Lance Brubaker

[Theme Music Plays]

Lance Brubaker: True advocacy starts with a well-trained lawyer… There’s a huge access to justice crisis, and there is. Not in personal injury, but in America there is an access to justice — it’s too expensive to get a lawyer… I kind of went through this crisis, I guess, where I was looking around, is there another field I can do that I just feel more purpose?

Narrator: Welcome to “Celebrating Justice” presented by the Trial Lawyers Journal and CloudLex, the next-gen legal cloud platform built exclusively for personal injury law. Get inspired by the nation’s top trial lawyers and share in the stories that shape our pursuit of justice. Follow the podcast and join our community at www.triallawyersjournal.com. Now here’s your host, editor of TLJ and VP of marketing at CloudLex, Chad Sands.

Chad Sands: Welcome back, friends, to “Celebrating Justice.” In this episode we hear from Florida-based trial lawyer Lance Brubaker. Lance shares his story of why he left corporate work to fight for people and how Arizona’s ABS law has opened Pandora’s box for the entire legal industry. To get to the stories, I asked him, why did you want to become a trial lawyer?

Lance Brubaker: I had a dream of becoming a lawyer when I was really young. I grew up in a small town in New York, one of the smallest there is. I never knew a lawyer. Nobody in my family’s ever been a lawyer, but we lived outside of town and it’d get really boring in the summers. And my mom would say, “If you don’t want to be bored, read a book.” So she’d take me to the library, and I got turned on to John Grisham novels and loved the stories. It just… being a lawyer seemed like such an honorable profession and felt like that’s something you can do that’s really important.

So I had it in my mind when I was very young. When I went to college, I chose a route that would have a good chance to get me into law school. But as far as becoming a trial attorney… when I was in law school, I had no interest whatsoever in doing plaintiff’s work or being a trial attorney. Just… something about it just kind of scared me. I wanted to be a transactional lawyer. I was going to do real estate, and hopefully— I always had a dream of starting my own firm, but I didn’t expect to get into this line of work.

But I graduated from law school, and the first five, six years of my career, I worked for oil and gas companies and some banks. The employers were good to me. I made a fair amount of money, but I just… there was something missing. I didn’t really enjoy my work. And also I felt bad coming down on people. And that’s oftentimes what you do when you’re working for these big corporations. They’re paying you to get a good result for the company, and oftentimes that result is adverse to regular people. People who have lost their homes and are dealing with foreclosure and whatnot.

And it’s important to have lawyers that do that type of work, but it did weigh on me. I don’t feel like I’m helping people. I’m helping a wealthy corporation make more money. And so I kind of went through this crisis, I guess, where I was looking around, is there another field I can do that I just feel more purpose on a day-to-day?

I listened to this YouTube video— it was Rick Friedman. He gives this just really compelling speech to Harvard Law students and stands up and says, “You guys are the best of the best, the brightest legal minds. You’re gonna have job offers from the best firms in the country who do the biggest work for the top corporations. Many of you will go into corporate counseling jobs and you’ll make a ton of money, but let me explain to you why you should consider having a career representing people.”

I mean, it’s a 20- or 30-minute speech, but it really resonated with me, and it was kind of… it was like the perfect timing for me to hear that. So I said, I’m going to try it. And I jumped in with both feet, and I really enjoyed the work. And also I found a lot of purpose in that work— fighting for somebody that really needed help and getting a big result for them. It’s really gratifying in ways that go beyond just money.

Chad Sands: So were you kind of working on the defense side then for these corporations when you got out of law school, or was it more just in general counsel or…?

Lance Brubaker: No, it really was just a lot of land-man work. You’ve seen— there have been a couple of movies. I think Matt Damon had a movie Land Man, and then there’s the new series Land Man with Billy Bob Thornton. It’s been pretty popular lately.

Chad Sands: Actually, I have heard of it— it’s about oil, right?

Lance Brubaker: I mean, what I was doing, I was buying right of way for some big oil and gas companies building pipelines, trying to transport product to new markets. And there’s a lot of development in the Northeast where I’m from. And I knew some people in the industry and…

Chad Sands: So how long were you doing that, and then you felt this call into the plaintiff side? And then when did you kind of go out and hang your own shingle, and how nerve-wracking was it to leave a steady paycheck and go out on your own?

Lance Brubaker: It was three or four years I did the oil and gas stuff, and then I planted some roots in Florida. It took me a while to study for the bar, pass, get licensed, and then I worked for wherever I could find a job, working creditors’ rights. When I decided to get into personal injury, I applied to some of the biggest firms in South Florida and one of them gave me a shot. I worked there three, four years, got my feet wet, and then it was almost three years ago now I decided to take the leap.

And it was a lot, and it was hard because I was comfortable financially and I was to the point where I was making good money. So it wasn’t easy to leave that security, but it was time. I knew I’m not getting any younger and it’s always been a dream of mine. And so I decided to start my own firm. And it was incredibly stressful. You go from just working on cases all day to, now I’ve got to figure out marketing. I’ve got to figure out how to keep a steady flow of cases and, yeah, running the business.

I mean, we’ve done very well to keep our overhead at a reasonable amount, but what’s reasonable? You’ve got to spend money to compete, and it’s stressful when you’re not used to spending money like that, to see it go and—when’s it going to come back? Is it going to come back? At the end of the day, it made me such a better lawyer. Now I know the intricacies of trust accounting. When I reconcile my accounts every month, I’m not depending on an accountant—do they know how to do it, are they doing it right? I had to learn, and I do that, and I take great pride in doing it myself now.

And also with the marketing—I mean, I’m not a marketer. I had no experience in marketing, and I like to think I was a good lawyer when I left, but I’m much better now just having to learn all those things and…

Chad Sands: Well, I mean, you touched on a little bit in terms of the marketing and the competition. You’re down in Florida, one of the larger states with a lot of personal injury law firms. What makes you unique then? How do you kind of stand out?

Lance Brubaker: We don’t employ an intake group in the Philippines or in Ecuador or whatever. The people from day one you speak to on the case—it’s me or my right hand, who’s the best I’ve ever met at what he does. And it’s consistent throughout. I mean, everyone’s really adamant about scaling and getting bigger, bigger, bigger. But when you do that, I think it takes away from the premier way to handle a case, where the person who’s working on your case has been with you from the very first moment.

It’s not chopped up into like an assembly line where you speak for 30 minutes to an intake specialist in Ecuador—imagine some of the information that they tell that person from Ecuador—but then from there, the case goes to a case manager that works on the medical treatment and gathering the records. And then maybe three, four months later, the attorney finally gets around to looking at it, but he didn’t have the experience of five, six phone calls.

I’m intimately involved from the intake call, every step of the medical treatment. I’m reviewing the medical records as they come in. I’m speaking to my clients at least monthly—usually every week or two—about how they’re doing, how the injuries are affecting them, and picking up key facts. I can’t tell you… I mean, it makes me sick sometimes to think of, what if I wasn’t on the phone for her to tell me that key fact? Because it completely changes the case.

But some of the bigger firms, it’s like the attorney might change two or three times just because your employees, they leave for better opportunities, or they’re disgruntled and they quit, or they’re just not doing a very good job and you have to let them go. And it’s just that you lose that continuity. And I think our biggest competitor—size matters, and that’s such a great benefit to your case, as far as those advertisements—but I think it’s actually the opposite. Your best chance at any personal injury case is having a really good lawyer and some really good support staff, and they’re going to be by your side for the whole journey.

We’re a small group with really talented people that really care. I heard a radio ad the other day from John Morgan’s firm that was like, if you went in for a medical procedure, would you want just one doctor doing that surgery or would you want someone holding the thing and someone holding the scissors… and I’m thinking about being under anesthesia and getting a major surgery and having like 15 people with their hands in it. It’s like, that’s not what I want. I want the really, really good doctor—who’s an expert, has been trained. He can touch me, but like, leave the other 10.

It’s just like there’s a diminishing return at some point.

Chad Sands: It reminds me a little bit about another movie with Tom Cruise called Jerry Maguire where he was that sports agent and he left—well, he got actually asked to leave—but he wanted fewer clients, more personal attention. So that sounds a little bit like what you guys are doing down there. And I follow you on LinkedIn, and we had an article in volume one of the Trial Lawyers Journal that kind of touched on the changes coming out of Arizona and non-lawyers owning law firms. And you actually post some great posts on LinkedIn about this topic, which is why I wanted to chat with you a little bit about it. Could you give me the two-minute, like 50,000-foot summary of kind of what is going on with non-lawyers and working and owning law?

Lance Brubaker: I don’t know if I can condense it to two minutes, Chad. I could talk about this topic for two hours. But I didn’t know what the issue was or about ethics rule 5.4. I think a lot of lawyers don’t, because it just hasn’t affected a lot of lawyers or clients, and so people don’t really understand it. But this ethics rule has been in place in the American legal profession for a really long time. It requires anyone who owns a law firm to be a lawyer, and the reasoning behind it—the big public policy—is that corporate ownership, private equity ownership, could interfere with a lawyer’s independent judgment and their ethical duties.

Part of what we do as trial lawyers, plaintiffs’ lawyers, is we push back against corporate greed. When corporations place money and their shareholders above the safety of the public, people get really hurt and they die. And we all have stories about—and know about—cases where these corporations… they don’t exist to help anybody. They only exist to make money.

And so the legal profession, as people who are officers of the court and people who are required for safeguarding the law and justice and American society, it’s just always been this black-letter rule where if you want to own a law firm, you’ve got to be a lawyer. If you want to sell your law firm, it’s got to be to another lawyer. And look, some of these law firms that have scaled to a really large degree and they’ve got 100, 800 lawyers working for them, they’re making a lot of money.

When you compare the valuation of a law firm like that, that’s making that amount of money, and what you could sell it for if that rule didn’t exist—it’s a lot more money. Private equity looks at the numbers and says, this is what we pay for businesses that are generating that level of income. So I think you’ve got a lot of older lawyers who have built those big firms and they want to sell and get the highest number, I mean, I would assume, that they can get another law firm to buy you for. No lawyer can afford to buy Morgan & Morgan. Whatever offer he gets is going to be, what, a tenth of what private equity might offer.

But still, it’s like, you chose to be a lawyer. The profession is just so much more important. The independence of lawyers—those who came before you, those that will come after you—should be more important than a big personal windfall. And that’s what really bothers me about seeing how many plaintiffs’ law firms are running into Arizona to do this. Because if anybody should be pushing back against the corporate private equity ownership of law firms, it should be you guys, because that system goes so against what a really principled plaintiff’s lawyer should be all about.

Chad Sands: The legal vertical is just one area. I get targeted on Instagram for investment opportunities in veterinary clinics across America. Mars Inc., who is the candy bar and food corporation, they own like almost 20% of the vet clinics in the U.S. That’s an example with animals. And at what cost are these private equity—like guaranteeing a return on your investment to invest in a vet clinic that takes care of pets?

Like, why does Mars, the candy company, want to own vet clinics? Well, because they can make money.

Lance Brubaker: It’s just money. And the people investing in the Arizona ABS system, it’s the same for them. What does the financier from the UK care about what happens? And that’s another thing that really bothers me about Arizona, Chad, is when they circled all these state bar associations saying lawyers in America aren’t doing a good enough job, there’s a huge access to justice crisis—and there is. Not in personal injury, but in America there is an access to justice issue. It’s too expensive to get a lawyer.

But they came around and said, we want to provide more access to justice. These underprivileged communities don’t have access to justice and we want to close that gap. And then all these ABSs come in—they’re gravitating to the same lucrative fields that so many lawyers gravitate to because of the money. There’s nobody writing a will for your grandma who’s living on Social Security, because that doesn’t make it… It was so clearly all about money.

And the other thing is, if Arizona wants to try this, fine. It’s like, you can change your laws, but keep it in Arizona. The other bars—I mean, here in Florida, the Florida Bar was unanimous. They unanimously rejected this after studying it for two years, and the Supreme Court backed them up. The idea that Arizona could change their law and that somehow allows it in Florida is crazy to me. That’s a very, very basic legal concept you learn in law school, that the states have their own rights to make their own laws.

Colorado legalized recreational marijuana. Did people in Florida start growing in Florida? No—right? The law was still the law in Florida. It’s just crazy to me. And when you go back to one of those concerns, those main concerns, that people were writing very scholarly articles about—what Arizona was doing, it’s so dangerous. You’re going to invite a flood of people who come into this system and think the law is more simple than it is. A rule change in Arizona doesn’t allow you to go into other states and practice there and catch cases there, whatever. Like, what else are they missing?

Chad Sands: It’s painfully ironic, actually, that you point that out. I’ve never really kind of realized that—how in this world of law, Arizona just changed something and that it’s impacting every other state out there. And now you have companies like KPMG, the big accounting firm, who got approved. How do you see this playing out over the next five years, as it’s kind of played out in the previous five years? Is Florida going to be able to make a law and finally keep these firms out, or is it just going to keep going?

Lance Brubaker: I actually go to those Arizona ABS committee meetings, Chad. I would invite you to go to them. You can access them on Zoom, and they’re just so interesting. I mean, the last one I went to, there were people on that committee that have really changed their tune. They’re telling applicants, “Don’t say you’re going to be national.” They were really hard on one of the applicants who’s operating in Colorado and saying, “Do you have something from the Colorado Bar that says an Arizona ABS can be practicing law in Colorado?” And it felt like they were reading them the riot act.

And I’ve been studying it for a couple of years, and I’m looking at these people and saying, some of the people saying this to him have been compliance counsel, have their own ABS, that have well-stated intentions of entering other states. KPMG sat in front of you two months ago and it seemed pretty clear to anybody watching that they didn’t intend to do this solely in Arizona. But I mean, so like, you’re kind of walking it back now.

Utah did a sandbox and it’s interesting to see what they did. They got the flood of applicants and then they just kicked half of them out and said, you need to have a Utah nexus and you actually have to demonstrate how you’re providing access to justice to the people of Utah. And they’re just watching closer. It seems like they’re being much more careful. And when I see that, I’m like, I have strong opinions about the issue, Chad, but I also recognize there’s an access to justice problem in this country. Most people can’t afford a lawyer.

But it’s not in personal injury—that’s crazy. That’s contingency work. We don’t get paid unless we win. The poorest of the poor can afford a personal injury lawyer. So if you want to try it and you guys figure something out, I’m all for it. I love justice. But you’ve got to pay attention, and you can’t just… Arizona, I call them the rubber-stamp committee, because it’s crazy how ludicrous some of these ideas are and it’s like, “Approved, approved, approved,” whereas Utah is taking a much more careful, nuanced approach.

And I think that you had people there that saw these entities are trying to take this to other states that don’t allow it, and you’re not going to catch us authorizing that, whereas Arizona just kind of turns a blind eye to it, and that really bothers me.

Chad Sands: Do you think it’s too late? Is Pandora’s box kind of opened already? Because, I mean, if you’re one of the largest accounting firms in the world, what’s going to stop you from trying to expand?

Lance Brubaker: I think, Chad, that KPMG getting passed was really important for my side that’s arguing so passionately against it, because now more people care. For the last couple of years, big law—the firms that make just incredible amounts of money and are doing the most sophisticated legal work in the country—they’re not threatened by it. Up until this point. Now that KPMG comes into the picture, they’re like, now it affects me. Now it affects me.

And I think you’re going to have a lot more lawyers in fields other than personal injury, because it’s almost all personal injury firms that have… I mean, there aren’t really any accounting firms or something that could threaten big law, but this could. My hope is that you get some of the best lawyers in the country that come in and start fighting this battle. I don’t have to—right? I’m trying to do my part. I think it’s really important.

Chad Sands: Keep posting on LinkedIn. But yeah, I think the whole “access to justice” is just an excuse. And as you said, there’s not a whole bunch of will and estate attorneys opening up across the country yet. But we’ll see, I guess. Let’s get back to the stories and the cases. Could you tell me a story about a case you’ve had that had a significant impact on you?

Lance Brubaker: One of the things I love about this job is just how different all the cases are. And I have a lot of impactful stories about particular cases. A lot of it comes down to just the relationship you build with the client. And something that can be so frustrating is how bad your client’s hurt and how bad they’re suffering—but how do you convey that to someone on paper, in writing?

You believe them 100% and feel so awful, but the insurance carrier is pushing a piddly offer on you because they just don’t think your client’s suffering is that hard and their medical bills aren’t that high. But when we break through for a client who really needs it, it’s just so rewarding.

To give you some specific examples, they stem from a marketing campaign we did when I first started my firm. I wasn’t in the position where I had just tons of money to throw at marketing, so we had to get kind of creative. And one of the things we thought of was our “take a second look” campaign. We had learned—me and my case manager, paralegal, working together at other firms—that some of the best results we got were cases that had been dropped by other firms. Either they didn’t see an insurance policy that we know how to get to, or they didn’t see an angle on the liability that we saw differently.

And those people, I mean, they have such little hope. They’ve already… it’s really, really devastating for someone—especially with a really severe injury—to get dropped by a law firm, and especially a big one. The big one that you really want took me, and they said I don’t have a case. What’s this little firm going to do? And then some of them, it’s almost like they don’t want to be let down again. It’s like someone who’s had their heart just trampled in a relationship or something, and they’re afraid to try again.

But to take on one of those cases and give someone hope who really needs help… A really recent case I had is a client—just an absolutely lovely woman, one of the nicest people that I’ve ever met. I consider her a friend at this point. She had a difficult case and a really big, America’s largest law firm took it and then at some point made a decision that this isn’t one we’re going to take any further. And she’s thinking, I don’t have a case. And it got to us through that “second look” campaign—yeah, we’ll take another look.

And it was two years we put two years of effort into it, and it was a tricky case for a lot of reasons, but ultimately we got it resolved—almost a million dollars for someone whose life was really changed by an incident that wasn’t her fault. And you have clients like that that… I mean, they break down crying because they’re just so, so grateful that… It’s really, really rewarding to be there for someone, especially when the system in a way failed them and they had such little hope from their previous experience with a law firm—to take it from a zero to a really good result.

And it’s just money. A lot of lawyers say, we can’t get you justice, all we can do is get you money—and it’s kind of cynical. The money does help a lot. But almost every case I resolve at a high amount, seven figures or close to it, the client always says the same thing. They’re like, if I could just have my life back the way it was and return all this money, I would in a heartbeat. The best cases are the worst cases—someone who just really suffered a huge loss.

But if I had to pick out a couple cases, the ones that had the biggest impact on me, especially in the last couple of years, it’s some of those “second look” cases where we were able to help someone who got let down by another firm or was told that they didn’t have a case.

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Now here is this episode’s “Closing argument.”

Lance Brubaker: I think I just want to talk about what an honor it is to be a lawyer. It’s an incredibly stressful journey to become a lawyer. It takes a long time and a lot of hard work, but you walk away with abilities and knowledge that I think we can lose sight of—how valuable that is to people with really serious problems.

It’s a great honor to have that weight on your shoulders. And something I’m really passionate about is the notion that lawyers should own law firms and should be responsible for making sure that law firms and their lawyers adhere to their ethical duties. Something that’s going on in Arizona right now with their deletion of Ethics Rule 5.4, you have non-lawyers, private equity interests, some of them from countries around the world, coming into the United States and starting these entities that… they look like law firms to the public, but they’re not. They have motivations that are completely financial and not toward the most righteous parts about the law. It’s perhaps the biggest legal issue applicable to the legal profession in the last century.

As lawyers, we have a duty to protect the integrity of the legal profession, as well as the best interests of our clients. And true advocacy starts and begins with a well-trained lawyer that is providing independent legal counsel in the best interest of the client, not in the best interest of shareholders or a corporation.

I truly believe there is an access to justice crisis in this country, and the crisis is that it’s so expensive to afford a lawyer. I’m open to listening to ideas about solving the access to justice problem, but the non-lawyers, private equity corporations that wanted to own law firms—their intent was to provide access to justice to the underserved in this country. Just… it was hard to believe.

At the beginning, and with what’s occurred in the last four years—what’s available for study—it’s very clear that that was not the intent. These firms gravitated towards legal practices that are very lucrative and are already very saturated with lawyers and that don’t have an access to justice problem—for example, personal injury. I would strongly encourage other lawyers to get involved with this issue and to pay close attention, especially if you see these schemes or these Arizona entities entering legal markets in places where our elected officials and people at the bar, people sitting at the highest courts of the state, have wisely said, we’re not selling the legal profession.

Chad Sands: That was trial lawyer Lance Brubaker. Thanks for sharing your stories. To learn more about Lance and his firm, visit their website, brubakerinjurylaw.com. All right, I’m Chad Sands. Thanks for listening. See you next time.

Narrator: You’ve been listening to “Celebrating Justice” presented by CloudLex and the Trial Lawyers Journal. Remember, the stories don’t end here. Visit www.triallawyersjournal.com to become part of our community and keep the conversation going. And for a deeper dive into the tools that empower personal injury law firms, visit www.cloudlex.com/TLJ to learn more.