Scaling a Business Without Living Like a Firefighter

Introduction and Jenn Gore’s Background

Jenn: A small law firm felt like zero diversified risk. I was constantly putting all my eggs in one basket, and then that basket would implode. I’d have to work all weekend and not see my kids, and I’d ask myself, why am I doing this to myself? Well, the business was too small. Everything I did was about making the business as stable as I could: stable revenue, stable intake, stable marketing. Contingency businesses can be feast or famine. They can be a roller coaster from hell. And if you don’t know how to stabilize every department, your life is basically that of a firefighter.

Harry: Welcome to the Harry Handles It podcast. Today we have the awesome Jenn Gore, who built and led Atlanta Personal Injury Law Group, one of Atlanta’s most prominent personal injury law firms. Jenn, welcome.

Jenn: Thanks for having me.

Harry: Of course. I’m very excited about this conversation. Let’s talk about scaling the business, your origin story, and what gave you the drive to build what you did.

Jenn: Oh man, that’s a loaded question. I started my firm in 2013, the same day I passed the bar and got my license. During law school, I worked at a law firm during the day and went to law school at night, so I already had experience as a paralegal and a case manager. That gave me the confidence to start the firm right away. I really encourage law students to work during law school. You learn so much more inside a firm.

I also had a two-month-old baby at the time. I took the bar nine months pregnant, had the baby, and started the law firm, all at about the same time. It was a very crazy time.

Harry: That’s wild. What a life transition.

Bar Exam Obstacles, Starting with $2,000, and Early Referral Partnerships

Jenn: I’m leaving out a detail. I graduated law school in July 2012, took the bar immediately, and failed it the first time, in October, by one point. I was three months pregnant with my first child and didn’t realize it until the night before the exam. I’d been feeling so sick and just thought it was from studying. I was devastated when I failed, and then I had to take it again nine months pregnant. That’s the backstory. When I started my firm, I felt like I had to hit the ground running, because I’d expected to start it six months earlier.

Harry: People who look successful usually went through some really rough times to get there.

Jenn: Always.

Harry: Isn’t that the prerequisite to growth? There has to be something painful you have to overcome to build something better.

Jenn: Yes. So I started the firm with a two-month-old, in my tiny house in the Atlanta area. I had almost nothing. I started the firm with $2,000 and a lot of hustle. I used to go door to door to chiropractors’ offices and offer to come sign clients up right in their lobby.

Harry: Concierge-level personal injury. That’s awesome.

Jenn: It slowly took off. I had a little whiteboard where I’d write my goal, like 30 clients or 60 clients, and every day I’d add one more client. I was so grateful just to have one. I wasn’t making much money, but coming out of law school, any money felt great. Humble beginnings.

Then I started working with a criminal law firm in Atlanta that had taken on a lot of personal injury cases. They said, “Jenn, we signed up 50 personal injury cases and don’t know what to do with them. If you’ll settle them, we’ll split the fees with you.”

Harry: Nice.

Jenn: That relationship really catapulted me. It was a cash infusion. Many of those cases were already positioned to settle, and normally when you start a contingency firm, there’s a long lead-up to cash flow. But I also got curious about how they got all those cases when I was out there hustling for every one. So I started building relationships with the people sending them cases, and I figured out who the key referral partners were. I built the firm from there.

We scaled to over 40 people and just under $10 million, and we were named one of the fastest-growing companies in America three years in a row. I was winning a lot of awards and speaking on stages around the country. I was in a lot of coaching programs, including almost every personal injury mastermind in the country. I’d say there are about seven that are really incredible. And I asked a lot of people to help me and be my mentor.

Harry: That’s the best grassroots story I’ve heard in a long time. Hit the ground running, hit the chiropractors’ offices, hit the masterminds. It’s like how kids tug on your shirt: “Mommy, mommy, get me something.” It’s relentless, and I see that in your story.

Securing Mentorship and Why Scaling Solves Core Business Vulnerabilities

Jenn: I remember being on a webinar in 2020, and Mike Morse was presenting his book. I thought, “Eureka, he’s going to be my next coach.” At the time, he wasn’t coaching anyone. There was no Fireproof program; it was just a book. So I messaged him: “You’re going to be my coach. I need you.” Within an hour he was on the phone with me, saying, “This isn’t really a coaching program. I wrote a book, but I’ll help you if I can.” Next thing you know, he’s flying to Atlanta to help me with my firm.

I really think people underestimate asking for what they need. Ask and you shall receive. Who do you want as your mentor? Go ask them. Now I have people come up to me all the time and ask me to mentor them.

Harry: That’s incredible, and what an awesome position to be in, giving that mentorship back to the next generation. When did you first get serious about scaling? Was it after the relationship with that criminal defense firm, when the cash infusion came in? And how did you handle the pain points of scaling from one person to 40?

Jenn: At the time, I didn’t realize I was “scaling.” I was just solving business problems. Picture standing in my office the day someone key quits. We’ve all been there. I thought, “I never want to deal with this again. Why am I always short-staffed?” There’s natural turnover in any business. If you have one associate and they quit, your life is hell. Everyone who has hired an associate knows that day. You’re left in a lurch. But I can tell you from experience that when one associate quits and you have eight, it’s not a big deal.

Harry: It’s a blessing to be in that position versus having just one.

Jenn: I told myself I’d never be in that position again and that I’d build my way out of it. A small law firm felt like zero diversified risk. If you think like an investor, I was constantly putting all my eggs in one basket, and then that basket would implode. I’d be working all weekend, not seeing my kids, asking myself why I was doing this. The answer was that the business was too small. So I thought, okay, I’ll have three associates. Not eight yet, but how do I make sure I never experience this pain again? That’s really how I got where I am. I kept running into problems and saying, “As God is my witness, I will never deal with this again.”

Harry: I think you might be selling yourself short. It also takes the foresight to see the problem, the ability to act on it, and the ability to get out of your own way.

Jenn: I do think I have a business mind. I see a business as a puzzle and how to put it together. But all of it was about making the business as stable as possible: stable revenue, stable intake, stable marketing. Contingency businesses can be feast or famine, a roller coaster from hell. If you don’t know how to stabilize every department, your life is basically that of a firefighter.

Harry: That’s a tough place to be as a business owner and as the lawyer running the firm. Your nights and weekends are gone.

The 2020 LSA Lead Surge and Navigating Contingency Cash Flow

Harry: Almost everyone in this space eventually considers an advertising boost. How do I get more cases? One thing I’ve found, as someone who manages the firm’s capital, is that wanting more cases doesn’t mean you should have them right now. Maybe intake is broken, or maybe you don’t have the systems to treat and service those cases once they’re signed. Did you run into any of those problems?

Jenn: Years ago at a mastermind, one of my mentors said, “I have a magic pill. Whoever takes it gets 500 cases. Who wants it?” We all wanted it. Then he said, “Think through what would happen if you got 500 cases right now. Where would they go? Who would service them? Who would take all the intake calls?”

That actually happened to me in 2020. Funny enough, my business boomed that year. I went from signing 20 cases a month to 99 in a single month.

Harry: Wow.

Jenn: It was the launch of Google Local Services Ads (LSAs) in Atlanta. During COVID, I was working around the clock. Fortunately, we were already paperless and remote, because I had a baby in January 2020 and spent all of 2019 systematizing the firm so I could work from home. Very serendipitous. When COVID hit, we went fully remote immediately.

A friend in California told me about LSAs, so I applied. Then I got notified that my firm was one of three firms in Atlanta selected to be verified. We had an intake team of two, and it felt like we were getting 500 calls an hour. That’s an exaggeration, but the floodgates opened from Google and you had to catch every call. We were signing wrongful death cases, and that really springboarded the firm. Everyone assumed there were no cases during COVID, but there were. I had just never experienced being first on Google.

And do you know what happened that season? Pretty much everyone in the firm quit.

Harry: Wow.

Jenn: Everyone quit. Our whole case factory blew up, and we lost a lot of those cases. Even while we were signing 99, clients were firing us. If you don’t have the systems to onboard double the volume, going after a massive number of new cases is really just burning money. If you can’t keep them, work them up, and retain them, it doesn’t help. You have to be strategic about growth. Every once in a while a huge opportunity comes along, and I’d do it all again because we learned so much. But it was really stressful and it wasn’t sustainable. You need sustainable growth.

Harry: Fundamentally, I’d say running a business or a law firm, at the highest level, is managing processes, people, and resources. Do you agree?

Jenn: That’s a good simplification of very high-level concepts, but each one has a lot of complexity. Here’s how I describe contingency: we live today on yesterday’s dollars. Our revenue right now is usually based on what we did 18 months ago. When you’re in high-growth mode, you need to reinvest profit, and with contingency there’s a big cash lag. You might be making great decisions if you were living on the business being onboarded through intake today, but you’re really living on yesterday’s revenue. That can put you in a cash crunch even while doing completely normal things to grow. Contingency cash flow and growth together can be very challenging to navigate.

Harry: I don’t know anyone running a contingency practice who hasn’t felt that pain. Either you learn the lesson early, you never learn it, or the cycle keeps repeating. It’s one of the most complex parts of managing resources: deciding on future growth using yesterday’s dollars. What would you tell a firm in that decision mode right now, with some excess on their P&L?

Jenn: I always want the most information and data. That gave me more control and the ability to drive the business. As we onboarded new business, we built cash flow projections. We knew our average fee in litigation and pre-litigation, and using the Fireproof method and the [name unclear in audio] method, we built formulas and projections. If we signed 50 cases this month, we estimated the revenue they’d bring in and, based on our data, which months it would arrive.

One-offs and outliers aren’t in that model, but for bread-and-butter cases, I knew our projected revenue for August, September, and October of the next year. When your data is good, the model is pretty much spot on. It told us how much money was in our pipeline. With a very large caveat: money in your pipeline is not money collected.

Harry: 100%.

Jenn: That also helped me figure out staffing capacity. In personal injury, you can hit a cash crunch because you’re understaffed, which is very counterintuitive. A PI revenue pipeline is like a pipeline of gold, but it has to be mined. If you don’t have enough people pushing cases through litigation or working them up in pre-lit, you end up with a revenue problem. And in the moment you have a revenue problem, hiring feels like the wrong move.

Harry: That’s where data points like average case value come in handy. If you’re in a cash crunch and your average case fees are dropping, you need to invest in people to bring the average fee and the pipeline back up. But when you’re having cash issues, hiring is the last thing you want to do.

Jenn: It may be painful, but it might be the right decision. That’s the challenge of personal injury. It can play mind games with you. You need enough data and sophisticated advisors on the CFO and bookkeeping side, because it’s easy to see things emotionally and miss what the data is telling you.

Harry: You can’t be emotional about the state of the union at any given moment. Look at the data, make decisions, and the ship will move in the direction you steer it, as long as you’re making reasonably good decisions.

Managing Attorney Production and Building a Sellable Asset

Jenn: Something else I saw over many years, in my own firm, after I sold it, and while I was at Sweet James, is that money in the pipeline does not equal revenue. You have to tightly manage your attorneys, especially pre-lit attorneys, to hit their monthly, quarterly, and annual revenue goals. I coach firms all over the country, and I’ve very rarely seen a firm where people are hired and just naturally hit their goals. It takes a lot of management to get people to produce and stay on time. I ultimately had a managing attorney, and you have to stay on top of production. It’s a fantasy to think you’ll hire a bunch of people and they’ll consistently hit their goals.

Harry: Without any direction or management. One problem I’ve had to deal with is that a good month doesn’t mean the next month is handled. You have to put your boots back on and get to work, again and again. It never ends. I had to reframe it for myself: a good year or a good quarter just means you get to do it again next time.

Jenn: Personal injury is relentless. Now I own a consulting business with recurring clients and recurring revenue, and it’s a walk in the park compared to having to get new clients every single month. In PI, you have to hit your intake goals, your demand goals, and your litigation goals every month. There’s no set-it-and-forget-it.

Harry: I think that’s true of all contingency work. Let me ask you this: when did you start thinking about monetizing equity? That never really came up in conversation until recently.

Jenn: In 2016, I went to my first business coaching event, and the first page of the workbook said, “One day you will sell your firm.” I honestly forgot about it until I was packing up my office after I sold, and I found that workbook.

Harry: That’s cool.

Jenn: Life is funny like that. But in the back of my mind, I always believed you should build something you could sell. I see myself as a business person first, because of my upbringing; my parents owned their own business. Life happens, people get sick, and there are many reasons you might need to sell. In 2017, I changed the firm’s name from The Gore Law Firm to Atlanta Personal Injury Law Group.

Harry: Nice.

Jenn: A trade name made more sense and gave a different vibe. On some subconscious level, I was always building the firm as a sellable asset, especially after that workshop and with mentors telling me to. But when someone approached me about buying my firm, I wasn’t trying to sell. I was at an event, and someone came up and said a buyer was interested. I was confused. I didn’t even know people were out there buying firms at that time.

Harry: Yeah.

Jenn: But I took it seriously and did my due diligence. I’d already started my consulting business and had been coaching law firms since 2023. I was approached in late 2024, and from coaching all those firms, I realized I enjoyed consulting more than running my own firm. That’s very confronting. I had a successful business, I was winning tons of awards, people wanted to buy my company, and life was comfortable. But I had a feeling that I was coming to the end of the chapter of owning this firm. What would that look like? What if there’s a whole other life? I already know I can build businesses. What if I put my energy into a different one?

Harry: Once you have business skills, you can build anything.

Jenn: Exactly. I was offered a partnership at the acquiring firm, and I thought I could learn a lot, since it was one of the largest law firms in the country. My whole life, I’ve chosen experiences where I could learn. Just continuing to own my firm and doing what I’d been doing was losing its effect. I could become a partner in a much larger firm, see inside a really big operation, and keep growing my consulting business. I’m always evolving, and staying with the firm just wasn’t going to be my next chapter.

Small Firms vs. Mega Firms, AI Adoption, and CEO Dashboard Metrics

Harry: What was that experience like? Did you get the insights you were hoping for, going from your own practice to the larger firm?

Jenn: One really interesting lesson is that large firms often have the opposite problems of small firms. Things that work in a small firm can go horribly wrong in a large one. Here’s one example. In my firm, I always erred on the side of signing people. Most firms do: if it’s a decent, viable case, sign it. But if you’re signing thousands of cases a month and take that same approach, what happens?

Harry: It becomes a big liability. You can’t get to them, or there’s a statute issue.

Jenn: In my experience, if I was signing 150 cases a month and had to let go of five, it wasn’t a big deal. Those five people might not be happy that we took their case and then had to offboard them, but that was it. If you’re signing thousands and have to offboard 500 a month, imagine 500 angry people writing bad Google reviews. What worked really well in a small firm, you literally can’t do at that scale. And that’s just one example.

Harry: That’s a good point. Things we did when we were 10 or 15 people don’t work the same way at 100-plus. And what we do now, we never would have done back then, because it’s a different playing field. The production line looks different and you have different tools. Have you implemented AI on either side, in your practice or at Sweet James while you were a partner?

Jenn: I’ve been involved in AI for a long time. I was one of the first clients of EvenUp, and I was the very first client of Eve.

Harry: Nice. The first one.

Jenn: I met the Eve team when they were focused on employment law. I told them I thought it could work for PI, but they didn’t have a product for it yet. So they built the product around my firm, and I worked with their engineering team for months to design the first version. I’m still deeply involved and helping develop some of their products now.

There’s been a lot of learning about how to get law firms to actually adopt AI. I use the example of the first dishwasher. Once you have a dishwasher, you can lie on the couch while the dishes wash, with no increase in output. Or you can use that time to do the laundry. Having AI tools doesn’t necessarily mean we’re seeing added production in the firm. At first, a lot of people used these tools to become lazy and complacent.

Harry: I can see that, especially in the billable model. I recently read a Wall Street Journal article saying big banks are asking big firms to show how they’re using AI to lower legal bills. Medical records review, trial prep, a simple chronology: what used to take hours now takes seconds. If you don’t put that saved time into moving your other matters forward, it becomes a problem. People will blame AI, saying they made the investment but got nothing back except free time.

Jenn: At the end of the day, people are still figuring out how to adopt AI. In fact, Eve and my company are hosting a conference in Atlanta in September to show firms how to power-use these products. I still see a lot of people with software they don’t use to full capacity. Even CRM systems: many firms use 5 to 20% of their CRM instead of 90%. My theory is to go all in on a couple of tools and build them out to maximum capacity. Even if you have to hire consultants or experts to help you build them out, you’ll get 10x out of them compared to trying to do it on your own.

Harry: I couldn’t agree more. When we moved from our old CRM to Litify, the process was painful. Even now, I’m happy with where it is, but I guarantee we’ve only scratched the surface. I’d bet we’re under 20% utilization. It’s like owning a Ferrari and not being able to drive it well because you never had driver training.

Jenn: Yes. Litify is a beast, and it’s great software with great reporting, but most people aren’t getting the full benefit.

Harry: And if you don’t know how the systems interact or how the automations work together, you get disconnects and frustration. Having experts guide you through it is really helpful. That’s great advice, and there are plenty of consultants who do exactly that.

Jenn, can you tell us about your coaching business, what it offers our viewers, and how they can get in touch? This was an awesome conversation, and I look forward to seeing you at one of these masterminds.

Jenn: My company is Evergreen. You can find us online at evergreenbizcoaching.com, with “biz” short for business. You can find me on LinkedIn as Jenn Gore and on Instagram at @jenngorelawyer. I’m pretty much everywhere. I also have a show called The Jenn Gore Show that follows me to legal conferences around the country. My email is jennifer@evergreenbizcoaching.com.

I help people look at their business as a business. One thing I do with many of the firms we help is get them to see their firm in a snapshot. As the CEO, can you sit down at your desk and, on any day of the month, instantly see leads, qualified leads, and signups and know whether you’re on or off track? Production numbers, demands, and litigation numbers: on or off track? Financials and settlements: on or off track? It sounds simple, but about 80% of the firms I meet around the country have no idea what’s happening in their business day to day. That means they can’t drive results or scale predictably.

Harry: 100%. Awesome, Jenn. That’s the work.

Jenn: And it’s really fun. It’s also like therapy for entrepreneurs, because running a company is lonely and you can’t have many of these conversations with your staff. You need someone outside your situation to look at it and say, “This is where you’re stuck.”

Harry: Jenn, this was a great conversation. Thank you for being on, and see you soon.

Jenn: Thanks for having me. Bye.