A Tale of Two CRMs… ah, hell. Let’s just vibe code it.

Episode Notes

Transcript

Gyi Tsakalakis:
When I think about tech stack, I’m like, this is the place I start. I’m like, I don’t – But you’re marketing dude,

Conrad Saam:
You’re biased. O course is where you

Gyi Tsakalakis:
Start, right? This is the point though. It’s not just m arketing, right? I’m going to say these things and you’re going to be like marketing, marketing, marketing, because you’re a marketing person too. But what are you doing to stay in touch with folks? What are you doing to understand how people are hiring you? This is table stakes stuff. You have to have this in place.

Announcer:
Welcome to Lunch Hour Legal Marketing, teaching you how to promote, market and make fad stacks for your legal practice. Here on Legal Talk Network.

Conrad Saam:
Welcome to Lunch Hour Legal Marketing. I’m Conrad Saam from Mockingbird, and I am currently wearing a Seahawks jersey that I won in a wager with Ryan McKean after the Seahawks won the Super Bowl last year. I will confess that I’m such a bad NFL fan and terrible Seahawks fan. I had to ask Gy what the bet was on. It was actually on the Super Bowl, which they won last year apparently.

Gyi Tsakalakis:
I mean, that’s classic you.

Conrad Saam:
I’m just not that guy.

Gyi Tsakalakis:
Not that guy, not that Gy. Not

Conrad Saam:
That Gy. Wow.

Gyi Tsakalakis:
I am Gy from AttorneySync and I mispronounced Conrad’s last name in our last episode.

Conrad Saam:
You know what’s so funny? We were talking about this. I still feel like I’ve bungled your last name.

Gyi Tsakalakis:
I mean, my name’s trickier. Your name is pretty straightforward and I can’t believe I feel so ashamed that I said Sam instead of Saam. I mean, it’s like I just met you yesterday or something.

Conrad Saam:
As I tell people who butcher my last name’s pronunciation repeatedly, if that’s the worst thing that happens to me today, I am winning at life.

Gyi Tsakalakis:
Well, my favorite thing, and again, I’m having a very unique name, very gracious and mispronunciations. I really doesn’t bother me at all. However, the one thing that does get me is when people are like, oh, I listened to the podcast and you called me Guy and I literally say my name. So you must be skipping past this part of the banter. Hey Guy,

Conrad Saam:
I love the podcast. It’s

Gyi Tsakalakis:
Not like I actually say my name at the beginning of every episode.

Conrad Saam:
Would you like to name anyone who specifically did that recently?

Gyi Tsakalakis:
No, of course not. I would never want to do that.

Conrad Saam:
Gy is not into the name and shame game. I, however, am a little bit. Yeah.

Gyi Tsakalakis:
Well, we don’t just talk about mispronouncing our names here. We talk about legal marketing and we are still vibing from the amazing Lunch Hour Legal Marketing Summit in Nashville. Conrad, wow.

Conrad Saam:
There are a couple things that came out that I really loved. The content was killer. I believe we have done an amazing. Watching me pat myself on the back, but we gave stage time and presence and authority opportunities to people who get overlooked, who do not see the stage but should, who do not pay for speaking spots, but deserve them. But

Gyi Tsakalakis:
Do all the actual work.

Conrad Saam:
Yeah. So I love that. We also had a crazy sense of community. I did disenfranchise genuinely a couple people who I shot in the face with the T-shirt cannon. Not just shot

Gyi Tsakalakis:
In the face, you literally knocked their beverages over onto them and yet still they gave you the benefit of the doubt.

Conrad Saam:
I think there were some peeve people. Let me put it this way. We didn’t launch any T-shirts on day three for a reason.

Gyi Tsakalakis:
The insurance didn’t cover T-shirt cannons, but what else are we talking about today?

Conrad Saam:
Okay. As always, we have a segment on the news. We are then, one of my favorite things to do, going to answer a question that showed up in the LunchHard Legal Marketing Slack channel. And then we’re going to give some exposure to my good friends over at Internet Brands. They recently came out with their survey called the Law Firm Growth Report. We’re going to go over that and pull out a couple of tidbits while poking a little fun.

Gyi Tsakalakis:
But first, the news. Old habits die hard here on Lunch Our Legal Marketing and Conrad and I are both very old SEO people. And so we would be remiss if we didn’t announce that Google is releasing its August 2026 spam update. I tongue and cheekingly posted that I wonder if this will be the one that works. Conrad, do you think this spam update’s going to be the one that solves the listicle problem?

Conrad Saam:
I hope not because we are going to go out of business if Google can ever actually get their shit together. We’re fucked.

Gyi Tsakalakis:
What else we got, Conrad? What’s the next news item?

Conrad Saam:
ChatGPT. I was just looking at the internet brands report with Glee. ChatGPT ads transparency issue. Talk to me about ChatGPT and their advertising, Gi.

Gyi Tsakalakis:
Yes, I posted about this. I just stumbled across this, but I was on ChatGPT and there was an ad for the Mike Morse Service Organization LLC, which I thought was an interesting way of doing that. But I suppose if ChatGPT requires you to put the actual LLC information in and that’s the name of the LLC that’s managing the media, then perhaps that’s the correct thing. But that’s not even the news story. The news story is that when you click into the About This ad with the ad transparency report, it says sponsored by Isaacs and Isaacs Law Firm with www.wewin.com. Now, Conrad – Whoops. There’s a lot of ways that this might have happened. What is your best guess of what’s going on here?

Conrad Saam:
My best guess, we have not done this, but I do live in fear of doing this, is some poor schmo at an agency that is shared by both of these law firms uploaded the wrong creative into the wrong account, into the right account, and Daryl Isaacs has been unwittingly paying for Mike Morse’s advertisements for some time now. I don’t know that that’s true, but by the way, that scares the crap out of me. It’s not that difficult to make that error, and it would be very difficult to actually catch that error.

Gyi Tsakalakis:
And I wonder if that’s the case, again, this is all very speculative, but if that’s the case, I wonder if they even knew that they were using the same advertising agency. But in any event, now they do, if that’s the case. Other things that it could be is maybe, if you’ve seen this also, we’d love to hear from you, but maybe is ChatGPT using ChatGPT to do ad transparency reporting and it hallucinated? I would love if that’s the case because the whole internet, this would just be another example of it. Or another option could be that it was actually some kind of joint advertising activity, so that these firms came together and firms have done this in the past where they do advertising. They don’t usually reveal that they’re doing a joint advertising thing, but maybe it’s paying out. That’s another possible thing, but I’m skeptical that that’s probably it.
I think you’re probably right with your guess.

Conrad Saam:
Yeah. Some poor Schmo. Gy, are you conflicted in both of those markets? I

Gyi Tsakalakis:
Don’t know off the top of my head. I’d have to look. Oh yes, I am. I actually know that I am. Okay. All right.

Conrad Saam:
Well, don’t call

Gyi Tsakalakis:
Gy now. Are you? Call Conrad.

Conrad Saam:
By the way, that’s not what we meant to do here, but it’s kind of funny, right?

Gyi Tsakalakis:
You did it, not me.

Conrad Saam:
There is the Schaden Freud turned sales approach that is just absolutely revolting. So I take back my question. All right. Reddit, go

Gyi Tsakalakis:
Next. Next news item. Yeah. Reddit’s ChatGPT search citations fell 86% in four days as reported by Search Engine Land. To me, the story. Meh citations. I’m very much like, I said that, I think my reaction to this was you can’t day trade citation sources. Trying to watch citations like what’s up and what’s down every day is a complete waste of your time. I do think that it behooves you to be on the majors, but I wouldn’t put too much stock in the regular fluctuations of leading citation sources on any given day.

Conrad Saam:
But didn’t we tell you that you guys are going to ruin Reddit by spamming the crap out of it?

Gyi Tsakalakis:
Yeah. I mean, this is another story that has been circulating. The Labs, all these AI labs now are buying huge inventories of physical books because they need something before the AI times to train on, and that’s all that’s left because they can’t train on Reddit, they can’t train on the internet in general, they can’t train on YouTube, and so they’re using books. That’s all that we.

Conrad Saam:
Please get your encyclopedia Britannicas over to the good people at Claude. Wow. That’s funny. I mean, that’s quite amazing, right? It is quite

Gyi Tsakalakis:
Amazing.

Conrad Saam:
Okay. And finally, if you want to hang with me, Conrad Sam, and my friend Guy. Gye. We will be in. Where are we going to be? Chloe. Charleston. Charleston. I’m going from Charlotte to Charleston. We’ll be in Charleston, South Carolina Friday the 18th with K Status. Our good friends at Case Status will be recording an episode of your favorite podcast live for their audience.

Gyi Tsakalakis:
And speaking of recordings and podcasts, if you’re watching us on YouTube, please like this episode and subscribe to the Lunchhour Legal Marketing YouTube channel. We’ve been getting more comments there. We love highlighting comments. We love our regular YouTube live fan base. And if you are interested in another episode, check out this last episode where we recorded live from LunchHard Legal Marketing Summit. Let’s take a break.

Conrad Saam:
Hey, Gy, you and I talk all the time about the importance of not having clients who conflict, but this also shows up in the insurance world. We are really excited to have Rio Lane from Alps Insurance talking to us about how small missteps have big consequences. In this example, a conflict takes money out of a client’s bank account.

Rio Laine:
Rachel was a litigation partner in New York handling a high stakes business dispute. Midway through the case, she noticed something that she’d missed at the start. Her firm was also representing a related corporate affiliate on the other side in an unrelated matter. Rachel didn’t raise it with the client. She believed the conflict was waivable, so she just kept going. Well, unfortunately for Rachel, the court disagreed and she ended up being disqualified and ordered to disgorge every dollar of fees that she’d earned. It didn’t matter that the conflict was unintentional. It didn’t matter that no confidential information was misused. And probably worst of all, her malpractice policy didn’t help because fee forfeiture was not covered. The case was gone, the client was gone, and the revenue vanished with them.

Gyi Tsakalakis:
Weird. Working with multiple clients that creates conflicts is a problem. Conflicts aren’t abstract ethics issues. In some cases, they’re immediate financial liabilities with zero insurance backup. Ignoring them is a misstep. Learn how to avoid those at Alpsinsurance.com. And we’re back. And as Conrad mentioned, if you didn’t know, Lunch Legal Marketing has a Slack channel where community members ask questions and share stories, and we have a question from our Lunchar Legal Marketing Slack community, but the questioner would prefer to remain anonymous. So I’m going to read the question and then Conrad is going to – But if you’d like to know who it is, join

Conrad Saam:
The Slack community.

Gyi Tsakalakis:
True. I guess that’s fair. But we’re very curative of who’s in the Slack community, so you have to request. Oh, that’s right. Curated. I think this person just doesn’t want it to be publicly dishonest.

Conrad Saam:
By the way, I’m just going to call this out because I know the question ahead of time. We are not deliberately pandering to one of our favorite sponsors. It just happened this way. I’ll set that table.

Gyi Tsakalakis:
And for John Henson’s benefit, because he terrified all of us at the summit, I am an investor and advisor to Lawmatics, and Lawmatics is a sponsor of Law Jar Legal Marketing. With that said, this was complete. There we go. We got our sponsor trumpet. We did not set this up. This was a genuine question asked in the community. All right, here we go. I’m a Filevine user and I’m at the point where I need good lead management software to help with intake. Lead Docket is the obvious integration for me, but at the same time, Filevine has a poor reputation for customer service as discussed on LinkedIn and in private lawyer Slack groups, which has been validated in my own experience. I think that’s probably the part that he doesn’t want published publicly. Also, Filevine

Conrad Saam:
No longer considering Lunch Legal Marketing in their sponsorship dollars for

Gyi Tsakalakis:
2027. Anyway, look, we’ve got friends at Filevine, but we’re here to report them.This is the news. We’re reporting the news. We’re just reading. This is the news. On the other hand, Lawmatics looks like a very good contender, trumpet, but I’m concerned about investing and building out a third party platform that may not be around in a few years given the rapid change in consolidation in legal tech. I’m also concerned about the inherent limitations in integrating third party apps with Filevine. Is there a clear winner here or should I just bite the bullet and stop overthinking the decision or am I better off claude coding my way to lead management solution? Conrad, give this person some good advice.

Conrad Saam:
I’m going to make two points. Number one, making these changes are very painful. You have to change the way you work. You have to use a new system. There’s QA shit that can go sideways. Do not underestimate the pain of switching systems, which is one of the reasons that these systems command really high multiples because they work on these subscription models and there’s a built-in inherent switching costs of change that is problematic for any business to work with. There is value in Stasis here. I really believe that. I also think there’s value in an ease of integration between Lead Docket and Filevine. That is just a true thing. So I think there’s a really good case to be made for don’t rock the boat and keep it easy. Also, and we’re going to come back to this internet branch survey, you are just now, and I know who this is, you are just now getting to a point where you’re talking about intake management software.
That is too late for you, my friend. I know your firm.
Those of you who do not have intake management software and spend time listening to this podcast, you should be thinking about this question and implementing this in some way within the next six months. If you have enough time to listen to me and Gy waffle on about marketing, you want the data and the functionality that comes out of intake management software, period. It shocks me that so few firms have intake management software, that any firms don’t have intake management software. So that’s kind of a side tangent, but it’s an important tangent. Okay. The next thing you were asking specifically about Lawmatics, and I’m going to use this to talk about why we have our indoor sponsorship model. I can do this because I’m not the investor in Lawmatics, but Matt Spiegel has created a great product that integrates extremely easily with many other things. I would say that Matt, I don’t know that I’m right about this example, but I think I am.
Matt was the first intake management software that integrated lead scoring into what they do. I’m probably wrong about that, but I believe that to be the case because his was the first that I saw and it was awesome. I think they are extremely responsive. I think they are ahead of the competition from a visual perspective. It is a great outstanding product, and I’m not just saying that because Matt stuff’s dollar bills in my pocket.
And

Rio Laine:
So

Conrad Saam:
It’s a great option to consider. Your third option is let’s vibe code this stuff, man. And I will tell you that. Given I made this point three episodes ago, more and more and more of you are building these things by yourselves in-house. Now, I would be cautious about two things. Number one, I would be terrified about privacy concerns with building your own stuff. I think you need to start with a really solid AI policy and assume that it is not sufficient and that AI is not following its own rules. So I would be a little bit terrified about that, but more and more people, I’m seeing this inside law firms are fussing around building their own things. We have a bunch of clients, in fact, we’ll put in the show notes the episode where we talked about this, but a bunch of clients, I know these people who are working on building their own mousetrap.
What I think your worst decision is, and I’m sorry for waffling on, I think your worst decision is to go from what you currently have to Lawmatics and then change that within a two-year period because you want to vibe code your own stuff. I would either sit where you are or make the jump now. It is painful to make these changes. What do you think, E?

Gyi Tsakalakis:
At the risk of, I just want to reiterate my biases here with the dog in the fight with Lawmatics. And look, straight up, I think for, again, knowing who this lawyer is and knowing their firm, you probably aren’t going to go terribly wrong with either choice, except for maybe the vibe coding one I think is you’re probably going to go wrong with that, but that’s just my two cents and I don’t know anything about your desire to maintain a product.

Conrad Saam:
Can I ask you a question? You said either choice. The third choice as that old. I’m blanking on the name. If you choose not to decide, you’ve still made a choice. We already used this Lyric, and I can’t remember who it’s from, but do you think the bad choice is to do nothing?

Gyi Tsakalakis:
Yes.

Conrad Saam:
Okay.

Gyi Tsakalakis:
When I think about Tech Stack, I’m like, this is the place I start. I’m like, I don’t – But you’re a

Conrad Saam:
Marketing

Gyi Tsakalakis:
Dude,

Conrad Saam:
You’re biased. O course is where you start,

Gyi Tsakalakis:
Right? This is the point though. It’s not just marketing, right? I’m going to say these things and you’re going to be like marketing, marketing, marketing because you’re a marketing person too, but what are you doing to stay in touch with folks? What are you doing to understand how people are hiring you? This is table stakes stuff. You have to have this in place. And by the way, there’s another choice here. There’s a million other intake management/CRM options out there that are both in legal and not in legal. But in any event, here’s my answer, my very biased answer is, and I’m just going to pose this. This the question I would be asking is get a sense of vision for the platform moving forward. Is the platform moving in the direction of integrations and open ecosystem of different software working together, or is the platform closing up, yanking API access or charging more for API access, cutting off integrations?
And I don’t know the answer to either of those things, but those are the types of questions that I’d be asking in this context. Yes, you do. Because I do think that that’s one place where I think Matt is a leader on that vision for his product.

Conrad Saam:
That’s why I said yes, you do. I think

Gyi Tsakalakis:
One of the things – I know Matt’s vision.

Conrad Saam:
You know half of the vision there, right? You half his equation. I know half of it. I know half the equation. And I think that is a macro concept that I think a lot of people are missing out, especially when you’re sitting in on sales pitches and demoing these products that work seamlessly with each other. What does it look like with all of the other systems that you want to integrate with? And I think
That’s certainly where Matt’s mindset was. And we can throw this out to Clio. I mean, that was one of the major differentiators for Clio was they went out of their way. They literally push and promote people who make clean integrations with Clio. And so that is the future. The closed gardens are problematic and concerning, and you will end up in. That’s when you end up in a situation where I would be concerned about the future of the business when something that is running all of your law firm runs out of funding and it’s not integrated with anything. Now you have a really big problem. That’s where your systemic concern lies.

Gyi Tsakalakis:
The thing I pick up from that, because we’re going to talk about Interrep Brands here in a second, and so we’d be remiss if we didn’t acknowledge Internet Brands purchased many of the flagship legal domains, Avo, Martindale Lawyers.com. And so the relevance here is that the transactions, the economics and the transactions and the funding and all this kind of stuff, which I think is the question or is also considering based on the way the question’s posed and talking about legal tech consolidation, totally valid. And those are the things that I think I’m more concerned about even than a feature-by-feature comparison or this integrates better with that is macro viewpoint. And it’s funny because I think the implication here was that maybe Filevine had a leg up in that context, but I would just be careful with that because again, it’s the direction that companies are going in consolidation world that is going to impact ultimately things like price, things about future innovation.
And so I think those are good questions to be asking your legal technology vendors. So I don’t know. We didn’t give a great answer there. I mean, I think big picture for me, I’m probably. If you really twisted my arm, again, we just. Do I need to say it again? I have a dog in this fight, but I think I’m fairly confident that vibe coding, it’s not an apples to apples comparison with either of those, right? It’s like you might be able to get by with some basic functionality over time, sophistication, tracking, reporting, security, compliance. I don’t know.

Conrad Saam:
This is going to happen though. It might not be happening right now, but there’s going to be that role in-house underneath an operations lead of putting all this stuff together. And we talked about this before, you’re going to have the software built around the way the law firms work instead of the law firms learning how the software works and working that way. And that is increasingly coming.

Rio Laine:
Yep.

Conrad Saam:
All right, everyone, if you liked our answer to this question and you would like us to answer your questions, Riverside has this amazing functionality. Find the Riverside link in the show notes and ask us a question. We will do our best to answer it during our next episode.

Gyi Tsakalakis:
Let’s take a break.

Conrad Saam:
And welcome back. I am going to take a trip down memory lane and talk about the thing, the brand that got me into digital marketing world. One Avo, acquired by Internet Brands. Thank you very much, Internet Brands for acquiring my employer. They put out their 2026 Law Firm Growth Report. One of the interesting things that I haven’t seen is the list of all the legal brands that they own on this. So I’m going to read these out because it’s significant. Martindale, Avo, Super Lawyers, Captora, Avogado.com, Lawyers.com, Nolo Fine Law, Engage Live Chat with whom I have Huge Beef, and Law Info. So you’re

Gyi Tsakalakis:
Talking about – Wait, you don’t have Huge Beef in a lot of those other logos?

Conrad Saam:
Not to the extent that I. Well, the bigger issue, yes, because

Gyi Tsakalakis:
My association – Didn’t you write the Fine Law Jailbreak Guide? Isn’t that what you’re famous for in

Conrad Saam:
The Gary V. That’s what I’m famous for. Keep working harder.

Gyi Tsakalakis:
You’re

Conrad Saam:
The

Gyi Tsakalakis:
Gary V of the Fine Law Jailbreak Guide.

Conrad Saam:
So I may have written. This was a long time ago I wrote about how to leave Fine Law. I remember hitting publish on that PDF and watching all of my traffic coming from, I think it’s Eagan, Minnesota where Fine Law is based, just kind of blew up. But everything I put in there was accurate. So anyway, they came out with their 2026 Law Firm Growth Report. We like to cite studies. We like doing market research. You heard us talk ad nauseum about our good friends at Near Media. So I’m going to pull two things, two main themes out of this. Number one, we’re going to poke a little bit of fun at some of the results in here because it gives us an idea as to who was actually answering these surveys. But there are some really fascinating kind of data points on this. But Gy, the respondents here, 400 respondents, 93% of whom were lawyers, others, the rest were in-house marketing people, and this was for firms with less than 20 attorneys.
They talked about, and we talk a lot about what is your budget for marketing services, and of the 403 people that they surveyed, not a single one of those firms spent more than $100,000 a month on marketing, and over 80% of them spent less than $10,000.

Gyi Tsakalakis:
Having said

Conrad Saam:
That – But

Gyi Tsakalakis:
Only 84% of them are actually pursuing growth.

Conrad Saam:
No, 60% of firms are pursuing moderate to significant growth. I don’t know how that works. So we talked about this the other day, how much are people putting into their marketing? If you are pursuing moderate to significant growth with a four-figure marketing budget, you’re not going to get there. I hate to say this.

Gyi Tsakalakis:
I’m looking at page three and it reminds me when we founded the agency that I’m a principal and outside of legal, we used to laugh because everybody we talked to, their goal was more leads for less, more leads for less. And so we joke that should be the tagline, more leads for less. And if you look at this on page three, number one goal, generate more qualified client opportunities while improving marketing efficiency, which essentially more leads for less. And look, I know we’re going to focus on findings from this report, but how many times we got to talk about the difference between incremental market share and marketing efficiency are sometimes at odds with each other?

Conrad Saam:
They’re a hundred percent at odds with each other. As I’ve said many times, you want to maximize your ROI, go cancel your marketing and make everything on referrals. We talk about this all the time.But still, that’s the number one goal. And he will point out the cost of referrals. Yeah. So I think this survey, the sample size, and the next data point is this. Of those people spending money, 41% of them spend money on, guess what? Directories, right? So I think this is probably a microcosm of the customer of overall internet brands. They’ve asked a bunch of directory advertisers where they spend their money, and amazingly, the directories are one of those things. In fact, they double up. Only 41% are spending on directories, only 19% are spending on paid search. The other things that come out here, referrals at 55%, SEO at 53, paid social is in here, some are spending money on traditional advertising as well.

Gyi Tsakalakis:
Well, and just the other thing here is you might have called this out, so if you did, I apologize. No, you’re

Conrad Saam:
Good.

Gyi Tsakalakis:
Over half of the firms are spending $2,500 or less per month on marketing.

Rio Laine:
Yeah.

Gyi Tsakalakis:
And if you take that up to $5,000 a month, you’re up to what, 70 some percent? 70 some percent are spending less than $5,000 a month all in marketing monthly.

Conrad Saam:
So if your primary marketing efforts are spent through internet brands, you are not really serious about growth, let’s be honest. Okay? I hate to say that. But having said Wow.

Gyi Tsakalakis:
Why do you say that? Why do you say that?

Conrad Saam:
Because there’s a correlation between the survey users and really minuscule marketing budgets and their objective to grow significantly. Those things just don’t work. Let me put this differently. The population of people who listen to Launch Legal Marketing probably are feeling the same way that we do right now.This is not the way to grow a firm. You just can’t. But I do want to pull out, instead of us just being mean to internet brands, which I enjoy doing for the fun of it, I do want to pull out some of the interesting stats in here. 72% of firms are investing in more than one channel. We’ve talked about this a lot, so I’m surprised that it’s only 72%, but this omnichannel, multichannel thing is very obvious. The other thing that really deserved a bigger font in the report, and I think this is something that we should talk about.
Separate research conductor across our legal network found that 86% of AI search results for legal services cite or reference our legal directory network.
That I think is very, very important for us to highlight. We’ve talked about this quite a lot, but 86%, and I don’t know what type of searches they’re actually looking for, 86% of AI searches. And I will say anecdotally, I’ve seen this. When you think about those directories, we talk about super lawyers a lot. We talk about Avo a lot. I don’t know that the other ones hit as hard as those two, but 86% of the time AI search results are actually showing up. They have a report called Why Law Firms in Legal Directories Dominate in Google and AI Search 2026. So this came out. I do think that you’ve talked about adjusting our efforts, where we focus. I spend more time of our work on directories now than we have in a very, very long time. I think that’s not surprising, right?

Gyi Tsakalakis:
Yeah, I think that’s not surprising. I don’t know. Just looking at this in some ways, another data point from this research, 38% of those firms are not using any of the following.

Conrad Saam:
Well, that was

Gyi Tsakalakis:
One of the things.

Conrad Saam:
Yeah. Go.

Gyi Tsakalakis:
CRM systems, call tracking, marketing, automation, analytics tools, intake technology. I don’t know. Maybe this is kind of what you’re saying too, because look, if you listen to the show, this is like table stake stuff and you’re almost 40% of people aren’t doing it. But then as a pushback, one of the members of our community is making a decision about their first intake software. So it validates this point that there is still a big gap. The report is positioning this as tech’s a competitive advantage, which that’s a short term thing. I don’t even know, it might even be true today, especially amongst anybody that’s sophisticated at all. All of the firms that are in competitive spaces are realizing that technology is going to be ubiquitous. I mean, maybe the type of technology is a thing to talk about because it’s the same pattern that we heard 15 years ago about cloud computing.
It’s probably the same thing they were talking about in the ’80s with maybe Blackberries or something. I don’t know. But the point is that to me, this is not a competitive advantage. It’s a table stakes composition.

Conrad Saam:
It’s a competitive

Gyi Tsakalakis:
Disadvantage,

Conrad Saam:
To be honest.

Gyi Tsakalakis:
Yeah. And again, look, the research is the research. 40% aren’t using any of those things.

Conrad Saam:
Well, I mean, it’s interesting. You asked me three episodes. I just listened to a few of them. You asked me three episodes ago, how many law firms don’t have intake management software? I remember that conversation, right? And I was like, they all do. But that’s my goldfish ball of the people that I associate with. Set to say, if you’re not running. So CRM, obvious. Call tracking through CallRail, obvious. Marketing automation, easy enough to do with Allawmatics. And that’s why that question came up earlier and that’s why Gy answered it the way that he did. Analytical tools or intake technology, guys, I don’t know what to say. Send them the links. That is a hole in your IT stack. If you are a growth oriented firm and you’re not running with maybe, maybe, maybe the exception of marketing automation, maybe that exception, the rest is just foundational.

Gyi Tsakalakis:
Here’s something I love because everybody’s selling visibility of course. So growth today requires confidence. Confidence that your firm is visible where prospective clients are searching. Confidence that your marketing investments can be measured, optimized and connected to business outcomes. Now hold on a second. Show me, is this implying that signing up for these directories is doing those things?

Conrad Saam:
I mean, I think it is a little bit and I don’t think that’s an

Gyi Tsakalakis:
Unfair – Okay, Conrad, tell me how you’re connecting business outcomes to AI visibility, please.

Conrad Saam:
Well, hold on. So go to the beginning of that sentence. They were talking about that you show up across a lot of different places. What was the first part of the sentence?

Gyi Tsakalakis:
Confidence that your firm is visible where prospective clients are searching.

Conrad Saam:
Okay. So what does that mean? I’m going to go back to this other concept that we talked about. So they talked about the ubiquity of directories. That’s clearly what they’re trying to make the case for here, where your business are being searched. Oh, and also, by the way, when you do those searches, 89% of the time or whatever it was, our directories show up. I think that’s a fair statement to make. The other thing that they say, and I pulled this off of page 12, we’ve brought this up in different words, but I think it’s a very real thing. Authority is no longer built through a single website. It is built across a trusted network of consistent digital signals.

Gyi Tsakalakis:
That’s always been the case, man.

Conrad Saam:
We talked about this is another way of looking at the abandonment of the hub and spoke model of the website as the center and being omnipresent across a variety of different places. I think that is a shift in the way AI functions systemically and displays itself to users. It’s not all about the website. Now, tying it to business objectives, blah, blah, blah, good luck on that one guys. And they even used the word ROI. In fact, I think they had. There’s a survey on ROI, right? Tying this stuff to business objectives, I’m not so sure about that guys.

Gyi Tsakalakis:
Yeah. I don’t know if this is what you’re driving at, but how confident are you in your ability to measure ROI across all of your marketing channels? 38% not at all confident.

Conrad Saam:
It should be 100%.

Gyi Tsakalakis:
Well, maybe that’s where I disagree with you. I think that the ways that people are thinking about attribution in general, the ways that people are thinking about visibility tracking, it’s not surprising at all. You couple that with all the problems with just the cross-platform data issues, the most obvious example, GBP tracking numbers and phone are in the UTM parameters showing up in ChatGPT. I think that we’re running into, for those kind of journeys, those kind of consumer journeys, which this is the main point is that, and we talked about this ad nauseum, but the reason that they’re not confident at all is because it’s the same story. They’re getting the up into the right charts, whatever that is, if it’s paid search charts or SEO charts or whatever charts they’re getting, and they’re not equating it to qualified consultations, open case files, if they’re tracking lifetime value of clients, revenue, whatever those business outcomes are, that’s the issue.
And that is not going to fix, it’s not going to change until you change mindset about, one, obviously having a technology infrastructure can actually do the measurement, but two, abandoning this idea of last click is the source of truth in my opinion.

Conrad Saam:
No, but that’s why I say it should be 100% who are not at all confident. I am –

Gyi Tsakalakis:
Oh, I misunderstood you. I see. I’m sorry. I

Conrad Saam:
Totally

Gyi Tsakalakis:
Misunderstood you. If you are very

Conrad Saam:
Confident that you can measure ROI, you are a moron.

Gyi Tsakalakis:
Got you. Now thank. Okay. I totally misheard you. My

Conrad Saam:
Apologies. No, no. We’re on the same page. I do this for a living. You do this for a living. My confidence, even assuming that you guys had the infrastructure to tie that click down to the revenue at the end of the day, that click is probably last click. It’s probably part of the story. And so to me, we are now in a world and we will stay in this world, I believe, that we will be somewhere between slightly confident and not confident at all across the board. 100%. It’s like the same people who are like, “I know we’re answering all of our phone calls because we have a third party answering service.” The only thing that tells me is that you’ve never listened to your inbound phone calls.

Gyi Tsakalakis:
We’ve reverse engineered ChatGPT. All right. We’re running out of time here, but I wanted to run these a quick rapid fire at you. I think this is positive. So this is the what high growth firms do differently. They have a quick checklist and I want to just get your yay or nay on that.

Conrad Saam:
Okay.

Gyi Tsakalakis:
Build authority across trusted legal platforms. Yay or nay?

Conrad Saam:
Yay. Directories

Gyi Tsakalakis:
Also

Conrad Saam:
Included. I’ll give them that. Go.

Gyi Tsakalakis:
With you. Focus on lead quality over lead volume.

Conrad Saam:
Nay. The best

Gyi Tsakalakis:
Way

Conrad Saam:
To find a lot of lead quality is to kiss a lot of frogs.

Gyi Tsakalakis:
Same. So

Conrad Saam:
Load up your intake staff and find the good ones.

Gyi Tsakalakis:
Yes. Respond quickly to new inquiries.

Conrad Saam:
Heard from both Angel Reyes and someone else at the Lunch Our Legal Marketing Summit. That is key to winning the game. Yay.

Gyi Tsakalakis:
Follow. Yes, 100%. And I can’t remember who gets credit for this, but I heard this quip. So if you’re listening to this and you said this, we will make sure you get attribution. Not speed to lead, speed to value. Yeah, I like that.

Conrad Saam:
That sounds like a Bill Biggs quip.

Gyi Tsakalakis:
Follow a structured intake process.

Conrad Saam:
I’m going to say nay on this. Okay.

Gyi Tsakalakis:
Okay.

Conrad Saam:
Structure to me suggests inflexible. And I think where we are at this point in time is, we talked about this at the summit among other places, the ability to identify that we need to treat this person differently. The ability for a intake person to have genuine empathy and figure out how to manage that person directly. The ability to recognize that, hey, you know what? This matter is so deep and meaningful and my prospective client is so scarred that the aggressive follow-up is a mess. It’s not going to work. And so the really good intake people may have guidelines, but it is ultimately a very flexible beast.

Gyi Tsakalakis:
I’m going to interpret it slightly differently and I’m going to say yay, but in the context of you want to be asking consistent questions so that things like, how did you hear about us? You can actually collect that data, but I agree with everything that you said from your interpretation. All right. Persist through multiple follow-ups.

Rio Laine:
Yay.

Gyi Tsakalakis:
Yay. I mean, that was their thing at the summit. When you listen to people who are doing advertising and intake at scale, they’re not just waiting around for the person to call back. I mean, I don’t remember what the number was, but heavy follow-up. That’s

Conrad Saam:
Right. There was someone who did 900 follow-ups before they give up, I think.

Gyi Tsakalakis:
Amazing. Love it. Guess what? I’d like to see your conversion rate. Their conversion rate’s higher too than those other people, by the way.

Conrad Saam:
So that’s the key. Persistent through multiple follow-ups. I would like to see above that, sign people early. I hate to say always be closing, but that is part of the game.

Gyi Tsakalakis:
Tim Semelroth brought that up at the summit and we should do a segment on the trade-offs on the sign turn down concept. I would love to do that. Measure consultations, retain clients, revenue and marketing ROI. They almost had you except that last little acronym. One at a time, measure consultations.

Conrad Saam:
Yes. Clients. The cost per consultation is a really good metric. Retain clients. Yes. Good. Revenue. Revenue.

Gyi Tsakalakis:
Trickier, longer term. Trickier. Marketing LROI. We already know how you feel.

Conrad Saam:
But as you sit here in your little seat listening to the podcast on your awful commute –

Gyi Tsakalakis:
I’m in a huge seat.

Conrad Saam:
Do you know? I’m not talking to you. I’m talking to our listeners.

Gyi Tsakalakis:
Listeners. They’re all in big seats. Do you

Conrad Saam:
Know how to calculate ROI? You don’t. You don’t. You don’t know

Gyi Tsakalakis:
What the formula

Conrad Saam:
Is. I would love to give away $100

Gyi Tsakalakis:
Bill on the next

Conrad Saam:
Marketing Summit for everyone who can tell me the actual calculation for ROI.

Gyi Tsakalakis:
Go on LinkedIn. For the hardcore fans, go on LinkedIn and post the formula for ROI on your LinkedIn feed and tag La Char Legal Marketing and maybe we’ll give you a prize. We’ll

Conrad Saam:
Send you a shirt. The

Gyi Tsakalakis:
First

Conrad Saam:
Person to

Gyi Tsakalakis:
Do

Conrad Saam:
That, we will send a La Charter Legal Marketing shirt. There you go. Tag

Gyi Tsakalakis:
Us. There you go. All right. Last one and then we’re out. Invest in connected systems that unify visibility, intake, attribution and reporting.

Conrad Saam:
I’m going to say nay for a very nuanced knit.

Gyi Tsakalakis:
Great. That’s what we’re here for.

Conrad Saam:
I would say the invest is the verb here, which is the problem. Connected is the adjective, which suggests the entire system is already connected. Don’t like that. What I want is to kill the invest as the verb. I want the verb to be connect. Connect systems that unify visibility intake attribution and reporting because I don’t want you tied to an individual vendor to make that happen, their own closed system. So the ones that really do it, connect those systems regardless of what they are.

Gyi Tsakalakis:
I’ll go with you on that one. And with that, dear listeners, thank you so much for listening to this episode. Thank you to the entire community that participated in the summit. We look forward to seeing you at the next summit. If you weren’t able to make it, we hope to see you there. And if all of this is new to you, please do subscribe to Lunch Hour Legal Marketing on all of your favorite podcasting places. Until next time, Conrad and Gy saying Farewell.

 

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