In today’s episode we’re throwing it back to one of Jim and Tyson’s favorite episodes: #112 The Best Law Marketing Strategies. In this episode, Jim and Tyson interview Seth Prince and John Fisher! They will dive into their marketing going through their systems, strategies, advice to people going solo, the future of marketing, and more!
Hacking’s Hack: A blog post. https://kk.org/thetechnium/1000-true-fans/
Tyson’s Tip: Filevine, Case Management Software for the Modern Law Firm.
John’s tip: Build a website that’s just for internal purposes in your law firm where people right entries for new policies in your firm every day.
Seth’s tip: The idea of repricing major expense areas.
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Transcript: Max Law Rewind: The Best Law Marketing Strategies
Jim Hacking
Welcome back to the maximum lawyer Podcast. I’m
Unknown Speaker
Jim hacking and on Tyson music, Jimmy, I’m excited about this. What are you doing?
Jim Hacking
It’s a historic feat. You know, we’ve never had a guest on twice. And we are really going all out today with having two of our most popular guests ever on the show on the show at the same time, Mr. Seth price and Mr. John Fisher. I’m very excited about having both. That’s gonna be awesome.
Unknown Speaker
This is the maximum liar podcast, podcast, your hosts, Jim hacking and Tyson metrics. Let’s partner up and maximize your firm. Welcome to the show.
Jim Hacking
So maximum lawyers, Tyson, I wanted to hop on real quick and give you an intro to this new concept we have going
Tyson Mutrux
called Maximum lawyer rewind.
Jim Hacking
There we go maximum lawyer rewind. This is a brilliant idea. From our very own Becca Eberhart and Tyson, they come up with a lot of good ideas. And one of them is that we want to bring you some of our best episodes, some of our favorite episodes. And I haven’t seen the list of what those episodes are. But I sure want to make sure that law firm Roulette is on the list, because that’s one of my all time favorite episodes.
Tyson Mutrux
Jim has not seen the list because he’s not completed his portion of it. But i i The first one I picked was the roulette. So, website roulette, it was the very first one that I picked. And I picked a few other ones. And there’s some really, really good ones in there that I had completely forgotten about. And Jim, so you need to finish the list. And so that people can can listen to the rest of our top 10 Maximum way rewind episodes. All right, I’ll do it. Alright, enjoy everybody.
Unknown Speaker
I don’t think Jimmy that we need to do introductions on this one. If you want introduction, go back and look at set prices and John Fisher’s podcast, and so they don’t remember the numbers. Maybe you’ll do. But here’s what I’ve done, Jimmy, I flipped the coin already. Where I did it. I know what the result is. John are one of you gets to get its heads or tails. And you get to go first or first. So who wants to get it? I’ll
John Fisher & Seth Price
say alright, we said till I did John Fisher.
Unknown Speaker
Hi, John, you get to pay for those first because it was failed. Okay, then I’ll go first, give me I’ll let you ask the first question. Okay.
Jim Hacking
So John, we’re talking today about the difference between referral marketing and online marketing and sort of, we’re having a lively discussion as to which is better. And you know, a lot of times we talk about, obviously, the need for both. But knowing your strong history with referral marketing and all the great work that you’ve done, why don’t you, for our listeners who don’t know how your medical malpractice firm thrives on referrals from other attorneys, why don’t you tell our listeners a little bit about what systems you have in place,
John Fisher & Seth Price
I’m happy to do that. And guys, by the way, thank you so much for having us on the show, you guys do a phenomenal show. And I am a huge fan, I listened to every interview that you do. So maximum lawyer podcast is my favorite. And you guys do just an amazing job. But basically, in a nutshell, a gym, what I did was when I started my own firm, I realized that the quality of leads I was getting from just traditional, and digital media was not nearly the same as what I got from lawyers and lawyers were pre screening the case for merit, they were sending pre packaging the cases, to me with good liability damages. And basically, they were transferring the trust that they had built up with the client on to me, so even if I screwed up the case, a big time, I was fine. And over time, I realized it wasn’t the quantity of lawyer referral sources that I had, it was the quality that made all the difference. So even with over 300 referral partners, there were going to be about three or four firms that sent almost all of the high quality work that I have. And it was nurturing and cultivating the relationships with prominent influential lawyers. Because what I found, guys is that when I would get a referral, it could be from the biggest plaintiffs firm in the state of New York, who incurs millions of dollars in marketing expenses every year, but I’m not paying a penny for that. Now, at the end of the case, I do pay a referral fee, but that I’m glad to do it. You might call that a cost, but it’s really nothing that’s coming directly out of my pocket. So it’s just easy for me, the quality of the leads are so high. And the consistency in getting the leads is so great. So really what I want to do is what I decided with our marketing directors to focus all of our resources on building and nurturing, not just referrals, specifically lawyer referrals. So we built a system that’s got basically five components to it, and we built that out. And you know, I’d be happy to go through that but we basically did was building an authority based marketing program with the lawyers which can Have a book, authoritative book that we send to basically everybody that book goes into law schools, it goes to law firms, we use it as the basically the indestructible business card that never dies. Number two speaking engagements and set prices all over the country doing speaking. And it builds the gravitas, the seriousness, you know that Seth price is a leader in the world of digital marketing and internet marketing, because he’s speaking at all of these big name events, pathoma, National Trial Lawyers, aaj all of them, basically, you see him over and over again. And that is the consistency of building a program. Number three, top of mind awareness, having print and email newsletters, you’re reaching out to your herd, nurturing that relationship you’re giving value, you’re not asking for a damn thing. Number four, building your tribe building the tribe basically means don’t go to one of these BNI networking or Chamber of Commerce. That’s a total waste of time network with attorneys who are prominent and influential, who can send you case after case. So for example, I’m a member of trial lawyers college and we meet on a monthly basis where we practice for about four hours, we practice cross examination opening statement. But bigger than that, there’s about 50 lawyers in the group, we cross refer cases, every medical malpractice case of these 50 lawyers will be referred to me and I refer them slip and falls call wrecks and things like that. So it’s a great relationship, building the tribe. And number five, what we do is random acts of kindness, where we’re reaching out to our referral partners. Now, in our mastermind, one of the attorneys, Michael liner has a great idea, when he settles a case, it will actually get an ice cream truck in the summer months, bring it to the law firm, and give free ice cream to every lawyer and employ the law firm. And then it’ll go over out to his other referral partners and do the same thing. That’s brilliant. When I had my first book, The Power System, I rented a 70. I think it was a 70 foot yacht, and we put it out on the Hudson River. I invited everybody lawyers who I knew lawyers who I didn’t know, prospective referral partners, and all of our former and current clients, and we blew it up huge. And basically what that did was people would come to me through that random act of kindness, and say, Hey, we never knew you thought of us as a friend. This is really cool. We’re getting to know you on a one on one personal basis. So those are the five basic components that we built out a marketing system that’s limited strictly to lawyer referrals. And here’s my challenge for everyone listening to this. I’m really inspired by a recent episode that I learned about an individual who had an incurable disease. And he developed what’s called a moonshot challenge. The moonshot Challenge is a notion that was first came from a speech that JFK gave in 1961, to Congress. And at that speech, he said, basically, I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal of having a man on the moon before this decade is out in returning him safely to the earth. That is a moonshot challenge that was given on May 25, of 1961. Long after he died on July 20, of 1969, Apollo 11 landed the first human being on the moon. That is the moonshot challenge, every lawyer listening to this should have their own moonshot challenge. And that is an ambitious five year plan for your firm that you think is absolutely impossible to achieve. So I’m going to give you an example, when I wrote my book, The Power System in 2013. My moonshot challenge at that time was inconceivable to me it was to have 500 referral partners that is an attorney or paralegal who’s referred at least one case in the last five years. In 2013, I did an inventory at 124 referral partners, I set specific base camps at every year to develop more and more referral partners goals that were known by everyone working at our firm. Today, December 27 2018, we have 317 referral partners, we got nowhere near our goal. But over the course of that roughly five year period, the number of our referral partners more than doubled two and a half times the original amount. That’s because we had a moonshot challenge in place. So going forward 2018, the goal is 375 2019, the base camp 475 and 2020. We want to have 600 referral partners, that is a moonshot challenge is to build and nurture the referral partners. And guys, one of the things that I think that everyone needs is accountability and structure to their goals. So it’s great to have a goal like that. But you think well, how the hell do I get there? And what you really need is basically a bunch of advisors guys like Seth price, Jim hacking and Tyson nutrix, who will guide you and nurture you through that process. So by way example. In April 11 2018, I joined Weight Watchers, I stepped through the door for the first time. at that first meeting, as scared as I was I weighed 182.4 pounds. Yesterday I went to a meeting, I weighed 166.8, I lost 15.6 pounds. Over the course of that five month period, average weekly loss is less than a pound. But it was consistent weight loss in the purpose of telling that is I had commitment and structure and accountability. I knew every time I went back to Weight Watchers every week, I’m going to step on that scale, and they’re going to tell me yes or no thumbs up or thumbs down. And that got me a little bit over 15 pound weight loss in five months, I’m almost at the weight that I weighed, I’m less than two pounds from my high school weight, I never in a million years would have dreamed that I could get to that point. But the goal here guys, is not just writing down a system and having accountability and structure. But writing on a piece of paper right now that moonshot challenge that crazy, ambitious, impossible goal that you never thought possible, getting it on paper, sharing it with other people, and then pursuing it like it’s going to kill you if you don’t make it,
Tyson Mutrux
Jamie. So that kind of reminds me of my first time I ever talked to John Fisher over the phone I called John. I think it was 2012 right around there. And I asked him for some advice. You’ve given me his book hybrid system. And John proceeded to talk about kidding, for 50 straight minutes by giving just straight value. I didn’t ask another question. So the end of the call, that’s fantastic. He just add value.
Jim Hacking
I had the exact same thought when I was listening to John talk, I remember. It’s so funny, because we’ve become such good friends with John over the years. Now I remember even when we had him on the podcast, we didn’t know him nearly as well as we know him now. And I remember just sort of that firehose of great content. And John says things with such certainty and such, you know, he can back it all up with his experience and his successes. So that was that that got me fired up. Just listen to the John again. And then thinking about how far we’ve come with the show. And with our friendship with John, I’m just really grateful.
Unknown Speaker
So if you’re listening to this, and you’ve never heard John talk, you might want to pause it, rewind it a few times, and take some notes as to what he just said, because he just said a lot of stuff. Alright, so if you want to add anything to Jim’s question, go ahead. But I want to ask you, just in general, what’s your marketing strategy? We heard a lot about John’s marketing strategy, you all are really different. And there’s some things that are overlap, but for the most part, you mark it in a completely different way. So do you want to talk a little bit about your methodology and how you do things?
John Fisher & Seth Price
Sure, I’d love to. And you know, it was inspiring. I had a similar call with John, when we first I think I cold call them and ended up talking for a better part of an hour, you know, what John talks about, and the way he approaches it is inspiring. And to a certain extent, having a goal putting systems in place and executing on them is the right answer for whatever you want to do. I have a big advocate of for lawyers out there listening, thinking about what area of practice you’re in, where it is, what the competition is, and what type of firm that you want. So for myself, when I started with a partner, we saw a void, starting with criminal defense, and then in PII in our market, in that there were a lot of older lawyers who had firms that had developed, but there had was nobody who was sort of taking the idea of legal excellence and bringing it online. In fact, when we started, many of the people that had a web presence, were sort of the defective lawyers in our market. And so what I was really excited about when I started was I had left the law partners, like a lawyer’s lawyer teaches up at Harvard, LLM and trial advocacy. This is a guy who loves being in the courtroom, and is great at what he does. And so the idea of taking digital marketing, which was sort of the right platform, it wasn’t a we were looking to do TV, and basically saw that the evolving area of the web was one that in a business to consumer market, was able to get in front of people in a way that could never have been done before. And that starting back with my experience, helping to launch us law.com, which was a precursor to find law lawyers.com with information and forms, and all sorts of great stuff for consumers to find the idea that if you were to take the web presence seriously, which now everybody is but 10 years ago, that was not, that was not something that was normal. But the idea that I stopped focusing on conferences that spoon fed lawyers as to what to do, but rather going to the firehose itself, learning from the best in SEO and paid search and saying, You know what, if we are to build a team to execute on this, we could deliver results for ourselves and now a blue shark for people well outside of ourselves that was unmatched in the industry. So, again, I looked at the situation, I said, What is it that’s going to move the needle. And although things have changed the fundamentals of link building, and content curation, and coding a website haven’t changed. What I should say the idea that those are the areas to focus on hasn’t changed what to do within those areas may have morphed. But that if we were able to take the legal excellence offline, and then demonstrate to both users that are coming through the site, as well as to Google, that the people that we have, are the best possible solution to a problem. That was sort of the goal and what we’ve worked tirelessly every day to execute. So while taking nothing away from relationship marketing, and in fact, I’m a huge fan of it and aspire to do things as well as John in many of those areas. For us wanting to have a regional firm with multiple practice areas, and leveraging legal excellence to consumers. The ability to do that, through digital has allowed us to touch people in a at a speed and a rate that we couldn’t have, if we had only gone through word of mouth, particularly when we started, it was a very crowded space in the relationship game. And that the people who relied solely on referral based marketing, particularly as the web became more popular, really suffered in some of our areas, not that there’s not always a premier player in a space that makes a really nice living through referrals only. But what we saw is we wanted the best of both, we thought that if we leverage digital, for expanding our footprint, and building that raving herd, that the referrals would also come over time. And that has happened. But it basically was allowed us to grow at a rate that we couldn’t have had we only relied upon relationship marketing.
Jim Hacking
All right, so my question for both of you, you’re both involved in active in our maximum lawyer Facebook group, and one of our members Polyak abiertas, just gave notice. And he’s going out on his own, for the first time in about two weeks. And I’m wondering, if you two were sitting across the table from him, what advice would you give him to think about as he gets ready to launch his firm?
John Fisher & Seth Price
Well, you know, if I could step in, because I did actually give him some advices, John Fisher on the Facebook page, the first and sole responsibility that you have is to your family. And that means protecting them, it’s ethically permissible to notify the clients who you’re actively handling their cases, that you will be leaving the firm while you’re still with the firm. Once you’re actually physically out the door, it’s ethically permissible, in my opinion, really kind of required that you can actually go to the clients and solicit them. So my take on this would be while you certainly want to try to end things on good terms with your former employer, once you’re out the door, your responsibility is to your family. And to make sure when you’re out on the street, and you don’t have any clients, you have very little value to anybody. You have to clients. As Tyson says getting clients is the most important thing that you do. And you have to make sure that before you leave the firm, you at least notify the clients that they have the right to select the attorney of their choice. And if they do that 95% of the time, the clients will go with the attorney who they build trust with, and who has been handling their case from day one. That is very important. That was the part that I felt was missing from that thread. And I would say for me looking at it from the way I built my firm, the number one thing would be to have a URL to put it live doesn’t cost a lot of money. URLs are cheap, get the testicle on Wix, put it live, put some content up, let the URL start to age. So while you’re figuring things out, getting your house in order figuring out what you’re going to do, you’re at least taking care of what would be dead or wasted time and the Google Sandbox time that Google doesn’t really allow a website to be seen until it sort of knows you’re going to be around for a bit. So that if during those early days where you’re really and hopefully if you with a good herd and this guy, you know within this community probably will get you know some nice early referrals from people who want to sort of see somebody do well, that you can use that initial bump that hopefully comes to sort of get yourself launched but making sure that you’re planting those seeds. The best time to plant a tree is yesterday, making sure that you don’t lose the valuable time I’m so that a year from now, when you sort of have your place in order and your systems in place, that your web property is one that isn’t starting flat footed, but already has a start. And even if it means writing two pages of content a month, by the end of that year, you’d have 24 pages of content on a site index that Google sees as a living breathing organism online, and that you would at least have that competitive advantage whether you decide to do something with somebody else, or what have you. You’ve built an asset during that first year, when I got fired from my old firm, they basically showed me the door and said, you’re out and the bulk of the firm’s clients I had got and brought to the firm. So when I left there, I only had really one goal, which was to maintain those relationships with my clients. And they’re turned to be a lot of bitterness and hatred towards me for bringing my clients with me after I left the firm. for some crazy reason, they thought that I was just going to leave everyone behind. There was no chance in the world, I was going to do that. But here’s the key point. When I’d meet with the attorneys, they would threaten to sue me, they would threaten to bring ethical claims against me and all this crazy stuff. And instead of fighting back, I just let it I was a comas day. I just took it, I accepted it. And I said, guys, I am extremely appreciative for everything you’ve done for me, and I’ll never forget it. And they looked at me like I had three heads, because they didn’t expect that response from me. Now, fast forward over times, that animosity has basically gone away. It’s easy. One of my best referral partners is my former law firm. And I’ve made I’d say, I’ve made somewhere between half a million and a million dollars just on their referrals. So that the point here is, even though there was bitterness and hostility in the very beginning, by taking a very professional approach that basically eased over time, I never got sued. And we’re now on very good terms. I see them were very friendly, and they’re referring work to me. So whenever you leave a firm, if at all possible, strive to maintain the relationship, because that relationship can be a goldmine for you.
Unknown Speaker
Hey, guys, it’s Becca here. I’m sure you’ve heard Jim and Tyson mentioned the guild on the podcast and in the Facebook group. That’s because we’re seeing some really exciting things happening with guild members and their businesses. The Guild is this perfect mix of a community group coaching and a mastermind. Inside you’ll gain support, tap into a network of connections, and continue learning a common theme among successful entrepreneurs. There are so many benefits inside the guild, including weekly live events and discounts to all maximum lawyer events, head over to maximum lawyer.com forward slash the guild to check out all of the benefits and watch a few testimonials from current members. Investing in a community is like the self care of business ownership. Being in a community with other people who get it is crucial when you’re creating a rock solid foundation to build your business on one that’s strong enough to withstand setbacks, transitions and growth. So head to maximum lawyer.com. And click on the guild page to join us. Now let’s get back to the episode.
John Fisher & Seth Price
I see this over and over again, you know, whether it’s during an interview that you’re taking with whether it’s leaving a firm, the little things that can be done, you know, there’s going to be bitterness over money. But if you’re able to keep it to a minimum, again, as you’re saying you took the pejorative out of it, you didn’t show anger, they may be upset, you took clients as a money issue. But if you’re not nasty about it, if you don’t try to do a land grab for other employees, if you keep it somewhat civil, where money is the only issue, memories, hopefully fade on things like that. And yours is a great case study on how you take lemons, and you turn it into lemonade. And just think of it for all of us, at least for most of us. There’s been a point in our career where somebody has fired us, maybe we’re working for the Department of Public Works, whatever it is, and the natural hostility that our employees have, when I let go someone I have to share this story. I let go someone, there’s bitterness, they you know, they hate me and all this other stuff. But just the other day one of our employees came back who was a secretary, and she gave me two hugs, not one, two. And she told me how appreciative she was how we handled everything. And now she’s on to some type of government job where she’s really happy. And so sometimes parting ways doesn’t have to be the worst thing in the world, it can actually help the employee move on to something better for them. And so I tried to do that with everyone without the hostility or bitterness. It doesn’t always work. I’ve had a recent star paralegal who left and she just hates me to death. But you know, I can’t take the low road and fight back. I try to give her some little severance package, make her feel better about the relationship and try to build it if I can, you know, get it back. But the bottom line here His hatred and hostility does not work, try to maintain your relationships whenever possible. So I want to give one other example guys, there was when I left my firm, there were a number of cases out there that I took with me. And it could have just totally blown up. But the reality is, when we had the cases got resolved, and there were lots of money, I mean, in some cases, over a million dollars in fees. And what happened was, we’d sit down at lunch, we discuss the division of the fee. And the bottom line here was their request would be outrageously high, there was no basis in the law for trying to get astronomical fee splits for the outgoing attorney. But you know what, I didn’t care, I basically caved in and I gave them what they want. For one reason, I wanted to maintain the relationship, because relationship building is what marketing is all about, in my opinion. And so even though they got, you know, maybe 50,000, or $100,000, more than what they really should have gotten, the fact is, they left they’re happy, our relationship was intact, and they’re sending the cases that are now resulting in fees, that could be a half a million dollars to a million. That’s the long term thought process that we have. Don’t worry about 50,000 or 75,000, build the relationship and think long term.
Unknown Speaker
Alright, so my question is for both of you, and I want to let Seth go first this time, my question is, I want you to look at the law five years from today, and how you currently mark it, and how most people typically market today. And I want you to tell us how the law and marketing can be different in five years, and how you are going to have to adjust the way you market now to fit that. That’s why
John Fisher & Seth Price
I’m sure we’re already seeing things when I started, the DUI component of a criminal practice was really a very valuable, and in many cases overshadowed the rest of the practice much more profitable from a per hour basis, as well as the source of funds. What I have seen this is that the market is seen as the bringing Uber into our vernacular, and the fact that a ride is a button away as opposed to a cab that may or may not ever show it an exorbitant rate that that entire practice has diminished and will continue to diminish as self driving techniques come into play. There are people in the pie space that you know, as the safety enhancements come to cars. And it’s not just them coming to cars, but for an entire generation of cars to upgrade to that point that, you know, whether it’s five years, whether it’s 10 years, whether it’s 15 years, many of the money areas of law, so to speak, on the b2c side being DUIs and being motor vehicle accidents are going to see, you know, a decrease over the coming years. How fast is debatable, and we’ll see. But what I would say is understanding that looking at the market as to where people have needs is always been something important. And that figuring out, you know, in addition to planting your steaks where you see there is business, figuring out where there is not representation, and putting yourself in those positions. So I think it’s as much about noticing about what’s declining as looking for almost like we saw in baseball with the advent of Moneyball, saying, Hey, this is an underserved area, there’s a lot of this country that’s underserved. So if you’re somebody who’s, you know, not geographically set, looking for places where there’s less competition, and then also looking for areas or verticals in the law that are underserved. Those two things, I think, are the areas that I’d be looking at if I’m looking at a 510 year window going forward. And Tyson and Jim, I think what I would say here is I would refer back to the Stockdale paradox which is a Navy Admiral James Stockdale was a prisoner of war in Vietnam for seven years. And they asked him, How did you survive? And he said, Well, it was very easy, because the people who came to grips with the reality that maybe they would be tortured and imprisoned for years and years, those people who accepted the reality were far more likely to survive than people who thought that they would be led out on January 1, or the New Year or holiday. He said those people were unrealistic, and you just knew that they weren’t going to survive. The point is, you have to consider your harsh reality. And your harsh reality means looking at the worst case scenario that you have for your law firm and accepting it as a possibility. So for for me, the harsh reality is, medical malpractice might be on the way out. Donald Trump has tried to eviscerate and practically eliminate medical malpractice with taps on damages. which have come close to passing the Congress, if caps on damages were imposed for medical malpractice, I’m out of business. The worst case scenario is I’m a law firm, that’s 100% dependent on medical malpractice. And my business may be over. If President Trump gets his way, that’s a harsh reality. So the way that I adapt is I created a website called spinal cord and brain injury.org. This is a resource of all the facilities doctors and information about finances for injuries of spinal cord and brain injuries limited in New York state. So that is just basically an information resource, because what I learned in my experience is if I just have a single catastrophic injury case, every year, that’s more than double the legal fee than what I make in medical malpractice in New York, because the fee structures are very different. So I’m just trying to accept the worst scenario. And as a lawyer, think to yourself, What is the worst case scenario for your firm? What if this area of law dried up, you need to have a plan B for that, and I don’t know where that’s headed. But with if Donald Trump gets his way, medical malpractice is done. For me.
Jim Hacking
One of the great things that Tyson I have really benefited from by having the podcast is getting to spend quality time with really smart people. So I’m sort of a off the wall question for both of you, you know, maximum lawyer is now about two years old. And we had our first conferences here. And Tyson and I are often thinking about ways to take maximum lawyer to the next level. And I’m just wondering, what kind of advice would you guys have for us, for maximum lawyer itself, we just formed our LLC. And we’re trying to become a little bit more formal with things. And I’m just wondering what ideas or thoughts you guys might have, as to what we could do to sort of spread our message even more,
John Fisher & Seth Price
that you have ideas. The first one is actually what we’re doing today, which is, you know, there are a lot of cool people out there, but very often, and I Tyson I have done this, where almost like jamming together, like you hear of musicians getting together, that when I get together with Tyson and we just go off for 40 minutes, the back and forth creates an energy that does not happen sort of in a vacuum with one person. And I think you guys have done a great job of interviewing guests, but that the collaboration, sort of like looking at it from different perspectives. Point counterpoint was one of the things I was excited about for today. And I think that would serve well in the future where it’s not just a linear approach. But you know, the idea ideally, that somebody brings something up. And it’s not to say that there’s a negative to it, because you want to be able to whiteboard and put everything out there. But you know, if somebody’s out there, and they what somebody is saying is not applicable to them, seeing the other sort of perspective of how things are done, I think is really valuable. Hey, guys, I’m gonna take you an example from the Facebook experience. at a very early stage, Facebook was just starting to build momentum. They were starting out with all these universities, Baylor University, Stanford, all these different places. And their momentum was getting crazy. All the college students loved Facebook, they’re all getting on it. And Facebook wasn’t charging a dime. And at one point in the movie social network, one of the cofounders of Facebook went to Mark Zuckerberg and said, We need to monetize this, we’ve got crazy popularity, and this thing is going through the roof. And Mark Zuckerberg said not now basically. In other words, he wanted to build it out. So it became so powerful, that by the time that they wanted to monetize it, it would be simple. And that’s exactly what happened. Facebook as a company is a perfect example of how to build a powerhouse maximum lawyers. So for example, in maximum lawyer podcast, you don’t have advertisers, you don’t have all these Bs announcements about oh, we’re proud to call this sponsored by so and so I click off, when I hear that stuff, you guys are not trying to monetize this. In your meeting, you charged such a low amount, and you should charge more. But it was so low that there was no price barrier to entry. Anyone could come you’re not trying to profit off of this, you will create a powerhouse as long as you keep the philosophy that you’re not trying to monetize or cash in. As long as you do that. I will be a huge fan.
Unknown Speaker
All right. So Seth, and John, we all know you do things quite a bit differently in your marketing everything. What’s one thing that you would like to adopt from the other person that you’re not using in your practice right
John Fisher & Seth Price
now? I need to leverage the book and authority marketing. John has done a marvelous job of basically putting himself out there the indestructible business card, I see it, it’s been talked about I poo pooed it because I didn’t like much of what I saw in the market sort of being brochure free. So you could say there was a book, but what John has clearly done is very few People have done well is create something that passes the last test that not just a souped up pamphlet, but is really value add an a book in the sense of what should get people’s attention. And he’s he’s not just written the book, which is a task unto itself, but how to leverage it. And that’s what I’ve watched and aspire to do better. Thank you, Seth, for saying that. And by the way, anyone listening to this, if you want a free electronic copy of the book, just go to the power of a system.com. And you can get the free book, if you want a physical copy of the book, just send me an email, a jay Fisher FIS H E R, at Fisher malpractice. law.com. So anyone listening to this, email me, I’ll send you a signed copy of the book, where you can get the digital copy online. And I have to tell you guys, one thing that I’m so excited about is the work that’s done by SAS group blue shark marketing, I have sort of what I consider an A concierge service where I have one contact there who’s emailing me more than weekly, maybe twice weekly, on satis links that they’re getting a suicide prevention scholarship that I wasn’t even aware of. They’re building links doing stuff. And they’re writing content and putting it out there, that solid, it’s great stuff. And what I see over time is one night I went to bed late like around midnight, I woke up at like six the next morning, and I saw that there were seven leads that came in while I was sleeping. I’m like this is crazy. But you know, I have been so impressed. Because what this has done with blue shark is that I don’t have to write copy till two o’clock every morning. They’re doing it for me. They’re building links, I didn’t have any quality links, before I began with blue shark. And now I’ve got.edu and a bunch of other things, that stuff really matters. And the machine just keeps going on. So I can do things like go to court and try cases, which I love to do. So I’m grateful that I can basically hand off the process of internet marketing to Seth and blue shark, and they’ve done a tremendous job for me. Thank you so much for your kind words. It’s
Unknown Speaker
alright, I want to thank both of you all for coming on, we’ll get to our tips and our hacks in the week before I do want to remind everyone to go to the Facebook group, tons of activity going on out there. It’s kind of insane. Also, if you will, please take a moment, give us a five star review on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts. We really do appreciate it. Jimmy with Dragon week.
Jim Hacking
So my hack of the week is an old favorite of mine. It’s a blog post from many years ago called 1000. True fans, it was written by a guy named Kevin Kelly and it talks about how if you can build a tribe of 1000 people who who really know you really like and really trust you that you can really build out everything you need from a marketing and referral based practice. I think it’s a great article. If you go to kk.org and type in true fans or just Google 1000 true fans will come right upon it. It’s a great article. And I think it’s one of those things you want to read a couple times a year just to remind you about the power of building that tribe.
Unknown Speaker
Excellent. And John says you know the routine John, you won the coin toss or she got first with your tinfoil hat can we
John Fisher & Seth Price
hack of the week build a website that’s just for internal purposes at your law firm where people write entries of new policies for your firm every day. So James Ruane one of the most successful criminal defense lawyers in the Northeast. His law firm Ruane attorneys has what he calls Ruane pedia which is sort of take off on Wikipedia, where he gets the employees to write new entries that contain photographs, screenshots, and detailed information on how to do every simple task and complicated task in their office. They upload that sample motions, they upload sample complaints. And this collective knowledge sharing website is extremely powerful so that when you have no Joey’s driver firm I would I make I’m a huge fan of that I have, you know, attempted overtime to implement it. I would just add on the idea is awesome. But it is like many other things that we talk about that it’s the follow through because I just I’ll take you know, when I do things. Well I talk about why don’t I put it in place. About a year ago, I came back the number of people that hadn’t touched it in the year that it needs to be something that is bought into by staff and that is up on their screen so that it’s a living, breathing document and not just a one time exercise. No, I agree. I mean, we just started it right now. So it’s a it’s a work in progress. And I really have no idea how it’s gonna pan out. But I think the idea is very simple because when you have new employees, you basically have them read the first 40 entries that they need to know and to learn the basic procedures of your firm before they even begin. Well that’s that’s awesome. higher and I started with like a lot of things in life. It’s the follow through. I was gonna say for myself, something we’ve been talking about online in the Facebook chat is the idea of repricing major expense areas. We saw some amazing swings on malpractice insurance, we had a sales guy we loved he sent it out to different places last minute allowed two salespeople to come in. And theoretically, there shouldn’t be any differences because he would be sending it out to all the places, and that we saw incremental decreases. In one case, a substantial decrease, really, by getting a number of people. Same thing can be done for credit card processing. Those people who’ve been this for a while on the revenue side as opposed to contingency side have seen massive swings, and that somebody who gives you a good deal one day that there are six month secret or non disclosed increases, that if you take your eye off the ball for too long, can really make it a very expensive process.
Unknown Speaker
Great tips. All right. So my tip of the week is actually I’m going to promote something that’s sort of waited to promote because I wanted to see how it works well until I’ve worked in and build out my system, I’m gonna promote file by because I will tell you kind of insane. Something I’ve been looking for for a very long time is seeing all basic communications between you and the client in one spot, text messages, emails, notes, all of that one slide that got that receipt, it’s really kind of crazy. Each client has their own unique phone number that they can text to their file, they’ve got a unique email address, that they can email directly to their file, document or on that they put into the Documents tab whenever they email you. It is quite incredible. I’d be happy to show you that I’ve got built up the file line. It’s really great. So, John, amazing, as usual, thank you so much.
John Fisher & Seth Price
Hey, guys, you do a phenomenal job and keep doing what you’re doing because the maximum lawyer podcast is hands down the best in the legal industry. And I am a fan for life. So keep doing it. And I can’t wait for the next in person coming 2019
