John Demas:
We put the client’s best interest first, no exception. If you live by those words, then the notion of “Oh, I have to settle cases because I need the money to pay my cash flow,” or if I need the cash flow to pay my expenses, it goes out the window.
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 firms hire when they want the rankings, traffic, and cases other law firm marketing agencies can’t deliver On this show I’ve been fortunate enough to learn from some of the best minds in PI, and now we’re bringing them together in one place at the first ever PIM conference. PIMCon is coming to Scottsdale this September. We’re laser-focused on one thing: getting more leads. And I’m not talking about just any leads, but quality leads that actually turn into cases. That’s it. That’s our entire focus. It’s not just theory. We’re talking about actionable strategies that have been tried and tested by the best in the business. If you’re looking to conquer personal injury marketing and go from good to GOAT, PIMCon is where you need to be.
We’ve gathered the top PI marketing experts to share their secrets, and believe me, this is cutting-edge stuff you won’t find anywhere else. Don’t miss out on another potential client. Grab your ticket to PIMCon now and get ready to supercharge your practice. Your future self will thank you. Go to pimcon.org. All right, let’s dive in. My guest today, John Demas, one of California’s top plaintiff attorneys with over 25 years of experience,John’s track record lives up to his core values. Without exception, put the client first. John’s not your average settle and run lawyer. We’re talking multimillion-dollar verdicts. Including a $10.5 million jury award, the largest ever in Sacramento County for a bicycle collision.
What sets John apart? While many attorneys prioritize quick settlements, he’s known for his readiness to step into the courtroom.This approach has not only won him cases, but also the respect of his peers. He’s been named among the top 100 attorneys for northern California and holds the coveted spot in the American Board of Trial Advocates. In this episode, John shares his insights on building a practice that consistently handles high value, complex cases, maintaining a client-focused approach while scaling a successful firm, leveraging digital strategies including smart domain choices to stand out in a crowded market. Here’s John Demas, founder at Demas LawGroup.
John Demas:
I’m a Greek immigrant. I was actually born in Greece. My parents are Greeks that immigrated here with really no education, and one of the things they stressed is obviously get educated, but they wanted me to get into a profession that I can actually work in Greece, where I can take, in the event that I wanted to move over there and work. So they were pushing me to go to dental school. And then I went to college and took organic chemistry and quickly realized that dental school was not in my future. And then I took a constitutional law class and fell in love with that. Had a mentor who was a lawyer and a professor at my college, and then I went off to law school.
Chris Dreyer:
That’s amazing, amazing. Did you know that personal injury law was it? Tell me about that background. Did you consider criminal defense, other areas? Tell me about that.
John Demas:
When I got out of law school, I went to work for a firm, a small firm here in town, an old school general practice firm, and I was doing a lot of work for one of our clients, which was a church. And so I did that for about a year and then got laid off. But at that firm there was one lawyer who was doing PI work. And I didn’t really get an opportunity to work on a lot of plaintiff’s cases. I was doing mostly the defense work for the church, but planted a seed that this is an area that I wanted to get into for sure. And then less than a year out of law school, I opened up my practice on my own with a partner. Actually, we shared an office at an executive suite building, paid $500 a month, two lawyers in one office, and just said, “Hey, we’re open for business.” We took pretty much everything that we could, Chris, for a couple of years, frankly.
Chris Dreyer:
What was your nice like, “Oh, this is a good case.This gives us a little ammo for the advertising”?
John Demas:
I remember we had our first $100,000 case that we settled. We went and celebrated with a steak dinner because it was a $33,000 fee, and we could never imagine that we would make that kind of money on one case. But we quickly saw that, both of us, that this was the direction that we wanted to go for sure.
Chris Dreyer:
Has the firm always been a very trial-and-error firm? You had the highest settlement amount for the bicycle accident in Sacramento, over $10 million, and you’ve had some big numbers. Has it been that focus out of the gate, or has it evolved over time?
John Demas:
Well, it’s definitely evolved. So my story really started, as I indicated, with a partner, and then I had another partner for about 15 or so years. I decided to open up my current firm where I’m the principal owner a little over 10 years ago. And over the course of the years, obviously my practice really evolved to become a real trial attorney. That’s probably 15+ or so years ago, I made a dedicated decision to really become the best trial attorney that I could be. And I knew that if I started trying cases, that could only help my practice. So yeah, since I started my own firm a little over 10 years ago, I started with one lawyer, and now we’re up to seven lawyers currently.
Chris Dreyer:
I want to dig more into some of the trial things and your thoughts on it, because you really stand out and I love the educational content you’re putting out on the web. It looks like from the outside, it looks like a lot of your marketing is on the digital side, the digital marketing side. What’s your approach and just thoughts on marketing to originate cases?
John Demas:
I’m going to focus just on the last 10 or 12 years since I’ve had my own practice. Has really been to get the best possible results that we can on our cases, and really do the work on our cases and let that become the engine of our growth. So when you start with, what’s in the best interest of the client and how can we get the best possible result for that particular client, in that case, if that means we settle the case, then we settle. If it means we’ve got to go to trial, then we’ve got to go to trial. Then you know that on every individual case you’re doing the best that you can. From there, you build on: “Okay, how can I now grow my business model?”Essentially, knowing and understanding that nothing’s more important than our client’s best interest.
From there we have, because we, I think, are frankly one of the few firms that does that, that really pushes to get the best result that we can, then I can approach other lawyers, which I’ve done, other local attorneys, other attorneys around the state, and say, “Hey, we can help you with some cases.” So I do get a lot of referrals from other lawyers that associate us with to try to get those results, as I indicated. Our client sare a huge source of referrals, because again, if we always prioritize the clients, and one of the things too, Chris, that I think a lot of PI attorneys have to understand is that clients don’t really have a point of reference on whether that result that you got on their case was necessarily a great result. They don’t know that. You can say, “Hey, I got you a half a million dollar settlement,” and they might be happy with the number, they might be pleased with the settlement, but do they have a point of reference that it’s a great settlement?
Not necessarily. They don’t really know. So you tell them it’s a great settlement. Obviously, you develop a trust and they can appreciate that you’re being honest with them, but they don’t really know. So what that means then from a referral standpoint is, the number that you get them in that particular case doesn’t mean that that particular client is the one who’s going to be a good referral source. It’s the client that has that relationship with you, that trust with you, that experience with the office, because the lawyer can’t do everything and won’t always be the point of contact. They have to have that experience and the relationship with your staff and with everybody in the office so they can then become an ambassador and refer cases. Some of the best referrals we’ve gotten from our clients come from clients who have not had very large cases. Cases where we’ve gotten tremendous results or great verdicts,that client, that doesn’t mean that client is necessarily going to be a great referral source.
Chris Dreyer:
A domain name strategy is a crucial aspect of digital marketing that many attorneys overlook. John’s firm has a powerful domain name, and I wanted to know the story behind it. John explains the strategic thinking that went into this digital asset.
John Demas:
When we first got going in the PI direction, originally we started as advertising in the Yellow Pages, that’s how long I’ve been doing this. But then, as things evolved, I saw quickly that the Yellow Pages were a dinosaur and dying. So yeah, we picked up that domain very early on.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah, wonderful, wonderful. And I think ConsultWebs is doing great with your SEO. You’re ranking number one for “Sacramento bicycle accident lawyer.” I was like, “Well, you got this fantastic bicycle accident result. I wonder if that case was originated from Google.” A couple of things, too, when you think of it, so you said the peer referrals and the client referrals. It’s interesting, because most people think of just the front end, just marketing to prospective. But you’re marketing to the existing and former very effectively.
John Demas:
Yeah. To touch on that, Chris, too, going back to the client experience, one of the things that we do is we’re not a high-volume shop. We don’t advertise on billboards or TV, so that’s not my model. Though we have big size firm for Sacramento, we actually have more lawyers here in my firm than most of the heavy advertisers because the work that we do tends to be more litigation oriented and needs more attorney horsepower. But getting back to this issue with the client experience, that’s really what we call it, a client experience. And because we don’t have to take a lot of cases and our model is small, or our model is such that we can be really selective with the cases that we take, we try to really focus on the client experience from their perspective, from the time they call to the end.
So when a client calls, and we filter that call because we only take probably two or three cases a week, but when we filter that call, we’re going to, and it’s a call that looks like we want, we’re going to get that client on with a lawyer as soon as they call, right away. So from the beginning, we’re setting that stage where the lawyer has to be involved, and the client is experiencing something different. Because most people have, most firms have large intake-type departments, and they don’t even talk to a lawyer. And we get a lot of cases from people who fire their lawyers because they’ve never talked to them, or once in a while, they might get a call from them. So it’s particularly important for that client experience, the entire interaction with the office, for referrals, as you indicated, but really, also as you pointed out, for reviews. Because I do think that those reviews are a stamp from real clients that they’ve experienced, hopefully everything that we’re hoping for them to experience, which is great representation, aggressive representation with tremendous service.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah, and I would say that’s significantly different from the large volume, where you may have a case manager that has literally 200clients, you just can’t go deep other than what the CRM’s telling you to give them as an update and just have a real relationship. There’s a lot of different models. There’s the front-end model that’s basically a marketing company that’s sending out referrals. You’ve got the large volume settlement, you’ve got the expert litigators like yourself that really value customer service. Could you explain to me, like for intake, sometimes you have this whole dedicated full intake and intake professionals. How does your intake work, and how do you decide which cases to pick, and how do you not waste and still monetize maybe the lower value cases?
John Demas:
Yeah, so great question, and that’s a constant challenge.Because you want to sign up enough cases where, we know out of the gate that some cases or a good chunk of cases should and will settle pre-lit. And so what we’re really trying to do is filter the beginning, and then more importantly, within 30 days of the signup for us on what happens to that case. So we have motto of, “The right lawyer on the right case.” So we have very experienced litigators and some not so much, and we have people that can handle pre-lit cases with attorney supervision, and we have lawyers that only handle very few cases in litigation. So we do settle cases in pre-lit, but what we try to do is really focus on that first 30 days and find out as much as we can in that first 30 days to see where that case is going to land.
Is it going to land with myself? Is it going to land with one of my more senior litigation attorneys? So we dig into the police report, we dig into policy limit searches, we dig into the medical symptoms, depending on where it is and where they are in their treatment. And really try to, at that point, in that 30-day mark, as best we can, say, “Okay, this case is likely to be one that there’s a chance it could settle pre-lit, depending on the limits.” Or, “We’re just going to file on this right away,” within that 30-day time period.
Chris Dreyer:
How do you know when the insurance company is going to go to bat and fight you? Are there signs? It’s like, “This one they’re probably going to settle just because, look, it’s clear this is a loser for them”? Or how do you make those decisions? Because obviously cash flow is implicated here in terms of when you’re going to get money and how much you’re going to invest.
John Demas:
Yeah, so what we’re looking at obviously is liability and the damages and insurance, those three, the three-legged stool. And then making an educated, essentially we’re looking at every single case and saying, based on the experience that we have, in which direction this thing is likely to go.You brought something up that I think is very important, this whole notion of cash flow and wanting and needing to settle cases. And I think just from a philosophical standpoint, I’m going to get back to our mission statement, which is, we put the client’s best interest first, no exception. If you live by those words, then the notion of “Oh, I have to settle cases because I need the money to pay my cash flow,” or if I need the cash flow to pay my expenses,it goes out the window.
Chris Dreyer:
Wow, that’s a killer statement. They’re a customer, they’re not a client, they’re a thing, they’re a widget. Versus you, you’re a client.
John Demas:
Yeah, these are real people who are going through some traumatic, bad events. Something bad happened to them when they call us. And as PI attorneys, I think we lose sight of the fact that these are individuals who are suffering through something that happened to them by no choice of their own, most of the time. Usually they’re not at fault. And we’re now entrusted to do the best that we can for them. And then we have lawyers who say, “Well, I’ve got to settle their case because we’ve got all this overhead that we have to pay.” It’s just, there’s competing interests here, right? And once you take that off of the table, it really frees you, and that’s what it’s done for us. And once you take that pressure off, because we have had the success with the verdicts that we’ve had and the settlements, frankly, but mostly the verdicts, because verdicts do drive settlements, and we can talk about that.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah, no, I wanted to dig into that, because your model is, when they’re looking at the colossus data, your averages are going to be way higher, and your numbers. So have you seen a real impact of that from the start?
John Demas:
Oh, huge, huge. And frankly, some younger lawyers, I think some get that, and I’ve seen some young, hungry, aggressive attorneys that want to try cases, and I think that’s great because that’s what I did. Look, I lost my first three trials, and I said, “That’s okay, because I’m just going to keep trying cases until I get that $10 million verdict,” which I got. What I’ve noticed, it’s not just one; you have to get a lot more than that, obviously. But what I’ve seen is especially in the last, I’d say five to 10years or so, the last few years for sure, verdicts have legs, verdicts last.But you’ve got to keep getting in there and banging away, because I know just based on the settlements that we get on our cases, from hearing the numbers from other lawyers, from listening to mediators about what our cases settle for and what other attorneys’ cases settle for, I know we’re getting top dollar on our cases. I know for a fact.
Chris Dreyer:
That’s incredible, and I’ve always wondered that. Because if you’re taking this, you’re trying to do a bunch of cases, you’re going to have the low numbers mixed in with the high, and it’s going to paint a different picture. And I’ve wondered that just due to the setup. Since your case selection criteria is a little bit higher and you’re looking at these and you’re more selective, do the partners that you pick, without naming the partners or whoever they are, take the low volume and then do they reciprocate and then bring you in on co-counsel for some of the big ones? Like,”Hey, we need to litigate this”? Is that the setup that you have,mutually beneficial?
John Demas:
Exactly. So we do refer out probably 95% of the intakes that we screen, and with the understanding that if one of those cases that we referred out to our referring group of lawyers somehow turns into a good case or a better case, that referring attorney then will bring us back in to litigate the case and push it, absolutely.
Chris Dreyer:
Wonderful, wonderful. One case, I was just wondering if you could tell that, just give me the case study, the story on that seven-figure, or actually eight-figure bicycle accident case. Just start tofinish, how did you get it? Just give me the 80/20. On this case, I would just love to hear that story. I find these very interesting.
John Demas:
Yeah, yeah. So that was a case that was referred, actually, by a former client, a great couple that was riding a tandem bike on the bike trail. We have a really long bike trail here that abuts the Sacramento River, very popular trail for cyclists and joggers. And our couple, our clients, were on a tandem bike. And they were on the bike trail in the evening, and as they approached a section of the bike trail, there was a young couple on a date, and the couple was walking in the middle of the bike trail. And the bike trail has signs that say you’re supposed to walk to see the bicycles coming at you, but this couple was walking in the middle. They were a 17-year-old and a 16-year-old girl, minors at the time. Our clients were coming up behind them, and they rang the bell on their tandem bike, and the couple split open to essentially allow the bike to go through.
And as the bike was going through, the girl from one side crossed right in front of them, and the bicyclists hit the girl, went down, and the woman, our client, in the back of the tandem bike, had a head injury, a traumatic brain injury. So we sued the two young people. Challenging case,very, very tough case. The homeowner’s policy of the girl tendered their policy. It was like $300,000, not a ton, but the homeowner’s policy of the boy who, frankly, the argument was, he didn’t do anything wrong because he was actually walking where he should have been, and he had no liability.
And so we sued them both under the theory that the young boy was the one who took this girl there. So he knew the bike trail, he knew the rules, he knew they shouldn’t have been walking where they were walking. He’s the one who called her over at the last second because she went on the wrong side of the bike trail. So we really tried to put all the liability on him, because the insurance company hadn’t offered us any money, even though we made policy limits demand to settle the case. And yeah, the case went to trial, they found fault on both of them, the majority on the girl, as they should have, but we’d already essentially accepted the policy limits from the girl, and then ended up getting a good chunk of fault assigned to the guy, collected a significant amount well, well above the policy limits.
Chris Dreyer:
Thank you for sharing that. That’s super interesting.
John Demas:
Tough case. Tough case.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah, tough case, wonderful story on litigating that. Yeah, so it’s just interesting, so many different models. The counter that I have said on this podcast is, if you’re doing the digital game and you’re trying to get Google reviews and play the local services ads game, the downside of a litigating firm is you just don’t have as many cases. You don’t have as many swings to get those reviews, but in your case, I guess the rebuttal to that is, yeah, but if you give them superior client service, then maybe instead of getting one out of 10, you get nine out of 10 to leave you a review.
John Demas:
And look, we don’t have a high volume, but we do have a fairly robust practice, which we do settle cases in pre-litigation. I don’t want to give you the impression that every single case gets litigated.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah, yeah.
John Demas:
But with the model that we have, lawyers in our firm have both pre-lit and litigation files. And again, it gets to, how do you get those reviews, how do you establish that relationship? I just think you have to have the lawyers involved, but obviously the rest of the team plays a critical role in getting the reviews. A critical role, because oftentimes they’re the ones establishing that relationship, that bond with the clients.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah, it makes me think of someone asking, “What is marketing?” Well, everything is marketing, and what is client service? Everything is client service. John, this has been amazing. One final question. Where can our audience go to learn more about you and the firm and just connect with you?
John Demas:
Yeah, sure. So our website, as you mentioned, is injury-attorneys.com or demaslawgroup.com. Reach out directly to me, just send me an email at J and D, it’s my initials, @demaslawgroup.com, and I'm happy to help.
Chris Dreyer:
Thanks so much to John for coming on the show. We had so much to share today. Let’s hit the takeaways. Live your values without exception. Putting the client first is not just a tagline for John. It drives every aspect of his practice, from case selection to settlement decisions. By prioritizing client outcomes over short-term financial gains, his firm has built a reputation for excellence. For a low-volume firm, this approach can differentiate your firm in a crowded market and lead to higher client satisfaction, better reviews, and more referrals.
John Demas:
We put the client’s best interest first, no exception. If you live by those words, then the notion of “Oh, I have to settle cases because I need the money to pay my cash flow,” or I need the cash flow to pay my expenses, it goes out the window.
Chris Dreyer:
Be picky. Once you’ve established your practice, begin to niche down, implement a rigorous case evaluation process. This can help you focus on high-value cases that align with your firm’s strengths and resources. John focuses on thorough evaluation within the first 30 days to determine the best approach to each case. This allows them to allocate resources effectively and maximize outcomes.
John Demas:
Right lawyer on the right case. What we try to do is really focus on that first 30 days and find out as much as we can. We dig into the police report, we dig into policy limit searches, we dig into the medical symptoms, depending on where they are in their treatment, and really try to, at that point, in that 30-day mark, as best we can, say, “Okay, this case is likely to be settled pre-lit,” within that 30-day time period.
Chris Dreyer:
Build your reputation. Invest in developing your trial skills and building a track record of successful verdicts. Publicize your trial wins and use them as leverage in negotiations. Consider partnering with other firms to take on high-profile cases. John’s commitment to trying cases and securing verdicts has elevated his firm’s reputation and negotiating power. This approach has led to higher settlements across the board, even for cases that don’t go to trial,
John Demas:
Verdicts have legs, verdicts last. But you’ve got to keep getting in there and banging away, because I know just based on the settlements that we get on our cases, I know we’re getting top dollar on our cases. I know for a fact.
Chris Dreyer:
For more information about John, check out the show notes. Before you go, do me a solid and smash that follow button, subscribe. Don’t miss 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.
