Michael McCready:
Traditional mass market advertisers pay a lot of money upfront to originate cases with the expectation that they sign up cases and 12 to 24 months later they get a return on their investment. The difference with what I do is...
Chris Dreyer:
Here's the thing, incremental improvements in utilization are what really tip the scale towards increased case value and profit. Most firms chase growth through more leads, but that's not where the real profit lives. I'm Chris Dreyer. I've helped hundreds of PI firms rise to the top, but this approach flipped even my thinking. Michael McCready scaled six offices, doubled his caseload, and became the go-to firm for referrals without a massive ad budget.
Michael McCready:
Most of my clients have never hired a lawyer before, and they're used to customer service that they get from Amazon, Domino's Pizza or Starbucks, and then they come to a law firm and lawyers don't return phone calls.
Chris Dreyer:
Michael's B2B model thrives because the little tweaks have massive impact. From 200 plus automated touch points to custom GPTs, this is what modern PI operations actually look like. You're listening to Personal Injury Mastermind powered by Rankings.io.
Michael, you've built what many would consider the go-to PI firm for referrals in the Midwest. You've scaled six plus locations, 100 plus staff, you doubled your caseload in the last 18 months. Let's kick it off, share some of the wins. What's going on with the firm?
Michael McCready:
I've noticed over the last couple years that there's been a seismic shift in where personal injury lawyers get their cases from and where we historically have been successful in getting cases is not going to work anymore. And so I focused all my energy on building relationships with law firms around the country because that's the way of the world, it's consolidation and a lot of money coming in and large marketers and they need somebody to do the legal cases. And so that's kind of what I've focused on and so far my strategy has proved wise.
Chris Dreyer:
Consolidation, the cost to acquire case has increased. Do you think that the trial lawyer component is just, it's so rare, right? There's so many of these pre-lit firms and advertisers. Do you think that you saw the writing on the wall and that's kind of where you shifted to this more B2B model? How did you think about this?
Michael McCready:
I think that's a great description, is I am much more business to business and my clients are other personal injury law firms. Now, listen, I mean, we still get our cases from, we've been in business for 25 years and we do some marketing ourselves. But I'll be honest, I can't keep up with the amount of money that's being spent in the legal field. Especially being in large DMAs like Chicago and Indianapolis and St. Louis, and now Minneapolis, you're talking millions of dollars of ad spend to brand yourself, and there's no guarantee that that's going to stick. So I made the conscious decision to invest my time and resources in cultivating relationships with other law firms.
Chris Dreyer:
What are some of the key principles behind this style of running a B2B firm? How is it different than a traditional firm, so to speak?
Michael McCready:
Yeah, sure. So traditional mass market advertisers pay a lot of money upfront to originate cases and build their brand with the expectation that they sign up cases and 12 to 24 months later, they get a return on their investment. But it does, it requires a large expenditure upfront. And I don't care if it's mass marketing or even digital, you're paying for those cases now and you won't get a return for 12 to 24 months when the cases settle. The difference with what I do is I'm still spending money, but my spend is on the referral fee, which is on the back end. It costs money to originate cases one way or another. No cases are free. You got to spend money. And with me, people are amazed. My marketing budget is about seven and a half to 8% of my revenue, compared to 25 to 35% for heavy advertisers. So I still spend the money, but I spend it on the back end on referral fees.
Chris Dreyer:
And I think that's something really interesting. I remember Michael Masterson's book, Ready, Fire, Aim, it talked about this disproportionate front end spend, which is what you see on the advertisers, but you have a disproportion on the back end of being able to litigate and pay for the expert witnesses and take a case all the way to the mat, so to speak. Talk to me about that, about working up the case and being the firm that the advertisers want to refer cases to because you do get the values.
Michael McCready:
I mean, listen, it's a lot to do with process. Over the years, we've developed amazing processes. One of our firm values is technology, and we have leveraged technology for a long time. We use SmartAdvocate, I've built it out very few firms in the entire country. Now for the last two years, we've been all in on AI. For a contingency fee practice anything that we can do to create efficiencies and allow us to spend our man-hours, so to speak, the time that people have to put into a case, the less time we have to put into a case now, not minimizing what we do, but the less amount of time we have to spend on the case increases our profit and increases our ability to handle more cases.
So all of these things that I've put into my firm over the last 25 years at the end of the day are all for the benefit of the client. All these things end up getting our clients better results, and that's the be-all and end-all of why we do what we do.
Chris Dreyer:
Let's dive right into, you opened the door for me on the ChatGPT and the LLM side, and I was fortunate to spend some time with you in Tahoe recently, and you gave an amazing presentation on how you're utilizing ChatGPT. I always see it on my end, the agency side, the marketing side, some of that intel. But talk to me about some of the things that you're doing to customize AI and utilize it at the firm. And I'll kind of open the door to you and then we can dig into some of these, maybe even some of the custom GPTs that you've created.
Michael McCready:
If you're not already using AI to some extent, you're already far behind. Firms like my own have got a jump on everyone. So the stuff that we're doing today is stuff... I need to talk about what we were doing a year and a half ago for most people, and I'm not trying to simplify it, but I'm trying to encourage people to actually do this, is to get a paid version of ChatGPT, it's $20 a month. You need to learn how to lock down the data privacy so everything stays contained in your system.
And then just start experimenting with it. Go down these rabbit holes. It's a conversation back and forth between an LLM, a large language model, which AI is built on, and yourself. And the more that you experiment with it, you're going to find new and greater uses for it. The stuff that we're doing now is pretty advanced, and it would be hard to explain to a lot of your listeners. Now, a year from now what I'm doing, everybody's going to understand. But today, in June 2025, it's quite the leap forward.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah. Well, I kind of do want to have that technical conversation as much as we can and some of the audience will follow. Because I'm curious myself, you inspired me, I got to tell you, I had used ChatGPT a ton. I'd done the personalizations on my profile, but I'd never built a GPT. And the thing that I'm struggling with is it won't follow my instruction. No matter what I tell it on, hey, follow these specifically, it still will give me the summarized versions. What I've been doing, because I haven't been able to figure it out, and I've even asked ChatGPT why it doesn't follow the instructions, is I'll take the instructions and I'll go throw it in Claude, and for some reason Claude will follow it, but ChatGPT won't. Let's talk about the GPT specifically. When you're thinking about creating your own GPT, how do you approach that? What goes into making it?
Michael McCready:
So first, you have to come up with what you want your custom GPT to do. Let's do something fairly simple as you want to create a custom GPT that will summarize depositions. Very simple. You upload a deposition and you want a summary. Well, in the configuration of that custom GPT, that's where you give it the guidance that you want it to apply to every single chat. And you can go into another GPT and say, hey, I'm creating a custom GPT. What would you recommend for the configuration? And I forget how many characters it is, but they'll give you a recommendation. Then you go back and edit that to what you want.
So for example, every lawyer in my firm has got a different style, the way they like their depositions. Some people like it very detailed. Some people like it page or line number. So you put those customizations into the configuration and say, anytime Michael requests a deposition summary, this is the format that we want you to use. Anytime that Jess asks for a deposition, this is the way that he likes it. And oftentimes we will upload deposition summaries that we have done ourselves manually over the years, and that gives them the GPT.
Here's another one is we use it extensively for trial practice. And I know that I did this when I was talking with you and some of the other lawyers. I'm a big fan of Mark Lanier. And I'll say, give me a closing argument, the style of Mark Lanier, and I'll put the facts in and out it comes. I'm not Mark Lanier, I can't give this closing argument. Only he can do that. I learned at a young age, you have to find your own voice. And so instead of doing it in the style of Mark Lanier, do a closing argument and here I'm going to upload three of my transcripts from closing arguments. Use that as your reference point and create a closing argument based on the style of these three transcripts.
I'm going to tell you, Chris, what comes out is unbelievable. It is my voice. It is so much, it's even my cadence, sentence structure that I use. I could give that closing argument, closing argument immediately because I trained the custom GPT on what I wanted it to reference on.
Chris Dreyer:
I've heard you say that it isn't replacing authenticity, it's replacing mediocrity. So maybe you could expand upon that.
Michael McCready:
Yeah, yeah. I read a really interesting article, I'm going to pivot a little bit from the law, but AI is fantastic at analyzing huge amounts of data and summarizing and synthesizing. So I think a lot of people know already you can type something in and ask it to be reworded. So in our case management system, one of our case managers might write in, this client is a real piece of work and boy, I've got a mind to tell him this and this, and this is what I need to tell him and then hit a button and it rewords it very professional manner. So that's very common.
But getting back to this is think about historians and the people who have written history over the years. You can now analyze literally the entire human history and have it synthesized and then have it retold based on whatever you want. So you could do the history of X, Y, Z as told from the perspective of the victor or from their perspective of the loser. So I think that it's going to absolutely revolutionize history and the way that history is presented, but once again, that is largely subjective. With the law, a lot of what we do is very objective. It doesn't need that kind of conclusion. We as lawyers are arguing to be persuasive, but always based on fact and emotion as well, but less room for that interpretation.
Chris Dreyer:
I'm using ChatGPT. I'm always thinking about some of the business books. For example, you mentioned history like Titan, Rockefeller's book. Has someone already uploaded Titan? I'm sure they have. And so who's feeding maybe some of these classic books that were around before the internet was more prevalent, is there someone just feeding these books into ChatGPT? Yeah.
Michael McCready:
It's not always the books themselves. There are a lot of books that have been written about. So for example, when I started two years ago, I got a digital copy of the Reptile Theory, and the Reptile Theory is a plaintiff's personal injury trial practice theory book. And a lot of lawyers swear by it. It's very effective. So I got the digital copy, because otherwise it's copyright infringement, and I uploaded it to use as a reference. So I would use all the theories in this book that I had uploaded to frame my responses.
But what I found out over the last two years is ChatGPT already knows the Reptile Theory because it's all over the internet and you don't need to buy the book. So you can ask, are you familiar with the Reptile Theory? Yes, I am, and here are all the tenets. And then well please use that in reference to the next query that I'm going to ask. Likewise, give me the top 10 books on cross-examination, and I know all 10 of those. I grew up reading them. Now, use these 10 books as your reference point to create a cross-examination for me based on the follow-up facts.
So a lot of that information is already out there. Now, there are lawsuits, of course, about how they have trained these LLM models and whether it is indeed copyright infringement. I don't come down on either side. But a lot of this information is already out there without the necessity of even buying the book. So Titan, I can guarantee you that almost everything in that book is floating around and could synthesize based on a query.
Chris Dreyer:
It's so incredible. I thought before we moved on, just if you wanted just some rando prompts that you like to run that are fun. One of my favorite is, I think you might've told me this, actually, I think you might've given me this, so I hope I'm not stealing it from you, is based upon all my previous prompts where are my blind spots?
Michael McCready:
Yes, yes.
Chris Dreyer:
That one was pretty tough to read.
Michael McCready:
Yes. And truthfully, I don't know where I saw that either. But everything is out there. The simple thing is I like to ask, you've given me a lot of information, what question didn't I ask that I should have? Or, based on the following response, please give me a response that a defense attorney would say? If my opening statement is based on the Reptile Theory, based on this opening statement, how would a defense attorney counter that? And it does. It goes back and forth. It's like ping pong. And that's the whole idea, is to really engage with this tool through this chat feature. Because everything, all the feedback that you give it is getting better and better to give you the response that you want.
Think about the Google algorithm. I mean, it's so good now, but I mean, it took 15 years to get there, and that is a type of AI. That algorithm has improved. So with all the learning that Google has had on people's search results, by what they're asking, what search results come up, how long they're spending on those pages, if they're going back, this is right up your alley, it's learning, and it's all trying to get best response possible. And ChatGPT and all of the LLMs, that's what they're trying to do, is to give you best answer to the question that you've asked.
Chris Dreyer:
You've automated over 200 client touch points, scaled marketing, and then taken tandem with software like SmartAdvocate and their automated process. Maybe you can just on that side, shift it from the LLM, maybe how are you utilizing SmartAdvocate maybe some of these processes to maintain consistency and growth across your six locations?
Michael McCready:
Of course. One of our touchstones is client service. We are a customer service business. Now, our services are legal services, but most of my clients have never hired a lawyer before, and they're used to customer service that they get from Amazon, Domino's Pizza or Starbucks. And then they come to a law firm and lawyers don't return phone calls. What do you mean? I mean, they don't understand that historically lawyers have been very poor at customer service. And so we looked at every aspect from our marketing all the way to the time... Well, past the time of disbursement. I mean, we're marketing to our clients after the fact. So we looked at the entire lifespan, the entire client life cycle, and tried to figure out where the touch points were, how we could provide superior customer service.
And one of the things that people feel customer service entails is communication. And communication takes time. So how can we create automations that clients can feel like they're informed about their case, they can feel like their lawyer is working on their case without people manually picking up the phone? And so every phase, every stage, every status of our client experience has certain touch points that are all triggered automatically. Here's how we started with this. You settle a case, you tell the client the check's going to be there in 30 days. One week later, is my check there? Is my check there? And when you settle enough cases, that's a lot of phone calls, a lot of inbound phone calls.
So what we did is, there's a trigger, as soon as the release goes to the insurance company, a text goes out and says, hey, we sent the release. It can be up to 30 days. And then one week later, hey, it's been a week. And then we text that client every three days, a different text. Hey, your check didn't come in today, or the mail just came and it wasn't there. It's been two weeks, it's not overdue. We called the adjuster and left a voicemail. It's been three weeks, it's still not overdue. Or we'll call you... Guess what? Our inbound calls went down dramatically because we are proactively communicating with the client.
So take that concept and then apply it everywhere in the case. I don't want my case managers calling the client, we're still waiting for medical records. No, we can send a text out. I don't need a case manager to call a client, say, hey, can you send us a copy of your Medicare card? That's a waste of a phone call. So if we have in our system that the client is a Medicare recipient, a text automatically goes out. And if the text doesn't come back, then another one goes out.
So all of these things that don't need human interaction and human involvement, and frankly when it's done automatically, it's done the right way at the right time every time. No room for someone to make a mistake. No room for someone to be on a vacation. No, it's done. It's done. So what that idea, that concept has allowed me to be able to do is have my team focus on those conversations which need to be had over the phone. For example, you missed your physical therapy appointment today, oh, I was busy. Well, physical therapy is a very important part of your case, and if you continue to miss medical treatment it can impact the value of your case. Oh, I didn't know that. Well, yeah. So please make every effort to follow the doctor's instructions. That is a phone call. I don't want it as a text. I don't want it as a video. I want that case manager to have that conversation.
When we get an offer on a case, the lawyer talks to the client. I don't want a text. Oh, I got an offer of 25,000. No, you call the client. Explain all of that. So that's kind of how we've built our firm and been able to scale and handle a lot of cases, and this might be another topic, but we get feedback from our clients. We do net promoter score. I know we're doing well because our clients are telling us. So we test the pulse of our clients several times over the course of the case. And if someone says the communication is inadequate, well, then we bump it up. We do a little bit more TLC. But communication is a two-way street. So we're communicating from the law firm to the client, but we want the client to communicate with us as well. And that's how I've been able to build the firm.
Chris Dreyer:
So many attorneys think about, I need more leads to grow my practice. But it's like the incremental improvements in maybe the leads, maybe your sales intake, but then also the utilization. You get more profitability because you attorneys, your staff, they can handle more bandwidth because you've got the text. And then the other thing that comes to mind is, and I hear this all the time, is, hey, I referred a case to this firm, and then that firm has to go check up on it. What's the status of it? All the time. And the receiving firm doesn't keep the referral firm and they don't communicate with them, and it's cumbersome. So talk to me about that. We had a brief conversation about that. So talk to me about communicating with your referral partners.
Michael McCready:
Two things. Two things. Years and years ago I used to refer out some cases, especially bigger cases. The client would be better served by having a more experienced attorney. So I would refer them out, medical malpractice, things like that. And I got really frustrated. I would refer out a case and the referring attorney wouldn't call the client for two weeks. So I came up with just a one page, these are my expectations when I refer a case out to you, and I'm going to go over that very simply.
One is, if I refer a case out to you, I expect you to contact that client within 24 hours. If you can't contact that client, let me know. I don't want anybody to fall through the cracks. If I refer you a case for litigation, it's because I wasn't able to settle it. It doesn't mean that it goes to you and all of a sudden, the insurance company is shaking in their boots and pays more money. If I refer you a case for litigation, I expect you to file it within 30 days, not wait to the statute of limitations. I require a copy of your malpractice insurance because I don't want to be on the hook if you screw up. This is now your client, I do not want this client calling me for updates. You have complete discretion. You're a good attorney. I'm referring to the case. You deal with the client. And then you send me a referral check and a settlement sheet. Is that too much to ask? You would be surprised.
So when I came up with that list and worked with partners, all of a sudden it dawned on me I need to be doing the same thing when people were referring clients to me. So we took it many steps further is we have a referring attorney portal that the referring attorneys can go on anytime and see the exact status of their case. We send out quarterly updates by email about the status of their case. Some of our larger partners, the ones that do the mass market advertising, we have a direct connection between our case management systems in real time, and they can check in real time exactly what's going on.
I'm very data-driven. And so we have our projected what we expect the minimum settlement value to be and the timeframe, what the referral fee is. And some of my referral partners use this because they can then forecast what their revenue is going to be, and they can forecast based on how much more money they want to put into market. So all of this data feeds into each other. And when I work with these firms that are very data-driven, it's a breath of fresh air when they see what I'm able to provide them. And then word gets out, that's how the referral business has flourished.
Chris Dreyer:
I would love that transparency, the communication, if I was the one sending you a case and being able to see just all the visibility. I also want to just talk a little bit about just your reputation. You're known as being one of the top premises liability firms. A lot of the firms we work with they don't take those cases, there's challenges to them. And talk to me just specifically just a little bit about that area of the law and some of your expertise there.
Michael McCready:
Yeah, we've really niched down into this and here's our playbook. We will send out a letter of representation, just very generic, our clients slipped and fell at your store and sustained damages, and we get a form letter back. We deny liability, of course, take that and throw it in the trash. I mean, we get the information from it, but we pay no heed to that. Then usually about 30 days, we'll say, hey, our client is still going through physical therapy, and it'll say, you know we denied this claim. Oh, yeah, we know. We know. And then our client has just been referred for an MRI, which was positive and is now going for an orthopedic consult. Whoa, whoa, whoa. Wait a minute.
Now we got the adjuster's attention because they just willy-nilly denied this claim without even knowing what our theory of liability was. And now this may turn into a claim, and now this adjuster's going to have to justify, if there is a claim, why they denied it immediately and now we've got the adjuster's attention. We would like to take a recorded statement. Sorry, we don't allow recorded statements. But then when the client is done treating, then we put together our whole theory of liability. We've had our theory of liability, but we present that.
Another one of our firm values is creativity. And our demand letters have always been extraordinarily creative. I mean, we've been embedding video and hyperlinks. We send out MRIs for 3D imaging, which are included in our demand letters. And then of course our theory of liability. No adjusters going to pay you money if you just say, oh, slipped and fell on something in the store. We're very detailed and we know what kind of facts are going to get us past summary judgment when we litigate these files. And at the end of the day, defense counsel may say, oh, you got a real loser on your case here. I'm glad you think so and you may be right, you may win 7 out of 10 times, but you explain to your adjuster why this case was such a loser when I hit you for half a million dollars. All they need to do is win 3 out of 10 times and I've made my money.
So it starts with the investigation and the way that we handle the adjuster, getting them to change their reserves from a denial of liability to, whoa, we would put some money on this to a mindset on how we litigate the cases. Obviously, we prepare our clients very thoroughly. We would win all of our cases if we testified, but we've got these things called clients that sometimes get in the way. We do what we can and we've been very, very successful.
Chris Dreyer:
And I was wondering if you could just briefly tell the story about the Chinese food restaurant? Yeah, that's a lovely one.
Michael McCready:
Yeah. So I had a client slipped and fell at a Chinese buffet, ended up having knee surgery. She was an older woman, and the deposition went on for about three hours. At the end, she's like, you know what? I don't know what I fell on. I just know I fell. And I said, ah. I wanted to strangle her. And I had picked her up from her house and drove her to the deposition. I had to drive her home thinking to myself, you've just ruined your case. And she's like, how'd I do? I said, well, we got some problems to overcome. So I went home not a happy person.
So I took the deposition of several of the employees at the Chinese buffet, and they spoke just Chinese, whatever dialect it was, and there was an interpreter, but the defense attorney hadn't spoken to them. So I'm deposing these witnesses, and they're like, oh, yes, we remember your client. Oh, yes, she fell. I said, where did she fall? Well, she fell here. And why did she fall? She said, well, there was a spill there, but we cleaned it up. So you're saying that where you cleaned the spill up was the exact location where my client fell? Yes. And all of a sudden I had a case again. But those are the vagaries of taking a case to court. Just never know. You could be up one day and down the next, and vice versa.
Chris Dreyer:
Michael, this has been a lot of fun. I love your approach to be in the B2B law firm and how you handle working with your referral partners. If one of our audience members have a case they want to submit to you or get in touch with you, how can they connect with you?
Michael McCready:
Well, we do SEO as well, so I hope that if you search McCready law, it's going show up, it better. But yeah, I mean, my URL is McCreadylaw.com. We've got an intake team that talks to everyone. We could have a whole nother conversation about the importance of intake because a lot of our people call us, they're not cases that we can handle. When I did intake, let's just say lawyers are terrible at it. Oh, you're in a car accident. Okay, well, when can you come in? Well, no, I don't care about your broken laptop. I need people who've got compassion and empathy who can listen that say, oh, I'm so sorry about that and we can take care of that. And even if it's not a case, just be very, very cordial and give them information. Because every lead that comes in, although we may decline, it is a potential case in the future and we're always remarketing to those people, whether it's newsletters or blasts or things like that. Never underestimate the power of spending a few minutes talking to someone, even if you're declining the case, because those people have come back time and time again.
Well, thanks for having me, Chris. Good to see you.
Chris Dreyer:
Like what you heard? Hit subscribe and get more of the no fluff, no BS conversations with the top minds and personal injury. I'm Chris Dreyer, this is PIM. Catch you next time.
