On March 25, 2026, Paul joined a panel of senior practitioners for the Legal Innovation Forum webinar “Defining a Winning Business Strategy for Your PI Firm.” The one-hour program was part of LIF’s ongoing inFocus series on Mastering the Evolving Business of Personal Injury Law, and was accredited for 1 hour of Professionalism Content with the Law Society of Ontario and 1 hour of CPD with the Law Society of British Columbia.
The webinar was chaired by Andrew Bowyer, Founder and CEO of the Legal Innovation Forum, and brought together panellists from across the plaintiff PI bar: Michelle Jorge of Jewell Radimisis Jorge, Daniel Badre of Badre Law Professional, Greg Neinstein of Neinstein Personal Injury Lawyers, and Paul. The program was held in association with Bridgepoint Financial Services Inc.
The framing of the conversation was different in important ways from the panel Paul had joined on the same series 17 months earlier. The October 2024 panel had focused on the operational architecture of plaintiff PI practice: case screening, partnerships, the economics of investigation and trial. The March 2026 panel went further upstream. It addressed the strategy decisions that shape what a firm becomes over the long arc of the practice, not just how it operates next quarter.
The four themes
The webinar was organized around four named themes.
The first was defining and executing a business strategy and marketing plan. Strategy in this context means the conscious choice of where the firm will compete, on what basis, and for which clients. Marketing is the operational consequence of that strategy: the brand, the channels, the relationships, and the public materials that put the firm in front of the people who refer the work the firm has decided to do. The two are inseparable, but they often get treated separately. The panel took them as a unit.
The second was the best practices for leading and retaining talent. Plaintiff PI firms, like other litigation practices, are built on lawyers. The lawyers who come up through a firm and stay are the firm’s most valuable long-term asset. The lawyers who come up and leave are the firm’s most expensive recurring cost. The discipline of leading, mentoring, retaining, and developing talent is not a side question to the practice; it is the practice, on a longer time horizon.
The third was staying ahead of the evolving regulatory environment. The plaintiff PI bar in Ontario operates inside a regulatory framework that has been in motion for years: changes to the Statutory Accident Benefits Schedule, ongoing developments in deductibility and threshold case law, evolving Law Society guidance on contingency fees and referral relationships, and the broader landscape of insurance regulation through FSRA. The firms that anticipate the regulatory shifts will be in a different position than the firms that respond after the fact.
The fourth theme was expansion into adjacent practice areas. For a firm with a sustainable PI practice, the natural growth question is whether to extend the practice into adjacent litigation work where the firm’s existing capacities and relationships transfer. Medical malpractice is the obvious adjacency for many PI firms, but so is product liability, occupier’s liability, and certain forms of professional negligence. The expansion question is not whether a firm could do the work; it is whether the firm’s strategy supports doing the work, and whether the work will deepen or dilute the practice that is already there.
A plaintiff medical malpractice perspective
Paul’s contribution drew on his work acting for plaintiffs in complex medical malpractice and personal injury cases at Davidson Cahill Morrison LLP. Three themes from his practice were directly relevant to the panel’s framing.
The first is strategic case selection and risk management. Medical malpractice cases are expensive to investigate, slow to develop, and binary in outcome relative to many other plaintiff matters. A firm that takes only the cases it can win, or that can be settled fairly on the strength of the workup, will be in a different long-term position than a firm that takes too many cases that should have been declined. The screening discipline is upstream of every other strategic question. The October 2024 panel had covered this ground; the March 2026 panel returned to it as a foundational element of any firm-level strategy.
The second is the disciplined use of expert evidence. In medical malpractice work, the experts make or break the case. The firms that have, over time, identified and worked with credible specialists in the areas the firm sees most often have built a structural advantage that no marketing can replicate. The expert relationships are part of the firm’s strategic position. They are also part of what makes the work intellectually challenging, which is part of what attracts and retains the lawyers who do it well.
The third is the long arc of firm growth. A plaintiff-side practice that operates well today is not the same as a plaintiff-side practice that will operate well in ten years. The choices about which practice areas to develop, which lawyers to invest in, which relationships to deepen, and which technology and operational infrastructure to build out, are choices that compound. The firms that make those choices deliberately will be in better shape a decade from now than the firms that drift.
Connection to the broader LIF series
LIF’s PI series has run as a structured conversation across multiple webinars on related themes: financing buy-ins and succession (March 4, 2026), case management and AI (February 11, 2026 and April 16, 2026), expansion into mass torts (May 14, 2026), and mergers and acquisitions (June 11, 2026). The March 25 webinar sits in the middle of that conversation, with the strategy question that the operational webinars implicitly assume. The format works because the same broad bar engages with the same broad set of questions over a sustained period, and the conversations build on each other.
For Ontario medical malpractice counsel specifically, that conversation has real value. Medical malpractice is a small part of a small bar, and the practice questions are not addressed in any conventional CLE setting. The LIF series, by treating PI broadly, has created a space where the upstream business questions can be discussed without being mistaken for substantive law CPD. Both are needed; they are not the same thing.
Practical observations
The strategy question is the question every plaintiff PI firm has to answer, even if it answers it tacitly. The firms that answer it deliberately, and that revisit the answer as the practice and the market change, are positioned differently from firms that do not. The March 25 webinar was a useful contribution to making that conversation explicit.
Paul was glad to participate alongside the other panellists, and grateful to LIF for the continuing platform on these questions. The work of building a sustainable plaintiff medical malpractice practice in Ontario is, in significant part, the work of making strategic choices that compound over years. The decisions that matter most are not the ones made in any individual file. They are the decisions about which files to take, which lawyers to develop, which experts to retain, and which adjacent practice areas to grow into. The strategy questions are what make the answers to those tactical questions add up to a coherent practice over time.
