Law Firm Marketing — How Much Should Your Associates Be Doing?

Episode Notes

Transcript

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Conrad, are you familiar with the concept of the Elf on the shelf?

Conrad Saam:

I have just recently learned about Elf on the Shelf. Frankly, I was kind of tired scrolling through Facebook and found the, I think it was the naughty Elf on the shelf ideas. They literally would not let you in if you were under 18

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Grownup Elf on the shelf,

Conrad Saam:

Grown up elf on the shelf with friends. Yeah,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

There’s an affinity audience for you There go. You want to get some brand affinity? Go find your Naughty Elf friends to market your services to.

Conrad Saam:

Now you have young children. I’m assuming you are not doing Elf on the Shelf. My kids. It sounds more like Beavis and Butthead are hanging out all the time, but I’m assuming you were doing kind of some wholesome elf on the Shelfing at home.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I shouldn’t say we. My wife is one of these brave souls who every night, well, I don’t, do we have any kids listening to Lynch our legal marketing?

Conrad Saam:

Yeah, that’s right.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

We’re have to put an 18 plus warning on this one Elf on the shelf. She’s every night doing the elf on the shelf and I’m grateful because the Christmasy magic, it’s amazing when the kids come down, it’s like, what’s the elf do? It’s also a great behavioral modification tool because they’re scared of upsetting the elf.

Conrad Saam:

Well, let me ask you a question. I heard that Jared Correia is notorious for killing the magic of the elf. What happened?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yes. We were talking about this in the pre-show, Jared, I don’t assume you listen to lunch, our Lego marketing, but Jared bumped into a family friend’s elf and it was like, if people don’t know if you touch the elf, apparently the magic goes away and so everybody’s freaking out. He’s trying to apologize to the family, so don’t touch. So if you’ve got good elf on the shelf stories, you can send him to Lunch Hour Legal Marketing.

Conrad Saam:

And the reason we bring up Jared is he is the original originator of LHLM. So happy to send a dig his way for ruining the magic of Christmas.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Alright, what else we got today?

Conrad Saam:

We have an exciting episode where as usual, starting with the news and next we’re going to answer a question that we have never addressed. Should your associates be involved in the law firm’s marketing efforts? And then I’m really looking forward to this. This is from a question that came up about three weeks ago, but we’re going to go into Gyi’s Origin story. Who are you? Why are you doing what you’re doing? And let’s get to know the man behind the microphone just a little bit further.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Mr. Lockwood, if you please

Announcer:

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 everybody, welcome to lunch Hour Legal Marketing. We have a big segment of news to get through after the music.

Alright, if you are a regular listener of Lunch Hour Legal Marketing, you were listening to this on December 23rd, which is when this issue is going to hit the airwaves, the Google algorithm, the November Google Algo update finally finished in December and we said it was going to be a big deal and we were yawn. Wrong. Average movement according to search engine, engine in the legal market was a three place average change in rankings, which basically turns out to be nothing. December 11th is when we’re recording this. Gemini two came out today. Gyi, what’s up with Gemini two?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Gemini two Google’s newest version of their ai, the agentic age of AI in mind. We didn’t put this in the news item, but chat GPT came out with their $200 a month subscription. I mean, I don’t know. Yeah, their new version. Go for it, check it out.

Conrad Saam:

For those of you who did not discern Gyi’s yawn on that piece of news, go check it out if you would like to.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well again, I try to think about our listeners here. Yeah, for us we pay for the $20 version of open app. We pay for Gemini as well. We pay for ’em all because it’s what we do. But average law firm, yeah, if you’re a heavy user, maybe $20 a month is worth it. Do you need to be on, I feel it’s the same thing about the algorithm update. It’s like do you need to sit around and listen and wait for this next news item about what’s going on with the algorithm update? No, you probably don’t. Most of you probably don’t.

Conrad Saam:

Okay. Alright,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

So

Conrad Saam:

We are moving on with the news. This is a little news that we give. Alright, now here’s a question. We feel compelled to share news. We feel compelled to share news. There’s good news. Do you think this is newsworthy? This made our list Apple. That’s should do gt. Is this

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Newsworthy?

Conrad Saam:

Is it newsworthy? We should do that before the recording. So let me ask you, do we care about this Apple adding chat GPT to

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Siri? Sure. I mean how many people use Siri? And if your potential clients are using Siri and Apple is making a deal with OpenAI and you are concerned about how you’re showing up in chat GPT responses, then yeah, what are you going to do about it? I don’t know. There was some good advice. I think it was from Ross at Siege Media, but he was talking about doing Roundup posts because Roundup posts tend to do well for best query responses in chat GPT. So if someone searches for best car accident lawyer and you have a list of best car accident lawyers on your site, it might increase the likelihood that the chat GPT might show you as a response and then maybe it shows up in Siri. There you go. Trying to tie some relevancy to your practice.

Conrad Saam:

So go start writing blogs about the best, right?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

That’s the problem.

Conrad Saam:

Personal injury lawyers in Memphis and list all of your attorneys there.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Exactly. Interestingly, I said now everybody’s going to go do this and we’re all going to be, I can’t believe they’re doing this great.

Conrad Saam:

But the good thing for us key is no one’s going to track whether or not it works because none of you do that anyway. And so we can just stand here and pontificate about what might be

Gyi Tsakalakis:

No, we just give an idea to one of the agency people who listens. They’re like, oh, we’re going to do a chat. GPT best roundup blog package.

Conrad Saam:

Speaking of agency, people who listen to Lunch Hour Legal Marketing, those loyal listeners will remember that last episode. Gyi and I shared that our Google business profiles had been vandalized and we posited that this was from a competitor. Fortunately,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I did not posit that I did notit that you did. 100% you did.

Conrad Saam:

No, no, no, no. By the way, I listened to the recording yesterday because I wanted to be sure that we were right. You 100% posited that this was nefarious action from a competitor. The good thing, dear listeners, is our Google business profiles are back up and running. They have nice beautiful reviews and we are back.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

We’re back. And if you get suspended and you want to go through the appeal and restatement process, hit us up. We’re happy to talk to you about it. I can tell you the we love to talk super fun process of getting your review business

Conrad Saam:

Profile. The more interesting thing would be if you could figure out who did it.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yes. And that’s another thing too for people that are wondering that fairly confident can’t do it through a FOIA request. You have to actually get a subpoena. You have to subpoena Google for the edits. That seems to be the common understanding and no one else has got any idea. So if you had another idea, we’d love to hear that too

Conrad Saam:

In the comments. We would love to know if you think we should subpoena Google to figure out if Google enabled a competitor to torch Gyi and Conrad’s profile. Anyway, moving on. As we’re talking about agencies, it is the December timeframe when lots of conferences are working on filling up their schedule. GH has talked a lot about the toxicity of the ecosystem of pay to pitch, and I’m going to share with you two numbers. This is shocking. Two numbers, numbers that I’ve received in December for paying to speak at conferences come out to these two numbers are $1,250 and $1,767 per minute to talk to you guys. Lucrative audience. So when you’re signing up for conferences, you’re travel next year, think about whether or not you want to hear from people who are dropping a thousand bucks a minute just to talk to you.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And here’s the thing I would tell you, you want to go somewhere where people are not paying to speak, come to AJ’s winter convention because Conrad and I will be there for that speaking.

Conrad Saam:

Yes,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

We’re not paying to be on that one and I will not be paying to be at tech show because tech show doesn’t accept fees for speakers.

Conrad Saam:

See two things here. Number one, Gyi is being a good tech show board member and promoting them and the fact that they don’t take payments to speak. I think that is maybe the very last conference to do so I’m sure that’s not the case, but boy is it

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Bedlum doesn’t take money for people to speak.

Conrad Saam:

We did not take money to speak.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

There you go.

Conrad Saam:

You should proud. Thank you for the pitch. You should

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Proud of yourself.

Conrad Saam:

Yes. Also, Ken Levinson, who he just mentioned left us a glowing review, which we’ll be reading later on when we come back. We’re going to answer the question, should your associates be involved in your law firm’s marketing?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And we’re back. And Conrad, we’re going to answer this question of whether or not your associates at your firm should be involved in the marketing. Why don’t you tease that out? Is that a good idea, a bad idea? Issues with that, tell us your experiences with associates being involved with firm marketing.

Conrad Saam:

So this is a comment that we get occasionally, it’s not the starting point of lots of our conversations, but this comes up with most of our long-term clients on a regular basis. I think by and large, my perspective here, Gyi, I think the best way to look at this is to move outside of the legal industry, which I think is a really healthy thing to do and move into the medical industry. Think about the way that those service-based professionals who are very much like lawyers go about marketing themselves. And the answer is most of them. And I think there is a good reason for that. Most of the people who went to medical school want to spend most of their time doctoring. Most of the people who went to law school want to spend most of their time lawyering. And I think that’s okay. Now, there are of course exceptions to that rule, but by and large, I think a couple things are true.

Number one, a law firm is most effectively marketed by a person, not by a group of persons, but by a person because it is easier to build an awareness and affinity of a person over a group of persons or even the law firm brand itself. So I think that is a very true thing. The other thing that happens is most lawyers, they’re just not into the marketing side of what we do and the lawyers who are outside of that tend to move into the CEO role, the visionary role in us parlance and kind of that figurehead role. And I think that is the most efficient way for a law firm to market. Now there are exceptions to this, which I suspect you’re thinking about that, but Gyi, do you agree overall? Do you want to share some of your exceptions?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, I guess I’m going to say I don’t agree as worded, but I think we ultimately will come to agreement and look, here’s an obvious one. You even said it yourself. You’re like it’s easier to market law firms getting marketed as a person, not a group of people. But what you’re saying though is that there is a person there and that person probably is the face of the firm in some capacity. That person has to be involved in content production. If you’re going to record a video, unless you’re going to use AI to create an avatar of them, they’ve got to be involved in that. If they’re going to be speaking, if they’re going to be at local events, all the things that we would do to market somebody, and it’s probably a lawyer, it’s probably, maybe you’re making this point too, it’s probably not just an associate at the firm, it’s probably one of the firm owners or a partner.

Does it have to be a lawyer? Not necessarily. I think there are some personalities at some firms that can become the face of the firm that aren’t actually the practicing lawyers. And there might be some reasons to choose to do that, but to me it comes down to it’s not should associates be involved, it’s what should people be doing. I’m going to give you the example of what they should be doing from maybe this is a future segment of ours from the attorney syn Slack archives. I’m looking at Slack and I’m seeing we’ve got a client who’s going into the paid search campaign and adding and doing things to keywords and stuff. Is that something the associates should be doing? I would say no, because in this particular case it looks like they started bidding on a bunch of queries that were totally irrelevant and created waste and all that kind of

Conrad Saam:

Stuff. Broad match lawyer

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Should lawyers be doing that, especially when they’re paying another expert to actually be the company that they trust to manage that, I would say no, they shouldn’t be doing that. So I think they play a role, it’s just like what role should they play? And really that should be based on their expertise. So I agree with you on lawyers should not be messing around with the stuff that they don’t know about.

Conrad Saam:

I will use, it’s interesting that you brought up the anecdote about associates being involved in pay-per-click campaigns. That’s super, super tactical. I want to hit that and then I want to talk about associates in general. I do think there is, and we have very recently had this issue, I don’t want to even call it an issue because it sounds like a bad thing. You may have someone at your law firm who wants to get deep into this stuff or you may want someone at the law firm to get deep into what’s going on with our pay-per-click campaign. Now, there’s two ways to do this. One is I don’t think my agency is doing a good job or I’m trying to do it myself, but I think in your case, Gyi, if you have a client who’s starting to do bidding on keywords, the answer to that is you need to start on the same side of the table.

That needs to be a joint conversation. We’re working as a team, we’re on the same side of the table. Hey, client or agency, let’s look at this. I think that’s super, super healthy. If we have a client who wants to get that tactical, we’ve got to have the mindset and the framework to be on the same side of the desk instead of oppositional. That has to happen. So I think that’s a very real thing working with your agency. But I wanted to ask you a question. We were talking about kind of the face of the law firm and you said associates. I think one of the problems with having an associate as a face of a law firm, even a minor face of the law firm, they can leave, right?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Don’t do that.

Conrad Saam:

Don’t do that. So I think

Gyi Tsakalakis:

It’s actually dangerous. Do business profile practitioner pages, right?

Conrad Saam:

Bingo. They take ’em with them. Okay, so hold on. You’re exactly right. Hey Gyi, what is a Google business profile practitioner page and why did you say that that is a bad idea for an

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Associate? Yeah, so if you don’t have this clearly spelled out and whether if it’s going to be an employment agreement or if you’re treating your lawyers that work here, your firm’s independent contract, whatever that is, or maybe it’s your employee handbook, but Google, as many people know, you can have a Google business profile for every office location and you can have a profile for every individual practitioner. So every individual lawyer. And so if you’ve got associates creating Google business profiles and the firm’s model is is that the firm does a lot of marketing and then they send people, they assign a lawyer and the lawyer works the case. The lawyer is an ambitious young lawyer and they encourage the happy client to go leave a review on the Google business profile for their practitioner page. There’s nothing to say when that lawyer leaves that they take that practitioner page and all those reviews with them if they leave. And so essentially the equity that you’re investing into your firm is now being passed on to your associates that there’s no equity being built up into the actual organization necessarily.

Conrad Saam:

So the reviews that you are paying someone to generate, sorry, that sounds wrong. Hold on, let me back. Make sure you buy this. Fake

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Reviews for your main office location.

Conrad Saam:

Let me try to be more clear in my speech. While you’re paying someone a salary to do great lawyering work and that salary is generating a bunch of great reviews. If those reviews go to a practitioner page, that is an asset that is going to leave when that person leaves. That is a big, big problem. If you are an associate planning to leave your law firm, that’s a great way to start getting a jumpstart on the way out the door. If you are a law firm owner, I would 100% not have associates do that.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Totally.

Conrad Saam:

Let me flip the coin here. We’ve been talking about the no on the associate being involved in marketing. I’ll make one caveat to that. I do think it is very important for each associate to be responsible for thinking about name search and the reason that names, and by name search, I mean Murphy Jones lawyer, Athens, Georgia for example, or whatever that might be. What shows up when someone for that individual lawyer’s name the reasoning is obvious. There’s a lot of vetting that happens via name search once you’ve been introduced to a client. And so I think that is really important. And name search becomes interesting because there’s different platforms. LinkedIn is the most obvious one, but avo, I spent a ton of my early career learning how to win name search for lawyer names at avo. There’s lots of different directories that are focused on name search.

Forbes, if you would like to enrage. Gyi, we can talk about Forbes again. The other thing with name search is it’s very different. Gyi and I have very unique names. It’s easy for us for better or worse to rank for our name. If your name is Thomas Brady, the attorney as opposed to the quarterback, you have a name search problem and it needs to be thought about differently. So I would say that I would want someone at the firm to be thinking about name search for each attorney and really involving the attorneys individually in winning that specific part of the SEO game. And listen, I want to be super clear dear listener, that if you have that enterprising, go get ’em. Associate who she gets compensated well for bringing in new business and helping to grow the firm. I’m not suggesting that you shut her down. I think you need to support her. I think you need to think about turning that rainmaker into a bigger part of the organization. We’re not suggesting to shut that down. What I am suggesting is that that shouldn’t be what you rely on to grow the firm.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

The other thing that you said earlier that really hit me, and I think it’s the root part of this conversation, is this idea of being an adversary with your marketing people. And this doesn’t necessarily cut just in-house versus agency. We hear this all the time from internal marketing people and we’ve done the diary from the in-house marketing director of What have you done for me lately? And we should all be thinking about accountability metrics and holding each other accountable as a team, whether that’s in-house people, whether that’s other associates at the firm, whether it’s agency partners. And I get that lawyers by profession, our adversarial, it’s an adversarial system. And so I get that that’s how lawyers come to the table. I’m a lawyer myself. I was very proud of my mock trial skills. But the point is, is that how many times do we come to the table even during intake, even when we’re doing intake with a client, we’ll be like, Hey, you know what?

Can you share what your goals are for the coming year? No, why? You tell me what my goals should be. It’s like when you are an adversary at every step of the way, if you’re looking for a reason, if we found a link in the footer, stop everything, everybody stop, shut down the marketing because we found a broken link in a footer and a blog post that was written five years ago and it’s like you’re not coming to the table as a true partner. And the truth is, and we hear this from a lot of the fractional CMOs talk about this too, where it’s like because they feel like they’re kind of on the outside even though they’re trying to embed with the team. And again, I’m not saying not to hold people accountable, but coming to the table as an adversary, you’re just hurting yourself. The partnership here, it’s like any sports team or organization if you’re looking for reasons to blame another teammate or looking for reasons. And believe me as Conrad and I, if you’ve been listening to us for any amount of time, how cynical and skeptical we are about the legal marketing agency and legal marketers. And it’s not just the industry. Right? Go ahead.

Conrad Saam:

It’s funny you said the link in the footer, what I thought you were going to go down the path of was like if that link in the footer links back to your competitors, maybe you should shut it down because, and I know this sounds absolutely fucking absurd, have no doubt that there

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Are off on for the week

Conrad Saam:

That have spun off agencies that are using the agency as a link building vehicle with hidden links on that client list going back to a law firm. Don’t think that doesn’t happen. So that’s a good reason to be cautious, nervous about getting on the same side of the table as your agency. But if you’re not willing to do that, if it’s an adversarial approach, you’re never going to win. It’s just not going to work.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, and again, this is what we keep talking about at the end of the day, and people don’t like to hear this, but it should resonate with lawyers because it’s really the same thing that they deal with with their own clients, which is it’s a matter of trust you’re hiring, whether it’s an in-house marketing person, whether you and a lot of lawyers do this because again, they’re like, we want to have our cake unit too. So they hire an associate lawyer, maybe they have a marketing background, maybe they came from a marketing world, maybe they took a Coursera course on marketing or they read an SEO Moz blog posts and so they’re the most knowledgeable marketing person at the firm and they hire ’em. Part of the reason they hire ’em is because yeah, you’re going to practice law, but you’re also going to do some of the marketing and then everything becomes this adversarial fight about everything.

And you’re like having a client and the client coming to you and being like, I’m going to write the brief this time for the motion for summary. It’s like what really? And you’d think that that stuff would resonate, but we see it happen over and over again. And so again, I hope this doesn’t come across as being like just trust your marketing people. No, hold them accountable. We talk about this all the time, define success. But at some level, if you don’t have the trust, you’re going to be nitpicking every single little thing. It’s only going to hurt. You’re paying for expertise and then not following the expertise instruction. It’s like going to the doctor and the doctor’s like, you got to change your diet. And you’re like, no, tell me something else. It’s like, no, the doctor’s telling you what to do. You’re trying to fight the doctor.

Conrad Saam:

Alright, I will give you a litmus test on whether or not your agency and you are sitting on the same side of the table. I know we were talking about associates, that’s the point of this conversation, but we’ve kind of devolved into working well with an agency. It’s December 23. If you’re listening to this, the day it comes out, did you and your agency sit down and talk about what you’re going to do in 2025? What your business

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Objectives are going to do? You’re so agency guy. And so I, you should have that conversation with the people at your firm. If you have in-house marketing people, it’s not an agency, it’s not an in-house out of house thing. It’s a great litmus test, but that applies just as much to the in-house team.

Conrad Saam:

When we come back, we’re going to get deeper. He mentioned he was a lawyer. We’re going to get into the crucible of academia and technology that formed attorney sink in the vision of my good friend and co-host. Gyi, we got an amazingly long and flattering review from long friend of the pod, Ken Levinson through Apple Podcast. I’m going to read parts of it because A, it’s long. And B, it’s so laudatory as to be flowery. We’ve selected the best parts that make us look great. Host and Conrad Som deliver an incredible mix of actionable advice, sharp insights and genuine entertainment. These two know the legal marketing space inside and out offering strategies that are as practical as they are innovative. They’re not only brilliant marketers. I like that. I’m going to put that on the website. But also genuinely wonderful individuals, their passion for helping lawyers succeed shines through in every episode Ken made my day. Thank you for sharing that with us. If you are dear listeners, please leave us a review. Tell us what you think about this episode on Spotify, and I would also recommend signing up for the bite. We will put a link in the show notes for the bite.

Every superhero has an origin story and we are going to get deep into the origin story of Zaki

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And you will be disappointed that it is not as exciting as any superhero story that you’ve ever heard. But this music is very

Conrad Saam:

Dramatic. Dude, listen, I’m not sure I’m going to ask Adam when we do my version of this to tone down the music I need.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Maybe something just leave the music on the whole time.

Conrad Saam:

We’re setting some pretty big expectations for you. Okay. Gyi, you and I met presumably sometime or at least crossed paths sometime in Ann Arbor in 1999 or 1998, maybe 2000. What’s the origin story? How did you get here?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

How did I get here? Well, and I think because it’s very hard to tell your own story here, and it’s like why are we randomly doing this? And we didn’t say anything about this. We didn’t. I

Conrad Saam:

Was supposed to do that. He’s prompting me to read the goddamn

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Show notes. Dude, the listeners are like, this is so random. All of a sudden they’re just going to start doing their bio. He’s going to talk about himself with some fancy music.

Conrad Saam:

So the superhero music brought to you by Daniel W 4 6, 1 0 on YouTube. And Daniel asked us, I watch all of your videos and find ’em insightful, but I have no clue who you guys are and why you make these videos. Are you in business together? What is your company name, et cetera. Just an observer just trying to help. Thank you Daniel. And for that question, we’re going to listen to the origin story from, Gyi, great.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

So now I, there’s some context, slightly less, totally awkward to tell you my origin story. Hardly a superhero. But I guess for me, for this part of it, I would start with, I started thinking I was going to go into computer science. So 1997, gratefully Michigan. Somehow someone at the admissions office at Michigan was not paying attention and let me slip through to get in

Conrad Saam:

Thank, yeah, I think we may have had the same admissions officer even though I was grad school, but boy, oh boy, I was in over my head when I got into Michigan B school.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And so I started out as a computer science major. And again, this was 1997. So computer science as a field of study is much different than if someone was starting computer science today. It became quickly clear to me that I was not going to be a hardcore coder. It didn’t sound appealing to me to be sitting in a room writing code all day. And again, that’s no offense to coders. It was a much different situation back then. And so I quote, pivoted and picked the most practical degree that I could ever think of, which was philosophy. And I don’t regret my philosophy degree for a second. In fact, beginning philosophical, maybe I should have gone into academia and become a full-time philosopher, but I had different ambitions. And so I went to law school, loved law school. I think law school was the first time that I was, it was the most engaged I’d ever been in my education ever.

And I wish I could just be a professional law school student. Very, very fascinated by all that stuff. And then practice law. Then I was at a small plaintiff’s firm, very grateful for the opportunity to work there. It was really baptism by fire. I got to participate in several trials and I covered a lot of motion hearings. I got enamored with being in court and the actual practice and super into that. And as a new lawyer, I was tasked with going out and figuring out, we talked about associates, should associates be involved in marketing? I’m the former computer science major new lawyer at the firm. So they’re like, go figure out what we should be doing online. And so I asked around, I didn’t just talk to the lawyers at our firm, I talked to other lawyers. I shopped all of the big players at the time.

I remember Legal Fish was a big player, total Attorneys was doing lead generation even back then. Talked to some other agency folks. Ultimately, I came back and I was like, man, there seems to be a huge gap here in the market. And a lot of lawyers, this is 2005 six, they started having this conversations. We found an attorneys thing in 2008, so somewhere between oh five and oh eight I was talking to lawyers and a lot of lawyers even would say things like, I just don’t think that people are going to use the internet to hire lawyers like us. Again, this is 2005, not super early. There were already, it’s already happening. So it was pretty clear to me this continued to be a thing. So anyway, gradually through that process, my business partner and I, Jeff, who’d been friends from undergrad, got together. He had been doing lead generation for at-home services. And so we found attorneys saying, and we were like, we feel like we can do a better job. That’s my origin story for attorneys saying,

Conrad Saam:

So at some point in time you had to be like, I want to do this thing that I don’t know anything about more than the legal stuff that I’m actually qualified to do. I mean, talk about closing your eyes and jumping off a cliff, right?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah. Well, and again, David c Bayer talks about this a lot too, and I think this is valuable for any entrepreneurial lawyer that might be listening. The common thing about being an entrepreneur is you have to have some risk tolerance. I don’t care what kind of expert you are switching from, I’m taking a paycheck

To, I’ve got to create value in a business that I own. It’s a huge jump and you’re going to be, unless you strike oil somehow for a while, you’re not going to be getting paid for these services. You’re not going to be paid probably what you’re worth. Now, it’s funny you said that I was qualified to practice law. I love this distinction because I was licensed to practice law. I was certainly competent to do the things that I was doing, but I was a couple of years out of law school, I wasn’t competent in the way that I think about competent to practice. So anyway, I think that the big thing that you point out though is that it is a leap. There is a leap that you have to make. And my leap was really, because there are times I still miss practice. There was stuff that I loved about practicing law that really energized me that I still miss to this day.

But at that time when I really try to reflect on what made that decision, it was an opportunity for me to create my own business and to really design a business and a lifestyle that hit a lot of the high notes for me. And Jeff and I talked about these types of things, like being able to design a workplace that we wanted to because it’s not just doing SEO and building websites and running a business. There’s a whole bunch of other stuff that you have to be at least willing if not interested in doing in order to make that jump.

Conrad Saam:

So I’m going to go personal. I know a little bit about your story. We’re going to go a little bit deeper into, Gyi,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Let’s go

Conrad Saam:

Deep into one of your superheroes. Maybe your biggest superhero is your mom, right?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yes, yes.

Conrad Saam:

And I mean she has to be amazingly proud of you, but how has your mom kind of influenced your direction?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, I mean, look, let’s face it, and I was in a single family household. My mom raised me by herself with my brother and sister, so she had three under five and she’s a special needs educator, so she wasn’t like a VC or a private equity person, but you asked me how she shaped my life. I mean, one just observing her living the journey that she was living and the perseverance that she had for sure. But look, I mean for me, I’d say it’s not campaign. A broad brushes is not true for everybody, but for me, my values really, the seeds were planted by my mom. And so even in our company, we talk about integrity, we talk about transparency, we talk about doing the right thing. That stuff for me came from my mom. Interestingly, it also came from a lot of the mentors I had later. My football coaches played a big role in shaping me and even my mentors at the law firm. And there was a lot of overlap there because the offensive coordinator from my football team, he was also the firm that I went to work at when I started, and he was my mentor both in football as well as in my early law career. And so super grateful to Matt Turner for being there for that and huge influence and my mom as well.

Conrad Saam:

If you were to do one thing differently, what would it be?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Oh, that’s a great question. Well, look, I wish that I had gotten exposed to the concept of working on your business instead of in your business much earlier. I was a self-taught marketer. I didn’t go to get a marketing degree. Early days, I was self-taught on Moz and I read everything I’d get my hands on about SEO and marketing, but I liked doing it. I thought it was so cool that we could do stuff and show up in Google. And again, we laugh about black hat and all this kind of stuff, but especially early on, even true today though, I still get excited when this happens, but when you take a business or take a website that doesn’t show up on the internet at all, and then all of a sudden you start to see traffic coming in and you start to see business converting, you start to see it showing up for more competitive queries.

You pop into the local pack. That’s exciting. What a cool thing. You took this business, this business website in our case law firms, and you totally transformed it. And again, SEO’s hard and super competitive and all that kind of stuff. But anyway, to respond to your question, I gravitated towards doing the work. I loved consulting on here’s what we’re going to do. Here’s how we’re going to earn links, here’s how we’re going to create the content that’s going to drive links. Here’s how we’re going to fix the website and your web presence and all this stuff. But the downside of that is, is that you don’t grow the same. And there’s nothing wrong with that. There’s nothing wrong with being a solo independent, just like a solo independent lawyer, solo independent practitioner. But for me, if I had one thing different, I could have had my eyes open to like, Hey, if you want to grow this business beyond just you doing the work, I would’ve come to that realization a little bit earlier because it wasn’t until years later that I started, me and my partner both, were both. We want to grow beyond what we’re doing right now, and that’s going to require actually having a business that’s made up of other people and processes and systems, and you’re going to have to teach them how you do things and all that kind of stuff.

Conrad Saam:

Last question, you and I talk perhaps ad nauseum about the importance of having a business focus on your marketing. Where are you trying to go? What are your objectives? Business metrics, KPIs, cost per client, those types of things. Definitely not taught in law school. I’m pretty sure when you’re reading the treatises of Socrates that I’ve just bungled whatever, I’m sure Socrates didn’t have treatise, but whatever one reads, when one is a philosophy major, that stuff doesn’t come up, right? And so you’ve been very self-taught on this, I’m assuming. Where did your orientation for this? Because I feel like some people either innately get this or they will never understand

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Where did that come from? Well, that’s school of hard knocks, brother. That is, you know what that is? We did work for a law firm and we’re like, the traffic’s up, the pixels are firing, it’s converting, the phone’s ringing, we’re generating all these leads we don’t understand, and the firm’s saying, this isn’t helping our business at all. You’re fired, right? That’s where that comes from. And so you really quickly realize you got to connect the dots. They’re trusting you to invest in their growth. And so if you can’t demonstrate that what you’re doing is helping them grow, you’re not going to last long. You can send ranking reports and traffic reports and even call reports until you’re blue in the face and you can show charts up into the right time in, time out. This is how it’s happened to us. We had clients that are like, we like you, we like your ideas.

We think that this all looks really good. What you’re telling us is all making sense, but for whatever reason, we’re not connecting it back to growth of the firm. And sometimes it’s stuff that was totally out of our hands. You and I talk about this on the pod all the time. They didn’t answer the phone. I wouldn’t even have known that was a thing. I wasn’t secret shopping. I wasn’t. I didn’t have CallRail being like, Hey, you got 50% of your calls are going unanswered or going to voicemail. And so that part of its school of hard knocks. And what you realize is that’s really where the value creation happens. It happens when you’re like, we agree on what the outcome we’re trying to achieve. And that’s not to say some of those other vanity metrics and leading indicators. Some people, that’s what they’re looking for.

They’ve got a lot of the other things locked down. They want to see that. Or maybe they’re brand new and it’s going to take ’em a while. But at the end of the day, for us, for our business, we know, it’s funny too. We talk about this, and you and I have talked about it a lot too, but whether you want to call it MBA mindset or whatever, you have to be able to demonstrate in our business the value that’s being created. And that’s true too. Again, going back to our earlier conversation today, whether you’re an in-house marketer, whether you’re a marketing director, whether you’re a CMO of a big company, this is why there’s so much churn in the marketing function because marketing people come in and they’re like, I got this great idea. It sounds cool. You do it. But if you can’t tie that to value metrics to the business, you’re eventually going to be like, I don’t know. I don’t see it sounds good, but I don’t see it.

Conrad Saam:

I got this great idea from a conference that someone was paying to speak at. We should do it

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Right. And that’s another thing that we are very, we do the mission vision values. We have the Vision Traction organizer, and our core focus, core purpose is always building trust. We want to be the most trusted team in digital legal marketing. And look, we’ve talked about many times it’s hard. We don’t always get it right, but we hope that no one that we work with ever feels betrayed or that we did something we weren’t going to do or that we hit the ball. And then again, back to this part of my origin story, that’s my mom, right? That’s my mom every day. And I had to take on a role early on in my family. I was the oldest brother of a single parent, at least in my experience. I had to take on a lot of that responsibility. And so that stuff was super, super important. And so we tried to bring that as best we can to our business to the extent that I’m able to influence that.

Conrad Saam:

Alright, dear listener, if you liked what you heard, please leave a review or get back to us if you want to hear more origin story of myself, because that’s what’s on task for our,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I can’t wait. Next report. Wait it to be your turn. I can’t wait for it to be your turn.

Conrad Saam:

What I’m suggesting is if no one got to this far in the pod and no one is hearing us asking for feedback, maybe we should skip the Conrad Origin story version.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

What we should do, let’s give a teaser and we’ll do a teaser because Daniel W 4, 6, 10 on YouTube, we didn’t even answer. We didn’t directly answer his question. So are we in business together? No. Conrad and I are not in business together. My company’s name’s Attorney Sink. I probably should have said that because I’ve never said that. Oh yeah,

Conrad Saam:

That part.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Conrad’s Company is Mockingbird, and he will tell you his story next time.

Conrad Saam:

There you go. There’s the teaser.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And with that, we are out of time. So thank you for bearing with us through my origin story, and hopefully you got something out of today’s episode. As always, please do subscribe, like leave a testimonial, try to write a nicer testimonial than Ken Levinson wrote us today. I dare you, but you can’t do it. Find us on Spotify. And with that happy holidays to everybody for whatever you’re celebrating. And Lunch Hour Legal Marketing. Conrad and Gyi, we’re out of here.

Announcer:

Thank you for listening to Lunch Hour Legal Marketing. If you’d like more information about what you heard today, please visit legal talk network.com. Subscribe via Apple Podcasts and RSS, follow Legal Talk Network on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram.

Conrad Saam:

This is good. I don’t know if I’ve had too much coffee, but this is good. We’re dancing on the edge.

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