Josh Schmerling:
One day I woke up and I just said, "This isn't enough. This is one life I have. Are there more people that we can help and be a greater influence in our community?" And our vision now is to help 10,000 injured people over the next 10 years.
Chris Dreyer:
Josh Schmerling, partner at Zirkin and Schmerling Law is the kind of leader that can make big dreams a reality. Resourceful, proactive, innovative. This is Personal Injury Mastermind. Let's get into it.
Josh Schmerling:
The biggest issue for my office in terms of growth was how to deal with all the medical records.
Chris Dreyer:
Josh took control. He identified the choke point and built a custom solution.
Josh Schmerling:
LAWPRO has helped with that a ton. In terms of just dealing with the medical records, writing demand, follow-up letters about medical treatment, which is why I created it.
Chris Dreyer:
In this episode, you'll learn how to spot bottlenecks that could hold your firm back and how to think bigger and build smarter so you can scale your practice without sacrificing quality. This is Personal Injury Mastermind. Let's get into it.
Josh Schmerling:
I have the law firm Zirkin and Schmerling Law. We're based in Baltimore, handle exclusively personal injury and workers' comp. And then also I co-founded lawpro.ai, which is a tech startup in the AI space where we take medical records, create case chronologies, summaries, demand letters, anything you want to know about the medical records is really what we focus on. We're signing up more clients every month right now than we ever have before. And the law firm is growing faster than ever has before. We have a great team of people and as we've grown, we've been able to increase our team and have people that have been with us for a long time move up. And then with lawpro.ai, we are in most states throughout the country at this point, working with some of the biggest personal injury law firms in the country. And then of course, work with some smaller mom and pop shops, one, two, three person firms, and just having great experience with all of our customers and continue to grow there.
So two really great things happening at the same time, which has taken up a lot of my time nowadays.
Chris Dreyer:
You said more cases than ever. You got a huge docket. I think you got, I think in our research, at least 1300 plus cases. Give me a picture of the firm, team size, touch more on the caseload. Just whatever you feel comfortable sharing.
Josh Schmerling:
We've been around since about 2007, 2008. And about three years ago, I made the decision that I really want us to grow faster. Things have been going great and I was happy, but it was time to just really take off. And we put a lot more resources into marketing, into sales, into hiring. And it's just been like a wildfire since then. Our biggest problem right now is we're out of space. So I moved into an office space that I thought was going to be plenty enough space for us and we're out. We have about 35 team members roughly. We're trying to hire five more right now and just continue to grow the business. We're bringing in about three times as many cases now than we were last year at this time.
Chris Dreyer:
So what was that mindset? What was the shift that you're like, "Hey, I really want to grow now." Was it you felt the confidence, you had the infrastructure? What was that trigger?
Josh Schmerling:
Really came down to, can we help a lot more people? And I woke up one day and I said, "This is one life I have. And I'm doing well right now and I'm happy, but are there more people that we can help and be a greater influence in our community?" And we actually changed our vision just recently. And our vision now is to help 10,000 injured people, whether workers or people injured through negligence over the next 10 years in our community. And so that's our vision right now. We're on pace to hit that and exceed it, and then we'll increase our vision from there.
Chris Dreyer:
When you say community, are you referring to the state of Maryland? How do you define community?
Josh Schmerling:
Yeah. The whole state of Maryland, we're present in the whole state of Maryland, but we also focus specifically in the Baltimore, Baltimore County, Baltimore City region. My law partner is a former state senator from Baltimore County. So we've been very active in the community for over 20 years at this point.
Chris Dreyer:
You start putting the foot on the gas. What were some of the things you did to grow? Your caseload grew. What marketing strategies, how you approach the community? Let's dig into that a little bit.
Josh Schmerling:
Yeah. So, the biggest issue for my office in terms of growth was how to deal with all the medical records. So as we continued to grow, we had more and more medical records coming in because we had more and more cases coming in. And it would always be an issue in terms of how fast could we read the records to understand what the positive and negative value drivers are, and then how long is it going to take us to do that and then write the demand and it was just slowing down the whole process. And I had my best people in my office, my top, top paralegals reading medical records all day. And I knew that there was a better way for them to handle our office, to help with our office than just sitting and reading medical records and I co-founded lawpro.ai about two years ago, a little bit less than two years ago.
We went to market about a year ago, and that has taken my top people, my top staff. And instead of them having to read medical records all day long, one of them is my director of operations now, and she's helping move the whole office. So instead of her reading medical records, she's hiring, she's making sure company culture's going well. She's taking on some of my biggest cases as a paralegal. She's doing a whole plethora of things. So LAWPRO has helped with that a ton. In terms of just dealing with the medical records, writing demands, follow-up letters about medical treatment, which is why I created it. I think we're one, if not the only one in this category of AI that really is shaped and co-founded by a practicing lawyer who has a practicing personal injury law firm. And that has been really, really helpful in terms of helping our growth.
And then it's just been marketing, sales, intake team, just making sure that we understand all the different steps we need to take, having more processes and procedures. When you start as a law firm, you're just trying to get as many cases as you can and make sure to keep on the lights. And then as you get bigger, it's really more about process and procedure. The cases are going to come in and they start coming in easier and easier as you grow. That's what I've found. But then you got to find a way to deal with them and to help your clients and make sure you're not missing things. From my perspective, you can't have the work go down, the level of work. Your clients have been in a really horrible... whether it's a car accident, where the leaders in Maryland on dog bite cases.
I have affected and pushed out law through appeal that have helped victims of dog bites twice now. You can't let your level of work slip because you're taking on more cases.
Chris Dreyer:
And then let's talk about marketing and sales. First, marketing. Look, it's fragmented. There's TV, there's streaming, there's search, there's AI, there's Meta and TikTok, and it's so fragmented. It's more fragmented to me than ever. How are you approaching advertising?
Josh Schmerling:
Yeah. So the way I'm looking at it is, I don't want to get into the radio or TV. Everyone's getting into radio and TV right now. It's a huge amount of ad spend. So that's not an area that we wanted to get into right now. But what we did want to focus in on was how we could really increase our volume and make sure people are aware of us without getting into that. And so that leaves us with really social. It leaves us with online, SEO, pay per click, LSA, all those things. So we have really taken a deep dive into all those areas and those are areas that we'll continue trying to dive into because I think for us, that's a good spot for us.
Chris Dreyer:
Perfect. I love that. Pretty much across the board, the cost acquired case is going up. I think PE is kind of circled. They were on the torts. Now they're moving more in a single event space and it's coming in different directions, consolidation. Some firms are doing some roll-ups and it's just driving the case costs up, not to mention channel movement and that's just part of the game. So on the sales side, you brought intake in house?
Josh Schmerling:
Yeah, so we have intake in house. I actually just made a hire, somebody that she's starting with us in July, really excited about it. She was at a publicly traded company and helped run sales for them. And she has a ton of training. She was there for 15 years, no legal background, but I'm going to have her help kind of run and lead our intake team just from a sales. And she's going to help some marketing as well and client journey stuff, but really excited to have her on board because that's the first touch point really for a potential client. And if you're not doing well there, you're missing out. So that's a big thing for us. I think the other big thing, you mentioned PE, and I think that's a great point. I think at this point, law firms either have to make a decision.
You're going to grow and grow with the technology and use the technology to help you grow, or you're not going to be around at some point. These PE groups have endless money and endless resources, and if you stay stagnant, you might not be here.
Chris Dreyer:
You touched on the incremental gains like, "Hey, we're doing more marketing, now we're doing the sales." So maybe your wanted case conversions were below 90s and now you're going to push them to the 90s plus and have the data to make those decisions. And then, hey, now from a capacities perspective and getting more utilization on our profit margin side to be able to facilitate more marketing, "Hey, I've got lawpro.ai." Right? So your guys can do a lot more work, your guys and gals. So let's jump over to that. LAWPRO AI, tell me about the company, give me the big picture, then we'll get granular on a lot of it.
Josh Schmerling:
Yeah, sure. So my co-founder and the CEO of the company is my brother. A law firm like myself, you can take all of your medical records, upload it to our system, and we're fully AI and engineering based, no humans on the backend. So if you upload a thousand pages, you'll have the case summary, you'll have the medical chronology, we structure the data. So you have all the different event types, whether it's a red flag or preexisting condition or a diagnosis or surgery and imaging, we pull out all this stuff automatically using AI and we're doing it within a thousand pages, 30 to 45 minutes. And so you can really understand your case very fast and then use that information to help negotiate with an adjuster or insurance company. A lot of the times, whether you're in trial or negotiations, the person that knows the case better usually has the better result.
And so that can be true at negotiations. It can also be true with trial.
Chris Dreyer:
You've got all the different LLMs, OpenAI and ChatGPT and Claude and DeepSeek and on and on and on, Gemini, et cetera. And then you've got your agents, your Manus and stuff like that. So is it an overlay powered primarily through a ChatGPT or an Anthropic? What gives it its power, here's the power and then we've taken it, maybe it's multiple sources. I have no idea. Talk to me about that.
Josh Schmerling:
Yeah. So we work with a lot of different LLMs all in the backend that the clients never see. And we have actually patent pending technology right now that basically uses lots of different LLMs at one time for specific purposes and automatically looks at what is the best for this purpose for us and then goes through that LLM to pull out whatever data we're looking for.
Chris Dreyer:
Talk to me about the hallucinations though. I think that's everyone's fear. I've heard it from some big firms, I won't name their firms that had some recent issues with it where maybe they have an associate attorney or use it and then they didn't pull the correct sources and case law and things like that. Talk to me about preventing the hallucinations.
Josh Schmerling:
Yeah. So hallucinations obviously are a real thing in AI right now with where the technology is right now. And for a law firm though, you can't afford to have hallucinations. We've seen people get disbarred because of them. We've seen people get in legal trouble. So we also have patented technology that actually reviews our end result before it goes to the law firm to look and change to make sure if there's a hallucination it picks up on, it can change it automatically. So it does that. We do that for every client before the final information goes to the client. So that's really, really key and important. The other thing that we do is we cite all of our sources. So if you ask for a demand letter, it's going to have citations next to it where you can literally click those citations. It's going to take you exactly where we got that information and you can see the record yourself to make sure it's accurate.
So it's important when you're using AI, from my perspective, that you verify things as well. If something doesn't look right, it might not be right. And you need to check the source, which is the medical record in this circumstance to make sure it's accurate. And so we provide that to all of our customers on everything we do. If you want a specific letter written, regardless of what that letter is, if you want summaries of the medical records or the medical treatment or the SOAP notes, whatever it is, we provide sources automatically so you can check to make sure it's accurate and not hallucinating.
Chris Dreyer:
Fantastic. How do you see AI shaping the personal injury landscape for the next five to 10 years?
Josh Schmerling:
This legal space to me is so exciting because for so long, the legal space was just so cut and dry and boring and the same way things have been done for the last hundred years and now it's changing. Lawyers used to say to me, "Well, I'm not into AI. I'm not going to use technology. I'm not going to use AI." And I would say to them, "You're not going to be in business eventually." It's the same thing as going from a typewriter to a computer, from my perspective. And anyone that's stuck with a typewriter, they were not going to stay in business. I don't think anyone right now is doing a great job of trying to figure out values of cases. I think the technology's not quite there yet, and I think there needs to be a lot more done in that, which is one thing that we hope to get to at some point soon from a LAWPRO perspective.
But also human capital needs. If you have a person that can do a lot more, but they don't have to waste time with an adjuster for 30 minutes setting up a claim, they don't have to request medical records the same old way that they've been doing forever. All these things are going to get better. The medical records one is a really hard one to figure out because it's just so broken up, that whole game of getting records. But I think we'll be able to resolve cases faster for fair values for our clients, which to me is the most important thing.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah. And the cash flow is going to help them stick around, right? I think that's the issue that the tort companies have ran into. It's like back in the day, you could start getting paid out maybe in three years and now it's like, "Look, it's seven or eight years." They've even pushed that into a strategy of itself because it just bleeds the firms out. Yeah. So I think the time on desk will shorten and all those things. And I also just think, do you think that, big picture in three years, do you think pre-lit's done? Just people that won't go to trial. Those firms existed. I've worked with several that they won't try a case. First of all, how do you get any value? Your value's got to be terrible, but what's going to happen to those types of firms?
Josh Schmerling:
Yeah, to your point, right? Insurance companies have books on all law firms, right? They all know us. They all have our tax ID numbers and they track us and they know who's willing to file suit and who's not. And of course, that'll change values for law firms and for clients and so on. I think right now, a lot of those firms have a lot of money for marketing typically. Typically, those firms are huge in the TV and the radio and so on. So I don't see them going anywhere in the next couple of years. I think some of those firms are starting to make this transition right now of actually hiring attorneys to try cases because I think that they see that the writing is on the wall for down the road where they might not be needed. So some of the firms that I know personally, some have started hiring lawyers now when they would not have kept stuff in house before.
But I think in the next three years they're fine. In the next five to 10 years, I don't know what happens with them, but they have a lot of money. So if they need to hire lawyers, they can do so pretty easily.
Chris Dreyer:
That's fair. And I've seen that too. And in fact, I circulated a text to Steve Gersten and Mike Rose and Anthony Russo and a handful of other attorneys. I'm like, "Hey, how are you paying your trial attorneys?" What's their compensation package look like? And I won't share theirs, but because I kind of see the writing on the wall and it's like, these trial attorneys are valuable commodity and it's like, so how do you golden handcuff with not only your values and missions and things like that, but also those dollar signs when they're motivated by the money?
Josh Schmerling:
Yeah, absolutely. To find lawyers, it's funny, I graduated law school in 2008 and the economy was in the tank and Lehman Brothers had gone out, Bear Stearns was down and I graduated law school and I was offered $35,000 in my first job out of law school. I was trying to get a job as a state's attorney and the people getting those jobs were graduating from Harvard Law School and I didn't graduate from Harvard, so I wasn't getting that job. So instead of taking that job of 35,000, I started my own law firm.
Chris Dreyer:
Good decision.
Josh Schmerling:
Thank you. I think because the law field is so strong for lawyers, a trial lawyer can get what they want basically. Even if I'm not hiring for a lawyer, I'm looking for a lawyer. And if I find everyone in my office has to try cases, there's no such thing as being a pre-lit lawyer versus a litigation lawyer. Everyone tries cases. And if I find someone that thinks to be good in front of a judge or jury, I'm hiring them even if I'm not looking right now, just because they're hard to find.
Chris Dreyer:
To be honest, I haven't thought about that and I think that's the perfect explanation of, yeah, maybe there won't be as many new startups because you can go to an established firm who has the ability to attract cases and still make a lot of money, right?
Josh Schmerling:
Oh yeah. Yeah. It's crazy. I go to a lot of different events now. I was at your event PIMCon, which was amazing last year, and you guys are having it again this year, which we're excited to be at. And I speak to lawyers all over the country. And the amount that associate attorneys, we're not even talking partners are paid. If they're good trial lawyers, it's really through the roof nowadays, but good for them. That's what the market says that they should be paid and that's what they get paid.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah. Merit. I love it. Josh, this has been amazing. I got one final question for our audience that want to connect with you whether to talk shop about law or to learn more about lawpro.ai, how can I get in touch?
Josh Schmerling:
Yeah. So the easiest way to get in touch with me is through my LAWPRO email, josh@lawpro.ai, L-A-W-P-R-O.ai. Whether it's legal or LAWPRO related or tech related, feel free to email me anytime and happy to chat.
Chris Dreyer:
Thanks for joining us for Personal Injury Mastermind. Don't forget to subscribe so you never miss an episode. I'm Chris Dreyer, founder of Rankings. Until next time, keep innovating, keep growing, and keep building the practice of your dreams.
