Speakeasy Authority Marketing

Hello, this is Richard Jacobs with Speakeasy Authority Marketing and Jacobs & Whitehall. We're up to day nine of the monsters that are there to feed off of and devour and destroy your law firm. You've got to get rid of these guys. They're bad news and there are a lot of them. I've identified 26 of them, which is why we have 13 unlucky days, where I describe two monsters per day.

We're getting close to the end of the marketing monsters. So far, we've talked about the branding barbarian, the social media serpent, the Rip Van Winkle of referrals, the follow-up fumbler, the SEO siren, the paid leads pusher, and the new client hopium dealer. Today, we're going to talk about the lowball leech and the omnipresent omnivore.

These two monsters are interesting because they are attorneys themselves. Let me describe this to you. The lowball leech…you know who this person is. They feed off all the marketing and all the experience and the 30 years of hard work you and everyone else has put into your practice. Do you know why? Because you'll talk to the clients, you'll do the advertising, you'll really get it in clients' minds that they need legal help with whatever their problem is, and then the lowball leech will come in and say, "Hey, you don't need to pay that money; I'll do it for a third of the price. Call me." You hate these people and I hate them too. What clients don't know about them is something you can use to fight back against these lowball leeches.

It is a three-part way of positioning your price and your services. This is critical because no attorney wants to do a new client intake or new client consult only to hear at the end, "This sounds good, but I talked to someone else and they'll do it for $1,500 and you're asking me for $4000." Then you think, "What am I going to say to this person?" At that point, you're on the defensive. To get rid of these lowball leeches who are ruining the attorney profession and are only going to put themselves in bankruptcy court, you've got to be preemptive and defend against them. Here's how you do it.

When you do a consult and you're ready to position price, I need you to do what I call the sandwich: you go low, go high, and then right in the middle. We can call it Goldilocks. What you want to say to clients is this: "I'm going to talk to you about price and your case. I'm sure you know that there are people out there, the low ballers, we all know them in this industry, and they'll do it for about $1,000. Those people are charging bare bones retainers, so guess what? The second they take your case, they're on to the next one.

They have to get as many cases as possible, because they make so little money representing people. They're constantly on this treadmill to get new clients, so they won't have very much time for your case. They have huge caseloads because everyone's attracted to them because they're so cheap, and they have to spend all this time on those cases."

Tell your clients that it's like having a public defender (if that's relevant to the kind of case it is) and if they need to do multiple hearings, they can't show up. They're much more likely to plead them out. If it's a criminal case, they're much more likely to cave in.

If it's a family law case and if the client has kids and a business and a lot of assets at stake, tell them good luck, because the attorney won't adequately defend them. If it's estate planning, they may do an off-the-shelf estate plan that really isn't tailored to their needs. If it's an auto accident, they won't really have time to fight back and forth with the insurance companies and get a proper settlement.

Say to them, "Your case may need one of those people, that's fine. They're about $1,000. You're also going to see these other guys, the big fancy firms. They're marketing everywhere, they've got a big monthly net and they show that real high price for good reason, partly to show off and party because they want clients to think, 'Wow, this firm is expensive. They must be good.' Sometimes they are, sometimes they're not. There are mills that charge a big price and have a big name, but they'll put you with a paralegal or a low-end attorney. That's the bad side of it, and you're paying a ton of money just for the name.

They don't really have any pull with the court, judges, prosecutors, or opposing counsel; they're just a big name and sometimes that actually hurts them. The court personnel and the prosecutor or the opposing attorneys look down on them because they know they're just a chop shop. Depending on who comes out of that chop shop to represent you, they may say, 'This will be an easy one, I'm going to steamroll these guys,' or 'They've got lots of money, I'm going to milk them and then they're going to pass that along to you, the client, because they know they charge a lot.' They're usually not good firms to work with.

If you pay something like $10,000 on a case and the low-ballers charge $1,000 and there is a lot at stake and you hire someone who is justifiably expensive, that makes sense. They can go to court for you, they can file motions, they can hire expert witnesses, and they can really go to the wall and beyond for your case; that's what money can help you do. I want to give you some good news. My fees are in the middle. They're not even close to the highest. I charge $3,500 for cases like yours."

That's what you say, that's how you end it; this is the meat, the middle of the sandwich. Now you've anchored it low and you've anchored it high. You can say, "Look, I'm not the cheapest because I do a lot more work than cheap guys and I don't want to have to go chase clients. I want to keep a limited caseload. I want to work the cases really hard and get to know your situation intimately so I can get you the best results I absolutely can. That's why I charge what I charge. It allows me, in some cases, to get an expert witness. It allows me to file multiple motions, and go to court four, five, six, seven, or even eight times if I need to. It really allows me to get into the nitty-gritty of your case and still make money because I am a business."

Then you can ask, "Given these three levels, the low-baller, the real high fancy one, and my price, which one do you think your case deserves?" Then, you shut up and let the client tell you. Most of the time, they'll say, "You know what? It makes sense to go with you." Sometimes they'll want to go to the high end. Sometimes they'll still want to go to the low-baller. But this is a great way to position yourself before they ask you that dreaded question and tell you someone else down the street charges a third of what you do. Don't let it get there. You've got to preempt these lowball leeches and stop them, and this is how you do it.

Let's talk about the omnipresent omnivore. An omnivore is a creature that eats everything. These especially occur in PI and the big firms that are on billboards, bus stops, and TV. They're just all over the freaking place, and a lot of attorneys are scared of them. They think, "How can I compete with these guys, they're everywhere." Well, I have good news for you: you can compete, because not even half of all the cases in your metro area go to these people. I guarantee you. Some people don't like these places and they shy away from them. To them, it's garish and they think, "Oh, man, these guys are going to be really expensive because they advertise everywhere."

I call places like this for bankruptcy and different areas of law when I do mystery shopping, and a lot of times, they'll put you with a paralegal or a low-end attorney on their staff. What good is that? You are paying for a name; it really doesn't do anything. These firms are not able to promise clients that they can get better results than other firms because that's unethical.

They can't say, "Oh, don't worry. We know the judge, we know the prosecutor, they treat us really well, and we'll get you special favors." They can't say that. Some do, and they can get in a lot of trouble for it, and they eventually will. Again, a lot of attorneys are so scared of these firms that they don't even market. They just give up and say, "Please give me my crusts of stale bread and water and I'll live off that. Thank you, sir."

You can never be like that. There are many niches within niches. Let's take auto accidents as an example. There are auto accidents with uninsured drivers, luxury vehicles, trucks, motorcycles, manslaughter, catastrophic injury, etc. There are many aspects and many sub-niches of every niche you're in.

If you're in family law, there's the 25-year-old who has been married for two years with no assets and no kids and who just wants to annul a marriage, and there's the married 32 years with three teenage kids, a business, three houses, and motorcycles and boats and all that. These two cases are very different and one will make you a lot more money than the other. Just because someone advertises everywhere, it doesn't mean they're going to get the juicy cases and only the crappy ones will come to you. In every single law practice area, there are many sub-niches.

If you're in DUI law, there are DUIs under 21, DUIs under 18, DUI due to prescription drugs, illegal drugs, or alcohol, second, third, fourth, and fifth DUIs, high BAC DUIs, DUIs with breath test refusal, DUI with a commercial driver's license, DUI with an out-of-state driver's license, and on and on. Every niche has a lot of sub-niches. Do not be afraid of these omnipresent omnivores, because when the chips are down like they were this year in 2020 with COVID, those guys and gals get killed, because they're spending $100,000 a month on advertising and if the clients dry up, they're dead.

That amount of debt service comes like a tsunami to wipe them out. You're probably in a very good position, you'd be surprised. Keep your debts low. Keep yourself lean and mean and hungry, you can still get great cases, and you can survive perfectly well and miss these omnipresent omnivores. I hope this helps. These are two more of the marketing monsters.

Tomorrow, we have one more marketing monster, and a staff, family, and friend monster. We're getting there.

Hello, this is Richard Jacobs with Jacobs & Whitehall and Speakeasy Authority Marketing. We're going to continue on a quest to uncover all the monsters that affect attorneys and their law firms, especially during this time of Halloween. We've gone through a bunch of client monsters, and we're well into the marketing monsters.

Today, I want to tell you about two of them: the paid leads pusher and the new client hopium dealer, both similar but distinct, and both terrible for your practice. The paid leads pusher is someone that hawks pay-per-click and paying for leads, and it sounds attractive when they first do it. They say, "Oh, it's only $50 per lead, and if you don't like the lead, you can challenge it and email us back and we'll credit you some of the leads if they qualify."

Only get leads in your area, only pay for what you need, etc.? It sounds wonderful but I used to be in this business. It is a tough business and a lot of the attorneys who do it are new. There may be other ones who really want clients immediately, and they want that hit right away. They can't wait for SEO and don't want to wait to build referral systems or do follow up or any of that. They need that hit—that crack hit right now.

It seems like paid leads are simple, but there are problems you may not know about, and the paid lead pushers won't tell you about them. This is because they want to hook you on their drugs; the moment you stop paying, the leads go away. It's not like SEO, which is like muscle building. If you build a muscle, you build up health, so if you don't go to the gym one day, you don't fall to pieces. With paid leads, if you don't pay the bill, the service gets turned off. That's it, no more leads, and then you're left stuck. This can happen. It has happened to many attorneys.

Another thing is it makes you dependent on that crack hit; you have to get that lead, and you have to be Johnny-on-the-spot and call that lead immediately. What a lot of these companies do, even if they tell you it's exclusive, is resell leads to other attorneys. Do you know why? Because some attorneys who are bad about answering their phone or answering texts will complain that all the leads are garbage. It's the attorneys fault, not the lead providers fault. I used to have to do this sometimes.

You would allow people to pay a lot more for exclusive leads, and if they didn't convert them, they wouldn't stay a client very long. Or, you would have to offer the leads to other people after a few minutes if the first attorney didn't answer because that lead is going to be calling and Googling and looking and all that after filling in a form; they're not just filling in a form and waiting for you to get back to them. That's not how people are today. They want instant results too. They are addicted to their own crack.

What this does is put you on call 24/7. You may want to get leads only during office hours, but sometimes it doesn't work like that. If you're paying for them, then you're paranoid about every lead that you don't answer, so you always have to be Johnny-on-the-spot and answer that phone. If you're at dinner, if you're hanging out with your spouse, if you're going for a walk, you can never rest, which is terrible.

What if you're on a Zoom session or in court and you can't answer? If you don't have an answering service that does a good job and if you're not on top of these leads 24/7, 365, they'll pass you by. Then, you'll want credit for the lead and you'll have fights with the companies that provide them. This is both sides of the coin. Paid leads make you impatient. It's like using social media; you become addicted and your attention span becomes very short. You're always looking for that next lead. If you land a client, you may celebrate for five seconds, but then another call is coming, and another and another…and you tend to just turn into a crack addict.

Paid lead pushers are bad news. It's not a way to build a law practice. It'll take you out of the mindset of doing a good job because you'll always be looking for that next hit. It stops you from pursuing referral strategies. It even leads to people building up huge receivables in certain industries, like bankruptcy, because even if clients aren't paying the bills, they're thinking, "Hmm, I'm just going to get more clients and that'll pay the bills, that'll fix it." They pay no attention to the real running, honing, and optimization of their business; they're just looking for that next crack hit. Don't let the paid lead pushers push you around.

Another thing to consider is that the quality of their leads may not be very good. I'm going to be very frank with you: we used to deal with all the paid lead providers, and the average was three in 10 leads were viable. That was the max. The rest were ghosts, not qualified, in the wrong practice area, wrong geography, freebie seekers, or something else was wrong with them.

If you're paying $50 a lead, that really means you're paying $150 per viable lead, approximately. You are not paying $50 a lead. But if you close one in 10, which is the average we saw (and remember, I delivered over 35,000 DUI leads years ago when I ran myduiattorney.org, so I know the numbers and the average attorney converted one in 10), then you need to know that you're not paying $50 a client, you're paying $50 a lead. In reality, if you close one in 10, it's $500 to get a client, which is not so bad, considering other marketing avenues.

I'm not saying don't do paid leads, but please do not make it what you depend on, because you're just headed down a bad path that will destroy your business and your ability to be patient and build a real, sustainable law practice—not one that's hooked like this.

Let's talk about the new client hopium dealer. Everyone wants new clients, and everyone wants more clients. Unfortunately, no one really wants to squeeze the juice out of the lead flow they're already getting. They think the grass is greener, and they want to chase new and exciting things; this is human nature, and I feel the exact same way.

Once books have been on my desk for a month, I'm not really interested in reading them. But when I get a new one in the mail, I take it out of its packaging and I want to read it. It's just human nature. That's how it is. The new and the unknown is always exciting. There are plenty of marketers who know hopium is one of the most addictive drugs out there, so they'll pitch you and sell you on all kinds of stuff. They will say they're going to unleash a flood of new business into your practice and that you're going to get three more clients a week or 12 more clients a month.

Reality check: all you need to do is pay this service, and all of a sudden, your practice is going to double or triple? It's just not going to happen, I'm sorry. When we talk about results, we give you realistic expectations. I'm not saying just hire us, I'm just saying have realistic expectations. You may get a 10 to 15 percent bump in the first six months with our service, and if you're with our service for a year, you may get 30 or 50 percent bump. That's significant.

If you're making $500,000 a year gross and netting $150,000 in your law office and I bump you up 50 percent, that's a huge deal. That's a lot more money than you were getting. Very reasonably, 10 to 15 percent can mean several thousand more a month, and one or two more clients a month.

For most attorneys, that's pretty significant. One more client a month in family law could mean $5,000 more a month. In DUI, it could mean $3,000 to $5,000 a month, and in personal injury, it could mean $10,000 because you wouldn't take a case smaller than that. In bankruptcy, it might mean $1,500. In business law, if you're negotiating a commercial lease or doing a business entity formation or business strategy, it could mean many thousands over time with repeat business.

It is the same thing with estate planning, since an estate plan may be several thousand dollars. It's significant. You don't need huge numbers and I don't want you to be seduced by marketing companies that tell you they have an easy button and that they do it all for you, you're going to get new clients, and you don't have to do any work. It's just hopium; it's bullshit, to be frank.

Whenever you do marketing—and I am being 100 percent straight with you—you can't just sit back and turn it on and let it run while you do nothing. No marketing works for attorneys works like that. I've been doing this for 11 years and have worked with well over 1,000 attorneys personally, and believe me, either I'm the dumbest person in the world and I don't know what I'm talking about, or I know what reality is; unfortunately, the reality is that you do have to put in some work.

If whoever you work with to get the best results just hands you that pipe and has you smoke the hopium, you're not going to get new clients. It's just not going to happen. I'm very sorry to tell you, I've had to work really hard on Speakeasy to make it what it is today.

Again, I've been at this for 11 years. There have been many times when I got stuck at a certain client level, and it took me months to grow beyond it. I wanted to give up many times, and I decided, I'm going to go back into the pit and slug it out and figure this out. When I did, I rose to the next level of sophistication, money, and success. You must do the same thing. You cannot smoke the hopium, and if a marketer is going to promise you all kinds of stuff, you really need to look into the details and take personal responsibility for working with them.

These two drug-dealer-esque monsters are powerful and seductive, but they really won't put you on the path to success and they may actually ruin you for other marketers. You may say you've been burned four, five, or six times and you don't trust anyone anymore. You know what? To be 100 percent frank, you have to take on part of that responsibility and ask yourself, "What part of this was my fault?" I'm not saying you were foolish and that you shouldn't have worked with any marketing companies. I'm asking whether you put in the work. Did you really look at things and build systems and processes to see how the marketing fits into your world, determine what kind of cases you want, and tailor and develop the content?

If you did all that, then you can fairly say you've been burned. But as one person told me, "You can't cheat an honest man." If that phrase makes any sense to you, "You can't burn an earnest attorney" is how I'd rephrase it for you. Take heed of these two monsters because they are bad news and there are much better, more wholesome, holistic, and muscle-building ways to build your practice.

Welcome back to day seven of the monsters that affect attorneys and their law firms. We're continuing with all marketing monsters. So far, we've talked about the branding barbarian, the social media serpent, and the Rip Van Winkle of referrals.

Today is the follow-up fumbler and the SEO siren. Like someone in football who fumbles the ball, dropping it on the ground and letting the other team get it, a fumbler is someone who is a screw up; they are dropping the ball and not following up. Why is this important? You may be of the opinion that when you do an initial consult with a client and they don't hire you right then and there, they're not coming back, so why pursue them? Why follow up with them?

This is a huge mistake. I don't know about you, but with the coronavirus this past year, every lead is precious, and every client is precious. We never know what's going to happen with the economic climate. It's been a roller coaster x100, I'm sure for everyone listening. Some people have done phenomenally well, but everyone's been really nervous about it, including clients. Do you think now is the time to have that attitude of, there's another bus coming in five minutes? No. You've got to be following up with all of your potential clients, because if you don't, you're not going to have good conversion rates. Conversion rate means you talk to 10 viable people, and you retain five of them. I've spoken to many attorneys throughout the years who will speak to 100 people and get one of them. Some of the best get one out of every three people. There's a vast difference of ability in how people convert.

What's the point of converting? What's the point of following up? You've got to realize that you spend money on marketing for each potential client, and you spend time doing initial consults; this is time that could be spent servicing other clients, doing other types of marketing, sitting and relaxing and smoking a cigar, watching a movie, or whatever it is you could be doing. But they've sucked up your time and energy and money only to disappear, and you don't follow up on them. That's like just setting money on fire. From now on, when there's a client you don't follow up on and they sound viable, I want you to picture hundreds of dollar bills being burned in a fire, because that's what you're doing and I'm being totally honest here.

Following up without spending any extra money on marketing can mean one to three or more extra clients every month, and if you're charging anything that's reasonable, that's at least $1,500 if it's a bankruptcy on the low end, $3,000 for a DUI or family law case, and maybe $5,000 for a personal injury case. You're going to not do a case unless your third is at least $10,000, so you're leaving a lot of money on the table. Again, you've spent hundreds, sometimes thousands of dollars, to get these people to text you, call you, email you, fill out a form, and schedule that initial consult. You better follow up.

The follow-up fumblers are the people who say they just need more leads or more phone calls. I've heard it all before. I've heard it hundreds and hundreds of times. It's foolish. It's very foolish. It's like trying to bring water home and your bucket has big holes in it. I don't care how much water you put in that bucket; it's just going to run out. You're going to get home and there'll be like two drops in it. What's the point of that? What's the point of making money and not keeping any of it?

To give you another example, I've been that person many times, and there is no point. You can work for years at a time and end up no better than you were five, 10, 15, or 20 years ago. Would you like that? No. You must follow up, and there are ways to do it without hurting your positioning, and without making you look like a weak, feeble person who is chasing a potential client.

There are really sophisticated ways to do it, and I've talked about them before. The fumbler is an advisor you have, a marketing person, your computer guy, or even family and friends, and they're saying, "Oh, don't follow up, it lowers your position to do that. Don't call them back, don't email them back, don't chase them because they're not going to come anyway. If they didn't want you the first time, they're not going to come back." It's a bad mental place to be and it's wrong thinking. I promise you, there is room in your practice to improve your follow up, and if you do, it's going to be so cool.

There are people who will come back to you. Sometimes it takes days or weeks or even months in certain practice areas, but they'll come back to you and you'll be surprised. They'll say, "I was thinking and thinking and thinking, and I finally decided I need your help. Let's do it." They'll say you called them the other day, emailed them the other day, or they got your card in the mail (or whatever it was), and they decided to do it. Then, you get that case when you otherwise wouldn't. If you don't follow up, you're at the mercy of the latest person they see on AVVO. They see an advertisement for the type of law that you do, they go with that person, and you think, "Why the hell did they go with them? I spent so much time with this person, what's wrong with them?" That person's not a good lawyer.

It may be because they're the last person they saw and that you didn't follow up. Don't fumble this one. It is incredibly important. I can't state it enough. If we didn't follow up with our attorneys, we would have starved to death a long time ago, and if any of you've seen my picture, I'm not starving physically (as Dan Kennedy once told me as a joke, which I took pretty well). Please follow up. Don't let this monster eat your business and cause you to lose out. It's a big mistake.

Now we're going to move on to the SEO siren. If you remember, the Iliad, the Odyssey, Homer; he went on this great journey, and at one point, he knew he was sailing into waters where there were these beautiful women that would sing and lure the sailors to their death. They would make them steer their ships towards the rocks, they would crash upon the rocks, and I don't know if the sirens would devour them or what would happen, but they were beautiful women who would lure sailors with their song. Homer actually had his crew members tie him to the mast and blindfold him (and I don't know if they plugged his ears), and he told them that whatever he says, don't let him go towards the sirens, and he struggled and struggled with all his might. He couldn't control himself, and he went towards the sirens.

SEO, unfortunately, can be this. It may be right for you; it may not be. What is the lure of SEO, the first page of Google, the sweet song of being number one for "Dallas DWI lawyer", or number one for "Los Angeles Auto Accident Attorney", or number one for "Orlando Business Law Attorney"? This is the siren song that so many attorneys are called towards, thinking that if they can just get there, the practice is going to be wonderful and they're going to get all this business. I've been there.

Years ago, I ran a site called myduiattorney.org and we provided DUI leads nationwide. I was obsessed with getting to be number one in the nation for "DUI attorney" and "DUI lawyer." By the way, I got there for a very short time. I worked my ass off and SEOed the heck out of the site, and I got higher and higher in the rankings. I remember I was on a trip and checking my phone like five times a day. I was number three, then number two, and finally I got to be number one.

Guess what? Crickets. We got, I don't know, eight to 10 more visitors to the site a day with that positioning, but no business, and no calls. Nothing. It didn't work. I learned then that this false siren song of SEO was no good. It ended up being a great thing because I developed my whole dandelion keyword theory, which is about long-tail keywords, which is how people really search. You may have heard this before, but people don't just put in "DUI attorney," but they may put in "Pulled over in Alameda, blew a 0.20, will I go to jail." If it's family law, they might type in, "Is it true the wife always gets custody of the kids?" If it's estate planning, they might type in, "Brother wants to cut me out of their will. What can I do?"

These are the things that people actually search because these are the questions in their mind. They're called long-tail keywords. The keyword or the question keywords is another way we refer to them. The short keywords that everyone thinks of like "San Francisco criminal defense lawyer" are shopping keywords that someone might search for after they know they want a particular type of attorney and they are shopping for one. Guess which keywords are the most expensive? Those keywords.

Guess which keywords everyone's gunning for with 100 hands grabbing for that last brownie? Those keywords. Guess which keywords are the absolute hardest to rank for and only come at the very end when your site is incredibly strong? Those keywords. Guess which keywords everyone ignores, and which are the real money-makers and which intercept potential clients a lot earlier on in their decision-making process? The question keywords, those long-tail ones.

If you show up for those and you don't go after the vanity keywords and you don't fall prey to the SEO siren song of getting to the top of Google, then you're going to do far better and get far more clients. This is a very expensive, dangerous monster that can eat up months, years, and hundreds of thousands of dollars. It never stops eating, this monster. It'll eat up everything you have and then some. All your time, all your energy, all your resources. Be aware of the SEO siren. Make sure that it's done right. There are many other calls of the SEO siren, like keyword stuffing, which is having a lot of keywords on your page. There are all kinds of tricks.

I want you to realize one other thing, which is that Google's algorithm represents hundreds of billions of dollars of revenue for their company. Do you think there's going to be an easy way to game their algorithm that other people don't know about? Do you think there's a hole that they will leave open for people like you to game their system and get to the top when other people are trying to do the same thing? Seriously? It's like trying to break into Fort Knox with a nail file and a piece of chewing gum. Do you think that Google's going to leave this multi-billion-dollar asset unprotected without a myriad of defenses and complexity? No, they're not.

Don't play that game. Don't try to scam them. Don't try to do a black hat. Don't try to do these amateurish little tricks because they'll just slap you and say "Get out of here. We have plenty of other sites that are doing the right thing. We call the shots." If you don't do it, they just kick you to the curb in two seconds. You're not even a fly on their back. You're like a bacterium on top of a fly on top of their back. They don't even know you exist and they could care less. They will de-index you and get rid of you if you push hard enough. This is not a siren song you want to listen to. The fate is certain death, so make sure you do things right. Make sure you get the right advice and please be careful. This may be one of the most dangerous monsters out there. Thank you.

Hello, this is Richard Jacobs with Speakeasy Authority Marketing and Jacobs & Whitehall. Today is day six of the Halloween broadcast of 13 podcasts. Thirteen is an unlucky number, because unfortunately, you have to hear about two of the 26 monsters that affect attorney's law firms and attorneys themselves. There are client monsters, there are marketing monsters, there are family, friend, and staff monsters. Now, we are into the marketing monsters. We've covered the client monsters.

Just to refresh, we have the ghost, the backseat driver, the nervous nelly, the vampire, the wimpy, the backstabber, the bungler, the narcissist, and the canary. Now, we are into the marketing monsters. We covered the branding barbarian yesterday.

Today we are going to talk about the social media serpent and the Rip Van Winkle of referrals. These two marketing monsters are pernicious, and they are out there. First, I'm going to talk to you about the social media serpent. The social media serpent is like the serpent in the Garden of Eden promising you that apple, saying, "Come on. Take a bite." What they tell you to take a bite out of is social media, which I've seen is poison. You can see what social media does to you, your family members, people you know…how it makes them depressed and irritable.

They are like drug addicts having to check it all the time, and unfortunately, there are these social media serpents that are hissing about all the new metrics and all the new media and saying that the old ways don't work so forget about them. Everyone's on social media, you've got to be on social media, you've got to post on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, Snapchat, and endless other channels.

This is an endless amount of work, and posting on social media is like trying to have a conversation with someone in the middle of a rock concert. There is so much noise around you, there are so many people screaming and hooting and hollering and signaling and posturing that having a conversation with someone on social media is impossible. You've got to get them off social media and onto your website, on their phone with you through text message, or on email; a quiet, private back room where you can have a chance at trying to get them as a customer. Social media can work, but the people who talk only about it and nothing else don't know what they are doing. I'm sorry. Likes and followers, you can't put them in the bank. Likes don't become clients and they don't pay retainers, nor do followers.

A lot of these stars have a million followers, 50,000 likes, eight million YouTube views, etc. It's meaningless, and it doesn't turn into business. It doesn't turn into clients. I would rather have no Facebook presence, no social media presence, and save time, monies, and aggravation by using real methods that work to get clients, than look at the fake vanity metrics of followers and listeners and downloads. Again, you've got to realize these are vanity metrics. The social media serpent makes a lot of money on these things because they say, "Ooh, social media is really difficult and you've got to have the right branding and the right message, and you've got to Tweet and post and do videos constantly."

You will end up on a treadmill of content creation, and guess what? If the social media platform doesn't like you, they will flag you or de-platform you. This has happened to many attorneys, and it comes in waves. They had YouTube accounts for four, five, six, or seven years, when all of a sudden YouTube said their videos violate community guidelines.

What? They take them all down. We asked YouTube what happened and what was violated, and they responded with, "Oh, you violated our community guidelines." We looked at the community guidelines and couldn't find out why, and we asked them again, "What have we violated?" They said, "Please read the community guidelines." It's like a broken record. They couldn't care less.

Meanwhile, all your videos are down. If they were embedded on your site, they all go to broken URLs and you are out of luck. If you haven't kept your information, you are gone, de-platformed, finished, goodbye. As you probably know, just this past week, the social media platforms blocked the Washington Post. Social media have blocked Trump's tweets. You may like him, or you may not like him; that's not the point.

The point is that these platforms are very powerful and can use that power against people they don't like or who go against their narrative or whatever it may be. Again, it's not liberal, it's not conservative. To you and I, it doesn't matter what side we are on. They have de-platformed people, and if they de-platform you, you are finished. Using social media only is building on shifting sands.

All your platforms and everything can be taken away from you at a moment's notice. It's a horrible idea to stake your claim on social media because you could wake up and it could all be gone—dozens of videos, hundreds of posts, thousands of followers gone.

If you are going to use social media, make sure you back up everything so if they de-platform you, you have a copy. Get all the emails you can, all the phone numbers you can, and all the names you can. If you don't have any of that stuff, you better find a way to get people out of the crowded social media room and onto platforms that you control, like your website, text message, email, phone, or your office.

If you don't get your client's information or your potential client's info, you may never see them again. Then, you've got to go back to the well and pay social media to promote your post yet again. Be very careful with the social media serpents. It's a Faustian bargain, I would tell you. Be careful.

Now we are going to talk about the Rip Van Winkle of referrals. Rip Van Winkle, as you know, is a fairy tale where he fell asleep for something like 100 years and woke up and didn't know what was going on. It's probably the opposite of social media serpents, the Rip Van Winkles. Referrals only; they are the best kind of client and I just deal with word-of-mouth only.

This may work in certain spots but it may not, especially in today's climate where everyone is hyper-connected. People don't have the same respect that they did for lawyers back in the day. I'm sorry, they just don't. It doesn't matter how good you are, people forget, they are busy, they are overstimulated.

Look at your own life; how much stuff comes at you? I'm lucky you listen to my stuff and I've been talking to you for years and years. I've been talking to attorneys for over 11 years. Every week, I get emails and calls from attorneys who say, "Hey Rich, I've been on your list for a year and now I'm ready to do [XYZ]" or, "Hey Rich, I've been listening to your stuff for three years and here is what is going on." If I hadn't been around and present in these people's lives for months and years at a time, I would never get this business.

Back to Rip Van winkle. Referrals are wonderful, and they are usually good clients. Guess what? No one even has a system for cultivating them. Just sitting there and saying you're going to depend only on word of mouth or referrals is nice but you are probably going to starve to death in the short-term because unfortunately, the world has changed. You can't just depend on the belief that someone is going to remember you. You are going to need a newsletter that's going to go out at least monthly through email, and probably physical mail.

You are going to need to call past clients and find a reason to do so. Maybe you need to update their will, maybe you have an expungement coming, maybe their marital status is going to change and it lets you help them with a family law case, or there's new custody issues or changes. Maybe you did a real estate lease with them and now that lease is ending and coming for re-up. Maybe you've done business formation, and now they need more business-attorney type stuff.

You've got to keep up with people to get referrals; they are not just going to come to you. You have to have a system for this. How do you get people to refer without just reminding them and saying, "Hey, I'm alive, come back and see me." There is a whole science to this. You can't just be like Rip Van Winkle and say it's like the 1950s and you're going to do things that way because it just doesn't work.

Anyone who holds onto that belief can't be doing really well without multiple systems and multiple marketing methods, not just referrals. Don't listen to the Rip Van Winkles that tell you of the good old days, because the good old days have gone. Things have changed. Beware of these two marketing monsters.

Tomorrow we are going to go into more of them and I hope this helps you. I want you to be on the lookout for all these monsters. You can't defend against all of them all of the time, but if you are aware of them, at least you have a fighting chance. Thank you for listening.

From 17 to 160 million in settlements and verdicts per year, in a very short period of time. How? All of the secrets are contained in Attorney Mike Morse's book, Fireproof: A Five-Step Model to Take Your Law Firm from Unpredictable to Wildly Profitable. Attorney Morse shares his knowledge and insights. Press play to learn:

• When it comes to advertisements in law, how to go from vanilla to cherry Garcia (i.e. how to stand out among the rest, be recognized for it, and profit from it)
• How Attorney Morse and his team have responded and adapted to the changes brought about by COVID-19
• What's holding lawyers back from scaling their law practices and becoming wildly more profitable

Morse is the founder of the largest personal injury firm in Michigan, but he hasn't always been. For the first 12 or 13 years, he ran his law firm by the seat of his pants, with no formal processes, systems, or way to manage the firm like a business. It was small, and relatively profitable, but nowhere near its full potential.

He didn't know how to scale, run a business, hire, fire, and pay employees, market himself, or make sense of the data and numbers tied to his practice. Morse says that so many other attorneys are held back from real growth because they also don't know how to do these things—in large part because it's not taught in law school. It wasn't until he decided to turn things around and figure out what was necessary for true growth that things really changed. All the information, experiences, advice, and insights he learned along the way are now available to anyone in his new book.

"If I had this book when I was in law school, I would have been a lot happier in my beginning years. I would have understood what I needed to do to really run a law firm as opposed to what every other lawyer does…" says Morse.

Tune in for all the details, visit https://www.855mikewins.com/ to learn more about Mike Morse, and find digital and audio copies of Fireproof: A Five-Step Model to Take Your Law Firm from Unpredictable to Wildly Profitable virtually anywhere online, including Amazon and Audible.

Good evening. This is Richard Jacobs with Speakeasy Authority Marketing, and Jacobs & Whitehall. Today is day five of the monsters that affect attorneys and their law practices. There are many monsters out there, and I've identified 26 of them; that's why you get two a day for 13 unlucky days of these audio broadcasts. You have to know about these monsters, you have to be aware of them, and you have to keep them away from your practice.

If you find one in and amongst your practice, you have to do everything you can to put a stake through their heart to stop them from destroying you, because they will intentionally, unintentionally, willfully, happily, accidentally do it. Watch out.

Today is the last of the client monsters: the canary. Then we're going to start on the marketing monsters, the first of which I call the branding barbarian. Today is a bit of a mix of one last client monster, and one marketing and promotion monster.

We'll start with the canary. As you know, in the old story of the canary and the coal mine, the canary sings when the toxic gases in the mine start to build up, and this alerts the miners so that they don't die. Unfortunately, canaries love to sing. They just love to do it. What is the canary in terms of a client? It's a client that won't shut up.

It's a client that's pulled over by police for who knows what, maybe their tail light is out, and they blab so much that they somehow end up getting a DUI. Or, they're in a divorce situation and they can't help but post stuff all over social media, talk to their friends, or text their soon-to-be ex-spouse or his or her friends and just put their dirty laundry out in the street for everyone to see.

These people are very hard to defend because they sing to everybody. They're canaries, they put their foot in their mouth because of it, and they can ruin a case that's going really well. You want to watch out for them and prevent them from singing to everyone. You have to say to them, "Do NOT talk to anyone about your case." I'm not telling you how to practice law by any means; you are far more experienced than I am. That's fine. I'm just telling you to watch out for these kinds of clients and to know the kind of damage they can do.

Undoubtedly, you've had clients in your past who acted like this. I'm here to tell you that regardless of your area of law if it's a will contest, or some kind of estate planning, you don't want a canary revealing what's going on with the estate and what the plans are, or what's in the will or what's happening with Uncle Joe that's about to pass in a week.

You don't want them talking and ruining your ability to defend them. If they're in a personal injury case, and they actually are injured or they're alleging they're injured, you don't want pictures of them on the golf course, videos of them at some party, or Facebook posts of them waterskiing, because it'll ruin the case. You don't want them singing to everyone, literally showing that they're actually in perfectly fine health and can work.

Regardless of the area of law—whether you're in family law, criminal defense, estate planning, business law, or whatever it may be—the canary sings, and everyone listens in. You know that prosecutors and other attorneys scour social media and that it's a gold mine of information. They can subpoena emails and phone calls and text messages that canaries love to broadcast on all the time and screw up their case. You need to advise your clients right at the beginning not to do this.

If you suspect you've got a canary, you've got to have a staff member or yourself check all their social media and everything that they post, continuously. When you have a client that you suspect is a canary or has a very sensitive case, I would assemble a list of their social media channels and the ways they communicate, and regularly scan them for trouble, for songs from the canary. Have they left any voicemails? Have they sent any text messages? Do they use any apps like Snapchat? If they do sing and send something out, you want to try to pull that thing down immediately and contain the damage.

Canaries are very dangerous and can turn against you when the case is over. If things went well, they may sing about it and write you a great review. If things didn't go well, or even if you think things went well and they just feel like talking, they may blab on about you and your firm in the wrong way. You don't want to be represented like that, so you must be very careful in managing these kinds of people. I'm not talking about a sweet little small canary; I'm imagining Tweety Bird when he drank that potion and grew to be six feet tall and became a monster. That's the kind of canary I'm talking about; true monsters that affect your practice. Watch out.

Now we're going to get into the marketing monsters. Marketing monsters include marketing channels, marketing sales reps, SEO companies, etc., and while they may have your best interests at heart, the things that they tell you to do in your law practice may not be a good idea. You have to be aware because there are many marketing monsters out there. The first one is the branding barbarian. The branding barbarian could be someone who works for you or could be your marketing company and they're all about branding.

They'll give you ideas and point to large brands like Coca-Cola or Facebook and say you have to get your name out there. They will say people have to see your name 100 times, and they're going to be the ones encouraging you to do billboards on the highway or bus stop benches or make sure you're at the top of Google, and make sure you're posting on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and Twitter every day. They're all about branding; they want you to look beautiful, they want you to have beautiful business cards, beautiful websites, and everything must look absolutely perfect. They're obsessed with the brand.

Do you know what creates the brand? People who actually hire you and use your services and are represented by you. The way you treat them and the way you work with them is your brand. A brand isn't just something that you decide it is; a brand is the overall experience of all of your customers. If you provide great service, if you go to 5,10, or 15 hearings, and if you're accessible to clients all the time, then they'll know and communicate that, and that will be your brand. You could even communicate that what your clients say is your brand.

You've got to be very careful with people who talk about branding. Here's another reason why these monsters don't care about your budget. Branding takes a lot of money. If you want to be like Coca-Cola or Doritos, you have to spend millions and millions of dollars, and you don't have it. I don't have it. We have to be smart. We have to be direct marketers. We have to get direct response, and go for advertising where we know how many clicks we get, how many calls we get, and how many emails we get. If we spend $100 to get an email and one in five of those turns into a client, that means $500 to get a client from this particular source of marketing. Or, if we spend $85 on Google Pay-Per-Click to get a call, and one in 10 calls are a good client, that means we spent $850 on Pay-Per-Click to get a $4,000 client.

Great. It's worth it. But we know our numbers. We don't focus on branding. We don't do ads where there's no way to contact us. There's no reason for doing so, because there's no urgency, no nothing. This is the way I've learned to market. This is what works.

Branding may come way down the road if you're making millions of dollars. But for the most part, it's a waste of money. When I look at these big firms that are everywhere and spending all this money on billboards and TV, they do make a lot of money, but their overhead is huge. When things like the coronavirus situation come about, they're some of the first to drown because they have such high expenses and their clients dry up; they're dead, and their debt and their monthly net is a tsunami that comes to drown them very quickly.

The branding barbarian is very strong. He wants to beat you up and muscle his way into your practice and tell you what to do and beat down your gates. You can't listen to him or her because they don't know what they're talking about, and I stand by what I say.

This is day five of the monsters that affect law practices and attorneys. Take heed. Tomorrow is day six. We're going to get deeper into the marketing monsters that can easily disrupt and destroy your law practice.

Good evening. This is Richard Jacobs with Speakeasy Authority Marketing, and Jacobs & Whitehall. Today is day four, where we cover the monsters that affect attorneys and their law firms. These monsters come from three distinct groups of client types: marketing, staff, and family and friends. Any of these three groups contain all kinds of monsters that threaten to ruin and disrupt your practice. This being the season of Halloween, we have 13 unlucky days, where I go into all these monsters that affect your law practices. Today is day four, and we're going to talk about the bungler and the narcissist. These two monsters are very important for your law practice.

What is a bungler? It isn't a bundler, it's a bungler—someone who keeps screwing up. You've all undoubtedly had clients like this. They can't seem to do things right. You've given them instructions to not post on social media about playing golf while claiming to be hurt after an auto accident, yet they do it anyway. You tell them not to post on social media about anything that their spouse will see that could hurt their ability to maintain or get custody of their children, but they keep screwing it up. You tell them not to continue driving while their license is suspended because they're already headed for a DUI, and if they get pulled over on a suspended license, they're going to have all kinds of other problems…but they do it anyway. You tell them not to get in any more trouble because they're already under indictment or facing misdemeanor or felony charges, and if they go near that school or person, then they'll be in violation of the protective order, or if they are seen with these kinds of people, the judge is going to go really harshly on them…but they do it.

There is another type of bungler, which is one that is back for their second, third, fourth, or fifth DUI, or their second, third, or fourth domestic violence case, or they seem to get in accidents and slip-and-falls every year. What is going on with these people? No matter how good your representation, you're unlikely to get good results for people who serially offend and just can't keep themselves out of trouble. They keep getting in their own way.

It may be okay to take these people on, they may be a good source of money, and you may think they're good clients. But at some point, their luck is going to turn because of their own incompetence. When it does, you don't want to be there when they write that bad review, or when they stop paying your fees, or when they hate you and go to the bar and claim you didn't practice properly or committed some kind of fraud or illegality in your representation. You don't want them telling people that you didn't represent them to the fullest when it was their fault.

You want to identify this. You might have repeat clients who you think might just be gold mines who you can continually get money from, but sometimes they are, and sometimes they're not. Or, you might have a client in a really high stakes case who you have advised on what to do or what not to do, and they are causing themselves problems. You have to cut that off early, because if you have an important case, even if it's the first case for someone, and they're screwing it up, then they are probably going to blame you. If they screw up their own case and ruin their own chances, they're never going to blame themselves, because they're a bungler. Be aware of these people and make sure they don't drag you down with them and bungle and mess up your law practice.

The next type of client monster is the narcissist. This is someone who just has to let the world know every time they eat a meal, every time they go to a party, every time they talk to someone, or every time their kids say "Hello" or "I love you dad." Whatever it is, the narcissist is all over social media posting everything and anything. This relates to the bungler, who is well-intentioned.

The narcissist is concerned about themselves and what's happening with them; they don't realize that their behavior can affect family members, their case, and your ability to defend them. It affects a lot of things, but they're just a narcissist, so they have to talk about themselves. These people usually make terrible people to put on the stand, because they'll just talk and say everything, and they won't even know that they're causing themselves trouble. They'll post all kinds of inappropriate things on social media and just add fuel to the prosecutor's fire or the other party's fire.

I'm not telling you how to practice law; I'm just telling you to look out for these kinds of people and get them in check early. Give them specific examples of how you have had clients who were very well-meaning, but posted certain things or talked to certain people and ruined their whole case because they weren't aware that the world doesn't care about them, and the legal system doesn't care about them.

The legal system has other jobs and other cares, and in order for you to defend them properly—whether in family law, estate planning, a will contest, an auto accident, getting them out of a commercial lease, or anything else—they can't be posting stuff all over the place. They've got to keep quiet; they may not be able to talk to anyone about their case, which is very hard for narcissists to do, but you have to instruct these people because they have to stay quiet.

What do you expect them to do when it comes to your law firm? They may post all kinds of stuff about it, including negative reviews which can result in a lack of referrals. It can be a nightmare. You have to manage these clients and look out for them. Be careful. In certain situations, they may actually cause you to feel uncomfortable with an ethical situation. For instance, there may be a family law case where kids are involved, and the parent that you're representing is a narcissist who really doesn't care about the welfare of the kids; they're just using them as a tool against the other parent and they really don't care what happens to them. It's not easy to defend someone and to know this, especially if you love kids, and this will trouble you.

Narcissists can pull on your ethical base and push you in directions where you don't want to go ethically. They can compromise you as a person on a personal level, not just professionally. You want to be careful and not let yourself be dragged into their world, because they want all the attention. They want everything to be about them, and it cannot only be about them. You have other clients to service.

You have your own family to support, you have your own firm, and you may have your own employees. Your professionalism, dignity, and platform cannot be compromised by a narcissistic client. Watch out for these people. They're actually a form of vampire, but just be very careful.

Today is day four of the monsters that affect your law practice and want to suck the life from it. Take heed

Good evening. This is Richard Jacobs talking to you about more monsters that plague attorney practices. Today we are going to go over two more client monsters that plague attorneys. The first one I want to discuss is the nervous nellie. When people are uncertain, they do all kinds of things that are not rational. A nervous nellie is a client who is just nervous about their situation; they may be facing a divorce, dealing with pain from an auto accident, or being accused of a crime.

One example of a nervous nellie is a normal "soccer" mom who was arrested for DUI and is incredibly nervous that they'll go to jail, have their kids taken from them, or encounter an immigration problem. Alternatively, a nervous nellie client might have had their business destroyed by the coronavirus shutdowns, and they may be nervous about losing everything they've built for 10 years.

Many things happen in people's lives. Unfortunately, when it comes to dealing with attorneys and legal representation, there is always stress and fear about the outcome, because no one knows what it will be and it certainly can't be promised. In some sense, all clients are nervous nellies. Your job is to try to squash that right from the beginning and establish confidence, authority, and knowledge.

Don't just tell people that you will figure it out as you go, or that "you never know," because saying these types of things doesn't inspire confidence. Instead, you can say, "Listen, I can't promise you a result, but what I can tell you based on my 23 years of experience with cases that are similar to this is that there are a couple of things that are likely to happen. We can say that this is probably what's going to happen, but it would be unethical for me to promise you results." This is a good defense against the nervous nellie.

Some people might just be nervous by nature or may not trust you. Right off the bat, you have to set your authority, tell them what they need to know, answer their questions, and not rush them into signing up on a retainer. If there is uncertainty there, you'll hear it in their voice and you will sense it.

You may ask them questions about their case and they may be hesitant to give you answers because they may not know, their memory might be impaired, or they might just be nervous and sketchy. You have to evaluate people and be able to tell whether they are nervous or shifty, and get a sense of what is going on based on similar cases or clients that you've dealt with before.

Pay attention to your gut and make sure you allay people's fears. Fears can worsen from unanswered questions that you brushed off or didn't fully answer. It's always a good idea to provide people with a roadmap, all disclaimers included. You could say, "There will be a preliminary hearing, then there may be some motions, then there may be another hearing, and then there may be a trial."

Within your practice area, you can certainly give people the lay of the land. This could be a diagram, or something you verbalize to them. You can also give your admins and other people in your firm access to this info so they can relay it to clients. A nervous nellie is a pain, and if you don't prepare them well, and if you don't give your staff and everyone that works with you the right information, then you are going to have to answer all of their phone calls, emails, and "what-ifs." Everything you do and say will likely be questioned if you don't calm their nervousness.

You don't want to waste your time or your staff's time, and you don't want to be frustrated and get short with someone because they've asked you the same question three times. They shouldn't have to do that, so do your prep. Make sure to think back on your clients and consider what kinds of questions they always ask. You might write those questions in an FAQ or make some videos on them. I arm my staff with written material, references, etc.

It may be a pain to get this together, but it will reduce the nervous nellies, which are just a plague upon your practice; they will suck your time and energy, make your staff nervous and distracted, and may even cause you to question your own sanity. This is the best advice for getting rid of these monsters that plague pretty much everyone's practice.

The second client monster is one of my favorites: the vampire. There are many vampires in life. There are time vampires, such as those who say, "Can I borrow you for a second? Can I ask you a question? It'll only take two minutes…" and it ends up being 30 minutes.

A time vampire is someone who is always asking for little things and who doesn't let you focus. Some clients are time vampires who will ask questions that you've already answered and will want to talk about different scenarios and the future. This is yet another reason why you want to have all of your materials and your ducks in a row so that you don't have to waste time telling people the same thing over and over.

This material could be a series of pre-written text messages, videos, written materials, etc. that can be accessed on the client management area of your website, where clients can log in with a password. This would build a lot of confidence with clients and reduce the time that these vampires suck away from you and your staff. This will help you to be more efficient and move on to other deals, go to hearings, spend time writing up motions and looking for defenses, asking for referrals, marketing, and ultimately getting better results for your clients. Time vampires suck away everything and you just don't want them in your practice; this is how you can get rid of them.

There are also emotional vampires, which can be similar to nervous nellies and backseat drivers. Emotional vampires are always putting their emotions on you, they are always worried, they are always upset, and they are always afraid. The emotional vampire client might be having to go take care of their child and take time away from work for the fourth time that month. There is lot of drama in life, especially in 2020, and some people will turn into emotional vampires if you let them.

Emotional vampires want emotional comfort from you in whatever way they can get it. This is draining, because we all have only so much to give and we've got to take care of our own stuff. You may be having a bad day and not want to deal with clients who are crying or whimpering in fear to staff members who can't lift a finger without asking you first.

You need to guard yourself against vampires who want to suck the life out of you. There are money vampires too, but within a law practice, thankfully those people are pretty rare or don't manifest in the way that you might think. Remember that it doesn't matter whether the vampires in and around your practice are being vampires intentionally or accidentally or because they are neurotic; you don't want them to suck you dry of time, mental energy, lost opportunities, and lost money that you could have gotten from other clients. You want to guard yourself and your systems against these people and set expectations.

My customer service staff are instructed to tell our clients that we love them and we are here to help them, but we don't answer calls after hours, which is usually 6pm until 8am or 9am. We will answer on the weekends, but only for emergencies or very urgent matters. Clients are not to text us directly, but should communicate through email and phone. They are not expected to speak to the customer service people at Speakeasy Authority Marketing about personal relationship.

If a client is emailing every single day or multiple times a day (which thankfully rarely happens, but sometimes it does), then we may have to put them their place; you must do the same thing with your practice. If you have 40 or 50 clients in play at one time, or even if you have five clients in play at one time, you have to devote time to getting new clients, marketing, running your firm, attending hearings, writing motions, etc. One vampire can suck you dry and make it very difficult for you to service everyone else, including yourself.

Do you want to work an extra hour at night just because some client who is paying you just the same as everyone else is sucking you dry in time and emotional energy? No. You must guard yourself, guard your neck, guard your practice, guard your time, guard your emotions, and guard your wallet. Intentionally or not, vampires are there to drain you.

This is the end of day two of the Halloween podcasts, and there are 13 total. Look forward to more and more monsters that are coming and that I want you to be on guard about. Thank you.

Hello, this is Richard Jacobs. This is day three of the Halloween podcast revealing the monsters that are there to eat you and destroy your business—the ones we have to be aware of and fight back against for you attorneys listening. Today I have two more client monsters: the wimpy (i.e. the guy who never pays but always promises to) and the backstabber.

I get the name Wimpy from Popeye, which is a cartoon from at least 30 years ago. You might know of Popeye, the sailor man who eats spinach, but there was also a guy name Wimpy in that cartoon. Wimpy loves hamburgers, and he'd go to this place and say, "I will gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today." I don't remember if the bartender or the person making the hamburgers would give it to him, but I'm pretty sure they did, and the guy never paid. He always said, "I'll pay you Tuesday," and Tuesday never came. It's like when you've gone to a bar and it says "Free Beer Tomorrow," and the same sign is burning there every time you go.

These kinds of clients are bad news, and just like every other monster, you want to catch them upfront. If you charge for a service and the client can't pay you in full, it's your decision whether or not to take a payment plan. But it's my recommendation that if a client needs a payment plan of more than three to five years, you shouldn't want to take them. Unless you're desperate, you won't take them, because you don't want to just hope that they will pay you. Someone who doesn't have enough to pay even a third or a fifth of your fee, or at least some sizable down payment, is just never going to pay you. It's never going to happen. Right upfront, you want to be screening people to make sure they have enough money before you get too far into your song and dance.

How do you do that? You can plant seeds. You can say, "Just so you know, cases like yours depend on the facts, but they range from $3,000 on the low end and go up to $10,000 if there's a trial involved. I want you to know that going in, because I don't want to go through this whole situation with you, only for you to tell me that it's completely out of your wheelhouse. I'm sure you've seen guys or gals who will do it for $2000 or $3000, but I want to give you a breakdown here of the three possible attorneys that you can talk to, and I'm one of them.

The low ballers will do it for barely anything, but here is the problem: they can barely afford to spend any time on your case. If you need to have multiple motions or multiple hearings, if we need to get expert witnesses, if I have to spend a lot of time reviewing and drafting and fighting and pushing…I just don't have the time to do that if you pay very little. These lowball people are going to get you excited and say 'Oh, we'll handle your case,' but think about it: since they're charging so much less than everyone else, they literally don't have time to do much for your case. They've got to immediately go begin hunting for more cases just to stay afloat, especially in today's economy. You can go with an attorney like that, but I'm just letting you know that they can't do very much for you.

On the other end, you've got the guys and gals in the bigger firms that may charge [insert high number for quote]. You may see those firms on TV or in advertisements, and they're doing it because they have to cover a huge advertising bill every month. You know what's good about people who charge a lot of money? It's that they have the time and money to really go to bat on your case. They can show up to court and appear at five, 10, or 15 hearings, file many motions, exhaust the other side, and hire expert witnesses. They can go deep into your case. They can recreate some of the scenarios or testing procedures and challenge every aspect. They can really go to town for you, but they're expensive. Some people are in real dire situations and I understand they've got a lot at stake, and I'm not even going to ask if that's you yet; I'm just giving you the lay of the land.

The third person—and this is where I fall—is somewhere in between these two. I am not the cheapest, so I'm going to do a significant amount of work on your case, depending on what's needed. But I'm not the most expensive, and I don't have a huge advertising bill to pay. I'm not here so I can buy a $1,000 suit or a fancy new car; I just want to do my job and represent clients like you. I come in at the middle, and I'm going to do quite a bit on your case, should it need it."

With all of that being said, ask the potential client, "Where do you believe your case falls? Is it on the low end, the high end, or do you think it's somewhere in the middle?" Don't say where do you think you fall, but where the case falls. Let the potential client tell you where their case is going to fall once you've set up these three scenarios. You may be surprised. They may say, "I'm a commercial truck driver, so I need to protect my CDL. I was pulled over for reckless driving and DUI, and if I lose my license, my career is gone." You may want to echo that, saying "Your case is going to need some significant work here."

With a potential client who has been married for 30 years, has four teenage kids, three houses, and owns a business with which his wife is actively involved, you might say, "It sounds like your marital estate could be worth a couple of million dollars, so there's a lot at stake here, including visitation with your kids. You probably don't want to go with a low-end divorce attorney." However, you want to get the client to say this and you want it to sound rational. There should be a reason why. This defers the cheapskates and the people who really have no money but talk as if they do. When it comes to wimpy potential clients, this is a great strategy for you. If you set this out at the beginning, you can echo this throughout their case.

If you're talking with someone who has really fell on hard times (I understand this and I'm sure you understand), and you can see that they're just losing faith and paying you more and more slowly, then there are problems. I'll talk very briefly on how to confront this. There are two things: the carrot and the stick. The stick is, "Pay me or I'm withdrawing from your case; if you don't pay me, I can't go to court; if you don't pay me, then I'm not representing you; if you don't pay me, I'm going to send you to collections." The stick, if it has to come at all, should always come after as many carrots as possible.

You want them to know that the stick is there, but if you can, you want to give carrots first. For example, if someone is on a payment plan, you could tell them that if they pay on time or early, then you'll take off $50 or $100 from the payment. Yes, you'll get less money, but you're more likely to get those payments from them. What's better, getting $400 instead of $500, or getting nothing? You tell me. Always use the carrot at the last moment. If you have to use the stick, then use it. It's always better and more amicable and you'll save a lot more situations if you use the carrot first. In regards to wimpy who wants a hamburger today but won't pay till Tuesday, that is what you do.

Let's move on to the backstabber; the name says it all. These are clients, who for whatever reason, are just backstabbers. They will sometimes tell you that they had an attorney before who did something wrong, and they are looking for someone who is really going to help them. When someone tells you a story like that, listen very carefully, because they may be telling you that they stabbed the past attorney in the back. If they did, they're telling you, "I bite. I'm going to bite you in the near future."

Every once in awhile, we'll have this with Speakeasy Authority Marketing, where a client says that they didn't like what their previous company was doing, so they quit and aren't paying them. I don't want a client like that, because they're going to do the same thing to me. If I am desperate or foolish enough to take them on, I always get bitten, and I get bitten worse than you'd imagine. If you take on a backstabber, do you think they're actually going to give you a positive review? No. They're probably going to give you a negative review, even if you gave your left arm to try to help them get a good result in their case; this is because they're backstabbers.

They're going to be backseat drivers. They're going to be control freaks. They're going to be vampires. They're going to be all the monsters probably piled into one. They're going to waste your time, and they're going to waste your staff's time. They may demand a refund. They may go to the bar association and complain about you. You have to stay away from these people by looking for any hint of backstabbing in the past that lets you in on their real intention and their real mindset. Be really careful with these people because they're not worth it; they will end up costing you three times what they would ever pay you in a retainer, and probably 10 times that in mental grief. I'm warning you: this is a bad monster. Stay away.

Tomorrow, we'll be talking about more monsters. I don't want you to feel depressed or anything, but there are a lot of monsters to know about out there. I'm telling you about them so that you can avoid them, improve your practice, and marginalize it to get the clients that you want—the ones who pay money, have interesting cases, listen to you, make you look good as an attorney, and let you do the job of being an ethical defender of people's rights, which is probably why you went to law school. Keep your eyes peeled and your ears open. More is coming. Thank you.

Good evening. This is Richard Jacobs talking to you about more monsters that plague attorney practices. Today we are going to go over two more client monsters that plague attorneys. The first one I want to discuss is the nervous nellie. When people are uncertain, they do all kinds of things that are not rational. A nervous nellie is a client who is just nervous about their situation; they may be facing a divorce, dealing with pain from an auto accident, or being accused of a crime.

One example of a nervous nellie is a normal "soccer" mom who was arrested for DUI and is incredibly nervous that they'll go to jail, have their kids taken from them, or encounter an immigration problem. Alternatively, a nervous nellie client might have had their business destroyed by the coronavirus shutdowns, and they may be nervous about losing everything they've built for 10 years.

Many things happen in people's lives. Unfortunately, when it comes to dealing with attorneys and legal representation, there is always stress and fear about the outcome, because no one knows what it will be and it certainly can't be promised. In some sense, all clients are nervous nellies. Your job is to try to squash that right from the beginning and establish confidence, authority, and knowledge.

Don't just tell people that you will figure it out as you go, or that "you never know," because saying these types of things doesn't inspire confidence. Instead, you can say, "Listen, I can't promise you a result, but what I can tell you based on my 23 years of experience with cases that are similar to this is that there are a couple of things that are likely to happen. We can say that this is probably what's going to happen, but it would be unethical for me to promise you results." This is a good defense against the nervous nellie.

Some people might just be nervous by nature or may not trust you. Right off the bat, you have to set your authority, tell them what they need to know, answer their questions, and not rush them into signing up on a retainer. If there is uncertainty there, you'll hear it in their voice and you will sense it.

You may ask them questions about their case and they may be hesitant to give you answers because they may not know, their memory might be impaired, or they might just be nervous and sketchy. You have to evaluate people and be able to tell whether they are nervous or shifty, and get a sense of what is going on based on similar cases or clients that you've dealt with before.

Pay attention to your gut and make sure you allay people's fears. Fears can worsen from unanswered questions that you brushed off or didn't fully answer. It's always a good idea to provide people with a roadmap, all disclaimers included. You could say, "There will be a preliminary hearing, then there may be some motions, then there may be another hearing, and then there may be a trial."

Within your practice area, you can certainly give people the lay of the land. This could be a diagram, or something you verbalize to them. You can also give your admins and other people in your firm access to this info so they can relay it to clients. A nervous nellie is a pain, and if you don't prepare them well, and if you don't give your staff and everyone that works with you the right information, then you are going to have to answer all of their phone calls, emails, and "what-ifs." Everything you do and say will likely be questioned if you don't calm their nervousness.

You don't want to waste your time or your staff's time, and you don't want to be frustrated and get short with someone because they've asked you the same question three times. They shouldn't have to do that, so do your prep. Make sure to think back on your clients and consider what kinds of questions they always ask. You might write those questions in an FAQ or make some videos on them. I arm my staff with written material, references, etc.

It may be a pain to get this together, but it will reduce the nervous nellies, which are just a plague upon your practice; they will suck your time and energy, make your staff nervous and distracted, and may even cause you to question your own sanity. This is the best advice for getting rid of these monsters that plague pretty much everyone's practice.

The second client monster is one of my favorites: the vampire. There are many vampires in life. There are time vampires, such as those who say, "Can I borrow you for a second? Can I ask you a question? It'll only take two minutes…" and it ends up being 30 minutes.

A time vampire is someone who is always asking for little things and who doesn't let you focus. Some clients are time vampires who will ask questions that you've already answered and will want to talk about different scenarios and the future. This is yet another reason why you want to have all of your materials and your ducks in a row so that you don't have to waste time telling people the same thing over and over.

This material could be a series of pre-written text messages, videos, written materials, etc. that can be accessed on the client management area of your website, where clients can log in with a password. This would build a lot of confidence with clients and reduce the time that these vampires suck away from you and your staff. This will help you to be more efficient and move on to other deals, go to hearings, spend time writing up motions and looking for defenses, asking for referrals, marketing, and ultimately getting better results for your clients. Time vampires suck away everything and you just don't want them in your practice; this is how you can get rid of them.

There are also emotional vampires, which can be similar to nervous nellies and backseat drivers. Emotional vampires are always putting their emotions on you, they are always worried, they are always upset, and they are always afraid. The emotional vampire client might be having to go take care of their child and take time away from work for the fourth time that month. There is lot of drama in life, especially in 2020, and some people will turn into emotional vampires if you let them.

Emotional vampires want emotional comfort from you in whatever way they can get it. This is draining, because we all have only so much to give and we've got to take care of our own stuff. You may be having a bad day and not want to deal with clients who are crying or whimpering in fear to staff members who can't lift a finger without asking you first.

You need to guard yourself against vampires who want to suck the life out of you. There are money vampires too, but within a law practice, thankfully those people are pretty rare or don't manifest in the way that you might think. Remember that it doesn't matter whether the vampires in and around your practice are being vampires intentionally or accidentally or because they are neurotic; you don't want them to suck you dry of time, mental energy, lost opportunities, and lost money that you could have gotten from other clients. You want to guard yourself and your systems against these people and set expectations.

My customer service staff are instructed to tell our clients that we love them and we are here to help them, but we don't answer calls after hours, which is usually 6pm until 8am or 9am. We will answer on the weekends, but only for emergencies or very urgent matters. Clients are not to text us directly, but should communicate through email and phone. They are not expected to speak to the customer service people at Speakeasy Authority Marketing about personal relationship.

If a client is emailing every single day or multiple times a day (which thankfully rarely happens, but sometimes it does), then we may have to put them their place; you must do the same thing with your practice. If you have 40 or 50 clients in play at one time, or even if you have five clients in play at one time, you have to devote time to getting new clients, marketing, running your firm, attending hearings, writing motions, etc. One vampire can suck you dry and make it very difficult for you to service everyone else, including yourself.

Do you want to work an extra hour at night just because some client who is paying you just the same as everyone else is sucking you dry in time and emotional energy? No. You must guard yourself, guard your neck, guard your practice, guard your time, guard your emotions, and guard your wallet. Intentionally or not, vampires are there to drain you.

This is the end of day two of the Halloween podcasts, and there are 13 total. Look forward to more and more monsters that are coming and that I want you to be on guard about. Thank you.