Transcript
Al Ludwig (00:00)
What’s the most important thing for law firm owners and marketers to know right now?
Lindsay Lucas (00:05)
The rules have changed. You know, the landscape of how you acquired cases and leads before is changing. The rules of SEO have changed. And if you are not familiar with your current marketing metrics, get an audit, get a second opinion. But it is important to understand how your marketing is fueling your growth or lack thereof.
Al Ludwig (00:28)
Welcome to the Law Firm Brand Builders Podcast. I’m Al Ludwig, CEO of Practice Made Perfect. And today I have Lindsay Lucas. She’s our director of client success and growth here at PMP Marketing Group. She’s a lot more organized than me and is a great contrast to my conversational style, which has been fantastic to have when we’re on calls with clients and prospects and anybody else we’re talking to. because I ha have a tendency to ramble while she has a tendency to reel everything in and move it forward in the right direction.
So Lindsay, welcome.
Lindsay Lucas (00:59)
Thank you, Al. Thanks for having me today. And thanks for the kind words. I assure you’re not as disorganized as you think you are. As Al said, I am a client success director here at PMP. I have the privilege of leading and working with some of our largest, most complex clients and helping them to see success in their marketing efforts.
Al Ludwig (01:18)
So Lindsay, you came from were you at LinkedIn right before this or was that a past job in big tech that you had?
Lindsay Lucas (01:27)
Two jobs ago, I actually left 2020. I was one of those individuals that with the loss of childcare ended up bowing out, unfortunately, but had some great time there. I was there for nearly a decade. I joined post-IPO just a few months afterwards and was brought on with a few other colleagues to help start our financial services practice within LinkedIn.
Al Ludwig (01:49)
And yeah. So I want to jump into a few things with you today. One being just obviously how that big tech background translates to legal marketing, to working at at a marketing agency such as BMP. Also your experience with the marketing ecosystem as it is today with some you mentioned some of those clients that you’re dealing with. They’re larger scale clients, very comprehensive ones, strong relationships there and just
how we have to think about marketing for them and their different types of situations. And then also just best practices in the client stewardship. You know, you’re at the forefront of that. You’re the connector to everything that PNP does for that client and really shepherding forward their their success through our systems. so I want we’re going to speak a little bit to that as well and then end it with just
The most important thing for law firm owners and and marketers to know right now. So with that, if you could give us a little bit of background connecting LinkedIn to legal marketing.
Lindsay Lucas (02:51)
Sure. So what’s interesting is within legal marketing, I find a lot of interesting parallels. But a lot of the the various lessons I learned at LinkedIn obviously apply now. Al to what you alluded to, obviously we we’re in the new landscape right now, right? And we’re seeing shifts in the way the the rules of the game are played. And in my time at LinkedIn, I was coming in in twenty twelve, very early in twenty twelve. And at that time
Going out and speaking with various stakeholders at Fortune 500 companies. We were having to discuss with them, educate them, and at times convince them about why testing into paid social media was the way to go. How long? Now I almost this was beginning of 2012. And I would say there was still friction for a number of years after entering that role and trying to educate and de-risk testing into something like that. I see a lot of parallels right now with both.
the opportunity that AI presents, but simultaneously that the risk assessment that is going on with a lot of our our various partners, rightfully so, but that is not foreign to me. And I definitely can relate to that, that feeling of being on the cutting edge of something both exciting but somewhat unknown.
Al Ludwig (04:05)
I can imagine in the f financial services industry how tricky that must have been in the 2010, 11, 12 era. Cause I I remember back in 2010, I started diving into social media marketing. And it wasn’t for any client or law firm. It was for myself. I was deciding to go down a path of I wanted to work at these marketing agencies.
around the country and find some good ones. And I created these social media ad campaigns in like 2010 to prop promote myself, built myself a landing page, a an email marketing system, all of this. But back then the privacy restrictions were non-existent. I was able to target, like I want to target these five people. And I was able to target those five people precisely. And it worked really well. It it it ended up leading to
one job and then another job about four years later for me from a contact I made through doing that because the the agency owner was interested in and and how I built all that out. And so I can imagine from the financial services or in the legal world, right? Where people weren’t quite yet thinking about the privacy aspects, but I’m sure it had some downline effect or maybe repercussions for some that just decided, well, they don’t have these restrictions. So I’m just gonna jump right into it.
Lindsay Lucas (05:26)
Yes, absolutely. and and to unpack that more, when I joined LinkedIn going into the financial services vertical, you have to think back in time. We were coming out of, you know, the economic downturn. And if you guys, you know, think back to that time, a lot of regulation was coming into financial services. But even more so, the government still owned some of those financial entities in part, meaning that the American people, we actually owned some of those entities. So there was
a lot more oversight than would even usually occur. And with that in mind, we had to to really unpack, you know, what risk was associated with actually posting potential language that could be seen as guidance around investments or guaranteeing returns or, you know, and these are well known now, right? within the industry. But at the time there was there was a lot of exploration that had to be done.
within these firms before they could actually take it out the door and run with it. Right. And I I see the same thing right now as far as, you know, within the legal space, we we have a lot of clients that want to know what’s out there, want to know what the new shiny thing is, but simultaneously they want to know who else is doing it first. Right. It’s fun to be out, you know, front, but that carries an inherent risk.
So a lot of times that’s some a role we’re playing for our clients is we’re doing that upfront research and auditing what is already out there, what’s working, what’s not, and then advising based on that to play that role of de-risking some of these new technologies, platforms, or go to market strategies so that our clients don’t have to do that.
Al Ludwig (07:03)
Yeah, and I think the the regulations can never keep up with the advancement in the technology, the advancement in the the ad strategies, any of that. And I I I experienced that firsthand whenever I was in house leading a large marketing program for a personal injury law firm and I had to work with the state board association. We had to file all of our ads. I had someone on staff who sold job was to file our ads, track all, make the
make the adjustments we had to make. But I mean, just back in 2022, it was so antiquated that we had to mail everything at the time. We had to mail a USB drive with the a printout of the the the filing application. Then we had wait for it to come back. And you know that they just they can’t keep up with it. Right. And then now you have it it was built for a system in the nineties, right? And and then now you have
Forty times more law firms advertising, right? They’re having to review way more items. And certain rules and regulations will will be updated and apply and will work them in. But then course all these rules and regulations in the in the legal space, they’re open for interpretation. And so many of the law firms that I’ve worked with also have a an ethics lawyer that they work with. And when we they want to do something, they’re like, well
My interpretation is that we can do this and if it gets if it gets hit or said, No, we don’t think you can do that, then it goes through a whole ethics discussion and an appeal and usually the law law firm ends up winning in the end, if it’s if it’s in that gray area enough. But you know, that’s I I I feel like it’s gonna get even stricter and stricter and have to be more carefully watched now as we have
the MSO space and private equity coming into the legal space and there’s just a lot more upheaval there that wasn’t there in the past. There was already a ton of money in the space and now it’s just tenfold more. So
Lindsay Lucas (09:05)
true. To go back to the the regulation piece, yes, regulation’s always reactive, right? It’s put in place after there’s an issue, after there’s a problem. and I think that’s something in the US that we tend to have like inherently within our culture of innovation, where we have a you know, let it ride mentality until we actually like need to to pull it back. And the AI spaces it’s interesting if
you guys look into anything going on in Europe, they’re actually thinking of proactively starting to regulate against AI already. We’re in the US, we’re really not having those conversations yet. So, you know, a tale of two approaches. But I think the same is true as we were talking about within legal or even within financial services. Those were all reactionary from something that had already occurred.
Al Ludwig (09:54)
Yeah. And this is where when I talked earlier, you’re a great compliment to me, because I’m the type that just wants to, hey, let’s do this, let’s do that, let’s do more, let’s let’s implement this new fun idea. And then people like you are there to go, Well, let’s think down line a little a little bit and there’s if there’s things we should worry about. It’s like, Yeah, well, right, let’s put it into that system first and and see what makes the most sense. And I think it’s it’s good to have a a nice balance of both. But he had mentioned to me
before this, some managers and mentors you had worked with. I don’t I don’t don’t remember if it was at LinkedIn or not, but talking about a client obsessed mentality. And that’s how, you know, I I view our relationships and our partnerships with our law firms at PMP as is client obsessed. And having been the client, right, I am hyper in tune to how they may be feeling and push really hard. And so I’d love to kind of get your
perspective of what that client obsess mentality means.
Lindsay Lucas (10:56)
Yeah. I think a lot of organizations approach client success with a client centric approach, which is just logical fundamentally, if you think about it, right? But I think the next step of that evolution is that client obsession approach. And that to me means foundationally becoming an expert at that company. And it sounds simple, but to do it very well, you have to be very organized. You have to be,
an ongoing student of that organization, right? And you have to be curious. And I think that’s something we do very well at PMP. And, you know, knowing exactly what the priority is for that client that week and shifting into we’re out of a specific practice area based upon what’s going on within
Al Ludwig (11:46)
How often do how often do priority shift for clients?
Lindsay Lucas (11:51)
Sometimes days. And that’s okay. Like we’re we have we’re a nimble organization and we have the ability to be agile like that. And I that honestly brings me joy that we actually can support at that level. Like, hey, there’s a new lawsuit that we are following, or we want to lean into this, we want lean out of that. And, you know, we’re able to do that. I also love w working with, you know, various vendors and partners and being able to speak to exactly what the priorities are in a ranked list and
I have that right here. I have this right there. And I think that that level, I often think of my role as playing the hub to many spokes. And it works really well when you have somebody who is like willing to go the extra mile and like I said, just become a student of the organization. The other aspect where I think the the obsession is is really understanding the objectives, right?
And the objective typically is to to grow the firm in the right ways. Right. And having those ongoing check-ins about, you know, what leads are coming in, what’s the quality? Is it the right distribution based upon the practice area that you’re looking for? And, you know, what kinds of returns are you seeing? And then using that data to inform future initiatives, targeting content. And sometimes it’s pumping the brakes over here and putting your foot on the accelerator in another area.
But just having that level of insight into the pulse of an organization, that that’s my passion.
Al Ludwig (13:21)
I think and and establishing that up front with the clients that that we onboard is always so critical because then we’re able to have those conversations when they get sidetracked either by a shiny object or by an old way of doing it, an old way they used to think about it. And I I think in a few instances where it was questions about traffic, right? We we’re looking at the number and and actually they’re at the time they’re happy about
The case, the call’s coming in, the case is coming in, they’re they’re hitting goals, everything’s going great. But then it’s just like, why is the traffic down? I’m concerned about X, Y, and Z. Okay, well, let’s let’s go back to our original discussion about what we were going to do, what we kind of expected to happen, and what our ultimate goal is here. And you of course we dig into the traffic and we we send them why and that’s exactly what we expect, right? It’s yeah, well, you you lost.
that 30% of traffic that was going to your website that was coming from India, we got rid of that. And it stopped coming in, right? Or we pruned certain things that would bring in completely irrelevant traffic to your website, which is also, by the way, making everything else look better now because it’s everything’s just more relevant and in tune with the people that we’re trying to reach. and so I always think it’s just very important. A lot of our I think a lot of the the firms in the space and, you know, I I I feel like
When I came back into the agency world, I came back almost in a little bubble. I was in the agency world for 10 years and then I was in-house for five years. And I knew how I operated. I knew the the goal, the things I wanted to track and knew what was important to me. And I wasn’t sidetracked often by things that were outside of the the main goal of growing our share of voice in the market versus direct data, growing our
average revenue per case or total number of cases, things like that. When I came back into the the agency side of it, speaking to some lawyers, some prospects, and sometimes going almost a full conversation without them talking about the actual revenue and cases, and more talking about the traffic, the impressions, the this, the that, that I forget some people have just been trained to look at instead of just the bottom line because they worked with vendors and not partners.
Lindsay Lucas (15:39)
Exactly. And unfortunately, the metrics that maybe mattered so much, even just two years ago, the value of them sometimes is not telling the story it once was, where we would see, to your point, a a direct correlation of traffic and leads or traffic and cases. Now that’s not necessarily true. And to your point, sometimes getting rid of a page that has only had traffic coming from India or China, it really was not doing
anything to support the health of an overall site can be a good thing. So we’ve definitely been reframing a lot of these types of conversations and doing a really thorough thorough job of of educating our clients on on the shifting landscape of, you know, especially SEO and overall performance and ecosystem within the age of AI
Al Ludwig (16:30)
Yeah. Funny enough, I was listening to our friends over at the lunch hour legal marketing. They were talking today about user journeys and this this research they did and where someone actually went through their journey and described their journey as they were looking for a a personal injury injury law firm. So it was more focused on like once they’re at the computer or on their phone and they’re looking for one. And it was interesting that even within that that system, you can see all of the various digital channels and components and even
things that you can’t account for that are just going on in the user’s head as being part of the journey that you can’t capture through an impression or a click and it’s impossible to have visibility to. But you could hear through their description of, okay, I understand why they’re familiar with this brand that they randomly ran randomly saw. I understand why they’re considering this one more than another one. Or on the flip side, I understand why this one’s going for a smaller local firm and trying to avoid the ones that are doing ads because that that’s just they’re
their general mentality. And it’s hard to kind of plan for all of them, but we want to as best as possible plan for for each each particular journey. and so looking at SEO, social, offline, type of digital, it’s just one big system that honestly works together across the entire journey. It’s the most important aspect of it.
Lindsay Lucas (17:51)
So it’s interesting. I think back to, you know, maybe maybe about twelve years ago when this splintering of various watering holes became to like very, very clear. Right. And we started to have to have conversations around like we have to meet prospects where they are. We need to have meaningful intersections with them when they’re on a social platform or it, you know, they’re doing a a search or they’re on a website or whatever it is. We have to meet them where they are because
The internet is only getting more complex and larger as opposed to smaller. And I think we talk about like search intelligence or or social in the age of of AI, like that that’s the why behind it, right? We have to meet them where they are to have that meaningful brand moment with them upstream before they have that single event and need help or before.
you know, they have something, you negative happen to them and they’re reaching out for, you know, expert legal advice. So that that’s the piece I think where historically we would say, yes, we will we will sell you paid social media or we will sell you this, but long gone are the days where these are individual tactics. These tactics are now bleeding over in a meaningful way, and it’s becoming very
It’s becoming more important than ever, I would say, to have a cohesive brand strategy. So whether you are meeting your future prospect Bob on Facebook, YouTube, your website, Google, Google Maps, it doesn’t matter. Telling the same story, having similar messaging, having a distinct differentiated logo from your competitors within your space is critical to to future success.
Al Ludwig (19:40)
Yeah, and w a takeaway for many law firms is there’s a there’s a thousand ways you can do this, right? It doesn’t mean you have to work with one partner to do everything. Obviously, I love doing that, right? I love working with a law firm and doing their entire marketing ecosystem. But if you’re not doing that, ideally you have some type of structure in-house, whether it’s it’s you as the owner or you have a a marketing director or some type of team built out where it’s, yeah, we we’re working with five different vendors, freelancers, whoever.
But they’re working under the common goal that we’re envisioning out within it. Because you know, at the end of the day, what the way I always describe PMP and and what we do is we’re a white glove agency that fits into a law firm where they need us in their current stage of growth and need. Right. And so if that means, hey, I need someone to quarterback my entire system, yeah, we’ll come in and we’ll do that. If it means, hey,
We’re launching into a bunch of markets and I need someone to be our go to market expert for Google ads and our Google LSAs. And we can do that as well, right? But in that instance, they’re usually coming to you because they’ve already got kind of a marketing ecosystem vision in place. And now they’re finding the people who are going to execute on that for them. And so I I think that the tide continues to turn in that world. As you mentioned, it got fractured a long time ago. I think.
when it became, hey, you can target people very, very precisely, which is great. In our world, perfectly preferly perf generally personal injury as opposed to pretty much any other legal category, it is it’s a little trickier, right? And that that granularity doesn’t isn’t as important. There’s definitely certain ways to use it across your growth pattern, but very different than someone who’s in a market life cycle for for sneakers. Right. I’m gonna be
a lot differently. Just like I’m we’re gonna hit someone for mass torts a lot differently. And it might be way more direct response than than brand building and top of mind awareness. and for we got one client, we’re kind of marrying that together where we’re building the brand but also doing all the direct response aspects so that he becomes the the the main source in that in that world while also gener just generating the leads and getting them in and turning them into cases.
You’ve been part of a lot of mergers and acquisitions. Yes. And we’re seeing that happen at scale right now in the legal world, especially personal injury. But I I assume it’s starting in personal injury and it’s going to advance to many other practice areas at an escalating rate. So I wanna want to pick your brain on that world, what you’ve seen and and the parallels to that in the personal injury space.
Lindsay Lucas (22:23)
Yeah. it’s interesting. So most of the MA activity I’ve been in was in the tech world, right? Whereas working you know, for a tech website acquired, working for another website acquired by Autodesk, working at LinkedIn acquired by Microsoft, right? The commonality there was that was boom times for tech. Right. Yeah, she mentioned a lot of MA type activity going on within the legal space.
What are we seeing that we saw before during the the era of like big tech and the rise of of all those platforms that have since to a degree consolidated? We’re seeing an influx influx of capital, right? And I think it’s it’s for those of us who are in the the legal marketing space, it’s everybody understands this is happening. I find when I have conversations with, you know, former colleagues or people in other verticals, they’re very fascinated by this because it it shift is shifting the dynamics of what was considered maybe.
a few years ago to be a little bit of a sleepy vertical, right? Yeah. And we’re starting to see people from the other verticals actually make the move into the legal space to support the infrastructure that’s needed to create and bring together sometimes disparate firms or create net new brands or build out custom technology and systems to to support, you know, national footprints, right? So it’s a very exciting time.
I definitely see parallels from my time in big tech and I definitely, you know, see parallels of that that rapid capitalization.
Al Ludwig (23:56)
Yeah, and and there’s a lot of contention in in in the space because just the historical nature of law firms they have to be owned by a by a lawyer and that’s that’s still the the majority of the case, but now it’s frack fracking out the back office into his own business that supports the different legal practices. But what a lot of people don’t know in this world is there’s brands out there that have been doing this for a very long time in a different manner. It’s just it didn’t have outside capital.
It didn’t have it didn’t have non lawyer money coming in. There’s law firm brands out there that own other law firm brands in different markets across the country that kept it under the other law firm’s brand because they had brand equity in that particular market, whereas the equity that they had in their brand wasn’t in that market yet. So I’m not gonna take it over, change the name. I’m gonna take it over and just let it operate at as it was operating and and take advantage of that. And that’s obviously
something that’s happening in the the MA and the PE space for for law firms right now with all the MSOs. It’s just kind of a little different and at scale. Mm-hmm. And so I think those guys that did it years ago, they also got it kind of a a leg up right now because they already have kind of some of the structure built out and now they can actually work with some of these outside investors to maybe even scale that a lot more. So I’m I’m there’s a few
few out there that I’m tracking closely to see how they plan on continuing to scale.
Lindsay Lucas (25:25)
It’s an interesting call out the the kind of the net new configurations we’re seeing, right? As far as like overarching structure. To your point, there are, you know, there have been like buyouts here and there where the original brand, the original structures, even the the leadership team at times are retained, right? And then you have others where basically the the brand structure is being purchased, right? And then
you know, the the parent company is bringing their own, you know, staff in. So very interesting, interesting times. And I’d also call out like we’re as PMP, we’re working with firms in various states right now. And it it’s, you know, of of that structure. And it’s very interesting the needs from a marketing perspective. to your point, like we we love it when we can do right, the soup to nuts, end to end marketing. But sometimes during these transitions,
A firm may just need, you know, digital, pay digital support. Or maybe they need to bring several different brands together and they need initial brand ideation, design work and and you know, execution. So they can have that c cohesive brand footprint. So for us, like in the marketing space, it’s been very interesting because there’s really no cookie cutter right now. And it kind of keeps us on our toes, but it it keeps our day-to-day very interesting.
Al Ludwig (26:49)
Yeah, I’ve seen it executed v vastly different in at vastly different at at different places. And it’s just interesting to see those those nuances. And I have some relationships with some people that are in it and like people that we don’t work with. and I just kind of hear the stories from from their end. So it’s I’m curious if in like ten years the infrastructure of law firms, particular particularly PI, if it starts more closely mirroring that of like healthcare systems, right? Where you used to have
your individually owned medical practices and you had a lot of And then over time they just got bought into the network. Right. Where I’m at, is there’s there’s auctioner. That’s that’s one big one. And I know a lot of people that used to be on their own, they’re now they’re they’re part of the auctioner network. So whether that’s that’s Morgan and Morgan or or some some other bigger one bigger ones that are out there and like you now become part of their network. And some of them s operate a little bit like that, but it’s just we haven’t seen it at at a large scale, like you kind of think about it from the healthcare system. So I I’m
Trying to kind of model out what what I expect it to look like in the end. One, you know, advantage that the legal space has and the personal injury space has is that they got to reap the rewards of for a very long time is really great revenue structures, right? Absolutely. Getting a thirty, thirty-five percent fee off of off of case work, off a knowledge work, right? For the most part, that’s a that’s a large gain for anybody. And there’s a lot of money to be made there.
And so now with this influx of capital, like I’m having the conversations with friends, with clients, prospect like over time, like you can’t expect your your cost per acquisition to stay your cost per acquisition. And you can artificially keep it around there. But what’s gonna happen over time is you’re gonna slowly start falling away. You’re gonna slowly start getting less. You’ll maintain that that cost per acquisition, but you’ll have this less cases over time, you know, just like anything.
It gets it gets more expensive. Anything with a lot of demand is going to get more expensive. And even things that don’t have much demand, we all know get more expensive. That’s that’s the whole point of inflation, right? Everything just gets more expensive. Salaries bec get higher, but when there’s a lot of demand, it gets more expensive quicker. And I think we’re starting to see that in a lot of places and a lot of firms focusing internally on operations, legal ops, intakes, and finding that.
1% gap here and there, the 2% gap here and there, where they could they could be making more money based off of what’s already happening there. And I’ve seen firms go from a eleven thousand dollar cost per case to a twenty thousand dollar plus and not case fee, but eleven thousand dollar case fee to a twenty thousand dollar plus case fee, mainly from putting systems in place and not necessarily just trying to to work only better cases.
Lindsay Lucas (29:43)
Couldn’t agree what you’re saying more. Yes, all day long. And it’s interesting, this this is another parallel that goes back to big tech. Big tech is infamous. And we’re seeing some of this now on the news headlines for bringing in like MBAs, an army of them, and looking for ways to gain revenue within. Right. I think simplistically we always think like, need more case volume, need to cle, you know, sign more cases, need a
higher quality cases. I just want the big ones, right? I just want catastrophic, right? For in the, you know, the PI space. But there’s a lot of revenue to be gained by tightening up systems and operations.
Al Ludwig (30:21)
And some of it some of it’s simple. Some of it is you have a law firm that has 30, let’s say it has 30 lawyers. A handful of those lawyers have good have been in the industry for a long time and are damn good at what they do. They’re great litigators. And then there’s a handful of them that have been in the industry for a long time, but stayed out of the litigation game. And they’re really good at working and set and and settling the cases of lower or mid value.
And then you have a handful of them that are going to be a little greener, right? They’re they’re the ones that are one to five years out of law school. They’re still learning the industry, learning the best practices, learning from those old heads and the other two groups and having a system in place where if you want to settle a case for under policy limits, it needs to go to a committee of a dozen lawyers in your firm or however many you have, right? If you had 10 lawyers of five lawyers, it needs to go to a committee where everybody looks at it.
pokes holes in it, finds ways to get more value out of the case for the client. And then you go back to the drawing board and try to get that. Or in some cases, you do it and go, yeah, you need to settle this and you need settle it now because like what you’re getting is we think this that’s all we’re gonna get. And that’s that one simple adjustment, if they put that in place at many of these law and many law firms do it, but a more don’t do it. That alone will
Increase your case values by thousands. It’s just a system you have to get you got to put in place. It is a roadblock, right? It is it is is not easy. And then you if you have a larger firm with l with legacy lawyers there, right? You got to get them to come on board a new system. And a lot of law firms that have lawyers there for a long time, it’s at the point where they kind of operate on their own. Yep. And so they have to come back into a a rigid system to help increase those case values, which, hey, you increase your case values, guess what?
Now you can spend more on marketing. You can have higher cost per acquisition, going from four to five thousand on a cost per acquisition. No problem. No problem when all of a sudden your case fee goes from twelve to sixteen.
Lindsay Lucas (32:28)
Yeah. I yes. I I think s so much can be gained from first auditing kind of end to end. And, you know, no, we do not work with every single law firm for everything, but when we do, it’s a beautiful thing because we have the ability to audit every step and see where we’re having drop off, you know, anything like that. And one of the things that we often will do is we will listen to intake calls. And I cannot tell you how many times.
You probably already know what I’m gonna say. I’m auditing and there’s no answer.
Yeah. And there’s some f you know, and I’m not gonna you know, industry wide, I think it’s something between like thirty and forty percent of calls are not answered.
Al Ludwig (33:10)
And that’s another area where I was in a little bubble after coming out of house because our systems credit to the the COO and the intake director and all that over there, which I got I got the had the pleasure of working hand in hand with on so many things. The systems they built out were so fantastic that like calls didn’t get there’s always gonna be some calls that get missed or glitched out or something like that. But it was like we didn’t miss calls. And
then when I would jump into a call rail for a law firm that just wasn’t as sophisticated, you know, holy crap, you’re missing twenty something percent of your calls that are coming in and you’re it’s painful. And and and it’s you’re just going to a voicemail and the voicemail’s horrible and no one’s gonna leave a voicemail. They just don’t do that, right? Or even so after hours, right? Not not not e not just spending a little extra money sending them to an after hours answering service at a minimum.
Lindsay Lucas (34:05)
Yeah. So these are just these are really like quick wins to close like gaps or leaks within the funnel as far as money being spent without return on it. Right. And I it’s not the funnest thing to talk about, but you know, with the to your point, the the rising costs of acquiring quality leads, you have to answer the phone. You know?
Al Ludwig (34:32)
It becomes it comes it becomes valuable to create a formula that can show how much that call is worth, right? or how much that review is worth. I was talking to Mark, our VP of of web on on on a podcast earlier, and he asked me how much is what what do I value a five-store review in the personal injury space? And the my valuation is roughly around a thousand dollars for every five-store review on Google that your personal injury law firm gets.
For a variety of reasons, but doing that same thing to a call that comes in, right? and just assigning these values. That way you can go. Like if you had if you missed 20% of your calls, we can now dictate how much revenue you did not gain because of that. And then same thing with with the reviews built into that. If I can get more reviews, I’m going to get more cases. I’m gonna have a higher brand sentiment, a higher higher optionality for clients to choose me. And so assigning those values, I think always
Eye opening, because it’s one thing to go, okay, yeah, we missed those calls, but it went to voicemail and did this and that’s why okay. Well, we created this complicated formula that assigned the value based off of your first party data, third party data, and other inputs to show you how much that that call was worth. And that’s without factoring in the exceptions, right? Yeah. Yeah, that call was worth five hundred and fifty dollars. But that call could have been a million dollar case. And that’s
That’s another fun way. Another fun thing about the personal injury law is the r the randomness that can happen. It’s almost like like going to the casino, right? You can you can sit there and you could just get a dollar win, a two dollar win, a loss, and this and then all of a sudden, boom, twenty thousand dollars. And that’s one factor that personal injury law firms have that most industries don’t have. They don’t have a a random, yeah, this could
This could be worth negative $3,000 for my firm or this could be worth five million dollars for my firm.
Lindsay Lucas (36:30)
Yeah. It’s interesting. We we have clients now that kind of are in two different stages that you were describing, like one that is currently further tightening up intake measurement tracking, and another that’s about to put, you know, modeled out case values back into Google. Yeah. Right. And that’s that’s like when people ask, you know, what will this do for me? Where am I going? You know, like one, removing the bottom line.
Right. We need to be tracking that and having a conversation about how we’re the job we’re doing to bring in the leads, the the cases, the the value associated with it. But two, make your own data work harder. Right. And so the goal is always once you have everything tightened up and cleaned up on the intake and the CRM side, then that’s when you can, you know, bring that that quality converted case data back into the Google platform. And then you’re getting to a place where you’re
mainly going to be paying for actions that are going to be doing almost a lookalike with the AI that that they have in place now. The AI, you know, algorithm is going to be looking for cases just like the one you had before. And if you have case value, you know, which is an eventuality for a lot of firms, if you have that too, it’s going to go fetch the highest value case potential, right? So really exciting stuff, but all of that stuff starts with operations and
I know this isn’t the funnest thing to talk about, but it kinda has to be airtight for for a firm to be able to reap the full benefit and reward.
Al Ludwig (38:05)
Yeah. And then I would say lawyers send your data back into your ad platforms so that they can optimize based off of the hundreds of millions of data points that Google, Facebook, all of those have on everybody in the country, right? They can over time figure out who’s more likely to get in a wreck, who’s more likely to get injured in a wreck, who’s more likely to contact a personal injury law firm, right? And, you know, I I’m a big proponent for big net.
catch as many fish as possible, right? But most law firms aren’t a fan of spending money like that. There’s some that are. Like if but if your goal like with Google isn’t really tight, bottom of the funnel, search intent, and I want to be highest impression share, top of page rate, absolute top of page rate of 80, 90% plus, and you’re willing to pay to get that, then you really need to be sending your data, your data in so you can optimize on
Some specific metrics that no one no one person can do that this algorithm can do way better than us. Absolutely. Assigning case values within that or projected valuations is another win. And it’s tricky. This is where we we skirt the line of like how valuable is it versus not. I think it’s very valuable, but you are sending signals to it that.
These are the values of it, even though you don’t quite know yet. So you’re working on of a baseline guesstimate, right? If you get enough cases in over time, the more cases you have to feed that, the more accurate that’s gonna generally be. Yes, it’s not gonna account for that one that you thought on an initially when you accepted it was a twenty-five thousand dollar case, but after many things have been uncovered, it’s actually a six-figure case or a seven-figure case. And yes, you’re not gonna
Lindsay Lucas (39:41)
And projected value.
Al Ludwig (40:02)
Probably feed in the actual case value at the end because it’s going to be six months, 12 months, 24 months before you actually have the that real case value. But creating your own internal algorithms of sorts to create valuations of the cases you ex you accept, assigning that to it, sending that data back in to tell, to tell Meta, to tell Google, go fetch more of these and adjust our.
bidding and exposure based off of that, right? And because I have to go after that minimum policy limit case because I I want volume, because I want higher lifetime value, because I want referrals from those people in the future. But I want to make sure you’re not spending $20,000 to get me the $10,000 case. Ideally you’re adjusting down for that particular case or or the the inputs that that person is likely that type of
Lindsay Lucas (40:57)
case. I couldn’t agree more. And the other thing that I think it’s interesting to call out, obviously there’s an underlying theme of this conversation that like we’re at an inflection point. Things are shifting. The rules that used to be in place, you know, the rules are changing, right? So you have to be able to have agility and be able to move quickly. Google is no different. And what’s interesting with Google right now is I think traditionally we all think of going onto Google and we’re buying key words.
As a representation of intent. And what we’re seeing right now is with Google be able being able to go get a case at a a certain value, Google is going and finding intent. And that’s something that the the AI is enabling them to do. And some of those signals are soft signals that we don’t have insight into. Yeah.
So it in some ways it’s not as clean as it once was, but it’s also simultaneously like allowing us to get closer to your your point of as far down the funnel as possible.
Al Ludwig (42:00)
Yeah. I was in a a mastermind and one of the attorneys, big personality where Google was there. And so you could just imagine that. A room a room full of like eight nine figure law firm owners and their marketers and operators. And two reps from Google are there to answer our questions. You can imagine how how heated some things could get and and you know, and and I’m
I’m a cynic sometimes when it comes to working with Google and and working off their answers. And so I’m I’m just hitting them up with a bunch of things. But he he’s going crazy, this guy. It’s just and he and he’s a big personality. So it’s fun to watch. It’s like watching a performance. And he said one thing in there that I was like, I never thought about that, but yeah, that would be a good intent. And he was like, Can I target people who are going 60 miles an hour? And then their phone goes zero miles an hour in a split second. Like, I want to target those people. And they’re like, No, you can’t do that.
Okay. Well, it’s like, but that’s a like, I’m sure there’s some type of indication that’s being fed into there that no one knows. But like the algorithm doesn’t even know is pulling it because it’s so complex as a it and it’s a signal that’s being sent in there unintentionally. Yeah. So it’s but it’s like, can I target that is precisely? No, you can’t target that precisely, but it’s possibly a signal if especially if you’re sending in all your data.
Lindsay Lucas (43:12)
Yeah.
Al Ludwig (43:23)
that may be happening. I’m not saying it is a signal, but I’m saying if there’s hundreds of millions of signals, it could be one.
Lindsay Lucas (43:31)
I think there’s probably more than we know. And I think what we are privy to, as I was kind of alluding to before, is so superficial now. I think when Google is going going to fetch a click or a converted case or whatever it might be, the level of sophistication and and the pathway to that conversion is purposely black box.
Al Ludwig (43:54)
Yeah. I and I I think some of it’s black boxed because no one really knows how it works, including the people who created it. Like it you know, it’s it’s it’s so complex and so many people working on it, right? and it’s one other takeaway I would give to a lot of law firms, law firm owners, marketers, all that, the marketers know, but many law firm owners that who don’t have marketers on hand don’t quite know, right? Is when you talk to Google
Take it with a grain of salt. They are the people at Google you’re talking to are mostly going to be salespeople that are kind of disguised as your client service representatives. And so you want to be careful when you’re talking to them. And chances are, if you have a marketer in-house or you have an agency, they know more about the product and how it works for your particular niche than that person ever will. And so it
That’s also why it’s always fun to kind of talk to a lot of Google people because they they push the same things over and over and over and over again. Like, no, you you don’t understand. You’re pushing it, you’re pushing this from an e-commerce perspective, not a personal injury law perspective, which is vastly different. So I love I love having those conversations and and getting myself frustrated and eventually just going cry in a corner and and then getting on with my life.
Lindsay Lucas (45:15)
To back up what you’re saying, just for again, some marketers will know this, but maybe they don’t understand like the full footprint. When I was at LinkedIn, 75% of us were in the sales org. So I think sometimes like, well, that’s a tech company. Yeah, it’s a tech company. And yeah, there’s some people who work in finance and there’s some people who are in the development department, and there’s some people who are in data. But, you know, that’s how these platforms operate, right? So it’s it’s important to keep in mind as like a frame of reference that
most of the personnel that are on hand are there to to keep revenue flowing.
Al Ludwig (45:50)
The more people that can objectively bring revenue in to the firm or or to the the company, right? The better. I think it’s it’s similar to the the other thing I was talking about with Mark with was review generation systems and building those out internally within your law firm, where it was how can I get the most people to get the most reviews from our clients and if
Lindsay Lucas (45:57)
Exactly.
Al Ludwig (46:16)
I’m putting that thousand dollar value at on them, right? It’s like, okay, so th each one of those is a is a thousand dollar sale for me. And we were talking about building out that system and I got a lot of pushback. And the one thing most people want to do is we’re gonna put someone in place who’s in charge of getting reviews. They’re in charge of calling our clients or or creating systems to just get more reviews and do the texts and the emails, which is great. Definitely put that in there. It’s like but I had fifty-five attorneys at hand that deal with the clients day in and day out.
Who own those relationships, that if I can get them to do that as part of their system, if fifty-five of them do it half assed, it’s gonna be way better than one person doing it at a hundred and fifty and sure enough, it it was, right? And the inadvertent I say inadvertent, but the the inadvertent effect of it was client satisfaction goes up, right? Because the attorneys are more involved in the understanding of having to get the these reviews and that’s fair.
signals that people are given that are going to be more likely to lead the reviews. And all of a sudden customer satisfaction goes up, our review counts go up, so on and so forth. We now have you get a thousand reviews in a year. I said a hundred I said a hundred dollars, a thousand dollars. That’s like a million dollars. That’s a lot.
Lindsay Lucas (47:29)
It’s a lot. A lot. And it’s interesting, like that that supports brand equity, that supports lead volume. That supports relevance, right? It’s like it’s one of those little things that often goes underlook like overlooked within the ecosystem, but it’s very powerful. we often look at that as a must have to maximize like LSA volume, for example. And the thing these two things do not seem like they go together, but literally one feeds the other.
Al Ludwig (47:59)
Yep. And if you’re a law firm out there and you’re not taking cases that you deem less valuable, but it is a case you could have taken and made revenue on, you’re you’re shooting yourself in the foot because you’re foregoing the lifetime value of that client and the referrals. You’re you’re foregoing the potential review there. And one thing Google is getting really good at is making sure you don’t get a lot of reviews if you don’t have a lot of customers and you’ve actively been purging.
ones that have the indications of a bulk review generation effort, correct, a in incentivized review generation effort, or all coming from the same place. When they purge all those out, the ones that still stay at the top are the ones that are just authentically generating as many reviews as possible from as many different people as possible. And that’s just going to get tighter. It’s just going to get better. And so if you’re taking a hundred cases a year.
And foregoing an extra 300 that you could have took, but you decided not to because the value the value was too little for you to you to work. You’re also foregoing and 300 reviews and the lifetime value of those potential clients down the road, which is going to snowball your practice and make you more valuable over time. And if you don’t do that, eventually in this new world, you might end up having to become a referral partner and just have a capped growth or
get swallowed up by one of these bigger entities as there’s more merg mergers and acquisitions happening.
Lindsay Lucas (49:30)
Yeah. It when you talk about the referral phase, it’s interesting. Like we on the marketing side, we often think about things through a funnel, right? we think about things down to a conversion and sometimes that’s where we leave off. But like after a conversion is a referral, right? And then in theory, if if you can, you know, you it’s your review and then it’s like a referral, I I guess I should say. And then the cycle can start again. And I think that that’s the piece where
I think there’s a breakdown sometimes in the logic or like the modeling where like the the f the funnel doesn’t really stop, right? there’s still an inherent value that should be.
Al Ludwig (50:09)
Your marketing from two years ago is still earning value right now, right? So you spent $100,000 two years ago and you thought that $100,000 brought in $300,000, but then two years later it actually brought in $325. And then another year after that, it actually brought in $375. So on because it not everything stays isolated to to that one year where you’re spending it. And because of that referral,
chain and what real case study on it, I would run reports where we would track the our clients coming in from our marketing sources, each channel, right? And we would we would get as best as we could in there. We know that again, there’s overlap between them all, but there’s certain ones where I could I could be a little more confident that it was mostly for this one thing. And my worst network or worst channel
had a 18% referral rate over the next, I think it was three years. It was three years or five years. Let’s go with three years. 18 18% referral rate over the next three years. And then when I looked at who they referred and those case values, each person that came in was worth 25% more than what their case value ultimately was. And that was one of our bad channels. Now, granted, we had great customer service, we had a lot of marketing,
We were re-engaging our our our former clients, both through just our broad mass media marketing that was hitting them, as well as very low cost social media campaigns and email marketing campaigns that were targeted only at our current and former client base. So you could just imagine on the the re the referral of the referral was always worth more, right? Because that referral knows that former client knows what you do. They know how.
They know who shouldn’t contact you. So they don’t refer people to you that are ir irrelevant. And typically the case values, for whatever reason, are just worth more. And so you want as many referrals as possible. And if your referrals at at some point become twenty-five percent of your cases and forty percent of your revenue, your marketing worked really well to get it to that point. And you just want that to continue growing.
I want you to leave us with what’s the most important thing for law firm owners and marketers to know right now from the lens of Lindsay Lucas, director of client success that works with some of the most premier law firms around the country. Sure.
Lindsay Lucas (52:43)
Well, we’ve this theme has come up multiple times in our discussion today. The rules have changed. You know, the landscape of how you acquired cases and leads before is changing. The rules of SEO have changed, right? And if you are not familiar with your current marketing metrics or how that is folding into your bottom line, then get an audit, get a second opinion. it doesn’t have to cost you anything.
But it is important to understand how your marketing is fueling your growth or lack thereof. And sometimes a simple audit by a second set of eyes can allow them to uncover something that can easily be fixed, improved, and put you back on the track for growth. So a simple exercise can be very valuable. And anybody that even has been very successful in the past, it it’s time to take a second look just because things are so dynamic right now.
Perfect.
Al Ludwig (53:43)
Love it, Lindsay. Thank you so much for joining today and taking a little bit of time. we’ll catch up again probably in a couple of weeks and talk some case studies and other fun things that are happening in this world so everybody can get some real tangible insights in some future episodes. But thanks for everything.
Lindsay Lucas (54:00)
Thanks Al, thanks for the invite.