Case Engine

Cyle Patnode is the founder and CEO of Case Engine, a Utah-based digital marketing firm that works exclusively with personal injury law firms. The public founder story on the site is brief: Patnode states he has spent his entire professional career working with law firms, and frames Case Engine around a single thesis — that personal injury is competitive enough, and case values high enough, that a general-purpose marketing agency cannot deliver the local visibility plaintiff firms need to justify their cost per signed case. Rather than positioning himself as a legal insider, Patnode leans on the operational side: building a client acquisition system his firms can run on for years, with direct owner access rather than an account-executive layer.

He is joined by partner Jake Karlen, who functions as the client-facing half of the leadership team, and a COO, Gabe, overseeing delivery. The agency has grown into a roughly 20+ person team spanning SEO strategists, on-page specialists, developers, designers, a data analyst, an executive legal editor, and an in-house media buying group — a staffing mix that reflects the firm's bet that Google Maps rankings and AI-search citations are won through sustained content, technical, and reputation work rather than paid media alone.

The guiding thesis is straightforward: help aggressive personal injury firms lower cost per signed case by dominating Google Maps, organic local SEO, and, more recently, answer engines like ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, and Perplexity. Client tenure — multi-year retention and expansion into second offices — is the metric Patnode points to most often as proof the model works.