Michael Burg:
There were eight different personal entry firms doing a commercial during one commercial break.
Chris Dreyer:
Everywhere you look, the biggest firms are built on volume, thousands of cases, fast resolutions and massive ad buys to keep the machine fed. It works for some, but there's one firm that did it completely different.
Michael Burg:
We had a case, that case went on for nine years. We had four different judges.
Chris Dreyer:
So how do you take the DNA of a trial lawyer, the precision, the patience, the obsession with getting it right-
Michael Burg:
We have the expertise in the area.
Chris Dreyer:
And scale it across seven offices?
Michael Burg:
We have context with the best experts in the world.
Chris Dreyer:
How do you grow without losing your edge?
Michael Burg:
And we have the financial resources to take it to the end. And the problem today is-
How trial readiness wins better settlements and signals strength to the defense
Chris Dreyer:
This is PIM, powered by Rankings.io. I'm Chris Dreyer. Each week we break down exactly what it takes to build the best personal injury law firms in the nation. Today we look at how Michael Burg grew Burg Simpson from a single location to a coast-to-coast litigation force with over $2 billion in verdicts. A firm where specialization drives success. This is the anti mill model and proof that you can grow big without going soft. Let's get into it. You are a legend in the trial space. You've been crushing at the highest level for over, I guess close to 50 years.
Michael Burg:
Correct.
Chris Dreyer:
Not slowing down. What's something you're excited about, a recent win you'd like to share?
Michael Burg:
I'm really proud that in December I got a $58.5 million verdict in federal court here in Colorado with regard to a woman that was burned by a pressure cooker. I said, "Hey, that's a win for some of the old guys."
Chris Dreyer:
There's very few trial lawyers that can say they've secured more than $2 billion for their clients. So paint me a picture. What does Burg Simpson look like today in terms of size, scope?
Michael Burg:
We have somewhere between 65 and 70 lawyers. We're in five states. Colorado's our main office. We're in Arizona, New Mexico, Wyoming, Cincinnati, Ohio, and we're in Florida and we're really diversified. Like in Florida, we do nothing but construction defect and we opened a firm there about five years ago for that purpose. We're diversified in terms of what we do. In Colorado, Wyoming, and in Arizona, we do all the different things. We do construction defect, we do commercial litigation, personal injury, products, med mal. In Ohio, we do mostly mass tort out of there. We do mass tort both in Colorado and also in Arizona. So one of the things we did was to diversify our practice and starting as a solo practitioner and then moving from there into a lot of different interesting things, to have that diversification really is helpful because some of the cases may go on for 10, 12 years.
Chris Dreyer:
You open the door on it, is this diversified practice. Of course, you're practicing in Arizona. They got the Waymos and the robotaxis, so the auto accident attorneys. So talk to me about the, first the decision to diversify from a practice area. And then I'd also like to hear from a location perspective. I guess let's start with the practice area.
Michael Burg:
Yeah, we've always done personal injury and actually we did defense work for about 20 years plus do personal injury. We got out of that maybe 25 years ago and thank goodness we did. So we got involved in mass tort. As you probably know myself, my partner Peter Burg and Seth Katz, we've been the lead in some of the biggest mass tort cases. Yaz, Zyprexa, Ortho Evra, gadolinium. We just recently settled the train case in Ohio where Seth was one of the leads. But those cases take years and years and years. And so we determined that we were trial lawyers and that you could try cases in any type of area. And we acquired a construction defect firm here in Denver about 16 years ago, and it's been unbelievable. Those cases take a long time too. And so we do workers' comp, which gets quicker. Personal injury, some take a long time, some don't.
Med mal, it's a real special tool. Scott Eldredge, Mark Johnson and others in our firm are at the top. And so that diversification is something for a firm our size, which is a lot bigger than probably almost any other plaintiff firm in the country, allows us from a cashflow standpoint to be able to continue to fight for 10, 15, 12 years. We had a case where we sued UBS and Moody's over the collapse of the world economy. That case went on for nine years. We had four different judges. We were dismissed for two and a half years. Ultimately, we got to go to trial and we settled the case in the middle of trial. If we didn't have the ability to continue to fight on that case or the other case. So we diversified from the standpoint of being able to hopefully measure our cashflow.
Chris Dreyer:
You're now in several states. You got Colorado and then all the way over on the East Coast, you got Florida. What goes into that decision as opposed to maybe staying in one?
Michael Burg:
We look at states that have no caps. We look at states that have jury instructions that are more favorable than others. Florida was easy. We did all the investigation of the kind of construction that was going on in Florida and we felt that not only as a result of COVID, but also the slowdown in 2008 and '09, they're putting those things up so quickly and they've got weather issues. And so we targeted Florida for the purpose of doing, we don't do personal injury there, we don't do products there. We only do construction defect. And our people down there, they are the best in terms of doing construction. Wyoming, when we merged our firms with Senator Alan Simpson, may he rest in peace, we just lost him this year. We were so happy when we merged 25 years ago. So we have a Wyoming office and that Wyoming office does a lot of different things, because of the nature of what's going on there.
So it's a combination of you don't just pick a city because you like it. I mean, Colorado, we still have some of the worst caps on non-economic damage in the country, but this is our home base. We've done well here. We've pushed hard to get the caps thrown out and/or increased. It takes a lot of due diligence to try to figure out if you're going to go to another state, why. And with Ohio, there was a firm there that did mass tort, one of the great firms, and it split up and they had an Ohio office. We took it over. We liked the people who were running it Janet Abaray, one of the great mass tort lawyers, and we took their name off the door and we put our name on the door. And so that's how we got to Ohio.
Chris Dreyer:
There's some firms, Jacoby & Meyers, they own Ed Bernstein, they own a firm in Washington now, and they have multiple brands. And then you've taken the approach of, ""Hey, it's Burg Simpson, kind of consolidation. One unified.: What's your thoughts on just the acquisition strategy? Because I think the consolidation or the acquisition strategy, it's not talked about as much in legal it is in dental and these DSOs and all these other places. Just talk to me briefly about your thoughts in that area.
Case selection criteria that protect a law firm’s brand, margins, and outcomes
Michael Burg:
We sometimes swim upstream. We're not doing what everyone else is doing. We're not a give me 10,000 cases and we'll run them through the system as fast as we can. I mean, every case has at least one lawyer on it and generally two. And if we take it, we have probably two lawyers on it and a paralegal. And we take every case as if it's going to go to trial. And I think the defense knows that. And so that's why we get some of the largest law firms in the world fighting us, these 2,000, 3,000 lawyer firms. Because the only way you get a good settlement is if one, the lawyers are handling it and two, that they know you're willing to go to trial. At 12 years old, I want to be a trial lawyer. At 25, I want to be a trial lawyer. And at my age, I still want to be a trial lawyer. We're interested in cases, but we're not interested in every case. I'd say we probably turn down seven or eight of every 10 inquiries we get. They're just not for us and other firms can take them.
Chris Dreyer:
A lot of our audience listening here, they're trying to get cases. That's a big focus like, "Where are the cases?" How has your approach, has it been the phenomenal trial attorneys willing to take the cases all the way and be more receiving end on the referral base? Or is it you've also kind of balanced that with the B2C consumer advertising? How do you think just in general about attracting cases?
Michael Burg:
Well, it's changed so much incredibly. First of all, I can identify with solo practitioners, people out there just starting out, and how do you get cases? And they don't have the financial wherewithal, nor did I. And then even smaller medium-sized firms. So I think I will say this, our best cases come from personal referrals or reputation. We have some incredibly horrible, horrible catastrophic injury cases that we work on. And there's a lot of competition for those. And so one of the things we're able to say, and not only to these potential clients, but to people who want to bring cases to us, we have the expertise in the area, we have contacts with the best experts in the world and we have the financial resources to take it to the end. And the problem today is, you go to Arizona or you go to Colorado, and I was watching the other night, there were eight firms in one commercial break, eight different personal injury firms-
Chris Dreyer:
Jesus.
Michael Burg:
Doing a commercial during one commercial break. It's all a bunch of noise. And so while if you have the financial wherewithal to be on television, yes, that helps. But personal referrals, obviously internet and other ways to get cases are really important. And the thing that I've noticed a big change is that over the last say, 10 years, people are more likely, especially in the mass tort area, to just hold their cases. Even if they don't know much about the case, to gather cases on cases they don't know much about. We're highly selective. We're not in every mass tort. The millions and millions and millions and sometimes hundreds of millions of dollars you have to put into those cases can put your firm at risk.
Chris Dreyer:
Every year personal injury firms spend millions of dollars on TV ads alone, but with more lawyers on camera than ever, attention's getting harder and more expensive to buy. It still works, but the return is tightening. The firms scaling now are finding leverage in other places, connected TV, digital retargeting, and referral systems that compound over time.
Michael Burg:
We're on TV, but our ads are a lot different. We don't talk about money. We talk about who we are until we have, I can't remember each year changes, but maybe we have 35 lawyers in the book. Best lawyers in America. You don't get in there. And we have an ad, which we've been allowed. We run that to say, "Look, compare. Go to our website." And so we're not saying, everybody's saying, "How much is your case worth?" I have to laugh at that. "Come into my office, I'll tell you what my case is worth." People come to me and I'll say, "I don't know what your case is worth because I haven't done the discovery. I don't know how much insurance there is. I don't know all the facts. I can tell you I think it's a good case because we're willing to partner up with you."
But all that money flashing in front of people I think is a distraction because if someone got $100,000 and they're bragging about it or a million dollars, what was the case really worth if a lawyer who really took it all the way? Was it worth 5 million? Was it worth 3 million? And yet they're bragging about what they got and there's no correlation that people actually, someone say, "Oh, we got 10 times what the insurance company offered." Well, maybe their first offer was $1,000 or $10,000. So anyway.
Chris Dreyer:
You open the door on the case values. What's your approach to trying to evaluate the potential of a case?
Why experience, focus groups, and real data beat verdict reporters for valuing cases
Michael Burg:
Well, I think experience. I have to laugh sometimes, back in the '90s, I was getting verdicts of seven, eight, $10 million. And my son, Steve Burg, who's a great lawyer here, he comes into my office, said, "Dad, what's that worth today? Don't take 10 million or 8 million on that case because it seems like a lot of money. What is the value today?" So here's what we use. We use our experience number one, because while every case is unique, the damages may or may not be unique as to what those values are. What we don't use is jury verdict reporters. And I'll tell you why, because the insurance companies are smart. Because what did they do? They want to settle their losers and try the ones they think they can win or limit. And so when you look at a jury, I go to mediations and they say, "Well, look at the jury reporter." I'm like, "Doesn't mean anything to me."
All that means is that they put that in that group that they were going to do well or get a defense verdict. So we use our expertise, but we also use focus groups. We do use jury consultants. And again, you have to decide, does this case, is it worth spending those kind of costs, which ultimately your client's going to have to pay for a jury consultant or an issue consultant. And so we basically look at the case, make decisions based on the size of the case, the liability of the case. I will say that we probably get more punitive damages, I think, than any other law firm that I know of because quite frankly, we gear it up for that.
Chris Dreyer:
That's a great answer. There's so much depth and so many levels to extracting value to the case, and I really appreciate that answer because it's definitely different than what I've heard. And being on this side, I can't from my own experience, but I really appreciate that, smart. I think we got to talk about your talent. You've got a ton of great trial lawyers. To me, at least from what I see is the trial lawyers are just more valuable than ever because technology is driving the volume but the case values down, and there's so many people fighting for those. And to me it's just they're more valuable than ever. Not that they weren't valuable in the past, but more valuable than ever. How do you approach finding great trial lawyers, keeping them? Talk to me about the people side.
How to hire for a trial mindset and retain top talent through shared success metrics
Michael Burg:
Okay, so Burg Simpson is not for everybody and we find out. I mean, look, you don't know in an interview whether someone really wants to be great. I mean, I interview people who tell me what their golf handicap is, a two or a three or a four, and I tell them, "Hey man, you can't be a trial lawyer and a great golfer because there's just not enough time." So what we sell is quality. You come with us... And quite frankly, we can't pay what the giant defense firms, these international firms pay them. So why would they come to Burg Simpson? Well, they come to Burg Simpson because of the work we do helping people, and that's really why I got into it. So that's number one. And number two is, there is the opportunity for them to make significant money based on their contribution, so we have bonuses. But the bonuses, some firms will give people a bonus based on their production.
We don't do that because it's, how did the firm do? How did your department do or your specialty? How did you do? And at the end, we don't have a formula. A lot of firms have a formula. We didn't go to it because I think it creates too much competition within the firm. We are a team, and I think when people come to Burg Simpson and they want to be part of a team and do something special in terms of the kind of work we do, they stay forever. We have paralegals that have been with us for 40 years, and we've had paralegals that have been with us for a month.
Chris Dreyer:
I love that answer for the purpose, the passion. It's funny, I put out these similar type of mindset, the Kobys, the Jordans, the speeches out there too. So I'm right there with you on the competitive side, to the point where somebody asked me to coach my kid's soccer team. I was like, "I can't." I was like, "Aaron's going to hate me." So I'm with you. I respect the competitiveness and the results you're doing for these injured victims. I think one of the things that I see when I'm driving down the road and I see the smiles on their face, it's like, "Congratulations for your injury." And it's just like, I just don't love that type of advertising myself.
Michael Burg:
Yeah, first of all, the client has to come first. When you bring in a client, I don't care if it's a small case, a medium case or a large case, that's the only case they have. I used to say, "I'm only as good as my last case." But I had a client say to me, "Hey, I'm your next case." And maybe about 15 years ago, I finally said, "Yeah, you're right. I'm only as good as my next case."
Chris Dreyer:
This has been so much fun, Michael. And I know our audience is going to have a ton of feedback or maybe follow up questions for you. For our audience listening that wants to connect with you, maybe they have a great case that they want to work with a top trial firm, or they just have questions for you, what's the best way for them to get in touch with you?
Michael Burg:
The best way would be through my email, which is mburg, B-U-R-G, @burgsimpson.com
Chris Dreyer:
Burg Simpson, bet on endurance, the long game. The right cases and the kind of lawyers who stay for decades. What Michael and his team built proves that you can grow nationally, stay profitable, and still put trial work first. This is PIM, powered by Rankings. I'm Chris Dreyer. If you're ready to build a marketing engine that matches your results in the courtroom, head to Rankings.io. I'll see you there.
