The new BenGlassLaw.com website was launched a few months ago and the architect behind the website is LeFleur Marketing. In this episode, lawyer marketing experts Ben Glass and Chip LeFleur talk about the state of digital marketing for lawyers as we turn into 2024. We also talk about the growth of both of our companies and the management challenges and opportunities that come with that.
Ben talks about how challenging it was to select a web vendor when the decision was made to update and revise a website that first saw light over twenty years ago. They talk about what the modern lawyer should be looking for in a web development company, and Chip explains human centered design thinking. Importantly, Ben shares some ideas he got from Nalini Prasad at Blu Shark when she came to speak at a Great Legal Marketing mastermind meeting earlier this year.
Chip first met Ben at a Great Legal Marketing Summit almost a decade ago.
Ben Glass is a nationally recognized personal injury and long-term disability insurance attorney in Fairfax, VA.
Since 2005, Ben Glass and Great Legal Marketing have been helping solo and small firm lawyers make more money, get more clients and still get home in time for dinner. We call this TheGLMTribe.com
What Makes The GLM Tribe Special?
In short, we are the only organization within the "business builder for lawyers" space that is led by two practicing lawyers.
One thing we're sure you've noticed is that despite the variety of options within our space, no one else is mixing
the actual practice of law with business building in the way that we are.
There are no other organizations who understand the highs and lows of running a small law firm and are engaged in talking to real clients. That is what sets GLM apart from every other organization, and it is why we have had loyal members that have been with us for two-decades.
We've always been proud of the tools we give lawyers to create the law firms of their dreams. We know exactly what modules you should, software you should utilize, and the strategies you need to employ to build a law-firm that is a cash-generating machine. When someone initially becomes a GLM member, you can bet that they're joining for the tactics and tools that we offer.
The new BenGlassLaw.com website was launched a few months ago and the architect behind the website is LeFleur Marketing. In this episode, lawyer marketing experts Ben Glass and Chip LeFleur talk about the state of digital marketing for lawyers as we turn into 2024. We also talk about the growth of both of our companies and the management challenges and opportunities that come with that.
Ben talks about how challenging it was to select a web vendor when the decision was made to update and revise a website that first saw light over twenty years ago. They talk about what the modern lawyer should be looking for in a web development company, and Chip explains human centered design thinking. Importantly, Ben shares some ideas he got from Nalini Prasad at Blu Shark when she came to speak at a Great Legal Marketing mastermind meeting earlier this year.
Chip first met Ben at a Great Legal Marketing Summit almost a decade ago.
Ben Glass is a nationally recognized personal injury and long-term disability insurance attorney in Fairfax, VA.
Since 2005, Ben Glass and Great Legal Marketing have been helping solo and small firm lawyers make more money, get more clients and still get home in time for dinner. We call this TheGLMTribe.com
What Makes The GLM Tribe Special?
In short, we are the only organization within the "business builder for lawyers" space that is led by two practicing lawyers.
One thing we're sure you've noticed is that despite the variety of options within our space, no one else is mixing
the actual practice of law with business building in the way that we are.
There are no other organizations who understand the highs and lows of running a small law firm and are engaged in talking to real clients. That is what sets GLM apart from every other organization, and it is why we have had loyal members that have been with us for two-decades.
We've always been proud of the tools we give lawyers to create the law firms of their dreams. We know exactly what modules you should, software you should utilize, and the strategies you need to employ to build a law-firm that is a cash-generating machine. When someone initially becomes a GLM member, you can bet that they're joining for the tactics and tools that we offer.
The good lawyers can think logically, can find issues, and so they're gonna need to both rely on and trust people like you. Yeah, to say, think about the customer experience and how can we make that better?
Speaker 2:Yeah, and that comes down to human-centered design thinking, right, and so I think, because of the way lawyers tend to think, it is a more natural bridge to a human-centered design thinking process. And so what we think of that human-centered design thinking? What we wanna do is we wanna understand the problem, understand the people and how the people interact with it, and then start crafting a solution, experiment and iterate, and so we go through this process and it's one of the things that I do not feel to you to avoid earlier. I am not the best person at it, you know. I've learned how to run a business. We have people on our team and they are human-centered design thinkers.
Speaker 3:Welcome to the Renegade Lawyer Podcast, the show where we ask the questions why aren't more lawyers living flourishing lives and inspiring others? And can you really get wealthy while doing only the work you love with people you like? Many lawyers are. Get ready to hear from your host, Ben Glass, the founder of the law firm Ben Glass Law in Fairfax, Virginia, and great legal marketing, an organization that helps good people succeed by coaching, inspiring and supporting law firm owners. Join us for today's conversation.
Speaker 1:Hello, this is Ben Glass. Welcome back to the Renegade Lawyer Podcast, where I get to interview people inside and outside the legal profession who are making a ding in the world. There's a very special audition, talking to my friend, chip LaFleur, because just recently I think within the last 90 or 120 days at Ben Glass Law, we relashed our website and we used Chip and his company to do that with floor marketing, or I'm not even sure it's floor web marketing or floor marketing, you guys do so many things.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and Chip and I had met many years ago. We came to a great legal marketing conference where we kept in touch and got reconnected. Recently I was telling you I'm talking about Chip, you know your journey, what you all are doing, because you're a businessman too. Before we went live, you told me you'd acquired another company. I'm like, oh, for some reason I'm like you know too much time on your hands. Oh, that sucks.
Speaker 1:But who better to talk about? I'm running a law firm. I'm running great legal marketing. It's challenging, you know it has high highs and low lows, so, but we're glad to be partnering up with you with Ben Glass Law, web Properties and dude like a bit of a while since you and I talked directly. So how you doing?
Speaker 2:I'm doing great. I'm doing great and you know we were just touching on a minute ago. How you know, going to that great legal marketing conference for me was the thing that helped us kick off. You know that was so we incorporated in 2015 as the floor marketing and all we had was two clients and we were going to go out and try to do something and by we I mean me, because it was just me, yeah, and I went to your conference and it opened up my eyes to marketing automation and the importance of email newsletters, the importance of newsletters in general, and I mean this makes a lot of sense, and so we built a lot of our company around that.
Speaker 2:You know, we started out with Sharper Street and we moved into a combination of Sharper Street and how it's about now to do some of those things. But you know, I think it's so fun to talk to you about this because that initial conference just set us in the right direction and now we're about 45 people. You know we've got clients all over the country and if we hadn't kicked off and done some things right in the first place, we wouldn't have done any of that. You know, most businesses go out the first year or two, so we were able to make it through that.
Speaker 1:So one of the stories I tell at my conferences is when CNA, my wife, cna and I went to a parenting conference to help with some of the challenges that we encountered when we started to adopt children. And you know, it's like you can go to a three day conference, but you hear one line, one speaker. They all can change the trajectory of your life and said what's it for me? Like I've got either conferences or people that have come into my life. You know, there's probably about five significant moments in my life where my trajectory of my whole life changed, and so you just never know what you're gonna hear, but I'm glad to hear that you were there in 2015. And now let's catch up, because we're recording this in the near the end of 2023, it's mid November and tell us a little bit about the universe of Laplor. You mentioned clients all over the country and 45 people under roof, which again like just that like 45 people under roof, which is bad. I'm curious now about your management style and habits and stuff like that too.
Speaker 2:Oh man. So we kicked off, so we started growing, kind of, I'd say, using pretty traditional management styles and structures, with the exception that, you know, I'm a big believer in treating people like adults and you know, for me, having a life experience to be able to do the things that are important to you which I know is something that I read from your material all the time but people should have time for their kids, people should have time to live their lives, and you know, I run a business and so I have that freedom. I want the people who work for me to have that freedom too, and so we started to grow. Initially, we all work remotely, and then, eventually, we got big enough. We felt like we need an office. We got in the office, but when we did that, when it was 2016, I think we never had a requirement to work in the office, and so it was so easy for us to recruit talent because people could work in the office, they could work from home, we were able to dip into talent pools, like moms with young children who are wildly capable, wildly talented, incredible experience, and they would be bypassed for roles because they had to pick up their kids from school or because they had to be flexible with their daycare, and so that opened up this pool of talent in the industry that we were able to tap into. I think to this day we're still probably 60% female across the organization, and it's not through discriminatory practice by any stretch. It's just that different people have different needs in their lives, and so we grew, we got to about 20 people and then we started to try to introduce middle management and that became a challenge.
Speaker 2:We went through the process of going through kind of an EOS structure.
Speaker 2:We did that through the state of Michigan.
Speaker 2:They were very helpful there, started to get better at how we conducted our meetings and how we ran a business, went through the EMIS to start developing standard operating procedures, and then I read a book called Corbett Rebels written by these two guys I think they're from the Netherlands, and I ran across an article in Harvard Business Review that they wrote, and throughout that book it's not really a way to run a business, but it's a series of case studies of organizations like Patagonia and Spotify, netflix, that have been disruptive but that have been able to maintain their growth and the premise behind all of that, which I think aligns with a lot of what I hear from you is you have to treat people like people, you have to build trust, you have to instill a lead with your values and be mission driven.
Speaker 2:And so if you can do that, you can create what we call a team of teams and you can have those teams understand the direction and they don't need that micromanagement. And so, as a result of, we've been able to largely eliminate that micromanagement structure and those teams are largely kind of self-reliant, with almost an inverted pyramid where we are servicing those teams. Those teams are our clients, the leadership's teams' clients, and so when they need us they can come to us and we'll always help them. But it's not us sitting here telling you what to do. It's saying here's where we wanna go. How do we help you get there?
Speaker 1:Well, exactly right. So being clear on that part, which is here is where we want to go, and then, as leader, saying, being humble and brave enough to say and I don't know exactly how we get there or in what steps, or I'm not the one to solve all of that but then filling your team with people who like the mission. So we call it hiring for the mission, not the position we get behind the floor, marketing, or Benglass law or great legal marketing, what we are trying to do in those businesses, and then unleash them. So that's cool.
Speaker 1:The other thing that we are kind of known for now and I learned this, I think, through our UOS coaches is asking such a if you were working for me, yeah, I am exactly asking how can I make this perfect for you? And I would say look, chib, I don't know that I can make it perfect, but if you don't know what's perfect and you can't communicate to me what's perfect, then we can't work towards it. Right, and that's a profoundly you know. You have to be brave because you have to be willing to at least listen to the answer to the question. Yep, so it sounds like you've built something very neat. So, like, give me some sense. How many are you angry in the law firm space now, in terms of marketing?
Speaker 2:No, we're not. So on the marketing side we've really delineated into professional services as a primary focus, and so we're split probably about 50-50 between legal and other professional services, and those professional services usually include financial service, insurance, medical areas that are highly regulated. And what I found is in my own experience working for various agencies you know we chase anything right, and at one point in time we had a little bit of extrusion manufacturing company. We had a beverage company that made fruit juices. We had an environmental engineering company and our team did not understand how those ecosystems worked. You know you sell extrusion equipment at conferences all across the globe. You need to know FDA rules for the labeling for fruit juice. Well, you can't be an expert across everything.
Speaker 2:So we really leaned it heavily across healthcare and legal at first, and then that grew to include consulting. And so the way that our businesses kind of structured is we do a lot of strategic work for some bigger organizations, for some enterprise organizations, where we really get embedded and gain a deep expertise in what they're doing, and then we help guide them, especially even to including new product development, new offering development, and then on the legal side we take some of those learnings and we take those workshops and we say, okay, we learned this from this experience. How can we bring this to the legal team? Because that's the other half of the business and they function differently. But the teams are made up of different people and each team can specialize and learn and that's been a good model for us.
Speaker 1:Give me some sense of how many law firm clients or websites, if there's multiple sites and firms that you guys have under your umbrella.
Speaker 2:I think. I mean, we've built hundreds of websites, I think. At a given time we probably are hosting 50 to 80. And then on the enterprise side, those are much deeper engagements, and so we always only have a few. Maybe it's two or three, but if we go too much more broadly than that, it's hard to get that sort of expertise that we need to be able to really do the work there.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. It'd be almost absurdly crazy to try to be good at even what you're doing. Sounds like that's a wide stretch from the left hand to the right hand.
Speaker 1:So let's talk to a bit about web marketing, in particular for lawyers. I think it still perplexes us. As I've told you, you know, many times now in the recent past, as a consumer, as a buyer of web services who feels he's relatively sophisticated about marketing, I found the decision making process to be challenging Because everybody we talked to was good, of course. Yeah, everybody pretty much kind of promises the same sort of product and I found, as a consumer, it was very hard to differentiate.
Speaker 1:At the end of the day, I think it gets back to what we teach lawyers is that people buy from people they know I can trust, yeah, and then hope that the product will be as good as the know I can trust part of it. So I'm curious about what you all are doing at the floor. When we're being approached by a lawyer who's looking to change, or even just asking the question like could just look at my site and tell me what I could do to make it better, what are you pitching as a floor? You should strongly consider the floor because, yeah, no, it's a great question.
Speaker 2:So, and it's a question where the answer, I think, is going to be changing very soon. So our approach historically has been to build on WordPress because it gives the law firm the largest pool of developers that they could pull in, and so I think it's always important to have an exit plan when it comes to your website. So, number one the law firm needs to own all the IP. They need to own the domains, they need to have a mechanism to take over hosting if they want to. So we host a lot for our clients, but because it's on WordPress, because they have the keys, they could take it and they can go, and I like WordPress because that's the biggest developer pool. You can find local developers who can come in and help you fix things, and you can navigate that on your own if you want, or you can go with an agency.
Speaker 2:So historically, that's what we've done build on WordPress, looking at portfolio, asking for their current sites that are in the same price range when you're quoting out, and then taking those sites to. You want to experiencing the low time, experiencing what that looks like when you load a page. What kind of thought process went there and then going to Google PageSpeed Insights, loading what they've built into Google PageSpeed Insights, and if you can get past just their flagship sites but ask for five or six of them, then usually you'll start to get into depth and you'll start to see, okay, this site is passing core values. This one's not. You know, if they're in the 80s and 90s in terms of page speed on mobile specifically, then you're probably dealing with somebody who's got a good handle on what they're doing.
Speaker 2:Where that is, I think, going to change very soon you know just having a conversation with a strategist here in Grand Rapids but we're going to start seeing changes, the creative elements in the creative energy and ours is the thing that is going to start to be the only thing that the law firm really is going to have to pay for, because the execution, the building, even the content development, is going to become more and more AI driven, and so that's going to shift the focus and the importance to the strategic side and away from the development side, because it won't be long before you'll be able to spin up a website by creating a prompt and saying here's what I want to build.
Speaker 2:So really investing in the thinking behind it and understanding the brand, the values, and then how to translate that. That's where I think the real value is going to come from the deliverables. And even. You know and this is a hard thing for us to rep our heads around and our business has been built around generating content for years and that's going away, you know. But the thinking has to remain, the strategy has to stay relevant.
Speaker 1:For sure. I mean the way we frame the issue, you know at Ben Glass Law and then when I speak on stage at Great Legal Marketing is, at the end of the day, for many practices, for many practice areas, the consumer has had a sudden and unexpected need. You've got a crack scent, got arrested, spouses haven't had a ferry, just discovered it, and so now they weren't paying any attention all to lawyer advertising at all last week. This week they are, and so how can we make to extent? They're using digital to try to find us? Yep, Even if a human mentions us and they come over to our web properties and this is what I'm always like yelling at my team about.
Speaker 1:Like, what is the consumer experience? Yeah, when they get Well technical people talk about web page loading and you know the colors and stuff. I'm like I. But if they push this button right here, yeah, and they expect this to happen, Is this actually happening? Yeah, or are we confusing? Yeah, so we've got an interesting internal strategic meeting here, because a very small part of our practice is paid consults and disability claims. So people who are thinking about going out of disability, you had all aware of the websites, pre-consult, pre-consult and then finding out that some people who are having their customer experience were going free console. But now you're selling me into a console Like what the hell is that Right?
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:And so I said, oh okay, like dummy, should have seen that Not the web team, but me, I should have seen that. And now we're thinking all right, so how do we first explain this on the web? How do we make that customer flow through the site Make sense so we can sell more of these types of consults? So it's exactly what you're talking about here, which is the overall strategy and the way you just put that. Like pretty soon, you're going to give a prompt and something's going to build your website.
Speaker 1:That sounds pretty scary to me, but one of the differentiator is all right, who's got a good strategy that stands out and is different from all these other lawyer websites that are out there? And how can we make my son, brian, puts his graces. How can we make dealing with us easy? Yeah, yeah, at least easier, right, and so I agree with you. Like that's where the money is going to be. I think most lawyers, though, are not trained in marketing or sales strategy at all. Yeah, they're good. Lawyers can think logically, can find issues, and so they're going to need to both rely on and trust people like you to say, think about the customer experience, and how can we make that better?
Speaker 2:Yeah, and that comes down to human-centered design thinking. And so I think, because of the way lawyers tend to think, it is a more natural bridge to a human-centered design thinking process. And so when we think of that human-centered design thinking, what we want to do is we want to understand the problem, understand the people and how the people interact with it, and then start crafting a solution, experiment and iterate, and so we go through this process and it's one of the things that I do not feel up to you to avoid earlier. I'm not the best person at it. I've learned how to run a business. We have people on our team and they are human-centered design thinkers, and one of the things that's been really fun that we've been doing a lot of lately is we've been taking those principles, those concepts, and sharing those with students, with kids. We've got a couple of schools around town and they're going out and they're teaching this way of thinking and despite us teaching it, we still internally run through this thing where people are asked to do a thing and then they do it because it's the thing that they're told to do, and I've done this myself. I don't stop and think am I doing the thing? Because we said we were going to do this because we sold it, or are we selling a thing because that's the thing that we sell? As opposed to, are we stepping back and are we listening to the problem that the client is bringing us? And if the client is bringing us a problem to say, I want to sign 10 more new cases every month, and then we go and say you know what you should, let us write 10 blogs for you. And then they say, well, then I can get 10 blogs somewhere else. They say, well, we write ours really. Well, who cares? How is that getting us new clients? Then what are you going to do to solve for that? That's where I think thinking through that strategy comes in.
Speaker 2:One of the things that I've had to take a step back and revisit is how much effort are we putting into just local search on behalf of our clients? When I looked at that and did a deep dive from a conversation I had with, I got a lot of the client of ours that brought me to your conference in the first place. We're not spending the energy on that that we should. It's not that hard. When we summed that up and we started doing it again, because when we looked at it, we saw that one of the areas that he got most of his home calls from was from Google Local. We're sitting there looking at web traffic and looking at how many pages they view and how many we spend on the page. I need to constantly remind myself all the time, because that is a low level lift. Take ownership of your Google, my Business, populate it at photos, at videos, post to it once in a while, and you're going to outrank your competitors 100%.
Speaker 1:We had a meeting this summer. Our mastermind groups were in here. We had a great Nalini Prasad at the Blue Shark came and spoke to our group for an hour. We went and made four changes to our Google my Business profile. I thought they called it this month Bamo.
Speaker 1:One of the points she made was you just check in every couple of weeks with Google and see a couple of things. One is they roll out these tests. They don't roll out across the country all at the same time. You just have to be constantly looking, or at least periodically looking, or having somebody look, for you to see oh hey, there's a new box back here on the user side. What's that box for? Well, let's fill it in with something and automatically the lead to we're getting the next month went up. That we attributed to that because we've got some tracking stuff. So I think that's really important.
Speaker 1:But here's the other thing because I think this is an advantage for you too is most of the good marketing, sales and customer experience ideas don't originate in legal, of course, right, and they originate in other industries and you have this whole portfolio over here and we're talking for a while about acquisition. So you've had this whole research, product research, development, and so you are able to see how these big giant nationally branded companies thinking about things and now bringing that to legal, because I think that's always been critical for me ever since I ran into Dan Kettys Look outside of legal. Find where the Rinaldo Street running a bagel bakery is doing really well. Ask yourself how can I steal that idea and import it over here? So yes, at our conference last month we had a great presentation on Google Local and I think people that pay attention and go and at least look at it Like number one is go live that or have your web team Go look at it.
Speaker 2:Go, look at it. It's such an easy list. It doesn't require expertise. There are services that you can buy for $100 a year and they'll populate your exact address across 150 different websites, and just doing that is great. We use a double. We use SEM Russian it's kind of one of our primaries but Moz Local has it too and it's like $250 a year and you enter it once and then it populates everywhere.
Speaker 2:But you touched on two things that I just wanted to circle back on. You mentioned Nalini over at Blue Shark. Nalini's a friend of ours. We talk about our problems. We talk about the things that we're facing organizationally. I talked to Seth at the conference. I'm sorry, sem Russian. Sorry, he's Sakalakis. We can edit that, please do. I'm so sorry if I've mistrened off the last name.
Speaker 2:I just always call him Guy, but there is a network of people that work in this space and they show up at a lot of the conferences and we know each other and we respect each other and it was really funny. When you're trying to validate again, the first conference that I went to was the one that you were talking about the vultures, the vultures in the space that are out there we run into so much noise especially now with AI and everybody climbing to be an AI expert you have to have that social affirmation and understanding that these people work in the industry and they know each other and they hold each other accountable. And so, as I was sitting down going through my link today, I see a notification popped up and Guy mentioned me and I thought, okay, I wonder what this is about. And I scroll over and there's a giant picture of me doing a presentation that he posted. Yeah, me doing a presentation at Steve Gerstin's advocacy 360 out in Las Vegas. And he did it right up and he said nice things about me and I thought, oh my gosh, like number one. I did not expect to see a picture of myself that I didn't post or that the company didn't post on LinkedIn, but he spent his time talking about that and I have so much respect for the work that he does because I'm familiar with it, and so I think that's one way to validate. I think there's a lot of good companies that are out there that are doing good work in the space. I think he's a great thought leader and he has great work.
Speaker 2:I've known Seth and Nalini for years. We have good relationships with each other. We're not trying to throw each other under the bus, but when you're out quoting these things, talk to us, talk to the group, because there's opportunity there. And then the other is we made the choice to keep our area of focus specialized, but not so specialized that we're not getting external inputs. And so when we made this acquisition, I wanted it for the market research side, because I wanted to be able to do more market research on the legal side and where we work in financial services.
Speaker 2:So we focused in highly regulated industries. Part of the reason is because we have to buy that insurance anyways, because it's a requirement for these big companies, because we have that protection. But what it lets us do is it lets us glean tactics and tools from those other industries and apply them within legal and it helps prevent us from getting overly siloed. And I know Seth over at Blue Shark they've done similar. They've gone into the medical space. I think they have a few other areas that they're going into. They do that with a team that can focus and give it enough energy and focus so they can understand the industry. But then they can cross between the teams and bring those ideas and I love that. I think it makes a ton of sense.
Speaker 1:You also made a great point just a moment ago talking about Guy and Seth and Nalini is that I think many people don't realize that the top leaders are all collaborating. Yeah, we actually see the world as big, the opportunities as growing, and we don't see the world as a zero sum pie that you're competing against and people are often surprised to hear that. Even in our great loo marketing, my groups have mastered my members who are personal injury lawyers in Northern Virginia in those groups with us when we share just about everything and they share a thing with us, and so that's a mind-grace thing that I just think that a lot of typical lawyer conventions at the local level, state level and the regional level, like there's nobody is collaborating. If you're in the same practice area, space that guy over there, I'd go over there. There are competitors and we have to beat them. So good for you. What are you Go ahead?
Speaker 2:We would have paid you and would have joined a mastermind group if you had one for marketers. Because, again, from that first conference I went to, I thought, well, that would be a great idea. Yeah, and a few years later, once we got a little bit of traction, we started to grow, reached out to Seth, reached out to a couple of guys, I think from Big Boo-Doo, the chat Dudley, the Dudley, debrasier, and then Mickey Love who runs the advertising agency that he runs. We were meeting up once, one to three times a year and where we could, we try to call us at a conference, we'd rent a room and we'd all sit around the table and talk about what are we doing, what's working, what's not working, how are we growing?
Speaker 2:And, man, we don't have the geographic boundaries. We do compete and there are times that we've had a presentation that would pitch up to somebody and they have to. I don't care, we're gonna win some, we're gonna lose some, but who else are you gonna talk to about this stuff? That knows the depth that we know to make ourselves better. Yeah, it's a great conversation. Chad had a great work across the board. I mean this consulting work. I think he's outstanding. And then the people he plugs into. But you just get this, get this brain trust. And then I replicated it locally with other businesses that are kind of that are not the same as what we do, but other people that are running kind of progressive ideas in the way that they run their management man, we meet quarterly and we share those ideas and it works.
Speaker 1:Again, you just given another great strategy that any lawyer so any lawyer is listening to this. Yes, there are mastermind groups you can join, you can pay for, there's all sorts of really good stuff, but at your local level, why don't you just start one? So when I started my practice 26 years ago and I had left a firm, I just sent all of my PI friends, my PI plaintiff friends slash competitors, that's by pizza. Let's sit down once a month back then let's just talk about this is pre-internet really. Let's talk about adjusters. Let's talk about strategies. What do you know? Talking about judges and defense lawyers, and it's the simplest thing to do. And in this world of everything is on Zoom and whatever there's, you know as shamefully or it is a shame that there's not so much in-person let's sit down and just chat about business. And so what you're doing on a local level is fabulous. We call it like cross-breeding, you know? Yeah, he's all dealing with human beings.
Speaker 1:Hey guys, this is Ben. If you like what you've been hearing on this podcast not just the marketing and practice building strategies, but the philosophy of the art of living your best life parts you should know that my son, brian, and I have built a tribe of like-minded lawyers who are living lives of their own design and creating tremendous value for the world within the structure of a law practice. We invite you to join us at the only membership organization for entrepreneurial lawyers that is run by two full-time practicing attorneys. Check us out at greatlivermarketingcom. So that's another thing You've given us a hint now of, because I was going to kind of ask you like predictions for 2024 or something, but you've given us a real hint as to the direction you think sort of we would call it like technical digital marketing and then strategic digital marketing. What else are you kind of hearing about? Yes, people are paying attention to AI. I think more and more lawyers are showing up on media like TikTok. I'll tell you something really funny.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:So two months ago I had like 17 followers on TikTok but I went to a conference where one of the things they were showing is how you can be an interesting character on TikTok. So we're doing a lot of that. That's awesome. But if you remember chips, I remember like 25 or maybe 20 years ago when lawyers first started doing video to market and they'd all get in front of their law books and they would go hi, I'm Ben Watson. I'm going to tell you three things. After the accident, everything that goes around comes around, and I see these lawyers on TikTok who are standing in front of a law books chip going here's three things about the bankruptcy code. You probably should know. I'm like no, not really, I'm really interested.
Speaker 2:We're going to be entertaining. You're going to be entertaining, You're going to be entertaining. But I love what you're doing here. I think that's awesome to begin with, because you just have to get out there and you just have to try, yes.
Speaker 1:Yes, you suck for a while, but you get 100 reps and 500 reps and you get a little bit better.
Speaker 2:Yes, you got to leave your ego, though, because you're starting with zero followers and that's where you're going to start and you're going to make mistakes, and that's part of that humanization, and what we found is that it's a funny stat, but we have significantly higher open rates and engagement rates on emails that we screw up. So if we send one out, we mess it up. Then we send a follow up that would say, hey, we're so sorry, we got this piece of information wrong. The second email will get open 10 times as much. I mean, we don't do it on purpose, but I sometimes think we should just, hey, make a mistake, resend it.
Speaker 2:People like that human element and people want to hire a lawyer that they can identify with, not somebody that they just would feel comfortable sitting in a room with. I'm not going to make an appointment with someone that I don't want to sit in a room with. That's going to be intimidating to me. I want someone who understands what I've been through, and that's my very good friend, tom Crosley, who I know you had on your show recently. That's what makes me like doing what I do is I got to know Tom and then, even more than that, I got to sit in front of probably a hundred of his clients and hear their stories, and from that I didn't have to infer what I know about Tom. I was able to hear the care that they got from the people that they worked with, and so that makes me love doing what we do and it really is that human element. But in terms of what's coming, I think that one we need to hang on to that human element. Don't let Chad GPT take that away from you. Don't let the iterative stuff is interesting and it's cool and we're going to get more and more tools to help with that. But keep that human-centered design focus. As a lawyer, what is the problem that you're trying to solve? Someone's hurt. They need help, they need to be listened to, and so making yourself be approachable in your online presence I think makes sense.
Speaker 2:On the more technical side, we're going to see a lot more API-driven websites. Headless CMS, I think, started to really come out Again. We're building on WordPress. We still do that, but we're exploring a couple of headless solutions. And those headless solutions they're building your page and your page stays largely the same when it serves up, but they're doing it on the server, so when the browser hits, it gets an instant load and it's not loading the elements. It's loading what's already been pre-built and it could pre-build it 27 times in a second, but when it serves it's very fast. So I think we're going to see that. I do think we're going to see some cool things with AI and personalization, because the way that we're searching is changing so fast. Yes, google and Microsoft are just pouring funds into that.
Speaker 2:And then, if I were a lawyer, the first thing that I would probably take a look at doing is I would get a paid account on chat GPT and then I would click on Create a New GPT. So that is basically saying I want a specialized AI that knows the answers to my questions, and it is. You can use voice, you could type it, but you basically explain and introduce yourself, and so I have one that I call my assistant to my leadership team, and I've told it who I am, but what I do. We have two companies Orchard Insights and the Floor Marketing. Here's the leadership at Orchard Insights. Here's the leadership at the Floor Marketing. Here's the leadership at the Floor One. Here's what the roles are the chat Dudley, dudley, debrasier. I save that and then I ask you things on my behalf and that's interesting.
Speaker 2:So when I go into a meeting I had a meeting I wanted to introduce Orchard and another company who's in that same kind of insight space and I said, hey, I'm meeting with this company and with Orchard, take a look at what each company does and find opportunities for synergies.
Speaker 2:And it came back and it actually suggested that Rashad, who's the president of Orchard, run the meeting. So I said I don't think that you should run this meeting, I think that Rashad should, and I think that here are some things that you could cover in the meeting. And then here's five ways you could integrate and create an offering that could be a saleable product. So if I run a law firm, I would explain I run this firm. This is the type of case that we take. Here's my name, here's the name of my assistant, here's the name of some of the staff that support me, here's what differentiates us in whatever other detail you want, and then ask it to do things for you. You know, what should I prioritize for today? Because that's going to live in its own separate chat. That is not just the general chat, gpt, and it's right now. It's 20 bucks a month.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's so interesting. So one of the ways we're using chat, gpt and great legal marketing is in my chief of operations is his name is Calvin and he's a nerd Like. He's into this and has been into it before it became famous. Yeah, more popular, and he's saying, you know he's saying to the software I'm probably not even doing it justice to describe it, but here's all of our material on newsletter marketing. Yeah, everything we've done Digested. What are we missing? Yeah, yes, you know you're written about.
Speaker 2:Yep, it's awesome.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we have, you know, 20 years almost of accumulated material and thank God, like we actually have 20 years of accumulated digital material. Then was younger that principally, I've been paying the same thing for 20 years, so that's a way to use chat. I imagine you could have it go. Hey, look, I'm a personal engineer lawyer. Look at my website. Yeah, what am I missing?
Speaker 2:I do that. I do that when we get on discovery calls. I still take a look at the site. But I just ask chat GPT to crawl it and say what could be done to approve this. And, as of like last week, now you know just the plus version for $20 a month. It can now browse. So, and that's one of the challenges too, is that one week you can't do something. The next week you can.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, let's say, if the Google local profile yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but if you're using it and you're asking it to help you with your day, you're going to see those things as they transpire it. And just to give one other example, you know we're talking about, you know, teaching kids and teaching kids design thinking and doing some things like that. I've got two boys, six year old and eight year old, and so every time we get asked to do something for a school or for something like that, I just say yes, because I think, man, someday my kids are going to want to do that, and if I can do that it's super fun. So we've got a school here, west Michigan Aviation Academy, and we've had a good relationship with them. They asked us to do some stuff and so I said, yes, I'd come there and I'd do some mock interviews for seniors.
Speaker 2:And here in our contact over there sends me this email the day of and it was long and I was very busy up until that time and they didn't read through it. And then I take a peek at it and I see that I'm supposed to be there 15 or 20 minutes early and I'm already. You know, I should have been there when I was leaving, and so I copied that email, I pasted it into chat GPT. I got my car, I hit the talk to button and the app the official app and I said, hey, could you please tell me what I need to know for this event? And I say she because it's a female voice, but she told me everything I needed to know to be prepared. I got there two minutes before the thing started and I was supposed to get there 15 minutes before. I felt bad, but I was ready because she read all the detail.
Speaker 2:And when I got close, also again knowing I was short on time, I didn't remember what the parking instructions were. And so I hit the button and I said remind me what the parking instructions are when I get there. And it said you know, come in. There's three visitor spaces up front by the flagpole. If those are full, a lot of kids are at KCTC, which is the trade school. By this time of the day the older kids will have left. And the administrator also gave the OK to park and handicap spots if you need to. I never had to read the email, you know, and so many attorneys are so busy, if they can have their assistant loaded into chat GPT. And, of course, be careful, don't use private information. You know enterprise accounts are different, but the plus for $20 a month make sure you're not entering private confidential information. But if you can have your assistant go and say, hey, copy this and make this bullet, you know, suburize it. For me it saves so much time it's crazy, that's amazing.
Speaker 1:So I mean, I had no idea that chat GPT would browse.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and it just started. It just started last week, last couple of minutes here, so like me.
Speaker 1:You're running seemingly multiple businesses. You've got little children, you are a leader, a visionary. So I'm curious about personal habits. You know what do you do to keep your relationship with family great? Personal health habits, yeah, what do you do?
Speaker 2:Oh man, that's all changed with some of the recency. So not all of it, some of it, but one. I don't work that much. You know I get up and I check my email. If I can get to the office by about 10, that's great. You know, I've usually done a lot of things before I leave and then I don't spend time in the office. When I don't have something I have to do in the office, that's good. Yeah, I leave and I go home, and if I've got three hours between a meeting and I want to really focus on something, I'll go home.
Speaker 2:I've got a home office. I'm probably not going to have somebody popping in. I make sure I'm available enough for my team to be around, but I want them to see that they can work from where something makes the most sense. Some people are very productive when they're not at home and we have ways to measure that. We don't need to see them sitting in this. So try to set the example there. So I don't stay in the office when I don't need to be in the office or want to be. Sometimes I just want to be here because it's fun.
Speaker 2:And then I have a personal trainer and so I work out three days a week now it was two and she's finally convinced me to add it to three. We're trying to walk more and do some things like that. I have a coach. I have a business coach executive coach and it's through Michael Chu out of Chicago, and I work with the guy Brian Ang in LA, and that's great. I have a therapist that I go and see every other week, and I started doing that just because I know that life is what it is and things are going to happen, and that's been such a great experience. You know, I'm 46 and I have not ever really gone to see a therapist and I didn't have a big catalyst moment that made me want to do it. I just have a lot of people in my office that are really vocal about mental health.
Speaker 2:Yes, and I thought, you know I'm going to start doing it, because a friend of mine is a father-in-law pass and went to the funeral and life is short and so when you know you're going to be confronted with loss, why not have a support network so that you don't have to start from the ground up? So that's been very helpful. And then, on the health side of it, I'm very proactive about my health. I have a great doctor. He suggested I go vegan and then, oh my gosh, like that's a big change. And then I tried it and it's actually not that hard and I'm not religious about it. I'll eat fish, you know, here and there, once in a while, if I want to eat a steak, I'll eat a steak, but maybe that'll be every three months or so. And I've been eating mostly probably 90% of vegan for the past two months and I feel better than I felt in ages. So I'm going to keep doing it and I'm looking for you, look.
Speaker 1:I think it is important. So you have business coach therapists, like it's good to have like one or two people in your life who aren't your friends, who aren't your spouse, who aren't your business partners. Yeah, you can share highs and lows with and get some objective. They don't care because they're not really on your board of directors. Yeah, advice and you can take it or leave it. But most people have no one, you know, sadly, have no one in their life, you know, independent of their family it's not, as families are dysfunctional, so that doesn't work very well.
Speaker 2:And it's low, it is lonely at the top. You know you run an organization and you have to be careful what you say to different people on the team. If you get frustrated with somebody you can't vent to somebody else, so you hold it in, you can bring it home. And then your spouse you know your kids are going to hear about it and they don't have the context, and so you know you have to have that support. That's. It's funny because that's where those mastermind groups have also come in so handy, because they get what we're going through and I can have an open conversation with them and not worry about it getting back to. You know, whenever the situation, whoever the people are involved in, I get to vent without any harm done. You know 100%.
Speaker 1:Well, look, chip, this has been wonderful. Folks that want to follow up and check out the company and maybe make a connection about websites again. That then Glass Law. It's in the last, I think, 90 or 120 days, we launched our new website with your company and it's been great. It's been a great process working with you and your team and having my CMO, lauren, working with your team, but I'm glad that you and I, the leaders, were able to spend all night here.
Speaker 1:That was great. So where should they go? Where should they go to?
Speaker 2:check you out so you can go to the Fluor Marketing. There's nocom, it's just the Fluor Marketing. That's our site. And a quick shout out to Lauren. She's been awesome, she's been crazy work movement. She is a rock star. She's fun.
Speaker 1:The first day of Ben Glass Law, when she started, was a sleepover with our leadership team because it was our annual two day offsite retreat, and so she was driving to a cabin in the woods with people she didn't really know she listens to true crime podcasts whether she was going to survive through the weekend. So get her to tell you that story one day. She survived. Yeah, we love her. Yeah, I love it.
Speaker 2:All I do. Thanks so much for taking that part. Thank you, ben, keep doing what you're doing. I love what you're doing. You're awesome. Thank you so much. Thanks so much.
Speaker 3:If you like what you just heard on the Renegade Lawyer podcast, you may be a perfect fit for the great legal marketing community. Law firm owners across the country are becoming heroes to their families and icons in their communities. They've gone renegade by rejecting the status quo of the legal profession so they can deliver high quality legal services coupled with top notch customer service to clients who pay, stay and refer. Learn more at greatlegalmarketingcom. That's greatlegalmarketingcom.