← Personal Injury Mastermind w/ Chris Dreyer
Personal Injury Mastermind w/ Chris Dreyer
370. 90% Referrals: Be the Lawyer Other Lawyers Call w/ Devin Janosov
00:14:47
How Devin Janosov evaluates impossible cases and turns reputation into his strongest acquisition channel.
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Transcript26 lines
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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 in the country. And while others are still scrambling to figure out ChatGPT, we're already optimizing for AI search. So your firm is the first answer clients see. Lead the pack, don't get left behind. Visit Rankings IO for aio, also known as AI Search and start dominating search today.
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When a case looks dead on arrival, he finds a path forward.
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B
A lot of lawyers don't know that you have like 30 days to get them on noticed and then the case is lost forever.
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A
Today's guest thrives because he runs towards the cases other lawyers won't touch. Premises liability, municipal negligence, catastrophic injuries where the facts are messy and the law is unforgiving. And over 90% of his firm's clients come from referrals. When no one else wants the case, he's the one they call.
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B
I hope you never have to call me again. But 20 years of doing this has shown me that if you get hit by a car once, if you get arrested once, there's a good chance that those two things are going to overlap.
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A
Welcome to Personal Injury Mastermind. Powered by rankings IO. I'm Chris Strop. Devin Janisov built a firm that owns a narrow lane. Let's get into it.
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B
A lot of defense attorneys don't think a plaintiff's lawyer is going to actually try a case. At the worst case, I will take it in front of a jury and I will do my absolute best to get a verdict on it. And I think a lot of times that's more important than any of the facts or anything else is the attorney's willingness to take it all the way to the end. There's a lot of lawyers who will take plaintiff's cases, but there's not a lot of lawyers who will actually go and try the case no holds barred. My firm tends to get cases where other lawyers think that there's probably not much of a chance of recovering. We get a lot of referrals from other attorneys and they tend to send us some of their harder cases. So we had a case with a, with a girl who was like 22 years old. She was out drinking with a friend, a guy having dinner. They went back to his apartment and he wanted to have a cigarette. So in his apartment where they would go have cigarettes was up on the roof. So it's in Stanford, Connecticut. They went up to the roof. It was like the fifth, fifth floor, a four story apartment, but then with the roof it was the fifth and it had those like bollards that like, you know, archers used to hide behind on like castles. So they're up there and they're talking and she goes over to one of them and kind of leans onto it and it just disconnected from the roof. And she went over the top of the roof, fell five stories, landed on her back and burst her heart in her chest. And ambulances came. They had to take her to the hospital. They managed to save her. Obviously the defense was taking the position that she had been drinking. She went and leaned on the bollard. She was too close to the edge. It was her own negl. The kid wasn't allowed to go out on the roof. He wasn't supposed to go out there. You're not allowed to smoke at the building. They went through his lease. It went on for forever. I was literally prepping for trial. We had done like 20 something depositions and then in the end we managed to get her a really good result thanks to a judge at a pre trial who had said the number that they had versus the number that I had my number was a lot more realistic. And she said, I think a jury is going to give attorney Janice of closer to what he's asking for than what you're offering. And we were just glad to be able to put it aside for her and get a result for her because most of the lawyers I talked to didn't think it was going to be a recoverable case. But we got a good recovery for.
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A
Your skill is it's so unique and so, so high value today, you know, with all the consolidation, all the technology. It's kind of commoditizing the, you know, the just standard cases and you know, the more complex cases. It's a different type of skill set. You know, talk to me. Maybe, you know, is it premises cases? Is it, you know, do you get any scenarios that like different weird, you know, maybe a dog bite case that's super hard to prove, you know, or talk to me about some of these other scenarios where just people might overlook a case.
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B
So the hardest case we've had, one of the only ones I've ever actually lost on a summary judgment. And then I appealed it to the Connecticut appellate court, I appealed at the Connecticut Supreme Court and they upheld the summary judgment both ways, was the Sandy Hook shooting. I had some of the victims in the Sandy Hook shooting against the school itself for not calling for the lockdown when they heard the shooter come in. There was also an issue with where the keys were. So that case was very difficult on the facts and on, on the law because municipal liability is something we do a lot of, because that's an area where a lot of lawyers don't feel comfortable with because, you know, they obviously have qualified immunity. Getting through that is very difficult. There's very limited exceptions. That's probably where we have our most complicated stuff is when we're doing municipal liability. I have a couple of those going right now.
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A
Yeah, talk to me about that. The buses and the garbage truck type of stuff, cases, they're protected a little bit differently.
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B
So one of the first ones we had was an 8th grade boy who was leaving for school. He was walking across the crosswalk, his mom was running out after him with her with his lunch in her hand. And a DPW truck towing a 2 ton wood chipper that the driver wasn't supposed to be driving, was coming down the road, didn't really know how to use the air brakes, and he killed the kid in the crosswalk in front of his mom. And that was actually a case that we were referred from a New York lawyer who looked at it and said, he's in eighth grade. What's the value for the life of an eighth grader? You know, how much is this case really worth? He didn't think it was really worth that much. He sent it to us and we got a fairly decent seven figure verdict or seven figures. It was a mediation actually that we mediated with somebody on the case. After years of working it up and working it down, but you know, we had to sue the town. In order to get the town, you have to prove that either they violated what's called a ministerial duty, which means there's a law or an internal policy that says you have to do this this way. So regular negligence isn't going to cut it. So the driver not being licensed or not being properly trained to drive the truck under normal circumstances would be fine. But without a statute or a internal policy that said he needs to be trained, he needs to have this license. So in that case it was much easier because obvious their hiring policy, they need to hire somebody who knows how to drive the truck. So a lot of lawyers, when they get those cases, you know, it's, it's difficult. There's a notice requirement. You have like 30 days to get them on notice. You have to put very specific things in the letter. The notice letter is actually an element that you have to prove at trial. You have to introduce the letter at trial in front of the jury and get it into evidence in order to meet your burden at trial. So a lot of lawyers don't know that. So they take these cases, they start looking into it, and then the 30 days or 60, 90 days, depending on the the notice requirement goes, and then the case is lost forever.
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A
When you operate in a narrow lane like this, your entire case acquisition strategy changes. For Devon, referrals are a major source of cases. But to be successful, the referral engine needs to be supported by digital marketing.
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B
Our firm's always been very, very focused on just litigation and literally just personal injury, plaintiffs litigation, and criminal litigation. Our clients are our best resource for referrals. We have our clients in criminal court, and we have our clients in PI in civil court. And we try to do the best job we can for our clients. And a lot of our business is just repeat customers. I always say to people, you know, I hope you never have to call me when I give them my card. Because I say, if you're calling me, you're definitely not having a good day. You're having a very, very bad day. So I hope you never have to call me again. And even when I'm done with a client's case, happy or not, I'll say to them, you know, it was really nice getting to know you. If you want to call me and talk, go out, get a drink, you know, anything like that, that's fine. I hope you never have to call me again. But 20 years of doing this has shown me that if you get hit by a car once, if you get arrested once, there's a good chance that those two things are going to overlap and that you're going to be back again. Connecticut's not a large legal jurisdiction.
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A
Right.
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The other lawyers know us. You know, we, we're very personable to defense attorneys. We try to be as personable to judges in the courts. Now a lot of lawyers I know are becoming judges. So really just keeping yourself, you know, at the top of your game is the best way to make sure that you get referrals. Obviously, the digital marketing and all that stuff helps immensely. And staying in to with your clients, I mean, in law school they tell you the number one way to get grieved is to not call your clients back and not be in touch with your clients. That is absolutely true.
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A
I had Nick Raleigh on yesterday and you know, he's similar philosophy, like, hey, doing good work, putting get, you know, putting the big case result numbers up. Take the cases that people aren't willing to take, you know, because you feel like they were wronged, right? You're trying to get justice and being willing to get in the game on the court and do that. It's admirable and it's rare. And because of that you're going to get referrals. So you set yourself up for success and doing right by the client. You know, talk to me briefly, the intake, you know, how do you for your skill set? Right? It's different. Like if an auto accident attorney that just does auto accidents, like here's the criteria. Case out the window. Right, That's. But like you're going to get a mix, a range of cases that come in. Like, does that necessitate an attorney reviews all. All the cases that come in? You know, some people just have the intake specialist or the paralegal. Like, like, talk to me about how you handle intake because it's so complex for you.
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B
Yeah, so that's actually a very good question because that's a problem that we had in the beginning at the firm when we first started to get a little bigger and started to get bigger cases is you'll see damages will be great in the case. And I'm not saying great because obviously the bigger damages, the worse the case is for the person. But the damages will be, you know, locked in. So you say, oh, this is a good case on damages. But you know, sometimes a lawyer who's referring the case in will look at it and say, you know, well, we can make up liability because the damages are so good and no, you can't make up liability. You know, so you need to really look at all the elements of the case when you're doing it. So here we have a paralegal who's kind of like our office manager. She's been with us forever. She'll review everything first. Then it'll go to my partner and he'll review it for like kind of pre suit stuff and make sure that all the stuff's there, there's insurance coverage, there's adequate insurance coverage, all that stuff is there. Then lastly it'll come to me and I'll review it for. If it gets into lit. Is it something that can be maintained? I'm not going to say that we don't take cases where I say I don't think I can win this because a lot of them, you know, they don't really go to trial. You know, I've kind of over the years taken the philosophy of nobody really wins at a trial. I mean, everybody kind of loses.
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It's.
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There's a few cases where, you know, a big Verdict will roll in, and it's like, you know, we really pulled that one off. But most trials, juries are very unpredictable, and it's better to manage risk.
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A
The cases Devin takes on require judgment, pattern recognition, and a team trained to see the details most firms overlook. And that skill set carries all the way through litigation because once a case is headed towards trial, the goal shifts. It's about positioning, valuation and building a narrative that the jury can feel. So I asked Devin how he approaches maximizing case value and how he prepares when a case is headed into court.
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B
I'm a big proponent of getting all of your discovery to the absolute max. I mean, jury focus groups are great. It's always good to put your case onto somebody ahead of time and see what are people going to think about this? Because as the attorney who's inside of it, and by the time it gets to trial, you've been with the case for so long, it's good to have other lawyers that you can call, but it's also good to have outside resources like jury focus groups and, you know, people that you can put the case in front of and put it on and put on your evidence and say, what's going to work? What's not going to work? Because even no matter how long you've been doing this, it's not difficult to get so up to your head in the facts of the case that you don't see, you know, your own blind spots, and the defense is always looking for your blind spots. And then there's the flip side, where you can be so concerned with what the defense is going to do that you start thinking about things that they're not even thinking about. And you start undercutting your own case for the defense because you're thinking of things that the defense isn't seeing. So it's. It's very difficult to know what to put in and what not to put in. Should this witness go on the stand, their testimony might be, you know, questionable. You know, they've got some reasons to potentially not be, you know, trustworthy, but their testimony is really important to the facts. You know, do I put them up? Don't I put them up? Those questions, it can be very difficult to try and answer that on your own, especially when you've been living inside of the bubble for, you know, years.
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A
Right. I've heard, like, not from the trial side. You know, I know everyone wants to do, like, these advanced retrospectives to where you run different scenarios and then like, hey, the defense didn't take, you know, a tactic they had there. Right. And you were more prepared. And then I've heard, even on the intake side, you know, these, like, settlement committees, like, if something doesn't hit a policy limit and you get multiple people say, well, you know, review it and, you know, before you. But, you know, different type of structure, you know, versus you, you know, going right to trial and having that trial first mentality. What do you see for the. The future of the practice? Like, what's some of the goals you're trying to accomplish?
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B
We just want to keep doing what we're doing. We want to keep helping people. We want to keep doing the best work we can. We're not looking to really grow. We've tried to bring in other lawyers before. Every time we've brought in another lawyer, it's been a mess. So a couple years ago, we just literally capped it at the three partners and our support staff. And we have a really good team here. And as long as we can keep going, and I'll be completely content to just keep doing what I'm doing and, you know, just keep growing the firm, keep getting bigger cases, keep getting results.
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A
This has been a ton of fun, you know, for our audience listening that has a. A complex case. They want to get in touch with you. They have questions about the pod. You know, what's the best way to. To get in touch with you?
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That's infoyentryfirm.com.
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If you want a marketing partner that brings the same level of care and clarity for your growth, that's where Rankings IO steps in. We help personal injury firms build demand, earn trust, and sign more cases in competitive markets. If you're ready to strengthen the engine behind your Firm, visit Rankings IO. I'm Chris Dreyer. Thanks for listening.