Building Authority Without Paid Search, Tactical Empathy & AI in a Law Firm with Scott Frost

Hey, Stephen. My name is Scott Frost, and I’m the founder of the Frost Law Firm. We’re attorneys for hardworking families, and we help individuals who have been exposed to different toxins and workplace exposures and have gotten either cancer or serious, debilitating diseases. We do that across the country.

Yes, unfortunately. My father worked in the construction industry in California, Kentucky and across the country. Later in life he developed lung cancer, and he had only smoked for a very short time when he was young, in his teenage years. We were trying to figure out how he got lung cancer. It turned out he worked for an asbestos company and in the construction industry, and sold different asbestos products over those years, and all of that contributed to his lung cancer even though he really didn’t smoke.

What’s interesting is that my father’s story really happened after I served six years in the United States Army. I was in the Judge Advocate General’s Corps, and I tried cases not only here in the United States but also when I was deployed to Bosnia, where we held courts-martial. Those experiences showed me how important it is to make sure the little guy gets a fair shake. I was a defense lawyer and a prosecutor in the Army, and I learned there were a lot of people who just weren’t getting a fair shake. When I got out of the Army and was looking for something to do, I always wanted to be representing people, because I found that I enjoyed being a lawyer for people versus companies. So when I got out, I immediately started representing veterans and other folks who had been exposed to asbestos and other products and gotten diseases.
Then, when my father was diagnosed with the very same disease, it showed me that it’s really important to make sure families are treated with empathy and clients are treated well, and that we do the best we can to help them in their most trying times. The folks we typically deal with either have a very serious disease that is probably going to end in their death, or a cancer that will definitely end in their death. So compassion is the big thing I learned from that. Having gone through it myself, I understand that you really have to sit and listen to clients and try to help them navigate the legal process.

In the law space you might call us a boutique firm, a little smaller than some of the larger firms. What’s different about our practice, and something clients don’t understand and I think it’s important for everybody to understand, is that most of the really good trial lawyers are in smaller firms. We’re very selective in the cases we take, which lets us work on them even more. A lot of people come in and ask, “Why shouldn’t I go with one of these big firms? They have more lawyers, more paralegals, more money.” That’s their perception, but the reality is the opposite.
The value of your case, whether it’s an asbestos mesothelioma case or a car wreck case, is directly determined by who your lawyer is, and who is going to show up at trial. The value of a case can be two, three, ten, up to a hundred times different if the other side perceives that you can actually take the case to trial. That’s the niche we’re in. We are a trial firm, and we will go to trial. I’m actually in trial right now, during this podcast, because that’s what we do. We go to trial regularly, and that really helps determine what the value is. When we started the Frost Law Firm, our focus has always been clients first and making sure we maximize the full value of their case.

Our firm is a little unique in that a lot of our referrals are attorney to attorney, business to business, just by the nature of our business. But some of our biggest cases have also come through traditional marketing like SEO. Our space is a very unique one, in that keywords like mesothelioma are very expensive if you’re buying them from Google. So our approach has been to bypass all that and build authority in the space using LinkedIn and our website, not just for traditional SEO, but to actually give people information that can be helpful to them. That’s what we’ve strived to do: give people information that can help them, whether they hire us or not.

Almost everybody nowadays has a book they wrote or did something with. Our approach was a little different, in that I didn’t want to just have a book so we’d have something to hand out and use as a marketing piece. That project spoke to me because I wanted to offer something for people. I wanted to give people outside our legal industry some insight into how negotiations in the legal industry are different from what a Chris Voss does with hostage negotiation, or if you’re trying to close a big deal. It’s definitely a different industry.
I wanted to provide value and insights, and it seemed like a perfect fit. First of all, I’d studied what Chris has done, and it was great to get to know him and be interviewed by him. But the bottom line is that it was not meant to be a marketing piece as much as something to offer a new perspective to folks.

AI is a very interesting topic, and I think a lot of people are scared of it. We run into that a lot with our employees, who think AI is going to replace them, and it’s not. What AI does is free them up to do what human beings are good at: thinking, contemplating, coming up with new strategies. AI is great at helping you write something, but it doesn’t sound like your voice. So we’re working very hard on getting our people to understand not only how AI can help them, but also how to implement it, to figure out what AI can help with that an employee might traditionally have done, so it frees up their time to do the more important legal work.
AI can’t do a complete analysis. You read about it every day, judges getting in trouble because AI wrote their opinion. That makes perfect sense to me, because what we’re seeing is that lazy people are using AI to do their job, and that’s not really what it’s good at. It’s good at PowerPoint, for example, but right now I wouldn’t use most AI programs for PowerPoint, because I can still do it better, being a trial lawyer who has used PowerPoint for twenty years. What we’re finding within our firm is that it’s really good at medical summaries. But when it comes to preparing for a trial, that still takes human beings sitting down with a pad and paper and figuring out what you’re going to do.

Our main practice is mesothelioma trial work. We also handle other asbestos cases, and other cases like artificial stone countertop cases and benzene cases, anything involving a substance that has exposed an individual, either at work or at home, and resulted in disease. That’s where we stay.

Yes, we handle cases literally from New York City all the way to Hawaii. I’m licensed in eight different states, and we have practiced in every single state in the country. We have lawyers positioned throughout the country, from the East Coast to the Midwest, and we travel everywhere. Our main office is in California, and we also have offices in Texas and Illinois.

The next thing for the law firm is that we’re working hard on getting our training together so that we can train the next generation of trial lawyers, folks who really want to be out there helping people. I think the major changes in our society are going to come from the lawyers and the law. We want to train the next generation not to just be lawyers, because I think AI is going to take over a lot of those jobs, but to be trial lawyers. What we do day to day is come into court and talk to other human beings about putting value on human suffering. That is a job that will always be for humans, and always be for people like me and the people in our law firm that we’re working hard to train. So our future is making sure we’re training people to be the best they can be so they can represent these clients. We’re very fortunate that a lot of them are veterans, and a lot of the other folks are hardworking families who just need a hand up. That’s what we’re doing.

Try to learn something new every single day. That’s what we try to do, and what I try to do: learn one little thing, and be better one percent every single day. At the end of five or six years, you’re going to say, “Wow, I don’t even remember who that person is.” So try to make yourself better every day.

Great, Stephen, and thank you. Hopefully we gave some folks some ideas or advice that will help them.

Thanks.