Ep. 34 - Being Human in the Age of Algorithms

In this episode, I zoom way out to look at the bigger picture - how far we’ve come as humans, and how fast technology has changed the way we think, work, and connect. From the discovery of fire to the invention of the Internet (which, if humanity were one year old, we’ve only had for about ninety seconds), I break down what this lightning-fast evolution means for your law firm’s marketing.

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The truth is, our instincts haven’t evolved nearly as quickly as our tools. Our brains are overwhelmed by digital noise, flashing ads, and constant information overload. And in our rush to keep up with the machines, we’ve forgotten the one thing that truly makes our message stand out: our humanity.

I talk about how to bring that humanity back - through storytelling, honesty, vulnerability, and authentic communication. I share why your voice, your mistakes, and even your quirks are your most powerful marketing assets. And I explain how being real connects more deeply with clients than any algorithm ever could.

Tune in and discover how to make your firm’s marketing more human, more relatable, and more effective - because in the end, it’s not the machines we’re talking to. It’s people.

Want to learn more about how our agency can help your law firm grow? Speak with John Rizvi ☎️

Transcript

John Rizvi 0:00

This is Pod Populi, podcast for the people.

The Law Firm Growth Professor 0:04

Called the Growth Professor. That's my name.

John Rizvi 0:13

Hi, and welcome. I'm John Risby, the Law Firm Growth Professor. For my new listeners, I'm pleased you came to join me today. And for my list returning listeners, it's always great to have you. In my podcast, I share the strategies for growth that have worked for me in growing my law firm, from a startup with just me, a laptop, and a cell phone operating out of a spare bedroom, to where we are today, a team of 60 professionals generating over 10 million a year in revenues from our 10,000 square foot headquarters in Coral Springs. Let's start today by considering a big question that too many people ignore when it comes to branding. Is your brand creating a connection? Now, this is a huge question, but it's so, so important. See, branding is more than just ditching stiff, dull, and boring PA and slapping up a new logo and a clever tagline and calling it a day. Branding is about asserting yourself and your firm in the public sphere. It's about forging an unbreakable link in people's minds between their legal needs and your firm. It's about making a connection. And that means making it personal. Now I've talked before about getting personal. A lot of attorneys think that's a huge no-no bordering on a complete taboo. It's not about us, it's about our clients. Getting personal is a recipe for disaster. Getting personal risks running afoul of ethics rules or state bars or federal laws. All of these things have been said before. And if you're okay with being stiff, dull, and boring PA for the rest of your firm's existence, there's things that you don't have to dive into any further. But that's the easy way. And you're not here for that. If you were looking for the easy way, you would have stopped listening to this podcast one or two or twenty-seven episodes ago or 30 some episodes ago, but you're still here. And we both know that the easy way either doesn't appeal to you or isn't working. So we're going to have to do this the hard way. What makes it so hard? Well, first, as we just talked about, there's a long legal tradition of maintaining a professional distance. We've got to stand slightly apart from our clients and their emotions so we can focus on helping them navigate the legal mechanics of their situations. Over time, that ethos has become a lesion of rules and regulations and laws. They're intended to protect our clients from predatory legal practices. They also protect us from even the appearance of breaching professional ethical lines. They exist for a reason. Now there's the problem of how personal we should make this. There's a huge difference between letting potential clients see who you are and stripping naked on Main Street. There's a way to safely and ethically bear your soul without compromising your ethics or looking foolish. For example, when I was a kid, I wanted to be an inventor. I dreamed up inventions all day long. Honestly, it got me in trouble quite a few times because I was stargazing when I should have been doing something else, like homework. One of my first inventions was an idea for a round Rubik's cube. I was so excited about this idea and I couldn't wait to make it a reality. But I found out when I was 12 or so that I've already waited too long. I walked into a KB toy store one day. For those of you that remember those uh KB toys, and I saw my invention on the shelf. It was called The Impossible. The Impossible. They even had a better brand than I had thought of, and I was devastated. My mom had to carry me out of that store in literal tears. But the lesson I learned that day is that ideas are meaningless unless you do something with them. You can have all the ideas in the world, but unless you act on them and work and to develop and protect them, someone else can and will get there first. I think that's the day John Risby, aspiring inventor, was replaced by John Risby, patent attorney to be. So I worked hard, I got my engineering degree, and then went through law school. Unlike most of my peers in law school, I knew exactly where I wanted to go and what I wanted to do. The majority of them were just hoping to get hired with any firm or community that would have them. I was a man on a mission, I'd done my homework, and I knew that the top law firm in the country, arguably the world, for intellectual property law, was Fish and Eve. I never even considered a second option, was Fish and Eve or bust. And in my third year, I applied to Fish and Eve, and my application was rejected. I still have the letter. Now someone less committed or less crazy would have thrown up their hands and just accepted the hiring committee's decision. Instead, I scrounged up the change and decided to make a payphone. So I got to the payphone and put the quarter inside and decided to call Miss Rogan, the person at Fish and Eve that had written the letter. And I made a long distance call to New York and I called Fish and Eve, and I told the first person who answered the phone that the hiring committee had made a mistake, and the second and the third, and so on, until I finally got through and I made my case and I got the interview. I got my dream shot and it was a nightmare. See, I wanted to work with inventors. I wanted to meet Steve Jobs and uh uh Bill Gates before they became Apple and Microsoft. And what while these were just a pipe dream on the back of a napkin, but when uh uh uh Alexander Graham Bell, when he came up with his first prototype for the telephone, that's the kind of inventors I wanted, the garage inventors and people on the ground floor of revolutionary innovations. That's what I wanted. But what I got was endless days in a gray suit and a sea of gray suits. I wasn't working with inventors. It was all attorneys and MBAs and endless arguing and dickering. Not an inventor to be seen anywhere, not even the hint of an invention. I was living the dream of a hotshot attorney fresh out of law school and I hated it. I left Fish and Eve and started my own firm a thousand miles south of New York City. Everyone thought I was crazy. Maybe I was, but more important than that, I was driven. I had a dream and I was going to achieve it or die trying. So I get it. I understand where inventors and innovators are coming from. I understand what drives them. I understand their passion because I share it. And I use that understanding in all of my marketing and branding. That's what I mean by making it personal. You see, by showing my potential clients that I'm in a unique position to understand what's important to them and why it's important to me, I create a bond of common cause. They have an invention that they've poured blood, sweat, tears, time, money, and sacrifice into. I want to help them protect that invention using every legal mechanism available. I know what that innovation means to them, but that doesn't mean anything if they don't know and really feel that I do understand them, right down to my DNA. So, what does that mean to you? I know I've touched on this topic before, but I wanted to really drill into it today because it's such a critical aspect of branding that so many people miss. You need to really think about how every aspect of your branding creates a connection with your ideal client. And that means figuring out how your passion and your client's interests intersect and align. Everything, everything from your logo to your website to your marketing to your conduct in court, your branding touches everything, including the core of who and what you are, because who and what you are is your brand. They're the same. If your brand isn't as close to who and what you are as the vein in your own neck and the pulse in your chest, it's just a meaningless symbol. So I ask again, what does your brand mean to you deep down in your blood? I want you to take a second here and really think about that. Feel free to pause the podcast if you want. Your clients come to you for a reason. No matter what field of law you work in, something drew you there. Whether it's personal, a paycheck, or prestige, something drew you there, and none of them are invalid. It's just a matter of figuring out how your objectives mesh with your clients. Now bear in mind, and please forgive me, revealing the painfully self-evident here that different people and groups are going to respond to different motivations differently. Corporate interests will react better to attorneys who are all about the money. They want each deal their attorneys complete to be worth as much money to them as possible while giving away as little as they can. Mutual benefit is the name of the game here. Clients who value prestige are more likely to gravitate to attorneys aligned with legacy firms who have been incorporated since the ink was drying on the Constitution. They're motivated by status symbols. Having a bespoke attorney who works for a firm that confirms their blue blood by virtue of its age is just another trophy to them. Clients who are motivated by personal issues, well, that's another matter. Anything can be personal. Family law is personal. If not for you, then certainly for your clients. A dad who wants to see his kids, but his ex-wife or lover or whatever won't let him. That makes that's personal. Estate law is personal to the person writing the will and deciding how their wealth is going to be divided and to the loved ones they leave behind. Patent law is personal because you're talking about a person's intellectual baby, which they will do anything to protect. Now look, I want to make sure I'm absolutely crystal clear here. Again, there's no such thing as a bad motivation. It's all in how you use it. I would never say a given attorney's path is wrong or bad or whatever. My point here is to get you to think about how your motivations and those of your ideal client intersect. There's no wrong way. Just the difference between a way that creates a clearer connection between you and your client and one that doesn't. A good place to start in creating this connection is by writing out what drew you to your specific practice or field of law. It doesn't have to be a novel. If you can distill it down to 500 or a thousand words, great. If you can sum it up in a few words and then flesh it out, more power to you. If you can break it down to a few paragraphs, excellent. Now you have to think about the associations your particular drive shares with the minds of the general public. You're getting into imagery, font, and colors at this point. So these associations and their psychological weight will be important here. You need to think about your preferences and more about what your choices say about your clients and how you can help them. Let's take the legacy firm I described earlier. For a client who's all about prestige and status, you might want to consider Cephia tones and a copper plate font for your website. These subconsciously create associations of historical stability and understated wealth. This is even better for a firm that's been in operation for a long time and wants to trade on that history. Think of the script on which the constitution was written, and then take your cues from that by creating that connection between history and your practice or firm. You're more likely to attract the type of client who prioritizes that sort of thing. Now, how about the corporate law firm? Here you might be thinking something straightforward metallic colors and a modern sans sheriff font could be ideal here. These suggest that you represent a no-frills firm whose only objective is to get your client the best outcome from negotiations. You wouldn't want to use all metallic colors though. For example, if you're going with a copper sans sheriff font, a neutral shade like white or gray can create a mellow contrast. The right shade of blue or green makes the copper pop and draws attention to it. You wouldn't want to pair copper with another metallic shade because it might get lost in the background. In this situation, you'll also want to think about what kind of corporate law you're primarily practicing. Finance law firms would probably consider some shade of green. Tech firms would want lighter blues. Remember, in this situation, it's not just about your firm or what you practice, but how your ideal client would associate these color palettes with your firm. Other types of law can be a little more, shall we say, nebulous. For example, in my own firm's marketing, I use a specific shade of red. I chose this knowing I might turn off certain clients. You think of patenting as a technical field and it is. But a lot of people associate light blues with tech, not smoking red. So knowing this color palette might make some clients decide my firm isn't for them. Why would I do it? Because I specifically want clients who feel a sense of urgency. I want clients who have an idea and are motivated to protect it. That's my specific clientele. Clients who are inclined to take their time or wait and see that they're not in my demographic. Clients who feel strongly and passionately about their inventions and want to take steps to protect them before someone else goes to the patent office. Those are the clients I want. Now, to be clear, I've made no bones about this. In fact, I made an entire video about it. Yes, I did a whole video in which I parodied the Sopranos telling my clients to shut their freaking mouths. You can find it on YouTube if you check out the links below. It was funny, tongue in cheek, and I and my staff had a lot of fun making it. But we were also dead serious about the underlying message, which was to shut your freaking mouth if you haven't protected your invention. If you can't comply with even this very simple precept, which every single attorney learns that practices patent law, then I don't want to be the attorney or law firm for you. So just so we're clear, we're not suggesting you should take this idea and run with it. The point here is that not every client is going to respond positively to your marketing. And they shouldn't. Remember, what you're looking for in your ideal clients is not the first client to walk through your door. Not every person who sees your ad on Facebook or visits your website is going to say, yeah, that's the lawyer I need. But that's okay. The key here is to get your message to the right clients, not just anyone who thinks they need an attorney for whatever their issue is. And that means spending some time inside your ideal clients' heads. You need to identify their pain points, their issues, and their struggles. You need to figure out how to make it personal. And that means working out how your client's struggle is personal to you. A friend of mine told me a while ago, I take my job personally. I can't take the wins personally if I don't do the same with the losses. I thought this was a great way to explain this mindset because we're not going to win every time as attorneys. We're going to fail once in a while. And we should take that personally because if we're taking it personally, it shows our clients that their wins and their losses are ours. It shows that we're human. It tells them that their cases and issues matter to us because we have a common cause. This is something I feel defense attorneys are likely to understand on a particularly visceral level. There are few fields of law where the stakes are higher on the purely human level if you take the financial element out of it. Again, I want to stress that this shouldn't be taken as me running down other practice fields. But it's hard to argue that a multi-million dollar deal stacked up against the life or death of a human being means that much in the long term. In this kind of law, it's especially difficult not to take a loss personally, which makes it all the more important that you own the wins when and where you get them. The point is, everything about your marketing should demonstrate why you're the right attorney and the right law firm to meet your ideal client's needs. It's not about you, it's about them. And if you've done it right, your ideal client will find you. So here's my question for this week. How has your marketing so far worked to draw in your ideal client? Have you found any areas that could use improvement? Or has it been doing what you intended? What do you think are the reasons for this? Remember, it's not just about clicks or social media engagement. Clients who engage your service are the key here. The comments are open and I'm listening. Once again, I'm John Risby, the Law Firm Growth Professor. Thank you for tuning in today. And before you leave, it would be great if you'd click that like button, subscribe if you found value in today's episode and you haven't subscribed already. And be sure to share this episode with your colleagues and friends and other attorneys that would enjoy it as well. Thank you.

The Law Firm Growth Professor 18:20

So when a new idea pops into your brain, Professor, that's my name. I'm a love of Professor. An engineer too. I think that's your ideas at new effort. So when a new idea pops into your brain.