426. Scaling With AI: How to Engineer Massive Profit Growth and Faster Settlements w/ Dwuan Hammond

If you want to outpace the competition, you have to operate efficiently and stop leaving money on the table. Today, we're diving deep into how to leverage technology to eliminate bottlenecks and scale your operations without just throwing more bodies at the problem. Joining me is Duan Hammond, Principal Owner and CEO of Global Impact Financial Solutions. Duan has an incredible track record, helping drive over 200% revenue growth in more than 500% profit growth for high-performing firms. This is Personal Injury Mastermind. I'm Chris Strider, founder and CEO of Rankings.io, the Elite Performance Marketing Agency for Personal Injury Law firms. In this condensed webinar sponsored by EvenUp, we're going to break down how to optimize your firm's search visibility beyond Google. Use the AI to capture every single lead without bloating your payroll, and shave hours off your case lifecycle and get better settlements faster. Let's get into it. Everyone knows AI's reshaping how clients find and choose law firms, and many of us used to just default to Google. We would type in a query, we would go look and look at the map pack, look at the reviews, and we wouldn't do a ton of research before making a decision. We might read a few reviews, but now that has changed and people are going to the LLM to demonize perplexity, chat GBT, and they're doing their discovery on other resources, other websites besides Google. It's important to optimize differently because people are getting their information before they make a decision differently. If you look at your Google Analytics, you're going to see this big spike in direct traffic or traffic from AI platforms, whereas before you could directly attribute to Google to your local maps, and basically AI has really shortened or closed the gap on context. It pulls and synthesizes information. We know that Google's responsibility was to organize the web, and because of how it's organized, LLMs are using that relevancy to basically shape decisions and to make recommendations. What's changed is Gemini is being trained on YouTube. Gemini is being trained. They just updated their policy on Instagram and Facebook. GROC uses X, of course. Chat GBT, which has the investment from Microsoft, uses a lot of LinkedIn. We know this. They've been really public about it since 2024. Google has used a system called Semantic ID, which tokenizes billions of hours of YouTube video to train their models. Everything is changing. How you market, where you market, it's more fragmented than never, and you've got to change. You've got to adapt to this landscape. Anything to add there, DeWan? Yeah, I would add that the consistency of who you are is so much more important now across all those streams. Just small changes to your title of your firm could really impact how you show up on a lot of these tools. I can agree more that we're becoming much more of, I know you guys have heard it all the time. We said all the time, we're becoming more of a global society, but now it's really becoming a lot of really shorter distance between contacts and communication. Of course, I couldn't agree more. Amazing. The first tip is you've got to optimize beyond Google. We know that doing things on Google, your title tags, the content, everything that you do on Google is going to be pulled, is going to be discovered on the LLM. You've got to think about optimizing on other channels as well. At the top of the list, because of just the distribution of Google and how Gemini is going to play a role in that distribution, you've got to think about YouTube and YouTube short specifically. That is still incorporating those keywords, those topics and the titles and the descriptions, but that's training the discovery of Gemini. That's number one is when you're thinking about search everywhere optimization, you've got to think about YouTube. The second is Facebook. They just acquired MainS, which is powered. It's a skin by an anthropic. You've got to look at Instagram Reels. You've got to look at optimizing your content on Facebook. The reviews that you obtained for the recommendation on Facebook is very important because that information's aggregated out to many sites. You have to continue to move on. Now we see a bigger audience, a lot more people are getting their news from X. X, of course, powers GROC. It cannot be ignored any longer and a lot of these posts are all embedded and indexed on Google. You'll see them when you do a search. You won't just see the static blue links. You'll see different content formats, video, so it's important to be everywhere. X, create your threads. One thing I think that many people kind of discount is how important your LinkedIn bio is. Right now, if you're an attorney listening, one of the first things that I would tell you to do is just type in your name and I can promise you that it's likely that your LinkedIn profile is going to be one of the top-ranking results. Now it's powering OpenAI and ChatGbT. It's absolutely essential to move beyond just focusing on Google and your website. You got to think about these external locations and I'll give you just one final thought here. Your bio pages and your team, your firm page are incredibly important. This is not a situation where you go and update them one time and you're done. You need to continually update these because all of the LLMs and Google love fresh content. Anytime you have an acolyte, I would award an accomplishment, a big case, make sure you go update your bio page as well as your team page. Do you want anything to add there? Yeah, I was going to ask Chris, so what do you think about the core competencies being also always listed on for the LLL firms because of knowing who they are and how important it is, as well as should you have someone employed in that role to scrub your information as well as the information of your attorneys? I think it's critical. I think that that is absolutely something you can do in-house because you have the most control, you have the most context. Not only should you be considering updating those bios, those practice pages and what your core competencies are, but the other thing too is that information that you're collecting, you should also be updating your LLMs, your LLM projects with that context because if you go use them to make any decisions in the future, it needs to have the current context about your firm. I think that that absolutely is a role that should be in-house. Now it can be complemented by external vendors like myself, like yourself, but yeah, I couldn't agree more. I also think that due to their importance, these are pages that should be prominent. They should be on every single page of the website, in the menu, in the footer, very accessible in the sidebars, the bylines of all the pages, the content that's written. In a nutshell, just search everywhere optimization, it's constantly evolving. And I would add, like you said, awards matter. People want to know that you win and want to know the impact. I always say your outdoor campaign is now being taken by the space of Google and all the other avenues. So extremely, extremely important to continue to promote your firm. I know a lot of firms use to promote themselves and they look at their information on a quarterly basis on a monthly basis. It is extremely valuable now to have this done daily. And the most timely information is the better fit for who you are as a firm. So I think that's critically important. Yeah, absolutely. The next in-and-nut shell is what AI knows about you determines who gets chosen and that goes back to what we were just speaking on as relevancy. You need to be known for your specific expertise. You need to have content externally and on your website that is all about that specialization. So in the past, I would say most websites would have a practice area page and then they would have a separate case results page. And the case results page would just be the aggregate of every single case result. Now I think it's more important that each individual page has specific cases related to that practice. You got to imagine that your practice area pages, we don't want to call them the sales page, but that's what they are. You're trying to showcase your expertise. It's more important than ever to have relevancy when it comes to that. So the relevancy could come from the specific cases that you practice on that specific landing page, but it could also be the testimonials of the individuals that you helped regarding that case. It could be a number of factors, but it comes down to relevancy and the more relevancy you have and the better it's organized across the web everywhere. The easier it is for the LLIMS to pull to understand the context of your firm and your expertise. Anything to add there is well done. Chris, I would ask another question. What's the impact of negative reviews? How do you feel firm should actually address or get in front of some of the negative reviews? Should that be the only reviews they respond to? How do you direct firms in that nature? Yeah, that's a really good question. So obviously, I like to use this example. If you're going to go on vacation and you type in best restaurants near me, you wouldn't expect to see a low rated restaurant. You'd expect to see a high rated. So it's incredibly important to try to maintain as high of a rating as possible. I internally tell our clients that 4.8 out of 5 is table stakes. That because the best cases are the ones where the consumers type in, best car excellence, or best personal injury lawyer. If you want to rank for superlatives on the LLMs and on Google, get that excellent reviews. And also, you know, going back to relevancy, it's the words and phrases in the context that the individual leaves on the review if they're talking about your car wreck case, you're talking about, you know, a slip and fall, that's gonna give the LLM more relevancy and it types of cases that you handle. So all that's incredibly important, but you know, back to your question, I think you should respond to every review and you know as well as I do, that negative review is not really addressing the individual themselves, it's addressing the future perspective clients. - That's right. And I think one of the impacts that I've seen over my years to offset that one negative review takes about 125 star reviews. So understand the impact of someone commenting negatively about you, but also for you as an owner, not to engage with that individual to clarify or clear it up is so so important. - Now, I'll say one final thing on the negative reviews, a lot of times the big advertisers, if you're an attendee that's a big radio advertiser, TV advertiser, a lot of times a consumer won't even do business with your firm that will say, "Hey, I hate your advertising, I hate your radio, it's super annoying," whatever. In those situations, you should absolutely report those because Google will take those down because they didn't have a client experience. So there are some tactics that you can take to get some of those removed, but ultimately use it also as a method, an advanced retrospective a way of a feedback loop of training so you can fix those systems that were broken that caused that negative review. (upbeat music) So tip number two, define your firm's entity to influence AI-driven search. So let me expound on this. When we're talking about relevancy, let's first start with a few different ways that you can segment this. So the first is your geography. If you're trying to be discovered as a St. Louis attorney, you wanna rank for, or be discovered for personal injury, prompts, queries, you need to be associated with anything in St. Louis, the arch, the neighborhood, central west end, soolard, restaurants, you need to have content that talks about the hospitals where someone can get treatment. You need to really personalize it to the geography. You need to be listed in St. Louis Chamber of Commerce, St. Louis Association, associations, goodwill, sponsorships, campaigns, all of this around St. Louis. That builds that relevancy around that category for your geography. Then the next one over is your expertise, your industry, which would be legal. So that's where super lawyers comes in, avogestia, bestlawyers, law.com, CLEs, where you've been mentioned in the news about a particular case. Maybe you've written a book, all of these factor into the legal profession. And then the third one, which kind of encompasses both, would be your reputation. We talked about the importance of reviews, the words and phrases that are mentioned on reviews, the awards, what's interesting is super lawyers, best lawyers, tend to rank better in Google now. Those awards use superlatives in their names, so you can then have that association with the superlative best or super. And then case results are just absolutely huge. And I know outside of California, it's got their SB37 restrictions in what you can and can't say in some other states have restrictions on the case results. But if you can talk about your case results, then I absolutely encourage it. - It's very important, we said it earlier that defining who you are as a business is extremely important, as that uniformity across all communications agents. But like you said about winning is important. You may not be able to communicate the actual client that you won on, but you can communicate the dollars collected on a case. And that is so vitally important. And I even think about when you associate yourself with cases, meaning maybe something you lend to another partner to try for you, it's still important to connect those cases when those results come in. Because people want to know that you are not only making good decisions for their case, they want to know that you're an expert. So, and that kind of shows that you're not only an expert in your field, but you're willing to give that case to someone else if you're not equipped to handle that case, which is so important for your clients. (whooshing) - Even up is a specialized proactive AI built for personal injury law firms. Personal injury is in their DNA. Visit evenupload.com to learn more. Getting the phone to ring is only half the battle. You could do everything right with your marketing, nailing your geography, your expertise, your reputation, but if your intake process is broken, you're just burning cash. We've covered how AI helps you attract the best cases. Now let's shift gears to talk about what happens next and how AI is completely transforming intake. The number one thing here is AI has bridged the gap of context latency. Let me explain that. AI can remember previous conversations from a long period of time ago. A thousand calls ago, if it has any information, it can remember it. It's recorded. That's why everyone loves Chat GBT because it creates this personalized results for you. So, it's bridged that gap. Your intake specialists are handling numerous calls per day and if they're not transcribing that into the CRM, obviously you wanna have transcriptions and all the recordings and things like that, but it makes it very challenging to bridge that gap on context and that's what AI does. So, the other thing that it allows you to do is you can answer in parallel or do parallel dialing. So, if you get, let's say you have two intake specialists and you get three calls to come in and you have two people on the phone, well, the other, what happens to the other, right? Does it go to voicemail, does it go to a third party? And I can answer hundreds of calls all at the same time. So, it's a scenario where you can absolutely capture every single call and I know some people are concerned about, oh, empathy and things like that, that's just around the corner. Like, it can read social cues, it can start to learn and be empathetic and I think the key thing here is, it's gonna turn into the norm. Right now, it's a little odd where we're, you know, we like talking to humans and we like that personal connection and but I think it's just around the corner where it's gonna feel very personal and to some degree, it's gonna eliminate a lot of redundancies where you're repeating the same information for them to do their intake over and over. Anything to add there, one. - Look, I would say this firms out there to say, I always want a lot of person to answer my calls. But there's still AI support around that to actually transcribe to get the information to your system. So, you have that, like you said, those large language bottles that can actually remember and really actually summarize your calls to be able to use that information in the right manner you wanna use it. I agree with you that there are some tools out there right now that empathy is one of the things they sell of saying, hey, this will kind of read the cues. But I like the personal touch with individuals, but I do believe in the support of the AI too, surround it to make that individual that much more impactful and to do the things that they can only do well, which right now is the empathy part. And, you know, there's something about someone asking you, how's your day going and listening to your answer and actually responding appropriately. And I think clients could withdraw into some of that information. So, don't feel like you are outside of the industry when you still want a life person. Just know there's all type of AI tools that support you, whether you go strictly AI answering the phone, or you do it as a support model. - Holyly, I agree. That takes us to our next step. You know, one of the main advantages here is you can maintain a lean team. You can use AI to scale in, take without adding a ton of bodies. I'll give you two really good examples. The first is at volume, your quality assurance and listening to every single call. At scale, when you're getting 100 calls, 200 calls, is the quality assurance rep going to listen to every single call? It's just not possible. So, there are tools out there that there's one company called a Speed AI that basically has an AI-based quality assurance rep. And it will listen to calls and flag anywhere you have the opportunity to close a case and something happened, right? So, it's a backup and it's just AI-based and it has certain parameters on saving that call that to prevent that leak. The other thing too is most firms, when they chase a four, let's say you get a form fill and you go to contact a person, you'll have your chase sequence. Most firms will do that for 14 days, very common. With AI, as long as it's in the statute, and you have the AI takeover after day 14, day 15 or day 30 day plus, you could have them chase for essentially no cost up to the statute. Now, I understand like there's issues with cases and they get too long so you can set your own parameters, but that's scaling and recovering cases at a fraction of the cost. You spend so much money advertising. We want our CAC to be less than $2,000. Hey, if you could just plug AI into your database to go and just recover some of these opportunities that you paid so much to obtain, that's a great use of it. I still, I'm with you. with you, Duan, I think I love the human first intake element, but I think you could absolutely supplement with maybe a chase agent or an AI based quality assurance rep to really get a lot more impact and give them that tool to power the intake even further. Yeah, I think you mentioned two things. You mentioned scale and AI gives you the ability to scale. I think a lot of firms when they're dealing with intake, you're always going to have misclose. No matter how many people you put in the desk, you're going to have missed calls. Also, the talent level of the people taking a call becomes a problem. And this is where I just start talking about single points of failure. So AI removes some of those obstacles. AI removes missed calls. AI removes single points of failure. And it grants two things you talked about, consistency and reduction of labor. So if you're not playing in that game, this is the comments of what if you're trying to grow and scale a business, the things that you're worrying about is look at your best employee. And how can you replicate that person across all departments across the full lifecycle of your system? And I think AI gives you the ability. I think this is exactly why we're here. AI scaling businesses. So this is one avenue that I think people are under invested in and could invest a little bit more. Yeah, and I just one final thing before we move on really well said one. The other thing is I think depending upon the size of your firm, it may not be cost efficient to hire an intake rep for after hours or weekends. And that's where AI can fit in. It can be your overflow mechanism. So at least you have 24/7 coverage. And then eventually maybe your in-house team performs better. Maybe you get your lead volume up where you can hire that person to handle those calls at night. But that gives you a very easy low cost opportunity to handle calls 24/7. I'll jump in here. Chris and kind of talk a little bit more about how AI has changed the operations game. I usually tell every firm that I work with. I work with over a couple dozen firms and helping them skill their practices, as well as to find efficiencies along the way and integrate their systems. So what I always tell firms to start with is start with their demands. And here's the reason why. The man's is that the one area are the easiest area to actually show a financial return. And that actually builds momentum. So when you can actually bring something into your system that is automatically going to generate more momentum, this is where I say the value kind of creates itself. And it allows your firm to become more adaptive. Because when you bring an AI into a firm, a lot of resistance by your teammates are your employees, I should say for that sense, there's a lot of resistance, but when you can bring something in that generates income and that does for the attorneys. And usually for if you have KPI setup, they usually does for your case managers, paralegals. So I tell everyone to kind of start with the demand level. And what happens is it builds a consistency across how you communicate with the defense counsel or your adjusters. And to me, that's very important. Because now I don't sound like the line. I don't sound like Chris. I sound like that individual firm and how we communicate consistently across the avenue. It also builds higher demands just because you have better data. So by actually pulling everything and being very consistent, your message is always consistent. And then I would add that when you say strengthen the outcomes for attorney time. And that what that does is that allows an attorney to review a complete file. And this I think is so important that when an attorney, when it gets to the review fades for an attorney, to send the demand out that every case looks the same as the same information. I'm talking more about the things that are needed in your demand consistently looks the same across borders. And that's so important. And also is the ease of being able to review rather than prepare. So think about that. And I'll tell you in one scenario I've had, I had five case managers and they were sending out one demand every three days. And that was because it was taken in three days to fully prepare the demand. So 21 work days in a month, they were getting seven demands out of piece, which sounds really good, 35 a month. When we implemented even up demand and the quick demand, it actually went to three demands a week in five. So think about that, that how fast we actually kind of accelerate ourselves that we were actually producing 15 demands a week rather than the six and a half seven demands. So it allows us to skill extremely quickly. And so when I look across borders, I tell everyone if you're going to start, start as the demand phase. And I used to think the demand phase was the most impactful phase of how you actually use AI to build momentum. And I, we can jump to the next slide because I will add to the fact that that now is no longer the case because of the admin functions that have been established. And so I'll say tip number four first, maximize case value for stronger data driven demands. And basically not only data driven demands, but they're going to move faster, they're going to be more complete. And you're going to see as long as you actually value it, you're going to see higher values in your cases as you drive them. And as we move on to the next one, as I was talking about, the other things that we can do. And this is about reducing administrative costs and burdens. And this is so, so important. And Chris, I will ask your input on this, but I think what we've seen and what we talked about on the intake side is just that. Reducing time on desk, reducing capacity, reducing administrative costs. And I don't know if you've seen any avenues when you're working with firms where you would see the highest administrative focus. Oh, I can tell you firsthand and I have a few clients that come right to mind where they have major issues with their cash acceleration formula rights. So the time on desk is too long and it's impacting their ability to grow right because they're waiting for that check to come in. And I even get the comments like, hey, once this case settles, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And or though, I want to reduce their ad spend and you know, there's ways to solve that through, you know, line of credits on the case inventory or what have you, but absolutely. And you know, one of the other things. And so look, I'm not an expert. I'm more on the front end, the marketing and the sales side. But I was going to ask you and maybe this is a question I'm kind of stealing. You know, what have you seen the tenders, the full policy offers? Have you seen with, you know, utilizing even up those increase? You know, and I have no idea what percentage of cases get full tendered and, you know, how has that impacted things? Yeah, you know, I have seen an increase in how many cases actually get tender full limits through using even up two things. I think the two things are in a pack was the completeness of the demand and the uniform voices the demand, but also the consistency of the messaging. And what I mean by that is that nothing gets better with time. Always outside of, you know, there's very few industries where you age your inventory and it gets better. In this situation, nothing is better at time. And if you ever look at the insurance companies defense council, that's their strategy. Their strategy is to delay their strategy is to to let it sit out for a while. So I tell everyone the consistency of movement is so vitally important. It shows confidence. It shows that you are engaged in your case. It shows that your client is engaged. And if you move the same administrative barriers with the AI tools on the front end, it will show consistency on how your clients are treating. So I think those things rolled up in one is the best way to actually get a higher case value and to get more policy limits. Because I think that's the thing that actually allows that to take place. We've covered how AI can help you hook the case and get the demand out the door. But let's talk about what happens next. The insurance company's entire strategy is to delay. As a firm owner, you know the time on your desk is the enemy of cash flow. If you can speed up that life cycle, you don't just get paid faster. You maintain the momentum needed to secure bigger settlements. Let's get back to the one as he breaks down how AI is giving case managers their time back and drastically reducing the time on desk. When we start talking about reduced time on desk, one of the biggest things I've seen is truly around the even up comm agents. And you know, I think we did a study not too long ago and what was told to me and as we kind of researched the study, that the comm agent actually gives seven to nine hours per case back to your case managers. So I would say think of this in this way that if you have one case manager that handles a hundred cases and if you turn your cases every six months, that means you're going to actually generate approximately if they touch a case every other week, they're going to generate roughly about 17 hours a week. So what could your administrative team do across that border? It would 17 extra hours. So that means every two to two and a half people, that's a full body. I know we don't look at AI and say this is a ability to decrease your staff, but it does two really impactful things for your staff and then we talked about it early. It gives you the ability to scale and I think that's important that way you free up 17 extra hours, those 17 hours. extra hours should be focused on what actually generates the highest return, whether it's talking to adjusters, what is it going to do for your firm to actually focus on and get 17 extra hours a week from one person? I just want to echo this. So I was talking about AI eliminating context inefficiencies right on the intake, but think about this guys. You have less silos when you have less people. So those communication inefficiencies just don't exist because we've all, as we grow, you do your all hands meeting and now you've got to flip three times or four times on the zoom before you can see everyone. Right? If you have less people that are more empowered, there's less silos that you have to go between. You could actually pay your people more, right? So it doesn't necessarily mean that you have to find new people. You could pay them more because they're producing more and you're getting more margin. So I think all that's really important to highlight. I agree with you. I think it makes a higher quality of life for your employees. So I think it believes that like you said, scale becomes so extremely important that you have now almost a third of the work week remaining for your employee to handle more cases, not just to give them busy work. And so I think that actually really produces for the firm very well. And that's what we've seen in the firms that I've worked with is that when we started implementing and integrating the AI technology within certain aspects of the firm, of the case lifecycle, what we saw was that there was more capacity. We also saw happier employees because the things that they don't like doing were the things that are consistently that needs to be done on a rhythm that AI was doing for the firm. And it was always delivering. Also single points of failure as we talked about earlier, it removes those single points of failure. So you don't carry extra labor because it's okay for your same retention to take place. And everyone's going to have turnover in some sorts. But I saw AI improving our workforce in many different ways. So increasing case capacity is one. And I think there's a pride associated with also case managers and attorneys like to do more. They like to have more ability and the ability to make more money. And a lot of that production for attorneys is a lot of their income is based on production. So I think it works well if you can get them to integrate it. So tip number five, increase case capacity without increasing workload. And I say that that happens extremely quickly when you integrate the AI system in your overall SOP. So I think we're going to talk a little bit about why what company I think actually delivers this at the highest level. And for me, it's always been even up. I like I said, I've worked with a number of clients across different areas. I work across different industries. But as a CFO and I always say we're business that operates in the law industry. And so I remind attorneys how they're business first and then they operate in this industry. And that's important because at some point there has to be a separation of running the business and running the law firm. There has to be some separation in that to actually keep a consistency and be able to scale your business. But I say that to say I think even though partners very well in that approach that even up, I think the relationships that I've had were not only about supplying me the best tools, but also supplying me the best feedback across the industry that allowed my companies to get a lot stronger. And I credit that a lot to the relationships and how even up has been at the cutting edge since they wanted the industry. So I think that's if anyone has had an opportunity they should really scan this, take a meeting, and actually ask some questions because I think they can help you a lot in their long run. I don't get anything for saying this but I think one thing that's not mentioned enough is the data because they were first in. They have significantly more data from all the cases that they worked up and so they can provide better demands based upon that historical data. So I think that's, you got a lot of pioneering new companies entering the AI space but it's really hard to replicate the amount of data that they have that can help with. And I want to have one of those things that I get asked some time of why I am so high on even up. And I think even up started in the industry as demand writers. And so they saw what actually were the pain points of the industry. And so instead of just coming into the end of the day, they got it. They took an opportunity to expand themselves, learning industry, and then they stuck tackling the pain points of the industry as they continue to evolve and expand themselves. A lot of companies are coming into the space without understanding the landscape of the industry. So I do believe that it gives even up a little bit of an advantage or a lot of an advantage because they understand the pain points of the industry and not at a 50,000 square foot saying here's the tools you should use because I'm an AI based company. It's a little bit more that I think they are business in the legal space that understands and knows how to put out AI products. So it's my pitch. Huge thanks to the Juan Hammond for sharing his insights today. AI is just something you buy and forget about. You have to actively integrate it into your standard operating procedures. When you build these systems into your firm, you empower your team to focus on the highest return task and maximize your overall profitability. If you're ready to stop leaving money on table and want to see exactly how AI can increase your case values and reduce your time on desk, you need to check out our sponsor, even up. Remember to even up.ai to see how they're proactive AI can help you turn your claims into stronger, more valuable outcomes. I'm Chris Strider and this has been Personal Andrew Mastermind. We'll see you next time.