Angel Reyes:
We're about 6,400 open matters. I know exactly what that case costs.
Chris Dreyer:
Welcome to Personal Injury Mastermind. I'm your host, Chris Dryer, founder and CEO of Rankings.io, a legal marketing company the best firms hire when they want the rankings, trafficking cases, other law firm marketing agencies can't deliver. Each week you get insights and wisdom from some of the best in the industry. Do me a favor and hit that follow button right now to subscribe. You'll be the first to get every new episode delivered straight to you the moment it drops, giving you the edge. All right, let's dive in. What fuels a personal injury law firm has recovered over a billion dollars for over 50,000 clients?
Sustained excellence and fierce determination spanning nearly 30 years. A super lawyer for the past 15 years, Angel Reyes has built the Reyes Brown firm into a Texas powerhouse in auto and trucking cases. With over 8,000 Google reviews, he leverages a four plus million dollars annual marketing budget to sign over 200 new cases every month. On today's episode, get the keys to Reyes enduring impact, the pivotal role of digital marketing, the power of reviews for generating clients and how filling the right seats with the right people drives growth. Here's Angel Reyes, CEO of the Reyes Brown law firm.
Angel Reyes:
The first time that I really thought about becoming a lawyer was after my sophomore year in college. I had a couple of professors. They kind of just planted the seed with me. Junior year, you kind of get ready to take the LSAT and in your senior year you start doing applications. I got very, very fortunate, I got into a whole bunch of really good law schools. The rest, as they say is history. There's a lot more to this story, but that's the first time that I really thought about it and it's not like I spent a lot of time with professors in college. I mean, this was a passing comment, but somehow I said to myself, "I don't know if this BA is going to take me too far in the salary ladder, so maybe I should think about this grad school idea." And that's what I did.
Chris Dreyer:
Amazing. Amazing. So they didn't catch you. You were arguing a bunch and they're like, "Oh, you should be at the..."
Angel Reyes:
Not really. These were classes, were largely papers driven, meaning a couple of papers a semester and I think maybe somebody saw that I was a decent writer. I dare say there's no arguing in law school.
Chris Dreyer:
I'm going to fast-forward just a bunch. Your firm has grown incredibly and you handle a high volume of cases at any time. You could have 3000, you get a few hundred or more every month. I kind of want to start a little bit differently just from an operational perspective because the solo practitioner that are focused on, "How can I manage the small volume of cases?"
Angel Reyes:
Yeah, of course.
Chris Dreyer:
Tell me how your operations has evolved and how you're handling the amount of cases at any given point.
Angel Reyes:
We're a 31-year overnight sensation. The firm started with just me and a friend of mine from law school. We were working at a big firm in Dallas. I originally started at an old Wall Street firm, Carter Ledyard & Milburn and I moved to Texas thinking, "Ah, be better weather. Get out of these winters." And within six months my buddy and I hatched a plan to leave. We were young, we were naive, but we also didn't have any responsibilities. About nine months later, he got married, moved, and I stayed. I never let it go. I'm like the guy in the monkey bars that just outlast everybody, right? In those early days, it was just he and I, we ended up hiring a couple of folks, but only because we settled a case. We got a $33,333 and 33 cents fee, so it was a hundred thousand dollars settlement and I convinced him to put 25,000 of that on Univision.
I was the first lawyer in America to advertise on Univision and it was a very big deal. They had to go to their board of directors. This is 1992. They wanted Toyota and Ford to advertise on their station. They certainly didn't want a bunch of lawyers, but we convinced them to do it and all of a sudden we started getting a lot of clients because, well, gosh, starting in the early '90s, Texas became an immigration magnet and a lot of Spanish speakers were coming here. My family both lived and is from Puerto Rico. I speak Spanish. Without intention, that's how we started. But since then we started adding lawyers. We started adding staff. We started representing more and more people. High watermark right now, probably we're about 6,400 open matters and that takes a small army, 265 people work here, 20 lawyers work here. We've got a huge litigation docket.
In fact, 70% of our cases are filed lawsuits. It takes more than just me managing. We're structured like a business probably ought to be. I'm the CEO and president. I have a COO, very talented executive, add scaled to companies before he ever landed here to 500 million in revenue. He didn't do that in the law space, but he did it in sales type businesses and ultimately personal injury firms, whether they like it or not. They're first and foremost a sales organization and then after that, they're a service organization, but we don't get a lot of sticky clients, right? If you're a sticky client, you got some really bad luck and when it's mostly one and done, you're a sales organization first and foremost. And then you got to deliver on the service piece. And so to manage that service piece, I've got a CEO, a CMO, director of digital.
I've got a director of social, which is digital, but it's different than the digital that we call digital. It's Google, Bing, et cetera, paid search. I luckily have C-level folks in all the right positions including a CFO, including a controller because there's really no other way to manage the number of checks we write, the number of clients we exit. I mean we'll exit 400 clients in a month. You get 1200 bucks client or you get 4 million bucks client and everything in between. We very rarely get those big extreme fees, but we get them sometimes. It's a big management task. There's no secret to it. All of us still work long days. It's rare that I'd work less than 55 hours a week. There's real management here and we have paraprofessionals that manage entire teams of other paraprofessionals. We have trainers. You have to when you're doing it at that pace, we're doing it at. So you got to keep the wheels on and that means you got to have some really good people helping you out.
Chris Dreyer:
There's so much done back here. What do the constraints look like for you now? Is there bottlenecks on delivery, maybe getting the case, the throughput? What are some of the main challenges at your size now as opposed to... solos is trying to get the leads, right?
Angel Reyes:
Yeah, right. Believing that everybody is giving best efforts is a little bit of a challenge to be honest with you. When there's that many folks, you don't necessarily know everyone's name. You can see them on an org chart. You try to help the managers hold their teams accountable. That's a challenge, believe it or not. Just believing that everyone's doing their part and hiring can be a challenge too. We're in a position where we can over hire, so what we'll do is maybe we'll bring on 10 people to help gather records. But in 90 days, maybe only five or six will still be with us because we'll just kind of decide who's hitting what we measure them by and if they're hitting it, we keep them. If they're not, we tell them, "Thanks for hanging out with us for a bit, but we're going to move another direction." So hiring is a little bit of a challenge.
There's always some churn and even if it's 20%, it's still 40, 50 people. That's a couple, four or five people a month need to get hired no matter what. Another thing that we've kind of noticed is that young lawyers are still struggling with whether they want jobs or careers. They really want to work nine to five, and that'll keep you a job, but it will not build a career. This is a demanding mistress, this legal practice, and if you want to get good at it, you're going to have to put some hours in. So, "Oh, I want to work from home." It's always on Friday, that young lawyers are trying to explore work-life balance and I don't know, I'm not sure you can have a career and be perfectly work-life balanced.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah, that work-life balance. That's definitely a myth. There's just not balance, right?
Angel Reyes:
I don't know if it's a full, is it a myth... I don't know. It is a goal, right? I mean it's a goal and that's okay to have goals. And it's okay, I'm not suggesting that you ignore your family or never take a vacation. That's not where we're at here. If you work nine, 10 hours a day in order to have that much life, you would sleep three or four hours a night and I don't know if there's too many people that can manage that. So it's necessarily imbalanced. You're going to have to spend some time in the office to get good at this work.
Chris Dreyer:
I couldn't agree more. I think my audience is probably chomping at the bit for me to ask about marketing and originating cases. One thing I want to point out before we even jump into this is you've got like 8,000 reviews in Google reviews. That's what caught my eye and that's why I reached out because they're so incredibly important for search engine-
Angel Reyes:
They are.
Chris Dreyer:
... marketing perspective, from the social proof perspective, and you also mentioned, hey, you've got an in-house, director of digital, you've got an in-house this, you've got an in-house this. So tell me a little bit about your approach and your thoughts on marketing and at your current state because you certainly have more capital to deploy and more options.
Angel Reyes:
Sure, sure, sure.
Chris Dreyer:
How do you think about marketing?
Angel Reyes:
I started out TV and I did it until about three years ago and then I decided I'm going to go all in. I'm tired of doing the straddle. I'm tired of spending some millions on TV and millions on digital. About five years ago we got a new database and the new database could just do a lot more than our old one and we could measure a lot more things. And one of the things we could really measure was attribution. We used a whole lot of web hooks and it dumped right into Salesforce and it told us, "Where'd we get the case?" Because we use a unique number for every single ad we do ever. We knew the TV wasn't working. Now I know there's some folks that swear by TV still and in small markets maybe it still does work. Dallas is the third-largest metro in the country, and I don't think it works here anymore. I'm a big believer that you shouldn't spend any money on TV, that you should spend all your money on digital to start.
You need to do paid Google and Bing, I guess is sort of in the mix a little. I think certainly if you're starting out, you'd be well advised to stick with the digital lane. One, you can measure it, two, you can control it. If you decided I've spent my budget tomorrow, you can stop spending and you just tell them, "Okay, done." And if you need a few weeks to recover from that, then you can kick back off anytime you want. TV doesn't work like that. You got to prepay 30 days in advance. You never know how many leads you're going to get, but when you start measuring it, I started realizing that certainly for us, our experience was TV leads were too expensive. So we went all digital about five years ago largely because the database helped us measure it really well. We also use an Invoca call software, which essentially does the attribution for us because it'll give a unique number to every single ad we have out there.
And so via a unique number and a Google tag managers and things like that, we're able to find out where we get our cases, and digital was significantly more cost-effective than TV was. I guess to the extent that anyone's looking for advice, stay in the digital lane, that's definitely where the action is and it's where the future is. I don't even think brands matter anymore. I think that people Google, best accident lawyer or highest reviewed accident lawyer, things like that, and that endorsed our benefit. We've worked for over a decade building our Google reviews. It takes a lot of follow up. We have a whole team. That's what they do. They keep dropping the link into their text. We are able to text our clients from our desktops because the Salesforce platform, legal database allows for that. It's another API that we use, and it allows us to keep communicating with clients as long as we want. Our open read rate on a text is something like 88%.
Chris Dreyer:
That's incredible.
Angel Reyes:
And the only folks who don't open a text, they just either don't care or don't... maybe even still have a flip phone.
Chris Dreyer:
Right. That's exactly what I went to. Still rocking the flip phone for an emergency in their pocket.
Angel Reyes:
They're totally out there, man. They're out there though. That's one of the ways that we keep reminding people, "Hey, haven't got that review you promised us, here's the link again." And you do that enough times and you can roll up pretty big numbers over time. Google doesn't count all of them. It's easy for me to sit here with 8,000 reviews and be like, "Ah, it is what it is. No big deal." But someone that didn't get that five they really wanted, that's probably pretty aggravating if I had to guess.
Chris Dreyer:
How do you see OTT and streaming? Is that a digital play? Do you still look at that as traditional? I know all the local TV stations are trying to sell it.
Angel Reyes:
Yeah, we've experimented with it. Not successfully yet. I think that in the next five or so years, it might be something we revisit largely because our research tells us if you're under 35, and that's a significant part of our clientele now, it's highly likely that you've never watched broadcast TV, never. Maybe a football game. Maybe you watch the Super Bowl CBS, but literally you don't watch it. And the only people watching broadcast TV during the week days and/or prime time are basically the Fox News crowd, and they're over 65. And I personally don't want to rule out 85% of America, which is what you'd be doing. The cords have been cut that ship sailed we're not bullish at all on broadcast TV, but OTT could make a difference. If you want to pay the lesser rate for Netflix and suffer commercials, that's probably likely our clientele.
That's what they're doing. But really what we found is most of our clientele will turn to Google. I call it digital video. A lot of our clients are using YouTube. That's how they watch everything. It's kind of hard to get in front of them though because there's no concentrated audience. There is no, "Oh, you're guaranteed 800,000 eyeballs this 22 minutes of broadcast TV." There's none of that. So it's kind of hard to pin it. We've got Google so dialed in and even social, Facebook and Instagram dialed in that they're bringing us cases for the right amount of money and we can help a lot of people every month. We can't keep them all. We lose some cases, fall apart from bad facts, no insurance, things like that. But generally speaking, we'll keep 80% of what we sign up.
Chris Dreyer:
And I applaud you for the attention arbitrage game that you're playing and being out ahead of the game, right? Because you're right, the eyeballs have shifted to different locations.
Angel Reyes:
I think that's right. I mean, I'm not trying to be right or dogmatic about it. If other folks have data that supports TV spend, great, go for it. We didn't. So we shifted to digital and boy, I'm never going looking back, never, never looking back. It's literally like four times cheaper for us.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah, I'll tell you too. And you weren't just dabbling in TV, so you had some real data and real spend.
Angel Reyes:
Oh, yeah. There were several years where we spent at least 6 million in Dallas market. It was a combination of Spanish and English, but nevertheless, it's a fairly big number. You're talking 500 grand a month on television. That's pretty serious, but it just wasn't delivered, so we ended up doubling down and spending twice that much on Google, and it worked out pretty well.
Chris Dreyer:
When you're saying Google, you're saying the full gambit, the LSA, the Google Ads, search, maps?
Angel Reyes:
GMB. I mean, I'm not really counting what I call organic search. It's so far down. I'm really counting your paid ads, your LSAs, LSAs are highly dependent on reviews, highly dependent, and your GMB page, your profile, et cetera. People find you that way too. And though collectively in the Google universe, we're definitely all in and it's working pretty well. And I think just because most people just pick the phone up and Google stuff like I just mentioned earlier.
Chris Dreyer:
And I imagine from what I've seen tying into Salesforce for your Google Ads, you get to tie it directly to the cases to let the AI run against the similar scenarios.
Angel Reyes:
I know exactly what that case costs. I mean, just do. And I know exactly which campaigns to turn off, and all of a sudden when that ad is generating 3,500 cost per case, I'm going to turn it off. It's too much. We need to be lower than that.
Chris Dreyer:
And then I guess some of those asynchronous, the big cases, kind of balance that out when you do overpay a little bit.
Angel Reyes:
Yeah, I mean you can't plan a business around those cases, so we just plan them around what we consider the value of a car wreck fee to be. I mean, that's how we do it.
Chris Dreyer:
Everyone wants those trucking cases, and it seems like everyone, especially San Antonio, they're blasting the TV ad, standing on the trucks trying to get the trucking cases. Have you found success through search, through digital, getting the big 18 wheeler, the big rig, the commercial van type stuff?
Angel Reyes:
Yeah, we do. I'd be willing to bet. One, I don't think it's a bad strategy to only focus on trucks, company cars, 18 wheelers, because I don't think that a person who sees this ad in whatever form, television, digital, YouTube, you name it, is going to say, "Oh, I wasn't in an 18 wheeler wreck, so I better not call them." I don't think you get ruled out by presenting yourself as the big truck guy or gal. I would be willing to bet though that our averages are exactly what theirs are. 14% of our cases have commercial insurance, and I'll bet you that that's what theirs are too.
Because the net gets cast and it's mostly let's say minnows. And every once in a while you'll have a tuner or a grouper in there, and metaphorically, that's like a car crash where there's some injuries versus an 18 wheeler where there's catastrophic injuries. There's only so many of them, and I believe that our numbers are big enough, 55,000 former clients, we can say that, yeah, the history says about 14% of those cases end up with commercial insurance. And that's just the, I don't want to say luck of the draw, but that's what statistics tells us.
Chris Dreyer:
This is what I hear from our clients or other attorneys. They say, "Oh, the big cases come from the brand." And you're saying, "Look, five years ago we shifted all to digital, and of course we're focused on our positioning and reputation." But you're getting that 14%.
Angel Reyes:
And it didn't matter. I think it's because these days, if you Google anything about lawyers and accidents, you're going to get five or six sponsored ads. You'll have competitors bid on your name and they'll be below you as long as you're bidding on your own name, but they'd still be a sponsored ad and people will just click, click, click until the fastest person answers their phone. These are urgent calls. These are not contemplative, "I think I'll do my research." If you want to pretend that that's what these clients are doing, feel free. I'm going to argue that that's not what they're doing. That they're literally, the minute they sit down after that car wreck, they're saying, "I'm going to get a lawyer to help me with this."
Because it doesn't matter who answers the phone. If you can help with a car wreck, whether it was a brand or no brand, and that's why I think that there's so many people coming into the space because brands don't matter. If brands mattered so much, there would be no new entrants. Think about how hard it is to be a non-branded entrant, but guess what? You probably already know this. More and more lawyers are getting into auto and truck wreck space than ever, and I think that is a direct reflection and it correlates to brands not meaning nearly as much as people thought or think they do.
Chris Dreyer:
I agree a thousand percent I think until there's a consolidation, right? That's happened in dental and some of the other spaces like funeral homes. Until that happens, I think it's the wild west.
Angel Reyes:
So when do you think that'll happen?
Chris Dreyer:
I think it's a long way out. I saw tech advancements in COVID, right? We saw advancements, we saw Zoom depots and things like that just to get people-
Angel Reyes:
Yeah, we're still doing [inaudible 00:21:27].
Chris Dreyer:
Right, right. And I think that shifted and transitioned things, but now even with AI, and I just think that legal's a little bit slower to adapt.
Angel Reyes:
It is.
Chris Dreyer:
So maybe five, 10 years would be my guess.
Angel Reyes:
Yeah, that's kind of my guess. I do think that slowly but surely the walls are getting knocked down between non-lawyer ownership of law firms. Washington DC allows it and Arizona.
Chris Dreyer:
Arizona, yeah.
Angel Reyes:
Texas actually just did a vote and it barely lost. They'll keep trying. The money's always going to be knocking on the door, and so they'll keep coming back every couple of years. And I think that eventually the door is going to open. The AVA will probably soften up because some of the big firms will say, "We want to buy PricewaterhouseCoopers, and we're going to merge it with let's say Latham Watkins. So big law, big accounting. We're going to merge this together and we're going to really be able to help corporate America. And that's where laws get made, man. When you can help corporate America, Congress tends to move. And so who knows, maybe it'll be some sort of lifting nationally and/or pressure on the A BA to get rid of that restriction. And I think there's plenty of pressure, and I think it's just a matter of time.
I just don't know how much time. You might be right, maybe it's 10 years. We do believe that private equity is going to be moving into this space looking to do roll-ups, and I think it's especially injury firms are probably going to be some of the first firms to allow outside equity in. Because imagine what you could do if you had an equity partner that wasn't a lawyer. I mean, you got an answer to the equity, that's for sure. If you've got a funder, you better pay attention. But I don't know. That's just, it's been the nature of business. And you already mentioned dentists, vets, doctors, they've all been rolled up, so to speak, and I don't know why we would think that we're so special that we won't be. I think we probably will be, just a matter of time.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah, I completely agree. One final question. Our audiences, where can they go to connect with you?
Angel Reyes:
Yeah. The easiest place to connect with us would be either my email address, which is angel@reyeslaw.com or our website, which is www.reyeslaw.com. We are way, way open to showing and telling people how we do it. Largely because we don't think we are perfect. We know we can improve all along the margins and maybe even in the middle. And so we're always looking to share best practices, talk to folks in other places. We're very open to people reaching out at any level. Certainly you need help in Texas, happy to do it, and if you need a pleading in Texas, we probably have it. We've litigated, oh my God, I don't know. We've literally file like 30,000 lawsuits in the last 20 years. You have to file lawsuits in Texas now. You can't really do right by your client without doing that. And we try to walk the walk, not just talk to talk.
Chris Dreyer:
There was a lot to take in from today's conversation, so let's hit the recap, time for the pinpoints. Know your numbers. Need to understand how ad spend impacts your acquisition costs. Measure the impact of each channel and reallocate dollars to the channels providing the best return. For digital, tools like webhooks, unique numbers per ad and call analytics software can help paint a clear picture. For Angel, knowing his numbers made him ditch TV entirely.
Angel Reyes:
I know exactly what that case costs and I know exactly which campaigns to turn off.
Chris Dreyer:
Be relentless. Ask for reviews more than once. Reviews add up over time and serve a dual purpose. They're excellent social proof and help you rank in Google local service ads and the Google Map pack. If you have a limited budget, prioritize referral capture over brand play. Oh, and pick up the phone.
Angel Reyes:
Because it doesn't matter who answers the phone. If you can help with a car wreck, these are urgent calls.
Chris Dreyer:
Don't go it alone. Reyes executives allow him to focus on strategy. Free from operations, he leverages experts to serve more clients. If you're expanding, consider a specialist team. It can take you far.
Angel Reyes:
We're about 6,400 open matters. It takes a small army. I've got a CEO, a CMO, director of digital, director of social, including a CFO, including a controller because there's really no other way to manage the number of checks we write, the number of clients we exit. I mean we'll exit 400 clients in a month.
Chris Dreyer:
For more information about Angel, check out the show notes. Before you go, do me a solid and smash that follow button to subscribe if you haven't already. I sincerely appreciate it, and I know you won't want to miss out on our next episode, a Personal Injury Mastermind with me, Chris Dreyer, founder and CEO of Rankings.io. All right everybody, thanks for hanging out. See you next time. I'm out.
