John Morgan: Blueprints for Organizational Transformation

In this episode, Steve Fretzin and John Morgan discuss:

• Business growth and scaling strategies
• Importance of partnerships and accountability
• Technological innovation in professional services
• Entrepreneurial mindset and vision

Key Takeaways:

• Successful businesses balance proactive growth (“catching fish”) with strong operations (“cooking fish”) for sustained efficiency.
• Clear, data-driven systems with dashboards and accountability can transform culture and boost individual and team performance.
• AI adoption should be cautious, tested, and iterative, with room for learning from early-stage mistakes.
• Long-term resilience requires financial reserves, backup strategies, and readiness for unpredictable “Black Swan” events.

“What ‘Only the Paranoid Survive’ means is: be aware. Do [not just walk] down the street with blinders on and not see it coming, because it can come from anywhere. A problem can come from anywhere, and so you just have to be prepared.” —  John Morgan

Unlock the secrets of the industry’s top rainmakers with Be That Lawyer: 101 Top Rainmakers’ Secrets to Growing a Successful Law Practice. Grab your ultimate guide to building a thriving law firm now on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0F78HXJHT

Thank you to our Sponsors!

Rankings.io: https://rankings.io/

Ready to grow your law practice without selling or chasing? Book your free 30-minute strategy session now—let’s make this your breakout year: https://fretzin.com/

Episode References: 

The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb: https://www.amazon.com/Black-Swan-Improbable-Robustness-Fragility/dp/081297381X

About John Morgan: John Morgan moved to Central Florida as a teen and was forever changed when his brother Tim was paralyzed while working at Disney and mistreated by both the company and legal system, inspiring him to fight for the powerless and seek justice against big corporations. He earned his law degree from the University of Florida in 1983 and, with his wife Ultima, founded Morgan & Morgan in 1988; over 34 years, it became the nation’s largest injury law firm, recovering over $13 billion for 300,000+ clients. John authored two books — You Can’t Teach Hungry and You Can’t Teach Vision — reflecting the principles behind his success, and he’s also a political advocate and philanthropist supporting marijuana reform, minimum wage increases, and aid for abuse survivors and the hungry.

Connect with John Morgan:  

Website: https://www.forthepeople.com/

Email: jmorgan@forthepeople.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnmorganesq/

Twitter: https://x.com/johnmorganesq

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/JohnMorganESQ

Connect with Steve Fretzin:

LinkedIn: Steve Fretzin

Twitter: @stevefretzin

Instagram: @fretzinsteve

Facebook: Fretzin, Inc.

Website: Fretzin.com

Email: Steve@Fretzin.com

Book: Legal Business Development Isn’t Rocket Science and more!

YouTube: Steve Fretzin

Call Steve directly at 847-602-6911

Audio production by Turnkey Podcast Productions. You’re the expert. Your podcast will prove it.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Steve Fretzin: [00:00:00] Hey everybody. Steve Fretzin here and geez, wouldn’t it be nice if you could get 101 rainmakers on a bus and just ask them anything you wanted to ask them? That book now exists and might be that Lawyer 101 Top Rainmaker Secrets to Growing a Successful Law Practice. It’s like having 101 mentors right in your corner, helping you build a practice, attract clients, and love the business side of law.

It’s on Amazon now. Go grab a copy and be that lawyer

Narrator: you are listening to be that lawyer, life-changing strategies and resources for growing a successful law practice. Each episode, your host, author, and lawyer coach Steve Fretzin, will take a deeper dive helping you grow your law practice in less time with greater results. Now, here’s your host, Steve Fretzin.

Steve Fretzin: Hey everybody. Welcome back. This is Steve Fretzin and this is a very special show today, everybody be that lawyer. [00:01:00] 500 episodes we started over five years ago. We have had some of the most incredible rainmakers legal experts, and today we are so blessed to have John Morgan here with us today for number 500.

John, how you doing? I’m good talking to yeah, talking to us from Hawaii and I’m here in cold Chicago, miserable, and and thinking about how happy you must be every day.

John Morgan: Every day.

Steve Fretzin: Beautiful. Listen, we’re gonna jump in and get started on this show. We love to do a quote of the show, yours, as you shared with me before we started.

Today, is only the paranoid survive. So a welcome to the show, and B, tell us why that is your famous or favorite quote.

John Morgan: Because look, it is very hard to do any business. And you seem to always be looking over your shoulder, looking to your side. You have to be aware. And what only the paranoid survive means is be aware.

Do not be just [00:02:00] walking down the street with blinders on and not see it coming. ’cause it can come from anywhere. A problem can come from anywhere. Gotcha. And so you just have to be prepared. Yeah.

Steve Fretzin: Keep your head on a swivel these days.

John Morgan: Correct.

Steve Fretzin: Yeah. I walked down the city the streets of Chicago. And trust me when I tell you I’ve got my head on a swivel these days, but I think that also is maybe a lead into our conversation today about business development and building a book of business.

I think if you’re just keeping your head down and billing hours that’s not being too aware.

John Morgan: And it’s not gonna come to you. Look, the deal about business is you’re only gonna give business and more business if you’re looking for more business. There was a book I read years ago called Never Eat Alone.

And never Eat It Alone. Basically stands for the proposition that nothing’s gonna happen unless you’re out making it happen. If you’re out networking, if you’re sitting at your desk every day eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, wooing it down in 10 minutes, yes, that’s [00:03:00] sufficient for doing your work.

But if you don’t have work, there’s no work to be done. And so there’s a balance between working and getting work. And so I call it, in my mind, I call it, there’s catching fish and cooking fish and they’re both sides of the business. If you don’t catch the fish, there are no fish to cook. If you can’t cook the fish, it doesn’t matter if you catch the fish.

’cause the fish are gonna rot. Yeah, you have to do both. You have to be able to catch fish and then you have to be able to cook fish and then you have to make sure that when the fish get delivered to the dock, you don’t let it sit on the dock too long ’cause fish will rot.

Steve Fretzin: Yeah.

John Morgan: That’s how I look at.

Business.

Steve Fretzin: Yeah. And my son and I do a ton of fishing and he’s got a passion about it and yeah, that makes a whole lot of sense. And the best thing is my teenager can catch ’em, he can bring them home, he can slice ’em up and cook ’em, and we have a meal and I [00:04:00] just get to sit back and enjoy the spoils.

What do they say? Teach it. What is it called? Give it man to fish. Teach your man. Yeah. Teach your man to fish. Yeah, so teach us sun to fish. Teach us sun to fish. I’ll tell you, it pays off dividends. So everybody that’s listening know, you guys know John Morgan. He’s totally infamous in the legal space and the owner of Morgan.

And Morgan. Would you do me a solid and just give us a little bit of your background, how you came to be? ’cause I’m sure you weren’t the success from day one, right? No.

John Morgan: I was born, I grew up in Kentucky. My dad. I was a drinker, lost his jobs. We moved to Florida, which was a terrible time for me ’cause I was established and popular.

I went from being the most popular boy in the school to eating by myself. And if any of y’all have ever eaten by yourself at lunch, it’s the loneliest lunch you’ll ever have. Especially when you’re like, I’m supposed to be popular. I’m not. So I came to Kentucky, from Kentucky to Florida.

I got here. The great, the bad luck that I had about leaving Kentucky turned into [00:05:00] be good luck because the Florida had these great schools, these great opportunities, and, but during my time in Florida, my brother Tim was injured at diving accident. When he was on the job at Disney, he was rendered a C six, C seven quadriplegic, and it turned our lives upside down for all sorts of reasons, being poor and being.

Powerless and helpless is a terrible feeling. And to make matters worse, it happened at Disney. Disney fought him like it was the Taliban. It was just brutal the way that they were combat, him. And so here I was, I was the oldest and I’m used to taking care of things, but I couldn’t take care of this.

Our mother had already left the family. She was a drinker too. So we didn’t have a mom there. And during that whole process. With the fight to get my brother set up, I became enraged and I didn’t know what a personal injury lawyer was. I knew that I always had thought about [00:06:00] going to law school because I was shitty in math and eng shitty in math and science.

So there was no CPA business for me. There was no doctor dentist. It was like I either could be a teacher or a lawyer. I didn’t know what a PI lawyer was, but that bad luck of Tim having that terrible accident became my entire purpose and passion. And so that’s all I’ve ever done. Once I went to law school, I had a lot of job offers, but.

I only really applied at PI firms ’cause that’s what I wanted to do and that’s all I’ve ever done. So that’s how I, that’s how I came to be.

Steve Fretzin: Yeah. And that’s a hell of a story. And the best stories are the ones where I. There’s something that influences us in our life and changes our course forever and dictates either how we, what we do for a living or what our passion is and how we spend that time.

And so I just, it’s tragedy, but I, it sounds like you took lemons and made some lemonade. And how do you go from being a [00:07:00] lawyer at a firm to an entrepreneur and building something truly special?

John Morgan: Look, some lawyers have a good business mind and some don’t. I was, I feel like I was a better businessman than a lawyer, for example, and, but I recognized it.

I, they, I think when I think of myself, it goes like this. I’m not that smart, but I am smart enough to know what I don’t know and smart enough to surround myself with people. I do, and then I govern by consensus. So that’s my personal management style. And I think the most dangerous person in the world is the person who is not capable, but thinks they are capable.

And when you find that joker you are, that’s a person that can take you down. So I have been always happy that I understood my limitations and what I could do and what I could not do. [00:08:00] So I surrounded myself with people who could do things way better than me. And, but then I had some other gifts. I was very good at marketing.

I was very good at networking. I was very good at getting business. I lived in union halls. I. I’m an Irishman so I can go drink and throw darts and play cards and stuff that doesn’t take that much academics. Yeah. And make it rain. So I thank my lucky stars that I understood who I was and what I was, and what I could do and what I couldn’t do.

Steve Fretzin: Yeah. Do you feel like most lawyers are disenfranchised with the idea that they got into the law to do something special and make money, but do something special, help people and then it’s thrown on them? Hey, by the way. You want to have, control and freedom in your career, you need to figure out this marketing and business development stuff.

And they’d rather just sit at their desk and bill hours, which I get right? But I feel like now more than ever, it’s hard to get away with having a career without engaging in the things that you and [00:09:00] I maybe find natural. And they don’t find it natural at all.

John Morgan: Hey, look, in every law firm, I have three types of lawyers I’m looking for.

Finders, minders and grinders. And some can be all three. Some can be a finder. Minder, grinder. Some can be just a finder. There’s some people just great, there’s a law firm in Alabama, Beasley Allen, and they got a guy named Gibson Vance down there. He is the most charming guy in the world, and he’s a finder.

He can try a case, but he’s a finder. And then sometimes you just have to have, grinders who are not, gonna go out or not extroverts, or a little bit shy, but smart as hell. And then you got the minders who were the finders who now manage the grinders. So all of it thrown together makes the delicious stew.

You don’t want one stew with just one vegetable, just, some carrots, you want it all, you want potatoes, you want onions, you want meat, you want, finders, minders, grinders. [00:10:00] That’s how I make up my firm. Each one of ’em is like a football team. Hey, you’re the wide receiver, you’re the quarterback, you’re the blocker, you’re the, and so that’s how I look at that.

They’re all very valuable because without all three of them, we can’t get our job done.

Steve Fretzin: Yeah. Let me ask you this, you’ve been, moving your way up all these years, and now you’re at the top of the mountain, but what would you say was your biggest mistake along the way?

John Morgan: It’s a mistake that you don’t, you can’t fix at the time, but it’s, it was certain people that I brought on as partners that were really nice people, but it was like swimming with.

A ball and chain around your leg in the Olympics.

You have, you know who your partners are can be really bad. I wrote a book called You Can’t Teach Vision. And I wrote, you Can’t Teach Hungry. And then I wrote, you can’t teach vision. Oh, you can’t teach vision. I talk [00:11:00] about everybody’s got these ideas about what they wanna do, their vision.

Everybody talks about visionaries vi Steven Spielberg’s a visionary. No. Steven Spielberg is a vision maker. There’s a lot of visionaries. Once upon a time, I used to go after church and to Denny’s and my kids would color with crayons. And the crayons were always rolling on the floor. And I was down on the floor picking up crayons.

And I used to tell my wife, somebody needs to invent a crayon that doesn’t roll. And one day I go into the Denny’s and they lay these crayons down their triangles. Yeah, I remember that. And I’m like. Fuck, this is my idea. Yeah, this is my idea. Look, you’ve heard me say it and she’s just looking at me.

I was a visionary, but I wasn’t a vision maker. And also to be a vision maker, it’s hard because you got a lot of what I call vision blockers. Try to tell you [00:12:00] why not to do it. There’s a lot of vision blockers out there, and the vision blockers can be even people close to you, your spouse. Don’t leave your job, don’t take the chance, don’t roll the dice, and the vision blocker can be you.

You just freeze up and you get fearful. So the hardest thing to do is to say goodbye to people that you like, but that you realize are dragging you down.

Steve Fretzin: But

John Morgan: you never know. You never know. You’re young and you’re starting out and, but all of a sudden in the middle of the race, you look over and you’re like, these people are not the, and but it’s a mistake that it’s impossible.

To know you’re making a mistake at the time. ’cause we don’t know who’s gonna be great and who’s gonna be good and who’s gonna be shit.

Steve Fretzin: But sometimes those mistakes have to happen for us to know what not to do. It’s the mistakes that, that we learn from that make the difference in our lives and our careers.

And that sounds like one that, that you maybe haven’t repeated. [00:13:00] Maybe quite the same way or at all since,

John Morgan: You learned, let’s say when I got rid of the firm was called Morgan Collen and Gilbert, and when I bought Collen and Gilbert out, I changed the name of the firm to Morgan and Morgan. It’s an easier name.

It’s, it flows and I bought ’em out back in 2000 and I immediately changed the name and it was the best thing I ever did, and I didn’t have to pay ’em that much money. To get ’em out. They were trying to get me to close offices in Fort Myers, in Jacksonville, and I was like, ’cause they didn’t wanna pour the money into it.

They wanted the money now.

Steve Fretzin: Yeah.

John Morgan: So they were my vision, they were blocking my vision. By the way, those two offices, they’re so damn profitable that those guys wouldn’t believe what they became but bad partners. Don’t share your vision. Don’t share your drive. Don’t share your work ethic.

You gotta, you, when you got a cancer in your body and you know there’s a cancer in your body, you need to cut it out [00:14:00] yesterday and you need to radiate it today. Yeah, because that cancer will metastasize and kill you.

Steve Fretzin: And hey John, here’s one that you may or may not have heard of before, but no, no ship sinks quite like a partnership.

I haven’t heard it, but

John Morgan: It’s true. Yeah. And it’s, and they’re messy. Yeah. Yeah. They’re very messy. Look, here’s the thing, all of us, me especially, we all think we’re more than we are by a lot, so we all think we’re bringing so much more to the table than we are what we find out when people leave, I.

Even great people, we find out, if you want another quote for your show, that graveyards are full of irreplaceable people. People who we thought, oh my God, how are we gonna go without this person? Guess what? Steve Jobs died, and guess what? Apple thrived. Walt [00:15:00] Disney died and Disney grew, and so you can’t be scared of that change.

And the sooner you make the change years ago. And so you say, when do I do it? You know when it’s time, you know when it’s bad. I tell people in my book, you can’t Teach Hungry. I got a chapter called Dog Shit and I said, Hey, have you ever been walking out in the woods? And you step on the, and something you foot slides.

You are like, did I step in dog shit? You’re like, no. And you don’t wanna step in dog shit. ’cause dog shit’s a big mess. And you say, no, that was some pie needles. That was some leaves. You get to the car. Yeah. It couldn’t have been dogs. But you get in the car and you smell.

Steve Fretzin: Yeah. You know that smell. We all, oh yeah.

Everyone knows that smell.

John Morgan: We all know that smell. Yeah. And so now you’re in the car and you’re like, you don’t want it to be, but you’re like, yeah. And the moral of the story is if you smell dog shit, there’s dog shit that goes to partnership if you fight a partner. Shit. [00:16:00] That’s got, and you smell it.

The sooner you do it, the better, because you’re just gonna track it in the house. Yeah. Walk it all over. Once upon a time, they fired Ron Zuck, the coach of Florida Gators, the mid-season, and the athletic director said something that’s stuck with me, which was, whatever you know is going to eventually have to be done, do it today.

Don’t wait. It’s not gonna get better. It’s not gonna get better. The dog shit is just going to be tracked more and more. You gotta stop. You gotta take off the shoe, you gotta rinse it off, you gotta take it home, spray it down, but you gotta excise the cancer. And the hardest thing is because it’s a partnership and partnerships usually fail.

The same reason the bands fail. Because John Lennon thought he was the king, and Paul McCartney thought he was the one, and they both thought they were the Beatles and then they split. If you look at rock and roll bands, [00:17:00] there’s usually Simon and Garfunkel. Who was the Alpha? Who was the, Simon was the Alpha, Garfunkel ’cause and they start resenting, Lionel Richie and the Commodore.

He was the Commodore. What happened to the Commodore when Lionel Richie left? Not much what happened to Lionel Richie? Yeah, so it’s the same in business and it’s like a band, you’re Mick Jagger, you are the Rolling Stones. Yes, we like Roddy Wood. Yes, we like Charlie Waters, but Mick Jagger is the Rolling Stones.

Keith Richards sort is too, but that ego. But the truth is somebody really is writing the songs. Then that person writing the songs and singing the song starts to resent the band mates making the same money as him. It’s not fair or her. So it’s a, but partnerships are some of the biggest mistakes I’ve made, but also some of the greatest [00:18:00] things I’ve ever done.

Some of these people that are my partners. Today. I couldn’t even do this without ’em, but not by close.

Steve Fretzin: Yeah. It takes a village with proven SEO and digital marketing strategies that drive actual clients to your firm, rankings.io prides itself on proof, not promises mentality. The best firms hire rankings.io when they want rankings, traffic, and cases.

Other law firm marketing agencies can’t deliver, get more rankings, get cases, and schedule a free consultation@rankings.io today. Hey everybody, it’s Steve Rezin as the, I’m the host of the Be That Lawyer Podcast, and if you’re serious about growing your law practice, let’s talk. I’ve coached hundreds of attorneys to build bigger books of business without selling, chasing, or wasting time.

This isn’t a sales pitch, it’s a real 30 minute. Strategy session to explore what’s possible for you in your practice. Just head over to Fretzin.com and grab a time that works for you, and let’s make this your breakout year. I wanna get into sort of another piece of this whole thing, which is, I [00:19:00] don’t know another attorney or firm that has scaled the way that you’ve scaled, and I know that there’s a lot of moving parts that goes into that.

What are some of the things that allowed you to begin? That scaling process outside of shedding, some bad partners or partners that weren’t, didn’t have the vision. And take us through that because that’s a story that needs to be told and I’d love to have you share it on my show.

John Morgan: What I decided to do was I brought a guy in who was a very bright guy to try to implement my vision. And one of the things that I worried about was that we, you got all these lawyers, but they’re all doing what they want, not what we want. Who knows what’s going on in every office and every law firm in America.

I wanted it to be done my way, the right way every day. And so the first thing we did, and I was highly skeptical, but this guy turned out to be a genius. We built our own software called Lit. It was [00:20:00] so successful we started selling it to other people. We were, we were bought out. We got bought out.

60% of our company was bought out by a company called Besser at a $330 million valuation. But solidify gave me the platform to do what I wanted to do, which was to see everything. I wanted to be transparent and automated. And this software gives us that opportunity. So now we can manage, we can see what’s going on inside of every, and we have operational managers who are overseeing lawyers to make sure all these things are happening.

We’re not relying on just the lawyer to do it. We have somebody watching the lawyer and they get reports every single week. And so what that, that was the big deal. That was the big. The seismic shift that allowed us to manage at a granular level, hundreds of thousands of [00:21:00] cases a year.

Steve Fretzin: It’s like today’s Ford model, right?

Every like everything needs to be done a certain way to get a certain outcome and a certain result. Everybody’s singing the same song. Exactly. Everybody has

John Morgan: to do it my way. You don’t just if you got a case where you know there’s been an injury at a place of business, you got three days to get witness statements, pictures, and if you don’t, the flag goes up.

So we built our own risk management type of practice inside of solidify, and that has in my mind, enabled us to move four x in the size of our average settlement.

Steve Fretzin: Yeah. Wow. And then, yeah, there’s a bit, but there’s, I mean there’s there’s that, that the software and the accountability and all that.

What are some other factors that have allowed you to scale out and be successful doing it?

John Morgan: The first thing you gotta remember, since you like these phrases, like only the paranoids about, [00:22:00] so you’re right, I do,

Steve Fretzin: I do.

John Morgan: Here’s another one for you then, since you’re a business. And by the way, most of everything I say I’ve heard from somewhere else.

It’s not like I’m Aristotle making this shit up. I’m stealing from Aristotle.

Steve Fretzin: Ace, we steal, we borrow, we use, it’s all gets all good,

John Morgan: right? So I’m not taking credit for these. When everyone’s accountable, no one’s accountable. And so I, the first time I heard that, I’m like yeah. So what I’ve done is I make sure that at every part of our business.

There is a person, a leader who is accountable that when shit hits the fan, we don’t have to go. Who was supposed to renew our workers’ comp insurance? We know who that is. That person in my firm is a guy named Will Lewis. So every city has a managing partner who has ownership in the firm. They have a big say in what happens.

And they’re accountable for a lot of things. Signing accountability [00:23:00] to partners and managers throughout the system. It enables us to make sure that the trains run on time,

Steve Fretzin: but everybody’s again, in line singing the same song, following your system, and doing things the way that should be done, and then accountable to that.

John Morgan: And every day I have dashboards that you can’t imagine every day. Everybody’s fees for that day go in. It’s tabulated. It shows where they are for the year. It shows where they’re trending for the year. Are they gonna be up? Are they gonna be down? We’ve circulated to out to all the lawyers.

It’s at a very, I managed by not, I managed by not managing, I managed by just going here. Here’s the numbers here’s number one, here’s number thousand. And so we, these dashboards, these leaderboards are very effective because nobody wants to be last and everybody wants to be first.

And it also takes care of a lot of people who just realize they’re not up for this job. And when, [00:24:00] and the, and I tell people all the time, the numbers don’t lie. At the end of the day, the numbers do not lie. And that’s how I manage, to make. As many people accountable for as many D whatever I can think of, I wanna have a person in charge.

Your insurance, your tech, your ethics. We have a general counsel that handles all of our ethics issues. I wanna have one person who, when shit hits the fan to go, what happened?

Steve Fretzin: All right, John, I’ve got one last question before we get to our game changing book. And it’s all right. We are now in a new phase.

We’ve got AI. We’ve got all kinds of cool legal tech and AI coming onto the scene. How are you seeing that transition either other law firms to be more competitive or how are you gonna utilize it within your system? What are you seeing happening for the, in the next couple of years with all this amazing new AI coming out?

John Morgan: First of all, you gotta remember like anything, when anything is amazing and new, [00:25:00] there’s a gold rush. Yeah, okay. There’s a gold rush. What do we know the most about gold rushes? There’s a lot of fools gold AI reminds me of the marijuana business. Everybody wanted to be in marijuana.

Everybody wanted to be in marijuana. Everybody’s racing to marijuana and a lot, most of them, most of it was fools gold. Everybody had this, idea. Oh, I’m in a pot shop and I’m making money, I’m getting high, and isn’t it great? It didn’t work for most of the people. AI is going to be something great, but I am being I’m using it slowly.

We had a matter the other day, which was embarrassing ’cause one of our lawyers relied on ai For some cases that didn’t exist and we had a trial in Cheyenne, Wyoming. We had to, I had to send my son out sight. AI gave [00:26:00] us bad information.

It was wrong.

Steve Fretzin: Okay

John Morgan: But my lawyer relied on AI but didn’t do the double checking that Walmart did.

And when Walmart comes back and goes, this is all bullshit.

Steve Fretzin: Okay.

John Morgan: People call me and say, what? What are you gonna do? I said Here, when you are wrong. There’s only one thing to do. Yeah. Best suck. Yeah, that’s up. Apologize. I told my son, I said, get on the plane. Fly to Cheyenne. Wear knee pads and apologize to that federal judge.

Yeah. And the judge was, oh, once you do that, the judge was like, oh, okay. But AI got us in trouble. Yeah. AI’s gonna be unbelievable, obviously.

Steve Fretzin: The angle I was going for judge, like demand letters and taking things that that, take a tremendous amount of time to get documents together and demand letters, invoice all the different pieces that go into.

The puzzle of a case. We,

John Morgan: We’re a little bit further ahead than that. We’ve got, okay, we’ve got our own little version of AI to cut and paste, demand letters, okay? Yep. Yep. And look, [00:27:00] demand letters are usually bullshit. I was using

Steve Fretzin: that as an example but again, it’s, I know how much can be automated.

John Morgan: A lot’s gonna be automated. It’s going to be, it’s gonna be, it’s gonna be bigger than what Google is. Look, think about your life without Google. It’s gonna be the span of your life without, look, I practiced law without a cell phone. I’m this, I’m that old. I was a lawyer without a cell phone.

Yeah. Okay. So I was a lawyer without a computer. I was a lawyer without a laptop. I was a lawyer without Google, I was a lawyer without ai, and now I have it. So it’s going to be incredible. But we have to be careful with anything new. I’m kinda letting other people beta test it. I’ve already done my deal with solidify, and by the way, a lot of the AI stuff is going on with, for me, is happening inside of the solidify that Besser has now.

And so I’ll be reliant on smarter people to [00:28:00] make me better, but I’m doing it with a lot of trepidation because. When you start rushing in the gold rush out west.

Steve Fretzin: Yeah. And

John Morgan: you don’t really know what, ’cause everybody is, it’s it’s like the, I don’t know if you’re familiar with the tulip bulbs story from Holland years ago, but there was these tulip bulbs and everybody started buying tulip bulbs.

And the tulip bulbs got bigger and bigger and bigger. And that there was just this, they were so expensive and all of a sudden one day it just crashed. And everybody was like, why? People buy these tulip bulbs, there was no explanation.

Steve Fretzin: Yeah.

John Morgan: The explanation I have is once, when I was a little boy, I used to go to my uncle’s, a farm in Kentucky, and I’d sit there in the field and I’d look in the field up above and I’d see the cows, and then I’d see one cow start running, and then I’d see another cow start running behind that cow.

And then before I knew it, there was a stampede and the cows were running to the top of the field, and then [00:29:00] they would get there. They’d kinda look at each other and like, why the fuck are we running?

Steve Fretzin: Who was responsible for this?

John Morgan: They were running because the one cow started running. Yeah. Yeah. So they started running.

Listen, at the end of the day, we’re a lot like the sheep and the cows, and that’s what’s happening with ai. People are running and the rest of the herd starts to run. I’m gonna stand back and let everybody run to the top of the field. I’m gonna let it thin out. Then I’m gonna see what’s going on at the top of the field.

And if it works at the top of the field, I’m gonna go up and take the best, but not the worst. Yeah. There’s gonna be a lot, there’s gonna be a lot more losers in AI than winners. Yeah.

Steve Fretzin: I love it, man. So great having you on the show. Let’s take a minute to just talk about your favorite book is Black Swan.

Tell us briefly about that.

John Morgan: Black Swan is a book that stands for the proposition that in life we don’t know what’s gonna happen. Once upon a time, people used to say, there’s only [00:30:00] swans are white. What color are swans? White. What color are swans? White? Everybody said Swans were white. Why? Because that’s all people had ever seen was a white swan one day on a lake.

There was a black swan, and they’re like, what is that? They go, that’s a black swan. That’s not a black swan. Why? Black swans don’t exist? Why don’t they, because they’re white. There’s one there. Yeah. And so what happened in Black Swan is there are events that happen in our lives that goes back to only the paranoid survive that we might not see coming.

Years ago the Mirage Hotel had, you should never have lose money at a casino. They had Siegfried and Roy they had, but one year they lost terribly because they had two black swan events. One, a bookkeeper made a mistake on taxes and cost ’em millions and millions of dollars, but the big black swan for them was the tiger, Roy, [00:31:00] the tiger.

Nobody came to the show ’cause there was no show and it went like this. That’s a Black swan event. Could you ever have really seen that coming? No. But it doesn’t matter what the event’s gonna be. A Black Swan event’s coming. It happened in 2008. It happened with the pandemic. It can ha it is in my life.

It happened at nine 11. You have these black swan events. You should, you really may not even see coming, but what the proposition stands for is this and what the answer is this, even though you don’t see it coming. Be prepared. Yeah. Be prepared for what It’s, how do you get prepared? There’s a lot of waves.

I’ve got inside of my firm, three le three layers of levers. I call ’em black squa levers that I’m ready to pull in the case of emergency all the way, I spend three $50 million a year in [00:32:00] advertising. That’s a lever I can pull if I have to. So I am prepared with my black swan levers for the Black Swan event.

When the pandemic hit, I was pulling fucking black. I was pulling black lever swans like crazy. We didn’t know

Steve Fretzin: John, I don’t think, I don’t think law firms are doing that. I don’t think law firms are prepared for another recession. I don’t think law firms are prepared like you are for those Black Swan events.

And I know this from, man, working with a lot of managing partners and lawyers around the world and I don’t know what’s gonna happen in the world. And if things go, crazy, like we think they might, I think there’s gonna be a lot of people. Completely, left behind and unprepared for that, which is scary.

And

John Morgan: part of the, and part of the preparation for me has been, look, I always on my money, I always think my A side is my investment money. My B side is my money that I never touch. I want my B side to be enough money that if the worst happens, which is there’s, [00:33:00] I have no law firms. My life doesn’t change.

Steve Fretzin: Yeah.

John Morgan: That’s called being prepared.

Steve Fretzin: Yeah.

John Morgan: So in your own work, in your own business, you gotta start building that nest egg for that black swan moment where it could be the last moment. Yeah. And, but I don’t think people do. I think most people walk around in life as lawyers. Hoping. Hoping, yeah. Hoping to catch lightning in a bottle.

And what I say to people, another one of my phrases, this. Hope is not a plan. Hope is hope. Hope is not a plan. Without a plan, you have no hope.

Steve Fretzin: Yeah, it’s so in line with what this show is all about and what we talk about and harp about and try to get that message across. Lawyers about preparation for, whether it’s having your own book or, leaning into marketing and getting active in your career and not just letting it roll by you.

John, this has been such an absolute pleasure. I want to take a moment to just thank our sponsors, the law, her podcast, [00:34:00] and rankings, io and PIM Con coming up in October. John, if people wanna get in touch with Morgan and Morgan, they want to send work your way. They want to learn more about you. Any particular website or digits you wanna share,

John Morgan: they can email me at j Letter j Morgan.

At for the people.com, jMorgan@forthepeople.com.

Steve Fretzin: This has been an absolute pleasure and thank you for celebrating and sharing your time and being on the 500 show of Be That Lawyer. This has been absolutely fantastic and I just appreciate you and glad I get to meet you. It’s wonderful too.

John Morgan: Here’s the way I take, there’s another book I want to give people to read. It’s called Give and Take. Okay. Yep. And it’s about people who give and people who take. The punchline of the book at the end is the people who give are the people who give, get the most in return. The people who take don’t get shit When you invited me to do this, and I didn’t know you, but I saw this was your 500th show, I thought, I can give him something.

A [00:35:00] half hour is not much to give him. I want you to be successful. Hopefully this helps you know your business and ’cause it was your 500th show. I thought about the book give and take. I said, you know what, I’m gonna give my new friend from Chicago a little bingo. A little

Steve Fretzin: wow. You did that in spades, my friend.

And I just can’t thank you enough. And I’m hoping to continue to get to know you better as time goes on, and we’ll promote the junk out of this when it comes out and and and just enjoy your time in Hawaii and and maybe you’ll come to Chicago sometime and, or I’ll come out and we’ll get to visit sometime.

I’ll take you out for a steak. Love it. Thank you fishing. Thank you John, and thank you everybody for hanging out with John and I today on the 500th show. If you haven’t heard already, we mentioned it five times be that lawyer helping you always to be confident, organized in a skilled rainmaker. Take care, everybody.

Be safe. Be well. We’ll talk again soon.

Narrator: Thanks for listening to be that lawyer, life changing strategies and resources for growing a successful law [00:36:00] practice. Visit Steve’s website Fretzin.com for additional information and to stay up to date on the latest legal business development and marketing trends. For more information and important links about today’s episode, check out today’s show notes.