David Brauns, Brauns Law – Goal Setting, Data & Dashboards, Create, Don’t Compete
David Brauns is the founding partner of Brauns Law, a Georgia law firm that focuses on personal injury cases, such as car accidents, trucking accidents, and wrongful death cases. David began his legal career as an insurance defense attorney, which gave him inside knowledge into how insurance companies evaluate and process claims.
However, David’s professional life didn’t start there. Before he was an attorney, David was actually a software engineer. Today, he puts those skills to good use in the legal field, implementing innovative technology to better and more efficiently run his firm.
David received his law degree from the Georgia State University College of Law. He is the recipient of many awards and is recognized as both a Super Lawyer and a Top 100 Trial Lawyer.
What’s in This Episode:
- Who is David Brauns
- What motivated David to quit software development and go to law school at the age of 31
- The early days of David’s firm, Brauns Law
- The importance of weekly goal setting when growing a firm
- The hiring pitfall that David had to learn from early on
- How to delegate while still maintaining a sense of control
- The books that have influenced David’s success
- David talks about the high-value actions that drive the most impact at Brauns Law
- David’s advice for fellow lawyers: Create, don’t compete
This transcript was created using an automated transcription service and may contain errors.
Episode 22:
Prologue
Welcome to The Rankings Podcast where we feature top founders, entrepreneurs and elite personal injury attorneys and share their inspiring stories. Now let’s get started with the show.
Chris Dreyer
Chris Dreyer here, President and Founder of Rankings.io where we help elite personal injury attorneys dominate first page rankings. You’re listening to The Rankings Podcast where I feature innovative business owners and of course, elite personal injury attorneys. I’m excited to have David Brauns on the show today. David is the Founding Partner of Brauns Law, a personal injury law firm with offices in Gwinnett and Fulton County, Georgia. He began his legal career as an insurance defense attorney, a role that taught him how insurance companies evaluate and process claims. However, David did not start his professional life as an attorney but rather as a software engineer. Today he puts those skills to good use in the legal field, implementing innovative technology to better and more efficiently run his firm. He is the recipient of many awards and accomplishments, including being named both a Super Lawyer and Top 100 Trial Lawyer. David, welcome to the show.
David Brauns
Hey, Chris, thanks for having me aboard. Glad to be here. I’m super excited.
Chris Dreyer
Yeah, I’m excited too. So let’s kick things off. So how did you get started with the firm? Where did the idea come from?
David Brauns
Yeah, um, so you know, like you said, I didn’t start in law school. I didn’t go to law school till 31. I had this whole prior career and I just, quite frankly, wanted a midlife change. I was just tired of sit in front of a monitor all day, even though I still do the same thing here, just looking at different stuff. So I actually went to law school for real estate, of all things. I was making a ton of money in tax, I was starting to invest in real estate. And I was thinking, hey, if I can do these deals and learn the playmakers, I could get into real estate as a second business. But when I got into law school, I just realized how boring lost real estate is. And there’s just copying and pasting content. tracks all day. So I started kind of just interviewing other attorneys to come out to lunch. What do you like? What don’t you like? And I just set it on personal injury. I also had my family up in Baltimore, Maryland, my uncle side, my mom’s side, we’re all personal injury lawyer. So I was around it never quite understood it, but just kind of saw them talking to success, they have stories they had, and things like that. So it was kind of a career change, followed by honing in on what area of law I wanted to practice.
Chris Dreyer
That’s awesome. And that’s such a different, you know, journey. Typically, it’s just go to college, you go right into law school. And so you’ve got this rounded experience of being a business owner, you know, being in real estate, you know, there’s all types of complexities there. And it’s very saturated and competitive, just like law. So you know, what were those early days of your of your firm and, like, well, what was it like?
David Brauns
So my firm, when I opened my firm, I did insurance defense, I was in a couple large firms, the first firm had like over 80 lawyers. three floors and a big building down in downtown Atlanta. Then I went to a smaller firm. So when I left that to start my own shop, it was literally startup mode. I’m now sitting in a spare bedroom with an Ikea table, a laptop and a cell phone. And that was it. I ran everything that way. If I had any clients, I put on a suit and go to Starbucks, and then I kind of scaled up from there to use virtual space, but it was literally, you know, tech startup, I have a spare bedroom. That’s kind of beauty professional services, you don’t need inventory, you don’t need spaces, all that kind of build out. It’s just literally a phone and the computer.
Chris Dreyer
Yeah, so what were those, you know, the big turning points at the beginning you’re hustling you’re, you know, you’re going all in you get a lead, you’re going all in you’re going to their door to get that contract to talk to them. What was that transition, the turning point where you get started, you know, investing a ton and building out your marketing team and grow your firm.
David Brauns
Yeah, I mean, it was very kind of guerilla marketing beginning. And I’ll be honest with you, there was no big pivot, there was no, I’ve never had a big multi million dollar case like some of my friends, it just allows them to kind of hit that next gear and drop stupid money into something for me, it was just a very slow, slow grind. It was really just about focus. And this is one of the tricks I learned. Just kind of watching myself work is, for me, what works best is weekly goals. When I first started, I had monthly goals. But I found that I wasn’t looking at them enough. I was only looking at them at the beginning of the month and the end of the month. And I forget about them for those two, three weeks in between. So it was really about focusing on weekly goals. And it was essentially Hey, the first week, the first year, I only get two cases a week. How hard is that can’t be that hard. You know, go out, call the chiropractors doctors do what I had to do. And I hit that goal. And so the next year, I was like, okay, three a week. And then the following year was four weeks and then it was five weeks. And so just by telling myself Hey, I can get one more case a week. That’s not hard. It’s just effort and activity. And that’s what I did. So there was really no, it was a very slow steady burn. that’s gotten me to where I am. And I’m in year seven now. So we’ve taken it from this, just the bedroom start up to here. But again, there was no huge case blew it off, no war chest, it was literally starting with, you know, $13,000 on a credit card, my back against the wall, I had no choice but to go out there and be successful and make it work.
Chris Dreyer
Let’s talk a little bit about those goals. So so were those like leading indicator type goals that helped? Were they predictive, or were they just stuck to keep you accountable and hungry? What were a little bit about?
David Brauns
Love goals, love goals. So the two big ones I focused on early on were number of cases, which is kind of top of the funnel, bringing it in. And then the bottom of the funnel was a revenue goal. And so basically, in personal injury, if you think about it, there’s two ways for lawyers to make more money. It’s more cases or make each case more people So we focus on that if we get the cases in the top of the funnel, we watch our average case fee. And you know, when we first started, I don’t mind sharing this with people. But when we first started the average case, it was about two grand. We’ve developed through the way we manage our cases, up to about 10 grand. And that was focusing that goal of making each case worth more by working it. So those were kind of the revenue goals to build it. The other goals I had were talking to clients, which I’m sure we’ll talk about the client service is huge in my firm. And so one of the things we would do is we set this all up in our case management system, but I run reports to make sure I was talking to clients and still this day, at least once every three weeks. And so I track you know, number of clients that I’ve called the number that I’m late on, what’s that percentage am I shooting at 90% or higher, just like in you know, elementary school, I want to keep a average But you know, internally that’s initially were the goals. Now that I’ve got staff, we’ve got a ton of goals on we measure everything from their late phone calls to the number of pieces of mail, they process a day to their total talk time on the phone. And again, the more we kind of focus on the work, and be self aware, it just kind of drives itself. I mean, you are what you think and what you focus on. And so I can’t stress enough how I didn’t really appreciate goals until I was in my own business. But now it’s everything I’ll give you. This is kind of my fun hack. So our IT group, we were set up forgot to change our computer login every 30 days just for security reasons. And so my password is always a goal. And so it forces me to type in that goal every time I want to unlock my computer. So like one was, you know, I want to weigh 220 pounds want to lose weight. Obviously I’m not there yet, but that was you know, for 130 day increments. The goal was lose weight on the other one was, you know, I want to hit X dollars per year revenue. So it’d be like, you know, X dollars in 2020. So that little hacks been really fun. And it just keeps me cuz again, Top of Mind consistently thinking about a goal, every time I kind of clock in and go to work
Chris Dreyer
that so I’m gonna steal that you write every day when I type in my pin or this. Yeah, and, you know, you can use LastPass to change it. So there’s things like that to protect from the rest of your team seeing your internal go goal. The other thing I wanted to unpack here was something you mentioned about case value. So I know most people can’t see me but you’ve, let’s say you’ve got this y and x axis where the Y is your brand. And the stronger your brand gets, the more you can attract these serious injury cases from your reputation and doing good work. And you talk about, you know, really taking care of your customers so that they turn into these evangelists with I’m sure we’re going to talk about your case management software and maybe how you utilize that for customer service. And just all of that goes into maximizing client value and turning those into a referral mechanism in the future. So that’s amazing. I am going to steal the password go there. It’s like an affirmation that you don’t have to say, but you have to type in, right, I really like it.
David Brauns
Have fun with it. That’s a good one. There’s, I can’t stress the goals enough is huge. And the more you think about them, you have to interact with them. Just like in school, the more you interact with your notes, the better you’re gonna do on the test. It’s just forcing these little mind hacks to kind of be able to interact with your goals and keep them in your head as much as possible.
Chris Dreyer
That’s great. So what was the big pitfall or mistake that you had to learn early on? Maybe it was hiring or partnership or marketing? What was the mistake?
David Brauns
Yeah, there’s a lot, right. I mean, you know, running a business is, you know, at some point, we’re lawyers, we’re also entrepreneurs, or business owners, and now you’re going to make mistakes. You can’t ever think stops You just need to get in there. And, you know, I tell myself and this is kind of the Facebook motto is done perfect is the enemy of done, right. So you just want to get in there and do stuff and take action. And if you’re going to fail, fail forward, you know, you’re going to fall, fall forward, keep the forward momentum going learn, get yourself back up, you know, add a couple big ones on kind of unlike the pivot was a slow grind. There were a couple kind of big moments in my firm. One was when I scaled it to be just not myself, but I started hiring people. I was up to a case manager and the case manager had two assistants. And we were maxed out when we were maxed out. I didn’t wanna spend any more money on payroll. And I think we had at the time, we were probably running about 160 280 files between the four of us, and the case manager. I didn’t catch it was burned out. And so she was going to quit and I want to say after the fact, and so she called her two assistants who she became friends with and said, Hey, I’m going Quit tomorrow. And they said, Well, hey, if you’re not working, we don’t want to work either. So they all came in and dropped their resignation on the same day. And so basically, I was back to square one. I mean, just, you know, one of the throw off, I was like, oh my god. So I gathered myself as David, you’ve done this before. You know, start back. It’s just work and effort and hustle and get back into it. And so we did, you know, I grounded out I called my wife she came in, started running records again for me, but the lesson learned was overhyped, like I would hire to the bench. And I’ve got every position right now in my office, where I’ve got excess capacity. And and now that I can afford the payroll, it’s by design, if someone leaves, we’re going to absorb that we have plenty of time to go find a great candidate. There’s no sense of urgency. So that gives me that buffer of not being lean and having something just blow up like that. It also helps our client service level right so now we have Apparently goes like for example, all paralegals run about 80 files max that’s look like most law firms are running 100 something. Again, we’ve got that bandwidth, I could take them up there, but I don’t want to because stuff gets missed they’re running too lean on the files. So now we’re deep in the files and because we kind of are paying that that that premium for the staffing, which is the product really the people are the product right? We’re now creating better cases that our case values and allows me to sleep at night knowing if someone leaves you know, I’m not going to lose everything and be back to square one again.
Chris Dreyer
Yeah, I was gonna say let’s, let’s talk a little bit about that situation here. So you mentioned earlier you’re very goal conscious, very focused on the number so are there now goals? Are there goals or metrics that you track say forecasting or capacity you mentioned the number of files are those the things that you look at for for staffing?
David Brauns
We do we do. So what we do is we’ve got to Case Management System that we we do some reporting out of that we also have hooked in Excel. And this kind of gets a little techie back in my tech background. But we basically use an ODBC connector to create dashboards in Excel that plugs right into case management. So what we’re looking at is the total number of cases handled, the number of clients that are treating meaning they’re in medical care, the number that are released, we have stages, as the case goes through the firm, we measure how many have in each stage and where stuff is stuck. So like, for example, one of the goals in the firm is a demand package needs to be written within 10 business days of the last medical record being received. We’re not gonna let a file sit. It’s not good for the client. It’s not good for the firm. It’s not good for anybody. We want to move files. And so if a case if a case is sitting for more than 10 days without a demand out, it hits a dashboard. And then Hey, I got a paralegal what’s going on with this, you know, what do we need we need help from and then she won’t get another case until she fixes that problem. So the two big things points that we look at kind of in our flow are the demands going out. And then also cases in negotiations, and that’s me. I mean, I negotiate all the cases, as a lawyer, I’m gonna want to allow to do that. And so my goal is I don’t want cases stuck in negotiations more than two weeks. If I can’t get a case resolved, and it’s time to make a decision, hey, we’re going to file suit. Are we going to, you know, what are we gonna do with this, and that keeps me moving on negotiations instead of setting up letting stuff hang out there. And now again, that could be another sticking point. So we take all that we measure average time on desk, right so we know the average time on desk in my firm is 8.2 months from the time we signed somebody to the time we close the case, that’s about 8.2 months, which is fast, it’s very fast. And that kind of pace and precision is what’s the brand has developed into nothing the client perspective because they know they don’t have anything to compare it to. But if you look at the vendors we deal with, like you know the doctor, the medical doctors, the lien Companies all these places they know Braun’s law is moving fast. And that gets us referrals from those medical practice, because that’s what they see as quality legal services. It’s not really the result, but how we’re interacting and how fast we’re moving in with precision, we’re moving.
Chris Dreyer
One of the things you mentioned there was, you know, the bottlenecks. So by setting it up like this, you can see where the bottlenecks occur. And you can set with limits there to look at them. And it’s, I can’t think of the name of the book and I guess the goal, I can’t think of the author’s name but but the author there would be proud because you’re talking about throughput you can, your, your, your throughputs improving when you can see these bounce on bottlenecks for efficiency, and it just makes you more efficient, quicker, it helps those referrals. So I think that’s genius in and looking at those stages to identify those situations.
David Brauns
I’ll tell you that this is something that I see a lot of law firms making mistakes and one is they you know, one things I struggled with when I was building the firm I got to the point where I had a delegate, right like I had I wasn’t running the fall by myself. I had paralegals receptionist, we got a records custodian. Now that does all the records work is how do I delegate, but still have a sense of control? Because I’m a control freak, I want to know, measure everything. And so those goals and those KPIs, and those dashboards are what effectively allow me to delegate, but still keep a pulse on things. I mean, I’m not touching the fallen doing everything. But I have this insight. There’s just this dashboard into everything, where I’ve got just a rhythm and the pulse of not only the firm, but every case takes. And I think that’s been strategic in terms in terms of how we’ve developed internally operations to perform the way we have.
Chris Dreyer
So if you’re sitting on a desert island, you can you can go pull up the dashboard and still have an idea that top level view what’s going on with the firm? Oh, yeah,
David Brauns
yeah. I’ll tell you, you know, interesting. I mean, we’re sitting here talking in the middle middle of the COVID thing, right? So all my team are at home I’m the only one in the office today. They’re all working remotely that wasn’t a big deal because we built the ground up to be that way with voice over IP phones cloud services, things like that. But they’re all working from home but I know they’re productive right because I’ve got a sound I’m thinking I’m paying 40 hours they working 40 hours a week it’s no I’ve got these dashboards I can see the inbound outbound calls the pieces of mail they’re handling with the relate on phone calls. So I mean we’ve done really well and I think I haven’t seen anything drop at all and I’m and now I’m thinking why don’t need all this office space doesn’t make everyone remote and kind of you know, crowded that way save a bunch of these.
Chris Dreyer
Yeah, things are going to change, there’s definitely going to be a lot less of the office space, I think post-COVID you know, everyone’s getting, you know, Zoom video conferencing. There’s better technology, Slack. There’s all types of internal software. Let’s talk about, you talked about a challenge that you overcame with the staffing situation and what you learned there. But what was a proudest man moment, a moment you look back on, and you’re just especially proud of a big success.
David Brauns
I mean, it’s just where I am, like I said, there’s really no big one. There is it I don’t like complacency on number one. So, but there’s not, I think it’s just I’m proud of what we built. You know, there’s a lot of smart lawyers out there, that could be phenomenal in the courtroom, phenomenal trial lawyers, but their office and their operations are just a mess. turnover. Staff isn’t fully engaged. You know, there’s a sense of empathy with the clients. And so I tend to be more of an operations guy. Um, you know, at some point, we’re all businessmen with bar cards is one of my sayings. And so we got to treat it like that. And so that’s kind of what I’m proud of is when people come in and see the office and interact with us. We’re and I know everyone says they’re different, but I think we are I just think the way we built this, maybe for my tech background, and seeing how corporate America works versus traditional wall from, it’s just a different animal altogether. And looking back over seven years when I came from nothing literally nothing at $13,000 on a credit card, that’s all we had to live on to where we are now is just that’s probably my proudest moments just how far I’ve come in the process.
Chris Dreyer
It’s incredible and now that you have all this data and everything you can see you can make you know smarter decisions on where you want to take the practice and identify those you know, if someone left you now like you said, you have the processes in place you have the team that can step in and take over the transparency that you built with the software. Let’s talk about you know, how you’ve developed and and and kind of your journey. What are a few of your favorite business books?
David Brauns
Oh wow. So first I will tell you that that’s that’s my favorite question because I don’t read a lot of books and I read like you know the the current opinions are coming out just to stay Carnival all but you’re not going to see me sitting around. With a legal treatise like in law school anymore, so everything I’ve read has been from different verticals. I’m a huge fan of sales books. I just think sales is a fundamental skill for life. You know, in sales is really both the technique and the mindset. So it kind of combines both of what you need to kind of be successful. Probably the two books that I credit to my success the most would be As a Man Thinketh, which is a really old old book. And I can’t remember the author’s like when there’s Dale Carnegie type books. And the other one is by a guy named Grant Cardone down in Florida called 10 X. And so when I was starting out in my bedroom, trying to stay motivated and deal with all this competition out there, I was actually going for daily walks. And I had both books on Audible. And when I listened to both those books, I kind of had this synthesis where I took the ideas from both and something just clicked, you know, As a Man Thinketh was kind of a you know, if you think about it, you’ll create an existence, you know, create don’t compete is one of my sayings to deal with all the competition in the marketplace. And then Grant Cardone, if you ever follow him, you just know it’s all about massive action, like just take action, take action take 10 times when everyone else is doing, it’ll work out. So the other time I tuned that, like the core, probably the book that gave me the best insight into operations and how to structure stuff is Scaling Up, which is kind of part of the Rockefeller habits series, where I could just see okay, this is how you really do like the E myth, which everyone reads was like that, but it wasn’t details real high level stuff. I haven’t really seen scaling up but man, this is how people grow from nothing, you know, to being on the shark tank to blowing it up to you know, multi million dollars. So that kind of led me into like, okay, we gotta have meetings and agendas and daily Paul’s. So I think that books probably the most success, the most contribution to kind of our operations portion of the firm.
Chris Dreyer
So I haven’t read As a Man Thinketh, I’ve read 10 X and I’ve read the Scaling Up, 10 X is definitely Grant Cardone’s book is not a book that you read before going to bed.
David Brauns
But did you read it? Or do you do the audible? I did. I did the audible, because his commentary is priceless. I mean, to have him like that living through it. It’s just phenomenal. Yeah.
Chris Dreyer
And Scaling Up well, I was gonna say, that’s a great book, too. But I would say that one’s also not an auto. I would say that one’s not an audible book. That’s, that’s a reader. It’s got the different charts and things in there that really provide more value. Those are great books. I Grant Cardone. I mean, love them or hate him. This guy’s taking action. I look at his Instagram profile. He’s this. He’s incredible. What about, you know, with your software engineering background, and we talked a lot about these dashboards and you’re on that site, what’s some of your favorite software that you use to run your, your firm?
David Brauns
Yeah, yeah. So I mean, I favorite software is our case management system. And there’s a ton of them out there. Um, you know, we took one that also had, it’s more Insurance defense oriented. But the reason I bought it was because it was completely customizable. I could go and add data fields, change screens, it had this workflow engine. So I could use my tech background and say, hey, I want to take this kind of infrastructure and customize it to go do this. Obviously, that’s not for everybody. Because when I started out, I had a lot of time on my hands, I could build it. Now I’ve got a vendor that I found out and outsource it all to saying, hey, I want this report. I want this done. But you know, one of my philosophies is every business I don’t care whether you’re retail, or restaurant, a law firm, an accounting firm, you are a tech firm. I mean, this is the year 2020. Everybody’s a tech firm, whether you like it or not, and the more you use tech, the more you leverage it. Again, you’re gonna have that pace and precision. So the case management system, we couldn’t live without where paperless office, you come in here it looks like a day traders office, right? There’s dual monitors, no paper, headset foam. That’s it. And the other ones just good old Excel. I mean, I’ve used Excel since day one. We’ve kind of built it to be a lot more. But I used to track my daily leaves, my phone calls all of that in Excel. And I actually make all my paralegals and everyone from receptionist on, go take basic and advanced excel. I think it’s I think everyone needs to have it on their resume. I don’t care what you’re doing. And so it’s a valuable skill set. And it also allows you to think differently the way you work Excel, kind of trained to be more of an engineering mind, okay, this cell and the cell relate and things like that. So I think Excel, and our case management system, were kind of the core of what we’re doing here.
Chris Dreyer
So I wasn’t going to ask this question, but but you’ve brought up a lot of processes type questions and data in Excel. So do you put your team through a personality assessment like a disc assessment or predictive index or Colby to kind of evaluate these processes mindsets?
David Brauns
I used to I used to, like back when I when I lost everybody on that fateful day when everyone walked out the door at the same time. I said that was on me, right? That’s on me. That’s bad leadership, bad management, I can’t fault them. What do I need to do differently. So I spent the next couple months just studying management, magnet management experience, I was always worked for somebody else being told what to do so that I had to teach myself. And then I also taught myself how to hire people. I use a process called Top Grading, which is like a really well defined for executives and I, I kind of pulled from that and tweak some things. I did it initially, but I don’t wanna say I didn’t believe it. I just didn’t think it was all that. So I used to spend the money on it. But the interviewing process That’s intense and things like that, but I just haven’t gone there. Because what I did is I had once I had everyone hired, I had a consultant come in and give the personality test is kind of a workshop. And when I was reading them, I’m like, okay, like, I see where that’s right. But that’s not. So I could see a little disconnect after having worked with a person that it’s not 100%. I mean, it’s a data point, right? It’s a thing point but I wouldn’t rely on that.
Chris Dreyer
Yeah, that’s that’s a great point. We put everybody through disk, but I read some of them on like that CES off. That’s just not who that person is. But But I do find it helpful. And it’s another data point. Yeah, let’s, let’s talk about mentors. Who are some of your mentors in their piece of advice for you?
David Brauns
Yeah. Yeah, you’ve kind of heard me in furnace throughout the talk together. But But really, my style is I’m kind of self learner. Even though I’m an extrovert at the office, I’m an introvert in the house. And so I have kind of my mentors have been books, and online personalities and reading. That’s really where I get it all from is just following somebody deconstructing what they’re doing or looking at excessive hands that I want to be like that person, how they get there, were they doing were they doing differently than me? So it’s really been a combination of just books. And now that being online with like, you’re doing podcasts, you know, like, you know, like, you’re putting Cast. When you listen to this, all you need is that one nugget, right that one idea from our talk today, like, Oh my God, that’s, you know, I spent a half hour, I got this one idea that’s going to, you know, create this much value in my firm or in my life. So I’ve done that in terms of real. I mean, from afar, my uncle was successful personal injury lawyer up in Maryland. So I saw his trajectory from kind of a DA when he flipped sides to civil and that I mean, my family wasn’t we were Baltimore blue collar poor. And then I had a buddy in law school buddy in law school was much younger than me. I was 31. He was 22. I had no idea why we’re hanging out that the guy was just laser focused. His name’s Dan Castro, I’ll give him a shout out great guy took the time to basically say, Hey, this is how I built my firm. Here’s how you need to do it. And he’d given that speech to ton of people before. And I think he was willing to kind of open up the curtain and show everything because he realized like we all do, that 95% of people that he’s talking to aren’t Go implement it right there. It just isn’t like you leave the seminar, you’re all jazzed up. And then you have two weeks later, it’s all gone. But I literally said, I’m going to follow everything you’re doing. I’ve seen the success you’ve had, and we still talk to this day. And lo and behold my phone through each year, because we compare KPIs each year, he’s like, five years ahead of me, works on the exact same path. So it’s scary, kind of the runway and how this played out the exact same way as his as his success.
Chris Dreyer
Yeah, and talking to him helps you elevate, you get to see like, what’s saying you don’t know what you don’t know. So you’ll see things that he’s doing, he’ll see things that you’re doing so you both are elevating each other. And that’s really exciting. So, you know, today, where you’re at today with the firm, what are your high value activities? What are the actions that you take the drive the most impact for the firm?
David Brauns
Yeah, great question. So the first one is always client contact. You know me talking To the clients is a differentiator in the market. Most personal injury firms, especially the successful ones, whether you’re a boutique that’s doing decent volume, or the real high volume TV guys, clients are not talking to lawyers, they sign up. I mean, maybe here’s the offer, do you want to take it and that’s it. So by me still contacting the clients the way I have been, the way I’ve been developing rapport with them and building the relationships, that’s what’s throwing off the client referrals. And you know, we are I looked this up before getting on the show with you today, year to date. 44% of our cases are coming from client referrals. That’s huge. They’re better quality cases, they’re easier to sign up because you’ve already been vouched for and they don’t cost anything. I mean, it just it just costs the surface of the pirate case. I’m not out there having to spend 100,000 in TV to acquire this new client. So I think I think a lot of people don’t focus on that low hanging fruit, which is a I have, and then we market to them constantly 2628 touch points a year, even if they’re even when they’re not clients anymore. So that’s the goal, the goal is to get the client referrals over 60%. And that’s just going to momentum again, it’s a slow burn. And then the other thing would really just be if I had to talk about it would be marketing and selling. I mean, just, you know, keeping the biggest fear of every personal injury lawyer is the phone’s not gonna ring with that next case the next day. So just kind of continuing to drive the marketing, both of rankings I Oh, you know, our conference calls our strategy how we’re doing stuff as well as just being tuned in the marketplace. I mean, that’s, that’s what’s gonna keep the phone ringing.
Chris Dreyer
Yeah, and the, you know, the actions that you’re taking now are going to pay off in the future. So though that 2829 touch points that you’re doing that that multiple touch cadence that keeps you top of mind because you can’t predict when they’re going to get in a car accident. But if you’re Top of Mind, it lends itself to more referrals. They may have a family member that gets injured and they automatically you’re the person that comes to mind because of how well you treated them. And you were empathetic, you had that EQ and you shared their experience. So I just think those are tremendously valuable. And that is a differentiator, I like to think of it is warmth and competence, or you have to do good work, right? That’s one component, but the warmth component, when you have both of those, it just really lends itself to just
David Brauns
Well, Chris, you’ve seen kind of with with your clients. I mean, during this kind of crisis, you have two personalities, right? You have the ones that are leaning into it. Like you and I have talked about that I am that like hey, this is an opportunity. Let’s Let’s lean into it. It’s not gonna pay anything now. But a year from now the garden will have been planted and it will be growing. And there’s people that are pulling back, right, they’re pulling back and kind of go into defense mode and the only way you should go in defense mode is to attack again. It’s hard to PI to write because it’s not an immediate sale, right? You get that you book that case, but you’re not gonna see the return on that for a year. And the more you do it, the more confident you kind of get in that rhythm. But at first, it was scary. It was real scary to kind of put it all out there and have the phone ring like oh my god, what am I What am I doing? You know, that’s the TV guys. That’s what’s interesting with them is they do all this like TV spending. And it’s not really direct response. Like to your point you have a family member. They’re not thinking poi lawyer until they’re hurt, right? It’s like a plumber. You don’t think about plumber until you walk in the basement and the pipes, you know, gushing water all over the place. And so the TV guys, they spend this ton of money, just trying to be in front of you all the time. So when you do have that thought there on the TV screen, I can’t afford to play there. I can’t not in Atlanta market where it’s just hugely competitive. And so, like with your firm, what we do is more direct response right when they type in the keywords. That’s where we that’s where we can play that That’s where you can play through like your you know what you do for us my analytics allows us to be with a scalpel in there just really working and playing with that type and so it’s also two different mindsets to TV guys you think about it putting out millions of dollars a month in Atlanta. I mean they’re literally spending over a million a month on TV and they hope the phone rings well the god this guy sleeping right now I mean it’s COVID it takes him drop by 80% and there’s still this ad budget sitting out there locked in at a million a month oh my god versus you know what you and I do together it’s much more direct response. We can tune it up tune it down see what’s working what’s not. And that just gives me peace of mind allows me to not be sleepless nights staring at the ceiling thinking oh my god, all my money’s out there as I’m gonna write.
Chris Dreyer
Yeah, here and you know, they all kind of work together for sure. Yeah, the bigger brand you get. It helps with the direct response when they do keyed in for search engine optimization. And one of the things I’ll mention about COVID is what other time In the past 10 to 20 years, did your competitors just stopped doing SEO? Right? It’s a huge opportunity. So yeah. 100% agree. David, one final question here. Do you have any advice for your fellow lawyers trying to grow a large successful practice?
David Brauns
Yeah. And this is I hinted at this earlier, you know, one of my guiding principles and, you know, Chris, you and I, I think we’re wired very similar. So everything I’ve said, really isn’t my idea. I’ve taken an idea from this book, that book and kind of made it my own through a synthesis of just being a constant learner. But I think when he especially in personal injury, if you want to tell yourself one thing, kind of one daily affirmation, it’s create don’t compete, if you compete, your attention on what other people are doing. And when I was getting started, and I’ve been TV guys out there for 2030 years, I couldn’t compete with that. And it was paralyzing. It was paralyzing like oh my god, how do I do started. And when I had that kind of revelation like David, don’t worry about it, it’ll just go heads down, create and build, create and build. If you trust that process, that’s what’s going to give you the result. Because you’re focused on creating your thing with your personality with your ideas, and you just gotta have faith in that. And at the end of the day, that’s gonna win, that’s gonna win for you.
Chris Dreyer
I love that. And that lends itself to innovation because you’re thinking about how you can improve and how you can provide more value as opposed to let me see what they’re doing. And you’re always kind of lagging behind. Guys, we’ve been talking to David Brauns, elite personal injury attorney and founder of Brauns Law. David, where can people go to learn more about you?
David Brauns
Yeah, you guys can go to my website, BraunsLaw.com I have kind of a funky name. It’s like Brauns electric razor with an S on the end is where I tell everybody Brauns, braunslaw.com and learn all about us. We’re also on Facebook at Brauns Law. We tend to be on Facebook Still a little bit if you want to look at pictures, Facebook has a little more content. But go check us out.
Chris Dreyer
Thanks, David. Thanks for coming on.
David Brauns
Thanks, Chris.
Conclusion
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