Micki Love:
The most important thing to do is know your market, know what plays in your market, and then go hard after those things.
Chris Dreyer:
Welcome to Personal Injury Mastermind. I’m your host, Chris Dreyer, founder and CEO of Rankings.io, the legal marketing company the best firms hire when they want the rankings, traffic, and cases other law firm marketing agencies can’t deliver. 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. On these special Toolkit episodes, we dive deep into conversations with the leading vendors in the legal sphere, the masterminds behind the technologies, services and strategies that help law firms not just survive, but thrive in today’s competitive landscape. This is Toolkit Thursday on PIM, your weekly guide to staying sharp in the legal world. Let’s get started.
How do you build a nine-figure firm? Know your market better than anyone, tracking shifts in attention, not just annually, but quarterly. My next guest is an expert at dominating markets through strategic marketing. Micki Love pioneered data-driven techniques while moving up the ranks at Hughes and Coleman. She handled everything from intake to leading the firm as COO during her 23 years there. Now, Micki is bringing the insider perspective on PI firm growth to the integrated ad agency, CJ Advertising. She’s laser-focused on results for law firms through digital, media buying, video and beyond. Micki shares tactical advice on how to market your way to nine figures and how to staff your firm to get the most out of your top 5% of cases. We also discuss the messaging needed to stand out and capture those coveted trucking and complex catastrophic cases. Here’s Micki Love, President at CJ Advertising.
Micki Love:
So I started at Hughes and Coleman when I was in high school. We had a co-op program. They didn’t yet allow you to go take college courses, so this was our entry into the workforce back then. Started out as a runner and a file clerk sitting in the floor putting staples, this was before they had the fancy way of stapling papers or inserting papers into files. So I was doing all the things and I was just super curious. I wanted to learn every aspect of what the case managers were doing, the attorneys were saying, so I was running errands and just trying to pick up as much knowledge as I could while I was there, and then eventually got my degree in accounting, worked my way from reception to a bookkeeper and I happened to be the youngest person at the firm at the time, so that automatically meant I knew more about computers than anyone else.
So we were one of the first adopters, our firm was one of the first adopters of pins, which was the predecessor to needles, and so I got to transition from a DOS based CRM and work with needles to develop what became needles. I don’t know why I chose accounting as my degree because I really don’t enjoy doing debits and credits, but I love figuring out how to make more money. I was sitting in that basement office thinking, “I’ve got to do something different with my life because I do not enjoy debits and credits.” So I just started fiddling with all the things that make the metrics move from a dollar-wise for the law firm. And so I took them to Lee Coleman and I was like, “Hey, what about this? Can I just take over managing the intake department for 30 days? Can I just do this and see if I can make a difference? Because if we can get more leads in the door, then we can make more money.”
He talked about it for a while and then eventually agreed to let me try it, and from there the rest is history. We took off and they let me do a lot of things. I got to work in marketing. At the time CJ Advertising was our agency, and so it’s full circle for me to be running CJ Advertising now, thinking back to 1993 when we first started using them. So yeah, from there I went through and took over the marketing role and learned everything I could about marketing for a law firm from Marty Malham. Just got even more curious about the business operations side and I got to work side by side with Lee Coleman, who he was one of the very first exposure I had to someone who systematized law firms from a management standpoint. We created spreadsheets, which eventually we came the dashboards that Chad and I created over years. And so it was just fun for me. I loved it. I loved the inner workings of figuring out how to make more money for the firm and it was just a great time.
Chris Dreyer:
For anyone that’s listening that’s working in a firm, if you can make the firm more money, you probably have an opportunity to grow. We run a business to make a profit, otherwise it’s a charity. So first of all, congrats on that.
Micki Love:
Thank you.
Chris Dreyer:
I love that you started with intake. It’s like, “Hey, you already had a pipeline, but hey, if I can impact the conversions on intake.” What were some of the things that you looked at and made an impact back then? Was it scripts? Was it identifying those big cases? What were the things that you did that made that impact right away?
Micki Love:
I wish I could say that it was that grandiose. Really what it came down to is we had four offices and we were really one of the first law firms to have four separate offices in two different states, and we were working off of old T-one lines, which meant they weren’t strong enough to send calls up and down the T-one lines and still support our ERM at the time, which was needles. I would get the numbers every Monday from the different offices, and I would notice that our national office, the call volume was really, really great, but every single week we signed up the exact same number of cases and I was like, “That’s weird because our call volume is going like this and our signups are going like this.” And so what I learned is that allowing everyone to do intake means that intake is not anyone’s priority, and so they’re just doing intake at what they could do.
I had Lee and Marshall get a separate T-one line for intake to be funneled into our Bowling Green office and we consolidated intake into one space with one team operating under the same rules for what gets signed up, what gets declined, and that was really the beginning of it. And then from there we worked on all the other aspects of intake. How do we tweak our follow up process to get people to sign up? How do we track how well our investigators are doing? Because there was no electronic signups back then, you had to send people out to go sign them up or get people to come into your office, and we learned asking people to come into the office was not converting at a very great rate. So then we hired multiple investigators in multiple states to go out. As soon as the calls came in, we just kept refining it from there.
If we wait too long, we miss them, so we’ve got to get the signup done within X amount of hours. And so a lot of those things still apply today, if you think about the electronic contract version, just staying on the phone with them until they sign because as soon as you let them go, the chances of getting them back is really, really low. And if you do have to let them go, then what is our follow up process and how closely are we following up with that? There’s so much more fun stuff you can do with customized videos from the owners with all the AI technology that’s out there that I think there’s so many opportunities to increase that conversion rate every single day. It’s just fun to keep playing with it.
Chris Dreyer:
Give me the big eighty-twenty of CJ Advertising. What does CJ do? How is CJ different from other strategic partners?
Micki Love:
The one thing that really sets us apart is that Chad Dudley and I are both super concerned about the law firm first. We’re not here to just sell marketing. Yes, that’s what we do, we’re a full service ad agency, but we also have the inner working knowledge of a PI law firm. Having been in PI firms, built PI firms and grown PI firms, we invest in the full law firm experience from how you run your intake all the way through to increasing the average fee of the cases through to disbursement and asking for referrals. There’s nothing that I enjoy more than figuring out how to grow the law firm. And of course marketing is a huge aspect of that, and so to be able to do the aspect of marketing combined with the PI experience, I think that’s what really sets CJ apart from most of the other ad agencies out there.
Chris Dreyer:
I love that. So yeah, you’re probably the closest to what I would refer to as an agency of record than a lot of other individuals just because you have so many capabilities. We get so many varying opinions and a lot of times they’re like, “What channel’s the best?” And I’m like, ”Yes.” Just a couple of weeks ago I had Angel Reyes on from Dallas, he’s got 8,000 reviews and did TV advertising, was a $6 million a year budget plus every single year, but up until five years ago, he just completely quit TV and went all digital. So that’s the extreme. And then you’ve got some, it’s a balance of brand and digital. Today you’re wanting to see those firms that are not trying to get to seven figures, let’s say past seven figures. You’re going to eight figures and to go to nine, what are the most effective channels? How do you think about marketing when looking at the commonalities of those successful firms?
Micki Love:
Everything. That’s the very general answer that everybody needs to hear, but I love to meet the firm right where they are. So each market is independently unique. So what works in Wichita, Kansas to get you to a $10 million firm and beyond doesn’t necessarily mean that that same platform or audience is going to work in Los Angeles, California. Every market is uniquely different, and we have to be able to adapt to that. We love to be able to do tests for each of those markets, identify their clientele, where do they live at, do a lot of the demographic research so that we’re making sure that we’re hitting the message in the right spot. If you’re in Los Angeles, it may be a completely digital play that we say, “Hey, this is going to work best for you,” where if you’re in Little Rock, Arkansas, we may be like, “Hey, you don’t need as much of a digital play because this is where your people are right now,” and it’s shifting every single year, sometimes every single quarter as to where the audiences are.
And so you have to be in a lot of places right now, but the most important thing to do is know your market, know what plays in your market, and then go hard after those things. I love building a brand, and I think nothing is better for building a brand than traditional TV and billboards at this point, but I’m also hyper-focused on direct response, because that’s what we need from an agency right now. If we’re not bringing you cases, then we’re not doing our jobs. So you’ve got to meet them where their clients are, and that’s usually some form of digital and traditional combined at this point, for most markets.
Chris Dreyer:
It’s like the attention arbitrage game. So a fifth TV in a market, maybe it’s oversaturated, maybe it’s more digital. Is that what you mean by… Or is it truly maybe the demographic, maybe the individuals? Maybe there’s a broader number of people watching cable in this market than another market?
Micki Love:
So you have some markets are still underserved when it comes to high-speed internet connectivity, so they’re not as likely to be streaming their videos. So we know now we’re not going to put a ton of our money into streaming. We may have to go more broadcast because that’s still where they’re receiving their traditional media at. And then we may go to some out of home next, which could be radio or billboards. So we’ll look at that and see what does this market look like? Is it overly saturated in one of these areas? And then how do we stand out? There’s a million marketers, it feels like, in every single market, and so how do we make our brand stand out but still be very unique to the person that we are attempting to brand? We don’t like to do cookie cutter type personalities with the firms that we work with. We like to make sure that they can stand behind the brand that we’re creating. It does us no good to build a brand, making someone look like a trial lawyer if they’ve never been to trial. Let’s not go there. Let’s make your audience understand, we’re going to get you the amount of money and let’s do it that way. So there’s just different aspects that we like to take a look at and see how do we make the most out of the market, and then how do we make the best out of the personality that’s coming to us to deliver the message with.
Chris Dreyer:
Being distinctive in the market. There’s nothing more painful than going into a market and all the billboards say, “Injured question mark at the top,” and it’s just like, “Oh my gosh.” It’s like I just tune those out. I think some individuals listening are like, “Well, that’s what works. I’m going to use what works.” But no, you don’t stand out. No one can remember who you are.
Micki Love:
I’ll tell you a fun story about the injured with a question mark. So back in 1997, 98, maybe 99, somewhere in that frame, it was the got milk question mark, was really big, and so we were experimenting with things with CJ Advertising back then, and so we took that injured and we did it in a similar font. We did it red with the injured, the big question mark, for Hughes and Coleman, and we actually got featured by the ABA, their big journal that they did about how horrible it was that people were advertising because one of our clients had actually worn that shirt to a vacation trip and was spotted by somebody that writes for the ABA. So it goes all the way back to that injured with a question mark from way back when, and it’s still being used today, which to me is fun.
Chris Dreyer:
Back then it’s advertising, it’s evil, which is just crazy to think because you’re helping the consumers and the injured victims, the more awareness you have. Even in Nashville, I went and I saw bus wraps and sports endorsements with the Titans and there’s different types of advertising and the NIL and the things like that. Do you see a lot of success? Do you see the NIL, it really making an impact? Do you think that social proof and trust carries over to the individual that they’re sponsoring? Do you think maybe it’s too costly, paying an athlete in college a hundred grand for some photography? What’s your thoughts on some of these emerging, what I would say, tactics?
Micki Love:
I mean, if the budget is there and you’ve maxed out the other channels that we know will drive leads to your firm, then let’s go for it. Let’s do a few of these fun things that are outside of the norm. Let’s be very cautious about the NIL deals. Not an overly huge fan of them just with they leave the team prematurely or hit the transfer portal or they’re still kids and they go out and they have a really good time one night and do something really stupid, and now your brand is associated with something that you didn’t necessarily want it to be with. So there’s a lot of vetting that has to go into that process, picking the right person, making sure that it aligns with your brand and who you are otherwise, it’s not authentic and it’s never going to resonate with your marketplace. And so we want to make sure that anything we do, whether it’s Titan, Saints, Kansas City Chiefs, whatever it is, we want to make sure that we are tied in with your brand for a very specific reason and that we can align with that reason no matter what it is.
Chris Dreyer:
When you do the whole team, it’s a little different. But yeah, I think there’s a lot of risks, these individual players, even these standouts. Another just fun question here is trucking accidents. Everybody wants the trucking case. And aside from doing TV in San Antonio, Texas and certain areas, is it just a numbers game where it’s a 10 to 15% have commercial policies? You see the individual standing on trucks or yelling at trucks or. What goes into really getting the big trucking cases? And I think everyone’s ears perked up, that are PI attorneys listening. What’s your thought there?
Micki Love:
I’ll tell you what, I get excited when I talk about big truck cases as well because I do think that there’s an art to getting the type of cases that you want. I worked with Parker, I don’t know if you guys know Jerry Parker with Parker Wakeman out of New York, but I had an opportunity to work with him early in my career and he said something to me that I haven’t forgotten to this day. He said, “You have to ask for what you want. If you don’t tell the people what it is you want them to do, they’re not going to understand it and they’re not going to do it.” And so from that moment on, my mindset is if you want trucking cases, you’ve got to let the world know that you want trucking cases. How are you going to let them know? I don’t care whether it’s internet webpages, if it’s billboards, if it’s television commercials, if you’re just putting it out in your email list, whatever it is, if they don’t know that you do it, somebody else is going to educate them that they do handle those type of cases and they’re going to move toward that person whether you have a personal relationship with them or not.
And we did a focus group with a law firm at one point, and a lady in the focus group was a friend of one of the attorneys there at the office, and she happened to have been injured by the truck and she called a different law firm. And so we were like, “Well, you’re friends with this attorney, why didn’t you call this attorney when you needed that help?” And she said, “Well, when I see this attorney on TV, he never says anything about truck wrecks, but this attorney that I did call is always talking about truck wrecks,” and so it was just a reinforcement for me. It’s like you have to ask for what you want, whatever it is. If it’s veterans disability cases, if it’s birth injury cases, trucking cases, nursing home cases, you have to have an idea of what you want and how you’re going to ask for it, always. But yeah, I love trucking cases and I love coming up with new and creative ways to grab people’s attention around the trucking accident world.
Chris Dreyer:
Follow up question to that, okay, you have PI firms that are asking for truck motorcycles slip and fall, maybe even nursing to some degree. They’re asking for all of these. Do you think that maybe just because there’s so much competition, so much noise, that being specific, being the Joe Fried, the David Craig, and those individuals that are just asking for this, the law tiger so to speak, of just asking for motorcycle, where do you think that fits in terms of the advertising, the extremes?
Micki Love:
You know what? I think they get everything as a result of whatever they ask for. So we’re very much into asking for a specific case type, but we track and monitor everything. So we know if we run a big truck ad, we’re just as likely to see 10 automobile accident cases coming in from that big truck ad. So I think even if they go to the extreme, they’re still going to attract the injury cases if the message is correct. So we’ve got to talk about the injuries, we’ve got to talk about whatever messaging they’re comfortable with, but trying to make sure we’re telling the clients, “We’re going to make it easy for you. We’re going to get you the best results possible, get you money, and we’re going to do it as fast as we can.” Those are three motivators for consumers that really help them to understand what you’re saying and to call you when they need you, regardless of if you’re just asking for truck and they’ve been in a car wreck, they correlate those same things together, but for whatever reason, it doesn’t work in the reverse where if you’re just asking for car wrecks, they don’t associate motorcycles and big trucks with those particular accidents.
Chris Dreyer:
Inflation is just crazy. Even someone making a hundred K today, it just doesn’t carry the weight that it used to, right?
Micki Love:
Correct.
Chris Dreyer:
So where does things like near shoring fit in? Because we’re all interconnected now, everyone’s got Slack or Zoom. Do you think we’re to that point, is it taboo or is it maybe it’s the norm now?
Micki Love:
I feel like it’s becoming the norm. I still think it’s still taboo in some areas, but I think that this is our future, we’re going to have to embrace this near shoring. There are so many tasks that the legal assistants and case managers inside of a law firm are doing that can be near shored while they take the extra time to spend on the client. And Chad and I are firm believers that if we’re going to spend any extra minutes on a case, it’s with our client because the more we know about them, the injury, how it’s impacted them, the more their case is worth, the more we can relay that to the insurance company. And so frame them up from some of these tasks of opening a file with an insurance company or data entry, we can near shore that while we continue to focus on keeping the client close to our best and making sure that we’re working to maximize the value of the file at all times.
And so I think we have to start embracing that, and I’m super confident that there are good ways to do this and there are bad ways to do that. My favorite way of doing this is making sure they feel like they’re integrated as part of your team. They love to get your swag, be able to wear a branded shirt. We like to keep them on a Team’s meeting all day or a Slack channel all day so that we can see what they’re doing and if they have questions, there’s someone here in the office, we’re connected with the office enough that they can answer those questions right away to keep them moving and keeping them engaged with the firm. But if you just leave them out there, you hire them, they’re offshore somewhere and you don’t interact with them and nobody from your firm ever reaches out to them, you’re not going to have the quality of law firm that you built or that you strive to have on an ongoing basis. There’s a lot of effort that goes into keeping those near shore people connected, but I think it can be super helpful and definitely have to do this to get our margins down to where we can continue to be operating at a profitable margin.
Chris Dreyer:
A lot of times when people will get the international labor, they think that, oh, they don’t have to attend meetings, they just do the task. Well, then you lose sight, but you don’t have that interconnectedness. You talked about the more time you spend with the client, the better you get to know them, the more value you can pull out of their case. Do you want the attorney talking to the client? Do you want the case manager talking to your client, because maybe the attorney doesn’t have those soft skills and you just want them doing the legal work? Where does that fit in? Where do you fall? There’s just different thoughts about that.
Micki Love:
I love both. I love there being a good balance between the attorney and the case manager. So we like to track the number of communications that the case manager slash legal assistant has with the client and the number of communications that the attorney has with the client. And it depends on the firm. So there’s some owners who are adamant that the lawyers are going to talk to their clients and only the lawyers are going to talk to their clients. If that’s the case, then let’s build a model that represents what the owner of the firm has built his reputation on, and let’s go track that, measure it and see how we can improve upon it. If that’s not where the owner sits at, I’m always at the mindset that let’s let the case managers do the vast majority of communications that are not giving legal advice. They’re holding the hand of the client, touching in about their treatment, keeping track of their treatment, so that the attorneys can focus on the legal issues and then the attorneys can check in with the clients once a month or once every 45 days, whatever their owner is really comfortable with. But I’m more in the mindset of the case managers are holding the hands while the attorneys are dipping in to check on the legal aspects and make sure all the legal questions are answered for the clients.
Chris Dreyer:
The epitome, I think in our space, that would be the AM the PM, with a little bit more client touch client service oriented side to it. So Chad, when he was on, we spent some time discussing those top 5% cases and identifying those can have major impacts to the profitability of a law firm that the follow-up on that is, let’s say you’ve identified those cases, what goes into staffing or setting up your operations to handle those? Do you have specialized Navy SEAL teams? Do you?
Micki Love:
Yes.
Chris Dreyer:
That’s what goes into it? So yeah, tell me about that.
Micki Love:
Yeah, we like to have our top case group. So these are the individuals that are accustomed to working on higher value, more complex cases. So a lot of your trucking cases will end up in that pile of cases because the injuries are usually pretty severe. There’s usually great insurance coverage that can help offset all those bills and injuries and pain and suffering, etcetera. So it’s got to be some lawyers with some really sharp minds that can think about the legal issues that we can overcome if there are any, as well as a great set of case managers coming alongside of those lawyers to hold the client’s hand, answer questions that the clients have around, “What do I do with my medical bills?” All the things that can just come into that. And we even offer, at Chad’s firm, they have brief writers and a bunch of other people that would fit into that top case group because we’re going to pour all of our effort into really making those cases worth every dollar that they deserve. And so it can be a whole lot of people, depending on the case type, there may be a whole Navy SEAL team, as you said, assigned to these cases to take them across the finish line.
Chris Dreyer:
I think you’ve got to treat them different. They don’t go on the assembly line of an auto rear end collision, they’re unique and you need the experts. So I appreciate that. And it’s not just about identifying, it’s working them up differently too and maybe giving that bespoke touch.
Micki Love:
Yes. In those cases, the lawyer is probably going to be the one doing the majority of the communications with the clients. It’s just a whole different mindset when you identify those top 5% as to how you process them through to the end.
Chris Dreyer:
Where can our audience go to connect with you and then learn more about CJ Advertising?
Micki Love:
Yeah, CJAdvertising.com, love it. Connect with me on social media. It’s just Micki Love. You can find me on all social channels. And I love our Accelerator Program that Chad and I do with consulting with law firms. We love to do that. Would love to talk to anybody about their operations piece at any point, even if we’re not engaged in working together, I still love answering the questions, so feel free to look us up. And yeah, I just enjoy the stuff.
Chris Dreyer:
Thanks to Micki for all the insights today. Let’s recap. Understand your market better than anyone. Know your market inside and out. Understand their habits and how their attention migrates not just year after year, but quarter after quarter. And remember, what works in one market may not work in another, so tailor your strategy accordingly.
Micki Love:
What works in Wichita Kansas to get you to a $10 million firm and beyond doesn’t necessarily mean that that same platform or audience is going to work in Los Angeles, California. If you’re in Los Angeles, it may be a completely digital play that we say, “Hey, this is going to work best for you.” Where if you’re in Little Rock, Arkansas, we may be like, “Hey, you don’t need as much of a digital play because this is where your people are right now.” And it’s shifting every single year, sometimes every single quarter as to where the audiences are. And so you have to be in a lot of places right now, but the most important thing to do is know your market, know what plays in your market and go hard after those things.
Chris Dreyer:
Mix it up, max out proven channels first. Once you’ve optimize your reliable lead sources, get creative. Consider NIL deals with athletes to establish social proof, but do your homework before you settle on a single athlete, especially if they’re young.
Micki Love:
There’s still kids, there’s a lot of vetting that has to go into that process, picking the right person, making sure that it aligns with your brand, otherwise it’s not authentic and it’s never going to resonate with your marketplace.
Chris Dreyer:
Motivate your audience. If you cast a wide net and go after auto accidents or craft a campaign to spear trucking cases, the goal of your messaging is the same, it needs to move your potential clients to action. Messaging must motivate clients to call you when injured. Emphasize that you’ll make it easy for them, get them the best results, get the money and resolve their case quickly. This resonates across auto accident and trucking accident cases.
Micki Love:
Those are motivators for consumers that really help them to understand what you’re saying and to call you when they need you, regardless of if you’re just asking for truck and they’ve been in a car wreck, they correlate those same things together, but for whatever reason, it doesn’t work in the reverse where if you’re just asking for car wrecks, they don’t associate motorcycles and big trucks with those particular accidents.
Chris Dreyer:
All right everybody, that’s it for this Toolkit episode. For more information about Micki and CJ Advertising, head on over to the show notes. Before you go, give me a follow 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. Thanks for listening to Personal Injury Mastermind with me, Chris Dreyer, Founder and CEO of Rankings.io. Catch you next time. I’m out.
