EP 518- Conversation with Ed Herman Part 2

Episode Notes

Transcript

Announcer:

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 back with Ed Herman who is the managing partner of the St. Louis law firm of Brown and Crouppen. Welcome Ed.

Ed Herman:

Thanks for having me back. I must’ve done something right. I’ve always been interested in your firm in that because you do handle mostly high level cases. I know with the stuff that we send you, if it doesn’t meet a seven figure plus criteria, you’ll pass it on. So I would imagine from a profit standpoint you’re in good shape. What about cashflow though? Do you worry about that if you’re only moving a limited number of cases every year? I can see that being a real problem. You know what,

John Simon:

I’m very careful with that and we do plan, you know how cashflow we solve that with trial settings? That’s what it’s, I tell the attorney,

Ed Herman:

You them out, even them out. Tell cross your fingers that they’re going to No,

John Simon:

Because you know what? If you get a case set for trial, historically one third of ’em are going to get continued. So if I have 25 cases set for trial, eight of them are going to get continued for one reason or another. It just happens. And so then you’re left with, instead of 25, you have 15 of ’em, say 15, 16 cases. And out of those you’ll try, we’ll try two or three and the rest of them will get settled. I tell the lawyers here, and Erich, you probably heard this when you were here, I say trial settings are like oxygen for us. Without ’em, we don’t survive without trial settings. Years and years ago we used to send around a list and from each attorney asking them What do you think is going to get resolved this year to kind of get some ideas?

Our business models, it’s revenue wise, it’s really hard for us to predict that and I abandoned that. Instead, what I have each of the attorneys do is say, identify your big cases and let me know when it’s set for trial. That’s all I want to know. I don’t want to know the amount. I don’t want to know what they think it’s worth. I want to know, actually, we color code cases here. We color code cases based on value and there are three categories and the highest category are the ones that I’m involved in. I’m talking to somebody about on a regular basis, but you just got to get a trial setting, a meaningful trial setting, and then that way if it’s going to settle, it will. And if it’s not going to settle, you get to try a good case.

Ed Herman:

And that’s where a firm like ours that has a large volume, we can approach things a little bit differently because cashflow is not really a concern. When you have that kind of volume, you’re always going to have things coming in and flipping and producing, even though we have massive amount of overhead. That’s an area that have you

John Simon:

Got enough volume

Ed Herman:

That the volume does it. And the thing is because we’ve handled so many cases, we start to our data because I’m only a data driven guy, I’ve seen too many examples of people convinced on gut, on instinct, on logic, even from one perspective that this can’t be right. But numbers really don’t lie. You got to understand the numbers, you got to make sure they’re accurate, but they don’t lie. And for me, I try to really focus on two numbers. I focus on the average fee per case and I focus on the acquisition cost per case because those two numbers in the aggregate are the name of the game. Everything you’re going to make in terms of profit is going to fall somewhere between those and you’re still going to have your associated expenses and the rest of your overhead. But you know that at the end of the day, if you can drive the average value up as much as possible, that is going to widen that gap. And if you can’t widen that gap, you’re not going to grow. That’s how you grow. So we’re talking

John Simon:

About running law firms and a lot of the things we’re sharing, our firms are a little bit different. And it’s funny, when I was a third year law student at St. Louis University back in, oh gosh, the 85, 19 85 or so, they had speakers come in to talk to the third year students about going out and starting to practice and hanging up a shingle or working at a firm. And two speakers came in and I don’t remember their names, I don’t remember who they were, but both were practicing attorneys. And one came in and he said over and over again, the practice of law is a profession. It is a profession. It’s not a business, it’s a profession. The next guy, the very next guy that came in said, the practice of law is a business. And he said, if you don’t believe that, you won’t be practicing law is what he said.

And the answer there is it’s both. It’s a profession. But if you’re not looking at cashflow, who would, I think there’s more, probably a little more security and having a larger number of cases and we’re putting all of our eggs more in one or two baskets and a smaller number of baskets. And I’m thinking that to go to a business person and telling them, here’s a proposal, here’s what we want to do. We want you to work with us on this project and we want you to spend probably a thousand or 2000 hours on it, and by the way, we want you to put in between two and maybe five or $600,000 and in three years, in three years you might get something and it could be here or it could be way up here and you wouldn’t have many takers. I mean you just wouldn’t have any takers.

Ed Herman:

No, it is tough to invest. It’s like every other investment you want it leveraged, you’d be much better off, even though we’re not going to necessarily, although once in a while we’ll hit a big one. You do. We had a few of them last year. It was a particularly good year and we’ve got a great group. We’re doing stuff now that we’ve never done in the past. I mean the number of seven figure cases that we’ve already resolved this year, we’ve already broken our all time record for the volume of, and we’ve got the whole rest of the year to go so we can work those. We’re not doing the high level stuff that you’re doing with these complex, like the product cases. Yeah, bazillion things because they are extremely time consuming, but we have great predictability and even within the firm, I break the cases out into different types of cases.

I break them out, I call them different tiers, but they’re, it’s not like rocket science, it’s tier one of your death and life altering injuries. Tier two are your broken bones, surgeries, herniations, things that would show up on a test. These are objective injuries and then soft tissue is tier three and those are subjective injuries. Sometimes you can see some evidence on a scan, but for the most part you you’re taking the person’s circumstances and then their credibility. Yeah, exactly. Like a whiplash injury. And based on that, I know what the average fee is for each of those types of cases. I know what the time on desk is for each of those types of cases and I know what the dropout rate is for each of those kinds of cases. What percentage of these are going to actually end in money? Once you have those three numbers, you can plot out exactly what the revenue is going to be and when it’s going to hit. So we have that. I have that on account.

John Simon:

Let me ask you this. One of the big things is the timing here. Every case we have is in suit. I mean very few of our cases are not in suit and it’s to the point where if a case comes in, we just file it. What do you do when if a lot of ’em aren’t in suit, do you do anything to follow up with the attorneys in terms, in other words, to make sure the case isn’t sitting there 12 months or 15 months?

Ed Herman:

They would say that they’re micromanaged and let me say this, we don’t micromanage. We trust the lawyers when it comes to the actual work itself, but the work ethics stay on top of it. We have very strict standards that we have put into place of designated times where a client needs to be contacted, needs to be updated. There are acceptable benchmarks for how long it takes to do each stage of the file. If anything falls off of those, it’s pursued by their supervisor just to find out what’s going on. You’ve got this many out, maybe it’s what we’d call an aging demand list cases that have everything in and a demand should get written and it’s not written in the first 30 days. It goes on the list. They got to talk to the supervisor and explain. And a lot of times it’d say, I know it says it’s an aging demand, but I’m waiting on one more record that once I started going through ’em, I knew I was missing one. Okay, I can accept that. But they know it’s being watched and you don’t want to overtax them with work. You want them to have an appropriate number of files so that they can give those files. Everything that those do. And all files are the

John Simon:

Same too. I mean you have twists and turns in cases and

Ed Herman:

Yeah, you do, but but we have benchmarks and we use solidify as our practice management software and there are checklists in there and we can see if targets have been made at a certain time. And then that same formula that I just laid out for you that I constantly have running firm wide, I have the same thing running per attorney based on their particular inventory and their particular tendencies. So at the beginning of the year, I’m able to sit down with each one and say, here’s in your inventory and given what your average fee has been and given what your time on desk has been and your dropout rate has been what you have in your inventory, this is what it should equal to at the end of the year. And we have enough, again, it’s like what the insurance companies use, the law of large numbers, the more numbers that are factoring into it, the more integrity the numbers has.

So the attorneys know right from the get go, they’ll have, this is the expectation, this is a stretch goal. We always want them to have something to shoot for above that, just to make sure that every incentive is to maximize settlement value. And we stopped celebrating when our attorneys, we used to celebrate every time an attorney cracked a million in fees for the year, it was because it was just a special number. And so they’re in the million dollar club for the year and then we stopped celebrating because I’m like, you know what? A lot of the attorneys here are given their inventories a million dollars, not a good year. Now that we know what their inventory should produce and if they hit that, I’m happy to celebrate them. I want to celebrate them. Nothing makes me happier. People think I’m nuts, but I’m like, if we’re paying out huge bonuses, it can only be because they did incredible things. We set up the system that gives them those bonuses. So why shouldn’t we be happy if the system’s working?

John Simon:

I wish you make five times more next year.

Ed Herman:

Yeah, exactly. Because that can only mean one thing for me, and it’s something very, very good.

Erich Vieth:

So Ed, it occurs to me, we have people who listen to the podcasts that are not from even Missouri or the Midwest. I’m fascinated by the fact I didn’t know you had 250 employees for instance, and I know you’re a Billy Ball type guy as far as data, would you be willing to sketch out the scope of your operation, like the number of offices? And I can’t imagine the intake department. It must be

Ed Herman:

It’s huge. And intake I always consider to be the most important department. And I say that because the work that they do obviously feeds everything else and they’re getting the person at the crux at that special moment. So where I really made my bones, the first thing when I sat down at that lunch with Ron Brown was you need an intake department that knows what they’re doing. You need a sales team that understands how to take a call, how to listen, how to coach and how to sell. I like you don’t have that at all. And if you had that again, that was point is you’d be making so much more money without having to advertise more because you’re getting the calls. It’s just what’s happening when the calls come in. So in terms of the operation, our headquarters is on the hill in St.

Louis and about 140 of our people would call that their main office, where they would be our second largest office, duke, Kansas City. That’s our second largest I guess, market that we’re in. And we’ve got a nice office out there, pretty close to Crown Center. And then we have hub offices, which are ones that can house 15 to 20 people. We have one in Edwardsville in Illinois and one in the Fairview Heights in Illinois or Belleville, whatever. We’ve got two of them there. We have a strong Illinois presence as well. A lot of our employees were from that side of the river. That just historically was the case. We were downtown. You draw a lot of people from over there. And then we’ve got satellite offices. These were offices that were originally set up for convenience. So we’ve got Arnold and Washington and St. Charles and O’Fallon and we have one now in Ferguson.

Originally those were started for convenience because people liked back then to still come into an office and that was common. Then we started having investigators help with our signups. They didn’t have to come to our offices. So then the offices kind of evolved to, well, they’re kind of like billboards. We put them in nice big populous areas and we’ve got one in the same shopping center as the Bass Pro shop in St. Charles. They get 2 million cars going to that parking lot every year, 2 million. Now it’s probably the same people going a lot, but regardless, 2 million. So that’s a billboard. Now it’s evolved to where we see our satellite offices as helping our digital marketing efforts because so much of when people do searches, they make their decision based on

John Simon:

On location,

Ed Herman:

The location, they get the map packs and you want to come up one, two or three in the map pack. So first thing you got to do is say, well, how am I going to get in the map pack? Well, they’re doing it by proximity. So you blanket the area, you map out your offices and you do it in a way so that yours is always, you’re always going to have one closer, especially where your demographic lives. You’re going to be closer. So then you got to get on there step one, right? You got to get in the mat pack. And step two is you got to make sure that you have enough high quality reviews so that people feel like they did their due diligence simply by finding you and glancing at your reviews. And you got to do it legitimately because Google pays attention to everything.

I’m always shocked by firms that have a perfect five star with a ton of reviews. I won’t mention any names. There’s one in town that comes to mind like all five, all five. And I’m like, I think there’s something about that that stinks a little, smells a little. When I’m buying stuff, I’m always looking for a four, seven or better with a significant number of reviews. So that’s kind of our target. Now, when you’re asking for reviews, I teach our people to ask the question, would you be comfortable giving us a five star review? Is that something, do you feel we’ve earned a five star review? That’s a good question because if they don’t feel we’ve earned a five star review, I’d like to know what we could have done better and just improve on ourselves. But when you phrase it as don’t ask them just to review you because if they review you, they may think they’re giving you a good review because they give you a four.

They’re like, four is pretty good, nobody’s perfect. Fours are going to kill your average. You don’t want a four. A four is terrible. So the question you want to ask is, do you think we’ve earned a five star review? And this way if they say yes, then you can say, if you wouldn’t mind, it would mean a lot to us. It really does help the business. If you go on Google and leave that five star review and maybe give a couple of sentences on something that we did well, we’d appreciate it. But by leading with that question, you’re sending the clear signal that if they’re not comfortable giving you a five star review, that’s fine. I’m not going to, I want to convince ’em to if they don’t think we deserve. I

John Simon:

Was going to ask you might as well ask for a five,

Ed Herman:

But if you phrase it as Do you think we earned a five star review and if we did, we’ll get it. And if they didn’t, we will talk about it. But see, I don’t want any review on there that’s less At this point it would hurt the average.

Erich Vieth:

So when people call the number that they see either on the billboard or wherever they find it, will a human being always pick up?

Ed Herman:

Yes, it’s actually, it was always a human being and I always wanted no transfers. I always wanted that the person that answered the call could take you all the way through the screening of the case. But again, that’s why you have to constantly review the systems that you have because what makes perfect sense at a certain size and a certain climate can all of a sudden become a hindrance at a certain size, a certain climate. For example, early on Terry felt like he wanted to talk to every new case caller because how magical would that be? And at a certain point it was, and he could handle it, but he’s not scalable. He’s one person. So when it comes to intake, right now what we put in and it’s brand new is the first thing you hear is just a splitter. If you’re calling on a new matter, hit one. If you’re an existing matter, hit two. As soon as they hit one, then it’s live person all the way through. And we did that simply because our intake people and we have a ton of ’em, like 35 people doing intake, it was inundating them with a blend of new case calls and then there’s

John Simon:

Another transfer,

Ed Herman:

Existing clients and vendors and adjusters. And so it was becoming a little bit, it was clogging up at the beginning. This goes a little bit smoother even though I hate the idea that there even has to be anything automated at the very top of the call. Ultimately it leads to a better call, but I am a big believer and there’s a big sacrifice for me to give up a live human being right out of the gate. They still get one within five seconds, but I would much rather in a perfect world, have enough people that it would be like that, but your overhead would make your operation

John Simon:

Not good. And it’s so important because they’re the face of your firm, period. The person answering the phone, the person at the front desk, that’s who you are. Whether it’s true or not, that’s what the

Ed Herman:

Perception’s going to be. The thing I tell people when I train intake is I say, I want you to understand that when somebody calls us that you’re experiencing the culmination of so much work, investment, reputation, and time to make that. That’s a magical thing that just happened when that phone rang. These people first heard about us years ago because we spent money on television, on billboards and radio and the internet. We did everything we could to try to earn a spot on the top of their mind in the hopes that God forbid anything ever happened to them, that we’d get the call. And when that phone rings, it’s the culmination of that moment. All of those dominoes have fallen before that call that we put a ton of money, resources, work and reputation into. And now it’s come. That’s the moment. It’s the most important moment in the case, and they have to appreciate that the phone ringing is a magical moment and should be treated that way.

And then I just tell them, I teach ’em three things. I say, number one, I want us to help everybody. That doesn’t mean we could represent everybody, but that person when they’re getting off the phone, they have been helped. Either we’re going to represent them or we’re going to connect them with somebody who will represent them. If they have a case, we think they’re better off handling on their own, they’re going to be given resources, guidance. If we don’t think they have a case at all, they’re going to be validated, listened to, respected, they’re going to get an explanation so that they understand exactly why they don’t have something. Does Tony

John Simon:

Do that

Ed Herman:

Or is it an

John Simon:

Intake

Ed Herman:

Person? Well, we have intake specialists, intake paralegals and intake attorneys. And you might wind up with any one of them depending on the circumstances of who answers the phone and how far they’re going to take the call, but they’re all trained in that philosophy. So philosophy number one is we want to help everybody. Everybody who calls us is going to get something meaningful. We want everybody to like us. Going back to when

John Simon:

We started

Ed Herman:

And when we started

John Simon:

25 years ago, there were three attorneys, we had three attorneys and three secretaries, and I did the intakes. When a call came in, it came to me and it got to the point where I was spending half of my day talking to people because they got an attorney on the line. The attorney can actually give a lot more information, meaningful, productive information than a non-attorney. I like talking to people. I would explain to them, I spent most of my time explaining to them why we weren’t able to take their case and giving ’em somebody else’s name, but most of it was like maybe a med mal case where just I knew it wasn’t a viable case and I wanted to do it in a way where they didn’t leave. They left, like you said, feeling like we helped them. I’d get done with the conversation and we’d say, well, I don’t think you have a case or We can’t help you. I never said You don’t have a case, but I don’t think it would be a case that would be worthwhile to pursue. And I would get, thank you very, I would get thank you for listen.

Ed Herman:

Most people out there, they don’t know this stuff. They just want an expert’s honest opinion on it, and they want it delivered in a way that makes them feel smart for having called, not foolish for having called. That’s essential. I tell the intake people, I’m like, I’m sure at some point in your life you’ve given your number to somebody that you were interested in dating and you then went through this thing of are they going to call? Are they going to call? You got giddy with your friends? Are they going to call? Are they going to call? And then the phone rings and you jump out of your skin and you see it’s them and you get that excitement. I’m like, that’s the way you need to feel every time of the phone rings. What it is for us, that’s what it is, is we’ve given these people our number, are they going to call?

Are they going to call? Yeah. And then it happens and you have to treat it that way. So I tell people that we want everybody to like us, we want them. I say, I can get a no to me far easier than I can get a yes to like me a no. If I have five to seven minutes of a good meaningful conversation where I explain to them what they’re up against and I make sure to assign the blame for it to the correct place. Also, it’s usually a broken system. It’s usually an insurance industry. It’s a to reform issue. I want them to know if they need a villain that they can pin it on. I want them to have a villain that’s not us because not the villain. I mean, Lord knows, as you know, if we thought they could do it. Nothing makes us happier though. System

John Simon:

Makes these cases so incredibly

Ed Herman:

Difficult. I want to make sure they understand that and consider it when they go to the polls or when they’re on a jury someday. I want them to think about that part of it. And then of course I tell people the cases that we want, we want. That’s the third principle. And what that means is I don’t care if it’s the best case in the world or the case that just cleared the upright and got in once we’ve decided that it’s a case that we want in our office. You take your toolbox and you use every tool at your disposal and you get that fish in the boat, that’s the job

Erich Vieth:

In person meeting,

Ed Herman:

Not usually. Usually we can close the whole thing on the initial phone call. And that was a big thing too, is executing contracts. Now we do it all digitally. Before the pandemic, we had switched to digital about two years before the pandemic and about 55% of people that hired us were comfortable doing a digital contract. They didn’t have much experience with it, but once we explained everything, they were comfortable. Once the pandemic hit and people got very used to being at home and doing stuff, that number jumped to over 90%, better than 90% of the clients we’re getting. We are signing up on the initial phone call digitally, and the other 10% that we’re signing up we’re typically either bringing them in for an appointment or we’re meeting with them or an investigator’s meeting with them. So the industry is really, I mean it’s changed, but the other thing that’s changed from an intake standpoint is the 24 hour cycle. Before the pandemic people were very used to a nine to five type of environment. It’s when business was conducted, people started working from home. They lost track of 9:00 AM and 5:00 PM the days sort of blended together. And what I noticed was the number of people that were contacting us after hours skyrocketed. The normal clock did not matter anymore before the pandemic. About 10% of our cases would come in sort of the after hours, the web contacts especially. And now 40% of our web contacts come in the

John Simon:

After hours. If you think about it, they’re probably doing other things during the day working and after hours, they’ve got time to

Ed Herman:

Sit. I mean, that’s why you got to meet them where they are.

Erich Vieth:

What are your clock as far as when live people will answer that call.

Ed Herman:

We will live answer 24 7. So even at two in the morning, two in the morning, there’s somebody that will talk to, we do, and we have gone through various answering services until we found one that was very open to getting our training and they’ve got the people, the resources, and they are fully trained on how we do things and how we talk to people and they do a really good job. So yeah, at two o’clock in the morning, they will answer, welcome to Brown and Cruin, do all your information. They’ll take you through it, and in most cases they’ll take you all the way through to a contract if need be. And then in the morning we review things, get back in touch with them and make sure that that we’re comfortable with what was

Erich Vieth:

Done. Now what about the case where it’s intriguing? Might be a good case, need to know more. You’re not signing them up yet. You

Ed Herman:

Sign ’em up.

Erich Vieth:

Oh, you do sign

Ed Herman:

’em. You have to look, I tell, and a lot of lawyers disagree. They say, well, I want to investigate a little first before I sign. I

John Simon:

Agree with you.

Ed Herman:

Yeah, putting an inch of work into that beyond the consultation, if they’re not under contract, well, I kind of look at it differently

John Simon:

Is if you’re doing anything for them, you need to be engaged. In other words, if you don’t know whether or not it’s a case and you need to do extra work and research, you need to have a contract and you don’t

Ed Herman:

Want another attorney reaching out and talking to them. And if they’re, they’re technically not represented, they’re allowed to. The second they’ve engaged you in a contract, they are not allowed to speak to your client. That includes the other side, but it also includes competition who may be trying to attract, they’re at a dinner party that you mention what’s going on. And before you know it, they say, well, you’re currently represented. They say, well, I haven’t signed a contract with anybody. Next thing you know, they’re hard selling them, so I don’t want to compete with that. No, if you’re interested, you get ’em under contract, you could always withdraw from it if need be. And you know

John Simon:

What, that’s a lot of cases, A significant number of our cases. We have four months and med mal, you got to get the medical records, see what they say, and then you got to give it to an expert and get the expert review. And half of the time the expert might be a little lukewarm on it or it’s, I agree with you, get ’em signed up and then

Ed Herman:

You hate to do all that work in investigation. And then for some reason, they look at the contract and they see something in there and they don’t like that they want to change it. And now you’re sitting there saying, well, I don’t want to change it, but I’ve just spent four months investigating it and I already am in this case, 20 grand. I think the better way to do it is

John Simon:

To either you’re representing them or you’re not. Exactly. It can’t be any gray area it’s representing ’em or not.

Erich Vieth:

So how do you deal with the cases that just aren’t going to happen? In other words, I might get a call from somebody who’s in a prison who is on the prison phone and I filed my appeal, the brief is due tomorrow and that kind of thing. And would you write my brief for me? What do you do when it says, I was going to say,

Ed Herman:

Excuse me, we have a bad connection. We joke, but at some version of that because No, I mean, listen, you got to be a better underwriter than that when you’re on those calls and something like that. I mean, you want to help as many people as you can, but you also, I mean for us, we are very good about staying in our lane too. I don’t think a person, a client is ever best served by having a lawyer who doesn’t routinely do that type of case.

John Simon:

Yes. Yeah,

Ed Herman:

Us too. I

John Simon:

Mean, we know a whole lot about a very narrow practice, and that’s the way it is. Anytime it’s close with the statute, it’s hard for us to evaluate a claim based just on a telephone call or even medical records. It’s most of them, like with product cases, you won’t know whether you have a claim until you’re six months down the road and you’ve spent some money on the case.

Ed Herman:

How close can they get to the statute for you to still take

John Simon:

It? If it’s a product case and it’s like three, four or five months, I want at least six months lease times six months. Every rule is a rule of thumb. Every rule can be broken. And I know you have broken that rule. I had one, I’ll give you an example. I had a product liability case involving, it was an automotive Ford Explorer rollover and client. Part of it is some people I just like and some people you like and you go out of your way a little more even without thinking about it. So this guy came in and his son and daughter were both involved in a rollover, really horrible injuries. And he came to the office and the statute was going to run in days in days, and it was a case against Ford Motor Company and he had already been to two or three firms and the last one had it for a considerable amount.

And I knew all of ’em. I knew all of the lawyers, excellent firms, great lawyers, and I was like, look, no. But he was really, I just liked the guy. And he was asking me, he said, got the whole file. And I said, look, here’s what needs to happen. You need to bring the entire file here to me today, not tomorrow, today, I’ll take a look at it. Anyway, we ended up doing that and fast forward two and a half years or three years, we ended up starting a trial in that case on a little bit different theory. It wasn’t the same theory that the other firms had looked at. And I took it because he was a really, really good guy. The injuries were pretty horrific and we ended up getting a good result for him in the case. That probably hurt me in the long run because then I started changing, bending the rule a little bit and taking cases with a month left. And I’m like, no, don’t do that.

Ed Herman:

Yeah, I mean that’s going to bite you at some point. And look, I understand that temptation. I feel bad for the people. I mean, I hate that. And there’s been so much talk about trying to shorten the statute. Well, you are already dealing with a short statute for med mal, but even for just regular pi. And I think that that would be a disaster for people. I mean, we would adjust. It’s not that big of a deal for us to necessarily adjust. You

John Simon:

Just file more suits.

Ed Herman:

Yeah, but that’s the thing is people, if you ask the regular citizen, do you think there’s too much litigation? Of course they have no idea how much litigation there actually is, but they’ve been conditioned. So if you say, do you think there’s too much litigation? People say yes. And you say, well, how would you feel about a piece of legislation that would take the number of court filings up from where they are now to what could be 10 times that? Would you be in favor of that? And they would of course say no. Well, that’s exactly what’s happening. When people want to shorten the statute from five years to two years, they’re taking away all the settlement time. They’re basically forcing you to file everything. And that seems to go exactly against what every person out there proclaims to want. So just, obviously I’m not the first person to shed light on the fact that people are heavily manipulated by the powers that be. I just wish we were the powers that be doing the

John Simon:

Manipulation. It’s amazing how almost everything that we’re talking about is learned from experience, doing it, maybe doing it this way, doing it the wrong way. Every procedure policy that we have is there because something happened that didn’t work out well. Or you just learn. You learn by what you’re doing. It’s again, when looking at cases, if somebody calls me and whatever they’re calling me about happened a year ago, automatically like a red flag goes up like, well, if there really was a case. Now, I’m not saying that they can’t sit on it and wait for a year, but if something happens to somebody, whether it’s an auto accident or a medical med mal case and they really think they’ve been wronged, they’re not going to wait a year to call somebody. And we talk about the screening case. You guys send stuff over that we look at and you guys look at it before we look at it. So the screening process is pretty thorough and it just, certain cases, especially with med mal, you really need to be my former partner, Paul, who you knew Paul Paani. He made me laugh. He said his standard for taking a med mal cases, it would need to be so good. He’d be willing to steal it from somebody. That’s,

Ed Herman:

It’s not a bad shorthand way of doing it.

John Simon:

He said, if it’s not good enough that you’d consider stealing it from somebody, don’t take it.

Ed Herman:

Don’t take it. It’s as good of a screening philosophy as any other.

Erich Vieth:

So thank you for joining us for this first episode and thanks for agreeing to come back another time. Outstanding. Happy to do it. Always good to see you, ed. Alright, that’s been another episode of The. Jury is Out. I’m Erich Vieth.

John Simon:

I’m John Simon. See you next time.

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