👋 Good morning. Chris Dreyer here. Google just changed how Local Services Ads charge law firms, and some of its own reps have muddied what it means. Starting Oct. 1, calls you never answered can start costing you. Our Director of Paid Digital, Jessica Ford, cuts through what actually changes and what doesn't.
Also, mass-tort lawyer Mikal Watts put seven figures into building his own AI, and now he wants it running inside PI firms whose back offices private equity has already bought. A defense lawyer who goes up against those firms says the combination makes them harder to face.
And I keep coming back to how much the message matters. "We'll fight for you" loses meaning when so many PI firms say it. Fight what, exactly? Donald Miller's advice is to get really clear about what you stand against if you want your marketing to resonate. Let's get into it.
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💡ONE BIG IDEA
Your Firm Has to Be Against Something
PI firms that say exactly what they're against build stronger brands.
But I'm not talking about "we'll fight for you." For starters, every firm says that.
Calling insurance companies the enemy doesn't go far enough either. Not nearly.
You build a stronger brand by getting specific about what your prospective clients are up against, why it's wrong, and what your firm will do about it.
So, what do I mean by specific?
I mean your messaging should talk about the adjuster who stops returning calls. The company that moves quickly to protect the driver who hit you and control the evidence from the crash. The insurer that pushes an early offer before the full extent of your injury becomes clear.
Prospective clients recognize those are experiences, and they should show up everywhere your firm speaks—from its ads to its intake scripts. An injured person should see your ad and think, "Yes. That's exactly what that guy on the phone tried to pull right after my accident."
Now you're not just promising to fight. You're showing that you understand the fight they're already in—and that you're standing with them against the insurance company.
Said differently, the strongest personal injury marketing picks a side: the client's.
And the payoff for doing so is significant. Your brand earns loyalty.
Donald Miller, author of Building a StoryBrand, says that when you define your clients’ enemy and demonstrate how your firm will protect them, people don’t just identify with your firm. Some will defend it, recommend it, and become loyal advocates.
And the villain doesn’t even have to be the insurance company—or a company at all.
You could name a practice everyone in the industry knows about or a specific behavior. Heck, you could name an experience people just dislike and try to avoid.
Quick example…
Let's say you really detest cheap stuff. A whole universe of people also dislikes cheap stuff. That shared belief connects them. Now you have a tribe—and a clear target audience.
A brand that wants to reach that audience needs to make its position clear: It stands against cheap stuff. It can say that outright or make the position unmistakable through what it sells.
Miller makes this point with Milwaukee Tool, a brand he discovered while looking for a better cordless drill. He bought the drill. Then a chainsaw. Then a blower and a hammer drill. Before long, he spent another $800 on a storage system for his new tools.
His read on Milwaukee is straightforward: The brand is against cheap stuff. It fulfills that promise by making extremely high-quality products.
That's the key insight for personal injury firms: It's easy to say you're against insurance companies. The harder work is defining exactly what you're against—and giving clients a reason to believe you.
Here's how I would build that position:
Name the specific enemy. Don't stop at insurance companies. Pull the language from intake calls, reviews, and recorded calls. What did the adjuster actually do? Maybe the insurer went quiet, pushed an early offer, or wanted a recorded statement before the client knew what was at stake. Maybe a trucking company raced to control the evidence. Name the conduct clients raise again and again, clearly enough that your prospects recognize it instantly.
Say what you stand for instead. An enemy gives the client something to oppose. A stronger position tells them what your firm believes they deserve. Miller recommends a vision and values statement that defines the customer, not the company. Stand against rushed settlements, and stand for developing the complete case. Stand against silence, and stand for keeping clients informed. Define both sides of the position.
Make the service prove the position. Milwaukee keeps its promise by making high-quality tools. Your firm keeps its promise in how it handles the case. Miller says the brand ultimately sells security. In personal injury, that means dealing with the insurer, protecting the evidence, explaining what happens next, and steering the client away from decisions that hurt the case. You can't rail against adjusters who ignore injured people, then leave your own clients waiting days for a callback.
Carry the position through the entire client journey. It should show up everywhere your firm speaks: ads, landing pages, intake scripts, emails, and client updates. The language may change, but the position shouldn't. Your ad names the conduct, your intake team shows it understands, and your case process proves what you do about it. Then listen for recognition. When a prospect says, "That's exactly what happened to me," you've connected with the right audience.
Naming an enemy doesn't mean running angry ads. It means telling prospective clients: This is what you're up against. This is why it's wrong. This is how we'll protect you.
Stop at "we'll fight for you," and the market hears another PI firm. Name the behavior, and the client recognizes their own story.
That's where a position starts becoming a brand.
Once you define that position, you have to repeat it long enough for the market to remember. Gary Sarner's radio advice starts with how much time that takes.
♟️STEAL THIS PLAYBOOK
How to Buy Radio Across Your Whole Market
Traditional radio still reaches 81% of adults ages 18 to 34 in an average week.
That got my attention because I've seen radio start working faster than television for some clients. I suspect frequency has something to do with it, although my data set is small and the creative still has to be right.
I wanted a more experienced view, so I asked Gary Sarner how he would approach radio for a PI firm. Sarner spent 35 years in radio and now buys media for law firms through his agency, ROI360+ The Radio Experts.
He starts by pricing the entire radio market. From there, he works backward: What can the firm sustain for 18 months, and how much coverage will that budget buy?
Sarner wants the buy broad because only a small share of the market will need a PI lawyer at any given time. You can't predict who will need one or when, so he steers firms away from precise targeting.
His standard is "wide and broad, not narrow and deep." Your dollars, he says, "need to reach as many people as possible at the lowest cost per thousand possible, and then you need to be in front of them all the time."
Television reaches 49% of that same group. When asked to choose between the two channels, Sarner wouldn't. "You need to do both."
Sarner treats radio as an 18-month commitment. He warns new advertisers that the first three months often feel like a mistake, and he can recite what clients say back to him. "This sucks. It's awful. I should never have done this."
Here is how he approaches the buy.
Price the whole radio market first. He reads what a market costs across television, billboards, and radio, then asks what it would take to own all the radio in it. "What is it going to take as an investment to own the entire radio market? And from there, we then start narrowing down, based upon their avatar." Maybe you can’t buy the whole market. Knowing the number tells you what share of it you can buy.
Take your own favorite station off the list. He says it comes up in nearly every meeting. "The person in front of me always talks about their favorite radio station first, and I know that's what they want to buy. Sometimes it's correct. Sometimes it's not." Let coverage pick the stations instead.
Budget for 18 months, and longer if you target tightly. Narrowing the target stretches the timeline. "The narrower you go, the longer it's generally going to take, because you've chosen one specific group of people that you're going to target." A tight target on a six-month budget asks one buy to do two jobs.
Keep Spotify, Pandora, and podcasts out of the radio budget. He says those channels reach small numbers of people and charge a lot to do it. "I'm not recommending it be a part of what you are doing in legal." What you sell changes the math. "If we were going to sell the headphones on your head, we could go very, very narrow and very deep."
Be intentional about the message on every channel, and sound like yourself. He calls creative the most lost art in the business, and he wants firms to know what they want to say on air, on billboards, on television, and online. On the voice: "Be who you are, you can't be someone else. You aren't for everybody."
Sarner tells a story about a trial lawyer, 50 years in practice, who had never advertised. The man came up to him after a talk and asked why the firms in his market that did advertise were getting the big cases.
"They're doing one thing that you are not," Sarner told him. "They're inviting people to do business with them."
By Sarner's account, the lawyer signed, heard the 18-month warning, and called in month four to add a second market. Sarner says he guessed the reason before hearing it: a trucking case.
If I were sitting down with a firm on this, I'd run it in that order. Price the whole market. Work out what you can carry for 18 months. Then buy the coverage that number supports.
📰 TOP OF THE NEWS
Google Announces Major Changes to Local Services Ads
Google is changing how Local Services Ads charge for calls, and where the campaigns run.
The first change takes effect Oct. 1 and reaches every firm running LSAs: Google will start charging for calls a firm misses. The second is structural, and will likely take place in Q4. Google is retiring the standalone Local Services Ads dashboard and moving existing campaigns into a Performance Max campaign type built for pay-per-lead goals and managed inside Google Ads. Google is phasing in that migration, and law firms are not in the first wave.
For a PI firm, the billing change is the one that stings. Miss a call during business hours and Google can still charge you for it. Answer every call while you're open, or you will pay for leads nobody at your firm ever talked to.
The migration runs by business type. It starts in August 2026 with select home and storefront service advertisers in the United States: plumbing, HVAC, electrical, appliance repair, house cleaning, lawn care, roofing, pest control, and moving. Service-area businesses without physical storefronts and accounts with custom bidding or booking configurations come in "late 2026." Non-U.S. accounts and every remaining category follow in 2027.
Most of what a firm buys stays put. You still pay for valid leads such as calls and messages rather than clicks. Ads still run only on Google Search and Google Maps, in the same positions. Targeting stays keywordless, built on service categories and areas. Verified status and the Google Verified badge carry over, and Google says it will no longer require insurance and license reverification.
Missed and follow-up calls become billable on Oct. 1. A missed call during business hours counts as a valid lead once the caller stays on the line more than 20 seconds. If a first call does not qualify, Google will also charge a later call between the firm and that same caller that meets Google's valid-lead criteria. If a firm's phone system asks callers to press a key to reach a department, the 20-second timer starts only after the keypress, with no charge if the caller never presses one, and Google says it will add safeguards against robocalls and spam.
Google is deprecating manual bidding. Google no longer supports setting a maximum cost per lead. Vertical-level target cost per acquisition (CPA) goes with it: A firm running different targets for separate categories under one campaign gets one campaign-level Target CPA that Google applies across all of them. Keeping separate targets means running separate campaigns.
Historical reports do not migrate. Google says previous performance reports won't carry over and the old dashboard becomes unreachable once an account moves, with logins redirecting into Google Ads. Account administrators get an email 14 days out and a reminder seven days later.
Weekly budgets become daily averages. Google divides the historical average weekly budget by 7 to set the daily average. That does not change what you spend in a month, which stays capped at the daily figure times 30.4, though daily spend can fluctuate on high-demand days.
A significant name or address change can pause the campaign. Business name, address and hours sync one way from the profile into Google Ads. Google says a significant change to the name or physical address triggers a verification review that typically takes 24 to 48 hours, "during which your campaign may temporarily pause."
Google also dropped Better Business Bureau callouts, and told advertisers to select at least six other structured callouts in the campaign's assets tab. It says to allow up to two weeks after migration for performance to return to stable levels.
The billing change, in particular, has firms asking a lot of questions. Here's our Director of Paid Digital, Jessica Ford, on the ones we keep hearing.
Why is Google doing this? To close a loophole. A firm could miss a call during business hours, then call the person back and avoid paying for a real lead. Missed calls already hurt LSA visibility, so always prioritize responsiveness. Firms that answer promptly should see little change.
Is this the same as the Performance Max migration? No, it is a separate initiative. Some Google reps have blurred the two. LSAs are not going away, only the standalone dashboard, and there is no way to prepare by launching a regular Performance Max campaign under your LSA account.
Will my cost per lead go up? Unlikely for firms that already answer their calls. Missed calls have always factored into LSA visibility, so this rewards the responsiveness good firms already practice.
Mikal Watts Builds His Own AI to Sell to Personal Injury Firms
Mikal Watts wants his own AI running inside PI firms connected to private-equity-backed MSOs. The mass-tort lawyer, who has helped plaintiffs sue Johnson & Johnson over talcum powder and utilities over California wildfires, told Bloomberg Law he is in discussions with Wall Street investors buying up the back offices of personal injury firms.
Those investors work through management services organizations, or MSOs. Most states bar non-lawyers from owning or profiting from a law firm, so firms move technology, IT, human resources, marketing, and client intake into a separate company that outside money can buy. The practice of law stays behind.
Watts wants his software running across the firms in those MSOs. "They're out there buying five, six, seven, eight, 10 different traffic firms," he said of the investors. Once they group the firms and streamline the processes, he wants them to "plug in Watts AI."
The tool automates document analysis, litigation drafting, and checking whether a case qualifies for a claim, all subject to attorney review. Watts is testing it now, with a launch planned for September on his tariff cases.
He took a four-month course before he picked a partner. Watts studied AI at the University of Texas earlier this year, then considered 200 vendors before settling on the technology services arm of Monks, the operating brand of Sir Martin Sorrell's S4 Capital. "There's so many vendors that are charlatans that will sell you ocean-front property in Arizona," he said. "You needed to understand enough about artificial intelligence to keep yourself from getting ripped off." He put seven figures into the project and declined to be more specific.
The software reaches other firms through the MSOs. Seth Deutsch, founder of Samson Partners Group, has worked on 25 law firm MSO deals so far this year and wove AI and technology into each one. Some buyers build in house, he said, but "a lot of them are going to be looking initially to outside providers." Karan Chetal, chief growth officer at Monks, says the technology will cut a firm's time to develop a case by 70%, and aims to serve many firms rather than one.
The money is already in the room. An invite-only conference at Holland & Knight's New York office in April drew Apollo Global Management, Fortress Investment Group, and Stifel Financial. Uplift Investors added a fourth personal injury firm to its Orion Legal MSO in July, and Rafi Law Group announced a $125 million investment into an MSO in April. Personal injury draws the interest because of case volume and a faster path to resolution than other litigation, Watts said.
A defense lawyer says it already changed the fight. Meshach Rhoades, a Hogan Lovells Cadwalader trial lawyer who defends consumer products companies in class actions, said the combination of AI and private equity backing makes plaintiffs' firms harder to face. "They can move faster, their resources can be greater, and they can bring lawsuits to fruition because they have more resources," she said.
Watts and Monks want the tool customizable for other firms and hope to start the MSO rollout by the end of the year. Watts put it plainly: He is proud of being a lawyer and running his firm. "I'm also a businessman on the side."
🔗 Bloomberg Law →
🚀 QUICK HITS
Meta Settles Child-Safety Claims With 48 States for $18 Billion: Meta agreed to an $18 billion settlement with 48 state attorneys general over social media's harm to teenagers, ending the Oakland federal trial where Instagram head Adam Mosseri had just begun testifying. Meta will add default limits for users under 18 on Facebook and Instagram, including a two-hour daily cap and overnight and school-hours blackouts a parent must approve to change. It pays 70% of the total, and the last $5.3 billion only if TikTok and YouTube adopt similar limits. A federal judge must still approve the deal, and Meta faces thousands of product-liability suits over its apps' design.
Claude Will Watermark the Text It Generates: Anthropic shared details on Aug. 15 about how future Claude models will watermark the text they write, part of complying with the EU AI Act, TechCrunch reported. The mark lives in Claude's word choices, stays invisible to readers, adds no cost, and adds no hidden characters. Light editing leaves it intact, but a full rewrite removes it, and longer passages are easier to detect. Anthropic says it will release a detection API, and that other major AI providers signed the same EU Code of Practice and will add their own watermarks. For a firm publishing AI-drafted content, that text now carries a signature readers can't see but a key can.
Crunch Fitness Faces a Proposed Voyeurism Class Action: Six members of a Crunch Fitness in Mandeville, Louisiana filed a proposed federal class action on Aug. 4, WWL-TV reported. Police say former employee Nathan Volz used a personal cellphone to record women in the gym's private tanning areas, and investigators have identified at least 10 alleged victims. The six plaintiffs say police confirmed their images were not on Volz's device. They are suing anyway, arguing the gym never restricted recording devices in private areas, never properly screened or supervised staff, and never warned the rest of its members.
Morgan & Morgan Sues the Florida Bar Over Its Celebrity Ad Ban: Morgan & Morgan sued the Florida Bar in federal court in Tallahassee, arguing the state's ban on celebrities in lawyer ads violates the First Amendment, Reuters reported. The firm says the rule's definition of a celebrity is too vague to enforce, and that Florida is a national outlier. Only Pennsylvania has a similar rule, and it is narrower. Attorney Deepak Gupta, who represents the firm, noted that insurers run ads with stars like Peyton Manning while injury lawyers cannot. The rule, he said, "protects the industries and interests that already have the upper hand against consumers, while silencing the lawyers who represent them." Florida has barred the firm from running ads featuring Shaquille O'Neal, Frankie Muniz, and John Daly.
Uber's Racketeering Suit Against California Injury Lawyers Moves Ahead: A federal judge refused to dismiss Uber's civil RICO lawsuit accusing California personal injury lawyers and doctors of conspiring to generate fraudulent injury claims, Reuters reported. Judge Sherilyn Peace Garnett tossed one conspiracy claim but let Uber's other racketeering claims proceed. Uber alleges the lawyers sent clients to "corrupt medical providers" for unnecessary treatment in a kickback scheme. The firms deny wrongdoing. Two of them, Downtown LA Law Group and the Law Offices of Jacob Emrani, claimed First Amendment immunity, but the judge said it does not shield sham litigation. In a partial win for the defense, she ordered Uber to pay some defendants' fees. It is one of at least 20 such RICO suits companies have filed against plaintiffs' firms in two years.
🎙️ FROM THE POD
Maxey Scherr on What to Do When You Land an 18-Wheeler Case
A trucking case does not start the way a car wreck does.
Maxey Scherr studied neuroscience before building an El Paso practice focused on trucking litigation and traumatic brain injury. She runs Scherr Law Firm, is president-elect of the Academy of Truck Accident Attorneys, and co-chairs education for the American Association for Justice's Trucking Litigation Group.
I wanted to know what a firm should do when an 18-wheeler case lands and nobody on the team has handled one. Maxey started with the carrier's federal record, then moved quickly to coverage, evidence preservation, and the other parties that may share responsibility.
She starts from the position that every truck crash is preventable because something failed.
Pull the carrier's record first. Use the USDOT number to pull the Company Snapshot on the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration's SAFER site, then check the carrier's federal insurance filing. Maxey sees those records as the start of the investigation, not the end. The filing shows the coverage reported to the federal government, not necessarily every available policy.
Most interstate freight haulers carry a federal minimum of $750,000. Insurance minimums have not moved since 1980. Medical bills have. Maxey lobbies Congress on the gap. She says $750,000 does not come close when an 80,000 pound truck hits a client at 75 miles an hour.
Move on evidence preservation immediately. Maxey says trucking cases require the right preservation demands and the right experts at the beginning. A lawyer cannot sit on that work while deciding how to handle the rest of the case.
Look past the driver for additional liability. A load secured badly. A broker who did more than broker. Or a defect in the truck itself: underride, crash avoidance, a seat, a gas tank.
Underride is the defect many lawyers don't think to look for. When a car goes under a trailer, the trailer can strike above the bumper and the vehicle's front-end crash protection may not work as designed. Federal regulators require rear guards on most large trailers, but do not require side-underride protection.
Learn the machine itself. Maxey holds a commercial driver's permit. She has completed pre-trip inspections, worked on brakes, and driven trucks on the road. When she tells a driver in deposition that she has been behind the wheel too, that experience gives her a different level of understanding.
The Academy runs a bootcamp for lawyers new to trucking every other year, and Maxey teaches in it, sometimes to lawyers 30 years older than she is. She says the first requirement is admitting you don't know everything.
"The place we excel, as opposed to the other side, is that we share, we teach each other." — Maxey Scherr on the plaintiff bar
I understand why a firm does not want to give up margin. But if nobody on the team has handled one of these cases, they might want to bring in someone who has. The right trucking lawyer knows what evidence to preserve, where to look for coverage, and which other parties they might hold liable.
Maxey says to call her either way, and she answers her own email.
Here's our full conversation:
🤖 AI SEARCH TIP OF THE WEEK
Update a page's content every quarter and AI cites it nearly three times as often. A 2026 report from AirOps and Kevin Indig found pages refreshed within three months earned citations 35% of the time, against 13% for pages nine to twelve months old or more. More than half of the pages cited had been updated inside six months, and on buying-intent queries that share tops 60%.
The action this week: Pick the ten pages that actually bring you cases, usually your practice area pages and your results page, and put them on a quarterly cycle. Change something real each time. A recent verdict, a current explanation of your fee, an example from this year. Editing the date does not count, because the models read whether your claims still match the present.
🛠️ TOOL OF THE WEEK
Speed.ai Scores Intake Calls and Flags Leads for Follow-Up
A "did not retain" tag doesn't tell you if you lost a good case. Speed.ai analyzes intake calls, scores case quality, and flags lost leads the company believes are worth another look.
Speed.ai says the average PI firm converts 7% of answered calls. The company attributes that figure to data compiled from "Law Leaders and industry research."
It scores the case behind the call. Speed.ai says its model evaluates each call for injury severity, medical treatment, liability signals, and case complexity, drawing on legal intake conversations and settlement data. When a potentially high-value lead does not convert, the company says Lead Rescue sends an alert with the case details, quality score, what went wrong, and callback talking points.
It identifies where intake broke down. The dashboard groups lost leads because of missing contact information, rejecting a possible referral case, or failing to identify underlying facts. Speed.ai separately generates call-specific coaching for intake staff.
It evaluates marketing channels by case quality. Speed.ai reports multi-touch attribution and says it compares channels by the quality of the cases they produce rather than call volume alone.
Speed.ai identifies Hayden Haskins as its CEO and co-founder and David Haskins as its co-founder and futurist. Both also hold roles at Drive Law Firm Marketing, where David is founder and CEO and Hayden is CMO.
Drive sells SEO, paid advertising, and intake optimization to law firms, and it employs an intake coach. That overlap provides relevant context when a firm evaluates Speed.ai's scoring criteria.
Speed.ai says it encrypts data at rest and in transit and does not retain call analyses after its models produce an analysis. Its trust center currently lists SOC 2 Type 1 as obtained, SOC 2 Type 2 in observation, and HIPAA under audit. Because intake calls can contain medical information, firms should review that status against their own requirements before connecting call data.
Speed.ai runs on existing call tracking, with CallRail, CallTrackingMetrics, Invoca, and Twilio among the platforms listed, and Speed.ai says most firms finish setup in under 10 minutes. If a firm tests it, compare one week of alerts with the intake manager's own review before relying on the scores.
Pricing is $599 a month for up to 1,000 minutes of call analysis and $1,299 for up to 5,000, with custom pricing above that. There is a 14-day free trial and it does not ask for a card.
🔗 Speed.ai →
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