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Personalizing Automation and Scaling Personal Touch with Jordan Ostroff 138
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Today on the show we have Jordan Ostroff of Jordan Law. Jordan discusses naming your firm after your first name, how he finds clients for his business law practice, and how we practices together with his wife.

We’ll dig deep on how he deals with his biggest frustrations, personalizing automation, and scaling growth without losing personal touch with clients.

Hacking Hack: Hemingwayapp.com is a plugin that gives you a rating of your language 1-5.

Jordan’s Tip: Put yourself in the clients shoes and be relatable.

Tyson: Go to Lawmatics – I’ve been really impressed with their service.

Make sure to register for MaxLawCon19, June 6 and 7 in St.Louis.

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Transcripts: Personalizing Automation and Scaling Personal Touch with Jordan Ostroff

Jordan Ostroff
We spent our focus on making the client site automation look super nice. So you know Mark has gone in and HTML coded the same banners and information from our newsletter. So that way there’s that consistency with brand, throughout everything that they get from us from the invoices to the, you know, automatic emails to following up about hiring to getting our newsletter every month.

Unknown Speaker
Run your law firm the right way. This is the maximum lawyer podcast, podcast, your hosts, Jim hacking and Tyson metrics. Let’s partner up and maximize your firm.

Jim Hacking
Welcome to the show. Welcome back to the maximum lawyer Podcast.

Unknown Speaker
I’m Jim hacking dice and we’re really excited Tyson

Jim Hacking
we have the max law con coming up. As everybody knows, we’ve been talking about it on the air for a while we got a great lineup, and we are at about 40 spaces left. And I’m pretty sure that just like last year, we’re gonna fill out the space. That’s one thing we’re excited about. The other thing is you and I and Kent sat down with our good buddy Joey vitality. And I think we have something cool coming for our members in the next couple of weeks.

Tyson Mutrux
Yeah, pretty exciting. I think I don’t want to get any information. But I think what it is going to be pretty awesome. It can be to a limited number of people. It’s not going to be something that’s huge, but I think it’s gonna be pretty cool. I’m excited about it. I’m excited for whatever we get to get to announce it. Alright, well,

Jim Hacking
we want to get straight to our guests. We know he’s a busy fellow. And we’re glad that he’s on the show. His name is Jordan Ostroff. He has a firm down in Florida called Jordan law. He practices criminal defense and family law. And he also has a little expertise with something that I want to talk to him about, which are student conduct hearings. But Jordan, welcome to the show.

Jordan Ostroff
Hey, thanks for having me. All right, Jordan.

Tyson Mutrux
So I talk a little bit about your journey and how you got where you are now, but I’m also curious why you named your firm after your first because it’s, I’ve considered the same thing in the past, because my first name is Tyson. And sometimes people call me Mr. Tyson. Because whenever they look at the website, they see Tyson Newchurch. And for some reason, they think that that’s the firm name. So I’m just curious how you got to the name of your firm, but also your journey in general. Sure.

Jordan Ostroff
So I guess the journey kind of answers the question about the name. I came up to Orlando to go to UCF. And I ended up on the trial team over there and realized that that was exactly what I wanted to do was stayed in town to go to Barry University interned at the state attorney’s office here and then got a job starting out there for a little over three years before I opened up my firm. And during that time, you know, I got to meet the hundreds of criminal defense attorneys in town that would have cases with us and talk to them about all the different things and issues that they had. And there’s a couple other guys in town that have really difficult to pronounce last names. And so none of them had, none of them had used their name, everybody had used a trademark name or something along those lines. And so it was kind of talking with them about that, and some of the issues and obviously, you know, Ostroff is what it sounds like, but you’re not necessarily going to spell it that way. Just hearing it. So we wanted to go with the Jordan law stuff. And then we talked about, you know, my wife and I talked about what we can do from there. And the biggest thing for us was, you know, our logo is basically the NFL NBA logo, you got the red, white, and blue. So then you got that whole Michael Jordan, the greatest of all time saying go, and so that’s why we went first name.

Jim Hacking
That’s awesome. Tell us about how your firm is set up and how you spend your time day to day, Jordan? Sure. So

Jordan Ostroff
the firm we’ve got five attorneys right now, myself and my wife are the two managing partners. And we’ve got three other attorneys in the firm. And then we’ve got four staff members. So for me, I mean, basically, right now at this point, I’m more of the CEO and the head marketing networker of the firm. So we’ve got the other attorneys do most of the work. And then obviously, if it’s something big, or there’s a trial going on, or a big motion or something like that, then myself and my wife will go with them to second share or lead it. But from our standpoint, I mean, most of what we’re doing and setting up all the systems, checking with our referral sources, trying to build new referral streams, overseeing all the work making sure everybody else is doing their stuff, training the staff and those kinds of things. So I tell everybody, I’m really like 90%, of small business owner, and only about 10% of lawyers these days.

Tyson Mutrux
Do you say you do mostly business loss of these days? So I’m curious how business law attorney normally gets their clients? Is it? Is it more referral base or in you get clients to the internet? And if you can, how do you do a simple? I don’t see myself personally, if I needed a business lawyer hiring someone to the internet, I would do it to some sort of referral. So can you talk a little bit about how you get your clients and what works best for you? Sure.

Jordan Ostroff
So in December of last year, we brought on an in house marketing person, Mark Miller, who’s been involved on the page as well as I have. And so we’ve been growing the SEO stuff from there, you know, slowly but for the most part, I mean, our firm we’re not doing advertising, we’re not doing mailers anymore. We’re not doing any of those paid for leads. It’s all the one on one. So for us from the business clients, a lot of them are going to be you know, people we came across with the criminal defense stuff. So you know, you get some DUIs from some big business clients, they like how we handle the criminal case. And then we’re involved in some of the local Chambers of Commerce. And some of the other organizations that do small business development here. So we always try to go and you know, speak and provide, you know, an hour long seminar on some of the upcoming legal issues businesses face and some of the things we’re seeing and you know, the tips on employment contracts and non disclosures and all those to try to, you know, set ourselves up as the go to experts in the field. And so it’s exactly like what you talked about, you know, it’s not a situation where we’re getting a lot of people just going on Google and typing in, you know, best business lawyer in Orlando, it’s, it’s more than one on one contact that we’ve built with people over the last several months, several years.

Jim Hacking
Jordan talked to us about practicing with your wife, do you have different roles in the firm?

Jordan Ostroff
Definitely. Yeah, it’s, uh, you know, everybody asked me if that’s a positive or negative. And so thankfully, you know, being in Orlando, we’ve got Billy Mansi, and his wife Zara here. So I was able to talk to Bill a couple times and get kind of the feel for what’s worked for them. And I mean, the biggest thing for them, and the biggest thing for us really is not stepping on each other’s toes. So my wife does a lot more of the the invoicing, the accounting, all that stuff with the business. And then she does a lot more of the training and oversight with the attorneys. And then I do more of the training and oversight with the staff, and then all of our systems, our intake team, our Zapier integrations and all those things. So it took us about three to six months to figure that out. As opposed to having you know, both of us doing the same thing. And then you know, you never get away from the work because when you’re living together, that’s all that you can talk about. And so now that we kind of have our own separate roles, it’s really wonderful. Because you know, we’ll have a day here today there where we’ve got nothing on the calendar and our cage just turned one. So we can go over to you know, SeaWorld or aquatic on a Wednesday, after all the

Tyson Mutrux
work that we’ve done over the weekend. That’s awesome. Jordan, describe Bill humanity in one word. Ooh, that’s

Jordan Ostroff
a tough one. Honest, I think that’s the one I’d have to go with.

Tyson Mutrux
That’s a good one. That’s a good one. I’ve got a real question for you. So but I just was curious. That’s actually a perfect description of building on us. But so where do you see this thing going? I mean, where are you? Where are you and your wife build? It gets to you, in five to 10 years? Where are you trying to sell it? Are you going to stay in the business? Just where are you headed with this? So well, we’ve

Jordan Ostroff
talked about, so I just turned 30 last year. And so we talked about, you know, the next 10 years is really what we planned out the, you know, at the time that I turned 40, where the business is going to be at. And so my hope is to get us in a position where I don’t have to be involved. I mean, obviously, I can’t see myself not being involved, but in being in a position where don’t have to be involved to free us up to do more, you know, travel and other things. So all of our decisions made from the business standpoint, are trying to put us in a position where there’s a model in place that isn’t so reliant upon the two of us. And so hence, you know, bringing in the marketing person, bringing on more attorneys system systematizing, a lot more of the referrals and the intake, the system, and all those things that we can do to not make ourselves essential to the firm. But obviously make ourselves able to, you know, fill in all the cracks and make sure everything’s better and keep refining everything, as opposed to being focused on you know, the smaller minutia day to day,

Jim Hacking
right now, what is your biggest frustration or headache, Jordan?

Jordan Ostroff
Well, right now my biggest frustration is I was supposed to have our internet installed in our new office an hour ago, and then apparently, veterans internet online system just doesn’t work and they never got the order. But from a, from a more longer term standpoint, I mean, I think our biggest frustration is always going to be making sure that everybody else is always doing the same, you know, top level five star service that we have in place. And so it’s a constant balancing test of having, you know, enough clients so that everybody makes the amount of money they want, but few enough clients so that you can constantly put the right amount of personal touch and effort and time on every case. And that’s something that, you know, we’re just always, always balancing and rebalancing to see, you know, depending upon, if somebody’s got, you know, all business clients, half business and half criminal clients, half criminal, and half the academic issues, you know, it’s always different for everybody. And so we’re just constantly trying to make sure that we’re able to provide the that great a customer service for the clients, because you’ve got people spending, you know, 1000s and 1000s, and 1000s of dollars for us. And I want to make sure that we’re giving them, you know, peace of mind, as well as great legal services.

Tyson Mutrux
So how do you track that, Jordan? And how do you hold people accountable? Because I know that that’s really tough is so what, what safeguards do you have in place to make sure that that happens?

Jordan Ostroff
So at its core, I mean, we use PracticePanther for case management. And so I can go and track and see who’s behind and all their tasks. From that standpoint, what I have them do is we’ve got a two week check in with the client on every case, that’s an automated part of our wealth, not automating the workflow, but the workflow runs a task to run a task for it. Because PracticePanther doesn’t let you automate recurring tasks and so that way I can see, you know, what have they done with this case in the last two weeks, what was the conversation with a client and then we’ll go ahead and just kind of randomly audit a number of cases. And so I’ll just sit down on Thursday for two or three hours and just call, you know, 10 or 15 different clients and see, you know, how’s everything going? What else can we do for you? Or, you know, are we being as responsive as you want? And, you know, thankfully, the return on those have been very, very, very overwhelmingly positive.

Jim Hacking
Jordan, I think that’s great that you’ve automated a lot of your practice. I think some of our listeners sometimes struggle with a fear of too much automation or automation mistakes gone bad. Have you had any mishaps? Or have you learned any lessons from automating that you want to share with everybody? Sure.

Jordan Ostroff
So I guess so from us, you know, it’s all Zapier and grand PracticePanther, and then Gmail and whatnot from there. For some reason, it seems like every two to three weeks, something goes wrong, even though we haven’t changed anything. And so the Zapier is task history is, is huge for us to see where the problems are. And the biggest thing that we have is we try to have a top down view, where everybody knows enough of what it’s supposed to look like, so that if my receptionist catches that there’s an extra matter being created, or something’s not going through, that she can let you know, myself and mark now and then we can try to address it as quickly as possible. So it’s, it’s one of those where, you know, you’re gonna have to get the thing set up. And in the long run, it’s so much better. But in the short term, you’re going to have to keep an eye out for all the little mistakes that you don’t realize or mistakes. Because it’s not necessarily a natural system between integrating, you know, seven different programs together.

Tyson Mutrux
So how many of those systems and what systems do you use more internally? And then what systems do you do more client facing? And then what’s the response that your clients give you on the client facing stuff. So the

Jordan Ostroff
goal for us is everything automated from the client side, I try to do my best to make it not seem like it’s automated. So there’s going to be, you know, a series of automated emails that go to them, but thankfully, we’re able to put in, you know, their name, automatically put in case notes, case information to add, etc, so that they’re gonna get an email that is at least, you know, 25% to 33%, targeted for them directly on their case, from the internal stuff. You know, I don’t care about the automation from that. And so everybody knows, it’ll randomly pop up, well, not randomly, but it’ll consistently pop up tasks, follow up with this person every two weeks, you know, check in with this person here. and whatnot. So it’s, we spent our focus on making the client side automation look super nice. And so you know, marks on it and HTML coded the same banners and information from our newsletter. So that way, there’s that consistency with the brand, throughout everything that they get from us, from the invoices to the, you know, automatic emails to following up about hiring to getting our newsletter every month.

Jim Hacking
Going, can you talk to us a little about your tech stack? What do you use from sort of start to finish for bringing clients in and then, you know, it sounds like you’re using PracticePanther. Talk to us about all the different programs that you have, that you use.

Jordan Ostroff
So as of right now, I basically use Zapier to create an intake system in PracticePanther, which is not perfect, but it keeps us all together. Now that law Maddix just rolled out their updated pricing, I think we’re going to end up jumping over to at least using automatics, for if nothing more, taking the place of MailChimp and automating some of the other automations because there’s some things that we just can’t get done like the the automated text messaging and whatnot, they offer with automatics. I hadn’t used them earlier, because we’ve got from having a former traffic ticket business, we’ve got you know, 10 15,000 prior clients, so user price on La Maddix was crazy with that many number of people but now that they’ve really done it to the unlimited contacts that a worthwhile price point, it’s better for us than MailChimp. And so hopefully over the next three to four weeks, we’ll start switching over at least the newsletter side alarm addicts as we redo a lot of the intake. But right now, I mean, basically I’ve got Zapier and PracticePanther, working as sort of like a Lexa, kata law Maddix intake system that automates pretty much all the follow up with potential clients other than any, you know, phone calls, and whatnot for us to book them for consultation, send them contracts, send them invoices, everything along those lines, but then, you know, we’re bringing in HelloSign to do the signatures. We’re bringing in Gmail to do the emails, we’re bringing in Zapier and PracticePanther, for all those things. So I’m hoping that LA Maddix will solve some of the issues with the intersection of the four different programs just to get the intake stuff done.

Tyson Mutrux
Right, McCain and I talk a lot and he’s telling me, I think last year Linksys I think 2018 He made a promise to his team that he wouldn’t add any new software for his for him for that year. And he saw there was a lot of benefit from it because he wasn’t changing things all the time. Was it tinkering with things they were committed to what they were using? Do you ever experience a similar frustration with adding new things and always tinkering with things and things like that. Do you ever have that issue? So,

Jordan Ostroff
I mean, I guess the way that it breaks down for me is you can only Coast downhill. And so I I’d like to get to a point where we are happy with what setup and we can do that. I’m not there yet. And, and candidly, I thought that I was there a couple of different times with everything. But then like I said every two to three weeks, there seems to be some sort of issue that will come up between Zapier and PracticePanther, without us changing anything. And so I’m constantly trying to fix those. So that’s why I have a thought about the law Matic switch. But the benefit of us is, you know, I’ve got four staff members right now, and we try to have everybody not, you know, step on anybody’s toes. So really, you know, a switch from for law medics to beginning, we would do an automatic internal form for the receptionist for her to fill out. So it wouldn’t really change what she’s doing, it would just be, you know, a slightly different form to fill out. It would be our intake team that would get a different program with law medics instead of the practice Panther stuff. So by, by trying to have all of our staff as specialized as possible, it makes it easier to make the changes. Because then you know, it may just be one person who has to learn a new program instead of four people.

Jim Hacking
I know, Tyson already asked you about your long term plan for the firm, but what’s your short term plan? What are you planning to do, or to change over the next six to 12 months.

Jordan Ostroff
So we’re moving into a new office right now a larger office. So right now, when we get waiting on all the furniture and everything and be delivered, that’s going to be our our big goal. And then once we get that set up, then you know, slowly moving over, I think to the law Matic stuff will be what we’ll see by the end of this year. And then I’m hoping that after that, it’ll just be, you know, focusing on our referral sources and our current clients and continuing to grow the business at the rate we’ve been growing without any drastic changes. So I guess my six to 12 month goal is for there to not be as many changes,

Tyson Mutrux
here’s something that people have criticized me for that criticize, but they, whenever I talk to them about automation, and things like that, like well, it takes away the personal touch of dealing with clients. And you’ve already sort of addressed that a little bit. But you ever get pushback from people about you using leveraging technology so much. And if you do, what’s your response to that,

Jordan Ostroff
we definitely got some pushback, for the most part, it’s going to come when something’s not running the way it’s supposed to be, when they’re getting you know, multiple of the same email or something along those lines. Our big thing is, I mean, we kind of sell them on, we’re trying to provide the best value. You know, I don’t, I don’t want to be the cheapest firm, I don’t want to be the most expensive firm, I want to be the most valuable firm to our clients. And so from that it’s it’s a open discussion with them about part of that is, you know, automated emails, part of that is talking to my paralegal, instead of talking to the attorney, when you call us part of that is, you know, a receptionist solving some of the problems, I always try to, you know, put us back to, like a doctor’s office, you know, you go in for your annual checkup, and you’re meeting the receptionist, she’s having you fill out all those forms, then the nurse practitioner comes in, and you’re talking to all those people to get a lot of that stuff done, before the doctor ever shows up. And so I tried to tell him that look, you know, that’s our staff, that’s our automation so that that way, when, you know, when I come in as the doctor as the lawyer, I’m not having to do all those other things. And so that way, I can give you a good 30 minutes of time, because another 30 minutes was covered by everybody else, instead of me having to make an hour of our time fit into 30 minutes. Because I’ve only got so much time in the day. And so it seems like the clients have really, once I kind of give them that explanation, it seems like that’s maybe there’s a lot better because they’re understanding that part of the reason why we’re charging them 250 An hour instead of 300 an hour or part of the reason why we’re charging them 3000 for a DUI instead of 4000 for DUI, is because we’re going to automate some of the processes, so we can carry less staff so we can handle, you know, more cases with fewer people for less overhead, and whatever it is. And so a lot of people seem to appreciate that once we have the, you know, explanation for them. And then also a lot of them, especially ones that have been through other attorneys. They like a lot of that automation, because we can give them so much more information in a manner that’s easy for them. So what we have set up is, you know, every time we book a court date, or a console, or mediation or a depo, or anything along those lines, the client gets an automatic email. Hey, it’s set for this. Here’s a little bit of a rundown as to what to expect. Here’s a link to our website for some more information about you know, pretrial conference about mediation about depositions. And then I have that same email go out again a week before and so that way it sets them for a reminder, hey, you know, next week, expect to either have this court that you have to attend, expect us to update you on the court date, you know, that afternoon and so a lot of them really liked that because you give an attorney a bunch of money, we don’t provide a product, we provide a service and so by not being able to just turn around and give somebody something back immediately, you know, the automatic emails and whatnot. It helps because you know, I look at it as we’re selling peace of mind. I mean, we’re not selling legal services, we’re selling peace of mind. Because anybody can provide legal services. It’s how we make you feel while the process is going on, in addition to getting a really good result, that’s what seems to be the most important

Tyson Mutrux
to our clients. Jordan, do

Jim Hacking
you have any questions for Tyson and I are there? Is there anything that we can help you with?

Jordan Ostroff
I mean, I’m just super excited about Mac’s lock on the head, got my ticket, whenever you guys first released it. And I just joined the site after last year. So I was reading through everything guys posted about last year saying and I’ve just been jazzed up. So I’m really looking forward to that. That’s what I think is going to be more help than anything else.

Tyson Mutrux
Pretty I don’t know about you, Jimmy, I think you’re as excited as I am. I think you’d be freaking awesome. I last year was really, really cool. And I think we’re, we’re on on track to just blow that one out of the water. So I’m pretty excited. Before we do artists next week, I want to remind everyone to go to the Facebook group get involved there, there’s a lot of activity each day going on more and more every day, it’s kind of crazy. If you don’t mind going to iTunes or wherever, get your podcasts and give us a five star review. It really does help spread the love. Jimmy will check in the week.

Jim Hacking
You’re right about that Facebook group, I we’re getting as many comments now in a day or new posts in the day as we used to get in a week. So it’s pretty exciting to see all the activity going on there. For my hack of the week, you know, I went to traffic and conversion, and I was taking lots of good notes. And I wanted to bring back some value for all of our listeners. And I’m 99% sure we haven’t talked about this app before. But I know there are apps out there that will help simplify your writing. But if you Google Hemingway app, or just go to www dot Hemingway app.com. It’s an app. And what it does is you can put in your text, like for a blog post, or even a letter, and it tells you it gives you a rating of the language one through five and it color codes. And so if something is too complex, that they think is going to confuse people, then it’ll turn red. And if it’s something that the app likes, it will turn it yellow. And it’ll tell you what the readability level is, what the grade level is for the writing that you’ve done. So I started using it for some of our blog posts. And it helps because, you know, I deal with a population that English isn’t their primary language. So I really have to make my writing simple. And I found this to be pretty helpful.

Tyson Mutrux
Very cool. So here’s my question to you, Jimmy, how many courses did you buy wall at? Your cotton the conference you went to?

Jim Hacking
I was alive texting you at the time as to how proud I was. I didn’t buy one course I didn’t sign up for one thing. Well, is that traffic and conversion, which

Tyson Mutrux
is a first? If I can add up like applause to the podcast I do right now. That’s an amazing feat for you. Very good. All right, Jordan. So you’ve been around for a while, what is your tip or hack of the week.

Jordan Ostroff
So that’s the biggest thing for us is just always trying to put yourself in the client’s shoes. You know, I think a lot of times we go to law school, and it teaches us to be a lawyer, and it kind of removes the ability to be a relatable human being for a lot of people. So my big thing is going to be looking at it from the clients perspective. You know, what do they want to see from you?

Tyson Mutrux
What do they expect from you and make sure that you’re honoring those levels? That’s really great advice. Actually, I think we sort of skip that sometimes when we’re thinking about marketing. So I think that that’s brilliant advice. All right. So my tip of the week is to go to law Matic, you mentioned law Matic, I recommend people check it out. I’ve signed up for automatic, I’m actually really impressed with their user interface, which is really freaking cool. I would check it out. Their pricing is ridiculously low. I am shocked how cheap it is. And I’m not just saying this because they’ve sponsored us because they’ve agreed to sponsor the conference. And I sign up after they agreed to sponsor and I, I’m checking it out, it is impressive. So give them some love. Go check them out, because I think I think you’ll be very impressed. So all right, Jordan, thank you so much for coming on. We really, really appreciate that and did a lot of fun, us kind of rapid fire if you take the questions and answers really quick so that we have a lot more value in this was actually the short time. Did you answer the question? So thank you so much.

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