That’s the thought that went through Kevin L. Edwards’ mind.
A mother and daughter sustained significant injuries in a crash, and went to court to seek compensation. Edwards, a young attorney, had just won his first trial against them.
“I saved a few bucks for a multibillion- dollar insurance company, and I guess it was at that point where I realized that that’s probably not where I need to be,” Edwards says. He walked away feeling like he’d done something wrong.
He made a decision: “If I’m gonna do it and be proud of what I do, I’m going to do it for injured Texans.”
Edwards’ former roommate, Pedro “Peter” de la Cerda, was also working as a defense attorney. He shared a conviction that he was on the wrong side of the courtroom. In 2008, they opened Edwards and de la Cerda in Dallas.
DFW’s Origins and Evolution
Crammed into a little office with no windows, Edwards and de la Cerda took on “anything we could get our hands on,” Edwards says. They made just $9,000 apiece their first year.
The pair spent a decade working as of counsel with another firm, specializing in mass torts. They won $73 million in pelvic mesh and $33 million in IVC filter product mass torts.
Along the way, they built relationships with local counsel across the country—attorneys who needed experienced trial lawyers to handle cases their own
firms couldn’t.
The money was good, but they felt it was not their own shop.
In 2021, with everyone from their wives to their bankers telling them they were crazy, Edwards and de la Cerda launched DFW Injury Lawyers to work on single-event personal injury. In one of the most competitive legal markets in the country, the firm prospered, growing its staff to about 40 persons in five years.
Edwards and de la Cerda’s reputations as mass tort attorneys gave DFW Injury Lawyers a jumpstart.
The relationships they’d built during the mass tort years followed them. An Illinois attorney they’d worked with on an IVC case sent them one of their first clients — someone injured in a Texas box truck accident. Edwards and de la Cerda won. The referrals haven’t stopped since.
Lawyers from both outside and within Texas who needed referral partners knew who to call. That referral network continues to feed DFW today.
“Bring the Muscle”: How DFW Injury Lawyers Built the Brand
As Edwards and de la Cerda prepared to launch DFW Injury Lawyers, Edwards spoke to the legendary Kentucky Hammer, Darryl Isaacs, who warned him that lawyers need to stand out in Dallas/Fort Worth.
An idea hit Edwards: “You watch all these like mob movies, and they say, ‘You got to bring in the muscle to get the money,’ right? I’m like, ‘This is genius. This will go over well.’” His wife’s immediate reaction was blunt: “Are you kidding me? It’s terrible.” Undaunted, Edwards phoned Isaacs and presented his idea.
“He was—pause—and he always talks, and it was a pause,” Edwards recalls. “I was like, ‘Are you there?’ And he’s like, ‘It’s terrible. I love it. Do it.’”
And it’s taken off. The firm nabbed a branded phone number (888-4-MUS-CLE) and started producing popular weekly social media video reels, “Muscle Mondays.” Strangers started to recognize him as the Muscle Guy.
Recalibrating Marketing for Quality Growth
The Dallas-Fort Worth market, however, required more than branding success. DFW poured money into TV, radio, and billboards. They signed very little of what came through the door.
Then came what Edwards calls the “Valentine’s Day Massacre.” One February 14th, the firm disappeared from Google entirely.
Edwards was ready to tear down the website and start it all over. Instead, he called Rankings.io.
John Lowe, DFW’s account manager at Rankings.io, advocated for gradual, routine, and intentional refinements. Improved content focused on the firm’s practice areas and home base of Dallas/Fort Worth. A new website improved conversion and engagement rates. Backlinks greatly improved DFW’s visibility against some of the market’s biggest competitors. DFW’s number of monthly high-value motor-vehicle accident cases from local service ads more than quadrupled.
Edwards has seen tangible results.
“We were averaging 40, 50 cases a month,” says Edwards. “We went with Rankings. Three or four months later, we’re north of 90. Six months after that, we’re north of 100. And now we’re pushing 200 every month. So it’s working.”
“A lot of the reasons I see firms not doing very well are due to their unwillingness to pull their weight or implement the things we discuss,” Lowe says. “Kevin is great at that. The collaboration component has been huge.”
Process and Scalability: DFW’s Long-Term Vision for Sustained Growth
When Edwards and de la Cerda started DFW Injury Lawyers, they wanted to build a machine that would run itself. That machine would require good, trustworthy people who would follow smart processes that Edwards and de la Cerda would continue to refine.
The machine is starting to run itself.
Edwards was in New York with his family, de la Cerda in Florida, when Edwards’ phone started lighting up. Settlement emails. Case signings. By the time he added it up, the firm had settled nearly $790,000 in cases — including one for $450,000 — in about two hours.
“There’s a running joke now that once I go on vacation, we start signing cases,” Edwards laughs. “So maybe I just need to get out of the office more.”
Edwards may joke about retiring to the beach in Cabo and letting the machine run, but he loves the hands-on of helping injured Texans too much.
