Internet Newsletter for Lawyers
January/February 2007, by Delia Venables

Personal Injury Referral Panels
by Nicola Webb

If you key ‘personal injury lawyer’ or any variation of that phrase into a search engine, you’ll come up with a myriad of links (including many 'sponsored' ones) to PI claims companies and referral outfits. Most of these operate by having a countrywide panel of solicitors to whom they refer cases for a fee. The hope is that by subscribing to one of these schemes, your firm will supplement its own marketing activities by piggy-backing off the activities of this larger organisation to help drive new business leads to your firm.

There are several different types of PI claims sites including groups of one or two legal practitioners who have set themselves up as a primarily web-based operation, larger firms or groups of firms with substantial PI practices setting up a branded website such as www.injuryplus.com, claims companies who tend to use their own in-house (and often junior) paralegal staff to handle claims and sites that operate using panels of solicitors covering the UK. It is the last of these, the PI panel referral sites, that I cover here.

Key Panel Referral Sites

Accident Line www.accidentlinedirect.co.uk is the only scheme endorsed by The Law Society. In operation since 1994 and claiming a 90% plus success rate, it is backed by Abbey Legal Protection whose insurance products it uses.

Accident Advice Helpline www.accidentadvicehelpline.com was established in 2000 and promotes itself heavily via daytime TV adverts featuring Esther Ransome.

Accidents Direct www.accidentsdirect.com claim to be ‘the leading personal injury specialists in the UK’. They guarantee that all clients keep 100% of their compensation and process all claims on a 'no win no fee' policy.

InjuryLawyers4U www.injurylawyers4u.co.uk, a consortium of personal injury solicitors marketing their own skills, most noticeably by extensive daytime TV advertising. They state that they do not deduct money from clients’ damages and don’t involve clients in loans or credit agreements.

National Accident Helpline www.national-accident.co.uk was founded in 1993 and claims to be the UK’s ‘TV brand leader’. It operates a nationwide network of PI solicitors.

Claims Helpline www.claimshelpline.com says that it has helped ‘many thousands of people claim full and just compensation’ at no cost to the individual.

The benefits of joining a panel/referral scheme

Marketing your PI services to generate a consistent flow of quality instructions can be time-consuming and expensive. You will need in-house or external marketing resources to create suitable adverts, identify and monitor the best publications in which to place the adverts, create an accessible website to generate enquiries and optimize the site so that it is found among the 50 or more commercial PI websites in existence.

As an example, if you are thinking of paying for sponsored links on Google so that your site comes up when someone keys in ‘personal injury lawyer’, you can end up paying as much as £30 per click-through to your site. And this is only a visit to your site; it is not a guaranteed instruction.

In contrast, panel/referral sites spend significant amounts of money on daytime TV, press and website advertising and will have sophisticated means of tracking which channels deliver the most effective enquiries. These costs will be shared among the solicitors in the scheme.

The downsides of joining a scheme

Solicitors are often taken onto a panel by reference to postcodes, usually "whole postcodes", i.e. the first three characters, with slightly different criteria operating in the London area. Prices are generally around £500 a postcode although a few successful sites are able to charge more.

Ongoing charges also vary. Some like IL4U don’t charge per case referred (although they have a higher initial fee) but most will charge anywhere between £600 and £2,000 per case taken on. In addition, many tie you in with their own insurance products, which can be very expensive.

Anecdotal evidence shows that only a few of the schemes perform effectively. One of the key problems is that the referrals that are passed on, for which quotes are provided, are of very variable – and often poor – quality. So that although you may receive quite a few referrals, the actual conversion to a real client can be low.

Nor is there any guarantee of volume. In order to cover their costs, some sites will carve up regions by subdividing postcodes (e.g. BS9 rather than just BS for Bristol as a whole). Or they will have a number of solicitors servicing a region and will refer cases to them on a ‘rota’ basis. Some of the panel members of larger (and generally reputable) sites report receiving an average of 100 claims a year, while other sites claim to generate about 350 claims a year but in most of those cases, the firms using them have not been part of the scheme long enough to judge. If the figure quoted seems too good to be true, it probably will be!

How to decide what site to join

Before signing up to any referral site, you should:

1. Ask for validated figures for web site traffic and if you don’t understand the difference between unique visitors and hits/impressions, ask someone who does to help you.

2. Check how effective their web marketing is by using your own keyword searches to see how high up the search engine listings their website appears. Research shows that anything below 20th (usually 2 pages of search results) is unlikely to be visited by a searcher.

3. Ask about the referrer's other promotional plans (e.g. the frequency and timing of adverts).

4. Compare prices charged for joining and per referral with those of competitors. You can negotiate on this - you may be able to get a lower rate.

5. Ask how many firms are on the panel and how many referrals are passed to each (on average) each year.

6. Talk to solicitors on the panel to confirm this and find out how many referrals turn into real clients.

In summary, it is difficult to get firm evidence of the effectiveness of the various PI panels; find out as much as possible before signing up. But with the right site on your side, it may generate a good number and quality of leads.

Nicola Webb is founder of Implementor, a marketing consultancy specialising in professional services. See www.implementor.biz for more about the company.

Email Nicola@implementor.biz.

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