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The Renegade Lawyer Podcast
I am more convinced than ever that nothing that traditional bar organizations are doing is going to move the needle on the sad stats on lawyer happiness ...
The root cause of all lawyers' problems is financial stress. Financial stress holds you back from getting the right people on the bus, running the right systems, and being able to only do work for clients you want to work with. Financial stress keeps you in the office on nights and weekends, often doing work you hate for people you don't like, and doing that work alone.
(Yes, you have permission to do only work you like doing and doing it with people you like working with.)
The money stress is not because the lawyers are bad lawyers or bad people. In fact, most lawyers are good at the lawyering part and they are good people.
The money stress is caused by the general lack of both business skills and an entrepreneurial mindset.
Thus, good lawyers who are good people get caught up and slowed down in bringing their gifts to the world. Their families, teams, clients, and communities are not well-served because you can't serve others at your top level when you are constantly worrying about money.
We can blame the law schools and the elites of the profession who are running bar organizations, but to blame anyone else for your own woes is a loser's game. It is, in itself, a restrictive, narrow, mindset that will keep you from ever seeing, let alone experiencing, a better future.
Lawyers need to be in rooms with other entrepreneurs. They need to hang with people who won't tell you that your dreams are too big or that "they" or "the system "won't allow you to achieve them. They need to be in rooms where people will be in their ear telling them that their dreams are too small.
Get in better rooms. That would be the first step.
Second step, ignore every piece of advice any general organized bar is giving about how to make your firm or your life better.
The Renegade Lawyer Podcast
Renegade Lawyer Marketing (Audio Book) – Chapter 7: Stuff Marketing Vultures Say, Part 2
This is Chapter 7 of the free audio edition of Renegade Lawyer Marketing (Second Edition)—only on the Renegade Lawyer Podcast.
In Part Two of this eye-opening series, Ben Glass takes you even deeper into the world of shady marketing deals, overpromised results, and expensive lead-gen schemes that cost lawyers thousands, with little to show for it.
You’ll hear:
- A breakdown of a real lawsuit between a law firm and a popular legal marketing vendor
- Why “link-building” and blog posts don’t matter if your website still sucks
- The hidden costs of mismatched marketing messages (and how Ben’s firm lost thousands)
- Two questions to ask before you write a check to any marketing vendor
- Why activity is not the same as accomplishment—and what to focus on instead
This is a raw and real chapter every law firm owner needs to hear before buying leads or burning their next marketing dollar.
📘 Get the book + bonuses at RenegadeLawyerMarketing.com
🎟️ Join us live at GLMSummit.com
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.
Hey everyone, this is Ben Glass. Welcome back to the Renegade Lawyer podcast. This is the next chapter. This is chapter seven in our making the audio version of my book Renegade Lawyer Marketing available to you for free. And today we're going to be talking about stuff marketing vultures Say, part 2. As we begin, I want to give a big shout out to two friends, guy Sakalakis and Conrad Sam. As you know, they run the Lunch Hour Legal podcast. It probably is one of the most popular and best marketing podcasts out there. They'll be broadcasting their podcast live this fall from the Great Legal Marketing Summit that we're holding out near Dulles Airport. If you go to glmsummitcom. They're going to be broadcasting this to or with a live audience of our Mastermind members. This will be the morning of the first day of the event, so if you're interested in joining our Mastermind group, reach out to me. I'm easy to find on LinkedIn and we can get you that information. But a shout-out to and a thanks to Guy and Conrad for making their show available directly to our audience. So that's going to be a really, really fun morning.
Speaker 1:Okay, stuff Marketing Vultures Say, part 2. The information in this chapter is from a court-filed and publicly available exhibits in a lawsuit that a law firm filed against a marketing company a fairly popular marketing company back in the day for lawyers, probably not so popular today, but it exists. The essence of the contract that they were suing over required the marketing company to conduct quote-unquote link building and create quote-unquote blog articles to promote two law firm websites. I'll explain why. Even if the marketing company had done what the law firm alleges it was supposed to do under the contract, this was still money being pissed away. Good marketers understand the questions that must be asked of those selling you the advertising. So let's talk.
Speaker 1:One of the contracts was a one-year agreement at $1,750 a month, $21,000 a year for quote unquote link building, and under this agreement the vendor was promising to create a minimum of 2,000 unique inbound links each month to the client's website. This was back in the day when you could probably spam Google with bullshit inbound links to temporarily give your website a boost in rankings, and this is what they were doing. I mean good gracious, 2,000 unique inbound links each month. Back to the book. The links would be based on keywords and phrases that the vendor determined would be optimal for the law firm. There was no mention or even recognition in the contract of the importance of link quality. Oh, big mistake there. The contract specifically disclaimed that it could help the law firm website achieve any increase in ranking results or improvement in search results. Oh, those must have been great sales calls. Hi, I'd like to sell you a package for $1,750 a month. We don't make any promises whatsoever.
Speaker 1:The first question a marketing savvy lawyer would have asked before signing the contract was why build links at all? Later the lawyers asked where did you put these 24,000 links? We'd like to go see them. Response from the marketing company again famous marketing company in the legal space. Sorry, trade secret. These are all court documents. The second question that should have been asked before the contract was signed was how will we verify that you're actually doing what you say you're doing and what we're paying you to do so? Here we had lawyers signing a marketing services contract that, by its very terms, professed to do nothing and in practice could not be verified. It's a good deal for the marketing company. That's why we call them the vultures.
Speaker 1:Second contract was for blog writing and social media marketing. Just vague, vague name, no description. The fee for this contract was $2,000 a month and the contract called for 20 unique blog posts each month 20. The vendor also agreed to begin adding followers to the client's social media accounts. Gee, how do you add followers to a social media account? You go buy them.
Speaker 1:This contract did provide some measurement of results. Specifically, the company would keep track of and report the number of Twitter followers, facebook friends and fans, linkedin connections, unique visitors to the website and calls on a unique phone number listed at the website. There were also provisions for tracking results all the way through leads, appointments and revenues. The agreement promised that over the 12-month term of the agreement, the vendor would add a combined 3,600 to 4,800 new contacts, friends, followers and first-level connections to the client's Facebook profile, twitter accounts, linkedin profile and other groups. This $45,000 for the year was what we call here at Great Legal Marketing activity masquerading as accomplishment. Who cares how many people are your Facebook friends or connect with you on LinkedIn? You can't deposit digital friends in the bank. These shiny objects are attractive to uninformed lawyers because they show that they're doing something cool, but they pale in comparison to the genuine human relationships based on hard and authentic marketing and community connections, not to mention having people who will truly go out and evangelize for you. Note, for $45,000, the firm could have hired a marketing assistant for a year, and we'll get to that in Chapter 24, entitled. So You're Thinking About Hiring a Marketing Director?
Speaker 1:The lawyers finally got fed up and sued, alleging all sorts of misrepresentations and throwing in a civil RICO the Racketeer Influencing Corrupt Organizations, claim for good measure. The lawyers weren't so smart because even they didn't know the real problem with this deal. I'm going to tell you what the real problem was. Sure, you can argue all day long about whether link building and article building were effective tools for a lawyer in internet marketing, but the essential problem was that the website being promoted with these tools was very, very ordinary. It looked like all those other boring lawyer websites, and consumers who got to the website found no good reason to interact with it, which is the whole point. Better to have taken all that money and invested it in fixing the website and we'll talk about that in chapter 31,.
Speaker 1:Make your website work for you, creating reasons for visitors to interact with the site and creating sophisticated follow-up sequences for those who did interact than trying to drive more people. It's like spending a bundle of money to get people to eat at a restaurant that gives people food poisoning. This is precisely what the marketing vultures don't understand Marketing. Since they know that most lawyers don't understand it either, they get away with selling snake oil. After saying all that, after saying all that, am I going to say that here at Ben Gloss Law, we've never made such a silly mistake, that we've never fallen for a vulture's trick due to a lack of marketing savvy ourselves? Huh, no, we're just like the rest. Every so often we fall for it. No, we're just like the rest. Every so often we fall for it. Now than before, but we've fallen for it. So let me tell you a story.
Speaker 1:Sometime in 2021, our law firm had settled a large case and we had a bolus of marketing dollars. This is always dangerous, my friends. You settle a big case. You're like oh, this is it. I'm going to go buy the bus ads, going to go buy TV. I'm just going to go. I have this money. I'm going to go blow it.
Speaker 1:We were trying to figure out what to do with those dollars, and one of the ideas that had always been in the back of our heads was TV advertising. Of course, it's in the back of every lawyer's heads, ben. We went out and tried to buy leads for TV commercials, but we did a poor job of vetting the actual process from the seller and I'll get to that in just a minute For $1,500 per exclusive lead. We're being fed phone calls from people who checked four or five criteria. Number one a crash had happened in the last two years. Number two somebody was hurt. Number three it wasn't their fault. Number four medical care was involved. And number five they did not currently have a lawyer. Now, if you look at all of the Facebook pitches that you're getting for this, this is exactly what they're doing today. It's just not TV, it's running digital advertising. Same type of criteria. These were the vetting criteria and as long as somebody met the criteria in a positive way, they were hot transferred over from the phone bank to our office. We had the exclusive lead on that case and also received an email.
Speaker 1:Here's the two lessons we learned. Number one as much as your marketing matters, your intake matters just as much, and you have to nail it. You learn that lesson quickly when you're paying $1,500 per intake call and at that point our intake was not great. It's really great today, but we did not have a great system or a great person sitting in the intake and sales seat. Number two you have to match the marketing message to what you're selling.
Speaker 1:When we finally got around to investigating our marketing, spend duh dummies and we saw the marketing collateral that was on TV generating these phone calls. The TV message was a team of lawyers is standing by to tell you what your case is worth. So people were calling, just like these Facebook ads, to find you what your case is worth. So people were calling, just like these Facebook ads, to find out what their case is worth. Now, today, the Facebook ads, of course, are worse, because they're telling people that AI is going to tell them what the case is worth. They don't even need a lawyer, even though what they're actually doing is filling in their contact information to be sold to the highest bidding lawyer. It's crazy. Well, this wasn't happening At Ben Glass Law. We're not standing by to tell you what your case is worth. In fact, one of the first things we'll tell you if you call and ask that question is I have no idea what your case is worth. I haven't seen any of your medical bills and records. I haven't seen the damaged photos of the car. I haven't evaluated liability. I don't know how much insurance is involved. So we had a terrific market message mismatch. We had a significant mismatch because people were picking up the phone and dialing the 800 number to find out what their case was worth and they're being met immediately with no, that's not what we're doing, that's not what we're selling. So our ads were lying to them. Perfect.
Speaker 1:Before you give a dollar to a marketing vulture, two things you need to know. Number one does the message that they're selling to the public on your behalf match the message you're selling when somebody answers the phone in your office? Number two do you do a good job of answering the phones in the office? The sales process, a timely answer to the call, scripted, trained loves the firm sells the great idea the person had to call the firm All those things are what makes up a great sales process. If you're missing one of those calls or miscommunicating at $1,500 per call, you're basically lighting your money on fire. Yep, all that money from that big case on fire. That lead is lost. Someone is looking for a quick, hitting answer, but you don't answer the phone. You're going to lose that lead too. The vulture got paid. We're still looking for leads.
Speaker 1:This is another case where the marketing vultures prove that they know very little about marketing. And this is what happens is they prey on us lawyers because we are good at what we do, but no one ever trained us to be good marketers and good business people, and that's what Great Ligure Marketing is all about. So let me just pitch Great Ligure Marketing here for you. What Brian and I are really good at is this If you know, if you can describe where you are today and you have a pretty good vision of where you would like to be tomorrow, we will absolutely. Us and our tribe will absolutely help you make a great decision about how to spend your next dollar or your next hour in building the practice, because the choices of where to spend your time or your money are endless, but there's only one best choice for the next thing you should do.
Speaker 1:And when you do the things you need to do to build your practice in an organized manner one brick of the foundation upon one brick of the foundation upon one brick of the foundation upon one brick of the foundation Then you build something like what we have at Ben Glass Law a machine that runs, a machine that gives Brian and I the opportunity to work only with the cases and clients we want to work with because there's a line outside the door. We command high fees in our long-term disability practice, both for consulting and for what people pay us over the life of the door. We command high fees in our long-term disability practice both for consulting and for what people pay us over the life of the claim. We've got $45 million of claims under future management. I mean it's a cash flow machine. We work hard and we're good at what we're doing, but the marketing and the sales process is what keeps that line to get in our door long and it helps us give great advice to clients and the clients trust that they're getting great advice and they, by and large, follow our advice.
Speaker 1:So if you ever wondered what great legal marketing is all about, that's what it's about. We don't sell websites. We don't sell any marketing collateral. That's not it's about. We don't sell websites. We don't sell any marketing collateral. That's not our job. We help you figure out what's best for your life, what's best for your firm, what's best to drive your favorite client to your practice so that you can enjoy this practice of law. So your family is proud and happy that you decided to become a lawyer and that running a law firm does not become a major source of financial, physical and emotional stress. Been doing it for over 20 years. We were among the first to the game of coaching lawyers, still doing it today, and if you're interested, find us greatlegalmarketingcom. Reach out to me on LinkedIn. For all heaven's sake, come to our summit. Just come taste what it is that we are all about. All right, next time, chapter eight, we're gonna talk about the 800-pound gorilla in your neighborhood. Talk to you then.
