Chris Dreyer:
Most personal injury law firms look at property damage as a massive headache, small margins, extra paperwork, and a total distraction from the big bodily injury cases, so they just ignore it. What if the exact thing you're leaving on the table is actually your biggest growth lever? What if you could add a completely new revenue stream and dominate local search with a revolving door of five-star reviews, all without putting any extra work on your case managers?
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 Jeff Zigman, the founder of TRUEclaims. Jeff has built a platform that uses AI to streamline the entire appraisal process. For law firms, this means you can finally maximize diminished value and total loss claims, turning a traditional bottleneck into a highly profitable new revenue stream.
Jeff and I talk about how to stop handing cases to your competitors at intake, the secret to maximizing total loss payouts, and how to turn fast property damage settlements into an unstoppable engine for five-star Google reviews. Let's get into it. I always like to start with wins. So, what's a recent client win that's really got you excited with what you're doing with TRUEclaims right now?
Jeff Zigman:
I'd like over 250 law firms on TRUEclaims coast to coast, but there's a few that I work very closely with, I have regular communication with and so on. I have one out of Louisiana who I was looking for more problems to solve or ways of perfecting the process. And anytime you're doing property damage, there's times where you can get pushback from the insurance company on where they don't agree with the valuation, that kind of thing. So, what he told me is that when they're pushing back too much, sometimes he'll put together sort of a fake file suit package, so to speak. Could take an hour or whatever to put it together, but that way he's sending it to them and he's saying, "Look, everything's ready to go if you want to do the court route. I really prefer not to do that, but I'm ready to go if so." So, I built that into a feature where they can just put that together in a minute now, and he used it and he got to a $5,000 settlement within two days of sending that off. So it's like, awesome. Good stuff.
Chris Dreyer:
Perfect. Don't listen insurance companies. I'm not an attorney, so I'm going to ask you a lot of questions and you're going to have to speak to me like I'm a 12-year old on the property damage side. But I guess let's start with most people over complicate marketing, but there's this massive volume of leads sitting in property damage that law firms regularly ignore. So why are so many firms leaving this on the table? What's the issue there?
Jeff Zigman:
It's actually a really interesting question. I spent so much time talking with so many attorneys to try to understand that where it's like, it's just money on the table you're leaving there and some of them get interested by it. Most want nothing to do with it. I think that it's just because the amount of money made per claim relative to bodily injury per claim is really small, and that's all they're looking at. I don't think that they're thinking about all the positives, like for example, how massive of a marketing tool it is to get tons and tons and tons of Google reviews from people every single month that will draw more bodily injury cases. And it's not like, oh yeah, they helped direct me to some help. It's like this law firm, which is the only one around that helps with property with vehicle damage claims, just got me an extra $3,000 that didn't know that was coming to me.
It's like huge difference between those two. And if you're the only one around doing that, then people who are searching on Google are going to look for it, are going to find you, but they just don't know. They just overlook it. Most of them, their eyes glaze over when a second you mentioned property damage.
Chris Dreyer:
So talk to me about driving up those settlement values by maximizing the diminished value and the total loss payouts. Let's go that route.
Jeff Zigman:
Okay. So diminished value and total losses are extremely different things. And most personal injury firms are some know about diminished value I'll explain a little bit, but almost none of them know the total loss side of things. So this will actually be really useful and super practical for them to get a lot more money for their clients really, really fast. Okay? So let me do the diminished value first and then I can explain the total loss thing. I think that this will actually be huge value for everyone listening. So diminished value just for those who don't know, vehicles in an accident, it's damaged, it's repaired. Even when it's repaired back to perfect condition, it now has the accident, the CARFAX on its record. So if you were to try to sell it, people are going to see, "Oh, there's an accident on its record." They're not going to ... It's like the inherent diminished value.
So no one's going to pay the same amount for it because of the accident on its record. So what really comes down to it for diminished value, there's no black and white way of calculating this. The way I calculate it here with my software is finding pre-accident vehicles, finding post-accident comparable vehicles, taking the difference, and then factoring also the repair estimate if needed into it. That's at a super fundamental level. There's tons of calculations that go into it. There's like over 60 calculations that get done within a minute from more than 35 data points that would take an appraiser between one to three hours to put together. And that's the diminished value side. Diminished values kind of found money because most people don't even know about it. And it's a very gray area thing and it really comes down to more of a negotiation where the better your leverage, the better of a settlement you can get to.
How do you get leverage? If you search for book values, for example, insurance companies don't really give credibility to that like Kelly Blue Book or whatever. Insurance companies don't value those high and their averages over time, which means if you're able to choose comparable vehicles in the market, you can find ones that are valued better and higher. If you take book values that are averages over time, by definition, they're going to be lower compared to the selected comparable vehicles. So my software search is like hundreds or thousands of dealerships to nail down ones that are suitable here. So not only are the valuations higher, but it's using comparable vehicles, which is the strongest method of proof that on can do in the market. The interesting thing is I've found that it's the comparable vehicles combined with a law firm behind it is what gives it teeth and the highest percentage are going well.
It's just a vehicle owner who's submitting it themselves, lower percent chance of getting good results. And if a law firm is sending it, and this is what used to happen more when they would help, by cobbling book values or whatever together and sending that off, they're going to have more difficulty and get worse results with lower valuations. So it's the conversation that makes a big difference.
Chris Dreyer:
And one of the things I want to ... I think I skipped ahead on when we were talking about marketing is you mentioned the Google reviews. How fast did these vehicle damage settlements come in? A typical life cycle could be 12 to 18 months or longer, right? Is that the secret to this is like, hey, these are turning over a lot quicker. So you have this point of happiness that you can come in and ask because you've resolved a pain for them.
Jeff Zigman:
Yeah. So diminished value through TRUEclaims, rough timeframes to settlement, one to six weeks.
Chris Dreyer:
Wow.
Jeff Zigman:
And the majority of the settlements fall between the two to $7,000 ish range. Law firms that want to monetize this, which is smart to do, can charge a lot are doing 33, 35% of the settlement amount. So that's a good protocol to follow for diminished value and you get better, high quality Google reviews that say something more meaningful that people reading them will care about and fast. You don't have to wait that one to two years to get them. So you can get this revolving door of Google reviews coming in every month. The law firm can profit off of every single one of those. Let's say the law firm is making 500 to $1,500 per claim and they're doing a hundred a month that covers their marketing budget, potentially several times over and there's no cost. So this is the details that a lot of law firms don't think about.
Chris Dreyer:
Music to my ears from a search perspective, LSA and now the LLMs factor those reviews. I mean, they're all being read in regards to relevancy and the words are going to talk about the vehicle and the wreck and use some of those words crash. It's going to really impact their visibility.
As a marketer, on to six weeks to resolve a case is music to my ears. But by securing a quick win on the property damage side, you create a raving fan in a matter of weeks. And those fresh, highly relevant reviews talking about car crashes and settlements is exactly what Google's local algorithm wants to see. Jeff and I got a little in the weeds, so let's get back to the discussion about total loss appraisal.
Jeff Zigman:
So diminished value, total losses, majority of the ones through TRUEclaims settle within seven days and the additional amounts is the majority are between three and $10,000 more in the pockets of the vehicle owner and tons of them, 10 to $20,000 more in the pocket of the vehicle owner.
Chris Dreyer:
Unreal.
Jeff Zigman:
But there's a caveat there, this is the part that comes from the collision space is to get those, kind of results involves invoking what's called the appraisal clause. It's in the vehicle owner's like insurance contract and what it does is when they invoke it or if the law firm invokes it on their behalf, it basically removes the ability to argue from the insurance company and it forces both parties to hire independent appraisers. So on the law firm, vehicle owner side, they connect with a TRUEclaims vetted appraiser that has done tons of these and uploaded evidence of the settlements into TRUEclaims and all that stuff who then goes to bat with the others, the independent appraiser on the insurance side and then they come together to a mutual agreement and those have been in the ranges I just said before.
Chris Dreyer:
Wow. It probably opens up a whole other keyword set that you could optimize for probably that PI attorneys would avoid, right?
Jeff Zigman:
Yeah.
Chris Dreyer:
So that's an interesting ... So talk to me about intake. A lot of times an intake rep may fumble the vehicle damage help. Where is that fumble happening? How should they look to engage in property damage?
Jeff Zigman:
Intake specialists are not answering these questions well or are fumbling on them. And if they're saying, "Oh, well, we don't really handle property damage. We can kind of direct you, but we don't really help you so you'll have to figure that out." Immediately, confidence gone from the person who's calling it, right? But if instead the person answers the phone saying, "Absolutely we can help you." Or even preemptively saying it because it could be in the back of their head. By the way, I don't know if this is in the back of your head, but we're also going to help you with your vehicle damage claim and see what we could do for you there. Right away, you're saying something that no other law firm around you is saying and it's very reasonable to capture several additional bodily injury cases daily at intake because of that.
We're talking potentially tens of thousands of dollars a day that you were losing before without realizing it.
Chris Dreyer:
Let's talk about that intake friction. If your intake team is telling callers, "Sorry, we only handle the injury, you're on your own for the car, you're missing out on an opportunity to get a huge win for your clients." Clients want a seamless experience, especially when their life has just been turned upside down. If your intake specialist can confidently say, "Absolutely, we have a team that will handle your vehicle damage too." You lock in trust immediately and you secure the bodily injury case right then and there. What Jeff is talking about could be an absolute game changer. Let's talk about this from the execution and the operation side. Firms are structured different ways with the case manager, the pre-lit paralegals, the legal assistant or what have you. Who really owns this? How challenging is the execution of this on top of their other duties and what they're doing?
Jeff Zigman:
Yeah, that's a good question. It's a combination of case managers and attorneys depending on the firm. I see attorneys who are doing it and running it themselves and I see a lot of case managers doing it as well. Execution wise, takes roughly a minute to run one, get the valuation done, like actually a minute to do. I have a click for a demand letter so they can be running it, sending it off to the insurance company in let's say roughly three minutes-ish. So that part is easy, smooth, simple. Then depending on how much the insurance company pushes back, there's a back and forth with rebuttals. I have an AI feature that does AI rebuttals based on all of the common responses I've seen and I've formulated an ideal response done with AI and so on to be able to send back with the structured appropriately.
So I have features that are helped like that helps to make the back and forth negotiation more seamless also. All in on average, I would say one claim probably takes maybe five to 10 minutes and if there's more argument coming from the insurance company, maybe as much as 20 depending, but something like that. It's not that most between five and 10 minutes, I would say.
Chris Dreyer:
The Google reviews component is something that really piques my attention is they're just so incredibly important for everything. Marketing's so fragmented that consumers don't just go and click one click buy, especially if they have a serious case. They're going to do their research. They're going to go to multiple websites and read reviews and things like that. This has been incredibly insightful. So if people want to connect with you and have questions about the pod or they want to learn more about TRUEclaims, what's the best way to get in touch?
Jeff Zigman:
I guess we can leave a link. They can go to the websites. I have tons of people just law firms just signing up from the website so we'll leave a link there.
Chris Dreyer:
Fantastic, Jeff. Well, this has been really intriguing, definitely a conversation we haven't had on property damage and so the audience could check out TRUEclaims, get in touch with you and thanks for coming on the show.
Jeff Zigman:
Thanks for having me. It's awesome.
Chris Dreyer:
Huge thanks to Jeff for coming on the show and shedding some light on a massive blind spot for many firms. Property damage doesn't have to be a headache. When executed properly, it can be the engine that drives your reviews, your search visibility, and your revenue. If you're an elite firm owner looking to dominate your market, you need a marketing partner that operates at your level. At Rankings, excellence is the standard. We help top personal injury firms sign more high value cases through aggressive performance driven search. We are 100% focused on getting the results you need to grow. Head over to Rankings.io today. I'm Chris Dreyer. I'll catch you next time on Personal Injury Mastermind.
