Jack Zinda:
Build on your pyramid as you go along, and before you know it, you look down, you're like six stories up.
Chris Dreyer:
Welcome to Personal Injury Mastermind. I'm your host, Chris Dreyer, founder and CEO of Rankings.io, the no excuses, no BS legal marketing agency that works harder than the competition. Each week you get insights and wisdom from some of the best in the industry. Hit that Follow button so you never miss an episode. All right, let's dive in.
How can you build a successful law firm while staying true to your values? Jack Zinda provides a roadmap. As founder of Zinda Law Group, Jack has created a firm guided by purpose beyond profitability. With a clear sense of core values, he has transformed hiring operations, case selection, and client service. The result, a gigantic firm spanning multiple states and over 20 offices. In this episode, Jack shares his strategic approach to expansion, breaking down how he evaluates new locations. We also hear how he leverages client satisfaction tracking to continuously improve, and he offers advice on thoughtfully developing niche expertise by examining market demand, passion, and talent. Jack provides a unique insights for creating a thriving, values-driven law firm. He shares the exact steps behind his own success. Here's Jack Zinda, owner at Zinda Law Group.
Jack Zinda:
My uncle was an attorney. I had no idea what type of lawyer he was. I think he did real estate and transactional law, but in my head, I thought he was kind of like the people in Law & Order or something from To Kill Mockingbird, so I think that's the first time I started visualizing, "Hey, maybe I want to be an attorney."
Then as I got older, I'm in undergrad, I was a political science major. My grandfather had a PhD in history and said, "Do not get a PhD in history. You won't make any money. Go be an attorney." That's really when I started setting my eyes on becoming a lawyer and I specifically, I knew I wanted to litigate, and originally I wanted to be a prosecutor, but I came out of law school with a ton of student debt and just didn't see a way to make ends meet on a prosecutor's salary and I stumbled into personal injury law, which sounded like even better than being a prosecutor.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah, and it's funny that you got that piece of advice about the history and the PhD. I actually have a history degree and I can vouch for that, not a lot of money, so I had to go into marketing, so you saw, you recognize, "Hey, I'm going to go into the PI space," and you didn't just go into the PI space, I mean, you have this amazing relationship with success, so countless awards, national recognition, your clients have left thousands of reviews, multiple offices. I want to talk about the success side and what did it mean for you when you set out on your legal career and how has that changed over time?
Jack Zinda:
Yeah, well, when I first decided to practice personal injury law, what really attracted me to it was one of the few areas where you felt like you were helping an individual person, you also could make money doing it, and you didn't have to charge them anything to accomplish that, and that really attracted me and when I started the firm, the first thing we put out was our core purpose, which is to help as many people as possible through the practice of law, regardless of wealth, and to me that North Star is really important and we've always focused in on that as we pursue law and as we practice, and kind of going back to when I started the firm I think was in 2008 was when I left a job as an associate at a firm in Round Rock, Texas.
Chris Dreyer:
Let's dive into that. Some individuals, they talk about how to make a profit and enjoy what they do, but often, purpose is missed. You mentioned your goal/purpose is to help as many people as possible regardless of wealth. Let's expound on that. How is that guiding you on a day-to-day for your firm? How do you get everyone rowing into the same direction in terms of that purpose?
Jack Zinda:
Well, I think it starts with number one, the type of people you recruit to your law firm, and I don't think a core purpose is necessarily a negative or a positive. There's not good or bad core purposes, but I think it's important you have one and that if you structure it the right way, it's going to attract the type of people that have similar values to yourself. In our profession, I saw some law firms that I felt like got lost because they focused too much on money and not on helping clients.
There was an attorney in town that got in a lot of trouble for bribing judges running cases and is like spending the rest of his life in prison and I saw a few other attorneys that seemed like they weren't doing it for the right reasons and then I saw some other amazing people that felt like they were making a lot of money but they were helping clients one at a time and so that's where that idea came from and it helps drive, "Okay, what type of people do we want to join the firm? Do they agree with our core purpose?" If maybe they're at a firm where they're handling a thousand cases and they don't know their clients, that's probably something that maybe wouldn't line up with our core values.
Then when it comes to types of cases we're going to work on, does it feel like a case where we can make a difference in the person's life? Or is it a case where we're just trying to make a quick buck? That helps determine how we might approach if we're going to take a case or not. How many cases can each lawyer have to be effective in helping our clients? At our firm, we have a ratio about 35 cases per attorney, and that's intentional because we want to try to maximize value and get the most out of each case. That means we have to take cases of a certain size. We can't take a large volume because you would need a hundred lawyers to do that and that helps drive that decision and everything down to how we run the operation side is kind of run through that prism. It might make us more money, but would it sacrifice us helping clients?
Chris Dreyer:
One of the words that I just want to emphasize here that you keep repeating is "clients" and not "customers." Clients has emotions and feelings and they're people and they're humans, they're an individual, and customer is just a widget, it's a thing, and so I really agree and love that aspect of what you're saying.
I'm going to dig into this, too, because I just want to highlight a few things. So we're talking thousands of reviews, like you've got hundreds on multiple locations, not only just Google, on Facebook, and on Yelp, and I was going to dig into client satisfaction, and using the word "client," not "customer satisfaction." One of the phrases you say is, "Each client's always going to deal with a lawyer on the case and not be just a case manager and you're going to get those attorney insights." How did that come about? How do you see that affecting this whole client satisfaction?
Jack Zinda:
That's a great question. The first thing that I think you have to realize is, do I truly want to know what my client satisfaction rate is? One thing we do is every case the client is required to fill out a short survey before they finish the closing statement. It's part of our DocuSign where we actually get the true unvarnished opinion of the client and our client satisfaction rate is about 96% and that's clients that have to tell us before they finish the document. Obviously, if they absolutely refuse, they wouldn't have to, and so as an attorney you have to decide, "Do I really want to know this information?" Because wanting to get a positive Google review for marketing is different than knowing if you have a satisfied client base.
The other thing is there's nothing wrong with having a practice where case managers deal with the clients, it's just not our approach, and a lot of case managers do an amazing job. Because we have a small docket size, we want the client to have an intimate relationship with the attorney so the attorney can one, evaluate the case, two, maintain strong client control so they listen to us, and that's because of trust and trust is built over the amount of time you interact with someone and how closely you interact with someone. If I just send someone an email, trust is going to be pretty wide. If I've had six in-person meetings, trust is going to be pretty close. They're going to believe in me as a person.
It's all tying together, and client satisfaction is not just for a gimmick, it's like that allows us to be successful. When we're in a mediation and it's a really difficult situation, the client's a tough call, they trust us because we've spent a year building that trust. If we don't have it, then the client's not going to trust us, they're not going to listen to us, and we're going to kind of not get the result that's best for them.
Chris Dreyer:
A thousand percent agree. I want to get just a little tactical real quick. On this survey, is it just a traditional NPS survey? Do you go a little bit deeper with a Typeform survey with multiple questions? What types of questions are you getting to get that radical candor to get that understanding? No one loves hearing it, but it's the only way to learn and improve. If you hear something negative, it's like, "Okay, we're all aligned. Here's the truth. How can we improve?"
Jack Zinda:
That's a great question and I'm happy to share this template with your users if they want a copy of it. We have a weighted question that is worded in such a way that does not seem like you're degrading the attorney or the staff because people might interpret that as, "I don't want to say anything bad about Paul because even though I don't like Paul and didn't do a good job, Paul's a nice person," so the questions are weighted in a way that come across as objective and it's a one-to-five scale and there's ten different questions. They're real quick, multiple choice, and then at the end, there's a place for them to leave text information.
Then we ask them, "Is it okay if we use this on our website for review purposes?" Now, obviously, if it's Google, they have to fill it out themselves, but it gives us something we can put on the website, a testimonial automatically in the process. If they're not happy with this, then we might dig deeper, say, "Hey, what could we have done better?" If they are happy with us, it gives us some insights on how the attorney practices law, and it also gives us people to follow-up with to get positive Google reviews.
We also have a process once a quarter we send out a client survey via text message and email that's just a real simple, "Would you recommend the firm to a friend or family member?" Traditional survey so we can kind of see just in real-time, what's the pulse of that? That one's been difficult to get people to respond to. Frankly, we get about a 25% response rate, but we have about a 99% response rate at the end-of-case ones.
Chris Dreyer:
Fantastic, so that text one's more like the traditional NPS and the surveys getting more information.
Jack Zinda:
Exactly.
Chris Dreyer:
The other thing, too, just digging into this, and maybe this is just common practise, but limiting the number of cases that you take, you say you turn down 90% of cases, right? To be so selective to really give your all on these, I always say the best way to get referrals is to give referrals, so are you using these for reciprocity? Like, hey, these cases aren't cases for you, but it's right for someone. Do you find that that's contributing from the business development standpoint?
Jack Zinda:
Yeah, for sure. We refer out a lot of cases to other law firms and we didn't start at this level where we were so selective. I mean, I remember when I first opened my firm, I settled my first case for I think $20,000 and I was like calling every day, "When's the check getting here? I got to make payroll."
But over time, we've slowly moved it up and one, you want to think about, "What type of practice do I want?" There's pros and cons to this approach. I mean, the pro is you get to work on really interesting larger cases. The con is every case is a little different and the level of attorney you have to have goes way up. If you have a lower-value case, you can train somebody to handle most things, and then you can handle the 1% edge cases. The more complicated, the bigger cases they get, every case kind of becomes an edge case, and it becomes more difficult to train people to... How do you find someone that can handle a case like this from the outside? So there's pros and cons to each approach. I just believe in life, you want to be intentional and decide, "What is the type of practice that I want and how do I get there?"
I've seen some great friends that do the opposite and make a ton of money and are super happy and some that are even more selective. I know an attorney in Kentucky that handles three cases at a time and he makes a fortune, just works on giant auto product liability cases and he wanted to be the go-to auto product liability attorney and he's done that.
Chris Dreyer:
Jack has built a nationally recognized practice through niche expertise and strategic growth. He breaks down his processes for smart expansion. Explaining how he evaluates potential new locations, Jack also shares his approach to capitalization.
Jack Zinda:
So I have a process to how we approach different markets. How it started was Texas has been a really anti-consumer state for a long time and about 10 years ago they started looking at some really scary legislation that would make it very, very difficult to be successful as a plaintiff's lawyer and that was really a wake-up call for me and I said, "Man, I got to have some ways to hedge my bets and look at other states," and that's when we started the expansion look.
Now, to break down your question to different parts, okay, how do I choose a market? I created a spreadsheet where I looked at the different things that an attorney that does personal injury law would care about on a legal side. Like, okay, do I get the full bill? What are the segregation laws? What are the minimum policy limits, the different things, bad faith laws that you might consider? Then I gave each state a ranking, one to five. Then I looked at how many attorneys were in the state for the population base. You can't really get a number on personal injury lawyers, but you can get a sense of attorneys per capita, and then I did some searching on Google AdWords to figure out, okay, how much do the cost-per-click words cost in that state to give me some sort of market competitiveness, and then I looked at some data on TV advertising. Even though we don't advertise on TV, it gave me a sense of how competitive this space was. Then I put all that in a spreadsheet and then I put in a column for, do I want to go to this place? What do I enjoy travelling there regularly? That's how we landed on our first state of Colorado because it met a lot of those elements and it's a place I want to go. It's a nice place. It's close, it's easy to get to.
Now, on the capitalization side, you've got to know your numbers first, so you need to know, "What is my average time to resolve a case? How much do I resolve a case for and how much does it cost to acquire a case?" So with that information, you can plug that in and figure out, "Okay, what's my startup capital needs, office space, marketing dollars, people on the ground? When am I going to get my first case and how long until I'm going to monetize it?" We went really light on the overhead at first. We worked in virtual offices, had one attorney, had all our staff in Austin before we started adding a lot of people to different spots.
Chris Dreyer:
I love the competitive intelligence that you did with the Google ads, the TV media buys, the market saturation, number of attorneys, and those different elements of choosing the market.
Just a few other things here. When you're talking about those basic numbers, if you're on Shark Tank, you'd be killing it, right? You have your numbers, right? A lot of attorneys listening don't have those numbers and I think it's a lot of firms, they have the bookkeeper and maybe the CPA, but they don't have, let's say... Maybe they have the controller, but maybe not the director of finance or the CMO or those people. How do you approach getting those numbers? Because those numbers tell you what you can spend to acquire and a client. So then when you're looking at, say, SEO or Google Ads or social or TV, you know your numbers, so you know what it costs to acquire a lead.
Jack Zinda:
I think the first thing you have to decide is, "Am I committed to getting this information?" I think most of the problems lawyers have in these situations is they're not really committed to doing the work necessary to make it happen or they're not willing to pay somebody enough money to make it happen. I taught myself how Excel, analytics, and QuickBooks and financials work because I wanted to grow and it was necessary. If you're very successful, you could hire someone to do a lot for you, but it's going to be very expensive 'cause there's a lot of know-how that goes into that.
The simplest, now once you've committed to say, "Okay, I want to figure out this information and I want to do it myself," the first thing you need to do is figure out what data to track and how you're going to track it and you want to start with, how do you get your business? Where does it come from? You can do this with an Excel spreadsheet, can do this with a basic CRM. You can do it with a piece of paper, but it's basically like asking each client, "Where did you hear about us?," and trying to get that as specific as possible.
Then you want to lay across how much money you spent by different marketing vertical and you want to include referrals. If you're a big referral business, you want to include the referral fee you're paying as a marketing expense on the backend 'cause that is a cost that you're having to put in. If you're only getting $10,000 per case and you're having to pay 5,000 in referral fees, that's a pretty high cost per client acquisition number. You're talking about 5,000 for 10,000 fee and so you can put it in a spreadsheet and then do a calculation. You could put it in a CRM. There's cheap ones like Zoho. You could go more high-end like Salesforce. We have a custom software program that we built that we use for our CRM and we also use HubSpot to track some more marketing data. That's one of the more pricey ones. But in the beginning, I was very conservative with how much money I spent on software, so it was a lot of spreadsheets and manual calculation.
Chris Dreyer:
That's fantastic and I think a lot of people could learn from just this section here because it's just not talked about enough. I know a lot of the Florida legislation and everything has changed over there and now they're looking at expansion in other states and so there's a lot of individuals that, hey, this is a way to hedge kind of when there's conversations are occurring. Sometimes a firm doesn't need to even open a new location to serve a new community. As of 2022, there's around 42 and a half million individuals in the US that speak Spanish as their native tongue. That's 13+% of the total population. You're very active in that community. How does Zinda Law Group tap into the Spanish-speaking market?
Jack Zinda:
It's really interesting. So my wife's from El Paso, her family's originally from Honduras, and so she speaks Spanish fluently, so do my kids, and I'm pretty close, and I never thought about it as a different market. I always thought about people that speak Spanish need lawyers and they're more comfortable talking to people that speak their own language. I think that's one you want to think about. Okay, when I'm talking about the Spanish-speaking community, know you're talking about a hundred different countries, a lot of different cultures. Every culture is different and every community is different. El Paso, for example, which has been one of our more successful markets, most people speak English, but a lot of people prefer Spanish, so it's just a comfort. You'll talk to a doctor who went to Harvard, but they just prefer speaking Spanish, and so if your law firm can do that, that adds a lot of value to it.
The reason why it's effective as a marketing tool is because most law firms are intimidated by the language barrier aspect, so the competitiveness is much lower, and so you're looking for population densities that have a high Spanish-speaking population, and then you just want to think, "Okay, what are the pain points that this community can have and how do I speak to them?" I found that 95% of them overlap with English-speaking communities, it's just in a different language, and maybe you have slightly different visuals, but it's very similar to how you approach different markets. What's been really helpful for us is we have Spanish-speaking lawyers, which to me makes a big difference in the client relationship. I find it's possible, but it's more challenging to have a relationship with a client through a translator.
Chris Dreyer:
People like people that are more similar to themselves, so that matches up to that client satisfaction, and Jack, you have this deep expertise and trucking law. Talk about this specialization and why you kind of leaned into the trucking side.
Jack Zinda:
Yeah, and it's weird, it kind of picked me. When I was an associate in my first firm, they hired me to start their PI practice, which was kind of crazy. I didn't know what I was doing. My boss didn't know what he was doing. He did family law. I was really fortunate to get a trucking wrongful death case in my first year, about 15 months into the practice, and I had to teach myself everything related to trucking. I remember reading 15 CLEs, I learned about Texas Trawler Association, met some other folks in there, and I probably had no business handling the case, and I was so stressed out about it. I forced myself to learn everything about that case and we got it resolved for policy, which was a million dollars, and the same thing happened again like six months later.
I didn't get another trucking death case for another two years. I had started my practice after that. Thought it'd be just easy, you market a little bit, just trucking cases come in left and right. But I really enjoyed it and I saw that there was so much damage being caused by trucking companies that was so much more than what a car causes and you could tell that the strategy behind a lot of them was putting inexperienced or untrained drivers on the road to save money and at the expense of the lives of other people and the companies knew about it and didn't care because they weren't being held accountable and that really got me excited to help people. They're way more interesting than a regular car right case in the fact the investigation piece, trying to figure out the evidence, you have a more difficult opponent.
So I've always enjoyed the gamesmanship piece, and we made that one of our, we call it "swim lanes." We have these different areas that we're trying to improve on as a firm, and about 10 years ago, we said, "Hey, we want to be one of the best trucking firms in the country." We put out Sticky Notes and we put in, "What do we need to do to do that? What are the things, the milestones we have to accomplish?." We laid that out for three years and I said, "Okay, we want to go to trucking seminars. We want to have trucking jury trials. We want to have more than one attorney that can do it. We can have case centers in multiple states." Then we just started checking it off and over time got more and more experience and you just kind of build on your pyramid as you go along, and before you know it, you look down, you're like six stories up.
Chris Dreyer:
I imagine participating in being part of that community, that group, it kind of lends itself and where you put attention, it kind of attracts to the firm, and that's excellent. Where could people go to get in touch with you and learn more?
Jack Zinda:
Well, one, I want to thank you, Chris, for having me on the show, and I appreciate all your kind words and questions and what success I do have is on the backs of giants, especially in the trucking space, people like Joe Fried, Mike Leizerman, all sorts of people that have done amazing things that I've learned from. Where people can find me, they can email me at, real simple, jack@zindalaw.com or go to zindalaw.com or anybody can give me a call anytime through the number on the website. I'm happy to talk to anybody either about business or cases. I love talking about this stuff and I have a blast doing it and happy to help out how I can.
Chris Dreyer:
Thanks so much to Jack for sharing his wisdom today. Let's hit the takeaways. Time for the pinpoints. Know where you want to go. There are pros and cons to high volume and bespoke service firms. Consider the level of involvement you desire in each case. Do you want an efficient system with streamlined processes or white-glove service with deeply tailored attention? Once your preferred direction is clear, build systems and structures to support it. Productized firms need refined protocols and automation to deliver results at scale. Custom models rely on talent and time to craft customized care. Defining your philosophy sets a stage to intentionally design the firm view and vision. With a clear destination, you can map out the optimal path to get there. Consider the level of involvement you want on every case.
Jack Zinda:
If you have a lower-value case, you can train somebody to handle most things, and then you can handle the 1% edge cases. The more complicated, the bigger cases they get, every case kind of becomes an edge case, and it becomes more difficult to train people to... How do you find someone that can handle a case like this from the outside? So there's pros and cons to each approach. I just believe in life, you want to be intentional and decide, "What is the type of practice that I want and how do I get there?"
Chris Dreyer:
Principles provide a roadmap to success. A clearly defined core purpose can guide decision-making at every level, from operations to client service models, these structures, and hiring. When values shape your choices, they act as a true north, orienting your firm and keeping it on track, even amidst complex decisions. Rather than getting lost in day-to-day details, let your principles light the path forward. With purpose at the helm, success naturally flows.
Jack Zinda:
There's not good or bad for purposes, but I think it's important you have one, that if you structure the right way, it's going to attract the type of people that have similar values to yourself.
Chris Dreyer:
Simple surveys can drive improvement. If you truly want to understand the client satisfaction, consider adding a survey before the closing statement. Implementing this simple feedback channel shows radical candor and action, the willingness to care personally combined with the courage to change and challenge directly. Adopting this mindset can help transform client relationships and your entire firm.
Jack Zinda:
We have a weighted question that is worded in such a way that does not seem like you're degrading the attorney or the staff and it's a one-to-five scale and there's ten different questions and they're real quick, multiple choice.
Chris Dreyer:
For more information about Jack, check out the show notes. While you're there, please hit that Follow button so you never missed an episode of Personal Injury Mastermind with me, Chris Dreyer, founder and CEO of Rankings.io. All right, everybody, thanks for hanging out. See you next time. I'm out.
