Beyond the Suit: How Matt Dolman Created a Client-Centric Culture
In this episode, host Judd Shaw interviews Matt Dolman, a personal injury lawyer from the Dolman Law Group in Clearwater, Florida. The pair discuss Florida’s recent tort reform and its implications on the insurance industry.
Matt shares his connection to personal injury law, highlighting the importance of empathy, connection, and customer service in his practice. He believes word-of-mouth referrals are the most valuable, and maintaining low case volumes enables attorneys and staff to dedicate more time and attention to each client.
The two stress the need to be approachable at work, wearing casual attire and using self-effacing humor to create a comfortable atmosphere. Matt and Judd also discuss the significance of sharing their mistakes and vulnerabilities to connect with clients.
The episode covers fostering a positive work environment, as happy employees are more likely to become “brand evangelists.” Team-building exercises and open dialogue are mentioned as essential in creating a strong team environment.
In this episode:
- [0:43] Recent tort reform in Florida and its potential impact on the insurance industry.
- [01:28] How his father’s injury in a car accident inspired Matt’s decision to pursue a personal injury career.
- [05:18] The impotance of empathy, connection, and customer service in a successful practice and their influence on client satisfaction.
- [11:41] Approachability, dressing casually, and using self-effacing humor can help put clients and prospects at ease.
- [14:04] Being open about personal mistakes and vulnerabilities helps to connect with clients.
- [17:23] Creating a positive and happy workplace for employees is important, as they’re more likely to treat your clients well, remain with the firm, and become “brand evangelists.”
- [19:43] The importance of team-building exercises and encouraging open communication to create a strong team environment.
- [22:26] Sterling the Knight and the mission of instilling empathy in children for a better future.
Transcript:
Judd Shaw:
Hi, everybody. Welcome to the show. I’m your host, Judd Shaw. I’m here with Matt Dolman of the Dolman Law Group in Clearwater, Florida. Matt, how you doing, man?
Matt Dolman:
I’m doing good. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.
Judd Shaw:
What’s shaking down in St. Pete/Clearwater?
Matt Dolman:
What’s shaking? We just went through a massive tort reform here in Florida, so that’s shaking right now in the Tampa Bay area and all throughout the state. I can tell you what the law says. We just don’t know how the insurance companies are going to play this out and what the next two, three years are going to look like.
Judd Shaw:
Matt, I really appreciate you coming on the show. I’ve been really looking forward to having a conversation about the importance of connection, and I believe you’re the guy. I’ve been working with a really, what I consider a world-renowned team, leading experts in culture leadership, trauma, what I have learned so much is that building connections build a safer world around us. You’re 14 years old and you get a phone call, Matt, we got a problem. Tell me about it.
Matt Dolman:
Sure. So my father was in a pretty serious car accident in the early morning hours on a old country road that’s in Long Island. In Jericho, Long Island and received pretty serious internal injuries including but not limited to a facial scar still with him to this very day. He hired a lawyer, I don’t know if you want me to go through the whole story, but he hired a lawyer out of the local Pennysaver, didn’t know any better, and it comports with the results that he received. I can go into as much or as little detail as you want.
Judd Shaw:
Well, the importance of that is your personal experience, and that shaped you in becoming a lawyer, didn’t it?
Matt Dolman:
It did. So I guess from a 10,000-foot view of it, how it shaped my perspective and my future is that I saw someone who didn’t care, didn’t give a shit, sorry to curse. But it was a lawyer that was checked out that was just simply interested in pushing paper and getting just settlements, and doesn’t matter if it was good or bad, was not willing to actually try the case and sell for a bottom dollar amount. Later on, when I got a little bit older and a little wiser and spoke to the lawyers in New York, ’cause that’s where the accident occurred, told me that the value on the case that they could have obtained through either settlement and mediation or a trial was 10 to 15 times the amount that the case settled for which left me, I was appalled at one, the lawyer’s cavalier attitude about the case. Two, the lack of communication he provided, and three, that he felt to champion the case for my father. It made me realize that the little guy is generally screwed unless they have the right lawyer or the right counselor on their behalf.
Judd Shaw:
Part about building connections, particularly with your clients, is being able to empathize with them. How much of a differentiator is it when you have clients as opposed to others when they say, “I’ve been involved in a bad accident,” or, “My family, my father was involved in a really bad accident.” Most lawyers would say, “I’m sorry to hear that, but we can help.” That’s sympathy. You can say, “I understand. I’ve been there before, and I get it.”
Matt Dolman:
Yeah, I can say I can empathize not from a victim standpoint, but certainly from a quasi victim standpoint, a family member who saw a loved one suffer greatly and sustained great injuries. I can see where all the pain points along the way in a relationship and where they would be and how I would avoid that. One is obviously showing a lot more empathy from the very beginning. It’s not about you, it’s not about the attorney. It’s more of that’s why I have these big ears for, I think God gave them to me so I can listen, and I do that well.
Catching your client generally at the most vulnerable hour, although, we do this day in, day out, and I’ve seen pretty much every type of personal injury claim you can imagine, there’s a few that still happen here and there that shock me, but for the most part, I’ve seen most car accident outcomes or scenarios and different fact patterns. But to the client it’s their first time or second time, they’re not getting into many car accidents and they’re vulnerable, and they don’t know what to expect. You always got to remind yourself of that every time you meet you with a client that although this might be mundane to you or to myself, it isn’t to the client. You got to put yourself in their shoes, and that’s where empathy comes in play.
Judd Shaw:
How important is it, and when we focus on customer service, a lot of great lawyers out there, but working the wow, to me, is delivering both parts high-quality legal representation in a first class client experience. How important of building connections with your clients is delivering customer service?
Matt Dolman:
Customer service is everything. So in the beginning of my career, I think the biggest mistake I made is I put too much emphasis in the legal talent in my firm and not enough emphasis in the intake department that I had, the individuals who are the face of the firm who meet the client from day one. When it comes to delivering, I guess the wow factor you got to remember, and especially business owners need to keep us in mind, the easiest clients to obtain are via word-of-mouth. They’re the cheapest clients to obtain. You don’t have to spend a lot of money on them. You could build a really sustainable great practice by it, and this shouldn’t be the reason why guide you.
You should just be a good person to begin with, but empathy goes a long way. Building that relationship with the client goes a long way. Those are the individuals who are going to refer your business going forward. The clients delivered by my clients, meaning the clients that I’m referred to, they come with inherent level of trust because they’re being referred by someone who already has trust in our brand and our firm and our talent and our ability to communicate with them as opposed to somebody who’s coming in fresh off the street based off of an advertisement.
Judd Shaw:
When I use the word safe, I don’t necessarily talking about the absence or presence thereof a threat. It’s really about feeling connected. When we talk about connections in our space, in our industry, clients and lawyers, when you don’t have calls back, when you call the paralegal and nobody communicates with you, you can’t ever speak to your lawyer, how safe is your client feeling about their case in their lawyer’s hands? What are some of the tools that the Dolman Law Group does so well that delivers that client service, that establishes both that connection and that feeling of safety with your client?
Matt Dolman:
So I wouldn’t say we’re perfect, and we can always improve, and every day is a learning experience for us. But where I’d say that what separates us from others, at least many of our peers, and how we are able to deliver these results on a regular basis by keeping the case count low with our paralegals and our attorneys, when you get too much volume or you have one person handling too many files, it becomes more about quantity than quality. No matter how good you are, no matter how empathetic you are, it’s impossible to deliver personal service and personal representation when you’re handling 180 files yourself and you’re not properly staffed at your firm. So we have a quota of how many files I want handled by specific staff members or specific attorneys. By keeping that volume low or at a set level, we’re able to offer that service, but it goes a lot further.
I want my staff members to be able to assist, to be the facilitators for my clients, but the attorneys are the ones who have to actually deliver the work product. That’s why I limit certain specific communications to paralegals and legal assistants and other communications are done by attorneys. I want all of my clients to have their attorney’s cell phone number, that’s paramount. A lot of communications don’t occur during office hours. Many of my clients work, not all, but a good portion do. They work normal 9:00 to 5:00 hours, although we do have a number of clients who are in the hospitality industry and work just irregular hours, that’s why it’s so important to have your cell phone available. Not all the calls are going to come between the hours of 9:00 and 5:00.
Oftentimes, we’re available on the weekends. Does it suck? Yeah, sure. When I’m with my family members, do I want to answer every last call? No, but at the same point I understand that is my role. I allow my clients to call on my cell phone. I don’t let them abuse it, and I will gently remind them of the fact that I do deserve some downtime and have time with my family members. I have four children. At the same time though, you got to make yourself available. Many of the biggest cases, they come in on the weekends and off hours, just different incidents arise. Different issues arise in my clients’ lives, and I should be available. They don’t want to sit on that information for two days waiting for their attorney to get back to them because it happens to fall on a weekend.
Judd Shaw:
Matt, when we talk following that experience that you had with your father in that accident, I had read that at some point you, when you were in college, you had learned about trauma and that background was also helpful. What did you mean by that?
Matt Dolman:
Yeah, so when you were going for my bio, we know we discussed this off camera, um, My father had a kind of a Napoleonic complex and, um, I grew up, I grew up small. I’m like, I’m still five eight, um, 185 pounds. Not, not a huge guy, but my father was more impressed by me getting into fights than getting good grades and poor behavior is often rewarded in my house, which is odd.
My dad’s more of a great friend than a great father at the time. And then I went to college and I loved getting attention, whether it was positive, negative, or indifferent. And there was a, a bunch of incidents that occurred during my freshman year. I was the guy who had knocked down the exit sign. I was just a complete idiot.
And, um, and I’m embarrassed of that behavior to this day. And it all culminated with someone, you know, it wasn’t me, but somebody filled up a garbage pail full of water and leaned it against the RA’s door. It was the resident advisor in a dorm. They opened their door and fried all their electronic equipment.
I wasn’t in town, but all the fingers pointed at me and I got in a lot of trouble. And the reason being is that, I was always the idiot. So therefore, where there’s smoke, there’s fire. And uh, I deserved it cause I got away with a lot of stuff that I never got in trouble for. Um, and I realized such behavior and I call trauma being that.
Getting, almost getting thrown outta school and getting thrown off campus and being placed on probation and academically and otherwise. That was a very scary time period. Um, that’s shaped me into who I am today. In that, uh, I realized I had to grow the F up, um, that I was kind of quasi an adult at that point and that I was, this isn’t tolerable for an 18, 19 year old man, boy, whatever you wanna call me at that age, um, to behave that way, that I was no longer under Mommy and Daddy’s watch and that this was no longer excusable, that, uh, negative attention is just that it’s negative attention. And I, people were more laughing at me than laughing with me. I didn’t need to be the joke at all times. Um, that I stood, at that point going forward. I began the maturation process, I guess Matthew Doman and I start to grow up and realize that I wanted to be respected as an individual, not be the asshole or the clown for everyone’s attention.
Judd Shaw:
But going inward, that to both the trauma and how you learned, how you’re responding ultimately led to your choice in your career. You decided that as you were going to enter into adult world, that type of fighting the bully was unacceptable. You’re not a kid anymore, but you can still fight a bully. Now, instead of being a negative attention as a result of it, now you can receive some really great positive feedback and attention from clients who are getting the result of you fighting on their behalf.
Matt Dolman:
Yeah. So instead of being the jerk and having a problem with every last person looks at me the wrong way or says something I don’t like, I realize that in this lifetime you got to be more happy with yourself than worrying about what others think of you. If you treat people the way you want to be treated yourself and act of respect of all times towards others, you’re likely going to surround yourself with decent people. At that point going forward, I began to surround myself with better individuals and behave in a much more mature manner. I focused myself on targeting big bullies, corporations. In law school, I decided that I wanted to become a personal injury lawyer based on the fact that corporations like insurance carriers, these are Fortune 1000 companies like Allstate, Geico, State Farm, they’re not going out of business anytime soon. They’re for-profit corporations. They’re making decisions not based on the best interest of the policy holders, but based on their bottom line and their shareholders. That was the motivation for becoming a personal injury lawyer.
Judd Shaw:
I love your story. We all have one. We all have a story. That background that you can draw on, again, allows you to create empathy and create connected space between you and your clients, which then tie you right into client service. The more connected your client feels with your level of service and you as an individual, the more safe they feel about having their life in your hands and their case in your hands, and the more likely they are to feel satisfied at the end of the case.
Matt Dolman:
Agreed. I want to be approachable to my clients. Even when I meet my clients in the office where it’s the first time or the sixth time, 10th time, it doesn’t matter, this is about as dressed up as I’m ever going to be unless I’m in a courtroom. But right now, I’m wearing a jacket and a shirt and jeans. Usually, I’ll wear a shirt and jeans. I never want to be too dressed up and too formal for my clients that they look at me as somebody who’s stuffy and unapproachable, and that’s really important, actually. I can’t tell you how many clients will tell me even from the jump that, “Matt, you seem like a very approachable guy, the kind of guy I can have a beer with,” and that’s how I want to be. I want them to feel safe and that they can approach me at all hours, that they don’t have to run through a bunch of staff members or a gauntlet of just individuals and hurdles and impediments to getting ahold of me on the phone or getting ahold of me in person and meeting me.
Judd Shaw:
Way to create a connection. See, even by what you wear can set the tone for how a client or a potential client feels. Generally, at the end of your interview, I know on our intakes, it all depends on at the end, does this person feel safe and comfortable having you represent them? I had heard one of your clients had mentioned by way of a testimonial that, “Matt Dolman understands the human aspect,” and that really hit me. I thought, “Wow, that’s … ” She, I think, even used the word connected and felt that from the very start you could understand her situation. I think in fact that was a wrongful death case or something. She had lost her husband, and really terrible situation. I’m wondering, again, how much of your history, your past, your ability to connect with that client helped land what I’m sure was a seven-figure case or plus?
Matt Dolman:
Yeah, and I think I know what’s what case you’re talking about a lot of my personality. But it’s a lot of it also goes down to, I think about this at a granular level. Even when I sit down with my client for the first time, or again for the 10th time, I use a lot of self-effacing humor too. Even in the darkest hour, you have to have a little bit of levity to take the person, make them just understand and be comfortable that you’re just a human being just like them. I’ll talk about my flaws and mistakes. The fact that I spent an hour this morning looking for my keys when they’re in my pocket, and I was having a meltdown.
I don’t want them thinking that I think I’m perfect or my shit doesn’t stink. I want them to realize I’m just a normal human being with the same problems that you have. I just happen to go to law school, doesn’t make me any better smarter than you are. I want them to realize that I am approachable, but also I’m not infallible, that I make mistakes and that we can do this together. I don’t want them to think that there’s a relationship where I’m here and they’re here and I’m talking down to them, not to them just as compatriots or partners in an adventure together.
Judd Shaw:
I love that. So you are vulnerable and open with your clients and say, “Listen, I make mistakes too,” and that drives that connection.
Matt Dolman:
I’ve screwed up my own personal life. I’m divorced and remarried. I’m a completely different person than I was even 10 years ago. Even though I was great with my clients then, I wasn’t great in my own personal life. My ex-wife is still one of my best friends, and we get along … my partner in my business. So my point being is that, and I often talk about that, embrace that, ’cause it all ended up well for everyone involved. But I make mistakes and no different than everyone else, and I have my own share of problems,
Judd Shaw:
Humanize it. I got a case once in which I remembered she had gone to a lawyer’s office, and she described how she waited in this waiting room, she had a cast on. She then goes into the office, and the lawyer is sitting on one side of a very large ornate desk. There’s a shark tank, you can’t make this up, a little shark tank behind him with small, little, I don’t know, some sharks swimming around in this tank. She’s sitting there and the chair, as she described it, either the cushion was worn out or it was just a really low chair. So she felt that her chin had just got to the level of the desk. This came about when I asked her, “How did you come to us?” She said that she described the feeling when she walked out as being terrorized. She was fearful of the attorney. “How could I hire him if I feel like I’ll be afraid to speak to him each time? He’s up there, I’m down here.” No connection.
Matt Dolman:
That’s exactly what I try to avoid. I don’t even sit behind a desk when I meet my clients. Either it’s in the conference room, or I’m sitting at a round table in my office right now. I can just show you around here. I don’t want to turn this all the way around ’cause otherwise, everything’s going to unplug from my computer, but I’m sitting here at a round table. I will meet with them, and usually my chair is just facing theirs, and it’s just a normal casual conversation.
Judd Shaw:
So you’re intentional about it too, which is great. What are some of the other things that you’d be doing at the office that you find helps drive connections?
Matt Dolman:
Well, it’s right down to your staff. I rely on my staff to bring in cases too and it’s not an expectation, I create, I just create a nice loyal environment where I treat my staff very well. Not only being nice to them, I can’t remember the last time I’ve ever yelled a staff member. I think it’s occurred one time I watch over an issue that somebody tried to bury that could have caused a bar issue. Aside from that, I treat them the same way I want to be treated myself. We treat them to lunch twice a week. We get donuts ordered and all sorts of things that want them to love where they go to work.
No one wants to hate showing up to the same place every day. If they enjoy where they come to work and it’s nice and collegial, they’re going to be first, better employees. No one works well under fear or a place that they hate every day or they checked out, but two, they’re more likely to be like brand evangelists. They’re going to tell others about how great it is that the Dolman Law Group, they love working here. Matt’s great to not only his staff, but also to vendors and obviously his clients, and it just gets around. We get clients, they’re referred to us by vendors on a regular basis as well.
Judd Shaw:
That’s so great. Most of the time we’re always talking about creating raving fans out of our clients. Often, we forget that we could have 1, 10, 2400, whatever team members who could also be raving fans of the company themselves.
Matt Dolman:
Your vendors, the people that whether you advertise through them, the companies that use for court reporters, how you treat anyone is how you treat everyone. How you do one thing is how you do everything. It’s just consistency across the board. If you’re consistent in a way you conduct yourself towards others and you’re actually decent human being, you’re not a scumbag, you’re not an asshole, you don’t talk down to people, you’re not condescending, it comes across. They will remember that and they will be happy to refer you work so long as you’re competent.
Judd Shaw:
I love how you talked about your team when we’re talking about connections as well, because you’re right, the Matt Dolman way is only able to grow and scale if you can teach everybody else that, and everybody else treats a client like Matt Dolman would be, so you’re walking around mirroring that behavior at the office. On the front line now, you have a team who are representing not only you, but the company name. What are some of the things that you’re doing at the office to help create connections with your team?
Matt Dolman:
We could do more team building exercises, I guess, but we have just, whether we order in donuts or pizza, we’re all sitting together. It’s hard to always get the entire staff together or the entire team of attorneys. That’s difficult, just being that everyone has just a different calendar and there’s so many different things going on in a given day. But more often than not, at least a dozen of us, it’s not always the same people, it varies, that we all feel comfortable grabbing lunch together or sitting down together downstairs at the conference room and just chatting.
Whether it’s about the news of the day or keeping it light and talking about our children or issues that we’re seeing in the office or things we can do to improve, that dialogue happens on a regular basis. I try to foster that and that’s what helps build a more of a team environment. Are we perfect at that? No, we could definitely improve. I think we should do more team exercises, especially during off hours. I used to be much better about it, but you get busy. But I think that helps foster a nice environment here at the firm.
Judd Shaw:
Originally from New York, Matt, Huh? You miss it?
Matt Dolman:
The food, yeah. Not saying the food’s bad in Tampa, it’s definitely not bad. But there’s more ethnicities, more diverse population up in New York, so certain ethnic cuisines were better up there, much better. I love the weather here. I miss the change of seasons. I missed the snow, seeing it, not necessarily driving in it. The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence, but I do love Florida, don’t get me wrong. I don’t like where the state is trending, at least not getting into politics, but getting into tort reform’s bad for us and our practice, but it is what it is. For years, Florida lawyers thought their shit didn’t stink and we thought we were much better than everyone else. It’s not that we were better, we just had an easier system.
I think the lawyers are trying to realize that now, that we have now the same problems everybody else in the country has. So it’s not, “Woe is me,” but, “We got to figure this one out.” But I do miss New York to an extent, but people tend to be a lot nicer here in Tampa, Florida ’cause most of the folks here are from the Midwest where the East Coast of Florida gets New York and New Jersey transplants. Here, we got individuals that come down from Chicago, Kansas City, Missouri, just all along the Midwestern corridor, they come down here. The people, they’re more friendly, more eye contact, less likely to be jerks. Some of the best qualities I have in terms of I’m up front, you know where I stand at all times, I wear emotions on my sleeve, that’s being a New Yorker. But then what comes with that, and over the years, I’ve chipped away at a lot of that is being a jerk. I’m not saying everybody from New York’s a jerk. That’s painting with a very fine brush, but that behavior’s more accepted up there than it is down here.
Judd Shaw:
I’ll have a shameless plug here if you want to visit sterlingtheknight.com. We’re working on a project now trying to help teach empathy to kids, particularly kindergarten, first, second, third, fourth grade. I don’t know the ages, but that’s why such a passion of mine right now is talking about connections and empathy, because I think that when your team feels safer in their work environment, they’re more productive, more work gets done. When your clients feel safer with your service, you generally have a more satisfied client, avoid problems. Even when your kids feel connected to dad at home, everybody feels a little bit better.
So talking about connections with you, Matt, has just been such a great pleasure because I knew that from what I had just seen from the great clients that you have represented in Florida and really just hit some great results right out of the park, I was just so curious as to whether as to that background that I had had learned about had such an impact on how well you’re doing today. It’s awesome. Yeah, man. Matt, I know that you have many offices throughout Florida, a primary office, I think, in Clearwater headquarters and multiple offices throughout the state of Florida. How do the good people of Florida contact you if they are in need of your help?
Matt Dolman:
Sure. They can reach me via email at Matt, M-A-T-T @dolmanlaw, D like in David, O-L-M-A-N-L-A-W.com. They can call my cell phone. That’s 941-961-8841 or our office, which is 833-55-CRASH.
Judd Shaw:
Tell you, man, you walk the walk. You’ve given the cell phone out, that’s really impressive. That’s awesome.
Matt Dolman:
Not that important.
Judd Shaw:
Way to build the connections, man. Matt, thank you so much for coming on today.
Matt Dolman:
Thank you very much for having me. I really appreciate it.
Judd Shaw:
I really appreciate it. For anybody out there, if you want, follow the podcast, subscribe. You’ll get updates on when new episodes coming out, and send me an email if you’d like. You can hit me up at judd@juddshawinjurylaw.com, and ask me for some swag, bring up a point of conversation you’d like to hear on the podcast, and I’ll reply. Thanks again for listening.
🎙️ Meet Your Host 🎙️
Name: Judd B. Shaw
What he does: Judd founded Judd Shaw Injury Law (JSIL) and serves as the firm’s Brand Chief. He founded the firm on the premise that clients come first. Over the years, the success he attained for his clients helped JSIL grow significantly. Judd’s clients are not just another number to him or his law firm.
Company: Judd Shaw Injury Law
Words of wisdom: “At Judd Shaw Injury Law, it’s all about high-quality representation and excellence in client service. Our clients are counting on us to win and the stakes are high. Our endless pursuit for awesomeness through our core values, the ability to WOW our clients, is in our DNA.”
🎙️ Featured Guest 🎙️
Name: Matt Dolman
Bio: Matt Dolman is a personal injury lawyer and founder of the Dolman Law Group in Clearwater, Florida. Impacted by his father’s car accident experience, Matt emphasizes empathy, connection, and customer service in his law practice. He maintains low case volumes, providing a more personal service to clients while fighting powerful insurance companies. Matt has multiple offices throughout Florida and various notable achievements in personal injury law.
Company: Dolman Law Group
🔑 Relevant Resources 🔑
- Sterling the Knight – Jumpstart a Child’s Emotional Intelligence
- David vs. Goliath: Dolman Law Firm Personal Injury Podcast
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