The turning point that led Joe Volta to leave a secure attorney role and start his own personal injury practice
Joe Volta:
I brought in a million dollars to the organization, and I only took home 400K.
Chris Dreyer:
That moment, the gap between what he made and what he kept, was the start of everything. That’s the question every successful associate eventually faces. Today’s conversation is for the rainmakers, for the listeners who have mastered getting cases, but want to know what really happens when you apply the talent to building something on your own.
This is Personal Injury Mastermind. I’m Chris Dreyer, host, founder, and CEO of Rankings.io, an Inc 500 Company, for the past seven years in a row. Joe Volta made the leap where he went from employee to empire builder, from asking permissions to giving direction, to creating opportunities for 20 team members who now work on his terms. He did it without sacrificing his family, without the 4:00 AM wake ups and midnight emails. What did he know that most rainmakers don’t? This conversation might be the reason you finally stop hesitating. Let’s begin.
Joe Volta:
I was being told, “Look, man, you’re valuable, you could bring in your own business.” That’s the hardest part. Getting cases, getting people to know you. But there are a lot of things that go into starting a firm that you don’t really realize the benefit of being at another firm. You don’t automatically have a website and they just put a picture up with you on it. You automatically have email, or maybe they’ve been using it for five years because it’s a new firm, but they still have form documents that you don’t have.
Chris Dreyer:
A lot of people have different area of strengths. You’ve been able to bring it in. Lead gen, social media. Let’s talk about, in particular, social. I get a lot of heat for social because I see so many PI attorneys doing social and it’s like a check the box item. It’s not a lead generation strategy. I think they’re approaching it incorrectly. I guess let’s just briefly talk about lead gen, how you’re thinking about social things like that.
Joe Volta:
I’ve pulled back from creating a lot of content because just trying to find that time. Now, that’s such a relative word. We make time for things that are important. But on my side of things, things that are important are my family, spending time with them. I’m not going to do the whole Alex Hormozi, working 20 hours a day and sleeping four. There is a place for that, but I’m not 20-years-old with no girlfriend, no wife, no family, no other interests. I didn’t even get a law license until I was 30. I had zero social media presence, just even friends on a Facebook account, until 2020.
I use social media as a strategy to meet other attorneys, and basically was shopping myself as I can help you, and you do nothing, and you make money. That’s been a great source of helping me get cases. Back the the lead gen side of things, people that use an SEO company like yourself, they might be getting personal injury cases for 1500 to 3K a case. I’m getting personal injury cases for much higher. If you’re sending me a case that we get settled for 100K, I paid 11-grand for that case. But I didn’t pay for it upfront, so I’m not using marketing money on March 5th and not getting that marketing money back until December 5th, because that eight-month lifecycle of a case, sometimes longer. But I’m paying a substantially higher premium for the case.
Chris Dreyer:
I hear that a lot, about the trial, the litigators and, “Hey, we don’t pay for marketing,” but you do through your split, your referral commission because you’re paying that piece for them to originate versus yourself. But again, the upfront cashflow you don’t have, so there’s some advantages there. Yeah, I think you’re going about it right. I think the website looks good. I was looking, I was checking out your rankings. You’re starting to rank in Charlotte.
I think all of it compounds and works together. The individuals that I see that have, at least who I work with, that have the most issues is they’ll pick one channel and that channel goes down, and they were just reliant on it. I think the omnipresence has continued to expand. But not diluting too much, there’s that balancing act of becoming good and doing the social right.
How Joe Volta scaled a PI law firm to 20 staff and 700 active cases in less than 24 months
Joe Volta:
Yeah. I would say, social media is strange to me. I’ve gotten to a place now with it, and I’ve gotten a lot more comfortable in my own skin. I won’t say that I’m fake on social media, because I do post a lot of real stuff where I go on there and make a funny complaint about something that I find is stupid. But because I’m so reliant on a lot of the relationships I have and trying to manage different people, it prevents me from being 100% authentic with some things. I’d probably say I’m about 90%, and then I keep 10 to myself. Which maybe isn’t necessarily a bad thing, because at the end of the day, social media is just a highlight reel.
I need to buy that book, Fireproof. I don’t even know Mike, it’s not even me about trying to rep that book. Someone just told me that’s exactly what he went through apparently. I don’t want that to happen to me because we’ve grown the organization, from 2023 when we started, it was four of us, and now we’re at just under 20. I think we’re at 16 or 17 team members now. We have four virtual assistants, six case managers, two intake people, an office manager, two litigation folks, three attorneys. Whoever’s listening can do all the math on that because I can’t do it.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah. I don’t know that I got to 20 people for maybe the first three or four years, so it’s at 20 people quickly. Are you and Michael basically recruiting yourselves, are you using a third party recruiting company? Do you have HR helping you? How did you staff up so quick? That’s pretty fast.
Joe Volta:
Yeah. We have over 700 cases in our inventory right now. I probably say about 400 of them are in the middle of treatment, and then we probably have about 10% of our cases in litigation. We listened to our team. Obviously, I read and look into a lot of ways of maximize operations. We’ve used a recruiter who I’m kind of friends with. He helped me get a job when I first moved to Carolina, so I’m friendly with him. Obviously, we pay him for his services. But I’ve used a recruiter, given that I give him stringent guidelines on what it is I’m looking for. Then we interview folks and we’ve made them offers.
Our lead case manager, my wife found her on one of those mom websites on Facebook. She was helping people answer legal questions and even saying all the right stuff. I’ve gotten people off listservs before, is another good place. You just see random posts like, “Hey, so-and-so’s firm’s closing, has staff looking for a job. They’re qualified with XYZ qualifications.” Found somebody that way. Then the virtual assistants, I just know a couple of people that I’ve reached out to that I know own remote staffing companies.
The personal injury intake systems Joe Volta uses to convert more leads and manage high case volume effectively
Chris Dreyer:
Last time we talked on the previous podcast, I’d really encourage everyone to listen, because we really go into details about social media, and your strategy, and everything you’re doing there. You are originating some cases through referrals, through digital.
How did you think about and approach intake? Because I know at some point, you were managing your own DMs and doing that thing, and maybe you do a portion of that still. How do you think about intake at the firm?
Joe Volta:
If you send me a DM on my Instagram @highvoltagelaw, it’s only me that responds. It’s only me to blame if you don’t get a response back.
But anyways, the intake part. When we really started ramping up in 2023, it was too much for me to handle. When I first started, I did the intake calls. I called leads, I vetted leads. I set clients up for medical treatment. I did all of that myself. If you’re young or you’re new, you do need to do all that, and you should want to know how to do all of that because then you can’t run your company if you don’t. But we transitioned to I have two women that, all they do all day is call leads.
We use Lead Docket is the platform that we use. We use CASEpeer as our client management system. They don’t link up perfectly because Lead Docket is a Filevine property. But they link up okay enough. To be honest, I don’t have it in me and I don’t think my team has it in me for me to change case management systems. I’ll probably be CASEpeer until I die, or until my firm closes, or until I sell my firm. I don’t think I have it in my for the change.
We have it set up where they are the ones on the phone. We use Teams for interoffice communication because we have a hybrid model firm. We have people in the office, people in different states, and that’s how we run all the leads. Looking at reports daily, checking on our metrics. Lead Docket’s great because it puts things in different buckets of the actual intake lifecycle. Because you have a full case lifecycle, but intake is its own can of worms.
You have the initial lead, then you contact the lead. They might not answer, so then it goes into another bucket that we call chase. Then you’re trying to call that lead. You can mark how many times you’ve chased the lead. Then you can move it to whether it’s been signed up, you can move it to a hold status. If you need to get more information, if you’re not understanding what the client’s saying and you’re like, “I need to see a crash report, I need to see some photos,” you can put the case on hold and not necessarily sign it right away. There’s a whole bunch of different things that you can do to break out the lifecycle of an intake case before it actually hits the case management system and you’re helping clients get into treatment, opening claims, et cetera.
It’s been a game-changer for us, but it’s just trying to run it through CASEpeer, it just wasn’t the best for what our firm needed. I’m not saying it doesn’t work for some other firms that I know use CASEpeer for everything.
Chris Dreyer:
A lot of times, we get guests on here and they’ll say their CRM, but they don’t talk about the utilization, the phases, the chases, so I appreciate the breakdown. I think that’d be helpful for the audience.
A lot of times, it’s getting those average fees up. There’s one part, it’s originating the lead in the case for a cheap price, but then the next is getting your average fees up. I saw, I believe on social, you mentioned securing a $3 million settlement on a case where the initial offer was 750K. You guys are willing to litigate and go to the final hour. Tell me about that decision, you’re hiring another dedicated trial attorney now, and how you’re approaching maximizing the case values.
Strategies for balancing pre-litigation and trial work to maximize PI case value while maintaining cash flow
Joe Volta:
I have to give all the credit to my partner on that case. We bounced ideas off of. It was his case, I buy no means want to take credit away from him. He did a killer job on that case. Yeah, Michael Chandler. Yeah, he’s my law partner. He was my mentor when I was working for him. That was a case he originated.
But to your other point of how are we maximizing value, yes, we do take cases to trial. We do put cases into litigation. A lot of that, when you’re setting up a firm, you have to decide on what kind of firm you want to have. Do you want to be pre-lit focused? Do you want to do exclusively trial work? You have to make the decisions based on that. Pre-lit focused, you have more cashflow quickly. You typically also have a lot of lower-end cases. I’m not saying that people’s injuries aren’t legitimate, and I’m not saying that their lives or their cases don’t matter. It’s just someone that doesn’t have a whole lot of treatment and they’re back to, quote-unquote, “feeling normal” after two months, that case obviously is not worth what a disputed liability death case is worth. What type of firm is it and what type of life do you want to have?
Litigation obviously takes much longer to do. High end litigation, even longer to do than just your regular soft tissue case. We have certain criteria that we’ve set out within our firm, whether we’re going to litigate the case. Or if it’s a case that we don’t feel good recommending the pre-lit offer to the client, referring that case out to other firms that are newer, or that they’ve had more success litigating lower value soft tissues cases, to just keep the time on desk moving along.
Then with respect to managing the cases, we have a protocol of how to help guide clients when they ask what they should do for medical treatment, whether or not they have their own doctors or where to go, that help build the case value. Because at the end of the day, as a plaintiff’s attorney, it’s our burden to prove our injuries to an insurance carrier. Most of the ways that you do that is through the medical documentation. Because if not, how would … I don’t really want to be defending insurance companies, but how would they guard against fraud? If anyone could just say, “Oh, I have a broken back,” well, how do they know that?
Why top-earning personal injury trial lawyers can thrive without owning their own law firm
Chris Dreyer:
Pre-lit does have the cashflow, the cash acceleration advantages. I know a lot of pre-lit only shops think they’re getting those maximum values for cases, but they’re really not. You’ve probably seen it with your data, the closer you go to trial, those numbers just keep going up. But it changes the operation to keep a good trial lawyer. Now you got to think about profit share or equity if they have a unique skillset, and all those different components like paying them really well for their value.
For those that maybe get an out of jurisdiction case and they get into the Carolinas, and they want to refer out, tell me about your firm, tell me about the Carolinas, why you’re a good option for those individuals.
Case selection strategies for PI lawyers working under North Carolina’s contributory negligence rules
Joe Volta:
I’m licensed in both states. North Carolina and South Carolina, they are very different in how they go about things. Right now, there’s a torte reform bill that’s going on in South Carolina. Hopefully we can keep fighting that and not have that go through. Then in North Carolina, torte reform hit in 2011. I was not licensed there then. They’re very different states.
I guess the two biggest things that are different about them is, in North Carolina, they have contributory negligence. 1% at fault, you recover nothing. I always find it funny. Sometimes you’ll see crazy trial verdicts across the country with famous trial lawyers that handled the case. They’re like, “Only 30% liability on my client. My client’s going to recover 70 million out of this $100 million verdict.” I chuckle to myself because I don’t think that they’re any worse trial lawyers, but I’m like, “They wouldn’t even take that case in North Carolina because they would get zero,” with how contributory negligence works. It’s 1% at fault, you get nothing. South Carolina has comparative fault, so it’s a little bit easier and it has better, more plaintiff-friendly laws. At least, for the time being.
I’d say you choose us in the Carolinas because, I always tell my clients … Well, referral partners I always tell the same thing. You don’t have to do any work, and I’m essentially sending you mailbox money, and you’re able to monetize a case you otherwise could potentially mess up.
Chris Dreyer:
Whether you’re thinking about making a leap or looking to refine your existing practice, Joe’s experience offers valuable wisdom. Start with your strengths, build infrastructure intentionally, and never lose sight of what you wanted, independence, in the first place. If Joe’s insights have sparked your curiosity about starting your own firm or improving your intake systems, you can reach him directly at jvolta@lawyercarolina.com. That’s J-V-O-L-T-A@lawyercarolina.com.
This has been Personal Injury Mastermind. I’m Chris Dreyer. Until next time, remember the talent that makes it rain for others can create an ocean of your own.
