Chris Dreyer:
Every firm knows to invest in marketing and every firm knows to build a strong digital presence. But what if you could rise above the competition, not by casting a wider net, but by spearfishing for whales? We're getting a front row seat to the new frontier of case acquisition through AI that targets perfect match cases and new business models that create direct pathways to premium clients. Two conversations shows us how to rise above the noise, one through technology that finds the exact cases you want, another through business structures that bring cases directly to you. I'm Chris Dreyer, founder and CEO of Rankings.io, the host of Personal Injury Mastermind. To kick things off, we start with Jake Soffer, founder and CEO of FirmPilot. Jake studied computer engineering with a focus on natural language processing, but this was way before ChatGPT.
Jake Soffer:
We were working on algorithms to read a sentence and say, "Is that a person, place or thing?" Very, very simple. We thought it was the coolest thing in the world.
Chris Dreyer:
Let's fast-forward to today, Jake explains how FirmPilot's AI platform sits on the top of your existing marketing, turning broad campaigns into precision targeting machines.
Jake Soffer:
We started to build a set of AI agents that do the same things an agency would do, your social media, your SEO, technical and content, link building, all the different things that your agency is doing. But what we built and orchestrated is what we like to call a data layer that sits on top of large language models, AI models that power ChatGPT, Claude, et cetera. And this data layer says, "Here's the things that you should do and here are the things that you definitely should not do." Like people being penalized for just saying, "Hey, ChatGPT, write me a blog post about car accidents." And you get penalized, no doubt, that is something you definitely should not be doing. We're very, very intentional about the content we write, given the data sets, that's where the value lies that see these AI agents that are writing your content, making your website faster, doing your social media.
That's the 80. The 20 is where I like to say maybe we miss out on that Rankings hits it on the park on it is a little bit more on the branding side, a little bit more on the tonality. At the end of the day, we still are AI. We do work with some higher end clients, but they tend to both have an agency and [inaudible 00:02:24] to supplement it as getting them a competitive edge. But we found this really, really nice sweet spot of if you are in the middle to lower half budget wise of this marketing agency world and legal, it's a great solution that automates each of those assets, just again, social, SEO, website speed and accessibility, all that powered by our data layer.
Chris Dreyer:
Guys, I'm not an investor, I just think Jake's tool is amazing and we were comparing the amount of deliverables and the production that it's capable of as respected to an agency cost, it's pretty incredible. So just wanted to state that, not biased, it has a lot of productivity. You mentioned in previous conversations there's 460,000 plus law firms competing for attention. How has this saturation changed in what it takes to win clients?
Jake Soffer:
We fish with a spear, not a net. Our biggest scare is when we sign a client and we see a graveyard where we see your intake system and you have leads that are three years old. We're all about precision, but if we don't have data telling us what's good, what's bad, how are we training the model? Or the last thing we want to do is train a model to go after what you don't want.
Chris Dreyer:
So it has some of those quote, unquote CRM type capabilities to help with the targeting, I guess with the demos and the psychographics too, is that what you're referring to?
Jake Soffer:
We have a firm that all he does is nursing home abuse. We were able to triple his monthly lead volume in three months because he had all this data and he just didn't know what to do with it. It's not as simple as WordPress, Google, make sure my content shows up in front of my most profitable client. However, there are mechanisms where you can get an edge. For example, Chris and Jake are sitting in the exact same room and we Google the exact same words. We very well might see different results. Google knows everything about us, if you bought your lunch with a credit card, it knows what you ate. So we can use this psychographic data to go target age, sex, household income, education, search history, all of that just hidden in the data behind the content based off what we call readability scores. We use an algorithm called Flesch-Kincaid to say, "This is who it's likely to show out in front of."
Chris Dreyer:
Flesch-Kincaid is one of the pains for me internally, because a lot of times our clients want to read the content written at a more sophisticated level, when we may only need it to be an eighth grade reading level because that's the consumer's reading level on average, depending upon which demo you're targeting and all the different criteria who you're going after.
I loved your analogy of fishing with a spear and the focus and more on quality and specifics. A lot of times when we think of AI, it's like Grant Cardone in the background, 10X, 10X, productivity, productivity. So maybe you could just speak to what is that data? What did you feed into it to give them this unique information to create this campaign?
Jake Soffer:
We like to think of ourselves as not just a vendor, a partner. What are your goals? We work with a large, large injury firm in Philadelphia. Their organic traffic was through the roof. If you look them up on Semrush, Ares, whatever, you're seeing thousands and tens of thousands of monthly visitors. But is that traffic actually valuable to them? So looking at their intake system, we could see they almost becoming like a news [inaudible 00:05:58] for those keywords, vanity keywords, whereas I'd rather get half as much traffic if it's high value clients and the clients that I, at so-and-so law, actually want.
So we looked at all this data with them in their intake system and they said, "Wow, we should really go after birth injuries. We are really good in doing birth injuries. We sign them quickly. We have a high conversion rate for people dealing with birth injuries." So if you just know where to look in that data and keep it clean, it makes it so much easier to really build the machine to say, "This is what we want to go after, here's how we make it run." Rather than, "Let's just put content up that says we're an injury firm."
Chris Dreyer:
Talk to me about the capabilities, okay, so we know it has the ability to create content, you mentioned social media. Talk to me about some of the capabilities in terms of the distribution.
Jake Soffer:
Outside of that, yeah, so another really cool one that we built is our PPC model. It is so crowded. Anyone can launch Google Ads. And firms think I'm paying, I should get guaranteed leads. However, what people often forget is Google's goal, and not bashing Google, they're a king and queen maker. However, Google's goal is different than your goal. Their goal is spend your budget as fast as possible. Your goal is to get good leads. And if 500 firms are bidding on the same keyword, how is it decided who's paying what cost per click? Because you're not all paying the same cost per click. And how is it decided who's going to be ad one, who is ad two, or who is ad three and four all the way at the bottom of the page? And how often does your ad show up? It's a bit of a black box.
So there is no way to fully open up that black box and see it. So what we do is we emulate tons of these guys, IP addresses, in your city and see how often does Chris's law firm show up? Is it always spot number one? He must be doing absolute impression share bid strategy. Or does he go second? What other keywords in a keyword cluster, we like to call it, similar off keywords, even longer tail, does he show up for it? Great. So now we actually have a baseline, meaning our copy has to be at least this good. Our cost per click has to be at least this much. Is it even worth it to go after for you? Your budget has to be at least X and landing pages have to be at least this long or this good as well. So now we actually have all this data saying, "Here's how we launch a good ad campaign." Not a gut feeling or a template that we've used for 500 clients.
Chris Dreyer:
When we get into these bid strategies, like the absolute top impression share and how that can be manipulated, now Google's going to run up that price or the max CPC, the auction base versus max CPA, which historically has the best for us, because you're giving it at least targets, but if you increase that CPA, they're going to spend it. And the other thing too is, does FirmPilot, does it feed back in the data, the offline conversions? Does it utilize that? What's just your thoughts? I mean, how valuable is that information? It's always like, well, we think it helps.
Jake Soffer:
It's everything. We've signed clients that were using a freelancer, another agency, and I'm shocked to see the amount of times that we don't see Google Tag Manager installed. That's like flying blind. You have to have that feedback loop. You could have the best AI in the world, but if you don't, if you're not feeding it good data, you're just guessing, even with AI. It's not as simple as saying, "Hey, I do X." I wouldn't trust a self-driving car that doesn't have millions and millions of training data to take me to the airport, because it's just guessing. It's the same with your ads. So if you don't have that feedback loop set up to capture those conversions, then you're really just again, flying blind and I wouldn't want to spend my budget that way.
Chris Dreyer:
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We've seen how firms can use AI to target their ideal cases, but what if you could go a step further and actually own the channel that brings in premium cases? That's exactly what Scott Hardy did. As an entrepreneur, not a lawyer, he built Top Class Actions into a platform that attracts 1.5 million potential clients every month. Then, when Arizona changed its rules to allow non-lawyer ownership of law firms, he did something unprecedented. He built his own law firm to capture those premium cases directly. Here's how this founder is reshaping the economics of case acquisition.
Scott Hardy:
I helped a number of lawyers become multi-millionaires by getting them their potential plaintiffs and getting those cases rolling and that kind of thing. And during that time I was just like, and my friends were like, "You got to start a law firm." I'm not a lawyer. I got a year and a half at community college. I'm not that smart. I just work really hard. But then Arizona changed the rules to allow non-attorneys to start a law firm.
Chris Dreyer:
But Scott, I've done the research. I know you read at least a book a week.
Scott Hardy:
Yes.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah. So let's... you're being humble here, so let's lean into it.
Scott Hardy:
I read a lot, yes, I read a lot. And so we started, it took a year to get the paperwork going, to find the right partner, the right compliance attorney, and then we got our ABS going. And we started, because Top Class Actions now gets a million and a half viewers a month organically. Those are all consumers who are actively looking to participate in lawsuits and settlements. And so now we'll use our law firm, LegaFi to co-counsel. And so in that case, LegaFi pays all the marketing expenses, co-counsels with some of the top law firms in the country, and we sign the cases and then LegaFi gets paid the attorney's fees. On the personal injury side, we just rolled out in the past six months a new target just for PI lawyers. And that's a package where they're spending a hundred thousand dollars with the expectation that we're targeting to sign about 20 commercial defendants for MVA accidents, motor vehicle accidents, MVAs.
And so that's averaging about a $5,000 per signed commercial defendant. And that could be Uber, Lyft, taxi, UPS, FedEx or of course whatever lawyer wants is the big rig and getting hit by those. And so we're doing that out state by state and we've only signed about 12 states so far. So we've got a lot of room to grow. So if your viewers out there are looking to sign MVA clients, we'd love to talk to them. And we're doing that with LegaFi. And so you pay the hundred grand, 10% of any of those, of the attorney's fees, go to LegaFi. But naturally with this advertising, we're also signing a number of just regular MVAs. And so when those get signed, those are just a straight co-counsel deal with LegaFi. That way our clients are able to get both MVA, which they aren't charged for, as well as the commercial defendants. So challenging, as you know, well, now we've got some law firms that are like, okay, I'll do five states or six states.
Chris Dreyer:
Can I ask you something, Scott? And then you can share or not. And I'm not asking for the secret or sauce on how to originate this, but I'm just curious. I had Angel Reyes on a show out of Dallas. And he was giving a number like, he doesn't care how you advertise, about 14, 15% are commercial policy cases. Do you think that number's low? Do you think maybe that's pretty consistent? So we're getting maybe eight, nine of the small before you get the commercial?
Scott Hardy:
Yes, that sounds pretty doggone in line. And all of our advertising, all of our paid advertising is only targeting commercial [inaudible 00:15:00]. But people see those ads and then call in, so we are seeing about 20% to 20, 30% depending on the market.
Chris Dreyer:
But yours are more laser targeted for the... Got it.
Scott Hardy:
Yeah. All of ours are [inaudible 00:15:14]. But the people still just see it and go, "Oh, yeah, I was hit." Or whatever the issue is, and they come in. That's been interesting because MVA wasn't our thing, but all of our clients were just like, "Come on, you're doing great on mass torts, can you also sign us up?" Because a lot of the big guys, as you know, a lot of the big mass tort guys, they've got their PI practice which pays the day-to-day bills. They just got that [inaudible 00:15:41].
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah, super smart. And then the tort payout, depending upon what you get in, who knows? It could be so different varying timetables there. In terms of the tort side, so you gave us some numbers on the PI, the commercial, I love that offer. It's a great offer, especially commercial cases of 5K. I mean, great. You're the epitome of what they would call forward integration. So a lot of times people go backwards integration for the supplying. They're like, you created your own distribution through Top Class Actions with the million users a month. And you're like, well now I... And the traffic itself helps you rank whatever you want to rank, especially the Google leak that came out talks about a lot of that and the signals from clicks. And then you're like, "You know what? For monetization, I'm shifting to... I'm going to participate in contingency." So you went through the ABS, just how long did that process take? I've heard seven, eight months. Was it longer than that?
Scott Hardy:
Right now, the Arizona Supreme Court is greatly overworked and they don't have the staff. And so if you were to submit an application now, you'd be lucky to get it approved within the next eight months to a year.
Chris Dreyer:
One question is, this is the SEO nerd in me is going to ask, on the torts and the class actions that they're out, their time runs or maybe they go to zero. I know the Zantac's hit or miss or whatever's going on at the state level. You got a tort that's just at zero, right? And then you got all this content on your website. Are you de-indexing it and removing it? Are you no following it? You just leave it up, let it rock, let it-
Scott Hardy:
We, and now it's sad, Chris, you'll be a little ashamed, but my team handles all of the tech backend now, so we don't de-index almost anything. We'll toss a redirect on it if we're going to take a page down, but we will continue to update that page, because like Zantac was dead until it wasn't, and now we're heavily involved in that. We'll throw a law firm in Top Class Actions. And so we know that these things come back to life. It's crazy how these torts go. And so when all of a sudden it comes back to life, we go ahead do a full refresh of the big long form page itself and then start generating new content. But my SEO teams, they actually meet a couple of times a week, and we had both the competitive SEO analysis, so if our competitors are ranking for terms that we want, we will go ahead and start immediately putting out competing content to put them further down the list to make sure we're back on top.
Chris Dreyer:
Two different approaches, one clear message. The future of case acquisition isn't about catching everything in your net, it's about precisely targeting the cases that drive real value. Result is better cases and better outcomes for everyone. Connect with Jake Soffer at FirmPilot or Scott Hardy at Top Class Actions through the links in our show notes. While you're there, subscribe to the podcast for more insights on building a more profitable practice. I'm Chris Dreyer. Thanks for hanging out and see you next time. I'm out.
