The Fireproof Podcast

Phil Pendergrass has been practicing personal injury law for over a decade... Last year, he merged his firm with two of his closest colleagues and built something new from the ground up. But it hasn’t been an easy transition: Two firms with different cultures, both with different ways of doing things. Plus a leadership team that wasn't fully aligned. Eight weeks into Fireproof, they've redefined t...

Chris F.N. Rose moved to Vegas on his 21st birthday and dealt casino games for a decade before going to law school and eventually opening his own firm. He built a referral business aimed at consumers… but after realizing he couldn't compete with the big players he had to scrap the model. We covered: → Why he introduces himself as "Chris F.N. Rose" → How ten years dealing craps taught him more abou...

I wrote a book in 2020 called Fireproof. Five years later, the firm has almost doubled, and Kate wanted to know what still holds up. So we sat down to go through it chapter by chapter. We started with the first one: Know Thyself. Here's what I've watched happen over and over. A lawyer builds a good practice, makes good money, then hits a ceiling they can't explain. They know they're a litigator. B...

Tim spent 16 years in property management before landing at Michael Kelly Injury Lawyers in Boston as their first-ever COO. No law background. No courtroom experience. Just a sharp business mind and a willingness to do the hard thing first. He restructured attorney compensation, built a leadership team from scratch, and helped grow the firm. Profitability went from 13% to 28%. Staff went from 32 t...

Seth Bader built one of Atlanta's most recognized personal injury firms from the ground up, starting in 2008 with zero team members and a clear mission: fight for injured people the way the insurance companies never would. But building a firm and running one are two different things. For years, Seth ran Bader Law the way most lawyers do: he made decisions by gut, spent millions on channels that fe...

Angel Reyes has been a plaintiff's attorney for 35 years. His firm has resolved over 70,000 cases and recovered more than $1.3 billion for clients across Texas. For most of those years, he ran the playbook everyone else ran: TV spots. Billboards. Bus ads. Over two decades, he spent roughly $200 million on traditional advertising and built a firm that worked. Then in 2019, he walked away from ALL o...

Andrew Pickett joined Fireproof in October 2024. The coaching forced him to look at what he was actually doing in his firm versus what he should be doing… His firm nearly doubled in 18 months. In our episode, we covered: → How Andrew identified the roles he was defaulting to as the firm owner → Why core values have to be descriptive, not aspirational → What a weekly accountability cadence does to...

D'Angelo Lowe grew up with a single mom, three siblings to help raise, and no professional role models... From a young age, was arrested 17 times for selling drugs. But after graduating high school while on probation, he looked at everything he'd already survived, and decided he owed it to himself to change. Ten years into running Lowe Law in one of the most competitive personal injury markets in...

Mike Alder built one of the most respected plaintiff trial practices in California. Mike was winning in the courtroom and leaving a lot on the table everywhere else. It took reading a book during COVID to start asking the hard question… what would it look like to build a firm the right way? That led him to Fireproof. And in a short time, the work on culture, hiring, case-building systems, and busi...

Deidra Haynes is a family law attorney and CEO of The Law Office of Deidra N. Haynes in Indianapolis. She's a successful law firm owner with 15 employees and a growing roster of clients... but the road that got her here is something few people understand let alone have lived through. In our episode, we talked about: → How Deidra rebuilt her firm from 5 to 15 employees without outside investment →...

Gray Broughton and Sharif Gray are the founding partners of Gray Broughton Injury Law in Richmond, Virginia. Both are Army JAG veterans. Both became personal injury lawyers later than most. And in a few short years, they've put up results that most trial firms don't see in a decade. Their philosophy is simple: the secret's in the execution. In this episode we covered: → What happened when they sto...

Most lawyers who start their own firm have a plan. Gordi Mikalacki had four cases, a ring light, and a ton of grit. She opened Elmm Law Group in 2020. Two weeks later, the whole world shut down. No partners. No playbook. Just her phone and a conviction she could build something better than what she'd seen from the inside. So she built her firm around a simple pledge: she’d never take more from a c...

There was never a moment Mike thought “this is too hard”... Mike Morse was trained by his dad to practice law, lost him in law school, and was let go from the firm that was sending him 70% of his work. On what would have been his father's birthday. He decided he'd never rely on anyone else to fill his pipeline again. He began to build a firm from scratch, operating only on the belief that quitting...