Law Firm Marketing in the AI Era, with Conrad Saam

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Yeah. When I think of number

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Thank you, Ben. I appreciate that.

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Hello, everyone, and welcome to

Elawvate Build and Grow Your Law Firm.

I am Jeff Wright, chief operating

officer at Gideon Asen. As always,

joined by owner and founder, Ben Gideon.

Morning, Ben. How are you?

Hey, Jeff. Good morning.

What's new in your world?

Oh, a little bit of everything. It's a

hectic time here, but all in good ways.

We're looking to bring on

a new litigation attorney.

We've done an internal promotion, someone

moving into a legal assistant role,

so we're trying to fill their role.

I know you and Merill are in the

middle of trial prep and we just

closed out the first quarter and

yeah, it's been a good start to 26.

You look a little haggard.

This is my pretrial look. Usually

it's like playoffs in the NHL.

I don't shave for a period of time

to get myself in the right mindset.

I like that. Well,

we're very lucky to be joined

today by Conrad Summ, owner,

founder, president of

Mockingbird Marketing,

which is in a nutshell a digital

marketing firm focused on law firms.

And I know there's a lot more to it than

that, Conrad, but welcome to the show.

Great to have you.

Thanks for having me. It's nice to

be at least virtually back in Maine.

I spent my college years up in Waterville,

and so really enjoy being in

Maine whenever I can get a chance.

So you're Kobe College?

Colby College. Yep. 96. So it's been a

while. Not sure I could get in today.

I'm.

Not sure anyone can afford it today.

That's also true.

It's a great school.

None of us could get

into any colleges today.

I've been going through this with my

own kids and it's just incredible to see

what this process is like.

So Conrad,

I think for the listeners out there

that may not be familiar with you or

familiar with Markingbird,

I think giving us kind of a quick

rundown of maybe your evolution from Avo

into what made you decide to go

out on your own and probably do it

better.

Well, so I was very lucky back in 2006,

I got contacted by headhunter who was

recruiting for this startup called

Avo. Actually, it wasn't

even called Avo at the time.

And I went into this role.

I knew a little bit about SEO at the time,

which was a lot more than

anyone who interviewed me.

I looked like I was a genius during

the interview. And at the time in 2006,

no one was doing this stuff.

My first ever presentation

was to the injury board,

400 lawyers in the room and my prizo was

called The Death of the Yellow Pages.

And I was trying to convince people that

the internet was kind of the wave of

the future and the audience hated me.

But the other thing that happened because

Avo was super well financed is I got

to play with all of the people,

and it was a small group of people who

knew SEO at the time. So I worked with

Vanessa Fox, I worked with Rand Fishkin.

I had dinners with Danny Sullivan

and Matt Cutts. It was a very,

very small community and no one knew

anything. And so it was very easy.

And that's not true.

Avo became the number one directory on

the web because we had access to these

great people and they taught me a lot.

And it was a very, very cool time.

Over time, I enjoyed

those talks to lawyers,

explaining how the internet worked,

explaining things like title tags

and meta descriptions. And I mean,

it was really,

really simple back in the day

compared to what it looks like today.

And I found that I liked helping

small firms grow. I'm an immigrant.

My dad started a company in the US.

There's a nobility of the American

entrepreneur. I love that.

That is kind of my reason for

being and being able to help

firms grow, businesses grow,

like be able to afford

the Colby College or

the House on the Lake.That's a part of

what we get to do and that's such a cool

privilege to be a part of.

And over time,

I decided I wanted to work

directly with firms instead.

And then the SERPs changed. The search

engine results page started shifting.

And it wasn't just SEO,

it was pay-per-click.

And then it wasn't just pay-per-click.

It was also the importance of websites.

And then social media came on the scene

and then we had LSAs and now we've got

AI. And so it's become massively

complex as opposed to like, "Here,

change a title tag,

and all of a sudden you're ranking number

two instead of number 22." And so the

need for a sophisticated understanding

of how all these chess pieces work

together for an individual firm situation,

I find that super, super fascinating.

We've obviously been grappling with a

lot of those issues and learning a lot as

we've evolved in our firm's

growth over five years.

And it does seem like the

world has changed tremendously

between when we opened

our doors and today.

What are the kind of top line cutting

edge things that are going on right

now? What is the hot stuff,

the stuff that people should

be paying attention to today?

So there's cutting edge

and bleeding edge, right?

And so bleeding edge is where you're

experimenting with stuff that is just kind

of fanciful and stupid.

What would that be?

There's been a lot of stuff

out there, right? So I mean,

there's things that pop up,

like we're going to get really excited

about this and we're going to get really

excited about that, and then

they kind of disappear. The.

Next shiny object.

This is the shiny object syndrome. Yeah.

Where we're living right now in

the last, it's not even 12 months,

it's the last six to nine months.

What I will call cutting edge,

and I do not think everyone

needs to live on a cutting edge.

I think that's really, really

important to understand.

We are now living in a

place of perpetual change,

and it's not like we can get this

system all set up and it's going to be

perfect. We're going to run

it for the next three years.

This is a pace of perpetual change.

And so I think law firms

break into kind of three

major buckets.

There is the law firm that

has the internal asset and

capacity and interest in being a

part of that perpetual change. Okay?

Are we playing with Agentic AI?

Are we working with OpenClaw?

What are the things that

we are experimenting within

our own firm to figure that

out? So you have that group. You have

the next group that are living it.

And I don't think this is a bad way to be,

that are living in a place where it's

like we're actually doing things the way

they have been done and it's

working. By and large, it's working.

In the background, especially

in the marketing realm,

things are changing somewhat, but we're

going to rely on third party vendors.

I'll give an example. We're

going to rely on call rails,

listening in AI technology to inform

us how our own stuff is working,

as opposed to we're going

to build it ourselves.

And then the third bucket of

firms, and again, this is okay.

It's okay to be in this place.

Third bucket of firms is going to rely

on a vendor completely to provide those

solutions, right? And so they want to

practice law, they want to be the lawyers,

and they're going to rely on a Mockingbird

or someone like that to provide all

of that as one source.

And so I think you need to understand,

you don't have to necessarily be

aspirational to move up that kind of

hierarchy, but there are three

different ways that firms are operating.

And right now, I think I would

advise a firm to think about that.

Do we want to play in that world

of perpetual change internally?

Is that kind of ethos of our firm?

Or do we want to really focus on law

and have a really trusted partner that's

going to run that for us? Or

is there something in between?

And it's not a change.

What I'm talking about is a structural

change internally within the firm,

as opposed to like local service

has just came on the scene, right?

It is the way firms choose to operate.

And I don't think there

is necessarily a bad way.

Conrad, you had mentioned back in 2006,

you were trying to convince everyone,

for lack of a better term, Yellow Pages

are dead, the internet's the way to go.

Are you finding in 2026 you're

having that conversation,

but talking more about AI?

Is the AI that much of a

revelation as the internet was

in 06?

So it's interesting, but

there's no backlash, right?

The backlash was like ... I remember

back in 2006, Avo rated lawyers,

you could leave a review

for a lawyer on Avo.

This is before you could do it on Google.

This is before you

could do it on anywhere.

And the legal industry was up in arms.

How can you possibly offer an opinion

about the quality of legal work for a law

firm? They blew their minds, right?

And so there was a backlash and a

pushback. And at Avo, we were always like,

we focus on the consumer

and the lawyers will follow.

And that worked for a while.

Today, I remember when ChatGPT ...

I remember the day I was watching

Michigan Football with my friends,

ChatGPT launches, and we're

like, holy crap, this is amazing.

We literally stopped watching the game

and started messing around with this

thing.

Everyone gets it.

Everyone gets that you can go to Claude

and have it write a paper about what to

do when you're in a car accident.

It's not something that needs to

be demonstrated. Everyone sees it.

It's not a question. My kids

are telling me that like, dad,

stop using ChatGPT like it's outdated.

We all get it. We know that it's here.

We just don't know. And

there's so many ways to use it,

we don't know where to start in many

cases. So yes, it's revolutionary,

but there's no convincing.

Currently, when you're

advising law firms, I mean,

I'm assuming you've lots of law firm

clients and they're in different types of

practices. They are trying

to increase their footprint,

detract more business, get more cases

in whatever sub-discipline they're in.

Where are clients coming

from today? Predominantly.

Are they still finding firms

through organic search?

Are they predominantly

coming through pay-per-click?

Are they calling lawyers they see

on TV? Are there metrics to ...

Or have they moved to AI

queries to find their lawyers?

How are people finding them now?

So this is a really important answer

and the digital agency industry

is so far behind in our thinking on this.

The answer is it's

different for every firm,

but to contrast it from four years ago,

five years ago, it was Google, right?

It was always Google, and that

was kind of the predominant play.

That has changed. And so

let me break two things out.

It's really important to understand

direct response and brand work. Okay?

Direct response is, I want to buy

some AirPods. I look up AirPods.

I click on an ad for AirPods.

I go to a site about AirPods.

I buy the AirPods and the digital

agency can track that all the

way through. And now I can say my cost

per client for the AirPods was $27.

AirPods were worth a hundred bucks.

That's a good ROI. Simplistic, basic,

pre-calculus, simple undergraduate

business degree can do that. Actually,

my children can do that if you

have the stuff set up correctly.

That still happens. Let's not forget,

that still happens. LSAs are really big.

If you're running LSAs and

you're running them well,

they can be a big part of your business.

Pay-per-click is still really big.

Some SEO work is direct response,

so let's not discount that.

But what's really happening now,

the firms that are winning over and over

again have a omnichannel approach to

their marketing,

which basically means I'm going to run

all of the things that make sense for my

business. I'm going to do

local. I'm going to do organic.

I'm going to figure out how to play

in the AI game. I'm going to run LSAs.

I'm going to do radio. I'm going to

do really clever digital retargeting.

I'm going to put my ads on the TV from

people who have actually expressed

interest or who fit my certain profile

or whatever that might be. Super targeted

brand advertising. I need a

better way to talk about this.

I'm going to touch those prospective

clients 10 times, 20 times,

120 times before they actually call me.

That's brand work. If I do this really,

really well, I'm not just going to get

them to know that this is Coke the brand.

I'm going to get them to like Coke. I'm

going to get them to like the law firm.

This is the win. If I can get

consumers in my target market to say,

"I like this law firm, you

have won." Let's not forget,

people hate lawyers,

but they might like their lawyer and

they might like you because you're ...

I said this to you when you started out,

you're wearing an LLBan jacket.That's

the right way to build affinity in Maine,

right? That resonates.

That means I'm local.

How do I get someone with really clever

branding and really solid positioning,

not just to know who I am, but to like

who I am. And if you win that game,

you win. You win. That is the win.

But it's omnichannel. It's everywhere.

I had two questions about that. One is,

you said it depends to some extent

on what type of law firm or practice

you have.

Are there particular categories

of law practices that

there's different channels that seem

to drive business for? So for instance,

if you had a criminal defense practice

or an immigration practice or family law

contracts, whatever,

is that different from say a personal

injury or medical malpractice practice or

is the guidance you just gave,

does it apply universally

to all types of practices?

So you need to understand your audience

and then you need to understand how

digital can work with a

targeting perspective.

So let me explain what I

mean by that. Family law.

The question that I've got for 20

years about family law is I need more

qualified clients. What

does that really mean?

I need to get people in rich areas of

the neighborhood. Okay? That just is.

How do I isolate my digital

targeting so I'm only serving

ads up to a wealthy part

of a city? In some places,

that's really easy. Outside of Denver,

it's really easy for me to understand

demographically this is a wealthy part of

Denver and this is not a wealthy

part of Denver. In Philadelphia,

it's block by block.

You can have a really,

really expensive block and

then next door it's not.

And so like even those nuances become

really fascinating. Let's say you do

immigration. Immigration's

a great example.

So you're ending up with doing a lot of

language targeting. How do we do that?

In the Hispanic market, there's

a lot of referral based business.

How do I inculcate my

brand into that community?

So that becomes really important.

You have some things that are very,

very long purchase cycles.

So a client that we have that

has done the best in AI from

generating clients, that's

franchise law. Why franchise law?

Because if you're thinking

about building a franchise,

you're doing a ton of

research. It's not the iPods.

I want to buy the iPods today.

I'm trying to decide whether or not

I'm going to make this investment in my

future and what franchise to research.

So there's a ton of research that goes

into this over a long period of time.

That client,

that prospect is going to rely on AI.

It's going to be really important to stay

in front of that prospect

over a long period of time.

So retargeting becomes really important.

How do I do retargeting digitally?

How do I put retargeting on OTT?

How do I make sure that I

can stay in touch with this?

Getting that prospective client's email

is really important because now I can do

a drip campaign over the next six

months where this person is going to be

considering should I buy a

McDonald's franchise or a Taco Bell.

So the purchase cycle becomes

important. Trademark, right?

Trademark, you should be really big

in LinkedIn because you have a very,

very finite group of professionals that

you want to be in front of on LinkedIn.

I can do my targeting there. So it's

really about targeting who is mine.

Personal injury, everyone

gets in accidents, right?

Everyone gets in accidents.

And so the targeting is very, very broad.

People talk about geofencing, hospitals

and stuff like that, but by and large,

everyone gets in accidents, right?

Everyone gets in accidents and nobody

gets in accidents and you don't know which

one it's going to be

until they've been in one.

So you don't have any preexisting

market for your services.

That is exactly correct.

And yeah, so I mean,

that creates a particular challenge for

this type of business because you don't

have that long cycle where

people are actively researching.

They have some kind of trauma

or event and then I assume

their decision cycle is very

short and often just based on some

memory they have of an easy to remember

phone number or a catchy jingle

that reminds them who the lawyer

is, does this kind of stuff.

But yet a lot of people

seem to be, I would say,

offended or put off by

that style of marketing.

And there's the billboard ads,

the constant catchy or kind of

low brow jingles you see for

plaintiff trial lawyers.

People that don't need those

services don't react well to that,

and it tends to portray the

industry in a poor light.

So I was just curious about your idea

that you want people to like you,

but then you have these lawyers out

there running these really dumb ads that

show them doing asinine things

that are really the but of a joke,

not something that people

would take seriously or like,

but they may be memorable.

So comment on that if you can.

So I have a hierarchy on this.

You have brand awareness and

then you have brand affinity.

Brand awareness is actually

really easy to build.

Anyone who has kids know that your

kids know a bunch of jingles, right?

The progressive jingle. They know these

things. They're stuck in their head.

They hate them, but it's there. That's

brand awareness. And in many cases,

and this, I'm just a craven marketer.

I just want my clients to win.

If that is what creates memorable

stuff, great. That's a win.

Your brand awareness, like just brand

awareness in and of itself is a benefit.

So let me give an example

that translates into digital.

We know that pure brand awareness

drives an increase in click to

rates on pay-per-click. And

that increase in click-to-rates,

whether you like the brand or hate

the brand when you don't need it,

it improves your quality score,

which then drops the cost per click that

you have to pay and the conversion's

higher because I'm familiar with

the brand, whether I like it or not,

whether it's an annoying jingle or not,

that actually worked.

My kind of mana of ideal

is not just brand awareness, but

brand affinity. I like these guys.

I like these guys or I like this firm.

And that transcends brand

awareness from the annoying jingle.

You can't have that annoying

brand when you have awareness.

Let me use the most obvious example.

Morgan & Morgan, size matters, right?

That can throw people off. People

don't necessarily like that,

but it's memorable and there's a

positioning behind it and it's meaningful.

And when you actually need

that service, that's something,

if you can remember that,

there's positioning in two

words in the legal industry that

you may or may not like,

but it's memorable and they make it

memorable by spending like med, right?

And that's brand awareness.

Conrad, I want to just take

a step back for a minute.

So our podcast is obviously called

Build and Grow Your Law Firm.

A lot of our listeners are either

someone looking to maybe leave a firm and

hang their own shingle or

a firm that is entrenched,

but they're looking to scale.

Usually in both of those scenarios,

they haven't done a lot with marketing.

So I guess from an opinion standpoint,

what should they focus on

first? Is it B2B? Is it B2C?

Is it website development, SEO? I mean,

obviously they probably don't have

the resources to jump right into every

channel.

How would somebody in that position

start and what should they focus on?

Let me answer the two different

markets differently because it's really

important to do that. The

person hanging their shingle,

there are two things

that you should focus on.

Number one is the location of your firm,

literally the location of your office.

That is either an asset or a liability.

If I put my brand new solo practice

right next in the same building as Gideon

Asen and I'm a personal injury

lawyer, I have just shot myself.

I've just taken a bunch of marketing

opportunities out off the table.

Conversely, if I can find a place that

is high population and no one else,

now I have an asset.

I have five reviews and all of a sudden

I'm showing up in the local results.

So that is something I would think about.

The other thing for that

person hanging their shingle,

I would triple down on referral marketing,

right? This is all about referral.

If you do not have a big

database, that's a liability.

If you do have that database of contact,

whether it's on a CRM like Filevine,

or if it's in your LinkedIn accounts,

like an active LinkedIn profile,

that referral business needs

to be what you lean into.

And ideally,

I don't necessarily mean legal referrals

where you're losing a third ...

Now your cost per case

is a third of the value.

I'm talking about people who are going

to send you matters that aren't expecting

that revenue share. So that is

vital for that person starting out.

If you can't do that, like it is a slog.

On the other side is the firm

that wants to grow up and scale.

And so I think what I would

look at is you probably

have an understanding of where your

marketing is most effective. You need to

have an understanding of where

your marketing is most effective.

And it will be different

for different firms.

I think one of the mistakes that

agencies make is they're like,

"Here's our silver product and we're going

to do 10 blog posts a month and we're

going to do these." It's not a bespoke

solution for the individual situation

that you are in.

And I think it becomes really important

to have that bespoke approach.

Having said that,

one of the mistakes that a lot

of firms make is trying to be

the entire market and

appeal to the entire market.

And I think one of the things that you

can do as a firm trying to scale is focus

your advertising, marketing, et cetera,

on a specific target. And

Maine's not a huge market,

but Maine's a great example.

You could choose to just be the major law

firm in Waterville. You can do that by

geography. You can do

that by who you appeal to.

You can do that by trying to be the

local firm. We are not Morgan & Morgan.

In fact, Morgan & Morgan's in

Florida, the antithesis of Maine,

or we're really deep in the community or

we push don't kick puppies or whatever

it might be like.

Where is your personal affinity and

how can I find that outside in the

community to start building

brand affinity for those people?

What are you really genuinely into

and just lean so hard into that?

There's so many opportunities to

not just be gavels and leather

bound books and stuff like that.

What percentage of people do you think

are starting to find lawyers using an AI

platform?

So it's growing, obviously,

and I will push this as I

actually have this data.

I'm going to get it roughly accurate.

I think right now it is around

3% of what we can track,

3% of, and this is from

a near media study,

but 3% of inbound prospects touch AI.

So it's not because of AI alone,

but they're touching AI

and that is self-reported.

Because, well, I mean, if

you're searching on Google,

you're going to get the

Gemini result, right?

Probably, right?

Depending on what you're looking for

and depending on what day it is and

depending on your personal history, right?

So probably it is going to touch that.

And again, this is self-reported.

So what do I mean by

self-reported? So attribution,

I even talked about attribution. I

think it is very, very important.

I talked about all these multiple

touches, this omnichannel piece.

How do you know which parts of your

omnichannel constellation are actually

working? The importance of having intake,

and I like phrasing it this way, "Hey,

listen, Jeff, thanks for calling us.

Is there someone we should be sending a

thank you to because we've got a pretty

good reputation in the industry

and I like saying thank you.

" And that's the open indication

to, how did you hear about us? "Oh,

no one referred you,

but I saw you on Gemini or I

used Claude or it was an LSA or

these happen all the time.

I saw this yesterday.

You guys happen to be in

the same building I'm in.

"That was a reason that

they called the law firm.

And these things we don't think about

when you ask this open-ended questions,

you get surprising answers.

So one of those surprising answers is

self-reported attribution is of course AI.

Joe consumer may often call AI,

Gemini, Google or the internet,

but that's what they think they're using

and that's what we get back as data.

Is it perfect data? Absolutely

not. If none of this is clean,

that's the problem with omnichannel,

but it all kind of works together.

You can think of AI in two different

ways from a outreach standpoint.

One is that you have direct consumers

who are substituting it for a

traditional Google search and they're

getting into Claude or into ChatGPT or

something and saying," Well, what's

the best lawyer in Waterville,

Maine and finding you. "The other

though that I worry more about,

because we still get most of our best

cases as referrals from other lawyers.

And in our situation,

many of those referrals come from

lawyers outside of the state of Maine.

They're for cases that may not even

be in Maine, but if they are in Maine,

they're from maybe somebody

who has a connection to Maine,

but their brother-in-law is a lawyer

in Chicago. They need a lawyer,

they call their brother-in-law and

the brother-in-law says," Well,

let me ask around about who

the best lawyer in Maine is,

and then they will connect

with communities of people.

We're well known in most

of these communities, and

then they'll get to us.

"My concern is that that

process where lawyers are going

to their communities where

you have your reputation,

that part will be circumvented

because the lawyer instead,

or somebody who's asked for that

question will get on Claude or ChatGPT

and instead just look,

tell me who the best lawyer in Maine is

rather than reaching out to their friend

or their buddy because it's

quicker, one less step.

And so I worry about it substituting

not for direct consumer contacts,

but to circumvent the normal referral

process.

And I'm just wondering if that's something

you've thought about and then what's

the ... When we talk about the

solution to that problem after that.

So referrals will always be important.

And one of the things that we know is

that people like that social proof.

And so let me highlight this thing.

You mentioned communities of

people who know who you are.

Part of your omnichannel marketing

needs to be a deliberate and low

cost branding attempt to stay in

front of those people all the time.

What is your database? How

do we just stay top of mind,

whether it's an email campaign,

whether it's display branding,

whether it's LinkedIn Outreach. It

is so important to maintain that.

Or a podcast, for example.

Or a podcast. All of these

things become so vital.

In terms of a replacement,

I think the one thing that seems to be

lost is the notion we're approaching

AI the same way that we thought about SEO.

I'm going into this black box and

what it spits out people is common.

It's so personalized.

So it's personalized in really

two different ways. Number one,

it's personalized based on your history.

And Claude knows that

I do search and rescue,

that I'm interested in mountain biking,

that I really love vintage cars.

They know everything about

me because of my history.

And so what I get and what you get

and everyone else gets is so amazingly

personalized. Don't forget

that. It's not this black box.

It's how Google evolved

to personalization,

but at a much deeper level because

they know so much more about you,

especially if you're talking about Gemini.

Gemini knows all the Google stuff

about you and then they

know what you're asking it.

And so that is so amazingly personalized.

The other way that we don't

realize how personalized this is,

the results shuffle

every time. It's a guess.

AI is just a guess every single time.

So if I search the same

thing 10 times in a row,

I'm going to get 10 different answers.

And so never forget that.

The importance of influencing

AI or Google or even

organic Into understanding who you are

and what your expertise are and how

that combines with the

personalized results for

someone in Sheboygan for looking

for a firm in Maine, that is very,

very real and that doesn't change.

And so it's really what

pisses me off right now.

And these agencies are lying to you

and they know they are lying to you.

They'll take a screenshot of who is the

best digital marketing agency in legal.

And they've trained their version of

Claude or ChatGPT or Gemini or whatever it

is to say their firm.

I could make up a firm today and I

could convince ChatGPT that for me,

that's the firm that you should represent.

And now I take a screenshot and I'm

like, "Oh, well, we've won the game.

We've unbackdoored how

ChatGPT..." No, you haven't.

The people who run ChatGPT

don't know how it works.

They don't know what the

results are going to be.

And so never forget about

the personalization of this

and the randomness of the

answers.

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There's a way in which we're evolving

in one sense in terms of the digital

data,

but I'm always struck when I do those

kind of queries in a ChatGPT or a Claude,

how bad the information is. So I mean,

if you're asking it focused

questions to identify the top or best

lawyer in a different category

in a certain geographic region,

it will often give you somebody that

if you're familiar with that area,

you know doesn't do that work. In some

cases they've been retired for a decade.

In some cases, they're

not even alive anymore.

And so it's just striking to me that

this is a technology that purports to be

all knowing. And in areas where

you don't know the answer,

you can accept it because

you don't know any better.

But when you're on the ground and

you actually know the right answer,

it's just striking how bad the information

can be. And it's actually a lot

worse than just a Google organic

search because that at least has some

guardrails, I think,

where you might not always get the best

person because it's highly influenced by

maybe marketing and manipulation

by vendors such as you in a

good way, but it's influenced by that.

But it's at least within a certain

parameters of guardrails of correct,

whereas AI is just all over the place.

And it's just amazing to me because we,

I mean, for instance,

my firm has a wealth of information

to figure this stuff out. I mean,

actual results, verdicts, papers,

publications, peer review,

all that stuff.

It should be able to figure out the

difference between that and somebody who

retired a decade ago, but

in many cases it can't.

So the interesting thing is, and

this is the same thing with reviews.

We are so lazy and trusting of

technology. Again, Near Media

did a survey on reviews.

These are amazingly important.

People rely on reviews, hundreds,

thousands of reviews for a law

firm. They also, in the same survey,

will tell you that a lot of the reviews

are fraud. What do you rely on the most?

Reviews. What do you trust the most? Not

the reviews. And yet they rely on it.

It's the same with AI.

We trust these machines

to understand and know,

and it is the extent to which this is ...

Human behavior is just

mad. And you know what?

I need to call a lawyer. I'm just

going to trust what it spits out.

That is a fact. It is human behavior

that I genuinely don't understand.

We know from our own experience that the

reviews are spam. We know that the AI

is garbage some percentage of the time,

and yet we're going to make a really,

really important decision like what

lawyer to contact. Yes, we are.

Sign me up because I'm lazy.

It remains shocking to me.

It's weird human lazy behavior.

We think the AIs are going to

get better determining quality or

identifying orders of priorities,

or is it just going to get worse as

the platforms open up to more direct

influence in marketing dollars?

So let me talk about the first lie.

The first lie is that I get this

all the time. I'm a great lawyer.

Google doesn't recognize that.

Google doesn't recognize if

you're a great lawyer, by the way.

They don't really care. Google

doesn't really care about that. They.

Don't care. It's not in the

algorithm. No one's like, "Oh, well,

they do a great job with cases." And

they don't care. And so that is a lie.

And it's a frustration that I've

heard from lawyers my entire career.

Google should recognize how good I am.

Well, it doesn't, nor does it care.

So there's two problems with reliance

on AI. Number one, we have this belief,

and maybe it is correct and

maybe it is not, that AI,

and I genuinely am not

sure that it is correct,

that AI is going to start to be able to

understand who's actually a good lawyer.

What is a good lawyer? What

does that actually mean?

How are we going to actually ... Was

this an easy case? Was it a hard case?

You think AI is going to be able to

figure that out? That's a really,

really big step.

The other part is just a reality.

Is there awful people like me who are

going to go out and convince AI that

you're a good lawyer,

whether you exist or not,

whether you're a good lawyer or not.

So you're seeing manipulation

of results.That's what we do.

The marketing industry, love us or

hate us, and most of you guys hate us,

which is fine,

but our job is to make whatever

is making that referral if ...

I'll use a simplistic tactic. You

want to find the best lawyer in Maine.

Semantically, how do I do that?

I make sure that you guys show up

on best lawyers. It's that simple.

Do you get on best lawyers because

you're the best lawyer? No.

But a computer reads semantically,

and this is overly simplistic. Oh,

this is a site all about

best lawyers. Well,

that's why this might be a best lawyer.

It's the same with Ava. Avo was really,

really big and then it disappeared

and you know what's brought it back AI

because Avo has ratings of lawyers.

What you want to find the best lawyers?

Avo's entire ethos is built on a

one to 10 scale of good lawyers.

And that's a resume score. That's

all that the Avo rating is.

It's a resume score, but it's something.

And so that's why Avo has

come back from obscurity.

That's how it works.

And there are people like me who will

make sure that you guys have a great

profile on Avo and we'll fill it out and

we'll do everything we can to get you

to a 9.9 or a 10.0.

You bet that a computer that's trying

to determine who a great lawyer is wants

to find something that scores lawyers

on a scale of one to 10. And that's the

whole thesis of Avo.

So you're saying we have to play the game.

Play the game, baby. Don't hate the

player. Sorry, don't hate the player,

hate the game, but I can't change the

game, but you got to play the game.

I mean, that's the power and sort of

simplicity of the Morgan & Morgan model.

They just usurp all of that by going

direct to the consumer by putting hundreds

of millions of dollars a year

into direct to consumer marketing.

And so they can craft their message and

have it received the way they want it

to.

And then I think you pointed out that

that also has a synergistic effect when

somebody gets online because if

they're seeing multiple search results,

but they recognize one of the brands

as familiar, even if maybe not likable,

they're more likely to click on it, right?

100%. I. E. McDonald's when I travel.

I know it is an inferior

product. I know this.

I know what it is and I know what I'm

getting and there's brand awareness there

and we're human, we're stupid, right?

It's tasty.

Yeah. But whether you're

in Sheboygan or in Seattle,

you're going to get the same consistent

product. It's a known quantity.

I know exactly what I'm getting. We are

so lazy as consumers. It's terrible.

Give us some positives.

Here, you want a positive?

Yeah.

Think about, we've been

talking about AI and marketing,

what you can do inside your firm with AI.

And my read for 2026 is there's

going to be a small number of

big improvements that law firms can

make with how they operate inside their

firm with AI. I think that's

really, really fascinating.

I will give you two simplistic examples.

I believe, and I've watched this,

I'm right about this is not a

belief. I'm right about this.

We talk about intake all the time and

how intake sucks, blah, blah, blah.

Most law firms underpay

their intake people.

It is the first experience

that someone has.

It is expected that it's an easy job.

You're just going to read the script and

take in the information and pass that

on. It's actually a hard job to do

well. It's a hard job to care about.

It's a hard job when you're underpaid

for it. It needs to be proactively

managed, right? And you need to have

someone sitting in and saying, "Hey,

you did a great job on this call and this

one you totally fucked up." And so you

need proactive management to have

a really good intake experience.

I believe that to my core. You can

do this really well with AI now.

I can pick out the best and worst

phone calls that came in to my

law firm over the last week, and I can

identify that Mary does a great job,

but John's a jerk and

probably needs to be replaced.

Or John needs to be coached.

Or we can talk about,

these were the five best calls.

We're going to do an intake management

meeting every morning or every week.

These were the five best calls that

we had and these were the five.

I don't have to listen to every single

call. I don't even have to listen to any

of them.

I can just have AI pull out the great

ones and the worst ones and I can have it

listen in for did you say

hello? Did you show empathy?

Did you use the law firm's

name? Did you do a follow-up?

Did you ask for their phone

number? Did you get their email?

That all can be done with AI. All of that.

So the hard slog of managing intake

can be done for you with an agent.

Simple. Let me give another example.

And this is my personal digital

marketing fantasy world.

We've talked about this

omnichannel touchpoints,

and it used to be that we would draw this

pretty little pie graph that was like,

"This is where all of your business came

from." And it assumed this one-to-one

correlation. That doesn't

work in an omnichannel world.

How do I understand and how can I

develop an understanding of all of the

touchpoints that have hit a prospect

before they called the firm? Was it just

direct response or did they see my email?

Did they mention that

they saw my billboard?

Did they mention that they called

us because Johnny Smith referred ...

I can pull all of that out.

That can all be done in AI and then

I can work on visualization of that.

And now you have the data to build an

understanding of how your omnichannel

stuff works.

Maybe you find out that the little league

sign that you put up three years ago

and spent $2,000 a month on,

maybe no one ever mentions that and you

start to pull that piece of data out.

So it's the ability to look at all

these different, I call it touchpoints.

And it's not just the simplistic

one-to-one pre-algebra calculus,

it's a pattern. Those two things

are very real at this point in time,

and that can be done by a firm,

and that's really, really cool.

Yeah. Those are both things

we've been focused on a lot,

the intake side and trying to analyze.

We recently launched into television

and radio and trying to develop

a cycle of information that

we're gaining about the

effectiveness of that.

And we're very disciplined about getting

that on the intake side and putting it

into our system. And I think

you know our marketing guy,

he's been working with you, I

think, in your mastermind group,

which is phenomenal, by the way.

Very smart guy. Yeah.

Yeah. I don't know if we're

in category one or two,

but we're trying to move toward category

one of trying to do it internally,

recognizing the importance of having

vendors in areas where we don't have

expertise,

but having at least somebody internally

who can understand it at a high enough

level that we can navigate

these issues intelligently.

But what you just mentioned,

building that out,

but it's still at a very state of infancy

right now where all of the information

from the channels comes in and then the

ideas that it would be assimilated and

analyzed through AI. At this point,

we don't have the critical mass of

data yet for that to be that useful.

We're hoping to get there and then really

be able to make smart decisions about

where to put our marketing dollars

and where the best ROI comes from.

So one of the things

that comes out of this,

this is really an impactful

for the size of your firm.

So this is one of the things that we

need to be very cautious about with AI.

AI doesn't start with a statistics degree.

AI is not thinking about things like

your confidence intervals and do I have

enough data? It's not really

thinking along those lines.

So it'll give you a nice

pattern on a data set at four.

So we need to be very,

very careful about this.

The other thing that we need

to be very, very careful about,

and I think there's an opportunity here,

is you can just get dirty

with the data that you have.

Just read through the raw stuff. And I

found, and this has happened in the past,

but the firms that will spend some time

going through the raw data and with a

mind, this is a really critical mindset.

Often data tells you what you have,

but it doesn't really

highlight what you're missing.

And what I mean by that is I would like

to spend more time looking at those.

What are my long phone calls

that didn't turn into clients,

which means they're not showing

up in my CRM system. So that data,

the most important data is the stuff

that falls out of your data set, right?

So how do I look at this and be

like, okay, this is a great exercise.

What are the 10 longest phone

calls that we had last month that

didn't trickle into our CRM and

why? The why is the peeling ...

And I don't think you can have

AI do this. Peel back the onion.

What happened to Mary? We have

this long call. She's in Maine.

She was in a car accident. What happened?

Did we not call her back? Did our

email bounce? Did she just hate us?

Did she not like the person

who did intake? What happened?

So if you spend 80 ...

Marketers like to show up and to the

right and success and so do law firms.

And so they're always

crowing about what they got.

Where did you spend 80% of your time

on the stuff that you didn't get?

That's the key to improvement.

Obsess over the failures instead

of crowing over the wins.

And that's the key to really

running a law firm super well.

And that data falls out by definition,

right? It's so fascinating. I.

Drive our marketing person, Matt, crazy

sometimes because we'll go through ...

We meet all the time and he'll go through

our spend for the week and what our

channels and what was running and

everything. And I'll say, "Well, geez,

we didn't. We didn't generate any

qualified cases this week." And he's like,

"Jeff, it's brand awareness.

We're doing brand awareness.

This isn't lead generation." I'm a very

black and white guy and I want to get to

the finish line and

generate qualified cases,

but Matt is very structured

and has the defined brand

awareness.

And I think that gets lost

because everyone's looking

at the ultimate outcome of

capturing qualified cases

in lead generation and

maybe ignoring how important

brand awareness is.

And this is the classic problem

of today versus tomorrow.

And a lot of law firms

hamstring themselves by

only wanting to invest in things where

you can see that direct rate of return,

or you can see things turning into cases

in a short time period and that doesn't

really ... It's part of the puzzle.

It's a really important part of

the puzzle for direct response.

But I'll use this as an

example. I desperately would

like to buy a Ford Bronco.

I don't need one, but I

would like to buy one.

Ford has been marketing to me for

probably a decade about the Ford Bronco,

and yet I still want one.

Maybe one day I buy one and it would be

very simplistic of Ford to be like, "Oh,

well,

he clicked on this ad or he saw my Google

business profile for the local Ford

dealership and that's why he bought

this car." And it's not just big ticket

items like a car.

Coke does the same thing.

Coke could turn off all of their branding

today and their sales would not fall

off for a while. It's not like I see

an ad for a Coke and I'm like, "Whoa,

I never thought of that. I'm going to

go buy one." And so it's all about this,

and which makes analysis

very, very difficult.

So we talk about doing it this way.

When you look at all of

your marketing activities,

you have the direct response stuff where

I know they bought this because of this

ad. You pull that out. Everything

else you do, we call it the BFA,

the big average. You take all

of the money that you spend,

you divide it by all of

the goodness that happened.

And now you have for that time period

an understanding of how your brand is

working.

But it's important within that all of

the stuff that you spent to try and

understand,

does something not show up here or does

something show up here over and over and

over again? Does Nancy send us cases

every single month and therefore

we need to spend more time

with Nancy?That's where

you start to look into that

constellation of marketing touchpoints,

omnichannel marketing touchpoints

that make a difference.

And you can't look at it from a month to

month or even quarter to quarter basis

because that's not how this

works, especially if you're in PI.

If you're putting dollars behind TV, radio

and building out a branding campaign,

I recognize it depends on how

much you're investing in that,

but what is typically expected in terms

of the timeline for when you're going to

start seeing the ROI on those dollars?

The answer as always is it depends, right?

But I don't think you should undertake

a branding activity unless you are

talking about a year.

Don't dip your toe in.

So this is the mistake

that I see people make.

We're going to do a

three-month radio test.

That is not branding that is a direct

response timeframe and a direct response

mindset. And so if you're

going to undertake a branding

effort, a year minimum,

right? We know that the old studies go,

you have to see something seven times

before you even remember what it is.

So what does that look like? This

is a very non-scientific answer,

but I think the mistake that I see is

branding campaigns that are three months

long, because that's not a thing.

That's a direct response timeframe.

I think of those as attorney vanity

campaigns where they just want to see

themselves on TV or see themselves in

the radio because it can't possibly be

effective to put $25,000

into radio and you're

just pissing away money at that

point. So when we got on TV and radio,

we did so with a mindset of

we're not going to dabble in it.

We're going big or we're not going to do

it at all and we're committed to it for

the long term because it just

doesn't make ... Otherwise,

you're just wasting your time and money.

But it would be nice to see the ROI on

it. What are we like six months in now?

And I mean,

we certainly have seen a significant

uptake in the phone calls and the

inquiries, but has that translated yet

into highly valuable new cases? I mean,

probably some, but not as

many as we'd like. But again,

we're really only at the

inception of the campaign,

so we wouldn't expect that much.

I can give you this. This is just

anecdotal from some of my clients.

You talk about that mastermind.

This is anecdotal from a couple of

the firms in that mastermind group.

The PI firms,

the big cases do not come

until you run PI advertising,

TV advertising, right?

So you can do a great job with people

like me running direct response and even

or organic search stuff,

but when the big matters,

the big cases come with brand awareness.

Now, I only know that anecdotally,

but that is certainly

something that we talk about.

Well, Conrad, it's been

great to have you on the pod.

You're such a wealth of knowledge

and really appreciate you joining us.

And also,

I really appreciate your mentoring and

time you spent with Matt in our office.

He's learned a lot from you and-.

Great guy.

Yeah. Just been great. Just don't

challenge him to a jiu-jitsu match.

No, I've seen it. So he was like,

"Hey, next time you come off,

we'll go snowmobiling." I was

like, "Okay, I can do that.

We're not doing jiu-jitsu." I like only

playing in games that I can win where I

know I've got a competitive

advantage. I'm not- Yeah.

I feel the same way.

Conrad,

do you want to take the last two minutes

and maybe talk about where people could

find you and what differentiates

you from your competitors?

I appreciate the offer.

My read is there's a lot

of bullshit out there.

I think there are a lot of agencies,

especially in this place of AI,

claiming competency. And let's be honest,

we are figuring this stuff

out. No one has mastered this.

We are tinkerers. We are messing with

it. We are trying things. And by the way,

as soon as you master it, the

sands shift under your feet.

So I just like calling

things out for how they are.

I like working with clients where we're

sitting on the same side of the desk as

opposed to kind of this

oppositional approach,

which means our job is not

to make ourselves look good.

It's to make you guys effective.

And that sometimes means like, "Hey,

this did not work.

This is not working." So I just like

being on the same side of the desk as our

clients. And the final piece is think

about the importance of omnichannel.

Think about if you've been

an SEO dominant winner,

that's not enough right now.

This portfolio theory in investing

is very true in marketing as well.

And I think there's an

importance of spreading your ...

We talk about playing all

the chess pieces, right? So

play all the chess pieces.

Think about what the next chess piece

should be for your firm, not to replace,

but to add.

And email or contact for you, Conrad?

I'm easy to find. It's ConradSam with

two A's S-A-A-M. If you can't find me,

I'm not doing my job.

Right. And that's probably a good point.

It's not like my name's like

Joe Smith. I should be findable.

You've got one extra A there.

Extra A. Yeah.

Thank you, Conrad. That was

really good. We appreciate it.

Thanks guys for having me.

Thanks for listening to Elawvate,

Build and Grow your Law Firm.

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