S3,E12: Did Referrals Fail the Best Referral Firm in the Country?

[00:00:00] Speaker A: In December of 2023, James Helm went on Chris Dreier's show and explained better than anyone has before or since why a law firm should advertise and refer instead of litigate cases. In his words, the problem a lot of traditional law firms run into is that they can't reinvest in case acquisition because of their operational capacity. They don't have intake staff, they don't have paralegals, they don't have lawyers. And what Topdog has been able to do is partner with law firms across the country that have capacity. Fast forward to last month, he posted that Top dog now has 400 employees. They're handling 1200 cases a month and, quote, aggressively hiring lawyers. Now, I run the largest referral platform in the country, so I will ask the hard question. Did the referral model fail the best referral firm in the country? Welcome to the Relay, the legal show for personal injury law for owners, presented by Lex Amica. I'm your host, Gabriel Steeritz. My guest today is James Helm, founder and CEO of Top Dog Law. James and I go back to 2019, the year he started Top Dog and the year I walked into a wage and hour firm and and started getting fax referral reports. Not from James, thank God. He never sent me one of those. James built the vertical version of the referral business. I built a product, and somewhere along the way, we became friends, which means I get to ask him interesting questions. What's on the table today is one of the most interesting pivots I've seen in the industry. James, welcome to the show. [00:01:12] Speaker B: I'm excited to be here and I'm excited to get into this stuff. [00:01:15] Speaker A: Now, before we get into all the fun stuff, some people haven't heard your story before. I'd love for you to share just a few minutes. How did Top Dog get started? [00:01:24] Speaker B: Sure. My name is James. Top Dog is how people know our firm. But the real reason was when I was in law school, I was selling advertising to lawyers. And there was an attorney out of Texas who's still operating today who had a branded name. And I remember thinking, like, easy to say, easy to spell, easy to remember. And so I was on this train early of creating a branded law firm. At the time of my life, I had just gone through a lot. I share very openly that I got sober when I was 25 years old, which to date is still the hardest thing I ever did. And when you go through that fundamental shift of how you treat alcohol and drugs, you also reevaluate the rest of Your life. And so I was going to be a defense lawyer because I thought it was something that sounded good at cocktail parties and because it would make my parents proud. And to everybody's disappointment at the time, I made this crazy decision that I don't think I would be happy as a corporate lawyer. And so I opened up my own PI firm. I named it Top Dog. And to my parents dismay and all my friends dismay, they thought I was ruining my life right now. Fortunately, I did know a little bit about lawyer advertising from when I did that in law school. And I started the practice not knowing how to actually practice law, but knowing that getting in cases was very important. And that was really how it all began. I was a small town, small time lawyer in an underserved city of Philadelphia, helping people, driving around, signing cases out of my car. And at that time, if you would have just told me, hey, this thing would become a successful Philadelphia personal injury firm, that was the dream. Because I felt like I had so many people to prove wrong, especially after the decision I made not to go to the corporate law. I started my own firm right out of school. And what started as a Philadelphia specific thing has morphed into the national brand we see today. [00:03:26] Speaker A: How many cities can you see a Top Dog billboard bus radio ad in? [00:03:32] Speaker B: We're in most of the major metros at this point. The TAM of the personal injury tam, like where most of the cases happen is like a U on the United States, right? So I think we're in about 88% of households in the United States. And my goal is that Top Dog law is synonymous with injury law. [00:03:54] Speaker A: One thing that you said, which I think is really interesting and telling, is that you feel you have two superpowers. You have, you understand B2C marketing and talent acquisition. Do you still feel like that's true today? [00:04:07] Speaker B: Yeah, I love what we do. And I think I've reflected a lot about it the last year with private equity coming in and lawyers selling their firms to me, I just love what I do so much. Tony Robbins, who I'm a big fan of, talks about the seven human needs and it's certainty, variety, growth, significance, right? To be unique, to stand out, contribution, and then love and connection, like relationships with your employees. And for me, my business solves all of my needs in different ways. The problems that come at you in a different day. And we're at this cool intersection of finance, law and marketing. And I feel like I started my career really focused on the D2C marketing. What would a big CPG company do if they were trying to market a law firm? [00:04:58] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:04:59] Speaker B: And I think this last evolution has been much more about the talent acquisition part. The job of a great CEO is a people collector. And I remember my CEO coach telling me at one point that I should spend 40% of my time hiring and recruiting. And as we've started to hire more and more trial lawyers across America, I think I'm even north of that now. I'm probably like 60, 70% of my time is interviewing, selling someone on the vision, going back and forth on counteroffers. I think getting the right people on the team is the single most important thing that you can do for your company. [00:05:39] Speaker A: And what are your top line numbers right now? What are you sharing? What represents the size of Top Dog? The scope right now? [00:05:45] Speaker B: Yeah, right now will be our first year that we're doing over nine figures in cash collected. We doubled in revenue every year and expect that to continue for the next two to five years. And we've been able, fortunately, to double the number of clients that we're serving every single year. So I'm still figuring out how deep can we penetrate each of our major markets. We're in New York City today. I'm really excited about our New York City office. And Obviously there's over 10 million people living here. And so I think we're still in the infancy of how many people within New York can really know top dog law. So I want to keep that trend continuing as long as we can. [00:06:28] Speaker A: So moving from that to what I'm really interested in talking to you about, which is really inside the industry, you're famous as the guy who built the fastest, biggest referral shop. And there's other ones, and there's great ones. There's lofty, You've got lhp, you've got firms that do some inbound, you've got some great inbound firms like Mark Simon. But you've been a very visible outbound referring firm and really committed to that model. And a few months ago, you made a hard. It's been close to nine months now since your announcement about Keller Swan, but a big change. So the question to open this is what was true three years ago that is no longer true. [00:07:11] Speaker B: I think it's helpful to look at the context. So when I started, I was a guy in Philadelphia trying to earn my stripes, handling cases myself, chasing medical records, signing clients. And I wanted each of our clients to get the best customer service and the best outcome at their case. I think at some point along that journey, I realized that Working with co counsel firms was actually better for the client because I wasn't that experience. And a lot of cases are challenging and the carriers are tough and partnering, whether it was like a co counsel, joint representation or referring the case, was the best thing to do for the client. We grew that business by growing the brand and just the, the demand that came from social media. I remember I realized pretty early on, maybe within the first year, that on social media you can't control who's reaching out to you. I was getting leads and cases outside of Pennsylvania almost immediately. But because social media doesn't know state boundaries, I was almost immediately having to figure out who is the right referral partner for this workers comp case in Illinois. And so we started to build this map of who we thought were great law firms that could give great client results. And that business scaled for five or six years. I built the team and the infrastructure to really run that business at scale. And fortunately we're still doing that today. But I think at a certain point I had to look in the mirror and say my original vision was to build one of the biggest consumer firms in the United States. And now that we have six or seven years, we have hundreds of employees, we have access to a lot of capital. I understand the industry way better. I'm able to go out and recruit high end trial lawyers with real seven and eight figure verdicts. I'm like, I think I can build the back end infrastructure to support this front end brand that I've already built. And so I knew the moment I made that decision that I was signing myself up for a lot of pain. We hired last month 122 people in one month. And so the amount of hiring, onboarding, training, people, issues like all the things that come with that, but I think I had something deep down where I was like, I just want to go for it. I think that we're uniquely positioned with the national brand to build one of the biggest consumer firms in the United States. And I think that I can build a trial team of lawyers that can litigate cases as good or better than any firm in America. And it was like I wanted that next challenge of proving that I could do it to myself, not really to anybody else at that point. And this last year was really about how far can I actually take this thing? And I'm committed to it. [00:10:12] Speaker A: Did you see over the next two or three years your ability to grow, leveling off inside of that referral business as any of the rationale for it? Is this merely an opportunity to Go build something that is more inside your control and you control that client experience like end to end better. Were one was one of those more of the driver than the other? [00:10:33] Speaker B: I'll give you three the three main reasons how I thought through why we should expand our litigation capabilities in house. So the first one was control. It's exactly what you said. We've built for our co counsel partners an entire team of working with them weekly or monthly, tracking the data that matters, coaching them. But ultimately if we got a bad review or a client had a bad experience or God forbid they thought they had a bad outcome, it's harder to have the impact that you can have when you do it in house. So there was this element of hey, we want to fully control our own destiny here. I think the second part was what's going on with AI? Traditionally, law firms spend approximately 20% of revenue on non lawyer staffing. And we could talk about where the current state of this is because I think it's hard to know exactly how much efficiency personal injury firms are getting from using some of this AI tooling. But I definitely think it's going to be an opportunity from here on out. And then the third part, and I think this one isn't actually talked about enough, is the biggest firms I know Morgan, and Morgan has said publicly, get about a third of their cases from repeat clients and current clients. And so you start to look at a huge ad spend and you think about, wow, what if I could get 30 to 33% of my clients for free because they're so happy with the service that we provided them or one of their family members? And you start to look at that over a time horizon of a decade or two decades and the rationale for doing the work in house gets really [00:12:12] Speaker A: compelling, which is really interesting too. With that you're looking at it that way because the other thing too is building that long term brand also gives you that same kind of. The time horizon on what you're talking about is longer. Were you able, have you been able to measure a baseline? I'm sure people are still hiring. Top dog, your co counseling case is out that 30%. You could be realizing some of that already from people who are happy top dog clients. So do you have a baseline that you're trying to, trying to get up to 30% or does it feel like you're starting from zero on that? [00:12:44] Speaker B: No, we have a baseline. It's actually pretty funny. You would think that if you're partnering with a firm and the case is in litigation and they're running point in the litigation that if that person has a friend or family member, they would refer it to that lawyer. And so we did get some of those repeat customers. But I'm super proud of the division we're building within our marketing department, which is client marketing. And I think this is twofold. I think it's the CX or the customer experience combined with generating repeat and word of mouth customers. I think as an industry, we always say client service is super hard. Why is it hard? I think the root cause of why it's hard is that clients don't understand the process. It was never explained to them that this case may take two to three years. Here's how pre litigation works. Here's how litigation works. So when they're calling your office and saying, what's going on with my case? It's just a lack of education problem. So we looked at it like, how could we recruit some people? Like Lillian from Credit Karma is building this out for us. We recruited a team in house where we said, okay, we're going to build a whole client journey. We're going to educate the clients up front. Here is the process you're about to go through. We're going to send them automated messages about where their case is in the process. They're going to have a portal where they can easily load documents, things that we're asking for to make both people's lives easier. And then that CX experience will also give us a good place to ask for repeat business. Because a lot of times I think lawyers just don't ask, hey, do you know anybody in your immediate network that needs a lawyer? I'm happy to help. Or hey, do you know that in addition to handling your slip and fall case, we also do work injuries? You might have clients within your existing firm right now that are like, oh yeah, my, my aunt had a work injury case. I didn't know you did that. And that's something we're really focused on. And I think if we do it right, it can one, make clients happier with their service when they hire our law firm, and then two, hopefully generate those repeat clients for the next couple of years. [00:14:51] Speaker A: Are you baking in margin compression as you verticalize this and is that going to expand later or does it compress the margins long term, but it allows you to achieve a greater degree of scale? [00:15:04] Speaker B: I think all of this depends on how you look at the economics. And I think you should probably look at it multiple ways over the last six years. The amount of money that's gone into legal advertising has gone up considerably. So I think everyone in the industry is seeing rising cost per acquisitions. I think you'll continue to see that over time. I think the more money you try to deploy in legal advertising, the more an incremental case costs you. I always try to tell people your first 10 cases or your first 50 cases, your first hundred cases, they're always going to be the cheapest customers to acquire. And then that next 10 or next 50 or next hundred are going to be incrementally more expensive. And so that's kind of the nature of how legal advertising works. I think for us, we want to make sure that we're capturing margin both on the marketing side, but then also that the law firm side is profitable. Right. We have our state managing attorneys. Understand what are the economics of your local market. And we have an accounting mechanism that accounts for what's being spent on the marketing side. And so we want to know our litigation departments. I think a lot of firms that do high volume, low value litigation, sometimes you can be upside down within your litigation department because the amount you're spending on lawyer salaries and paralegals, it exceeds the amount in litigation fees. And we've tried to be really mindful. We want to be a trial firm, we want to take cases to trial. So that's something that's really important to me when we decided to do this, that we're going to be a trial firm. But I think you also have to look at that law firm segment and say, is there incremental net new profit that's coming on the law firm side? [00:16:49] Speaker A: Question about the TAM you're in. You said 88% of households now are seeing your face. How much market share can you get? [00:17:00] Speaker B: To clarify, my point is that we have attorneys license in 88% of the United States, right. Of the where the population resides. So I always look at the number of accidents and the number of people who need a lawyer in any given market. And then you think, okay, what percentage of it is people who would even consider a lawyer that they see on TV or a billboard, etc, and then within that, what's your market share relative to the other advertisers in the market [00:17:29] Speaker A: and where is your highest market penetration? What does that number look like inside of that realistic market? [00:17:35] Speaker B: We're capturing significant share in Philadelphia. That's where we started. That's our original market. Chicago is a really big market for us. New York City is a really big market for us. The Midwest and kind of down the east coast tend to be bigger we're based out of Arizona now, so we're trying to capture additional share in Arizona. It's obviously very tough out there. I would say the west coast and the Sun Belt, we have a lot of room to grow, whereas the east coast and the Midwest were a bit stronger. [00:18:06] Speaker A: It's interesting to me how some of the strongest, maybe most of the strongest brands have been born in really competitive areas. Right? You've got Dan Newland in Morgan's backyard. You and Pondla hockey and Morgan are all fighting it out in Philadelphia. Georgia, very saturated market. Is there a correlation there or is it just that's where there's a large market and so there's room for multiple brands to develop and build. [00:18:28] Speaker B: I love this question because I actually thought about this in 2018 before I started my firm, because if you do SEO, and who knows what's going to happen to SEO as people use ChatGPT and AI. But there was a lot of opportunity six, seven years ago to open up offices in tier two, tier three cities, places where there wasn't firms that had a great SEO presence and lots of reviews and all these things. And I remember this thought of, hey, should I really open Top Dog Law in Philadelphia? Because even then Philadelphia seemed really competitive. And it was like, should I go to Scranton or one a smaller town city in Pennsylvania? And I'm glad I opened in the big market because what I've realized is that the markets that have a lot of competition have a lot of competition for a reason. The firms there are doing well and, and they're serving the community. There's obviously a lot of people who need representation in those states. And the states where you don't see a lot of PI firms at conferences or the ad spend for legal advertising there is low. It's usually low for a reason. [00:19:38] Speaker A: I don't personally know anyone from the Dakotas who started PI firms, so I tend to agree with you. So moving into. Look, you said you intentionally built built a referral firm, not a firm to handle cases. First question, why buy a firm instead of starting to hire? You've hired so many people from all over. We'll get into that in a second. But really, the first announcement came as you had bought Keller Swan. Why was that your first move rather than starting to. To just hire trial attorneys? [00:20:06] Speaker B: I spent a lot of time thinking about the decision to do more litigation in house and whether now was the right time to. To do it. And once we decided, okay, we're gonna go build this thing out and hire trial lawyers all around America. The next decision was like, how do we do that quickly? [00:20:26] Speaker A: Right. [00:20:26] Speaker B: I've tried to do this whole Top Dog thing and people who say positive things about us, I think they recognize we're moving very fast. And I think the people who have criticized us are like, they're moving pretty fast. Right. I think about racing Top Dog. Right. I want to do it in a way that's like, good for consumers, good for our employees. We're not just going to go crazy to the point where it's detrimental to anyone. But at the same time, I'm a growth guy. I want to move fast, I want to grow the company fast. And so we looked at the ability to acquire a firm and thought, huh, this gives us eight strong lawyers quickly. It gives us presence in Florida, which still is a good venue despite the tort reform. And we didn't have any presence in Florida. The other thing I really liked about Keller Swan is they had had proven they had been able to go multi state. So they had an office in Georgia and an office in Tennessee. And so it gave us kind of this hub in the Southeast. And we've done a lot to bolster up the operation in Georgia and Tennessee. And then we've added some of the surrounding states down there, small, smaller states that not a lot of folks are in. I know Arkansas, you're from Arkansas or Mississippi. Right. Where we added attorneys there in house. And that gave us kind of our initial platform in the Southeast. And then this year we've gone and built some markets from scratch. And usually that was when we found a managing attorney that we were really confident in. Top Dog already had a brand in that market. We knew it was somewhere we wanted to be. And we've been able to kind of grow those organically. So when I think about our future, it might involve some additional law firm acquisitions, but it's also going to involve a de novo build where we say, hey, let's get the right trial lawyers and let's start increasing the number of cases we're taking internally. [00:22:18] Speaker A: Yeah. And knowing you, for me, like, you're very much a build don't buy guy. So I was surprised when you started off this new thing with a buy retro it for me a little bit. Do you have any regrets about. There is a challenge to do an integration, like tech integration, ops culture. Are there any parts of that where, you know now that you've done it once that you would say, okay, I can make better decisions moving forward and what does that look like? [00:22:41] Speaker B: Yeah, it's a great question. And we actually did. And I'm proud of our team for forcing ourselves to sit down for two hours and slow down and actually do a retro of the acquisition. I learned a lot of things, I think, first and foremost, like, I am doing this because I love the process, I love the learning. [00:22:57] Speaker A: What is this? [00:22:58] Speaker B: I am building a business and an entrepreneur, not for some magical destination that I get a pot at the end of the rainbow. Right. I'm doing this because I genuinely love to wake up and build every day and I like to learn new skills. And so doing an acquisition, I feel like, is an important skill for an entrepreneur. How do you do an acquisition? And the process of trying to learn it and do it correctly, you're never going to get it right on your first one. And so I look back at what we should have done differently and like, the main thing that stands out is the. The integration would have been a lot smoother had I met with the all the employees one on one earlier. There's this period where you're negotiating the deal and then diligence is happening and then you want the sellers to be happy and you're trying to interface through them. And I think in the future, I want to build immediate trust with the team because when you do an acquisition, there's a bunch of people, lawyers, paralegals, staff that did not sign up to work for you. And especially if you're a firm named Top Dog, they're like, what? I'm now a member of Top Dog Law. Who are they? And when we had our annual event in Scottsdale and this was a blessing that it was only one month because it was Christmas, I was able to actually get in front of everyone and we worked really hard on the presentation and be like, hey, this is the company you're joining. This is what we're about. This is our values. And it was like that immediately made the situation start to improve. It's all about trust. Trust and communication. To give you some color, though, it was like 150 things that you have to do, from integrating tech systems to changing letterhead to changing the cases in the docket system and making sure the addresses are all right. It is a heavy lift. It certainly made me respect people who are doing acquisitions at scale or companies that are, because it is. It's playing entrepreneurship on hard mode. It was tough. [00:24:57] Speaker A: Yeah. Which is fascinating. You did. You were a very large entity acquiring a smaller one. And now you've got Orion. They've just acquired eight top market firms out of Core's acquiring firms. And you know firsthand how much work is going into that. And then they're hiring in a management team into each, into each of those. Emma, to me, that's a really good sign. Right? You're just, you're looking across all industries for great talent. How has that process of bringing people out of legal into it, how has that shaped your understanding of the future of your law firm and of the industry by bringing in outsiders? [00:25:33] Speaker B: I think I saw something early on where John Morgan talked about his C suite being non lawyers. And you mentioned Pondla Hockey. They're another Philadelphia firm that I think has a C suite of non lawyers. And it just makes sense, right? I was a jd, mba. I think of myself more as a business person. And you want to get people who have specific expertise and you're like, okay, do they all need to be lawyers and have that specific expertise? That would be very hard. And so I've always thought about how can I combine trial lawyers with best in class people at their various functions? And I think what I've had to learn is there isn't a lot of non lawyer talent in there. Just historically, the industry has. Firms have been managed in a large part by lawyers who are figuring it out. And so I would say for anyone who's looking for executives out there, don't be afraid to take someone who hasn't ever learned PI and teach them. Take a year or two for them to pick it up. But if they're the right value fit and they bring the right specific expertise, I think the best law firms will have a combination of best in class marketing, best in class ops and technology and best in class trial lawyers. [00:26:55] Speaker A: Well, you, you blew over this. That you said one to two years to get up to speed. So you're really willing to make that investment because of the payoff of bringing. Of having that external expertise inside of the function? [00:27:08] Speaker B: Absolutely. And look, we've learned that just to argue the other side. We've learned the lesson the other way too. Is like PI law has very specific requirements. You need to understand notice requirements or how to do lean resolution. Resolution is different in one state than another state. And you also do need people who have fundamental personal injury expertise that can teach. They have to be the kind of person that's curious, that knows they're entering a new arena that is willing to say, hey, I don't know anything about this managing attorney. Can you meet with me once a week and teach me? [00:27:43] Speaker A: Yeah. Morgan pivoting to technology. Morgan yesterday announced they're committing a billion dollars over 10 years to AI and that they're licensing the platform. You're a builder, you're approaching that scale. What is your approach to investing in technology? What does that look like for you? Do you have an engineering team internally? Are you investing in AI? What's your thesis around the tech side of the platform? [00:28:09] Speaker B: I think where we are right now is a super interesting moment in technology. I think that most service businesses, legal included, are going to move to using their own tools. Like right now, we're seeing it with Claude, where we've set up a bunch of Claude skills. And one of the issues that we're encountering is some work is being done within your case management system and some work is being done with Claude skills. And so building a standardized workflow is really hard. And I don't think anyone, any company has built a product yet that is an operating system. And I think the right thing to do for services businesses at scale is probably to build some version of your own that integrates with whatever tooling is available. I think the second piece of that is while you want to leverage AI for efficiency, automation, delivering a better client experience, at the end of the day, nothing is going to replace humans talking to someone on the worst day of their life. After someone had a devastating accident, nobody wants to talk to a spot. So I think our business is different than other types of businesses where call center, for example, can be fully automated. [00:29:39] Speaker A: Yeah, it's more like you're running a 911 center than you are a credit card customer service line. Yes, you are in talking to people who've been hurt, who are in a lot of pain. There are hard limits on it. But I do think, like you said, there's a lot of areas where AI can be behind people who are then interfacing with other humans. [00:29:59] Speaker B: Yeah. I think a good way to talk about it is people have rebranded their companies as the AI company for this or they'll even put AI in the name. But I think the right way to think about it is you want to use AI on the back end. You just want to deliver a great service. And there's always going to be like, I want to talk to my lawyer. That's just a part of this business. And so I think the world right now is going through this, this change where people are still understanding how to use it. But at the end of the day, I think AI is just another way of saying we're going to use automation and efficiency to make people better at what they do. [00:30:40] Speaker A: Yeah. Once we get over the hump of being Obsessed with AI itself? [00:30:44] Speaker B: Absolutely. [00:30:44] Speaker A: It's. You're looking to capture that margin on AI. So clearly you believe, and you're making a bet on it, that AI will make the practice of law and the business of law more efficient while still being able to deliver high quality output services, etc. So one of the things that you said recently is that the relationships, even during while you're verticalizing your hiring up relationships are a core part of how you will continue to grow. You said earlier here that you referred out more cases this year than you ever have in the past. How much are you willing to share about what your targets are for in housing cases versus how much will be referrals in the future as you continue to do this 50% growth every year? [00:31:27] Speaker B: Yeah, I would be lying if I said I knew exactly how it was going to shake out. What has been interesting is we have essentially two types of referrals now. In the beginning, we have joint representation, co counsel, which we do on a significant percentage of our cases still and will continue to do, is that you're [00:31:47] Speaker A: signing them in your call center and then sending them out. [00:31:50] Speaker B: It depends on the relationship. But the second point though is that there's also what we call inflight referrals where there's cases that we've taken on. And for one reason or another, maybe we don't have the lawyer capacity at the moment to take this type of case. Maybe we're being more particular in this market until we get that capacity. But we're now partnering with firms to handle cases that we've handled ourselves for some amount of time, whether that's three months, six months, or a year. And now we're like, okay, we want to bring this partner firm into it, but if I had to guess, I would think that we are always going to be co counseling tens of thousands of cases per year because we just. The amount of capacity it's going to take to do as much volume as we're generating in house will be very challenging. And the good thing too is now we have the data on who our best partners are. So it's like we're going to obviously continue to work with the partners that have delivered phenomenal results to the clients and with us. But then also I think that the amount of cases that we do in house, as we continue to add more and more trial lawyers across America, we're going to open a dozen or so more offices. I don't know if that'll be next year or over the next two to three years, but we're going as fast as the organization can reasonably take. [00:33:12] Speaker A: One of the things that I'm really curious about is because we see data on law firms as well and now you have an internal benchmark and you're an interesting place too where you can now not just benchmark law firms against each other, but against your yourself. Right? So now you've got this, this new, hey, you have to beat this in order for this to make sense. On intake, it's a perennially poor part of law firm operations and it's the cutover from you having a case in Top Dog to a law firm taking it over. What, how much does the intake process and the lack of good intake process, has that been a part of your decision making? As you said, hey, we need to bring this in house. Have you largely solved for conversion and this is entirely on the litigation value creation side, or has this been part of your thinking? [00:33:58] Speaker B: I'm obsessed with the call center. I think people have now correctly wrapped their heads around over the last six or seven years. The number one leakage was in the call center. And so when we look at the firms that we co counsel with, it's like if you don't have a call center and you can't take a live transfer, it's almost a non starter because we just know how important it is to get that client exactly to who they need to speak to at that very moment. I think the piece that's actually not talked about as much now, which we are, are trying to do a better job of solving internally, is the fall off that can occur within the first 21 days that matches the data that we've seen with our co counsel firms. And that gets back to that customer experience education piece. It's not only we want to hook the client, make sure they're committed to working with us, but how can we over that first seven days or first 14 days, make sure that even if a family member comes out of their woodwork with their uncle's lawyer and you have to use them instead of us, they're like, no, I've been with Top Dog now for three days and look at all the work they've done on my case already. [00:35:05] Speaker A: How much of that ultimately do you think is controllable and how much of that is out of your control? [00:35:10] Speaker B: So this is what we're, we're trying to figure out. Some states like Georgia, people have talked about this where there's a big solicitation problem and sometimes there's not a whole heck of a lot you can do. So you, you can try to control for some of that through education. But then I think there's also a large percentage that just their car needs to be fixed, they're hurt, they can't go to work, their life has just been changed. And so in the first 72 hours to really show them you care. And I think this is a combination of human touch points and automation. You can really keep them with your firm and keep them satisfied. [00:35:47] Speaker A: You mentioned law firms have largely figured out call centers, which I might argue that point with you. A lot of them have not. You're looking at a very specific subset. Most big firms can handle an inbound call. Well, I think outbound is still a weak point where you get a lead in what is the chase sequence, how quickly are you calling out to that lead to actually get them and how many times you chase them and over what time frame? Do you believe that all of that's been solved? Or do you still see that as an area where law firms are lacking? Because I know a lot of your inbound comes through lead forms on social media, people submitting through Async. And so you're, you've had to develop the harder part, which is the outbound as well as the inbound call center. [00:36:27] Speaker B: I agree, you're probably right. We work with a lot of the bigger firms that have solved this problem. But I think if you take a little bit of a wider view and you look at like all mid, small, medium and large size PI firms, it's still an issue. I think the thing that we solved for which, candidly this came from a lot of the analytical chops of our non lawyers was that all the data, all the call data needs to be pushed into a data warehouse and then it needs to be sorted in the data warehouse and then it needs to be pushed into business intelligence tools where you can look at it. Right. So like you mentioned speed to contact. I wonder how many firms out there could pull up on their computer in three seconds and say, what was my speed to contact yesterday? My experience is not that many. But if you can do that, you will quickly solve speed to contact because you will have what happened to us Right where you look and you're like, why is it taking us 25 minutes to dial our leads from yesterday? And then you work on it and work on it and work on it and you get it within two minutes. Right. But it's if you can't see the problem, you're never gonna be able to solve it. [00:37:39] Speaker A: Absolutely. And I think to law firms that will pick up the phone 24 7. They don't understand that they're then waiting six hours to call out. And that's. They're running two different call centers. One that runs really well and one that runs absolutely horribly. And I've talked to people who've done secret shopping, they've consulted with law firms and that's a huge part of it is one, they don't know it's invisible. And two, like the, the overall numbers cover up this really glaring deficit in their operation. [00:38:05] Speaker B: You look at the likelihood of conversion, right. If half of your calls roughly are qualified signups on the inbound side and then 10% generally are qualified signups on the outbound side. Like of course they're going to be really focused on the inbound calls and they should be because they're usually more likely to qualify. But building that process so that you can have a channel like a meta where you might have a 10 or 12% sign up rate and you can operate that within your call center knowing in advance. Okay. By sign up rate is going to be 10 or 12%. I think a lot of law firms, at least in the past, they would be like, oh, it doesn't work. Or the leads are. It's like, no, it's not that. It's just that your expectations are off. [00:38:48] Speaker A: Yeah. And you have to run it with a different set of numbers inclusive of what the cost per lead is and the amount of time you're spending getting a lead disqualified. Last few questions around. Where do you see vertical integration topping out here? I talked with Dan Morgan a couple months ago and they have lawyers in 50 states. Over a thousand. Dan's outbound referrals are running $90 million on track this year. And that is their exhaust. Right. But he says that it's the most profitable part of their entire business because that's there's no opex associated with it. Where do you see this going is what's your vision for what stays vertically integrated, what stays on principle co counseled out? Or maybe you don't know. But what's your gut telling you right now? [00:39:32] Speaker B: My gut says as we continue to hire more trial lawyers around America, it'll probably be something like 70 to 80% in house, 20% push to our co counsel firms. Co counsel firms with areas of specific expertise. There are always going to be cases for attorneys that specialize in nursing home or specialize in cruise ship accidents or specialize in med. Right. Those are much harder for a big firm that does advertising to internalize. Whereas something like auto, you may say, okay, we're going to handle a greater percentage of the auto accident cases in house. One lawyer might look at liability here and be like, oh, I don't know, this would be tough. We'd have to litigate it. I know this defendant. It would take three years. And other firms, I just had a case against that defendant last week and I know, I know them. And it went really well, right? And so there's that element. The point I'm trying to make is whether it's slip and fall or different auto accidents, and especially the stuff that's very specialized, you're always going to want to run a big co counsel business on those cases. [00:40:41] Speaker A: So you really have opposite sides that you're looking at. Which is also, that's part of the beauty of co counsel, right? Is people use it for different things. Other people use it the way you said, which is, hey, this might not be a fit for us. Doesn't mean there's not value for somebody else. I do think it's interesting how there are different specialization options for using co counsel on cases. You might say, hey, our specialty is we're just going to crush it on auto and then outsource the specialty stuff other people have. Hey, we're going to maximize our average fee. And so we're going to be sending a lot of the smaller pieces out to other law firms to work. [00:41:16] Speaker B: Makes a ton of sense. A lot of it depends on what is your core competency as a firm. If you've got spent time building a medical malpractice operation and you're like, hey, we love med mal. We know how to look at a quick med mal case and decide right away do we want this case or not, right? But as we think about, hey, we're the new guy on the block in terms of hiring trial lawyers in a specific state, we might not want to start with medical malpractice. [00:41:39] Speaker A: And I think the best firms are the ones who recognize that a case getting picked up on a third, fourth, fifth look doesn't mean that, like you said, they miss something per se, but that the more eyes you get on a case, the better chance you have. Especially on cases where maybe it's contested liability or there's weird things but the damages are high. Those are the cases where you really want to shop it around because there's risk adjusted upside that has to be captured by the right person. [00:42:05] Speaker B: We work with this nonprofit in Philly. We've done it five years in a row. We raise six figures for them every year. It's youth gun violence prevention in Philly. The founder is this amazing guy. They had this terrible thing happen where they were on a cruise ship and long story short, I didn't realize that because it happened at sea. They had said it was in Florida, but it really was out, out in the water, which made it a different set of laws and we couldn't take it. And you just think about what would I want to do? If it's a personal friend or my mom or a family member, I would want that firm to do their best to help get me to the right person. And that's what I've always viewed Top dog co counsel in is like we are perfectly aligned from our financial incentives. Like we make more money when we get them to the lawyer. That maximizes the value of the case for the client and our portion comes out of the lawyer's portion. So it's a total win win scenario for all parties. [00:42:57] Speaker A: 100% agree. So back to the original question that I posed. Did referral fail the best referral firm in the country? What's your verdict? [00:43:08] Speaker B: My verdict is no. I think that we wanted to come full circle and set out to do the original vision in 2019. And so I write annual letters and I like concluded this year's annual letter being like seven years later and we're back to where it started. [00:43:26] Speaker A: I love it. James, thank you so much. This has been fascinating. I appreciate your transparency and everything you're sharing. You're really building in public in a lot of ways and being willing to do that. Like you said, it benefits people who are looking for better representation, better outcomes on their claims and getting justice. And so I really appreciate it. [00:43:44] Speaker B: Thanks for having me.