Chris Dreyer:
As a trial lawyer, you're unstoppable. You're at home in the courtroom and secure six and seven-figure verdicts for your clients, but does anyone outside your county know about it? There's a hard truth in our industry.
Don Worley:
You've got the marketing lawyers that are really good at marketing and self-promotion and social media and television, but they're not necessarily trial lawyers and then you have the trial lawyers that aren't so great at getting their name out there.
Chris Dreyer:
What if you could bridge the gap and sidestep conventional marketing? Because here's the thing. When you stay quiet about your successes, you limit the number of lawyers who can call you. And if you're investing your resources and working up cases, building better referral partnership matters more than billboards or social media campaigns.
Don Worley:
There's a lot of great trial lawyers that not everyone in the nation knows about. In the region they know about it because they hear about verdicts, etc. Because they're not marketers, they don't even know how to market themselves to other lawyers.
Chris Dreyer:
I'm Chris Dreyer, founder and CEO of Rankings.io and that was Don Worley. He is a beast in the courtroom. His firm has tackled over 40,000 cases. Nearly every case comes from his nationwide network of law firms. He secured over 400 referral partners without ever buying a TV commercial or dancing on TikTok. In this episode of Personal Injury Mastermind, Don reveals that there's no one size fits all approach to raising your profile in the legal community. Don explains how letting go, having fun, and being transparent has doubled his caseload.
Don Worley:
Just relationship building is what worked for me. I would go to conferences. There's a big, for Mass Torts, there's a conference called Mass Torts Made Perfect and I would throw the opening party and it would be pretty crazy with little people and go-go dancers and models and we have a theme, so it would be fun basically. And most lawyer parties are let's be honest not fun. Sipping wine, talking about the case you had that no one cares about. So it's just a fun party with a DJ spinning. And so I would entertain people, I would meet them, and then also just take them out to nightclubs or dinners. What really helped me grow, I mean that helped me get some cases, but it helped me grow was being transparent and I would give a monthly update by email to lawyers that send me cases that say, "Here are the cases you sent me and here's the status of them."
Most lawyers don't want to do that because they don't want to show they haven't done anything on a case, but it actually helps me because if a lawyer says, "Hey Don, you've had this case for two months and you don't have the medical record yet, why not?" Well then I can turn to my medical records team and say, "Hey. We've had this case two months, we don't have the medical records. What's going on?" The reason I started being a mass tort lawyer myself is because a young PI lawyer I referred cases out, never heard anything, they wouldn't return my calls or my emails and then I hear about them settling enough. So I said, "You know what? I'm going to change the industry," and really it was just simple, it wasn't just marketing, it was also customer service.
Chris Dreyer:
Are you a PIing your CRM to your partners? Are you doing things like that or is it just like, "Hey, no, we're doing an email and it's here's the details."
Don Worley:
Well, no. They get feedback instantly because on their report, and I say, I do a little video that also goes out with the email every month. The video is basically what we need their help with, but also just an update on mass torts in general, what's going on, but I say, "Hey look, if you see on your report client non-responsive, we need your help." That means they're not responding to us. So you either need to try to call them or whatever call center you used to sign up this client, maybe they need to get them on the phone. If you paid somebody to market for these clients to sign them up, you need to go back to them and say, "Hey, this person's not responding and you need to either get them on the phone or get me somebody different." Because sometimes the client, they call off a TV ad call Lexus Law at 1-800. They call and sign up. Well they don't know who McDonald really is when we start calling them, even though they don't read retainers when they sign them.
Chris Dreyer:
You've been in the PI game for over 20 years and you kind of got this interesting start. So you spent some time doing some comedy, some entertainment, you're still doing some. Take me to the standup days. How did that help you out being a lawyer and just talk me through that?
Don Worley:
I actually was an actor and a comedian before law school and an undergraduate degrees in acting and theater. And I was doing standup comedy, but I went to law school just because I thought, "Well how can I use my talents as an actor or comedian and make a good living and help people?" And I thought from television that lawyers went to court every day. So I was like, "Well I could use my skills every day." So I went to law school and discovered quickly that lawyers don't go to court very often except when you go to trial or civil lawyers anyway. Personal injury lawyers don't go to trial very often, but even while I was still a lawyer, I would still continue to do standup on weekends in different places and made my 600 bucks a weekend and all you can drink.
It taught me a lot about changing things because in the middle of a trial, sometimes you just feel things are not working or the other side makes it not work and you have to adapt and there's some moments, I remember doing a show in either North or South Carolina, a little comedy zone and it shared the parking lot kind of a rodeo bar. My style was sort of dry pseudo-intellectual storytelling. The opener guy was a local guy and he opened every time. He was very high energy and his jokes were like, "Calling in sick is different than calling in effed up, right?" Both shows Friday night I ate it. I did horrible. No one was laughed or liked it and I decided to change it up and the only change I made is, when I walked on stage after he introduced me, I said, "Hey, he's a great comedian, right? He's good kisser too."
And then I changed my stories and it was the same stories from the night before, except it was him that was with me, the opener guy. And I killed it, both shows, just murdered both shows and all I did is change the character and the story to the guy they knew as opposed to third parties they didn't know. So it teaches you, you learn how to adapt and change and that's important even for being a lawyer when you're trying a case.
Chris Dreyer:
You have this film component to that you're applying to the practice. Do you have consumers asking you about it? Do you find it helps from the marketing and the lead gen side?
Don Worley:
Most of what I've ever done is more branding than it is direct marketing. I've never been one that could get on TV because I just don't come across as believable and natural. It looks like I'm faking it and the TV show is just more of a branding thing. I can't say that someone ever called my office and said, "I just saw your show on Amazon Prime or Tubi or it was on Discovery Channel and I want to hire you." It's more of a branding like lawyers know about it and almost all of my cases have come from referrals from other lawyers. We have about 400 law firms across the country that send us cases.
Chris Dreyer:
I really wanted to lean into that because your firm is, it's 400 plus firms across the nation sending you referrals and there's kind of these two camps, right? It's like referrals are bad because you got to pay the referral fee, but then referrals are good because they don't maybe overload the intake.
Don Worley:
I just don't think you can successfully do both. I mean I know that Morgan & Morgan does a lot of advertising obviously and then they handle some cases in-house, but they also refer out some cases and I'm fortunate enough to receive some cases in certain states from them as well to work with them and partner with them and I'll send them cases back as well, but I think it's really hard to be both an advertising firm and a handling firm and I personally would not have 40,000 cases if I were paying for advertising for those cases.
Even let's say they were mass torts and say that it costs you 2,500 to get, well whatever the math is of 40,000 by 2,500, there's just no way and then also pay for the prosecution of those cases, the filing fees, the medical records. It's really, I think it's better to choose one or the other and there's a lot of good advertising firms that refer out the cases and to me, if you're starting out, that's the best way to do it because if you send a case to me, you get 50% on mass tort and all you did is sign the client up. So that's a good way to build a business. Whereas on our side, we work it up and pay for the case. And yes, I could get a case for 2,500 and maybe I'm paying 20,000 for it because at the end I split my fee and if it settled for 100 and the fee's 40 and I give the other lawyer 20, then I paid 20,000 for a case I could have acquired for 2,500 a client, but then again, I pay that at the end out of the settlement funds opposed to up front.
Chris Dreyer:
The interesting thing too is I feel like it's constantly shifting. Right now you've got the lead gen companies and the paper lead and it's basically causing an increase on the cost to acquire the case. So you got to be a really good advertiser and at the same time I agree, it's hard to beat both. You said you've been heavily involved in torts. That space, it seems like I got a lot of clients that haven't been successful for a number of reasons. Just whether they picked the wrong mass tort or maybe they didn't stay connected to and they had a bunch of drop-offs or dual rep scenarios. What comes to mind just in this space being successful?
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Don Worley:
There was a moment of time when Wall Street fell in love with mass torts and the returns. So they were backing advertisers to go out and spend millions and millions of dollars on advertising and then they would either loan money to those lawyers and get their loan paid back out of the referral fee or there's a couple of states where you can actually be a non-lawyer and participate in fees. DC and Arizona are two that come to mind. There's more, but those are the two that I know about because I'm licensed in both of those states. But what happens is it started taking seven years to get your money back because there were so many mass torts.
I mean with 3M Earplug, at one point there were 350,000 cases. How's 3M going to pay 100,000 a case on 350,000? They're not. So the money dried up because they weren't getting the churn on their money and the return on their money that they expected. So there's basically just not as much money in the space to fund the advertising anymore. And we've diversified too. I went back to my personal injury roots and we're doing a lot of personal injury now. The biggest concentration right now is Arizona and Texas and New York, but we're taking cases all over the country, but those are the main offices that are staffed and working and have the most PI cases.
Chris Dreyer:
Other firms, when they're borrowing a bunch of money, if it's a short-term thing where if it's like a three years, maybe no big deal, but seven years, those points start to add up and before you know it, you're just paying off the interest.
Don Worley:
They get upside down and all their work and effort goes to a lender on Wall Street instead of them now.
Chris Dreyer:
Gotcha. The other thing too, just on this torts and then I'll flip back over to single then be I car, there's all different strategies that come to mind. Some people are like, "Hey, get in really early. Get as many as you can. They don't work out at least your cost of acquire was low." And then you got others it's like, "Wait until the science is established and then get in at the final hour." What's your thoughts on just selection? If someone, maybe they're wanting to diversify and put 20% or something in this field, what's that look like?
Don Worley:
Well all your marketers that listen to your podcasts are not going to like my answer, but the only way you can truly lose all your money is if the case does not survive Daubert or Daubert. It's pronounced two different ways. That's the only way you can lose all your money because once it passes Daubert, they're going to pay something. I mean, even in Geralto, it passed Daubert and Geralto, we lost every trial, five of them. We won one, but we lost on appeal so we basically lost all five cases, but they still paid around 35,000 a case. So you got some money back. But the way I've lost all my money is when it got dismissed. There's a couple different cases. One was Nixxiom, the bone density loss, and at the MDL it lost the Daubert hearing and the MDL was dismissed totally and I lost about a million bucks in that.
And then there was another one that was gadolinium and it was this dye for MRIs that stayed in your body and I lost several hundred thousand in that because it didn't pass Daubert. The judge didn't buy the science from the expert so they dismissed the consolidated action in California. So I say just wait until it passes Daubert and okay, so you pay 1500 occasion instead of 1,000, but at least you didn't lose $1,000 case on hand. I would say the approach is, unless you're going to be the firm that's the head of the snake on a case, go out and get some cheap early. If you want to be one of the ones that files first and trying to get in leadership in the MDL or trying to get a trial first and trying to run the show or be part of the show, go get them early, but if you just want to be an investor and buy the cases and refer them to me or someone else, I would wait until it survives Daubert and it doesn't matter if it's a little bit more. At least you're going to get a return and not get poured out.
Chris Dreyer:
You got Suboxone. I don't know much about that only that the quality of the person filing might not be the best. They might not be the best record keeper. And then you got Depo-Provera. It's another big one. I think it was talked about at MTMP. Unpacking your brain, what do you think on each of those?
Don Worley:
We'd pick what to do by volume of something. If someone sends me five cases of something, we just can't get involved with the case because that's not enough to support ramping up a team. So we're not in those yet. We may later if someone sends us a 1,000 cases or something, but right now we're not in them, but again, those are early stages. So my colleagues think they're good. I mean there is one early stage one that's a board power port and lawyer in my office is on the science committee and on leadership. And they say the science is really strong in that case. So we are involved in that case just because the plaintiff's steering committee, but that's a good early stage, but Dow bearer is still probably a year or so away.
Chris Dreyer:
And then on the single event, the auto space, everybody's going after auto. They're good cases. You can get the commercial vehicle policies, but I guess depending on the state and jurisdiction, what's your thoughts on some of these other types of injury related cases, whether it's birth injury or nursing neglect or even some of the premises stuff, maybe negligent security, or is it still like, "Hey. Auto's there. It's predictable. You can get the data, the cashflow." What's your thoughts on the single event side?
Don Worley:
I think it's just whatever you end up having a preference to and becoming more of an expert in, but eventually you're going to have to go down to the courthouse if you want to keep getting paid on cases because insurance company keeps data on a lawyer and you can lose four cases and still get paid more on the fifth case than if you settled everything. So if they know that you're going to take them down to the courthouse and make them try a case, they're going to pay you real value. So every once in a while you're going to have to try a case to keep your values up even on car wrecks.
Chris Dreyer:
What small change has had the biggest positive impact you think on your firm?
Don Worley:
I think it was just deciding to do what no other lawyer was doing and giving monthly updates to lawyers is what really made my firm go from 2,000 cases to 40,000 cases. Global MDL settlement, everyone's going to get paid the same. So why not send your cases to someone you actually like and you're going to have fun with and is going to be transparent and tell you what's going on?
Chris Dreyer:
Don Worley's journey from standup comedian to managing 40,000 plus cases shows that being yourself is your biggest differentiator. And his monthly case updates to referral partners, that simple commitment to transparency helped him scale from 2,000 to 40,000 cases. Want more insights on building authentic relationships in the legal industry? Head on over to rankings.io/podcast for all our episodes and resources. While you're there, you can grab a copy of my latest book, Personal Injury Lawyer Marketing From Good to Goat. Thanks for listening to Personal Injury Mastermind. I'm Chris Dreyer. Remember, your best marketing tool is the one that works for you.
