To Your Personal Injury Lawyer, Are You a Commodity?

Like the shifting sands of the Outer Banks, the facts in our current world seem to be forever undermined and shifting

Perhaps fifteen years ago, a Miami lawyer I knew told me the personal injury practice was being “commoditized.”

“Commoditized?” I asked. “What the hell are you talking about?”

I was a little insulted and fairly skeptical. What did he mean? How could the practice of representing an injured person be treated like a commodity?

It took me a while to appreciate what he was saying.

What Is a Commodity?

A commodity is a fungible good. Think corn or soybeans. One bushel can be exchanged for another bushel of the same grade, and hardly anyone notices a difference.

People aren’t commodities.

Neither are personal injury cases.

But increasingly, injured people are being introduced to lawyers through a system that can treat them that way.

Some marketing company, perhaps hundreds or thousands of miles away, uses advertising and algorithms to identify someone who has been searching online for information about a car accident, a slip-and-fall, or some other injury.

The marketing company doesn’t know that person. It doesn’t know the person’s family, medical history, job, worries, or what the injury has taken away from them.

What it knows is much simpler:

A name.
A telephone number.
An email address.
A short description of an accident.
Maybe something about the injuries.

In the language of internet marketing, that person has become a “lead.”

That lead—your name, your telephone number and information about your injury—has value because a lawyer may be willing to pay to acquire a new client.

That is commoditization.

Ask Your Lawyer a Simple Question

Ask your lawyer:

How did you find me?

Or perhaps the better question is:

How did you know about my accident before I knew anything about you?

You might also ask how much the firm spends every year on advertising and acquiring potential clients.

There is nothing inherently wrong with a lawyer advertising. Lawyers have advertised for decades.

But there is a difference between advertising your services and building a personal injury practice around the acquisition and processing of leads.

That distinction matters to me.

Because once a law practice becomes dependent upon constantly buying new leads, there is a risk that the injured people behind those leads begin to look interchangeable.

One accident comes in. Another settles. Another lead replaces it.

That may be an efficient business model.

But practicing law is supposed to be more than an efficient business model.

I Represent People

Not long ago, a woman I had just met asked me:

“What kind of law do you practice?”

“I represent people,” I answered. “People with individual problems.”

She smiled, paused, and told me that was one of the more interesting answers she had heard from a lawyer.

Oddly enough, it apparently wasn’t an answer she heard very often.

But that is how I think about what I do.

I represent people.

People with individual problems.

Your case isn’t interchangeable with someone else’s case simply because both of you were rear-ended.

Your medical history is different.
Your injuries are different.
Your doctors are different.
Your occupation is different.
Your family is different.
The activities your injury prevents you from doing are different.
Your fears about the future are different.

And the evidence needed to prove your case may be completely different.

That is why I don’t think personal injury cases should be processed like bushels of corn moving through a grain elevator.

The Problem With the Settlement Assembly Line

Personal injury lawyers are constantly bombarded with emails offering to sell us “leads.”

I receive them too.

The people selling those leads don’t know the injured person. They aren’t interested in representing the person. Their business is finding potential claimants and selling access to them.

That business model can create another problem.

A law firm spending substantial amounts of money every month generating new cases needs those cases to produce revenue. There is an economic incentive to sign cases, process them efficiently, settle them and move on to the next one.

Efficiency isn’t necessarily bad.

But efficiency and professional judgment aren’t the same thing.

Some cases should settle.

Some shouldn’t.

Some cases that initially look simple become complicated after a careful investigation.

And sometimes what initially appears to be an obvious liability case isn’t obvious at all.

That is where experience matters.

Evidence Doesn’t Preserve Itself

A lawyer who assumes liability will never be disputed may fail to investigate the case as aggressively as necessary.

That can be dangerous.

Evidence disappears.
Vehicles are destroyed.
Surveillance recordings are erased.
Witnesses move or forget.
Electronic data is overwritten.
Businesses close.
Memories fade.

A lawyer who has tried cases understands something important: you investigate a case while the evidence still exists, not after the insurance company tells you there is a problem.

Trial experience also teaches you to look for weaknesses in your own case.

I don’t just want to know how we can win.

I want to know:

How can we lose?

That question affects how I investigate a case from the beginning.

“Someone can legitimately find an excellent lawyer through Google. The more compelling criticism is not where the client first encountered the lawyer; it is whether the lawyer operates a volume-driven lead-acquisition and settlement model that treats clients as interchangeable inventory.”