A Dublin law firm set aside a €60,000 a year to spend on Google Ads and spent tens of thousands more on website development in a failed attempt to corner the market for personal injuries litigation, a partner in the firm has told an employment tribunal.
But the venture flopped after the solicitor hired to lead the digital marketing push neglected to spend the budget for months, the witness said.
The witness was giving evidence at the Workplace Relations Commission (WRC) in an unfair dismissals claim brought by solicitor Joseph McNally against Ferrys Solicitors LLP, which has multiple branches in the capital handling civil and criminal work.
Mr McNally claims he was subject to a “sham” redundancy when his employment was terminated in October 2024, an adjudicator noted.
Giving evidence, Ferrys partner Barry O’Donoghue said that in talks on merging Mr McNally’s practice with Ferrys, the complainant pitched himself on the basis that he had built a “very successful practice almost exclusively through his efforts with online marketing”.
“Joe was saying he was going to very significantly increase the business that would come into the firm,” Mr O’Donoghue said.
Ferrys had tried the same business strategy before, but had “never been particularly successful” with it, he said. The pitch “made Joe very attractive to us”, he said.
Ferrys had been prepared to offer Mr McNally a €120,000 salary, but ultimately an arrangement was reached whereby Mr McNally was to be employed on a contract of employment worth €40,000 a year, with €80,000 to be paid for services to Venus Bell Ltd, a separate company where Mr McNally was a director.
“He would be behind the wheel in terms of digital and online marketing; he would have the first engagement; he’d on-board the client, who’d become a client of Ferrys on foot of Joe’s engagement with them,” Mr O’Donoghue said.
Mr McNally was to “build/improve and manage” Ferrys’ old website and another dedicated website on the subject of personal injuries which Mr McNally already operated.
“If someone put into Google: “Had a car accident last night and had an injury – what solicitor?” the idea would be Ferrys would be high up the search results,” he said.
The former clients of Mr McNally’s firm were taken on by legal staff in Ferrys’ Ballymun office and other departments elsewhere so that the complainant could focus on the business development work, Mr O’Donoghue said.
He said that on foot what Mr McNally had requested in the merger talks, Ferrys set aside a €60,000 per annum marketing budget for Google Ads – some €5,000 a month for digital advertising – on top of the fees to Venus Bell and Mr McNally’s salary.
“A significant upswing in business coming in” was expected by management, Mr O’Donoghue said.
However, by the fourth quarter of Mr McNally’s first year, the new website was still not ready, and the ad budget had not been spent, Mr O’Donoghue said.
Mr McNally told the partners he had been “left to deal with old clients” but that the senior lawyers at the firm did not accept that as an explanation, as a “very experienced personal injuries litigator” had been hired in.
An internal company memo of November 2023, authored by the firm’s principal solicitor, Padraig Ferry, stated the volume of cases in Ballymun needed to “triple or quadruple and the quality of the cases will have to rise whereby they are not all just small whiplashes”, the hearing was told.
“It was that stark?” asked counsel for the company Cathal McGreal BL.
“Absolutely,” Mr O’Donoghue said. Any new business was positive, he said, but “if it’s a minimum impact and they [the client] recover after 2-3 months, there’s a very limited value to the firm taking that on… particularly on foot of the personal injury guidelines that were introduced”.
Between Mr McNally’s salary as an employee, the fee for services being paid to his company, and the advertising budget, there was a total provision for €180,000 in spending on marketing across Ferrys, Mr O’Donoghue said.
At one point, Mr McNally had set out a requirement for another €20,000 in budget for website development, but Mr O’Donoghue said that was meant to be covered by the fee paid to Venusbell Ltd.
Counsel for the complainant, Tiernan Lowey BL, said that the distinctions between his client’s duties as an employee and the services being provided by the limited company were a “key issue” in dispute.
Mr O’Donoghue said it was made clear to Mr McNally in November that an “immediate and substantial improvement in how the websites are being operated” was required.
“We don’t want to know how the sausage gets made. We just want to see the results,” he said.
By then, Mr O’Donoghue said, the law firm was “10 months in and €100,000 in costs” with “nothing to show for it”.
Correspondence from Mr McNally in reply to these points was opened to the hearing in which he remarked “the hustle is on”.
The website was generating inquiries by the following spring, but Mr O’Donoghue said they weren’t leading to fee-earning business. Rather, he said, the law firm was wasting resources fielding “Citizens’ Information-type queries”.
He said Mr McNally was “trying to pass the buck” by suggesting reception staff were failing to “capture these leads”, but that “simply wasn’t true”.
Ferrys terminated its commercial agreement with Venusbell Ltd on 20 September 2024. Mr McNally was made redundant the following month.
Mr O’Donoghue said Mr McNally showed “absolutely no interest” in proposed alternative jobs at Ferrys, such as a post in its criminal department covering Blanchardstown District Court.
“It didn’t appear to us Joe had any interest in doing litigation any more,” Mr O’Donoghue said.
The case is continuing.
