(air whooshing) Our next in-person mastermind is coming up this fall and we're heading to Vegas. We're kicking off this mastermind with an in-person tour as Zappos downtown Las Vegas campus, where you'll learn their strategies behind company culture, core values, employee engagement, and customer service. Looking outside the legal industry for business concepts and strategies allows you to gain fresh perspectives and innovative solutions that can be applied to improve and differentiate your firm's operations. Following the tour are the mastermind hot seats. Every attendee has the opportunity to dive deep into their business obstacles with their mastermind group and coach. We believe that nothing beats working on your firm in-person. So join us in Las Vegas on November 7th and 8th. This is your chance to break through barriers, spark new ideas, and accelerate your law firm's success. Limited spots are available. Visit maxlawevents.com for full event details and to grab your ticket today. Run your law firm the right way. The right way. This is the Maximum Liar Podcast. Maximum Liar Podcast. Your hosts, Jim Hacking and Tyson Matrix. Let's partner up and maximize your firm. Welcome to the show. Welcome back to the Maximum Liar Podcast. I'm Jim Hacking. I'm Tyson Matrix. What's up Jimbo? Tyson, how are you doing man? How did court go? It went well. It was quick. It was in and out and then I got to have coffee with Josh Evans between podcasts which was fun. I went Jim, court, podcast, coffee with Josh and then back podcast again. That's why I'm in the back of my truck right now. It's because I just had coffee with Josh. It sounds like you're getting your energy back which I'm happy to hear. I'm faking until I make it but I am feeling a little better that headache I had this morning. So Steve, you don't know. I'm on the back end of COVID, my third time of having COVID despite being vaccinated. It's the worst one I've had. So, Tyson, you want to go ahead and introduce Steve? Yeah, so this is one of my favorite bios that I will ever read for two reasons. One, it is very short. The other one is just the content of it. And please forgive me Steve if I pronounce your name wrong. But it's either Steve Mere or Mere. It's Mere. I was going to go with Mere but I don't think it may be Mere. But Steve Mere is not just an average personal injury lawyer but a business man first. That's the bio. That's it. So Steve, welcome to the show. How's it going? Happy to be here. So Steve, why don't you go ahead and introduce yourself to our audience, tell them sort of who you are, how you came to practice law and then build what you've built. Okay, yeah. I am currently the co-founder of Sweet James, accident attorneys. We're headquartered out here in Southern California. And we operate right now in California, Nevada, Arizona and just launched the Dallas office in Texas. We have about 400-ish employees, 50 lawyers. And we're probably one of the largest, if not the largest, single event personal injury law firm on the West Coast. So Steve, I kind of want to jump right in. Something like this takes time to build, right? It's not something that you can just dump a bunch of money. I guess you could. You could dump a bunch of money into it and kind of get started up. But that's usually not how these things evolve. So at what point did you start to realize, okay, you all were on to something and you started to see that growth where you weren't just a few people in an office. You're at 400. Where did you start to see that progress and what was it that started that? Right. Well, actually we did launch the firm in 2019. So it's a fairly new firm. But it's not my first rodeo. I used to be one of the principals of Jacobian Myers and kind of brought that brand back to life on the West Coast. And I had an exit in 2000 and end of 2018. And then in 2019, I partnered up with James. And I had a concept and we aligned on that concept. And he's like, "What are we going to call this thing?" You know, "Bergner, mayor, mayor, Bergner." And I'm like, "No, we're going to go with Sweet James," which was his nickname. And he's like, "Are you sure?" And I'm like, "I think this is going to work." So we were, you know, in 2018, the law, I believe, changed in California where they allowed trade names finally. So we launched this thing in 2019, but, you know, we had a template. So we were able to scale very fast. And when COVID happened, it was, you know, it happened, you know, within seven or eight months of us being partners. So, which was kind of a bad omen for car accident firms, especially in California, you know, no one was on the road. But I actually saw that as an opportunity since I knew the market well. And I knew that grabbing market share would be very difficult. So COVID was kind of that window that allowed us while everybody was retreating. We picked up the best radio spots, the best billboards, signed permanent contracts with them, drove, you know, tens of millions of dollars into, you know, traditional media to help establish the brand. And when we exited COVID, it kind of just catapulted the firm. So we added 200 of our staff just got added last year. So we've been just, you know, growing very fast. And it's not easy, obviously, being in the type of field that we're in. But, you know, definitely believe in, you know, saying hyper-focused in a niche. And, you know, we definitely niche down. And we're just a single event. We do car accidents. We do slip and falls, wrongful death. And that's about it. You know, we don't do mass torts. We don't do, you know, environmental disasters, class actions. So we're very narrow in what we do, but we're very good at it. And we, with about 45 teams that are lawyer led and 25 of them are litigation, 20 of them are pre-litigation. You know, we do trials. We got 23 million last year as a jury verdict. We settled the case just two months ago, right before trial for 13 million. So, you know, kind of assembled a team of very talented people. And that's it. But yeah, it is, to kind of answer your question, it did take a lot of capital in order to scale this fast. And it does take a lot of talent. So I kind of look at my role as, you know, chief talent officer. You know, I'm running a talent agency, if anything, so. Steve, tell us what it looked like sort of on day one. And then what your envision, what you envisioned for, say, the first 18 months or what your plan was pre-COVID. Right. Well, we had to change really fast, obviously. But, you know, initially, it was to have a better, you know, mousetrap, so to say, from a branding and marketing perspective. You know, I mean, it obviously, everything starts there. If you don't have clients, then, you know, you don't have work, and you don't have revenues. So the initial steps were to just kind of create that better mousetrap from a branding and marketing perspective. And that started with the name and the logo. And I know it's a little bit quirky, but it was designed to just kind of stand out. So we get calls pretty much weekly where people are saying, you know, I saw, I see your ads everywhere. And I always thought to myself, sweet James, what a silly name for a lawyer. But when I got in a car accident, it's the only name that would pop into my head. And to me, that means, you know, the advertising is working. So. So with that number of people, it really, it's like, it almost like bottles my mind. It's just a lot of people, a lot of offices to manage. But I want to focus more, I think, on the recruiting side of things. How do you manage your recruiting? And how do you make sure that you've got a good pipeline of people that are going to be a good fit for the firm? Because that's keeping a culture with that many people can probably, is probably pretty difficult. So how do you make sure that you, with that number of people, you're able to recruit the right type of people into the firm? I think one of the keys is, you have to always be hiring, even when you don't need people. And the reason is, you know, let's say you need to hire a lawyer today. The odds that that lawyer that is qualified, that matches your culture, is actually looking for a job this week or next week, is probably pretty slim. So if you're always hiring, so we're always, we always have ads for pretty much every position. And we have a very large database of resumes that are going through. And if we find a rock star or someone that's super talented, we hire them. Even if we don't have a position for them, we hire them, we bring them on the team. We'll figure out what to do with that person. So we're always, we're always hiring and accumulating resumes. So when we need to fill a position, we generally will go then back into our database. And if they were, and if the resume look good, they'll usually do one or two rounds of interviews, even if we don't hire them, but we have all that data. So that makes the hiring process much easier. So right now, we're in a spurt of hiring additional pre-suit paralegals. And essentially, my head of HR/recruiting, it's like, oh, I interviewed these dozen people. Which ones do you think would, you know, would be a good fit? I'm like, I will bring them in for another round of interviews. And so that's definitely been a key to being able to scale fast and find talented people. It's just something you do year round, and that's an investment you have to make year round. So we're always running, whether it's ads on Indeed or, you know, messaging people on LinkedIn. This is a year round, like day to day thing. So. What do you think most lawyers and law firm owners get wrong when it comes to growth? Clearly you embrace growth from the outset. We talked to a lot of lawyers who are scared and reluctant and sort of shy away from growth and specifically fast growth. I think making the investment in the people is a scary thing. To build teams when you don't always have the work. But, you know, part of my job here, my primary job here is really to be working on next year. So, modeling out, you know, how many teams do I need to bring online? And you don't always get it right. And then you've got to make those tough decisions. And sometimes we've had to collapse a team or two because we were too early. And that's not always a great position to be in. But the only way you're going to catch hyper growth or be scaling is if you're always multiple quarters ahead. And what does that mean? That means I'm making investment before it's necessary. And I think people would rather just kind of take their pay and not put that money on the table and bet. And that actually makes our job much easier. You know, if I look us as a hyperscaler in the legal space. So, I don't have a lot of competitors that are doing those type of things. So, I mean, if I can give advice to people, if you're in a market and you have some traction with clients, just really, it makes sense to make that investment. And make sure you niche down your hyper focus, but you've got to invest in people. And I almost always think you've got about 10% more staff than you need. So, if you've got 20 people in your firm, you probably should have two people that are twiddling their thumbs, waiting for the extra work to come. And you're always training them and doing whatever. And in our size, obviously we have a lot more people than is necessary. But they're there to catch the next wave of growth. So, Steve, you say something that I've found really interesting in the survey that we sent to you before the podcast. And you said that there's so much opportunity in today's legal environment to build the law firm of the future. And the most interesting part of that sentence to me is the law firm of the future. I wonder what you, like, what you believe the law firm of the future looks like. Because it's, I wonder if it looks like it is now, but I'm guessing that it isn't because you put that in there. So, what does the law firm of the future look like? The easiest way I could, you know, make a, you know, some kind of connection is look at where medicine was 15 years ago. You had a lot of small solos. You had a few large partner practices. And then they got gobbled up by either healthcare, you know, insurance companies or hospitals. And they've turned kind of into these conglomerates where now these providers are generally multi-state and they're ran much more efficiently and professionally like a business and they have actual back offices and things like that where a lot of these solo practitioners didn't have that in medicine 15 years ago. And I think legal is going through the same transition right now. And there's going to be, you know, winners and losers. And I think, like, if you're a small solo practitioner, I think you're probably going to be okay. But this middle of the market, these firms that have, I'd say from, you know, 30 to 100 employees, those are the ones that are really either going to shrink or they're going to have to consolidate and scale up. And not all of them are going to be able to do that because today to be at scale, you have to be top of class in your... Are you tired of the marketing guessing game? Does your website feel more like a digital billboard than a client magnet? If you're nodding along, you're not alone. And it's time to stop the uncertainty and start getting real results. Let's talk about your marketing spend. Are you just shelling out money every month and crossing your fingers? Do you ever wonder what impact your marketing is really having on your revenue? Well, it's time to take the guesswork out of the equation with Rise Up Media. We've been working with them for over a year and the feedback from our fellow members has been fantastic. Rise Up Media is here to take your marketing to the next level. They'll even perform a full audit of your online presence, giving you the good, the bad, and even let you in on what your competition is up to that you're missing out on. And the best part, there's no obligation, no catch, no pressure. If you decide to work with them, their contracts are month to month. That's right, no long-term commitments tying you down. So, what are you waiting for? To learn more about how Rise Up Media can transform your firms, visit RiseUpMedia.com/maxlaw and Rise is spelled with a Z. RiseUpMedia.com/maxlaw. We have a business intelligence unit that handles our data. We have five in-house software programmers constantly massaging what our needs are. So, you know, these capabilities have to be built into what the law firm of the future looks like. And, you know, we've deployed AI in our mail room. So, right now, we could scan a thousand documents. 900 of them will end up in the right client's file with the right naming convention. And the 100 that the AI gets confused on, it'll flag a human being and say, "Hey, I think it's this client's file." And I think this is a notice of a deposition at this time, but can you verify that that's what I'm looking at? And with very minimal human input, you know, that'll get pushed into the client's file. So, we went from 30 people in the mail room to essentially six right now. So, these are the type of, you know, investments that firms are going to need to make, you know? And I think a lot of lawyers, because they're classically trained, they have their head in the sand and they're like, "Well, I've always done it this way. I'm going to hold out as long as possible." So, all they're doing is they're either shortening their own shelf life in the future or they're ensuring that they'll never get to scale. So, Steve, we're an immigration law firm, Tyson's a personal injury lawyer. One of the things that we've struggled with as we've grown is management. We've had a hard time sort of building out the systems and developing good managers, we sort of say, "Well, you're really good at this job, so you'd be a great manager at watching over the people that do what you do." What's your philosophy on management over the growth? I have a robust management structure. We generally, you know, govern by consensus. Obviously, if I think the team's making a wrong call, I'll override it, but, you know, we have an executive managed team. We have, like, I'd say there's probably 17 people in upper management and about 15 people in middle management. There's a department head and then each department head answers to a managing attorney of sorts. So, I think management's definitely required, but I think management's job should be making sure that the KPIs that you have set, whatever those goals are, are being met, and then those team members are either being mentored or trained to meet those goals, and if they're not making the difficult decision of raising to HR or to whoever makes the final call, of this team member cannot hit these KPIs. And that's where you got to make difficult decisions of, you know, do we replace this person or is it a training issue? I mean, I think most people, when they show up, if they show up to get a paycheck, they're motivated, and it's usually a training issue, right? If they're not trained properly, they're not going to be motivated. So, a lot of issues could be solved with a lot of extra training, but then, you know, occasionally you get just people that just no amount of training can help them, and you got to identify those people early on and be able to replace them with people that could help the whole organization. So, Steve, for a while, I've been thinking about something that Seth Godin had said about, and I'll probably butcher this, but it's essentially that the future of law firms is like, for law for marketing, it's going to be more smaller firms. People are going to sort of gravitate to the smaller firms. And I don't know if that's true, but I don't know if it is or isn't. I do know it's easier to market. I think a smaller firm, because you can kind of point to a character. People seem to be drawn to characters, everything about people like Steve Jobs. You know, Apple's a gigantic company, but they were primarily drawn to Steve Jobs. Now, they're kind of drawn to Cook as a central figure at that company. So, how are you able to market a company like Sweet James whenever it is so large? Do you focus on the character? Is the marketing more towards the potential client? How do you shape your marketing so that it is the most effective? Yeah, I mean, if you look at our Instagram account, you'll see James is probably in 60% of the videos, and he is the central character around our marketing. And as we've evolved and grown larger, it's essentially quite a bit of work. He's either live on the radio or on TV almost every other day, and he's shooting commercials and videos. So, that's kind of taken a life of his own. I do agree with you. For us, I'd probably say it's 60% character-based, and 40% just really pounding results into the audience. If you're looking for results, you need to call us. So, that's generally how we handle the marketing. But I do think you need to have a differentiator, obviously, if you're marketing. And I do think it is easier for smaller solo practitioners right now, easier than it's ever been. With digital and being able to get your message out there, whether it's paid social or free social, there's a lot of having use to generate clients. And this kind of comes back to what we talked about earlier. This middle of the market is going to really fall out. You're going to have the large brands, and then you're going to have hundreds of solos with their characters that are strong in the community or in particular cities or in particular regions. For us, we want to be one of the larger brands. I'm aware consolidation is happening. We're not scaling just for the sake of scaling. We're scaling to make sure we have a good home for all our employees and their families in the future. And to me, that requires the firm to be of a certain size. You and your firm are clearly taking advantage of some traditional forms of media that a lot of lawyers have written off. You talk about radio and maybe I don't know if you're any direct mail, but can you talk about sort of the opportunities in those channels that people might be ignoring when they think they have to do everything on TikTok? Yeah, our traditional media is probably, I'd say, 75%, 70% of our spend. This year, we're going to spend about $60 million, which is a very large number on media spend. Last year, to give you an idea, we spent about $38 million, so you can kind of get an idea of the growth. So about $60 million, I would say TV and billboards are the number one item for the ad spend, and then followed by radio. And then, I would say equivalent with radio, we spend, you know, PPC, which last year we barely spent anything on PPC. Like maybe out of $38 million, we might have spent $1 or $2 million. This year, we're going to spend significantly more. Part of that growth in ad spend this year was really backing up our traditional spend with more digital buys. So we get a little bit higher market penetration in the areas we're in. So we're spending more on digital this year than we have ever spent, but the firm was built on a traditional trajectory. And like I said, I think partly having a catchy name, having a character like James, who's very personable. He's very, you know, I always tell people, he's like magic in a bottle. You know, we were able to grow the firm with a traditional spend. In a market like LA, that's kind of our primary market, Southern California, and then we have a secondary hub in Phoenix. We have about 100 employees in the Phoenix office. So we were able to do it with a traditional spend. So my question is pretty simple, but I think the answer might be a little bit more complex. Why do you think that TV and billboards are still effective? Because for me, like my brain, I used to work for a volume firm. I understand the marketing part of it. It is effective. And it's expensive. As you've demonstrated, it's extremely expensive to do. But why do you think that it still works? That's my question. Why do you think that those still work when we have all these other media outlets that they can consume all day? Why is it that TV and billboards are still working? Because I think regardless of how famous an internet celebrity is, they're not viewed the same as a TV celebrity, as a silver screen or, you know, your YouTube. So I think, you know, I don't know, who's the guy? The most famous guy on YouTube is Mr. Beast. But if you still ask, you know, 10 random people, I'd say one out of 10 might know who he is. But if you ask someone who the most famous person on TV is 10 out of 10 people will know. So I think the credibility you get on TV is not equivalent to the type of credibility you would get on, you know, whether it's, you know, any of these other media. So, and people want to say, "Oh, yeah, I hired that guy on TV." And the problem is a lot of these guys on TV, they're just marketing artists. They don't know what the hell they're doing. And, you know, I'm by no means a trial lawyer, but we have a very effective trial team that gets very big results. So for a large advertising firm, I would probably argue we probably are the largest advertising firm that's truly a litigation firm. You know, we get big results because we push and we litigate these cases hard. And for a lot of these advertising firms, as we know, like they're just more, some of them don't even have litigation shops. They're just the pre litigation, churn and burn type of a shop. So, but I think, you know, definitely being on TV gives you a certain amount of credibility that we can't get in social. We wouldn't be able to get, you know, we run YouTube commercials, we run paid social, Facebook. I mean, we're everywhere with our size ad budget. And we're just not going to get that credibility in these other mediums. And I think, you know, that's, hopefully that partly answers your question. It's just a credibility play. Steve, please talk to us a little bit about running offices in three states and then deciding to open a new office in Dallas. It's challenging. I think it comes down. You're having good people and a good operations director. That's the most important thing. I definitely wouldn't be able to have these other offices without strong operations directors. And that's kind of the key position. My operations directors in both Arizona and Texas, they're non-lawyers that come from other law firms. And they've been either the COO or they've been, you know, they're very high-level people. Now, we handle, we have like a unified back office. So, we have one office that handles accounting for all states. We have, you know, one records department. You know, so, so we do have a unified, I call office services. So, we have an office services suite that supports all offices. And that makes it a little bit easier. So, when you open an office in another state, you're not building out another accounting team and another records team. And another, you know, claims team and all of these other, you know, pieces that you would need. So, you do have to have some back office energy, you know, that you implement. I find your growth to be fascinating. I think it's really cool. I just, I think it's really neat to watch you. And I am curious to see how in the future, it does seem like Morgan and Morgan's trying to come on strong. You all are coming on strong. I am curious to see what the next 10 years look like and looks like. And we'll find out. It's, it's something that we'll live through and we'll figure it out. But I'm going to start to wrap things up. Before I do though, you want to tell people how to reach out to you if they want to ask any questions about the episode? Yeah, of course. My email address is Steve@sweetjames.com. S-T-E-V-E @sweetjames.com. Feel free if anybody wants to reach out, ask a question. Cool name, by the way. I really like the name. All right. Let's wrap things up. I do want to remind everyone to join us in the big Facebook group, just search maximum lawyer. You'll be able to find us there. And then if you want to have more high level conversations with people, we'd love to have you in the, in the guild, maxlawgild.com. A lot of great people there. And while you're listening to the rest of this episode, while we give our tips and hacks a week, we would love it if you would give us a five star review. Helps us spread the love to other attorneys all over the country. Jimmy, what's your hack of the week? I don't know if you've talked about this book before, Tyson, but I just started a book by Daniel Coyle called The Talent Code. It's about how people think, "Oh, you're just natively born with talent, and really that's not true at all, and I'm enjoying it so far, so I recommend that one." I don't know if we have either, but it's a good suggestion. Very good. Steve, we always ask our guests to give a tip or a hack of the week. It could be a podcast. It could be a book. It could be a quote. You name it. Do you have a tip or a hack for us? Yeah, definitely. So a book that I make all my managers read, and it's kind of, I think it's very relevant to law firms, is scaling up by Vern Harnish. So I don't know if you guys have read that, and we also use on the mailroom side, our document management AI system is Foundation AI. Ran by a guy named Vivek, he's a super smart guy, and so those are the, my tip is the book, and my hack is Foundation AI on the mailroom side. Love it. Great suggestions. That's two guests in a row that have recommended something for AI that I'm out the now, go and look at, so appreciate that, Steve. So my tip of the week is, so we are redesigning our website, and it was really interesting, is we get a lot of great designs and pretty designs, and that's fantastic, but what I keep telling them is, I don't care if it's pretty, I just, I care that if it's designed based on sound conversion principles, that's what I care about. Is it going to actually lead to clients? And so my tip is to focus whenever you redesign your websites on that, on conversion, more than making it look pretty, because there are a lot of pretty websites that won't get you no cases. And so you have to be very, very careful about that. And just because you have something that's extremely unique, if they can't figure out how to get in touch with you, it means nothing. So focus on conversion as opposed to making it look pretty. That's my tip of the week. All right, Steve, thanks so much. Really appreciate it. I would love to binge your ear more in the future because I think it's really cool the things that you're doing. I think we can all learn a lot from you and thanks for coming on and sharing some of your knowledge. Absolutely. Thank you, Jim. Thanks, Tyson. Thanks for listening to the maximum lawyer podcast. Stay in contact with your host and to access more content, go to maximumlawyer.com. Have a great week and catch you next time. Before you go, have you heard Jim and Tyson talk about the guild on the podcast or in the Facebook group? If not, you're missing out on some really exciting things happening with guild members and their law firms. The guild includes a community, accountability, trainings, group coaching, and in-person events like our quarterly masterminds. Inside, you'll gain support, tap into a network of connections, and continue learning, a common theme among successful entrepreneurs. Investing in a community is like the self-care of business ownership. Surrounding yourself with other people who get it is crucial when you're creating a rock-solid foundation to build your business on. One that's strong enough to withstand setbacks, transitions, and growth. So head to maximumlawyer.com/theguild to join now and get started today.
