Chris Dreyer:
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. 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. His journey reveals how attorneys can tap in their emerging areas through total commitment by mastering every facet and building a dedicated community of warriors. 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 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. This is the story of how niching down and becoming the authority can lead to unprecedented success.
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. And when I would tell people I am going to be a truck crash lawyer, they would laugh at me and say, "That's the craziest thing I've ever heard of. Yeah, that's not going to work." But it has worked out and now it's, of course, it's probably one of the most sought-after areas and it's 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 think I want to start with just getting the cases. 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, you have 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? 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. 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, so 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, and 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, 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, I would study those names that you brought up.
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-
Joe Fried:
I met her for the first time at NTL this year. She didn't know who I was and I didn't know who she was, but we now know each other.
Chris Dreyer:
Oh, wonderful. You got Gordon McKernan, an 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:
Yeah. 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 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'm a national player and I've done cases in 40 some odd states, and that's my life. 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 a 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. And also, if I'm really going to be a truck crash expert, I also, I want to do things regularly to demonstrate to the world that that's not just a marketing ploy, that that's the real deal. Whether you're a lawyer to consumer or lawyer to lawyer, I still believe that one of the best marketing things is go try a couple of cases, because there's just no substitute for that.
If you have a catastrophic case, give me a chance. 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 remember one time finding that 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. 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.
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:
Of course the answer is yes. And I'm smiling, because I love the question. 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 MedMal lawyer. Well, now I'm not just a MedMal 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 Amazonization 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 emerge, 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, new... You could pick any one of those and you could become the authority on telematics, the authority on Amazon, and I promise you, if you were willing to have your geography be big enough, you could develop an amazingly successful practice.
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. I'm 20 years into this and I still study every day everything that's coming out.
Chris Dreyer:
And 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 it, 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.
Just briefly before we turn over to some other litigation questions, certain states, when I look at the 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? 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 like you got to widen out your geography, and maybe it's just a component of your business and maybe not a specialty?
Joe Fried:
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. You can do really, really well for yourself with just a few of the right truck crash cases. So, 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, and I still think it's a very worthwhile cause if I go through the process of becoming the 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. 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 kinds 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 through. I'm a huge believer in that. People think I'm weird when I say, 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. Da, da, da, da, da. 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:
Incredible. When we're talking trucking cases, let's start with the evidence. How do you approach the investigation, preserving the evidence, and just those challenges that go into the case, as compared to just maybe an auto?
Joe Fried:
You're saying, if I'm an auto wreck lawyer and a truck wreck comes in, what do I do?
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah, that's the question simplified. Yeah.
Joe Fried:
Let's not pretend that all trucking cases are homogeneous, right? Let's say there are 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, then 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 could 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, right? 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. 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. And 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 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.
Chris Dreyer:
Well-
Joe Fried:
So, you have to start 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 or looking for? Had a case very recently, a year ago, where a gentleman was hit in a crosswalk at five o'clock in the morning by a truck, run over, left for dead basically, the truck drives off and three law firms turn the case down because they can't figure out the trucking company. Here’s what happens. They just get a call saying this guy has catastrophic injuries, but 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 five o'clock 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. 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 who 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, at the multi-million dollar, $20-something million result, only because that's what the coverage was. But that's old school, and sometimes that's what it takes. Takes a tenacity to just go after what you want to go after.
Chris Dreyer:
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, right? 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 there, 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 in playbook of here's how to limit our damages.
Joe Fried:
Some companies, the way 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, quote, 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 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 and 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 over... Depending on what make, model, year the truck is, but let's just say for the last minute or so, or two minutes, or 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.
Chris Dreyer:
Okay.
Joe Fried:
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 side?" As soon as it moves, the last stop record's gone. And the police officers are trained, and you know I'm a former police officer, we're not experts in trucks, and we're trained to clear the roadway as quickly as we can. So, "Yes, thank you for sending somebody who could move this vehicle off of here."
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.
Chris Dreyer:
Is that... 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.
