👋  Good morning. Chris Dreyer here. Morgan & Morgan now spends more on creators than on traditional ad production. A new study says it's in good company, and I'll show you what other firms can take from its playbook.

Then Amanda Demanda tells you why your own social feed is a bad guide to Meta ads. And I've got five intake fixes that sign more of the leads you already pay for.

Also: OpenAI just made it easier for ChatGPT to suggest a plugin in the middle of a chat. I'll tell you my crazy ideas about what a PI firm should build for it.

Let's get into it.

Last week, I told you about a Florida firm that signed four cases in its first week of ChatGPT ads for less than $115. Now OpenAI has opened a second door to the people asking ChatGPT what to do after a crash.

Startup founder Greg Isenberg might be on to something here.

"Every big platform has a few months where distribution is free," he wrote on X, "and most people miss it."

Think Facebook apps in 2007, iPhone apps in 2008, or blogs in the early 2000s. Each time, the early builders reached people for free before everyone else showed up.

What if a PI firm built one ChatGPT plugin to rule them all?

At its developer conference on Sept. 29, OpenAI gave plugins a bigger role in ChatGPT. Plugins are small tools that run inside the chat.

OpenAI says it improved how they're ranked and how they're "surfaced in conversations," TechCrunch reported. In plain terms, ChatGPT can now suggest a plugin in the middle of a chat.

And if you’re thinking, “Why is Chris telling lawyers about tech?” here’s why.

ChatGPT has 1.2 billion weekly users and counting, and some of them are asking what to do after a crash.

PI firms have also cashed in on new tech before.

In 2011, Allen, Allen, Allen & Allen in Virginia put out a free phone app called "My Lawyer – Travels with Me."

It had a big 911 button. It had forms for the other driver, witnesses, and the police. It let you photograph the scene and send it all to the firm, Virginia Lawyers Weekly reported.

Well, that was the iPhone-era version of this idea.

The ChatGPT version can meet someone in the middle of questions they ask the AI following an injury or collision.

So what should a PI firm build? Not a "find a lawyer" box, I'd argue.

Best Lawyers already put its lawyer search into ChatGPT back in May. And OpenAI's plugin rules say a plugin can't exist "primarily as an advertising vehicle." ChatGPT saves its proactive suggestions for plugins with strong utility and happy users.

Which brings me to this…

Build the tool an injured person needs, and put your name on it.

A few ideas come to mind:

• A crash report finder. Tell it the city or county. It tells you which agency holds the report, what it costs, and where to request it. It saves someone a tedious afternoon. Isenberg's advice is to write the plugin's description "using the exact phrases people type into ChatGPT." Your intake call notes already hold those questions, word for word.
• A first-week checklist. Photos to take, names to get, records to keep, and when to see a doctor. The Virginia firm's app did a version of this 15 years ago. Have it hand out information and collect as little as you can. OpenAI's rules bar plugins from collecting protected health information (PHI). And bar rules may treat someone describing an injury to your tool as a prospective client, so treat what they share as confidential.
• An adjuster-call prep sheet. What the other driver's insurer will ask, what a recorded statement is, and why you can say no to one. Build it alongside the others. Isenberg's playbook is to ship five, "see which ones get picked up," and double down. OpenAI reviews every plugin, so you'll need a verified business account, a privacy policy, and test cases.
• A plain-English deadline guide. How filing deadlines work in your state, in general terms. The American Bar Association's 2010 opinion on lawyer websites (Formal Opinion 10-457) says general legal information is fine. Answering a question about someone's own facts starts to look like advice, so send those questions to a person at your firm. Before any of these go live, run them past your bar's rules. A plugin with your firm's name on it constitutes lawyer advertising.

If I were starting this week, I'd build the crash report finder. It's boring, people need it, and I couldn't find a PI firm that has built one.

Remember Isenberg's warning. Free distribution lasts "a few months," and most people miss it. Don't let your firm be one of them.

🔗  OpenAI: Plugin Guidelines →

Your own social feed is a bad guide to advertising on Meta. It shows you what you like, and you're not the person who needs a PI lawyer.

Amanda Demanda put it better at PIMCON. "My algorithm is nice vacation places, investment properties, and watches," she told the room. "That's not who's going to hire me… You're not attracting yourself."

Amanda built Amanda Demanda Injury Lawyers on TV, billboards, and her personal brand. In May, she told us on the podcast how she grew the firm from $2 million to $60 million in five years. She did it without buying a single lead.

Meta was an afterthought for her, but numbers don't lie, do they? A Pew Research Center survey found that 71% of U.S. adults use Facebook and half use Instagram.

Amanda moved her budget to Meta. Over two years there, her leads went up and her costs came down, she said. Here's what I'd steal from her Meta playbook:

• Give every post one of three jobs. Organic posts build community ties and need no spend, like her collab with a local salsa instructor. Boosted posts work for hyperlocal moments, like a neighborhood backpack drive. Ads drive click-throughs to an inquiry.
• Build your ads as real campaigns. A boosted post is locked, Amanda said, so she doesn't count boosting as advertising. A real Meta campaign starts with an objective, an audience, and a geography. Then you test creative and measure what comes back.
• Make content for your client. Picture the injured grandmother, or the young driver who doesn't know how to deal with an insurance company. Keep the firm's account separate from your personal one, and let it be human, real, and even a little cheesy. Amanda's polished commercials brought in the same number of leads as organic-style video, at a higher cost per lead. (I love that one.)
• Film the holidays. Spots shot at the Christmas and Halloween parks her firm sponsors, plus World Cup content, drew more interaction at a lower cost per lead. Her team tests English and Spanish versions. It also watches for flagged words like "insurance," which can get an ad killed.
• Create the moments your team films. Amanda's firm has an in-house person running its ads. Her job is to create moments worth filming, like a toy drive or a judge's event. She also has to know the numbers well enough to direct a vendor.
• Get intake ready for colder leads. Meta leads run colder than TV or branded-search leads, Amanda said. If your intake team isn't ready for them, the leads you paid for slip away.

You don't need Amanda's TV budget to start. Her organic posts cost nothing. She still leads with brand and stacks Meta on top. However you start, just keep her number one rule in mind: You're not attracting yourself.

The cheapest growth at your firm is sitting in intake. In my experience, it's the biggest constraint a PI firm has, and the one firms watch least.

That's because the front end is easy to measure, the obvious stuff.

Cost per lead, acquisition cost, and total form fills all sit right there in a dashboard.

But law firms may overlook the middle bit, where a lead potentially becomes a signed case.

So where do you focus?

The number I'd watch is wanted-case conversion: Of the cases you want, what percentage do you sign? The benchmark is 90% to 92%.

Say yours is 60%. Get it to 90%, and you've added 50% more business without buying a single new lead or relying on outside referrals.

All you have to do is sign the cases in front of you.

Because intake turns marketing into revenue.

Here are the five moves I'd make first:

• Find out what "we answer every call" really means. A phone tree that rings four times for an attorney, then four more for a paralegal, technically answers every call. The caller is long gone. Pick up inbound calls within three rings, and use an outside answering service for overflow, nights, and weekends, not as the first stop. Ask any service what its wanted-case conversion is. In my experience, few reach 90%.
• Let AI keep chasing after day 14. The usual follow-up cadence runs 14 days, heavy at the start and tapering off. That limit comes from labor cost. AI can follow up for months, cheaply, with the case history in your CRM. Some people say they aren't hurt and feel it three months later. (I'm one of them. I'm practically on my deathbed before I go to the hospital.) Watch the statute of limitations.
• Introduce the case manager the night they sign. A firm runs a great intake on a Friday night, and the client doesn't meet the attorney or case manager until Monday. All weekend, that new client sees other firms' billboards and wonders if they picked the wrong lawyer. Have the point of contact call right after signup, explain what happens next, and share a direct number.
• Staff one intake specialist for every 150 auto leads. I worked this out on a napkin with a large firm in Lake Tahoe, using their intake headcount. It matched their lead count almost exactly. Use it until you're big enough for dedicated workforce management roles.
• Hire RevOps once you have six to 10 intake specialists. RevOps is the technical person who owns your tracking, call data, and CRM. A good one ties the cases you sign back to the channel that brought them in. That's how you see that a $20,000 acquisition cost on a commercial truck case is a bargain, while a flat $3,000 target hides it.

Google's Local Services Ads started charging for missed calls on Oct. 1. Most of you groaned. Me? I say good. You shouldn't miss calls anyway, and now it forces you to be better.

So before you spend another dollar on leads, check your wanted-case conversion.

🔗  Personal Injury Mastermind: Episode 487 →

Morgan & Morgan is on track for $700 million in marketing spend this year. Carlos Wigle, its chief creative officer, shared the number with Ad Age's The Creator Brief at Advertising Week New York three weeks ago.

“Anyone can technically get hurt in this country. Everyone who gets hurt should have representation. And anyone who needs representation should think of us right off the bat,” Wigle said.

Wigle told Gillian Follett of The Creator Brief that the firm is "hoping to hit a billion next year.” He wouldn't say how much of that goes to creators.

But Andrew Pagonis, the firm’s executive VP of marketing, did let on that creators drive both awareness and tangible action.

In fact, when the firm hired creators to explain a class action it brought, so many people signed up that its e-signature platform crashed.

Peak Morgan & Morgan? Er, far from. But the biggest advertiser in PI isn't betting on nothing.

A new study from Kantar, the marketing data firm, found that 91% of marketers worldwide now use creator or influencer marketing, which Kantar calls "a fully integral part of media mixes everywhere."

In the same study, 20% of consumers said creators are often their first source for discovering new products.

Let’s look at how Morgan & Morgan runs its creator program and what other firms can learn:

• Give creator deals one owner who can move fast. Morgan & Morgan runs all of it through a six-person in-house team. Wigle tried creator agencies early and found their red tape slowed the quick, trial-and-error deals the firm wanted. At a smaller firm, that might be one person with a budget and the authority to say yes.
• Pick creators for how engaged their audience is. The firm works with creators in any niche, from comedy to political talk to "a DIY mom," Wigle said, as long as their audiences are active and engaged. Kantar sees marketers moving the same way, toward micro and nano creators valued "for resonance rather than follower counts." For a local firm, that opens the door to creators in your own market with smaller, loyal followings.
• Test a lot, and let some posts flop. The worst case, Wigle said, is a post that never reaches anyone's feed. "If I can impart any wisdom to any brand out there, it would be to not be so precious about the work," he said. Kantar's advice to marketers is the same: "Brief creators clearly and let them work." So give each creator a clear brief, then stay out of the edit.

Kantar's data is global and doesn't measure legal. Consumers were least receptive to creator deals in healthcare and personal finance, so Kantar's advice is to test and learn.

Creators add to a mix that still runs on linear TV, radio, out-of-home, and sports partnerships. Dan Morgan, the firm's managing partner, breaks down what Morgan & Morgan will pay for a case in this week's Pod below.

🔗  Ad Age: The Creator Brief →

A Midwest PI firm we work with is now signing cases that start in ChatGPT.

The firm already ranked well on Google. But more of its potential clients were taking their legal questions to ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini first. So our team built an AI search plan on top of its SEO build out.

We had great results…

ChatGPT became the firm's top source of AI traffic, and our team measured a 992% jump in its ChatGPT visibility. Even better, the firm has confirmed signed PI cases that came from ChatGPT.

Here's what we did, and what any firm can copy:

• Answer legal questions on Avvo every week. The firm's attorney answered two to three questions a week on Avvo, with Justia added as a test. AI platforms often crawl and cite those sites in their answers, our team found. Before long, the attorney's Avvo answers showed up in AI responses. Our team calls this one of the highest-impact moves.
• Rewrite pages to answer questions directly. Blog and practice area pages now open with plain-language answers to common injury questions. Stronger internal links tie them together.
• Track which pages AI tools cite. Custom GA4 reports showed which AI tools sent traffic and leads, and which landing pages they cited. Those pages became templates for new content.
• Keep your firm's details consistent everywhere. The firm's practice areas, locations, and credentials match across its site and outside profiles, backed by links from other sites. It also added an llms.txt file, a plain-text file that points AI models to a site's key pages, as a test. Google doesn't endorse llms.txt and none of the major LLMs use it, so treat it as an experiment.

The Avvo habit is the easiest to steal. Have an attorney pull the questions your intake team hears most, then answer two or three a week.

🔗  How a PI Firm Turned AI Search Into Signed Cases →

• Driverless Trucks Can Swap Warning Triangles for Cab Beacons: FMCSA granted Aurora and other carriers running Level 4 driverless trucks a five-year exemption from the rule that requires warning triangles or flares around a truck stopped on or beside the road. Starting Oct. 7, those trucks can use flashing amber beacons mounted on the cab instead. Carriers must report any crash that happens while the beacons should be on within five days. The Truck Safety Coalition was among the groups that opposed the request.
• Hawaii Supreme Court Reverses a $4.25 Million Cut to a School Abuse Award: The court ruled Oct. 9 that a trial judge wrongly assigned 30% of the fault to the students who sexually abused a McKinley High School student with severe cognitive disabilities, cutting a $14.17 million award against the state. The judge made the allocation without notice to the family, which violated due process, the court said. The state never asked for the reduction and waived it.
• AirTag Stalking Suits Become a Federal MDL: The Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation centralized 17 lawsuits against Apple on Oct. 2 before U.S. District Judge Noël Wise in Northern California. Plaintiffs allege AirTags lacked safeguards to stop stalkers from tracking them, often through tags hidden in their cars or belongings. Apple opposed centralization. Twelve related cases could potentially join the suit.
• Minnesota Jury Awards $84 Million in Chest-Pain Malpractice Case: A Hennepin County jury on Sept. 29 awarded $84 million against Fairview Health Services over a 53-year-old man who died of heart attack complications months after seeking care for chest pain. His family argued a more thorough exam and follow-up could have saved him. Fairview said its care met the standard. The Minnesota Medical Association called it one of the largest malpractice awards in state history.
• ChatGPT Ads Test Bigger Images and Add Weekly Performance Emails: OpenAI announced a set of updates to ChatGPT Ads on Oct. 16, Search Engine Roundtable reported. It's testing wider ad cards and larger images on desktop and full-width images on mobile, using advertisers' existing campaigns and creative. A multi-image format comes next, starting with select U.S. advertisers. Advertisers with active campaigns now get a weekly email with week-over-week changes. A redesigned Conversions page puts event volume, trends, and warnings in one view.

Staying with Morgan & Morgan…

Dan Morgan, the firm's managing partner, says Morgan & Morgan feels in decent shape when an auto case costs under $3,000. The firm, which operates in all 50 states and has more than 1,100 lawyers, aims for about half that. At $1,500 to $1,800 a case, Dan says, "you're cranking."

When Dan came on the show, I asked what it costs his firm to acquire an auto case. I also asked how a one-city firm with a $50,000 to $100,000 budget should approach marketing.

• Your average fee shapes what you can pay for a case. If your average fee is $1,500 and a case costs you $3,000, Dan says, "you're unfortunately probably not going to be around in 2027." Pay $5,000 a case with a $15,000 average fee and $3,000 to $4,000 in workup costs, and "you're in business now."
• You won't know a case's value on day one. "We don't really know what a case is worth until 90 days in," Dan says. Some cases take longer. About 40 minutes before we recorded, his firm won a $6.1 million verdict on a double-herniation case. The insurer had offered $80,000. "If you're paying $20,000 for that case, yeah, you'd pay that all day now that you know," Dan says.
• TV is still king, so find cheaper ways in. A firm without TV in the mix, Dan says, is "fighting with a hand tied behind your back." But Morgan & Morgan isn't on sports broadcasts much, because the CPMs (cost per thousand impressions) are so high. A college field logo or bumper signage puts the firm in the same broadcast for about a $5 CPM, he says. DraftKings pays $58 for that space. And the firm's sign in the Yankees bullpen shows up on TV every time the game cuts to the bullpen.
• Smaller budgets start hyperlocal. For a one-city firm, Dan would start with out-of-home near the office, like good signage or banners at local high schools. Next comes radio, because people listening to the radio are in their cars. He still sponsors a youth football team himself. About $5,200 covers a year of uniform sponsorships with a jersey patch. That puts the firm in front of 42 kids and their families. "So, one case you can make that all back," he says. If he were starting a firm in 2026, he'd begin on social media, because TV is expensive to break into.
• Referred-out cases pay, too. Dan tells his lawyers, "Don't just turn down a case. Let's turn it down and send it out." If you don't handle workers' compensation or birth injury, "set up those referrals early and often." Last year, Morgan & Morgan got a $6 million referral fee on a birth injury case it sent out five years earlier. The case settled for about $92 million.

So start there. Know your average fee for each case type before you decide what you'll pay to sign the next case.

Here's our full conversation:

🎧  Personal Injury Mastermind: Episode 437 →

Gemini can draw on YouTube transcripts, host Edward Sturm said in a recent interview with Gary Vaynerchuk. He added that video descriptions "get surfaced a ton in AI."

Vaynerchuk, who runs the agency VaynerMedia, said YouTube and Shorts have moved to "the top of Vayner's strategy to clients." A year and a half ago, Shorts was "a distant fourth."

If your firm posts FAQ clips or attorney explainers, you already have the raw material. AI reads the text behind those videos.

Then structure each video for the way AI reads it. Say the question out loud in the first few seconds, and answer it in plain words. Add chapters titled with the questions people ask, like "What to do after a car crash." Put the short answer in the description, too.

Brought to you by Rankings.io. Rankings.io helps PI firms build AI search visibility across Google, ChatGPT, and every platform where injured consumers are looking.

A website intake form takes whatever the visitor types and moves on.

Perspective AI replaces that form with a conversation that asks follow-up questions. Its legal intake page targets personal injury, family law, and estate planning. The sample opens with "Can you walk me through what happened and when?"

When the prospect finishes, the firm gets a summary with the timeline, key facts, treatment history, and liability signals before anyone at the firm calls back.

Perspective hands your intake team the facts of the case before the first call, so the call starts with the right questions.

Here's how Perspective stands out for a PI firm:

• It asks the next question. You describe what makes a case a fit, and Perspective builds the conversation from those rules. A slip-and-fall intake follows a different path than a car crash, and the AI comes back to vague answers instead of skipping past them.
• It flags the intakes that stop halfway. It reports conversations that end partway or get abandoned, along with finished ones. That gives your team a list of people to call back.
• It sends the result where you work. Qualified intakes can flow into Clio, Lawmatics, or MyCase, and it can send data to other systems through a custom connection. We found no ready-made connection to Filevine or Litify.
• The entry price is low. The Pro plan starts at $99 a month for 1,000 credits. Each conversation uses 10, so that's about 100 intakes. New accounts get 100 free credits, enough for about 10 test runs.

One setting needs care. Perspective can automatically send a polite decline to prospects who don't fit your rules. Turn that off. Route weak fits to a person instead, or send them to a referral partner.

Perspective names no law firm customers, and its testimonials come from companies outside legal. It says conversations finish about 90% of the time, compared with about 46% for static forms, but it doesn't say how it measured that. We haven't tested it.

Before you put it on your site, ask three things. Will it sign a HIPAA business associate agreement, since intake captures treatment details? Does your intake data train its AI models? And how does it connect to your case management system?

🔗  Perspective AI legal intake →

Disclaimer: Personal Injury Mastermind takes all reasonable steps to ensure accuracy in the materials we share, including articles, newsletters, and reports. We provide these materials for general information only, and they do not constitute legal advice. They may not reflect the most current laws or regulations. Always consult a qualified attorney for advice on a specific legal matter.

Thanks for reading. Quick ask…if you know someone who’d benefit from this content, please forward this to them. I’ll be back next week. - Chris

Received this newsletter from someone else? Subscribe.