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The Renegade Lawyer Podcast
The root cause of all lawyers' problems is financial stress. Financial stress holds you back from getting the right people on the bus, running the right systems, and being able to only do work for clients you want to work with. Financial stress keeps you in the office on nights and weekends, often doing work you hate for people you don't like, and doing that work alone.
(Yes, you have permission to do only work you like doing and doing it with people you like working with.)
The money stress is not because the lawyers are bad lawyers or bad people. In fact, most lawyers are good at the lawyering part and they are good people.
The money stress is caused by the general lack of both business skills and an entrepreneurial mindset.
Thus, good lawyers who are good people get caught up and slowed down in bringing their gifts to the world. Their families, teams, clients, and communities are not well-served because you can't serve others at your top level when you are constantly worrying about money.
We can blame the law schools and the elites of the profession who are running bar organizations, but to blame anyone else for your own woes is a loser's game. It is, in itself, a restrictive, narrow, mindset that will keep you from ever seeing, let alone experiencing, a better future.
Lawyers need to be in rooms with other entrepreneurs. They need to hang with people who won't tell you that your dreams are too big or that "they" or "the system "won't allow you to achieve them. They need to be in rooms where people will be in their ear telling them that their dreams are too small.
Get in better rooms. That would be the first step.
Second step, ignore every piece of advice any general organized bar is giving about how to make your firm or your life better.
The Renegade Lawyer Podcast
Building a Law Firm Like a Startup: Adam Rossen’s Blueprint for Success
What if growing a law firm wasn’t just about cases—but about thinking like an entrepreneur? Criminal defense attorney Adam Rossen joins The Renegade Lawyer Podcast to share how he’s scaling his firm, attracting top legal talent, and using YouTube, grassroots marketing, and an innovative internship program to create a powerhouse brand.
In this episode, we cover:
✅ The internship program that's turning law students into future leaders
✅ A marketing strategy more powerful than SEO vendors can offer
✅ How Adam balances firm growth, community impact, and family life
✅ The fear factor in business—and why playing small is not an option
Whether you're a lawyer, business owner, or just love stories of bold innovation—this episode is packed with game-changing insights.
🎧 Listen now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts!
📽️ Check out Adam’s Internship Video – a must-watch for future legal professionals! Criminal Defense Internship Program
Ben Glass is a nationally recognized personal injury and long-term disability insurance attorney in Fairfax, VA. Since 2005, Ben Glass and Great Legal Marketing have been helping solo and small firm lawyers make more money, get more clients and still get home in time for dinner. We call this TheGLMTribe.com
What Makes The GLM Tribe Special?
In short, we are the only organization within the "business builder for lawyers" space that is led by two practicing lawyers.
One thing we're sure you've noticed is that despite the variety of options within our space, no one else is mixing
the actual practice of law with business building in the way that we are.
There are no other organizations who understand the highs and lows of running a small law firm and are engaged in talking to real clients. That is what sets GLM apart from every other organization, and it is why we have had loyal members that have been with us for two-decades.
We've had 300 applicants for basically seven to nine spots. And now one of the things we did last year so we show up organically on the first page of Google for many different search queries regarding criminal law, criminal justice, internship, especially if you put in Florida, we're there, we're right under Indeed or all those the job searches. But then last year we put it on Indeed and LinkedIn and we put a little money to it and we even got even better caliber of applicants through that process.
Speaker 2:Welcome back. This is Ben Glass. This is the Renegade Lawyer Podcast, where each episode, I get to interview people that are inside or outside of legal who are making a ding in the world. Today I've got my good friend, adam Rawson, and Adam's got a foot in both worlds. He is, at heart, an entrepreneur, but he is also a really, really good businessman and, underneath all that, a really really good criminal defense attorney. He's building one of the most robust and powerful practices in South Florida, specifically down in Broward County, but also spreading out.
Speaker 2:And Adam is one of our longtime GLM members and a mastermind alumni who's just always coming up with really, really cool ideas. So we're going to talk a little bit about the practice, but we're going to show you a way to get backlinks that is more powerful than anything any SEO vendor can get you, and we're going to talk about Adam's really neat internship program. So it was good we just saw each other. Like four days ago down in Florida, we were both at the 10 Golden Rules live event. Our friend Jay Berkowitz put on a great two-day event of marketing and practice building. We each had some time on the stage and it was good to catch up with you and Manny for a bit there. Friend Jay Berkowitz put on a great two-day event of marketing and practice building. We each had some time on the stage and it was good to catch up with you and Manny for a bit there.
Speaker 1:Yeah, ben, thanks so much for having me here. It was. It was a great conference by Jay, I know you, you gave. You know it's funny. Manny and I were talking. We're like wow, like Ben is full of energy, he's pumping it, he's ready to go. I mean, that was the morning of day two. It was great.
Speaker 1:But then I had my seven minute slot to talk about the internship program. So this hopefully will be 30 to 45 minutes where I can actually go in depth, more about how it's evolved and what the next iteration is. And you know, ben, I think I was thinking about it the other day. I think I'm going on maybe nine years of being in GLM and knowing you, something like that and I mean it's just I'm so thankful for everything that you've taught me and I know it's not a plug for GLM but or commercial for GLM, but it really is. Anytime I can talk to you and see you at a conference or be on your show is a great day for me and just I owe you so much. So thanks for having me.
Speaker 2:You're kind, but you know this is a funny thing, adam is. So many lawyers have come through our system and many are successful and many obviously would have been very successful. You would have been successful, I think. What, in particular, I can remember conversations with you and Manny is like at these early stages we pushed you yes, go get some more space. Yes, make that neck tire. Yes, even though you're not quite figuring out how you're going to fill all this space yet. And then you would come back 12 months later and go ah, I need more space.
Speaker 1:Which is a funny segue because I don't think I got a chance to tell you when I saw you but I just purchased a 6,100 square foot office condo in Boca and we are building with inspiration from yours. We're building a mock courtroom slash event space and we're having a built. We're building a video studio all in there and I really want that to be a community space.
Speaker 2:Hey everyone, this is Ben Glass, just breaking in here. As most of you know, in addition to running my own law firm for over 30 years, I've been coaching solo and small firm lawyers through Great Legal Marketing for over 20 years, and you know what Most lawyers who come to Great Legal Marketing come here trying to solve a lead problem, a lead generation problem. But when we start to dig in a little deep into their systems, we find out they really don't have a lead gen problem. Website works, advertising work, whatever they're using that actually works Turns out they have a conversion problem or a sales conversion problem. So let me introduce you to my good friend, Chad Kirby, someone I've trusted for over a decade. Chad and his team have cracked the code on turning more leads into paying clients, and normally Chad doesn't share his secrets behind the process unless you're a client of his company.
Speaker 2:But because of my long-term relationship with him, I applied a little pressure to make this happen for you. Trust me, you'll want in. So last year, my son, Brian, and I ran a webinar showing what happened when Brian overhauled our firm's intake system. The result Our conversion rate jumped 79% in just nine months. Yes, like many other law firms, we weren't very good at converting the leads. Now Chad is offering you his championship law firm playbook to show you exactly how to do the same for your firm. Here's the deal. Chad's doing me a favor. This highly coveted insight won't be available forever, so go over to scalableai. That's S-C-A-L-A-W-B-L-EA-I forward slash championship and get your free championship law firm playbook. You will not be disappointed. After you go through it, reach out to me. Let me know what changes you're going to make All right.
Speaker 1:Now back to the program We've had. We've hosted many judicial fundraisers, political fundraisers, bar events. You know we're in some networking, different networking groups, and just say come, come, come, come Our donation, we can be a sponsor by giving the room, come, our office is the community's office. And then same thing with having the video studio. So we're undergoing renovations now. Hopefully October, november, december we should be able to unveil it. I'm terrified. I hate using cheap or expensive, but it is a good amount of money.
Speaker 1:But then again if what you're doing doesn't scare you, then you're not playing big enough, and I've learned from you over the years to just go for it.
Speaker 2:Our space was inspired by another entrepreneur outside of legal and, yes, at every step of the way, when we were designing that, I'm like, really Like we need a TV screen that big and that expensive and we need an audio system inside like that. I don't know. It was one of the best decisions, as you know, we ever made because we were able to use that space. But again, it's an example of gee. I'm not a law firm that's going to spend tens of millions of dollars on advertising in any way, shape or form over the years, but you are very, very powerful and you've done it with a real ton of what we would call grassroots marketing. Just thinking outside the box, what can I do? So let's start here. I want to talk, give folks an idea of sort of the firm, the size. I did not know about what something you had added to your life, and so I think people will be curious to know like I'm so busy, yeah, but Adam's busier.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I don't know if it's an addiction, a dopamine rush or what, but I just can't say no to things. I have very big trouble. A little bit of both, yeah, yeah, probably. But so right now, Ross and Law Firm and here we are in 2025, we're at about 23 people or so. We got about 10 under roof and, I'm sorry, about 13 or so under roof and about 10 virtual employees. We got some offshore, some nearshore case manager who got pregnant and needed to move back home where she was from in Chicago and really we designed her role as an in-person role and the leadership team. We were just like, yeah, there's no way we're letting go of her, she's amazing. So there we go. She can work virtually, even from Chicago, from the United States. So we've really embraced a lot of that. And I know there was a GLM Mastermind meeting about three years ago where Manny and I got some great feedback from the room about virtual employees and even for legal, because we had had them but never for legal, and now we have one. We have, I think, five in legal right now.
Speaker 1:So we do criminal defense, all types of criminal defense. We have our main office in Fort Laurier and we have a small satellite office in Boca but we're flipping that over the next year. Boca is going to be our main base and we're currently looking to expand into Palm Beach County even more aggressively into the north part. We have cases in Miami. We're looking to expand full office and major presence there. We do federal cases, federal and white collar cases nationwide and again, lots of you know business ideas, expansion, different things like that, and that's really what I primarily focus on is the big level business, the internship program and the marketing and just the leadership team stuff. I don't even do more of the management level stuff anymore.
Speaker 2:But there was a day, you know, when you you were deeply involved in all of the cases and I'm sure could not have imagined like changing that role personally, and that's that's a growth thing that we see it's not for everybody, so leadership and ownership and all of the hats is not for everybody. You've done a great job. The other thing I think, as I watch you and Manny over the years, you've done a great job of attracting talent, attracting attorney talent out of the local either prosecutor or public defender's offices, because people know about the firm and they know that this isn't just one more criminal defense firm operating on a shoestring. You have a real business there, right.
Speaker 1:We do and EOS really helped us too, just by having core values that mean something.
Speaker 1:A passion for criminal defense is not one of our five core values, but it's a sub-core value and we hire fire based on passion for criminal defense work rather than just I like criminal law.
Speaker 1:There's a big difference between criminal law, which could be the prosecution side, and criminal defense and helping others through criminal defense. So there's a few firms in our area that are kind of like us in maybe size and revenue somewhere in that range, but I've yet to ever see them have those core values. What I believe their core values are just hustle to make money, which we do that as well, but that's not number one or number two. You know we are community and relationship builders and we we help people through criminal defense and then, yes, we're running a business and we all work really hard and we should be paid very well for the time and effort that we put into. You know, put our lives into helping others, but that's always kind of third for me and the firm and it allows us to really attract people who say I've interviewed at the other competition. But you guys have something really special here. It is a bit of a family and you guys are fighting the good fight from the private criminal defense side, so that's really been important to me.
Speaker 2:You guys were also a very early and aggressive adopter of YouTube and its platform and, although we don't really have time on this podcast to go deep on that, talk to us a little bit about sort of your philosophy of YouTube, your habits with YouTube and what that's done for the firm.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so I mean it's helped a lot. You know, we, we, we make money every year on cases from YouTube a pretty good amount. People find us and really it's. We have two different type of videos Forget about the shorts, I'm not talking about shorts two different types of, like longer form videos. We have ones where we analyze body camera footage and stuff like that from our cases. That gets a high amount of traffic but really no clients come from that. But it allows the channel to grow and hit the algorithm.
Speaker 1:And then we have more of the seven to 15 minute legal analysis videos and we have lower, much lower views on that. But those are the moneymakers because we we want people. We know that at 2am people are researching and they're obsessing about learning and figuring things out and they it's not just a one minute commercial. We're providing value with that. And it's funny because at you weren't there last year at TGR live, but at last year's Brian was there. But at last year's TGR live, um, jay had me talk about YouTube, me with my two and a half million views and 17,000 subscribers, and this year he got the guy with 200 million views and 500,000 subscribers. So you know he definitely upgraded for me to to Jeff Hampton and, um, I actually got to meet him there and him and I are going to be talking because I think I can learn a lot even from him.
Speaker 2:And his is a criminal defense. It was great, I think, in Texas as well.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it is.
Speaker 2:And then, when we were in in in Florida this week, you also told me that you had recently added like another big chunk to your life. So share what you have added in terms of your community involvement, family involvement and school involvement Right.
Speaker 1:So most people that know me know I coached high school basketball for a long time. I stopped about 10 years ago just because the firm had really taken off and so busy, but it's always been a part of my life. One of the schools that I coached at is American Heritage, which has two campuses in Broward and Delray, and we won a state championship at American Heritage. They have an amazing football program every year. They're top 15 in the country, but it's just an amazing school overall. So I live in Boca Raton. My kids are two and five years old. They both are well. The five-year-old started his first year at American Heritage. The two-year-old is pre-enrolled for the pre-K-3 program and I always wanted my boys to be in the same school pre-K through 12. I just think there's immense value in that. I think there's immense value in having a school that's a home and a family environment. And growing up, being born and raised in South Florida, I know the different schools, the public and private, and so we decided to put our kids in American Heritage. And because I have the internship program and I know how the school operates, they have six pre-professional programs. One is pre-law. They have a pre-law program. And here I am, for those of you watching this, coming to you live from the mock courtroom and I'll just turn my laptop around a little bit. I'm sitting on a judge's bench, you know, and they have at least two mock courtrooms that I know of in each school location. And so as I was talking with them and they do a lot of day-long internship programs and I said, well, I'm not going to take your seniors on a day-long, I'll see you that and I'll raise you. We have our official program. I will freeze out the other high schools and I will leave three spots every year for American Heritage students at my internship program. And of course they loved that and so getting involved more and more.
Speaker 1:A month later, the director of the pre-law program calls me and says Adam, I have a crazy idea. We need a new criminal law and criminal procedure teacher. The current one will be retiring. New criminal law and criminal procedure teacher the current one will be retiring. We've never had a criminal law practitioner actually teach it because of the court requirements. You got to be in court. You're at the beck and call of a judge and she goes. She says Adam, I know you run the firm, you don't have your own caseload. You don't. You know, you can teach if you want. And, by the way, one of the great things about the school is you get if you teach there, you get free tuition. So as I'm running through the analysis, I've always I still think I'm a teacher at heart.
Speaker 1:The best coaches are teachers. I'm teaching sophomores that are absolutely brilliant honor students in this program. It takes up a lot of time, but I've built the firm in a specific way where I can choose to do this. I'm having a blast Now. It's. It's been a ton of work. It's high school, it's every single day. It'd be much easier if I did Monday and Wednesday nights for two hours at at FAU or FIU, but but the school is great because it's basically parents are teachers there and they take care of each other's kids. You know there's a lot of non-parents there too, but it's been absolutely great. And if I can, you know again, just be connected to my kids' school and my wife is now one of the mock trial coaches. They recruited her as well and she's loving it. It's just, I mean again, a ton of work, but I love it and I've got a two-year-old and a five-year-old. I think one of the best things I could. I'm not gonna have nine ben.
Speaker 2:Sorry it's not happening um it wasn't our original plan either. Just so you guys right, yeah, yeah, yeah you have four originally. Uh, we thought we would have four.
Speaker 1:Yes, okay, okay, right, and and. But I can tell you like being a dad is one of the best things that I've ever done. I think it's. I mean, I'm just so happy to be a dad. I love being a dad. I think I can have it all. I can be this, you know, crazy lawyer, businessman, entrepreneur, all this stuff and be a great father. Why not?
Speaker 2:Believing that you can have it all, and that's really what GLM is all about, like, whatever the perfect life is that you have designed for yourself, we can help you get there. So let me move. So I want to talk about what you described pre going live as as internship 5.0. So take us a little bit through the history and tell us what you're doing, you know and, importantly, like like why you even started with this idea. Right, right.
Speaker 1:And I always say I'm not the most inventive person, but I'm very good at iterating and making something better. And one of the very first things I did when I joined GLM is I went through every single journal that you guys had PDFs on, I printed them, I put them in a binder. So I feel old, although I was using the fax machine Right when you mentioned the Dan Kennedy fax, that still made me feel young. And I just looked at everything and I constantly said, well, a family lawyer is doing this, how can I put my criminal law spin on it? So I took that I think some of the things that maybe the Hofheimers did with marketing to therapists for their family and divorce practice, and now I market to substance abuse treatment centers and therapists about for criminal law, and we've been doing that for seven or eight years and it's gone very well, and so same thing with this or eight years, and it's gone very well, and so same thing with this Version.
Speaker 1:1.0 and 2.0 were basically 2008 until 2019, which was, oh, you're a lawyer, oh, I have a friend of a friend who would love to have an internship and she's in her first year of college or she's in high school, and it was come hang out, just come hang out. No formula, no curriculum, no structure. Just come hang out, just come hang out, come. You know. No, no formula, no curriculum, no structure. Just come hang out and we'll figure it out. And that was great, and a lot of lawyers do that. And then we got to the point where it was one, and then you know one every so often. And then around 2017, 18, 19, we took two or three at a time, I believe in 2019, we had three and Manny looked at me and he was like dude, you're crazy, how can we do three? And I'm like I don't know, but we're going to help people. And then we had 20. So that was version one and 2.0. Version 3.0 was during COVID, and you remember those days we had weekly calls. Yeah, we were, you know, yeah, and everybody lost their summer internship. Everybody lost what they were doing. And I learned from you, ben, that if we are truly community and relationship builders, if we are the pillars of the community that we say we are, we want to be, then it's our moral and ethical responsibility to take on interns. That's what I believed. And then, directly from you, and so we took on 13 interns.
Speaker 1:That summer it was all Zoom and look, florida opened up pretty quickly, but it was still Zoom court and so it actually wasn't. It was pretty manageable for Manny and I and we had them on Zoom depositions. Zoom depots were a brand new thing. We had debriefs with them where we were just okay, you guys watched the deposition, you prepared for it. Now let's debrief and let's explain what we were doing, why we were doing.
Speaker 1:Um, we did projects, so that you know, um, george floyd murder happened around memorial day of uh 2000 and I did a pop-up law school final exam with them, saying that we were hired to represent Derek Chauvin, the police officer that murdered him, and I said tell me how we're going to win, which was very contrary to popular opinion.
Speaker 1:And so we made it difficult and I ranked them against each other, one through 13. And number one was a law student, but two and three were high schoolers and I was amazed. And so we had a great summer and it got me thinking and one of the I forget who it was who spoke at TGR, but maybe it was Mike Morris about time to think having maybe it was you, ben, I don't know, but it was just time more time to think and be deliberate. And so I thought it through and I said, hey, we have something special here. So we went from 3.0 to 4.0 and I said we're going to hone in more and make this criminal law related. We're going to make it in person and we're going to build a curriculum based on it. So for the last three years that's what we did. We booked and I and I had some amazing team members that took the baton from me and made it better. And then last summer I took it back, and so now it's something that is a big part of what I do.
Speaker 1:Right, well, they, they. They both left. Right, well, they both left. So it was easy. One is she's actually made Harvard law review. She's at Harvard law school now.
Speaker 1:She was um one of our um paralegals, but so I I took it back, cause last summer I was like, well, who's going to do this? We have nobody. And I love this, this is my, this is my thing. So, but I said I want to make a real curriculum. So we book club a book every summer. Last summer we did why the Guilty? What is it? Why the Innocent Plead Guilty and the Guilty Go Free.
Speaker 1:It's written by a federal judge and it's a harsh rebuke of the federal criminal justice system. I may add on Just Mercy this summer, just depending on the workload, we have a guest speaker series. I manage the speaker series. We bring in speakers from all across the country. We've had some real big heavy hitters. We do field trips. They spend a day with my wife at the prosecutor's office, federal judges, state judges, former clients. We have some federal secret service agents and federal police officers that come. So it's a real cool experience. And, yeah, and we learned from mistakes about different things, and so now it's.
Speaker 1:This is a program. It's rigid. It's 12 weeks. You get one week off. You can't come and go as you please. This is a thing Now. If you want to come and go as you please, you can spend a few days during winter break or spring break with us. But this is an official, prestigious program and we've had people from all the IVs down to the local law schools and colleges as well, and also we have an alumni network now, which is really cool. We want to be connectors among our alumni.
Speaker 1:But this year we're heading into 5.0, the next version, and so what that is is we're honing in more to make it purely criminal defense and criminal justice is we're honing in more to make it purely criminal defense and criminal justice and we're starting to partner with criminal justice organizations like the Innocence Project and a bunch of others local, statewide and nationwide to get even better quality speakers, but then also put a marketing spin on it. And as we're trying to build my personal brand and the firm's brand from beyond just Broward County or South Florida to a nationwide branding, we've seen this as an opportunity to get me on more podcasts, make more connections and also we're writing blog articles and press releases about the internship and we're looking at it from a digital marketing standpoint with the backlink profiles. So, as we're doing this, if we can get backlinks and write custom blog articles on 20 or let's just say, 30 nationwide criminal justice organization sites, they don't all have to be super high domain authority, but that is something that no competitor of ours can replicate. Those backlinks Everybody can get Avvo Justia. You know all the legal directories fine, you can even do local chambers and stuff like that.
Speaker 1:But to have 20, 30, 40, 50, 100 over the years of these backlinks from these criminal justice organizations, it's huge and I want them to be able to know us as having this program, as being their partner, because most of the time they partner with public defender offices, they're not really partnering with private criminal defense firms. So to me that's very important as well and it furthers our mission. So that's kind of the we're niching down even further and really that's the next version of it. And it just came to me over Thanksgiving as I was finally having time to just think and not run around every day and I said how can we? Okay, three years, it's going really well with this new iteration. How do we make it even better and it just kind of came to me.
Speaker 2:So there's a bunch of principles sort of embedded there in that story, and one of them is really the value of thinking time and the value of carving out time to get out of the office, maybe to get out of town sometimes, and to just give yourself permission to think, and unrestrained by the little bird that sometimes sits on your shoulders and says you're not smart enough, you don't have enough money, you don't really know how to do this, you don't have enough connections. Because if you have real clarity on what it is you want to build like that stuff will come, that stuff will come. Want to build like that stuff will come, that stuff will come. So, and the other thing is so, a principle that we teach is, whenever you do something so whether it's speaking at an event, whether it's developing an internship program, whether it's developing you know a podcast where you've got local celebrities, local businesses on your podcast we're always thinking like okay, that's one thing. Now how many different ways can we leverage for the benefit of ourselves, but also for the benefit of the guests, in your case, the interns how many different ways can we leverage this? So I imagine now that your 12-week internship program is showing up on a lot of resumes or applications for college or applications for law school, things like that. So who's the avatar? Intern, are these all high school kiddos?
Speaker 2:Hey everyone, this is Ben again, just butting in here. If you don't already have a copy of my book Renegade Lawyer Marketing, you're really missing an opportunity to help your firm grow. This book is 300 pages of very practical advice for those of us who are running solo and small firms and who are not spending tens of thousands of dollars or $100 million on advertising. At Ben Glass Law. Over 80% of our new leads start because a human being has mentioned our name, and in this book, brian and I share the secrets that make this possible. Now you can get the book over at Amazon, but if you do, you're going to miss out on three really terrific bonuses that are only available when you order the book over at Amazon.
Speaker 2:But if you do, you're going to miss out on three really terrific bonuses that are only available when you order the book from renegadelawyermarketingcom. Number one you're going to get our ultimate referral letter. This is the exact letter that we've used to drive referrals both from lawyers and other professional practice owners, including healthcare providers in our case, and has helped us accomplish our financial and growth goals. Second, you're going to get our intake success system, because what good is it to drive more cases to get more leads if you don't have a system and a person and a script for answering the phone when they do call? The intake success system is a complete course that will help you and your team convert more leads.
Speaker 2:And finally, you're going to get the notes from the latest Great Legal Marketing Summit. These are 100 pages of notes and slides from all of the speakers at our last summit and again, none of these bonuses are available on Amazon. Finally, if you like, after you buy the book, you'll be able to get on a 20-minute strategy call with either Brian or me. What we're really good at is helping you figure out what's the best use of your next dollar and your next hour in building the perfect practice to serve your life. So go over to renegadelawyermarketingcom pay shipping and handling and order your book today. Marketingcom pay shipping and handling and order your book today.
Speaker 1:We limit, we, we, we reserve up to three spots for American heritage students, for high school only, and we take anywhere from 10 to 12 interns now. So the rest are college and law students. Now it's an unpaid internship and so really for law students it's great. For one else, we, you know, for your one else summer, we've had a few, two Ls who were just so focused on I know I want to be a public defender and I don't care about being paid, I want the experience, and so they've done it their 2L summer as well. A few, but most of the law students have been 1L summer law students and we get a good mix. And this year alone, as of now, we've had 300 applicants and we're going to take 12, not counting the high schoolers. We've had 300 applicants for basically seven to nine spots.
Speaker 1:And now one of the things we did last year is we show up organically on the first page of Google for many different search queries regarding criminal law, criminal justice, internship, especially if you put in Florida, we're there, we're right under Indeed or all those the job searches. But then last year we put it on Indeed and LinkedIn and we put a little money to it and we even got even better caliber of applicants through that process. So I mean, this summer alone we have Duke Law, wash U Law in St Louis. We have Nova Law School, which is right by us, a great school. We have a University of Florida for undergrad. I think we've had who else. I mean it's crazy. We've had applicants of Florida for undergrad. I think we've had you know who else. I mean it's crazy. We've had applicants from Princeton Cornell. We have a whole Cornell pipeline now over the years. Penn, you know, university of Florida, florida State just lots of different places. And two of the law students, one from Penn State and one from Duke, are moving down here for the summer to do an unpaid internship with us, because that's how bad they want it.
Speaker 1:And we're interviewing, like we've learned many years ago from you, ben and others, we're attracting and repelling with our hiring, with the way we wrote the ad for the internship program, we put together a four minute video which is on our YouTube channel. Yeah, it's really cool. I mean you can probably link it in the show notes, but we had it. We had last year's set of interns. I said go in our video studio and we're just going to ask you a few questions. And so we did it and you know, and we left it. We didn't do anything with it. And then in December I said all right to my marketing team now it's time to build this and unleash it.
Speaker 1:And I think that the video is just amazing and the feedback we've gotten this year from the applicants. They constantly say the video really inspires them because they hear it from not from me, from other people and they love the fact that it's structured. Everybody has told us that. They said look, we've done the shadowing, we've done the come, hang out. I want a structured program and the fact that it's hands-on.
Speaker 1:So what we do is we have four lawyers in production right now with full caseloads. So we're going to go usually two to three interns this summer, three interns per lawyer. We're going to have an intern draft. We're going to make it fun. We do all this. They won't know where they get drafted, but the lawyers behind the scenes will do a draft and we're just going to have fun with it. But 25% of the year, quarter of the year, we have this amazing group of interns. Everybody loves it, they love having them around. Just tons of great energy with the firm and it really helps us build more connections. And now, I mean a few years later, we've had 50, 60, 70 interns, and it's pretty cool.
Speaker 2:And they're not just shadowing and watching, they're producing. In some cases they're producing work for you. I was on a panel recently so there's a bunch of William Mary soccer alumni. We were talking to current athletes in college and on our panel was a guy who was a hiring director at one point for giant law like not even big law, giant law and he said there's actually nothing like no one is hiring a 1L for anything over the summer anymore. Those programs just don't exist, at least at that level. And so you're giving these people an amazing opportunity and then like, what's the? Are any of them coming back as they enter the career and knocking on your door? I really like them.
Speaker 1:Great, so great thing you said that. So we haven't had anybody yet, but there's one in particular who's one of our alums, who's at the Broward Public Defender's Office, who I would absolutely love if in two years and she gets her full experience there, if she's ready to make the jump, if she came back home. You know I say that deliberately come back home because she was with us, for she actually was with us for two or three semesters and then we paid her to be a law clerk for us. So I would love it that way and so, yeah, I mean that that would imagine, right, the recruiting from that. It just makes it so easy and we and we've had a bunch of of interns in the past and one particular intern this summer she was referred by one of our alums. So it's great, it's just great to have these connections.
Speaker 2:As far as you can tell, is anyone. Have you seen anyone trying to duplicate this or take this idea and and run with it, cause you could do practice areas yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, not at this level. But I had really good feedback at TGR live and I want to talk to people. So if there's anybody listening to this and says, well, look, adam, I'm not like where you're at now. I'm still more in the 1.0 or 2.0 version, but I don't know what I could have them do, contact me, we can talk it through because looking back now, even in the 1.0 or 2.0 version, I could have made it structured. I just needed a little bit of deliberate thought and just a little bit of structure and parameters. So you can do that if you're small and then if you're bigger, like us, you can still do it. And look, if it's personal injury, if it's estate planning, it doesn't have to be as big and sexy as criminal defense and what we do. But I would love to give tips, tricks and pointers and, like anything, the more you niche down and the more you just iterate and learn from your mistakes, the better it's going to be.
Speaker 2:Do I recall correctly that the interns are on your website as well?
Speaker 1:They are. We were revamping the page but yeah, we have the internal alums on there and we feature them because I really want people to see and learn and put faces to names and say, yeah, this is a real program and it's not just some BS, like marketing scam, and it's certainly not common. We're getting free labor. Like you know a lot of people, some people who have been. Well, that's just free labor and you can't do that. I go no, no, no. This is an entire curriculum, a program. I mean they should get college or law school credit for it and we're working with some of the law schools on that. But of course we run into some bureaucracy from the law schools. Well, it's a for-profit business, we can't give credit for that. And we're just like, yeah, you guys don't get it, you don't get it. We, we persevere and move on and I'm still in a bit of an email battle with a few of the law school going back and forth that's okay.
Speaker 2:Like battles are good, battles are good for publicity. Battles are good for, you know, uh, rollicking the status quo, rejecting the status quo and trying to break some. You're actually doing something that is worthwhile in the world that very few others would even have had the idea to do and you've got a track record of success. So you've got. You have a. You have a line of people who want to get into this free labor, free internship program, including a line of people who've already, you know, who are in law school and presumably are accumulating debt. As we close out here, adam, give us some sort of picture of, if we followed you around for a week or two, I think you said you're not handling any cases individually. I know you're still coaching your own lawyers and stuff and you're involved, I suspect, at sort of high level strategic, right, at sort of high level strategic. But what has your personal role, you know, transferred to now, as we're in Q1 of 2025?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, well, look, five days a week I'm gone from about one o'clock till about four o'clock, but for teaching. So it's a big time away it really is. But again, I love it and there's a lot of profit that it's delivering to me and my family that has nothing to do with monetary profit, so that's something that's very important to me. But, and you know, we're actually at this inflection point with EOS where we're at kind of revenue level and employees, where we're trying to kind of add on or add some of our own little things here and there to it Because, like I still do some integrator duties, I'm meeting with our chief technology officer, we're on Salesforce and trying to continue to make it better. And now with AI, I'm digging in deep on all the cool toys. But there's many people that are so much more advanced than me on that and I'm kind of still deciding who's going to win the AI wars and I don't want to put my all my eggs into one basket who's maybe undercapitalized or whatever. So we're still looking into all of that, but that's, you know, it's huge. I mean, as with the leadership team we you know with, with the core people, I'm still a little involved in sales man. He's really taken that over.
Speaker 1:Manny's really doing a lot more of the management. He's better at it than I am. I think I'm a good teacher when I have time and patience, and a lot of times these days I don't have the time, so sometimes my patience, you know, is I'm not as patient as I used to be in a lot of ways, which you know. But it's about being self-aware too and just knowing that Manny's a better manager and other people on our team as well. But you know, we come back from TGR and there's a bunch of other meetings and different things that I'm constantly having to do and I'm really involved now with the office build-out, so things like that.
Speaker 1:We're always in talks. We've gotten to the point where in the last year we've been in talks with about four or five different lawyers who love the practice of law but hate the business of law, and we haven't made a deal yet, but we're still looking to add on people that have a book of business criminal lawyers in South Florida who just want to be a part of an absolute amazing family team, because being a criminal defense lawyer is very lonely, very lonely, especially when you're used to being part of the public defender or prosecutor family, you know. So we're really we're going to get a deal done this year. I know we are maybe two and then working on that and how the numbers work and just all those things. I think growth by acquisition is going to be a big part of our future that's.
Speaker 2:That's. That's so exciting. Um, and look at how far you've come from wondering whether you can expand from. I forget exactly how big your office was. It was probably some 800 square feet.
Speaker 1:Yeah, when we started together yeah, it was basically like 800 square feet to 2,500 square feet. It was actually even before that I was concerned because my rent was going to go from $300 a month to $1,300, and then we had issues with $1,300. Oh my God, we're going to go now to like $3,500 a month and now I'm buying this massive condo a month, and now I'm buying this massive Designing a building with an inside meeting and mock trial space and all of that.
Speaker 2:Well, look, this has been great to catch up with you folks. It's Adam Rossen, r-o-s-s-e-n. It's a Nancy Rossen law firm out of Broward County. Highly recommend you at least go check out the website, at least go check out the YouTube and if anything we've talked about today in terms of building an internship program is of interest to you, like, adam is one of these guys. He likes to talk to people who will do stuff like me. We don't like to talk to people who will waste our time, so don't waste his time. But if you are interested in, you know, in this grassroots marketing, in doing well and doing good and serving your community and your clients and, importantly, your family and Adam is a great guy, a great guy to talk to. He will share with you as I share and as many great legal marketing shares. So, dude, it's been fun to catch up man.
Speaker 1:Yeah, thanks, ben. I've had the benefit of having so many great mentors and people who have willingly shared with me, so I love it. Anything I can do to help.
Speaker 2:All right, we'll talk later, buddy, all right.
Speaker 1:Thanks, Ben.
Speaker 2:And that's a wrap for today's episode of the Renegade Lawyer Podcast. If you found this episode valuable, do me a favor subscribe, leave a review and share this with a fellow lawyer who needs to hear it For more powerful strategies on marketing practice growth and taking control of your legal career. Head over to greatlegalmarketingcom. You can also find us on LinkedIn. Search for Great Legal Marketing and Benjamin Glass to connect. Stay tuned.
