Cassidy Lewis, Chief Marketing Officer at Cooper Hurley Injury Lawyers, joins us to discuss prioritizing profit over calls. Cassidy will be speaking at PILMMA Super Summit 2025.

This episode and the next several will feature PILMMA speakers in our “Spotlight on PILMMA” podcast series.

In this episode, Cassidy discusses her role at Cooper Hurley Injury Lawyers, some of the marketing campaigns they run, KPIs, profitability, limitations to profitability as a metric, assessing profitability, ROI, and what she is looking forward to the most at PILMMA Super Summit 2025.

Visit Cassidy online here: https://cooperhurley.com/our-staff/cassidy-lewis/.

We’ll be at PILMMA Super Summit 2025: https://optimizemyfirm.com/pilmma-2025/.

See all episodes or subscribe to the Personal Injury Marketing Minute here: https://optimizemyfirm.com/podcasts/.

Transcript:

Welcome to the personal injury marketing minute, where we quickly cover the hot topics in the legal marketing world.

I’m your host, Lindsey Busfield. In marketing, we tend to focus on a handful of KPIs to evaluate the performance of any campaign we’re running.

In SEO, most of our clients want to know what keywords they’re ranking for, how well they’re showing up on the local map, and how many phone calls are coming in from the web.

Of those, the number of calls tends to get the most attention. After all, what better metric is there to demonstrate the success of an uptick than an uptick in the phone ringing?

Continuing our Spotlight on PILMMA series, Cassidy Lewis, the CMO of Cooper Hurley Injury Lawyers, joins us today to talk about her upcoming diploma presentation, Prioritizing Profit Over Calls.

Thank you so much for joining us today, Cassidy.

Cassidy

Thank you so much for having me, Lindsey.

Lindsey Busfield (optimizemyfirm.com)

Well, tell us a little bit about yourself and your role at Cooper Hurley Injury Lawyers.

Cassidy

Sure. So I have been the chief marketing officer here for seven years, a little over seven years now. When I started, I was a one-man band, and now we are a team of five and a half.

So we’ve come a long way. My day-to-day changes, I don’t have anything that I do twice in a week or sometimes even a month, but I focus a lot of my efforts on high-level strategy, right?

So how to make the phone ring, but how to make the phone ring with the right calls, with the clients that we want.

Prior to this, I think I’ve been in every facet of my… So I got my start in politics. used to run campaigns.

And then I worked at two Fortune 500s, one at headquarters, one locally, done some nonprofit work, some sales, own my own marketing firm.

Just, I came to Cooper Hurley with, I feel like, a good amount of experience. And I always tell people that, not to brag, but to say, legal marketing still kicks my butt.

Lindsey

It is a whole different level than anything else out there. So, yeah, but I’ve been here a little over seven years and we’re having a blast.

That’s excellent. sounds like you guys have had, you know, tremendous amount of growth to be able to grow it from that one man band to, you know, having, you know, several more people on staff and to be able to draw in the business support and scaffold that growth is fantastic.

Clearly, you’ve had some success with the marketing campaigns that you’re running for your firm.

Cassidy

What types of campaigns do you guys run? So we definitely have the multi-channel approach where we do some of the advertising pieces like TV, billboards, bus ads.

And we do social media, but not social media in the way you think. We don’t look for cases on social media.

We use that as branding. We talk a lot of community. We talk a lot of our employees. We use social media to meet our clients, to meet our future clients, right?

And then we focus a lot of efforts after the phone call. I always say that’s where the most money can be made is after that phone call.

After the phone rings, that’s where a lot of money can be made. So we do a lot of referral marketing, both attorney and client.

We focus a fair amount of money. efforts on our client. right Experience, right? So if we want to submit that referral, we need to make sure that we are giving them the client experience that is above and beyond.

But we check most of the boxes. We don’t do any PPC. We do do LSAs. We have a strong SEO campaign.

And then we have been doing a lot better in public relations these last maybe two or three years.

Lindsey Busfield

And clearly public relations goes hand in hand with a lot of those things. mean, from an SEO perspective, public relations is a huge piece of that.

But it sounds like you have a lot of irons in different fires, all with kind of the goal of bringing in new clients, but also meeting them and continuing that relationship after the client has done their business with your firm.

And that’s a great way to approach this. It’s a very wide net approach that meets that potential customer or potential client.

At every point in the journey. And with these campaigns, clearly, in order to be successful, you need to evaluate the success of the different campaigns that you’re having and making sure that each of those is profitable, and giving you a good ROI and meeting the KPIs that you have in place for the metrics of success.

So when you’re evaluating these campaigns, what are some of those KPIs that you’re looking at to assess the performance of what you’re doing?

Cassidy

I can tell you my KPIs. And I will, but I also want to make note of how important it is to really remain curious.

Sometimes when that phone rings, we’re happy as marketers, we feel like we’ve done our job, right? And it cannot, if you want to grow, if you want to increase profit margins, you have to remain curious.

And finding out the why, right? So the why a lot of times is the marketing channel. The mode of communication, right?

So are we getting these via chat, via form, via call? Which of those has the highest conversion rate? Why?

Why? But we have to remain curious after that phone rings, right? So the title of the presentation, Prioritizing Profit Over Calls, it came because I also own CMO Academy, and it’s a place where we build marketing leaders.

And so I get to open the hood up on a fair amount of law firms and talking to their marketers.

And we would see, and this was a number of firms where they would get the calls from social media specifically.

They would get the calls. They would even a lot of times sign up the cases. And then we find out.

Within six months, those cases have been dropped, closed with no fee, right? And as the marketer, the marketer struggling, well, we’re making the phone ring, we’re making the phone ring, we’re making the phone ring, but is it with the right calls, right?

And doing that for each of your campaigns is extremely important. And so that’s the platform from which I rise when I’m building out KPIs because I could have a KPI this month or for the next six months and say, okay, I don’t need to track that as closely anymore.

I’ll look at that quarterly or I’ll look at that annually now that I’ve put some things in place. I do believe that KPIs are very fluid and they depend on the campaign.

They depend on the team members. They depend on a myriad of factors. So again, my biggest thing is to remain curious, but, um, conversion rate is a big one.

And being as specific as possible. So looking at the conversion rate by marketing channel. But then after the phone rings, looking at the conversion rate by intake member, right?

Marketing and intake have to work closely, very closely together. Conversion rate and in as many spaces as you can put it into is extremely important.

That’s my, if I had to give it, if I had to put it in one sentence, conversion rate.

Lindsey Busfield

And clearly that is huge because if you are getting that phone to ring and hopefully, you know, during the intake process, you’re not signing up those clients that are going to be dropped off, you know, six months down the road or who are found to be at fault or really just don’t have a case or don’t have any opportunity to seek financial recovery.

That is something that I would imagine needs to be communicated through the marketing and intake as one of those unifying factors where they’re looking at the same goals there.

And so… I can absolutely attest that that’s a great KPI to use. And that goes hand in hand with what you’re talking about with profitability.

I