← Personal Injury Mastermind w/ Chris Dreyer
Personal Injury Mastermind w/ Chris Dreyer
388. 600 Cases a Month Without More Ads: The System Behind Chris Keller’s Growth
00:26:29
Why operations, data, and leadership—not more marketing—unlock real scale
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- [00:02]
A
Learn legal marketing and intake from the masters of personal injury. PIMCON 2026, October 4th through 7th at Scottsdale, Arizona. Get your tickets today. PIMCON.org that's P I M C O.
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B
N. O R G. Getting more leads.
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A
Is a major factor in law firm growth. But it's not the only one.
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C
A lot of people say, I want you to make my phone ring. I want more cases. You know, it was all about marketing.
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B
Okay?
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A
Chris Keller didn't have a marketing problem.
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C
My phone was ringing. I was bringing in plenty of work. As we added more clients, we got more referrals. And as we added more referral attorneys, we got more, you know, and so it just kind of all snowballed, which was good.
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A
So with referrals coming in the door and the phone ringing, it might seem like Chris had everything he needed to keep his firm growing. But like a lot of attorneys, Chris's problem was about how to actually run his business. So how did Chris Keller help get his firm from 60 cases to almost 600amonth in just a few years? You'll just have to keep listening to find out how this is. Personal Injury Mastermind. I'm Chris Dreyer, founder and CEO of Rankings IO, the elite performance marketing agency for law firms. Today I'm talking with Chris Keller, co founder of Keller Swan Injury Attorneys. Chris took a firm from 18 employees to over 80 in just three years. And at the time of this recording, was signing nearly 600 cases a month. And guys, just a quick note here. And while after our conversation, Keller Swan was acquired by Top Dog Law, the growth we're talking about happened before the acquisition. Let's get into it.
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C
I started a firm back in 2019, and it was me and two of my buddies. And we had one assistant at the time. And every year we grew. But then By November of 22nd, we were at like 18 people. That's when things really changed for me. I got involved in a business coaching program and really decided I was going to change my life. You know, I knew that for the firm to grow, I had to grow. We went from that again, 18, 19 people in November 2022 to now 80 plus in November of 2025. In 23 and 24 was a real rapid expansions.
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B
Do you mind sharing the code? Was it. Was it Vista? Was it, you know, a pilma? Like, was it a Vistage, an eo, like what kind of coaching?
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C
So I first joined Crisp. I went to Michael Mogul's Crisp event that year was at the Mercedes Benz Superdome. David Goggins spoke that year. Like, once David Goggins gets done talking, you're like, dude, you know, you want me to run through that cement wall? Let's go. You know, like, I can. I can do it. And so by the end of the event, you know, I was like, feeling like, all right, you know, this is the answer to what I'm looking forward to continue to grow. We'd actually doubled in size from 2 1/2 million of these to 5 million when we joined Crisp. I knew to go to that kind of next level where I really wanted to go, I. I needed systems, I needed processes, I needed to know how to hire. I didn't know what KPIs were. Never heard of a KPI. You know, what is that not something.
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A
At the dinner table?
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C
Right? Like, we never talked about a vision statement or core values or none of that kind of stuff. We signed up for Chris, joined Crisp, and then, you know, some of that stuff started coming together. But then also I did another coaching program called Fireproof with Mike Morris out of Detroit, Michigan. And that really is where I kind of started focusing now more on the data. Fireproof kind of took it to a different level as it related to personal injury firms and seeing Mike Morris and how he grew a personal injury firm to be what it is today.
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B
When everybody talks about growth, they typically just think about the leads, but really it's the leads, plus it's the intake, plus it's getting higher fees. So if you could just speak to each of those, like, just the recipe is of from marketing. Like, what changed then? Like, the focus on intake and then the focus on getting more value out of your cases.
- [03:43]
C
The crazy part about it is, like, I think a lot of people come at it from, how do I make my phone ring more? Right. They want the phone ring more. So when I joined Krisp, I was doing well with cases. I was bringing in plenty of work, and it was all through a referral network. When I went to Crisp, you know, I went to Krisp, not to. A lot of people go there and say, I want you to make my phone ring. I want more cases. You know, it was all about marketing. Teach me the tricks of marketing. I want to know. And I went and said, I don't need the phone to ring. Fix my operations. Let's focus on operations. Let's focus on, you know, making that better. How do I make my systems better? How do I create a high performing culture? How do I implement accountability? How do I have difficult conversations with my staff? How do I hire, recruit, retain. Like I didn't know how to do any of that shit, you know, or at least I didn't know how to do it well then when I said, okay, now look, I'm starting to build the systems and the processes and the operational support, all right? Now we can handle more cases. Now we're able to expand our reach, so let's invest more into operations. So then I went and let's, let's invest in intake. So before I make the phone ring, let's make sure we know how to answer the phone calls. You know, how do we answer the phone calls and how are we going to answer them and who's going to answer them and what does it look like when they answer them. We overstaffed intake. We went into intake heavily. We hired an outside consultant to come in, help us really build our scripts and, you know, how are we going to grade these people and scorecards and we did secret callers and, you know, all that kind of stuff first before we made the phone ring.
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A
I want to stop here for a second and really drive this point home. Many firms try to grow by throwing money into marketing with the hopes of generating more leads. Chris grew by spending time on systems. He knew that if he poured additional leads into a broken bucket, he'd just lose money faster. So let's dig into how he partnered with Blake Swan and fixed his firm's operations and plugged those holes.
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C
So then I get introduced to Blake and Blake is all marketing, right? Like he came from a different law firm than I did. I came from a traditional firm, been around for 40 plus years. Name, reputation, they built everything on name and reputation and a great firm, right? Been around for 40 freaking years and you know, big verdicts and very successful firm, right? Blake came from the high volume marketing side of the firm and just saw it differently. So when he came in, it was like fuel to the fire. We had systems of process. We kind of figured out some of the high level stuff. He knew how to make the phone ring. And next thing you know we go from signing, you know, 60, 70, 80 cases a month went before he started to 150. Then we jumped to 200, blew past 3 and 400 to 500. And so I think last month we signed 569 cases or something. And this month I think we'll, we'll pass that. I think we're on pace to blow by 600 this month. So, you know, he really brought the know how on the marketing side and we already had the systems figured out. So it was just kind of the perfect blend of, all right, let's do this.
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B
What I love about the story is, is you kind of work backwards. Like, a lot of times, the firm is like the opposite. It's like, let's pump the leads in and let the intake and ops explode and then try to fix them. But you kind of work backwards and let you maintain the reputation. It lets you take on more work. I guess let's do the same. Let's work backwards. What levers did you pull on the upside?
- [06:42]
C
Well, so, you know, look, it's one thing when you're lean and mean. So we were lean and mean right when we first started. We had one assistant, and then we kind of grew through Covid and added some people. But I was always trying to be forward thinking. So one thing that I think I always kind of got bogged down is I left that old firm because they kind of had their way of doing it. This is the way we do it this way. We've always done it. Well, how about this way? Well, we don't want to do it that way. We've always done it this way. Like, okay, well, great. I don't want to do it that way. And so then I started my own firm, and I wasn't really sure, you know, how to do things differently, you know, and so it was like, whenever a problem would come up, it's like, well, that's the way we did it. There was just do it that way. And then you said that enough times to say, well, I thought I left there, because that's awesome, right? You're like, shit, I'm doing everything the same way they did it. What are we doing this for? And so I was like, you know, look, I got to come at this different, right? You know, one thing we did in some ways was kind of forced because we were growing so fast, and we had a small space is we were remote before. Remote was cool. We were remote before COVID And so then Covid happened. And, you know, all these places are going remote, and they're trying to stumble to figure it out, and we're already there. You know, we were already a hybrid work schedule in a remote work environment. We had people, you know, all across the state. And so we. We were lean, mean, and nimble to make those kind of changes. And so we were able to continue to grow it higher because we kind of had some that figured out. And then, you know, we went into VAs before. I think VAS were really talked about a lot in the law. Firm space. You know, we were talking about our first VA that we ever hired is still with us today. Four plus years.
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B
Wow.
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C
So, you know, pretty incredible to have a virtual assistant start with you. And she's been here for four years. You know, we added a VA and we're using virtual assistants. And maybe it's just because of who I hang out with and the circles I'm in, but, but you know, VAs are starting to catch more and more and more and more and more firms are starting to talk about it and start to use it. At least the network I'm in. But for a long time you didn't really hear about people offshoring law firm talent.
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B
Yeah, Attorney assistant, legal soft. There's several now.
- [08:29]
C
So we, we kind of had that, you know, in place. First, the hardest part about growing and scaling and we've, you know, look, I'm, I'd love to tell you we got it perfect, right? I'd love to tell you, like, hey guys, I crushed it. Made no mistakes. We, we, we nailed it. We made, you know, like we had our growing challenges and pains. But because we had leveraged vas, because we had gone heavily in vas, that did give us a little bit opportunity to make some mistakes. Right. Because we, we weren't overly leveraged. And so, you know, because that's one of your biggest costs, obviously the, one of the biggest problems in scaling is, is how do you staff the cases. You're going to sign up these cases, but you know, a lot of times in personal injury, you can't staff the cases as quickly as you could sign them. You know, because we have the delayed revenue. We sign up the case, we may not see revenue for 12 months or 14 months. And meanwhile, as you're at those cases you got the payroll is immediate. You hire that person, you gotta start paying em. So a lot of the times the trick and the hard part in scaling is how do you maintain the growth and hire. And so there's ways to do it. You can go slow, which is probably the smart way to do it, or you can go really fast, which is the way we did it, which is maybe not the smart way to do it, but we survived. We made it.
- [09:33]
B
No, that's amazing. Secret shopping, you know, the scorecards, the KPIs, you know, was that kind of.
- [09:39]
A
When you started listening to the calls on the intake where you're like, oh, that one back there, that one, we should have closed that one. Like, did you have any of those moments?
- [09:47]
C
Yeah, no, absolutely, we still do. Look you know, it's tough. I say this in all sincerity, but as long as you have people, you're going to have people problems, right? And it's not a bad thing. It's just, it is what it is. It's in any profession, in any career, as long as you're hiring people, you know, people get sick, people get, you know, divorced, people go through illness, like there's all kinds of stuff that happens. And, you know, people don't show up every single day at their best. It's just not going to happen. Now, in my personal journey, I've figured out ways to be able to show up as my best for my team and I show up here in a much better way. But there were many years, and especially many years as an employee that I didn't show up as my best self. I showed up hungover, lack of sleep, just got in a fight with my wife, my kids were, you know, mad at the world, whatever is going on. And I came to work not in the best place and, you know, didn't do the best job. And we're not machines, you know, we're, we're humans and humans are going to make mistakes. So, you know, as long as we have humans, which, you know, there's always going to be a human element to what we do. You know, there is AI and different tools now that some tasks and things can be kind of replaced or at least people are made more efficient to do a better job. But as long as you have those human elements, you know, there's going to be times no matter how well you train, no matter how high you hire, something's going to happen. So, yeah, we still have those moments where you're like, oh, you know, what's going on there? But one of the things I was going to tell you, I think that's, that has made the biggest difference. And it was number one, we implemented eos. You know, I read Traction, obviously, you know, Mike Morrison, Fireproof is a EOS firm. You know, that's Fireproof and his system. So we put together a leadership team. We started operating under in the My90 software. We started tracking our data. And once we started knowing data, wow, that's life changing stuff. Because, you know, based on my career, based on my experience, I could tell you that I believed my average fee per case to be this. I believe that I handled and settled this many cases. I believe. And I had, you know, like it was all my gut. My gut told me X, Y and Z. I had to speculate, assume based on my experience. Based on everything. I knew this is what it was. But then once we started actually tracking the data and knew the data, wow. Now you can be proactive versus reactive and you can make a lot more plans. So that was really the kind of the life altering moment is yeah, we had great systems and processes, we had ways to onboard and train, we had ways to hire, we had retention policies in place, we put good benefits packages, we had remote work, we had done all kinds of great things. But until you really know your data and get to know the data in an intimate way, you know, you still can't be that effective.
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B
On the data side. Look, and I've been 13, 14 years and specifically just legal. It's the fall off rate. It's like I've zeroed in on the fall off rate lately because everyone talks about their wanted case percentage and they always say it's oh, 92 to 5%. Which is BS because I just don't believe them, right? But anyways, 92 to 95 and then they'll talk about the average fees or the cac and it's like, well, did you count fall off? And then you start measuring that fallout percentage between. And then you're just like, oh, it's not 15%, it's 30%. It's like, oh, okay, well you gotta.
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A
You gotta leak there.
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B
You know, like one of the things that was eye opening to me during the week on your 9 to 5, your falloff rate. Because of course there's a lawyer in the office. Like you sign the retainer, you connect them to the lawyer. But if you have the intake on a Saturday or at night and they gotta wait until Monday to connect to the lawyer, your fall off rate sometimes increases without attention there. And it just like some of these crazy things that, that wasn't even in my brain, like had no awareness that that was even something.
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A
Now, now that I'm running a marketing agency, this is the stuff that I'm looking at. It's like, well, what happened here? You know, it's like it was right there for you.
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C
We saw it and we adapted to it. So again we do our data and knowing our data that you can go diagnose the problem. Well, all right now if you diagnose a problem now you can go and solve for the problem. But if you don't even know how to diagnose the problem and where the problem exists and how are you going to fix it? So you know, we were seeing that too. And so we're staff on the weekends, we have an Intake that, you know, answers the phone on the weekends. We know what our high volume parts are. So we, you know, we stagger that and then we back it up with, you know, after our call service. But we have our people, our intake agents answer on the weekend. But then also what we did, we put in place our claim certification. Again, we accomplished through VAs, right? So now our virtual assistants, we can get them to work Saturdays and Sundays. We can get them to work nights and weekends. You know, with a time change, they can be on in our hours. Work our hours. So in our claims verification department, they work the weekends too. Because we saw that happen, right? We would sign up a case at 4:00 on a Friday. Nobody would call them until Monday. You call them on Monday, they've hired another attorney. You know, you're like, what? What the hell happened? We, you know, we signed a contract, so we were seeing that, right? And so now we have our claims verification department working Saturdays and Sundays. So now they, if there's calls on Friday, they're getting a call Saturday morning. And these people are like, wow, you guys are open on Saturday? Yes, you know, absolutely. Da, da, da. And now they're getting caught on Saturday, they're getting caught on Sunday. They're getting set up for treatment on Saturday and Sunday. We're getting them to the doctors and help them find doctors and do the kind of things that they need on Saturdays and Sundays. And now that level of service is just a different level. They're getting a text message, they're getting an email, they're getting a phone call and now they're locked in. So now that fall off rate's gone down and we still have a high fall off rate because, you know, whether it's popular or not, you know, our call center is essentially a one call close. You know, we're signing every case and then, you know, we, we know we have a big fall off rate over 30 days because we'll sign up, there's no coverage. We'll sign it up. The liability is not there. We'll sign it up.
- [15:20]
B
You know, I think that's smart. I think that's smart, like hook em tainer then, then drill down.
- [15:26]
C
Yeah, yeah, we have a high fall off rate, but we expect it. So then, but once you know your data, then you know, is it higher this month versus that month? And there was something off this month versus that month? Right? Cause then you can look back and say, okay, well we are understaffed. That's the problem. We lost more cases because the staff wasn't there to make the phone calls. But you can see the trends. And no, but if your fall off rate is always here and you're there, you're okay. But if you're not going too far one way or another, then you can kind of account for it. But if you don't even know what the number is, you know, you don't know if you're doing good or bad, you don't know what's normal. You know, even knowing settlements and knowing that like June is a, is historically a lower month. So then the following June, if you look and say, well, I think June's historically lower month, but you don't know what your last June was, well, is June this month better or worse? Or how much worse is it? What percentage are we off? You know, so when you're building all that out, knowing those trends, knowing that data really lets you. Okay, okay, we're, yeah, it's 30%, but we're okay with 30%. Why are we okay with 30%? Because we signed 600 cases and that's very eye opening.
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B
And did you, when you joined Fireproof, did they give you, like, here's what your nationwide average for wanted rate should be, here's your average fee, like, I.
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A
Don'T know, time on desk.
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B
Did they give you some of those numbers?
- [16:35]
C
100%. Mike Morris opens up his books and shows you they're an open book. They show you all their data, right? So you see a firm that's doing $300 million in gross settlements and you see their head counts and the, and their staffing models and all that. You know, you get to see how this firm operates. Now obviously they're in Michigan, I'm in South Florida. And you know, there may be, there's some things that are, I can't hire an attorney in South Florida for what they hired attorney in Michigan. So maybe we're going to have things off. But, but I can sit down with John and talk about it. All right, well, let's, let's walk through my scenario versus yours. But then they give you the data that you need to track. So they're telling you, like, here's the things that you really need to know. Like you need to know these, these data points. And so then the next step that they just added and has been, you know, eye opening to me is mastermind groups. So now I'm a part of the mastermind group. It's grown. I think we have, you know, 12 law firms from across the country in it and we're responsible for coming to our mastermind meetings with our data. And so they gave us a list and I think it's like 150 plus data points. Right. You know, to be in the mastermind, you have to be able to track that data. And a lot of firms are just frankly don't know how to do it and can't do it. And you know, we invested in a data engineer. I have an in house data engineer. His entire job is Power BI dashboards and collecting data provided me with data.
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B
So you have. So, so hold on, we gotta dig into that. Okay, okay. So I have, you know, in the SaaS world it's rev ops, right? Your go to market strategy, your integrations, your CRM, your dashboards. You mentioned Power bi. I don't know what the hell Power BI is. Is that the equivalent of like a domo? Is it lookers?
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C
Exactly. Okay, same thing.
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A
So just for our audience, because this is unique, right? We do a lot of these fit you kind of casually, what is, Tell me, the data engineer, what do they do?
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B
What, what? Cause it's clearly a ton of value.
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C
Yeah. So you know, obviously again, there's value to different organizations. So I knew like, hey, I need data, you know, I have to be able to, I have to be able to get data. And I knew that, you know, hey, I'm probably not the best person in the firm to go get the data. Right. And probably not the best use of my time and I'm probably not the most skilled at it. And I looked around, I'm like, well, I don't know that I have anybody else that can do this at a high level. So I was like, we need to go hire somebody that can do this. Like the only way we're going to get to where we want to go is by knowing our data. So I went to Crisp and I said, hey, look, I want to recruit a data engineer. And the cool thing about that was, is like, you know, and I talked to Chris a few times in the business coach. He was. I never hired a data engineer before, so how do I know what to look for? You know, like, who am I even looking for? Right? It's like for you to go hire somebody that does social media or SEO, like that's easy for you, right? It's like in your realm of what you do. For me to go hire a social media coordinator, I don't know what I'm looking for, you know, so they're like, why try to go recruit and hire somebody that you don't even know what you're looking for. So they did the recruitment of that person for me and they landed me an A plus, you know, rock star who's been with me now for over a year and has just done incredible things for us. We get the final say, we get the final interview. But they did all the heavy lifting and they put him through their hiring funnel, which we also have as well for our staff, but they put them through a hiring funnel. And so once they get to that hiring funnel, you've, you've gotten rid of a lot of the bad, the people who are not going to work the cream of the crop kind of rise in that funnel. And so this guy, you know, came to us and he's been amazing. So, yeah, so power bi is just like a domo. It just has a little bit more flexibility, smaller price point in a lot of ways too. It was cheaper. And again, I talk to my data engineer all the time. I just had my, my weekly one on one with him and most of the time he talks above my head, right? I'm like, hey, Alex, remember, talk to me like I'm a third grader, you know, like, I have no idea what you just said, man. Sounds great, but let's break it down. So that was a critical hire for us because it gave us access to, to the data that we had to be able to present and show to the groups. And you know, obviously what, what, what gets measured gets improved. And then what the mastermind group does is what gets measured gets improved. It gets improved, but what gets measured and made public gets drastically improved. So now all of a sudden I have to track the data and you know, I'll never forget about Arizona for one of the summits. And Mike Morris always goes around and says, hey, you know, what are you committing to by our next meeting? And I said, I'll tell you what, I'm not going to be the last place, right? I was like, you know, we're going to improve this data so that we're not in last place. And so that's what we did. You know, we went to work, we knew what needed to be improved. And because we knew our data and we went out to work on it. And for us, the hardest part through growth was profitability, you know, and so, you know, we made a concerted effort to, to dive in, focus on, you know, making this a very profitable business. And you know, again, we, we made a drastic improvement year over year and you know, and keep making improvements on that because again, we're looking at it. We know what it is. And we know, you know, the things that we're gonna have to do in order to, to fix it.
- [21:05]
B
So man, you've got me pumped up after this one. Thank you for sharing that. That's amazing. What a great story. This has been a ton of fun. I got just a couple final questions. What do you see for the future? Like what's some things you're excited about and then just how can people reach you?
- [21:20]
C
So look, when we went down this road of growth and building a firm, I knew that the legal market, legal industry was changing. You just hear about it, you read about it, all those types of things, you know, non attorney ownership in Arizona and D.C. and Colorado, to think and to believe that lawyers are going to be insulated against it and think that, you know, we're somehow we're better than the doctors and orthodontics and dentists and all these other people are getting swallowed up. Like it's coming for this industry in some way or form, you know, through consolidation, through M&As, through PE, through whatever it is, there's money to be made. They're going to find their way into it. And so, you know, when Blake and I went down this road to grow a firm, you know, the conversation was, you know, either A, we want to build the firm that we can then go and acquire other firms and continue to grow and expand our footprint and be that firm of the future before thinking leverage, AI leverage. Virtual assistants do the things to really be, you know, an amazing firm, remote work all the, you know, all those things are going to separate us, differentiate ourselves to be market leaders and industry leaders, be innovators in the space or two, put ourselves in a situation that we could be acquired and we figured on the way to number one, number two would present itself. And so, you know, that's what we're working towards. We're working hard to make sure that we build something that is either A, that we can go and be those industry leaders and we're taking over the world, or B, somebody's going to come talk to us and present an opportunity to us that gives us the opportunity we're looking for. Now it has to be the right opportunity, but for people to like bury their head in the sand and think this is not happening or this is not coming, like it, it's going to be commonplace before long. Just like, you know, virtual assistants wasn't a big thing, it's more commonplace. AI was like, you know, AI has been around forever. Like people forget, like it's been around since like, what, 1970. It's just not something that you know. So all this stuff is happening, and either you're out front or you're being left behind. And we always want to be out front. So we're, we're looking at all that stuff. We're talking about it. We're having those conversations. We're in the rooms where the people have those conversations so that, you know, we're, we're hopefully industry leaders in the space and we're the trendsetter. So if people want to connect, I have callchriscolor.com, which is my personal branded website. I have a blog there. I have a podcast as well called the First Lap podcast. I was blessed to have you and grateful to have you as a guest on.
- [23:30]
B
Yeah, thank you so much for having me. I had a lot of fun.
- [23:32]
C
And then the book. So call chriscoller.com, chris. Colorswan.com is my email. I can talk about this stuff all day, every day. Love it more than anything in the world. It's what really excites me, gets me going. So please reach out. I'd love to have a conversation.
- [23:49]
A
When you fix the operation bucket, the marketing can fill up without worry of leakage. This is how we approach partnerships at Rankings. But don't just turn on the faucet. We make sure you capture every drop. If you patch the holes and you're ready to fill up the bucket, find us@ Rankings IO. I'm Chris Dreyer. Thanks for listening to Personal Injury Mastermind.