← Personal Injury Mastermind w/ Chris Dreyer
Personal Injury Mastermind w/ Chris Dreyer
312. Law Firm Management Mastery: How Stepping Away from Cases Built a 275-Person Firm
00:33:59
Anthony Lopez transformed Your Insurance Attorney from a 70-person practice into a 275-employee powerhouse by making one pivotal decision: stepping away from the courtroom to focus entirely on law firm management.
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- [00:03]
A
Anthony Lopez built his law firm, your insurance attorney, into a 275 person powerhouse. He did it by breaking every rule. Rather than outsourcing marketing, he's got an in house marketing team watching weather patterns to target zip codes in real time. He trains lawyers from scratch. Instead of poaching talent, he turns HR from a cost center into a profit driver. And his explosive growth all started when he decided to go all in on running his law firm as a business.
- [00:30]
B
When I started your insurance attorney, I, I made a pivotal decision that really changed the trajectory of the law firm. I'm a board certified civil trial lawyer. I love being in court. I enjoy working cases. I like being trial. I was, I don't know, 60 people, 70 people back then. And it dawned on me, how can you work on your business when you work in your business business? I couldn't be the trial lawyer, the chief marketing officer, head of hr, deal with technology, dealing with the employees, looking at revenue. I couldn't do it all, or if I did, I couldn't do it great. So I stepped back, I made the decision to be the CEO, run the firm like a business. I replaced myself with another lawyer that I trained and he became a board certified trial lawyer under my tutelage. And now he steps in the court with for me. And I run the firm now with a whole C suite which I never thought I would have, including HR and all of these not necessarily non revenue generating positions. But by the way, there are ways to make those positions revenue generated. Talk about that. And that's when we really started experiencing exponential growth where it went from 70 to 100 to 125 to 150 to 200. And now I just, it, it just happens. But let me tell you, get away from you really quick because when you have big revenue, gross revenue coming in like it's very easy to lose track of where all of the dollars are going. So you really gotta be on it.
- [02:05]
A
Yeah, that's the data component, the cfo, the cash flow cycles and all those things. Especially challenging on the PI side.
- [02:12]
B
Well, yeah. Cause you could think you're making money, right? And you're not. Because when you're a firm that advertises in markets and we have our own in house digital marketing company that is here, we have our own in house call center. I don't outsource that because I want it done a specific way. So we have trained employees that know how to handle the calls internally. And it allows us having all of that in house. It allows us to be very Fluid on the market. Especially on the first party property side if you go down. So we're got 3,4000ft of this building but on, on the fifth floor you walk down to like my call center, there's five TVs and they're all just watching the weather throughout the country. Because if there is a hailstorm in Colorado or there's a fire in California or something's happening in North Carolina or the middle of the state, we will instantaneously start running ads to target those people. And we will geo reference zip codes so that people are on their social media while the hail storm is impacting their roof. And they're like, wow, I do hear hail hitting my roof. And they're on Instagram and my ads like did you have hail damage as a result of the storm today? So like very relevant marketing, very quick marketing. Which again I think differentiates us from a lot of our competitors because we have it in house and allows us to be very fluid and very quick.
- [03:33]
A
And I feel like auto, it's like so many people that the cost to acquire an auto just because everybody's going after it. So I think that works against itself and everybody's trying to get the catastrophic, you know, to help pay for the smaller cases. One of the things you mentioned, I do want to hear your opinion on the changing those non revenue into revenue. But I want to on the CTO and on the tech side because you guys do tech really, really well. So maybe you could kind of hit both of those for me. I'd love to hear.
- [04:04]
B
So yeah, so let's talk about the highest revit, like the highest cost. The most expensive part of usually running any business is your employees. Right. So if you have enough people where you have a head of hr, how can I turn someone whose job technically doesn't make me revenue? Right. That's not, that's not an office held by a lawyer that's bringing in dollars from settlements. Right. So what I do is I actually I tie their annual bonus to net revenue of the firm. And the way I do that is I say look, we spent last year $23 million in salaries. I'm like, and we made whatever call it 25% of our was net revenue. I'm like if you can through controlling salaries and employees, whether that's using more offshore employees as a component, working with technology and AI to try to figure out how to maybe get less people in the firm. If you can shave that number down and increase our, our net income. Like I will tie every point that you do that to a bonus that you get at the end of the year. And now you've turned your head of hr, which is not necessarily a profit center, into someone that is like monitoring your employees expenses and directly correlating that to your net operating income to try to figure out how they can increase that by decreasing the overhead. And that's how you monetize that position. And that's what I do.
- [05:38]
A
That's incredibly smart. You know, we're like 106 people. So we're. No, we're near. And I think our variable is tied to I think employee retention. But I like the, I like the revenue component much better. It's a different way to look at it because ultimately the business needs to generate profit and it benefits everyone.
- [05:55]
B
So the more people you have looking at your bottom line and trying to protect it and trying to get those little. Because you know when you're put a hundred million dollars a year like every point counts, right? But the more people you have looking at that number, the better your business is going. And I again, we lever technology. We run the firm on a salesforce platform. I have a dashboard where I can analyze every metric real time. That's important to me. Elite. I can see who's settling cases today, who settled what yesterday, last month. I can see the revenue today, real time. As it happens in the firm. We track our case acquisition cost like, like a hawk. So we're always looking at what cost to bring in the files. And then we're actually inputting that data every month and all of the cases to make sure that when a case settles, the firm gets paid its case acquisition cost back plus the firm gets paid back in interest. Right. Because that money costs money. And we actually have a formula built into our system where the longer a case is out, the higher the case acquisition cost becomes, so that it actually lowers the net of the case. The firm gets paid back its interest. So I can really look at a realistic revenue. Right. What did that case really net me over time? Because that's really the biggest component in this game, right. You're not settling cases in 48 hours. They're typically resettling over 17 months. Right. If they go to lick or whatever, we track all of that and our lawyers are paid bonuses based on net revenue from cases they settle. So they're incentivized to try to settle a case quicker because they know the case acquisition cost goes up the longer the case sits on their desk.
- [07:38]
A
We gotta talk about the marketing a little bit, right? So you got fear the Beard also got this tagline. I was reading this, I was looking at your staff to see, you know, unique employees you got. Before you call your insurance company, call your insurance attorney. So let's talk about some of these iconic taglines, Branding positionings. Just talk to me about how you think about brand and come about with these.
- [08:02]
B
So, you know, branding is an important aspect and always a conversation that we're having at every marketing meeting. Because obviously there are basically two types of advertising as I see in the world. There's branding, which is very hard to tie to revenue. Right. And then there's call to action, which is much easier to tie to revenue. Right. So I go back and forth with my CMO a lot because I think branding is a very important aspect of this trifecta that I like to call it of getting somebody to pick up the phone and call you. Because I think it's important for somebody to see the billboard. They're like, oh, you're insurance attorney, they don't remember it. No one's calling you really because they see your billboard. They're not memorizing the number, but it's subconsciously in the back of their head that like you're obviously a big firm because you have a billboard. Then we do sponsorships with Orlando Magic, my PC, things of that nature. So you go to the gang, you see your insurance again, subliminal, it's not really top of mind. But then something happens to you and then you Google it and now all of a sudden, hey, your insurance attorney pops up. I've heard of them, I've seen them. That's a big firm. Where do I know them from? So the touch points that branding provides I think are really what helps drive people to call. Then sometimes you see people that do zero branding and just run a hundred percent digital marketing campaigns and are pretty successful too. Again, I go back and forth with my CFO about this all the time. I like branding, he doesn't. Because hard to tie branding to revenue. Like it's not a trackable thing.
- [09:39]
A
Right, right. You know, it's, it's blended into just the, you know, your cost to acquire. You know, I, I want to have a fun question that you guys can debate about right here. You know, I had Angel Reyes from Dallas, you know, good size firm, and he's like, hey, brand doesn't matter.
- [09:53]
B
Right?
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A
He's, he's his, his logic and I think he just talked about this at national trial lawyers is look, you got all these lead gen companies that don't have a brand outside of like Walker with, you know, Los Defensaurus, you know, they're, they're originating cases using influencers and doing this. So, so hey, he's, he's saying brand doesn't matter, but I'm kind of on your side, you know, the likability component because they have options. If they didn't have options, then maybe it wouldn't matter. So, so what's your thoughts about that?
- [10:24]
B
So what, what we started looking at was so branding doesn't necessarily matter when you're looking at your specific campaigns that you're launching and the case acquisition costs from those campaigns. However, what you have to also track is organic calls that are not necessarily from direct marketing campaigns. So what we started realizing was when you look at the campaign that a case acquisition cost. Yeah, branding. Did branding make that person call? Like not directly attributable to. But when you start looking at all of the cases that come in through the firm that are not through any specific marketing, I attribute those to brand because how else do they hear of him? Like they didn't necessarily Google whatever it was that they were looking for. Like they picked up a phone because they heard of your insurance. So that is how. So branding does have an impact. And the guys that are doing solely digital marketing are never going to experience that because every call they get is as a direct result of their marketing.
- [11:28]
A
Yeah, and I've, I've heard, you know, those individuals that are doing acquisitions, right. You've got Jacoby has done, you know, I think the Ed Bernstein law. Then you've got Steve Mirror with Sweet Chains is doing some acquisitions. And the one thing that I would see is like that brand equity takes, you know, two or three years to maybe realize. And I would say man, maybe that is, you know, outside of like the asset purchase from a labor perspective, maybe the brand, you get a three year launch head start. From a marketing perspective.
- [12:01]
B
Well, yeah, it's instant credibility in the market that I've already spent a hundred million dollars developing. Right. So yeah, I agree with that.
- [12:10]
A
You've got, you know, a couple hundred employees. I'm not sure your exact size.
- [12:13]
B
2, 7, 5. Trust me, I look at the overhead every day.
- [12:18]
A
One of the things that caught my attention was like you, I hear these different trains of thought, like go with the experience, you know, someone that's, that's got all the reps and, and you know, I believe in an interview you said you prefer fresh law students, you know, and graduates over experienced insurance defense attorneys. And it's not to say like, like talent is Talent. Right. I know you're going to go pick, you know, the A plus. It doesn't matter. But, you know, is it because it's your way of training them or it's an energy thing? Like. Like, talk to me about the. The green attorneys in that approach.
- [12:54]
B
Yeah, I've hired, obviously, senior lawyers, trial counsel, guys that can just go in and try cases, and then lawyers that come from other law firms that are five to 10 years out, that have their own experience. But I found that the way I like to do it best is I like to get kids that are in law school that summer here for two summers that take the bar pass and then come here to work as. As baby lawyers. I find that those lawyers end up lasting the longest in the firm because it allows us not only to really get to know each other, but they get to understand the firm culture, which is very important to me. How we approach cases philosophically from a standpoint of. Of making sure that the client's outcome is more important than the attorney's fee. Things of that nature that not every law firm necessarily bridges and lives by. One of the big things that was always important to me and with the young lawyers was I would always tell them, I'm like, number one, don't chase money. You're chasing money. This is not the right firm for you. And number two, the fee can never be more than what the clients get. A lot of firms didn't really run like that, but it was important for me because gave us the opportunity to, number one, weed out candidates that we'd already spent a couple summers with that we really didn't think were going to fit within the firm culture and then really hone in on the lawyers that we liked, that we thought would work long term. And I have lawyers here that have literally worked with me through all of my iterations of law firms. I've got a guy here that's been with me literally 20 years. I hired him as a. A baby lawyer who summoned with me, and he's one of my partners to this day. And most of my young lawyers that we brought up that way are still here. The turnover, I find, is in the lawyers that come from other firms that have already want to, say, necessarily develop bad habits, but developed habits that are different than the ones that we like and appreciate.
- [14:57]
A
I think that's super strong. That gives you a unique advantage because everyone else is trying to get talent from, you know, they're poaching other attorneys. They're. They're going to the recruiters looking, you Know, with the resumes built out and you're like, no, I'm looking for the culture fits and individuals that I can work with and shape. And I think that's, that's unique. I think it's a huge strength.
- [15:17]
B
I think from a long term perspective ends up saving me money and making us more money as a law firm when we're able to cultivate our own talent.
- [15:28]
A
Yeah. And speaking of talent, so you've achieved something unique. At least in Florida you've got three board certified trial lawyers under one roof.
- [15:37]
B
That's very rare, especially in our space. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [15:41]
A
So how has that level of trial expertise, you know, shaped your approach to cases in case selection? You know, having these killers on, on staff?
- [15:49]
B
We pride ourselves on getting really good results for our clients and we enjoy going to trial. We like trying cases. I will try the, the impossible case if that's what the client wants to do rather than push them to settle. I think justice is usually better served when you can get that like home run outcome for your client as opposed to always pushing to settle. And it's also a reputational thing because insurance companies track all of these metrics. People don't understand the level that these insurance companies are looking at law firms and looking at settlements and looking at what was your opening demand and what did you ultimately settle the case for. These are metrics that are important to me and I need to make sure that the insurance companies understand that we're going to take them to task if required to do so. Yeah.
- [16:40]
A
Otherwise you're just going to get lowballed and State Farm's going to play, you know, play games and hold off until the final hour to see if you're really going to go to trial.
- [16:47]
B
There was a point in time in first party property in Florida, like 2009ish, 10ish, where state farm threw down the hammer and they basically stopped settling cases and they were making lawyers try all the cases. And I can't tell you how many lawyers just stopped taking State Farm cases. I feel like we were like one of the only games in town and we were in trial every week against State Farm at some point, but. And then ultimately they did a global and we resolved all the cases that we had left with them. But I think it's important to, to be able to take the cases all away.
- [17:21]
A
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- [18:31]
B
Sure. So property and casualty, like first party property is very niche. It's not something that you can just jump into and start doing. There's a lot of technical expertise that goes into handling these cases, especially at a firm like ours where we are direct consumer. So in other words, we're getting involved in insurance cases at the outset. So we're actually helping our clients adjust the loss. We're retaining experts from the very beginning to determine causation, to figure out what our damages model looks like, to do the engineers to make sure that the causation matches the loss if it's covered by the policy. Like a lot of upfront legal work that goes into these cases before any of them yet litigated. And a lot of PI guys are not used to dealing with these types of cases. The policies are vastly different, hugely complicated. And the case law is also not very straightforward on a lot of these first party property policies and proximate cause anti concurrent language and things of that nature, you really gotta know what we're doing, especially on really large commercial losses. So we honed our skill set doing that 20 years basically. And I've got an entire pre suit department built into my law firm that only handles first party properties and we do it all over the country. We have offices in Georgia, North Carolina, Colorado and California. So we're like actively adjusting right now and handling the wildfire cases.
- [20:05]
A
Yeah, so that, that's, that was going to be my follow up, you know, you know, specifically about the recent events, the Wildfire count claims. You know, at least I get on Instagram, I get on, you know, whatever social Media. I just see these bombarded by people trying to get these wildfire cases speaking to the consumer right for you. What kind of things should they be aware of that that might be a case like you've heard these horror stories of, you know, a week before the fires they, they pulled my insurance and you know, I don't know what types of things can, can they get help?
- [20:39]
B
So yeah, so I mean you have a lot of different cases going on right now. And what's concerning to me as a first party property lawyer that specializes in this area of the law is you have a lot of PI lawyers right now that are just trying to accumulate cases for the mass tort that are advertising that they're going to handle the first party property case free. Which I'm just having done this for 20 years. Like I don't either they don't understand what's involved in doing a first party property case or they're just not being authentic in their advertising and they're just trying to lure clients in on the mass tort. We are working actively with a lot of law firms that are handling mass tort cases out there that are accumulated cases. And we are as an added benefit to their clients, working in conjunction with them to handle the first party property cases to make sure the clients are getting what they should be getting out of their policies. We have, we're seeing all types of cases. So we're seeing cases where the house burns down and they really should be an open and shut case. And in those cases that clients that call us that want to retain us, we're actually telling them, look, don't hire us yet. Your carrier has a finite amount of time to adjust the loss and make a payment. Let's give it 30 days, let's see if they make the payment they're supposed to. Because I don't want you paying me if they're going to make the payment anyway. And that's the advice that we've always given to clients. If I look at a policy like taste and I'm like, this is pretty open and shut, like you really don't need me yet. You've already reported loss yourself. And I feel like things are going the way they should. I'll tell the client that advice because having done this for 20 years, unfortunately I would say 50% of those clients call me back because the carrier does not do the right thing on the total loss fire cases or the house is gone. The client shouldn't be getting policy limits. So there shouldn't be a lot to Talk about. And that's our advice. If you're not getting policy limits, give us a call in a month and let's reengage. The cases that we're gonna. That we are seeing that I know are gonna be heavily litigated and contested are the smoke. Because what people don't realize is smoke in and of itself is a covered loss and is toxic and causes massive amounts of damage to the house. So we work with experts that go out to the field, do the testing on all of the different components of the structure, and prepare reports to let us know, hey, what is the extent of the smoke damage and what needs to be ripped out and replaced. We've done thousands of those cases, and that's where we're going to be fighting with insurance companies because there's going to be. Oh, the conversation about who has to. Do you have to replace all the drywall? Can it only be part of the drywall? That room's not contaminated. The contents are fine. They can be washed. Those kinds of conversations are going to already happen, but those are going to do the highly contested claims.
- [23:32]
A
You were an entrepreneur before law and running businesses. Support your education. You know, what drew you to entrepreneurship so early?
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B
I needed to eat, I needed to pay rent, I needed to put myself through school. I've literally been working in one form of another since I was in high school and haven't stopped since. I did start a travel company while I was in law school. What differentiated our travel company was we basically specialized in doing high school and college trips. So, like end of the year high school trips, like grad night, college trip for, like, sororities and fraternities. And basically what we did was we organized the trips and then I would send out a film crew. The real world days of mtp. We would film these trips, edit them, put music, and then send out DVDs of the trip, which actually ended up doing two things. Number one, it differentiated what we were doing from what everyone else was doing, because no one was doing that. But secondly, it was like a great marketing tool because we had all of our company information on the dvd. I ended up selling that company at the end of my second year to my partner, actually for a pretty nominal sum. That was actually one of my closest friends. So I gave it to him. He ultimately ended up selling it for millions of dollars. Fast forward, here we are 30 years later, and I think we. I think I bring a lot of that innovation to the practice of law.
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A
You spent, you know, a few years on the. The defense side before Switching to plaintiff work, I have to imagine from a strategy perspective, putting yourself in their shoes when you, when you went to your insurance attorney was very helpful. But what was that moment when you realized like, hey, I need to make a change, I need to go on the other side?
- [25:14]
B
Oh, yeah, really pivotal moment in my life. Back in, when I was a baby lawyer, I was representing insurance companies, and I was associate at a firm that basically had insurance company this client. And I absolutely despised doing the work. It didn't feel good. Shortly thereafter, as luck would have it, the law firm that I was working for ended up this dismantling, and I ended up partnering up with one of the partners that I had worked for previously. And at that moment, I explained to them, I'm never representing an insurance company again. And I started representing policyholders and doing, playing this work 100%.
- [25:54]
A
2019, you launch your insurance attorney. That's a bit different because most of the firms, it's like five of the partners names strung together. It's hard to remember from a branding perspective. You know, in those early days, walk, walk me through kind of the vision you had for your insurance attorney.
- [26:12]
B
So, yeah, so let's talk about that. So when I started my firm in 08ish, the firm was ultimately named Marin, El Hayek, Lopez and Martinez. First of all, good luck pronouncing El Hayek when you see it on paper. Like, no one ever gets it. And good luck trying to spell it or Google it or figure it out. I realized when I was marketing and trying to bring in work that Marinal, Hayek, Lopez Martinez wasn't like a great brand name. And I felt like we were getting lost in the shuffle. So what I ended up doing as the firm progressed in my practice grew, was I started branding myself as your insurance attorney, Anthony Lopez. And that was how I was marketing myself to bring in cases. And then fast forward 2018, 19. I ultimately started a law firm and I called it your insurance attorney, which it's not your insurance attorney, Anthony Lopez, it's your insurance attorney. And I did that on purpose because I really wanted to create a brand. And when we were coming up with the concept, I sat in my conference room with my team and I said, look, I want you to think Nike. Like, I want the swoosh, but I want it for a law firm. We didn't want the firm to necessarily be associated with any one person. We wanted it to be more of a concept.
- [27:34]
A
Yeah, yeah. And it is distinctive. Right? It stands out. It's different, it's clean, it's sharp. I like that it's descriptive in the name. Like sometimes, you know, standalone name you don't really know. So there's an association there. So I think it's super smart. You know, you got your pilot's license and then you got your jet license. So I've never flown private and I here's the reason for me, I'm just afraid that once I do it, I'm never gonna want to do anything else.
- [27:59]
B
Well, money, that's a hundred percent true. So you're right on the money there. Once you start flying, unloading your own jet. Yeah. You're not flying commercial ever again.
- [28:08]
A
Tell me about the passion for flying, where that came about.
- [28:12]
B
Yeah, so 2015ish. You know, I always wanted to fly. Even when I was a kid, I always wanted to be a pilot, but I didn't have the resources to go and do that. And then finally started making money and then I don't have any time. Right. The age old story. But in 2015, I came to the office, I'm like, you know what, I'm gonna do it. The kid that had been working with me from the beginning called them into my office. I'm like, you've always wanted to be a partner, right? Said yes. I'm like, congratulations, you're a partner. And he's oh wow. He's I'm like all of these things that I'm doing, you're now doing. And I'm going to leave the office every day at 2:00 and go get my pilot license. That was my first partner and that's how he became a partner. And then I was building the airport three times a week to learn how to fly. And me being me, I got my pilot license in three months, foster minus. And then my instrument rated right after that. Then I got retractable gear, complex, high altitude. And then yeah, within I think three years I was flying a jet. I was type rated jet pilot. I had a Honda jet that I was rated single pilot in. And then I bought a Phenom 300E which I was also rated single pilot. I'd fly that from Miami to my house in Aspen with my family in the back all the time. Loved it. And I recently sold the Phenom and now I'm flying a Falcon 2000 LX. Huge upgrade. And we're loving it, it's the best. But to your point, once you fly private, you're never going back. And especially once you're flying your own planes.
- [29:40]
A
If there's one thing Anthony's story proves, it's that breaking from the pack pays off. While other firms stick to traditional playbooks, he built something different. A firm that can pivot marketing in real time, a team that grows its own talent, a business model that turns every department into a profit center. But none of it would have happened if he hadn't made that crucial decision. Step away from the courtroom and truly run the business. And now with Anthony@yourinsuranceattorney.com his team handles property damage claims nationwide, and he's always happy to share insights with fellow law firm owners. I'm Chris Dreyer, and you've been listening to Personal Injury Mastermind. If you like this episode, hit subscribe and grab a copy of my new book, Personal Injury Lawyer Marketing.