#515: Simple Marketing Hacks Lawyers Swear By, with Gyi Tsakalakis

Episode Notes

Transcript

Announcer: 

Welcome to The Lawyerist Podcast, a series of discussions with entrepreneurs and innovators about building a successful law practice in today’s challenging and constantly changing legal market. Lawyerist supports attorneys, building client-centered, and future-oriented small law firms through community, content, and coaching both online and through the Lawyerist Lab. And now from the team that brought you The Small Firm Roadmap and your podcast hosts 

 

 

Jennifer Whigham (00:35): 

Hi, I’m Jennifer Whigham. 

  

Zack Glaser (00:36): 

And I’m Zack. And this is episode 515 of the Lawyerist Podcast, part of the Legal Talk Network. 

  

Jennifer Whigham (00:42): 

Today’s podcast is brought to you by NetDocuments, and you will hear Zack’s conversation with them shortly. So Zack, we just got off of a companywide week off, and when, I mean company wide, the whole company shut down. Everybody was expected to not check into work, to do whatever they wanted, and it was mandated. And I’m curious what you did with your week off. 

  

Zack Glaser (01:08): 

Oh man. Yeah. Yeah. We turned the lights off here at the office, right? Proverbial office. So I actually extended my week. This is right around my birthday, and I extended my week to work on and volunteer at a professional track meet that we put on here in Memphis. And by professional track meet, I mean, we had 12 Olympians that are going to Paris there this last week. 

  

Jennifer Whigham (01:37): 

Oh my gosh. 

  

Zack Glaser (01:38): 

I was moving the blocks and whatnot for some pretty big names, which was really cool. But in that time period, I did a lot of physical moving of things, moving hurdles from one place to another, having to go get them from somewhere in the truck and go and get blocks and setting up fences and signs and all of those things. So it was a very physical thing to do with my time. 

  

Jennifer Whigham (02:01): 

You’re buff now is what you’re saying. 

  

Zack Glaser (02:03): 

I mean always, 

  

Jennifer Whigham (02:03): 

Right? I mean, you’re always buff, but you are buffer the vampire slayer. 

  

Zack Glaser (02:08): 

Yes, yes. That’s what they call me, but it’s decidedly different than what I do here. I remember when I became an attorney, one of the professors at the law school, not when I became an attorney, when I started down my path, one of the professors at the law school was like, why did you come to law school? Said it’s air conditioned. 

  

Jennifer Whigham (02:32): 

Spoken like a southerner. 

  

Zack Glaser (02:34): 

Yeah. But prior to that, I’ve been building athletic fields all over the southeast. I’ve been driving a tractor all over, so I enjoy being physical, it balances my brain out. But after a couple days of it of moving portable pole vault runways, which just as a plug, we had a pole vault on Beal Street, which 

  

Jennifer Whigham (02:56): 

Was really cool. Wow. That’s like a new song someone’s going to write. 

  

Zack Glaser (03:00): 

Yes. Their feet were 20 feet off of B. 

  

Jennifer Whigham (03:04): 

Oh, there it is. 

  

Zack Glaser (03:05): 

And it was a good balance. I was ready, I was ready to come back, ready to sit down and do some more kind of heady work, less lifting of mats and weights and implements. 

  

Jennifer Whigham (03:20): 

Kind of cool. You got out of your head though, because our job is very strategic and we’re in our heads a lot and we’re at our desks a lot and I mean, except for Lab Con, which is coming up in September, if you’re interested, special guest can join. Put it in the link, just a little plug, which is very physical. We’re always running around, but otherwise, it’s one of those jobs you have to force yourself to get some physical exercise outside of it. So good for you. Are there any Olympians we should be looking for that you met? Important question 

  

Zack Glaser (03:51): 

That I met. I always loved the Pole Vaulters America. The United States has a very, very solid set of pole vaulters going, although it’ll be really hard to beat Mon Duplantis who is Swedish. I mean, he grew up in Louisiana, but still. Anyway, Sam Kendricks, Chris Nielsen are two very solid pole vaulters. They were here and just, I don’t know, just watch the Olympics off track. It’s 

  

Jennifer Whigham (04:17): 

Fascinating. I love Summer Olympics. 

  

Zack Glaser (04:19): 

It is absolutely fascinating. The swimming’s going to be great as well as usual it Fantastic. 

  

Jennifer Whigham (04:23): 

Cook and Bacon. Have you been following? I can’t believe we’re tuning this into the Olympics podcast, but they’re the synchronized divers and they’re names are Cook and Bacon. 

  

Zack Glaser (04:30): 

Oh my God, that’s amazing. 

  

Jennifer Whigham (04:32): 

Please look for them for their names alone anyways. Yes, 

  

Zack Glaser (04:35): 

Absolutely. 

  

Jennifer Whigham (04:36): 

Cook and Bacon. 

  

Zack Glaser (04:37): 

Yeah. Well, and just as another plug for track, we’ve had the Women’s 1500 Meter world record broken multiple times over the last couple years. 

  

Jennifer Whigham (04:47): 

Whoa. 

  

Zack Glaser (04:48): 

And the 3000 meters, the steeple chase, the women’s steeple. Chase is probably going to get a world record. The men’s steeple chase is probably going to get a world record. I’m going to guess, and I’ll just say right now that the men’s 100 is going to go ahead and beat Usain Bolt’s world record. Oh, wow. I think they’re going to do it this year. 

  

Jennifer Whigham (05:06): 

You want to put money on this? I don’t know if it’s legal sports betting, legal state by state. We’re not going to put any money on this. I think 

  

Zack Glaser (05:14): 

It’s state by state. Yeah, we won’t bet on it, but if you’re out there, you can bet on it. 

  

Jennifer Whigham (05:19): 

Yeah. We just can’t bet on 

  

Zack Glaser (05:21): 

It if it’s legal in your state or your jurisdiction. 

  

Jennifer Whigham (05:24): 

Yeah, and this is legal podcast. We’re way off, but this was great. 

  

Zack Glaser (05:28): 

We’ve been pretty heavily off topic, but I think that’s the point, right? That’s 

  

Jennifer Whigham (05:31): 

Summer, right? There you go. Is 

  

Zack Glaser (05:33): 

That our break? Let us get off topic. Let our brains go a different 

  

Jennifer Whigham (05:38): 

Place. Let your brain get creative, man. 

  

Zack Glaser (05:40): 

Yeah. Let us all kind of do that at the same time was part of it as well. 

  

Jennifer Whigham (05:45): 

Agree. Now here’s our conversation with our sponsored guests, and then we’ll head into Stephanie’s conversation with Gyi. 

  

Zack Glaser (05:55): 

Hey y’all. Zack, the legal tech advisor here at Lawyerist, and today I have Michelle Spencer from NetDocuments with me, and we’re talking about AI specifically though what to look for in an artificial intelligence tool. Michelle, thank you for being with me today. 

  

Michelle Spencer (06:09): 

Great to be here again. 

  

Zack Glaser (06:11): 

So I obviously hinted at what we’re talking about here at NetDocuments. You guys have artificial intelligence tools built into a lot of aspects of the platform. When somebody’s choosing an AI tool though, and there are many, many, many out there, what should they be looking for? 

  

Michelle Spencer (06:30): 

Well, you have to start with access to a large language model and you need to pick the best model. There’s been some talk about does it need to be legal specific? I don’t know about that because we’re seeing great results with just Microsoft Azure OpenAI. We like to promote a tool that’s model agnostic so that if something great and wonderful comes along in the next year or so, then you have the ability to shift to whatever that most perfect model is for what you’re trying to do. 

  

Zack Glaser (07:06): 

I like that. But help us out here. What does the model and what would model agnostic mean for people? 

  

Michelle Spencer (07:13): 

So the model is the engine that runs ai, generative ai. Open AI is the company. We use Azure Open ai, which is the Microsoft protected kind of version of open AI’s model. There’s Claw, there’s quite a few different ones on the model, but having a tool that at some point if you want to switch your model, you have the ability to do that. 

  

Zack Glaser (07:41): 

Okay. Yeah, I like that. I like not being tied into anything, especially in this ever changing and really, really quickly growing AI world 

  

Michelle Spencer (07:51): 

Daily. So the other things, effective prompting, you want a solution where you can build a prompt and store it. So a chat bot is not the best interface. I know probably if anybody has experimented with chat GPT at some point it kind of forgets what you’ve already put in or you can go round and round and round and still not get the results that you want. And so having a system where you can build the best prompt and save that is a better interface than just a chat bot. 

  

Zack Glaser (08:27): 

Absolutely. Yeah. I mean there are classes out there right now on prompt engineering and I think attorneys are very, very used to asking the right questions. If you ask the right question, you get better answers. 

  

Michelle Spencer (08:39): 

Exactly. And do you want to turn everybody into a prompt engineer? I don’t think so. So maybe have that person who has that knack for that build a good prompt that then other practice areas or other people can tweak to make it their own over time. 

  

Zack Glaser (08:59): 

Absolutely. 

  

Michelle Spencer (09:00): 

And then we talked last time a little bit about having the right content and having it be secure and task specific, and then two other really critical components. The first is getting out of the box value from your tools. So that day one ability, so having some kind of prebuilt apps that cover some of those common tasks and then tie that with that ability to customize. I think that’s kind of the happy medium because if you get a black box solution where it’s just the tools that the vendor wants you to use, then you don’t have any ability to modify that and it’s their version and not yours. 

  

Zack Glaser (09:48): 

And you’re practicing their law or you’re doing their marketing. 

  

Michelle Spencer (09:52): 

Exactly. Kind of the same thing. If they’re all asking you to upload your content and you’re not sure what they’re doing with it. Yeah, you’re building their business, not yours. Absolutely. 

  

Zack Glaser (10:03): 

And 

  

Michelle Spencer (10:04): 

Who wants to pay to build someone else’s business, right? 

  

Zack Glaser (10:08): 

Yeah. 

  

Michelle Spencer (10:09): 

So really it’s all of those things. It’s the LLM, it’s the ability to build effective prompts, having access to the right content, securely, responsibly, task specific. And then it’s getting that out of the box day one value, having it be easy to deploy, and then going beyond that once you kind of get comfortable with it and that ability to customize, make it your own and go build some of those more complex use cases, the bespoke use cases, as we say. 

  

Zack Glaser (10:42): 

Great. Great. All right. Well I think that’s a pretty good rubric for getting out there and kicking the tires and looking at the AI solutions out there. So Michelle, once again, thank you for joining us from NetDocuments. I really appreciate your time. 

  

Michelle Spencer (10:59): 

Happy to share what we’ve learned through our experiments and those of our customers. 

  

Zack Glaser (11:04): 

Well, and we will absolutely have a link to net documents in the show notes and any information that we have on the AI within net documents. 

  

Michelle Spencer (11:13): 

Great. Thanks so much. 

  

Gyi Tsakalakis (11:19): 

Hi, I am Gyi Tsakalakis from the Lunch Hour Legal Marketing podcast. 

  

Stephanie Everett (11:24): 

Gee, it’s so great to have you on the show. It has been a minute since you’ve been with us. 

  

Gyi Tsakalakis (11:28): 

It has. And I’m grateful to be back. Love Lawyerist. Love Lawyerist podcast. And I think this, I was reflecting because you’re right, it’s been a minute, but I think this is my third visit. 

  

Stephanie Everett (11:39): 

I think that’s right too. We’d have to go back to two hundreds. I think it’s been 

  

Gyi Tsakalakis (11:43): 

The odds. 

  

Stephanie Everett (11:44): 

Yeah. Well, I am excited to talk to you because it has been a minute and because I do love the Lunch Hour legal marketing podcast. It is another one that I think everyone should have on their list, part of our Legal Talk Network family of podcasts. 

  

Gyi Tsakalakis (11:59): 

Thank you for that plug. And we love Legal Talk Network. Their production team has been fantastic. And again, for folks that are listening, maybe this is one of the things we can talk about, but if you have a podcast of your own, gosh, the production makes a difference from social posts and promotion and distribution and community engagement. Anyway, super grateful for everything Legal Talk Network does for us, 

  

Stephanie Everett (12:25): 

As are we. And people might not realize when we say that every week on the intro, they may have just never even considered that there’s, I think they have 26 or so shows now in the network and in the family. So people might should go check out all the other podcasts and see if there’s something interesting to them. 

  

Gyi Tsakalakis (12:44): 

Yep. Very cool stuff over there. 

  

Stephanie Everett (12:46): 

So let’s talk marketing because I feel a little behind. I feel like there’s changes happening in the world and maybe I just don’t even know where to start. So what would you tell us? What’s the big news? 

  

Gyi Tsakalakis (12:58): 

Gosh, I think the thing that’s been going on in my world, so for a long time, marketing people like me, we got super excited about performance marketing and attribution and hey, we can track where all of your leads are coming from. And look, it’s still true, but I think one thing that got the pendulum shifted a little bit too far and people forgot like, oh hey, your attribution system actually has a lot of limitations. And so the buzzword here has been this idea of dual source attribution. So I’ll kind of explain that. So the performance marketing side is like, oh, someone does a search, they click on your website, analytics fires. Maybe you’ve got call tracking set up with something like CallRail or something. You can get that information in your CRM and you can see a nice linear journey from organic search to qualified consultation to fee. 

  

(13:55): 

Then you can do all sorts of cool business stuff like return on investment and return on ad spend and cost per client analysis, which folks should be doing. If you’re not doing that, that’d be another thing we could talk about. But the problem is is that if you just rely on what this quantitative attribution system, well, what happens when someone’s like, well, I got your name for a friend and then I did a search. Well, your analytics is going to say organic search, and then you’re into this quagmire of like, well, is this because of my quote unquote SEO efforts? Is it because of my branding? Is it because of my referral stuff? And so we’ve been talking about how you’ve got to have dual source. You’ve got to be asking, how did you hear about us? Or who should we thank for sending us to if you don’t like that question, but basically this idea of an open-ended qualitative question because that’s where you’re going to see things like I was referred by a friend or whatever it is, and in the context of we’re talking podcasting, a lot of firms that we work with us ourselves, but we see this all the time. 

  

(14:53): 

People will say, I’ve listened to the podcast and if you match it up with the attribution data, it says things like organic search. And so anyway, that’s been a big shift in our thinking for the last suppose couple of years. And the counter, we hear the pushback all the time, well, people are going to answer incorrectly. And I’m like, it doesn’t matter. Even if they say internet or whatever they say, you cross reference it with your quantitative data and then you get a better picture and it doesn’t need to be a one for one. If you get 80% of the way there, it’ll help inform your strategy. But I think if you’re not doing that, you’re probably missing a big picture of how people are finding and hiring you. 

  

Stephanie Everett (15:33): 

We do that and I often hear the answer, listen to the podcast, read your book, been a fan for years, went to the website. And I’m just like, well, I don’t even know what to do with that. Okay, 

  

Gyi Tsakalakis (15:45): 

Good. Well, that means it’s all, well, again, I say that’s great. Here’s another part of this conversation, which over the last couple of years when we started doing internet marketing in 2008, it was still pretty competitive. And back then, and we’ve joked for, gosh, we’ve known each other for a long time, I’d be curious to hear what your thoughts on this topic, but back 2007, 2008, we all the time would run into, well, people don’t use the internet to hire lawyers like me. I would say we still that. We still hear it too. And we less, I’ll give lawyers credit, they’re coming along. The competition has only gotten more fierce over the last 17 years or whatever, my maths, whatever, close enough. And so what we’ve been talking a lot more about is this idea of demand generation. And the simple response to that is, look, you pay Google a couple hundred bucks a click or can that a hundred dollars be invested better to get people to think of you instead of searching Google? 

  

(16:47): 

And it’s a mix and it’s a balance, and every industry survey that you can find will show that there’s the split. Some people, they go to referrals, some people, they start their search on their own. Some people are going to do some combination of both. But anyway, marketing mix wise, we always talk to folks, we’re like, look, don’t paint yourself into this box of it’s either advertising or brand building or offline versus online. This stuff all works together. The lines between offline and online continue to blur. Traditional and digital continue to blur. As we talked about with attribution, the buzzer buzzword, dark social, people are sending referrals and recommendations through messaging apps. If you’re part of private Facebook communities, you see this people use signal and that stuff in attribution, it doesn’t come through. And so it’s important to be asking these questions and to be doing both non-brand acquisition as well as demand generation. 

  

(17:50): 

But look, we talk about this all the time, every six months, whole new crop of lawyers and so it’s more and more competitive. And I think macro curious to hear your thoughts on this too, but there’s a lot of consolidation going on. You see a lot of firms that are either merging or people buying firms, even though we feel like we might be a ways out from it, A lot of firms closed during covid, which meant consolidation of market share. You see the billboard advertisers and TV advertisers and the big spenders capturing more market share and the incremental costs going up Anyway, I think getting a sense of the lay of land out there, that’s even more of an argument for lean into that brand. What is it that you do? How do you stand out? How are you uniquely qualified to help? And then getting that message out there and being consistent about it and doing the work every day. That’s the other thing too. I can’t remember who I was talking with about this on LinkedIn, but marketing is not throwing hail Mary passes. It’s going to the gym. It’s every single day. There’s a lot of different things that can work, but it’s a little bit every single day of the discipline of communicating who you are, who you help, how you help them, why you’re uniquely qualified to help. 

  

Stephanie Everett (19:03): 

I feel like we know this, right? We know we should be doing all these things. You just listed all those things and I’m just thinking, yeah, yeah. And yet I suspect there’s some people listening that are just like, when do I have time to do all those things? Now I have to do all this. That’s a lot to do. And I saw you post on LinkedIn too. I was checking out the latest and you were like, if you only did one hour of marketing, what would you recommend people do? And of course everyone jumped on and said, why would you only do one hour of marketing a week? They kind of never got to the meat of your question. It felt like everybody was just arguing that no lawyer should simply spend an hour a week marketing that you do have to make more of an investment. But I’m curious, how do you tell people if they have more limited resources in time and can’t do all the things, is there a place that makes sense for people to focus right now? 

  

Gyi Tsakalakis (19:55): 

That’s a great question and I even zoom out one more layer and you’ve really got to ask yourself, what’s your role at your firm? Look, if you’re solo, your role is everything, right? We know that I’ve been there myself. Then it’s really about prioritizing time. And so if you’re like, look, I’m going to commit, I only have one hour. No matter what you say, gee, Stephanie, I don’t have more than one hour to spend. I would do content, I’d record video, content record once, go get an app like the script or something not that expensive in the grand scheme of things, allows you to cut up this one hour of maybe do 40, I’m really hold myself accountable here. We only have one hour, so 45 minutes of recording, 15 minutes of chopping it up and then go and post those videos. Because the top of mind awareness, again, the traditional notions of people hire people that they know and trust. 

  

(20:57): 

If you’re not producing the content, content’s really the fuel. If you don’t have something that people can look at and get to know you more, you’re going to fade in the distance. I mean, I talk to lawyers all the time who are like, I’ve been doing this a long time. I’ve got these established referral sources. And I get so frustrated because I hear through the grapevine that, so-and-so referred a case to somebody else and I’ll call ’em up and be like, why did you refer the case to them? Oh my gosh, I totally forgot. I totally forgot you do that. I totally forgot that’s what you’re about. And so at the minimum, that top of mind awareness nudge thing I think is kind of the minimum that I would tell folks to do. And look, we could debate, there’s probably a million other things that people will have people commenting, jumping up and down being like, how could you’re not doing this? 

  

(21:46): 

But look to me, if you don’t have some kind of, and I’m going to go with video because again, writing’s hard and earning an audience through writing and email and newsletters and subscribers, it’s really, really hard. Social content, I mean, don’t get me wrong, still can be hard, but to me that’s the path of least resistance. Unfortunately, this could be a whole conversation for another day, but unfortunately people are spending way too much time staring at their phone all day. But that’s where the attention is. And so if you are trying to stay top of mind with folks and you only have one hour to do it, that’s kind of what maybe where I would start from. 

  

Stephanie Everett (22:23): 

Yeah, I mean it’s a great question about what’s the role that you have in your firm? And so I kind of want to come back to that because a lot of the, I don’t know, marketing guru folks that I tend to be plugged into. And I do read a lot about it, and I was reading something recently and it was just like, look, if you’re an owner of a small business, you have to be the face of the business or you should be willing to spend time creating content for your business. It kind of hit me because I was like, yeah, I mean I need to be doing that. I’ve kind of fallen down on my LinkedIn posting recently, and so I’m just kind of curious what your thoughts are for that. 

  

Gyi Tsakalakis (23:03): 

Yeah, so again, I kind of agree with that general sentiment. I mean, somebody has to be the face of your practice. We can think of all the different ways to say it, but people hire people not logos. And look, there are some, we could talk about legal brands and trade names that have actually established themselves and that can be a thing, but for most firms, there’s a human being that’s going to be the face of the firm, and then you got to decide if it’s not, you better have a partner that you trust. Because this is the other thing that a lot of lawyers, and I don’t want to be accused of being an ageist, but a lot of, I’m 45 people, even my age and older will say if they’ve got younger lawyers coming in that are not equity partners, not skin in the game, and they build brand, they’re building equity that you’re not getting, they can take that with them. 

  

(24:00): 

That’s another thing that we talk about this with Google business profiles and having a social media policy at your firm, but somebody has to be, in my opinion, somebody I was going to say, somebody has to be, I’m not even going to say that. You don’t have to be, but I’ll tell you what, it makes it a lot easier to have a human face of your firm. It’s going to resonate more the emotional connect. People make these decisions a very emotional decision to hire a lawyer. It’s much more emotion than it is logic, even though, and lawyers, this is the thing we see with marketing. We’ve seen this for years. lawyers think, oh, I need to throw giant verdicts and how hard I fight and how many years I’ve been practicing. And they really focus on things that you might think are more objective measures of a lawyer’s competence. But look, some of that stuff is important, but people are hiring, they know you and they’re like, oh, this is someone I can work with during the worst thing of my life, why I’m hiring you. 

  

Stephanie Everett (24:58): 

I know a lawyer who told me, a client told them, I picked you because you had a dog on your profile, pick on your website. And I love dogs. There you go. If you love dogs, you must be a good person to work with. 

  

Gyi Tsakalakis (25:10): 

No, that’s right. And coming back to the podcast, Conrad and I talk about this all the time, this idea of affinity people want, they gravitate towards people that have common interests in, we talk about if you’re a cyclist, if you’re active in the cycling community, guess what the cycling community is like. Oh yeah. So-and-so is the lawyer in the cycling community or if you’re into food, and I always say, if you can connect it to some kind of a geographic thing, that’s great. If you’re a local lawyer serving local people, then things about your city and your community and your neighborhood, that’s the stuff that does really, really well because people care about it because they’re interested in it too. It’s their community too. And so finding those things I think is so effective in terms of attracting the right audience 

  

Stephanie Everett (26:00): 

All makes sense. And it’s work, right? I mean there’s no magic pill here, which is probably the hard thing to hear. 

  

Gyi Tsakalakis (26:06): 

Yeah, no magic pill and it’s day in and day out. That’s the other thing too. We talked to a lot of lawyers too that are like, I hear what you’re saying and I agree with you, but how do I incorporate that into my professional life? And again, it’s like everything else. It’s about time management and prioritization. There’s always too much to do, so you got to pick. 

  

Stephanie Everett (26:27): 

Yeah. Well, I do want to shift gears a little bit because I’ve been kind of curious. I’m hearing some stuff about Google and SEO algorithms are changing and ai, what’s that going to do now? Apparently Google’s telling us AI answers when we search for things, I think, and so I’ve got you and I’m like, alright, what do we need to know here? 

  

Gyi Tsakalakis (26:48): 

So I’m going to try to keep this as brief and understandable as possible. First, I want to debunk a couple misconceptions. People think like, oh, this AI thing’s brand new. And it’s like not really. I mean, it’s new in some respects, but at the very least, Google’s been using machine learning to understand user behavior and to deliver search results for quite a long time. And then OpenAI came along and did chat GPT, and all of a sudden Google is like, Hey, we’re losing market share again. These are publicly traded companies, got to keep the shareholders happy. And so they did this whole test in 2023, you can go check out if you search for Google Labs experiments, they changed the name of it, so I can’t remember what the old name is, but the current name for it is AI Overviews. And so the short version is if you go do a search, you got to be logged into Google. 

  

(27:40): 

So they’re not doing it for non logged in accounts, but you’ll see especially around how to searches, you’ll see things like it’s basically this AI overview layout on the search result. And so in the context of legal, they were slow to roll it out. They Google talked a lot about how well for your money, your life categories like legal, we’re going to slow roll it out, but we’ve been seeing a lot more, especially in the last couple months. And in fact, I’m supposed to be speaking on, it’s so hard to speak on this stuff because you create a deck and then a week later it’s like, oh, throw that away and then start a new one. But I’m supposed to be speaking about this in September and we’re seeing it all over the place, especially the how to file for divorce or a lot of the question research type legal queries. 

  

(28:25): 

And the short version is that if you are not part of what the algorithm is looking for, and again, I’m going to try to keep this as simple as I possibly can, but it’s a generative AI assisted result. And so what people don’t get is that the generative AI creates the answer and then goes and looks in Google for sources. And so weird things happen where the source that they’re getting the information from doesn’t seem like it’s quite right. Sometimes it looks like it’s just basically the featured snippet. Anyway. People ask me, well tactically, what should I do about this? And I’m like, good luck, because it’s very inconsistent. The same search can generate different results, but the thing that I would say is keep your eye on it, especially for localized results and try to identify sources that show up more regularly for localized results. 

  

(29:23): 

A lot of it’s going to be traditional legal directories, but if you see other law firm websites showing up as sources for the AI overviews, I’d say try to understand how are they structuring their content? What kind of content do they have on their pages? Some of it’s going to be an authority answer, which means basically these sites are recognized by Google as authoritative. They’ve been around a while, they’ve got links, they’re big sites, but it is the wild west right now, and we’re trying to monitor things very closely. Obviously this is particularly interesting in terms of the local pac. So lower funnel, like Chicago personal injury attorney type search, when there’s an AI overview, firms that have been very prominent in the local pack and those traditional organic listings, it’s not a one for one who shows up. Sometimes you see it’s just a copy of what’s the map pack is, and sometimes it’s not. 

  

(30:12): 

There’s a lot of flux going on, a lot of craziness. Other thing too that’s been, since we’re on the subject of Google that it’s just been driving me insane. Fake reviews are out of control. It’s a huge problem. It’s a bigger problem than I think anybody realizes. And I don’t know what the answer is because the state bars are not equipped to enforce. I think maybe state ag offices, there’s been chatter that they’re trying to get involved. The FTC has provided a lot of guidance, but I think somebody’s going to get a made example of, but if you’re a small firm, this is a huge strategic disadvantage for you because if these firms that they’re buying these fake reviews, it’s hard to get reviews even when you do a great job, people don’t want to go on there and say, Hey, thank you for getting me acquitted for my DUI, right? 

  

(30:59): 

Thank you for helping me get a divorce. Thank you for helping me after my serious car accident and stuff. We struggle because we tell people, we’re like, look, if you can’t find a way to earn reviews in a competitive landscape, like shift your marketing resources somewhere else, because even if you rank, you’re showing up there. If your competitors have hundreds of reviews and you’ve got 10, like it or not, Jeff Bezos trained everybody to buy on reviews. And so people call based on the reviews. And so it’s a real problem, and I hope that Google’s able to sort it out because I’m very sympathetic to the firms that are trying to do the right thing, and they’re getting crushed by these firms that are just like, they don’t care and there’s no one’s slapping ’em on the wrist, so there’s no disincentive for them not to do it. 

  

Stephanie Everett (31:48): 

Yeah, an interesting, I mean, I have a 13-year-old, as you know, and she was making her first internet purchase recently, some clothing or something, I don’t know. She’s very excited. She got a job, so she has money now, so she’s allowed, and she came to me and she was just like, I don’t know, mom, the reviews, she was apparently reading all these reviews of whatever it was she was trying to buy and was then just left very confused. And I was like, oh, sweetie, you got to learn after those reviews. Don’t mean any, I mean, who knows. You can’t just make all your decisions. So that’s just an interesting thing, thinking about the next generation of how they’re going to make decisions. 

  

Gyi Tsakalakis (32:25): 

It’s a great point. No, and it is a great example. And then this is a thing that Google has already recognized and they’ve acknowledged publicly that they’re losing market share because people are starting to lose faith in the, and there’s a whole other thing going on with the, basically, we’ll call it the Reddit problem, but Google wants to surface more of this user generated content. And so the theory was is that we’ll surface more discussion and forum sites, and some of that’s a reflection of people want Reddit, they’re going to Reddit for answers because they think that Reddit is more authentic. Now, I got some bad news for everybody. Reddit is just as polluted with spam as well. I shouldn’t say just as, but Reddit has a huge spam problem, and the SEOs ruin everything every time. So now Reddit’s showing up in search results. 

  

(33:16): 

And so people are going and seeding subreddits with fake questions, with fake threads. So then what happens? Well, people figure that out. And so then they’re like, all right, look, what do I know? And it’s, guess what? It comes back to the people that you actually know. And so if you go post a question on a social platform and people that you actually know respond, now you’re in, okay, now this is more trustworthy. And so the entire internet is going through this evolution of what do we do about the reliability of information challenge? And there’s all sorts of theories about this, but it’s starting to work itself out because again, human beings are saying, look, I can tell this is AI generated. I can tell that these are fake comments. And even if they’re not, the people I can trust are the people that I know, which again, as a lawyer, you should know that. 

  

(34:07): 

And so lean into how do you build more relationships? How do you build more trust? How do you become a person that people can rely on for information and for great service and all those things, because that’s what sorts it out. That’s the big filter. You can’t fake your authentic self. Your stories are your own stories. Your experiences are your own experiences, your knowledge is your own knowledge, and that’s the stuff that you want to make sure is getting out into the world because people are going to start gravitating more towards that kind of stuff and filtering out a lot of the fake reviews, fake content, Reddit threads, search results, social media posts, whatever it is. But it’s going to take us some time to get there. 

  

Stephanie Everett (34:51): 

Yeah. Well, my other kind of big takeaway is it’s changing. Things are changing sometimes faster than you realize behind the scenes. Maybe we’re not keeping up because we’re lawyers and we’re running our practices and doing all the things. So I guess it just reminds me how important your show is. I tell people all the time to follow you on LinkedIn. So it’s search, gee, I guess GYI. If you’re not seeing it in the show notes, I’m connected with you so you can find gee through me. But I think you do a good job on your LinkedIn post of letting people know what’s going on, and you do need to stay up on some of this stuff. 

  

Gyi Tsakalakis (35:27): 

Well, I appreciate that, and I try, and this is another whole issue, is that I’ve been very much like I try to stick to the substance so when people are, I don’t, not trying to call people out, but gosh, there’s a lot of misinformation out there, so I appreciate you giving me that nod. And we try to do our best, and we tell people too on the show, if you’ve got questions, we’d love to answer questions directly. We do an office hours every other Friday, and so you can come live, ask your question, you can ask it anonymously or you can submit it anonymously. But that’s the most value we can generate is to answer someone’s question. I mean, that’s free advice. So anyway, 

  

Stephanie Everett (36:08): 

And another thing I’ll make sure people know too, you guys do a good job of telling people what they need to know when they’re working with a marketing agency. As one of my pet peeves, lawyers just aren’t informed about this stuff, and there are people who are just taking our money and they’re not delivering on what they’re promising. So I think for sure, if you’re working with a marketing agency, go check it out because GI is great resources on your marketing agency should be able to deliver this very specific information to you every month or whenever the cadence is. And if they’re not, you need to start asking some questions and possibly move on. 

  

Gyi Tsakalakis (36:45): 

Yeah, I appreciate that too. And for folks that don’t have the opportunity to check it out, just so we can say that we set it here, if you’re going to pay somebody for marketing, if you do nothing else, you have to define what success looks like in advance. And it has to be defined in some kind of valuable business term, not in how many blog posts they’re going to write or how many keywords they’re going to rank for or how much traffic they’re going to get. And honestly, not even how many calls because raw calls isn’t a good value metric either. It’s got to be things like over the next period of time, if you’re talking SEO, if your objective is open cases, how are we going to grow cases? Where are we today? How are we going to go cases over the next 12 months and how are we going to do it? 

  

(37:33): 

And if they start hemming and hawing and they start talking about proprietary systems and secret Google things, I’m going to tell you, even if it works for a little while, but maybe it will, there’s plenty of spammy stuff that works until it stops working. But you got to have that the very, in fact, our latest episode we just talked about how much marketing does a lawyer need to know? There’s plenty of other things for lawyers to do, but if I kind of distilled it down to, at the very least, if your role is accountable for vetting vendors or hitting a marketing objective, you’ve got to define what those objectives are and how you’re going to get there in advance. And that really you find it’s very clarifying because now all of a sudden if people start hemming and hawing about that or like, Hey, I don’t want to talk about that, or We can’t talk about qualified leads, we can only talk about traffic or we can only talk about links or whatever, it makes it pretty easy to say, Hey, look, this is a good chance. This isn’t going to work out. 

  

Stephanie Everett (38:29): 

Yeah, super valuable. Please everyone, definitely go check that out because I hate seeing you waste and lose money on people for bad stuff. Don’t do it. 

  

Gyi Tsakalakis (38:40): 

Yeah, and even people with good intentions, look, marketing’s hard. That’s the other thing too that we talk about too, is no long-term contracts. Don’t lock yourself into a multi-year contract. Ask questions about if they’re working with competitors. There should be transparency into, you should own all of your data in your accounts. It’s another one we see all the time. If people are like, oh no, you’re going to use our ad account and we’re going to own your Google business profile or our proprietary content management system, there’s not a right answer to all this stuff. But if you don’t ask those questions, you’re going to find yourself more often than not being taken advantage of. And like I said, I know you’re a great resource too, Stephanie, so reach out to Stephanie, reach out to me. We’re happy to try to help you navigate any of that stuff. 

  

Stephanie Everett (39:22): 

Absolutely. Well, gee, thank you so much for being back on the show. I’m going to make sure it’s not another 200 episodes before we have you back on. 

  

Gyi Tsakalakis (39:29): 

Well, I’m so grateful to be back. So good to see you keep up doing the good work, love what you guys are up to, and thanks all. Who tuned in today. 

  

Zack Glaser (39:40): 

The Lawyerist podcast is edited by Brittany Felix, are you ready to implement the ideas we discussed here into your practice, wondering what to do next? Here are your first steps. First, if you haven’t read the Small Firm Roadmap yet, grab the initial chapter for free at Lawyerist dot com slash book, looking for help beyond the book. Let’s chat about whether our coaching communities are right for you at the Lawyerist dot com slash community slash lab for more information. The views expressed by the participants are their own and are not endorsed by Legal Talk Network. Nothing said in this podcast is legal advice for you. 

 

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