How We Found Our Identity

In this episode of Summary Judgment, Josh, Aaron and Margaret continue to discuss how FVF Law found it’s identity and why we chose to pursue a values-driven path as a firm.

Listen here or read the transcript below. FVF’s Summary Judgment podcast is available wherever you listen to podcasts including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, and more.

0:00:00.0 Intro: Thank you for tuning to Summary Judgment where Austin personal injury attorneys, Josh Fogelman and Aaron Von Flatern of FVF Law, discuss the ins, outs and in-betweens of personal injury cases.

0:00:17.1 Aaron Von Flatern: Hey, Margaret.

0:00:18.5 Margaret Von Flatern: Hey, Aaron.

0:00:19.6 AF: Who are you?

0:00:23.7 MF: Who are any of us really?

0:00:25.2 AF: Exactly.

[laughter]

0:00:27.5 AF: And that’s a great segue into our topic today, branding. Branding is such a buzzword in modern times, but it really comes down to identity. And so today’s podcast is all about telling the story of the FVF identity, what it is and how we discovered it, how we found it, and then grabbed onto it. So Margaret?

0:00:56.3 MF: Yes.

0:00:57.6 AF: Person in charge of all things operational, staffing, marketing, tell us about branding in FVF.

0:01:09.7 MF: Well, I think as much as identity is about deciding who you are, it’s also deciding who you aren’t. And I think you guys did a really good job from the beginning in establishing both who you wanted to be as practicing PI attorneys long before FVF Law existed, but especially as you were forming the organization, determining how you wanted to practice law, the types of lawyers you wanted to be, and also what you didn’t want in your practice. So maybe Josh, you can talk to us more about that.

0:02:05.9 Josh Fogelman: Yeah, I think when we… We’ve talked a lot about what our process of starting the law firm was like. So there’s a whole podcast on that if any of our listeners are interested. But I’ll fast forward to probably sometime in 2000… Had to have been 2015. We started late 2014. We’d really taken this leap of faith that we were gonna do this thing and that we sort of knew that we wanted to do it differently and we had a long-term vision about what generally speaking we wanted to accomplish professionally and as an organization. But having no real background in building a business or marketing, I mean, Aaron and I were just lawyers. We knew that we had an opportunity at that time to really seize on the special thing that we knew we were in the process of creating and we knew that we wanted to harness that and we knew that we wanted to make that a priority and to understand who we were as an organization and who we wanted to be sort of in detail as an organization as we grew up.

0:03:35.9 JF: And kind of to point back to something you’ve referenced in, prior podcasts to create a foundation that we could always look back upon to help us remember what our values are when presented with difficult situations or temptations that might lure us away from what we wanted to be and who we believed ourselves to be both as human beings and as an organization, even though we were a very small organization sort of at this time. And I remember speaking with Aaron about this. We were talking about our logo and talking about branding and talking about our website and talking about all of these different facets of the business and of the organization, and knowing that we needed direction and not really…

[laughter]

0:04:32.9 JF: Knowing if we could afford to hire someone to help give us that direction. And Aaron ultimately… We agreed that we wanted to do it. You were involved in this decision-making as well, even though you weren’t formally with the organization at that time.

0:04:49.4 MF: I was lurking.

0:04:49.8 JF: Lurking in the background, in the shadows. And you and Aaron brought someone to the forefront who could help guide us to that exercise, and I’m not sure that any of us… Well, I’m not sure that either Aaron or myself knew exactly what that process was gonna look like, but we knew that it needed to happen.

0:05:09.4 AF: I wanna tell a story different than that.

[laughter]

0:05:11.7 JF: Do it.

0:05:13.1 AF: And this is to give you credit because there are two paths you can go by, right, as a law firm that wanted to get out there. One is marketing and the other is branding. And they sound like the same thing, but marketing is like, how many trucks can you put your number on the side of? How many billboards can you put out? How many commercials can you make? How many impressions are you gonna get? How many eyeballs are gonna be on you? Branding is who you are, and wearing it internally and externally, which I know sounds kind of buzzy, but I didn’t… I learned this difference after. It was you, Josh, who said, let’s get a branding person. And we were way too small and young of an organization to be…

0:06:00.5 MF: And broke.

0:06:01.6 AF: And too broke of an organization to be like, instead of plastering our number everywhere, let’s bring in a person whose job it is to help us figure out who we are. It was a very interesting choice and it worked out great. I think the person who came in was vetted through Margaret and she’s become… I mean, she’s a star in her area, right? So she came in and…

0:06:30.1 MF: MKCO, Mary Kathryn Paynter?

0:06:32.6 AF: Yeah. Give her a shout-out here. Mary Kathryn Paynter came in and challenged us as to like, “Well, you guys, you have all these ideas about being different, but who are you? And let’s figure this out.” And she gave us some tools to help figure that out. Here are… What are the ways… What are the stories that you gravitate towards? What are the other brands that you like where you see them and you think you just have a good feeling about them? And why is that? Who is your ideal client? Which we had some misunderstandings about, I think, in the beginning. And that process of… I don’t know how many times we met with her and went through what I call corporate therapy helped us to sort of land on a vision of what we wanted our identity to be. And from that flow, those core values that Margaret is always talking about, and I’m sure you’ll have an opportunity to talk about them today.

0:07:32.6 MF: Are you talking about education, transparency, compassion, and advocacy?

0:07:37.2 AF: I am. I am talking about those things. And in general, now that I’ve sort of turned my attention to it and studied it a little bit, what I’ve found is that identity is this amazing motivator. And I’ll be real nerdy for a second and talk about a book I read, “Atomic Habits”, which kind of pointed out that if you want to motivate someone and you access identity, you’ll get a lot further, and that goes for yourself as well. So the idea is… The point is not to become good at playing music. The point is to become a musician. The point is not to be good at reading, but to become a reader and not to become good at fitness, but to become an athlete.

0:08:23.1 AF: And so when you wake up in the morning and you ask yourself, should I go to the gym or not? Instead of sitting there weighing the pros and cons of a, well, if I go to the gym, I’m gonna get like a good workout and burn some calories, all that stuff you put aside and you just say, what would an athlete do? And the question answers itself. You get out of bed and you go to the gym. So what would FVF do is kind of our question, and it does answer itself. If you want to be elevating the practice of personal injury law, if you want to be a different kind of personal injury lawyer yourself, what would that look like? We don’t struggle with our decisions. I think we walk the path and credit to Margaret for helping us to remember what that path is.

0:09:11.9 JF: Yeah. And I know… I wanna give you an opportunity to speak too, but something that’s kind of important, if you put yourself back in our shoes at that time when we didn’t know whether we were gonna survive, we just didn’t know what the future looked like for us, you’re confronted with this question of, okay, well, we’re about to really make an investment in ourselves and the decisions that we make today, this isn’t like, oh, we’re gonna do this now and then we’ll come and maybe rebrand ourselves later if we… This is who are we, what are we striving for? We are having this corporate therapy as you put it, which is very, very appropriate. We need to make the best of this opportunity now and we need to be true to ourselves. But at that time, being sort of novices in that and knowing that we were gonna be taking a risk in this investment, I remember sort of thinking it’s like, okay, well, is the question like who are we or is the question, who do we want our audience to think we are? And…

0:10:26.8 AF: Great point.

0:10:28.0 JF: And that… I mean, going through the process of developing our brand was the best possible method at least for me personally to go through to answer that question, which is definitively we need to brand ourselves as who we are, not as who we think the people listening to us or encountering us or seeing our names on the internet want us to be.

0:11:03.1 AF: And you see that all the time with other… I mean, not to call out other firms, but you do know when your intelligence is being sort of insulted by someone who’s sitting there telling you something that they believe you would wanna hear if you were, say, injured. And it rings kind of hollow.

0:11:21.1 JF: And I’m so glad that we went through that process and I’m so glad that we worked through that together because I think it was kind of through that process that you have to make a commitment to be true to yourself and true to the organization, and true to those values that really set the stage for how things were going to unfold in the coming years. Even if it meant failing, even if it meant staying true to yourselves and not choosing that alternative message meant that the organization would not ultimately succeed. That was a huge lesson learned for me.

0:12:03.9 MF: Well, and so one of my questions was, nine years into it, how is it that a organization of a relative size could have a brand that, at least I believe, is so… Like that we’re still really tapped into? And I think you answered the question. It’s easy to stay true to that brand when the core values, the mission and the purpose, the vision of the brand is true to yourself. I wouldn’t say it’s easy because you do make choices that are difficult, but it feels right. You know what’s right, you know what feels right, and you know what feels off brand.

0:13:10.6 AF: And it’s echoed back to us.

0:13:12.0 MF: Yes.

0:13:12.2 AF: We have… It’s kind of turned into marketing in a way. And so far as our clients have spoken these truths back to us in reviews, hundreds of reviews saying that this is what they wanted. They were regular people in unfortunate circumstances looking for guidance, looking for advocacy, needing a convenient and easy to use modern service. And we delivered on all of that and with compassion. Having that spoken back to you in reviews is really affirming to our identity and it makes us feel great about our branding. But it also kind of takes care of the marketing. They’re marketing for us in that way. And then the other thing that the way I see it coming back to us is from the attorney talent and the paralegal talent that we have. Our whole team’s talent level is extremely high. And I think that’s in part because they’re identifying with that brand. We’re internally and externally saying the same thing. We believe it’s important to do this differently, we believe it’s important to elevate this practice. And that is, I think, especially motivating for the team and it’s helping our retention, which is a virtuous cycle, of course.

0:14:37.8 JF: Yeah. We’ve never even contemplated rebranding. And I think that’s a testament to the work that Mary Kathryn did really to help us identify what our values were and articulate them in a meaningful way. And it’s interesting because rather than look back and say, well, this isn’t working, and maybe we should retool this, we’re making adjustments to our marketing all the time. But to our branding, rather than think about, well, how do we change this? Or what do we need to modify? We just dig our heels in further…

[laughter]

0:15:10.7 MF: I know.

0:15:12.6 JF: On the values that we’ve committed to.

0:15:15.0 MF: Yeah. What’s really interesting now that you say that is that we went through… So inside baseball, we went through a process, I guess, last year, maybe a year and a half ago, to make changes to some of our taglines.

0:15:34.3 AF: Messaging.

0:15:35.0 MF: To some of our messaging. So some of the more short and concise. When we can talk ad nauseam about our organization, and have 300 words, that’s great. But most of the time, you need five to 10 words to communicate a message. So we went through a process in the last year, year and a half with a different agency to work on messaging and specifically some of that more concise, punchy messaging. And at the end of the day, we hated everything except for the things that we came up with ourselves because ultimately no one… With the work, the foundational work that Mary Kathryn helped us with, no one knows this brand better than we do.

0:16:31.4 JF: No.

0:16:32.1 MF: No one can… And by we, I don’t mean just the three person… Three people sitting in this room. I mean the team that we have amass to be FVF Law. FVF Law is not Aaron and Josh. It is the 30 people who work tirelessly every day to serve our clients and each other. And so at the end of that exercise, we had a great worksheet of messaging that we produced that were our words and the messaging that made sense to us as an organization. And I think that that’s what is interesting in that, is that you two are not branders, you’re not marketers, but what you are experts in is FVF Law and what the organization stands for and what its purpose is, and the mission that we have to be better for our community.

0:17:35.1 AF: And we’re not too proud. We’re not opposed to hearing…

0:17:38.3 MF: No, not at all.

0:17:39.2 AF: Ideas from other people about what the brand should be and all that. But the problem is, at the end of the day, we have our hearts in it.

0:17:47.4 MF: Right.

0:17:47.6 AF: It’s like if you’re talking to someone who’s paid to come up with some stuff, no matter how hard they try, it’s hard for them to actually stand in your shoes and feel what it’s like to have the weight of a family’s expectations where they’re losing money, they can’t exercise, they can’t work, they can’t parent, and they need solutions and their legal and medical complex in front of them. The insurance complex is really complicated and scary. To feel that and know how to get through it and then have it charge you up, that is not an experience that the average person can access from the outside looking in. And so that’s why I think when it comes to telling the public or telling ourselves what our messages are and who we are, it kind of has to come from us.

0:18:44.5 JF: Yeah. I think there’s just nothing gimmicky about who we are. And I think that’s a really hard thing for a lot of…

0:18:55.1 MF: Marketers.

0:18:56.0 JF: Yeah. It’s just so pervasive in this industry. It’s hard to just…

0:19:00.7 AF: A lot of cleverness.

0:19:02.7 JF: Yeah.

0:19:03.4 AF: A lot of cleverness, which is to their credit, they’re creative.

0:19:07.2 JF: Sure.

0:19:08.2 AF: But it also just doesn’t quite ring true for us.

0:19:12.3 JF: How do you guys feel that our brand has influenced how we’ve built the team and the people that have chosen to join the team?

0:19:27.9 MF: Yeah. Values, values, values. We are a values driven organization and so the brand is very much about embodying those values. And so when we bring people on board, they definitely have to be those types of individuals that just intrinsically understand and can demonstrate that they are natural advocates, that they are to the extent that it is appropriate in the role that they’re filling, that they are compassionate or impasse, that they feel that education is important, whether that’s educating a potential new client that calls us that has a case that we can’t take for whatever reason, but our intake team or our lawyer on call is going to take the time to educate the individual who’s reached out to us about their rights or tell them where they can get educated about their rights. And then fearless transparency, peerless advocacy. So we…

0:21:00.5 AF: It’s another clever thing a marketer thought of and that was…

0:21:04.5 MF: That was you.

0:21:05.1 AF: That was my idea.

[laughter]

0:21:06.2 MF: And it’s good.

0:21:08.8 AF: It’s fine.

[laughter]

0:21:12.1 MF: But being again super transparent, both internally and externally with clients, with team members. One of the ways we demonstrate transparency is there’s a clause in our contract about if our values don’t align, then it could be cause for termination.

0:21:39.5 AF: No jerks.

0:21:41.6 MF: Yeah.

0:21:43.3 AF: No hateful things, and that’s not to say that this is all warm and cuddly stuff. I mean, to be very, very clear, we preach kindness in the right way, which is who are you being kind to? You have to be kind to your client and in furthering their case. Being kind to opposing counsel in a way that actually sets your client’s case back is not allowed, right? So fierce advocacy is part of our core values, and there is a way to do it with compassion, to do it honorably and with dignity, but also still be a great advocate. And that’s tricky and I think part of my amazement looking at our team is the fact that they are able to balance those interests so well.

0:22:35.6 MF: Well, and it goes back to transparency, right? There’s no… We go straight at the other side, right?

0:22:42.4 AF: Right, we don’t play games.

0:22:43.3 MF: We don’t play games because it’s not in our client’s best interest for us to do that, it’s not in the system’s best interest for us to do that. In previous podcasts, we’ve talked about there’s backlogs and there’s log jams, and there’s issues there and so we go right at the other side hard to get the job done that we need to get done.

0:23:05.3 AF: Right, and there’s no surprises. We don’t… One of the things I’ve always said from the beginning is never surprise an insurance company. If you really want them to get on your client’s side, you don’t wanna show up at mediation with new information. It’s not a game of gotcha or hide the ball. It’s like, we’re not even really negotiating with the insurance company. We’re negotiating with the jury. The jury’s gonna give us the right answer. Is there an opportunity to get it done before we get there? Sure, but that’s all it is, is an opportunity. And I think playing games and sort of getting wrapped up in the tit for tat with the adjuster as if the adjuster was the answer somehow, it’s like, oh, I’m dealing with a tough adjuster. It’s like, who cares? You have the courthouse, you have a jury. You can get the right answer no matter what you have on the other side of the case.

0:24:01.7 AF: And so that is something that I would like to see all of our lawyers embrace and continue to embrace and I want our new hires to understand that, that it’s not really about playing games or trying to one up the other side, because the other side is really just a sounding board. We’re eventually going to the jury.

0:24:20.5 JF: Yeah. And so our values are not a suggestion.

0:24:26.6 AF: Right.

0:24:26.9 MF: No.

0:24:27.4 JF: They’re a demand.

0:24:30.4 MF: Well, and the branding process that we went through helped to hone in on not what our values should be, because you guys already knew that, but it gave us a common language. So that good branding can provide an organization with, as we’ve said previously, guideposts, and a common language and understanding. We have definitions for what all of these values mean in our organization, and it has applicability inside and outside, how we deal with the opposing counsel, how we deal with our colleagues, how we deal with our clients. There is a very clear understanding across the board on what these different things mean and how they are applied in our day-to-day practice. And that’s the benefit of going through this process early, doing it right with somebody who is good at it and who can really listen to… In this case, we were the client. Listen to the client and say, “Okay, what I hear you say is this is what’s important. What if we call this X and then let’s define it as a group?” And those have tweaked a little bit over the years as we’ve grown, and we’ve needed to make the umbrella of audience larger on how that value impacts different folks that we interact with from a business and a community perspective, but the foundation that was established eight years ago now, seven years ago, eight years ago is still… That’s the foundation that we’re still working with.

0:26:26.2 JF: I know we only have a couple minutes left here, but I wanna get each of your thoughts on the FVF falcon.

0:26:35.6 MF: I love her.

[laughter]

0:26:40.9 AF: I love the fact that my son has all the stats on the peregrine falcon and always has had. I think young children when they learn about the fastest land animal, they get pretty excited about the stats of that. I love the fact that he connects with it that way. Swift, we’re a swift organization I hope. Also…

0:27:05.6 MF: Within pursuit.

0:27:09.2 AF: Within pursuit. [laughter] Yeah. And did we intend that it have a tie into our names? ‘Cause both of our names have some sort of tie in to flying, right?

0:27:22.4 JF: So that’s one of the cool things about it, right? When we were choosing a logo, this was not a one and done deal. That was a long challenging process.

0:27:34.5 MF: The first logo was terribly.

0:27:36.7 JF: It wasn’t good. And then even beyond that, which we had sort of just created ourselves with a one-off website, we went through round after round after round of Mary Kathryn presenting us with different logo options and we were just like no, no, no, no, no, no.

0:27:56.1 MF: Hate it, hate it.

0:28:00.8 JF: And when they put the falcon down one day, we were just like, that’s the one.

[laughter]

0:28:03.5 JF: It was in… There was no question about it. And it just happened to be that my last name Fogelman is Birdman. Yeah.

0:28:13.3 AF: And my last name is Von Flatern. Von Flatern stands for like Van Flutterman. Basically it means like fluttering. So a fluttering heart, if you will.

0:28:25.5 JF: Yeah.

0:28:26.1 AF: Or bird.

0:28:27.0 JF: I just think it was meant to be.

0:28:29.1 AF: Yeah.

0:28:29.4 JF: And we love it dearly and I wanna put it on everything I own, and wear it proudly. And I love when I go to the soccer games and I’m still so proud of it. And love and appreciate it so much. So I’m glad we landed on that. I’m fortunate to have that.

0:28:49.3 AF: I remember someone asking us why we changed from our prior logo and the answer was because people keep telling us it looks like Van Halen or the Corvette symbol.

0:29:00.3 MF: Yep.

[laughter]

0:29:01.0 AF: And Weezer. And I’m like, I’m tired of that. So I welcome the falcon.

0:29:05.9 MF: How long did it take you guys to notice her beak?

0:29:11.4 AF: Is it a her? I’m okay with that. I’m just curious.

0:29:15.0 MF: I feel like she’s a her.

0:29:16.3 AF: Okay. Well…

0:29:17.2 JF: I never really thought about it.

0:29:19.9 AF: I think the beak…

0:29:21.6 MF: She’s a beautiful lady.

0:29:22.2 AF: Pretty lady.

0:29:22.5 JF: Fierce and protective.

0:29:24.6 MF: Yeah.

0:29:24.7 JF: I don’t know. I feel like…

0:29:25.6 MF: Fierce and protective.

0:29:27.7 JF: I Feel like it was pretty instant.

0:29:30.1 MF: You saw the beak? ‘Cause I gotta be honest, I didn’t notice the beak until like…

0:29:35.5 AF: How do you see a bird without a beak?

0:29:36.9 MF: A couple years ago. It’s kind of hidden.

0:29:42.7 AF: What?

0:29:42.8 MF: Do you see a beak?

0:29:43.2 AF: If I didn’t see the beak, I would literally turn to the guy and be like, what did you draw?

0:29:46.0 MF: Listener. I’m turning to Dave off camera and asking him if he also saw the beak.

0:29:51.1 Dave: I did.

[laughter]

0:29:53.8 MF: Listener, that’s Dave.

0:29:56.7 JF: Dave, takeover.

0:29:57.7 Dave: Someday.

[laughter]

0:29:58.8 JF: All right. Well, I think we’ve exhausted our time here, but I think branding has been a really important part of the development of this organization. It continues to be an important part of decisions that we make every single day. Glad to have y’all here to talk about it. And y’all, thanks for tuning in.

[music]