30 Cases a Month to 150: How Feller & Wendt Scaled Across Three States in 18 Months
Personal injury | Utah, Idaho & Arizona
Feller & Wendt, LLC is a veteran-owned personal injury firm with offices in Utah, Idaho, and Arizona. Founded in 2009 and led by partner and CEO Thaddeus Wendt, the firm handles car accidents, truck crashes, motorcycle accidents, wrongful death, and a range of other personal injury cases. Today the firm boasts more than 1,000 five-star reviews, a 99% success rate, and more than $100 million recovered for clients. Getting there required not just great lawyering — it required a wholesale transformation of how the firm marketed itself, invested in growth, and organized its operations.
When Carl Downey engaged with Feller & Wendt as their fractional CMO, the firm was generating approximately 30 signed cases per month. The one-year goal was 100. The three-year goal was 300. Both targets would require changes that went far beyond adjusting ad spend or refreshing a website. They would require rebuilding the firm’s marketing infrastructure from the ground up — and then building the operational capacity to handle what that infrastructure produced.
The Audit: Seeing the Program Clearly
The first step was an honest assessment of what was already in place. Carl reviewed the firm’s existing digital marketing program and its agency relationships — evaluating not just performance metrics, but whether the right partners were doing the right work in the right way. The conclusion was that the current setup wasn’t capable of producing the growth the firm needed. A new agency search was initiated, with Carl leading the evaluation process and making the final recommendation.
The audit also surfaced a critical issue with the website itself. Feller & Wendt was practicing law in Utah, Idaho, and Arizona — but their homepage presented the firm as a Utah operation. For a firm with explicit multi-state ambitions, that was a fundamental mismatch between identity and intent. Prospective clients in Idaho and Arizona had no clear signal that the firm was built to serve them. That problem needed to be solved at the website level before any amount of marketing spend could fully address it.
A Website Built for Three States
The new agency brought in by CLM was tasked with rebuilding the website with multi-jurisdiction reach as its organizing principle. That meant state-specific landing pages, city-level practice area pages across all three markets, and a homepage that immediately communicated — to anyone arriving from Utah, Idaho, or Arizona — that this was their firm. The navigation, the content architecture, and the SEO structure were all designed to capture and convert traffic across three distinct geographic markets simultaneously.
The firm’s tagline — “Our Family Protecting Yours” — was consistent across all three markets, but the site was built to speak to each one specifically. A prospective client in Boise searching for a personal injury attorney needed to land on a page that felt like it was built for Boise, not adapted from a page built for Layton. Getting that right required a design partner who understood both the technical requirements of local SEO and the persuasion dynamics of a client who is comparing their options after an accident.
100 Videos and a Content Engine Built to Scale
Alongside the website rebuild, CLM deployed a major video production initiative. More than 100 videos were produced for Feller & Wendt, covering practice areas, attorney introductions, client testimonials, and educational content about the personal injury process. Video served multiple purposes simultaneously: it improved the website’s engagement and conversion performance, it gave the firm’s paid campaigns richer creative to work with, and it built the kind of credibility that matters to someone deciding whether to trust a law firm with their case.
In a practice area where clients are often scared, in pain, and uncertain about whether they have a viable claim, seeing and hearing from the attorneys who would represent them is a different kind of reassurance than reading a list of credentials. The video program gave Feller & Wendt’s attorneys a direct line to prospective clients before those clients ever picked up the phone.
The Budget Case: From $600K to $2.5 Million
One of the most significant interventions Carl made at Feller & Wendt was on the marketing budget. When the engagement began, the firm was investing $600,000 per year in marketing. Carl made the case — with data, with competitive context, and with a clear plan for how the money would be deployed — to more than double that investment within six months, bringing the budget to $1.5 million.
That wasn’t a number chosen arbitrarily. It was the level of investment required to compete seriously in three states, fund the new website, sustain the video program, and run the paid campaigns necessary to generate the case volume the firm was targeting. Within a year, the budget had grown further to $2.5 million annually — a figure that reflected both the firm’s growing confidence in its marketing program and the returns that program was producing.
Increasing a marketing budget by more than 4× in under two years is not a decision any firm makes lightly. It requires a level of trust in the strategy that only comes from seeing early results and understanding why they’re happening. CLM’s role was to build that understanding — and to make sure the money was being spent in ways that justified the continued investment.
The Result: 150 Cases a Month in 18 Months
Within 18 months of the engagement beginning, Feller & Wendt had grown from 30 signed cases per month to 150. That’s a 5× increase in case volume — achieved ahead of the original three-year timeline. The one-year goal of 100 cases per month was surpassed. The firm was operating at half the three-year target within a year and a half.
But the growth created its own challenges. Signing 150 cases a month requires a firm that can handle 150 cases a month. Intake processes, staffing, case management systems, and internal workflows all had to scale alongside the marketing program. Carl worked with Thaddeus Wendt to address this directly, including involvement in the firm’s adoption of the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS) — a management framework that gave the firm the structure to operate at its new scale without losing the quality and client focus that had built its reputation.
What This Kind of Growth Actually Requires
The Feller & Wendt story is often described in terms of its marketing outcomes — the case volume, the budget, the videos. But those outcomes were only possible because the firm was willing to do the harder work underneath them: replacing underperforming vendors, rebuilding the website, expanding the intake team, adopting new management systems, and consistently investing in a program that was producing results.
CLM’s role was to see the whole picture — to understand that getting from 30 cases a month to 150 wasn’t a marketing problem alone, but an organizational one, and to help the firm’s leadership address both simultaneously. The marketing created the demand. The operational changes created the capacity to meet it. Together, they produced a firm that today has offices across three states, more than a thousand five-star reviews, and a track record that speaks for itself.
The goal was 100 cases in a year and 300 in three. We hit 150 in 18 months, and built a firm that could actually handle them.
“Carl and his company have done an outstanding job of assisting us as a CMO…he has helped us to better develop marketing strategies and tactics that have increased our number of signed cases and our ROI. I can’t recommend Carl enough. He is a pro at what he does.”
Want results like these for your firm? Contact us through our website, or give us a call at (443)-619-5390.
