Ep. 224 (Part 2) – Ben Unleashed: Referral Marketing, Authority Building, and Making Money in the Dark

Part 2 of Ben's live CLE presentation is all about practical marketing strategies that actually work.

Ben dives into referral marketing, authority building through books and educational content, direct mail, AI, and why the best marketing often happens where your competitors can't see it. He also shares how Ben Glass Law measures marketing success, builds long-term relationships with referral partners, and has grown its long-term disability practice into a nationally recognized firm without relying on massive advertising budgets.

If you're looking for ideas to attract better clients, build lasting trust, and create marketing assets that continue working for years, this episode is packed with actionable insights.

Topics include:

• Why advertising should start conversations—not close sales
• Building a referral-driven practice
• "Making money in the dark"
• Books, videos, and educational marketing
• Direct mail in the digital age
• Using AI to accelerate content creation
• Measuring marketing ROI
• Growing a national niche practice

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

Live Talk Setup And Goals

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 good for good. Each week, Beth 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. This episode is part two of a live presentation about legal marketing and ethics. In part one, we talked about the philosophy behind marketing, why most lawyers are competing in the wrong arenas, and how we've built our practice by focusing on trust, relationships, and long-term thinking. In this episode, we talk about referral marketing, building authority through books and educational content, creating assets, and why I believe some of the best marketing happens completely out of public view. You'll also hear how we're using AI inside the firm, why direct mail is far from dead, how we measure marketing success, and some of the specific strategies we've used to grow our long-term disability practice into a national practice. Again, this was recorded live in front of both an in-person and online audience. It's unfiltered, unscripted, and very much been unleashed. I hope you enjoy the episode.

SPEAKER_02 2:09

Okay, welcome back from the break. We had interesting conversations offline. If you're listening or watching this and you have a question, any kind of question about marketing or marketing ethics or hey, here's my practice. What do you think I should do next? Just uh follow and John tell me again what how do I submit a question? That's easy. Oh, easy chat box to do that. We'll be happy to um happy to take

Stop Asking Ads To Sell

SPEAKER_02 2:36

the question. All right, so now this goes back to I I mentioned this earlier, and the thesis is that most advertisers, any business, it doesn't matter, lawyers, not lawyers, most advertisers try to make the ad do too much. We're trying to do the entire sell in the ad. Where really what we are trying to do is help the consumer make a great, in our case, the consumer make a great decision about who do I call and just talk to first. So that's an important part of the messaging of any advertising you do. Again, back in the day, yellow pages, in order to separate ourselves, because I wasn't a big full page or they called it double truck. You had you had both pages of an ad, right? I wasn't there, I wasn't that person, but I was coming, showing up with a completely different message, which was you can get my book. Now, many would argue today, and I think they're right, that that's slow. So, but we do that, we do that digitally, right? So one of the things that we offer is again, we have a whole library of YouTube videos. Like, you got a question? You know, you need to call me, you don't need to talk to me. Like, we have a whole library of uh we have two YouTube channels, one on personal injury, one on lung term disability. People can go and meet you and start to form trust impressions about you, right? And the more of that stuff we have out there in across different media, the more we are giving a potential client an opportunity to quote unquote test us out before calling. Because that's the goal. Like the call or the web form, the chat form or the email, that's that's the goal. Now I know that you are someone who is potentially in need of my services, and now we have conversations, right? So you're advertising in whatever form you have. Again, personal entry is a great place to go look for examples because every ad is exactly the same. I was in Phoenix and I was in Vegas in the last couple of months speaking. Miles and miles and miles. Oftentimes, the same law firm, the same face, every other billboard all saying the same message. I don't know how effective that is. I think they're all like in a competition to outspend each other. And their major complaint when you listen to them, these seminars is that their ad costs are going sky high through the roof. We're playing it simple. We're playing a different game. I want to give you a reason to just have a call. And then when that call happens, man, that has to be systematized, scripted, in a perfect scenario. It's not like the least busy paralegal of the moment picking it up and trying to sell the case. It's having someone who's dedicated to and who's trained in sales, right? Again, that's the optimum. That's what we have. We didn't start that way. But at least having a process for what happens when somebody calls. Um, the other thing on this is for whatever reason, like people expect me to talk to a live human being at two o'clock in the morning. And so there's a lot of services. We we have virtual answering services that's real people answers the phone after hours and on the weekends for us, gets printing uh contact information. The newest trend, and I don't know this trend will go anywhere, is AI, AI voice receptionists. We've tested it. We don't think it's very good, and we don't think it's for us. But a lot of these big firms are looking at it as a way to cut their costs. So you call and you talk to a bot. The bots get better every 30 days, they really do, because I've listened to them in the last two years. We've we've you know paid attention to that space, but for us, they're not there yet. And for us, and for everyone who's on this conference, the seminar, solo and small firm lawyer, your advantage is humans. Your advantage is the human touch. All right. Again, today's worldwide economy, the person who's talking to your client doesn't need to be in your office. They don't need to be in your country. And able to have a human-being conversation to move the caller to the next step, which might be a conversation with a lawyer. Most every of our cases are signed on both of our verticals without ever talking to a lawyer. Right? Because we've got enough proof out there. Someone else has sent the potential client to us, so that's a huge trust clue that we um, you know, the vast, again, the vast majority of our clients sign with us without ever speaking to a lawyer. Now, this is the cool part.

Intake That Converts Leads

SPEAKER_02 7:30

This is where we've really, in our firm, done well, made a lot of money, and that is developing marketing for our referral sources. And by that I mean identifying those lawyers who are likely to be seeing our next client. So in the disability space, we don't do social security disability, but so social security disability attorneys are a big referral source for us because they often do not do what we do. Workers' compensation, personal injury attorneys, big referral source for us. Financial gurus to doctors, we've discovered big, huge referral source for us, right? Again, a completely different space. So thinking about who might see your next client. Now, when you're in a niche practice like bankruptcy, like intellectual property, where it just isn't as crowded as personal injury, this becomes magnitudes easier to do. Because in the in the bank, in the you know, whatever, in the bankruptcy space, family law, personal energy, I'd be finding the people in my local community, the lawyers who are not doing this. And I'd be thinking about like, how can I, A, how can I help you first? What kind of cases are you looking for? But B, I would be educating them about what it is I do, and importantly, who I can help. So when they hear these words on a call, I have, you know, unmitigated credit card debt. That triggers, oh, you need to talk to my friend who's a bankruptcy lawyer. So, so developing a for us, and this is again, this is making money in the dark, right? Because nobody but your referral sources sees the materials that you are doing to keep you top of mind. And sometimes it's not just top of mind to the lawyer, but it's top of mind to the receptionists at the office or to the sales team at that office. So there's some offices across the country that send us cases. I'm sure my lawyer friends don't even know the case has been sent, but their intake team, their sales team, know that if certain words are used, I have a group disability insurance policy. Hold on, we don't do that. We're gonna hook you up with a guy that we trust, uh, Ben Glass. He wrote a big conference. So, Dan Kennedy, if you don't know him, Dan Kennedy is a is my marketing guru mentor who I uh hooked up with 25 years ago. And he is a guy who's leading other entrepreneurs to growing great businesses. So we have him out every so often at our conference. And he says, being forgettable is the greatest risk in a crowded market. And the easiest way to be forgettable is you just keep saying the same stuff that everybody else is saying. And so, again, there's there's teachings, there's books, there's uh seminars you can go to about being a more interesting copywriter, being a more interesting person, right? But this is critical for us because we are not going to ever match the spend. By the way, the spend in any space, I'm sure, that there are firms that are spending, you know, 100x, 200x, 500x, what we are willing to spend or what we're able to spend. And so if you're number one in a market, so if you're number one like in the TV market, right, you can spend the most, you're gonna win. That those numbers will work for you time and time again. But if you're number three or four or anywhere else below, it's much more difficult, right? And so our our view is you don't play in that market unless you can outspend them. And that's why we play in the be an interesting person market. All right. Again, this is a this is a riff on analog versus digital. Digital, yes, is important, like understanding how these different either local service ads, LSAs, local service ads are the ones someone types in a search term, an ad come pops up on Google that you're paying Google for. Google doesn't tell you how much that ad costs. Google's listening in on the call. Google is seeing if you do good on the call, and then deciding whether to show your ad ever again. Like there's a market there. There's people that play in it, there's people who do well in it. We've tested it, it's not been good for us. However, however, we also believe that spending money on LSAs, even if that platform is not working for us, we believe, we think we have proven to ourselves anyway, that our Google My Business profile is enhanced and shows up more often because they're spending Google money. We're spending, we're giving money to Google. Now, what Google is really interested in is the big spenders. Like they want the guys who can spend $100 million a year on digital ads, you know, across all businesses. And so they don't really care too much. Our view, my opinion, Google, don't sue me. Well, they don't really care that much about the small biz. Another reason why this is the small firm uh superpower. So again, analog marketing, we just mean it's it is physical, it is in-person meetings, right? It is gift boxes, it is gifts with not my logo on it, but yours if I'm sending it to you. More expensive, right? Harder to do one by one by one, but a hundred percent worth doing, right? So again, there's just less noise there. Look, we're all a little older here, you're young. It used to be the mailbox, you go out to the your driveway or your front porch, your mailbox, stuffed. The box was stuffed, and then there was a little thing that held like the periodicals, and that was stuffed, right? Today there's nothing in it, virtually, almost nothing in it. For a lot of our referral sources, there's always something in it from us. So there's less competition, less noise in the United States mailbox.

Referral Marketing In The Dark

SPEAKER_02 13:26

Higher trust. We so the A thing anybody could do is to most lawyers stop at, hey, what's my ad gonna look like? How do I and John and uh Tom showed up a bunch of big firm ads? How about if you look at every step of your client's journey? So personal injury, I'll do that because I know that space. I've been hit and the insurance company is calling me and I don't know what to do next. Boom. White paper on that, video on that, page of the website on that, on that, let's just call that a vertical. Go to the doctor, there's a form the doctor wants me to fill out. Say, was this an accident? Like, do I charge the insurance? Again, creation of white paper. You only have to do this once. Video, page on website. We could probably go through to about 10 or 12 in the personal injury space. Do I talk to the adjuster? What happens if they want an IME? What is MedPay? What is UIM? How has UIM changed in Virginia in the last two years? The greatest thing for plaintiff's lawyers ever, stacking of UIM in Virginia. All the way over to I want to fire my lawyer. So one of our inadvertent referral sources is, I won't name them, they're a big firm. They're really big firm. Inadvertent referral sources because people respond to their ads, they hire them, they don't do anything, the client gets frustrated, and the client goes loyal. So having a book on how to fire a lawyer or or what are the rules about firing a lawyer is like the end of this 12-step journey. So if you contact me and you are in the middle steps, so let's say you are you've been in treatment for a while and the insurance company is trying to negotiate with you. And I go, Oh, yeah, we're happy to talk to you. But while we're setting up that appointment, we'd like to send you the paper that Ben or Brian wrote on this exact stage of the case. And by the way, here's a link to the YouTube video where our lawyers discuss this exact stage of the case builds trust. When you buy digital advertising, you're renting space on somebody else's billboard. And when space is clicked, your dollars go out and the ad is gone. When you take the time to build out what I have just described, again, white paper, video, page on space, across your different practice areas and across all of the different sections that your prospective client may be in along the journey, that's equity. Because you build it once and it's there to be reused. And the cost to do that, like in the old days, it was I need typesetters, I need people could publish books. Like I've sat last couple weeks, I've sat down with Claude and I have an enhanced version of Claude and built out some, I think, amazing marketing pieces that would have taken months and a typesetter and a ton of research. And I and I did it in five and six hours for each one. By the way, if anybody is listening to this, hey, if you have a follow-up question after the event, reach out to me. I'm easy to find on LinkedIn, then glass. But also I'll be happy to send you our three most recent marketing pieces I built with Claude that are in like version 1.0. So they're not released yet, but you can see some work in progress. And I think what I'm what I am here for is to inspire you with some ideas of how I can take wherever my practice is today and move it forward. Um, this is another thing. I talked about this earlier. So run ads on Google, Facebook, whatever. And then Facebook says, well, we don't we don't want you to run ads that talk about injury or talk about disability because that might embarrass somebody, right? The dental industry, cosmetic dental industry also ran into this problem. It's like, you don't want to show let you run ads that show before and after people with bad teeth or no teeth, and now they get new teeth because that might embarrass somebody. And so they control the algorithm, they control the media, which is fine until they do something to change it. And so all of your time, energy, and money investment in it gets dumped. You control the male media, you control the in-person efforts you make to cultivate your referral sources, you control speaking opportunities. One of the reasons I'm here because it's another opportunity to get in front of lawyers, to align myself with a great organization, right? A trust clue, and to say things like, hey, by the way, after if you gotta want to get one of my newest ads, like reach out to me, and now I know who you are. And now maybe we have a conversation at some point. So again, everything that uh we do uh is intended to be very, very strategic. If you came and visited our office in Fairfax, we've got a 42-seat training center. We built that in part because we're in mastermind groups. We run our, we run our own CLEs, legal CLEs here. But also we say to the community, huh, and this was really big in COVID, because we had a lot of space. We have a lot of space. You got a, we've got um sewing group, book club, scouts, referee organizations, room that's slightly smaller than the room we're in here. Oh no, about the same size room we're in here, right? Like, well, we'll make it available for you. Our TV is a little bigger. No, it's about big size, same size time. We'll make it available to you for free. Oh, by the way, there's a sign. If you go on social media, would you go take your group pictures? Would you take your group picture under my sign? What do they say? Of course we will, Ben. Would you just say thank you to Ben Glaswa for hosting us on social media? Of course we will. There are signs above every door that are motivational statements, sayings from you know philosophers and stuff. Everything is very deliberate. If you're in Northern Virginia, you want to come see us, have lunch with me in the office. We invite you anytime.

Analog Marketing Still Wins

SPEAKER_02 19:44

I also run something called Lunch with Ben. Go to lunchwithben.com. Here's the deal on that. You make sure the salad shows up. You and I can have a conversation for an hour, a resume, about anything you want. And I talk to retired doctors who are thinking about the next stage of life. I talk to young lawyers, young people who are thinking about going to law school, and I talk to lawyers who are thinking about leaving their practice and start their own firm. So again, algorithm proof. Nobody can change that. I like doing it. My design, it works for me, makes me happy, gives me energy, and I ding the world. And I my view is it's not about Ben, but it's about every single one of us has something that we can ding the world with. Um, if we just weren't so like frazzled, tired, stressed out, financially broken because we don't run know how to run a business. And yes, I can say things I might never put on a website. Like, if I put on a website again, all my competitors can see it. If I put on a website, maybe like I did use a tussle with the Virginia State Wars. So this is a long time ago. Not even sure. So we had a print ad that there's a thing in the uh, there's kind of a uh a health journal. You know this thing, it shows up like in the safe way, uh, and you it's free, right? So all the doctors are in it. So we ran an ad that in large print said, we are the best law firm. In smaller print, pre pre-titled said, legally, I can't say. We are the best law firm. So some goofball sends it to the bar. And um we tussled, but finally, like it was they tussled over font size, font colors. I'll fix it. I'll fix it. So that's that's the way my my brain works. But when I do that in a public ad, there's more risk, I guess, with the bar, even as as sort of uh forward-facing as they are today, that someone is gonna get upset about this, right? Uh, one of my friends uh is the Medicaid expert, Evan Farr in Northern Virginia. He really is an Uber expert in Medicaid. So he was running ads that I am the Uber expert. And the bar at first said, Oh, you can't say that. He said, Well, here's all my stuff. And they said, Oh, okay, you can say that. His next ad said, Bar says I can say that. They said, You can't say that. All right, so that's fair. But this is just gets back to I can do a lot of things. In private, in make money in the dark, that you'll never see unless like I share it with you. And this is perfectly suited. So a mistake that lawyers make, that you've got a national practice, you're an IP lawyer. The reason I can do disability across state boundaries is the federal regulations that allow anybody, even a non-lawyer, to represent someone at certain stages of the case. If we go into litigation, of course, we get local counsel for the federal court in other states. But we literally have cases all over the country. Most firms are local firms. The mistake that a personal injury firm in let's just say, well, give me give me not Charlottesville, but if I drive in East on 29, like what's the next little town over? Orange. Okay, right. So you've got a personal injury practice in Orange, Virginia. And you're like, I'm gonna dominate Virginia. That's really hard. That's really expensive. How about if you just like got every case that was in orange, right? Or how come, how about if in Fairfax we just could increase our market share by 10% or 7% every year? Like that would make us fat and happy. And so, but the urge is the urge when you don't understand this is no, I want to be like, I want to spend the money to have my SEO guy or gal create copy for all over the state for personal injury cases. Now, it's hard for us. Our disability work is national, but most of it is in the Fourth Circuit. In fact, most of it is in the Eastern District of Virginia. Like we are the, we are the unabashedly the force. And I'll send you our newest marketing material that proves this objectively, right? So, yes, we get cases from around the country, mainly because of my relationship with the doctor group, the financial doctor guru. But most of our stuff and our direct mail is Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland, North and South Carolina, right? Because that's where we are, and it's frankly easier to do. So we don't even try to do national. But if you Googled, I need a long-term disability insurance lawyer, there's firms that are advertising nationally. You can play that game, it's expensive. And for most practices, you don't need to do that. You just need more of the cases you like doing. If you're a family lawyer or if you're any lawyer who's charging by the hour, that's going away. It has to go away now with AI. Flat fee. Like, I guess what you want is clients you like to work with who can pay you. They pay you a lot of money, I would argue, right? So focus on that. You don't need the whole state. You just need more of what you already have. That's why this is really perfectly suited to local firms, because we don't have to worry about whether the algorithm is going to show my ad in Nebraska. We're good at, and I I didn't, I meant to bring, but I didn't. Again, anybody who, anybody, any lawyer who would like to get on our list that sees every single month what we're doing, analog marketing to for the disability practice, just send me an email, bann at banglasslaw.com. I'll get you on the list. Not because you're going to do it or even that you're going to send me a case, but I want to inspire you. I want you to see how every month our letters are a little bit about here's some cool stories of wins we have. Here's some cool stories about people we talk to. Here's a book I read, and I'm big on buying books in bulk. And if you want a copy of this book, I'll send it to you, right? So you create a little bit of debt by by giving, actually. And here's something, here's something interesting that I saw someplace else that that uh or a podcast that you might want to go listen to. So it's not always about our wins, because that's kind of boring. We try to make it interesting. And we've got now I'm working with AI. So we've and AI, we've trained our AI on 20 years of my stuff and my voice and the words that I use. Um so that makes this, it makes it a lot easier to get to where we do our art. And our art is helping clients strategize cases. Uh, and nobody's doing it. Hardly anybody's doing it, right? Everyone else is digital. Everyone else is like, oh, I want to be on TikTok. Great, perfect, right? Hardly anybody gets in a line coming to find out how to do more direct mail unless they've heard this lecture or seminars like this that I run in other

Build Marketing Equity With Content

SPEAKER_02 26:28

places. And now here's the other really cool thing is that we can track it, right? So we know we know so math is really important in marketing. The wrong question to ask about math is what percentage of my revenue profit should I spend on marketing? It's a really bad question because well, we could just spend more money and not know anything about that money. The better question is if I send a dollar out into the world, how many dollars is that dollar coming back with? Like some multiple of that dollar. You can get there with digital. Again, we have a digital stack, a digital technology stack that helps us really figure out I'm spending money on LSAs and we're getting this back. Um, I'm spending money on, you know, SEO, we spend a lot of money on SEO, we're getting this back. But it's always a little bit fuzzy, right? Because someone has typically gone through the journey. Right? So so do we do we credit the first of our digital spaces that they went to? Do we credit the last one that we went to, right? To which media are we going to attribute this uh this case, these dollars? So it becomes easier, a little easier here, because you know who's on your list, who's getting the letters. We are fastidious about uh tracking the human beings who send us cases. And we are super duper, because I have a woman whose job, her official title is happiness director. Her subtitle is she's the director of relationship marketing, but she's a happiness director. Her name is Susie. Susie's job, if you send me a case, is to find out everything she can find out about you. Where did you go to undergrad? What practice areas are you in? What do you like? Because she's gonna go on TikTok and find all that stuff about you. And then to come up with ideas of, hey, Billy sent us five cases last quarter. What should we do? Well, Susie, what do you think we should do? Well, I think we should do this. That's a great idea. And when you have a firm where like no one has to ask is $100 too much, is $500 too much in terms of like the experience we're delivering, like dinner or a basket. We had custom-made um cut cutlery charcuterie boards, again, their logo, not ours, on it uh one year. So the math becomes a little simpler. And now it's easy to systematize and delegate that stuff. We're building equity. Remember, we we build the thing or the process that we're going to use either to attract your attention, so we have a mailing that goes to people who have never referred to us, never referred a case to us, lawyers, who practice in Social Security disability. We have AI go track you down, we get you know your name, you know your address, and we have a a particular letter sequence that is an introductory thing. You're probably getting calls like this. You may or may not have someone to refer them to. Either way, like consider us. Once we build that, I don't have to tweak it every month. I don't have to change it at all. All I need now is a system that says, here's how we're gonna go find the new names, here's a database of names they're going into, here's the mail house we use, here's how we pay them. And by the way, every piece of mail, I'm also seated on that at my home address, so I know, oh, they printed the postcard right, or they printed the letter right. Oh, it did go out when they said it that it went out, right? So it's easy to, what was the old commercial? Set it and forget it, right? It was some kitchen cooker thingy, right? Or frying thing, right? Set it and forget it. It's easy to do that, and there's lots of businesses who are in the business, like my friends at Jurassic Marketing, who are in the business of making that easy for you. Okay, this is actually uh kind of near the end. You know, I I make a big deal of being very transparent. And again, there's a lot of people. I grew up in Northern Virginia, high school in Northern Virginia, played soccer at William Mary, practice in Northern Virginia forever. My son obviously grew up in Northern. And so we've got a pretty strong, I guess, quote quote, brand as people. Again, not necessarily not not everyone knows what Ben Glass Law does, but our brand as trustworthy, friendly, nice people is, I think, unabashedly pretty, pretty strong. I mean, our numbers uh speak to that. Nine kids, four adopted from China. There's a long story there. It's on YouTube. Fostered 60 dogs during COVID. Um, I've I actually ran it, so our training center one one time, I had 50 local pastors because my pastor is very entrepreneurial. I go to a Lutheran church in Northern Virginia, and she's like, you know, some of this stuff we could use. How to get people in seats at churches, how to have a tribe of people who like your church. I gave them the same lecture that I just gave here, right? But I got 50 new people who knew my story, who themselves are what we would call tribal leaders because they have people that pay attention to them. So again, everything is very, very strategic. I am big in the youth sports sportsmanship world. So if you go to YouTube and you type in Ben Glass and Crazy Sports Parents, you'll see some videos we put up there. Don't be that person. I wrote a book for teenage soccer referees. It's a mindset book to get them through the first couple years of being a referee. It's not about the rules, but it's about what happens when you're trying something hard. And the adults in this earth are making it harder for you because they're being they're being mean. We run a uh every year we give away $5,000 in scholarships. This is pretty cool to uh a teenage referee or umpire, any sport, doesn't have to be soccer. A contest across the country, it's an essay contest. We just ran our first one uh in the fall. We picked a winner, she's a local uh student athlete at um uh one of the high schools out in Prince William County. So I got to go to a game with a big check, did that, big announcement. I then went to their senior scholarship awards dinner, same thing. We made a big deal about her. Um, but now think about this from an S pure SEO standpoint. So again, I'm not an SEO expert, but having links back to your website says to Google website is trustworthy, more trustworthy. So I didn't know this, but universities, many universities, have scholarship pages on their sites. Here's all the scholarships you can apply for. So dot edu link back to website. Very valuable. Okay. Web team did that part. And I said, well, wait a minute, there's hundreds, hundreds of sport, youth sport, and referee and umpire organizations across the United States. So I've got a great young guy uh in the Philippines who's part of our marketing team, like Anderson. Make sure they all know about their scholarship, right? And post it on their websites and their Facebook sites and send emails. And so our there's something called there's various sort of measures of domain strength or domain authority, depending on what service you use.

Measure ROI And Systematize Growth

SPEAKER_02 34:19

And ours just over the last six, seven, eight months, for a number of reasons, not just this strategy, but for a number of reasons has really, really accelerated, giving us a better chance to show up in ChatGPT andor a regular Google search. Again, everything we do is very, very strategic because a lot of law firms run scholarship programs, but we met, we took this one and put it in with something I dearly love. Again, so my line, because 52 years I've been refereing, not 52 years old, 52 years refereeing. So I'll get some young, young mom like yelling at me. I'm like, I may not be the greatest, but I've been refereing longer than you have been alive. And that usually is a pattern interrupt that shuts him up. So we just do, we just do fun stuff. This is a, I have this on my whiteboard at the office. The master of the art of living makes little distinction between his work and his play. He simply pursues his version of excellence at whatever he does, leaving others to decide whether he is working or playing. For him, he's always doing both. So people will say to me, Hey, when are you gonna retire? Like, I don't know, like this gig I have is pretty good. Like work at home Monday and Friday. Don't talk to too many people when I'm in the office. Get to be brand leadership, get to come do cool seminars, write stuff, do seminars, fly around the country and do talks. Like, that's pretty cool. Like, follow me around. So, and and my view is that you can build this, you can build this for yourself, even if you're at a place in your life and a place in your professional practice where you think that this looks so far away that it's impossible. Again, I just want to tell people that there are rooms and rooms and rooms, again, not just my room, but rooms and rooms and rooms of lawyers across the country who who trust in this, in this mantra. And they're making money, they're making a difference in the lives of their clients, they're making a difference in the lives of their families, they're making a difference in the lives of their employees and in their community. And when that stuff is all there, it's awesome. It's an awesome place to be. Okay, so I'll show you, I've alluded to a little bit about this. Um, I'll show you some of the specifics of what we did to help build out the ERISA practice. What we're talking about is insurance policies from an employer mainly. And because they're through an employer mainly, they fall under this federal law of called ERISA 1976. ERISA has a lot of regulations about how insurance companies evaluate these claims. ERISA gives the insurance companies, by and large, a huge benefit of the doubt in litigation, but it's a cool place to play, and there's not many lawyers in the country who are doing this. Um we have figured it out, and we have do it, we have three revenue streams, one the consults I told you about, two, we win someone's back uh back benefits, we get paid a percentage of that, and then we manage their claim going forward. So we have about $43 million of future claims under management, and that generates a lot of money every year and employs uh two parallels. But it started with one case in 1999. Uh, this is just as maybe an out-of-order slide. I'll I'll give you again uh one of the most recent editions of the Bengalas Law and Newsletter. Again, if you're watching this and you want this, just let me know. This is all the different ways that we have chosen to become authority figures that are not standing on top of the mountain to say we're the best. All right. So print newsletter. We host mastermind groups. So we host formal mastermind groups in our office. These are paid, lawyers from around the country, come share what's working, what's not working. Here's a resource, here's the problem I'm working on. But these are you can host these in your own community, right? So one of the things I did when I started my practice back then was all my own, me and one assistant. Is that and I had friends in the PI space, competitors in the PI space. I said, let's just start a group, like every every month, let's just get together, let's buy pizza, come throw your cases on the table, let's talk about adjusters, let's talk about legal issues, let's talk about insurance companies. That was a mastermind group where a group of people get together committed to helping each other do things. In any city or town, you can find the other small biz owners who are who are who would be curious about this lecture, who would be interested in this, and getting them together on some sort of periodic basis. And again, you may have access to a room like this. You may need to get a room at a restaurant, but getting together just to be able to share ideas and how can I help you first is a magical, magical way uh to build a practice. Obviously, uh in America today, uh the expert uh rules over the generalist. I get it that it's harder in a small town. If you're in a small town in Virginia, you may need to be more of a generalist, but be an expert in something, like be the guy. It's like so if some of my friends are like I am the truck accident guy in Iowa, a friend of mine, Tim Samurah. He speaks all over the country about marketing and practice building, but he always unabashedly introduces himself as like if you get a truck accident case in Iowa, like call me. I'm the guy, and here's my credentials, and here's all the classes and courses I've been on. So that's and we became, you know, you know, we are subject matter experts in both personal injury and ERISA law. Getting involved, getting involved is strategic. So for the young lawyers out there, when they tell you join lawyer committees and come volunteer and help out, like I'm not a huge fan of that, right? I know this is countercultural because you're in a room of lawyers, right? You're in a room with competitors, you're in a room with people who kind of groupthink about how bad the practice is. I've gotten far more about getting involved in community. For me, church, for me, the gym or our CrossFit gym, doing things like that and being the one that says, yeah, holly, I'll sponsor your gym. Put a banner up. Like we'll sponsor Murph, the workout over Memorial Day. You know, uh, where does the church? I've done our church does a lot with young people. And so I come in and do the how to be an adult uh lecture in the summer to young people. And we have separate, again, separate new, we call them newsletters. They're letters that go to our referral marketing um partners.

Authority Through Community And SEO

SPEAKER_02 40:25

Uh become the mayor of that's like the CrossFit gym. It's like so our gym, we are known showing up, doing hard work. I'm the oldest guy in the CrossFit gym, I think, in our gym. And so just being like, you know, a leader, being a friendly person. Like, there's a huge thing advantage you can get in America today, just being a friendly person, learning to ask curious questions, learning to have conversations with people you don't know at the grocery store, at your gym, at your church. This is a lost art, unfortunately. I just read there's a new book out about this. It's like it's like how even introverts, and I truly am an introvert in that I don't like large crowds, and that that drains me. But an introvert can light someone else's life up by learning how to ask great questions. I have to explain to the young'uns what a Rolodex is, but my Rolodex is really big. So if you have a problem, I probably know someone who can help you solve your problem. And then, of course, there's social media. We this is kind of our hit list when we are reaching out for new referral sources in our ERISA practice. Like, who has our next client? Who could we say something interesting to? So again, PI, workers' comp, social security, employment lawyers. Uh, there are lawyers who do this work to a certain level but don't litigate federal court. And now here's what's cool it's like I thought about, okay, what is it that the personal injury, the work comp lawyers and the employment lawyers, what do they need to know about my space? Well, they need to know if they settle their case and they do it one way and have certain language in their releases, they're screwing a client on the part that I handle. And they need to know that's easily fixable if thought of in advance, and they need to know to call me. So I have a whole group of particularly work comp lawyers who pay me to oversee a tiny part of their settlement of workers' compensation cases to make sure that the discussions they have with the defense lawyers and with the company lawyers, if they're involved, and the language that's in the release doesn't interfere with the work that I do because many people who are injured at work are covered under workers' comp, but they also may be an often hour covered under long-term disability. So I started writing articles about how you could screw this up and what the malpractice risk is in a nice, friendly, helpful way, not saying that you're a dummy. Everybody could do that. Like, like, I'm sure there's ways that if a bankruptcy potential client called me and I was stupid enough to give them any advice whatsoever, that I could screw things up, right? And so the bankruptcy lawyers letting me know, like, if you hear these words, send them over to me because these are the people I like to talk to. So, again, what we're talking about is work. It's actually hard work, but it's done once, it's mainly done once. And then the databases are monitored. So I am big on writing. I was speaking, uh, I got invited to speak to the National College of Endodontists, the root canal doctors. They found me, so I went up to Boston. I said, all right, I got four months. I'm gonna speak in Boston. That was my first event speaking to a big medical group, big medical conference. They're all doing root canals on each other out in the hall. Um I said, well, all right, I need something to give out because I'm gonna have an hour to do my talk. Got PowerPoint, they're gonna video record, so we'll have that. Of course, I have business cards around here somewhere. I don't know if I still have any business cards or not. But the world's best business card is a book, and so. So well, let's let's write another book. How doctors can beat insurance company BS and Secure the Disability Benefits They Deserve. How did I do it? Everything that we do in the law firm is recorded. It's either on Zoom, it's recorded, it's a phone call. All our phone calls are recorded. I had I don't know, hundred consultations I had done with doctors, all recorded. I was all right, let's put this, let's make a book. And what the importance for the book is that we have a variety of types of diseases, a variety of insurance policy language, and a variety of occupations, like specialty occupations. We anonymize everything, of course. But I have AI go through the transcripts to create, hey, go find. I just gave you the criteria. Go find in all these consults the ones that would like meet this criteria might be interesting. Cool. Step one. Step two, all right, let's make sure we anonymize. So obviously names come out, location comes out, but disease process, that stays. Insurance company, that stays. Language in the policy, that stays. And medical specialty, orthopedic surgeon, endodontist, chiropractor, whatever, that stays. And so knowing that I was going to speak and knowing that I did not have a specific book yet for that audience, in a matter of literally several months, worked on it. I I can't remember if I had an editor. I may have had an editor help me. We have a couple of book publishers that, you know, back in the day, getting a book publisher is real hard. Today there's a lot of self-publishing companies that will work with you. Took the uh did the cover on uh I think it's called 99 Designs, where you say, Hey, I'm gonna pay $300 to the winner of this contest. Here's what I'm writing, here's the book is about, here's some of my collateral, here's our brand colors. Uh and people from all over the world compete to design a book cover in the back cover. Like, that's the coolest thing ever. And so then I had a book. I had a book to give out. I talked to a guy last week. I said, How did you find me? He's an endodontist. He says, Well, I went to our National College of Endodontists website and was doing the research to see if they had any information about these disability policies. Because what happens when you're in the doctor world is when you're a resident, all these financial gurus and insurance gurus come and sell you stuff. What I understand is they oversaw you stuff. So they so these guys and gals in the medical profession all pretty much have some sort of a disability stack of policies, one or more policies. He says, well, only thing I could find was the video of you talking to the National College of Anadonis in Boston two years ago. And so that's why I called you and paid you all this money for this console. So everything you do, you figure out a way to repurpose. So I'm getting the audio from this, I'll figure out what to do with it, maybe it'll turn it into an article or something. But it's again, it's being deliberate and strategic. Here's the uh mindset moral philosophy behind this. If I say to a room full of lawyers, are you a good lawyer? Everybody who's a good lawyer, raise their hand. I'll raise their hand, right? Is there somebody in your town right now who's walking around who would be a perfect fit for you and you would be a perfect fit for them? Everybody says yes, because you know there's somebody who your experience, expertise, and knowledge and wisdom can help. Yes and yes. Okay, then why would we let them wander into the wrong law firm? That's the moral impetus for doing all of this work. Every single one of us and every single one of you online knows a story of a person who got into the wrong law firm. And the law firm, either because they weren't very good at all or they were business-wise dysfunctional, did not do, did not get the best result that could have been gotten for that client. I believe our obligation is to get good at something really good, unbeatable good, bragging good, it's okay, and then be able to have ways to say to the world, if you are this, the Avatar client, I want to talk to you. And you probably want to talk to me. We may or may not do a deal, but at least you're not just gonna wander aimlessly into the next ad that pops up into your social media and get into the wrong law firm. Uh we do so uh again, leveraging everything. Uh I speak around the country, both at lawyer, obviously, and non-lawyer events. I run the Renegade Lawyer podcast. So we're probably doing 25 episodes now. I've written a number of books into the space, and I'm on uh a number of many, many podcasts now. The hardest thing about running a podcast is getting guests. We do not have this problem. Like people want to be on this. We're getting pitched all the time, and it's fun. And the cool thing about running a podcast, like I met some guys who did um, I think they're I they may be IP lawyers. I was at this really cool conference a few weeks ago, a month ago, called Tees and CLE. So half the day was CLE, half the day was playing golf. I don't play golf, so I went on a bike ride. But it was mostly big law guys and gals, very divergent practice areas. Really neat because I heard from the IP like to Coca-Cola, right? Heard from the guys and gals who are on the cutting edge of NIL, name, energy, and likeness law, right? Representing college athletes and getting paid all this money. And guys and gals who are in the predictions, like that whole financial, the predictions market, like you vote whether it's gonna rain tomorrow or we're gonna bomb some country or steal somebody from a country. Like, like, it was really, really cool. But the guys who are running the business law, they have they have their podcast, right? Talking mainly, I think, to local business owners about their business. Like, not like, hey, we're the great lawyers, and there's all the legal solutions, but getting local business on their pockets to help advertise the pizza shop, the car dealership again. These are the things that all of us can do that the big firms are simply not, they're not interested. I give this, I've given this lecture to a room full of big lawyers, big, you know, big spenders. They're like, I'm gonna go buy another quarter million dollars of Facebook ads. Okay, that's good. That's just not the space that we're playing in. And there's plenty of cases for one. So I'm just about done. There's a number of ways to connect with me. If you look at QR code, it'll probably get you someplace, but I forgot where. Listen to the Renegade Lawyer Podcast. Again, anybody in the room or anybody online, I don't know, uh, John, if we have any questions, I am happy to answer your questions. I'm happy to share what we have. My son and I, like our mantra is we share. And particularly if you're a younger lawyer, uh, you should listen to Brian's podcast, Beyond the Briefs, because he's talking to you all who are been out in the profession for maybe six to eleven years, thinking about do I want to leave my firm, start my own gig? Do I want to become a partner in my firm? How do I build a brand inside of firm? And he's really good at that. And so we are we are here to help you. Are there any questions?

SPEAKER_03 51:25

No questions online. You can ask, do you all in the room have any questions? So

Q&A On Copying Teams And Ethics

SPEAKER_03 51:36

you've written books. Yes. It's all copyrighted material.

SPEAKER_02 51:39

Okay. Yep. Yeah, so here's it. So the question is you write a book, you put it out in the world, and you uh half a year later you find out someone's just copied and stole it. Here's how you do it. Number one, the rule, first rule is I can create faster than you can copy, whatever. I actually have had this happen. I do not call the IP lawyer, I do not threaten to litigate. I get a copy of their book and I write a sticky note on the front so the whoever's opening their mail is gonna see the thing. I go, John, looks like your ghostwriter got a little carried away because pages, whatever through whatever are actually my work. Take care of this, please. And take care of it, right? So, so yes, I mean, we started showing lawyers how to write books. I mean, how many different ways can you write a book about PI methodology, right? And what to do if you've been in an accident. So uh, but we start with a mantra, I can I can create faster than you and compete. And when we find things, like my one of my assistants told me she saw an ad and she said, I thought it was you, but it wasn't you. I said, Well, next time just cut, just cut and paste it, send it to me, because we would then put it up on the social media and go, it's nice to be copied. You know, and that's just the way we play, right? Yeah. So, you know, producers produce and put things out into the world, and it's the same thing, a a aligned question is this you have people come work for you, lawyers and non-lawyers, you teach them all of this stuff. Or do you? Because one day they may leave your firm to go and compete with you. And that has happened to us. And it always kind of hurts when somebody leaves your firm unexpectedly. It hurts most of the time. Sometimes it doesn't hurt. Like, let me hold the door for you, right? But you really, as an entrepreneur, you have two choices. Like you can come work for me, and five years from now, you can be exactly the same person you were when you walked in the door. That's not helpful to you, and it's not helpful to me. I want you to grow, I want you to be an entrepreneur. And so if you take what you learned and go do your thing, I have to be comfortable with good for you. Like I am happy for you. Because the opposite just sends you into misery and worry and angst and all this stuff. And so, you know, a lot of a lot of the legal ethics rulings and things you read in a lawyer's weekly, you know, so you maybe remember them later on, lawyer breakups, law firm breakups and taking cases. And but that all gets back to when I had my firm, had I consulted with an ethics expert to carefully draft employment contracts. Yes, there are rules about what you can and can't prevent the lawyer who's leaving from doing. There are rules about that. But there are things that you can embed in the contract that are incentives for staying, that preset the rules of disengagement, that are entirely ethical. It's like having a prenup, right? And I have a friend who's a, who's a um, I would call her a high-end complex divorce attorney in Northern Virginia. And she's talking about prenups. I'm like, oh, prenups, that sounds weird to me. Like I married to the one person for 45 years. She goes, no, it actually gets people to think about what we are going to do? What is the financial brand of the family going to be? How are we going to uh take every dollar we make and what basket are we going to put it into? What happens if? And it gets people to really think in advance. So, in terms of lawyers and partnerships, just know that there are experts out there, this is their whole practice as lawyers, is helping lawyers get together and then helping lawyers when they separate, which is a different question than what you asked. But it's aligned with the philosophy of let's go in, let's be transparent, let's have an honest conversation, brutal conversation. Our leadership team knows that we can freely debate, argue, whatever, resolve. But when we walk out of the leadership room, we are aligned behind whatever the decision was. In our case, because if we run EOS, I'm the visionary, Brian's the integrator. If there's a tie, Brian has a tie-breaking vote. And, you know, he's going to be in this a lot longer than I am. And I have to be good with that. Like it's a just a different position to be the dad, the guy who's near the end of his career, maybe certainly closer than he is, and trying to make sure that our firm stays really strong and well positioned and that people like coming to work on Monday. We work very hard on making this the best place you'll ever work. It's not always possible, right? But the language we use, this may be helpful, is Susie. By the way, I don't meet, except for lawyers, I don't meet any new employee until after they're hired and on day two or three of their employment. And I have a culture talk. I talk to them about the history of the firm and I talk to them about a bunch of this stuff and why we are what we are and what we do. And I say, look, I want to make this the best place you ever worked. But if you don't know what that is for you, and you you're not brave enough to have conversations with us, then I don't know what we're shooting for. And the hard part about that is most have either never heard that kind of language from an employer before, or if they have, it's been a lie. Right? We are not perfect. We are not the right place for every employee, for sure. But for someone who comes and wants to uh do interesting work with people they like and make good and make good money, like it's a pretty cool place. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, John.

SPEAKER_03 57:18

Question from the online audience. They want to know like, how do you stay creative? Like what fuels your energy?

SPEAKER_02 57:25

So the question is, how do you stay, how do how does Ben stay creative and fuels energy? I'm a big reader, so I read probably 70 hardback books a year, listen to a bunch of books on Audible. But I think the biggest thing is I am in rooms. I deliberately put myself in rooms again, paying for membership or attending conferences, my languages with people who do things bigger, better, and faster than I do. And being unafraid to say to somebody who, you know, who's farther along the path than I am, like, how do you think? Like, who are you reading? Who do you listen to? That's my favorite question. So exposing yourself to ideas, particularly ideas outside of legal. Although today there are many, many gurus, there are many conferences, and they're all have a place. Like none of them are bad. You should have to understand what you're getting into because some of them are doing coaching and seminars to sell you website and stuff. Again, it's neither good nor bad. Just know what it is, right? Our whole thing has always been I'll help you make great decisions about how to build your practice, who you're going to go in business. We don't sell, like we sell membership, we sell mastermind, we have some products, but I don't sell PPC or we don't manage any of that stuff. But we'll help you go buy that stuff. So being creative and staying inspired is to be in rooms of people that are, I think, awesome individuals, first of all, across different businesses, people who have an abundance mindset, who will share, who will tell you directly, who won't talk behind your back bad about you, and you not bad about them. That's what I do. And I read a lot. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 59:04

One last question. That's one. Can a Virginia lawyer pay an agency a marketing fee if a client signs on?

SPEAKER_02 59:13

Oh, so the question is can a Virginia lawyer pay an agency a marketing fee if her client signs on? So, well, I think the answer is you pay the marketing fee for the advertising they're doing to generate the lead. Having said that, I am now seeing ads I mentioned earlier, we will sell you signed leads. I have not investigated what's going on underneath the you know, underneath the table there. But generally, in my view, and Tom would be better on this, but in my view, like, like, no, we're not paying, we're not allowed to pay for the signed client, to pay a non-lawyer for the signed client. I can pay a non-lawyer for the advertising and marketing services, which may include they have someone answering the phone and taking the lead and taking the info and passing that off to me. That that for sure is real and is going on, and I'm sure is legit. I think what you need to be careful with any of these things is man, what ads are they running? Because you see these ads on Facebook that are absolute lies that say, hey, there's a new program in Virginia, 2026 program. If you've been hurt, only minor injury and an accident, you can get six figures call us. And it's an ad run by an agency for law firms, but it's a lie because there is no new program, there is no magic thing. And the problem is that law firm that's running it is probably an ABS law firm in Arizona who's owned by non-lawyers. This is the emerging, this is the emerging ethics question. Some states have dealt with it, Virginia has not. You get a call from a law firm in Arizona where they have uh firms can be owned by non-lawyers, like in part. They got a case to refer and they want a referral fee. Can you pay it? Some states are saying no. Virginia would probably say no. I don't know if that's right or wrong, but just know that there are emerging issues because the you know, it used to be, you know, I run my ad here. Well, how the internet is all it's all over the world, not just in Virginia. Is there another one? Uh, anybody else here?

SPEAKER_04 1:01:23

Yes. You get as much traction as you hoped with the room full of big moth attorneys is because of what you said. They're entrepreneurial.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:33

These, yeah, so this was interesting. So, like, I was here because the gener the guy who's running it is general counsel for a big marketing company who knew me through the world. He wanted me there. These guys and gals, I think we're entrepreneurial, but more importantly, they all now know that if somebody has a disability uh issue, like I'm their guy nationally. So I made a good impression. Yeah, it was it was, I think a young lawyer in their career should go to that event and just sit there for two days because I'm like, there's no, there's no plan, there's no commonality. Every practice area was different, but it was cool to hear because they have the same problem. How do we get clients? Same. Like the the the human universal problem is how do I get somebody to trust me? It doesn't matter whether you're Big Law, Coca-Cola, Ben Glass, or someone who's just opened a practice like yesterday. Same problem. We good? Thank you, everybody.

Closing And Where To Connect

SPEAKER_02 1:02:36

John's gonna come up to close us out.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:40

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.