The 12 Days of Legal Marketing: The Musical!

Episode Notes

Transcript

[Music]

Conrad Saam: Welcome dear listener. If Gyi and I are correct when we were talking about when we should launch this show, when we should actually throw it out on the internet, we came to the conclusion that we should do this during the holidays. Gyi, why are we posting this during the holidays?

Gyi Tsakalakis: Because everybody finally is going to take hopefully a little time off to themselves. Stop answering emails. Stop doing all the things that you do and sit on the couch or other soft seating and relax for a second and maybe relax to the sweet sounds of Lunch Hour Legal Marketing.

Conrad Saam: See, and I was a little more cynical. I thought this was the escape my mother-in-law. I’m going to put my headphones on and not my mother-in-law.

Gyi Tsakalakis:  was going to say not my mother-in-law.

Conrad Saam: Mine definitely does not listen to this podcast, so I think we are safe.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Mine doesn’t either but I really enjoy her company. So I’m very grateful.

Conrad Saam: That’s awesome. That’s a win.

Gyi Tsakalakis: I know, I’m lucky.

Conrad Saam: Why it’s a huge win.

Gyi Tsakalakis: I was looked at it like you marry the whole family. So –

Conrad Saam: All right, did you interview the mother-in-law first.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Several times.

Conrad Saam: Okay.

Gyi Tsakalakis: That’s for another episode.

Conrad Saam: Different episode, all right. Well, that is awesome. I hope you are all enjoying your family and if you are taking a little time to reflect or escaping creepy uncle Marv to the podcast, welcome to our amazing kind of break time podcast. Gyi, what are we talking about today?

Gyi Tsakalakis: We are going to do a quick rundown of some short news and then we have a song for you but that’s a secret, it’s a secret.

Conrad Saam: And until then let’s get the song that you all know and love. Oh So Well Money Makes The World Go Round.

[Music]

Intro: Welcome to Lunch Hour legal Marketing, teaching you how to promote market and make fat stacks for your legal practice here on Legal Talk Network.

[Music]

Conrad Saam: All right, welcome to Lunch Hour Legal Marketing. Happy holidays, to all of you and we hope you are overcoming your overindulgence on figgy pudding or some other things. Let’s first hit the news.

Ho ho. We got Santa news. Wow. All right, Gyi, we talked last week about AI generated content. What’s China doing about AI generated content?

Gyi Tsakalakis: They are banning AI generated content without watermarks. Now, look, I should say, they say they’re banning the AI generated content.

Conrad Saam: They think they are banning.

Gyi Tsakalakis: They probably don’t think they are. They probably are — that’s just, that’s their PR machine. But, you know, the point being last time I checked there aren’t any watermarks right now and I don’t think that people are going to be able to least right now, unless you’re super (00:03:17). Maybe we talked about this last time, maybe Google can distinguish between AI generated and non AI, what do you say, human-generated I guess, non AI generate.

Conrad Saam: Content.

Gyi Tsakalakis: But clearly the issues that come out of the ChatGPT phenomenon continue to catch our attention.

Conrad Saam: I’m super fascinated by this. I have given you some garbage for staying on Twitter with all of Elon Musk’s moves. Oneof our good friends is now off Twitter, what’s going on with Popehat?

Gyi Tsakalakis: Popehat has finally saying goodbye to Twitter and in fact as a huge Popehat fan, Ken White fan, I would suggest that you check out the Popehat report on, Substack, we will put a link but Ken publishes over there and, he makes the points that he’s been making on Twitter, Twitter and Musk, they’re free to do what they want and us users are free to make decisions as we want.

He’s got a lot of great insights over there, so I would check that out. I struggle with myself. Will we continue to be on Twitter.I mean TBD.

Conrad Saam: TBD. And finally andI know this feels like a plug coming from you. So I’m going to plug it myself, text your registration open. If you can’t get enough of Conrad and Gyi in your headphones, come, join us in Chicago at TECHSHOW, you can get more Conrad and Gyi in real life in the Windy City in the coldest month in Chicago. We look forward to seeing you there.

(00:04:56)

Gyi Tsakalakis: Make sure you stop by Conrad’s autographing podcast station.

Conrad Saam: I’m autographing? How do you autograph a podcast?

Gyi Tsakalakis: You’ll have to come to Chicago to find out.

Conrad Saam: Okay. Yeah, there you go. I will be autographing the airways at TECHSHOW.

Gyi Tsakalakis: And now let’s dive in to the Legal Trends Report minute brought to you by Clio.

In addition to the benefits that cloud-based law practice management software has for relationships with clients we also see how these solutions influence the actual delivery of client services. Overall firms using cloud-based LPM software are less likely to offer meetings after hours and on weekends. At the same time however, they are more likely to offer communications during these times. In this way, being willing to stay in touch remotely could be a form of boundary setting that allows learners to balance work and life compared to spending extra hours in the office, communicating through phone, text, message or email is a more efficient and less destructive way to stay in touch with clients.

Giving that working after hours, and on weekends is becoming increasingly hard to avoid, cloud-based LPM software helps mitigate the challenges of off work hours. In fact, cloud-based LPM software users are 44% more likely to want to work throughout the day rather than then between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m. Overall64% more of cloud-based LPM users want to choose which hours they work.

So story here, it’s you get flexibility and interestingly this, I think this is a point that comes up a lot for us, but the ability to automate communication and create ways of asynchronously communicated and less destructive communication that’s really the power of what the technology does, right. Because you don’t have drop everything and go to an in-person meeting. You don’t have to drop everything and hop on a phone call.

Anyway, but it seems like pretty intuitive to me at this point. I mean, I am actually curious if you’re listening to this and you don’t use any form of law practice management software. Hit us up. We want to hear from how you’re managing your practice.

Conrad Saam: I have to imagine the Venn diagram overlap of, I listen to podcasts about legal marketing and I don’t use law practice management software. There’s like three people in that lap.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Well, we want to hear from those three people. Don’t be afraid. We are not going to out you on the podcast but I’m genuinely curious here in 2022. How if you’re still like know we are yellow pad and flip phone and —

Conrad Saam: You’re such an asshole. You’re like we’re not going to judge you and then you’re like yellow pad and flip phone.

Gyi Tsakalakis: I didn’t say judge. I said out. I said I am not going to judge. Anyway. You got something you want to say?

Conrad Saam: No, no, no go ahead, you are good, keep moving. There is no one who is going to cut, after that no one who is going to contact us and a couple of people are going to unsubscribe.

Gyi Tsakalakis: And I’m just going to assume that that’s because everybody’s using law practice management software and my own filter bubble will be reinforced.

Conrad Saam: There you go.

Gyi Tsakalakis: 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. And with that, let’s take a quick break.

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[Music]

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[Music]

Gyi Tsakalakis: So we’re back and we thought being that it’s around the holiday season. We would have a little fun and not to be dismissive of many of the other traditions and celebrations.We’re fond of some of these Christmassy songs. And so we have decided to present to you dear listener the 12 Days of Marketing.With that, let us begin Conrad. Would you like to sing the first —

(00:10:10)

Conrad Saam: I can’t sing for garbage. I don’t even sing in the shower.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Right. That’s part of the —

Conrad Saam: We just read this like poetically?

Gyi Tsakalakis: Sure. You can read poetically, but I’m singing.

Conrad Saam: Then you should start watch that. See how I turn that around, go ahead.

Gyi Tsakalakis: On the first day of Legal Marketing my true love gave to mea subscription to Conrad and Gyi. We start with the shameless plug.

Conrad Saam: Plug away, baby.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Does anybody on that listens to this, are they not subscribed? Are people randomly landing on this podcast?

Conrad Saam: A fair question. That’s a good question for our data people.

Gyi Tsakalakis: There’s a few from our data people. Just breaking news. There’s a few.

Conrad Saam: Breaking news in our chat bubble.

Gyi Tsakalakis: How are you finding us and not subscribing? I mean, I understand if you found us and you don’t want to subscribe but.

Conrad Saam: Especially after Gyi insulted everyone, moments ago.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Subscribe to the podcast. Share the podcast. Hey, if you’re sitting there at a holiday function, turn on Lunch Hour Legal Marketing and see what the family thinks.

Conrad Saam: My family will not listen to this. I can’t get them to, even my mom won’t listen to this.

Gyi Tsakalakis: There you go.

Conrad Saam: On the second day of Legal Marketing, my true love gave to me two blog posts, Gyi. Two blog posts a month because that’s what you need.

Gyi Tsakalakis: You got to buy a blog posts like lumber, and the more the better. You get it on — you can actually, in fact, you can get a lot of blog posts if you use chat GPT to churn out blog posts, right?

Conrad Saam: Yeah, this feels like Santa is cheating here. If you’re getting blog posts — are we getting AI written blog posts? That’s like a whole segment we did last week.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Make sure you have your watermarks.

Conrad Saam: Yeah, especially if you’re in China, you’ll end up dead. All right, this is starting to turn dark for The 12 Days of Legal Marketing. All right, what’s on the third day?

Gyi Tsakalakis: On the third day of Legal Marketing, my true love gave to me three Meh Links.

Conrad Saam: I like your singing. All right, why do we–

Gyi Tsakalakis: Thank you.

Conrad Saam: Why is your catch phrase Meh Links, Gyi? Why?

Gyi Tsakalakis: Because the SEO pontification community loves to talk about great content. Google talks about great content. The technical SEO –

Conrad Saam: Core Web Vitals, baby.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Core Web Vitals and all this other stuff.

Conrad Saam: Algo updates.

Gyi Tsakalakis: And then, doing this now for too long time and again, when all those other things are equal, it’s usually links that are the competitive difference maker. Now look, are there exceptions to that rule? Sure. Keywords in the business name field, much more powerful signal in local than links.

Conrad Saam: Fake reviews.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Fake reviews. Much more powerful signal than links. Proximity in local matters a lot, but a lot of that other stuff. If you’re listening, I challenge you. Show me a search result page where the majority of the listings or any of the listings are on sites, domains that they have no links. Maybe you can show me some local pack, spam, but for the most part, especially in traditional organic results, those sites have links and you can’t change my mind, but I’d like you to try.

Conrad Saam: All right, I’m going to try and sing this next one.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Excellent.

Conrad Saam: On the fourth day of Legal Marketing, my true love gave to me four dark social mentions.

Gyi Tsakalakis: There you go. Nice job, Conrad. You did it.

Conrad Saam: I’m not. When I was in high school, I played lots of instruments, and then I went to college and I took music theory one, and I realized what a horrible, untalented musician I was. It was a great piece of personality.

Gyi Tsakalakis: What was your favorite instrument?

Conrad Saam: Played reeds. I played all sorts of reeds, but none of it well, and I thought I was amazing and then I went to college and learned just how bad I was.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Well, let’s talk about dark social mentions.

Conrad Saam: Can we track them?

Gyi Tsakalakis: Sure.

Conrad Saam: You can track dimensions.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Yeah, sure you can. And you can put an open text box field on your form. People will tell you how they found you.

Conrad Saam: Bingo. So, the key with dark social — we did a full show on dark social. We did a couple of others where we touched on dark social. I will tell you. I believe that dark social is the big differentiator in 2023 for generating not just brand awareness, but brand affinity for your law firm. And so, I remain have been and am increasingly excited about dark social in the legal marketing world for 2023.

Gyi Tsakalakis: You know what it really does too? It helps you not cut off your nose despite your face, because we know the marketing people, they direct response attribution it’s like “well, we can’t show any conversions are coming from this, so turn it off.”

(00:15:03)

We can’t show there’s any conversions from your podcast. We can’t show there’s any conversions from your local networking event, and then you stop doing it. And then now you’re stuck paying high click costs on AdWords, and then they’re like —

Conrad Saam: Which you should still do. Do it well.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Right.

Conrad Saam: Right, but this dark social is if you have the time and money to invest in building out dark social, game on. And if you don’t know what we’re talking about, we should put a link to our dark social episode because it was one of our best this year. All right, I interrupted your beautiful singing.

Gyi Tsakalakis: No, it’s all good. On the fifth day of legal marketing, my true love gave to me five viral videos. Look, it’s very hard to go viral, but you know what I tell people about the viral thing. You don’t need to be viral like you’re thinking viral. Just be viral in your local community. Be viral to your small raving fans. Be viral to your maybe it’s your professional network or there’s an organization you’re active in that’s who you need to be viral to.

Conrad Saam: And I think in Gyi’s point here, there is this misperception that without scale, social is useless, and your ultimate goal in social is volume and fundamentally disagree with that. The opportunity to have a conversation and a real engagement with a group of five people. That is unprecedented, right? We can do that now.

Gyi Tsakalakis: I’m going to tell you a super clever trick, and this is a nod to Ken Levinson and Jay Stephanie, we talked about them in the context of the food all the time, but they do something else that’s really quite clever. They do videos of how they use different software. And you know what happens? Lawyers who have the similar issue with configuring, whether it’s Filevine or something, go and search for like, how do you do X, Y and Z thing in Filevine? And, you know, it pops up videos of them. And then you know what they do? They reach out to them and say, Hey, thanks a lot for the Filevine. I saw you guys are doing this thing on Filevine. I’d love to have a quick call with how you’re doing that? And guess what happens? You just built a new relationship with your video.

So, again, is that viral? Maybe not, but you’re viral in that community of other lawyers who might refer your business because you’re doing videos of your configuring Filevine.

Conrad Saam: And so the key here to me is not the size but the quality, right? What are you actually talking through and I would much rather you focus on delivering great quality content like Filevine how to use. Whatever it may be. And if quality and consistency, otherwise don’t bother.

Do I have to sing again? This is a special one just for you.

Gyi Tsakalakis: You don’t have to.

Conrad Saam: No, I’m going to do it because this is all about you. On the sixth day of Legal Marketing my true love gave to me, this is my favorite of all the 12, six Gyi’s a-ranting.

Gyi Tsakalakis: I mean, what can I say? No words.

Conrad Saam: It’s funny, when we started here, I was the kind of bad cup and you were the good cup. We’ve kind of traded places there. You went off a couple of times this year. You really did.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Yeah, we had a couple of my real sensitive issues. But I don’t know, I’m like, got to be me.

Conrad Saam: What is your most sensitive issue that pisses you off?

Gyi Tsakalakis: That’s so hard. I don’t know. I guess, when it comes to mind, probably because it’s holidays, I’m pretty sure to say this, but it’s the inauthentic canned marketing stuff. Whether it’s a newsletter or whether it’s a social post or some other just like where it’s just like you can’t do better than that. And it’s like you paid for it because someone told you, you had to do it or you thought it was what you needed to do. And again, sometimes it just makes you like these firms less even though you actually know them and you like them as people, then you see some of this stuff and you’re just like, “Why are you doing that?”

Conrad Saam: Why bother, right?

Gyi Tsakalakis: Why bother?

Conrad Saam: My biggest annoyance are the marketing agencies that see the whole world through the lens of what they do. You need X because Y and wow, almighty, that’s exactly what I do. And I think the marketing agencies that are single threaded tactically don’t see the whole chessboard and I’m so tired of listening to people talk about why TikTok is better than blogs, or why websites are the most important thing, or why video is the wave of the future. I’m really fascinated with this chat GPT thing, but I’m not going to jump exclusively on that.

(00:20:02)

And so I’ve said this before, if you are tactically single-threaded, you can’t be strategic and I’m just so tired of the marketing agencies talking about, why, what they do is the thing because it’s not —

Gyi Tsakalakis: You just remind me of another one, all these Facebook ads where it’s like zero to 10 million dollars in fees in the next six months if you just do this one secret trick.

Conrad Saam: One secret trick, four hours a week.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Right.

Conrad Saam: Oh, and limited seeding.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Of course. Act now.

Conrad Saam: Act now. Our course, usually 899, now available to you for just $29. Let’s sort of break. We need to come back to the holiday spirit and be magnanimous and friendly as opposed to negative. So, after the break, Conrad and Gyi are going to come back to happy and positive to end your year.

[Music]

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Gyi Tsakalakis: Welcome back. On the seventh day of legal marketing my true love gave to me, seven pay-per-clicks a clicking, that was a little bit — I don’t think that lined up with seven but good enough, seven pay-per-clicks a clicking, where were your thoughts on pay-per-clicks a clicking these days Conrad?

Conrad Saam: You know, whether we love it or not we are still seeing tons of volume go through those pay per clicks a clicking and this is one of those situations where usually you have a fairly linear trackable path. It’s all that automatic tracking that, you know, Gyi and I have been talking about for years getting someone from the click to the website to a dynamic tracking phone number to an intake management software time at all together. Like you can you can make that happen. The key of course with pay-per-clicks a clicking is being very, very good at understanding what your costs are. And also frankly because it’s so expensive that people who are doing better on pay-per-clicks a clicking are those who are super, super efficient. They do a really good job at turning those clicks into clients, not just phone calls and part of that this is the pure math works out is they’re less picky about their clients because in order to get the cost per acquisition that is appropriate for them, they have to increase the number of acquisitions on that fixed cost, so that is my take on the clicks a clicking and we’re still doing — I’d love to know our data but I’m guessing 30% to 45% of the business that we tried for our clients are on pay-per-clicks a clicking or the LSAs, right?

Gyi Tsakalakis: That’s what I was going to ask you about what about pay-per-leads a leading?

Conrad Saam: Pay-per-leads, would’ve gone well with the 11 (00:24:00) leaping, ha-ha, here we go. Pay-per-leads a leading. You know, the pay leads — again these linear experiences, if you get your metrics really, really solid and you understand what your appropriate cost of acquisition is, and you work to improve that, right, these can be very, very effective. Now the other thing just as a pure LSA rant is it’s got an increasingly difficult to move the needle on LSAs. You’re either in or out, you don’t know why, they’re up, they’re down, it is like, it’s like if a marketing channel had a multi-personality disorder it would be local service ads.

Gyi Tsakalakis: A lot of testing going on there I believe.

Conrad Saam: Testing from Google, but very difficult for us to test for our clients because we have no idea what the heck is going on. So I am a fan that it generates clients for our clients but I hate it in that it is so unbelievably difficult to manage and it is insanely unpredictable.

(00:25:03)

Gyi Tsakalakis: So my — I know we’ve gone long on this one we weren’t supposed to, but I have a hunch that we’re going to start seeing some data on a correlation between Local Pack visibility and leads a-leaping or leads a-leading.

Conrad Saam: Leads a-leading, purchase leads and local packs?

Gyi Tsakalakis: I think your visibility — I think there’s some overlap in the factors that they’re using in Local Pack visibility and their likelihood to show your ad in LSA.

Conrad Saam: So you’re saying that Local Pack visibility will be correlated with LSA visibility, but you’re not saying that LSA advertising is going to correlate to Local Pack visibility?

Gyi Tsakalakis: No, I know there are people that hold that viewpoint.

Conrad Saam: No, I know. I mean it’s the same with pay-per-click, right, and Google is very, very explicit about the no on that for all sorts of antitrust issues which I don’t believe they really want to — they don’t want to play that game in the judicial system.

Gyi Tsakalakis: It’s not worth it to them.

Conrad Saam: Yeah.

Gyi Tsakalakis: But hey, you know what, it’s a really fun talking point for agency people to try to pitch on.

Conrad Saam: Wow. All right, I told you we were trying to move away from cynicism and you bring us right back. Six, Gyi’s a-ranting.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Gyi’s a-ranting.

Conrad Saam: All right, number eight, on the eighth day of legal marketing, my true — I’m doing this in kind of the spirit of, I don’t know, my singing is terrible. Let me try again.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Do it your way. You do you.

Conrad Saam: Do it your way, you do you, be your own boater. On the eighth day of Legal Marketing my true love gave to me eight emails lists, emailing. Wow, that’s a bit of a tongue twister. Email, still effective Gyi, yes or no?

Gyi Tsakalakis: Number one underutilized tactic sending regular emails, forget about email marketing, forget about nurture campaigns, forget about newsletters, you should be emailing people that you have a relationship with, whether it’s referral sources in some context, form, or clients, people in your local community, real emailing, you know, like it or not, people, they’re into email, and if you do it well, it’s one of the best ways to build that brand affinity that we’ve been talking about recently so much.

People want to hear from you. It’s all about making sure that you’re actually like, you know, number one emailing people that want to hear from you and then sending them something that they want to hear, but that doesn’t have to be like my 10 steps after a car accident thing. It can be like hey, happy holidays.

Conrad Saam: But not with the generic Veterans Day flag.

Gyi Tsakalakis: No. In fact, you should record a song of you singing and send a link to it in an email, people would love to hear that.

Conrad Saam: Okay. So I’m going to riff on that, definitely not going to record a song of Conrad singing. But BombBomb, if you are not using video in your email, check it out. It’s easy. It’s like $400 a year and you can automatically insert video into your email, personalized video. Cool stuff. All right. Move on.

Gyi Tsakalakis: On the ninth day of Legal Marketing my true love gave to me nine pages of ranking. This is the SEO day.

Conrad Saam: The ninth day, and on the ninth day created SEO. Okay, ranking reports, important or not Gyi?

Gyi Tsakalakis: The way you’re asking it I’m going to say not, they’re not as important as say a conversion report that shows you that you actually generated qualified consults from organic traffic, but maybe a ranking report is better than say impressions or likes.

Conrad Saam: More likes, more likes everywhere.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Well, I’ll give you a quick little story. So years ago, when we first started our agency, we did ranking reports and then I started digging into like how ranking tools actually work and I was like we can’t report on this because they’re so wrong.

Conrad Saam: The clients love it man, the clients love it.

Gyi Tsakalakis: The clients want it, and again, we still track rankings and we still have clients who insist on I want a ranking report, but when we take those clients on, we have to have a lot of education around, get ready for there to be flux, get ready for there to be all sorts of things that are happening. And in fact, we just had a prospective client come in and we were like, look, we’re just not the right shop for you because you are so focused on this one ranking and we just — we can’t promise you something that’s impossible to promise; it’s not the right thing to do, and by the way, even if that client was having success, even if we were generating them, whatever their metric was, return on ad spend, return on investment, target cost per acquisition, whatever those things are, it wouldn’t matter because they would wake up one morning, get their ranking report, see a dip and then be like you guys aren’t doing your job.

(00:30:03)

Conrad Saam: Yeah. On the sixth day of Legal Marketing my true love gave to me six Gyi’s a-ranting, right.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Sorry.

Conrad Saam: No, no, you’re all good. It’s the ranking report. So what’s interesting, I’ve very much evolved my theory on the ranking reports, I do believe that there is value in looking at your high converting pages and especially if you have a very large site, nailing down those pages that are ranking for high converting terms and understanding what can be done at the individual page level to make some changes and move the needle and it’s a prioritization exercise.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Yeah. Well, another one I love, I love watching the local share of voice grow, right? So if you’re using Places Scout or Local Falcon and you’ve got — you’re looking at a composite visibility score across a 100 different queries and you’re seeing that you’re actually going up like directionally, that’s a great way to look at rankings, right?

Conrad Saam: With the caveat that those 100 different queries aren’t like how to make chicken soup for my cat, right?

Gyi Tsakalakis: Right. They’ve got to be relevant queries. Ideally, they are queries that you know convert from paid.

Conrad Saam: Right, using cross-channel data. All right, well done. On the tenth day of Legal Marketing my true love gave to me ten state bars are raging. Gyi and the state bars at odds with each other. What’s going on with the state bar? What are we talking about this year?

Gyi Tsakalakis: Talk about Gyi’s a-ranting.

Conrad Saam: I know.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Well, look, it varies state by state. Some states are becoming much more innovative, but the ones that really frustrate me are the ones that are really make it difficult for lawyers to communicate the value of their services, right? They just can’t distinguish on anything, right?

The other one that always gets me mad; we brought up, Florida has a rule that says you can’t write an ad in appeals.

Conrad Saam: You are done, just say Florida, right, you don’t need an explainer after that.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Emotions. In fact, I should check in on this. I’m a little bit behind the times, but at one point Texas wanted you to print out all of your web pages and all your ads.

Conrad Saam: We used to do that. We had a client, every time — we printed everything and it was our job to send everything into the bar in Texas.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Print your tweets.

Conrad Saam: I would say it’s the bars who assume that people — general populace is so stupid that they need to be protected from lawyers using words like expertise.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Yeah. South Carolina, you can’t —

Conrad Saam: State bar legislator in South Carolina. Yeah.

Gyi Tsakalakis: And I feel for the lawyers and then, not another one more quick rant here. But if this Rule 5.4 changes, I can’t wait to see the intersection between non-lawyer owned law firms and the local advertising rules of professional conduct. Show me how that’s going to shake out.

Conrad Saam: Yeah. Who does that favor Gyi? Who does that hurt?

Gyi Tsakalakis: Well, you’re assuming a lot, but if you assume that it’s only — that those rules are only going to continue to apply to lawyer owned law firms like they do now, you’ve got a challenge, right, because we all know if you go do a search right now, Avvo and Martindale and Super Lawyers, guess what they all get to do, best lawyers in Chicago in the titles of all of their pages. Lawyers can’t do that.

Conrad Saam: Gyi, does the word best impact click-through rates?

Gyi Tsakalakis: Oh, it certainly can. Do click-through rates impact rankings?

Conrad Saam: Do click-through rates impact rankings? Yeah.

Gyi Tsakalakis: I mean think about that. Think about how unfair that is. Anyway.

Conrad Saam: And that’s why we continue to see the directory showing up in the SERPs.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Right, and the links that they have; they have ton of links, especially Avvo, they’ve got a lot of good links. How did they get all those links?

Conrad Saam: Wow, thank you. I am blushing. I am blushing behind my podcast.

Gyi Tsakalakis: On the eleventh day of Legal Marketing my true love gave to me 11 top-ranked chickens.

Conrad Saam: 11 top-ranked chickens, this is all yours today.

Gyi Tsakalakis: This is all yours Conrad.

Conrad Saam: This might be one of my favorite projects. For those of you who don’t know what Gyi is talking about just Google Zippy the Chicken and read that story. True story, and Zippy actually was injured this year. We have nursed Zippy back to health. Zippy is back in the chicken coop, doing much better.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Glad to hear that. And if you don’t have the time to go search for Zippy the Chicken, it is a story of the lamentations on lawyer awards, right?

Conrad Saam: It is a disgusting, very real parable about how awful the legal marketing industry is. So just when you thought that we couldn’t get any lower, boy oh boy, and I think we’re continuing to dig deeper. We are digging below Lawyers of Distinction’s fake awards. Let’s leave it at that. All right.

On the twelfth day of Legal Marketing my true love gave to me 12 intake experts.

(00:35:07)

Gyi Tsakalakis: Nice job.

Conrad Saam: This is why I can’t sing. I told you I was not musical and I just proved that to everyone.

Gyi Tsakalakis: I don’t know what you’re talking about. Plus, Lockwood is going to auto-tune you so you’re going to sound like —

Conrad Saam: Lockwood, I want to sound like — I can’t even name someone who uses auto-tune obnoxiously, but let’s do it.

Gyi Tsakalakis: You’re going to be, does Justin Bieber auto-tune; that goes to show my pop culture?

Conrad Saam: I’m 48, I can’t answer that question.

Gyi Tsakalakis: So intake, I think we’ve always known that intake is so important. I’ve got to tell you, I think reflecting back on all the years that I’ve been doing this, that’s probably the place that you probably should spend the most of your time because none of this other stuff matters if you screw up intake, right?

Conrad Saam: Yeah, yeah, 100%, and I suspect our path to getting into intake was exactly the same. We had clients who were annoyed about none of the marketing is working, and then we got into intake and we’re like, you know what, the thing that’s not working is the person who does intake, literally he is not working, and that’s turned things around. But we’ve gotten really deep into intake through third-party calling services like Posh Virtual Receptionist; that is a shameless plug for one of our sponsors, all the way down to evaluating individual calls, calling yourself, pretending that you’re a client using intake management software to smooth the transition and automate processes that can be automated, linking into Calendly to get people further down the funnel as quickly as possible.

And I think most of you — many of you, maybe not most of you, I don’t want to insult all of you, but many of you still view intake as very easy because the person who you are paying the least in your organization is the person that you put in charge of this most important of jobs and so get yourself over that misperception.

Gyi Tsakalakis: And that’s for the people that actually have someone dedicated doing this. I mean there are still a ton of lawyers they’re like, yeah, who fields your calls? I do. Who fields your calls at 9 o’clock at night? I do. Who fields your calls when you’re at motion hearing? I do. No, you don’t, you know where those calls go, to the next lawyer.

Conrad Saam: The next search on Google, yeah.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Oh no, they’ll leave a voice message for me. Huh, voice message? Do you leave voice messages for people?

Conrad Saam: Why local service ads aren’t working for you in a nutshell. You pay per lead and the lead leaves you a voicemail, you’re done. Good night. Goodbye. You are not playing the game.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Right. And it’s not even just that either, because then you get into the people that you’ve paid somebody and they’re friendly, they’re a friendly person, but they don’t actually know how to qualify a prospect, and I’ve heard these calls too where it’s like oh no, that was a qualified prospect and they just turned them away from the firm. I’m like, what? They’re paying someone to — whether it’s outsourced or virtual or someone at the firm. Like focus on your intake folks, 12, you need 12 intake experts.

Conrad Saam: This is a true story which I cannot share the audio recording of, but I’ll share the anecdote. We literally had a front desk at a law firm because everyone was busy right now. You can go back and there’s lots of lawyers on Google that you can contact, literally said that to our prospect because everyone was so busy.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Nice, that will help conversion.

Conrad Saam: Don’t do that.

Gyi Tsakalakis: And with that, that wraps up our 12 Days of Legal Marketing. Thank you all so, so very much for listening to Lunch Hour Legal Marketing. I hope you are having a wonderful holiday season wherever you are. I hope that this New Year brings you great joy and success and that I hope you continue to enjoy Lunch Hour Legal Marketing.

If you just landed here, please do take time to subscribe and like we always say, we would love to hear from you. So #LHLM, send us a message.

And until next time, Lunch Hour Legal Marketing, Conrad and Gyi saying farewell. Happy holidays.

[Music]

Conrad Saam: That was awesome. Pull out your legal band. Did I ever tell you about the time we had, we literally had a lawyer who wanted us to design his website like the Legal Pad because that’s what —

Gyi Tsakalakis: I’ve got even better, we had a lawyer we asked, hey, can you send us your open file from last month report, and they were like sure, where do you want me to fax you the yellow — copy of the yellow pad, and we were like wait, you are kidding, right?

[Music]

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