Tom’s Trek: How Tom Will Scale to $70K With Google Ads for Lawyers - #243

Google ads for lawyers is where most family law firms in the US bleed money—here's how Tom will scale to $70K instead.

We break down law firm Google ads, lead quality vs quantity, and family law lead generation. Then when to make your next associate attorney hire—and why YouTube marketing for lawyers feeds AI search.

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📄 CHAPTERS

0:00 - Google Ads for Lawyers: Tom's April 2026 Firm Review
0:35 - $49K Month, $26K Profit With Ads Barely On
2:39 - When to Hire Your Second Associate Attorney
8:01 - The Message Leads Problem in Google Ads
14:33 - Don't Lead With Salary: Recruiting Attorneys
18:36 - The $70K Plan: Scaling on a 3-5X Ad Return

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Tell us in the comments if you liked this episode and what other kinds of episodes you would like to see.

Transcript

0:00

I think that the recruiting conversation is an important one that a lot of firms struggle with as it relates to. When do you make that next hire? The worst thing that could happen is you get overwhelmed with You don't get back to people. Now your reputation starts to suffer. Stay in front of that and then ramp up time. So there's a lot to consider as it relates to to this decision. Welcome back to the Sterling family Law Show. I'm one of your co-hosts, Tyler Dolph. I'm also the CEO of our family law only focused marketing agency called Rocket Clicks. We have Jeff Hughes, who is my co-host and the co-founder of Sterling Family Law, with us today. And we're continuing our series with Tom Hartin. If you didn't know, we have followed Tom every single month since his inception of building his very own family law firm. And today we are reviewing April 2026. Tom, give us the high level overview on how April went for your firm. Thanks for having me back. Tyler and Jeff. April was another great month following up from March, where we had our first $50,000 month in April. Essentially had another $50,000 a month. Came up just shy at about 49,000 and changed. So another another great month in terms of billable work. We had nine new hires, which is another good month. And, you know, again, they were their busy clients. So we have you know, we have we have a lot of high, high activity cases going on right now. Expenses, you know, kind of stay the same each month at around 23,000. Not didn't really run much in the way of Google ads. I think it had it on for a couple of days and then wound up shutting it off. Still having that those message lead issues. So yeah, profit around $26,000 profit for the month of April, which I'm quite happy with. It's huge. Congrats. yeah it's great. like that. Yeah I know that's what I'm hoping for. I'm hoping hoping the summer doesn't get out to much because. Good. For those of you who are new to the podcast, Tom actually has been posting his financial numbers and his other metrics going back to the day that he started the firm. So if you want to see a long history of up and to the right, or you just want to model kind of like your own family law practice and starting it, Tom has been real generous and being candid about what's going on within his business. So it's a good place to go so that you can find. Is that Jay Sterling Hughes? That's my personal website, and you can just follow the links there and track Tom. He post those every month there. So thank you Tom for doing that. Yeah. Of course. Again, I'm sorry I've been so bad with my lead tracking. It's. It's just so hard to do when you're. bane. It's I know, Attributions really hard. yeah, it's it's just a hard thing to track. Especially just so many. I don't know about you guys. There's so many spam calls. So many like. Oh, I got six calls today. Wait. Four of them were spam calls. It's frustrating, but that's a that's another issue. So yeah, April was April was another great month. So I've, I've considered starting to look for a second associate to join my firm. So so I posted a job listing on indeed and kind of kind of in a place where if, if the right person came along, I think I would hire them. Now, you know, it's not like super urgent. So I felt like it was a good time to post it. I'm not doing any like sponsored job listing or anything like that. Just the standard indeed post. And yeah, if someone, someone wants to interview, I'll, I'll meet with them. You know, if it's, you know, if it's a great candidate, you know, like I have with my first associate, if I could find another one of those, you know, I'd be I'd probably jump on it right away because. Because she's been awesome and I'd love to have that. And the bigger issue I know I've talked about this before is having having someone fill in on the other county. So a lot of times I wind up handling those cases. Or if she does, you know, it's it's an hour and a half each way for her. So it's kind of a it's a waste of her time. But you know, everyone's time really, you know, billable time and everything like that. For her to be driving that far to handle a one hour court conference. So if I can, if I can have one person in each county, I feel like I can really, really step back and breathe a little. So I have that job opening. I was, if I was certain, like numbers were going to stay like this and I can do, you know, 50,000 a month in top line without even running ads, I would, I would, I'd pull the trigger. Now, I'd probably be going more aggressively. I think I'm posting that job listing again. Right person comes along, I think I do it anyway. And but if summer does stay slow, you know, we're it's June 1st now we're doing it. We're covering April, but we're filming this a little bit late. So if things stay busy through June and July, then, you know, I might I might start pursuing that even more aggressively. One thing you're doing really well Tom. As a law firm entrepreneurs you're balancing the practice like you practicing law, dealing with clients and spending meaningful time thinking about your business, planning around your business. And I know it's your dream just to get out of all the practice and just run the business side of it. So it's fun to watch you kind of figure out how to do that balance, because in the beginning to do everything, now, you're able to start thinking a little bit more about hiring your, your, your second associate inside a year and a half, which is really great. Yeah, I'm glad it seems that way from the outside, because from running around a crazy person. But I think that's every right. they stay practicing forever. That's why they stay so low. And that's great if that's what they want to do. But you've approached it from the beginning of you want to grow it and scale it. So it's fun Yeah, right. My. Yeah, my goal is to really. Hyah! Hyah! Great lawyers. And I again, really, really fortunate with with Christina. And if I can get if I can get another person like that covering Nassau County, I'd be, you know, that would that would really give me a lot of room to step back. And I would feel like I would have more time to focus on the business than. Tom. Can you give us a little bit more insight into how you're thinking about hiring timing along those lines, like what was the impetus for saying, okay, I, I think we should look at potentially in my next hire. Honestly, like, late April into early May were really busy. We were both we were both drowning and work, you know, between again, I'm still doing still doing some patent work on a contract basis and doing, you know, trying to balance family law clients coming in. And, you know, Christina's balancing her clients and balancing mine. And we we kind of have a, you know, in some cases that we're both working on simultaneously. But it just yeah, it just got to a point where it seemed like we were busy and we were falling behind. And I either needed to, you know, pump the brakes on signing new clients, which you never want to do as an entrepreneur, right. Or looking to or I guess there's a middle option where I, you know, I leave my patent job. But what we've talked about that, you know, the reasons I'm not ready to do that just yet for hire a second person. And, you know, either one of those, one of those options is going to have to happen if things stay this busy for another month or two, whatever, 2 or 3 months, then one of those is going to have to happen. Because, you know, we've signed again and signed 30 clients in the last three months, which is which is busy. I know for your for from your size, that probably sounds like nothing, but for my, you know, for my firm that's that's big. And again there we're busy cases. We have five trials this summer. I think one of them just got moved. So we're down to four. But that other ones in like September. So it's still kind of summer ish. So there's it's busy, you know, even if it's not a high super high volume of clients, it's still there's a lot of work. You know, one, one client that, you know, has a lot of issues going on with the trial scheduled in August is worth is the same amount of signing five other clients that are, you know, uncontested or lightly contested, you know, in terms of the amount of work to be done and the revenue coming from that client. So. Have you given any consideration to turning your ads back on and ramping that part of it up? Yeah, so funny. I just did that today. Still having that issue with the message leads, I don't know. It's it's it's such a give and take and it doesn't seem like there's any answer to it other than just deal with it. So right now I have the message leads off. And just as a refresher, in case someone didn't listen last time. So there's there's an option for Google ads. Traditionally, you know, you turned your ad on and it was for phone calls, right? So people saw your ad that clicked on it and you know, they called. And your intake team, which is still mostly me, you know, spoke to that person on the phone. Now Google has these these message leads. I don't know how new it is, but where the person's text message texts you or emails you. And I just find that those leads, they're just you tend to get so many more like tire kickers or just people fishing around for information, even people not looking for an attorney, you know what I mean? Someone who? Someone who really doesn't want an attorney is less likely to call. They're more likely to just send an email or text and, you know, because then if they just ignore it, if they feel like. And that that happened to me a few times where someone would message, I'd respond within minutes pretty much immediately. And then they just wouldn't answer, I got nothing, and you get I disputed a couple of them, but you still get charged for for those leads. But so naturally, you know, I don't really want those leads. I kind of want that off. But the flip side is Google ranks you and this has been shown. Google ranks you higher if you have message leads turned on. So it's like you know you'll pay more, but you'll also get you'll get more phone calls, but your cost per lead is going up because you're also going to get a bunch of junk message leads to. So yeah, I turned them back on this morning without message leads. I'm going to kind of see how I'm playing around with the budget to I, you know, if I increase my weekly budget, well, it rank me higher. There's just a lot of competition in this area right now. Hey, family law firm leaders. My partner Tony Carl's just released his book where he lays bare our precise blueprint for growing sterling lawyers from 0 to 17 million. This is the blueprint that we still use daily. And Tony explains it in very simple terms. The truth is, this is not simple to do. Success requires and demands hard work. But if you have the patience and the work ethic to do it, your family law firm will succeed. So you're feeling the, the, the pinch of lots of, of cases and leads and some going to trial and the complexity and feeling like, hey, we're we're getting really thin on capacity. It's time to start looking. And I don't I don't love doing trial work. I'll do it. I've done a few and I'm doing doing two more this year at least scheduled so far. But there are, you know, Christina as a like that's my associate, a much better trial lawyer than I am. And you know, to be to be a top trial lawyer, to be a great trial lawyer takes takes a lot of work. You know, it's not just learning divorce and family law, you know, all all the, you know, really nailing down all the evidence, rules and what can come in and what cannot. And, you know, everything. And it just seems like if my eventual goal is to step back and be the entrepreneur business owner anyway, it seems like a lot of work to put in to really become that phenomenal trial lawyer. If that's not where I want to be in 5 or 10 years anyway, you know, so my my thought this goes back to your question before Tyler, you know, why why look, to hire somebody is because you know, my my goal. It's hard to be really, really great at multiple things at the same time. That's kind of my philosophy. You know, I'd rather focus on being a really great business owner and being really great at bringing in work and getting clients to sign and creating a, you know, a great environment where people want to come and work and, and, you know, work for the clients that I bring in. And, you know, if I'm simultaneously trying to become a great trial lawyer, I'm going to wind up being average at both of those things rather than great at one of them. So if I can be the great business owner and hire great trial owners who want to do trials and who enjoy doing trials, it's it's a win, a win all around. So that's kind of where my head is. And why associate versus like a paralegal or an office admin or, you know, the other other roles behind. I have considered a paralegal. You know, again what I, what I really need right now that would take a huge load off is someone to handle cases in Nassau. Right. So obviously a paralegal can't go to court like an attorney can. So that I think I definitely will hire a paralegal eventually. But I think that would come after my second associate hire. Ideally, if I can't find a new one and I, I wind up going with a paralegal who knows. You know, if I don't get any hits on an attorney in the next month or two, and I think a paralegal would, would help lighten the load for Christina and I, then I might do that. You know, I might do that instead, but I can't I can't hire I don't have the funds to hire both at once right now. Are there any hiring targets that you know of that are currently at another law firm right now? What do you mean by hiring Like you hired Christina right from another law firm? She's been fantastic. Yes. going back to that? Well. So it's funny you mention that because we started talking about this before the podcast and I said, let's I said, let's jump on because this is a good topic. So I was going to ask you about that kind of now on the spot. How do you you know, like I said before, the only thing I've done now is posted an indeed job listing. You know, it's not right. I'm not doing anything crazy. It's not a sponsored job listing, just a standard job listing of someone's looking. They'll see it. I don't I don't expect that. That's likely the way I'm going to find the best people I could be wrong. You know, there could be. You could. You could strike gold there. But probably the best way to find a great associate is to, you know, just get make relationships with people. And and that's what I did the first time and see if, if they want to join directly or if they know people that that that are looking. So yeah. I don't know what how have you guys had success and you know, where have you found your best people from? Both of our current managing partners I got from LinkedIn, I just direct them, direct email on LinkedIn and direct message on LinkedIn and ended up meeting them both. And we've hired them both. So those were incredible hires. I mean, game changers historically in our firm, So. come in that way. What was if you don't mind like what was your is it like, was it salary. What. Like what what got them to move from. Don’t lead with salary, lead, lead with the opportunity, lead with the culture you're building, lead with, you know, the freedom you're giving these attorneys. So lead with all that because money is not the motivator typically. And if they if it's like the primary and only motivator probably not want them quite honestly. You want people who are considering all the other factors in life. Usually money is number four on the list by the way. Usually other stuff. And what I found is that the opportunity to work with other family lawyers and in a great environment and grow something together was a it's a winning. It's a winning, you know, hook. So we've amount of our lawyers off of LinkedIn, a fair amount from direct email right into them. I'm sure Christina could probably give you 2 to 4 names right now if you asked her, So yeah she could but again her her area is mostly Suffolk County. She doesn't know the, the people in Nassau as well. She probably does know a couple. But you know I'm not hiring another person in Suffolk wouldn't solve wouldn't solve my hiring issues. So. I think you have a really great story and the opportunity for a young associate or even an experienced associate to come in and be a part of, kind of like getting in on the ground floor and really make a name for themselves is right, right in front of them. Yeah. Another thing, Tom, you can leverage the playlist in YouTube for this podcast and say, hey, we're building an incredible firm. We've grown like crazy in the in our first year and a half. And operations we're adding right now. If you want to know more about me, you can go check the check me out on YouTube. This is, you know, you know, tell the story with exuberance. And I think you might be surprised the more people that'd be interested. And you know, it's funny you said before that it seems like I'm doing a good balance of managing the clients and running the business. That's that's one thing that I just keep meaning to do and just don't have the time to do is start a YouTube channel like a, you know, my own I know this, these go on YouTube, but you know my own because I feel like that's in this world. In this world. we've been at it for two hard years and we get results. It's worth it. There's a lot at play. It helps our AI, but I wouldn't think it's the top priority on your end, No, I'm not I'm not looking to publish a video a day. But, you know, if I could get if I could do, you know, even like two a month, something like that, you know, just I think, you know, like you said, it definitely helps AI that's been that's been a thought of mine. Although someone did call me this morning. They found me on AI, which is which is always fun to hear because none of us really know how that's working. But I've been told YouTube is a big player in that. But I think it's just going to become, you know, become more and more important. There's there's a, you know, I think, did you see that thing Google put out? I think it's just a test. But at some point it seems like they want to move to all where all searches AI search. So like your traditional Google results, you know, might not look the same. So I don't know. I think it something something everyone's kind of putting on the back burner. But you know, I think if I could establish a YouTube channel now again, not I'm not putting out tons of content, but if it's something, something that exists and, you know, whatever the algorithms could pull from and it's also, you know, even if I did like an introductory video to, you know, my firm and meet me and meet my associate, and this is how we work. And, you know, this is how the firm is structured. That might be good. Good to that might be good for people to see, you know, people that might want to come join us. World is changing very fast. higher will probably be your most important decision you make in the rest of this year. Not for any pressure on it. some people behind it. Yeah. No it is. And yeah, again, I mean, if I'm doing, you know, the last two months, 50,000 really without I mean, 2000 a month, right? I can basically say I'm not running Google ads at that point. You know, if, if I, if I want to get up to I think, you know, more like 65, 70,000 is where I'd be really comfortable hiring a second person. But, you know, I can easily get there by dialing up my my Google ads to it. Even 10,000 a month, maybe even 5000 a month, you know, on a 3 or 5 x return that that should get me there. So I'm not I'm not worried about that. I want to make sure things, things stay, you know, somewhat consistent for the next. Because again, we did have that slowdown in May, which I know you said is, you know, is typical. But I don't think it's I don't think things are going to explode in June either. Right. You tend to see a bit of a slowdown in the summer compared to February, March. So, you know, I had really, really busy months, but it was also the busiest time of the year. So let's part of me is like, wait and see how the summer goes. But I'm also open if the right person comes around that, that I would take them on. So, you know, if if things do stay really busy in June, July, I might do some, some more active, you know, outreach, trying to find someone. But for right now I think that the recruiting conversation is an important one that a lot of firms struggle with as it relates to. When do you make that next hire? The worst thing that could happen is you get overwhelmed with work. You don't get back to people. Now your reputation starts to suffer. Stay in front of that and then ramp up time. So there's a lot to consider as it relates to to this decision. Yeah. And that's that's how I felt in late April, early March. That was the first time where I felt like I'm I'm behind on on more cases than I'd like to be. So that, you know, again, the last two weeks worked slow in terms of new clients and consults and everything like that. So we caught up. But, you know, I don't want to get there again because that's that's not a fun place to be when you have six people emailing you. You know, I thought I thought this was going to be done a few weeks ago. All right. Well, another great month in the books. Congrats, Tom. Exciting things ahead. any other advice for. Yeah. Any other advice for hiring? I'm on indeed. You ever use. That's what I meant to ask. You ever use recruiters or not really in this space because like where I wish I initially started. Yeah, that's everything's through recruiters but doesn't seem like that's that's so in the family law your network, Christina's network and LinkedIn are more than enough. You'll find you'll find someone if you hit those. Yeah. All right. Cool. And yeah, we'll be back to talk about May soon enough.