👋  Good morning. Chris Dreyer here. An Ohio PI lawyer has spent about 20 years on a marketing channel he says none of his local competitors touch. It costs him about $220,000 a year. Guess what it brings back.

Also: Trudy Emlaw tells you when to make your first marketing hire, and why she wishes she'd made hers sooner. And, I’m sure you’ve considered selling your firm. But have you asked what makes a firm worth buying? You’ll want to hear this take.

And making the news: AI search is changing what works in Google Ads. Here are the warning signs to check in your own account.

Let's get into it.

Check your mailbox this week. Then check your inbox.

One of them is a lot less crowded, right?

Chuck Boyk has been betting on the quiet one for about 20 years. He's a plaintiff PI lawyer in Holland, Ohio, just outside Toledo. He's practiced for 43 years and runs six attorneys, 35 staff, and 10 satellite offices.

Let me say this up front…

Chuck isn't anti-digital in the least. His firm spends heavily on its website, LSAs, and Google ads.

But when he realized his competitors weren’t into newsletters, let alone one that a flesh-and-blood mail carrier puts in the mailbox (remember those?), Chuck saw an opportunity.

"We're all spending a fortune on the internet," Chuck said in a recent episode of AttorneySync’s Clienting Podcast. "I don't have one competitor in the local market that's doing [print newsletters]."

Smart guy.

Newsletters are one of the oldest marketing channels.

I've made the case here before for pairing discovery channels, like billboards and Google, with relationship channels you own, like a newsletter. Chuck shows what the relationship side is worth once you keep it going long enough.

An unobstructed, algorithm-free, direct line to an audience of thousands. And Chuck owns it all.

Which brings me to this…

PI marketing success often means you gotta zig where other firms zag.

Do it right, and the payoff can make you feel good about the career you chose.

Chuck’s client newsletter goes to 27,500 people every month, on paper and by email. He spends about $220,000 a year on it. So far this year, he says, it has brought in $1.8 million. Chuck puts the return at 9 or 10 to 1.

“But Chris, I’ve heard print is dead.”

I beg to differ, my friend. Megan Wray Schertler, co-founder of In Real Life Media, an agency that connects brands with independent magazines, has a theory why print works: "Print is expensive and that's exactly why people trust it," she wrote in Huck.

It also explains why Chuck is all in. The man mails a second newsletter, The Boyk Law Report, to more than 2,000 attorneys at roughly $36,000 a year. He says it has brought in over $2 million already this year.

Not to mention the compounded value of those reader relationships.

Three and four generations of the same families have hired him. Another former client moved. The person who moved into the house had a dog-bite case with a facial scar, and called Chuck's firm. It became a six-figure case.

Judges and opposing lawyers read the newsletter. Even insurance adjusters refer their own family members to Chuck.

Here's how I'd steal Chuck's playbook:

• Add every contact, starting now. Clients, callers, vendors, other lawyers, judges. Chuck didn't start collecting names until his 15th year in practice and calls that a mistake. "Get every email address... every contact," he said. "It's your herd."
• Fill it with your town. A typical issue carries a recipe, a local charity event, a local business, and a few recent cases. Referral partners write guest articles. Chuck frames each one and hands it to the author, who puts it on the wall.
• Give your team a byline. A young attorney at the firm writes a tech column under a caricature of himself. Press releases on big cases become stories. "I make them like the hero," Chuck said, "and they like the publicity."
• Never skip a month. Chuck has sent it every month for about 20 years. "If you're going to do it one month and then, you know, not do it for three months later, it's not going to work," he said.
• Ask every new client how they found you. Chuck still asks on his own intakes. A client who says "the internet" often turns out to have an uncle the firm helped 10 years ago.
• Check your bar's rules first. A newsletter to past clients can count as lawyer advertising, so run it past your state's rules. Any case result or client story needs the client's written permission and care with medical details.

Take it from a guy writing almost 5,000 words a week to reach the audience I care about the most: A newsletter is a must-have channel.

So start building your list this week.

🔗  The Clienting Podcast: Chuck Boyk →

You probably know when you'll hire your next attorney or case manager.

But when do you make the first marketing hire?

Trudy Emlaw told the PIMCON room a few weeks ago that it's a tougher call.

She should know…

She came to Mike Morse Law Firm from TV ad sales, as its media buyer. Back then, one person oversaw both intake and marketing, but the Morse firm eventually promoted her to head of marketing, working with a couple of agencies and no internal team.

When she left after 11 years, the firm's COO asked what her biggest mistake had been. She said she had waited too long to hire.

She kept waiting until there was enough work to justify a role. But once someone owns an area, Trudy said, they start spotting opportunities you couldn't see before.

"The biggest opportunity you're missing is the one you can't see yet," she said.

Trudy is now CMO at George Sink Injury Lawyers. Her framework for building a marketing team starts with the difference between two kinds of hires:

"Generalists help you grow. Specialists help you scale."

Here are the three phases she says a marketing team grows through, and how to build one the right way:

• Phase 1: Put one person in charge of marketing. Early on, the owner, an assistant, an intake person, or an agency handles it, and no one owns it full time. Trudy consults for an owner who made every marketing decision while also handling cases and running the firm. The marketing worked, she said, but it wasn't reaching its full potential. Hire someone who can own it and keeps asking questions. Get that hire right, and soon they'll have more work than one person can handle. When Trudy got a full-time marketing owner in place, gaps turned up everywhere, from past-client outreach and bottom-of-funnel numbers to a stale website.
• Phase 2: Hire for the bottleneck. About nine months in, her firm entered a new market, and Trudy's own time became the bottleneck. She hired two marketing coordinators. One was the right call, and two wasn't. Before you hire, name the bottleneck you want to solve and what success looks like. (The fix isn't always a person. Trudy said a specialist, AI, or software might remove the bottleneck.) With only a little direction, her first specialist, a data analyst, took work off her plate and produced reports "a thousand times better" than hers.
• Phase 3: Put alignment on the calendar. About a year ago, Trudy rebuilt George Sink's marketing team from scratch, with people spread across several states. She runs a weekly team meeting on goals, pacing, and who does what by when, plus a one-on-one with each team member. She never skips them. Do the same: Book a weekly team meeting and a one-on-one with each person, and treat your agencies as part of the team. Trudy holds hers to the same standard as staff. Good agencies can explain what they're doing and why. Bad ones leave you more confused. She once worked with a PPC agency whose ten-minute answers sounded like "word soup."

Need proof her approach works?

George Sink's Free Gas Friday shows what an aligned team can do. It's a pop-up event where the firm gives local drivers a free tank of gas. At one this summer, 99 drivers who'd signed up on the firm's website lined up outside its North Charleston office.

Behind the scenes, nearly the whole marketing team works together, handling the shot list, social posts, future website content, contact collection, and community partnerships.

One event turns into months of marketing. That's the difference, Trudy said, between people doing marketing tasks and a marketing engine.

Trudy said she'd still give the COO the same answer today. Write down the one bottleneck a hire would fix this quarter, and start working on the job description.

What would a buyer pay for your firm today?

Chad Dudley asked a version of that question at PIMCON. He once vetted a firm with $16 million in revenue and $9 million in profit. On paper, it looked like a great buy.

Then he looked closer. The two partners brought in 80% to 90% of the cases through personal referrals and earned 90% of the fees. Nobody led anything under them, and both planned to sail off to the Caribbean after the sale.

"What are we buying?" Chad said.

Chad has consulted for more than 300 PI firms. In January, he launched Orion Legal MSO, a management services organization (MSO) that buys into the business side of PI firms. (So yes, he's a buyer.)

He thinks every owner should ask his question now. "Every single firm in your market is on the market," he said.

Outside money first came in through D.C., which lets nonlawyers own part of a law firm. Then came Arizona, which licenses firms with nonlawyer owners, and then mass torts, Chad said. Now it's flooding single-event PI, the car crashes and other one-off injuries that fill a typical PI caseload.

He pointed to Greg Crabtree's book Simple Numbers, Straight Talk, Big Profits! Crabtree says any industry averaging more than 15% net profit draws competitors until margins fall back to 15%. PI firms have earned 25% or more for years behind a "fence," Chad said. That fence is coming down.

Build your firm to a buyer's standard, even if you never sell.

The same fixes make a firm easier to run.

Here's what a buyer checks, and what I'd fix first:

• Get to 25% net profit and stay there. A healthy PI firm, Chad said, earns 25% or more year after year. High-value, low-volume firms can run 35% to 50%. Pull three years of profit-and-loss statements. If you're under 25%, find out whether labor, case costs, or acquisition costs are pulling it down.
• Keep a cash cushion. Chad's healthy firm carries no debt except case costs, financed through third parties, and keeps three to six months of labor costs within reach. His advice is to pick the risk level that lets you sleep at night.
• Get cases off the partners' phones. Buyers pay less when a firm depends on its owners. Build referral relationships and marketing that belong to the firm, plus a leadership team that can run it. That's the gap that sank the $16 million firm.
• Know the numbers a buyer will ask for. Chad's first look covers profit-and-loss statements, intake stats, and closed-case stats. Buyers also weigh your footprint, your revenue, leadership depth, labor ratios, revenue per attorney, and what you pay to acquire a case. Firms above $15 million in revenue see higher multiples, he said. Review those numbers every month.
• If you talk to buyers, check their record. Ask how many deals they've actually closed, Chad said, because you will find misinformation everywhere. Get your own representation, and run any deal past ethics counsel, since you will face strict fee-sharing rules. In the MSO model he described, the lawyers keep owning and running the law firm. The services company can't take a cut of cases or profit.

Seven firms joined Orion in about seven months, and firms now come to Chad nonstop, he said. Ken Harrell, managing partner of Joye Law Firm in South Carolina, told me on the Pod that he expects his firm to join one of these platforms "more likely than not."

Chad also said what won't change. Client service will still set firms apart, and so will how you handle your top 20% of cases.

"People standing in front of people and getting verdicts is only going to become more valuable," he said.

🔗  ICYMI: PIMCON 2026 Recap →

Heads up! AI search continues to impact what works in Google Ads for law firms.

I asked Jessica Ford, our Director of Paid Digital, what she's seeing in our clients' accounts, and it’s clear what used to work in Google Ads doesn't work the way it did. For law firms, the biggest change has come since August, and we expect more in the months ahead.

Here are the warning signs to watch for in your own account:

• Click-through rates are tanking. Fewer of the people who see a law firm's search ad click on it.
• Cost per click is way up. Lower click-through rates push costs higher. They also drag down Quality Scores, which Google bases partly on expected click-through rate.
• Clicks are dropping even when impression share holds. Impression share, which is how often an ad shows compared with how often it could, is flat or even rising. Clicks are still falling.
• Search terms reports have gone haywire. Phrase-match keywords are triggering ads on random searches that don't come close to what the keywords mean. We've never seen that before, and it's a sign Google's algorithm is misfiring.
• Google reps want your budget out of Search. They're telling us to move ad spend off Search and onto Gmail, display, and video through Demand Gen. Google is also offering large credits to test Demand Gen and AI Max. We don't recommend AI Max for law firms.
• Google is paying advertisers to come back. For the first time ever, Google Ads is offering big incentives to restart paused accounts.

We think AI search is the cause. People use AI Mode in part because they don't have to scroll past ads or click links to get answers.

Law firms get hit harder, because Google mostly doesn't show ads in AI Mode on sensitive topics like legal help. In other words, we’re not able to run ads against any truly valuable AI search, and the conversations it lets us show ads for are total junk.

Our recommendation?

Don't wait for Google to fix this. Test ChatGPT Ads while they're still affordable and competition is thin. Results still swing widely. We've seen cost per lead from $300 to $2,000.

Build your firm's name with YouTube, connected TV, and audio ads. Those channels cost less than search right now, and results are steadier. Your name will be one of your best assets in search results.

And make sure your CRM tracks where every lead comes from, so you can trust your numbers.

My read today: Don't count on Search alone. Keep your budget flexible, so a sudden change in Google's auction doesn't catch your firm off guard. If your firm is seeing the same thing and wants to compare notes, reply to this email.

· · ·

For background: Growth in Google's search ad revenue, long its cash cow, slowed for the second quarter in a row. It grew 12% year over year in the third quarter, down from 17% in the second and 19% in the first, the Wall Street Journal reported Oct. 28.

On the earnings call, Chief Business Officer Philipp Schindler said searches are growing at their fastest rate in five years as people use AI Mode. But AI Mode searches earn less from ads than regular ones, he said, and Google is now working to earn more from them.

Shares of Google's parent, Alphabet, fell about 10% in after-hours trading. We expect the drop to push Google to get ads into AI results fast. We don't know when or how that will happen for law firms.

🔗  The Wall Street Journal →

• Instagram Bets on Long-Form Video With 90-Minute "Features": Instagram unveiled an overhaul of its long-form video tools on Oct. 26, including a test of horizontal videos called "Features" that can run up to 90 minutes, Business Insider reported. For now, Features is open to a limited number of creators in the U.S. and Brazil. Instagram is also testing "Series" labels that link a show's episodes in order. Creators can now link up to eight clips to one long video, and Instagram's TV app is coming to Apple TV. "We want to be the most culturally relevant platform," Instagram head Adam Mosseri said.
• Orange County Prosecutor Charges Parents Over Kids' E-Bike Riding: Orange County, Calif., District Attorney Todd Spitzer has charged at least three parents with child endangerment, The Wall Street Journal reported Sept. 24. His office is investigating 47 more. One mother faces an involuntary manslaughter charge after her 14-year-old son allegedly hit and killed an 81-year-old pedestrian on an e-motorcycle. Nationally, hospital-treated e-bike injuries rose more than 1,000% from 2020 to 2024, a San Jose State University analysis found.
• Camp Mystic Wrongful-Death Suits Can Proceed Nov. 9: U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Christopher López ruled Oct. 9 that wrongful-death suits over the July 2025 flood can move forward against Camp Mystic and individual defendants starting Nov. 9. The suits can go only as far as final judgment. The court must approve any money paid from estate property or the camp's $6 million insurance policy.
• California's AI Rules for Lawyers Take Effect Jan. 1: Gov. Gavin Newsom signed SB 574 on Sept. 30, a first-of-its-kind law on how attorneys use generative AI. Starting Jan. 1, California lawyers must personally verify every citation in a court filing, disclose AI use in documents they file, and keep confidential or personal client information out of AI tools not restricted to people bound to protect it. Arbitrators can't delegate their decisions to AI.

International SEO consultant Motoko Hunt calls the problem the "global consistency paradox." The more a company standardizes its pages, she wrote in Search Engine Land, "the easier it becomes to remove the local signals" that show real expertise in each market.

She wrote it for global companies. It fits a PI firm that builds every office page from one template and swaps in the city name. Her advice: "Don't make AI engines infer your local expertise."

Then test it the way Hunt suggests, without your firm's name in the question. Ask ChatGPT and Gemini, "Which personal injury law firms have an office in [city]?" Note whether you show up, and whether the answer gets your office right.

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.

Insurers comb medical records for treatment gaps and prior injuries.

Legalyze.ai reads the records already in your file and flags those problems, along with missing records and inconsistencies. Then it builds a medical chronology, a billing summary, and a draft demand, each cited to the page it came from.

Tools like Tavrn go out and get the records. Legalyze starts once they're in.

Legalyze is a records reviewer that shows its work, page by page.

• Every finding links to its source page. Click a visit in the chronology and you land on the page where the AI found it. Case Chat answers plain-English questions about the file the same way.
• It reads handwriting and scans. It takes PDFs, Word files, images, and spreadsheets, including handwritten notes. Its sample case runs 1,920 pages, and Legalyze says it has handled cases of up to 18,000.
• The billing and the demand come from the same file. The billing summary totals charges, payments, and balances by provider. The demand draft cites the records it draws on and goes to an attorney for review.
• The price is per case. It's $199 a case for firms that start by Nov. 30, then $299, with unlimited users and no seat fees. The first case carries a money-back guarantee.

Legalyze says it signs HIPAA business associate agreements, has them in place with its AI providers, and doesn't train its AI models on customer data. It offers a third-party penetration test report on request. It doesn't mention SOC 2. It connects to CASEpeer, MyCase, Smokeball, Litify, and Clio, among others.

We haven't tested it. Run it on one closed case where your team already knows the gaps and prior injuries. If it finds the same problems and cites the right pages, try it on an open file before the demand goes out.

🔗  Legalyze.ai →

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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