James Helm:

Once you have your winner, you can just scale that thing. You can let it ride for years.

Chris Dreyer:

How much does it cost to acquire a client? What’s a client worth? All those things, your win rate, your fall off rate helps you create the strategy and understand how much capital you can actually deploy instead just guessing like, oh, I think SEO is working.

James Helm:

The longer you were willing to delay gratification and take the profits that your law firm is making and reinvest them into expansion, that is going to pay itself over.

Chris Dreyer:

Welcome to Personal Entry Mastermind. I’m your host, Chris Dreyer, founder and CEO of Rankings.io, the legal marketing company the best firms hire when they want the rankings, traffic in cases other marketing agencies can’t deliver. Each week, you get insights and wisdom from some of the best in the industry. Hit that follow button so you never miss an episode. All right, let’s dive in.

The growth at TopDog Law is nothing short of explosive. In just five years, CEO James Helm, has taken his Philadelphia-based firm nationwide and has quickly gained the notoriety that takes others decades to accomplish. Already, the 99th percentile of mass advertising firms, TopDog Law fills thousands of calls monthly, so many that James recently opened an in-house intake department and adds around 10 new staff each month to meet demand. A master of advertising and business development, James does not view other firms as competition. James prefers to see other firms, including the other nationwide powerhouses, as collaborators. The TopDog mindset frames nearly every personal injury law firm as a potential strategic ally. This partnership philosophy underpins his meteoric rise. When TopDog succeeds, so do other firms in his network.

Today, James lifts the veil on one of the most successful advertising firms in the nation. He reveals that data drives growth, why creativity overcomes budget constraints, and the advantages of leaning into specialization. He also explains how to maintain strong relationships with referral partners. Spoiler alert, it all comes back to data.

The TopDog Law empire was not built overnight. His journey began, like so many fresh out of law school, as an unknown with a lot of ambition. Get ready for part one of two with James Helm of TopDog Law, the current alpha dog of legal advertising ready to lead the pack. Here’s James Helm CEO of TopDog Law.

James Helm:

I think I want to tell everybody first and foremost just how nervous I was calling our law firm TopDog Law. I still remember I went to my first ever legal conference and I’m checking in at the check-in table and I’m a little intimidated, just even walking in. I don’t know what to expect. I’m 28 years old in a room full of like 50, 60-year-old, very wealthy, established lawyers. Felt like I didn’t deserve to be in the room. And I get up to the table and there’s this nice older lady who’s checking people in. And right as I’m checking in, I’m like, “James from TopDog Law.” And I still remember these two lawyers next to me and the look on their face when I said TopDog Law. They were like, it was this scoff.

And at the time, I was ashamed, I felt. But over time, and as we’ve grown the TopDog brand, I look back and think about how contrarian it was to go with a branded name like that. And given that it’s so easy to say, easy to spell, easy to remember, I think a large part of our success is due to the name.

Chris Dreyer:

Yeah, and just massive brand recognition and the things you’re doing and it’s just so memorable. Even your taglines, TopDog gets you top dollar, I love everything about it. When you were thinking about brand, did it start with the name? Is that where it started? How do you think about brand and being distinctive in the market?

James Helm:

I think lawyers have traditionally been very bad at branding their businesses. I mean, every other industry has names that are easy to say, easy to spell, easy to remember. Whereas law firms, the brand wasn’t the focus. The brand was basically a bunch of last names that are often hard to spell, hard to remember. And the question becomes, who’s your lawyer? I don’t know. I could try to find their business card. Whereas, if your lawyer’s TopDog, it’s like, oh, TopDog. Go to topdoglaw.com. And how many more client referrals are you going to get? And we all know client referrals are the best kind of referrals. Why? Because they’re free.

And so I got into selling lawyer marketing, and when I did that, there were very few law firms that were using branded names. There was one I found out in Texas called Law Boss. And I first remember thinking like, “This guy calls himself law boss. That’s the most egotistical thing in the world. That’s crazy.” And I thought about that idea and thought about that idea and thought about that idea. And I’m like, that’s something to this. I’m like, “He’s probably getting so many more clients than the law firm with five or six last names.” Why? Because word of mouth. It just spreads. It’s easy to say, easy to spell, easy to remember.

Chris Dreyer:

I couldn’t agree more. It really just stands out. It is easier to say. I use that one example because I have problems pronouncing it. There’s times where I interview guests on the show where I have to go watch their YouTube video several times just to say their name right. And that’s a problem because I’m just like a normal consumer.

James Helm:

It’s crazy. And the problem I think a lot of law firms have is whether you would ever change your brand name, right? Because once you’ve built your firm around a certain name, it then becomes very, very challenging to reevaluate it. And when I created TopDog, it was 2019. So the idea of a brand name was starting to spread. Prior to that, you go to 2010, 2005, 2000, there were barely any law firms that were doing mass marketing, let alone doing branded names. It’s kind of a new concept. And as it’s evolved into seeing all the social media lawyers start to develop, the brand name has definitely gotten more popular for law firms over the last couple of years. And I think it’s a good idea.

Chris Dreyer:

Yeah, a thousand percent. And one of the things I want to talk about is you are a national firm now. That comes over time, but that comes with capital. So you’ve got the brand, but now you’ve got to get the attention. So there’s different types of scale capital. There’s free cash flow from operations. You can take debt on in a balance sheet. You can take on some partners. Maybe you could just talk to me a little bit about how you think in terms of capital and how you’re going to budget for marketing and just those types of aspects.

James Helm:

I think every law firm, even the firms that are now national, started local. Every law firm, whether it’s Morgan and Morgan, Lerner and Rowe, Shunnarah, whoever, they all started in one market, and they made their money growing that market. The chance then becomes, okay, now that I’ve established myself as either the market leader in this city or in the top two or three law firms in this city, can I take my brand that I’ve built here and can I duplicate that in other new markets? And the way you do that is you take the profits that you’ve made in the first market and you reinvest them in other markets.

I think John Morgan has this famous story about how he got into a dispute with his original partners because he wanted to basically roll all of the money that the company had made into new markets and they wanted to put it in their pocket. And it comes back to this Warren Buffett idea of delayed gratification. The longer you were willing to delay gratification and take the profits that your law firm is making and reinvest them into expansion either in your market or once you feel like you’ve hit a saturation point in your market or there’s a diminishing return in your market, you take that leap and go into a second market, that is going to pay itself over.

And what we’ve tried to do at TopDog is take our initial case settlements from 2019, 2020 when we first started the firm and basically take all the money we’ve made and roll that out into new markets. And once we were able to prove that that concept worked, we were able to then think about debt and partner law firm relationships and other types of strategies to help us get more access to capital faster.

Chris Dreyer:

I really want to lean into that, James, and you’ve been vocal about this. You’re a different type of law firm, right? You are a referral law firm. You work with strategic partners. How does your model play into that? Because you are a referral practice, can you spend more to originate a case versus doing an in-house versus a litigating type firm? Can you spend a 30, 40% in your marketing versus maybe other firms can only spend 20%? What about the budget itself?

James Helm:

The decision to move to more of an advertising and referral business was one that took a while for me to make. We still keep a small amount of cases in Pennsylvania where we were first based, but we’ve largely gone into new markets with the idea of partnering up with other law firms. And it comes down to the unit economics.

In most businesses, step out of legal for a second, you look at, okay, what’s your gross margin? Meaning, what do you get on average for a settlement fee versus what’s your cost of goods sold? And in the legal business, we’re one of the luckiest people out there because we have no cost of goods sold. It costs us nothing. It’s service fees. Now, there are case costs, obviously, but you think about, okay, whether your average settlement… Say you’re a car accident law firm that does a couple hundred cases per month, your average settlement… And I love Chad Dudley’s talks about this on your podcast and elsewhere, basically explaining if you’re doing under $10,000 on average for a car accident settlement, you got some work to do. If you’re doing between 10 and 15,000, you’re doing okay. If you’re doing 15, 20,000, 25,000 in terms of gross attorney’s fees on soft tissue and more general car wrecks, you’re doing a great job maximizing the value of the cases.

And so you should know your average fee. And then when you look at your average fee, you’re like, okay, well what does it cost me to acquire a customer? How long do the customers last? What’s the time on desk? From the day I acquire them, how long do they sit on my desk until I get that average fee? And then, what percentage of them fall off? What percentage of them result in no revenue? And once you’ve really gotten clear about your data on what does it cost to acquire a client, how long is the duration that they’re on your desk and what’s that fall off percentage, You can start to look at your average fee and say, oh, I can get this aggressive trying to spend money to acquire new customers and I can do it profitably.

And what we’ve done is we’ve looked at different debt options and done some financial modeling to see, okay, even if we’re borrowing a little bit of money and paying interest on that money, as long as we can manage the duration risk, which you can in a car accident, mass torts, it becomes really difficult. But in a car accident, you can say, okay, I know, at the longest, this is going to take four years. Most of my cases are going to take, if you’re selling a pre-suit, a year. If you’re filing suit on a lot of cases, maybe that’s 26 months. As long as you can manage that duration risk, you can start to see, okay, I can reinvest in new cases profitably.

And the problem that a lot of law firms run into, traditional law firms,| is they can’t just reinvest in new case acquisition because of their operational capacity. They can’t do the case. Why? Because they don’t have the intake staff, they don’t have the paralegals, they don’t have the lawyers. All of those different parts of the firm need to grow at the same time to be able to grow in capacity. What we’ve been able to do, which has been very helpful for us, is partner with law firms across the country that have that capacity. And so that’s allowed us to scale in a way that we couldn’t if we were doing all the cases ourselves.

Chris Dreyer:

Thank you for sharing all that. It’s really intriguing. I didn’t think about the capacity issues and trying to forecast that and under-hiring and over-hiring and all those components that go into just the delivery perspective.

The other thing too is, when you partner, it’s not just a referral-type partnership in some situations because you have a proven model. They’ve been able to help introduce capital because they’re going to be getting a percentage of the case. So talk about that because I really think that’s different. A lot of attorneys are leaning on free cash flow from operations or debt, whether they’re using a partner, there’s many of these debt-based companies versus like, Hey, you’re going to your referral partner because you’re actually… It is a true partnership because they’re generating profit off of your referral and they want you to originate more cases. So maybe speak to that in that capacity.

James Helm:

I think one of the differences with us is that we are putting up our own money. It’s either all of our own money or we’re putting up half the money and our partner firm is putting up half the money. And so it’s a lot different asking them to go in on this joint venture with us than it is with the marketing company where traditionally a marketing company can come to you, they can have good referrals, they can have a great reputation in the industry. I think Rankings has the best reputation, but at the end of the day, you are still asking them to put up money for services. And with us, because of the way the model is structured, it’s like we get to put up the money or ask them to put up half the money.

And so the ask is like, I’m putting my skin in this too. If this fails, I’m out the money. So why would I do this if I thought this was an unprofitable idea? I would only do it in the event that I think this can be a money-making activity for you and a money-making activity for us.

And the thing that I care about, because I think there’s this spectrum, there’s the law firms, I would put us in this category, that are very, very focused on the advertising side. I’d like to think we’re one of the best at it. We spend all of our time doing this versus the firms that are the opposite side of the spectrum where they are top 1%, top 2% trial lawyers, or if they run more of a big car accident style law firm, they’re really, really good at maximizing the case value, getting that 20K average fee or 25K average fee, but it’s hard. I’ve learned over time to run the full gamut, to be an amazing advertiser, to maximize your car accidents for 25,000 average gross fee, and to be able to take those top five percentage of your cases where you’re getting that 8 million, 10 million, $15 million settlement, and you have those lawyers that can litigate those catastrophic injury cases in-house. There’s very few firms across the spectrum that can do all of those things.

Chris Dreyer:

Yeah, and I like that explanation. And I think you said something along the lines of run your own race, don’t stress about the competition. So on that quote from you, how do you think about a referral partner that could then take their profit and then to go do a media buy or buy some billboards in the same market that you’re advertising? Do you think of them as competition? Do you think it’s a rising tide situation where now you’re just blocking out everyone else? How do you think about that situation where they could take the profit that you’re sending them and then advertise against you?

James Helm:

I think generally in our industry, we have too big of a focus on our competitors in the market. I mean, nobody has 1% market share. I mean, Morgan & Morgan is multiples bigger than every other law firm in the country. We are so fragmented as an industry, as a plaintiff’s bar. A large number of the cases are getting signed by lead generation companies that many lawyers are not even thinking of as their competition, and yet they’re spending all this time, energy, effort.

And look, I’m not perfect. I did this too, right? It is like spending all this time, energy, effort thinking about what my competitors are doing and who got this billboard and who’s doing what. And it really just doesn’t matter that much. And we’ve tried to position ourselves as allies of law firms. If you are a medical malpractice law firm, we’d love to partner with you. We have great partnerships nationally for medical malpractice or birth injury. If you’re a firm that does car accidents in so-and-so state, I’d love to see how we can work together. And I won’t view you doing your own advertising separate to TopDog as some type of a threat. I’m simply looking at it through the lens of the money that we’re investing and the money that you are investing. Are we making a return on that invested capital? And outside of that, I hope you have tremendous success.

It’s actually been really cool, Chris, getting to see our law firm partners grow and add staff and have this explosive growth and be able to be like, “Hey, working with TopDog was a large part of how we’ve grown our firm from doing $10 million to $18 million in one year” or whatever it is. And I didn’t think I’d get that much joy out of it, but the relationships I’ve made with different law firm owners across the country has actually been really satisfying.

Chris Dreyer:

National advertising firms like TopDog Law, originate leads and refer them downstream to local partner law firms best equipped to handle the cases. We’ve spoken with local firms on this show about the benefits of these partnerships, especially when they’re getting started early. Today, we flip the script, looking from the national advertiser’s viewpoint. How can local firms nurture the relationship and keep the referrer happy? James outlines key strategies for maintaining strong bonds and ensuring the case referrals keep flowing.

James Helm:

I am all for our partners being diversified. I am all for them having other referral sources. I’m all for them getting their own cases, whether that’s using a great SEO vendor like you or doing PPC or even if they want to do mass advertising. We’re big partners with Alex Shunnarah across multiple markets and they do a ton of their own branding and billboards and whatever, but they simply look at our investment as, what am I spending with TopDog and what is that yielding me on a cost per acquisition basis and how much money am I making? We’ve even done it in their home turf in Alabama because it’s just so profitable, it’s so profitable for them and for us. It’s like, why wouldn’t we do this?

And so, for us, there’s really a couple things that keep us happy. And you should be doing this whether you’re partnered with us or whether you are getting referrals from somebody else, is the intake center. We’ve moved away from law firms that don’t have an intake process. You have to have some designated part of your staff, whether that’s five employees, 10 employees, or Shunnarah has 140 employees. You have to have a call center because we need to have accurate data and reporting on how many leads are we sending you a month, what amount of those leads do you want, what amount of those do you sign, and what’s that conversion percentage? So you have to have the intake data is probably my number one pet peeve. If we can’t get that data, then the relationship just doesn’t work.

The second thing that’s super important is the average case value. I mean, like we talked about earlier, different firms monetize cases differently. I tend to like the firms that file a lot of lawsuits. Now, the states are very different on that. I grew up in Pennsylvania and my beginning of my legal practice was in Philadelphia. So that’s a tort threshold state. And I’m really familiar with tort threshold states like Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, where over 50% of car accident cases are going into suit. You might say, “Oh, that sucks. That’s a huge operational expense,” but the values are good. Whereas there’s other states where lawyers frankly have gotten lazy and they want to short settle the cases after six months, nine months, a year.

And I understand how that might be profitable for them, but when we’re investing our money in our joint operation, our best partners are looking to litigate cases. And we see that average fee number a lot higher on the firms that tend to file more lawsuits. And I have no problem on our end waiting two, three, four years. I mean we just had three settlements, one of 9 million, one of 10 million, one of 16 million. All of those cases took three years or more. I have no issue with that because I know that those law firms were maximizing the value of those cases and taking the case either to trial or right up to the courtroom steps. And you’re always going to get more value at the courtroom steps than you do a year before trial. It’s just the reality.

Chris Dreyer:

Yeah, I got to jump on what you just said here, right? You said a 9 million, I believe what, 15 million. So we’re talking big numbers. James, there’s this thought that advertising agencies can’t get the big cases, right? So what would you say against, it’s kind of controversial, they think that, hey, only the big cases come from referrals? What have you seen? Because you’ve clearly proven that no, that’s not true. You can advertise and you can’t originate these giant cases.

James Helm:

So I actually think there’s a little bit of truth to that. I think that the big cases come through brand. Now, when we go into a partnership with the law firm, we’re advertising through the TopDog brand. And so we’re using a brand to get those cases. And traditional media that’s top of mind awareness, buses, billboards, radio, TV. That generates this brand that when an accident happens, they’re not looking on Google. They’re not sitting around on social media a month and a half after the accident clicking on an ad about making X dollars on a car accident. Those big, big cases, them and their immediate family knows they need a lawyer, and often it’s the lawyer that they remember from the mass advertising that gets those calls. And then those mass advertisers will sometimes, and I would say almost usually, then refer that case to the catastrophic trial firm that specializes in it.

So what I would say to that point is I think there’s truth in the type of marketing you are doing has an impact on whether or not you’re getting the seven or eight figure cases. But it’s not that those cases don’t go to advertisers, it’s that they often go to the big brands that either that person, a friend, a family member knows, and then those brands either do the cases in-house. Or for us, we have the luxury of working with those top tier trial firms and really maximizing the value of the case, which, let’s be honest, is the best thing for the client because there are some perverse incentives here where a mass advertiser might say, “Hey, we can take this case that’s worth 15 million. We can do it in-house for 8 million and we can make a bigger fee than if we refer it.” And check my math there. I don’t do public math. But some version of that, right? Where instead, for us, we’re going to refer it, we’re going to refer it to the law firm that’s going to maximize the value of the case. And in turn, that’s going to put a lot more money in the client’s pocket.

Chris Dreyer:

It’s just a numbers game too. You get those asynchronous bets, they come in eventually with volume. So you’re in Atlanta, Chicago, New York, Philly. Everyone talks about how good Georgia and the Atlanta market is. Besides just the competition, how do you look at these different markets and approach them from a, hey, I’m going to invest capital here? How do you think about the market selection?

James Helm:

Like a lot of things, I’ve just learned from trial and error. I wish I would’ve been more strategic from day one, but our first market we went into after our early success in Philadelphia was Baltimore because Maryland is an hour and a half away from Philadelphia. I was already getting some spillover calls from Baltimore. So it was like, hey, why don’t we be more proactive of trying to see what’s going on in Baltimore? And I’ll be honest, I was attracted by there not being very many mass advertisers there. And what I had to learn the hard way was the reason there were not a lot of mass advertisers there was because the case values were bad. I mean, the case values, the average settlement results in gross attorney’s fees of 3,000 to $5,000, which is an ecosystem problem.

And it wasn’t just one partner we worked with there, we actually went through four, and we saw very consistent data regarding the settlement values. And when the adjusters are used to paying a certain amount, the treatment ecosystem isn’t there in terms of working up the cases, it becomes very, very challenging to get those high average settlement fees.

But then you look at a state like Georgia or Florida where the ecosystem is really developed, the insurance adjusters are used to paying policy limits. And you can take a case in Georgia and if there’s a $25,000 policy, which is the minimum policy there, there’s a good chance you’re getting that policy within six months if a client has some injuries. And that’s why there are 8 to 10 firms spending $10 million or more in Georgia. And so what I’ve had to learn the hard way, which is counterintuitive, is usually, if there is a lot of mass advertising there, it’s probably a good sign that it’s a lucrative market and to not necessarily run away from those markets, but instead lean into it.

But obviously, it’s a balance. You want to know which markets can you be successful in versus which markets is there a lot of competition versus which markets are the values high. And what I think is funny is a lot of times people try to apply the same reasoning to every market. So a law firm that runs a pre-suit model in Georgia or Florida would not be successful running that same pre-suit model in Pennsylvania or New York or New Jersey or Michigan. Why? Because there’s tort thresholds. If you can’t litigate the cases, you’re not going to be able to win in those markets with the tort threshold because too high of a percentage of the cases are going to need to go to suit and you’re just not going to be built that way.

And so I think it’s important in masterminds and events when we talk about the markets to really understand that all the personal injury markets are very different. And that’s based on the laws. That’s based on the ecosystem of treatment providers. It’s based on a lot of factors.

Chris Dreyer:

Man, that is so different. I was thinking about myself in the agency space, they always tell you find the smallest niche, and I’m thinking, look, I’m not going to make a bunch of money in basket weaving niche. It’s like the legal’s got money. I know it’s a bloodbath of competition, but there’s a reason for that. So then it leans into that in the same capacity for you. It’s like there’s a ton of competition in Georgia for a reason. It’s worth going into that market. And if there’s not a lot of competition, I don’t know, maybe it is a race to the bottom scenario. Not to say that efficiencies and all these things can help with profit margins and different types of arbitrage, international labor things driving down your costs to make money.

James Helm:

Well, you probably see it in SEO, right? Some markets, you can generate cases for your clients at X dollars, and in some markets, it might be double that cost or triple that cost. Now, here’s the interesting thing. Even if it’s double the cost to acquire a case, it doesn’t mean it’s less profitable because the cases could be worth double or more in that market.

Chris Dreyer:

Absolutely. When we’re looking at just from a Google Ads perspective, something like Florida, you’re targeting below 4K, or California, 6K, but then other states it’s like, hey, you can originate some cases through Google Ads for a thousand bucks. The value may not be as high. So all different strategies there.

The other thing too is here’s this thing I see is you’ve got firms that maybe don’t have the capital and want to be this national type firm and they don’t really have the strategy to go into it, and they’re actually doing quite well in their main market. How do you look at diminishing returns, right? So you’ve got ATL, Chicago, New York, Philly, all these different markets. How do you look at a market and say, my dollar… Is it just purely the data? You’ve got the data nailed down and it’s like, hey, I’m increasing my advertising, but look, my cases aren’t really increasing so I move it to a different market? How do you think about diminishing returns when you have multiple markets to select from?

James Helm:

I think the first thing about diminishing returns is looking at your original market or your home market. I know we’ve seen this where we’ve spent several million dollars in Philadelphia and we keep increasing. And the reason why is because that’s our home market. That’s our home field. Go Eagles. Hopefully we’ll win the Super Bowl this year. But it’s like I want to always be that force in Philadelphia, but I’d be lying to myself if I didn’t also know that every additional advertising dollar doesn’t go as far. Eventually, you put in more and more money, but you’re not getting cases at the same rate as you were before.

And so you can either continue to increase and try to find new innovative advertising strategies within your market, or you can do what we did and we can look at some new markets and the potential of new markets. Now, the way I like to look at new markets, and if you’re familiar with Facebook ads, you’ll probably resonate with this, is the best people at Facebook advertising do tons of split testing. You put up an ad, you use six different captions or calls to action, and then you put a small amount of money towards each one and you figure out where your winners are.

And we’ve tried to do that obviously on a little bit of a larger scale, but with the markets so that we test out markets and we can look at a new market as an experiment and maybe we’re in that market and we’re putting up $50,000 and our partner’s putting up $50,000 and we can evaluate the data in terms of, well, how many leads are we getting for this? What’s our cost per acquisition? If our partner has financial data on what those cases might be worth to them, we can use that to evaluate it.

And then, with that data, with the cost per lead, cost per acquisition duration, so time on desk, fall off rate and average case value, you can start to see the picture even before the cases start to settle of, what are your unit economics going to look like in that market? And you can compare that to other markets. And so, for us, we’re heavily invested in Chicago and part of the reason why is our brand is just doing really well there. People are resonating with our brand. They’re resonating with our marketing. They’re resonating with our messaging. We’re seeing that in our cost per lead. We’re seeing that in our cost per acquisition. And so we’re like, hey, out of a couple of markets we tested, this seems to be going pretty well. Why don’t we keep putting more and more money into the winners and either not put any more money or even pull the losers?

Chris Dreyer:

When it comes to advertising channels, James emphasizes creativity over budget. He shares how producing viral billboards and representing an influencer artist early on allowed TopDog Law to build brand awareness and stand out.

James Helm:

We got our start on social media, and I feel really fortunate that our social media stuff worked because I was broke. I didn’t have any money. I was 28 years old. I didn’t grow up in a house that had a lot of money. I took $187,000, which was from sales commissions selling pay-per-click and SEO to lawyers, funny enough. And I basically took that in a combination of debt and started my law firm. And so with that kind of a budget, when you got to get office space and your initial staff, it doesn’t go very far. And so we use social media. And I still think this is a good strategy, whether it’s Instagram or TikTok, or whatever, and as well as your personal network. Everybody has a personal network. Everybody has their friends, their family, kids they went to college with or hometown buddies. We hung out flyers on telephone poles. All the beginning cases were all free or close to free. They didn’t cost any money.

And I think still today we could run a really corporation in my home city, which is Philadelphia, but wherever you’re a lawyer, your home city, just doing that and just not really having much of an advertising expense. The problem is the scalability as well as the predictability of new clients obviously isn’t as strong as when you move into advertising. And so, for us, we got into paid social media. And then, after paid social media ads, we got into radio and billboards and buses and all the things to be top of mind in that market.

The problem that I think you’re alluding to, which is an important one, is attribution, right? So we’re doing SEO. We’re doing all these different mediums. Well, how do you try to determine where leads are coming from so you can measure your marketing efficiency per channel? And Chris Collins who’s on our team has really helped me build out UTM parameters. I’m good at the big ideas. I’m less skilled at the details. And you got to hire people around you that are good at the things you’re not good at. And he really helped us dial in our attribution across our different channels so that you can see our winners.

But I do also use instinct as well. I’ll give you an example is billboards. When we try to measure our return on investment from billboards, the ROI, the cost per case is terrible. I mean, it’s five grand or something, maybe even more than that. And I keep buying them. And the reason why I keep buying them is because I just think there’s a lot of our word of mouth referrals, our referrals from friends and family, maybe even people that are marketing other channels, so radio or social on how they heard of us. They’re also seeing our billboards. And that brand presence in the market, I don’t think is an ego thing. I know a lot of people think it’s an ego thing or think about… I think it’s a top of mind awareness strategy. And I think that money is well spent. Now, obviously you need to know how to negotiate good deals with the different billboard companies in your market. I mean, if you don’t know what you’re doing, they’re going to fleece you for three times the rate that I’m paying, right? Or somebody who buys a ton of them pay.

So you really have to understand traditional media is a lot more about negotiation than digital media. Digital media, you plug your card into Google or Facebook and they just whack you with transactions every $900 or whatever. But when you buy traditional media, you really have to learn how that works and it’s still very relationship-driven and negotiation-driven. And so I believe in investing in traditional media. Again, even if the CPAs are higher or even if we can’t even see our return as profitable on the billboards, I’m still doing it because, instinctually, I just believe that it’s a good strategy.

Chris Dreyer:

You and Ted Turner would get along really well. Since you mentioned that, a couple questions here, follow up on that. The first one is thinking about the short-term versus long-term orientation. When you choose a channel, how long do you give, say, radio or TV or billboards to work? What type of time span? I work with some clients, right? They’re like, “We shut off our TV.” And I’m like, what? After three months you need to give it a lot more time. I heard Kyle Backes says, “Put that money aside and don’t think about it for a year.” When you’re looking at these different… And I know, look, there’s this direct response versus brand, which by the way, I think is way over used. I think it’s just in general attention arbitrage. How do you think about how long to invest in a certain type of channel? Like you just said, hey, I’m doing billboards. I don’t know, 5K. I’m going to keep adding.

James Helm:

I think one thing that not a lot of lawyers think of. And if you got a pen and pencil or you’re driving in the car, this might be the one thing you want to write down is your creative matters just as much or more than the media channel. And so instead of saying, “Oh, I’m going to shut off radio. It doesn’t work,” or, “I’m going to shut off TV. It doesn’t work,” maybe your commercial just sucks. And unless you’ve gone through a dozen iterations of TV commercials and measured how they perform against each other, I think you’re making a bad decision by saying the channel doesn’t work. Obviously it’s working for some law firms. I mean legal category is a huge spender. We’re not doing that if it’s unprofitable, right? We’re doing it because it works. So I think a lot of times people are quick to pull the plug on the channel when it’s really that the creative doesn’t work.

And we’ve learned this more than anything with social media ads on Facebook or on Instagram. I run tons of ads, and some of them do terrible. And I’m not in my head going, I’m never going to run Facebook ads again. I’m going to say something was wrong with this ad. It was either the targeting was off or it was either the messaging was off. Some part of it was not hitting. And if you iterate and iterate and iterate and iterate enough, you’ll find a winner. And the good part is once you have your winner, you can just scale that thing. All the work gets done to find the winner. And once you have that winning ad, you can let it ride for years.

Chris Dreyer:

I think that’s such an amazing piece of advice. I’m going to be shipping this podcast to a lot of my clients in particular about SEO and other things they’re doing.

On the final question set here, I want to talk about something that’s a little different. I had Dan Morgan on earlier and we talked about earned media. And he has this purple cow meeting where they talk about getting the attention from the media. And I think, actually, you do earn media instinctively and just very, very well, right? So you’ve got the giant phone on the billboards, the prop. You’ve got your kind of fun with the big bag of money and you just take a different approach. And even your radios, you’ve had customers think they’re a song because they’re so good, the quality. How do you think about earned media and the reshares and people talking about your brand? What goes into that process?

James Helm:

I listened to that episode with Dan and it was actually super insightful. I love all the episodes, your podcast. I think attorneys are missing out if they’re not going through the archives of-

Chris Dreyer:

Thank you.

James Helm:

What you have because you’ve had such amazing people as guests here.

I would say I got a lot of my early exposure from earned media. Again, I didn’t have money. So when you don’t have money, you have to use creativity. I was lucky enough to represent a big time rapper influencer in Philly, and I got a lot of notoriety from that. And that just opened my mind to dollars are one way to get attention, is to just blast the market with dollars, but another way to get more attention is to be creative.

We put up a billboard for the World Series when the Phillies were hosting the Astros and it was the day of game one in Philly, and that billboard said, “Had a sign, but the Astros stole it.” And that billboard got plastered across every social media site, ESPN, CNN, all this stuff. And that was just one little idea. I had bought that billboard location and then I had a brainstorming session with my marketing department. We were like, “Let’s do this. This is funny. This is going to get viral attention.” Especially if you’re just starting out or you don’t have the budget right now to commit to millions of dollars in marketing spend, what you do have is your creativity. And if you can come up with something that you think will go viral either on social media or viral in the real world, those strategies are often more effective than the people with the money.

Chris Dreyer:

And one of the ones these viral strategies that you told me about that I just love was the half court shot. So you’re at a basketball, big basketball tournament, a lot of attention, and you’re like, “Hey, let’s do a half court shot.”

James Helm:

We should jam out one time. I have all sorts of ideas, some of which we’ve executed, some of which we haven’t even done. But just thinking about lawyer marketing, obviously until the late ’70s or whenever the ruling came down, there was nobody advertising. Then it went to Yellow Pages. Then it went to TV. But a lot of the TV ads are pretty much the same and they’re stern looking lawyers standing in front of libraries, giving the same cliche type sentences of like, “Get the maximum compensation.” And it’s like if your marketing is just an echo chamber, if it just blends into all the other commercials, nobody’s really going to remember it that much. And if you can instead think about how can I look at this differently, I think you’ll be much more effective with fewer dollars. It won’t cost you as much on a per lead basis if you’re more creative in the substance of your content because buying the spots is just one part of it. What you’re doing with your allotted time or with your social media posts or with your ads, that’s as big a driver as the actual media.

Chris Dreyer:

Thanks so much to James for sharing his wisdom today. Let’s hit the takeaways. Time for the pinpoints. Specialize based on your business model, few firms can be the best at advertising, maximizing case value and litigating complex cases. Pick one focus area and partner with firms that complement the rest of the process. Consider referring big cases to top trial firms to maximize client value over law firm fees.

James Helm:

But it’s hard. I’ve learned over time to run the full gamut, to be an amazing advertiser, to maximize your car accidents for 25,000 average gross fee, and to be able to take those top five percentage of your cases where you’re getting that $8 million, $10 million, $15 million settlement, and you have those lawyers that can litigate those catastrophic injury cases in-house. There’s very few firms across the spectrum that can do all of those.

Chris Dreyer:

Track everything, know your case value. Track metrics like average fee per case cost to acquire a client, time a case sits on the desk, and the percentage of cases that result in no revenue. Understanding your profit margins and risk factors allows you to determine how much you can reinvest into acquiring new clients while still being profitable.

James Helm:

As long as you can manage that duration risk, you can start to see, okay, I can reinvest in new cases profitably. And the problem that a lot of law firms run into, traditional law firms, is they can’t just reinvest in new case acquisition because of their operational capacity. They can’t do the cases. Why? Because they don’t have the intake staff, they don’t have the paralegals, they don’t have the lawyers. All of those different parts of the firm need to grow at the same time to be able to grow in capacity.

Chris Dreyer:

Keep the referral partners happy. How do you do that? Build out your intake capabilities and organize intake process with call center software and designate staff is crucial for referral firms to provide accurate lead data and reporting. Tracking metrics like calls received, sign cases, and conversion rates keeps national advertisers happy and the relationship strong. Intake is a top priority for partners like TopDog Law.

James Helm:

For us, there’s really a couple things that keep us happy, and you should be doing this whether you’re partnered with us or whether you are getting referrals from somebody else, is the intake center. We moved away from law firms that don’t have an intake process. You have to have some designated part of your staff, whether that’s five employees, 10 employees, or like Shunnarah has 140 employees, right? You have to have a call center because we need to have accurate data and reporting.

Chris Dreyer:

For more information about James Helm, check out the show notes. While you’re there, follow the show so you don’t miss part two of my conversation with James. He explains how to transform your intake team into a sales team of closers. Don’t sleep on this one. All right, everybody, I’m Chris Dreyer, founder and CEO of Rankings.io. Thanks for hanging out. See you next time. I’m out.