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
The Only Five Marketing Things Your Law Firm Needs
Want to transform your law firm's marketing without chasing endless tactics? Discover the five fundamental systems that create sustainable, profitable growth - regardless of your practice area.
Marketing a law firm shouldn't require constant platform-hopping or tactic-chasing. The truth is simpler: five core systems form the foundation of effective legal marketing, and most firms are missing at least one crucial piece of this puzzle.
The first pillar is a robust client attraction system that goes beyond generic "call now" buttons. While this works for some immediate-need cases, it misses a significant segment of potential clients still gathering information. By offering valuable lead magnets like downloadable guides or books, you capture contact information while establishing expertise. As one client memorably put it, "We hired you because you wrote the book."
But attraction means nothing without conversion. The shocking reality? Most firms could increase their client base by 15-40% without spending an additional dollar on advertising - simply by improving phone skills and follow-up procedures. When we called back six months of "ghosted" prospects, we signed 25 new cases in a single month - triple our usual rate. Gold is hiding in your database.
The remaining systems focus on leveraging existing relationships: systematically collecting online reviews (and repurposing them creatively), cultivating client evangelists through personalized appreciation, and developing professional referral networks that deliver cases at a fraction of direct-acquisition costs.
The math is compelling: While Google ads might cost $2,500-3,000 per case acquisition, targeted referral marketing can generate multiple cases monthly for significantly less investment. The question becomes: where should your next marketing dollar go?
Ready to implement these systems in your practice? Start small, but start today. The resulting framework will generate quality leads while maximizing your marketing ROI, creating a firm you genuinely enjoy showing up to on Mondays.
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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 to another Friday solo episode of 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 Mondays. Now, on Tuesdays, I release podcasts that are interviews with friends of mine, typically who are running law firms or who are vendor sponsor partners in the law firm space and can help you grow your law firm, and on Fridays you get these rants from me, and this Friday I chose violence and I've given myself the gargantuan task of explaining everything that I know about law firm marketing in a 15 to 20 minute episode and distilling, really the five marketing systems that you need to have in place in your law firm into one singular podcast episode. Now, I can do this in 15 to 20 minutes because I'm not going to talk about tactics and I'm not going to talk about mediums through which the message is disseminated, because neither of those really matter all that much, right, and because it's so hard to describe what the next tactic or what the next medium that you ought to be using without knowing anything about your law firm, without doing a really deep dive into what's working for you and what's not working for you, and so today's episode is all about marketing principles, the principles, the five things that you need to know to be able to run your law firm. So if you dig this, I will tell you that it is straight out of the outline that we use to write chapter 17 of Renegade Lawyer Marketing. And if you want to know more about what's in this episode, after you've listened all the way through, you can pick up your copy at renegadelawyermarketingcom.
Speaker 1:Now let's dive in. Now, the first system that you need in your law firm is some kind of a client attraction system. Now, if you're on the outside looking in, it looks like personal injury lawyers have this super easy, because all we do is show up at the top of Google with some kind of call me, now call to action. Clients call us and, I swear, sometimes in the span of a 12 minute phone call, client decides that you are the law firm for them. And there are firms out there that are pushing text retainer agreements to clients while they're on the first phone call. I don't know. It's a different market than it was 15, 17 years ago when I started as a personal injury lawyer, and the speed to lead is critically important. And so take this client attraction thing coming from a personal injury lawyer maybe with a grain of salt, but for everybody else and even for injury lawyers that want to attract larger cases, who don't view you as a commodity and who doesn't want a client that doesn't view them as a commodity you have to have some alternative reason for people to contact you your unique selling proposition. You need to be able to explain what it is that you provide to the world that is different than what every other law firm in your region, in your city, in your state, maybe even in the country, provides. And if you haven't figured that out, go back and listen to last Friday's solo episode, which is all about your unique selling proposition. But you need to give some people a. You need to give people a alternative reason to contact you, because a lot of people are still looking for information.
Speaker 1:So there's a couple of kinds of people that are shopping for lawyers online, which is where most of us are advertising. There are people who know that they have a problem and they know that they need a solution that's going to come from a lawyer and they've decided that you are the lawyer, right? Those people are just coming to your website to verify that you are an actual living, breathing human being, and the job of your website or your other digital assets is just not to screw it up right. That's the highest level. Those are slam, dunk, lay down kinds of clients. There are clients out there who know that they have a problem, they know that a lawyer is what they need to solve their problem and they're deciding which lawyer do I need to solve my problem? There are clients out there that know that they have a problem but are trying to solve it on their own and haven't concluded that a lawyer is what they need to solve a problem. And then there are clients that don't have a problem or don't recognize that they have a problem at all. So those really are the four levels of client awareness. When they're searching for lawyers online, they're either trying to find a lawyer to solve their problem or a lot of them now are trying to solve their problem on their own.
Speaker 1:And for that category of people, we want to be able to offer them something, something that's different than call now, because, remember, they don't recognize that the lawyer is the solution to their problem. They haven't, and they certainly don't recognize that you, the lawyer, are the solution to their problem, and so those kinds of people are still looking for information. We need to be able to offer them some information, some value, that's not some bullshit AI written blog on your website. So here I'm talking about, you know, it could be a YouTube channel, could be your Instagram channel. More and more people younger people are going to TikTok and Instagram and using that search bar as though it's Google, right, and they're finding information there. So you could be putting out information lead magnets on one of those things or on your website. You could have a valuable actually valuable written content.
Speaker 1:But what we want to drive people to do is to raise their hand and trade you some means of contacting them for more information. So usually this looks something like a downloadable book or a mailed book, where what we want to capture is their email address, certainly, but more important than that, if we can capture their physical mailing address, like amazing right, and then we want to deliver whatever they've asked for, plus something else. So if they've raised their hands and they've asked for the book, most lawyers in the great legal marketing world have some kind of info product book the five deadly sins that can wreck your auto accident. We have a book called Don't Try this at Home, which is about why you shouldn't handle your long-term disability appeal without a lawyer, right? There's some kind of info product book that we are gatekeeping, and when you give me your email address or your physical mail address and or your phone number now, I will send you that book, and I'm going to send something else that's of value in that package.
Speaker 1:We call these shock and awe packages. They're big boxes, they cost about $60 probably to produce and mail out and they have all kinds of information in them, along with a list of reasons, and it's not listed. You know it's not called like the list of reasons that you need a lawyer, but we've we've hidden these Easter eggs and these little nuggets that are all designed to lead somebody to the conclusion that they need a lawyer number one and that we are the right lawyer for their law firm number two. Now, if you are a personal injury lawyer and you are used to people finding you online and calling and signing while they're on the phone with you, this will sound like anathema, but I promise you that there are people out there that actually are still looking for some information and we have to service them too, and if we don't service them, we're losing out on 25, 30, maybe even 40% of the client base.
Speaker 1:Now, a good lead magnet is going to do one of three things. It's going to allow you to provide some value to people whose case you don't want right. So every law firm has these low value or no value cases people that truly are calling and have some problem. That's tangential to what you do, but is not what you do. So for us, it's somebody who's been in a crash and isn't hurt, but has a problem where they need to get their car fixed Right, and so the lead magnet will have a chapter. The book will have a chapter addressing how do you get your car fixed.
Speaker 1:And so, instead of having me or my staff spending time explaining how to handle that kind of a case or, worse, turning that person away, the free offer allows us to give something of value, some information of value, to them in exchange for the email and the mailing address that now gives us permission to contact that person and permission to market to that person from this point forward until they opt out. Right? This is where your print newsletter comes into play, right? Because we're sending the box of nice stuff and people actually don't throw away books. So they keep the book in the hopes that if that person ever has this problem and they are hurt again, or they have a friend or a family member who has an injury case and they are hurt again because of the laws of reciprocity, they're going to remember us and they're going to refer cases back to us or they're going to hire us for their case in the future. So number one good lead magnet allows us to provide value to people whose cases we don't currently want. Number two it helps us establish ourselves as the wise person wise man or woman at the top of the mountain, right. So this is for the person that has a problem. They know they need a lawyer to solve the problem. They're still trying to figure out which lawyer should I choose.
Speaker 1:Now it may seem to you, if you are in the law firm marketing space, that everybody has a book and that having a book is not a differentiator. Your clients, your potential clients, are not in the law firm marketing space, okay, and so having a book, having something to give them, is actually a differentiating factor. The number of times that we've heard from clients we hired you because you were the one that wrote the book would astound you. Sometimes, when we get too embedded in our own marketing and their own tactics, like, we forget what it's like to not to be on the other side of the equation. Okay, and so a good lead magnet establishes you as the wise person at the top of the mountain. At the end of most of our books is some kind of criteria by which you should be asking the lawyer before you select which lawyer to handle your case right. And guess what? We check all of the boxes on all of those criteria right. It's kind of one-on-one marketing stuff.
Speaker 1:Third thing a good lead magnet should do is demonstrate to your avatar client that the handling of the case on their own or hiring of the wrong lawyer is a path littered with landmines. Of course you know the client shouldn't handle their own injury or criminal defense or family law case on their own, but you know that people do it all day, every day, and so that's what our attraction piece ought to do. System number one you have to have a good client attraction piece that is different than the sign now button on your website. System number two that you must have in place is a client conversion system. It doesn't make sense. It doesn't do us any good to make the phone ring all day if we don't have a way of convincing and converting those clients from leads into signed paying clients.
Speaker 1:Most lawyers this is Brian's hypothesis, most lawyers don't need to spend any more money on generating any more leads and most lawyers could increase their number of clients by 15 to 25 to 40% just by getting better at answering the phones and better at follow-up. If you don't have a system in place for listening to your team, talk to clients on the phone at least periodically, and training on, how can we do this better? You are bleeding at the front door. How can we do this better? You are bleeding at the front door. Stop creating any new marketing pieces until you have figured out how to answer the phone and, in an injury firm, sign up cases that you want at a 90% clip. That takes me to another point that we don't address in Renegade Lawyer Marketing but is found in many of our other materials.
Speaker 1:Your team has to have a really good understanding of what is a case that we want. When Brian says this is a case that we want, what does that mean? And so we have what we call in our firm the deal box, both in the personal injury and the long-term disability appeals section. That's very clearly defined criteria that the team knows. If somebody calls and they're inside this box, what does that mean? It's a crash, there's an injury, they've had some treatment already, it's apparent that there's some insurance coverage and in Virginia, because we're a contributory negligence state, there is no question that this person did not cause the crash. If it's in that box, we sign it, yeah, and we do it as fast as we can because that's a case that we want. And then, of course, we measure the percentage or the ratio of cases that we wanted versus cases that we wanted that we didn't get to work on right.
Speaker 1:And you have to have this system in place for training your team, for how to convert leads when they call and for keeping KPIs around the number of people who called you, who had cases that you wanted, who you were not permitted to work on because the client elected to sign somebody else or they went somewhere else to solve their problem. I'll give you, if you haven't done this yet, if you haven't put dedicated effort into getting really good on the phones, you don't have a great follow-up system. Here is found money for you. Take all of the people that called you in the last six months, who didn't convert into clients and who haven't told you why, and just call them back. When we did this back in 2019, when I started at the law firm, we had this whole laundry list of clients who had called us, who had cases that kind of looked like maybe we probably want to work on them, but for some reason or another, we lost touch with. We called them back once, which is what most law firms do. We called them back twice, which is above average, and then we gave up, right, yeah, and so the only thing that we did on the month I remember it was the month of April, the year that I started month of April of 2019. We called back everybody who, in the last six months, had contacted us about a case who had not then told us you're not the right firm for me or I'm going to handle the case on my own, and we just asked them like what happened with the case? Are you still looking for a lawyer? We signed up 25 cases that month and at the time, we were averaging about eight cases a month.
Speaker 1:Right, how to blow the doors off of your caseload is by going back through your client roles and just contact the people with whom your team has lost touch. Life happens Like I'm in a. We live in a busy area in Northern Virginia, soccer season kicks up and people go. Well, you know what I'm going to deal with this lawyer problem later, right? So life happens. So those people are out there. There is gold in your potential new client files somewhere.
Speaker 1:Last thing I'll say on this is you should have a software that your clients are going into so that you have tracking on. Did my team do what I wanted them to do? So my software of choice is LeadDocket. We've been using it for about two years now. We have really good data on where our clients came from, which cases we wanted that we got, which cases we wanted that we didn't get, why that happened. And then we have our list of people that we can go back to every six months or so and just say, hey, you contacted us at some point and then you disappeared. Do you still have a legal problem that you would like to talk to us about getting solved? Some say yes, some say no, but most law firms are not doing that.
Speaker 1:And then the last thing I'll say on this is that my current system that if somebody reaches out to us and they don't get us by phone initially meaning they filled out a web form or they sent an email in or some other alternative or they requested a lead magnet right, we try to reach them by phone, by email and by text once a day for five days. So that's 15 contact attempts and then they get seeded into a much longer follow-up sequence. That's less intense, right, we don't call you, text you and email you for longer than five days, but we do follow up after that. So if you don't have any of that like, just start, you don't have to do it all yet. I didn't do it all in the beginning, but just start, all right.
Speaker 1:So, number three you've got to have a good system for collecting online reviews. This is not novel. Every conference that you go to now, people are like how do I get more Google reviews? You know, the number one way to get more Google reviews is to have a client customer service experience. That's actually worth writing anything about, right, and most law firms will skip over that and go straight to what's the best tactic. It's like no, like actually deliver good client customer service. We have a director of happiness who makes sure that every client gets some kind of personalized attention, that our referrals get some kind of personalized gift. That's not about us. It's not like a bang glass law coffee mug. It's something that has to do with them. This is really important stuff. So if you're not doing a great job delivering great customer service experience, work on that first.
Speaker 1:But if you are doing that, you have to get your staff a little bit braver about asking for online reviews. So most law firms will wait until the very end of the case to ask for a review. You know there's no reason to do that. Anytime, I think anytime a client says thank you, or you're amazing or we really like the team, I say, well, the best thing you could do for the team is go back and leave a review for one of them and I will tell clients. I tell clients all the time.
Speaker 1:The best source of information for anybody looking for a law firm is in our reviews. People want to know that we talk like normal people, that we're easy to work with, that we respond quickly, and so if you could say any one of those things or all of those things about somebody on my team who's not me. That would be amazing and that, I think, is a really critical point. Especially if your name is on the door or you're a partner in the firm, everybody who's calling expects to and wants to talk to you. But if you have celebritized your team and there are reviews that mention the team, your team, and there are reviews that mention the team, then there's social proof around those people being pretty good at their jobs also, and it's not just about you.
Speaker 1:The last thing that I'll say about reviews is you know, you have to find ways to repurpose them, right. If you let them live and die in your Google business profile, I think that's a mistake, and so a novel ways of repurposing them are using them on your social media, putting them in your print newsletter, and then one that we really like is, every once in a while, we will take all of the reviews that mention each team member and we'll copy and paste and put them onto these things called mixed tiles, which are little, three by three styrofoam tiles that can be used as office decorations. And, man, if you've got a team member who's got 25 of those things hanging in their office because people have mentioned them by name about how amazing they are at their job. Do you think they're more likely to stay in that job? I think so, because they're going to feel valued and they're going to feel like not only does my boss recognize that I'm doing a great job, but look at all these people that I've helped over the years by providing great customer service experience. So I mean you need a system for getting reviews. There's nothing novel about that. You've heard that at every conference that you've ever been to. What you hear less about is you need a system for creating and encouraging evangelists.
Speaker 1:These are the people sometimes we call them mavens, the people that refer you more than probably three cases a year. Right, it's a kind of it's an 80-20 principle, right, we all have these people in our firms, either former clients or medical providers or other professionals who give your name out more than anybody else. Right, because why do they do that? Because they believe that you are amazing at what you do and if you have those people in your life, god bless, you got to take care of them. Right, and so those people are really taken care of by our director of happiness, susie, who again takes great care and great pride in selecting personalized gifts for them at the highest level and then kind of at our what we call our intermediate tier. Sometimes you hear us refer to it as our dream 100 program. We have something that goes out once a quarter to people who are sending us cases or should be sending us more cases, and again, it's not stuff with our name on it, it's stuff that the goal is to get them to take a picture of it and post it on Instagram and tag us.
Speaker 1:Other Maven activities that you can get people to engage in, like client appreciation dinners. I know that there are big law firms that will take over the parking lot and bring in a bunch of carnival games and rides. We're not there yet, but you have to take care of the people that are taking care of you. The easiest way to start this process is to write about those people in a monthly newsletter or ask them to contribute to your social media, or ask them to contribute an article to the newsletter. There's all kinds of things that you can do to take care of the people that are taking care of you.
Speaker 1:Last system that you need man, I'm barreling down on I don't know 20, 25 minutes. This has gone a little bit longer than I thought, but I do get spun up about this. You need a system specifically in your referral program for generating more referrals from other professionals and other business owners, and I've talked ad nauseum about this in about our chiropractor referral program. But the idea is going up the chain from your clients and thinking about who are the community leaders or the other professionals who have an audience of my ideal clients. Right, super costly to go direct to consumer and to attract clients online, either through LSAs or SEO or PPC or any other direct-to-consumer marketing channel. It's far less costly to market specifically to a professional who can refer you two to three cases a month.
Speaker 1:Right, when you think about the fact that most law firms are paying 2,500 to 3,000 to generate a car crash case, now, through Google, if you want two or three of those a month, can you spend somewhere south of 6,000 to 9,000 on a referral networking program and generate the exact same outcome? Right, is there a world in which it is possible for me to engage in referral marketing activities that cost me less than $6,000 to $9,000 a month that generate two to three referrals? Of course it is right, like a good, a really, really high level referral marketing campaign might cost you a thousand dollars per professional right and a really really like. That's a super high spend and you can certainly get three to five referrals per month from professionals if you choose your professionals correctly, right? So this is all about thinking where is the best use of my next dollar an hour?
Speaker 1:A lot of times it is not going direct to consumer and trying to get new clients out of the general public. It's about identifying the people that are in your dream 100 list. If you don't know what I'm talking about, maybe I should do an episode on that coming up in the future about how we do that. But I talk about this a lot in my referral networking talks. But how do we go upstream? How do we find the people who have the ears and have the trust of my ideal clients? It's really not all that hard. All right, amazing. We're at like 23, 24 minutes and I've gone through the five systems.
Speaker 1:So let's recap them really quickly. Number one you need a client attraction system. You need a reason other than call me now for somebody to call you now. Number two you need a client conversion system Once those people call you and once you've got that phone ringing, we got to convert these leads into clients. Number three we got to convert our clients into people that have left us a nice review online, and the place that you should start with that is designing a customer service experience that's actually worth writing anything about. Number four once we've got clients that have left us a review online, we need a system for encouraging them to send us their friends and family who've been through what they are going through.
Speaker 1:And number five we need a system for going outside of our client base to find the other professionals and business owners who know, like and trust us, who can send us people that have problems that both of us are going to service. So I said those are the five systems that every law firm needs in the marketing space. If you want more on this, there's much more inside Renegade Lawyer Marketing you can get your copy at renegadelawyermarketingcom. It's totally free, except that you do need to pay for shipping, but for $9.95, I'll send you a copy of the book and we will send all kinds of extra goodies and guides to growing your law firm into the kind of place that you actually want to show up to on Monday. Have a great weekend, my friends.
