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
Building a Client-Centered Law Practice
What if I told you the secret to delivering exceptional client experiences in your law firm isn't working harder—it's working smarter through thoughtful automation? In this eye-opening presentation from the HONA Disrupt Festival, Brian Glass shares how his Virginia-based personal injury practice achieved 400% growth by combining cutting-edge automation with deep human connection.
When COVID-19 hit, the traditional client engagement model collapsed overnight. No more in-person consultations. No more handshakes. Just voices on phones and faces on screens. For many firms, this created a devastating disconnect with clients. But for Brian's team, it sparked an innovation opportunity: using technology to become more human, not less.
Brian pulls back the curtain on his firm's client journey, contrasting "good automation" that feels warm and anticipatory with "bad automation" that feels cold and transactional. The difference is striking. From personalized video messages that address clients' unspoken fears to "shock and awe" welcome boxes that arrive at clients' homes within days of signing, these touchpoints create the emotional foundation for trust throughout the case lifecycle.
The most powerful insight? Clients don't judge law firms primarily on case results—they judge them on communication. A staggering 50% of malpractice claims involve communication failures, not competency issues. This explains why a firm can secure an objectively excellent settlement yet still receive scathing reviews if the client's emotional journey wasn't properly managed.
Brian's approach has yielded not just remarkable growth, but something even more valuable: clients who feel genuinely cared for during one of life's most stressful experiences. By automating the redundant, his team maximizes the personal, creating space for the empathy that distinguishes exceptional client service from merely adequate representation.
Ready to transform your practice through automation that enhances humanity rather than diminishes it? Discover how to create systems that free your mental bandwidth for the high-value work only you can do, while still delivering the consistent, caring communication your clients crave.
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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 Life Beyond the Briefs, the number one podcast for lawyers choosing to live lives of their own design and build practices they actually enjoy showing up to. On Monday, my name is Brian Glass, I'm your host, and on Fridays I release these solo episodes. Tuesdays you get exciting interviews with entrepreneurs and other law firm owners who are doing interesting things in the world, and on Fridays you get to listen to me. Today's episode is a recording from the HONA Disrupt Festival. I had the great privilege of speaking in Salt Lake City a couple of days ago a couple of weeks ago, depending on when this episode releases for my friends Matt McClellan and Manny Griffiths of HONA.
Speaker 1:In this episode you'll hear my backstory with this entrepreneurial tech company in the legal space, how I found them, how they solved the problem that we had going on in our law firm, and then how law firms today can utilize AI and automation within their firms to grow practices that are actually more human. One of the things that I talk about a lot is how to look at what everybody else is doing and do the opposite, and in the legal world, I see everybody leaning into automation and AI and offshoring as ways to reduce costs, reduce friction, but the cost of that is empathy and relationship with your clients, and so we have found a way to use automation and AI and sequencing to increase our empathy and increase our relationships with our clients, and this episode is all about that. If you dig this episode, check out my friends at Hona. They will be coming to the Great Legal Marketing Summit, and if you're not yet, you can get your ticket at glmsummitcom.
Speaker 2:So up next, I'd like to introduce our next speaker. His name is Brian Glass. Brian and I met well, brian, manny and I met. So, manny and I, us co-founders. We went to National Trials Lawyers Summit in 2022. It was our first conference.
Speaker 2:We had just quit our job, like two weeks earlier, and we had no clients, but it appeared like we had clients. So when brian came up, we talked to brian and his father, ben, and we presented him this idea that we were so excited to pitch. We were probably like bright-eyed and bushy-tailed because we were just so excited about what we were building. And brian I don't know if he knows this, but he was our second client to ever sign with us and that's something, something special. He was taking a leap of faith. He used Casepeer, which we didn't even have an integration with yet, but across from us was the Casepeer booth with the founder of Casepeer and she said, yes, I'll let you integrate. So we knew we could integrate and so we signed a contract with Brian and now it's been four years.
Speaker 2:So, anyways, brian is out of Fairfax, virginia. So many accolades. I got a text with all of his accolades because not only Ben, his father, but also him they've been practicing law in the Fairfax area for a lot of years. They do something special. He's part of a group and he's the president and runs a group called Great Legal Marketing. If you've not seen their stuff before, they're doing something really special on helping law firms be better at marketing, which we all like more business and more leads coming in.
Speaker 1:So, without further ado, welcome Brian Glass. You know you told me at the time I was client number seven, so that was Manny, not me. Most great relationships start in the circle of trust and ours apparently did not. Hi guys, good morning. My name is Brian Glass.
Speaker 1:I have a personal injury car crash practice in Fairfax, virginia. I work with my dad. He has an ERISA long-term disability appeals practice and I'll talk more about how we've integrated automation and empathy into both of those practices. What I want to talk about today is enhancing the client journey, and I've got notes here I've got notes here because I sent my slides in like four days ago and I've had already five conversations since the time that I've been here that I'm like I've got to make sure I mention that. So if I'm bouncing back and forth and disjointed, I apologize. We'll talk about enhancing the client journey through the use of automation and empathy, and when I was invited by Manny to speak at this event back in January also at National Trial Lawyers Summit, but in 2025, I said I'm not sure I'm the best guy for this, because what I'm going to tell your audience is automation is amazing, but for small law firms and I have a small law firm amazing. But for small law firms and I have a small law firm like our opportunity really is in letting all of the big dumb law firms not Mike, but all the big dumb law firms out there automate and offshore and use AI and all this stuff, and we're going to lean into empathy and relationships and that's how we're going to get ourselves to the next level by comparison with Mike, like if you took a zero off of Mike's number, that's about, and then you subtracted maybe a million dollars, like that's what we do.
Speaker 1:And so the first thing I kind of want to start with is like getting a sense for who else is in the room. So how many people have, like, a car crash or an injury practice? Okay, cool, family law, criminal defense, trust in states All right. So predominantly personal injury and then a couple of our consumer client facing practices. I have a car crash practice. A couple of people this weekend have said, oh, you have a personal injury practices. No, I'm in Virginia. There is no contributory negligence, so there is no premises liability, there is no slip and falls Like the only thing that we do is car crashes. So if you're in a state near mine and you're thinking about where should I expand to? Please don't come to Virginia. We don't want you and it's really hard to make money there, although we're the one state in the country that seems to be going the other way Everybody else. We hear about tort reform and all this stuff and Virginia's enacting laws that make it actually easier to sue people, and they've increased the auto limits and they by default, now underinsure motorist coverage stacks. But please don't stay out of Virginia. It's really hard Because if you're 1% of fault, you don't get to recover anything.
Speaker 1:My big claim to fame is I had the idea for HONA back in 2021, even before I met Matt and Manny, but I think Manny said this morning ideas don't really matter was create a sense of connection with the clients who were no longer coming to your office. Right 2020, covid hits and clients stopped coming to the office, and the belief that I very firmly held in 2019, before COVID, was if you didn't make the time to come in and sit down in my office and talk to me about your car crash case, there was no way you were going to listen to me when it came time to evaluate the case and you probably weren't a worthwhile client to have, and that is just completely not the case, which we learned during COVID. I now have probably 2% of my clients ever step foot in the office and probably less than 1% come in. Almost nobody comes in before they sign a retainer. But the problem that we were trying to solve for was how do we create this sense of connection with somebody who we've only talked to on the phone? Right, we were trying to do Zoom meetings and we were offering that in the beginning of COVID and actually people didn't even want to talk on Zoom and so I stopped offering those. We were just doing phone calls and I'm trying to plug this hole of how will I get you to listen to me at the end of the case when I tell you here's what your case is worth, if I've just been the voice on the other end of the phone? And this is the problem that we have to solve now with AI and automation how do we create this sense of connection with our clients?
Speaker 1:And so I shot a whole bunch of videos. One day when nobody else was in the office, I brought in like three different jackets you can see a couple of different shirts I changed into and I shot all these videos that we uploaded to Vimeo and we were using Casepeer to text them out manually to our clients at various stages. In the case, I invented Hona before Hona was invented. But you can see what I did poorly is I labeled these videos as the better client welcome video. One week small case. 30 days small case. And it's not until I was putting this slide deck together that I realized I was sending these videos out to clients with those stupid labels on them. But what we were trying to do is exactly what Manny said is like automate the redundant so that you can maximize the personal right.
Speaker 1:So these conversations we were having with clients all the time hey, welcome to the firm. Here's the next thing that's going to happen in your case. Hey, it's been a week since you hired us. Here's all the things my team has done in the meantime. It's been 30 days since your crash. Here's probably where you are in the treatment course. Here's what you need to be thinking about. If any of these things are happening in your case, let us know like those are red flags. We'd like to take care of this.
Speaker 1:These are conversations that were taking up my time and staff time in the office over and over and over, and so we just put them into videos and started sending them out. And then it's January of 2021. And I meet these guys who I've since learned I was client number two. That's amazing, and the story that they told me was they took their last $5,000 in the bank account. They paid national trial lawyers for this booth. They brought this amazing I don't know where you got this wood coming in from Utah down to Miami, but the wood and the sign thing and at the time it was called Get Milestones right, because you would hit these certain milestones in your case and you would get videos about what happened Then apparently they got in some trademark trouble or something like that. It's the kind of things that happens to young entrepreneurs and I'm like, by the way, the history of my firm is we try to DIY everything right.
Speaker 1:Until last year, we were DIYing search engine optimization, we DIY our social media and we were DIYing this, and the thing that has fueled us more than anything in the last couple of years has been paying the expert to get this done for you and done correctly, so that your clients aren't getting videos to say, hey, you have a small case, here's what happens next. One of the things that I think you should take some time to do these couple of days while you're here is with the sponsors and the vendors that are in the hallway and with fellow law firm owners like you ought to ask people about their own entrepreneurial journey, because you will learn so much interesting stuff, because, as law firm owners that are running, you know, million dollar or eight figure law firms, we're solving for problems that are way smaller than the problems that the people out there in the hallways are solving for, and so I like to imagine in July of 2021, this is Manny working on my integration with Casepeer. That took seven months, even though he promised me it was going to be really easy in his basement on his air mattress, and I got this slide because he came and presented to our mastermind group at Great Legal Marketing at our event last October and told us his entrepreneurial story. From having this idea that my wife wasn't getting updates on her case and we had no idea what was going on in her car crash case to I could have met this Domino's pizza tracker for law firms to all the way up through their venture capital funding and all of these problems. Now we're like, how do we hire at a scale and at a pace to keep up with the kind of work that's coming in? So if you do nothing else, if you take nothing else from this conference, like just have conversations in the hallway and it's great at small events like this to be able to talk to people. You get 1,400, 1,500 people in a room. You're not going to see somebody more than once, maybe, right, but you can talk to people about what problems are you trying to solve for in your law firm.
Speaker 1:And my favorite question is like looking backwards, what did you do before? So all the young tech sales guys have been asking what did you do before? How did you end up at this job? Because I want to find entrepreneurial, smart, hungry people like you and I want to know what qualities I need to be looking for. I came across this question a couple of weeks ago. So, like Mike, we run on EOS, and how many else other firms run on EOS, the traction model, wow, okay. So I highly recommend that you check out the book, get a grip if you haven't read it. Get a grip is. There's two books traction, which is kind of like the rule book for how you run this thing, and then get a grip, which is a parable and much easier to read. But it talks about creating core values and targets and metrics and KPIs and all this stuff that has really helped our law firm grow by 400% in the last four years.
Speaker 1:And at the US conference in April, gino Wickman, who's the founder, gave this talk on. What do you obsess over? And if you were giving a speech five years in the future about the thing that had helped your firm the most, what would you say it was? And for me, it's been these three things. So we've grown 400% since 2020, and I've obsessed over three things that I've gotten this year. It's the sales process. It's getting our intake right. We spend no money on paid digital advertising, we have, for the first time ever, engaged a paid SEO vendor just this year, and the highest leverage opportunities that exist in most small law firms is getting your sales and your intake process right. You can acquire 25, 40% more cases just by not screwing it up when somebody calls you and wants to hire you.
Speaker 1:Second thing that we've done is we make it really easy for insurance companies to give us money. What you will find is most law firms in the personal injury space they can actually make it pretty hard to get insurance companies to give them money. They give them disjointed demand packages, they don't make it clean, they don't answer the phone when they call. I want to make it as simple as possible for an insurance company to give us money, so we're obsessed over that. And then the third thing which I'll be talking about today is customer service, and I've been reading this book on the plane. It's called Invent and Wander. It's Jeff Bezos's collection of writings and it's all the annual shareholder letters for Amazon, dating back from, I think, 96 all the way through today, and what you will find in the beginning of the company is every single annual shareholder letter. He talks about obsessing about the customer. It's not obsessing about innovation, it's not how do we acquire more customers. It's how do we get customers what they actually want and that's why he's growing was growing at the time at a 400% a year over year clip, which is just incredible. So that's a good book to check out.
Speaker 1:My operating philosophy in the law firm is that clients hired you to get a result and that their perception of that result matters much more than the result itself. And there are some dyed in the wool true believers that will disagree with me on that, but I think, as an injury lawyer, the reality is that when your client hires you, they have no idea what would have happened in the alternative universe where they hired your competitor down the street. They don't know what I got in 10% more, 10% less Would it have taken another year and a half? Would it have happened six months earlier? Percent less Would it have taken another year and a half? Would it happen six months earlier? And it's our job to tell them to do good work right To get them the result, but also to control their narrative and control the perception of whether we're doing a good job for them.
Speaker 1:And your role as a law firm owner as it grows is to manage that perception. As you grow and scale your law firm, you have, except for Mike, less and less impact over any given result. Right, if I show up in a courtroom, no judge is going. Oh my god, brian, I'm so glad to see you. Like I have limited impact on any particular case as we grow the law firm, but I have greater and greater ability to impact the perception of the result. And I can do this only by creating and delivering a great customer service experience.
Speaker 1:And the temptation with AI and the role of automation is to scale is to offshore it to Hona and say, oh, it's all taken care of now. Or to offshore it to AI and say we have all this scripted and I don't have to pay attention to it. And when you overutilize an automation, what gets lost is empathy and your own connection with the clients. And in the personal injury world and in family law and criminal defense, none of your clients are calling you because they're having a good day. They're calling you because something wrong, something has gone wrong in their life, because they've been thrust into your world and they're looking for somebody to solve the problem. And empathy is the secret sauce to growing your law firm and to getting more reviews, like people talk about. How do I, what's the? What's the best platform to get more five-star reviews. What's the best incentive program to get more five-star reviews? Best incentive program is to design a customer service experience and hire employees who can facilitate the customer service experience. It employees who can facilitate the customer service experience. It's actually worth leaving a review for right. And if you don't have that, it doesn't matter what system you're using.
Speaker 1:The problem that most law firms need to solve is communication. This is a 2023 and 2022 Clio Legal Trends reports. 86% of law firm 86% of clients said law firm responsiveness is a major factor in a hiring decision, which you know if you are running a personal injury law firm and you are scrambling to get to the phones. And almost 80% of clients who fired a previous lawyer said it was because of poor communication. Communication is everything. Results help, they matter, but your communication of that result is what's actually important to the client perception of the result. This is a hack that I like. If you were looking to design a good client service experience, what you should do is go read all your competitors, because you don't have any bad reviews. Go read all your competitors' one-star reviews. This is a local family law firm. Their communication is untenable, which is wild when you consider that six minutes is roughly $450. It's infuriating to trust people with a legal matter and feel like you're just abandoned. If you enjoy feeling like you paid thousands for incompetent representation because the alternative is cutting your losses and admitting your sunk cost fallacy, come on down. Your home is here Like that's a scathing review, and if you're the kind of client who is like I do, I'm going to search by the lowest rating, right, this is what's showing up and, by the way, no response from the law firm to that review.
Speaker 1:The ABA publishes a paper of the profile of legal malpractice claims. 50% of malpractice claims involve some form of client communication failure. That's claims, right. It's not necessarily valid malpractice lawsuits, but 50% of the claims that are being made are because there's been a communication breakdown, either real or perceived. And client communication problems trump both billing issues and competency as the most frequent cause of bar complaints, which you know. And if you do any medical malpractice work, it's the same thing for doctors, right? Most of your clients who have had a bad result would think twice if the doctor had ever come by and apologized and explained, right? And if you handle these kinds of cases, you know that you're getting calls from a lot of people who don't actually have any injury. They're just pissed off because the communication was so poor. Right, it's the exact same thing for lawyers.
Speaker 1:This is another one. This is from a criminal defense firm near me. Horrible experience had a reckless driving by speed case. So in Virginia if you're more than 20 miles an hour over the speed limit they can charge you with reckless driving. It's a misdemeanor. That's a bad thing.
Speaker 1:After paying $2,000, I met with a lawyer only on my court date. He was never reachable to discuss my case. On the court date he started talking about how he doesn't actually know the prosecutor and how the judge and the prosecutor are tough and despite taking my defensive driving course and putting in tons of volunteer hours, I got slapped with. Now I don't know whether that's a good result or a bad result. $2,000 for a misdemeanor that seems a reasonable amount to pay and from the lawyer's perspective it's like why do I need to talk to this guy before his court date? All we're doing is arguing about is it going to be a speeding ticket or is it going to be actually a misdemeanor? So the lawyer probably was never reachable because there actually was nothing to discuss. He goes out and does all this volunteer hours, probably because the lawyer told him to do it, and then doesn't end up doing any jail time, which, again, depending on the speed, might have been an amazing result, but because the client was never communicated.
Speaker 1:Here's what the expectation is and here's what I can do for you, and here's the things that move the needle. You get this one-star review Because, despite what you think about your own legal skills, what actually gets you hired, fired, recommended or blasted on the internet is not your case results, it's how your clients feel about them. It's exactly like Maya Angelou said People will forget what you did, they'll forget what you said, but they'll never forget how they made you feel. And so what do you want people to say about your law firm? And when you're creating your automations and you're creating your systems and processes, and when you're doing your hiring, you have to map all of this out first, because this is what really matters. This is what I want people to say about my firm. Notice, like none of these are. They got me the most money ever and it was amazing.
Speaker 1:I want people to say that we're responsive, that we solve their problems, that we talk like normal people, that we removed all their stress and we let them go back to their lives, right? I live in Northern Virginia. My ideal client is somebody from a dual working income family. They have kids, they have good health insurance, they have access to doctors and really what they want is to get better and go back to their life. I don't want somebody who I have to manage and send them to doctors. I don't want somebody who I have to say, hey, did you follow up? Did you do everything that your doctor wanted you to do? I want somebody who wants their smart lawyer to handle their problem so that they can go back to living their lives. And as a bonus, I actually don't want the review to say anything about me or my dad, right? Because if I have to be the one who's involved in the case, if people are expecting me all the time, then I can't scale and I can't grow my law firm. And so a couple of. I guess nine months ago now, we got this perfect review.
Speaker 1:Family and I were involved in a serious car crash in February 2024. Innocent victims unsure where to look for help after discovering Benglas law and reading the positive reviews right, people actually read these reviews. We reached out the next day, undoubtedly the best decision we could have made. From the start, the whole team treated us like family. My wife and my daughter were injured blah blah blah. Tammy and Lisa it doesn't mention Brian or Ben were incredible, providing constant support guidance. Blah blah blah Wouldn't hesitate to seek their services again. Right, well, you're only coming back to me if you're in another car crash. So hopefully not right. Coming back to me if you're on another car crash, so hopefully not right.
Speaker 1:In 2025, automation is necessary, but it's not sufficient. Having great teams and support for your clients really is what distinguishes great law firms from average law firms, from one-star law firms, and I think this panel just said it really well that you can't do everything yourself, and the temptation as a small firm owner is to be the one trying cases and taking depositions and running payroll and doing the hiring and shooting the social media and editing your own articles before they go online. And we can't be the ones who are doing all that because we don't have the mental capacity. So you need systems and processes so that your team can operate, because the goal of automation is to free up as much space in your brain for the stuff that only you, the very smart lawyer, can do. Right, it's exactly. It's that delegate and elevate chart. If you can focus all your time in that quadrant, where you love it and you're great at it, amazing. But all of the little things in the other quadrants that take up your mental bandwidth, like thinking about a statute of limitations or following up with clients, or having the same conversation about how to prepare for a deposition that you've had 2,500 times during your career, all of those things prevent you from doing the thing which you are uniquely situated to do. So there's good automation and there's bad automation.
Speaker 1:How many people have been a victim of bad automation? Like when you call a phone tree and you're mashing zero on your phone and you're yelling for the operator. Like that's bad automation. Good automation feels human. It anticipates client emotions and questions, because we've been there before right Car crash cases. They're all the same, or they're mostly all the same, right. So you know the emotions and the questions that your clients are going to have and you can anticipate them and respond to them, which Hona allows you to do. It supports connection with your clients and it sets expectations. Setting expectations is the kind of thing that prevents you from getting a good review a bad review, even though you got the client a good result and people have that experience. I got this guy an amazing settlement. I negotiated the lien, I navigated some sovereign immunity issue and the client's still like. My cousin got five times as much money and he wasn't even hurt. Right, it's because we set the expectations poorly or we did a bad job of client selection on the front end.
Speaker 1:Bad automation feels robotic, it overwhelms or it spams your client. It replaces human touch and it creates confusion. In the early 2010s, target did all this research and they went down and they created this algorithm that identified the 25 things that women buy when they're pregnant. And then they started a coupon mailer campaign and it took two years. But in 2012, they mailed a coupon to the parents of a teenage girl who didn't know their daughter was pregnant and got a call from a pissed off dad because they were targeting his daughter with all of these. What to expect when you're expecting style mailings? So this is an example about automation. There needs to be a way for your people to opt out of this kind of automation if they don't want to receive these things from you.
Speaker 1:Bad case sign up. Hey, thank you. Your case has been opened in our system. Your case ID number is AB3263-12. Please reference this every time you call. We'll contact you when we have an update. Right, and you laugh, but I've seen this before. Right, it feels like you're talking to the insurance claim adjuster. What's the first thing the insurance adjuster asks you every time you call? Can you give me the claim number? Right, you do not want your clients to feel like they're just a claim number. Your clients to feel like they're just a claim number Good automation. Hey, thank you for trusting us with your case.
Speaker 1:We know the hiring lawyer can feel overwhelming. You're not alone and you've taken a great first step. So we also send shock in all boxes. We used to send these to prospective clients back when the timeline to hire from first contact to hiring was like weeks. That doesn't happen anymore. So now we send it after you've hired. Because what happens in most law firms after you hire a lawyer is absolutely nothing right. You sign the doc, client signs the doc. You sign what some firms are getting signed on the phone the first phone call and then nothing happens. And in that silence between the phone call and whatever the next activity is, the client is telling themselves a story in their mind about whether or not they made the right decision hiring your firm, and so we make sure that within two days of signing our contract Box shows up at their house. This is better. Days are ahead. It's got all of these books about again automated stuff, right? Client handbook, what to do after your car crash five deadly sins that can wreck your auto accident claim. Everything the insurance company knows about truth, justice and fairness, which is blank inside and serves as a journal for them. Which is blank inside and serves as a journal for them. And a stuffed teddy bear, although now, with the new tariffs, I don't think that our teddy bear is from China. The cost to produce our shock and awe box is going up.
Speaker 1:And then don't be afraid to inject your own personality into this. Anybody remember a company called CD Baby One? Amazing, so young people. Music used to come on CDs, right, you didn't used to be able to go to Spotify and listen to whatever you wanted to, and CD Baby solved the problem where, like if you went to your local Tower Records or Best Buy, you couldn't always find the music that you wanted, especially if you were into, like punk, rock or indie music that had small production. So you could go online and search and buy and then you know, for most things most online e-commerce at the time you'd hit the checkout page and nothing would happen. And then a week and a half later you know the CD would show up. So CD Baby Derek Seavers kind of became famous for this email that would go out or this thank you page saying thank you for ordering with CD Baby.
Speaker 1:Your CD has been gently taken from the CD Baby shelves with sterilized, contamination-free gloves and placed in our satin pillow. A team of 50 employees inspected your CD and polished it to make sure it was in the best condition before mailing. Our packing specialist from Japan lit a candle and a hush fell over the crowd as you put your CD into the finest gold-lined box that money can buy. We all had a wonderful celebration afterwards and the whole party marched down the street to the post office where the entire town of Portland waved bon voyage to your package on its way to you in our private CD baby jet. On this day, friday June 6th and I assume the automation put the correct date in there I hope you had a wonderful time shopping at CD Baby and we hope you'll come back. Your picture is on the wall as our customer of the year. We're all exhausted, but we can't wait for you to come back to cdbabycom Now.
Speaker 1:I know that the lawyers in this room are thinking about the ethics complaint that's going to come when you have this stuff. That's not true, right, but there's a way in your firm to create this kind of automation and add a personalized touch. So one of the things that goes into that box from us is a personalized handwritten card and we batch the signatures on the card. We put these out once a month. Everybody in the firm comes by the coffee pot, signs all of the cards and then when new clients come in, they get a handwritten card from the person who's handling their case. That looks like it's been signed by the entire team. Right, it's automated, kind of like we're still running it, but it's creating that client connection that most law firms aren't.
Speaker 1:And the reality is your clients really aren't comparing you to other law firms because they don't know Most of them. It's the one case You're the only law firm that's ever handled their case right, never been in a crash before, never hired another lawyer to do anything. Most of my clients have not had an estate planning lawyer. They've not had a family lawyer. I'm the only. They're only brush with the legal system, right, but they are comparing you with their CPA, the dentist and the orthopedist who send out the automated text. Let them know what the next step is going to be and do a far better job than most lawyers do of guiding you through their system. And nobody actually wants to hire a lawyer. Like. I'm sorry to tell you, you're in a profession where most people don't ever want to deal with you. They're scared of you, and our job is to lower the bar and to make ourselves less scary.
Speaker 1:Bad case stage update. Hey, your case is now in the discovery phase. The hell does that mean? Right, but that's how we talk to our clients, and so this is one of the things that hona has helped us do moved your case to the discovery phase. Hey, we're like we're just changing information. We're giving the insurance lawyer or adjuster the ammunition that they need to need to go to their manager and get some more money on your case. This is is really easy. As a bonus, you can embed things like YouTube links. You can drive some traffic back to your website or to your YouTube page or to your Instagram or your social media.
Speaker 1:This goes to not being the one who is thinking of all of this stuff. You have to empower your team to send gifts. So our team, we have a whole prize closet full of goodies and I'll show you a slide later with some of the stuff that we've sent out. That's custom. I think most of the stuff in there is less than 50 bucks, but the team doesn't even ask if they need to send something to somebody to make their day a little bit better. They don't even ask, they just send it. As a result, most of our reviews, like I said, they don't mention Ben or I at all. And then a thing that we did for the team a year or so ago is we got all of the Google reviews that mentioned their names and we scraped them and we put them on mixed tiles, which are these little, you know, four by four styrofoam tiles with some sticky tape on the back, and my team now has a whole wall in each of their offices with reviews that mention their names. It's a good way to reward your team for taking care of your clients.
Speaker 1:What is this one about? Oh, the system that you create is only as good as the people who operate it, and so you can have all this information and tasking in place, but you still have to monitor it. Film on your business. This lawyer company is a joke. I got an accident in 2023 and this company said they could help. No communication at all. Never returned phone calls. Been waiting two months since the last communication. They never called back. I made the wrong decision. Now I'm screwed. Should have read the horrible reviews before I took this company on.
Speaker 1:Can't give less than one star right so you can have all this stuff in place. The team still has to run the playbook, okay. And then again, most law firms have no update, update right. So what happens in most firms is, if there's nothing going on, we don't tell the client that there's nothing going on. So one of the automated things in our system is, every 30 days there's a task that comes up to call your client, ask how they're feeling, ask if they've seen any new doctors that we don't know about. And, by the way, this actually it takes your staff's time, but it increases case value dramatically because your clients are being reminded that they should be going to treatment if they need to be reminded and you're checking on them at the various stages in their case and asking them things like hey, it's been 12 weeks, maybe you should get an MRI. You should talk to your doctor about that. We don't direct medical care, but we do know where the problems are for insurance companies and if you let your clients go off the rails, they will go off the rails.
Speaker 1:Somebody Jay mentioned APIs and Zapier. How many of us in this room would be absolutely screwed if the person in our office who knows how to use zapier quit? Only two, the rest of you not using zapier. All right, so zapier is. Is the connection that helps. Helps all your automations talk to each other, right?
Speaker 1:You put something into one system, it updates in another system and for a while we thought we'd be absolutely screwed if our key players left. And then they started doing something that was really transformational for us. They started leaving playbooks for each other. So I had two of our teammates went out on maternity leave this year at different times. The woman who runs our appeals department for our long-term disability appeals created this whole playbook of everything that happens, from the time that a case comes in the door to the time that an appeal goes out the door to the insurance company. And now we have a whole automated playbook that can be given to a VA or an EA to run, and that's amazing. I got these.
Speaker 1:My kids like Curious George. This is my son's favorite book Curious George and the Chocolate Factory, and so if I had told the story a little bit better. Curious George and the Chocolate Factory, and so if I had told the story a little bit better. Curious George hits the thing. The automated belt speeds up really, really fast. They all fly onto the floor and then he's the one, of course, that comes down and saves the day by putting all the chocolates back into the box. I'm running out of time, so I'm going to speed through these last two.
Speaker 1:My marketing director is on maternity leave now. That's a really scary time to be updating your SEO vendor, which is exactly what we're doing, and she created this whole playbook for us of hey, while I'm out. If you need to contact the web team, here it is. If you need to get graphic design work, here it is. She dummy proofed this for Ben and I. Here's actually the location in our server where you can find our brand guidelines if we hire anybody new. And then she did this. Before you implement any ideas, idiots if you have any light bulb moments, you have to talk about it at your weekly meeting. She knows how to control Ben and I, which is amazing. The real benefit of automation is that it frees up the mental space for you to create a better client experience.
Speaker 1:I told you I'd show you some of the client gifts that we've gotten. You can find most of this stuff on Etsy and it's cool because you could just search for, like I have somebody from Montana and it gives you these blankets that are custom to their hometown. We had, I think, a rep at one of our companies vendor companies. I think a rep at one of our companies vendor companies went over his handlebars on his bike and broke his arm, and so we got him. You have to be kind of careful who you send that one to. I got him. I do all my own stunts. Somebody going over the handlebars and breaking his arm. That's a really specific gift, but you can find it on Etsy. The other one that we really like is the kitchenbitchescom. Honestly, I just wanted to say that in a presentation. But you can get hyper-personalized gifts for your clients. Give them something that has their logo on it for your referral partners and I'm running very quickly, running out of time.
Speaker 1:Ben and I have written a book.
Speaker 1:I think many of the people in this room have bought it.
Speaker 1:If you haven't, I don't want you to buy it on Amazon.
Speaker 1:It's called Renegade Lawyer Marketing, where we talk about all the ways that solo and small law firm owners can compete with the 800-pound gorillas in the world of SEO agencies, mass advertisers and artificial intelligence, and if you skip Amazon and you buy it from me here, I'll send you a bunch of free stuff also including how we generated a quarter million dollars in referral fees from medical providers in the last year our intake success system and in referral fees from medical providers in the last year our intake success system and all of the notes from last year's Great Legal Marketing Summit.
Speaker 1:The thing that I want you to remember is your clients do this all the time or you do this. Don't remember that you do this all the time. Your clients only do this once and they can leave their experience with your law firm hating lawyers or believing that there's some good in the legal world, and our job is to make sure that we deliver them from one end of the bad experience, where they've been thrust into our world that they didn't ask for to a great result, and that you control their perception of the result the whole way through. Thank you.
Speaker 3:Probably important to have a mic. Thank you All right, brian, that was amazing. Okay, well, I have another giveaway for you guys Also. By the way, this is because it's a little bit more of an intimate group today. Feel free to, if you have any questions, raise your hand and then definitely speak to the speakers afterwards and get some more info. Right now we're going to do another nomadic bag.
