Carolyn Elefant is the founder and owner of the Law Offices of Carolyn Elefant, PLLC. She’s a...
Gyi Tsakalakis founded AttorneySync because lawyers deserve better from their marketing people. As a non-practicing lawyer, Gyi...
After leading marketing efforts for Avvo, Conrad Saam left and founded Mockingbird Marketing, an online marketing agency...
Published: | November 10, 2021 |
Podcast: | Lunch Hour Legal Marketing |
Category: | Legal Entertainment , Marketing for Law Firms |
If it seems like Google favors big firms – with big dollars – over small or solo legal practices, that’s because it does. With an eye on Google My Business (“GMB”) practices, the guys examine a retro approach to marketing that may end-run Google dominance.
Guest Carolyn Elefant joins Conrad and Gyi to talk about getting back to basics: rethinking billing practices, and how networking and focusing on “community” instead of “audience” may be a more efficient way to attract clients.
Also, Clio’s new Legal Trends Report is hot off the presses and they’re showing a spike in consumer interest in remote legal services and electronic payments. But that’s not all that’s changing. Are you keeping up?
Sponsor music provided by SoundStripe:
Got Me Like by Dr. Delight
Special thanks to our sponsors Alert Communications, LawYaw, and Clio.
Clio Legal Trends 2021 Report, https://www.clio.com/resources/legal-trends/
Google My Business: https://www.google.com/business/
Seth Godin, “Clusters”: https://seths.blog/2020/05/clusters/
Clio Cloud Conference: https://cliocloudconference.com/
Bedlam Conference, Nov. 10-11: https://www.bedlamconference.com/
Gyi Tsakalakis: Before we get started today, we want to thank our sponsors, Clio, Lawyaw and Alert Communications. Conrad?
Conrad Saam: Yeah?
Gyi Tsakalakis: I understand that you are headed back to school like the movie.
Conrad Saam: I have my final exams in a week.
Gyi Tsakalakis: And what are you studying?
Conrad Saam: I am studying OEC which is Outdoor Emergency Care which is essentially the class required to become a member of the Volunteer Ski Patrol.
Gyi Tsakalakis: Well, I could have used your services. I would have flown you out here because my son got stitches, are you now certified?
Conrad Saam: Don’t do stitches, don’t do stitches or injections.
Gyi Tsakalakis: No stitches?
Conrad Saam: No, no.
Gyi Tsakalakis: Okay, just tourniquets?
Conrad Saam: Basically, we do tourniquets. We do all sorts of stuff but stitches are well, I’m not sure I could stitch up a kid even if I had been trained in that. That’s another level. What happened to James?
Gyi Tsakalakis: He was flinging his head around as toddlers do and flung it into the corner of a coffee table but he is since fully repaired and stitched up and stitches out so cool. Well, I look forward to at some point being good enough to snowboard to be able to cap snowboard with you and have you stitch me up if, or tourniquet me if I need it.
Conrad Saam: I hope I never have to if that’s on a layer of intimacy with you that I don’t aspire to my friend. I love you dearly. If it needs to happen on there, let’s take good care.
Gyi Tsakalakis: Let’s avoid that so what’s in the news today?
Conrad Saam: All right, we have the brand spanking new, hot off the press, squeaky clean, Clio Legal Trends report and most exciting, one of the first people I met in this industry was Carolyn Elefant and she is going to be joining us today to talk about Google My Business virtual offices and the nightmare that that creates for the small Solo practitioner. Let’s hear some music.
[Music]
Intro: Welcome to Lunch Hour Legal Marketing! Teaching you how to promote market and make fat sacks for your legal flat case. Here on Legal Talk Network!
Conrad Saam: All right so welcome to Lunch Hour Legal Marketing. Today we are going to jump straight into the new so the Clio Cloud Conference. Hopefully last time you’re listening to the podcast you are also attending the Clio Cloud Conference. We’ve got some legal trends reports coming out to you and additionally, BEDLAM launching November 10 and 11 would love to have you there. Join us at bedlamconference.com. Me and Gyi are going to be sharing all the goodies, all the ways that we make our clients successful.
Gyi Tsakalakis: And speaking of the Clio Legal Trends Report, we’ve got a new Legal Trends Report for 2021 which means a new Legal Trends Report minute so we’re very excited this will be the first Legal Trends Report minute from the 2021 Legal Trends Report.
Conrad Saam: Hot off the press.
Gyi Tsakalakis: We hot off the press following in the Clio Cloud Conference of the same year and according to research, in the 2018 Legal Trends Report only 23% of consumers were open to the idea of working with a lawyer remotely. This year however, 79% of survey respondents saw the option to work remotely with a lawyer as an important factor that would have a positive influence on their decision to hire that lawyer. Online payments 66%, our top choice followed by automated payments at 61% and payments via mobile app at 61% with respect to payment options. It’s not to say that clients expect to fully remote legal experience, in fact, 67% said they would look for a lawyer offering both remote and in-person options when searching for an attorney and this figure increased to 79% among consumers who had hired a lawyer in the past. To learn more about these opportunities and much more for free download Clio’s Legal Trends Report at clio.com/trends. That’s Clio spelled C-L-I-O.
Conrad Saam: Yeah, I was looking at these the way this was worded is really interesting. It’s more dramatic than it actually looked. In 2018, 23% of consumers were open to the idea. Recently 79% it’s an important factor, right? It’s a hiring is factor. This a massive shift in the way that we deal with attorneys. It’s really, really striking and I guess you know, if you look back at the podcast we did two years ago. It was all like, how do we deal with COVID? How do we deal with remote? How do I set up, Zoom? There was people writing stuff like that. This is just par for the course at this point in time and it’s a preference which is fascinating.
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Gyi Tsakalakis: And speaking of attorneys we are very grateful to have an attorney with us today. Well, technically I’m an attorney but I’m not a practicing attorney. Carolyn Elefant has been so gracious with her time to join us today to talk Legal Trends Report and also help us navigate some Google My Business issues that are coming up. Carolyn, welcome to Lunch Hour Legal Marketing.
Carolyn Elefant: Thank you. Very exciting to be here and talking to both of you.
Gyi Tsakalakis: So I know you’re very familiar with Clio and the Legal Trends Report, I know that you’ve published on topics Clio and you know, you’re the patron saint of solo lawyers, probably the best I can think of to put it, tell us what you think. What did you see in the Legal Trends Report or about the Legal Trends Report in general that catches your eye?
Carolyn Elefant: So I did the remote statistic was a takeaway. It’s hard for me to say I agree with Conrad that it’s a big shift but I think we’ve seen that shift with other types of providers too. I mean people have been going to doctors remotely or figuring out ways to do like drive by COVID tests and then calling their doctor and doing telemedicine and so, I think that consumers are being accustomed to that so what we’re seeing in legal again is as usual, the tail wagging the dog rather than necessarily being leaders but it was refreshing to see and I think this kind of gets it those naysayers who always thought you had to have a fancy office and a client coming in because otherwise you wouldn’t be taken seriously. I think this kind of puts that myth to rest.
The statistic in this report that always intrigues me though is the one that has to do with the lawyers only bill 2.5 hours a day. First of all, I wrote a blog post several years ago, I think when the first Clio report came out about how they came to that conclusion and what exactly they were measuring. I mean, whether it was measuring flat fees or contingency fees or hourly bills and how that number came about. My second question was, is that such a bad thing? I mean everybody reveres the Tim Ferriss book, The 4-Hour Workweek so I mean 2.5 hours a day, that’s three times with Tim Ferriss thinks you should be working. I mean, it really goes to what you’re doing with those 2.5 hours. If you’re sitting at your desk and eyeballing to wills that a paralegal drafted for you at you know, $3,000 a pop you’re making $6,000 in those 2.5 hours and that’s what 6,000 x 5? That’s $30,000 a week. I mean, I’ve worked 2.5 hours a day for that so I’m not really sure what that number is supposed to prove. I mean, I know what it’s supposed to prove, it’s supposed to show that lawyers are so encumbered by administrivia that they’re spending the other 5.5 hours or 10.5 hours of their day you know, writing down how many hours they build or sending notes by pencil or carrier pigeon or something like that but you know, it’s never made any sense to me and I don’t, nobody ever discusses it. People just quote that to show how solar and small firms are struggling and I don’t know that that’s necessarily the case unless we have more information about what’s happening with that time.
Conrad Saam: Do you suggest that, that could be aspirational? Like can I get down to two and a half hours, right?
Carolyn Elefant: Right, yes.
Conrad Saam: I mean think that through, right?
Gyi Tsakalakis: Yeah, I think that you’ve given us a lot of things to think about here in the feedback that I’ve given them many times as well as is like at the very least you’ve got a segment between you know business model or billing model, right? Because you know there’s assuming that it’s everybody’s billing hourly and yep a lot of people are but as you mentioned contingency fee so I you know, I’m kind of like you, you got to break this down by billing and probably practice area and really another thing that you bring up here that is comp a ton is the whole conversation about pricing and again if you’ve evolved to be able to deliver some form of alternative pricing model, I’ll show my bias for value-based pricing but to your point if you’re delivering value to a client and you’re doing it more efficiently, working less to deliver more value to a client should be aspirational to use Conrad’s words so I think some clarity around that I think would be very helpful.
Conrad Saam: Carolyn, I want to ask you a question. You used the word administrivia which I love, you know, as the Godmother of the solo practitioner, what are the, we are going to shift a little bit off of Clio here, but what are some of the best ways that you know, like over and over again, for reducing that administrivia in a small law firm practice? I would love to you know, if you were to say, “Hey lawyers, do X, Y, or Z this works, and I’ve seen this over and over again”. Where would you go with that?
Carolyn Elefant: So that’s a really good question. I mean, some of it of course is dependent on practice. I mean, certainly I would delegate or high as soon as possible with either like a virtual assistant or a paralegal just to gather documents and store them
(00:10:00)
I mean just having some online cloud-based storage where you keep all of your materials instead of having to download something from a court website every single time, you know, that’s, in obvious, time-saving, using automation where it makes sense, and I think that you have to have a certain level of volume in your practice to make automation make sense. I mean, it can take longer to automate a court forum for, you know, if you’re just practicing in one particular court and you have to automate that particular form, it’s going to take more time and you’re not going to get it back if you don’t use it. But, I mean, to me, flat fee billing gets rid of so much about administrivia because you’ve got a price, you quoted upfront, you send an invoice for either 100% of it or 50% paid upfront, 50% in the middle, you know, or 50%, 40%, 10% at the end, and it’s done. I mean, that is how I have saved so much time. You just get rid of even reviewing the hours, and even with hours, even with automatic invoices and clock timers and things like that, I mean, I’ve got to say I’m not really up to date on that because I just, I just don’t use that stuff. But, even with all of that, it still takes time. So, I really think that changing the business model in some ways is really the best way to get rid of a lot of these administrative issues.
Conrad Saam: Before we jump to break, what’s the tipping point or what’s the thing that can push an attorney into changing that business model, right? Like when, when are you ready to move away from that billable hour? What’s you know, jump off a cliff? What should you be looking for in a law firm?
Carolyn Elefant: It’s hard to say. I think it’s really a mindset. There are some attorneys who really prefer the billable hour, and I think they prefer it because their whole business model is based and leveraged on it. They bill by the hour. They have associates who are doing more work. I’ve seen some practice management advisors encourage people to comb through their files and find more work that can be done and then hire somebody to do it and bill that out and bill more time. So, that’s really more a mindset issue, because as long as you’re thinking about a file as something to squeeze more hours out of, you’re really never going to change over. So, I think you just have to have, just make a mindset shift that you’re delivering a result or a solution, a deliverable. That’s what people are paying for. And that’s what we’re accustomed to seeing in, you know, any other kind of contract, you pay for deliverables. And so, I think if you think of it more along those lines, you can start thinking about ways to develop this flat-fee system to make it more profitable for you and start thinking of ways that you can define your scope of service. I mean, you can offer different products. You don’t have to offer the divorce where you respond to 75 motions to compel. You can have your flat feet cover three motions, and then do an add-on if there are more. Start thinking through your case. But it’s really a mindset shift. And there are some attorneys who are still just very much wedded to the billable hour because I think, at the end of the day, their profit model is based on it.
Gyi Tsakalakis: Right. And I’ll tell you, Conrad, in the stories that I hear from the lawyers that have made the jump. I was just talking to this, he is an employer side lawyer. It’s when they see, so as Carolyn’s point out the mindset, it’s when they actually are able to decouple the amount of time that they spent to the value that they’ve created for the client. So, in this particular case, it took them, you know they filed, I think they filed one motion and a case was dismissed, and the client was like, “Oh my gosh. Like, you just saved my business”, and my friend was like, “This just took me 30 minutes and I billed him at my hourly rate for 30 minutes”. And, obviously this client would have paid a lot more for that and it was like, you know, and vice versa where a lot of lawyers that I’ve seen that are in billable and they see somebody else, they see another lawyer deliver some kind of value to a client in a way and they ask him, you know, “How much did you bill for that?” And, you know, they talk about how their actual — well, the billing’s not tied to the amount of time I spent —
Conrad Saam: Yeah, that’s right.
Gyi Tsakalakis: When they see that, that I think is the first time that kind of that mindset shift begins to take hold.
Conrad Saam: I agree. And we’re going to cut to a break. We are waffling on a way off schedule already.
Gyi Tsakalakis: That’s with you.
Conrad Saam: But do you remember, I asked you the other day, do you think David Baker would give me an hour of his time? I offered him a thousand dollars and he said, no, it’s 16 for the whole product. And he’s right, right? And he would not spend an hour with me because he’s got something else.
Gyi Tsakalakis: He doesn’t’ sell time.
Conrad Saam: He doesn’t sell time. He sells value, and the value is facilitating that transaction. Anyway, let’s cut to break, and we’re going to start on the opposite side of this conversation. We are going to talk about Google My Business, reviews, small law firms and how to play in that game.
[Music]
Gyi Tsakalakis: No one cites routine drafting as the reason they chose to become a lawyer. But that’s where a lot of time goes for solo practitioners and small firms.
(00:15:01)
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[Music]
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Gyi Tsakalakis: Welcome back. So now, we want to talk about Google My Business and virtual law practices. So, kind of setting this up, some of the big issues and we want to go deeper on this. We think this is a really important subject. And, actually, this segment emerged from a conversation that Carolyn, Conrad and I had a little while ago. So, Google My Business, big picture. It’s the free tool you can go register for, put your business information on Google. It’s going to take up some serious real estate for searches on your name and your firm name, and it also powers these local pack results, which are the little map packs that show up in search results for searches, you know, practice area plus lawyer, so divorce lawyer in Chicago or that kind of thing. And they have guidelines and we’ll let these in the show notes, too.
But the short version is, is that Google for the Google My Business program, you’re either basically bucketed into a brick-and-mortar, meaning you have a physical office location, got an address where you actually receive in this context clients, you know, service clients at your location. Or, you’re a service area business where, hey, you don’t actually serve clients at a physical location, and so you create your service area and you remove your address. And, it got us thinking about how this impacts various lawyers and solos and smalls, particularly, because, you know, the instant thing that we think about is, is like well, if you don’t have a brick-and-mortar, are you disadvantaged in terms of visibility? Are you disadvantage in terms of, like, the features that you might have for your business? And so, we wanted to kind of open that conversation up. And, you know, really, I think the TLDR is, is that there are some serious competitive disadvantages to firms, especially solos and smalls, and those that don’t have physical office locations. Who wants to start to navigate some of this stuff?
Conrad Saam: Well, I think one really important thing to note here is these service area businesses were typically set up for people like plumbers or locksmiths, right? And so —
Gyi Tsakalakis: They come to you.
Conrad Saam: They come to you, right? Which is also not really the law firm model, right? And so, the law firm model, especially in these days of Zoom and COVID, it’s struggling in here, and the solos, I think, are particularly hit hard, which is exactly why I wanted to bring in Carolyn to talk about this. Carolyn, as you’ve talked to law firms, especially small or solos, dealing with Google My Business, what are some of the biggest frustrations that they’re seeing?
Carolyn Elefant: So, I asked around about whether Google’s policy of penalizing or making it more difficult for a solely virtual office to get some real estate on Google My Business had impacted them, and there have been a couple of firms that had gone from brick-and-mortar to virtual, and when they did, they found that their reviews weren’t displaying anymore, they weren’t showing up on search anymore. And so, those are the kind of responses that I received from them. And that’s something that’s very troubling. And the reason it’s troubling is because a lot of virtual firms, not all, but many virtual firms are set up with the express intent of serving underserved parts of the population by making legal services more affordable, or serving people who are very busy and can’t come into a law office. And many times, that target audience for the virtual firm are also people who don’t necessarily have a friend who has used an attorney or has hired an attorney, and so, that person can’t get a referral. I mean, in many cases, if you’re dealing with other populations, they can, you know, talk to a friend, get a referral. So, they’re going to go to the internet and these are the providers that they’re looking for, and they can’t find them because they’ve been displaced by these big brick-and-mortar shops that are hogging up the first three lines or the first page of the internet.
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So I mean, to me this is an access to justice problem and what’s interesting about this is that a lot of the voices we traditionally associate with access to justice like LegalZoom or document automation. They don’t really care about this issue because they have the money from their VC backing to buy paid search or do whatever it is you need to do to be on the first page of Google. So this is not an issue for them. But in terms of people who are interested in access to justice, with individuals, being able to find local attorneys to help with domestic violence cases, or small wheels or bankruptcy from purely virtual practice, they need to be able to find virtual law firms online, and that’s something that isn’t happening. And it’s — I’ve always been a fan of Google. I always liked this idea of online search, but it’s kind of startling that it can be blocked this way. And I guess the last point I wanted to make is just that, you know, I mean, someone small firms have always been disadvantaged financially when it comes to publicity. I mean, you think about the Yellow Pages, there’s always some, usually, all white male law firm on the back cover, you know, call 1-800 call me and solos, couldn’t afford that kind of listing. But I think there’s a difference because the Yellow Pages were not as dominant as Google is. Google has become kind of the default place where people look for attorneys online. So the impact of not being able to compete, I think is much broader and it goes beyond just not being able to spend money, but being able to engage in the service that Google is providing that supposed to make people more accessible and is working against these virtual law firms.
Conrad Saam: Hey, Gyi. I’m going to ask a clarifying question. Let’s talk through the virtual law firm. Why does the virtual law firm not show up in local? From the Google perspective, right? Why is that not really a thing?
Gyi Tsakalakis: Well, I don’t know that it doesn’t at all, you know, when we were doing our anecdotal research and preparation. I think we noticed that the overwhelming majority of listings that showed up for any of this column non-brand query. So, practice area, plus lawyer plus city, they were brick and mortars. And so, you know, I think Google’s struggling with this dichotomy of service area in this different context, because if you do a search for locksmith, as you mentioned, you’re getting all service area businesses, there’s no real, there’s no issue there, right?
And so, like Google’s showing, Google’s thinking as I think Google’s thinking I always kind of laugh because it’s like they’re thinking is terrifying. But in any event Google’s thinking, somebody searches for a lawyer, they’re looking for brick-and-mortar law firm. That’s what they’re looking for. And so we’re going to show them firms for the most part, not always. But for the most part firms that have physical brick-and-mortars. You know, there’s a thing that came out of this when we first had this conversation and didn’t dawn on me, but it is a very one-to-one is the issue of Google has published that review count is a factor in ranking. And so, you know Conrad you can kind of take this away because you brought this point up, but the big firms, they have a tremendous competitive advantage because they can do it more volume. They’re going to generate more reviews. And so you can be the best solo lawyer in the world, who’s delivering, tremendous value for clients, but you’re only taking on five clients a year, client a year.
Conrad Saam: Yeah, at the risk of co-opting John Morgan’s frankly, awful, new tagline, size matters. When it comes to review count, honestly, size does matter. It further disadvantages the small law firm and I mean Carolyn this is one of the things that you and I talked about the other day. It’s just it’s very hard for the solo practitioner who sees 10 matters a month to compete with the Walmart of law that seeing a thousand when reviews matter and the volume of reviews matter.
Carolyn Elefant: Yeah, and you know, the irony is, is you can sometimes if you look at a small law firm’s page, you see kind of the reviews that are provided, they’re very in depth and they give a lot of information about how this attorney help them with their practice, and they’re much more informative than some of these almost drive-by reviews, which are the result of, you know, sending or texting, emails or messages to people to review the firm or they review the firm for just, you know, making a phone call and answering a question, but not necessarily hiring them. So it’s a perverse problem too because it leads to people trying to gather reviews which are not necessarily inaccurate but may be inaccurate because there are situations that are out of context and so reviews can be a very powerful tool to communicate information.
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And in fact, in the Clio Trends report, which was really interesting and surprised me is that according to their study, they found that personal reviews ranked just a smidge, a couple of percentage points higher than personal referrals in individual’s decision to hire an attorney, which really surprised me. But it reinforces how important people consider these reviews to be. And so if they’re not accurate, that’s a big problem.
Gyi Tsakalakis: Right, and I’ll even do you want worse, is there are plenty of lawyers out there that are spending a lot of money to have completely fake fraudulent reviews on their profiles and you know, lawyers hear that and they’re like lawyers won’t do that. Like sadly, we know that they do.
Conrad Saam: Oh yes! They do.
Gyi Tsakalakis: The other issue that is kind of comes into and Conrad and I know this because we look at call tracking reports and you know, I tell clients all the time like you can rank number one all day. But if the person the number two spot has more and higher quality reviews than you, your phone’s not going to ring because these reviews do matter so much but let’s face it, Google is an ad machine, they’re an ad platform, 99% of their revenue comes from people clicking ads, there are ads in the local pack, so that’s a thing. But when you’re talking purely about Google My Business, it’s completely organic. You’re not paying Google for your visibility there, but it seems that if they’re going to put this out there, they’re going to put business information out there and it’s you know, because they’re the one we see all the time is people have, you know, fake business names and lead generation companies will create fake listings and fake phone numbers and you know, it’s bad enough when that stuff’s going on for like I got you’re looking for like someone to fix your car, but it’s that much worse when you’re dealing with what Google would call your money or your life when you’re talking about lawyers and doctors.
In fact, there’s a case we talked about this before out of Pennsylvania where a client is suing the firm because they claim that they relied on a fake review, but it seems to me that there needs to be some accountability by the platform in this case. If you’re going to put this information out there that you got to bear some kind of accountability, but at the same time then people say section 230. We don’t want platforms being liable, I don’t know.
Conrad Saam: So the interesting thing to bring us back to Carolyn’s point about the Yellow Pages. I actually remember, Carolyn this is a conversation where you and I had in Florida. I can’t even remember where we were. This is a long time ago where we are talking about the Internet opening up opportunity for the small and solo like detect leaning savvy, small solo. The internet opened up that opportunity and it had evolved away from that. And I still remember this client even made thrown this in my book where you said the internet is the new back cover of the Yellow Pages, right? I still remember that. So, Carolyn the firm’s that are being successful, the local firms, the solos, the smaller firms that are being successful in local, right, and with Google My Business, do you have any feel of where it’s working for them, or where it’s not? What are the things that are making the difference for that local firm?
Carolyn Elefant: One of the areas where I see firm succeeding locally is having a real local presence. So there are a lot of mom owned firms for family law or for estate planning and they kind of get into the mom communities, the mom social media groups, the in person or when we used to have in-person PTA meetings and baby and me and giving out business cards and speaking to local mom groups. I see that groups like that particularly in the area where I live, are very successful. The problem with that is, is those types of groups and those types of activities, attract certain people and many times again, women who were underserved who are working full-time, and raising children don’t have access to that. And so, I’m not sure how those populations are targeted. But usually the people, you know, the smaller firms I’ve seen or successful of very, successful, social media presences, Instagram, some of the newer ones, maybe TikTok for younger people and are really doing more of a community issue.
I’ve seen if there’s been a lot of articles out now on the creator economy. And I think that the creator economy and the way that creators are monetizing their talent and their value is very similar, has some lessons for how very small firms can do it. And one thing that it talks about creators is they target community or they build community, not audience, because audience is so big and so broad that you really have to have money and numbers to be able to compete in that. So I think with virtual law firms or smaller, solos, and small firms. The way they have the most success has by really drilling down focusing on a community or target audience and just like targeting the hell out of it.
Gyi Tsakalakis: Yeah. That is such a — thank you so much for sharing that and we will include in the show notes. Seth Godin talks a lot about this and he has a post called clusters that I reference a lot of times. But it’s exactly this, right? You want to know what you do? You end around Google all together. Forget about Google, right? Let the people that are going to spend the big bucks on pay-per-click and all kind of stuff go do that, but build your community, you know, it’s almost like full circle because you’re going back to the things that we did 100 years ago. It’s nurturing relationships. It’s being there in your community supporting the causes and passions of others in your community.
As you mentioned, these social networks, they provide us a platform to be able to do this stuff online now, so you don’t actually have to go to the in-person events in your community, but each of these organizations or affinity groups or whatever you want to call them. They tend to have a group or a community that’s growing on. Some online platform too. So I think that’s fantastic advice and that I think that’s the way to short-circuit the system. You know, don’t go out in this — be like, I’m beholding to Google. Let’s go actually find other ways to build brand, to build reputation, to build relationships. I mean a more traditional sense. But using technology.
Conrad Saam: We were talking about this the other day at the agency. There is a job description somewhere in the future for really solid legal marketing agencies to help local firms become more engaged in the community, right? I don’t think it comes naturally to many lawyers. It comes very naturally to a very small number. And I really believe there is a job function. It’s a combination of PR social outreach, relationship building and like sponsorship dollars and stuff like, there is that job that is part of the legal marketing world somewhere between one and four years from now. I do believe that. Next time unless you are legal marketing, we are going to go deeper into Google My Business and section 230. I think it would be a really, really fascinating conversation. And we would like you to help us build our community. If at all possible. Leave reviews, reach out on social, share how amazing Gyi and Carolyn in spite of their co-hosts. Would love to hear your feedback, neither otherwise. And if you are from Google, please do not send this on to anyone who you work with, because Gyi just told you the entire audience to do an end-around of the Google services.
Gyi Tsakalakis: And Carolyn, thank you so much for joining us. Really appreciate your time and insight on this topic and great chat with you.
Carolyn Elefant: Yes, thank you for having me. It’s nice and fast and efficient.
Gyi Tsakalakis: And thank you dear listeners again for joining us for another episode of Launch our Legal Marketing. As always, please do subscribe, review, comment. #LHLM. We’d love to hear your feedback. Until next time.
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Gyi Tsakalakis: I guess I ran out of juice.
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Legal Marketing experts Gyi and Conrad dive into the biggest issues in legal marketing today.