A Decade on the Casino Floor Made Him a Better Lawyer | Chris Rose

0:00Chris Rose: When I introduced myself as Chris fucking Rose, that just separated me from everyone else. But I can't compete with Top Dog. I can't compete with the social media giants. I was a casino dealer for about 10 years. I decided to go to college, became a lawyer after that.

0:15Mike Morse: It's a case that they were going to make zero on and you try to make them something on.

0:18Chris Rose: It's literally saving money. When I'm on a table, I have to be the one in control or the players will run over me. That taught me more than anything.

0:30Mike Morse: Everybody, it's Mike Morse for another fabulous episode of the Fireproof Podcast. Today, I have Chris fucking Rose with me. And, you know, I was thinking, am I going to use the F word there? Because I think that hurts us. I think we get an E on our thing as explicit. But, you know, that's your name, isn't it?

0:58Chris Rose: That is my name.

0:59Mike Morse: Tell me how that came about. Because if you don't know Chris, he's a great guy. We're going to get into all that. But that's his middle name. And he uses it on every tag, on every, I don't know if you're using it on Instagram or whatever. But how did that come about?

1:12Chris Rose: Yeah, so I was trying to find ways to make myself more memorable as I was moving into the conference circuit, into the legal industry. And I was at a conference where they forgot to print out my name tag. And a friend of mine was making the name tags. And she was like, Chris fucking Rose. And she wrote it on the name tag. And I was like, I'm wearing that. And it just resonated with people.

1:37Chris Rose: I realized that when I introduced myself as Chris fucking Rose, that just, it separated me from everyone else. And it also sorts my audience. Because if I see someone kind of cringe from that name, I know that they will not subscribe to my brand of irreverence. And so it is a way of like finding my people even faster.

1:56Mike Morse: I love that. Sometimes I'm in audiences. I'll drop the F-bomb. And there are a couple of, and I'm like, those are not my people. You know. I mean, not that I, you know what I mean. I mean, they just, I swear. Yeah. I mean, I punctuate. I'm passionate. You're passionate.

2:14Chris Rose: And authentic. That's the biggest part. It is authentic.

2:17Mike Morse: You know, it doesn't come out. It's not fake. You know, it comes out, it comes out. So, all right, Chris, tell us who you are, what's your background, and what are you doing these days?

2:28Chris Rose: Yeah. So, Chris fucking Rose. I'm originally from Alabama. I moved to Vegas on my 21st birthday. Sight unseen. I just, you know, as I say, I ran out of cousins. So, I was a casino dealer for about 10 years. I decided to go to college. Became a lawyer after that. Worked as a lobbyist and then moved into legal services about a year and a half ago.

2:54Chris Rose: I opened up my own law firm. I had intended to do referrals, something closer to, like, Top Dog or, you know, offering better attorney reviews. When clients are looking for an attorney, they're always reaching out to people. Hey, do you know someone that does this? They're looking for confidence from someone else. And so, my idea was to provide that to them. But I can't compete with Top Dog. I can't compete with the social media giants. And someone reached out to me who was a case manager and asked, hey, I need to find an attorney. Can you help me? And that's when I realized that I should switch from B to C to B to B. And so, now I help attorneys find other attorneys to refer cases to.

3:38Mike Morse: I love it. What's the name of your business?

3:40Chris Rose: LegalFlare.

3:40Mike Morse: And it's going great.

3:44Chris Rose: We are going through exponential growth right now. I'm awake 25 hours a day.

3:49Mike Morse: So, how does that work? If a lawyer needs to find another lawyer with a weird specialty, a different state, a different city that they're not experienced with, they call you. They say, I got a medical malpractice case in Oklahoma. Can you help me place it? And that's, you'll help them place it?

4:06Chris Rose: Absolutely.

4:07Mike Morse: Go ahead.

4:08Chris Rose: Our primaries are personal injury, employment law. That's a big one. It's a big space. Work comp in most states. And then some med mal and the occasional. But it's all contingency.

4:19Chris Rose: And I would say that the biggest area for improvement that firms should consider is leads they decline. When someone calls their firm and they decline that for any reason, you don't really know whether that's a viable case unless you have some type of layer of redundancy. So, I accept those decline leads. We get consent to contact. And then I send them to a sequence of attorneys of firms who will review those cases and see if there's actually a viable case there that may have been overlooked or is even, you know, out of jurisdiction, out of practice.

4:53Mike Morse: And you get a percentage of that fee? The lawyer who gives you the case gets a percentage of the fee.

4:58Chris Rose: Correct.

4:59Mike Morse: And it's a case that they were going to make zero on and you try to make them something on.

5:03Chris Rose: It's literally saving money. Because every time someone calls your firm, that's a phone call that you paid for. And if you just dismiss it out of hand, I mean, maybe your intake specialist was having a bad day or maybe there was some question that wasn't asked. And this way, it just creates that layer of redundancy. And additionally, you can determine how good your intake is by the number of cases that are signed after you decline them and make money at the same time.

5:31Mike Morse: I love it. I don't know another business like that.

5:32Chris Rose: I don't think there are any because right now I'm the only law firm offering that because I can do it all on contingency. It literally costs nothing.

5:42Mike Morse: Right. Are you heavy into software and AI and are you trying to leverage all that when you're communicating with all these firms?

5:49Chris Rose: I am at a level of intimacy with Claude Code that you would not believe. I spend at least 12 hours a day writing software. Everything I do, my emails, Slack messages, everything goes through Claude Code. I literally start my day by going into Claude Code and saying, run my inbox, what are all my tasks, what are my projects? And it pumps it all out.

6:13Mike Morse: Claude is a game changer. It's a game changer. I'm just starting to date Claude Code. You're already married, it sounds like, but I am in love.

6:20Chris Rose: Oh, we're open to threesomes just so you know.

6:23Mike Morse: Okay. Okay. Duly noted. Yeah. I have to go back to the 10 years of working in Vegas as a casino. What games were you dealing?

6:33Chris Rose: Oh, my favorite was craps. That was what I had a passion for because there's so much control, so much space to implant my personality onto it. And because it's more of a masculine game, that really taught me how to, one, how to multitask, how to watch so many things at the same time, and then to really exert myself, my control over other people.

7:01Mike Morse: So here's a serious question that everybody wants to know. Is the hard eight bet really a bad sucker's bet?

7:07Chris Rose: I mean, define bad sucker's bets. Like, there's tons of bad bets. It's just, you know.

7:13Mike Morse: What's the best bet on the craps table? The pass line?

7:15Chris Rose: So the pass line does have a house percentage, I think, of like 1.45, so it's quite low. And then the odds that you can take behind it, that is actually a neutral bet. But, of course, you can't make that bet until you've made the pass line bet. So if you incorporate them together, there is a small house advantage. But if you're just playing to reduce house advantage, that's the best way to do it. And odds are simply a way of increasing volatility.

7:41Mike Morse: What's the best game for gamblers to play in Vegas, in your opinion?

7:45Chris Rose: Oh, poker.

7:46Mike Morse: Poker.

7:46Chris Rose: Because you're not playing against the house. You're playing against other players. And so, therefore, skill is actually the highest determinant of outcome. And so I do like to play poker. For two years, I was a professional poker player. And I know I...

8:03Mike Morse: This is going to go on for three hours. I have so many questions for you.

8:06Chris Rose: Oh, please. Keep going.

8:07Mike Morse: You had a flight to catch it. I grabbed you as you had your bag walking out the door.

8:12Chris Rose: I promise they'll wait for me.

8:12Mike Morse: So the plane will wait. So are you a gambler now?

8:16Chris Rose: I play poker maybe four or five times a year.

8:21Mike Morse: Play tournaments?

8:22Chris Rose: No, no, no. I'm a cash game.

8:26Mike Morse: Texas Hold'em?

8:27Chris Rose: Yes, exactly. Occasionally PLO. Pot Limit Omaha, sorry.

8:31Mike Morse: Pot Limit Omaha.

8:32Chris Rose: It's four cards. It's a way of increasing volatility.

8:36Mike Morse: Have you ever won... What's the biggest pot you've ever won?

8:41Chris Rose: 6,600. So that was pretty good.

8:44Mike Morse: That is a big pot. So you don't do the tournaments. You don't do the million-dollar Texas Hold'em where you can win the rings. You haven't entered those contests?

8:51Chris Rose: No, and the reason is because tournaments have extremely high volatility. The best poker players, the best tournament players can go a year without winning and still have an overall positive expected value. It's just because it's a grind. You have to go through so many outcomes that small advantages have to accrue at the same time. And so I just don't have the time. I'd rather sit down and just maximize my advantage in the short term. So I only want to play for like three or four hours.

9:24Mike Morse: Are people using Claude Code to see if they should hold or fold or do all those things? I mean, I never thought about this. I used to play Texas Hold'em when it was popular. But now that all the statistics and odds are right there at your fingertips, I mean, I bet you can't use them at the tables.

9:40Chris Rose: So this is a really interesting point. First, no, you can't. But second, Claude is an LLM, a large language model. It's based around probabilistic determinations of words. What is the most likely next word to come in this sequence? It's not really geared toward math. If you want to use Claude Code, you have to ask it to write a Python script to do any math. For something like that, it'd be better off using what's called a solver. And so it can give you all of the probabilities for outcomes for best practices in specific hands, specific scenarios. So it doesn't quite have that LLM integration yet. And when they try to use LLMs to play poker, it's like watching, well, monkeys. You know, they're just clicking buttons.

10:31Mike Morse: Okay. I was just curious about that. Where'd you go to law school?

10:35Chris Rose: UNLV, the Boyd School of Law.

10:39Mike Morse: And you're still in Vegas.

10:40Chris Rose: I am.

10:41Mike Morse: So you love it.

10:42Chris Rose: You would have to drag me out. If I wasn't in Vegas, I'd be in Miami because it's just Vegas on the East Coast.

10:50Mike Morse: Do you have a favorite story when you were working the tables that, whether it be a movie star who sat down with you or some crazy hand, or you have a favorite story?

11:01Chris Rose: Oh, let's see. I dealt to Macaulay Culkin for about four hours. He was actually a surprisingly nice guy. Oh, oh, Kevin Hart.

11:11Mike Morse: Oh, really?

11:11Chris Rose: Kevin Hart walked up to my table. I was dealing to, he walked up with this entourage of like 11 people. He bought in for an exceedingly large amount of money. And with a lot of celebrities that, like they're just not who you expect, Kevin Hart was that and more. He was just charisma and charm and humor dialed up to 11. Everything he did just made me laugh and everybody was having such a good time and it was genuine. And then on top of that, when he won, he tipped me, I think he tipped me like $8,000 or something.

11:48Mike Morse: Holy.

11:49Chris Rose: I know. And that was his profit. Like he had been down when I came back from break. I got him all the way back to even and that $8,000 was his profit and he gave that to me.

11:58Mike Morse: I've always been curious about the tipping. You know, you're supposed to tip dealers. It's supposed to bring you good luck. You want them rooting for you, all those good things. But at the end of the night, what does an average dealer walk away with? On an average night, what are you making at the tables?

12:11Chris Rose: So I haven't been a dealer for 10 years now, but at the time, and it always depends on in which casino you're dealing. Because, you know, if you're dealing in some, you know, shithole, nobody's tipping. But at my best, when I worked at the Hard Rock, I made about $225 a night.

12:31Mike Morse: $225. Even if you got an $8,000 tip, you don't get to keep it.

12:34Chris Rose: No, no, no. We split those tips into a 24-hour pool and they're divided up in shares by how many hours you work.

12:41Mike Morse: You ever caught a cheater at one of your tables? Do people try to cheat all the time or is that just in the movies?

12:45Chris Rose: Not all of the time. I mean, a few card counters, but technically they're not cheaters. They are advantage players. But I did catch a few people who would like try to, we call it capping. They'll try and cap their bet, put a little bit extra on top. The biggest ones are, we call them shot takers. They'll try to take a shot at you by like getting you to mess up, getting you to make a mistake so that they can then use the rules in their favor to get paid out. And there were a few. We usually recognize them.

13:15Mike Morse: You know, is there any correlation between being a lawyer and what you're doing and dealing tables?

13:20Chris Rose: So many. My time, what I learned being a dealer that it directly fed into my being a lawyer, not just a lawyer, but someone who can differentiate myself in this space is first confidence. When I'm on a table, I have to be the one in control or the players will run over me, especially in craps. So taking what can be strong personalities and asserting myself through confidence as the one who's in charge, that taught me more than anything.

13:53Chris Rose: And I would say what's a close second, I can talk to anybody about anything. And what I got really good at was peppering people with questions, comments. I'm just seeing the slight like uptick, the slight blossoming of the face that showed interest in a specific topic. And I knew that's when I could just dig in right there. That's what they want to talk about.

14:17Mike Morse: You know, I was thinking as you were speaking, I've thought about writing a book about all the things that I learned waiting tables and how that relates to being a trial lawyer. And you just said a couple of them, you know, the confidence, being able to talk to anybody, et cetera. So it's remarkable. And it just dawned on me, when I'm standing watching craps, I played it a couple of times, but I'm not a big gambler. The math that you guys had to do in craps with the odds and the percentages and the multiples, that looks really, really hard. How long does that really take someone to learn? Because you have to know it fast and quick and you cannot make mistakes.

14:57Chris Rose: That did take a while. What is probably hardest is learning to manipulate the chips. Because in blackjack, there's just cards, but in craps, your tools are actually the chip stacks. So learning to get good hands, that's first and foremost the paramount skill. At a certain point, the numbers, they just begin to repeat. So it's a lot of just memorization of what amounts total what. But we did have keys, shortcuts, to get really good. The prop bets in the center, those are the ones with the large payouts. Those, I would say it probably takes five years to get really good at just being able to like know what, you know, what is some amount times 29 minus, you know, a third or something like that.

15:43Mike Morse: It's amazing to me. It's amazing. People want to get ahold of you. They want to make more money on their cases where they're not going to make any money. What's the best way to get ahold of you?

15:50Chris Rose: So two ways. First, Chris.Rose at LegalFlare.com. Super easy. And the second, you go into your bathroom, turn off the lights, stare into the mirror and say, Chris fucking Rose, Chris fucking Rose, Chris fucking Rose. And there I am. I appear just like that. Try it sometime, Mike. I might surprise you.

16:10Mike Morse: You are an amazing person. I always love seeing you at the conferences. Your hug, your professionalism, your fun, your everything that everybody should be. You're a good friend and I'm glad that I know you.

16:28Chris Rose: Same. Same. When we first met, I felt like I found someone who sees people. Like you saw me and there's that warmth to you. And I appreciate you for being my friend. That really means a lot to me. So thank you for everything you do.

16:45Mike Morse: You make it easy. Thanks for coming to Fireproof. Did you have fun?

16:50Chris Rose: One of my favorites. One of my favorites.

16:52Mike Morse: You go to every conference in the book.

16:53Chris Rose: I've dialed back a little bit this year, but I made it. I made it.

16:57Mike Morse: So what did you experience in Fireproof? And then that's the last question, because I know you got to catch a flight.

17:01Chris Rose: What I experienced, I love Nicole Bergen. Her information. Oh, MSOs. That is something I'm going to, if people don't know about MSOs, good Lord, reach out.

17:13Mike Morse: MSOs, you learn about brand studies.

17:15Chris Rose: Yes.

17:15Mike Morse: You heard from Mike Alder.

17:17Chris Rose: Yes.

17:17Mike Morse: I mean, all the Fireproof team were up there.

17:19Chris Rose: I would spend more time talking about everything that I learned and all of the thoughts that it gives me than I actually spent in the classes, because that's what conferences are about. What do you learn here? And then go home and what can you apply it to? And so I'll spend far more time thinking about that. And this is some of the best programming. Seriously. Seriously. You've done a fantastic job. It's amazing.

17:44Mike Morse: If you want to make some more money on those cases that you're just throwing away, or you're telling people to call the state bar, or you're telling people we don't do that kind of work, or you're telling people we can't handle that work, get Chris involved. He'll make you some money, and you'll be happy, because you'll have some extra money in your pocket, so you can go to Vegas and waste it.

18:03Chris Rose: Yeah. That's what could happen. Yeah, call me then too.

18:06Mike Morse: Thanks for watching another episode of the Fireproof Podcast. Share this episode, like it, comment, subscribe, do all the things you're supposed to do on podcasts. We'll see you next time.