Build a PI Firm Around Data and Client Experience with Justin Lawrence

If you do not know what is happening inside your law firm, you cannot reliably improve it.

In this episode of Judicial Dollars and Cents, Justin Lawrence, managing partner and founder of Lawrence & Associates Accident and Injury Lawyers, shares how he built a multi-state personal injury firm serving clients across Ohio and Kentucky. You will hear how an accounting background shaped his approach to data, cash flow, average fees, case duration, referrals, client satisfaction, and scalable systems.

You will also learn why Justin believes AI can make attorneys better when used wisely, how Net Promoter Score and internal surveys help measure client experience, why communication matters even when there is no major case update, and why law firm growth requires both business discipline and human understanding.

Listen to this episode of Judicial Dollars and Cents: Build a PI Firm Around Data and Client Experience with Justin Lawrence

Justin Lawrence is the managing partner and founder of Lawrence & Associates Accident and Injury Lawyers, LLC, a multi-state personal injury firm serving clients across Ohio and Kentucky.

Connect with Justin Lawrence and Lawrence & Associates:

Website: https://www.lawrencelaws.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lawrenceandassociates

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/LawrenceAssociates

Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@lawrenceandassociates

Phone: 859-371-5997

Email: justin@lawrencelaws.com

Judicial Dollars and Cents, a podcast hosted by Anders Partner and Virtual CFO, John Scott, focuses on helping law firms win high-stakes cases with smarter financial strategy. The show breaks down the key metrics, financial frameworks, and decision-making systems that drive stronger case outcomes and firm performance.

Website: https://anderscpa.com/learn/podcasts/judicial-dollars-and-cents/ 

TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@jdc.vcfo 

Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/jdc.vcfo/

John C. Scott, CPA, AEP, is a Partner in Tax and a leader in legal industry financial strategy by Anders. He helps law firms win high-stakes cases with smart strategy by delivering clear financial insights, identifying key performance indicators, and strengthening decision-making at every level. With deep expertise in estate planning and financial analysis, John works closely with attorneys and firm leaders to align financial goals with long-term business success and case readiness. His approach brings scalability, flexibility, and data-driven clarity to complex legal environments, helping firms stay focused, prepared, and competitive.

Connect with John C. Scott:

LI: https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-c-scott-cpa/ 

X: https://x.com/JohnScottCPA

Transcript

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Welcome to Judicial Dollars and Cents, brought to you by Anders virtual CFO services team from all across the United States. I'm John Scott, and in each episode, we'll shine a light on the financial side of the legal world, turning law firm numbers into impact-driven stories. From taxes and profitability to practice growth and leadership, we sit down with law firm innovators who are shaping the future of the profession. Let's dive in right here on Judicial Dollars and Cents. Hey, welcome back to Judicial Dollars and Cents, the podcast where we dive into the business side of running a law firm. I'm John Scott with Anders Virtual CFO Services for Law Firms, and each week we talk with industry experts who help law firm leaders think differently about growth, profitability, and performance so they can build practices that last. Today we welcome Justin Lawrence. Justin is the managing partner and founder of Lawrence and Associates Accident and Injury Lawyers LLC. It's a multi-state personal injury firm serving clients across Ohio and Kentucky. Justin founded the firm in 2005 and grew it from the ground up into a respected practice handling personal injury, property and casualty claims, workmen's compensation, and social security matters. He's recognized as a top attorney in both Ohio and Kentucky, and he's a member of the Multi-Million Dollar Advocates Forum and has been named a national trial lawyer. While his background includes significant courtroom experience, Justin now focused much of his time on leadership development, building scalable systems, and evaluating client experiences across the firm. Justin, welcome to the show. Hey, John, thank you for having me. Hey, you know, I really want to dig into how you went to law school and how you decided to start the firm that you have today. So can you tell us your origin story? Yeah, sure. Uh so origin story was I was a student at the University of Kentucky. Um, I was not someone who had any intention of going to law school when I started college. In fact, I wasn't even sure I wanted to go to college. And uh my mother told me she had not worked that hard for that many years for me to not go, and so I went, right? Uh bounced around majors a little bit like a lot of young students do, and wound up in accounting because I've got a head for numbers, which is rare for a lot of attorneys. You are unicorn. Yeah, exactly. So I get into about my third year of accounting and I realized I'm not sure this is actually what I want to do. And I was one of those kids that liked to argue. So, you know, when you've got a kid who likes to argue, people say it to you all the time, you ought to be a lawyer, you ought to be a lawyer. And I thought, well, I'll look into it, I'll figure it out because I don't want to start this undergraduate thing over again, right? So my girlfriend and I at the time had a trip planned out to California. I bought an LSAT prep book, read it on the way out, read it on the way back, sat down for the LSAT and surprised myself by doing pretty well on it. And so I thought, all right, I'll give this thing a try, right? So I get into law school, I go to Salmon P. Chase, uh, which is here in the Cincinnati area, Northern Kentucky University. And um, the first year, you know, you're all in classrooms together, it's very competitive. Everyone's gonna go for these clerkships at these big firms, right? And so you're setting up interviews. And that was exactly what we had done in the accounting program. And it was part of what made me want to back out because I didn't think that I wanted to work for some big company and be kind of a cog in the machine. And so I'm in the rat race, I'm doing all that, I'm doing well in my first year, and I schedule all my appointments, and all of a sudden I realized this is exactly what I just left in the accounting world, and now they're sending me to it in the law world as well, right? And so I canceled every single one of the interviews, never did a single clerkship, and I decided right then and there, toward the end of my first year, I was going to open my own law firm. That what I really wanted was to work for myself. Wow. And I got lucky. Like I loved law school, even though I didn't really intend to go in the first place. Once I got there, it was amazing. And once I got out, I loved practicing law. Did your mother say you're welcome? Yeah. Exactly. Hey, I have her to thank for a lot. And this is one of those things because I wouldn't have been on that path if she hadn't made it. So you went from directly from law school to your own firm? Yes, sir. That's amazing. And I love the fact that you have an accounting background because what we try and do for attorneys is help them run their firms like a business, but you have that background. So you understand the importance of data and metrics and processes so that you can make money at your craft. Yeah, 100% true. I say data is beautiful, and I 100% believe that. If you don't know what's going on in your firm, you can't possibly make it better. Oh, that's that's totally true. And if you have to have clean financials, you have to have enough cash to make investments and pay your bills, and you have to know what your capacity is. All these things that if you don't value the finance function, you can't make good decisions. You can still do well, but you can do so much better when you pay attention to the data. Exactly. It's a crapshoot if you don't know your data. Like one of the things that got me early on when I decided that what I really liked was the injury work, because I have kind of a you know, David and Goliath complex, right? I like to take on the bigger company, the government, whatever it is. Um, but when you're doing contingency fee work, and especially early on, when you don't really have a steady stream of cases coming in, how do you budget for the next year? Right. And so that was one of the first things that I had to sit down and unravel when I was using all that accounting knowledge that I had gained in undergrad to help me do that. Right. And I would bet that you, unlike a lot of PI firms, can relatively accurately forecast your cash flow because once you fill up the inventory of cases, you know by type about what they're worth and where they stand in the process. And that's how we build a forecast for PI firms. That up until that point, many firms have no idea what's coming in. They know what's going to come in in the next month because they're close to a trial date or they're, you know, once they get to close to settlement. But other than that, you know, they have no real clue as to what's going on. But I love the fact that you have all this data and the accounting background. So let's talk about AI because there's a lot of attorneys that there's only two camps. There's the camp that thinks it's the ruination of the profession, and there's the people that are embracing it to use it as a competitive advantage to compete with bigger firms. Where do you stand on that? I'm definitely in the latter camp. I think AI is going to make us all better as attorneys if you know how to use it so that you're using it wisely instead of letting it tell you what you're supposed to do. Yeah, I couldn't agree more, and it's ever changing. I liken it in the accounting world to when we used to uh do everything on green bar paper by hand, including amortization, depreciation schedules. And then we got VisiCalc and Lotus 123, and now we have Power BI. Now we're gonna have agents and bots that can come in and do a lot of the repeatable things. We still need human intervention and oversight, but it's gonna compact or compress the time it takes to do those routine mundane things. So building a firm from the ground up, what struggles did you go through as a solo practitioner and as you built it to what you are today? So, first struggle was trying to figure out, you know, where's my next dollar coming from? Because again, I had cases, like I said, and I'm trying to uh budget into the next month or the next year so that I can take some of the money that I'm earning and using it to grow. But if you don't know when you're about to have a drought, because you're a young solo, right? And you don't have any cases settling or trying that month, um, you don't know when you can spend money on growth. So, you know, I sat down and I started figuring out average fees, average durations. How long does it take me for this practice area to see a case from open to close, and what can I expect out of that case on average? And then that led me toward more volume instead of being more of a boutique firm. Um, because with better volume, you can get a better average. Right. Um, another thing that we did was we started looking at client satisfaction and net promoter scores. We started really pushing referrals back in. Um, so for example, if you can drive your client satisfaction high enough and you're asking them at the end, would you refer us to someone else? You get that on a scale of one to 10, right? You get your net promoter score from that. And whatever you can do to try to drive that score up, you know that you're just over time statistically more likely to have those clients refer their neighbors, their friends, their family, et cetera, back to you. And you can grow a business that way as a young person who doesn't have a whole lot of advertising dollars. So that was just something that I paid attention to. Um, another thing was I had to learn what my weaknesses were, right? Um, none of us is perfect at everything, none of us are perfect at anything, but we're not good at everything. And um, so I had to learn what is it that I'm not doing well here? And then I had to hire people in who could do that better than me. Okay, right. I love this. Yeah. So um, you know, a good example of that. Uh, one of my partners is the COO here. He and I have been uh working together for 11 years now. And I'm a guy who I'll have a hundred ideas a day, more than I can possibly implement. And I'll start to work on some of them. And when I get into the weeds, I get lost, right? The details distract me, and then I've got a new idea, and I start going over to do that, and I have trouble with the discipline of making myself sit down and finish just one thing. And my partner Pete, he's that guy. Once he's got a project, he will stick to that project and he will know every single detail of it. Nothing can distract him, nothing can move him from his timeline, and he will make it happen. And so we just work together really, really well at a high level when we decide to do something and we set out a calendar for the year on how we're going to accomplish all these things. If it was just me, we wouldn't make all those deadlines. You guys are the perfect partners because you're the entrepreneur, the idea person, and he's the doer. Yeah, that's exactly right. That's exactly right. And it's not to say that I can't get things done or that he doesn't have great ideas, but both of us have this niche that if we stick to it, we complement one another really well. You know, and I love the fact that you talked about early on the a struggle with cash, because that's one of the things that we try and set targets for firms, is to hold on to enough cash at all times. And and the rule of thumb we use is 10 to 30 percent of expected revenue. So a less risky firm, an hourly billing firm with eight clients that you know they pay by return mail, they can keep 10% of next year's expected revenue in the bank. But a more risky firm, like a PI firm that has case costs that they invest in and has not so regular paydays, they probably need to skew towards that 30% number. And you can use a line of credit to do that, but I see too many firms rely on debt, especially in the early part of the year because they took too much cash out at the end of the year, and then you're just kind of chasing your tail in the first part of the year. Hey, if you looked back at the early days of your firm, what one thing would you do different if you had it to do over again? One thing that I did very early on was um, you know, in terms of managing people, my natural impulse is to be everybody's buddy. I'm not a dictator or anything, you know, by nature. Um, and I've learned over the years that it is better to set some very carefully, you know, worded uh but strict boundaries. And so early on, when I was managing people, you know, I still believe nobody comes to work wanting to do a bad job that day. Most people, almost everyone comes in and they want to do a good job. But if you're not giving them the guidelines that tell them what a good job is, they're all going to go off in their own direction. So from when I first set up the firm and first started hiring people, and I hadn't learned that lesson yet, there was sort of a permissiveness in the way the jobs were being handled that meant we weren't putting out the best quality product. And when I realized what was happening, I went in and fixed it. But because people had started off with this much more permissive structure to start constricting it down on them, even in ways that are objectively very reasonable, that was a harder process. And that required um, I guess just um, I don't know, some trauma within the company that didn't need to be there if I had understood this lesson from the beginning. If you had set those boundaries early on. I I you mentioned in the pre-call you have children. Are they boys or girls? I have two children, one boy, one girl, 16 and 14. Okay, and so you already know this, but especially the boy, they need boundaries, right? And the other thing is when you uh when you set a curfew, whether it's 10:30, 11 o'clock, once you extend it to the next half hour, you can never go backwards. And that's what you experience with your employees. That's exactly right. I still get the text. How about 1115, Dad? Uh, you know, how about not? Big decision because it's always going to be 1115 or later after that. Exactly. So client experience, I know that's a big thing for your firm. How do you measure it? And you mentioned that uh uh promoter score, but is there anything else you can do? Do you reach out and interview clients about their experience post-case? Yeah, so every single client gets an internal survey uh partway through their case, and at each point where we're resolving a part of the case for them. Um so for some people, that's just one end-of-case survey. Sometimes they'll get two or three, depending on what type of case it is. And um, even clients that were terminating representation because we've done an investigation and we find that we can't uh move the case any further for them for whatever reason, they still get that survey. And what I've noticed on those is it is extremely rare that I get either positive or negative feedback because of the end result of the case. So it's not, oh, you got me a lot of money or oh, you told me you couldn't represent me. I'm happy or angry because of those things. Instead, when they give us responses every single time, it comes back to communication. And so what we've done in response to that is we put in a lot of rules regarding client communication to make it both frequent and high quality. And by doing that, we're driving that client experience. Do you have a dedicated team that does those interviews that are non-attorneys? The surveys you mean? Right. Um, yeah, so I do. Um, we have a marketing department. Okay. And um, inside marketing, they actually send out the surveys and get those responses, collate data, and produce a report. So if you did have an issue where communication was a problem, you could address it right away because you know about it. It's not something they would go away thinking bad about the firm. Yes. And on top of that, every single month, the results of those surveys get published. So everybody knows they're going to be able to see every positive and negative comment that those clients give. Um, you know, the attorneys who I manage, they have as part of their metric system high net promoter score, right? We have to know the clients are satisfied. Um, and then the non-attorneys, as part of theirs, they have what we call report cards every month. And it's where a random case gets pulled and evaluated by their manager. They get a grade on the report card, and one of the things they're getting graded on is the quantity and quality of their communication. That's interesting. Um, have you thought about scaling and expanding beyond Ohio and Kentucky? Yeah, I have. And um, that was a hard decision for me because you can grow tall or broad, right? And I talked to a few older attorneys about it who you know had been successful and some of which had gone broad, but even the ones who had gone broad told me go tall first. Right. Don't expand so much that you're not getting all of the market share where you are already. And so I've I've held on to that, and we're still in the states that we live in, growing taller before we decide to expand out. Yeah, but you're doing a lot of things right. So I think once you get the secret sauce, it would be easy to plug and play in the next locality. Yeah, I that's my hope, definitely. Hey, with respect to the NPS score and the surveys, how do you drive response rates? Or do you see that as a problem where people don't respond? Yeah, they're low response rates. There's no uh question about it. Uh so there's two ways that I drive it. One is the attorneys are required to like talk about the survey, ask for a response whenever they're doing their final meeting with the client, no matter what kind of meeting that is, right? Um so we're not allowed to shy away from say getting a response on a case that we lost. They still have to present it and ask for it. Um, and then we'll push it a couple of times and we'll, you know, ask the client, can you know, we really value your opinion? Can you please give that back to us? Even still, the response rate stays low. And I've not found a way to pull it up. Honestly, I want to say past the 12% mark. Um difficult to get them back. But the ones that do come back have consistent enough responses that I think I'm getting a good sample size over time to make good judgments from them. You you seem like a firm that generates a lot of work from referrals. Uh tell us about how that came about and is that the bulk of your new matters? Um, it's not the bulk anymore, although it was for a lot of years. Recently, we've been getting more into actual advertising, and so that's driving more and more non-referral cases. And I want to say we're maybe 60, 40 now. Um, but early on, it was a conscious choice, right? I'm starting out, I'm a solo, I don't have any money. I just graduated law school, I had a condo and a dog, and that was it, right? So I can't buy advertising, right? But they didn't, you know, Google was just getting started then. Most people still use the phone book. It was it was expensive to advertise. And um, you know, at the time I'm trying to pick up cases, and what I thought was I can go talk to people, I can meet people, I have more time than money. So I'm gonna do that and I'm gonna get some people to kick the tires on me helping them out with their cases. And at the time I was willing to take on anything, right? If you can get me into a courtroom, I'm gonna do that work. Um, what that grew into over time was I started being viewed as an honest broker by a few attorneys who were much more established than me, and especially who are maybe at a part of their careers where they didn't want to do all the hard work anymore, right? They knew how, they were good at it, but they were wanting to take a slight step back. And so I had a few of those firms that that started feeding me cases that allowed me to grow. And then one of the things that I learned was you know, there's a cost of acquisition for every case you bring in. It's gonna cost you time or money, right? One or the other. And for the ones that cost you money, a lot of the time, referral fees, which are you know ethical in both the states I practice in, they may not be in every state. Um, but those referral fees are a pretty good cost of acquisition, right? You're not paying anything on a case you can't recover on. You're not ever putting labor cost into something where you paid a cost of acquisition and now you can't get either one of them back, right? Because it just doesn't turn into anything. And so I kept at it. And I was a big fan of the, you know, never eat lunch alone line of thought. Um, I was constantly scheduling lunches and happy hours for a good portion of my career. And I've backed off of that a little bit now. But after, you know, 20 years in practice, if you spend 10 years really focusing on that, it becomes a little bit self-generating. Well, and even though the bulk of what your firm does is non-annuity work, those referring attorneys are annuities because when they get a case that you did a good job on the last five cases they sent to you and you shared a fees float with them, they're going to keep feeding you, feeding you work. Exactly. And my goal was always to wow them a little bit, right? They send me a case, you know, they're not sending me the cases they think are worth a lot of money and easy. So generally, they are cases that they don't think are worth a lot of money. And when I go out there and really put in the elbow grease and I turn it into a lot of money and they suddenly get a check that's far bigger than they ever expected, that sticks in their minds. And, you know, I would do a few things like um, I never mail that check, right? I drive to wherever they are and I hand it to them and I shake their hand and I thank them. Wow. Right. And I hand the check. You know, I try to get that last impression so that when they walk away, they're thinking, one, I like that guy, two, that guy did an amazing job. And three, how can we repeat this? That's a great touch that you put on that. Hey, let's talk about uh the client experience and what firms can get wrong about the client experience. What do you see other firms doing that you do better? Communication, communication, and communication. That is everything. Like, so first of all, I don't think law firms a lot of the time. Put themselves in their clients' shoes. You'll hear lawyers complaining about clients being needy or complaining too much or whatever it is. And you got to realize for the type of law that I do, no one walks in my door if they had something good happen to them. It is always, I just got hurt. I've just been diagnosed with an uncurable condition. My house got hit by a tornado or it burned down, right? It's always something like that. And so people are going under maybe literally the worst times of their lives. And they're not always going to be on their best behavior. And they have a very high need to know what's going to happen next because some of them are worried about how they're going to feed their kids. Right. So the first thing that you've got to do is you have to make sure when they come in the door that they feel welcomed and they feel like they've made the right decision. Because they don't know that. They don't know who you are. You know, they may have been told that you're good at your job, but they have no way of evaluating that on their own. And a lot of the time they feel guilty, right? You wouldn't believe how many people I've got who come in and they've been in some horrible accident. And I mean, they're really hurt and they need it and they deserve it by law. And they say, I just want you to know I'm not this type of person. And I say, There's either not this type of person or we're all that type of person because anyone in your shoes would be doing what you're doing right now. That's what you're supposed to do, you know? And then once you got that process started, you know, I I think a lot of lawyers view the communication process as when there's news, I need to tell my client there's news. And that's not right. The the real way to look at it is my client has a need to understand what's happening. And that is the same need, regardless of whether you have some new development that you consider news or not. Right. In some of these cases, the client may be treating for months, maybe even years, and it's hard to fully resolve a case while they're still treating and you don't know what the final outcome or prognosis is going to be. The client still needs very frequent communication, if for no other reason than to say, things look good on my end, you're doing what you're supposed to be doing, please keep doing it. And let me talk to you in a couple of weeks and see if anything has changed for you. So do you handle that communication both verbally, either over the phone or in person? And is there a portal where they can go check on the status? So there is a portal. What I found is clients don't use it very often. Um, so we continue to do the communication, either phone, text, email, whatever it is the client you know prefers. Um, the way that we handle it is our uh responsible team members, which are the non-attorneys working on the case, every 30 days they reach out. For the attorneys, every six weeks, even if nothing else is happening that requires their attention, they're required to go through the file, confirm everything is going well, and then reach out to the client and explain, you know, what's the status of the case, talk to me about what your needs and concerns are. Justin, you have a great firm. You it seems like you're building a firm that's going to outlast you, something that'll be transferable, saleable. This is I want to compliment you because a lot of firms, they're really great attorneys and they're great at their craft, but they don't run it like a business, and you really do. Hey, before we wrap up, I want to ask you about something that might be unique to your area, and that's the bourbon trail. What is your favorite brown liquor and and why? Uh, great question. So for me, I would say my favorite bourbon is probably a little blanton's. Okay. Um, now, what kind of blantons? I have gotten my hands on a couple of gold label bottles. And if you can do that, uh, you're riding high. That's a damn good bourbon. Um, but you know, even the regular Blantons, if you can find it somewhere, I like it a lot. And um, if you're looking for one that you can just buy on the shelf somewhere and it's kind of pleasing to all palettes, go get some Angels Envy. Can't go wrong, it's right out of Louisville, Kentucky. Yep, been there, been there a couple times. And one of my partners is a bigger brown liquor connoisseur than I am. And he will go into any liquor store that he sees, you know, down at the Lake of the Ozarks in southern Missouri, and they all get these allocations of things, and sometimes they don't know what they have. Yep. So he he was telling me he was down at the lake, and some great brown liquor he was looking for was there, and he bought, you know, three bottles of it. I go to the little liquor store near my house and I go, Hey, you guys get an allocation of these things, right? And the the guy behind the counter, he knew exactly what was going on because he upcharged that. He goes, Yeah, I got it. Here, here's what you wanted. It's $600. I'm like, okay, we're good. Yeah, yeah. Now, around here, they'll make you join a lottery a lot of the time and all that. And I you know I wasn't gonna do all that. Uh, luckily, a friend of mine one day introduced me to a guy uh named Gary. He owns a small shop and he doesn't play any of those games. Yeah. Uh, you know, the first time I went in there, um, he didn't know who I was, and he's kind of walking down the aisle and he says, Well, uh, Nate sent you, hey, you see that bottle? You ever tried that bottle on the shelf there? I said, No. He said, That's a good bottle. I said, Thank you, Gary. I'm gonna buy that. He said, What about that one over there? That's a good bottle, too. I said, You know, I'm gonna buy one of those too, Gary, right? I did that about three or four times going down the aisle with him. And he said, uh, I told him I like blands. He said, I got a little blands in the back. Let me go grab a bottle for you. I said, Thank you very much, Gary. And since then, I got a guy. You know, he knows he's he's the only one I go to. And I mean, I don't care if I'm buying, you know, a bottle of Basil Hayden for my in-laws or something that I could get anywhere, I drive to Gary every time. Gary's a good connection. Hey, Gary's a good dude. You got a great firm. And if this firm thing doesn't work out for you, I think you should go consult in the legal industry and teach other people how to run their firms like a business. If people want to get a hold of you, how can they how can they contact you? Uh, two good ways to get a hold of me. So if you want to call me, office number 859-371-5997. If you want to email me, you can get straight to me going to Justin J-U-S-T-I-N at lawrence laws.com. Well, thank you so much. And thank you all for tuning in to Judicial Dollars and Cents. If you enjoyed today's episode, be sure and like, follow, and subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. It helps us grow and ensures you never miss an episode. We'll see you next time on Judicial Dollars and Cents. Thanks for joining us on Judicial Dollars and Cents presented by Anders Virtual CFO Services. If you found value in today's conversation, be sure to follow or subscribe wherever you get your podcast. To learn more about how Anders helps law firms strengthen their financial foundations and drive growth, visit AndersTPA.com. Until next time, keep making smart decisions that make perfect sense.