One question attorneys and legal professionals grapple with is how much to spend on legal marketing. There is no set answer to this question unfortunately, as your budget depends on various factors. Asking yourself some basic questions is a good place to start:
An early adopter is a person who uses a product, service, technology, technique, etc. before it is adopted by the masses. Early adopters are the first 16% of people who use a new idea or service and help make them household names.
The cost of early adoption is usually more expensive when it comes to buying a technology or a product. Companies will usually knock off a technology or a product and sell it at a cheaper cost a few years after the original came out.
Social Security disability claimants, attorneys and advocates have long been complaining about the increased wait times to get a hearing scheduled. The wait time to get a hearing processed in 2011 was estimated to be 360 days; in 2016 the average processing time has risen to well over 500 days and continues to rise every month.
According to a recent Bright Local study*, 84% of consumers trust an online review as much as a personal recommendation and 74% of consumers say that a positive review makes them trust a local business. In today’s digital world, your law firm’s online reputation could determine how successful your practice is.
Cost Per Case (CPC) is often used as the metric to compare marketing campaigns in the legal industry. While it’s a good metric to get a quick snapshot on how your marketing campaign is doing, you really should be looking at your Return on Investment (ROI) to get a true sense of how profitable your marketing campaigns are. Revenue on a case is not earned as soon as your firm retains the case, but rather when the case is settled. The likelihood of getting a settlement depends on the strength of the case that you have retained.
Last month, the Social Security Administration (SSA) released its expected changes for FY 2017*. Some of these changes are more likely to have an effect on disability attorneys and advocates than others. There are three changes that are likely to increase the average monthly benefits for SSDI recipients, which will lead to an increase in back pay and thus an increase in average representative fees.
* https://www.ssa.gov/news/press/factsheets/colafacts2017.pdf
The SSA recently released its annual performance report that evaluated its performance in 2015 and set new performance goals for 2016 and 2017. With regards to the Disability Program, the SSA states that its strategic goal is to “Serve the Public through a Stronger, More Responsive Disability Program.” What does this mean for claimants and claimant representatives?
Given the current nature of the Social Security disability industry, some Social Security disability firms that do not have a solid budgeting plan in place are running into cash flow issues. This is due to the fact that average wait times for hearings are on the rise. According to a report released by the Office of the Inspector general, the average time to have a hearing scheduled was 490 days as of April, 2016 vs. 353 days in 2012.
Oftentimes attorneys and law firms believe that because they have already put in a lot of money into one marketing venue, they should continue to so invest in it even if it isn’t working. An economist would label this situation as the “Sunk Cost Fallacy”. A sunk cost by its very definition is a cost that has already been incurred and cannot be recovered. Law firms often fall into the sunk cost fallacy when they try to build a website and hire a search engine optimization (SEO) company to get the website to rank highly on search engines.
Many law firms are starting to use third party call centers to help them not only follow up with the case leads that they receive, but in some cases actually send out the paperwork and retain the case for the law firm as well. There are some very obvious benefits associated with going down this path, but you need to consider the potential cons as well.