John Risvold: Prioritizing Powerful IP Over Fancy Legal Tech 

Strickland Bonner: So your lawyer and your clients are squeezing you for lower fees. How do you put more cash in your pocket? We want to expose you to new ways of practicing law. Endless hours with no home life and a lease on an expensive office are so 1999. It's time to make a change for the better. Here to help you with that are your hosts Ron Bockstahler and Kirsten Mayfield. Welcome to the 1958 Lawyer Podcast.

Ron Bockstahler: All right, welcome to the show, the 1958 Lawyer. I am your co-host Ron Bockstahler,

Kirsten Mayfield: and I am your other co-host Kirsten Mayfield, and we have with us today John Risvold. He is a personal injury trial attorney at the Collins Law Firm. He's been an attorney for eight years now. He spends the majority of his practice helping victims of catastrophic injury obtain justice. Not not your your little injury cases here, catastrophic, and he's comfortable in trial. I think it's fair to say as he is part of multiple trial associations, including the American Associate for Justice Illinois Trial Lawyers Association. Thanks for being with us here today, John.

John Risvold: Yeah, thanks a lot for having me.

Ron Bockstahler: So, John, let's start with the softball. I mean, the pandemic's been going on almost a year. You and your firm are thriving. Tell us what are you doing right now to really make things successful during this pandemic,

John Risvold: we're just really good at teamwork and communication, but we also have everything in the firm set up so we can do this seamlessly. It wasn't much of a transition because we're great with technology because we have it all set up in Teams. We were just ready to go. It was sort of natural when we shifted to work from home, and we're still almost 100% work from home now. I haven't been in the office in in three weeks, but 2020 was one of the most successful years that the firm has had in the last decade. And through the testament, yeah, thanks. It's just a testament to everybody's pulling together and hard work and making the technology work too.

Ron Bockstahler: So you mentioned Teams. I assume you're talking Microsoft Teams.

John Risvold: No, we do a little bit. You use Microsoft Teams a little bit. Primarily, we use Zoom or just texting and calling to communicate. But the firm is sort of split into three sections. There's a business litigation section. There's the the catastrophic personal injury section, which is where I do the majority of my work, and then an environmental and toxic tort section. And so we're split into those three sections, and each team sort of runs their own cases and runs their own docket. So my team is me and another lawyer and two paralegals, and from time to time a law clerk, and we're running about 100 to 150 cases at a time, and they're primarily large cases, but they're at various stages of investigation, pre-suit, and in litigation.

Ron Bockstahler: Tell us a little about the technology you guys have. Either it looks sounds like you guys deployed technology before the pandemic, so give us idea of some of the maybe softwares that you guys are using.

John Risvold: Sure. So we've been using LogMeIn for a long time. We have a centralized server that we've had forever. It's top of the line. It has every file on it. We scan everything in, and then I can log into that from anywhere in the world. I can run the entire docket that I have from an iPad. I can log into my computer, access any of those documents, and then everything else is really run off of Office 365, which I know a lot of lawyers love their case management systems. I think Office 365 is a lot more powerful than people realize. If you know how to use Excel and you know how to use Word and Outlook and Teams, it really is a prefab case management system ready to go. And so we've used that, and then just good old fashioned talking on the phone, hopping on a Zoom call, a lot of texting, just to stay on top of things.

Ron Bockstahler: So when you say log me in, so your server is a premise-based server.

John Risvold: It is. We have an office in the western suburbs of Chicago, and we have a premise-based server, and then we log into it remotely.

Ron Bockstahler: So let's let's let's stay right there for a minute because I've been reading a lot where the future is cloud-based. Everything's going to be cloud-based, but you know some of us have major investments in our servers. You know, and so why do you have to make a change? It sounds like you're saying no.

John Risvold: I don't think we have to make a change right now. I think over the long term, the cloud technology is going to be so drastically different from server technology. I mean, I just think it's going to be better, faster, easier. That eventually it'll make more sense from a cost standpoint, or even from an accessibility standpoint, to move over to 100% cloud-based. But our email is all cloud-based. Everything in Office 365 is cloud-based, and then it periodically syncs with our server. And then all the the actual files, instead of you know the old-fashioned Redwells, which I still use and I still like because it's just a vestige of when I did insurance defense work, and the firm uses them too. We have all of that on a hard server, and then it's accessible from everywhere. So I think we have a good mix of technology right now, and we don't really need to upend everything. If you can port into your computer through a log me in or a go to my. Or there's even free ones. I think through Google Chrome, you know, Chrome View My PC, that sort of stuff. If you can get to your server from anywhere in the world, then you don't really need to rip out the server and move everything over to the cloud right away.

Ron Bockstahler: So I really like what I'm hearing that you don't have to jump just because a few things have changed that you can still get by without a huge investment, and if you're just starting off, I mean, maybe if you're just starting off and you don't already have an investment in a server, you want to go cloud based.

John Risvold: Yeah, I would. I would agree. I think if you're starting off and you're doing, especially if you're doing personal injury work, I think I'm a firm believer that if you have a good amount of cloud server space and a good laptop, you can run your whole firm.

Ron Bockstahler: Awesome. Okay, let's take a move over. I listened to one of your. You had a show on with Dr. Jason Lamarce. Am I saying Lamarche right?

John Risvold: Lamarche.

Ron Bockstahler: Lamarche. Okay, so you've got some relationships with some people in the medical field, and of course, you do traumatic injuries, so brain injuries. Kind of tell us where you got your, how you kind of tied in with Dr. Lamarche, and then where you got your knowledge. I guess because you studied political science, I think, as your undergrad.

John Risvold: Yeah, I have a political science degree, and then I've got a degree in English. So I just tacked on a degree in a language I already speak. I figured that might be easy. So that's my only degree.

Kirsten Mayfield: So I really cheap down.

John Risvold: I figured it was super easy, right? I already speak the language. I might as well lock this one up. So I, like I said, I started out doing insurance defense work primarily for large insurance companies, State Farm, Liberty Mutual, that sort of thing. And then I also did a lot of asbestos defense work. And when I was doing asbestos defense work, you just had to learn the medicine. You had to learn the science. It was just part of the job, and so that became, you know, ingrained in me. And I realized, and I hadn't realized it in my entire life, I really like medicine, and I really like the science. I'm not, you know, great when it comes to standardized testing for science, but in terms of learning it and applying it in a persuasive way, I really like that a lot, and I think it's really important if you're doing personal injury work that you do learn the medicine inside and out. And so when I when I made the switch to the plaintiff side, when I left defense work and came to my firm, now it was just sort of natural that I you know would continue to learn the medicine, and that has given me, in my opinion, a strategic advantage over a lot of even the defense lawyers who have so many files that they don't have time to learn the medicine or they may not want to because they don't need to. That has been sort of a big advantage for me. And while I've been learning it, I've made connections in the medical field just by simple things. I'll take a deposition of a client's doctor, and then I'll stay after the deposition and say, you know, hey, doc, I don't understand this, that, and the other. Do you got 10 minutes? You know, you have 10 minutes. I can talk to you. I know you're super busy, whatever. And sort of striking up those relationships have turned into genuine friendships. So when you talk about Doctor Lamarche, Jason's one of my very good friends, and he's become a very good friend of mine over the last five years, our families get together or got together before the pandemic, and plan to afterwards. And from there, you know, it's continued. I've met friends of his that are in the medical field. He's met lawyer friends of mine, and those relationships are tremendous advantage for my clients because they have the advantage of I have one phone call away, where I can ask a doctor any question under the sun, and you know he might know somebody that they can go see if they don't have a doctor, right? If they need an orthopedic surgeon, he might know the right one, and I might not. And so it's always good to have those sorts of connections and those sorts of friendships.

Kirsten Mayfield: I love that it's not just you saying it's good for their their case and it's good for what you're trying to do for them, but you're actually genuinely saying this is good for their life because you're saying, "Hey, this is just go to this doctor.

John Risvold: Yeah, absolutely. At the end of the day, if you're doing personal injury work just for money, I think you're going to burn out very quickly. You're probably not going to make a lot of money either because that's your focus. If you're doing it because you actually want to help people, I think you're going to be much more successful. I mean, the reason I did it, and I remember the exact moment I decided I wanted to do this work. I was on a plane home from a deposition in in Texas, in West Texas, in Amarillo, and a woman on the plane asked me what I do, and I told her, and she said, "Well, you sound like the villain in a Grisham novel, and and I thought, you know what, I I kind of am like my job as a defense lawyer in that field was literally taking money out of people's pockets, and I didn't like it at all, and it really kind of made me feel gross. And I had young kids at the time; my daughter had just been born at the time, and I thought, like, how do I explain this when she's five or 10 or 15, right? And you know, thankfully, Sean Collins and Ed Vanceky, the two lawyers I work with most closely, have been longtime mentors of mine. And I sat down for breakfast one day with Ed, and I just kind of laid it all out for him and said, "This is what I think about doing defense work. I really don't like it. And then I told him, "You know, I have a half a dozen cases of my own." That I've been able to pick up, and that their plaintiffs' cases, should I just go out on my own? And then they gave me a tremendous opportunity to join them, which has honestly, it's been life changing, practice changing. It's been really great to work side by side with my mentors.

Ron Bockstahler: So I would say, you know, you got a lot of one minute videos for people that have been injured to check out and kind of learn a little bit, and and honestly, I was very attracted to the way you present, and you seem to break things down. And many of your videos like, "Here's three things, right? Here's the three things you need to do if you're in an accident, which really stands out to me. Where do you get that, and why do you do it, and is it effective?

John Risvold: So I get it from my wife and my father-in-law, who are both journalists, they understand how to take complex things and distill them down into its simplest form. And so I learn a lot, especially from my wife. She's very, very good at this. And so anytime I make a video, she sees it and then just you know decimates it, and then I re-report it seven or eight times. And if I don't show it to her, she gets even more mad. Like I can't believe you didn't, you know, run this through its paces. So that that's been a huge help for me is just having a second set of eyes, especially an expert's eyes on it. And I think they're very effective simply because we want to see other people more than we want to read words on a page. I think these days that's why apps like TikTok and Instagram are so popular with millions and millions of people, and also short video is very useful because people don't have a lot of time to sit and watch long form, 45 minute video. You know, podcasts are nice because if you're on the go, you can listen, and you got headphones in, you can go anywhere you want and listen. But staring down at your phone while you're driving is an instant recipe for disaster. So I like to keep them short and simple. I think they're effective primarily because it's a lot of things that people don't know. If you're in an accident and you're seriously hurt, you don't know what to do, and you think that when an insurance company calls you and they're trying to get information from you, you think, "Oh, good, somebody called me. They're going to help me. They're going to pay my bills. They're going to take care of this mess. My life is upside down. And what most people don't realize is the sad reality of it is the insurance company that calls you. If they're not your insurance company, they're not interested in helping you. They're interested in building a case against you and paying you as little as possible. And so you need to be in a position where you're protected. And I tell people all the time, think about how many lawyers State Farm has. I don't mean to pick on State Farm, but I used to work for them, and I can tell you there were hundreds upon hundreds upon hundreds of lawyers. Don't you think you should have one? Just one. And if you don't think you should, then that you know more power to you. Good luck. But I wouldn't ever ask a heart surgeon to do brain surgery on me, and so I wouldn't ask you to try to you know resolve your own case or even litigate your own case.

Ron Bockstahler: So you have a show with Jason, Dr. Lamarche, and you talk about you know you never want to hire that attorney that's going to be waiting for you at the hospital, you know the what we call I guess the ambulance chasers. So where are you getting your your clients from?

John Risvold: The majority of our clients come from other lawyers who we co counsel with, who either they want to try a case and they don't have the resources or the experience, and that's a lot of what our firm does. If you're in a position where your client needs their case brought to court and tried before a jury, our firm is a trial firm, and that's one of the things that I really love about the firm is that everybody is geared towards how's this case going to be presented to a jury, how is it going to be tried, and what's the ultimate outcome going to be if we try it this way or that way. We focus group cases, we work through them with the end in mind, and I can't speak for other lawyers, but I do know that some of the folks we've co-counseled with who might be solo practitioners or might be doing smaller cases, they may not have that sort of mindset because they need to settle a case in order to get to the next month's payroll or whatever it might be. Versus, we're looking at how can we win this case from a you know a jury perspective. And honestly, when you do that, when you work backwards from how do you win a case at trial, all of your cases get better, they get stronger. They get more complete. You're doing a better job for your client, and the case values go up. They go way up, and especially if you start trying cases, you know your case values go up because the insurance company knows you're not bluffing. So, John, right now we know insurance companies are stalling. You know the the

Ron Bockstahler: courts are kind of slow right now. Your video court right now. There's no live trial, jury trials going on. So you got your insurance companies, you know, just delaying anything. So what's the tack now that we're looking at that you're taking that's going to help your clients?

John Risvold: So right now it's just been investing time. We have extra time. We're not going to court because everything's by Zoom. We're not really traveling around as much. We're not having to take an hour to go visit a client. We're doing a Zoom meeting, so the investment of time has made cases stronger and better. I think because there's a lot of superfluous wasted time that we just got to cut out. We don't have to do it anymore, and that has really helped cases. And along the way, I'm not a huge proponent for alternative dispute resolution. Arbitration or mediation-that's just my personal preference. I'd like to put 12 in the box and go. I'd rather always just be in front of a jury. But this year, we've had a lot of success with arbitration mediation simply because the insurance companies early on in the pandemic wanted to unload files because they were in free fall mode. They didn't know where they're going to get their next, you know, their next dollar, and so they wanted to unload things that were liabilities that they could unload easily, meaning complete cases that they knew liability was a slam dunk for us. Now things are sort of stalled out, and we're still getting. We have the benefit. We have the benefit that we're still getting cases resolved because I think of the expertise of of folks at the firm and the the history of the firm and its and its experience. But we really do need that jury trial mechanism in order to make some of these bad actors come to the table and want to discuss being responsible for the injuries and the negligence that they caused, and we're going to get there. We're almost there, but that is a really, really important tool. I think for any injured person is to have their day in court, and without that, there is a lot of stalling. The nice thing is, right now in Illinois, the state legislature just passed a bill that would allow injured people to get 9% pre-judgment interest, 9% per day, from the date that I send a demand to the date that I get a judgment in front of a jury, provided that I beat my demand. So you say I've got a case and I make a $50,000 demand and I get $100,000 verdict, and I'm using round numbers because, again, like I said earlier, I have an English degree. If I get, you know, I get a $50,000 demand, I get $100,000 judgment. I get 9% per day interest from the date that I made that demand to the date of my judgment on that $100,000 So that's a huge incentive for insurance companies to stop playing games, or any bad actor to not really play games and take it seriously and try to get the cases that need to be resolved resolved. If there's a horse race, if there's a dispute and liability and it can't be resolved in an arbitration or mediation, then we should absolutely try them. And those cases shouldn't resolve, and they shouldn't resolve for short money. They should resolve for full and fair value, full justice value of the case, and those cases need to be tried. And so we'll try a lot of those over the next two three years that should have been tried in 2020 in the early parts of 2021. But for the majority of the cases, honestly, 90% of the cases should resolve. They should settle favorably at some point in time, and it's just a matter of getting everybody to the point where they realize, okay, you're right. This needs to resolve. This mechanism should help that a lot, especially when you're dealing with some of the substandard insurance carriers that sort of fly by night, four a.m. advertisers. This will help with that a lot.

Ron Bockstahler: Let's talk a little about your ability, your firm's ability to do legal research, because a case is as strong as as you can build it, right? And the more legal research you can, effective legal research you can do, the stronger your case. Point in case you had a cesarean case not too long ago where you found that the doctor five years prior had left a sponge inside the client, causing great sickness. Well, tell me what you're doing that other firms might not be doing as far as your legal research to you know bolden or strengthen your case.

John Risvold: Sure. So legal research, I think, goes beyond using Westlaw and Lexis. I think you really have to dig into every possible investigatory avenue. So we use private investigators from time to time, but a lot of it is just simple stuff. You have Google, and everything is on Google. Type in the doctor's name. Type in the doctor's name with fraud in quotes, or lawsuit in quotes, or discipline in quotes. Every disciplinary action that's ever taken against a doctor or you know any individual is going to show up. Your driver in a you know truck driving, your your truck driver in a in a semi crash, have they ever been arrested for DUI? You can find that. Have they ever had any drug issue where they've been cited? You can find that. It's all available. So you have to know where to find it. It depends on the type of case. When you're talking about a medical malpractice case, like you're talking about here, you know the Department of Professional Responsibility will have all those you know disciplinary actions. Has the person ever had any sort of citation or any investigation against them? And we just use that in a deposition. We had a defense deposition. They had called in some doctor, some chiropractor that my client had seen years before her catastrophic injury, and she's had three spine surgeries since the crash that she's involved in. And they brought this doctor in, and he's talking about she had prior neck pain and prior back pain and everything else. And I asked him two questions. I said, "Doctor, you licensed by the state of Illinois? Yes, I am. And in you know in 2012, weren't you disciplined? Or falsifying patients' medical records. Yes, I was, and that was it. And they're never going to play that in front of a jury. But it's just because you have to do the digging and you have to do the research. Which, like I talked about earlier, the nice thing about not having to drive to court to give status updates all the time to judges is I get all these hours back that I can do things like this. You can do it sitting on the couch at night, like you're watching mindless Netflix, whatever it is. And I mean, you know, you're binge watching show after show after show at the end of the pandemic. Now we've run out of shows, but but you

Unknown: know, I want to ask you what shows

Ron Bockstahler: you still have to watch. Let's

John Risvold: yeah, right. We don't have much left. We, my wife and I just restarted Veep because it's like our escape from politics, but we both like politics.

Kirsten Mayfield:

Yeah. John Risvold: So we thought we'd rewatch that. It's a it's a good one.

Kirsten Mayfield: Yeah, you know it's getting bad when Netflix puts a button on there that just says play something because no one can choose anymore. We're all like just anything.

John Risvold: Please just put something on. I don't care what it is.

Kirsten Mayfield: Yep.

Ron Bockstahler: So you know we're hopefully coming out of this pandemic because we're running out of shows and we're all getting a little tired. That's what's

Kirsten Mayfield: going to make the coronavirus stop. It's like ah, at least people have got enough. The

Ron Bockstahler: business of law is really you know it it's starting to change. I mean, it hasn't changed much at all for the last 100 years, and all of a sudden now I feel like there's some real momentum going. We've rolled out some maybe not rolled out technology, but people started using some of the technology that was out there. So, where do you see the business of law as we're emerging out of the pandemic? You know, what do you what sticks with

John Risvold: us? Well, the nice thing about the pandemic, if there is a nice thing about the pandemic, is that it's dragged our industry kicking and screaming from the you know mid 18th century into the present, I was talking with you guys before we we started on the air, and in Cook County, it's the busiest civil court docket in America, or at least it was in 20 1819 I can't speak for 2020 yet because I don't know, but busiest court docket in America, and we were hand writing every case order, and we were using carbon paper to make copies, and you can't buy carbon paper. You have to. I had to go on eBay and buy carbon paper in order to write my orders. The carbon paper is such a hot commodity in Cook County that the judges have written their courtroom numbers on them and do not steal on every single one of them. So if you take one out of a courtroom, they'll know because it says you know 2201 on it, and Judge Johnson or whatever it might be, and so you're going to get dinged. You know the the court administrators or even the judges are going to yell at you for stealing carbon paper. So hopefully, now that they've decided to you know do smart things like digital orders and PDF orders and email, you know things that we've been using since the 1980s Email's 40 years old. We shouldn't be handwriting orders. That's helpful. And in all the collar counties of Illinois, or of Chicago rather, all the collar counties of Chicago, they're using Zoom. So I appear before judges by Zoom if I have to. What they're requiring now is that I meet and confer with defense counsel and come up with an agreement. You know, we agree to continue this case 60 days to do doctor's depositions. The judge doesn't need to hear that. He doesn't need to waste. She doesn't need to waste her time. We don't need to waste our time or our client's time if we can just send an emailed order in. So a lot of that technology has been great. And again, I think the way things are going, if you have a good laptop, a good internet connection, and you know how to use Word, Excel, and Outlook, you can run an entire practice. You don't need an office space. You don't need any of the fancy, you know, case management systems. And that's not to to talk down about case management systems. There's some great ones by some great companies. I just don't think they're necessary. I don't think they're needed. I think you really can run the whole thing from a laptop with Excel and Outlook.

Kirsten Mayfield: So where did you develop those skills? As you've said, you're an English major, so that that covers Word. But where did you develop all these skills to be able to use the software this way? Because it wasn't in law school, I'm guessing.

John Risvold: No, it wasn't in law school. Part of it is just I'm a nerd. Admittedly, a big nerd. I'm the kid who taught himself how to code in sixth grade because I thought it'd be fun to build a website. I just like that stuff. It's been interesting to me. And like I said earlier, I like science and I like medicine. I just don't test well for it, but it's very interesting to me, and I like to learn it, and so that's part of it. And the other part of it was when I was doing the asbestos work, I was managing three to 500 cases at a time, and so I had to learn it. I was forced to find ways to organize, or else I'm going to lose a lot of cases if I'm not organized. And I am very much a person who needs order and needs a routine, which is why the pandemic's been hard for me. And I need sort of my schedule in place and my organization in place. Otherwise, it's pure chaos. And so I've just had to force myself to do that because that's my personality type.

Ron Bockstahler: Tell me about marketing. We had Chris Dreyer, SEO expert. On the show not too long ago, and he really kind of gave us an education on SEO and online marketing, particularly for personal injury. What are you doing that you're seeing great success in

John Risvold: social media? Social media is a huge marketing tool if you do it properly. You know, we talked earlier about sort of don't be the lawyer in the emergency room. You can very much be a billboard lawyer or the ambulance chasing lawyer on social media. I think the big way that you can attract an audience and attract a clientele, whether it be you're marketing to other lawyers to get referrals or you're marketing direct to consumer, and there's a place for both of those in social media, and I can kind of talk about that in a second, but I think if you're giving, you're giving away content. You're giving away free advice, and I hesitate to call it advice because you don't want to give away free legal advice and get yourself in trouble. But if you're giving of your expertise, you're going to draw people in because they're going to want to learn more from you, connect with you. We're all sort of starved for genuine connection, and we're all sort of in a place where we realized-at least I've realized in 2020-I really have to kickstart my betterment. Right? I'm really focused on my career, but how do I get better, smarter, more complete? How do I become a more complete person and lawyer? And I think you can find a lot of those people by connecting with them on social media if you do it in a genuine way. If you're, you know, hire me, call one 800 John Risvold, whatever, you're not going to get those people. But if you're giving information and content, you're going to draw people in, and they're going to connect with you. And cases will come from that. They have come from that for me. I think if you're marketing to consumers, video is huge. Instagram, TikTok are very huge. Facebook is, you know, a stalwart. But if you're marketing to other lawyers, LinkedIn, LinkedIn loves content right now. It will push your content out the more you feed it, and you will get a ton of exposure on simple things. I mean, I I post something on LinkedIn a couple weeks ago, and it's seen by 25,000 people. That's unbelievable reach, and I didn't have to do any of the SEO. I didn't have to build out a website. These are things I can do from my phone that are tremendous marketing advantages that I think lawyers have that a lot of us aren't taking advantage of, or I think a lot of lawyers are doing it in a traditional marketing way, where they're you know creating little mini commercials with their tagline and their phone number in them, and I just don't think that's very effective. The most effective video that I have on social media, the one that's watched the most, was I went and stood on my porch the first time it snowed last year and said, "Hey, we're in Chicago. It's dumping snow on us. We're going to get six inches of snow. Here's how you drive safe in the snow. Here are the three ways to drive safe. It was a 30-second video, and it is the most watched piece of content that I have. And I, I've gotten calls because of it, and I've you know had referrals because of it, but you can't have that in mind when you set out to make the content. You have to give before you can get, just like any referral relationship.

Ron Bockstahler: I like that, and I, you know, I like your videos, so that that comes across. I appreciate it. What's going on with you know we're in a pandemic, so I would think that car accidents are down, but I read a stat saying they're actually up. So what's going on?

John Risvold: Everyone is driving in a much more dangerous way. So I don't know if it's something to do with the psychology of the pandemic, where we think that everyone is at, we think that the roads are empty, so we think that we can drive while staring at our phones or drive 3040, 50 miles over the speed limit, but that has been something that I've seen more often-a lot more distracted driving and a lot more speeding. The other thing that I've seen is directly tied to the pandemic, and it's more tractor-trailer semi-truck commercial vehicle crashes because there's just more of them on the road. You know, commercial vehicle traffic has probably doubled in 2020 as everybody has turned to Amazon or e-commerce and getting everything delivered to their home. And we've seen a lot of those, you know, crash, unfortunately. And they're they're catastrophic when they do. They're you know sometimes death, but a lot of times they're serious surgeries and life-altering injuries. And you know they're under the drivers are under a lot of pressure because we expect two day delivery. I don't care if it's you know I don't care if there's six feet of snow. I ordered it from Amazon Prime and it better be here in 48 hours or I'm going to throw a fit. And and that's not necessarily me, but that's the consumer at large. And so the the drivers are under a lot of pressure to get us our things quickly. Even something as simple as DoorDash, your food is hot. They need to get it to you while it's hot, or you're not going to tip them. And a lot of these drivers really need the tips. Things like that are are growing in number, and you know when there's more cars like that on the road, and there's more of a rush. There's more of a danger.

Ron Bockstahler: That's interesting. Go back to social media real quick. I seen that you recently joined up on Clubhouse.

John Risvold: Yeah.

Ron Bockstahler: Are you getting anything in that? What do you? What's your experience with that so far?

John Risvold: I love it. It's. I have not been much of a participator. I don't say much, but imagine having a mastermind group in your phone. That's the way I look at Clubhouse. So far, it is jumping into conversations about anything you can think of. There's a lot of lawyers on there, so it's a lot of practice management stuff that I've you know listened to, but it's also entrepreneurship, marketing, networking, business building, anything. It's and they're bringing together people that are no names, people that are really, really the experts in their field. Because right now it's in beta, and so you have to be invited to join. And so a doctor friend of mine invited me, and I've gotten a lot out of it so far, just by listening, because it's it's like live podcasts with all of these experts, and they're being asked questions from the audience, and you have that interaction as if you're at a seminar. And sometimes seminars are very valuable, and sometimes they're not. And this one has the added benefit of if it's not valuable, you just turn it off. You don't have to fly back home or deal with checking out of the hotel and get into the airport and everything else, like you just have that right in your pocket. I think it's great. It's

Ron Bockstahler: like you shut it off.

Kirsten Mayfield: Yeah. Can you give a brief like explanation of it? Obviously, you have to be invited to it, and it's it's been really hot just this past week. I think I've seen two new articles from a couple of lawyers. Nicole Black wrote an article about

Unknown: it. Yeah. Can

Kirsten Mayfield: you just give us like a brief overview? You know, it's like TikTok in this way. It's like Facebook in this way.

John Risvold: I think it's unlike any social media out there right now. The closest thing I can think of is if you remember back to the '90s when we all had AOL chat rooms.

Kirsten Mayfield:

Yeah. John Risvold: It's it's like that, but it's with experts in their field, and it's 100% audio. So it's a giant chat room where you're talking with, you know, whoever it might be. There was one the other day on marketing, and it was Gary Vaynerchuk. And if if there's somebody that knows something about marketing, it's that guy. And you're in a chat with him for as long as he wants to be there, asking as many questions as you want, you don't get access to experts like this in your day-to-day life, or at least I don't in my day-to-day life. Especially when we're all locked in our homes, or working from home, or trying to be distant and safe. So this is really sort of an inside inside baseball kind of way to get some more expertise. I think. I think it's really, really cool.

Kirsten Mayfield: So there's no video to this.

John Risvold: No, none.

Kirsten Mayfield: That's okay. So earlier you said you know these platforms with the video are really big. Why do you think this one, where it's just audio, is is appealing to people right now?

John Risvold: I think because you can take it anywhere. You can go anywhere. A lot of the way that I've dealt with being stuck in the pandemic is running long walks, get out of the house. If I have a call, I'll take it on my headphones and I'll go walk, and it might be a two-hour call. And cool, I walked for two hours. I didn't sit behind a computer for two hours. And I think this is part of the appeal. I can drive to the store and listen to 15 minutes, or I can go to the grocery store and pop it in and listen while I'm shopping for groceries. And I don't really have to even engage. I'm just you know listening. I can engage and ask questions if I choose to, and I could also host a talk and be the you know person on stage, so to speak, if I wanted to. But I think really you can just gain a lot by listening to other people's experience, other people's expertise. I think if you want to be great at anything you're doing, you have to always be learning. You have to be a lifelong learner in order to be great. And this is just pure gold content right now that I think is really helpful.

Kirsten Mayfield: It sounds like it gives you an opportunity to be the fly on the wall,

John Risvold: yeah, but also the fly that can ask questions,

Kirsten Mayfield: the talking fly on the wall. Yeah, the talking on the wall, right?

John Risvold: Absolutely, you really get to you choose your involvement, and that's what I think is really great about it. You're not forced into a situation where you have to ask a question, and I think the fact that it's audio removes some of that pressure. When you're on a Zoom call with 20 people and there's some expert, I was on one last week with Rick Friedman, who's a tremendous trial lawyer, one of the best in the world, and there were 25 of us that are AAJ members that were talking with him, and you kind of felt obligated to interact. And it was the middle of a workday. It was a very busy day for me, and so I felt bad because I'm, you know, over here on this screen checking email, and I'm drafting a response to emotion, and I'm also trying to engage with Clubhouse. What's nice is that no one sees me, so you don't see if I'm distracted. You don't see if I'm not paying attention. So you don't feel any sort of the emotion that. Comes with that when you're, you know, expecting someone to engage and they can't engage for a few seconds because there's some other fire to put out. But you also get the, you know, that that benefit of being able to still listen, engage, and interact.

Kirsten Mayfield: I almost feel like people are over engaging now with Zoom. Like I'm watching myself. We're on video for all you podcasters, we get to look at each other, and I find that when like we're in meetings with Ron, who is my boss, if he's saying something, I like nod like very egregiously so that he can see like this little corner. This person is saying yes, and I'm doing

John Risvold: it right now. Yeah, yeah,

Kirsten Mayfield: exactly. And I feel like it's developing this new weird skill. Like we're all going to be very like Greek soon because we're used to moving around trying to be the little box that people see. So it sounds very refreshing. I'm I'm I'm excited for when this is not a beta anymore and everyone can can jump on in.

John Risvold: Well, I have like four or five invites, so just shoot me an email after this, and I'll shoot you an invite.

Kirsten Mayfield: Oh, sweet! Thank you.

Unknown: Absolutely, that's very nice.

Ron Bockstahler: So, John, let's kind of as we start to wrap up, I want to give you the opportunity. What's like one or two things you want to you know leave in the minds of the attorneys that are listening to this show? Look, I think you're wonderful. You got a great energy about you. I appreciate it. You know, I deal with 1000s of lawyer attorneys on a regular basis. Been doing this for 20 years, and some just really stand out. And you've definitely got that energy that makes you want to talk to you, makes you want to work with you. I

John Risvold: appreciate

Ron Bockstahler: it. So you know that I'll say that, but I'll leave it to you. You know, what do you want to department? Sure.

John Risvold: What I always tell lawyers that refer us cases or co counsel with us is, you know, the best way in my experience to enhance the value of your case is to work in teams. And so, some of the best results I've had are because I've worked with and I've personally brought in co-counsel. You know, I had a great result a couple years ago in a case where I had the benefit of co-counseling with good friends of mine from Indiana, and they had a case in Chicago, and they wanted me to be local counsel. And it wasn't like they were that far away. It's just I knew the courts and I knew the judges, and you know the old adage that good lawyers know the law, great lawyers know the judges is kind of true. And we had a tremendous result because we were able to work together. We knew the ins and outs of the case, but we also knew the court system and we knew the defense lawyers and everything else. There's no harm in bringing somebody else on. I think if you're worried about splitting a fee or you know you're bringing somebody else on, so you have to pay them or whatever else, you're doing your client a disservice. You can take on huge cases and you can bring in someone like me or someone like my firm or anybody else, and co-counsel with them and fee split, and I promise you that the fee is going to be larger than it would be if you're trying to do it by by yourself. I think you know if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together, and that's just I think the way that the legal industry is going to work. A lot of my friends that do personal injury work are in California, and it's California is its own little unique sort of fiefdom, where a lot of the lawyers are solo practitioners, and you'll see four or five lawyers work on one huge case, and they're all from four or five different firms, and they're all splitting the fee because they're sharing resources, they're sharing expertise, and they're sharing the burden. Sometimes, when you're dealing with, especially say a catastrophic injury or a wrongful death, there's several burdens. There's the burden of the difficulty of the case. There's the emotional burden of the sort of absorbed trauma that you have as a trial lawyer. Sometimes, where you're dealing with a grieving family or these very serious injuries in a very seriously injured person, and there's also the you know the difficulty of financing a case. If you can bring people together and work as co-counsel, you alleviate a lot of those burdens, and I think you can actually benefit your clients in a really great way. So I always encourage co-counsel agreements. I always encourage referrals because I think that it's a really good way to help your clients. And if you're the kind of lawyer, also, I know I'm rambling, but if you're the kind of lawyer also that doesn't like to try cases, that's okay. You know, you don't have to be. Like I think we've all gotten into sort of this mindset of a lot of us have to be the TV lawyer. We have to be the you know the drama in the courtroom sort of lawyer, and I love that. I eat it up. It's my favorite thing. Before I went to law school, I was going to be a journalist myself, and then I ended up taking this path. And I love being in a courtroom. I love being in front of a jury. It's a pure adrenaline rush for me. But for a lot of people, they hate it. And so, if you want to get the best result for your client, you have to find somebody who's crazy like me who loves getting in front of a jury, just so you have that leverage. Because the leverage of a jury verdict is the greatest value you have as a personal injury lawyer. And once you have somebody on your team, whether it be you or. A partner of yours, or a co-counse, or whatever, who brings you that leverage, you're going to see all your case values go up, and that's better for your client because the more money you put in your client's pocket, the better their life is going to be on the back end of this catastrophe.

Ron Bockstahler: It's great. We let you round because we like what you're saying. You know, actually, it makes a lot of sense, and I love the idea of working as a team, especially when you're trying to finance a big case. I mean, if you can get three, four firms working it, it's it's going to be better for the client at the end of the day.

John Risvold: Absolutely, we have one like that right now. It's a large environmental case in the western suburbs of Chicago called Sterogenics. The Sterigenics plant poisoned a bunch of people with ethylene oxide, and there's probably 600 cases that are being worked on by 10 or 12 firms, and it's tremendous to see. And these are great firms in Chicago. Some of the you know heavyweights, and it's great to see all these heavyweights come together in a room. It's like the you know the meeting of the five families. They they all come together in a room, and and really the case gets so much better every time we meet, and the case gets so much better every time we work together. It's unbelievable.

Ron Bockstahler: Well, you got to call me when we're ready to tackle the sugar industry and sue them for the obesity in this country.

John Risvold: I'm in. I'm in.

Ron Bockstahler: But I digress. Final question for you. We like to ask everyone one last question, and that's what would you like to see change in the business of law going forward?

John Risvold: Let's continue to just inject into the legal industry technology. We're a tech-based society. We're a technology-driven world. The whole world is reliant on technology, except our industry. We really need to continue to find ways to modernize to use legal tech in a in a smart, effective way. Like I said earlier, the pandemic has been really, really great for our industry in a sense because it's forced us to do a lot of these things. It's forced us to cut out the inefficiencies and use technology to better our cases, our clients' outcomes. Just the industry as a whole, it's so much nicer to be able to hop on a Zoom call with a judge, talk to him for 30 seconds, and then hop off and go about my day, as opposed to driving an hour in traffic to tell them the exact same thing that takes me 30 seconds and then driving an hour back to the office. I think that if we can continue to create these efficiencies, technology is a huge part of it. That would be great. Now, the flip side of that, what I'd like to see the industry continue to do is be collaborative and be connected. We've lost a lot of that, you know, personal connection in 2020 because we couldn't be together. We couldn't have bar association meetings or even really lunch or coffee or the traditional sort of marketing that I love, which is don't eat alone. Go eat with somebody. Go visit somebody. Go to meetings. Go meet people. We've we've lost a little bit of that, and I hope that we can find a balance between you know the Zoom world that we live in and the sort of you know old school 1950s and 60s marketing that I think is so effective and useful. Yeah, I think you have to have both.

Ron Bockstahler: It's great insight. Thanks for joining us. We've listened to John D. Risvold. You can check John out. He has his own website. John is it Johnrisvold.com

John Risvold: Just johnrisvold.com

Ron Bockstahler: johnrisvold.com and he's also at the Collins Law Firm in the Chicago area. John, thanks for joining us. It's been great having you on the show.

John Risvold: Thank you so much for having me,

Ron Bockstahler: Kirsten. Thank you. You've been listening to the 1958 Lawyer. We appreciate it, and we'll see you next week. Thanks for listening to

Strickland Bonner: the 1958 Lawyer Podcast. If you like the show, tell a friend, and please subscribe, rate, and review us on Apple Podcasts, Google, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you'd like to hear more about Ron, Kirsten, or Amata, go to AmataOffices.com. All the links are also available in show notes.