Chris Dreyer:
Every firm owner thinks they can sign 100% of the cases they want, but when you actually look at the data, the reality is usually a wake-up call. Today's guests realized valuable cases were slipping through the cracks and he completely overhauled his intake process. The result? He more than doubled his average cases. And the good news is that you can do it too.
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, I'm sitting down with Michael Ponce from Ponce Law in Nashville. We talk about community-led marketing, generating massive review volume, and the data dashboards that run his firm. Let's get into it. So I like to start off with a win. What's something you're excited about in the biz or for your clients? Just anything that comes to mind.
Michael Ponce:
Well, probably our biggest thing that we've had over the last couple of years is we've been able to increase our average case value on all our cases, that's been a big focus of ours and it's really paying off.
We've more than doubled our average case value and really focused in on getting the most out of each and every one of our cases.
Chris Dreyer:
I got to follow up on that because the audience wants to know. So you're filing more? Is it the MedCron demands? What are some of the components that you did that are really increasing those fees?
Michael Ponce:
Well, we've really focused in on making sure that we get the right cases with the right attorneys. So we try to spend some time on the front end of all our cases, kind of making sure that we're ranking them, to determine also the case areas so that we have our best attorneys, our most aggressive attorneys working on our largest cases.
And one time, if you can believe it, we just kind of randomly have a rotation and you got what you got. And not all the attorneys are as experienced as others, not all attorneys are as aggressive as others. And we want to make sure that our big cases are going with our best attorneys. We also round table all of our cases that we consider are Pareto point cases, which is the point that 20% of the cases that kind of bring in 80% of revenues, make sure that we're meeting on a regular basis on those cases to brainstorm, figure out what we can do to get the best possible recovery on all of those cases.
We also set a minimum settlement value on those cases so that the attorneys know what the consensus is as to what that case is worth.
Chris Dreyer:
Super smart. I think I had Chad Dudley on the show a while back and he had kind of a formula for rating cases and he talked about the same thing, like the Pareto Principle. And I'm even seeing that on intake now, where there's some tools like Shadow and others where you can kind of barge in. So it hits that criteria that, oh, that's a commercial policy. Let me bring in a senior intake rep.
Michael Ponce:
Absolutely. And Chad Dudley's been a pioneer in this area. They've come up with so many innovations to run their offices as efficiently as possible. And we've kind of borrowed a lot of those ideas, made them our own, adapted them for our circumstances, and we really appreciate the good work that they do as well.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah, absolutely. Let's talk about everything that the audience wants to know about is attracting those cases. So community involvement to start is clearly huge for you. I've heard a rumor that you play the guitar in the public from time to time. How does boots on the ground affect your marketing? How do you think about attracting cases and generating business for the firm?
Michael Ponce:
Well, one of the things that we do is we do have, in our area here in Nashville, Tennessee, a very competitive market, our spend per household for television, that's what we can measure the easiest is one of the higher ones in the country, not the highest, but it is one of the higher ones in the country.
And so we know we're facing a lot of competition. We have national law firms, you know the names that we're competing against. And so we try to look for the things that could help distinguish us from our competitors being right here, living here. There are a lot of things that we can do that they either can or won't, and community involvement, being there for your little league team, your soccer team, playing music, things like that. Fundraisers are all things that we can do. We do a lot with the American Red Cross.
I would say as far as my musical skills, that may be repelling more clients than it attracts, but we enjoy doing it anyway and do raise some good money for causes. And in all honesty, we do have some really talented musicians that are a part of our office. And then plus me.
Chris Dreyer:
That's a lot of fun. That's awesome. Yeah. And I see with all the AI changes and the national players coming in, they typically will come in and just do the distribution, the digital or the media buys. And that belly to belly community involvement is what can really solidify and kind of help you own that piece of the market. So I think that's super smart.
Michael Ponce:
It's a lot of work, but it's also really rewarding to be honest with you. I mean, we got into this business to serve clients, to serve our community in the first place. And the people that we want to attract have part of our team want to be involved in the community as well. So not only does it attract clients, but it helps us attract team members, the type of team members that we want on this team.
I think we all want to be a part of something bigger than whatever it is we do on a day-to-day basis. And if your job is to answer phones or to call and get medical records, things like that, you kind of want to see the higher purpose, what is being accomplished by this and those types of things that we do in our community are a constant reminder of the good that they're doing.
Chris Dreyer:
Going hand in hand with the community and the grassroots, we got to talk about your reviews. So you've got 300 plus reviews in West Nashville. You got 300 plus reviews downtown Nashville. You got 700 plus reviews in Goodlettsville. But the thing that stood out for me is a ton of these include photos. So talk to me about your review process. How are you incentivizing the team, like getting them involved and acquiring these important reviews?
Michael Ponce:
What we do is we try to talk with all of our clients at the time that we're dispersing, if not before then, but certainly when we're dispersing, we want all our attorneys to come in and personally meet with the client at that time, because I always feel like this is the last best time to make sure that they know that we appreciate referrals, that we want them to come back. If they have any sort of legal needs in the future, that they can call us.
Even if it's outside our practice are, we want them to call us because we'll make sure that we refer them to a law firm that does practice if it's in that area. If they need a will draft, anything like that, we'll make sure they get in really good hands. And it's also a good opportunity to ask them if they're happy, if they would take the time to give us a good review.
And I'll come in for a lot of those as well. A lot of times they would like to get pictures with their attorney because we've advertised pretty heavily in the Nashville market for decades. I have some sort of status that people sometimes like to get a photograph with, shake my hands and stuff. And so I'll come down and meet with them and we'll chat.
And if they want to photograph with me, I'm happy to do that as well. And I think that personal touch and just looking people right in the eyes and asking them for the review, because if you wait on some sort of process where you're calling them a week later or something like that, they may intend to do that, but somehow we all get busy with life and they never get around to it. So just being really proactive and asking, you got to ask.
Chris Dreyer:
I love that.
Michael Ponce:
It sounds simple, but a lot of times people don't do it. And I've even had some team members that client loves them, loves the work they did, but they somehow are a little bit embarrassed to ask. And I tell them, "If you feel embarrassed to ask, call me. I'll come down and ask." I have no qualms about that. If they're happy, let people know.
Chris Dreyer:
I think too, the more they ask, the easier it gets too over time.
Michael's built an incredible local moat around his firm using grassroots marketing, but he isn't resting on his laurels. Consumer behavior is changing and the old reliable channels are shifting fast. Let's get into how Michael thinks about his marketing mix today and the massive wake-up call that he had when he finally looked under the hood of his intake department.
So you've been doing broadcast television a lot. How do you think about the marketing mix right now? We got the streaming, we got paid social and TikTok and GEO, generative engine optimization with these LLMs and that search has changed. How do you think about the marketing mix today?
Michael Ponce:
It is constantly evolving, but I've been through changes in the past. At one time, I was on the back of every Yellow Page book in the Middle Tennessee area. That went away. We switched over and did a lot more television. Now we're in the process of switching over again to more streaming. If you talk with the... I talk with the young people in our office. They do not watch broadcast television ever. They don't have it. They wouldn't be able to do it if they want to. So broadcast television is still an important market for us, but it is ever decreasing.
And so we're gradually shifting and changing to streaming and trying to focus in on optimizing our website for SEO. Still, that's a constant process. We need to do more there, but we're doing everything we can as this market evolves and we're right in the midst of a big sea change.
Chris Dreyer:
I couldn't agree more. First of all, the streaming TV, I mean, I'm a YouTube TV guy and I've got all the streaming services. I finally got my parents on YouTube TV. If only I could convince, as I'm taking care of my mom's Hallmark. If only I can get her off that next. Every time the login's messed up, I get the call.
Michael Ponce:
And we're also in the process of trying to take existing content that we have on our web and putting it in a more digestible form, breaking it up into smaller pieces, putting it more in a FAQ format where people don't have to read a long article. It's just short segments, because traditionally I've done a lot of that content where I've just kind of rambling dictate and it's a long blog, but it's not very searchable. It's not AI-friendly and we're having to put a lot of work into redoing a lot of our content that we have.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah. And the past that gigantor page was the way to go. And now it seems like chunking up your content into these individual sections and making it more digestible is significantly more valuable. It just costs so much to crawl the page from their perspective. They're going to want to crawl and summarize the page and avoid JavaScript and all those things. So I think that's super smart. Talk to me about intake. So you've got this big attraction machine. How do you think about intake? Talk to me about your tech stack, how you think about your team and those components.
Michael Ponce:
Well, I'll talk about our intake team first because that's been a major focus of ours for years. One of the things that I used to believe is that I signed up every single case that we wanted. People had asked that. I'd say my signup percentage was 100%. If we wanted it, we always got it. When we really started to dig deeper, bring in some expertise with our intake department, we realized quickly that that was not the case at all. And that we were losing leads, good cases that were going out the door. They weren't identified properly as a case that we wanted. We assumed that our intake team just had absorbed what was a good case, what was not a good case. We didn't have a formalized process at one time for evaluating cases and a formalized intake criteria and flow chart. We've revamped that several years ago and we run our numbers so we know how many leads each of our intake team members are getting.
What their want ratio is, that's the percentage of cases that they want by case category, what their signup percentages is, how many cases they're still chasing. And when you have those numbers and it's automated, so you've got it in a dashboard and they can see it, your intake manager can see it. It's a lot easier to control and manage when it's right in front of you all the time. And so when we have a dip, when we have somebody whose numbers are a little off, we can do some additional coaching. We can listen in through call rail, the calls, see if they need additional coaching on how to handle cases. And it's a constant process.
And I will tell you, even when you think you've got it perfected, if you take your eyes off the ball for very long, you'll start to see it in the numbers and you got to go back in and redo it because we're human, our intake team members are human and we all need coaching.
I need coaching. Everybody does.
Chris Dreyer:
I couldn't agree more. And a few things you mentioned there, I liked how you said your wanted percentage, but also you said per case category. So many people, you hear that number thrown around, "92% wanted case." Well, what's the traffic source? Also, brand versus pay per click, so to speak, or your different case types. Auto, of course, hit in those 90s, but what about premises? What about these other areas of law?
Michael Ponce:
Right. We do lots of different practice areas and for sure we wanted to be careful that our want rate's not too high because that may be that we're taking on cases we shouldn't be taking. They don't meet our intake criteria and we're going to get bogged down on a case that we can't help the client with.
And so we look at, if it's too high or if it's too low, and certainly it's going to vary by case type. Our premises liability want rate is and should be lower than it is for auto. Our work comp is, because of our work comp reform we've had in Tennessee is lower than either one of those categories. Social security is a different number. So you've got to compare apples to apples and oranges to oranges.
Chris Dreyer:
That makes complete sense. Talk to me about the data component. How are you collecting the data? Is it going into a Power BI, a Domo? Do you have like a data analyst? How are you collecting the data so that you can digest it and make the good decisions?
Michael Ponce:
We had a company come in and build custom dashboards for us with the information that we wanted. It goes through our case management system and automatically collects that information. We use SmartAdvocate at our office, but the same thing is done with Litify, with Filevine. I'm not familiar with the Neos product, but I'm sure it does that as well. Or you can use an outside component, such as lead docket.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah. I heard the former founder of Twitter, Dorsey was talking about, he was interviewed and asked, "What was his biggest failure at PayPal?" And he said that they didn't set up an administrative dashboard to look at the data closely enough and there were too many, I think, conversations and that's how they were making decisions and now it's the first thing that they set up.
Michael Ponce:
There's nothing worse than making important decisions without the data because otherwise you're just guessing in hunches and so many of our, what we think is accurate and true isn't when you really drill down.
Chris Dreyer:
You can't manage what you don't measure. Building a custom dashboard forces you to face the reality of your operations. It removes the emotion and the guesswork. But once your marketing is humming and your intake is dialed in to capture every lead, the pressure moves downstream to your delivery. And as your firm scales, the biggest bottleneck isn't usually the market. It might be you just trying to change too fast and too much.
In the opening you talked about kind of moving over to the operations and kind of delivery, you talked about, hey, you identify these key cases and like, talk to me about your structure because, yeah, you're doing workers' comp, you're doing a variety of cases and that lends itself to complexity, right?
It's not just the assembly line of auto, just push it down the line. So talk to me about how deliveries evolved and how you think about working up cases.
Michael Ponce:
Well, it's going to depend on, of course, the case types. I mean, the social security is totally different. That's a different department. The people that work on social security cases do not work on any other case type. The people that work on work comp are only working on work comp cases. We don't try to have a jack of all trades for any of those case types.
And certainly our trucking team, which is something that we've focused in on, they're working on trucking cases. They're all different and the trucking cases are going to be cases where they're going to be very labor-intensive. Those pods are not going to have a high volume of cases. They need to be able to concentrate on those. And so it's going to be a lower volume of cases. They're expected to really stay on top of those, to have communications with the client on a very regular basis, or early stages of those we're calling every single week.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah, that makes complete sense. I mean, and you could allocate more resources to those pods because they're just worth more as opposed to maybe a lean case that's minimum policy or whatever your minimum threshold is.
Talk to me about just the evolution of, you're getting more values and like talk to me about maybe a big constraint or bottleneck that you guys have kind of overcome. I know that, as the wearing the CEO hat, the owner hat, you do that one and then there's the next bottleneck. But what was maybe a big constraint, something important that changed and made a big impact?
Michael Ponce:
The biggest constraints you have are a rate of change. As an owner, I'm wanting to do everything all at once immediately. And what I've discovered over time is I'm putting too much pressure on our team members and what we need to do is know exactly what we want to do, but break it down into steps and realize that we're going to go with the lowest hanging fruit first, accomplish that, and we won't make that other change even though it needs to be made, we want to make it until after we've completed one job at a time. And so just accepting that a little bit more patience, give your team time to adjust is necessary.
So sometimes the owner, sometimes the CEO can be the impediment because we're pushing so hard for change and it just overwhelms our team.
Chris Dreyer:
I think me and you are speaking the same language. I think that person now, that DISC assessment, that high D, B. I heard Bezos was interviewed and this engineer he was working with, and I'm going to get this quote wrong or this conversation wrong, but he said, the engineer said, "Jeff, you have enough ideas to kill the company." Because there's certain points where you can only allow so much change.
And I also heard Hormozi say something about when you make a big change, it's always 20% worse at the beginning until it gets significantly better. So now I'm trying to consciously do the same thing as you. I'm trying to like, okay, even my frustrations like on EOS, you got these 90 day rocks and I'm like, "It makes me anxious. 90 days? They're supposed to be the most important thing that you want to do at the firm for the company. Let's do them in 30 days."
Michael Ponce:
I'm that same way, just highly impatient. Let's have it all immediate. But I think a little patience that I've gotten, as I've done this longer, gotten a little older has definitely helped. Sometimes too, as a firm evolves, not everybody's ready to make that change and sometimes your team has to evolve as well, and that's always tough.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah, that's definitely the tough part. And it's clear that you care about the team and the culture and all the things that you're doing. I saw that you were, I think, the first personal injury law firm to receive the Better Business Bureau's Torch Award for Ethical Commerce, which is extremely unique. It's the first time that I've heard of a PI firm obtain that award. So talk to me about that.
Michael Ponce:
Yeah, that's one that we're really proud of. It's not one that we expected, but to receive that award and being the only personal injury firm for many years that had ever received that, I think there's one other firm up in Kentucky that's now received that, is just an indication of the service level that we provide to our clients.
We really care about them. We care about our team members and we have the type of people on our firm that just bleed and die for these clients and they really appreciate it. And if we have a client that's unhappy for some reason, we'll do everything we can to make them happy. And if that means... Whatever change is necessary, we'll do it.
Chris Dreyer:
It's the epitome of the golden rule, right? To treat people how you would like to be treated, and I hear that from everything we've said throughout this conversation that you've said.
Michael Ponce:
That's what we're called to do.
Chris Dreyer:
That's incredible. Talk to me about the future, your vision. We're seeing a massive shift with AI and automation. How are you approaching trying some of the new AI tech or this... Just how are you looking at the change in the space?
Michael Ponce:
I think for us so far, it's changed the way we do our MedCrons, our medical summaries. Same thing with depositions. We're using it more and more to help us be efficient and find things that we might have otherwise missed. And so it's been a big blessing for us and there's more work that we need to do. And I just can't imagine what it's going to be like in a few years, as advanced as it is right now. One of the things that I've started doing is just as I come up with ideas, just have a dialogue with it to brainstorm has been very useful from a management perspective.
Chris Dreyer:
So talk to me about your locations, right? You're throughout Tennessee, multiple locations, your expansion. Talk to me about the evolution of your expansion and how you think about your market.
Michael Ponce:
Well, we've expanded just because space in our main office has kind of got limited. We outgrew that. Also, we wanted to be convenient for our clients and a lot of the growth is not where... It's where I live, but also more so in some other areas, south of Nashville. So we wanted to have offices that would be more convenient for our clients. And it's also been beneficial for Google purposes as well, so that when people are searching, you're going to be favored, and you know more than I do on this, if you've got close proximity.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah, absolutely. The LSA and Google Maps, and even the LLMs from a proximity perspective, because it will synthesize the information to determine who you may know locally, which is kind of unique. It's something that's not talked about. Michael, this has been amazing. For our audience that has a case in Tennessee or wants to connect with you, has questions about the pod, what's the best way to get in touch?
Michael Ponce:
I'll give you my phone number. It is 615-244-4321. The law office is Ponce Law and it's www.poncelaw.com. So real simple. And I'm always happy to talk with other attorneys. I don't really have all that many new ideas. I constantly am consulting with other attorneys and try to synthesize the best ideas that I can from a lot of different law firms. And I would say that going out and interacting with attorneys in other areas of the country has helped us more than anything else.
Chris Dreyer:
That's fantastic. Fantastic. Michael, thank you so much for coming on the show.
Michael Ponce:
Thanks, Chris. Enjoyed it.
Chris Dreyer:
Big thanks to Michael Ponce for coming on the show and sharing his insights. We started this episode talking about the trap of thinking you signed 100% of the cases you want. Michael showed us, by confronting the truth with real data in the dashboard, overhauling your intake to plug those leaks and letting the Pareto Principle dictate where the best attorneys spend their time, you can truly double your cases. When you're ready to scale your law firm, you're going to need more leads coming in.
At Rankings, we are the Elite Performance Marketing Agency for personal injury law firms. We help you dominate your market, drive serious volume, and sign more high value cases. Check us out at rankings.io. I'm Chris Dreyer. Thanks for listening to Personal Injury Mastermind. We'll see you next time.
