Monty Cain:
I'm in the customer service business, that just happens to be practicing law.
Chris Dreyer:
That mindset drove 25% more signed cases at Cain Law without spending another dollar on ads.
Monty Cain:
Things started to snowball because the clients started referring. You don't have to go out and search for TBI cases. By asking the right question, you will enhance the value of those cases significantly. The next step was...
Chris Dreyer:
That's Monty Cain and this is Personal Injury Mastermind powered by Rankings.io. I'm Chris Dreyer. Today, Monty reveals how looking closer at clients, at cases, at carriers reshaped his firm and even changed the rules for every PI lawyer in the country. Let's go.
Can you kind of take me through that moment? What clicked? What results did you see from that mindset change?
Monty Cain:
I'm in the customer service business, that just happens to be practicing law. So we've got to put the customers first and they've always had that particular thought. Went out on my own about coming up on 14 years ago. Was just me and one assistant. We're up to 12 attorneys I think, and then I think we have close to 30 staff that are either international or local. Things started to snowball because the clients started referring. Other clients are coming back having second accidents. And we try to fight for every little penny that we can get.
Chris Dreyer:
Once you have the leads, you still got to market to the clients because otherwise they're not going to leave you a good review, they're not going to send referrals. So that everything is-
Monty Cain:
Absolutely, there's been times over the career where, hey, I needed money, I wanted to settle a case. And well, it wasn't best for the client to settle this case, so let's keep fighting. It'll just pay you back in dividends.
We mine our past clients and we also have relationships with the clinics that handle personal injury in the state and have a good relationship with them. They send us their employees and also their family members. They're a critical piece to helping our clients and so we've built that relationship over the last 20 to 30 years that I've been practicing. And it's been a win-win for the client, for us, and also the clinics.
Because Oklahoma's a little bit different, you can't go to a primary care doctor and they'll treat you in Oklahoma. Most of the hospitals own the primary care clinics and they have rules or policies not to handle a car accident. So that has developed personal injury clinics that have developed to fill that void and so we have relationships with them to try to make sure we can get help to our clients that they need.
Chris Dreyer:
You have to structure to be able to handle volume on the intake side. So just tell me a little bit about your setup and how you think about intake.
Monty Cain:
We changed our intake a little over a year ago to where we had a dedicated team and that's made a significant difference of probably 20, 25% increase in our signed leads just without advertising or spending one more dollar than we were before. If you're going to be a volume firm that you're going to need a dedicated intake team, we use international people that are bilingual. And then we've added CallRail and Lead Docket. We're very new to those and so we're trying to figure out the full circle attribution so we can make better decisions on spending our marketing dollars. This has given us a lot more data and information that we'll be able to use going forward and make better decisions.
Chris Dreyer:
Monty uncovered hidden value most lawyers miss, starting with traumatic brain injuries, buried inside everyday car crash cases.
Monty Cain:
The TBI space, which I feel that we were one of the first ones in Oklahoma to really get into that area and luckily, because I had a commercial motor case that we had a young lady that got rear ended by a semi going 59 miles an hour. She was broke down on the side of the road, had a 20-month old baby in the back seat. And both of them suffered mild TBIs and this is seven or eight years ago and I really hadn't run across that. They had all these complaints, and I was like, "What do we do with it?"
So we started reaching out and making connections with different people that had had some experience with that and really kind of opened our eyes and learned that space and I think have been a leader in Oklahoma with the traumatic brain injury area. And it's really helped change our practice, that and the commercial motor carrier as well, litigation that we do.
Chris Dreyer:
What are some of the different components in this space? Because it's just a bit different because people don't know how to think about it.
Monty Cain:
Yeah, the gaps in treatment have been there for several years. That's getting better. You don't have to go out and search for additional TBI cases, it's just start asking the question. And a lot of the clients that are coming in have those issues and unless you're asking the right questions, you don't know it.
So I would say after we did this first case that we had, we started asking those questions and we started finding, I'd say 15 to 20% of our car accident cases would have some type of concussion or mild TBI issues. By asking the right question, you will enhance the value of those cases significantly.
The next step was how do you get them treated? And you talked about gaps in treatment or no treatment. Early on, we were just getting evaluations, that's about all we could do. There wasn't any resources in our area. Over the course of the years, I've really tried to work in our community with some providers to develop that and it has come a long way. And there's been a few providers that have really stepped up and developed a TBI program that is from A to Z now.
So now we're able to get them in and get them treatments. We're still at the tip of the iceberg, in my opinion, on the traumatic brain injuries. And the technology is changing. You've got the blood testing, you've got the eye exams, the balance testing. Obviously the DTI MRI has been around for a minute, but there's constantly changing. Once they get diagnosed, well what do we do with them next? And we didn't have any good answers for that for several years.
And now that has evolved and we're getting them help and they're getting better. And that's obviously the first goal. If they don't get better and they end up with some permanent injuries, then we still have the evaluations that we've done in the past and that we can get them evaluated and also enhance the value of their case by that evaluation. And if we need to go to the DTI MRI to look for objective evidence, because it's always referred to as the invisible injury for years and years, so now you're going to be able to objectively get testing done to support that clinical diagnosis. And the client's complaints, even if you've got the objective evidence as well as the clinical diagnosis, if you have some good before and after witnesses, that strengthens your case significantly.
Chris Dreyer:
You're part of the Trucking Academy, these cases are no joke. Talk to me about how you approach these types of cases that are a whole different animal.
Monty Cain:
Trucking cases are significantly different obviously than just a regular motor vehicle accident, so we have a whole checklist of things that we need to do right off the bat. And obviously, trying to get an expert out to the scene and do an inspection and make sure we get out letters for preservation of evidence to the carriers. And also get with the federal motor carrier, we send out a letter to get the past history of the trucking company. I think that's critical. By doing that and getting your OP-1, you can find things such as if they've operated under a different name. We found what we call chameleon carriers by doing that, and changes the value of the cases significantly.
Thing that I try to tell my young attorneys is that in a car accident case, they're wanting to get all your client's past medical so they can try to find any prior pre-existing conditions or inconsistencies with what they're claiming. And essentially, that's what we're doing with the commercial motor carriers, that we're trying to look under the hood and find out if they've been a good operator or they have a lot of safety issues.
We've changed the value on a lot of cases by going after systemic issues within that particular commercial motor carrier. And if we get a good ruling, the judge allows us to get into a lot of that. Then you expose their poor hiring practices, their failure to comply with federal motor carrier safety regulations. The more you can find on them, the more value that drives for your client. We got shut down in federal court before that decision came down and now we can go in and discover all those past problems that they've had with safety. And the more we discover, I think it drives the value of those cases significantly and get great results for our clients that you wouldn't be able to get if we weren't able to go after those in discovery, those specific prior violations and be able to use that as evidence against them at trial.
Chris Dreyer:
Monty's fight in Oklahoma courts made it possible for lawyers nationwide to dig into trucking company safety data. That one win reshaped how these cases are tried.
Monty Cain:
Nationally, it's about split across the country as whether or not you can bring a negligent trust claim against a motor carrier. And in Oklahoma, it was unsettled law. If you went to federal court, you lost that issue. State court is mixed bag. And I won that in a state court, district court and then it got taken up to the Supreme Court. And luckily, we won that issue and had a 9-0 decision in our favor.
So now that solidified the law in federal court and state court that now you can bring a individual claim against a commercial motor carrier, which has been game changing, I think, for a lot of clients across the state, not just for our clients but other attorneys as well, that now they can bring that particular claim against a motor carrier. And really helps when you have a bad carrier, to be able to bring that information out to the public and try to make our roads safer. And before, all you could do is bring a claim directly against the driver and not for the negligence of the motor carrier for hiring a bad driver or having a bad safety culture. So that was a game changer for us seven, eight years ago when we had that decision come down.
Chris Dreyer:
How are you thinking about the pre-lit versus lit and letter grading these cases? Volume lends itself to complexity. If you're just getting referred the big truck case, it's like, okay, that's a letter A. The 80/20 principle, it's like, hey, you might get 80% of your value for the year out of a small percentage of cases, so how do you approach that on the ops side?
Monty Cain:
I'm still playing catch up from when I was transitioning probably from what I would call a mom and pop law practice to a more corporate based type law practice and trying to learn the business of law. So we're constantly setting up new procedures and structure, I think, to try to accommodate that.
We are in the process of setting up a non-lit and litigation system. We already had that for our assistants, but we're doing that for the attorneys now. So the younger attorneys will be in the non-litigation space, but then we're partnering them with the more seasoned attorneys on the commercial motor vehicle cases as soon as they come in. So a litigation attorney's going to be on that A-graded or whatever star rating that you may have for grading those cases. So they're going to be on that early.
The other thing that we're doing is we're having weekly meetings with the staff and going over topics such as how do we initially set up the commercial motor vehicle? What do we need? Why do we need it? Making sure we're not missing anything. And trying to educate not only the young attorneys but also the staff, I think that's helped our firm grow significantly.
Chris Dreyer:
Developing the young attorneys, like that immersion component. I always joke it's like you can watch all the YouTube videos and read all the books about shooting a three pointer, but unless you start shooting the threes, you're going to be out of luck. So getting them in, setting by the attorneys, assisting with the case, I think that's the way to do it.
What's the vision look like? People talk about these 1, 3, 5, 10 years. What's your vision for the firm of the future?
Monty Cain:
I think the ever-changing space of the legal practice, which I think is going to change significantly over the next five years on the consolidation of firms, I think is coming. So it's a thing where I think we need to be intentional about our growth and that's what we plan on.
So we're probably hoping to grow double our size in probably three to five years and continue that growth. And I have two or three key associates that are all bought in on that and that will be included in that plan going forward. So we're being aggressive about trying to grow because I think we have to at this point. And I think just what I think is how the legal space is going to be changing in the near future. If you're not growing, then I think that could be a problem for a lot of firms going forward.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah, I couldn't agree more. Monty, one final question. This has been a lot of fun, I really enjoyed our convo. Where can the audience go to connect with you, they have questions or learn more?
Monty Cain:
Sure. Anybody can email me at Monty, it's M-O-N-T-Y, at Cain Law, that's C-A-I-N L-A-W hyphen O-K-C, for like Oklahoma City, dot com. And got to shout out to the Thunder as well. Oklahoma City Thunder won the NBA championship, so that was a lot of fun and I got to go to a few of those games and so got to give them a shout-out as well. And also they can give us a call (405) 759-7400 or just go to our website as well.
Chris Dreyer:
Growth comes from looking closer, at your clients, your intake, your cases, your systems. Monty Cain built Cain Law by asking the right questions and refusing to settle for surface level answers. If you got value from this episode, subscribe to Personal Injury Mastermind for more conversations with the country's top trial lawyers and firm owners because the strategies to scale firms like Monty's can scale yours too.
