206: TGR Live! 2026: Four Ways to Make Millions More from Your Cases with Steve Gursten, Trial Lawyer

206: TGR Live! 2026: Four Ways to Make Millions More from Your Cases with Steve Gursten, Trial Lawyer

In this keynote presentation from TGR Live 2026 - Growth Strategies for Law Firms trial lawyer Steve Gursten shares Four Ways to Make Millions More from Your Cases. Steve explains how lawyers should itemize injuries for adjusters but present their cumulative impact to juries, and why chronic pain, fatigue, sleep disruption, and cognitive effects must be framed together. He also shows how lay witnesses, universal values, work evaluations, medical testing, AI review, and wearable sleep data can strengthen credibility and prove economic loss. For firms competing in an increasingly crowded market, selective trial strategy and consistently stronger results can create referrals, differentiation, and sustainable growth.

Key Topics

01:13 – How Steve turned final offers ranging from zero to $30,000 into verdicts between $1 million and $15 million by reframing undervalued cases around permanent disability.

03:33 – Why lawyer referrals, internet marketing, and a reputation for superior results helped Steve grow his firm organically from four to twenty-six lawyers.

08:27 – The three-part case-value framework: try big and settle small, present the combined effects of impairment, and make the client worthy of a substantial verdict.

10:52 – How a credible trial reputation can increase an insurer’s settlement authority and why demand packages should make injuries easy for claims software to evaluate.

14:42 – Why traditional explanations of pain are outdated and how chronic pain can cause structural, chemical, and functional changes in the brain.

18:50 – How to combine physical injuries, cognitive limitations, emotional effects, sleep disruption, and fatigue into a persuasive total-disability narrative.

23:31 – The objective tools available for proving brain injury and when chronic pain may provide a more credible explanation for an acquired brain injury.

28:58 – How universal values, consistent recovery efforts, and testimony from employers and other lay witnesses can make clients more likable and credible.

34:29 – Why fatigue may be a client’s most disabling condition and how work evaluations, medical testing, AI review, and sleep data can establish future economic loss.

40:54 – Jay connects Steve’s trial framework to brand building, referrals, search visibility, and the importance of making stronger results a law firm priority.

Resources Mentioned

Technology


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About our Guest:

Steven Gursten is widely recognized as one of Michigan’s leading trial attorneys. He has been ranked among the state’s Top 50 lawyers by Super Lawyers and named a Michigan Lawyer of the Year. He currently serves as President of the AAJ Distracted Driving Litigation Group and the Belli Society, and has previously led several national litigation organizations focused on traumatic brain injury, truck accidents, and motor vehicle cases.

A nationally sought-after speaker and educator, Steve regularly presents on trial advocacy, brain injury, truck accident litigation, and maximizing auto accident settlements. He has also received two JD Supra Readers’ Choice Awards for his writing on Michigan auto No-Fault and insurance litigation. His record-setting results include the largest auto and truck accident settlement in Michigan history, along with multiple top verdicts and settlements reported by Michigan Lawyers Weekly and Verdict Reporter.

About Jay Berkowitz:

Jay Berkowitz is a best-selling author and popular keynote speaker. Mr. Berkowitz managed marketing departments at: Coca-Cola, Sprint and McDonald's Restaurants, and he is the Founder and CEO of Ten Golden Rules, a digital marketing agency specialized in working with attorneys.

Mr. Berkowitz is the author of Advanced Internet Marketing for Law Firms, The Ten Golden Rules of Online Marketing and 10 Free Internet Marketing Strategies that went to #1 on Amazon. He is the host of the Ten Golden Rules of Internet Marketing Webinar and Podcast. He has been profiled by the Wall Street Journal, The Business Journals and FOX Business TV.

Mr. Berkowitz was selected for membership as a TITAN for Elite Digital Marketing Agencies, he is the recipient of a SOFIE Award for Most Effective use of Emerging Media, and a Special BERNAY’s Award.

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Steve Gursten:

It's not just the physical injury, but how that physical injury now is causing cognitive effects such as memory, concentration, attention, and then the emotional sequelae that comes with that, and always pervasive, the disruption in sleep, impaired sleep, and constant fatigue that makes them unable to hold a 40-hour-a-week job. So, again, the exact opposite of what you're doing when you're selling with adjusters pre-suit. It's not you're not trying to drill down. You're trying to chunk up. It's the cumulative impact of all these injuries and the effect it has on your client that makes these injuries so disabling.

Speaker:

Welcome to the 10 Golden Rules of Internet Marketing for Law Firms podcast, featuring the latest strategies and techniques to drive traffic to your website and convert that traffic into clients. Now, here's the founder and CEO of 10 Golden Rules, Jay Berkowitz.

Steve Gursten:

So I have a goal for this talk, and it's to help you really to maximize your settlement values on cases that the insurance companies right now are undervaluing. So I'm not one of those lawyers that's going to come and talk to you about $20 million cases. I want to talk with you about the cases where you're getting 2030, $40,000 offers on, and and really how to just blow those up and explode the value and turn those into potentially million-dollar cases, and really take it from what the insurance company is looking at to really total and permanent disability. And does it work? We've been very fortunate. We've now had 14 separate jury verdicts, where the final offer before verdict was between zero and $30,000, and the verdicts have all been between 1 million to 15 million. So it works, and I will be teaching you some of the things we've been doing. I realize TGR is a marketing conference, so some of you are going to be looking at me strange, like why are you talking

Steve Gursten:

about maximizing damages? This is marketing, and it's really important. Everybody realizes that. My law firm, we started as four lawyers. I have now just hired my 26. God help me! I did that without any TV, any billboards, any bus wraps, all the traditional forms of advertising, and really, with the exception of very recently working with Gary Sarnar and doing radio, which really, by the way, had more to do with winning the AIO results wars, as Jay was talking about the importance of brand and how AI results seem to be overweighting established brands, that really had much more to do with it than trying to just do top of funnel Brand marketing-it's gone very, very well, and I'm very thankful to Gary. But advertising and this whole brand thing is new to me. My growth from four to 26 lawyers really has been organic. It's been from lawyer referrals, and it's been from internet marketing, where I was I was an early adapter, and it really changed my world. But the message I'm trying

Steve Gursten:

to get across to you at this marketing seminar is that you going home and establishing your law firm as being one of the go-to law firms in your area of law-that is marketing. So, as always, the great bard said it best: "Good wine needs no bush. So, what does that mean? In the time of Shakespeare inns, that that sold wine would put bushes above their door, and that would signify to passersby and locals that they sold wine and ale. But even back in Shakespeare's time, the inns that sold better wine than all the other inns didn't have to put bushes above their door because people would come to them, because they knew that was an inn that had better wine. The inn that sells better wine than all the other inns is marketing. People go to them. The law firm that is known to maximize. Results that is known to guarantee referral fees, that is known to get more money than other law firms. That is marketing, and it's a lot better when people are coming to you than you trying to do what

Steve Gursten:

everybody else out there is trying to do right, you know. Just just a quick aside, but I was at a marketing conference in October. A couple of you were there. They had eight lawyers. They were talking about branding. Eight. One guy was talking about for 30 minutes giving T-shirts away at wrestling events. We had someone for 30 minutes talk about billboards. She really liked her billboards. We sat there for 30 minutes. We looked at pictures of her on her billboards. There was a person spoke about Facebook groups. There's a person that spoke about phone numbers. And listen, that's all really, really important. That's all great. I'm not taking anything away from that, but I just need you to understand what they're doing, right? So we're in a profession where everybody is trying to get attention. You know, look at me, look at me, and they're just trying to draw attention to themselves a little bit louder than what everybody else is doing.

Steve Gursten:

And I don't know, in the world that we coming to us, where we have safety technology changes that are coming, such as automatic emergency braking with cars, that will be mandatory in 2029, that will absolutely reduce the number of car crashes. So you will have a shrinking pool at the exact same time that you now have ABS law firms and MSOs, and they're being super fueled by hedge fund money and private equity, and we're going to be in this insane world where you're going to have more money than ever before, chasing fewer cases than ever before, and I just don't know if giving away T-shirts at wrestling events, if that's going to be the winning strategy. What I do know is that if you can establish yourself as the go-to law firm in your area of law, in your city, in your state, and people are coming to you, your chances of doing well strategically, as a strategic matter, probably are pretty good. And the other thing is just think about the bottom line, because if you are known as a

Steve Gursten:

trial firm that maximizes results, is there anything that could increase your bottom line, than adding a 20% premium to your settlements across the board. My friend Brooke is here. You know what they call the money that you don't spend on marketing? Profit, profit, exactly. So it's a lot better when people are coming to you than trying to be louder than everybody else in an oversaturated field where everyone else is trying to get the same attention. So let's do this, shall we? So, all right. There's three areas I want to cover to begin with. Look at it as a three-part recipe. Okay. So the first part is try big, settle small. Try big, settle small. Chunk up for trial, itemize down for settlement with the adjusters. Part two is we're going to be talking about rethinking how we explain pain and fatigue and impairment and disability, and getting these cases to total and permanent disability that the insurance companies are putting $40,000 on. And part three, which is always critical,

Steve Gursten:

is trying to make your client worthy of a very substantial verdict. How to make them likable, credible, and worthy, so the jury wants to help them. So let's have fun. Let's start. All right, try big, settle small. For those of you that do personal injury, that do that do personal auto line type cases, there are now over 90 insurance companies out there today that use some forms of auto claims software. Most use a version of Colossus. State Farm uses Exactimate, but what you need to understand is what the insurance companies did. What McKinsey figured out in 1992 is taking the adjuster out of the equation, so they basically had no discretion anymore and no judgment, they basically input the injuries into the computer, and the claim software gives them a range, a settlement range in which they only have authority to settle that case within. That is our world today, and the reality is there's not a whole. Heck of a lot you can do to change that. Okay, there's really not. I mean,

Steve Gursten:

there's there's little tactical things you can do. Okay, so for example, if you have a neck injury, if you could show and then break it down that it's it's neck pain plus radiculopathy into the extremity, that is actually worth more money than just neck injury alone, and there are some really good speakers out there. Mike Schaefer in Kentucky gives a two-day talk about this. Jim Mathis gives a talk about this. There's a bunch of little things you can do that can optimize the demands that you're sending out to settle with insurance companies. But for the most part, for the most part, it's all within that range.

Steve Gursten:

So there is one thing, though, that could actually increase the value of these demands by up to four times more, and that is if they can say if they can input into the computer that you are known as a trial firm that will take these cases to trial, and if they do that, and I know this firsthand from bad faith litigation with some of these insurance companies where we've had excess verdicts, they actually can increase their authority to settle these cases by up to four times more than law firms that do not try cases, and I've tried this as an experiment. So I've I've literally had lawyers in Michigan that are retiring, and they ask me to to look at their auto cases and take them over, and I will literally just change a couple things on their demand package, put it on my letterhead, put my name on it, and I'm getting two or three times more than what they were getting, but it's just because they never tried a case for 20 years. So being known as a legitimate trial threat is absolutely

Steve Gursten:

critical. So that's on the adjuster level. For juries for trial, you want to do the exact opposite. Okay. So for the adjuster, what I'm saying is, you want to itemize down. You want to make it an A to Z. You want to make it as specific and easy for that adjuster as possible to input the injuries into the claim software, so you can literally feed it to them, so they can give you the biggest settlement back. Juries don't work that way. Juries, it's the opposite. You want to chunk up. You want to make it bigger than it is, and I'm going to show you exactly how to do that. But there are two things you need to know first. The first is is that medicine right now is badly broken and it doesn't serve our clients. So this is a fantastic book by Michael Porter. This has been around for 30 years. What it basically talks about is this: medicine today is so broken because it's specialized and then subspecialized and then sub subspecialized, and every doctor is only looking at their very

Steve Gursten:

very narrow field of expertise, and they're not looking at the total impact that these injuries are having on their clients, and in many cases, you get these absurd results where they're not even looking at other injuries that they've been trained in medical school for years to evaluate. So I'll give you an example: If you guys have neurosurgeons and they're spine surgeons, neurosurgeons that do spine surgery, do they ever do an evaluation for TBI. No. If you have a client that has traumatic headaches from a car crash, and let's assume that after eight months to a year, the primary doctor actually makes the referral because they're in an HMO to a neurologist. So eight months to a year later, they finally get in. That neurologist, if they see 30 patients in a day, I'm going to say 29 probably are MS patients or seizure disorders. They are not evaluating people for brain injury. So your client is maybe one person they're seeing for traumatic headaches, and they're not doing. I

Steve Gursten:

mean, they'll do a gross neurological examination. They'll do a mini mental status test, but you could have a mild to moderate brain injury and have a completely normal gross neurological examination. So they're not evaluating for these things. And then the problem is when you get into litigation, a skilled defense lawyer will look at these and say the absence of these diagnoses from the neurosurgeon or the neurologist is proof that your client really isn't injured. So that's one. It's just understand that medicine is broken. And the second thing is this, and this is going to blow you away. But everything we think we know about pain today is completely broken. It's wrong, and it's this guy's fault. So this is-I'm not making this up. In 1664, they did not have fMRI. In 1664, in 1664, Rene Descartes did a. Drawing, and that became the basis of our dualistic model of pain. That has been basically. I mean, think about your last 20 doctor depositions that you've taken. They talk

Steve Gursten:

about how there's a pain in the body, and then it's perceived in the brain. That's how doctors still talk today.

Steve Gursten:

It's still from Descartes, from 1664, and it is totally, completely wrong. That is not how medicine works. That is not how pain works in the body. Let me go back for a second. Dr. Sean Mackey is literally the world's most preeminent authority on pain. He is the world's leading expert on pain. He's also from Pennsylvania, so I don't really know why he said bollocks there, but that's what he said. So, so, but this is Dr. Mackey in Time Magazine over 25 years ago, and this is so critical. And I I know you probably can't read this, but what he's talking about is this: when your body has what the DSM calls pain that is chronic, and chronic is defined in the DSM as over six months, that is actually causing structural, chemical, organic changes in people's brains. Dr. Mackey talks about a literal rewiring of the brain and central nervous system. In other words, long-term exposure to pain actually is causing its own organic, physical, structural damage to your client's brains. There's

Steve Gursten:

probably about 100 peer-reviewed journal articles on this. I happen to like this one because it was authored by Nathan Zasler. For those of you who know Dr. Zasler, Jeff is shaking his head. I've cross-examined him a few times because he used to fly around the country as the big defense expert, as well as being a great plaintiff, TBI expert as well. Tough as nails, a really tough doctor. But what this journal article talks about, and the 100 just like this, is that there's a mind-body connection. Okay, this is really important. So we've always understood that what happens to our minds affects our bodies, right? But what medicine now is able to show is that what happens to our bodies affects our brains. And right now, Dr. Aaron Bigler, who is considered the godfather of neuroimaging, he's out of Salt Lake. He literally has written the chapter in merit on the neurological textbook they use in medical schools for doctors. He is doing right now serial DTIs on people who

Steve Gursten:

don't have brain injuries but just had pain, long-term exposure to pain without any history of brain trauma, and what he is showing through these DTIs over time is how the brain is organically being changed by the body's perception of pain, and that is probably in the next five years or 10 years because it's going to have to pass Daubert and reach widespread medical acceptance. But can you think of anything that is going to change our world more than in the next 10 years being able to objectively go into a courtroom and show the objectively the long-term impact of your client suffering pain than that? It's going to completely change our world. So this is now when we talk about taking cases that insurance companies undervaluate and how to blow them up to total and permanent disability. If you get this slide, you get my talk. This is the most important thing I want to talk about. So you got to remember, our clients got hit by a car. They got hit by a truck. They got a lot of problems, a

Steve Gursten:

lot of injuries, a lot of things going on. So it's not just the traumatic brain injury, or the cognitive impacts, or the pain, or the physical injuries, or the fatigue, or the depression, or the anxiety. In other words, it's not the multiple herniated discs. It's not the fusion surgery. It's not the tinnitus, the rotator cuff surgery, the traumatic headaches. It's all of it, and then it's the pain, the fatigue, the sleep impairment, the anxiety, the depression that happens when people can't go back to work and they're under the long-term influence of chronic pain over time, it's all of it. It is the combination effect. It is the exact opposite of what I was saying earlier, of what you want to do with adjusters when you're trying to settle on the pre-suit level, right? Because now what you're doing is you're taking these injuries, let's say a fusion. Surgery, and you're taking it into almost it's like that three legs of the stool analogy, right? Where it's not just the physical

Steve Gursten:

injury, but now it's the physical injury that is also causing memory, concentration, attention problems, and it's causing emotional or sleep or fatigue disruption.

Steve Gursten:

So you have three different legs, so that when you're trying this case, the defense vocational expert can't say, "Well, yeah, they have a bad back, but look, here's 10,000 other jobs that they can do, mr. Gersten. Because now it's not just one leg of the stool, the pain. Now it's actually three legs that makes them totally and permanently disabled, because it's not just the physical injury, but how that physical injury now is causing cognitive effects such as memory, concentration, attention, and then the emotional sequelae that comes with that, and always pervasive, the disruption in sleep, impaired sleep, and constant fatigue that makes them unable to hold a 40-hour-a-week job. So again, the exact opposite of what you're doing when you're selling with adjusters pre-suit. You're not trying to drill down. You're trying to chunk up. It's the cumulative impact of all these injuries and the effect it has on your client that makes these injuries so disabling. So this is a great

Steve Gursten:

physiatrist that I've used in probably 20 trials. What he talks about is that when you're talking about chronic pain, three plus three does not equal six. That when you're dealing with chronic pain syndrome, people's problems go up by multiplication, not by addition. That's what you need to do as the advocate for your clients at trial. And by the way, this is the other pet peeve of mine. We've all seen 1000 IME reports from these defense doctors that say our clients are either malingering, or exaggerating, or there's symptom magnification. Because what do they always say? They say the person says they're getting worse over time, and we know that most people get better over time. That's bullshit. It's not malingering. It's medical deterioration. It's what happens to our clients in real life. It's that vicious downward cycle of what happens when you have multiple injuries and the impact of them over time, because they can never catch a break. When you are exposed to long-term

Steve Gursten:

pain, think of it as as throwing kerosene on a fire, because what happens is is that pain and then especially disrupted sleep, fatigue, emotional problems, it acts as an accelerant. So pain cycles collapse; they get shorter and shorter, and people's ability to handle and withstand pain gets worse and worse, and that's how these people literally become functionally disabled. So the human body is way more interconnected than we ever thought before, and we know this now. All right, second tip: stop trying your cases just as mild TBI cases, I've been doing this for 30 years. It has never been easier to win a brain injury case than it is today. 30 years ago, it was the treating neuropsych versus a defense neuropsych, and it was awful. Now we have diffuse tensor imaging, we have SWI, we have PET, we have NeuroQuant, we have computerized balance testing, we have olfactory testing of cranial nerve one, which is objective. You've got NeuroQuant, you've got, I mean, so VNG. You've got ocular

Steve Gursten:

motor testing, which is also objective. Pupilometry, which is also objective. You've got literally a dozen ways that you can now objectively prove brain injury. I don't even need to use neuropsychs anymore, and by the way, I don't most of the time, it has never been easier to win a brain injury case than it is today. So I'm not telling you, don't try brain injury cases, try them. What I'm saying is sometimes you may want to rethink how you frame these cases to better help your client and explain to a jury so they can better understand what your client is going through, because the problem is, you can try your case and still lose, and that sucks. So let me tell you the way most of us will try this. And what I want to do again, what I want to do is I want to take the cases that we are forced to try. Because the easy cases they settle, so picture in your minds for me right now, you got the typical TBI case that we're forced to try. So let's say you've got no loss of consciousness or

Steve Gursten:

disputed at the scene, right? Let's say you have an eight-month delay in diagnosis and one year before they begin treatment, before they get referred to someone for treatment. Who wants to go try that case? Come on, be brave.

Steve Gursten:

Who's going to try that case? All right, now let me tell you what you could do if you wanted to try that case. What you could do is you could explain that first, most people who lose consciousness don't even know they lost consciousness, right? You could explain that according to the published literature, somewhere between 56 and 80% of brain injuries are completely missed in emergency rooms because they're acute care facilities. Between 56 and 80 percent are completely missed. You can explain to the jury that brain injuries are different from physical injuries. Brain injuries are a process; physical injuries are an event. If you break your arm, that's an event. You go for an X-ray. The X-ray will show it. Brain injury is different. When our brains undergo trauma, what you have is you've got this. Essentially, you've got three things going on. You've got something called apoptosis. You've got excitatory toxicity in the brain, and then what you have is neuroinflammation, and

Steve Gursten:

what it causes is this metabolic cascade that goes on in our brains, and that is why it is called a process, not an event. Because what's happening is is that the damage to our clients' brains is actually a process that is going on for days, weeks, months, and if you're epigenetically susceptible, years. That is a fact. Everything I just told you is 100% true. And then you ask a jury for $10 million, and they no cause you. So, is there a better way? Why fight so hard to try and push this rock up a mountain? Is there a better way to reframe these facts so a jury is more likely to accept it as true and give your client the compensation they deserve? Does it really matter what you call it? So instead of treating it like someone who may or may not have lost consciousness, yet an eight-month delay in diagnosis, a year in treatment gap, if you've got someone that was hit by a truck, who was hit by a car, who has really serious physical injuries, reframe it as an acquired brain

Steve Gursten:

injury due to long-term exposure to chronic pain, and what you will find, like I have found from trials and countless focus groups, is that that same jury that will be extremely suspicious that this was a brain injury caused from an initial trauma, is way more likely to accept it as true. Same facts when you're reframing it as sequelae from chronic pain syndrome, as an acquired brain injury, not caused from initial trauma. People get this; they understand this. And again, this is real life. All right. The third part is making our clients likable, credible, and worthy. This is so important. Juries are not going to want to help your client if they don't like them, or if they don't believe them. So this is, believe it or not, the best thing that AAJ ever did for us that nobody knows anything about in 1992, after Colossus was unleashed by Allstate, some of the greats Greg Kusamano, Dave Bossert, Dave Wenner, Phil Miller was really instrumental in this. They did a series of focus

Steve Gursten:

groups all over the country, and they were trying to figure out why are we getting no cause? Why are we losing these clear liability rear-enders that plaintiff lawyers always used to win? How are we losing these cases? And what they came up with is that there's actually a number of values, and if you can demonstrate to a jury how your client lives by these values, then you are making. Your client more worthy, more likable, and more credible. So things like personal responsibility, things like accountability, sacrifice, religious faith, helping the community, being a strong parent. Listen, I can't even remember now how many cases I've tried. It's been a lot. To this day, this is still the first page of every trial notebook of every trial I have, and I go through the trial, and my job is to try to find as many ways as I possibly can to demonstrate how my client, normally through lay witnesses, through the employer, through people other than my client, but how my client's life has

Steve Gursten:

demonstrated these quote conservative American values. And I'll tell you something: I've also been asked to try cases in 14 different states. This works if you're in a blue state or a red state.

Steve Gursten:

It works in a conservative county. It works in a liberal county because these are universal values, and there's a growing body of literature that now shows that people make decisions based on our values. We're no different from voters, right? There are values, voters. Cultural issues are values. Sometimes to manipulate voters, but it's all based on values. And if you're good, what you want to do is juxtapose how your client has always lived by these conservative American values, and juxtapose those with the defense and their refusal to take responsibility, to be held accountable to do the right thing when they have caused great harm. So what we're trying to do is make our plaintiff both worthy and credible. And here's the other thing that's really important: jurors hate people that play possum and give up, that play dead. They want to see how your client is working hard to get better. They want to see how your client has worked hard to make all their doctor appointments. How

Steve Gursten:

they're really taking improving their their condition and getting better seriously. So you want to show that they are a brave survivor that actually matters more. And the other thing that I found is, the more you can demonstrate these conservative American values, the more you really bulletproof your client from these inevitable defense attacks when they accuse him of things like malingering or exaggeration, because it's really hard to accuse somebody that, and for a jury to believe it, when your client hasn't missed a day of work in five years, or when your client never missed a physical therapy appointment or a doctor appointment in three years of treatment. So the more you can do that, what I'm, what I'm look, what I'm saying is, instead of waiting knee deep and spending a week of court trying to explain why the Tom test is bullshit or the Waddells or the fake bad scale, demonstrating these conservative American values actually makes your client so much more likable,

Steve Gursten:

believable, and worthy, and protects them from these nasty defense attacks. Probably better than anything you can do with the medicine, and just the critical thing is this: you have to prove life impact and why the injury matters. So important. It's not just pain; you have to show how someone's life is different from before to after, and it can't be through your client. You got to spend the time. You got to get great witnesses who knew your client before, preferably that are not related by blood, or that were friends, but coworkers, supervisors, people from church, from organizations, and really explain how this impact has changed your client's life. That's what juries care about. Okay, what I want to talk about now is a way that I have added, literally, about three to 5 million extra dollars to my cases over the last 20 years, and I will start with a question. And if you saw Jay's webinar, and you already know the answer to this, then you cannot answer. But for the rest of

Steve Gursten:

you, what is an impairment that your clients have that 50 to 75% of your clients actually have that they actually say is their very worst problem out of all the problems that they're going through. They say it's the worst. Who's going to be brave and answer that for me? Damn, you cheating, or are you actually all right? You're good. Nice job. Yeah. Fatigue, fatigue. So this is from the Journal of Head Trauma Rehabilitation. Fatigue is a significant challenge that confronts. And by the way, when I say TBI, it's also chronic pain. So every client you have that has been seriously physically injured or that has a brain injury, likely is also having problems with fatigue, and not just having problems with fatigue, but of all the problems they're having, they're actually saying it's the worst problem they have. Now, what are you all doing about it? They're saying this is their worst problem. What are you doing to help them? For most of you, the answer is nothing. That's why I'm on

Steve Gursten:

stage and you're there. So let me tell you what I've been doing. I'm going to skip to the latest, but this is over 20 years because the point is you can prove this. You can absolutely prove it, and it's a way to get your clients excess economic loss.

Steve Gursten:

And this is how I've been adding millions of dollars to my cases because you're using this to show they're not capable of competitive employment, and you're getting their future economic loss as part of the case. It's adding millions of dollars. So I started 20 years ago, and this is still around today. It's called the Universal Work Skills Evaluation. It's been around for 80 years in the field of industrial psychology. Basically, they they put your client in a similar work type environment to test them, and then over the course of three days, they measure output, and you can see the effects of fatigue. So, what literally happens most of times that they drop off a cliff, and that is because you need to understand that fatigue and sleep are what's called quantitative injuries, not qualitative, quantitative. So basically, what that means is that over time, these people that look pretty damn good on day one, by day three, they're a train wreck. The second way was

Steve Gursten:

neuropsychological testing through the years, and these are the tests in, for example, the Halsted Rayton battery that are highly sensitive and specific to fatigue. So if your client is having these problems, they're going to perform terrible on these tests. Thankfully, now with AI, you don't necessarily need to do this. You can put all your medical records through the AI, and it'll go through every history and through all the symptoms and all the clinical exams. It will pull the indicators that your client is suffering from sleep impairment and fatigue, and then this is the latest thing I've been doing, and I love it. Fitness trackers, and I love the Aura Ring. So I have bought probably 100 of these for my clients, just me. And what I'm doing is I'm having them measure their sleep using the Aura ring, which is incredibly sensitive. And actually, believe it or not, it's almost as good now as a full sleep study at a university. If the clients are having terrible impaired sleep,

Steve Gursten:

if they're getting four hours sleep and no deep sleep, they're functionally unable to function in real life to hold a job, but the key is this: this is what I've been doing lately. If the ordering is coming out positive, then get them referred for a sleep study, preferably a 48-hour sleep study at a university, and then with your physiatrist and your vocational expert at trial, show why they are not capable of gainful employment. And by the way, that's not me saying that, Stephen Gersten. That's a U.S. government, because the Social Security Administration says that to be considered capable of gainful employment in America today, you must be able to work a 40-hour work week, and you can literally show that your clients are unable to hold a job, and that is how you get excess economic loss. So, at the end of the day, this is my message to you. In a oversaturated world, where the supply of lawyers is greater than the demand. I don't necessarily know if the winning strategy long term

Steve Gursten:

is to just be waving your hands around and arms in the air and be screaming a little bit louder than everybody else in your city and state. It's up to you, but what I'm talking about is trying to truly make a strategic decision to differentiate your firm, to become known in your subject matter area as the go-to law firms, and have people come to you. Be calculated. Don't try your. Bad cases, but try your good cases that the insurance companies are undervaluing. Try them with the clients that everyone in your law firm likes, with injuries and with good policy limits. So at least you have an upside. Take your shots at trial, and it will completely transform your practice.

Jay Berkowitz:

So a few notes that I made, and hopefully you guys took some good notes too. You're doing your first brand advertising on radio.

Steve Gursten:

I am,

Jay Berkowitz:

and if you made the point from my presentation where I explained that it was revealed in Google's leak about the Google algorithm that brand is very important for SEO, and now we're finding out from AEO that brand is really important, and we're we're learning that pay per click. As a matter of fact, we did a study with Jeff that we'll talk about for LSAs and pay per click brand recognition improves click through rates, and improved click through rates means they show your ads more. It's great. I love that you're doing it, and love what you're doing with Gary the radio, I love good wine needs no bush, that you quoted William Shakespeare, and that's the first. So what I do is I write down an action item, and I encourage you all to do this. I create a separate list right at the front of my book called To Do, and we're having our EOS meeting on Wednesday. Our team is all here, so our management team's getting together, and I'm going to double down on results for 10

Jay Berkowitz:

golden rules because that will bring in more and more referrals. And we heard Stacy talk about that too. Number three, neurosurgeons don't do TBI. I thought that was really interesting. That 29 to 30 patients they see every day are not dealing with like brain injury stuff, and so you're finding other ways to do that. The combination effect I thought was fantastic: TBI, fatigue, cognitive effects, depression, pain, anxiety, and last point I made: make your clients likable.