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Today we’re excited to share a presentation by Steven Lefkoff from MaxLawCon 2021! Tune in to learn all about creating a legal product.

Lefkoff Law is a full-service boutique firm that represents businesses throughout Georgia. The firm is committed to creating partnerships with clients while providing high-quality counsel. As the principal and founding attorney, Steven focuses on developing strategies that help his clients with their legal needs. 

He cares about his clients and empathizes with each situation. Lefkoff Law values integrity, flexibility, and results. Whether you are seeking business litigation services or Magistrate Court coaching, Lefkoff Law can help achieve the best resolution.

2:17 no financial sense

6:37 keep being that

10:08 we all discount ourselves

14:11 I’ve got to solve my problem

18:04 that was so cool

Watch the podcast here.

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Transcript: From Idea to Execution, How I Created a Legal Product with Steven Lefkoff 

Becca Eberhart
In today’s episode, we’re sharing a presentation from Max law con 2021. Keep listening to hear Stephen left cough as we share his talk from idea to execution, how I created a legal product. You can also head to the maximum lawyer YouTube channel to watch the full video. Have you grabbed your ticket to this year’s conference? If not head to max law con 2020 two.com to get yours today. Now to the episode,

Speaker 2
run your law firm the right way. This is the maximum lawyer podcast, podcast your hosts, Jim hacking and Tyson nutrix. Let’s partner up and maximize your firm. Welcome to the show.

Steven Lefkoff
Ross talked about giving out books. And so in the last four minutes I ordered on Amazon Prime Now. I got a stack of them. I’m gonna get into in a second. How’s it going, guys? So I am wearing like a ridiculous brave shirt because they’re playing today. They actually first pitch is Thanks, Chris. First pitch is during my speech. So if I just stop and leave, you know why. But someone came up to me this morning and said, Is that what you’re wearing to speak in? And I said, Yeah. And he said we you got a lot of guts. Now the word he didn’t he didn’t use the word guts. But he said you got a lot of guts to speak and something like that. And I said, Well, this is kind of who I am. Right? We’re all you’ve heard today. A lot of people talk about who they are and making sure that you’re authentic to your authentic self. Right. So this is me another thing that’s me as I curse a little bit so if that’s not okay with you fucking sorry. But there’s the I like I won’t say too much, but I might. So let’s go ahead and get started. The quick about me where I promote myself, I founded left cop law. It’s a general practice firm in Atlanta, Georgia, we represent car companies, dealers, finance repair repo auction, as general counsel for those companies in Atlanta and throughout the state. It’s important because I’ll get into it in a second. And because it’s what I do, that’s the website, the logo, it’s pretty gavel is my online course it’s gaveled out legal. It is the country’s only lawyer led online course to teach pro se litigants how to represent themselves in small claims court without a lawyer, okay, so where you have cases where it makes no financial sense to hire an attorney, but the folks don’t want to show up not knowing what they’re doing, they can go on gambling, and they can take the course. Right, and that’s a legal product. We’re gonna talk about that. Then recently, thanks to Jim hacking and his brilliant guidance, I started something called the Georgia auto law authority, which unlike gavel is free. And it’s a lead magnet, also a legal product, but with a completely different focus, and different kind of scope. And I’m gonna talk about that as well. And that’s the pretty logo for that one. And that’s a ga carlaw.com. We’re gonna talk about a few things today for to be exact one is mindset. Two is finding and solving a problem. Number three is the structures and the way that I’ve done it is number four. We’re gonna show the book. I don’t know how many of you guys have kids? How many of you have kids under the age of say, 1010? Okay, so I’ve got 10 of these copies of this book called don’t push the button. It’s a classic. I’m gonna give them out. But I really only have nine to give out because I was hungover this morning in Oxford Brookes one of them. So I have nine to give out. You guys are welcome to come over and grab one at any point. Believe me one though, so I can speak Alright, so this book, don’t push the button is a favorite of ours. Right? It’s Dave Freese had that don’t spill the milk thing this morning, right? And I like hid under my table, because I went, Oh, crap. He stole my speech, right? And like four minutes, that guy blew away, whatever I’m about to say, over 20. Right. So don’t push the button is this book, where it’s it’s a kid’s book. It’s a phenomenal, phenomenal kid’s book. And you get this guy, Larry, right. And Larry is the main character of the book. And the idea is, if you push this button, crazy things happen to Larry. Right? And so he’s telling you don’t push the button. Because I don’t want all this shit to happen to me. Right? But if you’re a kid, and Larry says, don’t push the button, what are you doing? You’re pushing it. Right. Don’t spill the milk. All you think about is spilling the milk. Right? Thanks, Dave. So I’m doing this right when my kids my kids are now six and eight there. They think it’s just ridiculous now, but they liked it at the time, right? I’m sitting in the room, I’m reading to them. And I say, you know, don’t push the button and my little daughter will reach out. You know, like this, I’m going further and further and further until I’m running around the top floor of our house. And I’m running I’m one of these that we do this like this was one of the books that they want every night you know, kids like it’s ridiculous. They just the same thing over and over. So this is one of the books and so one night I was in socks running around the house, slipped and fell busted my lip like nearly broke my nose with bloody nose and all and my wife goes okay, Steven.

Steven Lefkoff
I don’t think you can read that again. I’m like, Damn, that sucks. I love that book. Alright, so But that’s the button. Right and that’s in the idea is, right again, if you push the button things, he changes colors, he splits himself in a million P in a million different Larry’s show up on the page. And all this stuff happens, right? It’s bullshit. It’s bullshit. Okay? Because there’s something that happens when you’re a kid and don’t really know the psychology because I’m not a psychologist. I’m a legal counselor. I’m a therapist, right? I’m not a psychologist. It’s very different than shit. Because kids you say this to and they want to push the button. Right? Adults, you say don’t push the button, they go. Alright, fine. Right? I’m not gonna push it. You have something you have a legal product, right? You have some idea that you want to come up with right and someone tells you you can’t do that the ethics rules prohibited. The It’s too hard. You don’t know all the software. You don’t have the right lighting. You don’t have this. You go fuck, I’m not interested. You know, I don’t do it. It’s too hard. Right? You tell it to a kid they go. I’ll show you soccer. Right. I’m gonna build that thing. So I think that’s garbage. I love the book. Right. I think everyone who has a kid should take this. I’ve got I don’t know if I don’t want to take them home. I have one. Right. I have one bloodstains on it. So no, I don’t want it. You guys take it if you have kids that are older, take it fuck with them. But but it is it’s bullshit. Okay. So like, this is one of the paid, right? No one’s looking. You should give it a push. Right? But see the behind there pushing the buttons the hard part? Right. That’s why we don’t do it. That’s why when we get where adults are like, Oh, we’re in our lane, we’re good. You’re in your lane, right? You hear that all the time stay in your lane, or your PII lawyer, you do PIs. They do PII. You’re making good money, right? You’re a criminal defense attorney. You’re doing great. Your criminal defense attorney, you got tons of clients, people want you keep being that. Right. Why do you keep being that because being something else is freaking hard. Doing something else is hard. And it takes advice. And it takes asking the questions and it takes trying and it takes practice and takes all of these things that we paralyze ourselves and don’t do because it’s hard. So we stay in our lane, right? pushing the buttons the hard part. It’s easy when you’re four. It’s hard when you’re 44. So you start to think okay, right, like, Fine, Steven, great, good, grand, whatever. But what can I do? Right? Like what? Okay, I’d like I like practicing law ish. It’s fun. I’d rather be at a conference hanging out with all you guys. I’d rather be doing a whole host of different things. But we’re so okay, what’s the legal product? Right? That’s one of the main what is that? Was it a meme? Right. So here’s where I came up with mine. Okay, first, I discovered a problem. Right? And for me, the reason I said it’s important that that I start off with the fact that I represent car companies is they have a lot of small claims cases, right customer buys a car engine seizes up day seven, they sue the dealer for not disclosing a problem, or they want their down payment back or they want to discount or whatever. People just hate car dealers, right? And then when I tell people, I’m a lawyer that represents them, it’s like, you can’t get lower than the lawyer that represents car dealers. But whatever. It’s what I do. I like I found my niche. So I’m sitting in court one day on a small claims calendar. And I’m watching two litigants who are representing themselves with no attorney argue their case, and it was a loan. That was unpaid, right plaintiff loaned her neighbor or friend or whoever it was $6,000 neighbor didn’t repay. So plaintiff sued neighbor, right? Pretty simple, like any one of us. Even I mean, even if you’re Ross and you’re an estate planning attorney, you can get in small claims court and argue that one, right, easy, right? Breach of Contract, paid didn’t pay back. Plaintiff who should have taken five minutes on her case took an hour and 45 minutes. She’s crying. She’s screaming, she’s, you know, pointing the marshal had to get in the middle of the two litigants, because the judge honestly thought there was going to be a fistfight in the middle of the courtroom. Between them. It was a shit show. Like I know, I mean, I curse because it’s fun. That really was a shit show. Right? And the defendant gets up. When it’s her case in chief. She says like three things I don’t even remember on because I was so traumatized by watching the whole event, which is kind of part of why I like small claims court because it’s just fun. But defending gets up says her piece and like four minutes, judge rules for defendant, and I’m going Holy shit, like, why did that just happen? Right? It’s the easiest case I’ve ever seen. Judge it should have been a no brainer, right? But it quickly dawned on me that the judge hated the plaintiff. Right? Just hated the plaintiff. We’ve all been we have clients we hate. Right? And you like people tell you firewalls, really hard to do sometimes. But you know those people, right? You know, those people. And I was watching it happen in the courtroom. And I said, this is not right. Right. There’s got to be a way for these people to get the help that they need to be able to litigate their case and not lose a case that they should win. Right. And so part of what I found was that problem and I had personal knowledge about it because I was in court all the time for these clients. Right? It was not it was a no brainer for me. I know this stuff, right? And part of I mean, Russell’s right? You are the smartest person in the room. Right? We all discount ourselves. We think, oh, you know, we get intimidated. I don’t know why we get into the I don’t know, the psychology behind all that. But we get intimidated and we we doubt it. We’re self doubters. Right naturally a lot of us are. And I thought, Okay. I know some things about small claims court I come. I win cases. I watch other people try their cases, I watch pro se litigants try their cases. But do I really know that much? Right? Do I really know how to answer all the questions? The answer is? Of course not. Right. Nobody knows how to answer. All the questions who does? What I started doing was I wrote down the issues that I saw arise in small claims court, right, I had like 10 topics. At first I go, Okay, I could talk I could put like something together a guide, right? I could put like a PDF or something together for people to help them on these 10 topics. So I start writing them out. 10 turns into 4040 turns into 50. Right, Jay talks about his systems, or you’ll see if you haven’t started making your systems, you’ll see how that happens. It’s exactly the same idea. Like, oh, we’ll do we’ll knock out these five systems in mind. But then you write one out, and that turns into five more, and then that turns into five more. Next thing, you know, you have 1000, right? I don’t have 1000. But J does. So start writing this out. It grows, it grows, it grows. Right. And then in this PDF, I start to realize nobody’s gonna read this shit. Right? Like, who’s gonna read ad topics on small claims court? Right? Like, could you imagine anything worse? Like, truly, I mean, it’s like the worst, right? So I kind of start going to the going to the drawing board, right? What can I do to make this engaging? Right, everybody talks about video. Now, I’ll turn this into videos. That’s kind of fun. I’ll sit in front of video camera. I spent three days trying to figure out what ring light I should use for my videos. Right? You know why? Because I was convincing myself not to push the button. Instead of just doing it with whatever I had. I was at max law 2019. Right, can’t get up. And there was a speaker at that conference if you weren’t there. And he was talking about, like, how he shoots video. And then he did a q&a at the end. And one of the questions was, if I recall, exactly, it was what lighting do you use? Right? And his answer, Chris, you held it up, hold it up. His answer was essentially, who gives a shit? Right? Like, pick up your phone and start taking your videos, right? So I kind of it took me three days to realize that that I was I priced out different lights. I went on Amazon, I went on all the Alibaba and I was like, Oh, if I get this from China, I can say 47 cents. And like, you know, I did all this stuff. But, but all I was doing was not pushing the button. Right? It wasn’t pushing the button.

Speaker 4
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Steven Lefkoff
So I said okay, I’ve got to solve this problem. I’ve got to push the button and Tyson got me there. Right use the people around you. I had a call with Tyson. He said Why haven’t you done this yet? said because I don’t know. Right? It’s vulnerable. It’s vulnerable. It’s like being on The Bachelor. Every word is vulnerable. Right? I felt very vulnerable at that moment. I was like, I don’t know why I hadn’t done it. He goes you know you’re gonna do you’re gonna get on Facebook Live, you’re gonna push the button. You’re gonna go live because once you do that, you can’t go back. Right? How do you do that in front of your 1000 People 2000 friends how many friends you have? How do you get on Facebook? Say I’m doing this and then disappear. Right? I don’t know how to do that. So I got on Facebook Live for the first time my life. Never been on Facebook Live before. Push the button. Thought I’d talk for four seconds like a good one. Well, you’re talked for 20 minutes. And then the plan was in motion, right to make this thing it was in motion. But look, you don’t not everybody does it. The way I do it, most people don’t, because I’m nuts. But there are a lot of different ways you can do this. You can do this as a product, right? You can, you can actually have a saleable product like I do sell a bowl sale for gavel, where I actually sell the program, right? I make money on this thing. You can have a business, right gavel, we’ve created this business called Small Claims Academy, and Gamble’s a product in small claims Academy, I have all these ideas that haven’t become anything more than ideas, because I haven’t pushed the button to do for small claims Academy, but it is its own business, you can do a lead magnet, right? Something that can bring people into your law firm, right? Whatever. If that’s really what you want to promote, then you can create things I’ll show you one in a minute, that can help get people to really where you want them to be, if where you want them to be as your law firm. And I said there a million ways there probably aren’t that many. But there are a lot of different ways that you can do this. So here’s how I did it. Like I said, I saw a problem I wanted to solve, I created this solution. I wrote out the idea. I created the content, right? I say this fast, like it was so easy. It was really fucking hard, right? But But I did it right because I decided I’m going to push the button. And I’m going to talk so so if you want to know the ring lights, like if you want to get in the weeds, this chart is what I did. And I’m gonna talk about Georgia, Carolina sec, because I haven’t even mentioned that. But for gavel, I use a course hosting platform, if you want a course called Kajabi. It’s like an all in one solution. People check out with it. It’s my landing pages through it, all the whatever they call those things, the metrics, the statistics, whatever you want to call them are all through Kajabi. My logo was done by a company a local company Atlanta called radical design. I use a Blue Yeti microphone. It’s great. It’s a friggin microphone. And then I have a web host through GoDaddy. I know I’m not supposed to use GoDaddy, a lot of people hate them, but I use them and it’s fine. Georgia car law. I use a totally different system because Georgia car law is a lead magnet for my law firm. It’s free. This was a Jim hacking idea. Right? Ross says join the killer because people have good ideas. They really, really do. Like, I didn’t really come up with any of this stuff. Right? This was all people way smarter than me, told me to do it. And I said, okay, they know what they’re doing. I’ll do what they tell me to do. Right? Georgia car launch provider called Get Response, which is like an E it’s like MailChimp, but for Dummies, and I’m a dummy. So I tried MailChimp and I was it was way too not dummy for me. The video hosting I’ll show you what it looks like in a second but it’s all through a page called dub, which is another Tyson referral for me. And Doug is awesome. Like when I it’s it’s a video platform and when I get like email introductions, right y’all get him? Hey, Steven, meet my friend Hunter. He’s you know, he’s a great attorney and you should totally talk to him right and it’s like great to eat meat you fuck is that he beat you so I respond with a dud video. I hate that I hate e meet you. Right? You either meet someone who don’t know me. So I respond with a dove video. Like instantaneously, I pop over my laptop, my camera. I take a video. I go hey, Hunter, it’s so great to meet you my schedule buttons below please pick a time and I get so many people. Everyone responds. That was so cool. It wasn’t cool. I’m an idiot. It’s an easy thing to do. Do you BB go there. It’s really easy camera. That’s a Logitech BRIO microphone, believe it or not the same microphone, same desk. I record these things from the same place. And I built the table of contents on Canva. Right? So easy. It’s so easy. And same web hosting. It’s all through GoDaddy, right? And then I promoted it on on Facebook. I haven’t done ads because I just I haven’t read the ads for dummies book yet. But this is gavel right? This is what the Kajabi page looks like. So if you log into gavel, you get this the video here you can see there’s graphics on it. It’s like it’s a totally, it’s a different animal. I’m charging for it. I feel like I have to. We’re lawyers, if we’re gonna make people pay, we want them to get something they feel like they have paid for. Right. So I charge for that. There’s a whole table of contents on the left. And the whiners. I’m happy to answer whatever questions you have, as long as they’re easy later about this. This is the Georgia car law page on dub. Okay, you can see it’s look at that mug. That’s me, right? Obviously, all the videos are down below and you can’t see it. But below that there’s action buttons, right because the point of Georgia car law is to convince my caught my potential clients that I know what I’m talking about, and you should hire me to be your lawyer. Right. So that’s why I have all the action buttons underneath Georgia car law. So again, if you guys have any easy questions, I’m happy to answer them hard ones. We’ll talk tonight after I’ve had a couple but don’t be afraid to push the bottom. Right. This is really what it comes down to like be a kid. Be a kid. When someone tells you you can’t do something do it. Because listen those fuckers right like just don’t they’re there. They’re yeses. Don’t be a no person, right? Hey, no people, I can’t do it. So I gotta be careful because y’all are all like movers and shakers in your areas. But right now it’s just in Georgia, but the plan is to make it a much bigger program around the country. Yep. You start off the To get up? It’s a great question. No. So I started actually by one on one coaching clients. And the challenge with the one on one was number one, it was too expensive, because you had to pay like, it was my time. Right. And then the other challenge was scheduling. I had to meet with you before your trial before you filed something I, you know, it was I wasn’t I got ethics clearance. So I wasn’t worried about giving advice or whatever. It was the time and the money. And so I thought I can flip this into something more affordable. But the plan Yes. Was always to charge something for it. Yeah. Collaborate with you to create a report? Yes, it’s something like that. Did anybody want to sign? Yeah, no, I’m happy to talk to you about it. ever use your report again? No, I think that’d be a conflict. I think that they I’d have to ask the judge to dismiss their case. No, no, it hasn’t as come up. But I have I have gotten clients for my law firm. This was not intended. I’ll finish up with this because a time’s up. But we did a direct mail campaign were sent out postcards for gavel. And I got, we did it for three days. It’s just like a trial. And one of the cards, somebody called my law firm, and said, I need an attorney. And I found you on Google. And I want I needed a small claims attorney and I found you on Google have a small portion of my website on my law firm website. And I said oh, well I have a like I have a whole program on that. It’s called gamble. They went just like us on the phone. She goes Holy shit, you’re that guy? I said yeah, why she goes I just got your postcard yesterday and it may it convinced me I need a lawyer I think we need to work on our postcards right they didn’t did not give the effect I wanted but she hired the frontline. She hired me at the firm to represent her so that’s all you know, it’s some of the stuff gets intertwined with it. But it’s all about kind of creating that image right and who you want to be and who you are. So thank you guys, go brave.