Morgan & Morgan Referrals Webinar

- Hello, and welcome to this webinar, on Morgan & Morgan's referral family, and how to join it. Thank you for taking the busy time out of your schedule. I hope that it is worth your time. I hope that we can increase fees to your firm. And give a little bit of insight about how we run our referrals business, and how we can help you. I'd like to start off by talking a little bit about our firm, Morgan & Morgan. Morgan & Morgan is the largest plaintiffs only, law firm in the country. We have over 500 attorneys. We have over 40 practice areas. And we've recovered more than $5 billion for our clients, in verdicts and settlements. We are one of the largest firms in the country, not just doing plaintiffs work, but in general as well. With the amount of attorneys we have, the geography that we cover, and also our nationwide practice areas as well. I'll also be talking, during this webinar, about our technology provider, Litify. Litify allows us to track our referrals, both outbound and inbound. But we also use Litify and it's full suite of products, for our intakes, matter management, financials, et cetera. But I will be focusing on the free referral platform of Litify that we use, so that you can better track your referrals to us, and have transparency throughout the process. A little bit about me. My name is Jake Sternberger. I'm an attorney in Morgan & Morgan's Philadelphia office. I work in consumer protection, that area of our practice. And I also manage our website: https://www.classaction.com. Which deals with a lot of consumer protection issues. So I'd like to start off by talking about some of the same problems that we had some years ago, when we realized that our referral system was broken. You may be having similar problems and be asking similar questions, that we were some time ago. Questions like, am I getting paid the referral fees that I'm owed, years and years after I've made the referral? Was that email that I sent to that lawyer in Washington state, referring the case, actually followed up on? And is it tracked in a system where we both know that this is a referral from my firm? Questions like, do I know how many of my referrals that are out there, out in the hinterlands all over the country are still active cases? Is it 100, is it zero. I referred 500, did that turn into five cases, 50, 100? You need to know. Knowing these things is important for your business. Other questions like, do I have the data to know these referral partners who I'm sending cases to, all across the country, in different practice areas, are they delivering? Are they cherry-picking the best cases? Are they taking some tougher cases? What's the nature of that other firm and our relationship, et cetera? And do I know where I can send cases of almost any kind, and almost any jurisdiction? Who are my friends, and who's who in the zoo, across the country? These are all questions that we struggled with some years ago. And we implemented systems ourselves to solve for a lot of these questions. We are now getting referrals from all across the country. And we're also sending referrals all across the country, because of these solutions that we developed to these issues. So first, let me give you an overview of the inbound referrals that Morgan & Morgan, my firm, has received. In 2018, we received about 3,800 referrals from firms across the country. That number has already more than doubled. It's actually larger, than the 7,500 cases that are listed in this webinar. It's already slightly out of date for 2019. But we've doubled our referral business, in just the last year alone. There are a lot of reasons for that. It's because our referral partners have been extremely satisfied with our verdicts and settlements. And critically, we give our referral partners full transparency on the status of the cases that they've sent us. And we do it through this Litify referral network that we've built out. So that our partners can see what's going on with the cases that they send us. And get notifications when we sign it up. Get notifications when we put it under review. If we've turned it down, et cetera. We've also received a ton more referrals this year, than last year and over time, because we are covering a very large swath of geography across the country. Larger than any other plaintiffs firm in the country. We're in 14 states. Though I believe, it's 16 now. We just opened an office in West Virginia, and an office in South Carolina as well. Handling some limited practice areas there. So we are in 16 states, all across the country. And I'll show you map, later in the presentation. We also have nationally recognized lawyers, in a wide variety of practice areas. Some of the best lawyers in the country. And I'll highlight some of them later. But we have 500 lawyers, and we believe that they are all great. And many of them are absolutely superstars. Additionally, and I offer this to anyone who sends us cases. If Morgan & Morgan can't help you with either the type of case that it is, or the venue of where the case is, I'm happy to tell you who we send our referrals to, out in whatever state it is, where you're trying to find a referral partner for a case that you had wanted to refer to us. We're an open book. We're happy to help grow the pie together for everyone. So that's something that we think is important. And it's earned a lot of trust, because we will say when it's not something that we can handle. And we'll help you find someone who may be able to, who we know and trust, as well. I wanna talk briefly, about some of our recent results. And I will go into this a little bit more later. But the bottom line is that, we are a large enough firm that we will absolutely not settle the case, unless it's the best offer. Unfortunately, in our industry there are some lawyers who need the money more than clients. But with our size, we can fight for and hold out for that best offer. And if we don't think it's the best offer, we can put the resources in to take it to trial. We are always working tirelessly for our clients to get the best possible results for them. Which means the best possible results for you, as well. We go to trial more often than any other firm. Every week, I receive in my email, the all attorneys blast. It's at least twice a week. Justice in Jackson, you know. Or, we get another verdict in Orlando. We are taking cases to trial, and we're not afraid to. And we get excellent results. You'll see on your screen, some of the pre-trial offers that we've been offered before trial. And then you'll see our results at trial. The insurance companies will tell us the case is worth $15,000. And then we'll get a verdict for $1.5 million. I guess they were wrong. And we've got a whole booklet of these from last year, which I carry with me everywhere. This shows our verdicts from 2018. And it's pages, and pages, and pages of similar numbers. The type of case, the kind of case, where it was, the venue, what the pre-trial offer was, and what the result was. We're very proud of our results. We publish them online. And we've put 'em in this magazine, so that you can trust us, as well. I encourage you to check it out. It's available on the internet, but we also carry it around everywhere. I'll mail you one too, if you like. This next slide is highlighting just some of the recent referral fees that we've paid. It features some referral fees from our med-mal department. It features some fees from our Business Trial Group, as well. You've got... a $400,000 referral fee on a security fraud case. Another close to $400,000 fee on med-mal. $265,000, $231,000, $205,000. The list goes on and on. This is just some selected data from 2018. And we pay these every day, throughout our offices, throughout our 50 offices the country. Another aspect that I'd like to go over is, we have created this Litify referral network platform, because it was a business necessity for us. When we were sending out our referrals, across the country, many years ago, before Litify, before the referral network, it was like sending cases into a black hole. You just didn't know what was going on with the case. You didn't know what the inventory was. But we built this for ourselves, so that we could track our outbound referrals. And now we're offering it for free, to firms who want to send us referrals to track the very same metrics. So you can log in every day, and look at the status of the leads that you've sent to Morgan & Morgan. Or, the status of the leads that you've sent to the other, almost 1,000 firms that are on the Litify referral network now, across the country. And you can sort it by, which cases were signed up today? Which cases are still under review? What cases has this firm signed up? What cases has Morgan & Morgan signed up? So we offer this transparency to our referral partners, because it was so helpful to us. We want it to be helpful to you, as well. We built it for us, but we wanna share it with you, if you join our referral family. This is a map of the states in which we have offices. I'm in our Philadelphia, Pennsylvania office, in that corner in the southeast of Pennsylvania. But our firm is a Florida based firm. That's where we started. I think we've got about two dozen offices in Florida. And we've got offices in all these other states, as well. Mostly around the southeast. But also on the west coast, and the northeast too. Up in Michigan we have an employment law office up there. South Carolina we just opened a first party insurance dispute office there. We are in Indiana, as well. We're in Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky. And like I said, if it's any of those other states, any of those 34 other states, where we send cases out when we get inquiries, I'm happy to tell you who we work with, where. And help you know who's who in the zoo. This is a picture from our most recent all attorney meeting in Orlando. These are our lawyers. These are not all of them. I'm not in this picture either, because I have a fear of large crowds. I tried to get in it, but then left it. It's a picture of our lawyers. In the front, you'll see John Morgan, Dan Morgan, Mike Morgan's in there, Matt Morgan, Ultima Morgan, the whole Morgan family. And then, the other 500 of us, with the different last names, who are also part of the family. And we want you to be part of our family, as well. We consider our referral partners to be family, too. These are some of the featured attorneys, who I'd like to highlight. Some of our absolute superstars. Keith Mitnik, is one of the best trial lawyers in the country. And probably the best trial lawyer in the country. He's the author of "Don't Eat the Bruises." Which is a great book that you should absolutely read. He puts out a free podcast, as well. A weekly podcast of his thoughts on trial strategy. Every time he releases one, they have... Thousands of listens within the first week of release. Keith is an absolute leader in the trial bar. And I encourage you to take a look at his results. And he has handled cases that have been referred to us, as well. Tav Gomez, leads our consumer protection department. That's mostly TCPA cases, FCRA cases. Tav handles those nationwide. He's based in Florida, but I see him up here. Even in the eastern district of Pennsylvania, because he's traveling all over the country to lead our nationwide consumer protection practice. Stacey Clark, runs our Veterans Legal Group. She handles veterans benefits claims. So anytime a claim is denied by the VA, if a client comes to you with that issue, you can refer it to us, and Stacy's department will take a look at it. Stacey leads that department. She's stellar as well, and extremely responsive. John Yanchunis, he leads our class action department. He's in Law360 articles all the time. He leads a lot of the data breach litigation. Yahoo, Equifax, pretty much anything you've read in the news, John Yanchunis is involved with it, if it's a data breach case. Even the Wendy's and Arby's data breach cases, as well. Which I read about recently. John's had a ton of success. Dylan Bess, Dylan is in our Atlanta office, in Georgia. He's work-comp attorney. He's one of our young guns. He's stellar, he's so good that we're getting him involved in our fire injury cases, as well. So we make sure that our talented guys, and our talented gals, get to handle cases that they're great at, and cases that they're interested in, as well. Katheryn Barnett, Katheryn is the Managing Partner of our Nashville office, in Tennessee. She fights a lot of hard fights on difficult cases against big companies. Last year, I think she had a $13-$14 million verdict for a product liability case. I know she's had some results higher than that, as well. She's an absolute rockstar. She leads our office in Nashville, but she also is trying cases, not just managing. She is handling some big, big cases. We've got superstars like this all across the country. This is a list of the practice areas that we handle. There are about 40 of them. This is not a completely full list, but it's some of the case types that we like to emphasize. Of course, we handle the regular gamut of personal injury cases, auto accidents, slip and falls, work-comp, med-mal, nursing home. But we're also handling cases like boating accidents, that are more maritime or admiralty cases. We have a department dedicated to that. We have a warranty department that's led by Jeremy Kespohl, in Florida. We have a fire injury department that handles cases nationwide, led by Ben Wilson, in Jackson, Mississippi. We have a Business Trial Group it's representing businesses on a contingency basis. So we generally represent smaller businesses that have been completely screwed over, by large corporate conglomerates. And we've had excellent results. We think it's really the big part of the future of the firm. We handle childhood sexual abuse cases. We handle civil rights cases. We have a civil rights department that is headquartered in Kentucky, Adrian Mendiondo leads that department for us. We've got a death and disability rights unit that's based in Florida. We've got a mass tort department, as well, that is always looking at different kinds of cases that you see in the news. And I'm always sending our referral partners updated lists, of the types of cases that we're looking for. Be it Roundup, be it Zostavax, be it Valsartan, all kinds of things like this. We are handling those national litigation types, as well. We have a Social Security Disability department, and many other departments that go along with it. So here are some testimonials, from some of our current referral partners, who we've been working with for a long time. And they have seen the results that we've got. This is a quote from Sean Flaherty, at Keches Law Group, up in Boston, Massachusetts. Sean says quote, "As our firm has grown, "we naturally started getting "more and more clients outside "of our core New England jurisdiction. "We needed to find a partner "that could handle those cases, "with the same level of excellence "that we hold ourselves to. "And there was no "better choice, than Morgan." Sam Pond, he runs Pond Lehocky, out of Philadelphia. Sam said that quote, "Morgan has revolutionized "the practice of law, "by delivering to everyday people "the highest level "of legal representation, "in the most professional, "effective and ethical manner. "They use the power "of a large firm to fight back "for the little guy, "against the most powerful interests. "They have a culture and reputation "for trying cases, "unlike other firms that settle cases "for inadequate offers." This final testimonial is from Emery Ledger, who runs The Ledger Law Firm, out in Newport Beach, California. If you're ever out in California, you should go visit Emery. He's a very fun guy. Emery says quote, "We refer hundreds of cases "per year to Morgan. "Morgan's remarkable client service, "coupled with their stellar "legal expertise, has elevated "them to true leader status, "in the fight for justice. "Our team is confident "that every client referred "to Morgan, is in the hands "of a top national firm. "And our confidence is supported "with the best possible results." If you have any questions about anything that I've said during this presentation, or anything else, please feel free to email me directly at, my first initial and last name @forthepeople.com. Jsternberger@forthepeople.com. I'd also like to offer, my direct line in my office. It is 215-446-9793. And that goes directly to me. It does not go to a secretary. It rings at my desk. So please call me anytime. We would love for you to join our referral family. And I look forward to working with you. Thank you very much, for your time.