Chris Dreyer:
Today, my team's put me on the hot seat. They brought me eight true or false questions to tackle the most common and controversial beliefs in personal injury marketing. From, Are billboards actually a scam? To, Is your law firm's brand just ego slapped next to a logo? To, Is an oversaturated market just an excuse for ineffective marketing? Today, we're separating fact from fiction. This is Personal Injury Mastermind. I'm Chris Dreyer, founder and CEO of Rankings.io, a legal marketing agency for elite law firms specializing in personal injury. We help firms sign more auto and premises liability cases. Let's get into it.
True or false: Are billboards a scam? They can be. I think that you need to be really careful with what they call remnant inventory that's super cheap, that they haven't sold, that's behind trees and in terrible locations. There's a reason why they're remnant. There's a reason why they haven't been sold. I also think that you need to be very strategic. If you look at something like programmatic boards, that's the thing that a lot of these board companies want to push because you get eight advertisers. It's every eight seconds or seven seconds, there's a rotation and it might be $1,500 versus five or $10,000 for a board that gets a lot of visibility.
The thing is though, from what I've had conversations with some of the biggest billboard advertisers in the country, they do not like programmatic. There are exceptions: around the airport, in highly trafficked areas, in places there's four-way stops and very visible close to the road, but by and large programmatic remnants, those are some things. Again, there's exceptions for every rule. I remember I was interviewing Shanara and I talked to him about when he negotiated with Lamar to buy all their remnant inventory, all of it at an extremely discounted rate. I think it was around COVID and he got a heck of a deal. So there are exceptions to every rule, but are billboards a scam? No. We just had Ross Gordon on the show recently and he talked about them being the A or the S tier in terms of advertising. That is if you have good placement, the correct buys, the correct strategy. That goes with anything.
Next question up. True or false: Most law firm brands are just the founder's ego with a logo. Ooh, this one's a tough one. True, true. Most of you don't have a brand. Most of you think you have a brand. You might have a personal brand. You might be a known trial attorney. You might have a reputation in that regard, but I would say brand, when I think of brand, there's associations. We need to define brands. So I would say true, true. Let's poke the bear here. True. Most law firm brands are just the founder's ego with a logo. Yeah, they slap their big head up on a billboard and say "Injured" question mark. That's not a brand. You're not doing anything unique. I would say true on this one.
When I think of a brand, and I think of Seth Godin's had this on many... He's had podcasts where he's discussed what is a brand and what is not a brand. And he would say Nike is a brand. You have the feelings associated with it, Just Do It. You can see the colors. I immediately think of the orange and the swoosh and it's more moderny. That's a brand, just do it. It creates an emotion around this. Apple has that with their cleanliness, the aesthetics, the modern. You think that when you get an Apple product, it's going to work. There's an association with it. That is a brand. That's where I think a lot of times firms, they think they're doing branding when they have a logo or a tagline, but it has to be incorporated into... To create an emotional response and association with something.
I remember one of my first conversations with Ed Herman. This was many years ago. It was probably in the top 10 or 20 podcasts. He was one of my earliest guests and he talked about brand love and having your firm be associated with a good and positive feeling. And we had this conversation about "know, like, trust". And he's like, a lot of people know Brown & Crouppen in St. Louis, for example, but he wants them to love. Replace the word like. He wants them to love their firm. And that's why they do the things, the three lawyers eating sandwiches, that's why they're really a part of the community. That's their strategy. I think it's a great strategy. There's a lot of firms take this approach differently.
Gordon McKernan has Gordon Gibbs and that's an association with that love, like "know, like". Okay, so they're out in the wilderness or in the ether, boots on the ground. But when it comes down in the middle, when they start to get to that "like" component, they want to be "love". They're part of the community. I think Morris Bart has that with New Orleans and I think that's a strategy that most personal injury attorneys should take. There's this interesting thing that happens when you do broadcast television. In the beginning, you're just the billboard lawyer, you're just the ambulance chaser, but over time, over years, you become a celebrity of that. You become one of them. One of us, one of us, one of them. And you're now a celebrity. People want to take pictures with you. You're not the ambulance chaser, you're not the billboard lawyer. You are one of them. And I think that's what happens over time and that's what many law firms should strive towards because there's such a negative connotation around lawyers in regards to the profession.
True or false: Every firm says they want more cases; most of them couldn't handle the ones they get. That's absolutely true. Where your brain immediately probably went, "I'm a lawyer, I could take a hundred cases," right? "I've got my case managers." Let's back up a bit, Bubba. Let's go to sales and intake. They say they want more cases, but you can't handle the intake. 99 out of a hundred of the law firms that we work with are understaffed on intake. It's just the truth. Run the math. You need to be looking at one intake specialist per 100, 150 leads. Do the math. It's compared to what the cost to acquire a case is. And I would say you're probably not there. And some of them don't have the data recorded properly when you got these inflated wanted conversion rates and you really go into the inventory and define they're not marking true cases wanted that fell through the cracks just to juke the stats. Maybe they're comped on their wanted percentage.
But the reality is the biggest constraint that I see across all the firms that we work with, and I know that Harlan Schillinger, one of my mentors, has been saying this for years and I used to kind of in one ear, out the other ear, but I've seen it firsthand. It's not a marketing or lead problem typically; it's typically an intake sales problem, because most of you are lawyers, you know your craft. Look, before I started Rankings, I was an affiliate marketer. I was a digital marketer for six to seven years before I even started the agency. I know digital marketing. I know marketing. That's not going to be my constraint. You got to learn. I had to learn. It took me 13 years to learn sales and have the right sales team. That's just reality. I was in the exact same position.
I had one sales rep for the first 10, 11 years before it just clicked. And then what happened? Oh, surprise. You have more sales reps, you get more clients. It's the same for most of the PI attorneys we work with. You're severely understaffed on intake, and you think that having a third party means you've checked the box and solved it. You have not. Chances are your wanted conversion rate is less than 90%, which is the benchmark. I would highly encourage you to look at stats, and it's just a numbers game.
True or false: Intake teams matter more than lawyers. Geez, my team is going right at you guys today. This is tough. I'm going to say false. There's two ways that I can answer this. I could say true because if a lawyer doesn't have the case, then they're meaningless, right? But I'm going to say false. I'm going to say great lawyers can maximize cases and case value, and that's the other constraint. After you do marketing, after you do sales, you got to have good case values, and lawyers are more important than ever. There's a shortage of them, of actually great lawyers. Pre-litigation can now be handled by third parties, case managers, AI, and there's this growing demand for through and through lawyers that really know how to pull everything out of a case, have the ability to file a lawsuit, and I think that they're limited and there's definitely a supply constraint in terms of great lawyers.
True or false: There's no such thing as an oversaturated market, just ineffective marketing. Ooh, false. There's definitely oversaturated markets and even bad distribution is still going to get attention. It's going to cost you more. Yeah, you could have the best marketing in the world, but if you don't have enough capital to deploy and get your message seen, then it's going to be really challenging. So I would say false. There's definitely oversaturated market that has extreme capital requirements. Sorry, that one took me for a little ride there. I could go back and forth. I think that people can be really creative with viral marketing and some shock and awe campaigns, but for the most part, if there's a ton of lawyers and you're trying to get to the main vehicles of distribution, the saturation of the market's really going to impact that. You really need to have a lot of capital.
Last time I talked about go to the red ocean and go where the competition is, which is a saturated market. I think that, look, your biggest TAMs, look at Los Angeles and how many personal injury law firms are there and what the cost is to acquire a case, but there's a ton of cases. You look at radio and the amount of listeners per station on some of these. So there's a ton of opportunity. It comes back to the best strategy. There's a couple of ways that you could approach this. First way you could approach it is go become a lawyer or work for someone else that has pipeline, get the experience and start to squirrel away some cash, squirrel away those funds and really start to analyze the market and understand how to generate cases. You could be a great trial attorney, but you got to have the ability to generate cases. It could be through being a great trial attorney. Maybe you have such a reputation, you have a personal brand that other attorneys want to refer you cases. So that's pipeline creation.
Then the opposite of that is, if you don't want to work for someone else, you got to be the dishwasher, the collections person, the marketer, the intake, everything, and you're not going to be able to do everything the best, but you can keep your expenses really low. It's just you taking care of yourself and maybe try to work some boots on the ground, get a couple cases, dig for other people's turndowns. You could really ride it out for a few years, keep your costs low and take other people's cases. Now, you're not going to get that revenue for nine to 12 months, so I don't know if you got a little bit of maybe a loan, maybe a little bit of money saved, but it's going to be challenging, but that's the other way to do it.
True or false: Right now the best use of AI in personal injury is intake. I'm going to say false, a big false on that one. I've seen this firsthand. I'm a big proponent of overflow intake for AI, third party, I think Capture Now, and there's a variety of companies basically guaranteeing that all of your cases, all of your prospect leads are answered, all your calls are answered. So if your one intake specialist is on the phone, it goes to the Capture Now. I think that's better than it just going to a voicemail. Having said that, we've seen a lot of data that the consumer doesn't want to talk to the AI. You know where you have those situations where you call the bank and you're like, "Receptionist, receptionist, receptionist, zero, zero, zero," and you try to get to the human, you don't want to go through the prompts. That's what we're seeing for legal intake.
And I think there are exceptions to every rule, but it is not the best use of AI for a personal injury attorney as intake. Maybe in the near future, I think it's probably close; it could be. But right now I would say medical chronology, probably the pre-litigation side is probably the best use. I don't know, it's so hard for me because everybody's data should be sent to some data infrastructure, whether it's with Snowflake or BigQuery or what have you to help make decisions on everything: your marketing, your intake, your strategies, how you can improve your overall business. As an intelligence layer, that's probably the best use. But where I see from an application side with amazing vendors like EvenUp, that could be a huge benefit for many firms, especially if they're having issues with staffing. But it's really a tool is where I see it for the most part.
My team wanted me to share my thoughts on some of our uses of AI. I'll talk through what's top of the dome of everything. The first thing is, is we use BigQuery for our data and we can pull in our HubSpot data and a lot of things, and then we can just ask Claude from the data to analyze certain things so we have more context. That's one component of it. Another, I'll tell you recently where I've been doing a lot of these solocasts like I'm doing now for content and my time, and the descriptions, a lot of my team will write the descriptions and then I have to edit them. Well, what I've created is Claude. I've created a project that has my voice. I've uploaded all of these solocasts. I've uploaded my book and it will take what they write and it will flip it into my voice, and then I can look at it. And it's still sometimes wrong, but it's a little closer.
For example, I'm not the best grammatically or I won't use colons or semicolons properly. I'll do the dot, dot, dot or a hyphen. I know how to do it, it's just not my style. I take a little bit more agro or bro-y. I call myself a bro nerd because I used to play sports, but I'm in the Magic, the Gathering and CCGs, so I've got kind of a unique voice. It's hard to capture from a Claude, but that's what I do. We use ClickUp, any of the tasks, any of the information in ClickUp has an AI component. Notion is our knowledge base. It has AI built in. We're in the process of considering moving Notion over to Notebook LLM just because then we can create quizzes, we can create podcasts and a different type of intelligence layer for training from an LMS perspective. We use a lot of the Claude co-work, I believe, in the Claude coding to create custom websites, and we have really cool tools that we use internally.
Those are just some of the things that come to mind. Right now I'm using Claude mostly, but bookmarked on my Chrome is GPT. Currently, ChatGPT is where I do the personal health, wife stuff, travel, kind of quick hitter. I'm using Claude more for business and Gemini more for business. Those are the two business oriented. I'm organizing ChatGPT more in the personal side. There's many, many other uses and my COO, Sonya Palmer's probably offended by my answer because we are highly integrated with AI, but that's just what comes top of the dome.
True or false: Case managers, not attorneys, decide whether a firm scales or stalls? I'm going to say false. Every single one of these, I feel like it depends. Case managers can help you scale a pre-litigation-style firm, because typically their salaries and costs are lower, they're more available and they can scale that type of firm; where attorneys or litigators can help scale a litigation practice, a more referral practice. So really it depends, but I would say false overall, you still need great attorneys. You need to maximize your values. I think the pre-litigation side, which is where the case managers typically thrive, is starting to become more commoditized because of AI and costs being driven down and just all the resources of getting medical chronology and these demands out. So I don't know that case managers are necessary for scale as much as they have been in the past. I think it's more attorneys and maximizing value.
Okay, so my team put another aggressive one here. True or false: Brand doesn't matter until you're spending seven figures. Everyone under that is cosplaying Morgan & Morgan. I want to say false because that's what everybody listening thinks. I'm going to say true. I can't help it. Everyone listening is going to disagree with me, but I don't care. This is the Chris Dreyer's solocast here. This is the Dryer vent. I'm going to say true. In most markets, if you don't have seven figures to just disburse in brand advertising, brand awareness, you're just not going to be known. Maybe you can do some belly to belly and you're calling that brand, doing some local grassroots stuff and that's how you're defining it, sure, if that's how you define it. But if you're wanting to be known in a market and have an association with a multitude of people, you're going to have to spend at least seven figures in PI.
Unless you're in New Mexico in some small city, or a city, 100,000 or less, that's where you could really own that market. You're back of every high school sports sponsorship, you're on the home run, you got your little billboard there, and maybe you could own a brand in a local market. But for the most part, true. If you don't spend at least seven figures, and that's per year, you're not really building a brand. And also, by the way, tactically, I don't know that you should necessarily be doing a ton of branding if you don't have the ability to deploy seven figures. I think you should be doing more performance marketing. I think you should be doing LSA. I think you should be doing Google Ads search. I think you should be doing Facebook ads. And even though Facebook ads is a little branding, but true, true. If you don't have seven figures to spend, you are churching up a word that doesn't belong.
Growth isn't about following the herd; it's about looking at your data and knowing when to ignore the noise. Whether it's realizing you're severely understaffed on intake or accepting that building a real brand is going to cost you some money, you have to face the brutal facts of your market. Stop doing what feels good and start doing what generates cases. I'm Chris Dreyer. Thanks for listening to Personal Injury Mastermind. See you next time.
