Chris Dreyer:
Imagine taking on one of the largest corporations in the world after a horrific, preventable attack on your clients and winning a massive $41 million verdict, but securing a win like that takes more than just great lawyering. It takes a well-oiled machine. It takes a team that knows how to adapt, how to handle the changing tides of AI search behavior, and why sometimes you actually need to overstaff your firm to succeed.
This is Personal Injury Mastermind. I'm Chris Dreyer, Founder and CEO of Rankings.io, the elite performance marketing agency for personal injury law firms. Today, I'm joined by Arash Khorsandi, who secured that staggering $41 million verdict against Walmart. It's an unbelievable case with some wild facts about a massive corporation putting profits over people. Let's dive right into how this case came in and the shocking details that led to the verdict.
Arash Khorsandi:
The verdict was out in June 2023, and we are currently, as we sit here right now, sitting on appeal. The defense has appealed that case. And so, that case is still technically live and it is still technically active because we're waiting on the appellate court to make their ruling on the defense's appeal. So let's start with the intake.
All right, everyone loves the intake. It's sexy. This one is actually a referral by a friend of ours in the Valley here in Los Angeles. He's got a great law firm, Gary, and Gary called us with this weird fact scenario. So the fact scenario, for people that don't know the case, is our clients is a husband and wife. They're shoppers at a Walmart, and this particular location had a lot of issues with security, safety, so on and so forth. And they sell a lot of bats, baseball bats, there, okay? At all of these places. And there was another individual in the store who came and walked around the store for a long period of time, and he was clearly, visibly not okay. And he picks up a baseball bat and he assaults our two clients, the husband and wife, in a very brutal, graphic, and horrific way, okay? And the injuries are obviously very catastrophic. Our clients are very lucky to be alive, frankly.
And until today, and this... The verdict was in 2023. Case, I think it was a 2018, '19 case, or something like that. So, we're already six, seven years post the incident date, and it's such a graphic scenario. These bats are really... You could kill someone with a bat, and now, you could. People have killed people with bats. And they're not locked, they're not secured, nothing. Security, forget it in the store. These stores have a history, a real deep history across many, many issues, and a lot of that came out in the trial where it was shocking to everybody, including, obviously, the jury. And they were just really baffled by the lack of care, and safety, and accountability, so on and so forth. So, there's a lot more that goes into that. That trial was six weeks long. I'm narrowing it to 2.5 minute.
Chris Dreyer:
Lock up the deodorant, but not the bats.
Arash Khorsandi:
Chris, you hit the nail on the head. The deodorant, the woman's hair products, the shave... When I go buy razor blades, they're locking that stuff up. I can't get to it. It's the classic putting profits over people, safety out the window, whatever, "Who cares about the bats? Oh, if they kill someone, who cares?"
Chris Dreyer:
It's wild. So, best of luck continuing on that case and wish you the best. Thank you for sharing. Let's move on to just marketing, attracting cases in general. You mentioned you got a nice case, a referral. So that's part of your strategy, and actually trying these cases and not just doing the pre-lit. How do you think about marketing, attracting cases that's so fragmented? The channels are so fragmented today. Used to be broadcast, television, Google, and that was about it. But now, there's a lot of options.
Arash Khorsandi:
The field, from a marketing standpoint, is changing dramatically. Obviously, everyone knows that the sexy topic is AI. It's not just AI, it's the disruption that AI brings and the consumer behavior that has changed the clientele and what they call search behavior, right? My search behavior, your search behavior, everybody's search behavior. Like you said, let's just call it 3, 4, 5, 6 years ago, search behavior was more limited, right? Yeah, you got Google. You got Yahoo. You could go to Bings, Microsoft. You could whatever and you were in a lane. And it was the browsers, right? And you had your phones, and it was either iPhone or Android, and that was it and everybody was good. Nobody knew what else. That was it, that's all we knew. You don't know what you don't know. And so, the AI component has disrupted search for all of us and our behavior and what we're talking about.
My five-year-old right now says, "ChatGPT it," right? And my seven-year-old, when she was five, she would say, "Google it," right? So you see the different dynamics now because they hear it. And us as well, I'll search on AI, but I still rely back onto Google. That's just me, and everybody is different. So, what's happened now is the search behavior has changed, consumer search has changed, and then you add, obviously, the fragmentation that you're talking about in general with marketing. So, my personal approach is diversify and try to maximize as many channels or verticals as you can, as far as marketing goes.
We're actually not a traditional referral-based firm yet, right? Less than 10% of our cases are attorney referrals anyways, okay? The Walmart case is just really an outlier as far as the marketing side goes and getting cases. I work with people that I know and I like, and it makes sense. But now, it makes a lot of sense to focus on a lot of these different... I call them the buckets, different buckets. And it's good to explore what it is that you are really good at. I love premise cases in general. Auto is auto, but premise cases have a different flavor. They're a little bit more intense. Of course, this one is the most intense. It's not your run-of-the-mill, but in general. So I think diversification, looking at your buckets.
So this AI, and the search behavior, and the fragmentation is a shakeup and it's a, "Hey, everybody needs to wake up. There's a lot more going on." And personally, I don't know... I can't predict the future. I think there's going to be a lot... Nobody really knows how the AI search is going to shake out. Everyone thinks there's some experts out there that might know more than others, sure, but I don't even think they know exactly. For example, the ad side of AI, the paid portion of AI, hasn't really shaken out yet. And some people think that it's going to be subscription-based only. Google is obviously testing their version, and ChatGPT is testing their version of paid ads and sponsored ad, but I don't believe for a second that we, the normal folks, have any visibility into really what they're planning and what they're testing. There may be more surprises down the pipe.
Chris Dreyer:
That's so fair. I agree with all of that. We're on the waiting list for ChatGPT's ads. And the thing is, I think every business, even our own, it's like you want to subscribe to these LLMs, whether it's Claude, or Gemini, and ChatGPT. And it's like I keep telling my team, I'm like, "Pump the brakes on these year-long contracts because Claude comes out with the next update and it's better," then OpenAI comes up and then it's better. And it's like it's hard to... You're in this hamster wheel.
Arash Khorsandi:
If you were paying attention, right now, it's two months, three months, four months ago. If you were even looking at the stock market and you saw the disruption that each Claude, Anthropic announcement had, it was everybody on a mass scale. Now, we're not talking about the normal folk. We're talking about Wall Street, just institutional plus other investors that were swinging by the Claude and Anthropic, and all this other announcements. And software just took the biggest hit, but there were... So, just like you said, you put the brakes on it because every other day is like, "Oh, look what we got. It's a new, shiny toy. Another shiny toy, another shiny toy." And I think people are starting to feel a little AI fatigue as far as products goes and announcements goes. So, I share that same sentiment with you, Chris.
Chris Dreyer:
I was wanting to ask, because to carry that Walmart case, it's like you're carrying it for years, and we're not talking... Look, I have no idea how much you've invested in this case, between expert witnesses and all this, but-
Arash Khorsandi:
Take a guess.
Chris Dreyer:
... I would imagine six figures, for sure. I have-
Arash Khorsandi:
Way higher.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah, I'm not an attorney.
Arash Khorsandi:
No, I got you. I got you. Look-
Chris Dreyer:
Quarter mill?
Arash Khorsandi:
Way more, way higher. And the problem with that is, going back to finance, because you live with this case for so long and it just keeps going, and going, and going, and just there's always this, and it just adds up, and adds up, and adds up. And then trial is unpredictable, timelines, experts, costs. You have someone scheduled for one day, judge goes early, judge goes late, the guy... It's crazy. So, it is not for the faint of heart, for sure, and it gives me a lot of heartburn and all this stuff that nobody really sees or necessarily appreciates behind the scenes.
Chris Dreyer:
Carrying a $41 million catastrophic case for years takes a serious financial runway, and the only way to fund those long-drawn-out wars is a relentless, predictable pipeline of new cases. To keep that war chest full, you need marketing to adapt to constantly changing search behaviors and an intake team that has extra bandwidth to give every caller the time and connection they need to trust your business.
You're managing over 3,000 clients, a massive volume of leads. To get over a billion dollars in recovery, this isn't a basic intake team. So, talk to me about your approach to intake, team composition, tech stack. How do you think about intake?
Arash Khorsandi:
So, I'm a big believer... I'm an old school guy just by heart and soul, so I'm a really big believer of in-office humans, touching intake as much as possible. Of course, there's tech and you want to be embracing tech, and I think there's ways to have the tech and the humans live really nicely and harmoniously together to advance and elevate the humans, meaning humans within intake teams. But I really believe in the human touch because the person calling your office in the field that we're in, and most fields generally of law, they have a problem, right?
And nobody is happy to be calling a lawyer, for the most part, okay? You do divorce, family law. Nobody is happy to be calling a lawyer. They have a varying degree of a problem. Some are worse, some are medium, some are on the lighter side, but some are the worst of the worst, which is someone died, a family member, someone loving. It's the most tragic day and experience of someone's life. It's the worst things that you would never wish upon anybody that you wake up in the morning and you thank God and you pray for safety and health.
And with that, you can't lose sight of that despite how many thousands of leads and calls, intakes, and things you're doing. So, I'm a big believer on the human side of things with intake. And right now, we talked about it yesterday, I overstaff the intake team, okay? There's more people on the intake team than "required," whatever that is, right? So you talk to experts, you talk to people, you talk to data people, you talk to number crunchers, and everyone's got their thoughts of proportions and ratios of calls, and this and that, and how many... So, whatever that number is, I like to overstaff that part because you owe that to your audience, you owe that to your potential clients.
And frankly, it's a win-win because, on the flip side, you will, on a long enough timeline, reap the benefits of that, I believe, because you'll be able to give more time to an intake, you'll be able to have a higher conversion rate, and that conversion rate differential will, in a long timeline, pay for or cover the expense and cost of an additional two or three humans in there. So, that's my philosophy on that.
Chris Dreyer:
I couldn't agree more. I tell our clients, I'm like, "Look, if you're going to hire one intake specialist, always hire at least two," because, then, there's competition, immersion, all the different things, and then there's always something that an intake specialist can do. They can always chase a lead, that's within the statute. They can always make the experience better and nurture that referral relationships with the... whatever. It could be everybody.
Arash Khorsandi:
They can also circle around. If it's a smaller office, they could circle around for reviews after the case settled on the settled side. If they got downtime, "Hey, let me go back and call some of these happy clients and tell them to help us out with testimonial," even, on an iPhone, whatever.
Chris Dreyer:
That's great, that's great. I want to move over to team a little bit. You're really passionate about it right now and that's your focus. You got a couple phrases I love. I'm going to call out a couple of them. One of them, "U-turns are allowed," meaning you make decisions fast. And if you recognize a failure, you reverse course immediately. I love the visual aspect of that, but talk to me about that philosophy and maybe a few more.
Arash Khorsandi:
I'm a super visual guy in everything. It's crazy, that's just how my brain functions, right? So all my analogies and everything for myself is always visually-related. So, U-turns are allowed, that actually came from my dad. That was his advice that he's always told me growing up. Now, today, he's one of the wisest people I know, and he said, "U-turns are allowed." So, how that applies in practicality and practice today for us is really understanding... I'll give you an example. We had a person who was hired as a case manager, okay? She applied for a case manager position. She wanted to be a case manager, or at least that's what she verbalized, right? And I'll get to that in a second. And within three weeks, I realized, "Oh my God, she's a horrible case manager," okay? We're busy, and this and that, and my initial inclination was to bring her to the office and tell her, "Hey, look, you're not cut out for this. I'm sorry, it's just not a right fit. You need a slower pace," whatever, and just explain it to her and part ways. That was my initial inclination.
So, I started doing that and I brought her in and I was going down that route, and then I said, "Wait a second, remind me again..." because it was six weeks ago. I'm like, "Remind me again, what were you doing before, before you started here? I don't have your resume handy. I don't remember. What were you doing?" She's like, "Oh, I was doing sales and intakes." I said, "Okay. So, why are you in this position?" She's like, "Yeah, applied for the case manager because that was the job that was... and that's what I thought it was going to be good. And I had case manager friends and I had..." this and that. I said, "Okay. Do you even like the last three weeks?" and she's like, "No," and I'm like, "Why don't we move you over to intakes and sales?" And so, we did and it worked out tremendously great, okay? And so, the U-turn there.
Now, coming back to teams and the magic or the secret, most people don't tell you really what they want to do, okay? Most people are not transparent at the jump because it's a stranger relationship. You interview someone, you interview them twice, you interview three times. Why does it matter? You just came into their lives, and vice versa. No matter how your interview process is, no matter who it is, right? But a month ago, you two were strangers. You were not in each other's universes, and now, these two universes collide. And most people have their guard up, or whatever, or they think that's the better job, it's the better pay. There's a million elements of really understanding what it is that people want to do, okay?
And then there's a second component of people sometimes don't know what their strengths and weaknesses truly are, okay? People really, truly believe, "Hey, this is really what I'm good at." Well, in fact, they might be really good at something else, but they haven't identified it. So there's the first component of really breaking down the guards and having a real transparent and honest conversation, trying to figure out what it is that they really want to do, right? What makes them excited, and happy, and passionate? And then the second part is, "Okay, try to match that with what are they strong at." Hopefully you can align those, but it's usually... not usually, but I'd say, 50% of the time, it's not aligned. There's a lot of maneuvering that has to be done with this person, and that's a collaborative process. And so, that's the magic, hard part, sauce, whatever you want to call it, is getting those two things going.
And then, once you figure those two, if you can figure those two things out, hopefully, now, you've got a really good strategy and plan of implementation to put them in a position of success, and putting them in a position of growth and all that good stuff that everyone really wants to do. I'm not good at a lot of things and it's like... So I'm not going to take myself on 5:00 to 7:00. I'm not going to be on a volleyball team, okay? So I could practice 10,000 hours playing basketball or volleyball, I'm never going to make the team. But golf, if I quit tomorrow and did 10,000 hours of golf, probably be pretty decent at it. I don't need to be 6'2" to play golf. I got lower center of gravity on the golf side, decent swing, practice my ass off. I'm going to be a decent golfer. So, it's a lot of that on the team side.
Chris Dreyer:
I'll just share briefly, we got a few minutes left, the convo. I'll show briefly a situation. On the flip side, and it makes me sound more like an ass when I tell this story, let's just say I think of it in sports. I've got this great pitcher. They're phenomenal pitcher. They're the A in that role, but they want to be a second baseman, and my team is like, "Well, let's put him over in second base." I'm like, "No, they were hired to be a pitcher." I'm not going to disclose the role because they may catch onto this, but I had to have that hard conversation. It's like, "Look, this person has proven that they can do this." I was like, "If they want to build up, and then their off time, prove they could do this other role and above and beyond, maybe we'll entertain that."
Arash Khorsandi:
Chris, that's actually a great point because that's something that happens, I feel like, for all of us. Again, every industry, every field, every business, every environment has that exact situation of someone is really good at something but they think or they want to be something else within the organization, but you're like, "No, no, no, this is your calling. You're doing great here. This is what we need. This is what we hired you for," so on and so forth. It's a challenging position to be in. I don't think you sound like an ass. It's a realistic scenario that comes up, I think, in everywhere. I think I'm sure Google has that problem.
Chris Dreyer:
In sports, it's really simple, you wouldn't expect. But when it comes to business, it's just a little different sometimes. Just briefly, just wanted to touch on this. Your location, it's a bloodbath for talent. And then talent, it's sales, right? It's your talent acquisition team and getting them in the pipeline, building out that. How are you finding retaining top talent in your market? Your market in particular, it's just a bloodbath.
Arash Khorsandi:
Hyperchange, as I like to call it, there's a lot of that. So, I'm fortunate and blessed that I am accessible and I enjoy people, and I really do enjoy getting to understand and learn about people and what they like and what they're good at. So, naturally, I'm very accessible to people when they want to talk to me about whatever, even if they want to brainstorm, "How does it look like if I come there? How does it look like if I'm on the defense and I've never done plaintiff?" and people that are trying to make a switch, or first-year, brand new baby lawyers that are just barred. We just hired, I think, three or four of them in the last couple of months, and we hired three post-bar clerks yesterday that are pending. So the accessibility, the deep conversations, deep meaning, like spending time and understanding, helps a lot.
Of course, from a just practical standpoint, just keeping your overall reputation, your name, your brand clean, and honest, and good. It is a small community at the end of the day, and word travels fast and people know, for the most part, what they're getting themselves into to some degree. So, all that comes into play in the talent acquisition side of things.
Chris Dreyer:
Couldn't agree more. Arash has been fantastic. I really enjoyed our convo. Great meeting you. For our audience listening that has a question, wants to refer a case, best way to get in touch with you?
Arash Khorsandi:
Yeah. My cellphone is always accessible. It's shocking, but my cellphone is 310-600-2541, and then email is always good. It's ak@arashlaw.com. And of course, you can call the office, but that's probably the worst way to get ahold of me. Yeah.
Chris Dreyer:
Arash, this has been amazing. Thank you for coming on the show.
Arash Khorsandi:
You got it. Thanks, Chris. Appreciate you.
Chris Dreyer:
Landing a $41 million verdict isn't just about what happens in the courtroom. It's about having the right team in the right seats, making quick U-turns when things aren't working, and building an intake machine that is built to provide excellent service, but none of that matters if your phone isn't ringing with high-value cases. If you want to attract more of the cases you want, you need the right marketing partner that truly delivers for you. Rankings is the relentless marketing agency that helps PI firms dominate their markets and sign more cases. Head in over to Rankings.io to learn how we can help you capture the market share you need to succeed. I'm Chris Dreyer, and this has been Personal Injury Mastermind. We'll see you next time.
