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
How to Create Personal Brand as a Lawyer (Without Calling Yourself "the Hammer")
Ready to transform your legal career? Discover essential strategies on how to build a compelling brand as a lawyer. We unveil the two primary methods: creating a memorable character and establishing yourself as an authority. You'll learn why authority-building marketing is crucial and how offering valuable information can set you apart from the competition. Dive into the importance of identifying your ideal client and tailoring your content to their needs. Addressing common client questions effectively can be more powerful than you think, and overcoming self-doubt is crucial, as it's almost a moral responsibility to position yourself as an authority if you're a good lawyer with the perfect client out there.
Unlock the secret to authority with actionable strategies like leveraging books and podcasts. Even a brief consumer guide can be a powerful marketing tool to gain potential clients' contact information and establish credibility. We'll share why being a podcast guest can expand your reach more efficiently than hosting your own show. Traditional media coverage can amplify your authority, and repurposing speaking engagements can further solidify your professional profile. From hiring a videographer to sharing presentations on social media, we provide practical tips to maximize the impact of your efforts and make it easier for potential clients to recognize your expertise and trust you with their cases. Don't miss this opportunity to elevate your legal brand!
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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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Welcome back into another Friday solo episode of Life Beyond the Briefs, the number one podcast for lawyers choosing to live a life of their own design. And in today's episode it is not actually a solo episode. This is Ben and I sitting down to talk about building your brand as a lawyer, and this is something that applies for law firm owners all the way down to associates. Now there are two ways to build your brand as a lawyer. Number one is to build a your brand as a lawyer. Number one is to build a personal brand around a character. You have your Alabama hammer, you have your Texas hammer, you have your Texas law hawk.
Speaker 1:I'm sure that there are many other state hammers who are now escaping me. The second way to build your brand is to position yourself as an authority, and this is the way that we teach lawyers how to build brand in great legal marketing by setting yourself up not as a character, but as an authority who is, as we've termed it over the years, the wise man at the top of the mountain that has all of the answers to your legal problems. Now you can couple this and there have been lawyers in our programs that have coupled this successfully with brand building and personality, but you don't have to, and so being a caricature, being an avatar, makes you uncomfortable. I want you to know that you can have a brand as a lawyer that is built around authority and not character, and that's what Ben and I dive into in this conversation.
Speaker 2:You see it on your Facebook feed, you see it on your LinkedIn, you see it on your TikTok and Instagram and all that stuff, and so being able to stand out without being the largest spender, the biggest spender in your marketplace is really important. For over 20 years we have taught this authority building and today we're going to talk about some of the tools, show you some examples of lawyers in the great legal marketing universe who have built authority and are not relying on just spending gobs of money on outsourced, on outbound advertising.
Speaker 1:So the whole point of building your authority is to put yourself in a position where people who have never met you before know you, like you and trust you.
Speaker 1:And the easiest way to do that and the way to distinguish yourself from most lawyer advertising in the market is to simply provide information to people right To be answering the question that's in your prospective client's mind.
Speaker 1:That's not how do I hire you and how much does it cost? Providing them little bits of information all along the way about things that might be helpful in their case, about landmines that might come up if they try to handle the case on their own. And we have done this in the law firm and in Great Legal Marketing for years and years, right From the five deadly sins that wreck your auto accident case to the robbery without a gun long-term disability appeals book. This has been our whole marketing base, and now we've spun off two YouTube channels that are just information marketing to our prospective avatar clients. And the thing about authority building marketing is that we really don't care what anybody else in the marketplace any other lawyers, web vendors or anything like that thinks about our marketing. We're really just trying to build authority with a small subset of people that might hire us to handle their cases.
Speaker 2:That's exactly right, and this goes back to a previous video where we talked about identifying and building out exactly who your avatar client is. Remember, who do you really want to see walking through your door filling out a web form or getting on a Zoom call? That's really important too, because if you think about building an authority and being famous and you thought that your target market was like all your whole county or your whole state, that's a really hard job. That's being the most popular local newscaster right. They have tons of money and tons of reach. That's not what we're talking about. So go back and make sure you can actually write out who you want to be talking to, because most of these are one-way conversations. Again, we'll talk about books and podcasts. It's a one-way conversation with someone who you don't really know who's listening, but we only care about the people who are our avatar content.
Speaker 2:So I think that a lot of people would say this is really and maybe because I've been doing it for so long, it just doesn't seem as hard anymore. But here's the biggest step that I had to take. Step that I had to take was to get over the mind block of who am I to be famous in this space, whether it's the space of personal injury law, risk of disability law, a thought leader in legal marketing, who am I and so many lawyers. It's so funny because they're otherwise full of brigado, at least when they're writing nasty emails, but they're way too shy about accepting the mantle and the responsibility of being famous in their niche. And here's what I would say to that Are you a good lawyer?
Speaker 2:Hopefully the answer is yes. Is there someone in your town right now who's walking around for whom you would be the perfect lawyer and they'd be a great client for you? I know that answer is yes. So if one and two are both true, then why in the world would we do anything, anything that would stop someone from walking into the wrong law office and not get them into our office? It's almost a moral responsibility, if you can answer yes and yes to those questions, to become the authority, to be famous in your niche, to get that client for whom you would be perfect.
Speaker 1:And here's the thing that holds too many lawyers back is that when you were sitting down and thinking about what you're going to write about, we have this idea that we have to write like the next great treatise on auto accident. Most of what is worthwhile saying in auto accident law has already been said somewhere. You can be one of one in the country at the top of the mountain. We're doing groundbreaking stuff and there's a space for that for somebody, but for most of your clients, although somebody somewhere has said this thing, they still don't know the answer to it.
Speaker 1:And so my friends out there who are doing auto acts and a lot, just think about what your clients don't know about their auto insurance policies. Right, because nobody has ever told them. And as a lawyer, when you are in this day in and day out and fighting with the justices and defense lawyers and judges, you assume that everybody else knows this stuff and it's just not true. And so you could start building your authority really out of basic 101-level tutorial YouTube videos or blog posts that go out into the world and reach your clients or, better yet, reach the people that have audience of your prospective clients. We've talked about that in some of the referral marketing pieces.
Speaker 2:There's people out there that still don't know that a plaintiff's personal injury lawyer is going to work on a contingent fee basis and you're not going to have to put up any money up front Like that. To us it seems that would be impossible. You have to be living under a rock Until you've had an accident. You're not looking in the ads. But here's a strategy that my friend Russell Brunson teaches. He teaches funnel hacking. Now, all funnel hacking is to say before you decide what you're going to write or say to your marketplace, go look at what your competition is writing and saying. Again, you'll see what Brian just said the bar is pretty low.
Speaker 2:Way back in the day, when I first heard of this idea although it wasn't called funnel hacking because there weren't any funnels, but the idea was go and look at all the Yellow Page ads. And so I did. I went to the library and looked at it. It rose and rose, shelves and shelves of Yellow Page ads. I looked at all the messages that the plaintiff's firms were putting out there and I realized that, oh my gosh, they all say the same thing. And that's where I came up with the original idea of hey, if you've been hurt before you hire a lawyer where you talk to the adjuster or sign any forms, get this free book.
Speaker 2:The point is pausing, looking around, what is your competition saying on internet, on YouTube, on TikTok, and now you'll find. I guarantee you you will find a space for your voice. And again, the other thing is lawyers. You guys got to lighten up about this stuff. You're not that special, right? You can be loose in front of a camera like I am right now. I don't care right, people will stick around and listen to your serious message if they find you interesting in the first instance. If you're still standing in front of law books or sitting behind a legal desk just reading off a really boring script, that's a turnoff. They're going to the next person. They will stay around if you're interesting and then they will get your serious advice. And the whole idea now is to get them just to take the next step, which is pick up the phone, fill out a web form, figure out some other way to contact you. All right, let's talk about some of the tools that we have used and lawyers across Great Legal Marketing have used for years.
Speaker 1:So there's a variety of different media that you can build your authority in, and not every media is going to be right for everybody, right? So there are people that don't want to be on video, and if you don't want to be on video, that's fine, right. The last thing you want to do is make three crappy videos and then decide that it doesn't work. So if you were somebody who doesn't ever want to be on camera, you can look at a podcast, you can write a book, you can be a contributor in news articles, and so some of the tools that we'll talk about today are that books, podcasts and how to get reporters to pay attention to you and ask you questions about your industry, your area of the law.
Speaker 1:Let's talk books first. Again, going back 15, 20 years, great legal marketing really was built on the idea that you could be a published author and be a celebrity within your niche by being the one that wrote the book. But so many people look at these books and there are 100, 120 pages and we go. I don't have time. I'm a busy lawyer trying to answer the phones, trying to solve client problems. I don't have time to sit down and write a lengthy book on my subject, and also very few people might actually read a Virginia auto accident book, so let's solve for that. What are some of the tools that we have to solve for the problem of not enough time to write the great next legal book?
Speaker 2:Remember that one of the purposes of the book is not so that your client actually reads it and understands all of it, but it's really to give your team an excuse to say, hey, if the person is not signing up right over the phone. Hey, mr Glass, brian, in this case he wrote the book on this. You mind, if I get your name and address and send you. And back in the day it was really hard. It was literally type at a computer, find a printer, do all that visual paint, all sorts of services.
Speaker 2:Today, michael DeLeon at Paperback Expert is someone that we're working with now. Michael has this whole process where you get an idea. He's got a team that will interview you, will ghostwrite your book for you, you edit it and remember. The whole idea is we're going to get something that would be interesting and attractive, that someone would trade their name and contact information for to get your book. And Paperback Expert puts out a really high quality book. Again, this is not the Lexus Treatise on Virginia Automobile Accident Law at all right. It's a little consumer informative guide and even though the strategy has been around for years and years, it's still used across a lot of different markets Dentists, chiropractors, lawyers, cpas.
Speaker 1:I'm glad you said that piece about it. The goal is not actually so that somebody will read your entire book and become an expert, right, I've always had. The book does three things. The book gets you off the phone or gets your team off the phone with people whose cases you can't help. So in my world that's like property damage, only stuff.
Speaker 1:How do we get this person off the phone? Provide them a resource that's helpful to them, but give them kind of a soft landing where they're not going to be a client of ours. Number two it convinces whoever your prospective client is that this is really hard. So the Robbery Without a Gun ERISA Long-Term Disability book is designed and we've peppered in all of these bad opinions from circuit court and court of appeals judges about how difficult ERISA is. And then the third one is to set yourself up as the wise person at the top of the mountain that answers all the questions. None of those three things is to really educate the consumer. Make the consumer an expert on legal processes, because at the end of the day, that's not why they called your law firm right. They called you to try to hire a lawyer to learn a little bit more about their case if they wanted to go become an expert. There are actually treatises that they can buy and try to become an expert.
Speaker 2:They go to the library. I once got a client because one of my books was in the local public library.
Speaker 1:Let's talk about another authority building mechanism, which is podcasts. Having run a podcast now for 18 months, I would tell you do not start a podcast audience now. For 18 months, I would tell you, do not start a podcast audience. If you want to become an authority and expand your reach, the better mechanism is to go on other people's podcasts, and so we've had a couple of Great Legal Marketing members who have done a really nice job of getting on other people's podcasts, because all podcast hosts need guests, right? So they're constantly looking for new people to talk to. They will do all the work of producing the collateral and producing the audio visual, and all you have to do is show up and ask questions, and so the easy kill for this, if you want to become a greater authority in your field, is to look for podcasts who are hosted and have an interview style and just reach out to the host of those podcasts and ask if they're looking for somebody in your field to talk.
Speaker 2:Perfect task for a virtual assistant to go and track down. And you know that there's going to be other business owners and entrepreneurs in your state or your local geographic area who are running podcasts, who are looking for guests. And one of the great podcasts from great legal marketing members so Scott Snelling is an Icon Mastermind member and for years he's been doing a podcast which features local business owners and he's got a whole sort of club around that. So he makes it a really big deal once you're a guest on that podcast. And the thing with having guests is now you can show guests how to promote and they promote this thing to their audience. So whether you're the podcast host and yes, that is a lot of work or the podcast guest, the podcast is a media, even though you might look and go oh, everybody's got a podcast now and nobody's listening. That's not true. People are listening. We get folks all the time who are calling us up at Great Legal Marketing because they've listened to you, to Brian, or to my podcast about building a practice. The other thing we've done you can go and search for the ERISA Long-Term Disability Litigation Podcast. I'll just leave you to go search for it actually and just find out how I do that entire podcast with zero involvement by me. Okay, go figure out what I've done there, because it's an authority-building tool that we now talk about on the website, and Richard Matthews is a great guy. He's been a vendor at some of our conferences. He's got a team that can help you. If you want to be a podcast producer, a podcast host, he can help you get that done.
Speaker 2:Let's talk about standard media. As we are recording this, one of our members just had a big case report out of Texas and now he's being interviewed all over the country and on a mastermind call last week I said how can I use this? So we gave him some really good ideas about how he can repurpose things. The Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, cnn, fox everybody's writing about his case. All right, that's big time. That's a big hit. But it comes out of a very simple divorce case for him. Actually, it's a benign case and now it turned into something big. The media is looking for people like you.
Speaker 1:And there are a number of resources that you can go to and we'll link to these in the description of this episode. But there's a number of places where reporters come and they look for subject matter experts. So three websites that I've been using recently to get backlinks to the website number one but also to get my name in print number two, are Featured Q-W-O-T-E-D and connectively, which is the rebirth of help a reporter out, which is like an old listserv style email. And I think all three of those are some version of freemium where you can reply to a certain number of requests every month before you start having to pay a monthly fee and it's worth paying the monthly fee and seeing whether there are enough questions in your subject matter to make sense. And so the way that I do that, I have an EA who monitors all three of those and then he populates a page in our shared workspace with questions that have anything to do with legal or anything to do with marketing or entrepreneurship, and then I go in and I answer in four to six sentences the question and he puts them back in through the portal.
Speaker 1:It's got to pick up for us a couple of backlinks every single month and then the task becomes how can we repurpose our name in whatever article it is, anywhere from, I don't know, legalconsultingio all the way up to Forbes magazine? How can we repurpose that in our own marketing to hold ourselves out as the authority? Now for authority. You're always going to get more of a push if it is a referral from somewhere else. Right Then if it's your own, talking about yourself, and so the ability to have somebody else who's produced something with your name in it and then share that with your audience is so much greater than your own YouTube channel or your own blog posts are going to do when it comes to convincing and persuading your prospective clients that you are the right choice for their case.
Speaker 2:And the thing is, once it happens, once you get a quote in the Wall Street Journal, then for the rest of your career you can run as featured in the Wall Street Journal or as quoted by the Wall Street Journal, like running a marathon. Once you do that, you have it. It's a badge that you carry forever and ever. Let's talk about, because we like this strategy as well, is speaking engagements. Now again, pause here Again, we're not trying to become the most famous person on the internet. We're trying to appear to our prospective avatar client as someone who's knowledgeable and respected in the space. And actually a lot of this stuff we're talking about isn't about becoming famous as a personal injury lawyer. It's about becoming a famous person in the community. So just remember, the bar just isn't that high. Let's talk about speaking engagements because we've learned a lot about showing up and speaking and, importantly, the thing that I didn't know in the beginning was how to effectively repurpose every single speaking engagement.
Speaker 2:I do so, whether I'm invited to Virginia trial lawyers to speak, as I was several months ago, or invited to speak virtually at a legal marketing prince, like. The things that are running through my head from the moment of the invitation is how am I going to repurpose this In the case of the VTLA? Like I contacted them, hey, are you guys recording this? I think that they weren't recording it. Great, I hired my own videographer. I hired my own paparazzi to follow me around, take pictures and get video of the event. That investment is well worth it because, again, one event, one talk I can live and I can run with that talk and the fact that I spoke to a room full of the smartest workers' compensation lawyers across Virginia. I can run with that for a long time.
Speaker 1:And here's the thing is that if you are speaking to a state or local bar association group, they probably are not as good at marketing as you are, and so you will have to do a little bit of the heavy lifting.
Speaker 1:So that looks like for us if we get invited to speak somewhere, creating our own Canva graphics that say we've been invited, with the date, the title of the talk, sharing it on social media, tagging the sponsor of the talk, hoping that they will reshare it right, probably taking a selfie or two at the site so that I can put that on social media later, using our own video. Or if you're doing virtual and you can get a copy of the recording, great. If you can't get a copy of the recording, it's just a matter of setting up a secondary camera here to record it so that you can repurpose that later. And then, if there are people in the room that are taking pictures of you and there's nothing better as a speaker than you put up a slide and everybody whips out their camera and takes a picture of you, and so if you're able to reproduce those moments and find them later and share them online, all the better use of that time.
Speaker 2:All right, so let's bring this back to home base. What's the purpose, what's the reason for establishing yourself as an authority? It's that just to be able to have other people talk about you, tell your story and even the story beyond. Oh, mr Jones is a great family law attorney. No, mr Jones is someone who runs podcasts, gets invited all over the country, is a respected lecturer, writer, author, whatever. It just broadens the number of ways that another human being can remember you and can tell others about you.
Speaker 2:And I tell you when a consumer, the other thing is it just gives you so much collateral to work with. Because when a consumer is going from website to website to website and they all look the same and you've got video of presentation or audio of presentation or a long list of I mean, I've been involved in over probably 200 podcast episodes. Right, that's a differentiator. All I'm trying to do is get someone to stop, pay a little bit more attention to me, investigate farther, a little farther, and see if it looks like I would be someone who their case would be safe and effective with. The bar is low and we're always available to riff with you on ideas you have, if you've got an event, if you've been published, if you're speaking someplace, reach out to us if you'd like, because I guarantee you that your competition is not doing this. They are waiting to be invited by some CLE board. We are looking at the 400 ways we can use that invitation to make ourselves more famous in our space.
