← Personal Injury Mastermind w/ Chris Dreyer
Personal Injury Mastermind w/ Chris Dreyer
341. Litigate Everything: How Blake Swan Built a 6-State Firm with Ruthless Intake and Data Discipline
00:36:13
Inside the intake, litigation, and leadership systems powering Keller Swan’s explosive growth.
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- [00:01]
Chris Dreyer
As the owner of a digital marketing agency, I see personal injury firms making strategic decisions without the right data every day. Look, I've worked with firms of every size and analyze what really works. Our team at Rankings will map out your entire competitive landscape, identify where cases are falling through the cracks and show you exactly what moves will drive growth. Want to understand where your market opportunities really are without spending a dime? Visit rankings IO consultation today. Hey there future VIP.
- [00:27]
Blake Swan
I'm Kinsey, your on site concierge for PEMCON.
- [00:30]
Chris Dreyer
The Personal Injury Mastermind conference October 5th through the 8th. When you go VIP at PEMCON, you're.
- [00:37]
Blake Swan
Getting the full experience, luxury accommodations included at the 5 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.
- [00:54]
Chris Dreyer
Grab your VIP tickets while you still.
- [00:56]
Blake Swan
Can@Pimcon.Org that's P I M C O N. O R G. See you this fall in ScottSD. Data tells stories.
- [01:09]
Chris Dreyer
Many firms settle fast and speed up cash flow. But what if that's exactly what's holding you back?
- [01:14]
Blake Swan
Data shows me that insurance companies don't like to pay you pre suit and they don't like to do right by your clients. Pre suit.
- [01:22]
Chris Dreyer
Blake Swan litigates 80% of his caseload.
- [01:25]
Blake Swan
If you set a precedent as a firm that you're going to take the 8090 when they're offering, you know when there's 100k policy pre suit. Good luck.
- [01:34]
Chris Dreyer
This is Personal Injury Mastermind Power by Rankings IO I'm Chris Dreyer and in this episode discover how a ruthless intake process, POD based profit models and 24 service help scale his firm to six states without losing control.
- [01:47]
Blake Swan
Fine. When you know your numbers is going to cause you to make shifts in.
- [01:50]
Chris Dreyer
The business, let's get into it. Blake Swan, welcome to the show.
- [01:55]
Blake Swan
I appreciate it man. Thank you for having me.
- [01:58]
Chris Dreyer
Yeah, I'm pumped. I. I like to kick things off, you know with some wins.
- [02:01]
Blake Swan
Within the past year I think We've added about 37 new staff. We're growing tremendously. As you know we're have expanded geographically as well. You know we're in Tennessee, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Arizona. Also happen to be licensed in Mississippi for expanding geographically expanding people. So there's been a lot of amazing wins. You know, I'm lucky I got a strong team. You know, we've had some good hits and trials and some good settlements lately as well. Life is good, man. Firm's doing really well, just growing, man. Like many firms that are growing at our rate, adapting. And some people call it growing pains. I call it, I think when you grow, you, you see all the little cracks in your business and it gives you the ability to jump in and put the putty in and make sure you're fixing things as you're moving forward. So it's been, it's been exciting.
- [02:55]
Chris Dreyer
Yeah, that's awesome, man. And, and to add 37 staff in that short amount of time. So we're definitely gonna have to circle back to that and talk about hiring and finding the talent. But you know, the thing the audience wants to know out of the gate is how you get in the leads. Right? As much as you want to share.
- [03:12]
Blake Swan
Yeah, it's interesting, the evolution of how I've gotten business. Right. I worked for a fairly large firm for a long time kind of running their division of their kind of multi state division, if you will. And when I left on my own, luckily I did a good enough job for enough people where, you know, I had some referral sources say almost all my business kind of out of the gate was referral sources. I'll tell you the truth, I don't know if I would have jumped had I not had that. And believe it or not, Chris, not to blow up your head, but I actually started watching your podcast and some other podcasts and listen to people that are doing SEO analysis and pay per click and different avenues for, for generating business. I've handled cases and litigated cases in so many states that, you know, I thought I had a unique opportunity being so geographically spread and being comfortable being so geographically spread as far as the laws and how to, how to manage cases and all that. I decided to, you know, start getting into some digital advertising, LSAs, PPCs. I was broke, my man. I, I mean I'm, I, I'm a new guy like on the street in comparison to some of these other big boys out there. Was just trying to figure out how am I going to find my way through this. So really, you know, learned a lot of stuff on my own self taught a ton of stuff, watching guys like you, watching some other guys on YouTube and really kind of learning my way through. And somehow some way it, it became effective and before I knew it, I was generating a lot of direct business to the point where, you know, some of my lower end referral cases coming in, I actually had the ability to say no for the first time, which was, which was somewhat liberating. You know, when it's somebody sending me A case with a, you know, very, very low value. I'm like, yeah, no problem, I'll litigate it. That was my attitude. And I'm still, you know, look, we're still very liberal on what we're willing to put into litigation. I think that's really important in a. Show them that you're willing to fight on the small ones too. I found that to be highly effective in our business. It's nice now having a balance, right? You know, where you go from 100% referrals, and then all of a sudden it goes to, okay, I'm generating 30% of my own cases to 40 to 50. It's been a nice shift. My referral source has changed, you know, from. From getting cases just for litigation. So you start building your trust, and then people are giving you the cases right from the jump. And we find that if we can handle cases from a job, build the relationship from the job, we're data driven. And we find that the. The average settlements on those cases that we handle from the jump are substantially larger than cases that are referred to us just for litigation purposes, are very litigation heavy. We're litigating about 80% of our files.
- [06:03]
Chris Dreyer
Why do you think that is? Like, on the. You get more value from the start. Is it because of your intake, kind of coaching them up to get the, you know, the treatment? Like, what goes into that?
- [06:14]
Blake Swan
Yeah, you know, there's a lot that goes into it. It's interesting when you get cases by referral, you can see certain things that, you know, maybe need to be tweaked on the front end. This is an infinite game. We're constantly tweaking stuff internally within our business to make things more effective and to increase values and provide better service for our clients. Starts at intake, right? I take intake incredibly seriously. You know, we are very data driven in intake, looking at when leads are coming in, how many staff we need, depending on when leads are coming in. We're using AI technology and intake. So, you know, our intake staff and get real time feedback on how they're doing on any particular call. You know, we use lead docket as well through, you know, the Zoom platform. Through lead docket, you know, we're really making sure that we're on top of everything coming in the door. My mantra is no missed calls, right? I don't ever want to see a missed calls. The KPIs, my intake are no missed calls. And if they have missed calls, you know, ultimately, you know, their bonus everything, their structure changes as opposed to if they Answer all calls, you know, hopefully within the first five seconds. Right. I want people answering right away, responding right away. If a new lead comes in, I want them responding within two minutes. And we've actually got that lead time down to two minutes. But it's being, you know, I think one of the most underestimated places in a firm is intake. We invest heavily in intake. You know, we have a third party vendor that comes in that trains our intake on empathy training, all that. And then it starts from there and we shift into. We have a claims verification department. I don't want to act like this is my invention. I'm smart enough to know that there's really smart people out there and I love looking at what other people are doing. And then if I think they're doing something that could be a game changer for our business, figuring out ways to implement it within our business. Right. So Mike Morris up in Detroit, you know, he runs the fireproof coaching. Great guy, great firm. You know, he runs a claims verification department. Heard about it, thought it was amazing and I was like, we're now doing that. The purpose of the claims verification department is we want to know within the first 30 days, one, you know, is the client following up with treatment, getting the medical care that they ultimately need for the case? And two, is there insurance, you know, is there a liability that we can go after and is the case viable? And really within that first 30 day period being able to tell a client yes, you 100% have a case, we're moving forward or no because of something that we're able to find out as far as, you know, defendant not being recoverable or whatever it might be, that the case is ultimately a turn down. And you know, that that department is very, very conversational, focused. It's, it's following up with a client, you know, once within the first 24 hours, once every 48 hours after that, and once every seven days for the first 30 days of the case. So you're really, you're, you're over communicating in the beginning. We find that to be incredibly important. I think Palmo put out a stat that it was clients that are communicated with at least once every 30 days that, that they find that case values go up by 30%. It's because they're invested in the process and they're invested in, you know, understanding the work that you're putting into the case. Because unfortunately, as you know Chris, this is a business where a lot of times it requires the work of your client as well. Whether it be showing up to depositions, you know, sometimes trial, whatever it might be. So showing the client that you're invested in their case, I think it reciprocates and what you find is much better results in the end. So those are like the little things that we've done that we found to certainly move the needle in a big way.
- [10:03]
Chris Dreyer
I got a million comments on what you just said put together there. You're a great referral partner. Just purely one of the big components is the intake, the client service, the lit component and the data component. Well that one reason. So multiple reasons. You mentioned a third party that helps. Is that Yanni Smith, legal Intake pros, or is it.
- [10:23]
Blake Swan
So we're using Chris Mullins. She does a lot of empathy training with the intake staff. She spends a ton of time with them. She's constantly identifying things that aren't working. You know, if there's, you know, my head of intake, if there's a missed call during the day, at the end of the day I get a full list of any calls that are missed and what was the resolution of that missed call. And then we're looking how quickly were they responded to if there is for some reason a missed call. But the goal is zero missed calls. What I find is when we have a missed call, it's a bot or something like that that's calling and hanging up. But like right away.
- [10:58]
Chris Dreyer
Yeah, like the less than 3 second.
- [11:00]
Blake Swan
On the call rail or it's, or it's some sort of scam call or you know, telemarketer or something like that. Yeah, but because of what we've implemented internally within Intake, we have very, very few missed calls. The goal is to ultimately get to where our intake is 24 7. We're not quite there. So if we do have a missed call, it's because it's going to our after hours service, you know, at 2:00 clock in the morning or something like that. But that's something in the very near future that we're looking to, you know, bridge that gap. I mean, I think it's really important intake to provide 24. 7 service. I heard John Morgan one time said that, you know, he's essentially creating a Google law firm. I thought that it's incredibly smart. I mean, I think what we're, what we're building is a 24, 24 hour, 78 a week service where people can contact you at any point in time and they can get instant service in that moment. You know, we're a firm that lead leads heavily into technology. I Mean, we're using all the fun AI gadgets that you can possibly think of. We find that to be highly effective and efficient in being able to move cases in a much more streamlined manner. And I think the leaders in the industry understand that. And you know, so that's one of the next things that we're working on, hopefully here in the next, truthfully in the next month or two is to be able to do 24, 24 hour, 7 day a week intake service. I think it's me extremely important for.
- [12:29]
Chris Dreyer
Us on the data side, are you guys using Domo, using like a bigquery, you know, dashboard? Like how are you kind of synthesizing the data? Because, you know, that's one of the issues. I love lead docket, but I think the data side's a little bit harder, more difficult to collect than say the salesforce.
- [12:51]
Blake Swan
Yeah, I agree. So you know, right now we use Power bi, so we have Power BI dashboards. We. So again, it's something I stole from Mike Morris. We have, we run on a POD profitability model. Our attorneys are paid based on the profit of their pod. We've bring technology right down even to that aspect of the business. They have what we call a chaos calculator where they can put in how many cases they settle, what are their average fees, spits out what they're going to make it. At the bottom, I'm building out that calculator so that calculator will also have a dashboard on the calculator. And the dashboard is going to show how many clients have they spoken with in the past 30 days. All the key metrics that I want to know that I think are indicative of how they're treating the clients and the ultimate performance of the case. So our Power BI dashboards track everything we have individualized for each pod. As far as what is your average settlement, what are your fees? Everything. And you know, we have it for, I mean every, everything you could possibly imagine within the firm. We have data for our data. I joke about or we, we really made it a conscious effort within the past year to really know our numbers and know our numbers in a big way. And what you're going to find when you know your numbers is it's going to cause you to make shifts in the business when you start realizing, hey, you know, data tells stories. You know, it's, you start looking at, okay, what's our average fee over here? And then you see the percentage of what, oh wait, in this state, our percentage of what is here. Our average fee is here. You can really, you see stories within the data that are extremely important. And you know, if your wash rate too, right, you know, if you understand what your wash rate is in your business, meaning how many cases you're signing up and then how many cases ultimately make it to the end of the funnel, you can make adjustments. We find that if clients are contacted same day after sign up, you know, unnecessary wash rate becomes very minimal. And we have data that shows it versus if they're contacted 24 hours later, versus if they're contacted 48 hours later, versus 72 hours. Your wash rate will increase, I promise you. And I can show you the numbers, I'll prove it. So what we've done is, you know, we're, you know, gone down to 24 hours and now we're actually moving to same day contact. We want claims verification on the day the case is signed up to be in touch with the client, making sure they understand the process, making sure that everything's squared away as far as, you know, medical treatment and all that. And because our data shows us it reduces our wash rate and we have a very low wash rate and we believe that's one of the reasons for it. Right. And we don't just believe it, we know it because we've seen it in the data as we made adjustments. So, you know, little things like that are going to allow you to make really important changes within your firm. And you know, when you make changes like that, I mean, if I don't know, you know, what the listeners, what their average fee is, but you know, you could start figuring out, okay, If I save 1, 2, 3 cases. And as your volume increases, all of a sudden it becomes a very large number that you're talking about little tweaks within your business. You know, we talk about 30% increase in value talking to a client once every 30 days, depending on how many cases you have. That could be a game changer in your business that could actually go from not making money to very good profitability based on that little dynamic. We found that data tells a lot of really important stories. And the key is adjusting to it, right? It's easy to get the data. Well, not that easy. We have a data engineer in house. Full disclosure, right? It's not me in the back room crunching numbers. I mean, I got a guy that, he's unbelievable and he's built out a lot of really cool stuff, including power bi. Believe it or not, he's built out a lot of AI tools for us, conversational AI tools that we use as Backup to the backup AI texting tools. I mean, we're really leaning into technology. It's important. All these things are really important. It gives you visibility within your firm. I think the hardest thing when you scale is that visibility aspect. So I always say that my data engineer is my, is my glasses into the firm.
- [17:08]
Chris Dreyer
I think that that's incredible. It gives you visibility to make decisions. There's like a saying, it's something like bad data, bad decisions, good data, easy decisions, or something like that.
- [17:20]
Blake Swan
The hardest part is cleaning up your old data because garbage in, garbage out. The biggest issue we had was going back and truthfully auditing old files. That because of the way we were pulling the data, certain things weren't pulling through correctly. There's changes in file line, there's changes in whatever case management system you use. Sometimes it can make it difficult to pull old data. But luckily I got a guy that's a lot smarter than me. That's our data engineer that figures all this stuff out for us.
- [17:50]
Chris Dreyer
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- [19:28]
Blake Swan
Yeah. Yeah.
- [19:31]
Chris Dreyer
What made you make that decision for the expansion?
- [19:34]
Blake Swan
Yeah, look, I dream big. I mean, I just. I don't do anything halfway. I was lucky enough to work for a firm for a long time that decided to expand into the Tennessee market, right. So I took the Tennessee Bar, you know, a couple years out of law school, and then I took the Arkansas Bar. And then, you know, before I knew it, you know, through being able to wave in and stuff like that. Now I'm licensed and six states, right. And I've had the opportunity to actively handle cases in those states. I don't just like. It's not like, oh, you know, Tennessee. I understand Tennessee law, Right. I've handled thousands of Tennessee cases. And, you know, I was lucky enough to have that experience as a young lawyer. I also was lucky enough to really start to understand marketing as a young lawyer. I was. I started my own firm with the knowledge of, okay, what is the case acquisition cost in Tennessee versus at maybe a more competitive market like Palm Beach County? Right. And what is the case acquisition costs of Palm beach county versus maybe even parts of Georgia? Georgia. Fulton county is extremely competitive. However, we have an office in Savannah. I find that to be, you know, much more doable for a firm that's. That's entering a market. So I was very strategic about, you know, where am I going to put my capital. I had saved up money knowing, you know, that eventually one day I really wanted to do this on my own. I wanted to build my own dream, build my own firm. And I had to be strategic because I knew, I knew my dollars would only go so far in the market where I'm sitting right now, which is Jupiter for. Right? Like, you know, Palm beach county is a very competitive market. So, you know, and I knew what average fees were across these various markets because I had experience, right? And so I. Me being a numbers guy, pad to paper, and it made sense for me to expand into Tennessee and almost off the jump, Believe it or not, Chris, like, most firms are like, wait a minute, like, you're one guy in a paralegal, and I'm. I'm in Florida, I'm in Tennessee. Like, right off the jump, you know, clients would be on the phone with me, and, you know, they'd say, hey, I want to meet attorney in person. I'd hop on a flight that day and I'd meet with them. Obviously, we have a really big infrastructure up there with attorneys and staff on the ground now, but that's where I was at one point. And, you know, I was willing to do it, willing to travel for depositions, whatever it took. And it was because I understood that I could compete at a much higher level in that market than I could in the Palm beach county market. But I had a good reputation in Palm Beach County. Right. I mean, I've litigated cases here for, I don't know, I don't want to say they probably 14 years, 15 years, whatever it is. Right. So I had a good reputation here as well. So I naturally had people referring me cases and people I know within the community that would, you know, send me family members and stuff like that. So my Florida firm started growing also. I had a good referral source in the Georgia market that asked me to help out with some litigation in the Georgia market. And that's what eventually caused me to kind of fall into the Georgia market and then found that, you know, similar to Tennessee, that I could compete. Right. That I could get cases. And then, truth, I kind of challenged that limiting belief that I couldn't compete in the Florida market and put some dollars into the Florida market and did pretty well in Florida too. Certainly my CAC was higher as anticipated, but I was able to compete. So I think a lot of people, especially a lot of young lawyers or new attorneys that are better venturing out, you know, everybody, at least I was at a firm where there was big fear of advertising and stuff like that, highly referral based firm, and they tell themselves that they can't compete, so they never try, which opens the door for others to be able to step into the market. And, and look, it's scary and it's risky and there was a lot of money I could have lost. And I did lose money in certain marketing ventures. I mean, I put money into Spanish radio and Nashville, Tennessee. I mean, if I got a case out of it, Chris, that might be saying a lot, right? So, you know, I ventured into some branding campaigns, maybe too early and, you know, and learned my lesson the hard way. But, you know, I also did a lot of things right. And that's what's always important to remember in business. It's easy to focus on all the things you did wrong, but it did a lot of things right and was able to grow pretty quickly because of it.
- [23:55]
Chris Dreyer
Yeah, and you grow. Guys are growing like crazy. And I only imagine with the infrastructure you have, it's kind of compounding now in the data, you know, the viewpoints to make decisions. You know, one of the stats, and I have no Idea. This is the first time, like, I've done like 300 episodes and this is the first time where you're like, hey, 80% of our files go into lit. I have never got that stat. Like, that's uncommon. Right. Like most people, it's like the complete opposite. Right. What made you go that decision? Like, what gave you the information and the knowledge to say, like, hey, putting more in lit is the better direction? Maybe your time on desk is, is longer, maybe your cash acceleration's longer, but ultimately it's better. I don't know, maybe you can expound on that.
- [24:41]
Blake Swan
Yeah, no. So I actually did a CLE somewhat recently. I thought it was cool. I did it like the Miami Heat game. I got a suite and invited some young lawyers. And the purpose of the CLE was to talk about that was talk about the importance of putting cases into litigation. You know, there are a lot of firms are very, very heavy pre suit because usually time on desk is, is a lot shorter. But data shows me that insurance companies don't like to pay you pre suit and they don't like to do right by your clients pre suit. And that if you put the case into litigation, yeah, time on desk increases, but the overall return to the client, to everybody involved who work on a contingency fee is better. When the case goes into litigation. Data is unmistakable. I kind of thought this was going to be true, Chris. I'll be honest. I give a lot of credit to the firm that kind of brought me up. They were a very litigation heavy firm because that's what they did. They were referred cases for litigation. You know, they got a lot of their cases from one referral source that referred them cases for litigation. And I knew, you know, what their average fee was. And I talked to other firms that were, you know, kind of more precipitate oriented and understood, you know, what their average settlement, what their average fee was. And so I always had an inclination that was the way to go. But then data really showed it to me. And, you know, it's funny, it's. Data pushes me to say that we need to file on more cases. Right. You know, if we were 90%, I wouldn't be opposed to it. You know, it's really important that your client gets the compensation they deserve. And unfortunately, what we're finding is that insurance companies are bold in pre suit. You know, they're pounding their chest and, and they're just not doing right by you pre suit. So you have to push it to that next level. And the data supports it all the way around, it's better for the client, it's better for the firm, it's better for everybody involved.
- [26:40]
Chris Dreyer
Blake, I'm going to sound like a real jackass here for a question. You know, with 80% in lit, like let's say, and this is me, just I'm not an attorney, right? Let's say they had, the person had a $100,000 insurance policy and the insurance company gives you 90 or 100. Like are you still filing?
- [26:58]
Blake Swan
You're still filing in those circumstances because you're setting a precedent, right? If you take 80, 90 pre suit on a case that's worth 100. Look, you have ethical duties to your client. Your client tells you to take the money, you got to take the money. Most of our pre suit settlements are tender situations, meaning that the insurance company tender the full extent of the available insurance policy. So that's where you get your 20%. The rest are going into litigation. Right. So if they're offering 80,000, my recommendation to the client is there's another 10,000, let's move and, and let's push it. And if you set a precedent as a firm that you're going to take the 8090 when they're offering, you know, when there's 100k policy pre suit, good luck. I mean I'm data oriented and you know, we're, you know, a fast growing, I don't know, I've called myself a small firm for so long that we're no longer a small firm.
- [27:47]
Chris Dreyer
Midsize, Definitely not the truth anymore.
- [27:49]
Blake Swan
Yeah, exactly. But if I have all this data, if I have all this data, the insurance companies have even more data, right? I mean these are some of the biggest corporations in the country. And if I'm taking 80 or 90 pre suit on a case, it's worth a hundred. And I'm to believe that they're not remembering that that's not somewhere in their system. I think that's very naive. We're litigating that case.
- [28:13]
Chris Dreyer
Amazing. Amazing. Yeah. So you're getting the better values that allows you to pay more to acquire the case than maybe the pre lit mills can. Just because they have to get a super low cost per case to be profitable where hey, you can get some exponential returns occasionally to balance things out. I kind of wanted to go to the hiring question, right? You've had a lot of staff, a lot of staff. Quickly, what does the team look like? Do you have like a head of talent? Do you use third party recruiters? Like, like what's your just Thought process on getting those A players to join. Join the team, so to speak.
- [28:49]
Blake Swan
Yeah, we're extremely lucky. So we have. I still have no idea how we got. But we have Stephen Horowitz, who is our fractional HR guy. He might as well be full time. He's here all the time. He's so heavily invested in the firm, tons of experience, HR for Starbucks, I mean, you name it. So he comes highly, highly credentialed, really knows what he's doing and understands how to bring in high level people. So, you know, what he does is he does a whole hiring funnel. We joke that, you know, if you can get through the funnel, like, you're most likely qualified, right? Like, there's a ton of steps you gotta go through. It's not just, hey, submit your application. We want to know if somebody's willing to do the work necessary to get through the funnel and if they make it to the end of the funnel, we find that the candidates are highly qualified. We're also using Coby, which is a test ultimately to figure out how people kind of look at work, if you will. And, you know, it's. If we're hiring for a particular position, we want to know what the Kobe score is and does it match up with the position we're hiring them for. We take that very seriously. We're actually using it to implement how we communicate with each other internally in house. You know, if you have a certain personality that's, you know, you're more of a quick start versus, you know, somebody that's, you know, heavy fact. Finder wants kind of all the information. Is this somebody that wants bullet points or do they want paragraphs? Like, how are we communicating with each other internally? Becomes extremely important. And, you know, we find Kobe to be a good task. We were using print at 1.2. Right now we've been primarily using the Kobe task. Print is more on kind of what motivates you, on what you do. So. And then onboarding. Chris is the guy my partner is like, he is just unbelievable. He is like, there's no bigger factor for the culture of who we are than my business partner. I think, as you know, I mean, he's the guy that gave up drinking, lost 70 pounds. He's training for Iron man right now. He ran a marathon. He got me to run a marathon. And he. He spends a lot of time focusing on culture. Our onboarding process is, you know, everybody gets a box of, you know, all the swag from the firm. The day that they come on, they get a personalized message from Chris welcoming them to the firm and you know, how excited we are or whatever. It's really, really impressive. You know, we're very, very intentional about who we're bringing in as far as personality fits, as far as, you know, a fit personality wise for that particular position. And then our head of HR is really good at vetting people out through the interview process. And we have a very, very low attrition rate. Usually when we lose people, it's because unfortunately, they didn't work out and we have to let them go. So people are happy at the firm. And, you know, we also work on a, you know, some people we do allow to work remote and then we have some people that are hybrid and we find that you can recruit better talent under that model than a more traditional model that requires people in house every day. It requires a ton of structure, which I again give credit to Chris for. Of meetings, making sure you're checking in, tracking all those things that are really important. A culture of accountability. We hold ourselves accountable. I love the Jocko book on accountability. Extreme ownership is one of my favorite. And you know, we embody that, right? It's. It's always our fault.
- [32:19]
Chris Dreyer
Good.
- [32:19]
Blake Swan
Yes, exactly. And I'm not a point there, Chris, but I'm going to get there. I usually get there the next day in my defense. And the moment I'm not there, but the next day I'm like, I'm glad that happened, right? Because it's a lesson. There's a lesson, all of it. And we really embody that. And it trickles down to your team. If they own everything, if they own all their mistakes, if they own all that, and if we as owners own that, we really do find it makes a massive difference throughout the organization. There's not a day that goes by that I don't make a mistake and probably won't be a day moving forward that I don't. And I learn from all of them and get better every single day. I think it's really important and embodies our entire team. They're all like that. The culture is unbelievable. Is one of the reasons, you know, Chris and I merged together. Two firms merged about two years ago. And, you know, we have a very, very similar mentality and very similar vision on, you know, what we're trying to build. And you know, I saw that in Chris, that he has that ability to really instill and inspire people, which is important. We're all driving for one mission and everybody's got to be on board. So I give him a ton of credit for that, truthfully, all rolling in.
- [33:33]
Chris Dreyer
The same direction and that momentum and that's, you know, you guys are killing it. Like this has been a ton of fun, you know, for our audience listening. You know, maybe they have a case in one of the six states, you know, the Arkansas, Mississippi, Florida, Tennessee, etc. You know, how can they get in touch with you?
- [33:49]
Blake Swan
Feel free to call me. My cell phone is 561-896-7926. You can also email me. It's Blake, Blake swan.com which is K E L L E R S W a n dot com. You know, we're happy to assist on any cases. I even enjoy helping shoot people in the right direction if it's a case I can't handle. You know, we have enough connections now because we've been litigating in all these states for so long that if we, we can't handle the case ourselves, we likely know somebody in the jurisdiction that can. I get people that call me on cases all over the country because when you've been doing multi state litigation long enough, you really do start to meet a lot of good people and always happy to point people in the right direction.
- [34:34]
Chris Dreyer
Blake Swan shows what happens when you leave with data, go heavy on litigation, and build an intake machine that never misses a call. For more industry insights, follow Personal Injury Mastermind. See you next time. I'm out.