There’s a number of answers on how to generate personal injury leads, and depending on your law firms goals and your budget, some may be a better option than others. There are also few different ways that personal injury leads can be delivered from a legal lead generation company over to the law firm. Most commonly there’s three main ways that a personal injury lead can be delivered to a law firm:
- Phone calls
- Email and/or Text Message
- Server to server Posting
Pay Per Call Legal Lead Generation Programs:
There are two different ways that a telephone call lead can be delivered. One is what’s known as a raw call, which would be a scenario where the lead is not vetted or screened by the lead generation company in any way. An example of this would be when somebody visits a website that a lead generation company he has built, they read an article about what the average settlement for whiplash was in 2020, and after reading they decide that they want to speak to an attorney. Low and behold, there’s a toll free number placed front & center on the website. This person then dials that number, and then that phone call would be routed directly to the law firm. Meaning, nobody in the lead generation company that generated this car accident lead, would be acting as an intermediary and screening those calls in any way to see if they might be a qualified case for the law firm.
In this scenario, the law firm is doing all the vetting, all of the screening, and is 100% responsible for follow up and converting that lead into a client for the firm. To account for the fact that there’s no screening done on behalf of the law firm, most lead generation companies will give the law firm a set time with which to vet the lead before it becomes considered a valid lead that the firm is billed for. Usually, that’s anywhere between 30 and 60 seconds, although sometimes it can go up to 90 seconds, which is to give the law firm enough time to realize that this person has no semblance of the case, and politely get off the phone before they have to pay for the lead.
Now, in this instance, usually when the clock on the call hit 60 seconds, that lead becomes billable. So, whatever agreed upon price was contracted between law firm and the lead generation company that would be billed as soon as 60 seconds on that phone call.
The other option would be screened calls, also known as live transfers. The way that works, rather than their initial call getting routed straight to the law firm, it’s routed through the lead generation company or a call center working on their behalf, and a layer of additional screening is done before forwarding that call on to the law firm. On the initial phone call, the lead generation company’s representative will typically ask a few key questions….
- Were you’re injured in a car, truck or motorcycle accident?
- Do you currently have a lawyer for this issue?
- Where do you found at fault for the accident?
- When did the accident occur?
- Did you seek medical treatment?
And so on… then, depending on how they answer those questions, that lead is then patched over to the end client, in this case the law firm, who then goes on to give the consultation, and hopefully sign up a new case. Typically, because of the additional screening and time that it takes, as well as the generally higher quality of these phone calls, live transfers are almost always going to be more expensive than raw calls, but will also almost always convert better.
Email & Text Message Lead Delivery
With regard to email and text message leads, they’re usually generated online when somebody has found a lead generation website, and rather than and picking up the phone and making a phone call, they have decided that they’d rather fill out a form and have somebody call them back. In this scenario, usually the vetting or screening of the client is done on that web form, rather than by a live person over the phone.
How To Generate Personal Injury Leads – The Web Form:
The form that they fill out will typically ask very similar questions to a rep over the phone… were you injured in a car, truck or motorcycle accident? Do you have an attorney for this issue? Were you found at fault? When did the accident occur? Depending on how they answered those questions and depending on where they’re physically located, as soon as that information gets submitted to the lead generation websites’ form, it will then get routed out to the law firm typically via email, although we, as well as a number of other lead generation companies do also have text messaging alerts for when attorneys are in court or away from their desk, and then maybe aren’t checking email but would like to get back to a lead as quickly as possible.
So, in this scenario, the form does the screening. Once it’s determined that the person has met all of the pre-agreed upon criteria, they’re information is sent out to the law firm via email, and sometimes also via text message. Generally speaking, these leads will be cheaper than live transfers due to the lower cost associated with not paying call center reps, but will convert better than raw calls since there is at least an electronic vetting process in place, saving the time & money of answering calls that would never amount to anything. On the down side however, with email/text leads the firm is completely responsible for getting the person on the phone, and will inevitably end up paying for leads that never answer the phone or return a call, so that needs to be factored into the overall cost per signed case.
Server to Server Posting:
The final way that a lead can get delivered to a law firm is by what’s called server to server posting. If a law firm has a case management software or a CRM of some sorts, salesforce & Infusionsoft are a couple of the more popular & well known, and then there’s a lot of lawyer specific case management software options that not only act like a CRM software for signing new clients, but will also help keep track of the files as the case moves along. More and more frequently a lot of the higher volume or more tech savvy law firms will have something like this in place and rather than getting well via email or sent on the phone, and then having to manually input the data into their own software, it can usually be posted from the lead generation company’s server to the law firm’s CRM or server, hence the name.
In a lot of cases, this can be done in conjunction with one of the other methods of sending a little you, so, a call could come in and as it does, that person’s information, if it was not a transfer could also get inputted into the lead generation server sent over to the law firm server. Similarly, somebody fills out a form on the legal lead generation website, once that, that information hits the lead generation server, that can get sent over to the law firm server in addition to an email and the text message being sent out.
In general, whatever method of how to generate personal injury leads and best follow up with them results in your firm being able to respond quickly, efficiently, and methodically, is usually the best option. Ultimately, whatever gets you to higher conversions and lower cost per signed case, is a good thing.