← Personal Injury Mastermind w/ Chris Dreyer
Personal Injury Mastermind w/ Chris Dreyer
378. Best PIMoments Replay: Client First Strategy for PI Growth, Intake, + Trucking | Monty Cain
00:12:26
Episode replay: From intake systems to client strategy, discover the strategies Monty used to grow his personal injury practice.
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- [00:00]
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Most agencies sell promises. Rankings delivers proof. We've taken firms from invisible to number one in the toughest PI markets in the country. And while others are still scrambling to figure out ChatGPT, we're already optimizing for AI search. So your firm is the first answer clients see. Lead the pack, don't get left behind. Visit Rankings IO for aio, also known as AI search, and start dominating search. Today.
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I'm in the customer service business that just happens to be practicing law.
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A
That mindset drove 25% more signed cases at Kain Law without spending another dollar on ads.
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Things started to snowball because clients started referring. You don't have to go out and search for TBI cases. By asking the right question, you will enhance the value of those cases significantly. The next step was.
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A
That's Monte Cain and this is Personal injury Mastermind, Powered by Rankings IO, I'm Chris Dreier. Today, Monte reveals how looking closer at clients, at cases, at carriers, reshaped his firm and even changed the rules for every PI lawyer the country. Let's go.
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B
Went out on my own about coming up on 14 years ago. It's just me and one assistant. We're up to 12 attorneys, I think, and then I think we have close to 30 staff that are either international or local. Things started to snowball because the clients started referring. Other clients are coming back having second accidents. And, you know, we try to fight for every little penny that we can get.
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A
Once you have the leads, you still gotta market to the clients because otherwise they're not gonna leave you a good review. They're not gonna send referrals.
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B
Absolutely. There's been times over the career where, hey, I needed money. I wanted to settle a case and, well, it wasn't best for the client to settle this case. So let's keep fighting. It'll just pay you back in dividends. We mine our past clients and we also have relationships with the clinics that handle personal injury in the state and have a good relationship with them. We've built that relationship over, you know, the last 20, 30 years that I've been practicing. And it's been a win win for the client, for us, and also the clinics. Because Oklahoma's a little bit different. You know, you can't go to a primary care doctor and they'll treat you. In Oklahoma, most of the hospitals own the primary care clinics and they have brules or policies not to handle car accident. So that has developed personal injury clinics that have developed to fill that void. And so we have relationships with them to try to make sure we can get help to our clients that they need.
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A
You have to structure to be able to handle volume on the intake side. So just tell me a little bit your setup and how you think about intake.
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B
We changed our intake a little over a year ago to where we had a dedicated team. And that's made a significant difference of probably 20, 25% increase in. In our signed leads just without advertising or spending one more dollar than we were before. If you're going to be a volume firm that you're going to need a dedicated intake team. We use international people that are bilingual and then we've added CallRail and lead docket.
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A
You're part of the trucking academy. These cases are no joke. Talk to me about how you approach these types of cases up that are a whole different animal.
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B
Trucking cases are significantly different obviously than just a regular motor vehicle accident. And so, you know, we have a whole checklist of things that we need to do right off the bat. And obviously trying to get an expert out to the scene and do an inspection and make sure we get out letters for preservation of evidence to the carriers. And also get with the federal motor carrier, we send out a letter to get the past history of the trucking company. I think that's critical. You know, we've. By doing that and getting your OP1, you can find things such as, you know, if they've operated under a different name. We found what we call chameleon carriers by doing that and changes the value of the cases significantly. The thing that I try to tell my young attorneys is that, you know, in a, in a car accident case, they're wanting to get all your clients past medical so they can, you know, try to find any prior preexisting conditions or inconsistencies with what they're claiming. And essentially that's what we're doing with the commercial motor carriers that we're trying to look under the hood and find out if they've been a good operator or they have a lot of safety issues. We've changed the value on a lot of cases by going after systemic issues within that particular commercial motor carrier. And if we get a good ruling, the judge allows us to get into a lot of that. Then you expose their poor hiring practices, their failure to comply with federal motor carrier safety regulations. The more you can find on them, the more value that drives for your client.
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A
Monty's fight in Oklahoma courts made it possible for lawyers nationwide to dig into trucking company safety data. That one win reshaped how these cases are tried.
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B
Nationally. It's about split across the country is whether or not you can bring a negligent trustment claim against a motor carrier. And in Oklahoma it was unsettled law. If you went to federal court, you lost that issue. State court is mixed bag and I won that in a state court, district court and then it got taken up to the supreme court and luckily we won that issue and had a 9, 0 decision in our favor. So now that solidified the law in federal court and state court that now you can bring a individual claim against a commercial motor carrier, which has been game changing I think for a lot of clients across the state, not just for our cl, but other attorneys as well, that now they can bring that particular claim against a motor carrier. And really helps when you have a bad carrier to be able to bring that information out to the public and you know, try to make our roads safer. And before all you could do is bring a claim directly against the driver and not for the negligence of the motor carrier for hiring a bad driver or having a bad safety culture. So that was a game changer for us seven, eight years ago when we had that decision come down.
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A
How are you thinking about like the pre lit versus lit and like letter grade in these cases? Volume lends itself to complexity. If you're just getting referred the big truck case, it's like, okay, that's a letter a the 8020 principle. It's like, hey, you know, you might get 80% of your value for the year out of a small percentage of cases. Like so how do you approach that? On the upside, I'm still playing catch.
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B
Up from when I was transitioning probably from what I would call a mom and pop law practice to a more corporate based type law practice and trying to learn the business of law. So we're constantly setting up new procedures and structure, I think to try to accommodate that. We are in the process of setting up a non let and litigation system. We already had that for our assistance, but we're doing that for the attorneys now. And so the younger attorneys will be in the non litigation space, but then we're partnering them with the more seasoned attorneys on the commercial motor vehicle cases as soon as they come in. So a litigation attorney is going to be on that, a graded or whatever star rating that you may have for grading those cases. So they're going to be on that early. The other thing that we're doing is we're having weekly meetings with the staff and going over topics such as how do we initially set up the Commercial motor vehicle. What do we need? Why do we need it? Making sure we're not missing anything and trying to educate not only the young attorneys, but also the staff. I think that's helped, you know, our.
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A
Firm grow significantly, developing the young attorneys, like that immersion component. You know, I always joke it's like, you know, you can watch all the YouTube videos and read all the books about shooting a three pointer, but unless you start, you know, shooting the threes, you're, you're going to be out of luck. So getting them in, you know, sitting by the attorneys, you know, assisting with the case, I think that's the way to do it. What's the vision look like? People talk about these 1, 3, 5, 10 years, like, what's your vision for the firm of the future?
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B
Since getting involved in organizations like PILMA and some masterminds who started being more intentional about it. And also I think the ever changing space of the legal practice, which I think is going to change significantly over the next five years on the consolidation of firms, I think is coming. And so, you know, it's a thing where I think we need to be intentional about our growth. And that's what we, what we plan on. So we're probably hoping to grow, you know, double our size and probably three to five years and continue that growth. And I have two or three key associates that are all bought in all that and that will be included in that plan going forward. And so we're, we're being aggressive about trying to grow because I think we have to at this point. If you're not growing, then I think that could be a problem for a lot of firms going forward.
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A
Yeah, I couldn't agree more. Yeah, Monty, one final question. You know, this has been a lot of fun. I really enjoyed our convo. You know, where can the audience go to connect with you? They have questions or learn more.
- [09:29]
B
Sure, anybody can email me at Monty, It's M o n T y at Kanelaw that C a I n L a w hyphen okc for like oklahomacity.com and got a shout out to the thunder as well. And also they can give us a call 405-759-7400 or just go to our website as well.
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A
Growth comes from looking closer at your clients and your intake, your cases, your systems. Monte Kane built Cane Law by asking the right questions and refusing to settle for surface level answers. If you got value from this episode, subscribe to Personal Injury Mastermind for more conversations with the country's top trial lawyers and firm owners. Because the strategies to scale firms like Monty's can scale yours too.