Chris Dreyer:
Welcome to Gold Medal Moments on Personal Injury Mastermind. This is a special mini-series that highlights my favorite lessons from former PIM guests. Each of these trailblazers and thought leaders will speak live at the inaugural PIMCON, the Personal Injury Mastermind Conference. Trust me, you don't want to miss them live. I'm your host, Chris Dreyer. Over the next few weeks we'll be sharing can't-miss insights and bite-sized pieces to help get your firm from good to GOAT.
The future of law lies in collaboration and specialization, and Bob Simon is leading the charge. As the mastermind behind Justice HQ, he isn't just talking about change, he's engineering it. Forget stuffy law offices and cutthroat competition. Bob's vision is all about creating legal superheroes through the power of community. Justice HQ isn't just a co-working space. It's a launch pad for solo practitioners and small firms that punch above their weight. Any case, any courtroom, any anytime. It's his battle cry for a new breed of lawyer. By pooling resources, expertise, and grit, Simon's network of legal Avengers is taking on Goliath-sized firms and winning. Bob Simon is the GOAT of networking. To hear Bob live at PIMCON, secure your spot at PIMCON.org. Use code PIMBOB for $200 off your ticket. P-I-M-B-O-B. Let the gold medal moments begin.
Bob Simon:
But when I went on my own, this was about 2010, 2009, it was much more expensive and much more difficult than it's now. So I had to lease an office that was like 1700 bucks a month. LA is expensive, and it was a single office. Factoring on the other stuff, I was probably paying three to 4,000 a month just in base overhead before you were talking about profitability and such, and it weighs you down. And half our day was scanning the mail, so fast forwarded to 2020 when we opened our first doors of Justice HQ in downtown LA. Now scaling quickly, but it was a thought process of that's eliminate all the bullshit that the lawyers have to deal with. Give a mentorship path, access to cases, help them with their media to get more cases, teach them to be specialists in their space and do it as one big collective.
However, everybody's independent. So every member of Justice HQ has their own firm or part of a firm, some of the members that are there do generate a lot of business and like to refer it out for a percentage. Justice HQ Exchange makes it really easy to do that. The concept was born, "Hey, what product would I have needed 10 years ago that would've accelerated my career exponentially, gave me a quality of life, be able to stay home and practice most of the time?" And then that's what we created. We do all of their media headshots, help with their social media, do all their plugs, teach them how to brand themselves, teach them how to use, here's the company used for SEO. This is how other people do it. This is how to set up your website to maximize it. This is how you write blogs, has your mentorship.
We have all the big trial lawyers like myself, Gary Dordick, Chris Dolan, these are all people that are part of this community that are on virtual chat rooms and live in the spaces to help the mentorship process. As all consumer advocates, you have to be vetted and approved to get in. We have a membership committee. Every member has to approve somebody that comes in, so it's hard to get into the organization. Again, we want those specialists in their spaces. So probably 50, 60% are solos or people under five total in their firm counting all employees, and it helps them really succeed. We have people that are experts in building your business, sit down with this person and talk about how your business could be more efficient, how you can outsource. So it gives a path. And it's also fun, dude. There's a lot of like-minded progressive lawyers that are in the same physical space and also the big umbrella of the virtual spaces.
I mean, we have members that are out of state that don't use any of the physical spaces whatsoever and are more than happy to pay the membership fee, because it helps accelerate their career. They get case referrals from it. They can help them with their media, their notoriety. It's just an exponential push. So now it's the point where we can't get the spaces up fast enough. We can't scale for the membership fast enough. It's a good champagne problem to have, but I do think it'll correct this societal problem in a legal world that thinks that one, you need an old stuffy lawyer to be your lawyer. Two, that you think you have to go to a big firm in order to succeed. Right now you're giving the tools of a big a la carte law firm. We have specialists that all they do is want to motion write.
So you get on, we're on chats with all them. Sometimes they'll do it for free, sometimes they'll do it for a small percentage of the fee. I've seen pleadings where there's 10 different solos that are on the pleading for the plaintiff side, just splitting up the work, sharing the costs, and just being in their specialist space to annihilate. And now you're outgunning the biggest firms in the world. That's where we are. I mean, that's the big vision. So I mean, it's been way more successful than we had ever thought when we opened our first doors March of 2020 during a pandemic.
Chris Dreyer:
I think that this is brilliant, first of all, and in the legal vertical, you have kind of this fractured environment and you don't get economies of scale like you do in other industries. And the model kind of reminds me a little bit of a couple. So walk up advertising, they pool ad spend, so that they get the economies of scale for lower cost per acquisition for Google Ads. And then you've got Law Tigers. They have the one Law Tiger website they can pull in and everybody gets those referrals. Not to mention just all the operating costs. Super, super smart. I want to talk about a couple other things that I think you guys are doing really great. So you have that saying, before we jump into the pivot. You have that saying, it's like any case, any practice, any location. I don't know the exact tagline. I thought that was super smart.
Bob Simon:
Any case, courtroom, any time. We actually copyright, we copyrighted that. And the justice team, that's trademark. I mean, it's crazy, but it is.
Chris Dreyer:
Nice. When I was doing my research from an outside observer, I was thinking, "Well wait, you guys really niche in the PI," and now it makes sense, because you have these resources that you can truly, truly do that.
Bob Simon:
Yeah. And then I mean, I was known as a very young lawyer trying a lot of cases early. So I was at the time, I think I was the youngest person inducted to the Los Angeles ABOTA, American Board of Trial advocates. You have to have certain qualifications. You have to try a bunch of cases and have certain results, and do with a civil thing. So I was like 34 when I got in and it's very young, but I preached people getting in there early. I have a guy that tried two cases while he was in law school, so I want him to be the youngest, beat us all. But then, Sebi Fisher, a partner in my office who made partner, Sebi got it at 32, and then Grace in our partner office just got it at 34. So we just went on this ABOTA trip in Hawaii, and we're like a generation younger than anybody at least.
Like, most everybody's in their 60s, 70s, and some in their 80s. And there's us guys in our 30s, I'm 41, by far the youngest folks there. But we had that mentality. I just never saw the value that what the insurance company was offering was the fair market value for what the injury, what the loss was. Again, going back to what happened to my uncle. I see, dude, people aren't just, they get this surgery, paralyzed. This is the way that it is. No, dude, you got to tell the story. This is affecting me for generations. So I made a point of trying a lot of spine injury cases. That's my niche. Fusion, septomy, to paraplegia, quadriplegia, because I've seen it. It's real for me. I can get up there and explain to the jury this is what's going to happen in the future, and this is why I'm asking you for $10 million for a fusion alone.
So I reset the barometer early on for trying these spine injury cases. And that's the niche that we're known for doing, and still getting huge results. And I've taught this to all of our lawyers. So all of the lawyers now in our office, we do them in teams. I teach a young ones how to try cases. This is our specialty. We're going to go and try these cases. We get the biggest verdicts in the country on these specialized things, but we get a ton of referrals just from doing that.
But at any case, any courtroom, any time was the moniker we had early back on, because we get in there and try anything. And now the moniker is happening at Justice HQ, where all these young solos are like, "Dude, I just want reps. I'll get in there."
They'll try anything, like anywhere. And it's fascinating to watch. On our exchange and our message boards, when someone's like, "Hey, I have trial coming up in two weeks. Who wants to do it with me?" You'd have 30 people pinging just to do it for free, just to get the reps in, and just to go in there and swing. It's amazing. It's so refreshing.
Chris Dreyer:
That wraps up this gold medal moment, featuring the GOAT of networking, Bob Simon. Visit PIMCON.org to go from good to GOAT, and join us live in Scottsdale September 15 to 17. We will conquer personal injury marketing, network industry titans, celebrate excellence, and become the greatest of all time in personal injury law. Tickets are limited. To secure your all access pass today, head to PIMCON.org, that's P-I-M-C-O-N dot O-R-G. I'm Chris Dreyer. Thanks for listening to these gold medal moments and I hope to see you in the winner's circle at PIMCON. For $200 off, use code PIMBOB. P-I-M-B-O-B.
