How to outsource intake, IT, and legal work to run a lean mass torts practice with low overhead and high adaptability
Gregg Goldfarb:
What I've done over the last five to 10 years is I basically outsource everything, including my work.
Chris Dreyer:
That's Gregg Goldfarb. Over the past three decades, he's put in the reps. From Rodney King era police brutality cases to Camp Lejeune water contamination, Gregg has always been at the front lines of the biggest fights.
Gregg Goldfarb:
I've done everything but the standard bodily injury accident cases. I said, "Listen, whatever you get that's not an auto accident case, send my way."
Chris Dreyer:
This is Personal Injury Mastermind, where we dig deep into the best personal injury firms in the nation with the leaders who go them there. I'm your host Chris Dreyer, founder and CEO of Rankings.io, the elite marketing agency for PI firms. On the docket today, mass torts for modern PI firms. Gregg has managed large teams, built full operations, but now he runs a skeleton crew by choice. His lean model is one any PI owner can learn from and he's crushing it.
Gregg Goldfarb:
I try to stay ahead of the game and see where the future is going. Throughout my practice, I've always had to shift. Whatever the hot new trophy was was what I was chasing.
What alternatives to big ad spend can drive consistent mass tort case acquisition—why $100K ad campaigns aren’t the only way to bring in cases
Chris Dreyer:
Gregg shows us the four strategies of a modern PI practice so you can compete with the giants in mass torts. First up, how he stopped wasting $50,000 ad buys and found a smarter way to bring in cases. Let's go.
Gregg Goldfarb:
It's so difficult today because there is a few big players out there that have an enormous, enormous marketing budget. No matter where you go, everybody seems to be national. You got the Morgan and Morgans of the world, they're swallowing up the small law firms out there, the more boutique outfits out there in the world. The marketing has become tricky.
Chris Dreyer:
What you're doing in marketing and how you're getting cases, are you more advertising, just due to your practice and how you do things that other people don't do, are you more marketing more to B2B, to your peers? Are you doing the B2C? Talk to me about the different components of advertising.
Gregg Goldfarb:
In the entirety of my 32 years of practicing, in one form or another, I've been doing marketing. Whether it was the organic stuff, going to the churches and the temples and all that, or the associations, or the newsletters, which I still do, it's tough out there. It's a big jungle and you have to be committed, you have to know what you're doing. You have to be savvy. The younger generation that are our colleagues or whatever are a little bit savvier with them. It's a fluid, seamless thing to go and do a video, and then make a Thread. It's just a nothing thing. Whereas when I try to do a lot of that, I don't succeed and it gets frustrating.
Over time, what I've learned is that instead of saying, "Okay, I'm going to spend $50,000 and hope I get leads." Then you realize, "Oh, $50,000, what's my ROI? I got one case, it wasn't good." What I've learned is that there's case acquisition. There's some really marketers and that's all they do and they market for lawyers. You basically give them a chunk of money and you set up criteria. You say, "I want Camp Lejeune cases. I want cases where the only injury that I'm willing to accept is," let's just say testicular cancer. Because you've realized that, in the cancer world, it's hard to prove a lot how you got one type of cancer, but there are certain types of cancers that are so rare that it's easier to connect the dots. And show that, "Wow, you have testicular cancer, you're 40-years-old. The only way you would have gotten it is drinking contaminated water at this Marine base," or whatever.
I sort of shifted into that because it was a level of certainty that I think helped me stay committed to the marketing world. I still market organically, I still go out, I still go to events, go to fundraisers and all that. But I think it's almost become my bread and butter right now, like the video game addiction is a big case that's coming up. Ultra-processed foods, a lot of people now are starting to wrap their brain around that. And social media has now really taken over this sort of case acquisition, case-specific type of marketing. I've been happy with it.
There's some downsides in that space also, because it's become so competitive and there's so many players. You have so many marketers around India doing ... I'm not denigrating the Indian country or whatever, but there's a lot of bad stuff going out where-
Chris Dreyer:
A lot of fraud for sure.
Gregg Goldfarb:
A lot of fraud, that's the word I'm looking for.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah, yeah. They see the criteria, they work the system, I saw that. And also, just the pie gets divided too much for some of these.
Look, have you found, without naming names, any of the ... You always hear the downside. "Ah, they're cherry-picking for this firm or that firm." Or they start you off hot, you get a bunch of good cases, and then they water it down. What's your experience been?
Gregg Goldfarb:
I've had the complete range from really bad to good. The mass tort space because it's so big and there's so many people affected, and the companies that get sued often times have multiple types of litigation that they're fending off, they're slowing it down as long as possible. You have to be ready for the long haul. A lot of the marketers, they're not going to even talk to you unless you're going to pony up, let's just say 100-grand. You pony up 100-grand, you're getting these cases, it looks good. There's an appeal, then there's a bankruptcy, and you're like, "How are these Fortune 500 companies filing for bankruptcy," or whatever.
You have the possibility of having a great case against a Fortune 500 company which you think has endless money and you set up great criteria, and then it goes bad. Either it takes forever for the settlement term, you are not going to be settling these cases. It's going to be a handful of lawyers at the head of the leadership council so to speak that settle it and you're stuck. Yeah, you can opt out or whatever, but then the judges aren't happy with you, they're blowing up at you, then you are left in the dust basically because leadership is not happy that you did not sign in and join up. They're not going to really help you out. They're not going to be like, "Hey, you wanted to go forward, you're on your own."
Then on the flip side in terms of bad case scenario, I've had campaigns where, okay, it sounded like a great case. EzriCare, it was this product that you were dropping into your eyes and people were losing their eyes. I ponied up some money, got what I thought were qualified cases. The law firm that I was going to work with decided they didn't want to go forward any more even though they told me the criteria, they gave me the criteria that they were willing to accept the types of cases. Then I got stuck with 50 cases in something that I really could not handle and nobody else was doing it. What was I going to do at that point? Was I going to sue that other law firm, try to force them to take the cases? Try to find somebody else? That didn't even work, or whatever.
Then I've had cases, campaigns where eventually every person in the campaign, every client disappeared. Let's say I had 15 cases, I sent them out to a very good firm, referring them out. One by one, they can't find the person. I'm sitting there calling the person. Was it BS? Was the marketer basically just like, "Whatever, I don't care, I got your money, I'm going to just have a bunch of stooges call you up initially, sign up the paperwork, they get a $200 payment and then they're gone?" You have to be very careful of worst case scenarios, pretty much on the opposite ends of the spectrum. The great case that just doesn't go anywhere and then the fraud.
Chris Dreyer:
That was really thorough. Thank you for that. I've always wondered that, too. You take suboxone. Some of these individuals have real cases, and then there's just a lot of problems with different case types, and the people falling off, and the dual reps, and things like that.
Gregg Goldfarb:
Right.
Chris Dreyer:
I guess a few questions here. The first thing is the cashflow. If you're auto or whatever, 12 to 18 months is one thing, but we're talking torts, it might be five years. That's part of their strategy is delay, delay, delay.
Gregg Goldfarb:
Yeah.
Why diversifying your personal injury practice helps law firms survive lengthy mass tort litigation
Chris Dreyer:
How do you think about the portfolio? Do you wait until you got some high risk before the science establish? Do you wait until the science is later? How do you think about selecting these?
Gregg Goldfarb:
I am definitely a big fan of diversification. I wanted to diversify the types of cases, the law firms that I was going to work with. When you go into the types of cases, it's not just, "Okay, I'm going to do sexual abuse cases," where you don't have any really complicated science that you're going to have to convince the judge that your theory and your expert is solid. Going back to the length of these cases or whatever, the baby powder talc cases, they're 10 years old now. They've already filed three bankruptcies. They did the Texas two-step, or what have you.
Chris Dreyer:
Gregg just showed us how he stopped wasting money on ads and starting buying the exact cases he wanted. To be successful in mass torts, you need diversity in cases. The real edge comes from catching the next wave before it comes to shore.
How to identify and prepare for the next wave of profitable mass tort opportunities
Gregg Goldfarb:
I try to stay ahead of the game and see where the future is going. Throughout my practice, I've always had to shift. Whatever the hot new trophy was was what I was chasing. Whether it was Rodney King back in 30 years ago, getting beaten up by the police. The next thing you know, I was doing the police brutality. Now with the cars, yeah. Obviously, a lot of society would like to reduce the number of accidents. If you can make that happen through technology and improved automation, the world is going to demand that. Us attorneys need to anticipate that. Maybe you go from the strict, "Hey, who's at fault," to, "Maybe it was the car, maybe it was the technology behind the car." Maybe you have to become a tort attorney.
I want to have cases that are new because those are going to be cheaper to get. Then, I want to get the ones that are advanced, that have gone past the motion for summary judgement, the Daubert and all that, and there's cases that are set for trial. Right now, in the water contamination PFAS world, there's a lot of us are getting excited about the possibilities there because one part of that whole water contamination type of case was with water providers. States and local agencies, they all sued 3M and DuPont for contaminating our water, this is our water. Everybody out there probably has a little PFAS in them. We're all very excited about the fact that there's a jury trial set.
Well, water providers had their first jury trial set over a year ago in Stuart, Florida, and 3M caved in hours before the case was going to go. The settlement was basically about an $11 billion settlement to help rectify the fact that they've contaminated pretty much every water base. The thinking is, "All right, now we're going to have our first jury trial." The judge actually, Judge Gergel out in South Carolina, from what I understand has basically said to the defendants, "You better settle up." They're going to be exposed to punitive damage because we know, we've gotten the evidence that they have known forever. There's a great documentary that just came out, I actually had the director of that documentary come on my show and it talks about How To Poison A Planet, if you really want to see just how bad it is or whatever.
The administrations, this one and the last one, they're trying to figure out how to handle it, and how to figure out how many parts-per-billion in a water base they're going to allow of these pollutants. It's not even get rid of them all, it's just how much are we going to let in there? And then what chemicals they're going to let go unregulated and what they're going to regulate.
In any event, that is one where you'll find a lot of marketers. In fact, one of my marketers reached out to me today. He's like, "Hey, you better buy as much as you can right now because it's going to close out soon."
Chris Dreyer:
So far, we've seen Gregg play offense, filling his pipeline smarter and jumping head-first into the next big wave. But the truth is, these cases are never clean. The companies he goes after, Fortune 500 giants, they stall, they appeal, they file bankruptcies. They'll drag things out for a decade if they can. To run a modern firm, you must be adaptable and willing to learn along the way.
Gregg Goldfarb:
I've done everything but the standard bodily injury accident cases. I mean, I have in the court. But I started out, I was a C-plus student, so I wasn't getting big offers or whatever. I had to market from the ground going forward as soon as I got my bar license. My dad, he's also an attorney, he's been around. Still practices, he's 94-years-old. I went to him and I said, "Listen, whatever you get that's not an auto accident case or your buddies, send my way."
Can I ask you a question, Chris?
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah, of course.
Gregg Goldfarb:
Okay. I was reading, I printed an article, Best Legal Conferences For 2025 at the beginning of the year. Then I was looking through it a couple weeks ago when we first got connected. I'm like, "Oh, my God, Chris has got a conference," but the date hadn't been released. Can you tell me about your conference? Because I hear great things, I've talked to a couple people. Did I miss the 2025 already?
Chris Dreyer:
First of all, I'm flattered. Thank you for asking this. I like getting the script flipped on me. It's October 5th through 8th, so two days. We got an awesome lineup of speakers. I think the main thing that I want to share is the main way it's different, because there's a lot of legal conferences, is it's all about marketing, and lead gen, and revenue on the front end side. The other thing is outside of myself and I believe one other individual, every single speaker is a PI attorney that owns a firm or is actively growing the firm. They're speaking from experience on how they're approaching growth, as opposed to a bunch of consultants or agencies, or what have you. It's the people that are eating their own dog food, so to speak. I think that's how it's different.
Keynote day one is Ross Cellino, he's got an amazing story how he approached marketing back in the day to current. Day two is James Helm, who has thousands upon thousands of cases, and a young, prominent advertiser. Then also, day one we got Nikki Glaser.
Gregg Goldfarb:
Nice.
Chris Dreyer:
She's going to do a comedy show, so that'd be a lot of fun.
Gregg Goldfarb:
Nice, nice.
Best strategies for choosing referral partners that don’t leave clients hanging
Chris Dreyer:
That's the conference.
Gregg Goldfarb:
That's in California?
Chris Dreyer:
That's in Scottsdale, Arizona at the Phoenician.
Gregg Goldfarb:
Nice, nice. All right. Sorry to flip the script, but as a podcaster, it's hard for me to just answer questions.
Chris Dreyer:
No, I love it, I love it. It's great. It's a nice little plug for myself.
Gregg Goldfarb:
Yeah.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah, thank you for that. Gregg, you got on the conference circuit, you can identify who the agencies, the ARC Social Media, Broughton stuff, they're out there advertising to get clients. How do you go about identifying who you're going to send the cases to? Do you just look at the steering committees? Is that where you start? Is you just you get in this world and you start getting the relationships and that's how it goes? I know Papantonio has Mass Torts Made Perfect. I like Mike. Look, it's smart from a marketing perspective, he wants everything referred to them. How do you find the right firms to send the cases to?
Gregg Goldfarb:
I have sent work to Pap. I have sent work to Bryan Aylstock's firm. Lots of firms, Pete Seeger's firm. I figured at the beginning, I should go with the heaviest of the hitters. You would go to the Mass Tort Made Perfect Conference, you would see whose speaking. Then you would hear whose in leadership, whose going to be the one trying the cases, whose going to be the one settling the cases. My initial take was, "Let's go with them." A lot of times, I would really be talking to the marketer and I would say, "Who do you like? Who should I refer?" Because it would add an element of protection for me, if I let's just say was using Broughton Partners and they connected me to a law firm that I didn't really know. I kind of anticipate it, I'm not an idiot. I knew that, all right, I'm not really giving these firms a huge volume of work in this space. I'm giving them 15, 25 cases, that's nothing for them. They're not going to bat an eye, "Yeah, we'll take the cases." Some of those won't even do it if it's a small amount.
I just started like that. Then I started like, "Wow, they're too big. Who am I?" They don't care." Then I started to go with smaller operations who I was getting to know at these conferences and having longer conversations. And who I felt like I got their cellphone number, I know where you live, you know what I'm saying?
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah.
Gregg Goldfarb:
I figured let me try them, too. Everybody has their good and their not so good. There's nobody that's been perfect as far as me. I'll have some of the clients call me up, "Hey, I want an update." Then I'm like, "Okay." I'm like, "Hey, this guy needs an update." Then two weeks later the client calls me back, "I never heard from anybody." You don't want to deal with a bar violation because you're co-counsel or the person you referred the work out to just doesn't respond to client that you told them is looking for an update.
Chris Dreyer:
That was amazing. That's the first time I've heard it explained in that detail. I want to hit this just a little bit more because the whole way that you structure a firm is different.
Gregg Goldfarb:
Yeah.
Chris Dreyer:
You're using these providers to get cases. Then you're working with partners for the monetization piece. What's the team look like? I imagine you're a more leveraged, more lean team overall. How do you put this together and make it all work?
Gregg Goldfarb:
You have to know, like you said, the world today is completely different. You can have companies answering your phone just for regular calls. You could have a call center that is specifically trained just to handle intake for lawyer cases. We know, and I'm sure you know too if the phone rings and somebody's looking for an attorney, if you don't call them back in a minute, they're gone, they're gone. In the old days, it used to be you got 24 hours to get back to you. Nowadays, you cannot afford to do that. What I've done over the last five to 10 years is I basically outsource everything, including my work.
Chris Dreyer:
Big teams managed, full scale operations built and run, Gregg's done the traditional law firm model at scale, and then he walked away from it because he found something that works for him. The way Gregg structures his firm could change how you think about your own practice.
Gregg Goldfarb:
A lot of my work, I'm just referring out to other firms. My bread and butter work was first party insurance claims and I had just so much of that, that I had two buddies that are close in Miami, close geographically. I gave them the work, I gave them my employees, and I've just basically outsourced everything. There a couple things more. I'd like to outsource my accounting so I don't have to deal with the accountant anymore. That would be ...
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah.
Gregg Goldfarb:
I'd like to outsource my IT system, that would be wonderful also.
Chris Dreyer:
That's awesome.
Gregg Goldfarb:
That's where I'm at right now. I'm 59-years-old, maybe in two or three years from now, I'm going to shift back and I'm going to be like, "You know what, I need to have my crew back in place." But right now, I'm a very lean skeletal type of structure.
Chris Dreyer:
I wanted to ask that because that's a highly leveraged model. You're the strategist, you could pick the partners. A lot of times, people think of, "Hey, these other people are experts and they niche in that area." A lot of times, they have leverage. They can have different economies and scale. I think that's super smart. If you were going to say, "Hey, here are the things that you need to do to be successful with torts, with this kind of model," 80-20, what would you say? What would you recommend?
Gregg Goldfarb:
Well, I think knowledge is key. What's going on is that, and I think maybe you've seen this as well. You go to law school, they don't even really show you how to be lawyer. Then you come out and you're like, "Okay, I got to figure out how to be a lawyer." Then you're like, "Wow, I'm a lawyer now, I know how to be a lawyer, but now I'm not happy with what I'm doing. I'm not making enough money and I'm seeing other people doing that." You start scratching your head and then you start saying to yourself, "Well, gee, I don't want to do that type of work because I want to stick with what I know." A lot of lawyers are just in this brain funk where they're like, "I can only do family law, that's all I know how to do. I don't want to take a chance."
The downside to going outside of your comfort zone is sleepless nights, you mess up. When you mess up, you're affecting a client somehow or another, and the trauma that they are subjected to when you mess up could be really devastating to a lot of people. But I think at some level, you have to have a roadmap because things are changing. The reforms that are going through, a lot of legislation now, you can't sue the pesticide companies, you can't do this, you can't do that. My business line has been written out by the legislatures on a couple of occasions. I've had to adjust, I've had no choice.
I think you have to, lawyers that are sitting there like, "God, I hate my work, God, I'm not going anywhere, I'm going to retire," or whatever. I would say I love the Mass Tort Made Perfect Conference because, A, you can sit there for four days and talk to every type of marketer, any vendor, case ware software, intake centers, and you can do what I'm doing. Which is just, all right, I don't want a big overhead anymore. If I'm going to spend money, I'd rather do it on getting cases than paying my 25 employees to sit around doing whatever it is that they're doing. We've all had that experience. You're like, "I'm trying to be a lawyer, but I'm ending up spending 90% of my career chasing after my employees to try to set up metrics so that they can get their job done."
I love the conferences because you can learn a lot, you can talk to other people, see what's going on. I think the world today is evolving so quickly and the old construct of being an accident lawyer from the beginning to the end, I think you're going to run into something that's going to be troubling. You're going to have to shift, or if you don't shift, you could be out. Then if you're out, talk about going from, "Hey, I'm a family lawyer," to, "I'm a bodily injury attorney," that's nerve wracking. Well, try going from a family lawyer to, "Okay, I'm going to open up a restaurant."
Chris Dreyer:
Right, right.
Gregg Goldfarb:
Good luck with that.
Chris Dreyer:
Wild. You started the Cut To the Chase Podcast. You featured some non-traditional guests, like scientists, homelessness advocates, wildlife experts. You got a lot of different voices and it's not just the same type of persona coming on. Tell me about the podcast, how you're tying it in to your practice, and everything of that nature?
Gregg Goldfarb:
Yeah. I would say that I've been always intellectually curious and I read a lot. I love science. To me, the fact that I don't quite understand the theory of relativity pisses me off, so I would start to read that. Then I would be like, "Wow, I really can't grasp it. It would be great if I could have my own physicist to talk to and ask questions." In a weird way, I started my podcast to help me take all this complicated information I was reading and bring people on that were the experts and have them basically explain it to me. I would just ask the questions.
Then I said, "Hey, you know what, I also would like to get some financial information, too. Why don't I just bring some financial person on and just ask them questions like estate planning?" A lot of people want to hear about estate planning. I'm like, "All right, you know what, it's going to be good for me, let's see where it goes." A lot of the podcast was to answer my intellectual curiosity questions, but also because I'm an attorney, I could get guests in that space.
As I'm sure you realized that having a consistent show with quality guests is not easy. As you get a little more down the road, more and more people actually pitch. I'm assuming they pitch you and they want to be on your show. They realize it's a good way to get in front of your audience. This all came together like it'll probably be good for my law practice. I'm not young, but I'm not a spring chicken anymore. Where am I going to go after here? I've always been like, "Where am I going next?" I thought, "Well, the podcast, I'm not really sure." Back when I started, it was a really new thing. I figured let me just see where it goes. I have no expectations, I have no agenda, and here it is four years and change later. Now I'm a guest on your show, which is great.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah, amazing. Gregg, this has been amazing. Thank you for sharing all those details and being so transparent. I love when we get in the weeds and when we talk like how it really is, as opposed to keeping things shielded.
One final question. Where can our audience that has questions, that wants to connect with you, where can they go to learn more?
Gregg Goldfarb:
My website is the best place, gregggoldfarb.com. G-R-E-G-G-G-O-L-D-F-A-R-B.com. I'm the original GGG.
Chris Dreyer:
Gregg built the perfect practice for his goals. You can, too. But you can't do it alone. Look, no one wants to see you win more than I do. That's why I created Personal Injury Mastermind Conference, PIM Con, and it's this October 5th through 8th in Scottsdale, Arizona. Every person on that stage will be a personal injury attorney sharing what they have learned in practice. If you're serious about building a modern personal injury practice that can compete in today's market, you need to be there. The relationships alone will pay for the trip 10-times over. That's PIM Con October 5th through 8th at Scottsdale, Arizona at the Phoenician. Tickets are at pimcon.org.
