← Personal Injury Mastermind w/ Chris Dreyer
Personal Injury Mastermind w/ Chris Dreyer
331. The Making of a Badass Boutique Law Firm: Relentless Growth and Smart Marketing w/ Danny Daniel
00:29:56
Loading summary
Transcript56 lines
- [00:00]
Kinsey
Hey there, future VIP. I'm Kinsey, your on site concierge for PEMCON. The Personal Injury Master Rhyme Conference, October 5th through the 8th. When you go VIP at PEMCON, you're getting the full experience. Luxury accommodations included at the five star Phoenician resort. $250 in resort credit for the spa, golf course, or wherever your mood takes you. A private VIP dinner and exclusive access to the biggest names in personal injury. Grab your VIP tickets while you still can at pemcon. That's P I m C o n dot org. See you this fall in Scottsdale.
- [00:39]
Danny Daniels
We hustle and we've always said, man, we're on the verge. There's always something that we can do better in our business and our life with our fitness. We're addicted to tweaking and getting better.
- [00:54]
Chris Dreyer
Welcome to Personal Injury Mastermind. Let's get into it. Danny Daniels sold his dream car to buy a yellow pages ad. 25 years later, he's still pushing because good enough isn't in his vocabulary. From courtroom wins to content teams, AI tools to brand attribution, he's always on the verge. Loving up through systems, stories and strategy to build a modern legacy firm. I'm Chris Dreyer, founder and CEO of Rankings IO. This is how top performers think, scale, and stay ahead.
- [01:23]
Jonathan Stark
Let's go.
- [01:24]
Danny Daniels
We had the biggest verdict in firm history last year. So that was Good. It was $42 million verdict.
- [01:30]
Jonathan Stark
Wow.
- [01:30]
Danny Daniels
My law partner, Jonathan Stark and one of our other partners, Chris Carver, tried that case and got a phenomenal result. Largest verdict in Limestone county history. We're real proud of that around here. You know, we worked hard to be a firm that goes after full value and that helped validate, you know, the fact that we do. We've had multiple million dollar verdicts, but that's the largest in the firm's history. So we're pretty fired up about that. We just continue to grow as a firm every year. You know, my goal is to grow about 20% a year. We call it, you know, the 20 mile march. If you're not growing your dying kind of concept. Thankfully, we've been blessed to be able to keep doing that and growing. In central Texas, we have six offices, two in Austin, Ryan, College Station, Colleen, Tyler, and Waco. So we're about 170 employees and 40 lawyers.
- [02:20]
Jonathan Stark
That's incredible. And I've got my notes here. I'm supposed to ask about the story of the 69 Camaro in your first Yellow Pages ad. So, you know, tell that story to me.
- [02:30]
Danny Daniels
Yeah, you know, my dad, he died when I was young. He was a big car guy and he was also a pilot. So all the stories that I heard about him from my mom because he died when I was 2, just kind of inspired me to do things. One of them which was tinkering around with cars, he was a big Corvette guy. I was put myself through college by just remodeling cars. So when I went to law school, I bought a 69 Camaro my first year. It was probably the nicest car I'd ever built. But when Jonathan and I started the firm, you know, we didn't have any money. My brother in law was a lawyer and he told me, danny, you can't do this unless you got 100 grand in a bank. Well, I had zero. So I sold that car for $13,000 and paid it all to the, to the phone book company to buy, you know, a full page ad in the phone book in the Dallas Fort Worth area, which is where we started. I've tried to buy that car back a number of times. We have an investigator. I said, man, can you hunt my car down? He would, and I'd call, no, we're not going to sell it. So I've never, I don't think I'll ever get it back. But it was a fun project and it went to a good purpose.
- [03:40]
Jonathan Stark
Marketing's changed, but back in the day, Yellow Pages was legit. It drove a lot of leads. And now you got your own podcast. You got the on the Verge podcast. So just briefly, before we dig in, tell me a little bit about the podcast.
- [03:52]
Danny Daniels
You know, the podcast is about ordinary people who get extraordinary results. You know, there's nothing really special about me or Jonathan. We just, we hustle and we've always said, man, we're on the verge. Some people might say, well, you're already there. I would say, no, we're not. You know, we're always pleased but not satisfied. And there's always something that we can do better in our business, in our life, with our fitness, you name it. It's just we're addicted to tweaking and getting better. And so that's what on the Verge is about, is really interviewing other entrepreneurs, people in the community who are remarkable. And we want to know their story and share that story. And you know, one of the things about our law firm is we love sharing stories. I think that's a huge differentiator. It's our second differentiator. We know your story's unique and so we just like telling the Stories. And the podcast is a way for us to, to tell people stories.
- [04:49]
Jonathan Stark
I gotta say that that fires me up. The, the on the verge and the goalpost is always moving looking. I think that's a part of the fun of being an entrepreneur is it's always different. It's not the grind.
- [05:02]
Danny Daniels
It is. Chris, you're on the merge, man. I read all about you, man. You're. You're killing it. And I can tell you just from what I could see, that you're not pleased with where you are. You're going to get better every day. And, and so I, I love that, man. So I was excited to be here with you.
- [05:18]
Jonathan Stark
Thank you. We're going to have a lot of fun. And, and you said, hey, there's nothing unique, but there's a ton that are different. You know, I've done a bunch of these and I, I want to. You mentioned one of those uniques, right? The three uniques. Is that like from eos? Is that when you guys do that exercise and.
- [05:34]
Danny Daniels
Yeah, we did. We did that. And it really pushed me to create these differentiators because, you know, personal injury is hard to differentiate from. There's a lot of different personalities, but. And there's a lot of different types of firms that do different things. I don't think any of us can do it. All our three uniques are. Well, first of all, we're 70% of our, our firm revenue comes from litigation. So we're, we are a litigation heavy firm. And we didn't start that way. We were a claims heavy firm that, that transitioned to what I'd say a big, badass boutique. That's why I like to describe it because we do handle a lot of cases. We end up referring out a lot because we were selective about what we want to handle. But we always say we don't handle every case, but when we do, we got your back. So that's number one. And number two is we know your story is unique. And a little background around that is people sometimes are embarrassed to tell their family or friends that they hired a personal injury lawyer just because some of the stigma around. And insurance company's done such a good job in their tort reform efforts to put a stigma on plaintiffs lawyers. And I actually think that pendulum is changing. But when they realize that, hey, I really have a unique situation here, I'm not just a. Like everybody else or what have you. So we, we let them know right up front, man, we know your story is unique, and we're going to tell that story that is our job. And last is full value matters. And it goes along with the story because too many times, especially insurance company, they want to bore you down to lost wages and medical bills. We're not cars, we're not property damage. Right. So the difference in the case comes down to the story. What's unique about it and how well can you tell that story? We really don't care about medical bills. I mean damages are important. We want to understand what they are. But that's not where the value of the case is. The value of the case is in the unique story, how the client's life's ultimately impacted by this tragedy.
- [07:30]
Jonathan Stark
You're taking that client approach versus the customer approach. The client has unique needs. The customer's kind of the widget on the assembly line also. Thank you for the transparency. And to Sharon, hey, we went from pre lit. Now we're a big badass litigating firm. You know, I value the transparency. I wanted to talk and dig into that a little bit. You've got this full settlement value committee, got the big case review. So it's not just saying these statements. It's like you're acting on it. Like these are systems at your firm. So tell me a little bit about the settlement community, the big case review, things like that.
- [08:06]
Danny Daniels
I can remember back in the day when tort reform was really, really hitting Texas and Jonathan and I looked at each other, said, man, we in the newspaper business, like are we going to survive this? You know, they were paid or incurred and all this other stuff. They were trying to hammer our damages. And at that time, you know, we made a decision that we were going to move forward, we were going to fight this battle and we were super passionate about it. So you know, our very first thing we ever established was our one shot. It's like you got one shot to get your life back to normal and that's through really good medical care. And so we, we started really focusing on ascension of care and understanding deeply what our clients treatment needs were and trying to help them connect with the right doctors, the best. And so we called that one shot. And then from there, you know, we're in a bunch of various groups with a lot of fabulous law firm entrepreneurs. And so I can't take credit for fsv. Now we call it different. Some firms call it MSV minimum settlement value. We said, well, we're going to call it full settlement value. But it's very much a similar situation where we have a committee of lawyers look at every case. Right. That's Over a certain threshold, which is mostly 100% of our cases because we screen pretty heavy. And it's what is the full value of this case. And the most aggressive lawyer on that committee will ends up setting the value. Right. And it's nice to have a committee because nobody wants to be the, the weak lawyer that says, well, I don't really think the case is worth this. Right. So it ends up being the most aggressive lawyer on that committee, ends up setting the value. And that's the value. That's it. And we're not settling for less unless, you know the client. We're going to do what's in the client's best interest and ultimately we're going to do what the client wants. But you know, our, our job is to try and encourage them to go the full length. And you get the most money for your case the day before trial.
- [10:04]
Jonathan Stark
You just do so, tons of data behind that. Right?
- [10:07]
Danny Daniels
I know, I see a lot of firms are pushing time on desk and trying to get it down. And I, I mean, I want to do it swiftly, but not at a discount. So that's fsb. And then we realized that, hey, we gotta do, we gotta do more with this. And that led us to Life Impact. And so we created this system in our firm called Life Impact Review. And so we hired a counselor that we knew from our church, and he's working for us full time now. And I promise we didn't steal him from the church. He, he retired from that, but now he's, he's with us and he's phenomenal. We dig in really deep from a counseling perspective with our clients to understand more deeply how they're impacted in their life. And, you know, if you just have a surface level call with a client, you're not going to get there. You get somebody that's really talented at digging in, and sometimes the clients don't even realize the depth of the pain. And he's got a way of bringing that out. So that's Life Impact. And then once we establish the life impact, that's really where you can get to a unique story. Then we also have what we call big case review. And that's where Jonathan comes in. Jonathan's super passionate about strategy on the biggest cases. And he'll still go try a case. He likes to do that. And so he looks at those cases. That's pretty much his whole job is big case review and developing strategy on cases. And we do it not only for our cases, but also we have, you know, other firms come in and bring cases in as well. We invite other firms to present cases and it is a source for us. We've had a number of times where outside firms have brought in cases and we, they end up referring the case to us. And so that's another, that's kind of a little bit of a side marketing thing. But we like to, we like to see other firms bring their cases in and a lot of firms want to understand how we do the big case review. And so we'll invite them to attend. We have them sign some confidentiality documents, but. And then we also invite them to bring a case if they like.
- [12:06]
Jonathan Stark
I want to kind of take it back to your decision to be this badass litigating firm and have these, you know, the big case review, the full settlement value. This committee, some firms, they want all the small cases and they refer out the big and others, they want to refer out the small and you know, and just keep the big.
- [12:26]
Danny Daniels
Yeah.
- [12:26]
Jonathan Stark
To me on the outside and I guess there's tons of way to skin a cat, so to speak.
- [12:32]
Danny Daniels
Yeah.
- [12:32]
Jonathan Stark
But today with AI and data and everything, it just seems like the prelates is getting beat down. Like, you know, your efforts to go and near shore to get these fees, you're just getting beat down, commoditized.
- [12:46]
Danny Daniels
But maybe I'm wrong.
- [12:48]
Jonathan Stark
Like when you think about, like how do you think, like push back, like I want it.
- [12:53]
Danny Daniels
No, no, I, I'm, I don't, I don't think you're wrong. I think you're right. Look, we were a claims firm for probably 10 years. I mean we're 25 years in and so. But it was totally different back then. I mean you could actually get reasonable values on cases in pre lit. And we still settle cases in pre lit and a lot of times it's because there's not enough insurance. I mean that's just. Oh, it's like insurance companies will pay on a no brainer. But if there's a lot of insurance out there, I mean, that's what the case is worth at a minimum. Right. If there's a million bucks, it's worth a million bucks. I mean, you can find the story. I believe that. I believe that if there was, you know, we're mostly car wrecks. I mean that's our niche. I heard you talk about that on, maybe it was in your book because I listened to the first two chapters. But you know, we're 95% car wreck. And so if there's substantial enough property damage, if you can look at the car and Say, oh, somebody probably got hurt in that. That's. Then tell me how much insurance is there and let's go. Because there's a story these people were impacted in a substantial way. And if you can truly understand that, improve that, bring that evidence to the table. I think you can get what's out there. I don't think that you can get full value if you can't litigate a case and put it in front of a jury to determine, because they're the true determiner of value. At the end of the day, for me, we're.
- [14:15]
Jonathan Stark
At least the way I think of it, we're not putting the Tesla bot up to talk to the jury. Right. Like, that's going to be a ways off.
- [14:20]
Danny Daniels
Right.
- [14:21]
Jonathan Stark
So you're going to have that, and that's a skill.
- [14:23]
Danny Daniels
Yeah. I want to talk about AI.
- [14:24]
Jonathan Stark
Let's talk about it. Let's hear it from your side. Yeah, let's hear it.
- [14:27]
Danny Daniels
Well, yeah, yeah, you're right. We use AI, we use Supio, and Jonathan and I are investors in that company. I very strongly believe in it. Those, they're brilliant. I'm just fired up about what they're doing, and we're. We're trying to figure out ways to use it more in our firm.
- [14:42]
Jonathan Stark
I'm unfamiliar with Supio. Give me the. What is.
- [14:47]
Danny Daniels
You know, AI driven medical chronology. They do demand letters.
- [14:51]
Jonathan Stark
Okay.
- [14:51]
Danny Daniels
There's validation there, too, though, I think. And that's what I want to do is back up for a second on AI, because AI, you had the LLMs and everything's moving so fast, it's crazy. So you got the LLMs and then so you can communicate with a chatbot. Right. And that's super helpful. Then they've gone to this more deeper research, reasoning models. And then now Even this year, 2025 is probably gonna be the year of, you know, agents. Right. So the agentic stuff, however, law is different than, say, math. Right. Because math. Math has a proof and you can validate the AI's answer and you can get certainty there. But in law, law is more about delivering evidence within the constructs of the rules and then having probability and judgment. Right. So there's not. I mean, the jury's the judge or the judge is the judge Right. For. For judging the. The evidence on probability. Right. And it's more probable than not. Right. And so there's not a way to truly validate that. So I don't see AI in the near future being implemented in law firms on a enterprise type level. I see it as More tactical. And that's how we use AI because it has to be validated. I mean, there's too much risk in our industry to. For error. I mean, you can't allow error. There's too much at stake on behalf of the client. So I think the risk in AI is, is law firms getting lazy and not validating and maybe relying too much on it. So one thing I do like about Supio is they have. They have validation. They have humans that will validate chronologies. If you use them to, you know, draft a demand letter, then they have human validation. But at the end of the day, you know, the lawyer handling that case is the ultimate validator, and it's their responsibility. And so there is a lot of risk using it. And I hope that it'll help us automate a lot of things in the firm and someday. But right now, we use it very tactically, mostly around medical, like understanding. It is an accelerator to learning big time, man. That's where I use it the most, is accelerating the unknown. Right. How do I. How do I get my head around this?
- [17:10]
Jonathan Stark
When you say validation, you know, the validator, you know, the thing that I'm running into and I'm trying to. I hope I'm not just being brainwashed, is like, every time I do something on Chat GPT, it's like, that's a good idea. That's an excellent idea. That's a wonderful idea.
- [17:25]
Danny Daniels
You mean Chat's telling you that?
- [17:27]
Jonathan Stark
Damn it, I'm not that smart, you know? You know, I'm like, be a little bit more discerning, you know, Tell me I'm wrong here.
- [17:34]
Danny Daniels
True. I mean, you know, you've got. I don't know what they call that. There's a. There's got to be a term for that where it just. It just wants to agree with you. And I even did. You're going to know way more about this than me. But I. I was searching the firm and in Chat GPT to just see, hey, you know, and I just made a false scenario, just hypothetical scenario in a car wreck and this market, which lawyer should I hire? I didn't come up. And I'm like, how does that. How did I not come up? So, I mean, obviously we're. There's more work to be done. But so. And then I was like, hey, what about Daniel Stark? Oh, they're amazing law firm and you know, like, oh, well, now maybe now it knows Daniel Stark. AI might know Daniel Stark because I put it in its head. But yeah, it wants you to do. Oh yeah. You say, well, what about this? Oh, well, that's really good too. So, yeah, it has its limitations, but it's getting better. It's pretty fascinating. It's going to. It's changing everything. So it's just. I think we have to embrace it. And we're using it to. I'd say we can. For the lawyers in my firm that are really embracing it, you know, they're getting 2 or 3 xed right now. I think they can get 10x because they're using it in the right ways to help them accelerate a lot of things. But it's very tactical, again, not broad and enterprise automation, et cetera, you know.
- [18:53]
Jonathan Stark
So you said the three uniques and the EOS traction stuff. You know, one of the things I found on our issues list is like, I won't even look at an issue if it doesn't have some type of context or background. Like, I don't just free roll an issue. Like, let's just talk about this, you know. So, yeah, I see my team are now running it through GPT for some background context and different scenarios. It helps us solve these problems instead of getting on a hamster wheel where we're just going back and forth and then I'm the bad guy. Cause I choose one without all the context.
- [19:26]
Danny Daniels
Interesting.
- [19:27]
Jonathan Stark
You know, the other thing I wanted to. So I wanted to talk to you too about this approach to brand advantage monitoring.
- [19:34]
Danny Daniels
Oh yeah.
- [19:35]
Jonathan Stark
You got a different kind of viewpoint on attribution and how you measure brand. Like. Like, tell me about that. Because you're, you're the big litigating firm, but you're also advertising. You got the podcast. You're. So you're doing it all kind of. Tell me about that.
- [19:51]
Danny Daniels
Yeah, I tell you, we're. Oh man, you're opening up a big old can here. You just got my mind going five different places. You want to talk about, ma' am? We want to cast a wide net. Bring in a ton of cases and hammer the big ones. That was the original vision. It's still the vision today. And so we still cast a wide net. We still bring in a lot of cases. And now some of those cases will refer to trusted counsel whom we have. You know, we even have retreats for them. We, we have them bring cases to big case review. A lot of times those cases end up back in the firm if we missed one, what have you. We don't just refer out cases and leave those counsels high and dry. We want the client to have the same experience that they're going to have. So we have training things and we have different retreats and stuff that we bring those lawyers in. I think it's the highest cord cutting market in America, so.
- [20:45]
Jonathan Stark
Oh really?
- [20:45]
Danny Daniels
I felt like, hey, you know what? This is an advantage for me because if I can learn how to compete in Austin, then I can compete anywhere because the whole world is going to that, right? All of the markets will eventually be similar and it's way harder. I'll just tell you, it is way harder. And so I started looking for how to develop a strategy and also realizing that when you're not just on tv, right, doing, I guess you'd call it, push marketing, right, the direct response kind of stuff, then how do you get relevant in the digital world? And oh my gosh, you gotta produce a bunch of content, man. My cmo Claudia, she says feed the beast. Feed the beast. And my understanding, last I heard, is our team, I think we have about nine people in our marketing department now. And this is only, you know, I'd say this marketing department is. It used to be Danny, okay, that was the marketing department, that's me. And now there's nine people there. And that was kind of part of the EOS FAC functional accountability chart. You know that I spent a lot of time trying to restructure the firm into who, you know, what it is today, a much larger organization. And we ended up with nine people right now in our marketing department producing 30 pieces of content a week. And that's probably not enough, but it's way more than we were doing. And so now it's like, well, where are you going to focus these nine people? Where, where should they focus their attention? That's where BAM came in. And it's called Brand Advantage Marketing. Jonathan renamed it Badass Marketing. And I think it's an advantage. I do. I think that we're learning how to use it. It's new. It's certainly early in its maturity curve. I'm still learning how to best use it, but I like it because what it does is it takes all of the digital activity in your market and it measures it in relation to your competitors. Whatever digital activities happen in searches, brand searches versus keyword searches versus et cetera, right. Clicks. I don't know. There's probably a thousand different data points, maybe more. And how many people are doing that for my brand versus another brand? And what it does is it provides you overall with brand attraction. This company, bam, is owned by Brett Channer. He's out of Canada. I met him randomly and he's telling me about this and I'm like, man, could you do this for me? He works for big Fortune 500, you know, doing, you know, Nike and Lululemon, stuff like that. They're measuring huge brands. And I asked him if he'd do it for me and he said, yeah, let me, let's check this out. And it became a good market for him and we ended up, I have another company, Legal Monkeys. So we ended up partnering together and, and I've got an exclusive license for this technology and legal own three legal Monkeys.
- [23:35]
Chris Dreyer
You can have the best marketing, the best case results, but if your revenue engine is broken, your firm won't scale. That's the gap most law firm owners miss.
- [23:44]
Jonathan Stark
Under Oath.
- [23:44]
Chris Dreyer
Powered by Rankings IO is the podcast to bridge the gap. Zach, Cole and Scott go deep into how high performing revenue teams win big. Quarter over quarter, week over week, and sale over sale. From intake to hiring leadership to tech. It's sharp, practical and built for people who want to grow on purpose. Search Under Oath Revenue and practice and hit subscribe. Even up is excited to announce AI Drafts, the only drafting suite on the market with AI built on the industry's largest and fastest growing personal injury data set, giving you unmatched accuracy and speed when drafting any high quality document. Built on hundreds of thousands of personal injury cases, AI Drafts aligns with real world outcomes, not just templated legal language. It learns from your reviews and firm wide preferences. Every document reflects your tone, structure and legal strategy. No matter who's drafting. With Even up, you're drafting to win. Learn more today at even up law.com that's even up law.com and so it.
- [24:44]
Danny Daniels
Measures all of this activity and it gives you first of all brand attraction, which is probably the most important brand strength in the market. Who's winning in brand strength in the market as measured by activity towards the brands. Okay, then it breaks it down into multiple different categories such as interest, presence, relevance, advocacy, things like that. There's a number of scales. It measures campaign performance and campaign efficiency as well. But what I really like are the are the various scales that go into brand strength or brand attraction. And if you look at those and you get to understand those, you can see where you're winning and where you're losing because again, it's as related to your competition and your competition is changing every single day. Some are better than others, right? But those that are investing in marketing and have a marketing team and are putting content out there, it's drawing digital eyeballs, right? And they're having digital handshakes go down, right? They're connecting with the community through events, they're getting PR out there through news articles, et cetera. And so you may be winning one month and you're losing the next in various scales. So where are we putting our marketing dollars? That's number one. Well, that's kind of more your world, but where are you putting your marketing activities? Right? What kind of strategy can you, can you go after? Are you throwing darts in the dark or do you have a true strategy that's based on data? And so when you're using bam, what you're getting is data backed strategy?
- [26:22]
Jonathan Stark
Got that bookmarked. I'm gonna check it out right after the show here. I think the key thing here is it's just marketing so fragmented. You know, back in the day it was the phone book and it was TV. Now it's shit. It's streaming and TikTok and Meta and SEO and AIO and it's overwhelming, it's challenging. And I think every market's a little different too, right? You got the guys that are oversaturating tv. It's like, well, not very many lawyers are on radio or you got no, you know, maybe an OTT opportunities.
- [26:48]
Danny Daniels
So I would say that I, I think if a law firm is not investing in an internal team of marketing people that can deliver content because I mean, I do know some lawyers that are really good at social media. I mean, they love it, they like it so much that they'll do it right when they wake up and they'll post about themself or whatever. That's not me. And I think there's a lot of lawyers out there that aren't like that, especially us that are a little older. And so you've got to find a way to continue to compete. And there are a lot of young lawyers that are coming out and they're just going to whoop you because they're pumping content out because they like doing it and they're getting eyeballs. I call those chippers. You know, they're, they're chipping at your brand every day. And you've got to develop a strategy that you can battle against that. Because everybody has a voice now. It's not just the law firms that have the money to advertise on tv, man, any, anybody can come out of law school and have a voice.
- [27:41]
Chris Dreyer
Danny Daniel proves that proof isn't a phase. It's a mindset. From casting a wide net to building systems that drive full value, he's always on the verge of what's next. If today's episode sparked something, share it with someone who's building bold. And don't forget to hit subscribe this is Personal Injury Mastermind, powered by Rankings IO, where top lawyers come to get sharper, louder, and smarter. Until next time, keep leveling up.