Daniel Morgan:
When I took over, our referral income was about 15 million bucks. This year, we're trending to the 63 million. After next year, they're saying it could be a nine figure year, and that's just referrals.
Chris Dreyer:
Few names carry as much weight as Morgan & Morgan, the strategies you're about to hear built a billion-dollar firm and transformed how an entire industry thinks about case acquisition. They've tested and refined what works so you don't have to.
Hey, guys. Chris Dreyer here, founder and CEO of Rankings.io. Today we're unwrapping an extraordinary gift just in time for the holidays. Wisdom from Dan Morgan himself captured live at PIMCon, the premier conference for personal injury lawyers. Dan takes us back to 2014 when he made a decision that would revolutionize legal marketing as we know it. Trading his time in the courtroom to pioneer a new path for Morgan & Morgan. His insights on testing, tracking, and maximizing every marketing dollar are invaluable for firms of any size. Here's Dan Morgan, recorded live at PIMCon.
Daniel Morgan:
I started about 10 years ago now, Morgan & Morgan. My first five to seven years, I was a full-on trial attorney, had case managers about an active inventory anywhere between 250, about a 350 cases, about 90 of those would be in litigation, the rest in pre-suit, it was just grinding those out and doing that and that was the path I was on. But as time was going on, I was getting less and less in thrill with the day-to-day of the case work and I always really loved the business side of it. Early on in my career, I started just being a doll with generating. I would go out with lunches with chiropractors, I was meeting with auto body shops and different people that were seeing accidents saying, "Hey, if I'll send people your way, you send them my way" and really do that in general business.
After my third year, I think I was the second or third most generated attorney in the firm and then I had a really big case come in and that's where I had the pivot and where I was doing as far as trying cases and litigating cases to really dive it into what we call Morgan X, which is inbound outbound referrals and really watching the business that way. And in the process of that as well, and about 2019, 2020, my dad started a committee, what he called a Purple Cow committee, which is a marketing committee. We had about four or five of our people. I was the only lawyer on it besides my dad. Our head of creative was on it, our COO or CMO and, another one of our social media guys. And those are really brainstorming sessions of how do we break the mold of traditional advertising, the traditional things we see in our space, TV, radio, billboards.
I mean that's the cookie cutter model. If you're going to start advertising, you're probably going to maybe dip your toe into some billboards, then maybe graduate and go to some radio. And then once you have the name, you go to TV, and then hopefully get the clients in the base and you keep it growing and growing. And the way that it works at Morgan & Morgan is we looked at our revenue from last year, we take a percentage and then that turns into our marketing budget. Anywhere between 10% to 15% of revenue goes to our marketing budget for the next year so hopefully year after year revenues go up and marketing bonus or the marketing budget increases. In right about when Covid was happening, I saw our TV budgets and some of these markets were getting outrageous, as you guys can imagine, probably seeing this in some of these markets and why are they on so much?
And I told my dad, "There's only so many times you can be on a Judge Judy TV show. We don't need to be back to back commercials on Judge Judy at 3 P.M. just because we have the budget and to spend the budget." So we started looking at different ways to spend more creatively and when I dove into the head of sponsorships and partnerships and then now what we've coined our iPhone strategy. But before we get into the marketing stuff, I'll dive into our inbound and outbound marketing. What we're doing could be beneficial to a lot of your firms, not to send those cases, but for you guys to be doing it with your own firms. With our outbound referrals, pretty much it's anytime a case that comes into our firm that we can't handle. Well, that's how it was originally, that we can't handle. So we're boots on ground in about 24 states. 26 states we're not in, but we still get a ton of phone calls in those other states that we're not in.
And the goal is that if we're not going to be handling that case ourself, to make sure it's getting to a capable attorney in that state, that we would feel comfortable if one of our family members was injured in an accident, who would we want working the case? Back in the day, I actually, fun fact is I've worked almost every job at Morgan & Morgan. I started in the call center when I was 17. I was an investigator back before DocuSign. We drive out to client's homes, you'd sign them up on packets, drive them back, drive the packets back, enter into the computer. I was a case processor. That's when the people that would then take those and assign to attorneys.
I was an intern, I was a case manager, I was a paralegal and then I was a lawyer, so I did good. I was able to see how the sausages made, so to speak about every aspect of the case. And the referral process for the longest time was in our intake center and it was a lady named Penny Brown. She had a legal pad. She'd say, "Sorry, we're not in Oklahoma.' Write their name down, their phone number, call an Oklahoma attorney and send it out. There's really no tracking. There was no monitoring it at all. In about 2015, 14, we hired a full-time guy that kind of took that over to really start tracking, but it was still only one person that was doing this for the entire nation. When I took over and more on the outbound side in 2022-ish, 2021, I realized this wasn't a job for one person. This was a job for a team.
So far, year to date, we've attempted a hundred thousand outbound referrals to outside law firms, about 20,000 of those being signed up. So to think of one guy was responsible for that, which is it's not happening. And the main things that we're trying to drive on those referrals is conversion rates, tracking and knowing the fees are coming in. So now, for our referrals, we have different buckets for each of those groups to make sure they're happening. When I first started our conversion rate on rear-end accidents outside of our outside referrals, it was like 18%. I was like, how is this possible? It's a rear-end accident, it's a mid-liability. It's not. But he said, she said, how is the conversion rate so low internally? Internally, Morgan & Morgan, these are like an 88%. Why are we at 16% here?
And then the answer I got was, well, our referral partners will sometimes lag getting back to us on whether this is a case or not, and then by the time they do say they want it, we call the client back and they say, "Sorry, I already hired another attorney." When I was... "Well, how much time are they getting?" And they said, "We usually give them a week." And I was like, "Well, that's our first mistake right there." That, tops, if it's not a weekend, you got to give them 24 hours to respond, if that. I personally believe if they're not signed up in the first 20 minutes, you're probably going to lose them to another law firm because as soon as you hang that phone up, they're going to be sitting there and they're going to call the next one. If that guy has a DocuSign available, that client's gone forever.
I'm 35 years old. Morgan & Morgan started. This is called Morrie Conn and Gilbert started six months before I was born and my uncle Tim was the first call center agent and kind of grew with this, hitting my dad to what they did. I was lucky enough to learn under Tim when I was in the call center and one of his famous lines that he taught me was, "Hook them and book them. As soon as you have them on the hook, you need to book them and get them done and get them signed up." Because essentially what you're doing is you're catching a fish, if you don't sign them up on the spot, you're taking that fish off the hook, you're throwing them back in the ocean and you're say, "Don't worry. I'm going to catch that fish in two days", or "I'm going to throw the line back out there and they're going to sign up with me.", which we all know, if you're a fish, it's just never going to happen.
Now, very rarely, you might get a guy that really wants to be with you or wants to be with a firm and they will hang around and wait or call back what's going on. But just by implementing the 24-hour rule, we went from an 18% conversion to about a 38% conversion. Since then, we've done more and more things where now we've launched what's called, I called it my nuclear plan, but it was essentially, if it's a rear end accident and it's in a state that we have a good partner, we're going to sign it up on the spot and then we're going to transfer it later. Now, obviously our ethics council and our corporate council, they're here for taking on all this risks and all these liabilities by doing this, but now our conversion rate on rear accidents is about 85%.
It's almost higher now than internally, which it shows you by little tweaks and little things you can do and having a team behind it, you can really see huge changes. Like I said, this year, year to date, we have about 15,000 or so that have been signed up, 15,000 to 20,000. By the end of the year, they'll be signed up by outside attorneys. About two and a half years ago, our number for the year was like 9,800. So we've doubled that by implementing this and by really having a team to buy into what we're doing and to be a part of the team and to know that... And to celebrate the wins. So if you're a team of referral manager, you have your states, if you're at a certain percent for the year, you're going to get a trip, you're going to party, you're going to have some fun. So they're working towards these goals alongside of us to celebrate the wins.
On the outbound side is also where I think a big opportunity for a lot of people in this room are the cases you're not working, your turn downs. You probably think, "Well, what would I, am I going to do with the turn down? They're not going to... They're turned down by me. Why would anyone else want to take them?" And that's our director of our call center, Angie's, kind of reaction was too, and I said, I want to start referring out our auto turn downs in Florida and Georgia. We have such a large volume, especially catastrophic injury cases. I wanted to get more eyes on these to make sure we're not having anything slip through the cracks. And she's like, "That's a waste of time, but our intakes are the best in the industry. We're not missing anything."
I said, "Angie, I love you and I believe that, but we're going to just run a pilot and see what happens here." So last year, we started that program and we had about 7% of our turn downs signed up by outside law firms. Some cases, for instance, a week and a half ago, we got one of those turn downs at a $2.25 million settlement by the other law firm. Semi truck case, they found liability, and they got a policy tender on the trough and then Angie couldn't believe it. We got a referral check for I think it was like $187,000, which if we didn't give a second look to that firm, we would've said, "Sorry, we can't help you." And we would've hung up the phone.
Another one, we had one about a month and a half ago. It was a premise liability case. They settled it for 1.7 million dollar turn down. We went back, anytime we get these settlements, always go back and look at the intakes and pull up what transpired, what went down, how do we miss this? And the client on the phone said, "I was walking up the stairs, I think I might've missed a step. I fell backwards and re-injured my back." Turn down. Not a case. Another guy took it. He went out to the site, he saw that the rail was out of code, the rail had failed and that his re-injured back actually was a double lumbar dish replacement. Big miss on our part. Luckily by the turndown system, we were able to catch that and at least make something on it. Every time you're spending marketing dollars, we're really driven Morgan & Morgan by CPAs, cost per... How much does this cost take to get the door? What's our average fee? What's the average referral fee?
Now that's really what drives every main decision that we're making is, "Is this ratio make sense?" We're getting $20,000 CPAs in a state. An average fee is 15,000 bucks. We're going to be in trouble pretty quickly. So everything you can do to hopefully bring that CPA down or find some money that could come in, there's a lot of attorneys out there that advertise, "We only take serious injuries. We only take catastrophic cases", which makes sense, especially depending on your firm's side. Brian Panish, I call him Uncle Brian, he is one of the best attorneys out in California, but his personal inventory is like 70 cases, but his average fees on those cases are going to be like 3 to 10 million plus plus plus. So he's able to be very selective on the cases he works and then he refers the rest out to other capable attorneys that might.
We get a lot of times there's no property damage or client only had chiropractor since [inaudible 00:12:01] at the Morgan & Morgan, our inbound side as well. So we try to have a system of both going in and going out and having relationships on both sides to hopefully raise the tide of everything. When we enter markets, we know a lot of times we're not welcome with open arms and people aren't happy to see the Morgan & Morgan billboards go up around where they are and we try to explain to them, "One, if you work with us, you're going to go see a good influx of cases, both referrals from us and practice areas that we don't do. Most places we go [inaudible 00:12:28] doing personal injury, car accidents and sometimes premises, but for the most part we focus on car accidents in our newer markets.
We're calm. MEN MAU has been a huge driver of our outbound referrals in the Northeast especially. I mean we partner with a few firms up there, but we track what our receivables are going to be on that and pretty soon our outbound MEN MAU will be paying for our marketing budget in the entire Northeast once those cases start hitting. So it's really knowing about what is your focus, what are you going to do? And if you're not the best lawyer to be doing that, it's probably best to look for the best that is, establish a relationship with them, and then to make the relationship keep going, to make... There's a lot of things that go in to trapping these cases and that's kind of been a struggle for me at least in getting some of these attorneys that we sent to to buy into what we're doing. We at Morgan & Morgan believe that every case, if you still have pain after three months, should have an MRI.
Some lawyers in here might disagree, some lawyers might be anti-MRI. I had a lawyer that said, "Dan, appreciate your firm, but I'm never going to send clients to get MRIs because MRIs can ruin cases if it shows no injury." And I was like, "Well, if there's no injury then there might not be a case there. And that's just what goes into it." And maybe it's not a disc injury, maybe it's a facet injury and there's still ways around it just because the MRI is negative. But if you're not sending our clients that we're sending to you for MRIs, we're just going to have to go our separate ways. So there's a lot of that that goes into it. A lot of the making sure that your client's being worked the way that you want to work the case.
Chris Dreyer:
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Daniel Morgan:
On the inbound side, we took the same practices that we're doing the outbound and just translated it out there. So we go to firms now and say, "Send us your turn downs", and they look at us confused and we say, "We have good success on some of these programs in our firms, we want to get a look at some of yours." So now we have some of the bigger firms that you see on TV. We said in turn downs, there's another turn downs and we're at least getting more eyeballs on the cases. And the way we do our referrals too is we have each practice area and it's done by states. Then we have three firms. First look firms, second look firm, third look firm. We would give all of them a chance to look at it and then if I really truly believe in the case still, I then tell my referral manager, this is the case, now you can go look for any lawyer that wants to take this case.
And again, that has also, we've seen a giant lift in our percentages, in our conversions by empowering our referral agents. Just because these firms aren't who aren't preferred, you can still have free rein to go out and establish your own relationships and see what you can do there. But when I took over, I think in 2020 for the year, our referral income was about 15 million bucks. This year, we're trending to do an outbound around 63 million, and we see where it's scaling. Hopefully, after next year, they're saying it could be a nine figure year and that's just referrals. Those profit margins are like 85% because we're really only spending on marketing and then I have a minimal team budget on my outbound team, I might have about 10 people that all make pretty good salaries. That's the other thing you have to do. If you want good people, good talent, good managers, and to be an attractive place to work, you have to pay them fairly, treat them right and make them want to enjoy working there.
Another thing we do, there's a strategy that we run with, I call it, is bullets before bombs. So test it out, make sure it works, then dive into it. Don't just go out and sign a hundred thousand dollars deal with Kentucky basketball, not knowing that this thing's going to work or not. Get some attribution, make sure that you're seeing return on it and yeah, we want to go heavy here. So these are some of established brands that we have teamed up with now. Our first one was three years ago. Our first one was with the Boston Red Sox. My dad was staunchly against it, pissing money away. This is all about ego. You just want to be hanging out with ballplayers and go to Fenway. Half true. But again, we made the assets work. We do... I'll get into it a little bit. We do sweepstakes.
We can do spectacular marketing with... Yeah, UFC's on here. UFC was the first big sticker price that I had and my dad have to jump on. He went back on about two or three times before the deal went down. So it was a test campaign. It was a hundred thousand dollars for one night in the off the go, so big sticker price. And my dad's like, "Nobody fucking watches this." We just got the data. It's the number one most watched sport. He's like, "No, it's not. No one watches it. We're wasting money. Don't do it." I'm like, "I'm telling you, this is going to work. So he calls the Saturday of, "Is there any way we can cancel it?" I'm like, "No, we're in the ring already. The Octagon's set up." He's like, "Buddy, this is going to go down as one of your biggest fuck-ups of all time."
And I was like, "If it does, I'll own it." About nine o'clock at night, I get a touch from my dad. He's like, "I keep getting calls from people saying they're seeing this. I told you. I cannot believe that there's this many dumb fucks watching UFC on a Saturday night." I was like, "Well I'm watching it. So I guess I'm one of them." Long story short, that following Monday was our highest call volume day in our firm history. So all of a sudden, my dad's like, "Hey, can we do more of that?" I said, "Let me see what we can do." So we went back with the drawing board and we did a year deal with UFC. We got the rights, we did the thing. We're in Octagon like six times a year and then we can use two of their fighters. We put that into our commercials.
We put their logo on our billboards. So one of the main I like to do is I compare these partnerships to high-end sports cars, Ferraris, Lamborghinis, that if you're going to buy a Ferrari, don't just park it in your garage. Don't go in there and look at it or once in a while have your one event and then you go out and take it for a ride that night. Put some miles on that [inaudible 00:18:48]. Don't worry about the resell value because it's more of a lease than anything because it's not a lifetime deal. It's a yearly deal. So give what you can out of it, put it on end cards of TV ads, get some viral stuff going on Instagram, do... UFC has like 38 million followers on Instagram. So part of our deal is to do sweepstakes with them, promote it on their Instagram.
So put our name on their Instagram, get all those followers. UFC is also owned by a group called TKO. They own PBR, which has been phenomenal, especially in states that we're not in like Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana. I mean you're literally just blitzing these states because that's what they do there. The TV numbers on it are staggering and comparatively, and my dad was with UFC. I was telling the PBR people, "No one watches this shit." Actually, here's the numbers and case counts and South Dakota spiked and there's really nothing else to point to except a PBR deal. Now we're actually a test with WWE, which has been the pious performing by far. So it's about taking these partnerships and really maximizing what you're doing with them. One of the many things that my dad always cares about is the attribution as we all do in here. If we're spending money on UFC, how do we know we're getting cases from UFC?
If we're spending money on Kyle Busch, how do we actually know? And the short answer is you don't, because we do so much and so different things that you really can't tell. Was it this was it that was it that was it that or was it just a blanket? And then finally, oh, it's that straw that broke the camels' back and then we got the case. What's cool about these sweepstakes that we do is when you enter these sweepstakes, we put your information into our system so we can, one, see if you've been a client before and two, see if you've never been a client. On the WWE SummerSlam, I think we had 23,000 entrants into our sweepstakes and about 18,000 in there have been clients before. We already know since then, about a hundred have become clients. So we have their info now, we have their number.
As soon as they call back, we see the first time they are put into our system was Kyle Busch meet and greet sweepstakes, June 2023. Client became a client in 2024. Then we can capture that data and attribute it somewhat to the CPA to know all we're getting our money's worth on it. And these are things that you don't have to be partners with these people to do it. Obviously, it works better when we have PBR or WWE or UFC co-signing and put on their Instagram, but it's pretty easy to go out there and get two tickets to the Colorado versus Colorado State game or something and to do it yourself. So it's just little things like that. Now, you have someone, hopefully a client for life even that you didn't have it before. My dad always says, he calls it, why bother? Why bother doing it?
He's like, "Well, the long run, something good's going to come from it. Why bother coming to speak at PIMCon" or "Why bother coming to sit to listen to people speak at PIMCon? Because most likely what's going to happen is you're going to make a connection. You're going to make a network. You might get one case. You might send a case, and this conference is two days, could turn into a seven figure business trip for you. So it's always about thinking about why bother? Why should I do this? You're going to get something out of it and just believe in that as well, and not just being a sticker slap. Don't just do it and be gone. Morgan & Morgan's slogan is for the people. So it's like how do we tie our brand to doing grassroots community events and being there and being a part of it.
We have events team now too. The next one, we have a disaster response team. This is a team about five or six people that their job is when something bad happens, they just go out and help wherever that happened. And the goodwill you get from that and being in their community and then seeing you there, if you're out there doing it and believing in it and having a team that can execute quickly, then it becomes not as formidable to do. What we then did with our disaster response team, since thankfully, there's not disasters, right? So regularly, they're now also our events team. So if you have a PBR event or a high school football game or something, we're going to mobilize them at least once a week so they're doing something. And again, that goes back to the NILs and all that. You don't have to do a splashy deal with the University of Miami or with Ohio State.
You can picture high school team, do a small $10,000 sponsorship, $5,000 sponsorship, but dive into it. Be out at the games. Let people know you're there. Let the parents know who you are. Give speeches at that [inaudible 00:23:09] practices. I sponsor about five popular teams, two in South Central LA, a few in Florida. If I make a point to at least go speak to the kids at least once because I want them to see me there, I want their parents to see me there. I want them to get my information, my card, and now most likely, at least I know for at least in the one in South Central, I've had about five cases since last year sign up from me just making the effort to why bother to go out to LA to take the flight, stay at the Beverly Hills Hotel. I mean, I'm not going to slum it, but make the effort and to do it.
Chris Dreyer:
That wraps up this special episode of PIM, Live from PIMCon with Dan Morgan. This marks our 300th episode of Personal Injury Mastermind conversations with the brightest minds in the personal injury law space, sharing their wisdom and successes. None of this would be possible without you, our listeners, who tune in week after week to learn, grow, and push our industry forward. Special thanks to Dan for pulling back the curtain on Morgan & Morgan's Marketing Evolution and thank you, our listeners for being part of this incredible journey. Cheers to the next 300 episodes. I'm Chris Dreyer. As always, thank you for hanging out. See you next time. I'm out.
