Justin Weinstein:
We want to be able to build that profile, really focus on demographics, where the call is coming from, being able to then focus our dollars in a strategic way.
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 cases other law firm marketing agencies can't deliver. We've just wrapped up the first ever PIM conference and I'll say a huge thank you to all our incredible speakers and to everyone who came. Seeing this podcast come to life was amazing. Over the next few weeks, we'll have some highlights that I can't wait to share with you. Until then, let's meet today's guest. Forget cookie cutter marketing. Justin Weinstein is taking risks and it's paying off big time. He's not just throwing darts in the dark, hoping his creative hits the target audience. Justin's using hard data to decode public perception attorneys and to combat it head on.
He's leveraging anime style ads to captivate new audiences and keep their attention. It's a bold move that's yielding impressive results. In just nine years, Justin's firm, Weinstein Legal Team has expanded to three locations with more on the horizon marketing with intention and forging genuine community connections long before people even need legal help. Today, you'll get an inside look at Justin's playbook, learn how to blend data-driven decisions with creative that pops, stand out in a crowded market and build a brand that resonates with your community. Here's Justin, founding partner at Weinstein Legal Team.
Justin Weinstein:
When I got out of college, I was still trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life. I majored in business and to market myself a little bit better, distinguish myself having a law degree while if I wanted to go to business or wanted to go into law, seemed like something that opened a lot of doors, a lot of options, so I went with it and it ended up being the best move I ever made.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah, amazing. There's just so many opportunities, so many different paths. Look, you've built an impressive operation, the Weinstein Legal Team across Florida. You first hung your shingle in 2016. What made you make the leap to go out on your own?
Justin Weinstein:
Yeah, that's always an interesting decision to make one where you have to weigh the pros and cons and really weigh your confidence. At that point in time, I had been working for a couple of other firms, both of which were in the PI space. I felt a little shackled with the amount of responsibility, the amount of authority that I had to make decisions, and I talked to a couple of clients and I was really, really honing in on there are things that are missing from these prior experiences that I've had that I really want to bring to the community. In order to do that, I had to open my own law firm and really start focusing on those things that I wanted to bring to our community, and that's what ended up happening.
Chris Dreyer:
Let me lean into that. Can you give some examples of some of those things for the community and just where you felt constrained working at for someone else?
Justin Weinstein:
Yeah, absolutely. I have a lot of ideas. I'm an ideas guy. As I mentioned, I majored in business and a lot of times I would bring up certain things that I would suggest in running the company or what we should do for marketing or how we should really be hitting boots on the ground and communicating with our communities, understanding what are their pain points, how can we help them a little bit better or provide more of a value add. What ended up happening was I was getting a lot of fear-based responses. It was almost as if I don't really want to go outside the status quo that I'm used to, and if I do that, I might be ruining what I've already built. That just didn't align with how I was feeling about how legal resources should really be accessible to the community.
Chris Dreyer:
I see this a lot. We work with about 130 PI firms now, and I see this a lot from the older school firms that were heavy in TV. They took a risk to do TV 20 years ago, but now things like social and TikTok and all the different strategies that are emerging, it's like they're less willing to change. I don't know if that comes from age or they were really successful doing a certain thing, but yeah, I see that a lot in many of the firms that we work with. I noticed you both, you handle PI in criminal cases, so what made you the decision to structure your firm to work on the two practice areas? Tell me about that decision.
Justin Weinstein:
Yeah, I had a very close friend who was going through his journey as an associate, had similar feelings that I did, wasn't really being heard, wasn't really being understood by the partners at his previous firm, had really good experience and knew that he wanted to build a network and a practice that he could feel proud of and really contribute to his community. Those are factors that we look for. Because I was such a close friend, I studied for the bar with this person. My partner is Matthew Shafran, and he embodies the same type of feelings that I did when I left, and it just made sense at that point in time to support each other and really to align our goals together. We opened that department in 2019 and I'm sure you're going to get to how does that relate to PI and it really does feed off of each other.
Chris Dreyer:
The cash flow implications are huge, right? I see a lot of people, these startups for PI at least nowadays, it's like how do you position yourself to not get paid for a year or two years? Tell me about the decision of their synergy and how they work together.
Justin Weinstein:
They're very related because our approach, which we're going to talk about, the law of we is all about you, but a lot of that has to do with our community and the relationships we're able to build within the community before a legal situation arises. What we find is that so many people have these legal issues that they run into that either could have been prevented or they could have had knowledge beforehand. It's all about building those meaningful relationships and having meaningful interactions so that people can feel like, "You know what? Lawyers are approachable. It's a safe space. I'm okay reaching out to a lawyer for advice before something happens." Don't mean to go off-topic, because criminal and PI really do feed off of each other. There are plenty of people that get in trouble with the law that also potentially have accidents or are injured or know somebody that is injured or in accidents. Everyone can be a potential client, so our marketing strategy is really involving and having these meaningful interactions with people before something happens.
Chris Dreyer:
That speaks to your earlier point where you're talking about boots on the ground being a part of your community, so this whole concept, this law of we, I guess it really encapsulates that.
Justin Weinstein:
Yeah, it's all about being proactive. When we did the research based on... Because this is a branding strategy that was born the middle of last year, it basically showed that the majority of these law firms out there are very reactionary or their marketing is based on a conditional experience or something that happened and then people can come hire them for legal services. If that's an accident, "Oh, did you get an accident? We can help. Were you arrested? We can help." It's very transactional or at least it feels like that to me, and when we spoke to people about that, they said, "Yeah, that's basically all I hear from legal marketing, it's just if I was involved in an accident."
You had a guest on recently that I listened to, Gary Jordan, and he actually put this point home where he said, "Most law firms are talking to the 1% out there that might've been injured or arrested." I completely agree with him. We need to expand that area to everyone. Everyone in our community deserves access to legal resources and the ability to speak to a lawyer about anything, and I truly believe that we have an obligation as lawyers and law firms to provide that as a service to our community.
Chris Dreyer:
This approach is transforming the way people perceive attorneys. Instead of being seen as sharks circling to the next case, lawyers become trusted members of the community, but Justin doesn't stop at external relationships. He understands that a strong community starts from within. He explains the importance of nailing team culture week after week.
Justin Weinstein:
Yeah, this is something that I harp on with every person that talks about our culture and what our culture is. How do we stay very positive, from the minute that we walk through all the way until we leave? Because our positivity is infectious, it's infectious to the people around us that we're working with every day. It's infectious to our clients. People hear it through the phone if you're not smiling, they understand that you really care about them and understand them. If you're smiling over the phone, there's research behind all of this. Understanding that our moods, our emotions, being able to understand them and then also be aware of how it affects other people. The start of the Monday morning minute was about priming our firm from the get-go of the week to be ready emotionally, to be positive and to go in it with a great mindset that we're going to bring this to our clients, we're going to bring it to our cases.
Anybody that we touch is going to be a positive interaction, and it starts with myself and the culture that I want to create here is one of positivity. A lot of firms, I feel like, especially the ones that I previously had the experience of working in or some other firms that potentially some of our staff I've worked in, there happened to be a lot of interoffice conflict and that's not something that we want to promote within our firm. I think it really just hinders our ability to provide the best service and to communicate with each other in a way that gets the best results. If we're dealing with drama, emotions in the wrong way, it really does impact everyone around us. That Monday morning minute, it's about self-development, emotional intelligence. I even write some stuff about biohacking and to improve our efficiency. It's just things that I've been reading over the week and I've gotten some really good feedback from it and I truly enjoy putting it together. It's something that's a passion.
Chris Dreyer:
That's incredible. I would personally love to see that in a newsletter format and maybe that's just an idea for you that maybe you can pass that to the community and maybe they would find it helpful, too.
Justin Weinstein:
We've recently, actually, I put it out there on my social platforms. If anyone is interested, feel free to DM me or message me your email. I'll add you to the list and Chris, you're number one that I'm going to add after the podcast.
Chris Dreyer:
Amazing. Yeah, I would love that. Thank you. I want to shift over to marketing and branding. I harp on this, you've probably heard this on the podcast that a lot of times attorneys, they think of creative as an afterthought. It's like, "Oh, I'm going to do TV," or "I'm going to do social," and then it's like then they think about the content and the creative, but you have some really unique ads, right? I just watched one before our podcast, the anime style ads, the Auto Injury Pros, so please tell me, give our audience the big picture, why you approach this differently and just tell me about Auto Injury Pros.
Justin Weinstein:
Yeah, absolutely. It starts with an idea of how do we effectively communicate our message while also being entertaining educational, show a value add, what we're really adding value from our competitors and make it so it's memorable. Looking at the trends in advertising, we saw some big campaigns when we did some of our research with a lot bigger companies, McDonald's. I remember a Super Bowl commercial a while back that was animation with Acura, the car brand and some other car brands. But it is really speaking to more of a younger audience and also is, we find, a medium that is gaining traction with people and being able to captivate them. We all know that people have very short attention spans. Social media is they're going to have some sort of disease with thumbs at some point because people are just scrolling and we need an ability to stop people to get our message across.
Animation, I feel, is one way that lawyers haven't really tapped into. Is it a risk? Absolutely. But we have to do what we can to separate ourselves to get our message across, and so I picked animation to start with, as is no one really seems to be doing it. It seems to be very entertaining and has the ability to have people watch videos all the way through. A lot of our research shows that people are watching it pretty much to the end of a 30 second or 60 second episode.
Chris Dreyer:
I got to tell you, there's something, I think his name's Chris Walker. I don't love this phrase, but he calls it dark social, where somebody sees something on social media and then they'll DM their friend. They'll text their friend or they'll reshare it, but they call it dark social because us as individuals that create the content don't know that it's occurring, but it's occurring behind scenes. I watched your video and I sent it to one of the top ad agencies in California, a buddy of mine, Jock Spitzer that owns Raindrop. He immediately commented, "Loved the creative, different approach," and just gets it.
Within that interaction today just immediately happened. I've heard other individuals say, "You got to be one of the top three spenders." I don't know that I agree with that. If you have content that's memorable, you don't need to pound them over the head with a hammer. Tell me about the impact with some of the early feedback on this then. I saw your landing page, it's got the anime at the top, but then it has the team at the bottom. Is it converting cases? Is it working to lift the brand and be memorable?
Justin Weinstein:
Yeah. We started this campaign about four months ago, maybe a little over four months. I would say, and a lot of, obviously, marketing companies say it's in its infancy. You have to continue to push and as I mentioned before, we're super interested in creating these meaningful relationships before something happens, which all too often doesn't happen with the current marketing that's out there. We are seeing a lot of responses, a lot of reposting or sharing with us saying, "We saw it. It's really cool looking. It got my attention," which is the entire point. The beginning of this marketing journey focused a lot on awareness and getting our name out there, because nobody had ever heard of the Auto Injury Pros before.
I got the idea some years ago when I saw Ticket Clinic, and I'm going to give them a little plug here because for whatever reason, a lot of PI lawyers like to use their last names. It's just when we got out of law school, let's put my name on the door, and it seems like a little bit of an egocentric approach, but we want to be memorable in a sense of this is what we do. Ticket clinic has that. They own the ticket space here in Florida. I'm sure in many other states, maybe Chris I'm sure heard it. Ticket Clinic, a law firm, when you ask people here, they know exactly where to go when they get a ticket.
The concept was why don't we create a name like that for auto accidents? The research showed that out of the five to six to 10 names or so that we had Auto Injury Pros stood out the most where professionals in the auto injury space, you know exactly what we do, and the hope is that continuing our marketing and our episodes, it's going to stick. We're going to create that trust, that safety, that idea that we are approachable to talk to about legal issues before or when they happen.
Chris Dreyer:
I think it's incredible. I think it's very memorable. I like the pros at the end, playing... It's right there on the edge of the superlatives, in terms of the conveying expertise. With the trade names, I've heard Florida's more stringent. Texas is more stringent. Is there certain jurisdictions or states or was this just a nationwide thing that trade names can be used? Can you just maybe educate me a little bit there?
Justin Weinstein:
Sure. Yeah, you're right. They're a bit more stringent and from what we've read and talked to the bar about, it's all about making sure that there is no confusion whatsoever with what it is that you do and what firm is handling the cases, and that your main practice is involving the auto injury, personal injury practice of law.
Chris Dreyer:
Got it.
Justin Weinstein:
Yeah, and yeah, you're absolutely right. Different jurisdictions have different rules. Before you do this and go out on a journey, if you're listening, thinking about doing something similar, make sure you call your local bar association, get some potential confidential review. That's what we have in Florida. Review of what your ethics dilemma is, and I would definitely suggest doing that.
Chris Dreyer:
Instinct can only take you so far. The most successful firms are those that harness power of data to drive their decisions. Justin's is doing just that with a dedicated data analyst on their in-house marketing team. Let's dive into how this data-driven approach is revolutionizing their marketing strategy and impacting their firm's growth.
Justin Weinstein:
I understood pretty early on that a marketing and advertising budget was something that needed to be analyzed and looked through with a tooth and comb in order to make sure you're able to grow and you're able to put the money in a place that's actually working. Yeah, there is some trial and error. Obviously you want to try things that are outside the box. You have a budget for that. The key in doing that is getting the data, researching specifically the clients that are coming in, the calls that are coming in, what are the data points that are moving those? Can you build your ideal client and then focus your advertising or marketing strategy to the ideal client? It starts off with saying, based on the law of we and our guiding principle that everyone deserves legal resources.
There are some demographics that will seek out our assistance more than others. It's just the way that it's, we want to be able to build that profile and then strategically use our dollars in a way that we're able to attract more of that profile. We really focus on demographics, where the call is coming from, making sure we are tracking our clicks, tracking where they're coming from, being able to then focus our dollars in a strategic way. I'm not sure about other firms and whether they're doing this shotgun type of style where we're just going to put money everywhere.
Some of the podcasts that I've listened to previously had really attracting and really a good pulse on where their money was going, and that's the way you really should be approaching this. It's the business side of law. How do we make sure we're not just willy-nilly spending? Those numbers that you had mentioned previously about spot TV, I listened to the one with the guy from Top Dog, he's talking about spot TV, and then there's these huge numbers that people are... We just started, we're going on our ninth year and we've grown year over year over year very, very nicely. It's good growth, it's manageable growth, and we want to continue to do that, but in order to do that, it takes this analysis of what's coming in and what's going out.
Chris Dreyer:
I agree. I agree. I think that's incredible. You have these KPIs, you can get your cost acquire client, your CAC numbers and values, and it helps you make decisions. I think that's incredible. I think a lot of times it's in the afterthought, it's more reactive and you're continuing... I see this trend of being proactive on making decisions. It's surprising to me sites like Media Monitors are like that they're not used more frequently, those licenses because look, it shows everybody in the US and where they're spending money in terms of the legal sector, it's super powerful.
Justin Weinstein:
Chris, just to mention this, if there's a lawyer that's listening to the podcast and thinking, "Do I need this role?" You think about return on investment, you had your podcast with Dan Martell, which was amazing, by the way.
Chris Dreyer:
Thank you.
Justin Weinstein:
He talks a lot about buying back your time, but he also talks about what is the return per hire and making sure you understand that when you spend, that person needs to be bringing back five or even 10 times what you're spending. Data will allow that to happen at an advanced rate, and so having that person who's listening to every call. By the way, he also does that, so he's listening to every single call making sure we have quality control, because we want our product, our service as we grow to continue to have the quality so that people understand, "This brand is high quality, they're communicating with me, they understand and they're empathetic to my situation." The quality of the call is also super important. If you're listening to this and you're thinking about a data analyst, I suggest, look, if it's affordable for your situation, definitely look into it. That's my recommendation.
Chris Dreyer:
I think that's incredible advice. Justin, this has been amazing. Couple final questions here. What's next for your firm? Any ideas you have that you're ruminating on that you're about to execute on, and how can our audience get in touch with you?
Justin Weinstein:
I am extremely proud of the work that our firm is doing in the community, building these relationships, being proactive, helping people before something happens, that's really like the heart of the firm and what we're all about. We are looking into other ways of being able to support our community. One of those things is partnering with these associations. If I can just list a couple of them.
Chris Dreyer:
Absolutely.
Justin Weinstein:
We have a Make-A-Wish that we raised over $26,000 at our holiday party. We had five wishes that were granted. We recently took a family out and rented a movie theater and had a great time with them, connected with them, built that relationship. We also are a big part of SOS Children's Villages, which helps foster kids and siblings stick together. We know that that's a big issue. They're doing incredible things, and we also partner with Heart Support, which is about mental health and resources, which is a very important topic to me.
With all of these, those are just a few, but we're looking into scholarship opportunities with them, so to give people the opportunity to seek potential education opportunities and we're really excited about that. That's one area where we're still contributing massively to the community. We go out, we're actually involved in the organizations and I'm super proud about that. We're also looking into expanding locations within Florida, so right now we have three main locations, which would be Fort Lauderdale, West Palm, and Orlando. We're looking into Southwest Florida, the Naples and Fort Myers area. We're also looking in Jacksonville in the Northeast and eventually over Northwest, which is Tampa and Sarasota potentially up even further up and doing everything we can to support the state of Florida and eventually, seeing where things go, maybe nationally.
Chris Dreyer:
Amazing. Justin, thank you so much for coming on the show. How can our audience get in touch with you?
Justin Weinstein:
Yeah, our website is www.thelawofwe.com. If they're interested in seeing the new branding with the Auto Injury Pros, it's www.autoinjurypros.com.
Chris Dreyer:
Thanks so much to Justin for all the insights. Let's hit the takeaways. Data-driven decisions, Justin's got a data analyst on his team and that's money well spent. He's not just throwing cash at random marketing channels and hoping something sticks. He's tracking every call, click and conversion to figure out where his ideal clients are hanging out. It's like having a GPS for your marketing budget. You know exactly where you're going and how to get there.
Justin Weinstein:
We want to be able to build that profile and then strategically use our dollars in a way that we're able to attract more of that profile. We really focus on demographics, where the call is coming from, making sure we are tracking our clicks, tracking where they're coming from, being able to then focus our dollars in a strategic way.
Chris Dreyer:
Start with creative. While everyone else is yelling, "Injured," question mark, Justin is grabbing eyeballs with animation. His Auto Injury Pros is brilliant. It's clear, memorable, and tells people exactly what they do. Consider creating a catchy brand name that owns a specific niche in your market. It's like being the super glue of personal injury law. When people think of your niche, they think of you.
Justin Weinstein:
Animation, I feel, is one way that lawyers haven't really tapped into. Is it a risk? Absolutely. But we have to do what we can to separate ourselves to get our message across. I picked animation to start with, as is no one really seems to be doing, and it seems to be very entertaining and has the ability to have people watch videos all the way through. A lot of our research shows that people are watching it pretty much to the end.
Chris Dreyer:
The law of we, it's all about being proactive and building relationship with the community before legal issues arise. Most firms are stuck in reactive mode, waiting for accidents to happen, but Justin's flipping the script, he's out there boots on the ground creating meaningful interactions and making lawyers approachable. It's not just about the 1% who might need a lawyer right now. It's about being there for the entire community.
Justin Weinstein:
Most law firms are talking to the 1% out there that might've been injured or arrested. We need to expand that area to everyone. I truly believe that we have an obligation as lawyers and law firms to provide that as a service to our community.
Chris Dreyer:
Huge thank you to Justin for coming on the show. For more information, check out the show notes. Before you go, do me a solid and smash that follow button to subscribe. I sincerely appreciate it and you won't want to miss out on the next episode of 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.
