Dave Abels:

With today’s technology, I can practice from almost anywhere in the world.

Chris Dreyer:

There’s a lot of different channels. People talk about TikTok or Instagram or whatever new channel it is, but if you’re not actively engaged and there’s just no need.

Dave Abels:

Newsletters are critical. I’m not someone that has a weekly newsletter. I have a very high percentage of newsletter opens when I send them out. I probably add 20 people to my list for every person that leaves.

Chris Dreyer:

Welcome to Personal Injury Mastermind. I’m your host, Chris Dreyer, Founder and CEO of Rankings.io, the No Excuses, No BS Legal Marketing Agency that works harder than the competition.

Each week you get insights and wisdom from some of the best in the industry. Before we get started, hit that Follow button so that you never miss an episode. All right, let’s get it.

At his core, Dave Abels is an entrepreneur who’s optimized his firm for his lifestyle. Rather than rapid high risk growth, David prefers slow growth and taking things one step at a time. His measured approach is based in adaptability. In the mid ’90s, David invested heavily in traditional media like newspaper and yellow page ads. As technology advanced, David realized his cases were coming more and more from online sources, so he focuses his efforts there, doubled down on digital marketing and SEO. Now, his firm dominates Google for terms like Chicago personal injury lawyer and Chicago car accident lawyer and employs five attorneys.

But as tech changes, one thing stays the same, relationship building, that word of mouth combined with great online visibility keeps new cases steadily flowing in. This frees David up to focus on business operations he enjoys most while providing clients top-notch legal representation and he can practice remotely when needed without disruption. David shares his lessons he’s learned from three decades in law. Here’s Dave Abels, partner at Abels and Annes.

Dave Abels:

I’ve actually been practicing since ’94. At first I was an Assistant State’s Attorney in Western Illinois and then I worked for a criminal defense firm in Chicago in River North and had some very interesting experiences. Got interested in PI and I’ve been doing nothing but personal injury since 1997. Back then, my niche was newspaper ads as far as bringing in business. An advertisement in a major newspaper that back then might have been $5,000 to $10,000 a month is now sort of useless. It might cost you under $500 a month. I remember there was such a focus on law firms in Chicago spending huge amounts of money, whether you had a full page or even a double page ad in the yellow pages that was big and all that has sort of become obsolete.

Chris Dreyer:

Things are adapting always. Even TV shifting over to OTT, now that’s fractured. It’s kind of like the Wild West over there, still multiple platforms. There hasn’t been this consolidation that we see in other areas, and SEO is changing. Went through tonnes of iterations. You know organic, continues to be pushed down. Then they adapt things like local service ads and the maps and all these different things, and you’ve really done quite well there.

What about the niche of PI itself? So you said you’re originally drawn to the criminal side and maybe being a prosecutor and what drew you to come over to the plaintiff’s side to do personal injury work?

Dave Abels:

I just thought the future in criminal defense looked real, it could be tough, and the next thing I tried that sounded interesting was personal injury. And I didn’t dive in as fast as far as some people. It’s not like I switched to PI and opened my own firm and that first year just started on my own. I mean, I was an associate attorney for several years at a small PI firm in Chicago, and I eventually became a law partner and then I went out on my own a few years later.

Chris Dreyer:

How did you meet your partner, Gary? You guys are kind like the yin and the yang, right? Where you’re bringing the business, Gary’s tremendous trial attorney. How did that kind of a relationship form?

Dave Abels:

We were sort of in the same, I guess you could say, the same legal circle in Chicago. He was someone that was real good friends with some of my good friends and whether it’s going to lunch or different events, you know would hang out together and my interest is more on the management side and marketing and pre-litigation and yeah, he’s a litigator.

Chris Dreyer:

Yeah. Yeah, and it’s been a fantastic combination because you’ve always invested in your marketing. You’ve designed what I would say, a very successful practice around your lifestyle, allowing you the freedom to do what you want to do, to take trips, to be a father, to be a husband. When you look into the competition, the opportunities, how do you make those decisions? Because it seems like if you’re constantly investing in growth, you’re kind of deferring profitability and time. And maybe I’m wrong, maybe it comes to delegation. What goes into those decisions and creating the type of law firm that fits your needs?

Dave Abels:

I’ve been able to sort of design a practice where I have certain freedoms that I like. But meaning because I’m marketing and pre-lit with today’s technology, I can practice from almost anywhere in the world. I mean, obviously you have time zone issues. But at the same time, when you run your own business, everyone that runs their own practice, you have to work hard and you have to be aggressive in certain respects. I mean when the phone rings or you get that contact on a new case or something comes up, I’m around. I’m working Saturday, I’m working Sunday if I need to. You know I find that the time off when I need it as well, but at the same time, that might not be traditional time off. I might work all weekend and then things might slow down on Tuesday. I mean, I’m still working and available. I like that lifestyle. I don’t have to be tied to the office like if you’re a litigator for the most part, you have to be in the office.

Chris Dreyer:

One of the things that you do well is the combination of grassroots marketing and digital. You have your newsletter and whether you’re giving away Cubs’ tickets or Bulls’ tickets, where did you learn this in terms of gathering engagement to your newsletter? And I’m sorry about the Cubs, but I can’t really talk about my Cardinal’s performance this year. They’re not doing too hot, but…

Dave Abels:

We started, okay. We’ve slowed down quite a bit, but I don’t think we were expecting that much this year. You know newsletters are critical. It used to be that you could have a fantastic settlement for a client and they might love you, but way back when, once they left, if they lost your card or your number, you wouldn’t see them again. Now with email and newsletters and things like that, you could stay in touch. We try our best to do that and we do try to make the newsletters… I’m not someone that has a weekly newsletter and sometimes, usually it ends up being more like every, it might be more quarterly. I try to make it where I have a very high percentage of newsletter opens when I send them out because I have something to say. I probably add 20 people to my list for every person that leaves because I don’t bother the heck out of people, but it’s enough where they remember you.

But there’s other forms of engagement as well. We do our best to have good relationships with our clients. I mean I get, especially after a case settles, I can’t tell you how many clients I’m Facebook friends with or friends with on some form of social media, good experiences with our firm, things like your own personal social media. I guess it’s just my age. I’m showing my age. I’m old. I’m not a TikTok guy. I wish I was more TikTok savvy, but you know, my age group is more on Facebook. When you have well over a thousand Facebook friends and people know what you do, that tends to bring in some good referrals.

Chris Dreyer:

There’s a lot of different channels. A lot of times people talk about TikTok or Instagram or whatever new channel it is, but if you’re not actively engaged and there’s just no need, right? So you’re engaged on Facebook, you got a thousand followers, it works for you and connecting people, you’re building that community there, then that’s great. The other thing I would say too with the newsletter that I like from what you say, it’s that nurture component where they’re not just gone forever. And I’d imagine that if a referral opportunity, one of their friends or family gets hurts, then it lends itself to a referral as opposed to, “Hey, here’s your check. See you later.”

Dave Abels:

Whether it’s a big case, medium or small, I mean our goal is, you work with our firm, we want to make you happy enough where if your kid or your relative or friend gets injured in an accident, you’re going to think of us, “Hey, these are good guys to work with.” You want everybody leaving happy, and that’s how we’ve always done business. The way we handle the case as far as keeping clients updated when they want an update, returning calls, staying on top of their case.

You know one of the biggest complaints about attorneys in general with PI attorneys is just the lack of communication or you know, I can’t reach my lawyer.

Chris Dreyer:

Just not being attentive.

Dave Abels:

Yeah, I mean a lot of people we work with are just so thrilled to be able to get that return phone call within a reasonable amount of time. We do our best to call back the same day. It’s pretty rare we’re not calling within 24 hours. People like to have access to firm members and they don’t need to leave 10 messages to talk to us.

Chris Dreyer:

Yeah, I imagine if they call and they don’t get to speak to you or you don’t return they’re call, they’re going to the next firm anyways.

Dave Abels:

They could, yeah.

Chris Dreyer:

So there’s a lot of cases there. On your website, a lot of times we see websites that they’re focusing in and marketing to the Spanish community, and there’s an audience there, but in Chicago there’s 1.9 million Polish Americans, so you’re marketing to the Polish community, and what are some of the unique needs of these communities and how does your approach to marketing attract those individuals?

Dave Abels:

There’s a very significant Polish population in Chicago. A lot of firms that I see, they’ll have secretaries that are some sort of legal assistant that speak Polish. And there’s different levels of speaking Polish. I mean, sometimes we are involved with firms where they say they have someone on staff that speaks Polish, but then Polish people are complaining about the limited ability to communicate, so we’ve sort of taken the extra step where we have a good lawyer in the office named Roman who he speaks Polish, and so we’ve gone the extra step where if somebody calls in, they’re not going to just speak to a secretary paralegal and they’re not going to sit there and have a long translated phone call. I mean, they’re going to have direct access to a Polish-speaking attorney.

Chris Dreyer:

We were talking about this briefly at National Trial Lawyers. We were talking about ChatGPT and how we’re at the advent of it actually speaking pretty fluently and not broken in terms of its translation capabilities. Have you played around a little bit more with the ChatGPT capabilities in terms of these translation types?

Dave Abels:

Not too much. The most important thing is you want someone to be able to pick up the phone and have communication. I mean, but if you need something translated for some reason, that would save… You know Polish is not the easiest language to translate, even if you’re fluent in Polish.

Chris Dreyer:

You see in your area tons of billboards, there’s a lot of your billboard guys in Chicago. You flip on the daytime television. What dissuaded you from going this traditional route to TV, to radio, to the billboards? What made you focus more on the digital and the SEO side and not so much the traditional?

Dave Abels:

We’ve definitely played with a lot of different types of advertising. We’ve done a little TV, radio, things like that. For whatever reason, I find that I like the cases the best that come from online. The people that find us online are typically sophisticated enough where they’re doing their research and tend to know what’s the case and what’s not a case compared to say, calls coming in from TV or newspaper.

But a lot of it’s your comfort level. A lot of times you’re talking about very large budgets and it’s not just bringing in the cases. Then you need to move the cases and there’s different levels of stress that different lawyers are comfortable with. We get a little bigger every year, but Gary and I were never the firm to go take out a massive line of credit and sort of gamble. You know we’ve been more conservative, slow growth. I mean at first it was just, we started with me, and myself and Gary and one legal secretary, which changed to two and now we’re still not a huge firm, but we’re five lawyers, one of counsel, and then we have support staff of five as well. And it seems to, you know it’s not overnight, it’s just sort of we slowly grow and that’s what we’re comfortable with and no one’s losing sleep at night. I know guys that maybe they love the high stress they like to use. We’re scaling up.

Chris Dreyer:

It’s intriguing, right? You got the slow growth, the compounded, they continue to grow and you guys have tremendous visibility and the other thing, speaking of comfort levels and without naming names, Chicago is you got these runners and cappers everywhere. What does a firm that’s above board, what do you do? Because you don’t want to put your name out there? How do you make a change? How do you prevent something like that?

Dave Abels:

There hasn’t really been much to prevent it. There is talk here and there about legislation as far as cracking down on firms or other organizations soliciting business. But yeah, we do get a lot of complaints as far as… When I say complaints, like when somebody contacts us, they say that, “I was in this accident and I thought I better call a lawyer because my phone’s been blowing up all day.”

It is a difficult aspect of being in Chicago, part of the problem is just the nature of the police reports in general. Illinois State Police, they have it set up where it’s just they provide redacted reports. Most departments, they give the name and phone numbers redacted. They do give the insurance information, but the problem in certain areas, for example, Chicago, is they just all goes up online including phone number and address, and certain groups have ways to get at the reports.

I was contacted recently about someone who didn’t want to hire me, didn’t have a case, but just was mad that he was in a bike accident and he wasn’t hurt, but he wanted the calls to stop. You know there’s some people that are sort of over the top when it comes to that stuff and hopefully it’ll get resolved.

Chris Dreyer:

Dave, I really appreciate your time and for those listening, how can they get in touch with you and what’s next for the firm?

Dave Abels:

You can get in touch with me. You can just call the office. Our main office is in Downtown Chicago. I’m, as I look out the window, I’m looking down at the Mayor’s Office. We’re right across from City Hall, but our main office number is (312) 924-7575. You can obviously find us anywhere online and I think the future plans are sort of stay of the course and slow growth and continue to do our best to make every client happy and get strong results.

Chris Dreyer:

Thanks so much to Dave for sharing his wisdom today. Let’s hit the takeaways. It’s time for the pinpoints. Stay agile. Marketing is constantly evolving. To stay ahead, you have to be willing to adapt, go where your ideal clients are and on the platform that makes sense to you.

Dave Abels:

My age group is more on Facebook, but when you have well over a thousand Facebook friends and people know what you do, that tends to bring in some good referrals.

Chris Dreyer:

Stay consistent. Give every client the best you have every time. Provide the same level of quality service over and over. Think about it like your favorite restaurant. You went once, really liked it, so you go back again and again. You bring your friends and the people you love.

If the steak started coming back cooked wrong, the cocktails started tasting differently or the service started to slip, would you go back without hesitation? Would you recommend it over and over to people you care about? Probably not. When a client thinks of a firm to recommend your name should come up without hesitation. Never lose sight of the importance of customer service and nurturing relationships, both new and old. This builds referrals and retention.

Dave Abels:

A lot of people we work with are just so thrilled to be able to get that return phone call. We do our best to call back the same day. Pretty rare we’re not calling within 24 hours. People like to have access to firm members and they don’t need to leave 10 messages to talk to us.

Chris Dreyer:

Relax, construct your practice in a way that avoids unnecessary stress and allows you to practice on your own terms. Achieving work-life balance will make you happier and more productive in the long run. Practicing law is a marathon. It’s hard, noble work. Take it all in stride. Enjoy what you do.

Dave Abels:

I’ve been able to sort of design a practice where I have certain freedoms that I like because I’m marketing and pre-lit. You know with today’s technology, I can practice from almost anywhere in the world.

Chris Dreyer:

For more information about Dave, check out the show notes. While you’re there, please hit that Follow button so that you never miss an episode of Personal Injury Mastermind with me, Chris Dryer, Founder and CEO of Rankings.io. All right everybody, thanks for hanging out. See you next time. I’m out.