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The Effective Lawyer teaches ambitious trial lawyers how to grow their skills and create a prosperous law firm. Using lessons learned by accomplished attorneys from around the country, we discuss lessons learned through their trials and tribulations. Our discussions cover a vast range of topics sought out by attorneys looking for advice, from depositions to how to market your law firm.
The show is hosted by Jack Zinda, Founder and Senior Trial Lawyer at Zinda Law Group. In less than 15 years, Jack and his team have grown Zinda Law Group from 3 attorneys to over 30, spanning several states and handling a variety of personal injury cases from gas explosions to truck accidents.
Jack and his guests share their knowledge and skills that they’ve acquired through the process of building one of the most successful plaintiff’s law firms in the country.
In each show we cover a new topic that an ambitious attorney would want to better understand, while providing practical skills to improve their legal practice.
For more information, visit https://www.zdfirm.com/the-effective-lawyer
00:00
Jack Zinda
Foreign. Welcome to the Effective Lawyer, a podcast for ambitious attorneys who want to improve their practice. My name is Jack Zinda, and I'll be your host. Hey, everyone. Today we're going to try something a little different. We're going to take some questions that my team has gotten from either attorneys in the firm, people that have come to some of our events, questions we've got online, and I have not read these ahead of time. So we're going to see how well I do in trying to wing this, and hopefully you get some value and use out of these. All right, next question. How do you decide when to push for trial versus taking a strong settlement offer? That is a tough one, and it is very case specific.
00:55
Jack Zinda
This is one of those questions when you ask anybody who's been doing a long time and like, the best attorneys like you get an unsatisfying answer. Either you get something that's kind of B.S. Like, no, we try every case. We're going to take every case to trial, which is definitely not true, or, you know, it's always the client's decision, which it is, but that's not really the whole truth. So what I like to do is develop frameworks that help me make decisions, and they kind of guide me, and they usually lead me to a few buckets. One is always, sometimes, never. Okay. So when looking at trying a case, sometimes there's a situation where trying the case is the only option. All right, we had a case recently where we got a.
01:36
Jack Zinda
A $3 million verdict, and the defendant had offered us $25,000 in mediation. That was a case that was definitely going to get tried. I know that wasn't the. The ask of the question, but it's helpful to kind of develop, you know, what those protocols are. How I think about it now, there's cases where the defendant offers a decent amount of money, and you have to decide what are you going to advise the client? Sometimes the client will say, whatever you say, I'm going to do. So you have to really sit down and think about it through their lens. Okay. The first thing that I think of, which I think is generally true, is most offers never leave the table.
02:16
Jack Zinda
So generally, as you approach trial, you're not going to get a worst offer after, you know, voir dire, after your opening statement, and you can still settle the case during the jury trial itself. I have not had a situation where they pulled an offer after the case proceeded. Now, maybe if you have a really important motion for summary judgment that you lose on, then you might get a Pooled. So one is kind of take the fear wave that the offer is going to go away later on in the case. So I look at it, okay, is this money within the range of what a jury would give us? And we have a very detailed process for how we value cases. Again, it's not perfect, but it gives us a framework for how to think about what we think the value of this range is.
02:59
Jack Zinda
So first, is it within that range? The second question is, would this money make a meaningful difference in the client's life? Okay, let's say I have a case where a client's a quadriplegic and they offer me $2 million. We can never take that offer because my client's probably on Medicaid. If they have any money in their bank account, they are going to lose their benefits. And it costs way more than $2 million to take care of someone who's a quadriplegic. So that's a situation where it would not, maybe that is in the range of what a jury might give, but it would not make a meaningful difference in the client's life. So, and I look at what the net to the client's going to because at the end of the day, the client's hired us to solve a problem, and.
03:39
Jack Zinda
And money is the way for them to solve that problem, to help pay for their medical bills, their future care, that sort of thing. And I put myself in the client's shoes, like, what would I want to be to happen in this case? Now, there are times where it may make sense to settle, but the client says, no, I want to try this case. Let's go get a jury verdict. And I put those into two different buckets. One is kind of they're being insane. So if I have a case where they're offering policy limits of, say, half a million dollars, and all my research shows it's really a $250,000 case. And they would be. It would be crazy if they actually got a half a million dollars at trial.
04:16
Jack Zinda
And I've had situations like that where, you know, we get a higher offer way more than I thought. One was a situation where the. This adjuster had gotten fired. And I think they let off, like, half their adjusters. And so I got a call from this person from New Jersey is when I first started my practice, said, hey, I'm the new adjuster on this case. I'm going around the country trying to settle these cases, and I want to fly to your office. We don't need a mediator there. You know, Bring your client, we'll all just sit down and talk and I'm going to bring a printer and hopefully we can get everything solved that day. I was very suspicious because this hasn't happened since. And I thought, you know, they're trying to screw me over somehow or kind of trick me.
04:55
Jack Zinda
But the adjuster came in and I put her in one room. I kind of acted like meteor in the way. So I was talking to my client, talking to them, even though I'm advocating for my client and they offer, she offered me three times the value of the case and cut me a check right then. And I was talking to her and the issue was she, her job was to get rid of all of these claims that had been sitting there forever. So she didn't really care about the value. She, she just was told, get rid of all these because we just laid off a bunch of people. And that case was a decent sized case, but it wasn't a seven figure case. So it was like a drop in the bucket. So there's a reason she paid us so much more money.
05:31
Jack Zinda
But if my client had said, hey, no, go get a jury verdict, we can beat that, you know, we'll try it. But it would have been a crazy thing to do. So if it's in the crazy bucket, I'm really going to sit down and try to convince the client, hey, this is really not in your interest to do this. Then we have the, you know, it could get better, could get worse. So my job in that situation is to lay out what are the options to the client. I will give them my honest opinion about what they should do. And depending on how confident, I may be less or more forceful. And if they decide to try the case, then if they're going in it knowing the risk, then we're going to try that case because that's what the client wants.
06:09
Jack Zinda
There is a substantial upside to trying the case. They understand the risk and you've explained it well to them. Now I see attorneys a lot of times make mistakes in not explaining the risk to the client and not explaining everything they're going to have to go through. You know, if I have a situation where I get policy limits offer at the very beginning of a case, pre litigation, and maybe the defendant has some assets that we could possibly get if we got a jury verdict. The client needs to understand, hey, what are the case expenses we're going to incur if we try this case? What is your time commitment? Are you okay with the time commitment you have to make and Are you okay with we may not get this offer here that we got offered now.
06:45
Jack Zinda
So explaining what those risks are to the client. So in the never category would be, you know, you're getting so much money given to you that, like, it's silly to try the case. Obviously, if the client really wanted to, you might not even, you know, continue on the case because you think it's just such a crazy idea. I've had that where we've had, you know, a case where there's a $30,000 policy limit and the defendant is, you know, homeless or, you know, very poor, and they want to go try to get a big verdict because they're mad about what happened in those situations. You have decided, is that the right case for you to handle in that situation? So to summarize. One, you got to really know what you think the value of the case is and what could happen at trial.
07:24
Jack Zinda
That's through research. Two, you have to know what's in the best interest of the client or what. What they could get at the end of the day. Not just, you know, the net now, but if you go to trial, what are the additional expenses? What's the additional time they have to commit? And. And, you know, what are the odds of beating what you have that offer now and explain to them a way that they understand, and then you just go forward. And I think you have to be decisive. I think it's better to be decisive than right. In our ideas, we look at a case like a train on a track, and the end of the train is the trial, and the defense can get off the track at any time if they offer enough money and our client decides to take it.
08:03
Jack Zinda
But I'm never taking my off getting the case to trial, so hopefully that helps a little bit in making that decision. Also, it is very difficult to decide that. You have to make sure you're not fooling yourself. A lot of attorneys don't want to really try cases. They say they do, but then it's like, man, it's a lot of work, and I have to do this, and I have to go get this witness, and they kind of convince themselves to take a bad settlement or just an okay settlement, because it's really. They don't want to try the case. So you have to really ask yourself deep down, do I want to actually try this case?
08:33
Jack Zinda
And if you don't go get someone to help you do it or do it for you, and then you can still get paid a percentage of the fee, but you're just being honest with yourself, and you're setting your client best up for success. All right, next question. What percentage of my revenue should be reinvested into marketing and operations? That's another tough one. And I hope some of these answers are satisfying because again, I like frameworks and I like formulas and I love math and I love spreadsheets, which is really dorky, but it's helped me a lot professionally.
09:07
Jack Zinda
By the way, if you're listening to this and you're thinking about going, you're going to college or your kids are going to college and they want to be lawyers and trial lawyers, have them take some sort of financial business, math, economics class, understanding how to run a business. And even if you don't need to understand how to run a business, how financials work will make you a much better lawyer almost no matter what you do. Even if it's just how to collect bill of ours, how that impacts your pay, things like that. So first you have to know where you're going to know how to get there. So the percentage you're going to invest depends on what mode you're in.
09:42
Jack Zinda
So, for example, you know, we typically will Invest around 25% of our revenue into acquiring clients, whether that's through referrals, you know, in time and energy, or, you know, doing digital ads or SEO or things like that. And we're doing that because we have really aggressive growth goals. You know, we're trying to grow between 25 and 50% a year over year, which is tough if you don't invest back in, to marketing. And then I know what I want my profit margins to be, you know, so I set the goal for profit margins and then I know I need to invest heavily in marketing, and that leaves the rest of the percentage for the other areas that I need to invest into. And when you say the word invest back in, you really have to decide, what does that actually mean?
10:30
Jack Zinda
Am I saying I'm going to invest back in, you know, any excess? I'm going to do this consistently month over month. But whatever you do, you need to stick to it and really have a model that you're strict about if you can set caps for yourself. Let's say you say, hey, 30% of our expenses go to paying our legal team, 25% go to paying for marketing, client acquisition, and we include intake people in that percentage. And then let's say you say 20% go to operating. The rest of things like, you know, recruiting, hiring, you know, website management, all that fun stuff. I think that gets us to 50, 75. So probably add a few more percentages here and there because 25% is pretty high for a profit margin. So then at the end of each month you say, okay, what, how did we do?
11:26
Jack Zinda
Did we meet those margins? Those percentages, were they realistic? And then are they going to help me get to my goal? And you really have to map it out for, you know, three to five years for where you're trying to get to. So you can plan that backwards. If you're not great at that, you know, plug it into ChatGPT, ask, you know, someone who's good at math to put together a spreadsheet for you. You don't have to really be an expert on, but you have to kind of know what you're doing. And I'd also say is budgeting. Don't budget towards a number, budget towards a goal. So if you say, hey, we're going to spend 250,000 on marketing in a month, you have to know what's that going to go to?
12:01
Jack Zinda
So hopefully that helps and I'm happy to talk to you maybe one one and kind of walk through their particular situation and kind of walk through what I would do in those shoes. But it's a tough question to answer and you'd really have to know what you're trying to do and what your goals are. If you'd like a copy of any of the things you heard about here today, or to set up a time to talk about one of our team members about a case, please go to Zendalaw IO and we have amazing resources, downloads, guides, and you can set up a time to talk to us if you want to talk about how we handle things or any case in particular. Okay, next question. What's the biggest misconception people have about personal injury law? Well, okay, there's a lot.
12:52
Jack Zinda
So I'm going to break it down a couple of different ways. First, I'm going to talk about the biggest ones that lawyers have that don't practice personal injury law. And then I'll talk about some of the ones the general public has about that. The first one is that what we do is easy. This is goes to lawyers that are looking to, you know, switch over to this practice area. You know, one thing in life, if it was easy, everyone would do it. And it is definitely not an easy practice area to handle. I've had a lot of people that have tried to make the switch from hourly or, you know, big law firm to go do it on their own. Or kind of join our firm or another firm. And they always underestimate.
13:32
Jack Zinda
The difficulty is to work on a case and evaluate a case without having money paid to you up front in that skill of trying to figure that out is. Is really hard, and it takes a lot of time to do it. The next biggest misconception I see is people underestimate or don't understand what it actually means to deal with clients in a personal injury case. You know, in a lot of areas of law, you're fighting over money. Okay, maybe family law is the closest that it's akin to, because you're fighting over, you know, a divorce, which there's a lot of emotion that goes into their child custody. But when you come to practice personal injury law, you have to learn everything about your client.
14:13
Jack Zinda
I've done some really cool things called psychodramas, where you spend a whole day with your client learning everything that they've gone through, both before the incident, you know, during the incident, after the incident, you know, what it's meant to their family, what their families have had to go through. And in those sessions, I've had to share those types of things about myself because for people to be vulnerable, you have to make yourself vulnerable. And that's not something that I anticipated doing when I became a lawyer. And the great thing is the relationships you make with these clients, you know, are just so intimate and so incredible, and there's such a bond there. You know, it's not really friendship and it's not really family. It's something completely different. And you're helping them get through a really terrible part of their lives.
14:58
Jack Zinda
And I've seen people try to join the practice, and they. They're not comfortable in that space. You know, I always, you know, when we're hiring attorney, I always give the couch test and I say, you know, would they be comfortable walking into, you know, our most modest client's house, you know, with very little money, sitting on their couch, you know, having a cup of coffee, having a beer, talking about what they've been through, you know, going through old family photos and just spending the day with them. If you don't feel comfortable in that space, you shouldn't do this. You're not going to get the most value out of it for your clients, and you're honestly, you're going to hate it. And I've seen attorneys try to force it, and they just can't. They just can't get over the hump.
15:37
Jack Zinda
Doesn't mean they're bad people, but they really aren't great at this craft. The next misconception I see is how much money that personal injury lawyers make. And that's because of all the ads that are on TV where people are advertising these massive verdicts, massive settlements. 10 million, 8 million, 50 million, 100 million, a billion dollars. And unfortunately, a lot of times those numbers can be a little misleading in the sense of, you know, did that firm actually handle the case start to finish, and what was the fee that they received? So, for example, let's say you have a case that settles for a million dollars, and the firm, let's say, gets a $400,000 fee on the case. Well, that case may have come in through a referral partner. So let's say they get half of that fee. Now you're at 200,000.
16:24
Jack Zinda
You have your lawyer that worked on the case if it wasn't used solely, so maybe they get a third of that. So now you're down to or 25% to 150,000. You had that case for two years, so you had to carry it the entire time, pay case expenses. You. You add interest on those case expenses, and you have to pay your staff, your overhead. So at the end of the day, you're not left with as much money as you would think after going through all those different costs. So to really get good at this and to make serious money, you have to have good systems, get great cases, and really know what you're doing. And I've seen a lot of people lose a lot of money because they think it's easy.
17:01
Jack Zinda
They come in and they just want to spend some money fast and try to get a quick buck. And it's. It's not that way. That's not really the realistic about how those things work. Let's talk about some misconceptions that the public has. Okay, the first is that, you know, a case is a lottery ticket. Any of the cases that you see where there's, you know, massive verdicts, one of three things has happened. One, there's something really terrible the defendant did. Like, we had a case recently where a driver, a commercial driver, was high on meth at the time they hit. Our client fled the scene. It was the fourth time it happened. The company had known about it before. It was just a crazy situation, crazy facts. You know, we ended up selling that case.
17:45
Jack Zinda
But if went and got a jury verdict, it would have been very large given what. What the defendant did. But those cases, there's insurance involved, and so, you know, you're really capped by how Much insurance is available most of the time. Another misconception on that front is that the parties are going to pay for what happened. It's almost always going to come out of insurance money and you're capped by how much insurance is available. So sometimes you might see a massive verdict on a Billboard, says like $10 million. Well, that may have been a drunk driver that killed someone, but there's no actual source of recovery. And they got what's called a default judgment against them, which is probably never collectible.
18:26
Jack Zinda
So it creates this perception that all of these big verdicts are coming and all these crazy things are happening, but it's not actually the case. So in those cases where you actually can get a big recovery and you actually can collect it are few and far between. We only post on our website and things we do is actually cases we've actually collected on from a third party or defendant. You know, and I've been doing this 15 years and I don't know how many seven figure cases we have. It may be over 100, but you know, you really have to know what you're doing and it just doesn't fall out of the sky. Next misconception is that PI attorneys or personal jewelers are quote, ambulance chasers. It hurts my feelings when people say it.
19:10
Jack Zinda
I had one of my best friend's wife, this is a funny story, and they just got married and I introduced what I did. It's like 10 years ago. And she's the sweetest woman. Like, oh, you're just an ambulance chaser, right? Which has so many negative connotations. I didn't say anything, of course, but it's one of those things. The image that it portrays is someone that is praying and trying to make money off the bad things that happen to someone else and kind of preying on them and looking kind of in the shadows, like waiting the ambulance came by and let's go chase it and try to see if we can come up with something that happens so we can sue someone. That is the furthest thing from the truth.
19:44
Jack Zinda
And unfortunately, a lot of the TV ads like don't help with that, you know, Persona. Yelling at a tv, punching a truck, throwing an army tank over a fence. I don't know, whatever they do not there's anything wrong with those. Well, I, I just, I guess I am saying there's something wrong with those. It kind of makes the profession seem like it's a joke in that you just yell loud and you're gonna get a lot of money for your clients, that's not the case. It takes hard, hard work. It takes really loving what you do. It takes, you know, late nights, weekends. And if it's just about money, you're not going to get the types of results that you're that you see on those billboards.
20:21
Jack Zinda
And sometimes it takes, you know, in every client that I've had where we've gotten seven figures or eight figures, you would never want to trade places with them. They lost a child, they lost a spouse, they lost a limb, they'll never walk again, they have brain damage, you know, that's not going to get fixed. And so it really bothers me when I see ads and someone who looks completely healthy is holding up a sign for a million dollars. Because I don't have cases like that unless someone was killed. And it creates a false image for the public, which makes it seem like this is a lottery ticket. And the saddest thing is our political system has gotten the voters to buy into that, which is funded by really well heeled insurance companies.
21:03
Jack Zinda
And so we are taking away our rights left, right and center because there's a, quote, problem with so many lawsuits. In Texas, for example, you can't even really bring a medical malpractice case if a child or a baby is killed. In a medical malpractice situation, even if it's clear the doctor messed up big time, it's almost impossible to bring a case because of the laws that have been passed. And so all of these things kind of lead to the idea that this is a lottery ticket system when in actuality, it's very difficult to get a big recovery. It is a lot of work, it is a lot of time. It doesn't happen that often. And. And then when it does, something really terrible occurred. All right, that's it. Thanks for all the questions.
21:41
Jack Zinda
I actually get a lot out of these and it helps me think through why I did things sometimes. I'm figuring that out actually as I answer these questions and I love to hear different ideas, insights. So thank you for sharing them and if you have any questions of your own, feel free to email us. You could text me, you could call our law firm. I love talking shop and I love helping other attorneys grow because I think a rising tide raises all ships. So thank you and talk to you soon. Thanks for listening today's episode of the Effective Lawyer. You can learn more about our team and find other episodes of our podcast@zindalaw.com as always, we'd appreciate that you subscribe, rate and review the pod. Thanks