In this week’s live episode Seth & Jay talk with Keith Givens, co-founder of the Cochran Firm, one of the USA’s fastest growing law firms, with 32 offices and a goal of 50! Keith talks about how vision matters, what to do when one owner out shadows the others, and more!
Hello, hello, and welcome to the Thursday, August 13 edition of Max Growth Live. I’m your host, Jay Ruane, and here at Max Growth Live, we are sponsored by Maximum Lawyer and Maximum Lawyer Media along with Firm Flex and BluShark. Here at Max Growth Live we focus 100% on growing your law firm. We interview guests from all over, and quite frankly, Seth, today we have just a legend, one of the best guests that we have. So, let me ask you, Seth, how are you doing this week?
I’m doing great. Having Keith here, he’s a bit of friend and mentor, has really meant a lot, and watching him in action, because he’s, nobody has scaled I think more efficiently than Keith, it’s just remarkable what he’s done with his business and his practice. You know, it’s been a crazy week, you know, I go to sleep one night, and all of a sudden, the Google algorithm is screwy and we have, you know, spam in the top of the search results, and, you know, later that night, Google admits that it’s, that it’s all nonsense, that they flipped the wrong switch. So, you know…
I mean, like, literally, could this year kick you in the teeth anymore than it has?
I just, in fact, it were, John Mueller responding to a literal dumpster fire tweet to say, yeah, my bad, we’ll figure it out. But this is Google, this is not meant to be, this was a mistake.
Yeah. And it just blew my mind, I was like, wow, this, you know, this is a crazy year, when you’re actually getting like, oops, we’ll get it fixed, folks. It just, it just blew my mind.
It is, but let’s get, let’s get to Keith, because Keith is a living legend and want to make sure we have time for all of Keith.
Absolutely. You know, as usual, I got a feeling this conversation is going to go long. So, first, let’s hear from our sponsors and then when we get back, folks, we’re going to have Keith Givens with us, chairman of the Cochran Firm. Give us a few seconds and we’ll get them right with you.
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We are honored and humbled to have Keith Givens here with us today. Keith is a friend and mentor who is one of my favorite business lawyers. This man has done incredible things changing the way that we all practice today. Keith was an amazing trial lawyer of his own right but has been known as the person who has scaled the Cochran Firm. Jacoby and Meyers, the National Trial Lawyers, top 140, under 40, as well as the Association Management Group, which helps all different organizations run their conferences. Keith, thank you so much for being here today.
Yes, thank you.
You’re very welcome. I’m honored, Seth and Jay.
Well, look, we, we work with a group of lawyers around the country that are step by step trying to figure out how to scale their firms, and there’s nobody better than yourself as far from my money, as far as figuring out how to take something from single off office in Alabama to a national powerhouse. Can you walk us through just some of the sort of fundamental basics that sort of. What has led to that success in your mind?
Well, probably no one has made more mistakes in the practice of law than I have, so let’s start off with that. You know, next year will be my 40th year of law practice, and I’ve really had a couple of major starts and pivotal points the first 18 years I was in practice, without Johnnie Cochran. The last 22 years I’ve had the benefit of the Cochran Firm brand, so just to sort of break it down I guess it, and look at it in segments. I happen to be from a city, I’ve lived in my primary residence is in a city population 75,000. So, I’m from a very, very small market, and it gets a seizure, you know, you talk about a big fish in a small pond, so it’s, it was probably easier in some respects to be a big fish in a small pond. I did come from a business background that may have given me a little jump on the business side, but I think the, the importance has been really creating three buckets, you know, looking at things in the early, early days, there were lawyers that instilled the importance of getting the cases, I mean, you’re not going to make any money, you’re not going to provide any cloud service if you can’t get the business. So, I have, so if you can imagine three buckets, one is the get the business bucket and then the second bucket is providing absolutely the best class service you can, that’s the second bucket. There were some lawyers that had the philosophy that if you were a great lawyer and provided great client services, everything else would take care of itself, you know, but that’s, that’s one of my mistakes and thinking that, you know, that’s only one bucket. And then there’s the third bucket, and that is the business of law bucket, you know, that’s the, you know, how well you structured? How well are you organized? What kind of systems you have in place? It’s that’s the importance of the scale is this third bucket, and you have to have, you know, a business operating structure and system to make sure all these buckets complement one another and function together. And I thought I had the, you know, the really good system at the time I met, we met Johnnie Cochran, I was 18 years into my practice, 40 Ish, maybe a little, little slightly over 40, and, you know, Johnnie Cochran taught me a lot about generational equity, the importance of brand, I mean, he didn’t preach the brand, but he was, he was the brand, and the importance of having a brand of that magnitude added a dimension of scale. We had 28 lawyers practicing in two states. We have four offices, and the benefit of Cochran and the brand, in the next 22 years we’ve grown to 31 offices in 19 states, so that was, that was just a different, a different league and a different level, so, it, that aided greatly in success, because he, he would have practice, you know, 50 years if he had been practicing this year in the practice of law, so he was a lot of rocket fuel in our tank when we met Johnnie in 1998.
You know, a bunch of questions to get you, I would love you to start with, for those that haven’t heard the story, how did it come to be? How did, you know, you’re sitting in Alabama, and this is a rockstar out of LA, how did you put that deal together?
Well, thanks to a lawyer by the name of Jack Smith, he was Alabama’s version of Johnnie Cochran. He practiced it in a city called Tuskegee, Alabama. I’m from Dothan, Alabama. We were in Birmingham, which is north of both of us. He’s close to Montgomery, Alabama. I was the president elect of the Alabama trollers and he was on the executive committee, and he and I had this idea of opening another office in Atlanta, a diverse office, a diverse, you know, of white trial lawyers, black trial lawyers, were historically in Atlanta, believe it or not, at the time really did not have an office of that type, so we thought it was ripe and ready, and he was a close personal friend of Johnnie Cochran primarily due to the fact that during Johnnie’s first book tour, he had met Jack, and Jack was special in that he had the largest, the world’s largest sports memorabilia collection and one of the world’s largest privately owned civil rights collections. And so, he and Johnnie became real close personal friends, and through that relationship, he mentioned the idea of opening an office in Atlanta, and they were socializing, and they were I think there’s a Jazz Festival in New Orleans, and I received an invitation from Jack to come to fly down from Alabama and meet Johnnie Cochran. And so that happened in 98, and we spent the better part of a day, probably 8 to 10 hours, talking to one another and ask or inquire that we would be interested in having him as a partner in our Atlanta office, of course, you know, that’s a no brainer from my perspective. And that’s how it started, so we started there, and then over six months, because we had a little bit of a robust infrastructure to scale, we ended up merging the LA office of Johnnie, the New York office of Johnnie, where he was living at the time, he was also doing core TV and writing his second book. So, that, you know, we immediately started off with five or six offices and ballooned up to about 60 lawyers, and so that, that was the foundation of scale, really moving it forward.
You know, you mentioned this, and something I always ask our guests about, you learn a lot from the mistakes, and you sort of alluded to that in your opening. Can you talk to us about like, some of those mistakes looking at it from our audience point of view? What are the things you wish you knew when you started this process?
Well, the, the one size fits all scenario, is probably one of the earlier mistakes, you know, you listen to people talk and, you know, they, you have the marketing, the marketing in movement where I felt that marketing was the key, some people thought that you having good business acumen was key, and it’s just one of these one size fits all that was. But one of the bigger, the bigger problems was recognizing early that if there are people in your organization, whether it’s partners or otherwise, that do not share the vision of the firm, then you have, they have to be identified and removed, because if you, if they carry too long there’s, there’s internal conflict and clashing, there’s no way to make progress, certainly not, not scale. So, that would be a mistake that, you know, I’ve probably made is, you know, just not being able to identify and remove that. And that’s not just lawyers and law partners, that’s anybody in the organization that do not, that does not buy in, and I think too, that sometimes when there’s hard times there’s, there’s a circle, the wagon mentality that you need to circle the wagons to sort of protect what you have and secure yourself. I think that’s a, has proven to be a mistake that when, you know, for example, like we’re in the middle of the pandemic, which is going to lead to, I think a result of financial or expanded financial crisis, whether it’s going to be on the magnitude of 2008 or not, but usually, I found that when you start moving forward and get aggressive during the so called game, game changing events, you know, like, whether it’s tort reform, court reform, there was a period of time, like in Bush one, a lot of large were sort of getting out because they couldn’t make the money as they thought that they needed to make rather than making adapt patients. So that’s an example of a mistake. So, I think that’s sort of a summary, and I think to not having specialist, occasionally I would either spread myself too thin by trying to be in too many buckets, you try to find the best specialist and don’t take the advice of whether you expand and have other partners who are specialists in business generation. You know, they talk about the founders, the minders, and the grinders, you know, so there needs to be some specialist finders’ rainmakers, those that are getting the business, even if they’re not the best at providing the service and processing the business, trying to make lawyers that are great at doing one function, spread their skills out, I think we’ve learned that just let them be great at doing what they enjoy doing and what they are excellent at and, you know, build a world around that excellence in the same thing with the founders of the business generators, if they’re not great in the courtroom but they’re great at generating business, keep them out of the courtroom, don’t try to make a courtroom lawyer out of somebody who can generate business. Same thing with the courtroom traveler, you know, keep him out of brief writing, you know, keep, you know, just keep him really out of the business, because the business side of law will drag down talent, and then, then you become, you know, less good at what has gotten you there but you also have, you know, at least in our world, in the primarily personal injury as opposed to some of the other consumer areas, we do have to have courtrooms specialists that only spend their time in the courtroom, so you know, try not to drag them, you know, drag them out. So, that’s, those are examples.
So, one of the things I’ve admired most about you over the last decade or more has been watching you in action, and the fact you have been able to collaborate with so many people to bring these different entities together. Never taking sort of the, you know, your, the ego seems to be checked at the door, It’s not about Keith, but it’s about putting these different entities together. Can you talk to me about your business philosophy? Because in so many different areas, whether it’s walking through your hometown in Alabama or walking through NTL, you have so many different collaborations going on at one point, and they seem to work. What’s the secret to your success there?
Well, I don’t know that there’s a success to have a secret about, I mean, it’s a process, I’m still trying to figure it, figure it out and reinvent myself every time, there’s a need, but I think it’s all, it’s sort of happened organically, you know, over time. I think a level of patience and recognition that everyone is different, and not using as a mission to convince everybody you see of what you’re selling that day, I mean, you need, I think listening and trying to figure out what the, what the needs are, and then sort of match up, you know, passion, if somebody’s passionate about something, sort of to get behind their, their passion instead of in front of it or trying to redirect it, because it doesn’t work that way. And usually, usually, there’s some synergies, because you’ll see people that you’ll get excited about, like, what, and also to, you know, from a standpoint, you mentioned this humble, humbleness, It, there’s no one in on our planet as a lawyer that deserves to be less humble than Johnnie Cochran, but the one thing that impressed me from the first day I met him to, you know, the last day he was here was his humility, he was extraordinarily, extraordinarily humble, and it wasn’t an act, it wasn’t an effort, he was just that was the man, I mean, he, if he walked into a room, it wasn’t about, you know, look who I am, I’m Johnnie Cochran, and he would get the kind of attention that would do that. And that he, he was, he was, if he went into a restaurant he was interested in, you know, meeting the waiting staff, talking to the, the chef, you know, making everyone feel important, pausing for pictures, I mean, he, it was never, never about him, and it’s, in terms of having served the organization, you know, when we hear if somebody’s doing something exciting, new or different, you can’t be resentful of it or work against it or see it as competition. Same thing with other, other law firms and other lawyers, even in the organizations that were part of is how, how can your firm help the next firm make money? Do what they want to do, because you can’t do it all, not one firm, it needs to be a series of collaborations and cooperation. And it also helps scale, occasionally, you find some compatibilities in which you team up on doing an effort, because we have not reached a point in America, where there especially on the consumer side of law, where there is one firm that even has 1% of the market, I mean, there’s, I don’t know of any other industry that that’s the case, you know, you’ve got, you know, you always have someone or some company, four or five companies that rise to the top of the market and have an appreciable market share was Microsoft, you know, Walmart, I mean, you can pretty much pick those, but in law they’re over, out of the 1, 2, 3 million lawyers, there’s five or 600,000 lawyers that are solo practitioners, you know, so the need for collaboration and cooperation, it feeds creativity to, I don’t know that I’ve ever had an original thought in my life, sometimes I get credit for a thought I’ve either picked them up from somebody else or, you know, tried to modify them, or been excited about hearing of another thought, and so I continue to look for those kinds of nuances and different things that, you know, help out or provides, you know, fuel to our own momentum.
Great. Jay, we’re talking about Johnnie Cochran and you have a question about that.
Yeah. So, you know, one of the questions I have is, there’s got to be a bit of a challenge early on in the, in the agreement, in the association with a person who had such a, just such a name, you know, in the community that I can imagine there was some challenges early on when people would come into the firm and say, well, I want Johnnie, and, and so, you know, even some smaller law players when they, when they’re going from one to two or, you know, one to five, you know, they still have this sort of aura in their local community, and it’s a challenge for them to be able to say, well, no, I, you’re coming to me, but here’s the person who I’ve selected is the best fit for you. So, how did you guys deal with that challenge, with someone as, just so big in life as Johnnie? Because that in, and of itself would have attracted cases, but he can’t be everything to everybody, so how did you deal with that challenge? And then I have another follow up question for you after that.
Okay. Well, in the early days, I thought it would be extreme, you know, and then a matter of fact, the first thought I had is, being a partner with Johnnie Cochran is the best way to suck all of anybody’s interest in you, I mean, all part of Johnnie Cochran is, I want my case handled by Johnnie Cochran, so we thought it would even be worse, not just new people wanting Johnnie Cochran. That’d be everybody that all 30 of our lawyers were representing when they found out you’re now partners with Johnnie Cochran, we were just like a black hole that would just suck in all the business into. Actually, we found the opposite, that what everybody wanted was Johnnie-like service, Johnnie, the quality that Johnnie represented, and even, we even Johnnie keeps in mind at the time, he was doing very, he was handling very little law, though he had a 10 law, your office in LA, there were no partners. He was located in New York, and so it was, you know, not clicking on all cylinders unless, you know, he was in LA, but he was 90% in New York, and he was doing Court TV. He was also engaged in writing a second book, but he was serving on numerous corporate boards, and he was also one of the hottest speakers in the country, I think he had made tons and tons of money if I throw the number out, because it was in Forbes, this is public, I think he made about eight or $9 million dollars the year before we had met him, just speaking, you know, just on speaker fees. So, he would, you know, he was being, Johnnie would drill had really taken him out of law and our, our business, initial business arrangement is the brand in the name was sufficient, you did not have to roll your sleeves up and do any legal work. And, but I think people were surprised, especially on big cases, they would come into the firm because Johnnie obviously and so, some of which Johnnie would even, its clients were surprised the other way, they did not expect to have Johnnie, but Johnnie would get on the phone If it was a big case and a significant place, Johnnie would want to talk to the client, would talk to the client, and he would also promise certain clients on some of the mega size cases to actually try the case. So, he, he invited himself more often into the case with other lawyers, and don’t get me wrong, classroom just expect to have a call from Johnnie Cochran, but we did not have a problem even from the start. Now over time, the resume of the lawyers and the successes of the lawyers created, you know, a backlog of large results, and we would go to the lawyers that had the best results and if it was a particular type of product case or a medical malpractice or whatever they were really environmental cases, they’re really, really good at, the class had no trouble and Johnnie had no trouble with deferring to the lawyers who had specialty in those cases. So, I’d say that’s, that’s what we did in the early days. Now keep in mind, Johnnie is this next year, or this year was the 50-year anniversary of his passing, and, but, and there was, it’s common that they had the world, did you keep it together? How in the world is there a firm called the Cochran Firm 15 years after its namesake and main brand and most significant trial lawyer has been gone. The National Law Journal had the same question. Matter of fact, one of the headlines in the National Law Journal about two years after Johnnie passing what, and it was almost like they were shocked, it says the Cochran Firm survives the death of Johnnie. That was the headline, but we were a feature firm because, you know, they keep up like the, you know, the top 10, they used to call it the hot list. Now they have some kind of other elite recognition, but the hot list would be the top 10 Personal injury firms based on results, and so we’ve made the hot list like three times since Johnnie passed an honorable mention like three or four times based on the numbers. So, that keeps, I think that keeps us going, we have reached scale. Now, if you, if you ask this question, had we not reached a scalable sizable operation with offices in major markets with attorneys with significant reputations thanks to Johnnie that he knew and brought in from everywhere from the inner circle, International Academy of Trial Lawyers, significant trial lawyers in their own right had already entered the firm, and that not happened at the time Johnnie was diagnosed, and it was a sudden, I mean, we were, you know, we were shocked when this happened, I mean, he had really come off of a year sabbatical and was, you know, living the life of Johnnie, and it was really to roll his sleeves up when he was diagnosed with the brain cancer. So, I’m confident that had we not had a significant level of scale that, it would have been devastating to lose a partner that magnitude, you know, because he, you know, he was a very important ingredient in glue to the firm. But we also had another founder, John Smith, which I’d mentioned that internally was, became the president of the firm after Johnnie passed, and unfortunately, we lost him tragically, to heart attack at the age of 62 at his home, he passed away in 2012. So, we’ve had two major founders of the firm that, you know, have, you know, have passed away that the firm had to start, I guess, sort of endure and work beyond. And we and we missed them, and it is a gap, and, you know, it, I mean, there’s no doubt about it, I mean, from a rainmaking in, from a firm standpoint, clients and us is, you know, just me from a personal standpoint, it’s not a day goes by that I wish I did have a chance to talk to Johnnie about one thing or another, so, it’s, you have to overcome that loss.
Yeah. Yeah, that can be devastating. You know, Keith, one of the things that I think stood out to me as I was preparing for this conversation was that, you know, I looked at your website, I looked at all the lawyers that you have working for you and I was able to quickly see a contrast with a lot of the substantial, I guess you would call them personal injury firms, throughout the country. So, I, you know, I spent a little time looking at the bigger players throughout the country, your firm is incredibly diverse as compared to many other large firms, and some of the more well-known successful personal injury firms in all the major markets. How do you think, you know, and it’s something that’s obviously in the news now, you know, for a need for diversity among law firms, it’s active in our community, a lot of Bar Associations are talking about that type of thing. Can you tell me a little bit how you think your attention to that detail, attention to having an inclusive and diverse partnership has allowed you to grow in ways that you may not have been able to grow if you were sort of homogenous, like many firms tend to be? I mean, you, look around, it tends to be in the big PR firms, you know, seven white guys, and that’s not necessarily the makeup of our society. And so, you’ve done something very special, and I want to delve into that a little about how you think that’s helped you really sort of scale and service the clientele?
Well, we do have the benefit. This is where Johnnie comes in the brand, comes in, is by design and by structure, Johnnie wanted the firm to reflect society, he used that term. Now, we’ve morphed it to a more diverse firm than even he envisioned it, and asking, what does that, what does that mean? Well, he says the first 25% African American population in the city, I’d expect that city to 25% African American attorneys that are providing the service to the, to the firm. Now, we are probably now more diverse than even Johnnie anticipated, because I do consider this as a minority law firm, it was founded by two minority partners that had a majority interest in the firm, so the white lawyers were a minority and ever, ever since the design our president has always been African American. Our board has always been controlled, and it’s a non-member board, majority African American Executive Committee, which is a 35-member expanded body, also majority African American. And I think in our continued growth, we’re doubling down on that because if you look at most of the markets there, they, you know, you know, pick one, you know, Detroit, Atlanta, Philadelphia, New York, these are diverse cities. Memphis, New Orleans, I mean, you can’t pick a major city that does not have extreme, extraordinary diversity to a point of also, you know, being, you know, the, see Baltimore, I mean, you’ve just been one, that 50% African American community, how do you not have a firm that reflects that? So, it, by necessity, it needs to be diverse. And I think it does, internally or from a business standpoint, I don’t know that that’s so much business, this decision is an important and providing class service decision, and we have not, you know, we haven’t steered away from that foundation. And I think also, the one thing that we share all in common is that the reputation and the quality of service that Johnnie said, no worries, he sort of put in stone, the level of quality, and you can’t, he did, he used this phrase, at one point, he said, I do not want to be a mile wide and one inch deep. If I were going to have an office in Philadelphia, DC, it’s not going to be to capture a case for me and finally it or whatever else, he said, I want to be, I want to be as deep as I am wet from a firm standpoint. And so, we have a tendency to have lawyers that are better, actually, you know, somebody else will want, you know, for the last 10 years, so why are you not trying cases? Because there are so many better lawyers and trying cases in my firm than me. I might have thought at the age of 40 that I was as good as, and that’s part of the trial or your concept, I’m as good as or better than anybody else at doing anything else. Now, you know, one afternoon with Johnnie Cochran of cure that. So, you know, you recognize that in the picker, pecking order of things, you know, this man is far superior to me, and I’ve happened to have been in court with him on numerous occasions, and it is, it was all real. And he’s, he’s helped in the philosophy, we came up with 10 criteria for an office, and if you hit all the checkboxes of those 10 criteria, you’re going to be deep, I mean, you’re going to have an experienced attorney. You know, because a lot of, like you say, a lot of firms are not the firms because they have great lawyers at the top, they wanted to lawyers deep, but we probably have, I’d say 40 or 50 lawyers with million-dollar verdicts, probably 25, 30 lawyers with, you know, 10 plus million-dollar verdicts, we have probably 15 or 20 lawyers with $100 million verdicts, we have several lawyers with billion-dollar results. I mean, it’s that that helps when the different practice areas are involved, and you’ve got lawyers and other places to call on, and there’s a lot of internal collaboration, you know, everyone knows when you can get in over your head as a, as a lawyer, as an office or as a firm, you know, this an environmental case, that’s going to cost 10, $20 million to fund, you know, doing it in a city population of 75,000 with, you know, maybe, you know, 20 lawyers in location, it’s not the same, you may only have one of those lawyers that do environmental case. So, it’s good to be able to pull from 31 different offices, and you may find six lawyers who work on a project, and so, we use that constantly to provide, to help provide the depth that we need. I don’t know if that answered your answered your question, but we, and we seek when we go to a city, we don’t attempt to find a lawyer to fill a seat to occupy space to put a flag for the Cochran Firm, we try to find the best lawyer for the community, and we do, we do affirmatively try to find the best African American attorney, you know, we do think diversity, you know that’s, you know, a high priority. And I think you did have to think it, I mean, because a lot of times, sometimes our circles are so small, it’s just easier for, you know, white bars to no other white lawyers and so just not thinking, you know, thinking diversity.
Yeah, no, definitely answered my question. You know, as I’ve seen, as we’ve grown, the more diverse we’ve become, the better we are because there’s a number of different perspectives that have worked. So, Seth, why don’t you take it over now?
Yeah. Well, I was gonna say that, you know, one of the, you talked about how you have these offices around the country and you have a mothership that is to site to be seen in Alabama. I’ve been honored to, to tour it with you. My question for you is, and as we walk, we’re now in this virtual world, and major cities in the northeast offices are not open, and so, all of a sudden, people are rethinking where people have to be sitting. And historically, when Jay and I hire paralegal talent, we’re not seeing great talent, generally less than 50, often $60,000 or more, and you have a cost structure at Alabama where talent is much more reasonable. You said something to me years ago about sort of outsourcing to Alabama, and sort of almost how you looked at it. Can you talk a little bit, because I think a lot of people right now are trying to figure out, you know, now that borders, you know, the office structure itself is not, is being questioned, you know, how you’ve leveraged the fact that you happen to be in a place with educated people at a reasonable price point and use that to your advantage to help grow and fuel the growth along the way?
Okay, I’ll talk a little bit about the structure so you understand, I guess, the, the context of the question, but I want to start off by saying, I am also questioning my own structure and the structure going forward and how changes may need to be made, so I don’t want you to think that, you know, hey, I got a perfect, you know, we got a perfect structure, especially in light of this. But we have, in about four different buildings in this, what I would consider a small town, we have 160,000 square feet of office space, that we have employees that occupy the space for various functions, and what you’re talking about the one building that’s 40,000 square feet, that houses our Intake Center, Call Center and processing. There’re 130 employees in that building, 75 seat call centers, it’s not the regional office, there’s no legal work done in this building, It’s sort of part of the operation that services all the other offices, and there’s probably 200 administrative employees in the city, some off site from the main site. Now, it is somebody, you know, what you’re probably referring to about the outsourcing it’s like Nike having its shoes made in Mexico or China or, you know, iPhone having its parts made somewhere else, Alabama does happen to be, you know, a place where, you know, a 75-seat call center would cost four or five, maybe even 10 times as much if it was in LA or in New York operation. So, we’re able to have more people, we happen to be close to the largest Army Aviation Military base in the world, you know, for helicopter training units, and it brings in a real diverse market force so we’re fortunate. We also happen, in our city, we had the call center for Verizon, so we’re able to get a lot of talent, because they’re coming in from all this, they serve, they handle Verizon call center work for the whole country, it’s there, we’re able to get their talent because, I mean, there’s, you know, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of employees, so we get their top train people to work in our call center, you know, pay them a little more, you know, they’re, we are, so, I mean, I hope that’s not going out to that cost, Verizon call center, but it helps us serve all 31 offices in the kind of scaled way, not to have to replicate the administrative departments that big businesses have, I mean, everybody’s going to have an IT department, they’re going to have an accounting, controlling department, they’re going to have a department that does nothing but marketing, they’re going to have somebody in operations, they’re going to have legal and we have in house legal talent, I mean, some of the departments that law firms do not have, I mean, only the 2000 lawyer law firms that really big law firms can develop the kind of departments that you see in corporations, but it’s helpful, I mean, that an office that has five lawyers, it’s hard to have 24/7 qualified paralegals answering the phone, and you can’t, you have to staff for the highest volume, you know, to, you can’t have just one answering the phone because that’s just one phone line ties it up, and you have to have enough to actually, you know, deal with, you know, deal with the volume. So, that that level of centralizing, you know, centralizing certain functions, same thing we have, you know, in the digital, you know, digital marketing, the content writers, the search engine optimizers, I mean, there’s, there’s a person for almost every kind of thought, you know Seth, because you’d have a company that does all that, next thing you know you have 30 employees, and they all have different, they all have different titles and different functions that they do, you can’t in a boutique, small office with whatever type, you can’t provide that service, you have to have had a scaled need. But at the same time, when you see a scale need, you got to meet it with these departments that can provide services to other places remotely, so we’re almost, we, we have been good at remote work, because when you call a New York office, you know you’re getting a New York accent answering the phone in Alabama, but they’re not, when they hang up, they’re not taking the next call and it’s, you know, Ginsu knives or, you know, the bed dramatic or even, I mean, they’re selling, I mean, it’s nothing but pure legal. Now, the part, the thing that we are analyzing now, which we’re finding because of remote work on, we’ve taken that 75-seat call center in every room, and we’re probably too spacious, we, but space is cheap, and Alabama back, we bought, we really bought four different banks, huge banks that moved out of the inner city and we renovated these banks, so they’re built very, very well and have a lot of space, and often, you know, opulent conference rooms and everything else that goes with it, and we’re able to put a lot of people in offices that can close the doors, you know, even though we have, you know, we’ve made glass everywhere. So, we have thought historically, we’ve always, you know, added employees, bought office space to accommodate and they spread out, you know, we had just recently before the end of the year, we bought two more office buildings on the same block and a house to actually house guests that come in and put a big iron fence around it, and you know, so we’re in expansion mode, but what we have learned is, we could probably double in size and not require any more space, because of our ability to, the key is getting everybody trained in onboarding, we found that you cannot, you cannot adequately train new employees without, you know, hard touch, you know, office, office habits, office practices, but a high performer, an experienced employee that had been there for a while, and say you haven’t been there, you know, we have a lot of, you know, 20 and 30 year employees who’ve had a lot of institutional knowledge and they have, you know, their targets and their goals and their performance and how, how we measure it and, and how they’re bonused, and everything is in place enough that they can do, they’re motivated to do it, they can do what they do at home or, you know, you know, pretty much anywhere as long as they have the technology, same technology. And so, we’re you know, we’re getting schooled, we’ll never be, we’ll never be the same. Well, you know, you know, through this pandemic, based on what we have found out, you know, even though our call center, I would think, well, you have to have a room where they’re all in cubicles and, you know, it’s like the parts that I can see, you see people in little cubicles and booths and doing what they do, but when we went virtual, you know, we’re still recording every aspect, we’re still recording conversations, they’re still, you know, centralized monitoring, we still can, you know, listen in, we still keep up with the numbers and, you know, and we, you know, make sure that the environments is right, I mean, we don’t particularly like barking dogs and crying babies but it’s not bad, you know, sometimes it’s, you know, as, it’s, it depends on the circumstance or the situation, because through your double door, I don’t know if you’re aware of it, I’ve seen, you know, a young one walking in and around, that’s sort of a nice thing to, to do. So we, we probably will not, we were talking about it the other day, I don’t think we need one more square footage to grow to maybe even three times the size, you should you go into shifts, you’re able to remote part time, even if you work, if you work two or three days, let some other employee work two or three days even in the same space. I think that is going to be some, there’s some permanent habits and practices that are being learned now that will never change. It’s got to hurt the office business.
Couldn’t agree more. We would be talking about renegotiating lease is rethinking everything, your hotel style is, you’re essentially alluding to, people will have a desk when they need to be there but, you know, if they could cut down on commute three days a week you may hold on to people you couldn’t have held on otherwise to.
Right, and I think that’s a good thing. I don’t think it’s a bad thing, I mean, you do have to double it down. This is where it hurts, if you do not have systems and processes and ways to measure performance and to motivate individuals, if you don’t have that, then your production is gonna crash and burn. And we’ve seen that with a few employees, particularly, you know, some that are just getting onboard, I mean, they’re gonna be spending time, you know, walking their dog, you know, an extra 15, 20 trips to their refrigerator because their house, I mean, I do it if I’m anywhere close, so those kinds of things are gonna have to be workarounds.
You know, something we’ve talked about that I’ve noticed, I’m curious to see on a larger scale what you’ve seen, is that the A players when they went virtual had been A players virtually, and the people that were on the, you know, on the cost that we’re barely holding on, they went even further that it was, you know, if you can somehow figure out how to keep it retain your A players, it’s less of an issue but not everybody can be an A player.
Right. Well, one thing we, you know, we did, and we might should have doubled it, I think you and I’ve talked when we immediately, just the word, when you hear the word, you know, pandemic remote work, I mean, you know, we did reduce our workforce by identifying and they were pretty much all identified, and but eliminating that bottom 5%. Yeah, you know, the company, let’s just, let’s just make a decision, it was an occasion to make a decision, and, you know, they probably were all better off because of the way unemployment turned out, I mean, it’s like, it’s a win, it was a win for us and a win… And we also, you know, looked at the PPP loans and structured it in the kind of way that, that really in our situation no longer is received any compensation of any kind, but all the staff that would qualify, you know, did, you know, so that, that was, you know, assistance and, but we haven’t, they just, from our internal standpoint, it just happened to hit us at a cycle where we were, abnormally loaded with reserves, you know, usually, you know, we say six to nine months and comfortable reserves in case the faucet just turns off, I guess that’s just a natural fear and paranoia that I would have. But we had a lot more than that, for some reason when it, when it hit. Now, that doesn’t mean you’re going to, you know, just burn through it, but it did give us some, you know, some, some preparation for bad times. And I don’t, you know, I don’t want to be a downer but I do not feel like the worst of times for the legal profession is here yet, you know, not, because I think there’s going to be an aftershock, I mean, this is the first time in my 40 years where we’ve had a situation where courts are closed, and there’s an essence of total shutdown and modification. The good news is, is everyone has upped their game on technology, and we have found out how you can save trips and hotel bills and time, I mean, you’re a lot more efficient with all the methods of communicating, taking depositions, doing hearings, I mean, that’s an, I don’t think that’s going to change, it’s going to just kind of come back a little bit to the way it was, but judges like doing it, I mean, they like sitting and being able to, you know, do a Zoom or Skype or WebEx or Microsoft Teams, I mean, whatever the process is for resolving things. I think that’s been a major, major takeaway, but what I’m, what I’m anticipate happening is in the next six months to a year, the economic impact of this malaise and this stall, I mean, there’s a lot less traveling, I mean, I would have thought and I even asked, I would have thought that, well, bankruptcies are going to go up, not the case, I mean, even the bankruptcy attorneys saying that there’s just a monstrous drop off, the people that are you typically subject probably to bankruptcy, bringing bankruptcy claims are so, are so broke, because like they’re beyond bankrupt, I mean, they can’t even can’t even afford to even go through the Bretton Frank bankrupt process, they just don’t even care. That was, you know, sort of one explanation, but I think same thing on the whether it’s personal injury insurance companies, everybody is going to be so economically impacted. Now, again, though we’re not, the second thing we did was, instead of circling the wagons, we decided on a offensive, we’re going to go from 31 offices to fifty offices, that’s sort of our target, and then we’re in midstream of that, so we are doubling down on forward movement, there’s greater need for consolidation, because a lot of prospective partners into the system are looking for solutions, and scaling one another or in teaming up, and could you imagine, for example, like there’s a lawyer across town to you, is hypothetical, not because you are scaled but, and you could cut your expenses in half by sharing them with them, and still have your same source of revenue because you’re, you’re sharing in a full time accounts, you’re sharing, I mean, there’s, you’re splitting your receptionist, I mean, you start splitting things, you know, and that’s, and you’re in the same market, I mean, you bind TV ads, and you just don’t know if you’re doing social security, say social security and family law, you know, so you’re just using one word and you’ve already saved half, you know, half your ad budget by throwing in another practice area. So, that’s, I think that that the opportunities probably for consolidation and scale are as, as good as it will ever be during the pandemic. Now, I know that sounds crazy, but I was just, so if you wouldn’t think that way this is, now’s the time, now’s the time move now timescale and now it’s time to be creative. And there’s probably three, four things from a business structure to do sit, you know, this is a good time also to sit down and reanalyze your own structure, look at what you want to be in five years, recognize all the empty seats, but go ahead, it’s almost like building out an organizational chart that includes what your vision includes, you know, what you’d like for it to see, and if there’s not a seat, don’t be limited by what you have people to put in seats, you know, be just only limited by your imagination, and then have them, isn’t, there’s nothing wrong with having an empty box and have a title, you know, I want to my, my son, I didn’t know that even there was such a thing as Chief Revenue Officer, you know, maybe it has a title, a name, it’s on the internet and everything else, so the next thing I know, he’s hiring a Chief Revenue Officers, I didn’t know that there was such a part of the Chief Financial Officer, this chief executive, I mean, the CEOs, but now the CROs and the CTOs, I mean, there’s a CEO for something. So, the purpose of doing that is to know if you got the right people in the right seats, and if you don’t, you need to move him out of the seats because sometimes, you know, it’s a tendency to promote somebody to something they can’t do, I mean, they may be great on the phone. Next thing, you know, the receptionist is the director of marketing, I mean, you can’t do, you know, you can’t be doing those kinds of things, I mean, you have to recognize when suddenly there’s an empty seat, you know, and place and all that structure. And also, it’s good time, I think now, I think we’ve all if we haven’t learned it, we don’t learn for, so with technology, when you get into the game on technology, when you, if you get to the best state of the art on the technology, and allows you then to move into the systems and make everything work in the processes to be able to monitor, you know, how it’s working. And I’ve constantly, now during the, if there’s a downtime, I wouldn’t spend it watching Netflix, I would spend it working on the organization, you know, getting it ready to move. And matter of fact, I’m a wreck. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard this.
Yeah, Jay talks about it all the time.
Yeah.
And I make, I try, I make a point that about every two years, I reread it. So, and I don’t know if you guys, if you ever had Mike Morris, you know Mike Morris?
Yeah.
We just interviewed him a few weeks ago.
Okay, well, you probably talked about that. And that was the galley proof, I haven’t gotten the other one that sort of makes it applicable. And the benefit, I guess, is learning the language, because it’s a, it’s not a hard transition. I happen to have a business undergraduate degree, and there’s no mystery, there’s no real mystery to it. As a lawyer, sometimes lawyers feel like there’s something about business they don’t understand. Just like business, people feel like there’s something about law they don’t really don’t understand but it’s easy, it’s easy to teach yourself the business terms and the business principles that allow, it’s an internal language that allows your organization to be able to hold itself accountable, and that’s why I’m a proponent of traction or get a grip, I mean, they’re all written by Gina Whitman, or rocket fuel, I mean, that little series is helpful in learning the language and also learning the lane, you know, until I read Rocket Fuel, I was in my house, probably, in my own way, a lot of times because I want to micromanage everything, control everything, you know, thank God, my judgment was better in every category, I mean, man was wrong, I mean, I was really holding, holding back progress by constant conflict with other managers that were better than I was in the departments that they were in. And so that’s why I recommend all your, not business oriented, graduate some business books, they’ll grab late, no need to grab legal books, grab business books, and that helps, that’ll help you scale probably as quick as anything.
Well, Keith, thank you so much. We could keep going on. I’d love to have you back. I want to hear the story of NTL from, you know, inception through what it is today. But this has been awesome. Really, thank you. It means a lot to have you here and you’ve meant a lot to me personally in the growth of my firm. So, just great to sort of sit back and hear the wisdom come right, come right out. Jay, you got any last words?
No, I just want to thank you. I mean, I think one of the things that a lot of people can take away from it, as somebody, you know, Keith, your position with all you’ve accomplished, aren’t you’re still setting quarterly rocks, right? You’re, you’re, you’re doing the things that you need to do to continue to grow, and it’s not something that just comes naturally, it’s something that you have to continually work at, and I think that’s a message that everybody can take away. Or at least one of the multiple things that I know I can take away from this conversation is that this is, this is a marathon not a sprint, and you constantly have to work at it, and you’ve proven it just now by talking about how you come back every two years and you make sure that you’re following the systems and systems scale, all those things matter. So, thank you so much for being with us. I really appreciate your perspective and everything that you’ve brought to the table today.
Well, thank you. And I also, likewise, look up to the two of you. So, and I look forward to following your insight and message and vision. So, thank you all very much.
Thank you.
Thanks, Keith.
All right, take care.
Well, to say wow is an understatement, Seth, that conversation really sort of opened my eyes to a lot of things. It’s, I mean, even this stuff at the very end, you know, talking about traction and notes. It’s a book, it’s a Bible that a lot of people in our community sort of look towards. But what are your thoughts?
No, I mean, look, I’ve always looked at Keith as that guy that was like, oh, why don’t we just slice the bread? You know, before they knew how to do that, like, every time he does something like, oh, yeah, that would make a lot of sense. And he’s done it, and he scaled it, and he does it over and over again, whether it’s Cochran, whether it’s NTL, and, you know, visiting him in Alabama, all of his different local business ventures, oh, we need a wedding venue, oh, this place would be great for that, and next thing you know, he’s invested in it, they, they have a lovely downtown venue for people to do things. So, I am, you know, always in awe and to get this much focused time to hear just what’s going inside his noggin, and really special, really special day.
Yeah, I mean, we’ve prepared for a half hour, we got an over an hour out of them, just to talk about all sorts of things. And I think, you know, some of the things that are cultural touchstones right now, the need for more diversity in law firms, I think, you know, Cochran Firm has done a wonderful thing focusing on that, and I think it shows in their ability to grow, and so that’s certainly something that a lot of people are talking about now and I think it’s something that people can, can take a lesson from and how to do it, and how to do it the right way. But we got to end now, because, you know, as usual, we’ve done over, what else is new. But we want to talk about what’s coming up in next week. So, Seth, why don’t you give a, give our listeners what they have coming up next week?
We got two things next week. Well, Nalini on talking about directories. You know, right now, we talked about the algorithm, you know, nonsense at the beginning of the show, a lot of uncertainty, and that means that where you place your dollars mean that much more, when the algorithm keeps changing over time, not just the, the mistake that Google made, you know, the question is, is it right to be in a directory? Is a cost effective? Is it worth the link juice? Can you get leads from it? That’s the first part. The second, John Fisher new book just came out, a juggernaut, a ton of information, and would love to sort of pick his brain and figure out what, you know, what he’s seen, because he’s kept his firm small, but the information he’s providing is really a blueprint for any law firm that wants to create systems, he quotes you a lot and wants to be able to scale, the same fundamentals are there and can’t wait to do a deep dive with him.
Yeah, so that’s great. So, for that, we’re going to end this episode now, that’s going to do it for us. But if you wanted to take us on the go, you can download the Maximum Growth Live podcasts on any one of the podcasting platforms. I have a preference for Apple podcasts and your Google guy, Seth, but it’s also available on Spotify. And you can tune in every Thursday for another edition of Maximum Growth Live. So, thank you for being with us today. If you have questions, please feel free to give us a comment down below, if you have any suggestions, you can also DM us on any one of our social channels. We’re happy to talk to you about this program and bring you the type of content you need to grow your firm. So, for that, for Jay Ruane, for Seth Price, we’ll say goodbye. Have a wonderful week and we’ll see you next Thursday here on another edition of Maximum Growth Live.
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