I'm The Pro. Here's The Proof. Part I

One phone call from Rome

I was on my honeymoon when I decided to bet the firm's future on dog bites. It turned out to be the best decision I ever made.

The call that changed everything

My law partner and I started Zirkin & Schmerling Law with almost no cases. We played a lot of tennis and basketball while we waited for business to come in. Out of our first 10 cases, two were dog bites: random walk-ins involving young children who had been viciously attacked.

I liked those cases. I liked representing those families. I saw that Maryland's dog bite law was unsettled and complex, and that gave me room to argue. Then I got married. I was on my honeymoon in Rome, and I called my partner.

"I said, "Hey, I've been thinking about this. We're going to be the dog bite people in Maryland." He said, "What are you talking about?" I said, "Just trust me.""

That was the beginning. Today, we handle more dog bite cases than any other firm in the state of Maryland. Competitors refer their dog bite cases to us. Judges ask me questions about dog bite law. The appellate wins are part of Maryland's legal record. The niche became the identity, and the identity became a competitive moat that no amount of advertising can buy.

The 10,000-client mission

The other decision that changed the trajectory of our firm was simpler, and harder to explain: I woke up one day and decided the firm was not big enough.

Things were going great and I was happy, but it came down to a question: can we help a lot more people? Are there more people we can help and be a greater influence in our community? So we set a goal: help 10,000 injured people in Maryland over the next 10 years. Not a revenue target. Not a headcount target. A client impact target. We are currently on pace to exceed it.

It is a useful lesson in how mission clarity changes everything downstream. Marketing strategy, intake decisions, staffing priorities, community investment: they all get easier when the firm can answer the question of whether a decision helps us reach more people who need us.

What it takes to scale without breaking

Growth without infrastructure breaks firms. I have lived both sides of that equation. We brought intake in-house and recently hired a leader from a publicly traded company with 15 years of sales experience to run it. No legal background required. What matters is the ability to connect with a potential client at the most critical moment of first contact.

The first touch point for a potential client is intake. If you are not doing well there, you are missing out. I also made a deliberate decision about marketing. No TV. No radio. No billboard spending. Everyone is getting into radio and TV right now and it is a huge amount of ad spend. That is not an area we chose to compete in. Instead we focused on SEO, pay-per-click, LSA, and social, where a well-run firm can compete without matching the budget of a national aggregator.

PE is a forcing function, not just a threat

Private equity is entering the personal injury market. They are spending on TV and billboards. They are acquiring firms and bringing professional management structures with them. Ignoring it is a mistake. Treating it purely as a threat is also a mistake.

If you have the right processes, procedures, and people, and you have implemented AI properly, maybe you become a takeover target. That is not a bad outcome. Before PE got involved, law firm owners had no one to sell to. Now they do. The firms that will be worth acquiring, or that will survive long enough to compete, are the ones that operate like professional businesses, with data, technology, systems, and client communication built into how they work every day.

The niche was never just about dog bites

What we built with the dog bite practice is a model that applies to any firm in any niche. Go deeper than your competitors want to go. Change the law if you can. Earn a reputation that makes other lawyers send you cases instead of competing for them.

A judge once asked me how many dog bite cases I had going on. I told him a lot. He laughed. That is the version of marketing that costs nothing to maintain once you have earned it.

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