Ben Bengston on Client Communication | The AICA Podcast Ep. 3

Jeff Shaw (00:00)

Welcome to the AICA podcast. I’m Jeff. And today we are excited to welcome Ben Bengtson on as our guest. Ben founded Bob Law, the law firm of Benjamin O Bengtson in 2014. He specializes in motor vehicle accidents, slip and fall incidents, and other general negligence claims. Ben grew up in rural North Dakota and California, two very similar states, as the son of a Lutheran pastor, very cool.

And after high school, Ben enlisted in the U S army where he served for four years in army intelligence as an Arabic linguist. How many of those do we know? This is my first while serving in the army. Ben also found time to coach gymnastics in Evans, Georgia, further developing his skills as both a teacher and a mentor in 2002, Ben attended Georgia state university college of law.

And no surprise after that bio graduated near the top of his class in 2005. So Ben, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for joining us.

Benjamin Bengtson (01:03)

Hey, thanks a lot, Jeff. I really appreciate you having me on.

Jeff Shaw (01:06)

Absolutely. So let’s dive in. Personal injury law, very unique. What drew you into that particular practice of the law?

Benjamin Bengtson (01:16)

Well, when I graduated from law school, I was just looking for a job. I wasn’t ranked. I ended up doing very well, but because I was a part-time student, I never got a summer internship or anything like that. So I just wanted to find a job anywhere. And I found a job working as a defense attorney, insurance defense attorney, ⁓ at Swift Curry, which is a great, great law firm. They’re very well respected in the community.

And at the time they said, hey, we’ve got this opening for a workers comp attorney. You want to do that? I’m like, yeah, sure. That sounds great. And so I did. I started representing insurance companies and employers and work injury claims. And eventually, after a while, I learned that I was not cut out to be, you know, I’m not really a B to C person, right? I’m not business to, sorry, B to B person.

I’m not business to business person. I’m a consumer person. Like my natural inclination is to talk to clients, to individuals, and to help shepherd them through what is often a really confusing and overwhelming process. And I was a workers’ comp attorney for a long time. And then when I started my own practice in 2014, I said, you know, I’m kind of done with workers’ comp.

I want to represent people in personal injury claims. I want to be a trial lawyer. I want to go in front of juries and ⁓ argue my client’s case and things like that. So I started my journey and my former law firm that I worked for helped me get started. And I started doing personal injury work and just have loved it. Interesting kind of tidbit about the difference between workers comp and personal injury is that, know, in workers compensation, if you’re injured on the job, right, you you’re entitled to medical care that they pay for directly, right, but it’s with doctors you kind of don’t want like necessarily you wouldn’t choose. Now, AICA is different. I can just put a plug in for you all because you all do take workers comp, work injury clients, and you’re fair, which is, I mean, to be honest, it’s refreshing to have ⁓ doctors who are fair and at least not super biased one way or another. so in but in workers comp in work in work injury claims, you pretty much have to do whatever they tell you. And you’re dependent on the employer and their insurance company to send you a check every week that you miss from work. And if you don’t get that check, you’re kind of at their mercy. And the and so there’s a there’s a lot of like helplessness that’s built into the workers comp system where if you’re injured on the job, you’re just kind of like you’re just subject to Somebody else telling you what you can do and what you can’t do in contrast in a personal injury claim. I get to tell my client. Hey look Everything that happens we’ve got to do it right? There’s nobody giving us permission There’s nobody telling us what we can do what we can’t do. We’ve got to do it. We’ve got to orchestrate it We’ve got to get medical treatment.

We’ve got to find some way to finance the medical treatment and then bank on the fact that at the end we’re going to get a recovery and be able to pay all of that back. It’s almost like this little business, right? It’s almost like a joint venture that we’re saying, hey, look, we’ve got to get your medical treatment done and we’ve got to orchestrate it. And that’s a whole different, Jeff, it’s a whole different, it’s a whole, it’s almost spiritually different, right?

where you as the person injured, yes, you got injured, it’s not your fault and this other person is responsible, but we’re orchestrating everything that needs to be done to make sure that you get a fair recovery. We do it together, which is very different from workers’ comp. So I became a lot happier being a personal injury attorney because I was able to shepherd my clients through that process of, look, I can show you how it gets done and carry you through that process. So that’s kind of the long-winded version of how I got into personal injury practice. I found it very rewarding.

Jeff Shaw (05:14)

That’s great. I mean, you can hear it when you talk about it. The passion just bubbles up. awesome. So I mean, know, you know, just knowing a bit about your firm, you guys have been growing, obviously the personal injury space, especially in the Metro Atlanta area. There’s a lot of folks that practice in it. A lot of hands raised for clients, know, we’re here, pick us. So how have you guys at Bob Law carved out your unique space in personal injury?

Benjamin Bengtson (05:48)

Well, we’ve done it in like three different ways one is that we build a partnership with our clients, right? Where we say hey look, you know to be honest like with rare exceptions the personal injury the process of getting a recovery in a personal injury claim It’s really not that complicated, right? But it is tedious and it’s a and it’s a lot of steps, right?

A lot of steps doesn’t mean complicated, it just means a lot of work, right? And so what we found was that we really only liked working with the clients that we liked. And so we’ve won when we make decisions about who we represent, I spend most of my attention not focused on whether there’s clear liability, not focused on the extent of the property damage, not focused on any of those things. I’m focused on you as a person.

Because ultimately, if I’m going to engage with you as a person, and I’m going to be your partner in this, I don’t actually know what’s going to happen, Jeff. Right? I can make some predictions, but I don’t know if the other side is going to fight us on liability. I don’t know if they’re going to say it was my client’s fault and not the other person’s fault. All I know is that when I’ve engaged with you as a client, I’m committing to you as a person. And that means it doesn’t matter if it’s hard. It doesn’t matter if like, you know, the insurance company denied liability. good. Like, I’m never ever going to just flunk on a client and say, sorry, it’s too hard. I’m not going to, I’m not going to pursue your case. because of that, we’re super careful about who we represent because I could be representing you if you’re, if you’re on the phone with me, I could be representing you for three or four or five years. If the, if the going gets really tough and that’s a long time to be representing somebody in a partnership with somebody who don’t like.

Right. so I, God knows I’ve been in partnerships that made me miserable. Right. I don’t like I’m old enough in my, in my career that I’m not picky about the case I choose. I’m picky about the person I choose. And that’s what’s important. Right. And because of that, we have this, we’ve, we’ve committed to that being how we choose our clients. And because of that, we have good people that we represent. And because of that,

At the end, we have happy people and those happy people tell everybody else about how wonderful and how wonderful we are. But like, mean, about our commitment level, right? You can look at our Google reviews and see we’ve got, you know, almost 600, you know, five star Google reviews. And it’s because people really actually like us. The second part of that is that I firmly believe so one is commitment.

Right, that first kind of element is I’m gonna engage with you as a person and I’m gonna commit to your case, I’m gonna commit to you as a person and we’re gonna go through this together. And the second part is communication, all right. We firmly believe that, you know, there’s an ethical rule that governs attorneys and many of us follow it, but there are plenty of people, there are plenty who don’t. And that is that we are to keep our clients reasonably informed as to their case so that they can make decisions about their case. And unfortunately, there’s some, you mentioned it, like every Tom, Richard and Harold out there is like, yeah, I’m a personal injury attorney, but not everyone has that same commitment to like informing our clients, particularly about what’s happening in their case. And so we, about three or four years ago, we just kind of engaged in this commitment to our clients of being like brutally accountable to our clients and saying, listen, we’re going to write you a letter that says in writing, here’s our opinion about liability. Here’s our opinion about damages. Here’s our opinion about how much coverage there is. And then we took it one step further and we said, hey, listen, nobody does this. We’re going tell you what the value is. Right. We’re going tell you what the value is before we ever, ever send a demand so that you never wonder whether we’re telling you to settle your case because of how much the insurance company offered. We’re going to tell you in advance, look, the value is between five and $10. And if we get an offer in that range and we think it’s the best offer, we’re going to pressure you to settle your case. But if not, we’re going to pressure you to let us keep pushing until we get what the value is supposed to be. That commitment level and that communication, I thought when we first started that, Jeff, that we were going to have egg on our face.

Benjamin Bengtson (10:30)

Like, my gosh, what if it’s wrong? What if the value really is three or four or whatever? But I’ve never had to walk it back. And the magic thing that happened was as soon as we put it in the universe, right? It has to be reasonable. It can’t be imaginary. You can’t say, he’s got $10 in medical treatment and he’s been in pain and suffering for five days and we’re asking for a million dollars. We know that that’s not reasonable.

Benjamin Bengtson (10:58)

But once we stuck our stick in the ground and said, look, this is what it is, you know what? We got it. We would just not stop until we got it. And eventually, now the insurance companies just kind of know. When we say, look, it’s got to be this, they just know we’re not going to stop until we get it. So those are the two things that we’ve really kind of done radically different that we think.

Benjamin Bengtson (11:23)

that help us kind of distinguish ourselves in a really saturated market. Did I talk too long? Sorry. I just get so excited about this that I want to talk about it. Anyways, go ahead.

Jeff Shaw (11:28)

so good. Well, no.

I love it. And I think it’s a great segue into talking a little more about client management and the reality of, you know, when you’ve been in something like a motor vehicle accident, it’s one of the potentially worst seasons of your life. You’re navigating being potentially carless, right? And you’re in pain and you’re navigating this process that maybe you’ve never had to navigate before. You’re dealing with people when they’re under stress. And so can you expound a bit on your firm’s kind of culture and philosophy toward client management?

Benjamin Bengtson (12:14)

Yeah, so the first thing is that I personally talk to all of our clients and we make a plan. The second thing is that we say things, I want to say brutally honestly, but we say things in plain English that explain to our clients exactly the kind of mess that they’re in, right? Let me give you an example. I tell my clients, hey listen, here’s the thing. In all civil case, pretty much all civil cases, right?

The rule is that we, as the person who got injured, we have to absorb all of our losses. And then at the end, the fancy term that we use is we get indemnified. Right. But the plain, simple version of that is we have to suck it up and absorb all of the losses and then settle up at the end after we’ve bottled it all up. That’s really tough because in order to do that, we have to find some way to pay for all of the medical treatment that we need in order to demonstrate how injured and to get better, right? But that’s not different than any other civil case there is. I had a contractor that came in and did work in my basement and messed up my basement, I would have to hire a different contractor and pay the new contractor to fix it and then take the first contractor to court and say, this is how much it cost me to fix it. That’s just how our law works. Right. And once I explain that to clients and they get it, then it’s just a matter of, okay, how are we going to get this done? Right. How are we going to orchestrate this? Obviously, Mr. Bob, Mr. Ben. Did you know the story about that, by the way? But what’s called the Bob law firm? I’ll tell you in a second. There’s a Mr. Bob, you know, Mr. Ben, like

You obviously have been through this before. How are we going to do that? like, hey, look, it’s like this. Boom, boom, boom. And then instead of using technical terms like this treatment provider is going to treat you on a lien, which means nothing to anybody, right? Is we tell them, hey, look, you remember I was telling you about how you have to absorb all of your losses. You have to find some way to pay for it. So there are medical providers that will loan you medical treatment, right? And people understand loan you medical treatment.

I’m going to treat on a tab, right? They understand that. And so once they understand, ⁓ right, anytime that I’m getting something on a loan, it’s going to kind of cost me a little bit more. Right. And also, by the way, we use that same terminology and the same language with insurance companies. Insurance companies push back and they say, hey, look, this medical provider you used, we think that their medical bills are higher than they than than normal. And we say, really?

How do you figure they say well, you know, these medical bills are supposed to be $200 I’m like, is that the cash value or is that the is that the loaned value? Is that the finance value? Right, right they know like they made these rules. I’m just working with them. Anyways, so the the story about the Bob Law Firm is that um, It’s just mine. It’s just my initials the B the B OB My last name is this really weird Swedish last name and it’s got a bunch of letters in there you can’t really say in the correct order or spell it if you wanted to. So anytime that somebody tries to Google me they would never be able to find me. Like I had a friend Jeff who literally I had known for 10 years and after I started my own practice he called me and said I cannot find you on the bar directory anywhere. When I’m like dude did you spell my name right? And he didn’t and so that’s why we chose the Bob Law Firm it’s just my initials B-O-B.

And it’s also kind of funny, right? The Bob Law Firm and the Bob Law Blog and all that stuff. 

Jeff Shaw (16:00)

Yeah, when

I was introducing you, almost caught myself welcoming you as Bob. I get…

Benjamin Bengtson (16:04)

Yes, Bob.

It’s funny. have a, um, yeah, I have, I have a hat. I have a hat that I wear around. It says Bob.

Jeff Shaw (16:18)

Love it.

A lot of exciting stuff that you have done and are continuing to do, what’s on the horizon for Bob Law? What are you guys envisioning for the immediate and long-term future?

Benjamin Bengtson (16:31)

Well, we’re growing. We’re doing it like in a very measured way. We don’t like to advertise. We’re just like growing by building our base of fans, right? And we’re continuing to build our system. We think that our system is different, right? We think that… ⁓

There’s kind of a bigger philosophical thing that’s going on here. And that is like, I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, Jeff, but there’s kind of a little dysfunction in the personal injury world. just saying like there’s lawyers suffer from a pretty bad reputation, right? And the bad reputation is that we don’t talk to people. We don’t talk to our clients. And we’re just kind of in it for the money. I aim to change that.

Benjamin Bengtson (17:14)

I want to change that narrative by offering, basically by taking our system and kind of bottling it up and putting it on a platform, putting on a software platform and offering it to other personal injury attorneys so that they can have that same kind of commitment level. I’ll be honest, like there’s a couple things about lawyers. To be fair to lawyers, we’re not really chosen for our people skills.

The greatest of us are really good orators and really good trial lawyers, but that’s a very small subsection of lawyers who do personal injury work. For the most part, the way they identify us is our problem-solving skills, right? The LSAT, the law school aptitude test, They give us tests, our ability to think critically and to solve problems, not to talk to people.

Right? And so, and so that that’s the system that we grew up through is identifying you as a problem solver. And so a lot of times when we graduate from law school and we’re and we’re getting down to our first job, we’re like, hey, give me a really good problem to solve. Right. They say, hey, go talk to that client. No, no, no. I don’t want to talk to the client. I want the problem. Right. And so you’ll hear it in discourse when lawyers are talking. They don’t we talk about we have I catch myself sometimes too. We talk about how interesting cases we have and what interesting problems we have. And it’s dissociated from the client, right? And what I want to do is change that. I want to change our industry so that it’s focused on having a good client experience, right? We suffer from a bad reputation because we generally, like the perception is, and sometimes for very good reason, that we don’t treat our clients very well. And that’s not acceptable.

Benjamin Bengtson (19:00)

We need to change that. And so that’s what we’re doing. We’re taking this system that we’ve built here and we’re preparing it so that it can be used by any attorney. You say, listen, if you want to have good, happy clients, use this system, right? So that your clients know what’s going on and they’re participating with you. The second part about lawyers, know, part of the reason we don’t like to talk on the phone with clients.

and this is a very practical thing, is because usually the organizational system that we have makes it so it’s kind of hard to figure out what’s going on with a case because there’s just stuff, like in the folder, we don’t spend a lot of energy on organization. And the reason is because some of that energy is wasted, right? Organization is wasted. I need to be focused on results, not on organization.

If I was focused on organization, I’d be a CPA or whatever, right? But I’m trying to get results. And so if client’s calling and saying, hey, I want to know this, it kind of takes a lot of energy to sit down with a file and say, okay, what’s going on in here, right? And I have to stop everything in order to do that. So what we’ve done at the Bob Law Firm is we’ve said, hey, listen, it’s just a small example, I’ll tell my clients this, listen.

I love you. But if you call, I’m not going to answer the phone. And if you try and leave a message, you can’t. I don’t have voicemail. And if you somehow convince one of my staff members to put a post-it note with your phone number and your name on my desk, I won’t call you back. I am a lawyer. But here’s the commitment I’ll have to you. If you want to talk, we’re going to schedule a conference call. We’re going schedule a meeting on the phone.

And I’m going to call you. And you know what? When I call, I’m going to know what’s going on in your file. Right. Because I’ll be preparing for that phone call. Make sure you answer the phone when I call. But that’s your that’s your designated time. The worst time in the world that this is just a public service announcement to all plaintiffs out there that have lawyers. The worst time in the world to talk to your lawyer is when you’re calling. Honestly, because, know, in order for me to keep the lights on, you see my lights are off, that’s just for aesthetic purposes, but to keep the lights on, I have to take more than one client, right? And because of that, we’re constantly having to be working on things all at the same time, but if you’re calling out of the blue, I’m not thinking about your case. Your lawyer is not thinking about your case. Just make an appointment, right? So the lawyer can be prepared to have a conversation about it.

If there’s one thing that’s radically changed our practice, that. It’s that I tell my clients, look, I’m super glad to talk to you. I want to talk to you. We need to make plans about your case, but it’s going to be Tuesday at 2:15, right? And so, yeah, that is what’s on the horizon for us. Thank you for asking. I’m super glad about it.

Jeff Shaw (21:58)

Well, I think even with what you were just saying, you know, if it’s about, set an appointment and I’ll be ready, but that also means you can count on the fact that I’m not going to be looking at calls from other people coming in at the same time or Post-it notes getting stuck on my, you know, when you have, when I’m, yeah.

Benjamin Bengtson (22:15)

Yeah. I’m not going to be staring at my email while you’re talking, right? Like this is your time. Yeah. Well, I’ll actually, we have that system so well orchestrated now that I’ll talk to 46, 47, 50 clients in the span of three days, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, my office hours. But what that also does, Jeff, is it allows me in those other hours to be working, right?

so that I’m not interrupted by phone calls, right? So yeah, it makes it, like I hardly ever get, well I don’t get bar complaints, but I don’t get complaints about communication because my clients know, you can talk to me just like at the appointment time.

Jeff Shaw (22:59)

Great. Okay. Let’s close with this one. This has been something I’ve, I’ve really been enjoying hearing responses to you. So in your long practice of law now, what is one of your most memorable moments or craziest stories that you’ve seen unfold?

Benjamin Bengtson (23:16)

We’ll call it the client Jane. Like there are very few, we have a couple of checks that we have made copies of and we framed and we put on our wall in the other room in our trophy room.

But they’re not the multi hundred thousand dollar checks, not the million dollar check, they’re not the five hundred thousand dollar check. It’s a check that we got for twenty one thousand dollars and another check that we got for forty three hundred dollars and another check that we got for fifty six hundred dollars. The reason those are framed is because the insurance companies in those cases said we are never paying you a dime. And we said, guess what? I think you are. And I’ll tell you a quick story about Jane.

So when she came to us, she had turned left into a neighborhood from a two-lane highway. And there was another car coming around the bend. was kind of a, not a blind turn, but it was hard to see that far. But my client was required to yield the right of way. She was turning left and this other lady was coming. She was coming pretty fast.

And they had an accident and the police, you know, cited my client and we talked to Jane and we, you know, when I initially talked to her, I just really liked her. It just kind of goes back to, you know, focusing on who you’re representing and your commitment to the person. And I told her, said, look, Jane, really have a terrible case.

And she’s like, I know, I know, I know. But I really feel like the other lady was going like too fast. I should have been able to see her like, and I said, well, okay, well, let’s just pursue it and see what happens. Right. And so we all, sent a demand to the insurance company and said, we’re bupkis. We are paying you nothing. Right. Your client was at fault. Jane was at fault. We’re not paying a dime. It was, you know, it was her fault. We said, so I talked to Jane about it again. 

And like, what do you think of this? She goes, yeah, I mean, I can totally see how like what their position is. I said, well, you know, I feel like there’s at least some chance that it’s a 51%, 49 % situation, right? Let’s just file a lawsuit, right? Let’s see what happens. And so we filed a lawsuit and the defense attorney called me up and just laughing. He’s like, there’s no way you’re ever going to get it done. And blah, blah, blah, blah.

And so I was like, okay, well, you I get it. We know, we totally understand how we can lose, right? And that’s our mantra in this office. you make this, it may be the thing that needs to be framed up here. If you haven’t figured out how you can lose, you haven’t done enough figuring. There’s a way, right? So, so finally the defense attorney took Jane’s deposition and, she was the most nice, incredibly sweet lady in her deposition.

And ⁓ I remember this like it was yesterday. The defense attorney said, now, Miss Jane, do you think that you could have done something differently to avoid this accident? And she says, yeah, really think I probably could have waited longer. And it was just so disarmingly honest. Like, yeah, I could have waited longer. But I just didn’t expect that this lady would be coming so fast the other direction. But she was just so, she was just like crushingly honest.

Benjamin Bengtson (26:42)

And then the next week they called us and said, we can offer you $17,000. And we’re like, no, it’s got to be 25. And we ended up settling it for $21,000. ⁓ But that’s the microcosm of, I don’t want to advertise myself as the person who handles contested liability cases. But what we found is that if we’re honest with our clients about what they have.

Benjamin Bengtson (27:07)

and they get it and they understand what the odds are, there are a lot of times that we can just, we can figure it out, we can outline it, we can get a recovery that’s fair. But that’s kind of the, that’s my favorite story to tell because it’s about sitting and just kind of believing in your client, believing that there’s an outcome that’s possible.

Jeff Shaw (27:28)

Love that story. And I think too, there’s this idea that if there’s anything that’s unfavorable, we got to figure out how to twist it or misrepresent it. And to your point is like, no, yeah, like let’s, let’s just be honest and authentic. And, and that actually probably worked in her and your, and your team’s favor. Right? So I love that story. It’s great.

Jeff Shaw (27:54)

Well, Ben, thank you so much for joining us today. That time flew by for me. love the stories. I know it’s, yeah. Well, we’ll definitely have you back. We will have you back for sure. There’s so much more to unpack, but thank you for your time today. And to all the listeners, thank you for tuning in, take care and we’ll see you next time.

Benjamin Bengtson (27:59)

Thanks for having me on. I really appreciate it and I really love your guys organization. AICA has been just really been a blessing to us.

Jeff Shaw (28:23)

And we appreciate it Ben. Take care.