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
Data Driven Law Firm Growth Strategies | How to 2X in 18 Months
Can you imagine doubling your law firm's revenue in just 18 months without increasing your advertising budget? In this week's episode of Life Beyond the Briefs, we share the proven formula that has helped 16 law firms skyrocket their success, as revealed at the Great Legal Marketing Bootcamp. Learn how transitioning intake tasks from an offshore VA to an in-house team resulted in a staggering 72% increase in case signups. We also dive into the critical importance of communication with digital marketing vendors to ensure their efforts lead to actual client signups.
Explore actionable strategies for growing your legal practice, focusing on collaboration and data-driven decision-making. Overcome the fear of competition in niche markets like auto accident law by leveraging partnerships and shared knowledge. Discover how refining your intake processes and swiftly responding to client needs can dramatically improve your firm's performance. Plus, hear an inspiring case study on transforming a legal practice through client referrals and streamlined operations for enhanced satisfaction and growth. Don't miss this opportunity to revolutionize your law firm!
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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.
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Happy Friday and welcome to another Friday's solo episode of Life Beyond the Briefs. I'm your host, brian Glass, and this is the number one podcast for lawyers who want to live a life of their own design and break free of their traditional work harder work, longer model. Today's episode is an excerpt from the Great Legal Marketing Bootcamp that we had in August. It was a wonderful event. We had 16 law firms represented in my office from Virginia, yes, but also from Colorado, arizona, nebraska, texas. It was an incredible two-day event and you do not want to miss the next one. Dates are coming soon, so in order to get advanced notice of the next bootcamp event that we're having, go to greatlegalmarketingcom, leave me your email address to get on the email list. Make sure you're among the first to know about our next event. This episode, specifically, is about the formula to 2X your revenue inside of 18 months and an introduction into the concepts that we teach inside of Great Legal Marketing. I hope you enjoy and I hope you have a great weekend. All right, good morning. It's good to see everybody. This is what you came for. The formula it's a 2X your revenue inside of 18 months, but first who's in the room? So we didn't go around and do introductions for the people that are in the room. Just about everybody was kind enough to fill out my survey before, and so here's the anonymous aggregated data on who we're sitting in the room with.
Speaker 0:So most law firms in here have between one and six lawyers. Most firms have two. Most law firms are under utilizing offshore staff. There's only one exception, paul. You had a. I don't know if that was a typo or if you got 20. Yeah, 20, right. Most firms in here only have zero or one offshore VA. My firm we have five today. We have 18 people in-house, five in the Philippines now. Average case value is all over the map here, anywhere from $4,000 to $40,000. But the average revenue of the firm in this room is in the neighborhood of $500,000. And most of you have somewhere between zero and seven support staff. Most have three.
Speaker 0:Here's the comments. Constraint is that you, as the lawyer, are doing far too much. Primary responsibility for intake and screening is 43%. You 17% said a lawyer. I'm guessing that sometimes meant you also. Primary responsibility for digital marketing 40 percent. You 6.7 percent said me and a vendor. I'm going to guess that means you not understanding what your vendor is talking to you about. So that's one of the things we're going to talk about over the next two days is how to communicate with vendors in a way that actually holds them accountable. Right, when they show you the graph up and to the right of new traffic coming into your website, but you don't have any more new clients signed. What is the disconnect there? How do we talk to them in a way that moves the ball?
Speaker 0:This is one of the things that we changed in our firm just in the last four months. That has made an incredible amount of difference in the signups is we moved from an offshore VA in Honduras doing our intake and screening to a dedicated full-time in-house person who can run screaming down the hall like your hair is on fire when a good case comes in, and we signed up 72% more auto cases in this year than we did at this time last year without any additional advertising spend, because we've moved faster, because we've gotten to a place where she's authorized to sign cases that are within our deal box, which we'll talk about, and because she can just run down the hall and get Lisa or Melissa or I and ask questions about a case if we have a case that needs questions about, because people who are coming to you from digital advertising, from SEO or PPC or LSAs they are not waiting for phone calls back. They're not. They're going on to the next lawyer on the internet. So that was a huge change for us. Yeah, so, like, most of you are not digital marketers, right? So the 40% of you who are doing the digital marketing, it's not your expertise and you will get far greater leverage if you are working with somebody who it is. Great.
Speaker 0:Legal marketing tends to be a place where people come because they are DIY or done with a vendor kind of marketers, right? Anytime that we've outsourced the marketing, we've been unhappy with the product, so we do it along with the vendor. We're in that light yellow sliver. But those of you that are doing it alone, like it's probably not the best use of your next hour and dollar. And then, of course, who does the lawyering? Like it's you, right? And looking at these yellow pie charts, when are you spending time with your family? When are you training? By the way, you're training the staff, right? You're listening to the phone calls. You're telling the intake team how to answer calls. You're probably the one dealing with your IT vendor. You're doing everything right, and so that's the common constraint is that the lawyers in this room and lawyers by and large, and so on small law firms are doing everything, and I want you to know that you're not alone, because everybody in this room is doing everything.
Speaker 0:The common constraints of people identified in the homework survey are, this time Number one there's only one of me, right, so that's the three pie charts that I just saw. Number two I'm hammered with casework, which is the most important thing you can be doing right Is adding value to your client's lives. That's why they hired you. I'm wearing too many hats, which we talked about, and I'm burnt out, right, which is because you're wearing too many hats hammered with casework and there's only one of you. The other common constraint is people.
Speaker 0:I don't have the staff in place, primarily because I don't have enough clients. That might be because you don't have the staff in place. It might be because your intake team is too slow because it's you, and if you solve for that and you can wait in a contingency, if you practice the 9 or 12 or 18 months to get paid, we've solved that cycle. I can't acquire top talent because we aren't big enough to offer great benefits. In my view, that's a self-imposed limitation and you do not have to offer great benefits. In my view, that's a self-imposed limitation and you do not have to offer great benefits. You can find people that don't need them, but we think, because we are high-earning white-collar lawyers, that this is what the job market demands. And I tell you it is not. And then I have good people, but they're not in the right seat. That's just a structural issue that we can work with you to solve.
Speaker 0:And then, like half of the people who responded to the survey said this, that I'm the bottleneck, because everything comes through your door right All of the marketing lands on your desk before it goes out, all of the demand packages land on your desk before it goes out, the estate plans come to your desk to be reviewed before they come out, and there are systems and processes that you can put in place to solve for you being a bottleneck. One of the things that we did is we instituted hours in our firm where the doors open and you can come in and ask us any question that you want for a limited period of time, but don't send me a Slack and don't send me a Teams message and don't drop by my door when I'm doing deep work. Right, you can remain the chief decision maker for certain points in the business, and you should, but you don't have to be the one who's being asked what color t-shirt should we order for the next round of law firm swag. And at the root of all this constraint the time and the people is this one it's fear that if I try to grow, I won't be able to generate enough income to support the growth that I have the unfortunate habit of not being sure anybody else can do what I do. That's just fear that I'm insecure in delegating management and financial tasks to others because I think that I'm the only one that can do it. And then I'm worried about hiring the next lawyer because the intake numbers are down and again, having more people often will solve for that problem.
Speaker 0:So my goals for you over the next two days are to alleviate the fear we're going to help solve problems over the next couple of days, especially during the hot seats tomorrow, to give you a little bit more confidence, to go back to your offices, to make those investment in people, to make the investment in marketing and to give you the clear path forward I want to get you into bonus time. So I heard this concept at a conference about six months ago. Bonus time is the idea that you spent a certain amount of money to be here between entrance ticket, plane fare for many of you and hotel room, and bonus time happens when you get the tip that pays for the conference. And my goal is that by the end of this morning, everybody is in bonus time and this thing has positive ROI for you. And so you'll see in the back we've hung up some white papers with everybody's firm's name on them. I want you to do two things with this, because this will help everybody else too.
Speaker 0:As you hear a tip that you can take back to your practice and take action on, I want you to write it on the back. There's some markers on the back. Just find your firm's name and write the action item for you to do on the back. We will collate these at the end and send them to you, and we'll do a follow-up call with you to make sure they're getting implemented. This does two things. Number one shows you how many ideas there are. Number two, you're going to walk around and you're going to see an idea on somebody else's sheet that missed you, or that at 11 o'clock didn't make sense, but at 3 pm, when you walk by and you see it, that's something that you want to take and implement in your firm, and so that's why we're doing that. There's always a fear that somebody else is going to take the great idea.
Speaker 0:There are three other Northern Virginia auto accident lawyers in this room. I promise you that the four of us do not have a corner on 100% of the market, and so we're not taking cases off of each other's plate. Frank Carney, who's in our Icon Mastermind group, has an auto accident and a workers' compensation practice that is, I don't know, 10 miles from my office. He's not taking any cases away from us. We're not taking any cases away from him. In fact, in the last two years we've done $800,000 in cases together. We are better off when we're together than we are when we are in our silo, not talking to each other and not sharing ideas.
Speaker 0:I want to get you out of the law of small numbers. So, those of you who have underprivileged 40 new cases through the first half of the year, you're in the law of small numbers. Oh man, I'm going to do public math now. So 40 cases in six months? Seven months is like six or seven or eight cases a month, right. In a month where you only signed four, you assume everything has gone wrong. In a month when you signed 10, you're a genius, right? We want to get you to a space where the overall number has increased and when a 200% increase is actually meaningful. It's not that you just signed up a car full of people and now you have 10 cases closed in the last month, which we've had before and then I want you to leave here with crystal clear next steps and when we get past the fear, you'll be able to do all the things that you identified in the pre-work that you want to be able to do in three years Be the lawyer who evaluates and guides cases without actually having to do the legal legwork. Answer the interrogatories, hang out at your beach house, monitor the work and collect a paycheck. Focus on the top 20% of cases only. Work exclusively on strategy those are the same things and become the brand of the firm, right? And so all of those things you can only do if you elevate out of the day-to-day running of the business.
Speaker 0:So how do we move past fear? So there's a couple things. So having good data in your business provides clarity. It tells you where to market next, it tells you where your cases are coming from and it tells you what you should be focusing on in the next quarter. So I asked Josh Asillo here to present on lead docket and how to use data to make good marketing decisions. This was our. Is this on our thing outside? On our three-year goal that we set in our EOS annual meeting four years ago now was data drives all of our marketing decisions. And we are just about there now. We still, just like every entrepreneur, we tinker with the marketing and we make decisions that feel good at the time because we think they'll work, and sometimes they do and sometimes they don't. But we have much better data than we did before, and then having the clarity that comes from that data leads to all of your good decisions, all right. So here's how we did it In 2018, I started this firm in 2019.
Speaker 0:In 2018, we did $500,000 in auto accident revenue. This year, we're on track to do two and a half million In 2024,. We shut off all of our PPC. We shut off all of our LSAs. We know that 65% of our cases come from referrals from other human beings. 80% of our money in the auto accident place, at least last year, came from referrals from other human beings.
Speaker 0:Oh yeah, our primary constraint wasn't leads, it wasn't that we didn't have enough calls coming through the firm, it was speed. We were way too slow to answer the phones because at the time there were only seven people in the office and three of them were in the ERISA LTD space. I only had four people on my team, three people on my team plus a receptionist. We didn't have dedicated intake and we had a lawyer answering every phone call and deciding whether or not we wanted to take the case. We're too slow to move people to sign up.
Speaker 0:We have this belief that if people were calling us and it was a simple case, we should not be taking a simple case because they can do it on their own. Well, people are calling you for reasons other than I have a complex legal problem and I need it solved. People are calling you because they are not lawyers, because they are plumbers and doctors and whatever else. Right, but they don't need to go out and learn how to do what you do. You went to law school for three years and you practiced for anywhere between 10 and 40 years to know where to hit the pipe and to know how to move people through the system and provide them peace of mind. And so we were way too slow to sign people up and say you have a problem and I can help you.
Speaker 0:And when we solve for that, we went back through in the last year all the clients who we had turned down because their case was too simple, and we called them one month. We said what happened with your case? Did you find another lawyer? Did you settle the case on your own? Do you still want help? We signed up 25 cases that month because while 80% of the people had moved on and found something else, found somebody else to solve their problem 20% of them had not and they were just waiting for somebody to come back and say can we help you? At that time we were signing up an average of six or seven cases a month and we went to 25 immediately just by calling everybody back. So those people are sitting there waiting for you.
Speaker 0:And then we were too slow to process cases, and this came from data. So one of the things that we did is I had my brother, matt, who was a college student at the time, intern for us. We did not have a case management software at the time that was any good auto accident cases and so I had him manually go back through all of our cases that we'd settled in the last year and say what was the date of the crash, what was the date the client retained us, what was the date of the last treatment, when did the demand package go out, when did the case resolve and when did we pay the client going out from case settled to money hitting our operating account, and we focused in 2020 on narrowing that gap. How can we move faster? Because in a contingency of your practice, you don't get paid for nine or 12, or, if you're slow at this, 24 months after even a simple case signs you right, and so that was our constraint. It was like just make things move faster, get people through the intake process to become a client, give them permission to hire you, give yourself permission to say you have a problem that I can solve, and then move them faster. And that's the thing that took us in four years, from a half million to $2 million in revenue, because solving for speed allows you to free up more of your cash flow, which then lets you pay for all of the other people. It lets you hire dedicated intake. It lets you hire a full-time marketing director and it lets you hire.
Speaker 0:What we have now is a full-time, dedicated referral relationship manager, and we'll talk about that during the referral section. So Susie, who's our director of happiness and this is a right person's right place thing and she, I don't think would mind me saying this she, a right person's right place thing and she, I don't think would mind me saying this she started with us as a legal assistant in 2019. And she was not good as a legal assistant because she doesn't like constant. She likes making people happy, and so when I'm telling her, call the doctor's office and ask them where the fucking records are, it wasn't her skillset, right. But when you put her in charge of be the face of the firm at the front desk, she's really good at that. And then we put her in charge of how can you take this list of people that refer us cases and make them happy and get them to refer us more cases? So now we have full-time people in this intake marketing director and referral relationship management seat all of which can be seen as cost centers and not profit centers if you look at it the wrong way.
Speaker 0:Hey guys, thanks for listening to today's episode of Life Beyond the Briefs. If you've gotten some value out of this podcast, it would mean the world to me. If you would leave me a rating and review. Wherever it is you listen to podcasts Apple, spotify, I don't care Rating and review would mean a lot and goes a long way towards getting other listeners driven towards the show. The second thing that I would love for you to do is put any of this into implementation. Begin practicing what you hear on this podcast in your practice and let me know how it goes. Thanks and have a great weekend.
