Chapter 5 · The Way Forward
How to Become a Better Acquisitions Lawyer
There’s something deeply rewarding about looking a victim in their eyes and vowing to help them go into battle against a corporate Goliath.— Darren Miller
In my mind, Darren Miller is the poster child—the Platonic template—for what it means to be a successful acquisitions lawyer as well as deeply principled attorney.
Darren was my first client—and remains one of my most dynamic and smartest collaborators to this very day. When I first outlined the importance of data curation and leveraging social media to find mass tort clients, he was a bit skeptical.
But here’s the amazing thing about Darren Miller and why he was my first choice to author this chapter. He’s an extraordinarily open-minded and studious man. He finds ways to see new angles way before the masses do and then calculates—with breathtaking speed—how to capitalize on what’s coming around the bend.
After our initial discussion about Facebook and big data, he went home and did his homework. He didn’t wait for me to circle back around and teach him. He educated himself on the topic. And then he did what all really sharp people do: He came back and said, “I understand what you’re doing. Now prove to me it can work.”
Which we promptly did. That’s how X Social Media has grown so rapidly over the last decade. If you commit to our process—to our methodology—we will not only deliver you quality leads but we will help you grow your practice as well.
Darren Miller committed to our process. As a result, we have forged a bond that will never die. We come from very different places and different environments, but we both understand the business side of the law. We understand the value of spending a dollar to get ten dollars back. And we realize that those profits are ten times sweeter when they come from helping underserved populations who have been irreparably harmed by bad actors.
As you will see, Darren possesses unique insights regarding what is needed to become a successful acquisitions lawyer, and he’s also given a great deal of thought to the essential ingredients required to scale up legal practice at a rapid clip. I believe his story is not only inspirational but it’s a road map I recommend everyone consult, no matter where they currently may be or how high they hope to climb. —JAcoB MALHerBe one AFternoon, BAck wHen I was in my third year at Thurgood Marshall Law School, I opened my mailbox and found a rather nondescript envelope stashed inside. I tore it open and felt the warm glow of a $10,000 check—with my name on it—radiating against my fingers.
I’m no trust fund baby. I come from humble people and humble beginnings, so my initial reaction, at the ripe old age of twenty-eight, was a sweaty-palmed jolt of both confusion and awe.
First, came the obvious question: What is this?
Although my first “mailbox money” check came as a complete surprise, I quickly developed a hunch as to the origins of this mysterious check. I’d worked, while in law school, on a mass tort involving— and I’ll be extra generous with the labels here—self-proclaimed “counseling centers” for teens and troubled children.
This was back in the 1980s and 1990s, when there was a seemingly endless loop of TV commercials that preyed on the frayed nerves of overworked and overstressed parents. Ads for these so-called counseling centers asked the kinds of leading questions that tended to stop worried parents dead in their tracks.
Have your kids been acting up—and mouthing off—more at home and in school of late? Do you get the feeling that those once sweet and incorruptible bonds with your children have begun to fray and fracture of late? Are your children losing interest in school? Do your kids seem to be keeping secrets from you about their social lives and friends, which might be contributing to their “new” behavior?
Scores of parents, staring bug-eyed at the screen, couldn’t help but mumble the words, “Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes,” and immediately begin scribbling down the telephone number plastered at the bottom of their TV screens. How could it hurt, they surmised, if we took a field trip down to one of these centers and looked into whether they might be able to help.
So these parents did what so many others did: They drove down to visit these facilities—big, beautiful sprawling buildings, which looked like they were airlifted in from some elite college campus. They’d meet briefly with an administrator and promptly sign their kids up for some carefully prescribed “guidance.”
Meanwhile, huddled away in some grungy back office, a different group of charlatans were busy vetting mom and dad’s medical insurance to see just how long they could bill them before their insurance premiums went dry. Some kids were enrolled in these phony centers for thirty days. Some for ninety days. Others even longer, if Mom and Dad thought it was prudent to shell out large sums of money to ensure Junior found a way back into the light.
And what did these cutting-edge counseling centers provide in return? An all-access pass to unsupervised psychological and physical abuse. Some kids found that their new peers were more than happy to help them graduate from pot into far more potent and addictive drugs. Some kids claimed they were sexually assaulted or raped on-site. Others felt psychologically traumatized by the fact that their parents were buying into the lie that they were being treated at all.
Eventually when Mom and Dad’s insurance claims ran dry, they would be informed that—miracle of miracles—their children were now cured! The treatment centers had done their job! The family could exit stage right into endless days of perpetual sunshine and a spot on next semester’s honor roll.
The law firm I was working for at the time saw things slightly differently. After interviewing a group of these kids and their parents, we began to understand the pervasive damage that these so-called counseling centers were inflicting on families. So we decided to fight back. Our firm signed up approximately six hundred plaintiffs, and I experienced a taste of my first mass tort.
Flash forward to my mailbox money moment. I quickly deduced that the check must have been connected to those cases in some way. So I took a visit to my old employer, slid my check across a boardroom table, and asked the only pertinent question of the hour: Is this thing legit?
He nodded his head yes.
Turns out that the firm had settled its bundle of cases for $117 million, pocketing 50 million bucks in the process. Not a bad haul.
At the time, $10,000 was a decent chunk of change for me, but the money wasn’t the real prize. It was the sudden revelation—call it a kind of awakening—that finding success within the mass tort space was within my reach.
If I employed the right business strategies and constructed my own set of best practices, there was no reason I couldn’t do this on my own. I, too, could do well by doing good. I could help large swaths of victims find justice while simultaneously hauling in sizable profits for my time and skills at the same time.
There’s something deeply rewarding about looking a victim in their eyes and vowing to help them go into battle against a corporate Goliath. But there’s something equally satisfying in knowing you can do the same thing for thousands of people at the same time.
It’s all about order of magnitudes. Do the math. Whenever you put an X behind a number, you’re going to move toward your goal at an expedited pace.
Good Act 2X is not as good as Good Act 10X.
And Profit 10X is always better than Profit 2X.
For me, that was the real revelation: I could do both. I knew, in that moment, what I wanted to do with my law degree. If I could create my own system—blending together my understanding of the business world and the legal field—I could continue to help individuals as a personal injury lawyer while also working in the mass tort space to help swaths of injured parties.
And you can too. That’s the message—in just four words—that I deliver to any lawyer who approaches me with an interest in entering the mass tort field. You can do this. That is if you make the right decisions and manage your business affairs in a strategic way.
There’s a pretty clear, well-manicured path for you to get you there. The question is whether you have the discipline and risk tolerance to follow it.
One of the great differentiators in our field is the ability to understand and anticipate change. Are you capable of diversifying your docket? Can you adapt to changing circumstances? Can you absorb new perspectives? Are you capable of leveraging the expertise of outside vendors? Can you build a strong and multifaceted team?
In short, can you develop your own unique approach to the business of law?
An ability to anticipate change—to see around the playing field— is one of the most essential skills in the mass tort arena, especially if you’re a personal injury lawyer. If you handle, for example, lots of car wreck cases and you know fewer people are driving and driverless cars are coming, how are you going to survive in that new world?
Do the math: less cars, less wrecks, more lawyers, more competition. Tally that up and you’re inevitably looking at fewer clients and lower returns, so why set yourself up for inevitable failure?
Look at what happened to medical malpractice lawyers in Texas. They’re going about their daily business—chasing the same clients, running their firms the same way they’ve done for decades. Total cruise control. And then, boom, the Texas legislature decides they’re changing workers’ compensation law. Remember those thousand-dollar fees you used to earn left and right? Guess what? They’re now capped at a hundred dollars.
And—BOOM—like an asteroid streaking from the sky, a whole meandering looping herd of dinosaur lawyers get wiped clean from the Great Plains of Texas.
The hedge against an unexpected shock to the system like that? One word: diversification.
Stop walking in a straight line. Take things at a more oblique angle. Your best long-term strategy, in my opinion, is to become a mass tort acquisitions lawyer. I don’t say this merely because your profit margins will experience a sizable boost. I say this because I sincerely believe that becoming an acquisitions lawyer is within the reach of every single lawyer who picks up this book.
Know Who You Are and What You Should Become: Who Is an Acquisitions Lawyer? First things first: a word of encouragement. Chances are you already possess the requisite skills needed to become a mass tort acquisitions lawyer. And if you’re currently working in the personal injury space, I guarantee you that you’re ahead of the game already.
Consider, for a moment, the skills that you’ve already honed as a personal injury lawyer. At some point or another, you’ve learned how to make deals with other lawyers. It happens to all of us. You sign up a client who was involved in an eighteen-wheeler case. You pour time, energy, and money into ensuring you’re going to win the case. Then your client sends you an email saying he switched over to his cousin Jimmy’s firm to represent him. So you have to call up Jimmy and negotiate. I’ve done X, Y, and Z. Let’s help each other. Can we make a deal? Let’s split this thing fifty-fifty, and we can both walk away from this in a better place than where we started.
Chances are you already possess the requisite skills needed to become a mass tort acquisitions lawyer. And if you’re currently working in the personal injury space,
I guarantee you that you’re ahead of the game already.
Then there’s the ability to sniff out value. Personal injury lawyers—I’d argue from birth—have a keen sense of which cases have value and which cases aren’t worth pursuing. Do you want the Fed-Ex rear-end collision case where the driver was drunk or the slip and fall at Walmart where grandma took a header in the store?
Personal injury lawyers know which direction the wind is blowing—both figuratively and literally. And we’ve trained ourselves to act quickly. Skilled practitioners in our business know the perils of waiting until Friday to call a victim back. We move in the moment. Doesn’t matter if you’re at home on diaper duty, changing Junior’s Huggies, we find a way to multitask. You’re going to make that call while giving Junior a refresh—and you’re going to be smooth, on both ends, while doing it.
I mention these skills—deal making, a nose for value, speedy responses—because these are prerequisites to becoming a successful acquisitions lawyer. In the simplest of terms, an acquisitions lawyer acquires mass tort clients and then hands them over to tier-one trial lawyers to try the cases. It’s all about collecting, referring, and striking deals with other lawyers.
You can leave the courtroom strategizing and litigating to other people. In return, you’re going to receive between 30 and 40 percent of the top-tier lawyer’s attorney’s fees. Although I bounce back and forth between being an acquisitions lawyer and a tier-one lawyer, depending on the tort in question, there’s no doubt that most newcomers should begin their mass tort journey as acquisitions lawyers.
It’s the best way to get your feet wet because once you hand over your clients to a trial lawyer, you can sit back and simply monitor the progression of the case. When a settlement is announced, your clients receive a check and you receive your cut. Simple as that.
In the simplest of terms, an acquisitions lawyer acquires mass tort clients and then hands them over to tier-one trial lawyers to try the cases. It’s all about collecting, referring, and striking deals with other lawyers.
Do the Math: Profits and ROI In terms of ROI, mass tort acquisitions lawyers enjoy the kinds of returns most personal injury lawyers can only dream of. Let’s do some simple math to prove that point. Let’s say your average cost of acquisition on your typical personal injury case—say a car wreck—is $1,500. The victim has a broken leg, hospital bills, and the like. It’s probably going to cost you, on average, another $1,500 to properly work up the case, so that takes you up to $3,000 in costs. Let’s say you win—noting that many states have capped policy limits and payouts—and your client is awarded between $25,000 and $30,000. Roughly speaking, you take home $8,000 in attorney’s fees. You’ve turned $3,000 into $8,000 in roughly eighteen months.
If you use a skilled and reputable lead-generating vendor, like X Social Media, it’s going to cost you the same $1,500 to find a mass tort client (or even less if you jump in early on). Then it’s probably going to cost you another $1,500 to vet the case and ensure the victim qualifies for the tort. As an acquisitions lawyer, you then hand that signed client over to a joint-venture tier-one trial lawyer, and he or she works the case. You’re looking, if you use an estimated average Boy Scout settlement as a guide, at a $75,000 settlement per victim. And that’s on the conservative side.
Let’s say you strike a typical sixty-forty split with the tier-one firm. So the attorneys’ fees come out to $30,000. The tier-one lawyer keeps 60 percent of that figure, and you keep 40 percent. The tier-one lawyer earns $18,000 and gives you 40 percent, which is $12,000.
Which would you rather do? Spend $3,000 to win $8,000 or spend $3,000 to win, at the minimum, $12,000.
Oh, but there are other sweeteners to remember as well. While you sit back and wait for a settlement to arrive, there’s absolutely nothing stopping you from taking on an individual personal injury case or whatever other legal work (family, bankruptcy, social security, immigration) you were previously focused on.
Then consider the final glistening cherry on top: When you’re an acquisitions lawyer, you’re never representing just one client. You’re gathering up bundles of clients and handing them off to someone else. So if you make $16,000 on a single client, you have to multiply that profit by the number of clients you signed. If you handed over one hundred clients, that $12,000 becomes $1,200,000. If you manage to round up a thousand, I’ll let you fill in that glorious product, but suffice to say, it makes that lackluster $3,000 single case profit weep with envy.
Becoming an Acquisitions Lawyer: A Road Map to Success Hopefully, you’ve done the math and can see—with starry-eyed clarity—the extraordinary financial benefits that come with becoming an acquisitions lawyer. But there’s likely another part of you that is whispering, “Yeah, but what’s the catch?” The only catch is that you need to think like a business professional to succeed. If you don’t build the right team, approach client acquisitions like you’re swimming with sharks, and partner with the right lead-generating advertising vendor, you’re not going to be able to find any victims to represent in the first place.
As any lawyer will tell you: No victims. No cases. No settlements. No attorney’s fees. It’s that simple. Up until recently, lawyers hoping to enter our industry were often intimidated by how difficult it was to actually locate mass tort victims. It was a pure needle-in-the-haystack proposition, which is what kept our ranks rather thin.
That changed, virtually overnight, due to social media and Facebook advertising vendors like X Social Media. Take it from me who was a data skeptic in the early going. Back when my firm began working with X Social Media, I didn’t fully grasp the true power and potential of using data curation and analysis.
Now data drives every single decision I make.
I remember listening to one of Jacob Malherbe’s speeches at Mass Torts Made Perfect (MTMP) and saying to myself, “What’s all this about data? Forget data. We need clients. Tell us how to acquire cases.” What I’ve learned in the years since is that data and client acquisitions are inextricably intertwined.
Now, like any new convert, I’m a true believer because I’ve seen, with startling clarity, what technology and data analysis can do. It saves you time, money, and energy—and quite frankly helps every lawyer become a better businessman or businesswoman.
Sometimes, a quality vendor will help by steering you toward the mass tort cases that are worthy of pursuing. Why spend $2,000 or $3,000 per victim on Shaky Mass Tort X, when you can pursue victims for Sure Thing Mass Tort Y for $1,500 a lead? These decisions equate to higher profits, while minimizing your risks.
But in other cases, like the 2017 Las Vegas shooting mass tort, the data has reinforced and supported my own analysis, which told me that the case not only had legs but that there were scores of victims out there who were willing to participate in the tort.
These are the types of decisions that acquisitions lawyers face every day, but I’ve developed a kind of road map—think of it as a recipe card—that can help new acquisitions lawyers more efficiently make the transition. We’ll use the Las Vegas mass shooting as a case study to show how the recipe unfolds and the stunning results that can occur by following it. Step One: Research, Research, Research If you find that your gut is telling you to pursue a particular mass tort, do the following: Stop. Drop. And immediately roll into a deep research dive. You need to understand the case on a multitude of levels to determine whether it’s worth pursuing. Ask yourself these questions:
• Who are the major players involved? What is the current state of the litigation?
• Which aspects of the case remain unknown or circumspect?
• How is the media covering the story?
• What are the potential risks and potential rewards of investing in the case?
• What deep pockets are there, potentially, to go after?
• How much is it going to cost to acquire leads now versus a few weeks or months from now?
In the case of the Las Vegas shooting, the consensus opinion within most legal circles was that MGM Resorts, which owned the Mandalay Bay, would never settle. It was difficult to find anyone who didn’t know about what happened in Las Vegas on October 1, 2017. A sixty-four-year-old gunman opened fire from his hotel room on the thirty-second floor of the Mandalay Bay into a group of people attending a country music festival. Over the next eleven minutes, the gunman killed more than fifty innocent people, while also injuring roughly 850 before he took his own life.
The facts and circumstances surrounding the shooting were undisputed. The question was whether Mandalay Bay had shown some kind of negligence or done enough to prevent this heinous crime from occurring.
After conducting my own research, I approached a well-respected tier-one firm and laid out my rationale for pursuing the case. As far as I was concerned, the hotel did not do enough to prevent the killer from bringing weapons into his room. Nevertheless, the firm I talked to told me they were passing on the case. They argued that there was no way the hotel could’ve known that the shooter would smuggle all those rifles into his room nor could the hotel have prevented this lone-wolf assassin from inflicting the amount of damage he did.
I approached the case from a different perspective. I’d done the research. I’d seen and heard and watched what these victims had experienced, and I kept thinking about the optics of these shootings. The facts spoke for themselves: These were people who went on vacation and wound up dying as a result.
Here was an American tragedy that I felt everyone could empathize with. Everyone goes on vacation. And you’re not supposed to end up in a casket or in the hospital as a result. Would the courts actually look the other way given the facts of the case?
It was clear to me that these victims deserved representation, yet no one was standing up to ensure their voices and stories were being heard. The basic question I asked came down to this: “Why are you so sure that this tragic event couldn’t have been prevented?” It seemed entirely reasonable to me that there was some kind of negligence exhibited by MGM Resorts. All we needed to do was dig deep enough to find it. Step Two: Generate a Game Plan What’s your overall strategy? That’s the question worth asking once your instincts and research point you toward the validity of a mass tort. What’s your game plan?
When it came to the Las Vegas shooting, I knew I had to do two things: Confer with my own internal team and reach out to X Social Media for further consultations.
No lawyer is an island; you can’t do everything by yourself. In the mass tort field, you’re only as good as the internal team around you. I always call meetings with my team members every week, not only to bat around ideas but to discuss new business opportunities. My goal is always to diversify our talent base: Hire a controller to set a budget and make sound financial decisions. Hire skilled attorneys to help investigate the tort. Empower my management staff to coordinate these efforts as efficiently as possible.
Ultimately, if you own your own firm, you’re the CEO. So you better make decisions like you’re the CEO:
• Who’s going to handle which tasks?
• What are the potential pitfalls looming on the horizon?
• Are your team members being actualized?
• Are they meshing as a team or fraying?
All of these decisions matter a great deal. Meanwhile, you have to reach out to trusted vendors, so I called Jacob at X Social Media. I wanted to get a better sense of what he was seeing on Facebook. He saw just as much potential in pursuing this case as I did. So we discussed costs. How much would it cost to do a test run? How much did he think it would cost to find an initial group of clients? And other variables. And then we readied ourselves for battle. Step Three: Spend Money to Make Money There’s no room in the mass tort world for fence-sitters. Scared lawyers never succeed in our world, but there are ways to improve the likelihood of success by following the right set of best practices. I’ve learned from Jacob and X Social Media, for instance, that it pays to spend a little extra money up front to see what the initial data reveals.
Some mass tort lawyers, including my former self, have a tendency to want to dive headfirst into a new project, spend hundreds of thousands of dollars right out of the gate. Jacob’s response is always, “Let’s slow down. Let’s test it. I want you to spend your money wisely.”
His argument essentially comes down to this: Why spend $100,000 to find out if things are going to work out or not work out, when you can spend $5,000 and come to the same conclusion?
That’s what we did with the Las Vegas shooting mass tort, and we realized that we had an opportunity to find victims if we worked quickly. The first forty-eight hours are often critical in cases like these because that’s when victims begin to think about the repercussions of the tragedy.
When someone’s spouse is sitting in a hospital room somewhere, they can’t help but think about the day after tomorrow: How will we pay for our house? How will we take care of our children? How will I ever be able to retire?
There are bound to be scores of questions that pop into victims’ minds. It’s Jacob’s job to try to anticipate those questions and help address them by showing them ads that will direct them to a reputable law firm.
In the case of Las Vegas, if we pursued our strategy early, we’d only have to spend $30 to $50 per lead. If we were to wait two or three weeks, we were looking at $500 per case. More than a month: $1,000 or more to find each victim.
Why, you may be asking, was it so inexpensive during the early going? Because you take on more risk early in the process. It’s entirely possible to sign up thousands of clients early on, only to find that the mass tort itself won’t ever get off the ground. But if the case progresses to an MDL or it appears to be heading to a settlement, other lawyers will inevitably jump in and try to find clients themselves.
By testing the waters early, we realized that X Social Media could find a surprising number of victims using Facebook, thus allowing us to find potential leads for dimes on the dollar. Which is exactly what we did.
Once the Las Vegas mass tort gained traction, we could have handed our clients over to a tier-one lawyer and sat back until the settlement came in. But I made the decision, very early on, that the tort was strong enough for me to handle it in-house. In some mass torts, like Roundup and hernia mesh, I hand my clients off to other lawyers, but in this case, I felt we knew more about the shooting than many of the top-tier lawyers, so I decided to see it to completion. Step Four: Keep Diversifying We harbored less fear about Las Vegas because of all the work we’d already poured into the research. I mitigated my risk by leaning on our internal expertise and following through on our game plan. But I didn’t stop there.
Once we committed to finding those early clients, we were already thinking about how we should spend all the money we’d saved by jumping into the tort early on. At my firm, we believe in building detailed budgets, which is why I’ve hired a team to focus on carefully monitoring them. We were clearly coming in under budget by jumping in early, so what should we do with that leftover money?
A more timid firm would have stashed the savings away, but that didn’t strike me as the wisest business decision. I felt we should start using it to diversify our docket right away.
Let’s use some nice round hypothetical figures. Let’s say that we spent $80,000 of our $100,000 initial budget on Las Vegas. That would leave us with $20,000.
We were doing great. X Social Media was quickly finding MGM leads for us. But I felt we had to build a more diversified portfolio. So I used the money to acquire relatively inexpensive cases involving a birth control product called Essure.
We wound up acquiring thousands of these particular clients at a very low cost. After several years of waiting, the courts announced a huge Essure settlement for approximately $1.6 billion.
Meanwhile, we continued to wait for the Las Vegas settlement to come in, which eventually closed in 2019. In the end, between four thousand and five thousand worthy claimants were awarded $800 million when the settlement was announced in 2019. We settled about a hundred of these victims’ cases, from wrongful death cases to other types of injuries, for many millions of dollars.
It all comes down to this: To be as successful as possible, you have to continually analyze your position and diversify your case docket. I recommend every lawyer look at their case roster before they go to bed. Really study it, like it’s your IRA. What’s your average cost per lead and cost per signed case? Then take some time to scan the day’s major and minor headlines. Who’s being arrested? What are the major developments in the medical world? What are the social issues dominating the headlines? What are the major court rulings of the hour?
Never let up. Keep detailed data and find new clients because, as I’ve just noted, the work will pay off one-hundredfold if you stay disciplined and follow the process.
It all comes down to this: To be as successful as possible, you have to continually analyze your position and diversify your case docket.
A Little Extra Help: The DMA Advocates I feel fortunate that I’ve been able to carve out my own unique niche within the mass tort space because my work provides me with extraordinary insights into the social issues that dominate the headlines. In some ways, the mass tort world acts as a giant mirror for all of us, which reveals the societal problems—sexual abuse, pharmaceutical abuse, corporate malfeasance—that we all should be addressing as we move forward.
I hope that, in some small way, my story and my process help other lawyers enter our space. At the same time, I feel a calling to encourage more Hispanic, African American, and minority lawyers— not to mention female attorneys—to take this leap because we need their diverse perspectives.
I sincerely believe that many lawyers are reticent to enter our field because they’ve never been exposed to this particular area of the law. My message to everyone comes down to this: Don’t be intimidated by what you don’t know. The plaintiff-side community is extremely open and supportive of new members joining our team.
We can teach you how to become an acquisitions lawyer. How to find victims. How to negotiate deals. How to partner with the right tier-one lawyers. How to evaluate cases. How to take that next step into the top tier. And how to scale up your business so you can do what I did and build a professional team that is perpetually making each other more productive and efficient.
This chapter represents a distilled look of the basic foundational elements required to be a mass tort acquisitions lawyer. But, of course, there are far more lessons worth sharing and other mentorship opportunities worth embracing.
Which is why I’ve launched a company called DMA Advocates PLLC, a case-acquisitions company that helps lawyers transition into the world of mass torts as quickly and efficiently as possible. If you feel comfortable jumping in with both feet, I encourage you to get out there and do it, but if you feel like you want a little guidance as you make that turn, DMA Advocates PLLC was built for you.
My message to everyone comes down to this: Don’t be intimidated by what you don’t know. The plaintiff-side community is extremely open and supportive of new members joining our team.
With the help of X Social Media, I know how to acquire leads, both quickly and inexpensively. Th ink of DMA as a kind of carefully hewed shortcut, which will allow you to quickly test out the industry and see if you’re comfortable with making a complete migration.
Here’s how it works: We charge our partners $99 for every client we successfully sign for you and take 10 percent of the available attorney’s fees when these cases eventually settle.
We devised this particular fee structure based on what we were hearing from lawyers entering the field. Let’s say you’re new to the game and you go to XYZ law firm and tell them, “Hey, I’ve got these Boy Scout or Roundup cases, and I want to make a deal with you.” Most of the time, a top-tier lawyer will give newcomers a 60-40 split. Th ey take 60 percent; you keep 40 percent. And sometimes it can be even lower than that.
With D. Miller & Associates PLLC, you pay us 10 percent, but we negotiate those deals on your behalf, saving you money in the long run.
Th is benefits newcomers in two ways: First of all, we are fully tapped into the mass tort world, so we’re going to find you the best tier-one lawyers on the market. And for our 10 percent commission, we’re also going to use our firm’s power to improve how much you get paid on your case. A typical referral fee on a case is between 33 percent and 40 percent. Because of our firm’s reputation, we are often able to insist on a referral fee of 50 percent. Meaning you will get a greater share of the total attorney’s fees, even after paying us our 10 percent.
Th ink of our services as a springboard. It’s a very inexpensive way for new lawyers to take the mass tort world out for a test drive, as we handle everything from signing up clients and monitoring the data to referring the case out and ensuring you get paid your fees when the case is resolved.
I paid my dues early on and know how frustrating those early days in a new field can be. Early in my career, I took small referral fees, just for the sake of learning the game and linking up with the right people. I know who’s skilled and easy to work with, and I know who’s difficult and subpar. No one joining our industry from the outside will know the difference. Which is why I’m convinced that my experience and connections can help outsiders become insiders at a more rapid clip.
Some of my friends in the industry have told me I was crazy to launch DMA Advocates PLLC because, in essence, I’m creating competition for myself. And that, in some sense, is absolutely true. Th e more lawyers that we mentor and groom to be acquisitions lawyers, the more competition there will be for me and my firm. But to be fully honest, I embrace competition. If anything, the proliferation of new blood and new ideas keeps me on my toes and improves our own operations.
It comes down to purpose. I’ve made money in this industry. God has blessed me. And I’ll continue to make money in this industry, as both an acquisitions lawyer and a tier-one lawyer. I feel a calling, at this point in my life, to help other people—women, minorities, lawyers in other fields—enter and compete in this space.
As I’ve said before, you have to play the long game, but there are always smart shortcuts worth pursuing. You just have to take the time to look for them and possess the courage to follow them.
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