How to Scale a Plaintiff Firm: 5 Lessons from a 125-Person PI Practice

Most firms want to grow. Few build the operational foundation to sustain it.

In our latest episode of The Scalable Law Blueprint, Michael McCready founder of McCready Law, a 125-person, multi-office PI firm, shares the systems, metrics, and mindset shifts that allowed him to scale intentionally over 25 years. His perspective is direct: growth isn’t about luck or marketing volume. It’s about running your firm like a business.

Here are the five most actionable lessons for managing partners, heads of intake, and operations leaders who want to build a scalable, resilient firm.

Scaling a Law Firm Requires Thinking Like a CEO, Not a Practitioner

McCready describes a progression he sees in every firm that scales:

1. Become a great lawyer

2. Become great with clients

3. Learn to run a business

4. Learn marketing

5. Build culture

Firms plateau when leadership never moves beyond Stage 1. The inflection point comes when you stop thinking like a practitioner and start thinking like a CEO—someone responsible for people, systems, and growth.

2. Hiring and Training Systems That Scale a Plaintiff Firm

Most firms take a reactive approach to recruiting. McCready did the opposite: rigorous screening, cultural alignment, documented SOPs, and role-specific onboarding.

Even before hiring a full-time trainer (around 80–90 employees), he built a culture of writing down every repeatable step. As he puts it: “Anything you have to repeat more than once should be written down.”

This mindset compounds—reducing errors, protecting consistency, and accelerating new-hire productivity.

3. Turning Intake Into a Predictable Client Conversion Engine

McCready is clear: attorneys should not run intake.

Why? Lawyers overanalyze, lack the necessary empathy on the phone, and don’t have the time to nurture callers who won’t become clients—despite the downstream referral value. His non-attorney intake team:

• Delivers the empathy callers need

• Converts at predictable rates (~30%)

• Generates five-star reviews even from declined cases

• Feeds a high-quality referral pipeline

For firms experiencing inconsistent conversions, intake specialization is usually the fastest win.

4. Running a Data-Driven Plaintiff Firm: Metrics That Predict Growth

McCready runs his firm through numbers—not gut feel. Daily, he reviews:

• Lead volume

• Signups vs. withdrawals vs. referrals

• Case manager capacity

• Settlement flow and cash timing

With these inputs, he forecasts hiring needs, predicts cash flow, and adjusts marketing or qualification criteria in real time.

He describes the job like operating a soundboard: if one lever moves, you rebalance the others to keep the entire system in sync.

This is the operator mindset many firms say they want—but few adopt.

5. Using AI to Automate Workflows and Improve Law Firm Operations

“AI is going to leapfrog case management systems because AI is going to know what to do without you having to program it.”  

Long before most firms embraced technology, McCready treated tech as a core value. Today, his team uses AI to:

• Grade intake calls for empathy and clarity

• Provide real-time coaching

• Autogenerate letters

• Draft briefs from 25 years of internal precedent

His view is that AI will leapfrog case management systems—moving from task automation to workflow decision-making. But the non-negotiable foundation is data integrity: keeping systems closed, controlled, and audited.

Firms waiting for clarity on AI will fall behind—just as those who resisted websites, SEO, or social media did.

Listen to the Full Conversation

If you're building a modern, scalable plaintiff firm, this episode is a masterclass in operator-level decision-making.

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