhere podcasts are available, not only are we syndicated on the maximum lawyer podcast, we have our own standalone podcast as well. And we would invite you to join our Facebook community, there is a Facebook page@facebook.com backslash maximum growth live, we have a Facebook group that you can join. And I would love to see you as part of the group where we talk all about how to grow your law firm, how to take it from one to many how to take it from 100 bucks to 100 million. That’s what we’re all about here, Seth. So if you’re cool with it, let’s take a quick break. We’ll play some words from our sponsors. We’ll get him in here. And we’ll be able to have a great conversation with him all about Parker Wakeman, about smart advocate and the wonderful things that he’s been able to do through the course of his career. Sounds good. Sounds great. Perfect, folks. We’ll be right back with the max growth interview.

Speaker 4
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Speaker 5
In this world today, if you want to grow your business, you want to grow your firm, you want to take on more cases and make a bigger impact. You have to have a digital blueprint. Statistically throughout the time that we’ve been working with blue shark digital our law firm the Atlanta In a divorce law group, over 14 100%,

Jay Ruane
Seth and his team have years of experience in this area

Speaker 6
blue shark is truly a part of the firm. So I don’t consider blue shark any different than the employees in my office

Peter Shankman
we are thrilled to be here with Jerry Parker, a legend in the space founder Parker Wakeman, and smart Advocate. Welcome, Jerry.

Unknown Speaker
great being here. Well, look,

Peter Shankman
there’s, you know, over the years, I have learned so much just being around you in my early days at tilma. I saw you there and you know, when I when I had not much going on, you were very good to me and sat down and gave me a lot of direction which I very much appreciate. Walk me back through the building of Parker Wakeman, what you know, what are some of the things you attribute to what became such a juggernaut?

Speaker 7
Well, there’s no, there’s no substitution for hard work. You’re not going to call my office on Friday at four and find me playing golf. So, you know, it’s really a lot of hard work is what really what it boils down to when my partner, Herb Wakeman, and I started the firm, we started actually in the basement of my house. We both were working for another law firm at the time. We both left together along with my secretary. And so the three of us showed up on Monday morning in the basement of my house, and we started looking at each other saying, Okay, what do we do now? And, you know, we just started doing some marketing on one of these marketing programs, I think you buy zip codes, and we bought two zip codes in the Bronx. And, and we were getting some pretty decent calls from those zip codes. And then after about a year, I said, her What about if we took the money we’re spending on that program, and we would have less ads, but we could buy one or two ads a week. And we could have the whole city, the whole city of New York, which is 22 million eyeballs and that DMA. I’m remembering that in those days, Yellow Pages was very viable, by the way. But you know, when you’re sitting in your basement in January of 1992, or actually December of 1992, and it takes a year to get the Yellow Pages going, because, you know, there’s five books in Brooklyn, Queens now. So Suffolk in the Bronx, then there’s two books for Nassau, Suffolk, you know, maybe Westchester and Rockland. But you can’t get them out immediately. And maybe you just missed the book. So the next book is a year away. So we scrambled with the yellow pages on their way, because we didn’t want to lose any more time. But then we did that TV thing. And so we started advertising, like once a week, because we had no money. And so we started advertising once a week. And then then I Oh, then I got on AOL 1.0. Back also in, I think, 1992. And then maybe in 93 and 94. I said to her, I said, Maybe we ought to do a website. So he said, What’s that? He says, It’s a thing that you put on a computer, and it’s out there and people can find it. And he says to me, you think that Jose Rodriguez in the Bronx is going to get into an auto accident and then go look for somebody on the web. So I said, Herb, you just never know. I said, let’s just do it. He says, Well, how much is it gonna cost? So I said, Well, we could probably do it for 500 bucks. He says, Okay, do it. And you know what? We got like 20 cases that year. And they were really good cases. They weren’t a guy in an auto accident. They were dehumidifiers that went on fire and killed people. I mean, very sophisticated, personal injury cases that were great. You know, from a lawyer’s perspective. I’m very sorry, that happened to the client. And so we were getting some really great cases back then. And then, after about a year or two of that, I said to her, I said, you know, her, I think if we had a better website, we would get more cases. So we invested into what they called, at the time a database website $25,000. And all of a sudden, the number of cases exploded. And the one philosophy that herb and I always had was, we treated the business of law to be more like Monopoly And we wanted to build hotels as quickly as possible screw the houses, we weren’t in hotels. So we took everything back. I mean, we took everything that we earn and put it back into the firm, we really took only what we needed to live. And we didn’t change out, we try not to change our lifestyle to the worst, because we started a new firm. But we didn’t want to take any profits, and then enjoy those profits in our lives, we wanted to put it back in the firm. And we did that for a very long period of time. And so we wanted to build hotels. And we did. And, you know, so in the 90s, we were getting hundreds of cases a day on the web, because there was no other lawyer advertising on the web. And whenever I would talk to lawyers about advertising on the web, they said, Jerry, you can’t get cases on the web. Oh, you’re I can’t remember what

Speaker 3
I could speak to that, because you’re watching us law. And we couldn’t sell directories, nobody would pay to advertise, I gave the LA worker’s comp listing to my uncle who was practicing out there, he thought the greatest thing ever who’s the only lawyer in LA at the time with it. So I can only imagine what it felt like fish in a barrel for you.

Speaker 7
Oh, it was unbelievable. And so that gave rise to a problem that we had in that we had a das date and you know, DLs, das, this operating system based database. And I want, I needed something that would integrate with a website, so that my leads would go into the database. So I went to all of these vendors, you know, all of the guys, you know, today that had been around for 30 years, maybe 40 years, in some cases. Some of them aren’t around anymore, but I went to all of them. I says, Guys, I need you to integrate my website into your database. And if you do, I’ll buy it. Jerry, there’s nobody getting wet cases from the web, you’re the only one getting in cases when I can invest $1 Just, you know, for you and never getting it back. And then I was using email. And nobody was using email. Nobody had BlackBerry’s not in our business. So an email was a big part of our business from from the web. Because all the cases were coming in via email. So I had to hire 10 people, just a block, copy and paste the leads into our das case management system. Jerry, nobody is using email. It was just, it was just unbelievable. So I was talking with my partner. And, you know, last thing we wanted to do is go into the software business that was you know, we’re, we’re busier than beavers and flood season, you know, in the pie business. And we just wanted to find the package that did what we needed. But since that was impossible, nobody would do it. And I actually did make a deal with another company. A guy told me he would do it. He took my 50 page outline that I wrote, I type it type written, or what I wanted and imagining his dinner based upon the one I had, and the improvements I needed, including integration with the weapon and with his email, and he says I’ll do it in a year. And I kept on calling him up, Jerry, we’re working on or working on it. Finally, in 11 months, I said to him, his first name was wit. He said, where is it? He said, Jerry, I want to tell you, he says my guys just couldn’t do it. I said in a whole year, they had to do something. So he says, Okay, guys, show him what we did. And they showed me what they did. They added a notice of claim field and a police report field. In a year, I said wit that’s all you did in a year to field. And that was it. And I said you know what? We’re gonna do it ourselves. And and we started, you know, we started hiring programmers first, we tried to do it, the team in India, and that didn’t really work out too well. So we took it in house and hired programmers in New York. Had they work in our office in New York so that the lawyers and paralegals could tell them what they needed, what they wanted, where they wanted it to be, what data should be on one page and how do we want to access it? And that’s still the way smart advocate is today the programmers are still in my office. They’re moving out now because we just got too big. But and we park and Wakeman needs the space also so

Peter Shankman
and when he says, Can I just when you say you need the space, you’re nice enough back in the day when I was building my firm to invite me out to your airplane hangar. Like, it’s like the four seasons of airplane hangars, I’ve never seen anything like it. You know, the middle of Long Island, you have this monstrosity of a building lawyers on the outside with glass windows, the air coming in rows and rows of staff, it is a sight to behold, this was back in the days, how to be outgrowing your space is really saying something.

Speaker 7
Yeah, I never thought that we would outgrow it because we had so much extra space when we moved in 1011 years ago. But, you know, we bought the building, back in the late 90s. We totally gutted it right to the windows and even some of the Windows came out, you know, put in seven new air conditioning is there’s not any plumbing or any electric That’s original. I mean, we built all the offices out. And you know, we did a first class job of it, because the way I was raised is I was raised to do things right or not do it at all. And so you know, and every time the contractor said, you know, we got an A way in a B way, we always went the a way. I mean, we spent the money. And you know you’ve seen it. So you know, everything is you know, really first class, because I’m of the opinion. And we did this with Parker Wakeman, originally when we reached when we moved out of my basement in 1994. Because by then we have 15 people in the basement. And I had the FBI installing telephone lines in the street, because we had 15 phone lines coming into a house and a highly residential. So they probably figured we were doing drugs, prostitution numbers, something but those guides on the telephone pole, they look kind of familiar to me. And because my first life I was a special agent with the Treasury Department. So I’m looking at these guys, and I’m saying these guys are in pool guys. These guys are, you know, listening to my phone calls. But anyway, we moved out in 1994, we went to Steelcase for the furniture, and I wanted to get old great furniture, I didn’t want to get stuff that falls apart. I wanted stuff that lasts forever. And so we bought waiting room chairs, and they were $1,500 a chair. So my partner says to me, we need $1,500 chairs. So I said herb, I says when the client sits in that chair, they’re gonna know that we’ve been around for a long time. And we bought $1,800 conference room chairs with a $5,000 table. And I said herb, when we’re doing the deposition here, everybody’s sitting in this Jen defendants, everyone, the clients, you’re going to think that we’ve been around for a long time isn’t Britain’s great furniture. So that’s been the philosophy ever since we started the firm and it continues to this day.

Peter Shankman
What are some of the things during that journey journey that you wish you knew upfront? That would have been helpful along the way for many of our listeners starting that journey?

Speaker 7
Well, this is a bit controversial, but I wish I knew that some of our colleagues weren’t as honest as I was expecting them to be. Because early on, we entered into certain relationships that were with people that ended up not being honest. And we got hurt by that. And the clients got hurt by that. So that gave me a very powerful lesson, in that you have to investigate who you do business with before you do business with them. And to make sure that you do everything you could possibly do to stay away from dishonest people. And that’s been a rule that we live by ever since. So that’s that’s a big deal for us.

Peter Shankman
Other things that sort of lessons learned from the trenches.

Speaker 7
Well, do your homework. Especially in our business, you know, we have, you know, a single event department that consists of about a dozen lawyers. But the majority of the law firm is mass towards the fact the pharmaceuticals, defective medical devices, environmental cases and things like that. You get involved within a mass tort, that goes the wrong way, you’re going to be in big trouble. Especially if you’re working the case. When we advertise for mass torts, we work the case, we don’t advertise to send it out, that would be a different proposition. But even then, you know, money’s valuable. And you don’t want to waste money. On a bad case. So even if you’re going to refer the case out, you really need to do your homework. And we do our homework early on, before we even file the case, we hire experts. So that if the case is not a really great case, we don’t get involved in it. So we might spend, maybe 100,000, upfront, you know, doing our homework on it. But if it’s not a good case, I’d rather than know about it upfront, and lose the 100, and move on rather than spend 10s of millions of dollars and six years of my life, you know, chasing after something that’s never going to come to fruition? So you got to do your homework.

Peter Shankman
Before it passes off to Jay, for a couple of questions. My question is, a lot of our listeners are not in a position to do the mass tort cases themselves. But there’s an entire industry out there trying to get people to sort of buy into cases and then and then ship them off. You know, your perspective on where that industry is today. You’ve seen it all, you’ve done it yourself. What you know, what do you what’s your advice to people who are considering investing in something through a third party group?

Speaker 7
Well, the same thing there is do your due diligence, because there’s a lot of people out there that are less than honest. And there are, you know, people selling cases? And are you getting the first dividend? Are they recycling it? Is it a case that some of a law firm checked out and gave it back to them, and now they’re selling it to you, hopefully, that you won’t give it back to them? You know, make sure you have the right to give it back, if it doesn’t pan out to what it was, you’re paying good money. You just gotta be really, you got to watch what everybody does. For example, if you enter into a marketing campaign of any type, whether it be TV, web, lead generation, retainer generation, whatever it is, you should be looking at your results. closely, weekly, every two weeks, four weeks? How many of these cases are panning out for me? Are these good cases? Are they not good cases. And you might start seeing patterns, you might see a source of a case or a group of cases, that most of them are terrible. And then another source that you engage with the very same time or a lot better? Well, maybe something’s not right, but the first one. And so you got to be really on your guard all the time to make sure that you’re not getting screwed by, you know, any of these advertisers. And even then, you’re gonna get screwed. Sure, but but you want to be on your guard so that you could limit the losses that you’re taking from dishonest conduct. I could deal with a loss, you know, that just comes back by happenstance. But if my loss is coming, because the vendor is not honest, that’s something that you know, we’re not going to tolerate.

Jay Ruane
Absolutely, absolutely. I want to talk to you, quite briefly about something that you talked about early on in the conversation. And that was the value of reinvesting in your firm early on. Because I think a lot of lawyers when they finally do hang that shingle, and they’ve been an associate for another attorney, and they’re going out on their own, they see the trappings of success in material goods and saying, Okay, I had a Chevy or a Honda. Now, I’m gonna lease myself to Mercedes, because now I’m a partner in my own law firm. Talk to us about the value of just reinvesting those dollars in your firm as it get off, gets off the ground.

Speaker 7
Yeah, especially as to the younger people watching this. It’s like compounded interest. You should be, you know, I divide life up into three areas. The first 20 years of your life, you’re just screwing around. And then the next 20 years of your life, you should be working your ass off actually 3030 and 30. So the first 30 is screwing around, but the second 30 You need to work your ass off, so that when you get to the third 30 you can enjoy your life. Now, if you don’t work your ass off, and that middle batch, that middle group of 30 years, you’re not going to have the money when you retire, to enjoy your life. In fact, you might even be in real financial straits. If you look at a lot of the stats, most people don’t have $10,000 in the bank. And you know, and it’s, it’s a bit scary. I mean, I have friends who’ve gone bankrupt, you know, in their third 30 year segment, because they don’t have the money. And so, you know, you want to put in the work while you have the desire to do the work. And you’re in your foot that second 30 years, from 30, to 60, or from 30 to 50. I know I couldn’t wait to get up in the morning, I would get up at two or three o’clock to start working. And it’d be funny because I’d be emailing my friends and some of my crazy friends would email me back at three o’clock in the morning, because we’re just crazy about work. But you know what, at this stage, I’m not that crazy about work anymore. So you need to put in that effort while you while your brain is letting you do it while your brain wants it. And that time is limited. So you need to use that time very wisely. So that’s why you’re not gonna find me on the golf course at four o’clock on Friday.

Jay Ruane
I’m with you, I’d much rather be at the office doing work than be at the golf course. Because I love seeing that I am building something. But I want to talk to you about another thing that you talked about. And that is taking chances early on, you took chances with the Internet. And I think that’s something that traditionally, lawyers by our own training, lawyers are not trained to take chances, we’re trained to say, here’s all your options. Now you get to decide to our clients, what is it about the value of being able to take a chance that I think makes young lawyers or lawyers who want to grow their firms successful?

Speaker 7
Well, I mean, we take chances, but you know, hopefully, we make them intelligent choices, right? So I talked about doing your homework, that eliminates a lot of the chance, you know, if you’re involved in a case, you know, if you’re, if you’re a referral lawyer, we do a lot of referral work. I mean, in the last 10 years, we’ve paid more than $100 million and referral fees. I mean, I don’t know how much more but a lot more. So, with me, I think it’s like insider trading. Because if I’m involved in a case, and I’m actually looking at the documents, and I’m taking the depositions, and I know about the fraud perpetrated by these major United States, corporations, I know that they’re never going to let a jury see these documents. So I will take every dime I have. And I will put it all in. And I’ll be on all in on TV. I don’t want to mention the case. But recently, we put in over $15 million, and in about a year on a case, because I just knew looking at these documents, this company could never ever defend their conduct. And sure enough, it was probably one of the biggest cases in our history. But this goes on in all the cases. So when you see that this has got to be a winner. You just put it all in now, my forwarding attorneys, they get the benefit of that, because I’m constantly communicating with them. And telling them, you know, you really thought up, you know, put your money into this case, but this case is gonna settle real soon, you know? Well, this case is excellent, though the documents are incredible or whatever. But you know, when but to me, it’s like insider trading. And so that’s one way that we minimize our risk.

Speaker 2
And I have one last question for you. Before we even for my last question for you is one of the things that I think is interesting about your story, especially when it comes to the development of the stock software is that you weren’t in the software business, you wanted to do something. And then you hit a wall with your developers. And many lawyers in that situation would just say, all right, it can’t be done. They hit a wall and they stop. Talk about a little bit about the I’m not going to be stopped by a brick wall mentality that you’ve had as you’ve grown your practice.

Speaker 7
Yes. Well, so the name of the software is smart advocate, if anybody wants to know and it’s smart as a

Peter Shankman
user and a fan and many of our listeners like John Fisher and guests, Michael McGrady are also big fans.

Speaker 7
Yes, yes. And I mean, Swan advocate is You know, I really get a kick out of it because I’m not really that involved in the company other than to give it ideas at this stage. Because I’m still involved in the law firm. And I’m still working seven days a week. But, you know, I sometimes on some of the larger demos involving 234 100 People all either attended demo, or they actually want me to be on the demo. And it’s really funny, because when we’re demoing SWAT advocate, I hear the the reaction of the lawyers and the paralegals. Wow, that really makes sense. You know, they see the screen. And there was this one big malpractice firm in, in Long Island. They were a user for 20 years of another product that’s been around for 40 years. And he said to me, Jerry’s is you know, I can get everything from that other product. But I gotta go to six or seven different screens to get it. He says, You have it all on one screen. Because that’s how you want to see it. You want to see it on one screen, you don’t want to go, you go and bouncing around. And what’s what’s more navigate. If somebody tells me about an improvement, we’ll build it. I don’t want to have to go by an intake system, by a document scanning system. Why a dashboard system, by a client portal, whatever it is, if there’s something that’s needed for the practice of law, we will build that into for navigate. That’s the way it’s always grown up, or what have you get as a new case wizard. It’s got document barcoding and scanning. It’s got a client portal, it’s got an iPhone, iPad app, Android to whatever it needs. In this this year, you know, stuff we just announced sworn advocate 2020. And it has over 1000 enhancements this year alone. And every year that we’ve sold spot avocat, it comes out with over 1000 enhancements every single year. And these enhancements are either driven by me, or they’re driven by clients who email us every day. Hey, what about this? What about this? What about this? Now you know about the competitors? Hey, you can give them an enhancement, and you’ll never see it ever. In Smart advocate, sometimes they’ll have it in less than a week. Because we have 20 programmers for smart advocate, which is probably more than most of the industry combined. And they’re just waiting for these enhancements so that we could program and then because you know why, at the end of the day, smart advocate makes my law firm more profitable, makes my law firm more efficient. And it’s the law firm. That’s my profit generator. So I just want to get the law firm, more efficient, more profitable, because that’s the best thing for me.

Peter Shankman
Jay, you have a final one, because I want to dive in. Look, I it’s just such a again, it’s been an inspiration. I saw you with a firm and you you had a need. You didn’t see it, you built it. So I get that. And I appreciate the sort of ability to follow a path. One of the things that a lot of people struggle with is the incentivization of the attorneys and a plaintiffs practice. And, you know, I feel like a lot of us have cracked the code in the non plaintiff side and the fee for service side. It’s I feel easier. But what is your been your secret to success in scaling and keeping people and keeping them financially incentivized, while still profitable for the firm.

Speaker 7
We don’t have any contracts with any of our attorneys. There’s no fixed percentage that they get on the cases that they resolve. We used to do that and what they were doing is they were resolving all the easy cases. And they would never resolve the hard ones.

Peter Shankman
Right. That’s that’s sort of why it’s so hard to do. Blyton depends on what the the allocation of the cases is. And like any incentive, it can be used for good or for bad. So glad to hear that you struggle with that as well. Okay, so what’s what did you commit to?

Speaker 7
You treat everybody right? At the end of the day, at the end of the year? You treat everyone right? And that goes for the paralegals goes for the file clerks goes for the receptionist goes for the messengers, and it goes for the attorneys. And you know, it’s what advocate it makes it easy because we have dashboards on how many cases they resolved. gross revenue, net revenue, net revenue after forwarders it’s all On a dashboard, we have that for everybody in the office. So it makes it very easy to see. But it’s not only about money, how did they get along? How did they do with others? How did they make me help the juniors in the office? You know, grow? Because

Peter Shankman
unless you’re up at two in the morning thinking about each person as you do, how can that be systematized? So it’s not dependent upon you? Or is that one of those things that you’ve kept for yourself?

Speaker 7
No, I’m not there. You know, I’m never I mean, our main offices in New York, we have a satellite and in New Jersey, and then we have another office in Florida. I live in Florida. I hate to say this, but I’ve only been to New York, New York office one day for the last three years. We have a lot of management. Oh, we have smart advocate, I can see what everybody doesn’t want to navigate every day. We have dashboards that tells me exactly what they’re doing. So but I don’t need to be there. Because we have very responsible people. Most of them have been with me for decades. I equate the employees that’s one advocate as Parker Wakeman, like a roach motel you get in but you can’t get out of it. They don’t leave because we treat everybody right. You know, for example, I pay 98% of their medical bills of their of their medical insurance. 98 they only pay 2%. That’s my accountant. I’m the last of the Mohicans. And he constantly is begging me to, to change that I won’t. Because I think I should be paying all of their medical premiums on. I compromise with him. I give him 2%. So when Pete, we didn’t lay anybody off during the COVID crisis. And we’re still in the middle of the crisis. I mean, we haven’t laid anybody off. We did actually hire people. We hired a lot of people, because I talked to the hiring. And we’re finding some great candidates. So and we didn’t redo salaries. We didn’t reduce benefits. We didn’t furlough anybody. And you know what? People don’t forget that. People don’t forget that you are loyal to them? Well, loyalty is so paramount. It’s paramount and our offer. And I tell everybody listening, I’ll stand by you. We had zoom conferences every week. You know, back in March, April, May, or May, even June, went through June. Every week, I address everybody. And I said, Listen, this is a rough time right now record the quote, You know what, in New York, the courts and spoke well, you can’t get a trial. Defendants take advantage of that. But I tell everybody, listen, you do what you need to do. To keep us going, and I’ll do what I need to do to keep everybody paid and employed. And, and so they stand by me and I stand by them. And that’s just the way the relationship is. So that’s why people, we have a very high percentage of people that are with the firm more than 10 years, more than 20 years.

Peter Shankman
So one of the things a lot of our listeners have struggled with is the fact that the courts are closed, especially in New York lawyers. You know, their little smaller cases are churning. But some of the guys who deal with catastrophic cases don’t have that that push of trial. And in New York, compared to most place a lot of the carriers wait till the steps of the courthouse to force it. How do you deal with you know, what’s your advice to people who are dealing with that situation where, you know, people are, you know, smaller cases, fine, but the bigger cases really are getting hung up and maybe worse through 2021?

Speaker 7
Well, I’ll get to your question. But in general, what we’ve done is we’ve taken that backlog of paper that everybody has had, and everybody always has, and we’ve eliminated it. So all the cases that we’re waiting for summons and complaints. They’re gone. Or what we in New York, we call it the bill of particulars, it’s like a derogatory, they’re all gone. We are doing everything humanly possible to clear all of that out. So that when they do open up that we’re ready for them. And, you know, we have been somewhat successful in mediation. Even on big cases, we just mediated a very, very large case yesterday and there was a very large recommendation from the mediator that I don’t know if it’s going to work but Well, yeah, I haven’t heard what the client said, and I haven’t heard what the defendant said. But at least there was progress. And so we’ve been fairly successful. mediating and resolving cases, not the same volume, but it’s keeping our head above water. And you just got to work really hard at it, at the same time. Making sure that you don’t leave the any paperwork on done. Take advantage of this, you know, during, during the COVID crisis, especially back in March, April, May, June, July, a lot of our colleagues, they went off TV, they pulled back on their advertising budget, we kept it absolutely the same. Because now we have less competition. So with the same money, we were getting more cases. In fact, I think it was in June, we got double the auto cases that we got from the year before in June.

Speaker 3
Wow. Yeah. And nobody’s driving me.

Speaker 7
And then went for the carry is also early on and said, Listen, if you don’t give us more spots for our money, we’re gonna be out of here. And we ended up getting more free spots. So you just got to play it, you know, you just gotta play tough, and you got to take advantage in bad times. When everybody else, you know, it’s like, the stock market goes up, and everybody thinks stock market’s going up, well, that’s probably the time to get out. And when everybody thinks the stock market’s going down, and everything’s going through the shit, that’s probably the time to get in. So, when the world was going to an end, back in March, and April, you needed to take advantage of that. And make sure your chips are all in. And that’s what we did.

Peter Shankman
That’s awesome. Any final words for our audience here? You know, it’s, it’s just awesome to have this time with you and soak up this knowledge? Yes, thank you so much. Any sort of parting words to people who are in the in the trenches in that first in that second 30, building their firm? Well,

Speaker 7
keep working very hard. So don’t look down look straight ahead. Your futures in front of you not behind you. Be creative, be different. We’re constantly striving to be different. I mean, in one case that I had, I put out post this advertising post, it’s on the front page of the Sunday newspaper in various communities. And stuff different, right? You never heard that. Anybody. But we did that. And you know, we got a ton of great case, though. So the idea is think out of the box. But I mean, really out of the box, be different. Differentiate yourself from the, from the normal, commercial on TV. Be creative. And listen, if anybody has any questions, I don’t know how many people watch this. But you can always feel free to call me. The number in the office is 5164666 500. My email address is Jerry at your lawyer.com. I’ll be happy to help you people out with anything. Any questions you might have. Hopefully, I have answers. And if you want to get rich, send me your cases.

Jay Ruane
Sounds good to me. My mask

Unknown Speaker
Bartlett.

Jay Ruane
Okay, want to get into it. I’m a criminal lawyer. And I want to get into mass torts just listening to you. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 7
I used to do the criminal side. And there’s a lot better when I left the federal government. You know, we were prosecuting criminals. But I went directly into a mass tort firm in Manhattan. And so I’ve been doing mass torts for almost four decades now. And it’s, it’s a lot of fun. It’s very interesting. You know, when I went to school, I went to college. I took a program I majored in accounting. Because in accounting, you didn’t need a language. And you didn’t need science. And now my whole life is science. Because every mass tort, whether it be a medical device, or pharmaceutical or environmental, it’s all about the science.

Jay Ruane
Yeah. But

Speaker 7
you got to know the science better than the defendants. Witnesses, because if you don’t learn the science better than them, they’ll run circles around. Yeah,

Jay Ruane
sure. So it’s amazing. It was it’s always been amazing to me, being a DUI lawyer and a trial lawyer, that I needed to learn science And that was never my strength.

Unknown Speaker
Yeah, well, now it’s my strength. Yeah. Enjoy

Peter Shankman
it. Thanks so much. I really appreciate your time.

Jay Ruane
Thank you so much for being with us.

Unknown Speaker
Stay safe.

Becca Eberhart
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Jay Ruane
Boy, you know, Seth, I gotta tell you, these interviews are getting better and better. I mean, the talent that you’ve been able to accomplish getting us conversations with is really mind blowing to me. I know, because this is your baby. You’re the one who gets all the people in here. But boy, oh, boy, just the nuggets that we got out of that conversation. I mean, I have my notes here. I saw you taking notes as well. What are your takeaways?

Peter Shankman
You know, for me, I think it’s the be creative. You know, it’s not like, you know, what’s coming next. He didn’t know, you know, he said, Hey, you know, in those days, Yellow Pages, were too long of a week for him. I look at it almost like SEO for some people, knowing what your resources are. And not just doing the me too, but sort of being creative, pushing it and doubling down. All great advice.

Jay Ruane
Yeah, you know, it’s funny, when he talks about his Yellowpages story, I quit my job and hung my shingle a week after they closed the Yellow Pages. And I can remember making a phone call to them saying, Hey, I wanted to give him the Yellow Pages. And the guy said, Great, I’ll pencil you in for 11 months from now when we can talk about your ad. And I was like, Well, wait a minute, why? And he’s like, Oh, the books closed. Dude, you’re out of luck for a year. And i My heart sank, because that’s all I knew lawyers did. And then, you know, a month later, my brother came home, I was surviving on subsistence cases from referrals. My brother came home, he had finished his freshman year of college and had taken a web design class. He said, Why don’t we build your website and see what happens? And I gotta tell you, talking to him about, you know, his early web leads might were the same. My web leads converted tremendously early in the days because the people who were on the web then loved it. And

Peter Shankman
perspective, this wasn’t just early 92 was like a head of AOL. I mean, this is like, this is like almost Al Gore early. I mean, Jack would, you know, this was really, really,

Speaker 2
I mean, I think he started off back when you could only own one domain name with it. I mean, that’s, that’s probably where he was because I can remember that they didn’t allow you to own more than one domain name, which is mind blowing in and of itself. until like the mid 90s.

Peter Shankman
When were you first online? The first I remember was to AOL.

Jay Ruane
Yeah, well was the first thing I was online but but back then I can would only allow you to own one domain name per business entity. And I because I can remember talking to a colleague we know back in down in Georgia Bub ahead when he first tried to he was going to get DUI lawyer, but he got drunk driving defense.com Because he figured that was be a better it better, because he could only get one. And that’s how Baba started to really build his his his empire

Peter Shankman
online. Absolutely. That’s how we both frankly, one of the ways we got there was was the Baba had connection. That’s awesome. So you know, we got we got a lot of excitement in the weeks ahead. I don’t know if you want to tip your hat to what is what is coming.

Jay Ruane
I think we should leave it. Let’s let’s, folks, we got a lot of cool stuff coming. We have some guests, that Seth must have sold his soul to the devil. And it wasn’t for a golden fiddle. It was for some of the guests that he is lined up for us to interview over the next couple of weeks. And so what I think we’re going to do probably is maybe we do a quick little pop up where we list and have a sort of a coming attractions of the people that we have coming up in the next couple of weeks because it’s mind blowing. The research that I’m having to do to get ready for the conversations is a lot of work, but man oh man, it’s gonna be some really good stuff.

Peter Shankman
That’s awesome. All right.

Jay Ruane
So why don’t we do this? Why don’t we end the show? That was a phenomenal conversation. I had I got some takeaways things that I want to think about. And you know, I know you did too. Why don’t we leave it with that? We are MAX growth live. He look at this. I’ve been doing this now. We’re like 40 shows into it. And I knew where I was. Go on, and I pointed the wrong way. So he is nobody, but he is Seth price. Seth price my man down there, DC, Maryland, Virginia. Price Benowitz. If you need a lawyer in that side of the East Coast, just stop short of Connecticut, you go to him anything Connecticut, you know, about 15 miles into Connecticut, I guess you can call me. But that’s who we are folks. And we are here to help you grow your firm. If you want to participate in the show. If you have questions for us, please leave us a comment down below. Send us a DM We love talking about this stuff. As you can see, you can go back in our history, plenty of videos on our Facebook page that you can watch going back to some of our earlier shows where I had all sorts of microphone troubles. But we are really here to make your life easier because both Seth and I as well as all of our guests have grown our firms, and we have taken the lumps and we don’t want you to take the lumps and take them as well. So please reach out to us if you have any questions says any parting words for anybody today?

Peter Shankman
Yeah, this is just great. And you know, I, you know, to just when you hear from some of the people who have been there done that it sort of starts to distill some of the things we know we need to work on and need to be inspired to do. But knowing that it worked for them, it can work for us.

Jay Ruane
Absolutely. And we’ll leave it with that folks. So for again for Seth price did it right this time for myself, Jay Ruane We are MAX growth live. Thank you for being with us. And we’ll see you again next week on another edition of maximum growth live. Bye for now.

Speaker 1
Thank you for listening to maximum growth live. Please remember to subscribe to our podcast for the latest episodes and tune in live on Facebook every Thursday for our live show. For more information visit maximum growth live on Facebook or maximum lawyer.com And be sure to share us with your friends