Life Beyond the Briefs
At Life Beyond the Briefs we help lawyers like you become less busy, make more money, and spend more time doing what they want instead of what they have to. Brian brings you guests from all walks of life are living a life of their own design and are ready to share actionable tips for how you can begin to live your own dream life.
Life Beyond the Briefs
Analog Law Firm Marketing That Works
Today's episode emphasizes innovative, cost-effective marketing strategies for small law firms by prioritizing relationship-building over paid advertising. Listeners learn how to optimize their firm’s lead conversion rates and foster valuable referral partnerships through strategic networking and community engagement.
• Understanding the importance of relationships in law firm marketing
• Identifying conversion issues rather than lead generation problems
• Exploring the Dream 100 strategy for developing referral sources
• Enhancing client intake processes to improve potential conversion rates
• Leveraging local community connections for hyperlocal marketing effectiveness
• Practical examples of successful referral partnership strategies
• The power of direct, meaningful communication with referral sources
• Recognizing the long-term benefits of investing time over money in marketing
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Brian Glass is a nationally recognized personal injury lawyer in Fairfax, Virginia. He is passionate about living a life of his own design and looking for answers to solutions outside of the legal field. This podcast is his effort to share that passion with others.
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Hello, my friends, and welcome back to another Friday solo episode of Life Beyond the Briefs. Today's episode is a keynote presentation that I did at the Law Firm Growth Summit earlier this year by the way, lfg Summit, what a fantastic name. My friend, moshe Amsel, puts this event on every year and asked me to give a presentation on small law firm marketing that doesn't break the bank, and so that's what this is about. Listen, you can go to any conference in the world and hear how to do digital marketing right. Like half or at least half of the speakers, and almost 100% of the speakers in the marketing space, are talking about SEO, ppc, gmb, ai and any other kind of abbreviation that you can think of. Ai and any other kind of abbreviation that you can think of. Very few are telling you how to market your law firm for free or almost for free, and so if your firm is doing less than a million dollars, this is the kind of stuff you need to be doing. It's not paying for leads. It's paying with your time and with your team's time to develop relationships. The more time that we spend, the more money that we spend trying to compete with guys and girls who can outspend us, the more often we are going to lose. But what the big law firms cannot do is outmaneuver you and create the kinds of relationships both with your clients and with referral sources that are what we use to create sustainable law firms. So that's what this episode is all about. I do hope that you enjoy it All right. So we're talking small firm marketing that doesn't break the bank.
Speaker 1:Thank you for hanging with me late in the afternoon. I know that it's day two of this conference and I just got back from National Trial Lawyers Summit and spent three days at a conference, and so if you are tired and exhausted day two like I get it Feel free to stand up, walk around, move around during this. I'm going to try to keep this fast paced, answer any questions that you guys have as we get going, and then I'm available to you afterwards, either by email I'll give you my contact information or LinkedIn really is the best place to find me. That's where I'm most active. So I was talking small firm marketing that doesn't break the bank, and I heard yesterday in the main session Moshe was talking about how to build a law firm as an investor, and one of the questions that he was asking everybody is who's spending at least $10,000 a month in marketing, and almost nobody in the group raised their hand and said I'm spending $10,000 a month in marketing, and so I'm just going to make the blanket assumption that is true of this group also that what we're looking for is avenues that aren't digital marketing, aren't paying for leads, aren't LSAs, ppc, seo, and we're looking for ways to attract people to our firm in ways that maybe don't cost us dollars but cost us time, because at the beginning of growing your law firm, you have all the time in the world, but you don't always have the dollars to attract clients to you. And so I'm going to just share quickly my screen and get you guys diving in to this presentation.
Speaker 1:All right, small law firm marketing that doesn't break the bank. So most firms try to solve leads problems with some combination of SEO, ppc, lsas and, in 2025, ai. And I know this because for a long time, we tried to solve our leads problem with SEO, ppc, lsas and some combination of AI. And I also know it because I was down at National Trial Lawyers last week and this is the sponsor sheet. I love this event for getting into rooms with lawyers that are doing things bigger and better than we are in my firm. I have a firm in Northern Virginia. I have a car crash firm that I'll talk about just in a couple minutes. One of the things that I don't love about that event is just how many vendors there are, and so this room was at least half populated with vendors and sponsors and, like all of them, do some version of SEO, ppc or LSAs, and so I got pitched on a lot of stuff last week, including, for $55,000 a year, I'll put your face on the side of a car, which is an interesting marketing concept.
Speaker 1:This is a company called Carvertize. Advertise Carvertize. They'll put you on the side of 10 Ubers in your city. They'll host these swarm events, they'll bring photographers to take pictures of the swarm events, and they've figured out how to retarget and remarket your branding to the people whose phones come into the vicinity of these cars. It's really cool. It's probably not the next thing that you want to spend your dollars on. Another thing that I got pitched was a $20,000 discount phone number. It's not even one of these. Cool, like everything, is a three, not like 800-333-3333, $20,000 for the phone number Again, interesting.
Speaker 1:Most of my clients now, when they're finding us on digital are just clicking the Google dial button. We don't do any billboard advertising, we don't do any television advertising, and so what I want you to know is there's all kinds of ways that you can spend your next marketing dollar an hour. And the problem is, the law firm owner is to figure out which is the best use of your next dollar an hour, because these things work right. John Morgan wouldn't have his face photoshopped onto that body on the side of an Uber if it didn't work. And as small law firm owners, we can look around at the big dollar advertisers and tell ourselves the lie that they are stupidly spending their money and that they have no tracking and there is no tracking on this Uber and Lyft model that he's doing. But at the end of the day, branding works. But the thing is, for most of us, branding is not the next best step that you need to be engaging in, and here's what's going to happen if you are playing in the digital space in the next couple of years.
Speaker 1:We are seeing in large law firms a compression of what it costs them to produce a case. So there have been presenters during this conference on compensation models and on VAs and on your ability to outsource almost everything that your law firm does. And what that happens for a firm that's doing this at scale is it takes your human production costs from somewhere around 40% for the paralegals and the lawyers and the back of office staff to about 25 or 30%, because you can outsource a lot of the paralegal work. And we outsource some of the paralegal and the records collection work to the Philippines and to Central America in my office, and it does reduce our human capital costs. But, unlike you or I, who probably would take that additional capital home as profit, the big firms are plowing it back into their advertising, which is why you're seeing ever-increasing numbers of what it costs you to make the phone ring through an LSA or through PPC, and so we'll be talking about how to do it without paying per lead.
Speaker 1:Let's see, because, let's see, most firms don't actually have a leads problem. What you have really is a conversion problem. You are either attracting leads from the wrong source and they're not converting, or, like many law firms, you're just not that good at converting people on the phone, and there are other people in this conference talking about how to nail intake and how to do that better. I suggest to you, before you spend another dollar on marketing, get good, really good lead tracking and figure out what your how leaky your intake and sales conversion bucket is and quantify that first. That is the best spend that you can make in your law firm in the next 30 days is get some tracking on how many cases that called that we wanted to work on. Did we not get the opportunity to work on? I'm big on this. Don't take directions from somebody who hasn't been there before. So this is my then five-year-old with a Grand Canyon map. We did not trust him to guide us to the big hole in the earth in Arizona, and so I'm going to take two minutes and just walk you through why you should listen to me.
Speaker 1:I'm a lawyer, just like you, so I'm a trial lawyer at heart. 2019, I tried my last medical malpractice verdict. We got a $3.4 million verdict in Fairfax. Virginia is a super conservative state, so that was awesome. I tried in. 2022, the largest punitive damages DUI case in Virginia history. I got a million dollar punitive damages award as part of a $4.2 million verdict. I joined my dad's firm in 2019 after practicing on my own for 10 years and in the four years, since four years between 2019 and 2023, we 4X our motor vehicle practice and then I run help him run two mastermind groups in great legal marketing. So I know what I'm talking about when I tell you what I'm going to tell you for the next 25 minutes, all right. So I know what I'm talking about when I tell you what I'm going to tell you for the next 25 minutes, all right.
Speaker 1:In 2024, we shut off all of our digital marketing spend and rerouted all of that money into a referral relationship management position. We were spending at the time, about $80,000 a year on digital marketing and we were having middling results. We were not spending enough money on PPC and LSA to do it well and, though we did not know it at the time, we sucked at intake and sales. I'll get to that in a minute. So we took that money and we said what would happen if we took that $80,000 and placed it into, basically, a pharmaceutical rep who can help us maintain relationships with our referral partners and build those human to human connections, so that we're not playing in a space where we just have to out digital marketing everybody else? And what happened is that in 2024, we signed 62% more cases than we did in 2023, without spending an additional marketing dollar. This is a belief that I hold very dearly, which is that if you have any new client calls that are going to an answering service or to a phone tree, you have absolutely no business running paid advertising.
Speaker 1:Here's what you need to know about the ability of law firms to respond to digital marketing and respond to leads that are coming through their funnel. This is a study done by my friend, jason Hennessey, about response times response lead times to inquiries that come in through your website. So in 2024, he surveyed 1400 firms and found that 28% of firms are responding in five minutes or less to a lead that's filled out on their website. 28% of firms are getting back to people who fill out leads in five minutes or less. On a good day, my team is in that red, we're like two hours, but on a good day we're in the orange, we're an hour or two. Most days we're in the red, we're over two hours. We reply to everybody, but I've got an in-house person doing it. It's not instantaneous, and so when you realize that, and then you do, and then you realize what happens with those people who have come through digital channels and found you and view you as a commodity, really, because you're the first person that showed up.
Speaker 1:You have to start thinking about is that the right place to be spending our money? This is from our lead docket. Lead docket is a data tool that we use to figure out where our leads are coming from and how good we are at converting that lead or not. And I'm showing you this because when somebody contacts our firm and this is for all of 2024, 23, and we're good at answering the phone I have 18 Americans working full-time in my office. I have five people overseas that are working full-time.
Speaker 1:We think we're pretty good at answering the phone and still, 24% of the time when a new lead calls, the answering service was getting it. Now, that's taking all comers. That's nights, that's weekends, that's our rollover call. 23% of the time it's going to the answering service. What we know about the manual entry ones, which is somebody calls our office and talks to either my receptionist or my intake team, is that of those people, they are 50% more likely to sign up with us than somebody who came through any other service. So if the only thing that we do is we talk to somebody when they call, we are 50% more likely to sign their case.
Speaker 1:And so, again, if you are running digital ads and you have somebody who's responding and it's either going to a phone tree which you shouldn't be doing if you're running LSAs at all or it's going like to an answering machine and you're not immediately getting back at them, I think you can get a 50% boost in qualified lead closure just by staffing that position, and so many small law firm owners go. It's a cost I don't want to pay. Good full-time intake, pay that cost. It's an investment in your ability to grow your firm, because the problem is that most people who find you on the internet they don't know you, like you or trust you. If somebody is looking for a Fairfax auto accident lawyer, they get all kinds of results, some of which are Morgan and Morgan, some of which are firms that don't even practice in Fairfax. But on any given day I might be the second result, I might be the fifth result or I might be unfindable. But if all you're doing is looking for plumber near me or lawyer near me, you have no connection with that person and you have no reason to stick around beyond the five minutes. And so if somebody calls and we can't immediately solve their problem. What are they doing? They're calling the next person and seeing if that person can immediately solve their problem.
Speaker 1:We are in the age of instant gratification, so the question that we started thinking about in 24 is how do we start getting people to just wait a little bit longer? And the only way to do this is to develop referral sources. And so what I want to do in the 20 minutes or so remaining, I've got three strategies for you for how to get people in your community to give out your name. First, because if somebody comes to you via referral, either from another lawyer or, in my practice area, from a doctor, or from a friend or a family member, they are far more likely to sign your retainer than they are if they just find you online. So this is just go back to statistics a lead docket man. If you are not using a good CRM and a lead CRM, you need to be using one, because that will really help you dive into the data and recognize how many cases you are missing, but also where they're coming from. So in the, I think, 18 months 18, 20 months between April 23 and the end of 2024, we looked at our data and 65% of the cases that we had resolved came from referrals from actual human beings.
Speaker 1:And one tip I would give you is lead docket will track your attribution to. If somebody comes in through your website, it'll tell you this person came in through website, but you always ask who can we thank for your referral? It does two things. Number one it gets you to that data that's behind the tracking number. Right, they might have clicked on your ad or they might have found you through a page on your website, but they looked for you first because even if they're getting your name from somebody else, they're still like double checking that you're a normal person and they might be getting three names from somebody else before they're coming through your funnel. So you always ask who can we thank for your referral so that you get that attribution.
Speaker 1:The second thing that that does is that it reinforces that you are somebody that's regularly trusted with referrals. So even if they weren't referred by somebody now, we've suggested to them and this is a little psychological trip we've suggested to them that most of our clients do come through referrals Other people like you with problems like yours. They know us and they trust us with their case, like you, with problems like yours. They know us and they trust us with their case. But here's the thing is, 65% of our cases came from referrals, but 80% of our money came from referrals and from actual human beings, and so you could draw two conclusions. Like you could draw the conclusion that we sucked at digital marketing and you probably wouldn't be wrong about that in 2023. Or you could draw the conclusion that we're like most small firms and that most of your money is going to come from a referral from somebody in your community, and so the way to start thinking about this is not to go to the next bar event and shake as many hands as you can and try to hand out your business card and do your 30 second elevator pitch, but it's to do strategic thinking about who are the hundred or so centers of influence that are talking to your clients before they come through, before they start looking for somebody like you.
Speaker 1:This is a Chet Holmes concept. It's called the dream 100. It's the list of people who have audiences that you want to talk to, and I have a slide a little bit later showing like how I would think about this if I weren't a car crash lawyer. But here's how I thought about it. Who else serves my clients and sees them before I talk to them? Tow truck drivers, insurance agents, auto body owners and medical practitioners that's the universe of people that talk to my client, recognize that there's a problem and then either helps them solve the problem or refers them to somebody else. And so we started thinking about what are the problems? Who's the best group in here to talk to? We've done lunch and learns with insurance agents, which is scary. If you are an injury lawyer and you ever talk to these insurance agents, you recognize they don't know anything about the product that they're selling and they give really bad advice to their clients. And so that, as an avenue of lead generation, that actually didn't work, because what we were trying to teach them was how to sell better policies and they're not. I think it's difficult to sell better policies. It's easier to sell the least expensive policy. At least that's how the ones that we talked to viewed it.
Speaker 1:So we landed on medical practitioners and, in particular, chiropractors, and in the auto crash world, most PI lawyers who have relationships with chiropractors and vice versa, expect that there's some kind of one-to-one referral relationship. You send me a case I'm going to send you a case, and so we had to be very deliberate about my digital marketing. It's not good enough for me to send you a case every time. You send me one, and so I want to help you solve some of the other problems that exist in your practice Problems like you want more patients. I can't really help with that, but when you sit down and you talk to these people, you find out they don't like dealing with lawyers. They don't like dealing with lawyers. They don't like patients that aren't compliant with treatment plans. They hate how long it takes us to pay them at the end of a case. They hate that we're always asking them to reduce a bill. They hate it when a client patient of theirs settles the case and doesn't pay them. And so we started thinking about what do I have going on in my practice that can help these people solve all these problems that they hate? And I guess I skipped a step here, because the way that I got to the root of this is that I just started asking a whole bunch of them out to lunch.
Speaker 1:I got into the practice a long time ago of if we settled the case, and it was with a chiropractor, who I did not know, who I did not have a relationship with. I made a point of hand delivering that check either over a coffee or over lunch so that I could make a face-to-face connection. Because, again, most of these people they don't know and trust lawyers or they've had a bad experience with one of us, and so if you can flip that and become the person that they're going to trust with their client's cases, like amazing, all right. So in talking with them, we recognize that they had all these problems and then we started telling them about all the problems that they don't even know that they have. Like most plaintiff's, lawyers are probably taking advantage of them on discounts. They move way too slow. The lawyer never shows them the work on the settlement statement and they don't keep them in the loose on the case status. So I just built a system that solves all of these problems. I'm going to show you the settlement statement.
Speaker 1:My team is really good about getting demand packages out the door and we have data around how long it takes us, and so we just started saying we're faster than everybody else and then we keep you in the loop during the course of the case. So that makes them happy. And so then, what do you do with this? We sent out letters to every doctor who is in a 15 mile radius of our office asking them to have lunch, and it netted me this in the course of a year, I got 18 new cases signed, I got 15 lunches with, or connection calls with, chiropractors, and I got an invitation to speak this fall, and I'm speaking at their annual convention this fall about how to build relationships with lawyers. It's pretty good. This campaign cost us I don't know $1,500 on the top end between lunch and between mailing all this stuff. My average case value is on a chiropractor case is like $10,000, $180,000 of revenue for 1,500. It's like a 12,000% ROI. That's amazing. And so what I did for you, if you want my entire mailer sequence, you want the guide to how to do this, even if you're not an injury lawyer, you can scan this. And if you're like watching this on your phone now, just shoot me an email later and I'll send it to you with the walk you step-by-step through how you do all of this.
Speaker 1:All right, now, if you're not a car crash lawyer, here's how I would think about this. Here's the people that you ought to think about developing these kinds of referral relationships with. If you're a family lawyer, like counselors, therapists, financial planners, realtors, child psychologists these are the people that tend to find out that you're going to maybe need a family lawyer before the person starts looking for a family lawyer. Criminal defense bail bondsman if you're in a state that still has bail bonds substance abuse counselors, mental health professionals, private investigators, estate planning man the world is wide with estate planners Like. Your net that you can cast is so wide Financial planners, tax advisors, funeral home directors, geriatric care managers, life insurance agents and here's what I would do. This is an amazing trick that I picked up from my friend, wally Elibieri, who's a mortgage broker Start keeping the Rolodex.
Speaker 1:If you're an estate planner and you know that every client who comes into your worldview needs these six professions, let's just call it these six professions Keep the Rolodex of who your clients are using and ask them as part of your initial intake and when somebody comes in and they don't have two of these now you've got somebody to make a connection with and if you refer a tax plan or a tax advisor, like three estate planning clients, they're going to know who you are and they're going to start referring you cases back, so starting to keep the inventory of who do my clients need and then how can I start to fill the gap with advisors for stuff that I don't do when they need it. That's an amazing way to build the referral source, but it doesn't stop at having lunch with these people and asking them to send you cases. We send a mailed newsletter. We have sent two print mailed newsletters one that goes out to our clients, another goes out to our referral sources. The referral source one is all about how to build better businesses and we always spotlight somebody who's on our referral source list.
Speaker 1:So this is really easy. It goes out once. This goes out once a quarter. It's like four pages. I think it costs us maybe a dollar a piece to mail this thing out and I can get to. My marketing director creates all this on Canva. We have it printed in and have it mailed.
Speaker 1:People who are actually sending us stuff, people who are actually sending us cases. We send gift boxes to them and these photos aren't amazing because the principle that I want you to take from this is that the gift has to be, like, labeled to their business and not to yours. So you see a cutting board. There we put, we went and we got the logos of all the firms that had referred us cases that quarter. We put it on the front of the cutting board and then it's got stuff from us on the back. People will hold on to stuff that has their name on it and they will recognize that you did something special and went out of your way to make it special to refer them cases. The last thing they need is another coffee mug with your name on it. All right, here's the principle. If you are committed to doing digital marketing, the digital way to do this is to think about the people and the businesses that are upstream from your clients. So this has been an amazing investment for us.
Speaker 1:There's a website called the White Coat Investor. I have a car crash practice. My dad, who's my law partner, has a long-term disability appeals practice and our best client in that practice is a doctor with a debilitating progressive disease who has an insurance claim that's denied, and so we found this website called the White Coat Investor. It gives investment advice to doctors and dentists and other high income professionals, and we just asked them if they had anybody. They had people who were selling these insurance products, but nobody that was advising their people on what to do when your claim denies or, more likely, how to prepare your claim for you to go out on disability. So we took out an ad on there. It's $3,000 a year and we got, I think, 40 leads from them last year. Amazing, a lot of those leads come in the form of consults. Yeah, I have a policy. I have this disease. Here's my business setup how do I best set myself up so that my claim might not get denied?
Speaker 1:And so Ben started doing these $2,000 pop consults where we review the policy, review any medical records and then advise the doctor on how to navigate this claims process before they went out on claim so that the claim didn't get denied. What we did with that is we recorded all of those. Like all the consults are done on Zoom, so we recorded all of those, scrubbed the names of them, fed it to chat GPT and asked it to anonymize the stories, change the practice area, change the location, change the disease and feedback these stories of these consults what kind of advice have we given to people? And we turned that into a book that's now available for download. I think that it's available for download now on our website. Lauren, my marketing director, was working hard to get that up now. And then there's QRs QR codes in that book that then drive people back to our website to watch more videos that explain more in depth, like here's, the process of what to do when you have one of these diseases, and the principle here is how to take the thing that you're already doing in initial consults anyway the 101 of what happens in your practice area to a potential new client and turn it into a book or turn it into something that people can take as lead gen. That sets you up as the advisor and the leading lawyer in the nation for whatever your niche is. Do we handle these cases for people that aren't doctors and dentists and high-income professionals? Of course we do. Would we rather handle doctor, dentist, high-income professional claims? Of course we do. Would we rather handle doctor, dentist, high-income professional claims? Of course we would, and so that's what our marketing is set up to attract.
Speaker 1:Third strategy is to go hyperlocal, and this is something that we're testing. I have no idea whether this will work or not. There's a Harris Teeter pharmacy that I can see from my office, and so we started advertising on their pharmacy bags right when you go and you get a prescription filled, we took out an ad on the front of the bag. It was a thousand dollars for 36,000 prints on these bags, which they tell me will be on every prescription that they fill for the next year, and it's got a QR code in it, because my friend, jennifer Porter, told me she just throws these in the trash when she gets them. So we said, before you throw this in the trash, if you were in a car crash like you should watch this video. So if you scan this, this will take you back to my website. It's got a video of me talking about how I'm the local lawyer, how I can see the Harris Theater from my office, because my belief is, if you only dominated your practice area in the 10 miles that were immediately around your office, you would make a ton of money. You don't have to dominate the whole state. You don't have to dominate the whole area. If you just had those 10 miles around, you'd make a ton of money. So that may work. It may not work. The principle here, though, is all this is trackable, right? I'm going to know exactly how many hits that website gets. We'll exclude today's results from it so we don't skew the data and Lauren doesn't get all excited, but all that is trackable. And then, through Lead Docket, I can tie that URL that you come in through to your profile so that if you ever come back and call me, I know that you clicked on that QR code. That's an amazing product.
Speaker 1:The other strategy that a lot of us are doing is like advertising in your kids stuff. So we sponsor the local high school I don't know the football team, the sports program I have my face hanging at my alma mater. We sponsor a little league, and then this is the third banner that you see here is that the gym that Ben and I work out to work out at it's a CrossFit gym. But don't just give these people your money. You've got to figure out what do we want out of our investment. So each of these things individually is probably a $2,500 investment, which most lawyers, I think, just write off as charity. Right, I view this as marketing. You get a hyperlocal backlink, which you probably need to negotiate with, because the person that you are dealing with probably doesn't know what that means. Can I connect my marketing director with your webmaster and get a backlink from the school system, from the little league, which has aorg web address from the gym. Like you want the backlink, you're going to have to do the social media work yourself.
Speaker 1:Create your own graphics. Moshe, for this event, did an amazing job of creating graphics and distributing them to all of the speakers. Most events and most of your local community isn't like that. So if you get a booth, bring your own photographer, create your own marketing around the event that you can then get the event to share through their marketing. If you are going to get a booth, host a raffle, collect email addresses, collect mailing addresses, spend the $500 to get the cool thing that you can offer off at your booth and raffle it off.
Speaker 1:Give people a reason to come over to your booth. By the way, the best booth that I saw in National Trial Lawyers for this, they had an artist and the deal was, if you come over and you listen to our five-minute pitch, we will have an artist do a courtroom drawing of you. That was amazing and they sent that email out before the event so that everybody knew that they were doing that. But you have to have a reason for people to come over and trade you their name and their email address and their phone number for whatever it is that you're raffling off, and then you put that on your mailing list, you put that on your email list, you have that contact in your database and you can continue to market to that person.
Speaker 1:And with that, the curtain came down and they hooked me right off the stage, just kidding. There was some Q&A that came after this, but the audio on it isn't very good and so I didn't include it in this episode. Hey, by the way, if you are putting on a conference, if you're out there listening and putting on a conference and looking for speakers, I'd love to show up and provide value, whether it's a bar event, a CLE event or something larger. You know how to find me. I am available to you. So until next time, guys, have a great weekend.
