They Will Forget You in Two Years

Hey subscriber,

On this week’s episode, I sat down with Tim Semelroth, partner of RSH Legal in Iowa, a personal injury and disability firm with offices in Cedar Rapids, Des Moines, Dubuque, and beyond. Tim is an Eagle Scout, a trucking CLE regular, a law school instructor, and one of the most thoughtful law firm partners I’ve talked to about the long game of building a firm in a smaller market.

He opened the conversation with a line that stuck with me: do the best job for a client, make no effort to stay in touch afterward, and odds are they will forget who you are within two years. Everything we talked about flows from that.

Tim grew up surrounded by teachers. His mother, his wife, his sister. He was an Eagle Scout and spent eight summers as a Boy Scout camp counselor, managing teenage boys and learning the basics of leadership before he had a law degree. He teaches at Iowa Law. He presents at trucking CLEs across the country.

He is intentional about all of it. At every trucking CLE he presents, he makes a point of mentioning at least twice that he’s from Iowa. Not because it’s remarkable, but because he is usually the only person in the room from Iowa, and when a truck wreck case lands in that state, he wants to be the name that comes to mind for every attorney in that room.

That is referral marketing through authority. Not networking events. Not golf. Teaching. The byproduct is a national reputation in a niche practice area, generated from a market of three million people.

The original firm name was Riccolo, Semelroth, and Henningsen. Three names that, as Tim puts it, few people can spell, and few people can pronounce. When they decided to move into mass marketing, that name was a liability. RSH Legal was the solution: short, clean, and memorable enough to anchor a brand without getting in its way.

Fighting for Fairness came next, and the thinking behind it is worth understanding. When the American Trial Lawyers Association rebranded to the American Association for Justice, the research behind that decision showed that being for something leaves a better impression than being of something. Tim took that same principle and applied it to RSH’s tagline. Fairness is what clients want. That’s why they call.

He knew it was the right call when insurance companies started writing checks made out to Fighting for Fairness.

That was one of the things I found when I pulled the data before this conversation. The branded search volume for RSH Legal combined with Fighting for Fairness outpaces the generic category search in their own market. That doesn’t happen by accident. It takes years of consistent advertising, consistent messaging, and a name and tagline that people can actually remember and repeat.

Tim has been at this for over two decades. Iowa is less saturated than most markets in the country, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy. The math on cases per capita still has to work. The infrastructure still has to be built. And as he pointed out, the firms that haven’t been there building that brand equity for years are not going to walk in and close the gap with a media buy.

This is the one that landed hardest for me. Tim said it plainly: you can do the best job for a client, and if you make no effort to maintain the relationship after the case is over, they will forget who you are within two years. That’s not a criticism of clients. That’s just how memory works.

RSH Legal’s answer to that is a full retention system. Monthly print newsletters. Twice-monthly email newsletters. Active social media. Birthday cards. Holiday cards. If you are in their system, they are showing up in your life on a regular cadence long after your case has closed.

This is the same principle that runs through every conversation I have about referrals. The best cases come from past clients and attorney referrals. But past clients only refer if they remember you. And they only remember you if you stayed in front of them. The firms that treat a closed case as the end of the relationship are leaving a significant amount of future revenue on the table.

Iowa only has three million people. RSH Legal covers the entire state with offices in Cedar Rapids, Des Moines, Dubuque, and others. Every office can be traced back to a single decision: they found a great lawyer from that community and built the infrastructure around them rather than lose the talent.

Their practice area diversification follows the same logic. Motor vehicle accidents anchor the firm, but they also do workers’ comp, medical malpractice, nursing home neglect, Social Security disability, and plaintiff’s employment. In a smaller state, that breadth matters. A client who came in for a disability case is still a client. If their family member gets into a wreck two years later, RSH is who they call. Not because they searched for a personal injury lawyer, but because that’s their lawyer.

Tim is not chasing private equity money. His reasoning is direct: their best cases come from attorney referrals and past clients, not from more TV buys. The team of seventeen lawyers and fifty-plus staff is the moat. Disrupting that for outside capital is not a trade he’s interested in making.

Tim has been practicing for twenty-eight years. His brand has been built over decades of teaching, of showing up at CLEs, of litigating trucking cases, of staying in front of past clients long after most firms have moved on. The search volume tells the story: RSH Legal and Fighting for Fairness have become more recognizable in their market than the generic category search.

The lesson is not that you need twenty-eight years. The lesson is that you need a system. A way of staying in front of the people who already know you, so that when they need you again or know someone who does, you are the first name that surfaces. The firms that treat the end of a case as the end of the relationship are starting over every time. The ones that build a retention system are compounding.

Talk soon, 

Al 

P.S. The full conversation with Tim is live now. He goes deeper on the Boy Scout lessons that still shape how he manages his firm, the deposition where the opposing witness tried to fight him across the table, and a trial story involving four bullets and a pelvic X-ray that had every man on the jury crossing his legs. Worth the listen.

Get in touch.

Have a legal marketing question? Want to be a guest on the podcast? We’d love to hear from you. Reach out at www.pmpmg.com/podcast or connect with Al directly on LinkedIn.