Building a National Firm in a Small Town

Jonathan Hawkins: [00:00:00] Welcome to Founding Partners Podcast. I’m your host, Jonathan Hawkins. Really looking forward to today’s conversation. I’ve got somebody that I’ve met recently.

We’ve got a lot in common. We we’re both eight years undergrad. We both grew up on the Gulf Coast. He’s a little bit less than me or where I grew up, but I happen to have Loyd Bourgeois on the podcast this week.

So Loyd is a disability and personal injury lawyer down in Louisiana, so we’re near New Orleans, I think, but I’ll let explain why don’t you introduce yourself, Loyd.

Loyd Bourgeois: Hey, Lloyd Bourgeois Jonathan said just west of New Orleans, maybe 20 minutes, 30 minutes if traffic is bad, but do a lot of social security, disability, personal injury cases down here.

Jonathan Hawkins: So tell us about your firm. So how many folks do you have? How many attorneys, how many staff how do you guys have it staffed up?

Loyd Bourgeois: So, we’re a small firm. I only have I have eight total people right now, and we’re always trying to hire [00:01:00] more. It always feels like we need another one at least week by week.

Some weeks it doesn’t feel that way. But I have one other attorney. He handles most of our injury stuff along with myself.

And then I have a paralegal slash eligible for direct pay, non attorney social security representative. It’s just a long acronym that they put out there.

So anyway, she basically can practice it from the Social Security Administration. She’s certified to do that. So she handles most of our disability stuff, with me helping out as needed.

And then we have, intake, marketing, couple of assistants, two virtual assistants over in the Philippines. And we’re the cusp, like I was saying, on the cusp of needing to grow bigger, wanting to grow bigger, but always ah, is it the time? Is it not the time?

Jonathan Hawkins: It’s a decision we get into that in a minute, but yeah, I’m convinced. You have to decide to do it because you have to go for it at some point.

Loyd Bourgeois: Yeah. We have.

Jonathan Hawkins: It could happen by accident, maybe, but I think [00:02:00] you have to decide.

Loyd Bourgeois: We have this saying around here. It’s comes from field of dreams. If you build it, they will come. If we just hire one more, the work will come and it will be enough. We’ll get more cases that’ll work out, which always sounds great in theory.

And then you’re like, okay how are we going to pay for this person until that happens?

Jonathan Hawkins: And it’s hard in a contingency practice where you don’t have the cost of cash flow, I’m sure.

Loyd Bourgeois: Yeah. It’s very difficult, especially like for us, we have probably two thirds to 70% of our cases are disability cases. 30% are injury cases, but that two thirds, the 70% of our caseload is a smaller revenue portion of our practice than that percentage by a lot.

But when you have that many cases, it just takes a lot of people to work on them. And it’s those cases, there’s a lot of externalities and dealing with those cases that we don’t really have a lot of control over it makes it even more difficult than just a regular contingency [00:03:00] fee practice to figure that out.

Jonathan Hawkins: So, let’s talk about injury practice real quick. So growing up on the water. imagine, if you’re here in Atlanta, car wrecks or truck trucking wrecks down there coast, I’m sure you have those, but are there like water injury type cases too? And are those different?

Loyd Bourgeois: Yeah, they are. We have Jones Act semen cases, which are workers who are tied to a vessel. And with the river right runs through our parish. So you have a lot of folks who are working on barges, tugboats, ocean going vessels, you have a really built out oil industry here in South Louisiana.

So sometimes you have some Jones Act cases there, but you have Longshore Harbor Workers Compensation Act cases, like a federal workers type of scheme for people who work in harbors then, and our long shore, so they basically are not tied to a vessel, even though they may [00:04:00] work on the water from time to time.

They’re not tied to a vessel. They are more land based. They may have to go out, and so they get hurt and injured, so you do have a ton of those cases that are very specialized, and there’s different criteria and factors that go into those cases than your typical auto crash cases.

Jonathan Hawkins: It sounds complicated. It sounds like you got to maneuver. I guess the Jones act is that federal cases too?

Loyd Bourgeois: Jones Act is weird, you can file it both, either in state or federal just the way that the act was written. Just some criteria about, is it a seaman, so that’s usually where a lot of the battle is in the Jones Act cases. Is the injured party an actual seaman, are they tied to this vessel or are they not tied to the vessel?

And they’re just like, voluminous case law on that. And it’s like a battle in many cases Fifth Circuit has made made its kind of mark on American jurisprudence a lot in Jones Act cases.

Jonathan Hawkins: So are there just landmines for like malpractice all over the place, like missing deadlines, [00:05:00] suing the wrong people, suing them in the wrong claims or the wrong courts? Is that it?

Loyd Bourgeois: Yes. There’s, I guess to an extent, there are landmines there for folks who maybe have not, who aren’t familiar with it, just the typical auto crash attorney and they never had a case like that and they don’t exactly know what to do.

But, the good thing is because it’s a niche area, but there’s also very good niche attorneys here in the New Orleans area south Louisiana that you can turn to and be like, hey, this is what I got going on, can we co counsel? Can I refer it what’s going on here that you know, you can help yourself by not getting involved?

Sometimes if you’re not comfortable, or you can learn from some great legal minds.

Jonathan Hawkins: Let’s go back before law. So like I mentioned you, you’re an engineer. I guess first thing is, what kind of engineer and did you actually work as an engineer before law?

Loyd Bourgeois: So, I did civil and environmental engineering at LSU and I passed the [00:06:00] fundamentals of engineering exam. The FE before you become the PE you gotta do that. And I worked in chemical manufacturing industries during college.

So I was pretty proactive. My stepdad worked at a plant, he got me a first job at one. And then after that, I would just meet people that worked at a plant. I’d be like, Hey man, I’m in engineering school. What can I do to come work over there? I ended up getting some jobs, internships through that, like one year.

And then the next year I went through our like formal program at school and did my formal internship with, at the time it was Monsanto. Now it’s Bayer, which has a really, I think it’s like their biggest roundup facility is right in there.

And so I worked there for two summers, doing environmental engineering grunt work.

Jonathan Hawkins: Oh, wow. Is that what led you to say, yeah, I’d rather be a lawyer. What led you to that for it?

Loyd Bourgeois: Yeah, it pretty much was. Look, the [00:07:00] pay was great. But, especially for a college student. The pay was great. The people were great. But the work that we were doing, and the work I was seeing the other engineers do, was just not what I thought it would be.

I’ll tell you a little bit about my background. I came from a very poor family. I didn’t have anybody in my family who went to college. None of my aunts and uncles went to college. None of my even extended family that I knew had ever gone to college.

My grandparents didn’t go to college. My mom didn’t graduate high school. My grandmother didn’t graduate high school. I had my great grandmother couldn’t read.

So, like I just got lucky and hit the genetic lottery and was smart and like people were like, oh you’re good at math. You’re good at science. Go be an engineer. And I knew, I like being outside and hunting, fishing and going out and doing surf fishing and in South Louisiana, like the coastal erosion was a big issue. It still is a big issue.

But it’s we heard about a lot when I was a kid. And I remember talking to people like if you want to help with coastal erosion, go learn and like environmental engineering and you can help make an [00:08:00] impact on us.

And I was like that sounds great. I’m going to go do that. And I went to engineering school and I was working in a chemical manufacturing facility, just like, running reports on air quality metrics and water effluent

Jonathan Hawkins: Yeah.

Loyd Bourgeois: Chemicals. And I was like, this is not what I had in mind. The people were great. And they’re like, look, it can get exciting sometimes, but for the most part, this is how it’s going to be.

I don’t know. Working within this framework and these permits and these parameters, and you have some input sometimes on how to fix things, but usually it’s out of our hands. We just get some directives from corporate and make sure our numbers are right. I was like, ah who has more input on that stuff?

And they’re like we have these corporate environmental people and we have these environmental lawyers that help do all our permitting and everything maybe if I can’t actually go work in the environment to do that, then maybe I can just be the lawyer to help start directing this stuff.

And that’s why I went to law school.

Jonathan Hawkins: Did you think you’d want to be an environmental lawyer or did you have?

Loyd Bourgeois: Yeah, I thought I would. And then that’s the time of Erin Brockovich [00:09:00] came out. a civil action came out. And so you’re seeing all this stuff and I was like, man, that’s awesome.

If I can do those things, like you’re helping getting back to where you really believe them to helping the environment, making things safer, helping your community, also helping people remove these kinds of pollutants from the world, or at least holding people accountable.

And yeah, I went to Tulane law school, got an environmental law certificate. Wrote on the journal there. It was a great experience, but then, most of the jobs are not like that.

Jonathan Hawkins: I know. It’s like most, that’s the funny thing. A lot of people think about, I want to be an environmental law because they want to help the environment. But it seems like most of the jobs are representing the companies.

Loyd Bourgeois: Yeah. That’s right. And lobbying to make the laws looser, or you’re litigating to say why it’s not as bad or get around it.

Your company did fine, which, look, I respect those jobs, that wasn’t my vision. Yeah, that’s when I went in, that’s what I thought it would be.

Jonathan Hawkins: It’s funny too, as an engineer myself, whenever I told people in law [00:10:00] school or right after that, I was in law school, we’re going to be a lawyer. They’re always like, Oh, you’re going to be a patent lawyer. You probably got that too.

And I know back then there was like a automatic premium on the salary if that’s what you did, but I had no interest in that at all. I don’t know if you even looked at that.

Loyd Bourgeois: Yeah, I didn’t look at it. Same way, a lot of people were like, Oh, you must be coming to do patent law. Like I was just a dumb kid, man.

Like I didn’t even know what engineering was when I went to engineering school and then I went to law school. It was going to be an environmental law. I’m like, Oh, you can be a patent lawyer. I was like, Oh, that is.

Jonathan Hawkins: They get paid a lot more.

Loyd Bourgeois: Okay. I’ll look at that

Jonathan Hawkins: All right. So you come out of law school? What did you go do? So you thought about environment you didn’t do that. So what was your first job out?

Loyd Bourgeois: It was an interesting time in New Orleans. I graduated like in May and Katrina hit in August, the end of August. I took the bar in July and thought everything was great. And then we get some phone calls or messages like, Hey, we might’ve lost the bar exam, certain portions of them. And so at that point it was really just whatever job [00:11:00] I could get.

I did well, I had a job lined up before, but no one knew if those things were going to still exist.

And so it took a few weeks for us to figure out exactly what I was going to do, the firm I ended up working for, they did a lot of the maritime stuff, we started the conversation with.

I did a lot of Longshore Harbor Workers Compensation Act, maritime law, collisions, allusions, vessels against vessels.

So I did that for six months and the work was fine, but I hated the people. It was just a place that was, toxic beyond belief. And I could not believe anyone would spend their whole life working at a place like that.

And so six months in, I was like, I’m out, I’m not doing this. And I think my son was like eight months old at the time. And I told him, I’m not doing this anymore.

And I’m going to work for the Navy. And it was like a hazardous waste manager at a naval yard here south of New Orleans for another six months.

And [00:12:00] then I got a job doing, was

Jonathan Hawkins: So wait, so you quit the law firm and did a non law job? Oh, wow.

Loyd Bourgeois: Yeah.

Jonathan Hawkins: It was it because you couldn’t find another job or you were just like, you want to take a break?

Loyd Bourgeois: No, I just had an eight month old kid and I knew that law firm wasn’t going to work out. And so I was just looking for anything that would get me out of that law firm.

And so wasn’t that I didn’t like the law. It was just that I knew that place was not for me. And so I just. The best opportunity that I got was being a hazardous waste manager.

And so it’s funny to say, I was like a 24 year old dumbass who’d never really worked doing hazardous waste management. Here I am being a hazardous waste manager, but it was interesting because you were working with a lot of, by the book military folks. So they respected titles a lot more, I think, than just people do outside of that environment.

And I was able to really they had a big inspection coming up that they needed to pass and, was able to get the [00:13:00] place in really good shape.

Got that inspection passed. They offered me a full time job after that. So it’s like a contract worker for that period of time.

And then I was like, if take this job, I’m never going to do the law again. I just it. And is that what I want? Am I to that point yet where I’m really willing to give up all those long nights, all those hard days. To go and not, I won’t say not use it, but not be a lawyer yet.

Jonathan Hawkins: And that Tulane private school tuition too, that you’re probably carrying it.

Loyd Bourgeois: Yeah. We’re limited on the pay was good, but there was not a lot of upside to it. The floor was high, but the ceiling was very low to get into that type of work with the government.

And yeah, I was like, so I just put out some feelers and ended up actually the ad I responded to us, I’m an old guy.

It was a classified ad newspaper.

Jonathan Hawkins: Oh, wow. Oh man. For a law firm job?

Loyd Bourgeois: Yeah.

Jonathan Hawkins: Oh my God. That’s awesome.

Loyd Bourgeois: Yeah, this is what it said. It said, looking for engineer dash lawyers. And I was like that’s me.

So, [00:14:00] I responded and I just went and worked for a firm. And we were doing a lot of hurricane Katrina litigation from the defense side insurance defense, but also had an opportunity there to do some plaintiff’s work.

And then do some environmental, it was defense side, but it was for like a small company that was a contract for big oil companies and they were getting sued along with the big oil companies for contamination and these neighborhoods and stuff.

And so, it’s interesting to it was really like the first time where it’s for me, it wasn’t black, it wasn’t like you have a polluter and you have people who had no choice.

This was just, they were exposed to these pollutants and they didn’t even know it, neighborhood.

But this was like, okay, you have the polluter, like the oil company, you have the neighborhood and you have this small company in the middle who’s doing the work and getting all these things to clean when they don’t know these things are polluted, contaminated with chemical that is harmful.

They’re just doing their job and their [00:15:00] people didn’t know, their owners didn’t know. And so it was Hey, maybe it’s not so black and how does this work?

Did that for a few years, right before I started my own firm.

Jonathan Hawkins: Yeah. So tell me about starting your own firm. So it’s, obviously at some point you did it. What was the spark or catalyst where you just said, I’m going to go do it. Did you have entrepreneurial streak growing up or what was it?

Loyd Bourgeois: I won’t say I had an entrepreneurial streak growing up. I always was just a hard worker. Just remember like getting up in like eighth grade summer, the first day of summer and getting a phone call.

Hey man, we got some work. Do you want to come work with us? And just said, yeah.

And going pick up roofing nails for some guy who was a roofer in the neighborhood. It was just giving kids jobs around the neighborhood.

And so, they were up on the roof doing the roof. We were picking up the stuff on the bottom, building pools the next summer. It was just, so it was always just like a hard work. I knew like I could put in them.

And so I knew that wouldn’t be a problem. But I think what really, was the impetus, it was two things.

One, there was this thing that was [00:16:00] happening at firm that just showed me that I could probably do it. Just gave me the confidence that I had the ability to maybe run my own firm.

And then the second thing was, it was an external thing from the firm, but it was a family member, a cousin of mine. It’s actually my mother’s cousin, but my grandma called me one day and she was like, Hey, and again, you got to remember no one in our family even went to college, much less go to law school.

So like I’m the person, everyone in the family called for anything legal or non legal within my realm of knowledge or not if anyone knows how to fix it, it’s going to be Lloyd, right?

That’s how it was. And to an extent still is, but my grandmother called me and she was like, Hey your cousin, she’s got brain cancer.

She was getting disability, but her mom just told me they kicked her off. I don’t know exactly what’s going on. Can you call and figure it out if they need some help.

So I just called her up and said, Hey, what’s going on? So she explains to me what’s happening as best she could because she had brain cancer and she [00:17:00] wasn’t, a 100%.

And I said, look, I’m going to come over, give me whatever documents they have and I’ll take them with me and I’ll figure it out.

And that really set the stage for kind of my firm, because just me figuring out I knew I could put in the work and that’s what I did. I would stay late. I’d get up early. I’d work weekends, just trying to figure out what the heck was going on.

How could this insurance company tell my cousin that she could work when it was clear to me it was impossible for her to, this was someone who she had known me her whole life, right?

She’s my mother’s age. Her and my mother and my mom’s sisters and all the great friends of the high school together related to us.

And I’m having a conversation with her and she just stops me, puts a hand on my shoulder. It was like, thank you for helping me. But can you tell me your name again?

I’m like, how in the heck can you say this person can work? She don’t even know people she’s been had in her life forever.

And she was an insurance salesperson and they were like, Oh she can sell insurance on the phone. And I was just, I was [00:18:00] flabbergasted, man. Like it was mind blowing.

And so I figured out how to fight that battle. It took me a little while, but I figured it out. And then like along the way, I just started like a WordPress blog and just kept was blogging about what I learned, blogging about the stories I was reading, blogging about what I was doing.

And just to help me sometimes you got to write it down to help you see it better and it just helped me to put it out there and then people just started contacting me, it was like, I am going through the same thing, can you help?

Hey, that’s crazy. They’re telling me I can work and not, it’s the same exact situation. And, can you help me? And that was happening at the same time, like we had this big case that was coming up at the firm and I’d never been to trial before.

I didn’t know what the heck I was doing. And the boss was like, I’m going to Spain for two months with my family. Just figure it out. And was like,

Jonathan Hawkins: He dropped the case on you for trial.

Loyd Bourgeois: Yeah, was I like, I don’t know what I’m doing yet, man. We figured it out. We worked it up, got in a good spot. We ended up resolving it right before [00:19:00] trial, but I was like, okay, if I can do all that, and now I have this kind of like niche that just came upon me.

Let’s just give it a go, man. Let’s just try it. It’s the worst that can happen is you don’t succeed and you go back to another firm.

Jonathan Hawkins: It’s interesting. You talk about the blog that you did on disability, because I have a similar story for like my practice area.

I imagine I think the firm you’re at didn’t do disability. Cause I was at a firm that didn’t do what I do now and I got interested in it. And I just started learning it.

And then I would do a blog post every week, a deep dive in certain little areas. And then I would just put it out there. And I did that for every week for three and a half years.

And I would send emails out and I would just tell people about it. And number one, it’s how I learned it. It’s how it became known, I’m as writing articles and stuff too. And it’s just classic education based, development of a practice areas is it’s cool that’s how you did it as well.

I guess nowadays blogs aren’t really a thing so much anymore. I guess you do something else [00:20:00] now videos or,

Loyd Bourgeois: It was interesting. Like I said, man, there was not a lot of people writing about it. Probably your same situation.

And so what happens, like I was getting people that called for me to help them, but then I just started getting calls from other attorneys Hey, man, I stumbled on your blog and I saw you’re writing about this.

And so obviously, what the heck’s going on. And I got this case and I just wanted your opinion on it. I don’t really know either, man, I’m willing to tell you what I know.

Jonathan Hawkins: Let me get back to you on that.

Loyd Bourgeois: Yeah.

Jonathan Hawkins: Okay. So you started you developed this practice area, the disability, and you had the confidence, you knew you could do it. Get a case ready for trial. And you said, all right, I’m doing it. You were married at the time, right? And you had kids or how old kids?

Loyd Bourgeois: Yeah. We were married. I was married. Still married. At that time, I had two children. They were, let’s see, my son was probably five. My daughter was like three. And then, my wife was pregnant with our third child. I left the firm, I think the official start date of this firm is like September [00:21:00] 1st of 2010. And my third son was born in November of 2010.

So we were like, in a big transition period in our own life as well, my wife, she’s always been very supportive and very helpful to like the ultimate part of like exactly what you want in life.

She’s look, if this is what you believe if you think this is going to help us as a family and that’s what you believe, then let’s do it.

Let’s do it and we’ll give it a shot and if it doesn’t work, we’ll figure it out. And you can’t really, it means a lot to have that kind of support at home when you were making a big decision like that.

And you know what? I’ve never had to go back to another firm. I’m not saying it won’t happen, having that from the beginning even somehow has been very beneficial.

Jonathan Hawkins: That’s huge. I know that’s huge, cause if you were going different directions, it’d make it way harder.

Loyd Bourgeois: Yeah.

Jonathan Hawkins: It may doom it from the beginning.

Loyd Bourgeois: That’s right. It’s already a stressful time and you need a little sanity somewhere. And you’re stressing about this new firm you’re trying to build and develop and you’re stressing at home about [00:22:00] not having on the same page, not with this on the thinking the firm’s the way to go, man, then you really don’t have anywhere to get that sanity.

And then it has been very helpful.

Jonathan Hawkins: Alright, so you had the confidence. You had the desire, you had your wife on board. So let’s talk about the rest of it. Did you have money saved up? Did you have cases that were coming with you to start? Or were you starting from just zero.

Loyd Bourgeois: Yeah. It was pretty much zero. Like I said, the firm I was at we didn’t do disability at all. I did my cousin’s case as a one off and didn’t really have any other cases in the hopper, but I knew that we could make it make a go.

Now my wife did work and she still works full time. She’s so that gave us a baseline of financial certainty that we could count on, but we did. I knew, it’s coming. It didn’t happen like overnight.

And so I’m saved up a bit to, I think more to give myself the cushion to know that I could get it done [00:23:00] and gave myself a timeline. Hey, this is the money it’s going to run out in a year.

And so you either got to be well on your way to making it succeed, or you got to go get another job.

And so I did, we had a year’s worth of, if Loyd doesn’t bring in a dollar, we can survive as a family, but we never even had to tap into that. It just

Jonathan Hawkins: It happened.

Loyd Bourgeois: It just happened. It’s just weird to say we had all these plans and we had this kind of contingency, but we never really had to.

Because once people knew that I was out on my own, I started getting a lot of disability cases. Like I said, we had that blog early on, but we were also very good at just marketing.

I know you and I know each other kind of through great legal marketing, GLM. I was reading some of that stuff way back then and trying to implement even then before I could pay for it.

Implementing some of those principles, implementing some of that, those kinds of techniques and tactics into my marketing and really just built a good website on my [00:24:00] own when I didn’t have cases are the phone went ringing. I was just working on building a web presence and making it as good as I could make it.

And that really just snowballed into more cases. Like people will say, Oh, we saw you, I never really spent a lot of money on marketing because a lot of times did it myself. Like I said, my wife’s a computer engineer.

So any kind of technical stuff, I’ll be like, Oh, Hey, can you figure this out for me?

Jonathan Hawkins: That’s nice. Yeah.

Loyd Bourgeois: So, it was pretty easy to get that figured out. But we.

Jonathan Hawkins: A real quick. So when you left, you had no cases and you were focusing on the disability. Was that all you were focusing on? Where had you gotten into the stuff yet? Or did you have any other just like random arrow wish stuff?

Loyd Bourgeois: Yeah. So again, I’m like, I’m in a small town. Our town is maybe 15,000 people are parish was like a county in most places is maybe 50,000 people total, but it’s a bedroom community to New Orleans.

But being in a small town and opening up your door, you can want to focus on one [00:25:00] specific case type, but every case type is going to come through the door and be like, hey, I need help with this, and I need help with that, and I need help with this.

And especially early on, we took a lot of stuff. Most of our cases, 70, 80% of our cases were disability cases, but we did other things for folks.

We did wills, successions or probate cases and traffic tickets and auto crash cases. One of the reasons I never really, but we never marketed for those things. That was just people like knowing I was a lawyer in town, other people saying, Hey, if you got this problem, call Lloyd.

So we never marketed for that kind of stuff, but we always got other things. And I think that’s probably why we didn’t have to dip into that reserve we had because these disability cases they take a while.

You know, you’re talking 18 months, two years? It’s not uncommon to take that longer for. So even if I got 10 cases on day one, it’s going to take that long to pay out.

So I [00:26:00] had to do some other things along the way to help grease the wheel, so to speak. And so we always took those things and we’re always focused on just doing the best job we could while also being a human that they could talk to because that’s what I found is people have problems. They trust you to solve them, but they want to know.

They don’t necessarily want to know your recipe for solving it. They just want to know they’re part of your, what you’re thinking about.

And so we always really made a big effort at communication, talking to clients, sending stuff out to them, keeping them in the loop. And that just started paying off in spades over time.

You know, start doing a good job for that. They know you do disability, they send you disability stuff, or you’re doing a disability case that they get in a car crash. They’re like, Hey, I know I got a lot of choices, but I know you did a great job and I know you pick up the phone. I know you call people back.

And over time we were able to stop taking a lot of those other cases and focus on just the disability and injury [00:27:00] cases. But we still approach it with that same mentality.

Jonathan Hawkins: Yeah. So let me unpack that just a little bit. So early on, you took, this is a community grew up in, I think. And so you knew people, they knew you went out, they’re coming to you with all sorts of problems.

You’re doing everything to get the cash flow and then slowly sort of niche into your disability p. I. Practice, but I’m sure today you’re still getting looks of all these other kind of cases, probably still.

What do you do with them now? Do you send those out? How do you handle those now?

Loyd Bourgeois: Yeah. So we’re still in the kind of same small town. We just tell ’em like, Hey, we don’t take this type of case, but we have a great referral partner that we can get you contact connected with. Do you want us to have that person call you or do you want to call them?

And like 99% of the time they’re like, Oh, if you can give them my name so they call me, I’d appreciate it.

And so we, just through our case management system, we send out a message to Referral partnering, it just depends on the case. [00:28:00] We got different referral partners all over.

And what we look for is the same thing that we would give to our clients. When people were going to pick up the phone and call them, we send something over to them that they’re going to respond and say, Hey man, thanks so much for sending this to me to get on the phone.

And then they tell us, Hey, I took the case. I didn’t take the case. Cause we tell the people call us because a lot of times they’re calling us because they read our reviews.

They know us in some way from this community. They will refer to us. That, Hey, look, we’re going to send this person your name. If you don’t hear from them, call us back.

We’ll figure out what’s going on. We’ll find you a new referral partner. Yeah. And so it’s hard to do that. What I tell my team and I say, I tell them, man, if you let me do intake, we will have every one of those cases because I can’t tell them no.

That’s why I have to hire you to do intake because you’re going to, I trust you to tell them I need to refer you out because I just really think that I’m going to double up.

Jonathan Hawkins: That says a lot, man. That’s why they’re calling in the 1st place because they know you. Yeah.

So you mentioned it, you grew up in this town. It’s a small [00:29:00] town. Small town practice is different than a big city practice. I know you’re close to new Orleans, but how is it, I know sometimes in the smaller towns, it’s hard to niche up cause you gotta take whatever.

So how have you been able to create this niche practice in the small town?

Loyd Bourgeois: You know, it just really started again with the vision, right? To have an initial, even though early on we could not sustain just doing disability and injury stuff. And we were taking other cases.

The only thing we ever marketed for were disability injury cases. And so people would come to us for these other things, but we never marketed for that.

We wouldn’t tell them no, we’d help them as best we could. And because our vision was always to try to get to a spot where it was just injury and disability cases.

And we knew if we started even earlier, we knew if we started saying we could do all these other things, it’s going to work. It’s going to be hard to pull back from that. You leave a lot of people disappointed.

And so even early on, like our [00:30:00] website was just Louisiana disability law. I took all kinds of stuff, but that was our website. And if you went on our website, there was nothing else other than disability.

Jonathan Hawkins: Just real quick. I a 100% agree with that approach and there’s so many lawyers out there that are scared to niche down in their marketing message.

They’re like but I do these other things, they won’t come. And it’s, it’s been my experience and other attorneys I talked to and yours that you niche down in your marketing, but it doesn’t stop the flow of all these other types of cases. And it actually might make it easier. I don’t know.

Cause if it to be everything to everybody, can’t even make any coherent message, right?

Loyd Bourgeois: Right. Nothing makes it easy from a marketing perspective. I’m not trying to talk to everyone. I’m just trying to talk to people who need an injury attorney or a disability attorney. That’s a specific problem.

I’m not trying to talk to a guy who’s looking to form a business or a lady who’s looking to open an accounting firm. I’m not trying to talk to those with my messages.

Now, if they called or walked in, it doesn’t mean I’m not going to talk to them and be nice to [00:31:00] them and try to give them something to help them along the way.

It just means I’m not like out there actively trying to talk to them. And that was our kind of approach from the beginning was knowing that we wanted a firm.

Eventually that we could just focus on injury and disability stuff and really having that vision early on and being true to it and say, okay we may have to take some other things along the way.

But that doesn’t mean we have to go out into the marketplace and tell everybody that’s what we, let’s just be focused on telling them this is what we do.

And yeah, so over time, that’s how it developed is from a saying, this is what we want, then it being a big mix to, continuing to say, Hey, this is what we want.

This type of cases were best, that type of people we help to where now most of the people call us are looking for injury or disability cases.

You still get other calls, but it’s definitely not a bigger, [00:32:00] as big a percentage as it was in those.

Jonathan Hawkins: So kudos to you for very early, picking your vision and sticking with it and doing the website and your marketing message.

I think, a lot of people don’t have the fortitude or the backbone to do that. They’re too scared. So that’s good.

So let’s talk about your marketing stuff now. You’re good with your message. You’ve been doing it for a while now.

What sorts of things do you do that you find are effective for your practice area? Maybe, that applied to a small town, I think the disability you do nationwide. What sort of marketing approaches do you use that you find effective nowadays?

Loyd Bourgeois: I just think the biggest thing is one just showing up, doing it and being authentic about it. It’s not a, yes it’s what we do. It’s what we’re good at, but beyond that, it’s, we do it because we want to help you.

We know what you are going through and we’ve helped plenty of clients just like you get through this to the other side and really being authentic with that message. And not just from [00:33:00] me but really from our whole team, right?

And that has, on our website and our marketing materials like I’m the face, so to speak, the face of the firm. But the way we approach it as a firm is that every interaction with every client, every vendor is an opportunity to market our services by being authentically us.

And especially in a small town, especially when you get into injury cases, right? You don’t really see that type of approach in injury case.

And you don’t see it too much in disability cases because that’s, traditionally, a high volume, low profit practice area where people are just trying to churn the case. That’s not the approach we take.

And so we try to get that kind of feeling that people are going to experience when they work with our team. We try to bring that out in every interaction.

And so I think that’s the underlying theme of our approach is just be us. If we were looking for help, what type of people would we want to help us?

And so that’s who we [00:34:00] tried. That’s how we approach every interaction, every marketing piece. I would say from a small town perspective, one of the things that we do really well and really could probably do better is just we are trying to be a part of our community.

Yeah. Like you said, I grew up in this town. My wife’s parents live, where she grew up was five blocks away from my office. My house is three blocks the other way. It takes me three minutes to drive here.

Jonathan Hawkins: Oh man. Nice. Yeah.

Loyd Bourgeois: People know us, our kids went to school here. I coached here. I’m on the sidelines, I came to show up to the high school events, but I don’t just show up in there.

We sponsor the teams and not just a sponsor with a little logo, with everything else there. We try to do other things like, Hey, if we see a need.

A few years ago we had a game which rained and the team had these tents that they were leaking. We’re like, hey, how about we buy them some tents for the football games that they can stand under?

Yeah, so we called them up and we’re like, hey, can we buy you guys some [00:35:00] tents and brand it with the school logos and school colors? We’ll put our name on a sign, we would love it. We go to every game now, they’re out there.

Jonathan Hawkins: Nice.

Loyd Bourgeois: A few years ago, they were doing like the little robotics things at the football games where they shoot like t shirts.

They didn’t have a lot of t shirts, but we just called them up. We’re like, hey, we’ll buy all the shirts, put our name on the back, put the school logo on the front.

We’ll just give them to you, you can shoot them all game long. They’re like, oh, we would love that. Now they use that as a springboard to then try to get more stuff, which is fine.

But it was just, again, just being in your community, looking for ways to, that you can help, but also in a way that highlights your commitment to your community.

Jonathan Hawkins: Yeah. That’s some of the benefits, I think, of a smaller town. You’re almost like the the shadow mayor, right? Maybe that’s in your future, too.

Loyd Bourgeois: I don’t know about that, yeah, but I agree. But it’s easier to do in a small community. But here’s the thing, it’s easy to do that in a big city too, because every big city has neighborhoods, every big city has little communities within them [00:36:00] that you can just become like the person for that community.

And it doesn’t take a ton of people to support your firm for you to be successful.

Jonathan Hawkins: Yeah. You get your clients you’re out in the community, you get your clients in and you treat them like, this really caring sort of journey through your firm and through their case.

And then after you’re done with them, I imagine you’ve got some systems to stay in touch with all those people you’ve helped and because you give them a good feeling while they were there, just continue the good feeling, right?

So what sorts of things do you stay in touch with your former clients?

Loyd Bourgeois: Yeah. Obviously we do the, printed newsletter that we send every month. We do like quarterly just postcards, birthday cards. But we do hand signed birthday card from the whole team. And if they’re low, say, look, they’re in Louisiana. We just buy a $1 lottery ticket, throw it in there.

Jonathan Hawkins: Has anybody won yet?

Loyd Bourgeois: Yeah, man, they call us. I’m nobody’s retired off of it, but they do call us. I’m like, Oh my God, this [00:37:00] is so awesome. Like, I won three bucks. I won five bucks, different things like that. And they’re like this and it seems so simple to just saying.

You got their birthday, you already got a database with your case management stuff in it. They’re like, man, you’re like the only person, I get a birthday card.

It’s just, to me I get birthday cards from people all the time. On my birthday, my wife gets them, my kids get them. But not everybody has that in their life, and if you can be that person for them, that one person, man, it means a lot.

And we love doing it, and they call and they want to say thank you for sending it. It means a lot.

So those are just some ways we try to just stay updated with what’s going on in their life. If they are, their kids get married, we send out.

I have some of the team just, Hey, look, we try to friend our clients on Facebook so we can see what’s going on or Instagram so that when they post good stuff, we want to celebrate with them.

We’ll send them a thank you note. Hey man, or, just a little congratulatory. So your son graduated in this month. Man, that’s so awesome. [00:38:00] Glad you made, glad you helped him get to that point in life. Just small little things that can help you, help them know that you are still, and they will be aware of you.

Jonathan Hawkins: And like you said, like those sorts of things go so far. We take for granted sometimes how far those things can go.

So I want to shift a little bit and talk about the operation of the running of your firm. And it’s a two part question.

So I want to ask as you’ve been doing this a long time now on your own as you look back, what was the biggest challenge in running your firm in the early days?

And then as with anything, problems don’t go away. They just change.

So what’s the bigger challenges you see nowadays?

Loyd Bourgeois: I would say, I look at my firm as really having two lives. So when I left the firm that I was working on and started on my own, from that point until probably like 2017, we were what you would consider a traditional solo firm, which just me. And that was by design [00:39:00] because my kids were young.

I knew I wanted to be heavily involved in their life. I didn’t want to be beholden to a calendar or a caseload that would not allow me to do it.

And so, I really tried to limit the firm at that point. Like I didn’t want to grow it. I just needed enough to sustain at a minimum level.

And so in those days it was like the balance of, especially in contingency firm, it’s great cash flow, poor cash flow, great cash flow, poor cash flow.

And that’s like those peaks and valleys are like years at a time, right? And so it was just trying to maintain a consistency of reserve to deal with the bottoms when we were at the tops.

Because I didn’t want to grow too big. I didn’t want the firm to take so much of my time that I couldn’t be there for my wife and kids as they were growing up. I wanted to put them on the bus and get them off the bus and go and be a coach of soccer and baseball and basketball, whatever they wanted to play.

I wanted to coach them and I wanted to go to the [00:40:00] meets, swim meets in the summer, in the middle of the day and not have to worry about those things.

That was the first, like 2017, then in 2017 as my kids started getting older, my oldest son at that point was like a teenager. My younger one was, where I was starting to coach him, but my older one was aging off where he was going into like upper middle school and high school and he was going to play school sports and I didn’t have to coach him as much anymore.

Then we started really trying to grow with her. And I would, I think from then until now, it’s really been our period of. We’ve grown from just me to the eight people that we’ve been as high as 12 people.

We’re at eight now trying to probably get back to 10 in the next three to five months. I think the difficulties during that period, just getting the right people.

It’s always, it just seems to be a challenge. We run with some of the same folks sometimes, man. And it just doesn’t seem to [00:41:00] matter if you’re a small firm, just starting out, if you’ve been there for a long time with a hundred people, the biggest thing people get frustrated about is just making sure you’ve got the right people.

Jonathan Hawkins: The longer you do this, the more you realize there’s just absolute truth of that, early on, you think, or if you’re not doing it, you think the biggest problem is getting the cases or the biggest problem is figuring out the technology to use, whatever, it’s no, the biggest problem is getting the damn good people in then keeping them.

Loyd Bourgeois: Yeah. So people it’s been an issue and then just trying to get your culture, cause it doesn’t take much to ruin it. That, that old saying, like that one bad apple spoils the whole barrel.

And it really holds a lot of sense when it comes to firm cultures, man. It doesn’t take much, it’s hard to build up, but it takes a long time to get it right, and you think you got it right, and it just takes one bruised ego to bring it all down, and you it’s hard to always be on top of that.

I’m always trying to be mindful of that, to where it doesn’t happen. And it takes a lot of energy that I didn’t [00:42:00] really, I didn’t think that was going to be a problem, or ever be an issue, but it is just one of those things that.

Jonathan Hawkins: Yes, it’s just a couple of things that I’d point out from what you said, for people listening, guess number one is, your firm is or can be whatever you want it to be. Early on, you said, hey, this is what I want it to be just me, small time, whatever. So I have the freedom to go coach the teams and do this and that.

You don’t have to, you go out there now, there’s all these messages about getting the biggest firm in the world or doing this or making gazillion dollars.

And that might be for some people, but it’s not for everybody. That’s the first thing I’d say. And that’s the cool thing about starting a firm. You can make it what you want.

And then the other piece is deciding to grow, that you mentioned that. I think you’ve got to decide to grow if that’s what you want, it’s not just going to happen accidentally,

Loyd Bourgeois: Yeah.

Jonathan Hawkins: You got to make the decision and start taking the risk and taking the actions. Right?

Loyd Bourgeois: Yeah. I’m not saying it can’t happen, right? Anything [00:43:00] can happen, right? You might get that one big case that just sets you up and gives you a big, you might get that one great client who’s going to pay their bills on time and never complain.

It’s any more work than you know what to do with, but the odds of that happening that way are very low. Whereas if you vision it out, put a plan in place as we were talking about before, man, just if you build it, type of mentality, if you build it, they will come type of mentality.

You have to see it and work towards it, make decisions that are in line with making that kind of vision come true.

Jonathan Hawkins: So as you’re sitting here today what’s your vision for the next, I don’t know, however many years where do you want to take it?

Loyd Bourgeois: Yeah, we’re like in a transition stage right now again, right? Going from zero to the side and we wanted to grow was like a seven year thing from deciding to grow to where we are now is like a seven year thing.

And we were really what we envision is growing our injury practice more bigger. Having a few more attorneys with [00:44:00] us. When I say a few more, I’m thinking probably within the next four or five years, we’ll probably have five injury attorneys.

And then the big, the big decision point for us. And it’s something that we’re struggling with. It’s just social security and how to best manage that or to manage it.

And just one of those things that as I’m sitting here today, talking to you, I don’t really have it figured out yet. And it’s not comfortable for me to not have it figured out, but I also know it’s okay to not have it figured out just yet.

And that part of it is part of maybe part of the plan is working to try to figure it out, that in letting that fester, sometimes you can come up with maybe some ideas or pathways or things that you didn’t really think about or see right away can materialize.

And so that’s where we are right now as we move forward into 2025 and beyond.

Jonathan Hawkins: I know you’re figured out. I know you will. So just keep at it, but so if I’m a lawyer out there, [00:45:00] thinking about starting my firm, or maybe I’ve taken the plunge and I’m on the early side of it, what sort of advice would you give to that lawyer?

Loyd Bourgeois: Yeah. Just be fearless and asking for help and guidance, man. Like none of us can do this alone. None of us have figured it out by ourself. And, I didn’t know this when I was starting my firm, but man, so many people are so generous and willing to help.

And sometimes it’s just giving you an ear and letting you talk it out. That will help you. And sometimes that’s what you need is someone who will just do that for you.

Sometimes you do need some specific advice. And there are plenty of folks like you, like many of the members of the mastermind groups we belong to that are willing to listen and give you guidance that can help you along your journey.

You just gotta be willing to ask and you gotta be willing to say, Hey, I don’t know this. I’m fearful of this. And whether it’s a business issue or a legal issue, there’s [00:46:00] always going to be someone who’s figured it out already.

You just gotta be willing to ask enough people to get to that one who’s willing to share with you.

Jonathan Hawkins: It’s amazing to people that are ahead or even behind, no matter where they are and including yourself, you’ve got something that they don’t know about and they’ve got something you don’t know about.

So just so much to learn. Every time I talk to somebody, it’s I get a new little nugget. I’m like, that is, that’s awesome. I’m going to start trying to use that.

And again, it’s from people that, by all appearances are way ahead. And then people who by all appearances are just starting

Loyd Bourgeois: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And I just think, when we start our businesses, we we’re very confident, you gotta be confident to start and sometimes say, man, if I ask somebody, it’s going to let them know I’m not as confident as maybe I’m, I seem, maybe I don’t really know what’s going on, but listen, man, that’s how we all are.

We were all there. We’re all still there to some extent in many areas and just be fearless and asking.

Jonathan Hawkins: Great advice. So Lloyd I [00:47:00] appreciate coming on today, man. This been fun.

I’m glad we’ve gotten to know each other for anybody out there that wants to get in touch with you to have any questions or they got a case down your way, how is the best way to find you?

Loyd Bourgeois: Yeah, so you can find this on all the social media platforms. It’s Loyd J Bourgeois. Lloyd with one L. It’s weird.

As I told you earlier in this broadcast, my family is very poor, so we couldn’t afford that second L for that ink on the birth certificate. So we just ended up with one.

But anyway, it’s a little unique, and so it’s Loyd, L O Y D. Jay Bourgeois is how I would show up on LinkedIn, Facebook, or Instagram, TikTok.

If you want to reach out to me directly, just my name, Loyd@LJBLegal.com.

Jonathan Hawkins: And you’ve got that good Louisiana last name too, right?

Loyd Bourgeois: Yeah, Bourgeois, man. It’s it’s been spelled every which way, but correct by most people.

Jonathan Hawkins: You know, I thinks I told you this story, but, you know when I was in middle school in Mobile, we had this girl move over from New Orleans and her [00:48:00] last name was Bourgeois.

She came in. She told us how to do it, right? New Orleans is a little different.

Loyd Bourgeois: Yeah.

Jonathan Hawkins: Yeah, but we’ll cool. There’s something we didn’t get to talk about maybe next time. We’ll talk about is all the good food down there.

Loyd Bourgeois: Yeah.

Jonathan Hawkins: To give us some lessons on how to cook it.

Loyd Bourgeois: Man, I was just talking to someone yesterday. Actually, I was in a mediation yesterday, a client from up in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

And he was like, man, I love New Orleans. The food down here is so good. He’s what do you cook? And I cook most stuff. He’s when you invite me over.

Jonathan Hawkins: Yeah. Cool. Loyd again, man. Appreciate it. And look forward to staying in touch.

Loyd Bourgeois: Yep. Thanks Jonathan. Appreciate it.