What's your firm worth without you?

Imagine someone offers to buy your firm.

Not someday. A real buyer, at your conference table, running the numbers.

They ask to see your systems. You tap your temple. "Got it all up here." They ask who tries your three biggest cases if you vanish for a month, and what the firm is worth without you.

There it is. The whole problem, sitting on the table between you.

This year, two private equity deals closed 72 hours apart, and every plaintiff lawyer in the country started running some version of that math. Most of them got scared of the wrong thing. They panicked about the outside money. The money was never the threat.

The question was never whether to sell.

The real question is whether you have built anything worth selling. Most plaintiff firms have not. They are a very good job with a law license attached, and a job cannot be sold or handed to anyone else. That is the real exposure, and private equity did not create it. It was there long before anyone came knocking.

You built a practice, not a business.

The test is not complicated. A business is a thing that could fire you tomorrow and keep running. A practice is a thing that stops the day you do. Most plaintiff firms, if they are honest, are the second kind.

Seth Price built one of each at the same time and watched them age side by side. Price Benowitz, the firm he started in DC in 2002. BluShark, the marketing agency that grew to 300 clients before he sold it this year.

His own verdict surprised him. The agency was the easier thing to build, and not because the work was easier. He was simply allowed to organize it like a real company, with systems in the center instead of a rainmaker. One of those two is sellable. The other is a hostage situation with a nicer conference room.

Seth shares what selling his agency really taught him.

Sellable and survivable are the same test.

Here is why this matters even if you never take a dollar of outside money. The work that makes a firm sellable, getting the cases and the systems out of one person's head, is the exact work that lets it survive a bad year, a lost rainmaker, or a founder who finally wants a life. Sellable and survivable turn out to be the same project.

Seth's own read is that the payoff was never the check. It is capacity: room to take the next big case and stop being the ceiling on your own firm. You do not have to sell. You have to build the thing a buyer would want, so that selling becomes a choice instead of a rescue.

From the Inbox

Last issue I asked which "bad venue" you had been warned to fear, and whether you had ever beaten it. Mohamad Ahmad at Kermani LLP wrote back with a story that stopped me cold.

Before a 2023 trial in a Central California county, his own trial judge told him where the ceiling was. This is not Los Angeles, the judge said. You will never see more than $4 million in this court, and you will probably get a lot less. The largest verdict in the county's history for a single plaintiff was $11.4 million, from a trial the judge had presided over himself. The defense brought in a firm that, a year earlier, had held a $30 million ask in that same venue to a $600,000 verdict.

Mohamad tried it anyway. On June 28, 2023, the jury returned $51.3 million, with $44 million of that for his client's pain and suffering.

Everyone in that courtroom had a reason to tell him to take a discount. He prepped the case to the teeth with Sean Claggett and the Trial Lawyers University crew, then put it to a jury and let them decide what the harm was actually worth. (Read Sean's piece.) That is the entire bad-venue argument from last issue, sitting in one reader's trial file.

Beaten a venue everyone warned you about? Hit reply and send it my way. The best ones run right here.

One more thing

I consume standup comedy all week. In the car, on YouTube, on Netflix, falling asleep to it and waking up to the autoplay. So take my word on this one: the best bit anyone has ever done about a personal injury case was done by Mike Birbiglia, who did not go looking for litigation and instead had it done to him.

Here is the setup. A drunk driver T-bones him in Los Angeles. Mike spins, nearly dies, and climbs out the obvious, textbook, sober victim.

Weeks later the accident report lands, and the report says Mike did it. The officer had scrambled vehicle 1 and vehicle 2 so completely that, read literally, the thing has Mike crashing his own car into his own car. On the strength of that document the drunk guy becomes the injured party, and Mike owes $12,000 to fix the man's Mercedes. You have read a report like this. You have one in a file on your desk right now. You know that a single transposed box on page one is the whole reason a sober man ends up buying a drunk man a new bumper.

Mike calls the cop to fix it. He is told to just do the right thing and pay for the car, which, as you know in your bones, is cop for "I filled out the form wrong and I am not about to admit it."

He does consult one real lawyer. The lawyer asks whether he lost any income. Mike says no, it is not about the money, it is about being right, and the lawyer sensibly declines to enter an appearance. So Mike becomes the lawyer. Badly. He buys a $29.95 subscription to a find-anybody website and starts working up the drunk driver like opposing counsel. He builds the case on cocktail napkins until 3 in the morning. He is now suing the driver and the entire LAPD in a courtroom that exists only in his kitchen. His friends stop asking how he is doing, because he tells them.

He is the intake call you screened out on Tuesday. He is the guy who shows up to the consult with a binder. He is a comparative fault trial being litigated by one man with a printout and a grudge.

Then his girlfriend tells him she is just glad he is alive, and the whole thing evaporates. He drops it. He marries her.

The bit is called The Accident Report. It runs five minutes and you can listen to the whole thing in the car. Do it this weekend, because here is what a room full of plaintiff lawyers will catch that Mike never did. The man had a case. A drunk driver nearly put him in the ground. He just spent a year litigating the wrong one, alone at his kitchen table, because it never once occurred to him to call one of you. It is Saturday morning. Go listen. Then leave your phone on.

Reply and tell me one thing: has private equity come knocking in your market yet? I am mapping where the money is moving in plaintiff law, and the map is filling in faster than anyone expected.

Make yourself optional,

~ Adam

Quote of the week:

“If your business depends on you, you don't own a business, you have a job. And it's the worst job in the world, because you're working for a lunatic.”

- Michael Gerber, The E-Myth Revisited, the book that taught a generation of small business owners why their company could not survive without them.