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443. The NIL Advantage & Building Custom AI w/ Digger Earles, Laborde Earles
This episode focuses on how a growing Louisiana personal injury firm uses better data, tighter operations, and bold marketing to scale intelligently. Chris interviews Digger Earl about building in-house AI tools, using athlete endorsement and NIL deals to strengthen brand trust, and designing a client experience that drives referrals. They also dig into attorney caseload strategy, why more files do not always mean more revenue, and which numbers actually matter when forecasting firm performance. The conversation is ultimately about replacing industry assumptions with disciplined systems, measurable outcomes, and sharper decision-making.
Chris Striar: This is *Personal Injury Mastermind*. I’m Chris Striar, founder and CEO of Rankings.io, the elite performance marketing agency for personal injury law firms.
Today I’m pumped to announce that our guest, Digger Earl, will be speaking live at PIMCON this year, October 4th through 6th in Scottsdale, Arizona. He’ll be diving deep into NIL, name, image, and likeness deals to help you dominate your market.
In this episode, we’re talking about building in-house AI, why reducing attorney caseloads can actually maximize fees, and the numbers you actually need to be tracking. Let’s get into it.
Chris Striar: Hey guys, I got one of my favorite humans back on the show. Digger Earl, welcome back.
Digger Earl: Yeah, thanks Chris. Glad to be back.
Chris Striar: I know we talked just back in November, but I always like to start with a win. What’s something recent the firm succeeded at that you’re fired up about?
Digger Earl: One thing I’m really excited about is all the AI craze sweeping the world these days. There are a lot of changes in the legal community, lots of different AI products coming into market. We’ve tested a bunch of products. We reached out to some colleges and hired our own AI in-house data guru. I don’t know his exact title, but he has his doctorate in artificial intelligence, and he’s helping us do some pretty amazing things with our own in-house data and our own workflows and how our systems and processes are moving along.
So that’s a huge win for us. We saw the need, we went out and got it, and it’s already proven to be beneficial to us and just a wonderful, wonderful home run for us.
Chris Striar: That’s amazing. I know I joked with you before that I creep all the company profiles, and I know to see someone on the team. Are you guys looking at where you’re going to data warehouse? Are you going to do BigQuery, Snowflake? Have you gotten into the weeds there? To me that seems like one of the biggest hurdles slash opportunities for law firms.
Digger Earl: Yes, so he is deep into the weeds already. He hit the ground running. He started in our mail room, just creating a workflow through AI software that automatically populates the files as the mail comes in. So that was a huge home run for us.
I guess the power of what he does, or what his background is, he was pretty flawless on the project. It moved pretty quickly, and much more quickly than any other software implementation that we’ve ever done before. So he’s moved on to the next project, and we’re looking at how we can streamline those workflows and become even more efficient than we already are.
Chris Striar: Let me ask you a question. Having the AI specialist in the office, is it like, “Oh shit, this guy’s about to automate my role?” How has the team felt with his presence in the office?
Digger Earl: Yeah, that’s a great question, Chris, and so far we haven’t been met with that feedback. It’s more that people are excited to learn from him and see how he can make them more efficient in their roles or how he can help them in their roles.
If I would leave him alone, he would be much better off, but I keep pulling him into projects. I’m starting a trial next week, and he’s helped me really comb through piles and piles and piles of medical records and data and expert reports. We’re utilizing AI for our jury voir dire next week. We’ve done a lot of background work on the panel, and I’m amazed at what he’s brought to the table so far.
Chris Striar: I’m also excited. You’re going to be speaking at PIMCON this year. You’re talking about NIL, name, image, likeness, professional athletes, the partnerships, and some of the things that you’ve done in that space that have had an impact on your marketing. Maybe just a little preview of what you’re going to talk about. Talk to me about some of these deals that you’ve done, maybe the impact.
Digger Earl: A lot of changes in the world with the NIL world right now. We were with professional athletes and celebrity endorsements before NIL became legal, and then with NIL sweeping the nation, we jumped in the NIL world as well.
I tell people all the time, watch why Reebok uses Shaq, or why Peyton Manning stands there with Papa John’s, or State Farm has Aaron Rodgers, because it works. That’s why.
We kind of picked up on that. We partnered with Alvin Kamara his rookie year, and we saw that really take off, and rolled into an older Saints legend quarterback, Bobby Hebert, and then to Taysom Hill and Jamaal Williams. We partnered with some NIL deals with LSU athletes, and it’s proven to be very beneficial for our brand.
It’s wild that someone would choose a lawyer based on who they associate themselves with, but just look at the business world and it’s why celebrity endorsements are such a big deal.
Chris Striar: I agree 1,000 percent. There’s a reason why Patrick Mahomes is with State Farm. There’s a reason, because people like Patrick Mahomes, and by nature they’re thinking, “Let me go with State Farm.”
Digger Earl: It’s wild to think that you get credibility just for standing on TV or social media with an NFL player, but you do. Louisiana football culture is crazy down here, and people hold these athletes like they’re superheroes. To have them give the public their vote of confidence, or kind of endorse me in some sort of way just by being in commercials with me, is amazing. It’s really cool.
We’re really proud to have kind of pioneered that in the legal world. When I started doing it with Alvin Kamara years ago, no one else was really doing that. Now, imitation is the best form of flattery, right? Some other lawyers throughout Louisiana have started to bring athletes on to their marketing campaigns, but anyway, it’s good stuff.
Chris Striar: Let me ask you this, just touching on it. I see a lot of firms will try to do the full team, and even with the player route, I think we buy from people. There’s the emotional relationship there. A lot of times too, there’s fans like me. When a player moves, I go to that team because I’m following the player. Have you thought about that strategy of the individual versus the team? Because I know these licensing deals are massively expensive for the team stuff.
Digger Earl: The team stuff, the licensing deal is negotiating with the NFL or the NBA or some real players there, Chris. We felt that focusing on the individual player was more of a connection to the fan base. Instead of just a team or a brand, being able to connect with an athlete and have those athletes participate, instead of just using the NFL and NBA team’s logo or brand in commercials or their name in the commercials, you have that athlete themselves coming, making appearances, making commercials, and letting the public kind of see behind the scenes who they are underneath that helmet.
Chris Striar: I like that. It makes it real. You can see them laugh. I’ve seen some of the commercials. Amazing.
Chris Striar: I am the worst design critic. I look at my website today, I like it. I look at it the next day, I hate it. And I look at your guys’ website, I think your website is phenomenal. One of the things I genuinely like is it’s not stuffy. You guys are in jeans, you’re doing the flex, you’re smiling. Everybody’s in professional attire, but it’s not like the suits with the one guy standing there with a frown on his face. You look approachable.
Digger Earl: One of the reasons we partnered with athletes in our marketing campaign is, how do you be different? How do you stand out? Years ago, every lawyer commercial on TV was the lawyer in a stuffy law library talking about how he’s the greatest lawyer and he’s going to fight for you. After 20 lawyer commercials like that, how do you differentiate yourself and how do you stand out?
So we came up with the NFL athlete angle. Lawyer websites, every lawyer website, “We’ve recovered billions for you, and we fight for you, and we’re the best for you, and we can do this for you.” Well, our website’s more, this is who we are. Yes, we’re lawyers, and you’ll see that side of our website. Yes, we’ve won billions, and you’ll see that side of our website. But this is who we are as people too. You’ll see it’s kind of a fun, lighthearted part of it as well. Comments have been pretty overwhelmingly favorable since the launch, so it’s good stuff.
Chris Striar: Everybody on the team, they just seem approachable. I feel comfortable. I think people get that.
Digger Earl: Yeah, that was the idea. That was really the idea, that the user experience when you come to that website, if you were searching or trying to choose between lawyers in our markets and every law firm website kind of looks similar, and you come across ours, it’s like, hey, these guys look like they’re serious at what they do, but they also are very relatable. That was the whole idea behind the user experience of the website.
Chris Striar: Well, it’s working, so I love it. OnMySide.com. Y’all should check it out.
Chris Striar: I want to talk a little bit about team. The more I start to learn about this industry, I see the different staffing models, and it kind of tells a story about the type of firm you are. A lot of these firms that process a lot of volume are very heavy on the case managers. I’ve heard comments of anywhere from 150 and up, tech enabled. The one thing that stood out for your firm is different, I didn’t see any case managers. I saw pre-lit paralegals. That’s not to say that you don’t care about client experience. Clearly you do. Even from the website, you’ve got a thousand reviews. Your main office is 4.9 and 5-star glowing reviews. You have a client experience manager. Is it Louisiana and their direct action statute, the modified comparative, the one-year statute? Talk to me about this decision and how you’re staffing versus other firms.
Digger Earl: You’ve maybe heard some of your listeners here, but in Louisiana you cannot have case managers. It has to be a lawyer that settles your case or negotiates here. So we have a lot of pre-litigation paralegals that help us build the files and get them in order.
But the pre-lit lawyer model is separated between pre-litigation lawyers and litigation lawyers. The pre-lit guys command pre-lits, get them set up, get them treating, figure out insurance coverage, and then ultimately try to get that case set up for policy limits. And if it can’t, then it gets pushed to the litigation guys, and they file the lawsuits and litigate the case.
But we have a customer experience manager here. We’ve mapped out our customer journey from the time the phone rings to the time the settlement check is placed into their hands. We take it extremely seriously, that customer journey from start to finish, because we want to create fans. We want to create not only happy customers or happy clients, but we want to create fans that go out into the community and promote our brand and send their family and friends to us.
Chris Striar: Yeah, those are the evangelists. I can’t remember the exact stat you told me, but the percentage you told me on referrals was way higher than I’ve heard before.
Digger Earl: Yeah, it’s like 70 percent.
Chris Striar: Unreal. That’s amazing. Everybody talks about consolidation, everybody’s costs go up, and you’re like, hey, I’ve got 70 percent. You’ve got a nice motor.
Digger Earl: Yeah, marketing costs seem to go up every year. Our CAC seems to increase every year, year over year. So how do you combat that? If the answer is spending more money, you have to spend more money, and there’s only some excellent pool of injured people in Louisiana, and that pool’s even shrinking with safer cars and just fewer wrecks.
So what do you do different? You kind of lean into your customer base that you’ve already built out over the years. You take really good care of them, and you stay in touch, and you stay in front of them, and you create fans or evangelists, as you called them. Whenever their friends and family need a lawyer, you’re there. You have to stay top of mind.
Chris Striar: That’s really smart. People talk about what is marketing, but marketing is everything you do. So this client experience is marketing.
Chris Striar: The other thing I was going to ask about, combating the rising cost of the front end, is obviously being great litigators. You’ve got some amazing results for your clients. I guess for our audience, and this is more for audience, not for me, of course, what are some tips to maximize fees, just in general, if you’re trying to maximize and increase your average fees?
Digger Earl: One thing I always appreciated about your podcast and all the guests you’ve had on it is the guests that truly dialed into the numbers and the guests that really got into the detailed shared information. That’s what made it an interesting podcast and what made me want to listen. So I want to do that for you.
What we have found is you get all these lawyers, and all your lawyers just want as many cases as they can because they think more cases equals more money. We’ve kind of found that there’s a fine-tuned number. You can only touch X amount of cases, X amount of files per day. Whether you have 50 files or 500 files, only X amount of files per day can get your attention.
That number is different for every lawyer. Every lawyer is very different, but we try our best, our leadership team here, to really fine-tune what number these lawyers work best at. The best tip that I could tell you is more cases doesn’t necessarily mean more money or more revenue for your firm or for that lawyer.
Our lawyers are all commission based, so they want to work hard and settle as much as they can, sign as many cases as they can, to make more money for their families. What you find, and it was a tough sell at first, is, hey, instead of 200 cases, we’re going to give you 75, and you’re going to work the heck out of those 75 cases.
So what do I find helps maximize those case values? It’s fewer cases, but really focusing on attention to detail in those files. It’s amazing what you find in those files when you really dig down or have the time to really dig down into what the case is, who your client is, who the defendant is, what you can uncover when you really spend the time to focus on.
Digger Earl: The second part of really maximizing fees is taking them to the mat. Common lawyers say, “Oh, well, we’re going to fight for you, we’re going to fight so hard,” but insurance companies have amazing records and amazing data. They know when you settle 90 percent of your cases. They know when you accept less than policy limits on your cases. And they know who does it.
So I’m not beating on my chest to tell you that I’m going to fight harder than anybody else. I’m just telling you that the devil’s in the details on our side and their side, and they know who is going to stand up and take them to the end.
I try a lot of cases. Our firm tries a lot of cases. I try a lot of cases myself. I start trial next Monday. It means something to really hold them accountable and to not accept their first offer, their second offer, or even their last offer, but really take them to the jury and let’s see what the jury has to say.
Chris Striar: Thank you for sharing that. That’s incredible.
Chris Striar: I’m sure you did get pushback in the beginning, but it makes me think, I can’t remember who I was talking to, maybe a FindLaw rep. They were talking about how they split the territory in half. I think it was the St. Louis FindLaw rep. I was like, “Well, did you hit your quota?” “Yeah, I hit my quota.” They’re like, “We get half your territory.” Smart business. They just doubled their revenue.
Digger Earl: Great point. I’m not saying that 75 is the magic number. I’m telling you lawyer A may be rolling on all cylinders at 80 when lawyer B does his or her best at 60. It’s all about them and the team they have around them and their systems and their processes.
We have a lawyer who will read every word of every page 10 times. He can’t have 100 files. He needs fewer files. That’s just his method, his way of doing things, and it works really, really well for him, but he needs fewer files to be able to do that.
Chris Striar: Yeah, and you’ve got the team surrounding them. You’ve got the paralegals, the investigators, all the resources.
Chris Striar: If you’re going to choose to have a smaller docket in the cases, I know attorneys hate the word soft tissue, but is it like, hey, maybe these lower-tier cases now go to another firm? Is that naturally happening on the front end where you’re screening a little bit more on the front end?
Digger Earl: No, we are screening better for losing cases. Tort reform hit Louisiana pretty hard in the last couple years. No pay, no play in Louisiana used to be $15,000. You were barred from recovering the first $15,000 of your claim if you didn’t have insurance. Last legislative session, they upped that to $100,000. So if someone doesn’t have insurance, they are barred from recovering the first $100,000 of their claim.
So our intake team and our intake attorneys really focus on trying to figure out viable, money-making cases on the front, instead of bogging our team down on cases that may not ever pay a dividend in the end. For example, no pay, no play. If they don’t have insurance on their automobile when they get in an accident and their injuries aren’t severe enough to ever get past that $100,000 mark, then we cut them loose pretty quickly because if it’s going to be a loser or a case that you don’t make a fee on, then you don’t want to tie your team up or bog your team down for a month or two just for no reason.
Chris Striar: I talked to one of the bigger attorneys in their state. They said during COVID, they didn’t know how it was going to go, so they signed up all the cases that they wouldn’t normally sign. He was cursing. He was like, “Yeah, didn’t make money on any of those.” He was just afraid during COVID.
Digger Earl: I just used no pay, no play as an example of something we cull and get rid of. But your lower value cases, your young lawyers could cut their teeth on those lower value cases. If they’re pretty good lawyers, they can get a demand out, get them set up, figure out the fleas on the case, try to expose the fleas early, figure out how to beat back the fleas and make the case better.
If they’re young litigation lawyers, you don’t cut your teeth on the multimillion dollar cases. Where you really learn and fine-tune your craft is with the smaller cases with issues, with problems. That’s how you become a better trial lawyer, when you handle cases with issues. Any dummy can handle a rear-end collision with a back surgery and they just offer you the policy limits. That’s not how you fine-tune your craft. Where you really get good is when you’ve got problems that you have to overcome. Young lawyers dealing with problems makes them better, better lawyers.
Chris Striar: Well said.
Chris Striar: One other question I had is, we’ve got a lot of EOS. I know you’re in a lot of masterminds. I see you. You’re constantly growing and making improvements. In EOS they have these leading indicators, these KPIs, make your scoreboard, make your jumbotron, whatever it’s called. At the top line, what are some of the key numbers that you’re looking at to judge the health of the business or just things that you’re interested in seeing?
Digger Earl: We track and measure everything. Some of the numbers I look at every day are how many cases we saw in the very day. That’s all I used to care about. I heard someone on this podcast, or maybe it was even me, that told you that on my death, I want my kids to know I love them, I want my wife to know I love them, and I want to know how many cases we saw in that day. That’s all I cared about, how many cases we saw.
At the end of the year, when you start looking at revenue numbers or projecting revenue, there’s a really big number you also need to consider, and that’s closed without fee. If you sign up 100 cases but only 75 pay, then you need to know that. You’re not basing your financial projections on 100 cases paying. It’s only 75 that pay.
So two big numbers are sign-ups and then closed without fee. You want to know your cost per acquisition. You know your marketing dollars, how well they’re working. You want to know average fee. Of the kept cases, what amount of fees are paid per case? What’s the average pre-lit versus lit? All kinds of numbers we’re tracking, but I think those are the high-level, most important ones.
It’s amazing what the data will show you when you start tracking large amounts of data. It’s amazing the trends that become easily identifiable and the things you can recognize. My CFO predicts our revenue every year within one or two percent at the beginning of the year, and it’s just data. We know we signed up this many cases last year, this average fee. We know we settled this much, this percent of cases per month, and this many in pre-lit. When you start tracking all that data over multiple years and gather that much data, the trends become easy to see and easy to spot. From a business owner standpoint, it’s invaluable information to know within one or two percent where you’re going to end that year.
Chris Striar: Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. It lets you forecast and avoid those pitfalls of over-hiring, under-hiring.
Digger Earl: Every Monday, my CFO sends my partner and I what we call the jumbotron. It’s everything you can imagine that we are tracking. Every department reports up and has their report weekly. So every Monday afternoon we get that. We meet on it every Tuesday morning, and we’re monitoring cases signed, cases closed, closed without fee percentages, average fees, how many settlements were in this week, how many fees were in this week, attorney caseloads, paralegal caseloads, all those good things.
But when you compile that data and you keep that data in a way that you can understand it, it’s amazing what that data will tell you and where it will lead you.
Chris Striar: And it helps you make better decisions. Very smart. Thanks for sharing.
Chris Striar: Digger, this has been incredible. I’m really excited to have you speak at PIMCON. For the audience that wants to connect with you, has a case in Louisiana, wants to send to you, wants to talk shop, what’s the best way to get in touch?
Digger Earl: Yeah, OnMySide.com is the website. My email is digger@onmyside.com, cell phone 318-359-5069, Instagram, Facebook, all those good things, you can find me there. I love what I do. I love legal marketing. I love talking about it. Anybody, any time, if you have an issue in Louisiana or you have something, maybe you want to bring a celebrity athlete to your hometown, call me. I’ve got some connections that maybe can make some introductions for you. So, love to help.
Chris Striar: Amazing. Digger, thanks for coming on the show.
Digger Earl: Yeah, thanks Chris.
Chris Striar: What an incredible conversation. Digger is proving that you don’t have to accept the industry standard. By leaning into technology with custom in-house AI, tracking the exact data to drive profit, and having the courage to reduce caseloads to maximize case values, he’s built an absolute powerhouse down in Louisiana.
If you want to hear more from Digger, and trust me, you do, you need to be at PIMCON this year. He is taking the stage to break down his exact playbook for using name, image, and likeness deals to completely dominate your market. You do not want to miss it. It’s happening October 4th through 6th in Scottsdale, Arizona. Head on over to PIMCON.org to secure your tickets before they’re gone.
I’m Chris Striar. Thanks for listening to *Personal Injury Mastermind*. See you next time.