Ep. 25 - Branding with Purpose: Why Your Story Matters

In this episode, I tackle one of the most overlooked questions in law firm marketing: Is your brand really creating a connection?

Branding isn’t just about a logo, a tagline, or a polished website. It’s about making your story resonate with the people you want to serve. And here’s the truth: if your brand doesn’t feel personal, it’s forgettable.

I share my own journey from a kid sketching inventions in a notebook, to chasing (and almost missing) my dream job at Fish & Neave, to finally building my own law firm from scratch. That story shaped who I am, and it shaped my brand. And when I let my clients see that passion, it creates a bond of trust they can feel.

In this episode, I’ll walk you through how to uncover the personal side of your own story, how to align it with your clients’ struggles and motivations, and how to weave it into every touchpoint of your firm - from your website to your courtroom presence.

If you’ve ever wondered how to stand out in a crowded market, the answer isn’t louder marketing - it’s more authentic branding. Tune in and learn how to make your brand personal, powerful, and unforgettable.

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

Transcript

The Law Firm Growth Professor 0:00

This is Pod Populi, podcast for the people. That's my name.

John Rizvi 0:13

Hi, and welcome. I'm John Rizvi, the Law Firm Growth Professor. For my new listeners, I'm pleased you came to join me today. For my 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 too many people ignore when it comes to branding. Is your brand creating a connection? Now, this is a huge question, but it's incredibly important. See, branding is more than just uh ditching stiff, dull, and boring PA, slapping on 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 clients. Getting personal is a recipe for disaster. Getting personal risks running afoul of ethics rules or state and federal laws, and it can make me look foolish. All of these things are risks if it is if they're done wrong. But if you're okay with being stiff, dull, and boring PA for the rest of your firm's existence, there are things that you don't have to worry about. But that's the easy way. And you're not here for that. If you're looking for the easy way, you would have stopped listening to this podcast one or two or twenty-six episodes ago. So if you're still here, we both know the easy way either doesn't appeal to you or it isn't working for you. 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 professional, ethical lines and of breaching them. They exist for a reason. Now there's the problem of how personal we should make. How there's always this a way to safely and ethically show your personality and the things that help shape who you are. 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. I was 12 years old at the time, and I found out that I waited too long. I walked into a KB toy store one day. Some of you will remember uh what those were. Uh almost every single mall in the country had one. And I would always go to the aisle where they had puzzles and games, and what I saw on the store shelf that day crushed me. Somebody had already invented the round Rubik's Cube, and it had a better name than Round Rubik's Cube. They called it the Impossible. The Impossible. And in my 12-year-old mind, they had stolen my idea. Now I tried hard not to cry. I looked up at my mom and she was crying. You see, nobody knows you like your mom. She had seen the sketchbook under my bed with page after page of my drawings for the round Rubik's Cube, and had constantly been on my case to pick up pieces of destroyed Rubik's cubes that I had taken apart to try to reverse engineer them. 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 to develop and protect them, someone else can and will get there first. I think that's the day that John Rizby, aspiring inventor, was replaced by John Rizby, the patent attorney to be. So I worked hard and I got my engineering degree, and then I 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 the top firm in the country for intellectual property law was Fish and Neve. I never even considered a second option. It was Fish and Neve or Bust. And in my third year, I applied to Fish and Neve and I was rejected. I still have that rejection letter. Now, someone less committed, or perhaps less crazy, would have thrown up their hands and just accepted the hiring committee's decision. Instead, I scrounged up all the change I could and made a beeline for the payphone down on the corner. I pumped money into the phone until I could make a long-distance call to New York City and Fish and Neve. 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 got an interview. I got my dream shot and it was a nightmare. You see, I wanted to work with inventors. I wanted to work with the Steve Jobs and Bill Gates of this world before they became Apple or Microsoft, garage inventors, and people on the ground floor of revolutionary innovations. That's exactly what I wanted. What I got was endless days in a gray suit in a sea of gray suits. I wasn't working with inventors. It was all attorneys and MBAs, and I felt like all I was doing is moving paper around. Now, in the five years that I spent at the law firm, not once did I meet with an inventor. Now when 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 just a little, but more important than that, I was driven. I had a dream and I was uh doing and go everything I could 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 potential clients that I'm in a unique position to understand what's important to them and understand 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 understand them, right down to my DNA. So, what does all this mean to you? I know I've touched on this topic before, but what I wanted to really drill into today, because it's such a critical aspect of branding that so many people miss, is that 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 are 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 to really think about that. Feel free to pause if you want, because your clients, they 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, but different people and groups are going to respond to different motivations differently. Corporate interests will react better to attorneys who are all about minimizing risk. After all, the person in the company choosing the lawyer for a particular matter is making a decision that will be scrutinized carefully if something goes wrong. They want each deal that their attorneys complete to be worth as much money to them as possible while giving away as little as they can and risking as little as possible. Mutual benefit is the name of the game here, but clients who value prestige are more likely to gravitate to attorneys aligned with what I call legacy firms, firms with history and a reputation that confirms their status. Now, other clients who are motivated by personal uh factors, and anything can be personal, family law is personal. Uh, if not for you, then certainly to your clients. A dad who wants to see his kids, but his ex-wife won't let that happen, makes it personal. Trusts and estate planning law is personal to the person writing the will and deciding how their wealth is going to be divided, and to the loved ones that they leave behind. Patent law is personal because you're talking about a person's idea. It may be that one novel idea that they have, the one that's going to change the world, and it's their baby and their one chance to protect it with a patent the right way. 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 and how it's presented. 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 less 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 uh Cepheidones 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, for example, that the Constitution was written in, and take your cues from that. By creating a connection between history and your practice or firm, you're more likely to attract the type of clients that prioritize 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-fills 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 draw it, 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 the kind of corporate law that you're primarily practicing. Finance law firms, for example, 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 more nebulous. For example, in my own firm's marketing, I use a specific shade of red. I chose this knowing that it 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 candy apple red. So knowing this color palette might make some clients decide that my firm isn't for them. So why would I do it? Because I specifically want clients who think outside the mold. They feel a certain sense of urgency. And 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 aren't in my demographic. Clients who feel strongly and passionately about their inventions and want to take the 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 uh about this. In fact, I have an entire video about it. 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. It was a funny, tongue-in-cheek video, and my staff and I 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 idea. 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 that you're looking for your ideal clients, not the first prospective client to walk through the door, or even every prospective client that walks through the door. Not every single person who sees your ad on Facebook or visits your website is going to say, yes, 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 this 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 the right mindset because we're not going to win every single time. 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 them 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 multimillion dollar deal stacked up against the life or death of a human being means that much in the long run. 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 client, your ideal client's needs. Remember, 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 uh has what you've been doing worked the way you intended? What do you think are the reasons for this? And remember, it's not just about clicks or social media engagement. Clients who engage your services are the key here. The comments are open and I'm listening. Once again, I'm John Rizvi, the Law Firm Growth Professor. Thanks for tuning in. Uh, before you leave, it would be great if you'd click the like button and subscribe if you found value in this video. Uh and be sure to share this episode with your colleagues and friends who might enjoy it as well. I'm glad you came by today, and I'll look forward to seeing you on our next episode.

The Law Firm Growth Professor 18:52

So when a new idea pops into your brain, call the patent professor. That's my name. I'm a law school professor. An engineer too, I think math is fun and patent. If the patent of says your idea's not new, that's just red tape that will cut right through. So when a new idea pops into your brain, call the patent professor. That's my name.