Clay Payne:

Prior to me going down this endeavor 90% of our cases were referred from other firms.

Chris Dreyer:

Level up, learn a new skill, get more leads.

Clay Payne:

A case that’s not referred is probably worth twice as much because you’re going to have to pay a referral fee.

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 that in one a star review. I got a big hug for all my haters too. Ready to dominate your market? Let’s go. Litigation firms don’t really advertise. Typically, they’re sent cases from larger pre-lit firms like the big guys with massive budgets on billboards and TV. This was definitely true of the litigation firm Cruz & Payne Injury Lawyers. 90% of their cases came from attorney referrals and they did virtually no advertising, this also meant that 90% of the cases had fee splits. Clay Payne saw this as an opportunity, on a warpath to earn more clients he learned a new skill and levelled up. He now has over 200,000 followers on Instagram, his efforts generated so many cases that he earned the title of partner.
Social media is a great way to build the network of potential clients. He explains how to get over that follower plateau and why you don’t need a massive team or fancy equipment to get it done right. Here’s Clay Payne, partner at Cruz & Payne Injury Lawyers on how he first got into law.

Clay Payne:

Both my parents are attorneys and my grandparents are attorneys and uncles who are judges, and so it kind of just ran in the family. So I was always interested and kind of just grew up around the plaintiff’s side lingo, talking about different issues at the dinner table.

Chris Dreyer:

Are there any early memories that stands out with those experiences?

Clay Payne:

Definitely tagging along with my father and going up to Austin for mediations and stuff like that. I always wanted to be a plaintiff’s side personal injury attorney, and that’s what I went to law school for. When I got out of law school, I wanted to start at a firm that did plaintiff work because I wanted to figure out how to practice law. So that’s essentially what I did. Up until January of this year I wasn’t actually a partner at my firm. I just became a partner and a large part of that is due to the leads I’ve been generating from Instagram. Last year around April is when I really dove into Instagram and marketing essentially. Before that I was just grinding and trying to settle cases, get courtroom experience and kind of go from that angle.

Chris Dreyer:

That’s amazing, and kind of jumping over to the biz dev side. A lot of times our audience wants to know hey, how do I get the leads? And your Instagram has a massive following. Last I checked it was 209,000 and counting and I went in there and I clicked. I was like, let me see what these comments are. Let me see if you got good engagement and see what’s going on and you got good engagement. So what goes into that? Then we can get granular, and then how that makes an impact on your firm?

Clay Payne:

I learned early on maybe through a revelation that to be successful in the injury space, you need to learn how to bring in cases. There were some attorneys out there on Instagram doing kind of informational videos and stuff like that. But I really didn’t see anyone doing it kind of every single day just being in front of the camera and there were a few attorneys that do that and they do that even today. But the competition is not that fierce, I think slowly and attorneys are kind of getting into it. In any case, I dove into basically providing informational content through TikTok and Instagram. My first videos that I did performed horribly, you kind of are very awkward in front of the camera when you haven’t done it before. So when I got the hang of it and eventually I started learning how to make videos go viral, and organically the trajectory of my followers has gone from zero to over 200,000 just on Instagram.

Chris Dreyer:

So let’s dig into that. There’s a ton of attorneys listening that are doing social media, they’re even being consistent, but they’re still stuck in that I would say 500 to 2000 followers range and they just kind of stay there. They don’t really have a lot of engagement. What are some of the elements that you’ve broke this down and you’ve kind of figured out what makes something go viral. What are some of those components to really generate impressions?

Clay Payne:

Absolutely, it’s harder to execute it than it may seem. I found out that Instagram it depends on the user’s preference. So if you talk about car accidents day in and day out and these obscure insurance codes and you know how you need UIM and you need to get your PIP coverage and you need this you’re going to bore your audience to sleep. As much as that intrigues personal injury attorneys and as much as it intrigues colleagues and we talk about all these nuances of law and how we can one up the defense attorney, it’s not interesting to the average Joe. So essentially what I’ve done and what I think the attorneys who are successful on TikTok and Instagram have done is they realize that it’s a branding play. To gain the follower account and to gain the virality you can’t focus on just injury law and insurance law. You need to go broad and do criminal, interesting facts, do situations that create controversy in some sense. Because controversy drives views and it doesn’t have to be controversy that casts a negative light on you.
But it could be a controversial topic that everyone’s talking about, and if an attorney can opine and talk about it in such a way people are engaged with that. So essentially my strategy has been create video ideas that kind of capture people’s attention and then essentially I pepper in the fact that I’m an injury attorney. I pepper in the fact that I do car accidents, I pepper the kind of boring insurance stuff like, “Hey, you need UIM coverage. Here’s what to do after a car accident. Here’s what to do if you get into a Uber, Lyft accident.” Those type of topics they’re peppered in all throughout the videos. So you’re not seeing just that, you’re seeing this other interesting stuff and then you’re also seeing the injury stuff.

Chris Dreyer:

If you’re too narrow you position yourself where you’re too specific and you don’t appeal to enough people. Look, if you’re trying to reach a broad audience talk about things that a broad audience would be interested in, and I think that’s so interesting. The other thing too is you seem to be really consistent. Are you getting in a regular cadence like hey, every Monday I knock these out or maybe it’s every day at 9:00 AM I’m knocking the… Tell me about the habits that go into this since you yourself are creating the content.

Clay Payne:

Sure. Yeah, so I don’t have a social media team. I mean essentially now I’m a partner at my firm Cruz & Payne Injury Lawyers, and I do all the video production myself essentially. I think it can be delegated. I think you can definitely delegate it, but I’ve kind of gotten in a cadence so to speak in such a way where I can knock it out pretty quickly. But as far as the weekly shoots and everything, essentially it involves coming up to my office on Sunday either a home office or my physical office and my wife is my teammate. She actually comes up and we use the back camera on the iPhone 13, we record all the videos. It doesn’t require extensive production equipment or anything of that nature. We’re shooting it with that, and we use a professional microphone essentially like the road mic. It takes about two hours to record, and then I send it off to a video editor to do the edits and everything.

Chris Dreyer:

So once a week you’ll do a two-hour batch and it’ll be good for the week, is that what you’re saying?

Clay Payne:

Yeah. I try to do seven to 12 videos a week, so at some point throughout the week I sit down. So in addition to those two hours, I also have to devote one or two hours throughout the week to come up with the ideas because I essentially write myself a script. I bring my script to the shoots, and so sometime throughout the week I write my script and then on Sunday I shoot the videos and then send it off. It is a time commitment, there’s definitely a devotion. You have to devote at least two or three hours a week to it, but if you’re getting half of your cases coming in through social media I mean it’s worth it.

Chris Dreyer:

I just heard [inaudible 00:09:11] on my first million, he was talking about his role and he said it’s just to do podcast in social media because he creates distribution and that distribution is so powerful. Right? So if you have a message, the firm has a message you’ve now got a few 100,000 followers that’s just going to continue to grow that are engaged and going to hear what you have to say as opposed to 2000. Right? There’s just a lot of leverage there. I want to circle back around to that first point where you’re like hey, you’re pretty transparent. Whenever I started bringing in the cases I had something to negotiate to bring to the partners like, “Hey, I want to be a partner. I’m generating a lot of business.” So you kind of understood that. Did you also approach the attorney referral side? Did you go that direction as well or was it just like I’m going to focus on social, and then that’s where you’re kind of laser beam focused?

Clay Payne:

No, I’m actually going on all fronts right now. The attorney referral side, I think the social media helps in some way because it gets your name out. I mean, I’m sure there’s probably going to be some attorneys that watch this podcast and maybe reaching out to me and say “Hey, I saw you on the podcast or I listened to the podcast and it was great and let’s connect.” Maybe I’ll send them some cases, maybe they’ll send some cases back to me. But at the end of the day people do business with people they like, the trust type of deal. So obviously they have to know you first. If you have over 200,000 followers on Instagram, a percentage of those are going to be attorneys and a percentage of those are attorneys that are going to need a referral source. Our firm essentially doesn’t do any marketing outside of my social media. We’re a litigation firm, so prior to me going down this endeavor of getting cases essentially coming in right from the inception.
90% of our cases were referred from other firms, billboard firms or firms that did a lot of ad spend, pay-per-click and stuff like that. Radio, television and that type of stuff. I’ve been reaching out to a lot of firms to see if there’s cases that might not fit their business model. Oftentimes, there’s relationships that have come about through this progression of just getting your name out there. Social media can also be used to just get your name out there and then once people recognize you it’s an easy end to make that introduction and have that potential referral partner.

Chris Dreyer:

When creating content for social media, you got to know who you’re talking to. Is it referring attorneys or potential clients? The messaging for one might not fit the other, but chances are there will be some overlap. You got to understand your firm’s unique positioning and relationship to the target audience to create content that converts.

Clay Payne:

I think that my content that I put out is not geared towards attorneys at all, I think it’s geared towards potential clients. As far as the referral base and bringing in cases as a litigation firm I think it’s easier because most pre-lit firms or firms that have maybe multiple departments and stuff like that. They’re going to be hesitant to take a case that has any sort of liability dispute, property damage issue or some sort of issue that’s going to create the need for litigation which is those are the type of cases that we want. The cases that are getting referred over to us are cases that need litigation. There’s probably high damages, but maybe potentially a liability issue or maybe there’s low property damage. But clear liability and the firm that’s handling it before us doesn’t have the wherewithal to work it up in the proper way, get the experts involved that they need to get involved. From a marketing standpoint on Instagram, a case that’s not referred is probably worth twice as much. Because you’re going to have to pay a referral fee on any case that you get referred over to you.
So any cases that come in through Instagram, obviously they’re generated by our firm. There’s not a referral fee on it, so there’s value there.

Chris Dreyer:

We talked a lot about Instagram and you’re crushing on Instagram, is that the originator and then you’re curating to TikTok and maybe YouTube Shorts? Is that kind of the strategy to originate? Because I think a lot of attorneys right now are kind of originating on TikTok, it seems, then they’re putting on reels and then they’re putting on YouTube Shorts. What made you make that decision?

Clay Payne:

No, so I actually started on TikTok. But I realized that… And I think I had gotten quite a few followers on TikTok before I even moved to Instagram. I think I had like 50,000 or something at some point, but I didn’t get any leads at all from TikTok. There’s issues with TikTok because you can’t message within the app without friending each other. In addition, I think the type of potential clients or the type of users of TikTok tend to be I guess in a younger audience and maybe a trust issue with establishing that brand identity. So as soon as I moved over to Instagram or I started just doing both. I moved over to Instagram and started posting on both platforms, that’s when the leads started coming in through Instagram. Because you can message right within the app, you post a video and people see you every day dressed up in a suit talking about different legal issues and then they go get into a car accident and you’re the first person on their mind.

Chris Dreyer:

That makes sense on Instagram in terms of the DMing and having that ability to control like an intake. I guess the attention span too on TikTok is probably just way shorter than… It’s just super swipe. I don’t know the speed if anybody’s done that type of test. I know you’re getting the referrals from your litigating side, and you have that side too and you got to pay those referral percentages. How has your role changed since you’re now partner? Or has the rest of the firm now give you more of the freedom to pursue this because they’ve seen the impact? How has it changed?

Clay Payne:

Business development, I mean bringing in clients is a significant part of my job now and it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. You start bringing in cases, you make partner and then now it’s kind of your job to keep on bringing in cases and potential clients. So a large part of my time in the office as well as on the weekends through Instagram and all that is now spent potentially looking for the next way to bring in a potential client. I think that as far as just keeping your head down in the papers and just grinding away those days are kind of long gone. I mean, obviously I still am an attorney. I still do all my depositions, trials and all that but the amount of time I’m spending on my career is significantly more now. It’s not a 40-hour work week, any attorney is probably not a 40-hour work week. But especially when part of your job is to bring in cases and stuff it’s definitely an additional career in and of itself. If any of your listeners are out there and thinking about jumping into social media I encourage them to do so.
I think it’s a great marketing tool, it’s completely free. In other words, you don’t have to do ad spend, my 200,000 followers came from all organic. So I mean essentially my only costs were my video editing costs, which to pay someone to edit my videos for me. Other than that, like I said I think that it’s still a very viable way to bring in cases and I encourage people to try it out.

Chris Dreyer:

On the video editing side, do you use Tasty Edits or Video Husky or anything like that? Is there a particular service you use for that?

Clay Payne:

I found someone on Fiverr that I like, I don’t know if you’re familiar with Fiverr?

Chris Dreyer:

Yep.

Clay Payne:

You can go on there and you can find someone that will edit your videos for like five to $10 a video. So you can upload seven videos, your weekly videos if you want to post one a day and spend $100 essentially a week. So it’s very, very minimal cost.

Chris Dreyer:

For the attorneys listening where can they go to get in touch with you and what’s next?

Clay Payne:

Sure, absolutely. Everyone can get in touch with me probably through my email is best. It’s cpayne@cruzpc.net, which is C-P-A-Y-N-E at cruzpc.net and as far as what’s next just keep grinding away and putting up the good fight against the insurance companies.

Chris Dreyer:

Thanks so much for Clay for sharing his insights today, let’s hit the takeaways time for the PIM Points. Here we go, PIM Point number one. Social media may not be as saturated as you think, it is still a great way to widen the pool for potential clients. But you got to be consistent, show up over and over and stay on the top.

Clay Payne:

But the competition is not that fierce.

Chris Dreyer:

Next up, PIM Point number two. Your content has to be memorable. Think about the reasons you came to social media, to be entertained? To learn something that interests you? Or maybe you just scroll until you see something that grabs your attention. Whatever the reason the app puts the user at the center, make content for the user. If you’re a B2C firm make content that clients would understand.

Clay Payne:

So if you talk about car accidents day in and day out and these obscure insurance codes and you know how you need UIM and you need to get your PIP coverage and you need this you’re going to bore your audience to sleep.

Chris Dreyer:

PIM Point number three, you don’t have to be everywhere all at once to be effective. Get comfortable with one platform first, evaluate the performance, see what works for you and what doesn’t. Go to the platform that makes sense for your demographic and your business needs.

Clay Payne:

I think I had quite a few followers on TikTok before I even moved to Instagram. I think I had like 50,000 or something at some point, but I didn’t get any leads at all from TikTok.

Chris Dreyer:

I’m Chris Dreyer, founder and CEO of Rankings.io. Join me each week for insights from the best in the legal industry. Click that follow button so you never miss an episode and leave a review. If you’re here for the first time, welcome and if you’ve been here for a while do me a solid and leave me a review. All right everybody, thanks for hanging out. Next week you’ll hear from Mike Alder of AlderLaw on why depositions are crucial to getting maximum value. See you there, I’m out.