Bull$#!% You Hear at Legal Conferences || What Are You Reading?

Episode Notes

Transcript

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Conrad. That is a very nice jacket you are wearing.

Conrad Saam:

Well, thank you. Gyi, I had this jacket when I had my motorcycle, which I bought right when I graduated from Michigan, and then it disappeared about two months before I got married. My wife remains under suspicion of that, but I really haven’t pulled out the Harley Davidson jacket for a long time until this conference. I am in Savannah, Georgia, a beautiful, beautiful city at the first ever motorcycle accident conference. And bluntly, it’s been a bit of a breath of fresh air different because there’s just a topical difference in general to the typical marketing conferences that you and I spend so much time at.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I saw they’re highlighting a airbag for motorcycles that looked pretty sweet.

Conrad Saam:

It was cool. They did a in-person review of this. They pulled the ripcord on this wearable airbag and this guy got ensconced in a wearable airbag. There you go. There’s some new SAT vocabulary words for those of you who have children who are around 15 or 16 years old.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Very nice. What else you got today?

Conrad Saam:

Well, considering that we’re at a conference, we’re going to talk, starting on the news. There’s lots of Google stuff, but then we’re going to talk my favorite segment, one of your favorite topics, bullshit you hear at legal conferences, and then we’re going to finish with what are you reading?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Alright, Lockwood, hit it.

Speaker 3:

And welcome to Lunch Hour Legal Marketing, teaching you how to promote market and make fad stacks for your legal practice here on Legal Talk Network.

Conrad Saam:

Alright everyone, welcome to Lunch Hour. Legal Marketing. We have got a healthy dose of the news and we’re going to kind of newsjack this because there’s so much to talk about and unpack in our news items. All right, Gyi, hold on. There’s another Google Core algo update that smacked us around the head just yesterday. What’s going on with the Google Core update?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

So we’re search nerds. We always talk about Google stuff and sometimes we get sick of it, but gosh, this week there’s a lot of goog this going on. First is March, 2024, spam updates launch. And for folks that are listening that don’t know this, you can search for Google search status dashboard. Google reports on some of these updates, not all of them, but many of them. And so keep your eyes peeled because spam updates rolling out. They announced the 5th of March and they say it could take up to two weeks to complete and then the core could take up to a month to complete. And so this is everybody, all the SEOs are anticipating that this is going to be a response to the helpful content issues, the Reddit issues, a lot of this AI generated content stuff showing up in results TBD, but I’m pulling for Google. I hope they’ve figured this out.

Conrad Saam:

Okay, and Gyi, can you give a little more perspective on when they talk about spam, are we talking about content spam or are we talking about backlink spam, or are we talking about review spam? Or are we talking about spam and eggs? What do we know about this?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, they list some specific spam detection and spam policies. You can go deep in it. I think for me, they’re hitting a couple that are like, you don’t see ’em so much in legal, I don’t think. But this idea of you buy a medical website to list online casino content because you want to get the quote domain authority of the medical website. So like the domain reputation stuff, they’re supposed to be cracking down on that. There are a few others in there. The real focus is on this idea of helpful content. And so they’re saying that this update should reduce about 40% of the unhelpful content. But this is the thing that I always get into because I think it’s funny because on the one hand, we talked about this last time, I think, but I guess it comes up again. On the one hand, they’re licensing this API data from Reddit.

Reddit’s supposed to have all this helpful content that they’re training their algorithms to learn, and they’re trying to get rid of all this unhelpful content. And they specifically call out content that’s designed for clicks. So clickbait content, but ironically, their system at least is training on, or they’re learning about how to improve their systems based on whether content’s getting clicked down or not. So they’re like, stop creating clickbaity content, and yet we are training the algorithm on content that is generating clicks or it’s likelihood to generate clicks. So I don’t know, that’s why I was on a thread and I was like, I think that they’ve just, it’s all broken. They don’t know what to do, and they are, it’s

Conrad Saam:

All broken.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I don’t know. Tell

Conrad Saam:

Notably missing in the spam update is anything about review spam?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

No review spam in this one. And I’m like, okay, so what’s the tactical thing here? Go remove unhelpful content from your website. And we joke, because if you go do a search right now and lawyers that are on top of this that do these searches, I promise you that not much is changing right now. There’s still plenty of websites that have all sorts of unhelpful content that are ranking. And so let’s bookmark this for a month. Let’s come back. We’re recording on March 6th, so April 6th, April 7th, somewhere around there. That’s when it should fully roll out. And we’ll revisit this and see if we noticed any differences.

Conrad Saam:

Alright. There was also an LSA update, mid-February that I found to be completely and utterly disgusting, yet entirely predictable. The update from Google with LSAs was a rollout where you can now bid on your brand and Google automatically enrolled everyone doing LSAs in this, which means that if someone types in Smith and Jones looking for Smith and Jones, your LSA ad can show up for that even though they were already looking for you. And you can pay for the privilege of having a strong brand like that. Google’s been doing this in pay-per-click for a long time, which I find gross. And they’re deliberately conflating. For example, I use the obvious example, Morgan and Morgan with car accident lawyer. And that basically increases the number of people who are bidding on those discrete terms, which increases the cost overall in the market. And it’s gross. It’s really gross.

And for them to now roll this out into LSAs is even worse. I think the thing that really pisses me, well, there’s lots of things that really piss me off about this, but with pay per click, you can actually see what’s happening. You can see what you can separate out. You’ve heard from us over and over again that you need to separate out your brand campaigns from your non-branded campaigns. That should not be surprised to any long-term listeners. But with LSAs, you don’t get that data. The opacity in this is really, really concerning. You have no idea how much you’re paying for that call that was looking for Smith and Jones to start out with. And so there’s really nothing to do. Gyi, what has been your strategy with this? Are you opting your clients out? Are you keeping your clients in? Are you just kind of in a wait and see? What does that look like for you?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

So for clients that have a well-established brand, they’re getting a lot of search. I would opt out, and I say this, I hate painting with broad brushes because test it on your own stuff. See if something’s happening that, because the other side of this coin might be, and to your point, we don’t have transparency on this, but what happens if being opted into the brand thing improves your visibility for the non-brand, then maybe it’s worth paying for those leads even though you are paying on your brand name. And it stinks. And I agree with you, and I think it’s gross too, and I don’t like it, but what happens if turning it off? Google says, okay, well you turned that off, and so you’re getting less volume. And so we’re going to start showing you’re not booking as many leads, you’re not booking as many appointments through the platform.

So maybe we don’t show you for non-brand queries. In which case, I would say it’s probably worth depends on what your cost per lead is. But if you’re a big brand, you talk about Morgan Morgan’s probably like the more the merrier, bring it on, a hundred bucks a lead on searches on my name, they’re probably bidding on their own brand name anyway and pay per-click. And so this is probably cheaper than what they were paying in pay per click because they’re only paying per lead versus paying per click. But if you’re a small budget, if LSAs is your only advertising and you’ve got an established brand, and to your point, a good practice here would be bid on your name so that you can actually see what the relative volumes and costs are. And then you can compare your Google Ads brand campaign to LSAs. And maybe you can make some correlation there of like, oh, we’re actually paying less for brand search and LSAs than we are in Pay-per-click. But I think if I had to paint a broad brush, I would say opt out of it, typically, I don’t think it’s worth it to be buying your own brand name back. That’s something that a lot of the, I remember when major sites that I won’t name used to do this, they would arbitrage on,

Conrad Saam:

Does it rhyme with Bravo?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

One of them did. Yes it did. But you can opt out. So if you’ve got LSAs running, run over to your dashboard right now and we’ll put a link in the show notes. But yeah, you can opt out of it. But again, if you do that, if you’ve been humming along before this and then you opt out and then all of a sudden your impressions in LSAs goes to zero, you might think, Hey, maybe I just killed my LSAs by opting out. I don’t know. What are you telling people?

Conrad Saam:

The whole thing that pisses me off is you don’t know. It’s such a fucking guessing game. It really is. It’s so hard.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

That’s not very helpful for our listeners.

Conrad Saam:

Hate the player, hate the game, all of it. No. So bluntly, we’re actually doing the opposite. We’re keeping people in. I am making the potentially fallacious assumption that the cost for your brand queries is lower than the cost for a transactional term. I don’t know that I’m right about that at all. I have no clue because we don’t have any data. I don’t know that. But having said that, my worst case scenario is someone is looking for Smith and Jones and they wind up somewhere else, and all the work that you’ve done to generate that referral, who then vets you online gets lost because you go somewhere else. That is a fear. Having said that, we have clients who spend five figures on their brand just in pay per click, right? And so, all right, you’re big brand advertised. You should expect that. Is that 15, $20,000 worth it? Have you retained a case that you would’ve otherwise lost? I don’t know.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And that’s the thing, people get all mad at us and we’re like, what do you want us to do?

Conrad Saam:

Right? Gyi, it’s your fault. It’s just gross. It is a gross move by Google to extract rent out of people who have spent a lot of money building a brand. And I hate it.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

It’s also so messed up too because, and they just updated their quality rater guidelines too, which that should be another news item. But if you follow the quality rater guideline stuff and you, they’ve been adding all of this documentation on their spam updates, they’re trying to actively remove from the results these spammers that are trying to trade on other people’s names organically. But in ads, it’s no problem. We don’t care in ads if you are trading on other people’s names, because that’s where we make our money. It’s messed,

Conrad Saam:

It’s messed.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Alright, anyway, the other way I, before we move on, you made some really, I want you to slow down and talk to people about branded PPC. So let me set it up for you and then you can take off. So

Conrad Saam:

Because you already said this, slow over the plate, please.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah, well, I think this is important because this is the tactical part of it. So even if you, let’s say you’re like, look, I don’t want to bid on my competitor’s names. I want do car accident lawyers. So I’m exact matching car accident lawyer, and this is Google Ads. We’re not talking about LSAs here. You can’t do that. LSAs obviously, talk to us about what the problem is, and I’ll even take it one step further. So people are thinking, oh, well I’m only exact matching car accident attorneys, so I’m not bidding on my competitor’s names. Conrad, what’s wrong with that? And what else can lawyers do to avoid their ads showing on competitor’s names?

Conrad Saam:

So the big problem with this is the conflation of exact match terms with branded queries. And the example we use over and over again is Morgan and Morgan and car accident lawyer synonymous in the eyes of Google now. Yeah. So

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Lemme say the buzzword. Yeah, go. The buzzword here is close variant, right? So even with an exact match term, Google will show your ad if Google deems that your exact match search term is a close variant to a branded search term like Morgan and Morgan, is there anything you can do about this Conrad?

Conrad Saam:

Yes, there is. So I used to really encourage people to do it yourself on pay-per-click. In many cases, this has now become so convoluted and difficult to do that I actually would make an aggressive case that hiring a really good agency to handle this is the right answer. So, Gyi, the only way to really deal with this is to have massive negative keyword lists for your competitors. And the negative keyword basically says, if Morgan and Morgan gets searched, I don’t ever want my ads to show up for Morgan and Morgan. You can imagine how complicated that might get.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

How many agencies do you think are actually doing that?

Conrad Saam:

Well, and the problem is Google is, this is even worse. It’s more nefarious than it sounds because their recommendations are to help you spend more money. And they name these things, these recommendations to make it sound like you’re getting more when you’re really, really getting less. So the agencies that don’t really know what they’re doing are getting fucked up with this. The lawyers who are trying to do it themselves are getting fucked up with this. When you have an inefficient campaign, it doesn’t just impact you, it impacts the entire market because it’s an open bidding system and it screws everybody. And Google’s making a ton of money by screwing the industry. The end. Goodbye. I’m sorry, we need to come up with something happier to talk about right now.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, we have a lot of happy things to talk about, but first, let’s take a quick break.

Conrad Saam:

Alright, Gyi, we’re now going to go into our segment. We’ve talked about this before, but the bullshit you hear at legal conferences, and I’m sitting here in beautiful Savannah, as soon as we finish recording, I’m going to go off and talk to a bunch of motorcycle accident attorneys. And you take some umbrage with this concept, don’t you?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, no, I don’t take umbrage with the concept of conferences. And we’ve talked about conferences before. We’ve been doing this a long time. You and I have spoke at many conferences. In fact, we should put on a conference together. Oh yeah. I’m the former chair of tech show. So we’ve been around the conference world. It’s not like I don’t want this to come across as sour grapes. We’ve had this discussion many times, but it came out of a Facebook post where you said you were hearing some things at the conference and we’re going to get into the specific things that you’re hearing that we might have issue with. But what happened was we opened this conversation up about conferences doing a better job of vetting speakers. And I don’t know what the solution is, but conference after conference, we hear people on stage saying stuff that we’re like, I can’t believe they’re saying that.

And to me, one of the issues is, is that conference organizers should do a better job of vetting speakers and they should be more transparent about the economics of how the conference works because many of these speakers are paying to speak. And again, I don’t have an issue with paying to speak, but let the audience know because when I go to buy a ticket, I want to know, is this a sponsored content piece or is this person’s there because you’re a curated expert on the topic. And again, I’m not opposed to it. I don’t have a problem with it. I don’t have a problem with sponsorships and paid content. But go look what the FTC says about native advertising. I mean, essentially, tell me this, if you pay to get up on a stage, is that not a native ad? How’s it not a native ad?

Conrad Saam:

So you’re taking FTC concerns to the pod?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, I think the FTC is a totally different topic, but there’s some people that seem to think, who cares? It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter with the who’s paying who for what. And I’m like, of course it does. Of course it matters. Who’s paying who for

Conrad Saam:

When you say there are some people, you were talking about the conference putter honors who are profiting from agencies. It’s usually agents. If you’re a marketing person at a conference at this point in time, and it’s not tech show, my default is that person is paying to pitch fair to broad brush.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, it’s more and more common, which I think is why it’s more and more on our radar. But no, I don’t think that’s, and again, even let’s just say it is, let’s just say then just disclose it. Just put it out. Let the attendees know, Hey, this is a sponsored session. This is a paid for session. The problem is that they’re misleading people because the lawyers are coming to these conferences. They think, oh, this conference organizer is just getting the best people around to come speak on this topic. And it’s like, well, maybe, but maybe the best person didn’t want to pay the $25,000 freight.

Conrad Saam:

Yeah. So my bigger concern, the disclosure part, I hear you. I don’t care as much about, and by the way, and I’ll be fully upfront on this, I pay a shitload of money to speak at conferences, and I’ve been bummed that I haven’t seen you at a lot of them because I know we kind of live on philosophical different sides of this, but not really.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I’m not against you paying. I’m never having a problem with you paying

Conrad Saam:

No, but you won’t do it. You’re standing on a bigger, you’re a more principled person than I am.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, not even that. I would just say this for me. If I’m going to go and I’m going to sponsor a speaking thing, I’m going to pay to speak, then I think it’s important that the conference is like, Hey, this is, Gyi, attorneys think is sponsoring this session. That’s all I care about.

Conrad Saam:

Okay. My biggest problem with all of this is the bullshit content that is being delivered at these conferences to people who are paying to get good content, whether it’s poor vetting or just the prostitution of the speakers. But

Gyi Tsakalakis:

That’s connected. Those are connected

Conrad Saam:

Things because I get it. I get your point that they’re connected. I feel like you’re solving the bad content problem through disclosure. I don’t think that is going to change the bad content problem. You’re still going to get people bluntly who have no business speaking about some of the things that they talk about at some of these conferences. And disclosure doesn’t help that I don’t think. Don’t, the conference hosts are doing a good job to think about are these people really thought leaders in their business? And that whether they’re paying or not is really, really problematic. And it’s gross.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yes. I don’t think that the disclosure solves the problem, but it helps the audience give a weight to what they’re hearing. Also, we’d like to give a shout to Mike Mogul. He dropped an episode on his podcast about the realities of legal conferences today. So Gogo, check that out. We’ll put that in the show notes. Well, let’s not keep beating this dead horse. Let’s go into what have you recently heard at a legal conference that we’re going to go

Conrad Saam:

Into three examples from very recent history. One might not even call it history. And I would love to get your feedback on this because for two reasons. Number one, we’re making the point that some of the content that you get at these conferences is absolutely off. Number two, I want to start to spelling some of these concepts that you guys are hearing at places like conferences because it’s problematic. Okay? And by the way, I sent these three things to our VP of SEO because I wanted to make sure that Conrad wasn’t out of step. And Kevin, in his typical fashion, in his gruff voice said, I wouldn’t agree with any of these things. So now that I’ve set that up, I’m going to ask you these questions, gui, and I would like you to dispel now that we’ve kind of suggested, or maybe you disagree with Kevin, but I’m going to give you three things that I want you to respond to, and hopefully the audience is going to take away, not just that we are suspicious of conferences in general, but I do think these are some items that you really should not be thinking about tactically.

Alright? Number one, in order to rank for transactional queries, head terms like motorcycle accident lawyer, you need to start by getting five to 10,000 sessions a month for informational queries. Like how to put on your motorcycle helmet, true or ky?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, so just to frame, you’re saying you can’t rank for transactional queries without first ranking for informational queries?

Conrad Saam:

Well, because Google likes that. Gyi,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

So that’s false. Okay. Now, if I wanted to be a judicious listener, does ranking for informational queries correlate with ranking for transactional queries? Probably because as your site gets more authority, you probably see that you’re ranking across a broader of the four types of search intents. Classically people would say navigational, informational, commercial, and transactional. And so you probably see that, but I’ve never seen a situation where you have to, and especially if there’s a specific number of sessions being implied, and first of all, the only place that you’d actually be able to see this would be in search console, because you’re not seeing this from GA four, which is technically is where sessions come from. I don’t even know if we call what’s going on in search console sessions, so to speak, but no, I’ve never seen that. There’s a threshold for one search intent in order to rank for another search intent.

Conrad Saam:

And listeners, you already fucking know this because if this was the case, you would read all of your content on Amazon, which does more transactions than anybody else, and Wikipedia would be selling motorcycle helmets and microphones and mousetraps, which it’s not. So you already know this. Put some common sense in here. Okay. That was number one. Number two is very, very tightly related to this, but I want to give you your opportunity to respond to this. Traffic is the capital V-S-E-O-K-P-I, the primary S-E-O-K-P-I. You should look at is traffic true or fki?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Sure. For the New York Times, sure.

But for a law firm, no. I mean traffic, you want some traffic. I mean, you can rank for, you can get some traffic, all sorts of different ways. You aren’t ranked for Detroit Lions. You could rank for some random search query that has nothing to do with the practice of law. You could buy this medical domain and post a bunch of content and generate all sorts of traffic. That’s never going to convert into a single potential client inquiry, let alone a client inquiry. And so relevant traffic, the growth of relevant traffic is a good leading indicator. So no way close to the ultimate S-E-O-K-P-I.

Conrad Saam:

Okay, I could not agree more, and I can share this. I’m pretty starting, these guys don’t listen to the podcast and I won’t share who it is. But we’re looking at a firm right now that has seen a massive spike in traffic. This is a law firm. They’re really killing it for Brooklyn style pizza, which I didn’t even know was a thing, but boy oh boy, are people looking for it and landing on some content. But Brooklyn Style Pizza,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Maybe they should start selling ads to Brooklyn Pizza joints.

Conrad Saam:

It’s funny you say that. So this is going to go tangent, but part of me is like, okay, you’re winning that game. That’s an asset. How can we leverage that? Right? What can we do with that? So can we profile? Yes, I do think these things through a little bit further, but the reality is their phone’s not ringing from Brooklyn style pizza.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Okay, here’s a question for you. This is another tangent. Have they attracted any links because of it

Conrad Saam:

To Brooklyn Style Pizza? I don’t believe so. So great question. So let me ask you this question, and I think I know your answer if you have something that is completely unrelated. So for example, if you happen to sponsor a conference, adopt a puppy, a conference, if you had something that was a non head term and you had content on that, and it got a link, let’s say it’s completely, it’s an Adopt a Puppy thing, and you get a link from that relevant

Gyi Tsakalakis:

From where, where’d you

Conrad Saam:

Link from? You get a link from the local

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Animal, animal shelter,

Conrad Saam:

Local animal shelter about why you should adopt puppies. And you get a link from I like it.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I still like it.

Conrad Saam:

I like it too. Yeah. So I knew that we could be your answer for our dear listeners who are not so steeped in the intricacies of SEO. Gyi, why do you like it?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

It’s locally relevant. You might even drive some traffic from it. You might drive some other local interests. Anyway, I’m big on the local links. To me, that’s the thing that over and over again that I keep seeing. If you find ways to get businesses, organizations, schools, blah, blah, blah, in your local community, it also is great from a, you’re highlighting that your good works in the community stuff. So even outside the SEO context, I think it’s a good thing. And that’s the thing too, is I think that SEO people like us, we get so hyper-focused on some of these wrong metrics. That’s great. The other thing I always think about is scholarships. So scholarships got abused. Everybody’s trying to get links from.edu, but there’s a law firm here in Southeast Michigan that they sponsor three different scholarships. One is for it is a go to law school scholarship, one’s for injury crash survivors. And it gets picked up in the news and it gets great PR for the firm. And it attracts a bunch of links from local organizations and education organizations where people that want scholarships. That’s a great way to do the scholarships.

Conrad Saam:

Great. Yep. Yep. I could not agree more.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And they rank all over the place.

Conrad Saam:

So for those of you who are brand new to the Lunch, Hour, Legal Marketing, if you go back and listen to old episodes, this is a concept that is going to come back over and over again. Local links. And by the way, and this is another tangent, sorry, we’re on tangent. Heaven here, Dr. Those DR ratings are not going to pick up the value of a local link. Did you just barf when I said Dr. Dr

Gyi Tsakalakis:

When you said Dr. Dr, I’m so tired of it. So exhausting. I mean, I was just funny. I was just got five emails today about Rocket Boost, DR. 70 backlinks.

Conrad Saam:

Yep.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I’m like, ah. Still thing

Conrad Saam:

Rocket Boost. Okay, final question for you, sir, because this did not sit well with me. You have to carefully select your SEO company who can balance tactics, because some tactics hurt organic while helping local. There are tactics that you can do that work against local or organic at the same time. Can you come up with me, Gyi, of a single digital marketing tactic that you would use that would hurt organic in favor of local or vice versa.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Oh, so you didn’t give me vice versa before. So I didn’t prep for that one, but I was really trying to rack my brain. I mean, the short answer is no, but if you really wanted to stretch, maybe you could say something like you could buy fake reviews that would help your local, but those fake reviews could potentially, arguably, if you were using the fake reviews as part of your structured data on your site, and you were violating the self-serving ads thing, and you got a manual action for the fake reviews on your structured data on your,

Conrad Saam:

Wow, okay. So you’re going to manual action to come.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I’m creative, man. Up with an example. I’m

Conrad Saam:

Creative.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I like it. Creative. I’m a creative guy and I want to be a judicious listener. I think the other thing that I thought when we talked about this before maybe would be something to do with how you’re using URLs. The URLs you’re using, your Google business profile versus the URLs you’re trying to rank organically. Your structure of your URLs could arguably help you in local and hurt you in traditional. But gosh, other than that, I really couldn’t

Conrad Saam:

Think. Are we stretching?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Oh yeah. We’re way out in, okay.

Conrad Saam:

Okay. So la la land. My point here, the goosh, so to speak, is local and organic. While the tactics are, there is some overlap in some of the tactics they are reinforcing, they’re not oppositional.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah, right. I mean, go look at what the ranking factors are for local. I mean, it says right in there, traditional SEO factors impact prominence, which is the major factor in local. The thing I always think about when we talk about this kind of stuff, I know what you’re going to say, but maybe I’m too philosophical. Maybe some of the people that are talking about this, they actually believe it. Do you think they believe it? Do you think they believe these things? Or do they think that they’re just really just shilling for the crowd?

Conrad Saam:

I think it’s both. I think there are some people who just genuinely don’t know. And I think there is some deliberate subterfuge, and I believe the onus is on the conference hosts to sift through the more, do more bullshit sifting and not just happily cash the checks. And now I’m going to get myself uninvited. But

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Same. Don’t worry. That’s why you even see me around. All you do is just pay more, man. You’ll be at every one of these conferences. Just keep paying.

Conrad Saam:

I do. You can say

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Whatever you want.

Conrad Saam:

So full disclosure to the listeners, I have a six figure budget for conference speaking this year, and it is bigger than it was last year.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

That’s great.

Conrad Saam:

I know that. I feel like I’m telling a dirty secret to you. I feel like this is a confessional, not a podcast.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah, that’s what it is. This is our confession segment.

Conrad Saam:

Alright, let’s move away from my Catholic school history lesson. We’re going to take a break when we come back, GI and I have an amazing, exciting announcement for you. Stay tuned.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Listen up. Lunch, Hour, Legal marketing lovers. You need some more Lunch, Hour, Legal, Marketing in your life. Conrad and I are going to be hosting Office hours. March 15th will be our first crack at this. So head over to LinkedIn because we’re going to be communicating the logistics and how to sign up and topics and that stuff over on the Lunch Hour, Legal Marketing LinkedIn page. So follow us there for more details. But we’re super excited. We’re going to go deep. We’re going to take specific questions. We’re going to solve specific problems. We’re probably going to have some additional guests on there. Lunch, Hour, Legal Marketing. Office hours three 15. Mark your calendar, check it out

Conrad Saam:

And bring your questions. We want this to be live responsive. Gyi and I just kind of talk about this. We’re waxing poetic off of the script here, but we want to respond in real time to your question. So if you’ve got a dumb question or a brilliant question for legal marketing, come join us. Looking forward to it.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Alright, Conrad. Well, we’ve been ranting and raving. What are you reading?

Conrad Saam:

I picked up just kind of at a whim. I’ve been doing a lot of flights recently because I keep paying to go to all these conferences.

Sad but true. I picked up Shoe Dog, which is autobiography by Phil Knight. It’s his memoir. And he goes into his experiences in the sixties and seventies creating this amazing, and the reason I love this is it shows just how messy it was creating this business. And I think we have this mis perspective that those really successful businesses, they’ve got it all worked out. It was a master plan drawn up in some corporate strategy session that was executed against flawlessly. It is brilliant. And I think the reason it’s brilliant is because it just shows how messy it was for Nike to build Nike. And it’s the same thing for us building our agencies. Gyi, I mean, you and I deal with stupid stuff all the time. There’s messes that we have to deal with on the regular. Same with law firms. I did an interview with Christopher early the other day, and he was talking about how it just gets harder and more complicated.

You never get to a point where it’s easy. He’s just continuing to get better all the time. And that’s really the mindset. It really puts to bed this perspective that it’s kind of this neat plan that was foretold obviously and easily. And it’s also really, really interesting. Reid, Phil Knight used to drink a lot. By the way. That was one of the things that I was my biggest surprise. I mean, he was an Oregon runner, but boy oh boy, he talks about being hammered in Japan a lot in the book. That was unexpected. Anyway, Gyi, what are you reading?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I’m in the process of reading everything Tiago Forte that I can get my hands on. And for folks that are familiar with his work, the books are building a second brain and the para method. And speaking of messes, part of what he’s talking about is how to capture and utilize and apply in a proactive way all of the digital information that you touch and learn about across everything. I do think that this has been a really interesting thing for me. We’ve tried many different methods. We’ve tried different capture tools, but I think that Tiago might have a, he claims to have a proven method to organize your digital life and unlock creative potential. So I’m not done with it yet. But so far, from what I’ve read and some of the videos, he’s also got some courses that I think are worth checking out. So I encourage folks to check that out.

Conrad Saam:

Alright, well, I am off to go speak on a panel for which I paid the privilege. But I will tell you this. Gyi, do you know Byron Brown?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Byron Brown,

Conrad Saam:

Byron Brown. I’ve used him a lot as an example. He’s the anti Lawyery lawyer, I believe he’s out of Utah. He’s done some amazing branding and positioning. If you want to really get your creative brain going, check out the anti lawyery lawyer, Byron Brown. I have never met this guy before. He’s been heroes. A little bit of a stretch, but it’s not too far off of mine from a branding and positioning perspective in the legal world. So I am going to go sit on a panel with him. I’m really looking forward to it.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well tell the people the truth, Conrad, and enjoy the rest of the conference. And to you listeners, thank you so much for struggling through another episode of Conrad and I burning everything down. If you enjoyed this episode, please do subscribe to Lunch Hour Legal Marketing. Check us out on YouTube, head over to LinkedIn and follow the page so you can join our office hours and get your specific problem solved. Until next time, Conrad and Gyi signing off for Lunch Hour Legal Marketing.

Speaker 3:

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