The challenge
CEL Solicitors is a national consumer law firm headquartered in Liverpool. It started out in a 200 sq ft office on the Albert Dock and has since helped more than 9,000 clients recover over £150 million lost to fraud. Alongside its scam recovery work, the firm built up teams handling cryptocurrency recovery, housing disrepair, Japanese knotweed, professional negligence and personal injury claims.
The people CEL most needed to reach were often the hardest to find. Many scam victims feel too embarrassed to tell their own family, never mind a solicitor, and plenty assume the money has gone for good. CEL needed coverage that showed those readers recovery was possible, and it needed to reach a fresh audience every time it opened a new area of law.
Our approach
We ran a traditional PR campaign for CEL with three strands.
Client stories came first, because someone who has been scammed is far more likely to come forward after hearing from a person like them. We placed stories of people who had won their money back, including a woman awarded £179,000 after losing £150,000 to a romance fraudster, a homebuyer who won £25,000 when a conveyancer missed an old septic tank, and a mum who won £15,000 from her council after knotweed spread into her garden.
The second strand was expert comment whenever fraud was in the news. CEL's lawyers commented on stories ranging from Netflix's The Tinder Swindler and the scam that cost Love Island's Amy £5,000 to pump-and-dump meme stock schemes and HMRC impersonation calls. We also created a campaign comparing the manipulation in BBC One's The Traitors with the tactics real fraudsters use, which ran across more than 100 Newsquest regional titles.
Third, we took the same approach into each new service as CEL grew: Awaab's Law and damp and mould for renters, deposit protection, energy overcharging, and knotweed warnings each spring. Broadcast gave CEL the chance to speak to potential clients directly, with appearances on BBC Morning Live and ITV's Tonight, and on BBC Radio 1Xtra.
The outcome
Over the four years we worked together, the campaign earned 1,524 pieces of coverage, with a large share appearing in print and on air as well as online. CEL featured in the Daily Mail, the Financial Times, The Sun, The Independent, the Mirror, GB News and This is Money, and in regional titles including the Liverpool Echo, Manchester Evening News and The Northern Echo.
Online, the coverage earned more than 600 backlinks from sites with an average Moz Domain Authority of 70, and it delivered an estimated 19.5 million opportunities to see. For someone who had just been scammed and went looking for help, CEL's advice was often already in the article they were reading.
