Your Law Firm is a Business. Take it to the Next Level

It’s very easy for marketing agencies to mislead law firm owners. Whether that’s through deceptive marketing, misrepresenting their services, or overcharging, you have to be very careful who you trust to take care of your marketing. 

You also need to be prepared before hiring a firm to help you. There are things you have to understand about your own firm, what kind of agency would be the best fit for you, and what to expect when it comes to working with a marketing agency. This will prepare you to make the best decision and spend your law firm’s money wisely.

Through our many years in this industry, we’ve witnessed the ups and downs of law firms working with digital marketing agencies. As a result, we’ve learned many things along the way. In this episode, we’re going to share some of those things. 

Tune in to learn everything you need to know before hiring a marketing agency.

Show Highlights:

• Why you need to know your law firm’s goals before calling a marketing agency.
• The importance of defining your intake process.
• Other metrics to share with your marketing agency.
• How to figure out who your ideal client and marketing partner is.
• How to determine if you can fit marketing into your firm’s budget.
• How to analyze references and reviews to make sure an agency is a good fit for you.
• What to look for in a contract.
• Why marketing agencies should have transparency of data.

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We’d appreciate you subscribing to this podcast and leaving an Apple Podcasts review. Reviews help others discover and learn what Law Firm Next is all about. It only takes a second and helps us out a lot!

Supporting Resources:

Mark’s marketing agency: gngf.com

Action Steps:

1. Figure out your goals, intake process, key metrics, and rough marketing budget before you reach out to a marketing agency.
2. Where are you in your law firm's maturity? Do you have the revenue to support outsourcing a lot of your marketing to an agency? Do you need to find some marketing investment money or are you going to go down the path of some DIY (sweat equity marketing supported by a specific freelancer here and there)?
3. Think about the pros and cons of month-to-month vs. a year-long contract. Where is your comfort in the risk and fear of trying to choose a long-term partner?
4. Think about if you feel you are OK with one-off done-for-you type work where you drive a lot of the strategy and decision or if you want more strategic guidance (similar to the outsourced CMO vs. freelancer conversation).

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Episode Credits

If you like this podcast and are thinking of creating your own, consider talking to my producer, Emerald City Productions. They helped me grow and produce the podcast you are listening to right now. Find out more at https://emeraldcitypro.com Let them know I sent you.

Scheduling your time is one of the best decisions you can make in your business.

For us here at Law Firm Next, it has changed our lives. Blocking our time allows us to take breaks during the day without guilt, get more tasks done, communicate a realistic turnaround time to clients, and more. It is a seemingly simple process to implement in your law firm that will free up loads of your time. 

In a previous episode, we talked all about the benefits of using a scheduling tool. That episode set a great foundation for why it’s so helpful to schedule your time, which tools we like, and some tips for how to best utilize them.  

Today, we’re turning from the topic of scheduling tools to that of calendaring. Tune in to learn how to set up your law firm’s calendar, block your time, and make the calendar work for you.

Show Highlights:

• Why you need more than one calendar for your team.
• Why you should use a digital calendar.
• How to organize your team’s calendars. 
• The importance of noting when deadlines are met.
• What time blocking is.
• How to create specific time blocks in your calendar.
• Why you need to define what constitutes an “emergency” with your team.

Subscribe and Review

We’d appreciate you subscribing to this podcast and leaving an Apple Podcasts review. Reviews help others discover and learn what Law Firm Next is all about. It only takes a second and helps us out a lot!

Action Steps:

1. Review your task list and block time on the calendar for each one. Bonus: communicate these time frames to your clients so that they have realistic expectations.
2. Decide how to mark your deadlines as complete and let the rest of your team know.
3. Define an emergency and let the rest of your team know.

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Episode Credits

If you like this podcast and are thinking of creating your own, consider talking to my producer, Emerald City Productions. They helped me grow and produce the podcast you are listening to right now. Find out more at https://emeraldcitypro.com Let them know I sent you.

Burnout is serious. 

It’s also, unfortunately, very common in the legal field. As lawyers, we’re always running around to client meetings, facing serious and heartbreaking issues, and oftentimes bringing that home with us. There’s an expectation that we’re always working. This is only amplified when we own our own law firms.

This is why it is important to learn tactics to manage stress and prioritize rest. If you’re feeling burnt out, we highly recommend that you take it seriously, talk to a professional about it, and implement any necessary changes. Today’s episode is a good place to start.

In this conversation, we discuss how to rest and prevent burnout. Though we are not mental health professionals, we are sharing tips on this topic from personal experience. Tune in to learn how to start taking care of yourself again.

Show Highlights:

• How raising your rates can prevent burnout.
• How delegation leads to better customer service.
• How to build a lifestyle that supports less stress.
• When you may need to consider switching practice areas.
• How to improve your daily habits to prevent burnout.
• When burnout is so serious you need to consider a career change.
• How to pivot in your career.

Subscribe and Review

We’d appreciate you subscribing to this podcast and leaving an Apple Podcasts review. Reviews help others discover and learn what Law Firm Next is all about. It only takes a second and helps us out a lot!

Action Steps:

1. Schedule time on your calendar to brainstorm things that you can delegate, even if you don’t have anyone to delegate to yet.
2. Decide to raise your rates. Your new clients don’t know the difference.
3. Find one thing that you can do regularly that you enjoy. Mine is after dinner walks with my kids. It doesn’t have to be daily, though! It can be a weekly book club or something similar. However, the more consistent you are, the better.

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Episode Credits

If you like this podcast and are thinking of creating your own, consider talking to my producer, Emerald City Productions. They helped me grow and produce the podcast you are listening to right now. Find out more at https://emeraldcitypro.com Let them know I sent you.

This week, we have a short chat about Mark's Vacation and how it ties into next week's episode.

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Episode Credits

If you like this podcast and are thinking of creating your own, consider talking to my producer, Emerald City Productions. They helped me grow and produce the podcast you are listening to right now. Find out more at https://emeraldcitypro.com Let them know I sent you.

Do you feel confident doing SEO for your law firm yet?

We hope so! Over the last month or so, we have been covering the foundations of search engine optimization. We have taught you how to set up your website and other online accounts to rank higher on search engines, specifically Google. 

Today, we’re wrapping up the series. Later on, we may begin another series on more advanced SEO techniques and tools that you can utilize to market your law firm. However, today, we’re finishing this foundational series. To do so, we’re going to discuss local SEO one more time.

Tune in for a refresher on what local SEO means, the benefits of doing well in your local search, and specific tactics to increase your local search ranking.

Show Highlights:

• What local SEO is.
• Why you should care about local SEO.
• Factors that help Google push your local listing.
• How to pick the category to list your law firm under.
• Why you should include keywords in your local listing.
• Why you should report spam listings.
• The importance of reviews.
• What citations are and why they matter.
• The benefits of having an office in proximity to suburban areas.

Subscribe and Review

We’d appreciate you subscribing to this podcast and leaving an Apple Podcasts review. Reviews help others discover and learn what Law Firm Next is all about. It only takes a second and helps us out a lot!

Supporting Resources:

SEO Starter Guide

Action Steps:

1. If you haven't completed your Google Business Profile, review episode 14 where we covered optimizing your Google Business Profile.
2. Review your categories (look at competitors).
3. If you haven’t built earning and asking for online reviews into your law firm culture, go back to episode 16 where we covered that in detail.
4. Google your keywords and see if any directories show up on the first few pages of Google. If so, make sure your profiles are very clean on those directories. This could be Yelp, Expertise.com, or maybe even Findlaw, Avvo, or Lawyers.com, although we don’t see those ranking as high as they used to.

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Episode Credits

If you like this podcast and are thinking of creating your own, consider talking to my producer, Emerald City Productions. They helped me grow and produce the podcast you are listening to right now. Find out more at https://emeraldcitypro.com Let them know I sent you.

There is one business tool that your hosts here at Law Firm Next just don’t agree on. What is it? Slack.

Slack is a communication tool used by many online businesses. It can act as a replacement for email in that you organize your team into groups and send quick messages to multiple people at once. For some, it helps keep communication streamlined and organized. For others, it just doesn’t get the job done.

Today, we are having a high-school-style debate on Slack. Joining us is a third-party moderator, our producer Daniel Parrish. Tune in to hear each of our sides on the topic of Slack and why or why not we use it in our online businesses.

Show Highlights:

• Why Mark and his team love Slack.
• Why Melanie doesn’t like Slack.
• Why Slack is helpful when you need a quick response.
• The software you can integrate with Slack.
• Why it’s important to house everything your company is doing in a workflow tool.
• Why Melanie prefers meetings to constant messaging on Slack.

Subscribe and Review

We’d appreciate you subscribing to this podcast and leaving an Apple Podcasts review. Reviews help others discover and learn what Law Firm Next is all about. It only takes a second and helps us out a lot!

Action Steps:

NO ACTION STEPS TODAY. You may still be working through all the Law Firm SEO work that we covered in Episodes 39 to 44. Stay tuned next week as our next episode will be wrapping up the SEO Series and talking about “Local SEO so you can learn how to get your firm ranked in the Google local pack maps.

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Episode Credits

If you like this podcast and are thinking of creating your own, consider talking to my producer, Emerald City Productions. They helped me grow and produce the podcast you are listening to right now. Find out more at https://emeraldcitypro.com Let them know I sent you.

Streamline Legal has been fully remote for three and a half years. Melanie and her team have figured out a great system for working remotely and made it work well for them. 

With the ever-changing market and more and more companies going remote, good advice on how to transition to remote operations is more needed than ever. So, in this episode, Melanie is sharing all of the tips and tricks from her organization. 

She’s discussing the many things she’s learned over the past three and a half years of running a fully remote company and teaching us all how we can do the same. She’s also diving into how to keep communication strong in a remote team and navigate other logistical concerns. Tune in to learn all about how her remote team operates!

Show Highlights:

• Why it’s important to have messaging and video conferencing tools for your remote team.
• Examples of good messaging and video conferencing tools.
• Why client portals are useful.
• How project management software helps remote companies run smoothly.
• How to organize client information remotely.
• How to organize your documents and files remotely.
• How to find the best hardware for working from home.
• How to set up work-life boundaries for yourself and your remote team.
• How to handle the logistics of a remote company.

Subscribe and Review

We’d appreciate you subscribing to this podcast and leaving an Apple Podcasts review. Reviews help others discover and learn what Law Firm Next is all about. It only takes a second and helps us out a lot!

Action Steps:

1. Download the checklist in the show notes to make sure you’ve got everything covered. There are a few additional considerations in it such as your home office space.
2. Go back and listen to Episode 9: Is the Paperless Law Firm a Dream? and Episode 13: I Can’t Stop Handwriting Notes to get more insight into how to make the paperless office a reality.

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Episode Credits

If you like this podcast and are thinking of creating your own, consider talking to my producer, Emerald City Productions. They helped me grow and produce the podcast you are listening to right now. Find out more at https://emeraldcitypro.com Let them know I sent you.

Tired of SEO yet?

We hope not because, today, we’re continuing the series. We’ve talked about SEO-friendly content, keyword research, and all the things you need to optimize on your website. Today, we’re shifting a bit and talking about offsite SEO.

We’ll start as we always do with the foundations: what is offsite SEO and why should you care about it? Then we’ll get into the difference between a local and a national focus around offsite SEO. Finally, we’ll teach you three ways to get quality backlinks to your website. 

Join us so you can get started on improving your offsite SEO right away and have it well underway in just a couple of months!

Show Highlights:

• What offsite SEO includes.
• What a backlink is.
• Different examples of backlinks.
• Why you should care about offsite SEO.
• Why your backlinks must be high quality.
• What local SEO is.
• How to optimize your local SEO.
• Our top three tips for getting quality backlinks.
• The benefits of PR.

Subscribe and Review

We’d appreciate you subscribing to this podcast and leaving an Apple Podcasts review. Reviews help others discover and learn what Law Firm Next is all about. It only takes a second and helps us out a lot!

Supporting Resources:

https://www.tateesq.com/

Action Steps:

1. Catalog all the Local Associations you are a member of and double-check that you are listed correctly on their website. Maximize that listing with information that maps to your keyword research (in a natural way). Are there other associations you can pay for a membership with ($250 is a lot cheaper than hiring an SEO firm to do complex backlink work)? If the chamber has a great website and member directory, think about joining. 
2. Look at your current referral partners. How can you help them with some content for their website? You don’t want the same content on all of the sites but you can word things differently and provide that to a few referral partners. Make sure they link back to you.
3. Look at things you sponsor or could sponsor. Do they have a good website? Make sure to get a link there. And remember to ask for it to be phrased a certain way. Most of the time they have no idea about SEO and won’t care or know why you are asking. 

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Episode Credits

If you like this podcast and are thinking of creating your own, consider talking to my producer, Emerald City Productions. They helped me grow and produce the podcast you are listening to right now. Find out more at https://emeraldcitypro.com Let them know I sent you.

You’ve probably realized by now that SEO is a complex topic. Some companies spend all of their time on it. There are so many different pieces involved in SEO and things to learn about it. 

However, our goal is to break everything in business down into just the things a law firm owner would need to know. There’s no need to get overwhelmed by every aspect of entrepreneurial life. This rings just as true when it comes to SEO.

In this episode, we’re continuing our discussion on the basics of search engine optimization. This will be a continuation of last week’s episode where we began talking about onsite SEO. Tune in to learn more about the technical aspects of onsite SEO and how to help Google learn more about your website.

Show Highlights:

• What a URL slug is.
• How to write good slugs.
• Why internal linking is important.
• How to utilize internal linking well.
• What schema is and how it’s useful for law firms.
• How to structure your website to get it ranking in Google.
• What site performance means.
• Strategies and tools for improving your site performance.
• Why you should keep your plugins updated.
• How to make your site secure.

Subscribe and Review

We’d appreciate you subscribing to this podcast and leaving an Apple Podcasts review. Reviews help others discover and learn what Law Firm Next is all about. It only takes a second and helps us out a lot!

Supporting Resources:

Yoast SEO plugin

Pagespeed Insights

Cloudfare

WP Engine

The Legal Marketing Academy

Action Steps:

1. If you have your website built, go back through all the steps from last week’s episode.
2. If you already did the last episode’s action steps, next:

• On every page do the following: 
• • Optimize your URL / SLUG 
  • Add internal links throughout your site

1. Work on sitewide things to help Google better learn about your website:

1. Your Website Structure
2. Performance of your website
3. Create and submit your sitemap to Google
4. Make your site secure

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Episode Credits

If you like this podcast and are thinking of creating your own, consider talking to my producer, Emerald City Productions. They helped me grow and produce the podcast you are listening to right now. Find out more at https://emeraldcitypro.com Let them know I sent you.

This week, we’re diving back into our SEO series.

A couple of weeks ago, we set the foundation. We explained what SEO really is, why it’s important, and how to get started with it for free. Now that you have the basics under your belt, it’s time to get into the technical side of SEO.

So, in this episode, we’re talking all about on-site SEO. This encompasses anything on your website that helps people find you. In other words, it’s how you optimize your website for searchability. This includes writing your content in a certain way and organizing its technology correctly.

Tune in to start your deep dive into on-site SEO!

Show Highlights:

• The importance of writing content that resonates with your ideal client.
• How to organize the pages of your website.
• How to utilize keywords well on your website.
• Where to come up with content for your website.
• How to make use of headlines.
• Why you should include external links in your website content.
• The difference between a passive and active voice.
• Tips for writing title tags and meta descriptions.

Subscribe and Review

We’d appreciate you subscribing to this podcast and leaving an Apple Podcasts review. Reviews help others discover and learn what Law Firm Next is all about. It only takes a second and helps us out a lot!

Supporting Resources:

The Legal Marketing Academy

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Episode Credits

If you like this podcast and are thinking of creating your own, consider talking to my producer, Emerald City Productions. They helped me grow and produce the podcast you are listening to right now. Find out more at https://emeraldcitypro.com Let them know I sent you.