Life Beyond the Briefs
At Life Beyond the Briefs we help lawyers like you become less busy, make more money, and spend more time doing what they want instead of what they have to. Brian brings you guests from all walks of life are living a life of their own design and are ready to share actionable tips for how you can begin to live your own dream life.
Life Beyond the Briefs
Double Your Law Firm Revenue: Proven Intake & Referral Strategies with Brian Glass
What if you could increase your law firm's revenue by 72% without spending a penny more on digital marketing? On this episode of Life Beyond the Briefs, Brian Glass unveils the transformative strategies that helped his firm achieve just that. From signing more auto accident cases to attracting the right leads, Brian shares actionable methods that ensure no lead is left behind. He also delves into a powerful three-part direct mail sequence that’s been a game changer for boosting referrals and recounts his personal journey of working alongside his father to create a more sustainable and profitable practice.
Ever wondered why some advertising campaigns fail despite bringing in leads? Brian reflects on his firm's 2019 TV ad campaign and a Spanish pay-per-click initiative, revealing the critical lessons learned about the importance of an effective intake process. He highlights that many small law firms mistakenly focus on acquiring more leads when the real issue lies in optimizing their intake processes. Learn how defining desired case criteria and aligning intake teams can significantly improve lead conversion rates and, ultimately, client satisfaction.
Ready to enhance your firm’s referral growth? This episode is packed with strategies for maintaining an engaging newsletter, creating a compelling social media presence, and targeting specific referral sources like chiropractors and financial advisors. Discover the benefits of hiring dedicated intake specialists and utilizing advanced lead management software. Plus, get a sneak peek into an upcoming bootcamp designed to help small law firms double their revenue within 18 months with expert insights on branding, retargeting, lead management, and more. Tune in to transform your practice and unlock unprecedented growth!
____________________________________
Brian Glass is a nationally recognized personal injury lawyer in Fairfax, Virginia. 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
Connect on LinkedIn
Happy Friday and welcome back into Life Beyond the Briefs, the number one podcast for lawyers who want to avoid living life on autopilot. Exit their traditional billboard hours model and greet each other with something other than I'm busy, but it sure beats the alternative. Now, if you want to enjoy living a life of your own design and take control of your future, join us as we explore Life Beyond the Briefs. I'm your host, brian Glass, and on today's episode, I got three secrets that I'm going to be sharing with you that we've learned through the course of the year signing 72% more cases in our auto accident section, producing at least a million and a half dollars in future revenue for my firm. Probably it's all going to be realized in 2025, which is one of the things that you find as you're going along. Right, the cases that come in today aren't money for us for 9, 12, 15 months. I got three secrets I'm going to be sharing with you today. You stick around till the end. You're going to get two bonuses, two totally free things. One is coming to you about halfway through. The other is coming at the end. We're going to be talking about how to sign more cases, how to get the right kinds of leads coming through your funnels, how to nurture those leads, how to take care of them, how to extend the period of time that you have to communicate with people. One of the things that I hear from small law firm owners all the time is how difficult these digital and internet leads are, because most of us who, like we were several years ago, are operating a six, seven, eight person law firm or smaller, you probably don't have a dedicated intake person. You probably don't have somebody dedicated to answering every form that gets filled out, picking up the phone every time. We're going to talk about the methods that you can use to solve that problem and create more qualified leads that will wait longer for your firm to call them back. We're going to talk about what the hell a qualified lead is and how you can get your team to accurately track them to make sure that you're getting the kinds of signups that you want. We're going to be talking about how not to miss any more leads that are coming through your funnel and, at the end of the day, the whole point of this is so that you can afford anything in your law firm If you focus on nothing other than top line revenue and bringing the right people into your firm. In the next six, 12, 18 months, you will be able to write a check for absolutely anything, and that's the place that I want to get you to how to increase cases new cases coming through your firm by 72% or more without spending an additional dollar. On digital marketing, and if you stay until just the middle of this presentation, I'm going to give you this three-part direct mail sequence that has been boosting referrals into my law firm. We're talking about what we've done in Benglas Law, which is me and my dad and three other lawyers in the first half of 2023. Okay, cool. So if you don't know who I am, it would be strange that you were on this call and you don't know who I am.
Speaker 1:My name is Brian Glass. I'm a personal injury lawyer in Northern Virginia. I am now 16 or 17 years into my career. I started practicing the first 10 years of my career across town, ostensibly competing with my dad running an auto accident practice. It was heavily Korean-based. When I started, almost half of our clientele was Korean-based, which was great because I didn't speak Korean and barely had to talk to any clients. It makes for an interesting dynamic, and so, about 10 years into my practice, we got to a point where really three things happened in my life. My partner and I decided not to expand into any additional space and we had somebody quit. Ben's firm was expanding into additional space and then my wife had a really hard third childbirth, which kind of left me with the feeling that if I don't ever go in, if I don't leave now in this perfect window of opportunity to go and work with my dad, then I'm never going to be able to do it In 2019,. I came over and started working with him and at that time the firm was in transition.
Speaker 1:Ben is a medical malpractice lawyer and a long-term disability lawyer by trade. He had some auto practice here, but it wasn't very large, very large, and when I dug into the numbers and the numbers of my gift in 26 and 17, the firm had done well on the injury side, but two of the in one year, two cases made up 75% of the revenue and in another year one case made up 60% of the revenue and that was a case that had gone to trial and gone to a verdict. And if you were running a practice, that's a contingency fee practice and 60% of your revenue is reliant on a case that went all the way to a trial and a verdict. You have some problems because almost a coin flip if you're going to trial, right. And so we dug into the numbers and we said how can we make this more sustainable? How can we sign up enough cases at a large enough average case value that we actually have predictable, reliable revenue? And over the course of the next four years, we were able to 4X the revenue of the auto accident section, and we did it without spending any additional digital money. That's not true. We did it without, because I'm going to tell you about some digital money spend mistakes that we made through the course of today's presentation, about some digital money spend mistakes that we made through the course of today's presentation, but we did it without any additional ongoing digital spend. And in 2024, we've actually turned off all of our LSAs, we've turned off all of our pay-per-click and we focused on getting much better referrals and getting much better on the phones when people actually call us. And then, in 2023, ben asked me to become the integrator at Great Legal Marketing, and so this presentation is going to be drawing on a lot of things that I learned in the law firm, but also things that I've learned along the way coaching and consulting and running mastermind groups with other firms who are in Great Legal Marketing.
Speaker 1:So let's start here. There are only three ways to make more money in your law firm. Those three ways are to sign more cases, to make them worth more money and to make your process more efficient. And if you are operating a firm that is not a contingency fee firm, the last one doesn't really count right. The only two options you have in a non-contingency fee firm are to sign more cases and make them worth more money. And you make them worth more money by raising your hourly rate. And what you find as you're going through this journey of building your business is that you have incremental years and you have exponential years depending on what you're working. Because you can only work on one or maybe two of these things at a time, it's really hard in a small firm to sign more cases, make all your cases worth more money and make your processes more efficient all at the same time.
Speaker 1:So we spent the first year that I was here signing more cases, spent the second year that I was here working on a process to make each individual case worth more money, and we spent the third year that I was here building the systems and processes that would make it more efficient so that I could elevate and so that I could really get out of most auto accident cases. Right now, my personal case portfolio is less than 20 cases. I have two other lawyers who are in the auto accident space with me, but I've got a team of three paralegals and three virtual assistants in the Philippines who are working in our case management software to really make the process much, much more efficient, and so the last two years for us really have been incremental years, but they've set us up to do what we're doing in 2024, which is sign more cases and have an exponential year. So this is today's focus is how do we sign more cases in our law firm, and while I can't promise you that you're going to have 4x growth if you do everything in this presentation, I will tell you come on Slade that if you're doing less than a million dollars in revenue and or you are missing two or more of these elements, I can 2x your revenue inside of 18 months.
Speaker 1:Here are the five elements that I think are most important in a law firm, and especially in a contingency fee law firm. Number one having a solid, really solid understanding of where your cases are coming from and, in particular, where your qualified leads are coming from. Because those you can have your SEO guy who shows you the up and to the right traffic graph, but you're not getting any more cases because all that traffic is unqualified traffic and sometimes that traffic is unqualified callers. So you want to have a really solid understanding of where your good cases are coming from. You need to have an intake process that gets your callers to stop shopping. This is the major problem in most small law firms is that we don't get back to people quickly enough. We don't solve their problem in the first call or promise them that we're going to solve the problem very soon. And so what do they do? They just pick up the phone and call the next lawyer that they find on Google. This is the major problem with your digital leads.
Speaker 1:Number three you have to have customer service worth leaving five-star reviews for. I go to a bunch of legal conferences and there's always somebody who's complaining that they don't have any reviews. And there's always somebody who's complaining that they don't have any reviews and the biggest question is what is your customer service doing? That's different than any other business that is actually worth leaving a five-star review for. And when you get to the place where we are, where we have I don't know a little bit more than 300 five-star reviews, we have a handful of one-star and two-star reviews. They're almost all from people whose cases we did not take, but the next review stops being so important incrementally. But it's important for Google's algorithms and for the GMB algorithm, which I'm going to talk about in a second, that you get consistent reviews after that. So, in other words, it's almost better that you get one review every other week once you have a couple of hundred reviews than that you get 50 all at once. And so some firms will run these programs with their staff to bring in a whole bolus of reviews. Google will likely reject some of those as spam, and it's much better for your GMB algorithm that you get a steady trickle and you have a system for asking customers for reviews but also for having a client service experience. That's actually worth leaving a five-star review for.
Speaker 1:Number four having a strategy for dominating local search with simple Google my Business hacks right. So much of what happens in our law firm now is through the framework of. If I could only be the most dominant player in a five-mile radius of my law firm, there would be enough auto accidents and PI work to keep my team fat and happy for years and years. And then the last thing you need is a herd of at least 25 non-lawyer fans who will refer cases to you. So how do I know that I can teach you how to do these things in your law firm? Because we've done it before.
Speaker 1:Within Great Legal Marketing, we've helped many lawyers triple or even quadruple their revenue. Michelle Lewine, who's my friend down in Richmond Virginia, has tripled her revenue since becoming a member of Great Legal Marketing. And then Ben Westbrook, who's a injury lawyer in Texas, says he's spent five times as much money every single month with other coaching practices and been locked into a long-term contract. And if you have been engaged in a long-term contract, you might know the company that Ben is talking about and only gotten a tenth of the menu that he's received as a member of Great Legal Marketing. This is the best price per service. Enough about the testimonials. Just know we've done it before for hundreds and hundreds of other law firms. All right about the testimonials Just know we've done it before for hundreds and hundreds of other law firms.
Speaker 1:All right, so before I get into what is working for me and my law firm in 2024, I want to tell you a couple of things that I've tried that didn't work, because I know that everybody has these problems and I want you to know that, even the people who are running coaching and mastermind organizations. We don't have all the answers, and the most important thing that you can do is try and fail, and test and fail and try and fail again and just get better each and every time. Oops, I went the wrong way. Okay, so here's some things we tried that didn't work. The only TV that I watch now is CNBC, and I still see this commercial, sometimes in the morning. It's a TV ad.
Speaker 1:So one year, we settled a big case I think this was 2019, and we had some money to spend in advertising, and we've always had this idea in the back of our mind of what would happen if we went into TV advertising. So what we did is we contracted with a company to buy a handful of leads. We didn't ask any of the right questions, and so what we got was an ad that showed a bank of lawyers, a bank of people answering phones, and the call to action for the caller was we have a team of lawyers standing by to tell you what your claim is potentially worth, and so they would ask a couple of qualifying questions when was your crash? Was it in Virginia? Was it within the last two years, and what kind of injuries did you have? If you met all four of these criteria, they would hot transfer you to the firm right. Problem is, the callers who were hot transferred to the firm are waiting for the team of lawyers who are standing by to tell you what the claim is potentially worth, which, of course, is like the last thing that you're able to do with somebody whose case you don't know about and who is talking to you for the very first time. So that campaign actually broke even, which was a shock, but we at least got our money back on that.
Speaker 1:One Second thing that we tried three years ago was Spanish pay-per-click. This is our first foray into virtual staffing companies. I had a Spanish speaking intake person, and so we said, hey, why don't we try some Spanish pay-per-click? Right, it's at a lower cost point than English speaking pay-per-click. And so we said, hey, why don't we try some Spanish pay-per-click right. It's at a lower cost point than English speaking pay-per-click. And actually, after about five months of working with a great vendor, he fired us because our intake process sucked. We weren't answering the phones quickly enough, we weren't getting back to people who we missed quickly enough. Our guy was going off script and we're very grateful to the vendor that we had for firing us, instead of doing what most vendors would have done and saying, no, it's only working because you're not spending enough money.
Speaker 1:Third thing that we tried in 2021, we built out this $20,000 Infusionsoft-based email sequence and it was beautiful. It was in our personal injury vertical and in our long-term vertical. The problem was it was way, way too sophisticated for our team. It was the kind of thing where, if you called with one problem, it took you down this decision tree and it sent you a hyper specialized set of emails driving you to conversion based on what problems you had. And it would have worked amazingly well if we were a much larger firm and we had many more leads than we did. That was $20,000. We basically lit on fire, which is a lot of fun if you've never done that before.
Speaker 1:So why didn't these things work. Here's the common theme with all of these things that we tried is, all of them brought in more leads, and in all of them our intake was never any good. Right, at best we broke even and at worst we lost a whole bunch of money. Because for us and for most small law firms and most of the people who are on this call are small law firm owners or small law firm lawyers more leads isn't actually your problem. Every conference that I've ever been to focuses on one thing how do I get more leads and it's almost always from the internet, right? It's LSAs, ppc, it's SEO, which is all good stuff, but that is not the root of your problem, and most of the lawyers that I talked to at these conferences think I signed the vast majority of the cases that I want.
Speaker 1:If a case calls my office and it fits in our case criteria and I get to talk to them, then I sign that case, and so my problem is that I don't have enough leads, and I am here. The not-so-secret thing that I've learned in the last few years is that I need more leads. Is the lie that lawyers tell themselves to help us sleep better at night, because it puts the problem on an external fix. It doesn't require you to fix anything inside of your law firm. It says if I could just pay more money and get more people through this funnel, then we would be better off. The highest ROI and the highest return on time you will ever find in your law firm is time spent. That is fixing one thing. Most important metric in your intake system is how many leads that you wanted did you lose? How many leads that you wanted do you lose?
Speaker 1:The first step here is how do you define a case that you want? Again, most lawyers think if somebody calls me and I get on the phone with them and it's a case that I want, I will sign that case. And that might be true. But there's a number of places where somebody could fall off. Number one might not get on the phone with you, might not make it past your front desk, might not even get to your front desk if they come from the Internet because you have taken too long to get back to them and they moved on to the next person.
Speaker 1:But the thing that I find more and more often is that no lawyer, very few lawyers, actually have a written criteria for what they want. Most lawyers don't have a written criteria for what they actually want in a case, and so what happens is, if there's somebody who doesn't sign with you, then we go I didn't want that case anyway, right. And when you incentivize your team based on this and you don't have a written criteria to backgrade, is that a case that we wanted or is it not a case that we wanted? Then what happens is the team starts shuffling off the cases that they didn't sign as cases that you didn't want anyway. There are two ways the law firms lose qualified leads. Number one, you don't get to them in time and you have no idea whether or not they were actually qualified. Or, number two, your team drops the ball on conversion because you didn't address their problems or you scared them away.
Speaker 1:Here's what most small law firms need to understand about digital marketing. This is from Jason Hennessey's 2024 Hennessey Digital Lead Form Report. So Jason and his team filled out web forms at 1,400 law firms and what you're seeing here is their response time 28% of law firms when you fill out a web form, they get back to you in five minutes or less. 28% of law firms when you fill out a web form, they get back to you in five minutes or less. I will tell you that my team, on a good day we are somewhere in the orange 30 minutes to 60 minutes, 30 minutes to two hours, and on a bad day we're two hours plus right, because that happens and I don't have somebody on nights and weekends who is responding to lead forms. And if you just go to Google and you look up the 2024 Hennessy lead form survey, you'll find the full results. What you find is interesting. Some markets are hyper-competitive. Some markets you have much more grace time to respond to people. And when people do respond, here's the responses they got 90% of people called responses. They got 90% of people called. 90% of the law firms called the called his team back, 65% emailed, 36% text texted and only 25% did all three.
Speaker 1:Here's the thing that. Here's the problem that I have with this. If there's somebody who has elected to fill out a form on your website instead of calling you, that's a hint to me that they don't want to be on the phone. And so when there's all these firms that are only calling people back and they're not following up by text or by email not that you're going to convert somebody by email. But somebody who's filling out a web form probably is not in a position where they can even call you on the phone if they wanted to. They might be at work, they might be out somewhere, they're filling out a form because they can't call you most of the time, and so the easiest way to boost your conversion rate is to respond with all three of these things. And actually a hint that I picked out recently is to text first. So if you text and you say, hey, this is Ben Glass Law, then when you call, the cell phone will suggest, hey, it's probably Ben Glass Law giving you a call. So that's a little hack that you can do, but most firms will only call.
Speaker 1:And the shocking thing is 10% of the firms that were reached out to by a forum on their website never picked up the phone, never responded at all. That's shocking. We're just lighting money on fire. Never responded at all. That's shocking. We're just lighting money on fire. And so I told you that I've signed 72% more auto accident cases this year than we did year to date last year. This is my graph. This is my data. You'll see that there is absolutely no increase in overall leads. Overall leads totally flat from when we started with a lead docket, which kind of like middle of April of last year, just totally flat. But still we have a 72% year over year increase.
Speaker 1:And that's because we put this proven process in place for follow-up. Number one respond as soon as you see the lead come in, and again, at best we're like 30 minutes, at worst we're sometime over two hours. But after you respond you call text and email and you do that every day for a week and we have a written process in Lead Docket that updates every single day with the next scripted text and email to go out. And the last one is something that I stole from Chris Voss's negotiation book, which is have you given up on? Give somebody a negative framework and they will almost always respond to you and listen. Some people will say no, I found another lawyer right, but a lot of people will never tell you, they'll just ghost you. And so giving that negative framework to give them permission to say no, permission to say I've moved on, at least lets you close your book. And I don't have time to do a deep intake dive right now, but towards the end of this I do have a gift for you for sticking around at least through the middle, and for that I got a really easy win for you have somebody on your team.
Speaker 1:Call every lead that ghosted you in the first half of the year, every lead that it didn't either sign up or that you rejected, or that they told you they had a different lawyer, or they told you weren't interested. Call every single one of those people and just ask what happened. I'll tell you that in 2019, when I started here and we did that in April I started in January. We did it in April. We signed 25 clients up from that campaign alone. We went back in the last year, said who are all the people that contacted us at some point and then fell off? Let's just call them. So, do you have a lawyer? You settle your case on your own? Did something else happen? You have a lawyer? You settle your case on your own. Did something else happen? 25 people sign up. That's an easy bolus of cases, bolus of money coming through your door, all right. And so you're saying, just like me, you can't get to everybody in the first 30 minutes. I totally get it. So I want to give you some hacks to make the people that are calling wait a little bit longer for you and that's not so secret.
Speaker 1:Number two is that people do business with people they know and trust, and the thing is that most people on the internet they don't know you, like you or trust you. Yet your digital leads fall into this category. The leads that you're paying somebody to rank you highly on Google fall into this category of people that want a fast answer and a fast response because they do not know you, like you or trust you. They're clicking because you had either the first response, the first listing or one of the first five listings, or you had the best headline or whatever. But it has absolutely nothing to do with you and with your law firm. This is also my data. So this is in the last 12, rolling 12 months.
Speaker 1:If somebody calls us from one of these sources, what is the likelihood that they fit into our case criteria that we would have taken the case and for Google Organic, actually we have to provoke over a hundred phone calls to find eight cases that we would have taken. But if a client is coming from a referral from a past client, there's a more likely than not. There's a 50, I don't know 57, 58% chance. That's a case that we actually want Google pay-per-click. It gets a little bit more specific, like 12% chance back when we were running pay-per-click Google my Business Profile. It's a little bit more specific. But what do you notice about the bottom five of the bottom four of the bottom five are referrals from actual human beings. So somebody who's referred to you by an actual human being probably has the kind of case that you want to service. The only other one that's listed is a sponsored website. We sponsor a financial advisory for doctors website in our long-term disability practice. It feeds us with a lot of high quality leads and a lot of high quality cases.
Speaker 1:But four of our best five sources in terms of percent chance that is a case we actually want to work on are cases from actual human beings, and the benefits to increasing your stream of cases that are coming from actual human beings are they will wait longer for you to call them back, right, they are not moving on to the next referral source just because you took more than 30 minutes to call them back. Number two they tend to be larger cases. And number three, they tend to convert at a much higher rate because they pre-sold. There's a reason that they are calling you. Their friends told them to call you, and it's not just a Google listing that they found you on. So we're coming up on bonus number one for you here how do you cultivate more referrals?
Speaker 1:So you have to be somebody who's interesting, right? You have to have an email, a mailed newsletter, which is what we do, or an email newsletter, which many of our mastermind members are doing and which we are starting. You have to have a social media, interesting social media presence. I think that is much better, actually, in one of these alphabet soup style practices than it is in something like auto accidents. I think it's great for family law. I think it's great for estate planning. Problem with the auto accident, with the contingency fee practice and social media, is that unless they were in a crash on Tuesday, they're really not thinking about auto accident lawyers. You can go down this rabbit hole of like the divorce lawyer algorithm, right, as you start consuming more and more family lawyer content, you're going to be shown more and more family lawyer content. So having an interesting social media presence if you're in one of those practice areas is a great way to do this. A referral newsletter so we have a mailer that goes only to our referral sources chiropractors, physical therapists, doctors and financial advisors to doctors. It's different than our mailer that goes to regular clients and then in-person meetings, and the thing is that's in most firms that's all it takes, right? If you had five doctors that were sending you five cases a month, that's 60 cases a year how would that change your practice? For this webinar.
Speaker 1:If you're sitting through this and you're like geez, that sounds like a lot of work, like when will I actually practice law? What I want to tell you is the great thing about being a law firm owner is that you don't actually have to do everything. Great thing about being the owner is you get to pick and choose what you want to do. You get to pick and choose the thing that you are the best at that only a lawyer can do, or you can hire a lawyer to do the things that only a lawyer can do. And the only thing is that your vision for your law firm and for your team must be large enough that you can find space for all of the good people that you need to work for you to fit inside of it so that you can have those people operate the kinds and the parts of your business that you actually hate, and everybody has the parts of their business that they hate.
Speaker 1:Problem is, for most lawyers, additional staff is always seen as a cost, and I want to give you a reframe that will help you think about not bringing people on as additional costs but as assets in your firm, because everybody is afraid of taking the next step right. No matter where you are on this spectrum and you might not want to exit legal production, but no matter where you are on this spectrum I think everybody looks up at the next step with a little bit of fearfulness. People don't want to have 24-7 answering because they got burned one time in the past and you get locked into long-term contracts sometimes and they're quote there aren't any good ones out there. There's at least the best of the worst, right, and you can at least get them to set an appointment for somebody who calls nights and weekends. Send you a message about that so that you can stop the shop. There are firms who, in 2024, still have an answering machine that's answering the phone on nights and weekends, and I promise you that you are missing four or more clients than you could ever dream of because there are people that are calling and not even leaving a message, that have qualified cases that are going on to the next person.
Speaker 1:The next step up is dedicated intake, and this I hear more often than anything else as a cost center and not a revenue. But I will tell you, the best thing that we did in 2024 was bring our intake back offshore and bring it back in-house so that when there's a great case on the line, krista who's running our intake can run kicking and screaming down the hallway and find a lawyer to get on the phone and sign the case. Dedicating intake is one of the things that has contributed very significantly to our 72% increase in year-over-year signed auto-assignment cases. Next one is upgrading to a great lead management software. So again, this is one of these things. It's a complete pain to switch case management or to switch lead management softwares and everybody is getting afraid of being stuck in one that doesn't work and everybody has this fear that it's going to take six months to import all your stuff from your old system to your new system, and it will. So my advice is find somebody on your team who is not you, who's in charge of making all these things connect. Pay extra for the service to get you a startup on the software. Upgrading to great lead management software is the only way to know for sure where your cases are coming from, what percentage of the cases that you want you're signing and how much money is walking out the door because you don't have a dedicated intake. Next one is hiring an associate. Right, and the fear with hiring an associate is you're going to have to teach them everything and then, as soon as you want to exit legal production, the fear is that the associate will leave also, and what I'm here to tell you is that if you set it up in the right way and you provide a great space for somebody to work, then all of this works out.
Speaker 1:Do I have a lead for a suggestion for great lead management? I'll tell you what I use. Michelle is a lead docket. That's the graphs that I've been showing. There are many good lead management softwares. I like lead docket. It has good reporting and, importantly, it has Zapier APIs where you can plug in all of your data to them. So, for instance, if somebody calls us through one of our tracking phone numbers, it automatically populates what the origination source was. I know what website they were looking at. I know what lead page they were looking at. And I don't have to rely on my team for attribution, because what happens when you rely on the team is that somebody goes oh, they found us on Google, they looked at our website, right. But it's really helpful to have that tracking data in place so that which part of the website they were looking at, or that you find out like they weren't looking at the website at all.
Speaker 1:There's a story of a lawyer who signed a new client and said where'd you come from? And they said who signed a new client and said where'd you come from? They said I saw you on a billboard. I don't have any billboards. People will tell you stories about how they found you that aren't necessarily true. All right. So the question on the intake one is how many additional cases do you need to sign at your average case value to get a great full-time intake person that pays for themselves? And honestly, it's not that many. Our average case value in the first half of the year is $25,000. So all in, three to three and a half cases and the intake person sign pays for themselves. So if we can just find three or four more cases a year, that's one every third month. Then that person has paid for themselves and it's taken some of the burden off of us and I promise you that it will net you more than three or four cases per year.
Speaker 1:I had a coaching call a couple of months ago with Cameron Harrell, who wrote Vivid Vision, former CEO of Got Junk, and the thing that he said to me that has changed the way that I think about this is that if the only thing that you focused on is top-line revenue and people because the CEO of your firm, if the only thing you thought and people there isn't a thing in your business that you couldn't write a check for. We've been talking for about 40 minutes and it's hard to cover all of this stuff in detail, and so we've given a really like a high level overview of a lot of different things. But I have an opportunity coming up where we can spend some dedicated time focusing on nothing but doing this how do we increase the top line revenue at your firm? It would be okay if I took a couple minutes and I told you about that opportunity. All right, at least one person has said cool. Thank you, tb. I appreciate you.
Speaker 1:Okay, on August 1st and 2nd I'm hosting a bootcamp in my office. I'm in Fairfax, virginia. The bootcamp is going to be hyper-focused on one thing and it's hoping a small firm the small firm 2x their top line revenue inside of 18 months without spending any additional money on digital marketing, capping this thing at 25 law firms, and no other conference is going to be this focused on your firm and the problems of your firm. We're going to do a pre-call. There's going to be specialized homework to gather the numbers and the problems that the firms that are in the room are having. If you go to these big conferences and I've been to many of the big conferences and even if you come to the Great League of Marketing Conference, a lot of this stuff is on. How do we, at a high level, get more leads from various sources, which is awesome. Everybody needs more leads. If you can't convert the leads, you have a problem, and so we're going to spend dedicated, focused time on your firm in this session.
Speaker 1:The admission is $3,000, but, like everything else that we do at Great Legal Marketing, it's backed by a full money-back guarantee and if you come and you don't like it and you don't get value out of it, I'm going to write your spouse a check for $500 for wasting your time over those two days. So let me tell you a little bit about who's going to be there. So my friend, kia Arian, who runs Zine Graphics and produces the newsletters both for Bangalas Law and for Great Loon Marketing, is going to be there. She helps law firms craft their branding message, so she will help you hone in on what exactly is it that you do for your clients. How do you take them from legal problem to legal solution? Kia is going to be workshopping with the firms that are there.
Speaker 1:Tiffany Swidensky, who I think is on the call, is going to come and talk about retargeting and remarketing, which is the lowest hanging fruit for your digital properties. How do you get somebody that comes and visits your website once to not forget about you? Tiff has developed a method to follow people around for the next, I think, 90 days after they've visited your site. If you've ever shopped for something on Amazon and then you see ads in your Facebook browser, that's exactly what TIFF is going to show you how to do. Josh Salcillo, my friend from Lead Docket, is going to be coming and talking about all of the things that his program is able to do. But and I'm going to get to this in a second. Josh isn't here as a paid sponsor. Josh is here because he helped grow his uncle's firm from a small firm in Alabama to something like nine or 12 locations, because he understands this stuff and he understands lead attribution is terribly important and Nalini Prasad, who's in our backyard at Blue Shark Digital, is going to talk about all of the small Google my Business hacks that you can use to elevate your profile.
Speaker 1:The tip that she gave our mastermind group last January is that if you look at both your phone and look at Google Maps, and as you zoom in and out, what you'll notice is that Google lists like all of these cities and all of these areas that are not actually the name that anybody who lives there would call them. Francis yeah, this is in-person only, and Nalini taught us a way to tell Google that you service these areas that only Google identifies, which is low-hanging fruit for you to start showing up as a practitioner in those areas when people are searching from those areas. My marketing director, lauren, is going to be going through the exact process that we use to utilize AI and some SEO programs to figure out what is the next article we should write, to write that article and then to save the human being, the time where the only thing the human being has to do is go back through lightly, edit the article, apply some backlinks. Of course, ben is going to be there and I'm going to be there. This is a one and a half day intensive 25 law firms only. It's going to be awesome and it's going to be the thing that changes 25 lawyers' practices in the next year and a half. And I know what you're thinking.
Speaker 1:This is another pay-to-play legal event where everyone is pitching and I don't get any ROI. I promise you this. There is nobody that is paid to be at this event. I handpicked each and every one of these people and I invited them up because they sit in the space where I like to play, which isn't DIY, it isn't vendor, it's this done with you space. Each and every one of these people will walk the solo and the small law firm manager, small law firm owner, through the things that you can do in your firm to not have to pay a vendor to do this.
Speaker 1:For you, emily, yes, you can send your office manager. Yeah, if you have a number two. Or for you, emily, yes, you can send your office manager yeah, if you have a number two, or if you have a marketing director, a high-level associate, send them instead. That's perfectly fine, all right. So this event is for you. If you're missing any of these elements and you want a 2X your revenue inside of 18 months, if you don't really know where your cases that you want are coming from, if you don't have an intake process, it gets callers to stop shopping. If you don't have a customer service experience, we're leaving a five-star Google review for and I'm going to show you at this event all of the things that go into our customer service experience.
Speaker 1:One of the things that happened after COVID is people stopped coming to the office and so we used to give this gift bag, goodie bag, whatever you call it of books on how to be a great client, how to give a great deposition. If it gets there, we have these little stuffed animal, benji bears, like all of that stuff, and you would get it as part of the signing, like you signed, and now we gave you this dopamine hit of here's all this great stuff, and that doesn't happen anymore. Now you sign a DocuSign and for most firms, then nothing happens, right? Then we don't hear from you for 30 or 45 days. We've got a great welcome box at Kia Arian helped us design that goes out to clients Again reinforcing. You made a damn good decision in hiring my law firm. You need to also have these.
Speaker 1:I got off track here strategy for dominating Google local search with some simple hacks. Nalini is going to teach that and then we're going to talk about in depth how you cultivate this herd of non-lawyer fans who refer you cases. And here's the last thing that I'll say is we're doing this thing. We're doing this thing August 1st and 2nd. People high-income professionals like you guys we use August for one of two things. It's one of two. Either take all of August off right, and that's awesome if you were going to take all of August off or take advantage of all the people that are taking all of August off, and the best way to do that is to kick it off August 1st and 2nd with me, ben, five of our friends and 25, 24 other law firm owners who are, just like you, propelling yourself to a great next 18 months.
