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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 8: The Truth About 800-Pound Gorillas
🎧 This is Chapter 8 of the free audio edition of Renegade Lawyer Marketing (Second Edition)—only on the Renegade Lawyer Podcast.
In the first edition of the book, Ben Glass claimed that big firms—the “800-pound gorillas”—don’t understand marketing. In this updated chapter, he confesses: he was wrong.
Today’s gorillas are smart, funded, and sophisticated. But that doesn’t mean you’re doomed.
You’ll hear:
- What the biggest PI firms believe about consumers (from an actual lawsuit)
- Why bus ads, billboards, and TikTok blitzes aren’t unbeatable
- How solo and small firms still win—without trying to be the biggest
- A pro tip list of tactical steps you can take to compete on your terms
- Why your mindset matters more than your marketing budget
📣 Shout-outs:
Big thanks to our friends at Nifty Marketing for sponsoring the Great Legal Marketing Summit—and for being one of the smartest digital teams serving lawyers today.
📘 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.
Hey everyone, welcome back. This is Ben Glass. This is the Renegade Lawyer Podcast, and this is another in the episodes where we are making the audio version of my book, renegade Lawyer Marketing, available for free. We'll be talking about Chapter 8, 800-lb Gorilla and a big mistake I made in the first edition of the book. But before we go there, I just want to give a shout out to our friends at Nifty Marketing.
Speaker 1:Nifty Website Marketing. Nifty is one of the sponsors of the Great Legal Marketing Summit which will be held this October in Northern Virginia, out near Dulles Airport. They'll be hosting an expert roundtable and they'll be. They are one of the companies where these guys are really smart. A lot of our members and our mastermind members use Nifty for their web marketing. They understand what we do, they understand, obviously, the digital space and they understand lawyers. So if you've ever wanted to have an opportunity to talk to some of the top web marketing companies in the United States on an informal basis and also hear their leaders talk from the stage, go over to GLMSummitcom and register for this year's event. A word of warning a week from now, the price of the summit goes up again, so go buy your ticket. There's no reason to wait. We look forward to seeing you there All righty.
Speaker 1:Chapter 8, 800-lb Gorilla. There was a big mistake in the first edition of Renegade Lawyer Marketing when that book was first published in 2015,. This is what I said about the 800-pound gorillas in the market Rejoice Like the vultures. The 800-pound gorillas really don't understand marketing either. They just spend money like it grows on trees. I'll tell you one story then give you a caveat and a renegade pro tip that'll allow you to ignore the gorillas. Many lawyers get depressed when they see that the local 800-pound gorilla can do with a gargantuan marketing budget. You know who I'm talking about. Their faces are on every TV channel, city bus and billboard for miles around. Some lawyers think those firms get all the cases Fret no more. They don't and from all I've seen, they don't know a whole lot about effective marketing either. Know this around every Home Depot is a thriving mom and pop hardware store. That's what I wrote back in 2015.
Speaker 1:In my defense back in 2014, when the book was being crafted, there wasn't a whole lot of organized effort on the part of the guerrillas to let the rest of us know exactly what they were doing. They were not, after all, gathering in conferences to tell all. Now they do At conferences like CRISP's Game Changer Summit, mass Torts Made Perfect and National Trial Lawyers' Business of Law events. These are all excellent events, by the way, you can see and hear from firms that are ready, willing and able to spend anywhere from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars a month on their digital marketing alone. By attending these conferences, you can get a sense of the millions of dollars invested in setting up, training and monitoring call centers around the world that these firms, or the marketing agencies selling them hundreds of thousands of dollars in digital marketing, have at their disposal. And it's not just the big law firms themselves. You're competing with LegalZoom, which does over $600 million in revenue with over 1 million transactions in 2023. Right For a $213 million sales and marketing spend in 2023, you're competing with Colvard Kravis Roberts Company, an $82 billion private equity firm that owns Nolo and Avvo.
Speaker 1:So the conclusion about the gorillas in the 2015 book is wrong. These gorillas are extremely sophisticated about marketing and they're out to eat our lunches. If you've never seen my 45 pages of detailed notes from the 2022 Business of Law Conference, send me an email bannetbengalastlawcom with the subject of line BOL 2022 notes and I'll send them to you. That offer still stands. We'll also send you, actually, the notes from the most recent Great Legal Marketing Summit, so complete notes and slides from that. If you will send me an email, tell me that you listened to it on this audio book at the Renegade Lawyer podcast, and tell me where to send it, and I will email you both sets of notes.
Speaker 1:Many lawyers get depressed when they see what the local 800-pound gorilla can do with a gargantuan marketing budget. You know what I'm talking about their faces on every TV channel, city bus and billboard for miles around. Now they're also all over TikTok, facebook, instagram and whatever new channel may have emerged by the time you listen to this book. Some lawyers think those firms get all the cases. I think this is what the giant firms want you to believe, hoping to convince you to not even try. This statement from the first edition of this book remains true. Around every Home Depot is a thriving mom and pop hardware store. How do I know? It's still true. We've got hundreds of them in great legal marketing and a couple of dozen in our hero and icon mastermind groups. Thriving law firms, happy lawyers, proud families none of them 800-pound gorillas. They're thriving because they're playing a different game.
Speaker 1:While some of these giant firms boast of spending tens of thousands of dollars a month on digital marketing and in one case I heard a guy boasting of spending $50,000 to promote a single TikTok video our members start by building successful human relationships that bring a steady stream of highly qualified clients to their offices. Sure, almost all of us get to a point where we're spending some money on outbound general advertising, but it's almost never where the majority of our members' advertising budget is going. At Ben Glass Law, we spend very, very little, almost nothing, on outbound advertising per se either. Digital TV, whatever Our firm is based, is built on relationships and direct mail marketing. A few years back, a lawyer marketing centered lawsuit involved an antitrust claim arising out of bus advertising in Philadelphia. This lawsuit revealed just how differently the big advertisers do think. In the lawsuit, the plaintiff law firm whined that it would be put out of business if it couldn't advertise on buses.
Speaker 1:Here's what the pleadings revealed. They believed about the world we were all marketing to. This is what they said in their pleadings about consumers. They claim that consumers base their decisions for legal representation for small personal injury, social security, disability and workers' compensation legal services primarily on brand name recognition or recall. Now, obviously some do, but this is not so for the thriving solo and small firms who make up our membership at Great Legal Marketing. They claim their business is wholly dependent on the ability of the firm to attract and ultimately sign engagement agreements with a high volume of individual clients. That sounds like pure chaos to me and not a life I would want to be living. Law firms in the market for small personal injury, workers' compensation and social disability cases typically build their revenue by aggregating such clients in high volume. Again, this is a claim they made in the lawsuit. This strikes us as a stressful business model to choose, but it does suggest a marketing message for the rest of us. We treat our clients individually, not as an aggregate lumps of small bags of money.
Speaker 1:They claim that if a potential client wasn't exposed to the name of a firm on a routine, consistent and repetitive basis, that client wouldn't know to call the firm's phone number. This isn't true. Anywhere the internet exists, they said that to get the biggest bang for the buck, their term in the lawsuit was to advertise legal services through mass reach outlets using constant messaging and saturation advertising. Again, this is not our world at all. In the great legal marketing for members and our fans and our law firm, they insisted that without mass advertising, law firms practicing in these areas were unable to compete effectively and efficiently. This is objectively not true.
Speaker 1:They wrote the most effective and therefore most coveted mass reach, constant messaging, saturation advertisements that provide the greatest return for the cost spent are those placed number one on the exterior of buses. Of all things, number Thank you displayed inside arenas where sporting and concert events are regularly held. Really, you go to a basketball game to text your lawyer Like? I get it that all these stadiums now have local law firms who are spending a ton of money. They're not small law firms, they're pretty significant law firms running ads around the stadium. I doubt anyone's calling their lawyer based on those ads.
Speaker 1:They said there's no economically viable substitute for bus exterior advertising and none of the available advertising alternatives are as effective and efficient because they cannot achieve the same consumer recognition that bus exterior advertising does without a cross-prohibitive amount of money. You can go search this If you go to Lexus. Look up Larry Pitt and Associates versus Lundy Law at 213 United States District, lexus, 174607. It's right there. They said the internet wasn't as effective or as efficient a form of advertising as bus exterior is because the sheer volume of information available on the internet makes it impossible for one law firm to distinguish itself from others in a particular market. Well, this is true only if you and your firm don't know what you're doing, they whined. Consumers are often quick to conclude that a law firm that no longer advertises on bus exteriors may no longer be in existence. Wow, what a depressive view of the world.
Speaker 1:Here's our mantra on this Let the big firms spend their money that way while we work on ways to get more out of every dollar and every hour we spend on marketing. So here's your renegade pro tip. Your advantage is in being nimble and doing things that don't necessarily scale to the gorilla's size. It's a bulleted list here. Number one track where your leads come from. Number two cultivate personal relationships with referral sources. Number three deploy that all-important USP. Know your why, and we'll talk about that in chapter 12. Number four develop your niche. Number five write that lead generation book. We'll also talk about that later in this book, but we've written any number. We're probably in double digits now on the practice area books sent to referral sources, sent to potential leads and sent to clients after they've signed.
Speaker 1:Next, send mailed monthly newsletters Again, as I am making this audio version, there's a lot of back and forth chatter on some of the Facebook websites for lawyers about this. Let me just be very clear. If you're going to do email marketing and it's on top of everything else, fine, it won't hurt. If you're going to do email marketing and you think this is a good use of your time, I mean, that's just you're rejecting reality. The reason most lawyers don't do print mailed monthly newsletters is that it's actually work For us. It's work worth doing. Over 83% of our money comes because someone knows our name, repeats our name, makes a referral and these come out of our list. Right, and so we're in front of folks at least once a month and, depending on who they are, several times a month with print mail.
Speaker 1:Next, make yourself look more like a specialist than a generalist. More on some of these items later. But in my view, the inside secret about marketing is that what goes on inside your head is far more important than the words you put on the paper, the ads you run on TV or the pictures you include on your website. Don't put gavels and law books on your website. I mean, that's the sign of pure amateurism, both you and whoever told you to do that.
Speaker 1:Marketing techniques and tools are important, no doubt, but getting your head on straight is a condition precedent to success. You can win by playing a different game. That's what we do. You might not be able to outbid them we don't on a bus advertising but you don't need to, and that's really what the rest of this book is about. In chapter nine, we start to go into this mindset part, and so I invite you back to listen to that chapter, which is what do you think about ideas, things or people? All right, if you haven't done it, leave a comment, a thumbs up on this podcast, tell your friends about it, sign up for the summit, visit us at greatlegalmarketingcom. If somehow you wandered upon this recording and you've never heard of us before, all right, until next time.
