What are Workers Compensation Leads?
Workers compensation, or workers comp leads, are defined (at least by us) as someone who was injured at work or in a work related accident, and has requested a free consultation with a local work comp attorney to discuss the viability of their claim, ask any pertinent questions, etc. In order to qualify, the leads have to confirm that they have not already hired an attorney for their work comp claim, and have an accident date that falls within the statute of limitations for that state.
Once we have confirmed that the injured worker meets our screening criteria and is a valid lead, it is matched to one of our local law firm partners and the request is sent to that firm for follow up. We only charge when we deliver viable, valid leads to your firm. This ensures that the person gets a local attorney that’s familiar with work comp laws in that state, and that the law firm is only paying for valid opportunities to speak with someone that’s in their area and meets basic criteria for a viable potential new client.
Why Should My Law Firm Invest in Workers Compensation Leads??
For some firms, workers compensation leads are a nice addition to marketing a personal injury law practice, while others focus solely on workers compensation law.
One of the advantages to this is, that while workers comp leads generally cost less than personal injury leads or auto accident leads. As a bonus, many times they can lead to a personal injury claim as well if a defective product or personally driven car was involved. They can also lead to Social Security Disability cases down the road if the injured worker is expected to be out of work for an extended period of time. So if your law firm handles a multitude of case types and practice areas, work comp leads can be a very versatile way to get the most out of your legal lead generation efforts.
Here are a few more reasons why your firm should be investing in workers comp leads:
In 2018, there were 2,800,000 non fatal workplace injuries reported by employers. Of those, over 900,000 resulted in missed work and over 333,000 required a doctor or hospital visit.
- According to a 2019 Bereau of Labor & Statistics report, there were 5250 work related injury deaths in 2018, 40% of which were related to transportation.
- According to that same study, about 20% of all work related accident deaths occur on construction sites. The “Fatal Four” accident types that cause the majority of all construction site deaths are:
- Falls – 338 out of 1,008 total deaths in construction in CY 2018 (33.5%)
- Struck by Object – 112 (11.1%)
- Electrocutions – 86 (8.5%)
- Caught-in/between* – 55 (5.5%)
(*This category includes construction workers killed when caught-in or compressed by equipment or objects, and struck, caught, or crushed in collapsing structure, equipment, or material)
- The average number of days missed because of work related injuries for adults aged 20-64 was 7.8 in 2012, according to a BLS study.
- Average workers comp settlement in the US by body part:
- Arm Injury: $169,878
- Leg Injury: $153,221
- Hand Injury: $144,930
- Finger Injury (Thumb): $42,432
- Toe Injury (Big Toe): $23,436
- Eye Injury: $96,000
- Ear Injury: $38,050
Source: https://projects.propublica.org/graphics/workers-compensation-benefits-by-limb
How are your workers compensation leads generated?
We advertise to attract people searching for info about, or attorneys for, their workers comp claim. Then we give people some general information, after which people who want to take it a step further and discuss their issue with a local attorney fill out a form.
Our advertising takes 2 forms – about 80% of our leads are generated through paid search on google, yahoo, and bing. The remainder are generated through facebook ads and retargeting display ads to previous website visitors.
How Do You Screen Your Workers Comp Leads For Quality?
Upon form submission, we screen for specific criteria (must be injured, must not already have legal representation, must provide valid contact info, etc).
You are only billed when a workers compensation lead is delivered that meets all qualifications:
- Must have been injured
- Injury must have been work related
- Detailed client information required (Name, City, Zip, Phone)
- Accident date must be within your states’ SOL
- Must not already have an attorney for their workers comp issue
By screening our workers compensation leads heavily before sending them out to our law firm clients for follow up, we’re able to secure dozens of opportunities every month while cutting down on the amount of time our clients intake teams spend talking on the phone to unqualified prospects.
Because of their relative value to potential case size, in general workers compensation leads end up producing a very good Return on Investment (ROI). With good intake strategies in place, law firms often do very well on these inquiries. Learn more about calculating and improving ROI for personal injury leads.
How Our Workers Comp Leads Are Delivered
As soon as a workers comp lead gets submitted, it’s screened in our API software to make sure it meets our qualifying criteria to make it a valid lead. If it qualifies, within seconds we will match the qualified leads to our law firm partners in that state or city, and send that leads information and request to you via email, sms, or direct post.
When you sign up to take on workers compensation leads from our program, you’ll provide us with any email addresses you’d like the leads to be delivered to, cell numbers for text message lead alerts, and if you have a CRM or case management software we can send the leads directly there as well!
Why Digital Marketing?
The short answer is, because that’s where the clients are. According to a google study, 96% of people seeking legal advice use a search engine, and 62% of all legal searches are “non-branded” (i.e. not searching for a specific law firm or attorney).
According to a 2015 study by law firm Moses & Rooth, people 18-24 were nearly 50% more likely to use the internet to hire an attorney than use a recommendation from a friend or colleague. As it’s now 2020, these 18-24 year olds are not in their mid to late 20’s and there’s an entirely new crop of 18-24 year olds, all of whom grew up with smartphones, social media, etc – which way do you think that trend is going?
Why Search Engine Marketing Specifically?
Read our blog post – A Case For Search Based Leads
There is a huge difference between someone who’s going to google and searching for information about how to handle a workers compensation claim and someone who sees a banner ad on a social media or news site. It’s push marketing vs pull marketing – and when you’re dealing with legal problems and someone who has to meet a very specific set of criteria in order to be a viable case for you, pull marketing just works better.
The fact that someone is being proactive and going to a search engine to try and solve their problem generally speaks to a higher level of interest and commitment to fixing the issue, as well as a recency bias that’s hard to discount… whenever we’ve tested display or social media ads, there’s a massive jump in the amount of lead submissions that have accident dates outside statute of limitations as well as in the amount of people who’ve already had their case rejected by another law firm.
Because of this, search engine marketing is very expensive. Below are estimates from google that show how much it would cost on a PAY PER CLICK basis to advertise on the top of their search results pages (SERPS). Many of these click prices are higher than we charge for a workers compensation lead, and doesn’t take into account that many of the people who click won’t every contact you, and many of the people who do, won’t have any semblance of a valid workers comp claim.
Why Do We Sell Exclusive Leads?
Some workers compensation lead generation companies sell their leads to multiple law firms at a time, leaving firms scrambling to be the first to make the call and leaving the person who requested the free consultation bombarded by dozens of follow up calls, texts, and emails. Yes the leads may be cheaper but the cost in time and morale will more than make up for it.
With that in mind, we never sell leads to more than 1 law firm. While we may work with multiple workers comp law firms in a given state or city, each unique lead is matched at random to a law firm in that area. If a territory is shared between two or more attorneys, qualified leads are sent out on a round robin rotation.
No Federal Employee Work Comp Leads
We often get asked if we include federal workers compensation leads in with private sector employees… the answer is no. We understand this is a practice area unto itself, and while we can’t guarantee that a federal employee will never fill out one of our forms to get a free consultation, we do everything we can with our messaging to filter out federal employees, and will accept returns if one does get to you.
When Does Buying Workers Compensation Leads NOT Work?
Obviously, we’re big believers that legal lead generation is a good strategy for growing your law firm and keeping a steady stream of cases flowing. But it’s not always a fit for everyone.
Here are a few instances where buying workers compensation leads may not be a great fit for your law firm:
- You’re very specific in the type of cases you’ll accept. If you’re only looking for massage therapists who’ve developed carpal tunnel syndrome, or dog sitters who’ve been bit by an angry poodle, buying workers compensation leads is probably not going to work for you.
- You don’t have the people or process in place to follow up with leads that you buy. No matter how good the leads you buy are, if you don’t have the people or procedures in place to handle leads as they come in, call them quickly, send text messages, follow up emails, etc, you probably won’t close many cases.
- You aren’t prepared to vet lead generation companies and possibly try a few out to find a good one.. Here’s a blog post we wrote about how to find a good legal lead generation company. (Link to post about questions to ask)
- Bad expectations. Even the most successful clients working with the most successful lead generation companies are only closing 20%-30% of the leads they buy. This means that in a best case scenario, you’re “wasting” time and money on 3 out of 4 leads. Now, we’ll discuss ROI a little below and link to a much more in depth blog post about how to calculate the return on your marketing dollars, but from an emotional standpoint if paying money for a lead that doesn’t turn into a case is going to piss you off… lead generation probably isn’t a fit for you.
- Unfavorable state laws. With workers compensation leads, there are some states where the laws are just not favorable towards attorneys making a lot of money on the cases. Unfortunately, google and bing still charge a lot of money per click, so the leads still cost the same as they would in more attorney-friendly states. UNfortunately, sometimes this negative arbitrage can make buying workers comp leads cost prohibitive for some firms.
How to Best Follow up on Workers Comp Leads for Higher Conversion Rates
- Call early, and call often.
- Follow each call up with a text message. Many people, especially younger ones, will never answer a phone call if they don’t recognize the number. Many of those people will never listen to their voicemails either. But everyone looks at their text messages.
- Vary the time of days and type of contact. People have weird hours, especially in a post-covid world. Meet your client where they are.
- Leave voicemails, but do so sporadically. No one wants to look like a stalker.
- Stay in contact with the lead generation company – by giving whoever you’re working with feedback on which leads turned into cases, which were rejected and why, etc, you can help us understand where to put more resources because it’s working, and where to cut because it’s eating up ad spend without producing viable cases for you.
How to do Cost Per Signed Case/ROI calculation
Knowing your numbers is crucial to a successful lead generation campaign. You need to know how many leads you’ve bought and for how much, as well as how many cases you signed out of that batch of leads, the value of those cases, and so forth.
We make it easy to do cost per signed case and return oin investment analysis with our reporting dashboard and lead reports available to all our clients. You can easily see leads you’ve bought and returned, which you can then cross check against your client list anbd determine which of our workers compensation leads turned into cases, what your conversion rate is, and how much each signed case cost you in marketing dollars.
For more, please read our post on calculating ROI on legal lead generation campaigns.
Closing Thoughts:
While in some instances and some states, buying workers compensation leads may not be the best fit for everyone, in many cases it’s a great way to start building your caseload immediately with a relatively low buy-in and a lot more transparency than many other forms of marketing your work comp firm. If you have additional questions on our workers comp leads or would like a free price & volume estimate, please contact us anytime.
WORKERS COMP LEADS FAQs
We do allow lead returns for federal employees who were injured on the job, so if you don’t handle that type of workers compensation lead, you can return them for full refund. We try not to get too many of these leads and don’t, but occasionally we do see people who are government employees and were injured submit a lead, so if you can help, great! But if not, you will not be billed.
Our workers compensation leads are vetted for the following:
- They must have been injured or sustained injury while at work.
- They cannot have an attorney.
- They cannot be a federal employee.
- The accident date must fall within the state statute limitations.
They also have to be in the agreed upon geography and have provided a valid name & phone number, as with all our legal leads.
Cost for workers comp leads can vary depending on geography and order size, but usually they are priced in the range of $125-$200. The better question is often “how much per signed case” and at what conversion rate… please give us a call to discuss.
All of our leads, workers compensation, personal injury or otherwise, are exclusive and never sent to multiple law firms. We may have multiple firms buying leads in the same geographic area, any valid leads that come in will be in a rotation between active firms.
For work comp leads it’s a 50 lead prepaid order, with no contract. Once the 50 leads run out, you can calculate your conversions based on the performance of the program. If you’d like to keep going (which about 75% of firms do), you will have first right of refusal, but are under no obligation after the initial order runs out.
We can turn a campaign on anywhere in the United States. We have the infrastructure in place, but if we don’t have a buying customer, we’re not going to drop funds into a campaign to run. Once we have a client that wants to activate the account for that particular area. We can then turn our campaigns on and we can typically generate traffic in about 48 to 72 hours.
As soon as a lead is submitted, it’s screened to make sure there is a work related injury, an accident date within statute of limitations, and confirming that they don’t have an attorney for their work comp claim already. Once that’s confirmed, we make sure all contact info is valid, and then based on the zip code provided, we will send that lead simultaneously via email and SMS text to your law firm in real time. Additionally, we can post data directly to your case management software or CRM service, if you use one.
Since we can’t control what happens once a lead is submitted with regard to follow up, we do not give refunds for, nor do we guarantee that cases will be signed from our leads. We “sell” people who visit us on a free consultation with a local workers compensation lawyer to discuss the specifics of their situation, ask questions, and determine viability of their claim. Many people will decide against filing a claim against their employer, many more will not have adequate injuries or clear enough liability to make it an attractive case for a law firm to take. We’re still accruing all the costs in order to generate traffic in all of these instances, just as your own advertising efforts will generate more leads that don’t convert than leads that do. Ultimately, the conversion part of the equation falls on the law firm, and most of the workers compensation attorneys we provide with leads report back a conversion rate in the 20% range. Taking into account an average cost per lead of about $125 on workers comp marketing campaigns, that would work out to about $625 per signed case.
It’s going to be all over the place as far as types of cases. We do get a lot of construction accidents, nurses, people who drive a lot and get into auto accidents in work vehicles. Naturally, there’s going to be some very small cases that are going to filter through as well. We attract people searching for info about workplace injuries, and by default since there’s a wide range of work injuries that happen, there will be a wide range of workers compensation leads you’ll get. And if for some reason it’s stated in the lead and they state that they were injured at work and you get them on the phone and you discuss it with them, you find out well, the injury really wasn’t on the job. Therefore, there is no workers comp claim at that point in time, we’ll use a common sense approach and we’ll grant a return.
We generate a number of other leads, all in the legal category. A full list of the legal leads we generate is below, please click on any of those links to learn more about other practice areas:
Absolutely. Our workers comp leads are able to be sent directly into all major case management software platforms, as well as almost any CRM software you or your call center may have. We can do this in addition to email and/or text message delivery, or in replacement of those lead delivery methods. When you’re getting setup just let us know where to send the leads and we can do the rest.
We do not require our workers comp firms to take leads statewide, you can buy them in a metro area or give us a county list that you’d like to target. However, there are a few stipulations when buying leads on a county by county or metro area basis:
- There are obviously a lot less people in any given city or county that in an entire state, so it will be harder to estimate volume.
- Due to increased competition and the fact that we are somewhat limited in our advertising options when we can’t advertise statewide, county/metro area campaigns are usually priced a bit higher per lead than statewide campaigns. It’s often harder and more expensive to get exclusive workers compensation leads in big cities, which is reflected in the cost per lead.
- We may find that there’s simply not enough search traffic or people in a certain city or county to make it worth anyone’s time. If that happens, we will either suggest expanding the advertising area or decide it’s probably not a great fit.
Here’s a workers compensation lead that was submitted in June 2020 with personal and contact information redacted. We get a lot of factory workers like William who sustain injuries working in the warehouse. We also get a lot of construction injuries, nurses and assisted living facility employees, and delivery drivers. Below is exactly what a workers comp lead looks like when it gets sent to your email.
You have a new lead!
Contact Info:
First Name: William
Last Name: Pxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Phone: 757xxxxxxxxxx
email: pxxxxxxxxxxx@gmail.com
City: NORFOLK
State: VA
Zip Code: 23503
What Caused Your Injury: Work Related Accident
Has An Attorney: no
Comments: Broken sternum, I was driving a fork lift at work when suddenly it just jerked forward and I hit my chest in the steering wheel