Why Most Law Firms Fail at Lead Generation w. Devin Downey

(upbeat music) Welcome to the Legal Edge, where we dive into what actually drives law firm growth. I'm your host, Rob Rosasco. Today we're talking to someone who's helped scale some of the biggest mass tort and PI campaigns in the business. Our guest today is Devon Downey, founder of Blue Sky Legal, our performance-based client acquisition agency. Devon's team delivers signed retainers through a mix of direct media buying, lead sourcing and a tightly controlled intake process. You built the agency after leading marketing and intake at Baron and Bud, and is now helping law firms grow without losing control of cost or compliance. Devon, welcome. Hey Rob, thanks for having me. Absolutely. Devon, before we dive into tactics, I always love hearing an origin story. Your business didn't just pop up out of nowhere. You saw a gap in the market and you built something that's hyper-specific to address that gap. Let's rewind for a moment and talk about how Blue Sky Legal came to be and why you chose to focus specifically on motor vehicle accident leads. Why did you build Blue Sky Legal around signed retainers and warm transfers and not just selling leads? Yeah, sure. Originally I was a cheap marketing officer at Baron and Bud, which is a large national litigation firm for Planes. And we were running pretty big marketing budgets for mesothelioma and mass torts. A little bit of serious injury marketing as well as well as like class actions, right? So when COVID hit, we slowed down a little bit and we got away from performance marketing. The firm got really caught up in the national opioids. So it was one of these scenarios where it was quickly turning into a public relations job as opposed to being a performance marketer, which was my background. And in my background, when I was running advertising at agencies or overseeing strategy on advertising agencies that work with Fortune 500 brands, we were just so data driven. The purpose that I brought into Baron and Bud was to build an agency inside the firm that was extremely data driven and able to more importantly than anything else deliver predictable results. And so in transitioning out of Baron and Bud and starting Blue Sky Legal, one of the things that Baron and Bud did for us is they signed a five year agreement for us to do all their advertising, which was just the biggest thing that could happen in terms of having an anchor client and something I'll appreciate them for forever. We're in the three and a half year range of having worked on that and been an agency in existence. And during that time, we really focused on diversifying our clients. And while we do branded advertising for someone like Baron and Bud, mostly what we found in the market robin, you've probably seen this is that firms really want a cost for retainer model most of the time when it comes to paid advertising. And that was a big adjustment for us because we've always felt we'll do a campaign. It's just for this firm, that firm will get the total yield of the leads. And it's really a venture to get them the best cost for retainer we can get. But we were kind of forced into this other model, which is, hey, we're going to tell you what the cost for retainer goal is. We're going to try and hit that. If we can't, we're going to tell you because the markets are dynamic. But ultimately, what we're trying to do is work towards the guaranteed price. And that's going to take a little bit of time and a given market. But for mass tour, where you're going national, it tends to be a little bit easier until they accelerate with a lot of competition. Right. With motor vehicle accidents, you just know there's a ton of competition from the beginning, right. And you know that in a given state, that you're going to have periods where you get more soft tissue than you want. You're going to have periods where you get a higher mix of commercial vehicles, which is ideal. And then you're going to have times that you deliver home runs. And it's a lot about dollar cost averaging. And that's really been my theory throughout all of these things, if the attorney can be consistent in their investments, the yields should be there as long as the agency is doing the right thing for them. And to do that, you can't really cut corners. I think you asked for me a little bit about compliance. And I know we'll talk about this in the episode, but it's one of those things where when you are advertising with someone, it helps a lot to have somebody leading the agency who's been on the other side inside of fur for seven years, right? Because I actually created a swipe file over the years of some of the more amazingly, let's say misleading or just sure outright. Greg, you can say it. Jimmy a word, Rob, because I started posting some of these on my link dead because they just blow my mind in terms of the promises that they make. There are ads that literally will break maybe eight ABA rules in one ad, you know, and wouldn't pass any state bar whatsoever. That type of advertising is prevalent in motor vehicle accidents. Right. For personal injury, it is a lot of different methods that are essentially crooked from their genesis. And we've strived to be an agency that a firm can trust. And that's not always going to deliver the lowest cost, but it's going to deliver an honest yield. And at the same time, we're going to make sure there's compliance. Right. We're like everyone else. You can't solve for big volume on your own. You can run your media. You can control that message, but there is ways to do it. You can also control the message with your publishers, your affiliate networks. Right. So we have to hedge our bets by using third party leads as well. Okay. And any agency that says they don't do that is just doing extremely low volume or their telling stories. Right. I mean, if you take probably the second largest agency in our space, they don't have a single media person on staff. So you can quickly see what's happening just by doing a LinkedIn search. From all perspective, we came into this business thinking we would run all our own media. And it's not a reality for being able to stack volume in terms of a non branded approach in a given market. Just like if you're controlling all aspects, the quality of the lead, the compliance aspect, even if you're using a third party, then at the end of the day, I'm assuming the firms you work with don't care. Correct. They don't. And there are some firms that just don't want to know anything about what you're doing. And we kind of force it on them. We tell them, hey, we're going to run media or run content by you. And so that's something that's kind of common for us that surprises our clients. I mean, I've had conversations with firms where they've said, don't do that because we don't want the trail. And I'm like, but everything we're sending you is compliant. It's okay. Right. And so that whole don't ask, don't tell. There's something I had to learn as I moved into motor vehicle accidents. They want to know how the sausage is made a lot of times. But the firms we connect with the best are our partners and we go and we tell them, hey, these are the types of visuals that can be used. These are the types of visuals that can't be used. This is what the written copy of the content is for the ad for the landing page. And this is the structure we're going to stay within. And we get that approval. And a lot of times they have feedback that's super useful. I mean, who knows more about personal injury marketing than the folks that have been involved with it for decades potentially? Right. We're not believers that the client doesn't know what's best for them. We feel like the client has more to teach us than we have to teach them if that makes sense. It does. Okay. You mentioned you referred to a mass tour marketing. That's just a few minutes ago. What advantages did mass torts give you in terms of building a foundation for Blue Sky? With mass tour, it's one of those things. We just knew it so well. Being in a mass tour firm for as long as I was, it was a scenario where I knew the agency's very well that we're in the market. And what I felt was there was this little gap where all the agencies seem to be trying to serve many masters. If you're going after one thing, let's say it's a sure contract back when that litigation was going on, there were a number of firms that were trying to really stack clients, right? They were trying to have a very deep docket on that particular tour. If I had worked with three to five of those firms at the exact same time, I just don't think they all would have gotten great results. I was lucky enough to work with Barron and Bunt on it and to be able to bring in a lot of quality planists because I wasn't trying to figure out how to spread my media around as much. Some of the agencies in mass tour just blow my mind. They're able to work on the same tour with 20 firms at the same time. I can't imagine how they do it. I know the systems. I know the software that's involved. But the amount of sprinkler, like you get a plaintiff, you get a plaintiff, you get a plaintiff. It sort of just blows my mind as to how they're necessarily doing that and maintaining strong cost for the client, right? So, we try to limit the amount that will work on, which I think helps us a lot, but we try to make sure they're going to go deep. The firm that's going to throw $50,000 at a particular mass tour and not continue is not a great client for us. We want the clients that are going to go long and they're going to think of it as something that is a marathon as opposed to a sprint. That's been our differentiating factor. I think we call ourselves the best cup secret in legal marketing and intake because we don't work with every firm. We work with 10 to 12 firms at a given time, which is extremely narrow for this segment. Then what, again, you hinted at this a few minutes ago, but what was the driving force behind the move into motor vehicle accident and injury leads? We kept getting requests. Can you guys do motor vehicle accidents for us? It wasn't that there are firms that are doing a great job at it. For instance, Walker advertising, they have figured out so much about how to do motor vehicle accidents and how to do it at high volume and how to control the lead markets. They typically, I'm not hearing complaints, but when it comes to the other agencies that are involved in the mix, a lot of times, I'm just hearing that the firms are kind of worn out in those relationships. They don't necessarily like interacting with the folks that they're dealing with. They don't necessarily believe the quality they're getting is very strong. It's a combination of factors. I don't think it's ever one answer for a firm in terms of what they need. Sometimes it's just a gut feel. For us, we felt like there was this opportunity across the whole legal market just to come in and be nice to deal with, to be honest, to be able to work with them on the other side of the desk and say, yeah, totally get what you're saying. Let's try and make an adjustment here. But the big thing that I think happens in motor vehicle accidents is there's so many personal injury firms out there that want them that vendors have the capability to say, look, I'm just going to take my supply somewhere else. That's something that's a reality in the business and it's a choice that those agencies have the luxury of making. Sam R&N, we're just trying to figure out who are the good guys to work with. Who are the firms that are really understanding of both sides of the fence that will invest in the agency's success as well as we invest in the firm's success. And that, as you know, in your business, it's like that's the magical combination. Absolutely. And the magical combination isn't having 50 firms going after the same thing. No, right. Unfortunately, there are agencies out there who believe the latter is better, having 50, you know, firms that are paying them. Yeah. So, understand. And there's plenty of room for them to be successful. Oh, yeah. Absolutely. I burned through this relationship, but there's 10 more out there. Yes. And then, and more after that and then 10 more after that. Right. And those are the agencies typically that are cutting corners. And their margins are probably phenomenal. Like, private equity probably just cannot get enough of that type of agency in terms of acquisitions because their margins are insane. Yeah. So, it's up to me a little bit about where Blue Sky stands in terms of, I know it's ever changing. It's evolving, of course. On a scale of one to 10, 10 being you've got the perfect mix of the perfect clients. One, sadly, being, you know, the exact opposite. Where does Blue Sky stand in terms of your client relationships? I mean, are you closer to a 10 than a one right now? You know, I think we have a lot of room for groups. Like, from our perspective, I think we can do a better job at analytics. I think we can do a better job of client updates. I think that we can do a better job of spending time with our clients. There's a lot of people. One of the things I always realize when I'm talking to an attorney is that I'm probably not the most important meeting of their day. I may have the greatest impact over time for that day's meetings in terms of what we can do for that firm. These are folks that are caught up in litigation, making decisions about personnel, all kinds of things. And I learned that inside the firm because I had a lot of meetings, just got canceled, right? And when those meetings would get canceled, you know how it is, Rob, especially when it comes to something like SEO or something like that that's very involved. It's like that meeting gets canceled. You did all this work to prepare for and it never sees the light of day, right? And so the biggest thing that I've been focused on is how do we get the cleanest, most simple to read out of glance reporting in front of our clients so that they feel comfortable that we're taking care of their investment. And I think there's just always room for growth in that area. I think AI plays a big role in helping to shape the way that we're doing those things. That's really our goal because if we can become more and more predictive for our clients, especially in scenarios where it's not a performance deal, if we're running just a commission only, we're running just a media campaign for them. If we can make them feel comfortable that we've got their back and they can see it at a glance, that's where I think we could become a nightmare again. You know? Yeah. Okay. I see you just playing at a seed for me too in terms of where obviously and I think everyone in our industry is trying to figure out where AI fits in and how we can utilize AI to streamline and to do things more effectively. So it has this great capability. You know, that saying contact is king and context is emperor. It's a great way to start to challenge as you run into if they come every day or they come every week, whatever it is, the client wants. Eventually they're just wallpaper. Right. They're just something in their inbox. They might engage with it occasionally, but typically they don't. And so the biggest issue in there is it's just pure data, right? And it's giving them a point of view of what's going on and it's got useful information in there, but there's no context. And yet you and me, if we want to give context, it takes a lot of our time to do that. To do it repetitively every day would be really challenging. Right. Sometimes on a big campaign, right? But in general, I think AI gives us that capability to communicate better and that is something I'm really interested in doing, but also all that data gathering, you know? And all of those things that are just like manual tasks that do become so important, but can be disregarded on a daily basis when you have more important things to do. Right. Right. And so that's I think a ring for growth in every agency greater efficiency to be able to do the repetitive tasks, but at the same time, I don't know about you, but the hallucinations still for you. Right. Everything still has to be checked by human being without question. I mean, it's amazing how many times I like run financials or things like that through AI. And I find that I could make some really bad decisions of what I'm getting back, right? You know, or a question about human resources or something like that. And it just pulls the wrong data. I asked some questions about taxes yesterday and it was pulling like code from like years and years ago and giving me the completely wrong answer, you know? So that's the dream to be able to trust it, right? And to be able to get that context. But I don't think we're there yet. No, I don't think we are either. And I also think to a certain extent, it's generational too. My generation is going to be considerably less trusting of that, you know, the feedback that we get from AI than your generation impregs, you know, even younger before you. So yeah, truly. And I think that's the risk right now is trusting it. Yeah. Agreed. Okay. Before I was like, the boomers don't get it, right? And now, unlike, wait a minute, there's something to this. As you see, you know, attorneys in trouble for hallucinations that they presented in core documents, obviously that's something that impacts intake in a big way. And that's a good segue right there because intake, everybody's selling this idea that can all be done through AI. You know, it's like the perfect voice chat. It's the perfect email and SMS and everything else that needs to happen to get somebody signed. We're still in a business that human connection matters. Right. Right. I agree. Yeah. So I believe in AI in intake, but I believe it's meant to assist the agent. It's meant to allow them to do a quick query when they're on the phone with a client where we've really presented, you know, a bot with a very narrow capability to respond because one of the biggest things we don't ever want to do is give legal advice. Right. Right. And so from that perspective, I'm just not ready to trust it on, you know, talking to clients, etc. And these companies that are promoting it, I think are irresponsible at the moment. I agree. Yeah. Yeah. All right. So let's get into the sort of nitty gritty. A lot of. law firms spend a whole lot of money on leads, but they don't always see results. So, let's unpack what actually works. So, what, Devin, in your opinion, separates a good lead generation strategy from one that simply just burns through a budget? I think the best answer is data on the prospect that you're trying to target. You know, understanding that target audience more than anything else. In a mass toward that's extremely different from one mass toward to another, in motor vehicle accidents, it can be very different from one market area to another. Understanding who's actually getting in these accidents and who are we targeting from that perspective? And what are the signals that are out there that would determine that this is a good potential prospect to put an ad in front of so that you are avoiding that waste? Now, it's one thing to get leads and the leads just aren't qualified. And maybe that means you've got a problem in your messaging or in your landing page. Maybe that's, you know, if it's a billboard, well, maybe your billboard just has a phone number on it, so you should expect that, right? It's all about the medium and then it's about the message, but bigger than that, it's about the targeting. And that targeting, especially for like mass toward their data sources out there that you can basically syndicate, where you're buying against those audiences, that you're not getting PII out of that process. You're getting hash data where you can really target closely for mass toward that makes a ton of sense because you can find out that an audience that has an injury or something like that that you want to advertise against. For motor vehicle accidents, it's a little tougher, right? Because you and I might look exactly the same on this day in terms of our demeanor and we might behave the same way. All the things of our search might be the same, but you were in accident yesterday and I wasn't, right? So how do you determine that that person was in an accident? How do you get them raised their hand? That's either going to be saturation of media and having great visibility for the person at the right time, the right place, or in our business, it's paid search. But how do you turn awareness advertising into advertising to those people that have raised their hands? We've developed some, I wouldn't say proprietary ways of doing it, but close to proprietary in terms of the way that we operate and the way that we target these people. To get those signals without just relying on paid search and SEO, because we're never going to really have a strong paid search or SEO presence as a non-branded entity. The studies show that if we're running a non-branded type of that in Google, on paid search, for that PPC budget, we're going to perform far worse than what a branded law firm would do. That's what, from my perspective, I never look at our service as the total solution for a law firm in a given market that has presence. They need to be brand building. That doesn't have to be the lawyer themselves pitching, but they need to have a message out in the market. It needs to be consistent, needs to be visible in multiple places. They really need to invest in their website and your SEO. Everything they're doing from a video perspective that contributes to the experience is absolutely critical. When firms talk to me, I'm always happy to consult on that side of the business too. We're not trying to sell against it. We're trying to say, "Okay, if you need to build scale, then we're an option for doing that." But in your core, you should be investing in your future where if you want to get a lower cost per contract, you need to have a lot of visibility in your market. Then you arbitrage that with what Blue Sky Legal or Walker advertising or someone else can do for you in terms of either generating warm transfer leads or getting retainers signed for you. Were the ability to scale? Were not the solution for everything. You know? Talk a little bit about your intake and qualification process. What measures do you take or would you have in place that maintains a certain performance level to protect your performance? That's a great question, Rob, because I think a lot of firms aren't paying as much attention to their intake process, compliance, and everything that happens from the lead, filling out the form, coming all the way to the firm, making first contact and continuing to contact that person. As we know, speed-delead is absolutely key. It also can take on average about seven calls before you get somebody signed. They're not calling you. There are a couple of things that are key in the process to making sure that you have the consent to call. The first thing is, especially on a paid advertising landing page, you need to have trusted form. And trusted form is going to record that whole process of the person filling out the form. You need to make sure that you're compliant in terms of the permission that you get on that landing page and what your legal speaks as the bottom of that form. Those are critical features that a firm should never let a third party advertise on their behalf without having checked for those things. And that advertising agency or lead generation agency should be able to have that trusted form on file for years. And then if there is an issue, and someone says, "I never provided my permission to be contacted by the firm," you have that assurance that you at least have the recording of them filling it out, along with their IP information and other details. Now, once that lead comes over completely, there's another component. Most firms are recording the conversations, but most firms are not doing what we expect from like AT&T or anyone else that calls us and they say, "You're on a recorded line." If you were to go through and kind of do a secret shopping of multiple firms' intakes, they're recording you, but they're not necessarily telling you. Let's be on an outbound call. On an outbound call, agents will forget all the time. And it's something that now we have AI solutions for, right? We can monitor our agents. We can look for issues, have them flagged, and then have our compliance team take a look at the recording, the transcript, and everything else. And then if the agent makes a mistake, then that agent is going to be disciplined for that from the perspective of their performance review is not going to probably go very well, because that's the most critical error that as somebody who runs a call center, that's the one you just can't live with. Right. I think not compliant, right? Then from there, when you talk about screening, it's about following the script. And a lot of times intake will take details that the client is provided without questioning them, hey, they filled on on the form that they were in a car accident and they weren't at fault. Rather than just taking that, let's ask them some questions about the car accident, right? And a lot of lead generation firms don't want to know because they want to sell that lead. So they don't want that detail. They just want, they answered this, they answered that, they answered the other. That's a qualified lead. That's somebody that's exactly, and I'm either sending that to the firm or I'm calling them and transferring them or I'm signing them up based on that. Right. And that leads to just a ton of attrition. You know, it's one of those things where if you don't ask a clarification question, you're not going to really know what you have. A lot of people, when they're submitting an online form, they're doing that from the passive thinking side of their brain. You know, it's not an analytical response. They're scrolling on Facebook or Instagram or TikTok at two in the morning. Yes, then. And you know, a lot of leads, I mean, you see this Robin, you're just a lot of leads. I mean, like from midnight to four in the morning. And it doesn't mean it's a bad lead. It just means that, you know, this person probably had less consideration of submitting the form than maybe some of the daytime leads you get. Right. And so there's been a lot of options for doing intake over the years that have evolved. It used to be we sent out hard copy retainers to every client. That wasn't that long ago. That was 10 years ago. And then at Baron and Bud, we were challenged by Steve Barron to figure out how our sign up process could be as simple as signing your iOS agreement on your show. You know, like the giving that consent that companies ask of us every time we tried to update software or do something like that. Yeah. And so we created an online journey nine years ago that we actually tried to patent where it was qualifying the person, taking him through the whole process and then serving up the retainer to them to sign it. And when we first did that, I won the firm. I was like, look, we've got this great funnel, if you will. And we've taken the friction out of it. And it's fantastic that the things we're going to like sign up people. And we're never going to talk to them ever because we're never going to find them, right? Because people are just doing this from the past side of their brain. They're going through. And they're just filling it all out. But the strangest thing happened, Rob, after a couple of years, I did a study and I looked at people who had originally initiated with a phone call from our team outbound, okay, people who qualified themselves online. And I found the attrition level on mass torque was exactly the same. There was no correlation in terms of the populations to see that there was an issue that I expected there to be. Right. I mean, I always called those people vampires because the people who sign up and then you can never reach them, they're vampires, right? Like they're sucking off from resources and that it's a reality, right? Because we're doing with audiences that still change phone numbers. I don't know about you, but I never changed my phone number, but this audience can, right? And so you always expect there's that certain kind of level of vampire or phantom that you never can reach that way. But it did lead to much higher signup rates. We went in the firm from having like 60% being our average sent to sign rate to 80, 85% and we didn't see a drop off in terms of that attrition, that vampire audience is still there, but it didn't get worse. That was the issue. So yields were greater, right? And so when the firm would be like, we've got a referral partner who wants $200,000 from us and they're going to do contracts at X, Y, Z. What we would do is sometimes I didn't have control of that and the firm was just going to do it. And I'd be like, well, let me run a campaign alongside it and let's see how we do. Never lost one of those. We're right. We've never, never because we were doing branded, we were already establishing a relationship from the beginning. Right. And we were taking them further than what this third party law firm that was going to be the referral partner would do because we actually cared to find out the answers to ask the questions that were logical to ask in terms of the next steps, right? Right. To run the full questionnaire from start to finish, right? And those are the advantages the firm has doing branded advertising. It comes directly to them. Yep. This advantage is they have an intake is they usually are terrible at following up. Yeah. They make a call. It's, you know, four hours later, it's eight hours later, it's the next day. And then they said the lead is bad, right? And that lead, the first five minutes are golden, absolutely golden. So speed the lead is critical. And you can't view it when you have two intake people and a paralegal that helps out. No, right? I have firms that contact me and they're like, I just want to buy leads or I just want you to warm transfer leads to us. And what are your resources to answer the calls? And they're like, well, I mean, everybody kind of pitches in. Yeah, sure they do. I mean, good luck. And then you know, any kind of standardization as to what they're doing, right? Receptionist, you got your paralegal, you got a couple of attorneys that aren't even working on that type of case. And they got some printout that you dropped off on their desk in case they get a call. Well, that still exists, you know, or they go into an intake system that they use like every now and again, and they have no idea how it really works. And it's very grating for them, right? And so you end up with this hodgepodge of like qualifications and everything else. And you don't really know what you have. And worse than that, you know, this one, they can't do any attribution as to how they got the lead. Nope. Yeah. I got here on the board. My predecessor was running only digital, right? And then I went through our intake database and actually had a marketing analytics person on my staff. I might have been the only firm at the time you had that. And they went through and they figured out what were our best historical channels for getting mesothelium of victims. And it came out as TV. Okay. And then I found out they'd only run one TV ad and they ran it for about a week. That's it. Yeah. It was like regional as well. Like just whooping specific area one market. They hadn't run it nationally. And yet what was happening is the intake people were asked to ask the first and how they learned about the firm. Right. You've seen this before. People will say, I learned about it from a billboard. And you're like, we've never done a billboard. I learned about it from a TV ad. Well, we didn't run any TV ads. That was the main channel that was showing up as the most positive. Oscar contract. Because if you've got zero costs, your trips with contract is amazing, right? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. That is a critical part of intake that people rely on. They're just still asking, how do you hear about it? And if they're asking that, that at least some of our firms don't even ask that. Right. And it makes it really hard to take something like earned media like you're doing and to attribute that revenue that the firm is ultimately getting off of it. No, no. It also creates an opportunity for cannibalization as well. Right. So when we didn't know where lead came from because they switched different channels to get to us, we just always attributed it to SEO. We had a strong SEO presence inside the firm. And that worked to our advantage many, many times. But in reality, they came in on a paid search ad. They got retargeted with a Facebook ad. They came back. They considered it. And then they converted. I mean, when I was working on Hilton, we were the digital agency of record at the agency I was at. And we had a 70 people working on the account. We were running 40 to 60 million in digital media. Plus we were building their websites and doing all their SEO. We figured out that on average, for one of the brands, people were coming and visiting a page for the hotel 11 times before they were converting and booking a room. Think about that. Yeah. That's a considered purchase, right? Yep. Yet the strangest thing about legal is a lot of times they come in and they convert on the first visit. Right. Right. But if it's an intermediate play, they may have come in on a paid campaign. And then they just come back. They come through Google Maps or they come through the front door of the website. And the phone doesn't realize that they've already visited them five, 10, 15 times before they made that decision. Right. And so if you hadn't been visible in the end, your paid media would have never paid all. Yeah, I just, that was like the coolest thing to figure out. We're like, oh my god, they're coming 11 times before that thing. You know why we triggered that out though? It was because they were like, we want to cut our branded campaign budget in paid search. And you're like, look, every time I see somebody do that, they're cutting their nose off despite their face. Yeah. Yeah. And so that, that was like the studies we were constantly doing. It's like, if I take my branded down here, what happens to my non branded? And it would always kill it. Same TV. Every time TV was doing better than digital, we would cut digital. And the TV would stop performing. Inversely, the same way, if we cut TV, then digital stopped performing the same way, even though we were attributing it to digital, talking about buying media, you also source qualified leads from publishers. And here, the continuation of that is that's not typical in the industry. Is that accurate? Yeah. I mean, most lead gins are just buying leads and then passing them along. That's pretty much how the market works. If you look at your typical legal agency, a lot of times they have three components. They have a sales team, the relationship guys, the folks that want to have a drink with you at the conference. And they're awesome. Play around a golf with them. Hang out. These guys and gals have all the personality in the world. And they have the relationships and they get a lot of return business in part because they're charming. Right. And then you have the ones that let's say in terms of the way that they're perched, they're just doing so well in the industry that everybody's going to use them despite the fact that they may not like them. But the sales team component is usually the largest part of a digital agency in the lead marketplace. The next component is the operations team, which is basically focus on the systems that are going to allow the leads to come through the funnel and to be able to be spread out amongst their customers and to match their criteria. Right. And then the third component is the group that's going to bill you. And so like within that, there's no media component. There's no actual, hey, I've been running Facebook ads for forever and ever. And I can turn on TikTok. And if you guys need TV, we can buy TV through like in various different methods in terms of whether I'm going to go and do CTV or if I'm going to just go and do linear, can buy radio ads, can buy billboards. Most agencies in our business just don't have that. It's easy to see on LinkedIn. It's easy to see other places. And yet at the same time, you typically have to source lead a lot of times as well from a compliance perspective from an understanding of the marketplace in general, and you have to match criteria closely as you're doing it. And ultimately, you've got to make sure the leads are quality. That is something that unfortunately, almost every agency has to do and order to hedge their bets on costs. There's a lot of great lead gins out there that we buy from. There in the past were a lot of lead gins that bought from us. But ultimately, I think what helps us the most is that we can do boat. - Okay. - Devon, how do you decide when to source versus when to buy direct? - A big part of that, Rob, is whether the client will allow us to source leads or not. - Okay. - There are clients that simply want to do Miranda advertising. There are clients that just want to make sure that we control from the beginning to the end every single component. And what we have to tell those clients is that the arbitrage method allows us to better identify a final cost for contract. - Okay. - But when we do it the other way, a lot of times I refer to it as going into the wild. - That's right. - If you're gonna use the brand, the brand matters, do they have a brand? And then if you're going to say, "Okay, we'll buy all the media and we'll throw up a campaign," well then they better have a big enough budget for us to optimize it. If they're not gonna have a big enough budget, the only thing you can do is try to hedge their costs by leads sourcing from someone who has a successful campaign going on that's compliant. - Yep. - And maybe mixing in your own media until you can get to optimization over time, but you have to have the results initially, or the client will not continue the campaign. - And so that kind of conversation up front, I think just differentiates us and it's important. - Okay. - Because the way the sausage is made matters. And the client needs to realize and understand what the agency is doing on their behalf, because that agency is an agent of the law firm. And so anything that they do wrong, ultimately comes back to the law firm, including if they violate the federal trade commission rules, which happens constantly. Like you can't be promising outcomes that you can't achieve. - Right. - And some of these lead gins are saying, your case is worth $200,000, as they're doing their little survey lead generation form. And what firm can deliver against that on a regular basis, not even knowing what their case is. - Yeah. - And so that has to be completely under control. And it can be if you're doing things the right way. And the way we did it is we went out and studied regulated industries. And so, for example, one of them is life insurance. With life insurance, they're buying leads constantly. From third parties. And so what we did is we studied the way they do that. And we went through the same playbook to make sure that we had a step-by-step compliance policy that would keep our clients as safe as possible. There's risk in everything you do in this. But you can really, really narrow down that risk by doing things in the way that a regulated industry does. And for some bizarre reason, legal is not regulated in the same way. There is no legal advertising compliance watchdog. And a lot of us in the industry have talked about creating one. And I've seen efforts to do it. But ultimately, it's just never caught fire. And so what ends up happening is the law firm needs to monitor and more than anything else, they need partners they can trust. So let's run through the rapid fire questions. Okay. Devin, what's the biggest misconception law firms still have about paid lead? That all firm, all agencies are crooked. And when it comes to paid leads, a lot of times I'm talking about using a lead generator. Right. There's a lot of mistrust. Where do most law firms lose the case before the client even signs? If it's their own advertising and going to their own intake, it's just being available, making a quick call from the intake team and then being consistent, knowing that it may take five to seven calls or more on average to get somebody signed. Okay. During your time in the industry, you've sat across from dozens, heck, maybe even hundreds of our slendery firms. What's the first thing you listen for from management at the injury firm when deciding if they're ready to scale? It's all about their model. I first want to know what their intake is doing. If they have a great intake team, then that's going to be the ultimate decision maker in terms of the way that we would want to work with them. We'd want to have them sign them up, warm transfer to them if they're going to be available. Yeah, if they don't and they don't have intake resources, then we need to sign those people on their behalf with their approval of a script for intake, and criteria and everything that goes into that. And so when I sit down, the first thing I'm trying to figure out is what's their model? Yep. Okay. What is one red flag that tells you that a partner of yours isn't taking compliance seriously. I think it's just the way they run their business, right? The flakier they are, the more likely that they're cutting corners in other places. Okay. More than anything else is their resistance to turn over creative and quickly. And if they're resistant to that idea, they can't work with us. Okay. Interesting. And finally, you've seen the front end backend of extremely high performing well-real funnels. What is the one detail that most offers missed from creating high performing funnels? I think it's really about in-bound marketing, right? You get a lead. That lead is potentially a client obviously. And the way you nurture them matters. You need to be able to text them instantaneously. You need to email them instantaneously and give them a way to provide more information, whether they can sign up on their own or whether they have to talk to someone first. Most firms are just calling. They're not immediately texting and emailing. And it's all about impressions, right? Just like media, it's about impressions and intake. I call, I leave a message most likely. Right. They don't have my phone number. I email and I text. Now, I'm trying to keep my phone number labeled but it doesn't always work. Right. So I have to have consistency in all three of those impressions, right? I need to call more than once the first day. And then beyond that, I have to have a nurturing program in terms of inbound marketing saying, I'm going to keep getting impressions on this person to sign them when they're ready. Right. Because lot firms forget that these people are injured. You know, their timeframe is not necessarily your timeframe. Right. Especially for somebody in the hospital or somebody that's grieving as a loved one. And just because they submitted an inquiry to us today, it doesn't mean that their intention is not to call and talk to us next week, right? We need to meet them where they are in the medium that they want to meet us. And if that's having a text conversation, let's have a text conversation. If that's a few emails back and forth, let's do that. Eventually, let's make sure we talk to them and vet them. But ultimately, that I think is what things break down is that people do an initial burst, email, text, phone call, and maybe they make a few more phone calls and that's it. Right. And why is that? Well, you have to think like a marketer. And that's not easy to do necessarily for every firm. No. Debt, this has been really good stuff. I really appreciate your time. Thank you very much. For anyone listening who wants to love a lot there, would have been a relaxed and pipeline or just to get smarter about paid lead acquisition. I hope you're applying. The best way is on our website, blueskylegal.com. You can also reach out to me on LinkedIn. We're generally pretty responsive when people get in touch with us. We're not looking to sell you. Our biggest thing is we're looking to learn about your business and to see if there's a fit. And so from our end, it's very low pressure in terms of running a campaign with us. We want to do it if it's a good fit for you and if we think we can get results. Okay. Davenigan, thank you very much. I really appreciate you being on the show. I appreciate you inviting me. Good deal. All right. Everyone, I thank you for tuning in. I have today's episode helped you rethink your lead generation strategy. Please subscribe to the legal edge. And we'll see you on the next episode.