De Facto Digital

De Facto Digital — PI Legal Marketing
Marketing Intelligence for PI Firms

Burden of proof:
can your agency prove a single dollar
turned into a single case?

We can. De Facto Digital runs paid acquisition exclusively for personal injury law firms — and every dollar we spend is traceable back to a signed case.

From the Firms

Firms we have
worked with.

From the very beginning they were transparent and helped us analyze our agency and marketing efforts. The analysis was very detailed and they gave us an action plan moving forward. I would recommend them to any personal injury firm.

Brittany Lawson
Marketing Manager, William Mattar Law Offices — New York

De Facto Digital provided us with an objective fact-based review of our internet presence which proved to be invaluable. All of the companies who contacted us had a vested interest in the outcome. De Facto did not.

Mark Kuminski
Levinson Axelrod — New Jersey

They gave us great advice that has helped guide us towards a more effective digital marketing plan. I feel very confident that De Facto gave us all the facts and customized their recommendations for our firm’s specific needs.

Jesse McGee
Operations Manager, Fuicelli & Lee, P.C. — Denver, CO

Their independent 3rd party audit truly armed us with the knowledge we needed to intelligently talk to our website provider about adjustments we needed to implement. Definitely worth giving them a call.

Jason Stephens
Stephens Law — Fort Worth, TX

My law firm spends a mini fortune every month on SEO. Because John and team were not trying to sell me any products, I could trust what they had to say. I will continue to rely on their unbiased analysis.

Jeremy Rosenthal
Solo PI Firm — Denver, CO

They analyzed my current agency’s work and gave an honest assessment — the good and the bad. They equipped me with the knowledge to keep my agency accountable. These guys are the real deal.

Steven A. Schwartz
Joel H. Schwartz, P.C. — Boston, MA
The Problem

$20,000 a Month and Nothing
to Show For It

The legal marketing industry has a dirty secret: most PI firms can’t prove their agency is getting them cases. Here’s why — and what to do about it.

The average PI firm spending on digital marketing pays somewhere between $10,000 and $25,000 per month to their agency. Over three years — which is roughly how long these relationships tend to last before the frustration becomes undeniable — that’s $360,000 to $900,000.

Now ask yourself: could your agency sit across the table from you today and prove, dollar for dollar, which cases came from their marketing?

Not leads. Not calls. Not impressions or clicks or sessions or any of the other numbers that fill up a monthly report. Cases. Signed retainers. Revenue.

“If the answer is no — and for most firms, it is — then you don’t have a marketing partner. You have a subscription.”

De Facto Digital

And like most subscriptions, it keeps renewing long after you’ve forgotten why you signed up. Twenty thousand dollars a month deserves more than a report. It deserves proof.

On Transparency

Your agency is showing you
what it wants you to see.

The monthly report is full of numbers — impressions, clicks, sessions, quality scores, graphs trending upward. It is designed to look like evidence. It is not evidence. It is a curated selection of metrics that are easy to present and impossible to argue with, because none of them answer the only question that matters: how many cases did this produce?

Your call data — the recordings, the hang-ups, the leads who called three times before someone picked up — lives in platforms your agency controls. The data belongs to your firm. But your agency decides what you see, when you see it, and how it’s framed. That’s not a reporting policy. That’s a gate.

The Only Metric That Matters

Marketing Efficiency Ratio: total case revenue divided by total marketing spend. Most agencies don’t report it. The ones who know what it is understand exactly why it’s dangerous to them — it’s a number that tells you whether the relationship is working, and it can’t be dressed up with graphs.

The Conversion Math

A firm generating 90 qualified calls at 28% conversion signs 25 cases. Move that rate to 45% — through better intake, faster response, a CRM that actually works — and the same 90 calls produce 40 cases. Fifteen additional cases. No new ad spend.

What You Should Be Asking

Who owns your accounts? Can you access your own data directly — not through a report, not by submitting a request? What happens if you bring in a third party to audit the work? If the answer involves any version of “we don’t allow that,” ask yourself why.

The Model

Why we cap at
20 clients.

Stay small, stay focused, give every firm the attention it takes to move the needle in a competitive PI market.

01 —

Full attention, always. John and Kyle are on every account every week. Not a team lead — the founders.

02 —

One firm per market. We don’t run competing firms in the same geography. Your budget isn’t working against another client.

03 —

Month-to-month. No lock-in. We earn your business every month with results traceable to signed cases.

A question worth asking

Did your agency
sell out?

Many of the largest legal marketing agencies in the country have sold to private equity. It’s not good for your firm, your case acquisition, or your position against your competition — and here’s exactly what happened.

These agencies spent years collecting your retainer payments. They took that capital, reinvested it into their own marketing and growth, built up a client roster, and then sold the entire operation — including your account — to a private equity firm that has never run a PI campaign, doesn’t know the difference between a soft tissue case and a catastrophic injury, and has no idea what it actually takes to compete in your market.

What you’re left with is an account managed by people who inherited you as a line item in a portfolio acquisition. The founder who sold you is gone. The strategy is templated. The team executing your campaigns today is working from a playbook written for a hundred different verticals — and PI is just one of them.

De Facto Digital was built as the alternative. No investors. No rollup. No offshore execution. John and Kyle run every account — directly, every week. Your retainer pays for the work, not for a management layer that exists to absorb your frustration before it reaches someone who can actually fix something.