[Music] Hello and welcome to the Millennial Lawyer podcast with New York litigation attorney Mark Shirian. Mark specializes in various areas of personal injury cases, employment law, employment discrimination, and medical malpractice. I am your host Kevin Rosenquist and in today’s episode, we’re gonna do something a little bit different. We’re gonna talk to Mark about his story, about his background, the founding of his law firm, and of the values that helped him shape its growth. Mark, how are you doing today? 

I’m doing great Kevin, how are you? 

I’m good, I’m excited to learn more about you. We’ve talked about other things and now I get a chance to learn more about you. So you you ready to dive into what makes Mark, Mark? 

We’re ready. 

Can you tell us a little bit about your background and what inspired you to become an attorney and specialize in the vast types of cases that you take on? 

Sure, so I grew up in New York, I’ve never left New York, and you know growing up you watch different types of movies, and one movie that really inspired me to become an attorney was the movie Philadelphia with Denzel Washington and Tom Hex. It’s a great film and I love it. It just really did something to me. Watching this film inspired me to pursue law, to go to law school. I also had an interest in sports representation which I dabbled in briefly early on, so it just inspired me to go to law school and pursue being a lawyer. 

Was there any specific turning point in your career that made you decide to start your firm Mark David Shirian PC Attorneys at Law? 

Yeah, you know, I would go back to 2009 when I graduated from NYU. If you remember 2009, very depressing time in the country, in the world, with the economy and smart people losing jobs, you know, I always had this grand vision of working at a big firm or corporate America, and 2009 going into law school was such a downtime time in the country that it made me really think about other avenues and other career paths. I think it really just guided me towards entrepreneurship and having my own firm. I was blessed to work with attorneys while I was in law school that had their own firm and had a nice work life balance and they were successful. It just made me realize that for me, true security was forging my own path and working for myself and making my own money. So it just kind of shaped me where other people were looking to work at big firms, I always had my eye on building a foundation to start my own firm. I did that. 

How did your previous experience in law and even how you, you know, were shaped throughout your life prepare you to run a law firm of this magnitude? 

Well I will go back to wrestling. So I wrestled in middle school, high school, and then I was fortunate enough to be a member of the wrestling team at NYU when I was in college. And then while I was in law school, and into my working career, I was the head wrestling coach at an all boy school on Long Island. It was a great experience just, you know, my best friends are from wrestling and I’m still in touch with a lot of the wrestlers that I coached. So you look at litigation and it’s a lot like wrestling. You’re out there by yourself, there are two sides, it’s imperative to be prepared before you walk into a courtroom or step onto a mat, the judge is a lot like the referee, and it’s important to be quick on your feet, and like I said, prepared and not to falter so quickly and easily and be tough out there, but also putting the work in when nobody’s watching. So I go back to my career as a wrestler and that’s helped me tremendously in my practice as an attorney, but also in building my business and having the fortitude to overcome a lot of the challenges that have come my way. 

You have experienced working in both large firms and as a solo practitioner, what lessons from these experiences did you bring with you when you started your own firm? 

Customer service, treating the clients like gold, being diligent obviously, we don’t have the resources of a big firm but there are pros and cons to everything, you know. We’re able to have a personal touch with our clients and with the cases that we’re dealing with. I’m a lot more accessible to my clients than, you know, compared to being at a big firm and not necessarily having as much interface directly with a client. I think very good customer service, being accessible, and being diligent starting any business can be a daunting task. 

Starting a law firm would fit in there as well. What were the first steps that you took in establishing your firm? 

Developing a client base. I was very fortunate to be able to develop a client base when I was at a firm before I went out on my own. They gave me the opportunity to develop a client base, but I wanted to build a foundation where I could determine the type of cases that I wanted to handle and not have to share my fee, with two-thirds of the fee with the partners at my firm, so I was fortunate to be able to already have not a huge client base, but understand how to develop a case from A to Z. I think the most important thing is having a client base. You can’t market and get into all that stuff if you’re not having money coming in and the way you have money coming in is through clients. So my advice to anyone trying to start a business is, or especially a law firm, have a very clear picture of who your clients are going to be and you better be confident that you can attract clients to your firm because without clients and without money coming in, you know, nothing else matters. 

Yeah, what were the biggest challenges that you faced at the beginning when you launched your firm?

Juggling actually doing the legal work and the marketing and the administrative tasks and everything else.

Yeah, it’s a business, you got to run it all right? 

Yeah it’s, I remember early on I’d mail stuff out myself. I’d go to the Post Office myself, taking calls, you know thankfully now we have a receptionist here who’s taking all the calls. I was fielding all the calls, I was going to court, I was writing all the motions, I was responding to all the correspondences, I was doing everything, and then I was also doing the bookkeeping. So it’s important to get to a point where you feel comfortable delegating all these tasks and buying your time back so you can focus on what is the most important thing, which is maximizing the value of these cases or being out and about and attracting more business in the early days. 

What strategies did you use to build that client base further and gain more visibility? 

A few things. Referrals from other lawyers. I kind of miss going to court as often as I used to. I’m talking about pre-pandemic because you go to court, you talk to other lawyers, get information, you get advice, you exchange information in court. I’ve been blessed to have a lot, to be able to obtain a lot of referrals from attorneys that I’ve met in court. So that’s one. Also, just be sure to tell as many people as you can about what you do because your clients will be a good source of marketing for you because they know 10 people and I think just focusing on doing a good job for your clients will naturally lead to more clients because they’re going to talk about you, and their friends and family will reach out out. Those are some of the things that we like to do but I’ve built my business in a very organic way. We didn’t have a website until 3 years after I started my firm. It was very grassroots and organic. I started this law firm with $15,000 to my name. Is it possible, yes, but you have to be very intentional about getting the word out and not being shy about asking attorneys for business and overflow. Yeah, referrals are big whether it’s other attorneys or whatever your line of work is. And then customers. 

Yeah that’s the best marketing you can do is having your customers or other attorneys be advocates for you. 

Absolutely.

How did you initially decide on the primary areas of practice that you wanted the firm to be involved with?

Well, so when I was at the firm that I worked at before I went out on my own, they handled personal injury defense. So I was on the other side briefly, but they were gracious enough to allow me to bring in my own business and, with respect to the employment stuff, I came across a sexual harassment case and I had never handled a sexual harassment case, but the partners at the firm that I was at, they were extremely gracious with their time and their knowledge. They were like, you know, bring in cases, we’ll help you, we’ll finance the cases, we want you to learn, we want you to feel that, you know, you’re developing your own business. It was great. With this particular case, we were able to obtain a really good resolution and that led to other cases. So I would say with respect to employment discrimination, coincidentally those are just the type of cases that come in and if you look at it, look at any room you go into, people are either working for someone or they have people working for them. So the chances of getting an employment case are a lot higher than an injury case. My first job at a law school was at a personal injury law firm and I interned at various personal injury law firms while I was in law school. Actually, my first ever internship at a law firm was in college at a personal injury law firm with an Alum who was a former wrestler at NYU. 

Oh cool, that’s a good connection. 

So I always had a liking towards personal injury. I felt I was good at it, and that’s how I kind of got into these two areas of law. And I’m grateful that we’re able to practice different areas of law because I think it would have been boring just to handle car accidents or just discrimination. So it’s fun for me that we’re able to handle two different areas of law, but they complement each other very well. 

What would you say are the core values you uphold at Shirian Law and how do they reflect your personal approach to practicing law?

Very good question. I think number one, because this is a family business with my brother who’s an attorney works here, we pride ourselves in treating our clients like family members. And when I say that, I mean when we advise our clients, we advise them the same way that we would advise one of our family members. Okay, we don’t put our interests above our clients. So that’s number one. Number two, it’s imperative for us that with everything that we do whether it’s taking on a case or the tasks within that case that everything that we do is promoting justice. If it’s not promoting justice, it’s not the type of case that we’re going to take. Everything that we do within the case is for the sake of promoting justice. Those are the two core values here, because I’ve learned throughout my life that everything that you do has to have an underlying purpose. 

That’s good. 

And if we stick to that we’re going to have a lot of success and we’re going to stay out of trouble. Doing what’s best for the client, promoting justice, making sure that we are advocating and bringing up cases that are meritorious in good faith, and that we’re doing everything that we can to get the best possible results for our clients. It’s as simple as that. 

You can definitely sense your passion, your commitment to your clients. Obviously you work really hard to get to where you’ve gotten, how do you continue to stay motivated? How do you avoid burnout? 

The short answer is trips to Miami definitely help. 

Can’t hurt, I’ll remember that one. I’m going to bank that one, start taking more trips on my end. 

But listen, a burnout is very rampant in a lot of different fields, especially with attorneys. I have been very intentional about my health, about taking care of myself, and making sure that I’m the best possible version of myself. I love hot yoga, I love to go to hot yoga on a weekly basis. I love biking. I love to read, and you know occasional trips here and there are great, and I like to go to conferences because it’s a good source of motivation. You know, I always come back from trips very motivated to get back to New York City to my firm, to my clients ,and back to the grind. Burning out doesn’t help my clients, it doesn’t help me, it doesn’t help my business, so time away, you know, early on it’s it’s hard to get away or you don’t necessarily have the time or the finances early on to go out on your own because you’d rather get that money and put it back and invest it back into the business. Or you don’t have, early on I didn’t have staff and resources. When I’m away now, when I’m away the firm kind of runs without me which is really the goal when you’re building a business or a firm. So I want to be the best possible version of myself. I owe it to my clients and I’ve become very intentional about my mental health, my physical health, and how motivated I am at work and being burnt out just doesn’t help anybody. 

Yeah that’s a great way to be for sure. Where do you see, you know, your law firm in the next five to ten years? Do you have any short-term or long-term goals that you’re looking to achieve in the future? 

Yeah I mean long term I would love to have more of a national presence. I would love to start satellite offices in other big cities in this great country that we live in. So that’s just as far as long term. I would love to expand on a national level because I believe that there are people in other cities that need access to high quality legal representation. I also would say maybe less cases, higher value cases at the same time. So you know we’ve become very selective, but I would say on a long-term scale becoming more selective, taking on less cases and being able to achieve higher value on those cases. That is what I would say on a long-term basis. On a short-term basis, maximizing the value of our cases and bringing on more staff to handle the type of volume that we already have now, so we’ll have more room to maximize the value of our cases that we already have to ensure that we are on the right path, and growing as much as we possibly can, and getting the best possible result for our clients. So I say just maybe more staff on the short term and, you know, looking at different avenues, staying in touch with you know marketing the firm the right way, and staying abreast with the technology that’s coming out. 

Yeah that sounds really good Mark, thank you for sharing some of your insights and a little bit more about your background. It was really good to get to know you a little bit more. Thank you so much and thank you all for tuning in to the Millennial Lawyer Podcast with New York litigation attorney Mark Shirian. To connect with Mark visit shirianpc.com and of course, don’t forget to like, subscribe, and review our show. 

Mark until next time, thanks again. 

Thank you so much. 

Thanks for watching, be sure to hit that like and subscribe button and leave us a review in the comments.