Chris Dreyer:
Anthony Lopez built his law firm, Your Insurance Attorney, into a 275 person powerhouse. He did it by breaking every rule rather than outsourcing marketing, he's got an in-house marketing team watching weather patterns to target zip codes in real time. He trains lawyers from scratch instead of poaching talent. He turns HR from a cost center into a profit driver. And his explosive growth all started when he decided to go all in on running his law firm as a business.
Anthony Lopez:
When I started Your Insurance Attorney, I made up a pivotal decision that really changed the trajectory of the law firm. I'm a board certified civil trial lawyer. I love being in court, I enjoy working because I like being trial. I was, I don't know, 60 people, 70 people back then, and it dawned on me, "How can you work on your business when you work in your business?" I could be the trial lawyer, the Chief Marketing Officer, Head of HR, dealing with technology, dealing with the employees, looking at revenue. I couldn't do it all, or if I did, I couldn't do it great.
So I stepped back. I made the decision to be the CEO, run the firm like a business. I replaced myself with another lawyer that I trained, and he became a board certified trial lawyer under my tutelage, and now he steps in the court for me when I run the firm now with a whole C-suite, which I never thought I would have, including HR and all, not necessarily non-revenue generating positions, but by the way, there are ways to make those positions revenue generating. We'll talk about that. And that's when we really started experiencing exponential growth where it went from 70 to 100 to 145 to 150 to 200, and now it just happens. But let me tell you, get away from you really quick because when you have big revenue, gross revenue coming in, it's very easy to lose track of where all of the dollars are going, so you've really got to be on it.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah, that's the data component, the CFO, the cash flow cycles, and all those things, especially challenging on the PI side.
Anthony Lopez:
Well yeah, you could think you're making money, right? And you're not because when you're a firm that advertises and markets, and we have our own in-house digital marketing company that is here, we have our own in-house call center. I don't outsource that because I want it done a specific way, so we have trained employees that know how to handle the calls internally, and it allows us, having all of that in-house, it allows us to be very fluid on the market, especially on the first party property side.
If you go down, so we've got 3, 4,000 feet of this building, but on the fifth floor, you walk down to my call center, there's five TVs, and they're all just watching the weather throughout the country because if there is a hail storm in Colorado, or there's a fire in California, or something's happening in North Carolina or the middle of the state, we will instantaneously start running ads to target those people, and we will geo reference zip codes so that people are on their social media while the hail storm is impacting their roof, and they're like, "Wow, I do hear hail hitting my roof." And they're on Instagram and my ad's like, "Did you have hail damage as a result of this storm today?" So very relevant marketing, very quick marketing, which again, I think differentiates us from a lot of our competitors because we have it in-house, it allows us to very fluid and very quick.
Chris Dreyer:
And I feel like auto, it's so many people that the cost to acquire an auto just because everybody's going after it, so I think that works against itself, and everybody's trying to get the catastrophic to help pay for the smaller cases. One of the things you mentioned, I do want to hear your opinion on, the changing those non-revenue into revenue, but I want to on the CTO and on the tech side because you guys do tech really, really well. So maybe you could hit both of those for me. I'd love to hear.
Anthony Lopez:
Yeah, so let's talk about the highest cost, the most expensive part of usually running any business is your employees. So if you have enough people, or you have a Head of HR, how can I turn someone whose job technically doesn't make me revenue? That's not an office held by a lawyer that's bringing in dollars from settlements? So what I do is I tie their annual bonus to net revenue of the firm. And the way I do that is I say, "Look, we spent last year $23 million in salaries." And we made, whatever, call it 25% of our was net revenue. I'm like, "If you can through controlling salaries and employees when we're at using more offshore employees as a component, working with technology and AI to try to figure out how to maybe get less people in the firm. If you can shave that number down and increase our net income, I will tie every point that you do that to a bonus that you get at the end of the year."
And now you've turned your Head of HR, which is not necessarily a profit center, into someone that is monitoring your employee's expenses and directly correlate to your net operating income to try to figure out how they can increase that by decreasing the overhead, and that's why you monetize that position, and that's what I do.
Chris Dreyer:
That's incredibly smart. We're like 106 people, so we're nowhere near, and I think our variable is tied to I think employer retention, but I like the revenue component much better. It's a different way to look at it because ultimately the business needs to generate profit that benefits everyone.
Anthony Lopez:
So the more people you have looking at your bottom line and trying to protect it and trying to get those little, because when you're putting a hundred million dollars a year, every point counts, but the more people you have looking at that number, the better your business is going. And I, again, we lever technology, we run the firm on a Salesforce platform. I have a dashboard where I can analyze every metric real time. That's important to me at least. I can see who's settling cases today, who settled what yesterday, last month. I can see the revenue today real time as it happens in the firm. We track our case acquisition costs like a hawk, so we're always looking at what costs to bring in the files and then we're actually inputting that data every month and all of the cases to make sure that when a case settles, the firm gets paid its case acquisition costs back, plus the firm gets paid back in interest because that money costs money.
And we actually have a formula built into our system where the longer a case is out, the higher the case acquisition cost comes so that it actually lowers the net of the case the firm gets paid back. It's interesting. So I can really look at a realistic revenue. What did that case really net me over time? Because that's really the biggest component in this game. You're not settling a case in 48 hours, they're typically setting over 71 ior whatever. We track all of that, and our lawyers are paid bonuses based on net revenue from cases they settle, so they're incentivized to try to settle a case quicker because they know the case acquisition cost goes up the longer the case sits on our desk.
Chris Dreyer:
We got to talk about the marketing a little bit, so you got fear of the beard. Also got this tagline. I was reading this, I was looking at your staff to see unique employees. You got, "Before you call your insurance company, call your insurance attorney." So let's talk about some of these iconic taglines, branding, positionings. Just talk to me about how you think about brand and come about with these.
Anthony Lopez:
So branding is an important aspect and always a conversation that we're having at every marketing meeting because obviously there are basically two types of advertising as I see in the world. There's branding, which is very hard to tie to revenue, and then there's call to action, which is much easier to tie revenue. So I go back and forth with my CMO a lot because I think branding is a very important aspect of this trifecta that I like to call it, of getting somebody to pick up the phone and call you because I think it's important for somebody to see the billboard. They're like, "Oh, Your Insurance Attorney." They don't remember it. No one's calling you really because they see your billboard. They're not memorizing the number, but it's subconsciously in the back of their head that you're obviously a big firm because you have a billboard. Then we do sponsorships with Orlando Magic, and you know, things of that nature.
So you go to the game, you see your insurance, again subliminal, it's not really top of mind, but then something happens to you and then you Google it and now all of a sudden, "Hey, Your Insurance Attorney pops up. I've heard of them, I've seen them. That's a big firm. Where do I know them from?" So the touch points that branding provides I think are really what helps drive people to co-op. Then sometimes you see people that do zero branding and just run a hundred percent digital marketing campaigns and are pretty successful too. Again, I go back and forth with my CFO about this all the time. I like branding. He doesn't because hard to tie branding to revenue. It's not a practical thing.
Chris Dreyer:
Right, right. It's blended in to just your cost to acquire. I want to have a fun question that you guys can debate upon right here. I had Angel Reyes from Dallas, good size firm, and he's like, "Hey, brand doesn't matter." His logic, and I think he just talked about this at National Trial Lawyers, is look, you got all these lead gen companies that don't have a brand outside of Walker with Los Defensoros. They're regenerating cases using influencers and doing this. So hey, he's saying brand doesn't matter, but I'm kind of on your side. The likeability component because they have options. If they didn't have options then maybe it wouldn't matter. So what's your thoughts about that?
Anthony Lopez:
So what we started looking at was, so branding doesn't necessarily matter when you're looking at your specific campaigns that you're launching and the case acquisition, the cost from those campaigns. However, what you have to also track is organic calls that are not necessarily from direct marketing campaigns. So what we started realizing was when you look at the campaign or case acquisition costs, yeah, branding, did branding make that person call? Not directly attributable to, but when you start looking at all of the cases that come in through the firm that are not through any specific marketing, I attribute those to branding because how else do they hear it? They didn't necessarily Google whatever it was that they were looking for. They picked up the phone because they heard of Your Insurance Attorney. So that is how, so branding does have an impact, and the guys that are doing solely digital marketing are never going to experience that because every call they get is as a direct result of your market.
Chris Dreyer:
And I've heard those individuals that are doing acquisitions, right? You've got Jacoby has done I think the Ed Bernstein law and then you've got Steve Mirror of Sweet Chains is doing some acquisitions, and the one thing that I would see is that brand equity takes two or three years to maybe realize, and I would say, man, maybe that is, outside of the asset purchase from a labor perspective, maybe the brand, you get a three-year launch head start from a marketing perspective.
Anthony Lopez:
Well yeah, it's instant credibility in the market that I've already spent a hundred million dollars developing, right? So yeah, I agree with that.
Chris Dreyer:
You've got a couple hundred employees, I'm not sure your exact size.
Anthony Lopez:
275. Trust me. I look at the overhead every day.
Chris Dreyer:
One of the things that caught my attention was I hear these different trains of thought like go with the experience, someone that's got all the reps, and I believe in an interview you said you prefer fresh law students and graduates over experienced insurance defense attorneys. And it's not to say like talent is talent, right? I know you're going to go pick the A+, it doesn't matter, but is it because it's your way of training them, or it's an energy thing? Talk to me about the green attorneys in that approach.
Anthony Lopez:
Yeah, I've hired obviously senior lawyers, trial counsel guys that can just go in and try cases and then lawyers that come from other law firms, so they're 5 to 10 years out that have their own experience, but I sound that the way I like to do it best is I like to get kids that are in law school, that summer here, for two summers, that take the bar, pass, and then come here to work as baby lawyers. I find that those lawyers end up lasting the longest in the firm because it allows us not only to really get to know each other, but they get to understand the firm culture, which is very important to me. How we approach cases philosophically from a standpoint of making sure that the client's outcome is more important than the attorney's fee, things of that nature that not every law firm necessarily bridges and lives by.
One of the big things that was always important to me and with the young lawyers was I would always tell them I'm like, "Number one, don't chase money. You're chasing money. This is not the right firm for you. And number two, the fee can never be more than what the clients get." A lot of firms didn't really run like that, but it was important for me because it gave us the opportunity to, number one, weed out candidates that we'd already spent a couple summers with that we really didn't think were going to fit within the firm culture and then really hone in on the lawyers that we liked that we thought would work long term.
And I have lawyers here that have literally worked with me through all of my iterations of law firms. I've got a guy here that's been with me literally 20 years. I hired him as a baby lawyer who summered with me, and he's one of my partners to this day. And most of my young lawyers that we brought up that way are still here. The turnover I find is in the lawyers that come from other firms that have already, I don't want to say necessarily develop bad habits, but developed habits that are different than the ones that we like and appreciate.
Chris Dreyer:
I think that's super strong. That gives you a unique advantage because everyone else is trying to get talent from, they're poaching other attorneys, they're going to the recruiters looking with the resumes built out, and you're like, "No, I'm looking for the culture fits and individuals that I can work with and shape." And I think that's unique, and I think it's a huge strength.
Anthony Lopez:
I think from a long-term perspective, it ends up saving me money and making us more money as a law firm when we're able to cultivate our own talent.
Chris Dreyer:
And speaking of talent, so you've achieved something unique. At least in Florida, you've got three board certified trial lawyers under one roof. That's very rare.
Anthony Lopez:
Especially in our space, yeah.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah. So how has that level of trial expertise shaped your approach to cases in case selection? Having these killers on staff?
Anthony Lopez:
We pride ourselves on getting really good results for our clients, and we enjoy going to trial. We like trying cases. I will try the impossible case if that's what the client wants to do rather than push them to settle. I think justice is usually better served when you can get that like home run outcome for your client as opposed to always pushing to settle. And it's also a reputational thing because insurance companies track all of these metrics. People don't understand the level that these insurance companies are looking at law firms and looking at settlements and looking at what was your opening demand and what did you ultimately settle the case for? These are metrics that are important to me, and I need to make sure that the insurance companies understand that we're going to take them to task if required to do so.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah, otherwise you're just going to get low balled, and State Farm's going to play games and hold off until the final hour to see if you're really going to go to trial.
Anthony Lopez:
There was a point in time in first party property in Florida like 2009ish, 10ish where State Farm threw down the hammer, and they basically stopped settling cases, and they were making lawyers trial the cases, and I can't tell you how many lawyers just stopped taking State Farm cases. I feel like we were one of the only games in town, and we were in trial every week against State Farm at some point and then ultimately they did a global, and we resolved all the cases that we had left with them, but I think it's important to be able to take cases all the way.
Chris Dreyer:
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I also want to just dive in briefly about your practice areas and the areas of laws that you feature and have expertise in, not to say that you don't have expertise across a broad range. On the property damage side because most of the time when I am speaking to someone, it's like auto, trucking. Talk to me about property damage. What's different about this area of the law and just speak to me a little bit about it.
Anthony Lopez:
Sure. So property and casualty, first party property is very niche. It's not something that you can just jump into and start doing. There's a lot of technical expertise that goes into handling these cases, especially at a firm like ours where we are direct to consumer. So in other words, we're getting involved in insurance cases at the outset, so we're actually helping our clients adjust the loss. We're retaining experts from the very beginning to determine causation, to figure out what our damages model looks like, to do re-engineers to make sure that the causation matches the loss if it's covered by the policy. A lot of upfront legal work that goes into these cases before any of them get litigated.
And a lot of PI guys are not used to dealing with these types of cases. The policies are vastly different, hugely complicated, and the case law is also not very straightforward on a lot of these first party property policies and proximate cause, anti-incurrent language and things of that nature. We really got to know what we're doing, especially on really large commercial losses. So we honed our skill set doing that 20 years basically, and I've got an entire precinct department built into my law firm that only handles first party property, and we do it all over the country. We have offices in Georgia, North Carolina, Colorado, and California. So we're actively adjusting right now and handling the wildfire cases.
Chris Dreyer:
So that was going to be my follow-up, specifically about the recent events, the wildfire account claims. At least I get on Instagram, I get on whatever social media, I just see these, I'm bombarded by people trying to get these wildfire cases. Speaking to the consumer, right, for you, what kind of things should they be aware of that might be a case. You've heard these horror stories of a week before the fire say they pulled my insurance, and I don't know what types of things can they get help on?
Anthony Lopez:
Yeah, so I mean you have a lot of different cases going on right now and what's concerning to me as a first party property lawyer that specializes in this area of the law is you have a lot of PI lawyers right now that are just trying to accumulate cases for the mass tort that are advertising that they're going to handle the first party property case for free, which I'm just, having done this for 20 years, either they don't understand what's involved in doing a first party property case, or they're just not being authentic in their advertising, and they're just trying to lure clients in on the mass tort. We are working actively with a lot of law firms that are handling mass tort cases out there that are accumulated cases, and we are as an added benefit to their clients working at the junction with them to handle the first party property cases to make sure the clients are getting what they should be getting out of their policies.
We're seeing all types of cases, so we're seeing cases where the house burns down, and they really should be an open and shut case, and in those cases that clients that call us that want to retain us, we're actually telling them, "Look, don't hire us yet. Your carrier has a finite amount of time to adjust the loss and make a payment. Let's give it 30 days. Let's see if they make the payment they're supposed to because I don't want you paying me if they're going to make the payment anyway." And that's the advice that we've always given to clients. If I look at a policy or a case, and I'm like, "This is pretty open and shut, you really don't need me yet. You've already reported the loss yourself." And I feel like things are going the way they should, I'll tell the client that advice.
Because having done this for 20 years, unfortunately, I would say 50% of those clients call me back because the carrier does not do the right thing. On the total loss fire cases or the house is gone, the client should be getting policy limits, so there shouldn't be a lot to talk about, and that's our advice. If you're not getting policy limits, give us a call in a month, and let's re-engage.
The cases that we're we are seeing that I know are going to be heavily litigated and contested are the smoke cases. Because what people don't realize is smoke in and of itself is a covered loss and is toxic and causes massive amounts of damage to the house, so we work with experts that go out to this deal, do the testing on all of the different components of the structure, and prepare reports to let us know, hey, what is the extent of the smoke damage and what needs to be ripped out and replaced? We've done thousands of those cases, and that's where we're going to be fighting with insurance companies because there's going to be, oh, the conversation about do you have to replace all the drywall? Can it only be part of the drywall? That room's not contaminated. The contents are fine, they can be washed. Those kinds of conversations already happen, but those are going to be the highly contested claims.
Chris Dreyer:
You were an entrepreneur before law and running businesses to support your education. What drew you to entrepreneurship so early?
Anthony Lopez:
I needed to eat, I needed to pay rent, I needed to put myself through school. I've literally been working in one form of another since I was in high school and haven't stopped since.
I did start a travel company while I was in law school. What differentiated our travel company was we basically specialized in doing high school and college trips. So end of the year high school trips, like grad night, college trips for sororities and fraternities and basically what we did was we organized the trips and then I would send out a film crew, the real world based MTP, we would film these trips, edit them, put music, and then send out DVDs of the trip, which actually ended up doing two things. Number one, it differentiated what we were doing from what everyone else was doing. No one was doing that, but secondly, it was a great marketing tool because we had all of our company information on the DVD. I ended up selling that company at the end of my second year to my partner actually for a pretty nominal sum that was actually one of my closest friends. So I gave it to him. He ultimately ended up selling it for millions of dollars. Fast-forward, here we are 30 years later, and I think I bring a lot of that innovation to the practice of law.
Chris Dreyer:
You spent a few years on the defense side before switching to plaintiff work. I have to imagine from a strategy perspective, putting yourself in their shoes when you went to Your Insurance Attorney, it was very helpful, but what was that moment when you realized like, "Hey, I need to make a change, I need to go on the other side?"
Anthony Lopez:
So yeah, a really pivotal moment in my life, back in when I was a baby lawyer, I was representing insurance companies, and I was associate at a firm that basically had an insurance company, this client. And I absolutely despised doing the work. It didn't feel good. Shortly thereafter, as luck would have it, the law firm that I was working for ended up dismantling, and I ended up partnering up with one of the partners that I had worked previously. And at that moment I explained to them, I'm never representing an insurance company again. And I started representing policyholders and doing plaintiff work 100%.
Chris Dreyer:
2019, you launched Your Insurance Attorney. That's a bit different because most of the firms, it's like five of the partner's names strung together. It's hard to remember from a branding perspective. In those early days, walk me through kind of the vision you had for Your Insurance Attorney.
Anthony Lopez:
So yeah, so let's talk about that. So when I started my firm in 08ish, the firm was ultimately named Marin, El Hayek, Lopez, and Martinez. First of all, good luck pronouncing El Hayek when you see it on paper. No one ever gets it and good luck trying to spell it or Google it or figure it out. I realized when I was marketing and trying to bring in work that Marin, El Hayek, Lopez, Martinez wasn't like a great brand name, and I felt like we were getting lost in the shuffle.
So what I ended up doing as the firm progressed in my practice group was I started branding myself as Your Insurance Attorney, Anthony Lopez, and that was how I was marketing myself to bring in cases. And then fast-forward 2018, 19, I ultimately started a law firm, and I called it Your Insurance Attorney, which it's not Your Insurance Attorney, Anthony Lopez, it's Your Insurance Attorney. And I did that on purpose because I really wanted to create a brand. And when we were coming up with the concept, I sat in my conference room with my team, and I said, "Look, I want you to think Nike. I want the swish, but I want it for a law firm." We didn't want the firm to necessarily be associated with any one person. We wanted it to be more of a concept.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah, yeah. And it is distinctive, right? It stands out, it's different, it's clean, it's sharp. I like that it's descriptive in the name. Sometimes standalone name you don't really know, so there's an association there. So I think it's super smart.
You got your pilot's license and then you got your jet license. So I've never flown private and here's the reason for me, I'm just afraid that once I do it, I'm never going to want to do anything else.
Anthony Lopez:
Well, buddy, that's a hundred percent true. So you're right on the money there. Once you start flying on your own jet, yeah, you're not like commercial ever again.
Chris Dreyer:
Tell me about the passion for flying, where that came about. Tell me about it.
Anthony Lopez:
Yeah, so 2015 ish, I always wanted to fly. Even when I was a kid, I always wanted to pilot, but I didn't have the resources to go and do that. But then finally started making money and then I don't want to be tied, right, the age-old story, but in 2015 I came to the office, I'm like, "You know what? I'm going to do it." The kid that had been working with me from the beginning, called them into my office. I'm like, "You've always wanted to be a partner, right?" He said, "Yes." I'm like, "Congratulations, you're a partner." And he's, "Oh, wow." I'm like, "All of these things that I'm doing, you're now doing, and I'm going to leave the office every day at two o'clock and go get my pilot license." That was my first partner, and that's how he became a partner.
And then I was building the airport three times a week to learn how to fly, and me being me, I got my pilot license in three months plus or minus, and then my instrument rating right after that. Then I got retractable gear, complex, high altitude, and then yeah, within I think three years I was flying a jet. I was a type rated jet pilot. I had a Honda jet that I was rated single pilot in. And then I bought a Phenom 300E, which I was also rated single pilot. I'd fly that from Miami to my house in Aspen with my family in the back all the time. Loved it. And I recently sold the Phenom, and now I'm flying a Falcon 2000LX. Huge upgrade, and we're loving it. It's the best. But to your point, once you fly private, you're never going back. And especially once you're flying your own planes.
Chris Dreyer:
If there's one thing Anthony's story proves it's that breaking from the pack pays off. While other firms stick to traditional playbooks, he built something different, a firm that can pivot marketing in real time, a team that grows its own talent, a business model that turns every department into a profit center, but none of it would've happened if he hadn't made that crucial decision, step away from the courtroom and truly run the business. Connect with Anthony at yourinsuranceattorney.com. His team handles property damage claims nationwide, and he's always happy to share insights with fellow law firm owners.
I'm Chris Dreyer, and you've been listening to Personal Injury Mastermind. If you liked this episode, hit subscribe and grab a copy of my new book, Personal Injury Lawyer Marketing.
