← Personal Injury Mastermind w/ Chris Dreyer
Personal Injury Mastermind w/ Chris Dreyer
415. AI Can Write the Lawsuit: Why Client Service Is the Future of Your Firm w/ Brian LaBovick
00:26:21
Brian LaBovick reveals how to protect your margins from tech-enabled settlement mills by making elite client communication and organic brand equity your ultimate competitive moats.
Loading summary
Transcript64 lines
- [00:01]
A
Hey, Chris Dreyer here. If you want to sign better cases and move them faster, join me April 16th for a free live session with Even Up. We'll show you how top personal injury firms are using AI to increase case velocity and profitability without adding headcount. Save your spot@ Rankings IO Webinars. The traditional law firm model is under attack.
- [00:24]
B
I know a business model that has over 2,000 cases in house. They have three lawyers.
- [00:30]
C
Wow.
- [00:31]
B
And they roll right. Client success manager who handles 500 cases.
- [00:36]
A
If you think your only competition is the firm down the street, think again. The game is shifting and overhead is getting slashed by new tech enabled players
- [00:44]
B
like two or three paralegals that are all overseas by the way. And they all run the paperwork just to get them to settlement. And now they're using AI so that they have the demands redone for them. They don't have to worry about that.
- [00:56]
A
If artificial intelligence and overseas talent can't process a case for a fraction of the cost, how does your firm stay competitive to stay highly profit profitable? Yet to prove why a human lawyer is worth paying for? Today we're diving into how to protect
- [01:08]
C
your margins and prove your true usefulness
- [01:10]
A
by delivering an experience that machines can't touch. This is Personal Injury Mastermind. I'm Chris Dreyer, founder and CEO of Rankings IO, the elite performance marketing agency for personal injury law firms. Rankings get you cases. Today we're joined by Brian Lubovic who is doing incredible work over at the Lubovic Law Group. Brian is thriving in the hyper competitive Florida market. He's here to give us a masterclass on future proofing your firm. We're breaking down the massive attrition rates of third party lead gen, why brand equity is your ultimate insurance policy and how to use tech to keep your attorneys strictly accountable to the client experience. I'm also beyond pumped to announce Brian is speaking at live at pimcon this year. He'll be talking all about getting those pivotal five star reviews for your practice. You're absolutely not going to want to miss that. So grab your tickets to hear him drop gems just like he does today. Let's get into it.
- [02:08]
C
We got to start with a win. What's a win? Something you're fired up about for the biz.
- [02:12]
B
I'll tell you a win. So I brought in my lawyers the other day, my personal injury team. So we've got a bunch of lawyers in the firm and previous to that I had gone to AI and I had gotten a prompt that gave me 15 causes of action in a 15 sentence fact pattern. And I gave it to them and I said, you guys have 4 minutes and 10 seconds to tell me all the things that we can sue on every cause of action in that fact pattern. And I let them all sit there and read it, right? And they read it and I said, okay, guys, now tell me all the things that are there. And they got collectively 11 of the 15 after, you know, we talked about, I let them have time and all of that. I said, okay, I want you to see something in the four minutes that it took you to read it and then the 10 minutes that we had to talk about flushing out the issues. I got this fact pattern from, you know, AI. I got 15, not 11 causes of action out of it. And I printed 15 complaints, 15 interrogatory, 15 sets of interrogatories, 15 sets of requests for production, 15 sets of requests for admission, 15 summonses and 15 notice of depositions. I said, I did my whole case on all 15 causes of actions better than you guys got 11 in the same time period. I don't need you. Why do I need you? Why do I need you? You all need jobs and I don't need you to do this much work in four minutes. I can do that alone and I want to do it, but I only need one of you to do it. What am I going to do? And they looked at me and they were like, client contact. And I said, bingo, you hit the nail on the head. So now I want to ask you a second question. I did your case reviews last week, and I don't do case reviews, but twice a year I have other people that do the case reviews. So every once in a while I pop in. And the reason I pop in is that I know that it gets them honest on client contact. So we use litify. And Litify lets me see how many client calls they make. Right? They were collectively 175 calls behind on their client calls when I did the case review. And I looked at it that day, they were 42 calls behind. So I said, I want to know something. If client contact is the key to your job security, why were you guys 175 calls behind the day before I asked you to do case reviews and then you had to call your clients and come in and talk to me about what you knew about the case. I said, I don't want to have to go and make you call your clients. You need to step up if you don't want to step up. I'll find people that can step up. Because we have two things. We have two things we're going to do in the future, right? Talk to human beings and try cases. Because they're not going to let AI try the cases for a long time. So if you can't do those two things, this is the wrong space for you, and I'm not going to hire you. It was a shocking moment for these people.
- [05:03]
C
My man, that reminds me of Dan Kennedy's the no BS people in profits book where he's like, hey, it's not my job.
- [05:09]
B
I love Dan Kennedy, too.
- [05:10]
C
It's like, it's your job to make sure that you're indispensable. Not my job, right? And it's like, you got to continue to elevate. Why not case manager? Why not director of client success, maybe client success team? Why the lawyers, right? Because lawyers highest hourly rate. What are these other individuals do it. Like, what's just your thought process behind that? And maybe it's like, hey, I want to keep my people. I like my people, and. And now I need them to do this thing.
- [05:34]
B
No, I think if we're talking straight business, we're going to see lawyers needed less. You know, if you can't get your cases to trial, if you're a settlement mill, I know a business model that has over 2,000 cases in house. They have three lawyers.
- [05:50]
A
Wow.
- [05:51]
B
They roll, right? They roll those cases, and they roll them with client success manager, who handles 500 cases. And all they do is make sure people are happy and just client communication. So that's one job, one lawyer, 500 cases, and then a paralegal, you know, like two or three paralegals that are all overseas, by the way, and they all run the paperwork just to get them to settlement. And now they're using AI so that they have the demands redone for them. They don't have to worry about that. They just roll the work. And we're going to see efficiencies like that. I mean, when you look at the P and L of A of a law firm, right? It used to be that you would put like 20% in the attorney bucket, 20% in the support staff bucket, 20% in the other, you know, administrative stuff bucket, and want to get 20% of profit out of this thing or. Or 20% in marketing and, you know, 20% profit. So you would have that kind of like divisional layout and people would do different things, right? And as advertisers have gotten crazy, over the moon, like money into advertising, it's like 30% into your advertising bucket. So Something's got to give. So that means it's 15 or 10% goes to the lawyers, 15 or 10% goes to the support staff. And there are some people running on 15% human capital costs. An entire law firm, ah, that's really thin. But if they can make it work on the back of technology, that's where we're headed.
- [07:14]
C
Yeah, you know, transparently. I've seen, I think, Finch, there's a few of these companies, right. And they kind of tech, enable, run it through like, and then they take over all that. So now you can outsource the pre lit stuff.
- [07:25]
B
Yep. We were just contacted by some people and they'll do it. They were talking about torticity. Torticity, yeah, yeah, I've talked to torticity. Yeah, that's exactly right. It's like, yeah, this is a really great model. If the client experience isn't what you're after. Right. It matters what your core values are, what your vision is, what your mission is. I go back to that all the time. There are things that people do in the world that aren't as profitable as other things. And if your vision and mission isn't to be the most profitable tech enabled, no human being law firm in the world, and you want to give good service and you believe in the justice system, and you believe in getting people to maximum justice by aggressively fighting for your clients rights, which is our mission statement by the way, then you have to do things that comport with those core values. And I think that it would be antithetical to my core values to take the lawyers out of the mix.
- [08:17]
C
I love that mission. I mean that, that resonates with me. I think a lot of consumers that hear that would love that.
- [08:23]
A
Staying true to your core values and keeping lawyers at the center of the client experience sounds great on paper, but to make that work financially without your overhead eating you alive, you have to be wildly efficient everywhere else. For Brian, that means turning his intake department into a well oiled machine. He is testing everything from AI listening agents to parallel dialers that can make 200 calls at once. Here's a look under the hood at the exact tech stack Brian is using to qualify leads faster and chase down every single opportunity.
- [08:51]
C
Talk to me about like what you've seen on the intake side. Right? You said you use Litify. Have you tried out neato, you know, or Capture now or.
- [09:01]
B
We're, we're in the process of trying to get NEATO in. We've done Capture now we are doing speed AI as a listening Agent for our intake agents and it's been good. It's a post event warning system. So it's a training event. It's. You can get back on the phone and try to call people if there's. But it's not a real time thing for us. I think there are some real time AI agents that could help us if we step into them and lean into them more. It's just bandwidth. I know that we use Ringcentral. We used to use NICE in Contact, which is the step up call center version of Ringcentral because we were doing so many outbound calls on the SSD practice and we killed that entire business model of you know, like chasing SSD that way. But they had the agent inside the NICE in contact model. I think that it's now available in the lower level ring central model and I would like to see us move into that. But there are some great AI alternative SaaS companies that kind of are the plug and play companies like Eve and Supio and they're leaning into that. Even up. I don't think Even Up's doing the intake side yet, but Eve is looking at the intake side. There's another one that was the counter to case status that we looked at seriously, which was hona and they are leaning into the intake side of it. So where case status isn't leaning into intake yet, HONA started to lean into intake which honestly was the reason that I didn't choose HONA over case status. I thought they were comparable products. I like both teams a lot. I think they both have smart platforms. I wanted people not to concentrate on intake. I wanted them to concentrate on client experience. So when they started to go in that direction I thought their focus was off of the ball that I wanted to pay attention to.
- [10:37]
C
Interesting. Yeah, that makes sense. What about staffing? Have you seen on like how do you think about intake? Are you, hey, I'm a man in my 9 to 5 and in a third party it. Are you workforce management on the weekends? Like how do you think about just the staffing and set up on the intake?
- [10:54]
B
We're in transition. I mean I felt like I've always been in transition because I'm always looking to that next best step, step in intake. But I started with legal intake professionals ages ago and at one point we had outsourced, you know, nighttime calls, you know we were 9 to 5 ing it and then we outsourced everything. Cause I thought they were better than my intake people and we just didn't want to have all of that Drain. Because we didn't have an intake team. We were small, we were 15 people, 12 people. So you have like people jumping on the intakes as the receptionist finds real cases. So she's the triage now I'm thinking that like NEATO or some of the AI intake products can through natural language be the receptionist that directs the call in the most appropriate way possible. And so I think if we can get that and people accept it, which I don't know if they will yet or not, but I think they will. I go by what I would do, right? Like we think we're normal. So my normal is that if I get an AI bot agent and it's a triage agent, like hi, my name is, you know, Brian the warrior robot. And I want to get you to the right person at the Lebovic Law Group. Please let me know. Are you calling about a new case or do you want to speak to someone in particular? Right. And then you say no, I'm calling about a new case. I understand. Is it an accident case or is it an injury case? Is it a Social Security case? Which division is best for me to get you to. Oh, it's a personal injury case. It's a. I got hit by a truck. Oh my goodness. Let me get you to the right person right now. Like if you go that far with it. I think people are good, right? Like just that qualify fast get to a human being. I hope so because that's the direction I want to head with my, my inr.
- [12:31]
C
Yeah, you could have, you know, your, your value props on the, you know, like on the waiting and stuff like that. Like that's consistent, you know, for your script side I guess for the NEATO stuff. The best application I've seen on the chase side is it's the 30 day plus. You know, it's like because a lot of times people do a 14 day chase or you know, kind of then
- [12:50]
B
maybe we have a 21 day chase.
- [12:52]
C
21. And then it's like after 30, it's kind of like ah, you know, and throw them in an email nurture or something. But if you got still somebody, that's what we do.
- [13:01]
B
We throw them in an email nurture. You hit it and you nailed it.
- [13:04]
A
Yeah, I think that 30 day plus
- [13:06]
C
neato in parallel with like the email nurtures, it's going to draw some cases
- [13:10]
B
out at almost no cost. At almost no cost. Right. Like the relative cost of doing a 30 day chase or a 50 day chase or a 90 day chase is allowing a computer to do work that it doesn't charge you for.
- [13:20]
A
Yeah.
- [13:20]
C
I think the other thing that I like about these and I like having the conversation because you're in the mix of all this stuff that, that I love too is I think the cool thing about the, the AI is the parallel dialers.
- [13:30]
A
Right.
- [13:31]
C
So it's like, I don't know, the cost of labor, even if you do nearshore is going to be so much. And if you're doing like let's say a practice area that's a super high volume and you can have an AI agent do 200 calls at the same time. Like you just can't do that with a human.
- [13:48]
B
100% no. And we can't keep up with the industry that's out there. So if you're not going to do it, you're just, you might as well go work for somebody. Like you're just not going to keep up. So this is not the right type of law for you to be in. I have a, a very, very close friend of mine. He has a very high end, very only referral based practice. He chases no one, he advertises nowhere. He does nothing except be a great lawyer to people. And it has served him incredibly well. Right. And that's a great business model, you know.
- [14:25]
C
Yeah. Lean and mean, you know, got a bunch of mouths to feed and you
- [14:28]
A
can take care of yourself really well.
- [14:30]
B
Yeah. He's got a good sized staff. I mean they're not a small office. He has a lot of people.
- [14:40]
A
Even up is a specialized proactive AI built for personal injury law firms. Personal injury is in their DNA. Visit evenuplaw.com to learn more. Okay, intake is dialed in now. You want to pour gas on the fire, but acquiring cases in a market like Florida is getting expensive fast. If your whole strategy is to buy unvetted third party leads, you could be finding yourself playing a shell game. The attrition rate will bleed you dry. Listen to how Brian learned this the hard way. And why building an organic brand moat is the only real way to protect your firm.
- [15:20]
C
How are you thinking about attracting cases right now with all the competition? You know what I've been telling people and you could push back on me, especially in Florida. People forever used to say if you can get an auto case below 2K, rock and roll, right? That, that's a good cat. That's not what I'm seeing today. I'm seeing if you can get it below 3k, you're in the business. And in Florida maybe 4 and in California maybe 5 if you're getting cases
- [15:46]
B
in Florida under 3k, you're crushing it now. And I used to say, because I used to bring them in for 1800, I remember I was at a crisp seminar ages ago, like seven years ago or eight years ago, and they were talking about, you know, relative cost of bringing in cases, and they were talking about a thousand to two thousand dollars to bring them in if you're really good at whatever that thing is you're doing. And I, and I was thinking, I think we're about 1800 or 1850 per case at the time. And I wasn't shoveling enough money into that. Like, you know, so at one point in my life, I owned a tropical smoothie cafe. And if there's a business that you can't make money in, it's a fast food business that when you don't know what you're doing, if, when you know what you're doing, I think that they probably turn money. But I did not. And we did not. But at one point we were asked, okay, you have three items on the menu. A sandwich that costs $7.40 and you have $3.12 of profit. A smoothie that costs $6 and 20 cents that you have $2 and 40 cents in profit, and a soda that costs, you know, like three, you know, a $27 and has a $20 in profit, right? Whatever it is, what do you want to sell somebody? And people were like, oh, the sandwich, it has the most profit, right? What do you want to sell somebody? All three?
- [17:02]
C
Yeah.
- [17:02]
B
You want them to buy all three, right? Because you're selling all three. You want the profit, you want them to buy as much shit as you can. Because the more you sell, the more profit you get, right? So if you find something that's doing eighteen hundred dollars, shovel everything in there. If you've got something's doing 1800 and something's doing 22 and something's doing 27 and something's doing 3500. But you're profitable bringing them in under 4000. Do them all. Like, do as much as you can as long as you're profitable to bring in the stuff that brings in the best work. Just bring in the cases.
- [17:30]
C
I think that's great. You know, I had a conversation with the president of a firm recently, and, you know, owning a marketing company, we get this a lot. It's like there's always these conversations of Rob Peter, Paypal. Let's say you have someone that's 3,900 and some limited resources, like, I'M not take away from the 39 because it's still where you're at. I'm saying when you have more capital, allocate then go add to the ones that are cheaper, that are getting the better cases. And it always drives me nuts. It's like, okay, well we're going to shut down this and then we're going to take that money and we're going to put no, it doesn't function like that. In fact, they actually benefit a lot of times with the Omni presence.
- [18:09]
B
Let me admit something to you here, right? Just since you're on that whole like omnipresence where things go. If you have a business in a marketplace and you want to sustain that business over time, unless you can bring in cases forever from some non branded way. Brand and brand equity within a certain geographic market is where you create your insurance that another person can't come in and invade your market easily with their brand equity and kill it without spending tons and tons and tons of money, right? And I never really appreciated how important that website brand equity would be over time. By developing that, I really didn't see the future well coming full circle back to that because of mass media advertising and the money that was put into new methods of bringing cases in. And people are pay per click and LSAs and Google Maps and there's all this stuff out there, right? And I think what is happening, especially in the age of AI, is that your website, your presence in the world, your brand equity in the world as a consumer lawyer is going to come back and be the thing that insulates you from all the other things that are out there. Which means that having great web in the long run, SEO SEM is really like your best play. And you can't forsake it to get on TV or buy more LSAs or do PPC. I mean, it's just a bad deal for you in the long run.
- [19:41]
C
I couldn't agree more. You know the thing that I see a lot of these different firms that use heavy Legion is they can get the cases, they might get the initial cac, but when you start factoring in attrition rate or fall off rate, however you want to define it, then it's like, okay, the numbers change quite a bit and then you factor in, hey, I should have a commercial accident if I advertise myself X every X number and then it's less. Through the Legion play.
- [20:08]
B
When we did this, we were losing up to 80% of our cases at the end of like, I think it was a 60 day review backwards. We were losing 80%. We were bringing all these cases, you know, over a hundred cases a month, PI cases. And then the next thing you know, you're like at 22, you're like, what happened? Like 60 days later, there's no business like what happened and it's just awful. You have to really, you know, pay attention to how you're bringing those cases in.
- [20:31]
C
You think, you think it's just a big shell game where they're all just, I don't know, selling the same lead to 10 companies?
- [20:37]
B
I think so. I think, I think that some level that that was what was happening. I mean, I'm sure that I got some of that. I was getting other people's leads and people were like, oh, you'll try another lawyer for me? Thanks. You know, like they're happy to, you know, go 14 different lawyers deep to find the right guy that would take the case.
- [20:52]
C
Yeah. So interesting. I agree with the mind share and, and the brand and the best cases. And you want people like they're coming and looking for you and then they're not going to drop, they're going to stick with you. They're the bigger, higher value cases. So I agree with all of that. What do you think about, you know,
- [21:06]
A
the op side, the legal side.
- [21:08]
C
Right. Tech. We touched on this client service is so incredibly important.
- [21:13]
A
Does your criteria of what cases go
- [21:15]
C
to trial, has that expanded? Because you know, the cost to acquire a case is, you know, higher and you need to lit more like how do you think about, you know, that dynamic?
- [21:26]
B
It's, it's an, it's an increasing reliance on litigation to maximize the value to get to the client to the point of justice. That's reasonable. We watch annually our case value, our average case value, you know, fee value go in directions. Right. So many years ago I was doing it and we had an $8,000 per case average value and we kept driving toward greater points of Justice. Until two years ago, we were at 26,000 per case average case value. Now that's fallen back to 24 in higher case costs two years ago or last year and now this year, this past annual year, I think we were at 22, 7 or something. So I've watched it get to 26 and now fall back and we kick out the bottom three and the top three outliers so that we get a real kind of better average so that like one $10 million, $14 million, $20 million verdict or collection settlement doesn't affect your whole bottom line. Average vice average wise, you know, being
- [22:30]
C
in Florida, did you see that, the tort reform stuff, did that impact it tremendously?
- [22:34]
B
In my opinion, it, it is. I didn't think it did for about two years. So now we're, we're almost three years out. And now looking backwards, watching it, I think that part of my issue is slip and falls have gone down in value because of the 50%, you know, comparative rule. I think that makes them more risky. I think clients get more edgy. I think they're willing to take less money to feel like they got the maximum value. So I think that has happened to a degree. And then for my particular practice, we did a lot of PIP claims for doctors and hospitals and they took attorneys fees away. And so that has tremendously affected the practice as well.
- [23:09]
C
Brian, this has been amazing for audience that wants to talk shop, has a case for you, wants to talk about, you know, case status or anything that we discuss. What's the best way to get in touch with you?
- [23:19]
B
Easiest way is my name, Labovik. L A B O V I, C K. You look it up online. I'm the only person that'll probably pop up. Lebovic Law. Www.lebovic.com We have the eights. So my area code is 561-888-8888, so that's easy too. Or 866-Lubovic. So caller click. Lebovic used to be the tagline.
- [23:39]
C
Amazing. Brian, thanks for coming on the show.
- [23:41]
B
Peace, Chris. Awesome.
- [23:46]
A
Brand equity is an unshakable SEO foundation and a relentless focus on human connection. That is how you future proof your law firm. A huge thank you to Brian Lebovic for pulling back the curtain on his operations today. And remember, Brian is bringing even more heat on stage as an official speaker at pemcon this year he'll be breaking down exactly how to secure those pivotal five star reviews for your practice. If you want to dominate your market, you need to be in that room. Grab your tickets. Tickets now@pimcon.org thanks for listening to Personal Injury Mastermind. We'll catch you next time.