SHOCKING Insights from Clio’s 2024 Legal Trends Report

Episode Notes

Transcript

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Happy Halloween. Conrad.

Conrad Saam:

Happy Halloween. Gyi,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I feel like it’s a tradition that we do these Halloween episodes with our masks on. You’re wearing a very interesting costume this year. I am. You have a visor and some hair and there’s something on your ear. What are you dressed as?

Conrad Saam:

I think regardless of your political persuasion, this is the scariest Halloween season we have coming up. I like to go every four years as a political character. What are you? I’m the scariest thing that might happen to the United States. How’s that? I see.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I got to take my helmet off. I can’t see anything or even tell you

Conrad Saam:

Can’t see anything in your voice. No, you sound like you’re in a box. So for those of you listening, Gyi just took off his, I think I made it at the Star Wars reference his Boba Fett

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Helmet. Yes. Look at you. Pop culture reference my son’s Boba Fett little pop

Conrad Saam:

Little pop culture for you and a little political culture. I have to take this off. I will probably catch on fire if I don’t.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

There we go.

Conrad Saam:

Now it’s the real you and me. Good to see you.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Great to see you. And we are here with a special bonus episode to kiss up to Clio.

Conrad Saam:

We are kissing up to Clio. In fact, I think we talked about this last podcast. We’re doing a bonus episode of the Clio Legal Trends report. And we talked about whether or not this looked like we are just kissing up and prostituting ourselves to clea, which we are not. And the reason we decided we are not doing that is because we would cover this anyway. This is really

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Important stuff and we did, we covered it when they weren’t a sponsor. We’ll cover it after they pull their sponsorship after this episode. This is one of the leading industry reports. People are

Conrad Saam:

Saying, this is the biggest industry report. It’s better than lying. Larry Ports Rocket Matter report. This is the best report

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I’ve ever seen. This is the most beautiful reports that we could ever imagine. But seriously, you can write your entire marketing plan. You download all the Clio legal trends reports, and you go through ’em. Or maybe you upload ’em to chat GPT and have ’em summarize ’em for you. But they cover a lot. And I referenced the 2019 report and I’m super grateful I gave them feedback over and over again like you got to bring marketing back. And Clio listened and I had the opportunity to hop on a call with some of the folks that put together the CLE leader trends report. And they’re committed to making this one of the best resources. And those we’ll dive into today. This is a really valuable thing for folks and Clio puts together the research and it’s free

Conrad Saam:

Music.

Announcer:

Wlecome To Lunch Hour Legal Marketing teaching you how to promote market and make fat for your legal practice here on Legal Talk Network.

Conrad Saam:

All right everybody, welcome to this bonus edition of Lunch Hour Legal Marketing. This is a very special episode because I think it is going to provide you with context about your own firm. One of the things that we really like to do at Mockingbird is to provide benchmarking numbers. And I’ve always said data without context is just numbers. So you can start thinking about how you perform relative to what everyone else said to the people at Clio. Now, Gyi, this was a reasonably, I think one of the important things, we touched on this the other day, one of the important things when looking at data is to cite your sources. Can you give a quick overview of where this data comes from because I think that is very relevant to the rest of the conversation.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

So some of it is Clio user data, some of it is independent research that Clio hired an independent research company to perform. And again, like I said, I’m appreciative that they include some of that. I’m for full transparency of the data. I feel like if we’re going to have industry reports, you got to release the underlying data. And I know that there’s proprietary and we paid for this and all that kind of stuff, but to me, if you want to go scientific, the data has to be subject to review.

Conrad Saam:

But I wouldn’t question the integrity of this data, right?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

No, I’m not questioning it at all. I mean, again, I think that they’ve articulated how they conducted this research. I was just saying maybe I’m asking too much, but I would say go one step further and just like the data available for download.

Conrad Saam:

Alright, so Gyi, the report starts off, not surprisingly, with a long conversation about ai, any interesting data points for you. And by the way, dear listener, we are going to encourage you to download this yourself. But the next 30 minutes or so, Gyi and I are going to pull out the nuggets that we found interesting from both the technology and marketing perspective. There’s a lot of other stuff in there. So

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Don’t

Conrad Saam:

Take this as canon. We’re cherry picking the things that we care about because we care about them.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And again, I would say go download the other years and especially 2019. So don’t think that this is the end all be all on the report. Of course. So the big headline here, and they even kick off with talking about the 2023 Goldman Sachs study talking about 44% of work tasks and legals could be automated by ai AI’s on everybody’s mind. The headline I think in this context is lawyers have been quick to adopt ai, which is counter to how they’ve been on tech adoption in the past. And Cleo’s data supports also that AI could automate nearly 75% of hourly billable work in law firms. So the big headlines are lawyers are adopting ai, all the powers that be seem to think that most of the current billable legal work is doable through ai. And so, okay, well what does that mean for us? It yerger should have a bunch more time on your hands to be able to do the things that the robots cannot do. And ironically as we’ll discuss to me some of that means business development and marketing and that’s great. It’s frees up time for you to focus on growth. And ironically, a lot of the lawyers respondents to this survey said that they think that generative AI can actually replace generating marketing content we’ll dive into. So anyway headlines, AI is being adopted. They see great opportunity to reduce the amount of time that you’re spending doing billable work. What does that mean for you as a lawyer?

Conrad Saam:

So you said something that I jumped into and I noted as well when I was reading this, you mentioned how it is atypical. And I think even in the report the word surprisingly, I think the sentence was surprisingly, lawyers are quick to adopt ai. I think this goes counter to the narrative that lawyers are fearful tech Luddites. And I’ve never really felt that way. I think this is much more reflective of the reality than the narrative that the legal industry really is pushing things and finding ways to do things better and that is going to continue forward.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Part of that narrative though is not just their resistance to tech. It usually comes with ethical concern. The big thing with the resistance to cloud was now my client’s stuff’s going to get hacked, right? It’s not secure and blah blah blah. Which is ironic because at the time lawyers

Conrad Saam:

Much better were leaving their

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Files out.

But with ai, to me there’s been some discussion of some of those ethical issues and they’re real. And I think that’s one of the things the platforms like Clio are talking about is this is one of the reasons why deploying generative AI in a self-contained platform is a better way to do it. Although I think some of the data shows that most people are using chat GBT, but this is an extremely accessible technology. It’s almost like having a search engine in some ways as a conversational search engine. And if you want to think about it like that, whereas some of the other tech that we’ve been resistant to cloud is a little more ethereal at the time. This feels very much, I mean, I am just saying anyway,

Conrad Saam:

Okay, let’s get into some of the numbers. Gyi, we promised to read out some of the numbers. What were some of the things that you found interesting?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, with the lawyers, with all this extra time that they should be getting from automation, should be able to now start responding to emails and answering the phone. Because according to the survey to the court, wow, in 20 24, 60 7% of law firms did not respond to the emails at all, which is actually worse. It’s about 12% worse that they did in 2019 when it was at 60%. So less people responding to emails. Now again, I posted this on LinkedIn and some people responded like, well hey, how are these emails being sent? And it’s like they’re being by an independent research company whose job is to try to send these emails. So it’s not it. It was like, Hey, marketing at Clio dot com, please respond to our email. This was the experience as I understand it was very much like the experience of a potential client contacting you or a client contacting you.

Conrad Saam:

And that’s what they were trying to measure. So the funny thing is we’re talking about automation, the data source on this survey, there were roughly a thousand legal professionals that they talked to, which included lawyers and paralegals and the like that they surveyed and that were 1400 Clio contact. So you’ve got a survey set of 2,500. I don’t know who that independent researching firm actually reached out to. I don’t know that it was Clio users, I don’t know that it wasn’t. But we’re talking about automation. There is zero excuse for that number. Even if the response is, we’ve received your email and we’ll be getting back to you shortly.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah. And again, if we were like, let’s just say we were at 50% even this is worse than half of the law firms are answering emails at all. I mean that’s staggering to me. Which brings you back to, you start asking questions, talk to me about how the data was collected because it’s just like, how is this possible? But guess what? Phone is

Conrad Saam:

Even worse. So share the phone

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Data. Percentage of law firms that answered our phone calls

Conrad Saam:

Or phone us back or

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Phone us or phone us back or phone us. It didn’t bothered to phone us back at all. 2019 73%. And I remember, I bet you if you go back and listen to our prior conversation, we were like, this is unbelievable that 73% of the phone calls are going unanswered. You have to fix this. There’s huge opportunities miss. Well guess what it is. In 20 24, 50 2% only half answered or phoned back.

Conrad Saam:

And of the answer, the actual data point is 40%. 40% of phone calls were answered.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

What is going on this camp? Something’s wrong. Was the phone down that day? Was there a national phone outage when they were conducting this data research?

Conrad Saam:

This is so bad it does call into question. Now I’m going to put myself in your listener. And what I don’t want you to do is to say, Hey, oh, it’s 40% answer the phone. We’re better than that. So I don’t need to worry. I know we answer more than 40%. You’re probably right. But what I bet you don’t know is what is your actual answer rate? What is your number? And I’ve said this, this is probably the 10th time I’ve made this same point. If you don’t know what your phone rate, phone call answer rate is, it is probably worse than you think it is. If you do know what it is, it will be above average and it will annoy you. I know across our clients our phone call answer rate is about 93%. Okay? That’s across all of our clients. The ones who are really doing a great job are closer to 97, 90 8%. So the high volume shops that have this really nailed down are in the 97 to 98% range. If you think you’re answering a hundred percent of your phone calls because you’re using a third party answering service, I 100% know that you have never tested your third party answering service. That is

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Case, not case. You’re blowing these numbers out of the water. Right?

Conrad Saam:

Well, so I mean part of this becomes like a sample size question. You and I both work with firms who are aggressively marketing. You and I are both working with firms who are investing a whole bunch of money

Gyi Tsakalakis:

In pay per click. And hold on a second. Not all of those clients that are 93% now came to you at 93%

Conrad Saam:

Either, right? Right. I mean, we find the outliers and

Gyi Tsakalakis:

If that is, and you’re helping to improve

Conrad Saam:

And that is where you suck the most. You’re going to hear about it from us based on what we’re looking at here, well above average. But my point being, know what your phone call answer rate is and know it empirically, not because you think we’re really good at this. And so we answered all the time because you, if you don’t know the actual number, you perform really poorly. So that

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Was, well, the good news, here’s the good news,

Conrad Saam:

You want to find the good news you can all improve.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

No, it’s even better. This is actually a very cynical, bad thing to be saying, but

Conrad Saam:

Wow,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

It doesn’t matter whether you answer the phone or not because of the firms who actually answered the phone. So this is the few people that actually bothered to answer the phone Clio or the research asked, what would you like to have answered And what was actually talked about?

Did the firm provide clear next steps? Did the firm reference similar legal situations that they had experience with? Did the firm provide any rate or information or overall cost? Which that’s another big section in here that people should download this to check out. Cause we’re not going deep on pricing. There’s all sorts of stuff about pricing and pricing transparency and you should be on it. And I know that a lot of lawyers that are listening to this right now are like, I roll on pricing and price transparency, but change is coming in the event, people that answered the phone in 2019, only about 30% were giving next steps 2024, 18% in terms of referencing similar situations. My experience 20 19, 20 7%, that’s down to 2%. Only 2% of the firms who answered the phone made any reference to similar legal situations. Now again, we can be critical and be like, whoa, maybe it was misinterpreted and blah, blah, blah, but it was bad in 2019. This is saying it’s basically not happening. And firms that provide rate information overall costs 27% in 2019 down to 18%. So less firms as a percentage of respondents are sharing rate information and overall cost information than they were in 2019.

Conrad Saam:

Okay? One of the things I really liked out of the report was they focus on tactics that people can use to improve conversion rate,

Right? And I really liked these changes in conversion rate. These are things that you can do at a small level. They all add up. And the concept was being able to do e-signatures, doing online scheduling, text messaging for example. All of those firms that were using those had higher conversion rates and they actually found that e-signatures, and this isn’t a shocking concept, if you enable e-signatures, your conversion rate overall is 10% higher than if you don’t, which makes sense, you’re just making it easier. But think about how dramatic effect that could have on your business if you just enable that one very specific piece of technology to improve your overall conversion rate.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

A lot of the intake folks, not great for everybody’s practice, not great for every practice area, but certainly in the context of pi, it’s get them signed up, meet some basic criteria, but get them signed up and then investigate the claim and do a turndown. But getting the signed up, that’s what changes a lot of these businesses because they’re indexing so high on conversion to actual clients. And then when there’s no case or there’s not one they’re going to represent, it’s a turndown. Now, some lawyers don’t like that, they don’t like the sign up first, but that’s the place to attack it. It’s to attack it in conversion, to attack it in intake, to attack it in the tech things that you can make it more frictionless also on payments. Take the friction away.

Conrad Saam:

Take the friction away. And one of the other things on that conversion side that we talked about in turning into clients, and I love that they did this, you and I ge have talked about funnel velocity, which means the faster that you make a decision about purchasing something, the more likely you are to purchase that thing. The example I always use is cars, right? Car salespeople are taught to not let you off the lot until you’ve bought the new Ford Bronco, right? Because when you go home, you have to think about it, your research, you talk to your spouse, you talk to the bank, blah, blah, blah. But if they can get you to buy, then you’re more likely to buy. So one of the things that was fascinating in this, they call it difference in time to hire e-signatures. The percent difference between those using and not using each feature out of Clio grow. If you’re using e-signatures out of Clio grow, those are converted 24% faster online schedule, 7% faster online intake forms 8% faster. The interesting thing that they added in here, and this is a bit of a Clio pitch because you can get ads directly through Clio, but online search ads, this I found really fascinating outside of the context of Clio. They were finding that the time to hire is 25% shorter from that digital marketing channel, which was interesting, but it actually makes sense because that’s not

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Surprising.

Conrad Saam:

You and I know that when people are looking to buy a thing, pay-per-click is something they actually, there’s been studies on, you’re more likely to click on the pay-per-click ad than a research phase where you’re more likely to go to organic and not believe what you’re reading in the pay-per-click ads. But if you’re interested in buying some peanut butter, you’re more likely to click on the peanut butter ad, which is fascinating to me, that’re showing up as 25% faster at turning into a client.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Guys, that doesn’t surprise me at all. This is bottom of the funnel non-brand in my opinion. For the most part, they’re obviously not segmenting brand non-brand

Conrad Saam:

A hundred percent,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

But that’s going to be fast, right? That’s bottom of the funnel direct response. That’s performance marketing. They, that’s why, what do we always say? If you need it fast, you got to do

Conrad Saam:

Ads a hundred percent. And I think the subtext behind this that I like to remind people of is not all of your marketing channels perform and convert at the same way. If you need a hundred more leads, if you think you need a hundred more leads to get to your marketing objectives, those a hundred more leads could actually be 50 pay per click leads or 150 SEO leads, right? And those channels perform fundamentally different. The conversion rate by channel changes the conversion rate by intake. We call it intake type, phone call form, fill text or chat changes. It is fundamentally different. And I think we tend to to believe it’s all the same.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

To me, all that matters is you do it the opposite. You say, what cost per client works for my firm? Okay, now let’s go figure out what channels we can play in because the cost per client, so again, we’re like ads are fast, guess what? You pay a premium. And so many people think about, oh, let’s deploy resources, Andres, there’s all these different channels. And it’s like, no, you should only be deploying against the ones that you have some reasonable hypothesis are going to work for the economics of your firm. The problem is you’ll ask a firm like what’s your target cost per client? And they’ll be like, I don’t know what you’re talking about.

Conrad Saam:

It’s like, how much would you like to pay for your revenue, right? I don’t know, right? I don’t know. What else do you pull me some gems out of here?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, not surprisingly, shoppers are unlikely to promote law firms. So they provide some awesome data about the lack of response increases, the likelihood of detractors and no phone response. You’re at 90% detractors. And again, anecdotally, we know this because we see negative reviews didn’t respond to my calls. It’s like it’s right here. This is the impact of your failed responses. And so anyway, the point is because again, lawyers, we say at the beginning of this, they’re like either rolling their eyes about the response rates on emails, they’re rolling their eyes about the response rates on phones, they’re questioning the data and all this kind of stuff. And at the end of the day, we know that unless you can answer Conrad’s question of what the hit rate is, your answer rate on phone calls is you don’t know. And it’s probably closer to these numbers than it is to Conrad.

Conrad Saam:

Alright, and when we come back, Gyi and I are going to dig deeper into the marketing side of the CLIA legal trends report that gets into budgeting and preferred marketing channels.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, not surprisingly, if you’re listening to this episode, we’re going to suggest that you go and download and read the Clio Legal Trends report 2024 right now, that can be found at Clio dot com slash trends and join Conrad in Florida.

Conrad Saam:

That would be great. We toyed with this. We hinted at it, we talked about it a little bit. Our client summit is in Florida November, 2021. If you’d like to join us at the Speedway, we’re going to be mostly talking about our own data. So we talked about clearly legal terms, report and benchmarking. One of the things that we will be sharing at Bedlam is our own benchmarking data across all of our clients. So we’re sharing that it is mostly a client-centric conference, but we’ve got about 10 rides left and by rides. We’ve hired out a bunch of Ferrari and Lamborghinis, Audi R eights, Porsche nine elevens, et cetera, Corvettes to take laps at the Miami homestead. So between sessions on benchmarking your law firm data, we’re going to be doing laps in fun cars. And I hate to say there’s 10 seats left, but we literally only have room. You

Gyi Tsakalakis:

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Conrad Saam:

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Gyi Tsakalakis:

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Conrad Saam:

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Gyi Tsakalakis:

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Conrad Saam:

We actually do have 10 rides left in those cars, and so we’re limited to 60 people and we’ve got 10 spots left. One other note, because this is primarily a client summit, if you are a competitor to one of our existing clients, please register and I’ll politely send you a note that says you can’t come, but if you’re not and you’re high growth company and you’re in the area, we’d love to have you November, 2021. Okay, enough of the Conrad Bedlam Summit pitch. Let’s get back to the Clio legal trends report. What did you find surprising, interesting or noteworthy, Gyi, about their marketing data?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, so at the outset they talk about that 23% of legal professionals believe that AI is going to improve the client experience or satisfaction 22%, that it’s going to increase the firm’s revenue, right? AI is going to increase the firm’s revenue. 19% help me grow my business. So those are the headline marketing AI topics. And then you get a little further down, and we mentioned this earlier, I think it’s like 87% believe that AI can generate marketing content. Now I’m like, look, can AI help you generate content? Of course, there’s lots of different ways to use it, but what I’m seeing a lot in the marketplace right now is lawyers that are wholesale copying and pasting chat GPT output into blog posts and social posts. And so when I see this data, I’m like, yeah, that’s what I think is actually going on. And as this episode is released, and maybe we’ll talk about this more in a future episode, the FTCs rule on fake reviews just went live in terms of accountability for compliance. And this to me, you’re pasting chat GPT stuff and claiming that you wrote, it certainly seems like false and misleading and definitely seems like fake social indicators, which are expressly not permitted under the FTC rules. Now, will any of that get enforced? Probably not, sadly, a couple people might get made example of, but the legal trends report data really shows and look at the other one that got me was growth rates for law firm spending since 2012.

Software spending is growing at three times the rate as marketing spending.

Conrad Saam:

So the marketing spend I found really fascinating. We’ve often talked about how much should you spend on marketing? And our answer has always been, it depends on how aggressively you want to grow. Interestingly, the data point from the Clear Legal Trends report is that firms are spending 5% of their revenue on marketing. That’s so low. It’s fine if you don’t want to grow, right? So again, no, it is, and some people don’t want to grow, and that’s totally fine. That is it. We have this false god of growth. And sometimes I don’t necessarily want to be the biggest agency. I want to be the best agency and there’s lots of constraints.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I don’t, I think you need a basic, there’s call it the basal market level, not to grow, but just to prevent you from dying on the vine where you’re like, some firms are like, I’m just going to do good work and wait for referrals to come and great. And if you’re doing that and you’ve got a very strong pipeline of referral sources, more power to you. But even that should be nurtured and you should be investing in those referral relationships, which means you’re spending some amount of money. And so I’m like, if you’re spending zero, there is no investment in, and I, I’m going to use marketing as the function. It’s a marketing function. It’s not just a risk of not growing, it’s a risk of contracting and going out of business.

Conrad Saam:

So it’s interesting, this is the same data set that said 74% of the lawyers market through their company website. And so you don’t have a company website, you’re only spending 5% on marketing. This is an average figure. I wonder what the median was. I’m wondering if this average gets brought down by a bunch of zeros, that very much could be the case.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And the other thing, the other issue with the data is this is the question. What are they counting in there? Lawyers classically, they take people out for dinner. They’re going to conferences or speaking events, like all of this referral relationship building stuff, they don’t count that as marketing, so it’s not in their p and l, it’s not tag marketing expense. And so they would say, I don’t spend anything on marketing. And I’m like, these referral relationships that you’re nurturing, they’re not free. I don’t know that this data reflects that.

Conrad Saam:

Well, it breaks it out. There is interestingly, if a 31% client attended conferences or trade shows, that seems really high for a dataset that also only three out of four of the people have a website that seems very interesting, backwards, not what I would expect. 75%. It does break this out. 75% are marketing their services through referrals, which is totally fair and not super surprising. I would look at, this is on page one 19, how people are spending money on their work. One of the things I found interesting, what’s bigger than SEO social media? Baby social media has eclipsed, at least in terms of participation spending and go ahead.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, this is my issue with this. So again, I’m grateful that Clio included me in the feedback process and then responded to it. But this is how are lawyers marketing their services? Not how are potential clients looking for lawyers? It’s less valuable to know what lawyers are doing, by the way. A lot of them are doing stuff they shouldn’t be doing. It’s much more valuable to know what are legal services consumers doing to find and make decisions on lawyers. And then let’s compare that to how lawyers are marketing their services. And let’s see the gap

Conrad Saam:

There. So this is an interesting data point that you’re bringing up there. Gyi, and we talked, I think last session, we at least talked in the preamble. We may not have recorded this. There was a data point that I called into question that it said, this was something I heard at a conference. 66% of phone calls are generated by organic search.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I mean, that doesn’t even have any meaning

Conrad Saam:

I called utter bullshit on that because without the context of other firms, that may sound achievable. It certainly doesn’t line up with what you’re seeing here in terms of where firms are spending. But that seemed crazy. And this is why, and I hate to plug bedlum, but we will be talking about the benchmarks.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Do you hate it? Do you hate it?

Conrad Saam:

You hate it. I know I can hear Adam snickering in the background, but without understanding where the rest of your competitive set sits on that, you may swallow a piece of data like that and just take it at face value.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And again, here’s my thing about it. Just give me the data, give me the underlying data. Maybe it’s true of this dataset, but how many firms is this based on? What are the other things that they’re doing? Maybe it is true that there’s 67% of the phone calls for this dataset were generated by organic. That could be true.

Conrad Saam:

That could only be true for a firm that was only marketing digitally through organic

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Mostly, right?

Conrad Saam:

Right. Interestingly, solos were spending 9% of their revenue on marketing, whereas the average firm was spending 5%. So almost double. Why do you think that is? Gyi,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I don’t know. I honestly don’t know.

Conrad Saam:

Okay.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Why do you think it is?

Conrad Saam:

I think it is because I think it is a change in the denominator, not the numerator. Meaning you solos are struggling to generate revenue and you have a smaller denominator to think about percentage of marketing to revenue, which means I think you’re spending a lot of money foolishly and with wasted time. Well that be true. It will never return. And if you’re not answering the phone 52% of the time, all of your pay-per-click advertising is twice as expensive. Your cost per client is twice as expensive as it needs to be. If you’re running pay per-click, for example.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And again, we don’t have enough detail in the data, but to me, the solos are spending in a more appropriate spend level as a total percentage of revenue on marketing. Again, I think nine 10% is not that aggressive growth target. And even the small business administration I think recommends like 10 to 12 or something. And so it’s those other firms that are very under capitalized. My question is, why are they so undercapitalized? Is it because they’re spending it on software now and other stuff? But that’s the thing that doesn’t make sense to me.

Conrad Saam:

I mean, I think you and I probably exist in this growth orientation, right? Because what we do we’re the fertilizer of law firms, we’re the growth engine of law firms. And there may just be a bunch of law firms that don’t care about that.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

No, I mean for sure there are. And that’s why too, again, I’m like, we got to be talking apples to apples. Are they considering all of the business development resources that they deploy in the marketing bucket? That’s the part that I’m curious about. Okay. Anyway, again, the headlines here are they give you the blueprint of what people are looking for. They show you the blind spots that law firms have. Go first, go manage these things at your firm. Go look at your numbers, compare them with the benchmarks, and statistically, you are going to find that you’ve got some blind spots that you can improve upon that can have big impacts on your business.

Conrad Saam:

So download the Clio legal trend support, not that we are a shill for Clio, and we’re not doing this just because your response for the show. This will put you in a great place to understand where you fit, things that you’re not even thinking about, numbers that you have never considered. It’s a good reset. It’s a good reset. And it’s why we recover this every time it comes out. Download ’em all. Alright, dear listener, that is the end of Gyi Conrad waxing poetic about the spooky chilling, surprising and otherwise terrifying numbers coming out of the Clio Legal Friends report. And if you’re listening to this on the day it came out, you have seven days to cast your vote. The scariest thing you might do is not take advantage of that opportunity. This is like the podcast. I wouldn’t Die.

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