From Big Law to Building Dreams: Ben Gideon’s Journey to a Value-Driven Law Firm
Running a law firm is vastly different from being employed by one. But what exactly does it take to build your own law firm from the ground up? How can aspiring founders gain the skills needed to succeed?
After 20 years of laboring away at large, successful, law firms, Ben Gideon knew the natural next step for his career was to build a law firm of his own. Just one small problem… Law school doesn’t teach you how to start a law firm. That education is a rocky river that Ben had to learn how to navigate on his own.
Luckily among the many lessons Ben shares with us is finding someone to grow with you. One When Ben met his partner, Taylor Asen, he knew that their combination of skills and knowledge could build an extraordinary business.
As the team pushed forward, they had to get down in the trenches and figure out how everything works. In doing so, Ben realized just how important the small things were. While developing their operations manual, Ben ensured value-focused operations in every detail — right down to how someone answers the phone. When you pay attention to the little things, your customers and clients will take notice.
Thanks to professionals like Ben who forged ahead on their own, lawyers starting their firms don’t have to. As Ben’s final piece of advice, he leaves us with“A rising tide lifts all boats, and when we share tips and tricks with fellow lawyers, we’re all better off for it.”
Listen to this episode of Working The Wow Podcast with Judd Shaw featuring Ben Gideon, Attorney and Partner at Gideon Asen. Ben talks about the value of smaller law firms, his strategies for building a firm from the ground up, and his podcast that blends trial law with personal growth. Additionally, Ben discusses the influential people in his life and how his team champions their clients.
In this episode:
- [0:35] Judd Shaw welcomes his guest, Ben Gideon
- [1:01] Ben shares the details of his podcast, Elawvate
- [3:09] Ben talks about the accomplishments of his wife, Sara, and what it was like being the first husband in politics
- [5:04] Why did Ben leave a large law firm to start his own?
- [10:36] Ben explains why the small details matter
- [14:45] How does Gideon Asen hold up their “champion” attitude?
- [19:09] Ben discusses how he met Taylor Asen and started the firm
- [22:26] Why it’s important for lawyers to share tips with each other and give back to the community
- [26:35] How Ben was influenced by his parents
- [30:34] Developing a code of conduct within Gideon Asen
- [35:07] Ben talks about what it’s like running a law firm
- [37:54] What Ben loves about Maine — and the challenges since Covid
Transcript
Judd Shaw:
Hi, everybody. Welcome to the show. I’m Judd Shaw. My guest with me today is Ben Gideon. Ben, welcome to the show.
Ben Gideon:
Great to be here.
Judd Shaw:
Ben is with the personal injury law firm of Gideon Asen in Portland and Bangor, Maine, right?
Ben Gideon:
I’m a long way from home right now, almost 3000 miles.
Judd Shaw:
Well, we’re airing from California here, and before heading more about the great work you do for Mainers and Down Easters, you actually have your own podcast, Elawvate, right?
Ben Gideon:
I do.
Judd Shaw:
Tell me about it.
Ben Gideon:
So about a year and a half ago, I made a fairly big life transition. I left a law firm where I’d been a partner and owner and been there for 17 years and I started a new firm Gideon Asen. At the same time, I started a new podcast with a friend and co-host Rahul Ravipudi, who’s based out of here in Los Angeles. So we thought it’d make a nice team with one person on the East Coast and one on the West Coast, and it’s been really great. I’m having a really fun time doing it.
Judd Shaw:
Yeah, I saw that from Elawvate, it was a focus on trial skills, lawyering. Is that the background of the podcast?
Ben Gideon:
Really my concept for the podcast was to do something a little bit different, because there are a bunch of trial lawyer and trial skills podcasts. We wanted to do that, but in addition to that, tap into kind of the emotional and psychological dimension of what it’s like to be a trial lawyer, including its impact on people’s personal lives, lifestyle, and dealing kind of with the stress and other elements that go along with that practice. And trying to get a little bit more personal with the guests, having them dig a little bit deeper than just, “This is how you do a direct exam. This is how you do a cross examination.” So that was kind of the concept of it. We like to say it’s where personal growth meets trial law. And I think it’s fit a nice niche, because I don’t think anything exactly like it had existed before. We’ve had a lot of nice feedback from people that listen that like that concept.
Judd Shaw:
You can check out Elawvate on anywhere you listen to your podcasts, iTunes, Spotify, Podcast Addict, things of that nature.
Ben Gideon:
Yeah. Absolutely. It’s been really gratifying to see the show grow. I think now if you actually just type in Trial Lawyer to either Spotify or to Apple iTunes, we’re the number one trial lawyer podcast in the country.
Judd Shaw:
That’s super cool. Now your wife, Sarah, a former two term speaker of Maine House of Representatives was the 2020 democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate in Maine. What is it like to be the first husband in politics?
Ben Gideon:
Well, that’s an interesting question. No one’s ever asked it quite that way before. Unfortunately, I’m not, no longer at first husband because my wife lost that campaign against Susan Collins for the U.S. Senate, despite being ahead in every poll for about 10 months, and looking like she was going to be elected in that race. It’s been fantastic, honestly, because my wife is just really terrific at politics. She’s got a great way of connecting with people and she’s one of these people that does it for the right reasons. She wants to make a difference in people’s lives. And sometimes when you’re in a narrower career, and we help people in our practice, but sort of one at a time with our clients, you like to feel connected to the bigger world where you can do more to help more people. And it felt nice to be connected to that with my wife doing that good work. So I liked the role, for the most part I was kind of the silent partner in the political world. She was out in front on that, not me.
Judd Shaw:
Really cool. That’s amazing.
Ben Gideon:
Yeah.
Judd Shaw:
But for you, you grew up in Maine, you pretty much wanted to be a lawyer all your life. You go to Cornell University and in Ithaca, you end up going to Boston University, and with exceptional grades, transferring to Yale where you earned your law degree there. And then from Yale, you go on to one of the most prestigious, largest law firms, at least in the country. And ultimately you spend a large portion of your career, as you pointed out, 17 years, at another law firm, which was Maine, I think at some point, maybe still is, largest personal injury law firm in Maine. Why’d you leave and start your own firm?
Ben Gideon:
You only live once, and I always dreamed of having my own law firm with my name over the door and being able to design a firm exactly how I wanted it and a firm that could fulfill my vision for what a firm would be. I loved the firm that I was at for 17 years. I was an owner of the firm. I was on the executive committee, helping to manage the firm for a long time, so I did have a lot of control over it. But what you realize is when you’re making decisions by large committees, with lots of people who have to have a voice, it is difficult to kind of carry out a personal vision. And so at some point, and also just for the need to make a change, to keep my life challenging and interesting, I decided to make the move and it’s been fantastic. It’s been one of the best decisions I’ve ever made, other than marrying Sarah and having my three children.
Judd Shaw:
On my podcast a lot of times we talk about delivering exceptional client service. Is there a difference in what you have created at your firm, along with your partner, as opposed to where you come from?
Ben Gideon:
I think so. I think we are, I mean, at my old firm, we greatly valued client service and that was definitely a priority at all times, but there can be a lack of quality control when you start to get, we had 17 or 18 lawyers and probably 40 to 50 support staff. And the quality is inconsistent when you get to that number of people in a smaller market like Maine, where you don’t necessarily attract only the best people to particularly the law jobs. So I think there is some inconsistency. In our firm, one of the great aspects of my current firm is, we right now have three lawyers. And for every client they’re going to be serviced by a combination of just the three of us. And we work together on every case. So I know what quality client service and the work that’s being done on each individual client case in a way I didn’t in my old firm.
Judd Shaw:
What happens is, from my experience, is you fly at 35,000 feet at a larger firm. And there’s just so many different layers. You may have middle management at 15,000 feet, your front line, 5,000, and then all your others on the tarmac. And it’s harder and harder in those leadership to get down on that tarmac where it’s really happening. And the benefit at getting Gideon Asen is you are on the tarmac, right? You’re down there. And so on the front end, your clients are benefiting from that because they’re getting the Ben Gideon way. I call it the Judd Shaw away at the firm, in order to scale and grow I need to teach everybody how the way I would speak to a client, doing a call, an intake, things of that nature. And for you and your team, you’re right there.
Ben Gideon:
Yeah, 100%. And that’s been one of the most gratifying aspects of building this new firm, is that when you’re at a larger firm, I mean, you referenced a different firm I was at, but I was at a firm called Latham & Watkins, which at the time I was there probably had about 1,000 partners spread over 17 countries-
Judd Shaw:
I think they have 4,000 lawyers now or something.
Ben Gideon:
Right. I mean, it’s one of the largest firms in the world, and there are people in your own building that you will never meet and you will never know what their names are. And when you’re a lawyer there, everything is taken care of for you. Your IT is done for you, all of the file, document storage systems, litigation systems, all the support staff are managed by mid-level managers, as you’re pointing out. But when you build a new firm from the ground up, you have to get down into the trenches and figure out how all of that stuff works, because I’ve never had to do any of that in my career. But it’s actually been great to do that because you see how little things make a huge difference.
And one of the things we’ve done from the outset is we’ve built out, we call it our operations manual, but we write down every policy about how we’re going to do each individual thing in our firm. And then everybody ultimately has to review it and sign off on it. And over time we revise it, and improve it, and change it. And you really see how little things like, how does the intake process work? How do you triage phone calls in what manner? And literally, what does the person who picks up the phone say when they’re talking to a client? And we happen to have amazing staff and they really care about these things. The other day my, one of our staff started scheduling, so our practices, we mostly do medical malpractice, we do some other types of cases, but that’s our bread and butter. And those cases are complicated, and patients come to you with a whole story they want to tell you and you have to sort through, is that a case or not? It can be difficult sometimes just to know and-
Judd Shaw:
And costly if you make a mistake.
Ben Gideon:
… I often tell people, “You make your money in this business on the cases you turn down.” Because once you accept the case, you’ve bought really a blank check of great expense. But so our practice has been, for a year and a half now, every client who comes to our firm for a potential medical malpractice case will speak to a lawyer. And sometimes those calls are 30, 45 minutes, an hour, and we’re turning the case down. But the practice is always that we will call that person at a designated time and the lawyer’s expected to make their call on time so the person knows when to expect us.
Well, one of our staff people started asking the clients to call us at the time, instead of us calling the client. And one of the other staff people said, “No, that’s not the way we do it. That’s not what our policy manual says. You’re supposed to schedule the call for the lawyer to make the call. That way we can guarantee the call will get made.” And she wrote to me, and she said, “This has been happening.” And I thought that made sense. But one of the things she pointed out was, when we opened this firm we said we were going to have the best customer service. And our slogan is, “Let us be your champion.” And it would be inconsistent with our business model and our vision-
Judd Shaw:
Core value.
Ben Gideon:
… for us to do that. It’s a small thing, but if the client has to call you, about 25% of the time, they’re not going to call you. So the call will never happen and they’re going to miss out on talking to us. Whereas, when we make the call, we connect with them probably 90 plus percent of the time. So it’s just a small detail, but I’ve learned that these little details really matter.
Judd Shaw:
I think so. One of our core values at our firm is, “Be a knight in shining armor.” And we try to say to our team, “If the client is waiting for you to call, and expecting it, or you’re just going to hope that the client calls you, are you really being their knight in shining armor? Are you really working it?” And what it sounds like is, and I can appreciate one of the joys of that, is that you have your DNA all over every system and process. At our firm, we also do, when we get a new client to come in, we give them a preference sheet and it’ll say, “What do you want to drink?” “Coffee.” “How do you like the coffee?” Soda, water, ice, no ice? And they fill out that form and then we enter that in our case management system. So the next time the client comes back, the ambassador of our first impression, our reception team comes and says, “Jimmy, you wanted a diet soda, no ice. Here you go.” And how goes, “How does he remember that?” Right? We do that intentionally.
Ben Gideon:
That’s actually an important thing to do. I think we’re going to adopt that strategy. No, I was sitting at the bar last night and there was a guy six seats down at the bar, and the bartender, and then his girlfriend or wife joined him at the bar. And the bartender came walking over and said, “So that’ll be sparkling something.” And she said, “How do you remember my…” I said, “Of course I remember.” She had been there once, one other time, but you can see what an impact that made on somebody.
Judd Shaw:
Right. Active listening while they remember it. And it’s those little things. They get lost to those big behemoth law firms, but you have the ability to control that and have those, what I like to call small touches. And next time they come in, “Coffee, cream, one Sweet’n Low.” “How did you know that?” “Well, we have a system for that.” Speaking of being incredibly competitive and insanely smart, which you and your partner, your firm really stands on this principle about champion, which to me is not a good representation, it’s not average representation. It’s like top notch. You think be a champion, you got to play like a champion, you got to win like a champion. For example, in 2014, you achieved a record setting $22.5 million dollar verdict for a utility line worker who got injured. How does that case highlight the type of work or the type of effort, that champion attitude that you have at the firm?
Ben Gideon:
Thanks for asking. I mean, I love the term champion because it can be used as an adjective, a noun, or a verb. You can champion somebody else’s cause, which is what we do as a lawyer. You can be a champion, which is what your clients want. They want to be the champion. They want to be the hero of the story and they want to win their case, so they can be the champion and you can be a champion of something. So I just thought that that really encapsulates what we’re trying to do. That case that I tried in 2014, that was really an epic saga for me. It kind of tracked a big part of my growth as a lawyer because the case went on so long. I think it went on, by the time I tried it, I’d been working it for over five years.
And it started out, so I represented this utility line worker who lived in northern Vermont, a small town up by the Canadian border. And he went out one day, he was called to open a switch on a transmission line, which are the big, high voltage power lines. And if you’ve ever driven down the road and you’ve seen these substations where there’s barbed wire around, and maybe a gate, and a bunch of electrical equipment inside. So that’s where he went, he went to a substation, went inside, went to throw the switch, which involved manually operating a lever. And when he did that, the power at the top of the switch way up by the power line came down the switch into the handle and through his body and essentially blew off both of his legs. So he became a double amputee from that point on, he was 36 years old. We’re actually exactly the same age. So I could really relate to him and his wife and his young family.
So this case went on, like I said, for five years, we originally sued six parties, I think, and settled with five of the six and ended up trying a case against the one remaining party. At that time, they were a Fortune 500 company so they had all the money in the world for the defense. They brought in, they parachuted in a Boston big time trial guy to try the case. And it really felt like kind of a David and Goliath thing, but I worked really hard on it. We invested a lot of time and a lot of money into it. And at the end of the case we got this really incredible result, which was completely deserved by our client and really been a life changer for him. And it’s just been great to see how he and his family have thrived since then. I’m still in touch, and whenever I’m in the Burlington, Vermont area, I try to look him up and see him. Last time I was there we had dinner and it’s just really gratifying to see what that can do to help improve somebody’s life.
Judd Shaw:
It’s the greatest reward of what we do.
Ben Gideon:
Absolutely. Yeah. And it couldn’t have happened to a better, I mean, he was just so deserving. He’s really, he and his wife are amazing people. They were the people, for example, whenever there was a downed, whenever there was a storm outage and the line workers had to work all night, like a 24 hour shift, they were the ones who always held the spaghetti suppers at their house or the breakfast at their house. And over the years, even after Mike lost his legs, every year they hosted at least one and sometimes multiple exchange students at their home. They’ve adopted, they adopted a little girl who had disabilities, who was very young when I started the case and has now recently graduated from high school. I mean, they’re just amazing people on all levels, so just great to see when good things to good people.
Judd Shaw:
Yeah, when you can champion a cause and bring it home. So I would refer to you as insanely smart, Cornell, although I know that you, at one point went on for hockey, that didn’t work out, that you sort of flunked out in academics and here you end up graduating at Yale Law School. It’s such a story. Unbelievable. But you refer to your partner as insanely smart. Tell me about him. How’d you guys connect?
Ben Gideon:
Yeah, it’s interesting. His father Michael Asen, so my partner is named Taylor. His father, Michael is a prominent partner in a law firm in Maine. And so I’ve known him for a number of years, and actually he was very helpful to my wife in her campaign. And I didn’t know Taylor much, but I knew of him. And at some point I was sitting in my office at my old law firm and I got a call from this guy who was working at a plaintiff’s class action firm in Brooklyn and told me he had graduated from Yale Law School, and done a federal clerkship, and asked me if wanted to get together and have coffee or something with him when he was in town. And so I did that and ultimately was able to recruit him to come to my old law firm. And he was there and been there a couple of years as an associate before we left to start Gideon Asen.
So yeah, he’s a very smart guy, as that resume would kind of suggest, he’s an exceptionally good writer, very good analytical thinker. But I really like the fact that if he’s working on a case, I have complete confidence that it’s going to be done at a very high level and done right. And if we have to submit a brief and he’s writing it, I know it’ll be a good quality work product. There’s nothing that drives me crazier than seeing crappy work product out of lawyers, I just don’t like it. I don’t like bad or shotty writing. So I know I have confidence in him that he’ll be able to work to that level, which our clients obviously deserve. And it takes that stress away from having to worry about what my partner’s up to.
Judd Shaw:
Well, I mean, it goes back to the fact that in your DNA, when you’ve built this thing to have somebody who shares that vision, and those core values, and knows that he’s going to deliver the same product you are, it’s a good combination, it’s a deadly combination.
Ben Gideon:
Yeah, it’s been good. And the other part about it is we actually just talked to somebody who we may hire or may not, but was interested in our firm. And there’s another guy who just came off of a federal clerkship. And once you have a critical mass of people with that background, it can be easier to recruit people because it’s, you sort of give a permission structure for people that wouldn’t normally be doing plaintiff’s tort law. And I think sometimes our profession gets a bad rap, but I think I love trial lawyers, plaintiff’s trial lawyers, they’re my favorite people, because I think there’s just something real about what we do that’s so different from other aspects of the law. And I’m sad that there aren’t more people that go to Harvard, or Yale, or places like that that think that that’s a noble and viable option for them. So I think it’ll be nice to sort of see if we can up the level of the plaintiff’s bar a little bit in our state.
Judd Shaw:
Here we are at an event together. And I don’t think the community realizes how close the plaintiffs bar is, right? It’s competitive in every state, and with each other, and everybody, some people have billboards and commercials right next to each other, but then yet they’re sharing tips and help. And I mean, we’re fighting against the same bully.
Ben Gideon:
I think we have to share, because if we don’t, the institutional forces on the other side are so powerful that we’re all going to be disadvantaged, but if we band together and share, we’re all better off for it. And I think you kind of learn that over time, it’s not like if your colleague down the road gets a big case and a big verdict, that doesn’t hurt you, that actually helps you because it raises the bar for the next case. Now, all of a sudden, the case that they wanted to low ball and say could never be worth more than X, they’ve been proven wrong, it is worth more than X. So it’s kind of one of these rising tide lifts all boats, I think. I do think there’s an element in the plaintiff’s bar, I think we have to be real about it, that doesn’t behave that way.
And there are some bottom feeders in this business and there are some unethical and bad actors in this business. Of course that’s probably true of any business, right? But I do think that maybe, because the barriers to entry are lower, that there’s not as much of a filter. I mean, it’s very hard to get, if you want a job at Sullivan & Cromwell or Boies and Schiller, you got to have pretty good credentials and background and certain pedigree. If you want to do plaintiff’s work, you don’t really need anything other than a shingle and probably a law degree, hopefully a law degree in most cases. So there’s definitely a less of a filter there, and so we do have a wider disparity of types of people, but I think at the upper level of the plaintiff’s bar, they’re some of the best, most humble, generous, kind people that I’ve met, and smart, and street smart too.
Judd Shaw:
I do too. I met, there was a law firm, I’ve traveled the country visiting, I’ve visited over 60 law firms now around the country. And one of them was doing this child car seat giveaway. And so families could go by and they would have the fire department, they worked with the police department, and they would check the car seat. And if the car seat was the right car seat for the right age appropriate, or they’d fix it and buckle it in. But if it wasn’t, they would just give them a brand new car seat right then, and people would say, “Well, why is this firm giving away car seats? Doesn’t that reduce the amount of cases that they may have because they’re reducing injuries?” And the law firm’s great response was, “There’s already enough injuries. There’s already enough accidents. We should be doing, part of our work, part of the champion of the cause is changing the conduct or the behavior that leads to these injuries.”
Ben Gideon:
I completely agree. And one thing we’ve been proud of is we participate in something called 1% for planet in our firm. So we’ve committed to give back 1% of our gross fee revenues. So it’s not our profits, it’s our gross fees. And anybody who does this for a knows that there’s a great disparity between those numbers.
Judd Shaw:
Sure, you’re not giving away 1% of what goes in your pocket, it’s more than that at gross.
Ben Gideon:
Right. So it’s been great, I mean, we were, our first year, last year, we were able to give away quite a bit of money, even though it was our first year, but we started strong and it’s just so nice that we’re developing relationships with all of these environmental nonprofits that we are able to fund through this. And then this coming year, it’ll probably be double or maybe triple what we were able to give away last year.
Judd Shaw:
That’s amazing.
Ben Gideon:
It’s really pretty cool.
Judd Shaw:
That’s amazing. Now your partner, his father was an attorney, but your father was an attorney too, wasn’t he?
Ben Gideon:
I don’t like to think of him as an attorney. He was a law professor. So he actually was a lawyer, but he never practiced law. And anybody who’s seen the difference, in some, there are law professors that practice law. My dad is a true academic, so he loves the law and he’s written many articles and likes thinking about it and teaching about it, but my dad wouldn’t be able to argue his way out of a speeding ticket.
Judd Shaw:
Yet it had to be some really academic or interesting kitchen table conversations about the law. How impressionable was that on you?
Ben Gideon:
It was enormously impressionable.
Judd Shaw:
I imagine.
Ben Gideon:
I mean, my dad and I, our relationship, until more recently because he is older now and doesn’t take as kindly to it, but our relationship for years was essentially based around arguing. We would argue about everything. So we’d argue about the law, we’d argue about politics. We’d argue basically about everything else to the point where standard dinner table would be us arguing. And my mother standing up and storming off because she got frustrated by it and my two younger brothers basically just kind of melting away and trying to ignore us. So, yeah, I really enjoyed that. I mean, my dad, my dad is truly one of these high IQ people. He would do New York Times crossword puzzles in five minutes, he’s published his own crossword puzzles in the New York Times. When he was in college, he was chosen as one of a couple people to be on the college quiz bowl for the whole, for his school
So he was a really smart guy and really academic, but I learned a lot from him, but it’s interesting as much as my dad was a law professor and I’m a lawyer, I think personality wise, I take after my mother much more, because she was an elementary school teacher, but she was really kind of a, I would say a social activist type. She always got involved in causes to champion people in need. I mean, she does it still to this day. I mean, I remember probably 30 years ago, she went to learn how to teach English as a second language so she could help immigrant children coming into the community. This was before there were really many immigrants in our community, it was kind of on the front end of that. But she just always did things like that and she’s very tenacious. And if she wants something, you better get the hell out of her way because it’s going to happen. And I think in terms of the skill set that’s needed for the job of being a plaintiff’s lawyer, that’s a much more important skillset than any kind of brain power.
Judd Shaw:
Yeah. I was thinking she’s like the company mascot, right? She’s like, that’s, what you’re saying is exactly what the firm is about.
Ben Gideon:
Yeah. I mean, we kid ourselves sometimes, but the world of being a plaintiff’s lawyer is not the most highly intellectual job most of the time. The med mal stuff sometimes engages the brain in a way that requires you to think about things carefully. And there’s some in depth thought, but I don’t think of our pursuit as really being intellectual or academic in that way, I think it’s much more practical.
Judd Shaw:
Yeah. I wanted to shift for a moment on the operation side and this operation manual, something I was thinking about client service and customer services, whether you have thought to incorporate the behaviors that you want of your team in that operations, like, “I will do this. Non negotiable. We will update, we’ll call, all calls get returned within 24 hours.” Something where it’s almost like the code of conduct for your team as you grow in that operations manual. Because as you’re, you say, you pass it along and everybody signs off to say, “Okay, this is our system. This is the process of how we’re going to do things, but also have you thought about building in that code of conduct that goes along with those things?”
Ben Gideon:
Yeah, it’s an interesting question. I mean, we definitely have built in there, for instance, when they’re time sensitive things, such as if we get an intake, that we will respond within 30 minutes, either if we’re texting someone, or emailing, or phone call within, by the end of that day, typically. Things like if we do dictation and we have letters going out, I think we give them two, there’s two day window that that should go out unless there’s some reason it can’t right. So we do try to build that in there. We’re small enough now, and I can manage people closely enough and see their conduct, that probably don’t, some of it is just a culture we’ve created. One of my favorite parts about our culture is that we’ve instituted voluntary, guided meditation every day at-
Judd Shaw:
That’s amazing.
Ben Gideon:
Yeah, it’s generally right around noon. So one of our paralegals, actually before she became a paralegal, was trained in, she worked for a number of years as an acupuncturist, but she has a lot of training in Eastern medicine and she is a certified yoga instructor. So we talked about meditation and I had been doing it for a number of years to just try to manage my stress level and all that. And we talked about instituting it, and I thought, oh, well maybe I’ll do it, but nobody else is going to be into that, and they’ll complain about it, and maybe we’ll do it for it once or twice and then we’ll never do it again.
It is one of the most popular things in our office, virtually everybody does it almost every day. We do it for exactly 12 minutes, because that’s what my paralegal says the literature suggests is the minimum amount of time that has the maximum benefit. And she usually comes with a short game plan of, “This is going to be the lesson or the thought for the day.” And then it’s silent meditation after she introduces it for 30 seconds or so. And in the summer we do it outside on the lawn, which is really great, people love being outside. It is having a reset button pushed in the middle of your day or taking a shower and coming back, you feel so relaxed and rejuvenated after that.
Judd Shaw:
I love that. I love that. That mindfulness, particularly with your team that brings out empathy, appreciation, you just, that that’s amazing. I think that’s awesome. And going back to it, for instance, we call ours a social contract and the social contract is built into our operations manual. So the social contract, we try to come up with ways in which we can help guide our team, our growing team, instead of what we had found was do this in two minutes, this in four minutes, but processes kept changing and then we realized, oh, we forgot to change something about that thing it’s two minutes, now we want it at one minute, whatever. And so instead of it, we say, “You agree to act with a sense of urgency.” Or, “You agree to earn your spot on your team, be accountable. Learn from your mistakes.” Things of that nature. But yeah, I mean-
Ben Gideon:
Well, what’s the size of your business?
Judd Shaw:
So now we have about 11 or 12 lawyers and about 40 team. So we need those kind of guides that let everybody know, again, sort of as I start to get higher and higher in that elevation, in feet, and going farther and farther away from the tarmac, to make sure that everybody understands how I would do it. And that’s how actually it evolved to come up with the Judd Shaw way. And we really are very intentional about it. And I love what you said about the culture, because culture in a company, it exists in every company. And if you’re not working on it, you have culture, but it’s not probably the one you want. And when you’re intentional about it, when you say, “We’re going to do this mindfulness exercise and anybody can participate.” And everybody starts to participate, talk about rising tide, the whole team benefits from that. So I love that.
Ben Gideon:
Yeah, absolutely. It’s such a learning curve for me because I’ve never run a business like this before. I mean, I’ve usually just had my head to the grindstone on the practice of the law side. So trying to learn this, it’s also, it’s great to connect with resources, I’m sure your podcast is one, to help lawyers figure this stuff out, because aren’t a lot of great manuals. And they certainly don’t teach you anything, at first of all, Yale Law School, they don’t really teach you anything about the law even, but they certainly don’t teach you how to manage a law firm. So I actually got most of my knowledge about that from listening to podcasts. But at each stage you run up against kind of a brick wall of, okay, I’ve figured out that part of it.
So we’re at the, we have four staff and three lawyers, and we may be on the brink of hiring another lawyer, which would probably mean we need to hire another staff, but we’re starting to transition from just very small, where everybody knows exactly what everybody else is doing at all times to still small, but a little bit less small. And then also trying to think, okay, what do we want to be? I left a 17 lawyer firm, partially thinking I don’t want to recreate the overhead of a 17 lawyer firm, I don’t need that. But now we’re moving towards creating more overhead again. But there’s that sweet spot where you’re scaled for the business you’re in and the market you’re in. But just thinking through, okay, what is that sweet spot? Where do we want to be? Do we want to be a 10 lawyer firm? Do we want to be a 20 lawyer firm? Or are we content being a three or four lawyer firm? And how do you make that decision? You know what I mean? There’s just, and it just-
Judd Shaw:
I think it’s organic and probably changes over time. Right? I remember moving in one office and saying, “This is the most space I’ll ever need.” And that’s three offices ago, right? Yeah. Well, listen, I mean, here we are in sunny California. And when we get back to the east coast, I encourage, maybe we’ll visit each other. You come and visit my firm and we’ll walk you through it. And you sit with our intake and sit with the operations, and then likewise, I’ll come there and I love visiting firms. Speaking of going there, and outdoor activities, I know that you are a, I read somewhere that you’re a fanatic about outdoor activities, right? Canoeing, and hiking, and biking, and with Sarah and the three kids, I have never had the privilege of being in Maine and even your hometown of Freeport. Tell me what makes Maine special.
Ben Gideon:
I love Maine. It’s just such an unspoiled, natural, beautiful, accessible place compared to so many other places in the world. I mean, one of the best parts of it is that we don’t have that many people, so you don’t have to deal with things like traffic and the hassles of just being in any kind of big urban area. I love coming to LA. I love, I mean, I lived in New York City for a number of years when I worked at Latham. I love cities, but I can just drive to work every day without ever having to think about even the possibility that there’ll be traffic. And I just think about how so many people spend their lives, hours a day, dealing with those kind of hassles. We don’t have to deal with it. So Maine also has a great, so I live on the coast, so I’m able to do things like fishing, and swimming in the ocean, and summertime activities, but then we also have great mountains. So we’ve got a ski house in Maine too, so we can go there and go skiing in the wintertime.
So it’s just kind of, so much is accessible there all within the state, the one downside to it, which it is definitely a factor and something I think about is, I mean, it is a small, poor, out of the way state without a lot of opportunity. And actually, since COVID we’ve seen a lot of the people moving into our state, driving up our home prices are all people from New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, who can still move to Maine and trade in their small brownstone in New York City for a giant mansion on the water with a bunch of acres, which will probably be changing at some point. But when you’re building a business, it is very limiting, because we have 1.3 million people in our state, and there’s only a certain number of high value cases. And we have no industry really, I mean a little bit, but we don’t have major corporations building things or doing things in our state that lead to workplace injuries, explosions, the things that are kind of the bread and butter of plaintiff’s lawyers in bigger cities.
Judd Shaw:
How would the good people of Maine, the Down Easters, get in touch with you, Ben, in the event that they are injured and need a champion of champions?
Ben Gideon:
They can just send me an email. My email address is bgideon@gideonasenlaw.com.
Judd Shaw:
And the website for the firm?
Ben Gideon:
Judd Shaw:
Ben, thank you so much for coming on the show.
Ben Gideon:
Thank you. It was really fun.
Judd Shaw:
Yeah, man. Thank you. Thanks for coming on the show. If you want some swag, please reach out to me at Judd Shaw Injury Law. Send me an email, listen to the podcast, but also definitely include a request for some swag and we’ll send you some stuff out, till next time, thanks for coming.
🎙️ Meet Your Host 🎙️
Name: Judd B. Shaw
What he does: Judd founded Judd Shaw Injury Law (JSIL) and serves as the firm’s Brand Chief. He founded the firm on the premise that clients come first. Over the years, the success he attained for his clients helped JSIL grow significantly. Judd’s clients are not just another number to him or his law firm.
Company: Judd Shaw Injury Law
Words of wisdom: “At Judd Shaw Injury Law, it’s all about high-quality representation and excellence in client service. Our clients are counting on us to win and the stakes are high. Our endless pursuit for awesomeness through our core values, the ability to WOW our clients, is in our DNA.”
🎙️ Featured Guest 🎙️
Name: Ben Gideon
Short Bio: Ben is an Attorney and Partner at Gideon Asen, a personal injury and medical malpractice firm in Portland and Bangor, Maine. Ben began his law career in private practice at Latham & Watkins in New York City before returning to Maine to join Berman & Simmons, PA, Maine’s largest plaintiff’s law firm. He spent 17 years at Berman & Simmons before founding Gideon Asen. Ben has been named in Best Lawyers in America every year since 2013 and was named “Lawyer of the Year” twice for the state of Maine, among many other accomplishments.
Company: Gideon Asen
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