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
Why Throwing More Money at Marketing Usually Backfires | Conrad Saam and Gyi Tsakalakis pt. 1
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Most lawyers think their marketing problem is tactics.
Wrong platform. Wrong agency. Wrong strategy.
But what if the real problem is how you’re thinking about marketing in the first place?
This episode is a little different.
We’re taking you inside a live session from the Great Legal Marketing Summit, where Gyi Tsakalakis and Conrad Saam basically did what they do best… challenge everything lawyers think they know about growth.
It starts with origin stories. How they got into legal marketing. How they built their businesses. Why two competitors can still operate as “worthy rivals.”
But pretty quickly, the conversation turns into something deeper.
They break down why most marketing advice feels confusing, why lawyers struggle to make sense of what actually works, and why chasing tactics without context is a losing game.
There’s also a bigger theme running through all of this.
If you want a better firm, you don’t just need better marketing. You need better thinking.
Part 1 sets the foundation. Part 2 gets into the weeds.
If your marketing has ever felt like a black box, start here.
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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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Welcome And Firm Growth Update
SPEAKER_05Hello, my friends, and welcome back to Life Beyond the Briefs, the number one podcast for lawyers choosing to live a life of their own design and build the kind of practices they actually like showing up to on Mondays. We have uh new live recorded episodes coming back soon. It has been a busy first part of the year. For me, the law firm is just um just ripping. If you're a member of our great legal marketing tribe uh community, you heard this on a recent community call. Um our marketing is is generating cases left and right. We're up, I think, 61% in new signed car crash cases over last quarter. Some of that attributed to turning Google LSAs back on, some of it attributed to just all of the activity that we've been putting in over all of the years. Um and uh and and this year everything has just kind of come together. So it's a really cool place to be, but it has meant that I am more and more busy and have less time for the recording of live podcasts. And so that's why you've been getting these recordings of old podcasts.
Boot Camp Invitation And Links
SPEAKER_05Today's episode is uh part one of two, the discussion with Ben and I and Guy Sakalakis and Conrad Som that happened back at the Great Legal Marketing Summit in 2025. And the reason that I'm putting these episodes, uh part one and part two, out when I am, is that we're coming up on a Great Legal Marketing boot camp in my office May 6th, and I have about four tickets left. If you are interested in revamping your digital marketing and hanging out with the smartest minds in legal digital marketing, including Conrad Somm, Jay Berkowitz, Gisakalakis, Tiffany Swedensky, and many, many others, then this is the opportunity for you. Go to glmbootcamp.com to grab one of the last four remaining tickets. If there are remaining tickets, and if you see the sold out sign, then we'll be running another boot camp again in August. Or you can come to the Great Leo Marketing Summit, which will be in October. And I do not have the dates in front of me, but you can check that out at glmsummit.com. Anyway, today's discussion is background on Gian Conrad, kind of the origin stories, and then a deep dive into all of the little things that you can do to get your marketing off the ground and to help you have your best year ever uh in 2027, because it does take a while if you are just ramping up the marketing to get everything going. And yeah, so on with the show, and I hope you enjoy, and I hope to see you on May 6th in Fairfax, Virginia.
SPEAKER_04So, what we're gonna do this morning, Conrad and Gee are gonna shoot a version, a live version of their lunch hour legal marketing podcast, and we'll have an open QA from all of you for that. But I thought
Why Marketing Takes Time
SPEAKER_04one of the principles of speaking is you can never assume that everybody actually knows your story. You have a very famous podcast, you have your very famous brand uh in the legal marketing space. But I'm curious about a couple of things. Like you are competitors, first of all, digital marketing experts. Tell us a little bit uh briefly, each of your own sort of personal backstory, and then how this gig got together that is lunch hour legal marketing.
SPEAKER_03So I um in 2006, I got hit up by a headhunter. I was working at a unethical, underhanded, dirty software company in Seattle. Building the trust. Yeah. And I got hit up by Headhunter to work to to interview with something that at the time was called Legal Brain. And so I interviewed with them. I realized that the people who found were funding that uh was Rich Barton, who started Expedia, rolled off Expedia, and then started Zillow. And my buddy Mark from the University of Michigan was the CMO at Zillow. And so I went over to Mark's house and I said, Hey, I've got this interview with this thing called Legal Brain, and uh, can you prep me for it? And I bought a pack of IPA and we drank six IPAs, and he taught me everything anyone knew about SEO at the time. And so I walked into that interview looking like a genius, but it was really just, you know, two hours talking to my buddy Mark. So the guys at Avo ended up hiring me, and I got to run their SEO from the beginning.
Conrad’s SEO Origin Story
SPEAKER_03And it was really, really fun because none of you guys knew what SEO was. You didn't think that the internet was a way that lawyers would be found. You didn't think it was ethical for people to write reviews of lawyers. And so it was it was kind of shooting fish in a barrel. So Avvo went from nothing to the number I have always said it was the number one legal directory from a traffic perspective. We did that in like two years, partly because there was no one else doing it. Um Tim Stanley from Justia was doing it. There was uh Chris, what's what's Fine Law was doing it? Fine law, Chris, Chris Silversmith. Chris Silversmith was at Fine Law, he was really good. That was it. It was the three of us. And so I got to learn this stuff when it was really easy.
SPEAKER_04Then when Avo kind of got bigger and bigger, and we started calling you like mad, and you guys got mad about the how many people were here at the dawn of Avo and were like all pissed off that this was happening? Wondering who the hell are these guys?
SPEAKER_03It was a cool ride. It was a really, really cool ride, and then it kind of got big and corporate, got sold by sold to internet brands, and that was financially good for me, but it wasn't professionally good for me. And so I started working directly with lawyers, which is what I've been doing ever since. And that's that's kind of my origin story on this. You've got a more traditional
Guy’s Path From Law To Marketing
SPEAKER_03story.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, mine's super boring. You thought that was exciting? I used to buy I used to serve beer to Conrad. That's true. I was wondering when this is gonna come up. Yeah, I used to be a bartender at Michigan. Uh Conrad was playing rugby and would come into my bar, and I would we didn't know each other though. Um I was a computer science major. I was kind of like technical mind, thought I was gonna go into computer engineering, but this was back in the late 90s. It wasn't as cool as it is now. Although now it's you computer science majors can't get jobs anymore because there's no junior program. So that was really appreciative. There was a period of coolness of it, but I didn't want to be, I ended up not wanting to be a coder, so I became a philosophy major, which is super practical, but wouldn't trade my philosophy degree for anything. Uh, didn't want to go into academia. I was probably a little bit over enamored with uh court being in court. And so uh I went to law school. I practiced law for about two years as the young lawyer. Uh people were like, hey, what should we do in for marketing? Went, did research, talked to a lot of lawyers, same sentiment. Like, people aren't gonna use the internet to hire lawyers. This is like 2004, 2005. I was like, they already are. And uh by 2007, 2008, I was convinced that there was a business because of what I saw in the marketplace wasn't very good, in my opinion. And so uh we started Attorney Sync in 2008. Met Conrad at uh through Avo. And uh I I like to use the Simon Cynic term, like we are worthy rivals because there's plenty of blue ocean of lawyers that are getting either underserved by their marketing people or have no marketing function at all. And so uh plenty of opportunity for us. And so we uh inherited Lunch Our Legal Marketing from Legal Talk Network. There was a guy named Jared Korea who actually started it and uh decided he didn't want to do it anymore. I picked it up as a co-host. I don't remember what year it was, um, but I did it with a employee at AttorneySync. We did it for a while. She went on to do other things, and so I was like, hey, you know what? It'd be awesome if Conrad joined me on the show. And so how many years have we been doing the show now? I think we're about four years in. Four years, and uh yeah, and so we are grateful that people actually we were very cynical and skeptical as we usually are, uh, that people would like to listen to us, but uh here we are and grateful to be here.
SPEAKER_04I'm curious, why why do you think you were
Why A Legal Marketing Podcast Works
SPEAKER_04cynical and skeptical? Is that just like natural entrepreneur self-doubt that I have anything to say, or so I think probably some of that, probably also it's like a legal marketing podcast.
SPEAKER_00Like, you know, people actually want to regularly how do you talk about legal marketing twice a month for an hour? And fortunately, we are so full of hot air that we come up with new things. And you know, look, it's a dynamic thing, and um it's as we know, it's competitive out there. Obviously, I think also this audience is tuned into legal marketing, but like as a big thing, I think a lot of lawyers think of it as a necessary evil. They're like, I gotta do this marketing stuff, but I want to practice law. And we can talk about some of that depending on what your role is in your firm and what you're trying to build. People have different perceptions of it. And so I was very much like, are people really gonna want to tune in twice a week? Uh is there enough are there enough lawyers and and legal marketing folks that are interested in the subject matter to be a podcast and and maybe something more?
SPEAKER_03And I mean when we started it was monthly, and then we we convinced LTN to move it to to uh twice a week, twice a month.
SPEAKER_00And Conrad's trying to go weekly.
SPEAKER_03I want to push it weekly. I love it because I love talking. I'm not good at a lot of things, but that I'm good at.
SPEAKER_04All right, so that's cool. So then if you if you were to do this weekly, and you guys cover a lot of ground, I think, in every podcast, how do you get your material because weekly would seem like oh my, that that's a lot of
Finding Topics And Prepping Fast
SPEAKER_04prep. I'm curious to each of you, so your your habit in terms of seeing material in the world and then saying, Oh, okay, that might be something we could work with.
SPEAKER_03So I think there's two elements of this. Number one is you have to build up a like uh a legacy group of evergreen content. Stuff that is going to apply six months from now, nine months from now. So it's content maybe we haven't recorded it, maybe we've already recorded it and we've got it in the hop or ready to go if we need to, but it's stuff that is not timely. And the other part of it is you have to have the discipline on the regular to when you see like see stuff all the time and you're like, wow, that's cool. And so we just have a sh word doc. It's not a word doc, it's a Google doc that we throw things in or I come to. I don't use all that often. I often send it to Ghee as email and then he gets annoyed. But you just have to pick things up and look. You have to always be looking for this stuff, right? And I don't care if we're driving and I see a weird billboard, I don't care like if I'm at the n looking at the news, I don't care like if we if we're on our mastermind group or if someone sends us a question, you have to just always be looking for ideas and they're out there. You just have to be looking for them.
SPEAKER_04How do you guys actually prep for each episode? Huh? So we do uh Maybe you can say we don't. No, no, no, we do it's really important.
SPEAKER_00We do. So, you know, we're we're gathering all this stuff all the time, and then an hour before recording, essentially, we spend going through we call it the rundown. This we have a sheet that's the rundown that gives us the framework for the show. So there's some you know, you typically, as you'll see today, it's a we do some banter at the beginning, we do a news segment, and then we usually do two different segments. We vary a little bit in that, but you know, we talk about we pick the from the topics uh that are that we've captured in the news or things that we've seen that you know we're supposed to put in the rundown or Conrad emailed me. Um, and we talk about kind of prep. But I'll tell you, we find it's like a balance because some prep so the prep's great because it allows you to go deeper on something, right? Because you can actually be like, all right, I've got my notes here, I've got I can go deep on a topic, but it starts to get more quote unquote canned the more that you prep. And so we found even like we've talked about this all the time, and just like even recording just the prep because so much gold comes out of the conversations in the prep. And so um, you know, if you're doing a podcast and be happy to talk more about like the details of like what podcasts we think work for lawyers, but it's like the uh that random kind of content that really tends to be the best conversations, even beyond the prep. But the prep helps. I mean, it we wouldn't be it wouldn't be as good without the prep.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, I think the rule that we've learned is like once you start going a little bit deep on a topic in the prep part, you have to put a bullet in it and hold it because when you try and repeat the gold of when you're excited about something, it it never comes out as as genuine or or as as passionate. And he he can get riled up really easily. Yeah, so you want to be able to capture that when you're actually recording. We've actually toyed with recording the prep and using that sometimes.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and we do outtakes from time to time because even sometimes you know uh we're also beneficiaries of Legal Talk Network does all of the production. So we have an audio engineer and video content person, and obviously we have a distribution network through the Legal Talk Network. They do all the heavy lift on actually making us sound good and adding the sound effects and things like that. And you know, post-production we always laugh about, but we do capture a lot of those outtakes because they end up being pretty good content. And the other thing that I would say that's been huge for us is the you know you recording video as well and doing the social media clips. So if you do a podcast, I think you know this idea of being like multimedia is really important. Um, you can use the clips to promote the podcast and not just be stuck in the uh audio format.
SPEAKER_04Aaron Powell Do you have any questions, Brian?
SPEAKER_05I've got more, but go ahead.
Making Lawyer Podcasts More Interesting
SPEAKER_05Yep. So one of the things that happens when you produce a bunch of content is that people consume it, they come up to you and you don't remember what you said. I'm curious if there's anything that you guys have been like epically wrong about and then got confronted with three months, six months later.
SPEAKER_00Aaron Powell Well, we don't say anything wrong ever, so but we do forget all the time. That's a good question. Nothing's coming to mind, but I'm sure we've done this.
SPEAKER_05We've done a couple of like prediction shows. Right. We got those. And then I've heard the recaps of those. Yeah. We've got some predictions going.
SPEAKER_03I think the b the bigger problem, we and we we've talked about this internally, is Gee and I are out there yammering to you guys, and then we've got our staff that's trying to like do work for you guys. And sometimes it'll be like what Conrad's saying and what Conrad's staff are saying are not perfectly aligned. So I've now made, and I apologize to them every time, but like they have to listen to this because we can't be speaking differently. They have to.
SPEAKER_00I'll tell you my my kind of reaction to that question is this issue of, and I think this is true for everybody, it's not just unique to us, but you know, look, we have a podcast, uh, we put a lot of content on the world. There's not a lot of context. So people will, you know, whether you read a blog post or you listen to a podcast, or or even you come to a conference, the context is what matters. And so what I see is people, I'll hear somebody interpret something that I said, and I'm like, that's not exactly what I meant. And I think that that's a bigger issue, even than whether I'm right or wrong. Like, and again, we're very self-deprecating about it. I don't believe that you should listen to a I mean, we love that you listen to the podcast, but don't take the pod the podcast isn't the end all be all on whether we're right or wrong. You're gonna lack context, and you're getting, you know, our bite-sized snippets. I think on the newer stuff, like when you're getting news items and things, I think that's helpful. Uh, but you got to keep perspective that it's not like you're not getting the full thing. You're sometimes you're getting a sound bite. And it's true for me as I think as a consumer myself, like I'm you have to be very conscientious about the accountability of listening to some of this content because a lot of it is taken out of context.
SPEAKER_04I think you're very good, Conrad, when you are dealing with listener questions about prefacing with it depends, and it really is what this event is all about, what greatly marketing has always been about what do you want to actually build first? Let's let's be real clear about that, and then which of these tools can help us if we take action move towards what we actually want to build. Many of us in the room have podcasts of sort of different sizes and different uh um you know technical things running in the background. What would you say to lawyers who are running podcasts and have actually gotten past episode number five, which is kind of where most podcasts die, in terms of either technical, it's great that you've got a company behind you, you have sponsors even, or just the whole art of being interesting.
SPEAKER_03I I love how you say the art of being interesting. I think the heart so you mentioned most people are podcast fives. We did a study, 83% of podcasts fail within the first six months because you don't give up on it. And so, and I'm gonna come back to the art of being interesting. The key on this, and this is this is a real benefit that we have with Legal Talk Network, more than anything else, they do amazing post-production work. They get the sponsors, like they do, they do all of the work. We just show up in the right, which is awesome for us. But they have sponsors, which means the sponsors are expecting a show every two weeks, which means they hold us to account to get that out. We do not have an option, right? We do not have a you know, it's Easter, or I don't feel like it, like, or I sound like crap because I've got a you know a sore throat. Like, we do not have an option not to record. And so the long-term discipline to make this work is really fascinating, which then brings us back to how do you keep it interesting? Sometimes we have our pre-production meeting and we're like, got nothing. There's nothing to talk about right now, right? And that really only happens when you stop looking during the week, right? Where you have have lost that discipline to do that. So there's interesting stuff that's happening all the time. You guys get asked interesting questions all the time. There is always fascinating context out there. There's always stuff that's going on in your community, there's always stuff that's interesting. You have to be looking for it, and you have to have the discipline to capture it, however you capture it, right? And so I think that's that's the art of making it interesting all the time.
SPEAKER_00Well, and I'll go back to something that uh Ben brought up because I mean you think about it in the like why we do this um for ourselves. The first thing is like why are you gonna do a podcast? If you're gonna do a podcast because you want to have top of mind awareness in your local community so that people think of you because they might hire you, um, that's gonna take you down this path. And then on the interesting side, the great part about that is that if you're not interesting, have a guest that is interesting. And so you get, you know, because I know a lot of lawyers will say, you know, this just isn't my shtick. Like I'm not into the podcast thing. I I'm not like my personality is not gonna be a good jive, but there's ways you can get around that to attach your quote unquote brand to the podcast with local guests who might be interesting, covering local topics that might be interesting. If, again, if that's the purpose. Um, there's a lot of different purposes for podcasts. Like there, there might be, you know, maybe it's to develop referral relationships uh with other lawyers, and so you're gonna have lawyer guests on. But I think we tend to think of this thing of like, and again, this is like the context part. Like I don't want people to come away from this being like the only way a podcast can work is if I'm super interesting and funny and self-deprecating, like Conrad and Ghee are. It depends on what you're trying to do. And then the workarounds for if it's like not really your thing, but you think that might be a medium that might be useful for your practice, I would start thinking about like things in your local, if again, if the purpose is to be top of mind in your local community for what you do, I'd be thinking about like, okay, where are the overlaps with my uh quote unquote affinity audiences? Like, what am I into outside of practicing law? Who are the people in that community that might be interesting to talk to about that? Uh and then use the guest to kind of help you, you know, quote unquote, be more interesting. I don't know why I'm saying quote unquote so much right now.
SPEAKER_03But but there's there's a couple of keys to this. One of the hard parts is, and I hate to say this, most of what you do is not interesting, right? And it's not interesting. You don't do most people most of the time. And talking about the practice of law is really hard and most of the time it's dull, right? Maybe you're covering celebrity divorces or something like that. But like you mentioned affinity, getting people to like who you are. There's lots of different ways to be interesting about the things that you are interested in that aren't the seven things to do after you've been rear-ended in a car accident, right? And so I I feel I would love to push lawyers to be more interested and interesting about things that are outside the practice of law. I'll use you as an example. You talk about soccer refereeing all the time. That's a parenting thing, it's a coaching thing, it's a kids' development thing. That's nothing to do with the practice of law. It's super interesting, right? And so that resonates with by the way, most of you guys who have kids have had your kids play youth soccer, right? Most that is that is a true fact. So, like there's a there's an affinity right there because of something that he is genuinely interested in and does all the time that has nothing to do with the practice of law. That's interesting. The other thing that I want to bring
Guests, Fake Influence, And Vanity Metrics
SPEAKER_03up, and and he mentioned this, our show is a little bit everyone thinks they're special. We're special. We're a little bit unique in most podcasts. Use the guest format. It's frankly, it's an easier format. And the theory of this goes, okay, I'm going to basically glom onto someone else's audience, right? So um, we're gonna have some fancy guest, and you guys will all know who that is, and we're gonna interview that person, and then people who are interested in Murphy are gonna listen to that podcast, and the theory goes, will then be so interested in me and Ghee that they're gonna subscribe to the podcast. It doesn't happen by and large. And so what so what's worked for us has really we we have one or two guests a year, maybe. We've recently recorded a lot of not even podcast guests, but more interviews. But there it there is a limitation with that guest thing, right?
SPEAKER_04There is a limitation to I'm pro-guest, by the way. One of the limitations is the guests sometimes can be dreadfully not good.
SPEAKER_00That's right.
SPEAKER_04They're horrible.
SPEAKER_03And so you curate your guests. You curate the guests, but like we get, I don't know, how many emails a day do we get asking to be guests on the podcast, right? And if they become guests on the podcast, that means they're paying some PR person to try and get more publicity and more listens and blah, blah, blah. And that what that really means is what they really want to do is talk about and promote whatever the thing that is that they happen to do, right? That is so awful, right? Go find guests who aren't being pimped by PR people. Go find guests who are like interesting people who you genuinely connect with, who you can have a conversation with that that isn't pushing some awful like paid agenda.
SPEAKER_05Did you really like No, I I mean I have an add-on. The add-on to that is those people are much more likely to actually share your episode and and get somebody else to listen to it, right? So the people who the professional guests aren't then pushing the episode out to their audience because they're paying somebody to build their audience is the person who's never been on a podcast before that's going to share with all their friends and family and might actually get you the glam on effect that Conrad or that uh Conrad was talking about. Um and and by the way, like everything that you just said about affinity groups, it's not just podcasts, it's social media, it's your newsletter, it's all of all of the marketing that we're doing. Just be an interesting person in the community and don't talk about the law, and then people will know, like, and trust you and come and hire you for the law.
SPEAKER_00That's right. And the other thing, too, that we always fall into trap of is this idea of like, well, how do we measure its effectiveness? Yeah. And because you know, you think about the guests because you're like, okay, I'm gonna glom onto this audience or I'm gonna get more subscribers. Like, who cares? Like, I would just abandon all that thinking. The only place that you want it to show up is if people are like, Hey, how'd you hear about us? Oh, I've been listening to your podcast, or I've been following you on. social media. And again, not a one-for-one, like you're trying to do like direct response attribution for every single client that comes in. If you just hear it coming up, make a note and you're hopefully you have a CRM or you've got something that's tracking like how clients are finding you. If you just hear people talking about it, like that's what you really care about. Like again, if your purpose is to use a podcast or any kind of media vehicle to generate business, you should be focused on like, is it showing up at all? Not in like, who cares if you got 10,000 subscribers and not a single one of them is going to become a client of yours, unless you're selling advertising or some other sponsorship, it's not doing anything from a business standpoint for you. It's just it's a vanity metric. And by the way, it's the other thing that drives me nuts like the internet is all fake. Most of the people, most of these podcasts that you go and watch and you're like, oh, they've got like 10,000 subscribers or this lawyer's got like you know a million TikTok followers, go click in and look at the followers who they are. They're it's largely all fake. Like they paid somebody to just create fake profiles to boost their to amplify like what they look like online, but it's all trash. So I would say focus on like if you've got, you know, in your local community again, I don't I don't know you, but in your local community you've got like if a hundred people in your local community are listening to you every week on a podcast. That's amazing. And then so you again you want to hear like that it's coming up in conversations in the community people are talking about it. And most importantly in intake people are like, you know, how'd you hear about us? Well you know I've been a huge fan of your podcast for the last year.
SPEAKER_03I I know what's going to happen here. A prediction watch hey gee. Don't be wrong. Are there any legal podcasts that you would like to call out for doing something like that? Buying followers? No, I don't I don't talk trash.
SPEAKER_00Okay. How has it been for business?
Does The Podcast Drive Business
SPEAKER_00Very good. I'll I'll won't speak for Conrad but it's Lunch Our Legal Marketing shows up on our CRM a lot.
SPEAKER_03Yeah I I mean it's good and it's it's again I I'll reiterate it because I feel like you guys don't get it and we tell you the wrong things all the time. It is one of the influences on people contacting us. It is one of many influences on people contacting us. And the podcast in and of itself as a as an individual thing I don't think works extremely well. I think as you have this as some of the content goes on to social as we're at events like this these things all build on themselves. And so it is one of many things. And that is that is what's going to happen in a law firm right and there are some things that are direct response podcasts are not direct response right most of your social media work is not direct response. And so it just requires time.
SPEAKER_05Do you guys ever compare sales notes and you have somebody who's who calls and says I'm talking to AttorneySync and Mockingbird because I listen to the podcast like give me your best pitch.
SPEAKER_00Yes. Yeah and and we we right now there's awesome that are like tell me why you're different than Mockingbird and I'm like go hire Mockingbird.
SPEAKER_03So my one of the the worst like yeah thanks. No no no no no this is the this is the worst meal I've ever been to we had a and and the funny thing is he hired neither of us we had a a prospect who's in my neck of the woods it was a great meal the meal was fantastic. The conversation was horrible it was great. He comes out to meet with this prospect in my town and he's like why don't you come to dinner with us and I'm like what the fuck are you talking about? And I'm like no he's like no totally fine the people I just I just want this guy to hire to to make a good hire he had talked to us like we knew who he was well anyway we go to dinner and the prospect I saw him the other day by the way he's like so which one of you should I hire he asked we're we're having a cheeseburger and both of us are like we're pointing at each other like we're we're playing the polite game dude still with Scorpion which absolutely chaps my ass so there's there's more to that story that we probably can't share but Jesus my point there is is so to answer the question like yeah it does happen but again a lot of times and you know this with uh partners that you've worked with some of it's just like you just like you resonate with an account person or you like the strategy or you like the approach.
SPEAKER_00And in my view is like we're looking for right fit clients. If it if you're if Conrad and I are like fighting over something about like trying to convince somebody to come with us like I feel like we're doing it wrong.
SPEAKER_03Yeah I mean it it's it's putting the customers here's the other thing. And you guys probably live in this world too there are a lot of terrible lawyers out there. There are a lot of terrible digital marketing agencies out there. And we just come at this with a perspective of like I want you to make a good decision because you're talking about the future of your firm you're talking about whether or not you can buy the mountain house you're talking about whether or not you retire at 65 instead of 70 right like all of these things are very real. I just want you to make a good decision and you've already you've already I know you've taken a step to doing a really considered approach to selecting an agency because you're talking to the both of us. Now that is completely self-gratifying I get that but it's
Live Show Setup And Recording Starts
SPEAKER_03also genuine.
SPEAKER_04Well why don't we do this uh Brian and I will leave the stage you guys can start the podcast and if you all have any questions about anything that we just talked about why don't you hold that for the QA part of the podcast.
SPEAKER_03So when we do QA and we're gonna turn record on over here when we do QA we're gonna have actually have a mic so we can run that out to you. The last time we did this at our own conference we completely bungled it. And so the questions that were asked we love the QA because it it it's really interactive and it gets us thinking on our feet and it's always great content unless you can't the the recording of the person asking the question sucks. So we're gonna have a mic runner um hit you guys.
SPEAKER_00So when you do have a question, just please uh get get that mic runner and then we'll get it and feel free to introduce yourself when you have the mic so that we can uh help you you know get some uh PR for your own practice if you want it if you don't want to that's fine too if it's a question driven it's not uh share um but again we view it as a vehicle for to help promote lawyers doing great work.
SPEAKER_04So cool guys thanks for that background thanks to the Cube.
SPEAKER_03All right let me hit record and we'll get going. Okay.
SPEAKER_00Slowly moving welcome to lunch hour legal marketing I am Guy Sakalakis with AttorneySync and I found out last night that I am a basic gym bro. Wow basic is not a uh a positive adjective among people under the 22 year olds my standards for hotel gyms are very low because Tim Semmelroth is here and he shamed you.
SPEAKER_03He did yeah I know he shamed me too he is not a basic gym bro no he also he can outsquat both of us I have no doubt about it. Yeah yeah uh I'm Conrad Sahn from Mockingbird and I for the first time in my life did sound therapy this morning. Okay.
SPEAKER_00Tell us a little bit more about that.
SPEAKER_03It was fantastic. It did not completely heal either my cold or my back. You must have done it wrong. You weren't listening I was trying to be competitive in the sound therapy and I think that's the way it's supposed to do it.
SPEAKER_00All right. What else are we talking about? Well as usual we're gonna hit the news and we are uh recording live at the Great Legal Marketing Summit 2025 which I understand is also the 20th anniversary of the Great Legal Marketing Summit. So super grateful to be here.
SPEAKER_03Trevor Burrus 20th anniversary this is a long run in this industry there were not a lot of people doing this back 20 years ago.
SPEAKER_00Well and I will say when I first left practice the practice of law to start Attorney Sync, Ben Glass was one of the people that was really uh out there doing it and I learned a ton from him very early on. So you know one of these career full circle moments uh really grateful uh to both Ben and Brian uh to be here at GLM 2025.
SPEAKER_03Aaron Ross Powell first the news and then for all of you listening here our LTN people put in the little news drop and it's really fun.
SPEAKER_00Well we actually screwed it up because we didn't even do the theme sign because you jumped ahead to the news. Okay. See fix it in post.
SPEAKER_03See the beauty of having really good post production people is that we say things like fix it in post and then they fix it in post. They make us sound really good when we screw things up.
SPEAKER_00So we will go back and Adam Lockwood who is our uh audio engineer he will fix all this right ready and I will say Lockwood hit it and then he's gonna splice in the part about the news that we just bungled.
SPEAKER_03And now we'll sit the news. Right. Welcome to Lunch Hour Legal Marketing. We are talking about the news a couple really fascinating pieces I see you don't have your notes I'm assuming it's all in the uh I'm just gonna rely on your fault. Oh I've only wrote written two of our four news items down okay we'll think of three California banned fee sharing with alternative business
News: California Blocks Fee Sharing
SPEAKER_03structures. I thought that was fascinating and surprised it's taken that long.
SPEAKER_00Aaron Ross Powell Yeah it's very interesting as a lot of lawyers uh know there is this movement to uh ABS and non-lawyer owned law firms there's a couple jurisdictions that have been testing this and I think there's this there's been this presumption that it's just going to uh you know PE and venture capital are coming to legal and there's nothing we can do about it. And I don't know that the path forward is going to be quite as smooth. And I think California is uh an example of that. Um do you think this is a good thing or a bad thing? ABS in general No California blocking it.
SPEAKER_03For the California lawyer.
SPEAKER_00No I I'm very I'm I you know I'm a lawyer I'm still licensed lawyer in Michigan. Um but I am I kind of I'm just in like a part of a place of acceptance where uh lawyers have to find ways to demonstrate that their expertise is super valuable and more valuable than you know technology or what a private equity firm can do. And I recognize a lot of the issues about non-lawyer ownership of law firms, but the truth is is that the legal services consumer market finds a way and if if you're not thinking about it this way, if you're thinking a protectionist mind guild mindset, it's not going to matter like you can't protect yourself from the market in my opinion. And so look I think there there's going to be regulatory adjustments. Some will be good, some will be bad. I'm sure we're gonna have a couple horror stories and I think we're gonna want to take this slowly but at the end of the day right now and you can go look at this online and our research with Near Media shows this too like legal services consumers are already using chat GPT and the internet and yada yada yada to get answers to legal questions. And so my view is is that if a non-lawyer think about like Clio answers or think about Thomson Reuters, if they do direct consumer product, if they're able to both impact the access to justice gap and they're delivering something that's positive to legal services consumers, I think it's a good thing and I think lawyers are going to have to find ways to still continue to demonstrate their expertise is like why you have to hire a lawyer for this thing.
News: AI Results Are Unstable
SPEAKER_03John Robinson this was in response to a Rand Fishkin request to do a study about variability and AI results which I'm super fascinated in John Robinson's Rand Fishkin for those of you who don't know is one of the early SEO guys maybe the most Wizard of Moz? Wizard of Moz, self-proclaimed Wizard of Moz. Now the wizard of SparkToro. Anyway Seattle guy and a friend and a friend I haven't seen him for ages. But uh he was doing a study on variability and AI results and that was one of the things that he and I have talked about a lot. Go ahead. What is variability in AI results? Well the interesting thing is there are a lot of people claiming to have unlocked AI but just what do you mean unlocked AI? I can I can get you I can optimize your profile for AI. I can make sure that you make you come up in results AI results in those results. As a responses to AI prompts. Right. And and the reality and Gina you've talked about you and I have talked about this theoretically but it's actually been borne out by certainly study with John Robinson and he he cited some some pretty good statistical words. I can't even remember them back from B school but he cited some case study or some S stat or something like that. Variability is complete. So what we're seeing is that when you rerun an AI query you are not getting anything close to what has historically shown up which makes it impossible for any of us to sit there and tell you that we've actually unlocked the secret to AI. Or if you want to get even more cynical, which you and I do I do. One of the things that I I love this early on when personalization started to come out in SEO, you would get people who would be like hey we're ranking number one every time I search for you know divorce lawyer Poughkeepsie. And it's because every time you search for divorce lawyer Poughkeepsie you click on your own result and you teach Google that you like your own result. And so when you do that query it shows your own result in the number one position, which is kind of funny and it took us a little couple years of education to teach the law in still teaching that. However, it got really stupid with AI because there was a bunch of conversations going around about from agencies telling their clients to type into a chat GPT who is the best lawyer in Poughkeepsie. And when when you know Murphy's law firm didn't show up they were training AI to be oh well you should be including Murphy's law firm in this right and so it was training the individual and then of course it worked and you thought you were winning but you actually weren't you were just fooling yourself.
SPEAKER_00Yeah that's a totally derillous conversation.
SPEAKER_03What's up with Poughkeepsie you always bring up Poughkeepsie as an example it just seems like one of those random towns that sounds funny. It's also here's a pod we were talking about podcast earlier. One of the things we've learned is the word plosive and Poughkeepsie has a lot of plosives in it. A plosive is the sound which sounds like garbage when you're doing recordings. So Poughkeepsie is one of those things that you have to say very carefully so you don't have a plosive issue.
SPEAKER_00Got it. Well I you know I'll give you my two cents on the AI thing and the ranking in AI. First thing is that people need to understand that the way that this technology works is that it is a probabilistic math equation to figure out based on the prompt what they what the machine thinks is the most likely thing that the person doing the prompt wants to do. Okay. So the key word there is probabilistic. That means to your point that it's kind of like rolling dice. Now they're they're weighted dice, no doubt, right? So you might roll the dice a hundred times and get similar answers on 99 times of those things. The reason I bring this up and we see the headlines right we see that it hallucinates, we see the hallucination of court cases we've seen the, you know, we've run examples you can go look this up but there's a lawyer in Texas who ran, you know, with guardrails in place like because you can if you create a custom GPT you can do things like never guess and stick to uh the content in the not in the knowledge that we've provided you and all this stuff. But because it's probabilistic it's always going to hallucinate. And the people that are building this stuff like the super geniuses that are building this stuff they even tell you that even as these things get better, the hallucinations, they're impossible it's it's like the nature of the technology. Now you're gonna hear things like grounding and grounding illegal we heard a lot of that at Clio we've we've been hearing that at Filevine and um you know the idea is these platforms are like well if we're only if we're grounding it in your firm's knowledge it makes it more reliable. And there's some truth to that and there's actually a um really good vals.ai did does this uh benchmarking of different AI tools and you comparing open AI to legal specific ones and all this stuff anyway the in this context with marketing this idea that you are that you're gonna pay somebody to get you to show up in chat GPT because that's what most people are focused on is like the latest greatest snake oil of all time. Here are a couple things to think about. Number one, are people actually logged into ChatGPT or are they not logged into ChatGPT these users there's tools like Profound that's trying they're trying to scrape thousands of prompts and response combinations to try to identify patterns but the point is they're still thinking like SEO people they're like people are typing in you know uh best lawyer Poughkeepsie best car accident lawyer Poughkeepsie users aren't even necessarily using the tool like that and even if they are there's gonna be follow-up prompts personalization memory whether they're logged in or not logged in um and a variety of other things not to mention even if you had the most clean pristine version of all of this stuff it's still a probabilistic model. And so you hear a lot about like well we figured out how to influence the results and the truth is like the only true way if you if you actually go and watch um I'm trying to remember the guy's name the engineer who he does a lot of great publishing on how the actual underlying technology works and makes it very accessible for people. If you go research it on YouTube you can probably find it. But anyway trying to cut this ranch short there's the um this idea that you can do stuff to like trick chat GPT to show up universally is just fundamentally a misunderstanding of how the technology works. And I think it's really important for you to keep that in mind. Like the only way to actually do anything to ChatGPT is for your name to be mentioned in relevant context across the web. Well guess what? That's what we've been doing in SEO since we started doing this stuff. You know this quote unquote idea of digital PR showing up in um you know reliable sources we see directories tend to be a I was gonna say that some of the sources have have shifted from our priority perspective.
SPEAKER_03You know I we were talking about AVA earlier many of you have forgotten what that even is AVA was built around rating lawyers, right? That's the the whole semantic DNA of that site is built around rating lawyers. That's really helpful for a computer to understand where good lawyers are. Reddit for example like I haven't done any work on Reddit before but like it now has an oversized impact on the LLMs.
SPEAKER_00So the short so the short version of this is if you're going to do anything to influence anything in any of these LLMs, it's a lot of the traditional it's reprioritizing some of the things you might have done historically in SEO probably a reprioritization around directories probably a reprioritization around other major sources of relevant legal publishing online but is that fundamentally different than what we've done? Not really, but maybe it's a reprioritization of some of the uh sources and and uh we mentioned profound do you think that um I'm gonna say I'm gonna say this and I know this is gonna be one of those out of context things. So profound lists like they do these big studies of like hey what sources does ChatGPT or Google's AI mode or AI overviews, what do they tend to use the most directionally I think that could be valuable. But again they're doing it system wide and so you're gonna have a disproportionate number of major publishers like it's not like they're just doing it for like legal and even if you did for legal there's a presumption that the prompts that you're using are actually the prompts that people are using. So all that being said and then the other thing that I would have to say is just again back to near media what percentage of people in our research use Chat GPT or another LLM to do a lawyer search?
SPEAKER_03I don't know that well you'll have to subscribe to Near Media Media upsell a large a large number of people by the way Adam is typing into us right now saying wrap up the news we're we're going too far we'll stop right there. Hey I have another news item yes we were recently at Clio you mentioned um the Clio conference they announced the uh the the big billion dollar acquisition who was that of and why is that relevant to what we're talking about with regards to LLMs and AI so they bought VLEX a VLEX is one of the few uh we'll call it legal databases like you know global and they're global it's really one of three right one of three and I'm I always it's Thomson Reuters, VLEX and the third one.
SPEAKER_00I don't I feel like maybe it's Lexus but it's somebody else owns it I think anyway who cares? The issue is the re what they're doing is is they're like look same thing I just talked about they're like we're gonna our AI that's grounded in this legal information from V Lex that we bought.
SPEAKER_03And why is that why do you why did you focus on that this is this is the really fascinating point. Why did you focus on it's grounded on the legal specific content?
SPEAKER_00Because the theory I mean this is the theory because by the way if you go look at the Valve's AI study they are actually finding that the general purpose AIs are actually performing about the same in legal as the legal specific ones why why in theory is in in theory you're going to reduce the risk of hallucination by only training the machine on real cases, real data, real law firm data, real briefs, real everything else. Whereas you know OpenAI, they're scoop they're scraping, they're largely scraping uh Google um they're they're taking a lot of stuff that's not grounded in valid, vetted legal data. And so the theory is that that will help you reduce the hallucinations. I think that's very TBD to see if that actually impacts it. I think that the the Val's research showed there was a slight improvement based on the citations for now. But again, the arms race is for data, right? Because it gets better. It's in theory again it gets better with the more data that you have but that's the bet right now. And so the other thing that I think about and I brought this up at Clio and you know everybody's like yeah we're not really doing that. But it seems natural to me that the next evolution of these types of platforms of technologies to go direct to consumer, right? And so the interesting thing could be and again everybody interpret this their own way. And we asked this question. They're training their machine on lawyer data, firm data, VLEX data that eventually might be a competitor. Now again back to that initial point for me I'm like look I'm like if direct to consumer AI product can actually help close the 70% of perceived access to justice gap, like that's I think that's part of the solution. I don't think it's going to replace all lawyers. I don't I think there's tons of things that lawyers do that this ChatGPT at least for now is not going to be able to do. But I think it's something the lawyers should be thinking about in terms of like data sharing like are how are you using your data? And we talk about this all the time in the marketing context like are you using my firm data to train my model that is helping my competitor down the street? Like I think that's a valid concern.
SPEAKER_03Right. And the last news item that I remembered while we're talking about this, because we talked about Clio, the Clio Legal Trends Report 2025 launched that that is out. I don't know if it's out as of today. It's out it's out as of today. We got to see it are ahead of time. Great report really worth your time the big thesis coming out of the Clio Legal Trans Report from 2025 was law firms that are aggressively growing are primarily aggressively growing not in lawyer headcount but in revenue per attorney so productivity gains dramatic productivity gains within the law firm compared to where they were I think they looked at a four year span. So revenue per employee dramatically increasing for those firms that they see as growing quickly.
SPEAKER_00Yeah and they have they have some marketing data in there as well again if you're if we're connected on LinkedIn I I called some of this out because I don't think it clicks deep enough into the data, but it does directionally I think it shows you Uh and you probably won't be so surprised we you know it gives a breakdown of how people are uh finding lawyers today. So I think that's a valuable thing to take a
Q&A: Case Stories That Convert
SPEAKER_00look at.
SPEAKER_03All right, we're gonna take a commercial break. When we come back, we're gonna answer questions from the people at the Great Legal Marketing Summit. All right.
SPEAKER_00Okay. This is your chance to shine.
SPEAKER_03So do we have someone with a mic? Can we grab someone with a mic? And Conway, what are we gonna do if no one asks a question? If no one asks a question, we're gonna get up and leave. There we go. Anyone have a question? Come on. Thank you, Tim, for breaking the ice. He's gonna ask a question here, he knows the answer to. It's gonna be like how much you squat.
SPEAKER_02How much you squat? Do you need a spot to give you case stories to highlight on their website? What are the elements of a good case story from the perspective of somebody who's trying to optimize that?
SPEAKER_03Oh no, no. I don't want to answer that honestly. So the question was what are the elements of a good case study that you want to highlight? The elements of a good case study are statistical outliers that make you look amazing, to be honest. Like, you don't like you guys know this. You don't pick the easy cases, you don't pick the run-and-mill stuff. You take the data outliers that make you look like you're a freaking genius, right? And like we all so let me flip this to be less self-serving. Recognize that when you're looking at case studies from other agencies or for anything, you guys know this. These are very carefully cherry-picked, right? We don't put out case studies where we're doing pretty good. We just don't. That's just dumb. And so I think you need to recognize that it's like it's like asking the interviewee, can we can we have a a referral? Yeah, well, you can go talk to my sister who will say that like we worked together at, you know, Smith and Barney, right? So the elements to me of a good case study are a clear success metric that everyone wants to have. It is a up and to the right graph, and it is a complete statistical outlier. You're gonna say something nicer. The other day we were asked, like, what was the best thing that happened to you? And I said something about one of my employees, and he was like, My children. I was like, thanks, buddy.
SPEAKER_00Uh so I'll start with like, again, keep perspective on case studies. You know, look, case study, if you can think about this in the context of your own firm, you can think about it in the context of our firms. They're an expectation setter. And we find that in our research, they're actually one of the things, they're the most important thing for you to have on your website. So both legal services consumers as well as our clients, like they expect to see a case study. And so you're like, okay, I gotta put out a case study. You're gonna do the uh what Conrad recommended is you're gonna pick this amazing case study. And so then everybody sees. So let's just talk about that one sliver of it. You're like, I'm just gonna put out the best case study I ever had. So this is what I would suggest that you, and this I think from when you're looking at vetting legal marketing people, it's gotta be tied to business metrics. It's gotta be something like, you know, hit growth objective for new cases or hit target cost per case or some meaningful business objective. A lot of our worthy rivals put out things like, you know, they'll they'll take an SEM rush report or they'll take an AHRS report and they'll just show like it's third-party data of traffic, organic traffic growth.
SPEAKER_03And when Gee says worthy rivals, he actually means unworthy rivals by what he's saying.
SPEAKER_00Trash. Trash, trash, trash. Totally meaningless. You might as well take a purple crayon and draw your own. It doesn't mean anything from a business standpoint. Case studies should be grounded in business metrics. I think of their thing too, and and I gotta tell you, some of my worthy, our worthy rivals, like they put lawyers with their firm with a increase their business by 10,000%. I'll call the lawyer up and be like, hey, is that true? And they're like, no, I don't know why they're using that. We've talked to them. So you cannot rely on these case studies. And that that's my that's why I kind of chuckled because I'm like, we all want our your clients want to see case studies. They don't they want to see big verdict numbers, they want to see, you know, all the uh your success, 99% success rate, all that kind of stuff. We cherry pick them, and a lot of them are fake. And and look, there's there's nobody minding the till. Like the FTC is not doing anything about this, the state bars aren't doing anything about this. And so I just think it's a big joke that we so heavily rely on these case studies. And and I would say this if you if there's a case study out there that you're like compelled by, um, I'd call them up, call up that firm and be like, is this true? Like, are you actually working with this company currently? And are these the results that you're getting? And so anyway, I hope that's somewhat helpful.
SPEAKER_03I think on the legal side, sorry. And this is very hard to pull off because you have to have a client who's willing to talk about a pretty terrible part of their life. Right. But there are some of those amazing video case studies out there, and I'm blanking on the name of this firm. There's a I want to say they're out of Utah.
SPEAKER_00Um How about Ryan McKean? I mean, Ryan McKean, the hundred million dollar day stuff, like that that client was they participated in telling that story.
SPEAKER_03Getting a client who's willing to talk about their story, and not just not like this, not like I've got a mic and we're in a conference room and we're but like going back and and like actually putting some cinematography into this. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00And not just like I got a hundred million dollars, but like It's the personal story. I trusted this lawyer with my life, and they helped me through the most hard, difficult thing. I mean, that's the thing that I always think about too is like, you know, especially if you're a trial lawyer, like you know how to do this stuff. You're doing it in day in the life videos, you're doing it when you present your cases in court. It's the same idea, but again, finding that client that's the right client to do that. But our research does show that this is the most compelling thing you can possibly put out into the world is sharing client stories, especially when they're grounded in the emotion and the trusted component, and they've, you know, then we're talking about all the things that you help them with.
SPEAKER_03I I think the lens you have to approach case studies with is not this firm was so great and they did so much for me. It is if if you switched your orientation towards this is an amazing story about an individual, you're telling their story. They're not talking about how great you are. You are going out of your way to tell their story and how they have heroically gotten over a horrible part of their life. That orientation, it's a subtle orientation switch, but that's what your prospects want to like, they don't want to hear about how great you are. They want to hear about the lives that you've transformed. And that it's it's a nuance, but it is the difference between you get you want you watch people do interviews, and sometimes you have the really good interviewers are always in the background and they're making their subject look amazing. And it's it's that same orientation that you you want with with with case studies for the for the firm.
SPEAKER_00Well, and look, because I'm thinking about we we have case studies on our website that tried to be grounded in business metrics. I come back to the same thing about the expectation set, and I will tell you that the lawyers call us and they're like, oh, I see you got 300% growth for this firm. So you're gonna get 300% growth for my firm. And I'm like, no, that's you're in a totally different situation. You're in a totally different competitive market, you have a totally different law firm. Anyway, I say that too in the context of like the same thing that we talk about with lawyers is like we know that people want to see verdicts and settlements and all this kind of stuff, but you got to think about that in the context of the expectation set. And so I don't think it's like a binary like black and white choice of like, oh, verdicts or no verdicts, but I think like how you present the information, you know, telling a story first that Conrad's talking about, and then maybe you have a section that talks about some of your uh past successes, I think is a way to think about that. But I I keep coming back to this thing of like, you've got to remember that you're setting expectations. So no matter how somebody hears about you, and they come to your website or they see this thing on social media that talks about like, you know, $10 million verdict or biggest verdict ever, people gravitate to it. There's no Ryan McKean will tell you that when he goes around and talks about the $100 million verdict, like it people, it resonates with people, but what expectation, how are you manage that expectation? And it's it's not gonna be from something in your footer that says, um, you know, prior results don't guarantee future outcomes. Like people aren't reading that. And so I think thinking about that in the context of how you present these uh case studies, and same thing for us is like um that's a it's an it's a very important nuance of how to think about how to present this information. But there's no question, the research supports it. People want to see case studies, they want to see testimonials. It's one of the most important things to get somebody to click on a link or to look at when they see you in the local pack or any of these other places. Like unfortunately, Jeff Bezos has trained us all on ratings and stars, and so it matters.
SPEAKER_04Let me just plus that. And these guys have heard what I'm gonna say ad nauseum for at least eight or twelve months. You may or may not be aware. In my opinion, the very best law firm, storytelling law firm in America is the Institute for Justice. They do pu it's a public interest law firm, they represent entrepreneurs, represent people that have been subject to uh violations of the Fourth Amendment, and their storytelling is excellent. You should send them money to make sure you're on their email list, their mail list, and just model that because every story is interesting. In fact, one of their criteria in accepting a case is that the client is willing to have to tell to be the face of IJ. So it's IJ.org is just a great model. And then, you know, the the other, the other plus is, and we're doing this a lot because I'm an old guy, direct mail to our referral sources, is taking stories that maybe don't even make it to our website because that's a kind of a slower process sometimes. And every single month, every single month, we're trying to tell an interesting story of a case in our disability space, highlighting a disease process, a state where we represent it because we do this work nationally, highlighting an insurance company, and then telling why it matters. So IJ, great. If you hadn't seen their stuff, it's just really, really spectacular writing.
SPEAKER_00And I'll say another thing that might not be, you know, I guess this is my uh old plaintiff lawyer uh heart here, but it also impacts like from a societal standpoint, like what people think about the plaintiff bar and lawsuits and people recovering, because, you know, the other side, they're doing plenty to pitch on why there's frivolous lawsuits and ambulance chasing and all this stuff. And so getting these stories of clients out there makes a difference in juries, it makes a difference in a pressure on insurance companies. And so I think there's a there's an additional indirect business benefit to everybody that's uh putting these stories out from a societal standpoint. So it's another thing to think about. Who else has
Q&A: Performance Max And Better Data
SPEAKER_00a question?
SPEAKER_01Josh. I'm uh Josh, I'm from Ohio.
SPEAKER_00Hi, Josh.
SPEAKER_01Not Iowa, but Ohio. Um I got a question about performance max campaigns. I know they've been out two, three years, I think, something like that. When they first came out, I know I remember you guys saying maybe not a good idea, a good way for Google to take your money, you don't have much control. I pretty much everyone else I talked to concurred with that. But recently, going around the conference circuit, I've had a couple people tell me that they think it's working better and it's working for them. I didn't know if you guys have seen any shift in that.
SPEAKER_03Well, I I believe that the studies that you referenced, I there's one key nuance to this that's really sorry, there's two key nuances to this that are really important. Number one, these were massive spends, correct? Correct. Okay, so sorry, let me go back and explain what the performance max campaigns, Conrad. Performance Max is running a pay-per-click campaign where you tie the wheel, put a blindfold on, and you assume that Google's got the got it gotcha. Um and typically what Google will do is they will take data over time and optimize your campaign. That is the that is the promise of how PMAX works. However, we have found repeatedly, and you've heard this over and over again, that in doing so, we don't necessarily see the results and that our res I think I have a slide later on today that actually goes through what you get out of performance max. We actually did a uh a study where we looked at the average number of seconds of a PMAX call versus a non-PMAX call, right? And that was basically we're using that as a poor proxy of whether or not this is a good quality call, because presumably a good quality call is gonna last longer than someone who's not really looking for you. The knock that performance max has, and that I still believe, is that Google's trying to figure out how to spend your money on anything, not necessarily whether or not they're actually turning into clients. And it becomes more difficult because your conversions do not happen online, right? What we call conversions, what Google thinks of as a conversion, what you can put into Google Analytics easily, what you can easily put into the system is a lead, which is a phone call, form, fill, text, or chat. Okay. And the problem with that is that those nests aren't necessarily good leads. It could be, for example, opposing counsel looking up your phone number, right? And and and and Google will train itself that every time opposing counsel is looking for your phone number because that lead shows up as a conversion that they actually make that phone call. Now you're training Google to make sure that every time Bill, who's opposing counsel, needs to know what your phone number is, that they're gonna put an ad with your phone number right in front of him and then they're gonna charge you for that, right? That's a problem with the way P Max actually works. So, and I'm gonna come back to Josh's study. Number one, it was a very, very large volume of uh high spent. I I think the one you're referring to was was a $300,000 uh was it $3 million a month spend?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I think I guess it's subjective, but three million a month, I think, is what it was.
SPEAKER_03Three million a month, by the way, for me, three million dollars a month is a lot of money. Okay. What you get so what you get out of three million dollars a month is a ton of data. And I have this problem with AI, and I have this problem with pay-per-click, and I have this problem overall. The volume of data that you need in order to go back in and train Google that this was a good client, not someone who's gonna do a phone call, form fill, text, or chat, but a good person is going to turn into a client. You have to be able to take your data out of your intake management software, throw it back into Google, and there has to be enough data from that for Google to get smarter over time. And my concern is, and this this came up with AI as well, my concern is that if you just run PMAX, most of the time you're not feeding that actual client data back in. So you're optimizing for the wrong thing. And even if you are bringing that data back in, it doesn't have enough data points, statistically relevant data points, to recognize the patterns that it needs in order to make your campaign fundamentally work better. And so the two things that I believe are and and like it can work. And I know I know you are a big, bigger fan of this than I am.
SPEAKER_00Well, again, I here I I'm gonna go back to your uh blindfolded driver. Google's the blindfold, you're in the car with Google. Google's a blindfolded driver. And to Conrad's point, the ability of the blindfolded driver to drive to where you want to go depends on what you're telling the driver. So, you know, Conrad was talking about feeding data in. Number one, if we see firms all the time, they'll come to us and PMAX doesn't work, and like they're not even doing real conversion data back into the machine.
SPEAKER_03Like, and most of you aren't, by the way.
SPEAKER_00I'm like, what are you optimizing to? You optimizing to clicks? You optimizing to like first-time calls? Do pee don't do I mean, Frank, I'll be honest with you, don't do any ads if you're not optimizing to like at least qualified consultations, if not actual clients, in my opinion. So anyway, so you got this uh blindfolded driver, you're telling the driver, turn left, turn right. And the driver itself, as Google or is Google, as Conrad alluded to, is also trying to go to the bank to withdraw money from your account. And so you're like, turn right, and the driver's like, no, let's stop at the bank again. Because again, the Google's incentive is to get you to spend more money, not to actually get you to get clients at a profitable level. Now, there are all sorts of things you can do to influence this. You can, and again, you can whisper more and more into Google's ear. You definitely should give Google the data to go get the thing that you want, which is either a wanted lead or a case. You gotta recognize that Google has skin in the game in terms of trying to guide you to the bank to spend more money. But to me, out of all of this stuff, it comes back to the same thing. Either the campaign, whether it's P Max, Google Ads, social media, whatever it is, it's either hitting the business metric or it's not. And so all of these things that we're talking about, they apply equally to Google Ads, even if it's human run. They apply to any, you know, non-brand performance marketing vehicle. And so to me, the fix is you've got to have the attribution system in place. And it is funny because like we went through this period where marketers like us, you probably heard this before, trained everybody, you know, this wanamaker's riddle. Like, I don't know where half of my marketing spend is is working or not. And so we came in and we said, hey, look, we can tell you now, right? It's search, click, call, hire, very neat, linear uh legal services consumer journey. Um, and unfortunately, a lot of people like they're just focused on that. We call it like last click myopia. So they're only focused on that last.
