Episode 1: Jordan Ostroff of Jordan Law – Full Transcript

Picture a world where costs are down, profits are up, and customers are clamoring at your door you’re listening to Let’s Get Up To Business from Jordan Law. Old interviews with business owners, service providers and area experts can teach you how to create a world of success and profitability. Jordan law, we protect you and your business.

Hello, and welcome to the Jordan Law, Let’s Get Up To Business podcast. This is the first episode of the podcast. So I want to give you a little rundown of what to expect as well as some more information about us. The way that this podcast is going to work is it’s going to be targeted towards small to medium business owners. We’re going to have guests coming on ranging from accountants to tax professionals to drug tests to all sorts of things that can be ancillary benefits to a business owner, as well as also having a number of business owners come on to share their story, their tips, their tricks and information.

So, hopefully between these two things, this will be very helpful to anybody looking to open a small to medium business having open one and looking to grow or to make sure that their businesses running as best as possible. To give you a little bit about us, Jordan law where we’ve got five attorneys throughout Central Florida. Most of us are former state attorneys and PhDs with extensive trial experience and now in the firm focuses on both criminal defense and business law.

So a lot of what we’re going to talk about is going to be the intersection of those two things from our standpoint, i.e. keeping business owners out of criminal issues or explaining to them what to do when their employees get caught up in criminal issues as well as obviously, the other benefits that we’ve talked about. So again, anything from 401k plans, incorporating the business itself and some other information that we can provide along those lines.

That will also probably work in some questions from people every five to 10 episodes, as well as whatever other information comes up. So as part of our podcasts that focus on business owners, we’re going to be asking them about five to 10 standardized questions. So what I’m going to do for this first podcast is interview myself as weird as it sounds for me, I don’t know if it sounds weird for you. I’m going to ask myself those questions and then answer them myself.

So the first one is, what is your origin story? What’s been the road that’s gotten you to the 2019 version of you? For me, I grew up in South Florida. And really, I always knew I wanted to be a lawyer even before that had any idea what that actually meant. And the more that I saw what it was, the more I realized it was what I wanted. I had the chance to job shadow with a judge when I was in high school. When I got into college at UCF. I started doing the mock trial team here and then the same in law school, and I realized that that was what I liked.

You know, I was arguing with people which is what I did as a kid the entire time. My parents will vouch for that one. And then getting into law school, I had the chance to do a Certified Legal Internship. So basically, I got to be a prosecutor without a bar card. I had to have another prosecutor there. And I realized that that was just what I liked. I like being in the courtroom. I like being in trial. I like doing all those things.

And so I was at the prosecutor’s office originally for about three years. Until 2015, I opened up my own firm. And we’ve grown from, you know, just me sharing office with somebody else, to now having five attorneys two offices across multiple counties. That’s, that’s my origin story. That’s what’s gotten me to 2019.

We had, you know, as part of that switch, we also brought on business long, and I sat down and looked at what was my ideal client. And I realized that as great as it sounds, a lot of times my ideal client is myself. It’s somebody who runs a business of about 10 people. It’s someone who’s interested in networking and growing their business over the next, you know, 15 to 30 years, and it’s somebody who’s really interested in doing the right job for everybody else. As well as utilizing technology and whatever other edges we can come across in 2019, to make the best product available for a client or the best service available for a client.

So what’s the greatest flaw or mistake that you made and how did it help you get to where you are now? For me, this one’s easy. And really, I don’t even want to say that it’s a full on mistake. But it’s the biggest struggle that I brought on myself that wasn’t forced on by anybody else. About nine months into opening up my own firm, I had the opportunity to purchase an already established firm. And I went ahead and did that because I knew I wanted to grow. I knew I wanted more cases, I wanted more the ability to have more attorneys, and I thought that would kind of jump start it. The problem for me was I didn’t know I hadn’t been doing this long enough to know what I was getting into. So as simple as all of my stuff was on the Gmail and the Gmail Suite and the firm that I bought, all their stuff was on Outlook, and the Microsoft Suite

So for about three months, I was running two complete different firms with two totally different emails with everything. And I was able to kind of realize where the problems were in that and kind of see how I wanted to do things in a more modern situation and how a more established firm was doing things and merge the best of both worlds together. Took me probably about a year to get it to where I wanted. And even to some extent now, it’s still not because I’m a perfectionist, but that was definitely my biggest struggle.

And it you know, it made me who I am today because it forced me to have policies and procedures in place. It forced me to have, you know, consistency across a larger caseload. It forced me to be able to, you know, do the right thing for each individual case, even when you have more clients. And it’s really shaped a lot of how we run our firm now, where, you know, we’ve got five attorneys, we’ve got actually fewer staff than we have an attorney. So we’re a very attorney focused firm. A lot of that comes from seeing the things that I saw that I wanted to do when I was a solo, to be able to bring them into a larger firm.

So how did you get into the industry that you’re in? Obviously, I mean, I hope every lawyer got in their industry by going to law school. I mean, I know “Suits” is a pretty popular show but I don’t know that that actually happens. So for me, I went to law school in Orlando, I came up here to go to the University of Central Florida for undergrad stayed here to go to Barry University.

I just I fell in love with Orlando. I tell everybody that in our town, we kind of get to cheat. We’ve got just over 2 million people in Orlando but or the Orlando area, but because we’ve got Disney and Universal and SeaWorld we have access to much better opportunities than a lot of similarly sized cities have. So you know, that’s the Body’s exhibit. It’s the Book of Mormon. It’s Hamilton. It’s all these shows that come to as a relatively small town. Like our the Orlando area.

So for me, my last semester of law school, as I said, I interned at the State Attorney’s Office, my exit interview is my job interview. So after I passed the bar, I call them you know, they told me that the next time they had a bought open it would be mine. And then after a little over three years there decided it was time to make the jump and open up my own firm, and expand out from just doing criminal law to now, you know, criminal business and some other sort of stuff that we have based upon each attorney doing, you know, to two or three different areas of law. What sets us apart from our competitors? One, I think, again, we’re an attorney heavy firm.

So we’ve got five attorneys, we’ve got four staff members, that means that in theory, I’ve got more hours to dedicate to attorneys doing the work as opposed to a lot of other firms. You’re looking at, you know, one or two and three attorneys and maybe having six or seven or 10 staff members. And so you’ve got almost three times as much work happening from the staff than you do from the attorneys. The other thing that sets us apart, especially from any sort of litigation type firm, there’s always gonna be a lot of time spent in court, whether it’s criminal cases, business cases, family law cases, there’s a number of court hearings that have to happen and the unfortunate reality is most attorneys have to take cases across several different counties.

So you know you’re hiring an attorney to do a business litigation matter. They may have a couple of cases in Polk County a couple of cases in Volusia County, a couple of cases in Brevard. And there’s always those one or two days where you just have to be everywhere at once. So our firm by having two offices across Central Florida and by having five attorneys can really focus on not wasting so much time driving.

Because what I can do is I can send one attorney to Osceola, who’s going to do all the Osceola cases I can send one attorney devolution is going to do all the Volusia County cases I can send one attorney to provide he’s going to do all the Brevard County cases and we can have one or two attorneys stay in Orlando to meet with clients finish up the other work through the Orlando court hearings, make sure that the right documents are everywhere.

Those are the two biggest things that set us apart from our competition. The last one along those things is we’re a paperless firm, you know everything gets scanned in and some paper gets saved but everything ultimately is available through our system based upon having multiple offices in multiple counties with attorneys in multiple courtrooms, we want to make sure that all of our documents are at least accessible through the internet.

So what are the three biggest mistakes you see other business owners making? And how would you recommend they fix them? For me, I think the biggest issues that I see from people are looking at things short-sighted Lee, a lot of attorneys, usually government attorneys, you know, state attorneys or something along those lines there. They’re going to look at this case as the end all be all.

And so from that, a lot of people will burn bridges, on every case over the dumbest things. Now, obviously, we have an ethical obligation to zealously represent our clients. So there are definitely situations where we have to burn a bridge on that case because it’s ethically the right thing to do. But in a lot of the smaller matters. It’s better for each individual client and future clients to build a relationship with opposing counsels, with judges with whom it is, so that you have that to us later.

You know, I tell people, we try to always be very friendly with opposing counsel as much as possible so that when a situation comes up, that’s an emergency, they’re more likely to take our calls faster, they’re more likely to respond to our emails quickly. You know, it’s not something where I can say that we’re going to get a better deal than anybody else. Because I don’t know that that’s the case. But when you have that relationship with somebody, it’s easier to get access to them.

You know, if you come into that relationship, where you come into that phone call, having a better relationship with that person, you know, it’s a phone call that you want to make. So if you’ve got to make five phone calls that day, most people are going to want to make the phone calls that are going to end up better than the ones that they’re going to hate. So if you have the reputation as being somebody that aggravates everybody, you’re going to be the last phone call. And that’s not what we want for our clients, especially again, when it’s an emergency. Another big mistake that I see people doing is doing things solely because that’s the way they’ve always done them. I think that’s the worst answer that you can ever give anybody as to why do we do it this way?

The answer being we’ve always done it that way. So at our firm, we are constantly trying to do things in a better way, in a more efficient way, in a faster way for our clients, whether it’s flat fee cases or hourly billing cases, you know, if there’s a, if there’s a motion that normally took us five hours, but now that we can use technology with one of our intake systems to do that motion in two hours, we’ve saved our client three hours, or we’ve opened up three hours to do something else to focus on, you know, another case to handle another part of the situation that can’t be done quickly. So I talked to a lot of lawyers, we see a lot of firms that are still operating with, you know, searching through books, instead of using Lexus or Westlaw that don’t have an online case management system that have hard files, and then you know, if something happens, you forget to pick up a file from the office, you go to court without it as opposed to us. You know, as I said, everything’s available through the internet. That’s the thing that really helped set us apart.

The other biggest mistake that I see people making is the inability to say no, you know, I had a professor in law school, who always told me that you’re not going to get judged by the cases you take, you’re going to judge by the cases you don’t take. And so I think a lot of attorneys, I guess it really kind of goes back to the shortsightedness will take every case. You know, for us, that’s not what we want to do, we want to take the cases that are going to be the best potential results for our clients, the most worthwhile cases, the most legally significant cases and something along those lines.

And that’s not to say that we’re not going to take cases that are simply because a lot of times a simple case, you can get the best result for a client. But or not taking cases that are difficult because a lot of times those will be the ones where you can do the best legal work, but we don’t take cases just take cases. We take cases to help people to get through. They’re usually the worst part of their lives. You know, I tell everybody what we do. It’s sort of like being a mortician. You know, you never want friends and family in the office.

Because between the criminal in the business stuff, usually, somebody is coming to a what the problem you know, we do have those clients that come to us that are looking to create a business now, but most of our clients are you know, already have that business and some issue has come up or some issue has potentially come up. And sometimes it’s too late to fix it as best as possible. Now obviously, you can always well, you can usually mitigate any sort of situation if not completely fixed the issue but you know, the earlier the better for a lot of issues.

So my recommendations for fixing some of those mistakes from other people, I would immediately try to get paperless and get stuff available on the cloud so that you have access in the courtrooms and different offices from the house, etc. Also, for us, we were able to put an entire other offices into our, our Orange County building because I don’t have a giant copier and a huge file room.

You know, all of my all of our stuff is saved on Google Drive. So it’s just they are not you know, you know, on the cloud are backed up on a hard drive. And so that a lot of stuff an entire extra office and it’s relatively small, but it’s just crazy to think that beforehand somebody was utilizing, you know, a couple of hundred square feet just for a copier and a bunch of files.

What motivates me to succeed? I mean, look, the best lawyers are going to tell you, I think to be a great lawyer, you need to be vain, at least to some extent. I mean, what motivates me to succeed part of it is I hate losing you know, there’s a lot of the old football coach quotes were winning is great, but losing is way worse.

And that’s how we operate but from the same side, you know, we I also got into this because I enjoy helping people and I know that sounds very flighty or whatnot, but I just it’s so much more rewarding. Having been a prosecutor, it’s so much more rewarding now, to actually be able to see my client you know, as a prosecutor, your clients that the state of Florida, so it’s great to get a conviction. It’s great to get you to know, Justice for this victim, but they’re not my client.

You know, a lot of times they’re not interested in what I’m doing to prosecute on their behalf or something along those lines. So now you know being able to see that joy in our clients face when the case turns out the way they want when their business survives the litigation when they’re able to win the non compete issue. mean that those are the things that really motivate us is that success in that and that feedback that we get.

So let people know where they can find us and what to expect from our company. Again, it’s JordanLawFL.com, FL like in Florida, Our phone number is 407-906-5529 what to expect from our company?

You know, I’d like to say you’re going to expect the best value for your money. We’re not the cheapest, we’re not the most expensive but we try to provide the best value and some of that comes from setting up automated emails with case updates from making sure that you know a lot of our stuff is available online that our clients can you know, book consultations with us through the computer, I mean a bunch of different steps like that to try and provide the best client experience or the best customer service experience, ideally, that you’ve ever had.

You know that’s, that’s probably a crazy thing coming from a law firm, but that’s our goal. You know, I want our clients to genuinely not necessarily want to come back but to if they do need more legal services, be very happy to come back to us and send friends and family. So that’s what I hope that you’ll expect from my firm and what will deliver on is the best customer service experience.

The last question that we have and this is one we’re going to end on with everybody is what is that one piece of professional advice you’d like to give to your younger self? I think that that’s a really good question for every business owner or any potential business owner to ask themselves, because, you know, with age comes wisdom, at least hopefully.

And so it’s always interesting to see what people wish they knew when they were younger. And so the one for me and I keep coming back to this and anytime I’m asked, you know, what’s the one big tip, I always go back to this because I think it’s so important is put yourself in the clients’ shoes. You know, again, most people are coming to us in their biggest moment of need in the worst day of their life, they might lose their business, they’re getting sued for a bunch of money, they might go to jail. I mean, whatever it is.

So I think by putting yourself in your clients’ shoes, one, it helps you with empathy. You know, one, it helps you understand what they’re going through, it helps you understand why they’re aggravated, it helps you understand what their pain points are. But to I also look at it, put them put myself in my clients’ shoes from the customer service standpoint.

So one of the biggest things for us is, you know, electronically sign documents. And now since I implemented that with the firm, I just every time I buy anything, and I have to actually print it out and sign it and re scan it and send it back. I’m just sitting there like it’s so much more difficult for me it’s so much worse from the client from a client standpoint. So again, that you know putting yourself in the client shoes is everything from making the process as emotionally painless for them to making it as, you know, physically painless as possible, or at least this as smooth as possible.

And again, you know, that’s not to say that it’s always going to work out that way. Because unfortunately, when you’re dealing with the law, you know, you’ve got case law, you’ve got facts, you’ve got the history, you’ve got judges, you’ve got opposing parties, every case is going to be different based upon sometimes the smallest facts, but at least for us, you know, what we can control we try and control to make it as smooth and easy for our clients as possible. And a lot of that goes back to just, you know, roundtable and a lot of situations where all of us will sit there and table and think, hey, if I was in the client shoes, how would I want this to play out?

What sort of emails what I want? How would I want this phrase? how accessible would I want the loader to be? Those sorts of things. So that one piece of advice I wish I can give my younger self would be just always trying to put yourself in the client’s perspective or the other side’s perspective or, you know, the victims perspective.

It’s something that a lot of us lose sight on because we get focused on you know, the ability of ourselves to be so great when at the end of the day you know, we don’t matter that much what matters is the client and the client having the best experience possible and getting the best outcome possible and you know, wanting to come back and refer other people I mean, that’s what helps build a business in my opinion in the right way. So again, thank you so much for joining us.

This was the first episode of the Jordan law Let’s Get Up To Business podcast over the next couple weeks expect that we’ll have some podcasts involving some other business owners accountants, tax lawyers and some other potential service providers for some of our business owners especially with the should be breaking a little bit after taxes are due so if you’re like me, that was April 15 wasn’t the best day of your life and so we’re going to talk about some of the things that might be able to be done to help that going forward. So again, we are Jordan law FL we can be found at www dot Jordan law FL. com our phone numbers from (407) 906-5529. Just to give you a little bit of background about our firm and what we offer for business owners. We do both transactional and business litigation.

So that’s going to be everything from setting up the initial corporate paperwork, acting as Registered Agent, walk them through any sort of employment contracts, non disclosure agreements, anything along those lines that are needed before or during the existence of the business, as well as specific consultations in regards to each individual profession to prevent liability or at least limit exposure going forward. One of the things that we do that’s different from other firms is we subscribe to the model that high seas raise all boats.

So what we do is not only the legal work for clients, but we like to try and work with our clients from almost a business consulting standpoint as well trying to link them to other professionals that they need when it comes to growing their business. And that’s kind of the entire goal. This podcast is to be a mix between the legal issues that we focus on as well as seeing from some other professionals, what offer what they can offer to business owners, and then hearing the stories of a number of business owners themselves.

So between all those three things, we hope that this podcast will bring a lot of insight, guidance perspective, and really at the end of the day, peace of mind to anybody who is currently running a small to medium-sized business or plans to be running a small or medium sized business in the near future. You know, it goes back to that age-old adage, you know, stitch in time saves nine, the early bird gets the worm, etc.

However, you know, even us having run this firm for several years, still learn things every day to you know, to better our business so that we can better serve our clients, whether that’s updates on case law, whether that’s new business development ideas, whether that’s new relationships that we can build upon and help grow. So I hope that you’ll enjoy this podcast. With us being a new podcast, we would ask for a review. If you get the chance, an honest one.

Hopefully, that’s going to be a five-star review. And if you have any information or any ideas or any feedback on the podcast, please send me an email. My email is Jordan, j o r da n at Jordan law fl.com. Have a great day and I look forward to talking to you all later.

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If you are interested in being a guest on the podcast, please contact producer Mark through email at mark at Jordan law fl.com. Use this subject line podcast guests in your email. Thank you. We look forward to speaking to you again soon.