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James “Jimmy” Grant from Georgia Trial Attorneys at Kirchen & Grant, LLC joins us on the podcast today to discuss how he became an attorney, started a personal injury firm and now helps other PI lawyers with litigation.
Jimmy is a true entrepreneur and plans on offering their services to other personal injury law firms all over the US.
Jimmy can be found on TikTok @AccidentAttorneyJG or you can email him at jgrant (at) 8334thewin.com. Jimmy & Co-founder Mark Kirchen started Georgia Trial Attorneys which you can visit here: https://www.gtakg.com/.
See all episodes or subscribe to the Personal Injury Marketing Minute here: https://optimizemyfirm.com/podcasts/.
Transcription:
Welcome to the Personal Injury Marketing Minute, where we quickly cover the hot topics in the legal marketing world. I’m your host, Lindsay Busfield. In some markets, it can feel almost impossible to compete against all of the other law firms. Unless you have millions of dollars at your disposal for marketing, you just can’t win going toe-to-toe with the Goliaths using strictly conventional techniques. So you have to get creative. Some get creative in their branding, others niche down and throw their whole budget at one target demographic. Both are great options. But James Grant has taken the traditional legal marketing model and flipped it on its head. Rather than marketing directly to consumers like everyone else is doing, Jimmy has built his law firm using B2B marketing principles, creating his own market space and dominating it. Thanks for joining us, James.
Jimmy:
Thanks, Lindsey, for having me. I’m super pumped to be on today.
Lindsey:
Oh great. We’re excited to have you here. So tell us a little bit about your background and how you got into practicing law in the first place.
Jimmy:
That’s always a funny story, because everyone looks at my degree and they’re like, “You went to Georgia Tech? You’re a civil engineer? How did you get into law?” And I look at them and say, “I don’t really know, but it just kind of happened.” You think you want to go one way and you end up on another direction entirely.
Lindsey:
You just stumble into greatness.
Jimmy:
I mean, some would say that, others would say I’m crazy, but you know what, it’s been a fun ride. I thought I was going to be patent law. And now I own my own personal injury law firm. So weird things happen.
Lindsey:
That’s fantastic. You have one life, you may as well do everything you can in it.
Jimmy:
I mean, in my eyes, it gives me a little exposure to a couple different sides of things. I’ve got the analytical side of my brain. Of course, I have no idea how to do math anymore. If I can’t do it in an Excel or on a calculator, it doesn’t happen. But that’s one side of things. And then be creative on the other side.
How Georgia Trial Law was started:
Lindsey:
They automate that. Right. Well, you’ve got tools for that, you’ve got people for that, and you figure out how to make it work. So talk to me about your first practice and kind of how you ventured into the legal side of things.
Jimmy:
So when I first graduated law school, the number one priority’s obviously passing the bar. So you put every ounce of everything into that. Luckily I was one of the lucky ones that passed the bar the first time. And then from there immediately started working at a local prosecutor’s office. Georgia’s a little bit different than most states. Most states, the district attorney handles everything. In Georgia, we split things up where the District Attorney handles felonies and the Solicitor General handles misdemeanors. I was working at the Solicitor General’s office and got a whole lot of exposure to a whole lot of stuff really fast. I mean, I probably had, I think, 20-something trials in the 18 months that I was there just because it’s churning and burning.
Lindsey:
Wow. Yeah.
Jimmy:
So then after my public service, I was like, “All right, let’s try the private sector and see what we can do.” And I started at a law firm that did what I called door law. Meaning if you walked in the door and you either had a case or you had cash, they were going to take it. So I got a lot of exposure to a lot of different things. Maybe didn’t know how to do it the best. But I was thrown in there and I figured it out. My business partner now, Mark, he and I met at that firm within two weeks of each other. We both started at the same time pretty much. And about three months in we’re like, “Mm, I think we can do this. And we can probably do a little bit better and put our own little flavor and spin on it.” And I mean, that was three months into us knowing each other and working together at that firm. But we started saving, we started planning.
And then, I think, what was it, 14 months later, we turned in our notice and opened the doors to Georgia Trial Attorneys. Now, that was a train wreck, in my opinion, because we were two dummies, as I call it. We had no plan, no clients, no referral sources. We were literally just two dudes hanging out in Mark’s basement. But slowly like we made it work. We figured out a plan. We decided that personal injury was what we were good at. It’s what we had fun with. We were able to help a lot of people do a lot of good. So we’re like, if you dabble in a little bit of everything, you’re a master in nothing. So that was the beginning, I would say, of narrowing our focus to where we are today of starting at the big funnel of personal injury and then slowly working down.
And then that’s gotten us today to where we are no longer a B2C law firm. We’re not going to the clients or the consumer, because like you just said it in your intro, there are big guys out there that are spending millions upon millions of dollars just in advertising alone every single month. And if you’re not keeping up with that, then they are going to just demolish you. So we’re like, “There’s got to be another way.” Because also, I mean, you can take a rock and you can throw it down the street, you’re probably going to hit 17 personal injury law firms. Doesn’t matter where you are. Everyone either does it or knows somebody or will refer it or figure out something. So there’s a lot of us personal injury attorneys that are out there.
And Mark and I were like, “Well, everyone’s really good. And they want to do the pre-litigation side of things.” That’s where there’s good margins. You’re able to just do a lot of hustle market sale. You’re able to do a lot of marketing, bring in a lot of cases and it can carry a law firm. The next phase, if you can’t settle a case, generally the case is going to have to go to litigation, not every law firm is built for that. Most of the pre-lit firms out there are built for pre-lit. They’re not built for litigation. So what we found is there’s an underserved area in the personal injury community. There’s not a lot of firms that want just to litigate and help other law firms litigate their cases. So that’s where we started a couple years ago. And it’s just been mashing the gas. And now we’re to the point where we’re not even marketing to consumers, we’re just marketing straight to other businesses and other law firms.
Lindsey:
Right, because if you can lighten the load for them, for the cases that they aren’t terribly interested in or don’t have time for, then that’s a win-win for everybody. And from the client’s perspective, how does that relationship look?
Jimmy:
And that’s the fun thing about what we’ve been able to come up with because the typical model that everyone thinks of when they hear about this, they’re like, “Oh yeah, I get this. I’ve got a buddy. We refer them cases.” The typical model is is I’m going to refer you to the case. You’re going to run the case entirely. You’re going to handle everything. And then you’re just going to send me a check when the case settles. That’s the typical model that everyone understands and really operates under.
But that doesn’t work for so many law firms. Because you think about it from the originating law firm’s standpoint. They put all the investment in marketing. They are the ones that are bearing the cost of acquisition. They’re the ones that sign the client. They’re the ones that worked the client’s case and built that relationship for however many months while they were in treatment, going through the demand and the negotiation phase. And as much as we can say that we’re working together and that we’re on the same side and that you’re not being pawned off, a lot of clients do feel like they’re being pawned off. Or, “I hired you, why can’t you handle this? You’re the attorney.”
So what we’ve also found is in addition to doing just straight referral work, which is fine, we also provide services to firms to effectively give them a backend solution. So if they want us to just do all the backend work, drafting all of the pleadings, making sure the lawsuit’s filed, making sure the lawsuit’s served, communicating with the investigators, getting that process started, we can do that. If you want us to build in a little bit of level of client contact where we’re handling all the pleadings, we’re handling all the client communications but your attorney and your office is the one doing it, we can do that.
So it’s more about finding out what level of communication and confidence they want to place in us and themselves and making sure that we can work together. Because once I get your letterhead, once you give me your logo and stuff, I make it look like all the stuff coming out of my office is coming out of your office. So then, not that we’re trying to trick the client, but it also gives you the ability to focus on what you’re good at and you still look like the rock star while we’re able to process and do all the work on the backend.
Lindsey:
Right. It’s a real true white label relationship where, as you said, they’re investing so much into the acquisition. It’s their brand, their reputation, everything is at stake at the front end for them. And they might just need some extra support to either expedite it or take some of the load off for the parts of it that they don’t even enjoy. And it’s okay to say that as a lawyer you don’t enjoy doing every piece of the lawyering. So getting assistance where you can, or if it’s more economical to have somebody else who can manage that process, then that’s a great solution for a lot of lawyers in those cases who would’ve otherwise just been pushing those off to referral relationships. And so how do you connect with the law firms that you’re working with?
Jimmy:
So it’s an entirely different style of marketing. It’s not like you’re able to just spend a bunch of money on Google AdWords and you’re going to get in front of attorneys. That’s a tough thing because generally most attorneys aren’t there going to Google, who can I refer a case to? It’s a different demographic when you’re talking about clients versus law firms. So what we’ve had to move to is, it’s business development, is what we call it.
So we have people that are focused on developing relationships with businesses. It’s more of the old-school way of marketing where you have to get to know somebody. You still want to do that with your clients, you still want to be able to identify with a personal injury client that you’re originating, but it’s a little bit different in this instance. You’re dealing with somebody that’s got a law firm, they’ve got things running, they’ve got processes, they’ve got procedures.
They want to have confidence in you that this relationship is going to work. How is the handoff going to play in? What are all the dynamics that we need to work on? How is our technology going to work together? How are we going to have updates? How are we going to have consistency? There’s a lot of things that we have to work together. And you don’t just get that through one sales pitch. You don’t get that through, “Hey, look at this infographic that I can send you.” It’s more about, “All right, let’s go to the golf course. Let’s play golf a couple times. Let’s go to a Hawks game or let’s go to a football game,” whatever it is. But it’s more about building those relationships through spending time together outside the office.
Lindsey:
That sounds like a lot more fun than building Google Ads. And nothing against Google ads. Traditional marketing techniques are obviously very important for the right industries and for the right businesses. But the ability to get out and meet people and network and really build those relationships and that way they can continue to build relationships with good clients and you can do that on their behalf. And so in doing this, you’ve tapped into something that a lot of lawyers wish that they could, where they are not isolated in their own geographic area. And if you’re in Georgia and you are strictly competing against your Georgia law firms for the Georgia personal injury cases, it’s an extremely limiting factor because as you said, you throw a rock and you hit 12 personal injury firms. So does this allow you to open up your network a little bit geographically?
Jimmy:
Oh yes. I mean, before we have done some coaching and some mindset work, I would’ve set lofty goals, but I don’t say that anymore. We’ve just got big goals. And the big goal is we see this being a national presence because there’s so many different people that we can help. And really when it comes to litigation, a lot of litigation is the same state to state to state. The process is very standard. Yes, there are a lot of nuances and things change and certain timelines and rules that you have to comply with, but still putting people and procedures and processes in place to make it run efficiently, which is something that we’ve worked in Georgia and we’re already working on that same process in other states now.
It just makes it easy because we’ve effectively cracked the code so you don’t have to go do it. We cracked it for you, we’re putting it in place so that way, again, you focus on hustle market, sell, cranking out your pre-lit cases, and then we can work together or you can let us handle it entirely and just send you mailbox money, whatever you want, but it at least allows for that ability for it to be something that is very big.
Lindsey:
That’s great. That’s great. Well, I always love hearing about new business ideas, new marketing initiatives. I think that you’ve really tapped into something great here. So how can lawyers follow up with you if they have additional questions?
Jimmy:
So I do a lot of the business development myself, number one, because I like it, but it also gives me the ability to travel and do things as well. And we all love business expenses as business owners and law firm owners. So I like for a lot of the attorneys to work with me and then we can also work with other business development people on our team. But if anyone wants to email me and reach out to me, they can email me directly, jgrant@8334thewin.com. That’s 833, the number four, thewin.com.
And also you can find me on TikTok. I really enjoy TikTok. It’s fun. You can search accidentattorneyjg and just hit that little follow button. And again, just grow my following and we can have some fun together. But yeah, however you want to find me, whether it’s through email, through a phone call, through our website, through TikTok. I mean, I’m here for it and here to have fun with it.
Lindsey:
Well, thank you so much, James. We’ll be sure to put all of that in the information on our site with the podcast so that people can reach out to you and follow up.
Jimmy:
Excellent. Looking forward to it and thanks again for having me.
Lindsey:
Thanks, James.
