Mastermind Hacks & The $100k Assistant: Secrets to Scaling Your Law Firm | Ethen Ostroff

Lawyers, listen up! Want to explode your firm's presence online just like Ethen Ostroff, the TikTok legal star?
Ethen, a lawyer who's a social media whiz, will share how he used TikTok to build a massive following of over 200,000 people looking for legal advice. 
He'll reveal his secret sauce for creating engaging content that keeps viewers entertained and informed, even when explaining complex legal stuff.
But this episode goes beyond social media! We'll also dive into building your dream legal team for the digital age. Learn how Ethen Ostroff Law turns social media buzz into happy clients with a smooth system for handling leads.
Plus, he also shared about tips for connecting with your audience and managing a virtual assistant team to free up your time. It's all about creating a winning combination of authenticity and efficiency, and completely changing how you attract new clients.
Thinking bigger? We'll also chat about the power of teamwork. Ethen will explain how he works with his team members to achieve amazing results.
Want to take your practice to the next level? There's a sneak peek at the Future Firm Mastermind program designed to help legal leaders revolutionize their practices with delegation, marketing, and systematization.
This episode is packed with valuable insights for any lawyer who wants to attract more clients, work smarter, and finally achieve that work-life balance you deserve.

Want to learn more? Ethen invites you to keep the conversation going beyond the podcast! Check out the Future Firm Mastermind and connect with him directly for more information on how they can help your team become the dream team! Reach out via email: eo@attorneyassistant.com or eo@ethenostrofflaw.com

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Brian Glass is a nationally recognized personal injury lawyer. He is passionate about living a life of his own design and looking for answers to solutions outside of the legal field. This podcast is his effort to share that passion with others.

Want to connect with Brian?

Follow Brian on Instagram: @thebrianglass
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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

And we have just cracked over a thousand Google reviews. We have a 4.9 rating and we don't even settle people's cases for that.

Speaker 2: 0:07

Hold up? Did Ethan just say he's got a 4.9 Google rating across a thousand reviews and he isn't even settling people's cases for him? How does that work? Listen, there's a million different ways to run a law firm, and Ethan Ostroff has mastered the art of generating leads on the internet, and especially by social media, and then crafting a system that pairs those leads with the right lawyer in the right subject matter in that person's state, and today he's going to tell you the story of how he does it.

Speaker 2: 0:36

This isn't right for everybody and I suspect this episode might even be controversial among the do good work and the cases will come crowd, but I want to let you know that there are a million different ways to operate a successful law firm and this is one of them. So, guys, welcome back to the show. Today. I've got a great guest for you, if you have any interest at all in growing your social media following or finding a new mastermind group to be a part of. Ethan Ostroff, who's the owner and CEO of both Ethan Ostroff Law and Attorney Assistant, which is a virtual staffing company for law firms. Ethan, welcome to the show.

Speaker 1: 1:21

Thanks so much for having me, Brian. I appreciate it. I'm excited to be here.

Speaker 2: 1:23

Man, I'm excited to have you here. You know, you first kind of came into my awareness on TikTok, of all places. And look, you have over 200,000 followers on TikTok. How did you get started there and what have you done that most other lawyers are still, you know, fumbling around having 200 views on their videos with Sure, you know, fumbling around having 200 views on their videos with Sure.

Speaker 1: 1:55

So I was the third lawyer in the country on TikTok I got. My first post was done in October 2019. And I kind of saw this very bizarre paradigm. First off, gary Vee was pushing people to the platform and said, hey, right, now's the time. If you want to jump on something where there's organic reach, give it a try. And I've always kind of been one that's been not scared to be the first to do something. I don't care about being judged to be wrong, so I am fine trying something and being wrong. And it was like I passed the bar a year before that and I always saw this opportunity with social media to really, you know, scale your service in a way that could go viral.

Speaker 1: 2:41

And I was kind of observing around TikTok for maybe two, three weeks and I saw two lawyers on there. One they are the lawyer that's their, you know at on there. It's Anthony Barbuto, who I had become friendly with after going, you know, viral myself on there and I saw Anthony's content and it was sort of like G-rated, fun, friendly, kid-oriented content. And then there was the GA lawyer, who also I saw just a slight like kind of playful content type. It wasn't really like straight to the jugular what to do if you're in this situation. One, two, three the jugular, what to do if you're in this situation one, two, three, kind of like direct legal marketing. That was more professional, I guess is the way I would describe it. So I saw this opening to be the first to just be like if you are an insert here, do these three or four things. If you're in a car accident, pull over, call the police, do this.

Speaker 1: 3:41

At that point that content wasn't on the internet yet. The police do this. At that point that content wasn't on the internet yet. So I just kind of went for very direct legal marketing. The first video I put out it had like 250,000 views. And then my second video, same thing. My third video had over a million views and I was kind of hooked. And you know from there the organic following really grew in that first six months and since then I actually haven't grown that much, kind of stayed steady at that number. And you know I'm not the best content creator on TikTok by any means, I'm a little bit direct and boring. You know I'm cool with my brand, but you know there are way more entertaining warriors that have come since then. But you know, my follower count was because I was willing to try something that was you know somewhere. I was going to definitely be judged and I was definitely made fun of a lot by my peers for doing it.

Speaker 2: 4:38

So that first mover advantage. I'm curious what was that video that got a million views about?

Speaker 1: 4:43

I'm curious, what was that video that got a million views about? So I found pretty quickly that, even though I didn't practice in criminal defense or criminal procedure type of work, it was what to do if you are stopped by the police and it basically is trying to educate people on you know what to do to avoid a search or seizure. I knew a lot about stopping frisk law. I knew a lot about you know what questions you ask. You say am I under arrest? If the answer is no, you say am I free to leave? If the answer is yes, you walk away slowly.

Speaker 1: 5:19

And I shot that actually right in the middle of Broad Street in Philadelphia. So the background was pretty unique. I was wearing like a suit and I don't really wear a suit in my content these days, but that's just kind of my, you know, being authentic style. But I think it was a combination of the content being, you know, a little controversial because in the comments they were, you know, a back and forth happening about how this doesn't work for everybody, which is fair, but by law, if you ask those questions, you should be able to leave in theory from that interaction. So it was like a criminal defense topic that went over viral and then some of my other personal injury stuff always did well, but I found that those topics actually are the ones that trended the most at that time.

Speaker 2: 6:08

It's really interesting because the ones that you have pinned to the top of the page, at least right now, are like what to do after a trip and fall, and you have some reenactment of some guy tripping over a crack in his driveway and it has like two and a half million views, million views, um, and, and to me like the only way to um to go viral is to get people to argue with each other in the comments. At least that's what I've found, um. And did you have you put any money or anything behind those that? Or are there seriously two and a half million people looking at videos of some of the five steps to take after you trip on somebody's driveway?

Speaker 1: 6:42

Yeah, I mean shockingly. You know I've never paid to boost anything on TikTok. Recently I started running ads on TikTok that you'll see maybe in some of my most recent content it'll have a call to action of click below those ones I am paying for for lead gen purposes. So those are kind of a little artificial watch counts. But I've never boosted a post before, especially when I, when I first started on TikTok, you couldn't even boost posts. So you know those are all organic, real people.

Speaker 2: 7:16

And then, speaking of not being afraid to do things differently and do things in a way that maybe the traditional legal bar might say some negative things about your firm, I think you're the only lawyer there and you have, I think you said, 35 intake staff members, so tell me about how you've set up Ethan Ostrov Law.

Speaker 1: 7:33

Sure. So, being an early adopter on social media, I was also an early adopter in learning myself how to run TikTok and Facebook ads. At one period of time back in late 2020, I was the only personal injury lawyer in the country running TikTok ads myself. I learned how to do it. They stopped allowing personal injury ads for a year or two. I just recently started getting actually approved in my ads on there, so I'm starting to tap back into that in my ads on there. So I'm starting to tap back into that.

Speaker 1: 8:08

But the infrastructure of my firm is very heavy on lead generation, where I saw a really big opportunity. Back when I was at my dad's firm. When I first started on TikTok, I was tipped off about a CPAP recall back in June 2020 from a contact at a big firm and I tested some lead gen and I literally shot it on my phone in a shirt I wear to sleep literally pajamas. I was like off centered. It was not shot well by any means, but it was authentic and it basically said if you were a loved one, have a Phillips CPAP machine and have insert here. Issue lung cancer, you know, mouth cancer, any of these other issues? Click below for a free case evaluation and it generated sub $5. Leads across multiple platforms.

Speaker 1: 8:57

So I saw this lead generation scale possibility and in a month we generated 650 leads, which at my dad's firm was kind of unheard of, but they didn't have the intake staff to deal with them. So we referred them all out unsigned, unvetted, and the firm we sent them to converted on less than 3% of those leads and I knew that it could be better. I knew that those leads were good, those were real people. I knew we could be converting at bare minimum, at 15%, on those. So I decided to leave and start running my own social media content ads.

Speaker 1: 9:37

I did everything myself for the first 15 months, literally hit publish myself, and now we generate between two to 3000 leads a month. We sign between two to 300 mass tort and single event cases per month, all on referral fee basis or we're starting now to keep some work in very specific case types. So you know the infrastructure. Kind of like you said, brian, I have myself a paralegal that oversees my intake department. I oversee the paralegal if she can't get somebody off a ledge when she's speaking to a client that got escalated A marketing director, a business partner who's a data person who oversees our sort of coding and operations department, our COO, and then it's all those VAs like you were talking about.

Speaker 2: 10:26

There's so much that I that I want to go in there. I mean I, I think first, like this whole mass torts world fascinates me. Um, because there's clearly a whole lot of money in it, right, because you can't have conferences like mass torts made perfect and all of the parties out in Vegas without the ton of money. I know your, your know, your staffing company had a booth out there and you were a sponsor. But I think for small firm owners like me, there's not really a one-on-one on what do you look for in these cases, how do you vet them? And then to your point about well, they were converting only three and it should have been 15. I guess I'm curious initially, like how did you get to that decision where you looked at that and said these guys should have converted five times as many cases into clients as they did? Where did that information come from?

Speaker 1: 11:20

I just looked into the leads themselves and we were seeing on the surface leads I want. So the way you run the lead gen, brian, there's basically on Facebook or TikTok, wherever you run it. Lead gen is where it says learn more in the bottom right corner or contact us, you click that. Then those social media platforms pre-populate first name, last name, phone number, email and then you can add a question like tell me about your situation. So really that's the only question they need to answer. And in the tell me about your situation, uh, they were saying the injuries we want.

Speaker 1: 11:59

You know, now at my firm we have a lead 1%. We've built out where if in the description it says an injury or fact pattern, I want that's a 100. If it says nothing to contradict, it's a. You know sometimes they hit submit too quick or whatever that's a 75. If it says something in the description that I don't want, like I rear-ended someone else, that's a 33. And then a zero is oral confirmation of conflict. So I was seeing hundreds consistently and knowing these were the right leads and we were just getting a feedback loop. That was just not what it should have been. So when we left, or when I left my dad's firm to start my own. We started running some of these same campaigns in CPAP and Hair Relaxer and talcum powder and all these major mass torts and we were converting people at a 15% to 20% clip. So I knew I was onto something there and now our data kind of shows it. I knew I was onto something there.

Speaker 2: 13:01

And now our data kind of shows it. And now you've built out this team of 30 to 35 people looks like largely in the Philippines. Tell me about how you're finding employees over there and then how you train and manage them, because, again, many of the lawyers who have been told about VAs, we're like we don't even know how to manage the people who are physically sitting on our own office very well, and so managing somebody who's halfway across the world is a whole nother bridge that many of us don't want to cross. So how are you managing a whole team of 30 plus people overseas?

Speaker 1: 13:35

Great question. So I'll kind of go into two parts One how do we find them? Two how do we onboard and train them? Okay, part one how do we find them? As crazy as this is to say, I started with one really, really good one at my dad's firm who was from a city called Bacolod City, which is now where we have almost 95% of our Filipino base, and from that one person the tree branches are now over a thousand people.

Speaker 1: 14:05

So, our best person led to great referrals on great referrals, on great referrals, and we vet for the things we found in that first person. We hire on character, work ethic and then we train skill. Hire on character, work ethic and then we train skill. So at my firm, something that I taught in the first course of my mastermind, which is from what I've heard about a lot of masterminds I don't know exactly how you run yours, brian, but a lot of masterminds are more like either practice area specific or firm presentation focused. Hey, here's my guts finance, infrastructure, what can I learn to improve? And then everyone kind of does it that way. Ours is a little more problem focused. So it's basically like you know, call it, every two weeks we have what we call a legal pioneer round table where we talk about the two courses we released those previous two weeks covering specific problem solution content. So, like, the first one we did was how to delegate to dominate, how to delegate your processes to dominate, and that kind of infrastructure is required to delegate the work and know what needs to be delegated.

Speaker 1: 15:26

But at my own firm we have an extensive onboarding process where we actually have like an exam that they have to pass. We have refresher quizzes every single week. We've built through our best VAs a quality assurance department where they spot check random calls, put people through a rubric. If they fail, that can be as much as a problem as a warning, where three warnings is a fire. We also have hired I hired basically the person who worked at T-Mobile in the Filipino division as their onboarder and trainer to build out our onboarding and training documents and we actually got a second person to work under her. So we have extensive documentation on the how, and then we have sort of like guide rails on the keeping the quality high in an ongoing basis.

Speaker 1: 16:22

So I guess, like to onboard people, you have to know what it is you want to delegate. You have to know what are those ongoing things that are a problem for you. Maybe it's reception and transferring calls. Maybe you're answering 60% of incoming calls. Maybe it's following up with your leads more. If you follow up with your leads less, if you follow up with your leads less than two or three times, you are definitely wasting your marketing dollars. So documenting the ongoing things, then creating either looms or step-by-step documentation on how to do that thing and starting with one ongoing process, that's a pain in your team's ass at a time, and then you have your ongoing training documents getting built, if that makes sense.

Speaker 2: 17:09

It's funny because I I just gave a presentation last Friday at the Virginia trial lawyers annual convention where I said that basically the same thing like start with one system. You okay Most law firms. You have no systems. You have a paralegal who runs the cases, you have a lawyer that runs the cases. If either of them get hit by the bus, like nobody knows what each other does right, and so just pick one system and start with it and before you spend another dollar on any marketing, fix your intake system because you are missing so many calls leaking through the bucket. But for me, I'll tell you like solving a lot of these systems has been through trial and error, and either you have found shortcuts around that or you are really good at trial and error that in five years you've solved for all this and built a team as large as you have. So which is it for you? Do you have the secret mastermind somewhere that you go off and learn things from, or are you just a really quick learner, implementer and system changer?

Speaker 1: 18:07

So, brian, not to sound obnoxious, I started my firm in January 2022. So our internal-.

Speaker 2: 18:13

Not even five years.

Speaker 1: 18:16

It was our internal team across my staffing company. My firm stateside, plus VAs, is about 70 people now are staffed on projects. We work with about 135 firms across the country about 460-ish internal plus external. So that's really like 390 are on other firms. So I'm literally in the business of delegating, like I. I want to say like this sounds kind of weird. I think I'm lazy, I think I like have this like passion to get out of shit. I hate doing, I like refuse to do things. I know I shouldn't do.

Speaker 2: 18:57

I think everybody has that passion, it's just not not. Everybody has the um, has has the balls to get out of the things that they don't want to do.

Speaker 1: 19:08

Yeah, I mean, at a certain point you know, when you start a firm you are going to be the one that cares about it the most. Your name is on the billboard. You're going to be the one that gets gives 10 out of 10 work product on everything you touch. You're going to be the one that gives 10 out of 10 work product on everything you touch. You're going to be the one with the highest conversion rate. In my opinion, if I could have 35 people close at a 50% opportunity close rate as opposed to me at 90%.

Speaker 1: 19:35

That's way more people that are really, really good at it, and at this point, some of my intakers are better than me at closing people. So you know I'm very comfortable with eight out of 10 being done. Done is better than perfect and you know, when you are trying to represent a million people, like you know, eight out of 10 is still done, and we have just cracked over a thousand Google reviews. We have a 4.9 rating and we don't even settle people's cases for them. People just want help and want their questions answered and we're really, really good at our our maximizing our time. Basically.

Speaker 2: 20:15

What so? And I heard you say you don't even settle people's cases for them because you're doing these co-counsel relationships. Yep, how much of your time is spent, or was spent, trying to find the lawyer in Wyoming who handles a DUI case, for instance? Because you must get those calls.

Speaker 1: 20:36

What does the building of your referral?

Speaker 1: 20:37

Rolodex look like so early on. I can't say exactly where I got it from, but I had a really great friend at a really big firm sending out cases in every state and I, you know, bought a six pack for him and said, hey, come on over, come on over, we'll spend as much time as we need. And we basically mapped out the best for every practice area we ever would realistically need in a first, second and third role. In every single state run a B2B to law firm business. There are times where I refer someone a case and they become a staffing company client. Or you know, my staffing company clients are that extra firm that I was looking for and I kind of am just constantly every day building that Rolodex where it started with a very good base.

Speaker 2: 21:38

And.

Speaker 1: 21:38

I also use a tool called the Litify Referral Network, which has firms already on it pretty much in every state. So that gives me another layer of research if that first list isn't good. But I have a full department on finding these firms, vetting them, getting agreements in email confirmed and that's know that's. That's something that we're. Our business model is sending firm firms other cases. So you know that's something we just spend a lot of time on every day.

Speaker 2: 23:05

So I'm a huge believer that you can't have the big vision and the big goals that you do, which is to represent or co-counsel on over a million cases, without having a great number two. So who is your number two and how did you find him or her?

Speaker 1: 23:18

So it's a good point. So I started my business. The first person I started with is my brother-in-law. James is way more patient and brilliant than me. Just from a pure you know book smart. I passed the bar by zero points Like I'm not bragging about that Like I made it here. I'm grateful I made it here and I also don't know how I made it here. Like James was like a triple major at Pitt, finished first at Pitt like just like a brilliant, like mind and he's the COO of both my staff and company and the firm and basically it started as he did everything. I just didn't feel like doing. I was starting the delegation path with james but, um, we run eos in both of our businesses and, uh, james is our EOS integrator and I'm the visionary.

Speaker 1: 24:10

And for me to be in my sweet spot, which is doing stuff like this and building relationships and coming up with the next big concept. Most of the time it's James that helps facilitate the troops and making sure that it happens, and I just I'm a little ADD like it's hard for me to focus on any one thing, and he's really good at digging into details on that one given thing. So we kind of have a nice balance.

Speaker 2: 24:40

That's awesome. Let's talk mastermind groups. So you were running a brand new or a couple months old mastermind, and you're right, there are plenty of different structures for how you run these groups. Yours sounds a little bit more like a coaching group with a community component to it, but I'll let you tell us about the structure of your group.

Speaker 1: 24:59

Sure, Absolutely so. It's called the Future Firm Mastermind. People who join are legal pioneers. The vision is for CEOs and COOs of law firms. I have made a few exceptions for people who sort of run a pod within a pod. You know, sometimes there's really big firms and there's an entrepreneurial lawyer to me, Exactly. So I've made a few exceptions on those circumstances, but only for people that I like personally, have vetted and said yes to.

Speaker 1: 25:43

That's interesting, this to be valuable for the person who can't afford the bigger group yet all the way up to the firm that you know is in layer one of the biggest group and, you know, have the ability for people to access myself and those bigger firms that have already executed on some of these things through our community. But the vision was keeping the first hundred members at 23 per month. Then it'll jump up to a hundred per month on member 101. The vision is to run it sort of like a nonprofit. I view this as an opportunity for me to give what I've kind of learned through these first few years to, you know, my community members who are probably faced with a lot of the same challenges. I kind of prioritize it based on courses. So every week a course is released on a subject that is prioritized, based on where I think people should start to. You know where it gets more and more sort of from 101 to 102 sophisticated, so, like first week, was delegate to dominate, which is basically how to name.

Speaker 1: 26:57

Uh, you do, you do. You are you familiar with EOS, Brian?

Speaker 2: 27:00

We run. We run both companies on EOS. Yeah, Great.

Speaker 1: 27:03

So you know, eos, uh, I found from the hierarchy chart was a little overbroad.

Speaker 1: 27:11

I found it a little limiting, and so my forever task map which I'm happy to give to your mastermind if you want an example of a blank one, was my iteration on how to take the hierarchy chart, which creates the high level parts of the departments and then it kind of creates the ongoing tasks within those departments and it allows for you to name the owner of that ongoing task, the manager and the doer.

Speaker 1: 27:42

Because what I find in EOS firms is there's a lot of finger pointing on who is responsible for a single given ongoing task, and this kind of solved that for my own companies, where the owner of the task is if it breaks, you fix it. The manager is making sure it happens day to day and the doer is the one that actually is doing it. Sometimes when you're smaller, that's the same person in all three, or maybe manager and doer. But the goal of this is to basically see who sits in what task seats, to create job roles for the things that are outside of the matter management, like paralegal case manager, like what else do they do so that you can like create a job description and know where your holes are and what you need to hire for.

Speaker 1: 28:32

Essentially so like that was the first course. Then we did like organic and paid marketing, then we did like AI for lawyers and Zapier 101. I find Zapier to be one of the most important tools at my firm and I have a full-time person who just does integration work in Zapier 101. I find Zapier to be one of the most important tools at my firm and I have a full-time person who just does integration work in Zapier and people don't even know what it is. So you know, that's what critical to getting to intake, which is one of our next few weeks uh, categories of like. You should never, in my opinion, never, ever, ever, should you manually create an intake in your system. It's impossible to track attribution, it's impossible to see who did it in a way that you can track and monetize for future marketing campaigns. So, like, if you want to get to cost per case and you manually create intakes in your system, it's exponentially harder to get there because the source tracking gets really difficult.

Speaker 1: 29:31

So Zapier is what we use to do it, and I kind of like walked through an example of like CallRail, for example, like have you ever heard of CallRail Brian?

Speaker 2: 29:40

Yep, yep, we use CallRail.

Speaker 1: 29:42

So CallRail has a Zapier trigger where when a new call gets created in CallRail, it can activate a trigger to create a new intake right away. So instead of like going and manually creating all your call-in intakes in your system, now every single direction, they can be automatically created in your system and it can say oh wow, they called the. You know Google ad campaign number for premises liability. They called them. You know Google ad campaign number for premises liability they called them you know, click to call on the website.

Speaker 1: 30:14

They called this, they called that, and you can even grab the specific Google click ID that tells you where that came from. So you know, basically, I walked through how to do it a few examples and I gave them. Like you know, how to learn Zapier 101 type materials, essentially.

Speaker 2: 30:32

This is an incredibly valuable course, or set of courses, that you're putting out, and you're putting these out once a week. Yeah, so we do that sounds like a lot of work.

Speaker 1: 30:43

Um one course a week. It's not all on me, though, vision is. I put out courses. My director of marketing has put out courses my COO has. This week's is how to run EOS at our staffing company, which is really more related to like a flat fee Cause it's not just PI firms in my mastermind, it's more like flat fee or hourly that's what that more applies to and then EOS in your law firm. So we put out two courses on that, and then EOS in your law firm.

Speaker 1: 31:09

So we put out two courses on that, and then James will lead that round table. The vision, though, is to have people in the mastermind start doing the courses, which will support them with, like, the editing and the you know, the PowerPoint and whatever, but what we just need, you know, from them is just shooting the content, so I'd like to like pick people in the group that I know are, like, really phenomenal at specific problems they could help us all solve, and, like you know, it might be running a focus group, it might be, you know, adding a specific AI thing for summarizing medical records. I don't know whatever somebody might be really good at. We're going to be enabling people in the group to start to serve, like serve as a round table leader.

Speaker 2: 32:00

I think that's, that's brilliant, that really is. You know, the true mastermind is not the guru telling you here's how to do it, it's having everybody else in the group who's contributing and really teaching the thing that they are best at. You know, the thing that I said to you when you launched this um, this low cost mastermind was like good luck, because everything that I've ever signed up for that was free or low cost. I did three of them and then I stopped going. Right Because, in my view, like when, at least for Brian, when I pay, I pay attention have. Right Because, in my view, like when, at least for Brian, when I pay, I pay attention have. Have you made it far enough down the pipeline where you're starting to see people fall off, or not?

Speaker 1: 32:35

It's a good question. So we have had zero people cancel. We have thirty nine paying members already. We're at twenty three bucks a month, so it's not free. My vision was a premium Netflix account for the first group and then, when the value is there enough for 100 members, we're going to raise it to $100 because we want to host in-person events and we can't do that on $2,300 a month.

Speaker 1: 33:01

It's just not enough so you know, our vision is to cover our hard costs and host in-person events. You know, for me, brian, like from a pure business perspective, like is there like a ultimate goal? I will. I don't let vendors into it. Like technically I'm the only vendor in there because I also own a staffing company, the only vendor in there Cause I also own a staffing company. Like, for me, giving away this value to me furthers my mission of helping more people because if they get better and their representation gets better, I'm helping someone through that process. So, from a like pure, charitable, charitable lens, like I feel good it fills up my cup doing this work.

Speaker 1: 33:52

And like, let's say, somebody is growing their firm. It's great for my business to be in with really smart people growing their firms, because when they inevitably need to hire people, I'd love to be a go-to for them and I don't sell anything to anybody. So you know, from a vision perspective, my bigger sale is I have a staffing company and if they ever want that help, I'm happy to give them that.

Speaker 2: 34:20

Mm-hmm, I love it. And this was born for you out of frustration with joining other masterminds where you felt like you were paying. You found out maybe some other people were paying less or not paying and you really jumped again, from starting in January of 22, jumped straight into the fire right High-cost mastermind straight in. So tell me about that straight in.

Speaker 1: 34:47

So tell me about that. Yeah, so I I'm not going to name the mastermind, cause I don't be like that, it's just not my style. Um, I joined a mastermind that, uh, I did like, uh, I found there. There was basically like monthly meetings and then an annual get together. Um, I found that I was in a group that was the right from a size perspective group for me. I guess, like I personally was sort of a square peg in a round hole because I'm just doing very different stuff with my business model. Like I refer out my cases. It might not At that point I didn't know for sure it was in my refer out my cases.

Speaker 1: 35:27

It might not. It at that point I didn't know for sure. It was in my vision to handle cases. It is now, but at that point I wasn't quite sure and you know I couldn't, like I couldn't give a firm owner value in stuff that was case handling related, because I don't like to talk about stuff I'm not like doing and know confidently. But where I was, where the focus kept coming back to was marketing related topics and we focused a lot on social media. We focused a lot on stuff that, like, not to sound obnoxious, I just didn't need that help from that group on those things.

Speaker 1: 36:08

And I felt like I was actually being brought like sort of on the stage of the groups and like I just it felt kind of weird to be paying to be put on the stage to teach on things that I wasn't getting as much. I know that the value you get from these masterminds is the networking. That's number one and I think it can be both. I think it can be content and networking. And like I just saw like and when there was sort of like a vibe like hey, don't talk about the deal I'm giving you. And afterwards, when I wasn't in it, I found out the deal was way worse than other people got and that kind of just pissed me off. So you know.

Speaker 2: 36:54

I mean it's, it's just like lawyering right. Credibility is huge, and so once you, once you have lost a little bit of member trust, then you know why would anybody stick around and believe anything else that you have to say about your membership? You know to your point about content and networking. I have found that it's not necessarily networking that is beneficial to me, for the masterminds that I've been in, it's the people that are three to five years ahead of me who know questions or know the answers to questions that I don't even know Right. So you know, the example that I usually give is I'm in a mastermind called GoBundance. It's an entrepreneurial all men mastermind.

Speaker 2: 37:36

There's a lot of real estate guys in there, and the first local meetup that I went to, I mentioned to somebody we just bought a short-term property at the beach and I found out about cost segregation and I didn't pay taxes in 2022.

Speaker 2: 37:48

It was wild and I never would have known to even ask that question had I not been in a room with people that were several years ahead of me. And so that to me, it's not that I'm going to find somebody in Philadelphia or Atlanta that I can refer a case to, it's being around people that are running bigger, faster, stronger practices than you are, and it doesn't even have to be revenue-wise. It can be the way that you were better at social media than some of the other players and I suspect had you had an operational in the cases type of practice at the time, you could have learned a lot about that, but maybe you just didn't find in that room what you were looking for and what you were trying to learn. So I'm curious for you, as we sit here in spring of 2024, what is the deficit that you're trying to solve for in your own businesses right now?

Speaker 1: 38:39

Yeah, so uh, I need to generate more consistent cash flow in my firm. My staffing company is doing excellent and it's very nice that I can prop up two businesses with one, and it's not healthy for my businesses to be doing that indefinitely. So I'm picking cash flow generating case types that will pay me much faster than mass torts that will pay me much faster than mass torts.

Speaker 1: 39:09

So issue number one for me is cracking the code on generating faster cashflow case types that ideally I can generate, intake, sign and handle so I can own the whole process. That's sort of our biggest goal and I have a lot to learn in some of the practice areas we're eyeing up handling. But you know that's in my firm Number one. We got it. You know we got to pay the bills on our own and stand alone.

Speaker 2: 39:38

Have you thought about looking outside of contingency fee work for that?

Speaker 1: 39:42

I definitely have thought about it. I know that I can generate wills, trust and estates work. I have referred out like 60 wills in the last two months.

Speaker 2: 39:59

And like, go ahead, like the smallest case that I sign up tomorrow won't pay me for six months, right, and so unless you're getting kind of these late stage auto accident trial referrals, that's probably not fast cash flow but in terms of like hour per dollar arbitrage that you could turn on tomorrow, that would look something like bringing on a trust and estates lawyer who is great lawyer but garbage at generating business and then letting you do all of your social media. Like if I were running a uh an estate planning practice. Everything would be geared at the 35 to 55 year old um child of the 70 to 80 year old person. It would all be about asset protection and how do we get every? How do I get? How do I talk to my mom and dad about coming in and doing their estate plan? And that could be cash flow that you could turn on faster than okay. Again, if I generate an auto accident case, it might be six or nine or 12 months before it pays me and even that's going to be a relatively small case.

Speaker 1: 41:00

Correct, correct. I think that that is something I have explored. I recently just started referring that work out from the same leads. For example, I have someone on the phone who's dying of cancer and they don't have a will. That's a very real thing we deal with all the time, and even if we give them a template $300, something we could service that same client.

Speaker 1: 41:22

That is a free lead essentially for wills, trusts and estates. So multiple monetizing of the same lead, that is a free lead essentially for wills, trust and estates. So you know, multiple monetizing of the same lead that we're generating in pi primarily is something that we you know, definitely have dug into um which I haven't quite figured it out perfectly yet.

Speaker 2: 41:39

So yeah, and and and. Then you I mean you have a huge list, right? Because just because of the sheer volume of intakes that you've done, and so then turning on newsletter or e-newsletter marketing to those people about a different problem that you know, that I don't know, 7% of them have seems like another relatively easy way to turn on floodgates.

Speaker 1: 42:03

A hundred percent. Yeah, we're totally aligned on the same page.

Speaker 2: 42:07

Yeah, what is your next? Um? Social media channel, uh, or app that you're studying and thinking about deploying into so the mastermind that we just deployed is on a platform called school school.

Speaker 1: 42:23

I am very bullish on from a uh uh a blend of monthly recurring revenue billing model plus social media, plus course creation, plus community generation. I think it solves the problem that I think is missing from like what is your hub of where you send your clients from? Like, what is your hub of where you send your clients? You know, there's my wife just actually started a psychology practice and she's using a program called circle to release a course building. Circle is a little bit more like specific to a website, whereas I think that school is actually more a social media platform than is Circle. Circle is more of like a course platform.

Speaker 1: 43:09

Basically, I think that school has a lot of potential and is worth, you know, popping into a free community and starting to build your follower base over there, because there's a parabolic growing audience on that platform and that's usually the indicator I look for. In terms of other stuff, I think LinkedIn is a really great place if you run a B2B business. You know, talking about things that you care about, know about, feel vulnerable about, just be yourself, you know. I think that you do a really good job of that, brian. Just hey, this is something I want on this week.

Speaker 1: 43:45

this is something I got my ass kicked on this week and like a combination of those two is healthy. I probably am two out of three. This is how I suck, or this is what I screwed up. Then I am. You know I won here. I don't really like talking about my wins that much. I'm a little. Yeah, I get uncomfortable doing that.

Speaker 2: 44:06

I just, um, my EA who's in the Philippines, by the way um, he just asked me to to edit or write a bio for guesting on other people's podcasts and I hate doing it because you, you know, you feel like you have to talk about it and it's very hard to write a bio in a kind of self-deprecating way that doesn't sound like it's bragging. So I, you know I did it, but I, I hate talking about wins.

Speaker 1: 44:30

Yeah, I hate talking about it. It's tough.

Speaker 2: 44:34

Well cool, ethan, I I really appreciate you coming on today. Tell people where they can find out more about you and more about your mastermind.

Speaker 1: 44:41

Sure. So what I will do is I will provide my email that you can put, maybe like in the comments or some description on this, but it is EO at attorneyassistantcom or EO at EthanOstroffLawcom. I'll also give you the link to the mastermind. Twenty three bucks a month yeah, that's legit. Twenty three bucks a month. $23 a month yeah, that's legit. $23 a month, that's it.

Speaker 1: 45:10

If you are, we still have 61 spots left. At that rate, then it's bumping up to a hundred bucks a month where we, you know, are solving problems and would love for any law firm owner to join. You know, in terms of staffing side of things, go check out our website at Attorney Assistant, where we can supply full-time, exclusive virtual assistants at your firm to do stuff that your team hates doing and shouldn't really be doing anyway. And it'll be modeled basically after how I scaled up my own firm, whether that's intake, medical record retrieval, consistent, repetitive admin. We really love doing the stuff that your team doesn't like doing anyway. So I'll make sure that you have all the links to get in touch with me or to check out the mastermind or my staffing company. But you know, brian, it's really a pleasure to get to hang out with you a little bit. I look forward to getting to know you a little bit better.

Speaker 2: 45:59

Yeah, man, my pleasure, and we'll make sure we link to all that in the show description. All right, until next time, guys.