Lunch Hour Except the Law? Conrad & Gyi on How Clients ACTUALLY Find Your Firm

Episode 76 of the "Everything Except The Law" podcast has arrived! This time we’re speaking with the hosts of Lunch Hour Legal Marketing, Conrad Saam and Gyi Tsakalakis.

Nick Werker and Tony Prieto, hosts of The Legal Intake Experts, also join for this conversation.

The Everything Except The Law podcast can be found on YouTube, Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

In this episode, the four marketers break down the hype around AI in legal marketing, examine why many law practices are struggling with bad or incomplete data and share their visions for how marketing attribution and new client intake should be handled.

About our guests:

After leading marketing efforts for Avvo, Conrad Saam left and founded Mockingbird Marketing, an online marketing agency focused exclusively on the legal market. Conrad is the author of “The FindLaw Jailbreak Guide,” a Google Small Business Advisor, and has held positions for various ABA Practice Management marketing committees.

Learn more about Mockingbird Marketing here!

Gyi Tsakalakis founded AttorneySync because lawyers deserve better from their marketing people. As a non-practicing lawyer, Gyi is familiar with the unique considerations of ethically and effectively marketing a law practice online. He regularly writes and speaks about online legal marketing.

Learn more about AttorneySync here!

For more of Conrad and Gyi's thoughts, check out their Lunch Hour Legal Marketing podcast!

See the previous episode of “Everything Except The Law” here.

This podcast is produced and edited by Joe Galotti. You can reach Joe via email at [email protected].

Episode Transcript:

Nick Werker (Host): Wow, I'm way too excited. Hey everyone, welcome back to Answering Legal's Everything Except the Law Podcast. I am your host, Nick Worker. If this is your first time tuning in, this is the podcast where we share expert advice on all the parts of running a law firm that attorneys weren't exactly trained for back in law school. With me today, I have Conrad Saam and Gyi Tsakalakis hosts of the Lunch Hour Legal Marketing Podcast, which I am a huge fan of and I am not starstruck at all. And just two of the most knowledgeable and generous people in the marketing space. I actually had to go to Tony and be like, will you come on with me so that we can like I'm not uh two against one here. So my co-host on the Legal Intake Experts podcast is here. Welcome, Tony. We have a lot to get into in this episode, but let's start by learning everything there is to know about Conrad and Gyi that we don't already know. But I I actually don't know this. I went without telling anybody, I went to try and find the first episodes of Lunch Hour Legal Marketing. But how did how did your relationship start? And what was like uh like how did you start this podcast?

Gyi Tsakalakis (Guest): It's a great question. So we didn't start the podcast. Our good friend Jared Correa gets credit for starting the Lunch Hour Legal Marketing podcast, and it really started just as a I think he was doing something with the uh Massachusetts law practice management folks. Uh eventually he was like, I don't want to do this anymore. Uh legal talk, he's like, but my good friend Geek might be interested in this. And so Kelly Street and I did it for several years while she worked at AttorneySync. And then uh she left, and I was like, gosh, you know who would be a great co-host for this? Would be my good friend Conrad Saam.

Conrad Saam (Guest): Rest is history, man. Uh, give me a quick audio check. I know it's not as good, but I somehow lost my scarlet mic.

Nick: I think if I talk, it's my echo. Yeah, I was right. Yeah, I was right.

Gyi: Everybody's echoing. This is a good hot outtake reel.

Conrad: We're not running this live, right? Are we okay if I drop down and come back in?

Nick: Yeah, yeah.

Conrad: All right. Sorry.

Gyi: Let's do it live. Switch to live. At least the echo's gone. Yeah, but you know, I don't know if you know this, but so Conrad, uh, he did his MBA at Michigan while I was an undergrad there. And there was a bar called Touchdowns. And I barked, I worked by I worked in the I worked at everything at touchdowns. I worked the door, I worked in the kitchen, I was a bartender, I became the manager, but we're pretty sure that I probably served Conrad and his rugby buddies uh a couple beers at touchdowns. So that's probably where we met. But we really got to know each other when he was CMO at Avo. Um, and then of course he launched Mockingbird, and we are friendly rivals that love to expose all of the dirtiness of the legal marketing industry, which is why part of at least part of our charm, we think. We don't really know, and we're very self-deprecating. I think that's what people really come to listen to.

Nick: I think that's maybe why I'm so drawn in, is I'm also self-deprecating. Listen, while Conrad's not here, I have two comments that I want your opinion on. Because I often, and I'm bad at this. I don't oh, I have to let Conrad in. Let's let him in. He's banging on the door.

Gyi: He’s back.

Nick: I saw your post and I had interacted with this. What's with the… because I refuse to put my information in because my information has been sold so many times. My cell phone rings all day long. Once in a while I answer it, it's a whole thing. What's with the uh the AI detectors where you type in your law firm website and then it pretends like it's loading? You know what I mean? Like you type in it's it's like, oh, this is what Chat GPT is saying about your law firm right now. Well, I guess you could just go to ChatGPT and ask what it says about your law firm, which would…

Gyi: Yeah, you can do that. You can. Um, we could talk lots about that. Or would you want to me to give my opinion on what how the Chat GPT is coming up with what it thinks about your law firm?

Nick: I'd actually love to hear what you think about that.

Gyi: There's lots to say here, but I'll try I'm gonna keep it close tight because we want to talk about this the whole time. But but this new thing comes out, Chat GPT, and everyone's like, oh, I gotta rank in ChatGPT. And so all they call their consultant friends and the consultants are happy to oblige with Chat GPT. We reverse engineered ChatGPT, we know how it works, even though the people who created ChatGPT are like, we don't really know how it works. Um, but putting out the the short version, the mini Gyi ranty, but cut off a little bit version is is that the machine takes in a bunch of training data, so information from all sorts of different sources depending on what platform you're talking about, and then tries to predict what response to whatever prompt you type in. And so there is a uh certain amount of predictive capability to what it has. So to listen to the law firm context, your law firm has a bunch of information on a variety of websites that are included in the Chat GPT's training data. And the other thing to keep in mind that a lot of people forget, but most of these tools are also grounded in some kind of other data, usually search results. That's why you see those little fan-out queries where it's like, oh, I'm like going and research these sites. And so the idea here is it's it's really it's not just limited to like an LLM technology, it's really retrieval augmented generative technology, meaning that okay, uh for this prompt, we are going to uh try to ground or uh influence our response based on this other set of data. So the the so the answer, what's the answer? The answer is to get your firm mentioned in all of these different places that the tool is training on. And not surprisingly, there's a huge overlap with what we've always done from an SEO perspective. Now, are there little things you can do that maybe are more chat GPT than SEOE? Sure. You know, we they they talk about chunking content, people talk about things like LLMTXT, which I think is largely a waste of time, but it is a fundamentally different underlying technology going on. And so I think it's worth saying that. But I think the takeaway for listeners, like if you've got people that are lawyers that are like, I want to like do this, one couple things to keep in mind. One, how people use these technologies is not the one-for-one with how they use search. So in the past, we thought, oh, you know, lower bottom marketers people will say bottom of the funnel, non-brand, search query. They see a result, they click on it, they call you, they hire you. Well, this technology, one, the expectation that the user comes to the technology with is different than just keywords, right? Like we're like we've been learning about prompting. And so the the prompts tend to be much longer, more nuanced, more personalized, more contextually relevant to whatever that they're looking for. And even with all that said, you do 100 prompts on a tool with something that doesn't have a high level of reliability in the response, you're gonna get a high level of flux or different responses. Not to mention that, like I like I said, there you got this personalization layer, even beyond outside of the actual prompt being used. But like it's it's gonna take, you know, Google's big they just uh announced this. Um, I'm gonna blank on what it's called, but it's a it's an additional layer of personalization where it's actually using things like your Gmail history and your Google Drive documents to even inform the types of responses that's gonna make. And so there are people that will sell you prompt tracking and rank tracking and AEO and GEO and all this stuff. And I would just my thing with everybody is it's like, okay, you can call whatever you want and do whatever you want. How are we gonna define this in terms of success for the law firm from a business development standpoint? And usually, even the people that I know and like that are trying to like be forward thinking, they're like, Well, of course, we're not doing any of that. We can't. You can do qualitative, like, how'd you hear about us? And people can tell you chat GPT, and you that and you should do that, but largely it's being oversold. And not to mention, I'll let Conrad jump in here because I've already been ranting way too long. You know, Conrad and I partnered with Near Media to do research to actually watch how people inner when you tell somebody, hey, pretend you've got to go get a you're gonna be a you're in a car accident, you're looking for a lawyer, and you're gonna use chat GPT. Like, what would you do? And what you find is that how people use this technology, it's not the way that the search people would like you to think that it is. And I'll end my rant there. That was a lot more than I needed to talk about.

Conrad: We'll make this short wrap up on this. The reporting that comes the reporting that we bul we we sell as being certain is bullshit. And that's that like you just have to understand that the reporting is bulls***, and and it's different. We we've grown up in this era of like I used to be able to say you you searched on this keyword, and I can track you all the way through with a with a high level of certainty. Now, assuming that my infrastructure is set up correctly, like that's it, that's that's what I grew up doing. And so anyone who is certain that they have cracked the code, as Gee will tell you, like, even the people who run these things don't know how they work.

Gyi: Yeah, and constructively on the reporting side of things, you know, look, you can ask people how did you hear about us?

Conrad: That's great reporting. That that and and drill down, and like that's where you're and that's actually what you care about, right? As opposed to visibility based on some AI, you know, they they do these AI AI creates a bunch of prompts that they think people are using AI with, but they're they're not grounding it in anything. So we have AI measuring, guessing at what humans are doing with AI to tell you how AI is doing. Like the like the level of stupidity that just comes into that that that self-fulfilling circle is insane.

Gyi: Well, and it'll give you another great example because what the a lot of the early you know tests and research revealed was that uh these listicles, so lists top 10 lists of different things, the AIs really seem to like them. And so you we saw in our space every digital legal marketing agency created a list top you know 2026 best legal marketing agencies.

Conrad: Yeah Did you create a list, Gyi?

Gyi: I did not create one.

Conrad: Neither did we. We're probably the only ones. There you go.

Gyi: I think we should do a list, but like making fun of it. So we'll be like, I don't know how we'll do it yet. But anyway, so you know, and again, I like I'm people are listening to this. Like, please don't take me off your list. Thank you for putting off. But the point is now you've got all these lawyers that are out there, and so to Conrad's point, they're like, All right, I need to get on this like best car accident lawyers list. That's literally uh there, they're like, We're the best car accident lawyers, and uh actually, you know, I don't they handle the the two through ten in different ways, but it's just to it's just artificially creating a random list so that the AI will use the list to spit back the very people who created the list in the first place to show up. And and again, like none of this stuff is new to us because all of these same claims were being made during the times of SEO, right? Like everybody cracked the SEO code, uh, everybody's reverse engineered Google's uh listing, and you know, we have a proprietary methodology for to get you to rank and all this stuff. And I would just say that it's it's a lot more of that, but now it's even less quantifiable because at least with uh historically with search, you did have, you know, you had impressions, you had average position from Search Console. Um, even though there was personalization, you know, a lot of these tools would like ping the Google Maps API for local, and so you could get directionally like, hey, we're actually showing up more. And and and I and I don't mean to poo-poo the whole thing because there are ways you could use these tools like to give you some third-party metric about your visibility, but it's definitely not like we've reverse engineered this. We're gonna get you to rank number one for car accident lawyer because we know a bunch of people are on Chat GPT searching for car accident lawyer. Oh, and by the way, even if we get you to show up in Chat GPT, most of the transactional layer, like they're still like the call you and hire you, they're still going somewhere else because a lot of these times you're like you get a list of firms from ChatGPT. There's no phone number, oftentimes there's no link to the website. Um, so guess what happens? People are like, oh, uh that firm was highly rated by ChatGP. They go over to Google and search that firm's name. And so we've seen a lot of like, oh, brand searches up, not because we're doing any more branding, but the ChatGPT is doing the branding for us because they're showing they're surfacing us, and then people are going to shop on our brand on Google anyway.

Nick: I only watch, I don't listen. I'm not a good listener, I'm a good watcher. I watched the episode where you guys talked about people writing the the top 10 lists, and I love I lurk I lurk on everything because I try to learn as much as possible so that it can inform all the decisions I make. But I played around for a long time with ChatGPT. I would ask it about answering legal and other answering services and compare and why'd you give that answer? And one week there was this weird out-of-context response, and it was like, yeah, this answering service thing really matters. I don't even remember what it was, but it was like, but it doesn't do this. And I was like, where are you getting this information from? And it split back the top 10 thing and I found it. And I was just like, oh, so that's really what people are doing. And then I saw your episode where you're talking about people writing the top 10 list. I went to go look for that top 10 list and it came down, I think maybe because that person also watched or listened to that episode and and caught on. Um, and then I wish I could show you, I don't have it on this computer, our internal Slack communications for our marketing department, me and Tony, when Joe, who invited everybody to this and puts all this thing together, sent the search engine land or journal article, I forget which one, about Google cracking down on the on the top 10 listical posts. And I was like, everybody who talked about this and did this is screwed now. Enjoy your penalty or or whatever infraction you're gonna experience on on behalf of that.

Gyi: And my thing about this is is like, because again, I on the one hand, I you know, I try to come to the table with like, I'm gonna give you a judicious interpreter of the facts, even if you don't get a penalty, right? It the issue for me is is like you have a finite number amount of marketing resources, time and money you're gonna spend on stuff. And if you're doing this whack-able thing with like whatever the latest thing that whoever said, Oh, we found out this thing to make it rank better in LLM world, and then it changes, you just spend all this time and money doing this thing. It's the same thing, and it's like the LLM TXT is another example of it. So the LLMTXT, it's it's literally just a text file that's like crafted to like speak to the bot. But the bots aren't they're not going to the there's no unified protocol like there is with like uh you know an XML site map or something.

Nick: Do you think they're crawling in the same way? I actually don't know the answer to that.

Gyi: No, they’re not.

Nick: Because the whole robots text thing is for the crawler, but like the LLM text doesn't make sense to me.

Conrad: It's just a page, so it's a text, it's just a page, it's literally a text page.

Nick: Okay.

Gyi :t's literally a text page with with you know they'll they'll say that they you know organize the text in a way that is more prompty for the LLS.

Conrad: It’s a tangible thing that you can sell to people who don’t know what they’re talking about.

Gyi: That's right.

Nick: So I love your partnership in Near Media. The Near Media thing that I pay attention to for law firms is all of the reviews, because I think everybody's focused on Google and and local, especially for for law firms. But the whole reviews thing, like how much time should people really be spending on reviews? And and Conrad had the best point where it's like people both don't believe reviews, but also click on the ones that have the most reviews. And you're talking about finite resources and what you allocate. Like, how do you how do you balance that knowing both those things?

Conrad: This is a competitive landscape conversation, right? And the question is if you look at your ability to generate reviews, the the velocity of reviews you can generate in a week, genuine reviews that you can genuine. I'm I am not gonna push faking reviews. That is an asset or reliability dependent on your competitive set. If you're in Westwacker driving downtown Chicago and you have two lawyers and you're trying to keep the keep the lights on, you're not going to be able to catch up to the 3,000 reviews that the number 10 competitor has. How does that firm try and play in the review game? Review becomes a vetting tool as opposed to a ranking tool, and that that's just reality. On the flip side, where can you get those I can generate five reviews a month? How where can I turn that into an asset? And that's a geography question from a local ranking perspective. You cannot have the conversation about reviews in a vacuum that does not include your competitive setup.

Nick: That's fair.

Tony Prieto (Guest): Um well, I it it's kind of more of like uh, you know, the more things change, the more they stay the same, right? Like a lot of the uh LLM strategies are a lot of the SEO strategies, and as much as things have changed in the ways people view reviews, it hasn't changed the fact that you need to take into account the fact that the reviews are are putting you up against your competition, right? Like just these things, it everything feels like it's changing really fast, but the the core assumptions have stayed the same.

Gyi: Well, I I I look at it like this. I'm like, where are we? Law firm, where are we? Are we brand new? We're brand new, you know. Conrad said you're brand new and you're in Chicago, you're a personal Andre law firm. And then you're like, okay, so how much should I deploy any kind of resource to appealing to clients who are searching, who don't know me, who are searching for a car accident lawyer near me. And I'm like, okay, well, here's the thing it's probably lower priority for you. And the reason is because even if you rank, even if you or you buy an ad or whatever, you get your brand in front of these people. If they're shopping on reviews and you cannot and you're not competitive on reviews, you should probably decrease the resource there until you're in a place where you can be more competitive. Now, is that zero? I'm like, no, because to Conrad's point, people are still gonna vet you on this. And so I again, I and this, you know, to Tony's point, it is it's the it's all of these things we've always known, right? Like people care what other clients have to say about you, period, regardless if it's search or whatever. And the internet now has democratized a lot of that, and Google in particular. People are gonna go look you up on Google, even if they're not even if they know you by name or they refer to you word of mouth. It can be a you know, a friend, somebody goes and looks you up, they want to see that, like, oh yeah, you're actually good at this because a lot of your clients are seeing your praises. The issue is is the expectation, and like, okay, guess what? If you don't have a competitive number of reviews, I'm not putting 100% of my marketing budget into local SEO and LSAs because guess what? I'm not gonna compete. There people aren't gonna choose me because I don't have the reviews, and so then it's like, well, how much should I put into getting reviews? And I'm like, every focus on delivering something remarkable from a client experience standpoint. Have the system in place to nudge people who are happy to sing your praises and send them to a place to get reviews. Get creative about other ways you can get reviews beyond just service. You know, maybe it's you do focus groups, or maybe there's something else you do at your firm that's reviewable. Maybe you have people that you don't take on review intake process or something. But I think to me, it's just a matter of like contextualizing like you're not you shouldn't be spending all of your marketing resources competing in a space that you're not going to win.

Conrad: That's right.

Nick: I feel like this is a good follow-up because I feel like this is where you're going. From my very few posts on LinkedIn, I'm sure you might get the semblance that I very much hate direct attribution. Not hate, hate is a strong word. I don't really subscribe to the fact that because the point of sale happened somewhere, that that is the end all be all. It's definitely a an indicator of, I mean, that might be a good place to capture demand, but the whole journey is really what you want to find more and more about. When it comes to data, I know you talk a lot about data. What are you looking at from like a journey standpoint? And how do you how do you like funnel that? I know funnel is a buzzword, but like where's the journey? How do you map that for like a law firm owner client?

Conrad: I'll give you my fantasy.

Nick: I would appreciate that.

Conrad: And it depends on the technical platform that you're working on. I I think this concept, so very, very big picture. This this single source attribution, MBA's drawing pretty pie graphs, is we all understand is simplistic. And so we're actually using the wrong word. When we're when we're talking about attribution, I think it's actually it has become the wrong word. And for want of a better term, I like to talk about touch points, these are the and then. Starts to sound creepy when I it's keep talking, so just call that out for what it is. These are the 27 ways that we touched this person before they actually became a client, right? And they and if you have a very, very sophisticated infrastructure, and most of the I think I can say this accurately, none of the legal specific CRM intake management software can actually handle this, all of this. But can you run your advertising, right? And know that this record has been seen. This advertise, whether it's pay-per-click, whether it's display advertising, whether you're running retargeting, what do people come back and look at your website? Are they looking at these specific pages? Every single place that I've been able it can I see that I I've had an OTT ad served to this client? Can I see that they've seen our display ads? Can I see that they searched us um and clicked through from an SEO perspective? Can I see that they hit a pay-per-click ad? All of these different touch points that you look at. I would love to have a list for my clients, all of their consultations, the people who actually sat down and talked to them, who had that vetting process, but they actually said, We're gonna actually talk, sit down and talk to you. What are the 27 ways that we touch that person? And the problem when you do that is you end up with there, the the you can't draw a pretty pie graph and be like, this came from that and this linear attribution where you're like, yes, well, then let's do more of that, right? Um, but what you will find is we call this the BFA. When you just take all of the good things that happen and all of the costs on all of the things that you did to create um all of those touch points, what is the average? What is our cost per client? And it is a very messy, unsurgical approach and unscientific approach to doing this, but that's actually how people work. And I had this great conversation with a friend of mine where you and there are all these modeling systems. There's this 20 2060-20 where you give uh 20% of the value of the client to the first touch attribution and the 20% to the last touch attribution. And then if you have other touch points in between, you divide it all out between those touch points by 60%, blah, blah, blah. That's not how the human mind works. We know that some of those touch points are subconscious. We know that some of those touch points, they actually never load. They literally never load. Like, so you don't know, you don't know how the human mind is is performing. And to try and put a mathematical approach to defining how all human minds work when it comes to their influence of advertising and marketing is a an and and and it's just stupidity. So, what I would love to have is a list of all of these touch points, and you'll start to see that, like, hey, the fact that we advertise on the little league field that keeps coming up, or the webinar, or the podcast, or the this, or the that, and you'll start to develop those patterns if you get really, really dirty in the data, and that's where the magic is going to happen. That's my fantasy.

Nick: That is such a fantasy.

Tony: I for one, I would love to see how did you hear about us advertising on the little league field. That's just like such a direct, like, yeah, that worked.

Conrad: Right. So to do this, to do and like by the way, this is this is actually achievable with all the technology that we have right now, and you can automate it with AI, right? So, like, this is it's fantasy, but like this is very, very achievable. You also need to train your intake people. How did you hear about us? Peel back the onion. Was there anything else? Did you see the billboard? We just tried doing the little league field. Did you see like you can train your you have to start training your intake staff, not to just check off the back, hire your hair around us, law inform, right? But like actually get into that and turn that into a conversation. That's and so that's a hard thing too because you're dealing with humans, and then you've got like like a third-party answering service or whatever that might be, but like it's hard. But we have a technology like that tech stack exists right now, and it's pretty cool.

Nick: We have how did you hear about us? We use HubSpot. I know you're probably a big fan of HubSpot.

Tony: Yeah, HubSpot can do all of that.

Conrad: It can do all of that.

Nick: HubSpot is crazy, and it can do all of that. I love when it's like it came back, and so and I love talking about this. Tony knows I'll go on about this forever. So we have specific pages that we optimize to appear in in the AI overviews. So I know that it's the only way that it can get to the AI overview. And it's like somebody viewed this page, but it's direct. I know that it's not tracking it correctly or however that works. I don't I can't think about that too hard, or blood'll come out of my nose. But my favorite thing is obviously we are an answering service. So we can get, when somebody does call us, we get our receptionist to obviously talk to the person, do an intake on them before we eventually patch them or schedule something, any number of things. And the receptionist will ask, How did you hear about us? And there's an infinite number, because I just keep adding stuff as as a text field into the CRM of what people say. But then an account executive or a salesperson or whatever vernacular you use for that will get on the phone with them and also have a conversation with them. And it'll invariably be different. So they'll and I love that because it's where did the point of sale happen or the conversion? Because even with the tracking number, you could see what page they were on, or I have different tracking numbers for everywhere. I list it, and then they'll say, I heard about you on they'll just say Google, but then somebody will have the conversation with them and be like, uh, what's the name of that group? I think it's called Lawyers on the Beach. And somebody will be like, Oh, I heard about you in Lawyers on the Beach. And it's like, Well, you said Google and you found me over here. So it is, it's like what you're saying, it's touch points. But it's important to ask, even though I think people either misremember, or if you ask them one time in not a in a conversational way, they'll just answer it with one word and then the conversation's over and you don't get the full insight.

Tony: But how they remember it is is as important as like that first thing, they're like, Oh, I saw it on Google. But if you ask them two weeks later and they remember it differently, you know that that has stuck in their heads, you know?

Conrad: Right. And you can start filling those out. And the and the key is to not not try, and this is so hard, not try and categorize all these touch points. This is a that, this is a that, because once you have a finite list of what that looks like, you're missing the things like he's my neighbor, or like you miss all of those weird little nuances that you don't learn. And then probably intake's gonna be like, Well, I gotta put him into one of these categories. Like, I love these open-ended approaches and using AI to actually analyze that, amazing.

Nick: Does that happen to you often, though, where you come with this like really disgustingly disorganized attribution, touch point, whatever, to a client, and they're just like, but yeah, like just break it down for me. Easy. Where did they hear about it? Like, what's actually working?

Conrad: Well, so I will tell you this that data, and I can speak to a a finite number of our clients. That data, it it actually like for for me or Gyi to come in and we do we we see a part. I don't know if you feel this way, Gyi, but we see a part of their world. We don't see their whole world, we don't see what they're doing in their community, we don't see what they're doing offline, we don't see a lot of this stuff. And so for me, the clients who are really nailing this are it is the CMO, COO, someone internally, the managing partner who wants to get dirty in that data, and they'll start picking up those patterns and they'll start to recognize that someone says ball field, they actually mean the little league thing that we were doing. Like it's I would love them to rely on us because that puts us in a position of power, but really they have the understanding of what of what those little nuances mean, right? The the firms that I know that are really doing a great job spend a lot of time in all of those touch points, right? What pages on our site are really resonating? What like what are those things?

Gyi: Yeah, the other thing that I'll add to this, which is just throws an additional layer of like mind correction of the whole thing, like you know, all the headlines like data's the new oil, every data, data informed data, we love the data. Most of the firms they don't even have enough data to be reliable anyway. So, like you can't you're not gonna make your marketing plan decision based on one record in your CRM that says saw you at the ball field, right? You need to see patterns, you need to see like, oh, we've got like 20% of our open cases last month mentioned this thing. Oh, okay. Now now you got a signal from the noise. And so I think I say that because you know, a lot of firms they're they they they're starting to, you know, we've been Conrad and I do this for a long time. They're firms are buying into this business stuff. They're like, oh, this makes sense. Like you're talking about like a marketing budget and resource deployment and holding the marketing dollars and time accountable and all this, and we're like, and they're like, this is great. And so then we say that we're having this conversation, someone's gonna listen to this podcast, and you're like, all right, I gotta go get my data infrastructure right, you know, and they're they're not spending any money on ads, and they're opening, you know, a half dozen cases a year or something, just making numbers up. You're not gonna get like, is it good to have that? And should you ask? Like, sure, but you're not gonna get the kind of data you need to be like, I got 98% certainty that by investing X additional incremental dollars into this campaign, it's gonna produce Y, because you have a data scarcity problem. And I and I think that that is probably the a bigger issue than everything else in this data conversation is is that people need to understand that we're not telling you, like, oh, you asked how did you hear about us, and because you said, like, I heard you on this podcast, you're like, deploy all resources through that, right? It's you've got to this is gotta like you gotta have some math behind this to actually validate that. Oh, yeah, this is actually what it purports to be. Like, so like the bad data, that's the new problem, right? It used to be no data, now we're in bad data, and now we feel emboldened because we've got some data, and so we're like, oh, you know, I was we just I just literally having a call with my business partners of this firm, and and they know it. They're like, we got there's something going on with the attribution, we're not 100% sure. The marketing agency is telling us X, Y, and Z is going on, but we're not experiencing that. And we you know, we look at it and we're like, Yeah, you've got a really bad you got a bad data problem. Um, so you're now you're confident in your business metrics and they're wrong, and that's a tough conversation, right?

Conrad: And that’s worse with AI, right?

Gyi: That’s way worse with AI.

Conrad: You're like, oh, I'm gonna put AI on top of my bad data or short data stack, and now I'm really confident in my decisions because ChatGPT told me, right? Like, all right, because you know, you know who didn't go to stats school? Chat GPT, right? So, like, understand it's not it's not just math, it's really stats, like understanding this is this fine this stuff.

Nick: But I want to be clear. Are you talking about because if you like if you upload a spreadsheet to ChatGPT and get and tell it like break down this math for me, it can do that. You're talking about like what insights would you draw from this data? And then ChatGPT gives you some like insane biased response. Is that what you mean?

Gyi: I would actually like to push back and let you try to answer that question. What math do you think ChatGPT is doing?

Conrad: That's right. Bingo. That is correct, right?

Nick: I don't use ChatGPT anymore. So I like Claude. Everybody listen, everybody makes fun of me too, because I talk to Claude instead of most other things. But I've had it do like if I upload a spreadsheet of like something that I made, and I'm just like, what's the percentage of this, this, this, this, and this, and just do formulas. I do take it if I shouldn't be.

Conrad: Great, great. Well, so but but what you're missing is the statistical nuance behind that, okay? And and I and I bluntly think a lot of people who in the same way that people say ROI and they don't know what the calculation is, a lot of people talk about statistically relevant data and they don't actually know what that means. And so you you can absolutely take a spreadsheet and ask for the confidence interval that your median is within what data range, right? But you need to know what that means, yeah, right. And you need to to and and and to Gyi's point, it's not doing that unless prompted. It's not starting with a hey, we need to have a statistical relevant conversation about something. Um, and you're probably not starting with a spreadsheet, right? You're probably not starting with those things. And so I think the missing academic element in a lot of this data conversation is people don't know. We've got all these digital marketing, data-driven digital marketing experts who don't know what a t-test is, right? Like, what are you talking about?

Nick: I'll be honest with you though, I did take stats in college, but it was open book and I did get an A. So I do know what you're talking about, but like the fact that I only know a rudimentary level, it it speaks to if you didn't actually take stats and and that I say this all the time too. Uh, there's a certain medical topic that's really hot. And I'll have arguments with my friends who have kids and they're very concerned about these things. And I'm like, you didn't go to school long enough to have any of the nuanced experience to make any causal judgments about anything of what you like. You can have an opinion, sure. You can have your own opinion, but you don't even know how ignorant that is because you don't even know how to read the research correctly in the first place. Is it is is that kind of what's going on when you're talking about statistics here?

Conrad: That is the first derivative of statistics. How confident are you in your statistics?

Gyi: And I'm a philosophy major. I'm gonna tell you something even worse. How are you making a distinction between causality and correlation anyway?

Conrad: That's a that's a stats thing. Don't try and steal that, dude.

Gyi: No, it just came way before the stats wasn't even a thing when we were asking questions about causality.

Tony: The way to bring that together is to have a gambling problem because then it's statistics and philosophy combined.

Gyi: Totally. Well, you know, and marketing, that's the thing. I mean, we uh as much as that really ties it all nicely together. We'd love to say, like, we want to create a forecast. You know, Conrad and I talk about like the more data you have, the more reliable your forecast and all this kind of stuff is. It's still a guess, it's still a gamble. Marketing is a speculative endeavor. I don't care what anybody says. You know, you I listen to a lot of our contemporaries and they'll be like, oh, it's formulaic, just do X, Y, and Z, and ABC thing comes out. And like, look, there's no doubt, there are things that we have a much higher you know likelihood of happening based on observations, based on experimentation, based on, you know, benchmarks, statistically significant results and testing and all that stuff. That's true. It's still though, all that is is just a highly, a highly probabilistic guess. And so I think that's an important thing that we try to talk about that a lot because again, I the last thing I want someone to feel is like they were misled. Like that they thought that we were trying to do something and that for whatever reason they feel like that we misled them. But the the the devil's in the details and the nuance of trying to like, you know, how much stats you're gonna teach a lawyer when you're gonna go and and create these um statistical models and forecasts. And so, like, I you know, again, I'm like, let's talk about your business metrics, let's talk about what your objectives are, and then based on our experience and what tools we have available, we're gonna put a plan together to try to hit those things. And here's how we're gonna know if we're heading in the right direction from a leading indicator standpoint. Um, but it's still even with the most, you know, Kendra already mentioned this, with the most advanced attribution system, data modeling system, high degrees of certainty, it's not a 100%. It's not a you're not gonna be like because guess what? If it was, if it was that easy, none of us would have a job, would none of us would be in business, everybody would be out there just doing it because the technology is gonna be ubiquitous, everybody's gonna have the same technology. Anyway.

Nick: That was exciting for me. Um, I have a lot of crossed wires.

Gyi: We all do.

Nick: Yeah. So I do this thing where I'm like, I and and I I think way too much about this stuff, and I'll think, and I'll tell Tony this too, because I don't ever ever stop talking to Tony. God bless Tony. I'm like, we can't do a podcast about legal marketing because we don't sell legal marketing, and our opinion on legal marketing is is therefore invalid. But then I think, but I'm totally kind of unbiased because I'm not selling legal marketing. And then we do the same thing where we talk about legal intake on our other uh podcast, and I'm like, but I'm biased on how to do intake and and but I just think if I shut up in my own head for 30 seconds, that both perspectives can be useful and valid. And so I always love hearing the perspective of somebody in your guys' position on intake. So like what's the…can you be doing with intake…

Tony: We’ve talked a lot about fantasies. Like, what's your dream…your client has a dream intake setup. What does that look like?

Nick: You rescued me. Thank you.

Gyi: I'll tell you the dream intake setup. You have a lawyer who it has a ton of empathy, who's been trained on intake, who's available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, who is accessible via any tech communication technology that the client prefers. That's that's the number one intake. It's it's it's meeting the prospective client where they are, when they are, getting them an answer and helping them um down their path of legal jerk legal journey, which requires at some point in that journey a lawyer uh to help them resolve their issues. And I'm glad you guys are all laughing and smiling because of course you can't do that. You can't do it. The other at the other end of the spectrum, maybe it's leave a voicemail, and then there's a whole bunch of stuff in between. And so that was that's that's kind of the fantasy version, but it's the same thing as the marketing. You got to look at like what are your what's your resource deployment and what can we do to map. I think for me, and I'll cut this off and let Conrad go. At every decision you make, you're calculating the trade-offs between the cost of the implementation and the impact of that decision on whether it optimizes for that potential client's experience or not. And so, in a perfect world, it's what I said, you've got someone can reach you on demand, but that's obviously the the costs of that are they're not even doable because you have to have lawyers on staff at 24-7 that have a ton of empathy and are all trained on intake and can field chat messages and phone calls and all this stuff. And so you've got to make decisions along the way, and it's not the same for everybody, but yeah, I'll tell you what, at the very least, create a feedback loop so that you're hearing what the impact of those decisions are. So if you've got a bunch of, you know, well, number one, Conrad and I talk about this all the time. If you don't have some kind of call tracking thing going on, you don't even know how many calls you're missing. Go ahead, Conrad. What do you think? Intake.

Conrad: I've got two answers on intake, slightly different, but building on that. If I am a client of Answering Legal, I want to use that to help understand that Google is listening to these calls, and I would want to help feed Google what Google wants to hear about my firm. And they are very specific about what they listen for. It is pricing information, right? And this is generic, it's not about legal, it's about everything. Pricing information, lawyer bios, awards, and what they call special offers, which I can't imagine. Like if you're a pizza restaurant, yeah, it's great, you know, it's it's this weekend, it's ten dollars off a cheese pizza. I don't think that really applies to legal, but I would I would be working to make sure that that the intake people are feeding the beast what the beast wants to hear. And the beast has told us what it wants to hear. So, like, okay. And they've also said, like, this isn't just this goes across the Google ecosystem, right? So part of your marketing staff is your intake staff, and you you're feeding Google what it needs to hear, what it wants to hear. So I would I would want to know that the other part that I think is the colossal miss for lawyers, and Gee Gee hit this at the end, is we focus on what we get, we don't focus on what we lose, right? And so we got 27 clients. I would much rather have a law firm instead of at the end of the month be like, we had 27 clients, we won 27 clients. I would rather have them say, We lost five clients. What happened? Oh, they called us and we didn't get back to them for three days, or they called us and Jeff was having a really bad day and was rude to the client. You know, we've got clients who large firms, big intake staff, they have a uh uh policy. If you're not having a good day in the morning, don't come into work if you work in intake. We'll do we'll do a better job elsewhere. Don't come into work, and there's no and there's that's not like uh go go find a new job. That's like don't come into work when you're not having a good day because it it bleeds over. And then the final thing I'll say is um we think it's an easy job, right? You think it's an easy job, you're just gonna answer the phone and take a message and we'll be fine. Uh and that it's not an easy job. It's not an easy job. Done well. It's it's actually a pretty hard job. So don't overlook that, lawyers, because you forget about these things.

Nick: Can I add one thing? I have one opinion.

Gyi: Go.

Nick: Everybody will tell you I get I get one new hobby per year, and the hobby it just just it I go way too far with things. Right now, my hobby is CrossFit, and one of the things that CrossFit really hones in on is coach training, and they have what I like to liken it to is um Scientology, where there's literally levels. So you're a level one, a level two, a level three, and the highest level that they offer is level four, which they have only recently brought back and you can only apply to for a limited time. But uh the principles that they teach about coaching, I think are very interesting. If you look into how to appropriately reward and give criticism, and you can use those skills to help your intake team get better and help your salespeople get better everywhere, it's a lot better than like for me. If I and I do this because I can hear phone calls and this is part of my day to day. But if I come to that person constantly and I'm just like, this is how you lost this deal, this is how you lost this deal, and I don't at all reward the the ones that went really well, it it gets lost on them. And so I'm looking into how to become better at this like. Reward and I I have this coach that I deal with online, and I'll do something terrible. I'll send him a video of it, and he can just be like, Great job, dude. And then I know he's about to hit me with some negative stuff, but at least like I did get that dopamine hit of this really this guy who I respect who is more knowledgeable than me, said, Great job, dude. I have it saved as a voice note out on my phone.

Conrad: That is the s*** sandwich approach to management, right?

Tony: Yeah.

Conrad: Good, bad, good. Sorry.

Tony: That's how I that's how I learned how to give. I was a creative writing major in college, and they were like, pick two things you liked about the story, one thing you didn't, and put the one you didn't in the middle.

Conrad: Yeah. Um, no, but you're right. Like it's actually the management of this, which I think in intake often gets overlooked, right? This is a this is it's it's our job. Um, and and and you guys probably want the feedback all the time. Feedback is good, and I think in man in many law firms, intake is viewed as something that is roots routine, easy, and therefore doesn't require oversight and management and reward and direction and coaching, and it is often grossly overlooked. Whether that's done in-house or externally, right? Sorry.

Gyi: Yeah, no, I think I just to kind of keep on this point about like because you say they think it's easy, and that and we we talk to lawyers all the time, and the oh, yeah, I close every one time, close, one time call, close. And I'm like, No, you're not. I'm like, have you listened to yourself on the phone? Listen, why don't you go back and listen to this conversation you're having with me right now? You're not good at this. This is not what your strong suit is. You're not trying to cross-examine your potential client, or maybe that's what you think, you know, and that's the third problem, too, is that, and this goes back to this mindset about like what you're optimizing for. If you remind yourself that you're optimizing for the experience of the other person on the phone, it's different than being like, I'm trying to optimize for efficiency of determining or whether or not this is a client, right? Optimizing for experience, you're listening, you're like, Oh my gosh, you just told me that your brother was killed in a car accident. I am so so sorry. Optimizing for uh whether or not they're a client, what year did that happen? That's tough, right? And you hear it all the time. Yep, you hear it all the time because they're like, they're like, you know, and again, I'm sympathetic, I get it, but it doesn't matter if you're in-house or um you're uh an intake consultant or whatever. You you a lot a lot of times law, the lawyer gives you a script and they're like, follow the script. And you're like, this script stinks, don't follow this script. This is wrong. This you're gonna get people, uh people that might otherwise have a well, we don't care, we don't want to waste time, and people that have blown statute of limitations. And I'm like, Great, so guess what happens? They go online and leave you a negative review, being like, This firm didn't spend a second with me, couldn't get a hold of anybody, never spent turned my calls, blah blah. We all know the stories. Um, and so anyway, I think that that to me, like when I after all of this conversation, I think if I was gonna give one tip, it would be to try to optimize your intake experience for the person that's calling. That's good, and and know that they're gonna be trade-offs. You know there are gonna be trade-offs, but try to mitigate those trade-offs the best you can so that that person's getting a great experience. Because then you turn intake, like Conrad said, intake's a marketing tool because now they're out there being like, and and I I'll use Ken Levinson, my friend in Chicago. Like, he's got reviews that say, you know, I ended up not high, Ken wasn't the right lawyer for me for the type of issue that I need, but he's he sat and listened to my story for 30 minutes on the call. That's a posit that's a that's a Google business review. Now, again, I'm not saying that uh that's the way to do it, and there's trade-offs, and not everybody can actually have can deliver that and then deliver it through the internee and all those kind of things. But I think the mindset about trying to improve the experience versus just like let's reduce this into the most automated because again, everybody's gonna think in the same thing. So, guess what? No one stands out for that, and that's why every single report comes out, and it's like every all clients are upset because they can't get a hold of anybody at the firm, no one responds to any of their messages, yada yada, bar grievances, negative reviews, all this stuff. Flip that on its head.

Nick: That's pretty good. I have nothing to add to that.

Gyi: We solved intake, done.

Conrad: Done.

Tony: Yeah, just listen to this podcast.

Conrad: Send a check.

Nick: Send a check is crazy. All right, I think because I'm at a loss for words, and also I would like everybody to know that I kept the straightest face during this. There was a point earlier in this podcast where I drank. You ever take the too big of a gulp of your freshly brewed coffee and just absolutely annihilate your throat? Oh, I kept such a straight face. I thought I I thought tears were gonna come out of my eyes.

Gyi: What's the timestamp for the you for the listeners at home? What's the time stamp? So they can't.

Nick: You know I really should have done it, but it was probably within the first 10 minutes, and I think it was when Conrad was still it was just me and you, and and I went like this, and I just oh, you could see it in my face a little bit.

Conrad: It was early because I don't remember you drinking uh at all.

Gyi: Consummate professional. Power thru. Show must go on.

Conrad: Show must go on, baby.

Nick: Um, anyway, Conrad and Gyi, thank you guys so much for joining me. It's it's an honor. And thank you to all of our listeners. We hope you enjoyed this conversation. We will be back with another episode of Everything Except the Law soon. Be sure to check out previous episodes of our show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and the Answering Legal YouTube channel. Links to everything covered in today's conversation can be found in the description of this episode, including Lunch Hour Legal Marketing, the Summit, uh, Mockingbird, AttorneySync, anything else I can think of off the top of my head and whatever we talk about as soon as I hit this stop recording button.