Matt Thelen:
Attorneys that are hungry and want to build their practice should started bidding on cases. It's a very cheap source of cases for you and to build a practice around.
Chris Dreyer:
Hey, guys, let's talk about referral cases. That mailbox money we all love, which sounds great on paper. But here's the reality I see, an efficient mess that's costing you money. Finding the right partner is a time sink. Once you make the right connections that you're scattered across different cities, states, and practice areas, and that's just to start. What should be a straightforward money in your pocket becomes this admin nightmare that makes you question if it's worth the hassle. There is a better way. We'll show you how.
Welcome to Personal Injury Mastermind, the show where ambitious attorneys come to learn, implement, and get results. These special toolkit episodes, we dive deep into conversations with the leading vendors in the legal sphere. I'm your host Chris Dreyer, founder and CEO of Rankings.io. We help elite personal injury law firms dominate Google.
Today's guest has a referral management solution that caught my attention. Matt Thelen holds a joint JD-MBA, and a stake a startup to an IPO on the New York Stock Exchange. Now he's applying that space efficiency-focused mindset to solve one of the legal industry's biggest headaches, referral management, so that you can rest easy. Let's dive in.
Matt Thelen:
We wanted it to be 100% attorney-to-attorney, peer-to-peer. It allows attorneys to build better referral networks across the country, which is obviously important for their own business. But I think it's critical for the industry itself. The way referral networks happen, both in legal space and really any industry, is you end up gravitating towards people like you. You end up gravitating to the people that you know, that you're friends with, that you're buddies with. In the legal industry, what that's resulted in for, I would say worse, is an old boy's club. Where if your grandpa wasn't practicing law, or you didn't go to XYZ law school, you don't know the right people to build a practice from ground up.
Whereas with Attorney Share, you can find those attorneys that might not already be within your social sphere. That might not already be on the same alumni lists that you're on. You can really expand your network, and do right by the industry by getting cases to people based on merit, not based on who they had beers with last week.
Chris Dreyer:
I love the component of merit. Especially if you're the referrer, you want to get maximum value. You got no labor-based fees on that case.
What I see working with a lot of PI attorneys, they get this out-of-jurisdiction leaders, or maybe a practice area that they don't quite cover, and they're like, "Oh, wash my hands. See you later." There's just not a lot of effort put into the referral, which is basically like burning money.
Matt Thelen:
Yeah. And it's a huge risk to the client, because you're just telling the client, "Too bad, can't help you." At best, what they do is send the client to the bar association list serve, and then the client's like, "I'm picking names from a hat at this point. I don't really know who to go with."
But when I really started digging in, I identified three major pain points that, in my opinion, it really bogged down what attorneys do in the referral space. The first of those is shopping of referrals. Even if you have a great network of partner attorneys across the country, it still takes a long time to find a home for a lot of these cases. You might have a case that you think is great for your partner Joe in Northern California, for example. You're thinking it's his back pattern or his criteria, or whatever he judges his leads based on. But maybe he sees something in the case that you don't. Or maybe, he's too busy and he has a full calendar, and he can't take any more cases. You take 10, 15, 20 minutes pitching this case to Joe up in Northern California, only to find out that he doesn't want it for whatever reason, and you're back to square one.
The second major pain point we identified was how do you build a referral network over time. How do you find a good attorney in every practice area throughout the country so that, when you have a case that originates in that jurisdiction or for whatever you need to place a case there, how do you know who you want to send the case to that's going to do right by the client? But also, uphold your reputation, since you were the one vouching for this person.
Then the third piece that we really identified is that there's no great way to track referrals once they're made. The more sophisticated attorneys will hopefully track them on an Excel spreadsheet where they say, "I sent Chris six cases last year on these dates, here are the terms. I should probably reach out to him and figure out what's going on with these cases." A lot of times, it's in emails buried somewhere, or on a legal pad somewhere in the office.
What we did is we designed Attorney Share to really create a much more dynamic environment, digital environment, that allows attorneys to know where their cases are and what's happening with their cases, their referrals.
Chris Dreyer:
Give me the backstory on how you came into law and the tech side, this whole intersection.
Matt Thelen:
My story starts in law school, where I actually got a JD-MDA. And found a strategy firm in San Francisco that was doing IP strategy, in both expert testimony and valuation work. Did that for about a year, and found myself gravitating more and more towards early stage startups. Had some friends over at Bessemer Venture Partners who were deploying a pretty big check into a startup here in LA. They wanted someone that they felt comfortable could really run the regulatory side of the business. The founders were surprisingly not looking for an attorney, but I convinced them that I'd be able to help across the business, and really take all of the regulatory work off of their plates because it was taking a disproportionate amount of their time. They decided to bring me down to LA as the first legal hire.
In that time, I led that company, which was Winc. I joined in the Series A, led them through an IPO on the New York Stock Exchange, which was a great experience. And I've been doing really venture work ever since. Ended up meeting Bob Simon, who convinced me to come help him establish and build Attorney Share, which is a referral marketplace for attorneys.
Chris Dreyer:
Individuals like us or Bob, we may have the network, but maybe not the backup individual, or the non-PI. You get these employment leads, or what have you. The consumers don't know specialties, so they're just contacting who they know who's an attorney.
One of the key features that I think is really cool is the waterfall feature. Maybe explain what that is and how that helps with things?
Matt Thelen:
Yeah. This is actually the brain child of my co-founder Alex Becker. He struck upon the brilliant idea of automating the sequencing of referrals. What Waterfall Referrals allows you to do is to create sequences within the platform that you send cases to.
For example, if I have a motor vehicle accident waterfall here in Los Angeles, I could put Bob Simon at the top. Then I could put name your attorneys down the list. You could essentially sequence the order in which those referrals are "shopped" to those attorneys. Once you put all the details into Attorney Share, the details will then pass directly to the waterfall in sequence. When Bob passes on that case, it will automatically push to number two. Then it'll automatically push to number three.
You could also time-bound the amount of review period for each individual in the waterfall. If you give 48-hours to the person that's top of the waterfall, and they don't review it, don't check it, don't do anything with it, it will automatically push to the next person. If that client then needs an immediate answer, you're able to create a force function to drive the referral partner to respond as quickly as possible. Then the consumer gets an immediate response, gets placed with a better attorney. They're not in this weird limbo state where they're asking you for an answer, but you're waiting for the referral partner's response, and it creates unnecessary delays.
Chris Dreyer:
There's more and more of these feature developments that you're creating to make it more efficient to get cases in the platform. I know you guys just did something with Clio Grow. Talk about some of these different aspects that make it super efficient to get into the platform.
Matt Thelen:
Yeah, yeah. To bring a case into the platform, we're trying to build two-way integrations with all of the large case management platforms, which will allow you to push cases directly from your case management platform into Attorney Share. And also, take that case, if you are a Clio customer and I'm a CASEpeer customer, and you push your case into the platform for referrals, you and I come to an agreement, I could extract the case detail into my case management platform so that I don't have to do any manual entry. That's the end state. It is a lot of work, building integrations across dozens of case management softwares. But we're making good progress and it's really exciting.
Really, the end goal for us is to absolutely be able to pull case status updates from those softwares. The referral that you send me, instead of having to ping me every month or so for an update on the case, you could just log into Attorney Share, extract the case status update from the CASEpeer account, and you'll be able to see the actual status of the referral that you sent me.
Chris Dreyer:
Talk to me about network effects. What I mean by this is thriving community of referrals needs not only good litigators and a lot of attorneys on the platform, but you also need cases. Tell me about the network effects, the community, what's going on? If you're a litigator listening, you might want to be one of the early ones on the platform because there's maybe not as many members as there are going to be in a year.
Matt Thelen:
We're seeing attorneys from all over the country join, we're in all 50 states. Growing several hundred attorneys a month at this point. I think the reason it's growing so quickly, it's because it's such a clear problem within the industry, and it's such a block for everyone in what they're trying to do, and operate their firms, and operate their businesses. That we've come in and tried to solve those pain points, and make everyone's lives a lot easier.
Chris Dreyer:
Let's face it. Being a great lawyer isn't enough. To succeed, you need to generate consistent leads. Personal injury is the most saturated niche. Competition is fierce, and differentiation is everything. When the deck is stacked against you, you need a comprehensive resource to beat the competition.
My last book, Personal Injury Lawyer Marketing, is your roadmap to consistent leads and exponential growth. It is a masterclass on marketing for personal injury firms. It's packed with actionable strategies on where to invest your marketing dollars for maximum impact. No more guesswork, no more wasted ad spend. Just clear, proven methods to transform your firm from good to GOAT. Grab your copy of Personal Injury Lawyer Marketing on Amazon. The link is in the show notes.
Yeah. I was going to replace your word with efficiency to save time, and make it easier. It makes me think of Alex Hormozi's value equation. It's dream outcome, speed. And it's decrease effort and sacrifice. Make it as easy for the consumer to make these referrals as possible, which is why I really like this. If you don't know someone, just throw it to the marketplace and see if you can monetize it. I got about 100 PI firms specifically. Well, 120, 130 firms total.
I was thinking, "Well, what could we do here?" If I can help my clients make more money, then it's good for me. They're going to want to do more marketing. I was in there, toying around. There's a solid amount of cases coming in, every single day. There's already, look, I don't know, I'm just guessing, 500-plus, maybe 1000 attorneys in there, a decent amount. Just being transparent, I've had several of the people that had been on this show in there. As podcast guests, I've seen them on there. Really cool to see that develop.
I think it's really cool, especially as the environment shifts. We don't know tort reform, and what's going to happen with auto, and collision detection, and all these things. I've talked about it a lot. It opens up the opportunity to find other areas to pursue. If you're getting a lot of SSDI cases, I don't know.
Matt Thelen:
That's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, the other thing to think about is it gives you confidence in building practice areas in other jurisdictions, or other practice areas per se. What it lets you do is you say, "Hey, I want to make sure I have some supply of cases as I enter these new markets." You can tap into the marketplace on Attorney Share, or you can talk to your referral network and say, "Hey, I'm opening up an office in Arizona. Make sure you add me to your Arizona waterfalls." It becomes a lead gen source.
Then conversely, to your point, when people are saying, "My marketing budget is 50,000 a month, and I'm thinking about raising it to 75,000 a month. But what do I do with cases that I might not be able to handle myself? I'd prefer those not to be at some cost, and I'd prefer to be able to monetize them." Well, to put them in Attorney Share, and you can at least get some ROI on those ad spend dollars while monetizing the cases you want for your firm.
Chris Dreyer:
I couldn't agree more. Talk to me about the fees. How does the fee structure work? Are you paying to get these cases? Are you paying to put them in? How does it all work?
Matt Thelen:
Yeah. I think that's the beauty of it, is that it's such an approachable price point that I think that's why people are excited. There's no cost to join the platform ever. For anybody that's referring cases or taking cases, it's entirely free. We will never take a cut of the client's fee. The referring attorney never pays anything. Full stop. The referring attorneys can send cases directly through their waterfalls or a direct referral and it doesn't cost them anything. They could put a case into the marketplace entirely for free.
The referee attorney, if they are the recipient of a direct referral or a waterfall, they do not pay anything. We don't want to disrupt any existing referral relationships that might be out there. If you know you have your dog bite guy in North Dakota, and you don't want to shop the case or everything, but you want the efficiency of Attorney Share and the functionality of the platform, load it up into Attorney Share, send it directly to your dog bite guy in North Dakota, and it won't cost either of you a penny.
The only time anyone pays anything is if I'm a referee attorney, I submit a proposal to a case on the marketplace, and that proposal is accepted, so I get the case. I'd pay a 299 administrative fee. That's it.
I think what we've tried to build here is a platform that allows partnership and collaboration throughout the industry in a seamless manner, as much as possible.
Chris Dreyer:
The feature of referral networking isn't about who you know, it's about how efficiently you can connect the right case with the right attorney. Every lead that comes through the door has value, it's just a matter of having the right system to capitalize on it. To learn more about Attorney Share, check out the show notes. For more weekly insights in growing your practice, don't forget to subscribe to Personal Injury Mastermind with me, Chris Dreyer. Have a great holiday season, and I'll catch you next time.
