Best Practice: Should personal injury firm consider TV advertising?
Asked and Answered
By John W. Olmstead, MBA, Ph.D, CMC
Q. We are a three attorney personal injury plaintiff firm located in Los Angeles. We started the firm 15 years ago. Two of the three attorneys are equity owners. Our firm is a high volume/low case value practice - we currently have 500 open cases. A high percentage of our cases are settled without a law suit ever being filed. We are an advertising driven practice. While over the years we have effectively used a variety of advertising vehicles, we have never ventured into TV advertising. We are considering venturing into TV and would appreciate your thoughts regarding TV advertising.
A. I have personal injury plaintiff law firm clients that have had great success with TV advertising and other clients that have had poor results. High case volume/low case value firms such as yours have had the greatest success. In order to be successful you must have the budget to be able to stay the course and the infrastructure to support and manage the advertising effort and to support the work and cases. The worst thing you can "dabble" with TV advertising. Here are a few thoughts:
1. Be prepared to invest in TV advertising for a least six months - or don't do it.
2. TV advertising can be scary from two vantage points. If it is not successful you will have invested a great deal of money without receiving an adequate return on your investment. I have client firms spending one to two million dollars a year on TV advertising. You could easily spend $100,000 to $200,000 before you find out that the investment is not paying off. If your campaign is successful you may not be prepared to handle the volume of work that could result - either in the form of infrastructure or working capital. (Cash Flow)
3. Be prepared to respond to client inquiries 24/7.
4. Prepare your infrastructure scalability plan. Do you have the facilities, communications system capacity, staff and other resources to handle an immediate dramatic increase in case volume if it comes? If not, how quickly can you scale up? Do you have access to the capital to finance such expansion?
5. Measure and monitor ROI from your program and fine tune adjust your program.
6. Use a placement agency that has experience with personal injury law firms. Solicit law firm references from other markets and call each one and discuss their results in-depth.
Like any other business venture - if you do the proper due diligence and do your homework - TV advertising can be a great investment - if not it can be a nightmare. I have seen it go both ways.
Click here for our blog on marketing
Click here for articles on other topics
John W. Olmstead, MBA, Ph.D, CMC,(www.olmsteadassoc.com) is a past chair and member of the ISBA Standing Committee on Law Office Management and Economics. For more information on law office management please direct questions to the ISBA listserver, which John and other committee members review, or view archived copies of The Bottom Line Newsletters. Contact John at jolmstead@olmsteadassoc.com.