September 2, 2024 • 27 mins
Colleen Joyce is the CEO of Lawyer.com.
Colleen spent the last decade building Lawyer.com alongside an amazing team. Throughout the way, she has learned new skills that range from management to online best practice marketing. She has hosted Marketing CLE courses for Lawyers, helped launch new products, and was part of the team that bought Lindsay Lohan on as Spokeswoman for Lawyer.com.
Lawyer.com is the #1 U.S. Lawyer Matching Service and online directory, focused on connecting consumers with a qualified local lawyer.
Connect with Colleen on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/colleenjoyce/
Visit Lawyer.com: https://www.lawyer.com/
The Lawyer Growth Summit: https://www.lawyergrowthsummit.com/
On This Episode, We Discuss…
Colleen spent the last decade building Lawyer.com alongside an amazing team. Throughout the way, she has learned new skills that range from management to online best practice marketing. She has hosted Marketing CLE courses for Lawyers, helped launch new products, and was part of the team that bought Lindsay Lohan on as Spokeswoman for Lawyer.com.
Lawyer.com is the #1 U.S. Lawyer Matching Service and online directory, focused on connecting consumers with a qualified local lawyer.
Connect with Colleen on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/colleenjoyce/
Visit Lawyer.com: https://www.lawyer.com/
The Lawyer Growth Summit: https://www.lawyergrowthsummit.com/
On This Episode, We Discuss…
- Transforming Lawyer.com from a Startup to a Leading Legal Directory
- Bringing Lindsay Lohan on board as a Spokesperson for Lawyer.com
- The Critical Role of Empathy in Client Interactions
- Lawyer-Client Matching
- The Lawyer Growth Summit
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Before you spend another dollar on bringing in revenue. You
really need to understand what your processes are in place,
because chances are there's some low lying fruit that you
can optimize and without even having to suspend a dollar,
you can get work lines. It's like, Okay, where's the
low lying fruit, what can we do to improve.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
You're listening to the Legal Mastermind podcast presented by Market
My Market with your hosts Eric Barsano, Ryan Klin, and
Chase Williams, the go to podcast for learning from the
experts in the legal community about effective ways to grow
and manage your law firm.
Speaker 3 (00:38):
Hello and welcome to another episode of the Legal Mastermind podcast.
Today I have with me Colleen Joyce. Colleen is the
CEO at lawyer dot Com. Colleen, welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 1 (00:51):
Hey, Eric, Harrey you today.
Speaker 3 (00:53):
I'm doing good. I'm excited to talk to you as
we were just kind of chatting before the Mike's got hot.
We've both been in this legal world for a long time,
but this is the first time we've actually cross paths,
which is surprising to me. I've known about lawyer dot
com for a long time and would kind of just
(01:14):
like to start off with you maybe kind of given
a little bit of history on yourself and how you
came to this position.
Speaker 1 (01:20):
Sure, so I started as an intern with our parent company,
World Media Group. World Media Group is a domain development
company and they have a bunch of different brands that
they look to develop. When I started, I was fresh
and green and was ready to take on the world.
Have just this incredible entrepreneurial spirit and quest for innovation,
(01:42):
and really I found where I needed to be, and
we had a lot of great domains that we had
the opportunity to build brands out of. I spent some
time building out entertainment website called popstar dot com. I
was the publisher there, did celebrity interview, read carpet events,
movie awards. It was a very fun business, but it
(02:05):
wasn't generating any revenue, revenue worth putting effort into. It
was a lot of fun. We had the domain lawyer
dot com, which was a great natural brand, and we thought, okay,
let's put some effort behind building out lawyer dot com.
We put a directory up and our main source of
revenue was just advertising at that time, and very naturally,
(02:27):
lawyers started calling and saying, Hey, how can I get
listed in this directory. I need to get better online presence.
And then consumers were calling saying, hey, I need a lawyer.
I got a call once from a couple on a
cruise ship in Italy that was sinking, and they said,
I don't know what to do. I came to lawyer
dot com. Can you help me? And just like that,
(02:48):
lawyer dot com was born and we've been able to
help consumers and lawyers match for twelve plus years.
Speaker 3 (02:57):
Yeah, and the legal space has gotten very crowded. I'm
sure you're aware of that, and I think being innovative
on your domain and offering specific things not only to
the lawyers but to the consumers themselves to try to
make it easy to match. Can you talk about some
of the evolution of things that you've updated and changed
(03:18):
to make it easier and easier for both sides to
use and more valuable for both sides.
Speaker 1 (03:24):
Sure. So again, as time goes on, consumer behaviors change,
and that's also true with lawyers. So whereas everybody was
very email driven or very phone driven, right then we
would lean on that, but now you have to lean
on text messages. No one really wants to get a
cold phone call anymore. They want to be warmed up
(03:44):
for it, So we have to take all that into
consideration as we build out the products for lawyer dot com.
Speaker 3 (03:52):
When you're comparing yourself to other directories and lawyer dot
com amazing, you were like you said, that's a that's
a winner. And if you were just trying to sell
that today with no website attached to it, I'm sure
it would fetch you know, seven figures or more so.
But being in a crowded space, are there differentiators that
(04:14):
that you focus on. Is it more of just being
ubiquitous and being everywhere or is there anything specifically that
you try to offer.
Speaker 1 (04:22):
Sure, so not a long winded answer, but let me try.
When we started, we were small. We were a startup, right,
and that's something that we're very proud of. And we're
in a room where, yes we're lawyer dot com, but
our competition are huge companies. But our brand name helped
us get in the door, and we use that completely
(04:44):
to our advantage and that's really what's helped us be successful.
Speaker 3 (04:50):
You guys did, and I'm wondering that this was a
cross from your past life to your current life. You
brought Lindsay Lohan Lohan on as a spokesperson. Now, was
that through a connection that you had from your previous
life or was that an idea that you came up
with and you just made it happen.
Speaker 1 (05:08):
So again, I know we were talking earlier. We really
like to think outside of the box. I know whenever
we whenever people think about law, they think, oh right, like,
oh that's not fun or that's bad. But that's not
necessarily the case, and that's not how we run our business.
We try to be very creative and have fun. So
what an idea was, Hey, listen, what is if we
(05:28):
had a celebrity spokesperson that would help us elevate our
brand right, bring more attention, get more consumers brought into
the database. And we thought who would be the perfect fit,
and that's where Lindsay came up. We got very lucky
with connecting with her. She's an incredible actress, incredible woman.
(05:48):
We've been very fortunate to work with her. She still
stays on as a shareholder and we had nothing but
a great experience with her. The challenge with law and
social media is that you're not going on social media
and saying, hey, I'm getting divorced or hey somebody died.
Speaker 3 (06:09):
You know, it's just that's just yeah, I got a dui.
I'd like to tell everybody, right or.
Speaker 1 (06:14):
Yay, I was arrested for armed robbery right, And it
just it wasn't a fit at the time. And I
still struggle with social media and law, and I think
a lot of the industry does because everyone's just putting
up blog posts and you do it because you go
through the motions. But if we were selling beer or
T shirts, social media would be such an amazing tool
(06:35):
because you could do an offer, Hey, get you know,
get ten T shirts, get one for free, whatever. But
it's a little different with law. But we learned a
lot through our experience with Lindsay and she was fantastic. Again,
we just like to do things a little bit differently.
Speaker 3 (06:51):
Yeah, I think that's it's just a smart idea. It's
it's a it's a risk that you had to take,
and I think it came off really well. Number One,
she's got name recognized and you know, I think she
would even admit this. She had a couple of run
ins with the law. So it really was a great
overlap for the audience that you wanted to hit and
was you know, entertaining along with educating as well. Now,
(07:14):
even though you know you're in charge of lawyer dot
com and that you know everything that happens there, you've
probably talked to law firms about marketing in general. I
would assume are you seeing any any new changes? Is
there anything that you would you know, want to maybe
point people in the right direction on that you've seen
be successful. Sure?
Speaker 1 (07:35):
So, I mean it goes without saying, right, we can't
have a conversation without talking about AI. And it's something
that we really started to dive into at lawyer dot
com about two years ago. We've built products for AI,
we've held seminars, we've held boot camps because it is
the wave and it's really important that we use what's
in front of us to help build our firm, especially
(07:56):
when it comes to marketing. Right, Well, we talk about
blog posts. It's one of those things you have to do.
Why don't you use AI? Why don't you write a
powerful prompt to help get it done faster, more efficiently,
and sometimes even better.
Speaker 3 (08:10):
Yeah, And I think there's a misconception with AI. You
know a lot of people I talk to would say, oh,
you know, are you just using AI? To write all
this content. You know, is AI just going to take over?
And you know, maybe five years, maybe ten years from now,
that could be the case. But I think what it's
doing now is it's helping people come up with better ideas,
more ideas, you know, as opposed to just looking at
(08:33):
a blank page. AI. You can say, you know, what
are the ten best topics on criminal defense? Or in
my state, what are the ten penalties for arm robbery?
And now all of a sudden it just spits out
a couple of things. You can have it start writing,
but nothing is going to be more informative, I think
right now than a human. So if you're directing an
(08:54):
attorney to use AI as a tool as opposed to
the end result, I think that's where you're going to
get your best value, right, And we.
Speaker 1 (09:01):
Talk a lot about that in our AI webinars. It
is a tool. It's not going to be replacing lawyers.
So we don't want people to come and jump to
that conclusion. But we've all been there when the screen
is blank and it's like that cursor is taunting you,
being like you have nothing to say, You have nothing
to say. But if you go into chat GPT or
you know, any of the platforms just say, hey, listen,
(09:23):
I have a mental block right now, this is what
I need. Help me out. And again that's just the
content marketing side. There's so many other great applications for
running a law firm.
Speaker 3 (09:34):
Now you've mentioned, you know, some of these seminars, and
I want to get to the Lawyer Growth Summit, but
I want to save that for a bit. Can you
explain these the seminars that you put on and how
those work, how often they are?
Speaker 1 (09:48):
Sure? So when AI hit hard, we were doing weekly
webinars and we would bring people in and it was
just kind of one oh one, this is what you
need to learn. I kind of like to think of
that as like cocktail talk, right, so when you're at
a party, you want to know enough to get by
the conversation and feel like you can be part of it.
So what we were doing is very high level talking
(10:09):
about it. They would be weekly webinars. We still do
some webinars, but like you know, it's you know, we're
not going to present content unless it's really good content,
and it's very hard to come up with good content
and sometimes it takes us longer. But that is something
that we actively do. I feel very privileged that we
can educate people in this space, whether it be the
(10:32):
consumer or the lawyer. So it's something that we hold
dear to us.
Speaker 3 (10:36):
And is that something that people can just find on
on lawyer dot com where they just go there and
they can see some of your upcoming.
Speaker 1 (10:43):
We yep, we have YouTube channels, social media. You know, well,
well we will put it everywhere. We'll blast it out
so you'll you'll see it there. We actually held last
year we did a live boot camp that was all
about AI. So we got about eighty lawyers in the
room and we talked about everybody's fears and excitement surrounding
(11:04):
AI and how we could be using it. I'm a
big fan of talking about something, but an even bigger
fan about implementing it. Because you can tell me all
day how to use something. I really want to get
my hands dirty and used it. And that's what we
try to do with lawyers.
Speaker 3 (11:19):
Is there anything that you can remember that was a
common theme that came out of that that AI conference.
Was there one worry that kind of kept coming up
or was there a solution that people talked about.
Speaker 1 (11:31):
It's interesting anytime, even in the live event and online.
We started every meeting with kind of like where do
you what's your emotion right now? And when we first
started doing this about a year and a half ago,
everybody was scared, rightfully so because the unknown is scary.
And as we continue to educate them and everybody warmed
(11:52):
up to the idea. So I think that and I
think that's still happening right now. Right when you don't
know what's going to happen, you're going to be a
little apprehensive, you're going to a little scared. But the
more you learn and see and know how to use it,
I think everybody was spooked at first. There was a
big lawsuit because the lawyer had used I think it
was chat GPT and it had hallucinations, and that was
(12:16):
kind of a worry about a year ago. And I
think that kind of all has really really settled. And
you have to give credit to that lawyer who tried
something different, Like we are all just trying to get
to the next level and there was a tool there.
Unfortunate what happened, yes, but good that you were trying
different things. And I think that really you've seen lawyers
(12:37):
kind of go through the rollercoaster emotion of AI and
on the other side right now, I do see a
lot more lawyers wanting to implement it in their daily business.
Speaker 3 (12:47):
Yeah. One of the things that I've heard is, you
know that you can really kind of customize your own
chat GPT. So if you're just using it in general,
it's going to pull out information from all over. But
if you just load it up, let's say with you know,
if you're a criminal defense, just the penal codes of
your state, and that's the only information has to pull
from and it's all up to date. Now, when that
(13:10):
chat GPT or a large language model spit something back
out at you, it's only pulling from that one resource.
That's about my limit on it. I don't know how
to build one. I'm sure there are people out there
that can do it. But besides AI and you touched
on social media a little bit, would you have advice
for an attorney, Let's just say someone who's in a
(13:33):
mid market. You know they're not the biggest advertiser, but
they've got an advertising budget. Do you see low hanging fruit,
whether it's anything that's new or something that's kind of
an old standby that you would kind of guide them towards.
Speaker 1 (13:48):
So I'm a huge back to the basics kind of person.
So before you spend another dollar on bringing in revenue,
you really need to understand what your processes are in place,
because chances are there's some low lying fruit that you
can optimize and without even having to spend a dollar,
you can get more clients. It happens to us all
the time, right, It's like, Okay, where's the low lying fruit?
(14:10):
What can we do to improve? Lawyers really need to
have that mentality, you know, are you following up?
Speaker 2 (14:17):
Well?
Speaker 1 (14:17):
First of all, are you answering your phone? Which is
the most basic task but understandable. Lawyers are businy. They
shouldn't be answering their phones, but they are. Are they
doing intake? Are they following up? These are all things
that are like absolutely paramount, But if you're not doing it,
you're losing that marketing revenue you're spending.
Speaker 3 (14:39):
It's such a good point, and you know, I can
imagine some people listening to this might have just laughed
when you said, are you answering your phone? But I
call law firms all the time, and I would say
ninety percent of the time I would have what I
would consider a bad user experience. It either goes it
you know, ring way more than it should and I
know what's happening. It's ringing the office. No one picked.
(15:00):
So then it goes to their answering service. And then
you get an answering service that might not have empathy
or you know, they don't feel like they're trying to
help you. They're just trying to get you off the phone.
And I would say it's at least twenty five percent
of the time, I get nothing, I get no answering machine.
It rings several times and then it's just nothing. And
if you're a personal injury attorney or a criminal offense attorney,
(15:22):
that could have been your case. Six that makes your month.
Speaker 1 (15:26):
So we were kind of it was a trend, and
about six seven years ago, I was sick of not
being able to get lawyers on the phone, or the
lawyers would call me and say, hey, I'm trying to
get in touch with this case that you sent, but
they're not answering. I'm like, well, did you call them?
Did you follow up? No? So then we started our
own call center because it was so important that that
(15:49):
was a huge hole in the market, right, So we
built a legal only twenty four to seven US based
call center, and like you said, lead with empathy. Everything
has everyone goes through training. The consumers calling you on
their worst day, most likely right when you need a lawyer. Unfortunately,
it's not a happy situation unless maybe won the lotto,
(16:10):
but that doesn't happen too often. So you need to
have people answering the phone that are trained in empathy,
that know how to get through intake efficiently and when
people are upset, how to placate them and to keep
the conversation going. And that's a skill and something that
we've perfected throughout the years because we saw a demand
(16:32):
for that.
Speaker 3 (16:34):
Yeah, and not only that, I think the average person
is going to be nervous to call a lawyers. Most
people have never had to hire a lawyer in their life.
And believe it or not, you and I have been
in this industry for a long time, so we all
know that a personal injury attorney and most employment attorneys
are going to work on contingency. We did dozens of
focus groups last year and that was still one of
(16:56):
the number one things that we heard in these focus
groups is oh, well, you know, I know attorneys are expensive,
so this person offers a free consultation. And to me,
it was shocking to hear so many people say that
because I just thought it was ubiquitous. I thought everybody
really knew that already.
Speaker 1 (17:12):
No, No, we see the same thing. So we try
to you know, we try to know our role and
do the intake and educate before passing it off to
the lawyer. But it's not easy calling and hiring a lawyer,
which is the beauty of lawyer dot com. Right, if
you're a consumer, you come to lawyer dot com, you'll
talk to an agent who's been trained and knows how
(17:34):
to get to you through the process. And then next
thing you know, your phone rings and the lawyers are saying, oh, hey, Eric,
I see that you're looking for a criminal attorney. How
can I help you? That's an amazing service. And you're
not sitting there dialing for not dollars, but dialing for
somebody to answer the phone.
Speaker 2 (17:55):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (17:55):
And the other thing that I hear time and time
again is the number one way for an attorney to
get a bad review, whether that be Google or Yelp,
is to dismiss somebody on the phone. So they might
have they might not have a legitimate case, you can't
help them, but not showing empathy and not either trying
to direct them to another resource could earn you a
(18:17):
one star review and it's going to take a lot
of five star reviews to make up for that. So
having a service like that where you put your best
foot forward from the beginning, number one, it's the right
thing to do, but number two, it can have long
term effects because that person has a good experience and
they'll tell people about.
Speaker 1 (18:33):
That, right And it's hard because as an attorney with reviews,
because you're not going to win every case and you're
not going to keep everybody happy, but you can at
least set the expectations from the front. Hey, this is
what's going to happen, and this is what you can expect.
And yeah, okay I didn't win my case, or okay
I have to pay it or I have to do this,
but at least you were communicating with me, and that's key.
Speaker 3 (18:57):
So lawyer dot com as an entity, are what are
all the services? Because I didn't even realize until you
mentioned that you actually have a call center, so I
know there's directory. So any attorneys out there, you know,
if you're not in lawyer dot Com already I would
highly suggest signing up, but what comes with it? What
are the options? I assume there might be different platforms
(19:20):
or so.
Speaker 1 (19:20):
We try to get every attorney listed in the directory
because again, our goal is to help the consumer find
a local lawyer, whether they're a paid client or not.
So speaking in the directory is so important. You have
an enhanced listing, you have information. Right, consumers are still
going to the Internet to look for information to research
before they take action. So we have our directory and
(19:43):
then we have potential clients that come out of that.
Right they say, oh, hey, I need a lawyer. Where
do I go lawyer dot com? Okay, well you know
what I just I need a file for chapter eleven?
What do I do? Okay, well, let's see in Nevada.
These are the attorneys that would match your call, vacations
or your pre your requisites. So that is our core business.
(20:05):
And like I said, throughout the years, we see holes
both on the consumer side and the lawyer side, and
we try to create products to fill that. The biggest
one was our call center, and we're very much in
the as a startup mentality is let's see if it
sells before we put all this time and effort into
building it. So we said, hey, listen, we're going to
(20:25):
start a call center. I called one of my lawyers,
who's my guinea pig, and he's always so helpful to
let me you try everything, and he trusted me enough
to give me his phone line and for about a
year to my cell phone. I was the mark law firm,
and we learned so much that we built our own
call center. We now have over one hundred and eighty
(20:45):
agents us base. Like, we learned so much, and we've
tried many other products. Obviously some that have been successful,
like reputation management. Some not successful, but again we learn
with every failure how to make another product better. And
that's our goal is how are we going to make
the lawyers marketing journey easier? If I was a lawyer,
(21:09):
I would be so frustrated that I have like twelve
different vendors and it's so difficult to remember. Okay, well
John's over here, but Kristen's here. And our goal is
to be the one stop right. You need directory, you
need presents, you need leads, you need your phone answered,
and really that starts the life cycle of bringing new
clients in the door.
Speaker 3 (21:30):
Yeah, I really like that you said that, you know,
you actually were answering the phone yourself. Without doing it
that way, you miss so many opportunities. I remember listening
in on phone calls before, you know, when running some campaigns,
and they're fun to talk about because the mistakes are
so egregious. You're like, I can't believe this is the
way that they're operating. I remember doing a campaign. It
(21:53):
was a mass toward campaign, doesn't matter where the law
firm was, but they got an out of state call
and the receptionist says, oh, we don't take calls from that,
we don't take cases from that state. Click. And this
is a campaign that they're spending, you know, six figures
a month on to run. So without doing it yourself,
you probably would have missed the opportunities that you're able
to capitalize on.
Speaker 1 (22:14):
But it goes back to what we were saying earlier, Before
you spend another dollar, understand what's happening under your roof,
because there's so much optimization that could possibly be be happening. Right.
I've been on calls where I've called law firms and
they're like, oh, you know, here's the website and it
(22:34):
was the wrong website, or oh yeah, actually he's not
that good at that. Maybe call another lawyer. And it's
just it's shocking when we do those secret shopper what's
actually happening? We say, there's what you think's happening, what's
actually happening, and you know what the consumer's hearing. So
it's getting your hands dirty is so important.
Speaker 3 (22:54):
So let's pivot now to the Lawyer Growth Summit that's
going to be coming up. It's in October with the.
Speaker 1 (23:03):
We're twenty third through the twenty.
Speaker 3 (23:06):
Third, so what's uh, can you tell us a little
bit about the summit and what people can expect.
Speaker 1 (23:11):
Sure? Absolutely. So we had over the last year or
so have done smaller boot camps where we brought about
thirty forty fifty lawyers into a room and we talked
about how can you scale and grow your firm? And
it was so much fun. It allowed us to learn
and it allowed great networking for the attorneys. So we
came back to the table and we said, Okay, how
(23:33):
do we make this even bigger? So we doubled down.
And if you're going to go to any hotel in
Las Vegas these days, it has to be the Fontane
Blaue because it's phenomenal. So I got the only dates
that the Fontane Blue had left available in the fall season.
And the goal is that we're going to bring in
industry thought leaders. We're going to bring in experts in marketing,
(23:54):
experts in finance. Right, these are things that we have
to be talking about when you run a law firm.
Yes you need good marketing, Yes you need good intake,
but are you reviewing your your financials every month? Do
you understand what your runway is? We're going to be
bringing in experts to talk about all of these pillars
to grow a business. And everything that we do always
(24:17):
has the fun element. So not only will it be
very educational, great for networking, it should also be a
really wild and fun time.
Speaker 3 (24:26):
Oh that's great, and that's the city to do it in. Right, So,
is there is there anything that we didn't cover that
either lawyer dot com does or you know, advice that
you'd give to you know, people that are again either
new when they're trying to figure this out, or somebody
who feels like they've plateaued with marketing and they're looking
(24:47):
for their next good idea.
Speaker 1 (24:49):
Sure listen I've been there many, many, many times. The
best thing to do is just say, okay, we go
back to the low lying fruit. What is the easiest
thing that I can do to get a win? Because
once you get one win, you can get another one
and you use that as building blocks. So I would
sit down and look at your firm as the whole.
Where is it struggling the most? Is it your team?
(25:12):
Is it your intake? Is it your marketing spend? What
really needs the most attention, and then break it down
into bite size projects because, as you know, running a
business is very difficult and can be very overwhelming when
you look at the big picture. But if you come
in and say, okay, create your P and L. I
(25:32):
could do that for a week. That's something I can
do and you get accomplished that and then you move
on to what's your intake like and then really you
start kind of snowballing.
Speaker 3 (25:41):
Now do you offer coaching? Is that one of the
things that you do.
Speaker 1 (25:45):
We do offer coaching. It is part of our live
events platform. So we have a free coaching program and
then we have a more custom tailorized program. Our free
coaching is we do it once a week. It's open
to the public where really allows us to pool everybody
and talk about the challenges that everybody is experiencing. And
(26:06):
then it kind of like workshop. Okay, what are you feeling,
what's working for you? It's not and that's every week.
Speaker 3 (26:13):
That's great. Yeah, Well, I'd like to thank you for
your time today, and I'll let you I'm sure there's
not many more memorable URLs, especially in legal than lawyer
dot com. But is there any anyplace else that you
would like to send people to to either learn more
about what you do or the upcoming event that you
have in Las Vegas.
Speaker 1 (26:34):
Who are come to lawyer dot com. Everything's there. We
do have a website specifically for the conference, which is
called the Lawyer Growthsummit dot com. That is the name
of our show. Check us out on social media, and
you know, hopefully you'll see more of us, hopefully we'll
see more of you Eric too.
Speaker 3 (26:51):
Absolutely well, Colleen, thanks for your time.
Speaker 1 (26:54):
Thank you very much, appreciate it.
Speaker 2 (26:57):
Thanks for listening to the Legal Mastermind podcast presented by
market my market. You can check out additional episodes and
recaps at Legalmastermind podcast dot com.
Before you spend another dollar on bringing in revenue. You
really need to understand what your processes are in place,
because chances are there's some low lying fruit that you
can optimize and without even having to suspend a dollar,
you can get work lines. It's like, Okay, where's the
low lying fruit, what can we do to improve.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
You're listening to the Legal Mastermind podcast presented by Market
My Market with your hosts Eric Barsano, Ryan Klin, and
Chase Williams, the go to podcast for learning from the
experts in the legal community about effective ways to grow
and manage your law firm.
Speaker 3 (00:38):
Hello and welcome to another episode of the Legal Mastermind podcast.
Today I have with me Colleen Joyce. Colleen is the
CEO at lawyer dot Com. Colleen, welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 1 (00:51):
Hey, Eric, Harrey you today.
Speaker 3 (00:53):
I'm doing good. I'm excited to talk to you as
we were just kind of chatting before the Mike's got hot.
We've both been in this legal world for a long time,
but this is the first time we've actually cross paths,
which is surprising to me. I've known about lawyer dot
com for a long time and would kind of just
(01:14):
like to start off with you maybe kind of given
a little bit of history on yourself and how you
came to this position.
Speaker 1 (01:20):
Sure, so I started as an intern with our parent company,
World Media Group. World Media Group is a domain development
company and they have a bunch of different brands that
they look to develop. When I started, I was fresh
and green and was ready to take on the world.
Have just this incredible entrepreneurial spirit and quest for innovation,
(01:42):
and really I found where I needed to be, and
we had a lot of great domains that we had
the opportunity to build brands out of. I spent some
time building out entertainment website called popstar dot com. I
was the publisher there, did celebrity interview, read carpet events,
movie awards. It was a very fun business, but it
(02:05):
wasn't generating any revenue, revenue worth putting effort into. It
was a lot of fun. We had the domain lawyer
dot com, which was a great natural brand, and we thought, okay,
let's put some effort behind building out lawyer dot com.
We put a directory up and our main source of
revenue was just advertising at that time, and very naturally,
(02:27):
lawyers started calling and saying, Hey, how can I get
listed in this directory. I need to get better online presence.
And then consumers were calling saying, hey, I need a lawyer.
I got a call once from a couple on a
cruise ship in Italy that was sinking, and they said,
I don't know what to do. I came to lawyer
dot com. Can you help me? And just like that,
(02:48):
lawyer dot com was born and we've been able to
help consumers and lawyers match for twelve plus years.
Speaker 3 (02:57):
Yeah, and the legal space has gotten very crowded. I'm
sure you're aware of that, and I think being innovative
on your domain and offering specific things not only to
the lawyers but to the consumers themselves to try to
make it easy to match. Can you talk about some
of the evolution of things that you've updated and changed
(03:18):
to make it easier and easier for both sides to
use and more valuable for both sides.
Speaker 1 (03:24):
Sure. So again, as time goes on, consumer behaviors change,
and that's also true with lawyers. So whereas everybody was
very email driven or very phone driven, right then we
would lean on that, but now you have to lean
on text messages. No one really wants to get a
cold phone call anymore. They want to be warmed up
(03:44):
for it, So we have to take all that into
consideration as we build out the products for lawyer dot com.
Speaker 3 (03:52):
When you're comparing yourself to other directories and lawyer dot
com amazing, you were like you said, that's a that's
a winner. And if you were just trying to sell
that today with no website attached to it, I'm sure
it would fetch you know, seven figures or more so.
But being in a crowded space, are there differentiators that
(04:14):
that you focus on. Is it more of just being
ubiquitous and being everywhere or is there anything specifically that
you try to offer.
Speaker 1 (04:22):
Sure, so not a long winded answer, but let me try.
When we started, we were small. We were a startup, right,
and that's something that we're very proud of. And we're
in a room where, yes we're lawyer dot com, but
our competition are huge companies. But our brand name helped
us get in the door, and we use that completely
(04:44):
to our advantage and that's really what's helped us be successful.
Speaker 3 (04:50):
You guys did, and I'm wondering that this was a
cross from your past life to your current life. You
brought Lindsay Lohan Lohan on as a spokesperson. Now, was
that through a connection that you had from your previous
life or was that an idea that you came up
with and you just made it happen.
Speaker 1 (05:08):
So again, I know we were talking earlier. We really
like to think outside of the box. I know whenever
we whenever people think about law, they think, oh right, like,
oh that's not fun or that's bad. But that's not
necessarily the case, and that's not how we run our business.
We try to be very creative and have fun. So
what an idea was, Hey, listen, what is if we
(05:28):
had a celebrity spokesperson that would help us elevate our
brand right, bring more attention, get more consumers brought into
the database. And we thought who would be the perfect fit,
and that's where Lindsay came up. We got very lucky
with connecting with her. She's an incredible actress, incredible woman.
(05:48):
We've been very fortunate to work with her. She still
stays on as a shareholder and we had nothing but
a great experience with her. The challenge with law and
social media is that you're not going on social media
and saying, hey, I'm getting divorced or hey somebody died.
Speaker 3 (06:09):
You know, it's just that's just yeah, I got a dui.
I'd like to tell everybody, right or.
Speaker 1 (06:14):
Yay, I was arrested for armed robbery right, And it
just it wasn't a fit at the time. And I
still struggle with social media and law, and I think
a lot of the industry does because everyone's just putting
up blog posts and you do it because you go
through the motions. But if we were selling beer or
T shirts, social media would be such an amazing tool
(06:35):
because you could do an offer, Hey, get you know,
get ten T shirts, get one for free, whatever. But
it's a little different with law. But we learned a
lot through our experience with Lindsay and she was fantastic. Again,
we just like to do things a little bit differently.
Speaker 3 (06:51):
Yeah, I think that's it's just a smart idea. It's
it's a it's a risk that you had to take,
and I think it came off really well. Number One,
she's got name recognized and you know, I think she
would even admit this. She had a couple of run
ins with the law. So it really was a great
overlap for the audience that you wanted to hit and
was you know, entertaining along with educating as well. Now,
(07:14):
even though you know you're in charge of lawyer dot
com and that you know everything that happens there, you've
probably talked to law firms about marketing in general. I
would assume are you seeing any any new changes? Is
there anything that you would you know, want to maybe
point people in the right direction on that you've seen
be successful. Sure?
Speaker 1 (07:35):
So, I mean it goes without saying, right, we can't
have a conversation without talking about AI. And it's something
that we really started to dive into at lawyer dot
com about two years ago. We've built products for AI,
we've held seminars, we've held boot camps because it is
the wave and it's really important that we use what's
in front of us to help build our firm, especially
(07:56):
when it comes to marketing. Right, Well, we talk about
blog posts. It's one of those things you have to do.
Why don't you use AI? Why don't you write a
powerful prompt to help get it done faster, more efficiently,
and sometimes even better.
Speaker 3 (08:10):
Yeah, And I think there's a misconception with AI. You
know a lot of people I talk to would say, oh,
you know, are you just using AI? To write all
this content. You know, is AI just going to take over?
And you know, maybe five years, maybe ten years from now,
that could be the case. But I think what it's
doing now is it's helping people come up with better ideas,
more ideas, you know, as opposed to just looking at
(08:33):
a blank page. AI. You can say, you know, what
are the ten best topics on criminal defense? Or in
my state, what are the ten penalties for arm robbery?
And now all of a sudden it just spits out
a couple of things. You can have it start writing,
but nothing is going to be more informative, I think
right now than a human. So if you're directing an
(08:54):
attorney to use AI as a tool as opposed to
the end result, I think that's where you're going to
get your best value, right, And we.
Speaker 1 (09:01):
Talk a lot about that in our AI webinars. It
is a tool. It's not going to be replacing lawyers.
So we don't want people to come and jump to
that conclusion. But we've all been there when the screen
is blank and it's like that cursor is taunting you,
being like you have nothing to say, You have nothing
to say. But if you go into chat GPT or
you know, any of the platforms just say, hey, listen,
(09:23):
I have a mental block right now, this is what
I need. Help me out. And again that's just the
content marketing side. There's so many other great applications for
running a law firm.
Speaker 3 (09:34):
Now you've mentioned, you know, some of these seminars, and
I want to get to the Lawyer Growth Summit, but
I want to save that for a bit. Can you
explain these the seminars that you put on and how
those work, how often they are?
Speaker 1 (09:48):
Sure? So when AI hit hard, we were doing weekly
webinars and we would bring people in and it was
just kind of one oh one, this is what you
need to learn. I kind of like to think of
that as like cocktail talk, right, so when you're at
a party, you want to know enough to get by
the conversation and feel like you can be part of it.
So what we were doing is very high level talking
(10:09):
about it. They would be weekly webinars. We still do
some webinars, but like you know, it's you know, we're
not going to present content unless it's really good content,
and it's very hard to come up with good content
and sometimes it takes us longer. But that is something
that we actively do. I feel very privileged that we
can educate people in this space, whether it be the
(10:32):
consumer or the lawyer. So it's something that we hold
dear to us.
Speaker 3 (10:36):
And is that something that people can just find on
on lawyer dot com where they just go there and
they can see some of your upcoming.
Speaker 1 (10:43):
We yep, we have YouTube channels, social media. You know, well,
well we will put it everywhere. We'll blast it out
so you'll you'll see it there. We actually held last
year we did a live boot camp that was all
about AI. So we got about eighty lawyers in the
room and we talked about everybody's fears and excitement surrounding
(11:04):
AI and how we could be using it. I'm a
big fan of talking about something, but an even bigger
fan about implementing it. Because you can tell me all
day how to use something. I really want to get
my hands dirty and used it. And that's what we
try to do with lawyers.
Speaker 3 (11:19):
Is there anything that you can remember that was a
common theme that came out of that that AI conference.
Was there one worry that kind of kept coming up
or was there a solution that people talked about.
Speaker 1 (11:31):
It's interesting anytime, even in the live event and online.
We started every meeting with kind of like where do
you what's your emotion right now? And when we first
started doing this about a year and a half ago,
everybody was scared, rightfully so because the unknown is scary.
And as we continue to educate them and everybody warmed
(11:52):
up to the idea. So I think that and I
think that's still happening right now. Right when you don't
know what's going to happen, you're going to be a
little apprehensive, you're going to a little scared. But the
more you learn and see and know how to use it,
I think everybody was spooked at first. There was a
big lawsuit because the lawyer had used I think it
was chat GPT and it had hallucinations, and that was
(12:16):
kind of a worry about a year ago. And I
think that kind of all has really really settled. And
you have to give credit to that lawyer who tried
something different, Like we are all just trying to get
to the next level and there was a tool there.
Unfortunate what happened, yes, but good that you were trying
different things. And I think that really you've seen lawyers
(12:37):
kind of go through the rollercoaster emotion of AI and
on the other side right now, I do see a
lot more lawyers wanting to implement it in their daily business.
Speaker 3 (12:47):
Yeah. One of the things that I've heard is, you
know that you can really kind of customize your own
chat GPT. So if you're just using it in general,
it's going to pull out information from all over. But
if you just load it up, let's say with you know,
if you're a criminal defense, just the penal codes of
your state, and that's the only information has to pull
from and it's all up to date. Now, when that
(13:10):
chat GPT or a large language model spit something back
out at you, it's only pulling from that one resource.
That's about my limit on it. I don't know how
to build one. I'm sure there are people out there
that can do it. But besides AI and you touched
on social media a little bit, would you have advice
for an attorney, Let's just say someone who's in a
(13:33):
mid market. You know they're not the biggest advertiser, but
they've got an advertising budget. Do you see low hanging fruit,
whether it's anything that's new or something that's kind of
an old standby that you would kind of guide them towards.
Speaker 1 (13:48):
So I'm a huge back to the basics kind of person.
So before you spend another dollar on bringing in revenue,
you really need to understand what your processes are in place,
because chances are there's some low lying fruit that you
can optimize and without even having to spend a dollar,
you can get more clients. It happens to us all
the time, right, It's like, Okay, where's the low lying fruit?
(14:10):
What can we do to improve? Lawyers really need to
have that mentality, you know, are you following up?
Speaker 2 (14:17):
Well?
Speaker 1 (14:17):
First of all, are you answering your phone? Which is
the most basic task but understandable. Lawyers are businy. They
shouldn't be answering their phones, but they are. Are they
doing intake? Are they following up? These are all things
that are like absolutely paramount, But if you're not doing it,
you're losing that marketing revenue you're spending.
Speaker 3 (14:39):
It's such a good point, and you know, I can
imagine some people listening to this might have just laughed
when you said, are you answering your phone? But I
call law firms all the time, and I would say
ninety percent of the time I would have what I
would consider a bad user experience. It either goes it
you know, ring way more than it should and I
know what's happening. It's ringing the office. No one picked.
(15:00):
So then it goes to their answering service. And then
you get an answering service that might not have empathy
or you know, they don't feel like they're trying to
help you. They're just trying to get you off the phone.
And I would say it's at least twenty five percent
of the time, I get nothing, I get no answering machine.
It rings several times and then it's just nothing. And
if you're a personal injury attorney or a criminal offense attorney,
(15:22):
that could have been your case. Six that makes your month.
Speaker 1 (15:26):
So we were kind of it was a trend, and
about six seven years ago, I was sick of not
being able to get lawyers on the phone, or the
lawyers would call me and say, hey, I'm trying to
get in touch with this case that you sent, but
they're not answering. I'm like, well, did you call them?
Did you follow up? No? So then we started our
own call center because it was so important that that
(15:49):
was a huge hole in the market, right, So we
built a legal only twenty four to seven US based
call center, and like you said, lead with empathy. Everything
has everyone goes through training. The consumers calling you on
their worst day, most likely right when you need a lawyer. Unfortunately,
it's not a happy situation unless maybe won the lotto,
(16:10):
but that doesn't happen too often. So you need to
have people answering the phone that are trained in empathy,
that know how to get through intake efficiently and when
people are upset, how to placate them and to keep
the conversation going. And that's a skill and something that
we've perfected throughout the years because we saw a demand
(16:32):
for that.
Speaker 3 (16:34):
Yeah, and not only that, I think the average person
is going to be nervous to call a lawyers. Most
people have never had to hire a lawyer in their life.
And believe it or not, you and I have been
in this industry for a long time, so we all
know that a personal injury attorney and most employment attorneys
are going to work on contingency. We did dozens of
focus groups last year and that was still one of
(16:56):
the number one things that we heard in these focus
groups is oh, well, you know, I know attorneys are expensive,
so this person offers a free consultation. And to me,
it was shocking to hear so many people say that
because I just thought it was ubiquitous. I thought everybody
really knew that already.
Speaker 1 (17:12):
No, No, we see the same thing. So we try
to you know, we try to know our role and
do the intake and educate before passing it off to
the lawyer. But it's not easy calling and hiring a lawyer,
which is the beauty of lawyer dot com. Right, if
you're a consumer, you come to lawyer dot com, you'll
talk to an agent who's been trained and knows how
(17:34):
to get to you through the process. And then next
thing you know, your phone rings and the lawyers are saying, oh, hey, Eric,
I see that you're looking for a criminal attorney. How
can I help you? That's an amazing service. And you're
not sitting there dialing for not dollars, but dialing for
somebody to answer the phone.
Speaker 2 (17:55):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (17:55):
And the other thing that I hear time and time
again is the number one way for an attorney to
get a bad review, whether that be Google or Yelp,
is to dismiss somebody on the phone. So they might
have they might not have a legitimate case, you can't
help them, but not showing empathy and not either trying
to direct them to another resource could earn you a
(18:17):
one star review and it's going to take a lot
of five star reviews to make up for that. So
having a service like that where you put your best
foot forward from the beginning, number one, it's the right
thing to do, but number two, it can have long
term effects because that person has a good experience and
they'll tell people about.
Speaker 1 (18:33):
That, right And it's hard because as an attorney with reviews,
because you're not going to win every case and you're
not going to keep everybody happy, but you can at
least set the expectations from the front. Hey, this is
what's going to happen, and this is what you can expect.
And yeah, okay I didn't win my case, or okay
I have to pay it or I have to do this,
but at least you were communicating with me, and that's key.
Speaker 3 (18:57):
So lawyer dot com as an entity, are what are
all the services? Because I didn't even realize until you
mentioned that you actually have a call center, so I
know there's directory. So any attorneys out there, you know,
if you're not in lawyer dot Com already I would
highly suggest signing up, but what comes with it? What
are the options? I assume there might be different platforms
(19:20):
or so.
Speaker 1 (19:20):
We try to get every attorney listed in the directory
because again, our goal is to help the consumer find
a local lawyer, whether they're a paid client or not.
So speaking in the directory is so important. You have
an enhanced listing, you have information. Right, consumers are still
going to the Internet to look for information to research
before they take action. So we have our directory and
(19:43):
then we have potential clients that come out of that.
Right they say, oh, hey, I need a lawyer. Where
do I go lawyer dot com? Okay, well you know
what I just I need a file for chapter eleven?
What do I do? Okay, well, let's see in Nevada.
These are the attorneys that would match your call, vacations
or your pre your requisites. So that is our core business.
(20:05):
And like I said, throughout the years, we see holes
both on the consumer side and the lawyer side, and
we try to create products to fill that. The biggest
one was our call center, and we're very much in
the as a startup mentality is let's see if it
sells before we put all this time and effort into
building it. So we said, hey, listen, we're going to
(20:25):
start a call center. I called one of my lawyers,
who's my guinea pig, and he's always so helpful to
let me you try everything, and he trusted me enough
to give me his phone line and for about a
year to my cell phone. I was the mark law firm,
and we learned so much that we built our own
call center. We now have over one hundred and eighty
(20:45):
agents us base. Like, we learned so much, and we've
tried many other products. Obviously some that have been successful,
like reputation management. Some not successful, but again we learn
with every failure how to make another product better. And
that's our goal is how are we going to make
the lawyers marketing journey easier? If I was a lawyer,
(21:09):
I would be so frustrated that I have like twelve
different vendors and it's so difficult to remember. Okay, well
John's over here, but Kristen's here. And our goal is
to be the one stop right. You need directory, you
need presents, you need leads, you need your phone answered,
and really that starts the life cycle of bringing new
clients in the door.
Speaker 3 (21:30):
Yeah, I really like that you said that, you know,
you actually were answering the phone yourself. Without doing it
that way, you miss so many opportunities. I remember listening
in on phone calls before, you know, when running some campaigns,
and they're fun to talk about because the mistakes are
so egregious. You're like, I can't believe this is the
way that they're operating. I remember doing a campaign. It
(21:53):
was a mass toward campaign, doesn't matter where the law
firm was, but they got an out of state call
and the receptionist says, oh, we don't take calls from that,
we don't take cases from that state. Click. And this
is a campaign that they're spending, you know, six figures
a month on to run. So without doing it yourself,
you probably would have missed the opportunities that you're able
to capitalize on.
Speaker 1 (22:14):
But it goes back to what we were saying earlier, Before
you spend another dollar, understand what's happening under your roof,
because there's so much optimization that could possibly be be happening. Right.
I've been on calls where I've called law firms and
they're like, oh, you know, here's the website and it
(22:34):
was the wrong website, or oh yeah, actually he's not
that good at that. Maybe call another lawyer. And it's
just it's shocking when we do those secret shopper what's
actually happening? We say, there's what you think's happening, what's
actually happening, and you know what the consumer's hearing. So
it's getting your hands dirty is so important.
Speaker 3 (22:54):
So let's pivot now to the Lawyer Growth Summit that's
going to be coming up. It's in October with the.
Speaker 1 (23:03):
We're twenty third through the twenty.
Speaker 3 (23:06):
Third, so what's uh, can you tell us a little
bit about the summit and what people can expect.
Speaker 1 (23:11):
Sure? Absolutely. So we had over the last year or
so have done smaller boot camps where we brought about
thirty forty fifty lawyers into a room and we talked
about how can you scale and grow your firm? And
it was so much fun. It allowed us to learn
and it allowed great networking for the attorneys. So we
came back to the table and we said, Okay, how
(23:33):
do we make this even bigger? So we doubled down.
And if you're going to go to any hotel in
Las Vegas these days, it has to be the Fontane
Blaue because it's phenomenal. So I got the only dates
that the Fontane Blue had left available in the fall season.
And the goal is that we're going to bring in
industry thought leaders. We're going to bring in experts in marketing,
(23:54):
experts in finance. Right, these are things that we have
to be talking about when you run a law firm.
Yes you need good marketing, Yes you need good intake,
but are you reviewing your your financials every month? Do
you understand what your runway is? We're going to be
bringing in experts to talk about all of these pillars
to grow a business. And everything that we do always
(24:17):
has the fun element. So not only will it be
very educational, great for networking, it should also be a
really wild and fun time.
Speaker 3 (24:26):
Oh that's great, and that's the city to do it in. Right, So,
is there is there anything that we didn't cover that
either lawyer dot com does or you know, advice that
you'd give to you know, people that are again either
new when they're trying to figure this out, or somebody
who feels like they've plateaued with marketing and they're looking
(24:47):
for their next good idea.
Speaker 1 (24:49):
Sure listen I've been there many, many, many times. The
best thing to do is just say, okay, we go
back to the low lying fruit. What is the easiest
thing that I can do to get a win? Because
once you get one win, you can get another one
and you use that as building blocks. So I would
sit down and look at your firm as the whole.
Where is it struggling the most? Is it your team?
(25:12):
Is it your intake? Is it your marketing spend? What
really needs the most attention, and then break it down
into bite size projects because, as you know, running a
business is very difficult and can be very overwhelming when
you look at the big picture. But if you come
in and say, okay, create your P and L. I
(25:32):
could do that for a week. That's something I can
do and you get accomplished that and then you move
on to what's your intake like and then really you
start kind of snowballing.
Speaker 3 (25:41):
Now do you offer coaching? Is that one of the
things that you do.
Speaker 1 (25:45):
We do offer coaching. It is part of our live
events platform. So we have a free coaching program and
then we have a more custom tailorized program. Our free
coaching is we do it once a week. It's open
to the public where really allows us to pool everybody
and talk about the challenges that everybody is experiencing. And
(26:06):
then it kind of like workshop. Okay, what are you feeling,
what's working for you? It's not and that's every week.
Speaker 3 (26:13):
That's great. Yeah, Well, I'd like to thank you for
your time today, and I'll let you I'm sure there's
not many more memorable URLs, especially in legal than lawyer
dot com. But is there any anyplace else that you
would like to send people to to either learn more
about what you do or the upcoming event that you
have in Las Vegas.
Speaker 1 (26:34):
Who are come to lawyer dot com. Everything's there. We
do have a website specifically for the conference, which is
called the Lawyer Growthsummit dot com. That is the name
of our show. Check us out on social media, and
you know, hopefully you'll see more of us, hopefully we'll
see more of you Eric too.
Speaker 3 (26:51):
Absolutely well, Colleen, thanks for your time.
Speaker 1 (26:54):
Thank you very much, appreciate it.
Speaker 2 (26:57):
Thanks for listening to the Legal Mastermind podcast presented by
market my market. You can check out additional episodes and
recaps at Legalmastermind podcast dot com.
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