Michael Steinger:
I have these hundreds of employees. They're depending on me to make the right choices for their survival. And the only way I'm going to be able to do that is to have capital to compete. So as a leader, it was my job to find a path forward.
Chris Dreyer:
The market is evolving, the channels fragment, the cost of attention goes up. And at some point you have to decide whether you're building a firm that survives in the environment or one that gets boxed out by it.
Michael Steinger:
I need a market large enough to have a population base so that I don't need 100% of them. I can take one or 2% and still make a living.
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. Michael Steinger is the founding partner at Steinger, Greene & Feiner. The firm started with two people answering their phones. Today it operates across multiple states, employs hundreds of people, owns one of the most valuable domains in legal, and is actively buying firms as consolidation accelerates. We talk about how he chooses new states, how self-driving cars are affecting the volume of NBA cases and why brand still matters, even when you have the cash to spend at scale. Let's get into it.
Michael Steinger:
We've had massive expansion over the last few years into multiple states, every state being fun, and this is what I love. And we're looking at an industry that we see consolidation beginning. We see a few big players that will ultimately we feel dominate. And so we're taking advantage of every opportunity to do that.
Chris Dreyer:
Love it. And I can't wait to dig into some of those, the consolidation, the expansion. I mean, you went from two people essentially answering the phone to a 400 plus person operation. So it's got to be surreal. Take me back to the beginning. You were receptionist and the lawyer, so talk to me about that in the very beginning.
Michael Steinger:
Unfortunately, I had no idea what the hell I was doing, but started out with two of us from answering the phones to new client calls, to driving to people's homes and to typing our own documents and everything from start to finish. And it was working insane hours and just you don't have the money, so you have no choice. So you just have to do this on your own. And it's just trying to build it from there. And I can tell you our first employee is still with us some 27 years later. My motto has always been, let's have fun and make money. It's still have fun and make money. And that means taking care of the people around you because they're doing even more of the work than sometimes we do. And so yeah, it's about finding those people and growing together as a family and respecting everybody around you. So that's been the most fun and the most challenging part of this for sure.
Chris Dreyer:
Absolutely. And you know when people have fun, it seems like they're more productive too. You can even hear someone's smile on the voice or on a call for intake in particular.
Michael Steinger:
I agree with you. Having fun making money. To me, it's not a job. This is just what I do. If it was a job, it would suck. So it is building the environment to make people feel like it's home and it's fun and they enjoy it. And so we have times of laughing and goofing around and we know there's a lot of hard work that has to get done, but you got to have fun while you're doing it.
Chris Dreyer:
One of the things I want to dig into, because you have a robust marketing engine, right? You've got not only the trial lawyers that bring in the referrals, and you've been at this a while, from the systemic referrals. You've got the injurylawyers.com domain. But I kind of want to fast-forward and you even alluded like, hey, consolidation and things are changing. How do you think about marketing today, like the marketing mix for attention today?
Why traditional media still delivers ROI and how to balance it with digital spend
Michael Steinger:
We started out very traditional media, television, outdoor, because when I started, it was all that there was. So we have still an insane marketing budget and a significant piece of it is still traditional media and continuing to brand, but a much more significant piece of it is digital now. So between, as you're aware, PPC and LSAs, between SEO, there's just a million different ways to reach people. Social media still is a big piece of it and you have to be there and you have to spend dollars. You have to do both. You have to be organically present and you have to pay to be there. There's more channels to reach the same number of people, so you have to be in more places.
Chris Dreyer:
There's big umbrellas, right? On the traditional, thoughts on TV versus radio and then on the digital, where does programmatic fit in?
Michael Steinger:
We still think traditional television, whether it's network TV, cable TV, all gives you dimensions of both audio and video. So we think it's more impactful and more responsive for our audience. We've had a firm jingle that we've used in radio and have always used in TV and we jingle the firm name and phone number and it's been around forever and little kids still sing it that I see in our communities and it's great, it works, but we have to be everywhere. It's not easy.
Chris Dreyer:
It's not. And it's so fragmented. I mean, back from the Yellow Pages day where it's like the double truck ads or whatever they're called, and then it's like TV and broadcasting. But now there's multiple even social media channels and platforms to use.
Michael Steinger:
I think it was easier in the old days. There were three major networks and that was it. And that's how you reach people and now you have to be all over the place. And you've got to kind of pinpoint your demographic and your niche and your market. And if you don't have an insane budget to compete with large advertisers, you have to find your place in the community that you can resonate. As you make more money, put more money in. Keep putting in your profits to build your business because at the end of the day, someone's going to win.
Chris Dreyer:
You guys have been expanding. You're in multiple markets now and each jurisdiction has its own challenges, right? Florida had the tort reform and now other states are being targeted. California's in particular is being highly targeted right now. On the expansion side, you're going to go to a new market. How do you think about that approach?
Michael Steinger:
It depends. If you're going organically as your own firm and trying to grow it, I look at markets to think, okay, first, I need a market large enough to have a population base so that I don't need 100% of them. I can take one or 2% and still make a living. So I need enough population. If it's too small, it's a big struggle. And then you got to understand the laws and make sure that they fit to what we do. There's some states where the laws work really well and some states not so great and you got to pay attention to that. Some states, you're 1% at fault, you're going to recover nothing. Some states, you could be 99% at fault and recover. So you got to be careful on those jurisdictions, coverage amounts, whether or not you can board medical bills at trial. There are a lot of considerations that go into making that determination, and we usually try to weigh those out and trying to pick places to grow into.
And then sometimes we have a message that works in one market that does not work in another. I've run TV commercials in South Florida, Miami that do not resonate in Nashville, Tennessee. It's different people and they respond differently. And there are brands that are built in those markets already. So breaking through takes time and money and you have to be able to wait it out. And we know going into a new market, I'm just going to bleed money for a year before I begin to see any cashflow at all.
Chris Dreyer:
I've talked to Ross Seleno. I've talked to other individuals and they'll say, "Hey, at minimum three years before we even start to break even and start to saturate the market." But I guess especially the different type of messaging, just any thoughts on that because you're already behind the eight-ball in the cash flow cycles anyway. You're 12 to 18 months anyways.
Michael Steinger:
You're already spending the money, so you got to throw it out there and you got to try. We tend to use what's worked in other markets first, and if it doesn't resonate, then we look to change a message. We look at what other people who've been in the market are running to see what is appealed to that demographic in that market. And then sometimes we also say, "Well, there's no one running money ads, showing people how much they can recover and there's an opportunity to do that in a market." And so sometimes it just depends who's there and what's running. Most consumers respond to fear and greed, greed because they want the money and fear because they're going to miss out on getting some.
Chris Dreyer:
When I see the ads of like the winning positioning versus the outcome of them holding the check, the results oriented, it's like the feature versus benefit that's always spoken about in marketing.
Michael Steinger:
Clients don't really want to know the hell that someone else went through and their surgeries and everything else. They just want to see a lottery winning outcome and think, "Ooh, that's for me."
Chris Dreyer:
Right.
Michael Steinger:
So yeah, don't tell me how bad it was. Just tell me what the ultimate... Show me the check, show me the money, and I'll feel like you can accomplish it for me.
Chris Dreyer:
Well said. Let's talk about intake. So you've called your formula the grit plus systems. So let's dig into that. Growing to your size, feeding the beast with the marketing engine, you got to make sure you're making sure there's not a lot of leakage. And talk to me about your systems, your intake team.
Michael Steinger:
Well, we have a huge intake team, probably pushing, I don't know, at least 80 people. We're covering different time zones throughout the country. Someone has to answer these phones 24/7. We have to be bilingual. Spanish is huge, especially in places like Texas or Florida, Arizona, markets where there is a big Hispanic population and we cover all of those. So it is constant training, constant upkeep. We have built software systems both for intake and case management, Salesforce based systems that are proprietary to us, but we have people on staff, both here within the US and external. We have outside of the country call centers that we actually run that are staffed by our own people, but it is never ending training. It is never ending staying on top of them. We track every metric you can imagine. So we know what our wanted rates are. We know what our closure rates are and what we need to maintain, and people are compensated by maintaining certain numbers.
Chris Dreyer:
I would say a lot of people that I talk to in the PI space, it's generally it's Salesforce or lead docket, right? Filevine, Lead Docket. You chose Salesforce. The downside, it seems like you need your own developer, data engineers. How are you approaching the customization of the Salesforce? Do you have a whole data engineer team?
Michael Steinger:
For those who can't afford it, pick something that is standardized that works. We created our own through Salesforce, and so it did take dollars to develop and to do it in a way we wanted, but I needed to see integration of an ad placed all the way through to case resolution so I can track where an ad came from and what an average fee per case was for that particular channel and know exactly what we're getting and what that value is. So we needed something to integrate all the way from marketing all the way through case resolution and to be able to pull all this data in Salesforce, but it was millions of dollars to build. I wish I could tell you otherwise, but it was worth it for us.
Chris Dreyer:
Thank you for the transparency. And I got one other question just in general about the team set up because you do have a large team, right? So is it full cycle intake reps? Do you segment the chase team? What's the team structure look like at this size?
How to structure intake teams, chase groups, and outbound dialers to convert leads at scale
Michael Steinger:
It is divided into groups and teams and kind of graded by level of intake. So there's A level and B level and C level and phones have to ring to groups or emails or APIs come into groups, the best groups first to grab that are available and then trickle downward. And then there's chase groups and outbound dialers to stay on top of every lead that comes in. Not everyone is an inbound call. There's a lot of form fills and other things that we have to outbound and we have to stay on top of those outbounds and we have to have dialers that continually bug people until we get them on the phone. So there's different groups for outbound calls.
Chris Dreyer:
Technology changes, attention shifts, and someone declares that the old channels are finished. But what's interesting is that the firms still winning tend to ignore the panic. Michael has lived through multiple ways of disruption. He's watched predictions come and go, and instead of reacting, he's kept building. That's what led him to this observation.
Michael Steinger:
You hear the doom and gloom that came from everybody. We had doom and gloom that network television would die and you'll never be able to build a brand. And that was now 10 or 12 years ago. And here we all still are building brands and running traditional. It is not dead. I happen to have a Tesla. Our accident numbers are all still up and here because we have these wonderful things called cell phones and so accidents are continuing to happen. America was built on the automobile. People love to drive. It is not going to end anytime soon. I feel like my kids will become lawyers and this practice will still be happening. And I can tell you that we are probably 80 plus percent auto-driven, so that is our core focus and we do not see the downturn. What we actually see is less competitors in each market because people can't afford it as we're consolidating to big players.
So our market share keeps gaining and accidents keep happening. We pull accident statistics from every market, every county and city, so we know where they sit and how they're happening. We'll still be here for decades.
Chris Dreyer:
So let's talk about like communication, alignment. You've got 17 offices. You got a big staff. How do you keep everybody rowing in the same direction? Do you have a business operating framework that works for you at your size, EOS scaling up, or a custom version of your own operating system?
What metrics drive expansion decisions and keep office partners accountable in a data-driven firm
Michael Steinger:
There is back of house that handles everything from marketing and intake to HR to finance that helps an entire engine function. And then every office is run by an office, we call them office partners, lawyers who are responsible for all of those teams of lawyers under them. And they are given, they have dashboards of metrics of every kind. So they know number of cases coming in and viability and values and coverages and everything they need to know and how their teams are moving and how many days before the case has been on desk or hasn't been reviewed. And they're responsible ultimately for a number at the end of the day. So you can ebb and flow and you can settle a case today that you thought wouldn't settle till next month or you cannot settle a case you expected. It happens. But on average, as you go through really large volume, it all seems to average out.
And they're responsible to make sure that their teams produce a number. And we kind of function a little bit like a publicly traded company. We are functioning quarterly and we run numbers quarterly and there are goals and budgets set by every market for every office partner as to what targets they need to hit and what we expect, not just in just pure revenue, but also in number of cases moved and average fee per case. Each of those managers is met with every single week to go through where they're at in their quarter and how it's progressing and what their projections are and what resources they need from us to help them to get what they need to reach those goals.
Chris Dreyer:
A lot of these different business operating systems, they'll tell you to do the KPIs. Do you have CFO, controller, do you have a data scientist? Who's ultimately responsible to determine even what these KPIs are and hold everyone accountably?
Michael Steinger:
My answer's yes on all of those things, and we review them all the time. There are global dashboards given out to partners so that daily, so they can see where things are. They have their own dashboards that they work from. Unlike how law firms worked in the old days, this is massively data driven. And that's why we felt some of the out of the box softwares didn't accomplish everything we needed, which is why we ended up building systems that work specifically to how we function.
Chris Dreyer:
Smart.
Michael Steinger:
Yeah. And it's helped.
Chris Dreyer:
You opened the door on the consolidation. So we got the MSOs, we got one function. Some of them have the staffing company set up like the Legal Zoom and that's how they're playing the game. And you got the ABS and then you got some of the firms doing consolidation. They're just merging and then others are keeping them separate brands. First, just for me, in my space, there's a ton of consolidation and there always has been, but like why is it happening more today? Was it the ABS, kind of the push?
Why law firm consolidation is accelerating and how to build a firm that acquires, not gets acquired
Michael Steinger:
I'll give you my take on that and what we've done and how I think the industry's evolved. There is non-lawyer ownership, both in the UK and Australia. And we looked at those models years ago and then Arizona happened to be my home. I was raised there, grade school, high school, undergrad at Arizona State, that was home for me. So when I saw Arizona evolving into what looked like a UK ABS model, we looked for a path to say, "Okay, is this how the country's going to go?" And if there is going to be outside investment, how on God's green earth are we going to compete without it? And if Wall Street gets their hands in it, which they haven't before, we're not going to be able to spend at a level to keep up.
And so at the time ABS was beginning, I thought, well, I have these hundreds of employees that are like family to me, and it's my job to support them and their family. They're depending on me to make the right choices for their survival. And the only way I'm going to be able to do that is to have capital to compete. I'm going to have Morgans and then many others who are just going to throw dollars into an industry like they did in medical or dental, like an Aspen Dental and how on God's green earth... I'm going to lose market share, I'm going to start peeling back employees and these people are going to suffer and it's going to suck. So as a leader, it was my job to find a path forward. So we were one of the first to get an ABS license in Arizona, thinking that ABS was the path of how the country would ultimately fall. And then Utah opened and we were the first to get a license both in Arizona and Utah. Utah has since made some significant changes, not loving outside investment.
And so I thought the US would begin to fall jurisdiction by jurisdiction, and I don't see that any longer. So I see other states pushing back, other bar associations pushing back. An MSO or a managed service org as is done in healthcare normally or even in accounting, it's been done in a lot of professional services industries, is the norm or is becoming the norm. So we followed that path as well. So we do have an interest in an MSO that runs services across the board for all of our firms. And through that, we have partnered and raised external capital that has given us an opportunity to continue to grow and expand both through organic growth and through law firm acquisitions.
In the old days, lawyers couldn't sell a practice. They're in it till life, till they die and pray that their kid goes to law school. And I've tried to put my kids on that path, but at the same time, there are people who are aging out or people who want out. They have built really great brands and markets and we have worked to acquire brands in other markets that we think are viable and great businesses that we will continue to operate and run branded to who they are.
Chris Dreyer:
That's amazing. First of all, thank you for your transparency. We got a big audience of PI attorneys, and if they're interested in joining forces, then hey, there you go. You're someone that's open to it.
Michael Steinger:
We are buyers all the time. We look to enter in discussions, probably 10 or 20 of them a year for the past few years of looking to make acquisitions of other firms that want out, that either want to completely exit or that want to partner to sell a portion of that we can then use capital to grow even larger in their markets. And sometimes it is easier to grow an existing brand who's been there 10 or 20 or 30 years than it is for me to organically enter a market and spend years building, so.
Chris Dreyer:
Super smart. I went down the rabbit hole of all this information. I talked to Crispin, who I believe was a big contributor to UK and-
Michael Steinger:
Yeah, we hired Crispin when we first-
Chris Dreyer:
Oh.
Michael Steinger:
Covered ABS and building MSO. And Chrispin kept telling me, "Michael, this is it and the whole world's going to go this way." And he was wrong and he'll acknowledge that it didn't fall the way he thought it would fall in the US and that's okay. There are really bright people who find paths to make things work when you need it. And our industry needed capital to be able to do what we do better, to be able to service clients better, to be able to recover greater amounts for our clients. At the end of the day, we are completely aligned with our clients in seeking to make their lives whole and recover those dollars. And the more equipped we are to do that, whether it's through software systems or it's AI or an ability through marketing to reach those clients who need us or to fight insurance carriers and to spend the money to do it, it is to the benefit of our clients always.
Chris Dreyer:
1000% agree. You got the scale economies, you already got the tech stack, the better buying power from consolidation. So I'm with you. I think it's smart. It's also, on the other side of the coin, the other thing that I've started to uncover is like, okay, well, how does the lead gen providers, I won't name names, but everybody knows who I'm talking about. How do they compete? Well, the way they compete is it's because they buy media nationwide.
Michael Steinger:
Correct.
Chris Dreyer:
And the overflow goes to a couple particular buyers on the broker side, and so they get the buys at a much cheaper rate.
Michael Steinger:
Agreed. We have worked with some really great lead gen companies and we've worked with some really bad ones. I still believe in a brand and building a brand, though I don't have an issue with supplementing that brand with lead gen at the same time. There is a value to it if you work with those who are truthful, honest, and real, but when you're buying nationally, your cost is coming down. And then we've looked at acquisitions of lead gen providers as well into our business model because some of them have a value and it works and some of them we've partnered with and have really great partnerships. Coming out of law school today would kill me, but realistically, if you're going to do it and break into a market, there's a path to buy leads, to build a business, to get a cash flow that you can then use to continue to build a brand. So there's a path for it.
Chris Dreyer:
Michael, this has been amazing. We've covered the gambit and I appreciate the transparency because most of the time people are a little bit more guarded on the info.
Michael Steinger:
Google we'll tell you everything you want to know with the world. I don't know what I'm protecting here.
Chris Dreyer:
What's the best way for our audience if they have some questions, they want to connect and get in touch with you?
Michael Steinger:
I have a firm website, injurylawyers.com. So easy. And if you send some crazy email inward, somehow they will find me because unlike a lot of people, I'm not just in this to market and enjoy my life. I'm actually in this every day, in my office every day, doing this and here and answering and responding and working and I'm here to help. And I love helping others and those people who struggle through issues and problems and I love it.
Chris Dreyer:
Love it. Michael, thank you so much for coming on the show.
Michael Steinger:
Thank you.
Chris Dreyer:
Markets change, channel shift. Capital matters even more every year. The firms that keep winning are the ones building demand they actually control. If this episode made you think differently about your visibility or your position in the market and you want help turning that into cases, visit rankings.io. We'll see you next time.
