Live! From LHLM Summit 2025

Episode Notes

Transcript

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Welcome to Lunch Hour Legal Marketing. I am Gyi Tsakalakis with AttorneySync. And I love the Game of Craps.

Conrad Saam:

I’m Conrad Saam from Mockingbird, and the number one country on my list that I’ve not been to is Japan.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Oh, great. You got to get over to Japan. Why do you feel badly want to go to

Conrad Saam:

Japan? There’s two reasons. Number one is they have unbelievably Utah level powder for skiing.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Ah, yes.

Conrad Saam:

It was not a cocaine reference, it was a skiing reference. And I also, from a cultural perspective, I like visiting places where it’s less Americanized,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Less Americanized. Well, in addition to Japan, what else do we talk about here on Lunch Hour? Legal Marketing.

Conrad Saam:

So we are going to start as always with the news and then because we’re in Las Vegas, we are taking questions from the Lunch Hour Legal Marketing Summit attendees. If they have nothing to ask us, this is going to be very, very short recording.

Announcer:

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

Conrad Saam:

Welcome to Lunch Hour Legal Marketing. Let’s hit the news.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

We do have a news item. We do have a news item that we need to cover. There it

Conrad Saam:

Is. There we go. Here’s our news

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Item. Legal Talk Network is celebrating a Signal Awards finalist for the Amanda Knox episode for the Innocent, which for the innocent fans out here. Great podcast folks. There we go. Hit that QR code. See cross-promoting. We’re cross-promoting shows. QR code please vote for. I mean, listen to the episode, save the QR code if you want to do that. But we’d love for you to vote for this episode for the Signal Award finalist. Great job Legal Talk Network.

Conrad Saam:

A couple of the other things, Adam Lockwood right here was the producer on this. So you guys heard from Adam earlier. Adam got to be the producer on this show. It’s really, really good. So please, we’d love your support on this. It was outstanding episode.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Absolutely. Alright, flip back to the branding.

Conrad Saam:

Well, here’s the other thing. Here’s the beauty of running podcasts and we started using this phrase because it makes us feel like professionals, we can fix it in posts.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Adam will fix it

Conrad Saam:

In post. Adam and his crew always make us sound and look better than we actually are.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Wasn’t it great to see Adam in person?

Conrad Saam:

It was great to see Adam in person and we just fumbled the beginning even though it was so delightfully served up on a platter, we blew it.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

That’s what we do.

Conrad Saam:

I know. And then they fix it in post.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

That’s right. So we are asking the audience,

Conrad Saam:

Actually, it’s the other way around.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Questions are being asked of us by the audience and if not, I’m going to ask you questions.

Conrad Saam:

Well, I bet Kathleen has found someone to ask us a question. There we go. Thank you Mr. Ro. It’s going to be about links.

Audience Member #1:

No, it’s about Google Business profile. Okay. What are three things to what we should be doing for the care and feeding of our Google business profile head clients getting more reviews.

Conrad Saam:

Who

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Asked that question?

Conrad Saam:

That was Tim sra,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Mr. Iowa himself and the house.

Conrad Saam:

One of the things on Google business profile that I think is super important is imagery. I think you need to think about there’s ranking and then there’s earning the click. One of the things that I think a lot of people don’t think enough about is what are the images that are being drawn into that Google business profile When you do that brand search and sometimes they’re awful, sometimes they’re stock imagery, sometimes they’re from the outside of the office. It can be very random. I would be very deliberate about putting the image forth that you want to actually present to drive that click. You guys, and I didn’t say this then I’ll say it now. Do you remember when I think Gyi brought up, he did the brand search for Josh Hodges and my critique on that content that came up, the Josh Hodges picture that was there was Josh Hodges in a suit looking like a lawyer.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

No reds hat.

Conrad Saam:

There was no reds hat. It pissed me off. What’s he

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Doing?

Conrad Saam:

That was a miss from Hodges because it was missing his branding. Honestly, it was two white guys who looked exactly the same at a thumbnail level, and so all of his branding, the reason he would run the click, the reason people would recognize him, he needs to be in a Carhartt and a hat, right? And that doesn’t apply to everyone, but understand, oh, he’s there. Sorry, I thought you were gone. Sorry to be

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Just there. He’s got the hat on now. Hometown lawyers, hometown

Conrad Saam:

Lawyers. He got the hat on now. But I would really be thinking about not just ranking, which is a reviews thing, but earning the click, which is a reviews thing and some other elements to that.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Great points. I would also add number one, give a shout to Darren Shaw, Whitepar local Search ranking Factors survey. Conrad and I both contribute to that. There’s a new one supposedly coming out pretty soon. He has a whole section on things you can do to your Google business profile to improve in the spirit of the clicks thing. I know Conrad thinks this is dirty pool, but put,

Conrad Saam:

This is a clever dirty pool.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Remember how I pulled up that Google Post with the link inside of it? Create stuff inside Google posts that require people to click on them. Maybe it’s ticket giveaways, maybe it’s restaurant giveaways, all that stuff that just does from local community standpoint. If you’re going to do promotions, put them in your Google Business profile posts and then tell people on social media. The only place to go get it is in your Google Business profile. What does that do? It causes people one to search on your brand name, that’s a biggie, and then click into your Google business profile to find that offer thing buried deep somewhere in the images that gives you a lot of engagement for your Google Business profile posts. I’m in the camp. That user engagement with Google Business Profiles is very key to showing up in local pack results. The other one I’ll just say quickly is service pages. If you haven’t built out service pages, they actually make a much bigger difference than I think a lot of people realize. Really the general rule is fill out every single thing as deeply as you possibly can. More information for the machine is better.

Conrad Saam:

And there’s a recency to that

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Too. Yes.

Conrad Saam:

I think just because you filled it out seven years ago, well, there’s a recency element to this, so I would go back and re-edit this if you haven’t touched it in two years.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Absolutely,

Conrad Saam:

Yes. The answer is even if nothing has changed, go rewrite some stuff, update information. There’s a recency element to a lot of this. And yes, a hundred percent reviews. There’s a recency element to how reviews impact. So yes.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Also, I think Conrad might’ve mentioned this, but now you got me thinking about reviews and I know Tim said anything but reviews. But the more you can have consistency in your reviews versus we do these people do these review campaigns, they’re like, oh, I got a list of former clients where I’ve never asked for a review. You push it out and you send it all at once and you get a couple out of those. Not as good as is getting one review week after week after week. So stagger those review generation campaigns and find different ways to get reviewed, right? We talked about with Top dog gets, they get reviews for social media, again, maybe that’s not the best example, but finding ways of getting reviews outside the context of the practice. As long as someone has an experience with your firm, it’s fair game as far as the guidelines are concerned. Okay, the question is about media mix. When should law firms consider various media like television, OTT, and maybe some other non-digital or slash digital traditional types of media?

Conrad Saam:

I’ll give you, this is a very theoretical answer, but I think you could turn this into tactical helpfulness. One of the themes and gizo on this, and I think this is really important, is the interplay between different marketing channels. Your television will make your pay-per-click work better. That has been proven out over and over again. This is why we keep talking about brand, right? Brand awareness. It drives clicks, it’ll make your SEO work better. All of these things work together. The problem, and this is why we did the boil the ocean thing, is it’s difficult to be everywhere from a pure budgeting perspective, but if you can identify a target market so you can identify people who ride motorcycles and you can put ads into only houses where people ride motorcycles, that’s pretty cool and it’s not a massive spend in order to do that. So my answer is the more channels you can add to a very thin slice of the market, the more you should. And that’s why I don’t love billboards, but even billboards can be geographically super, super targeted. Ryan Lee, how billboards do you have?

Audience Member #2:

Zero.

Conrad Saam:

You have zero. We were thinking about it, right? You’re

Audience Member #2:

Talking about you’re probably confusing my advertising at local football stadiums and that kind.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

So great idea by the way, advertising local football stadiums. Love that.

Conrad Saam:

So it’s finding the markets. If you can carve out the market and be really, really specific and really, really small, I would like to see your budget spread out. And we talked about the portfolio ethere on marketing channels. I would like to see your budget spread out as much as possible to include offline traditional as much as possible. When you guys all drive back to the airport today, there is an example of the absolute best billboard targeting. And every time I see it, it makes me happy. It is injured in a casino Las Vegas, and it’s only shown to people entering the airport. So literally leaving Las Vegas, were you entered in a casino in Las Vegas? It is brilliant and no one else wants that billboard real estate because it’s all pointing away from people coming into Las Vegas. It’s genius. Super, super good marketing. So having that stuff, wherever it’s target, I love,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I’m going to give you a related answer, but maybe a little bit more of a framework here. And again, you got to know your own numbers. I’m just going to throw some numbers out, but hopefully you can think about this in the context of your own practice. So let’s say you’re going to be a 10% of your top line revenue. That’s your overall all in marketing budget. Okay? So when do you add some of these other channels? Well, when you have a significant budget, those other channels can make sense. Here’s the problem. I’m all for portfolio theory. I’m all for going across all these. I did a whole thing on it. However, to go buy enough OTT or billboards or TV and still make that 40% of your brand budget, your budget’s got to be pretty big. You can’t buy, depending on what market you’re in, you can’t buy 10 different billboard ads for a year, for a hundred bucks. And so to me it’s more of you start adding these more expensive channels when you can afford them and when they make up only a smaller percentage of your total media spend, don’t go all in on like, oh, I’m going to spend 10% of my revenue and just buy billboards. That’s the problem. So it’s a balance of the portfolio theory and then adding channels as your budget grows to be able to buy enough of that media that it makes sense is the way I would answer it.

Audience Member #3:

Favorite topics has been unreasonable. Hospitality,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Sam, unreasonable hospitality.

Conrad Saam:

What are some gifts we’ve given or received? I will use this example because I’m going to make myself look really cool right now and you just opened the door for it and she’s sitting here. Elise Bowie sent us, I think this was a second referral. She’s not a client. We happen to live in the same place. It’s a great person. And I think the first time I sent flowers, cookies or something nice to Elise and then she sends us another referral and I was like, fuck, I need to do something more creative on this. What can we do here? So instead of sending Elise anything we sent her nothing. I got the addresses of everyone in her firm and I sent them flowers from Elise through us. And so that’s the type of stuff. And I got a bunch of my people here. We’ll sit down and be like, what can we do that would be really, really cool and thoughtful?

And so I started with this concept of we used to put people’s brands on things and we’d send them out as a thank you and I love that. Stop putting, I love the Mockingbird logo and I appreciate that some of you guys have some stuff, but really you want your own stuff. You’re never going to toss it out. So we started with that kind of concept, but then it’s like, how do I take you, take that one level further. How do I make a lease look awesome to her employees? And that’s what I was trying to do. Thank you. That was a fun one. I have stopped sending booze to people because I’ve sent booze to my friend who’s Mormon and a friend who was an addict, right? So do

Gyi Tsakalakis:

You want me to stop sending booze to you?

Conrad Saam:

No, I’m neither Mormon or an addict, so yes, please continue. He sends me stuff all the time, but one was a bottle with the lunch, our legal marketing logo on it. So yeah, I also sending gifts that are unexpected and not needed. That’s one of the keys for gift giving. What about yourself?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Best gift? Best gift I’ve ever received is my children. Oh, Jesus had to tap you,

Conrad Saam:

So do the best gift. You just upstage me. I’m like, I’m a good person. I just tried to play that really hard and he’s like

Gyi Tsakalakis:

The best gift I’ve ever received though in this context. Charlie Mann actually asked me to speak at one of his events and he took my do what the bots cannot quote made a t-shirt. And so again, my thing is it doesn’t have to be expensive, it’s meaningful, right? He took my words, put ’em on a t-shirt, and every time I pull that t-shirt out of my kids are like, do what? The bots cannot dead. And I’m like, thanks. I think of Charlie Mann and so I’m like, thanks Charlie Mann. And I’ve done the same thing. I’ve taken other people stuff they’ve posted online especially people post very vulnerable and meaningful stories on social media and stuff. Finding quotes from those and putting them on even coffee mugs. People are like, that’s amazing. And now they’ve got that coffee mug with that meaningful thing in their life. So that’s the way. A couple examples,

Audience Member #2:

I was going to answer the questions before you contract go a few years back you sent it to myself and my partner Valenti Valentine’s today. The Valentine’s Day box, the chocolates obsession day items, things, the notes said in case you forgots to prepare for Valentine’s Day. Here you go. And so I take that. That’s a good one.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

That’s a

Conrad Saam:

Good one. I love that. I love trying to do those things that

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Are just saving marriages.

Conrad Saam:

It’s making other people look awesome. And if you can put your brain into that, it’s not about me trying to look great. It’s like I know this. If Ryan’s wife thinks I’m a good person, he’s not leaving our agency. Right? It’s awesome.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

You read that book

Conrad Saam:

Unreasonable Hospitality,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Is it in, I think it’s in Giftology, the knives. You buy the knives for the Yeah. Other questions. What are awesome about bad fatigue

Conrad Saam:

Add fatigue. I love it. I hate seeing your ad all the time. I think ad fatigue becomes if you have an audience who knows you so well that they’re tired of seeing you, I’m okay. I do think there is something to be said from a creative perspective about making sure that you’re constantly interested. What Josh can’t do right now is stop the stuff that he’s doing because it will disappear over time. And I think it’s important to constantly be showing what you’re doing and there’s got to be some change to that with brand consistency put into that. But just the over exposure, I think you may get to a point where my money is better spent elsewhere with different formats and again, portfolio theory on different places, but the people who have done radio really, really well will do the radio station. They will do it for years and years and years and years and that level of consistency, it’s just, I know when I listen to 1 0 7 7 in Seattle, I’m going to get one 800 DUI away. I know that, right? And hopefully I never have a DUI, but if I did, it’s right there. I’m struggling to come up with a reason why I hate this other than spend money elsewhere.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I’m going to go back annoying. It depends. But if your media buy objective is saturation marketing, guess what? For the people that get fatigued by it, write ’em off because you’re focused on saturating that everybody who’s listening to that station, watching that channel learner and learner locally four times on the morning news, you don’t care. There’s no ad fatigue. I don’t care if someone gets fatigued, they’re not my audience. And guess what? Even those people that get ad fatigue, if they’re hiring lawyers like that, they’re still going to call earner and learner. It mean it’s the same thing, the John Morgan stuff. It’s like you can survey people and be like, I would never hire John Morgan because his billboards and then when they go and hire somebody, they hire John Morgan. But to Conrad’s point, I would say, if that’s not your objective, change your ads, make your ads better.

I mean, think about Hodge’s stuff. Think about all the lawyer ads you see and if it was all that local stuff in the ad copy itself, that’s what I was trying to do in the integrated marketing thing, which I probably didn’t do a good job on. Take some of those social media posts and put those in your digital ads, put them in your TV ads. Who doesn’t want to see Josh making bread as a TV commercial? But that’s a totally different campaign objective than just sheer saturation marketing. So it kind of depends on it, but I wouldn’t stress it. And you can also do research to say, is there ad fatigue even, right? So if everybody’s like, I’m so sick of seeing these ads in my local market, maybe there is a significant number of ad fatigue. I think nine out of 10 times it’s just not even a thing.

Conrad Saam:

I mean there’s a reason Coke still advertises like mad, right?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I’m so tired of Coke,

Conrad Saam:

I hate, I

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Love Coke. I don’t drink Coke. It’s poison conversation another day. Bourbon. Yeah, that’s poison too. But I do drink that. The question is, is it okay to have multiple versions of a logo that might violate this idea of complete brand consistency?

Conrad Saam:

I deeply believe that you should have a very specific use of your logo and you should not mess with it. So I want it everywhere. I want logo fatigue, I want it everywhere and I want it to be the same every time. And yet, does anyone have a silver logo on? We effed this up. We literally had this conversation. This is a sparkly silver version of our logo because it was good for here. So only for Vegas. Only for Vegas.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

What about supporting causes like pride just in your logo for pride,

Conrad Saam:

Would we put a flag on the logo for Pride?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Maybe not you maybe, but what do you think of that as a concept? What? Let’s take a break.

Conrad Saam:

Thank you. That was beautiful. I’m trying to come up with a reason why I don’t like that and I can’t.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I’m okay with it to be honest. I think variations kind of make it more interesting. I mean it depends. I wouldn’t be totally going nuts with it, but I think some vari, I mean we’ve got variations. You’ve got to have variations for different color backgrounds. So we at least have to have a white version for a female on black background if you have a colorful logo or come back into contrast. Well, I’m down for a couple different versions.

Conrad Saam:

So I think a couple different versions that are defined very, very clearly and accessible in a library that people can access easily. This is where we put, we’re really specific about where the logo and the Mockingbird shows up. We’re very, very clear on this and we’re very, very consistent with that. I think that’s really, really important. I’ll tell you this. So this is another thing. One of the very first shows that GUI and I did for the podcast, it may have even been the very first one. We talked about changing the name and we talked about changing the music and we and the burger. And the burger and very bluntly, despite the fact that we’re in Vegas, I’m not like Money makes the world go round is not really a Conrad ish thing,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

But it’s such a great song.

Conrad Saam:

Maybe it is, but when we went through this whole thing, we’re not going to touch anything because the consistency is so unbelievably important. It was more important to me that this all worked. I love cheeseburgers, but this all stayed consistent and there was limited confusion because there was a host change and so we wanted to minimize that. So I love the consistency and I really struggle to make changes.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Think it’s got to be consistent most time, but just make sure it’s remains recognizable. Don’t change your logo in a way where people don’t know that it’s your logo. I think that’s my takeaway question, Conrad, have you ever done a brand refresh?

Conrad Saam:

Brand refresh is my favorite approach to this

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Recency bias.

Conrad Saam:

We have had, and we’ve done a bunch of episodes a little bit too recently on this, the brand refresh should feel like an evolution of something that exists. What I push back against aggressively is the rebrand and you end up in problems with law firms where it’s like, we talked about this before Smith and Jones becomes Smith Jones and Murphy and then everyone hates Smith and so now it’s become Jones and Murphy. No one knows what the firm is anymore. So that becomes problematic. That is not a refresh, that is a rebranding that is problematic, that requires new names, it requires a whole bunch of SEO problems. But I like the evolution of a brand and the brands are doing this all the time. The coke that we see today has changed, but the elements of it have remained consistent. So there’s the polar bears and stuff like that that happens during Christmas, but I like the brand refresh, but my whole point of this is it needs to feel evolutionary.

And so we Mockingbird have recently redone our website which was overdue by at least five years and it’s been an evolution of the brand as opposed to we’re completely changing these things and the reason Conrad’s been out here with the orange vest on and the orange sneakers all the time is because that is now part of our branding and I spilled wine on this thing that’s not going to go over well. But our bird Atticus right now wears an orange vest and that’s why I’ve been sweating my butt off all the last three days in this insulated orange vest because it is part of the brand. I just like the evolutionary concept.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I want to pick on our hero pick Josh

Conrad Saam:

Hodges, we need another

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Person. He’s too good though, so he needs an opportunity for improvement. What do you think about this? The hometown lawyers and Kruger and Hodges.

Conrad Saam:

So this is a problematic piece, right? It’s difficult. Josh has the brand of his law firm and he’s known as the hometown lawyer, right?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I’ll tell you, when I was actually making my deck, this actually hit me for the first time. I’d never thought of this before, but I’m sitting there thinking and I’m like, you got all this brand around the hometown lawyers. So people that know him on social platforms and they go and search for the hometown lawyers and Kruger and Hodges comes up. Now luckily he ranks number one, but if I’m looking for the hometown lawyers, I’m not saying that. The second example of that is what about LSAs? He’s coming up in LSAs as Krueger and Hodges. If I’m looking, if I do a non-brand search and I know the hometown lawyers, I’m not getting that brand affinity for Kruger and Hodges,

Conrad Saam:

Which is why he needs the Cincinnati baseball cap.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

We still love you Josh. We love you Josh. Do an awesome job. Love.

Audience Member #4:

So I have current work, those 12 nine firms that I’ve had four or 500 days in there over the years and I just recently found out that one of major days is retiring, so we’re going have to figure out that problem. In addition to that, we are a growing law firm, have members joining lawyers on our right now and we’ve talked about it’s easier to brand a person and equity in that versus a company me. How would you recommend I move forward?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

This is great. Alright Conrad, we’ve got a law firm, we’ve got a partner, longstanding partner, well-known partner in the brand name as retiring issue one. Also though the firm’s growing got a lot of new attorneys coming up and some of those new attorneys might be good for marketing and maybe you want to get them involved in the brand. Maybe one of those attorneys can become a named partner. What do we do?

Conrad Saam:

So this is very clear to me because I’ve watched this cluster and it’s easy because I’m not on the inside of a law firm and I do not have to deal, as Tim mentioned it with the empty egos of attorneys on this. But I think you are sitting at an amazing opportunity right now. Your partner Smith is retiring. You have four names in your brand now. Yeah, two right now. There’s two in the brand right now. Yes. And one of those guys is retiring. You have an amazing opportunity. You set the precedent that we’re not adding anyone else onto the brand. He’s gone but he stays with the brand. And I use this example, I’ve used this over and over again. Berman and Simmons in Maine is the oldest law firm in Maine. Berman and Simmons both died more than a hundred years ago. They’ve never made a name change, it’s never been confusing as to who this firm is, right?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And in fact, this is so powerful that the states have actually changed the rules of professional conduct to allow you to maintain your firm name even after you have partners who are deceased.

Conrad Saam:

So you think about the fx, which is awesome. I never do nice to have. I think this is an amazing time for you to set the present. If you don’t change the name when the dude is gone, you don’t have to add the name When Mary gets made the name partner, this is a branding conversation. Otherwise you will always have this problem and it is awful and the new partner, it’s going to break up and you’re just dealing with these attorney egos. I think you bite it right now and just leave what you’ve

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Got. What about the corporate firm brand versus the personal brands of lawyers at a firm? How do you navigate that? I mean I can give you plenty of examples where firms are doing both R rs h legal for example, and Tim Ro Tim’s the face of the firm, but they still market in the local community as RSH legal. Can you have the best of both worlds? Can you have hybrid? What do you think?

Conrad Saam:

So this is a very theoretical answer.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Perfect.

Conrad Saam:

So potentially this is academic. It’s academic, which means there’s no research. I

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Can’t prove this. It’s our favorite. No accountability.

Conrad Saam:

This is my opinion. People come and go, right? And as someone said most eloquently earlier today or yesterday, you can’t send a Turkey to eagle school. And so the people issue is going to be a constant thing. The people who do want to work on their marketing and build their personal brand and all that stuff, great support that all you absolutely can and it is easier to brand a person so that’s an easier job, but the roots of the company need to stay consistent. I don’t want to ask Josh, we’re not going to call Josh no more.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Josh. Josh actually has a rebuttal I think on our No more

Conrad Saam:

Josh on this. Go rebut rebuttal. Josh, you’re now on Josh. Not going to argue with us. I have a

Audience Member #5:

TI actually completely agree with what saying so and when we switch, recruit time to wall because I this out maybe some collections six. The question is though it’s kind scary as far as 10 E-O-G-P-P, I’ve got D, DBA, so I don’t do that. Guys have this less likely to get GG submitted or take out overall performance much. There’s going to be some destruction change. We go to slides, not a rebrand, just change back a bit. But the advice would be,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

So Josh’s asset, we called Josh out for having this brand problem and so constructively he’s taking that feedback and he’s asking us, what about issues with name changes in GBP? And my view of this is, and I didn’t even intend for this to be like a straw man argument, but I think you just need to work the hometown lawyers somehow into your visibility under Krueger and Hodges. I wouldn’t change it. I think the risk is too big on changing your name and from a GBP standpoint, it’s a lot of work. But if you can find ways, maybe it’s a justification. There’s these little justifications you can have. Maybe you encourage happy clients to leave testimonials to refer you as a hometown lawyer. But my biggest issue was hometown lawyers doesn’t appear to people with whom have a familiarity with hometown lawyers. That’s the problem. Maybe your primary GVP picture is you in a hometown lawyer’s shirt or gear or something. And in the LSA, it’s a picture of you in the hometown lawyer’s stuff. Now those people, it’s okay that it’s Kruger and Hodges because they’re scenic. Oh yeah, it’s Kruger and Hodges is the hometown lawyers Problem solved. I wouldn’t mess with the GVP personally

Conrad Saam:

Given your market. And I think this is one of those things where it depends where you are and you have to think about this really carefully given your market and the work that you do. You’re bluntly winning on three brands. You’re winning on Kruger and Hodges, which should be easy. You’re winning on the hometown lawyer and you’re winning on your name given where you are now. If you were in downtown Seattle or downtown Chicago or Los Angeles

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Or what if he grows into some of these other small Ohio towns that might not be as familiar.

Conrad Saam:

Josh’s whole point is I’m going to win in those markets where I can win.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I think you’re probably right, I think

Conrad Saam:

Probably. And so I think it’s different if you have a different market. The other part of this that we don’t think about all that often is your individual name. You have a fairly common name. Gyi has a very uncommon name and I have a very uncommon name. And so I also think you need to think about how much competition is there for Conrad Saam. There’s none, there’s no others as my wife says. But I think you need to think about the competitiveness of brands as well.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

A hundred percent. I think that’s probably right. I think my biggest concern of the whole thing of that was the non-brand search and not benefiting from the familiarity If people didn’t know Krug and HARs but no hometown lawyers, that would be the only thing that I’d be a little bit concerned about. But I don’t think you have a huge branding consistency problem honestly. And you put the branding in a lot of your social posts like the Kruger and Hots branding in hometown lawyers. So as long as you’re cross-pollinating the brands, I think for the most part you’re okay. Hi,

Audience Member #6:

We have good office location and I want to know the strategy for what’s the process that you keep across all three and then how we differentiate each of those locations we need.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Great question. So Conrad Gabriela is asking about, you got multiple office locations and we’re going to have to ask some follow up questions here. Questions about differentiating locations, brand consistency, are there multiple practice areas? Tell us more about the firm.

Conrad Saam:

Yeah. Do each of these offices do the same work?

Audience Member #6:

Yes they do.

Conrad Saam:

I’m trying to come up with a reason to differentiate between them

Audience Member #6:

And questions. Do we keep the same community events in post all of them or do we differentiate to promote?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Are there geographic differences? Are they so close that everybody’s speaking the same language and the same community or are they far enough apart that you could do different local marketing based on location?

Conrad Saam:

This helps The things that I would have fundamentally differently, and this applies to any office using again, this imagery is going to come up and you can use the imagery to say that I am local and it’s such an easy way to be like we’re not just a corporate firm, we’re actually in your backyard. I would grab imagery of people who work in that individual office and put them in the most recognizable part of whatever that town is, whether it’s a ball field or a bridge or

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Having lunch at a local restaurant.

Conrad Saam:

Yeah, something that’s very clearly this is South Bloomington or wherever it might be. I would work on those type of differentiations.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Different phone numbers. Yeah,

Conrad Saam:

That’s key. Different with local area code numbers. These are really small dials that I would be thinking about. The differentiation needs to be based around the geography and nothing else in my opinion. I agree.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Great question. Klan, what do you do to market to your current clients while the representation is active?

Conrad Saam:

So I feel like we owe you a refund because the one person who did not unfortunately get to speak here was Jason Crim who was specifically going to talk about this on day one, marketing to your existing clients. Super, super important. And you saw Cassidy, she had a bunch of specific parts of the client journey,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Box of Sunshine,

Conrad Saam:

Box of sunshine, those types of things. How many of you guys are marketing to your existing clients? Well we know they’re going to turn into your referral source. Think about what’s the damn book we just talked about?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Unreasonable hospitality.

Conrad Saam:

Unreasonable hospitality. Go read that. Think about those elements where you can put unreasonable hospitality and someone else showed, everyone in their firm has the ability to spend $50 to delight a client. I’d want to know that people are spending $50 to delight the client. Have you actually spent that gift budget? If you don’t manage these things, they don’t happen. It’s a nice idea. But I want to know that everyone in my firm, this is a good idea, Laura, we should have everyone in the firm have. I want you to spend at least $200 this month on something nice for a client. I think that type of thing becomes important. The other elements of this that I think is really important is you need to know how they’re doing. And so I will give you two different examples of how to get a feel of how they’re doing. Hona talks about this. So Hona is basically a way to stay in touch with clients, let them know and it’s all text-based, but as people go through different phases of a matter for Hona clients, they basically send them a how are we doing, right?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Case status can do that too.

Conrad Saam:

Case status will do it too. If you know that someone has been happy throughout the client journey. So they talk about this in terms of actually getting reviews, but we’re presupposing that the client is happy all the time. I think you need to evaluate that. The other example of that that I have big law firm, I dunno they’re 200 people, something like that. They have someone who’s only job and if they’re big enough to do this, but their only job is to check in with people multiple times during a matter. And it’s this phone call and is we care even the message that we care. So knowing how people are doing I think is really important. And here’s the other part, this is obvious, but I don’t think people do this. We’ve talked about reviews ad nauseum. Don’t ask the pissed off clients for a review.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Isn’t that review gating

Conrad Saam:

And don’t keep in touch with them. Part of the CRM needs to be like, John is crazy, let’s not put our brand in front of him for the rest of his life.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Box of rocks.

Conrad Saam:

Yeah,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Conrad mentioned this and I’m going to put on my channel my Brian Glass. This is a firm policy for them. Pick up the phone and call them in a world of AI and automation and no one wants to talk to anybody. What stands out? Picking up the phone. They have a firm policy lawyer calls a client once every 30 days. It can be just, Hey, I’m just saying, hey, how are you doing?

Conrad Saam:

So a bunch of COOs that we work with, one of their metrics is how has it been since we’ve physically, physically since we’ve spoken to the client, you had

Gyi Tsakalakis:

To physically speak nowadays, physically

Conrad Saam:

Speak. It’s like having children.

Audience Member #7:

Hi, I small and before I started working back 10 months ago, they didn’t do much. And so my question is how do I go about getting everyone else to also in marketing, there’s about 10 employees. Two I stated they don’t be on social media, are well aware, even asked business even necessary and some kind of second question. The two partners also of course carry it but don’t even do well on video and kind of struggle of making the videos. They don’t want to be in even partner. So in general, buy back from everyone in the

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Office. What kind of law firm, what kind of practice area? Personal injury. Okay, it’s a small PI firm. The partners are like this. Marketing stuff’s for the birds. We just do great work. People’s word of mouth. We don’t need social media. I don’t want to do social media.

Conrad Saam:

And you also said they’re bad on video, right? Cringey. No

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Cringey lawyers. Conrad, I get it. We got cringey lawyers at the firm, case management support staff think this marketing stuff’s for the birds.

Conrad Saam:

So I think it is incumbent upon you to not make Tim called them hostage videos. Bad video is bad. And you can tell that people don’t want to be there and it doesn’t work.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Can’t make a Turkey an eagle.

Conrad Saam:

You cannot send a Turkey to Eagles. Genuinely think, and this is really hard. I genuinely think in your situation where you basically you’re on an island and you have no support because no one really wants to buy into it. And I think you said they don’t want to do social media, right? That’s the problem. They want you and we won’t say who you are, who work for, but thank you for sending her to this conference. They want you to do the social media work that they do not want to do. We’ve talked about how the value of a person is easier to market a person than a job if they’re not going to be good in that context and on social media, you will fail trying to make that work. I think you need to look for marketing channels that have nothing to do with the things that they’re already bad at. And I would not try and make them better at turning a D minus into a B plus video. It’s just not going to happen. It’s just not going to happen. So we talk about portfolio theories. I love all this stuff, but I would look at marketing channels that do not involve social media and them developing content if they’re garbage at it because it’s actually worse unless it’s so cringey that you’re like

Gyi Tsakalakis:

The cringey firm.com.

Conrad Saam:

If it’s that bad and that it’s good, but I don’t think you’re going to be able to pull that off, nor do they probably want that. So I would look for other channels.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Forget the lawyers. You’re not going to convince them. Send them as many examples of all the awesome Send ’em Josh Hodges videos. They’re never going to figure it out. Put them aside for everybody else at the firm who might be struggling to see how to do it, go check out the champion firm and what they do on social media, they make it fun. People actually want to participate in the social media because it’s like fun. So they gamify it. I think the other thing that I would be thinking about from if you have influence on this is to incentivize nothing talks like money, incentivize people to contribute and make their associated to performance metrics in terms of stuff in the marketing function. I think that getting alignment there gets people motivated by it. You might have to be in this world of like, we’re actually going to lean in more on this corporate firm brand idea because the lawyers, even though they’re technically the face, they’re not really a great face. And so what we’re going to do is we’re going to say, Hey, when we go out and do stuff like Cooper Hurley injury lawyers does, when you’re out in the community and stuff, brand the firm, brand the firm, do the community engagement things. When you have happy clients who want to sing your praises, make them the heroes of your marketing. Forget about the cringey lawyers

Audience Member #6:

Again, I have a question when it relates to, we had experiences with someone, whether it’s a negative experience or point, they leave a negative review, it did lead to a protection order being in place because we’re making present against the firm. And this is specifically on ye, we gone through Yelp, we’re flagging it, and all this is continuing to allow the person to rewrite their reviews. So it takes out the or takes out names and then they’re continuing to rer his rule post. What is the strategy for reviewers like this? Or we go through to try to add our positive reviews to vary. What is the strategy there?

Conrad Saam:

So the one upside is that it’s on Yelp.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah, what’s Yelp,

Conrad Saam:

Right? So it’s not on Google,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Although Yelp’s making a comeback, man, I got to tell you.

Conrad Saam:

But this is what I genuinely think your objective here is. You want this to just go away. And the worst way to make it go away is to try and hide it. And so what I think your worst case scenario is they go from Yelp, you’ve got a Yelp or who hates you, great. They’re not all over Google. They’re not on avo. They have not broadcast their displeasure further and very bluntly, and this sucks, I would let it be, I would shut up. I wouldn’t even push more reviews on top of Yelp to try and cover it up. That may piss someone off. That person is going to go back to their Yelp or review be like, I ain’t Joey that off for him. And then it’s buried and they’re like, oh, fuck that. I’m going to do it again. Right? It’s honestly like it’s letting a 4-year-old just scream it out and I’m walking away.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Here’s the good news. There’s a lot of companies beyond lawyers that are really concerned about reviews. There’s one company called Amazon. Every study that comes out shows that having a mix of good and bad reviews is actually a net positive thing. People are more trusting of firms, brands, products, whatever. When there’s a mix than when there’s no negative reviews. They think that it’s AstroTurf. And if this person depending on it, we’ve seen some really bad cases. People aren’t dumb. They’re like, oh, obviously this person’s crazy and they’re just plastering bad reviews everywhere. And we’ve also can see that there’s a significant number of positive reviews over a peer on these other platforms. People will figure that out. Now the counterpoint to that is if most of the reviews are bad or you have a scarcity problem where you don’t have reviews anywhere else, and that’s the only review online, then I would be like, all right, we got to ramp up, try to get some more reviews across platform.

But I’m with Conrad, let’s sleeping Dogs lie. And for other people, maybe not this specific instance, but for other people, if you’re dealing with a negative review issue, you got to step back, take a breath, don’t get too pissed. Most of the time you’re not going to convince this person. You got to kind of go through that assessment of if this is a crazy person, let ’em alone. If you think that there’s a chance that this person had some bad experience and you can rectify the situation, call ’em up and be like, Hey, I’m really sorry that you had this experience. I’d love to be able to fix it for you. It doesn’t sound like that’s a situation in this case. And then third, if it’s not a crazy person and you can’t rectify it, you go on there and you respond and it’s like, I’m really sorry you had this experience. You’re not trying to convince the person to change their review. It’s just to show the next person that hey, you actually care about your reputation. You’re here, you’re listening and you care.

Conrad Saam:

That is key. You have to think about the reply to the negative review has nothing to do with a person who left it. It is marketing for everyone else who reads that

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And check your state bar rules because some of the state bars unfortunately are totally unrealistic about this and that even responding to a negative review is a violation of client confidence

Audience Member #3:

And question about books. So if someone in this room, my 2026 marketing strategy is I want the owner law offer, whether it’s self-published or trial, something like that. What advice do we have for someone very denial through or do you know with the people who,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

So number one is who’s the audience? If the idea is to write a book that other lawyers are going to purchase. So if it’s like a trial guide type of book where it’s like, I’m going to do trial practice tips and stuff like that because people are going to buy my book and then they’re going to refer me cases. That model I think works pretty well. If the goal is some kind of direct to consumer thing, if you’ve got a story to tell and it is local and something like that, that might work. But to me it comes back to the audience thing. Everybody’s writing these books for the sake of writing books. I read some of these sadly, and you can tell that it’s probably ghostwritten and it doesn’t really resonate. And it’s like maybe it was a direct mail piece that had some thing there, but I’d be like, who’s the audience? Why am I writing this book? What’s the objective for writing it? And if you’re going to do it, commit to doing it and write a book. It’s the same thing with the ai when you can tell that somebody paid somebody to write a book with their name on it. I think especially with lawyers who are pretty sophisticated audience, if you’re ghostwriting books for lawyers, they know, they’re like, this isn’t this person’s voice.

Conrad Saam:

I think books have, I mean, the traditional book thing has been Prove your authority. No one reads the bloody book. We all know that. And it’s been used as a lead magnet. I’ve never really loved this. Let me give you a completely different example. You guys saw Christopher early,

Earlier today. He had an awful childhood, an absolutely awful childhood. He’s the person with do lawyer in Massachusetts. His book is about his awful childhood. And I mean, he’s a great dude. He’s just a great guy and he’s overcome hell. That resonates to people and they actually want to read it. I have sent his book to seven people now. They may never hire him. They may not be in Massachusetts, but I would much prefer a meaningful book that someone actually wants to read. And by the way, it doesn’t have to be about an awful childhood. It can be about, you could do a book about why you love your local town. There’s things that you can do that are much more interesting than, here’s why I’m the best divorced lawyer in Poughkeepsie, New York. Right? No one wants that. No one’s reading it. And I want some of that. Who you are coming out. And also, lemme just respond to the initial part of your question. You said what they want to do in 2026 is write a book. That’s the number one thing that someone in your firm is thinking about. I would have a different conversation about that being the best use of their time.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Obama was a lawyer. He wrote a book, a couple books he

Conrad Saam:

Wrote. Yes.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I actually read a couple of those actually. So there’s, there’s a recommendation book recommendation.

Conrad Saam:

Okay. Obama and Christopher early. That’s awesome.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Oh, question in my inbox. Lemme get my inbox out.

Conrad Saam:

The question is, do you read your email?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

The question is, am I make my flight? Oh, who’s this question from? So I got a lot of emails in here.

Conrad Saam:

This is why we can fix it in post when we have these awkward

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Silences, oh, my pizza coffee order has been delivered. How are other firms approaching compliance when it comes to marketing, SMS, texting campaigns? What are the best practices or safeguards do they put in place to ensure compliance while still running effective campaigns? My first answer would be contact John Henson.

Conrad Saam:

I was going to say the same thing. Who’s now gone?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Hopefully you connected with him while you were here like we told you to.

Conrad Saam:

I would connect with John Hanson. I would follow his stuff. He knows more about compliance than anyone. I don’t know. He loves this stuff and I really don’t understand that. It’s like trying to get someone to listen to a tax planning blog or something. But he really loves this stuff. So that would be my starting point.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

How are other firms leveraging billboards in their strategies? Even though billboards aren’t directly trackable? Have firms seen measurable or anecdotal? ROI your favorite term from them? Or is it just branding?

Conrad Saam:

Measurability on billboards is very, very straightforward for me. We didn’t talk about attribution enough. Dual source attribution, how did you hear about us? And the key here, and this is I think very, very important. How you answer that question is not a single thing. It is not a dropdown where you can pick X, Y, or Z. It is seven or eight or nine things. I’ve seen your billboards and I heard you here and I clicked on your ad and I did this and that. And the other thing. If you run billboards, everyone runs billboards and asks that question, we’ll see that they actually work, which blows my mind. But

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah, I think that’s great. I was just going to two things for me on dual source attribution first, and I just learned something new is a great, it was Casey that said the second question, right? First, every intake mandatory field, either how did you hear about us or who do we thank for the referral? Got to be there every single time. And then Casey during the panel made a great suggestion that everyone thought about in addition to, how did you hear about us? How did you get our phone number? Because

Conrad Saam:

That’s a good one.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Those might be different answers. And if the billboard comes up. And then of course, the other thing that I would be doing is research about brand activation, right? Are you seeing growth in brand search queries? Are you seeing growth in, if you’re doing local research, like, Hey, have you heard about, do you recognize this brand? Brand, recognizability studies, stuff like that. Those are the ways to track that. You’re not going to be able to do tracking off of a billboard. I wouldn’t even recommend, I’m not even going to say it. I would just say focus on brand building and the impact of traditional media on brand. Last one, has anyone used their email list for targeting through meta, Facebook, Instagram ads? Does this work effectively in larger markets or does segmentation often end up being too small to generate results?

Conrad Saam:

It depends on the size of your list. So size, recency, quality of your list becomes really, really important. But 100%, it is a great way to keep your brand in front of people. And again, it’s a very, very small list relative to the population. So the overall budget spends on that are so low. It is, in my opinion, no brainer.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Thank you so much. We want to support you. We want to create a platform for you to get to know each other. I think there’s so much untapped and in-house legal marketers who are on islands that we can help facilitate more conversations and learnings amongst each other. Appreciate you. Safe travels home. Until next time, Conrad and gee, for Lunch Hour Legal Marketing saying fa,

Conrad Saam:

Well go get another flight.

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