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The Renegade Lawyer Podcast
I am more convinced than ever that nothing that traditional bar organizations are doing is going to move the needle on the sad stats on lawyer happiness ...
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
Renegade Lawyer Marketing (Audio Book) – Chapter 6: Stuff Marketing Vultures Say
This is Chapter 6 of the free audio edition of Renegade Lawyer Marketing (Second Edition)—only on the Renegade Lawyer Podcast.
What’s the biggest danger to a small law firm? It’s not the bar. It’s not Google. It’s the marketing vultures.
In this episode, Ben Glass exposes the shady pitches, scare tactics, and empty promises that fill your inbox—and distract you from the only thing that matters: real human relationships.
You’ll hear:
- What a real-life spammy SEO pitch sounds like (and how Ben responded)
- The fatal flaw in marketing shortcuts—and how Google punishes them
- Why Avvo’s rise (and its tactics) is a cautionary tale about building on rented land
- The single most important asset in your law firm’s marketing—and how to protect it
If you’ve ever been told to “just buy more leads,” this one’s for you.
📘 Get the book + bonuses at RenegadeLawyerMarketing.com
🎟️ Join us live this October at GLMSummit.com
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.
Welcome back. This is Ben Glass. This is the Renegade Lawyer Podcast and this is the next in our series of making the audio version of my book Renegade Lawyer Marketing available to you for free. And today is Chapter 6, stuff Marketing. Vultures Say Part 1.
Speaker 1:As we get ready to get into the chapter, couple of things. Number one this has really exploded our downloads and that's awesome. Now what I need you to do is to go and click like and leave a comment on the podcast so it'll show up in more people's feeds. That's my ask of you and it'll just take a moment.
Speaker 1:The next thing is that as I reflect back on 42 years of practice and over 20 years of running Great Legal Marketing and coaching lawyers, it just strikes me that it's just a lot harder today. I'm not sure I would want to be the one starting out with a brand new law firm, trying to figure out how to break through with the marketing and getting cases, acquiring cases and clients and things like that. When I started, we had a couple of choices yellow pages, big ad or little ad, tv if you had a bunch of money, radio, maybe. I started right back to where I think you need to start today, and that is with developing human relationships, people who actually know you, know your story beyond the fact that you are a lawyer, trust you and feel safe reaching out to you, no matter what their legal concern is. I mean, you really want everyone in town knowing that you are the trusted lawyer that they can call if they have a problem and that you can either handle their claim or case or opportunity, or you can help them find somebody who can. And so the challenge today is that the choices for anyone who's trying to start up marketing a law firm are enormous. I mean, they're almost endless. We are all pitched every single day by lead acquisition companies, lead generating companies, seo companies, electronic email companies all sorts of ideas that mostly have nothing to do with developing a human relationship. I think I've told you this before at Ben Glass Law over 83% of our dollars start that customer journey. Their client journey starts because someone mentioned my name, or Brian's name or the law firm's name.
Speaker 1:Marketing vultures, say. I mean the marketing vultures. We've used that term for ever, since the beginning of Great Legal Marketing. In fact, at one of our Great Legal Marketing summits, we actually gave out little tiny, stuffed marketing vultures, and they're the ones who sell you this stuff that isn't related to developing a human connection. And then, when it doesn't work, they just say to you it didn't work because you should have bought more or you should have done it longer.
Speaker 1:And now let me be clear. Like each one of these products or services may have a place and it may be worthwhile, but we don't start there. For example, email marketing is something that's kind of hot today. I don't know why, because I get hundreds of emails that I don't even see, because my executive assistant deletes them before they even see my eyes. For a whole bunch of other emails, ai is summarizing them, so I never see your long, carefully drafted, creative email. Anyway. Now, email marketing might be good. Now email marketing probably won't hurt, but it's not the first place I'd go. You have to build this foundation.
Speaker 1:I will tell you that for the entirety of its 30-year existence, my law firm Ben Glass Law has had as its fundamental, primary marketing tool a print mailed monthly newsletter. We are also really good at keeping track of our humans. Who are our referral sources? How often do they send us cases? How often do we send them work? What have we done for them recently? That's the mindset that I've lived by. That's what we teach at Great Legal Marketing and, at the end of the day, if you're listening to this audio version of the book and you're wondering, gosh, how can I choose? I burned so much money Just ask yourself, how can I create or foster or improve upon a human relationship today, every single day, seven days a week? Okay, now let's get on to chapter six.
Speaker 1:I've long made fun of the marketing vultures, the folks selling advertising media such as websites, pay-per-click advertising, lead generation services, tv and radio ads and print advertising. They fill your email inbox with all those we can help you with your website messages. Today, linkedin is filled with this sort of spam. There actually is a mute button on LinkedIn, so when you get it, you can mute the person and never hear from them again. I just now learned that Sometimes I like to bait these marketing vultures when they email me.
Speaker 1:Now I'm gonna read you here an actual unsolicited email I got from a vulture. Now, this is a little while back, but you'll get the sense. Hello, it began. I run a few high authority private blog networks with relevant content to lawyers. These are high quality with zero footprint. I didn't know what that means. I'm reaching out to various SEO firms that work with lawyers to see if you're interested in renting out relevant links that you can use to boost your client's sites. So I'm not even sure why he was emailing me, because I'm not even one of them. Please let me know if you're interested and I can send along more information. This is currently the best way the email went on to create high quality, sustainable backlinks to boost your client's rankings. Thanks, signed Manu M-A-N-U.
Speaker 1:So I decided to bait him and I wrote back. We're interested, as long as this does not violate any internet policies. Does this violate policy? Signed Ben Glass. He responded hello, ben. Unfortunately, buying and selling links of any kind does go against Google's webmaster guidelines. However, they're just guidelines, with a little smile emoji he's so crafty. This happens in practice every single day. In addition, I have set up my links in such a way that everything looks natural and there is no way Google's algorithms aka Google's engineers, phd SEO engineers no way that Google's algorithm and all of its engineers can find out Bullshit, right? Please let me know if you have any further questions. Signed Manu.
Speaker 1:Oh yes, let's try and fool Google. There are no shortcuts, zero. Google will eventually catch anything that smells like a scam. They have hundreds of PhDs working on killing off this BS. Don't find yourself in their crosshairs. And look, we've all known firms who tried to screw with Google, who tried to cheat. Today more than ever, google has such control and all they need to do is take out their black magic marker and cross your name off the list and you can't even get a human being to help you get back on the list. So don't shortcuts. Remember human connections. I wrote in the book. There are no shortcuts. Let me give you another example of those vultures to watch out for.
Speaker 1:Back in 2007, now again, this is a while ago which called itself an online marketplace, was a lawyer directory. It was more of a democratized super lawyer or Martindale-Hubble type of directory. Avvo was a place online where lawyers could claim their own listing and have more influence over what was posted. We could drive traffic to our Avvo profile sites in two ways. You could have clients go to Avvo instead of Google to leave a review. You could go to these open question forums and answer them in the forum. The client would use the Avvo forum in the way that people are using Google now and ask a general legal question, and lawyers from across the country would answer it. One of the ways, apparently, to boost your Avvo profile was to answer questions in areas where you didn't have any expertise at all and either outside of your state lines where you were licensed.
Speaker 1:The result of these reviews and responses to legal questions was that Avvo attracted a whole lot of attention and a whole lot of search engine juice because it had predicted correctly that Google was going to pivot towards these long tail query based searches. When you were just looking for lawyers or legal responses, well, avvo came up first page one of your Google search. But here's the point about owning your own list. Lawyers had invested a whole bunch of not money but time and effort into building their link, their Avvo profile, by answering these questions and by driving client reviews there. It was time invested, avvo data, scraped the directories of all those state bar organizations and found all the lawyers and, in many cases, created a profile for you, whether you wanted one or not.
Speaker 1:Avvo now has a powerful search rank where it has used the scraped results to rank highly for your name, whether you claim the profile or not. And now they're charging you for all the work. They did and never asked you if you wanted it. Avvo then says oh, if you want someone who comes to our website to call you or email you instead of the three lawyers that we're suggesting in your practice area, in your location, well, pay a subscription fee. There's a great business model for them. If you pay them, are you building their business without owning the list?
Speaker 1:This is one example showing that you have to be careful of the information-based marketing that you're doing. Now I don't blame Avvo. Like X, facebook or TikTok, they own their own media. They get to write it any way they want. Lawyers need to stop whining about this. So where does your 70% come from? In a mature practice, over 70% of revenue comes from inside your own list. Again, in ours it's over 83%. When we use the term list, we're referring to people you stay in contact with on a regular basis by using either real human beings to make a phone call not related to anything specific about a person's case, or direct mail, that's Postman and Stamp. Do you think they can substitute email marketing for this type of relationship? Delude themselves Again. My opinion on this has not changed in years and years. Direct mail and print aren't limited to a mailed monthly newsletter. Although most of the successful great legal marketing members do employ the print newsletter strategy and each month we get hundreds here in the office mailed by our members.
Speaker 1:As the business owner, your biggest leverage continues to be your list. You must expand your tribe and that usually includes your social network among lawyers and other professionals and your consumer network. Own your own list. Own the media. Let the vultures pick at the other victims who aren't reading this book or listening to this audio Renegade pro tip Don't build someone else's crowdsourced platform. Build only yours. The goal of what we teach is for you to develop your own list. Own it. Get your own newsletter list. Maintain your own tribe.
Speaker 1:Okay, next we'll be into Chapter 7, stuff Marketing. Vultures Say Part 2. In the interim, if you haven't signed up for this year's Great Legal Marketing Summit, go to glmsummitcom. Dan Kennedy and I will be spending a bunch of time, but we've got a whole host of great speakers. Particularly, we have some of the best speakers in the internet space. We've got some money speakers and a whole money track which is far beyond the agenda of what you see at most legal conferences these days. We're going to be showing you how you can just basically ignore all this noise you hear in the world about venture capital gobbling up firms and spending all this money and putting all the little firms out of existence. It's not going to happen. We've seen it in other industries and I hope you'll be there in October to hear from Dan Kennedy and I and Brian all about this. All right, remember, go hit like, leave a comment. Tune in next time for Chapter 7.
