Attorneys, Paralegals and Law Firms Sought

Juris Informatica (”JI”) is looking for a attorney, law firm or possibly a paralegal who can help us screen clients with tort and personal injury (”PI”) claims, negotiate referral agreements with attorneys around the country, and then refer these clients to these attorneys. Compensation is a percentage of the legal fees earned by the referred-to attorney, with total fees typically being one-third of the amount recovered. We are seeking a long-term and productive relationship with someone who is serious and professional. On a smaller scale, we are looking to replicate James Sokolove’s extraordinary success, except that all of our leads are generated via the Internet.

Company Background

Juris Informatica is a new Web publishing company which has launched nearly 50 web sites. Approximately half of our web sites are legal sites devoted to comprehensive coverage of topics related to potential tort or personal injury cases (Vioxx, mesothelioma, toxic mold, etc.), and going forward, all of our new sites will be legal sites. Visitors to our legal web sites are able to contact us through a web form or a toll-free telephone number if they think they have a legal case. Each lead is screened, evaluated, and referred to a qualified attorney if appropriate. To create and manage our web sites, we employ professional writers, editors, web designers, and search engine optimization (”SEO”) specialists.

Why We Are Looking

To date, we’ve been working with a prominent Massachusetts attorney to handle case evaluation and manage referrals. We have been disappointed, however, in his performance. Because he has not been able to focus on our referrals, he has missed capturing some significant potential revenue opportunities for us. We are seeking to find other attorneys, possibly paralegals and/or a law firm, to supplement his efforts.

We have already interviewed several other local attorneys and law firms, and our experience has been unfavorable. Most do not seem to understand customer service, nor do they understand the simple business needs of being responsive, accessible, and pro-active. Therefore, we are now conducting a more extensive search for the right firm or individual who can recognize the revenue potential of our business model and who has the right attitude and skills to participate in our success in a significant way.

Potential Candidates

Candidates for this position may include:

An attorney with tort or PI experience who is not currently consumed in their practice, or is willing to shift the focus of his/her practice to the business of managing attorney referrals nationwide
An exceptionally sharp and dedicated paralegal working in conjunction with an experienced attorney to manage nationwide case referrals
A partner in a law firm who has the ability and willingness to commit a portion of the firm’s resource to generating significant revenue through nationwide referrals

Roles of the Referring Attorney

The ideal candidate for the position of Referring Attorney has two principle roles:

Manage the client referral process efficiently and effectively
Provide strategic advice to guide the expansion of the business, thus increasing the number of leads, conversion percentages, and total revenues

Referral Management Responsibilities

Initial Client Contact

Talk with prospective clients to determine whether they have a viable case and if potential damages are sufficient to refer the case to a suitable attorney.
For the client who does not have a viable case, politely explain the difficulties of the case while being sympathetic with their plight.
Ask if they or any family members or friends have any other legal issues with which we might be able to assist.
For the client with a viable case, obtain the client’s verbal OK to let us refer a local attorney.
Write 1- or 2-page description of each viable case.
Enter all relevant information in our database.

Attorney Referral

Identify the best attorney geographically close to the client.
Ideally, over time you will have established relationships with appropriate attorneys in most major metropolitan areas, so we do not need to find a new one.
If not, we have developed some good methods to identify the top litigators in a given city and techniques for approaching them.
Approach the identified attorney and sell him/her on the case.
Customize our standard referral fee agreement, send it to the attorney, and negotiate any changes.
After a referral fee agreement is signed with the attorney, send your case description to the attorney
Proactively manage the client and attorney until the client signs an engagement agreement with the attorney. Once that happens, you can step back and let the other attorney move forward on the case.
Every ninety days, obtain an update on the case and update the database. We expect this to be an automated process, with automated e-mails sent to the lawyer handling the case, and that lawyer being asked to provide this information through a Web form that writes directly to our database.

Strategic Development

More senior level attorneys, particularly those who are “strategic thinkers,” could assist us to:

Identify potential legal topics (mostly in the area of tort liability) for both existing and emerging legal claims and issues and rank their attractiveness so that JI can focus its efforts on the most lucrative legal areas.
Identify, contact and contract with potential referral attorneys in all practice areas covered by JI, throughout the United States.
Assist in the development of a comprehensive information/database system to track all of this information.
Assist in due diligence on potential acquisitions by JI, such as third-party legal Web sites

Essential Qualities

Availability, Responsiveness and Follow-through

It is essential that the person or firm be unusually responsive and available.
People call during the daytime or at night. Ideally all of the calls would go to your cell phone and you can take calls as they come in.
Accordingly, you must be reachable. A lot of people will not leave a voice mail, and we could forever lose the call and its potential revenue. Any call could be worth nothing or it could be worth as much as $100,000 in referral fees. It’s essential that you be reachable.
Follow through is extremely important. Sometime clients will not call you back, in which case you have to call them. You need to be relentlessly resourceful.
The same is true in approaching lawyers about cases. Many attorneys whom you want to take the case can be difficult to reach. We don’t want to lose a client while you’re attempting to reach an attorney. You have to be diligent in reaching them.

Desired Characteristics

Knowledge of personal injury and tort cases is essential. We do not care how you acquired that knowledge but we do not have time to teach you basic legal analysis.
Empathy. In most cases, the prospective clients have real problems. As the voice of our franchise, you must create goodwill in all communications.
Excellent communications skills, both oral and written. You will need to persuade a client to use us. You will need to persuade attorneys across the country to accept our cases.
Detail oriented.
Good computer skills.
Systematic, able to follow our detailed manuals and procedures. In many cases, we spell it out for you.
You are highly, highly available. You are easy to reach.
Hard worker. The financial rewards will be commensurate with dedication and effort.
Willing to work at odd times. The total number of hours required per week may not be high, but when a prospective client calls, ideally you should talk with the client at that moment when his/her interest is highest.
You need to be available to take phone calls from other attorneys when they call rather than playing phone tag. Phone tag wastes time and diminishes opportunities.

Thoughts for Law Firms Considering this Opportunity

We are open to using a law firm in performing this role as opposed to an individual attorney or an attorney/paralegal team. Ideally the law firm would be able to bring several special competencies to bear and handle a much higher volume of business and revenue:

With a wide staff footprint, the firm should be able to field every call as it comes in. Prospective clients would never hear, “Someone will call you back soon.” (Don’t you personally hate that treatment?)
The ability to handle calls after hours.
Substantial experience handling plaintiff contingency cases.
The ability to respond quickly to leads, so that they do not go elsewhere in the meantime.
Ability and focus on using our advanced information systems to automate the referral management process as much as possible. If the firm has a competent in-house information technology (“IT”) expert, that would be great.
The willingness of senior partners to become involved in landing and closing clients with particularly good cases.

The Firm’s Earning Potential

JI will be launching over 500 Web sites in the next five years. If each site generates 12 real cases a year, that will be 6000 cases a year. One legal site we are considering acquiring currently receives 3500 to 4000 leads a month. The potential to earn a substantial income is extremely apparent.

To handle this volume of cases, JI could potentially enter into non-exclusive relationships with several different firms to evaluate and manage case referrals. Our strong preference, however, is to find one firm that can grow with us and handle all of these cases. In our ideal vision:

If the firm understands and mines the potential, then within ten years all of the firm’s partners should be able to retire.
Entrepreneurial mindset — You don’t make $10 million without being a risk taker.
Excellent business skills, something that some law firms are alleged to be lacking.
Strong management leadership
Personal involvement by the managing partner of the firm, including the investment of a considerable amount of his time
Financial resources. Although the referring firm will not be actually handling the cases, given there will be so many cases to screen, a substantial amount of time needs to be invested, at various levels of experience, from paralegals to the managing partner.

Please Read

If you are interested, you should read the following:

If You Are Interested

If this opportunity resonates with you, please respond with an email describing your qualifications.

Supplemental Information

Regarding Our Current Attorney

We were talking with a prominent personal injury/tort attorney in Massachusetts to handle the legal referral side of our business. He initially came on quite strong, saying he was very interested. The follow through has not been there, however.

He has not been proactive in pursuing this. In almost every case, we have to call him rather than him calling us.
He is very busy. The last two phone calls, he could not even schedule a time to get together. Instead, he said he would call us and of course he did not.
His firm seems to be bottom heavy. He is at the top and he has 25 employees and it looks like he has too few chiefs and too many Indians. As a result, he is too stretched.
He knows nothing about search engine optimization. He casually mentioned, “Of course, within a couple of months, all of our sites will be one or two on Google.” Right, no problem, just wave a magic wand and it will happen.

Keeping Our Database Current

We have developed a sophisticated system to track clients, attorneys and law firms. This data is stored in a Microsoft SQL Server database, accessible to anyone with an Internet connection and the right password. We have written a really good front end in Microsoft Access, which we are enhancing almost every day of the year. The idea is that all of us are working off the same database and that everything is tracked. This way, if you’re unavailable, someone else can call up your notes and talk with the client or the attorney. Thus, you must have reasonably good computer skills and you must be conscientious about maintaining this database. If that is something you are uncomfortable with, this is the wrong position for you.

File Server

We have a file server that you will have access to. The most important documents to store on our file server are PDF copies of referral fee agreements with attorneys and the engagement/fee agreement the attorney signs with the client. You need to make certain that as you receive copies of these documents, they are stored on our central file server so that everyone has access to them.