Bull$&*! Marketing & the Goobers Who Buy It || How Super are Super Lawyers?

Episode Notes

Transcript

Conrad Saam: Before we get started, we’d like to give a huge thank you to our sponsors, Lawmatics and CallRail. Gyi, let me be the very first person to publicly recognize your great achievements as the host of Lunch Hour Legal Marketing named the number one marketing podcast every lawyer should listen to. Although it was not Lunch Hour Legal Marketing, I believe perhaps maybe you have a second podcast called Lunch Hour Digital Marketing. Can you tell us all about this amazing award?

Gyi Tsakalakis: We did it. We solved podcasting, number one, what was the site again?

Conrad Saam: This is on LegalScoops, brought to you by Jacob Maslow.  Jacob, thank you for recognizing Gyi’s awesomeness with Lunch Hour Legal Marketing.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Are you a LegalScoop subscriber?

Conrad Saam: I am not a LegalScoop subscriber. I am, however, a Google Alerts subscriber, which is the only reason I learned about this. In all seriousness, Jacob Maslow at LegalScoops put together a list of 10 podcasts that he thinks every lawyer should listen to. But we were the first one listed, so we are calling ourselves number one. Number one Lunch Hour Digital Marketing.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Now, this just kind of makes us seem like unappreciative jerks, right? We got recognized but, you know, why are you thumbing your nose at it?

Conrad Saam: Are we blowing the lid off the craven pathetic attention seekingness that is the marketing world and the legal marketing world?

Gyi Tsakalakis: I’m not, I’m just here to celebrate. What else are we talking about here today, Conrad?

Conrad Saam: Oh, boy, this is going to go deep. So, as usual, we’re starting out with the news, and we are then going to have a special guest join us, the master of marketing and bullshit, Mr. Paul Faust of RingBoost. Finally, we’re going to end with a segment on Super Lawyers. Just when you thought this couldn’t get more interesting, we’re going to do Paul Faust and then head to a discussion over whether or not Super Lawyers is worth it. Hit it.

[Music]

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

Conrad Saam: Welcome to Lunch Hour Legal Marketing. Let’s do the news. All right. Gyi, Elon Musk does a rebrand of Twitter. How did that work out for Mr. Musk?

Gyi Tsakalakis: Well, it didn’t seem like it was planned very well, considering that Meta and Microsoft may own the intellectual property. I mean, you can’t make this up, I mean, how good is this? Got shut down in Indonesia because they thought maybe it was in violation of some of their obscenity laws. They couldn’t change the sign because they never got permission to change the sign. And I think this is from an independent article, but one user was noted as saying, the X logo looks like it’s for one of those ridiculous fragile masculinity subscription box services that would send you, like, an axe, a bottle of hot sauce, small batch coffee, and some beard oil every month in 2019. Sounds like it’s all going very swimmingly over there.

Conrad Saam: So this is what happens when you do a rebranding. Elon is doing the new Coke of Coke to what happened to Twitter. Hey, by the way, Gyi, if it’s now called X, what should we call tweeting?

Gyi Tsakalakis: Crossing?

Conrad Saam: Crossing, well done. All right. Two episodes ago, we talked about the introduction of Threads to take down Twitter. Twitter seems to be taking itself down on its own accord, but it looks like Threads is not doing all that well either. We talked about this last episode, users down, and Threads is now down by more than 50%. So for all the digital marketing gurus now, only half of you guys have even hung out there.

Gyi Tsakalakis: As hard as Elon tries to burn down X, Zuck apparently can’t figure out how to keep people on Threads. So hopefully you didn’t build your Q3 marketing plan around dominating Threads for lawyers.

Conrad Saam: Or hopefully you didn’t name yourself a marketing guru because you were the best out there.

Gyi Tsakalakis: First on Threads.

Conrad Saam: First on Threads. I must be —

Gyi Tsakalakis: People were posting their Threads number. Do you see that?

Conrad Saam: Oh, I know. This is my point. We won’t call anyone out, but you know who I’m looking at.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Uh-uh.

Conrad Saam: And finally, I had a really great interview with John Henson. He is in the lead generation regulation space, which does not sound all that exciting now that I say that out loud.

(00:04:57)

But John’s perspective is that the FTC is really cracking down heavily on lead generation. We did specifically talk about the legal industry and his overriding take is that what we have as marketers assumed are sufficient disclosures to date are no longer sufficient because it leads clients, those end users to bad surprise moments and so expect changes coming down in the lead generation space. His exhortation to the listener was to make sure you know, if you’re buying lead generation, where those leads are coming from seems fairly simple, but I guess most of you aren’t.

Gyi Tsakalakis: And where can your mom go to listen to this interview?

Conrad Saam: Your mom — we will make sure that my mom can listen to my interview with John Henson. We’ll throw that in the show notes. When we come back, we’re going to talk to Paul Faust about bullshit in marketing.

[Music]

Gyi Tsakalakis: Smart firms use CallRail to track where every lead comes from; PPC, LSA, organic search, or even offline ads. CallRail tells you which channels drive your best leads.

Conrad Saam: CallRail even integrates with your favorite CRM or practice management tools to help manage your leads and see the ROI on your marketing investments.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Know exactly which marketing tools work. Plans start at 45 bucks a month.

Conrad Saam: We recommend CallRail to every single one of our clients. Go to callrail.com/lunchhour now and try it for free.

[Music]

All right, everyone, as promised, we don’t like having guests on the program, because every time we do, people ask to get on the program, and we like to talk about what we want to talk about. But we did invite Paul Faust for our segment on bullshit. Bullshit works sometimes, and we don’t like it. Paul, you were recently reappeared on the cover of DotCom magazine. I want to be the first to congratulate you on social media for that amazing achievement. Gyi, do you want to get in on that action of congratulating Paul publicly?

Gyi Tsakalakis: Absolutely, congratulations. We did see that pop up. While we start Paul, tell us about this experience and the honor of winning DotCom magazine cover.

Paul Faust: Yeah, it was probably since Hebrew school, the first honor I’ve actually gotten. I was a tree in my Hebrew school play, and that was big. My parents were there, my grandparents were there, there’s no small roles, I’m just a small actor. So without the tree, there was no shade in the scene. So that was my first big moment. Being interviewed DotCom magazine was — I remember in college, I said, this is what I’m going for. And it was an honor to speak to them. It was an honor to be in front of my colleagues in the industry. I’ve spent so much time around DotCom that it was nice. I mean, I’ve typed DotCom a lot, and it was nice them to have me. So, yeah, big honor for me. I almost retired after that, but I’m just going to go for one more cover.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Well, you clearly didn’t need to retire because, boy, oh, boy, there were lots of people on all of the socials just falling all over themselves to offer you plaudits for that.

Paul Faust: Yeah, you know what, I’m blessed to be in a wonderful industry that you could pretty much post anything and people will comment, people will share. Some of them are just truly honored to be friends with me, and the rest are just jealous. Most of them are just jealous that they don’t get the covers that I get and the social media exposure that I tend to get. And so some of them, the comments are true, and others are just masks and jealousy.

Gyi Tsakalakis: So I want to dig deep into the cynicism that if you’re not reading this or hearing this from us, Paul, how much did it cost to get on the cover DotCom magazine? Did you pay for that?

Paul Faust: I did not pay for that.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Okay.

Conrad Saam: That’s an honest answer.

Gyi Tsakalakis: A carefully worded honest answer brought to you by Paul Faust.

Paul Faust: Look at the time in our company, we had an in-house marketing person, and look, she was great at it. Just pounded people, pounded people, pounded people to get anyone — in all seriousness, anyone to talk about — what we talk about and I think, honestly, the pitch was the power of voice in an increasing digital age. We used to joke about at my company, that you could pick up any magazine in the world knitting, farming, and there’d be articles about SEO pay per click social media, and nobody ever talks about the power of voice. So the reality is, I think we went with the fire hose just dumping on everybody, and I was like — but yes, we were paying PR companies and paying for outlets to say, hey, you want to talk about this, no one talks about it. So it was kind of funny but yes, I thought it was silly that I was on the cover of DotCom magazine.

Conrad Saam: The irony is just right, isn’t it?

(00:10:00)

Paul Faust: You know it’s funny because a lot of that — I have a lot of my dearest friends here in the SEO space, the social media space, the pay per click space. And so, look, I’m one component of a thing. It was just interesting that I guess it’s because there was no great phone number magazine, somebody had to put me on the cover and it happened to be that one.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Yeah, and part of the — you know because we’re having fun with this, which I think is awesome. But one of the reasons, in our audience is a lot of lawyers. This stuff’s huge in legal, right? Every day, lawyers are getting 500 calls, emails, you know, hey, come beyond lawyers of whatever list beyond our cover. And so, one, we kind of wanted to have you tell the story of it. And two, and I think to play devil’s advocate for a second, for the marketing person who signed up for it. Like, look, it got awareness, right? It got people talking about it and we laughed. But you had 100 and some comments on the Facebook feed, here we are doing an episode about it, even though we’re doing it a little bit unjust. And so that’s kind of the point of this episode, is say, look, a lot of this stuff, yeah, it’s paid PR, lawyers are inundated with it. And how do you kind of sort through, like, should I do this? How much should I spend on it? Is it going to be a professional liability or is it actually going to be the type of thing that might add some credibility to my practice?

Paul Faust: Look, I agree with you. I think the cynical side is we all know in this industry that we’re all in, it’s very much write a check, get on stage, write a check, get the best positioning, write a check, get endorsed by the right people. In some instances, it’s unfortunate because it lends others to believe that, well, you must be the best if you’re on the stage. If so and so put you on the stage, well, then they’ve got to be vetted and that’s not always the case. And in other instances, I completely understand it. You want to put on a conference, you want to bring in real value. There’s real cost to it. The industry, and it’s not just our industry, but the legal industry, people don’t want to spend 5 to 10 grand to show up at a conference. You need the owners on sponsors. And so if a sponsor says, “Hey, I’m in the industry, I’m willing to write a check, I want some speaking time.” The other side of that is, look, if someone calls you as a lawyer and says, we’re going to put you on the cover of pet grooming magazine, well, if the story is interesting enough, it’s good exposure. I mean, I got links out of it. I got even jokes out of it when people say, how the heck are you on DotCom?

Gyi Tsakalakis: Right.

Paul Faust: So, yeah, I would take every opportunity for press I could, but it is kind of silly. The funniest story ever is at PILMMA. Ken Hardison invited me to have lunch on stage with him in front of 200 lawyers or 150 lawyers. And I was sitting with Ed Lake, and he goes, “I want to induct our newest member of the PILMMA Hall of Fame.” And Ken Hardison goes, “Paul Faust.”  And Ed —

Conrad Saam: You, he’s putting you in the Hall of Fame?

Paul Faust: In front of 200 people.

Conrad Saam: Who? You?

Paul Faust: And it was kind of funny. He was like, get me, because, no, I don’t pay for sponsorships. But you know what, I’ve come to every PILMMA. I’ve brought in other vendors, I’ve helped vendors, I brought lawyers there. So, yeah, it’s nice to be honored when you actually deserve the honor.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Well, let me go back to the other flip side of this. And the thing that kind of blew my mind when I saw your post reignited, like, three or four years late was all of these people who looked like they were genuinely like, hey, good job, Paul, congrats. And kind of lacked the perspicacity to recognize this for what it was, despite the fact that they lived in the digital or legal digital marketing world. And this goes to your point of, like, there’s no such thing as bad publicity because people are like, yeah, good job. There’s really no downside to that and that’s kind of where for me, it can get increasingly ugly depending on what you’re doing. But it just blows my mind, the lack of kind of awareness among people. But again, you get the links, you got the likes, you could grow the profile. It, to me, is a little bit surprising. Any thoughts on that?

Paul Faust: Yes, I agree with you because I think some people didn’t even look to see that, wait a minute, he sells phone numbers and he’s on the cover. They were just like, oh, you got a cover. This is amazing. It’d be like if I got on the cover of magazine but it was really the FBI wanted poster. Like oh, look at you, you’re in the post office.

Gyi Tsakalakis: No such bad thing as bad publicity on social, right?

Paul Faust: Right. Our friends in the industry can make jokes. Other people just think it’s great, wow, look at you. You’re doing this and this and this. Yes, it’s almost like anything you do on Facebook. People just like, like, like. You didn’t realize that it says I was on the cover because I was indicted for something. They don’t know but you know what, for me, it’s okay because my personality allows me to be self-deprecating and laugh at it. And by the way, I just want to be clear to the audience. I think I was only on the digital cover. I don’t think there was a print cover.

Gyi Tsakalakis: I don’t think that’s it like that’s the awesomeness. It’s DotCom magazine. It’s a contradiction in and of itself, and some people didn’t get it.

(00:15:02)

Conrad Saam: I do think, though, that this is part of the story, though, right? Because I will tell you, I saw this thing in 2019 and I said congratulations. I think I made some kind of smart aleck comment about Internet wasn’t dead. I think I quoted something from the article. But the point is Seth Price comments a congratulations, he knows what’s going on out there. Part of the story, too, is that when people see this stuff on Facebook or they see 10,000 likes of an Instagram or a TikTok video or whatever it is, there’s nuance there that’s not being captured, right? So, like, the average person drops by that post and says, oh, all these smart marketing people said congratulations to Paul, and we’re all kind of laughing about it.

But that’s an important piece because, again, it’s know what’s the takeaway for lawyers like, yeah, guess what? There are some lawyers out there that are dancing on TikTok, and they’re going viral. But those same lawyers that might be commenting and liking and going to conferences to your point and having dinners and showing all this stuff. They might not even refer case to those lawyers because they don’t trust them to handle the referral.

Paul Faust: I agree with you. I’ve had the conversation but it becomes in our industry, as you guys know, it becomes — my lawyer friends and a lot of my friends of mine it’s almost like the cat with the pointer is that they’re chasing it, chase it. All it takes is one or two of the right ones to step on it for a second and then flies like, I got to do it. And if they all got off TikTok and they did the handstand challenge, they do it. At the end of the day, I’ve joked with people. I’ve said, look, I love it, but I don’t know if I get in an accident, I go, hey, honey, you got to call a guy that meal preps. Do you see the way he cuts those carrots? I got to get him in court. Or did you see that old dance where they all did the squatty dance? I’m not sure that that — I think there’s a place for it, and you mix it in with other stuff to show your human side, but you have to be self-deprecating. Come on, guys, let’s also call each other’s BS. I’m waiting to be on the cover of Trial Lawyer Magazine. So I got DotCom, I’m waiting for Trial Lawyer Magazine man of the year or something, and then I’ll officially announce my — those two covers I’ll officially announce my retirement.

Conrad Saam: What if we do this for the dyslexic out there? I’m just thinking we could do The Trial Lawyer Magazine, maybe people won’t notice.

Paul Faust: I’ve liked the trial. I’ve liked the trial. No, Sharon, Keith and Chase, Ken, all you conference people out there, I’m willing if you want to interview me for a cover story, The Trial Lawyer Magazine, you could speak to my people. After DotCom magazine the demand got too many requests, so I don’t even handle them. You guys I handle directly because we have a relationship, but everyone else will go through my people.

Conrad Saam: All right, Paul, thank you for joining us. And by the way, I do have to thank you for one of the most unique gifts I’ve ever given my kids. And I’d recommend if you guys have kids becoming phone capable, Paul’s a great resource. All of my kids have phones. Their phone number includes their name, and that’s what RingBoost does. Paul buys and sells phone numbers. And so if you are looking for a great phone number for your kids or for your business, more importantly, connect with Paul. When we come back, more bullshit or not about Super Lawyers.

Gyi Tsakalakis: And we’re back. And we would like to first thank Charlie Mann of Law Firm Alchemy. Dropped me a message after our last episode. Listen to your most recent LHLM about coaching. I was practically cheering in the car when you talked about the, “I’m just going to tell you what I’m doing and oh, by the way, send me your referrals model.” I refer to those people as gurus rather than thought leaders or coaches. It’s a cult of personality more than actual coaching. So if you want to see more or hear more of us ranting about coaching, check out that last episode. And also thanks again to Charlie for listening and check out Law Firm Alchemy. And Charlie has a podcast as well, which he will be referencing Conrad and I’s conversation, so we encourage you to check that out. And if you’re brand new here, subscribe so you can hear us rant about coaching and other things, digital marketing for lawyers, Lunch Hour Legal Marketing which brings us to our next segment, How Super are Super Lawyers?

So we get this question all the time, should I pay for Super Lawyers? Should I pay for Avvo? Should I pay for Lawyers of Distinction? Should I pay for the cover of DotCom magazine? How much should I pay for it? Is it worth it? Conrad starts to walk us down the path of what you think about how super, Super Lawyers and their ilk are.

Conrad Saam: Well, the ilk is a pretty broad category.

Gyi Tsakalakis: It’s big ilk. Big ilk.

Conrad Saam: It’s a big ilk. And I think there are two ways with which you can pay for these things. You can pay with your cash book, right? You can pay with your bank account. In some cases, you can also pay with your integrity.

(00:20:02)

And I think you need to figure out where you need to draw that line or where you want to draw that line. There is some value in some of these paid directories, right? And at the very smallest level, you can get links out of this. You can get recognition by people who don’t know anything about the legal industry. You can get that crystal plaque in your office that means nothing that you paid for that actually, people are like, oh well, they must be a good lawyer because they got a crystal plaque I’ve never heard of.

And when I say this, I’m not saying this with a level of cynicism. This actually happens. We know that people take these things seriously regardless of what is actually behind it. You need to think about that. And then I would take it to the final extreme, the Lawyers of Distinction. We’ve hit Lawyers of Distinction over and over again because it’s just such a good story. The top level is I was able to get my Chicken Zippy awarded a Lawyers of Distinction because it’s not a real award, it’s a bunch of bullshit. And yet lots of people are still pushing it because again, I go back to this concept that even when people don’t know or recognize the award and by the way, most of these awards no one has ever heard of.

Joe Consumer does not know Super Lawyers. They don’t know Best Lawyers. They don’t know Lawyers of Distinction. They don’t know the Chicken Awards like, they just don’t know. And so the crystal plaques, the little gold leaves that you throw on your website, it has an impact regardless of the efficacy. So if you are such a bad lawyer that there’s no other reason that someone would hire you and you have no integrity, by all means go get one of those awards because they work.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Love it. And if you didn’t notice the subtlety of our invitation and the segment with Paul is lost on you in having this second segment —

Conrad Saam: If you didn’t notice the subtlety, please hang up and just go back to get —

Gyi Tsakalakis: Go buy Lawyers of Distinction. But I will say this, I think there’s some points here, though, that I’d like to go a little bit deeper on. And as Conrad mentioned, it varies from plaque of distinction to plaque of distinction. Because we’ll put the selection, the Super Lawyers selection process in the show notes.

Conrad Saam: I believe it’s patented.

Gyi Tsakalakis: It’s patented. And I’m not going to read all through it here, but the point is, is that you know, look, someone calls you up I mean, Paul mentioned this. Someone calls you up and like, hey, you won Super Lawyers, you’ve been nominated, or you’ve been recognized as a Super Lawyer. Cool. Awesome. Thanks. Right? They’re not asking you for anything, you want to put that on your website, fine. Conrad’s point, because most people don’t know anything about these things. They see that you share it on social media and just like Paul did with his DotCom cover, people chime in, hey, congrats. It’s awesome you got that award.

Step two, okay, now they want you to pay. They’re like, hey, in order to be able to use our trademark company logo, you got to pay us a licensing fee. Now things get a little bit dicey, right? Because it’s like, well, this is obviously a play for them to make some money. They still reached out to me, even though their selection — you can go try and vet their selection criteria. And again, we’re not trying to just single out Super Lawyers, we are in fact, in the show prep, we went through Facebook and just searched for Super Lawyers. And almost every lawyer that I was connected with that had won Super Lawyer or was nominated or won a Super Lawyer was showing up in the feed as celebrating the Super Lawyer things with a ton of celebratory comments. Right, everybody’s congratulations. Hundreds of likes and hearts and all that kind of stuff.

And so to Conrad’s point, there’s maybe not Super Lawyers, but some of these do have a bad reputation amongst lawyers. It’s funny because it’s like you actually might have reputational harm for celebrating one of these that’s known as, like pay to play or something. Then you have the Rules of Professional Conduct. And so you might ask yourself, like in the example I gave, I don’t know, it’s like, well, they nominated me. They have a selection process which you might say is BS and everything. But if I’m disclaiming that I was nominated, and you can go and review the selection process on superlawyers.com and you’ve disclosed that you paid a fee to use the logo, is that false? Maybe it’s misleading. The FTC is working on guidelines, I don’t know if this came up in your conversation, on your FTC conversation, but maybe the disclaimer doesn’t pass FTC muster. I’m not 100% sure about that.

But for me, the practical thing always comes back to, should I pay for this? And the other thing that happens with a lot of these programs is they bundle them right. So you’re not just getting the distinction. Yeah, maybe you’re getting a plaque you can put on your desk or something to hang on your lobby. Maybe you’re getting a premium profile. Maybe you can get an email signature. Maybe you’re signing up for some lead generation thing that comes with it.

(00:25:00)

And so, is it worth paying for? I have no idea. How much are they asking you to pay? Is it 600 bucks to be able to use Super Lawyers in your stuff and you’ve got a $25 million marketing budget. Probably it’s worth it, right? I don’t know. Conrad, what do you think? What are you telling folks?

Conrad Saam: Yeah, I mean, the paid side of this, you need to think about what you’re getting out of it. If you only get the award, if you’re paying for the award.

Gyi Tsakalakis: You would mean the actual physical trophy.

Conrad Saam: No, and by the way, don’t pay a subscription to that trophy. That is just insane. The auto renewing subscription to the trophy, the physical trophy, that drives me bananas. No, there are — those awards where you have to think through what the value is, right. And this goes back to kind of whether or not the directories are useful as well. Are these things getting traffic? Do they get eyeballs in and of themselves? I think that becomes very relevant and that is increasingly difficult for them to do with the advent of all the changes in the cert pages. So are these things getting eyeballs and does that in and of itself generate value for you? I don’t know —

Gyi Tsakalakis: Not at all. SGE, SGE. They might be coming back.

Conrad Saam: This is a really good counterpoint to where the — and actually so let’s take the SGE thing. So to catch the listeners up to speed, SGE is Google search generative experience. One of the things that Gyi pointed out early, early on, is that SGE, the large language models that build SGE, rely heavily on directories to actually populate some of the content. This was early findings into the content that’s coming out of SGE. Additionally, on top of that, they’re using words and this is all semantics, but they’re using words like best lawyers to determine whether or not a lawyer is actually good. Which you guys can’t do as lawyers, but best lawyers certainly can.

And so you have these interesting things where perhaps — this is an aside, but perhaps with directories, this becomes very a much bigger deal, especially the directories that include superlatives like top 10, right? And we’re seeing these show up in the LLMs, which are then showing up in SGE, which maybe a very, very interesting move for you in 2024. That is a very interesting digression, but it is important to note, however, take SGE out of it. Is it worth putting money into these directories? So do they get visibility in and of itself? Is that a thing or not? So I would look into that and you can do that just by frankly doing a bunch of searches. When you run a Google search, something like four to seven of the organic results are frequently directories. Depending on how low in the funnel you go. So what shows up and is that therefore relevant to your practice? Number two, bluntly, don’t buy links. But boy, oh boy, is this a good way to buy links without buying links? You heard that, not from me. That was Gyi’s idea.

Gyi Tsakalakis: I support it.

Conrad Saam: Yeah, but like game on. That is a very, very real thing. And then finally, and I hate to say this, but regardless of the veracity of the actual award, it means something to people. So if you are such a bad lawyer that you need to come up with reasons for people to hire you and you needed an award to push them over the edge, it works. I hate to say it, but it works. So there is value to these things.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Yeah. I’m going to say a slightly different version of the last part. Look, I’m empathetic, you’re a brand new lawyer, you don’t have 100 client reviews and somehow maybe another lawyer nominated you, maybe you’re a couple of years in and you win a Super Lawyers thing. And should you share that you won the Super Lawyers? Like yeah, you should. You should probably put it on your website. Do I think it’s going to make the phone ring off the hook that you were nominated in one Super Lawyers? No. Do I think that you should be paying thousands of dollars a month so that you can use that in your social media feeds and in your email signature? No, but I don’t even know what the pricing is to just be able to publish it. And people that do you can hashtag LHLM, as to let us know what you’re paying for Super Lawyers and stuff like Super Lawyers.

But to Conrad’s point, like, yeah, people, they don’t know. There’s a reason why even some of the actual best Trial Lawyers in the country are sharing on Facebook that they’re a Super Lawyer, that they’re in the top 1%, that they’ve won best lawyers and they’re blah, blah, blah, because their target audience sees that and they congratulate them for it. Just like Paul’s Faust friends congratulated him for the cover of DotCom magazine.

Conrad Saam: So if you want to take some more cynical veneer off of the comments here, go run a search for a Super Lawyers, see the people that you know have won it, and then look at the amazing engagement that that generates, right? It works. My concern, it’s not a concern, it just annoys me.

Gyi Tsakalakis: Exactly.

(00:30:00)

Conrad Saam: The word in and of itself does not matter to the end consumer because the end consumer doesn’t know. And the potential for abuse with that, as we have seen with things like Lawyers of Distinction, is very real and it is gross. And that, by the way, I will go down saying that that is something that should be beneath you as professionals.

Gyi Tsakalakis: There you go.  Well, thank you, dear listeners, for tuning in to this super positive and constructive tactical episode of Lunch Hour Legal Marketing. Thank you to our good friend Paul Faust for joining us today. If you just landed here, please do subscribe to future banters between Conrad and I and let us know what you think. Drop some reviews, follow the hashtags, suggest show topics. Till next time. Gyi and Conrad, Lunch Hour Legal Marketing. And we are out.

[Music]

Outro: Thank you for listening to Lunch Hour Legal Marketing. If you’d like more information about what you heard today, please visit legaltalknetwork.com. Subscribe via Apple podcasts and RSS. Follow Legal Talk network on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram.

Gyi Tsakalakis: We can fix the mistakes in posts. I think Paul Faust taught me that.

Conrad Saam: Yes, he did.

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