Why clarity around life goals and firm priorities enables sustainable law firm growth
Chris Dreyer:
A 14-time Texas Super Lawyer, Brian Beckcom brings a rare combination of trial experience and systems thinking. His firm is known for trial excellence, board-certified attorneys, and results that speak for themselves.
Brian Beckcom:
You could be the best lawyer in the country, and if you don't have any clients, it doesn't matter.
Chris Dreyer:
He's written six books, published hundreds of articles on law and success, and hosts the Lessons from Leaders Podcast, where he studies what high performers get right across business, sports and the military.
Brian Beckcom:
You need to figure out what you want your life to look like, and then design your practice around your life.
Chris Dreyer:
This is Personal Injury Mastermind. I'm Chris Dreyer, founder and CEO of Rankings.io, the elite performance marketing agency for law firms. Brian didn't just build a successful firm. He built one that fits his life deliberately, with clear boundaries around who the firm serves, how it operates, and who belongs inside it. Let's get into it.
Brian Beckcom:
I don't really look at my courtroom results as wins or losses. I look at them more as learning experiences or we get some money. The funny thing about it is, Chris, I've been keeping a digital journal for 25 years about every single trial I go to. And when I win a case, it's two sentences, "You're the best, you're awesome. Keep doing what you're doing." But when I lose a case, it's 20 pages of, "Do this better, do that better, do this better, do that better." So that's been my new mentality, not to get too worked up about outcomes.
My job as a trial lawyer is to stack the decks in my client's favor as best I can. But at the end of the day, it's either a judge or a jury that's making the decision and you don't have control over that. And if you try to control that, it causes all sorts of anxiety, it causes you to be less relaxed. So I have a note that pops up on my phone every morning that says, "Forget about the outcome," because I'm really trying to be outcome-neutral. There's only so much you can control, and I want to control that and I don't want to worry about anything else.
Chris Dreyer:
Mohnish Pabrai has this book called The Dhandho Investor: Heads, I Win; Tails, I Don't Lose. Basically, it just talks about the Indian culture and how a lot of the Patels own a lot of the hotel chains. So it's kind of interesting, I've never thought of that, that risk, that asynchronous side of things. But really, it is a zero-sum game if there's a winner and loser in a trial.
Brian Beckcom:
Well, and the other side of that, Chris, is not everybody likes that risk. A lot of people are very uncomfortable with the kind of risks that trial lawyers take on a daily basis. They want certainty. They want to know, when they go home, that they don't have to worry about something happened to their client that night, or they don't want to worry about, am I going to spend half a million dollars on a case and lose it all, or is my client going to be mad? That's uncomfortable for a lot of people. But that's why people that are willing to take on a lot of risk, or that's one of the reasons people, like trial lawyers, that are willing to take on a lot of risks often get paid very well, because most people aren't willing to do that.
It's that simple. You've got to be willing to lose, and lose big and lose publicly, to be a trial lawyer. And until you're willing to lose, you're never going to be good at winning. And quite frankly, it's taken me forever to realize that. First 15 years of my practice, all I could think about is how embarrassing it would be to lose a trial. Everybody would think, "Oh, he's no good. He lost that case. That lawyer he tried against isn't that good. Oh, that was such a winnable case. What happened? What happened? He's not that good." That's what I thought people would think. Well, it turns out people really don't think about you at all, first of all. And secondarily, if you know what you're doing in the trial field, you know that all that matters is people are actually going to trial.
The best lawyers in the world lose cases. I love Gerry Spence. He died recently, I don't want to speak bad about the dead. But if you've got a lawyer claiming he's never lost a case, that lawyer's not trying much cases. That lawyer's either cherry-picking cases that he can't lose or he's not telling the truth. So I want to see Phil Beck, who's a famous defense lawyer, who literally on his website lists all his wins and all his losses, that to me is confidence. I'm trying to look at, am I controlling what I can control? Am I putting my clients in the best possible scenario? Am I giving them good advice? After that, I've got to let the chips fall where they may.
Chris Dreyer:
I think that's fantastic. What a mantra. I went to a retreat recently. I had Brett Turnbull there. He does a lot of trials in Alabama and Georgia. And he's like, "You've got to take some zero sometimes." And Nick Raleigh kind of said the same thing. You journal after these, you do that retrospective, what's some of the notes that you've written down? Is it, "My opening could have been stronger, my close"? First of all, I'm not an attorney. What comes to mind? Maybe it's tonality or pacing, maybe jury selection.
Brian Beckcom:
So it's everything, basically. I'll use an analogy to jiu-jitsu, because I do jiu-jitsu basically every day. I'm a purple belt. Every time I go in there and train against white belts and destroy them, am I really learning a whole lot? I'm learning a little bit. But when I go against a black belt and get destroyed, I'm really learning a lot. I'm learning, "Here's a hole in my game, here's another hole in my game. Here's a mistake I made. Here's where I've got to get better." Then I can go back and research that, I can work on that, I can close that gap. It's the exact same thing, as far as I'm concerned, being a trial lawyer. I have holes in my game.
So let me give you some examples. I think I am absolutely fantastic at picking juries, fantastic, that's my strength. When you see me pick a jury, doesn't matter if there's 60 potential jurors or 600, every single one of them is talking, we're having a great discussion. That's what I'm good at. Not so good at presenting plaintiffs, like direct examinations. And until recently, I was terrible at closing arguments. And so, after a win, if I win a case, what am I going to say? "Oh, that must have been a great closing argument and a great plaintiff's direct examination," when maybe it wasn't. Maybe there was some other reason I won the case.
When I lose a case, a lot of the times, we get to talk to jurors, they'll tell you what you need to work on. So my notes will be more like, "Hey, you need to work on your rebuttal closing argument," or, "You need to work on your organization of the evidence in the case," or, "You need to work on presenting your clients in a way that you get out of the way." So I guess my point is it's everything. And I have this saying with the lawyers that work for me, I want everybody to be a five-tool lawyer. You ever heard of a five-tool baseball player?
Chris Dreyer:
I haven't.
Brian Beckcom:
Yeah. So a five-tool baseball player hits for average, hits for power, runs for speed, is a good fielder. There's one other that I skip in my mind right now. To me, there's a big difference between being able to take a deposition or draft discovery or go to a court hearing. Those little discreet things, there's people that are very good at that. There's probably a lot of people that are better than I am at it. The real skill though for us plaintiff's lawyers is a human being comes into our office, and two years later, that human being's story turns into a substantial amount of money. So it's taking that story, and then at the end of the process, actually converting that story into compensation. Not a lot of people can do that.
Because think about what that involves, Chris. First of all, you've got to get the person to come in the door to begin with, and that's marketing, that's your telling your story. You could be the best lawyer in the country, and if you don't have any clients, it doesn't matter. And I know you've got a lot of listeners, a lot of listeners are going to know exactly what I'm about to say. You, Chris, me and every single one of the people listening to this and know about the way our business works, we know lawyers, that we don't think are very good in court, that are super-duper successful, because they're good at something else. What? Marketing. They bring in a lot of cases. So that's the fundamental beginning of any plaintiff's practice. If nobody's hiring you, none of this other stuff matters.
Chris Dreyer:
Let's dig into that, because you're speaking my language, right?
Brian Beckcom:
Yeah, yeah. Now, you know exactly what I'm talking about, right?
Chris Dreyer:
And VB Attorneys, it's different, you take on high-stakes cases. You have three, I believe, maybe four board-certified trial attorneys.
Brian Beckcom:
Yeah.
Chris Dreyer:
How do you look at that from a differentiation, from an attraction perspective to get those cases?
Brian Beckcom:
Yeah. So like I was just saying, and I think, Chris, you'd probably agree with this, the marketing of the firm has to come first, because nothing else matters. If you can't pay your employees and you can't bring clients in the door, nothing else matters, so that has to come first. And frankly, that is an uncomfortable truth for a lot of lawyers, because when we're in law school, at least in my generation and the generations before, we're taught that marketing is icky and you don't want to do that, people will come to you if you're good enough. That's horseshit. In fact, they should teach lawyers how to market in law school. They don't do that. Maybe there's some classes now. But that's fundamental. When I opened my firm 20 years ago, I had no clients. I knew nothing about marketing. I had to do a super deep dive for a year. And I still, every single day, I do something in marketing every day. That comes first.
The second thing is I don't put my clients first, Chris, I put my staff first. People who work with me, they come first, and there's selfish reasons and there's altruistic reasons for that. The altruistic reason is because it's the right thing to do. The selfish reason is if my staff is happy and I'm a good boss, they're going to work harder for me and the clients are going to get better treatment, so the clients are going to be happier. And guess what? I hate to say this. Most of my clients, most of your listeners, come in the door, they have one case and we never see them again. It's not like a corporate practice, same clients again and again.
And so, my staff's going to be with me for basically the whole time that I'm practicing law. My main paralegal's been with me basically since I've been practicing law. In fact, when I interviewed her, I said, "I'm not looking to date. I'm looking to get married." So you've got to treat your staff right. You've got to motivate your staff, you've got to lead your staff. Then, after you've done those two things, that's when the specifics of the marketing, the specifics of how you run the cases, your reputation, all that other stuff comes into play. But Chris, I'm with you, marketing has to come first.
Chris Dreyer:
For Brian, growth was never about reach for its own sake. Before tactics, before scale, he made two decisions that shaped everything else.
How defining a narrowly scoped ideal client sharpens PI marketing and case selection
Brian Beckcom:
Here's the first thing I suggest everybody do. Most people do it backwards, Chris. Most people say, "This is my law of practice, this is my business, and I'm going to design my family life and vacation and fun around my business." You need to do that in reverse. You need to figure out what you want your life to look like, and then design your practice around your life. So that's a mindset thing.
The second thing you need to do is you need to have a very clear picture in your head of who you are marketing to, who is your avatar client? And you can have multiple avatar clients. So I do a lot of maritime work. And so, my avatar client is a 35 to 45 year old man, who's making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, with a high school education, who's married and has a kid and has payments on his pickup truck and his house, and he's been hurt really bad because of no fault of his own. He reads Field & Stream, he likes to hunt and fish, and he lives in Alabama. I'm super specific about who my avatar clients are. And then, once you're real clear in your head who they are, then you design your marketing message for those clients.
What you really want to do, if you can, is you want to have no competition, you want to be one of one, and there's millions of different ways to do that. And I know your listeners have seen all sorts of... There's the lawyer that comes down in a helicopter, the Strong Arm of the Law, Frank Azar from Colorado, who's a friend of mine, Jim Adler, the Texas Hammer, who's another friend of mine. I have a little bit of a unique niche. We have a marketing message to the whole martial arts community, we fight for fighters. And so, I kind of own the martial arts community, in some respects, because I'm a martial artist and I'm in there fighting with them, and they're all wearing my t-shirts and I'm wearing their t-shirts.
And so, I call them herds, I have a herd of people. Every single client, every single non-client that's ever contacted me is in a database, and I communicate with them on a regular basis, because what I'm really looking at... So think about it from a marketing professional standpoint. Our business is kind of strange, because people aren't going, "There's a chance I might get hurt in five years. I need to have a relationship with a personal injury lawyer." So we have a window that something happens to somebody, either a personal injury or a wrongful death or a business gets defamed or an insurance company does... There's been some wrongdoing, somebody suffered some damages. Our window is from that moment until they hire a lawyer.
And during that time, depending on where you live, you're driving past billboards, you're watching commercials, it used to be you'd look at the Yellow Pages, you're looking at websites. They all say the same thing. Every single lawyer's aggressive, every single lawyer's got 15 decades of experience. It's all the same shit, there's all this noise. And you can either spend millions and millions and millions of dollars creating this brand, like Frank has or like Jim Adler or some other, a good friend of mine, Anthony Pusch, who's a younger guy who's creating a bunch of awesome branding stuff, but that's expensive, that costs a lot of money.
Or you can do what I do, at least in part, is I've got a database of thousands of people that know and like me, and I communicate with them on a regular basis. So guess what happens? If something happens to them or somebody they know, they don't even look at the TV, they don't look at the billboards, they don't look at anything, because guess what? That comes to their lawyer. And that's really what you want. My herd, my people, my thousand true fans, to borrow a quote from a guy named Kevin Kelly, a technologist... He wrote an article called 1000 True Fans. I recommend you read it, I recommend all your listeners read it. Especially in the day of social media, when somebody on Instagram has 20,000 followers and 95% of them are fake bought followers. 1000 True Fans is the idea that you're better off with a thousand people, that really like you and know you and support you, than you are with a million people, most of whom will never meet you, don't know you, they're just following you because they're following you.
So I have thousands of true fans, that's really what I want. I don't want millions of followers on Instagram. I want a couple of thousand diehards that are my champions and I'm going to be their champions. So the cool thing about that is, like I said, the TV, the billboards, the Yellow Pages is all invisible to my herd because they're calling me.
Chris Dreyer:
Very powerful. And those typically are the best cases too, right? Not the tire kickers. Not to say you won't have some of those, but yeah, those are the best, and certainly depending upon how you look at cost, your lowest cost per acquisition too. I guess the other side of that too is then you don't need a hundred-person sales team to do your intake, they're probably calling your cell or maybe emailing you back.
What happens when PI firm leaders fail to set boundaries around access and availability
Brian Beckcom:
They're not calling my cell, I promise you that. Actually, there are some clients that have my cell phone number, and I've been like this for a long time, I do not take unscheduled phone calls from clients ever. I think I'm probably preaching to the choir with a lot of your listeners. If you've got like a car wreck docket with hundreds and hundreds of cases and you take unscheduled phone calls, you and your staff are going to be on the phone all day long, and you're going to be focused on client A's case, and client B's going to call, and you're going to stop focusing on A, and then you've got to go back... It's ridiculous. And so, every single one of my clients gets a welcome packet. One of the things that it says is, "You can talk to Beckcom and his lawyers and his staff anytime you want, as much as you want, free of charge, but you have to schedule the call."
Chris Dreyer:
Makes me think of the other side of that is just sometimes you don't have a true solve, so it's just kicking the can. When you have less interactions, maybe you have real updates, and then you turn into a receiver instead of a leader when you're just on the support all the time.
Brian Beckcom:
It's funny. And by the way, here's another little trick, here's a little practice trick for your listeners. When you set up these calls, make the client call you, I'm not calling them. Because you know what happens half the time? "Okay, let's schedule a call in a couple of days," schedule the call and it's already solved and it wasn't that big a deal, and it's like, "Oh, I didn't actually need to talk to you." And so, that's the best way to do it. If the client really has something important to talk, I want to be able to focus on what he has to say, and if it's important, he will call me on time when it's scheduled. If it's not, he won't. Problem solved.
Chris Dreyer:
As the firm grew, the focus shifted to people, not just hiring more staff, but choosing the right ones. For Brian, building a strong firm starts with being intentional about who you bring in, and just as deliberate about who you don't.
Why prioritizing staff experience improves client outcomes in growing PI firms
Brian Beckcom:
The hardest position at my firm to hire for was a receptionist and an intake person, because our receptionist was doubling, was also doing intake. Why do you think that is? The reason I think that was is because historically, generally speaking, the intake person, the receptionist, doesn't get paid like the lawyers get paid or some of the senior paralegals get paid. They tend to have a little less experience. This is not always the case, but generally speaking, they get paid less, they're a little bit less experienced and it's hard to find super-duper-duper good people that are willing to get paid less for what is a really hard job. I think my intake is the hardest job at my firm, because think about it, they're listening to these terrible stories all day long, every day.
And we've had a couple superstars that we put in that position that have actually... I've got one that's a lawyer now. She worked from receptionist up to paralegal up to law school, I wrote her a letter of recommendation, and now she's a practicing lawyer. But that's rare. So that is normally... And we've actually changed our intake process. We now contract that out to a company that handles that for us. We've trained a specific person who's remote to do nothing but intake. This person is absolutely phenomenal. So that's how we've solved that problem.
In terms of paralegals and support staff, what I've found, and I don't know if you've found this too, Chris, but what I've found is if a lawyer has a really, really good paralegal, they never let them go, because they're rare. My paralegal is... She won the 2016 AAJ Paralegal of the Year. I call her Brockovich. She's broken a couple of cases, literally the difference between a $1 million and a $20 million settlement, she's found evidence. Hard to find people like that. And so, the only way I've found to find people like that is when it's a lawyer that's about to retire or do something else and there's somebody that's been with them for 10-plus years. Boom. If I can get somebody like that, man, that's absolutely the best.
And there's a saying, Chris, hire slow and fire fast. I've typically done the opposite. We've hung on to some people for a year that we're like, "Gosh, dang, this is not working out, but let's see if we can make it work." Anyway, if you have any ideas on that, let me know, because I'm still trying to figure that out.
Chris Dreyer:
For me, I think, because I'm a real people person too, but once I started putting the data behind it, "Hey, it's not me, it's this data." So that makes it easier. But then, I remember I was sitting in Vistage, I was about three years in, and this guy, Jack Daly, he was an old school salesperson came in, and he was basically lecturing everybody in there, including me, about not spending enough time with the top performers, trying to take someone that's not good and make them good. And he was like, "You just need to get rid of those individuals and concentrate." He was like, "If you're doing sports, you've got to practice most of the time... The first five on the basketball team's on the court most of the time. The other ones have got to just earn it or maybe find a different career there for them."
Brian Beckcom:
Yeah, no question. I will say this though, that I think COVID changed everything when it comes to the law practice, not everything, but a lot of things. And one of the things it made me realize is it used to be I had to hire paralegals and lawyers that were in Houston, because they were physically... Blah, blah, blah. Now, I have access to the best talent across the country, which is super-duper cool. I can hire a lawyer who lives in Maine and he can work in my firm seamlessly, or she, and if they're the best, it doesn't matter that they live in Maine anymore. So I think it has opened up the ability for smaller firms to have access to the best talent in the world. You don't have to live in New York City anymore to do New York City type of cases. You don't have to live in Houston or LA to do Houston or LA type of cases.
Chris Dreyer:
Geez, that tech, I think of little things like Zoom or Teams from the video conferencing software, on the legal perspective, the legal industry's slower to adopt, and it's like, boom, everybody knows how to use Zoom now or Microsoft Teams. Talk to me about the computer science background, just touch briefly on AI. How do you think it impacts the PI space? Are you utilizing any AI within the firm? Talk to me a little bit about that.
Brian Beckcom:
Been using AI for three and a half years now. My team is super deep in it. We use it every single day. We use it very effectively. It is a game-changer. I like to collect opening and closing arguments in huge cases where there were big verdicts. I have this big collection, it's not just me, it's all these lawyers I respect. I've loaded all these things into an AI, I've had the AI analyze every single one of them, break them down, the structure, why it's persuasive. I can now, with my AI, plug a bunch of stuff into my AI and say, "Draft me an opening statement." It's about 80% there when it's done.
And I was sitting there thinking the other day, I was like, "Uh-oh, I think I'm a pretty good lawyer, but now all the C-level lawyers, they're going to be able to do the same thing, so where's my competitive advantage?" Well, you know where my competitive advantage is right now? My competitive advantage is I know the questions to ask the AI, where some C-minus lawyer may not know the questions. But what happens in a couple of years when the C-minus lawyer goes, "I'm a C-minus lawyer. What kind of questions would an A+ lawyer ask you?" Now, you've got the best opening statement that's ever been written in history, and a C-minus lawyer wrote it. Now, he's still got to deliver it, or she's still got to deliver it. But AI is a big deal. If you're not all over AI already, you are well behind the curve.
Chris Dreyer:
So you're really in the game with the GPTs and stuff. I was looking at X today by a guy that does a lot of AI posts, and he tries to gaslight his ChatGPT. So he'll get a reply and he'll be like, "Is that really the best you've got for me?" Trying to make it better. That's so funny.
Brian Beckcom:
Yeah. There are all sorts of problems with AI. You cannot trust it, it hallucinates all the time. But that said, some of the stuff you can do with it is ridiculously amazing, especially the more and more you use it, the more refined it gets, it better understands what you're doing. If you start uploading files into it, the better and better it gets. You start learning about how to prompt it in better ways.
But drafting discovery requests, I can draft discovery requests in any case in about 30 seconds now. That's just one example of where it's awesome. I get a plaintiff's deposition in, where one of my lawyers presented the plaintiff, attached to it is an AI summary every single time now in the exact format that I want it in. Before I take a deposition, I upload all the other depositions from the case. I have a deposition template I use, I say, "Read all these and then spit out all the questions in the precise format that I like, precisely numbered and organized." It's not perfect, but it saves me so much time. It is absolutely astonishing.
Chris Dreyer:
I was an expert witness recently on a case. Guys, I'm retired, that was my one-and-done. But I underestimated how long these depositions are. I was like, "My God." And just having the AI to help assist with that and maybe flag some things. I wanted to actually, you take on some high-stakes litigation, some cases that are different, it's not just the auto rear-end collision, just wondered, what's a few cases that stand out in your mind? Because in case our peers have an oddball case, maybe they need somebody with your experience, what's some cases that you've tried that are out of the box?
Brian Beckcom:
So like I said, we have a big docket of maritime cases. The most famous case I've handled by far is there was a movie called Captain Phillips about the Maersk Alabama, which was an American ship that got captured by Somali pirates. Obama sent the Navy SEALs in. It was made into a movie, starring Tom Hanks. I represented the crew of that ship. I was all over the news. I was on Nightline, Dateline, Good Morning America, London Daily Telegraph. It was a huge deal.
I have a lot of expertise in any case that touches on the water. Every single car wreck lawyer should be scrubbing every single significant injury car wreck case for a products liability case. I guarantee you, every single one of your lawyers that has a car wreck docket has given up millions of dollars every year by not doing that. Every single car wreck where there's a death or a severe injury should be scrubbed for a products case. We do a lot of that. So there's lawyers in Houston that have hundreds and hundreds of car wrecks. I love these lawyers because they're doing the Lord's work. They've got to deal with these crappy insurance companies all the time that are nickeling and diming them to death. That sucks.
And where there's a really serious injury or there's a death, these lawyers are calling us up, "Hey, Beckcom, will you scrub this to see if there's a products liability case?" And oftentimes, there is. The theory of crashworthiness basically says you shouldn't die or be seriously injured in a car wreck. The technology is such now that essentially you should be protected from all but the most violent and severe crashes. And so, T-bone accidents, rollovers, there should never be a fire that kills people in an accident. But a lot of lawyers miss those, and it makes me sad because those are big cases. That's an opportunity to really, really help somebody, and it just doesn't occur to most lawyers.
Chris Dreyer:
Interesting, yeah. And I think you have an advantage there, especially on the autonomous stuff, the Teslas, the Waymos, things like that.
Brian Beckcom:
Big time.
Chris Dreyer:
Amazing, amazing. Brian, this has been fantastic for our audience that maybe has a case that maybe they want to scrub for products or they have some questions about what we discussed. What's the best way to get in touch with you?
Brian Beckcom:
V as in Victor, B as in Brian, vbattorneys.com. If you type that in, we're everywhere on the internet. Type in my name, Brian Beckcom. It's a kind of weird last name, B-E-C-K-C-O-M, B-E-C-K-C-O-M. Type that in, you'll see I'm all over the internet, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, all that stuff. Give us a call and let us take a look at it.
Chris Dreyer:
What ties this together is clarity. When you're clear on your audience, your people and your priorities, leverage follows. Marketing works harder, teams operate with less friction, growth becomes more predictable. That's how we think about building durable firms at Rankings. If you're ready for a performance marketing partner, find me at Rankings.io. I'll see you there.
