Life Beyond the Briefs

The Simple Marketing Tool Most Law Firms Ignore | David Vicknair

• Brian Glass

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Most law firm marketing feels like a treadmill. Post more. Track more. Spend more. Hope the numbers behave.

David Vicknair is playing a different game.

He’s in one of the most competitive PI markets in the country, he’s three years into TV, and he still keeps coming back to the same “boring” foundation that most firms skip. Build your list. Stay in touch. Be memorable. Not with more noise, but with consistency.

In this episode, David tells the real story behind what’s working for his firm in New Orleans. We talk about the surprising world of TV advertising, why you have to commit for the long haul, and why dabbling is basically a donation to the market leaders.

Then we get into the move that makes a lot of lawyers squirm: a print newsletter and the effort it takes to manage it well. Not because it’s flashy, but because it compounds. It keeps you top of mind with people who already know you, trust you, and will send you the next call when it matters.

You’ll also hear David’s take on “attribution disease,” why perfect tracking is impossible, and the simple way he thinks about marketing health without going insane. Plus, a fun detour into organic content that doesn’t take itself too seriously, because nobody is searching for “seven things to do after a crash” until they’re actually in one.

If you want marketing that feels steadier, simpler, and more owned, this episode will click.

Connect with David

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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.

Want to connect with Brian?

Follow Brian on Instagram: @thebrianglass
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Reframing Costs As Investments

SPEAKER_02

You can't and you know, I'm I'm just as guilty of that as any other lawyer. I mean, I my stupid lawyer brain was there at one point, right? Because you start to uh you have to shift your mindset because uh for me it was always like, Oh, I'm gonna really spend it's like a cost. I'm gonna spend twenty five hundred bucks to send another person between registration fees, a flight, maybe more than that, meals, rooms, all that stuff. It's really an investment because what are you what is the loss opportunity cost of a high level person who has had their skills rapidly developed and their eyes open for the organization when they come back? You just shift it, just like I was giggling one day. I saw a post you had. It's like running a law firm and owning a law firm is just like looking at your average fee and convincing yourself over and over again this next thing you're gonna spend money on is gonna get you it's gonna cost less than that or get you more of that. You know, it's like you do have to shift your mindset a bit and just understand that it's an investment in the future of the organization.

Meet David And The TV Trip World

SPEAKER_00

Welcome back to Life Beyond the Reefs, the number one podcast for lawyers choosing to live lives of their own design and the kind of practices they like showing up to on Monday. It is gonna be hard for me to not call you Scott Vicnair through this through this podcast, my friend David, who is the only lawyer, who has the travel schedule and Instagram travel influencer vibes who I'm jealous of. So, David, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me.

SPEAKER_02

A lot of what you see is pseudo work because a lot of what you see is mastermind meetings and specific conferences.

SPEAKER_00

So uh not all pleasure, but well, but but you introduced me recently to the idea that if you do enough TV advertising, they take you on TV trips also.

SPEAKER_02

That's a truth story. Yeah. So a lot of TV stations, if as an incentive to clients, they will have a trip. Uh, we have a couple stations down here who do client trips. One of them does it every year, and one of them do it every two years. And so it's one of those things where the TV station will pay for your flights, pay for your costs on the trip, lodging, a lot of your dining and cocktails, or if you don't drink mocktails, everything. It's kind of like an all-inclusive type of trip. And it's, you know, most TV stations I've learned over the last two to three years are all owned by four or five or six huge publicly traded companies, whether it's Gray Communications, Nextor, and that's been in the news a bit because of the anybody who's paying attention, this merger issue between whether or not Nexar would be allowed to merge with I forgot the other company. In any event, this is like an incentive program that a lot of them build in for clients to continue to invest money with them, spend more money.

SPEAKER_00

It's crazy. There's whole whole worlds that you know I don't even know anything about. So thank you for introducing me to all of that.

SPEAKER_02

So you're down in either three years ago, so you know it's uh You're down in New

Mardi Gras Culture And Court Slowdowns

SPEAKER_02

Orleans.

SPEAKER_00

That's right. And uh we're recording this a couple days after Mardi Gras rapped. So we were talking before we got on about like the city of New Orleans during Mardi Gras week and how everything grinds to a halt. So for the uninitiated, tell tell me about the run-up to Mardi Gras.

SPEAKER_02

Well, the run-up to Mardi Gras is usually about a month and it's kind of like a slow build. So there's parades which start four to five weeks out from Mardi Gras Day. You're one of two kind of, or you're really kind of maybe three profiles of Mardi Gras people down here. You're there's one profile where you're like, you start going to parades all the way at the beginning, and you're like, I'm all in from the beginning, five weeks out, until Mardi Gras Day. The second bucket, these are my buckets I just made up in my head, by the way. The second bucket is the second bucket is you're not going like this is me if I'm staying in Mardi Gras. I'm not starting five or six weeks out. That's too much, and I honestly don't have time for that crap. So I'm starting on Muses, which is the third, or maybe I'll go to Cru de Vue. I love Cru de Vue, which is a satirical French quarter parade, which like is just hilarious and has like satire, all the floats are satire on politics. So that's like the one exception for me. Like I will not I'll go to that before Muses, and maybe I'll go to another parade or two before Muses. But that bucket of people, you may go to Cruz de Vue, you may go to maybe Barkas, the dog parade in the French Quarter, maybe you go to one or two others, but you're really committed Thursday through Tuesday. Some people call it Deep Gras. I mean, that's like a meme that became popular five years ago on Mardi Gras. We're in Deep Gras now. It's like Thursday of Muses through Tuesday. And so if you're in that bucket, you're like, those are my five or six days. I'm committing to participating in Mardi Gras on those five or six days. And then there's a third bucket who says, forget all of you, I'm going skiing in Colorado.

SPEAKER_00

Okay. Fair. Fair. And basically all of the law firms they shut down during deep gras? For the most part. What about court? Is court still happening?

SPEAKER_02

Not really. I mean, let's be honest. It's kind of like down here we have our judges who the summers are sparse.

SPEAKER_00

There's a big You have you have that weird civil system, right?

SPEAKER_02

We do.

SPEAKER_00

What's it called?

SPEAKER_02

All right. So we have the Napoleonic Code and the civil, it's allegedly different than all of you. It is. We so we're supposed to be a statutory codal jurisdiction. But if we're gonna be honest, like we do have statutes and we are governed candidly,

Civil Code Versus Common Law Reality

SPEAKER_02

like first come the statute, first come the comments to the statutes. That is supposed to control our laws, but we have very we have, I think, changed in over the decades, and we have so much case law and jurisprudence now that we, in my opinion, have become more akin to a common law jurisdiction just with different languages. So, you know, because you go in front of a judge and it's like, hey judge, like this is really simple. Code Article 1869 governs, which is like a two-centence code article. They want to see the cases, like they want to see how the Court of Appeal has applied it, they want to see what the Supreme Court has said on it if they have opined in this particular um statute and how that may or may not apply to specific facts in your case. And so, in some ways, we have a lot of commonalities to a common law jurisdiction. We just use different language. I'll say fee simple. I don't even know what that is.

SPEAKER_00

Got it. So if you get arrested on the first Thursday of Deep Gras and there's no court, are you stuck? So Is this a Shia LaBeouf question? Uh is it really? I have no idea. Have you not seen the news about Shia LaBeouf?

SPEAKER_02

No. After this show, you gotta look that up. He has gotten himself in a lot of trouble, and he was arrested in the deep gras, and he attacked people at a bar I actually like quite a bit. It's in the Marini called the Orbor. They play like movies on the TVs and the bar. It's kind of hilarious while you're in the bar and there's music playing. In any event,

Shia LaBeouf Deep Gras Arrest

SPEAKER_02

he was made a lot of derogatory comments and attacked a few patrons. I didn't even know that we had a transformer who was living amongst our mists. Apparently, he has family down here and has line is from here a bit, and so he had has a house down here, but he got in trouble, he got arrested, and he got out very, very quickly. And so that's a controversial topic going on in the news down here right now. Is how did Shia LaBeouf get out of jail in the middle of Deep Gras that quickly? And was he let out too quickly? Because shortly thereafter he was pictured parading through Bourbon Street with what appeared to be his oral or his return on reconnaissance bond and criminal tickets in his mouth, allegedly.

SPEAKER_00

Mardi Gras. Right. Um I I I want to segue in it and talk about marketing.

Content Strategy Beyond Legal Tips

SPEAKER_00

Are have you uh uh some of them? There's some New Orleans lawyer uh TikTok where he was made 1700 videos explaining uh all of Mardi Gras. Have you guys uh at Scott Vignair embraced that and made content around it? Or are you talking to people in New Orleans who like, duh, we already know all this stuff, you don't have to explain it?

SPEAKER_02

We've we've had some fun. We started to try to like I guess I'm always in this weird juxtaposition with social media content as far as like organic content that you put out. Is on the one hand, like I think it's helpful to have videos that go out both on Instagram, YouTube, whatever it is, which are substantive and actually address things that people may be looking for and interested in if they want to hire you, if you're trying to, now that we know social media to a certain extent is being pulled into the AI algorithm and different search queries and stuff like that, like I think it's important to put that stuff out. But high level, it's like who gives a crap about like seven things I should do after I get in a car accident. Like nobody really gives a crap about that until they get in a car accident. So we are trying to have some more fun and put more trends into a lot of our content and do that type of stuff. You know the smallest example of others is I don't know how they convinced me to do this silly dancing meme two months ago, but I was like, eh, what the heck, I'll do it, and grabbed one of the case managers I knew I would do it with me. And it was like, I guess they showed me between TikTok and everything else that it went on, a little ticky talk, that it was like 40,000 views of me looking like a ridiculous human being dancing in the lobby. So what does that do for the law firm? I don't know. I mean, I guess it shows a little bit of vulnerability, a little bit of fun, a little bit of us in a different context that may make us more approachable if a client is considering hiring us if they're injured and they need us. And so I think that's a component of it is you gotta have some fun and not take yourself so seriously. We do, and one of the things we started doing with that is like every holiday, we're like three things to stay safe this Halloween, and then like you flip over and it's like nothing to do with safety, it's complete joke and ridiculous commentary that I find to be funny. I think some people might find to be funny, some people might

Social For Retention And Recall

SPEAKER_02

not. But we're trying to take it some of the social organic stuff that we do in a bit more of a like a light-hearted and fun manner. And that I guess for every lawyer, there's a bit of a some go to the extreme, right? That's all they do, some don't do it at all. I think the answer is somewhere in the middle, like most things in life.

SPEAKER_00

And and you guys have done a good job with your organic local. I know for a while you're doing pizza reviews and and maybe iced coffee reviews and and there was there was something else. It's just you and Brad out in the community um engaging with local businesses, which I think is is fantastic. When I don't think anybody stumbles onto a page that's seven things to do after your car crash and actually cares, right? Just like you said. Because if you weren't in a crash, you know, last night, you're not looking for that kind of content anyway. But I do think the interesting character content, like the dancing, is it's really actually, David, I think it's marking more to your current clients than it is to anybody perspective, right? Because you're giving your people a taste of your personality outside of what you're doing in the courtroom, and it gives them the ability to to remember you three years after their case is over, which is you know, in a world where you know you're dealing with somebody who had a crash in 2018, most people can't tell you who represented them for their crash in 2018. But at least you've given them by social media something to remember you by.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, so I I think that's a really good take, and probably true to a certain extent. I also think, you know, one of the things you hit on is you know, there's a place for all that stuff, right? Like you want it to live in your YouTube, you want it to live on your page, like you want to be an authority, so there's a place for it. But I think that ultimately for me, maybe we're hitting the current clients with that a bit and they're having some fun with it. I think that's a good point. But for me, I always go back to the foundations of what I learned in

List Building As The Marketing Core

SPEAKER_02

great legal marketing. It's like the real place that I stay in front of my current former clients is through our paper program, our digital program and building our list. We are list builders first, foremost, always. I think of myself as like a little construction worker, like building the road. It's like I'm always building my list, and I live in that world. Our marketing team kind of lives in that world, and that to me is the best place to stay top of mind and in front of the people who we already have built a relationship with and understand what we're about and know our brand.

SPEAKER_00

I love that from a guy who's who started this by talking about TV advertising trips, right? So you're telling me you got more than 5,000 people on your print newsletter list now that goes out once a month. Four pages, eight pages, what are you sending?

SPEAKER_02

It's four pages, and I'm really proud of that. I told my I sent a message uh earlier this morning when we got, we do, I was mentioning to you before the show, we do a keep audit once or twice a year. And I just want to know to be able to chat with Brad Scott like high level.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02

Where we are we double checking, because by the way, something's not done correctly every single audit. Every time. Is this list opted in? We're missing these 400 people. I'm like, that's kind of a big deal.

SPEAKER_00

I know that I know Tiffany, who used to be our marketing director and was at Great League Marketing before she went out and started her own fractional CMO business, is listening to this. And she probably has told you about the time that our marketing assistant ran the list incorrectly and moved the address line one like one Excel line below the names or moved the city one Excel line below the sheets, street, and we got every single one of our 3,000 newsletters returned. Oh my gosh.

SPEAKER_02

It was painful. She didn't tell me that. Uh, you know, look, humans are gonna human, we're gonna make mistakes, and so we audit things to ensure that we catch stuff like that, right? But uh in that process, it also gives you me like a high-level view of like, you know, we're constantly working on list building, adding people to the list, how far have we come? And I I don't have the exact number in front of me two years ago, but I want to say we've added 2,500, 2600 addresses every um in the last two

Print Newsletters, Audits, And Ops

SPEAKER_02

years, which, you know, in legal, uh a challenge we have is we can't just go acquire addresses, we can't just go do these things that maybe other businesses and different types of industry can. In our profession and our industry and our businesses, we have to have people opt in either through a giveaway or other types of things that we're running or being current and former clients or people we have relationships with. And so it is hard to build that list and it has to be intentionally planned and you have to do certain things and you have to prioritize it. And it's a weird thing to me, to be honest with you, Brian. And I'm friends with a lot of these people, and I have gotten to know a lot of different people in different parts of the country who have firms who do brand marketing. And when you talk about like that piece of the budget, which is a fraction of the cost of other parts of a robust marketing program, it's just very few people allocate money to it, and I just don't understand it, but it's not my job to convince them that they don't they're wrong.

SPEAKER_00

My my suspicion is that it has to do with the amount of effort and not the amount of money that it takes to manage that list and to do to do the audit every once in a while. Because you're looking at a list of 5,200 people and you know, every now and then trying to make a decision of who comes off, right? Who who has who has died or who you know or who has moved and we can't get a new address, or is it like a lean time, okay, whose name do we just not recognize anymore, right? There's a lot of human power, and and especially as the firm grows as yours has grown, there's not just one person who has that institutional knowledge of like, no, this is our super referrer, right? And so that that can be mentally ch much much more challenging than like let's just spend another 15% over here. Yeah, let's go buy some more LSA.

SPEAKER_02

Yes, my counter to that would be when you look percentage-wise at the cost of different funnels, whether

Why Firms Underinvest In Lists

SPEAKER_02

it's uh TV, radio, or billboard, the three brand funnels I think of are other funnels, digital funnels, PPC, LSA, a very low acquisition cost um method. You look at all these funnels, comparably speaking, the percentage of money that you have to spend on print is pennies.

SPEAKER_00

Oh, I agree with you completely.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah. And so the margin, like to me, I guess you never even have to worry about like I shouldn't say you never have to worry about it, but like if your biggest problem is, hey, we're sending weight, we have too many people on our list, you have a good problem.

SPEAKER_00

Mm-hmm. How do you if I called your firm and I was doing an intake initially, what is what kind of questions are you asking to screen for attribution? That's a really good question.

SPEAKER_02

They're asking, they're doing the best they can to find out where they came from and how the person heard about us. And they we have a great consultant. We work with we've been with Carrie James for about a year and a half. There's other good people in that space. Uh, hear nothing but good things as well about legal intake pros. And so Carrie's really worked hard with us for a year and a half to two years with our new our intake team on training, call listening. These are weekly things that we do. And we brought my new marketing director, Whitney, on board. One of the best things about bringing her on board was she also was able to manage our intake teams and she's got eight or nine years experience doing both. So training is a constant thing that they're working on. But at the end of the day, attribution isn't possible. I mean, like, we kind of just dump TV, like we get TV attribution, but we just dump it into the Google world and just kind of visualize

Intake, Training, And Attribution Reality

SPEAKER_02

it all in that world because it's one of those things where the person says, Oh, yeah, we found you on Google, but they may have clicked on us or looked for us in Google because they've been seeing the TVs for a year and they finally needed us because they were hurt or they had a family member who was hurt or whatever it is. So I do think, and I probably can't say this enough, I think lawyers in the world that you and me and others live in suffer from attribution disease. At the end of the day, it's like take your marketing budget, divide it by your signed cases after your drops, you have a true cost per case, you apply it to what your average fee is, and that will tell you the health of your business very simply. Like everything else is noise.

SPEAKER_00

And then the only, you know, the only reason really what that you would need to know that is to compare it to somebody else's.

SPEAKER_02

Sure. Yeah, I mean, if you if you're if you're measuring year over year, if you're looking at, you know, if I spent $100 last year and that got me 10 cases, and then I spent $200 this year and that got me 20 cases at its simplest form, you know parts of your program are working. Um, and you can test, like, you know, there's certain things that we have direct attribution on, right? Like LSAs, PPC. You can call true. We have calls, we have like, I guess, 7,000 call tracking numbers now, thanks to our a lot of things to our good friend Tiffany. She's been an incredible piece of our growth and putting a lot of this infrastructure in place, but not 7,000, a lot of call tracking numbers. So it's like we track everything we can and we can get a good sense of a lot of things, but some things you just can't. I mean, and at the end of the day, like you can you can track referrals. We love tracking that. We usually between attorney referral, former client, word-of-mouth referral last year, we were around 30%, which I was very proud of and happy of on maybe 560 new cases. But, you know, I'm always like, we need to get to 40% referral because I think the bigger your referral percentage is, it's a a a a high-level indica of what type of hospitality and experience are you providing to the client, and what is your reputation by and large from a brand perspective with the consumers in your market?

SPEAKER_00

160 new cases. That's I stopped listening when you said

Cost Per Case And Health Metrics

SPEAKER_00

that number. Um That's uh what's that, 40, 45 a month? Is that is that um I know that uh Brad has the estate planning practice and we'll talk about that in a minute. But the 560, is that just the uh just the car crash injury side?

SPEAKER_02

That's right.

SPEAKER_00

And are you doing are you doing I don't know, SSDI? Uh it is just single event injury.

SPEAKER_02

Single event, mostly premises, MVA, some maritime. We have maritime industry uh down here. And we do a bit of comp, not much at all. Really just like cases where we can do bulk settlements because we don't charge on the TTDI interim benefits. We don't have a full comp program, nor are we interested in building that out. But they we do have a comp case that'll come in and the clients getting benefits, but it's like more of a they need guidance and helping potentially resolve it long like in a bulk settlement. Um, and so we'll do those, but generally that's 95 to a 98% single event cases. How long have you been on TV? This is the year three. So we started in the beginning of 2023.

SPEAKER_00

I'm I'm I've always I'm I'm not sure I've ever asked this question of anybody that's done it. When you started doing TV, was it because you got a big uh a big case in, or did you start investing before the money was there?

SPEAKER_02

Well, that's a really good question.

SPEAKER_00

And in fact, what was the what was the step up to the TV? Because it is a huge uh a huge monthly investment, month after month

New Orleans: A Brutally Competitive DMA

SPEAKER_00

after month. And from what I hear, not doing TV, six months really before you start to see any traction at the earliest.

SPEAKER_02

If you do it well. And it's a significant, so you know, I guess the bet the easiest answer was I was reading uh maybe three years ago, You Can't Teach Hungry by John Morgan. And I was toying around with TV, we were thinking about it, and we ran like a test campaign on OTT back in 2022, which I don't count. It was the worst commercial ever. I had no idea what I was doing. It was like vegetable lasagna. It was bad. It was like we're lawyers and we were like walking on a frickin' levee, and it was a terrible idea. Anyways, uh, you know, that was fifty thousand dollars I took in putting a dumpster and burn. But in any event, um, it got me. I don't view it that way because that got me on my first TV trip. And on that TV trip, coincidentally, I just became a really good question asker and listener and started poking around at a lot of the agencies that were on that trip and spending time at dinners and cocktails at happy hour with TV reps and things like that. And I got to collect a bunch of information and find out who I thought had good information and who didn't. And once I siphled through all that, I could really get a picture of who I needed to talk to more and learn more from. And that kind of led me to the jump back in 2023 to going on there. And so that, along with reading um the book, just in my mind, I was like, this is an 18 to 24 month commitment. And I, in my mind, have spending this number of dollars, which is an incomprehensible amount of money, uh, in in just a single vacuum like that. But I'm like, I'm not changing my mind, I'm not wavering. Like I told my team back in 2023 at their state of the firm at the beginning of the year, like all the chips are going in at the middle of the table. This is it. We're doing this. Um, and there have been to answer your next question, if it's coming, there have been many months where I'm Like yeah,

Going All‑In On TV And Staying On

SPEAKER_02

but I'm kind of like a once I'm in, I'm in type of person. And and I don't think to do it well, you can not be that be any other way. And there's a lot of people in various industries, not just legal, who go on, they go off. They go on, they go off. They put their toe in a little bit and then get out. And I just think, at least in my market, which is probably the most competitive PI market in the country, there is no way I we could have penetrated the market like we have from a brand perspective, without there's some other things that we did as a piece of the campaign, but we had to be committed, had to stay committed, and we have never gone off.

SPEAKER_00

What makes New Orleans so competitive?

SPEAKER_02

Well, Morris is here, and so Morris Bart, for those who don't know, was the second person on TV after Bates versus Arizona in the country. And so Morris has been a staple of the PI brand world for 40 plus years being on TV. So he was in at the beginning, right? He's huge, and then Dudley DeBeauger is huge.

SPEAKER_00

Right, that's right.

SPEAKER_02

Gordon McKernan, probably not as big as Morris, but also huge uh in Baton Rouge, which is a joining market, came into New Orleans at the beginning of this year or beginning of last year in a massive way. And we also have in that kind of tier of big marketing spenders, uh a guy named Ed Womack, who was has been on TV for 25 years. Collectively, between those four, you're probably talking in this DMA, so the Southeastern DMA, somewhere between, I don't know, twenty to twenty-five million dollars is my best estimate in brand spend. And so not all TV, you know, maybe ten to twelve million on TV between those four. And so it's just a lot of lot of comp competition. That's all it is. A lot of people who are ingrained players in that area down here and who've been for there forever. And there's new entrants, there's nibblers, they call them, they come in, they leave. Um, and so it's just that's a big piece of it. The other piece of it is just in the New Orleans metro area. I think somebody gave

Brand Mix Without Billboards Or Radio

SPEAKER_02

me the statistic. It's something like 15,000 hail, storm, rain, 15,000 MVAs in the metro region a year. So some infrastructure issues, some bad drivers, a lot of collisions, a lot of competition. It's a little bit of all that cool.

SPEAKER_00

Mm-hmm. It's funny because all you know, as you rattle off those names, I'm familiar with those names. I I w I would not have tracked them back to New Orleans. Uh I don't know why. When I think hyper-competitive market, I think California and I think Atlanta. Um maybe it's just those are just the circles that I kind of know people from. Um big ass country, lots of big ass law firms.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, a hundred percent. I mean, if you if you it and there's some list out there which will like rank like the top ten most competitive DMAs, you usually see New Orleans and Baton Rouge on there. And then really I've I've come to that conclusion listening to Mickey Love a bit, who works closely with Dudley de Boisier. And you know, Mickey described Dudley de Boisure and Gordon are really based in Baton Rouge and they came into New Orleans. So this isn't technically

NIL Deals As Brand Support

SPEAKER_02

their home market, but it's a joining. I mean, it's it's right next to each other. The TV market and the brand market is right next to each other. So they came into New Orleans and Mickey describes it as the most competitive. So yeah, not everybody does, but everybody knows thinks of Vegas is super competitive, California, Atlanta, of course. But whether it's the most or the fourth or the fifth mo fifth most, in any of those markets, like from my perspective, whether you're if you're in Atlanta, LA, if you're gonna go into a brand medium, like and you think you're gonna make a difference or feel it if you nibble at the edges, I just think you're fooling yourself.

SPEAKER_00

Mm-hmm. And and like I said, uh earlier, you guys are doing all the things all the time. You know, you have uh you have TV. I assume you have billboards. None. No oh billboards uh not a thing in New Orleans, or you're elected not to play in that? They're very much a thing. Okay. All right. So we're not we're the billboards, the only thing you're not doing. Um we have a podcast. We're not doing radio, so we're not on radio. We're not doing radio. Um but you've you've done all of um all of like kind of the newer you you know, you wouldn't call it rogue, um, but but the grassroots stuff. Like you guys have done the project backpack, you've done name it, you were one of the first firms that I saw that was doing name image likeness deals. Um so tell me about like how the success is that is that uh almost a charitable giveaway thing? You find somebody who's a track star at Tulane and you give them five hundred bucks and they're happy, or like or do you expect that when all their friends are in a crash they're gonna remember you and come to you? How does that one work?

SPEAKER_02

Okay, so for for NIO, let me just say I had one point before I get to NIO on it. And um, is the way I thought of this before we went to TV or any brand medium is the law firm has certain foundations, right? And the digital presence, your GBPs, your reviews, your website strength, the things that you can do digitally, and the things that you can do foundationally, whether it be community marketing, building your list, having that all, those systems in place, it takes a lot of time and effort, attention to detail and focus. And so

Content That Puts People First

SPEAKER_02

building that foundation, I spent a year, two years, three years building the foundation before we went on to TV. Because I watched enough lawyers do the stupidest thing, which is the opposite, which is like they hit a big case and they throw a bunch of TV commercials up because it's easy and not much friction and it's exciting and not boring like the other stuff. And that's in my mind the reverse way to do it. Like you build the foundation before you try to build a brand because the foundation supports the brand. They work together, right? When NIL, it really is simply number one, it's fun and it's good content. And number two, I had been donating some money to my Alma Mata, a good bit of money to the athletic department. And when this came about, I'm like, you know, I don't like there's nothing that gets my marketing flags going that this is great, right? Like being a sponsor on the banner at the stadium or any of this stuff, right? I'm like, I could spend way less money, directly put it in the pockets of kids who this money has a significant impact on that feels good, have a lot of fun with it, have good content. But most importantly, I see it as a brand support device because we're penetrating micro segments of our market that are already being hit by our television commercials, that maybe they have a friend who has a friend who works here or they had a case with us. And I'm really trying to build with everybody in my market a parasocial relationship where they're seeing me on multiple mediums and multiple ways, and that is making us more memorable. They're knowing what Scott Dignary is, they're understanding our values, they're being educated on what the firm is about. And this is a small way of doing that because we're penetrating that social market. Like everybody's got a phone, all right? Their phone is a TV, and we don't always, as lawyers, think about it that way, but it is. And what better way to penetrate their focus and them see our brand very slightly, other than supporting a kid from their community

Two Practice Groups, One Trust

SPEAKER_02

who's never had an NILD or an offer or who never thought they would. And typically it's going to be athletes who are from our market. So we have at least, you know, we don't have the resources, the time to dig through every single one of their followers and know who it's from. But, you know, most of their followers we think will be from our market, and it's just another way for us to be in front of them in a positive and a good way.

SPEAKER_00

At a really high level, like what's the structure of how you pick the athlete and then what you are getting in exchange for your whatever the $500,000 that you're giving them.

SPEAKER_02

So the selection process is very sophisticated, and I say that very sarcastically. It's a hey, here's these three schools, four schools. Go find people from the area who are on these rosters, who have a good social media following. Let's compile a list, let's prioritize which people we want that think we that will think will fit within our budget, and let's start contacting them and getting them to sign our contract and developing content with them. And the content has just, I'm really proud of our team. Miles and Mariana do an amazing job in shooting it and branding it and making it high quality. We've really shifted away so much of what we do,

Conferences, Masterminds, And Execution

SPEAKER_02

which I think is smart marketing personally. I'm giving myself a pat on the back. We've tried to stay away from, I've learned this, stay away from so much of being about us and make it about highlighting the kids and what they like and why they pick this school and what their favorite thing about this sport is. With subtly branding the firm, and of course there being branding for the firm in there, but that you'll see that theme in a lot of our marketing, not just in INIL videos, but also in the small biz, big wins segments we've started to go highlight local businesses and people in the community, is being more supportive and set a brand forward can sometimes be a good brand device in a marketing world.

SPEAKER_00

That's awesome. Um the estate planning practice. Uh estate planning or state litigation that Brad has? They do both.

SPEAKER_02

They definitely Brad's more litigation than planning, but he does do estate planning.

SPEAKER_00

You don't see a lot of firms that have an estate practice and a personal injury practice who don't also do like bankruptcies and criminal defense and whatever the hell else walked in the door. So and and I know you you guys have kind of a unique origin story. So tell me how the how the two of you got together and how you planned, if you did plan, to get from there to here. I don't think we planned.

SPEAKER_02

Just kind of happened. I mean, um, I think so. Brad and I, I met Brad clerking for a law firm, he was the managing partner, and he had uh a partner I was working for had left. Brad had gone out and started his own practice, and years later, four years later, we had lunch and kind of we had just been staying in touch. We had got along great. He's like a big brother to me. And so he was like, Hey, why don't you come leave some space for me if you're thinking about going around your own to cut the story short? And and I did, and it's just kind of iterated and evolved from there. Uh you know, the practice groups don't necessarily conflict, they don't necessarily work together. The glue is just me and Brad. I mean, uh, and the key to that is just we just get along completely trust each other. And so our our practice groups are completely divergent and different. It's almost like we're running two different firms within the firm, but there's nothing about it that doesn't necessarily work. It it's

Avoiding Comparison Traps

SPEAKER_02

simple. It really is simple. And I mean, at the end of the day, there's some marketing things that we do together, but Brad has a totally different marketing strategy and different client, avatar client, and different things he's trying to do than me. And so we don't try to make them work together, we let them just coexist. And the things that we can do together, we do together, and the things that we don't need to, we don't. And it's really simple.

SPEAKER_00

I mean, it is set up kind of nicely for cross-pollination of practice areas, right? Clients, number one, but also like, hey God, you almost died in that crash. Do you have an estate plan?

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, yeah. I mean, and we have, you know, we have like a lot of clients who will call me and be like, hey, do you know somebody who does this? I'm like, yeah, my law partner, let me get you over to his team. And do I get if if somebody wants to do I get any money from that? No. You know, I don't need to. If Brad sends a case over, does he get money from it? Yeah, we'll send him a referral fee. It's real simple. It's not, you know, you can't really referral fee an hourly case. You can on a um I'm not supposed to say referral fee in Louisiana, which is silly. We have co-council fees. I mean, technically, ethically, I guess I can give a referral fee in our firm, the Louisiana State Board says. But in any event, um it's it's a very simple structure and it just is easy because we trust each other completely and we're basically like family to each other.

SPEAKER_00

All right, last thing I want to talk about. You have a um a wild travel schedule and you mentioned a bunch of masterminds and conferences. How do you pick and choose what to go to? And then

Send Your Team, Buy Back Time

SPEAKER_00

how do you filter for filter all of the information that you're obtaining at these events for the four or maybe five things you can actually execute on in any given quarter?

SPEAKER_02

That's a really, really good question. And I've actually been thinking about this. So let me start with how I filter it. I have a really like old school process for it, which is I go there. I've been convinced by somebody a year or two ago I don't even open my computer. This probably caused me more work, but I couldn't care less. I write notes. Then on the plane ride back or the morning before I'm leaving, depending upon my flight's taking off, I go through my notes and I put together what I call an action list from that conference, which is if I had 30 items, I'm like, what do I really want to try to implement? And let's say there's 10. Am I trying to do all 10 when I get back? Absolutely not, because I have a master, it's very, very sophisticated master action list. Here we go.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, okay.

SPEAKER_02

It's a word document.

SPEAKER_00

Typed up, printed out, and stapled. You know?

SPEAKER_02

Yeah. So you're three steps ahead of most people. I would take 15 items and say, is it realistic for me to execute four of these over the next four months? Probably. So I'll put four in, what are we in February? Four in March, four in April, four in May, four in June. And nine times out of ten, I've gotten ninety-nine, ninety-five to ninety-nine percent or all of them done over that four-month period. And so I think we have paralysis sometimes, and we try to do everything all at once you can't, spread it out over time, however, it works for you, visually lay it out for what are the priority things, what worked together in certain months that you could implement this, do this, then do this later. That's how

Mindset Shift On Training Investment

SPEAKER_02

I've always done it the last two or three or four years, and it's really worked for me from an execution and an implementation standpoint. From a picking what to go to, that's a good question. And in fact, I am in a mindset right now, maybe this is the opposite of a lot of your listeners, where I'm trying to avoid legal conferences as possible. I find it to be pollution for my brain, a lot of it. A lot of it is I relate to like I would avoid the library and law school because I don't want to be in that comparison bubble where everybody's like, oh, so and so Brian studied for a hundred hours and I only studied for 50, I'm gonna fail, right? Like in some ways, like you go to some of these events and it becomes like a thief, you know, comparison is the thief of joy.

SPEAKER_00

It's like a well that's that's that's what we're talking about with like what's your cost per acquis cost acquisition per case, right? Or like what's your marketing spending? Shit, he's spending 10% more than me, and he's got a lower cost per acquisition.

SPEAKER_02

Yes.

SPEAKER_00

100%, I feel you on that.

SPEAKER_02

So I I I find personally like the mastermind experience to be whatever mastermind you're in to be the premier way to really get detailed information, to share numbers, and have comparison be comparison in a positive and good manner.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02

To like

GLM Summit And Final Thanks

SPEAKER_02

really dig into comparable numbers and say, how are you spending $100,000 less than me but getting 50 more clients? Like, let me dig down into where your big um channels that you're producing new clients from or new business from. Let me understand that and ask questions on that. That to me is interesting, intellectually challenging, and productive, where some of these legal conferences are just, I think, detrimental to my own productivity and my own mindset. So I'm really being very careful about which ones I go to this year. It probably won't be more than one or two besides my mastermind meetings. And in fact, I'm not going to some that I usually do go to. So I'm just trying to go to as little as possible is the short answer.

SPEAKER_00

I think you probably need one or or maybe one uh one a season, right? A spring and a fall, just to see what's new that's out there. But I went to like six last year.

SPEAKER_02

You went to a lot.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, you still Well, I kept getting invited to speak, you know?

SPEAKER_02

I get it. I get it.

SPEAKER_00

And here's the thing is if you if on February 20th I have all six invitations and I could pick, perfect, right? But it doesn't work that way. You get one, then you get another, and then it's like next thing you know, you're out of town five or six five or six weekends.

SPEAKER_02

And so here yeah, but I think I here's my take on that. But part of it I think you're you're already doing really, really well, obviously, anyways. It's like there's other ways to brand yourself to lawyers in other states for referral business and to be known for purposes of like if that's part of your goal, one of which is LinkedIn, which you do really well. Um but there's other ways to do it besides just that. I just, you know, for me it's like after you I've been to a fair amount of conferences, and after you've done it for two or three or four years, I agree with you wholeheartedly that it is important, I think, to go to one or two a year to get updates on technology and certain things here or there and tinker with this and that. But at some point you've kind of heard the whole spiel, you've seen the whole schmodigal. It can just be like, are you like, what are you doing? Go on vacation or take some tarball.

SPEAKER_00

I did I did that too. I I went to um uh to Lunch Hour Legal Marketing, which is out in Vegas, and took my wife thinking like it'll be a great like couples trip. Like, I'll only go to half the thing and we could spend the rest of the time together. Nope, it didn't work that way.

SPEAKER_02

I will say, and that's a great segue for me to also say that I'm kind of like at the point too where I know you have started to go as well from reading some of your LinkedIn posts, where like I don't need to be at all the legal conferences, right? So lunch hour legal marketing is a great example. We sent my marketing coordinator Miles to last year. He'll probably be going again with my marketing director, Whitney. We just sent Whitney to you and your dad's analog boot team. We do a lot of that already, but it was a good thing for her to be experienced to and take some nuggets from, right? And so I think as you grow, part of it can be no different like buying back your time in other areas of the organization operationally. You can have other team members go and pick up nuggets of things changing in the legal industry and alert you to it. That doesn't require you to make that trip and be there and have to walk through a vendor hall of 79 vendors.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, and and just so I don't get in trouble with my friends Guy and Conrad on Charlie Morgan, who's a great event. I am not good at mixing learning with spending time with the family and making sure that everybody actually is happy the whole time. My wife, turns out, was happy the whole time, but I'm sitting in the event wishing I was up by the pool with her. I'm up by the pool with her, going, shit, that speaker at two o'clock was probably pretty good. I'm just I'm not really built to go back and forth like that.

SPEAKER_02

And that and that event, like some others, right, is built so they have speakers like you, and I think Tim Simmeloth was there last year, and they have some other lawyers, but that event is specifically targeted for marketers, um, which is great. And so I think part of it is like figure out what events you could send. Like, for example, if people I have a COO, if people have a COO or an operator, like I know we haven't sent Brad to this yet, but I know Cameron Herald has an event for that. Like those other events that you can research and find that can help develop the skills of other team members that are going to help the whole organization that don't require you to just be there.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, that's the mistake I see a lot of lawyers making is being the the one who goes to the conference and doesn't bring anybody from their team with them and then comes back and either idea dumps or gets mad that the the rest of the team hasn't grown or evolved or doesn't have the skill set, um, but then doesn't want to uh doesn't want to invest to send the team out there. And I when I talked to Gui and Conrad about the the um their kind of after after action plan from that event, they were like, turns out most lawyers aren't willing to send their marketing assistant or marketing director out to an event that they're not going to. And so it's it's hard to get people to invest in everybody else. But I think to your point, it's like it's critically important if you ever want to um to grow to the size that you all have grown to almost 50 employees now. You can't you just can't do that all by yourself.

SPEAKER_02

You can't, and you know, I'm I'm just as guilty of that as any other lawyer. I mean, I my stupid lawyer brain was there at one point, right? Because you start to you have to shift your mindset because uh for me it was always like, oh, I'm gonna really spend it's like a cost. I'm gonna spend 2,500 bucks to send another person between registration fees, a flight, maybe more than that, meals, rooms, all that stuff. It's really an investment because what are you what is the loss opportunity cost of a high-level person who has had their skills rapidly developed and their eyes open for the organization when they come back? You just shift it, just like I was giggling one day. I saw a post you had. It's like running a law firm and owning a law firm is just like looking at your average fee and convincing yourself over and over again this next thing you're gonna spend money on is gonna get you it's gonna cost less than that or get you more of that. You know, it's like you do have to shift your mindset a bit and just understand that it's an investment in the future of the organization.

SPEAKER_00

Absolutely. And if you were looking into to invest in the future of your organization, head over to GLMSummit.com, get on the list for presale tickets. It's in October. I'm trying to pull up my calendar and figure out exactly when it is. We'll probably start running ads on the podcast soon that'll tell you uh GLM Summit.com, send your people.

SPEAKER_02

Brad was there last year. Brad Scott was there last year. Uh that was GLM was the first conference that kind of I went to back in fall of 2022 that really kind of kicked this whole thing off. It was like I remember that feeling, feeling like uh I think people have definitely said this before, but like it were or described this feeling before when you just have a lot to do with the law firm and you get exposed to an environment like that, as it was like feeling like a fire hose was hitting you in the face. I was like an overwhelming about it. Like I was like, if we're gonna do all this and grow the organization, like we have so much to do, but that really is what kicked it off for me.

SPEAKER_00

In a good way, hitting the fire hit with the fire hose in a good way. All right, David, I appreciate you coming on today, man. Where can people find more about you? ScottDingnair.com is our website.

SPEAKER_02

We are on all the socials. I write twice a week on LinkedIn. We have a podcast, it's the Overall Podcast, which is on all the channels, and we're gonna have you as a host soon. Thank you for coming on and having me. Um but you can pretty much find us anywhere. Thank you, Brian, for having me. I just have to give GLM a quick shout-out before we close. It's not kissing your butt because I'm on the air. But I told somebody on a I think it was oh yeah, it was I was on a podcast, I was on Chris Early's podcast, filming it last week, and was mentioning to Chris that uh there uh I am one, he is one. There are a significant amount of lawyers around the country who your dad changed their lives, and your dad changed my life just from listening to his podcast back in 2021, began my evolution of changing my mindset and how I think. And so I just I tell everybody I can owe a debt of gratitude to your father and your family for what y'all did for me and mine. So thank you for having me on.

SPEAKER_00

I appreciate you saying that. Thank you, dude.

SPEAKER_02

Yep.

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Brian Glass

Host