Turn Calls/Inquiries into Signed Retainer
Agreements and Cash in the Bank… Remotely
interviewer I know you’ve created and grown an extremely successful practice. When did you change from just doing okay, or were you super successful the whole time?
Robert The story you told easily could be and was my story. I’ve been practicing law 27 years and after practicing for 15 years, I got married and moved from Alexandria, where I grew up and had a regular stream of referrals and had been a prosecutor. The other thing I did and got a lot of publicity for when I was a prosecutor, was I did stand-up comedy professionally on the side. I had an opportunity to open up for seven different Saturday Night Live cast members, Martin Lawrence, et cetera. I ran for the prosecutor job in Alexandria. So while I was up there, I had a very high profile and did not have to spend a lot of effort to get very good referrals from a lot of different sources.
I went out and made the classic mistake business mistake by falling in love and following my heart to Richmond. I got married. My wife’s a family doctor here in Richmond and she was just starting her residency. I had a sister who went to Virginia Commonwealth University. There used to be two comedy clubs on the same block, so I spent plenty of time in Richmond and liked it there. But was moving to an area where I didn’t have that base of people who knew me from growing up. It was just sort of putting out a shingle here.
One of the things I quickly realized was that my business was going south very quickly and I certainly needed to learn how to market. Before I really found out and started becoming a very intense student of marketing in general and actually trying to help other lawyers with their marketing, I like to say my first adventure in marketing was what I like to call “RC marketing”, which is random chance marketing. I was just sitting in my office and sitting by the phone, hoping that by random chance, someone would call. Of course, that doesn’t work.
The next thing, and from some of the things you had mentioned about lawyers and pricing and checking around seeing what other lawyers are charging or how other lawyers are doing that. For their marketing, they’re maybe at that time getting a Yellow Page ad or something. I like to call that “MSMD marketing”, which is monkey see, monkey do marketing. It means you look around and see what everyone else is doing and copy it.
The problem with that, from any perspective, business or marketing, is that doing what everyone else is doing, by definition, your marketing is average and you’re doing nothing to distinguish yourself in telling the public why they should choose you over all the other choices. The other thing is, since in professional schools, they don’t spend one second teaching you how to market your practice or run your business because you have no training in this, by definition, lawyer marketing is sub-par to begin with.
interviewer To give people an idea, I’ll tell another short story. When I spoke to you at the conference, you gave me your iPhone and said “Look at my email”. I looked at it and you said “Here’s the subject line to a lead that came in” and you told me to scroll through it. I scrolled through it and saw lead after lead after lead. I said to you “Oh my God. How many leads are you getting?” I think you told me it was about 20 a day for a lot of weeks.
Robert That’s correct. That never lets up. That’s really where things have come to. What you described that people told you, Richard, is exactly the position I was in. I was going through my misadventures in marketing. I had some of the things I’m sure some of the guys who filled out your survey went through. These guys are great technicians. They know how to, if the case comes in, do a great job for their client. But that is not the issue. The issue is how to get the clients to find you in the first place.
One of the things that happened with me is my wife was pregnant with our second child, we have two sons now who are 11 and age 7, she said to me “I would love to go to just three days a week but we can’t afford that because your income is so sporadic”. I didn’t have what I like to call now the “sleep at night business”. Meaning you know from a track record that the phone has been ringing and will keep ringing. You saw, just from taking a quick glance at my phone, I have that and have had that for many years.
Really, the big transformation for me was back in 2006. The people who you were speaking about at the marketing conference. A lawyer by the name of Ben Glass, he’s in northern Virginia and he has a company called Great Legal Marketing. I’m now a part of it, actually teaching DUI lawyers how to market. Ben, at the time, was offering his first seminar in northern Virginia, which is about 100 miles from me in Richmond. It was not for CLE credit. It was two full days and cost about $2,000, maybe. A lot of money for me, today, and it was certainly relatively more for me at the time. But in reading what he was talking about, this new way of thinking about lawyer marketing and advertising, it really resonated with me.
Making that investment, taking action, deciding to do it, making investments, going up there has been the most life-transforming decision I’ve ever made. He started me on the road to learning about outside the box marketing. When I say “outside the box”, I’m not talking about wacky, crazy picture of Robert B. in a flying saucer or Robert B. screaming at people on TV. You heard me talk about being a comedian, but my marketing to potential clients couldn’t be more textbook in the overall design.
When I talk about Marketing 101, it’s identifying the problem to the potential client, aggravate the problem to the potential client and solve the problem. That’s an overall theme. The reality is that as DUI lawyers with reckless driving speeding lawyers, when I say aggravate the problem, more of that is just explaining to the client how serious this could be. It can leave them with a permanent criminal record.
I’ve got many true horror stories that I do share with people about people who didn’t realize it and they have a conviction and it’s too late. With DUIs, you don’t need to explain to people that it’s a big deal. It’s just getting out of there, identifying the problem. You heard this at the conference from many of the different speakers: the big thing is going from talking all about the lawyer, which so many lawyers want to do. “Let me tell you about this, let me tell you about that”, I’m saying to people all the time “People don’t care what law school you went to. People want to know how you’re going to help them with the problem they have”.
You, basically, what I like to explain is that you enter the conversation that’s in the client’s head. The reality is, that if you’re a lawyer who has been defending these people for any amount of time, you’ve had, depending on how many clients. You’ve had thousands of conversations with people about their DUIs. I know exactly what they’re going through. I know exactly what they want to know and that’s what my marketing addresses. It sounds very simple, it is very simple, but it’s something that in just that focus alone, 95% of lawyers get it wrong right off the bat.