Welcome to episode 61 of The Earley Show, hosted by personal injury attorney Christopher Earley! For this conversation, Chris is joined by Angel Reyes III, founder and president of Angel Reyes & Associates in Dallas.
Angel has been a lawyer for 35 years and has spent 33 of them building a roughly 650-person firm with 46 lawyers and more than 550 jury verdicts in Texas. He got there doing the opposite of what most firms do: narrowing to one case type, shutting off every TV ad, billboard and bus wrap he had spent two decades buying, and refusing to spend a dollar he can't measure. He and Chris walk the whole arc — the 1994 policy-limits fee he put into Univision instead of a new car, the meeting where he told a dozen lawyers the firm would never touch another mass tort, the 2019 decision to go fully digital that produced a 5x increase in case count, and the machinery holding it together: Litify, nearshore teams, always-on Zoom rooms, the Wonderlic, and a training academy that never stops running.
00:00 Intro
00:52 35 years a lawyer, 33 in business
03:13 Michigan Law, Wall Street, and the move to Dallas
09:13 The firm today: ~650 people, 425 nearshore
10:32 The 1994 case and the $50,000 Univision bet
11:45 Cutting everything that wasn't car wrecks
16:26 The only three jobs of a CEO
24:10 "We are never doing another mass tort"
26:52 Hiring the person, not the resume
28:04 Why every hire takes the Wonderlic
30:29 Killing broadcast media for Google
33:01 The hockey stick: 5x the case count
33:37 "If you can't measure it, don't spend it"
35:04 Leaving Needles for Litify and Salesforce
42:51 ActivTrak, RTO and the nearshore decision
46:03 "An overpaid watcher of watchers"
48:10 How to reach Angel
About our guest
Angel L. Reyes III is the founder and president of Angel Reyes & Associates in Dallas, Texas. Born in Hawaii to a Puerto Rican family and raised on the island until age 11, he finished high school and college in Kansas City before attending the University of Michigan Law School. He started his career in corporate securities and finance at a Wall Street firm, moved to Texas in the early 1990s, and opened his own firm about five months later. Today the firm handles auto and truck cases exclusively, employs roughly 650 people including 46 lawyers, and has secured more than 550 jury verdicts in Texas.
Connect with Angel
Website: reyeslaw.com
Email: angel@reyeslaw.com
Topics covered
Growing up between Puerto Rico, Hawaii and Kansas City — and how speaking Spanish shaped the firm
Michigan Law, Wall Street big law, and the accidental move to Texas
The 1994 policy-limits case and the $50,000 Univision buy that followed
Building around a market nobody else was serving in 1990s Dallas
Why the firm dropped mass torts, work comp and premises to focus only on auto and truck
The three criteria that make a case worth taking: fault, coverage, and a willing client
Case cost financing, phantom income tax, and keeping case costs in a separate account
Hiring: interviewing the person instead of the resume, and why every hire takes the Wonderlic
Why 2018-2019 was the right moment to kill broadcast media and go fully digital
Competitor keyword bidding and where the Fifth and Ninth Circuits landed
Attribution: unique numbers per ad since the 90s, and the 2021 test that proved TV wasn't lifting
Migrating off Needles to Litify on Salesforce — and what that unlocked in measurement
The nearshore decision: service, not savings
Always-on Zoom rooms, ActivTrak, Power BI and "watching the watchers"
Training as a permanent operating discipline, not an onboarding step
The only three jobs of a CEO: vision, talent, and paying the bills
People and resources mentioned
Angel Reyes & Associates, Dallas, TX — reyeslaw.com
Glen Lerner — Lerner and Rowe; Ninth Circuit keyword-bidding litigation
Mike Morse — Fireproof
Gino Wickman — Traction / EOS
Michael Gerber — The E-Myth
Univision — the network behind the firm's first big media buy
Litify — case management platform built on Salesforce
Needles — the legacy system the firm migrated off in 2019
RingCentral and Invoca — telephony and call tracking
Power BI — productivity and activity reporting
ActivTrak — workforce activity monitoring, adopted in 2020
Wonderlic — the 50-question, 12-minute test the firm gives every hire
practicetipoftheday.com — Chris's free weekly email list for lawyers
Learn more about Chris' practice, the Earley Law Group, here: https://www.chrisearley.com/
Check out Chris' book "Scaling The Wall" here: https://tinyurl.com/mrxxyv5n
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