The LHLM Q&A Extravaganza — LIVE! From LEX Summit 2024

Episode Notes

Transcript

Announcer:

And 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:

Alright everyone, it was super cool to see you. Gyi, here at Salt Lake City at Filevine’s user conference, they asked us to kick off the show.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

There are all these people here. We don’t know what to do. Usually we’re just locked in dark rooms staring at each other. But we are super grateful to be here. And thank you all for showing up to this live recording and question and answer session for Lunch Hour. Legal Marketing.

Conrad Saam:

So this is literally standing room only and we were going to pull someone off the street if no one showed up. So I appreciate all of you guys getting up here. This show is about you today. So do you listen to Pod Save America?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

A couple episodes, but I’m as dedicated as you are.

Conrad Saam:

I’m an every episode kind of person, but they do live shows and it always turns out really, really well. Good precedent for you guys. The show is for you. We’ve got someone walking around with a microphone to ask questions and I would love the first person asks The Jawbreaker The Icebreaker.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Icebreaker. Or a Jawbreaker.

Conrad Saam:

Or a Jawbreaker. We’ll give away some cool stuff.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

What news is out there in legal marketing world today, Conrad?

Conrad Saam:

Well, apparently there’s a big purchase made in the agency world.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Oh

Conrad Saam:

Yeah. Do you know anything about this?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Nope.

Conrad Saam:

Oh, you are a liar. He’s already lying to the audience.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Don’t trust me.

Conrad Saam:

All right. Scorpion purchase GNGF. Our good friend Mark Homer is now moving all this clients over to Scorpion. Yeah. Big news in the agency acquisition world. Anything else going on that we should be talking about?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, there’s some excite, this is going to be spliced in later. We can’t give it away, but there’s some big news coming from Filevine that I’m sure a lot of you’re here to learn about, but we can’t say anything about it cause we’re under embargo. But people are listening on the podcast, it will be spliced in,

Conrad Saam:

You’ll know Gyi. And I were lucky to get a sneak peek into Filevine’s big announcement that’s coming later today and you guys will all hear about that. So enjoy that.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

We even beat Bob Ambrogi.

Conrad Saam:

We beat Bob Ambrogi, the original news Legal source. Digital news guy.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Godfather.

Conrad Saam:

Yeah, he doesn’t even know about this yet. And we do. So we feel special.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

He probably knows now though.

Conrad Saam:

I dunno. Alright, I dunno. And now for some news and a first for Lunch Hour Legal Marketing, we are going to be breaking a story that nobody knows about yet except for our amazing guest.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah, we’re super lucky to be recording live from Salt Lake City, Utah at Filevine’s Lex Summit 2024 and we have the chief product officer, Mike Anderson here to join us to break this exciting news from Filevine. Mike, welcome to Lunch Hour. Legal Marketing.

Mike Anderson:

Hey, happy to be with you. Thanks for having me.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Thanks so much for being here. So tell us what is this exciting breaking product news?

Mike Anderson:

So here at Lex we’ve announced several really exciting features. There’s a bucket of those that are like fan favorites. If you’re in Filevine all the time, you’re going to really, really appreciate those. But the first one that I’ll talk about is really just an entirely automated flow for a law firm that deals in retainer fee agreements. We notice that there’s a whole bunch of work that happens right at the beginning of opening a file where you’ve qualified someone, let’s say it’s for estate planning or divorce or something like that. You go through qualification, you need to send out an agreement and then you need to get a payment and then you would actually be okay opening up the file and start tracking time on it. That entire flow you can do in a completely contactless way. You can do it without human intervention. So that really the prospect turn client is driving the entire workflow. So we’re excited about that one.

Conrad Saam:

Okay. So this sounds like a lot of potential setup.

Mike Anderson:

Yeah, there is some setup. So Filevine offers our own digital payments offering. And so if you have that set up, if you use our lead docket product and if you use our e-signature product, yeah, there’s some configuration but nothing that you couldn’t do in an hour or so if you’ve got those things already.

Conrad Saam:

Okay. And I’m saying when you say you, do you mean a smart technical person like Gyi or do you mean Bill the owner of the law firm?

Mike Anderson:

I think like the maybe head of operations at a law firm, the office administrator or something like that, depending on firm size, this is not something you would need an engineering degree to do. It’s point click configuration. That’s what I would say to that question. The second we think is pretty revolutionary. So I remember being on a plane not that long ago and I noticed because I’m in this industry, I noticed someone sitting in front of me was clearly doing document review. They had their laptop, small little laptop on split screen and they had their kind of analysis on part of the screen and then they had the source document on another and they were going through that document and scanning through the pages, putting something on the other side, scanning through the pages, putting a little bit more. And I saw this person do it for hours, just hours and hours.

We think obviously there’s a big part of that that has to have a legally trained mind to do it, but we think the place that you can get them to can be way further down the line. So we released a product that allows for a document to be uploaded to the system and automatically you predefine a set of key criteria and those key criteria in fields think of it that way. Those would just extract out of the document and in the system and then you would have those as just like your base going into the document review. So we call it AI field mapping.

Conrad Saam:

There’s one use of the term ai. We’ve given Mike four total uses of the word AI before the dog shock color comes in. So there’s your one

Mike Anderson:

Deal guys. It is part of the technology, but you’ve got to have the system and the whole kind of client matter context for it to really be valuable to be able to go into your client matter in your system and load in that document. And then those key details are already extracted for you. And then you can then crosscheck them and you can say, okay, are we sure this extraction got it correct and then enrich it from there as an expert. So that kind of first pass of extracting information, putting it in organized flow, we can just get you that right out of the gate. So we think we’re really, really excited about that.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I’m curious what’s your best guess is how much time folks are going to save from using this awesome

Mike Anderson:

Tool? Yeah, I think it’s really interesting. We know of law firms who outsource this work to others. Sometimes they bring it in house and they kind of outsource the first pass and then they have an expert trained eye. So you may be saving money, you may be saving time, but it’s got to be that first pass, maybe 30 minutes for every page. It kind of depends on how complex that evidentiary documentation is. No,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

That makes a lot of sense. And my hunch is you alluded to is probably a lot more cost savings too, right?

Mike Anderson:

Yes. You

Gyi Tsakalakis:

To outsource this and you’re doing it in an integrated environment with the other stuff. So that’s going to be time and money savings there

Mike Anderson:

Too. Yep. We’re pretty excited about that. And then the last product that I’ll share, and this is a completely novel product we don’t know of anybody. I mean the last one is pretty novel but you can kind of see where it comes from. This is entirely novel. We looked at technology that is now available and we looked at the deposition process where someone goes into a deposition with an outline and they, before the deposition have written up this outline wanting to make sure that they get a certain answer locked down or maybe they get an expert from the other side to kind of pin them in a certain direction or get them to say a certain thing and they’ve got all of this inside of an outline and they enter that deposition and they’re stuck between looking at that outline, making sure they meet their goals and the person in the room and reading the room. And pretty much everybody that we’ve talked to has left a deposition thinking, oh crap, I forgot to do this. I

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Know I have,

Mike Anderson:

Yeah, I forgot to do this. Or did I really get the answer that I needed to get? We actually have heard from attorneys that do this day in day out and they’re like, yeah, you think you’ve got the answer and then the transcript comes back and you’re like, oh my gosh, this isn’t even admissible. And I was sure that I got an answer. So we are introducing deposition copilot, depo copilot as we call it. And what Depo copilot is, it is a tool that can sit with you in deposition and while the deposition is happening, this technology now exists, it can live transcribe the deposition. It’s like a one or two minute delay. It’s live transcribing the deposition. Like this isn’t the official deposition transcript of course, but it’s live transcribing what’s happening and then you loaded your goals into that tool beforehand and then it tells you you have a bathroom break, whatever.

I mean, I think in the state of Utah where we’re at, I think you can have a deposition that lasts two days. I mean there’s going to be breaks as those who take a lot of depositions know there’s going to be breaks and you check the tool and you can see the live transcription and then you get an AI piece of analysis that says, did you meet your goals and goal by goal? It will tell you, yeah, we believe this is met. You click into the goal, it will reference you to part of that transcript to say, yeah, this is where we believe that goal was met either during break or maybe you have an associate with you in the deposition or something like that and they’re checking the tool. We think that this will fundamentally change the way the depositions are done, the ability to use that live streaming feedback while you’re in the deposition. So you really just have that one shot and the ability to get it right in that one shot and have something tell you that you didn’t lock down that answer, you think you locked it down. And then it has a few built-in capabilities like the ability to track down inconsistencies, it recommends follow-up questions, things like that.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

That’s what I was going to ask. I didn’t want to put the cart before the horse, but it will prompt you on. This is a question. I think that that’s where the real magic happens, right? Yes. It’s going back through the transcript saying, Hey, we don’t think you hit it. Ask this question. Bingo.

Mike Anderson:

Wow, bingo.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

That is a game changer.

Mike Anderson:

And what we announced today does all of those things that I just described, we are super appreciative to folks who come out to our user conference. So we actually allowed all Lexi attendees to have free access to the tool through the end of 2024. And we want to get this out there, we want to get it used. People are going to have great feedback, they’re going to find things, they’re going to have great suggestions. So where we think we are in a unique position to take this tool because we do case management, doc management, all of that good stuff is okay, let’s do everything we described before, but let’s give it some of the context that we already have. Let’s give it some of those documents that were shared from an expert or whatever it might be. And let’s have that also be part of that referential material that you can get that live feedback during the deposition.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

That’s amazing. That’s really, really cool. It’s exciting stuff. And where can folks go in that are interested in learning more about this? Where can they learn more about this feature and everything?

Mike Anderson:

Yeah, yeah, I mean you can find out at just filevine.com. We’ve got a place to sign up there. Like I said, our L attendees, they’re going to get kind of a special spot in all of this, but it’s available to use. We’ve shared it with folks already, so yeah, they can find out more just to Filevine.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Very cool. Well Mike, thank you so much for joining us on Lunch, Hour, Legal Marketing. We’re really excited to be here and excited to see these new releases from Filevine.

Mike Anderson:

Yeah, really appreciate you guys having me.

Conrad Saam:

Alright, what do you guys want to know? Any question? Tactical, philosophical parenting. I told you we’re going to give something away. Come on.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

We thank

Conrad Saam:

You winner.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Thank you Brave Soul.

Conrad Saam:

We appreciate it’s going to better. It’s going to be better than this. You already have one of these.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Conrad is still going to knock the camera off the table when he throws it to you.

Audience Member #1:

How long have you folks been in business doing these podcasts?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

The podcast, podcast? Give your a quick life story. Conrad, my

Conrad Saam:

Quick life story I started How

Gyi Tsakalakis:

About Avvo Conrad?

Conrad Saam:

Well, I always try and avoid Avvo because none of you guys like Avvo anymore. So I started this in 2006 doing digital marketing in the legal world, running SEO for avo, which at the time was very revolutionary. I’ve had the agency for 11 years now. Gyiz, your agency’s a lot older than mine.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Is it not a couple years? 2008. We started in 2008.

Conrad Saam:

It’s a good time.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

When did you

Conrad Saam:

Start? We’ve been doing this pod together for three years, I think three, three and a half years. But it pre-existed both of us. It was originally started by Jared Correia. One of the things that lots of people are excited about doing pods here, so I’m trying to go tactical already. Lots of people get excited about launching a podcast and lots of podcasts gets launched. 83% of them fail in the first six months and there is huge value in the longevity and having things keep going. And so I think one of the successes of our pod is the fact that it’s been around for so long and it predates both of us.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah, I think consistency is key. I mean I think that’s true in marketing in general. I found my agency in 2008, Kelly Street was my co-host when we first joined Legal Talk Network, but I think you just celebrated your hundredth

Conrad Saam:

Episode. Hundredth episode, yeah.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Hundredth with Conrad. So it’s been going on longer than that, but a couple years. And yeah, I think the consistency is really important, getting people involved. A lot of the shows, whether you’re due guests or you have people submitting questions, we found that to be a really helpful way to get more people engaged. So thank you for your question. Go.

Audience Member #1:

So we are an immigration law firm based on the East coast predominantly for a Latino audience. And most of our leads are coming in through referrals in social media marketing. It’s been performing really well. At what point do we start doing SEO, Google pay-per-click, that kind of thing.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Go ahead. I have no idea when you should start. And in fairness for us to really give you good advice of if this is the right time for you to do it or how much money to spend or how to invest or which agency to go with, we’d have to have a much longer conversation. But I think high level, this is what I would say always start with the economics of your firm. If you have a sense of what the value of a client is and you start working your way backward and say, okay, I can spend this much money to acquire a client, then you can start thinking about where you want to deploy resources both time and money. I would say this just, and this is kind of like the SEO talking point. SEO’s great. If you’re starting brand new and you’re in a competitive market, in a competitive practice area, it’s probably going to take some time.

The other thing that I would be very sensitive to is language. It sounds like if you’re serving a certain community that might not be speaking English. Stuff you do on your website matters a lot from an SEO standpoint. And so the buzzword there would be like international SEO. But the good thing about SEO is if you have resources in-house that you can start working on it. You can start right now. You don’t have to pay anybody except the time that you’re spending to do that, which is a positive. Ads ads can be tricky. A lot of people, Google makes it really easy to open an ads account, but to actually manage media to a target cost per acquisition and the right client, that’s a lot harder. And so again, for me, it always comes back to the economics. If you’ve got to cut target cost per acquisition, you’ve got a budget you want to experiment with, it’s usually worth trying some new things. But when to do that, how much to spend, it’s really hard without having a deeper conversation.

Conrad Saam:

And that really goes to where do you want to go with it firm? How aggressively do you want to grow? I know there are people in the room right now who are like, I’m trying to take over this market and that means every channel. And in immigration in the Latino market, we know this, a lot of really good business can come from referral through social. That’s the right game to play, but it’s a portion of the market. So you are not playing, you’re ignoring, I’m pulling this out of the air. You’re ignoring 60% of the market, which may be fine because you’re able to acquire clients through social media work and that’s completely fine if you want to own it, you need to play across channels and that has a completely different calculus and I would think that through. And then the other component to this that you didn’t mention is the time element. Pay-per-click is the tap you can turn on right now and you turn it off. And so you can turn that up and down based on how busy you are. That and the SEO has a much longer term play. So I would be thinking through those elements. Great. Hey, oh Gyiz, who led?

Audience Member #2:

I don’t even know if it’s done. So Jason Hennessy, I have a law firm. I do personal injury, but I also have a side hustle where I am a really good dog groomer. So do you guys recommend me merging those two practices together on one website?

Conrad Saam:

You’re a really good dog groomer. Yes. I can see your hair looks fantastic. Well played. So the question Jason is really asking is if you do completely different practice areas, should those live on separate websites?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

This is a tough one. So if it’s dog grooming, I would say not topically related enough, but I think there are, if you’ve got practices and and you want to consolidate topics on a site, I think that’s fine. But as Jason knows, which is why he threw us this softball question, the more specific that a domain or a website is about a particular topic, the better it tends to do in Google. And so trying to go general on personal injury is not going to be as effective as a site that’s dedicated to bicycle pedestrian accidents along the specific geographic area. So that’s what I would tend to say. The trade-off is though, is that the more that you separate sites across domains, the more authority that you’re trying to build up across these sites. And so you have to have resources to be able to deploy to be able to do that.

Especially if you’re talking about a local context. As a lot of us know in the local pac, the map results, you’ve got Google business profiles, you can’t create a Google business profile for every practice area you’ve got. And so then you start thinking about like, well, am I going to have a website that’s on this topic that’s not tied to a Google business profile? Maybe it’s a content website. But I think generally speaking, if there’s practice areas that you have that are not related to each other at all, I tend to say put ’em on different websites, but I know that there’s different views on

Conrad Saam:

That. I mean it’s more than twice as expensive to market two websites. That is the hard part of this. If you have the resources to market those two websites, fine. But I’ll use kind of the ridiculous question as an example. It really depends on the assets that you’re sitting on. And so it depends what you’ve got. So us giving a theoretical answer without looking at those specific assets is kind of silly. Let me extend this further, and I’m not recommending this, but you could make an argument that this would work. If you’re winning in downtown Chicago and your kid has a dog grooming business on the side, you can throw dog grooming on that domain and probably crush it because the domain authority is so strong compared to the rest of all the kind of, I’m assuming there’s not a big dog grooming fight on the web, but it’s possible that because your domain authority is so unbelievably strong that you could take something that’s completely topically not relevant and actually be successful. You guys are all familiar with for the people that business now hasn’t gone into dog grooming, but it is able to continuously add different practice areas that Morgan and Morgan does not do in-house because of the authority of the domain. And so you have to look at the assets here.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah, look at forbes.com, right? I mean forbes.com, they just throw up new pages and rank right away for everything, which is super frustrating. But I think a lot of people see that and think they’re going to do that. And if you don’t have an established site, I’d be much more thinking like exact match parcel, match domains. As you know, those work really well still even though Google says they’re not supposed to. Great question, Jason. Thank you.

Audience Member #3:

Hey guys, I’m curious to know what piece of advice you’re giving to law firm owners that they’re either too slow to implement under, invested in, or simply don’t believe

Gyi Tsakalakis:

All of the above. What do you got Conrad?

Conrad Saam:

I think the piece of advice that is ignored the most is stop looking at what everyone else is doing. Everyone else has a different set of assets and liability. How strong is your domain? Where are your offices? What is your unique niche? There are all of these different elements you need to look for. Where do you have that unfair competitive advantage? And that can be in your positioning, it can be in your geographic reach, it could be in your review count, it can be in your backlink profile, it can be in your content. There’s so many elements of this. It can be in the fact that you’re willing to take anyone with an insurance card and a pulse, right? That’s an asset. That is an asset that you can leverage. I talked to a lot firms the other day, they’re killing it. They’re everywhere on pay per click. And I’m like, that doesn’t necessarily mean the economics work for them even. And it doesn’t necessarily work for you either. So I think starting with what everyone else is doing is the wrong approach. I think you need to start with an understanding of your assets. Where do you have that unfair advantage or where can you create an unfair advantage? It’s a blood path out there. We know this, it’s brutally hard. Everyone’s doing this. So where do you have an unfair place to compete? Where can you find a blue ocean strategy for yourself?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

So mine’s super boring and buzzwordy and it’s one word, it’s brand. You’re going to say ai, I’m not going to say ai. I’m sure we’ll talk enough about ai. And what I mean by that is that’s the answer to how you stand out. And we were talking about this at dinner the other night, but the cost per acquisition of a client in a competitive space in ads, advertising, SEO, all the channels you can think of, even social media to a certain extent, depending on what you’re doing is going to go up over time. Whereas brand, if people are coming directly to you, that cost is not going to go up at the same rate. It’s going to be much easier to may not easier, but it’s much more efficient in terms of attracting a client. But no one likes that because they’re like, I want to rank number one for all of these head terms, or I need to get 500 reviews to get all these people to fill the top of my funnel.

But most of the time when we ask questions like, what are you doing to stay in touch with former clients? Nothing. Why would I do that? Right? What are you doing to build an email list? Nothing. Why would I do that? And so I keep coming back to this Erich Schmidt thing, which I don’t think he really intended when he said it, but brand sorts out the cesspool, right? Because people trust brands. When they know you, they come to you, it’s going to help referrals. And so much of it is just reminding people that you’re out there, what you’re doing, being active in the community. Conrad, if you listen to Lunch, Hour, Legal Marketing, we always talk about brand affinity. People that are in groups with you and that share the same passion that you do about whatever it is. Those people are much more likely to be your people as clients as well. And the investment in building those communities is a much more efficient spend. Now again, to Conrad’s point, and this is why it’s so hard to answer these general questions, but are you going to dominate your market with right away? No. You’re not right to be the billboard, the everywhere lawyer to be saturation marketing. It’s a lot harder to do. But I think if you’re talking about the question being like what do lawyers under index on? It’s that they under index on brand. I think for the most part,

Conrad Saam:

I was literally having this conversation two floors down over coffee about an hour ago. This is a great way to tell if your brand is strong and you have good brand affinity, are people coming to you for things that you don’t do? Which seems like the wrong answer. Like, oh, if I had a good brand they’d know what I do. But Joe Public doesn’t know or care what you do, but they know if they like you and you will start getting those inquiries for things that you don’t do because they know who you are and they trust you and they have affinity. You’re winning, right? You’re winning. If you find that you have to refer all those out, you’re winning. You’re building relationships, you’re building goodwill. And that to me, is this underlooked at key for do I have a strong brand? Are people coming to you just because it’s you? Regardless of what the issue is?

Audience Member #4:

Gyi, Conrad, Matt live shows. To build on that question, there’s a lot of discussion about dead web and bots reading bot content. And I think you touched on it, Gyi, which was brand being the answer. So what advice would you give to a firm? Maybe they’re looking to start building brand. What are some things that you have seen effective? And for Conrad, does that involve taking selfies and posting them to Google business in an extended radiation? As long as you

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Geotag Them, you got to geotag them.

Conrad Saam:

Wow. Thanks for the drive by dig at SMB team. Go ahead.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well again, so I’m just going to make up a, because it varies by the type of law firm you want to build, right? So let’s just say we’re talking local law firm, direct to consumer personal injury or criminal defense bankruptcy. I say start getting active in the community. I think that that is probably another place where when I think about brand, getting involved in local organizations, local events, and this is the thing that we talk about all the time, is the line between real life and the web is totally blurred. People are taking pictures of us right now and posting them on social media. You’re going to do it at the conference. You do it in your local community when you go to do things. And so it’s not like in real life versus the internet. It’s not digital versus traditional marketing. They’re the same thing.

And so I think getting active and starting to create and nurture and solidify those relationships in your local community is the most valuable thing. And then it spreads the word, right? You’re starting naturally having conversations with people or maybe you join private affinity groups on Facebook or something like that. But I think the intersection of what’s going on in your local community is that’s the cornerstone for a local business, if that’s what your firm is, is local business to get started with building. Because brand really is, it’s just reputation and relationships. It’s just like what do people think about you when they think? Do they think about you first of all? And then when they think about you, do they like you? Do they trust you? Do they think you know what you’re talking about? Do they think you’re going to tell them the truth? That’s how people make decisions. Difficult choices about trying to hire a lawyer.

Conrad Saam:

And I think one of the difficulties that we sit here and like, Hey, get involved in your community. I’m in Salt Lake, I’m a single lawyer. I can’t build a community in Salt Lake. Don’t boil the Salt Lake Ocean. That’s funny. You can’t boil the

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Ocean. You totally were thinking about that. You

Conrad Saam:

Plan. I was.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

You plan that

Conrad Saam:

Promise, but don’t try and boil the ocean. What is it for you? And it does not matter what the thing is, but it’s got to be genuine to you. So how do you segment Salt Lake out into women business leaders, into environmentalists, into people who are into the University of Utah, whatever it might be. How do you build a brand within that small community first? And that’s a key. I think you’re in a large city. How do I build community in this huge city? You can’t but own part of it and don’t try and do the whole thing. You won’t be successful trying to build the whole city.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

What’s this about Google business profiles and picture selfies? Oh Geez.

Conrad Saam:

But I’m not going to name who asked the question, but if anyone thinks that taking photographs of local landmarks and putting them on your Google business profile is going to help you rank in local for that, the SMB team would like to talk to you.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

But you might show up on a picture of the local,

Conrad Saam:

Which would be great if you’re looking for people wanting to go to the Space Needle.

Audience Member #5:

Hi, we’re here. Hi. What advice do you have for people who refuse social media? So I work at a law firm. I do pi. I’m a senior case manager from eight to five intake from 6:00 PM to the next day. But I’m kind of the goal person that everyone comes to. And every time a client comes to the office, they want to meet with me, talk to me. I try to help as much as they can. And the first thing, the boss always say, you need to open your social media account. However, I don’t know anything about social media. I refuse social media. So what advice do you have for that?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I’m going to try to articulate the question. You’re not into social media. You’re getting pressured to use social media. What should I do? And here’s my thing with all this stuff, and it’s not social media. It could be video, it could be writing blog posts, it could be speaking engagements. If it’s not you and you don’t want to do it, I would say don’t do it. Because if it’s something that you want to, that you’re aspiring to learn to, great, there’s all sorts of training and education stuff. But if it’s just not you, there’s a lot of lawyers too, and support folks that are just like, it’s not my personality to be kind of front of the house. I would say find somebody. Either you hire somebody who likes to do that kind of stuff and that’s going to be their role. Or you work with somebody, a partner or a fractional person, or you outsource it to somebody else.

And you see this all the time because people come to our listen to us talk and they’re like, all right, these guys said you got to do all this stuff. And you go do it, and you’re just like, I’m uncomfortable with it. And guess what? It doesn’t come out being an asset anyway. It comes out being more of a liability to reputation because it’s not your thing and you don’t want to do it. And guess what else happens? You end up not doing it anyway. So find the things that you like to do, spend more. And it’s hard in an employer employee relationship to have those conversations. But I would just come to the table and say, Hey, look, here’s what I’m really great at. Here are my strengths. Here’s what I like to do. How can we use this to support the marketing versus trying to force something that it’s like, I’m not comfortable with this. Also, you’re going to create awkwardness with clients. I mean, again, the client is the most important thing. If you’re feeling awkward about it, the client’s going to pick up on that. It’s going to be bad all the way around. So that’s my advice is don’t do it. Don’t do things that you’re very uncomfortable with doing that you don’t really want to do. Anyway.

Conrad Saam:

That goes true for different social platforms as well, right? I’m all social. I love talking. That’s why Gyi and I have a podcast is because we like talking. If we didn’t like talking this, would

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I do it for the cheeseburgers?

Conrad Saam:

For the cheeseburgers and the comradery? But I’m not on TikTok. It just doesn’t work for this, right? This does not belong on TikTok. So he’s right. Don’t do it. And what I would, honestly, if I’m sitting in your seat and you’re probably not going to do this, I would push up the social presence is not you. I would push this back up. They will be more successful if they want to be successful and social. It does not come from you. It does not come from the firm account. It comes from the individual. I really believe in that.

Audience Member #6:

My question is, one of you made a comment about your brand affinity is growing if you are seeing an increase in work that you don’t do. That was a revelation because I have been screaming at people being like, we’re spending money and people are calling me for divorce. We do personal injury work in Massachusetts in the Boston area. 60% of our clients are Latino or Hispanic. Now we’ve learned to monetize that after decades of saying, no, we don’t do that, and craziness. So I can give anyone advice here, think of ways if that’s happening to get good referral partners and monetize those. But I always thought when I was talking to my marketing people, we’re doing a poor job. More and more people are calling me for real estate or divorce within the Latino community in the Boston area, and I was upset by it. So am I correct in saying that that’s a good thing? Overall, it’s

Gyi Tsakalakis:

A great thing. Well, I’m going to say it depends because

Audience Member #6:

We are growing our personal injury practice. So that’s continuing to grow, and I’m happy with the progress. I just thought that I’m not narrow, I’m not niched enough, I’m not precise enough in my marketing and I’m wasting money.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

So I think it’s great to the affinity standpoint. So if you are building brand, people are coming to you, you’re out in the community, you’re more visible. That’s a great thing. The other side of the coin though, is that if you told me, yeah, 90% of my PPC leads are coming in because I bid on divorce lawyer, I would say, that’s not a great expenditure of money. Now you could try to flip it on its head and say, well, we’re doing PPC media buying to have brand awareness for divorce, even though we don’t do it. But that’s going to be a very inefficient way to try to get that affinity. So anyway, I think about search ads. Search ads. That’s why I kind of said, put that on its own. If you’re talking about direct response search ads, you better be targeting the right keywords with the right messaging, because if you’re trying to do brand building through that, that’s going to be extremely expensive.

Conrad Saam:

So there’s a guy sitting two seats to your right who has nailed this. And what happens is, and you said one other thing. You said, we’re really big in the Latino community. This is the second time Latino and community has come up. There’s a lot of referral work that happens. That market operates fundamentally differently. So there’s a lot of referral business that happens because of that, and that is great. My read is, and we used to get this all the time, like, oh, I’m getting all these cases that we don’t want. You’re do something with that. That is an asset. And if you’re getting that because people know and trust you, or you’re one step removed from someone like you’re winning, man, you’re totally winning because you know what? Nobody likes in the us. Nobody likes lawyers. They like their lawyer, but they don’t like lawyers.

And you’re getting people that are sending you business. It’s amazing if you’re in a secondary, you said Boston, right? So one of the other games to plan. I think this is a really good strategy if you were in a secondary market or a tertiary market. Martinson and Beeson is a great example of this in Huntsville, Alabama, although they may take offense now with me calling Huntsville a secondary market, but they’re able to run a whole variety of practice areas because they have such a really, really strong brand affinity in that market, and that’s what they’ve done. They’ve expanded their practice area to cover a whole bunch of things. Or you’re in a Boston, a great big market. You stay true to what you do and what you do from a direct response perspective. But everything else you just farm out and you make great relationships with, and people love it. You’re winning. Totally winning.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

That’s it. Thank you all again so much. Enjoy the show.

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