Chris Dreyer:
To make sure that we got the most out of such a legendary guest, my team and I actually created two completely different interview preps for Morris Bart, the godfather of PI Marketing.
Morris Bart:
I'm looking forward to speaking at the conference in October in Arizona. That's going to be fabulous.
Chris Dreyer:
However, all that got thrown out of the window because Morris had his own plan.
Morris Bart:
I know most if not all of the successful lawyers in America that are doing this marketing and running personal injury law firms, and I have three traits that they have and I have that I think everybody should have to be successful.
Chris Dreyer:
So think of today's episode as a takeover from Morris Bart. I pop in now and then, but this interview is the Morris Bart show today.
Morris Bart:
And so what I've come up with is three personal traits you must have to be successful. And so, kick back and think about yourself now, and see if you have these three traits, because if you don't have all three of them, it's going to be more difficult to be successful.
Chris Dreyer:
This is Personal Injury Mastermind. I'm Chris Dreyer, founder and CEO of Rankings.io, the elite performance marketing agency for personal injury law firms. Today's episode is all about Morris Bart talking about the three traits that you need to be successful in personal injury. If you want to hear the rest of what Morris has to say, then you'll need to join us at PIMCON in Scottsdale, Arizona from October 4th through 6th. Tickets are available at PIMCON.org. If you like today's podcast, then you'll love seeing Morris Bart at the rest of our speakers in person. Let's get into it and hand this back over to Morris.
Morris Bart:
Trait number one. You have to have a strong work ethic. There's no easy way around it. There's no such thing as a four-hour work week. You're not working offshore where it's one week on and one week off. You have to show up. You have to be there every single day. When you think about success in other fields and other endeavors, whether it's a talented musician, a top surgeon, a top chef, they have worked their off. They have devoted their whole life to their profession in order to be successful and to be a successful trial lawyer or a marketer or a combination of both of them. It ain't going to come easy. You got to work hard. You're in a hyper-competitive profession.
I don't think there's any business in America that's more competitive than being a personal injury lawyer. Because not only do you have those that call themselves personal injury lawyers, you have the real estate lawyer in your town that would gladly accept a personal injury case and refer to his friend for a percent of the fee, which of course is legal. You got to do some work on the case, but it's legal and ethical.
So your competition is really every single lawyer in America. Not to mention, now you have these quasi lawyers entering the space, whether it's the private equity guys, where it's paralegals that are in certain states being given more and more authority to handle cases and negotiate cases, massive competition. You're not going to rise above that competition unless you bring your A game every single day and you show up and you're willing to work and you're willing to work harder than everybody else if you want success. And everybody I know, starting with John Morgan, who I'm friendly with, guy worked his ass off. I mean, sure. People look at him now and go, "Wow, he's at his house in Hawaii."
But if you talk to John Morgan, and I knew him way back when, he worked harder than anybody else. He had the fire in the belly, he wanted to make it. And no different with me. I mean, we and a lot of lawyers in my generation, we started with nothing. We didn't know if advertising would work, but we were willing to take the risk. We were willing to work harder than everybody else. When I first started advertising, a lawyer in New Orleans I really respected, told me. He said, "You better hope this advertising stuff works because if it doesn't, you will never get a job in New Orleans. You'll have to move to another city." So that's where I started from. If I didn't make it work, then my name was mud. No firm in New Orleans would hire me. I'd be blackballed. I would've spent all my money trying this crazy thing called advertising and I would've had to move to another city. I actually looked at what other cities I would move to. That's how seriously I took it.
But fortunately I jumped on the train. I was a pioneer. I went on television in January of 1980. So one of the first ones in America to advertise personal injury on television. It had to work. It had to work. And so I worked seven days a week for many, many years to build up a successful firm. My story is not unique. That's what it takes even more so today in the face of massive competition. So quality number one, trait number one, evaluate yourself. Do you have a strong work ethic?
Chris Dreyer:
It's so true. I get angry if there's someone at the building before me and after me. First in, first out every day. And of the firms that I look at across the space, the biggest firms, they have a strong work ethic. I don't care who it is. Like you said, Steve Mear, amazing work ethic. All of them. They're showing up, they're rolling up the sleeves. And it's funny we look at things differently on the weekends. They're still taking calls. They're coming in the office when it's necessary. They're thinking about laying in bed at night, thinking about how to grow the business when they should be getting some shut-eye. And I think that's what it takes.
Morris Bart:
Yeah. And I'm sure you relate and that you have had to do the same thing yourself to build up your name, your reputation, your importance in the legal space.
Chris Dreyer:
Absolutely.
Morris Bart:
Because there's a lot of people doing podcasts and you've reached the pinnacle of the heap and it doesn't come easy. So yeah, it's important for everyone to know that. And it cuts across. I'll give you another quick example, then I'll move on. My next door neighbor is Gail Benson, who is one of the richest women in America. She owns the New Orleans Saints and the New Orleans Pelicans. There's only two people in America that own a NFL franchise and an NBA franchise. She's one of them.
And I think it was Forbes Magazine said she's the most powerful woman in sports and America. She owns 40 different businesses. Those are just two of the businesses she owns. And I've gotten to know Gail and be friendly with her and I'm a major sponsor of the Pelicans. She gets up every morning seven days a week at 4:30 AM. She's in her home gym by 5:00 AM and from 5:00 to 6:00 AM while she's working out, she often does phone calls. And her executives, top executives at the Saints and Pelicans know at 5:00 AM, I better be awake and I better be on the phone because if she calls me, I got to pick up the phone and I got to answer it. And then by 7:30 AM, she's showing up at the Saints' headquarters ready to work. And so everybody else better be there. That's work ethic.
This is someone who is a multi-billionaire. And yes, she's got the yacht and the private jet and everything else, but she gets up at 4:30 AM so that she can work out and put in a full day's work. Just an example of someone with vast success that does what I'm talking about.
Trait number two, you got to love being a lawyer. You can't fake it. You chose this profession. You went to law school. Nobody forced you to go to law school and become a lawyer. You got to love doing it. One thing that always aggravates me and still occasionally comes up is we have a lot of lawyers in the firm. I think now we're around 90 lawyers that work for me, which makes me one of the largest in America. But several of the young lawyers, I'll tell them, look, on your social media accounts, you need to put in there you're a lawyer that you're handling injury cases that, hey friends of mine that are following me on social media, if you get in a car wreck, if you get injured on the job, if any of you are in your favorite sushi restaurant and slip and fall somewhere, give me a call. This is what I do.
And they get a little squeamish. They're like, "Oh no, that's my personal space. That's what I use just for friends and happy talk. I don't want to talk about being a lawyer." And I said, "You need to do that. If you were a chef, your profession and your personal space would be fully integrated with each other. You would be showing pictures of special dishes you made. Why isn't that the same way with law? Why is there some aversion young lawyers have that way? Work is work and my personal space and my personal space is like, no, this is your life and you have chosen to be a lawyer. The two should be integrated." I just think that's very important. If you don't love being a lawyer, you can't be successful. And again, it's a very important personal trait. It goes back to every single lawyer I know.
I don't know a successful lawyer in America that isn't proud of being a lawyer, isn't proud of his success or her success, isn't keeping up with developments in the law, changes in the law. I don't see it. Now, that puts a big question mark on this new trend of private equity moving into the legal space. These guys are wizards when it comes to numbers, but they don't know about running a law firm. And in a hyper-competitive profession, how can someone who is a very astute business person run a law firm where they're not even a lawyer or don't know the law? Big question mark, it remains to be seen. You know what my view is? My view would be very cynical about their success after they spend millions to buy lawyers out.
My belief and every lawyer in America I've seen that's successful, is just into the law, that their legal identity is the same as their personal identity. I think you have to have it.
Chris Dreyer:
Immediately when I was thinking of you, I was thinking of, and this is not to be pessimist or negative, I was thinking about the firms that I know that are struggling that don't have the love. I went the opposite way. And then I immediately was thinking about, well, how could this individual that at one time did love the law and was successful and now isn't as successful? How could I bring back that passion back to the profession? I do agree with you on the MSO, the misaligned incentives and everything's a number. When everything's a customer and a widget and not a client, it changes. It's just about numbers. It loses the passion, the feeling. So I agree a thousand percent.
Morris Bart:
Let me give you another issue that every business, every firm needs a leader, a role model. You set the stage. So if you are a sole practitioner or maybe one lawyer in your firm, yeah then you can thumb your nose at the law and say, "I don't give a shit about it." And it doesn't matter because you're really not a role model to anybody. But if you have several lawyers in your firm, I have 90 lawyers in my firm. I can't ask them to bust their ass coming in early, leaving late, working hard to negotiate with the insurance companies to get top dollar as opposed to just capitulating and take 50 cents on the dollar.
I can't expect them to stay up all night preparing for a trial the next day and put their soul into it if I don't give a shit about the law. It just doesn't make sense. They're going to look to me as the role model. And if they see me as the leader of the firm and I thrive on the law and I'm proud of being a lawyer and proud of my profession and when they talk to me about developments and changes in the law, I'm interested, I'm engaged when the head of my mass tort section talks to me about a new mass tort.
I'm interested in what's going on and I want to hear what about our clients? What kind of clients are we getting? What are they seeing? What are they experiencing? And still occasionally meeting with them. In my early days before everything went digital, I used to have a rule that every file in the office, it just shows how far back we're going. Every file in the office on the outside cover of that file was a little cellophane slot and we would take a Polaroid picture of our client and put it on the outside of that file.
So when someone looked at a file or someone brought a file to me, the first thing I would see is the picture of a person because that file represents that person and I'd look at the person and then I'd open the file. We're in the people business, we deal with people. So it's very important that you love what you do. If you love what you do, you will be more successful. You cannot like it and achieve some level of a success but not achieve a high level of success. And I don't see how it's possible to motivate people that work for you if you don't care about what you do, it's inconsistent to me. So that's trait number two. You got to love what you do and you can't fake it.
Trait number three, you've got to be a people person. You've got to be a people person. You got to like dealing with people from all walks of life. And the staff you have, you've got to like dealing with them. And if you're going to put yourself out there, if you're going to put yourself on social media, on television, on billboards, et cetera, people will see you and know you and approach you. You're going to give up a large percent of your privacy. You've got to be willing to do that. You've got to enjoy. I can't go anywhere in... Actually, I'm in three states, Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, but especially in New Orleans, which is where I live, I can't go anywhere without people stopping me, taking pictures, asking for my autograph, which is really a privilege. But of course I get into all the restaurants. I get into parking lots when they're full. I get to restaurants when they're full. So it's got plenty of upside too, but I enjoy the interaction.
I enjoy talking to people, even the ones that jokingly harass me, like they'll see me and they grab their neck, "Oh God, my neck hurts. My neck hurts. Can you do something for me?" And I jive with them. I like that. It's fun to do. But I'm a people person. You got to love people. If you don't love people from all walks of life and statistics show that we pull primarily from the middle to lower socioeconomic strata. We pull working class minorities That's who traditionally come in to see a lawyer that advertises. So you have to like people from all walks of life. On the one hand, you have to be able to talk in an easily understandable way to your clients, many who have never seen a lawyer before and you have to be able to talk to them and instill confidence in them that you are the person to handle their case.
Then you have to flip it around and be able to talk on a professional level with attorneys, doctors, insurance adjusters. So you need those skills, you need good communication skills, but it all stems from you got to be a people person, you got to love people. And if you're going to put yourself out there in a public way, you've got to be a very social person. If you're not, if you're geared more towards reading and studying and privately being in your office, you're not going to achieve much success. You got to be out in the community if you're going to put yourself out there.
Chris Dreyer:
There's so much truth to this. I think a lot of people with AI and technology are trying to get away from the people component, but at least from what I've seen, it's a tool to enhance capabilities. Still, we're in professional services and it's labor and people do the work and it's who you deal with in the community and the best cases come from relationships for referrals and all of those things. I think about even the younger attorneys listening, it's like they don't have hundreds of thousands of dollars to deploy and broadcast or radio or Facebook ads. Well, you can get out in the community and shake hands and be a human and be likable and grow a business that way. I think there's so much truth to that. On the opposite side, it's the billion dollar machine on State Farm Geico has tried to convince the public that personal injury attorneys are bad.
I think that anything that you can do to humanize yourself in the community, because unless they meet someone, there's this connotation that lawyers are bad. And I think, "Oh, I met Morris. I took a picture with him. He's a great guy. I shook his hand. He's doing stuff for the community. He's doing stuff for charity and he's got a sense of humor and he's just like me." And I think when you do that, it just goes so much longer because ultimately it's all about trust if they're going to choose you versus someone else.
Okay. I'm going to pop in here really quick just to quickly recap the three traits that Morris is talking about. You have to be willing to outwork the competition. You have to genuinely love being a lawyer and you have to be a true people person. If you don't have all three of these, scaling is going to be a much more difficult battle. But when you have them working in tandem, it opens up incredible opportunities to stand out from the noise, which perfectly tees up how Morris translates that authentic community connection into massive organic earned media.
Morris Bart:
And actually that's a fun part of the job. If you really are a people person and you're not lying to yourself, because all these traits, I mean, look, everybody's going to say they're a people person, but this is self-evaluation time. You have to ask yourself, "Am I really that way?" If you are, then this is a joy. It's a joy to get out there and be actively involved in your, whatever your church, your temple, different organizations. It's kind of the old-fashioned sweat equity of getting out there and shaking hands and getting involved.
And there's lots of things you can do that get you publicity. If not, you generate your own publicity, you do it and you take pictures or videos of yourself and you post it on your social media. It's pretty cheap to boost posts and then you start getting more and more followers. If you don't, you have to evaluate the content you're doing. A lawyer sitting there and just saying, "Now, if you get hurt in a car wreck, here's the five steps you need to follow." That is so boring and so pedestrian. I can't imagine anybody would be interested in listening to that or following that.
But if you put yourself on in an engaging way, it's walking down the street talking to someone, maybe you sponsor an event. You could be a sponsor event for $500 or $1,000 and you go there and you're shooting videos of yourself, shaking hands, talking to people, whatever you do, there's limitless examples. It's only limited by your imagination and you do that and then you start posting that on social media all of a sudden it becomes a little more engaging. They're going, "Yeah, I remember seeing that guy at the fundraiser for the zoo and next time I see him, I want to get him to shoot a picture with me." And you build that way.
Now, social media in and of itself doesn't mean it's going to generate cases, but it's just a matter of if you have a limited budget, like if you have $100,000 to spend and you're in a city where you got advertisers spending millions of dollars, then you're going to have to do something to step it up. You can't say, "Okay, well, Joe attorney has a hundred billboards in my city, but that doesn't bother me. I'm going to put up five billboards." No one cares about that. You're wasting your money.
Chris Dreyer:
I just had the pleasure to speak to Richard Harris over in Nevada and he made a statement about advertising being like PI advertising generally being white noise and you have to do stuff to stand out, but I was so enthralled by the stories that he tells about the history of Nevada and he just kind of drew me in and it wasn't about the law. It was about Lake Tahoe and this location and that location, I think it's called Spirit of Nevada. I think he's got something on it, but like all of that humanizes what we do and another thing that came to mind based upon what you said, Morris, is there's like these three categories, at least they're taught in marketing. It's like you've got owned media, paid media and earned media.
And I think so many PI attorneys do the owned and paid. They'll put up the billboard, they'll do this. But those that really think about the earned, people are going to talk about it, you're going to stand out and be different, and I think it just goes so far. You can't quantify it. And it's just something I've been thinking about lately when it comes to advertising in this space.
Morris Bart:
Well, it's interesting you mentioned Richard Harris. I'm friendly with him and it's a perfect example of the three traits I just told you. I mean, a guy has a great work ethic, loves being a lawyer and is a very social people person. Now, what you just said that he talks about Lake Tahoe, he talks about Nevada because he's truly a son of Las Vegas, just like I'm a son of New Orleans. We're not faking it. It's not like he doesn't care about Las Vegas, but he does it because it has marketing value and same with me. I love New Orleans. And so as you love a place where you live and you do things, then earned media comes about. And it's the same with Richard Harris. I mean, he does so much in Las Vegas, very philanthropic, just like I'm very philanthropic in New Orleans.
And when you do that, not with the direct aim, I'm going to do this only to get media. You do it because you love the community, you love people, and then it gets picked up. I mean, it just naturally evolves. I'll give you a quick story. So there was this young mom outside of Baton Rouge. She lived in Prairieville and she had a two-year old son that would go wild every time he saw my TV commercials. And so she decided I'm going to throw him a Morris Bart themed birthday party and she contacts us and we send her all sorts of swag and this is how things evolve. So she does the party. She has a friend, works at the newspaper. The friend thought, "Oh, that's a very fun story." She picks it up. It was like a full page story in the newspaper.
The next thing you know, I get a call for the producer of the Jimmy Kimmel Show and he says, "We would like to have you on, you and this boy. And we want to set it up where you go to their house and surprise that boy live on television." And I said, "Sure, I'd love to do it." It's been like a lifelong dream to be on the Jimmy Kimmel Show.
So I bought the kid a bicycle and I bought him a lawyer type suit, dark suit with a white shirt and a red tie. Jimmy Kimmel Show had sent a laptop computer with a live feed to his show. And so he was doing a live interview on his show with the mom and her two-year-old son. And on cue, I opened the door and walked into the house while it was being recorded and live on television, and the kid went nuts and it was just a very cool episode. It was a sensation. It went worldwide. I mean, the story just blew up like I was tracking it moving across the world from like America to London over to Italy until eventually a friend of mine in Australia called me up and said, "I opened the paper this morning mate and there you are right in my newspaper."
Then I got calls from lawyer friends of mine saying, "That was a great idea. How do I do it?" And I'm like, "No, you can't do it. You can't do it." You can't plan earned media. It's just organic. It just grows like that. You can't plan to do something like that. I could never plan something like that. It happened once. It will never happen again.
So coming back to what we were talking about, that's earned media. If you're doing it with the intent of, hey, I'm going to get free advertising out of this, it will never work. They're too shrewd. The newspaper, the television, all of these media companies, they're too shrewd. They know if a lawyer is doing something for publicity. But if you do it occasionally, you get lucky and it gets picked up and it doesn't matter if it gets picked up or not because you enjoy doing it.
Chris Dreyer:
Morris has built an incredible brand deeply tied to his love for New Orleans, but when it's time to grow your total addressable market and expand across state lines, how do you recreate that magic? For example, if you're a diehard St. Louis Cardinal fan, how do you expand in a market full of Cubs fans without losing that authentic community connection? I asked Morris how he translate his local passion into brand new markets and what goes into these expansive decisions.
Morris Bart:
So you don't have to do the same thing in every market. First of all, you start with your foundation. Your foundation is you're appealing to the middle to lower socioeconomic strata and the basics of that do not change. As you establish yourself in a market, you can add onto that by doing sports sponsorships and other things. I have good friends with Brown & Crouppen. And if you look at that, Terry Crouppen is a very charismatic guy on TV. He's just got a persona that really comes across well. And his son, Andy, is also really good on TV. All of them, Ed Herman, I know all those guys. So they start with that. They have a good television persona. They have worked their off to build up the firm that they have now and that's your foundation.
Now, we're well established in St. Louis, let's say. Everybody knows of the firm. How are we going to embellish it? How are we going to add onto it? Okay, let's do sports sponsorships, add onto it. Just because we do a sports sponsorship in St. Louis, that doesn't mean we will now run that in another market. That will be localized just to St. Louis. And then we would maybe when we establish ourselves in other markets, we do a sports sponsorship there. As much as I do in New Orleans, I really haven't done sports sponsorships in other markets with one exception. And that was in Birmingham I did the University of Alabama, which Alabama is split in half. You have Auburn fans and Alabama fans. So if you align with one of them, you're going to off the other half of the state.
But I had the opportunity to align with Alabama with the football team as a newcomer in the market. So it made good sense in that market to do a sports sponsorship. I've since moved away from that. It just depends. You got to evolve and it all comes back to money. How much money do you have? I mean, look, if you're not well established in a market, your better play is to spend every dollar you have on marketing your firm. And when you get established and hopefully successful, then you evolve to sports sponsorships. But if you have a bigger bucket of money, you can go into a market and spend an appropriate amount on advertising and then embellish it right in the beginning with the sports sponsorship. It's just you're limited by the size of the bucket you have.
Chris Dreyer:
Last we talked, you still liked broadcast television. We talked a little bit about your marketing. I guess the one emerging question I'm getting now more is not... And I would put this in a whole different category. I would really like your opinion on if you've done more with YouTube, YouTube TV, YouTube ads. From what I just saw recently, they just surpassed Netflix in terms of viewership and I guess for audience loves their marketing tactics and who better than to ask you just your thoughts on maybe YouTube for the broadcast television advertisers.
Morris Bart:
Sure. I'm observing it is the best way to say. I'm not a fan of it. I'm not doing it myself. I still prefer traditional media, television, radio, billboards, but you've got to cover all the bases. I have a robust social media presence. We do the paid Google organic. I mean, we cover all the bases. I have a digital marketing department, I have traditional marketing department. I like covering all the bases. I know that the streaming TV is really emerging. A lot of people looking at it, embracing it. I haven't heard of much success though, to be honest.
Chris Dreyer:
Hard to beat those less than a dollar CPMs or less than $2 CPMs on TV or radio.
Morris Bart:
Yeah, I know. It is enticing. We used to call it a dollar a holler. I just haven't seen it. I mean, I haven't heard from any of my friends that they've had success using streaming and it's kind of a collective venture with that. If I start hearing from friends of mine, yeah, I've been on Peacock or YouTube and now we're getting a good response, then I would embrace it. I have done it, tested it a few times. In one of my outer markets where I've been there for a while, but it's just kind of flat. We're in 17 different markets. So it allows me the opportunity to experiment with certain things outside of my major markets.
And so I'll have a market, let's say that's been flat. For six months, it's the same. I can spend more on TV. I can spend less on TV. I can put up more billboards, less billboards. It's flat. I can't move the needle. Two or three times I've gone into those markets then with streaming and done like a two or three month test, did not move the needle. So it's like, what's the point? But it might change. It might change as more and more people embrace streaming, particularly people in the socioeconomic strata that we're appealing to. If more and more people embrace that, which I know on some of the streaming services they do, but I'm just not hearing about a lot of success.
Chris Dreyer:
I'm so excited again to have you speak in October. And for our audience listening that wants to connect with you, has questions about the pod or in advance of that, what's the best way to get in touch, Morris?
Morris Bart:
Well, they can email me. I don't mind sharing my email address. It's hard for me to get to everybody. I usually can get to it in two or three days. But yeah, my email is Morrisbart@morrisbart.com, a very easy email, and that comes to me. But yeah, they can email me. Just make it quick in an email. Don't ask me to write some sort of thesis about what's going on.
Chris Dreyer:
Love it. Love it. Hey, Morris, this has been such a pleasure. Thanks so much for coming on the show.
Morris Bart:
Thanks, Chris. Yeah, and I'm looking forward to October.
Chris Dreyer:
What an absolute masterclass. When Morris Bart speaks, you take notes. He nailed the three core elements of success, a relentless work ethic, a genuine passion for the law, and the true connection with your community. If you loved hearing this from Morris today, you absolutely have to be in the room with him this October. He's headlining PIMCON 2026 in Scottsdale, Arizona, and we're going all out. It's going to be an incredible room full of personal injury firm owners who want to scale, share strategies, and take things to the next level. You do not want to miss out on the networking and the insights from the best in the game. Head on over to PIMCON.org right now to secure your tickets before they sell out.
I'm Chris Dreyer and this has been Personal Injury Mastermind. Catch you next time.
