AJ Bruning:
How do we bring in as many leads as possible and how can we expand our geographical area?
Chris Dreyer:
I think you guys run one of the best operationally sound practices. Sales is buttoned up, marketing's buttoned up.
Ryan Bruning:
And we sell that case, and we're just going to pour all the money we made back into marketing and try to build the practice on it.
Chris Dreyer:
Welcome to Personal Injury Mastermind. Let's get into it.
They sued the Rams, won 24 million, and reinvested every penny into marketing. Now they're one of the fastest growing PI firms in the Midwest. AJ and Ryan Bruning transformed the Bruning Law Firm from a three-person startup into a market dominator. They work harder and smarter.
The Bruning brothers triggered explosive growth by ruthlessly analyzing marketing data, targeting neglected markets, and building custom tech. Their formula combines baseball-style attorney metrics, custom-built Salesforce automation, and an AI strategy that's already transforming their operations. Let's go.
Ryan Bruning:
Ryan Bruning. AJ and I are obviously the partners and owners of the Bruning Law Firm, a personal injury firm here in St. Louis, and I've known Chris for quite some time and excited to be on his podcast.
AJ Bruning:
Yeah, I'm AJ Bruning, the other half of Bruning Law Firm. We started the firm with our father, Tony, but he is now retired, so we run the show over here.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah, and you guys run an amazing practice in St. Louis, one of the biggest, certainly one of the fastest growing too. And I like the experience you bring, both from your father, each of your own individual backgrounds, trying cases, having those experiences. But what's the state of things? I'll continue with you, AJ. Tell us a little bit about the firm, the practice, just as much as you want to convey to the audience.
AJ Bruning:
We started the firm back in 2016. We have a father that is a personal injury attorney, so we grew up watching him practice. And getting to meet some of his clients and just the impact that he would have on their lives, the weight of the responsibility was something that we always thought was just really amazing and really looked up to him. And I think as we got older, we really both wanted to follow in his footsteps and become personal injury attorneys. We took different paths to get there. I started as a litigator in the city of St. Louis, which anybody around the area know, there's plenty of work to do at the prosecuting attorney's office, unfortunately.
And Ryan worked at a firm that did high-volume practice, which was the total opposite of what our father did, and we really took those experiences in and to help formulate the practice that we run now.
Chris Dreyer:
Did you guys join, sat in trials and get to see your father do the trials? I know he had tremendous experience with subrogation and burn cases. Tell me about that experience growing up.
Ryan Bruning:
Yeah, absolutely. Went and watched him in trial. And that's his specialty, he was a trial dog. He wanted to litigate cases, settlement wasn't even an option or word that he used in his vocabulary. And just growing up and seeing how passionate he was about representing these people, but really also his work ethic, he just would outwork any defense attorney, strategize them, and that was what he thought his advantage was, and it was. He would only handle 10, 15 cases at a time and just pour everything into it.
And it was really admirable watching that growing up, and it's what inspired AJ and I both to get into it. When we first were in law school, got out of law school, we thought that that was the practice that we were going to inherit and build on. Just a small practice, litigation-heavy, both trial attorneys. I'd say that really my experience, I went to work with John Page over at Page Law, which is a high-volume, younger practice. He was one of the first people really to do internet marketing.
In just my first years there, had an a-ha moment where my father, who's this great trial attorney, business was drying up a little bit, word of mouth wasn't as big as it was when he first started his career. And here I am, one or two years out of law school, sitting at the kitchen table with a family, sign up a million-dollar wrongful death case. But in the back of my mind I'm thinking, this case should really be going to my father, and here they are signing up me. And the reason they are is because John was doing a great job with internet marketing and putting himself out there.
I just had realized the landscape had changed. And if we were going to be relevant, be competitive, we had to change with it. I remember I called AJ right after that meeting and said, "We're going to need to change the direction of what we're going to do if we're going to start a firm eventually." So that was a big changing moment for me, and I think led us to the path that we ended up going on today.
Chris Dreyer:
AJ, I think out of the gate, you saw advertising a little bit different. Tell me about the conversations you had with Ryan, how advertising and how you think about case acquisition, it's so competitive. Literally today, I was looking at MediaRadar, it used to be called Vivvix. I was looking at the TV buys in St. Louis and it's like Morgan's got a war between Di Pasquale and then Brown & Crouppen and it's like TV money came in. You guys are thriving on the digital side, but just tell me about how you think about case acquisition.
AJ Bruning:
Yeah, I think when you're looking at an established market, you have think about things that they don't care as much about. When you're taking on people who have been doing it for a while, playing in the same sandbox as them when they have more money and more resources is a difficult way to do it. So I think for us, what we really focused on was how do we bring in as many leads as possible and how can we expand our geographical area so that we're just not competing with all of these dollars in St. Louis, but we're looking at the markets in the middle of Missouri and the markets at the middle of Illinois where you live, Chris, which we thought were underutilized markets.
And we thought that was the case because lawyers typically are around where they practice law, and obviously lawyers are going to go to places where there's more clients and the bigger city and there's bigger verdicts. But these places in the middle of the states, they weren't getting the same representation, there wasn't the same competition. So we really focused on building a Google AdWord campaign, looking for lead gen services. When you have little money, you do everything you possibly can to become more efficient. And really focusing on the bottom of the funnel with the mindset of, "Hey, once we establish ourselves and get to X revenue, we'll really focus on branding and really start building that out."
And every time we started to have that conversation, we found more leads at the bottom of the funnel that we could just capitalize on. And we listen to your show a lot, we listen to other shows a lot. We know how important brand building is, but for us, as we were able to just really get into the analytics, and we're very data-driven here, and measure the results, we knew what the acquisition costs for all these leads were. We knew what our return was, so just keep fueling the fire until we started seeing the acquisition costs get up, and then at that point in time start focusing on branding.
We're starting to now put more dollars towards branding this year, but honestly it's not because the bottom of the funnel costs have gotten that much higher, we're still able to find little niches and places where we're able to spread those marketing dollars around and get a good return on our investment.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah, that's fantastic. And you guys, I know you have the in-house, the Google Ads, tremendous, even where I'm at. I'm in Marion, Illinois right now, and if I type in a few combinations, I'm going to see you there. Very president for those really intent phrases. Ryan, your thoughts on this? Like you said, you had Page, I know he was a big Google Ads advertiser. I think with Cagle, they were some of the first in that really jumped into Google Ads, but your thoughts on advertising, anything else to add there?
Ryan Bruning:
Yeah, just to follow up, I think it's for us, with us being so data-driven, even early on, every dollar we spent, we had to know exactly where it was going. So we've just focused on any acquisition that we could track the exact dollar that we spent on that case. And so we just kept going in. If we knew that the case was going to cost X amount, if we've spent this much, we're going to get it. And we just kept pouring into those avenues, and we've just continued to do so.
And really it's just been fun over the last three or four years to see the data that we've collected is really now we can start to use it because we have so much of it that it starts to make sense. Obviously if it's a small sample size, it doesn't mean anything. So we're really looking now at, okay, this lead source brings us this much in revenue, this is our profit per source. And anything that has a higher profit, we're just pouring more money into it. As long as the case acquisition stays the same, we're going to keep using it.
Chris Dreyer:
I remember, I was sitting at a table with you guys, this was a long time ago, this is when we were both getting started. And AJ, you were talking about CRMs. You were talking about, "Ah, am I going to use Salesforce? Am I going to do..." I think maybe the firm, your father maybe used Needles. I can't remember the exact CRM he had. And at the time, I was super green, so on the digital side I knew Pipedrive and Infusionsoft, and now you guys are using Salesforce. A question here, it has tremendous capabilities, the data that you can get, but it seems like you need a full-time Salesforce employee just to manage it. Talk to me about that selection, and just to use its capabilities versus a Lead Docket or Clio Grow that's like out of the box, like a good piece of software.
AJ Bruning:
Yeah. We took a unique path, and I don't know that it's the path that I would recommend others take. This was back in 2016, and at the time, really Trialworks, Needles, that was the biggest pieces of software out there for attorneys. And those pieces of software were not very customizable, you were really trying to fit your workflow into the way that system was structured. And the other issue was the analytics component was very weak, and one of the things we realized from an early state was we were going to have to really make sure that we were cataloging all this data and that we were able to really quickly and easily surface this data to make improvements through our system.
I was basically a trial attorney by day, and then I'd come home at night time and teach myself Salesforce till three o'clock in the morning. I did that for about six months. I built out our entire case management system, and really just continuously improve that system where now we do have a full-time Salesforce admin. We just hired a Salesforce developer. It takes a lot of time and effort to make sure that it's a system that works really well. But it's so customizable for us and we're so quick to make really, really good decisions. Our system runs really, really well and our people really enjoy it, because if they need a certain task, if they want the UI to look different, if they want information presented to them in different ways via reports and dashboards, those things are happening in weeks. And we're able to really automate and run our entire workflow, our data structure, it all lives within Salesforce.
Chris Dreyer:
You got a different range of listeners on the podcast. You got the bootstrapped solos that are getting ready to start, that's looking at a CRM, versus some of the bigger advertising firms. If you were bootstrapped, are you saying, "Hey, maybe not go the Salesforce direction, maybe that's a later." I think it's different when you look at it in retrospect, and it's you spent six, seven months and after trials learning it. Do you still think, "Hey, it's the best CRM. If I had to do it over again, I would continue to use it, do the same thing?"
AJ Bruning:
Yeah, I think it's the best CRM for us. Technology right now is changing so fast, and the way you're able to utilize AI, especially with some of these new case management systems, I think have really bridged some of the gap. And if I was starting out right now, honestly, I would spend all my time learning AI and how I could utilize that to my advantage, and that would be the starting point for any sort of case management system that I would use is totally make it AI first. Make sure that every single part of my tech stack was scaling as these new models are getting better with AI. And I think that would be the best way to do it now if I was just starting out.
Because honestly, AI is extremely cheap for us to use. You can get a $20 ChatGPT account and build some amazing things, or you could just get on Microsoft Teams and use Copilot and build out an entire operating system there if you wanted to. So that would probably be the way that I would start honestly.
Chris Dreyer:
AI, it's absolutely changed how I do things too, to the point where it's like, I know you guys, and we're going to talk about EOS. And I got a rock recently and it was just like I thought it was going to be super complicated, and I did some prompts in ChatGPT and I got a validation I was on the right direction. It was like 90% done. In fact, and I got a funny story without getting super weird. I was riding on a golf cart with my kid yesterday and I got stung, or I had this big mark on my back and I'm like, "What the heck is it?" And I didn't feel the sting. And I load the picture, just the picture, and it's like, "Oh, you got stung. This is what you need to do." And it's just like-
AJ Bruning:
Wow.
Chris Dreyer:
It's just wild, but I digress.
AJ Bruning:
Well, did your kid tell you to do it? It's funny, we used to always say Google this or Google that. When anything comes up in my household, my kid's like, "ChatGPT that. Ask and figure out what's going on."
Chris Dreyer:
And they talk to it, I'm still doing the texting.
AJ Bruning:
They're looking at me, like, "Why are you taking so long to ask this from ChatGPT? What are you doing, dad?" So yeah, it's so transformative. And it really is, it's seeping into every application that's useful out there. The easiest thing I think to do is just pay attention to the changes that are happening to the applications that you're using. For instance, I know obviously you guys use Canva. Canva just had a huge announcement with tons of new AI applications. The easiest thing you could do is take those systems that you're already using and just make sure you understand the new AI advancements that they're making, and just try to stay up to speed on what's going on. And you could just ride that wave without having to build custom GPTs or custom applications yourself, I think you can let these third-party companies take the heavy lift for you.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah, it's amazing. And Ryan, what about you are, you know, are you ChatGPT? I heard a new one today and I was like, "Oh, I haven't heard of this one." I did DeepSeek for a few days until I got weirded out by the security issues.
Ryan Bruning:
So yeah, I'm ChatGPT a lot. AJ introduced it to me six months ago and then it's just been a tailspin from there. I'm using it all the time. I'm planning our vacations with it and using it for a personal... For here, we're actually really trying to get everybody on Gemini, because we use Google Workspace, and excited about Google's collaboration with Salesforce coming up. So I've been trying in the office to use Gemini. For emails, I don't know if you have Google, but there's just a button right on your email. And I don't send one email without at least running it by Gemini to polish it up for me and it make sure it sounds better than whatever I came up with.
So it's just a game-changer in everything. AJ and I use it all the time, and we've slowly been pushing it on our staff. And just the responses we're getting, the replies from our staff saying, "It's changed my life, and it's making me so much more productive and effective." And obviously there's precautions we have to take in terms of our client's information and things like that, but as long as we're doing that, sky's the limit on really what we're going to use it for to increase productivity for everybody in our org. Yeah, we're excited.
Chris Dreyer:
Fantastic.
AJ Bruning:
I think a lot of people are sitting around in the C-suites and going, "What should I build with this? How do I use this?" I think you just need to tell everybody in your company, your law firm, "This is how you get there. This is how you prompt. You got to change the way you use it versus Google. Keep asking it questions, keep giving it more context." If you do that, which we've rolled out to everyone in our company, you'll be amazed at the things people are coming up with.
I made this whole presentation to all of our support staff. I talked to this paralegal the other day. She had built a personalized GPT to upload court documents that would then calendar all the events for her. I'm just like, I didn't think of this use case, but she did because it's in her normal workflow. It's something that she saw could get easily taken away by automation. And people will use it in the most interesting ways, you just got to give that productivity tool to them and allow them to use their creativity to be more productive.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah, I remember using ChatGPT a lot. I asked it a prompt, based upon all of my previous prompts, "Where are my blind spots? Where am I weak?" And the answer it gave back to me, it was pretty incredible. And you also got to be careful too, or you bias it a little bit and you might have to clean it up a little bit.
Ryan Bruning:
Well, it was interesting. I was listening to your most recent podcast and you had the same complaint that I did, it's too friendly. Every single thing I put out, it says, "Yeah, that was a great idea. Love it." I'm like, You could be a little bit more discerning. It's okay, you could tell me that that was a bad idea. Let's move on to something else." So yeah, I need to change his personality a little bit, but-
Chris Dreyer:
That's great.
Ryan Bruning:
That's funny.
Chris Dreyer:
Ryan, I knew your guys's father background from the fire cases. Talk to me, we talked a little bit about Tam, about southern Illinois, expanding the geo, what about the practice type. With auto, ton of competition with collision detection and the different... You got Waymo's were in Arizona, now they're in Texas and it's like, what's your thoughts on practice types?
Ryan Bruning:
For us, when we joined this practice, it really was about combining his specialty of handling these high stakes fire cases, but then combining that with the most common case, which is auto. The specialized cases are just so hard. We tried when we started to do pay-per-click and SEO on fire cases, and they're just so one-off, it was really hard. And the auto stuff, especially for AJ and I who are so data-driven into process, it's the perfect kind of case because they all have the same factors generally. And just if you're going to build something, to build it around the auto practice.
And of course there's threats to it, the technology and the self-driving cars. But we've been hearing that for a long time, and I think that it's shocking how many accidents there are and how many cases that we get, because we know the other law firms are getting a lot of cases too, so they're out there, I wouldn't be afraid of that stuff. Right now, if it changes, then maybe we're singing a different tune in a couple years, but we still feel confident about that. And of course there's ways to diversify with where we do workers' compensation and dabble in mass torts and things like that, but the auto industry in the cases is still a bedrock to build a practice behind.
Chris Dreyer:
That's constantly a question top of mind. It's like nursing, but then those can be really complicated. And then there's the birth injury cases and cerebral palsy, and especially actually where we're at, you've got Simmons Hanly Conroy and some of those firms doing the MISO cases still. Just a constant, I like to ask that just to see what people are thinking about. Talk to me, you guys, EOS-based practice, talk to me about that.
Talk to me about using EOS. Give a little background to the audience, what it is, how you guys use it. Because being transparent, and I genuinely mean this, I think you guys run one of the best operationally sound practices. It's like sales is tuned up, buttoned up, marketing's buttoned up. You've got the data component, you've got the trial experience. It's across the board a very strong operationally sound practice.
Ryan Bruning:
Well, thanks, appreciate that. And AJ and I have worked hard on that, and really I think we've separated ourselves from the actual legal work. We made that decision about three or four years ago, and that's when we started EOS. We both read Fireproof by Mike Morris and really was just eye opening to us. It was circling around a lot of the ideas that we had already been doing, but just fueled it and took off. And for anybody who doesn't know, Mike Morris runs a great practice up in Michigan and has a book, Fireproof, about the entrepreneurial operating system.
And it's based on the book Traction, which of course we also read, and just to keep things moving along and setting up the proper infrastructure for your organization, it was just huge for us. What we did was we self-implemented, which I think was really important for us. We had thought about hiring his practice or someone else to come in immediately and take that over, but AJ and I just did it ourselves, started running the meetings every week. And really just got in the flow of it, knocking out issues, figuring out what the problems were.
And I think as lawyers, it's really hard to step back. We're so in the weeds on these cases, and to think that, Hey, I'm going to spend an hour of my day meeting and talking about ancillary issues is not something anybody really wants to do. And forcing ourselves into that habit early was important. Then of course, we brought in a coach at your recommendation, James Ashcroft, who really just took us to the next level. And then after that we brought our whole org into it. Getting our other attorneys to buy into that was a challenge, of course, at first, because we're adding more time away from their cases. But now that we've got everybody in it, things are flowing and they're really moving in the right direction. There's nothing that slips through the cracks, and it's allowed us to have, as you call, a really buttoned up organization, I think.
AJ Bruning:
Yeah, I think that the most important part of that process, it's really ran by two people. As you know, Chris, you need somebody who's the visionary, you need somebody who's the integrator. You need those roles really with strong people who understand the business and who know how to lean into those things. And it just fit into our personalities so well. Just there's two of us, we're totally different in that regard. And because of that, I think it allowed us to focus really on growth, and making sure that we're taking a look at the entire market, taking a look at all the different threats and opportunities that were coming our way and kind of digesting that at a 5,000 foot view. And it allowed Ryan to really make sure that the organization, the operations are running smoothly and efficiently.
And I think because we've been able to separate ourselves and really focus on those things, we've grown at the right pace. And we haven't outgrown ourselves, but we haven't become stagnant. And we're consistently making sure that we're planning for the future while also making sure that everything that we're doing today is providing the best service for our clients.
Chris Dreyer:
Fantastic, fantastic. And I've seen the growth and it's just continued, it's pacing nicely. I feel like every time I see Chris Levinson over in California, he gives me shit about the Rams. And Chris, if you're listening, this one's for you, buddy.
AJ Bruning:
We're diehard Rams football fans here, and we went to all the games and really grew up with the Rams. And when they decided to leave, and we saw it coming for a while, if anybody wasn't in St. Louis, probably wasn't paying as much of attention, but it was a big buildup to the whole thing. And they left in January of 2016 and became official. Well, that was exactly when we started our firm, and the thought process was, well, we're really so upset that they left, and although it's not a good idea to file a lawsuit out of spite, we went through and we tried to find everything we can.
We found a good reason to file a lawsuit against them, which was when they came to St. Louis, they had everyone get PSLs, personal sea licenses that lasted for 30 years. And they left St. Louis after 21 years, so we said, "Well give all these people their money back for the nine years that they missed out on." And so we filed the suit against them, we had just started the firm, so there was only three attorneys. And I'm sure when the Rams got that petition and they looked up our firm, I don't even know if we had a website at that point of time. So we filed a suit, we brought in a few attorneys locally that we knew we needed some help to help us out with the case.
And we showed up, a judge ordered mediation about two months in. And we showed up at Armstrong here in St. Louis, and I guess as a show of force, the Rams raves showed up with another law firm and 30 people on the other side, and there was us five. And so they sit us at a table, like a lunch table, and they put all the attorneys and Rams on one side and put us on the other. And at that point in time, they said the best thing they would offer us was for all of the St. Louis PSL owners to buy tickets in LA, which we said obviously we don't want that.
So we litigated the case for three years. Ryan and I spent a lot of time out at LA, and at the end of the day, they paid $24 million, which was the exact amount of the nine years left on the PSLs, plus they paid our attorney's fees and costs. So I would never suggest anybody file a lawsuit out of spite, but it worked out for us that time.
Ryan Bruning:
It was a great PR too, especially at the launch.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah, that's amazing.
Ryan Bruning:
Yeah, that's why we did it at first, because we'd say, "Hey, this will put us on the map, and we probably won't get anything out of it." And then when we did, it truthfully built our practice. AJ and I made a decision when we settled that case that we were just going to pour all the money we made back into marketing and try to build the practice on it. So yeah, it was thank you to the Rams for leaving in the end.
Chris Dreyer:
That's right. I had my Sunday's back too instead of watching crappy football, that's good. Oh, that's amazing. I've always wanted to ask that, get the story behind it, and that's amazing. Guys, this has been awesome. If you're going to look to the future and think about what's next and how the PI shaping with this AI environment, what can you do to set yourself up for success for the future? And I'll ask, I'll start with AJ, and then Ryan, I'll finish with you.
AJ Bruning:
You need to make sure your data is super clean, super organized. You need to make sure that if you have the ability to add metadata descriptions to your data, you should do that, and make sure it's not siloed is the first thing that I would say. And the reason that's important is because you're going to start utilizing your AI to surface all kinds of information wherever you are housing all of your data. And you got to think of it like an associate. You ask that associate to go in and look at your information and give you good feedback back. If the information's not complete, if it doesn't make any sense, if part of your data's in one place and part of your data's in another, you're not going to get good results.
So even if you're slow to adopt AI right now, focus on making sure that your data is really clean and organized. Because when you do start utilizing these tools, you won't have to go back and start making sure that's correct as well. So I think that's the first thing. The other thing I'd recommend is understand where does your workflow live, whether it's in Salesforce or whether it's in a different CRM. Understand that workflow and understand how AI is going to interact with that workflow. Traditional workflows have gone from the if then this process, which means the more variables you add to those workflows, the more complicated it gets.
And what we're about to introduce or what's getting introduced to all of our workflows is the ability to take that process and add reasoning to it, which means you don't have to add so many variables to every single process, you really could start processing things that weren't necessarily possible or too tedious before. So understand where your workflow lives and develop a plan to make sure that your workflow is going to be able to work with AI.
And then I think the last thing is also look at where your employees are interacting with each other right now and make sure that that's a natural space for them to interact with AI agents, which are right around the corner. Because the user interface and the way that they are able to interact with these AI agents to get things done is really going to be an indication of whether or not it's going to be successful rollout or not, because they have to be able to utilize these AI agents that you built specifically for tasks within their normal workflow or they just won't use them. So those are really the three things that I think people should be thinking about and focusing on as we go through this crazy advancement of these AI models.
Chris Dreyer:
And Ryan, take us home here. Any final thoughts here?
Ryan Bruning:
Sure. Yeah, look, I think it's about the people really for us too. AJ and I spend so much time building the infrastructure out and the process that now it's about finding the right people and really training those people to fit it. EOS, right person, right seat. And so we're focusing a lot on that, but also giving our people that we have the tools to be successful. So one of the things that we're excited about that we're working on now is we're trying to get everybody down to one number. EOS talks a lot about that. Traction talks about it, get everybody down to one number.
It's really hard for attorneys and staff that are working on so many different variables, how do you get them to one number? So what we've done, actually, AJ and I, big baseball fans, love the war statistic that they have for their players. So we've developed our own war algorithm for our attorneys that basically sets these are the par values, we're looking at fee per day, average fee divided by average age or time on desk. And that's one factor of many. And at the end of the day, the algorithm pumps out one number, and if you're a zero, you're a replacement level player. If you're below, you're below that, and hopefully you're above it.
And we just rolled it out recently, and the returns already have been huge. They love it actually. They want to know beyond just what my revenue number is, am I being productive, am I doing a good job? And so we're going to start working on that for every position we have and get everybody down to one number, and excited about that. So I think getting the right people in, hiring, focusing on recruitment, putting your brand out there in order to attract the right people. And then once they're in your org, build them up. Give them the tools they can to be successful.
Chris Dreyer:
Big thanks to AJ and Ryan at the Bruning Law Firm for sharing their story. No matter how crowded your market seems, there's always room for a new player with the right approach. The brothers didn't try to outspend the Giants, they outsmarted them. If you're just starting out or looking to grow, find your unique angle, embrace technology, stay nimble, and hit us up at rankings when you're ready to get to the top. I'm Chris Dreyer, this is Personal Injury Mastermind. Catch you next time. I'm out.
