← Personal Injury Mastermind w/ Chris Dreyer
Personal Injury Mastermind w/ Chris Dreyer
390. After the Phone Rings: Managing Leads at Volume w/ Rob Levine
00:32:27
Routing, training, and decision-making in high-volume PI growth
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- [00:00]
A
On the East Coast, Rob Levine earned the nickname the Heavy Hitter. Over more than 24 years, Rob has helped more than 50,000 people recover more than $2 billion in personal injury compensation and disability benefits.
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B
If you're advertising for Big Truck, the group, who are your best people always designed to take your Big Truck cases. So if you're running pay per click ads, you can make that a call group. And that call group only goes to people who are qualified to take it. And you never deliver it to somebody. EL.
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A
Welcome to Personal Injury Mastermind. I'm Chris Dreyer, CEO of Rankings IO, the performance marketing agency for elite law firms. Rob Levine and Associates runs one of the most sophisticated intake operations in the industry. Automated phone operators, 24. 7 coverage, real time data, sales discipline applied to legal services, all built to make sure leads never leak.
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B
And so I hired the training and development manager from T Mobile. She had been there 13 years because I wanted to build, you know, a real academy. You want be a case manager and you go to my academy for 12 weeks. It's eight hours a day, five days a week, full time.
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A
But it all starts with getting the phone to ring in the first place. Rob and I start the conversation with marketing. Here's what works for him. Let's go.
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B
Marketing today is different than it was 25 years ago when I first started. Right. Digital is out of control. Then you have streaming on top of that. Now we have AI. Right. So AI as far as SEO is concerned. And coming up in ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, all of the other AI services. So it's definitely changing. So we're trying to stay ahead of the curve with everything we do. Television, radio, billboards. Right, that's our traditional staple. And then obviously we do lsa, we do pay per click, Facebook, Instagram, lots of social. And then now we're trying to make sure that we're showing up in all of the AI searches.
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C
What's your thoughts on the streaming? You doing any Amazon prime stuff or the Amazon ads on Prime? You doing any ott Programmatic?
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B
Yeah, we're doing everything other than Netflix. So Paramount, Hulu, Amazon, we pretty much got accepted by everyone and we're doing it direct, but not Netflix. I think we don't spend enough apparently for Netflix to approve us. So we're everywhere but Netflix.
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C
The one that's caught my attention lately is the Amazon's dsp. The Amazon ads. I've been watching shows lately and I guess they just implemented the ads because now I'm sitting through these two minute periods and I'm like, oh gosh, I got to get on there and upgrade. And I feel like GEICO is on friggin every other commercial block. I mean they're really saturating prime right now.
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B
Yeah, I wonder how it's, you know, people, they've accepted, right. As part of traditional tv you have to watch commercials. That's just the way it is. But with OTT streaming, like people for a long time have cut the cord, gotten away from traditional and not been using ads. And so now we're, I wondered how long it would last. Right. Obviously everybody wants to make money and selling ads is the way to do it. So I don't know how people look at the advertisers if they're annoyed, right? So like you're just kind of commenting geico. Oh, they're there all the time because you know, if you're on too often or you're not in the right places, people can not necessarily have a good response.
- [03:31]
C
I think maybe for me at least when I'm thinking of the geico, it's like the frequency like, I don't know, like should they change the commercial? Because it was the same commercial every time. But I tell you what, I recognized and I knew it was gonna, oh, here's this GEICO commercial. But like if it was a different one, like would I have to recall and like think like, oh, is this a GEICO commercial? Until you see the gecko.
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B
Right?
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C
So it's kind of an interesting thing on the frequency component.
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B
And the question is, right at the end of the day all they care about is the brand. So when you associate getting insurance, you think of geico. So the question is, is the high frequency of repetition creating that top of mind awareness? Is there a negative stigma and you're annoyed? And if you even have top of mind awareness, are you going to choose Geico or the name pops in your head and that's going to be where you shop.
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C
The one thing too, just unlike the TV versus radio, I've always heard like a, you know, for your investment you get a lot more frequency on radio. And I talked to Russell, you know, he came to Pimcon and he was talking about mixing creative on TV and boards, but on radio he just sticks with the jingle and like runs the same. It's very consistent with his radio message. And any thoughts on that? Just the different medium on the audio component.
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B
I think the benefit of TV is you can really create your personality, right? Because they see you, right? You can do crazy shit. You can demonstrate who you are, what you are what you stand for and you can create that celebrity status. Right. So we do the super bowl ad, we do the World Series. Not that I think the World Series has the impact it used to have, but. Right. So you pick these top of line shows and you really get yourself out there as a celebrity. You can't do that in radio, in my opinion. You can build lots of frequency, you can get people to remember your name, but it's not the same. You can't build a celebrity status on radio. I don't think you can't build your personality. So I agree. Like having that repetition so that it's just another way to reinforce. Just like a billboard, it's static. You're not really building your personality but it's a constant reminder when people are driving by it. Oh yeah, that guy, Rob Levine. So I would equate radio and Billboard similar from the fact that it's just tremendous repetition and really building that brand. That name or the number. We have a jingle so it cuts both ways. I'm not really a believer in the phone number anymore. Right. Because you know, we just switched our jingle and our phone number actually. So I somebody offered me Rob Wins for short dollars and I bought it. So we have 888 Rob wins. And I use it not because I want someone to memorize my phone number but because that's our whole new thing. Right. Is the Rob Wins. And I like the message. So it's cool. It's a good number, it's a good strategy. And it's just we're changing it from call 800-Law-1222. Right. So the jingle before the heavy hitter is the one for you. The way people use their cell phones today, they don't need to know my phone number, they need to know my name. If you know my name, you can search me anywhere in the country and I come up first for my name. So that's what we really drive home. We stopped using our old phone number 800-Law-1222 on billboards and everywhere because we just drove the name. But now we're driving the phone number because I like the message Rob Wins and reinforcing the new jingle. And it just kind of ties together.
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C
Yeah. That outcome of winning and it's congruent. I like it. It kind of just putting it everywhere. So next, you know, like I mentioned, I watched one of your videos. I thought it was fantastic. On intake, McCready was in the crowd. Michael Cowan was in the crowd. A lot of folks that I recognized. So I guess, you know You've made that statement. It's like what you do afterwards. Like, I really want to get granular on some things here, but big picture, do you think that just this is just an absent thought? Like people think about marketing and they just don't think about intake enough?
- [07:37]
B
It depends on the size of the law firm. Right. So smaller law firms, you have the owners really still engaged in the active practice of law. And so it's very hard for people to switch their hat from CEO, right, to operator. And so to get, as you said, granular and really know your numbers and make sure you're hitting your marks. Because at a smaller law firm, you don't have someone who's head of marketing, head of finance, head of hr, head of intake. You're doing a lot of those things yourself. And so it's hard, I think, for. And even for me, it was hard as we were coming up. Right. I started the law firm just me and then it was me and one, me and two, me and three. And so it's hard to be able to manage everything. And so, yeah, I think intake is one of the things that kind of fall by the wayside because lawyers focus on law. So they're looking at their process if they're wearing their operator hat and they're looking at how they're running their cases and the dollars coming in. And I think they just assume, well, the phone is ringing, we're answering it. So you know, what really is left for us to do? An intake.
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C
Yeah. On my end, you know, with the marketing, it's like, oh, yeah, we have an after hours, It's X. And I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa. That doesn't mean you're done. You know, like one of the things that you mentioned, when the call comes in, it's not round robin, it's a, B or C. Did you mean like, hey, I've rated this intake person as my A plus, and if that person's not on the phone, they get it.
- [09:12]
B
If I have 10 people sitting at a table and each one of them has a phone in front of them and I have one call coming in, there's no question that I know I want my best closer to answer the phone. Why would I give it to my worst closer? I have 10 people I want to feed my superstar every time I can when they're available because they have the highest closing rate. And so to that specific part of. There's more to what you said, but 100%, you nailed it. If I have a choice, I want to go to my superstar. So we rate everyone in the intake department. And when the phone rings, when I say I don't want it to round robin, even if we take the rating piece and put it aside, I don't want it to round robin because people look around to see who's going to answer. You're available, the phone's ringing to you, you're answering. So when the call comes in from technology, it scrubs against the case management system. No matter what case management system you have, you should tie your phone system to your case management system so it recognizes one of three things. Either the phone number is not recognized in the system, which automatically means to me there's a high likelihood it's a new client. So this call goes into intake. Intake. Those calls never get put on hold. And we direct the call based on two things. Number one, because we do more than just PI, right? We do social, VA and PI. If I can identify where the caller came from, right, Based on using a DID number. So I know it's coming from my campaign for social. I want someone in social who does social calls answering that call and I want somebody who's the best rated person in that group to answer the call. So number one, I want to make sure only the calls that I think are new clients go to intake. So that's group one. Group two is going to be, let's say, vendors. So anyone who's a vendor, I don't want to waste manpower on at all. They're commercial people, they're used to on ivr, so they go to the ivr. Thanks for calling. Rob Levine, Law. If you know the number of the person you're calling, blah, blah, blah. And they self direct to where they need to go and it works for them because that's just what they're used to. I would never use an IVR with a client. Lots of law firms have this initial answering system. Never use an IVR for a client. For a commercial person, absolutely. So if the number matches geico, as you said, they're going to my ivr. The third group obviously are existing customers. So existing customers, I know who they need to talk to when the phone rings because I know the status of their case. So when the phone rings, it searches it, identifies it as a client and looks at the status of where they are. And then it delivers the phone call to that person, whether it needs to go to the case manager, to the attorney, to the finance group. So I'm not bothering reception and I'm not bothering intake. And then if you go Somewhere and you want a person, you hit zero, then you go to my reception group. So that's the idea.
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C
That was killer. So I guess it's like set up like a waterfall, you know, if you John is available, when he's your best and then it shows he's up in the queue. Just the execution of this, even for myself, who I consider myself more tech savvy, it seems like a little overwhelming. Is this like, tied to, you know, Ring Central or Amazon Connect, or is this start with your CRM, your lead docket, Salesforce? Like, how would someone that's listening want to even approach this?
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B
Yep. So Ringcentral, good example, because that's my phone system. But it doesn't have to be Ringcentral. If you have Zoom or any other phone system that has the ability, Right. To just tie into an API and connect. If it doesn't, you should dump your phone system. Then you're going to tie it to your case management system. So as long as your case management system is open source, which almost all of them are, they almost all have APIs. And the API is going to let you either pull or call the right information. Right. So I need to know the match the phone number, and I need to know, is it a client or is it a vendor? There's not a lot of information I need. If you have lead docket sitting on top of your system, you're going to want to do all three, right? Because the phone rings, it'll go to lead docket first. So lead docket is going to tell me if it's a client or not. Because if you're using lead docket, every client's listed in lead docket. And then once it becomes a client or a lead, then it pushes to the case management system and then we open it. So let's say you have lead docket on top of filevine, so it'll scrub lead docket first. If it doesn't scrub, find it in lead docket, it's done. It identifies that as a new client and it's going into the system. If it sees the number in lead docket, then it's going to deep dive into filevine and say, is it a vendor? Is it an existing client? What is it? And then it's going to direct.
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C
You've got your inbound, you've got your, your vendors, and then you got your existing clients. Like, where does outbound fit into this? Is it pushed back to the intake side on the front end? Cause I've talked to some firms and they'll segment the inbound and the outbound, the chasers, or maybe even have them on the chats or the. The form fills. Like, how do you think about that?
- [14:34]
B
Yeah. So first, the goal is one call. That's all right. The absolute goal for the law firm and the intake person should be, I'm going to immediately build a relationship with this person. They're going to trust me. I'm going to qualify their case. I want it or I don't want it. If I want it, I'm going to electronically sign them. And my goal is to overcome any objection they have and sign them in one call. That has to be the mentality, right, to close on that first call. Because the minute we go to outbound, as you said, we're chasing them. Well, when you chase somebody, there's no way you're going to close as many people as you did when you had them on the phone. Right. Because I've got you your mind. You made a choice. There's a reason you're talking to my firm, whether you like my marketing, whether somebody referred you. That's the highest ability and chance to close that person. You can't close on that call, and you have to start chasing them automatically. Every day, your odds of converting them go down. So the answer is, as part of that CRM, whether you're using lead docket or you have it built into your case management system, you should have for each one of those things a cycle of how often you're going to call them, how often you're going to text them, and if you believe in email still, whether or not you think that works. And so the system should just be doing it automatically. I don't have an outbound team. My entire team is open, whether it's inbound or outbound. So again, let's sit at that table. And we have 10 people and nobody's doing anything. So the system is automatically looking at what is the next person we have to follow up with. So it has a list of people in the CRM that says, okay, today we have to call this person back. So it's going to identify that there's an intake person available. It's going to decide who has the highest close rate, who's my best person that's available. It's going to then pull that, delivers it from the CRM to the front. The ringcentral swings by, grabs it, and then delivers it to the next available rep. That rep sees the screen pop of who it is, what the information is, and then the call is made.
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C
Let'S say you got a, a big truck, a U Haul, anything that could be classified as commercial on the intake. Do you have someone listening that barges in and takes over? Do you like, how do you treat those scenarios? Because I'd imagine, you know, if your bottom person in the queues on that call, you probably don't want the newbie, you know, answering the big truck case, like what happens in those scenarios.
- [17:03]
B
So if you're advertising for big truck, you can treat it just as I described how we have social VA and PI, right? You could have the group who are your best people always designed to take your big truck cases. So if you're running pay per click ads and things like that that are specifically geared towards those ads, you can make that a call group. And that call group only goes to people who are qualified to take it and you never deliver it to somebody else.
- [17:32]
C
Let's talk about Rob Levine Legal Solutions. So tell our audience, you know, like I said, an amazing video on YouTube. I found out, I think it was about 40 minutes long, very detailed, very instructive. I think you even did Secret Shop and maybe did a scorecard where everybody in the room, which was really fun. Tell me about Rob Levine Legal Solutions.
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B
Sure. So basically there's three solutions that we market. One is our record retrieval company. The other is our academy and staffing. And the third is the mastermind. So the record retrieval company that I've had for a long time, right, because we created our own record retrieval company for my law firm and ran it just for my law firm for many, many years. And then I decided, you know, we've really mastered this now let's offer it to other law firms. So what's cool? There's two things that are super cool about our record retrieval company. The first is it's 100% integrated to the case management system. So we're integrated with filevine, Litify, Casepier, Smart Advocate, Needls, Clio, Neos. Right now we're doing practice Panther and we're adding Smokeball. So pretty much, you name it, we're integrated. And when I say 100% integration, if you look at the process map for collecting a record, there's 16 steps. And so if you hire us, you do the first three things, which means you pick up the phone and talk to your client. You enter into your case management system the client's information and the providers they treated with, and you drop in a HIPAA form. That's it, you're done. My system is going to come in. It's Going to scrape your system. It's going to pull that information once an hour, eight hours a day, every day. We grab anything that's new that's in there, we process it, we get the records in, we make sure they're verified, and then we're going to send it back into your document storage system. So we OCR them, we compress them and we deliver them. We send you an email to let you know the records arrived. We also take the costs and expenses, we deliver that into your expense tab in your system, and then we deliver all the notes and everything we're doing in your system. So you know 100% all the time. What's happening? The newest thing we're rolling out, which will probably roll out in three weeks, will be ehr. So what's super cool about EHR is the electronic health records, right? So all of the large hospitals are on EHR now. And then a lot of other facilities are. There's probably, if I had to guess, about 400,000 providers in the United States that now have EHR portals. So we're connected now to 80% of the EHR portals in the country. What's super cool about it for the law firms is everybody thought high tech was really cool. So when hitech came out, right, you could act in the client's shoes and collect the record and get it the old way and they'd send it, but you're still fighting and they charge you six bucks. EHR is free. Zero. The medical provider cannot charge for the medical record. There is no charge. And I get you the record in one day. So it works exactly as it did before I come in. I scrape your system. My system identifies whether or not it's an EHR provider or not. We send a text to the client, the client authorizes me collecting the record, and that's it. We scrape the information from the portal, we go through the records, we make sure it's organized and set up for the law firm, and then we deliver it into the law firm system. That's going to be a game changer for us. There's only one other company in the entire country that does it besides us. And they charge $20 more a record. I charge 4,995. They charge 20 bucks more than I do. So it's, it's going to be great.
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A
Marketing, ad spend systems, all the operational work upstream. The phone rings, and this is the moment everything leads to how the phone gets answered matters just as much as who answers it. You don't want that call fumbled after.
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B
All that effort, our law firm is big on training. So when we decided to start doing international staffing and we were hiring people for us, I had friends that said to me, hey, could you get me people? And at first I'm like, yeah, we're not really. It's not the plan. And so enough people asked and I'm like, okay, I guess that's going to become the plan. And so I hired the training and development manager from T Mobile. She had been there 13 years because I wanted to build, you know, a real academy. Not just. You see, there's lots of companies that say they can get you staff in another country. And I own companies in Colombia and Peru, but they're not trained. So we built an academy. So if you want to be a case manager, we hire you in Colombia or Peru and you go to my academy for 12 weeks. It's eight hours a day, five days a week, full time as I go into college. Well, way more intense than college. It's like a semester long, though, but it's full time. So there's a learning management system. You're taking exams, you're doing videos, you have live instructors. Like, it's full time. You learn so much information. And then, you know, we wipe out probably 20% of the people we hire because they just don't hit the standards we're looking for. And then we graduate and we certify you. I either put you in my law firm if I'm hiring at that moment, or I'm placing you in someone else's law firm around the country. So what's great is the time zone is only different by an hour. So they're really working the same hours we are. They're all bilingual. I only hire people that speak great English and obviously they all speak fluent Spanish. So it's been fantastic. Like, it's really been great. If you're going to hire internationally and you're going to do it through a regular company that doesn't train, you have to be able to have a plan to train those people. So it's also having the right culture in your law firm. Right? So if you don't treat them as part of your team, whether they're international or us, whether they're remote or they're in office, they all have to be part of one team. So we try to coach the law firms that hire from us how to have that right culture to really make it very symbiotic, because otherwise you just have a lot of turnover. Turnover costs law firms a lot of money.
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C
Couldn't agree more. So you got the staffing and it is the academy kind of the joint or is it separate from.
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B
No, it's together. So if you want to hire someone for me, they go through my academy and then I place them in your law firm and the academy is free for you. So I don't start charging my clients until I place someone in their law firm.
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C
Got it, Got it. Amazing. Amazing. And you're putting excellent content out there on YouTube and I really encourage the audience to go check it out. I mean, it's a lot of times this type of content would be gated. And you know, I typed in. I don't remember what I typed in, legal intake, coaching or something of that nature. And I found your video. It was. There wasn't a ton of content, but it was really valuable for me personally.
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B
Thank you.
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C
Yeah. Let's continue on. On the. Just a little bit more on the firm side on just kind of the future. And how do you structure operations? What are you seeing for success? Being a larger scale operation of like the pre lit versus litigation components, the handoff, does one person, full cycle, run the case from start to finish. And, you know, talk to me about just operations and how you think about, you know, growing, building a firm built to scale, first of all.
- [24:52]
B
So my firm has pre litigation and litigation separated. I think it's very difficult for someone to be able to do both. I think there truly are separate skill sets if you're going to really maximize your medicals. Right. So the goal of a law firm obviously is to help that client get as much money as they can. And so if you don't really focus on talking to the client about their injuries and their treatment and really do what I would call medical management, then you're not going to get the value out of that case. Right. So when you see the AI company that only does your demand for you at the end, right. And then they tell you, oh, it's the best demand ever. You missed the entire first 75 or 80% of the process. Right. It's the investigation upfront. Right. And you have to be able to do the investigation. So you set up liability and then it's medical management. Right. And then all the other things that come along with that case, that's a specialist, Right. The person, the people who, the attorneys who do pre litigation and case managers who do pre litigation and do it well, they don't get enough credit. They. They are very good at what they do. Right. And so then litigation obviously is. Don't need to explain that. That's right. Another group of specialists who really know how to litigate. So for us, we separate them and then, you know, we monitor everything. We have KPIs throughout the entire process. So we're watching all of the stages and making sure that we're not bottlenecking, we're maximizing them. We pay bonuses, obviously, to the case managers based on different KPIs and goals that they have to hit. So we keep driving it forward.
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C
On the KPI side, do you have like your own operating system or you're doing like a scaling up? And there's the US and then there's some other. There's the Rockefeller habit stuff like how do you think about the framework of the business?
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B
So we use Smart Advocate as our case management system, and we run lots of reports in there. On top of that, we use something called Domo, which ties into everything, right? It ties into our phone system, it ties into QuickBooks, it ties into Google, it ties into Smart Advocate. So we're pulling all of those data sets into one place and then running reports. And people have different dashboards that they can look at and get reports emailed to them so they can follow. So it takes Smart Advocate and puts it on steroids, right? It just superpowers all of our reports. We use Monday.com, so we use Monday to build out projects and a lot of other reports and goals and KPIs. And obviously we're using AI. So that's the future, right? So I'm a part owner in a company called Faster Outcomes. We are in the medical and legal. We do both in legal. We do personal injury. It's really my forte, what I'm focused on for faster Outcomes. But we also do family law and we do corporate. So the idea of where I said AI system does your demand, right. I'm building the opposite, right? I want our AI system to help a case manager, help a lawyer run the entire case, so that we're right now integrating. The integration will probably be done with our first system. It'll be Smart Advocate because that's what I'm on. So selfishly, I said, hey, let's integrate with Smart Advocate first. So faster outcomes in Smart Advocate will tie together and so there'll be bilateral communication. So I put all my information into my case management system. My goal is that you never leave your case management system so you can work there. And then the extraction goes into the AI system. Faster Outcomes, it ingests it. And then there are all of these playbooks. So based on the status of where you are in the case. It's running the playbooks, which is basically nothing other than groups of prompts that are pre built. So for the investigation, it pulls in the police report, it pulls in pictures and then it's going to analyze it and it's going to say what you're missing, what you need, what you're looking for. If you have a slip and fall, it's going to give you the building codes, it's going to look at the pictures and tell you what I need for more information. What am I missing? Medical management is going to say you have a potential TBI based on the rescue port in the emergency room. This is what they should be referred to. This is what we should be looking for. This is the treatment that you need. And so just it keeps running the case and helping you maximize everything.
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C
Yeah. So you're basically tech enabling with AI. So you're just enhancing your individual labor's ability for their throughput. Each individual's throughput. So this has been amazing. Rob, thank you for sharing all this information. Our audience, what's the best way to get in touch with.
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B
You could just email me. It's my name so it's Rob.
- [29:30]
C
Roblevine.com Amazing Rob, thanks for coming on the show.
- [29:34]
B
My pleasure. Thanks for having me.
- [29:40]
A
This episode is a reminder that marketing doesn't stop when the phone rings. If you want marketing that fills your pipeline, go to Rankings IO. This is Personal Injury Mastermind. Subscribe so you never miss an episode. See you next time.