Joe Fried:
If I could build a successful practice from something as narrow as car fires, I could do it with trucks.
Chris Dreyer:
Welcome to Personal Injury Mastermind. I'm your host, Chris Dreyer, Founder and CEO of Rankings.io, the legal marketing company the best firm's hire when they want the rankings trafficking cases other law firm marketing agencies can't deliver. Each week you get insights and wisdom from some of the best in the industry. And speaking of the best, I've got some exciting news to share with you. This September at PIMCon in Scottsdale, Arizona, we'll be joined by none other than my favorite comedian, David Spade. You know him from classic movies like Tommy Boy and Joe Dirt, and of course, his unforgettable run on Saturday Night Live. It's going to be a blast having him with us. So say bye-bye to FOMO and get your ticket to PIMCon now. All right, let's dive in.
In the competitive world of personal injury law, standing out from the crowd is everything, but how do you separate yourself from the pack and become the expert in your field? Joe Fried has the answers. As one of the original pioneers of trucking litigation, Joe hardly needs an introduction. Joe quite literally built his national renowned practice by hyper specializing before it was even considered a distinct legal niche. He co-founded the Academy of Truck Accident Attorneys and was a driving force behind establishing the Board Certification and Truck Accident Law approved by the American Bar Association. But trucking didn't always have a commanding presence in personal injury law.
In the early days, haters were everywhere. With grit and determination, Joe stuck with it. He knew that hyper specialization was the way to make sweeping changes in technology safety. His journey reveals how attorneys can tap into emerging areas through total commitment by mastering every facet and building a dedicated community of warriors. Whether you want to blaze a new trail, build a support system you need, or just learn everything from Joe's secrets to dominating any specialty, he shares his insights and hard-earned wisdom. This is the story of how niching down and becoming the authority can lead to unprecedented success.
This is actually the second conversation I had with Joe. I highly recommend you listen to the first episode. You can check out the link to that conversation in the show notes. Here's legendary Joe Fried, founding partner of Fried Goldberg, on how trucking became the robust powerhouse it is today.
Joe Fried:
When I first started focusing on it, there wasn't a single billboard out there, there wasn't a single advertisement, there wasn't a single Google campaign that was focused on trucking. It's really kind of crazy to think about. And when I would tell people I'm going to be a truck crash lawyer, they would laugh at me and I literally had people in group settings laugh at me and say, "That's the craziest thing I've ever heard of. That's not going to work." And there were times when I believed them, but it has worked out and now, of course, it's probably one of the most sought after areas. And like what you described is a very robust community of people who not only are looking for those cases, but who are truly becoming and have become subject matter experts in this area, which I'm so happy and proud to see. It's what my real goal was.
Chris Dreyer:
I've had a few situations on the podcast where an individual's got a trucking case and they discovered an additional insurance policy. And due to really having the expertise in the craft, and I think many of these individuals have been in the same types of communities and groups that you guys are in, that you're all very willing to share information. I kind of want to start with just getting the cases. Last time we talked about niching and it's been incredible for you. I mean I think of a few people, honestly, when I think of trucking and your name is always mentioned in that from a peer referral, if an individual was going to try to originate their own cases, you got Witherite with 1-800-Truckwreck, you got Shunnarah with tons of billboards. Monge, I saw him on I-24 all the way to I-75 South all the way to Miami from Illinois. What do you think the best tactic you've seen for acquiring these cases? I mean just big picture, what do you see that's working to get these commercial policies?
Joe Fried:
All of those people you mentioned are all friends of mine who I personally helped try to build their trucking practices. So, the way I break it down is, you've got your catastrophic truck cases and then you've got your, what I'm going to call more run of the mill truck cases. Now your more run of the mill truck cases, as compared to run of the mill auto wreck cases, still have a much, much higher value. So they're more attractive cases for that reason. But we are dealing with different worlds from a marketing perspective. In my view, if you are looking to get a volume of trucking cases so that you're going to have lots of broken bone cases, lots of various levels of TBI cases, you're going to have lots of those kinds of things versus your death cases and your amputation cases and your very serious orthopedic life-changing, those kinds of injuries or very, very serious brain injury cases.
From my perspective, I chose, a long time ago, to be a lawyer-to-lawyer marketer. I really view that as one path, the Witherites and the Monges and Shunnarah, and I've done cases with all of those types of firms, not all, but lots of those types of firms who spend that kind of money on that sort of consumer marketing. I don't do that. You have to first choose, are you going to be a B2B kind of a marketing person? So, are you going to market to the lawyers who are marketing? Or are you going to be a B2C? And if you're going to be a B2C, first of all, I'm not an expert in that, but I would study those names that you brought up. So I think that I would study people like you. You got to make sure the people in your communities know what you're looking for, if that makes sense. And I think it's oftentimes overlooked.
Chris Dreyer:
I think David Craig does a good job of that with his positioning. In Miami, you got Amanda Demanda who's stopping a truck with the heel. You got Gordon McKernan, individual standing on trucks. You got Adler yelling at trucks. You got Darryl Isaacs talking about trucking. And then you're on my podcast, we're here talking B2B, you got the peers listening. We're talking about trucking. I'm coming to you with your expertise. Is that what you see on the difference between the B2B to the B2C?
Joe Fried:
It is. People say it takes so much money to do business to consumer, lawyer to consumer marketing. You're going to be competing with all these names that you've thrown out there, and hundreds more, thousands more. And the amount of money that pours in is overwhelming. But then you look at me, I mean I spent eight figures last year easily on referral checks to a lot of those kind of people who are spending their money marketing. I think that's the division point. I think you're either the kind of lawyer who is trying to get business indirectly, or you're the kind of lawyer who is trying to attract referrals from other lawyers. And then there's a lot of people who are hybrid who are trying to do some of both with varying degrees of success. Because I think one of the things that we need to recognize is the world's not really truly homogeneous here.
I mean I'm a national player and I've done cases in 40 some odd states, and that's my life. I'm on a lots of airplanes, lots of Zoom calls, all those kind of things. Most lawyers don't do that. Most lawyers have a community that is their local area that they're trying to stay within. That's where they live, that's where they do their business, that's what they want to attract business from. And by the way, we talked last time about, when you niche down, one of the things that happens as you niche your practice down in terms of practice area is you tend to have to let the geography grow because there's not as many of those kinds of cases. So that's a tendency. It's not always true, but that's a tendency.
I'd still try to look for some edge that makes me different. I also, if I'm really going to be a truck crash expert, I also want to do things regularly to demonstrate to the world that that's not just a market employee. That's the real deal. Whether you're a lawyer to consumer or lawyer to lawyer, I still believe one of the best marketing things is go try a couple of cases because there's just no substitute for that.
Chris Dreyer:
The vast majority of cases never go to trial. Upward of 95% of all cases are settled. As Joe points out, taking a case to trial is an opportunity for skilled attorneys to maximize its value. He shares how by taking a case to trial, he's able to add millions of dollars to the case value.
Joe Fried:
If you have a catastrophic case and they're telling you there's X amount in coverage and your case is worth exponentially more than that, before you say yes, give me a chance. And what I'll do is you get to keep all the fee on whatever the heck you got, and I'll take my fee on whatever else I can find, if I can find something. And so it's a zero loss proposition to the lawyer. There have been times when I've found another million. There's been times when I've found 150 million. I mean I remember one time finding the chassis, not even a trailer, but a chassis, just the frame that a container would get clipped onto to be taken down the road, that that chassis was part of an interchange agreement that had $150 million in additional coverage on it. So a case that was catastrophic, that involved multiple fatalities and injuries, that was worth a lot, a lot of money, in other hands, it would've been resolved for the $1 million policy and that would've been it.
I had never really contemplated that the chassis could really be considered a separate commercial motor vehicle and has insurance of its own. And turns out that all these parts, the trailer, each trailer, each chassis, each dolly that connects all of them, they all may have coverages. So it's an important way to look. And then of course, there's all these players in the trucking industry that go beyond the driver and the motor carrier. You've got all these other players in the transportation cycle that, depending on the fact, may have some liability and that's the other place we look for coverage beyond the vehicles.
Chris Dreyer:
So many people, when you hear trucking, they immediately think 18 wheeler. But now we have commercial vans with all the Amazon deliveries, we've got garbage trucks, RVs. Do you think there's an opportunity to drill down even further?
Joe Fried:
The answer is, of course, the answer is yes. And I'm smiling because I love the question. My dad always used to say that things that look simple become more and more complex. You put them under a microscope and the more you look at them, the more you see the complexity in that, right? We used to draw PI as the world and say, "Well, we've niched down. We're PI lawyers. We're not generalists. We're just PI lawyers." And we would say, "We're specialists." And then you'd say, "Okay, well now I'm not just a PI lawyer. I'm a med mal lawyer. Well, now I'm not just a med mal lawyer, I'm actually just a birth trauma lawyer." And we get more and more and more specific. So, of course, the answer to that is true in trucks. You could become, and there are people right now, for instance, who have really spent a tremendous amount of time focusing on brokers.
I believe that right now, as you have what I'm calling the Amazon-ization of the world, Amazon is changing the trucking world, and not only the 18 wheeler trucking world, but those smaller commercial motor vehicles that were talked about, the vans, the delivery services, and all of the logistics and how it all works. As we have new technologies emerging, specialty technologies having to do with monitoring drivers, with stopping vehicles from getting into collisions. As we have specialty electronic logging devices, as we have all of these new systems, new logistics systems, new ways of doing business, new relationships, you could pick any one of those and you could become the authority on telematics, the authority on Amazon, the authority on broker, the authority on any of these things. And I promise you, if you were willing to have your geography be big enough, you could develop an amazingly successful practice.
When I focused down on trucks, they would send trucks because they would see, okay, this person went through, and I did, this isn't BS. When I committed to being a truck lawyer, I committed to knowing more about this industry than any other PI lawyer. That involved truck driving school. It involved really studying the regulations at a level that was very significant. It involved studying the industry, the technologies, all of these parts and pieces as deeply as I could to understand them. And continuing to do that, I mean I'm 20 years into this, and I still study every day everything that's coming out.
So I know I've gone off on a tangent here, but I encourage people, people call me every week, multiple people a week, call me to say, "I want to be a truck crash lawyer." And I usually say, "Why?" And some of them say, "Because you make a lot of money." And I go, "That's the wrong reason. It's not bad. I get it. You can, but it's got to be a passion for some other reason." And what I then usually do is say, "You can do it and be a generalist within trucking." But this is actually what I'm recommending to them now is, go study something. Go learn everything there is to know about trucking-specific accident reconstruction. You could build a whole practice around that, around just the telematics piece where you could bring a level of expertise that nobody else is doing right now. So, I encourage that. It's part of the niche down thing that you and I both are big proponents of.
Chris Dreyer:
That piece there, it made me think of Naval Ravikant, he gives this example of these individuals that spend tons of money to find this treasure in the ocean. But then once those individuals identify, well, they have to get the expert scuba diver. This is the only person that can salvage that gold. So, it's a different type of luck, and it's positioning yourself there. Certain states, when I look at statistics, on your website you've got an accident statistics page and you've got incredible resources there. You see states like Texas, California, and Florida, of course, right? I mean the population is significantly larger. What if you're in one of those low population states and you want to be the trucking? I guess your advice is, you got to widen out your geography, and maybe it's just a component of your business and maybe not a specialty.
Joe Fried:
I have a number of friends who are phenomenal lawyers and they live in places like Wisconsin, and I'm picking on Wisconsin because probably nobody from Wisconsin will listen to this. All three lawyers are probably busy doing other things. I'm teasing. Please don't yell at me, Wisconsin. But the truth of the matter is, I mean a couple things. Number one, when I decided to become a truck crash lawyer, I never thought, and it never has been part of my goal to be a volume trucking lawyer. I don't want to have hundreds of truck crash cases. The reality is that you can do really, really well for yourself with just a few of the right truck crash cases. The reality of the world is there's very few places that don't have at least some truck crash cases that are serious every year. I wish it wasn't true, but it's true.
So, I think one of the things is to set a mentality of, what does it mean to me? How am I going to define what it is that I'm going to be? Because if I live in Timbukthree, and Timbukthree is a relatively isolated community, but everybody knows me in Timbukthree and I already have credibility in Timbukthree, I still think it's a very worthwhile cause if I go through the process of becoming an expert in truck crashes and be a part of the community of other lawyers around the country who are, so that they know, if they ever get a truck crash case, here's the thing that happens. A truck crash case can happen in Timbukone, and the better venue for that might be Timbukthree. So the other lawyers who handle truck crash cases still need to know about you in Timbukthree.
But then you can also build your community and say, "I don't need 100 cases. I'm going to be fine if I have four truck crash cases a year and I can do very, very well, I'm going to focus on those." So I think you do have to make a decision on what kind of lawyer you're going to be. And when you're marketing, I know you talk a lot about brand and you talk a lot about planning and all these kind of things, one of the key things that has to happen, I believe, and I think you do too, that the more clarity you define yourself as, the more time you spend and really say, "This is what I want my life to look like in terms of my practice mix and this is the environment that I'm going to work in. These are the kind of people I'm going to be around." The more time you spend really defining that with specificity, the more likely it is going to come true.
And I'm a huge believer in that. People think I'm weird when I say it, but I've seen it over and over again. Shut your eyes and say, "I'm going to be, one year from now, or six months from now, I'm going to have four truck crash cases largely in my community. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom." And I think it happens, and I know that's weird for me to say it, but I've seen it happen over and over again to myself and to other people.
Chris Dreyer:
Different cases need different considerations. For the auto rec lawyers listening, I wanted to know, what should they do if a trucking case comes in the door?
Joe Fried:
Let's not pretend that all trucking cases are homogeneous, right? Let's say, there's some cases where my hope is you would look at it and say, "This is a catastrophic, multi gazillion dollar case. In the right hands, if there's coverage, if there's all these other things, if everything lines up, this is one I probably ought not do on my own." And I don't say that lightly. I'm not saying call me, but there's lots of great lawyers out there. I do think we should know where our limitations are. And if you're going to do that, you don't want to be penny wise and pound foolish and wait too long to make that decision because people who know this area and who have the resources to spend, they're going to start spending a lot of money and utilizing resources right away to start to secure the evidence at a very sophisticated level.
But let's say it's a case that you may be holding onto in house and you're not going to go and employ somebody else, then I think that the key things in these cases, the first thing that's most important to do is get a spoliation letter out or a preservation of evidence letter out. You go to my lawyer portal, you can download one from there. The idea is to put everybody on notice, the trucking company or companies, on notice to preserve everything that can be preserved so that, if they start playing games with the evidence, you at least have a letter saying, "I put you on notice not to destroy anything and you did it anyway." And in many states, that gives rise to various kinds of sanctions, either a presumption or something along those lines.
It also very quickly sends a message to the other side that you're not just the average bearer, you kind of know what you're looking at because if the letter is a sophisticated letter, telling them to preserve things, you're making reference to the federal regulations and you're making reference to these kind of things, you're sending a message. Make sense? So then beyond that, you really want to have a plan. And actually, we have a couple of checklists on our portal for this purpose of things that you want to do. So you send the spoliation letter out, and then you do start the investigative process because you got to understand that the trucking companies, by default, they get notification of the wreck from the truck itself. Even if the driver doesn't call in, they know their truck's been in a wreck, and if it's a significant wreck where there's serious injuries, that starts a very well-oiled machine at that point because they're in the asset preservation business at that point, right?
And it's not necessarily about discovering the truth, it's about discovering, how can they best protect themselves? So you have to counter that with your own plan that involves dealing with the vehicles, the scene and witnesses, and preserving and getting that evidence quickly. That's the biggest thing that needs to be done right away. And then of course, we could break that down and say, "In what ways and what things are you after and looking for?" And these days, there's so much technology that's out there, it's a different world than it was when I started practicing law 30 years ago. I had a case, just to tell you this real quickly. I had a case very recently, a year ago, a gentleman was hit in a crosswalk at 5:00 in the morning by a truck, run over, left for dead basically, the truck drives off. Three law firms turn the case down because they can't figure out who the trucking company is and what happened, they just get a call saying, "This guy has catastrophic injuries."
And all the sophisticated everything in the world, we couldn't even really get any of that stuff started. We got that case done by literally going old school. We went down to the area, we drove the area, we found a business that looked like it had a camera that might be pointing in that general direction. It was about a third of a mile away from where it happened. But we figured, well, maybe it picked up, it was 5:00 in the morning, there shouldn't be that much truck traffic. We begged, borrowed, and pled, got the video. And sure enough, there were only two trucks that went by.
I sat there with another one of my guys, and we literally hunted through logos of trucking companies and found the closest match that we could. We had, with the help of some law enforcement people that contacted the trucking company, confirmed that there had been a truck in that general area. This is now a week after the incident. We got them to stop that truck. Law enforcement, six or seven states away, went and met with that truck driver and found blood splatter on the wheel well.
Chris Dreyer:
Unreal.
Joe Fried:
That case went from being one that could not be brought to one that was obviously they paid everything they had. Multimillion dollar, 20-something million dollar result only because that's what the coverage was. But that's old school, and sometimes that's what it takes. It takes a tenacity to just go after what you need to go after.
Chris Dreyer:
That's incredible. And it sounds like you're countering a different level of speed, you said quickly, but they get notified immediately if it's a certain amount of collision, the truck automatically gets notified before you may even get the case or the call. Is speed their main defense mechanism like, "Hey, let's get out in front of this?" What's the common defense for a trucking case? They know they're at fault. What's the common thing that you run up against that they try to use for defense? Because these are so large that they've got the processes and playbook of, here's how to limit our damages.
Joe Fried:
Yeah, I mean, look, and they use all of those. They're very sophisticated, and it depends on the circumstances, it depends on the lawyer, it depends on the company. Some companies, they do it, what I think is, the right way. They know they've got a problem. They try to reach out to the family early and they try to come in and do something that is "the right thing" to try to take care of the family members. You can say they're doing that altruistically, or you can say they're doing that to save money. And depending on who it is, I'd tell you what my thought is on it. But then there are the companies that do start to play games.
They'll start to divest themselves of the truck gets fixed very quickly, the truck is moved from the scene, even though the company knows that it has telematics, that it has a black box. The way the black boxes on trucks work is there's something called the last stop record. So when the truck stops, the system takes a snapshot, depending on what make, model, year the truck is, but let's just say for the last minute or so, or two minutes, whatever, depending again on the truck manufacturer, takes a snapshot of what the speeds were, what the braking was, and other information about the truck. And it's just a snapshot. But as soon as that truck starts to move and gets to, again, depending on who the company is, let's say by five miles an hour, moves five miles an hour, that last stop record disappears, it can never be retrieved.
And then when it stops again, a new stop record happens. So imagine the gamesmanship that might be played, even with somebody coming to the scene and telling an unsophisticated police officer, "Hey, would you like for me to move the truck off of the roadway here over onto the sign." As soon as it moves, the last stop record's gone. And police officers are trained, and you know I'm a former police officer, we're not experts in trucks. We're trained to clear the roadway as quickly as we can.
So, yes, thank you for sending somebody who can move this vehicle off from here, dot, dot, dot. There's all kinds of gamesmanship. But these days, I mean there's a very, very sophisticated plaintiff's bar. I've personally been one of the leading forces of training people around the country on how to do these cases. I knew early on that if I truly wanted to affect highway safety, I wasn't going to be able to do it alone. There's just not enough of me to do that. So I needed to build an army of lawyers who knew how to handle these cases and who could bring the industry to a point where they could change their belief from, safety is something we have to do because we're required to comply with rules to, safety is truly good business. And we have to do that, unfortunately, one case at a time.
But we've made a difference. And I'm joined by a lot of other people who are warriors in that movement. AJ has the... Initially, AJ had the trucking litigation group. Some of us who were in leadership of that, primarily Michael Leizerman and I formed the Academy because we wanted an organization that was specifically trucking and didn't have to worry about nursing home cases and bad faith cases and all these other... We wanted just a community around that area. And so, that was the purpose of building ATAA. And now ATAA has about 1,500 members, which is crazy. It's as big an organization as most state trial lawyers' organizations, and it's a phenomenal group of tight-knit folks with resources. We share amazing listserv. It's a game changer and it's affected in a positive way highway safety and specifically in the trucking area. So I'm really super proud of it.
Chris Dreyer:
That's phenomenal. That's incredible, Joe. And you've made a real impact.
Joe Fried:
By the way, it's totally nonprofit. Nobody makes any money on the Academy of Truck Accident Attorneys, in case anybody ever wants to know.
Chris Dreyer:
Got it. Got it. And then, I had Steve Gursten on, and I was looking at his website. I believe I saw he was the only board certified one in Michigan. So, what's that distinction? What's that involvement?
Joe Fried:
Yeah, let me tell you. Thanks for asking, first of all, and being interested in it. So one of the things we wanted to do at the Academy is we wanted, frankly, I mean it's a great talk from a marketing perspective. We wanted there to be a way to truly have a distinction between lawyers who have the best marketing from lawyers who actually have the best skillset to handle a case. And those aren't necessarily the same things. A lot of times they're not the same things. And so we first created a way for lawyers who were willing to put themselves through a vetting process that was essentially a third party vetting process. We wanted that piece done. And while we were doing that, we then went through an arduous process with the American Bar Association to get them to accept that truck crash law actually is a legitimate specialty onto itself.
And so now there is an ABA recognized board certification through the NBTA, National Board of Trial Advocacy, which is a third-party system. They vet the lawyers. So there's a skillset requirement, there's an experience requirement, and then there's a six-hour bar exam, is very specific to truck crash cases, covers everything from investigation all the way through the trial of the cases. And if you are board certified, then I can represent to the world that you have a sophistication level, both experience proven in the world, and a knowledge base that has been tested that's pretty sophisticated. And so that's what it is. We're up to about a hundred and something board certified lawyers across the country. That was one of my missions when I started the academy. It was a crazy dream because, again, nobody thought it could be done, but it's done and it's real. So the Academy does a lot to advance and support the idea of being board certified.
Chris Dreyer:
That's incredible. And those doubters, those that, you said, were laughing back in the day, are no longer laughing. They see the specialty and what it's become.
Joe Fried:
I have thought back on those times a lot. I recognize that it took some level of either stupidity or something, gumption, to stand in that breach for that time. But I had spent a decade before I got into trucking, I spent doing nothing but post collision fire cases. So think about how niche that is, and that's all I did for a decade. Think the Pinto case. That's all I did, and that's what I built a national practice around, initially. I knew, if I could build a successful practice from something as narrow as car fires, I could do it with trucks. So I had the benefit of having that life experience in niching down before I went in that direction.
Chris Dreyer:
Incredible, Joe. Incredible. This has been amazing. This has been very valuable for the audience. Final question. Where can those listening that want to connect with you learn more? How can they get in touch?
Joe Fried:
Well, the easy way to get me, I'm pretty transparent. I'm kind of all over the place. I give out my cell phone number. It's (404) 429-6677. Our website is just friedgoldberg.com. If I can help anybody who is looking at, you're trying to figure out how to niche down, you're trying to figure out whether it's trucking or something else, I feel so ridiculously blessed in the life that I've been able to have through this process that if I can ever be of help to anybody else who is trying to figure this out, or maybe you're trying to re-figure it out, like you've been in one path and life's not playing the way you wanted it to play, and you're burnt out and you wonder if there's another way. You'll find a willing ear here. And I say it and I'll say it again, you help me as much as I may help you, whenever I do something like that. So I welcome the opportunity to do it for real.
Chris Dreyer:
All right, y'all, let's go over the pinpoints. A recap of the key takeaways from today's episode. It's not too late to niche down. As industries evolve, there are more opportunities for hyper specialization. Joe made an entire career out of just car fires for a decade before niching into truck accident cases. But if you decide to hyper specialize, you need to fully commit to being the expert in that particular niche. As you grow, you'll likely need to expand your geographic reach beyond your local area.
Joe Fried:
Amazon is changing the trucking world, and not only the 18 wheeler trucking world, but those smaller commercial motor vehicles that were talked about, the vans, the delivery services, and all of the logistics and how it all works. As we have new technologies emerging, sort of specialty technologies having to do with monitoring drivers, with stopping vehicles from getting into collisions, as we have specialty electronic logging devices, as we have all of these new systems, new logistics systems, new ways of doing business, new relationships, you could pick any one of those and you could become the authority.
Chris Dreyer:
Blaze your own trail. The critics laughed when Joe was building the foundation for a trucking-only practice. Today, the niche he started is one of the most sought after in the nation. He even started the Academy of Truck Accident Attorneys and has more members statewide than other national trial groups. When you stick to the guns and become the authority on a niche, it pays big. Boldly charting your own niche path, no matter how unconventional, allows you to uncover lucrative angles your competitors miss, like Joe's discovery of $150 million in hidden insurance coverage on a single case.
Joe Fried:
It's really kind of crazy to think about. And when I would tell people I'm going to be a truck crash lawyer, they would laugh at me, and I literally had people laugh at me in group settings and say, "That's the craziest thing I've ever heard of. That's not going to work." And there were times when I believed them, but it has worked out and now, of course, it's probably one of the most sought after areas. And it's, like what you described, is a very robust community of people who not only are looking for those cases, but who are truly becoming and have become subject matter experts in this area.
Chris Dreyer:
Build a community you need. Joe wanted to make sweeping changes on a national level. He knew that he could not do it alone. Building community around trucking accent cases had multiple advantages, from resources like listserv for knowledge sharing to continuing education and board certification, they were able to do advanced trucking safety at a massive scale all while legitimizing what was once a non-existent field.
Joe Fried:
I knew early on that if I truly wanted to affect highway safety, I wasn't going to be able to do it alone. There's just not enough of me to do that. So I needed to build an army of lawyers who knew how to handle these cases and who could bring the industry to a point where they could change their belief.
Chris Dreyer:
For more information about Joe, check out the show notes. Before you go, do me a solid and smash that follow button to subscribe. I'd sincerely appreciate it and you won't want to miss out on the next 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.
