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
When Should Your Law Firm Hire a Marketing Director?
Every growing law firm reaches a crossroads where the founding attorney can no longer juggle every role. The marketing director decision becomes unavoidable, but timing and selection make all the difference between transformative growth and costly disappointment.
When should you hire a marketing director? The answer might surprise you: now, or at least as quickly as possible. A dedicated marketing professional creates a powerful multiplier effect – while you handle cases and client meetings, they ensure your pipeline stays consistently full. The right marketing hire doesn't just cover their salary; they generate significant returns that compound over time.
Most small firm owners struggle with relinquishing control of marketing. We started our firms because we wanted more than just practicing law – we wanted to build something, learn business skills, and wear multiple hats. But this mindset creates problems when hiring marketing talent. Your first marketing hire rarely comes with comprehensive expertise, and neither do you. The solution? Experiment with fractional relationships first, bring your marketing person to educational events where you're learning, and develop their skills alongside your own.
Creating an effective hiring process means developing a clear ideal candidate profile, prioritizing attitude over specific skills, and asking revealing questions during interviews. Try these: "What are you currently reading or listening to?" "What would a previous employer say was your worst quality?" Watch how candidates explain topics they're passionate about, then compare their enthusiasm when discussing previous marketing work. This reveals whether they genuinely know what they claim to know.
Remember to respect title progression – don't call your entry-level marketing hire a "Director" or "CMO." They must earn those titles through demonstrated competence and leadership. Your ultimate goal should be building a firm that doesn't collapse without your daily presence – one where you can disappear for three weeks knowing everything will continue running smoothly.
Ready to transform your marketing approach and build a firm that works for you rather than the other way around? Join us at the Great Legal Marketing Summit on October 23-25 in Washington DC – bring your marketing director! Get tickets at glmsummit.com.
____________________________________
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.
Want to connect with Brian?
Follow Brian on Instagram: @thebrianglass
Connect on LinkedIn
Hello, my friends, and welcome into 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 the kind of practices that they actually enjoy showing up to on Mondays. Today's episode is about how and when to hire a marketing director for your law firm, and it comes at an interesting time and maybe that's why I'm thinking about this episode because my marketing director is just back from maternity leave about two weeks ago and I had an opportunity to speak at Tiffany Swidensky's Marketing Director Mastermind last week, and so marketing directors, especially in small law firms, are on my mind, and we get asked this question a lot in great legal marketing when should I hire a marketing director or an assistant? And the knee-jerk reaction is now. Hire one now, or at least as fast as you can, because somebody in your office who's focused on doing the right marketing will be a major multiplier of your efforts. You, as the lawyer, have cases to handle and appointments to attend to, and having marketing-focused employees with just one responsibility to make sure that you have more appointments to attend and cases to handle will make your life easier. Your marketing director will stay busy as they work to keep you busy, and when it's done right, that position doesn't just pay for itself, but it has a significant return on investment that will grow over time, and one of the mistakes that I see lawyers making in small law firms is that we want to be the marketing director. Actually, what happens is the lawyer grows up through the ranks and then at some point, decides they're tired of being the lawyer and doing the lawyering work anymore. They want to be a law firm owner, and being the law firm owner is giving yourself permission to wear 47 different hats, and one of those hats is marketing director.
Speaker 1:And I got asked this question during Tiffany's Mastermind of how do I get my lawyer to just go back to being a lawyer, and all the lawyers listening to this podcast who own law firms, I think, will like this answer, which is that you don't right. The reason that lawyers own law firms instead of just being the lawyer is because they don't want to just be the lawyer. We want to have something broader. We want to learn business, we want to learn marketing, and we know just enough about all these things to be real dangerous to ourselves and dangerous to our practices and dangerous to the young people that we hire who often don't know anything about marketing to begin with. The people that we hire in small law firms especially as you're growing and especially as you're making your first marketing director hire, that person usually doesn't know very much about marketing, and neither do you, or understands SEO a little bit, although SEO is now kind of the thing that most of us are outsourcing, but it wasn't five or 10 years ago when Tiffany worked for me. That person gets elevated into the marketing director seat or the marketing assistant seat and they're growing and learning alongside us. Which three minutes into this episode I haven't plugged the Great Legal Marketing Summit, so I'm going to do it now.
Speaker 1:It's very hard for you, as the law firm owner, to go off to a conference where you're learning marketing and you're getting hit with a fire hose of all these new ideas and then to bring it back to people that have not been at your conference with you. So the number one thing that you can do after you've hired your marketing director to begin to scale and grow your marketing is to bring the marketing director with you. I know that's totally novel, but bring him or her with you when you go to these events, because you need somebody else who's sitting there as a second set of eyes and ears for all of these ideas that you hear, and it is way easier to translate thought into action if they've been sitting there listening to the same speakers and watching the same presentations that you have for the last three days than it is if you go across the country by yourself and then bring ideas back and try to translate it back to your marketing director. And so, once you've hired this person, bring them with you, and the best event to bring them with you, too, is the Great Legal Marketing Summit, and you can grab your tickets at glmsummitcom. All right, shameless self-promotion on my solo podcast episode.
Speaker 1:But the question we get asked pretty quickly after when should I hire a marketing director? Is how do I hire one who doesn't suck? And, by the way, we've had a couple who have sucked and if you are holding out for that perfect person, you're going to fail. So what I think I've learned over the years is if you can begin to experiment with people in a fractional basis first, and then bring them on as your marketing director, as your marketing assistant or as your marketing helper or like whatever you want to call it, that's the best way to learn whether they actually know anything about what they're telling you that they know about in an interview. They actually know anything about what they're telling you that they know about in an interview, and it's how we hired Lauren my marketing director, who ran PPC campaigns for us freelance for a while, and we brought her on, and it's how we ended up partnering with Jason Hennessey, who's doing our SEO now. We were coaching with him for long enough to determine that he did, in fact, and his team did in fact know what they were talking about, so we brought them on to take a broader role, and so if you can find people in your orbit to bring on as freelancers or to bring on as part-time to handle a piece of your marketing, that's a good way to get a understanding of whether they actually know anything that they're talking about.
Speaker 1:And we talk about systems for your marketing all the time, but you ought to also have systems for hiring the marketing person, and so what I want to do with the balance of this episode is walk you through how we think about, philosophically and tactically, about hiring the next person in marketing, and this is going to apply for almost any role in your law firm, the first thing you have to do is create your ideal candidate profile. You will get much farther if you actually spend time and effort thinking out and writing out your job listing and who it is you want to attract, and this is true both for attracting people into your law firm and for creating things in your life right. This is back to vivid vision, which I've talked about a whole bunch of times on this podcast. But if you don't know exactly what you want, there's no way you're going to end up happy with your marketing person, and so you need to spend some time visualizing your ideal candidate. What traits do they have? How do they give and receive feedback? What background do they have? What attitude and skill do they have? Because having a clear idea of what you want before you start reading through interviews or before you craft the job description is going to help you identify the right candidates.
Speaker 1:We have always prioritized attitude over skill set, and this is especially true in a growing and smaller law firm where you can't afford the skill set right. We often you know lawyers who are doing less than a million dollars in revenue, probably less than $2 million in revenue. You can't afford a real marketing director's skillset, so you can hire a fractional CMO, or you can hire somebody who you can, uh, who will learn alongside you how to do all of these things. We always hire for attitude over specific skills skills. They can all be taught, whether it's SEO or PPC or Canva or podcast editing or video production. All this stuff can be taught right, but qualities like self-motivation and the desire to sit down and watch a video and learn how to do it, and then demonstrating that you have at some point in your past, sat down and self-taught yourself anything, are the kinds of things that we're looking for when we're hiring entry-level or assistant-level marketing folks that come on.
Speaker 1:There are two questions that you can ask during the interview process that are really revealing, right, and maybe I'll give you a bonus. Third, the two that I've written down before we've gotten here is what are you currently reading, listening to and watching? Because if the person says that they're not reading anything and they're not listening to podcasts or they're not listening to books, they still call books on tape audio books. That's a clue. That's a clue that they're not spending free time learning, and what you need in a small law firm a growing small law firm is somebody who's curious about the world and who is reading and listening to interesting things, and so it's not necessarily like there's no, probably right answer to what are you currently reading and listening to. There is definitely a wrong answer, which is I haven't read a book since high school. That's a problem and it's a clue.
Speaker 1:Second thing that you can ask is what's the worst thing a previous employer would say about you? This question sometimes is going to get you an honest response. A lot of times it's going to get you well, my greatest strength is also my greatest weakness. My greatest weakness is also my greatest strength, whatever Michael Scott said, but it gets the person to think reflexively about and show some humility. Right, you have to have some self-awareness working in a solo or small law firm. That there are problems with you also right. And if the person either isn't willing to admit anything or just doesn't have an appreciation for the fact that sometimes we as the employees screw up, then that's a red flag for you. The last trick that I picked up somewhere and I've forgotten I would give attribution to this, but I've now forgotten it is early in the interview.
Speaker 1:You want to ask them about hobbies or something they're excited about outside of work. You want to get them to explain how to do one of those things because you'll hear them talk about it. Like when I talk about running and heart rate, you hear that I get excited and talk about it. Or my friends hear that I get excited and talk about it. When I talk about marketing, when I talk about systems within law firms to make more money and bring more clients to the door, I get excited about it. It's demonstrable and my friends who aren't in this world can tell right. And so you want to get the person talking about something that they're excited about and that they can explain well, so that when you ask them questions about marketing and about tactics and about things that they have said they've done in other jobs, you can tell in their tonality and their specificity and their level of excitement whether they actually did those things. If you are explaining something you love in flowery terms and deep dives and excited, fast language, and then I ask you about work and your tonality completely shifts and that's a clue, okay, and they shouldn't be talking. Well, I don't know, I was going to say they shouldn't be talking to you until late in the interview, but that really depends on the size of your law firm.
Speaker 1:Our process now begins with a phone interview with Krista, who's our HR director. Also my wife and actually nobody who comes through our funnel now talks to Ben or I until we are sitting down on their first day of work, except for lawyers. But people who come through the funnel, they talk to Krista, they talk to the teammates that they'll be working with. We absolutely do in-person interviews and we've learned to ask the rest of the team what they think about the person we just brought through the office, even if they didn't interview with them, and we've caught a couple of rude people red flags and kept them out by doing that.
Speaker 1:We use personality tests. I did an episode a couple of weeks back with Jay Henderson, whose personality test is like witchcraft. If you have never done it before, uh and Jay will set you up with an account for your team so that you can number one, uh, do a set, do an assessment on yourself. But number two, use it as a hiring screen and a go-no-go test for people who you think you want to hire, people who already made it all the way through your pipeline, and then the last couple of things is like you have to be able to sell the position to the person, but you shouldn't be in a position where you are talking them into taking this job. You have to believe, just like your team has to believe, that you are the greatest lawyer in the world in order to sell you on an intake call to a prospective client. You have to believe that you've created a great place to work for.
Speaker 1:And sometimes I talk to people and they say, well, nobody wants to work anymore and nobody wants to work hard, and it's really hard to find good people. Well, yeah, like if working for you sucks, if you're Eeyore and nobody wants to work for you, then nobody wants to work for you. And then your perception is that nobody wants to work right, and so you have to first fix yourself and your business to put it in a position where you get excited talking about it. And if you can't even do that, how can you expect your marketing person to come in and solve these problems for you? Hire slow fire, fast. Everybody's heard that. Don't hire the first person whose resume lands on your desk just because you need to fill an empty seat. Everybody knows this. Everybody knows this, but no few people do it. It's much easier said than it is done and we give everybody a 90-day probationary period to see if they're working out right, and then we're pretty rigorous at the end of that 90-day probationary period of saying this isn't the place for you or you're not the right person for this job and then moving on.
Speaker 1:We have found our best people again not on job boards, and my perception of Indeed now is that the only people looking on Indeed are people that don't have jobs. And it has become so easy, both on Indeed and on LinkedIn and on a handful of other job application sites, to just click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click and apply to 17 jobs in a minute that when we post jobs on there, we often get candidates who are not qualified. We post a lawyer job on there and you get somebody who's been flipping hamburgers in a McDonald's right, but maybe they were a manager and people just don't. It's too easy. The barrier to entry is way too low to apply for your jobs and that's why you get such garbage and you have to rigorously screen and if you can have somebody in your office do it, it's not you. Amazing.
Speaker 1:And lastly, your best people are going to come as referrals from your best people, right, nobody wants to hire the friend of the friend, the friend of the employee. But, quite honestly, if you are building a great business, then you want your people going out and trying to recruit their friends or trying to recruit colleagues who are working across the V from them as a paralegal for a defense firm or something like that. Right, you want your people going. And it's harder for a marketing director, but you want your people to be going out and evangelizing for your firm and bringing people back. And our best people have always come as referrals from our people, and we pay a financial and monetary reward to anybody who brings in a friend, who applies for the job, goes through our process and then gets the job. And so that's, philosophically and tactically, how I think about going about hiring a marketing director.
Speaker 1:And the last thing that I'll tell you please, god, don't call your 24 year old new hire who just graduated from marketing college, from college with a marketing degree. Don't call your 24-year-old new hire who just graduated from marketing college, from college with a marketing degree. Don't call them a director of marketing. Don't call them your chief marketing officer. This person might be a great assistant. One day they might turn into a marketing director, but if you start them off with a director title, you're doing them a disservice. They need to earn that title and you're doing their next employer a disservice, right? We have had such inflation in job titles that it's really hard to tell who's actually done what, and it requires you to sit down with these people and go through. What do they actually know how to do? Because there are different skill sets. Your assistant is your doer. Your marketing director maybe is managing a handful of accounts but is doing, and maybe is managing a person who's doing. And then your chief marketing officer is actually doing very little. They're managing vendors or managing people in-house. And so please, if you are solo, do not do the disservice to your first marketing assistant by calling them a director. All right, that's it for today's Friday solo episode of Life Beyond the Briefs. I hope that you enjoyed this episode.
Speaker 1:If you're listening to this on Saturday or Sunday, I'm not in the country anymore. My wife and my family and I are taking off for Italy for three weeks. Episodes are still going to be coming out, but this is a dream that was hatched over Thanksgiving, like two years ago, when I had too much wine and declared that we were going to go to Italy for a month, and it didn't end up being a month, but it is going to be three weeks. We have a villa in Tuscany. We'll spend a couple of days in Florence. We'll spend a couple of days in Sorrento overlooking the sea, the Tyrian Sea. Tyrian Sea, it's not the Adriatic, it's on the other side of the island or the peninsula and then we'll wrap up in the Eternal City in Rome for a couple of days, and I will be back mid-July.
Speaker 1:And one of the things that I'm proudest of over the last couple of years is I've built the kind of firm that I can walk away from for three weeks. And am I going to check email? Yes. Am I going to check Filevine? Yes, but I'm not having a single client call and I'm not taking any remote depositions. So that's awesome, and my goal with this show is to help you get to where I am even faster, and so I very much appreciate that you're listening, and I would love to see you on October 23rd through 25th at the Great Legal Marketing Summit in Washington DC. Get your tickets at glmsummitcom and I will catch you on the flip side.
