👋 Good morning from Scottsdale. Chris Dreyer here. Today is Day 1 of PIMCON, our biggest event of the year. And let me tell you: Three years in, and I. Am. Pumped.
We kicked things off last night at The Phoenician, and the sessions start this morning. If you're here with us, thank you for making the trip.
Now, a question to answer before PIMCON ends: Who at your firm can hear a $500,000 case in the first 90 seconds?
Most of the AI intake talk I hear involves answering the phone fast. Speed to lead, as we say. But I recently came across a post from someone who builds these systems for PI firms, and he makes a sharper point. The real value is capturing that person's judgment, and you have to do it without losing them.
Also: Take a referral fee, and you can be on the hook if the other firm blows the case. Here's my checklist before any file changes hands.
🎩 Hat tip to Josh Brumley, founder of Seattle's Brumley Law Firm. He built case management software for his own team first, and now other PI firms can use it. It's our Tool of the Week. 👇
Let's get into it.
Start Advertising on ChatGPT Before Your Competitors Do
People ask ChatGPT what to do after an accident. It can explain their options, but it can't take the case. An ad below the answer lets them reach your firm directly.
For now, the clicks are cheap. They start around $4 to $6. On Google, competitive legal clicks routinely clear $300.
That won't last. ChatGPT shows up to two ads per chat, and almost no firms are bidding on them yet. As competition grows, expect prices to rise.
Rankings.io is one of the few agencies in OpenAI's limited legal ad pilot. We'll build your ads and landing pages, set up tracking and get your firm running while prices are still low.
💡ONE BIG IDEA
Build Your AI Intake to Capture Judgment
Most of the AI intake talk I hear is about speed to lead, answering every call fast and winning the first 90 seconds.
Or about making sure the firm never misses a single call…
Cool. That's good work, and you need to invest there. But speed doesn't tell you which callers to sign.
Let's hop over to this post on X, shall we?
Iqrar H. wrote on Sept. 25 about an intake specialist at a PI firm. She'd spent 12 years learning which callers were worth a signed retainer and which wasted an attorney's afternoon.
He says she could hear a $500,000 case in the first 90 seconds.
Here's my take…
Speed is the floor. Build your AI intake to capture the judgment of your best intake people.
(Same goes for the rest of your team. Intake is just where you can most easily hear the judgment.)
The catch is that they have to want to hand it over.
Iqrar's team was building that firm's AI system. It would listen to every inbound call, pull the intake details into the case management system, and flag the leads worth a closer look. (Full disclosure: His company, Metadots, sells this kind of work to PI firms.)
Everyone knew the AI would do the part of the intake specialist's job that she was famous for. So did she. 😬
She gave the team "polite, useless answers," he wrote.
Handle the rollout badly, and you lose the knowledge you wanted to capture.
Writing in Harvard Business Review in August, Faisal Hoque, Tom Davenport, and Paul Scade warn that an AI replacement often handles only "the most visible parts of a job."
In one survey they cite, one in three HR leaders said they lost critical skills and expertise along with the people they laid off and replaced with AI.
At the law firm where Iqrar was building the AI, the managing partner turned it around. Before the project restarted, he sat down with the intake specialist. "You're not training your replacement," he told her. "You're building the system you'll run."
Then she gave the team far more than they asked for, like the caller phrases that meant a pre-existing injury, the accident types that looked strong and settled badly, and the referral sources that sent junk.
Generic scoring rules wouldn't have known any of that about this firm's cases.
Iqrar put it this way: "People don't resist AI. They resist being made smaller by it."
(It's one firm's story, told by the company that built the system. But the research on cutting roles points the same way.)
Iqrar's approach and thinking on this issue are solid:
Give your best intake person the bigger job. Her title became intake director. The AI handled transcription and data capture. She owned the scoring rules, reviewed every call the system flagged, and trained new hires on the calls the AI can't judge.
Pay her when the system works. The managing partner also told the intake director, "Your knowledge now has a price." The firm tied her bonus to signed cases from AI-flagged leads, so the better the system got, the more she earned. "Suddenly she wanted it to be good," Iqrar wrote. (I'd add one caution here. Check your state's rules on paying nonlawyer staff first, since bonuses tied to specific cases can raise fee-sharing questions.)
Put her name on it. He also told her, "Your name goes on it." Inside the firm, people called the screening rules her playbook, partners included.
Three things I'd add:
Keep the speed work. Answering every call fast still matters, and a good AI system handles it well. Just don't stop there.
Check the calls you turn away, too. Conversion rate alone won't tell you whether the rules work. Track the signed cases you later drop, and have your team review a sample of declined calls each month.
Set ground rules before launch. The AI can flag a caller, but a person still decides who to sign. Some calls need an attorney right away, like a fatality, a close deadline, or a caller asking a legal question, so record who gets them. Check your state's call-recording consent law, since some states require everyone on the call to agree. Then run the plan past whoever handles your malpractice coverage.
You can start this week, before you talk to a single vendor.
Sit down with your best intake person and 10 recorded calls. Ask them to mark the moment they knew whether each caller was worth signing, and what they heard.
Write down what they tell you. That's the first page of their playbook.
Then settle their title and bonus before the first vendor meeting.
🔗 Iqrar H. on X →
♟️STEAL THIS PLAYBOOK
How to Refer Out a Case Without Taking on Its Risk
Last week, I told you to ask the biggest firms in your market for the cases they turn down. (I'd dumpster dive for those cases, remember?)
This week, I want to look at the other side of that deal, and what to check before a referred case changes hands.
A referral fee looks like the easiest money in PI. You send the file, then you wait for the check.
Here's the catch…
A referral fee can make you responsible for a case you never worked.
Chris F.N. Rose runs LegalFlare, a law firm that places referred cases. On the Trial Lawyer View podcast, he put it this way:
"Case referrals are not an old pair of shoes on eBay."
If the firm on the other end "screws this up, your malpractice insurance has to attach," he said.
The rules explain why. Under ABA Model Rule 1.5(e), lawyers at different firms can split a fee only if the split matches the work each one does, or each takes joint responsibility for the case.
The client has to agree in writing to each lawyer's share. And the lawyers need to charge a reasonable total fee.
States write their own versions, and some go further. Florida's bar rules make every lawyer who shares the fee in an injury contingency case sign the contract with the client.
Each one also takes on joint legal responsibility "as if each were partners." And the referring lawyer can take no more than 25% of the fee.
Rose shared a story that shows what's at stake. A firm sent him three cases that looked strong.
The statute of limitations had expired on all three, and each one approached the end of a 60-day extension to serve and file. Each one already carried an earlier fee split.
He calls a case like that "a bomb in a muffin." 🧁
He asked for the sign-offs he needed. When the firm wouldn't provide them, he turned the cases down.
Here's the checklist I'd run before any referred case changes hands:
Get consent before anyone calls an unsigned lead. Rose's first step is getting the lead's consent to let the other firm contact them. Without it, that call can run into your state's solicitation rules.
Put the split in writing, and have the client sign it. Rule 1.5(e) requires the client's written agreement to each share. Rose says handshake deals sit at the heart of many of the fee disputes that end up in court opinions.
Ask for the whole file before you accept. Check the incident date and the statute of limitations. Look for any earlier fee split and the consent to associate. If a firm won't hand those over, that tells you what you need to know about the case.
Test the receiving firm, then keep checking. When Rose tested referral networks with his own team posing as clients, he says about a third of the firms never reached them. He asks partner firms for an update every 30 days. With one large firm that kept dropping files, he moved to weekly check-ins, then placed those clients elsewhere.
Check the itemized settlement before you sign off. Rose compares every settlement line and cost against the numbers he expects. He still finds math errors from his best partners.
These are the ABA's model rules, and your state's version may differ. Check it, or call your bar's ethics hotline, before you change how your firm splits fees.
📰 TOP OF THE NEWS
ChatGPT Ads Hit a $1 Billion Run Rate. Here's What They Cost PI Firms.
ChatGPT ads reached a $1 billion annualized run rate in 200 days.
That's from a new report by Graphite, a growth agency that runs SEO, AEO, and paid search for its clients, and Similarweb, a digital data company. The report dates the launch to March, though OpenAI began testing ads in the U.S. in February.
The report pairs Similarweb's user-panel data with Graphite's review of more than 98,000 ads and 8,000 landing pages. Similarweb shares percentages only, not volumes.
In September, 43.4% of ad-eligible U.S. users saw at least one ad. Click-through rates worldwide rose 112% from March 30 to Sept. 20. The U.S. all-time rate sits at 0.73%.
Timing matters. Ads in the first four turns of a conversation drew a 48% higher click-through rate, and 51% of impressions landed in the first three turns.
Brand names matter, too. Of the exchanges that carried an ad, 61% named a brand, against 36% of exchanges with no ad. In one example, a user asked about Wix and got an ad for a competitor, Lovable.
Legal is already in the mix. Business and professional services, the category LegalZoom leads, took 8.5% of U.S. impressions and had the most advertisers, 2,231.
Most advertisers are still experimenting. Among 10 brands running on both ChatGPT and Google Search, only 1.9% of ChatGPT headlines matched their search headlines. And 60% of advertisers send traffic to five or fewer landing pages.
Graphite's advice: Budget it like a test, treat it as an addition to Google, and plan to re-test.
So what does that look like inside a PI account? I asked Jessica Ford, our Director of Paid Digital, who runs ChatGPT ads for PI firms at Rankings. Jessica, take it from here.
· · ·
Thanks, Chris. Our early numbers look a lot like Graphite's.
Click-through rates run under 1%. A couple of our accounts have topped 1%. That's in line with Graphite's 0.73% U.S. average.
Clicks cost $4 to $65. Around $15 is common. Conversion rates run about 2% to 5%.
We can't benchmark or forecast yet. The ads haven't run consistently long enough to give us a reliable baseline. Treat any spend as a test.
Set up intake to capture UTMs. Your intake chat tool or web form has to record the UTM tags on each lead. That's how you tell a paid ChatGPT lead from one that found you in ChatGPT's regular answers. We worked through this with a client recently.
Don't count on ads lifting your organic visibility. There's a rumor that running ChatGPT ads boosts a brand in ChatGPT's regular answers. OpenAI says ads don't influence its answers. Logan Mosby on our team and I are testing it anyway.
My read today: ChatGPT ads have earned a small, tracked test, as long as intake can tell paid leads from organic ones. If your firm is weighing one and wants to compare notes, reply to this email.
AI Overviews Explain Why Rankings Rise While Clicks Fall
Your rankings can climb while your clicks fall. AI Overviews are why.
One of our clients experienced this last month. The firm's keyword rankings in Georgia nearly doubled from a year earlier, and its clicks went down. A managing partner saw the decrease in clicks and thought the firm's visibility had dropped.
It hadn't. Fewer searchers clicked, most likely because Google's AI Overview answered them at the top of the page.
Clicks have declined like this since Google launched AI Overviews in May 2024. In February, Ahrefs, an SEO software company, found that when an AI Overview appears, the top-ranking page's click-through rate runs 58% lower on average.
Now AI Overviews are showing up on searches for a firm's own name.
They jumped in September. DemandSphere, a search data company, tracks branded keywords daily. AI Overviews appeared on 26.12% of them on Sept. 1 and on 90.48% on Sept. 27, it reported Oct. 1. Google hasn't announced a change.
Ahrefs sees the same climb. AI Overviews appeared on 61.3% of the branded keywords it tracks in July and 73.3% in September, Ahrefs reported Oct. 2. On Sept. 29, the share hit 82.91%.
Big brands are seeing it, too. Chris Long, co-founder of the SEO agency Nectiv, ran a scrape and found AI Overviews for 93 of 100 enterprise brands. "So expect CTR to now go down on your branded searches," he wrote on LinkedIn.
Other sites get a say. In Ahrefs' panel of 100 major brands, the outside sites cited most were Wikipedia, YouTube, and LinkedIn. For a law firm, that can mean a directory or review site describes you before your own site does.
None of these reports measured clicks on branded searches yet. But a searcher who gets an answer at the top of the page has less reason to click through to your site.
If your rankings held or rose while clicks fell, check Search Console before anyone calls it a ranking drop. Compare impressions and clicks month over month for your top keywords and for your firm's name. If impressions held and clicks fell, an AI Overview likely caused it.
Then put signed cases next to clicks when you report results to your partners.
🔗 Ahrefs →
🚀 QUICK HITS
Pennsylvania Supreme Court Upholds $250,000 Cap on Suits Against State Agencies: The court on Oct. 1 upheld the cap in a case against SEPTA, Philadelphia's regional transit agency. A SEPTA bus hit Hayley Freilich in a crosswalk, and she lost part of her left foot. The cap cut her $7 million stipulated verdict to $250,000. The majority held that the cap doesn't violate the state constitution's rights to a jury trial or a remedy. Two justices dissented.
Roundup Trial Tests Claims That Survived Bayer's Supreme Court Win: Three cancer patients opened their case against Bayer's Monsanto unit before a St. Louis jury on Sept. 29, Reuters reported. In June, the U.S. Supreme Court barred claims over inadequate warning labels, so these plaintiffs argue that a design defect made Roundup unsafe to sell. Bayer faces about 65,000 Roundup claims and wants to resolve them through a $7.25 billion class settlement. These three aren't part of it.
Arbitrator Orders Uber to Pay $40 Million Over Rider Killed on Highway: A retired judge serving as arbitrator ordered Uber to pay the parents of Emily Normandin-Parker, 23, LAist and the BBC reported Sept. 18. Her parents say the driver pulled over on an Orange County highway in 2023 and ordered her and a sick friend out of the car. Another vehicle struck and killed Normandin-Parker. Uber, which argued its drivers are independent contractors, says the arbitrator was wrong.
Father and Son PI Lawyers Both Disbarred in Florida: The Florida Supreme Court disbarred Longwood PI lawyer Larry Powers III in August, ABA Journal reported. His father, Larry Powers Jr., lost his license in January 2025 over allegations he used client money for personal expenses. Less than two weeks later, the father tried to enter a jail's client-lawyer area with his son's bar card. A deputy noticed the names didn't match. A case referee later found the son's conduct dishonest, and he never responded to the Bar.
California Raises Penalties for Lawyers Who Pay to Find Clients: Gov. Gavin Newsom on Sept. 27 signed AB 2039, which adds a $25,000 civil penalty for each violation of the state's ban on "capping," or paying people to recruit clients, Reuters reported. The State Bar must also set up a fast-track process to disbar lawyers convicted of felony capping, or of misdemeanor capping done knowingly and for profit. The bill followed Los Angeles Times reporting on allegedly paid and false claims under Los Angeles County's $4 billion sexual abuse settlement.
Google Gives Businesses Four Days to Reject Suggested Profile Edits: Google's Business Profile help page now says owners have four days to accept or reject a suggested edit after Google notifies them. If you don't respond, Google "may automatically publish the update" when public information, such as your website, supports it. Have someone at your firm check those notifications daily.
🎙️ FROM THE POD
Kelley Simoneaux on Building a Niche Firm Around Her Own Story
Kelley Simoneaux named her firm for the injury she has lived with for 25 years.
At 16, she was riding in the back middle seat of an old car with only a lap belt when it crashed. She broke her back, became paralyzed, and later had a product liability case of her own.
In 2019 she opened The Spinal Cord Injury Law Firm in Washington, D.C. As she puts it, "I am the spinal cord injury lawyer."
Episode 480 is about using that story as the brand: what the narrow name commits her to, how she finds cases around the country, and how her own life keeps turning up new case types.
Her firm's name tells clients what it does. It also meant turning away cases far outside spinal cord injuries. Even the domain matches: spinalcordinjurylawyers.com. Kelley admits the approach is "definitely not for everyone."
Build more brands inside the niche. Her personal brand, The Pushy Lawyer, started as an advocacy campaign and helps people who meet her find the firm. A separate SCI Pressure Sores campaign, with its own domain and social accounts, goes after one case type the firm wants more of.
Some firms won't take pressure injury cases. After a spinal cord injury, Kelley says, hospital staff should turn a patient every two hours. The turn charts she reads show gaps of 10 or 18 hours. The wounds that follow can lead to infection, amputation, or sepsis, and cost the patient time in rehab.
Ask other firms for the part they don't want. A spinal cord practice limited to D.C., she says, wouldn't be "super successful." So she works with lawyers around the country and asks them to send her the pressure injury piece of a case while they keep the car wreck. At her own firm, she brought in a law partner who is a quadriplegic, which she says strengthens the brand.
Match the life care planner to the client. Kelley had a life care plan made for her as a teenager. She now keeps several planners, because a pediatric case needs someone who can project a child's needs into adulthood.
Turn a repeated problem into a practice area. She flies every week or two, and airlines have damaged her wheelchair several times. The Air Carrier Access Act gives passengers no private right of action, only a Department of Transportation complaint, so her firm is exploring consumer protection claims instead.
"We all have a story. All of us have some type of background, some type of experience in our life that has very much shaped who we are today. And that, in many respects, can make each of us a better professional, a better business owner, a better lawyer." —Kelley Simoneaux
Her advice to other firm owners starts there: Look at your own experience for the clients you understand best and the problems you've watched repeat, and build the practice around them.
Here's our full conversation:
🤖 AI SEARCH TIP OF THE WEEK
A small YouTube channel can still turn up in AI answers.
AI visibility platform Rank Prompt analyzed 29,635 YouTube citations in AI answers between June and September. Nearly half went to channels with fewer than 10,000 subscribers. In a one-day check of YouTube's own search results, 86% of the cited videos weren't in the top 10 for the same question.
Shorts made up less than 2%. If your firm already has a few longer explainers on YouTube, revisit those videos. The study doesn't show which edits earn a citation, so test one video before you change the rest.
The action this week: Pick one video that answers a question your intake team hears every week, such as "Who pays my medical bills while my case is pending?" Ask that question in Google AI Mode and Perplexity, and save the video sources they cite.
Then update the video's details. Make sure the title names the question it answers, including your state if the advice is state-specific. Add a short answer in the description and timestamped chapters for the topics it covers. Check the captions for errors in names and legal terms.
Ask the same question every week for a month, and note whether your video appears and which other videos keep showing up.
🛠️ TOOL OF THE WEEK
A PI Firm Built Its Own Case Management Software. Now It Sells It.
Brumley Law Firm built the case management software it wanted for itself.
The Seattle firm says its case data was scattered across systems, and its staff handled demands, medical records and deadlines by hand. So it built Alpha Law, and it now offers the platform to other PI firms.
Founder Josh Brumley says it runs its own cases on Alpha Law every day and that the firm doubled in size over a 12-month period, "in large part because of the platform."
The platform covers intake through settlement. Its advertised features include:
Intake. A multilingual AI phone system collects case details, even after hours.
Medical records and demands. It organizes treatment records into chronologies and drafts demand letters for attorney review.
Case questions. Staff can ask a question and get answers drawn from case data, calls, emails and documents. Client texts and replies stay in the platform, too.
Deadlines and offers. Calendaring adapts to case type and jurisdiction, and a settlement tracker logs every offer, counteroffer and insurer conversation.
This would replace your case management system, so the bigger job is moving your files and retraining your team. Alpha Law advertises migration help and training. It lists no public price.
Before you upload client files, get two answers in writing:
Does your data train its AI? The FAQ on its homepage says, "Your data never trains our AI models." But its privacy policy lists training its AI models among the ways it uses information, and its terms allow aggregated, anonymized data to improve them.
How long do you have to get your data out? The FAQ promises 90 days to download everything after you cancel. The terms make you responsible for exporting your data before your account ends.
We haven't tested it. If you book a demo, ask the team to walk one sample case through intake, a medical chronology, a demand draft, and a client update. Check the source behind each answer, and bring the paralegal who would use it every day.
🔗 Alpha Law →
Disclaimer: Personal Injury Mastermind takes all reasonable steps to ensure accuracy in the materials we share, including articles, newsletters, and reports. These materials are intended for general informational purposes only and 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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