👋  Good morning. Chris Dreyer here. How long should you run an ad before you change it? Probably longer than you'd like. Research from System1 ties consistent ad creative to much higher returns. If you're planning a new campaign for 2027, read this one first.

Also today: My good friend Brian LaBovick shows you how to turn an unhappy client into a five-star review. He borrowed the model from the Ritz-Carlton. (Psst…it works.)

And making the news: New York City has followed Uber in suing a PI firm under the federal racketeering law. Eight states are also suing OpenAI with a playbook PI firms wrote.

Let's get into it.

Brands with the most consistent ad creative averaged the highest return on their ads.

I’m not surprised one bit.

That matches what I've seen running an agency.

Some creative just works. And every so often, an ad works better than anyone expected, and it keeps working long after you thought it would wear out.

And then what happens?

Someone higher-up wants to swap it for something new.

Bad idea.

A report from System1, a company that tests ads for a living, backs up my own position on this with hard numbers.

It calls the payoff for sticking with one idea that works "compound creativity."

But what exactly is compound creativity?

It's System1's term for the gains that stack up when a brand keeps running the same creative for years. Every year it runs, more people know whose ad it is, so you're not starting from zero.

The report measures consistency three ways:

1. Creative foundations: the same positioning, creative idea, and agency over time.
2. A culture of consistency: committing to one idea across every channel.
3. Consistent execution: the same brand codes, like a character, a jingle, or a tone of voice.

For the study, System1 scored 136 U.K. and U.S. brands over five years on 13 kinds of consistency, from positioning and agency tenure to sound and tone of voice. The study covered more than 5,000 ads and $5 billion in media spend.

Then it checked those scores against two libraries of ad results. One is the Effectiveness Databank of the U.K.'s Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA). The other is the case library of the Effie Awards, which honor ads that worked.

The most consistent brands came out far ahead. In a 2025 study System1 ran with Effie, they averaged an ROI of 8.8 on their campaigns, against 2.1 for the least consistent.

In the IPA cases, the most consistent U.K. brands reported 4.8 times as many very large brand effects, like awareness and trust, as the least consistent.

On profit, 38.5% of the IPA campaigns from brands with what System1 calls the strongest "culture of consistency" reported very large profit growth. Among the weakest, it was 6.7%.

Here's what I'd take from the report, with one more lesson from PIMCON:

• Keep your creative partner long enough to compound. Brands that never changed creative agency in five years reported an average of 2.2 "very large" brand effects in the IPA cases. Brands that changed more than once reported 0.8. The ads of brands that stayed put also grew more distinctive over those five years. Changing the top marketer made no comparable difference.
• Let your ads wear in. System1 found that the longer a brand kept its ads running, the more its viewers could tell whose ad they were watching. The report highlights one brand whose campaigns ran 713 days on average. Its recognition score rose about 15 points a year. Retire a spot when it stops working, not when your team is bored with it.
• Point every channel at the same idea. The report cites a 2023 regional test from the motorhome rental marketplace Goboony, which held its Meta spend steady in every region. Where Goboony added four weeks of radio, Meta click-through rates rose 29%. Where it added two weeks of outdoor ads, like billboards, on top, they rose 86%. For a PI firm, that means running TV, radio, billboards, and social as one campaign so each channel lifts the others.
• Own a few brand codes and repeat them. A character, a jingle, a phone number, a color. Felix Cat Food was a small, dying brand in 1989. It relaunched around Felix, its cat character, and kept him at the center of its ads for more than 20 years. Its market share grew fivefold, and it toppled the No. 1 brand on a fraction of the budget, according to a case study by strategist Les Binet in the report.
• Apply the same consistency and commitment to sponsorships. It's not just ad campaigns. Digger Earles, whose firm has partnered with New Orleans Saints players for a decade, told PIMCON that it takes about three years for people to connect an athlete with a brand. So his athlete deals run at least three years, with a renewal option. Seventy percent of his firm's business now comes from its brand, he said.

Alas, the report does come with a warning: "Consistency is not enough. You need commitment." By commitment, it means the budget, campaign length, and number of channels a campaign runs on.

🔗  System1: The Power of Compound Creativity →

Handle a complaint well, and it can earn you a five-star review.

You heard me…

Your clients may not know how strong your demand letter is. But they know when they've called twice and nobody called back.

And when they do complain, your response is what they'll judge you on.

Brian LaBovick, founder of LaBovick Law Group in Florida, built his firm's whole review system around that idea. One line stood out to me from his PIMCON talk last month:

"Human beings are feeling machines that think. We are not thinking machines that feel."

And reviews, my friend, are where those feelings end up. A client who felt ignored, or cared for, will say so in a review, and as you well know, every future client can read it.

That's why Brian calls reviews a compounding asset (there's that word again). Good or bad, a review keeps working for you, or against you, long after the case closes.

In other words…

People who can't judge your legal work lean on what your past clients say.

But he also warned the room against shortcuts. You know the things…

A QR code at the front desk, shiny review software, a polite request for five stars… none of it makes up for bad service.

"The review should be the mirror of your client experience," he said. "If you don't see what you like in the mirror, you can't spray it with Windex and expect it to be cleaned off."

So the real work starts where clients get frustrated. And at Brian's firm, a lot of that frustration came down to one thing: phone calls nobody returned.

When those complaints come in, Brian borrows the Ritz-Carlton's system for making things right with an unhappy guest. Hotels call it service recovery, and done well, Brian says, it can turn a complaint into a five-star review or a referral.

Here's how to run Brian's system at your firm:

• Track how clients feel at every stage. Brian's firm sends a Net Promoter Score survey, the 0-to-10 "Would you recommend us?" question, every time a case changes stage. "Saying that client experience matters and not tracking your client experience and how it's going is like saying client experience doesn't matter," he said. A low score tells the paralegal and the lawyer to repair that relationship now. Never use the score to decide who you ask for a review.
• Listen first, then name the hurt. Let the client unload before you explain anything. Then say the feeling back, which Brian calls naming the hurt: "I hear you. You feel ignored." Then apologize right away, even if someone else caused the problem.
• Whoever hears the complaint owns it. Don't pass it to someone else. Fix it on the call if you can. If you can't, tell the client what happens next and when you'll call them back. And give people room to act. The Ritz let even its maintenance staff spend up to $2,000 to fix a guest's problem. You can create a much smaller version, like letting a case manager book a same-day call with the attorney without asking first.
• Separate the task from the ask. Brian splits review duty in two. One person owns the task: the process, the timing, and the training. The ask belongs to whoever holds the client's trust at that moment, from the receptionist to the attorney. That way, the system doesn't depend on one person. "One enthusiastic employee who owns this job is not a system," he said. "Once they leave, the system dies."
• Ask every client, and pick your moment. In July, I suggested building the ask into four milestones: signing day, the onboarding call, any update that feels like progress, and the settlement check. Brian goes a step further: "The calendar doesn't tell you when to ask. The client tells you when to ask." Clients tell you with lines like "I can't thank you enough" or "My last lawyer never did this," and his team is trained to listen for them. Whoever is on that call can say, "What you just said means a great deal to us. Would you share it online? It'll help someone else who needs help." Every client still gets an invitation by the time the settlement check goes out, whatever their score. Never ask for five stars, and never buy a review.
• Let software handle the reminders. Brian's firm builds prompts into its Litify case stages that remind staff to listen for the right moment, and he said Case Status has sped up its review growth. But "don't automate the actual moment of asking," he said. The review ask still comes from a person.

Don’t take reviews lightly. Pull every client who complained in the last month and ask two questions: Did someone call them back? And did someone fix what went wrong? If the answer to either is no, give that complaint an owner and a date for the next call.

New York City is now using the federal racketeering law against a PI firm.

In early October, city lawyers sued Manhattan firm Asher & Associates in federal court. They allege the firm filed 15 bogus claims over the past decade that blamed cracked sidewalks and potholes for injuries that medical records tied to other incidents, Gothamist reported.

A city law department spokesperson said it's the first time the city has used the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) against staged accidents and injuries.

Asher & Associates calls the claims baseless. Its lawyer, Matthew Laroche, said the firm has represented injured New Yorkers for more than 40 years.

"This lawsuit is a clear attempt to chill that work by recasting ordinary, contested personal injury litigation as racketeering, and by grossly mischaracterizing the facts," he said in a statement.

Big companies got there first. Uber and others have filed at least 20 civil RICO suits against plaintiffs' lawyers in federal courts over the last two years, Reuters reported in August. A win triples the damages.

How have those cases gone so far?

• A Brooklyn judge threw Uber's case out. In August, a federal judge in Brooklyn dismissed Uber's suit against three New York firms. The judge wrote that Uber hadn't shown the firms received anything from their ties to doctors beyond "commonplace fee-sharing arrangements, client referrals, and medical testimony, not bribes."
• A Los Angeles judge kept most of Uber's claims alive. In August, she let most of Uber's RICO claims against lawyers and doctors move ahead. She also ordered Uber to pay attorney fees to three defendants, including the Law Offices of Jacob Emrani.
• Uber's Philadelphia case heads to trial. On Oct. 13, a federal judge ruled Uber can pursue its claims against Marc Simon and his firm, Simon & Simon. Uber still has standing to sue, the judge held, even though its insurer, Farmers, paid Uber's defense bills in the original injury suits. Trial is set for March. Simon denies wrongdoing.

The city's case faces its own hurdles. "There's no such thing as an easy RICO claim," Jeff Grell, an adjunct professor at Southern Methodist University who wrote a book on the law, told Gothamist. "They're all very complicated."

🔗  Gothamist →

The product-liability theory PI firms used against social media is now aimed at ChatGPT.

Eight state attorneys general sued OpenAI in mid-October, each in its own state court, alleging the company failed to build enough safeguards into ChatGPT to protect vulnerable users, including children, Bloomberg Law reported. The states are Arizona, Arkansas, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Montana, Nebraska, and West Virginia.

The suits follow a consumer-protection case Florida's attorney general brought this summer, a proposed class action filed the same week, and a growing list of individual injury claims.

• PI firms wrote the template. Personal injury firms first sued social media platforms in the late 2010s, arguing that Instagram, TikTok, and other companies produced defectively designed products. Courts eventually let some of those claims past Section 230, the federal law that shields platforms from suits over what their users post. The youth-harm cases have since produced almost $1 billion in jury awards, attorneys told Bloomberg Law.
• AI may not get the same shield. Section 230 covers what users post, and ChatGPT generates its own answers. "It makes sense that these are framed as product design, product liability type cases," attorney Jennifer Beckage told Bloomberg Law. Her firm represents companies on data security and privacy.
• The cases are moving faster this time. "The adoption of this new technology was really much, much faster," said Matthew Bergman of the Social Media Victims Law Center, whose cases allege ChatGPT pushed users toward suicide. He told Reuters in early October that he has about 30 more cases against OpenAI in the pipeline.
• OpenAI says it already protects young users. It told Bloomberg Law it has built "industry-leading age-specific protections" into ChatGPT.

This time, the states moved early. In the social media fight, attorneys general joined years after plaintiffs' firms filed.

"The state AGs were able to hitch their way into a moving train," Bergman said of the social media cases. "That's not what you have here."

🔗  Bloomberg Law →

• Arizona Approves Its First Law School Without ABA Accreditation: The Arizona Supreme Court approved Grand Canyon University Law School on Oct. 15, saying the move would help address the state's lawyer shortage, Reuters reported. The school could open as early as fall 2027. Its graduates will qualify to take Arizona's bar exam. The U.S. Department of Education may revoke the ABA's status as the federally recognized accreditor of law schools.
• Georgia Disbars a PI Lawyer in a Crash-Data RICO Case: The Supreme Court of Georgia unanimously disbarred Decatur attorney William Taylor Payne Oct. 14, Fox 5 Atlanta reported. Payne entered an Alford plea in 2025 to one felony count under Georgia's RICO Act. The plea let him maintain his innocence. Prosecutors said he and three co-conspirators used stolen data from the Georgia Electronic Accident Reporting System to solicit clients in 2015. The court agreed with a special master that Payne acted with a dishonest motive.
• Another Big Law Partner Leaves for an "AI-Native" Firm: Goodwin Procter partner Leon Johnson said Oct. 14 that he'll lead OmniLex Partners, a new U.S. firm tied to the Zurich-founded tech company Omnilex AI, Reuters reported. Johnson wants a firm built on projects, outcomes, and fixed fees instead of the billable hour, with AI supporting senior lawyers' work. Like many AI firms, OmniLex will use a management services organization (MSO) structure so it can raise money from investors. An online directory now lists at least 60 AI-native firms.
• Perrigo Agrees to Pay $10 Million Over Store-Brand Baby Formula Prices: Perrigo agreed to pay $10 million to settle a proposed class action alleging it conspired with Gerber to keep new competitors out of the store-brand infant formula market so it could inflate prices, Reuters reported. The parties filed the proposed settlement in federal court in Brooklyn on Oct. 13, and now it needs a judge's approval. Perrigo denied wrongdoing and will cooperate with the plaintiffs in their ongoing case against Gerber, which has also denied wrongdoing.
• L'Oréal Explores Selling Off Its Talc Injury Claims: L'Oréal's U.S. subsidiary has hired restructuring advisers to explore moving its talc and other chemical-related injury claims into a separate company and selling it to an outside investor, WSJ Pro Bankruptcy reported Oct. 5, citing people familiar with the matter. The claims allege its talc products caused illness. The approach would follow Honeywell, which last year moved asbestos liabilities to Delticus. L'Oréal didn't respond to the Wall Street Journal’s requests for comment.

That's a change from Google, where people squeezed their problems into a few words, Becky Simms wrote in MarTech. Simms, founder of the digital agency Reflect Digital, says those longer questions work as customer research.

She also warns against reading too much into a single test prompt. AI assistants can remember past chats, so two people who ask the same question can get different answers.

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.

One missing discharge record held up a policy-limits settlement for months.

That happened at Louis Law Firm. A client had a long hospital stay, and the carrier was ready to settle at policy limits. The carrier needed just one document, the discharge record, and the firm spent months calling and emailing the hospital to get it.

"The client waited for months for a case to settle that could have been resolved in a couple weeks, possibly days," the firm said in a case study Codes Health published.

Chasing records ate 15 to 20 hours of case-manager time a week at the firm, which has three attorneys, three case managers, and 350 to 450 active cases. After it moved the work to Codes Health, it estimated a saving of one to two hours per case, per case manager.

Codes Health, a records retrieval service built for plaintiff firms, requests medical records, bills, imaging, and affidavits in all 50 states, follows up with every provider, and says its average turnaround is one to two weeks. A mix of AI and people does the work.

Last week's pick, Legalyze, reviews the records in your file. Codes Health handles the step before that: getting the records. It summarizes them, too.

Think of Codes Health as a prelitigation records department you don't have to staff.

• It checks requests before they go out. Codes Health says most records requests end in rejection. So it validates each request, finds who treated the client, and picks the fastest route to every provider, including direct connections to claims clearinghouses and payers.
• It chases every provider separately. On one Louis case, Codes Health worked nine or 10 providers at once and tracked each request on its own, so a problem with one didn't hold up the rest. "The case manager did not lift a finger," the firm said. You see the status of every request, with updates on every fax and call.
• Records come back organized. Codes Health groups visits and bills into summaries and builds a medical chronology that shows what's missing. It also flags diagnoses, possible breaches in care, and future expenses for your attorneys to check. The company says people verify the AI's findings.
• Your case system can start the request. At Louis Law Firm, a case reaching a set status in the CRM sends the request automatically, with no handoff, and setup took a couple of weeks. Codes Health says it partners with Filevine so firms can request, receive, and review records inside Filevine.

Codes Health says it signs business associate agreements with relevant vendors, encrypts patient data, runs third-party penetration tests, and doesn't train its AI models on customer data. It doesn't list pricing on its site.

We haven't tested it. Ask for per-request pricing, any extra fees, and typical turnaround on completed requests. Then run it on a few open files where you're still waiting on records, and compare it with your current vendor or in-house team.

🔗  Codes Health →

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

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