Michele Mirman:
At the beginning, no other lawyer wanted this case. After the case, people started to call me.
Chris Dreyer:
That's Michele Mirman, and over the past five decades, she's recovered over $1 billion for her clients.
Michele Mirman:
I had a website and I also had an app in 2000. The issue was that nobody had computers, so it was useless.
Chris Dreyer:
The founding partner of Mirman, Markovits & Landau, she has been on the cutting edge from day one.
Michele Mirman:
They said, "Make me an AI program," and it's able to read our depositions, our medical records, our retired files. It's made our lives phenomenally easy.
Chris Dreyer:
Behind every legacy firm is a lasting strategy. This is Personal Injury Mastermind. PEM is powered by rankings.io, the award-winning marketing agency for PI firms. I'm Chris Dreyer. Today, how to build a PI firm that lasts, Michele Mirman breaks down how innovation kept her on top. Let's go.
How early marketing bets paid off in unexpected ways for long-term law firm growth
Michele Mirman:
I started in 1977. Some of my favorite wins though, or my best wins, I represented a young woman, a mom, who was struck by a pickup truck in a pedestrian safety zone, and she sustained horrendous, horrendous injuries, which of course were amplified because her three-year-old was standing right next to her and her husband was there. I was able to get her a terrific amount of money for her and her family, they've gone through counseling, they continue to go through counseling, and they're getting their family back on the right track. And that for me is the win, when it's not just a question of money, but it's a question of whether the money can help the family, the person who's hurt, live their life again.
Chris Dreyer:
I hear this doing good by doing right, and I think when you truly try to provide value and offer the comfort and care and the best representation, I think it follows. You've built one of the most enduring brands in New York for personal injury law, so I want to talk about., everybody listening, wants to know how do you get cases, how do you get cases? And so, let's start with the decision, you move the firm to Manhattan, so what drove that decision?
Michele Mirman:
Well, we were a Brooklyn law firm, it had been started back in the '60s, actually, by two attorneys who passed away early. It was taken over by my first husband, I took it over after him, and in 1991, I realized that I wanted different cases, I wanted a broader base, rather than not, quote-unquote, "just Brooklyn," Brooklyn would be the fourth-largest city in the United States if it was a city by itself, we have four million people, we were moving away from being a neighborhood office. In Brooklyn, people would just drop by and stop by and say hello, and I was getting many clients who didn't need that anymore. So telephone and then the internet with a lot of the drop-ins.
By the time I moved in '92, people already knew our name. We were starting to be able to advertise in, I think it was 1976, and we were in the trains right away, the buses and the newspapers, when there was a Yellow Pages, we were in the Yellow Pages, and it just continued as we were able to find new avenues to advertise in. We were on television constantly. When cable started, we moved into cable. When the internet started, I had a website in 2000 and I also had an app in 2000, the issue was was that nobody had computers so it was useless.
Chris Dreyer:
The app is way ahead of the game. Many people today don't even have that.
The role of legal tech in how Michele Mirman’s PI team prepares cases and secures wins
Michele Mirman:
Well, we had our first computer back in 1980. We tried to develop some databases. Through the '80s, we hired people to do databases for us that were not great. Then in '94, I ran into, at a legal conference, a group called Needles, I'm still with them today. And I try always to stay on top of technology. My son has his PhD in AI, so what I did when he came back to the United States was I said, "Make me an AI program," and it's able to read our depositions, our medical records, our retired files. When you ask it, it gives you the page, the line, the date, the time. But it's made our lives phenomenally easy, phenomenally easy.
Chris Dreyer:
We've got to dig in here. On the marketing side, you have a Wikipedia page, and today it's like a strategic asset, because a lot of these LLMs, your ChatGPTs, your Claude and Perplexity, they reference and cite Wikipedia a lot for credibility. So Google search has shifted and a lot of the tactics from a search engine optimization, talking about your website and how people find you in the past and now, some of that traffic has shifted over to people using ChatGPT. Have you found that prospects say, "Oh, I did this search and ChatGPT or Perplexity recommended you"?
Michele Mirman:
Well, I think it's a product of how much you have out there online, how many videos, how many words, how many blogs, how long you've been around, and whether you have any kind of gravitas. So it's not just that I'm any lawyer floating around in the universe, I'm the president of the New York State trial lawyers, the president of the Brooklyn Bar, I'm very, very involved in New York City charitable work for a long time. So I am picked up for those reasons, not just because I get on a TV commercial and say, "Hey, call me, I'm a great lawyer."
Chris Dreyer:
Absolutely. I could double stamp, triple stamp that. I think that you are a person of notability, so because of that, you are more discoverable, and it has all the trust and the social proof components with it. You've been handling sex assault cases since the early '80s, before there was even this real push, like now, it's a big push for a lot of attorneys, and it's also a space where discretion matters, and how did you approach or start to develop these types of cases? Because they're great cases, but they're very challenging to speak about from a marketing perspective.
Why taking personal injury cases other firms avoided built Michele Mirman’s lasting reputation
Michele Mirman:
At the beginning, the first case I took, no other lawyer wanted this case, and the cases are very time-consuming, it requires a lot of handholding, but I believed in this case very, very strongly. And also, this was at a time when rape trauma syndrome wasn't even in the manual for psychological disorders. I had to call at trial a psychiatrist to prove that this was a disorder, and I won that case, and the jury was actually out for four days, they prayed during this. After the case, people started to call me, other lawyers with this type of case, a case where somebody had been sexually assaulted in the trains and private buildings, and again, each one required a tremendous amount of handholding, it's just not an easy case to take care of. And I was extremely happy, extremely happy, when our legislature changed the law to permit these cases to be bought for a much longer period of time, because especially with children, they hide, they don't reveal themselves, they don't bring it up for many, many years, and it can be devastating, change their lives entirely.
Chris Dreyer:
Here's the marketing play. Michele went all-in on cases no one else wanted, the same thinking, going deep into cases not even on the radar, is exactly how trucking became a practice area. You own the cases others avoid, and the market starts to know you for it. That's how a niche is born.
Michele Mirman:
Whether we take a case in or not always falls down to the three of us, my partners, Tom Markovits and Ron Landau. We vet every single case. I don't want to take in a case where I'm going to lead a client down the garden path and at the end say, "Sorry, Charlie, there's nobody here," I just think that's the wrong thing to do. And I'd rather take in a case where I know that there's definitely responsibility by the defendant for the accident, where the client has injuries and there's a possibility of either insurance coverage or a way to get them paid. I think that it's wrong to almost seduce another person to say, "Oh, yeah, you have a case," and then they really don't, there's either the injuries are so minor, nobody's going to pay them any money, or they're absolutely at fault, or there's no coverage for the accident.
Chris Dreyer:
You've argued some of the sensitive cases in New York. You've taken cases that have never been tried before in this certain type of case. What's that process look like to determine, hey, this is a case, we're going to go the extra mile, and it may be a year or two years, I'm not an attorney, but it may be a grueling, lengthy process?
Michele Mirman:
Well, in New York, it already is a grueling process. It takes two to three years to get your case on the trial calendar, at least two to three years for all the discovery and the preparation, then you're going to wait at least a year, a year and a half, sometimes two years or more, to get your case to trial. So you're talking about a four to five year endeavor. So again, I want to make sure that it's a case that we want to be in for the long haul.
And the way I look at it is that we start preparing the case for trial from the day that we take it in. First, it has to, again, have liability, injuries, coverage, and then we do our investigation. We make sure that we get all the medical information and background information from the client, and we keep collecting it as we go along. I look at depositions as really trial testimony, so there's really no part of our case that is not geared toward trial. And when we take a case in, that's what we are thinking about, is this a case that we can try and win?
Chris Dreyer:
Over in Vegas, you've got, I think it's Lawyer Ball or Legal Ball, you've got the big data component style type of firms where they run all this big data to determine what the case is worth, and then there's, I guess, some other services that do a ton of these mock trials. How do you determine the value, some of those components on the trial side?
Michele Mirman:
So obviously, there are verdict search groups that will give us the value of a particular case, how old the client is, what the nature of the injuries are, loss of earnings. We use economists to determine the amount of actual lost earnings, the amount of medical expenses, what the client might need as far as help in the future, the actual hard evidence for damages, we do the research about the prior cases. And then, those are our bases, so at least we have a ground level to work from. It doesn't always mean that that's the amount of money that a client will get. Sometimes a case has an intangible way about it that enhances its value, so even if you have that verdict search or you have that printout saying, "Your case is worth X amount of dollars," our experience teaches us that that's not written in stone.
Law firm culture strategies Michele Mirman uses to retain attorneys and staff for decades
Chris Dreyer:
Verdicts make headlines, teams make legacies. Michele's kept people for decades and built a culture that pushes attorneys to perform. If you're churning through hires every year, that might be why you're stuck. Your edge is your people.
Michele Mirman:
I have great people here. I have not only great people, but people who have been with me for a very, very, very long time. So many of my support staff came with me through internship programs in high school, they did not go the paralegal route through college. We're a service business, and the most paramount thing is that I have people who are friendly, and the second paramount thing is I want everyone in my office to get along, and the fact is they are friends, and I want them to get along because we're very collaborative. I can't have somebody in my office say, "Oh, no, I'm not going to do that because it's her job," or, "I won't do that because it's his job." We have about 20 people here, seven to eight lawyers, about 12 to 14 people in my support staff at any one time, and I want to know that the phones are covered, that anyone here can speak to a client, that everything can be taken care of.
So with my support staff, I try to get them right out of school or in school and I train them, I start them from the beginning as file clerks, so they know everything about the office on the way up, they answer the phones, they do the filing, then I start them with the data entry, they learn how to do new cases, and I have people here for 10, 15, 20 years. In my office, there's always a way up the ladder, so that they're well-paid, they have all the benefits that work can provide, 401(k), medical, psychological, dental, vacation time, sick time. And the next thing I think that's extremely important about keeping staff is that you're flexible. We're human beings, we have problems, we have old parents, we have young children. If you're going to tell somebody, "I'm sorry, your can't go home because your kid is sick," you're not going to have that employee very long. So that's my paralegal team.
And with my legal team, again, Tom and Ronnie have been with me, Tom from 1980, Ronnie from '86, O'Hagan started with me in about '90, '91. The other attorneys been with me 10 years or so. I have a couple of people who've been with me for a couple of years, and I'm always looking to add more attorneys, but it's the same thing, it's collaborative, I don't kill people. I try to give people, my lawyers, what they're best at. If somebody's not a good brief writer, I'm not going to make them a brief writer and force them to do that. If somebody's great at depositions and great at doing motions, why wouldn't I encourage them to do that and let them do that? So I think it's worked out for me, finding out what's the best in my people and letting them do their best.
Chris Dreyer:
Have you found that, hey, so-and-so does want to just write the briefs and that's it and they're amazing at that, and then maybe someone is the person on your team that just goes to trial and speaks to the jury?
Michele Mirman:
Right, that does happen, and it has happened. So I do have attorneys who essentially write briefs and motions and attorneys who essentially just go to trial and prepare the cases for trial. But we all review the files, so whatever files we have, they're just divided alphabetically and we review the files constantly, I go through them A to Z, my lawyers have their chunk. And then, I switch the chunks every few months, every six months or so, because I want different eyes on the cases, and that way, we all end up knowing the cases also. Having a database is one thing, we could always open up the database and look at the case and say, "Oh, this is what's happening," but I want people to really know the cases inside and out.
Chris Dreyer:
For our audience, we've got a lot of attorneys that are considering growing out on their own, putting their flag in the sand, so to speak. Today, it's super competitive, it feels like every marketing channel is saturated. What piece of advice would you give them to get started maybe before they go out on their own?
The top advice Michele Mirman gives attorneys starting their own personal injury firm
Michele Mirman:
I think you have to have a really good base in your community, because I believe that that's where you're going to get your cases from, and I think you have to make a credible name for yourself by taking in cases that are credible, they'll get reported, your name will continue to burgeon.
Chris Dreyer:
When you take on some of those cases that are different, by the nature of them being different, you automatically stand out.
Michele Mirman:
Right, right.
Chris Dreyer:
Michele, this has been a lot of fun. What's the best way to get in touch with you?
Michele Mirman:
So I'll give you my telephone number, it's the office number, not my personal one, it's 212-227-4000, and our website, it is mirmanlawyers.com.
Chris Dreyer:
Iron sharpens iron, you've got to grind to stay in the front. Use tech to stay sharp, be disciplined in your case selection, and build the right team around you, that's how you thrive, today and for decades. Ready for more? Hit subscribe. Every week on Personal Injury Mastermind, we break down what it takes to win.
