Clienting: Digital Legal Marketing

Kelly Street was joined this week by lawyer Erin Gerstenzang, a trial attorney with a law practice in Atlanta, Georgia. She provides concierge-level service to clients facing drug and alcohol-related offenses. In addition to running her boutique criminal defense law practice in Atlanta, Georgia, Erin Gerstenzang is dedicated to helping other attorneys succeed in their practices. She is a regular speaker at CLE events across the country and helps lawyers understand legal ethics in a technology-enabled world. She also lectures on women mentoring women, design-thinking for law firms, and using social media to build a legal brand.

Erin Gerstanzang has been public speaking since before she had a trial and has legal in her blood as a second generation lawyer in a family full of lawyers. 

Speaking has allowed Erin to introduce herself to new attorneys, gaining referrals and making a national name for herself and her firm. Erin speaks about everything from blood testing and criminal defense issues to women and diversity in the legal practice. Her perspective on public speaking is that it is a reputation builder. You can showcase expertise, being helpful, and teaching other attorneys to do their job better. 

Erin gained traction in legal speaking by discussing legal ethics and has focused recently on social media, including in her talk at Clio 2018 with Kim Bennett. 

Speaking tips: 

1. Don't be boring.
2. Present real tips, information, and advice.
3. Less is more for your slides- your slides shouldn't be your presentation.
4. Don't present sitting down. It's weird. 
5. Show your personality in speaking and in lawyering.
6. Refer to yourself 2-3 times during your presentation, (listen to hear why)

Branding your practice:

• Step outside the lawyer box.
• You'll attract the kind of clients you want if you can create a strong brand.

Improving your public speaking: 

• Get comfortable on the stage by filming your talks and watching them to identify your crutches and fine-tune your talks. 
  • Creative Live - public speaking courses
  • Vanessa Van Edwards - hand gestures
  • Ted Talks - speakers show their hands
• Start off with an embarrassing story to create a connection with the audience, instead of wasting time thanking the audience. The first 30 seconds are vital to your talk.

Watching yourself speak requires an act of kindness. Watch with the understanding that you will develop a tough skin and get better over time. 

Do lawyers only want to hear from lawyers? Kelly says yes, Erin says no. The legal world has a lot of learning and growth to do but is making strides to be open to non-legal experts for noon-legal topics. 

Then Erin shares her thoughts on paying for speakers- to get quality content, legal organizations should consider paying for speakers. You get A-Level speakers when you are willing to pay for it. 

Your ears are not deceiving themselves, Kelly interviews attorney Taymoor Pilehvar without Gyi Tsakalakis in this episode. 

Taymoor Pilehvar is an immigration attorney out of South Florida whose clients are athletes, entertainers, investors, workers, and family members.  He markets his services primarily using social media and engages his audience with methods considered unorthodox in the legal field.

Taymoor moved to Florida specifically to practice immigration.

Taymoor uses Facebook and Instagram primarily to attract clients. Kelly saw one of his posts about working with a sports influencer client and was intrigued by how he is using social media for client development in that particular client niche.

Claudius Vertesi - scooter pro

Is Taymoor getting clients for all of his efforts? Yes! He makes sure to include his Instagram handle on his business cards to passively market to his followers. 

Taymoor had not used social media prior to starting his law firm and learned while starting his firm, that he needed to do free marketing to build an online profile. Early on in his firm, he was living in his office because he couldn't afford an apartment and an office. He worked hard to build an online presence because it was a free way to get clients and he could do it all from his phone. During this time, he drove Lyft until he built up a client base. He actually has worked on a case for a Lyft ride he gave! 

Use likes, shares, and comments to gauge client interest and happiness. 

Certain practice areas can use luxury to intimidate and set expectations for clients, but immigration is typically not one of those. Taymoor lets his personality show in his content for the purpose of breaking down barriers between himself and clients.

Taymoor uses Direct Messages to communicate with potential clients. In Florida, the ethics rules around social media say to apply the rules of email to direct messages. 

Fake followers: Taymoor bought 200 followers or bots, to boost his follower count. Kelly 'caught' it, he owned it and explains why he uses fake followers. 

CALLOUT: Are there any lawyers working on influencer regulations?

His clients come from interpersonal interactions and then he nurtures the relationships through social media. 

Fun fact: Taymoor was featured on Judge Judy, unintentionally, to get money back from bad tenants.  

Gyi Tsakalakis and Kelly Street were joined by Joseph Wilson, an Atlanta-based trial attorney who uses Instagram for client development.

Joseph Wilson is a personal injury trial attorney at JL Wilson Trial Law, and specializes in motor vehicle collision cases, trucking collisions, as well as negligent security cases. 

Joseph started his law firm in January 2018 and as a bootstrapping entrepreneur-attorney, was looking for methods to inexpensively promote his law firm and cases. As a young lawyer, he turned to a method that was familiar to him, Instagram and Facebook.

Joseph was a lead lawyer on the case against the "Rapping Doctor" and utilized the PR from that case to promote his law firm and help find other potential clients who may have been affected.

He takes the approach of educator and shares his knowledge and life on his online social media profiles. He does not use his posts as outright advertisements but as "added value" for his followers and potential clients. He strives to make his posts authentic and engaging for followers, to stand out from what people think about lawyers.

Joseph understands that plaintiff's attorneys may have a bad reputation, so he purposefully shows his family and lifestyle in his profile. This helps potential clients see him as a father, husband, and generally kind, hardworking person, instead of the typical hard-hitting personal injury attorney.

Instagram bio tip: Write out your particular practice areas in your bio, because the general public may not understand what "personal injury" or "trial lawyer" means. Listing out "car accidents, slip-and-fall, medical malpractice" is much more meaningful to non-lawyers.

Where does Joseph find the time to cultivate his online marketing? Priorities. He begins each day with social media marketing and a calendar appointment on Thursdays to post legal tips, PR videos, and more. 

Is Joseph actually getting clients from his efforts on Instagram? Yes! In the last year, 20-25 at least. When he posts verdicts or legal tip posts, he gets Direct Messages from potential clients.

Hashtag use: Joseph uses relevant hashtags and tags his location as Georgia, but finds that pictures and informative captions are more meaningful than specific hashtags.

The JL Wilson website has a feature using "Click to Facetime" that allows potential and current clients to use Facetime instead of face-to-face meetings or consultations and giving another access option.

For his short time in solo practice, Joseph has a great review profile built up online. He encourages clients to leave reviews easily with email links and more. His web design and marketing company, Moxster, aggregated his reviews on his website to make sure potential clients would see their social proof and be assured of his expertise.

Joseph is working on creating a Rolodex of professionals, building a referral network and help other business people, using genuine reciprocity. He cares a lot about the law of reciprocity.

Gyi and Kelly were joined by Aastha Madaan, owner of Madaan Law Firm and Concierge Wills & Trusts, both located in Southern California.

Aastha runs a traditional law firm and a secondary, 100% virtual law firm. She came up with the idea for a completely virtual practice after realizing that the traditional model was inconvenient for a large portion of her clients and that going virtual would make them happier, leading to more referrals and reviews.

She used design-centered thinking to build out and iterate the process of going virtual. Aastha started small with virtual consultations and built her secondary practice from there. Education is the key with this new type of practice-- her clients understand what makes this process and firm different, based on the video on their website homepage. 

1. Empathize - explore and find the pain points for your clients. Aastha surveyed clients to see what they would have liked to be different in the process.
2. Define - Outline the pain points; Aastha's client's pain points were pricing, meeting in person, and where to meet. 
3. Ideate - Come up with options that you could try.
4. Prototype - Implementing the options you can try.
5. Test - testing out your model. This is where you start and go back to step 3 or 4 as you try out additional options and ideas.

How is Aastha finding clients:

• Facebook ads
  • Aastha started by wasting money iterating and learning the process but has developed a working process.
  • Email list didn't create interest, website visit and courses didn't engage, but a short video leading to a webinar created engagement and interest.
• Referrals from all over California
• Referrals from clients in the traditional practice; and their established SEO, Google, Yelp, and online presence.

Setting her firm apart from DIY:

• Lawyers are hesitant about DIY, Legal Zoom, and other services,
• Aastha doesn't feel that she is competing with those services but has to educate clients about her process,
• The more lawyers are practicing virtually, the easier her sales and intake process will become,
• The available tools are replacing menial tasks- not lawyers. "Our value [as lawyers] lies in our knowledge, in our ability to emphasize, and our innate ability to adapt because we are human."
• AI tools will only enhance our practice and our lives.

Cryptocurrency & Estate Planning - a new addition that lawyers in this practice area need to be aware of for their clients. 

Their intake process: 

• Online form fill leads to a questionnaire. This helps their firm understand what the client needs before they get on the phone.
• The results of the questionnaire either lead to a consultation or emails containing the documents they need, rather than a consultation. 

A few other notes: 

• Concierge Wills & Trusts use ZenDesk for website chat and find that both potential clients and current clients engage with it. 
• The model uses technology to support the law firm and lawyers, and firms should begin to automate what can be automated.
• Aastha on Imposter Syndrome: This comes up as hesitation,  nervousness, and a lack of confidence. It takes a lot of work to climb out of the feeling and hearing the stories of others who have felt the same way can help break those feelings down. Validating others good ideas will help bring more good ideas.

Find Aastha on Twitter & Instagram at @madaanlaw, or Facebook as Aastha Madaan. 

Gyi Tsakalakis and Kelly Street were joined by Justie Nicol, owner of Nicol Law Offices, a Criminal Defense Attorney in Fort Collins, Colorado. She is a savvier than average solo attorney who used technology tools to make her practice run smoother and create better work/life balance. 

Justie has even taught a CLE on tech tools as a solo to boost client experience! When you look at the list of tools below and listen, keep in mind that Justie is a regular lawyer who implemented these tools over time, as she saw a need. She starts with a low-cost or free solution

What Justie uses to streamline her firm and client experience:

• Wisestamp for email signature (appt scheduler, tweets, etc)

• Copper CRM
  • Connects with Zapier to her email and more
• Typeform for intake/conflict check
  • Prior to client consultations, have them fill this out.
  • Send a post-consultation form to see why a potential client didn't choose your law firm
  • Send a post-case form to get client feedback for reviews
• Zapier, to connect apps and services
• Acuity for appointments
  • Set expectations with clients so they know when and how appointments should go; filling out a conflict check prior, etc.
  • Consult with everyone who wants one or send them referral sources; just don't let them feel ignored
• Square for payments
  • Easily end to collect payment at the time of engagement
  • Justie includes a credit card charge policy in her engagement letter, so clients know how payments work
• Docusign for document signing
  • Engagement letters, etc.
  • AttorneySync uses PandaDoc for document sharing and signing
• Buffer for social media
• Trello for content management
• Outsourcing marketing efforts
  • Content creation
    • Schedule posts, draft one month at a time
    • Use an attorney or an agency who understands legal ethics
    • Posts for referrals and posts for clients
  • Digital marketing
    • Pay-per-click
      • Cost per click, and customer acquisition cost
    • SEO
      • Monitor ad copy to make sure it complies with your state's ethics rules
  • Website updates and buildout
  • Make sure to track Return On Investment for all marketing efforts; Justie likes to try one new method at a time
• Smith.ai for after-hours receptionist and chatbots for website communication
  • Receptionist service for inbound and outbound calls, filling out the intake form and helping schedule appointments or court reminders for clients.
  • Using a chatbot as an option for communication, even if it isn't something you would want to use.
• Non-tech: Engagement Letters to set client expectations
  • How you will communicate with them and when it is appropriate to contact you
  • Your lawyer-style; aggressive or not?
• Quickbooks for firm accounting methods
  • Manually reimbursing credit card charge fees
  • Square & Quickbooks connections
• Ethics Issues:
  • Engagement letter includes a section about the technology used for information and document security

Contact Justie at [email protected] or find her on social media: #officedogs

Contact Kelly for more information on Clienting at [email protected] 

Wayne Pollock is the founder and managing attorney of Copo Strategies (www.copostrategies.com), a national legal services and communications firm. 

Wayne helps other attorneys and their clients ethically, strategically, and proactively engage the Court of Public Opinion to help those clients resolve their legal disputes favorably, and to help those attorneys build their practices. 

Serving as a consultant to law firms or as limited scope co-counsel to clients, Wayne's counsel incorporates legal strategy, media strategy, ethics compliance, and defamation avoidance.

How to get your message out in the court of public opinion. The public, your clients, and the media are not digging through court files so how do you get your client's story out of the courtroom? The answer: PR

Ethics of PR:

• Model Rule 1.6- not disclosing case or client information publicly;
• Ethics Opinion 480- must have client permission to publicly reveal any case-related information publicly
• Rule 3.6: Trial Publicity, cannot make statements outside of court that could prejudice a case.
  • (6 months has been ruled as enough time between media coverage and the case for the public to forget about the case). 

Protecting your clients (from themselves). Litigation strategy and PR strategy run parallel to one another. 

PR in the modern era of search engines- how to navigate technology ahead of the law. 

Who needs PR? Criminal Defense, Trial Lawyers, Real Estate, or any other litigator that has or uses public documents. 

How to work with reporters: 

• Create a reporter relationship,
• Connect with reporters and use comments or the media to your advantage
• Greg Siskind's reporter outreach via Twitter
• Help A Reporter Out

PR = phone calls, inquiries. They may not be clients but you can be an advocate for your practice area. Position yourself as an expert in your field and practice area. 

PR + SEO = opinion summaries are a great way to get links, traffic and more. 

Find reporters in your area, likely to cover your practice area. Email them and introduce yourself; who you are, what you do, and how you can help the reporter. 

Lawyers have a PR problem and the public perception is often negative.  

From large law firm lawyering to legal coworking to blockchain lawyer, this week's guest, Yev Muchnik, has a really cool perspective on future-forward law practice. 

Yev makes some great points about how the traditional law practice model isn't working for many attorneys in 2019 and how coworking spaces focused on legal can help solve this issue. 

Ethics of legal coworking: 

• Many state bar associations have decreed that coworking is ethical for lawyers and law firms to do.
• Make sure conference rooms are enclosed and bring your own white or blue noise machine to keep conversations private. 

Blockchain Lawyering:

• Currently focused on securities and corporate law
• 'Smart contracts'

Engaging in a new practice area and becoming the go-to expert: 

• Meetups
• Collaboration & 'distributed lawyering'
• Conferences within that niche
• Speaking engagements
• Facebook groups, Slack channels, etc
  • Stay away from being 'salesy' and focus on providing information or being a resource.

In this practice area and moving into the legal world in general, clients are looking for tech-savvy lawyers. Yev is using security and technology to be an asset for her clients, instead of a burden.

• MyCase, case management software
• HelloSign, to be a remote office
• Signal, a secure phone app for texting and phone calls
• Zoom, for video conferencing with clients

Yev works with Citizn Company which uses smart contracts to help customers become more aware of what they are signing. They discuss the ethics of AI and smart contract readers.

Technology makes us more efficient, accountable, and provide better service for clients. As Yev says, technology = superpowers. Legal consumers are beginning to have expectations that their lawyers will be technologically aware.

Yev's mission of Access To Justice with the Colorado Bar Association and how unbundled services will allow clients better access to legal services. Which means there is also a place in the market for lawyers who are willing to unbundle their services and gain more market share.

Find Yev at [email protected] or her website at techlawstartup.com.

Gyi and Kelly celebrate their first year as podcasters and talk about the trends from last year and what to expect in 2019 as you market your law firm. 

• Flashback to 2018, what we talked about then: 
  • Voice search
  • Mobile-friendly everything
  • GMB updates
  • Visual Search (video results)
  • Changes to Google
    • proximity, hyperlocal
• 2019 Marketing Trends: 
  • AI & intentional advertising (FB/Instagram algorithms)
    • Messenger Ads
    • Video Ads
    • Smarter, targeted content
  • Personalization 
    • More data-driven content
    • Ad copy segmented more to specific groups or interests as a response to Social Media Ad algorithms
    • Chatbots, the digital concierge
      • Disclosing that your chatbot is not a human when people interact with it
  • Voice Search: By 2020, it’s expected that 50 percent of all searches will be voice searches, and by 2022, voice commerce sales will reach $40 billion. - Chief Marketer
    • Rand Fishkin Google marketshare article
  • Video
    • It's still a thing and evolving to Instagram and FB TV, and Live videos
    • Video search results: Kelly predicts that Google will start adding video results for non-celebrity searches to the Knowledge Panel in 1-5 years
    • Caption your videos, 85% of videos watched on Facebook are without sound on.
  • Email is making a resurgence
    • Gyi argues that email never went away but we need to change how we use it
    • Keep in touch with former clients by sending birthday or holiday emails
    • Don't spam and look at your email data to make sure people are getting a benefit out of your emails: 
      • open rates, spam reports, etc.
  • Influencer Marketing
    • Are law firms using influencers to market their firms?
    • Mitch Jackson's book got tweeted & retweeted from Gary Vaynerchuk

This episode is all about ethics! Gyi Tskalakis and Kelly Street were joined by Will Hornsby to discuss the challenges legal ethics bring to a solo and small law firm. We also learn how Will became a go-to legal marketing ethics expert. 

After serving as staff counsel in the American Bar Association’s Division for Legal Services for 30 years, Will Hornsby now maintains a solo practice that helps lawyers, legal marketers and innovators maximize the potential of their communications and delivery models while understanding and complying with the ethics rules. His practice focuses on working with clients to explore opportunities to expand their marketplaces. Will is also an Illinois disciplinary hearing officer, an adjunct professor at Chicago Kent College of Law and a member of the Board of Directors of the Justice Entrepreneurs Project, a Chicago-based lawyer incubator.

What's it like to go solo, what Will has been up to, and how unbundled services are still an untapped market. 

Delivery of services and the challenges on changing the standard legal services delivery model, as it relates to ethics rules. 

Legal movers & shakers are talking on social media but the conversation needs to move into ethics rules governance. 

Where is 'the line' in legal ethics? It's important to know your particular state rules but not to be frozen by them. Understanding the ethics rules creates an opportunity and allows law firms to know if their marketing is ethical; it doesn't prohibit marketing. 

Marketing can help solve the A2J - access to justice - issue in the marketplace. 

Will's grid: People who don't know they have a problem/People who don't know it is a legal issue. Ex: Kids w/asthma caused by mold & Elderly people in assisted living need pre-nups

Are reviews ethical? Is it ok to ask your clients for reviews?

How to protect your clients online: using social media with legal ethics in mind.

How changes in technology can open up new areas of legal practice. 

Gyi Tsakalakis and Kelly Street were joined by attorney Shreya Ley.

Shreya Ley is half of the lawyer-human duo at the Lay Roots, an asset protection law firm based in Seattle, WA that focuses on estate planning, intellectual property, business law, and more. 

Lay Roots and life-business partners Colin & Shreya carefully thought about what their law practice should look like to work best within their lives and for their ideal clients. 

Colin and Shreya have taken on the mantle of Lawyer-Humans both as a joke and as branding, to separate themselves from lawyers sitting behind mahogany desks in a law library. 

Defining your clients through your marketing, instead of letting your clients define your marketing and firm. Shreya finds inspiration in Seth Godin and his perspective on finding your tribe. As a result, Lay Roots has built longer-term, deeper relationships with clients which have led to more referrals and repeat business. 

Clients through volunteering and personal networking. 

Lay Roots looked at podcasting in a different way- putting short audio clips and conversations into a 5-minute breakdown of what's happening in their heads for that day, instead of getting into legalese. 

Online scheduling tool on their website for clients who know what they want, who they want to work with, and they're ready to get started. 

Lay Roots uses service menus and bundled services for clarity with potential clients.