Jim Hurley:
I started out as a solo, and we're going to be at 12 or 13 million this calendar year.
Chris Dreyer:
That's Jim Hurley, managing partner at Cooper Hurley Injury Lawyers.
Jim Hurley:
The firm's been in existence since 2011. I've been doing injury law for 30-plus years.
Chris Dreyer:
In Virginia, they are better known as the Car Crash Experts.
Jim Hurley:
Approximately three or four years ago is when we embarked on the Car Crash Experts. We really started branding that concept. It's more of a niche-niche approach. Overall, I think it has worked for our branding.
Chris Dreyer:
I'm Chris Dreyer, founder and CEO of Rankings.io, the award-winning digital marketing agency for personal injury attorneys. In this episode, Jim Hurley and I walk through the four steps to get to your first $13 million year. Let's go.
Jim Hurley:
The first couple years when we started it, not a whole lot of change. Luckily, we had done enough from a marketing standpoint, so the first year or two, not a whole lot of change. Year three and four, and we're going into year five, year three and four, there was a definite uptick. From number of cases and revenue. Number of cases increased maybe 10 to 15 percent. The revenue increased a little bit, but was still a little bit stable. As you know, in the world we live in, you sign up a case and our average we get paid is about anywhere from 13 to 19 months out.
Chris Dreyer:
You got I believe nine, maybe more offices, they're all in Virginia. What's your thought process on the expansion of staying in Virginia?
Jim Hurley:
What we're really looking at short term, which would be the next two to three years, is we're trying to be a big fish in a little pond, as opposed to a little fish in a bigger pond. Our area geographically is coastal Virginia. We go from Williamsburg, Virginia east. That our DNA, our designated marketing area, we're about 50 or so, so we're mid-major market for that. In total in that area, we have two, three million people. Right now, we're one of the top personal injury firms in the area, but we're not the premiere injury firm in the area. We're really trying to focus on our immediate area in the next two to three years to be the big fish. Then at that point, we may consider expanding a little bit.
Chris Dreyer:
Jim put down the shotgun and picked up the rifle, focusing his brand as the Car Crash Experts. By owning his niche, he grew from solo to a $13 million firm. If you're chasing your first $10 million year, here's step one.
Jim Hurley:
You got to try to be everywhere because you really don't know where people are going to be. Cassidy Lewis is our chief marketing officer. The word she often uses is omnipresent.
Chris Dreyer:
I love that you teed up Cassidy, your CMO, a number of individuals I believe that work with Cassidy as well. When did you decide to bring a little bit more control in-house? Look, I own a marketing agency, but there's ways to do both. You can do everything in-house and have full control, or you can maybe start and work with an agency. When did you go about bringing it in-house? What was the thought behind that? How did you approach that component?
How Jim Hurley built Cooper Hurley’s brand by going all-in on in-house personal injury marketing
Jim Hurley:
We brought marketing in-house approximately maybe 15 years ago. Prior to establishing Cooper Hurley Injury Lawyers, I had established Hurley Law Firm. Then John Cooper joined me and since then, we built the firm to where it is today. Even when I was a solo practitioner at Hurley Law Firm, I knew marketing was crucially important. I actually brought someone in-house on a part-time basis because I didn't have the ability to coordinate everything I wanted to do. It wasn't super expensive, but when you're a solo practitioner, a dollar is much more valuable than let's say you're a bigger firm. It was painful, but I knew it was necessary and it was less money in my pocket at that time.
Then as we continued to grow, then we had the ability to hire somebody of Cassidy Lewis' stature and ability. She's been with us now for approximately eight years or so. Then through that, we have three other full-time in-house marketers. Then we have a graphic design person that works with us that's not in-house, but we work with her on a regular basis.
When we decided to do that was it's a money question. We knew we had to do it, and as we got bigger and we had more money, then we could add people. The in-house marketing people, one focuses on social media, one focuses on client satisfaction and gifts, and things like that. Then one focuses essentially as a marketing assistant with an emphasis on the referral specialist type stuff.
But again, most firms listening to this are probably smaller. I'm sure there's firms much, much larger than we are. But if you're a solo practitioner or two or three attorneys, it's like, "Why am I listening to this guy?" We're about 50 employees, 10 lawyers. Our marketing budget is about $2.3 million. We do TV and various other things. "Well, this guy doesn't know anything, he can't help me." But I started out as a solo, and then slowly worked up with John Cooper. He joined me, so it's two of us. We slowly worked up to where we are today.
I've always said, look, you may not be able to afford in-house marketing, but if you want to grow your firm, you've got to have some type of in-house presence to help coordinate with a marketing agency like you have, and/or trying to do projects that you just don't have time to do.
Chris Dreyer:
There's different times to bring it in-house, to do a hybrid. I've seen the impact. You've got such cohesiveness across your brand. On the website, your social profiles, I imagine your events. That was one of the things that stood out to me, the consistency in the messaging and just how cohesive it was. That's really very challenging to do with working just an agency and not having some in-house capability. I think you're doing an excellent job.
Marketing gets the phone to ring, but without a system, too many good cases slip away. Step two, dial in your intake.
Why intake is as critical as marketing for law firm growth—and the common mistakes that cost firms millions
Jim Hurley:
I always realized intake was important, but I always treated it as secondary. A call would come in or an internet lead would come in, I would pay attention to it, but I wouldn't jump right on it and I wouldn't realize how important that was. In the beginning when we were trying to build the practice, we were losing a lot of cases. About 10 years ago I go, "Oof, that's bad, that's wrong."
In the last probably three or four years, we've really focused on intake. We had paralegals and legal assistants and lawyers taking the intake and that was a disaster because no one wanted to take the phone calls because it was interrupting them from what they were doing. Then the last few years, we've hired three full-time people, that's all they do. Then also, from teaching and training, we've been working with Legal Intake Pros, Ms. Yani. She does a lot of the conferences and she's very good. We've worked with other people in the legal intake world.
We realized we really needed to bring some outside help in to help us, like marketing and advertising agencies. That we'll never be a great marketing advertising agency because that's not what we do day in and day out. We've always worked with other agencies and marketing people to help us get better.
Chris Dreyer:
Yani Smith, I hear her name get brought up a lot, Legal Intake Pros. I've had the pleasure of speaking to her. How do you think about the after hours and weekends? Do you use a third party there, or is it still in-house? You got the phone by the pillow for some of these reps.
Jim Hurley:
Yeah.
Chris Dreyer:
How do you think about that side?
Jim Hurley:
Sure. I'm smiling because it's a small world in so many different ways. We just had a conference in regards to a meeting, Intake Conversion Open, with Yani and her group and the group that does it here. She goes, "Do you have any questions for me?" I said, "How can we get better with non-office hour intake?" That's why I'm smiling and laughing because your question was directly what we just talked about yesterday.
That's one of our weak areas. We define non-office hour intake as Monday through Friday from 5:00 PM to 9:00 AM, then Saturday and Sunday. We do get a fair amount of calls that are really good calls during that time. Currently, we have attorneys on call to respond to that. Then we rotate them month after month so they don't get burned out. But it's not great. We're losing cases, we're not responding the way we should.
We've looked into virtual assistants before. For various reasons, we decided not to go that route. We've looked into hiring an in-house intake person where their hours would be different, i.e. Monday through Friday noon to 8:00, then Saturday from 9:00 to 4:00, or something along those lines. We haven't pursued that, but we've thought about it. My best thing is it's unbelievably important to have a good system for non-office hour intakes because there is money in those hills. It's hard to do with the current way we do it because the lawyers are busy, a lot of them are younger, they have children, they don't want to be interrupted during dinner. When they're not working, they don't want to be interrupted. It's an issue we're struggling with and our current system is good, but not great.
Chris Dreyer:
Half of Jim's cases come from referrals. Attorneys, past clients, community connections. Step three, maintain your friendships.
How personal injury law firm referrals became Jim Hurley’s most reliable and scalable growth engine
Jim Hurley:
You have to have a good database. Here at Cooper Hurley Injury Lawyers, we call it a friend of the firm because a database is so cold. But if you tell someone, "You're part of my friend of the firm," then they go, "Oh, that's nice." It's so easy to say and it's so unbelievably hard to do. It takes so much time and effort, not necessarily money. This is something that you can do without having huge amounts of money, but having a good database and having good software to maintain and control that database, it's the one thing I can say you got to do it. Most people have it, but they don't take the time and effort to build it and to nurture it, and to constantly pay attention to it.
Early on in my career, I had a lawyer that's no longer with us, but this guy taught me. He goes, "Look, at the end of the day, your cheapest form of marketing is people that know you." But just because they know you doesn't mean they're going to refer you cases. You've got to constantly keep in contact with them and touch base with them.
Chris Dreyer:
When your network starts to grow, you need the tools to keep up. The right software with automations, reminders, and integrations makes sure no contact slips through the cracks. Step four, use tech to track and manage your database.
The best CRM strategies for personal injury law firms to track cases and nurture client connections for years
Jim Hurley:
I'm old and I'm not a tech guy, so CRM I know is the term we use. I still use software or database. You've got to pick one that works for you. Currently, we have Filevine and Lead Docket, and that works relatively well for us. Well over 50% of our business is referral-based. Both the number of cases and revenue derive from that. What we've done is that we have a segment or separate databases for each and every characteristic of that role.
The five main ones are that we have obviously current clients, and then we have past clients. We have attorneys and we have a whole campaign trying to get business from other attorneys. Then we have what we call business contacts, which essentially is anybody we know that doesn't fit into those other ones. Then we have intake. Intake are people that have called us, we can't help them for various reasons, but we get their basic contact information. We put them on the database and then they get mailings from us, and email blasts from us, and social media from us, and various other things. Three years later, they call us because they've been hurt in a car accident and we say, "Why are you calling us?" They go, "Well, I don't know why, but I keep getting information from you all and I know you do car accident stuff." We never realized how valuable that was until we did a deep dive a few years ago into that. Those are our main big five that really generate vast amounts of business for us.
Chris Dreyer:
Then staying in touch with them, are you doing a monthly newsletter, you mentioned some print? You've got the list and you're using Lead Docket and the segmentation. How do you stay in touch with the individuals? You don't want to annoy them, you want to provide value, you want to be known. How do you keep that reputation and stay in front of them?
Jim Hurley:
We do still do physical mailings. Newsletters, postcards, things like that. We try to do not every month because our friend of the firm is so large now, but we try to do at least one every quarter. They actually get something in the mail. Older generations still look at that. Younger generations, not so much, but we still have to cater to both. We try to do email blasts maybe once a month. The hard thing is you want people to know about you, but you don't want to bother them.
Then we do a lot of social media. We view social media more as a branding, as opposed to direct marketing. Then part of our social media is raffles. We have a raffle essentially every month, doing various raffles for interaction and things like that. Then we have various what I would call community events or sponsorships, community involvement. We give away to local schools approximately I think it's now 15 or $20,000 and we have all our friends vote on the local school. Then we have Vote for a Cause. Again, I think it's 15 or 20,000, where all our friends say, "This is my favorite charity." Whoever gets the most votes gets the big cash prize. We try to touch bases not directly, you're hurt in a car accident, call us, but more in an indirect way.
Chris Dreyer:
Let's just zoom out, think about the future. You've set a goal, I believe 12 million, 70 to 80 staff by 2026. What do you think needs to change to get there? Or not? Or is it just doing the same things?
Jim Hurley:
Sure. Not everybody knows this, but our new goal is to get to 20 million gross revenue by the time I'm 70. That would be approximately in four years. We currently going to probably be at 12 or 13 million this calendar year, so it's a substantial jump. Then obviously, I believe we can go over 20 million as well, but that's a realistic goal.
What can get us there? I've been doing a lot of thinking on that. The two main things that I think we have to do is we're at the stage where we got to break stuff. Under the theory what got us to 50 employees and 11, 12 million gross is not going to get us to 75 to 100 employees and 20 to 25 million gross. That's a little scary because of the fact that when you break it, you don't know whether you can put it back together better than it was.
Chris Dreyer:
So true.
Jim Hurley:
Then the second main thing is we've got to get much better what I would term human resources, which is finding good people, keeping good people, teaching and training good people, having people believe in our vision and our values. We're not even close to getting there. We have an awful lot of really, really good people, but we still have a long way to go. I've always believed you're not going to get to where you want to go unless you have the people to get you there.
Chris Dreyer:
I couldn't agree more. I think if our audience is listening and be honest with themselves, I think they'd agree with those points as well. Jim, this has been so much fun. First of all, thank you for your transparency in sharing. It's not often that we get into the details and we have this level of conversation. First, thank you for that.
For our audience listening that wants to get in touch with you, that has that case in Virginia they want to refer to you, or just has some questions about the podcast, what's the best way to get in touch with you?
Jim Hurley:
Sure. We're always willing to help in any shape, form, or fashion. My email and I tend to be an emailer, is jhurley@cooperhurley.com. H-U-R-L-E-Y, Cooper Hurley all one word. Our phone number is 757-333-3333. Then obviously, our website, you can touch base on the website. We're happy to help in any way we possibly can.
Chris Dreyer:
From solo to 13 million, and now chasing 20 million, Jim shows exactly what it takes to be the biggest fish in your pond. For more strategies like this, hit subscribe so you never miss an episode.
