November 1, 2024 • 35 mins
Kyle Hebenstreit is the CEO of PMP (PracticeMadePerfect).
For more than 15 years, PMP has partnered with consumer law firms to help them reach more clients through our marketing and website management services. They focus on the business of law, so their clients can focus on the practice of law.
From Broadcast TV and Paid Search to Streaming, Website Management, and everything in between, they have the tools to reach prospective clients at every stage of their decision-making journey.
Connect with Kyle on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hhebenstreit/
Visit PMP (PracticeMadePerfect): https://www.pmpmg.com/
Trial Lawyers Summit: https://ntlsummit.com/
On This Episode, We Discuss…
For more than 15 years, PMP has partnered with consumer law firms to help them reach more clients through our marketing and website management services. They focus on the business of law, so their clients can focus on the practice of law.
From Broadcast TV and Paid Search to Streaming, Website Management, and everything in between, they have the tools to reach prospective clients at every stage of their decision-making journey.
Connect with Kyle on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hhebenstreit/
Visit PMP (PracticeMadePerfect): https://www.pmpmg.com/
Trial Lawyers Summit: https://ntlsummit.com/
On This Episode, We Discuss…
- Importance of Multi-platform Marketing
- Custom Marketing Strategies
- The Importance of Setting Clear Expectations with Clients
- Embracing New AI Tools While Maintaining a Human Touch
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Ultimately, what you need to be thinking about is who
are the people who are currently walking down the sidewalk
today who might be my client tomorrow. What are their
habits and how do I position my firm in front
of them in a way that's favorable and trusting, And
how's that going to get them to be more likely
to hire me when the time comes, if it comes
to need an attorney.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
So being very human.
Speaker 1 (00:21):
Focused is going to be a good source of truth
for anybody in navigating what it will be an increasingly
evolving lanscape.
Speaker 3 (00:30):
You're listening to the Legal Mastermind podcast presented by Market
My Market with your hosts Eric Bersano, Ryan Klein, and
Chase Williams, the go to podcast for learning from the
experts and the legal community about effective ways to grow
and manage your law firm.
Speaker 4 (00:48):
Hello and welcome to another episode of the Legal Mastermind podcast. Today,
my guest is Kyle Keevan Street, who is the CEO
of PMP, which is Practice Made Perfect. Kyle, welcome to
the podcast.
Speaker 2 (01:03):
Thank you for having me, Eric, I appreciate.
Speaker 4 (01:05):
It absolutely so I'd love to dive right into the
marketing stuff, but can you give our audience a little
bit of a history on who you are, your background,
and how you became the CEO of PMP.
Speaker 2 (01:19):
Yeah, my pleasure.
Speaker 1 (01:21):
So I started my career in the film and entertainment industry.
I went to University of Southern California for undergrad and
studied film and business there and then subsequently worked at
a couple different companies and production companies. But the lion's
share my time was at a company called sky Dance Media,
which is a film co financing and production company. Now
(01:41):
they're much larger, actually they're in the process of acquiring Paramount.
Speaker 2 (01:46):
Nevertheless, we were at.
Speaker 1 (01:48):
A growth phase at skuy Dance, and that sparked my
interest in entrepreneurship because we were still a small company
and growing and I found that interesting and wanted to
pursue that. I thought the best way to do that
would be to go to business school and formalize some
of my skills in training, and then ultimately work as
a management consultant with Deloitte Consulting, where I did a
(02:11):
lot of again like media work, a lot of mergers
and acquisitions and growth strategy projects for large fortune five
hundred companies. But the nagging itch to pursue entrepreneurship was
still there, and I found an opportunity to partner with
an investment firm based out of Chicago that acquires great
small to medium sized businesses that are approaching their next
(02:32):
phase of growth, and I identified PMP as a great
company and acquired it with these partners in early twenty
twenty two and have been operating as the CEO for
the last two and a half years now. PMP has
been around since the early two thousands and it was
actually founded by John Morgan of Morgan and Morgan and
(02:55):
really started as a lead referral network and evolved into
being an advertising agency for personally in law firms round
two thousand and seven. As Morgan and Morgan grew and
became competitive with some of our clients, that created some
friction and his business partner was also looking for an
opportunity outside of PMP, and that presented an opportunity for
(03:15):
them to sell PMP, and we overlapped and they handed
off the business for its next phase of growth. And
we've got a great team in place and our goals
to really invest in the infrastructure and identify unique opportunities
for PMP and pmp's clients and hopefully continue to grow
over the long term.
Speaker 4 (03:35):
Yeah, that's a great history. And you know, having a
trained eye working as a consultant at Deloitte, you know,
there must have been something really attractive for you to
go from Deloitte over to you know, being the CEO
of this company. What were the factors that you saw
that made it so enticing for you?
Speaker 1 (03:53):
Sure? Well, first of all, you know, I did a
lot in terms of advertising strategy when I was a consultant.
I grew up in a family of lawyers. My dad
as an attorney and had his own practice for his
entire career, and my mom just retired from a federal
bankruptcy court as a judge back in June, and she
was a judge for thirty years of her career. My
(04:15):
sister is a former prosecutor. And so, you know, I
felt like I understand and still do feel like I
understand sort of the client base that is law firms
and sort of small to medium sized law firms, which
is different than you know, large corporate or white shoe
law firms. So that was sort of thing one is
I felt I understand the shape of clients. I felt
(04:36):
like I understood the shape of the services. YPMP specifically,
I thought was an attractive company. You know, they they've
been smart about how they invested in their advertising strategies
and smart about how they invested in providing digital services
and website services for clients. They had and still do
have a long tenure of clients, so a very loyal
(04:58):
client base I had grown with the clients. I also
like the notion of providing marketing services to personal injury
and consumer law firms in general. It's not their core
competency as lawyers, but it is something that is somewhat
the lifeblood of their business because it's typically a non
(05:19):
recurring relationship that they have with their clients, and there's
a heavy need and emphasis on continuing to identify potential
new clients to support and represent, and so from kind
of like a macroeconomic perspective, marketing and marketing partners sit
in an important part of the value chain of the
(05:39):
life cycle of a case, and I think that that
is interesting for us as a business. And I also
think that there's a long way to go for law firms,
which is, you know, it's highly fragmented.
Speaker 2 (05:51):
There are a lot of potential law.
Speaker 1 (05:53):
Firm clients across the country, and there's a lot of
way to go in terms of adopting technologies and ways
of doing things that maybe have seen success in other industries.
And I think that allows us to have a vision
for where we could build our company to sort of
stay ahead of the curve on behalf of our clients.
Speaker 2 (06:11):
And that presents some opportunity at PMP as well.
Speaker 4 (06:14):
So let's dive into that. You know, you've been in
this so long, You've seen a lot of changes in
marketing and how law firms do client development, can you?
And I'd really love to focus mostly on, you know,
what present day is, but leading up to that, what
are some of the biggest changes that you've seen that
our challenges or new opportunities for law firms.
Speaker 1 (06:38):
Sure, when I talk about this, I usually point out
sort of three macro trends that I think heavily impact
our part of the market. One is increasing amount of competition,
Two is platform diversification, and three is increasing professionalization kind
(07:00):
of brought on by the increase of institutional capital, particularly
in the planiff's firm market.
Speaker 2 (07:07):
And by those.
Speaker 1 (07:08):
Things, I mean roughly, and I'm going to exaggerate, just
like for the purposes of conversation. There's obviously nuance to this,
but if you were a plaintiff's firm in sort of
the early aughts or early teens, even there was a
lot of low hanging fruit. There wasn't a tremendous amount
of competition from an advertising standpoint. The model hadn't quite
(07:29):
been proven or sort of socialized in a way that
was acceptable to sort of your traditional law firm. I
think the market saw the success of a lot of
those law firms who were on TV advertising or doing
billboard advertising, and success breeds competition. So over time you've
(07:51):
seen more people entering the market looking to share in
some of the success that some of the law firms
who are relatively early movers I would call them, and
sort of the aughts and the teens, and giving them
a little bit more run for their money. At the
same time, platform diversification is something that's evolved, and so
instead of just being in first you know, the Yellow
(08:12):
Pages and then maybe on broadcast TV and billboards, you've
got you know, websites and SEO and paid search and
paid social media, programmatic advertising, connected TV or streaming. You know,
there's a proliferation of platforms where people consume media, and
as a result, there's a proliferation of platforms where you
can place advertising dollars to reach those people, and the
(08:36):
equation has gotten a lot more complex as a result. Lastly,
I would say sort of the professionalization brought on by
institutional capitalists. You're starting to see because of the sort
of ABS model in Arizona that allows for non lawyer
ownership of law firms, some other sort of shifts in
(08:56):
the marketplace that allow for private equity firms Headgephone, et
cetera to participate in the legal market. Those investment firms
typically are looking for a level of professionalization and operations
and a level of competition that the legal market wasn't
previously set up for, and I think that brings sort
of different demands in terms of how you treat your
(09:19):
law firm as a business to stay relevant and competitive.
So that's a long winded way I guess of saying
that you know, things have gotten more competitive, the market's
gotten more complex, and there's sort of a new entrant
of type of participant in the form of institutional players
that sort of places greater pressure on law firms to
(09:39):
evolve in a certain way to be successful and sustain
that success over the long term.
Speaker 4 (09:44):
Yeah. I kind of got into the industry right around
the time when the yellow pages were going away, But
I still worked with a lot of lawyers who would
see their rep once a year, pay their twenty thirty
forty grand and that was it. And with all the
changes that you just described, there's so much more need
(10:06):
for involvement from the law firm. And I think, at
least the way I see it, you've got an old
guard that's not used to that model. You know, they
might have even practiced before you were legally allowed to advertise.
Then it became, like you said, billboards, yellow pages. So
I guess my question to you is, if you're a
law firm that is looking to get more clients through
(10:29):
marketing in your specific geography, what type of plan do
you want to put together for them, Because, like you said,
there is so much fractionalization of where you can put
those marketing dollars. Do you have kind of a one
size fits all or specific starting points that you then
grow into something bigger.
Speaker 2 (10:47):
Yeah, that's a great question.
Speaker 1 (10:49):
So what we do is, you know, we build custom
plans for our clients across you know, website and SEO
through you know, digital advertising and what you would consider
traditional advertising. Sometimes it's the holistic plan. Sometimes it's a
la carte because you know, they might leverage a different
vendor for a different sort of slice of their overall
marketing mix. But suffice to say, we think about this
(11:12):
as a holistic marketing uh plan, and we we execute
against that based on the needs of the particular client,
their objectives, local market dynamics, and frankly, like size of budget.
What we've done is we've learned a lot because we've
served a variety of different types of law firm clients
(11:32):
and different markets. There are certain characteristics that sort of
define what strategy makes the most sense. And we've got
a couple of like starting playbooks based on inputs, and
that's again like sort of how competitive is the market,
how long has this firm been in market, what are
the objectives of the firm, things of that nature. We
(11:52):
take that information and then we sort of leverage the
playbook and then we personalize it to that firm, and
then we sort of act vate a campaign where there's
a test and learn period to make sure that the
personalized campaign is actually truly optimized for that firm, a
firm that might just be starting out, that doesn't have
a huge budget that really just like wants maybe it's
a solo practitioner or a solo with a couple of
(12:16):
attorneys on staff. They don't need a tremendous volume of cases.
They just want to sort of stays busy and augment
the referral and sort of word of mouth business they have,
and that's sort of the lifestyle that they're looking for.
Speaker 2 (12:28):
That plan is going to.
Speaker 1 (12:29):
Look a lot more like, well, you need a website,
maybe some content and some light SEO and maybe some
local services ads and perhaps pay per click.
Speaker 2 (12:38):
But that's going to help sort of create an.
Speaker 1 (12:39):
Engine for you online where you're going to start augmenting
your reach beyond your core word of mouth or referral
base and start to be meeting clients through those mechanisms
over time. So that's a sort of much smaller and
contained plan. Conversely, there might be a firm that's been
in market for twenty years, been advertising twenty years, as
(13:01):
you know, twenty attorneys and you know, many more support
staff and internal intake services and a lot of overhead
to maintain that firm needs to continue to effectively keep
the engine going and you know, maintain brand awareness, but
also drive a lot of performance and conversion based tactics
to make sure they're driving the case type and case
(13:21):
volume that they need to continue to either sustain and
grow their practice. And that looks like a completely different
plan that's going to probably be touching most of the
relevant platforms within the media mix that you'd see in
the personal injury space, from sort of offline media and
online media and you know, organic website SEO traffic.
Speaker 2 (13:40):
So we try to take those inputs.
Speaker 1 (13:42):
Identify that archetypes they fit from the client profiles and
strategies that we believe and know work based on our experience,
and then we personalize it through sort of the onboarding process,
and then we optimize it as we're live in the campaign.
Speaker 4 (13:57):
One of the most difficult parts of being a marketer
in this world is, you know, what I call the
valley of doubt. Whereas you someone's excited to work with you,
they want to get going. There's there's different types of
mediums that you can use, but almost nothing is instantaneous.
(14:18):
You know, LSAs and maybe some paid search, but what
are how do you set expectations for your clients, because
as you mentioned, there's it's so much more competition these
days than it used to be. So if you're working
with someone who might be, you know, behind the eight
ball and needs to catch up, what type of conversations
do you have with them, and do you have a
(14:41):
starting point that you like to to say, Hey, here's
where we need to start, and here's your expectations, because
you're not going to get phone calls tomorrow just because
you started today.
Speaker 1 (14:52):
Yeah, Fortunately for us, I think a lot of folks
have heard that narrative previously. And what I find is
when we speak to new clients, they come with the
expectation that there's going to be a bit.
Speaker 2 (15:04):
Of a ramp or build. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (15:05):
That said, sometimes people are impatient and everyone wants to
be seeing results sooner rather than later, and greater results.
So what we sort of say is, you know, we
are trusted advisors. We have a lot of experience in
the market. We've been doing this for a long time.
We know and we have strong beliefs on what works
and what doesn't work. We have benchmark abilities across clients,
(15:27):
so we can pressure test what's happening in one market
versus another. So that kind of intelligence allows us to
be even smarter about advising our clients. But at the
end of the day, our clients are the decision makers.
We're not the decision makers on their behalf. So we'll
give a really strong, intellectually honest recommendation on what we
believe is going to be best to meet their objectives,
but it just may.
Speaker 2 (15:48):
Not be what they want to do or they have
time to do.
Speaker 1 (15:52):
So we try to first set expectations on how we
work with one another, and we ultimately serve the client.
Because we are in professional services business, it's not really
our way or the highway. We just want to make
them aware of what the reality looks like from our perspective,
and then we can execute against a plan that we
sort of collaborate with.
Speaker 2 (16:11):
Respect to setting expectations.
Speaker 1 (16:12):
In terms of results, there's a lot of pressure to say,
you know, you spend this amount of money and you'll
get this many cases, and there's certainly you know, pay
per lead lead gen companies out there, and you know,
I think there's economic benefit to law firms pursuing those,
but there's also a lot of risk involved in those.
I tend to think our model is more sustainable for
(16:35):
the law firm. If you're investing in your brand and
you're front facing image to the market, that's an asset
that builds over time, and ultimately what you're going to
be doing is driving more cost efficient and more predictable
cases in the future. So if you really want to
do it well, you need to take a long view
and you need to allocate your time and your investment
(16:57):
dollars over a multi year view to build the version
of your firm that you want to see. And we
can extrapolate and provide case studies of what we believe
the case volume and case type will be based on
comparable firms, and that's how we sort of build conviction.
But we will never promise specific results to a client
(17:18):
because there is so much noise in the market, even
though there's a strong temptation from a sales perspective to
say you will get this. You know, that's what people
want to hear. But you know, we tell people the truth,
even if it's not necessarily what they want to hear.
Speaker 2 (17:33):
So that's more or.
Speaker 1 (17:34):
Less how we how we treat the ambiguity of those conversations,
and how we set our expectations and if.
Speaker 4 (17:40):
We were to separate these two different types of marketing
one output in you know, just that we'll call it
traditional for now, which would be SEO PPC LSA's that's
one bucket. You need some involvement, but not a ton
of involvement from the law firm. If you go to
the social media and especially the TV side of things,
(18:00):
I think you really need more buy and involvement from
the law firm. Is that a go no go for you?
Meaning that one of the partners has to become the
face and you know, be willing to do commercials and
be willing to do social media ads. How does that
look in these conversations? And if you find someone who
(18:21):
doesn't want to do that, it just eliminates one of
the mediums.
Speaker 2 (18:25):
No, I love that. That's a great question.
Speaker 1 (18:27):
And when we talk about being advisors versus decision makers,
a lot of times that comes down to sort of
like creative direction and not just like channel strategy or
media mix. And you know, I have a point of
view and our team all have a collective point of
view on like creative approaches that seem to resonate and work.
(18:49):
Messaging that resonates and works. However, it's not our face
up on the billboard. It's not our firm. So these
decisions from a marketing standpoint, it's not made sort of
like an academic chamber like you might have in like
a larger corporation. It's made based on that, but ultimately
it's a person's business and their likeness that they're representing.
(19:12):
And these are folks that walk around their local community
being recognized, and they want to be perceived a way
that's consistent with their personal preference, not necessarily in a
way that is going to optimize the number and type
of cases that they want. So it's it's a push
and pull between like what we see as effective versus
what our clients feel comfortable with. There's also the consideration
(19:33):
of like what our clients have the capacity to create.
So authenticity is a key part of entertainment media in
any format. And if you've got an attorney who is,
you know, molecularly designed a certain way and you want
them to show up on camera a completely different way,
it's going to be inauthentic and not work. So there's
like a variety of different considerations that goes into what's
(19:56):
the right creative direction. You know, if a if a
client does not want to be on camera but wants
the success or is not necessarily great on camera, or
wants the success of a video based advertising campaign. We
work with spokespeople who represent themselves as attorneys, and that's
(20:17):
a good solution, and so that's sort of how we
manage it. Occasionally, we'll, you know, have another attorney within
the firm sort of be the face of the firm.
We advise that we want that person to be an
equity partner in the firm, so they're not building up
their own brand credibility and potentially opening up a law
firm elsewhere. So there's other considerations to that effect, but
(20:39):
in general, it's it's a not necessarily a one size
fits all approach, and there's sort of serious marketing that
we've seen work really well. There's also marketing narratives with
a little bit more levity that might be less loyally,
but that also work well, and so it's it's a
(20:59):
con some sort of evolution. I will say that I
believe that one of the consequences of an increasingly competitive
market leads us to need to think about creative differently.
Because what happens is all of these firms are focusing
on the same sort of share of voice, and you
need to differentiate not just from your channel strategy, but
(21:22):
in terms of your creative and if it's just sort
of the same, similar, off the shelf type of creative,
you're going to be drowned out by other competitors in
the market who are popping more. Also, creative is different
based on TV versus TikTok and the audience that consumes those.
So you really want to have a clear brand identity
(21:43):
and then you activate that brand identity in a consistent way,
but on different platforms through different tactics.
Speaker 4 (21:52):
Yeah, I find myself having this conversation with lawyers all
the time. Is you know, they say, and rightfully, so,
look all I want is cases, and I just say
it's it's not as simple as that or as easy
as it used to be. Every law firm is its
own brand, and usually there's at least one person that
needs to be the face of that brand. And hiring
(22:13):
an attorney, whether it's personal injury or bankruptcy or famulaw,
this is such a personal decision that for someone to
hire somebody that might be one of the most difficult
things they've gone through in their life based on you know,
a sentence in a Google ad isn't reasonable anymore. People
are used to creating these relationships, you know, before they
(22:35):
you know, make such a decision. So if you're an
attorney out there, I think you really need to understand that.
Whether it's you the owner or one of your partners,
somebody really should pick up that mantle and run with
it because you need to be able to compete on
a branding perspective within your own market. I want to
(22:56):
shift a little bit because i'd love to get your
take on, you know, the latest trend of AI and
how that can be used in law firms in a
beneficial way, and maybe even some things to avoid, you know,
if you see some common mistakes that people are using.
Speaker 2 (23:13):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (23:13):
Sure, so in terms of law firm operations, my perspective
is that we're seeing a lot of AI tools pop up,
and typically they're solving a part of the process, whether
it's like document review, a certain type of document review,
doing a certain type of job, document creation, things of
(23:34):
that nature, Like it depends, We're seeing a lot of
kind of individualized tools doing one job to be done.
I think there's going to be a temptation over time
to sort of tie all these AI tools into one
sort of holistic you know, enterprise AI practice management system
for law firms, But for now it's still a little
bit of a one off basis, and the efficacy of
(23:55):
any given tool is really sort of I guess in
the eyes of the user, but they're not all sort
of built the same way, So I guess one area
is like, be cautious of the quality of a tool you're
really signing up for and understand what you're getting yourself into,
because you don't want to spend too much time going down.
Speaker 2 (24:10):
The road with a tool that's not going to be
effective for the needs of your firm.
Speaker 1 (24:15):
I think from a marketing perspective, what we tend to
see and how AI has incorporated to what we do
and how we engage with our clients. One is, you know,
content writing on site for SEO, you know, we take
the point of view we use AI as a tool
to augment our human content writers who are in house,
and so maybe it's for idea generation or a bit
(24:37):
of a first draft, or if we want to have
a summary for Google Business or elsewhere, we might use
AI to draft to you know, take a blog that
we've written and create a summary. So we use it
as a tool to sort of augment what our team does.
But there's always a meaningful amount of human intervention involved,
and that's our point of view. I think someone can
(24:58):
make a completely honest argument for AI doing the entire
job with like very minimal human intervention. We believe that
that's just a little bit risky in terms of quality
and how it might show up in terms of Google results,
because at least from a quality standpoint, there's always a
little bit of a risk and liability with respect to
lawyers being in compliance with bar regulations, and you don't
(25:20):
want to have AI write some sort of statement that
is not necessarily provable and it is potentially voting liability
onto your clients. And so that's how we have largely
incorporated it. We've also incorporated it into our development and
design process for websites to enhance and expedite the process
(25:43):
for building and designing our websites. We've also used it
to build sort of internal chatbots. So you know, there's
various preferences almost like brand books for our clients, and
you know how they like to show up in terms
of content and voice and things of that nature. So
we've started building internal chatbots that are sort of bespoke
(26:04):
to certain clients, so we can ask what the right
approach would be for a given client, and we can
institutionalize that knowledge and an AI chatbot tool.
Speaker 2 (26:14):
One thing that we're kind.
Speaker 1 (26:15):
Of figuring out, and maybe you would have a perspective
on this, is like how certainly Google's AI overview is
affecting search traffic to our client's websites. Like we've seen
traffic decline in all transparency due to no other factor
than Google's changing its AI overview. And when you think
(26:36):
about it from a user experience, it's very likely that
someone would be googling some sort of search term and
be satisfied with what they're reading on the search page
and not necessarily immediately clicking through to seek services. And
does that disrupt the typical, you know, potential client journey
that they would go through. Maybe, but you know, we're
still sort of in the process of running experiments to
(26:58):
truly form a smart opinion on that.
Speaker 2 (27:01):
But that's an area that we are trying to keep
an eye on.
Speaker 1 (27:04):
In addition to that, I mean, there's just provably like
search habits of people not using Google at all and
using other AI tools like chat GBT as an example,
to resolve questions or queries that they.
Speaker 2 (27:17):
Might normally go to Google for.
Speaker 1 (27:18):
So those impacts we're seeing effect search quite a bit.
And then the last area of AI outside of like
marketing or the internal law firm operations is really sort
of with respect to intake. Intake is not necessarily something
we currently provide, but it is something that we interact
(27:39):
with quite a bit because it's a part of the
funnel from marketing and website to actually a converted case.
And you see various applications of AI, whether it's with
chatbots or otherwise. I think that it's going to be
some time before truly like voice activated AI is managing
(27:59):
call in a way that people would trust. But that
feels like the direction that that would go over the
longer term. But that's not necessarily something that I believe
is in the near term, just based on human demand
and preference. So those are some of the areas that
we run up against AI as a topic and how
we think about it. But we're constantly having conversations and
(28:22):
we've got our ongoing team's channel for the whole company
where people will put interesting articles or they'll will do
like AI competitions for creating a song just to kind
of get people thinking about it and like practicing that
muscle because it's going to be part of our life.
Speaker 2 (28:38):
It's just figuring out the right way to introduce it
over time.
Speaker 4 (28:42):
Yeah, one of the address one of the key points
that you just made, which was really the disruption with
Google Search. I agree the AI results that Google has,
then there's the chat sheapts, and then the development of LSA's.
You know, So for anybody who do and know what
an LSA is, it's basically like Google AdWords, except for
(29:03):
they show up on top of those and you pay
per lead as opposed to per click. And I think
it's been obvious that that's really where Google's trying to
drive the services industry is to their lssas, which is very,
very disruptive to traffic clicks all that. So I think
you're onto something there. And I also feel like we're
(29:24):
in this evolving, hyper evolving stage right now where the
new landscape that's going to be the next several years
hasn't completely settled yet, so it's really being open to
different ideas in marketing and not being not being adverse
to trying something that might fail with at least a
budget that you're able to risk, because if you just
(29:47):
continue to do what worked five years ago, you might
go the way of Blockbuster video. And you know, we're
just about at the end of our time here, and
I feel like you've got a ton of inform maation
that you could share. So I guess as my last question,
I would just leave it open ended. Is there anything
that you would want our listeners to have as a
(30:08):
takeaway from this conversation when considering increasing either coming up
to speed with their competition their local market, or they're
already doing well and they want to do better. How
some type of an interaction with you could help them
to achieve that.
Speaker 2 (30:25):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (30:25):
Absolutely, I think like two things come to mind. One
is sort of audience focus and the other is treating
your law firm like a business. And so I will
start with treating your law firm like a business. The
temptation historically has been that you know, law firm and
(30:48):
practice of law is sort of a learned profession and
as sacred and in many ways it is, and you know,
our justice system obviously is what allows our sort of
democracy to run effectively, and I believe in that.
Speaker 2 (31:00):
However, you know a by product.
Speaker 1 (31:02):
Of doing that well as a lawyer, as you're running
a successful small and medium sized business, which is a
different competency. Many lawyers are able to make that adjustment. Well,
most in my experience are not, because it's a different
way of allowing your mind to work. You're good at
one thing, the things required to grow and manage your
(31:23):
business require different.
Speaker 2 (31:24):
Competencies that you don't have.
Speaker 1 (31:26):
And I am a firm believer in outsourcing what's not
your core competency as a business. We have an outsourced
it firm because we don't have you know it expertise
on staff. So I think that law firms need to
sort of come to terms with the fact that in
order to stay competitive, they need to think about their
law firm like a business, not just as like a
member of the community, anymore like it might have been
(31:47):
where word of mouth and reputation would have allowed you
to build.
Speaker 2 (31:50):
A strong practice.
Speaker 1 (31:52):
But don't like to hear that, but it's true, and
I would encourage folks to strongly consider outsourcing variety of
their services that are not core to the practice of
law and serving their clients. That's what they're really good at,
and they should leverage the expertise of outsourced providers of
elsewhere to get better results, but also to manage overhead
and de risk the operations of managing a law firm.
(32:15):
So that is sort of area one. Area two is
being audience focused. I think that's a north star in
any advertising, but particularly here, and when we talk about
evolution of platforms, ultimately, whether it's Google or Chat, GPT
or you know, you know, fill in the blank. I mean,
(32:36):
whether it's broadcast TV or streaming on Hulu, it's ultimately
about informing and influencing the behaviors of people who are
in need of a service. And so if you put
yourself empathetically in the shoes of those people and how
they engage in their day to day life and their
physical world, that's going to help you and that's going
(32:57):
to help inform the strategy of how to best represent
your firm in front of them. So it's easy to
get lost in sort of the machinations of what's going
on with AI and consolidation of website providers in the
market and all this stuff. Ultimately, what you need to
be thinking about is like, who are the people who
are currently walking down the sidewalk today who might be
my client tomorrow. What are their habits and how do
(33:20):
I position my firm in front of them in a
way that's favorable and trusting, And how's that going to
get them to be more likely to hire me when
the time comes, if it comes to.
Speaker 2 (33:31):
Need an attorney.
Speaker 1 (33:32):
So being very human focused is going to be a
good source of truth for anybody in navigating what it
will be an increasingly evolving landscape.
Speaker 4 (33:43):
Well, Kyle, thanks for your time today. This is the
first time that I've ever met you, although I've known
of Practice made Perfect for a long time end of you.
So I'm glad we got the chance to have this conversation.
Anything that you'd like to point somebody towards that we
can leave in the show notes. Obviously you're website any
books that you've written, or any conferences that you want
(34:03):
to tell people about that you're going to be at.
Speaker 1 (34:06):
So we'll be speaking at the National Trial Lawyer's Summit
in Miami in January, so if anybody is there, I
would love to connect in person, and we'll be at
a variety of conferences throughout twenty twenty five.
Speaker 2 (34:18):
I have not written any.
Speaker 1 (34:19):
Books, but you can find a lot of really rich
content on the nature of law firm marketing and and
other things that affect small to medium size law firms
on our website at pmpmg dot com. And if anybody
is interested in learning more about PMP or just you know, chatting,
(34:40):
you can email me at Kyle at pmp mg dot com.
Speaker 4 (34:47):
Thanks, Kyle, really appreciate your time today.
Speaker 2 (34:49):
All right, thank you, Eric, This is great, appreciate it.
Speaker 3 (34:52):
Thanks for listening to the Legal Mastermind podcast presented by
market my market. You can check out additional episodes and
RecA apps at Legalmastermind podcast dot com.
Ultimately, what you need to be thinking about is who
are the people who are currently walking down the sidewalk
today who might be my client tomorrow. What are their
habits and how do I position my firm in front
of them in a way that's favorable and trusting, And
how's that going to get them to be more likely
to hire me when the time comes, if it comes
to need an attorney.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
So being very human.
Speaker 1 (00:21):
Focused is going to be a good source of truth
for anybody in navigating what it will be an increasingly
evolving lanscape.
Speaker 3 (00:30):
You're listening to the Legal Mastermind podcast presented by Market
My Market with your hosts Eric Bersano, Ryan Klein, and
Chase Williams, the go to podcast for learning from the
experts and the legal community about effective ways to grow
and manage your law firm.
Speaker 4 (00:48):
Hello and welcome to another episode of the Legal Mastermind podcast. Today,
my guest is Kyle Keevan Street, who is the CEO
of PMP, which is Practice Made Perfect. Kyle, welcome to
the podcast.
Speaker 2 (01:03):
Thank you for having me, Eric, I appreciate.
Speaker 4 (01:05):
It absolutely so I'd love to dive right into the
marketing stuff, but can you give our audience a little
bit of a history on who you are, your background,
and how you became the CEO of PMP.
Speaker 2 (01:19):
Yeah, my pleasure.
Speaker 1 (01:21):
So I started my career in the film and entertainment industry.
I went to University of Southern California for undergrad and
studied film and business there and then subsequently worked at
a couple different companies and production companies. But the lion's
share my time was at a company called sky Dance Media,
which is a film co financing and production company. Now
(01:41):
they're much larger, actually they're in the process of acquiring Paramount.
Speaker 2 (01:46):
Nevertheless, we were at.
Speaker 1 (01:48):
A growth phase at skuy Dance, and that sparked my
interest in entrepreneurship because we were still a small company
and growing and I found that interesting and wanted to
pursue that. I thought the best way to do that
would be to go to business school and formalize some
of my skills in training, and then ultimately work as
a management consultant with Deloitte Consulting, where I did a
(02:11):
lot of again like media work, a lot of mergers
and acquisitions and growth strategy projects for large fortune five
hundred companies. But the nagging itch to pursue entrepreneurship was
still there, and I found an opportunity to partner with
an investment firm based out of Chicago that acquires great
small to medium sized businesses that are approaching their next
(02:32):
phase of growth, and I identified PMP as a great
company and acquired it with these partners in early twenty
twenty two and have been operating as the CEO for
the last two and a half years now. PMP has
been around since the early two thousands and it was
actually founded by John Morgan of Morgan and Morgan and
(02:55):
really started as a lead referral network and evolved into
being an advertising agency for personally in law firms round
two thousand and seven. As Morgan and Morgan grew and
became competitive with some of our clients, that created some
friction and his business partner was also looking for an
opportunity outside of PMP, and that presented an opportunity for
(03:15):
them to sell PMP, and we overlapped and they handed
off the business for its next phase of growth. And
we've got a great team in place and our goals
to really invest in the infrastructure and identify unique opportunities
for PMP and pmp's clients and hopefully continue to grow
over the long term.
Speaker 4 (03:35):
Yeah, that's a great history. And you know, having a
trained eye working as a consultant at Deloitte, you know,
there must have been something really attractive for you to
go from Deloitte over to you know, being the CEO
of this company. What were the factors that you saw
that made it so enticing for you?
Speaker 1 (03:53):
Sure? Well, first of all, you know, I did a
lot in terms of advertising strategy when I was a consultant.
I grew up in a family of lawyers. My dad
as an attorney and had his own practice for his
entire career, and my mom just retired from a federal
bankruptcy court as a judge back in June, and she
was a judge for thirty years of her career. My
(04:15):
sister is a former prosecutor. And so, you know, I
felt like I understand and still do feel like I
understand sort of the client base that is law firms
and sort of small to medium sized law firms, which
is different than you know, large corporate or white shoe
law firms. So that was sort of thing one is
I felt I understand the shape of clients. I felt
(04:36):
like I understood the shape of the services. YPMP specifically,
I thought was an attractive company. You know, they they've
been smart about how they invested in their advertising strategies
and smart about how they invested in providing digital services
and website services for clients. They had and still do
have a long tenure of clients, so a very loyal
(04:58):
client base I had grown with the clients. I also
like the notion of providing marketing services to personal injury
and consumer law firms in general. It's not their core
competency as lawyers, but it is something that is somewhat
the lifeblood of their business because it's typically a non
(05:19):
recurring relationship that they have with their clients, and there's
a heavy need and emphasis on continuing to identify potential
new clients to support and represent, and so from kind
of like a macroeconomic perspective, marketing and marketing partners sit
in an important part of the value chain of the
(05:39):
life cycle of a case, and I think that that
is interesting for us as a business. And I also
think that there's a long way to go for law firms,
which is, you know, it's highly fragmented.
Speaker 2 (05:51):
There are a lot of potential law.
Speaker 1 (05:53):
Firm clients across the country, and there's a lot of
way to go in terms of adopting technologies and ways
of doing things that maybe have seen success in other industries.
And I think that allows us to have a vision
for where we could build our company to sort of
stay ahead of the curve on behalf of our clients.
Speaker 2 (06:11):
And that presents some opportunity at PMP as well.
Speaker 4 (06:14):
So let's dive into that. You know, you've been in
this so long, You've seen a lot of changes in
marketing and how law firms do client development, can you?
And I'd really love to focus mostly on, you know,
what present day is, but leading up to that, what
are some of the biggest changes that you've seen that
our challenges or new opportunities for law firms.
Speaker 1 (06:38):
Sure, when I talk about this, I usually point out
sort of three macro trends that I think heavily impact
our part of the market. One is increasing amount of competition,
Two is platform diversification, and three is increasing professionalization kind
(07:00):
of brought on by the increase of institutional capital, particularly
in the planiff's firm market.
Speaker 2 (07:07):
And by those.
Speaker 1 (07:08):
Things, I mean roughly, and I'm going to exaggerate, just
like for the purposes of conversation. There's obviously nuance to this,
but if you were a plaintiff's firm in sort of
the early aughts or early teens, even there was a
lot of low hanging fruit. There wasn't a tremendous amount
of competition from an advertising standpoint. The model hadn't quite
(07:29):
been proven or sort of socialized in a way that
was acceptable to sort of your traditional law firm. I
think the market saw the success of a lot of
those law firms who were on TV advertising or doing
billboard advertising, and success breeds competition. So over time you've
(07:51):
seen more people entering the market looking to share in
some of the success that some of the law firms
who are relatively early movers I would call them, and
sort of the aughts and the teens, and giving them
a little bit more run for their money. At the
same time, platform diversification is something that's evolved, and so
instead of just being in first you know, the Yellow
(08:12):
Pages and then maybe on broadcast TV and billboards, you've
got you know, websites and SEO and paid search and
paid social media, programmatic advertising, connected TV or streaming. You know,
there's a proliferation of platforms where people consume media, and
as a result, there's a proliferation of platforms where you
can place advertising dollars to reach those people, and the
(08:36):
equation has gotten a lot more complex as a result. Lastly,
I would say sort of the professionalization brought on by
institutional capitalists. You're starting to see because of the sort
of ABS model in Arizona that allows for non lawyer
ownership of law firms, some other sort of shifts in
(08:56):
the marketplace that allow for private equity firms Headgephone, et
cetera to participate in the legal market. Those investment firms
typically are looking for a level of professionalization and operations
and a level of competition that the legal market wasn't
previously set up for, and I think that brings sort
of different demands in terms of how you treat your
(09:19):
law firm as a business to stay relevant and competitive.
So that's a long winded way I guess of saying
that you know, things have gotten more competitive, the market's
gotten more complex, and there's sort of a new entrant
of type of participant in the form of institutional players
that sort of places greater pressure on law firms to
(09:39):
evolve in a certain way to be successful and sustain
that success over the long term.
Speaker 4 (09:44):
Yeah. I kind of got into the industry right around
the time when the yellow pages were going away, But
I still worked with a lot of lawyers who would
see their rep once a year, pay their twenty thirty
forty grand and that was it. And with all the
changes that you just described, there's so much more need
(10:06):
for involvement from the law firm. And I think, at
least the way I see it, you've got an old
guard that's not used to that model. You know, they
might have even practiced before you were legally allowed to advertise.
Then it became, like you said, billboards, yellow pages. So
I guess my question to you is, if you're a
law firm that is looking to get more clients through
(10:29):
marketing in your specific geography, what type of plan do
you want to put together for them, Because, like you said,
there is so much fractionalization of where you can put
those marketing dollars. Do you have kind of a one
size fits all or specific starting points that you then
grow into something bigger.
Speaker 2 (10:47):
Yeah, that's a great question.
Speaker 1 (10:49):
So what we do is, you know, we build custom
plans for our clients across you know, website and SEO
through you know, digital advertising and what you would consider
traditional advertising. Sometimes it's the holistic plan. Sometimes it's a
la carte because you know, they might leverage a different
vendor for a different sort of slice of their overall
marketing mix. But suffice to say, we think about this
(11:12):
as a holistic marketing uh plan, and we we execute
against that based on the needs of the particular client,
their objectives, local market dynamics, and frankly, like size of budget.
What we've done is we've learned a lot because we've
served a variety of different types of law firm clients
(11:32):
and different markets. There are certain characteristics that sort of
define what strategy makes the most sense. And we've got
a couple of like starting playbooks based on inputs, and
that's again like sort of how competitive is the market,
how long has this firm been in market, what are
the objectives of the firm, things of that nature. We
(11:52):
take that information and then we sort of leverage the
playbook and then we personalize it to that firm, and
then we sort of act vate a campaign where there's
a test and learn period to make sure that the
personalized campaign is actually truly optimized for that firm, a
firm that might just be starting out, that doesn't have
a huge budget that really just like wants maybe it's
a solo practitioner or a solo with a couple of
(12:16):
attorneys on staff. They don't need a tremendous volume of cases.
They just want to sort of stays busy and augment
the referral and sort of word of mouth business they have,
and that's sort of the lifestyle that they're looking for.
Speaker 2 (12:28):
That plan is going to.
Speaker 1 (12:29):
Look a lot more like, well, you need a website,
maybe some content and some light SEO and maybe some
local services ads and perhaps pay per click.
Speaker 2 (12:38):
But that's going to help sort of create an.
Speaker 1 (12:39):
Engine for you online where you're going to start augmenting
your reach beyond your core word of mouth or referral
base and start to be meeting clients through those mechanisms
over time. So that's a sort of much smaller and
contained plan. Conversely, there might be a firm that's been
in market for twenty years, been advertising twenty years, as
(13:01):
you know, twenty attorneys and you know, many more support
staff and internal intake services and a lot of overhead
to maintain that firm needs to continue to effectively keep
the engine going and you know, maintain brand awareness, but
also drive a lot of performance and conversion based tactics
to make sure they're driving the case type and case
(13:21):
volume that they need to continue to either sustain and
grow their practice. And that looks like a completely different
plan that's going to probably be touching most of the
relevant platforms within the media mix that you'd see in
the personal injury space, from sort of offline media and
online media and you know, organic website SEO traffic.
Speaker 2 (13:40):
So we try to take those inputs.
Speaker 1 (13:42):
Identify that archetypes they fit from the client profiles and
strategies that we believe and know work based on our experience,
and then we personalize it through sort of the onboarding process,
and then we optimize it as we're live in the campaign.
Speaker 4 (13:57):
One of the most difficult parts of being a marketer
in this world is, you know, what I call the
valley of doubt. Whereas you someone's excited to work with you,
they want to get going. There's there's different types of
mediums that you can use, but almost nothing is instantaneous.
(14:18):
You know, LSAs and maybe some paid search, but what
are how do you set expectations for your clients, because
as you mentioned, there's it's so much more competition these
days than it used to be. So if you're working
with someone who might be, you know, behind the eight
ball and needs to catch up, what type of conversations
do you have with them, and do you have a
(14:41):
starting point that you like to to say, Hey, here's
where we need to start, and here's your expectations, because
you're not going to get phone calls tomorrow just because
you started today.
Speaker 1 (14:52):
Yeah, Fortunately for us, I think a lot of folks
have heard that narrative previously. And what I find is
when we speak to new clients, they come with the
expectation that there's going to be a bit.
Speaker 2 (15:04):
Of a ramp or build. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (15:05):
That said, sometimes people are impatient and everyone wants to
be seeing results sooner rather than later, and greater results.
So what we sort of say is, you know, we
are trusted advisors. We have a lot of experience in
the market. We've been doing this for a long time.
We know and we have strong beliefs on what works
and what doesn't work. We have benchmark abilities across clients,
(15:27):
so we can pressure test what's happening in one market
versus another. So that kind of intelligence allows us to
be even smarter about advising our clients. But at the
end of the day, our clients are the decision makers.
We're not the decision makers on their behalf. So we'll
give a really strong, intellectually honest recommendation on what we
believe is going to be best to meet their objectives,
but it just may.
Speaker 2 (15:48):
Not be what they want to do or they have
time to do.
Speaker 1 (15:52):
So we try to first set expectations on how we
work with one another, and we ultimately serve the client.
Because we are in professional services business, it's not really
our way or the highway. We just want to make
them aware of what the reality looks like from our perspective,
and then we can execute against a plan that we
sort of collaborate with.
Speaker 2 (16:11):
Respect to setting expectations.
Speaker 1 (16:12):
In terms of results, there's a lot of pressure to say,
you know, you spend this amount of money and you'll
get this many cases, and there's certainly you know, pay
per lead lead gen companies out there, and you know,
I think there's economic benefit to law firms pursuing those,
but there's also a lot of risk involved in those.
I tend to think our model is more sustainable for
(16:35):
the law firm. If you're investing in your brand and
you're front facing image to the market, that's an asset
that builds over time, and ultimately what you're going to
be doing is driving more cost efficient and more predictable
cases in the future. So if you really want to
do it well, you need to take a long view
and you need to allocate your time and your investment
(16:57):
dollars over a multi year view to build the version
of your firm that you want to see. And we
can extrapolate and provide case studies of what we believe
the case volume and case type will be based on
comparable firms, and that's how we sort of build conviction.
But we will never promise specific results to a client
(17:18):
because there is so much noise in the market, even
though there's a strong temptation from a sales perspective to
say you will get this. You know, that's what people
want to hear. But you know, we tell people the truth,
even if it's not necessarily what they want to hear.
Speaker 2 (17:33):
So that's more or.
Speaker 1 (17:34):
Less how we how we treat the ambiguity of those conversations,
and how we set our expectations and if.
Speaker 4 (17:40):
We were to separate these two different types of marketing
one output in you know, just that we'll call it
traditional for now, which would be SEO PPC LSA's that's
one bucket. You need some involvement, but not a ton
of involvement from the law firm. If you go to
the social media and especially the TV side of things,
(18:00):
I think you really need more buy and involvement from
the law firm. Is that a go no go for you?
Meaning that one of the partners has to become the
face and you know, be willing to do commercials and
be willing to do social media ads. How does that
look in these conversations? And if you find someone who
(18:21):
doesn't want to do that, it just eliminates one of
the mediums.
Speaker 2 (18:25):
No, I love that. That's a great question.
Speaker 1 (18:27):
And when we talk about being advisors versus decision makers,
a lot of times that comes down to sort of
like creative direction and not just like channel strategy or
media mix. And you know, I have a point of
view and our team all have a collective point of
view on like creative approaches that seem to resonate and work.
(18:49):
Messaging that resonates and works. However, it's not our face
up on the billboard. It's not our firm. So these
decisions from a marketing standpoint, it's not made sort of
like an academic chamber like you might have in like
a larger corporation. It's made based on that, but ultimately
it's a person's business and their likeness that they're representing.
(19:12):
And these are folks that walk around their local community
being recognized, and they want to be perceived a way
that's consistent with their personal preference, not necessarily in a
way that is going to optimize the number and type
of cases that they want. So it's it's a push
and pull between like what we see as effective versus
what our clients feel comfortable with. There's also the consideration
(19:33):
of like what our clients have the capacity to create.
So authenticity is a key part of entertainment media in
any format. And if you've got an attorney who is,
you know, molecularly designed a certain way and you want
them to show up on camera a completely different way,
it's going to be inauthentic and not work. So there's
like a variety of different considerations that goes into what's
(19:56):
the right creative direction. You know, if a if a
client does not want to be on camera but wants
the success or is not necessarily great on camera, or
wants the success of a video based advertising campaign. We
work with spokespeople who represent themselves as attorneys, and that's
(20:17):
a good solution, and so that's sort of how we
manage it. Occasionally, we'll, you know, have another attorney within
the firm sort of be the face of the firm.
We advise that we want that person to be an
equity partner in the firm, so they're not building up
their own brand credibility and potentially opening up a law
firm elsewhere. So there's other considerations to that effect, but
(20:39):
in general, it's it's a not necessarily a one size
fits all approach, and there's sort of serious marketing that
we've seen work really well. There's also marketing narratives with
a little bit more levity that might be less loyally,
but that also work well, and so it's it's a
(20:59):
con some sort of evolution. I will say that I
believe that one of the consequences of an increasingly competitive
market leads us to need to think about creative differently.
Because what happens is all of these firms are focusing
on the same sort of share of voice, and you
need to differentiate not just from your channel strategy, but
(21:22):
in terms of your creative and if it's just sort
of the same, similar, off the shelf type of creative,
you're going to be drowned out by other competitors in
the market who are popping more. Also, creative is different
based on TV versus TikTok and the audience that consumes those.
So you really want to have a clear brand identity
(21:43):
and then you activate that brand identity in a consistent way,
but on different platforms through different tactics.
Speaker 4 (21:52):
Yeah, I find myself having this conversation with lawyers all
the time. Is you know, they say, and rightfully, so,
look all I want is cases, and I just say
it's it's not as simple as that or as easy
as it used to be. Every law firm is its
own brand, and usually there's at least one person that
needs to be the face of that brand. And hiring
(22:13):
an attorney, whether it's personal injury or bankruptcy or famulaw,
this is such a personal decision that for someone to
hire somebody that might be one of the most difficult
things they've gone through in their life based on you know,
a sentence in a Google ad isn't reasonable anymore. People
are used to creating these relationships, you know, before they
(22:35):
you know, make such a decision. So if you're an
attorney out there, I think you really need to understand that.
Whether it's you the owner or one of your partners,
somebody really should pick up that mantle and run with
it because you need to be able to compete on
a branding perspective within your own market. I want to
(22:56):
shift a little bit because i'd love to get your
take on, you know, the latest trend of AI and
how that can be used in law firms in a
beneficial way, and maybe even some things to avoid, you know,
if you see some common mistakes that people are using.
Speaker 2 (23:13):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (23:13):
Sure, so in terms of law firm operations, my perspective
is that we're seeing a lot of AI tools pop up,
and typically they're solving a part of the process, whether
it's like document review, a certain type of document review,
doing a certain type of job, document creation, things of
(23:34):
that nature, Like it depends, We're seeing a lot of
kind of individualized tools doing one job to be done.
I think there's going to be a temptation over time
to sort of tie all these AI tools into one
sort of holistic you know, enterprise AI practice management system
for law firms, But for now it's still a little
bit of a one off basis, and the efficacy of
(23:55):
any given tool is really sort of I guess in
the eyes of the user, but they're not all sort
of built the same way, So I guess one area
is like, be cautious of the quality of a tool you're
really signing up for and understand what you're getting yourself into,
because you don't want to spend too much time going down.
Speaker 2 (24:10):
The road with a tool that's not going to be
effective for the needs of your firm.
Speaker 1 (24:15):
I think from a marketing perspective, what we tend to
see and how AI has incorporated to what we do
and how we engage with our clients. One is, you know,
content writing on site for SEO, you know, we take
the point of view we use AI as a tool
to augment our human content writers who are in house,
and so maybe it's for idea generation or a bit
(24:37):
of a first draft, or if we want to have
a summary for Google Business or elsewhere, we might use
AI to draft to you know, take a blog that
we've written and create a summary. So we use it
as a tool to sort of augment what our team does.
But there's always a meaningful amount of human intervention involved,
and that's our point of view. I think someone can
(24:58):
make a completely honest argument for AI doing the entire
job with like very minimal human intervention. We believe that
that's just a little bit risky in terms of quality
and how it might show up in terms of Google results,
because at least from a quality standpoint, there's always a
little bit of a risk and liability with respect to
lawyers being in compliance with bar regulations, and you don't
(25:20):
want to have AI write some sort of statement that
is not necessarily provable and it is potentially voting liability
onto your clients. And so that's how we have largely
incorporated it. We've also incorporated it into our development and
design process for websites to enhance and expedite the process
(25:43):
for building and designing our websites. We've also used it
to build sort of internal chatbots. So you know, there's
various preferences almost like brand books for our clients, and
you know how they like to show up in terms
of content and voice and things of that nature. So
we've started building internal chatbots that are sort of bespoke
(26:04):
to certain clients, so we can ask what the right
approach would be for a given client, and we can
institutionalize that knowledge and an AI chatbot tool.
Speaker 2 (26:14):
One thing that we're kind.
Speaker 1 (26:15):
Of figuring out, and maybe you would have a perspective
on this, is like how certainly Google's AI overview is
affecting search traffic to our client's websites. Like we've seen
traffic decline in all transparency due to no other factor
than Google's changing its AI overview. And when you think
(26:36):
about it from a user experience, it's very likely that
someone would be googling some sort of search term and
be satisfied with what they're reading on the search page
and not necessarily immediately clicking through to seek services. And
does that disrupt the typical, you know, potential client journey
that they would go through. Maybe, but you know, we're
still sort of in the process of running experiments to
(26:58):
truly form a smart opinion on that.
Speaker 2 (27:01):
But that's an area that we are trying to keep
an eye on.
Speaker 1 (27:04):
In addition to that, I mean, there's just provably like
search habits of people not using Google at all and
using other AI tools like chat GBT as an example,
to resolve questions or queries that they.
Speaker 2 (27:17):
Might normally go to Google for.
Speaker 1 (27:18):
So those impacts we're seeing effect search quite a bit.
And then the last area of AI outside of like
marketing or the internal law firm operations is really sort
of with respect to intake. Intake is not necessarily something
we currently provide, but it is something that we interact
(27:39):
with quite a bit because it's a part of the
funnel from marketing and website to actually a converted case.
And you see various applications of AI, whether it's with
chatbots or otherwise. I think that it's going to be
some time before truly like voice activated AI is managing
(27:59):
call in a way that people would trust. But that
feels like the direction that that would go over the
longer term. But that's not necessarily something that I believe
is in the near term, just based on human demand
and preference. So those are some of the areas that
we run up against AI as a topic and how
we think about it. But we're constantly having conversations and
(28:22):
we've got our ongoing team's channel for the whole company
where people will put interesting articles or they'll will do
like AI competitions for creating a song just to kind
of get people thinking about it and like practicing that
muscle because it's going to be part of our life.
Speaker 2 (28:38):
It's just figuring out the right way to introduce it
over time.
Speaker 4 (28:42):
Yeah, one of the address one of the key points
that you just made, which was really the disruption with
Google Search. I agree the AI results that Google has,
then there's the chat sheapts, and then the development of LSA's.
You know, So for anybody who do and know what
an LSA is, it's basically like Google AdWords, except for
(29:03):
they show up on top of those and you pay
per lead as opposed to per click. And I think
it's been obvious that that's really where Google's trying to
drive the services industry is to their lssas, which is very,
very disruptive to traffic clicks all that. So I think
you're onto something there. And I also feel like we're
(29:24):
in this evolving, hyper evolving stage right now where the
new landscape that's going to be the next several years
hasn't completely settled yet, so it's really being open to
different ideas in marketing and not being not being adverse
to trying something that might fail with at least a
budget that you're able to risk, because if you just
(29:47):
continue to do what worked five years ago, you might
go the way of Blockbuster video. And you know, we're
just about at the end of our time here, and
I feel like you've got a ton of inform maation
that you could share. So I guess as my last question,
I would just leave it open ended. Is there anything
that you would want our listeners to have as a
(30:08):
takeaway from this conversation when considering increasing either coming up
to speed with their competition their local market, or they're
already doing well and they want to do better. How
some type of an interaction with you could help them
to achieve that.
Speaker 2 (30:25):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (30:25):
Absolutely, I think like two things come to mind. One
is sort of audience focus and the other is treating
your law firm like a business. And so I will
start with treating your law firm like a business. The
temptation historically has been that you know, law firm and
(30:48):
practice of law is sort of a learned profession and
as sacred and in many ways it is, and you know,
our justice system obviously is what allows our sort of
democracy to run effectively, and I believe in that.
Speaker 2 (31:00):
However, you know a by product.
Speaker 1 (31:02):
Of doing that well as a lawyer, as you're running
a successful small and medium sized business, which is a
different competency. Many lawyers are able to make that adjustment. Well,
most in my experience are not, because it's a different
way of allowing your mind to work. You're good at
one thing, the things required to grow and manage your
(31:23):
business require different.
Speaker 2 (31:24):
Competencies that you don't have.
Speaker 1 (31:26):
And I am a firm believer in outsourcing what's not
your core competency as a business. We have an outsourced
it firm because we don't have you know it expertise
on staff. So I think that law firms need to
sort of come to terms with the fact that in
order to stay competitive, they need to think about their
law firm like a business, not just as like a
member of the community, anymore like it might have been
(31:47):
where word of mouth and reputation would have allowed you
to build.
Speaker 2 (31:50):
A strong practice.
Speaker 1 (31:52):
But don't like to hear that, but it's true, and
I would encourage folks to strongly consider outsourcing variety of
their services that are not core to the practice of
law and serving their clients. That's what they're really good at,
and they should leverage the expertise of outsourced providers of
elsewhere to get better results, but also to manage overhead
and de risk the operations of managing a law firm.
(32:15):
So that is sort of area one. Area two is
being audience focused. I think that's a north star in
any advertising, but particularly here, and when we talk about
evolution of platforms, ultimately, whether it's Google or Chat, GPT
or you know, you know, fill in the blank. I mean,
(32:36):
whether it's broadcast TV or streaming on Hulu, it's ultimately
about informing and influencing the behaviors of people who are
in need of a service. And so if you put
yourself empathetically in the shoes of those people and how
they engage in their day to day life and their
physical world, that's going to help you and that's going
(32:57):
to help inform the strategy of how to best represent
your firm in front of them. So it's easy to
get lost in sort of the machinations of what's going
on with AI and consolidation of website providers in the
market and all this stuff. Ultimately, what you need to
be thinking about is like, who are the people who
are currently walking down the sidewalk today who might be
my client tomorrow. What are their habits and how do
(33:20):
I position my firm in front of them in a
way that's favorable and trusting, And how's that going to
get them to be more likely to hire me when
the time comes, if it comes to.
Speaker 2 (33:31):
Need an attorney.
Speaker 1 (33:32):
So being very human focused is going to be a
good source of truth for anybody in navigating what it
will be an increasingly evolving landscape.
Speaker 4 (33:43):
Well, Kyle, thanks for your time today. This is the
first time that I've ever met you, although I've known
of Practice made Perfect for a long time end of you.
So I'm glad we got the chance to have this conversation.
Anything that you'd like to point somebody towards that we
can leave in the show notes. Obviously you're website any
books that you've written, or any conferences that you want
(34:03):
to tell people about that you're going to be at.
Speaker 1 (34:06):
So we'll be speaking at the National Trial Lawyer's Summit
in Miami in January, so if anybody is there, I
would love to connect in person, and we'll be at
a variety of conferences throughout twenty twenty five.
Speaker 2 (34:18):
I have not written any.
Speaker 1 (34:19):
Books, but you can find a lot of really rich
content on the nature of law firm marketing and and
other things that affect small to medium size law firms
on our website at pmpmg dot com. And if anybody
is interested in learning more about PMP or just you know, chatting,
(34:40):
you can email me at Kyle at pmp mg dot com.
Speaker 4 (34:47):
Thanks, Kyle, really appreciate your time today.
Speaker 2 (34:49):
All right, thank you, Eric, This is great, appreciate it.
Speaker 3 (34:52):
Thanks for listening to the Legal Mastermind podcast presented by
market my market. You can check out additional episodes and
RecA apps at Legalmastermind podcast dot com.
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