In 2015, I founded Mighty with a mission to help innocent people get a better deal from the justice system after an accident. We saw massive opportunities to help the innocent party by using data, litigation finance, and new technology. We raised millions from top VCs and assembled a mission-driven team. By many metrics, we were successful, and many of our products are still widely used in PI today and generate millions in revenue. 

But in reality, we chickened out. We held the naive view that if we built tech products that increased efficiencies for PI lawyers and other service providers, those savings would somehow trickle down to injured people. But because we never addressed the fundamental problem in personal injury – misaligned incentives – they never did. By the metric of our mission, we failed.

What do I mean by “misaligned incentives?”  Because PI lawyers are paid a percentage of the total settlement, they are incentivized to: (1) work to inflate the total settlement even when doing so actually harms the client (2) outsource their operational tasks to third-parties as “out of pocket case expenses” so they can pass them onto the client (3) provide as narrow of a service as possible by focusing exclusively on activities that increase the settlement, ignoring other important needs. These incentives encourage behavior that directly hurts the vulnerable when they are most vulnerable.

The question now is: How do we rewire those incentives, especially given a regulatory landscape in which lawyers still need to play a central role in cases? We spent months untangling and redesigning many of the key components of the PI experience into the Mighty you see today — it’s the personal injury service we’d tell our friends and family to call if they got into an accident. Here’s how it works: 

1. Clients who sign with Mighty only work with lawyers who play by the rules and charge at least 10% less

Mighty Law is our partner law firm that adheres to a Code of Conduct unlike anything practiced in PI today. For example, Mighty Law lawyers must charge a rate that’s at least 10% lower than industry standard, follow strict disclosures to ensure hyper-transparency, and allow their clients to test their services for 60 days with no commitment.

2. We share costs with clients, incentivizing us to lower them 

Mighty Law has implemented a cost-sharing mechanism that essentially means that clients get 10% back on most of the expenses associated with their cases. We made the decision to do this not only because it gives more of the settlement to our clients, but because it aligns our interests with theirs, since we have an incentive to bring these costs down in the near and long term.

3. We help our clients with far more than just legal services. We want to be with them for everything that happens on their journey. 

The rule of thumb at most PI law firms today is to only help clients in ways that may impact the value of their case. But people after an accident need help with far more than that.  We help clients get their car repaired, find mental health support, facilitate interest-free friends and family loans, and much more.

4. We tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth

We will never use the total settlement number in advertising without context because it’s highly misleading. We will never refer a patient to a medical provider that buys lunch for our office or takes Mighty Law lawyers to sports games. We will never allow our lawyers to have settlement quotas, which would incentivize them to settle cases solely to hit business goals. What we will do is value truth, honesty, and frankness, all while under-promising and over-delivering.

We’re just getting started

In the coming months and years, you can expect us to continue innovating, with one singular metric of success in mind: does this directly benefit the innocent person after an accident? We will be thinking and building in public and I’ll be posting developments on my Twitter and on our company blog. But I know we won’t succeed alone.  

Reach out to me directly at js@mighty.com if you think we could potentially work together to create a market that innovates, competes to lower prices for clients, and provides a better service to the people who are actually suffering.

Joshua Schwadron is the CEO and Founder of Mighty

When you think about diversification, you typically think about the process of allocating assets or capital as a way to reduce exposure to any one particular asset or risk. This philosophy holds true across numerous decisions that individuals and businesses have to make throughout their lives. 

For the past five years, I’ve been exposed to two separate industries in both marketing (Influitive), and legal technology (Clio). It was only about two years ago that those worlds collided. I had the opportunity to help reshape the way law firms digitize their storefronts specifically through Google My Business. 

In today’s blog, I will guide you through how to think about diversification of marketing spend, and the value it will have on your law practice.

Let’s begin,

Raise your hand if you’ve ever ordered UberEats/DoorDash/Skip? 

Again,

Raise your hand if you’ve gone to a restaurant to pick up your food? 

I bet this is the first blog you’ve ever read that just made you raise your hand! So why do I ask? Well, because you’re all consumers of goods and services, and it’s important to think about selling your services the same way you buy them. 

Although food and legal services are not one in the same, the concept of how restaurants diversify to capture consumer demand is of extreme relevance. Similar to you, every restaurant wants a consumer to walk into their restaurant, saving their bottom line 20%. That being said, you still see all those restaurants exposing themselves through on-demand delivery apps. This is the power of diversification. 

Consumers shop in a magnitude of different ways. Some consumers leverage referrals, or Google Reviews, while others prefer to remove the confusion, and complexities of finding a lawyer, and leverage services that mimic everyday consumer interactions. 

All business owners hope that they are found organically, but when you’re competing with millions of legal brands throughout North America, it’s a pipe dream. The legal market is saturated, and only continuing to expand as individuals continue to open up their own practices.

With little to no barrier to entry to open up your own practice, the legal market has bred one of the most competitive industries when it comes to consumer acquisition. 

Leveraging multiple tools, and diversifying your spend across the internet is one of the most impactful things you can do for your business. Providing you/your firm what I refer to as “at bats” (conversations) is the success metric you should be focusing on. You don’t have to convert a client for these platforms to be considered a success. These platforms that you diversify through are to help your firm reduce your cost per lead / acquisition of conversation.

Although a lost client might seem like you have fallen flat, and you struggle to find a direct Return on Investment (ROI), it’s important to treat every conversation as a current & future opportunity. Every individual you connect with creates a webbed network effect. If not for them, someone they know will need legal services. If you continue to leverage tools that open up conversations, all while providing the customer experience that is expected, you will be surprised at the referral network you’ve now opened up for you and your firm.

Daniel Steinberg is Co-Founder @ Lawbrokr

I have told this story a few times to several people over the last twenty years, but with 2021 being the twentieth anniversary of my law firm, it seemed that now would be a good time to share this with a broader audience – perhaps most importantly with law students or young professionals early in their careers.

Beginning in my second year of law school, I began the process of informational interviews at different larger law firms around the Seattle area and the Eastside. It was the height of what would become the “dot-com bubble” and Seattle was a hotbed of start-up companies that were pursuing the dream that the expanding Internet seemed to offer. I would send out my résumé and schedule one-on-one meetings with partners and various senior associates, trying to learn all that I could about the firm, while also seeking employment opportunities. Competition for any available positions was fierce, and I was not your typical law student, failing to meet many of the implicit “requirements” for working in one of these firms: Going to a big-name school, being in the top 5% – 10% of the class, or being on Moot Court and Law Review – the list could go on. Even though I eventually graduated with honors from law school, I lacked these expected minimum credentials to even be given the opportunity to interview at one of these firms. The process was as much discouraging as it was exhausting, despite my unflagging ambitiousness. I wanted to work in a firm doing business transactions, and in my mind at the time, this was the only way that I could meet that goal, by working at one of Seattle’s larger law firms.

During one of these occasions with a large and well-known firm (whose name I will not disclose), I met with a junior partner (another name that I will not reveal) who worked in mergers and acquisitions. During the interview, we discussed the firm, his area of practice, my aspirations in the field, as well as my experience and work history. As he looked over my résumé, he commented that I was not on Law Review, as well as not being in the top 10% of my class.  It didn’t matter that I demonstrated a strong work ethic, that I had overcome a number of significant obstacles, or that I possessed numerous relatable skills and experiences for the role. Lacking the “requirements”, it seemed clear that I stood no chance at getting a real interview, much less a job offer. Undaunted by this, I asked about other ways to demonstrate my value to a firm like this, or to take steps to be laterally hired. In response, he said to me: “You know, it’s really the case that a guy like you could never work for a firm like ours.” A long and uncomfortable silence followed, as his statement hung in the air. Stunned, I didn’t know what to say. Either realizing the harshness of his delivery, or reading the expression on my face, the silence was finally broken by his attempts to walk back the statement a little and to provide some well-meaning career advice. And yet, he had been speaking truthfully. The interview quickly wrapped up, and I left the Seattle high rise building, clinging tightly to my cheap attaché case along with the last shreds of my dignity.

Only a few months after that interview, the dot-com bubble burst. During the period between when I graduated from law school, took the bar exam, and received the notification that I had passed, the entire industry that I had intended to enter and be a part of had imploded. In the six months before I took my bar exam, if you had a pulse, you had a job. Six months afterwards, people who had been with law firms for a decade were scrambling for work, and most were willing to take almost any available positions. That economic tumult was the business environment in which I founded my own law firm – entirely out of necessity. There was huge risk in doing this, but statistically, continuing on the path I had been on (looking for work in one of the larger law firms) was not turning out to be a safe bet either. Almost symbolically, I burned the nearly 2-inch stack of “form-filled” rejection letters I had received from one law firm after the other and set out on my own. Friends and family were some of my first clients, and I took on all sorts of crazy cases just to keep the lights on, nothing I had expected when I had started down the path to a legal career.

That was 20 years ago, and a lot has happened since then. Since that time, that conversation with the junior partner has all but been forgotten. Yet, there was a moment just a few years ago that brought that conversation back from the recesses of my memory. I was in the process of finishing closing letter on behalf of a client for a business deal with a publicly traded business partner. We had been working on this transaction for nearly 18 months at this point, having had crazy meetings around the United States, countless late-night calls, and months of difficult and complex negotiations. After all the hard work and uncertainty, we were finally ready for signatures from the respective executives. As I finalized the letter, excited about the part that my firm and I had played in making this deal a reality, I looked at my law firm letterhead and suddenly remembered what I had been told years before: “You know, it’s really the case that a guy like you could never work for a firm like ours.” I paused for a moment and had a response to that statement that I didn’t have sitting in that office two decades before: “You know, you’re right – I could never work for a firm like yours – because I will work for mine.” And with that, I hit “send”.

So, for anyone reading this, who is trying to figure out how to pursue their dream job or profession, or who finds themselves discouraged because they don’t check all the boxes for their “dream job”, just know that there are many ways to reach what you are striving for, even if you are told that you’re not the right “fit.” More times than not, you’re not meant to fit someone else’s mold; break that mold – and make your own.

Jeffrey Possinger is the founder and managing member of Possinger Law Group, PLLC.