181: Amazing Strategies - Meet the Speakers Coming to TGR Live! Growth Strategies For Law Firms 2026

I want to tell you what I've been doing lately, because I think this is a game changer. So the easiest and simplest way I've been doing this has actually been using fitness trackers, and I have bought probably well over 100 aura rings for my clients just in the last few years. And what I do is I use AI like CPO or followed by an AI. And I go through the medical records, the histories, the notes, and if I'm finding complaints that are consistent with fatigue, consistent with impaired sleep, I will buy them as a cost of the case. It's only a couple of $100 in ordering. And the ORA ring now has gotten so good and it is so sensitive that it is basically similar to a sleep study. And what I'll do is I'll buy them the aura ring, we'll track it for a couple months, and if it shows that their sleep is as impaired as they claim, and they're having the problems that are consistent with what they're reporting in the medical records. What I then do is I'm sending them to the University of Michigan or another hospital for a sleep study, and you do a 24 hour sleep study or 48 hour sleep study, and then what you have is objective evidence of why your client is not able to go back to work.

All right. Well, welcome everyone. Thank you for being here. We have an awesome panel, maybe one of our best ever, and it's no surprise that we have amazing guests and speakers, because today we're previewing some of the speakers from tgr live growth strategies for law firms. My name is Jay Berkowitz. A little bit more about me in a minute, and you'll meet all the panelists in just a minute. What we're doing is we're meeting some of the speakers from tgr live, and everybody's going to share one of the highlights of their upcoming presentation. So we'll meet Stacy, Steve, Rob, Chris and Cassidy in just a minute, and I'll tell you a little bit about tgr live. So this is our annual conference that we do for 10 golden rules, and it's in beautiful Delray Beach, Florida. And by the way, the beach is amazing. So for those of you who are just about to get crushed by a winter vortex, march 15 and 16th in Delray Beach is beautiful, and Delray Beach is on the east coast of Florida, in between Miami and Fort Lauderdale and West Palm Beach. Our office is in Boca Raton. Del Ray Beach is the next community, and it's absolutely beautiful. The resort is fantastic. It's called the opal grand and it's right across the street from the ocean, beautiful pool area, and the hotel did an amazing job last year. The meals were great. Everything was great. And Delray Beach is really cool. It's like a little seaside town with great bars and restaurants. And we're going to have a welcome cocktail party, and then on Monday night, we're going to have a party on this beautiful rooftop patio, and we're going to have the first ever tgr legal All Stars band. So if you play in a band, let me know, and we'll get you guys in the jam band. But we've already got six lawyers and one lawyer's wife, who's a singer, who are going to be participating in the jam band at the cocktail party. The other thing that's kind of unique and cool about tgr live is we work really hard so that if

it's your first legal conference, or you don't, you're not one of the in one of the clicks, everybody gets to know everybody. So we have a welcome cocktail party. And the first morning, before the first break, we do speed networking. And everybody, when we did it last year, everybody's, oh, I don't like networking. But then we sat people like this, like speed dating, and gave them a simple task, your name, your company, and who you'd like to meet, what an introduction or something you'd like to accomplish at the conference. And the energy goes wild, and everybody meets everybody. And then we have this, we're going to have the third annual 10 golden rules World Championship, Rock Paper Scissors before we go to lunch. So I promise you, you'll have a couple friends to sit with at lunch, where we're going to have power tables, and you're going to get to sit with the experts. So a lot about the conference, but it'll be fantastic. It'll be amazing, and you're going to get to meet some of the best speakers. So you'll know what's coming. We hope to see you all March 16 and 17th at tgr, live at 10 golden rules. We tell a joke of the week every week, and we do that as part of our EOS to be fun and easy to work with. And so I start all my presentations with a joke. What do you call a priest who's passed the bar exam? Father in law, not bad, right? I'm looking at my audience here. And one other thing about tgr live, we have a new new thing this year as well, called ambassadors. So you probably know some of these famous folks, Gary sarner and Paul foster at all the legal conferences, Joe Rotolo, who. From intake, Ivy and Anna and the ambassador is going to make sure everybody gets to meet everybody and introduce you to the vendors. If there's a solution that you need for your business, it's going to be awesome and tons of fun. So without further ado, let's get into the presentation, and I'm going to go first, and I'm going to share some of the content that I'm

going to talk about, and I'm the founder of 10 golden rules and the host of tgr live growth strategies for law firms, which is the conference I just described. I'm the author of five books, and two of them made Amazon bestseller. We have over a million views on our YouTube channel. And what goes on our YouTube channel is the 10 golden rules of online marketing podcast and our monthly webinars. So this webinar will be available on our YouTube channel. I'm a former hockey goalie, and I play doubles tennis, so today I want to talk about one of the things I'm going to talk about at the conference, and this is the hottest thing going, and that's AI SEO, and right at the top of Google is a new section called AI overviews, and on chat GPT, people are searching and AI Google's AI and chat GPT are answering their questions like, How do I choose a car accident attorney? So it's very important that we figure out how to get in these listings now. 18 months ago, chat GPT posed an existential threat to Google if everybody just answered all their questions on chat GPT, like, how do I choose a car accident attorney? And there was no links to lawyers websites. Not only was Google at risk, but law firms were at risk, and SEO agencies were at risk. And a couple of things happened, like number one is chat, G, P, T, and some of the other large language models, the search engines started getting hit with trademark and copyright issues, and so they started sharing links, and then Google went to the mattresses, if you remember that expression from the Godfather and Sir guy, Bryn, came back into the company, came out of retirement, and started coding on Google Gemini, which is what they call their AI product. And I would argue that he's won the battle, because Google went from a $2 trillion valuation in the past 12 months to a $4 trillion valuation. And essentially what Google did is they started giving us really, really good results in this AI Overview section. So they if we had gotten

used to going to chat GPT for asking questions, we didn't have to anymore. You could stay on your familiar browser and get all the other benefits of Google Now chat GPT is significant. It's not insignificant, but the opportunity for us, for in the legal community and the SEO community, is when you search for something, not only is Google giving you a good answer, but they're showing a link to additional lawyers websites. And this is our client, Jeff McDonald, coming up in one of the AI search results. And so this is a new traffic opportunity where if somebody doesn't get the entire answer they need, they're going to link out to your website, and we're starting to see a lot of traffic to our clients websites from these AI links. Typically, it's the websites that are coming up in SEO that are being used by Google. So these are the websites they use to compile this answer. So what's the business opportunity? The business opportunities to continue to improve your SEO and figure out how to come up in the AI links and the chat GPT links. I mentioned that chat GPT is growing, and it's significant, but there's a 19 point 7 billion searches every day on Google and YouTube, and only 1 billion searches on chat GPT. So while there's a lot of hype around chat GPT, I would argue that there's significantly more business opportunity to come up in the AI overviews and YouTube searches than chat GPT. Now there's a new data point that we're starting to look at, and we can tell you how many searches your firm is coming up for in AI. The biggest so far, obviously, is Morgan and Morgan, but even this tool says they only have medium results, so they have 354, terms on chat GPT and 1000 terms on AI overviews. One of my friends, Rob Wilhite, has 11 chat GPT results and 347,

AI overviews. And here's an example for slip and fall accident law firm Colorado Springs, they come up in the AI overview results. So the obvious question is, how do we get listed in more AI overviews? And that's probably what most of you are asking yourselves. So the first thing is, in the industry. We're calling it AEO answer engine optimization. So we used to do SEO, search engine optimization, and now there's kind of a merger. So the obvious first strategy is to answer questions in your SEO so we do a lot of videos with our clients. Here's Jeff McDonald answering a question, what happens if I get hit by an Uber or Lyft? And literally, you use the answer in the video. So one of the things that our clients are asking us all the time is, what do I do if I get hit by an Uber who's going to pay for my car repairs and my medical? We search engine optimize that video on YouTube, and then we use that video in a search engine optimized blog on the website. So we're literally answering a question to position ourselves for those Aeos. We also use these in these videos, in social media, a newsletter. And super important is Google Maps. The Google Maps is almost like a mini website that you lease from Google that's as important, or almost as important, as your website itself. So we're answering questions and getting great results in these AEO, Google, AI, SEO opportunities. The second big opportunity is the question and answer engines. So Reddit and Quora are essentially Question and Answer engines, where people ask questions and then people rate your answers, and Reddit and Quora showing up all the time, and they're heavily influencing these results. So if you can get an answer in Reddit, vote it up, and you see this answer, lawyers have read it. What's the dumbest thing your clients ever do? Client's ever done? This answer has been voted up 2700 times, and so that this guy's developed authority in Reddit. And there's lots of questions like,

do I need to get an attorney? This is a new question, and it only has eight votes so far. So the first thing is, you want to answer questions on your website and your videos in your blogs. The second thing is, you want to become an authority. The same question, how do I choose a car accident attorney? We see the AI results, we see a couple SEOs, and we see Reddit and Quora, but videos are now becoming more prominent in Google. And I don't know if you all noticed this, but three or four years ago, videos used to come up in searches. Then for whatever reason, Google stopped showing the YouTube videos, but now they're coming up all the time. So doing the videos is great for SEO. As I mentioned, we have over a million views on our YouTube channel, and so it's helped us in develop our authority. My friend Jeff Hampton is an attorney who is a criminal attorney, and even has an Airbnb attorney business, and he's got millions and millions of views on long form videos explaining things very thoroughly, and they've done very well in building his authority, getting articles in your local chamber of commerce, your local bar association, Super Lawyers, makes you an authority. And in these instances, it's more important that Rob Levine or Steve Gersten is the author, as opposed to the Michigan Law Firm. Or, as for Jay Berkowitz, it's more important that I get authority than 10 golden rules. A Wikipedia page is great. A grocer PDF page coming up in local news articles is very helpful for the SEO algorithm to build your authority. The third strategy is things you can do on your website for the AI SEO cover topics comprehensively with detailed explanations and real examples. Bulleted lists will often be grabbed from your website and used in the AI SEO results. Frequently Asked Questions. Most people wrote like three or four of these when they first built their website. It's a great time now to go and build 40 or 50 frequently asked questions, coming up with

proprietary data doing surveys. Hire a couple graduate students to do a survey and come up with proprietary data, send it out as a press release, publish it on your website. And there's some code things we're doing on the website. If you click on the right, click on any website, it's going to view the source code. And you see here we've got schema code on this website. Schema is something that Google and Yahoo and everybody, all the search engines came together about 10 years ago and said, We're going to create some standardized code that you all should use on your website to make it easy for us to identify things like local business maps, what type of business you are. Well, now there's over 800 schema codes that they've developed. So Google saying, use this standard code. We're going to rank you better if you use it. Duh, you should use it, right? So things like legal service, attorney, FAQ, pages, there's structured data for answers, question and answers and all kinds of things, articles, blogs, just. Making it simple for Google to read and understand what you're putting on your website. So this is the end of my section, and the AI SEO secrets. Number one is answer questions. Think of it as AEO when people are asking questions for the Google overviews or the chat gpts, or all the other perplexities and the other llms, they're basically asking questions. So answer questions in your SEO with videos and blogs. Become an expert in Reddit and Quora. Build your authority by writing articles and getting published. Developing a podcast. Videos are great. And finally, the things you can do on your website, like bulleted list, detailed descriptions, frequently asked questions and schema code. If you'd like to grab some of this and share it with your marketing team, you can scan this or go to 10 Golden rules.com/hot, trends. We've laid out these strategies and some more stuff and information around Google AI overviews. We also have some tips for getting ranked in Google

Maps and the Google screened LSAS. So if you want to scan this quickly or write down 10 Golden rules.com/hot Trends, you can share this with your marketing team or your agency. So without further ado, I want to introduce our first guest, Stacey brown Randall, I absolutely love her content. Stacy, thank you for being here. Thanks for having me. Her first book is called generating referrals without even asking, and her second book is called the referral client experience. She's an award winning author, speaker, podcast host, if you want an hour with Stacey, she did a great job on the 10 golden rules podcast. And she runs an event called the referral accelerator, and you can do, what is it? A two day, two day coaching event with yes, that's

Stacey Brown Randall: one way that I work with clients, is through the referral accelerator two days to learn it all.

And so Stacey, are you going to present slides, or are you going to present, yeah, a

Stacey Brown Randall: couple of slides to get people interested to know what's coming. And I'll leave them hanging a little bit more. So let me go ahead and share my screen. Okay, so when you are thinking about your business and where your clients, where your prospects, where your leads come from. There's this one known area that most folks are like our best clients come from referrals, right? That doesn't mean all your clients come from referrals. You should have a multi faceted strategy of how you're bringing in clients, but some of your best clients, some of the clients that will be the easiest to close, they'll be quicker to close, they'll be less price sensitive, and in some cases, are really the type of clients that will refer other clients as well. Are going to come from referrals. But what people get wrong, and what I see a lot of attorneys, get wrong, is figuring out where referrals fit within their overall sales strategy. So when you're thinking business development, when you're thinking sales strategy, where do referrals fit? So I'm going to kind of position your sales strategy so you can think about how this is different, and then apply where referrals fit with everybody else that you're going to be learning from. So traditionally, we are taught that our sales strategy is a two legged stool, but my argument is that it's actually a three legged stool, and I'm going to break down the three legs for you so you can see where referrals fit. Now the three legs of the stool, of course, one is always going to be prospecting, one is marketing, but that third leg, of course, is referrals. And I want to break down what's included in each of those legs. So you can see this visually, because here's the thing that I find a lot of my clients, a lot of the attorneys that I work with, that they ultimately get wrong. First, they don't always define referrals correctly. They don't understand what actually has to exist for a referral

to happen. And then they don't understand what they should be doing to actually be able to trigger those referrals to happen. And the way I teach it is trigger those referrals to happen so you don't have to ask for them. You don't have to network all the time to constantly be seeing you don't have to be gimmicky and promotional, like putting in your email signature the greatest compliment you can give us as a referral, right? We don't want to do any of that stuff when we're trying to position ourselves as the authority, as the one that they trust as the attorney they want to hire and they want to trust with their case. So let's break down the three legs of your stool, and then I'll explain why referrals has its own leg to the stool. The first leg of the stool, of course, is the prospecting leg. So if you think about these as like buckets, right? These are all the activities that are in that prospecting bucket. Of course, this is not an exhaustive list. There's more that could actually go in here, but it's things like networking, joining leads groups, maybe joining different associations, going to trade shows. Maybe you do 7 million cups of coffee or constantly meeting with people of coffee meetings, potential centered influence relationships, right? Maybe you're sending cold emails or doing cold calling. Or cold outreach on social media, maybe you're buying leads right again. This is not an exhaustive list, but things that fit in the prospecting bucket are there because they're the activities you're doing that's trying to get you as quickly and as close as you can get to the prospect. So what can I do so that I can get to the next prospect as fast as possible. And these are things that we would consider to be prospecting in nature. It means when we do them, we're doing them with a prospect, right with a potential client in mind, and that's our mentality. That's who we're trying to speak to. That's who our messaging speaks to, is trying to get that prospect's

attention. It's the same thing with our marketing, which is our second leg of the stool, and then the marketing bucket, right? You've got your website, social media, maybe you're trying to get some earned PR. Maybe do free speaking, SEO, right? Other online digital marketing strategies, print advertising, online advertising. Maybe you're guesting on other people's podcast. Again, not an exhaustive list, but this is everything that fits into your marketing bucket, right? These are the activities that you do from a marketing perspective, and the messaging is still the same in terms of who you're trying to speak to. This is you're trying to get the attention on the prospect, right? You put up the billboard. You're trying to help that people see the Billboard, and then they will call you because they are a prospect and have that potential to become a paying client. So the idea here is, is, when we're thinking about prospecting and marketing, we're speaking to the prospect. We're speaking to the potential new client. Our messaging is sales in nature, right? We're trying to get their attention, and that is the activities that we're doing support who the end user of that messaging is, which of course, are the prospects for decades and decades and decades. The way referrals have been taught is that they must fit into one of these two buckets. It must fit into prospecting, or it must fit into marketing. When you hear advice that referrals actually fit within prospecting, that's where you hear advice, like you must pay for referrals. You must ask for referrals, or, of course, you must be networking to know everybody, so that everybody knows you. You're always seen and you're never forgotten. When referrals are taught that they belong in the marketing bucket, then you're taught tactics and strategies from a marketing perspective that sometimes lead experts to actually look gimmicky and overly promotional, like putting in their email

signature the greatest compliment you can give us as a referral, or putting in your email newsletter, right? Hey, we are open to referrals. So there's different tactics that are taught depending on who you're listening to, about where referrals fit. And if you believe referrals fit in marketing, you get some very old school tactics the same way, if you believe referrals fit into prospecting, but that's not where referrals fit. They don't fit in prospecting, and they don't fit in marketing. It's the third leg to your stool, and that third leg to the stool is actually more of a planter than it is a bucket. And we go layer by layer. And of course, the secret sauce to all these layers working is the language that we use, which we call referral seeds, and it is the language that we use that allows referrals to grow and to grow in a consistent way. And so we break down this bucket, so to speak, this planter, and we go layer by layer, by making sure not changing systems and processes and procedures you have in place, but by tweaking them, by shifting them slightly right from the intake process to what you track to your metrics to how you think, moving into actually the plans you want to have in place in your business for cultivating more referrals from people who already refer you your existing referral sources, new people referring you within your client experience, and then moving into our third layer, and all of that is contained in the strategies and the processes and the plans we put into place, but it's all anchored and the language that we use. The big difference between referrals versus marketing and prospecting is marketing and prospecting is speaking to the prospect. Referrals is never speaking to the prospect. The language, the messaging, the what you do, the actions that you take, you're speaking to the to the referral source, or the potential referral source, the person who knows the prospect. There's no selling needed. It's all about relationship

building, but doing that in a very strategic way, so that you don't actually waste time and money. So when I'm at tgr live, we're going to break down understanding the things you need to understand about the science behind referrals. Why asking it doesn't work. We're going to talk about some of the pieces in this planter that you are seeing, and I'm going to explain to you how referrals work and how they can support a firm. And I'll do that breaking down one of my personal injury attorney. Her name is Amanda. I'll break down exactly how we worked with her for a number of years to grow her referrals to a consistent way of just how she runs her firm, and we will do all that when I'm with you guys.

Live Stacy, that was awesome. What's one tip that you would give attorneys for building referrals from other attorneys?

Stacey Brown Randall: When I talk with attorneys, we're going to look at your referral sources and we're going to carve them out with a couple of. Different types. When I work in the legal world, you guys have this great bonus, which is where attorneys like to refer to other attorneys. Sometimes it's because you're obviously taking a cut. Sometimes it's not. I have as many law firms that don't take cuts as I do as I have that do we still cultivate the same plans with attorneys that are referring business to us, but it's with the understanding that, knowing that when you have a law firm referring to you, or a law firm that you want to refer to you, it's understanding really like where you fit in terms of, are you on a list that their intake team gives out and so that's ever, never coming from the attorney, right? Or is actually that referral coming from the attorney, and understanding who at the firm you need to be maintaining relationships with. It's always going to start with the attorney that you know, right? But you've got to make sure it's permeating through the firm, so that it makes it to the intake team or the client relationship manager, and that that person understands who you are too, in terms of being able to receive referrals from that firm. And that's really important, and people always overlook it. They always overlook that you may be on the list because you know the attorney, but it said intake person, that's actually the one who's giving out that information to refer and it sometimes never gets to the attorney, and they're really picking people from a list, usually, unless they're only told to send to one, and most people completely ignore developing a relationship with that group of people. Awesome.

Well, stick around and we'll take some questions from everyone at the end. And I'm really excited to introduce my friend Stephen Gersten, Steven and I've got to hang out at a couple conferences. And we, I think we do most of our hanging out at the gym, because he's always there from like five to seven, so we definitely overlap. He's the president of the AJ. Distracted Driving litigation group, and has a number of past presidencies in these groups, speaks of things all across the country, voted as a super lawyer, recovered the largest auto and the largest truck settlement of any Michigan lawyer or law firm. And he's a regular listener of the 10 golden rules of online marketing podcast, and Steve, I really appreciate that, because you're kind of like my avatar. I know you listen to every episode. So a lot of times when I'm interviewing people, I'm thinking of you as someone who's our audience, and he's a teacher. Live, he's going to talk about four strategies to make millions more from your cases. I've seen the presentation a couple of times. It's awesome, and he's going to share with us just one of those strategies. So are you, do you want to share the slides, or do you want

me to share? Sure, so Stacy, by the way, that was a great talk, and I have to corner you after and figure out how I changed my email that says the greatest compliment you can give me is a referral. So apparently I'm doing it wrong, but great talk. Really honored to be a part of tgr, and what I would say humbly is I have the best topic of all, because the goal really with my talk is you're going to walk away from my talk with ways that you can literally add millions of dollars to your cases every year, and this is one of the four areas I'll be talking about, and since I'm giving it away with the preview Slide, So Jay, I apologize, he's probably gonna yell at me when this is over, but what I want to talk about is fatigue. And what I want to talk about is that this is basically you will find fatigue and evidence of fatigue in every serious physical injury case you have, every brain injury case you have that is serious, and every chronic pain syndrome case that you Have, and it is everywhere. And what lawyers don't realize is it is absolutely devastating to our clients. And this is from the Journal of head trauma rehabilitation, and what it says is that this is a devastating impairment that 50 to 75% of your clients who have either chronic pain syndrome or TBI have, and this is the amazing part. Over half say this is their worst problem, and yet we're doing nothing to demonstrate this for our clients and show what they're going through so we can get them the compensation they desperately need because they're not going to be able to go back to work. This is the source for that last quote, and the takeaway here is you can prove and document fatigue. I've been doing it for over 20 years. We are literally able to add millions of dollars to our cases every year by doing this. And there's no one in the country that seems to be doing this, even though it's such a pervasive, devastating injury. A couple quick tips, and I'll tell you how to do it real

quick. One you do want to pick cases with significant economic loss. You are using fatigue, evidence of impaired sleep, as a way to show why your clients are not. Capable of competitive employment. And that's not me saying it. That is what the US government says. That's what the Social Security Administration says when it says that you have to be able to work at least 40 hours a week to be considered capable of gainful competitive employment. So the second thing you want to do is you want to pick your clients. This is an invisible injury, very similar to mild TBI or headaches or connective tissue, soft tissue type injuries. The jury really has to believe your client, and they have to like them. They have to want to help them. So you want to pick clients that have excellent work histories where they're not caught on surveillance roofing when they say they're completely disabled and they show up to your office looking like this guy. You want to pick good people and really try to make these cases as clean and as believable and credible as possible, just like frankly, you would with every case. So how do you prove fatigue and work disability? There are three ways I've been doing it over the years. I'm going to go through these very quickly. The first way that I found, and this is all over the country, it's called the Universal work skills evaluation. Uwsc, it passes Daubert. It has been around for about 90 years in the field of industrial psychology. This is an actual case I had where he had soft tissue injuries, a knee replacement, and the literally, the most mild TBI you could imagine. And he was an auto worker in Detroit, and we tested him for three days. This was the beginning of the first day. It's a cold factory floor. They use a job that is tasks that are similar to what these people do as part of their normal lives, their normal jobs, and then they measure output over three days. And that's really important, because you have to

understand that sleep and fatigue are quantitative injuries. They're not qualitative injuries. So it's having 20 screens open on your laptop at the same time you're using a lot of battery power, a lot of processing speed. That's what a quantitative injury is. And what this shows is that over the course of three days, his output completely falls off a cliff. By the third day, he is flushed. He's red in the face, he's sweating. His jacket is off. He's working so hard, and his output is a fraction of what it was in the beginning of the first day. And then you use a vocational expert and your economist to basically show why they're not capable of a 40 hour work week, and this was the report we got in that case. Long story short, the highest offer before trial was two and $50,000 the jury, on the basis of fatigue, came back with $6 million so a really important way to show what your client's going to face in the future. The second way is neuropsychological testing. I've been using the Halsted Ray tan test, which is really the seminal battery for neuropsychological testing. This is a quote from Muriel wieseck. It talks about how brain damaged patients tend to fatigue easily. It's chronic. It's there. It's something that all of our clients who have these injuries tend to face. If you do use the Halsted Ray 10 battery or neuropsychological testing, these are some of the tests that are most sensitive to fatigue. And you can use this, again, similar to what I was just talking about with the uwsc to then use a vocational expert and an economist to show again why they're going to be impaired and unable to come back to work full time, I want to tell you what I've been doing lately, because I think this is a game changer. So the easiest and simplest way I've been doing this has actually been using fitness trackers, and I have bought probably well over 100 aura rings for my clients just in the last few years. And what I do is I use AI like supio or follow my AI, and I go

through the medical records, the histories, the notes, and if I'm finding complaints that are consistent with fatigue, consistent with impaired sleep, I will buy them as a cost of the case. It's only a couple $100 in ordering, and the aura ring now has gotten so good and it is so sensitive that it is basically similar to a sleep study. And what I'll do is I'll buy them the aura ring, we'll track it for a couple months, and if it shows that their sleep is as impaired as they claim, and they're having the problems that are consistent with what they're reporting in the medical records. What I then do is I'm sending them to the University of Michigan or another hospital for a sleep study, and you do a 24 hour sleep study or a 48 hour sleep study, and then what you have is objective evidence of why your client is not able. To go back to work. So it is simple way of doing it. This avoids me if I'm in federal court, having to fly to Finland to take an engineer at the ore company to authenticate this evidence, and it's really powerful testimony and evidence that can really help secure your clients the millions of dollars they will need because they're not going to be able to go back to work. This is one of my talks, and I'll give you three other ideas to add millions of dollars to your cases at tgr. Live, Jay, thanks for having me. Oh, and if you have questions, feel free to reach me through my email.

Hey, Steve. Leave that up for one sec. So when you prove fatigue, how much of that is a contribution to adding millions to a case.

So you're using it not to prove pain and suffering, not to prove mental anguish or emotional injuries. You're using it as a way to secure future excess economic loss damages. Jay, so it really is going to depend on your client and the job they have, but if you have a high wage earner, I guess what I'm saying is these are the types of cases where lawyers are failing to prove a key component of evidence that can really allow them to secure millions of dollars for their clients depending on what they do, and you know how much money they make every year? Awesome.

Well, I love your take on this stuff, and I look forward to seeing the whole presentation. Thank you. Stick around in case we have questions for you at the end, and I'm going to switch to rob Levine, Rob, great to see you. Thanks for being here. Rob's known as the heavy hitter in Rhode Island, and he's spread through the areas he's in some other states. Transition to law after a career ending injury as a police officer. Super interesting. Has a great program called Rob Levine gives back and I love the Thanksgiving aspect, and backpacks is great. And Rob also has a business called Rob Levine legal solutions, and they're going to be at the conference, and they help with intake and hiring, and Rob will tell you a little bit about that. So without further ado, happy to introduce Rob Levine, who's going to talk about optimizing legal intake.

Thanks, Jay, all right, Jay, thanks for having me super excited to be here. My first time at tgr. I've done a lot of presenting over the years. I know Steve really well. We've been different groups together. Great job, Steve, that was awesome. Stacey, yours. I'm also want to speak to you. I think that's some great stuff we can add to our firm. So just so you have an idea who I am and why you should maybe pay attention to what I'm going to talk about on intake. So our law firm is 300 people. Last month, we opened over 1200 cases. We average 1200 cases a month. Now we do personal injury, Social Security and veterans, disability, veterans and socialist nationwide. We now do personal injury on TV or advertising in all of Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and then digitally in Connecticut. So I love talking about intake. Steve said his topic is the best personally, I think mine is I think probably each one of us thinks our topic is the most important. The reason I think mine is super important for you is because it's what I call low hanging fruit, right? So every law firm has intake issues. If you fix the intake issues in your law firm, you're automatically going to increase the number of cases you get, like it's just guaranteed across the board, every day you're going to make a change. So this is an overview of what I'm going to talk about at tgr. So integration of systems, delivering the call, use of a queue, auto callback, how to convert the chase process, sales teams, analytics and KPIs. So Jay asked that we speak for no more than 10 minutes. So I'm picked out a few slides to whet your appetite and give you some interest in intake and why you should make some changes. At the end, I'm going to give you a link to a ghost call sheet, and I recommend that before you come to the seminar, that you really ghost call your own law firm. And so that sheet will take you through all the questions to ask, and you will see exactly where you

are today, and you'll see where the holes are. Most lawyers have never called their own intake system. They've never called their own law firm to really see how a new client is handled. And if you do it, you're going to find out it's not going exactly as you hoped. So let's start with technology. Now, when I teach any topic, I teach three things, people, process and technology. I think people always has to come first. That's the most important thing of everything we do process. Obviously we have to have processes in place. And then obviously technology is super important to support that. So I'm only really going to talk about a little bit about technology today, but at the conference I'm. We're going to talk about all three integration. You have a phone system, a CRM system and a case management system. Everybody has a phone system, I assume most of you have a case management system, file, Vine, smart advocate, case, beer, whatever it is, some of you may have a CRM in between. We can put that it's not necessary to have a CRM tool, but what's important is linking your phone system to your case management system. So what do I mean by that? So every day Your phone is ringing, let's only focus for a minute on inbound calls. The phone is ringing and calls are coming in, if you have an intake department, and let's just say it's three people, right? And it could be ours. We have 58 people in our intake department. But no matter what size you have, when the phone rings, a lot of law firms let a receptionist answer the phone. The problem with that is that no matter how good she is, she's really, really busy, and she's talking to everybody who calls the law firm. And it's not that everybody isn't important, but your new client is the most important person, and that person has to be treated differently than everybody else. And by integrating and connecting your phone system to your case management system, we can separate people into categories, and there's

generally three buckets. You have vendors, you have existing clients, and then you have your new clients. By taking the phone system and connecting it when the call comes in, we can identify which big bucket that they fit in. So within a split second, your system as the phone rings, because it brings in the caller ID, the phone number of the person calling. It's going to scrub your against your entire case management system and identify, does that phone number exist in our system? If it exists in the system, it's going to say, is this a client or a vendor? Because in everyone's system, you mark off that this is a client, so the system knows it's a client, what should you do with that? You should direct route it to the person they need to speak to. So based on the status of that person's case, they either talk to a case manager, they talk to an attorney. If it's a negotiation, the case has been settled, they need to talk to finance, wherever we direct them to the person they want to speak to. If it's a vendor, I recommend you use an IVR so a telephone tree. Thanks for calling. Rob Levine law, if you know the number of the person you need to speak to, dial it. Now I don't ever recommend an IVR for clients, new clients only, commercial businesses, right? So vendors are commercial businesses. They're used to IVRS. They're happy to hit the button and transfer. So now we've taken that group, they go on their own. We've taken our existing clients, deliver them to where they need to be, and our two people, three people, 50 people, whatever it is they are in a closed unit that ideally only talk to new clients. Why is that important? It's important because, number one, we want a single point of contact. We want that new client have an amazing experience with the law firm from day one, right? That person answering the phone is the creator of first impressions. That's the first person they speak to. That's the person that's going to build trust, that's going to be

the person that has empathy. That person is a salesperson. Why? Because their job is to sign that client, to become potential client, to become your client. You never want to put a person on hold. So imagine put yourself in the shoes of an existing a new client, right? They got into a car accident. They've never been in an accident before. They did a search. Ai told them you're the law firm to call. Jay was talking about it earlier, right? So they call you, they don't really know you. And the first thing that happens is Susie answers the phone and says, Thanks for calling ABC law please hold and puts that person on hold because three other calls are coming in, and she's the receptionist. The experience that that person has is horrendous, from the first minute they called and there was a percentage of those people were going to hang up. That's a guarantee. Everyone in this room has hang ups. We all have them. Most of us aren't tracking them, and we're going to do a slide on that. That's the sexy slide. Big numbers save you a lot of money if you pay attention to that last slide. The next thing is, you want to make sure that they're talking to the right person, right? So if you have call center software, so depending on what you have for a phone system, it can identify based on, let's say, a DI D number, right? What advertisement is coming from. So if you do more than one area of law, you might have your people in your office specific. Who do you want them to talk to? The DIB number will allow you to route them to the right person who answers the phone. It will also score the people. So if you have five people in. Take and one's an absolute superstar, and the others are average. And then you have someone who's in training. Let's say that you do trucking cases. It's your most valuable case, dollar for dollar, and you use a DI D number on your trucking cases. When that phone rings with a trucking case and it's a new client, you want to make sure they

talk to the best possible person to convert that person into a client. So by using call center software, it can identify route the calls to the right person. Lastly, another super cool technique is that we do social security as well as, let's say pi. We do a number of things, but Social Security's value is a third of a PI case. And so if I have, let's say, a queue, my on hold, and I have two people on hold waiting for an agent, and one of them is a Social Security case, and then the phone rings and it's a PI case, my system knows it's going to deliver the PI case to the call center agent before the Social Security case, simply because of the math, I might convert that Social Security client to a case, but if my PI case is worth so much more, I want to talk to that person first, because people only stay on hold for so long, so it gives you the greatest chance of converting your lead to a case, you should all know what your wanted to signed ratio is. If you don't know, you want to look it up, and then we're going to talk about it when we get to tgr live. And so wanted to sign means as a intake person, I want this case. I'm talking to you. I know you're a good case. The question is, from the cases I want, what percentages of those cases do I sign? The average law firm is in the 70 percentile. Your goal is to be at 95% it's the difference between a rowboat and a yacht. Huge dollars when you go from 70 to 95

so next quick thing you want to know is you're going to give your people three ways to contact you, a phone call, a form fill, and chat and text. So on your website, they can call you inbound call, they can form fill, or they can chat with someone. Most law firms are doing this right what you're not doing. And I know this because we ghost call lots of law firms. You don't treat all three with the same sense of urgency. So I'm the client. You gave me three options and said, if I want to fill out a form, because I don't want to call you and I want you to reach out to me, I have the same expectation as if I called you, if I call you, you're going to answer the phone right in under 30 seconds. You're answering the phone, and we're on the phone talking. So why if I fill out a form fill? Should I have to wait two hours, four hours, two days, or never get a response? There are law firms who I've ghost call literally never even respond to a form fill. Super important to treat all three equally and respond with the same speed. There's an MIT study that shows when somebody starts to wait for a return call, there's five minute window before they decide to run. Once you break five minutes, it's like a giant waterfall going down fast. You're losing the opportunity for them to wait for you, and they're going to go to somebody else. The only other thing I'll say about this slide is chat and text. If you've given someone the opportunity to chat, so you're using an outside service, or you're doing it internally, you do not want to convert them to a call. I can tell you what we used to do is, when we were chatting with someone, we'd say, Oh, we have somebody who can talk to you on the phone right now. Would you like to talk to them? And we would live transfer them to somebody to talk to them. The problem with that is, they chose to chat they don't want to talk. After probably a year and a half of doing that, I looked at the stats to see how was our conversion

ratio. 50% of the calls we tried to transfer to a live call hung up in the transfer, and no one ever realized it. If you give someone the opportunity to chat, stay on that chat call from start to finish, we have clients now we never call. So when we open your case, we ask you, what is your preferred method of communication? If they say, I'd like to text chat, we sign you by text. We communicate with you by text. We finish your case by text. If you don't want to talk, we don't make it last slide before I give you the ghost card. This is super important. You all have this. You just don't know it, and it adds up to a ton of money. These are real numbers from my law firm. Several years ago, we did this study when we started doing this, when someone calls your law firm, there is a percentage of people who hang up before you answer. Either you put them on hold and they hang up, or they never even let it ring long enough two rings takes 15 seconds. So when I dial a phone number, once I finish dialing, the time for it to connect and ring twice, 15 seconds has gone by. So imagine 111, 1002 1003 1004 1000 all the way to 15. There is a percentage of people who hang up between 15 and 30 seconds, and in our office, we created this system so that we could call back people who hung up. So our system identifies that the phone rang. We only call people back that hung up after 15 seconds. Studies show that if it's before 15 seconds, they probably didn't mean to talk to you. It was an accident. They changed their mind, and they don't want to be called back. But longer than 15 seconds, we call you back, this study showed that in a ton month period, we dropped hangups. There were 2300 calls. Every one of those people gets called back immediately. Our system identifies the call lasted the hang up, the on hold was longer than 15 seconds. Either rang for longer than 15 seconds or they were on hold. They hung up before talking to a human. We immediately call them back. It

pops the call to the agent. They get a screen. Pop Here's the phone number, here's the name, if it's from the caller ID and we didn't talk to them. 688 of those 2300 calls converted to a client and became a case. So if we took our average fee Social Security included, that would be $6 million that I would have lost in that 10 month period. Now, obviously we have a huge volume of calls. I think we're doing, I don't even know now, a 4000 a week or something, calls, but this was probably two, maybe almost three years ago, I should probably update the numbers. But in your office, even if you're only dropping five calls a week, and two of them were going to turn into a client and you never called them back, and let's say your average fee is 10 grand. That's $20,000 a week, $80,000 a month, $960,000 a year, almost a million dollars from five hang ups two calls. So it's really, really important to track your hang ups. Okay, so the next slide, I'm going to put a link in the chat. These ideas are what you want to be looking for. So take a snapshot of this screen. Take a picture of it. Whatever you do you want to look at your speed to answer the phone. Were they placed on hold? Was the caller transferred during the call? Did an attorney have to review the file before signing? Was the fee agreement offered electronically during the first call? Was the call chased after the call. How and how many times how quickly did your firm respond to the form fill and was the FORM FILL chased? So the form fill is much more in detail, but those are the main things you want to really be looking for when you go call the firm.

I have a million questions for you. That was I learned a lot. That was great. Thank you. Yeah. So Chris Keller, another guy I've been happy to get to know at a couple conferences, and he was a teacher Alive Last year, husband, father of three, CEO, trial lawyer. And the cool thing about Chris is he's really transformed his life, becoming a triathlete. And his book is called the year to change your life. His presentation is called Five disciplines to improve your life and your practice. Chris, thanks for being here, and over to you, sir. Awesome.

So guys, I'm so excited to present this year. I was an attendee last year. Learned so much from all the valuable speakers. Enjoyed the speed networking, as well as getting to hang out and make some new connections and relationships. So invite you all to join us there. I got a lot of information this morning just from this webinar. Thanks to Steve and Rob and Stacey and as well as Jay and I, get to talk about the five disciplines to improve your life and practice and something I lived in, a story I've shared in the book that I wrote, but this was me just three years ago, obviously looking very happy and successful, starting my own firm. I was, this is about five years in to practice, and from all the external factors look successful. So this presentation is going to be about how I went from this to this and just a couple of years. And so I went from, you know, lost 50 plus pounds, began running, biking, swimming, started training for triathlons, started training for Iron Man. And this was just November 16 of this year. I completed my first full iron man out in Arizona. And so hopefully I'm gonna be able to talk to you guys about kind of designing the life and the firm for you. And it's really about the power of five. Five. And so that's what we're going to talk about at tgr. Live. Is your Power Five. The Power Five is your mental, emotional, spiritual, physical and financial well being and really having all of those working together is how you compound and really grow. And when one of these areas is out of whack, it can really affect your personal life and your professional life. And I saw that as I grew my firm, I went from a seven figure firm to eight figure firm, and ultimately had an exit and doing so really focused on each of these categories. So mental discipline for for us is about focus. Most lawyers don't need more information. We're bombarded with all kinds of communication all day and information, and we actually need

fewer distractions. And so we're going to talk about some areas of mental discipline. Emotional discipline is how you show up under pressure. Your team doesn't feel your intentions. They feel your energy. And when you're leading large firms like Rob and Steve, the energy that you bring every day is important. So we're going to talk about emotional discipline and some strategies to really make sure that you're healthy emotionally as well. Spiritual discipline is that alignment when your work disconnects from your why burnout isn't possible, it's inevitable, and that's what I found. I got to burnout. And so having a spiritual component in my life for the last two years, really leaning into faith, joining some CEO men's groups, Christian based has really been a big help for me, and we're going to talk about some spiritual aspects of building that life that you want. Next thing is the physical part. I know Steve has a we're talking about it. He has the treadmill desk in his office there. I have a standing desk. Love the treadmill desk as well. Getting those steps in is so important. One of the things I did in my business was walking, talks, getting outside and walking with someone, and getting the fresh air and movement just really what it does to change physical discipline is about energy. If you're exhausted all the time and every decision is going to cost you. So talking about a morning routine this morning, I was up at 4:30am out the door at 5am to meet a couple of friends for a six mile run, all of them before 6am so we're gonna talk about a strong morning routine to get you started, to really start your days off, checking boxes. A lot of us wake up, we're right into it. We're checking emails, see what happened, what we missed, and it's not the best way to start your day. So we're going to talk about some routines and some things that you can start your day off right. And then financial obviously, one thing that we all think about we're always

chasing more financial discipline is about intention. It's easy to look at revenue and gross revenue and these numbers, but profit is quiet, and so we need to create some discipline. When we have discipline on our finances, obviously it affects everything else as well. Tgr, we're really going to talk about having that strong life, that strong firm. And now there really needs to be no trade offs. We don't want to trade off from one over the other. You know, a lot of times we spend a lot of our time building our firms, investing our firms, and then our personal life, our health, our family, our relationships struggle. Likewise, when we try to reconnect with our personal life, then maybe our firms don't take off as well as it is. So it's really about building that strong off that strong firm and no trade offs. So I look forward to sharing what has made me, I believe, successful in the last couple of years, and building my firm, and looking forward to meet you all at tgr live.

That's great. And, Chris, huge congratulations. I didn't even recognize the guy in the first picture you showed because we met in person a year ago at tgr live in March of 2025 and you didn't look anything like the guy in the picture. So great work. I'm going to cheat and ask a couple questions, and then we'll open it up. If people want to put questions in the chat, we'll allow you all to ask some questions to the panel, but because I got the mic and I've got some great questions. So the first one is, and this is for the entire panel, but Chris, you go first. How do you get and stay motivated? You know, here we are, January, 22 2026 if you're watching it, sometime in the future, and so many people made those New Year's resolutions and they're starting to fade. So how do you get it? Get it done every morning.

Yeah, it's really discipline. Motivation is great. Motivation is what you know when you go to bed at night and you're motivated to get up and go run in the morning, but when you wake up and it's a little bit cold around or training, that motivation kind of wanes and goes away. So for me, it's about creating discipline in my life. I thought I was a disciplined person, but once I got disciplined my life now, discipline is what carries me through, no matter if it's raining, no matter if it's cold, I'm going out getting my run in because I know I'm training for whether it's my next marathon, my next Iron Man, I've got a 50k race coming up. And so if I'm going to compete and I'm going to show up and be the best version myself, then I've got to get this stuff done. And so discipline outweighs motivation. So for me, it's about, you know, creating a routine, having structure, and then, you know, no matter what, you follow that routine. And then the other part of that is not stacking bad days. What happens to a lot of us is we get up, we're motivated to go to the gym, we go to the gym next day. Maybe we take a day off, take the next day off, and it just becomes easy to take days off. And so for me, it's no days off. It's about every day showing up and going through that routine, making it a habit. And once it becomes that habit, once you've built that discipline muscle. Well, then that doesn't become a problem anymore. I'm three years of doing this every day and not missing a day.

So Steve, why don't you take that one next? Because you also crush it in the gym.

Well, thank you for saying that. I think everyone should read atomic habits by James clear. I think what Chris just said is absolute, right? Motivation fades. Habits, don't you create systems, and you've got your program, and you just follow your program, and at a certain point it really just becomes automatic. The other thing is, there is, I think, a mental, psychological component to this, where, after a while, your body yearns for it and needs it. I always joke around that I get lied to for a living with defense lawyers and adjusters and judges and sometimes clients, and we're in this weird profession that's one of the last zero sum game professions where everything is brutal and combative, especially when you're a litigator, you need some way to have an outlet to remove stress. And you know, as Chris would say, and Jay, I know you would say it's a lot healthier doing this than what we were doing 3040, years ago with alcohol or some of the other places that people pursue to remove stress on their lives, they just make it a part of their

life. Rob Stacy, you want to take a crack at that one.

So I 100% agree with Chris and Steve. I mean, I also am a workout fanatic. I've been working out for a very long time, and discipline is definitely the key. But for me, it's aside from being disciplined. Yes, I'm probably a machine. Is the passion, right? So while they said, motivation can fade, it's I love what I do, which I assume we all do, but I'm passionate. Since I when I became 16 years old, I became an EMT on a rescue squad as a volunteer, and then I became a military police officer, then a police officer, and when I could no longer work as a police officer because of a catastrophic accident. I became a paramedic. Like serving others has been the theme my entire life. And so I don't know how many open cases we have now, 15,000 or something, current open clients. We're helping so many people, and it's just, it's amazing. And now it's not just the people, it's the team, right? So the law firms, 300 solutions companies, and other three, we're 600 people that work for me and so to see the differences we've made in people's lives and growing them. And we just graduated our first class from a seven month Leadership Academy and training leaders and making them managers. It's just been an amazing experience to have be able to touch so many people's lives. That's what drives

me Awesome. Well, while you've got your mic on, I have a couple questions from your presentation. Explain that your phone system should connect to your case management system, and in some cases, you should have a CRM. So I'm familiar with lead docket. What are some of the other CRMs, and what's the role for that interstitial,

I call it. So the CRM only needs to be in place if your case management system can't really do what your CRM would do for you, right? So we don't, I don't have a CRM. The last thing I want to do is stack technology on top of each other. Sure we all know Right. Technology fails, it has bugs, it has glitches, it's creates problems. And the more technology you stack on top of more technology, you end up having more issues, more training problems. So if you can use your case management system to be able to do the automatic callbacks and create the campaigns and tell your people when they need to make calls and tracking and bring the stuff in from the website, and then categorize everything and campaign it. Then I would say, don't use a CRM tool. You don't need to. If you have a weaker case management system without naming one that just won't do all of that, then you need a CRM, because you need somewhere to house all of those calls that you're going to chase and track, and that's where the CRM really comes in.

All right. If anyone wants to add questions to the chat, please go ahead. We're also streaming live on LinkedIn. We got a question from Tony for Steven, what is one strategic shift you've seen law firms make that consistently increases case value, not by working more cases, but by handling the right cases.

You asked what that law firms are making. I think law firms do a pretty bad job overall of maximizing value and really exploding the value of cases. I think we're in a world where things are actually getting worse, not better, where there's a race to the bottom. You have more of these, these mill type operations. You've got lawyers that are getting stuck with 300 cases each. They can't breathe, they can't be proactive, they can't think, they can't return phone calls. So I guess my answer is, you want to do things different. From what most law firms do, especially in our field. For me, what I really, consistently preach and really, really strongly believe is this is our trade. This is our craft. You have to know the medicine, you have to know the science. And I'm always just shocked that you've got lawyers that are up 1015, years, and they can't explain the most basic injuries, even though they've taken, you know, 100 Doctor depositions of orthopedics on, you know, a bulging disc or a herniated disc, if this is how we make a living, you need to know the medicine. I'm a big believer in that. And there are diamonds everywhere. In our cases, we lose so much value because we're not using the medicine, which really is on our side, the medicine and the science is on our side to show how so many of these injuries are so much worse than what we've been brainwashed by adjusters and insurance companies to believe value is, you know, soft tissue injuries are a great example. When I came out 30 years ago, I was the luckiest guy in the world, because it was like Malcolm Gladwell outliers, right place, right time, and we were all trying these missed, minimal impact soft tissue cases. And I got a ton of trial experience, but one of the things that I did differently from everybody else is I would go in there and I would have 60 peer reviewed journal articles that I'll use for cross to show how even these mild, mild soft tissue type cases that the

defense was offering $10,000 on how the literature shows that they can be absolutely permanent and cause permanent pain and permanent disability. You use people like one of the greatest defensive tackles of all time, Reggie White, or the Minister of the Interior, right, who literally the one of the toughest, meanest football players of all time, he had to quit the sport because of a little little bulging disc. So you use these examples that are just out there, and whatever the injury is, there's so much powerful just science, medicine, journal articles that we can use to show why it's so much worse than what the defense is saying it is. And just let me add one quick thing that I'll be talking about a tgr. I am constantly amazed that lawyers don't talk about what the future holds for our clients. And again, the science and the medicine are on our side the future. When you have anyone with a mild TBI, for example, you will almost have by definition, that they were they're going to be far greater risk for dementia, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, neurodegenerative disease, sleep disorders, and those are the things that add not only millions and millions of dollars to a life care plan, but millions and millions of dollars to your jury verdict. So what I would say is, don't do what everyone else is doing for God's sake, but really take pride in our craft. Take pride in what we do and really learn the medicine and try cases. Awesome.

I got a question from Aaron for Stacy, how can I increase referrals from past customers? Yeah.

Stacey Brown Randall: So when we talk about referrals, we talk about how referrals live in an ecosystem, and one group of folks you can certainly generate referrals from are clients, and when they have moved to the alumni stage, though, you have to do it a little bit differently. So when you have a client that's going through your client experience, they're coming in, they're a new client, and then they move to active and that's when you're actually having contact with them, right? So it's a little bit easier to be able to plant referral seeds and bridge the gap to receiving referrals. But once you're done, once the case is closed, once the work is done, and they've moved to the alumni phase, there's no work delivery being done, so it's all relationship building. And so really what we focus on is looking at, how are you going to stay connected to your clients in a way that fits what you do, right? So the way I would talk to this, talk to an intellectual property attorney, this is going to look different than someone who's doing personal injury, right? So the right? So the type of law you do matters in terms of how you're going to stay connected to your clients. And it's not your email. It's not just sending out your weekly newsletter or your monthly newsletter to your previous clients. If you do that, we've got to do a little bit more, because referrals come from relationships the majority of folks, when you're thinking about like into that personal injury space, your clients don't forget you when you do whatever you do for them, regardless of how the case goes, they don't really forget you. And that ability to generate referrals from them will almost always be there just because you help them through a traumatic moment in their life. But there are ways that we can also make sure that we're staying in closer contact with them and doing some specific things. And it doesn't mean like, like, your emails go out or fine, but that's not really going to do

it. But sometimes it's like, just dropping the handwritten note doesn't have to be you. It can be someone from the team that just kind of stays connected to them and lets them realize, like, whoa. I didn't expect that from my attorney so many months later, and it's but it's a creating a process. This is. And I heard this great idea, and so now we're going to go write notes to everybody that we've done cases for. It's a process of some cadence of how you're going to stay in communication with them, and what you're going to do and how things are going to look and it has to show up without a sales mentality or language, and it has to be part of a process and a plan that you're going to put in place. But for, I will say for a lot of my personal injury attorneys that I work with the clients, isn't the main place we focus on to generate referrals from. We're looking at centers of influence and others, obviously, other attorneys being a part of centers of influence, but then there's a whole slew of other center of influences that can be referring cases as well. We usually look there first to generate referrals, and kind of look at clients second. But there's definitely places to put plans in place of how you're going to do outreach so that you can stay connected to your previous clients, or what we call alumni clients.

I love it. Let me segue from the referrals and ask the three attorneys a question. I've become enamored with case status and Hona. I think these tools that keep the that your clients updated on the case are really critical, and I call it five star concierge service, and the number one bar complaint is my lawyer doesn't get back to me. My lawyer doesn't keep me updated on my case. Are you guys using these tools, and how important is it to keep the client super happy, so that they will give you a five star review. Chris, maybe go first. Yeah.

You know, we use case status. I think it is extremely important. One of the features I love the most was kind of the heat check, where you can kind of check in on clients to see different phases. They have to rate the level of service. And I thought that was so important, because you could see a client who maybe put a four down, and you need to reach out to him right away, versus a client who put an eight, nine or a 10 down. And so I think it's an essential part of it. We've done a lot of things in our firm to automate communication, to give them communication, and a lot of touch points. And I think those touch points of communication, whether it's Hona case status, whether you, I'm sure Rob can with his case manager, can build it out. You know yourself, you know yourself, you don't have to use one of the services as well. There's ways to do it, but automated touch points are super important. Those heat checks are critical in the practice.

I love it. Rob, how about you?

Chris's answer is exactly on point. We didn't build our own system. We use Hana, which he mentioned. It's some systems are worth building, others that work great. It's much easier to just buy somebody's system and use it. We very carefully measure our client contact ratio. There's very specific timeframes to return a phone call. Anytime a call comes into the office, it's tagged and tracked electronically. So I know that the case manager returned the call within one business day. If they don't, it goes on to a spreadsheet. We have a zero tolerance policy, so if you don't return that call, you're terminated. There's just there's no way around it. So with the volume that we have, we it's easy to get complaints right if you're not returning people's phone calls, and that just can't happen. Plus clients just deserve the communication. So between returning phone calls Hona, we did, I think, 23 videos that are automatically set through statuses to update people on what's happening with their case as it's moving. How often the attorneys have to talk to them? We do NPS scores, similar to what Chris just said, right? So we do an NPS score. Would you refer us to a family or friend member? It's a single question halfway through the case, and then after they've gotten their check, we wait a month so we're out of the honeymoon period and the excitement to hear what they really think. We do it as a follow up.

Stephen, you get the last question and answer. Sir,

nothing really to add. I think Rob and nailed it. Chris, I think gave a great answer. We use quilla, very similar. I guess, the one thing that I would emphasize, though, is we do live in a world right now. I don't care what state you're in, where I've never seen so much ambulance chasing and illegal solicitation and just bear tree and just ugliness out there as there is today. And don't use these tools as a substitute from you creating a real rapport and connection with your clients. You really need to do that. You can't delegate it. You can't just use a tool. You really need to spend FaceTime, or at least time talking with your clients, establishing that relationship, or they're susceptible to people coming out of the woodwork and trying to steal these cases. Awesome.

Well, thank you all so much for being here. And thank you to our audience live. And more, maybe even more significantly, our audience on recording, because 1000s of folks will watch this in the future. So I hope you all can join us at tgr live 2026 and if you missed it, join us for 2027 and the information is at 10 Golden rules.com and I look forward to seeing all four of you and everybody joining us virtually and in the future. Thanks, everyone.