Episode 137 – Mining Gold From Your Past Cases.

In today’s episode I’ve shared an insight on how you can use your past cases to create useful content & case studies. You’ll also learn how you can use this content to your advantage and get more clients. Go ahead, listen to the audio below for complete insight.

 

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Hello, this is Richard Jacobs with Speakeasy Authority Marketing. Today, I’m going to tell you that you’ve got a whole bunch of gold nuggets sitting in your old client files. And here is what I mean by that. So, I just got an email from an attorney and he was saying to me, “Rich, I am having a real hard time getting testimonials. Everyone wants to be anonymous because I do criminal defense and Google won’t let them be anonymous. Yelp has given them a problem and all that so it’s very hard for me to get reviews. What do I do?” So I thought about this and here is the answer I gave him. And this is really going to be, you’re going to like this one. So, this guy does criminal defense and DUI so I am going to start with that as an example. So I told him, “Look for your past client files and look for cases in DUI where the person had a really high blood alcohol level but yet you prevailed. Look for ones where they’re over 21, under 21, they had multiple offenses and you still got them off. They had a very low BAC, they failed the field sobriety tests because they were way overweight and those kinds of things. Look for all these different cases that you’ve done already and write up case studies”. So let me give you an example of one.

This is just a fictitious one just so you know. Attorney Smith got my DUI reduced to probation and helped me keep my driver’s license. I was pulled over in LA by a highway police and when I was pulled over, they had me do those roadside tests, the Walk and Turn and that kind of thing. Because I am nearly a 100 pounds overweight, I wasn’t able to do the tests and the police took this as a sign that I was drunk and arrested me. During my case, the attorney was able to show the judge that because of my weight, I was physically unable to do these sobriety tests and got them thrown out. Now, the police lacks probable cause to have arrested me and my case ended up getting knocked down to probation and the offense itself was changed to a lesser offense. It’s not exactly the deal. This is the case study.

Now, here is how you use it. One way is on your website. So if you do, let’s say, DUI and you have an area on your website with articles about field sobriety, put a case study like this on those pages because people are going to see that and they’re going to say, “Yes, I have that same problem. I am way overweight too”, or, “I think I couldn’t even do those tests if I was sober”, they’ll see that stuff and they’re more likely to call you. And this is not just for DUI by the way, this is for any practice area. Let’s do a family law one just so you don’t think it’s only DUI. Let’s say you’re self-employed and you’ve been married for 25 years and you’re getting divorced and in your state, there is perpetual alimony or perpetual spousal maintenance. But your attorney, because of some ability, they’re able to not have to you perpetual alimony; it’s only for 10 years which is better than for life. This is a huge help to you, it’s going to save you tens of thousands of dollars. That’s a great case study, okay. Or someone that wants to get custody of their kids but they are the man and normally you would think woman would get custody but the man gets custody because of your legal work, these are great case studies. A custody example should go on your custody pages; an alimony example should go on your alimony pages.

This goes the same whether it’s bankruptcy, immigration, family law, personal injury, anything. Any of these things have case studies, you have them in your files, these cases you’ve done where you’ve gotten good results and you can talk about them without putting someone’s name on them and without putting any identifying details that would expose that person. And now, here are some of the places you can use them. So, again, you can put them on your website, and this will help you. If you do direct mail, like Jail Mailer or Auto accident mailers, put them in there too, it’ll help you; also on the phone. If you or your admin or anyone in your firm is talking to someone and they have a set of circumstances that’s similar to a case study you have, well then you give them the simple script, you say, “You know what, I have a couple of cases I’ve done that are really similar to yours. I’m going to send you over some case studies I have. It does not identify the person obviously, we protect people’s privacy but I am going to send it to you by email. What’s your best email?” So what happens when you do that? You send someone — let’s say they got into an accident with an uninsured driver and they were rear-ended and they don’t know if they are going to collect any money, and you have a case study where you somehow were able to collect substantial settlement for this person. You send it to that person, the person is going to think, “Wow, this guy or this girl has handled cases really similar to mine. He got good results. That gives me a lot more faith in them. I am going to hire him or her”, okay. That’s the affect of this type of stuff.

Now, I am going to give you one more example. So I’ve got an attorney in Pennsylvania, I did a DUI, jailer-mailer letter for him. And in the letter, we had some case studies. One was where he defended someone that had a blood alcohol level of like 0.33 or 0.31 which, if you don’t know if that’s not your practice area, that’s like 5 times the legal limit, that’s like half dead. If you’re that drunk, you’re almost drunk. You got to be a major alcoholic to be that high, okay. He somehow got this person off because he got evidence suppressed or whatever it was. So he put his testimonial with his case study in his letter. He started getting calls from people with high BACs, 0.27, 0.25, they told them, “I was going to give up but when I saw in your letter that you defended someone with an even worse situation that I am in and still got a good result, I had to call you”, and he got some great cases from it.

So of course you want to put disclaimers in this. Every case is different, yes, say that. Go ahead and put a disclaimer, no problem. The results in this case may not be the results of your case, each case is different. You can’t depend or rely on these results but I wanted to show you these results to show you at least, in some cases, what has been possible. So if you put those disclaimers in and you mine your history and you get these case studies out of there, you’re going to be a heck of a lot more powerful and compelling in the marketplace because you’d be able to demonstrate to people that you’ve helped people just like them. So if you want help unearthing these case studies for your practice, we can easily do that by phone. We can do a half hour or even an hour phone of interview. I’ll charge you a flat fee for it but we can help get these cases out of you without you having to sit there and go through files. So it’s up to you. If you want something like this, great. Email me Richard.Jacobs@speakeasymarketinginc.com, call 888-225-8594. If not, use this information yourself and improve your practice. Thank you.

 

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