Growing a Legacy: Lauren Kelly Gielarowski on Expanding a 90-Year-Old Family Law Firm

Viktoria Altman (00:01.008)
Hi Lauren, welcome to my podcast. It’s great to have you here. Thank you so much for joining me today. To kick things off, could you briefly introduce yourself and your practice?

Lauren Kelly Gielarowski (00:04.003)
Hi Victoria. Thank you for having me, I appreciate it.

Lauren Kelly Gielarowski (00:15.65)
Yeah. So my name is Lauren Kelly Gielarowski. I am a plaintiff’s personal injury and medical malpractice attorney in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Our firm, like I said, specializes in auto accidents, personal injury, premises liability, medical malpractice cases, really all aspects of personal injury law. Specifically for myself, I handle all of the firm’s medical malpractice cases and catastrophic injury cases when they go into litigation.

So that’s kind of my specialty. I started the first 10 years of my career as a defense attorney doing medical malpractice defense and then switched sides to the plaintiff side two years ago. So that’s kind of helped me see both sides of things in this part of my practice and in working on medical malpractice cases.

Viktoria Altman (01:05.508)
That’s an interesting progression. So why did you start in defense and why did you switch?

Lauren Kelly Gielarowski (01:11.478)
Yeah, so I think, you know, out of law school, a lot of law schools funnel you toward the big law defense side of things. And I started my career actually at a large international law firm. I was doing banking and finance law. So I was representing banks and financial institutions and consumer class actions. And I liked those cases. I learned a lot. I got a lot of experience, but I knew that I wanted to try cases.

So I transitioned from that area of defense work to doing medical malpractice defense. A lot of those cases do frequently try. And so I got a lot of good experience, did that for about 10 years. And then my father started the law firm that I work at now, Luxembourg Arbit, Kelly and George. And I was looking to work with him and come on the plaintiff’s side, really help people that can’t fight for themselves. It’s a really rewarding area of the law to do plaintiff’s personal injury work and I’ve enjoyed it so far.

Viktoria Altman (02:18.522)
So we might have people who are listening to us who are thinking of switching, or maybe we even have some people who are about to graduate thinking of which way they should go. What would be your words of advice for those folks?

Lauren Kelly Gielarowski (02:30.69)
Yeah, I would say try as many things as you can as a lawyer. I can probably count on one hand maybe the number of people I went to law school with that are still at the same firm that they started at. So it’s good to get experience and get on-the-job training in what you like. And I enjoyed defense work, and I got a lot of good training, a lot of good experience.

But on the plaintiff’s side, like I said, I find it to be very rewarding. And of course, there are no billable hours on the plaintiff’s side, so that’s always nice.

Viktoria Altman (03:06.729)
Yeah, you can just do the work without constantly going back and forth on it. So the law firm you work at that your father started, you said, how old is it and what year was it started in?

Lauren Kelly Gielarowski (03:11.846)
Exactly.

Lauren Kelly Gielarowski (03:21.7)
I believe if I remember correctly, it was started, it’s about 90 years old at this point. And so it was started actually by, the founding partner was Marvin Luxemburg and then the next name partner, Chuck Garbit came on along with my dad. And my dad’s been practicing for about 40 years. They have another partner, Joe George, who still is at the firm. And yeah, we’ve had over 10,000 clients, I think, or more.

Lauren Kelly Gielarowski (03:51.236)
We take pride in everyone that we have as a client. We say that they become family and it’s true because a lot of people in our firm are related. My sister works there as well. One of our paralegals is my dad’s cousin. So the secretary’s been there for 36 years. So we’re a family unit.

Viktoria Altman (04:12.398)
I love that you all get along to that point where you all still like each other.

Lauren Kelly Gielarowski (04:18.473)
Right, I know because family businesses can go one of two ways, but thankfully we’ve had a good experience so far.

Viktoria Altman (04:25.358)
Yeah, so do you have any tips for folks out there who might be thinking of going into business with their partner or their dad or, you know, just their best friends?

Lauren Kelly Gielarowski (04:32.33)
Yeah. It can be challenging at times. And I think it’s hard sometimes to draw those lines between family and coworkers. But we’ve very thankfully been able to do that. It is interesting though at times, now, working on a case with your dad or your sister. But it’s good in the end. I’m glad that we do it this way.

Viktoria Altman (04:57.306)
So are you leaving the work at work or are still talking about work when you get home? Or what’s the trick to not wanting to kill anybody?

Lauren Kelly Gielarowski (05:06.158)
I know, I know. We try to leave it at work and my dad’s good at that. When he comes home, he tries to shut off and relax. And sometimes I call him and say, I hate to talk shop and I hate to bother you, but we need to talk about this case. But we try to keep it separate as much as we can.

Viktoria Altman (05:29.04)
So you’ve been in business for 90 years. One tip I’d like to share with you is you have amazing reviews. I could see that. But you have 92 of them, which means you have approximately one review for every year you’ve been in business. So reviews are a really big part of the algorithm. And for you guys, since you have so many happy clients, doing a review outreach would be probably helpful to help you kind of make yourself even more present on the maps. That’s something you have control over. I would suggest having more, you probably already have more than many of your competitors, but the more the better, the more the merrier. And for you guys, since you have 92 reviews on your Google My Business listing, I would suggest sending some reviews to your Aval profile, and to other attorney profiles that you have set up, you should have all of them set up, think. Super Lawyers and Facebook. Every time you put a review somewhere else, Google pulls from everywhere.

So when it creates you picture of you as an entity it’s creating a picture of you from everywhere. Now you have outstanding reviews so obviously you have a lot of great work so for you it’s easy you just have to kind of reach out to clients. It’s a little bit harder for people who are just getting started but I don’t think that’s a problem for you.

Lauren Kelly Gielarowski (06:37.869)
Okay.

Lauren Kelly Gielarowski (06:54.902)
Yeah, yeah. And that’s good advice. I’ll pick your brain, Victoria. We have been pushing to get Google reviews because they are so helpful. I think a lot of people, know for myself personally that when I’m considering going to a restaurant or some sort of business, I look at the Google reviews. It’s just how to get clients to want to do them and go through with it. Because it is, it takes a little bit of time sometimes. And people aren’t tech-savvy. So what are your tips on that?

Viktoria Altman (07:25.78)
So first of all, it doesn’t have to be a client that leaves your review. Anytime you have a professional interaction with anybody, you can ask them for review. So I bet you are consulting people, you’re giving free advice, you’re helping people out. So every time you do something like that, ask for a review. And usually, people know that you help them out. You do something just out of the goodness of your heart. They will be grateful to have some way to repay you with clients when you are giving them that check, it’s good to say, you know, I hope you had a good experience. I’m sorry for the misfortune and would you be so kind as to leave a review you that’s another, you have to kind of do it right away and then you should follow up. We generally have a follow-up cycle for this. The other thing is you can ask lawyers to leave your reviews as well. Again, if they’ve had a professional interaction with your firm, whether they called for a consultation or maybe you referred them to a case or whatever the case may be. And those are really powerful reviews, right? Because the lawyers, you know, they have a lot of other profiles out there that say they’re a lawyer. So they’re very, very entity relevant for Google. So

Yeah, anybody who is willing to lead your review in a professional capacity. Completely fair game.

Lauren Kelly Gielarowski (08:43.138)
Yeah, those are all good tips.

Viktoria Altman (08:46.242)
Awesome. So you are working with Mad Mal cases. Now I know as an SEO that Mad Mal is super easy to rank and it’s very hard to find the good cases out of those hundreds of calls you get. And I have lawyers who don’t want Mad Mal, not because they wouldn’t take a good case, but because it’s just such a struggle to go and sift through them. Do you have a system for doing that? How do you find the good kind of gems out of all those colds you get?

Lauren Kelly Gielarowski (09:18.454)
Right, right. We always say that the best cases we tend to get are those that come from referrals from either other attorneys or prior clients. I will say, though, that we have gotten really good medical malpractice cases just from Google searches. But you’re right. It is kind of finding the needle in the haystack with medical malpractice cases. We get hundreds of calls and contacts a year. And we probably end up taking maybe 10 % of those, maybe five, 10 cases a year, just because they are really difficult cases to pursue from a litigation standpoint. And also, they are very expensive cases to pursue with experts that you have to retain. A lot of them do end up going to trial. And so the damages in the case have to be there for us to be able to proceed. Otherwise, it could end up costing the client more to go forward with the lawsuit, then they can potentially recover. And we never want to put someone in that position. We want to leave them in a better place with us than without us. So that’s kind of our system.

Viktoria Altman (10:27.311)
Yeah.

Got it, okay. So are you, how much time are you spending on pre-screening these cases versus how much time are you spending on actually doing the work? Do you have somebody in the office to do it? I’m getting very specific here because I do know that there are a lot of lawyers out there who aren’t sure how to kind of approach the whole mad-mal part of the practice. After all, it is such a high volume number of calls.

Lauren Kelly Gielarowski (10:52.6)
Right, right. So our system is essentially we have an intake coordinator that when a potential client calls in with a medical malpractice case, she will get all of the background information, the facts. She’ll pass it on to me actually and I will review it along with our senior partners at the firm to see if it seems like a case we might be able to move forward with. Whether we are or we’re not, as the attorney, I make the call to that and let them know one way or another from our review whether we think we can move forward. If we are potentially able to move forward, then we’ll meet with the client, we’ll get their medical records, and we’ll investigate the case. But if it seems from the outset that we’re not gonna be able to go forward, then we simply call them and let them know.

Viktoria Altman (11:43.064)
Yeah, that’s it’s a really good system for you to call the clients back. I know that your time is very valuable and there are a lot of folks calling. But I think just looking back at my clients and looking back at other folks I speak with, those calls can pay off in the end because you know, you are getting first of all, you’re not going to get a bad review because sometimes people get angry if you don’t take a case. And if you’re not polite enough, sometimes they will go online, and you might get a negative review. So just having that call is good but it’s also good just because you are establishing a relationship and you may end up with a referral later or whatever reason is just to be you know it’s valuable time but it’s also time I think well spent you know if you’re taking if you’re doing it

Lauren Kelly Gielarowski (12:25.956)
Right. Right, exactly. And that’s always our motto. always say, that even if we can’t take the case, we want to make a friend. So that maybe the next time something happens, if they’re in an auto accident, if they have a workers’ comp case, they’ll think of us. They’ll remember that they had a nice interaction with us, and they’ll give us a call.

Viktoria Altman (12:44.79)
Even if we can’t take the case, we want to make a friend. That is excellent. And I try to do the same thing in my agency, right? Because not everybody I’m going to speak with is going to be my ideal client. I’m not going to be everybody’s ideal agency. But I try very hard to make sure that, you know, at least they have a positive interaction and you never know where things turn out in the future. And it’s always nice to make a friend, isn’t it? So.

Lauren Kelly Gielarowski (13:09.732)
Great, exactly.

Viktoria Altman (13:13.954)
You worked on both the plaintiff and the defense side. Now, how has that affected your approach to the cases that you work on?

Lauren Kelly Gielarowski (13:22.626)
Yeah, it has helped me immensely, I will say, doing medical malpractice defense, then going to medical malpractice plaintiffs work. I understand the things that go on on the other side, the strategy of the cases, the things that the defense does, and why they do them. It’s so helpful, I think not only to myself in litigating the case, but beneficial to my clients to have that insider information and to be able to tell my clients, know, this is why they’re doing this. This is why they’re not doing that. That’s immensely helpful. And it also really helped me a lot with screening cases, you know, knowing kind of settlement ranges and settlement values on the other side and kind of being able to translate that to this side is helpful as well.

Viktoria Altman (14:10.8)
Yeah, that’s a very valuable experience. And I know a lot of plaintiff’s attorneys don’t have that experience. So you bring something special to help your clients. So to get back to marketing, you’ve been around for 90 years, and I bet you have done every kind of marketing under the sun. So talk to me about how has it changed for you in the, let’s say in the past few years, you know, we’re gonna talk about what happened 90 years ago, but how have things changed for you? How are you moving with the times?

Lauren Kelly Gielarowski (14:40.76)
Yeah.

Right, right. And that’s been a challenge. I think it’s probably a challenge for all attorneys, especially if your firm has been around for a while. We used to heavily do cable advertising and billboards. We had our magnet on the Yellow Pages phone book, which I don’t even know if that exists anymore. So now just trying to move forward into streaming, into SEO, into social media, you know, we created an Instagram page and we have a Facebook page and trying to just post things that are relevant to our law firm, but also just our personal lives so that we’re just top of mind with people. But it’s been challenging to kind of move that forward and make sure you’re staying with the times and doing things that are effective for your business.

Viktoria Altman (15:40.004)
Yeah, so personal injury has a very quick sales cycle. It’s always good to have those relationships, but in the end, when you need a personal injury lawyer, chances are you didn’t know you were gonna need a personal injury lawyer for months. So you weren’t following somebody online. It’s not like an estate or a divorce, you know what I mean? So you are on social media. What kind of social media are you on? What are you guys focused on?

Lauren Kelly Gielarowski (16:01.71)
So we’re on Instagram, we’re on Facebook, we made a TikTok, but it’s just so hard to come up with content when you’re a busy person. And I know a lot of firms have companies that run their content for them. That’s something we’re kind of looking into. But I understand that with all these social media platforms, you have to be posting very frequently. And when you’re a busy attorney, that’s hard to come up with content and think of captions and do that.

Viktoria Altman (16:11.151)
Yeah.

Lauren Kelly Gielarowski (16:31.748)
So we’ve kind of just been dabbling. It hasn’t been a super-focused approach to social media yet.

Viktoria Altman (16:39.184)
Have you found any success on social media? Have you gotten any clients from there?

Lauren Kelly Gielarowski (16:45.794)
You know what? We have gotten a few. I have a friend in the area who, you know, we’re more like acquaintances, but she was in a car accident and she said to me, I remembered seeing your social media posts on Instagram and remembered that you were a lawyer. And so I thought I’d give you a call. So, you know, anecdotally, we have that kind of things and outcomes that will happen, but it hasn’t been a steady stream from the social media at this point.

Viktoria Altman (17:16.464)
personal injury, social media tends to be a nice addition to the other things you do. Especially when somebody is checking you out, you know, and a lot of the best clients are going to do a little bit of research, even though they’ve been in a car accident or whatever, they still want, you know, it’s really good clients, they still want to check you out, they still want to make sure you’re legit and stuff. So they will check you out on social media before they call you, which is why it’s important to have social media that is very least updated regularly. So for instance, in my company what we do is while we’re not posting to convert anybody, we post to keep things updated. So we post for all clients, we post a Facebook post a couple of times a week, and a Twitter post a couple of times a week. Not because I think I’m going to convert somebody, but because when somebody looks they can see, yes, you’re in business, yes, you’re legitimate, yes, you have properly worded social media posts, and so you’re professional. So in that sense, it’s good. For folks listening out there, my personal opinion from having been in this industry for a few years is that you are going to get better with things like search engine optimization.

website and ads, depending on the case. Social media is great, but you don’t expect like constant conversions from it. But if you have the resources, keeping up with it and doing interesting things with it can be helpful. And another thing that I found just from talking to so many people is a lot of times social media is so personal. It needs to be about you, your personality, you know, your history, you know, your relationships it’s much easier to do social media in-house than it is to do it with an outside agency because they don’t know you the way you guys know yourself. And you can hire a social media person in-house, know, straight out of college who’s grown up on social media and knows all about TikTok and all these other things. You can get them, you know, for a reasonable salary and they know all this stuff and you can get a good deal that way, and that way you are.

Lauren Kelly Gielarowski (19:16.216)
Yeah.

Viktoria Altman (19:27.45)
You know, keeping it in-house and they know you, understand the sort of the specialness of your company and they’re able to translate on social media. So if you’re looking at more social media, that’s something that I know worked well for a lot of folks that I’ve spoken with. So hopefully that helps.

Okay. So talk to me about how I know you’ve been in business for 90 years and I know there’s been some things that you’ve done in marketing and you’re like, God, why did we do this? Everybody has. Tell me about the things that are not, that has not worked that you would suggest, you know, the listeners wouldn’t try, or maybe some red flags you saw that you ignored at the time. And now you know better.

Lauren Kelly Gielarowski (20:01.7)
Yeah.

Lauren Kelly Gielarowski (20:11.498)
Yeah, you know, luckily a lot of our marketing has done well at the time it was happening. But I will say now, you know, we do still advertise on cable, but we are probably going to be looking to get out of that because I just don’t know if it’s working anymore for anyone because a lot of people don’t even have cable. I don’t have cable. I like YouTube TV.

Lauren Kelly Gielarowski (20:41.156)
So, you know, I don’t know that that’s the most effective use of marketing dollars when people aren’t watching cable. They’re streaming, they’re on their phones. So I think, you know, we’ve kind of transitioned more into streaming services and advertising on there. But I just, I don’t know that the cable’s ever gonna come back. So.

Viktoria Altman (21:04.336)
I didn’t even know it was still around , to be honest with you. Do you guys still do like the old-fashioned stuff like billboards and you know things like that? Do those still work for you?

Lauren Kelly Gielarowski (21:07.321)
Yeah.

Lauren Kelly Gielarowski (21:16.054)
So we do still have some billboards and we do get so many people that tell us, saw your billboard, I saw your billboard. You know, whether that’s converting to someone seeing our billboard and calling us or just people we know saying, I saw your billboard, we do try to track our leads via our intakes. And they are every once in a while someone says, I saw the billboard and decided to call.

I think you have to see it enough times probably for it to convert. But a lot of our people now are word-of-mouth referrals or just Google searches.

Viktoria Altman (21:54.618)
So one of the interesting things about billboards is they help you with SEO. And here’s what happens. When somebody goes online and Googles your brand, then Google thinks, hey, you are prominent, you are interesting, you are important, and they will rank most of your pages better. So by having a real-world representation of yourself where people are inspired to go and Google you for whatever reason.

that can help you with digital marketing, which is not something people realize, but the old-fashioned stuff can help. So, you know, if you have it in the budget, you know, it’s probably good to continue to it, even if you can’t necessarily track the calls back to it. If you have it in the budget, having that brand recognition makes a big difference for the more modern advertising sources. Yeah. Okay.

Lauren Kelly Gielarowski (22:24.835)
Yeah.

Lauren Kelly Gielarowski (22:43.63)
That’s interesting.

Viktoria Altman (22:48.154)
Can you tell me, you’ve been in business for a long time, can you tell me a favorite client story?

Lauren Kelly Gielarowski (22:54.702)
Let me think about that. A favorite client story. So just, I recently had a case that resolved favorably for a client. It was a medical malpractice case and just developed a really good relationship with her throughout the case. And after we were able to get it resolved, she was just so thankful and so appreciative.

I genuinely enjoyed spending time with her while we were sitting in the mediation, which those are hour-long event where you’re just sitting with your client. And we just developed such a nice relationship. at the end of the case, she was like, you should come and visit me. She lives out west. You can stay with me. Please come and visit. Bring your husband. So I just really enjoy it when I can get a good out.

Lauren Kelly Gielarowski (23:48.932)
come for a client and they’re appreciative and they’re happy and we can form a special relationship like that along the way. That’s what’s most rewarding to me.

Viktoria Altman (23:59.652)
Yeah, it’s important, right? Because they’re not coming to you because they’re in a good place. They’re coming to you because a terrible event happens. And to try and turn it around into something not so terrible, know, at least some kind of compensation for, you know, the awful thing is, you know, it probably feels very good to be able to participate in somebody’s life in that way.

Lauren Kelly Gielarowski (24:03.576)
Right.

Lauren Kelly Gielarowski (24:20.129)
It does, yeah.

Viktoria Altman (24:24.174)
So going back to the founding of your firm, now your father is Larry Kelly and he’s a well-respected figure in the legal community. And how has his influence and mentorship shaped your career trajectory and your approach to practicing law?

Lauren Kelly Gielarowski (24:40.098)
Yeah, so I grew up watching my dad who was a trial lawyer. And so I knew from high school, I think, that I wanted to go to law school and I wanted to do what he did. And just watching him and his compassion for his clients and his pride in his work, he genuinely loves being a lawyer and loves helping people. You know, I meet so many people who are attorneys and who say, I would never tell my child to be a lawyer. It’s just so hard. It’s just so tedious. And he just never was that way. He loves being an attorney. He was recently elected to be the president of the Pennsylvania Association for Justice, which is our statewide plaintiff’s trial lawyers association. so that is such a great fit for him. think there are over 2,000 lawyers in the organization across the entire Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. And I just think his outlook and his positivity and his zeal for his clients and for the causes that we champion for them is going to be such a great fit for that. And so that’s just one more accolade he has, an accomplishment that he has that I look up to. And I’m just so fortunate that I get to work with him and continue to learn from him and benefit from him his mentorship and experience.

Viktoria Altman (26:01.998)
And you guys all get along. I love it.

Lauren Kelly Gielarowski (26:03.594)
And we do. Yes, a lot of people ask me, know, are you like succession and you all fight with each other? No, we’re not like that.

Viktoria Altman (26:12.174)
I love that. you know, there’s positivity. I could tell by the way you’re talking that there’s a lot of positivity and respect and that’s beautiful. That’s beautiful. So what’s next for your law firm? You are going to be in charge, I guess, in a few years, right? Next session minus the crazy.

Lauren Kelly Gielarowski (26:28.01)
Yeah, exactly, exactly. Yeah, you know, we’re just trying to keep moving forward and keep up with the times with everything we can. You know, our law firm was traditionally headquartered in Newcastle, Pennsylvania, which is about an hour outside of Pittsburgh when I came on board and my sister, Gianna Kelly, who works at the firm came on board about two years ago, we opened a Pittsburgh office. So we are primarily based in the Pittsburgh office and we’re just continuing to look to expand and grow the firm, grow the brand, and just keep doing good work for our clients.

Viktoria Altman (27:06.704)
Where do you see yourself in five, or 10 years? Do you see it as a larger firm with a lot more lawyers or do you wanna kind of stay, you know, family-owned and personal?

Lauren Kelly Gielarowski (27:15.276)
Yeah, that’s a good question. I do think we like having a tight-knit group. And I think our clients like that, too. I think they can feel that we have all the resources of a very large firm, but we have, it’s very personal. Every lawyer in the firm, I will say, knows about every case. I could step in for someone else on a client’s case and know exactly what’s going on. So we pride ourselves on that. But of course, if there’s new fresh talent out there, we’re always willing to bring more people on board.

Viktoria Altman (27:51.758)
Yeah, yeah, it’s important, I think, for clients that their cases don’t get lost. It’s actually why I prefer to work with the small law firms too, because I feel like there is a lot less red tape and there’s a lot more personal attention to the clients. And so, it helps me do my job when you guys are so good at doing yours.

Lauren Kelly Gielarowski (28:12.556)
Right, that’s important to us too.

Viktoria Altman (28:15.95)
All right. Well, thank you so much, Lauren. I appreciate it. This was super helpful and I appreciate you sharing your wisdom. Stick around for a couple of minutes because we’ve got to finish the upload of the podcast and I will see you guys next time.

Lauren Kelly Gielarowski (28:27.95)
Thank you, Victoria.