Danny Daniel:
We hustle and we've always said, man, we're on the verge. There's always something that we can do better in our business, in our life with our fitness, we're addicted to tweaking and getting better.
Chris Dreyer:
Welcome to Personal Injury Mastermind. Let's get into it. Danny Daniels sold his dream car to buy a Yellow Pages ad. 25 years later, he's still pushing because good enough isn't in his vocabulary. From courtroom wins to content teams, AI tools to brand attribution, he's always on the verge, loving up through systems, stories, and strategy to build a modern legacy firm. I'm Chris Dreyer, founder and CEO of Rankings.io. This is how top performers think, scale and stay ahead, let's go.
Danny Daniel:
We had the biggest verdict in firm history last year, so that was good. US $42 million verdict.
Chris Dreyer:
Wow.
Danny Daniel:
My law partner, Jonathan Stark and one of our other partners, Chris Carver, tried that case and got a phenomenal result. Largest verdict in Limestone County history. We're real proud of that around here. We've worked hard to be a firm that goes after full value and that helped validate the fact that we do. We've had multiple million dollar verdicts, but that's the largest in the firm's history, so we're pretty fired up about that. We just continue to grow as a firm every year. My goal is to grow about 20% a year. We call it the 20-mile march. If you're not growing, you're dying, kind of concept. Thankfully we've been blessed to be able to keep doing that and growing in central Texas. We have six offices, two in Austin, Bryan College Station, Killeen, Tyler, and Waco. So we're about 170 employees and 40 lawyers.
Chris Dreyer:
That's incredible. And I've got my notes here. I'm supposed to ask about the story of the '69 Camaro in your first Yellow Pages ad, so tell that story to me.
Danny Daniel:
Yeah. My dad, he died when I was young. He was a big car guy and he was also a pilot. So all the stories that I heard about him from my mom, because he died when I was two, just kind of inspired me to do things. One of them, which was tinkering around with cars, he was a big Corvette guy. I put myself through college by just remodeling cars. So when I went to law school, I bought a '69 Camaro my first year. It was probably the nicest car I'd ever built, but when Jonathan and I started the firm, we didn't have any money. My brother-in was a lawyer and he told me, "'Danny, you can't do this unless you got a hundred grand in a bank." Well, I had zero. So I sold that car for $13,000 and paid it all to the phone book company to buy a full-page ad in the phone book in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, which is where we started.
I've tried to buy that car back a number of times. We have an investigator. I said, "'Man, can you hunt my car down?" He would and I'd call him "'No. We're not going to sell it." So I don't think I'll ever get it back. But it was a fun project and it went to a good purpose.
Chris Dreyer:
Marketing's changed, but back in the day, yellow Pages was legit. It drove a lot of leads. And now you got your own podcasts, got On the Verge podcast. So just briefly before we dig in, tell me a little bit about the podcast.
Danny Daniel:
The podcast is about ordinary people who get extraordinary results. I, know there's nothing really special about me or Jonathan, we hustle. And we've always said, "Man, we're on the verge." Some people might say, "Well, you're already there." I would say, "No, we're not." We're always pleased but not satisfied and there's always something that we can do better in our business and our life, with our fitness, you name it's just we're addicted to tweaking and getting better. And so that's what On The Verge is about, is really interviewing other entrepreneurs, people in the community who are remarkable and we want to know their story and share that story. And one of the things about our law firm is we love sharing stories. I think that's a huge differentiator. It's our second differentiator. We know your story's unique, and so we just like telling the stories and the podcast is a way for us to tell people stories.
Chris Dreyer:
I got to say, that fires me up, on the verge and the goal post is always moving looking. I think that's a part of the fun of being an entrepreneur is it's always different. It's not the guy.
Danny Daniel:
It is. Chris, you're on the verge man. I read all about you, man. You're killing it. And I can tell you just from what I could see, that you're not pleased with where you are. You're going to get better every day. And so I love that man. So I was excited to be here with you.
Chris Dreyer:
Thank you. We're going to have a lot of fun. And you said, hey, there's nothing unique, but there's a ton that are different. I've done a bunch of these and you mentioned one of those uniques, right? The three uniques, is that like from EOS, you guys do that exercise?
Danny Daniel:
Yeah, we did. We did that and it really pushed me to create these differentiators because personal injury is hard to differentiate from. There's a lot of different personalities and there's a lot of different types of firms that do different things. I don't think any of us can do it all. Our three uniques are, well, first of all, 70% of our firm revenue comes from litigation. So we are a litigation-heavy firm and we didn't start that way. We were a claims-heavy firm that transitioned to what I'd say a big bad-ass boutique. That's why I like to describe it. Because we do handle a lot of cases. We end up referring out a lot because we are selective about what we want to handle, but we always say, "We don't handle every case, but when we do, we got your back."
So that's number one. And number two is we know your story is unique and a little background around that is people sometimes are embarrassed to tell their family or friends that they hired a personal injury lawyer just because some of the stigma around and the insurance company's done such a good job in their tort reform efforts to put a stigma on plaintiff's lawyers.
And I actually think that pendulum is changing, but when they realize that, hey, I really have a unique situation here. I'm not just like everybody else or what have you. So we let them know right up front, man, we know your story is unique and we're going to tell that story. That is our job. And last is full value matters. And it goes along with the story because too many times, especially insurance company, they want to boil you down to lost wages and medical bills. We're not cars, we're not property damage. So the difference in the case comes down to the story. What's unique about it and how well can you tell that story? We really don't care about medical bills. Damages are important. We want to understand what they are, but that's not where the value of the case is. The value of the case is in the unique story, how the client's life's ultimately impacted by this tragedy.
Chris Dreyer:
You're taking that client approach versus the customer approach. The client has unique needs. The customer's kind of the widget on the assembly line. Also thank you for the transparency and just sharing, hey, we went from pre-lit, now we're the big,-ass litigating firm. I value the transparency. I wanted to talk and dig into that a little bit. You've got this full settlement value committee, you've got the big case review. So it's not just saying these statements, it's like you're acting on it. These are systems at your firm. So tell me a little bit about the settlement committee, the big case review, things like that.
Danny Daniel:
I can remember back in the day when tort reform was really, really hitting Texas and Jonathan and I looked at each other and said, "Man, are we in the newspaper business? Are we going to survive this?" There was paid or incurred and all this other stuff. They were trying to hammer our damages and at that time we made a decision that we were going to move forward. We're going to fight this battle, and we were super passionate about it. So our very first thing we ever established was our OneShot. It's like you got one shot to get your life back to normal, and that's through really good medical care. And so we started really focusing on ascension of care and understanding deeply what our client's treatment needs were and trying to help them connect with the right doctors, the best. And so we called that OneShot.
And then from there, we're in a bunch of various groups with a lot of fabulous law firm entrepreneurs, and so I can't take credit for FSV, you, we call it different. Some firms call it MSV, minimum settlement value. We said, well, we're going to call it full settlement value, but it's very much a similar situation where we have a committee of lawyers look at every case that's over a certain threshold, which is mostly a hundred percent of our cases because we screen pretty heavy.
And it's what is the full value of this case and the most aggressive lawyer on that committee ends up setting the value, and it's nice to have a committee because nobody wants to be the weak lawyer that says, "Well, I don't really think the case is worth this." So it ends up being the most aggressive lawyer on that committee ends up setting the value and that's the value. That's it. And we're not settling for less unless the client, we're going to do what's in the client's best interest and ultimately we're going to do what the client wants, but our job is to try and encourage them to go the full length. And you get the most money for your case the day before trial, you just do.
So tons of data behind that. I know I see a lot of firms are pushing time on desk and trying to get it down and I mean I want to do it swiftly but not at a discount. So that's FSV. And then we realized that, hey, we got to do more with this. And that led us to life impact. And so we created this system in our firm called Life Impact Review, and so we hired a counselor that we knew from our church and he's working for us full-time now, and I promise we didn't steal him from the church. He retired from that, but now he's with us and he's phenomenal. We dig in really deep from a counseling perspective with our clients to understand more deeply how they're impacted in their life.
And if you just have a surface level call with a client, you're not going to get there. You get somebody that's really talented at digging in and sometimes the clients don't even realize the depth of the pain and he's got a way of bringing that out. So that's life impact. Then once we establish the life impact, that's really where you can get to a unique story.
Then we also have what we call Big Case Review. That's where Jonathan comes in. Jonathan's super passionate about strategy on the biggest cases. And he'll still go try a case. He likes to do that. And so he looks at those cases. That's pretty much his whole job is big case review and developing strategy on cases. And we do it not only for our cases, but also we have other firms come in and bring cases in as well. We invite other firms to present cases, and it is a source for us. We've had a number of times where outside firms have brought in cases and they end up referring the case to us. And so that's kind of a little bit of a side marketing thing, but we like to see other firms bring their cases in and a lot of firms want to understand how we do the big case review, and so we'll invite them to attend. We have them sign some confidentiality documents, and then we also invite them to bring a case if they like.
Chris Dreyer:
I want to kind of take it back to your decision to be this badass litigating firm and have the big case review, the full settlement value of this committee. Some firms, they want all the small cases and they refer out the big and others, they want to refer out the small and just keep the big. To me on the outside, and I guess there's tons of way to skin a cat so to speak, but today with AI and data and everything, it just seems like the pre-lits is getting beat down. Your efforts to go and nearshore to get these fees, you're just getting beat down, commoditized. But maybe I'm wrong. When you think about ... How do you think push back, I want it?
Danny Daniel:
No, no. I don't think you're wrong. I think you're right. Look, we were a claims firm for probably 10 years. I mean, we're 25 years in, but it was totally different back then. I mean, you could actually get reasonable values on cases in pre-lit, and we still settle cases in pre-lit, and a lot of times it's because there's not enough insurance. I mean, that's just, oh, it's like insurance companies will pay on a no-brainer, but if there's a lot of insurance out there, I mean that's what the case is worth at a minimum. If there's a million bucks, it's worth a million bucks. I mean, you can find the story. I believe that. I believe that if there was ... we're mostly car wrecks. I mean, that's our niche. I heard you talk about that on, maybe it was in your book because I listened to the first two chapters. But we're 95% car wreck.
And so if there's substantial enough property damage, if you can look at the car and say, "Oh, somebody probably got hurt in that," then tell me how much insurance is there and let's go, because there's a story. These people were impacted in a substantial way, and if you can truly understand that and prove that, bring that evidence to the table, I think you can get what's out there. I don't think that you can get full value if you can't litigate a case and put it in front of a jury to determine because they're the true determiner of value at the end of the day,
Chris Dreyer:
For me, at least the way I think of it, we're not putting a Tesla bot up to talk to the jury. That's going to be a ways off. So you're going to have that and that's a skill.
Danny Daniel:
Yeah, I want to talk about AI.
Chris Dreyer:
Let's talk about it. Let's hear it from your side. Yeah, let's hear it.
Danny Daniel:
Well, yeah. Yeah, you're right. We use AI. We use Supio, and Jonathan and I are investors in that company. I very strongly believe in it. They're brilliant. I'm just fired up about what they're doing and we're trying to figure out ways to use it more in our firm.
Chris Dreyer:
I'm unfamiliar with Supio. Give me the ... what is-
Danny Daniel:
Supio is AI driven medical chronology. They do demand letters. There's validation there too, though, I think, and that's what I want to do is back up for a second on AI, because AI, you had the LLMs and everything's moving so fast, it's crazy. So you got the LLMs and then so you can communicate with a chatbot, and that's super helpful. Then they've gone to this more deeper research reasoning models, and then now even this year, 2025 is probably going to be the year of agents, so the agentic stuff. However, law is different than say math, right? Because math has a proof and you can validate the AI's answer and you can get certainty there. But in law, law is more about delivering evidence within the constructs of the rules and then having probability and judgment.
So there's not, I mean, the jury's the judge or the judge is the judge for judging the evidence on probability and it's more probable than not. And so there's not a way to truly validate that. So I don't see AI in the near future being implemented in law firms on a enterprise-type level. I see it as more tactical, and that's how we use AI because it has to be validated. I mean, there's too much risk in our industry for error. I mean, you can't allow error. There's too much at stake on behalf of the client. So I think the risk in AI is law firms getting lazy and not validating and maybe relying too much on it.
So one thing I do like about Supio is they have validation. They have humans that will validate chronologies. If you use them to drafted a demand letter, then they have human validation. But at the end of the day, the lawyer handling that case is the ultimate validator and it's their responsibility. And so there is a lot of risk using it, and I hope that it'll help us automate a lot of things in the firm and someday. But right now we use it very tactically, mostly around medical understanding. It is an accelerator to learning big time, man. That's where I use it the most is accelerating the unknown. How do I get my head around this?
Chris Dreyer:
When you say validation, the validator, the thing that I'm running into and I'm trying to, I hope I'm not just being brainwashed, is like every time I do something on ChatGPT, it's like that's a good idea. That's an excellent idea. That's a wonderful idea.
Danny Daniel:
You mean Chat's telling you that?
Chris Dreyer:
Damn it, I'm not that smart. I'm like, be a little bit more discerning. Tell me I'm wrong here.
Danny Daniel:
True. I mean, I don't know what they call that. There's got to be a term for that where it just wants to agree with you, and I even did, you're going to know way more about this than me, but I, was searching the firm in ChatGPT to just see, Hey, and I just made a false scenario, just a hypothetical scenario and a car wreck and this market, which lawyer should I hire? I didn't come up and I'm like, "How did I not come up?" So I mean, obviously there's more work to be done, and then I was like, "Hey, what about Daniel Stark?" "Oh, they're amazing law firm." And like, oh, well, now maybe now it knows Daniel Stark. AI might know Daniel Stark because I put it in its head, but yeah, it wants you to, oh, yeah, you say, "well, what about this?" "Oh, well, that's really good too."
So yeah, it has its limitations, but it's getting better. It's pretty fascinating. It's changing everything. So it's just I think we have to embrace it and we're using it to, I'd say we can, for the lawyers in my firm that are really embracing it, they're getting two or three X'd right now. I think they can get 10 X'd because they're using it in the right ways to help them accelerate a lot of things, but it's very tactical, again, not broad and enterprise, automation, et cetera.
Chris Dreyer:
So you said the three uniques and the EOS traction stuff. One of the things I found on our issues list is I won't even look at an issue if it doesn't have some type of context or background. I don't just free roll an issue. Let's just talk about this. So I see my team are now running it through GPT for some background context and different scenarios. It helps us solve these problems instead of getting on that hamster wheel where we're just going back and forth, and then I'm the bad guy because I choose one without all the contacts.
Danny Daniel:
Interesting.
Chris Dreyer:
The other thing I wanted to talk to you too about this approach to brand advantage monitoring.
Danny Daniel:
Oh yeah.
Chris Dreyer:
You got a different kind of viewpoint on attribution and how you measure brand. Tell me about that, because you're the big litigating firm, but you're also advertising. You got the podcast, so you're doing it all. Tell me about that.
Danny Daniel:
Yeah, I'll tell you, oh man, you're opening up a big old can here. You just got my mind going five different places. You want to talk about, ma'am, we want to cast a wide net, bring in a ton of cases and hammer the big ones. That was the original vision. It's still the vision today. And so we still cast a wide net. We still bring in a lot of cases, and now some of those cases we'll refer to trusted counsel, whom we even have retreats for them. We have them bring cases to big case review. A lot of times those cases end up back in the firm if we missed one, what have you. We don't just refer out cases and leave those councils high and dry. We want the client to have the same experience that they're going to have. So we have training things and we have different retreats and stuff that we bring those lawyers in. I think it's the highest court-cutting market in America.
Chris Dreyer:
Oh, really? I didn't know that.
Danny Daniel:
I felt like, hey, you know what? This is an advantage for me because if I can learn how to compete in Austin, then I can compete anywhere because the whole world is going to that. All of the markets will eventually be similar and it's way harder. I'll just tell you it is way harder. And so I started looking for how to develop a strategy and also realizing that when you're not just on TV doing, I guess you'd call it push marketing, the direct response kind of stuff, then how do you get relevant in the digital world? And oh my gosh, you got to produce a bunch of content. Man, my CMO, Claudia, she says, "Feed the beast. Feed the beast."
And my understanding last I heard, is our team, I think we have about nine people in our marketing department now, and this is only, I'd say this marketing department is ... It used to be Danny, that was the marketing department, that's me. And now there's nine people there. And that was kind of part of the EOS FAC functional accountability chart that I spent a lot of time trying to restructure the firm into what it is today, a much larger organization. And we ended up with nine people right now in our marketing department producing 30 pieces of content a week. And that's probably not enough, but it's way more than we were doing.
And so now it's like, well, where are you going to focus these nine people? Where should they focus their attention? That's where BAM came in, and it's called Brand Advantage Marketing. Jonathan renamed it Bad-Ass Marketing. And I think it's an advantage. I do. I think that we're learning how to use it. It's new. It's certainly early in its maturity curve. I'm still learning how to best use it, but I like it because what it does is it takes all of the digital activity in your market and it measures it in relation to your competitors, whatever digital activities happen in searches, brand searches versus keyword searches versus et cetera. Clicks, I don't know. There's probably a thousand different data points, maybe more. And how many people are doing that for my brand versus another brand?
And what it does is it provides you overall with brand attraction. This company, BAM, is owned by Brett Channer. He's out of Canada. I met him randomly, and he is telling me about this, and I'm like, man, could you do this for me? He works for big Fortune 500 doing Nike and Lululemon and stuff like that. They're measuring huge brands and asked him if he'd do it for me. And he said, "Yeah, let's check this out." And it became a good market for him. And we ended up, I have another company, Legal Monkeys, so we ended up partnering together and I've got an exclusive license for this technology in legal, on three Legal Monkeys. And so it measures all of this activity and it gives you, first of all, brand attraction, which is probably the most important brand strength in the market, who's winning in brand strength in the market as measured by activity towards the brands.
Then it breaks it down into multiple different categories such as interest, presence, relevance, advocacy, things like that. There's a number of scales. It measures campaign performance and campaign efficiency as well. But what I really like are the various scales that go into brand strength or brand attraction. And if you look at those and you get to understand those, you can see where you're winning and where you're losing because again, it's as related to your competition and your competition is changing every single day. Some are better than others, but those that are investing in marketing and have a marketing team and are putting content out there, it's drawing digital eyeballs and they're having digital handshakes go down.
They're connecting with the community through events, they're getting PR out there through news articles, etc. And so you may be winning one month and you're losing the next in various scales. So where are we putting our marketing dollars? That's number one. Well, that's kind of more your world. But where are you putting your marketing activities? What kind of strategy can you go after? Are you throwing darts in the dark or do you have a true strategy that's based on data? And so when you're using BAM, what you're getting is data back strategy.
Chris Dreyer:
I've got that bookmarked. I'm going to check it out right after the show here. I think the key thing here is it's just marketing's so fragmented. Back in the day, it was the phone book and it was TV. Now it's streaming and TikTok and Meta and SEO and AIO.
Danny Daniel:
It's overwhelming.
Chris Dreyer:
It's challenging. And I think every market's a little different too, You got the guys that are over saturating TV. It's like, well, not very many lawyers are on radio or you got maybe an OTT opportunities.
Danny Daniel:
So I would say that I think if a law firm is not investing in an internal team of marketing people that can deliver content, because I do know some lawyers that are really good at social media, they love it. They like it so much that they'll do it right when they wake up and they'll post about themselves or whatever. That's not me. And I think there's a lot of lawyers out there that aren't like that, especially us that are a little older. And so you've got to find a way to continue to compete, and there are a lot of young lawyers that are coming up and they're just going to whoop you because they're pumping content out because they like doing it and they're getting eyeballs. I call those chippers. They're chipping at your brand every day, and you've got to develop a strategy that you can battle against that because everybody has a voice now. It's not just the law firms that have the money to advertise on TV, man. Anybody can come out of law school and have a voice.
Chris Dreyer:
Danny Daniel proves that growth isn't a phase. It's a mindset. From casting a wide net to building systems that drive full value. He's always on the verge of what's next. If today's episode sparked something, share it with someone who's building bold and don't forget to hit subscribe. This is Personal Injury Mastermind powered by Rankings.io, where top lawyers come to get sharper, louder, and smarter. Until next time, keep leveling up.
