Chad Dudley:

In a healthy personal injury firm, their top 5% of their cases typically generates around 50% of their revenue. Let’s max out those cases.

Chris Dreyer:

Finding the top 5% takes a special blend of art and science.

Chad Dudley:

Identify the cases with the most potential, get them to the attorneys with the most skill, experience, and results and support them with your best resources. That’s the goal.

Chris Dreyer:

Welcome to Personal Injury Mastermind. I’m your host, Chris Dreyer, founder and CEO of rankings.io, the preeminent personal injury marketing agency. Before we get started, if you like what you hear, head on over to Apple or Spotify and pound that five star review button, and if you don’t like what you hear, tell me about it in a one star review, I got a big hug for all my haters too.
Each week we talk to the best in the legal industry. Chad Dudley knows how to make it rain. He’s the guy to call when firm owners are ready to improve quality of life and profits. As part owner of CJ Advertising and co-founder of Vista Consulting, he has worked with over 200 firms to help them reach their goals. His seemingly simple methods have worked for his own firm as well as founding partner of Dudley DeBosier in injury lawyers. He has grown his business to over 170 staff.
Today, he shares distilled wisdom that can help any personal injury firm get results. We dive into how data driven evaluations and radical candour serve as the foundation for a firm to source sky high, and he explains how to budget advertising spending based on your business model. Chad attended LSU on a tennis scholarship. He played D1 for all four years after college. He considered going pro and taught tennis at a few country clubs, but Chad could not beat the Louisiana heat. No longer wanting to work outside, he saw law school as a great way to combine his love of reading and writing. Here’s what happened after law school.

Chad Dudley:

I worked for a big personal injury firm, did it for a while, enjoyed it, but then wanted to try something different. Went to a firm that handled a very small number of high value cases, got to work on some really big files there, big cases there, did some trial work there. Enjoyed that. And then I had a career with a firm that did some advertising. They brought me in to be their coo. Really, that’s where I really kind of hit my stride. I enjoyed the operational, the business side, the logistics. The firm is growing and the two owners got disbarred. 10 years prior to hiring me, they paid legal assistance, a portion of the fee, and the bar eventually said, no, we don’t like that. And all of a sudden, me and Steve DeBosier my partner and James Peltier my partner, were looking around going, gosh, we’re happy. We’re enjoying what we’re doing, and now we got to make a decision. We either, is everyone going to start their own law firms? Is everyone going to join other law firms? Basically we started Dudley DeBosier. With all that, the phone kind of basically stopped ringing and we decided that we’re going to focus on what we can control.

Chris Dreyer:

With fewer incoming calls. The firm saw an opportunity, they now had more time to spend with existing clients, so they focused on client services, how to identify the best cases and how to get the best value from what they already had.

Chad Dudley:

I had a little bit of a background in some database programming. I was writing some programmes that helped us optimise our practise and track a lot of things about how frequently we’re talking to clients, how frequently we were touching the files, how long we were negotiating, what was… All these things that are sort of the rhythm of what makes a law firm flow. And as I was starting to go down this path, other firms reached out, say, Hey, you guys are getting some pretty good results. We see you growing. How about can you help us out?

Chris Dreyer:

To keep up with demand, Chad started Vista Consulting with Tim Mackey in 2009. This is around the same time he also started his firm, Dudley DeBosier Injury Lawyers, and they both took off.

Chad Dudley:

I’ve gotten to work in some consulting capacity with over 200 law firms across the country. Dudley DeBosier went from a smaller operation, where we’re across the state of Louisiana. We manage five other firms. In 2018, we bought the agency that was doing our ads, which was CJ Advertising. We’ve been running that, so it’s been kind of a wild ride, but it’s been a lot of fun and I wouldn’t change a thing.

Chris Dreyer:

You’ve seen the inner workings of over 200 firms.

Chad Dudley:

Correct.

Chris Dreyer:

That gives you incredible insight into what’s working and how to run a thriving practise and commonalities. I guess let’s start with maybe the data side. Are there key indicators that you can look at, maybe some key numbers or things when you look at a firm and say, Hey, this one’s got it going on. This one’s really missing.

Chad Dudley:

There’s so many common elements that you see that success leaves clues, and there’s certain things that the best firms do on a consistent basis, even though they can be wildly different. I’ve worked with firms that are like, they might have four or 500 employees and they multi state, and just got a massive operation. And then other firms, it’s like it’s two attorneys and they got eight people and everything in between. You seen revenue numbers, what are they spending on labour? What’s the average fees that a attorney should generate in a plaintiff personal injury environment? And while there’s these general rules that guide you, there’s also the anomalies or the exceptions where you’re like, okay, well this is the general role. This firm does it a little better. This firm does a little bit worse, but you get these parameters and I can tell you, so right now when I go into a firm, I’ll do an assessment.
I’ll gather some information from them. I’m looking at their profit and loss statements for the last three to five years. I’ll look at some of their intake metrics and data. I’ll look at their closed case statistics and based off those three sort of data sets, I can give them a lot to go on for 12 months. In some cases, they’ll say, Hey, look, you just tighten up here. This is a little bit out of whack. Let’s create your budgets over here. The way I approach it is having taken all that information that I’ve seen from firms over the past, gosh, almost 15 years doing this, hundreds of firms looking at their data that I start with, okay, where is this firm currently? What are their current strengths, weaknesses? And it’s just a health check. And I’ve done, gosh, so many of those over the years.
I’m like, okay, what’s driving this call? Is it a quality of life thing? You’re trying to be more efficient work, have more discretionary free time, or is it a profit slash growing thing? We’re trying to scale. We’re trying to grow the firm, we’re trying to increase profits. And while those are not mutually exclusive, usually when people reach out to me one or the other is sort of driving a little bit more, sometimes I have guys say both. Out of all the years I’ve done, so I’ve had one firm where I’m like, dude, you’re working the hours you want to work. You’re firm’s making a really crazy health profit. You’re in the upper 1% of all the firms that do this. What? What’s your drive? And he’s like, no, I just wanted to get a check and making sure that I was, like going to the doctor and making sure that everything was healthy. I was being proactive about it.
But other than that guy, there’s been so many that, okay, here, work on this, work on this and we’ll start there. When I go into a firm, I mean, I always say, look, there’s two baskets of low hanging fruit in my opinion, because a lot of these things that you work on are disciplines that you just do consistently over time and you start to see some results. The two quick fixes I would say are one, intake. When I go into a firm, you go straight to intake. You’re like, okay, if we clean up some stuff today, you’re going to see benefits tomorrow and you can do a lot of stuff in 30 to 60 days, like a tonne of stuff. And it’s just some really low hanging fruit.
The second thing is when I’m working with the firm, I’m like, look, can we flag the top 5% of their cases in the building? Do we have them flagged and are they with the right person? And are we going to maximise value? What can we do? We got to make sure that we do not undervalue those cases and we just get the best results because in a healthy personal injury firm, their top 5% of their cases typically generates around 50% of their revenue. And sometimes in cases, it’s a bummer because sometimes firms aren’t totally in touch with what those top 5% are. And I’ll go in there and we have to find them first. And there’s an art to finding it. It sounds easy, we’ll just go find your top 5%. Well, the more cases you get it’s more and more of an art.
There’s science to it, but we just try to make sure, look, let’s max out those cases. And I know that sounds simplistic, but even if you grab one of those cases that was about to settle, maybe say it’s about to settle for a million dollars and you push it to get an extra 500. Sounds simplistic, when I go into firms, it happens all the time. And just putting the brakes on that process from happening and making sure you get top value, intake, top 5%, max value has a pretty big short term impact. And then you go hit all the sort of long term strategies after that.

Chris Dreyer:

If the top 5% cases begins with clear communication with your firm, the conversation may be uncomfortable, but Chad says, it’s critical to maximising the value of each case.

Chad Dudley:

If the goal of every personal injury firm is to identify the cases with the most potential, get them to the attorneys with the most skill, experience and results and support them with your best resources, if that’s the goal, and that should be the goal of every personal injury firm. If you’re going to execute on that, one of the first things you have to do is have the attorney sit around and get some agreement on who, which attorneys the ball needs to go to when a case develops. And so that’s an uncomfortable conversation. But the firms that aren’t willing to have it’s like having a football team and everyone wants to be the quarterback and they’re all fighting over who’s going to be the quarterback and no one’s running routes and no one’s blocking. So it creates this unintended chaos.
So one of the first things I’m like, all right guys, let’s just have a conversation. Let’s say that all the attorneys in this building, were going to put them on a scale of tier one to tier five and tier one is you’re fresh out of law school or you’ve never done personal injury and you’re going to require a tonne of supervision, da, da, da, da. This is the definition, right?
All right, tier five, this is an attorney that has been first chair and made multiple jury trials and gotten verdicts in excess of a million. You trust them with basically any case in any venue. And look, these are fast definitions and I work with each firm to develop and fine tune it, but the concept is now, okay, attorneys now that we’ve all talked about, and we defined tier two, tier three and tier four, and while there’s an outline for it, I like each firm to kind of adopt it to what they feel those things are.
And I try to keep it kind of clean so that you can figure out where you fall. And I ask each attorney on their own, and it’s in a survey that we do just online and go, all right, now that we’ve defined these tiers, where do you think you fall? Just have an honest, I think I’m a tier five, I think I’m a tier three. I think I’m a tier two. Put where you think you fall. And the second thing that I ask you to put is where do you want to be ultimately? And if you’re, you know, might put, Hey, I’m a tier, I get it. I’m a tier one. I just started doing this, but I want to be a tier five and I want to be a great attorney. That tells us a lot. And so we’ll take that information and a couple things. Sometimes when I’ll work with the leadership at the firm or the owners of the partners at the firm, I’ll go, all right guys, here’s what all your attorneys, Joe thinks, he thinks he’s a tier four and he wants to be a tier five. And sometimes the partners, oh, my Joe thinks he’s a tier four? He’s out of his mind. He’s the tier two.
And the point of that is not to go beat up on Joe. It’s not to make him feel like he’s a bad person, but gosh, you got to have those conversations and you go to him, Hey, look, Joe, look, I saw you put four, and you got to hammer that out because if Joe thinks he’s a tier four and he’s really a tier two and you’re trying to assign cases and get the cases with the most potential to the attorneys with utmost skill and results, and Joe thinks he’s one of those guys, well, you just got to get out that out of the way in a conversation versus making it awkward every single time a case is assigned. Right?
And firms that aren’t willing to have that conversation operate in this really murky, I don’t want to take a case from him, or we’re not supposed to pass the ball in that situation because we haven’t really discussed it, and he thinks he’s just as good as this guy, even though this guy’s gotten a bunch of jury verdicts, and it’s designed to just have the, and look, sometimes we’ll have attorneys that are like, Hey, I get it. I’m a tier two. I want to be tier three, but I really don’t want to be a tier four, tier five. I don’t want to try cases. I don’t want to go depositions and can I play in this ballpark? And that’s also awesome. All right, if you’re cool, you want to be a tier three, you’re going to max out there. Here’s what your role is.
When a case looks like this, you’re going to pass it to the tier four, tier five, and you’re going to identify those. And if you do that, you help out our clients, you help out our firm, you’re not going to be in a position where you’re in over your head. Awesome, great. And some firms will kind of like, everyone’s got to be tier five. No, not really. We need people playing different roles on the team, but just talk about it. And so many firms are reluctant to talk about it and it just creates issues. So when I go to a firm, that’s one of the first things I’ll hit. They go, let’s just talk about this.

Chris Dreyer:

Dan Kennedy talks about if you only have one horse and you need to put it down, you can’t have one lame horse, you got no backup. So is that a scenario where, hey, you rate these attorneys, you’re like, oh, I’ve got ones and twos. Is it a temporary solution to then go refer out to build your team and top grade right away? It sounds like a lot of those principles are like the Ray Dalio, they’re the radical candour type principles.

Chad Dudley:

Yeah, you got to get there because I mean, if you watch some of these, look, watch a documentary on any high performing team, there’s a high level of candour. You’re not beating around the bush. People are, great coaches will say, Hey, I know as a coach we’re implementing a certain standard and having certain conversations, that’s good. We’ll be okay. If we have leaders on the team that are implementing a certain standard and have a certain level of candour, that’s even better. He goes, a lot of them will say, we reach championship status when the players on the team, the guys on the front lines are adopting the standard and not afraid to have those conversations where if you’re running a sprint and you’re half-assing it and the guy next to you, your teammate, your partner, your colleague is like, dude, you can do better. That was a bunch of crap of what you just put out there in the field, when it’s at that level and you can talk to each other in that amount of candour, everyone gets better.
And so I have firms who are like, Hey, we want to be a great trial firm. Do an assessment. When’s the last time you guys went to trial? What does it look like? Okay, you got a bunch of tier two and tier threes. Is that the end of the world? No, but just be honest with where you are. And then, okay, well, what’s the best way to improve that skillset? I’m like, well, you’ll be the same person in five years from now that you are today, but for the books you read and the people you meet, well, what does that mean? Well, go find some guys that are getting the results that you want to get. Can you co-counsel? Can you learn from them? Can you go to conferences? Can you listen to podcasts like this? Can you read books and prove your skillset?
Because there’s a lot of guys out there that I know that have made that leap and they’re aggressive about that. You can’t want to be a tier five and not do these things and not take your craft. And so if you’ve got a bunch of tier ones and tier twos and you’re like, man, our firm’s never settled a case over a million dollars or whatever, we’ve never gotten a verdict over a million dollars, you’re going to ask yourself, well, yeah, I mean to the hammer, everything’s a nail. To a tier one, tier two attorney might not see the big case that are right in front of you.

Chris Dreyer:

Ah, there’s like a Nick Saban quote here. It’s like high performers can’t tolerate the low. I can’t remember exactly. The low performers and the low performers don’t like the high achievements, something like that.

Chad Dudley:

Even being a Baton Rouge and a LSU fan, I can still appreciate it.

Chris Dreyer:

Yeah.

Chad Dudley:

Nick Saban, he’s done enough good. But yeah, I think the short version is high performers don’t like to hang out with wingnuts. I mean, they want to be around other people that have a certain standard and they’re impatient and anxious being around people that just don’t have that standard. When I go visit a firm, it’s actually a really clean way to see how good is the firm at executing on identifying its best cases, getting them to highly qualified people and supporting them with their best resources. And it’s a proto point analysis and we’re like, all right, if your top 5% of your cases does not produce 50% of your fees, is there opportunity? If your top 5% only produces 25% of your fees, if your top 20% doesn’t produce 80% of your fees, but only 60%, usually those are firms that are not good at executing on that mission.
They treat all cases basically the same. The more you treat cases the same, you see that sort of distortion in those numbers, and they’re not a clean 5% produces 50 and 20% produces 80. And I go, okay, this firm’s got some opportunity. They got big cases and they’re building. The two things that I hear from firms when I’m working with them, I’m like, I’m going to call BS on that is we can’t find great people and we don’t have good cases, we don’t have great cases because we say I can’t find great people. Well, most of the time it’s because your training sucks and you have such a narrow window of people that will be successful at your firm that you got to find one out of a hundred is going to succeed at your firm. As your training improves, as your coaching improves, as those systems, also now the number might be, well, 90 people out of a hundred could do well at your firm because it’s so easy. It’s made so clear. So I think when you say, I can’t find good people, replace that with our training sucks and we got to improve it.
The other thing is when people say We don’t have great cases, I’d say you do. You’re just not good at finding them.

Chris Dreyer:

Or you’re treating them just like everything else, not treating them special.

Chad Dudley:

Yes. And if you’re relying on tier one, tier two, even tier three attorneys to see what makes a great case, you’re going to have a tough time finding them.

Chris Dreyer:

When your firm needs the field lead pipeline. It might be time to invest in advertising. Chad explains how to think about advertising in relation to business development at your firm.

Chad Dudley:

The first thing I ask a firm and they’re like, Hey, what should these numbers look like? It depends. What are you trying to build? Are you trying to build a low volume, high value practise? Like each attorney’s only going to handle 20 cases and you want them all to be worth in excess of a million? I’m like, okay, well, in that situation, you need pretty much all tier five attorneys. Your acquisition’s going to come mostly from co-counsel. A lot of your stuff’s going to come from increasing attorney referrals, that’s one methodology. And so your advertising budget’s going to look a little different. Your labour budget might be a little bit higher depending on how many of those guys are partners because the ones that stick around in that environment tend to have all partners. They’ve all got some piece of the pie. You don’t get tier fives that aren’t having some participation in the upside. Okay, that’s a different conversation.
Or are you okay, I’m an advertising guy that’s trying to get, I want to be someone that’s doing mass advertising out of the gates. What’s that going to look like? Well, guess what? Your advertising to revenue ratios going to probably look at, it might be 30, 35, 40%. It might get up in that range, but your labour ratio is going to be really, really low because a lot of the times you’re working in the, you’re working just in the business, you’re trying to, and there’s a conversation, there’s a book called Simple Number, Simple Profits, and I think it’s Dan Crabtree. He kind of gets in the concept of, well, when the owner’s working in the business, don’t calculate that as free labour. You should say, well, if I were paying myself what I would pay someone to do this in the open market, how much free labour am I providing the entity?
You got to look at that and while it’s just a fact of life in the early stages of a startup of a firm, you always want to keep your eye on it. Make sure you don’t ever think, well, I’m great. I’m really profitable when you’re providing 500 grand of free labour a year to the firm, and it’s covering over a bunch of inefficiencies of that. So to answer your question is like, okay, I first asked what are they trying to build? What is it a mass tort firm? Okay, well those are big epic typical swings in revenue. I’ve seen that. Or is it a referred out firm? You’re just going to try and get the cases in the door. Okay, well that one, well, your marketing might be 40, 50% of your revenue and your labor’s going to be 10 or 15%. Right? It’s a totally different model.
And so you’re, we put it on paper, is this, what are you excited about doing? And if we were to have this conversation three years from now, what do you want your firm to look like? And I can tell you based on what you’re telling me you want to build, okay, I want to do a hybrid. I want to mass torts, but then I want to also have a single event practise and I want to make sure that in the low years for mass tort, that single event stays at this level of profitability for the firm and da, da, da. And if we hit on mass torts, then it looks like, and you kind of model that out in budgets and we usually go three years out of what we’re trying to do. And I give numbers out all the time. And it’s funny because in groups you’re like, oh, my numbers are way better than that. And you dig in and yeah, I mean you’re a different firm. You’re solo.

Chris Dreyer:

Yeah.

Chad Dudley:

You got no overhead for this. Yeah. But while it’s good to know the numbers, you got to know your numbers and know kind of where you want to be. The guy I spoke to that looked at his firm was healthy labour ratio, great case acquisition number, working the number of hours he wanted to work in each week. He had a discretionary free time that it all jived and he liked what he was done. I’m like, man, just keep going. I don’t know.

Chris Dreyer:

Hey, here’s some validation. You’re doing good.

Chad Dudley:

Yes. So usually there’s some rub that people are going, Hey, can you, I got to itch. I need to scratch. Can you help us solve this? Can you help us get here? We’ll get a strategy that’s takes all those budgets into consideration.

Chris Dreyer:

Oh, okay. So you’re talking about the low volume, getting peer referrals and things and the expert litigators. A lot of times they have a niche where they can go deep in a particular area of the law. One of the things I’ve always wondered is if they try to do both, it’s almost a conflict of interest. If I’m depending upon peer referrals, but then I get a case and I’m like, oh, you know what? I don’t want to pay a referral fee. I’m going to go start advertising myself. Now you’re competing against the guy that’s referring you cases. Do they see it like that? Do they stop getting their referrals when they become an advertising threat?

Chad Dudley:

If they are sending cases to someone that is not doing advertising, then those guys start to advertise. Most of the time they’ll find a new referral partner. But each, everyone’s a little different. I noticed there’s some that don’t necessarily fall into that category. They’re like, look, have at it. I’m going to keep getting [inaudible 00:20:52]. But most of the time that will happen.
One of the things that I’ve seen as an evolution probably over the last decade, and I think we’ve, we’ve been a big proponent of it, is you used to have these firms were either or. They’re either, Hey, you’re a advertising high volume, when I say low value, I don’t mean, I’m not talking about the clients or who you represent. I’m talking about in general, their average close fee is lower, and then you got the low volume guys are high value and they’re like, we have a case count of 20 cases. They’re all highly contested liability. Damages are through the roof. We have to litigate every single one. We have to try most of them.
And so those are used to be two separate types of firms. You’re either or. The evolution has been, well, I think, and we took this very seriously early on, it was like, why can’t we be both? And so we had to have the conversation with, okay, let’s talk about who are the best attorneys, and if a case looks like this, we’re going to pass the ball from here to here. Okay, I get it that ultimately one day you want to handle cases like this, cool, you’re going to work with these guys, but we can’t, you’re not taking a test run on a client. We’re going to make sure you know how to fly the plane. We make sure that you are trained or make sure that you’re gone side by side with someone a bunch of times before we turn you loose on one of those on your own and just have that conversation.
And so the goal was, can we have both? And so now I think there’s a bunch of firms that are saying, yeah, we can get in a bunch of cases and we’re going to select top 5%, top 20%, get it to attorneys that are of this skill level and let them focus on those cases. And there are still some of the guys that just, there are still some firms that are lower volume guys that work with, if a mass firm has no tier four, tier five guys, I’m like, guys, you got to find a friend. I mean, you got to go talk to one of these guys, have them sit in on your best cases and develop some rapport. Because they need you, you need them. There’s a deal to be cut to get the best result for the clients. And so that’s been a conversation. I think it works well, but yeah, I mean if you’re a low volume, high value, you get a bunch of attorney referrals from an advertising firm and then you go start advertising, most of the time that faucet turns off.

Chris Dreyer:

I was earlier going to ask you about revenue per employee, but I guess it’s different if you got the volume, you probably got way more head count, lower revenue per employee, and then you got the lower volume. You got super high revenue per employee.

Chad Dudley:

Yeah, yeah. Look, again, it’s a different model where, okay, if you’re a referred out firm where cases come in, you’re like referring them out immediately and co-counsel agreements, I mean your labour ratios going to be low, your revenue per employee is going to be low. So those, you look at the numbers for those firms a little bit differently and then you look at, okay, well a low volume, high value firm, that’s going to look a little bit different. And so I’ll just look and see what it is. I will look at revenue per employee. I will look at revenue, so I’ll say revenue per fee centre and by fee centre, I mean some firms, they have case managers that resolve things pre-lit. Who in the firm is expected to generate fees? Do you have a case manager pre-lit that that’s expected to generate fees? Well, that’s a fee centre.
And then lit. Is it only attorneys? Most firms are okay, it’s only attorneys that are our fee centres. But then you’re like, well, we have 10 attorneys. I’m like, yeah, but you have one that’s an intake attorney. You have one that’s a research attorney. You have one that’s a partner that’s managing the firm. Those three or not, are you expecting them to produce fees? Well, no. Okay, well then you got seven fee centres and what’s your revenue per fee centre? And so you kind of look at these things totality and you’re like, okay, well if your labour ratio is high, total amount spent on compensation divided by revenue, if that ratio is high north of 40%, then you got to ask yourself, well, is it high because our fee centres are not producing a proportion amount of revenue that we would expect per fee centre. Okay, well, they need to produce more or is it high, they’re producing. We’re just carrying a lot of overhead. We’re not getting, we’re carrying a lot of labour and that’s a difference. Are the comp plans wrong? What’s going on there?

Chris Dreyer:

Volume would lend itself to productization versus the low volume would be more bespoke, more custom, more maximising value and looking at each individual case.

Chad Dudley:

We try to go, okay, I know we get a bunch of cases. I know that we’re fortunate that we get to represent, we’re lucky enough to represent so many clients, but we also want each of those clients to feel like they hired a firm where they do get that bespoke treatment. They’re treated as an individual, not as a number, a person whose story matters. I think that that’s the goal. Our mission, we’re continuing to try and innovate to try and get better at our craft so we can serve our clients better, get better results for our clients so that we can create a place. Our core values are take care of our team, take care of our clients, do great work, have fun, give back to the community and do what’s right, not what’s easy. And we love it. Me and my partners, we love what we do and it’s what we take pride in.

Chris Dreyer:

Thanks so much to Chad for sharing his insights today. If you want to get ahold of him, you can email Chad, reach out to chad@cdudleydebosier.com. That’s Chad at C-D-U-D-L-E-Y-D-E-B-O-S-I-E-R.com. Here we go. PIM Pointoint number one, chances are you’ve already got great cases walking through your door. Trick lies in identifying the top 5% of cases and getting them to higher value. This begins with intake.

Chad Dudley:

I’ll do an assessment and I’ll look at some of their intake metrics and data. Be like, okay, if we clean up some stuff today, you’re going to see benefits tomorrow and you can do a lot of stuff in 30 to 60 days, like a tonne of stuff, and it’s just some really low hanging fruit.

Chris Dreyer:

All right. PIM Pointoint number two, growth, more free time, better profitability. Whatever your goals are for your firm, you got to know where you’re at before you can make changes for major impact. Benchmark the talent of your existing attorneys. Ask about their goals for professional development and identify your firm’s gaps and ability so that you can co-counsel or hire appropriately to get maximum value for your case.

Chad Dudley:

Tier one is you’re fresh out of law school or you’ve never done personal injury and you’re going to require a tonne of supervision, da, da, da, da. This is the definition. All right, tier five. This is an attorney that has been first chair and made multiple jury trials and gotten verdicts in excess of a million. One of the first things you have to do is have the attorney sit around and get some agreement which attorneys the ball needs to go to when a case develops.

Chris Dreyer:

And PIM Pointoint number three, advertising budgets have to be tailored to your business model and your specific business development plan. We often hear generalised numbers like you have to invest X percentage to have a successful campaign or project, fulfilling the pipeline requires thoughtful resource allocation.

Chad Dudley:

What are you trying to build? Are you trying to build a low volume, high value practise? Like each attorney’s only going to handle 20 cases and you want all to be worth in excess of a million? I’m like, okay, well, a lot of your stuff’s going to come from increasing attorney referrals, or I want to be someone that’s doing mass advertising out of the gates. What’s that going to look like? Well, guess what? Your advertising to revenue ratios going to probably look at. It might be 30, 35, 40%.

Chris Dreyer:

All right everybody. Thanks for hanging out. I’m Chris Dreyer. If you like what you heard today, click on the follow button so you never miss an episode and leave a review. I’ll be forever grateful. Now get out there and dominate. I’m out.