More Likely Than Not, that 0.01% is all it takes to tip the scales of justice. Join us as inner circle legend, Charla Aldous, Eleanor Aldous, and Caleb Miller walk you through the critical moments, big decisions, and bold strategies that win high stakes cases and show you how to turn that 0.01% into a game-changing verdict. You're listening to the podcast where winning is More Likely Than Not. Produced and powered by LawPods.

Welcome to the next episode of More Likely Than Not. We are so excited to have the one, the only Jarrett Stone here on the podcast today. He is the founder of Law Venture and he also is the author of the book, Win the PI Game, which you can find on Amazon. And he talks about in that book, what we're going to talk about today, which is how do you run your own PI firm and how do you build it into a successful venture? We're so excited to have him here today.

I appreciate the intro. That's very humbling. I'm pumped. I'm ready to talk about this.

And I'll mention I've known Jarrett now for quite a while, so we're actually ... I'm lucky enough to have him as a friend, as well as just a guest on the podcast.

I'll be honest, Caleb, given our history, I'm just glad Eleanor's here to act as guardrails because otherwise this would go any direction.

I agree with that. I agree with that. But before we get into some of the substance of today's episode- You

Mean the meat and potatoes?

Well, you guys just gave me a hard time for saying meat and potatoes over and over again. So I thought I'd pivot a bit, but sure. Before we get into the meat and potatoes of the episode, Jared, why don't you tell the listeners what you're doing with your career right now?

So I'm solo and I've been solo for quite some time. We'll, I'm sure go through that origin story. But since running my own law firm, which is virtual, I've been able to have great profit margin and seeing great growth. And the indicator of success for me personally is that I can get a sense of my retirement age becoming sooner and sooner and sooner based on how things have been going. And I've gotten to the point now where I can do whatever I want to do. I can coast in my career. I can ramp up in my career. I can pivot away in my career. So my law firm's given me a lot of freedom, which is why I wrote the book and why I'm more than happy to talk about anything and everything that I've done in order to get to this point.

Can I ask a quick question? What do you mean when you say your firm is fully virtual? I know some of our listeners are going to wonder what that means.

I run an entire law practice out of my house. Now, I have a designated office converted an old attic space into a nice office space, but it's all virtual. There's no actual physical office. And it's an employee of one, so it's just me. And it's kind of trippy at times because I'm dealing with national counsel for these insurance companies and they're in the high rise massive buildings with a hundred lawyers. I got six lawyers CC'd on emails, and it's just me probably in sweats in my house more often than not working away.

Are you doing the thing? Charla used to tell us this story where before she could hire anybody in her firm, she would say, "All this Law." And you're kind of answering a different voice so they think there's more employees around?

No, I own it. So this is one of those things where it's like, I'm not trying to put up a front of any sort. I mean, when I answer, I just say law firm. But I've had potential clients where I'm talking to them on the phone and at some point, I guess they don't expect to immediately talk to a lawyer. I think feel like they are going to work their way up to it. And then once they realize they are talking to a lawyer, the shift and dynamic changes and the relief that I get on the phone is fantastic. And clients like that immediate contact is what I've learned. And I've also learned that over the years, clients don't really want to swing by the office just to say hi. If they ever need anything, it's a phone call or a Zoom video call away.

So virtual's really worked for me.

How do you manage that though, having all these PNC calls while also actually doing the law work?

That is probably going to be up there on my more controversial approaches. I told a marketing person what I do and they were floored with snails on the jockboard of them. So I don't do any advertising. Everything for my law firm's growth has all been word of mouth referrals. It helps keep the incoming calls a pretty healthy baseline. And then my website, and this is where people are going to potentially cringe, don't freak out, don't overreact. My website actually doesn't have my law firm's phone number on it. Instead, it's a form and the form acts as a filtering process to where if they check off certain boxes and I know based on how they answer that I would be interested in those calls, then it gets routed to me. So in those situations, that acts as a filtering or I get a referral from a provider and the provider's office effectively is a filtering process as well.

They know what cases I'm looking for. The only X factor in the situation is where it's a previous client's like family member or friend. That's more of like, it just comes in and we'll see how it goes.

When you set up these filters on your online form, does it have to do with what injuries have you suffered? Are you just assessing damages or are you assessing liability? Are you doing all the things?

So step one is liability, and usually it's having them answer whether or not that's clear. I think most people, whenever they are trying to call- They're like, "It's very clear." Yeah, it's very clear. I was wrong. "Here's what

My cases

Were." Exactly. And then the phone call itself allows me to filter that out. So then it becomes a damage thing. Is this, are you calling because you have an issue with property damage or are you calling because bodily injury? Property, I'm not going to handle it. And there's an explanation why. The form doesn't just say, sorry, it gives context to why I'm not the right fit for them. I

Bet people appreciate that. I

Hope so. I wouldn't know because they don't get filtered to me, but ultimately it gives them that path, it gives them that context. And then when I'm on that phone call with them, I kind of revisit the filtering process to see if they're the right fit.

I want to backtrack a bit because we've talked about what you're doing now and how you've been running a virtual law firm for how many years?

So I want you to tell the listeners a little bit about how you decided to go out on your own. And I think that'll be relevant later to some of what you're explaining in your book and what people who want to start their own firm should do.

Yeah. I'm a big believer of getting out what I'm putting into something. And I know when we're baby lawyers and associates, it's not really that one-to-one ratio. What we're trying to get at that point is I would say two things, one being experience, the other being connections, like building your potential referral sources. So for me, when I came out of law school, I mean, I took a job that paid less than my peers and I took that job over other jobs that paid more because I knew I'd get great experience and great exposure. And through the first three years or so as an associate, I was learning a lot and learning to the point where this particular job dynamic didn't have me siloed on what my role was. So it wasn't like, "Hey, you're only pre-lit or you're only lit." I was seeing all aspects of handling a case from A to Z, which lifted a lot of anxiety of, "Oh, if I go solo, I'll be able to handle everything if it's just an employee of one." And so that gave me a lot of confidence.

When you say old mindset, it's so funny to me because I think a lot of people think you have to have an office because when clients come in, they want to be impressed or if you have to have meetings or if you have to have depositions. Was that kind of what you mean when you say the old ideas of needing a brick and mortar office?

Yeah. Yeah. I actually, very early on during this process on Law Ventures YouTube video, I made a video addressing this because I think if you're either watching or listening right now, you probably have some gut reaction and objections to this. For example, what if there is a deposition? What do you do? Now it's pretty standard to do virtual depositions. In fact, my office has all the techs set up ready to go and I prefer virtual, but let's just play devil's advocate here and say, "What if you want it in person?" I'll just go to the defense lawyer's office and do it there and be totally fine. I don't feel like home territory versus away territory really affects me in any way. Push come to shove. I'm always down to rent a space if I need to. Renting a space for even a month, that's not bad compared to having a space I don't really need for an annual lease, that's totally different.

In some cities, they have court reporting offices where you can rent out the room just for the day. I actually just learned that in Oklahoma City. I mean, I'm sure it's expensive, but I get what you're saying. There are options out there.

Now at this stage, it's like, "Oh, okay, the technology makes sense." But what I realized was I'm doing this all from home and nobody cares. This isn't holding anything. Money's being sent electronically. I drop it off in the mail, and I haven't looked back since. I let the lease expire. I didn't renew it, and that eliminated a massive amount of overhead that I was anticipating. And that was what was game changing for me because it allowed my law firm to start profiting more, much more quickly. So whenever I would get a sizable lick on a case, attorney's fees come in, they're not immediately going out the door. And that allowed me to have a lot of financial flexibility.

And so I guess at a certain point you figured out what you need, what you didn't need, and then along the way, you would make videos for other people out there that were going through the same things you were, right?

I'm a big believer that I'm one chapter ahead of somebody, and I want to be able to teach that person who is essentially me a chapter earlier. Now, as I go down my experience book of sorts, I'm maybe three or four chapters ahead from certain people, but maybe still one. So I'm a big believer in teaching what I know and kind of passing that on. During this time period where I was sharing this idea of like, "Guys, I think I'm going to start a virtual law firm with the YouTube audience I was growing." Nobody else was making content like that because it was so new. And so I didn't know if there was anybody a chapter before me at the time. I was like, "This could crash and burn, and at least I'd be a public study of what not to do. " But it ended up going really well.

And so yeah, I was trying to teach that to as many people as I could because I love the idea of somebody being able to control their own career trajectory, especially in such a stressful field and having a sense of freedom from that. And if you can do it to where, again, you have great margins, those margins give you the freedom. Are you investing in yourself? Are you investing in yourself personally? Are you investing in your business? It gives you so many choices. And if you ever do want to scale into an office, I'm not opposed to that. It's just get that foundation and then make that decision at that point instead of immediately jumping into the deep end. Because notice I didn't say that I had to take out a massive loan. I didn't take any loan out. It was just a matter of putting myself in a good financial position based on balling on a budget.

And now you have the flexibility to do what you want. So when you're talking about these YouTube videos where you're trying to help the person who's maybe a chapter or multiple chapters behind you, that's law venture.

Yes.

That has me wondering, was there anyone that you followed who was a chapter ahead of you that kind of led the way? Or was this something you just kind of had to figure out on your own?

That's a great question. I would say when it comes to litigation and the actual practicing of law, I would consume anything out there. Every video on YouTube at the time that involved Mark Lanier, watch it multiple times over. But frankly, during that time, there wasn't a lot of content. And I think it's not too surprising because as lawyers, we're busy and it's just, I don't think a lot of lawyers also had the technical experience to run a podcast like I'm seeing in front of me right now. We still don't, as you could see from our delays starting today. Exactly.

So I imagine it was a lot of trial and error then.

Pun intended, yes. And at the end of the day, it was just me posting and I didn't know if anybody would watch it. And then at some point I started getting comments of like, "Hey, you're the reason why I started my own law firm and now I'm doing better than I ever did with my career." Or now one of my favorite comments was that her and her husband are now planning early retirement because her trajectory totally changed. And that just fuels me to want to lean into law venture again, based on the freedom that my law firm has provided me.

And this is a cool story I want to share with the audience and you remember this. So Jerrick and I were teaching high school mock trial. This is like three or four years ago probably. I got connected with this mock trial coach from a friend of a friend and she's great. She was asking me if I know any other lawyers that would want to help. And so I thought of a friend of mine, Drew Thomas, and I thought of Jared Stone, and the three of us went and we taught sophomores through seniors how to do mock trial. The first night that Jared walks in to teach, they all look at him like he's a celebrity and the teacher says, "You're Jared Stone of Law Venture."

Oh my gosh.

Unbeknownst to us, the teacher had been looking for ways to teach the mock trial students how to open how to close, and Jared had made those videos. And so she had been teaching the class from his law venture, and then here he was in the classroom. It was pretty cool.

I was as red as a strawberry. I've never been spotted like that.

The paps got you.

Totally, totally. And the kids were great and they were asking all these questions. It made them feel more comfortable. And that was one of those moments where it's like, yeah, I didn't make those videos and that content for any particular reason other than just the teach. And frankly, it's like, what did I want at that stage that I was in and trying to just pass that knowledge on, which is why I eventually wrote the book because it's like, if there is somebody out there who is considering starting a law firm, any objection you have, I've probably heard it and there's ways to handle it and there's ways to pivot.

So I want to talk about some of the concepts now in the book because there's a lot of really good things here for, I think people starting out on their own, but frankly, for people who have their own firms already. There's things that I learned for the first time when I read your book that I just had no idea. So I think this is something that can help anybody in their career as long as you probably practice personal injury law. So the first thing you start out or one of the first things you say in your book, the reason why you want to do this, the reason to win the game is so that you can be free of it. And it's an interesting quote because it's kind of counterintuitive, right? We're never taught that, oh, hey, start this successful company or this firm so that you can eventually leave.

Tell us what you meant by putting that quote in and what was the purpose for you of this adventure with your firm and with Law Venture and everything else?

Yeah. So that quote is from Naval, who I found on Twitter. And the purpose of playing the game is so you can win it and be free of it is a really important concept that I do want to stress and make the context to be the same. It's not always to leave the situation. In my mind, winning the game and being free of it is having the freedom to leave it or pivot.

Yeah, it can be free of it.

Exactly. And I think dynamics shift whenever you have the choice to do what you want to do, and that puts you in a different mindset. So if you're not enjoying it, then the mindset is, I can always leave it. If you're loving it, then the mindset is, "I'm going all in and I'm going to keep doing this until that changes." And so in my mind, it's all about freedom and then the question starts becoming, well, how do you get that freedom? And so the way I present that in the book, especially for lawyers who want to start a PI firm, again, it's about balling on a budget early, building word of mouth referrals so that you get fantastic ROI, doing great job with clients so that they become your walking billboards and another referral source. And then as your income and your client exposure and these cases start rolling in, if you're pretty disciplined with your expenses, you're just going to see compounding growth so that you can make the choice of what best serves you.

I sent early copies of this book to numerous lawyers and some lawyers were like, "Yes, early retirement, that's my goal." Other lawyers were saying, I would always want to pivot to maybe investing or doing real estate. Other lawyers are like, "No, I want to have a larger associate team make more of an impact, sponsor little league baseball, have my law firm's name on the back of their jerseys." All those options are going to be very intimate for what the lawyer truly wants. And part of it is having that, I would say, identity crisis of sorts of like, what do I want? If I can have everything and achieve everything with my law firm, what serves me and figuring that out.

A lot of people are going to be afraid hearing that, right? That means you're not just following the regular trajectory of, "Okay, I start out as an associate. I got to work my way to partner. I got to do this, that, and the other." Instead, they have to do a real internal inspection and figure it out and be okay with pivoting. So I mean, that's pretty cool. I mean, it sounds like this is all about empowerment, the freedom and the empowerment to do what you want.

Absolutely. I go to therapy on a regular basis and whenever I told my therapist early on about the potential pivot to where spoiler alert, eventually I am going to close down my law firm or kind of be semi-retired. The law firm entity itself will probably be up and running, and it'll take a few years, but at some point, that was kind of like a stop moment for my therapist. It was like, okay, is this a cry for help or is this actually a healthy decision? And I told them, I was like, "Look, my ego's in check. I don't need to have a certain lifestyle based on my ego where it's driven by me having to be at my law firm." Again, a freedom thing. Once my ego was getting in check, I have an ego. I'm going to deny that. But once my ego started getting in check and the lay of the land of what my future could be based off of that, it gave me more freedom because it's like, do I need a fancy car every single year?

Do I need a massive house? Do I need the Harvey Spector office from suits? And it's like, I don't really have any desire about that. I spent five weeks in Europe last year and I love that. And it was like I had freedom to be able to travel and I ran my virtual law firm from there. I was like, okay, so if I keep my ego in check, that gives me certain perspective. The other part of it is I do think it's uncomfortable for myself and for any lawyer to have to stop and breathe and assess because we've always been pushing forward. I

Mean- Yeah, we put our heads down and we get to work.

Exactly. And coming up for air can be kind of scary and disorienting. And in fact, this last year was really good for me financially with my law firm and it rattled me. It totally rattled me because it's like, what do I do with this money and the profit? Because that felt like it was going to become an identity. Once you start making decisions with a lot of money, you're kind of putting yourself out there of what your purpose is and you can very easily be tempted to be lazy of like, just grow, grow, grow and not ever think, is this what I actually want? Again, if that is what you want, do the reflection and that is what you want, go for it 100%. But the last thing you want to do is be 20 years down a path that you've never truly wanted to be on in the first place.

Or never even really thought about before you ventured off of it.

Exactly.

Or be looking back and saying, "I could have had 10 years back in my life to do something different."

And imagine where that trajectory could go based off of that path. And so yeah, there's a lot of reflection when you become a business owner and you have a law firm because you're steering the ship and so you decide where you want to steer that ship and at some point you decide you have to do an entire totality of the circumstance, using a legal phrase, of what is going to serve you because it's not just the law firm world anymore because if you have a lifestyle that is overly expensive and indulgent, any business owner knows that that undercuts the law firm as well. It's just like having a bloated law firm to where in order to fund that lifestyle, you need to increase your law firm and your results. So they very quickly, when you are that CEO, become merged in a sense. And that's why it becomes this intimate decision of what you personally want to do because it's simultaneously a decision for your law firm as well.

I want to talk to you about some of the most common myths you hear people say about going out on your own and I'll start with one I've heard and I think you already kind of debunked this one a little bit, but I have to save up two or 300,000 before I could start a firm. What would you say to that?

That's wild to me because I probably had like two or 3,000 in the bank at the time I started a law firm. So in the book, I have different factors to consider, which is, okay, do you have the money and the budget in order to just weather the storm, start a law firm from scratch and take it from there? That's one aspect. Or do you have the case flow? In my situation, I had case flow and I didn't have a lot of money at the time. And the case flow was a life support to where I knew cases would start paying out within reason, right? Because we know in the personal injury world, you sign up a case today, is it going to pay out in six months, a year, two years, right? But in my situation, whenever I made that decision, I knew I had some policy limit cases that were going to hit pretty quickly.

So experience allowed me to see my case flow as a lifeline. The other part of it being experience. If you go solo, do you have the experience to be able to handle things and assess things as well? If you don't have the experience, you need time. Time then is going to be circle us back to the money aspect. So if you feel like you lack an experience in case flow, having money stacked up is going to help give you the time to build your connections, help give you the time to get experience. But if you're rich in the other aspects, you don't really need the money. So I would assume that the people who are still listening and still watching this point are in the PI world. They're probably not going to be totally new. So I would say more often than not, you don't need to have hundreds of thousands of dollars either saved or loaned.

Jerry, I have a question about that. So obviously one of those is experience. None of us are all knowing. I mean, I know my mom who's been practicing for 38 years is still learning, right? So it's not about having all the experience, it's having enough experience to feel confident going on your own. Do you have though sources or friends or other lawyers who you can call when you're working up a case and you have the experience level, but you still need some advice on how do I handle this?

You're sitting next to them. Caleb Miller is one of my go- to guys. So my previous boss who was a go- to person, and I had people like Caleb in my life, and that's part of why with Law Ventures specifically, I'm not trying to create to where it's just an echo chamber of me. I'm trying to bring people together for community so that can help with that transition process. And when I went solo, it was pre-AI. So it's not like I could ask AI, "Hey, how do I

Handle this? " Yeah, Claude, help me.

Exactly. And so a support group is fantastic. With this mic that was just handed to me, I'm going to look at the camera. I'm going to specifically say this. I think a lot of personal injury plaintiff lawyers are defense lawyers in disguise and they don't even know it themselves. And what I mean by this is they're so focused on the next paycheck that they're not evaluating their cases the way they should and they're starting to use more of the formulaic insurance approach or they don't have the experience/confidence in order to fairly evaluate the case as well. And when I say the experience/confidence, I think part of that comes from having the time to really build and research your client's case. So I've always had parameters as best as I can. There have been seasons of my legal career where I've been busier than I would want, but I've always had parameters built within my law firm of my workload.

And if it's a case that's more complicated, I want to be able to give it the atignment, the attention that it deserves because oftentimes I think when you are that law firm owner, what feels comfortable is quantity and you lose sight of the quality in the cases. And so you're onto the next one, onto the next one, and you're not necessarily maximizing value for each case. So in my situation, for example, I've been developing a new approach and strategies with UM/UIM cases in Texas based on developing law. And in those scenarios, I've been able to get 2X or 3X value that lawyers used to tell me, "You don't do this, you're wrong." And they started cutting checks and it's like, "Okay, I think I may be onto something."

So that's where the confidence comes in.

Confidence, but that requires time. So I preach very heavily in the book like, look, once you feel some semblance of safety, don't lean too much into the busyness. Busyness will become detrimental. You need to associate having time as your business having an R&D department, research and development. You need to be able to sharpen your skills in order to get more out of your cases. And that's where I think you start seeing that exponential growth because then you stand out. You're just not a lawyer who gets mediocre results based off of numbers. Your lawyer who gets great results based on limited numbers and word starts spreading and that word of mouth continues and continues.

So it's kind of like time to think.

Yes.

It goes back to a myth though, right? One of the myths we hear probably in law school, but when we're young lawyers too, is like, you want to sign up as many cases as you can. More cases, the better. And that goes back to one of the myths, which you don't need that many cases to be successful. You get to a point if you're signing 200 cases and you don't have the infrastructure to handle it, you're probably not more profitable than somebody who might have 20 cases because your money comes in, it goes out right away, and then you're too busy to be able to put the work in to get the quality to maximize the value.

And it's the 80 / 20 principle is what I've learned is the cases that you spend 80% of your time make up 20% of your income and vice versa. The ones that you spend 20 ... I mean, it's the high maintenance cases The ones that really get my attention, $10,000 cases. Ends up being that. The clients that know their cases are high value and I educate them on the process, they want me to take my time. They want it done right. They understand there's only one bite at this apple. And so they give me the time to let it breathe. The ones that are smaller cases that are the ones that help keep the lights on, especially during your early days, those are the clients who they want the quick results in order to get their $5,000 so that they can just move on with their life.

If you have too much of the small ones and you have too much of those clients in your ear, it's hard to-

Not transfer it over to the big ones.

Exactly. Exactly. And I'm a big walker. I love walking and just kind of thinking and figuring out, okay, what's this strategy? How am I going to handle this? I always joke, you give me enough walking distance, I'm probably solve most of the world's problems. But that allows me to help strategize because I also know that that's our competitive advantage as plaintiff's lawyers. Defense firms are based on quantity.

Churn and burn.

Totally. And so they're not thinking many moves ahead. And the reason why, for example, the UM/UIM strategies that are new that I've been implementing, they haven't seen it coming. They haven't seen the law shift because they're not able to take that step back and see it. So by the time you're implementing different strategies, new approaches, they've already lost and you're maybe four or five cases in at least on these new strategies that you can maximize. So R&D time, that's going to be so critical. So if you are either starting your law firm or you have your own law firm, you need to have boundaries, you need to respect that time.

I was thinking of this story. So Jared was doing all this experimental stuff with UIM cases. And truly what he's saying is absolutely correct. The defense lawyers didn't know what to do with this, but one time we had a UIM case at the office and I hadn't really worked on a lot of them and it's been a long time since I've had a UIM case. And so I asked Jared if I could look at one of his demand letters. And so I send one. Well, I've used some of the language that he's added in over the last couple years for the new cases. And this is just hilarious. The insurance company for the UIM carrier ended up hiring an attorney just to look at the demand because they didn't know what to do with it because they were afraid that they would owe more than the policy limit based on failure to tender immediately.

And I called him and he just started laughing and he's like, "This is what's happening to me all the time."

It's funny for people who can't see or just listening, you should see the pasa meet and dodo grin that Jared has on his face right now.

It's a different kind of scaling in my mind because the natural thought of scaling is more cases, more staff, and you scale that way. But I'm a big believer in scaling through depth. And if you develop a new strategy or you figure out how to get more value on one case and you can repeat that with all your cases, you're increasing your case value by scale. And so if you're getting 25% or 50% more value than other lawyers with less cases, then you can decide what kind of life you want to have to where do you want to have a little extra free time? Do you want to be able to travel? So

You can go on more walks.

Go on more walks, stay active. Yes.

Quick question. So just going back, you talked about experience and case flow. A lot of people listening are going to wonder, how do you get these cases? How did you get this case flow going for yourself? Can you just talk just very briefly about your journey in building that case flow?

It's the very briefly caveat that you gave me

That's going to be

The hardest part. I know.

Well, because I can see Caleb jumping at the bit to get to the rest of what we've planned on.

Oh yeah.

But this is probably the most important thing because anybody who is solo or is wanting to go solo is like, okay, where's the money coming from? How'd you figure that out? And the big thing about word of mouth referrals is those are free. And what I can't stress enough is if you have providers sending you clients, they're the ones spending the money on ads and they're the ones who are taking on that risk and they're your filtering process and they're your advocates. It just makes it so easy to get good cases whenever the patient for them, a. K.a. The potential new client for you is on the phone. And so what I started focusing on was meeting and connecting with chiropractors. Chiropractors are a great source, in my opinion, for just getting your baseline foundation inflow of cases because when it comes to just a numbers game, they're going to see more people.

They want personal injury cases. The opportunity of being able to sign up those people will be higher as well because typically a first touchpoint. If you're trying to connect with an orthopedic surgeon, more often than not, those people already have a lawyer involved or they've gone without a lawyer for so long, the case is going to be not very good. And so what I was doing was I would go to chiropractic offices and I would, one, introduce myself, but two, I would teach them like, "Hey, if you handle your own first party claims, this is what you should do. This is how it works. Or if you want to use me, feel free." And I had chiropractors tell me like, "Oh yeah, we've had this office for many, many years. You're the first lawyer to ever set foot in this office." And from that point on, it's just a matter of showing up for the providers.

And so for example, with particular first party coverage, PIP and/or MedPay, I don't take a contingency fee on that. I handle that for free. So when the providers having that bill submitted through PIP or MedPay, I'll handle it. So I effectively act as a lawyer kind of in their interest, obviously representing my own client, but they don't need a legal team and they don't need to hire staff in order to handle these insurance disputes and fights. They're like, "No, we're going to have an entire lawyer handle this and he's not going to take a cut of this. "

And it's the right thing to do.

Absolutely. And so money comes in, client is like, "Yeah, let's get the bills paid." They get paid with no weight on their infrastructure from a provider standpoint. Client, I take care of them on the bodily injury liability or if it's UM/UIM side, they're happy. Everyone just collectively as a team is having a great experience. And I always tell the providers like, "Look, if you're the one referring the case to me, if it requires a reduction, I'm going to reduce first because you advertise, you put the expenses in. " And at that point it's like, why wouldn't I keep using Jared because we don't have to hire people, he handles it and then he's first to take reductions. So many, so many providers have told me that they have lawyers reaching out asking for these crazy reductions with no context. And that's like the first impression it is with the lawyer.

And so many lawyers reach out to me and they're like, "Jared, I don't know if I can go solo these days. I feel like the market's so saturated with personal injury lawyers. How am I supposed to stand out? " And I tell them, every provider I talk to, they can probably list a hundred lawyers, but if you ask them how many lawyers they trust and go to, it'll be one. Hopefully Jared.

All of them will say Jared.

And every single one in Texas, across the board. No, that's what's great. I didn't realize I had that level of commitment from these providers until they started calling me on my cell phone with their own legal issues or their own legal questions.

Yeah, they trust you.

Yeah. And that's what it comes down to. And so at that point, they funneled the entire business PI through me because of the connection. I do good work. So that's my big recommendation for anybody listening, anybody watching is go face-to-face, educate, explain these things and then allow that relationship to nourish.

I think part of the problem too is maybe we feel like we're so busy that you don't want to take the time to go in person to do the things that are free, right? We'd rather throw $30,000 at a pay-per-click ad campaign and complain when we're not getting the cases instead of going and taking people to lunch or going to offices. It's a weird thing to think about.

I think it's insecurity, frankly. I mean, I'm going to pivot us back to therapy because imagine putting yourself out there. You're trying to connect with this provider, get their business, and they don't send you any case.That kind of hurts the ego.That doesn't feel great. And it's much less intimate compared to doing Google ads or Facebook ads.

Because you're not really a person at that point, you're an entity.

Exactly. And then you're hoping to get business through that. And I think that's where there's a lot of reluctance and resistance. And if I had to guess, there's probably a correlation to the lawyers who are willing to put themselves out there and them being good trial lawyers. Because if you're willing to put yourself out there in front of a jury, you probably don't even care about what a provider says in the grand scheme of things. Those people are probably going to get outsized results compared to somebody who is wanting to stay behind a keyboard in all aspects. They may use time as an excuse, but I think it's more of an insecurity.

So if someone went to you and said, "Jared, I have $20,000 or $30,000 for marketing budget. I just went out and started my own firm." How would you tell them to use that money?

I would use it as a buffer in order to get more time, more freedom so that you can step away to go connect with these providers. If your assessment is showing that you don't have any case flow coming in through word of mouth, then that means it's truly taking you money to make money and that snowball's only going to get bigger. If you want to make more money, you got to spend more money. In my situation, I call it on LawVenture, walking billboards. I have these people and these connections that if they ever see a car wreck, then they are referring people to me versus the opposite of a traditional billboard. A car wreck, you see them, "I don't really know that lawyer. Oh, there's another billboard over there." You're having to compete with other billboards, it's a different experience. And so again, I'm not trying to say that you should never advertise similar, like I've said, you should never scale, but I think there is a time to advertise and that's once the foundation of your walking billboards and your word of mouth referrals is built.

And if you want to ignite it with fuel, then that's the time to do so.

So basically what you're saying is if you're starting out your firm and you have this 20 to 30,000 set aside for marketing, take it away from marketing, allocate it elsewhere.

And you just figure out collectively what you do with this extra money.

So if you're investing your money in the stock market or whatever else your investment is, you're saying over time, you're saying, if this is $100,000, well, that represents one year I could operate the law firm with no business. And then at that point, that frees you up to go get more business because now you can take your time.

Exactly right. And you can find the right business because if you're struggling to keep the lights on because your expenses are so high, you're going to take cases that are going to be higher risk. Earlier we talked about the filtering process. Your filter's going to get way more relaxed whenever you need money and you're having to really see what happens. You may take cases where liability is a little questionable or proving damages may be more difficult. And what ends up happening on those cases, you spend more time on those cases. Those cases become more headaches. And if you have just additional case flow coming in, then you're just increasing your headaches as well. So yeah, this is all interplaying at the same time.

I'm going to go back and ask you a couple more questions specifically about things you mentioned in the book that I think our listeners would be interested in. So if you had to tell somebody starting their own firm, what are the absolutely necessary tools you have to have, what would be on your list? Physical equipment, staff, what things would you say?

Internet.

Is that it?

Basically, I mean-

On a computer.

Yeah. Yeah. If you have an internet without computer, you're really missing out. A law license. You need your law license.

Yeah, you just stare at the modem.

Yeah. Look, it's one of those things where the technology and the recommendation is always shifting. I'm going to try and do my best on Law Ventures website to keep an up-to-date, here's what I'm using, and have it almost tiered to where ... Maybe if you're in the beginning stage of balling on a budget, this is kind of a cheaper approach, maybe not be as seamless, but here's your option if you want to throw a little extra money. For me, I'll say that the heavy hitters on value is, one, I have a permanent mailbox through UPS. That's the law firm address on that. Everything goes there. That way, my address from home isn't on the letterhead. Two, I use Google Drive and Google Workspace, which comes with Google Drive, Google Docs and all those things. So that's what truly keeps me virtual on uploading files and whatnot.

The other aspect now is, you mentioned Claude. I'm more of a Gemini person because of-

Oh, Google.

Yeah.

Don't debate Eleanor over

That. She's

Real sensitive over the- Claude's my boyfriend and then I have Eve. She's my girlfriend. It's fine.

Is it turning into from 20 years ago? Remember Mac versus PC, you'd have those commercials? Yes, exactly. Pepsi

And Coke.

Exactly. Now it's AI. But because of me being in the Google Workspace world, Gemini's integration has been fantastic. So whatever AI you use, that's like in my mind, having an associate at very high value. Just caveat, obviously, what you're getting with AI at this stage is a great associate that can do research and that can write, but you're always going to have to be wielding, right? Seeing the strategy and playing chess, AI is just not there, but it saves me so much time. That's a big one. And then I use Google Voice as well for the phone system, so that way it's not my cell phone. I mean, early on I used, I can't even remember what the phone service was that went through my cell phone and I began to resent my cell phone. It was way too active. Friends couldn't get in contact with me because I would just throw my cell phone somewhere and never go back to it.

So having that type of separation and boundary with Google Voice so that it's called a soft phone. So it basically is a phone through my computer.

That's really cool. I don't know that I've ever looked at that before.

I will send you a link.

I don't know if we really need it over here, but I need to check it out. I just have a couple more questions and then I want to move on to some ending questions before we end the episode. But what would you say are the most common fears you see with people associated with starting a firm or the people that you talk with on LawVinsure?

Yeah. So we hit on one of them. One of them is oversaturation. They see the commercials, they see the billboards, they listen to the radio, they hear the radio commercials as well, and they just assume there's just way too much competition. But in reality, there's just a lot of noise in my mind. And what you really need at that point is just connection with providers.That's how you offset. Exactly. That's how you offset it. Another objection is usually what we talked about with having enough money saved or the fear of having to get a loan. And I think there needs to be a recalibration of what you truly need based on the technology that's available and maybe what your ego is wanting you to have versus what is necessary. And then I would say the final thing isn't necessarily an objection. It's just a little bit of a psychological data point that I've noticed is that the people who reach out to me to treat me to lunch in order to ask questions because they want to go solo.

When I was sending out my book, I would send them free copies and like, "Hey, whatever questions you have, just send it to me and I'm happy to answer because I may want to put this in my book." And the paradox was that the people who were telling me they wanted to start a law firm wouldn't follow up with me. The people who were established in law firms, the Caleb Millers of the world would just digest the book in a couple days and give me feedback and all that. And I think there's an element where it's psychological. It's just so easy to have an obstacle in front of you to justify either the delay or just not eventually pulling the trigger. So maybe some self-reflection to see if that is something you're doing because my job is to make you uncomfortable with this book. My job is to take away all the objections and obstacles that seem perceived and then that way you can kind of jump in and bet on yourself.

Yeah. They don't have an excuse anymore really. And if they start asking questions, they have more information, which means they really could do it if they wanted to. Yeah.

And I think it seems easy for some of the people that are like, "Hey, will you come do lunch with me? " And if I don't have lunch with them, it's like, "Well,

I guess it doesn't happen." I can't do it. You can't do it. I tried.

Gave it my best effort. Well, I want to end with some questions that I think would be interesting. Some of our listeners, and the first one I have is if you could give any advice to a lawyer that's considering going out on their own, what would you tell them?

I would say just, honestly, it's the self-reflection portion because that's going to lead into what is motivating you and that motivation is going to ultimately get you to where it's like, where am I trying to go? Doing the self-work on what you're wanting and figuring out what's maybe holding you back. And again, I think it's a lot like being a trial lawyer. There's elements there where you have to stop thinking like a company and be more passionate and be more open and more vulnerable. And so I think that starts at the end with the jury trial, but at the beginning with starting a business.

I guess this is kind of along the lines of that, but if you could go back in time and tell yourself one thing on the day you hung up your shingle, although your virtual shingle, what would it be?

Ooh, it would like an avoidance to avoid issues or ...

It could be that, or how would you have empowered yourself or what pops in your mind?

I don't know if it would've worked, but if future self could talk to younger self, it'd be like, "Don't be so nervous. Don't be so anxious." But also, if anybody ever tells me not to be anxious, does that ever

Work? No, it makes me more anxious.

Exactly. So I think I would try to do that.

That kind of comes with time, I guess.

I think it does. I think you just have to accept that it comes with time and growth. The other part of it

Being- So maybe be patient.

Yeah, be patient. And I'm very proud of myself for having the confidence of pulling that trigger when I did. Maybe I could have pulled it a little bit earlier, but that's just splitting hairs. So I think just being patient, accepting that this just takes time and it'll be okay. I mean, honestly, my first year was during COVID. And so the anxiety had never been higher because of that. It's like, I mean, if I needed an excuse for things failing that I could tell people and be like, "It wasn't me. It was COVID."

But it's funny because COVID also kind of catapulted you into your virtual law firm and gave you the ... You pivoted, you used it as an opportunity.

Absolutely. That's why I'm like, there's no regrets, maybe some fine tuning over the years, but yeah, I've liked how things have turned out.

Yeah. You're almost seven years now, right?

Yeah.

Crazy.

I thought you were going to say you're almost 70. Oh

Yeah, no.

I've had a lot of work done. So what's in store for the Stone Law Firm for Law Venture for win the PI game in the future?

So for Stone Firm, the next step is basically the existing cases that I have is to finish them out at max value. And there's a lot of heavy hitters in those cases. Even if I'm being reasonable in my trajectory on those, I think they're going to put me in a very comfortable spot, like more comfortable than I already am. And then as those are dwindling down and my free time is gearing up, pivoting that free time to do more Law Venture stuff. So the goal is to put more content out to help teach people, maybe do more podcast interviews, and to ultimately build community so that Law Venture, again, isn't an echo chamber of Jared Stone, but it is a community of personal injury lawyers coming together so that we can all catapult one another.

If our listeners wanted to find a way to contact you to find Law Venture to read your book, how can they do that?

Yeah, lawventure.com, that's going to take you to all the links and all the paths. So yeah, just check that out. And if there's any questions that you have, if you want to find me on Instagram, first name's a little confusing. So on video, put it down below. But for those listening, J-A-R-R-E-T-T, Stone Law.

Well, thank you so much for joining us today. If anybody wants to learn more, I would suggest you go pick up the book, win the PI game. It's an easy read. You'd probably finish it in two to three days and it is just so, so helpful. So thank you again. And if you have any questions at all for us, you want specific people on future episodes, please contact us at [email protected]. Thanks.

I think you can tell, and we at Aldous Law here, we actually kind of like each other and we absolutely love, love what we do. And we work a lot of our cases up from the get- go, but we're brought in on cases a lot. We try cases all across the nation. If you have a case that you're interested in talking to us about, we'd love to hear from you. We've tried everything from trucking, workplace injuries, explosions and burn cases, dram shops, ride-share sexual assaults, birth injury, your personal injury cases. If you need a partner to help you with your case, please call us. We can be contacted at aldoslaw.com. We'd love to hear from you.

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