Trial Lawyer View Podcast
Jon Robinson

Jon Robinson00:00:00

The right way to look at your marketing is first to look at your client outcomes. Are your clients actually happy with the outcomes that you’re giving them? Because everything else cascades from there. All you can do is you can control how high a level of service quality outcomes you’re going to generate for your clients.

Jason Lazarus00:00:17

That’s Jon Robinson, co-founder and CEO of RR digital. He believes the AI era is fundamentally changing. Legal marketing, bigger budgets and clever tactics are no longer enough on their own. The client experience has to deliver first in the marketing, has to amplify what’s actually true.

Jon Robinson00:00:34

The number one thing that helps us marketers is not actually doing better marketing. It’s having an intake team that we can align with that actually is able to convert the leads that we are helping our clients generate.

Jason Lazarus00:00:44

In this episode, you’ll learn why client outcomes are becoming central to modern legal marketing, how better attribution is exposing wasted spend, and why responding to leads faster can have a major impact on acquisition costs. I’m Jason Lazarus and this is Trial Lawyer View. So from doing my research, I know you’ve spent seven years as CEO, a launch that built out sold lunar five and ran growth and operations there. What did you see inside? You know, from firm data during those years that convinced you the standard legal marketing agency model was broken for personal injury firms?

Jon Robinson00:01:24

My days at lit were it started right before Covid hit and ran through the first year of Covid. So, I got to see the true evolution of firms having to evolve, right? It’s one thing to like desire to evolve. It’s another thing to really have your hand forced because of the fact that one car is not on the road as much less accidents, two people not seeing billboards, three people being stuck in their house for digital adoption going through the roof like those of us who who live through that in our careers, truly saw how it changed everything. So being at Lydia, which in and of itself is a digital transformation company for law firms. I got to see how the law firms were being impacted, and then how the technology could be applied to help solve some of the disruption that was happening. From a marketing perspective, at I, I just got more exposed to what firms were doing. You know, that was the the early 2020s where we just started to see TV become not the go to anymore. Right. And now with systems like a little Phi where you can actually track everything that was happening. Decisions were being made that weren’t just because, hey, this is how we’ve always done it. This is what works. People can actually look and see, like, hey, this campaign that we ran got this many calls, this many leads, this many qualified, this many retainers out, this much in sign cases. And then being able to kind of extrapolate that down funnel two years, three years when those cases are starting to resolve. You know, allow people to make much more intelligent decisions. So long winded answer is firms went from being blind and into now having the tools available to them to actually make the decisions that they need to make, which sometimes meant turning marketing off that had been working, working for them, released, they thought was working for them for years or decades.

Jason Lazarus00:03:33

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Jon Robinson00:05:14

I got to sit down with the leaders in the private equity personal injury space in Puerto Rico, and I did. I sat down, I did a whole podcast episode with people who were involved on the advisory side, on the funding side, on the acquisition side. And like, actually firms that were were involved with getting acquired and going through that process. So I got to kind of really hear behind the scenes of how this process is working and how it was playing out. I also get to hear from the firms that are shifting their mindset from, I’m scared that a giant firm that isn’t from my market is going to come in and eat up market share, because that has been the mantra for a very long time, right? Oh my gosh, Morgan and Morgan, they’re coming into yet another market. They’re just going to throw a whole bunch of money at billboards and TV, and they’re going to eat away at my market share. Now there’s this shift to, well, do I need to align myself with an MSO, potentially sell my firm some interest in my firm before my competitor does because of the capital that is going to be injected into the market? So there’s there’s this very interesting dynamic that’s playing out right now from the firms that have not yet aligned themselves with private equity at the macro level. I mean, it’s it’s capitalism at play, right? Private equity has identified that the legal industry, specifically the plaintiff legal industry, is a lucrative industry, and states like Arizona have opened up paths for capital to be invested in legal cases in an ethical way. Now we’re starting to see some of that clamp down from states like California, Colorado, you know, Illinois. And we don’t know where it’s going to land yet. But I can tell you from from where I sit that this is the narrative now. You cannot get into a conversation with a personal injury firm that is seeking growth. That does not involve either. Do I need to posture my firm for potential acquisition at some point, or what do I do to stave off what’s going on around me? And it has evolved even beyond just law firms themselves. And being in the legal marketing industry, I’m seeing, you know, agencies getting acquired, right? What does that mean? I will tell you from again from my seat, I think law firms getting acquired by private equity can be good for the consumer, can be good for the lawyer. Right. It’s bringing more competition into the market. We’re not as long as we’re not dealing with, like, a monopolistic situation when you have more capital put in. There needs to be more creativity in marketing. There needs to be more of an ethical consideration in everything that you do, because you have institutional capital in many situations that is not going to be willing to be put at risk with unethical marketing. I think it makes sense for law firms. Some law firms where I don’t think it makes sense is on the agency side, because there’s not as much of an ethical constraint around how marketing agencies for law firms operate as there is around the law firms themselves, that it is opening up the door to offshoring, to implementing unsupervised AI automation. And the law firms themselves are now no longer aligned with their agencies because the agencies are trying to extract value, because that’s how private equity works in a way that they can. That is not necessarily the most ethical. So I have lots of opinions on this. In short, I think the legal industry, it happened everywhere else. It was bound to happen in legal. I think it’s okay, if done correctly and in the legal marketing space, I think there’s many problems, many problems with it.

Jason Lazarus00:09:04

It’s really fascinating to me to watch what’s going on. And I had Chad Dudley on not too long ago. And, you know, we talked all about this particular topic. And then I saw this week there was a defense firm that was sold for a massive multiple of EBITDA. And the rationale around it was that the law firm needed capital to basically deal with the influx of cases that were happening because of acquisitions of plaintiff firms driving more personal injury lawsuits, which I thought was interesting, just that that concept, in any event, I I’m curious, though, about how you see that really impacting what you guys do day to day and whether it’s changing the conversation at all with potential clients in the marketing. Because you had mentioned this, this fear now, because I think and it’s probably a legitimate fear of is my firm position properly given everything that’s going on. How have you seen that playing out with your interactions with your clients and with potential clients?

Jon Robinson00:10:20

It depends on the firm. The firms that we work with tend to be very aggressive, have very aggressive growth mindsets. So they look at it from a perspective of is this fuel? Can I use this to my advantage to help me grow, or is this a roadblock. And how do I get it out of my way. They shift right. Some of them want to go down the this is fuel. How can I? How can I leverage institutional capital to help by firm grow? Am I taking on debt? Am I taking on equity partners? And by leveraging an MSO right. There’s all these different iterations and ways that it can work. And then you’ve got the ones who are are want to maintain control and ownership and have 100% founder led law firms. Maybe it’s because they are intending on passing the firm down to their children, which has historically been like the exit strategy of a of a partner. Right? You either sell it to your partner or you pass it down to your children. It’s a bifurcated conversation. Really depends on on what the long term goals of the firms are. I have one firm that I work with. I could rewind back a couple of years ago, and he kind of saw the writing on the wall. It’s him in another name, partner. And the other name partner, you know, is significantly older than him. At some point he’s going to retire, and he said, I have to make a decision. Do I rebrand the firm under my name? Do I keep my partner’s name? Who’s going to retire and not be actively involved, or do I take this as an opportunity, while he’s here, for us to rebrand the firm as something that at least gives us the option of being acquired at some point down the line. That has become much more of the focus of the conversations around private equity. For those that truly understand what’s happening. It is going to invade our our geography, our practice areas. At some point, I need to make sure that I have the right posture to either stave this off or align appropriately. And that’s it’s not an instant thing, right? M&A takes a while. There’s appropriate due diligence that happens. Historically law firms in the pre days did everything on pen and paper right. And when institutional capital is looking at a multi-million dollar investment the due diligence is real and your finances need to be in order. Your marketing needs to be in order with appropriate attribution. Operations need to be in order. You can’t just outsource everything to other vendors, because then what is it that a potential acquirer is actually buying? It has become an active part of the conversation in one way or another. I’d say that’s that’s how the narrative is shifting. It really wasn’t even in the narrative at the beginning of 2020. Right now it is. You can’t not be exposed to it in some regard.

Jason Lazarus00:13:04

RR digital reports on cost per sign case instead of leads or impressions, which you hear a lot about when you bring that to a law firm owner or C-suite executive and a law firm, if they have such position and they see that number calculated accurately, honestly, what is the reaction to that?

Jon Robinson00:13:28

There’s a level of transparency that law firms thought they had that they didn’t have. And it’s this realization of, oh, I’m spending X dollars on TV, but now we have attribution that you help me set up with a call tracking platform or a QR scan analytics platform, whatever it is, you have shown me that TV does not have direct attribution, right? TV may be a demand generation channel, but the demand capture is happening on Lsat, or it’s happening on Google Ads, or it’s happening through my Matt pack. Right? Or people are hitting my social media. Last touch attribution is kind of the only North Star that we have to go off of now, because we live in this multichannel multi-touch world. It’s been very interesting. I’ve, I think this is the year where significant amounts of marketing budget are shifting away from things that historically people thought worked, that maybe they don’t work as well as they used to. I’ve talked to a lot of firm owners who have been large TV buyers, that are now starting to shift large percentages of their budgets away from traditional media. And just keeping enough. Right. We’re going to reallocate that budget. It’s not like we’re not going to spend, but now we’re going to spend intelligently, because I actually have the data that shows me that this is going to get me more eyeballs on my target market than this May. It’s great to see the legal industry catch up, and I feel like I have this conversation like every half a decade. You know, it used to be just technology at all, right. And now it’s it’s data analytics, marketing automation, marketing operations. And these are roles that are now starting to pop up within law firms, beyond just the the legal discipline that are becoming somewhat necessary in order to help these law firm partners truly run their firm like a business, make intelligent decisions before it’s, hey, what’s my marketing budget? How many cases am I getting? You know, it’s simple division, and that’s not the way that the world works. Hard to measure multi-touch attribution and influence. But you know, we’re we’re getting closer. We’re getting more intelligent about it. Unfortunately, we’re moving towards a world I think we’re attribution is going to continue to get muddied. So this whole cost per case perspective, I think, is going to go back to this. Here’s my bucket of marketing budget. Here’s my number of cases I’m generating from it. How do I reshape various aspects of that budget to change the overall output and measure what I can? Because AI has shifted how people actually find attorneys, right? They may spend hours in multiple touchpoints talking to real humans. That’s not trackable reading on Reddit. That’s not trackable. Looking at social media that’s not trackable. So it’s just it’s allowed us to have more intelligent conversations.

Jason Lazarus00:16:28

Yeah, it seems like to me. Anyway, the AI channel is one of the most intriguing. But also, you know, again, another way that it muddies the water a bit because we’re I mean, we’re similar like trying to figure out that attribution. And it’s it is muddied with the variety of different ways that there can be touch. And so, you know, I know that most law firms focus on their monthly marketing spend, but far fewer will know their sign case costs by channel. So how does how will all of this fit together for firms to really be able to look at that and know, yes, this is the right place to invest?

Jon Robinson00:17:17

I’m going to answer your question in a completely different way, probably than you’re expecting. Okay. Truly, if you peel back the onion, the right way to look at your marketing is first to look at your client outcomes. Are your clients actually happy with the outcomes that you’re giving them? Because everything else cascades from there. You cannot control where those people are going to go afterwards and say, good or bad. All you can do is you can control how high a level of service quality outcomes you’re going to generate for your clients. Marketing has shifted from this, creating the narrative to taking the narrative that exists in the real world and putting it in a place where it can be amplified, where people can see it, which is becoming more and more the digital landscape as opposed to the traditional media landscape. So this era of direct response and gimmicks trying to acquire cases is eroding, and it’s eroding at a rapid rate, because AI has given us this level of transparency that has been impossible to analyze before, because AI is literally going out to the entire digital landscape and grabbing everything it can, and it’s summarizing it, and you can’t control what’s out there. You can only control what’s on your website. You look back 3 or 4 years ago, and you had law firms that were hiding behind white label brands that were using gray hat SEO tactics to rank websites, and they were getting cases from it because it worked. That stuff doesn’t work anymore because even Google has a layer of AI on top of it that is analyzing what’s happening. And if you are an entity that didn’t exist yesterday and today, you’re touting that you have all these great results and there’s nothing that ties back to reality that’s not going to work. So that’s sort of like how we’ve begun to think about this is getting more integrated into the firms and surfacing like, forget about the good things that people are saying about you. Forget about the positives, right? That we’ll get to that. Let’s focus on what are the things that people are saying that are negative? What are the things that are holding you back? What are the constant challenges that your your employees are facing where if they wind up leaving and they go on Glassdoor and they leave you a bad review, right? That is going to hurt your firm’s reputation. Let’s look at are you spreading yourself too thin across too many geographies so that you don’t have the presence that you want to have and the markets you’re in? Are you not niching down enough? And just saying, I take all cases in my market. So you need to know who your customer is. You need to know what they expect from you. You need to provide those things to them. And then you need to make sure that your you’re doing the things that you need to do online to showcase that. And I can give you examples of this, like, you know, all the time firm owners are prompting googling, right? Their name, their firms, their prompting. Who do I choose? I got into a car accident in this city. Who should I choose? And if they don’t see themselves, they’re like, why don’t I see myself? I encourage you ask, why didn’t you choose X, Y, z law firm? And the system will tell you that. Well, you know this law firm, they have some good results, but there’s a lot of reviews that say that their communication is poor. Right? Great. You just found a gold nugget. Now you know the things that are being held that are holding you back. And you can go and directly address those things. That’s not just changing the online narrative. That’s actually becoming a better communicating firm, which in turn improves client outcomes. And at the end of the day, that will also help you from an AI and a digital visibility perspective. So it’s very odd to be in like the AI era and to be talking about doing things in the real world as opposed to doing things to manipulate and market online. But I think that’s what’s that’s the separation that people are still. I don’t think it’s fully made its way through the system yet, and I don’t know if everyone truly understands that you can’t just buy your way to the top anymore.

Jason Lazarus00:21:24

You just mentioned case outcome. I’m curious about your take on how a firm should look at the relationship between case acquisition costs and expected case value in, say, a standard motor vehicle practice, because that educates kind of what you do, right?

Jon Robinson00:21:43

Those are two different metrics. You have an input and you have an output, but a change in the input. So your your cost per case going up in no way changes the output. Right. If a case costs me $2,500 for an MBA case today. Right. Which I would love it if everyone could just say, all right, I got $2,500 cases, you know, in my market. It’s not the case anymore, but let’s just say $2,500 a case, and then that yields a legal fee of $10,000, right? Simple math. If your case costs rise to which is double it, $5,000 because of competition, because someone bought up your inventory, because whatever reason, your intake team was unable to sign cases at the rate that it was previously. In no way does that affect the fact that you’re still getting $10,000 in legal fee at the end of the day, right? It’s two independent variables that I understand why people connect the two. But from a finance perspective, right. From a like an actual practice perspective, the idea is to keep the case quality at the same level or better and maintain your acquisition costs or hopefully drive it down. Obviously increase volume along the way, but there’s really no relationship unless you’re talking about changing the shape of the types of cases that you’re acquiring to increase the legal fee. When I was talking about outcomes, I was thinking about the client themselves. Obviously, there’s a financial component, but if it takes you three years to get that resolution and check in your client’s hand, even if it’s a lot of money, are they happy? Right. Ghosted them for 18 months while you were in settlement negotiations. I don’t think they are right. Especially when they find out that, you know, the case settled for 100,000. And then I’ve got, you know, medical liens and case costs, and then you’re taking your fee. And like, at the end of the day, I’m walking away with what?

Jason Lazarus00:23:43

Yeah. I mean, something that we talk about all the time because of what we do, you know, accelerating the time between settlement and disbursement can mean the difference between a client leaving a good review or not, because sometimes that’s the last taste from their mouth is what they’re dealing with, particularly on how leans are eating away at the net proceeds. So yeah, I mean, it’s incredibly important. I, I was just wondering though, like in terms of case acquisition costs versus case value, is is there a way, a, a strategy of manipulating it so that you’re getting a higher tier case into the firm versus getting the smaller case, for example? Or is that really not part of what you are advising clients about?

Jon Robinson00:24:37

No, no, of course, of course it is. It becomes an interesting conversation though, because we don’t sell a case to a client, right? We’re out there marketing on behalf of our clients firm. So my advice to them usually is you cast this net and within that net you were hoping to catch tuna and you take your tuna, but you also caught some crab in that net. Someone else is in the market for crab, right? It didn’t cost you anything to catch the crab because you were trying to get tuna. So find someone who wants to buy crab and sell them the crab, right? How do you do that? Take the case in. Maybe you. You retain it and refer it. Maybe it’s just a referral directly over. Let them retain the case. But those are cases that otherwise would hit the floor. Right? And now you’re talking about reputational damage because someone reached out to you. You denied them. Not because their case maybe didn’t have merit, but because it wasn’t a case that you wanted. So again, it goes back to your marketing needs to speak to the people that you want to reach and as much as possible, that is what you should be focusing on. But inevitably you will get bycatch and you have to have a home for that bycatch where you can monetize it, where you can generate a happy client that you never even have to touch. Other than that initial touchpoint, they may be so happy that, you know, maybe they reached out to you thinking that you were a you could help them with their divorce case and you couldn’t send it over to a family lawyer. But the next time they have a car accident. Well, you really helped me out. You introduced me to someone who really helped me out in my life, and they come back to you, and then that’s a zero acquisition cost case. Honestly, it’s just all about doing right by your potential claimants, by your your retained clients, not treating them like inventory. A single event case on average takes about 18 months, depending on your jurisdiction. That is an opportunity for you to have a customer who is basically almost like, forced to read everything that you send to them, right? You’re going to send them an email. They think it’s about their case, right? Great. Send them emails about their case, keep them updated on their case, but also figure out where else you can help them. Do you have a newsletter? Are there mass tort cases that are out there that maybe some of your existing clients can appeal to? Do they have friends and family that can refer you? Do the types of things that now make them a customer for life, and your long term acquisition cost will wind up declining because you’re marketing to a preexisting customer base, versus every single time you have to go out to market and pay the acquisition costs through direct response for a new client. It’s it’s a very different mindset that you have to get into in modern day marketing, that it’s not a slot machine anymore. Right? I don’t put a quarter in. Pull the lever and expect that something’s going to come out at a given rate. It’s it’s all about what you are doing, how you are doing it. And then you build your marketing around that.

Jason Lazarus00:27:41

Switch gears and asking you about pipeline and the importance of that. Can you explain how the time between first contact and signed retainer changes? Economics of a law firms operations?

Jon Robinson00:27:54

I would love to. This is my favorite topic to talk about, because the number one thing that helps us as marketers is not actually doing better marketing. It’s having an intake team that we can align with that actually is able to convert the leads that we are helping our clients generate. The kind of rule of thumb for me is within five minutes. If a form comes into the website within five minutes, that form is called. If you are not able to reach out to them within five minutes because it’s outside of business hours, you have to have another touchpoint. Maybe it’s an email, maybe it’s a text message, but something to let them know that you will reach out to them the next morning. It’s not ideal, but that speed to lead is the biggest factor that you can actually change about your acquisition cost, because you don’t have to. I love using the orange tree analogy. If if you want more orange juice, you have two options. You can grow more oranges, which costs you money, or you can squeeze the oranges you have for more juice. Think of intake as squeezing the oranges you have for more juice. Just keep squeezing and squeezing until there’s there’s nothing else left. These are people who you have already spent money to reach out to or market to, who have already reached out. All you have to do is get them to sign a retainer if they are fit for your firm, it is the easiest and least expensive, but the most neglected path to lowering your CPA and signing more cases.

Jason Lazarus00:29:20

In the case management systems, because you’ve got experience in that regard. What data sits in a firm’s system that nobody uses today to make marketing decisions that they should be looking at?

Jon Robinson00:29:35

Well, I wouldn’t say nobody because there are firms that we work with that are very sophisticated, that are pulling whatever data is available to them. I think the, the key data points that could be mind would be looking at medical history and seeing if there’s potentially other cases that your claimant may be eligible for. I think looking at how engaged they are, are they opening emails that you’re sending them? Are they engaging with your social media? Are these people that can actually become I don’t want to call them influencers, but rabid fans of the law firm that can spread the word for you. You’d be surprised, right? You may find a celebrity in your data set. I’ve seen that happen before. You may find someone who had a a really great outcome who also happens to be someone who’s engaged, who would be a great testimonial. Bring them into your office. Record a video. Use it for a commercial. Put it on YouTube. Put it on social media. The data points that are there. If you’re not using them, you shouldn’t be collecting them. If you think about it that way. Right. Why are you making your intake team or your paralegals collect all this data without having an end goal?

Jason Lazarus00:30:57

Curious about your take on transparency? Because you know that that’s a word that comes up a lot, with marketing. I’m curious, what does real transparency look like in practice? And what should a law firm owner or a law firm decision maker demand to see before engaging in agency and signing a contract?

Jon Robinson00:31:25

Going back to like the start of this whole conversation. Who owns you? Are we mutually aligned? Are you taking our money because you need to hit quota? Are you a salesperson? Are you going to be involved in my campaign in any regard at all? Or are you just here to sell me? And then you’re going to pass me off to someone else? And I and my partner, Marc, have been committed to not have salespeople at our organization because of that reason specifically. Like we throttle how many new clients we take on, we turn down clients that aren’t going to be a good fit for us. But there is not one person who has become a client of our agency who hasn’t spoken to myself or Marc or both of us, and probably multiple times before joining an engagement. So I would say if you’re vetting an agency, you should you should actually understand who owns the agency, what are their objectives, and who’s going to be working on your account. Maybe not specifically like the people, but are the people that you’re talking to in any way going to be involved? You’ll be surprised, right? There are agencies that use outsource sales organizations to prospect and to sell, and then they just hand off a client to the agency. You should ask them about how their tactics have and strategies have evolved over the past six months. Because I could tell you, as someone who has our process over the past three months, because of the way that things have to be done differently because of AI visibility, that if the agencies that you’re talking to are doing things the same way that they were doing them last year, they’re doing the same things they were doing six months ago. Honestly, if they’re doing the same things now they were doing a month ago, there’s a problem, right? Every single week there’s advancements that are happening, right. We found out this week great October 1st, LSA. All of a sudden you let that phone ring. 20s you’re getting charged, right? That’s a change. How are you shifting and how you run for your clients? How is the law firm themselves going to need to shift based off of that? There’s just so much rapid evolution in marketing that you need to have that level of transparency with your agencies knowing what they’re going to do, not honestly aligning to specific deliverables. I get this like, I get I have an RFP I’m filling out today. And one of the questions on the RFP was list the deliverables that you’re going to be giving us every month. And my answer to that is I cannot tell you the deliverables I’m going to be giving you every month, because I don’t know what your firm is going to need. You don’t need a certain amount of backlinks, a certain amount of pages, a certain amount of hours. I have no idea what you’re going to need three months from now, because I don’t know how your firm is going to be perceived in the places where you are visible three months from now, and what the levers are that we’re going to need to pull, which has evolved our agency immensely over the past six months. We built a whole video team. I’ve got eight cinematographers on our video team that every week are flying to another one of our clients and recording videos. Why? Because that’s what we need to do in order to have that level of transparency between our clients and their clients or potential clients. We built a PR division. Why? Because we know that you can only control so much narrative on your own website and own assets. You have to make sure that that aligns with the way that the market is talking about you. We built a social media team, organic social media team. We expanded our paid social media team. We built a data and analytics team, and we’re continuing to evaluate like, what are the disciplines that are necessary in order for when our clients need help. We’re there to support them as opposed to it’s another month. I got five pages. I got to write, I got to talk to my outreach team and, you know, get you half a dozen backlinks. Any agency that is like narrowly focused on a specific discipline, like an SEO agency or a paid agency, like you’re pigeonholing yourself as a law firm owner into their discipline. And if their discipline is not what your firm needs. As the landscape evolves, they’re making their money off of that discipline, and they’re going to steer you in that direction. And I would much rather be more, strategic and approach it from an advisory perspective, even if we don’t do a certain discipline and say, like, hey, this is what you need, the community doesn’t know who you are. I can only do so much digitally. You need to go and get billboards. And here’s like our advice on the places you need to get them. And yeah, we’ll help you design them. But I don’t do billboard buys. I’ve got people in my network I can refer you to, but I would much rather see our clients be successful than see our clients spend more money with us. And we’ve ingrained that into our team that we don’t have, like a budget per se for each client that we’re spending every month. It’s how much time do we have to do all the things that we need to do for this client to be that much more successful this month than they were last month, in a short term and long term perspective. So I wish I had a checklist I could give you and say here, ask your agency this, but I could give it to you today and it’s going to be different questions tomorrow. So ask them to to, you know, just open the book and explain this is how we approach it and see if that aligns with how you expect your agency to operate.

Jason Lazarus00:36:59

So given how quickly things are evolving, what are the most common things that legal marketing firms in the industry sells to personal injury firms that don’t make any sense today?

Jon Robinson00:37:13

I’ll start with number one would be selling backlinks. And one A is going to be the evolution of selling backlinks, which has become selling citations for AI visibility. It’s feeding on fear. It is not reality. These things don’t work. If anything, they are putting you in a bad digital neighborhood where it’s you and everyone else who bought placements on all of these sites. Do you think that the AI systems don’t understand that this website that you have a placement on is literally just selling all of these placements? They’re consuming the entire internet. They know what’s going on, right? There’s a Reddit thread that talks about these are the places where you should be buying links because they’re available. And this is the price. Like the dots get connected. So number one would be the the link building backlink. AI citation, snake oil backlinks are great from an SEO perspective. They’re great from an AI perspective, but you have to look at them as something that naturally happens by the fact that you are doing something good somewhere else, and then someone else gives you a link for it. Not that you purchase that link, right? It’s a manipulative tactic. So that’s number one. There was a law firm that decided not to work with us anymore. Happens very rarely. But they they made the decision, hey, we’re going to go at a different direction. And they have this other agency that they brought on board. We amiably work with them and transition everything. And I was still left on one of the accounts, and I got an alert. And that alert was we just finished processing disavow file of almost 600 backlinks, and immediately we’re not generating any revenue from this firm anymore. I just emailed them and I said, hey, you need to be very, very aware of what’s going on, that this other agency is doing something that Google flat out has said publicly, do not do this anymore. But this is an ingrained thing that three, 4 or 5 years ago, it’s something that was just on every agency’s onboarding checklist. We’re just going to disavow a whole bunch of backlinks because they’re toxic. Another item I would I would look at would be content deliverables. It’s a touchy subject because content has been the the backbone of digital marketing, for a couple of decades. Content is king. You’ve seen whole content farms spring up on, on this whole premise of I need to beat my competitors with more pages covering more topics, and my page needs to be longer or cover more of a topic than my competitor. Again, this is something that has been completely just not become an issue anymore. In fact, it’s actually the inverse. So when we take over clients, one of the first exercises that we do is we call a large percentage of their website and remove all this content that our now clients have paid for over the years, because it’s acting like an anchor and weighing their site down and weighing their brand perception down to these AI systems where they’ve been sold this concept of bigger, more, better. Same thing with like agencies that are using AI to generate content at scale. You’re literally just like lighting a bomb and waiting for that bomb to explode, right? It’s not that using AI to generate content with a scalpel is a bad idea. It’s not. It’s when you, you’re like, okay, the the way to be successful is more longer. And I can sell my client 40 extra pages a month, right? It’s a way for me to increase the retainer and sort of feed off of this fear that I’m not. My site is not as big as my competitors. I’m behind the eight ball, so I would be very wary of, like, of that concept of we’re going to get X amount of pieces of content per month. Honestly, I can opine on this topic probably for an entire episode. I’ll give you another one, right? Content comes in many forms. AI systems are multimodal audio, video, graphics, text. It’s not just words anymore. So if if your agency is pushing, I need to write more pages or only writing pages and they’re not doing the the multimodal multimedia types of elements, that’s a red flag.

Jason Lazarus00:41:50

I wanted to ask you if you woke up tomorrow morning as a CEO of a law firm or managing partner, and you had to make decisions about how to grow the firm. Where would you look, given kind of today’s landscape?

Jon Robinson00:42:10

The first thing that I would do is I would I would look at the firm itself. Right. Is this the firm that that I want to take and grow the way that we are doing things today? Is this scalable when you talk about growth? Right. Inevitably growth is generating more revenue. How are you going to generate more revenue? Are you going to sign more of the same cases? Are you going to sign better cases? And are you positioned to be able to operationalize and systematize the processing of those cases and deliver as good, if not better outcomes for those clients? Because that, again, is what fuels the flywheel. You have to be doing great work. So start there before you start looking at marketing. There is no silver bullet. Sure, you can call lead generator in the first month. They’ll get you signed cases and they’ll be great. And then by month three, they’ll be cherry picking out all the great cases, and you’ll be left with all the junk, right? If it was easy, everyone would do it. I would think about it that way. Are you actually running a good business? Are you doing good things for your clients? Are you treating them the right way? Are you are you exceeding the expectations that they had when they initially reached out to you? And honestly, everything else will fall into place. It becomes so much of an easier job to market your firm when you’ve already done those things. Whereas if you take the opposite approach and you worry about scaling and growing and signing more cases before you worry about what’s going to happen to those people after they become a client. That is where you’re setting yourself up for failure. Long term. And that’s truly this is it’s a business. It’s not. How many cases did you sign this month? It’s growth comes in year, month over month, year over year. Right. Decade over decade. Are you trending in the right path? And I think that that’s that’s the core. I would look inside and ask yourself those questions.

Jason Lazarus00:44:12

Final question. And it’s a bit open ended. So you can answer however you want. I’m just giving you the opportunity, a platform to talk about whatever you want to take us out of the episode. I ask this of every guess at the end. So as a legal marketing expert guru, what’s your view? Whether it’s the view on kind of where things are going, the view of what’s going on in your specific little corner of the world, however you want to answer that.

Jon Robinson00:44:42

I believe transparency wins the day. As a business owner. I believe it with my employees, with my clients. I think that is it is something that law firms, law firm owners should embrace. It is extremely, extremely important that you are, you are transparent. And one of the things that I have embraced is all of the knowledge that I have gained over the years. You know, anything that’s not proprietary. I enjoy testing, refining and sharing that information. So much so that over the past year started the Jon and Mark podcast. Mark and I every week are talking to whether it’s a, you know, a big attorney in the space or someone who’s involved in the legal industry. Every week we do, you know, a quick hit 1015 minute video episode with Joe Fantino where we talk about what’s going on in mass torts because it’s very difficult for people to kind of keep up on all the dockets. And then we are launching a podcast that I’m doing called Marketing Matters with Cassidy Lewis from Cooper Hurley Injury Lawyers, where we’re taking sort of the opposite perspectives of, she as a CMO of a very successful personal injury firm, and me as the co-founder and CEO of a successful legal digital marketing agency. Kind of going back and forth and evaluating very strategies, tactics, what’s going on across the landscape. So the answer I give you today is probably watch the things that we’re producing on a weekly basis. You’ll hear, you know, what we are seeing as what makes sense for law firms to do or not to do. But yeah, just check out those channels. You can go to Jon and mark.com. That’s Jon A and marc.com. You can also check us out our digital media. Com. We’re on YouTube. We’re on Spotify or on Apple Podcasts where everywhere that you listen. So appreciate the opportunity. Thank you so much.

Jason Lazarus00:46:50

And if anyone has any questions about anything you talked about during today’s episode, what’s the best way to reach you?

Jon Robinson00:46:55

Probably LinkedIn would be the best. I mean, all of my other email messaging channels are just saturated. For right now, LinkedIn seems to be the place where a message will come through. So, yeah, hit me up on LinkedIn.

Jason Lazarus00:47:07

Great. Well, we’ll include a link to that in the show notes. And Jon, thank you for joining me today on Trial Lawyer View. And we’ll see everybody on the next episode. If today’s episode gave you a new perspective on how your firm operates or sparked a useful idea, consider sharing it with a colleague and be sure to follow the show so you don’t miss future conversations with leaders across the personal injury. Space. Trial or review is brought to you by Synergy, a strategic operations partner helping personal injury law firms resolve healthcare liens more efficiently. If you’re looking to accelerate case flow and allow your team to focus on high level legal work that moves cases faster. Consider partnering with Synergy. I’m Jason Lazarus and I’ll see you in the next episode.