#550: Beyond Content: How AI is Changing Law Firm Marketing, with Gyi Tsakalakis and Conrad Saam

Episode Notes

Transcript

Zack Glaser (00:12): 

Hi, I’m Zack. 

  

Jennifer Whigham (00:13): 

And I’m Jennifer. And this is episode 550 of the Lawyerist podcast, part of the Legal Talk Network. Today, Zack right there talks with Gyi and Conrad about how AI is affecting your marketing. 

  

Zack Glaser (00:29): 

I feel like there’s supposed to be a thing where it’s like this episode is brought to you by- 

  

Jennifer Whigham (00:34): 

Is there, was it brought to you by something? 

  

Zack Glaser (00:36): 

This episode is brought to you by artificial intelligence? 

  

Jennifer Whigham (00:39): 

Sure. I mean, just in general, the concept as it was invented. No specific one, just AI as a concept? 

  

Zack Glaser (00:51): 

Yeah. Well, I don’t know. This podcast is brought to you by Alan Turing. 

  

Jennifer Whigham (00:56): 

Let’s do that. Let’s that RIP. Horrible ending. 

  

Zack Glaser (00:59): 

Wonderful man. 

  

Jennifer Whigham (01:00): 

Probably, I mean, I watched the movie, that’s all I know is from Benedict Cumberbatch playing him, correct. 

  

Zack Glaser (01:08): 

Oh, the Imitation Game. 

  

Jennifer Whigham (01:09): 

Yes, the Imitation Game. Imitation Game where he plays Alan Turing, and in that, I really appreciate him as a person. Here’s something I actually want to talk about though that’s not AI. 

  

Zack Glaser (01:16): 

Okay. 

  

Jennifer Whigham (01:17): 

And it is our best law firm website contest for this year. This is a contest we run every year around this time. We invite people to submit their websites to us. We have specifications. You can look at past winners on our websites. We can put then the show notes. But Zack, tell me a little bit about, first let’s just talk about what makes a law firm the best. 

  

Zack Glaser (01:43): 

Oh, I’d say about $200 in my pocket. 

  

Jennifer Whigham (01:49): 

Okay. Yes. Also, I don’t like money. I think money is dumb, but I would take 200 orange tic-tac boxes because that’s the currency I trade in. Okay. 

  

Zack Glaser (02:04): 

Yeah, that’s fair. That’s fair. 

  

Jennifer Whigham (02:05): 

What makes a law firm the best? 

  

Zack Glaser (02:08): 

Well, so we’ve got a couple of videos coming out on this, but really it comes down to a lot of times usability and authenticity. 

  

Jennifer Whigham (02:20): 

Say more. 

  

Zack Glaser (02:21): 

It’s really think about what your clients need, what your potential clients need. They need to be able to navigate your website, and then they need to be able to get to the place that you want them to go. Just contact you, probably maybe call you, maybe email you something like that. And when it really boils down to it, your website, because a lot of times it’s kind of the end of the funnel. It just needs to do, it’s this simple. It needs to do what your client needs it to do. 

  

(02:58): 

That’s it. But when we talk about the specifics of it, it needs to be your clients are working on their mobile phones, so it needs to be mobile responsive. Some of your clients may have visual impairment, so it needs to be helpful to someone who’s visually impaired. Or One of the things that people don’t often think about when we’re talking about accessibility is words, concepts. It needs to be something that can be understood by your clients. We don’t need to use legal jargon. I mean, I guess unless if your clients are other law firms, maybe. 

  

Jennifer Whigham (03:43): 

Right. That would be the exception. 

  

Zack Glaser (03:47): 

I was about to say, if you’re just doing divorces, if you’re doing divorces, if you’re solely doing divorces, let’s say it that way. You need to speak to humans, 

  

Jennifer Whigham (03:55): 

Human people. 

  

Zack Glaser (03:57): 

Human 

  

Jennifer Whigham (03:58): 

People. 

  

Zack Glaser (03:59): 

So the best law firm websites connect with their clients where they are, 

  

Jennifer Whigham (04:07): 

And I would say they need to elicit some sort of emotional, all of that. Get that done. You’re golden. You want to go next level? Can you elicit some sort of emotional reaction that is authentic and not forced? As in, can I go to your website, anxious, confused, scared, not know where to turn, and I read your website and my anxiety ratchets down 5% because I feel like, okay, these people got me. I feel steady. They’re experts. They know what they’re doing. They’re going to guide me through this process, and it’s going to be okay. Can it elicit that reaction? Then I think off to the moon for you in a good way. 

  

Zack Glaser (04:51): 

Yeah. And I think that goes with authenticity. And then just trustworthiness. 

  

Jennifer Whigham (04:59): 

Do you have a website like that’s not necessarily a law firm website, but one that really stands out to you? 

  

Zack Glaser (05:04): 

Oh, man. It’s almost as if I told you that I had a website. 

  

Jennifer Whigham (05:08): 

Don’t tell them behind the scenes. This is just natural. I just thought of this question, 

  

Zack Glaser (05:12): 

This whole thing at the top of my head. 

  

(05:15): 

So I told you before we started recording for years, for 20 years now, since college, I have been going to the website of the band, the gorillas with A-Z-A-Z-A lot often in order to see what new way they are. Imagining the website experience. 

  

(05:42): 

Years ago, the gorillas website was, if you’re not familiar with the band, the band, it is characters. It’s animated characters essentially. And the website years ago was their house. And you could move through their house and play their record player. You could play video games in their room. And so I just go to the gorilla’s website to see what’s going on. Now, it helps that I like the music because a lot of times you’ll get on there and the music will be playing automatically, or there’s video or something like that. But I like to go on there and see what’s up, what’s kind of new, what 

  

Jennifer Whigham (06:31): 

You’re immersed. 

  

Zack Glaser (06:32): 

Yeah. Well, how can we be thinking about the website experience differently? And that’s the next level. But again, they know who their potential website viewer is. It’s not somebody who’s looking for the best divorce lawyer in Detroit. It’s some weirdo like me that’s like, I want to hear some music. So I go there to, I know get inspired, but you were talking about getting elicit a feeling. I go there and yeah, it’s relaxed. I’ll put, right now, they have a playlist of their songs, actually, their videos that are on the website that just automatically start playing. So I’ll pop on there and then just have that on the background. 

  

Jennifer Whigham (07:23): 

We don’t recommend that, by the way. I mean special cases. Yes, but maybe don’t have something automated. 

  

Zack Glaser (07:28): 

Oh, automatically playing. No, because your clients aren’t going to want that. 

  

Jennifer Whigham (07:31): 

Your clients don’t want that Gorilla fans. Yes. The point is not to do that, but it is to know who your client is so well, to know what would appeal to them. 

  

Zack Glaser (07:44): 

Yeah. So I just mean it’s kept me coming back a ton of times. So what about you? What’s a website that you go to 

  

Jennifer Whigham (07:56): 

Told you not to ask me? Because I wasn’t going to be able to think about it at the top of my head 

  

Zack Glaser (08:01): 

Other than prodigy.com. This is what 

  

Jennifer Whigham (08:05): 

I said, Prodigy, because that was my first internet in 1993. I was president of the pets message board. I can’t say that that was the best ui, but it did keep me coming back. 

  

Zack Glaser (08:18): 

Well, but because it had a purpose, it was doing a thing for you, it was providing value, right? 

  

Jennifer Whigham (08:24): 

Yes. Let’s spin this. Yeah. It provided value for me. I don’t think your website has to provide community, but I went to that message board. I’m like, this is who I am. I love pets and I want to talk about pets, and I want to run for office to be the president of the pets. And it appealed to me in that way. And we’re giving you these silly examples because I also want you to think bigger than just what information do people need? Okay, that’s great. That should be a foundation. How can they easily get that information? Great. How can we elicit emotion? Great. But your website can be your whole world. You can do so much with it, and it doesn’t have to cost a lot. It just has to cost your imagination. You can do whatever you want with it. You don’t have to stay in a cookie cutter. This is how law firms have always been done, and this is what they look like. No, 

  

Zack Glaser (09:25): 

I swear to you, if your website has Rich Mahogany in the background and scales of justice and things like that, it’s unlikely that it’s actually speaking to your potential clientele. 

  

Jennifer Whigham (09:43): 

And you have to think about different generations too, because Rich Mahogany is not necessarily speaking to the generation that’s coming up that might need to talk about their estate plans or talk about their divorces, or even talk about trademarks, that as they’re thinking about stuff like Rich Mahogany is not the color of Gen A or Gen X or Gen Alpha or Alpha Alpha, gen Alpha. 

  

Zack Glaser (10:08): 

I like to think they’re Gen Sigma at this 

  

Jennifer Whigham (10:11): 

Point, 

  

Zack Glaser (10:12): 

Because I get it. I don’t like any, no, I’m just kidding. Don’t come after me. 

  

Jennifer Whigham (10:16): 

Interesting. But the point is just like things are changing. You’re not big law. You are the speedboats that are agile against the barge is a big law. You get to do what feels right to you and what feels right to your clients. So just take this as the inspiration to just try something interesting. Be interesting. 

  

Zack Glaser (10:37): 

Yeah. So that segues into my conversation with Ian Conrad that’s coming up because marketing is about standing out 

  

Jennifer Whigham (10:49): 

Authentically, though. That’s such a line. 

  

Zack Glaser (10:51): 

It really is, especially in this world of artificial intelligence, and we get into it in the podcast, but we can create so much shit with generative ai. We can create video. I can create a damn podcast from a white paper. 

  

Jennifer Whigham (11:09): 

This is AI right now. We created this all through voice spoofing. No, we didn’t. No AI could do this. 

  

Zack Glaser (11:15): 

No, no. AI 

  

Jennifer Whigham (11:16): 

Would be, there’s an element of randomness that doesn’t follow the pattern recognition of AI right now, 

  

Zack Glaser (11:21): 

But so much content can be created right now that the content marketing game, it’s not about the amount anymore. It’s not about quantity. You can’t just overwhelm stuff. People are looking for quality. People are looking for you. Who’s looking for you? Your clients. Your clients are looking for you. Why? Because you have value. I know that marketing and selling your services a lot of times feels dirty to lawyers. I know a lot of lawyers who do not want to charge people for doing the thing because they just want to solve problems for people 

  

Jennifer Whigham (12:04): 

That, 

  

Zack Glaser (12:04): 

But at the end of the day, these people need you. They want to find you. They want your services. You are providing a hopefully fantastic service to people and stand out. Let ’em know. Let ’em know you’re there, 

  

Jennifer Whigham (12:22): 

But don’t feel pressured to not be someone who’s not yourself. That’s a lot of things we’re throwing at you. But the idea is just sit down, brainstorm your wildest ideas, and then pair those down into something that’s actually doable for you. But start wild. 

  

Zack Glaser (12:38): 

Yeah. Yeah. Well, and while you’re waiting on the AI to get back to you and give you the content or the answer to whatever question you have right there, go over to Apple Podcasts and leave us a review. It helps our ai, it helps people 

  

Jennifer Whigham (12:54): 

Find us and mention us specifically. Just kidding 

  

Zack Glaser (12:56): 

Mention Jennifer specifically. But now here’s my conversation with Gyi and Conrad. 

  

Conrad Saam (13:05): 

Hey, this is Conrad Saam. I am a co-host of lunch hour legal marketing, and I’m here with my good friend, 

  

Gyi Tsakalakis (13:10): 

Gyi Tsakalakis also a co-host of Lunch Hour Legal marketing. And I also think of myself as shy. 

  

Zack Glaser (13:20): 

Thanks. I think the audience obviously thinks that you guys are shy after this. Gyi, Conrad, thanks for being with me. I’m Zack, the host of the Lawyers podcast, and that’s what you’re listening to right now. In case you heard Conrad and Gyi’s voices and thought, am I in a different place? Am I on a different podcast than what I usually listen to? Because you can obviously catch them on lunch hour, legal on the YouTubes, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify podcasts, any podcast that you want to get into. And you can easily see them on LinkedIn as well. They have a lot of good content there that you can catch. We’ll put links to that stuff in the show notes. But let’s jump into this thing. We’re talking AI and marketing guys. How is consumer behavior? How do we as lawyers who are trying to get our website seen and our website visited and our phones ringing, how do we adjust what we’re doing in marketing to account for that? 

  

Gyi Tsakalakis (14:23): 

Conrad, what do you got? 

  

Conrad Saam (14:25): 

Well, sorry for being a bad guest, but I’ll do this twice. I’m taking umbrage with your assumption. You take that out of every podcast We do. I love it. I love it. It’s just me and you. Usually I can be an asshole to you. Now, I’m an asshole as a guest to our host. No, I think I’m not that good host. You need in your mind, not you, but the listenership needs to realize that our objective is not to get people to our website, because if that’s what we are going to try, you are swimming against the tide of the economics of what make platforms go round. What do you mean by that, Conrad? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Expand please. LinkedIn. LinkedIn makes $0 as soon as you go to someone’s website. And we’ve seen this with engagement. So you throw a link into your post in LinkedIn and all of a sudden you get much less distribution. And so we play all these stupid games about LinkedIn, the comments below, right? 

  

(15:28): 

Shit like that. So we know this. We’ve known this for years. It just makes sense. I think we need to think about the way different platforms connect to a law firm. And that is not necessarily, not always, but not necessarily through a direct click to the site, which shows all the traditional marketing attribution, UTM parameters, call rail, all that stuff becomes really, really difficult. So we get hazier about what’s actually working, because we’re losing the kind of granularity that you can get that we had 10 years ago when I knew where every single click to my website came from. And I knew that 99% of the phone calls came into my law firm, were from my website. So that is gone, and that toothpaste is not going back in the tube. 

  

Gyi Tsakalakis (16:25): 

So I’m going to hit this answer in a slightly different light. So you answered very literally, and I agree with you completely 

  

(16:33): 

The question of clicking through the websites, but if we’re going to zoom out a little bit and say, well, how is this stuff impacting consumer behavior from a law firm’s perspective in terms of awareness and affinity and searches for lawyers and that kind of thing? Well, of course it’s dramatically impacting that because we’re already seeing chat, GPT and perplexity and these other technologies showing up in qualitative attribution data. And what we mean by that is, is that when you ask someone, how did you hear about us? Or who do we thank for referring us? They say, right in the CRM, it says chat GPT. And so my big things here are, and we could spend a whole talking about how the LLMs work and the flux and the data sources and all this kind of stuff. Here’s my short version. It’s not that much different than what we’ve historically done. 

  

(17:27): 

Maybe you reprioritize directories, maybe you do some research in what are the sources, the source sites that the GPT is using for their response to a prompt and prioritize appearing in those or making sure information’s accurate in those. But the truth is, it’s kind of a fool’s errand because of the flux and the way that the GPT works. But here’s my big thing with all this, all that being, you can do all those things that we just said and we could talk about that. But the thing that’s most important to me is the impact on the way that the consumers are engaging with the technology. See, historically, we think of search, we think of keywords and people type a keyword in. This is totally different. This is conversational. And so optimizing around keywords or optimizing around queries is really, again, a fool’s error. And it’s really understanding, and this is still true even in historical marketing things, who your audience is, what are the issues they’re dealing with? What questions are they likely to type into one of these prompts? What are all the different follow-up kind of questions that they might have? What are the refinements on their queries? And making sure that your, what’s publishing in the world is responsive to those questions. 

  

Zack Glaser (18:51): 

So are we losing this kind of time period? And please don’t make fun of me too much if I’m way behind. We losing this time period where we could really track where we got that minutiae. We got that granular stuff. But in my mind, that granular stuff wasn’t necessarily, it was was there, we looked at it, we used it. We might even use it to drive what we’re doing. But really what we need to be doing is what y’all are saying anyway, which is the actual marketing, speaking to people appropriately, trying to figure out where people are coming from. I’ve seen a lot of people where they’ll spend on Google ads because they can track it when in reality they get their stuff from referrals, but they just never ask, where did you get this? Who referred you? It’s easier. It’s lazier to go look at that. Google Analytics. 

  

Gyi Tsakalakis (19:45): 

Well, and it’s in the agencies and the marketing to say that everything’s coming from Google Pay-per-click, or if they’re an SEO person organic search. And I know Conrad’s got a lot of thoughts, and he is building up for a crescendo here. The one thing that I will say though, in terms of the quantitative data is look, there are still legal services, consumer journeys that are very linear search, click call hire that exists. 

  

(20:15): 

And for those journeys, you should hold those dollars accountable for those linear paths. The issue is not that everything is totally gone. Now, in the context of GPTs, yes, there is no GPT analytics. You’re not going to get the actual data. However, there’s plenty of companies that are working on modeling the same way that a lot of places model for rank tracking what businesses show up for relevant prompt responses in GPTs. And so that’s an indirect measurement or assessment of whether or not you’re appearing. Now, we had a long way to go on that, and whether or not that’s actually a reliable data source in the long term is still TBD. Because again, what I see is this, the flux is the problem. The personalization is the problem. Remember when you’re logged into these GPTs, it’s remembering your interactions with them. And so for example, if I say, give me a list of the best SEO companies for lawyers and attorneys, sink’s not on that list. And I say, Hey, this list should include attorneys sync. Guess what happens? Every time I do that from now on, I see attorneys syn show up in the results when I’m logged in. 

  

Conrad Saam (21:26): 

So for those of you who are Gyi’s clients and he’s convinced you that he’s doing a great job, 

  

Gyi Tsakalakis (21:31): 

Well, it might not show up for them. It might not show up for them. 

  

Conrad Saam (21:33): 

No, no, no. But here’s the tactic. Here’s shitty, sorry. Gyi would not do this. Here’s shitty agency. Here’s a way to make it look like you’re doing a good job. Go teach your clients to train the chat of the world, to show their sites, their firm, their show their sites, and convince your clients that is representative of what is showing up in the rest of the world. 

  

Gyi Tsakalakis (21:58): 

But how different is that than just being like, why don’t you search for your firm name from your firm office. I 

  

Conrad Saam (22:03): 

Know it non brand 

  

Gyi Tsakalakis (22:04): 

From your 

  

Conrad Saam (22:05): 

Firm office. This is why Gyi, and I have no friends, because this 

  

Gyi Tsakalakis (22:09): 

Is why Conrad has to pay to speak. Now 

  

Conrad Saam (22:11): 

I have to pay to speak, and I have a larger litigation budget than most firms. Than most. No, but this is the problem, right? Yeah. So it’s very easy. These types of shenanigans exist, and it’s very easy to convince people that that’s how it works and to give these kind of false positive success. And it’s no different from SEO. It’s no different from the people who are taking credit for brand queries and paper clicking and passing them off as family lawyer Des Moines, Iowa. It’s no different than people running GBP and taking credit for the billboard phone call. The billboards that are driving phone calls into this is the same key’s point, and I can’t, well, we should move off of this, but the direct response stuff, pay-per-click, LSA, some SEO, where you don’t have a starting point, you don’t have a law firm. You’re doing research, you’re going to make a purchase today, or at least make the inquiry today, that still represents a massive portion of the market. 60, 70, 80% of the market looks like that depending on the firm Gyi’s giving me, 

  

Gyi Tsakalakis (23:21): 

Depending on the firm, I would say, depending on the audience. But yes. 

  

Conrad Saam (23:24): 

But I mean, if there are plenty of firms, you don’t have to have a brand to generate business from the internet. A hundred percent. 

  

Gyi Tsakalakis (23:32): 

Yeah, 

  

Conrad Saam (23:32): 

You don’t. But it certainly helps. It helps, and it makes the economics better. Blah, blah, blah, blah. We’ve talked about this ad nauseum, but a huge portion, the AI thing’s interesting. It’s fascinating. It’s the direction, it’s the change, blah, blah, blah. You take your eye off if you want to dominate your market a go reassess your ambitions unless you have a massive, massive budget. Because to dominate your market, you need to play in very expensive, high volume direct response channels. You have to do that, 

  

Gyi Tsakalakis (24:08): 

Right? 

  

Conrad Saam (24:10): 

And that’s just a part of it. So I don’t, I love the AI thing. I love the change. I love the direction, I love these pontifications, but let’s not kid ourselves that a huge portion of the market still goes through these trackable direct response things. 

  

Zack Glaser (24:24): 

Well, let’s talk about though something that the Gyi was saying in there, which is, what is it your clientele is interested in? What is their, what’s their path? Are they looking at local service pac? Are they searching for people on maps or going to chat GPT? And you guys said something before we got on about thinking about AI in marketing in a different way, and using AI to help you with that, to help you with that client journey. Kind of like doing what I would consider the meat and potatoes of what you need to do for your marketing. 

  

Gyi Tsakalakis (25:05): 

So to me, this is where AI really thrives, is deploying AI against your firm’s data. And so whether that’s client data intake, data acquisition data marketing data, the AI is really good at identifying patterns and insights that we are not as good at, especially at Scalera. Conrad and I talk about CallRail all the time, call Rails ai, and I’ll let Conrad, because he’s deeper on this go in. But CallRail can provide you insights about the questions, the issues that your audience is facing that can inform you in a way that can help for content creation, but can also help you identify media buying efficiencies. And this is my biggest thing of all of this, especially if you’re talking about media buying in general, is if you are not telling the machines, which of the exposure awareness ads that they’re showing to their audience are actually turning into qualified consultations and clients for you, you are wasting your time and money because that is where the machines really shine. And I don’t know that you, you’re going to create so much waste. And people, we still see this all the time where it’s like they’re optimizing media to basic conversion, pixel firing, and there’s just way too much noise in there. And I think that’s a place where people don’t really realize that that AI is actually doing that. But deploying AI on firm data, I think that’s the place that it really changes everything. 

  

Conrad Saam (26:50): 

I think the key to this is, unfortunately, you have to have enough data to make sense of the data. What that means is if you are a low volume firm, if you are a solo, that you can’t detect a pattern. 

  

Gyi Tsakalakis (27:04): 

I think that’s true for media management, but even with, it’s still a problem at really small numbers, you’re not going to get statistically significant mathematical insights and analysis. But even just clumping frequently asked questions together and just seeing stuff like that, 

  

(27:24): 

I think the AI can help with that, even deploying it against crm. I mean, look, data scarcity is a thing. There’s no question about it, but I think sometimes we think about, okay, to get to 99% or 90% statistically significant insights and analysis, that’s a huge problem for small law firms. This is also one of the things that con talk about is that’s one of the advantages of working with a partner who actually has access to a larger set of data. Anyway, I’ll let Conrad talk about that. But again, when you’re taking data from different sources and you’re cleaning it up and you’re marrying that data, especially when you’re talking front end marketing data with backend CRM data, there’s still a data scarcity issue. But oftentimes you can aggregate enough to give the AI something to chew on. But anyway, that’s my point of view. Conrad, go. 

  

Conrad Saam (28:18): 

No, I mean, the analysis that AI can do is, I think that’s where this gets interesting. The content development stuff is cute, problematic, and it doesn’t really, it’s not a game changer because everyone else has access to it. 

  

(28:35): 

Being able to analyze your data and figure out, you talked about your audience. Who is your audience? Why do we connect? You can use AI to do that. You can use, one of the best things that a high volume firm can do is do lead scoring. Is this a good leader or is a bad lead? And my great leads are going to go to my best closers and my best attorneys and my shitty leads are going to go to the worst ones. And that is an instant way to make more money without doing any more investment in marketing. You can use AI to do lead scoring. You can use ai. We talk about this all the way, we have not said intake management yet, Gyi. So we’re going to say that you can use AI to score the quality of your intake staff at the phone level, at the individual call level, and now you can pinpoint things where they’ve made a mistake or where they’ve done really well. You can have AI make that happen, and now you can become a better manager because you’re sifting through a week’s worth of phone calls and finding the three best ones and the three worst ones. And now we have something to talk about on Monday morning when we’re going to do a better job this week. Right? 

  

Gyi Tsakalakis (29:41): 

And another one too, because again, this audience identification stuff, because I think sometimes it gets lost and we get so stuck in the ways we’ve always done it, but think about taking the last 10 years. Say you’re a PI firm, you’re doing motor vehicle accidents. Think about taking the last 10 years of crash data from your state police websites, public data you can get, and marrying that with demographic information across the state and marrying that with maybe your average position for your Google business profile, thinking about opening new offices. To me, those kind of cases are the ways that AI just beats us because think about what we would do. We can take that stuff, we can put it in a spreadsheet, we can do pivot tables, we can try to mash it up. AI is going to crush us in that context. 

  

Zack Glaser (30:35): 

Yeah, I like that because it kind of gets out of, that’s something more than what people would normally do. Like a regular sort of firm isn’t going to go and start to analyze those things because really, they wouldn’t create the pivot tables. They just wouldn’t do it. Right? 

  

Gyi Tsakalakis (30:55): 

They’re going to be a spreadsheet. 

  

Zack Glaser (30:56): 

Yeah. Yeah. I didn’t learn math. That’s not, those 

  

Conrad Saam (31:01): 

Are the firms that in the last three or four years, the firms that figured out the spreadsheet really used that type of data and the analysis on that data. Those are the firms that are winning today. And it wasn’t AI generated, it was data nerds and MBAs and analytical people, but those were the firms that I will say the last four years, maybe even five years, 

  

(31:31): 

Those were the firms that are now at the forefront. I’ll use one example that GI and I, we sat on a stage with, what’s the doggy one? It’s not lead dog, it’s top dog, big dog, top dog, big dog, lead dog, top dog, top dog. They went from nothing to a massive franchise model based on spreadsheets. How can we take that skill and put it in more people’s hands, right? And then this becomes this another race to get smarter, but getting smarter with AI and having AI do the getting smarter part for you, that’s magic. 

  

Gyi Tsakalakis (32:15): 

Yeah, I think that’s a really good point. This is where this is really transformational is that it democratizes access to research, data analysis. I mean, we’re seeing in the context of coding, you don’t have to have all of those different skills in order to take advantage of what the can do for your business. And really, we’re talking about marketing as we’re marketing people, but across the board operationally, service delivery, audience identification, all this stuff. 

  

Zack Glaser (32:51): 

Well, I think one of the important things that’s kind of coming out of what y’all are saying here, and we can kind of take it all the way back even to trying to figure out where my leads came from, and you’re saying if you have, essentially if you have one UTM that you put on every link that you have out there, yeah, you’re figuring out that something came from the internet, but you’re not figuring out where it came specifically, and artificial intelligence can help us get into that. It’s the value of the data, of the granular data, and I know a lot of attorneys who they don’t track this information because they don’t see the value in tracking this information. Where did you come from? Who referred you? I don’t see the value in that because I just know that Pete down the street refers some stuff to me. We have lower volume, and so I don’t need to track it. Well, it seems like if you start tracking, you can use this. I mean, Gyi, Conrad y came up with a ton of different ways to use just the data about my company, about my clients, my potential clients, the world around me to make informed decisions about my company and my marketing. 

  

(34:05): 

It makes that data capture more important 

  

Gyi Tsakalakis (34:09): 

A hundred percent, because we’ve heard those stories too, and I’ll tell you some other common ones for listeners who maybe these stories will resonate. If you’re ruling your eyes about all this data stuff, I can’t tell you how many times someone makes a strategic decision in their firm about investing in nurturing or referral relationship or buying media or where to open an office that is based on nothing. It’s just based on what you just said. It’s like a gut instinct. And these over and over again, we see just poor decisions made based on gut instincts, and again, we’ve talked about this on the podcast all the time. You’re the go-to person in your community. You’re not trying to grow your firm. You’re happy. Maybe you’re towards the end of your career. You can have a very successful law practice without any of this stuff. I will say this, you are playing with your hands tied behind your back because once you see it, you can’t unsee it. Once you see the impact of that, your gut instinct was so vastly wrong and you were about to go invest a bunch of time and money doing things that actually doesn’t have any value for really anything, that’s when you’re like, okay, I can never go back. I’ve got to capture this data. I’ve got to get it cleaned. I’ve got to deploy it on my business, 

  

Conrad Saam (35:36): 

And this happens. We’ve talked about expanding offices. Lots of you are thinking about your next office and blah, blah, blah. That’s evolved. I call it the centipede strategy. When done with analysis, most of you are really stupid about this because you’ll be in the suburbs somewhere and you, you’ll have a rudimentary level of tracking. You’ll understand that you’re a Google business profile. You’re doing well in the local results. No one else around you, not because you’re really good at anything, but because there’s no one else there, and you’re like, well, I’m just going to move right into downtown Atlanta where there are a lot more people, and then we will have the same success there. And you’re not thinking about the ability to do analysis at this point in time. That is the differentiator between the firms that are winning today and they’ve been doing this for three or four or five years, and the ones that aren’t AI is just going to make that a little bit easier. You were talking, Zack about attribution modeling. Gyi and I talk all the time about dual source attribution modeling. There’s the direct response stuff, which is the linear pay-per-click and LSA and some SEO stuff, and then there’s all the other stuff, all the other things. And because it is all the other things, and it is often many things to an individual client, I called you because of these 27 different reasons, using AI to capture 27 reasons and knowing that and putting that all together and understanding a map that these 27 different touch points were actually all effective. That’s amazing. 

  

Zack Glaser (37:09): 

You’re absolutely right, and sometimes you have those moments where it’s like the glass breaks and you’re like, holy crap. Yeah. Capturing multi-source attribution actually means something if you can start to, I can’t look at it, look at a spreadsheet and go, oh, shit, there’s a pattern there, but I could operationalize artificial intelligence to potentially find a pattern or find something that looks a lot like a pattern to that. Even if I have 12 potential sources. How did you find out about me? Well, your podcast, your website, your book, your, all of those things. Okay, great. Those are all helpful information, and I had never thought of that, the value to 

  

Conrad Saam (37:52): 

That. Now, that is to me, and it’s hard to do that, and then it’s hard to do the analysis behind it because it’s super, super messy, and one of the things that Gyi and I have talked about is this isn’t less attribution modeling. It’s more we need to solve this question with more attribution modeling, and when you try, and this is the difference between spreadsheets and AI in a spreadsheet, you have to came from one of these seven different things, or maybe it was three of these seven different things, but I’m already defining the things are, because if I don’t define what the things are, I can’t draw a pretty graph because I’m an MBA, and that’s how we validate whether or not you should keep spending money with your agency, right? Things don’t slot into those seven different options or 10 different options or whatever it might be. It is a whole Penelope of things that you might not even think about, and that’s where you can go from kind of definitive but flawed spreadsheets to comprehensive, messy, but much more accurate understanding through ai. That’s the fundamental shift in what can now be analyzed, 

  

Gyi Tsakalakis (38:58): 

And lemme give you another one, because again, if you do the capture and you’ve got, there’s another whole issue here, which is garbage and garbage out, but you have clean data that you’re working with and you’re including firm financial data. Imagine the power of being able to be like, Hey, give me my most profitable referral sources over the last 36 months, just like that. You don’t need a spreadsheet, you don’t need to do formulas, you don’t need to do VLOOKUPs. You can converse with your data. It’s unbelievable. 

  

Zack Glaser (39:32): 

Yeah, and like you’re saying, we’re talking about capturing things in multi-line text fields, for lack of a better way of really saying it as opposed to even multi-choice fields, because we’re not limiting what people are saying because quite honestly, we might find that people found out about us from a totally, totally different place than what we thought. I found out the other day that we have a video embedded on some outdoor magazine website, and it is a video that does, it’s Marshall Lick tying and teaching people to tie his shoes. It goes gangbusters on YouTube because it’s posted, it’s embedded on this outdoor thing. I would never would’ve thought of that, 

  

Gyi Tsakalakis (40:15): 

Never 

  

Zack Glaser (40:16): 

Would’ve thought this was seen that 

  

Gyi Tsakalakis (40:17): 

I’m going to give you a very relevant to this podcast conversation. My CRM the other day, someone’s like, I’ve been listening to Gyi since used to write for Lawyerist, and the quantitative attribution in the CRM said, Google CPC, because they searched on my name, got a branded ad, clicked on the ad, and then filled out the open-ended open field text box on our website, and again, I would’ve never made that connection. I would’ve been like, someone’s got my name somehow, but would’ve never known that. It’s from that. 

  

Zack Glaser (40:50): 

Yeah. Okay. Obviously, you guys could have an entire podcast on all of this. It’s your career, an entire career on all this. Dude, 

  

Conrad Saam (41:04): 

That sounds awful. You just put my, wow. Thanks, 

  

Zack Glaser (41:10): 

Buddy, but we got to wrap this one up somehow, but I guess what I’m really saying is there’s a lot of stuff in here, a lot of kind of little points that I think would’ve piqued a lot of people’s interest, and you guys have a ton of information on your YouTube channel through your podcast. If people want to look into better attribution modeling or something, you guys have something on your website for that. You guys have something on the YouTube channel for that. Yeah. But for our purposes today, we have to bring it down. We have to bring it into it. What would you guys though, in this world of artificial intelligence searching and creation, whatnot, give us something that somebody could, what would you say to somebody today that they could take away? What do they need to do for their marketing 

  

Gyi Tsakalakis (42:04): 

Stand out? I mean, that’s why I’m like P shows, I’m not a huge French file, but the more things change, the more they stay the same. The legal services consumers change, their behavior changes the platforms, changes how they research and consume information changes, but at the end of the day, marketing is still about standing out and finding ways for more people to know about you and more importantly, and trust you and whatever you can do, whether that’s producing a video, whether you’re doing it with AI or not, whether it’s writing, whether it’s podcasting, whether it’s attending local community events, doing more things that get your name in front of people in a way that they trust, and that’s what you should spend most of your time doing. 

  

Conrad Saam (42:56): 

Okay. I’ll give you digitally tactical elements to think about. I believe that this, in order to get included in some of those AO reviews, so super, super tactical, I believe this goes back to a very old concept from Google called Authorship. It was reinforced by this concept called eat. Both of those things are kind of annoying, but I would go back and research how authorship happened and what the key to authorship was tying content to a individual or an individual firm through a web of connections, so LinkedIn, Facebook, all tied to this piece of content that’s tied to this website that’s tied to this individual person. That’s kind of the authorship, and it’s the foundation of what Google called eat. I would dig deep into that. The other component to this, and Gyi teased this earlier, but never told the punchline, is the directories. I think the directories, I think AI has saved the directories because they’ve become that much more relevant, and I would continue to think about directories that you play in and having a presence there, and he’s going to disagree. I saw him pull his microphone closer to him, so he’s going to last word this. 

  

Gyi Tsakalakis (44:15): 

I’m not going to disagree. I think that’s right. I still think tactically, I think it’s worth researching. We talked about this on our podcast the other day. You have to be a part of the training data to show up in any of these things. It is the same thing as showing up in Google if you’re not there, if Google doesn’t have pages and video content, and if social platforms don’t have content, that’s the fuel. And so however you’re creating that stuff, you’ve got to be, I think it’s worthwhile to be a little bit mindful about the message, what you’re talking about, where you’re publishing, but at the end of the day, for so many lawyers, because I know a lot of lawyers, they’re like, I practice in law. I don’t have time for all this AI stuff. What should I be doing to survive the future? 

  

(45:04): 

And I would carve out a little bit of time every single day to put something into the world that differentiates you, that talks about what you’re interested in, your community that’s supporting the local community. Even if you’re a local community lawyer, that’s the stuff that’s still going to win the day, because when the next person sees that, forget about clicks, forget about likes, forget about all that stuff, you’re going to stick in their brain, and that’s the most important place to be because that’s what they’re going to use when they are like, who do I know that can help me through this difficult life legal situation that I’m in? 

  

Zack Glaser (45:41): 

Love it. Love it. Well, Gyi, Conrad, I really appreciate y’all sharing your advice and thoughts on all of this. And if anybody wants to, like I’ve said a couple of times, because I go to lunch hour legal marketing to watch videos and learn things, if anybody wants to learn more, they can always go to y’all’s YouTube channel or the podcast places that people get them, and it’s lunch hour legal marketing. Guys, thanks for being with me. 

  

Gyi Tsakalakis (46:08): 

Zack. Thanks so much. It was a pleasure. Pleasure. Thanks. 

 

 

 

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