How Brett Schreiber Built a High-Growth Trial Firm (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: Well, Brett, like, first of all, thank you for doing this. This is seriously incredibly cool. I couldn't be happier for you. I have some idea, a tiny idea of the work that goes into that kind of a trial and that kind of result. But before we even get into that, tell me a little bit about Brett Schreiber.

[00:00:18] Speaker 2: I grew up in South Florida. It was actually kind of what made this trial cool, it was a bit of a coming home. But no, I grew up the son of a poor man's lawyer. My dad was a public defender. So I was brought up, in fact, there are a lot of people who say that they were born to be a trial lawyer. I was actually born because of a trial. My dad was defending a couple of guys who, you know, had allegedly murdered some people. And halfway through the trial, him and the bachelor prosecutor noticed that there was a new court reporter who took over for the second half of the trial. And they had a bet as to who could have a, get a date first.

[00:00:56] Speaker 1: This is incredible.

[00:00:57] Speaker 2: Yeah, who could get a date with the, you know.

[00:00:59] Speaker 1: You're starting off with this story. This is a great story.

[00:01:02] Speaker 2: And who could get a date with the court reporter. And my dad won the bet. And as a result, you and I are sitting here having this conversation.

[00:01:09] Speaker 1: You have got to be. That is awesome. Yeah. That is awesome. Okay. So take me back a little bit. You grew up in Miami. At some point, you decided to become a lawyer as well. Was that always in the cards or?

[00:01:22] Speaker 2: No. So I was actually, I'm at Florida State. I'm back there. And like I said, I was, you know, a writing and religion major. So I was utterly unemployable. And I knew, law school was interesting to me. I was going to go into kind of the ivory tower. I had been given a full ride to get a doctorate in human rights and ethics. And I had started this new department. And so I started doing that part time. But I had grown up in politics. My dad, as a public defender, eventually became the chief public defender, which means he got elected every four years. And when I was in Tallahassee, there's, you know, it's the capital of Florida. And so I had worked in the Democratic Party and worked with the various senators. So it was an interesting time to be around politics. And I was there. And I remember two things. One, the philosophy of human rights classes were interesting. But I remember as we would talk about these issues involving human rights, I would occasionally raise my hand and be like, well, what are we going to do about this? And they're like, do? We don't do anything. We just sit here and talk about stuff. And I was like, yeah, this is not for me. I get this thing in the mail from this school in San Diego. It's called Thomas Jefferson School of Law. And I went to this guy. His name was Skip Campbell. He was a senator. I think he went on to even become the attorney general of Florida or something. I went up to him. I said, Skip, I've known him because I've worked for him. I said, I got this thing in the mail from this school. I've never heard of it. And he goes, look. He's like, Brett, by any objective measure, I've been wildly successful as a trial lawyer. And he said, and I've tried cases all over the country, and I've never once had a judge or a jury ask me, where did I go to law school? The sage advice he shared with me, which I still remember to this day, is he goes, look. He goes, find a school where you can have some fun and get the education and minimize the damages while you're at it. And they basically gave me a free ride to go to law school. The other piece to that was it was important to me. By that time, my dad had been in politics in South Florida for 40 years. I never made a ton of money. He was a government employee. But he knew everybody. And everybody knew him. And all the judges, all the lawyers. And if I went back to South Florida and went to law school there, I was going to be Al Schreiber's kid. And there was nothing wrong with that. But that wasn't the path I wanted.

[00:03:34] Speaker 1: Okay. So you graduated, had some fun while you were at it, I assume. Yes. Absolutely. Maintained quality of life. Maintained quality of life. Incredible. At some point, did you go work for another firm? Did you start your own firm? Yeah.

[00:03:45] Speaker 2: So I worked throughout law school. And that was even a weird time. Did you really? Yeah. The ABA had rules that you're not allowed to. Right. And I was like, well, that's stupid. Right. You know, the law is an apprenticeship profession. Totally is. Right? And it never made sense to me that they actively discouraged people from getting that experience. So I worked constantly all the way through. In my third year, I got a job as a law clerk with a plaintiff's firm here in San Diego. Kind of old guard plaintiff firm. I had about 40 people, which was large for a plaintiff practice, especially in that era. And I started there and that became my only adult job. And then it got to the point five years ago, four and a half years ago, I had just turned 40. The partners who had founded that firm were all in their mid-70s. The next five years was going to look very different to each of us. You know, no knock on them, no knock on me. It was just the bend of the space-time continuum, you know, was just going to treat us both differently. And so it was time to start something new. So is Singleton Tribor only like five years old? Four and a half. Yeah, it'll be five years in January. I ported over a team of eight. Jerry had like 30 or something that were doing mass tort and fire. Like our official headcount when we started was 46. As of last week, it's at 475 in seven states. Oh my goodness. Incredible. So I mean, we've 10x'ed in the last four and a half years.

[00:04:57] Speaker 1: You have 475 employees. Yeah. That is... Across seven states. That is a lot. It is. You and I have spoken about this. The first time I thought, oh, I really like this guy was when we met over Zoom. I don't know. A year and a half ago, something like that. And you told me about the culture in your firm. And what had happened is one of our sales guys had flagged me, he's like, this Brett guy is like really interesting. You should just talk to him. So he puts me on the phone with you and you tell me about the culture of your firm and the way you treat people. Look, nothing against our amazing profession. And by the way, 100% of what you've said so far, like the law is almost in some sense like the applied engineering of like of society. Like we get to actually fix things. It's incredible. So I couldn't agree with you more about the power of being a lawyer, but lawyers are not necessarily known for treating their employees phenomenally well. That's not the brand. Right. How have you done that?

[00:05:50] Speaker 2: I think being very intentional about it. I think we have very much, look, to be a plaintiff lawyer and to do it at the scale and size that we are doing it, you have to have an exceedingly high risk tolerance about you. And so with that has to come the courage to be willing to fail. I always tell people it's not, don't be afraid to fail, but be terrified of regret. That is really kind of baked into the ethos of what we do. Like my people know that they can make a mistake and it's not going to be a lot of like finger wagging as long as the decision was made with the best interest of the client and the best interest of the firm in mind. I learned a lot from the firm I was with for 16 years, but I really learned a lot, just like anything in law, you learn a lot about what to do, but I've learned way more from watching other lawyers and how not to do things, how not to run a business, how not to take a deposition, how not to cross-examine a witness. It's just like trial. I learned way more from my losses than I do from my wins.

[00:06:55] Speaker 1: Right. But that is truly unique. I mean, to this day, I think you're the only, I mean, FileLine has something like 6,000 law firms and I don't know that there's a single one that does it, at least not quite like that.

[00:07:05] Speaker 2: So a friend of mine, when we started the company four years ago, four and a half years ago, I had a friend of mine who had scaled a tech company and sold it for a kabillion dollars. And I asked her, I said, looking back, what was the moment where you look back and you're like, that was either the right decision. And what she said was she's like 60 people was this fulcrum point where I needed a full C-suite, the CIO, the CTO, the CFO, the CEO, every frigging C under the sun. Right. And we hit that in the first nine months. And then we did that. So when you bring in people, and I think that is something that has been different about our approach, right, is you bring in people who are looking at process improvements and systems and ways to optimize. And lawyers just don't do that.

[00:07:50] Speaker 1: Right.

[00:07:50] Speaker 2: So having a group of people who are singularly focused on ensuring the trains run on time and the back end is there and the operations are there and the systems are there and all of that. Because again, you have the risk tolerance that we have. We're kind of pirates. Right. We're kind of lone wolves a lot of times. And then to have people, I think we've touched on this before, too. It's I always say, I don't need people to answer my questions. I need people to question my answer.

[00:08:15] Speaker 1: I do think you are doing things in a pretty different way. There are a lot of good trial lawyers or at least trial lawyers who've had a lot of success that don't do it that way. Do you think you need one for the other? In other words, does your success as a firm and a great firm culture, is that making you a better trial lawyer or are the two not related?

[00:08:37] Speaker 2: I think it does because especially for my teams that run the trials and really for everybody because I made a point of that when we did our first all hands after the Tesla verdict, right? I let everybody know whether you're on the mail team or answering the phone or an IT, you play a role in this. Every one of you, even the ones of you who are not client facing, right? You play a role in this. And I know sometimes it's hard to see that, but that's why we got to celebrate those wins and talk about our losses and figure out ways to get better. I've got some people who, I mean, they would gnaw their own arm off if they had to get the case to where it needs to be because they are just that firmly committed to the cause.

[00:09:20] Speaker 1: The grit and determination that the practice of law takes at that level is just, it's extraordinary. I think a lot of people don't realize just how intense it can be.