Chris Dreyer:
I'm constantly asked why some firms continually get low value cases. You're grinding out soft tissues cases day in and day out while another firm down the street seems to effortlessly land the massive commercial truck wrecks and catastrophic injury cases. Is it just luck, or do they know something you don't? The truth is that quantity creates quality. To capture the massive cases, you need a high volume of leads to give yourself the right opportunities. But it's not just about deploying capital. You also have to prove yourself in the courtroom before peers will refer those high value catastrophic cases your way.
Today we're going to break down how to leverage referral relationships, why you need to get your inexperienced attorneys in the courtroom for reps, and exactly what you can do right now to attract bigger cases. 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. Let's get into it.
So I'm often asked why a firm continually gets low value cases. There's a number of reasons that I see. The first, let's start with the referral relationships. If your referral relationships are primarily with chiropractors, not always, but most of those are going to be any soft tissue injury, any minor injury, they go to see the chiro. So a lot of it starts there, but if someone's really hurt badly, a surgery, a significant injury, they're probably not going to the chiropractor. So it could be your referral relationships.
And we can expand on referral relationships, right? So it's if you're a younger attorney who doesn't have a proven track record of winning a big trial, you're not going to get a peer referral. So you got to prove yourself a little bit. You got to originate those yourselves to put those on the scoreboard, so to speak, before they start sending you cases of that nature.
Then there is just the quantity. I always say quantity creates quality. It's the same thing. If we could just go out and hunt commercial truck accidents, that's what everybody wants because the equivalent of 60 to 80 car accidents, much bigger insurance policy, significant injuries. The reality is when you're advertising, it's very difficult to narrow down to just truck. You've got to advertise for car accidents and just auto accident injuries in general and you're going to get those occasionally. So it's a volume play.
It could be the content on your website, though. It could be what you're writing about and talking about. A lot of times the message that you put out into the ether, so to speak, is what you attract. So if you refer to yourself as a truck accident attorney, then that's going to land and people are going to see you as potentially an expert in that area. It's one of the main benefits of niching. So every brain surgeon has had their first brain surgery, but you're perceived as an expert. So it's your positioning.
And then it's just the channels that you advertise in. So for example, if you're advertising and doing a lot of pay-per-lead gen, that's a lot of affiliate marketing. They tend to be lower quality. Sometimes there's some cherry-picking and they send the good... because they have multiple partners in an area, they're going to cherry-pick and send that big case to their biggest spender. They might try to keep it themselves or try to get more value out of it. There's a number of reasons.
I would say, though, if I had to narrow it down, I would say, one, you have to prove yourself in the courtroom before you're going to receive a referral for a big case. That's number one. And number two, you need to advertise and have a volume of leads to get you the opportunity to land to capture a big case. Those are the two big.
A lot of times there's this question of whether or not you should keep the soft tissue cases, these low value cases, or you should refer them out. It really depends on where you're at as a firm. If you're a new firm, you need to make lemonade out of lemons or whatever the saying is. So every single case, you need to maximize that opportunity. I remember we had an episode earlier with James Helm where he would take a small case and turn it into three because he would get referrals from that case and he really went 110%. So it created these opportunities, these very low cost to acquire case opportunities.
Then there's a scenario where maybe you're a little bit more seasoned and you want to be more selective. Maybe you want to be a lean firm and that's who you want to be in. And again, create the business that you want that you thrive in. So then there's a scenario where, hey, maybe you score your cases on the front end and if they don't meet your criteria, you have a partner or several partners that could potentially help them. That allows you to advertise significantly. You still get monetization through the referral fee, through co-counsel.
And then there's the other side of it, though. If you do have the capacity and AI is generating and creating more capacity and leverage, then maybe you want to take these low value cases simply to get the Google review or to create the referral relationship. So it's really all about you. I am more try to monetize as much as you can. I think it also gives the inexperienced attorneys opportunities. You can start them out as an associate attorney. They work these lower level soft tissue cases and then they prove themselves. You don't get the full tender and over time you start getting these full tender offers and maybe there's a scenario where you get to try a case that didn't get the full offer. So you get experience, you prove yourself in the courtroom, and then the firm sends you bigger cases and then you prove yourself there and you go up the ladder.
At Morgan & Morgan, you start in auto and actually the vertical that everyone wants to be in because it's bigger cases is premises liability, which is a bit odd because most people think that auto is the number one stunner area. But a lot of times their track, their upward mobility is you start in a different area, then you go to auto and then you go to premises. So it comes with time and it's really all about you. So let's expound on that.
So let's talk about the AAA program. The AAA program are the associates taking these cases to trial and getting the experience and proving themselves on the field, so to speak. Everyone talks about the GOAT of today of trials, Mark Lanier. He had this big win in the social media trial that just happened. I got to tell you, every single day, I don't know that many people know this, but he's also a pastor, so every single Sunday or whatever, he's preaching to a congregation. He's practicing being an orator, speaking, communicating to an audience. That's what you can do with these lower value cases. You can send your inexperienced attorneys to a courtroom and they can practice. They can get the reps in. They can feel comfortable in the courtroom. Competence builds confidence. Those are the types of things that you can do to grow as a firm.
If you want to get the high value cases, first of all, you got to be known as a trial firm. You have to be willing to go the extra mile. You can't just stop at pre-lit. You're never going to have the big numbers. You have to try cases. You have to be in the courtroom. You have to show up. You have to be constantly practicing your craft. I would say to try to congregate with the other trial attorneys, the Sean Claggetts, the Nick Rowleyes, the Mark Laniers. Go to their conferences, learn from them. If you really want to be the best, you're constantly trying to get better. So that's part of it is getting that record of being a trial attorney and that's how you're going to get referrals.
The other thing is just advertising. The more capital you can deploy, at a minimum, if you're trying to grow, you should be spending at least 20% of your capital on advertising and case attraction. Now, maybe if you have a referral scenario set up, maybe you can go down to 10%. But here's the thing that's interesting. We have a lot of attorneys say, "Oh, I don't advertise." And they're like, "We're a referral firm." I'm like, "Yeah, you're paying for their advertising," every time you receive one of those. So you're still advertising, no matter how you look at it, but you need to deploy more capital and it's just a numbers game.
Your intake has to be dialed in and recognize the opportunities, so you need your best intake specialists on those opportunities. So when that commercial question, you identify it's a commercial accident, maybe your senior rep comes in, barges in, maybe you have an intake attorney that comes in and closes it, locks it down. Get the e-signature out there, lock it down, get an orientation, have them meet the attorney very quickly. Speed, speed, speed, value. I promise you that other attorneys will be calling. Even though it's against bar regulations and advertising ethics, they will be calling. Maybe it's not the attorney. Maybe it's a consultant or somebody else, a runner they hired, but they're going to be coming for that case.
There's this constant question of whether I should be a generalist or an expert. Look, I wrote the book Niching Up. So I talk about the values of niching and the jack of all trades, the master of none. So let's go back to TBI, for example. Let's say we want traumatic brain injury cases. Number one, maximize the brain injury LSA subcategory. Number two, geofence trauma, neuro, rehab centers. Maybe you have a medical liaison outreach program, you have co-counsel campaigns, DTI advanced imaging, you produce data live cinematic ads, you bid on medical competitors, create lead magnets, TBI symptom diaries, join brain injury associations. I could go on and on. I could literally give you 100 right now off the top of the dome, but that's because I am a personal injury expert. We work with 200-plus PI firms. We have over time. I know how to generate those cases. I guarantee a criminal defense attorney, a generalist agency is not going to be able to rattle off even the five to 10 that I just rattled off right there. It comes with that expertise. It allows you to see opportunity when you focus.
There's also this scenario of, "Should I hire an agency? Should I try to do this myself?" And it's you want to look at your core. What are you core at? What are you best in the world at? That's typically what you want to keep in-house. And then you would consider hiring experts where their core is the skill that you need. And over time you can hire the A-players with these extreme salaries and kind of buy expertise and knowledge and their experience. It comes with pros and cons.
So if you're going to bring it in-house, it is higher effort, but it's also more control. It's higher effort because you have to train them, you got to find them, you got to give them the opportunities, but you have more control. You can get them to do whatever you want. For a freelancer, it's medium control, medium effort. Medium control because someone else could just come in, swoop in, and take their utilization, take their time. It's medium effort because you're hiring a freelancer because they already know the craft. You read their reviews, you understand that they know how to solve this problem.
And then you can hire an agency, right? That's low control, low effort. Low control because they have processes. They've solved the problem before. They know how to solve the problem, right? But it's low effort. You hire them because they know how to solve the problem. You can outsource that work. So there's a lot of reasons and it comes to this evolution of your firm and this journey.
A lot of times these big nine-figure firms, I'm talking the big of the big, they have the capital to deploy to hire these 200,000, 300,000 employees. But I got to tell you, you look at an agency like ourselves, you can't go hire an SEO specialist and think they're going to have the expertise in all facets of SEO: content creation, technical SEO, local SEO, link building. Maybe you could, but I promise you it's not going to be $100,000 or $200,000. It's going to be very costly. So that's some of the challenges that you face when you have to recognize, "Should I get help? Should I do this myself?"
What can you do right now to attract the bigger cases? You have all this time. So the first thing that you could do is you go build relationships. You could go meet with physicians. You could go talk to other firms in your area and try to get those referral opportunities and prove yourself. The other thing you can do is create content. Reminds me of my good friend, Harlan Schillinger, you get what you ask for. So go create content about what other case type that you want. If it's a commercial trucking accident, go and do UGC, user-generated content, some selfie-style videos, go do some YouTube videos, some YouTube shorts, put content out on a social, write some blogs on trucking accidents, try to be everywhere, omnipresent. You could go create a Substack newsletter. There's a lot of ways to get distribution for very low cost and that's where I would start.
And then if you have a piece of content that hits, it gets views, it gets comments, it gets engagements, then consider changing that into an ad. A lot of times people think you turn a piece of content into an ad for the purposes of direct conversions. That's not necessarily the case. It could be a top-of-funnel strategy to get distribution and awareness for your firm that you have this skillset and it's not a direct action where they're going to immediately hire you. So those are some actions that you can take right away.
There's a lot of question of when you should pivot from a generalist to go to a specialist or to declare yourself an expert. Now, obviously I know you're an attorney for an advertising ethics, you can't say specializes in most circumstances, you can't make that distinction. However, third parties can. Other individuals can make that distinction. I would say if you feel that you can have a consistent way of attracting cases, that's when I would do it. Or you have a lot of dry powder and maybe you have the big eight-figure case and you're willing to wait and really willing to put a lot of content energy out there to get the next case, that's when you could do it. But in general, I would say wait until you can have a consistent pipeline of those cases.
Once you get a case and you maximize it, you go to court and you get this big value, that's where you go nuts. That's where you hire a public relations person, you do news conferences, you get on the media everywhere and you just disperse it. You really take that as a time to distribute to everyone your success. Get on newsletters. We have a newsletter where we highlight some of the big cases. I know Berbay is a company that specializes in that. They work with a lot of big firms: press releases, newswire, Law Firm Newswire, all of those scenarios to get the word out. But ultimately I wouldn't niche down until you could feel that you could have at least a somewhat consistent pipeline of new cases.
Every time that you receive a case, you should be collecting data on where that case came from into your CRM. You should have dedicated tracking numbers through your phone numbers. You should be looking at Google Search Console, Google Analytics. The better the data, the better the decisions, right? Good data, good decisions. And here's the thing, attribution is not perfect.
So I like to do it the Chris Walker way. Chris Walker will ask you, "How did you hear about us?" And they can tell a story because it may be multiple touch points, but then there are just the last-touch conversions that's going to show the UTMs and where they finally converted. And there are ways to also see the life cycle of that engagement. There are manners of that. But where I'm going with this is the better the data, good data, good decisions, and then that will help you determine if you can have a consistent pipeline or if there's a channel that maybe produces better than another and that's where you should spend more of your time.
And there you have it. If you want to start moving up the ladder to high value commercial and catastrophic cases, you have to be completely intentional. You need to dial in your intake and lock cases down quickly, build a volume strategy to uncover the gems, track your data ruthlessly, and most importantly, prove yourself as a true trial threat in the courtroom.
If you're tired of blending in with the background noise and you're looking for a true marketing partner who demands excellence, you should check out my company, Rankings.io. We're dedicated to helping top-tier PI firms sign more cases and absolutely take over their markets. Head over to Rankings.io and claim your complimentary growth audit today. I'm Chris Dreyer and this has been Personal Injury Mastermind. Catch you next time.
