Transform Your Law Firm With Marketing and Advertising

 if you own a law firm and you think that the words marketing and advertising are the same, that probably points to the reason why you're struggling to grow at the pace you want to grow and hit the goals.

You want to hit?

The last 15 years I've been teaching law firm owners how to do this.

I built a law firm myself. Using these strategies I'm gonna teach you

and we've helped countless others accomplish the exact same goal.

We just had our entrepreneurial attorney of the year contest where four law firms have either increased from 51% to doubled their net incomes, and they all use these primary strategies.

I hope to give you a tool that you'll be able to walk away with at the end of this video so that you can actually implement these strategies yourself.

Finally we're gonna talk about who on the team you actually need to execute this.

I'm gonna make sure you have the ability to, identify, what level law firm owner you are, so you can understand where you fit into this plan.

 

Marketing is actually the umbrella.

 

Over advertising in sales. And so if you confuse marketing and advertising, you are missing a huge piece of the puzzle inside of this conversation that we call sales. This is what we call the perfect client lifecycle or the PCLC in our world.

So this is where we're gonna talk about sets and shows and hires. And Total client value, right? we're gonna be talking about those types of numbers inside the sales. Also, if you are not a contingency firm, average money down, right? All these things need to be understood in sales, and they need to be understood.

As they relate to advertising. So which advertising source are you using produces your best conversion to appointment? Set your best conversion to people that show your best conversion to, prospects that retain the firm.

The person doing the marketing, the marketing leader. Has to have a fundamental understanding of advertising and sales.

The first thing to do to identify where you want to go is to identify where you are right now.

 

We have to understand where we are.

Our A, we call that our A. And this helps us understand how much farther we have to go to get to be. And that distance is see the journey.

I believe you have a really hard time understanding where you want to go if you don't clearly understand where you are.

 

The first thing I want to do is give you a resource so you can start to understand where you are. you

can download it from the link below. it's a free, law firm level ownership. tool. You just take this quiz and it'll tell you what level law firm owner you are.

so you can take the quiz on your own time.

 

there are four fundamental law firm level ownerships.

This is what we call the attorney level. What we call, keep it small, keep it all. Kiss Kia. Keep it small, keep it all.

If you choose to be at the attorney level, level one and you're doing it purposefully.

It means you could take July and December off if you want, or you could take seasonal vacations with your kids on their natural school breaks if you want.

It has a lot to do with practice area. There's a good version of the attorney level and there's a bad version of the attorney level. The bad version of the attorney level is where you don't have any time.

You barely have any money, you don't see your kids. You can't take vacations. If you stop, your business stops and you're just over broke, you have a job, right? That's a bad level. The third level. Is the CEO level. And this is where a lot of law firm owners want to get to

Not every law firm owner wants to be a CEO and I get that, which is why I say it's okay to be the level one attorney.

But the CEO level means you're likely not doing any legal work anymore or you're not doing any legal work you don't want to do. You'll take a case or two 'cause you choose to do it 'cause you got into law for a very specific reason and you like working some of these cases.

But the bulk of your work is done in building your systems, managing your systems, and managing your team through maximizing efficiency, allowing your team to use their own brain, and actually accomplish the goals and overcome obstacles.

And that's where a lot of people want to be. the second level is called manager level. There's another name for this. The other name for the manager level is known as hell. There's no good middle road here if you are in this place. You are in law firm ownership hell and that means that you are working 60, 70 plus hours a week.

You are still billing as the attorney, managing the clients. You are still managing your team. Nothing feels scalable. The more the business grows, the harder you have to work.

You feel like there should be a better way, but you just aren't sure why things aren't working and you could use some guidance. That's law firm ownership.

Alright. the fourth level is what we call the investor level.

 

Means you're not doing any of the legal work. You're not running your firm at all. Other people are running your firm and you're just yielding your profit from the firm. And you're either in the mountains or on the beach, and the firm runs itself.

You have a CEO, you have operations manager.

If you are, this level one attorney, or this level two attorney, trying to go to the investor level, sounds great, but I'd love to see you get to the CEO level.

It's important for you to take that, which level law firm owner are you analysis to figure out are you level one?

level two, or level three? if you are not at level three right now and you're at level one, you have to decide, do you want to cross over. To level two and get to level three, because you gotta go through level two to get to level three. There's no skipping it. The only question is how much time are you gonna spend in hell?

If you are, in the level two ownership right now. You have to decide if you're gonna go backwards to level one and ease things up on your life and reset a little bit and contract, or you're gonna push forward to level two.

 

I had a client the other day, Charles EAY, winner, that's entrepreneurial alternative of the year winner and he said to me, I think I need to go back to level one. I feel like I'm playing on hard mode a little bit even though things are going well and he is really profitable.

he told me his revenue numbers and I said, no, no, no. It's gonna be harder for you to go back than it is for you to go forward.

 

Let me see if I can break this down for you, with math. So at the attorney level, this is typically doing Less than 1,000,002.

It's between that number and like 750 k. And that just depends on a number of factors. If you're hourly billing, how much do you bill an hour? If you're flat fee, what do you charge? Flat fee. And how long did cases take? Depending on your practice area, you're gonna want to get into this sweet spot between seven 50 and 1.2.

if you do and we maximize profitability, this is where you actually have choices to say, I'm gonna do this in a way that allows me the freedom that I want.

Like how many days off do you want a year? How many free days do you want a week? When do you want to take vacations?

And so this is very much where it's you and just a handful of team members, probably less than five, maybe even four.

And you're just maximizing your efforts all the way through. it's a great place to be, if that's where you want to be,

to get to the CEO level, depending on practice area, you need to be at 2.5 to say 4 million

in that 4 million, that's gonna be what it takes to get to the CEO level.

Regardless of what level we're at, we really want to be at that 30 to 50%, margin mark. that's how much owner's benefit you keep to the bottom line, however you take it, whether you take it in salary, profit, perks, whatever. that 30 to 50% is where you want to be all the way through e even at the 5 million, 6 million, $7 million mark.

 

We've got a firm right now that's doing, $30 million. He invented this flow methodology that we teach, Bert Diener, he'll keep 50 plus percent. and he shares a big percentage of that with his staff.

 

And so it's important that you understand where you are and where you want to be, because when you're in hell, you gotta understand if you're gonna contract right, you're gonna go back to level one or you're gonna grow to level two.

If you are at the CEO level and you're trying to get to the investor level, it requires the same things. More importantly requires a decision on your part.

if you want the investor level, you're gonna have to buy your freedom. And so if you're not making 30 to 50% net incomes owners benefit at the five plus million dollar mark, you've got a real problem. it's one of the pipelines or maybe multiple pipelines you've gotta solve.

And so that's another problem. It's still a problem if you are keeping the 30 to 50% owner's benefit at that $5 million plus mark and you want out, you've either gotta work with a company who can manage it for you, which, reach out to us. there are companies we can introduce you to.

Or, you gotta buy your freedom and you gotta higher upper level management to get you out of this. and you need probably better frameworks of managing your team in general. once you're at the CEO level, there really is only one way to go.

You want to go to the investor level, right? you probably don't want to go backwards from there. there's just no reason for it. If you're keeping 30 to 50% and you're doing 2.5 to. 5 million plus, you've got plenty of dough.

 

📍 You have any other questions about that, reach out to me. You can go to law firm secrets.com and get some more information.

 

Whether you decide to contract or grow You need to have a marketing strategy that entails an advertising strategy.

this advertising strategy, needs to understand how many leads you need and how much you need to be investing in advertising to achieve your goals.

But you also have to understand what marketing is doing. you gotta understand what the whole picture's doing. I'm gonna demonstrate what this looks like.

 

You'll notice I break this down weekly for you. I just think it's easier to chunk things down.

People want to hit annual goals and that's great, but we really gotta chunk it down to a week because if you miss your goals, by a week, you'll miss your goals by a week.

So here's how you go. We're gonna assume you can keep it small and keep it all at a million dollars a year and maximize profitability. So that's gonna mean we're gonna have a $20,000. Per week revenue goal. That makes sense. Simple math. 20 times 50. We're assuming you're taking two weeks off of vacation.

I don't know where you are, it depends on practice area, but we're gonna say case value is $3,000. We see them all over the board. if yours is higher than this, you put your numbers in, it'll work for you.

So this basically says, okay, I gotta hit $20,000 a week, and my case value is $3,000. That means. I need seven new clients. All right. Now here's what this doest take in consideration, your realization rate. So if your cases are worth $3,000, but you only collect 70%, you're only getting $2,000 of it.

So I'm going into the assumption your're collecting most of what it is you invoice. If you're not, that's another problem we gotta deal with.

So you basically know that if you wanna hit $20,000 you have case value of three, you need about seven cases, of course we're rounding up.

Okay, well now you have to ask yourself, what's the higher rate on average for the past 30 days? I don't ask you what your weekly hire rate is. I'm asking you what your average is for the month.

So what's the higher rate?

 

your higher rate is the number of new clients

divided by the number of initial consultations that show. Minus non-qualified. if you're advertising, you're gonna get people who you meet with that are non-qualified. it's important when you have non-attorney salespeople to make sure you're checking on them marking non-qualified.

'cause it makes their higher rate go up, but that equals your higher rate, right? Basically the number of clients that we get divided by the number of people we meet with, minus the number of non-qualified, gives you your higher rate. Your higher rate for most practice areas should be over 60%.

Some practice areas should be high as 80, 85%. it does depend on practice area, but if your higher rate is 50%, most law firms that come to us think that they have an 80% higher rate. When we run the math, we find out it's actually 37.5%. the truth is that the average firm that walks into our world has a 37% higher rate.

 

But let's say you've got a 50% higher rate, that means that you have to meet with 14 qualified prospects

what's your show rate? Well, let's say it's 60%.

that means that you book these appointments on your calendar and 60% of 'em show

that tells you that you need to have 23 appointments set in that week. do you have 23 open slots in a week, even if you do what I tell you to do and close deals in half an hour? Probably not. So the first thing you gotta ask is, my gosh, we won't be able to hit our goal with the number of slots I have available for initial consultations, because otherwise I can't get the work done.

So that means that you either have to fix your higher rate, fix your show rate, or both, or you need to maybe replace yourself in one of those roles, even while you're keeping it small, keeping it all like the salesperson role. So that, or the lawyer role, you could either one by the way, so that we can free up the time.

Kind of depends on which one you love more. if you love being a lawyer more, then replace yourself as a salesperson. If you love being a salesperson more, then replace yourself as the lawyer. If your goal is a million dollars and you have a $3,000 case value and you need seven clients, and you have these close rates, this is the truth.

But if you do all three, increase your prices, increase your hire rate, and increase your show rate, well now we're cooking, right?

Alright. You get the point,

Now, if you're a firm that does hot transfers, or you don't set appointments because you're a PI firm or a contingency firm or a criminal firm, and you think you can't set appointments, you're wrong. your sets would be leads that got transferred.

There'd be a set and a show. That would be the same thing, right? The lead came in, you caught 'em on the phone. You hot transfer 'em to somebody, they qualified them, signed them up or not. That's a lead set show.

So I wanna be clear, your set rate from your leads would be a hundred percent if you transferred everybody. That's the math. That would tell you that you need 33 leads.

Now the next thing you need to know, how much does a lead cost you.

Which comes back to advertising. this was sales. This is all sales, right? On the marketing funnel, we talked about sales. Here's advertising number of leads, cost per lead. That's advertising. You're gonna work with your advertising agency, internal, external to get this number.

What is your cost per lead? Do you pay? Use a paper lead company? Do you use traditional advertising like tv, billboards, radio? do you use referral development programs where you're investing in referral programs to generate leads? are you doing digital advertising

 

Take your total marketing spend, including agency costs, and divide that by your total qualified leads. in the same period, that equals your cost per lead.

Ideally, you want your cost per lead by lead source.

Once you know your cost per lead back to this screen.

 

Now, this basically says, you need to be investing $1,650 a week in advertising. That's. $3,300 every two weeks, four weeks in a month, $6,600 a month, 70, $80,000 a year. Right? So if you, if you think about this, are you investing this much money, a year or a month?

To achieve your goals. if you're not, then you're not gonna get there if this math is true. If you are spending that much and you're not achieving these goals, then something else is wrong. Your set rate is off, your show rate is off. Your higher rate is off, right? Your client value is off.

This tool just allows you to clearly see where you're headed. to clearly plug in the numbers, no problem. you probably build this yourself if you're remotely good with Excel, but I'm gonna give it to you.

All you have to do is go ahead and download it. just click on the link. It'll take you to where you need to go.

I want to be clear, I just made this for the level one attorney, what if you want to be a level three attorney and you want to get to the $3 million mark and you are at the million dollar mark and you're like, I'm willing to cross the chasm.

So now you want to grow to the next level. If I want to do $3 million a year, I'm gonna do $60,000 a week. if my numbers are the same, I've gotta be spending $4,000 a week, that's $20,000 a month and ad spend.

So I wanna be really clear, like if that's the case. You definitely have to maximize case values. You definitely have to maximize all these sales numbers. And if it was me and I wanted to hit $60,000 a week, I, I wanna make sure my case value is at an average of 500. I wanna make sure that my show rate is 75%. I wanna make sure that my set rate is 75%. my cost per lead is my cost per lead. But if I make sure those are maximized, I don't have to spend $4,500 a week. I gotta spend $1,500 a week.

I'm at the same number and doing $60,000 'cause my case values went up and my conversions were where they wanted to be. So the way that you get to speed to go from level one through level two to level three is by maximizing all these numbers at level one. You could be a little bit more lackadaisical about it.

It'll reduce your profit if you try to do this and not maximize these numbers and try to go to level three,

 

the number one reason why law firm owners get stuck is because their new client attraction pipeline is broken.

There's workflow that has to be dealt with. There's talent that has to be dealt with, but fundamentally it's the new client attraction pipeline that is broken

, and the bigger you are, the harder it's gonna be to fix. And so you may want to consider contracting. Now, if you're at that 2.1, 2.2 2.3 level,

you're gonna have to do what it takes to get to the next level.

You probably don't have much you have to do. You only have to grow 20, 25 to 30% to get to where you want to be, depending on that number and practice area. But you're gonna have to get these things fixed or you're gonna be in hell forever.

If you're struggling with those decisions, reach out to our team, schedule a breakthrough call with us. We're happy to talk to you. maybe we're the right firm to walk alongside you, hold your hand and help you accomplish these goals. It's what we do.

happy to do it with you.

  📍 You have any other questions about that, reach out to me. You can go to law firm secrets.com and get some more information.