← Personal Injury Mastermind w/ Chris Dreyer
Personal Injury Mastermind w/ Chris Dreyer
357. Inside a $1B Legacy PI Firm: How Innovation Keeps You on Top w/ Michele Mirman
00:20:00
Marketing, Niches, Tech, and Teams — The Secrets to Building a PI Firm That Lasts
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- [00:00]
A
Your next client is asking Chad GPT right now, who's the best car accident lawyer near me if it's not you, you lost the case. At Rankings, we make sure your name shows up, go to Rankings IO and dominate search before your competition does.
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B
At the beginning, no other lawyer wanted this case. After the case, people started to call me.
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A
That's Michelle Merman. And over the past five decades, she's recovered over $1 billion for her clients.
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B
I had a website and I also had an app in 2000. The issue was, was that nobody had computers, so it was useless.
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A
The founding partner of Merman, Markovitz and Landau, she has been on the cutting edge from day one.
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B
They said, make me an AI program and it's able to read our depositions, our medical records, our entire files. It's made our lives phenomenally easy.
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A
Behind every legacy firm is a lasting strategy. This is personal injury Mastermind. PEM is powered by Rankings IO, the award winning marketing agency for PI firms. I'm Chris Dreyer. Today, how to build a PI firm that lasts. Michelle Merton breaks down how innovation kept her on top. Let's go.
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B
I started in 1977, so some of my favorite wins though, or my best wins, I represented a young woman, a mom, who was struck by a pickup truck in a pedestrian safety zone. And she sustained horrendous, horrendous injuries, which of course were amplified because her three year old was standing right next to her and her husband was there. I was able to get her a terrific amount of money for her and her family that they've gone through counseling, they continue to go through counseling, and they're getting their family back on the right track. And that for me is the win. When it's not just a question of money, but it's a question of whether the money can help the family, the person who's hurt live their life again.
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A
I hear this, you know, doing good by doing right. And I think when you truly try to provide value and offer the comfort and care and the best representation, I think it follows you've built one of the most enduring brands in New York for personal injury law. So I want to talk about, you know, everybody listening wants to know, how do you get cases? How do you get cases? And so let's start with the decision you move the firm to Manhattan. So what drove that decision?
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B
Well, we were a Brooklyn law firm. It had been started back in the 60s, actually by two attorneys who passed away early. It was taken over by my first husband. I took it over after him. And in 1991, I realized that I wanted different cases. I wanted a broader base rather than not, quote, unquote, just Brooklyn. Brooklyn would be the fourth largest city in the United States if it was a city by itself. We have 4 million people. We were moving away from being a neighborhood office in Brooklyn. People would just drop by and stop by and say hello. And I was getting many clients who didn't need that anymore. So, you know, telephone and then the Internet really obviated a lot of the drop ins. By the time I moved in, 92 people already knew our name. We were starting to be able to advertise and I think it was 1976 and we were in trains right away, the buses, in the newspapers. When there was a Yellow Pages, we were at the Yellow Pages and it just continued as we were able to find new avenues to advertise in. We were on television constantly. When cable started, we moved into cable when the Internet started. I had a website in 2000 and I also had an app in 2000. The issue was that nobody had computers, so it was useless.
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A
The app is way ahead of the game. I mean, many people today don't even have that.
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B
Well, we had our first computer back in 1980 and then I had my. We tried to develop some databases through the 80s. We hired people to do databases for us that were not great. Then in 94, I ran into, at a legal conference, a group called Needles. I'm still with them today. And I try always to stay on top of technology. My son has his PhD in AI. So what I did when he came back to the United States was I said, make me an AI program and it's able to read our depositions, our medical records, our entire files. When you ask it, it gives you the page, the line, the date, the time. But it's made our lives phenomenally easy. Phenomenally easy.
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A
We gotta dig in here on the marketing side. You have a Wikipedia page and today it's like a strategic asset because a lot of these LLMs, your ChatGPT, your Claude and perplexity, they reference and cite Wikipedia a lot for credibility. So Google search has shifted and a lot of the tactics from a search engine optimization, you know, talking about your website, how people find you in the past, and now some of that traffic has shifted over to people using ChatGPT. Have you found that prospect, say, oh, I did this search and chatgpt or Perplexity recommended you?
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B
Well, I think it's a product of how much you have out there online, how many videos, how many words, how Many blogs, how many, how long you've been around, and whether you have any kind of gravitas. So it's not just that I'm any lawyer floating around in the universe. There's the president of the New York State trial lawyers, the president of the Brooklyn Bar. I'm very, very involved in New York City charitable work for a long time. So I am picked up for those reasons. Not just because I get on a TV commercial and say, hey, you know, call me. I'm a great lawyer.
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A
Absolutely. I could like, double stamp, triple stamp that. I think that you are a person of notability. So because of that, you are more discoverable. And it has all the trust and the social proof components with it. You've been handling sex assault cases since the early 80s, before there was even this real push. Now it's a big push for a lot of attorneys, and it's also a space where discretion matters. And how did you approach or start to develop these types of cases? Because they're great cases, but they're very challenging to speak about from, like, a marketing perspective.
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B
At the beginning with the first case I took, no other lawyer wanted this case. And the case is very time consuming. It requires a lot of handholding. But I believed in this case very, very strongly. And also, this was at a time when rape trauma syndrome wasn't even in the manual for psychological disorders. I had a call at trial, a psychiatrist, to prove that this was a disorder. And I won that case. And the jury was actually out for four days. They prayed during this. After the case, people started to call me. Other lawyers with this type of case, a case where somebody had been sexually assaulted. I got into trains in private buildings and business buildings. And again, each one required a tremendous amount of hand holding. It's just not an easy case to take care of. And I was extremely happy, extremely happy when our legislature changed the law to permit these cases to be brought for a much longer period of time. Because especially with children, they hide. They don't reveal themselves. They don't bring it up for many, many years, and it can be devastating. Change their lives entirely.
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A
Here's the marketing play. Michelle went all in on cases no one else wanted. The same thinking, going deep into cases, not even on the radar, is exactly how trucking became a practice area. You own the cases others avoid, and the market starts to know you for it. That's how a niche is born.
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B
Whether we take a case in or not always falls down to the three of us. My partner, Tom Markovitz, and Ron Lando we vet every single case. I don't want to take in a case where I'm going to lead a client down the garden path and at the end say, sorry, Charlie, there's no money here. I just think that's the wrong thing to do. And I'd rather take in a case where I know that there's definitely responsibility by the defendant for the accident where the client has injuries and there's a possibility of either insurance coverage or a way to get them paid. I think that it's wrong to almost seduce another person to say, oh, yeah, you have a case, and then they really don't. There's either the injuries are so minor, nobody's going to pay them any money, or they're absolutely at fault, or there's no coverage for the accident.
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A
You've argued some of the most sensitive cases in New York. You know, you've taken cases that have never been tried before. In this certain type of case, what's that process look like to determine, like, hey, this is a case, we're going to go the extra mile. And it may be a year, two years, or, you know, I'm not an attorney, but it may be a grueling, lengthy process.
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B
Well, in New York, it already is a grueling process. It takes two to three years to get your case on the trial calendar. At least two to three years for the, well, the discovery and the preparation. Then you're going to wait at least a year, year and a half, sometimes two years or more to get your case for trial. So you're talking about a four to five year endeavor. So again, I want to make sure that it's a case that we want to be in for the long haul. And the way I look at it is that we start preparing the case for trial from the day that we take it in first. Then it has to again have a liability injuries coverage. And then we do our investigation. We make sure that we get all the medical information and background information on the client and we keep collecting it as we go along. I look at depositions as really trial testimony, so there's really no part of our case that is not geared toward trial. And when we take a case in, that's what we're thinking about. Is this a case that we can try and win over?
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A
In Vegas, you've got, I think it's lawyer ball or legal ball. You've got like the big data component style type of firms where they run all this big data to determine what the case is worth. And then there's, I Guess some other services that do a ton of these, like mock trials. How do you get the determine the value? How do you like some of those components on the trial side?
- [10:57]
B
So obviously there are verdict search groups that will give us the value of a particular case, how old the client is, what the nature of the injuries are, loss of earnings. We use economists to determine the amount of actual lost earnings, the amount of medical expenses, what the client might need as far as help in the future. You know, the actual hard evidence for damages. We do the research about the prior cases and then those are our bases. So at least we have a ground level to work from. It doesn't always mean that that's the amount of money that a client will get. Sometimes a case has an intangible way about it that enhances its value. So even if you have that verdict search or you have that printout saying your case is worth X amount of dollars, our experience teaches us that that's not written in stone.
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A
Most agencies sell promises. Rankings delivers proof. We've taken firms from invisible to number one in the toughest PI markets. While others are still scrambling to figure out ChatGPT. We're already optimizing for AI search. So your firm is the answer the clients see first. Don't wait while your competitors eat your lunch. Visit Rankings IO and start dominating search today. Verdicts make headlines. Teams make legacies. Michelle's kept people for decades and built a culture that pushes attorneys to perform. If you're churning through hires every year, that might be why you're stuck. Your edge is your people.
- [12:43]
B
I have great people here. I have not only great people, but people who have been with me for a very, very, very long time. So many of my support staff came with me through internship programs in high school. They did not go the paralegal route through college. We're a service business, and the most paramount thing is that I have people who are friendly. And the second paramount thing is I want everyone in my office to get along. And the fact is they are friends and I want them to get along because we're very collaborative. I can't have somebody in my office say, oh, no, I'm not going to do that because it's her job, or I won't do that because it's his job. We have about 20 people here, seven to eight lawyers, about 12 to 14 people in my support staff at any one time. And I want to know that the phones are covered, that anyone here can speak to a client, that everything can be taken care of. So with my support Staff, I try to get them right out of school or in school, and I train them. I start them from beginning as file clerks so they know everything about the office. On the way up, they answer the phones, they do the filing. Then I start them with the data entry. They learn how to do new cases. And I have people here for 10, 15, 20 years in my office. There's always a way up the ladder so that they're well paid, they have all the benefits that can provide, you know, 401k, medical, psychological, dental, vacation time, sick time. And the next thing I think that's extremely important about keeping staff is that you're flexible. We're human beings. We have problems. We have old parents, we have young children. If you're going to tell somebody, I'm sorry, you can't go home because your kid is sick, you're not going to have that employee very long. So that's my paralegal team and with my legal team again. Tom and Ronnie have been with me. Tom from 1980, Ronnie from 86. O' Hagan started with me in about 1991. The other attorneys have been with me 10 years or so. I have a couple of newer wives who've been with me for a couple of years. And I'm always looking to add more attorneys, but it's the same thing. It's collaborative. I don't kill people. I try to give people, my lawyers, what they're best at. If somebody's not a good brief writer, I'm not going to make them a brief writer. They and force them to do that. If somebody's great at depositions and great at doing motions, why wouldn't I encourage them to do that and let them do that? So I think it's worked out for me finding out what's the best in my people and letting them do their best.
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A
Have you found that, hey, so and so, you know, does want to just write the briefs and that's it. And they're just, they, they. They're amazing at that. And then maybe someone is the person on your team that just goes to trial and speaks to the jury.
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B
Right? That does happen, and it has happened. So I do have attorneys who essentially write briefs and motions and attorneys who essentially just go to trial and prepare the cases for trial. But we all review the files. So whatever files we have, they just divide it alphabetically and we review the files constantly. I go through them A to Z. My lawyers have their chunk, and then I switch the chunks every few months, every six months or so, because I want different eyes on the cases, and that way we will end up knowing the cases. Also, having a database is one thing. We can always open up the database and look at the case and say, oh, this is what's happening. But I want people to really know the cases inside and out.
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A
For our audience, we got a lot of attorneys that are considering going out on their own, maybe strike, you know, putting their flag in the sand, so to speak. You know, today it's super competitive. It feels like every marketing channel is saturated. Like, what piece of advice would you give them to get started and maybe before they go out on their own?
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B
I think you have really have to have a really good base in your community because I believe that that's where you're going to get your cases from. And I think you have to make credible names for yourself. By taking in cases that are credible, you know, they'll get reported. Your name will continue to urgent.
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A
When you take on some of those cases that are different, you know, being by the nature of them being different, you automatically stand out.
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B
Right? Right.
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A
Michelle, this has been a lot of fun. What's the best way to get in touch with you?
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B
So I'll give you my telephone number. It's the office number, not my personal one. It's 212. 227. 4000 at our website is mermanlawyers.com Iron sharpens iron.
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A
You've got a grind to stay in the front. Use tech to stay sharp, be disciplined in your case selection and build the right team around you. That's how you thrive today and for decades. Ready for more hit? Subscribe Every week on Personal Injury Mastermind, we break down what it takes to win it.