Seat At The Table: How To Establish My Firm’s Brand (Series Premiere)

Episode Notes

Transcript

Christopher T. Anderson:

All right. Today’s topic, we’re going to talk about folks, we’re going to talk about branding, and it’s a great time to be having that conversation. This time of year is when some people decide to hang a shingle. Some for the first time is their first job. Some have come out of a bigger law practice or splitting from another small practice or whatever, but they’re hanging that shingle, they’re opening an office or doing it virtually. They may have an employee or two and they come and they ask about what should I be doing about branding? And their experience with branding is Coca-Cola and polar bears is Miller Light commercials. We’re all exposed to brands all the time. And so when you’re going to start a business, obviously it seems obvious that that’s something that you should do.

Announcer:

Unbillable Hour Seat at the Table, a monthly round table discussion between industry professionals about topics most relevant to law firm owners today.

Christopher T. Anderson:

So greetings everybody. Yeah, this is Christopher Anderson, host of The Unbillable Hour. Also just lawyer and just overall a guy who likes to talk about the business of law. We are here to help and we’re going to be having conversations just like in the unbillable hour about how to really give you the information you need to move your business forward. And so if that’s what you’re here for, if you’re here for the numbers and you’re here for the vision and you’re here for how to turn that vision into reality, this is the room. We’re going to be with you every month talking about a different topic that we’re just going to deep dive on with a group of experts that really can help you bring that topic into the practicality of how it works on the ground in law firms. Really, really excited to introduce our guests today.

I’m just going to rattle off everybody’s names and then we’ll talk to them one at a time. Kristen David is joining us from UpLevel Your Business. Erik Alicia and Elliot Alicea. They are the founders and owners of Empirical 360, a marketing firm that helps law firms not just improve their marketing, but improve their client acquisition overall and improve their business to support it. And then Rob Lightner is a world renowned law firm coach, also serves as the chief of staff for the new Leaf family of law firm brands. And we’re just excited to have these folks here who have combined just so many years and such depth of experience in helping law firm owners to achieve the goals that they set out to achieve when they decided to own a law firm and sometimes struggle to meet that goal. So everybody, welcome. Let’s start with Kristen.

Kristen, will you just give a little bit longer your background and why people should be listening to you?

Kristen David:

Absolutely. So my name’s Kristen David. I’m CEO and founder of UpLeveling Your Business. And after 15 years of being a trial attorney, I built up a multimillion dollar business and finally learned how to step up as a CEO and get out of the trenches. And today I’m passionate about helping other lawyers and professionals get out of the trenches because it is so much more fun on the other side. Less fun to spend 85 plus hours a week being the doer day after day. I’m excited to be here and be talking about some great topics.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Excellent. Elliot, how about you?

Elliot Alicea:

My name’s Elliot. I’m the co-founder of Epiracal 360 with my brother there, Erik. And so we help family law firms grow through digital marketing and sales coaching. And I would say the thing that I love the most about doing what we do is watching people’s lives change through sales and marketing. And I think that it has an icky connotation when we say sales in the legal world, but the reality is it is one of the biggest levers we’re seeing right now in firms. And so for me, watching a firm struggle and sometimes be in the red and maybe a year later, watching them thrive and have a completely different life is just really amazing to witness.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Erik, how about you?

Erik Alicea:

I am Erik Alicea also, co-founder of Empirical 360. We’re a marketing and growth agency for family law firms. And like Elliot said, we help them with not only client acquisition, but also their intake and sales systems. What I’m passionate about, similar to Eliot, just because we talk about this stuff all day is I do love changing people’s lives, especially through sales and marketing, but I like the unsexy side of sales and marketing. So taking all their marketing or sales problems, breaking it down in a spreadsheet or a small pipeline, identifying where the biggest bottleneck is and solving it. That’s what gets me up in the morning pretty much.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Great. And Rob, please introduce yourself to the folks.

Rob Leitner:

Sure. Hey, everyone. I’m Rob Leitner. I serve as chief of staff for New Leaf Family, and I mainly focus on profit and success and systems and a little bit of operations in order to help the firm succeed. I’m truly passionate about helping firms succeed and grow. And I enjoy supporting the legal team, helping everyone pursue their shared mission and their shared vision in this great industry. And I’m happy to be here. Thank you.

Christopher T. Anderson:

All right. Let’s segment and segregate the conversation a little bit. So we’re going to start the conversation with this startup idea. And then before we’re done today, I’d also like to talk about people who are like, should I rebrand or should I refresh my brand or should I spend some more money on branding? But let’s start the conversation with startups, with firms that are just getting underway. Erik or Elliot, let me let you guys take the first crack because you meet a lot of these firms in the world and they’re talking about getting their marketing going and they probably bring in that conversation to branding. What do you tell them and why?

Elliot Alicea:

I view this as like when you’re starting, there’s like a peacetime leader and a wartime leader. And when you’re starting, I feel like it’s going to be a little more war time. You got to survive pretty much. And in my mind, when you’re first starting, A, you don’t really know who you are yet, unless you’ve really thought about it or you’ve had a very life-changing experience that got you into this. And then I think you could be a little more clearly defined. But when you first start, if you don’t have a war chest or a nest egg, you’re probably concerned with making money. And so for me, if I’m advising a firm, if they’re just starting out, it’s more so how do we get flow coming in and then we can worry a little bit more once we see who we like to work with, the types of clients that we resonate with, and then be able to define it a little bit more down the road.

But to me, in the beginning stages, it’s let’s create flow, let’s create some cash flow. And then we get the luxury of starting to think about our brand because at that point we’ve taken care of the necessary like base level hierarchy of needs. So again, might be a little contradictory, but that’s my stance on it.

Christopher T. Anderson:

But so let me understand it. So what you’re basically saying is you don’t know who you are yet. Your main goal should be getting the business that you need to keep the doors open for the first few months. Maybe you shouldn’t be worrying so much about branding.

Elliot Alicea:

Well, I reflect on like when we start our business too, we have a joke in our company of core values, 5.72 section nine, because we’ve reiterated on our core values many times. They’ve been relatively the same for the most part for years, but they solidified after having a larger team and having to fire people. And that’s like not the brand itself. But I think in the beginning, you don’t really know who you are yet and who you like to work with. And when you’re creating a brand, you want to probably start with the end in mind of, okay, well, what do I want to have happen? And then how do I reverse engineer that and then create the brand? But in the beginning, you have no data set to say, I like this client or I like that client or I stand for this, right?

Unless of course you start the firm because of some sort of

Passion of like, “I went through a divorce and I’m here to save everybody that went through this situation.” Then I think you have a little bit more clearly defined brand or at least a mission of sorts. But in the beginning stages, if you’re just like, “Hey, I want to start a law firm.” I’ve seen people start a PI firm and then all of a sudden they’re doing family law and then all of a sudden they’re doing estate planning. And so they don’t know yet what they want to do. And so if you spend a bunch of money on branding and then all of a sudden you’re doing estate planning two months later, it’s like, “Well, we wasted all this money and time and energy when we could have been figuring out what do we want to do. ” So that’s kind of where it comes from.

Christopher T. Anderson:

That makes a lot of sense. Kristen, you seem to resonate with some of that. What were your thoughts?

Kristen David:

Well, we have seen it a lot where people think they want to do one thing, but after they get in, they find they really don’t enjoy working with that type of client or the longevity of that case. They might want quicker cases that move faster. I always tell people, your brand should be somewhat of an extension of your personality and who you are. Although if you’re building this business to be a business on its own, it shouldn’t be entirely upon you. But if you hate doing certain things, don’t try to attract those clients or that work.That’s not going to be much fun for you. I think the one part I would add to that is that I often tell people when they’re just getting started, one of the first things to do is start a brand guide, go into Canva, go in somewhere, it’s going to change, but pick a couple colors that you like.

You can refine those colors, but you want to be able to drop that document into AI and say, “Make me some social media posts.” And so that brand guide needs to kind of say who you are, what kind of colors are you looking at, what kind of clients are you trying to attract? There’s nothing worse than wanting to be real techie and then doing a bunch of, or saying you’re techie and putting a bunch out there, and then you’re still in the dark ages in your office. And people are like, “No, I just want to upload my documents or I want a portal.” And they’re like, “I don’t have a portal.” So you got to be a little bit congruent and in alignment with what you’re saying and what you’re doing. But I agree, you don’t have to perfect it all at day one. Just get started, pick some colors, do something.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Yeah. Yeah. Erik, you said you like to look at the less sexy side of things. I do. So talk about this in a less sexy way.

Erik Alicea:

I actually love what Kristen said too about just starting a brand guide because people always want to hire this guru of branding. It’s going to tell them everything at the beginning of their business. And I haven’t seen one of those. I haven’t met one of those gurus yet. But when I think about brand, there’s actually two definitions of brand that I enjoy the most, which I think can really help startups. So the first, Steve Jobs, I know Rob Liner is a huge Apple product fan, but Steve Jobs, he defines brand as simply trust. So if you’ve ever purchased a MacBook or an iPhone, they ensure that every single time you open the box when you buy a new computer or a new device, the device turns on instantly without having to be charged. And that’s the first step in building trust with you. And they have a bunch of steps that they manufacture after that, that everything works.

And so with our business, it’s actually a metric that we track weekly. Simply keeping your promises, like doing the things you say you’re going to do will build your brand in the beginning. So if you tell someone you’re going to help them with their case and they’re going to call you tomorrow, answer the phone tomorrow, answer the phone, do the case for them, deliver an excellent service, do all the things you’re going to say you’re going to do and you can build your brand organically. So that’s like the first thing is, are you doing the things you say you’re going to do? If Amazon said they’re going to send the package to us today, does it arrive today? And that’ll build trust. If Uber said, if you’re going to get this by 1150, does it arrive by 1150? And that’s why I think a lot of the largest brands have built their brands is by those constant iterations of trust.

The other definition that I’ve heard, which is like the longer term play like Eliot heard is brand. It’s almost like an association. So if somebody wears Lululemon, they’re associated with like the athleisure crowd. If somebody has a Rolex, they’re associated with like a luxury crowd. And that is the thing that I think you could build over time because in the beginning, I don’t know if you know who you want to be associated with. You may think you want to only work with high net worth clients. Some of those clients come in, you hate them. And so those are the two definitions of brand that have been the most useful to me. And for our business, the first one, trust is what we really measure because I think in the beginning that’s really important.

Christopher T. Anderson:

So the two for you are trust and …

Erik Alicea:

The associations people have

Christopher T. Anderson:

About you. Associations. Got it. I think there’s a theme here, but before I enunciate the theme, Rob, you’re like the most rubber meets the road guy on this. You’ve worked with firms, you’ve helped them build brands. What’s been your experience? And again, this concept of the keyhole we’re looking at this through right now is startup. So what are your thoughts? What’s your experience been?

Rob Leitner:

Yeah. I mean, branding is critical for the startup. I look at it in two aspects, the holistic aspect and the practical. From the holistic point of view, I always recommend to differentiate. Don’t be genErik. Don’t give the same genErik bullshit. You don’t have to manufacture this. This can be authentic. I encourage small business owners, small law firm owners to think about why they’re here, why they’re doing this. Is it their passion? Is it an event that spurred the rest of their life? Is it a cause? Maybe it’s just in their DNA. Why are they here? And use that as the foundation. Keep in mind that your brand is also the foundation for the firm’s culture. Everything starts with that. So it has to be something you believe in, something people can connect with. And if you want to flip the script, also put yourself in the shoes of a PNC, a potential new client.

It’s about the clients. How will they see your brand and how will they receive the message and will they connect with it? Are they in your sandbox? So that’s half of it. The other half is certainly the practical aspect. Lining up your brand versus reality. So whatever you want your brand to be, you come to that decision. Do a little test. See if the domain names are available. Do a little pay-per-click search, see how expensive it’ll be for you to market, look at the competition. Maybe you want to purchase a vanity phone number. Just do some research, canvas some of the marketing channels out there. Try not to fight the tide when you’re first starting out. You won’t have the people power or the budget. Those would be my preliminary considerations for a startup.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Excellent. And I think that really helps to bring it into practicality. So the theme I’m hearing, and quite honestly, I think, Kristen, I think you kind of nailed it. Just like pick a collar, go with it, right? But don’t buy a thousand mugs in that color. Don’t buy a hundred t-shirts to give out. You’re not committing to it. And Elliot and Erik, I mean, I think you came at it from a really great way as well, just the understanding. And Erik, one more time, give me your two criteria, the two aspects of it.

Erik Alicea:

Brand is trust from student

Christopher T. Anderson:

Dogs.

Erik Alicea:

And then brands are the association or brand are the set of associations people have with

Christopher T. Anderson:

You your

Erik Alicea:

Business.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Right. So trust, that is hopefully one you never let go. Trust is one that delivering … And so I like to distinguish when I talk about that first one of trust, the difference between brand and brand promise, because people like to talk because it’s easier, quite honestly, to talk about my brand. I’m going to use this font and these are my colors and our mascot is teddy bear, who knows what it is. I’m sorry, the SunnySide brand and the newly family brands have a sunshine that kind of is on everything that we do. People like to think about that and they forget about the brand promise because at the end of the day, it’s kind of like your word is your bond. The brand promise is the first aspect of your brand because if you sell that, no amount of graphic artistry is going to get you out of it.

And trust doesn’t have to be like, you can trust me with all of your future. You can trust me with all your money. You can trust me with your problems. Trust is just about you can trust that I’ll do what I say I’m going to do. That this business will deliver on what we say we’re going to deliver. And it doesn’t have to be big things. In fact, it shouldn’t be big things. And one of the things that I like to talk to folks about is to start keeping promises as early in your interaction with people as possible, right? If you say you’re going to drop a podcast on Wednesday at three o’clock, it goes out before three o’clock on Wednesday. If you say that you’ll get a call back by tomorrow morning, you make sure they get a call back by earlier than that.

Whatever you tell people the business is going to do for them, you make sure that it at least delivers and better than that over delivers. And to me, so the brand promise is sort of the same as what Erik is talking about as trust. And then I think to what Rob said, what Elliot said, what Kristen said, Erik, your part about association is both true and really difficult because the truth truth is when you’re in startup mode, you don’t know.

Kristen David:

Yep.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Kristen, you’re laughing because you just know, like you said, you may say, “I want to do high net worth this or I want to work with these kind of clients.” And then you find out you hate them. It happens all the time. I mean, Elliot, I think you were talking about the people who start as a PDI firm and then end up in family law or vice versa because they thought they liked it, but they don’t. Michael Gerber in the eMyth Revisited talks about the technician with most business owners, most business owners come to their business first as a technician because they liked doing the thing that they’re going to build their business on. And his was baking pies, I believe. It’s been a while since I read the book. And for law firms, it’s lawyering to a large extent. So they like doing that thing and they think they’ll like owning doing that thing and they find out that they do or that they don’t or they like that aspect of it.

And just think about it like this. In your branding journey, you will learn a lot about yourself and your market and the people in it. And you don’t want to paint yourself into a corner with a huge amount of investment on a brand that you don’t believe. And the last point I want to make, there’s a theme that came out of everybody in a different way, which I really appreciated. Elliot talked about it differently. Rob, you talked about it differently, Erik, Kristen, and that’s authenticity. Don’t make your brand something you’re not. It’s even dangerous to make your brand something you’re aspiring to be because the market, it’s wary and it smells it a mile away. Make your brand who you are. And if that means fallible, that’s fine. Your clients are too. And so no big deal if your brand includes some vulnerability, includes part of your journey that might not be the version of you that you would make your movie look like, but it might should be.

But so at the very first, because the other thing about authenticity is if you base your brand on authenticity, you don’t have to remember it, right? You don’t have to think, am I on brand? Because if the brand is you, you’re on brand. And then you can look around you and say, is everything else aligned with that? And I think that’s what brings it in. So just for fun, if you don’t have a story, it’s fine. But let’s go around the table here and say, what’s a branding mistake that you’ve seen that you would caution others away from? Don’t name names, unless it’s me, then you can name them. But Kristen, any branding mistakes you’ve seen along the way?

Kristen David:

Absolutely. I see it all the time with, they say they want to work with wealthy, like high functioning neurosurgeons or CEOs or whatever, but they’re in this place where they say this, but then they’re trying to make the person come to the office to hand sign rather than just using eSign. And they’re like, “Well, I don’t want to use eSign because I don’t really know how to use it. ” Well, I’m sorry, but anybody that’s functioning fast, they don’t want to drive to your office and do a wet signature in your office. And you’ve got to tap into their life and who they are. And so I see it all the time where it’s just incongruent between what they say and what they project themselves as, but then their systems are so archaic and backwards. It’s like, you’re not keeping up. That becomes a trust buster.

And a neurosurgeon doesn’t want to leave surgery and drive 45 minutes to your office for one signature. I mean, send a courier over to meet them at a coffee shop and have it signed, come up with some other alternative. But I just think it becomes such a damaging point to their whole brand. It’s kind of that trust factor. When you say one thing, but then your office or your team or you are doing something differently, it’s damaging. And I think that you’ve got to think that through. And listen, with AI, pop it in there, ask the question, how can I be more in alignment or congruent with this audience, this theme and the way we run things? And I just think there’s no excuses anymore. So yes, I tell my clients all the time they need to get with the times and they need to step up and be more in alignment.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Yeah, be more alignment. And you know what? Your alignment could be not being with the times, right?

Kristen David:

Yeah.

Christopher T. Anderson:

If your authentic self is, I’m a pen and paper guy, you know what? Your clients are out there. They really are. I can tell you, they are. All right. Who else has a good story or example of branding kind of-

Elliot Alicea:

I would love to piggyback onto what Kristen said more in the sales and marketing world is exactly the same scenario. I want to work with higher end people, more sophisticated. And the first interaction with the brand, at least person to person, is on the phone. And if we miss the call, well, how are you going to handle the rest of my case and are you going to be there? I always relate it to an AC company, whoever I’m calling, whoever answers is more than likely who I’m hiring. And then the quality of the person on the other end of that call and their skill level and do they sound like our ideal client, that is usually the most common mismatch that I see is I want to work with somebody. My initial retainers are $20,000, but the person on the phone is completely outsourced or they don’t really understand our mission, our brand.

And that mismatch is usually like the number one repellent for client generation at the very least. But then it just speaks to exactly what Kristen said. There’s just a giant mismatch. So super common.

Erik Alicea:

Yeah. I’m going to do like a part three of Elliot and Kristen because exactly what they said is what we see happen. So actually we looked at the stats. It was for one of our owner’s calls that we do with our clients and people will spend about, I think it was less than 30 seconds on your website. Actually, no, it was 10 seconds on your website, sorry. It was less than 10 seconds on the website. People will spend less than 30 seconds watching your videos. They’ll spend about five to 10 minutes with intake and then 45 minutes with salespeople. And if you think about that time of consumption as being where your priority should be, people are generally the complete opposite that. They’ll obsess. I’ve seen people pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for a beautiful website and again, it looks beautiful. And same thing for videos, and they’ll obsess over those things all day and all night long, but they won’t listen to a single intake call or a single sales call and put a lot of attention on those.

And so just purely based on the time of consumption, that points out like the point of leverage. So that’s mistake one to put a different mistake out there that I see is people will assume things about their ideal client and they won’t just look at their actual client data that they have. And I think that’s like the most valuable way to figure out your ideal client is look at your clients that are winning. That’s how we figured out that we wanted to niche to family Law is by looking at our clients because we have never came to that conclusion without that doing that. Sure.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Rob, any other thoughts or examples of branding gone the wrong way?

Rob Leitner:

Yeah. In terms of branding mistakes, it’s really the same for any small business owner. Don’t believe your own bullshit. The lack of authenticity can be very damaging to you, to your career, to your staff, to your clients, to your leads. And it’s not a good thing. I encourage everyone to ask themselves, “What am I? ” And be true to that. Your brand should equal the reality and the truth will reveal itself. You can’t fool everyone all the time, and it’s just not a good strategy long term.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Yeah. Yeah. I appreciate the emphasis on that because I think it’s really, really important. One last thought on that, and we’re going to talk about rebranding or firms that come at this. We’re going to take another keyhole before we wrap up. And that is this. You don’t know what you don’t know. I think Erik, your story was really on point with this in that when you’re a startup, you don’t have the data. At best, you might have somebody else’s data, including your former firm,

But that’s not your data. And you don’t know, for instance, to Kristen’s point, you don’t know who your best clients are yet, right? It takes some time to know that. You don’t even know, quite honestly, who the clients you’ve enjoyed working with most are yet. So be careful about presuming that. And yeah, it’s just easier and smarter to focus on being you and try as hypotheses what you think your best clients are going to be, and then be willing to pivot and not invest so much money on the brand. And Erik, I mean, my goodness, you’re right, people always want to focus on the things that, I don’t know, they’re shiny objects. And it’s not like listening to your calls or paying attention to your clients takes more time. It’s just less sexy. So we’re going to peg you as the less sexy chair,

But it’s exactly it. And I loved it. I took a course a long time ago now, but it’s a great course called Pragmatic Marketing. And in pragmatic marketing, they give you a mug. I don’t have one, I just have a plain white one, but the mug, you hold a mug like this. So on the side facing you, it says on the mug, your opinion, while interesting, is not relevant. And I think that’s a good way to end to talk on startup branding is your opinion about your brand. While interesting, particularly at a startup stage, is not particularly relevant, so don’t spend a whole lot of time there. Spend time being authentic, spend time reaching out to the market and getting some business and not procrastinating with marketing.

So let’s now pivot the conversation a little bit. So I’m going to turn now to Erik and Elliot for starters, but so your client has now been in business for a little while, has reached good revenues for a law firm, somewhere one, one and a half million to $5 million, they’re getting going. And now they come and say, “Okay, now I know who I like working with. Now I know who my most profitable clients have been. I know what I like doing. I know the team I like working with and I’m pretty comfortable in my own skin. Now I’d like to really spend some money, time, energy, effort in establishing a brand in the marketplace.” What’s that conversation look like for you guys?

Erik Alicea:

Again, there’s the two sides of it. There are There’s the look and the feel and the value propositions even too. So your value propositions as a business. And all of those things at this point, since you’re at an advantage, you’re making money, I would AB test. So if I think that value proposition one, two, and three are the most important value propositions, I would test them on social. I would test the colors that I think that are best, the imagery that I think is best. I would test it all before finalizing it and stamping it as this is my brand. And that’s on the look and feel side. I would just rely exclusively on data at that point.

Elliot Alicea:

Yeah. And in the spirit of being authentic for Rob, it would all be points that are in line with how I want to do business because I think that matters. And there’s people out there for you. But again, I would focus on the association. Erik talked about the origination of brand is like stamping cattle. I stole the story by the way. But it’s how are you going to treat that cattle when you see it when you see the brand? Are you going to return it because you’re afraid of the owners? Are you going to kill it because you hate the owners? The association of that brand is what is important. And so I would interview my clients and ask them all the questions I need to ask them. So why did you choose us? What made the biggest difference? How did you feel? There’s survey questions to Kristen’s point, you go on AI and say, “What are some user surveys I can run to understand what resonates with my clients?” Once I gather those messages, I would then AB test it like Erik said.

As long as they were in line, I would pick the ones that were in line with me. And then that would be my go- to market of this Association of Changing Lives, for example, is what I want them to think about when I see this logo and these colors. And you pretty much pound that message home for a very long time, tactically speaking. So that’s how I would have the conversation is it would start with a little bit of unsexy work of asking people what resonated with you when you worked with our firm.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Cool. Thank you, Elliot. So Christian, you’re going to get the last word. Rob, I’m going to go to you next, which is, so you’ve been, Rob, you’ve been associated with and helped several firms who’ve grown and achieved the levels that I’m talking about and probably looked to or made efforts at brand. Based on that experience, based on what you’ve seen, where do you take them in that conversation about, okay, now it’s time to really actually get serious about the brand?

Rob Leitner:

I’m going to piggyback on what Erik was saying, and I should have mentioned this earlier, defining the value proposition is critical. It may take a very long time. You only need a couple of bullet points, should not be genErik, should differentiate you and the firm, very specific, and it should resonate with potential new clients, others in your sandbox. I’m going to give you an example. I used to work with a criminal law firm in, we’ll just say Austin, okay? Criminal law firm in Austin. And the marketing message was genErik, bland, same as every other one, nothing stood out. However, this gentleman was actually a prosecutor for like 15 or 20 years, has a lot of local ties to the community, and he never really leveraged that in his message. So we changed that to something like former Austin prosecutor who believes in Second Chances. That to me is a value proposition.

In other words, why would I choose your firm over the competition? And that’s the main question that should be answered as we discuss branding, especially for a now more mature law firm.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Perfect. And I love it because it’s also, it’s differentiation, but it’s also authentic, right?That’s who this guy was. So Kristen, just as we bring this episode to ahead, what are your thoughts on rebranding or when firms really … When is it time for them to start getting serious and what have you seen or what should they be doing?

Kristen David:

For my years as a legal malpractice defense attorney, I mean, I’ve seen the stats of lawyers often want to pivot and do something different every three to five years. It just, you get kind of bored with what you’re doing, but you also naturally just evolve. So sometimes it’s the what you want to do. So you might want to get out of litigation and like in family law, go to collaborative or get to work with more people that just want to get it done. Other times it’s the who that you’re working with that’s driving you crazy and you want to make a transition. And sometimes that who has to do with like where you are and what’s where there’s a need. If you’re, I’ll use family law since we’ve used that as an example, if you’re in Miami, Florida, the top one and two categories of divorces is healthcare, doctors and nurses and lawyers.

We just looked this up the other day. Again, AI can do a great job of helping you in Colorado. The top two divorce industries are energy, oil, gas, and aerospace and defense. So there you’re working with a lot of engineers and consultants, and then you can tone your messaging to say like, if you’re looking for engineers, architects, it’s like, we’ve got the blueprint, we’ve got the schematic, because you’re telling them they’re in the right place because that’s their language. If you’re working, trying to target attorneys or doctors or pilots, you say things like, “We have the checklists or the processes because pilots and doctors, they go through checklists like mad.” I don’t know, Christopher, how many checklists do you do before you get in the air in an airplane? I mean, eight or nine different checklists. So sometimes when you want to rebrand, it’s a what type of area of law, but sometimes it’s the who that you really want to niche into.

And I think just doing some of that research helps you and then you can have fun with it. Be vibrant. People love to work with people who are passionate about that niche. So again, rebrand is, we help clients all the time with rebranding because it’s natural to want to evolve and to do something a little different. So don’t be scared of it. Have fun with it.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Perfect. I love it. So to wrap it up then, I’d like the theme that I think came out of this part of the conversation is, first of all, Erik, I think you nailed a thought, which is that branding at the end of the day, and Kristen, this is exactly going to what you’re talking about too, is its feel. Branding is giving the person who’s viewing it the feeling that they’re in the right place. And that’s what we’re doing when we brand is we’re making it obvious. We’re putting it out there. We’re emphasizing that they’re in the right place. And then to the other point is, you’ll get it wrong. You’ll try that and it won’t be right. And the truth is that you don’t know, and there’s no way for you to know other than to experiment, to put it out there and then ask yourself, and this comes from a gentleman by the name of Erik Ries, who’s written a number of great books, but I learned this phrase from him.

What did we learn and how do we know? And so you put it out there and to find out, is this brand resonating with the market? Is it giving them the feeling that they’re in the right place? Yes or no? And if you think you have a yes, how do you know you do? And so you set up the experiment that way and we can talk more about that on another episode, but right now we’ve got to wrap it up. And so Elliot, Erik, Rob, Kristen, thanks so much for being on the inaugural episode and we will hopefully see you again really soon.

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