← Personal Injury Mastermind w/ Chris Dreyer
Personal Injury Mastermind w/ Chris Dreyer
299. Toolkit: Turn Rejected Cases to Revenue; Tap into Your New National Network
00:16:50
Matt Thielen discovered that even successful firms left significant money on the table by mishandling out-of-jurisdiction leads and referrals. He reveals how modern technology is transforming traditional referral networks from an administrative burden into a thriving revenue stream, making it possible for firms to monetize every lead that comes through their door.
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- [00:00]
A
Attorneys that are hungry and want to build their practice should start bidding on cases. It's a very cheap source of cases for you and to build a practice around.
- [00:13]
B
Hey guys, let's talk about referral cases. That mailbox money we all love. Which sounds great on paper, but here's the reality. I see an inefficient mess that's costing you money. Find the right partner is a time sink. Once you make the right connections that are scattered across different cities, states and practice areas, that's just the start. What should be a straightforward money in your pocket becomes this admin nightmare that makes you question if it's worth the hassle. There is a better way. We'll show you how. Welcome to Personal Injury Mastermind, the show where ambitious attorneys come to learn, implement and get results. These special toolkit episodes we dive deep into conversations with the leading vendors in the legal sphere. I'm your host Chris Dreyer, founder and CEO of Rankings IO. We help elite personal injury law firms dominate Google. Today's guest has a referral management solution that caught my attention. Matt Thielen holds a joint JD mba, has taken a startup through an IPO on the New York Stock Exchange. Now he's applying that same efficiency focused mindset to solve one of the legal industry's biggest headaches, referral management. So that you can rest easy. Let's dive in.
- [01:17]
A
We wanted it to be a hundred percent attorney to attorney, peer to peer. And it allows attorneys to build better referral networks across the country, which is obviously important for their own business. But I think it's critical for the industry itself. The way referral networks happen both in legal space and really any industry is you end up gravitating towards people like you. You end up gravitating to the people that you know, that you're friends with, that you're buddies with. And in the legal industry, what that's resulted in for I would say worse, is an old boys club where if you, if your grandpa wasn't practicing well or you didn't go to X, Y, Z law school, you don't know the right people to build up practice from ground up. Whereas with attorneyshare you can find those attorneys that might not already be within your social service, that might not already be on the same alumni list that you're on. And so you could really expand your network and do right by the industry by getting cases to people based on merit, not based on who they had beers with last week.
- [02:29]
B
I love the component of merit. I mean it's in especially if you're the referrer, you want to get maximum value, right? You got no labor based fees on that case. You know what I see working with a lot of PI attorneys, it's like they get these out of jurisdiction leads or maybe a practice area that they don't quite cover. They're like, oh, you know, wash my hands, see you later. And there's just not a lot of effort put into the referral, which is like, basically like burning money.
- [02:57]
A
So yeah, and it's a huge service to the client because you're kind of just telling the client, too bad, can't help you. I mean, I asked what they do is send the client to the bar association listserv. And the client's like, I'm picking names for my hat. At this point, I don't really know who to go with. But when I really started digging in, I identified three major pain points that in my opinion, it really bogged down what attorneys do in the referral space. And the first of those is shopping of referrals. Even if you have a great network of partner attorneys across the country, it still takes a long time to find a home for a lot of these cases. You might have a case that you think is great for your partner job and in Northern California, for example, and you think it meets his back pattern, his criteria, or whatever he judges his leads based on. But maybe he sees something in case that you don't. Or maybe he's too busy and he has a full calendar and can't take any more cases. And you take 10, 15, 20 minutes pitching this case to Joe of the Northern California, only to find out that he doesn't want it for whatever reason? And you're back to square one. The second major pain point we identified was how do you build a referral network over time? How do you find a good attorney in every practice area throughout the country so that when you have a case that originates in that jurisdiction or for whatever you need to place a case there, how do you know who you want to send the case to? That that's going to do right by the client, but also uphold your reputation, since you were the one kind of vouching for this person. And then the third piece that we really identified is that there's no great way to track referrals once they're made. The more sophisticated attorneys will hopefully track them on Excel spreadsheet where they say, I sent Chris six cases last year on these dates. Here are the terms. I should probably reach out to him and figure out what's going on with these cases. A lot of times it's in emails buried somewhere or on a legal path somewhere in the office. And so what we did is we designed attorneyshare to really create a much more dynamic environment, a digital environment that allows attorneys to know where their cases are and what's happening with their cases, their referrals.
- [05:16]
B
So give me the backstory on how you kind of came into law and the tech side, how this whole intersection.
- [05:24]
A
My story starts in law school where I actually got a JD MDA and found a strategy firm in San Francisco that was doing IT strategy and both expert testimony and valuation work. Did that for about a year and found myself gravitating more and more towards early stage startups and had some friends over at Bessemer Venture Partners who were deploying a pretty big check into a startup here in la. And they wanted someone that they felt comfortable could really run the regulatory side of the business. And the founders were surprisingly not looking for an attorney. But I convinced them them that I'd be able to help kind of across the business and really take all of the regulatory work off of their plates. Because it was taking a disproportionate amount of their time. They decided to bring me down to LA as the first legal hire. In that time I led that company, which was Wink. I joined in the series A led them through an IKEA on the New York Stock Exchange, which was a great experience. And I've been doing really venture work ever since. Ended up meeting Bob Simon who convinced me to come help him establish and build attorneyshare, which is a referral marketplace.
- [06:43]
B
For attorneys, individuals like us or Bob, you know, we may have the network, but maybe not the backup individual or.
- [06:51]
A
Or the non PI.
- [06:53]
B
You know, you get these employment leads or, or what have you that just, you know, they're con. The consumers don't know specialties and so they're just contacting who they know that who's an attorney. One of the key features that I think is really cool is the waterfall feature. So maybe explain what that is and kind of how that helps with things.
- [07:13]
A
Yeah, this is actually the brainchild of my co founder, Alex Becker and he struck upon the brilliant idea of automating the sequencing of referrals. So what waterfall referrals allows you to do is to create sequences within the platform that you send cases to. So for example, if I had a motor vehicle accident waterfall here in Los Angeles, I could put Bob Simon at the top and then I can put name your attorneys down the list. You could essentially sequence the order in which those referrals are quote, unquote shot to those attorneys. So once you put all the details into attorneyshare, the details will then pass directly to the waterfall in sequence. And so when Bob passes on that case, it will automatically push to number two and then it'll automatically push to number three. And you could also time bound the amount of review period for each individual in the waterfall. So if you give 48 hours to the person that's top of the waterfall and they don't review it, don't check it, don't do anything with it, it will automatically push the next person. So if that, that client that needs an immediate answer, you're able to create a force function to drive the referral partner to respond as quickly as possible. Then the consumer gets an immediate response, gets placed with better attorney. They're not in this weird limbo state where they're asking you for an answer, but you're waiting for the Tempo referral partner's response and it creates unnecessary delays.
- [08:49]
B
There's more and more of these feature developments that you're creating to make it more efficient to get cases in the platform. I know you guys just did something with Clio grow, so talk about just some of these different aspects to make it super efficient to get into the platform.
- [09:05]
A
Yeah, yeah. So to bring a case into the platform, we're trying to build two way integrations with all the large case management platforms which will allow you to push cases directly from your case management platform into attorneyshared and also take that case. If you are a CLIO customer and I'm a case peer customer and you push your case into the platform for referrals, you and I come to an agreement. I could take extract the case details into my case management platform so that I don't have to do any manual entry. That's the end state. It is a lot of work building integrations across dozens of case management softwares, but we are making good progress and it's really exciting. And, and really the end goal for us is to absolutely be able to pull case status updates from those softwares. So the referral that you send me, instead of having to ping me every month or so for an update on the case, you could just log into attorneyshare, see that it extracted the case status update from the case peer account, and you'll be able to see the actual status of the referral that you send in.
- [10:17]
B
Talk to me about network effects and what I mean by this is like thriving community of referrals needs, like not only good litigators and a lot of attorneys on the platform, but you also need cases. Tell me about kind of the network effects, the community, like, what's going on. You know, if you're a litigator listening, you might want to be one of the early ones on the platform because there's maybe not as many members as.
- [10:41]
A
There are going to be in like a year. We're seeing attorneys from all over the country join. We're in all 50 states, growing several hundred attorneys a month at this point. And people are, I think, the reason it's growing so quickly, it's because it's such a clear problem within the industry and it's such a block for everyone in what they're trying to do and operate their firms and operate their businesses that we've come in and tried to solve those pain points and make everyone's lives a lot easier.
- [11:11]
B
Let's face it, being a great lawyer isn't enough to succeed. You need to generate consistent leads. Personal injury is the most saturated niche, competition is fierce, and differentiation is everything. When the deck is stacked against you, you need a comprehensive resource to beat the competition. My latest book, Personal Injury Lawyer Marketing, is your roadmap to consistent leads and exponential growth. It is a masterclass on marketing for personal injury firms. It's packed with actionable strategies on where to invest your marketing dollars for maximum impact. No more guesswork, no more wasted ad spend, just clear, proven methods to transform your firm from good to go. Grab your copy of Personal Injury Lawyer Marketing on Amazon. Link is in the show notes. Yeah, I was going to replace your word with efficiency to save time and make it easier. Right. It makes me think of Alex Hermosi's value equation. Right? It's like dream, outcome, speed, and it's like decrease effort and sacrifice, you know, make it as easy for the consumer to make these referrals as possible. Which is why I really like, you know, like this. You can, if you don't know someone, just throw it to the marketplace and see if you can monetize it. I got, you know, about a hundred firm PI firms specifically. Well, you know, 120, 130 firms total. But I was thinking, well, what, what can we do here? How can they, you know, if I can help my clients make more money, then it's good for me, right? They're going to want to want to do marketing. So I was in there toying around and. And there's a solid amount of cases coming in every single day. And there's already Look, I don't know, I'm, I'm just guessing 500 plus maybe a thousand attorneys in there, a decent amount and, and just being transparent. You know, I've had several of the people that have been on this show in there. Right. So I've, as podcast guests, I've seen them on there. So really, really cool to see that develop. I think it's really cool, especially as the environment kind of shifts like, like we don't know, tort reform and what's going to happen with auto and collision detection and all these things. And I've talked about it a lot, so it opens up the, the opportunity to find other areas to pursue. Like if you're getting a lot of SSDI cases. I don't know.
- [13:24]
A
That's right. Yeah.
- [13:25]
B
Yeah. Well, I mean the other thing to.
- [13:26]
A
Think about is it gives you confidence in building practice areas in other jurisdictions or other practice areas per se. Is that what it lets you do is you say, hey, I, I want to make sure I have some supply of cases as I, as I enter these new markets. And you can tap into the, the marketplace on attorneyshare or you can talk to your referral network and say, hey, I'm opening up an office in Arizona. Make sure you add me to their Arizona waterfalls and becomes a lead gen source. And then conversely, to your point, when people are saying my, my marketing budget is 50,000amonth, that I'm thinking about raising it to 75,000amonth. But what do I do with cases that I might not be able to handle myself? I'd prefer not that those not to be a sunk cost and I'd prefer to be able to monetize them well to put them in attorneysherry and you can at least get some ROI on those ad spend dollars while monetizing the cases you want for your. I couldn't agree more.
- [14:29]
B
So talk to me about the fees. How does the fee structure work? Like, you know, are you paying to get these cases?
- [14:35]
A
Are you paying to put them in?
- [14:37]
B
Like, how does it all work?
- [14:38]
A
Yeah, and I think that's the beauty of it, is that it's such an approachable price for it that I think that's why people are excited. So there's no cost to join the platform ever. For anybody that's referring cases or taking cases, it's entirely different. We will never take a cut of the client's fees. The referring attorney never pays anything, full stop. So the referring attorneys can send cases directly through their waterfalls or direct referral and it doesn't cost them anything. They can put a case into the marketplace for entirely, entirely for free. The referee attorney. If they are the recipient of a direct referral or a waterfall, they do not pay anything. We don't want to disrupt any existing referral relationships that might be out there. So if you know you have your your dog bite guy in North Dakota and you don't want to shop the case or run everything, but you want the efficiency of attorneyshare and the functionality of the platform, load it up into attorneyshare, send it directly to your dog bite guy in North Dakota and it won't cost either of you a pennant. The only time anyone pays anything is if I'm a referee attorney. I submit a proposal to a case on the marketplace and that proposal is accepted. So I get the case. I'd pay a 299 administrative fee. That's it. And so I think what we've tried to build here is a platform that allows partnership and collaboration throughout the industry in a seamless manner as much as possible.
- [16:17]
B
The future of referral networking isn't about who you know. It's about how efficiently you can connect the right case with the right attorney. Every lead that comes through the door has value. It's just a matter of having the right system to capitalize on it. To learn more about attorneyshare, check out the Show Notes for more weekly insights and growing your practice. Don't forget to subscribe to Personal Injury Mastermind with me, Chris Dreyer. Have a great holiday season and I'll catch you next time.