Chris Dreyer:
On the East Coast, Rob Levine earned the nickname The Heavy Hitter over more than 24 years. Rob has helped more than 50,000 people recover more than $2 billion in personal injury compensation and disability benefits.
Rob Levine:
If you're advertising for Big Truck, the group who are your best people always, designed to take your Big Truck cases. So if you're running pay-per-click ads, you can make that a call group. And that call group only goes to people who are qualified to take it, and you never deliver it to somebody else.
Chris Dreyer:
Welcome to Personal Injury Mastermind. I'm Chris Dreyer, CEO of Rankings.io, the performance marketing agency for elite law firms. Rob Levine & Associates runs one of the most sophisticated intake operations in the industry. Automated phone operators, 24/7 coverage, real-time data, sales discipline, applied to legal services, all built to make sure leads never leak.
Rob Levine:
And so I hired the training and development manager from T-Mobile. She had been there for 13 years because I wanted to build a real academy. You want to be a case manager, and you go to my academy for 12 weeks. It's eight hours a day, five days a week, full-time.
Chris Dreyer:
But it all starts with getting the phone to ring in the first place. Rob and I start the conversation with marketing. Here's what works for him. Let's go.
Rob Levine:
Marketing today is different than it was 25 years ago when I first started, right? Digital is out of control, then you have streaming on top of that. Now, we have AI. So AI, as far as SEO is concerned, and coming up in ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, all of the other AI services. So it's definitely changing. So we're trying to stay ahead of the curve with everything we do. Television, radio, billboards, right? That's our traditional staple. And then, obviously, we do LSA, we do pay-per-click, Facebook, Instagram, lots of social. And then now we're trying to make sure that we're showing up in all of the AI searches.
Chris Dreyer:
What are your thoughts on the streaming? You doing any Amazon Prime stuff or the Amazon ads on Prime? You doing any OTT programmatic?
Rob Levine:
Yeah, we're doing everything other than Netflix. So Paramount, Hulu, Amazon. We pretty much got accepted by everyone, and we're doing it direct, but not Netflix. I think we don't spend enough apparently for Netflix to approve us. So we're everywhere but Netflix.
Chris Dreyer:
The one that has caught my attention lately is the Amazon's DSP, the Amazon ads. I've been watching shows lately, and I guess they just implemented the ads because now I'm setting through these two minute periods, and I'm like, "Oh gosh, I got to get on there and upgrade." And I feel like Geico is on freaking every other commercial block. I mean, they're really saturating Prime right now.
Rob Levine:
Yeah. I wonder how it's... People, they've accepted, right? As part of traditional TV, you have to watch commercials. That's just the way it is.
But with OTT streaming, people for a long time have cut the cord, gotten away from traditional and not been using ads. And so now we're... I wondered how long it would last. Obviously, everybody wants to make money and selling ads is the way to do it. So I don't know how people look at the advertisers. If they're annoyed, right? So you're just commenting Geico, "Oh, they're there all the time." Because if you're on too often or you're not in the right places, people can not necessarily have a good response.
Chris Dreyer:
I think maybe, for me, at least when I'm thinking of the Geico, it's like the frequency. I don't know, should they change the commercial? Because it was the same commercial every time. But I tell you what, I recognized and I knew it was going to, "Oh, here's this Geico commercial." But if it was a different one, would I have to recall, and think like, "Oh, is this a Geico commercial," until you see the gecko.
Rob Levine:
Right.
Chris Dreyer:
So it's kind of an interesting thing on the frequency component.
Rob Levine:
And the question is, at the end of the day, all they care about is the brand. So when you associate getting insurance, you think of Geico. So the question is the high frequency of repetition, creating that top of mind awareness, is there a negative stigma, and you're annoyed? And if you even have top of mind awareness, are you going to choose Geico, or the name pops in your head and that's going to be where you shop?
Chris Dreyer:
The one thing, too, just on the TV versus radio, I've always heard like, "Hey, for your investment, you get a lot more frequency on radio." And I talked to Ross Cellino, he came to PIMCON and he was talking about mixing creative on TV and boards, but on radio, he sticks with the jingle and runs the same. It's very consistent with his radio message. And any thoughts on that, just the different medium on the audio component.
Rob Levine:
I think the benefit of TV is you can really create your personality because they see you, right? You can do crazy shit. You can demonstrate who you are, what you are, what you stand for, and you can create that celebrity status. We do the Super Bowl ad, we do the World Series, not that I think the World Series has the impact it used to have. But so you pick these top-of-line shows, and you really get yourself out there as a celebrity. You can't do that in radio, in my opinion. You can build lots of frequency. You can get people to remember your name, but it's not the same. You can't build a celebrity status on radio, I don't think. You can't build your personality. So I agree, having that repetition so that it's just another way to reinforce, like a billboard.
It's static. You're not really building your personality, but it's a constant reminder when people are driving by it, "Oh, yeah, that guy, Rob Levine." So I would equate radio and billboards similar from the fact that it's just tremendous repetition and really building that brand, that name, or the number. We have a jingle, so it cuts both ways. I'm not really a believer in the phone number anymore, right? Because we just switched our jingle and our phone number, actually. So somebody offered me Rob Wins for short dollars, and I bought it. So we have 888-ROB-WINS, and I use it not because I want someone to memorize my phone number, but because that's our whole new thing is the Rob Wins, and I like the message.
So it's cool, it's a good number, it's a good strategy, and it's just, we're changing it from call 800-LAW-1222, right?
So the jingle before The Heavy Hitter is the one for you. The way people use their cell phones today, they don't need to know my phone number. They need to know my name. If you know my name, you can search me anywhere in the country, and I come up first for my name. So that's what we really drive home. We stopped using our old phone number, 800-LAW-1222, on billboards and everywhere because we just drove the name. But now, we're driving the phone number because I like the message Rob Wins and reinforcing the new jingle, and it ties together.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah, that outcome of winning and it's congruent. I like it, and just putting it everywhere. So next, like I mentioned, I watched one of your videos. I thought it was fantastic on intake. McCready was in the crowd, Michael Cowan was in the crowd, a lot of folks that I recognized. So I guess you've made that statement. It's like what you do afterwards. I really want to get granular on some things here, but big picture, do you think that this is just an absent thought, like people think about marketing, and they don't think about intake enough?
Rob Levine:
It depends on the size of the law firm. Smaller law firms, you have the owners really still engaged in the active practice of law. And so it's very hard for people to switch their hat from CEO to operator. And so to get, as you said, granular and really know your numbers and make sure you're hitting your marks, because in a smaller law firm, you don't have someone who is head of marketing, head of finance, head of HR, head of intake. You're doing a lot of those things yourself. And so it's hard, I think, for... And even for me, it was hard as we were coming up. I started the law firm, just me, and then it was me and one, me and two, me and three. And so it's hard to be able to manage everything.
And so, yeah, I think intake is one of the things that kind of fall by the wayside because lawyers focus on law. They're looking at their process if they're wearing their operator hat, and they're looking at how they're running their cases and the dollars coming in. And I think they just assume, "Well, the phone is ringing, we're answering it. So, what really is left for us to do in intake?"
Why managing leads at volume requires performance-based call routing instead of even distribution
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah. On my end, with the marketing, it's like, "Oh, yeah, we have an after-hours. It's X." And I'm like, "Whoa, whoa, that doesn't mean you're done." One of the things that you mentioned when the call comes in, it's not round-robin. It's A, B, or C. Did you mean like, "Hey, I've rated this intake person as my A plus, and if that person's not on the phone, they get it?"
Rob Levine:
If I have 10 people sitting at a table, and each one of them has a phone in front of them, and I have one call coming in, there's no question that I know I want my best closer to answer the phone. Why would I give it to my worst closer? I have 10 people, I want to feed my superstar every time I can when they're available because they have the highest closing rate. And so to that specific part of... There's more to what you said, but 100% you nailed it. If I have a choice, I want to go to my superstar. So, we rate everyone in the intake department, and when the phone rings, when I say I don't want it to round-robin, even if we take the rating piece and put it aside, I don't want it to round-robin because people look around to see who's going to answer.
How personal injury firms classify intake calls to prevent vendors and existing clients from clogging lead flow
Rob Levine:
You're available, the phone is ringing to you, you're answering. So when the call comes in, from technology, it scrubs against the case management system. No matter what case management system you have, you should tie your phone system to your case management system. So it recognizes one of three things. Either the phone number is not recognized in the system, which automatically means to me there's a high likelihood it's a new client. So this call goes into intake.
Intake, those calls never get put on hold, and we direct the call based on two things. Number one, because we do more than just PI, right? We do social, VA, and PI. If I can identify where the caller came from based on using a DID number, so I know it's coming from my campaign for social, I want someone in social who does social calls answering that call, and I want somebody who is the best-rated person in that group to answer the call.
So number one, I want to make sure only the calls that I think are new clients go to intake. So that's group one. Group two is going to be, let's say, vendors. So, anyone who is a vendor, I don't want to waste manpower on at all. They're commercial people, they're used to on IVR. So they go to the IVR, thanks for calling Rob Levine Law. If you know the number of the person you're calling, blah, blah, blah, and they self-direct to where they need to go, and it works for them because that's just what they're used to. I would never use an IVR with a client. Lots of law firms have this initial answering system. Never use an IVR for a client. For a commercial person, absolutely. So if the number matches Geico, as you said, they're going to my IVR.
The third group, obviously, are existing customers. So, existing customers, I know who they need to talk to when the phone rings, because I know the status of their case. So when the phone rings, it searches, it identifies it as a client, and looks at the status of where they are, and then it delivers the phone call to that person, whether it needs to go to the case manager, to the attorney, to the finance group, so I'm not bothering reception, and I'm not bothering intake. And then if you go somewhere and you want a person, you hit zero, then you go to my reception group. So that's the idea.
Chris Dreyer:
That was killer. So I guess it's set up like a waterfall. If John is available and he's your best, then it shows he's up in the queue. Just the execution of this, even for myself, who I consider myself more tech-savvy, it seems a little overwhelming. Is this tied to RingCentral or Amazon Connect, or does this start with your CRM, your Lead Docket, Salesforce? How would someone that's listening want to even approach this?
Rob Levine:
Yep. So RingCentral is a good example because that's my phone system, but it doesn't have to be RingCentral. If you have Zoom or any other phone system that has the ability to tie into an API and connect. If it doesn't, you should dump your phone system. Then you're going to tie it to your case management system. So as long as your case management system is open source, which almost all of them are, they almost all have APIs, and the API is going to let you either pull or call the right information, right?
So I need to know the match to the phone number, and I need to know is it a client or is it a vendor. There's not a lot of information I need. If you have Lead Docket sitting on top of your system, you're going to want to do all three, right?
Because the phone rings, it'll go to Lead Docket first. So Lead Docket is going to tell me if it's a client or not, because if you're using Lead Docket, every client is listed in Lead Docket, and then once it becomes a client or a lead, then it pushes to the case management system, and then we open it. So let's say you have Lead Docket on top of Filevine. So it'll scrub Lead Docket first. If it doesn't find it in Lead Docket, it's done. It identifies that as a new client, and it's going into the system. If it sees the number in Lead Docket, then it's going to deep dive into Filevine and say, "Is it a vendor? Is it an existing client? What is it?" And then it's going to direct.
Chris Dreyer:
You've got your inbound, you've got your vendors, and then you've got your existing clients. Where does outbound fit into this? Is it pushed back to the intake side on the front end? Because I've talked to some firms, and they'll segment the inbound and the outbound, the chasers, or maybe even have them on the chats or the form fills. How do you think about that?
Why eliminating intake hold times protects first-call close rates in high-volume PI firms
Rob Levine:
Yeah. So first, the goal is one call that's all. The absolute goal for the law firm and the intake person should be, I'm going to immediately build a relationship with this person, they're going to trust me, I'm going to qualify their case, I want it, or I don't want it. If I want it, I'm going to electronically sign them, and my goal is to overcome any objection they have and sign them in one call. That has to be the mentality to close on that first call because the minute we go to outbound, as you said, we're chasing them.
Well, when you chase somebody, there's no way you're going to close as many people as you did when you had them on the phone, right? Because I've got you, your mind, you made a choice. There's a reason you're talking to my firm, whether you like my marketing, whether somebody referred you. That's the highest ability and chance to close that person. You can't close on that call, and you have to start chasing them, automatically every day, your odds of converting them go down.
So the answer is, as part of that CRM, whether you're using Lead Docket, or you have it built into your case management system, you should have, for each one of those things, a cycle of how often you're going to call them, how often you're going to text them, and if you believe in email still, whether or not you think that works. And so the system should be doing it automatically. I don't have an outbound team. My entire team is open, whether it's inbound or outbound. So, again, let's sit at that table, we have 10 people, and nobody is doing anything. So the system is automatically looking at what is the next person we have to follow up with.
So it has a list of people in the CRM that says, "Okay, today we have to call this person back." So it's going to identify that there's an intake person available. It's going to decide who has the highest close rate, who is my best person that's available. It's going to then pull that, delivers it from the CRM to the front, the RingCentral swings by, grabs it, and then delivers it to the next available rep. That rep sees the screen pop of who it is, what the information is, and then the call is made.
Chris Dreyer:
Let's say you got a big truck, a U-Haul, anything that could be classified as commercial on the intake. Do you have someone listening that barges in and takes over? How do you treat those scenarios? Because I'd imagine if your bottom person in the queue is on that call, you probably don't want the newbie answering the Big Truck case. What happens in those scenarios?
Rob Levine:
So if you're advertising for Big Truck, you can treat it just as I described how we have social, VA, and PI, right? You could have the group who are your best people always designed to take your Big Truck cases. So if you're running pay-per-click ads and things like that that are specifically geared towards those ads, you can make that a call group. And that call group only goes to people who are qualified to take it, and you never deliver it to somebody else.
Chris Dreyer:
Let's talk about Rob Levine Legal Solutions. So tell our audience, like I said, an amazing video on YouTube I found. I think it was about 40 minutes long, very detailed, very instructive. I think you even did Secret Shopped, and maybe did a scorecard where everybody in the room, which was really fun. Tell me about Rob Levine Legal Solutions.
Rob Levine:
Sure. So, basically, there are three solutions that we market. One is our record retrieval company, the other is our academy and staffing, and the third is the Mastermind. So the record retrieval company, that I've had for a long time, right? Because we created our own record retrieval company for my law firm and ran it just for my law firm for many, many years. And then I decided, we've really mastered this now, let's offer it to other law firms. So what's cool, there are two things that are super cool about our record retrieval company. The first is that it's 100% integrated to the case management system. So we're integrated with Filevine, Litify, CasePeer, Smart Advocate, Needles, Clio, and Neos. Right now, we're doing PracticePanther, and we're adding Smokeball. So, pretty much, you name it, we're integrated. And when I say 100% integration, if you look at the process map for collecting a record, there are 16 steps.
And so if you hire us, you do the first three things, which means you pick up the phone and talk to your client, you enter into your case management system the client's information, and the providers they treated with, and you drop in a HIPAA form. That's it, you're done. My system is going to come in, it's going to scrape your system, it's going to pull that information once an hour, eight hours a day, every day. We grab anything that's new that's in there. We process it, we get the records in, we make sure they're verified, and then we're going to send it back into your document storage system. So we OCR them, we compress them, and we deliver them. We send you an email to let you know the records arrived. We also take the costs and expenses. We deliver that into your expense tab in your system, and then we deliver all the notes and everything we're doing in your system.
So you know 100% all the time what's happening. The newest thing we're rolling out, which we'll probably roll out in three weeks, will be EHR. So what's super cool about EHR is the electronic health records, right? So, all of the large hospitals are on EHR now, and then a lot of other facilities are. There are probably, if I had to guess, about 400,000 providers in the United States that now have EHR portals. So we're connected now to 80% of the EHR portals in the country. What's super cool about it for the law firms is that everybody thought Hi-Tech was really cool. So when Hi-Tech came out, you could act in the client's shoes and collect the record and get it the old way, and they'd send it, but you're still fighting, and they charge you six bucks. EHR is free, zero. The medical provider cannot charge for the medical record.
There is no charge. And I get you the record in one day. So it works exactly as it did before. I come in, I scrape your system, my system identifies whether or not it's an EHR provider or not. We send a text to the client. The client authorizes me collecting the record, and that's it. We scrape the information from the portal, we go through the records, we make sure it's organized and set up for the law firm, and then we deliver it into the law firm's system. That's going to be a game-changer for us. There's only one other company in the entire country that does it besides us, and they charge $20 more a record. I charge $49.95; they charge 20 bucks more than I do. So it's going to be great.
Chris Dreyer:
Marketing, ad spend, systems, all the operational work upstream. The phone rings, and this is the moment everything leads to. How the phone gets answered matters just as much as who answers it. You don't want that call fumbled after all that effort.
Rob Levine:
Our law firm is big on training. So when we decided to start doing international staffing, and we were hiring people for us, I had friends that said to me, "Hey, could you get me people?" And at first I'm like, "Yeah, we're not really. It's not the plan." And so enough people asked, and I'm like, "Okay, I guess that's going to become the plan." And so I hired the training and development manager from T-Mobile. She had been there 13 years because I wanted to build a real academy, not just... You see, there are lots of companies that say they can get you staff in another country. And I own companies in Colombia and Peru, but they're not trained. So we built an academy. So if you want to be a case manager, we hire you in Colombia or Peru, and you go to my academy for 12 weeks.
It's eight hours a day, five days a week, full-time, it is like going to college. Well, way more intense than college. It's like a semester-long, though, but it's full-time. So there's a learning management system, you're taking exams, you're doing videos, you have live instructors, like it's full-time. You learn so much information. And then we wipe out probably 20% of the people we hire because they don't hit the standards we're looking for. And then we graduate, and we certify you. I either put you in my law firm if I'm hiring at that moment, or I'm placing you in someone else's law firm around the country. So what's great is the time zone is only different by an hour, so they're really working the same hours we are. They're all bilingual. I only hire people that speak great English, and obviously, they all speak fluent Spanish.
So it has been fantastic. It has really been great. If you're going to hire internationally and you're going to do it through a regular company that doesn't train, you have to be able to have a plan to train those people. It's also having the right culture in your law firm, right? If you don't treat them as part of your team, whether they're international or US, whether they're remote or they're in office, they all have to be part of one team. So we try to coach the law firms that hire from us how to have that right culture to really make it very symbiotic because, otherwise, you have a lot of turnover, and turnover costs law firms a lot of money.
Chris Dreyer:
Couldn't agree more. So you got the staffing, and is the academy the joint, or is it separate from-
Rob Levine:
No, it's together. So if you want to hire someone from me, they go through my academy, and then I place them in your law firm. And the academy is free for you. So I don't start charging my clients until I place someone in their law firm.
Chris Dreyer:
Got it. Got it. Amazing. Amazing. And you're putting excellent content out there on YouTube, and I really encourage the audience to go check it out. I mean, a lot of times this type of content would be gated. And I typed in, I don't remember what I typed in, legal intake, coaching, or something of that nature, and I found your video. There wasn't a ton of content, but it was really valuable for me personally.
Rob Levine:
Thank you.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah. Let's continue just a little bit more on the firm side on the future, and how do you structure operations? What are you seeing for success, being a larger-scale operation of the pre-lit versus litigation components, the handoff? Does one person full cycle run the case from start to finish? Talk to me about just operations, and how you think about growing, building a firm built to scale.
Rob Levine:
First of all, so my firm has pre-litigation and litigation separated. I think it's very difficult for someone to be able to do both. I think they truly are separate skill sets if you're going to really maximize your medicals. So the goal of a law firm, obviously, is to help that client get as much money as they can. And so if you don't really focus on talking to the client about their injuries and their treatment, and really do what I would call medical management, then you're not going to get the value out of that case. So when you see the AI company that only does your demand for you at the end, and then they tell you, "Oh, it's the best demand ever." You missed the entire first 75% or 80% of the process, right? It's the investigation upfront, and you have to be able to do the investigation so you set up liability.
And then it's medical management, and then all the other things that come along with that case. That's a specialist, right? The attorneys who do pre-litigation and case managers who do pre-litigation and do it well, they don't get enough credit. They are very good at what they do. And so then litigation, obviously, is... Don't need to explain that. That's another group of specialists who really know how to litigate. So, for us, we separate them, and then we monitor everything. We have KPIs throughout the entire process. So we're watching all of the stages and making sure that we're not bottlenecking, we're maximizing them. We pay bonuses, obviously, to the case managers based on different KPIs and goals that they have to hit, so we keep driving it forward.
Chris Dreyer:
On the KPI side, do you have your own operating system, or are you doing a scaling up, and there's the EOS, and then there's some other... There's the Rockefeller habit stuff. How do you think about the framework of the business?
Rob Levine:
So, we use SmartAdvocate is our case management system, and we run lots of reports in there. On top of that, we use something called Domo, which ties into everything, right? It ties into our phone system, it ties into QuickBooks, it ties into Google, it ties into SmartAdvocate. So we're pulling all of those data sets into one place, and then running reports, and people have different dashboards that they can look at and get reports emailed to them, so they can follow. So it takes SmartAdvocate and puts it on steroids, right? It just superpowers all of our reports.
We use Monday.com. So we use Monday to build out projects and a lot of other reports, goals, and KPIs. And obviously, we're using AI. So that's the future, right? So I'm a part owner in an AI company called FasterOutcomes. We're in the medical and legal.
We do both. In legal, we do personal injuries, really my forte, what I'm focused on for faster outcomes, but we also do family law, and we do corporate. So the idea of where I said AI system does your demand, I'm building the opposite, right? I want our AI system to help a case manager, help a lawyer run the entire case, so that we're right now integrating. The integration will probably be done with our first system. It'll be SmartAdvocate because that's what I'm on. So selfishly, I said, "Hey, let's integrate with SmartAdvocate first." So FasterOutcomes and SmartAdvocate will tie together. And so there'll be bilateral communication. So I put all my information into my case management system. My goal is that you never leave your case management system. So you can work there, and then the extraction goes into the AI system, FasterOutcomes, it ingests it, and then there are all of these playbooks.
So based on the status of where you are in the case, it's running the playbooks, which is basically nothing other than groups of prompts that are pre-built. So for the investigation, it pulls in the police report, it pulls in pictures, and then it's going to analyze it, and it's going to say what you're missing, what you need, what you're looking for. If you have a slip and fall, it's going to give you the building codes. It's going to look at the pictures and tell you what I need for more information. What am I missing? Medical management is going to say you have a potential TBI based on the rescue port and the emergency room. This is what they should be referred to. This is what we should be looking for. This is the treatment that you need. And so it keeps running the case and helping you maximize everything.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah. So you're basically tech-enabling with AI, so you're just enhancing each individual's throughput. So this has been amazing, Rob. Thank you for sharing all this information to our audience. What's the best way to get in touch with you?
Rob Levine:
You could just email me. It's my name, so it's Rob@roblevine.com.
Chris Dreyer:
Amazing. Rob, thanks for coming on the show.
Rob Levine:
My pleasure. Thanks for having me.
Chris Dreyer:
This episode is a reminder that marketing doesn't stop when the phone rings. If you want marketing that fills your pipeline, go to Rankings.io. This is Personal Injury Mastermind. Subscribe so you never miss an episode. See you next time.
