Life Beyond the Briefs

The Young Lawyer's $500 Marketing Plan

• Brian Glass

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Most lawyers think growth starts with paid leads, slick branding, or a pricey SEO retainer. We take a different path. This episode walks through a lean $500 marketing stack designed for brand new attorneys and fresh law firms that want to become findable, credible, and convertible—fast. You’ll hear the exact steps to build proof of life online, create an offer that beats “free consultation,” and follow up like a pro without handing your client experience to an AI bot.

We start with the essentials: own your name and your firm’s name as domains, set up a professional email, and publish a no-frills, mobile-first, one-page website where every button works. Then we move to the channels that matter most for local discovery—claiming your Google Business Profile, choosing the right categories, writing a human description, and posting images that actually tell your story. You’ll also learn why consistent social handles matter, even if you’re not posting yet, and how a bare-minimum presence supports word-of-mouth referrals who inevitably check you online.

From there, we show you how to stand out with a niche lead magnet—a short, useful book that trades real value for permission-based follow-up. Price it high on Amazon, give it away free on your site, and capture email, phone, and mailing address to continue the conversation. We dive into follow-up that wins: short emails, quick calls, and personal Loom videos that acknowledge what prospects truly worry about—medical bills, car repairs, time off work—so they feel heard. Finally, we map a 30-day plan to gather Google reviews at moments of delight, repurpose them for credibility, and set your practice on a path to scalable, cost-efficient client acquisition.

If you’re ready to build a practice you actually like showing up to on Monday, this framework gives you momentum without burning cash. Subscribe, share with a lawyer friend who needs a clean start, and leave a review to tell us which step you’re taking first.

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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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SPEAKER_00:

Hello, my friends, and welcome into another 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 like showing up to on Monday. This is uh it's like mid-November now, and this is the first solo episode that I have that's coming out post-Great Legal Marketing Summit. Uh, so welcome back to me. It's been a busy fall. I attended, I think, four conferences this fall, including the one that we host. Uh, and then uh our conference, of course, went Thursday through Saturday. Dan Kennedy speak at a private lunch to our mastermind members on Saturday afternoon, and then I went out and ran Marine Corps Marathon on Sunday morning, and uh and then coached a soccer game on Sunday afternoon. It's been a busy fall for me, uh, and so the content that we that we've had coming out has been in the queue, and I have nothing in the queue uh tonight, this morning for you is I I record this now on November 17th for an episode that's gonna come out tomorrow morning. Life gets to all of us, even the ones who think that we're pretty good at planning things. So today's episode is gonna be the$500 marketing stack for brand new lawyers. Listen, it's um it's November. Virginia, uh, like every state, has a whole bunch of brand new licensed lawyers. And so if that's you, amazing. Congratulations on passing the bar. Congratulations on becoming one of us. Uh, and so this episode, I'm I'm gonna try to accomplish two things. I'm gonna accomplish what I would be doing if I were a brand new lawyer with no following whatsoever, just to kind of stake out my claim on little piece in the internet, even if I weren't a law firm owner, but I'm also gonna weave in what you should be doing as a new law firm owner. If you're somebody who's thinking about leaving your firm, if you've left the firm recently, uh, or if your marketing has been done entirely for you by an agency uh and you want to come back and do all of this grassroots stuff that we teach at Great Legal Marketing, all of this stuff can be done really in the span of a weekend if you rush at it uh over the course of a month, certainly if you were busy doing other things, and none of it really costs very much at all. Um, these are all of the baseline things that are properties that you own that aren't subject to the whims of the Google gods, although there's some Google marketing stuff in here or the Facebook gods, and it really doesn't cost you any money to implement. So the number one thing, number one thing that all lawyers have, even if your practice is entirely referral-based marketing, is you ought to have some proof of life online. Because even lawyers who are 65, 70, who who mean it when they say and are accurate when they say all of our cases come from word of mouth and none come from advertising, need to have some proof of life online because it's rare that somebody who is being asked to give a referral to a lawyer is giving out only one name. So you are probably one of at least two names, probably more like three names being given to a prospect, and your prospect is going and looking you up um online somewhere. And increasingly they're looking you up in multiple places. So at the very least, you should own your name, your law firm's name.com, right? Um that's like barrier to entry kind of stuff. But if I were a brand new lawyer, I would be buying my name uh just as a domain, you know, or first name.lastname as a domain. That's gonna be fairly cheap for most lawyers out there, even if I was working in somebody else's preface, I would I would be buying this. And the other thing that I feel like I shouldn't have to say, but I do have to say, it's like set up a branded email from that name. You don't do this if you're an employee at somebody else's firm. But if you're running your own, like set up a branded email at you know, Brian at Brianglass.com or whatever. I still see every once in a while somebody who's running a business, not often a law firm, but you know, chiropractor, physical therapist, whatever, with a Gmail or a Yahoo. I shouldn't have to say that, but I you know, if you're running on a Gmail or a Yahoo or Godforbid an AOL.com email address, like change that. That's pretty easy to change. And then if you're starting out, like there's no reason to go out and spend um$5,000 a month on SEO if this is the first thing that you're doing. And and in most markets,$5,000 a month isn't gonna get you anywhere on SEO. So build the cheapest, dirtiest, one-page mobile first website that you can find. Um, this is not in the vast majority of markets and the vast majority of practice areas. This is not where a new lawyer or a new law firm is gonna get its cases from. So we we just want to get minimum viable product up there and out there. We can come back and work on the SEO later. We can fix all the stuff. Like just get the bare minimum page up, make sure all the buttons on the page work, right? There's a contact button, make sure it actually works. Um, but that's all you need, right? Because all that we're doing is providing proof of life for somebody who's been given our name on the internet that we actually exist. Uh, and then, you know, if you want to be really fancy, like let's take a stab at having a call to action that is not schedule your free consultation, call it a case fit call, call it a strategy session, you know, maybe that's level 201 kind of stuff. But the website just needs to be proof of life online. The other things you should do, go out and claim all your profiles. This is something you can have a VA do. We want to have um a consistent name, address, phone number across all the profiles. You can get a company like yux.com, y-e-xt-t.com, to coordinate this for you. That's about, I think,$700 a year. So it kicks it outside of the$500 marketing stack for brand new lawyers. But you can have a VA do this for fairly cheap. Just go claim all the profiles you can claim, link them back to your website. There's some SEO value to that. It's not really why we're doing this. We're just making sure that people can find us in more places than one. Lastly, claim all your social media profiles, you know, with a consistent handle, right? Consistent handle. Uh mine is the Brian Glass across LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, TikTok. Um, a consistent name going across all your social media. Now, that doesn't mean you have to start creating social media for every single channel, but at least claim it. For now, we can come back and pick that stuff up later if we need to. All right, step number two, be findable where it matters, which is your Google business profile. I'm not going to spend very much time on this. Um, you need one. You need to claim it if you own a law firm. If you own a law firm and you haven't done that, I'd be shocked. Um, you know, there's all kinds of little things that you can do to improve your chances of getting found. There are better experts out there to tell you what those things are. Uh, I recommend talking to Will McCreight or Nalini Prasad of Blue Shark Marketing. They are excellent at this. Um, but choose categories, obviously, that we're actually practicing in. Like if you're an injury lawyer and you don't handle medical malpractice cases, don't say that you handle medical malpractice cases. That dilutes your brand. Just talk about the cases that you actually practice in. Add a short description that sounds like a human being wrote it. List the service areas, the states, the counties where you practice, and make it a goal to post um consistently. Like you can use your Google Business profile in the same way to post updates that you do on social media, on Instagram or on Facebook if you're posting images there. It is not hard to also post images on your Google Business profile. I like having uh and and you should look at here's here's the reverse engineering hack. Look at what everybody else who's at the top of the Google Business Profile listings in your vicinity is doing, and at least do that, right? Do they have headshots of themselves? Yes. Um do they have images with some words on them? Probably. Um, is it just crappy images of your office and furniture? Probably not, right? And so look at what everybody else is doing and at least do that, and then try to add some more interesting things. Again, not gonna spend a whole lot of time on this because there are more uh knowledgeable experts out there, but like duh, have your business Google business profile. Number three, now this is where we get into the stuff that we we teach a lot at Great Legal Marketing is everybody else's call to action is gonna be like, call me to discuss your case or find out what your case is worth, or free consultation, or we don't get paid if we don't get some money for you, right? Um and so we all we have to do here is be a little bit different forever and ever and ever. The Ben Glass Law call to action was before you sign any forums, before you talk to any lawyers, get our free book about your car crash, right? Um, the the speed to lead has made that less attractive for most people, but there is a cohort of people for whom calling a lawyer is not why they're on the internet looking at personal interview lawyer websites. Like there still are people out there who are actually trying to learn how to do this on your own, their own. And you want to have some opportunity to feed them. Now, I think the book, the lead magnet, serves really one of three purposes, right? Number one, we have this thing on hand so that we can give it to people whose case we don't want to work on, right? Every injury lawyer gets a call about the property damage case. We don't want to take the property damage case because there's no margin and the client is never happy, right? But we want to provide some value to that person. So we have explained the thing that we explained in 700 consultations in a book. Now we have that book to give them. So number one, you have some deliverable to give people who are calling who you do not actually want to serve. Number two, you have authority building, right? You are the guy or the girl who wrote a book. And if you are in the great legal marketing circle, you look around, you go, well, everybody has written a book. But if you talk to people who are outside of that circle, actually being an author still carries the weight of authority. Um, I don't know. Surprises me every once in a while, people are like, oh, you've written a book. Like it's not that hard. Um, but people who haven't written a book don't recognize that it's actually not that hard, right? And so this holds us up as the authority who crafted the um seven steps to get a divorce in your state for military spouses. Like, pick a niche. I don't know. Um pick something that people will actually be interested in in Googling. Uh, this will improve your SEO on your website, even though, as I said, that's not necessarily the goal, starting out first. Um, but it holds you up as the authority. And number three, the book for people who are actually shopping for information. And I promise you, there are still people who are actually still shopping for information. The book is our ability, it gives us the ability to tell them that this shit is actually really hard, and you probably do need a lawyer, right? Um and it gives you another opportunity to talk to them in your own voice and without selling directly, because people hate to be sold, but they love to buy, convince them all of the reasons that you are the person, the right person for their case. Because in many, many markets, there still is nobody that's traded value for attention in this lead magnet. Now, here's the thing about the lead magnet. I see guys write this and then post the book on Amazon, right? Well, Amazon doesn't give you all of the contact information for that person when they buy. You want the Amazon book, if you're gonna put it on Amazon, make it some outrageous price. Make it$79.99, right? Make it free on your website. Make it a digital download on your website if need be. I like to have it as a physical format so that I can request your physical address so that I have permission to put you on my mailing list, which we're gonna talk about a little bit later in the episode. But what we're doing here is we're trading something for the book. It's not just a guide that you can download without giving me something in exchange. At the bare minimum, it's your email address. Love it to be your email, your phone number, and your physical address so that I can continue to market to you. And then we're gonna follow up like a pro without becoming a robot. The new thing uh in law is having AI do all of your follow-up and even have AI do your intake. I think that's a mistake. I think that people more and more in 2025 want and need connection. There is no, at least not in 2025, there's no good AI voice bot that does this very well. And so this needs to be done by a human being in your office, ideally, virtual assistant if need be, right? But we lose so much more business to follow up than we ever do to our competition. Somebody has already raised their hand, they've already given you their email address and their phone number in exchange for the information that you're giving them. This small lead magnet to begin with, right? We're following up after that's um been delivered to say, number one, hey, did you get it? Hey, do you have any questions that are outside of the guide? Hey, um, especially and when you were starting out, your commodity, your greatest, your greatest asset is that you weren't you have time because you don't have a ton of clients, right? And so you can be the one making these calls and finding out like the intake calls are such golden opportunities to find out what your clients actually want. In the injury space, do they do they want more money? Sometimes, right? But usually they have concerns about medical bills, usually they have concerns about getting their cars fixed, usually they have concerns about getting getting back to work. Usually money is like two, three, four, five down the list. And it's even further down the list for good cases, right? Because them they're worried about getting their health back. And so this is your opportunity to learn what all of your prospects actually care about. And so either you can do it if you're brand new, if you have some staff, have your have your staff do it, right? And and just following up, providing value every step of the way. And listen, if somebody tells you that they don't want to talk to you anymore, stop stop talking to them, right? It's not that hard. Um, but we can't just put these books and these um lead magnets out there into the ether and hope that somebody number one reads it and then remembers us and then calls us. We have to do the follow-up to push them towards becoming a client. Next step, and this one doesn't cost anything but your time, is getting social proof. So most jurisdictions allow experience-based reviews that don't promise results. You know this. We know to ask for Google reviews. You can repurpose these in social media graphics, you can repurpose them on your website. Your mileage may vary depending on your jurisdiction, and I won't I won't pretend that I know um the restrictions in all 50 states, but most jurisdictions will allow you to take somebody else's words for an actual client and then use them in your marketing. And so the key here is you know, you don't have to wait till the case is over. Again, especially if you're a brand new lawyer, don't have to wait until the case is over to ask for the review. We tell this to our team all the time. The best time to ask for a review is anytime somebody has had a positive experience with you. Um and what I tell my team to do is now I'm levering leveraging the team, is like, you know, anytime somebody sends you a over-the-top thank you email, or says you've been really easy to work with or whatever. Hey, that's that's that's amazing. What is really helpful to me in my day-to-day with my boss is if you can go on Google and say a couple of nice things about me. I like, Brian likes um as the owner when they talk about the team, because I don't want to be personally involved in every case. I can't be personally involved in every case in the stage of business where we are now. And so I want them to talk uh reviews to talk about the team so then when people call and they're talking to somebody on my team, they've seen that information out there before and they know that they're gonna be well taken care of. And by the way, if you were brand, brand, brand new, again, check your jurisdiction and check Google's rules, but um you can have people in your network leave you a review as to your qualifications as a lawyer, right? Don't have to be a client of yours necessarily to leave you a review as a lawyer. So what can you do in your in the next 30 days? Like you can go out in the next 30 minutes and buy a couple of the domains with your names on them. In the next couple of days, you can set up that branded email if you don't already have it. Um, and you can work with ChatGPT just over the weekend to create a lead magnet. Like I haven't done this, but off the top of my head, it would look something like I'm trying to generate an eight-page lead magnet for my law firm that does blah, blah, blah. Ask me enough questions until you understand what exactly I'm looking for, then ask me questions one by one from a content perspective so that we can populate the lead magnet in my own voice and just let it rip, right? Within a 90-minute conversation with your computer, you're gonna have this eight-page lead magnet and you can probably slap it into Canva, make it look a little bit prettier, print a couple of print versions, and you're off and running. Um set up your follow-up machine. You can load up an eight seven-day email sequence, uh, preferably with some human touch follow-ups in the middle. And again, if you're brand new, like take the time, just record people looms when they uh when they have reached out to your firm. Hey, Brian, I got your my request for the lead magnet. You're not gonna call a lead magnet. I got your request for the book. I'm shipping that in the mail to you right now. If you have some questions about your case in particular, I'd love to talk to you. If you could shoot that as a loom, get it over to them in a link and watch your uh conversion rates skyrocket. And then last thing, just email 20 people in your network asking, um, asking them to go and leave you a review for you as a lawyer. Again, check with the compliance rules in your state about whether you can use that in your marketing in the vast vast majority of states you are allowed to. All right. What can you completely and utterly ignore for right now? Fancy branding. You don't have to do anything fancy. You don't have to have a multi-page website. You don't, you certainly don't need an SEO retainer. God, do not spend money on paid leads. This is the first thing you're doing in marketing. Um, none of those things are bad necessarily. All of those things work. They're just not the first thing to do. Right now, what we're working on doing is building a system that gets leads in the door, gets us conversions, and lets us build a cost-efficient practice at scale, especially in the early days. So you don't need permission to show up every day and do this work. You don't need a budget to uh to do this work. What you need is a clean page, findable profile, hopeful guide, a little bit of uh human touch follow-up. All of this can be put together in a week, maybe a month, and um, and doesn't have to be you operating. Ideally, you know, if you have the budget, you can get a VA, get somebody to operate this stuff for you. Amazing. So if this kind of stuff resonated with you and you think it'd be helpful in your practice, I want to tell you about an event that we are putting on in February. It will be February 10th, I believe. Not gonna edit this part out. Nope, wrong. February 11th, Wednesday, February 11th, in my office in Fairfax, Virginia. I'm hosting an analog marketing boot camp, primarily aimed at lawyers who are uh doing less than a million dollars in revenue. You'll see a bunch of that copy on the website. Um when we get the sales page all put together. But really, this is for anybody who's trying to improve their cost per client acquisition. So the best uh, because we don't have the website all the way built out just yet. Cart before the horse kind of thing. Um if you're interested in coming uh on February 11th to the one day analog marketing boot camp, email me, Brian at greatlemarketing.com. I'll get you on the short list to get the information as soon as it is ready. And that's it for this week. Catch you guys later.

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Brian Glass

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