8 Tips from Personal Injury Consultants: Working in the New Normal

As personal injury consultants, we understand the realities that personal injury claims and lawsuits haven’t gone away, COVID-19 claims have emerged, courts are backed up, and that as a personal injury lawyer, you need strategies that better serve your prospective and active clients while actively protecting your law office. Here are 8 tips to help you improve your experience working in the new normal.

Update Your Website
As personal injury consultants, one of the easiest and most cost-effective things you can do is to update the language on your website.

• Are you meeting with prospective clients virtually?
• Are you accepting COVID-19 related claims, such as worker’s compensation or wrongful death claims?
• Are you open or accepting phone calls during limited hours?

Updating your website helps both active and prospective clients know what to expect when it comes to communicating with your office.

Related: Raising the Rates: Client Fees

Be Timely in Your Response to Prospective & Active Personal Injury Clients
If you feel as if you’re missing out on a lot of new business, we encourage you to ensure that you’re timely in your response to both prospective and active personal injury clients. There are several ways that prospective clients may be reaching out to your law firm, regardless of whether you’re working from home or in your office. It’s imperative that you’re responding to these leads quickly. Make sure that the phone is being answered and that voicemails that are left are returned within a certain timeframe. Return email inquiries by the end of the day. If you don’t, prospective clients will find another personal injury law firm that they believe really wants their case.

For active clients, all emails, phone calls, and voicemails should also be returned within a reasonable timeframe. It’s common courtesy. If you don’t have an answer for your active client by that time, let them know you’re still looking into the matter and that you haven’t forgotten about them. A little common courtesy can go a very long way in keeping personal injury clients happy. Happy clients are more likely to leave positive online reviews and refer others to your law firm.

If you don’t have the staff to staff to ensure that your responses are timely, hire a legal virtual receptionist if you’re working from home. If you’re working from the office, consider bringing in part-time or full-time help.

Related: Leveraging a Law Firm’s Associates and Paralegals

Reevaluate Marketing Efforts ROI
While we’re a law firm marketing blog, reevaluating the analytics and metrics associated with your marketing efforts is an important concept that plays directly into another key point that we will mention next. ROI means “return on investment.” In short, it’s what you’re getting for what you spend. Marketing ROI can bring several results. Of course, as a personal injury law firm, you need website visits, email inquiries, and phone calls to convert to consultations. You need those consultations to, more often than not, meet the guidelines of the types of cases you take on, and you need the consultations to convert to clients.

Consider every marketing avenue you’re using, the cost, and the results. Hopefully, you are tracking how your leads come in. If you’re not, there are several ways this could happen. For phone calls, the easiest way is to ask. You can ask during the initial intake process or during the consultation. For websites, a simple UTM code can be used to track where clicks come from on your site to your contact or scheduling page. The same can be done with Google My Business.

If you’re using PPC ads, it is important to understand how well they are working. Are the clicks coming to your website qualified? How often do those clicks result in visitors contacting you? How often do those visitors convert to paying clients?

All of the money associated with marketing as well as how many prospective clients turn into paying clients leads to the next metric to watch.

Cost Per Personal Injury Case
As personal injury consultants, we’d like to clearly state that this is the amount that your law firm is willing to invest in the actual case. Generally, the marketing ROI isn’t included in this, but it’s important to keep in mind that you did invest money to secure the client to begin with.

The methodology used to determine the cost per case for your firm may depend on the type of personal injury cases taken by your firm, the ability to withstand and support the risk, and the likelihood of recovery. As personal injury consultants, we work one-on-one with our clients to develop the right plan to determine the appropriate cost per case.

Personal Injury Law Firm Analytics and Metrics
Personal injury law firm analytics and metrics are also known as key performance indicators or KPIs. You may have noticed we talked a little about some of them under marketing ROI. For example, how are your client leads getting to you?

Those aren’t the only analytics and metrics that should be tracked to measure law firm operations. Other metrics include productivity, profitability, performance, client experience, and law firm culture. Each metric needs its own goal. Each area must be routinely reviewed and, where necessary, improved.

Ask Clients to Leave Reviews
Online reviews continue to be important. In the “new normal,” they certainly won’t go anywhere. How you work with others during the pandemic, particularly in how you meet with them and make them feel, and says a lot about your law firm. To help protect your reputation and to help encourage new clients to reach out to you, ask every client to leave a review. You can create short links using Bit.ly using their free account to make it easy to remember and easy to send links to your Google My Business page, FindLaw, Avvo, Facebook page, and any other website where you accept reviews. If your website has a spot to list testimonials, ask clients if you can use their review with only their first name on your testimonials page.

Consider Alternate Pricing Strategies
If you find that your law firm tends to handle the same type of small personal injury matter over and over again or if your law firm handles both personal injury and other civil law practice areas, look for matters where you can consider alternative pricing strategies. For example, insurance defense lawyers may use a fixed fee or flat fee strategy for certain activities for their clients. Contract review matters may be done for a flat fee. Limited-scope matters are becoming popular flat fee options for lawyers. Consider the areas in your law practice where you may be able to both streamline and perhaps even make more money.

Personal Injury Consulting for Your Law Firm
RJH Consulting provides personal injury consulting for small and medium-size law firms. With more than 60 years of experience, we’re here to help not just survive the new normal but thrive. To learn more about how we can help develop an individualized plan for your personal injury law firm, schedule your free consultation!