Building a Mass Torts Practice with Gregg Goldfarb (Ep. 19)

Asbestos, tobacco & Agent Orange… What do all of these things have in common?

If you guessed mass torts, you are correct!

In this episode, Darren is joined by Gregg Goldfarb, a very successful Florida attorney with over 25 years of experience as a law firm owner handling tens of thousands of cases involving complicated mass torts. Mass tort litigation refers to a legal action where a large number of plaintiffs file individual lawsuits against a common defendant or a group of defendants, typically involving a defective product, harmful drug, or toxic substance that caused similar injuries or damages.

Gregg discusses:

What exactly mass torts are and how they differ from class action lawsuits
How he shifted his practice and what motivated him to dive into the world of mass torts
Some anecdotes from recent cases he worked on and how he navigated fighting them
And more

Resources:

Wurz Financial Services

Connect with Darren Wurz:

Connect with Gregg Goldfarb:

About our guest:

Gregg Goldfarb of Gregg M. Goldfarb, LLP has over 25 years of experience representing clients, including individuals, small businesses, and medical professionals. His practice provides dedicated representation for clients in cases that include accidents, defective products, insurance claims, PIP insurance claims, civil rights, and whistleblower claims. Representation is focused on suiting your needs and using his knowledge and experience to help you pursue compensation for your injuries. Consultations are always free, and you pay nothing unless there is a settlement or victory that leads to a payout for your claim.

Transcript:

[00:00:00] We are on a mission to help lawyers and law firm owners maximize wealth and achieve financial independence. Welcome to the Lawyer Millionaire with Darren Wurz From Wurz Financial Services. In this podcast, we will help you build wealth, minimize your taxes, and plan for retirement with money management strategies designed for the legal profession.

Join us in this journey where we help you manage your money so you can make the most of your future. Start feeling confident in knowing you are well prepared for retirement and on track to financial independence. Now onto the show.

Darren: Asbestos, Tobacco, Agent Orange. What do all of these things have in common? Well, if you guessed Mass Torts, you got it right. Today’s guest is going to tell us all about his experience in mass tort litigation, as well as building [00:01:00] and running a law practice. Thanks for joining us today. I’m your host, Darren Wurz, certified financial planner and author of The Lawyer Millionaire, the Complete guide for attorneys on maximizing wealth, minimizing taxes, and retiring with confidence.

Before we get started, if you like what you hear today, head on over to Apple or Spotify and give us a five star review. Today’s guest is Greg Goldfarb, a very successful Florida attorney with over 25 years of experience as a law firm owner handling tens of thousands of cases involving complicated mass torts.

He’s also the host of his own podcast “Cut to the chase”. Welcome to the show, Greg.

Greg: Hey, thanks for having me on. It’s a privilege and an honor.

Darren: Absolutely, we’re so excited that you’re here today and I’m really excited to have you on the show because I want to hear all about your advice on building and running a law practice and also to learn more about mass torts.

As I understand it, [00:02:00] there’s a lot of opportunity in mass torts for attorneys.

Greg: There is, it’s really become quite the industry over the years. Some people have really collaborated very effectively. Some of the lawyers and brought us all together in a very impressive way at conferences and we all exchange ideas and there are marketers there.

And so we connect with marketers and learn how to build our practice and it’s really amazing. I never, and as an attorney, expected to see competitors collaborating as effectively and seamlessly as they do in the mass tour world.

Darren: Very cool. So, okay, let’s start with the softball here. Give us a quick definition for those of us who may not be as familiar. What exactly are mass torts and how are they different from class action or other personal injury cases?

Greg: So typically your mass tort involves [00:03:00] either a product, a defective product that has harmed a lot of people, or a device, a medical device, or a drug. It could be, for a heartburn, it could be for, any, anything that the pharmaceutical industry is trying to deal with oftentimes ends up being just the opposite in harming people.

So in the mass tort world, you typically have one thing, one event, one product that injures a variety of people. In the class action world, you have almost the same scenario, but typically, in the mass tour world, the injuries are usually personal injuries or death and economic injuries. In the class action world, it’s typically for economic damages.

So let’s just say your bank did some kind of funky surcharge that it charged all of its customers. A [00:04:00] hundred thousand customers got some bogus charge on some foreign transaction, and everybody is just harmed economically. So, It’s almost like a mass tort because there’s one thing that happens to a lot of people, injuring them economically.

The class action will be handled as one case, so the result will apply to everybody. In the mass tort world all the cases are consolidated in front of one judge who effectively pretrial will make rulings that will apply to everybody, but then everybody’s individual case has to get tried because everybody’s injuries are different.

Substantially different.

Darren:Okay.

Greg: So that’s the shortest answer I can give you on that front.

Darren:Great. Yeah, so that makes a lot of sense. Where each of the plaintiffs maybe has something different that they’re dealing with and might get a different amount. I guess then as well, right?

Greg: Yeah, [00:05:00] exactly.

Darren:Yeah.

Greg: And there could be situations where you have a mass sort and a class action at the same time over the same product. So they basically separate the injuries, the emotional distress, physical injuries, from the economics of it all.

Darren: Oh

Greg: So let’s say you bought a car that had rollover problems and effectively you, let’s just say you spent $30,000 on the car, but it really should have only been 25,000 because whatever they just, you know, overvalued the price of it or whatever.

And let’s just say that that car also resulted in lots of rollovers. So you could have the mass tort rollover. And then you have the class action for the fact that people overpaid for the same car, which had this defective component.

Darren: Okay. Okay. Wow. Very cool. Now Greg, how exactly did you get involved in mass torts? Give us a little bit of your background, your story, you know, is this what you were dreaming of as a [00:06:00] kid? How did, what led you to this specialization and how did you get started?

Greg: Well, I’ve always been really big pro environment and I sort of started out my career. Did started I incorporated a nonprofit to help clean up the Miami River, and I actually got some pretty interesting trial work in environmental work, but it never really, I couldn’t make any money doing it, so I sort of moved all around and I got into whistleblower cases, I got into accident cases, insurance claims, doing all of that. Then at some point, one of my clients actually had been taking Fen Fen, so I know everybody’s, there’s a lot of talk about the latest diet drugs on the market that appear to be safe, but diet drugs typically have proven to be unsafe. So this is a perfect example of a product that is designed to help people lose weight, but Fen Fen basically just sped up your internal processes and it would end up causing heart problems. Okay? So I had [00:07:00] a client from a, just a regular ordinary case and she had seen an ad on TV about Fenn. And she’s like, Hey, you know, listen, I actually have my moderate regurgitation and I’ve been taking Fen Fen . What should I do? So I didn’t know how to handle that kind of case. I got connected with an operation at a mass tort law firm in Pensacola.

I referred them the case. Next thing I know I got a really big referral fee and I was like, wow, this is great. I should do more of this. Then a few years later, Vioxx. So Vioxx was a medication that was designed to help relieve pain. So now we hear in the news about the opiate and the opiate crisis.

So painkillers have also been the holy grail for pharmacy companies. They want to create, you know, something besides Tylenol and Advil and all that to deal with pain and it never really worked. So I got another Vioxx case, I sent it to the same firm. Couple years later, another big thing, and my line of work [00:08:00] shifts over the course of my first 15 years and I started doing what’s called personal injury protection.

It’s a Florida only kind of healthcare collection type of a practice. It’s very cut and dried, cookie cutter kind of stuff. Very boring, nothing at all related to the environment, which was my passion. So I was over the years realizing that my little. Personal injury protection practice was probably gonna get cut by the legislators of Florida.

They didn’t like it. They thought they created this PIP industry. To reduce the number of small whiplash cases that were getting filed in court. So they basically did this little song and dance where they said, well, you can’t do these little small whiplash cases, but you have to have $10,000 of insurance for your medical bills.

So that was the trade-off. So everybody gets $10,000. Even if you’re at fault, you’re gonna get $10,000 of your [00:09:00] medical bills paid by your insurance company. In relating to an auto accident. So I’m doing this and over the years they keep saying they’re gonna get rid of it. They try, it gets closed, and I knew that I had to shift. I knew.

Darren:Mm-hmm.

Greg: Lawyers don’t like to shift. They don’t like to, they just do their thing and that’s it. They don’t wanna learn anything new, but I knew that eventually I was gonna have to get that done. And so I get a phone call. I actually had a third case, a hip replacement case. Hip replacement products are also extremely difficult to manufacture in a safe way.

Darren: Okay?

Greg: So I had a hip case. I sent it to them. They called me up, they said, Hey, we were trying to settle it, but the client is being difficult. And I’m like, oh, well I know the client is my girlfriend’s uncle. I’ll talk to him. So they said, by the way, there’s breaking news about this 3M earplug. Okay, so the 3M Earplug case was enormous. And they said, you gotta get into this. So I said, I know that I gotta do something [00:10:00] different. And so that was my opportunity. So I said, how do I get into this? So they opened my eyes to the whole mass tort world and the fact that you can go out and hire marketers to do case acquisition for you, I never realized that you could do that.

I thought the only marketing was a newsletter or a bus bench or billboard, which is not really that direct of a marketing apparatus, so to speak.

Darren: So you wanted to get more involved in the mass torts arena and how did you do that? How did you go about shifting in that direction and, uh, what did that look like for you and how would another attorney do that? And what advice would you have for someone else looking to get involved in mass torts?

Greg: So, One of the ways, one of the issues was, okay, can I handle this work? Can I actually answer the phone calls properly and then do the work? And I [00:11:00] was, I knew that I could probably do it, but I had to ramp up my office personnel and train them how to answer phone calls and to screen the clients. So you do a marketing campaign, all of a sudden you get hundreds and hundreds of calls. Can you handle those calls these days? People don’t wait a full day for you to call back as an attorney. It’s just, they’re go, they’re off and running, they’re gonna find another firm in 10 minutes. So they’re basically the mass tort world.

And when I mentioned the marketers and the vendors at that conference, you have call centers that are specifically designed for law firms. That’s all they do. And they just are very well trained and they handle all the calls and they handle them quickly. They get back to people. They will call people back.

A couple of times, let’s say they need some information or whatever, so they’ll stay on top of the person. So you can effectively be like a one person operation like myself and handle a large volume. In addition to call centers, there’s also what we call back [00:12:00] offices, so these are like almost like virtual law offices that exist that you just hire to handle your work.

And they’ll get the medical records, they’ll do whatever’s necessary, the paperwork, and they’re independent contractors, so they’re not your employees. So you can basically offshore all of the work from the marketing, answering the phone calls, and then you know, the actual operation.

If you don’t wanna do the your own operation, you still have to manage it and supervise it and you’re responsible. The other alternative is to refer it out. And so a lot of the lawyers in the mass tort world love to get referrals because they don’t have to spend the money on the marketing. And, you know, all of a sudden here’s a hundred new cases that meet your criteria.

All these law firms will have “we’re only gonna do these kinds of cases with these types of injuries” and so that’s what the call center is designed to do, is to make sure, like, I’m sure everybody’s heard of the camp Lejeune ads. Those have gone [00:13:00] crazy. I mean, they, the marketers, some of the marketers overdid it and are causing the industry a little bit of flack. Uh, Congress is not so happy because they made claims that were outrageous. They made telling people that the case is settled, click here to pick up your money.

Darren: Mm-hmm.

Greg: Right? They’re like, the marketing has gone beyond what is legal. So they’ll cold call people, they’ll send people texts.

They’ll say, Hey click this link here to recover your money on the Camp Lejeune, even though they don’t know whether that person actually lived at Camp Lejeune and has an injury or what. So it just went completely overboard, but, that’ll auto correct itself when people will get in trouble and all that.

But in any event, so you can refer your case out. All you did was effectively say, okay, I wanna get into this mass torts stuff. You select your marketer. And oftentimes they’ll handle the call center. They’ll actually hire the call center and they’ll tell you who to go to. They’ll tell you what law firm to go to.

So the trick really is to make sure you know the marketers, the [00:14:00] marketers will do the whole thing for you. You just have to make sure that they’re following the ethical rules.

Darren: Mm-hmm.

Greg: Okay. Because if they don’t, you’re on the hook. You might not realize what they’re doing. But you’re gonna be the one that gets sued and you’re the one that’s gonna get into ethical problems if they’re doing, if they’re violating whatever ethical rules are in your state.

Darren: Okay. Yeah. So, you can be involved both ways as either you’re referring clients out to other firms, or you could be one of the attorneys or firms that’s receiving those referrals, right.

Greg: That’s right. Yeah. So you could, you know, and I could do that myself. I could ramp up my operation or hire a full-time back office.

And there are back offices that are like very very trained and experienced in handling these. They handle ’em for other law firms. So it’s kind of like a, you know, an easy way to get into other litigation without really taking that much [00:15:00] risk, aside from spending money.

Darren: Yeah. Yeah. And some attorneys may not wanna go through the complicated process of the litigation.

So that I can see where that would be very attractive. So tell us a little bit about, like, you know, your work with a client. So why is a client coming to you? What, what is the service that you’re providing to them? What are you helping them to achieve? What’s the advantage that you bring to the table for them?

Greg: So over the course of my career, I’ve basically been in almost every type of what we call plaintiff’s work. Okay? So whether it’s a whistleblower, whether it’s a defective product, whether it’s an auto accident, a slip and fall, even financial crimes, I’ve basically done the whole gamut. So at this point in my career, and I’m well connected with all attorneys in each one of these areas of law. And so what I’ve sort of become like your family consigliere, you got a legal [00:16:00] problem. Who do I call? I don’t really know. I don’t know who to trust. I don’t wanna just like call some law firm that I never heard of or whatever. Well, you call me. Okay? You tell me about your situation and I’ll tell you whether you have a case or not. I am pretty much competent enough in all these lines of work where I can see, yeah, you got a case, you probably have a case, maybe you have a case, you don’t have a case. And then I connect with, I bring in my specialist, my colleague who medical malpractice, I know the best medical malpractice attorneys. Trucking case. If you’re involved in an motorcycle accident, which are horrific, horrific injuries. So I know the best of the attorneys and each one of those. So let’s say you hire me, I bring in the other attorney. You’re not gonna pay anything more, you’re gonna have your, the normal contract in these kind of cases is 60 40.

So you would get 60%. The attorney that would be me and the other law firm would get the 40%, whether it’s just [00:17:00] me, whether it’s just them, or whether it’s the two of us. It’s the same 40% that we end up splitting up. We refer, we have our own arrangement, so you get me and that law firm, and I help with the communication process. A lot of people try to call their lawyers. They don’t get anywhere, you know, they try to reach out to the people handling the case. Nobody’s calling them back. So in those situations, you could call me. “Hey Greg, I’m trying to get an update from these guys. They won’t, I haven’t heard from them in a month or whatever.”

And then I call and I say, listen, you gotta blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I don’t want a bar complaint. And you know, they’re all on my case about the fact that you’re not answering the phone. So the next thing, two minutes later, they call them up so you get a little extra protection. You get a second attorney, me basically saying, yeah, that settlement offer that you don’t like is a good offer because, and then I can explain to them in a little bit more detail than the other [00:18:00] lawyer that they might not really even know.

And then, you know, typically they’ll understand it a little better when the trust is there. So I kind of give you that added bonus to the whole thing.

Darren: Yeah. That’s very cool. I like that positioning and the way you’ve identified yourself and your market and put yourself out there for your potential clients.

Now, as you’re looking back on your career and some of these mass torts.That you’ve been involved in, you mentioned a few of them. What’s been the one that’s been maybe the most fascinating or the most interesting to you that you’ve dealt with? Well, right now they’re all really interesting and a lot of them deal with environmental issues.

Some of them don’t deal with environmental issues, but they’re also still interesting. Not in a positive way, but just more like fascinating. So the sex abuse whether it’s been at, at churches or public institutions, colleges, football, football coaches or whatever, getting crazy stories or [00:19:00] whatever.

The Boy Scouts, I mean, the Boy Scout, I couldn’t believe it. You know? So I got involved in the Boy Scouts and the church diocese out in California and Colorado on sex abuse. And those stories are just really just very upsetting, I guess.

Darren: Mm-hmm.

Greg: You could, you know, when you see, I mean, imagine you were growing up, you heard about the Boy Scouts.

Did you ever think that that would be an unsafe place to be. I mean that like, you know, you’re a parent, you’re like, okay, let’s get our kid in Boy Scouts or Girl Scouts or let’s send the, you know, our kids to church and then, you know, all these horrific acts take place. And you have to wonder like, why is that happening?

What are these institutions? Are they magnets for bad people? Are they just. You know, I couldn’t even really get into like how it’s happening, but those stories are really interesting. On the environmental mass torts the cases to me right now that are [00:20:00] most also fascinating, but concerning are the, um, water contamination cases.

So, and they’re called forever chemicals. So what’s going on? And you might hear like a Triple F, which is. Aqueous firefighting foam. So what has happened is DuPont and 3M created this firefighting foam to help firefighters put out fires, and it’s basically, they have these compounds that they basically created to make the foam be something that is never gonna go away.

All right? So it’s also in Teflon. A lot of clothing has these, you know, food packaging. There’s a lot of products that have these chemical compounds that are specifically designed to like never disintegrate, you know that, I mean, that’s, so they’re called forever chemicals. Well, the problem is a lot of these chemicals cause horrific cancers.

So the firefighters, what do they do? They train, they’re, you know, a lot of times firefighters at the airport, [00:21:00] military bases, and they were just spraying the stuff everywhere. And the initial thought, what they were initially told was, it’s completely safe. It’ll go away.

When the rain hits it, it’ll just. Disappear. Well, unfortunately what’s happened is it’s just seeping into the aquifers and the water bodies all across the country, and also in many other countries as well, and it’s completely contaminated water bodies. So now, and the EPA has been following this.

For years, and there’s a lot of pressure on them to set limits of how much of these chemicals can be in a water body. So recently they did set the limit, and I think it’s one part per trillion. So it’s almost like one little eyedrop in 20 Olympic sized swimming pools can have these forever chemicals.

So now you have. All these water bodies are getting tested by the Department of Defense. Some of the water bodies are testing it [00:22:00] themselves, and now they’re finding out that they cannot, their water bodies are contaminated and they have to now clean them up. So now there’s all these lawsuits against 3M and DuPont because of these forever chemicals.

And my guess is you will eventually hear Forever Chemical. You might, maybe you’ve seen it in the newspaper. What is this? What is this? A Triple F. And it’s really, people do not realize every single person, I am almost confident has these forever. If you test yourself, you’ll find out you have it in yourself, okay?

When it rains, the rainwater, the actual rainwater now has these chemicals. So it’s just a horrific public health threat that, I mean, right now there’s so many major issues, public health, right? We just got over covid or whatever and it just wiped us out. You know? I don’t know how much the population can, I don’t know how much energy the population [00:23:00] has to wrap their brain around the fact that their drinking water is probably not that safe, you know?

So my advice is go out and get really good filters, you know? And. I don’t even know if the water bottled water is safe. I haven’t really looked into that, but that to me is, so number one, there’s a lot of firefighters that have cancer.

Darren: Mm-hmm. \

Greg: Cause of this, when the stuff sprays on them or whether they drink it, the water and that water body, they’re getting it.

So a lot of firefighters are just, they have now accepted the fact. That this is going on. And you know, obviously they’re not happy. So a lot of them are suing for their own injuries. That’s a master. And then you also have the water providers suing 3M and DuPont and to pay to clean up these forever chemicals.

Well, it’s not that easy to pay. It’s not like the sludge from an oil spill. I mean, that’s not easy either, but that is something that can be cleaned up over time. You know, cleaning this stuff up is [00:24:00] really tricky.

Darren: Yeah, that’s a quite scary thing to think about. And I’m pretty familiar with the Forever Chemicals thing.

I did, I watched the movie Dark Waters about the, uh, the Teflon and all of that stuff. Yeah, it’s very crazy stuff. So, I want to before we run out of time here, I wanna shift gears just a little bit. And ask you a little bit more about your experience as a law firm owner and what advice you might have for other attorneys, especially law firm owners like yourself.

So, you know, what are some of the biggest lessons that you’ve learned as a law firm owner that maybe you were not prepared for in law school?

Greg: So, you have to stay nimble. You have to adopt technology. You have to train your employees and make them happy. You have to be able to accept the fact that maybe your bread and butter line of work might not be here in the future.[00:25:00]

If you’re only focused on one thing, you better make sure that that’s gonna survive. When you do make a lot of money on a case or a client, don’t take that money and go out and buy yourself a little luxury yacht. It’s so sad. I see so many of my friends, like, they were, oh yeah, oh my God, I gotta get a contender, a commod, or whatever, and they’re like, Hey, I made it $200,000.

And I’m like, all right. You know, a year later I’m like, why are you outta money? Well, you know, I bought a boat and I didn’t realize how much money it was. It was going to cost me to fix it up and store it and dock or whatever. And I’m like, dude, you know, So you gotta take, you gotta be smart financially.

Also, a lot of lawyers just, they’re like, Hey, I’m a lawyer. That’s what I do. I study the law. I do the law. Well, if you have a law firm or you’re on your own, you gotta like, you gotta realize that you gotta spend money to make money. Invest in yourself, invest in your employees. Don’t be foolish and shortsighted and take the money run.

You put a lot of pressure on yourself when you’re. [00:26:00] Out of money and you’re like hoping that another case settles down the road and then you start forcing the client to take less money because you’re desperate. So I think that artificial intelligence is becoming a major issue and I think people, law firm owners or people that are out on their own have gotta grasp that reality, wherever that goes, I mean, that might eliminate jobs. It might create jobs, it might eliminate, you know, now everybody’s talking about how you know, in the law world, let’s say you, somebody comes in your office and they have this major accident and they got hurt or whatever, and you get the medical records, you do an evaluation and you make a demand.

On the bad actor, and you say, we’re demanding X amount of dollars. Right? So nowadays, it used to be you would write a letter, you’d attach your medical records, you’d say you’d have a doctor evaluate and said, oh, there’s a 10% disability and blah, blah, blah. Right. Nowadays, it’s so much more advanced and people are using artificial intelligence to help them write up their demand packages.[00:27:00]

And so does that eliminate the person at your law firm that’s only doing demands? Well, I mean, maybe they utilize that artificial intelligence to help them generate the demand and then they review it, make fine, tweak, fine, tweak it or whatever. But I mean, that’s just sort of, I see how the artificial intelligence, I don’t know if it’s gonna be disruptive, helpful, it’s gonna create new jobs in the industry or what have you.

But I think if you’re if you are in charge of your law firm, you better get your hands on that one.

Darren: Yeah, you do. And you need to position yourself. In a way that’s valuable to your clients. You know, you have to, you gotta and this is just good business practice. Yeah. You know, you have to prove, you gotta sell yourself.

You gotta sell your value to your clients, to your would-be clients. In the financial world, you know, we’ve been facing the prospect of AI for some time. I mean, now you have robo-advisors and things like that. So you have to differentiate yourself somehow. And part of that is really having [00:28:00] a well-defined niche.

That’s something that you’ve done a really good job of and that’s something that we’ve talked about on this show before. We had Chris Dreyer on, we talked about nicheing and, and the importance there. What’s your take on specialization? Can you speak a little bit about that and marketing perhaps, you know, what are some of your tips for attorneys that are trying to get their name out there and and build their market share?

Greg :I would say five decades ago we weren’t even really allowed to advertise or market. And then somebody made a constitutional challenge, first Amendment, and the Supreme Court said, yes you can, but the states can still regulate it. So it just opened up the opportunity to market and you know, you have to really dig into the marketing aspects and people just don’t want to do it. They don’t realize that there are great opportunities out there to do this kind of marketing and you as an attorney, [00:29:00] If you don’t market, people would go to like clubs, the Kiwanis Club, they’d go to the church, they’d give speeches, you know, and I know like in the financial world, in the old days, you would go to some, like an old age home and talk to them about estate planning or whatever, and that would be the way that you’d get work, you know?

But those days are pretty much gone, you know, so you gotta grasp that reality and a lot of my colleagues have no idea about the marketing opportunities out there. They don’t know, they don’t wanna know because it’s just spending money, in terms of niche, these days I think you have to consider it.

Maybe get a niche. You have to separate yourself from everybody else, which is a hard thing to do when you’re in an industry with so many competitors and so much, I mean, the money that’s being spent on marketing is staggering. So there are some law firms out here and you know, maybe even nationally like Morgan and Morgan, I’m sure everybody’s heard of Morgan and Morgan.

You cannot imagine how [00:30:00] much money they are spending on advertising. How are you gonna compete with Morgan and Morgan? Well, you’re doing the same kinds of stuff that they are. So you’re thinking, well, what could my niche be? It’s hard to niche in the legal space, but you can separate yourself.

You can say, Hey, listen, I’m a small operation. If you go to that big operation, you’re not hiring Morgan and Morgan. John Morgan’s not gonna call you up. You have no idea who that lawyer is. It could be somebody right out off the street or whatever that they’re assigning your case to. Do you know that?

I mean, do you know whether your lawyer actually has ever tried a case? So if everybody’s going to these big names because they’re seeing that. So the niche could not necessarily be a subspecialty, but just separating yourself. So, hey, you hire me. I’m the one that’s going to court for you. I’m the one you’re gonna talk to. So, that’s what makes me different than Morgan and Morgan. I was in a niche, this personal injury [00:31:00] protection world was really a niche and it was a lucrative niche, but it’s now gotten written off. So you gotta be careful if you’re in a niche. That some another gets legislated out or artificial intelligent, eliminate whatever it is.

Then where are you going? So I always say we always have continuing legal education, right? Find good continuing legal education in other areas that you’re not practicing in case you need to, either diversify, which, in the financial world, that’s what you always talk about, right?

So lawyers and law firms that’s the negative side to nicheing is that you’re not diversified. And I’d like to think that if you’re a law firm, you’ve gotta be diversified. If you’re a lawyer, you have to be capable enough, even if you are like, okay, I’m just doing this kind of estate planning and it’s working great, but you better be able to make sure that if that goes away, you can transition.

Maybe you wanna start transitioning now just in case something happens like it did to me, in my view. [00:32:00]

Darren: Yeah. Yeah, that’s great advice. I love that being nimble and being able to adapt. And I love what you said about your niche, it can be, you know, a specific type of work, but also it’s what makes you different and what sets you apart from other people.

And you know, one of the things I often say that sets me apart is it’s my name on the door. You know what I mean? When you work with me, you’re getting me and you’re not. You know, I’m not going anywhere. You’re not gonna call Wurz Financial and, uh, oops. Darren went to work for a different firm.

I’m pretty much gonna be around here. So, yeah, you gotta think about what it is that’s gonna really bring those clients in that that is gonna set you apart from your competitors and everybody else that’s out there. Well, Greg, we’re uh, near the end of our time here. I want to ask you one more question.

We ask all our guests what’s in the future for you? What are your future goals? What is your dream retirement look like? Tell us about that.

Greg: So, I, you know I like the family [00:33:00] consigliere type of mass toward referring cases. To other law firms connecting with them. That’s, I see that sort of as my future this pip part of my world will be dying out.

I think I’m pretty sure within a year or two. So I like to do that as my retirement. I love the podcasting. You know, you get to meet people, fascinating people like yourself, and you learn, and you grow. And so I like that. I’m starting to write some articles on the topics that we talked about.

The Forever Camp Contamination bankruptcy and Mass Torts is now a big thing with the Johnson and Johnson. So I wanna start writing, got a PR person helping me get into some of these bigger name publications. So, that would be my retirement. I wanna be involved. I don’t wanna, you know, I’m a big avid golfer and tennis player, whatever, that’s fine.

But I don’t want to be fully retired, because I don’t think that’s gonna be the best thing for anyone.

Darren: Okay. [00:34:00] Yeah. I love it. And retirement looks different for everybody. Some people it is cutting out work completely. Some people it is being able to work on their own terms, you know? Yeah. So I love that.

That’s awesome. Now, if you would quickly share with our audience how they can find you and learn more about you and your work.

Greg: All right. So you can go to my website, which will help you, with all the connections. And my name is spelled, I’m the original Triple G. The original 3g actually so it’s Gregg, not Gregory, but gregggoldfarrb.com is my website, and I’ll give you the best secret I can give you, my cell phone, (305) 803-6084. Please don’t give the spammer my number. I don’t care how much they pay you. It’s not worth it. You will regret that. You’re very brave, Greg. Well, thank you so much for being on the show, Greg. I want to thank you, the listener, for joining us for this episode.

If you enjoyed [00:35:00] today’s episode, please like, share, subscribe, and give us a five star review on Apple or Spotify. If you wanna learn more about me, please visit the lawyermillionaire.com where you can download your free guide to Retirement Planning for Law Firm owners. Book a free consultation or even order your own copy of my book, the Lawyer Millionaire.

Now, take what you learned today and go make those dreams a reality. I’m your host, Darren Wurz, and I’ll see you next time on The Lawyer Millionaire. Thank you for listening to the Lawyer Millionaire. Click the follow button below to be notified when new episodes become available. This content has been made available for informational and educational purposes only. This content is not intended to represent investing or tax advice. Always seek the advice of a qualified investment or tax advisor with any questions you may have regarding your own financial circumstances.[00:36:00]

Building a Mass Torts Practice with Gregg Goldfarb (Ep. 19)

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