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.
Monty Cain:
I went out on my own about coming up on 14 years ago. It's 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 or 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've 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.
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. We've built that relationship over the last 20, 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 car accidents, 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 the structure to be able to handle volume on the intake side, so just tell me a little bit 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-
Chris Dreyer:
Wow.
Monty Cain:
... just without advertising or spending one more dollar than we were before. If you're going to be a volume firm, 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.
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. And so, we have a whole checklist of things that we need to do right off the bat, 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've found what we call chameleon carriers by doing that, and changes the value of the cases significantly.
The 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, 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.
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 to whether or not you can bring a negligent entrustment 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 a 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's 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 road 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. And 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, that immersion component, I always joke, 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, sitting 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 one, three, five, 10 years. What's your vision for the firm of the future?
Monty Cain:
Since getting involved in organizations like Tillman, some masterminds, who started being more intentional about it. And also, 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. And 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. And so, we're being aggressive about trying to grow, because I think we have to at this point. 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've really enjoyed our convo. Where can the audience go to connect with you if they have questions or to learn more?
Monty Cain:
Sure. Anybody can email me at Monty, it's M-O-N-T-Y, @cainlaw, that's C-A-I-N-L-A-W, -OKC, for Oklahoma City, .com. And a shout-out to the Thunder as well. And also, they can give us call at 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.
