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Taylor Gerchman Shares Insights on Growing a Law Practice

Attorney & Founder at Life Legal Services

In this episode of Wytpod, host Stephen Bland interviews Taylor Gerchman, founding partner of Life Legal Services, discussing the firm’s inception during the pandemic, its niche focus on life insurance disputes, and the challenges of starting a law practice with limited resources. Gerchman shares insights into the firm’s remote operations, growth strategy, and the importance of maintaining relationships within the legal field to ensure success.

Life Legal Services is a boutique law firm specialising in life insurance disputes, serving clients in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and across the U.S. under ERISA.

Taylor Gerchman
Attorney & Founder at Life Legal Services

Hello everyone, welcome to our latest Wytpod. I’m Stephen Bland, your host with Wytlabs, a full service marketing agency. Today’s guest is Taylor. Taylor, feel free to introduce yourself and let our viewers know about your background.

Hi everyone, my name is Taylor Gerchman. I am the founding partner of Life Legal Services.

Awesome. Well, tell me about your journey of Life Legal?

So I started Life Legal in September of 2020, so right around the pandemic times. Just before that, I had been working for a life insurance, a boutique life insurance practice in Center City, Philadelphia for several years after I graduated from law school. So I was there for a couple of years and decided, hey, I think I could do this better myself. So I decided to open my own shop.

Yeah.

At the time it was just me and really hustling to try and get some clients, try and get things moving. And then after a year or two, I took on a partner and now it’s just the two of us.

Awesome, awesome. Who is your ideal target audience for your firm?

We’re really looking for anybody that has a life insurance dispute of any kind. And when I say life insurance, it kind of falls under an umbrella of a couple of different types of issues. There’s regular individual life insurance policies that you can take out through an agent or broker. There’s life insurance policies that are offered through employers. They fall under an ERISA category, a different statute that governs it.

And then we’re also talking about accidental death and dismemberment policies and critical and chronic illness as well.

Gotcha. What makes you different than your competitors?

So the area of practice that we work in is extremely niche. There aren’t a ton of other firms out there that practice solely in this area. So it’s a tight -knit group of firms currently. What makes us different from them is that we are a fully remote practice. We are not dabbling in any other types of practice. We’re not looking at personal injury, we’re not looking at criminal defence, nothing like that. We’re not looking to make a quick buck off of a different type of case. We’re looking only at life insurance, and that’s what we’ve focused our entire careers on. So we’re truly dialled in on only that type of case.

Gotcha makes total sense. And what areas are you servicing? The entire state of Pennsylvania or?

Yes, so with regular life insurance policies, with individual life insurance policies, we’re looking at New Jersey and Pennsylvania state. And then also under ERISA, we can kind of take cases from all over the United States because ERISA allows us to bring them into a jurisdiction that works best for us.

Gotcha, makes total sense. What is your future plan for yourself and the firm?

Our future plan is, currently we’re two to three person shop. We’d love to slowly grow that over time to be able to take on more clients to help more people. But we wanna do that really slowly and really mindfully so that we can continue to provide the kind of service that we really believe in, some really individualised work on each of our cases.
So we’re going to work on that really slowly to add more attorneys, to add more support staff so that we can give the best kind of work that we can to our client.

Awesome, awesome. Well, most of our listeners are entrepreneurs or aspiring attorneys or attorneys. What challenges have you faced since starting the firm and how were you able to overcome them?

That’s a good question. I practice, like I said, I opened my practice in September of 2020. I had quit my traditional law job. So I had no source of income. I hadn’t really saved up any money to start the practice, which was not my best idea. But really, money is the biggest problem when starting out your own business of any sort, I’d imagine.

But more specifically in starting your own law practice, you need a case management system. You need a way to advertise to clients. I really had to be scrappy. I really had to work hard to get those first couple of clients so that I could get some money rolling. And that was, I would say, the biggest hurdle for the first couple of years was really trying to get a stream of income in order to be able to do the things that you really want to do, that you aspire to do, to bring the best service to your clients. So we had to ask family members for loans. We had to keep things really lean in terms of what we were willing to spend our money on and really just fight hard for those first couple of cases to make sure that they paid out so that we had some money going into our bank account and then be really mindful about what we spent it on. That was definitely our biggest hurdle to overcome.

Definitely, what, speaking of trying to get your name out there, what’s been the most successful way to promote the firm for you?

So aside from all of the stuff that you would normally hear about, the SEO and trying to get your name at the top of Google, things like that, yeah, we’re definitely focusing on that. But we’re also really, really focused on maintaining relationships within the legal field.So, maintaining good relationships with not only referral counsel, attorneys that are referring us cases, but also opposing counsel on cases. We see the same players over and over and over again that work for insurance companies. And we like to try and maintain really good working relationships, although it can be adversarial at times.

Being able to keep a friendly disposition, even though adversarial and, you know, reaching out and keeping and maintaining those relationships has been really helpful for us because believe it or not, sometimes they come across cases where they know somebody needs to be represented and they’ll send them our way. So that’s been a really great way to get some cases and it’s also makes your job a lot easier.

Definitely, 100%. What advice could you give an aspiring attorney or someone that’s looking to start a firm this year?

Advice? I would say don’t try to move too quickly. I know especially my colleagues, the type of person that goes into this field is somebody that’s got a lot of ambition, a lot of motivation, really wants to hit the ground running. I would caution against moving too quickly in growing a business, in adding people onto your payroll.

Try to be really, really scrappy for as long as you can. Hustle for as long as you can. And then once you’re really, really comfortable, then it’s time to start bringing some other people in and make sure that those people are trustworthy.

That’s amazing advice. Well, the website to find you is lifelegalservices.com. Is there anything that I haven’t asked you, you’d want listeners to know about yourself and the firm?

That’s right.
The only other thing that I could think of is that I do have a law partner that I didn’t mention him by name, but I do want to mention him here just because he deserves all the credit in the world as well. His name is Mark Bozar. He’s stationed out in Colorado, but we both work in tandem to make Life Legal the best law firm that it could possibly be. So I did want to give a nice little shout out to my partner.

Awesome. Well, I’m sure he will appreciate that. Alright, Taylor. Well, I really appreciate your time and coming on the Wytpod and thank you so much. Definitely.

Yeah, thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it.

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