178: The Truck Accident Authority Joe Fried on Niching Down and Building Personal Brand Expertise

I wanted this to just resonate with people that a truck cashes really are different. In other words, differentiate the market from car crash cases. And secondly, to put myself into a leadership role in that space. And it worked very effectively, and that's been my whole career. Is when I learn something that is effective, I teach it, I go to programs, and I was already doing that as an auto products lawyer, so I already had a national practice, and I was invited around the country. The last two years. I've done over 100 talks to lawyers each year, so that's two a week, and I keep a very active trial practice. I also run an organization. I also started an organization for people who want to know how to be truck crash lawyers. It's grown now to over 2000 lawyers around the country. It's called the Academy of Truck Accident Attorneys. Super proud of that organization and what it's become, it's really the preeminent organization for anybody who wants to do this for a living. So, yeah, no, thanks. So it's a very long winded answer to your question of what I did to market. It didn't feel like marketing. It felt like teaching.

Well, good morning, good afternoon, good evening, whatever time this podcast finds you welcome to the 10 golden Rules of Internet Marketing for Law Firms. Podcast. We've got a great guest today, but as always, I'm going to start with a super quick commercial before I introduce our guest. The commercial is for tgr live, our live event. We're booked. We're locked in. We've got some great speakers for March 16 and 17th, 2026, and one of the things that's unique about our conference is it's like super intimate. You're going to get to know everybody at the conference, we do a lot of interactive things. The first morning, we're going to do speed networking, we're going to do the third annual World Championship rock paper scissors, and then we're going to do power tables at lunch, and I guarantee you're going to have 10 new best friends by lunch on the first day, we've got some amazing speakers. Steve Gersten is going to share with us how to get millions more from your cases. Rob Levine is going to talk about AI for law firms, and Stacy brown Randall is going to share how to get referrals without even asking. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. March, 16 and 17th in beautiful Delray Beach, Florida, by the way, if you want to come to Florida, a perfect time to come is the middle of March. That's almost a guarantee for the weather. I can't give you a guarantee, but we did book The rooftop patio for our big cocktail party on Monday night without further ado, Joe freed. Welcome to the 10 golden rules podcast.

Thanks so much. And now I want to come to your program immediately, because a I agree with you that March is about the perfect time to be in Florida, and you got some great people coming. My good friend Steve Gersten is worth listening to. You gave me a bogey that I have to get more views than him, so I'm going to work on that for this program.

Yeah, Steve did, actually, we covered that topic four ways to get millions more from your cases. So if you like the content today, go check on our YouTube channel and watch Steve.

Mine is going to be how to get 10s of millions more, not just millions more, 10s of millions.

Yeah, we'll cover that today. Joe's very well known as the truck accident guy, but we'll talk about how he got there, and I'd love to hear a little bit about you and your journey and how you became an attorney, and how you started becoming the truck guy?

Well, I'm happy to share my background. I started out in law enforcement. I was a police officer in the metro Atlanta area, and a judge kind of befriended me and encouraged me to go on to law school, which I did, and then that's the beginning of it. Then I've had a couple of sort of unique careers in law. I started out as a med mal lawyer. Then I became a certain type of auto products liability lawyer, and then about close to 20 years ago, I decided to niche down into trucking. And at that time, nobody was really doing it. So it's kind of watched this field grow, and I've helped steer it to where it is now.

Now we both talked a little bit about this for a minute before we press record. I had what I call the godwig and I know you did too, so I'll tell my story very quickly, because yours will be more interesting. But I met a guy and I owned a digital marketing agency, and this guy owned a digital marketing agency, and he only dealt with franchisees. And I'm like, How do you do two or $3 million of revenue only with one niche? He said, it's great. He said, we picked the niche. We got good at it. Everyone starts referring us, and our team got really good at it. Then I met this developer, and they created a software for real estate developers only in the hospitality niche, and they sold the company for three, $60 million and when the two brothers told the story, the one brother said the my brother kept encouraging me, we got to pick a niche, and they picked the niche, and they only targeted this one area, and there's only two conferences they had to own, and only 300 people in the world they needed to. All their software to and then finally, I met the folks from seven figure agency, which is my mastermind. And all these guys were doing incredibly well, achieving seven figures in revenue, a million dollars in recurring revenue, targeting niches like plumbers and air conditioning and only real estate. And so I looked up and I said, Okay, I get it, and I'm looking up, and I said, That's my god wink. And that was God telling me three times within like, a month that I should pick a niche. And so we picked the lawyer niche, and it's been fantastic. We made the ink 5000 this year. Like our business has grown tremendously, and we got really, really good at what we do. So Joe, I know you had a similar God wink story. I'd love to hear your story.

Yeah, there's really, there's two parts to the story, at least two. The first is, you know, as a baby lawyer, I, like everybody else in this field, is struggling to try to figure out who the hell I'm going to be in this field and how the hell I'm going to be anything in it. And I remember going to a conference early in my career, and kind of looking out at this sea of lawyers everywhere, and suddenly feeling really small, and saying, How can I compete? That guy is a fourth generation lawyer, and that guy has a billion dollar verdict, and that guy written three books, and that guy is related to the governor. And I was like, I don't have any of those things. How am I going to compete? And about that time, somebody asked me, What does it take to be an expert in something? And I said, you know, it takes a PhD in 20 years. And they said, Well, that's the long way. That's a way to get there, but that's the long way. He said, What it takes is you have to write something authoritative, and then you have to be asked to speak on the subject by your peers. And as soon as you take the DS and you're speaking to your peers on a subject, you're an expert in something. And that made sense to my baby lawyer brain, and I ended up going down to the Continuing Education Office and finding out who, who runs CLE. And I put myself on that committee. I was a worker bee, so much so that the next year I ran the committee, and next thing you knew, I was out there speaking. And what that really did was I learned a lot of things from that, not the least of which is, you don't need a PhD in 20 years. What you need is a concentrated it's very there are very few subjects that you can't, in a relatively concentrated period of time, become a subject matter expert in. So that was the beginning of the thought about niching down is that wait, I can be a subject matter expert in something and that makes me different, that separates me and distinguishes me

from all this sea of lawyers who are out there, who are trying to be something else, or trying to be some everything else. I think that was a god wink, giving me that that perspective. But then years later, after I spent basically a career doing some medical malpractice work, and then another career doing cases that involve car fires. So I was a product liability lawyer after Ford decided to change the design on this vehicle that I was after, and they settled all my cases with me. I literally woke up I had no cases, so I knew that I was going to niche down into something else. And for a period of time leading up to a particular day, everywhere I looked, I saw a truck crash. I turned on the TV, and it was a truck crash. And I even got on an airplane, and somebody had left, kind of like an industry magazine open to a safety problem, like for real. And so late that night, about three o'clock in the morning, I made this decision after tossing and turning, okay, I'm going to be a truck crash lawyer. But what you have to understand is, at that time, there wasn't a single billboard in the United States about truck crashes. There wasn't a single SEO directed towards truck crashes. Everybody treated truck crashes like big car crash cases. There wasn't a truck crash lawyer that I knew, and my only problem is that I didn't have any truck crash cases.

So when, what year was this?

This would have been 2006 and so that morning, I went in full of energized and I took myself, taking myself off of all these boards that I got myself on as a product liability lawyer. And at 815, in the morning, my phone rang. The person asked for me by name, and she told me a story about losing her husband at about three o'clock in the morning to a truck crash. I still get emotional thinking about the story. I asked her how she knew to call me. She couldn't tell me, and that was in early November of that year, and by the end of the year, I had four truck death cases, so I knew that I was on to something, and I went to a very real effort to become a subject matter expert that I continue on that journey to today. I'm always learning, and it's my field. Yeah, it's been a hell of a ride. Tell you that

so and what have you done to market that both among referring attorneys and the marketing stuff you do?

So the biggest thing that I have, that I credit people knowing who I am to, is teaching, and it probably goes back to the first part of the story that I told you. I think you're one of two kinds of lawyers. Ultimately, when it comes to marketing, you're either A, B to C, business to consumer person. There's somebody who is trying the best they can with billboards and SEO websites and all the things that are done there that are designed to attract customers directly, clients who need you, or there are people who are B to B kind of lawyers who are they're really marketing more from lawyer to lawyer for lawyer referrals. As somebody who was a med mal lawyer and a products lawyer, I was inherently a B to B lawyer. So I was somebody who, you know, was looking to make sure people knew if you had a car fire case, call me. If you had a med mal case, call me. And what was good about those cases is nobody wants to do med mal, nobody wants to do auto products. And so it was easy for people. It was easy to get referrals. Trucking is a little bit different. I've done a lot to differentiate that from the car to car crash case, and so, but most of what I do is I put content out that is based on deep dives into trucking. I've done that from the beginning, for the first three years. I think that I was doing this, I ran an ad that said truck crash cases are different than car crash cases. It said, Did you know? And there was a box, and in that, I changed the box every week to put something unique to trucking in there. Did you know that truck drivers are required to.my thought was that I wanted people to I wanted this to just resonate with people that a truck cashes really are different. In other words, differentiate the market from car crash cases, and secondly, to put myself into a leadership role in that space. And it worked very effectively, and that's been my whole career. Is when I learned something that is effective, I teach it, I go to programs, and I was

already doing that as an auto products lawyer, so I already had a national practice, and I was invited around the country the last two years. I've done over 100 talks to lawyers each year, so that's two a week, and I keep a very active trial practice. I also run an organization. I also started an organization for people who want to know how to be truck crash lawyers. It's grown now to over 2000 lawyers around the country. It's called the Academy of Truck Accident Attorneys. Super proud of that organization and what it's become. It's really the preeminent organization for anybody who wants to do this for a living. So, yeah, no, thanks. So it's a very long winded answer to your question of what I did to market. It didn't feel like marketing. It felt like teaching. It felt like, Hey, I learned this. I can't wait to share it. That's one of the things I've learned in this field. And I know you're a leader in this field, too, Jay. And what this is about, I think, from a content perspective, what it's supposed to be about is real content to help each other, not to just get cases right. So my theory throughout is just put the real stuff out, help people be better lawyers, to get better results for their clients. And you'll have plenty to do. And that's been true for my life, and I think it's true about universally, and I don't know that for sure, but when I mentoring people, that's what I'm encouraging. The Don't worry as much about the money on the front end. Worry about just put yourself out there in the way that you want to be viewed in the world. Be that person for real, and the money will take care of itself.

But you do consumer marketing as well, right? TV, radio, website.

Now we have a website, and we definitely, you know, we definitely do some of that and but then I'm on a lot of programs like yours and others. My goal is for people to just know who I am and know that I'm for real and what I present myself as. It's not just a marketing campaign that I do trucking cases I would put don't get me outside of this space, because I don't, I don't want to be compared to anybody outside of this space. But within my niche, I really am a subject matter expert. And I'm not saying that to aggrandize myself, because I'm not a subject matter expert in so many other things. So the marketing that I do, yeah, we've got a lot of website stuff. I've got a marketing director here, but you know, my marketing director here at my office, much of her life is managing my speaking schedule and content that's coming from that which gets reused and gets put out in different forms and formats. We've written a couple of books, but the idea is to put the idea, for me is much more lawyer to lawyer.

That's great. You mentioned mentoring. What would you. You suggest to a young lawyer who's trying to find their space and their place,

the biggest lesson that I would give, and it's not easy. It's easier to say it than to do it, is to find your passion and then lead from that place of passion. And so for me, when I happened into trucks, I wasn't looking at it because I thought it was going to be a gazillion dollar business. It's something that I had. I had a law enforcement background. I used to work recs, and I saw in truck crash cases. I saw a hole in, from a safety perspective, in something that I thought I could make a difference in. And so picking something that you feel like you can make a difference in and that your sense of justice requires that to happen, gives you sort of a purpose that's beyond just getting cases, and that becomes contagious because people see you and they want into your passion. And so if I speak to somebody about trucking, I can speak to anybody about it, because it's truly a passion for me, and I know that I've have made a difference in this field, and I'll continue to as long as I do this. So so back to somebody who's at the beginning of their career. My exercise is this, sit quietly somewhere and imagine the phone rings, and when you pick up the phone, you're going to hear about a case that's being offered to you, and I want it to be the closest thing to a perfect case for you that you are going to be so excited about working on, that you are going to dedicate yourself to, that it's the kind of case that you're going to take home with you. You're going to think about day and night. You're going to You can't help it. You're going to be compelled by the case. What does that case sound like in as much detail as possible. Where is it in the country? What happened? Who was hurt? What were the nature of the injuries? What brought it about? What is it that offends your sense of justice? What is it that's making you excited about this? And it can't just be money, factually. What is it that makes you the unique person who is compelled to be that

lawyer in that case

and spend your time? I understand there's a lot of in truck cases, a lot of times like FedEx, UPS, Amazon, the truck is not owned by FedEx. The training was not done by FedEx. The maintenance was not done by FedEx. And they hire contractors, and they bid these jobs out to the lowest bidder, and a lot of corners are cut. Is that a simple way of describing some of the big truck cases? Or is it not that simple?

No, it is, in some ways that what you said is true. There's an effort by these large players to try to dissociate themselves from the driver. So what they do is they insert an independent, looking and sounding entity between themselves and the driver, and then they say, See, they're independent. Can't hold us responsible for them, but when in reality, they're controlling a lot. And what's interesting is, in today's day and age, that control is oftentimes via technology. So like, you think of an Amazon situation or JB Hunt is doing it now, where they have apps that people are signed on to, and those apps are monitoring and they're checking up on, and they're really kind of giving the instructions. It's almost like a supervisor inside the phone. And so we're in an interesting time now where we're legally, where we're looking at sort of the interplay between old school law that has to do with agency and sort of master servant relationships, and now this new thing called the gig economy. And how do you apply these laws and rules that when they were enacted, we didn't have a gig economy, and it was not even contemplable, not only contemplated. So now we have this interplay. So it's fascinating. So trucking has now become something that you also have to really focus on agency and understand how this system works, and we're taking apart the system and trying to make it safer.

You mentioned speaking a lot, another question I get asked all the time, how do you get speaking gigs? How do you get booked?

Well, you have to start somewhere, and once you do when, if you do a good job, then there's no shortage of speaking opportunities. I turn down more than I take, and I take 100 a year. So I think what you what the steps of this are, in my view, the quickest way to get asked to do it is actually take the time to demonstrate a subject matter expertise that people are going to be interested in, just like I would imagine in your world, Jay, when you're giving a lawyer advice on how to distinguish themselves, from an SEO perspective, or in the world, I would imagine that your advice to them is something like, well, but have something to say that's worth listening to. Mean, if you don't have something to say that's worth listening to, why should they ask you to speak? If you have something compelling to say, write it down, put it out there in the world, and people will see it and say, Damn, I. Not have that guy come and talk, right? I mean, that's what you really want. I think that's the difference between earned media so to speak, and the same concept is applied here earned speaking engagements. So what is it about your topic and what you have to say, and what you've done with this that makes it earned for you? They can't not ask you to come.

I assume you're barred in one state, or do you practice in multiple states? And then do you consult on truck cases across the country?

Yeah, I love it when you say barred. Well, first that barred usually means prevented from in this case, it means Yeah. So I'm not barred from any state, thankfully, not yet, at least, and it's not my goal. I have licenses in five states, but I've practiced in 46 states, so I've handled cases in just about everywhere. There's just a few states left that I haven't handled cases in. And so yeah, and the nice thing in law, as long as I don't have a lot of disciplinary issues and things along those lines, then I can be admitted, especially for to handle a particular case. It's called a pro hack Vijay admission, and that's most of my work around the country. In states where I'm not specifically licensed, I get pro hacked in,

oh, that's great. I wasn't familiar with the clause,

yeah, it just means for the for a specific purpose. Yeah, I think so they tell me,

that's great. So that frees you up to be a national expert and work on cases.

And I've worked on truck cases everywhere. I'm sure I've worked on truck cases in all 50 states. Most of the time when I'm brought into the case, I'm lead counsel in the case, and somebody is beside me oftentimes, since most of my cases are referral cases or CO counsel cases, sometimes refer to me. The difference is, there are some times where people want to just say, Joe, you and your team take this case. I'll get you into the court in my state, but I want you to call me when you're done. There are other times when they really want to learn. They want to do the case with me in an effort to learn. Which I love doing. A lot of lawyers don't like that. I love it, because what they don't know is I learned from them. Also, sometimes there's a very real curse of knowledge that happens in our field, and so having somebody who doesn't have the background helps sharpen the edge on how we present things. And so I love doing that.

I love how much you give back. You know, I always like to ask successful people for some business management strategies I see from looking from the outside in, two law firms can have similar amount of leads, and one firm will sign 80 cases. One firm will sign 20 cases a month. And the real difference is the one firm runs their business like a business. What are some tips you have for operating the law firm and both business and marketing?

Those are loaded questions, and I'm probably not the person you want to take advice from, except this advice surround yourself with great people if I want to have the best chance of ranking in the world, in the SEO world, and now, with all of the interplay of that with AI, I need someone like you. I need somebody because I'm guess what. I'm not a subject matter expert in getting cases through the ways that you know how to do that. So I think recognizing where you do have expertise and where you don't is important, and then surround yourself with the best people, because anything that is not the best is actually hurting you. If your goal is to be the best, then good enough is not good. So do the work to surround yourself with people. And then internally, I'm really good at being a lawyer. I'm not really good at at some of the organizational stuff that needs to happen that is paramount to be being a good lawyer. So my advice is surround yourself with those people too, including people who can help you build systems that are bulletproof. Because if you take the time to get off the hamster wheel for long enough to build those systems, then you've fixed a long term problem. If you don't take the time, and you suffered through the system, it's a problem that's going to plague you for your entire career. So get off the damn hamster wheel. Get the people together who are necessary, and if you're not a systems person, then find somebody who is there's plenty of good consultants out there who can help you put things together. We're living in a world now with AI and other other advances and apps and technologies that that certainly weren't around when I started. I got great credit for networking my office for the first time and putting actual computers at lawyers desks that wasn't heard of when I started practicing. So I've been but that's my advice. My advice in all of these things is, know where your edges are, and don't have ego attached to that.

Get the damn people who can help you solve the problems and deal with the problems. When you identify a hole in your system, it's your job, not necessarily to know how to fix it, but. Know that it has to be fixed, and then to take steps to fix it. You don't have to have all the answers. In fact, if you think you do, that's a problem. Get people who are truly experts in that field fill the holes, then recognize that it's an iteration, meaning you're probably going to have to evolve that as times continue to evolve, and don't see that as a pain in the butt. That's just part of the system. Look forward for opportunities to keep doing better and better.

Great business coach named Dan Sullivan, he wrote a book called who, not how, and you just have to find the right who to solve a problem or to work in a role on your team.

I love that. And then one other point that I'd make is don't be afraid to ask for real, honest feedback, like not the feedback that you want put in your Google review. Don't just say it was great to work with you because I'm handing you a multi gazillion dollar check. Tell me where your real frustrations were along the way, because I need to hear them if I'm ever going to get better. I don't want to be that guy who's offended if somebody says dealing with this part of your office sucked. And I just want you to know that. I want to know that because I don't want any part of my dealing with my practice to suck.

I want to take that one step further. And I actually got this tip this morning from my mastermind, all my agency guys, yeah, one of the guys said this is the best instruction I've appended to AI recently. So if you had a paid chat, TPT or Claude or perplexity, he said he told the AI, tell it like it is. Don't sugar coat responses. Take a forward thinking view. Adopt a skeptical questioning approach. Do not agree with me. Always act as a contrarian. You said, for people, you said, Don't sugarcoat for your team, but now he's recommending do that for your AI, yeah, actually, if you ask a really good question from the AI, you get a really good answer, yeah.

Interestingly, I'm not an expert in AI, but I will tell you chat GPT, there is a straightforward response that sounds a lot like what you just read, that you just click a box and it will automatically respond with that, by the way, if you don't do that, then I think some of these AI models are really, they're really kind of programmed to kind of give you what they think you want, which is really not that helpful. I always tell people I don't need any, yes, people in my life, I need people who are going to push back. How do I learn? How do I get out of my own perspective, if I don't have something pushing back, it's what I'm using AI for mostly now is to point out that my perspective is not the only perspective. So anyway, that's great.

Have you guys used an operating system like Eos, or any of the business operating systems

we should, but we don't, and those are the areas that that are frustrations where I didn't take my own advice and haven't fixed those. The real reason for me is that distinguishes how I can live like that for as long as I have is I'm a very low volume lawyer, where many practices measure their number of cases in the hundreds or 1000s. I'm typically working on four or five, six cases at a time, at the most, but very big cases. Yeah, they're country, they're very big cases, but they're they're limited in number. So the organization for a case like that needs to be different than if I had to have dashboards to manage what's going on over hundreds of cases.

That's awesome. We've come to the time where I asked the quick one liners, and I've been asking these for over 10 years, so I'm very interested to hear what you have to

say. Hopefully I won't screw them up.

Are there any apps or techniques you use for personal productivity?

Well, I'm playing a lot with AI these days, and so to me, I'm going back and forth between different AI models, and I'm using it in lots of different ways. It would take a long time to go into all the different ways I'm doing it, but you can basically, these days, create agents and ask those agents to to help you in a myriad of ways. And I just shared one having to do with the desire for perspective. Yeah, and so. But I have a trial guru agent. I have a watch agent because I've gotten into watches recently, and I have different perspectives that I use AI to practice with. So that's where I'm spending a whole lot of my time trying to understand how to best use AI as we move forward from here.

I love it, and are using one of the legal AIS on thesis themselves.

I'm using AI. I have looked at a number of them. I don't need something to write a demand letter for me because, again, I'm a low volume

practice, and it's very sophisticated when you write it. Yeah, right.

So I'm a pretty advanced user of chat GPT, and I'm a pretty advanced user of perplexity and Claude, and, more recently, now grok. I'm using that as well, but I'm just kind of learning that one. But so yeah,

do you have a personal wellness and fitness routine?

I do. I've had some health issues in my life that have been cardiac related, but thankfully, they're all doing great now. I've lost a lot of weight, and for me, as I get older, I'm. 59 I'm about to be six. I'll be 60 next May. This coming May, for me, it's about keeping my weight down and really looking at functionality and health. So I have a I have a concierge doctor. I recommend, once you can afford that, to do that for anybody who, somebody who focuses on really looking at the metrics of your life, and the metrics, blood metrics and things like that, so that they can help, because in today's day and age, there's so much that's fixable and that's preventable, but you got to know about it. So the first thing I would say is that, and then, you know, I try to get some, I nothing fancy, but I try to get my philosophy is, is consistency. So just doing something, my rule is, I got to do something for at least 20 to 30 minutes a day. And I tried it. And that can be lots of different. Things. Used to be peloton. I did 1400 plus days in a row on peloton without missing and then I had a hip replacement and heart surgery. So there we go.

That's a good excuse. Yeah, we talked about our buddy, our joint friend, Steve Kirsten. Off the top, have you ever tried to hit the weights with Steve?

Steve and I, for a very short period of time, had the same coach, because I was so impressed by what he had done to transform himself. I knew Steve before. Steve was a Adonis, but he transformed himself and he he would agree with me, I think consistency is the key. Fitness is as much about what you eat and put into your body as it is what you do, and it's the part that nobody talks about, but you've got to eat right, and that's a big part of it. So for me, it's the challenge has been to retrain myself. And what does that mean, especially when you're not 30 and 40 anymore,

by the way, Steve's a regular listener to this podcast, so somewhere right now, yeah, Adonis is a good description for him, and you just made his day. He will, He

will have, I'll give you the what do they call it? When the little Jeff thing that goes over and over, yeah, here it is, Steve. Steve gerson's An Adonis, Steve gerson's An Adonis, Steve gerson's An Adonis, okay, there you go.

He won't have to make that for himself. That's right, all right. I love this one best business books.

My best business books are not really about business. They're about being the best human being that you can be. To me, we're all in the field of persuasion, so I'll read anything and everything that I can get my hands on that has to do with how people make decisions and how people process information. So anything related to neuro linguistic programming or persuasion, like Robert cial, Donnie is one of my one of the people I've read a lot those types

of books, fantastic. And how about digital stuff, blogs, podcasts, YouTube, what do you subscribe to? And when it hits your feed, you stop everything and listen to

I'm gonna start listening to this because I didn't know much about you until, until this. And so now I see some of the amazing people who have spoken and some of the topics, and I'm definitely going to be one of your listeners. I am at a point in my life where I've already said I'm kind of a student of the human and so I listen to a lot of life coaches. I listen to people like Peter Crone, Joe Hudson, people like that. I sometimes listen to Joe Rogan, although I can't sit through a whole two hours. Also listen to anything that's out there by Alan Watts. And so a lot of that stuff is just out there on YouTube. But again, these are things that are less the mainstream stuff and more how to be the best person, how to understand this human animal. There's some, some of the legal stuff. So I'll listen to Cowan as a good friend of mine. So I'll listen to him. I've been on his show a few times. There's some other just really good ones. I'm just drawing some blanks right now.

Yeah, and there's so many now, it's, it's hard to there used to be 10 of us who had Marketing podcast. Now there's 1000s. Who's your NFL or sports team?

I'm a University of Georgia Bulldog fan. So I'm not, I'm not really an NFL fan anymore, but I'm an SEC sports guy, and particularly in football, and the Georgia Bulldogs are my team great.

And what's a great introduction for you? Who should we all refer to you?

I think the cases that I make the biggest difference in are obviously truck crash cases that are, that are serious truck crash cases. And while I like the easy ones, I actually like the ones I make the most difference in are the ones that are challenges where there there's either very significant challenges to liability, and somebody wants me to look to see if there's a way that I can figure out how to make the case stick, and then or there is tremendous liability, and there's real challenges with the person and to presenting damages, and those are in both sides of that. I've been very successful in figuring out ways that are different than the traditional ways. So I'll see into cases in ways that there's big liability challenge of some kind, and I'll figure out. A way to get around those kind of cases. And I help people beyond trucking, I try to stay in my lane, but I've also become known for this concept called Speed trial, which really is much less about speed and it's more about choosing the right story to tell and then really honing the case down to the best theory for recovery and then presenting it in the most compelling manner. So I like helping people take something that is complex and figuring out how to present it in a way that's almost binary and simple. It's the puzzle for me. It's more fun than golf, so I do a lot of that, even in cases that I'm not technically involved in for a fee.

We were talking about storytelling and getting the story right, is that the speed trial kind of like getting the story

it is and it's and it's being very intentional. See, lawyers are trained that the story has to do with the incident. In my world, that can be true, but it oftentimes isn't. It's not about the left turn. It's about something else. It's not about the broken bone or the herniated disc or the TBI. It's about how those things affect people at a deep human level. Honestly. I mean, that's how you take a case that on the surface might be, you know, a broken arm, or a case that's worth X and the way you 10x 20x 50x the value on a case is by making it about something that's deeply human and emotional, as opposed to this surface level diagnosis that most lawyers focus on. So a broken arm case can be about a broken arm, but it can also be about how it affects somebody's relationships and how it affects their deep psyche and why. And it's not BS. It's very important for me to say it's not taking something and making it into something else. That's not true. This is only true if it's true. I mean, this is only something that we do if it's true. But so many times the lawyers don't even look in the right places. They see a diagnosis. It's about a TBI. Let me go prove the diagnosis of TBI. And they forget to spend time really deep diving into what that diagnosis means when it comes to relationships, when it comes to psyche, when it comes to somebody's ability to live their life on their own terms, their concepts of living life with freedom, their concepts of fear and with their experience of fear in the world, the things that that are universally true for all of us, that make us human, that's where I focus my energy and building cases around, if that makes

sense, total subtleties, like I was rear ended twice, and I've got herniated discs and I'm super conscious about shoulder checking. Now, yes, there's a little, there could be a little pain. You know, it's like, now I'm nervous driving, right?

I was gonna, I was just gonna say, so that is part of it. Nobody starts to cry yet for you. But now, when we start to talk about, so, what is it that, how does that really change your life? And like you said, driving, well, what about when you have some you have something important going on and and you have to drive, and you have to get somewhere quickly, and you have to you have people who are important in the car, or if you had kids or grandkids, and how that's going to play out. And we, we start to really explore the fears that come with that. Because how does this progress? You're the age you are now. But do you ever think about what this is going to be like in 10 years and 12 years, and as health becomes more of a of a challenge as we get older? I don't mean to put any of this in your mind, but my bet is it's already there. Yeah. So if we focus on those things, if we focus on what's a click in your neck, that's not going to get anybody nobody's awarding you a million dollars for that. But if we start talking about how it affects your relationships, how it affects your sense of safety, how it affects your your fear about being able to live life on your own terms, how it affects your ability to take care of yourself and other people who are important to you, how you feel as the protector in your family, those kind of things, then people start to react.

That's how you get the emotional connection with the jury. That's right. That's right. Awesome. Last question, Where can people get in touch with you?

Best way to get in touch with me is through my office in Atlanta. The office number is 404-591-1818 but my direct dial my cell phone number is 404-429-6677, that you can text it or or call me, and I'll get the message and I'm happy to respond. And that's, uh, frankly, whether you're looking to you want somebody to help you with a case, in terms of, like, co doing the case with you, but also, I'm available if there's any significant legally related issue that you're facing and you think that I can be helpful to you. I have been so ridiculously blessed financially and otherwise by this field. If I can give anything back, it's my pleasure to do so, so and I mean that, and I get lots of calls. I have employees whose job it is to just manage that part of my life, and it's the part of my life that I'm, frankly, most proud of right now. So happy to help in any way.

Joe, this was really great. Thank you so much for your time.

Thanks, Jay. I appreciate it, and I feel like I made a new friend today, and I appreciate that you're my kind of people, and I want to learn more about how you're doing things, and I'm also your newest listener

now, awesome. Well, every Tuesday morning the 10 golden rules Internet Marketing for law firms. Podcast, hey, thanks. This was great. Thanks.