Ken Hardison:
Well, months from now, it'll be 100 times better. This is the fastest-growing thing.
Chris Dreyer:
Once you start trimming and then you got all these A players, then some of those A players start looking like Bs, and your criteria changes, and your expectations change because you know what's possible.
Ken Hardison:
I think that the lawyers that say, "Oh, I'm too old for this." I mean, I'm 67 years old, man. Listen, I don't even know how to type, but I know this is real.
Chris Dreyer:
Welcome to Personal Injury Mastermind. I'm your host, Chris Dreyer, founder and CEO of Rankings.io, the elite legal marketing agency. Each week, you get insights and wisdom from some of the best in the industry. On these special Toolkit Tuesdays, we dive deep into conversations with the leading vendors in the legal sphere, the masterminds behind the technology services and strategies that help law firms not just survive, but thrive in today's competitive landscape.
Now, this isn't about selling you the latest software or getting kickbacks from affiliate links. It's about bringing you the best so you can be the best for your firm, for your staff, for your clients, and for you. This is Toolkit Tuesday on PIM, your weekly guide to staying sharp in the legal world. Let's go.
When Ken Hardison sees a great opportunity, he takes it. In the '90s, advertising was uncommon, especially on TV. Many saw it as unprofessional. Not Ken. He saw it for what it was: an untapped goldmine, so he borrowed a half a million dollars and invested all of it into TV. In just 90 days, the firm exploded. Before advertising, the firm brought in 20 cases a month. After TV, over 100 cases per month. By June of 1998, just two years after starting the firm, they hit their first $100,000 month.
Rapid success came with serious growing pains. Ken fought on and learned to create systems and processes to manage the ever-increasing volume of cases. Four years later, he had 14 lawyers and 47 staff. They pulled in about five million a year. With operations dialed in, that number grew to eight million. By 2010, Ken was ready to sell his firm.
But that is just the beginning of Ken's story. He has built not one but two multimillion dollar firms. He wanted to help other law firm owners experience wild growth and eventually escaped that 9:00-to-5:00 rat race. So he started the Personal Injury Lawyers Marketing and Management Association, or PILMMA. Through PILMMA, he provides training, coaching, Masterminds, and other resources to shortcut that path to law firm growth. Members gain access to Ken's tested marketing tactics, management best practices, and innovative ideas.
He shares some of those insights today. Ken explains why AI is the great equalizer for small firms, what to look for in A players, and how to set proper KPIs. Here's Ken Hardison, founder and president of PILMMA on how he sees AI changing the landscape.
Ken Hardison:
I think it's the biggest thing to ever hit in my lifetime. The internet was big, and those that embraced it and got on it, the lawyers that got on it, they made a lot of money, and they're still making money because of their longevity, and you know that better than anybody. The ones that just said, "Oh, no. It's just a pad," or whatever, no. This thing has grown faster than anything new. In three months, it had over a million users.
And we just are on the edge of it, I mean, what it can do. But what I think it's going to do is I don't think it's going to replace people, because that's what everybody's scared of. I am scared of some things, and I'll tell you that, but I'm not scared of it replacing people. I think what it's going to do is that as far as the marketing part, I see it as a great equalizer for smaller law firms. It can pump out a lot of content.
And you'll get people to argue with you both ways, but my research shows me that if you do it right, and you go back over the content and make sure, like the lawyer in New York didn't go back and check the citations, it's going to make mistakes, but it can reduce the amount of labor it takes to produce something. Instead of putting out 20 or 30 pages of content a month, I mean, realistically, you could use the same person and put out 300 pages of content.
It could write blogs. I think it's going to be very useful. We're testing it now with an avatar. We're using this thing called Opus, where I take one of my podcasts, and then just run it through the deal and let it just cut me out a bunch of shorts to use on social media, which saves time, right? It saves time for me, it saves time for the editing, which is always the hard part about video to me. That's just two or three splices, voiceovers.
That's the scary part, because me and you are out there all day, so somebody could take our voice and take our image and put shit out there, and that could be a bad part of it. That scares me. On the productivity side, for PI lawyers, especially, man, writing demands, you can bring that in-house instead of paying these companies that do it. You could probably do five to 10 demands in the time it takes you to do one.
And you still got to go back over it, you still got to look at this. Medical chronologies using them for depo preps. You can use them for how to dumb down something for a jury. Discovery, if you get an AI, not ChatGPT, but an AI platform, and download it in, and then create.
See, that's what everybody's thinking. It's just ChatGPT. ChatGPT, I think in the next couple years, it's going to be only 10% of the use. There's so many free AI platforms out there that you can use and dump stuff in, so you don't have to worry about your client's personal information, the HIPAA rules and regulations. So you're going to have your own learning machine, and you're going to be feeding it, and that's where I see it going.
Chris Dreyer:
The number of applications for AI and personal injury practice seems limitless, but where do you begin? Ken's got the answer. He's put together the AI Mastery Workshop, and it's not just theory. His program is all about doing.
Ken Hardison:
We're going to talk about it, but then we're going to actually give you something to do, and let you do it, so that when you walk out of there, you can actually do it. That's why we limit it to 25 law firms, because we've got to have so many people. I've had to hire a bunch of geeks to come in and be there to help people to make sure that they know how to do it, and when they walk out of there, I want them know how to use this stuff. And that's why we use four people per law firm, so you can bring your marketing people, you can bring your case managers or your lawyers. You can bring one person for each thing, because I think it can be used on all parts of the law practice. And I think 12 months from now, it'll be 100 times better. I mean, I really do. This is the fastest-growing thing.
And I do pride myself on that. And PILMMA. I want PILMMA to be the leading edge. I want us to be out what's front. When they had LSAs, our members, we were getting verified before it even went live. I mean, we had them on there. I had all my people, all my Mastermind members and everything, they were getting verified and everything. And as soon as it came to the trial, man, they were ready to go, and they killed it for three or four months. Of course, everybody figured it out. He who is first gets the golden ring.
So I think that's the same thing with this. I think that the lawyers that say, "Oh, I'm too old for this." I mean, I'm 67 years old, man. Listen, I don't even know how to type, but I know this is real. And I play with ChatGPT a lot, and it's got some great stuff, and it's got some stuff that's not so great, and also the pictures. There's some stuff. If you want to talk about Midjourney and different things, some of it's really good, some of it's terrible. Some of it, you'll have six fingers and stuff, so-
Chris Dreyer:
It's always the hands.
Ken Hardison:
... you got to pick the right software. Yeah. It's always the hand, the fingers. But there's so much. I mean, it's just think about it this way. It's like I told somebody yesterday. It's just like all other technology. It's going to get a lot better and a lot cheaper. You look at the VCR, you look at the chip, you look at anything, you look at the phones.
When I bought my first cellphone, it wasn't even a cellphone, it was a bag phone. It was $3 a minute, and the phone was over $2,500, but I was the only guy in town that had a phone in his car. You know? I don't know that I really even needed it. I think it was more of a status symbol, to be honest with you. I was a young, cocky lawyer. Thought I had to have the latest and greatest. I probably wouldn't do that now. And then you see all of this evolve, but it's just going to go a lot faster than anything we've ever seen before, in my opinion. That's just my opinion.
Chris Dreyer:
AI, particularly for personal injury work and on contingency, it's going to help improve utilization, so there's going to be a lot more profit capability there, because you're not on the billable hour typically. And then the billable hour guys, especially the business lawyers, are more at risk, because you can go use ChatGPT to whip up a quick NDA, or whatever it may be.
The one thing that you mentioned on the forefront, and just plug in our audience, is Threads, which is Instagram's version of Twitter just dropped yesterday, yesterday being July 5th. I checked today. They added 30 million users in a day.
Ken Hardison:
Well, they made it real easy with Instagram, right? You can just go into Instagram, and they made it real easy, which is something to think about. Anytime you're trying to sell anything or give a service, you got to make it easy as you can for the people to click in or getting reviews or stuff like that. I always say when we're doing stuff here at PILMMA, I said, "You got to give them at least two or three different ways to do it, and you got to make it easy."
I got to got a golf ball company, and when we're selling online, I try to make it where they can pay with anything. They can even pay with Amazon. I want to make it where it's so easy, PayPal, whatever it is, Apple. I want to make it so it's so easy. They can step right there on the phone and do it and not even have to pull out their credit card, you know?
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah. There's nothing more frustrating when you have one way of paying. Yeah. I want to keep going deeper on PILMMA, because last time, we spoke about your history and we talked about how when you got into TV and the impact that had on operations, but I think we just kind of covered PILMMA on the high level. I really want to dig in and share with our audience what PILMMA is, who it's for, kind of how it can help you and be the mentor?
Ken Hardison:
Well, PILMMA is Personal Injury Lawyers Marketing and Management Association, and it's a membership. It's a subscription model, and we have two levels. We have the Masterminds, and then we have the gold membership. And I hear a lot of lawyers' challenges every day. I mean, I do a lot of free 30-minute consults with lawyers all across the nation. We've got maybe 10 different things that we offer for 397 a month. It's a no-brainer, really, and everything I do comes with a money-back guarantee. So because lawyers, I think they're just very skeptical, and we're trained to be, so that's good. That's a good thing.
But we do intake training because what I've seen is that's the most leakage in any law firm. Guys like you do a great job, and then the law firm says, "I'm not getting any cases." And 90% of the time, it's the lawyer that screwed it up because he don't have dedicated intake people, he's not trained them properly, they don't even know cases. If you can go from a 30% conversion rate to a 40%, or I like to go by the cases I want, go from 77 to 90. That's big money. That's big money, and we've helped people to do that.
Other thing we have that, believe it or not, one of the most popular things of the whole deal is it's a listserv, where every member there has access to go online and ask questions to all the other members and me, and it might be about a vendor, it might be they want to refer a case. Like this morning, we had a guy in Florida that said, "Hey, listen. The doctors in the hospital say my medical request letter is hard to understand." And he said, "And I looked at it, and it is. Anybody got any?" Three members popped in their medical request letters just like that.
So they like that, because they can get instant gratification, because you've got several hundred members out there. And I don't allow any selling on the listserv, but you can give your reviews and whatever. So that's a big thing that when I did it, I didn't think it was that big a deal, but it's turned out to be one of top three.
We do a monthly magazine, PILMMA Insiders' Journal, and we have people come on and write articles about different things, marketing management. We have a monthly round table session. I bring on management each month, and then a round-table session on marketing. We also have a monthly Q&A with me, and then also, inside, we've got members resources, where I've got a bunch of forms and templates. Plus, I did about over 30 videos, Chris, and I put them in four or five sections, what you should do.
Some of them, you're going to know. Some of them, you don't. But they're all anywhere from eight to 25 minutes, so I made them short enough people would watch them, because if you get something much over, we know doing podcasts, if you get much over 30 minutes, people are going to bail out on you. Attention spans.
So that has been very helpful, especially for the ones that are not bigger, the smaller law firms, because I go in there with the very basic stuff about knowing your numbers, what are your KPIs? Just stuff about how to get reviews, how to market to your past clients, how to reduce your costs, how to do a newsletter, why you should do it and how to do them. Just different things, all kinds of things. How to get in the 3-pack, which I think is really key.
I got to do one on LSAs, but it's been kind of changing. I've been scared to put anything on there, but we've got some of our Mastermind that has cracked the code on LSAs, and they're killing it. You hear all this and that, but I mean, I'm sitting there and listening to them, and they know what they're doing. And I got lawyers that are signing up 30, 45 cases a month off LSAs.
Now, they're spending a lot of money, but you know, they got a lot of Google reviews, they stay on top of their Google My Business page, and they answer the phone real quick too, because that'll kill you on LSAs. That will kill you. If you drop a call-
Chris Dreyer:
You miss one, you're done.
Ken Hardison:
You're in the dungeon, baby. There's a way to get out of it, but you've got to spend a lot of money. Every time I see somebody get up, it costs about $25,000 on stuff that they really didn't even want to take, just to get to the phone, to where they prove they'll answer the phone again.
Chris Dreyer:
Have you found with the listserv that your members are starting to become familiar with each other, and it lends itself to referral situations? So-
Ken Hardison:
Oh, yeah. It's a daily thing, somebody referred a case to somebody else. And sometimes, they know each other, and sometimes, they just throw it out there. We had one yesterday, Indiana. "Anybody want to take this case in Indiana?" And then some of them will say, "I got a client that got hurt down here or whatever, but he's moved to Indiana. Anybody know any good doctors up there?" And of course, if they help him, if they have to go to court, then they'll end up referring that case, because they can't try it, right? So we get that a lot.
But, yeah. I tell people, I say, "I can't promise you, but promise probably at least 50% of the members get enough referrals that they pay for the membership 10 times over," but that ain't the reason to join, but that's an added extra bonus, I guess. I don't ever make a big deal out of it, because it's probably going to be 50% that don't, right?
Because number one, you've got to be quick. You've got to be looking at it, because I see, say, somebody in South Carolina, and all of a sudden, you have three or four lawyers say, "Yeah, I can take it. I can take it. I can take it."
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah. And like anything, the people that utilize your Mastermind and are actively engaged get the most out of it, versus the people that don't.
Ken Hardison:
Yeah. And then the Mastermind, very briefly, I think we went over that last time, but basically, we meet three times a year, and everybody's two days, and everybody shares what's working in management and marketing, what's not working in marketing and management since the last meeting, and what challenges they have, and we sit there and try to help them out. Everybody gets about 45 minutes to an hour. I usually keep the group under 16, 18 people, so that everybody gets 45 minutes to an hour.
We go to different places, like next month, well, this month, next week, Nashville, and then I think we did Key West before, and then I think the next one's going to be in Vegas, so we go to nice places. Sometimes, they bring their family members or significant other ones, and "Come down two or three days early, or stay a couple days later. Do some sightseeing, write it off."
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah, yeah. And is this separate from the conference? Or just sometimes you align the conference to where it's-
Ken Hardison:
No. I used to align my conference, but I've got so many. I've got six Masterminds now, so there's just no way I can do them at the same time. So we do a big conference. Well, we're doing them Mays now, and the next one will be in May. I think it's May the 14th through the 17th.
It's been doing real good. We're actually having to move hotels. We pretty much have maxed out of the Ritz Carlton in New Orleans, and so now we're going over to, what's the one across the street? The Roosevelt. I hate leaving Ritz, because they're just really great service, but we ran out of a room. We could have sold 10 or 12 more booths, and the room was at capacity. It was tight. I mean, but we had enough seats for everybody. If we'd had 25 more people, they'd have been standing up.
Chris Dreyer:
Ken may have sold both of his firms, but he still has so much on his plate. He runs PILMMA, has multiple businesses, mentorships, and a personal life. But he isn't working around the clock day and night. In fact, Ken is passionate about having more free time. Here's how he does it.
Ken Hardison:
My ego is not so big that I got to think it's got to be done perfect. I mean, I want it as good as it can be done, but say, I'm not going to do it and do it perfect, or we'll get it 99% right. Whereas if I delegate to somebody and they might get it 92% right, well, I'm okay with that. It's a little different. I know that people say law, you can't do that, but as long as you got somebody reviewing it, you can't do it all. And I think the other deal is we all got unique strengths that we're really good at and stuff we've got a passion for, we're really good at, and it's usually stuff you love to do.
So what I've tried to do over the years is I know how to teach management, but I hate management. I hate managing employees, okay? I just hate it. I'm not good at it, because number one, I want everybody to like me, and number two, I just think if I tell you to do something, then I just expect you to do it, and you can't do that in business. You've got to have somebody inspecting and keeping the eight KPIs and holding people accountable. That's not my strength, okay? I'm just being honest with you. My strength is leadership, and I'm the big idea guy. I'm thinking about the future.
And so I usually hire very strong management people and other people, like I'm not really good at technology, so I try to hire people that really know technology, and delegate to them and empower them, trust but verify. And that's what KPIs do, and that's what reports do. And really, I mean, I used to run the reports, but then I'd give it to my office manager, and I'd say, "Go take care of this, because this person, they're not meeting their quotas," or, "Do this or that." I mean, I know what to look for, but I just didn't want to be the one to confront them.
And there's different points of delegation. It's in the top ones, where you just give it to them and just know they're going to take care of it. Those are very hard to find, but the deal is you don't want something where you got to show everybody every time. You might as well do it yourself, right? That's what most people think. "Well, the time I show them how to do it."
But if you can train somebody and you got processes, procedures, and they can go there and learn it, that's where the rubber meets the road. I mean, that's what I think. I mean, that's the key, is having these processes and onboarding people and training them, and then just delegate to them and have some way to hold them accountable. I mean, we do it with KPIs and reports, and most lawyers do. They use whatever your KPI is.
So when I ran the law firm, from the time somebody got released until I got the medical records, my goal was 30 days, and I'd run reports that we got over 30 days. Then I wanted to know why, you know? So they knew we were watching. And sometimes, there's legitimate reasons, right? And sometimes there's not. But if they know you're watching.
And then I wanted the demand out two weeks from the time they got the records in, because they had to hit a button, and if they won't, then I wanted to know why. I want a case settled after a demand went out in 60 days, and sometimes that don't always work. But if it didn't, I want to know why, and if there was no good reason, then I want a suit filed in 30 days, so I pushed everything. Everybody knew what the benchmarks were, and we didn't sit there and micromanage them, but everybody knew what the goals were. You know what I'm saying? What the benchmarks were.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah. And I think for me too, I'm the same way from a emotional perspective, and what I found with these KPIs is it makes it a lot more objective. "Hey, you're missing your KPIs. It's not me. I'm not the bad guy here. It's you're missing your numbers. Here they are." And it presents a different way of managing those people.
Also, Ken, I heard recently, Codie Sanchez, she owns multiple companies, and she said she goes by the 140 rule, and I was, "What's that?" And she's like, "Well, maybe get two people that are 70% as good as you, but combined, they're 140, so they can do more than the one individual," and that's not always the case. One person can be the equivalent to three, but I like that perspective of looking at things too.
Ken Hardison:
Well, I'll tell you what I like to do. Everybody says hire slow, but I'm really looking for A players, even if I got to pay them more. This is a prime example, Costco versus Walmart. Costco probably pays their people 30 to 40% more per hour, but they use a lot less people. What the studies have shown is that A players will produce 150 to 170% more work than a B player or a C player. And not saying B players are bad, Cs are, I don't want Cs in my business, but Bs are not bad. You're not going to have all As, because there are just not that many of them out there, but the more you can have.
I was talking to some guy on the account, and he had 60% A players. I said, "That's good." I mean, that's great, because really, I'd be satisfied with 30 or 40%. I'd be tickled to death, because A players are the ones that are going to give 150%. They treat the business like it's their own, and they're hungry not just for money, but they're hungry to grow personally and help the business grow. They know how to get along with other people, they're not assholes, and they're humble, but they're very confident.
You find somebody with all those qualities, you've got an A player, you know what I'm saying? And those people are worth more. I'd rather pay somebody 60,000, an A player, than a B player 40,000, because I know I'm going to get just as much done, if not more. You know what I'm saying?
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah, absolutely. You know what happens too, though? Here's what I've found in growing my business, and I'm sure you've seen the same, is the individuals that once you start trimming and then you got all these A players, then some of those A players start looking like Bs, and your criteria changes, and your expectations change because you know what's possible.
Ken Hardison:
Yeah, that's true. That is true. I had one lawyer one time, he said he ran a contest. He was a social security lawyer down in Florida, had a big operation about six, seven thousand cases. I mean, big, and he used to run a contest, like how many briefs could you get out in a day or something?
There was two that just really beat everybody to death. Then there was some lower, but he took in between the top and average. And he said, "Okay. You make this every day, you get a bonus every day." And he set it up like that because he said, "I had no idea." He said, "But when I did the contest, I had two people that just blew it out of the water, did 30, 40% more than everybody else." You know?
And then I said, "Well, did you use their top numbers?" He said, "No, because then nobody would've never reached it," but those two. He said, "But I went below, but above the average of the rest of them, and in between." And I said, "That's a good market." I thought that was pretty cool.
Chris Dreyer:
I think that's unbelievable. I would love to just highlight for this podcast, I think that's super smart.
Ken Hardison:
Well, I wish I could take credit for it, but that was Ken LaVan out of Florida. Smart dude. He used to do a lot of speaking for me on management. Very short guy.
Chris Dreyer:
I think that's incredible, because a lot of times, we don't know what those KPIs should be. Even if you're doing time tracking, which I think time tracking, a lot of times, there's a lot of issues with that, because it's not measuring throughput, the actual outcome, it's just measuring the time, but that's a whole different track.
Ken, this is amazing, and most of our audience is personal injury attorneys, and if a personal injury attorney is listening, how can they get in touch with you, and what should they be thinking about in regards to PILMMA?
Ken Hardison:
You can go to info@PILMMA.org, or you can just go to PILMMA.org, and we've got a place in there where you can contact us, phone numbers, emails. If you want to join, you can join right online the Masterminds application process. Because just to be honest with you, it's market-exclusive, and money is number two. It's not number one anymore. I just ain't going to put up with somebody that's going to be a jerk. I'm just not. I'm beyond that now.
Chris Dreyer:
Thanks so much to Ken for sharing his insights. Let's get over to those takeaways. Boost productivity with AI. Avoid blank-page syndrome by using AI for routine written work at your firm. This can look like first draughts of demand letters, deposition prep, briefs, or demand letters.
Ken Hardison:
It's going to make mistakes, but it can reduce the amount of labor it takes to produce something. Writing demands, you can bring that in-house instead of paying these companies to do it. You could probably do five to 10 demands in the time it takes you to do one.
Chris Dreyer:
Know what to look for. Hone in on those A players. We all want them on our team. Hard skills are easy to measure. What about the soft skills that set A players apart?
Ken Hardison:
They treat the business like it's their own, and they're hungry not just for money, but they're hungry to grow personally and help the business grow. They know how to get along with other people, they're not assholes, and they're humble, but they're very confident.
Chris Dreyer:
Measure success the right way. Key performance indicators are KPIs that are so important for making sure that your firm is on track to reach those big goals. Set the KPIs based on real data, not just assumptions about what you think employees should produce. Getting to those numbers will take a little creativity. Remember that numbers won't necessarily be the same from person to person either.
Ken Hardison:
I had one lawyer one time, he was a social security lawyer down in Florida, had a big operation about six, seven thousand cases. I mean, big, and he used to run a contest, like how many briefs could you get out in a day or something?
He took the average and he said, "Okay. You make this every day, you get a bonus every day." But he said, "But when I did the contest, I had two people that just blew it out of water, did 30, 40% more than everybody else." I said, "Well, did you use their top numbers?" He said no.
Chris Dreyer:
All right, everybody. I hope you added a few more tools to your kit. For more about Ken, PILMMA, and tapping into crazy growth, head on over to the show notes. While you're there, leave me a five-star review. I'll be forever grateful. Thanks for listening to Personal Injury Mastermind, with me, Chris Dreyer, founder and CEO of Rankings.io. Catch you next time. I'm out.
