Lunchtime Hors D’oeuvres || Salacious Scorpion Speculations

Episode Notes

Transcript

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Welcome to Lunch Hour Legal Marketing. I am Gyi from AttorneySync. And I am in Austin, Texas one week after Texas loses to Ohio State

Conrad Saam:

And I am Conrad from Mockingbird and I have lived on three different continents

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And this is Lunch Hour Legal Marketing where we talk about our travels as well as marketing for law firms. Conrad, as I mentioned, I’m in Austin. I’m at the 8:00 AM Kaleidoscope Conference and I got to tell you, it’s a great show.

Conrad Saam:

I think they had you and definitely not me because I did not love their rebranding. What are you talking about at Kaleidoscope?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I am talking about social media, I’m talking about client communication and I’m talking about AI in marketing, so I’ve got a full slate.

Conrad Saam:

All right, well done. Well done. Exciting conference. They’re doing a great job. 8:00 AM

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yes, it’s their inaugural conference. As you have pointed out, they’ve just completed their rebrand, but again, I think in the context of some of these bigger conversations about legal technology and consolidation, look, they’ve got a portfolio that’s very compelling across practice management and various verticals and accounting and payments, and so grateful to get an inside look at what their future holds, but enough about my travel. What else are we talking about today?

Conrad Saam:

As always, we are starting with a quick hit on the news and then I’m going to share my postulations that came to me while I was riding my bicycle, thinking about Clio and Scorpion and their partnership, their very close partnership announcement. And then we are going to hear from six of our Lunch Hour Legal Marketing speakers. We ask them to provide us with some tactical concepts. We’re going to listen to their tactical ideas and then Gyi and I are going to extrapolate on each of those tactics. Music money.

Announcer:

Welcome to Lunch Hour, Legal Marketing, teaching you how to promote market and make fat stacks for your legal practice here on Legal Talk Network.

Conrad Saam:

Welcome to Lunch Hour Legal Marketing. As always, we’re going to start with the news. All right everybody, welcome to the news. Gyi, you are at the 8:00 AM Kaleidoscope Conference. Any other conferences come in where we are going to see you?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yes, you will see me at lunch or Legal Marketing Summit, which we can’t stop talking about. You’ll also see both of us at the Great Legal Marketing Summit and I will be also at Clio, so a lot of conferences in my life coming up here.

Conrad Saam:

Alright, conference season is back in full swing.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Where can people see you? Conrad, where are you going?

Conrad Saam:

I think basically you and I are just meeting up on the regular. I don’t think there are any things that we’re doing that are outside of that, although we’re running some more webinars. We haven’t done webinars a lot. The summer is a good time to start doing webinars and so we got a late start on redoing webinars. We are going to do a webinar on outsourcing, so how do you near source both from a hiring and management and even payment perspective talent and then also the technical aspect of making sure that you have security if you’re outsourcing work to Mexico, et cetera. So that’s coming up at the end of September. I wanted to give a shout out to Brett Trembley and Ryan McKean, two great leaders in the legal space. They’ve dabbled in digital marketing, but they’ve partnered together to put together virtual case managers. So there’s training that goes along with this. There’s identifying people that are going along with this. Ryan is doing all of the training for the virtual case managers. I believe Brett is doing the sourcing and that is something that you guys should check out. Two really, really smart minds getting together to bring something together for you. Gyi, Google survives. Tell me about this. Google, the good old Google what’s going on.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Google survives the breakup that the antitrust case had at least alluded to. They will have to share data, which is supposed to somewhat level the playing field for other competitors. Although at least I saw the CEO of DuckDuckGo thinks that this is less than a slap on the wrist. Honestly, from my viewpoint, the ads stays with them. Chrome stays with them. I think the devil will be in the details of how the data sharing actually works and what’s being shared and how that’s all being validated. But Google survived a big bullet here,

Conrad Saam:

So you don’t see major changes coming.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

No, I think that the breakup of search ads and Chrome would’ve been the change that I think people had at least hoped for that they thought would be the needed change and they’re not allowed to make these exclusive deals and I think that’ll have some impact and default user behavior on devices and whatnot. But in terms of the competitive advantage they have based on ad search and Chrome as that kind of core business, I don’t think that it’ll be that.

Conrad Saam:

On the sad trombone side of news for Google search engine land reports that Google’s share of general search, I don’t know how they’re actually defining general search, but Google share of general search fell from 73% in February to 67% in August. That is a precipitous decline,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

So I’m going to call, I don’t think that this is that rigorous. They’re citing this higher visibility you can go

Conrad Saam:

Because you don’t believe in general search.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

No, because the implication here is that for at least these contexts of search that Google commands almost, what did they say? Half all month? 73, 60, 0, 73. I mean

All the other research about this would be contrary to this including now look, do I think Google pads their numbers? I do, but every single other place that is reporting on this, I don’t think anybody is implying and maybe this, and again, you can go judge for yourself what the survey says and you can hit us up on LHLM on LinkedIn if you have other thoughts, but the implication of this headline is that for this context of search, someone else is taking 30% of search and if you go, actually you want to hear some of the other places that people are going to Conrad Yelp. You buy Yelp, you buy Yelp is jumping in there. You think people are up on Yelp these days? When’s the last time Yelp’s come up in your conversations? Andrew Shy was talking about they were just buying Yelp ads and he is like it was crickets.

Conrad Saam:

Okay, keep going. You see

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yelp showing up in search results

Conrad Saam:

Here we have, Gyi, slandering our old friends from search engine land. I like it.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

No, they’re sourcing and they’re sourcing another study. It’s not even search engine land study, it’s just they published it. So anyway, look, bottom line, is anybody surprised that there’s growing users on chat gt? No, they’re not.

Conrad Saam:

Right?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Does anybody in their right mind really think in the local search context that 30% of the local searches are going somewhere else?

Conrad Saam:

Where are you getting 30% from?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I’m again, I’m embellishing my point here, but

Conrad Saam:

Got it.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Local is one of the categories that they talk about. Again, people go read this yourselves. I’m just paraphrasing here and we’re going fast as a news bullet.

Conrad Saam:

Do you think do your own research, we’re supposed to be the research people

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Telling, do your own research on the internet. You can always find you’re the one who put this in the news, bro, you put this in the news, not me. You want to defend it. Do you think that informational search, Google’s only at 70% market share?

Conrad Saam:

I am just putting the news out.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Does Mockingbirds data show that searches down 30% in terms of

Conrad Saam:

Are you

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Telling your clients to limit budgets? Take a 30% haircut on SEO because Google

Conrad Saam:

Not Where’s 30% coming from?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I’m just saying that other places have Google at over 90% market share and search.

Conrad Saam:

Okay,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

This is saying there’re 70, so 20%.

Conrad Saam:

Got it. Okay.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Sorry.

Conrad Saam:

And that’s why I was asking what do you mean by the definition of what general search means potentially heavily expanded, right? From what you would otherwise perceive. Having said that, there is a downward trend in search traffic, right? That is a thing

Gyi Tsakalakis:

For sure, but that’s a totally different issue than users on Google. This is saying that people are not using Google, not talking about traffic. They’re saying that people are going other places for search.

Conrad Saam:

I don’t dispute that concept.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

The numbers mean I don’t dispute it either. But how much?

Conrad Saam:

7% drop in six months. That’s big.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah. Okay, let’s just go through local business searches, 67%. The next largest place that people are going for local search is Yelp. The third biggest place according to this

Conrad Saam:

Data that may be from people in Mountain View,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

The third biggest place is social media. I don’t know, maybe they’re about the same. It’s about 10% Yelp, 10% social media, 10% ai. Again, I’m like if the headline is people are using other tools for search, a hundred percent is Google down to 70% market share on search.

Conrad Saam:

This is why I keep saying general search, right? Anyway,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Alright.

Conrad Saam:

The other thing that I’ve been reading on the news is the rise of Reddit. This keeps coming up. Reddit keeps coming up. We have not done a segment on Reddit. Maybe that is something that we should dig deeper on, but Reddit, especially in the AI context, is a primary driver that it comes up study after study after study, anecdote after anecdote after anecdote. So think about what your Reddit strategy is and maybe Gyi, next time, next recording, we can go a little bit deeper on how to be successful on Reddit. When we come back, we’re going to be talking about my speculations that I had about Clio and Scorpion. So Gyi, you and I have talked about this before because I couldn’t help but share it with you, but I was on my bike doing a long bike ride where some of my best thinking happens and I was thinking about the episode that you and I did with Scorpion and Clio and you and I kept saying it just felt dissonant because it was this closed. I think it was this sole preferred provider, what did they call it? Gyi.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah, sole preferred marketing partner. Partner, I think. Yeah.

Conrad Saam:

Yeah. And it just felt so off to me that Clio, which has been all about openness and connecting with people would be so tight at an exclusive level with a solo marketing provider. We actually pushed them. Gyi, you pushed at the end of that interview and you asked Clio clients, are they going to get pushed to Scorpion, right? And the answer was yes. And they weren’t shy about it. It was a resounding yes. Gyi, you felt that was dissonant, right? It felt off brand.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I was surprised. Again, my hangup, this is your reflection, my hangup was with, so it didn’t make a ton of sense to me that ccle would be like this is our sole marketing provider.

Conrad Saam:

So I had this epiphany sitting on the bike, and by the way, this is based on, no, this is pure speculation. No one has said

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Anything. Pure Conrad told me anything speculation too.

Conrad Saam:

This is 100% Conrad

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Speculation nothing to do with this.

Conrad Saam:

I think it’s very possible that Clio has quietly or is planning on quietly purchasing Scorpion and that’s the only reason that I can come up with where Clio would abandon what has been a very open approach to working with partners and go a complete 180 to a closed approach. It’s the only thing that makes sense to me. And so they do get to this great thing and they mentioned this ROI, and this is a thing like you and I have made fun of ROI for a very, very long time. If you can do attribution and then equate it to ROI, which you can by connecting these two systems together, that can sound like a very powerful thing. The problem of course is we discussed during that interview was I don’t buy the attribution modeling at all and it’s too easy to have Google business profile take credit for all the offline things that you’re doing, which law firms are increasingly doing. You enable online to claim attribution for what’s really been demand generated by offline activity and then claim ROI and make things look all hunky dory to people who they admitted were under sophisticated and didn’t want to get in the weeds of their own marketing. Does that make sense to you? Gyi, I mean it’s plausible.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, I would say this to the second part. You’re coming to the table with a lot of baggage my friend, but they could easily, the second part of what you’re talking about segmenting brand versus non-brand, they can accomplish that. You’re assuming that’s not going to happen. The firm’s using Clio can simply be like, how’d you hear about us? Bill referred me. Okay, great goes into Clio as Bill referred me, that comes out of the bucket that’s going to non-brand digital

Conrad Saam:

And what gets reported back to the end client because there’s no insight.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, again, taking them at their face value, they are providing insight all the way down to the keyword level if you want it. They’re providing you have total access to your data. It’s just that the account is owned by, it’s not owned by you. You’re renting the account, but the data you have access to

Conrad Saam:

And I think that’s where I am not buying it.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Okay.

Conrad Saam:

Right.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

To your first point, I’ll say this, your epiphany makes a lot of sense, right? They have three options. They’re in build, partner, buy

Conrad Saam:

This

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Is public as partner. Partner sure dovetails into buy a lot easier than Bill does. And so if it’s on their roadmap to be delivering those services, then that makes a lot of sense. The other thing that I would say that we come to the table with baggage acknowledging that we are at least rivals, I don’t even know if we were the rivals, but at least rivals of Scorpion an acquisition. It could change their entire trajectory. Maybe they go, maybe they adopt the Clio ethos of being more open when they are an acquisition. I mean you laugh, but if ccle is setting the game plan, they own the company, then that’s totally on the table too.

Conrad Saam:

I just can’t come up with another reason why Clio would disenfranchise all other agencies, literally disincentivize them from introducing Clio products to their end law firm clients. I can’t come up with a reason why you would make that trade off unless something else. I mean Clio is in an acquisition mode right now. We’ve seen some really, really large acquisitions and Scorpion’s major investment is a hundred million dollars back in 2021 from Regal Saman. Now’s the time four or five years later where as a PE firm you would be looking to make that type of flip. The timing starts to make sense to me when I look at it this way.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, I’ll tell you what, you should make sure that ZE covers this topic at lunch. Our legal marketing summit.

Conrad Saam:

He’s only got five minutes and that was the fourth time we’ve pitched lunch, our legal marketing summit in the first 16, 16

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Minutes. We’re excited Conrad. We’re excited about the summit. We’re not even, we’re less than 20 days out,

Conrad Saam:

20 days out. How many tickets are remaining? Watch? We’re going to pitch it even harder. There are

Gyi Tsakalakis:

30, 20, I think 20 under 38 I saw I was counting like we’re at 20 left.

Conrad Saam:

Okay,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Maybe we’re, I think there are metrics.

Conrad Saam:

I think there are 38. I think you’re probably looking at the early bird versus non early bird.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

That’s possible

Conrad Saam:

Ticket stack.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Anyway, I’ll defer to you.

Conrad Saam:

We are going to, speaking of Lunch Hour Legal Marketing, we are going to play some clips from some of the speakers that was well received on the last podcast, but this time Gyi and I are going to offer our unvarnished commentary and take those thoughts a little bit further. Adam, who do we have up first? I believe it is Brian, Brian Glass. How would you go about evaluating or considering lead gen providers and then how do you hold their feet to the fire? What are you looking for

Speaker 5:

Evaluating or considering lead gen providers? So I think that your best recommendations are going to come from people that trust and have used them before in different markets. I think you have to be familiar with your own bars ethics rules about what you can and cannot say in an ad and you need to ask the provider to show you all the ads that they’re going to run on your behalf to generate phone calls because the lead gen providers aren’t subject to bar advertising rules, but you are, right? And so if they’re running something that runs a foul of your state’s rules, they’re not going to get in trouble. You are. And so that’s how you have to vet them and you just have to be comfortable that they’re actually running and generating clients based on the ads that they’ve shown you. The other thing that we’ve done after you’ve made the buy is I’ve just asked potential clients who called through that ad, what was it that you saw that you liked?

Why did you call us and not any of the other hundreds of data points or people that you could have called because of this. So that’s how you go about vetting and how do you hold their feet to the fire? Well most of these lead gen companies have their own dashboard and so it’s very easy to see when they told you that they generated a call that they did in fact generate a call that it is a live person and I think you want, if you’re willing to do this, you should not be spending money on the non-exclusive leads and I think you can just ask the end client, did they give you my name or did they give you a couple of other names? So that’s fairly easy to figure out. And then just like with LSAs, you need to be legitimate about going in and marking as booked, not booked and rejecting cases that don’t meet the criteria that you agreed to with Allegiant Company.

Conrad Saam:

Alright, key. What do you think? Any thoughts from Brian? Surprise you

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Brian. Brian’s a really smart guy. I guess I would add this one. I because he talks about getting referrals from other firms and I think that’s a great way to call your list and say, Hey, we’re going to try these providers, this other firm we know is having great success with ’em. I think the ethics thing’s a huge thing. I would add two more criteria. One, I would say you have to have full transparency with them about how they’re going to generate the lead. I want to see the ad copy because again, to Brian’s second point about the ethics, you’re on the hook. If the lead gen company goes out there and starts randomly texting people and you’re violating TCPA and all this stuff and you’re the lead buyer, I think there’s arguments to be made that you’re on the hook, at least from a rules professional conduct standpoint.

So I demand transparency. Where are you buying media? How are you buying it? What’s the offer? What do the ads look like? Are you like winner free iPad? And then the final thing, and Brian mentioned this, but I would just add, and this goes to the point about the assumption that because your friend’s having success, you’ve got to track your own data, the cost per client that you end up paying for these leads, which is basically a function of how many of these leads because paying per lead convert into a client for you and then what’s the ultimate value of those cases for you? You have got to have that locked down. And so with all of those caveats, great, but here’s the question. If you go in there and you’re like, we’re buying Facebook ads and here’s the creative everything and you’re paying a premium on those, you got to balance that against running it yourself or delegating it to an in-house person or hiring an agency to do it on your behalf. Because here’s the thing, most of these lead gen companies, they’re not generating leads under the lead buyer’s brand name. And so if you got to weigh the premium, you’re paying for a non-branded lead when you could just be running the media yourself with your brand, getting the additional brand affinity equity buildup on top of generating the lead yourself.

Conrad Saam:

You bring up good points. I had a kind of corollary to that. There’s a massive cost. Brian talked about showing all of the ads you want to see all of the ads and how they’re running them. That is a huge cost to you. Now I think you can probably do that with a cover your ass approach. Like, hey, we asked them to show all the ads. We don’t necessarily have them, but we did ask for that. So I think that’s a possibility just to kind of cover your ass if anything happens. But you’re not talking about, I don’t know any firms who are purchasing leads from lead providers who are going through and auditing the individual creative. It’s a huge expense. The other thing that he said that I was surprised to hear, especially from Brian was the don’t spend money on non-exclusive leads. My read on don’t spend money on non-exclusive leads is really a, you better know that you’re getting them at a much, much lower cost and B, if you have a fast and amazing intake system that can actually be from an economics perspective, a better play.

The reason I say I was surprised here that they come from Brian is that I’m making the assumption given the way what I know about Ben and Brian, that they have a fast and really, really good intake system. Therefore the economics for that might work better. The flip side is fast can be come across as aggressive and so I think that’s something to balance, but that did surprise me. Next clip and then we’re going to take a break. We have the lease Friday. Have a listen tactically, what are most firms not doing that they should be?

Brian Glass:

If I’m being honest, my favorite response to this question is most firms are not getting the lawyers within their law firm excited about LinkedIn when they should be. So many lawyers are on LinkedIn, it is free 99, and people do business with people. They don’t do business with a brand. If a law firm can get the other associates and their law firm excited about LinkedIn, talking about what they’re doing, talking about the law firm, they’re going to be so much more successful because they have so many people within the firm helping do the marketing for them and I think more lawyers should be on LinkedIn.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Conrad, how would you react to Lisa’s sentiment that more lawyers should be on LinkedIn?

Conrad Saam:

Well, this goes back to something that I think is really important and often overlooked from a marketing perspective is the good old name search. So you may work for a large law firm. Most of the lawyers at that large law firm are not bringing in, they’re not the face of the firm. They’re not the person that is being hired. Why I’m attracted to this firm, someone else, the first thing that someone is going to do when they get connected with a lawyer under the brand of a bigger firm is check out that attorney. There’s name search, there’s vetting that goes on on that. LinkedIn is such an amazingly effective winner of name search and it is what people want to validate when they are researching an attorney. So a hundred percent agree on this. DEI mentioned the value of brand versus people. You and I have been talking about brands so much and yet it is the person that becomes really important down at the nitty gritty of we’re engaging with this law firm. I’m really engaging with this person. So I think from a pure vetting perspective, not even a networking perspective, but from a pure name search, SEO vetting perspective, LinkedIn is something that is not thought about enough.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah, I’ll just reiterate, I’m thinking about, I’m at this conference meeting people, you know what the first place everybody’s connecting on it’s LinkedIn. They’re not going to Facebook and adding me as a friend. They’re not going to follow me on Instagram. They’re connecting me with me on LinkedIn. We’ve talked about this before, the idea of advertising to referral sources, LinkedIn is the place to do that in the professional context. If you’re a law firm that serves a local community and you get referrals from other, whether they’re lawyers in other practice areas or professionals that are not lawyers, LinkedIn is the place to get your message out and connect with more of those great referral sources and stay top of mind with them.

Conrad Saam:

You said something, I can’t remember when I wrote this down, but I was talking to you when I did. You mentioned about advertising to referral sources and I wrote this down during this conversation. I’m going to read it because it’s still sitting on my desk. I’m taking the LinkedIn concept in Dee’s point and your read on this and extending it further. I wrote down referral marketing isn’t about doing great work. It’s about marketing to people who don’t need you right now. And I think most of the time we think about referral marketing being a reflection of the amazing job that we’re doing and that is a massive misperception. The missing link in this, the missing LinkedIn ha in this is staying in front of those people and one of the greatest ways to do that is through LinkedIn well played. When we come back, we are going to read a glowing review about ourself. My favorite thing to talk about is how great I am, brought to you by Jonathan Hawkins. And then you’re going to hear from Charlie, Brittany, Josh and Thomas, four speakers at launch, all legal marketing summit that you don’t want to miss.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And we’re back and we are super grateful to Jonathan Hawkins who’s an outside general counsel to law firms for his post speaking of LinkedIn, on LinkedIn. Here’s what Jonathan writes, if you’re a law firm owner, you should be listening to Lunch Hour, Legal Marketing. Gyi and Conrad do a fantastic job with that podcast. He was catching up on a recent episode on branding, positioning and messaging, and this is just a teaser. Go connect with Jonathan on LinkedIn to see the rest of his post and to catch the episode that he’s referring to and get in the conversation. Love to see you there.

Conrad Saam:

Alright, we’re going to hear from four more LHLM summit speakers, starting with the man with the best beard in digital marketing. Charlie Mann, how do you grow an email list, right? That’s one of the biggest things. It’s an asset you have to develop. What’s your best way to make that happen? No one wants to give out their email address. No one likes lawyers. You got two problems to solve. How does that work?

Charlie Mann:

Okay, so we can solve that. People don’t like lawyers by saying, okay, you’re not going to be lawyerly in what you publish and the way that you’re going to add people to this list is as you do intakes, boy oh boy, I hope that you’re gathering contact information from people so that way you can add to your list there. When you’re out networking, are you swapping business cards, et cetera, getting people onto your email list. It should be grown in a warm fashion. I don’t believe in going on say a website and scraping a bunch of email addresses and dumping them on a list. Don’t do that. Have a warm point of contact so that way when you start showing up in the inbox, they go, oh, cool, I just met that person the other week and they’re not sending me the boring lawyerly content. Although in my opinion, there’s a lot of lawyer content that is actually really fascinating that makes it very easy to publish lawyer content because lawyers are all over television, they’re in movies. I think that law firms are secretly tabloids in the making and you can publish sensational content just out of what you view as an everyday case that people will eat up.

Conrad Saam:

This is a hard one because growing an email list, I do believe in the value of the size of an email list. It’s hard to make a email campaign work when you’ve got 20 subscribers. He mentioned intake, which is an obvious one. He mentioned swapping business cards, which is an obvious one, but Gyi, I would love some more creative approaches and positive approaches to gathering email list. If you’re a lawyer, people don’t want to give out their email and what are your thoughts

Gyi Tsakalakis:

They do if you’re offering them free tickets to their favorite sports team.

Conrad Saam:

There you go, baby.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

They do. If you’re giving them free dinner at their favorite local restaurant.

Conrad Saam:

Okay, so you are, what’s

Gyi Tsakalakis:

In it for me? What’s the trade? Email’s a trade, right? I’m going to give you my email. I’m going to opt in to get messaging from you. And again, this is only one context and in fact, I don’t even think this is the context that Charlie’s talking about, but I’m super grateful and excited to hear his talk in particular. Actually, I can’t wait for you, me and Charlie to sit in a side conversation so you can fight it out about the value of email. I’m big on email, but again, it goes to the point that you’re making, Conrad is if you are like, sign up for my firm’s email newsletter, don’t be surprised when it doesn’t work. But hey, you want to talk about Affinity? I’ll give you another example. My friend Ken Levinson is doing an online book club. Sign up for the online book club by subscribing to the online book recommendation email list and then do a zoom call once a month to talk about the book that you’ve read. You’re attracting affinity people that are into reading and are interested in the topic. They join and sign up and you’re talking book reviews. Nothing to do with how hard Ken fights, nothing to do with how big his verdicts and settlements are. Nothing to do with how many years of experience he had. He loves to read, he wants to gravitate with other readers email’s sacred, right? You can’t spam email. Everybody’s going to unsubscribe. You got to treat it right? It’s a huge undervalued asset for a lot of firms.

Conrad Saam:

I’m going to pitch Charlie a little bit on this. One of the things that we have not ever talked about at Lunch Hour Legal Marketing is the importance of deliverability and open rates and what you need to do with your list in order to maximize the likelihood that someone is actually going to do something with that email. It is easy enough to send out thousands of emails and have them never actually reach the inbox, and that’s something that Charlie’s going to be talking about. We have never ever covered that on this pod. It’s a good piece of content that most people do not think about. Okay, up next, Brittany Green.

Brittany Green:

When I was in my firm, I started my in-house role as the client happiness coordinator. And so we were doing unreasonable hospitality before we even knew that there was a name for that in the greater world. So we were doing so much unreasonable hospitality in our firm through me in that role without even realizing it was this specific idea. So we were doing things like sending birthday cards, which we found ways to do that automated but still have them be handwritten. I’d get off the phone with a client because one of my duties was checking in routinely to make sure they were happy with our service, and if they were having a particularly rough day, I’d surprise them with a little, their favorite Starbucks drink from an Uber Eats delivery to their door stop. So there’s those little gestures that would happen if they had surgery, we’d send them milk bar cookies, right? If they got married, we’d send them a little gift. I’d tried to find their registry and find something off of it to send. So doing these little one off, they feel one off, but they were still strategic, right? Because we had sort of a system in place.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Get yourself a Brittany.

Conrad Saam:

Yeah, get yourself a Brittany. Totally agree. One of the things, and Gyi, I don’t know if you see this with your clients, I have a handful of clients, it’s not a lot, but a handful of clients where there’s someone who’s at least their job or part of their job is checking in, they’re almost a third party. They’re not involved in the matter, they’re not involved in any of the legal, they’re not involved in anything other than, Hey, how are things going? It’s almost like having that third party when you drive behind a truck and it’s like, how’s my driving? It’s that job at a law firm to have someone dedicated to that. There’s some level of scale that’s required for that, but it doesn’t mean that you can’t have someone who’s responsible for how are things going. I love this,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And again, my hunch is again, as a plug for the summit, my hunch is that a lot of law firms, they’re not even thinking like this. And this is one of those mindset shifts where you’re like, this isn’t about what I’m delivering from a legal services delivery standpoint. This is a, I am focused on my client purely on the overall experiences that they’re having, how our firm is making them feel that are well beyond scheduling depositions and settlement negotiations and all the other stuff that you do from a service delivery standpoint. To me, this talk and getting to know Brittany and following what Brittany’s putting out in the world is the stuff that is the game changer in terms of getting more people to talk about your practice. Because again, clients have these unreasonable service experiences and they tell other people about them and they write about them and they put them in reviews, and this stuff can change so much of perception about your practice and really change the entire conversation about what it’s like to be a client at your firm.

Conrad Saam:

And I’ll take that further. You said it changed the perception of your practice. It changes the perception of how well you are doing your job as a lawyer, even though it has nothing to do with your lawyering, and this is what we call bedside manner with doctors. Same thing exists in legal, but they’re equating the quality of your legal services with the delight they feel while they’re using those legal services. That’s a Harry Beckwith principle from selling invisible. Most of your clients will never have an ability to truly understand if you’re doing a good legal job, they will have a really easy job of understanding how you make them feel while you’re doing that legal job and that becomes a reflection of how you’re doing as an attorney. Next, Josh Hodges, who is taking over Ohio, small town by small town. How do you find your little influencers? Right?

Josh Hodges:

I think the algorithm knows. I do a lot of local content and I consume local content, so then I start seeing people and I’m like, oh, this chicken Columbus keeps talking about small towns in southern Ohio. So I follow her and I message ’em. I have Brooke, my outreach person now is finding them for me too. That’s part of her job. So she’s been setting me up coffee dates and lunches with local content creators. I’ve probably met 10 or 15 and I’ve done videos with three already and it’s not expensive. I mean, they’re going to do where they went to lunch video anyway. So if I give ’em a couple hundred bucks, put me as a guest star in it and I buy ’em lunch and I get all their viewers see me. The cool thing is, and what I hope is I’ll pay ’em here or there. I’ll do a collab video for free with ’em or whatever, give ’em some swag, but then they’re following me and they comment and like my stuff because now we’re kind of friends and now their people are more likely to see it because of that.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

He should not be telling people this, it’s too good.

Conrad Saam:

Please rewind the podcast if you’re over 40 years old and you know what rewinding is and don’t listen to Josh Hodges too good. He understands this local influencer better than almost anybody. I think the key here, the thing that he did not say, Gyi, and this is what I was trying to bait him into with my question. He did not say find the person who’s local who has the largest influencer list, the largest number of followers. He was sourcing these people by seeing how they are engaged in the community, not their Facebook body count,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

The original local social butterfly.

Conrad Saam:

Alright, love that guy. Finally, LSAs super hot. We haven’t talked about LSAs for a hot minute. Gyi, I’m going to say we got five or six episodes. You have to go back. Before you and I talked about LSAs, we’re going to hear from Thomas Glasgow about local service ads. Your opinion, what is the best kind of tactical approach to managing LSAs

Thomas Glasgow:

Best tactical approach? I think the biggest lever that law firms have that can be an advantage to them over other firms is what happens during the actual call. So I think that’s the secret sauce, if you will, of running a successful campaign is understanding that Google one is listening to that entire call and doing whatever they want with that data. So being aware of that, but then understanding, okay, if Google wants to provide this great searcher experience and they have all this data that they’re gathering, how do we show them the searcher experience that they want to see? And so how can we design intake processes to one, say things that we think Google wants to hear, not say things we think they don’t want to hear because every single thing that happens on that call is a data point that influences how your LSA ranks. And so from a tactical standpoint, I think it’s developing those systems and processes and training intake on them to make sure that that entire conversation is completely crafted in a way to influence the ai how we want.

Conrad Saam:

Love this. I feel like we should just mic drop on that because I’ve got nothing to add.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I would just add, which is all in alignment with what he’s saying. Our near media partnership, which you’ll get a chance to get to see David Min present. He’s got some data on LSAs and all of this rings true love them or hate them. They command high visibility on search. They have a lot of features that a lot of the other listings don’t have. Google’s an ad platform. If you can figure out your economics for LSAs and maximize your value as well as in alignment with Google’s, you will win.

Conrad Saam:

Alright everyone, you have just spent a solid 40 plus minutes listening to Gyi and Conrad. If you are looking for an excuse to jet off to Las Vegas and spend three days talking digital marketing, please jump on as of this recording, there are 39 tickets left. I’m hoping the dregs of the remaining tickets are available. Head over to [email protected], see if there’s anything left we haven’t sold out. We would love to have you find a good excuse to jet off to Las Vegas.

Announcer:

Thank you for listening to Lunch Hour Legal Marketing. If you’d like more information about what you heard today, please visit legal talk network.com. Subscribe via Apple Podcasts and RSS, follow Legal Talk Network on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram.

Conrad Saam:

Adam, we’re not getting audio now.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah, I can’t hear it. Am I supposed to just have memorized it?

Conrad Saam:

No, no. We tried this before and we were getting audio. That’s Gyi, being smarty, I.

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