Injury firm: a second market built, and less reliance on referrals

Results as reported by our founder, from the firm’s own records; rounded. Anonymized. This is work our founder led before founding Probative; the firm’s own teams also contributed.

The starting problem

Scaling an inconsistent program heavily dependent on referrals. A small practice was expanding into a second market, with ad spend of about $30K a month at the start. Lead flow was uneven, and there was no reliable strategy for winning cases in the new market.

What we changed

1. Separated campaigns and budgets by market. Each market got its own campaigns and its own budget, so the new market couldn’t borrow the established one’s results or hide its own.

2. Built local service pages and supporting content. Service pages and supporting content were written for each market, to earn local search visibility where the firm wanted cases.

3. Introduced centralized intake routing and follow-up. Inquiries from both markets were routed to one intake process with consistent follow-up.

The program ran on Google Search, Local Services Ads, local SEO and remarketing. Remarketing ran only within each platform’s policies, and no Customer Match or look-alike audiences were built from client lists.

The results

• Cost per signed case: $5,000 → $3,000 (−40%).
• Signed cases: 6 → 30 a month as spend increased from about $30K to $90K a month (+400%).
• Projected fee-value return on ad spend: 2× → 4×.
• Annual firm revenue: $1.5M → $4M (+167%). This is the firm’s total revenue. Many factors contributed to it, and it is not revenue we claim to have caused.
• Other wins: a repeatable second-market pipeline; median first response 30 → 5 minutes; improved local visibility.
• Engagement: 20 months.

The figures are as reported by our founder from the firm’s own records, rounded. We don’t publish the firm’s name, location or dates.

How it was measured

Signed cases were counted from the firm’s own case records, not from platform reports. Spend came from the ad accounts the firm owned. Projected fee-value return on ad spend is the projected attorney-fee value of signed cases divided by ad spend. Percentages are computed from the figures above and rounded; the growth in signed cases came with a tripling of spend, so it is not a like-for-like comparison. Today the same measurement runs every week in our Monday report, under The Probative Standard and our method for reporting results.

What this means for your firm

A second market is a second program, not a bigger budget. Give it its own campaigns, pages and numbers, and route its calls to an intake team that answers fast. The practice detail is on our personal injury page.