Jerry Bowman:
I realized that a lot of these larger firms were spending an incredible amount of money on advertising and marketing, and I didn't have the bandwidth to do anything near what they were doing.
Chris Dreyer:
When you're going up against mega firms, dropping millions on billboards and TV spots, how do you compete? You don't outspend them. You outservice them. Jerry Bowman realized this back in 2012.
Jerry Bowman:
I focused heavily on online reputation because that's the way that I saw the world going. Smart consumers are doing their research about what they're buying and who they're hiring.
Chris Dreyer:
Today, your reviews are the ultimate currency, but generating over a thousand 5-star reviews doesn't happen by accident.
Jerry Bowman:
It was one client at a time, one case at a time, one relationship at a time. The growth was slow, it was intentional, and it's hard to earn.
Chris Dreyer:
If you look at Jerry's Google reviews right now, you'll see over 500 reviews and a 5-star rating.
Jerry Bowman:
The reviews certainly help because they help us with the local service ads. They put us in a position where it could be top 3 on the maps, and we take advantage of that.
Chris Dreyer:
That social proof helps him dominate local search without spending a fortune, leaving the mega firms wondering where their marketing share went.
This is Personal Injury Mastermind. I'm Chris Dreyer, founder and CEO of Rankings.io, the elite performance marketing agency for personal injury law firms. Today, we're sitting down with Jerry Bowman, founder of Bowman Law, a premier personal injury firm out of Colorado. Jerry has spent the last 12 years building an absolute review engine by leaning into technology, community impact, and an untouchable client experience. Let's get into it.
I want to bring up, you were recognized by the Colorado Supreme Court for your practice's commitment to pro bono work. I think every lawyer has to give 50 hours of pro bono work, I'm not exactly sure, per year, but you've been doing this for almost 10 years. Talk to me about the pro bono work side.
Jerry Bowman:
I've actually been doing this for, now, 13 years as a practice. To me, it's important. The general public and talking about the community, we have to make sure that they understand that there's people here to help them in situations they find themselves in. The civil justice system is one of the most powerful safety mechanisms we have in our country. In personal injury, it's not because it just pays people money, but because it punishes businesses, it changes behavior, and it holds those accountable who don't want to accept responsibility for what they are doing. The pro bono side of things, I think that that's something that most attorneys don't focus on because, obviously, they have work, they have business, they have things that they have to do. To get away and to represent people who are still deserving of representation, but maybe in a different area of law, I think it's helpful and it's great because these people don't have any other resource.
There's times when I go to court for a client just because I want to help them avoid having to travel for two hours to get in and take care of something. And yes, that also includes sometimes taking care of citations, and it's a pain, but it's helpful for some of these people. We look at pro bono work as an opportunity to invest in a community and help people who otherwise don't have that representation.
Chris Dreyer:
We're 300-plus episodes in on the pod, and I've never really talked about this and dove into this. Specifically, some things that... Yeah, you see a lot of PI attorneys, they'll do the Toys for Tots and the turkey giveaways and the backpacks and the stuff that I would say that that's phenomenal. Those are all goodwill. Those are good causes. But I always thought like, "Well, what about pro bono? How does that fit in?" I imagine getting a review after you just took somebody's case for free and how important those reviews are. Has it created a pipeline of itself doing that work?
Jerry Bowman:
Yeah, it has. The people that we help out in different areas of law, they keep our contact information, and they're always trying to explore ways to help because they didn't pay for the legal representation that they were afforded. Having the ability to help people in that regards, it's about helping people, but also it does allow us to generate more clients in the personal injury world. Most people that start their own firm, they don't have a roadmap to becoming a lawyer or a business owner. I didn't come from a family of lawyers. I didn't really have any built-in mentors. A lot of what I learned, I learned the hard way. Along the way, people opened doors for me. So having the ability to help people when they need it, it does transfer over to this idea of personal injury when someone does need a representation.
So yeah, it exists to kind of close that gap, pro bono work. When I take a case for free or donate time to kind of a community project, I'm helping someone access a system that would otherwise be closed to them. It's about experience and being able to help people in that regards. Having a footprint in the community is very important to our firm.
Chris Dreyer:
One of the things that caught my eye when I was doing the research for this is not only do you have the 5-star rating on Google and you've got exceptional rating there, 5 star is very hard to maintain, right, but you have 94 reviews on Yelp that are 5 star, which is definitely an outlier. Talk to me about that customer service, your process for capturing reviews, and specifically Yelp. How are you getting Yelp reviews?
Jerry Bowman:
Yeah, that's a good question. It hasn't been easy. When I started the firm in 2012, I realized that a lot of these larger firms were spending an incredible amount of money on advertising and marketing, and I didn't have the bandwidth to do anything near what they were doing. But they were primarily investing in SEO at the time, and that was back in 2012. When I entered the legal arena, I didn't have the ability to pay someone for that work, and so I handled it myself. I learned SEO. I started drafting different articles that I posted as blogs. I put all the website pages together, and it wasn't a great job, but it was good, and I focused heavily on online reputation because that's the way that I saw the world going. Smart consumers are doing their research about what they're buying and who they're hiring.
Nowadays, it's so much easier to simply look on your phone and see what other people are saying about a law firm or some other entity that you're thinking about bringing on. I focused on that early on. If you look at the reviews, you'll see that a lot of them started back in 2012, 13, 14 years ago. From there, it was a matter of making sure that clients received the best representation, and sometimes that involved us actually cutting our fee or waiving costs or things that would put them in a position where they recognized the inherent value that we brought to the case. I've created these systems with my firm where client communication is primary. That's the most important thing, making sure that clients hear from us, making sure that we know the status of their case, and, along that continuum, there's this kind of relationship that builds. At the end of the case, one of the things that we focus on is making sure that they had a great experience.
Most clients that we settle cases for are thrilled with the outcomes, the other ones. Some of them are happy with it. Maybe they expected more or they didn't understand the fact that there's limits in Colorado, but we explain all that. When they're happy, when they're satisfied, we tend to send them a Thank You card. Sometimes we'll include a gift card in there to Starbucks or something like that, and there'll be a QR code on what we send them, and so they can scan it and it goes directly to Google.
And you asked about Yelp. Yelp, back in 2012, it seemed to be the leader for reviews, but Yelp ended up being somewhat of a closed community. That was one of the problems with Yelp, I think, is that what they expected was for people to pretty much live on the Yelp platform. For you to get reviews, it actually requires someone to have a community on Yelp to be able to have your review posted, and so I would send people links to Yelp and ask them to leave reviews. I would ask them to copy it and paste it to Google. But that created problems too because, when you send someone a link, the algorithm for Yelp identifies that as potential issues or someone fraudulently putting information out there, and so they were taking them down.
And if you look on Yelp, if you go all the way down, you'll see this unrecommended folder. It's very small at the bottom of Yelp and it says, "These reviews are unrecommended." It's a strange thing to do, but these are reviews from people that actually had great success stories with us, and yet there's over 100 of them that were put into that folder because of the algorithm, because I sent someone a link instead of them living on Yelp and having the community on Yelp that I discussed. And that created issues because our reviews, at one point, went from like 170 or 180 down to like 80 or 70.
While we still have probably the most amount of reviews of any law firm in Colorado, we're not seeing as much traction from Yelp. Primarily, I think what we're seeing is Google. A lot of people are contacting us from Google. But the reviews certainly help because they help us with the local service ads, they put us in a position where it can be top 3 on the maps, and we take advantage of that.
Chris Dreyer:
You get an office check-in, it might be more likely to stick versus... or how you can add your Facebook profile and it shows who the Yelpers are and who've left mini reviews, and those might stick. There's all these gains, and I don't quite understand Yelp's reasoning or logic to do what they do.
Jerry Bowman:
No, I don't either. What's funny is I talked about how I focused on reviews in 2012, 2013, and thereafter. After a few years, I saw that any firm that was either entering the market or firms that existed, but didn't really have an online presence outside their website, they also started focusing on reviews. Some of these larger firms that have 20, 30 attorneys, they can churn out dozens of reviews per day if they choose to do so. Not all of them are positive reviews. I've seen some of these larger firms start down a path where they have a lot of reviews and then starts to go negative. Some of these firms can simply just start over, start a new Google My Business page and have new reviews from scratch, and then just throw some money at local service ads with the new business on Google.
Chris Dreyer:
Jerry figured out early that doing the unscalable work, like pro bono cases, fuels that scalable engine of organic 5-star reviews. You can have the best lead generation and review machine in the world. But if your internal systems collapse when you start to scale, those 5-star reviews will quickly turn into 1-star nightmares. To protect his firm's reputation and to avoid staff burnout, Jerry had to get into the weeds, elevate his team, and start using technology as leverage.
Let's dig in just a little bit further on the attraction side. I think a lot of our audience, PI attorneys, say, "You could be the best attorney in the world. But if you don't get pipeline..." You talked about pro bono and how that kind of... the go-giver, the reviews, doing your own SEO, any other thing that you want to add, like how you think about attracting cases?
Jerry Bowman:
When I brought my partner out in 2020, when COVID hit, I focused heavily on the systems. In the early years, we were working off a Dropbox, and it was basically just an Excel spreadsheet that we monitored our communications and different things that were happening with the case. And that works when you're small, but it collapses when you start to scale. Three years ago, we transitioned to Filevine, and we didn't just implement it. We spent years kind of building it out properly, including the workflows and the data tracking, litigation management, reporting, customization. It was a big underhaul. The first employee that we actually hired 13, 12 years ago, Cameron, he spent a lot of time doing that, and so I wanted to make sure that he understood his role. Last year we made him COO, and so he had been focusing now on the growth of the firm, and that's something that I'm proud of. It's not just the growth in revenue, it's kind of the growth in people as well.
When you build slowly and intentionally, the people who grow with you become foundational in terms of the culture of the firm. Now, Cameron oversees operations, metrics, HR, vendor relations. He's sort of the structural backbone so attorneys can focus on cases and actually getting value for their clients. Nowadays, it's more about me making a conscious investment into my staff, making sure that we have everything that we need there. And our marketing efforts are working because calls are increasing, leads are increasing, litigation cases have multiplied. I think that, with that, we're getting a lot of cases from the Google reviews, from the Yelp, from the online footprint. I've done a lot of work with the blogs and making sure that everything's consistent and that Google recognizes the quality of the information that's being presented.
I like to do it in a way that's not just publicizing myself and not trying to push for people to hire me, but more so about educating the curious public, making sure that they have information. Growth certainly amplifies a lot. It amplifies your strength-ness and your weaknesses. And if your systems aren't in place, if they're not solid, then scaling will reveal that quickly. First thing that we did was focus on the systems, the Filevine. And then it was not just about, "How do we get more case in?" But, "How do we handle more cases without losing the quality, without upsetting the clients?" Because, really, growth is dangerous if it's careless. That's where AI kind of came into things, and it's not just a gimmick. It's something that we use as a tool, demand drafting, internal messaging, workflow optimization. AI, to me, has become a reality for all law firms.
A lot of firms grow by stacking files on people's desks, more cases, more pressure, more burnout, more mistakes, but that's not sustainable. It's not fair to clients either. And so I started looking at technology as leverage. I started to look at how we can better manage cases with the workflows, better document cases, calendaring. Really, what's happening is that we have this repetitive, low-value, time-consuming task being automated, and that's important because, in personal injury cases, as you know, there's an enormous amount of administrative tasks, of cognitive overhead, of dealing with thousands of pages of records and requests. Historically, lawyers and paralegals would spend hundreds of hours organizing, summarizing, extracting information, but that's expensive. It's slow, and it burns people out, and so AI changed everything.
To answer your question, we have invested kind of heavily into AI to see what we can do to maximize efficiency and make sure that our operation is economical.
Chris Dreyer:
That's amazing. Completely agree on AI uses leverage to basically exponentially enhance someone's ability for their capacity and all the things. Is there any that you mind sharing, specifically like, "Hey, maybe it's Claude, maybe it's ChatGPT, maybe it's something legal-specific"?
Jerry Bowman:
Yeah, so the problem with ChatGPT is just that open network, and so it's not private information. I know that you could put some codes in and make it more private, but that's a concern of mine is making sure that my client's information is protected, their privacy is still contained in-house. There's some AI platforms out there that do different aspects of cases. Just recently, I met with Supio and Eve, and both of them have similar products. They focus on litigation, but also pre-litigation in the sense that you could just plug in information and, through kind of examples that you provide, they will draft your demand for you. That's kind of the most elementary, basic form of AI that you see now. EvenUp, they were pioneers in the game a couple years ago. They were really doing well. And then Filevine introduced Demands by Filevine, which was similar to EvenUp.
The reason that Supio and Eve are a little bit different from Filevine and from EvenUp is that the litigation aspect of both those apps are really important. Basically, when you have a case in litigation, you plug that case into Eve or Supio, and they do a lot of the legwork. They can start preparing your 26(a)(1) disclosures. They can start preparing discovery requests, deposition questions. And then when you get to the point of actually doing a deposition, they can help in terms of creating cross-examination questions and things like that. Supio and Eve, both of them have been pretty powerful exhibitors. I haven't quite decided on which one I'm going to go with yet, so stay tuned on that, but both of them are in the wheelhouse. We've used Hona for the last year. Hona is a communication tool for clients. The thing I love most about Hona is that, once we change the phase of a case in Filevine, it then sends an automatic email and/or text message to the client notifying them that their phase is changed.
And in that notification, once they click it, it goes to a FAQ page where there's a lot of questions and corresponding answers, as well as a seven, eight-minute video about the status of their case, about where they are and what they can expect. That eliminates a lot of the communications back and forth because clients are no longer wondering, "Where is my case at right now?" They have all that information at their fingertips, and they can access it simply by clicking a link that prevents the back and forth that we're used to. It eliminates some of those communications, which is helpful because it allows us to focus more on the case. So yeah, Hona has been helpful in that regards.
We use some different apps on our website. Right now, we just recently moved to Juvo. Juvo is a lead generator and a communication tool on the website. Prior to using Juvo, we were using Smith.ai, which was primarily based on... Well, it was AI robots communicating with potential clients. The difference between Juvo and Smith.ai is that Juvo has actual live people communicating with potential clients. They could send correspondences, they can send the new case paperwork to have them sign it, they can chase leads. We've only had Juvo for the last few months, but it appears to be a much better system than Smith.ai. I'm not saying that Smith.ai is not helpful. It was great for the two years that we used it, and it may be great for some people who are out there, but we have been more interested in Juvo.
So yeah, those are some different AI tools that we've been using. I try to stay away from ChatGPT, and I try to impress upon my staff that they should stay away from it because of the privacy issue, but there's a lot of different tools out there nowadays.
Chris Dreyer:
Thank you for that explanation. Familiar with all of them that you mentioned, had many of them on the show, and I like to hear how you're using them. I guess one of the things, how does that change the team? The old school... I don't want to call them old school, but traditional law firms. It's like you got a case manager, they're handling 100, 200 pre-lit cases. How does the operational team look like when you're tech-enabling these individuals? How does it change the staffing?
Jerry Bowman:
Well, you think about how AI operates, it improves internal culture. When you remove repetitive work, people are happier. Paralegals aren't buried in data entry. Attorneys aren't drowning in document review. Staff can focus on meaningful work. That reduces turnover, it improves morale, it improves outcomes, and it makes the law firm more resilient. What I see is that not only is my staff utilizing AI to move cases along, but they're doing so in a way that makes the cases far more efficient. Communication is better with the clients. I already have a rule that basically attorneys and paralegals are required to reach out to clients at least once per month via phone and by email just to memorialize the conversation, but AI helps with that. It sends the correspondences for you, the emails for you, and so the legwork that's involved in sending 200 clients an email asking for a status update or their prognosis is time consuming, and this eliminates a lot of that.
No matter how advanced technology becomes, one thing won't change. It's that we have to have a system in place, which I've talked about, and the staff has to be invested into the strategies that the law firm kind of employs, and my staff is on board with that. We use technology to become better humans in our practice and not less and to be faster without being careless, to be efficient without being impersonal, and really to scale up on a level where we can focus on growth while still providing top-notch representation.
Chris Dreyer:
I love that approach. I think that clearly represents your review ratings and the experience of your customers too. I also like that, "Hey, instead of going out and recruiting super expensive C-level," it's like, "Hey, I'm nurturing my employees to have these opportunities," as opposed to just the rapid like, "Hey, let's bring them in and kind of roll the dice and hope they fit in with the culture."
Jerry Bowman:
Absolutely, 100%. I think one of the things that I've enjoyed about growth at the firm has been that I've had the ability to stop being a practicing lawyer who owned a firm and started becoming more of a business owner who practices law. I have now the opportunity... Because I have Cameron as my COO, he's handling the day-to-day operational aspects of it, the communications with different parties, helping with marketing, scheduling volunteer events.
You mentioned volunteer events or pro bono work earlier. A couple Fridays ago, I had 13 members of my staff go to a nearby elementary school and build 72 bicycles that we purchased for the students. And then we taught them how to ride bikes. It was freezing outside, but it was still a rewarding experience. That's the kind of thing that I get to see now is that it's not just about me sitting here wondering how I'm going to get my next client. It's about making sure that my staff has sufficient caseloads and that these caseloads are with quality cases. By building it that way, I've seen staff morale be improved and see how we can actually scale the business and continue to grow. And now, there's five attorneys, seven paralegals, and there's very good likelihood that I'm bringing on another attorney within the next quarter.
Chris Dreyer:
That's fantastic. Jerry, this has been amazing. For our audience listening that has questions about our conversation that wants to maybe refer a case to you in Colorado, any questions at all, what's the best way to get in touch with you?
Jerry Bowman:
Oh, you can email me at bowman, my last name, B-O-W-M-A-N, @copihelp.com, COPI Help, Colorado Personal Injury Help. They can also call me. I'm an open book, and I make myself available. If someone wants to text me, they can text me, and I'm happy to provide my cell phone number. Office number is (720) 863-6904, and my cell is 616-889-5369. We're not the type of attorneys who are on billboards. I don't have any commercials. We have clients. Over 12 years, we've generated over a thousand 5-star reviews on the various sites. As I said before, some of them are in unrecommended folders, some of them have been taken down. This all didn't happen overnight. It was one client at a time, one case at a time, one relationship at a time. The growth was slow, it was intentional, and it was hard to earn, and we put that much into our cases in terms of making sure that the clients are getting maximum representation, maximum compensation.
Chris Dreyer:
Jerry, thank you so much for coming on the show.
Jerry Bowman:
Thank you, Chris.
Chris Dreyer:
"Growth is dangerous if it's careless." I absolutely love that line from Jerry. He leverages AI to keep communication flawless, elevates his people from within, dedicates real time to community through pro bono work. Through these efforts, he has built a highly profitable firm that runs like a well-oiled machine. It's a good reminder that you don't always need to outspend the competition. You can outservice them. And if you're ready to stop renting attention and start owning your market through dominant search presence and an undeniable 5-star reputation, head over to Rankings.io to see how we can help you generate leads you need to win. Thanks for listening to Personal Injury Mastermind. We'll catch you next time.
