EP 517- Conversation with Ed Herman Part 1

Episode Notes

Transcript

Welcome to The. Jury. is Out a podcast for trial attorneys who want to sharpen their skills and better serve their clients. Your co-hosts are John Simon, founder of the Simon Law Firm Tim Cronin personal injury trial attorney at the Simon Law Firm and St. Louis attorney Erich Vieth.

Erich Vieth:

Welcome to another episode of The. Jury is Out. I’m Erich Vieth.

John Simon:

I’m John Simon. And we’re here with Ed Herman of the law firm of Brown and Cruin. He’s a managing partner. Welcome.

Ed Herman:

Thanks for having

John Simon:

Me and Ed, ed, you and I, how long ago did we meet?

Ed Herman:

I gave that some thought this morning. We actually met, it’s been 25 years ago. I wasn’t even at Brown and Crouppen yet. I was at sta Luth and Rudder working with Mark Rudder and they were a very small firm. They didn’t have the resources to handle a high-end med mal or product and we used to send those to you and that was the first time I met you was actually through them. Then we had a bunch of years where I didn’t see you much, but then as soon as I started with Brown and Rein, we’ve obviously been working with you for forever

John Simon:

And that’s an incredible story

Ed Herman:

At you at Brown and Rein. I mean, you started there as an associate. I did. At the time I started there, I was 29. I was the youngest attorney at the firm at the time.

John Simon:

And what is your position there now?

Ed Herman:

I am co-owner. Wow. Yeah, Andy Crippen and I bought the place and of course been managing partner along with Andy for a long time now.

John Simon:

Incredible changes since you’ve been there. I’ve witnessed them firsthand. I’ve talked to you about some of them now and then.

Ed Herman:

Well, you have to evolve. This is a very competitive industry and Terry and Ron who started the firm, they did a great job. They were pioneers in that advertising for a law firm. Didn’t become legal until 1978, the Bates case and the Supreme Court. So for them to start advertising in their early eighties as they did, and they were the first ones in St. Louis to do it, they really put a gigantic target on their back. They knew that the public wasn’t used to it. They didn’t know what to make of it, yet the profession didn’t care for it. The veterans in the profession hated it, still do. But obviously things have evolved and people have followed the path that Terry kind of set forth by going on television. Now we have to fight to get airtime. Back then it was all ours for the taking.

John Simon:

I remember the lunches with, and Terry and Ron have been, I’ve been working with them since 30 years,

Ed Herman:

For 30 Years or so

John Simon:

and we used to go to lunch now and then, and it was always, Terry would always leave. I just leave feeling upbeat. He’s had a great sense of humor. He would, no matter what was going on, he just had this way about and it

Ed Herman:

Made you feel good. And it’s why I felt so comfortable there. They’re not pretentious people. They don’t take themselves too seriously. Ron, of course passed away in 2022 and we miss his sense of humor because the public didn’t get to know Ron. They knew Terry from the commercials and Terry is just like, you see, I mean the only difference between Terry and the commercials in real life is that in real life you would never see him in a suit. In real life you’re more likely to see him in a Hawaiian shirt.

John Simon:

What you see is what you get

Ed Herman:

And that’s it. He’s just regular. Nobody really got to know Ron. And I think people always assume that if you have one kind of lighthearted fun partner that the other one must be like the serious one. But Ron was a nut

In the best possible way. He had the body sense of humor. He was the one that if you get him to laugh and you were his friend for life, he loved that. I enjoyed those lunches. It was so cool. He was also always obsessed with whatever you were eating. If you were in decent shape, he wanted to know your regimen, like bite by bite as if he was going to recreate it. He was never going to recreate it. The guy was always had a handful of m and ms. But yeah, so anyway, yeah, that’s how that got rolling.

John Simon:

And Eric, you and I met how long ago? About 25 years ago. That seems right or so, right? Well, I started

Erich Vieth:

With your firm in 2013. Do I have that right? Maybe a little earlier. 2, 2, 4. Oh yeah. Yeah. So I stayed for 10 years. I stayed until about 2013 and enjoyed my time here. I became part of the class action consumer area. It was a wonderful time. I eventually split off to do just that work with one of the other attorneys here. But yeah, we’ve known each other for a long time. So Ed Herman, you’re sitting next to Brody Herman, your son. My boy,

Ed Herman:

My 22-year-old Brody. Whatcha you going to say for yourself?

Brody Herman:

I don’t know. I’m happy to be here. Really

Erich Vieth:

Excited. There you go. Tell me a little bit about you though. Are you

Brody Herman:

With Yeah, I am from, no, I mean right now I’m at the University of Minnesota. I’m studying journalism, so

Ed Herman:

Right. They’re in the Hubbard School over hub school, journalism, university of Minnesota.

John Simon:

You’re probably missing the best weather of the year. I’m missing the best weather of the year in Minnesota.

Ed Herman:

Yes. You know, work with two of your children.

John Simon:

Yes.

Ed Herman:

And I’m guessing that the amount of pride, and I know both of your kids and you’re really lucky because they are very sharp, hardworking. It’s not like you’re carrying kids that just have your name and they’re getting a free

John Simon:

Ride. Thank you so much. And the thing, I’m in a position and Johnny is, well how old is Johnny? I think Johnny’s 35 or so and Mary’s probably 33. Johnny’s been practicing for about nine or 10 years and since day one, since they both started, I’ve always felt like they’re looking out for me. Literally, we’ll come down to the office. Johnny did it this morning. I’ve already talked to each of them two or three times today by phone and it’s How are you doing? What’s going on? What do you have going on today? And it’s like they’re genuinely interested, not just in what I’m doing but how I’m doing, which is amazing. It’s

Ed Herman:

Amazing. That’s the hard work that you and your wife put into them. You made them who they are. You raised them in that feeling and now you’re the

John Simon:

Benefit of it. My George is not an attorney and he’s the same

Ed Herman:

Way and he owns a food establishment.

John Simon:

Yeah, he took another route. He’s got a couple of Middle Eastern bakeries, Sada sweets. One is in Afton and one is in West County off of Manchester. It’s good stuff. I love the

Ed Herman:

Food from that area of the world. So yeah, we’re lucky people. He’s going into a senior in college, so he’s spending the summer half the time he’s working with me at Brown and croup and just learning, seeing what I do, gaining some appreciation for how many different things there are. And from running your business, you got to change hats constantly throughout the day and you don’t know in the morning necessarily what your day is going to look like. You have no idea what’s going to be thrown in your direction that you’re going to have to deal with. I can’t even describe the job except to say I fixed stuff. I say, well, what do you do for a living? I’m like, I don’t know. I fixed, I fixed stuff, I stuff. And I feel like this summer he is really gotten to see it firsthand. You say you have a deeper appreciation for what I do now than ever before.

Brody Herman:

I do. I have very deep appreciation for what you do for more than you’ve ever done before. I mean all the things you do, you have many different hats when you run a business and then all the three legs that you have like business development and operation and really the client and the lawyers and the paralegals

Ed Herman:

All see, he pays attention. Operat. I explain to him that the firm, especially as you get larger, I always say it’s three legs that the firm runs on and the business development is everything that happens from the time somebody is born until the moment they sign a contract with your office. Because marketing to them, getting them to know who you are starts on day one. They came into the world, they’re in our market. We’re marketing to them. And so that’s business development. Then we have the case handling people, and that’s everything from the time a contract is signed all the way until all the proceeds are distributed. And that’s just the people who actually have their hands on the file doing the work. But then you really have operations and those are the people that recognize, yes, we’re a law firm and what we do is provide legal services, but we are a business for profit and we have a lot of mouths to feed. We have over 250 employees and we have to make sure we’re doing things correctly, end to end, all processes, protocols, everything. People have to be mining your nonstop cashflow, your revenues and your expenses. And so those three legs really make up the business. And then it’s Andy and Me’s job to monitor those three legs. I mean

John Simon:

That’s exactly right. I have had many days where I’ll come home and Margie, my wife will say, what did you do today? And I go, I have no idea. I know I was busy. That’s what I’ll say. I go, I have no idea what I did today, but I just didn’t have a minute. It was constantly going.

Ed Herman:

Did you find that because you are in constant conversation all day as I am meetings all the time or conversations that in my private life I don’t speak very much at all. I’m a very, very quiet person in the times that I’m not working. Do you find that in

John Simon:

Yourself? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I just, I’m told that, what’s that test you do for the Briggs? Briggs Meyer? Yeah, we did that as the office. Yeah, we did that and I was told that I’m an introvert and whatever category I’m placed in that there were two other people in the office and it’s our office administrator, Angela and my daughter. Were the only three out of 50 or 60 people.

Ed Herman:

Isn’t that interesting? People are always shocked when I tell them that I am absolutely an introvert. And they’re like, how is that possible? You do these videos, you’ve got a big personality, you’re very social when you’re out amongst people. And I say, but that’s not my natural state. Did you ever

Erich Vieth:

See the movie all that jazz? Of course, yes. Remember the scene where get ready in the morning every

Ed Herman:

Morning, showtime,

Erich Vieth:

Showtime,

Ed Herman:

And

Erich Vieth:

You turn it on and you go do your thing,

Ed Herman:

You do it,

Erich Vieth:

But then you recharge on your phone

Ed Herman:

And that’s the key word is recharge. Recharge an extrovert builds energy in the presence of other people and expends it when they’re on their own, an introvert refuels on their own and then expends it in dealing with other people. So that to me is my definition and that is a perfect explanation of how I operate because it is, and I don’t actually, I go to parties and stuff, but if people watch me closely, what they’ll see is that I get there early so that as people arrive, they have no idea how long I’ve been there. I find the most comfortable corner seat to sit in and I remain. There’s the entire time that’s

John Simon:

What I do.

Ed Herman:

And different people throughout the day, they’ll come over and if they want to talk to me, they’ll sit down and I’ll chat for a few minutes. And it’s good because I’m not good at interrupting other people’s conversations. Like in a social setting, if there’s a group of three people talking, I have a very hard time entering that little conversation. I always feel like I’m interrupting, interfering, I’m taking them off their subject. I just don’t like that at all. But if I’m sitting in my corner and they come to me, I treat ’em like they’re a guest and I’m the talk show host, they can sit down, get five, six minutes, whatever it is, and then they invariably say, I’m going to go get a drink. Do you want something? And the key is you got to say no because they just want out at that point and you want to let them out. But if you accept a drink then now they’ve got to come back to you. You don’t want ’em coming back. I find

Erich Vieth:

There’s a tension between planning, which we all have to do and being in the moment. And there’s a couple quotes, a quote I heard yesterday. You don’t write a book, you write a sentence and then you write another sentence and then you write another sentence that’s kind of quote, you stay in it. And also there’s another quote about, and I’ve heard it in the context of Al-Anon, you do Next Right thing. And I think that’s really brilliant. It helps keep me in the moment, but then it interferes with the long range planning. But you need both. You need both. How do you

Ed Herman:

That’s does I think you develop what you know to be your general philosophies, you general approach. That’s how even with the videos and stuff, I never write out when anything I do, even when I used to practice law and now I am really just focused on running the business, but I never wanted to script anything that I do. And I don’t like scripts for our intake people. I like people to have the basic philosophy ingrained in their blood

Brody Herman:

Like an outline.

Ed Herman:

It could be an outline, it could be bullet points or it can just be a simplified, like a north star that they know represents what we’re going for. And then improvise, just improvise your life. It keeps it natural, it keeps it organic. Quite frankly it’s better for marketing. I mean if there’s one thing nowadays that there’s one word that means more than anything, it’s genuine because this generation, they can smell fake even though so much of what goes on online is fake, but in a way it’s trained them on that they don’t believe testimonials. They treat testimonials the same way you treat references. Everybody can find a few people to say some good things about you. You would hope. Yeah, you would think if you can’t get ’em, you got real trouble. They want to feel like they’re getting to see the actual you in a private way that they wouldn’t otherwise get to see. That moves people. You let them in and that’s what they want. They want to feel that it’s a type of interest.

John Simon:

I approach it as the thing like you were saying, Eric, whatever I’m doing, whatever, if I’m summarizing a deposition or appearance, I always really make an effort to do the best I can at it.

And I kind of, a federal judge said this to me years ago, said to a group of us, and it’s so true, he said, do your future self a favor, do your future self a favor. And it’s always stuck in my head where whatever I’m doing and we always drop it and then pick it up in our practice. You do something and you don’t look at the file again for six months or I’m trying a case for the second time in a month in August, we’re going to try a case that was a mistrial and we’re trying it again. And I’m looking at the things that I did and I’m thinking, man, you’re almost like borderline crazy. All the stuff you did, I have notes in there in summaries me. Is that one of ours? To me it is.

Ed Herman:

It, yeah. I remember when the mistrial happened, I was like, damn, I had that money spent.

John Simon:

I literally have notes in my file saying JGS to myself when this guy gets testifies you need to do. And what I did right after the mistrial, I sat down for a day and I went through all of my notes while they were fresh and left a whole map for me of terms of what they said that was effective. But you were talking about an idea, I’m different than most of the attorneys in this office in terms of how I present to a jury.

And we got some really, really great lawyers here in the office and even my son Johnny I think does it this way, Tim, Amy, it’s more they have it. They actually write out the opening, which everybody tells you to do, write it out, write out an opening, write out a close. I never write out anything. What I do is I get an idea a point and I’ll write it in six words and I’ll have it, my outline will have three six word phrases to a page and it will be, this is the point I want to make and I’ll just engage and look at ’em and talk to ’em. And it’s more natural. You can think about here’s what we’re going to be talking about in the case and here’s some of the things you’re going to hear versus on this date they did this. And again, I’m not criticizing everybody, it’s what fits well. They

Ed Herman:

Got to find what works for them. But I have to say that obviously what you’ve done is spectacular. You’ve had one of the great legal careers certainly in St. Louis, but maybe even nationwide. But that’s exactly what I would expect from you. And I think that that’s probably, I’ve not seen you in court, but knowing you as I do, I can imagine exactly what your approach would be. And I think the reason it resonates with juries is because it doesn’t sound like bs. You’re just to emre talking to, you’re talking to ’em like just regular folks, you talking to ’em. And a lot of people thought I was nuts when I gave up handling individual cases because it was something that if you asked anybody I grew up with, they would’ve said that he was born to do this, he was born to talk to juries because he can explain things way knowing you.

I think I would agree with that. That seemed like it was going to be my destiny and I was heading that way and I really enjoyed it. Then I was doing it for Brown and and then everything changed one day, as you’ve heard the story, I abbreviate it. But one day at lunch with Ron Brown, I just laid out a bunch of things that I thought the business could be doing better and would be making a lot more money without having to spend anymore. And he got so excited about some of the ideas that he took away all my files and he said, I want you to start working on those things tomorrow. What a great decision that

John Simon:

He made.

Ed Herman:

And

John Simon:

That was it. That started really my career. I’ve seen it firsthand, the transformation of the firm. What do you have like 250 employees?

Ed Herman:

Yeah, 250 employees. And we handle obviously a lot of files and we also have relationships with other firms like yours because you do have to know where your wheelhouse is. When are you the right firm for a client and when is it in the client’s best interest for you to at least partner with another firm? Because you got to acknowledge there are other lawyers that have specialties and they’re spectacular at what they do and you owe it to the client to get the best result possible. Sometimes you get that best result by bringing in another law firm who has better experience on something. There’s something else

John Simon:

That Erich and Ed that you share, and I think it’s part of who you are obviously, but why you’re both successful in what you do. And that is you both treat people really well. I think you genuinely like people. I see that with walking through your firm the other day, how you interact with people that are working for you. And Eric, you too. I mean you’re both really nice guys. You’re just nice. Eric, I don’t think I’ve ever seen you angry. I haven’t think

Erich Vieth:

If you saw the top 20 videos of my worst moments, you would never want to be with me. That’s everybody. That is everybody. That’s every hundred percent right. But I think everyone does have story and some people have more stories than others or more interesting stories than others, but almost anybody, even at a bus stop and I’m humbled by people who just come out of nowhere in the past. I have taken a bus sometimes, and one time I was sitting there and pondering something I was kind nervous about at work and some person, I think it was an older man with missing teeth and he came up and he said, are you okay? And I thought, that’s phenomenal. This is like a stranger. So especially when a stranger and we were strangers 30 minutes ago, but there’s something about unwrapping a new person and learning who they

Ed Herman:

Are. It’s true. I call it their origin story. You get in comic books, I always say I’m fascinated by people’s origin stories. I do not chitchat even with a new person, I don’t. I want to cut to what made them who they are. I want to understand them. And you’ll find that most people, the key is if you can get them talking about something that they genuinely care about, you’ll see the best in them because they light up. Whenever somebody talks about something they’re passionate about, they’re knowledgeable about, they feel strongly about, they enter a different energy. I like to try to get to that energy as quickly as possible with people. There’s something about,

Erich Vieth:

There’s better ways to have conversations and in my experience, and one would be to see it like playing catch, make sure that no one’s saying, I’m going to tell y’all what the deal is. That’s a turnoff. There’s something about the back and forth and the playfulness of it.

Ed Herman:

So what’d you find out about that guy? Say, I’m fascinated now by the guy who came up to you with the missing teeth?

Erich Vieth:

There wasn’t much more conversation. I said, oh, I’m okay with, thank you for coming up. And I’m just nervous about some things. And then I think he had some long time ago some advice about hang in there. Life sometimes is hard and you work through it and it was just like a moment like that.

John Simon:

Do you still ride your bike back and forth to work and all of that? I work often out of my home, but I do ride a bike

Erich Vieth:

Quite

Ed Herman:

Often. Yeah. Eric, do your stationary bike within the home on those days?

Erich Vieth:

That’s great. Right in front the No I and the dead of winter. But there was an article that inspired me before I started riding in the really cold, cold, it was a friend of mine from Wisconsin sent me an article on how to ride a bike in the winter and he starts with like when it’s 40 you put on a jacket and a layer and when it’s 30 you take the car. No, no. He goes down and he’s got toe coverings and face masks and all that. And when it’s 10 below it’s like I’m thinking, okay, I can handle 30 people.

Ed Herman:

That’s my

Erich Vieth:

Cutoff. Well, I guess

Ed Herman:

They don’t have a choice. They could do the ES stationary bike.

Erich Vieth:

So How cold does it get?

Brody Herman:

It gets pretty cold in Minnesota. Minnesota. It can get down below 10 degrees most days probably in December, January and February. It’s about zero degrees between zero to 10 degrees. It gets pretty cold up there.

Ed Herman:

But just think of how good that is for inflammation.

Brody Herman:

Oh, it’s great for inflammation.

John Simon:

My son Johnny, it should be their slogan. My son Johnny visited Marquette in Milwaukee in August when they have their music festival and it’s 65 degrees or 60 degrees. And so that’s where he went to undergrad and I remember when it got to be November or so him calling and saying, dad, it’s really effing cold here. I go, well what did you think?

Ed Herman:

I wasn’t in

John Simon:

Buffalo,

Ed Herman:

It’s in

John Simon:

Our blood. But he said, no, no. He goes, you don’t get it. I mean I’m talking cold. Not St. Louis cold, like cold that when you walk somewhere it takes you about 15 minutes before you can start moving and actually doing things.

Ed Herman:

Yeah, no, well, in a lot of those schools and buffalo is like that where all the buildings were attached. So once you got in on one end, you could stay inside to do all of your walking. But for that one portion where you had to go from the dorm to the building, you used to have to, I remember they used to keep your eyes closed as much as possible so that they don’t freeze

John Simon:

Because

Ed Herman:

It was so cold and the wind was so brisk. But at the same time, I back while you’re walking, keep your eyes closed. Just keep ’em closed as much as possible. If you just sit there, it’s just freeze your eyeballs. But you know what I will say in Buffalo, they knew how to handle snow. I mean if when you’re in those cities that get a lot of it, they put their resources there, they have those roads cleared, they have their drainage system set up. It’s really remarkable. It’s only when you’re in a city like this where it’s not really worth the money to put in that infrastructure. We just don’t get enough snow. So when we get some snow, everybody loses their mind and doesn’t know what to do about

Erich Vieth:

It. Well, they act like they’re losing their mind. There’s a quarter inch of snow and they cancel those schools. The next thing, all the parents are driving their kids out to the art hill where they can do sled.

Ed Herman:

Exactly, yeah. Apparently it was fine for that. Right? Although on the other hand though, what could be better than a snow day? I really thought they were going to be gone once the pandemic hit and they learned how to do zoom classes. I thought, well, there go snow days. They’re just going to say going to be a front on Zoom. You would think you know why? Because the thing is everybody loves a snow day. And I remember as a kid thinking, why are we doing any of this? If everybody loves a snow day, why don’t we just have snow days all the time? The teachers clearly loved it. Students I thought complaints, what force out there? What person out there is forcing us to go to this every day? That was where my mind was. As a child. When you

Erich Vieth:

Settle a case maybe unexpectedly, isn’t it like a snow day? What do you do with the next week that you would, or the next two weeks where you would’ve been engrossed

John Simon:

In? You would know better than me. I usually will take a day or two off. But because you postpone so many other things when you’re in preparing for trial and ready that the calendar just fills up immediately because you have all these things kind of floating trying to get on your calendar. And when I’m two weeks before trial and especially a week before, it doesn’t matter what it is, it’s done, it’s canceled. It’s like the outside world is I just have to cut it off and focus on the trial. But you’re right, 90% of the cases settle and then when they settle, our cases usually don’t settle before the trial starts though

Our cases will settle well into the trial. Sometimes when the jury’s deliberating, yeah, heal on their throat. Well, that’s how you do it. Well, I think that the further we get through the trial, it creates more clarity and clarity of thought and people kind of come around a little bit. I think part of it too is that the individual who is making the money decision in most cases is not the person that worked it up. It’s not the attorney that worked it up. And I think I’ve had a lot of cases where there’s a big difference between what the attorney who’s defending it thinks and ultimately what the case is worth. And I think part of that is sometimes they miss it, but most of the time they don’t. I’ve had cases where the other side doesn’t seem to really appreciate the significance of the case.

That doesn’t happen too often. We got really good lawyers on the other side, but what I think happens is they didn’t do a good job on some aspects of the case. They’re expert tanked on ’em or wasn’t prepped the right way. And probably they’re probably not anxious to let their client know about that. A lot of times I’ve had cases for instance, where if a corporate representative, we take their deposition and they’ve basically admitted all the elements of the case, and it isn’t until a mediation when we’re saying, well, this is what your clients said, but anyway, it’s Well, they have a

Ed Herman:

Lot of motivation to shield that information. They don’t want to look like they’re doing a poor job.

John Simon:

And I get that. And I think part of it too is and they want to keep billing. They want to keep billing. That’s true. Yeah. That’s a big, big incentive. As a young lawyer just starting, I would spend a significant amount of time trying to settle cases. I’d do demand letters and what that all involves in getting the medical records and the bills and getting photos, putting ’em all together, getting the letter, and then it’ll sit there for three months while the insurance company asks you for or three or more things that they really don’t need to evaluate the case. And then I would find out that six months pass or eight months or a year and you’re no closer, you finally, you get to mediation, the case is worth $20 and they offer you a dollar and a half and because it just continually, it was the same thing in the last 20 years probably. I don’t do demands unless there’s some strategic reason to do it, to set up a bad faith or something. But there are cases where I don’t make any demands ever. I just don’t. And part of it is my assessment is that they’re never going to voluntarily pay what the case is really worth.

Why engage, just no,

Ed Herman:

Listen. I think that’s, and that could be a very intimidating theory too because insurance companies, they’re accustomed to you asking for their money and what you’re basically doing is you’re recognizing that there’s only two entities that get to decide what your case is worth. You’re either going to take the insurance company’s number or you’re going to take the jury’s number. There’s no third number. The plaintiff doesn’t get to decide it. We can ask for it, but ultimately it’s going to be either these people saying yes or these people saying yes or it’s going to be your take their number or you wait for their number. And I think obviously the longer you wait, it’s a game of chicken. They know that they have exposure and then if you put a nice job on a trial, as I’m sure you do, they can recognize that their exposure just gets bigger and

John Simon:

Bigger and you can see what the jury looks like. That’s the big part of it.

Ed Herman:

That accounts for your amazing

John Simon:

Results. That’s one of the three legs. One of the three legs. I’ve got the stool drawn in my notes here.

Ed Herman:

See, that’s, I was missing talent there. It looks like a stool even upside down from here.

John Simon:

What I did, ed, is I divided my world, my law firm world into two. It’s a two legged stool. That’s why maybe it’s wobbling.

Ed Herman:

I was going to say that doesn’t need a third leg. You need the third leg for stability.

John Simon:

And mine is getting cases in develop marketing to business development and then handling ’em once they’re in. And that third leg is me doing the other thing without acknowledging it’s the business side of it. It’s the cashflow issues, it’s all of the other things that go into it other than

Ed Herman:

Handling the claim at Quest, coming up in October, and the topic that I’m speaking on there is growing by shrinking. It’s getting people to fall out of love, give up your love affair with revenue and fall in love with profit because too many people are paying attention to the top line and they’re not paying attention to the bottom line. And I’m not saying disenfranchised clients or whatever, as you know, I mean cases that of a certain high level. We involve firms like yours. We partner with solo and small practitioners who have lean operations are very hungry and can get a great result on those cases. So you really have to be keenly aware, and this is something that will lead my discussion there. We constantly look at what percentage of our cases that end in money account for what percentage of our total revenue because, and you’ve all heard of the 80 20 rule and stuff like that. These things, we call it the Pareto principle and you learn a lot. We did it back in 2008 and we found back then that 65% of our cases accounted for 91% of our revenue. And so that meant that

John Simon:

60 accounted for

Ed Herman:

90, 65 accounted for 91, and that was the ones that ended in money that didn’t count all of the cases we bring in to investigate. And then you find there’s no insurance or there’s no injury, so forget all those. I’m just talking about ones that ended in money. And when you see that, you start thinking, well, geez, as you know, just the amount of time that a case takes you is not necessarily in direct relation to the value of the claim. A smaller claim could be very time consuming.

John Simon:

So I do the same and I’m a numbers person. My background is in business and we’re closer to the 80 20. It’s even more skewed here where every year we have, I dunno how many cases and we settle a hundred, 150, whatever, not a large number based on the number of attorneys, but probably the top four or five cases account for 80% of our revenue,

Four cases account for 80% of our revenue. What I try to focus on here is to identify where those cases are and their cases where there are cases. The more time you put in, you don’t increase the value of the case. And that’s the death nail for doing plaintiff stuff in my view. You’ve got to recognize that going in and say, Hey look, this case is, it’s either capped or there’s insurance limits in the case and the facts might be phenomenal and the injury’s horrific, but you can spend another 200 hours on that case and you’re really not going to increase the value. And you got to find,

Ed Herman:

So what do you do with those?

John Simon:

You do what you need to do and get a trial. We’re still not going to discount the case, but you don’t need to take 40 depositions in the case. You take the two or three key depositions that you need and get a trial setting, doing more isn’t really going to increase what the other side’s going to pay you. And recognizing that I think is key for just like you were talking about profit versus revenue or just the work, it’s the rate of return. But the other thing too is not just identifying the cases, but picking the cases that spending more time will massively increase the value of the case. And that’s what we’ve done, I think successfully. That’s where our success comes from. Yeah,

Erich Vieth:

So thank you for joining us for this first episode and thanks for agreeing to come back another time.

John Simon:

Anytime.

Erich Vieth:

Always

John Simon:

Good to see you, ed. Of course. Alright, that’s been another episode of The. Jury is Out. I’m Erichve. I’m John Simon. See you next time.

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