The Renegade Lawyer Podcast
The root cause of all lawyers' problems is financial stress. Financial stress holds you back from getting the right people on the bus, running the right systems, and being able to only do work for clients you want to work with. Financial stress keeps you in the office on nights and weekends, often doing work you hate for people you don't like, and doing that work alone.
(Yes, you have permission to do only work you like doing and doing it with people you like working with.)
The money stress is not because the lawyers are bad lawyers or bad people. In fact, most lawyers are good at the lawyering part and they are good people.
The money stress is caused by the general lack of both business skills and an entrepreneurial mindset.
Thus, good lawyers who are good people get caught up and slowed down in bringing their gifts to the world. Their families, teams, clients, and communities are not well-served because you can't serve others at your top level when you are constantly worrying about money.
We can blame the law schools and the elites of the profession who are running bar organizations, but to blame anyone else for your own woes is a loser's game. It is, in itself, a restrictive, narrow, mindset that will keep you from ever seeing, let alone experiencing, a better future.
Lawyers need to be in rooms with other entrepreneurs. They need to hang with people who won't tell you that your dreams are too big or that "they" or "the system "won't allow you to achieve them. They need to be in rooms where people will be in their ear telling them that their dreams are too small.
Get in better rooms. That would be the first step.
Second step, ignore every piece of advice any general organized bar is giving about how to make your firm or your life better.
The Renegade Lawyer Podcast
Maximizing Law Firm Growth - Digital Marketing Insights with Bo Royal of Pareto Legal
In this episode of The Renegade Lawyers Podcast, dive into the world of digital marketing with Bo Royal of Pareto Legal. Discover how law firms can optimize their online presence, from website efficiency to maximizing ad spend. Bo shares insights on data-driven strategies and common pitfalls to avoid. Whether you're a large firm or a solo practitioner, learn how to fuel your practice's growth with actionable tips from a marketing expert. Tune in for a masterclass on making the most of your digital marketing efforts.
Ben Glass is a nationally recognized personal injury and long-term disability insurance attorney in Fairfax, VA. Since 2005, Ben Glass and Great Legal Marketing have been helping solo and small firm lawyers make more money, get more clients and still get home in time for dinner. We call this TheGLMTribe.com
What Makes The GLM Tribe Special?
In short, we are the only organization within the "business builder for lawyers" space that is led by two practicing lawyers.
One thing we're sure you've noticed is that despite the variety of options within our space, no one else is mixing
the actual practice of law with business building in the way that we are.
There are no other organizations who understand the highs and lows of running a small law firm and are engaged in talking to real clients. That is what sets GLM apart from every other organization, and it is why we have had loyal members that have been with us for two-decades.
I think firms should start by taking their data seriously and having a pulse on what their kind of baseline results are before they kind of worry about oh I need a new website, I need to do this, I need to do that. If you don't have a gauge on what your baseline results have been, if you introduce a new tactic or a change in your marketing portfolio, it's going to be really hard to deduce whether or not there was any incremental impact as a result of that change.
Speaker 3:Welcome to the Renegade Lawyer Podcast, the show where we ask the questions why aren't more lawyers living flourishing lives and inspiring others? And can you really get wealthy while doing only the work you love with people you like? Many lawyers are. Get ready to hear from your host, ben Glass, the founder of the law firm Ben Glass Law in Fairfax, virginia, and Great Legal Marketing, an organization that helps good people succeed by coaching, inspiring and supporting law firm owners. Join us for today's conversation.
Speaker 2:Hey everyone, this is Ben Glass. This is the Renegade Lawyer Podcast. Welcome back. I am just back from Nashville a couple of days down there with Sandy and I and, as you know, each episode I get to interview really interesting people, really interesting companies inside and outside of legal. Today we're going to one of my favorite topics, which is digital marketing SEO. We're going to talk to Bo Royal of Pareto Legal. It's Bo's got an interesting background former Fortune 500 advertising agency executive turned law firm marketing expert. Held a leadership position at eBay's Marketing Solutions I want to talk about that and scaled the online advertising revenues of a variety of well-known brands, such as Calvin Klein. Found the world of legal marketing five years or more than five years ago and hasn't looked back since. He's building websites for folks who are listening to this podcast and, I assume, not just building websites but supporting them and helping them by all their digital marketing endeavors. And so welcome to the program today.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much for having me on, Ben. I'm excited to be here.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's good, it's going to be fun.
Speaker 2:You know, before we went live, I was saying to Beau that every day, like most of our listeners, my email inbox and my LinkedIn inbox is filled with SEO experts and web builders from all over the world, all telling me how much my site sucks, how many mistakes it has and how they can all fix it.
Speaker 2:So I say that, beau, only as a precursor that lawyers like me and the folks who listen to this are continually frustrated, I think because they don't know how to judge very well Either the vendor, the partner, the services being rendered. They don't really know how to judge their website, and so I'm not a wine guy, so if a wine aficionado tells me one wine is better than another, I don't have any basis other than trust. So let's kind of start there, because lawyers, I think, either love their current website and they're really happy, or most everyone has one, I think, unless you're just starting a law firm or they don't love them and they're out in the market. And I just tell you, it's hard. It's hard for guys like me who even me like who've been in this game over 20 years in the marketing side and 40 years in the practice to figure out, like all right. Who do we believe this week? How should we be looking at that?
Speaker 1:I think firms should start by taking their data seriously and having a pulse on what their kind of baseline results are, before they kind of worry about oh I need a new website, I need to do this. I need to do that. If you don't have a gauge on what your baseline results have been, if you introduce a new tactic or a change into your marketing portfolio, it's going to be really hard to deduce whether or not there was any incremental impact as a result of that change, right? So what do I mean by that? Fundamentally, are you tracking the number of leads, qualified leads, cases that are coming from your marketing efforts? Are you able to effectively attribute which marketing tactics are driving a greater proportion of qualified leads or cases versus other marketing tactics? So I guess that's just all you know, a way to say get a handle on. You know where you're at currently. Before you start kind of worrying about, oh, I need to be doing this thing and that thing. I mean, the reality is this you need to be trying everything from a marketing perspective.
Speaker 2:So much of marketing is.
Speaker 1:It's an iterative process. It's not like there's never going to be this end state that you get to where you're, like my marketing is done, I am making all the money in the world.
Speaker 1:Nope, that's never going to happen because the market's shifting, the different channels are changing, so you basically need to set up an infrastructure at your firm that enables you to measure how all these different marketing tactics and things that you're trying are working and then start doubling down on the things that are working and kind of ignore the stuff. That's just taking up your team's time and budget. That's where I would start.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I'm with you and, as you probably know, like most, most firms don't have that data right. They have, you know, they have a gut feeling, which is probably a 100% wrong. And so if you were coaching a firm comes to you and you're like, all right, give me this set of data and they go I don't even know what you're talking about and you were coaching them through either sort of a processes or a tech stack and we're recording this in the summer of 2024, what is a decent 101 set of criteria and maybe the technology that will get you the criteria for a law firm that Bo just doesn't know today.
Speaker 1:Probably the simplest tech stack would be get Google Analytics 4 installed. Get those tags installed on your site so you can track where your traffic is coming from a channel perspective, from a geographic perspective, what pages on the site they're looking at, what pages are driving form submits and live chat, leads and phone calls. Like get, like, start there. And then the next thing, or rather tech stack item, would be start pushing your lead data into a Google sheet and have your intake team update that Google sheet to be able to tell your marketing folks, hey, of these leads that we generated, these 20% of them turned into a case. That data is going to be invaluable for your marketing folks because then again they can double down on the marketing tactics that are actually driving the end result that your firm wants, which is cases. You don't care about leads, you don't care about number of phone calls, you want cases, you want new clients, right, and so that data feedback loop needs to be established if you really want your marketing effort to take off. Tag installed on your website and then start sending the start pushing the lead data that you generate from your website into a Google sheet and have your intake team keep that up to date. That's like the free, like low elegance solution. To add to the tech stack, I would be considering a call tracking solution. There's a ton of them out there. They all kind of do the same thing. So, basically, what those do is they enable you to attribute which marketing channels are driving phone calls. They enable you to listen to the phone calls and categorize them based on quality. So that would be another thing that I would add to the mix, and there's probably a million other things I would add to.
Speaker 1:I mean, we're typically the way we're working with more established firms is we automate the input of lead data into their case management or CRM system. So all this is being done automatically. We like removing the human element from the picture, so there's not as many mistakes. And then we're taking that data from the CRM or case management tool and pushing it back into the advertising campaigns, which, basically, is a way to train Google's AI or Meta's AI. On. Hey, of this budget we're giving you, and of this traffic and these leads that you're generating, of this budget we're giving you, and of this traffic and these leads that you're generating, these are the leads and clicks that are equating to actual customers, actual clients and if you can train their machine learning algorithms on that, they're going to get more and more efficient, more and more effective at finding more clients that your firm wants. So this all ties back to the first answer, which is like get control of your data if you really want to be serious about scaling your marketing effort.
Speaker 2:And you know it is so much so I agree with you. And it is so much easier today because the tech firms are really falling all over each other to try to. You know, even if you're like a case management software producer, you're trying your best to add some sort of lead tracking to it. Otherwise the law firm's got six or seven different pieces of software all hooked together with Zapier and you're hoping that the one link doesn't break in place.
Speaker 2:And the other thing I would say is you know your phone sales team, your intake team, your conversion team, I think has to be pretty persistent and ask. And we ask the same question over and over in the beginning of a new client is how did you find us? And think deeply like where or how was the first time that you heard our? Because what we found, our data is and we've got a good internal team that has pieced together software that helps us a lot. But almost 80% of our dollars come because a human being mentioned our name first. That prospect absolutely 100% of them go through the digital journey anyway.
Speaker 2:Right To check out your website, to check out your reviews. They're all over your social media in many cases. But when you press them and your team presses, you find out that there's a human being somewhere who said Ben Glass, brian Glass or Ben Glass Law, and that started them on the journey. So I would just implore the sales team to keep pressing. Don't let them get away with Google. Oh, I found you on Google. That's like saying I found you on my computer someplace.
Speaker 1:Right, yeah, what you're basically talking about is just attribution, and something that we've advised our clients on is exactly what you just said. Like add a question to your intake that basically asks how did you hear about us or how did you find us? And the neat part is there's typically a discrepancy between the actual channel or campaign they came in through and you know how the channel that they say they've heard about you from right.
Speaker 1:So like a common answer might be oh, I saw your TV commercials, or I saw your billboards, or I was referred to you by a friend or something like that, but then they maybe might've clicked on your website or got your phone number through a Google business profile link or through a Facebook ad or something like that, and so in that case you're going to want to assign some fractional credit and you know there's no one size fits all solution to this Like it's really up to your firm how you want to attribute the credit to each marketing touch point. But it's an important question to ask because, going back to what you said, ben, like you, if you look under the hood and you set up that Google Analytics 4 tracking and you see, oh wow, 90% of my leads are coming from Google don't just think people are discovering you on Google.
Speaker 1:They could be discovering you just simply driving by your office or asking a doctor for hey, who's an attorney that can help me with this right? So I think it's really important to add that as a question to the intake.
Speaker 2:Let me ask you this who is your sort of favorite law firm client? What's the perfect avatar profile for your company?
Speaker 1:Perfect avatar would be a personal injury firm in a top 50 US metro by population with ideally at least a million dollars in advertising budget. So a bigger, more established PI firm.
Speaker 2:Okay, yeah, and so that firm walks through your door. Of that million dollars, are you talking? Million dollars digital or million dollar advertising budget? So million dollars, digital budget, digital? Okay, now spread that for me and I know every firm is different, every case is different Are you SEO pay-per-click boosted ads on TikTok? What is that? There's no one size fits all. What is that? There's no one size fits all, but what are the different ways that a firm can be spending a million?
Speaker 1:dollars a year on digital Okay. So I'll be very precise in saying that the million dollars a year, that's going to be specifically for advertising, so not for SEO or building content.
Speaker 2:There's the answer then. Okay, interesting yeah.
Speaker 1:So at least a million dollars a year in digital advertising budget, right, and so what does that encompass in terms of channels and tactics? Google advertising is obviously going to be a big part of that pie and under the umbrella of Google, you're going to have local services ads, which are the pay per lead ad format. I think everyone is probably familiar and seen these ads before. They're the top three slot in the search result page. You typically will click on it from a mobile device and it will connect you directly to that company or firm. Those ads are available in other industries as well.
Speaker 2:They're not unique to legal those ads are available in other industries as well.
Speaker 1:They're not unique to legal, but so local services ads is a piece of that Google pie, and pay-per-click marketing as well is a part of that pie and that's going to be the text ad result at the top of the Google search result page as well. So those two tactics are going to get a big piece of that budget. Also, under Google you're going to have video that you purchase via YouTube, and that's also going to be a tactic. You can use that tactic in multiple ways. You can use it to reach new prospective clients, or you can use it to re-engage with prospective clients, former clients, so on and so forth. But I'd say those are kind of like the big three tactics underneath the Google umbrella.
Speaker 1:And then meta is a big piece of that budget as well, so that's going to encompass Facebook and Instagram. So both you know social channels are under that meta umbrella and we're going to be running a combination of video and static banner ads on those platforms. And then the remainder of the budget is going to go to some more fringe advertising tactics, more awareness building. That might go to something like TikTok. That might go to something like TikTok. It might go to a DSP, a demand side platform, where you're going to be generating top of funnel display traffic on third party sites and trying to target people that are passively browsing online. Maybe they haven't indicated that they're in the market for an attorney yet.
Speaker 1:But that's where the remainder of it would go. It would be testing the budget on more top-of-funnel prospecting tactics.
Speaker 2:The lion's share again is going to go towards Google and then Meta, so I may have made an assumption when we started our discussion. So how much of Pareto Legal is? Are you building websites too, or are you building landing pages that are tied to digital ads and you're building funnels and sequences there? The latter.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we're more focused on the paid acquisition side and the landing pages. We'll build those ourselves. We'll build the funnels. We'll basically dictate the strategy to acquire clients from a paid perspective. We really don't do much with SEO or anything else like that, all right.
Speaker 2:All right, so this is cool. So this is different, all right. So the firm that's coming with a million dollars of digital budget needs what in terms of human beings behind the budget call center? Oh yeah, I mean they have that. You're not providing it, or?
Speaker 1:Yeah, we're not providing that.
Speaker 1:That has to be handled, you know, internally, by them or they need to have a third party that's handling that side of it. We're really helping them with the strategy, the execution and the optimization of their advertising budget. We're building the campaigns. We're setting up all of that analytical infrastructure so that we can feed that data from the case management system back into the campaigns so that we have a very clear picture of what the true ROI is. And we're building tests. We're A-B testing ads, landing pages, we're trying new campaign types, we're testing new markets loop and then just constantly tweaking, optimizing so that we can not only increase the case volume over time but keep the cost per acquisition either flat or decrease it over time as well.
Speaker 2:Do you do any vetting then of the firms to make sure that, oh my gosh, we do all this work and you can't answer the phone properly or on time or anything like that, or you may even ask more questions behind that? So do you have kind of a at least on an internal criteria of just because someone shows up with a big check doesn't mean you're going to take them?
Speaker 1:It comes up on the first sales call. I have to ask on the first call do you have a proper intake operation in place? I ask questions about what's your conversion rate on a qualified lead, what's your overall conversion rate? And I can quickly tell if I get a weird look or they're stuttering and they don't quite know it's probably not going to be the right fit or, you know, maybe it will be. But they need some help, just kind of like wrangling some of that data to figure it out on their end, which is totally fine, but yeah, so much of you know our success rests on the hinges of their ability to effectively convert the leads that we're driving.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean not 100%, but you are accurate and you are correct that if you sell services to a firm that can't convert, can't answer the phone, can't get to live chat or form fills, then you're going to be blamed.
Speaker 1:Yes, Luckily for us, because we are so ingrained in that data infrastructure, we have access to their call tracking solution. We can actually go and we do this. If there are clients that the case volume isn't where we expected it to be, we'll actually go and listen to some of the calls and we can quickly deduce whether or not they're being handled properly or not. And if they're not, typically what we'll do is we'll connect them with an intake consultant or some company that can assist them with that. Yeah, that's such an important piece of the puzzle. It's something that I try to make clear early on in the sales process.
Speaker 1:Like I said, we're you know, we're basically we're gasoline for law firms, right, and we're only going to work if you already have a fire going. If you already have some you know logs in the fire, it's you know things are cooking great, it's going to work well. All you need to do is put some budget against this. You know, give us some time to iterate and figure out you know the messaging, the landing pages, that the target audience, and if we have that runway and you have that fire going, it should work well.
Speaker 1:If you know you're a solo practitioner and you're still handling all the calls yourself and you know you just got a big settlement check and you want to start spending a hundred thousand000 a month on Google, you're putting the cart before the horse. You need to get that back-end infrastructure figured out in terms of intake. You need to get the software figured out. What type of platform are you using to manage your intakes? What's your follow-up process look like? What types of people are you hiring? What's your hierarchy look like in terms of your intake team? So, yeah, we are going to be best served to law firms that are a little more mature in their business lifecycle and they have some of these things already established and they really want to find a subject matter expert, a T-shaped marketer that just does digital advertising for their specific industry.
Speaker 2:Exactly Because they already have the you in, perhaps, tv and broadcast media, they probably have the you in SEO as well, and so are you then tracking data all the way to fees earned, do you?
Speaker 1:That's the ideal I mean we run into you know every client's different, so sometimes we do run into technical hurdles in terms of how far down the path we can go. But our ideal end state is we are pushing the lead data into the case management system and that data follows the case from initial call all the way to settlement received. So that's really where we're trying to get all of our clients to.
Speaker 1:But you know you have to consider that there are, you know, other stakeholders in the mix. You have an intake team that you have to train. Sometimes there's limitations in terms of what the CRM or the case management tool can do. So you know, worst case scenario, what we're kind of leaning on, like I said earlier in the podcast, no-transcript. I think that's something that every marketing agency needs to strive to do these days?
Speaker 1:You need to make a concerted effort to validate that all this stuff that you're doing is driving the end result that clients expect of you.
Speaker 2:There's some marketing agencies that wouldn't want you to be able to figure that out until you run out of money, right, right, I mean because their stuff isn't good, right, and it's not really effective. And I imagine if some big firm who's spending a million dollars a year is working this off of Google Sheets, they're not working off of Google Sheets for long because someone's going to say, oh my gosh, what technology will make this a lot easier for me. So someone who's listening to this, who's a smaller firm it's not a million dollar a year firm should they be asking themselves should I even be playing in the digital advertising space? Again, separating out from SEO, it strikes me that you need an expert, that you need 24-7 eyes on your stuff and again, having put hands on many years ago in the advent of AdWords, right, it was hard enough then. But should someone who doesn't have even the people infrastructure, should they even be dabbling in paid advertising for PI or for any legal services? Probably not.
Speaker 2:It just seems like you're up against you, like you're up against you. And good technology, good money.
Speaker 1:The answer is probably no, but I think it really depends on, again, what stage in the business's life cycle they're in. And let me be more precise, from purely a marketing perspective do you have clear goals in terms of, like, what you're trying to achieve in terms of leads, cases open per month, so on and so forth? Like, let's start there, because if you don't, if you don't have clear goals, you're going to, you're going to completely change your marketing campaigns, your marketing effort, you know, month to month, year to year, and you're just going to end up nowhere. Whoever's filling your email?
Speaker 2:inbox.
Speaker 1:Exactly so. You need to really kind of draw a line in the sand and say, all right, this is where I'm at currently, this is where I want to get to, and then iterate, build a plan that's going to help get you there. And that doesn't necessarily mean dig into your pocket and take out your credit card and give Google a million dollars a year, right. But so start with the goals. Then you need to figure out your positioning, like you need to look at the market that you're in, or the markets that you're in, and basically it's really a thought exercise of All right, who are the main players? Who are the competitors? How have they positioned themselves? How do they talk about themselves on their website?
Speaker 1:Oh, okay, this is the only PI attorney that's also a surgeon. Okay, that's his unique position, got it?
Speaker 1:Here's a firm that just does premises liability Okay, got it. And you basically need to understand who the players are out there and then basically mesh that with all right what goals am I trying to achieve? And come up with a unique way to stand out in that marketplace. And this is so much easier said than done, because what it's going to mean is when you start really positioning yourself, it means you're going to say no to a lot of things and no to a lot of case types, no to a lot of potential clients.
Speaker 1:I'm working with a firm right now that in the last two years they used to do DUI, they used to do premises liability, they used to do all these types of cases. They only want to do car accident, motor vehicle accident cases now, and we've really helped them like hey, this is the type of things we need to say on the website, this is what the landing page needs to convey, this is what the ads need to convey. So all that is to say, positioning is another really important thing that firms need to figure out. You can't expect to be another Morgan Morgan if you basically throw up all these different practice areas on your services page and just be like oh yeah, we handle everything. No one wants to work with a generalist, right. If you were to have a heart attack, you wouldn't go to a general practitioner for help, you would go to a cardiologist, right.
Speaker 1:So the same thing is true when it comes to the types of cases that your firm wants to generate more of. You really need to think about how the overall market perceives you, and if you really want to generate more of that case type, you probably need to orient all of your marketing, messaging, your website, your intake, to make it clear to that audience that this is all we do and we're the best at it. So that's the second thing. And then the third thing would be and this is more like tactical get a Google business profile set up and get as many reviews as you can Like.
Speaker 1:If I have so many sales calls and unfortunately I can't work with a lot of people that I speak with for the reasons I mentioned in terms of like the budget requirements and all that and, yeah, I try to tell them every sales call I have. I'm like, if you do anything, if I can teach you anything from this call, get more Google reviews. It's going to bolster your visibility in the search result pages and it's going to give you a leg up on your competitors in the market, because you better believe that when someone needs a divorce attorney or an estate planning, you know estate planning attorney or something like that. And you know they're going to Google, they're going to look at the two, three, five alternatives out there and they're going to use those Google reviews to deduce who the best one is right. People, basically people are shopping for lawyers the same way they shop for a laundromat or an Italian. Everything else Right, exactly.
Speaker 2:And so if you're listening to this, you really ought to hit rewind for about three minutes, because Bo just gave you a masterclass in the philosophy of how you should think about this. So, exactly right, look, there is a space for everybody and a lot of the great legal marketing members they're not the ones who are your avatar client. They're not spending a million dollars a year on digital advertising client. They're not spending a million dollars a year on digital advertising but they're competing against those firms and there's so many things that the smaller firm can do, particularly in terms of these people relationships and enhancing referral relationships and all of that. But, bo, like, the number one thing I see with new members or someone who I do a consult with is I'll go to their website and I'll see the 27, even, like in PI, the 27 different types of PI cases that they do Right. And I tell them exactly that Well, you look like a generalist.
Speaker 2:Like, do you really like doing, you know, workplace crane fallovers? Do you have any experience doing workplace crane fall? Well, no, but you know, a big one might come along. That's stupid. That's stupid. Like, let's go from blue car hits red car and start there.
Speaker 1:You can still have a page for that on your website, but don't put it on your homepage as one of the 50 things that you do Like on your homepage. You should really clearly state like this is the type of case that we excel best at.
Speaker 2:And it's a mindset block for a lot of people, especially when you're growing. You're like well, when you're growing, Because you're like well, you know, but that one case might walk in, or I need the money, or whatever. And I've always been of the mind, Beau, it's like no, like reject that case, turn them away and spend another hour thinking about marketing, reading a book about marketing, watching a video, attending a course, and just get better at that. Because if you can get five more of the cases that you're really good at and you like doing, you're going to save yourself the headache of taking a case you should never have taken, you're not really good at, and you're going to get sued when you screw it up by the way.
Speaker 2:And all of that. So that's just great advice. And then on the reviews, you're exactly right and the thing I teach people is you know there's no rule that says you need to wait to the end of the case to ask for a review. No, you help somebody even if you didn't take their case. You sent them someplace or you told them look, don't waste your time or money.
Speaker 2:We ask people to just write that we tried to help, we're friendly and if they dealt with someone on our team, to mention our team member by name and tell stories. And then we write and respond to every review because I think the more the prospect can go and look through reviews and see stories, the more chance they're going to see a story that's like their story and they're going to go oh, these guys like, oh, they've done work, like what I need to be done. And again, that's practice area agnostic. It could be anything. Developing a culture, a firm culture that really like it, starts with having a team that thinks that you're really good, because that team is going to be asking for and prodding for reviews more than a team that hates coming to work for you.
Speaker 2:Let me ask you you described your avatar as someone with at least a million dollars of pay-per-click or digital advertising budget. I don't really know the answer to this question, but the biggest firms that you may see nationally you mentioned Morgan Morgan, there's lots of others Give us some sense of what some of these behemoths are spending or budgeting on digital advertising alone.
Speaker 1:I think I just saw an article about this. It was specific to Morgan. Morgan, I want to say their digital advertising budget was somewhere in the $100 to $200 million annual. Don't quote me on that, but it makes sense for their business model, right? Because they want everything you mentioned before. Ben, you were like.
Speaker 1:I advise some of my clients maybe don't accept that case and bog down your operation and sink all your time into this and potentially risk not getting a check. Morgan doesn't have that problem. They're generating so much volume that they have the luxury of being able to cherry pick the cream of the crop cases and then they refer out everything else and the economics work such two, three years passes and those referral checks start coming in and it continues to float the ship. It continues to float the entire marketing operation, right? So, and that's what some of the other big players are doing too you know another one.
Speaker 1:This is actually a firm that, like I think, started in Philly that the owner works out of Arizona now Top Dog Law you've probably seen them and he's built his practice, you know, over the last five years mainly through social media, and he's just started to generate a lot, or do a lot, rather with outdoor advertising at least, and I know in the Philly market. He's really started to entrench himself there, and it's the same model. It's a volume practice, trying to generate as much awareness, as many leads as possible, and they have such a robust back-end operation that they can, you know, filter in, keep the good stuff, filter out the not so good stuff and refer it out, and that's one way that they've decided to grow. I think most firms out there, though, are growing the way that we just described, in that they are really focused on their positioning.
Speaker 2:They only do this type of case, or at least they say they only do this type of case in this market for these types of people and that seems to be a good approach for the smaller practices, but yeah, and you know, despite the huge numbers, and if you go to some events mass torts, national trial lawyers and you listen to the very smart, good lawyers, good marketers on stage and they're showing astonishing numbers, but they don't get all the cases.
Speaker 2:And there's showing astonishing numbers, but they don't get all the cases. And there's plenty of cases, no matter what your practice area is. And I think the way we want to think about this is if you take your current business and you can incrementally change how many people are aware of your firm, how many, what percentage of callers can you convert? How can you reduce the time from the time the client comes into the office to the time the case settles? Like working on all of the different steps of the case to make sure there's no slippage there just because your client's finished treating and you don't get the man letter out. So there's lots of different ways to just, inch by inch, improve your systems and make more money efficiently. So there's plenty of work to go around.
Speaker 1:The only thing I'm going to add is okay, ben, just going back to your question before about what the big firms are doing, between the bigger firms and the smaller firms is the nature of the advertising investment starts to change as you get larger, and what I mean by that is the larger firms are investing more in like brand awareness versus direct response, like they have their direct response campaigns built and they're kind of dialed in.
Speaker 1:What they're really focusing on more of over the long term is generating brand awareness, and the way they're doing that is investing in more traditional tactics like TV, billboard, radio. They're investing in digital video and they're blasting that to the target markets that they're looking to generate cases from. And those come with their own set of challenges from a tracking and attribution perspective. They're not as easy and it's not as black and white as like a Google pay per click lead. You know someone that sees your billboard and then watches your TV commercial and then, you know, walks into your office a year later. That's a very messy conversion path, but that's the type of problem that a large firm like that is dealing with, and those are the types of things that they're spending proportionally more time on versus the smaller firms. I was talking to a client a smaller client the other day and they don't have a million dollar a year budget.
Speaker 1:It's probably more like 500,000 a year and they were talking about doing some billboard and I was like sure you could do that, but you're not even capped out on what you could be doing on Google right now and you have very clear data that's telling you. You know this is what your cost per lead is, this is what your cost per acquisition is, and your campaigns are only at 40% of what they. You know they're at 40% potential right now. They could go up another. You know two and a half X to get to. You know 100%. And so I think a lot of small firms out there they see the big guys and they're like oh, they have billboards, so I need billboards now.
Speaker 1:It's like no, not necessarily. If you have a couple channels that are working really well, why don't you try to maximize what you're doing there for first, before you put some budget into this brand new tactic? That the attribution is not going to be as clear, it's not going to generate results as quickly, right? So I think there's this like I don't know how to describe it Like, oh, since he's doing it, I need to do it.
Speaker 2:It's shiny object syndrome. Oh, I saw a guy on stage at a conference and he's doing this, so I got to go do this, like I got to make 400 TikTok videos. It really gets back to how you described at the beginning of the call, which is you've got a fire going and so there's fuel that's going in and there's production coming from the fuel. All right, our questions would be do you like that practice area? Do you enjoy the clients that it brings in? Great, how much more gasoline could we pour on that and how much more efficient could we make the engine and all the different ways we just talked about. From the time that first, you know the hand is raised either by phone call or form fill or whatever like how we could get better at that.
Speaker 2:And the other thing that you know will make most lawyers sick is go listen to 10 intake calls of your own internal team representing your brand and you will throw up most of the time, right, right, and so there's a ton of space just in answering the phone and making the caller feel like they made a great decision to pick up the phone. Like. These guys are really smart here. These guys and gals are really smart. Let me ask you this Do you have any good stories and you don't have to name names but firms that came to you? You saw something that they had not seen before. You found a lever that really made a difference for them. I think that would be interesting to hear. And again, just because Bo mentions it doesn't mean it's going to work for you, but we're always looking. All right, that's a cool idea. Yeah, how can we adapt that to our practice?
Speaker 1:Well, you can tell me if this is along the lines of what you're asking. So this is more of like something not to do. No, no.
Speaker 2:Something like look, somebody comes to you, they've got a budget and they may be leaving a current provider or agency. They come to you and you're able to make them happy because you saw something Either landing pages suck or ad graphics are horrible or someone's not paying attention to the data. Like, where do you find the levers to make a firm really happy? And it can't be just spend more money, right, because everybody that's the answer too many agencies give you should have just spent more money. That can't be the only answer, right.
Speaker 1:I've got two good ones More recently. We so taking a step back. When we initially engage with a new client, we actually start with an assessment, so we're not going right into like, hey, let's manage your campaigns for a year. We want to look under the hood first to understand how things have been set up, what the targeting looks like, what the messaging, what the landing pages look like, all that good stuff. And so this PI firm hired us for the assessment and we got on a call with them and basically showed them 40% of your budget is being spent outside of your target market of Baltimore. Perfect, 40%, yeah. And it had been that way for three years. And we told them that and their heads exploded. They were like, can you quantify how much that was? And it was hundreds of thousands of dollars just wasted on irrelevant traffic that they couldn't help. And so, needless to say, we ended up winning that client and we reallocated all that budget right back into Baltimore and their leading case volume just took off.
Speaker 1:So that's like a very like like no brainer type of thing Like but we catch this stuff all the time. The other one's another kind of like how did that happen? Large workers' compensation firm in a major metro. Their budget at the time was about $2, $2.5 million a year. They were spending all this budget on TV radio. They had a pretty decent digital budget as well. We basically figured out that pretty quickly. They weren't picking up the phone past 5 pm. It was going to an answering machine and no one was checking that answering machine.
Speaker 1:So, it's like it's no brainer stuff and obviously they got an answering service. They started prioritizing their intake more and the firm is killing it now. But it's like going back to what we said about shiny object syndrome and feeling like, oh, I need to grow. Yeah, that's fine If you want to keep growing and growing, but you also need to, like, take a step back, look at all the different levers and things that are happening in your company and making sure that there's not just blatant inefficiency happening.
Speaker 1:Intake is the biggest area of optimization for most firms Most firms if they want more cases. You don't need to spend another million dollars, just optimize your intake. If you can increase your conversion rate 20%, that's going to yield hundreds of thousands, millions of dollars.
Speaker 2:Right, you don't need more calls. Exactly, necessarily, right, exactly right. Tell us a little bit about your background, because you come from big companies and found your way to legal, so talk to me about that path.
Speaker 1:Sure. So I've always been in the marketing advertising field. My last big agency was eBay's marketing solutions division, where I worked with the company's largest clients Kate Spade, calvin Klein and I was there for four years three, four years.
Speaker 2:I was there when I was very young or you know I was in my
Speaker 1:mid to late twenties, when I was there and was in charge of a team of like 15, 20 people working 80 hours a week. It was like fun but incredibly stressful, and I just got to a point where I was like this isn't for me. I felt like a small cog in a big wheel and even though I was managing multi-million dollar budgets, in terms of the overall impact of the organizations I was working with, it still was like a drop in the bucket. There were so many other things that these companies were doing, and so I did a bit of a 180 back in 2018. And so I did a bit of a 180 back in 2018 and I ended up becoming a CMO for a large injury law firm in Philadelphia, and that enabled me to get in at a company where I could have an actual impact and see the fruits of my labor, if you will, and I was their first ever marketing hire.
Speaker 2:I you know basically Were you like in-house physically in whatever building Cool.
Speaker 1:Physically in-house. I had to learn about the intake department. I needed to, you know, manage all the TV budget. I needed to help revamp the website Like I touched everything. And I was there, you know, in a full-time CMO capacity for three years. I'm actually still involved with that firm in an advisory board member capacity now, but, yeah, it's an unconventional career path right Cause I could have stayed in the fortune 500 realm and probably done just fine there, but it was too. It was too corporate for me.
Speaker 1:I like this way, more I get to work with, a lot I get to have a more positive impact on a lot more companies now and I just feel like legal is just such a great industry to be in.
Speaker 2:Well, and you get to run your own business and you get to work only with people that you like working with. So there's all that. How big is the team? Do you have a team behind you, or is this mostly you?
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, we have a team of seven. Everyone is based in the U? S and, yeah, we've been doing this now for six years, which is hard to believe.
Speaker 2:Very good. Well, Bo, why don't you tell people where they can go, what website? I don't know if you have any offers or consults I didn't go and look at any of that but feel free to let people know.
Speaker 1:Yeah, sure. So if people are interested in speaking with me, I would encourage them to go to our website, which is legalparadoppccom, and my account link is available there so you can book time with me. Link is available there so you can book time with me and, as I mentioned before, the main offer is a paid assessment. That's really like our starting point offer or foot in the door offer, and that basically entails us looking under the hood, making recommendations for ways to generate more cases from your digital advertising campaign. So if that's of interest to any of your listeners, I would encourage them to go on the site and book a call with me.
Speaker 2:Well, thanks, and this has been a very fun interview because again, I came into it thinking a little bit different. Your space is actually narrower, which is really cool, and I think it's really important for the solo and small firm market to be in rooms or to listen to podcasts, to listen and hear really how sophisticated some of these big firms are and they're not all sophisticated. Some of them are big dumb spenders, but most of them are pretty sophisticated about how they're tracking this, because there's a lot we can get from it. And again, at the end of the day, there's cases for everybody and everybody has their space, and what I think we're good at is helping people figure out.
Speaker 2:What you were talking about, beau, was like what do you really like doing? What are you good at? All right, how can we optimize for that? And again, most of our firms are hyperlocal. Like we tell our marketing team here just get me another couple percentage points of all the car accidents that actually happened five miles from my office, we'll be good. Give me all those cases, we'll be good. It's been a really fun afternoon talking to you, bo.
Speaker 3:And again.
Speaker 2:People can go to Pareto PPC that's P-A-R-E-T-O-P-Ccom, and check out the company. Thank you so much, Ben.
Speaker 3:Thanks, man. If you like what you just heard on the Renegade Lawyer podcast, you may be a perfect fit for the great legal marketing community. Law firm owners across the country are becoming heroes to their families and icons in their communities. They've gone renegade by rejecting the status quo of the legal profession so they can deliver high quality legal services coupled with top notch customer service to clients who pay, stay and refer. Learn more at great legal marketing dot com. That's great legal marketing dot com.
