Ep. 223 (Part 1) – Ben Unleashed: The Marketing Philosophy Most Lawyers Never Learn

In this special live edition of the Renegade Lawyer Podcast, Ben Glass takes the stage at a CLE program and delivers a candid, unfiltered session on legal marketing, law firm growth, and building a practice that serves your life—not the other way around.

Ben shares the philosophy behind decades of success, why most lawyers waste money on marketing, how delegation and global hiring transformed his firm, and why "making money in the dark" beats chasing every new digital trend.

You'll learn:

•  Why happiness should come before marketing strategy 
•  The biggest mistake lawyers make when hiring marketing vendors 
•  How Ben built authority without bragging 
•  The power of direct mail and relationship marketing 
•  Why most lawyers focus on the wrong metrics 
•  How to create a law practice that energizes your life 

This is Ben Glass live, unscripted, and unapologetically renegade.

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.

Transcript

Show Premise And Live Recording

SPEAKER_00 0:03

Welcome to the Renegade Lawyer Podcast, the show that challenges the way lawyers and professionals think about life, business, and success. Hosted by Ben Glass, attorney, entrepreneur, coach, and father of nine, this show is about more than just practicing law. For over 40 years, Ben has built a law firm that stands for something bigger. He's helped thousands of lawyers create practices that make good money, do meaningful work, and still make it home for them. Each week, Bett brings you real conversations with guests who are challenging the status quo. Lawyers, doctors, entrepreneurs, thinkers, and builders. These are people creating bold careers and meaningful lives without burning out or selling out. If you're ready to stop playing small and start thinking like a renegade, you're in the right place. Let's dive in.

SPEAKER_01 0:57

Hi everyone, this is Ben Glass, and welcome back to the Renegade Lawyer Podcast. What you're gonna hear next is a live recording. Recently, I was invited by Virginia's CLE to participate in a lecture on legal marketing ethics. Uh so we had an hour and that from another speaker, and then I was able to do two hours pretty much Ben Unleashed. And so this episode is about the first hour or so of that talk, where I talk about the philosophy that must predate and pre-exist, uh, any type of marketing decisions, talk about how we've uh grown the law firm by delegation and global hiring, how Vinny the marketing vulture always has an answer for your marketing problem. So that is, you should have bought more stuff from me, and how we make money in the dark, and how we have grown our ERISA practice in ways that our competitors just can't see. So, look, I hope you enjoy the episode. Again, this was live in front of a both in-person and an online audience of probably hundreds, I don't know, but it's it's it's Banglass Live, it's unfiltered, and I hope you enjoy that. And then we'll episode two will be released shortly after this one. Okay,

Ben’s Background And Early Lessons

SPEAKER_01 2:20

welcome back. Thanks for being here today. I'm gonna take you on a two-hour journey of how of how solo and small firms can market, get clients, improve their lives, improve their practices, and never come close to any of the dangers that my friend Tom pointed out. Uh, for those of you who don't know me, my name is Ben Glass. So I've been practicing, I am a full-time practicing attorney 42 years. Today I limit my practice to I represent claimants across the country in ERISA, long-term disability insurance cases. My son Brian runs the personal injury, manual automobile accidents, dog bites in um in northern Virginia. We've got a firm in Northern Virginia. And for the first 12 years of my life, I practiced in a firm that was doing insurance defense. So I got to try a lot of cases. I did a lot of medical malappractice defense and general liability defense cases. That firm was switching to plaintiff's work, so I learned how to do plaintiff's cases. I was very fortunate, again, back in the 80s, to be able to try a lot of cases and to be able to hang out with a lot of really experienced lawyers and see how they took depositions and see how they did trials. So I was very blessed by that early experience. 12 years in, I decided, you know, I'm pretty good at this. Uh the commute's kind of long. Like, let's go start a law firm. Like, how hard could it be to start my own law firm? I was having good results. Um, I had cases of my own. And so I went and started Ben Glass Law, which just celebrated its 30th birthday in October. And that was good for a while until it wasn't, because I figured out that although I was a good lawyer and getting good results and could talk to juries and judges and things like that, I didn't know anything about running a business. I didn't know anything about marketing. I didn't know anything about hiring, developing culture, developing processes and procedures. And so after a while, it became very, very hard because I was unable to get a flow of cases. And now this is a long time ago because we're talking yellow page ads or TV and radio. I mean, those are basically the two media that we had, or I had back when I started the practice. The internet was just the internet and websites was just being born, and you know, I can remember like the, I think it was a cat video from the White House, like the first internet broadcast. And so I started to look around for information that would help me become a business person who was a good lawyer. And I looked in the legal space, and there was really like maybe three books, very boring, very plain, and not very helpful. Fortunately, I learned that there was this whole world outside of law of entrepreneurs and other small business owners who were teaching each other how to build better hair salon, bagel bakery, retail store, a used car. And so I said, wow, that's kind of interesting. Let me go over to those seminars and let's see what they have behind the wall, right? And what I found was a world of very successful people who were happy in what they were doing, who were getting customers, clients, patients, whatever it was. And I said, Oh, I gotta stick over here for a bit, and I'm gonna get good ideas from the entrepreneur space, and I'm gonna bring them back into my law practice and let's see what happens. And so we started to do things that were at the time revolutionary for lawyers. For example, I was the first one really to write a book like the ultimate guide to your Virginia Car Accident Case, so that when somebody would call the office, my team could say, Hey, did you know that Mr. Glass wrote the book, true statement, on Virginia car accident cases? And so then even if the client did not sign with us that day, we would get their name, we would get their address, we would mail them a book, they would then start to get our newsletter. By the way, for those who are live in the room, I've got copies of our law

Borrowing Entrepreneur Tactics For Law

SPEAKER_01 6:20

firm newsletter to share with you. And we started to then run ads in the yellow pages, not about how good Ben Glass was, but ads about the book with a tagline that said, if you've been injured in an accident, before you talk to the adjuster, hire a lawyer, or sign any forms, get our informational book. And that was the dawn of changing my practice and actually changing my life. And so then the guys and gals that I was hanging out with said, You're pretty good at this. You've got some really interesting stuff. You should teach this to lawyers. And there was no one at the time. So I was the first one to I create a company called Great Legal Marketing. I was the first one to bring to market a seminar for lawyers that was not a CLE seminar. It was not about how to take a better deposition or try a case or do any of that, all of which is necessary and is the buy-in to the game. But it was about how do I build a business that makes me happy. And today, Great Legal Marketing, like our mantra is we help sole and small firm lawyers across the country build businesses that make their families happy that they became lawyers and, in our case, mostly law firm owners. And so while we're talking about marketing today, this really is a life journey. You actually should be getting like health and wellness credit in Virginia for this because I'm going to improve your life. And today it's become so, so complex and complicated, and there's so much non-lawyer money in the marketing and advertising space that if you understand what I'm going to show you of the next couple of hours, it's really going to help you make great decisions about how do I spend the next hour or my next dollar in making my practice a better business. So I can take my art, which is being a lawyer and helping clients, and put that into the world. So by the way, um, as part of the materials that I submitted here, you've got um it's a collection of notes from the 2025 Great Legal Marketing Summit. No other conference in America, when this when the conference is over, delivers all the PowerPoints and all the notes and all the bios and everything. So that packet is worth studying for sure, because we had speakers on everything from the latest and greatest on AI, both in the production of cases, but also in the marketing of cases, how to hire and fire, how to be seen as an authority without saying, oh, I am the wise man and the best guy at the top of the mountain, right? We don't have to do that. That's mostly what Tom and mostly what the ethics boards have wrestled with over time is really bad marketing, bad lawyer marketing that relies on me boasting about myself, versus if I can get the consumer, my next client, to say, huh, in my opinion, this guy does know what he's doing. He does have experience and he has expertise. I want to go hire Ben Glass. Now we have a line forming outside the firm. Now we have choices as lawyers as to who we are going to represent. So we're going to be happier anyway. And we get clients that pay, we get good clients. So that's what this journey is all about. I will say that uh Tom talked about uh money-back guarantees. We actually have, so I do this thing in my ERISA space. I'll just introduce this. Is I consult with, I made myself famous inside the doctor industry, the medical industry, right? By aligning myself with another organization that teaches financial literacy to doctors. He is the Dave Ramsey to Whitecoat, it's called Whitecoat investors. I am famous in that space. So I show up and I'm like the only lawyer that shows up there. So a doctor who has a new diagnosis and maybe a tremor or a vision or a hearing issue and knows that they're not gonna be able to continue to do what they're born to do. A lot of surgeons, dentists, chiropractors, facial surgeons, plastic surgeons get a tremor. But they have this stack of disability policies over here. And they may be a partner in one organization, have all different streams of income. They have complicated financial lives. So I'm a guy they call to say, hey, Ben, got this new diagnosis. So usually on a Zoom call with their spouse, I have this stack of policies. I don't really understand what to do next. Help me manage this process. And we're really good at that. And for an hour of my time, we charge good money, $2,500. The guarantee is this. Dr. Smith, if at the end of the call and you get my notes and you get my advice and you get my plan, if you don't think that consult was worth it, just don't pay the invoice, right? That's a money-back guarantee. I don't really need it because I'm the only one in the space, and no one has ever taken it. And this is a growing, growing, growing part of our part of our practice. All right. And if you have questions, anytime here, if you're live in the room, raise your hand. If you're not, send an email. My friend John will alert me that there's a question. All right. Now, I am I am known for being sort of the philosopher king of marketing. And I don't say that with any arrogance, but this is this is maybe what differentiates me from a lot of the other, because today there's a lot of conferences, there's a lot of marketing groups, there's a lot of ways that lawyers can go and find out how to market. The same as never in the history of man have consumers had more access to information about who to hire as a lawyer. Like, so so, yes, consumers aren't as dumb as the law thinks they are, and B, there's tons of ways consumers learn about us. But I believe this taught this starts, and you cannot talk about marketing and you cannot talk about a strategy unless you know where you want to get. What is it that you want to build? And I always start my conferences with this that you are a hero. And it's not because you help clients. Like that's kind of the traditional thing. Again, that's the ante to play the game. I mean, we're all strategizing for clients. We're either helping them solve a problem or

Authority Building With Books And Content

SPEAKER_01 12:40

exploit an opportunity, right? But if you're a law firm owner, you're a hero. You're a hero to your family. You work hard. You have, if you've built a practice, you were the first one in, you were the last one to leave. Sometimes you were the last one to get paid. You go to seminars, you try to learn both a substantive area of your law, you learn how to build your better business, you communicate you, you communicate with your involvement community, you're a hero. And sometimes, like we forget that. Like we forget to give ourselves permission to say we are doing something good in society, both the legal stuff, but also just being a business owner. So while we're here in this room, I guess with lawyers and maybe there's some marketing assistants perhaps on this call, like you're here, no matter what role you play in helping a law firm get better as a business. I want to thank you for that. Now, here's the wellness part of this. You have no control over who you were born to, when you were born, and into what circumstances you were born. We think we have some control about how many years and days and months that we have on this earth. And to some effect we can have impact by diet, health, nutrition, things like that. But the reality is we don't know. You don't know how many days you have. I believe that you were meant to be lived, that life was meant to be lived in your own happiness first. You are the primary. You and your families are the primary. And that goes contrary to a lot of what you hear from established legal ethos. The client comes first. And my son graduated from law school. There was a Supreme Court justice, now retired, now deceased, who's told them that you are a slave and your new master is a client. I'm sitting there in the back room going, this is the most this is BS. This is why we have lawyer unhappiness and unwellness problem in America. It's because we put the client first beyond everything else. And I think that's wrong. Because the lawyer who is happy, who is financially, emotionally, spiritually, physically great, has great relationships, that lawyer is going to be in a better position to help strategize the opportunity or the challenge that the client has versus the lawyer who's struggling. So most lawyers who get into trouble, and I recently was at a different conference, and there was a lawyer on lawyer ethics and all the ways lawyers get in trouble. The root core of lawyers getting in trouble with Virginia State Bar, ethics-wise, is bad business. It's a failure to communicate with clients. Well, that's systems. You can communicate with systems, you communicate with hiring great people. It's, oh, sometimes I'm taking money out of the trust account to go over here when it shouldn't be coming out of the trust. You got to go over here because I don't know anything about bookkeeping and I don't know how to run a business, and so I'm always poor. Or it's I'm finding a brief with all these AI miscitations because I'm so busy and I am working seven days a week and 12 hours a day, and I'm shortcutting things. These are the things that get lawyers in trouble. And my thesis has been for over 21 years that if you have a sane business running with systems and great people who want to come to work for you every single day, the clients will be well taken care of. For sure. And so at Ben Glass Law, like there's a lot of personal injury lawyers, right? There's a bazillion of them. There's fewer ERISA disability lawyers, a ton of personal injury lawyers. We proudly say and take the position and then train, hire and train on this that as a as a client, you will not go to a law firm where you will get a better client experience than with us, right? And so we proudly take that position and love it when people come battle with us because I want everybody to get their client experience as good as ours. So but you gotta start there. And and I think that this is what at the end of the day, marketing and getting more clients like builds towards this, and then you have a great life. Tom said, he says, um, he's been practicing, I've been practicing 42 years. He's at, I think he said 48 or 49. He says, he told me on the hall, like I'm trying to convince him to let me just stay working here for free. Like he loves what he does. Isn't that cool to love what you do, get paid for it, making money with our brains, working with people that we love to work with for people we love to work with. That's what all of this leads up to, because it's not just marketing to get another case, right? Or to get another matter. Like that's that's that's like the interim. Like, what's the big thing that we're we're doing here? All right. And so that's why I, you know, there's tactics, and I'll show you a whole bunch of tactics and ideas thinking differently. If you've never given yourself permission to think this way about your firm, I want to invite you into a world where we we have surrounded ourselves with thousands of lawyers who think this way. And if you've never been in a room of lawyers who are positive, optimistic, happy, proud, financially successful, and all of that, right? And they're actually people you would actually like to go have a drink with, because a lot of lawyers like, no, we don't want to do that, then just know that there's a world of us out there. And so my core premise has been to do work that energizes your life. And so, yes, I'm at the later stage of my career, maybe. Yes, there are times it's been very hard. Yes, there were times we laid people off because we didn't have enough money, because we weren't running a great business. But you can get to that place, and I'm really proud now of helping lawyers get to that place faster. We can honestly say that being a lawyer gives you energy. Like walking in on Monday gives you energy. Talking, in my case, to these doctors and their spouses gives me energy. And then you build a team that believes this too, and you figure out how to go find them and hire them, right? You become unbeatable. And it doesn't matter what your practice area is. So Tom gave a lot of examples of big law firms, but most of America is small law firms. Most of America is solo in small firms, less than five lawyers, right? And we've helped people all across the consumer-facing practice areas and this and the lawyers who help small biz, like that's that's our space. And and again, so many lawyers I talked to, like they've never even they didn't get their slide in law school, right? Nobody in law school told them it's okay to have fun with the practice of law and to be energized by the practice of law. They told them it's going to be a grind, that of course it sucks to be a lawyer because what did you expect when you signed up and went to law school? Like, so every time the Virginia State Bar Journal writes an article about lawyer wellness, I'm usually writing a letter to the editor back to say you have the premise wrong. The premise should be that this should be a fun journey. All right. Really, really important before

Marketing Starts With Life Philosophy

SPEAKER_01 20:10

we talk about any marketing is to have real clarity on these four areas. Who do I want to serve? So we talk, we talk about, we call that our avatar client. And being brave about defining who it is you want to do work for, and the the urge when you are young in the practice or young in your law firm, you have a new law firm, is I have to take all comers because I got to pay the bills. And I think that's a false, again, a false idea, a bad idea. Rather than take the next bad client who's gonna drive you and your staff crazy and suck the life out of you and then have a bar complaint later when they're not happy, right? Go to a marketing event, go to an entrepreneur event, go read a book about personal development, go get a personal coach. Like, let's say no to people who don't match who we want to serve. What do I want to be known for? If you go to Benglas Law and you look at our online reviews, most of them say, thank you for helping me. We tell folks who are gonna write a review, like what we want the world to know is that we will try to help you. We may not take your case, we may not be able to represent you, but we will help you. We may help you find the right lawyer for you. We may tell you that, look, you really don't have a case. What do you want to be known for? So I am known as the guy who's like the well, we have a brand. I have a podcast, the Renegade Lawyer Podcast, the guy who thinks countercultural to what most lawyers and most bar association bar leaderships think. I'm the I am the stick in the mud that's pushing the profession forward. And there are many people like me today. The CrossFit Athlete for 52 years. I've been a soccer referee. Dad to nine, right? Data four, dot D some chart. Like people know these things about me, even if they don't understand what practice area I do. Like, what is this ERISA stuff, right? They know enough about me to give them some confidence that I'm not crazy and nuts, right? And so they can say with confidence to somebody else, a neighbor, hey, call Ben. I'm not really sure if he can help you, but I know, I know that he will try to help you. So being known for saying, and it's very hard. Like if you say, well, I just want to be known as a bankruptcy lawyer, or I just want to be known as a personal lawyer. Well, great, except there were only like a million of you. So that's not anything very special. But maybe you're a bankruptcy lawyer for a certain type of small biz or a certain type of consumer debt or something like that. I don't know the space a lot, but I would be figuring out like what again, what gives me energy? What do I like doing? What am I really good at? How can I change someone's life and become known for that? And the known isn't just putting up a billboard that says, I am. The known is all of these things we're going to talk about that help people find you and discover what you are known for. What do I want my days to feel like? Well, again, and you could say, ah, well, Ben, you've been doing this a long time. It's easier for you. But Mondays and Fridays for me, no schedule. No scheduled events. I'm working, I'm doing my creative stuff at home. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, except for today, because I'm in Charlottesville, nothing is allowed to get on my calendar before 11 or after four. So if you want to get on my calendar, which can only be done by appointment because I don't take unplanned inbound phone calls, that's another life thing, right? It has to squeeze into there. And I have, but I but I importantly, before I was ready and able to create what I wanted my days to feel like, I created it. I crafted it. I wrote it down on paper. I consulted with experts. I have a mindset coach. I have a business coach, right? I asked them, how do I do this? No one is, it sounds like impossible. You walk into most lawyer events, like, oh no, that'd be impossible. No unplanned inbound phone calls. How do you practice? By appointment. I'd practice by appointment, right? And then what am I no longer willing to do? That is probably the first list like I would work on. I'm a journal er, and for years I've had that page, you know, I'll just be nice and say crap I don't like doing and don't want to work on it anymore, and stuff I do like doing. And again, when you start to create that list, you're like, oh, but I'm a lawyer, like nobody could do this as good as me. It's just not gonna happen, right? That's wrong. That objectively wrong. Especially today, in a worldwide economy, there is for whatever you don't like doing or think you're bad at or don't know about, there's someone whose life will light up. So at Benglas Law, we have, I think, five or six people who work for us in the Philippines. They work on the United States East Coast Time, right? And there's this whole culture in the Philippines of folks who who work reverse hours, and they're fantastic. They're great. And they do things that a lot of our workers, if we were just hiring out of Fairfax, Virginia, would think, chase medical records all day long? I don't want to do that. They make more money working for us than they would in their local economy. They get to work with a pretty cool firm that sends them swag. So a bunch of them go to a secure facility in the Philippines, the Bengals Law wing of the office. So just know that. Like, lawyers are not special. There's somebody who's a better lawyer, there's someone who's a better writer, there's someone who's a better storyteller. We can go and find them for everything that we don't like to do. All right. And this is big too, because again, more than a decade ago, I made the decision when I really couldn't afford it to hire a personal mindset coach that I first met with weekly for probably two and a half years. And now monthly we get together. And he's that person, his name is Sammy, he's in Toronto. I have my wife, Sandy, does the books for the firm, married 45 years. I have my oldest son, Brian, who I'm in practice with. But there's certain conversations that you can only have with someone who is disassociated, right? Who can call you on your BS, who can also say, by the way, I, Sammy, coach 47 other people like you. And here's an idea I heard over here for you to implement, and here's someone to hold you accountable. And so a lot of times people come to us and they do change because they they develop

Your Ideal Client And Your Reputation

SPEAKER_01 26:40

a more abundant belief system, they develop a more entrepreneurial belief system, they take risks because they've figured out like what they they have bought into the notion, this weird notion that it's okay to be happy as a lawyer. All right. So again, self-explanatory slide. No prize for being exhausted, right? You're morally allowed to design a better life because when you do this, the firm just gets better. And your service then to the community, your service, if we can call that to clients, just gets better. So an exercise after this event is over. If you have not done this before, and even if you don't think you're there yet, you don't have enough money, you don't have enough contacts, you don't even have enough cases today. Start to craft that vision. Who do you want to work for? Me, physicians facing disability insurance claims. So high wage earners who can pay my pretty high fee for talking for an hour to Ben Glass, right? To get service by my team. What problem do they have? And what result can I help them get? And I will tell you that it that our experience is that specialty matters, that trying to be everything to every person, so even a personal injury lawyer. Like I go to personal injury lawyer websites and it's like, oh, there's just 47 different flavors of personal injury we do, including product liability and medical malpractice. I'm like, well, dude, like when's the last time you did a product liability case and would you even know what to do? No. All right, let's get that off your website because that actually just says I'm a generalist now. So the again, even if you feel you're not there yet, I would start to think about and vision and dream what a perfect day would look like. And and that perfect day, in that perfect day, who am I serving? Who do I want to see walking in the door, bringing you up on Zoom, calling you, filling out a web form, things like that. And I don't think the ethics rules, I don't think there's anything to be afraid of. Yeah, you want to know your bar rules, but like Tom said, like they become very more common sense, especially Virginia, is much more common sense. But the reality is most of the bar rules are about you bragging about yourself. And you don't have to brag about yourself. I'll show you like a way, like we are bragging about ourselves now, but we can objectively prove what our brag is. And you know, we write a lot. And so people who know me, uh, you know, you say you have your thousand true friends, like your referral sources who know your story beyond lawyer, because most people don't need a lawyer today. Like they're walking around town. We're in Shawsville, and most people don't need a lawyer today, right? But you gotta have something you'd be remembered for, right? And so we are very transparent. People have different levels of comfort with my whole life is on LinkedIn, TikTok, Facebook. I had uh I had open heart surgery, I had a triple bypass surgery uh 24, 27 months ago. And here's the scary thing zero symptoms discovered by very smart and curious doctors, zero symptoms, so but critical heart disease. And I started on the day on the on the weekend, the surgery is gonna be on Monday. Okay, I'm gonna document this whole journey. So if you go to Renegade Lawyer on TikTok, you can go all the way back a couple years ago, on the whole journey from before the operation through my recovery, my my walks back and forth on the driveway, back to full recovery to CrossFit and refereeing. Literally between March 18, I was back in the CrossFit gym the day after Memorial Day. Not doing everything they were doing, but I was back in the gym with my tribe, right? So I'm very transparent guy. I am not afraid of being of you know, letting people see my life. Okay, so now let's get to what we're here to talk about, which is marketing. And most lawyers in the solar small firm space are like, oh shoot, I got a problem. Leads are down, money's down, I'm not sure what to do. Let's pick something. And right then an email comes in that says, I can get you on the first page of Google. You can buy these. So now the ads that I'm seeing are you can buy, if you go to my Facebook page, you'll see I've reposted, you can buy fully signed personal injury cases. Holy crap. You'd have to be really desperate. At first, I think that ad like violates, it does violate the rules, right? I think the consumer, like, and as a consumer now, like you're selling their stuff. Uh you're running an ad that's like, hey, if you've been hurt, but no law firm name, and then you're getting sold. Anyway, so but this is this is the path of most lawyers to spending money on advertising and marketing. It's like it comes in a panic time, and they're inundated every single day, and they see what Bobby's doing over here, and Susie's doing over here. So I'm, and I heard about this seminar over here, and I read this in a book, so I got to do something. And so they they go in their wallet and over their credit card, and they say, get me some, get me some cases. All right, and so that's how they get to wasting money on marketing because they haven't built out the stuff we just talked about. We haven't built out like what do we want this thing to actually look like? They don't know how to measure what the agency is gonna do for them. And it's just like in the old days, it was just always a battle to have a bigger ad so you can get up closer. There's 70 pages of yellow page ads in Northern Virginia in the old days when I started. And you want to be near the front, I guess, because there were so many pages. And so there was always that battle. So that's what they do. And today, so I I invented, I crafted 21 years ago, Vinny. Vinny's the marketing vulture. Vinny's answer for every failed marketing campaign is you should have bought more. You shouldn't have stopped those TV ads, right? You shouldn't have stopped mailing your news. If you just like bought more stuff from us, let us spend more of your money, you would have been just fine. And so today, I mean, there are so and actually there's so many new and emerging ethics

Designing Your Days And Delegating Work

SPEAKER_01 32:50

issues that come from digital marketing that I don't have time to go into. Tom kept throwing me out. Maybe Ben will cover this, no, not in two hours, but it's uh it is a whole new world. And what I want to get you to is a place where this world, this very confusing world, right, where you literally, how many? You know, a dozen social platforms to learn and master their algorithms, learn and master their ad campaigns that they're selling you. Google search, pay-per-click, gee, uh, we didn't even get to, you know, you search for Ben Glass Law, and the ad that shows up is Billy Jones's personal injury, like someone who's trading on my name, maybe, right? All sorts of interesting issues. Uh, all sorts of ways to get content out there, right? And this can be dizzying. And pick one, pick two, pick three, and learn it. And in three months, the algorithm is going to change anyway. And so the place we want to get to as solo and small firm lawyers is to use what's appropriate, but not be dependent on really any of this. I call this making money in the dark. Because if I do something on social media or my website, you can go hack it. We call that funnel hacking. Like you can see exactly what I'm doing, right? We're running AI software in our office now that goes and looks at our competitors' websites, looks at what their messaging is, compares it to what our messaging is, and suggests to us areas where we can put out a message that no one else is saying, disability space and then the personal injury space. So when you are doing anything on digital media and there's a place full of it. There is a place. Just know it's really easy for your competitors to see what you're doing. We're gonna talk about what I call analog marketing, making money in the dark. All right. And we're leading you into the trap, right? And the trap is it's exhausting. And if it doesn't work, now they're not only saying you should have bought more, oh, but it's Google's fault because Google changed its algorithm. There's a big algorithm update like, you know, two weeks ago, and now your pages that were ranking aren't aren't ranking. But if you pay me another $25,000, we're gonna get you right back up and ranked up there. Okay. So it is a huge chop. Again, there's a place. So everything we talk about in marketing, like there is a place for. But what I am known for is helping you figure out what's the place for me? What guru should I go read or watch, or event should I attend? What should I invest in in terms of my firm's marketing next? Because it can't do everything. It's impossible to do everything. You don't need to do everything, but but they love it. So if you go to some some of the big, so I go to these uh lawyer conventions where the big, big, big $800 million advertising spenders are, right? You should see the technology and the booths and the young kids. Yeah, how long you've been working for that tech company? You're selling me your new AI thing. Oh, two weeks, great, perfect. Like, what do you know about life? Nothing. So, so that's the that's the thing that's out there, right? And so it it there's a huge cost to doing this. So, yeah, like I have a lot of rule number ones. But rule number one is we have this in CrossFit, like in CrossFit. You know, you don't look around at what everyone else is doing in the gym and say, oh, well, she's lifting more than me. I should be able to lift that much. Let me go do that because I'm gonna get hurt. So you don't look around what everybody else is doing and say, I gotta do that, right? That was rule number one for me back in the yellow pages was I went to the library, regional library in Fairfax. I had rows and rows of yellow pages. And I started to write down just the headlines of the personal injury app. After a while, you figure out you figured out there's only like three. No fee if no recovery, right? We are aggressive. And I figured what the third one was, right? But the object of marketing is to figure out what is your competitors doing and how can I say something different? How can I do something different? So there's a ton of cost there. All right, so let's do digital marketing because everybody has website and it's like everybody's favorite sexy subject. And I'm not a digital marketing expert. You do not need to be a digital marketing expert. What you need to be able to do is have an intelligent conversation with whoever's building your website, whoever you're sending a check to or giving a credit card number to, who's building this thing that they say is gonna help you get cases, right? You need to know enough to have a conversation so you know when they are talking, BS. All right. So let's just talk a couple of things. Two things before we get to any SEO. So SEO, of course, is I type a search thing, a search query in, and it returns, returns website. That's gotten in in the last 24 months a hundred X more complicated. Why? Because people, many people are now going to Chat GPT or Perplexity or Claude and typing this who is who is the best person G lawyer in Fairfax. And Perplexity is going out and now doing the searches across many, many websites and across the all the review sites and Avo, yes, Avo still exists, and across uh you know, they're even searching uh Yelp, like who uses Yelp? But so so that's become a lot more complicated. So let's just put SEO first side for a moment. We invest a ton of in SEO, we think it's important. But if you're building a website,

Panic Marketing And The Vinny Trap

SPEAKER_01 38:30

a new website in particular, the things you want. It's gotta be a great user experience. So, meaning, gotta show up really well on the laptop, gotta show up really well on the phone. If it has links, they all work. If it has video, the video works. Many, many, many, many, many lawyers, like most of the people I work with now, have some form of web chat, right? Uh, we uh has been important for us. It and but then the question is, is it a live person on the other end, or is it an or is it an AI bot on the other end? Like, and both can work. You know, they charge different amounts of money for different services. So, but so many and like the first page of the website should not be like the skyline of Richmond. Like nobody came to you if they're looking for a family lawyer to see the skyline of Richmond. They don't care about that. They want to know do you have EEAT, the experience, the expertise, the authority, and the trust to make me do what? Not hire you, just contact you first. That's the whole game. Is we need to get all these consumers who are wandering around outside who have not made a decision about A, whether they need a lawyer, B, which lawyer do I pick? We just want them to reach out and contact us. That's the game. All right. So, so doing an audit of your website to make sure that and it's not about you, like the website's not about, oh like I'm the best. It's not what problem are they of the clients that you want, what problem are they trying to solve? Do you have experience with solving that problem? They need to see that, right? And everything needs to work. Tom mentioned blogs. I don't, you know, I guess some websites still have quote unquote blogs. If you're gonna have blogs, and I and I visited some websites this week, and I go there, and the last blog was written in 2022. I think you're as stale as your blog. So if you're gonna do something like that, you either take all the dates out, or you make sure that you're putting something fresh up every so often. Because why? Because these are trust clues to the consumer who's visiting 10 websites, maybe did a search on perplexity, which visited 20 websites, and they're trying to make a decision of who do I call or which web form do I fill out, or any of that stuff. And so we have to give them enough clues that we have the expertise, the experience, the authority, and the trust right from the beginning. Right? And that has nothing to do with SEO, but that's making sure that your website actually works. And this is just a little bit more on EEAT. Again, that's a great thing to write in your journal, EEAT. Expertise, experience, authoritativeness, trustworthiness. Even if you're new to the practice of law, you can do things that leave clues about experience. You do not want to be deceptive or misleading, as my friend Tom said, for sure. But you could write a book. You could have have somebody or AI search your competitors' websites to see what they say about, I don't know your room, but chapter seven bankruptcies. And you could probably write something that's better or different, or as a call out, is a dog whistle to a particular type of business owner, particular type of consumer. Now that's work, but it's work that's worth doing. Because the alternative is again, I whip in my wallet and I give a credit card to a vendor. Again, many good vendors out there, but they're not you. And if you have a vendor who you're thinking about hiring for any of this, and they're not beginning a discussion with what we just talked about for some 35 minutes, I'd kick them to the can because they're not really interested in doing a good job. They need to know what it is you are trying, you are trying to build. Okay, so Ben Glass Law spends we are supporting the United States Post Office. We do a lot of mail. Now, I'm not talking about the mail that says I'm gonna buy a list of everyone who was arrested for a DOI or everyone who has a car accident and mailing them a solicitation letter, because actually that's almost that's like too slow these days. There was a time when that worked and done well. It was, A, it was, it was legal, it was ethical, it was moral, it was uh it was proper, right? And that worked. But I'm talking about staying in front of you, my thousand true friends, including my lawyer and non-lawyer referral sources, in an interesting way, every single month. I'm talking about having databases of people who send me cases. And when I see an article, being able to go to the database, get their address, get the article, put a sticky note on it, and say, Susie, think it about you, that you might be interested in this. I'm talking about establishing trust through direct mail. And unless they eliminate the post office, this is not going away. Number one. Number two, our competitors don't see it. And as you said earlier, when I'm sending letters to lawyers who can refer me to disability cases, I I I don't know if you call it stretching the line, going beyond the line, whatever. We believe there. We are the best choice for a particular type of client. We believe it. And we are not shy about saying to the lawyers who send us their cases, you are making a great decision every single time you take us a case. And let me tell you why. Let me tell you about our latest wins. Let me tell you about some cool stuff that we're working on next, right? And so the bar never sees this, but it's all fine anyway, but it's not marketing to the direct consumer anyway. So I think there's a difference. All right. So you control the piece, you you control the spend because you're deciding every month. There's lots of companies now that will help you. So we've got a company called the coolest name, Jurassic Marketing. And

Website UX Trust Signals And EEAT

SPEAKER_01 44:40

they come to our event, they have big giant dinosaurs. And they walk around in dinosaur costumes. Why? Because it's old school. Because everybody else has gone over to this digital stuff and things that did that, you know, people who'd say to you, everybody's on their phone, no one will read a long letter. BS. Like, did you watch like Netflix? Did you binge a whole series of Memorial Day weekend? Like you watch eight episodes or something. People will pay attention to stuff that's interesting to them, right? So there's lots of reasons why this is uh this is the old is new, and old is very profitable for those of us in the solo and small firm market. Again, it takes some work. Somebody has to write well and interesting, but there's books you can read about writing interestingly. Someone has to maintain databases. Yep. Someone has to spend money on top referral sources, like sending them gifts. Like I find out where you went to college and I go to the college bookstore and I buy the sweatshirt. You it's outrageously priced, you would never buy it for yourself, but I'd buy it for you. I don't put my name on it, I just send it to you. You're like, oh, Ben Glass, like that was really thoughtful. So think this is how we think, and this is how the lawyers and I hang out with me. All right, so again, we sort of reviewed this, right? But the uh yeah, there are five. We end up sabotaging ourselves, number one, by chasing the new trends. So again, go on any social media, uh, you'll see, oh, you've got to do this now. Like this guy's doing TikTok. He's got a bazillion followers. They never tell you, like, how many cases are they getting, right? But if TikTok works for them and they enjoy doing it, great. Doesn't mean that you're gonna benefit from TikTok. This is a big one, no follow-up system. So we have very robust uh well, first I have a salesperson who's my intake person, but we call her the director of sales. So when the calls come in, if it is an avatar client, she is personally offended if they don't sign right away. By the way, we used to think that lawyers that you needed to sit down with a client and have a conversation with them and show them everything, and they'd sign a retainer agreement on the thing. Hell no, like you send them a P you you send them a uh docusign, they come back in 10 seconds. Click sign, boom. So but we do have some people that don't sign right away. So we have a really robust both mail documents and email that talk more about the problem that they called with to to uh to I'll I'll tell you a a myth, a myth is if they don't sign with you today, they sign with somebody else. Not true. So at one point we had an associate leave, and then we we brought uh we brought another one of my sons in for the summer to do internship. His job was to look at all of the cases, all of the calls we got over the last six months that there was no, we didn't have good follow-up, and they didn't sign with us. So we started calling them. Hey, you still need help with your case? Myth is, oh no, they signed for somebody else. Well, they sold the case themselves. And we got six cases out of there, like $100,000, because we sat down, because Matt did the work, we sat down and called people. So it's a myth to think that they've gone on. So robust follow-up system, a lot can be automated, but just understanding that these calls are not one and done, right? There are plenty of good agencies out there can help you. Again, if you don't know where you're going, they can't help you get there. Uh, past clients is big. So we have our newsletter. Uh, I forget how many we're mailing to now. It's monthly, eight-page full color, a nice paper newsletter. It is a project to get out the door, but we do, right? And so, you know, you get a client and you in a personal injury space and you say, Yeah, you know, I had a prior accident five years ago in the case settled, and you ask them two questions who is your surgeon, orthopedic surgeon, you know, who's your lawyer? I don't know. Okay, missed opportunity for that lawyer to now represent you on this case. So staying in in past and staying in contact with past clients in an interesting way. Again, so for my bankruptcy friends, and what's your practice area? What are you intellectual property? Oh, so we got a great guy in Indiana who markets the small biz. Is this you? Like, that's your target avatar yeah, but your target is small biz IP or or Exxon. Okay, Exxon. But still, okay, but still, Exxon is a big giant corporation, but there's human beings there. It's human beings that ultimately make decisions about who to hire. So good for you. EnergyIP.com. Energy IP. Okay, so there's a guy. So if you couldn't hear that, one of our in-person uh attendees owns energyIP.com, does intellectual property to major corporations, so he knows who he markets to. He's defined himself clearly, so he doesn't have small biz with a new idea for a better pizza sauce calling you, right? Because that's not who you want to represent, sounds like, and probably is is very clear, gets in front of the right people, the right organizations, the right events, and now has to figure out like how do I differentiate myself? Because it can't be just that we do this, because there's a lot of law firms that do this. Anyway, and that goes to consistent or inconsistent, consistent or inconsistent messaging. All right. We're very consistent. We're just uh Ben and Bryan and a great team that will try to help you raise our kids, do sports, do crossfit and exercise, long-term marriages. How about that? Like, just talk to us. Nothing about like how good a PI lawyer we are. You don't really actually need to see that. Of course, we have a lot of that out there. I just want you to remember me to enough to go and invest investigate me. And we'll go five more minutes and we'll take we'll take a short break. All right.

unknown 50:32

Ah.

SPEAKER_01 50:35

This is this is really what we've talked about. So 83% of our money at

Making Money In The Dark

SPEAKER_01 50:40

a pure contingent, almost a pure contingent fee firm, except for um those uh consults that are you, comes, the journey starts because someone mentioned my name or Brian's name or the firm's name. So it did not come from a cold search. They may have gone through all of our digital properties, they may have checked us out on LinkedIn, TikTok, whatever, right? But when you ask the right questions, you we find over 83% of our money comes because of a human being uh referred them. We build relationships and tends to just give you one example there. So I don't know if uh I'm a group called Provisors. Some of you may be in Provisors. Provisors is a networking social group for people that are experienced in the business world. It's like uh BA, but uh but a little bit more mature, I think. My personal opinion, right? Um, and so one of the things we do, we get on monthly calls, and I'm always listening. Like, who are the two or three people on the call that sound interesting? And what I'm listening for is what do I know or who do I know that could help them? I'm not at a social networking group to get you to know more about me, to send me a case. I'm here to get to find out about you so I could do something for you first, but also because I have another tribe of people who I know over here, and somebody in my tribe over here might need an IP lawyer or bankruptcy lawyer or whatever kind of lawyer, or a mortgage broker, or anything like that. So it's a little bit different way of dealing with networking groups and human relationships, but everything that Brian and I do that you see us do on LinkedIn is very, very intentional. Like we do not do things, we try not to do things by accident. Um, all right, now, and we'll finish with this, and we'll I think we'll take a break, is I showed you the slide that had all of the different choices that are really available to us today. Our best members at Great Legal Marketing. So the people, the lawyers across the country who have like been most successful at changing the fabric of their practices have done it by getting good at two or three things. All right, getting good at writing interesting newsletters, getting good at being an in-person networking person, um, getting good where their firm is good at follow-up marketing, getting good at TikTok. I mean, there's lawyers at I I have a TikTok channel, I don't think I'm very good, but whatever, there's lawyers who like relish in it. So they don't try to do every single thing that's out there. And given the choice between if you're doing one, two, or three channels, and somebody says, Well, Billy, you gotta try this too. Like, okay, but that's a whole new learning curve. How about if I made one of my one, two, or three channels a little bit better? Like, let me go talk to an expert in one of these spaces, or somebody who's got some more experience than I do in one of these spaces about how we can make these channels better. Like having a business coach is also a game changer. Again, someone who is divorced from you emotionally, who has experience across an array of not just law firms, but businesses who can call you on your BS, but and can hold you accountable for the promises you make of what you're gonna do in the next 90 days, like that's been really important. We track everything. So our tracking stack is insane. Tom, he was, I forgot exactly what he's talking about. You know, if you come to our website, we're probably gonna show up on an ad if you're at CNN.com, right? Everything is trackable these days. And what we have gotten really good at in the last couple of years, in particular, is really knowing our numbers and trying to make the next marketing decision based upon real data. So we have a full-time in-house, uh, she works remote, but she's in-house marketing director of the law firm. Again, we didn't start here. We started with me, me and one assistant, right? But this is where you can get to, whose job it is in large part to manage our vendors and to hold our vendors accountable. But we go to our annual two-day off-site retreat, which we do because we run EOS, Entrepreneur Operating System. The book is traction to read. And we have like a 40-page report, marketing report, about this. Lead sources, well, lead sources, so that we can decide where we're gonna spend our money in the next 12 months to make each one of these lead sources stronger. And oh, here's somebody pitching something. Do we really want to go start new over here, or do we want to make one of these stronger? We're very consistent. Our newsletter goes out every month, around the same time every month, and we follow up relentlessly, both with our potential clients, but more so with our referral sources, with this question always, which is how can I help you? What can I do for you first? Zig Ziegler said you can have everything in the world that you want if you only help enough people get what they want. Now, that does not mean you're a sacrificial slave to the world, but most, and

Focus Channels Track Numbers And Close

SPEAKER_01 55:50

we'll end this session here. Most of the very successful business people I know are very giving people. And if you show up with curious questions and a notebook and a commitment to go and do something with what this guru, he or she, tells you to do, we love talking to you. We hate to have our time wasted. And so just know that if you and if you don't know somebody, like somebody you know knows somebody who will help you. Because for all of us, no matter what are where we are in our businesses, there's somebody over here who's five steps ahead, and somebody over here who's, you know, a year ahead of us who got some experience, and we are willing to share, even with competitors. So we run mastermind groups in great legal marketing. We have local personal injury competitor law firms in our mastermind group. Why would we do that? We believe the world is big. The billboards in Atlanta or Jacksonville prove that there's more cases than there are warriors. And we believe that the that the world gets better and the tide rises when we all come and freely share.

SPEAKER_00 56:56

That's it for today's episode of the Renegade Lawyer Podcast, where we're rewriting the rules of what it means to build a great law practice and a great life. If something sparked a new idea or gave you clarity, pass it on. Subscribe, leave a review, and share this with someone who's ready to think bigger. Want more tools, strategies, and stories from the trenches? Visit GreatLegalMarketing.com or connect with Ben Glass and the team on LinkedIn. Keep building boldly. We'll see you next time.