The Marketing Strategy Session Every Law Firm Needs — with Ron Latz

Episode 73 of the "Everything Except The Law" podcast has arrived! This time we’re speaking with Ron Latz, Founder and Law Firm Fractional CMO at LegalFenix.

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

In this episode, Ron and host Nick Werker discuss the importance of having a diversified marketing strategy, how to build a strong brand as a law firm, and the critical role of intake processes in converting leads. They also delve into the challenges faced by small firms when competing with large national firms and the importance of leveraging technology to optimize intake and client interactions.

About our guest:

Ron Latz is the Founder of LegalFenix, a marketing advisory firm redefining how law firms approach growth. With more than 15 years in the legal marketing industry, Ron has guided countless firms through the complexities of modern marketing with clarity and candor. Known for his vendor-neutral stance and results-driven approach, he helps law firms align strategy with execution, optimize budgets, and rebuild trust in their marketing partnerships. Whether he’s decoding agency jargon, demystifying performance reports, or designing a blueprint for sustainable growth, Ron’s mission is to give law firms the clarity and confidence they need to win.

Learn more about Ron's company here!

See Legal Fenix's upcoming webinars here!

Connect with Ron on LinkedIn here!

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): Hey everyone, welcome back to Answering Legal’s Everything Except the Law Podcast. I’m your host, Nick Werker.

This is Take Two, so if you’re embarrassed or nervous to start podcasting, I messed up the intro the first time. But 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 my good friend Ron Latz, the founder of LegalFenix. We have a lot to get into in this episode, but first, I want to learn everything there is to know about Ron.

I do know a bunch about Ron, but I have heard, and this is by your own admission, before there was Ron Latz the marketing strategist, fractional CMO, guru helping everybody get their marketing in order in the murky space of legal marketing, you were in a band. Can you tell me a little bit about your band?

Ron Latz (Guest): Throwback, Nick. First and foremost, thank you so much, and you did not botch that intro as badly as you alluded to in your second attempt. And yes, I was in a band back in the day. It was something I did throughout my later years of high school and early years of college. Admittedly, I was a terrible musician, but I played piano in an indie rock band that eventually turned into a full-blown metal band. We went on a couple of tours. We went across the country, played in some pretty cool venues, and did some neat shows in front of a decent amount of people.

But I had these things called college loans and had to get a full-time job. So making the time that was required to go to the studio, practice, and write was not fair to my bandmates when I was spending time elsewhere. We decided it was best to part ways. They went on, got signed to a smaller label, did a couple more tours, kind of thought they made it, stopped touring, and that was pretty much the end of the band.

I think I shared this on another podcast or with a client, or I commented on LinkedIn. There are some videos out there. I will not divulge how you will find them, but if you go to the depths of the internet, you can find some of it.

Nick: When we were preparing for this show, I thought, let me give it one try to see if I could find anything. I Googled your name and then something else and found an article that said you were going to the Warped Tour, which I found very cool. That is it. I was also once upon a time a musician. I thought I was very good. I did not get along with other people though, and I could not understand why I kept getting kicked out of bands. It was probably my fault. I never went that far. I just dreamt of it and also had student loans. And I did not want to live in a van anyway.

Ron: Fair. It is not an easy life by any stretch of the imagination. We were very fortunate to have made some inroads and connections that got us exposure and looks that a lot of up-and-coming bands do not have. We were very lucky. And pretty good, right? It was a lot of fun. Different life.

Nick: I think it is so cool. After that life, your second life, can you catch us up on your background and experience in marketing and how you came to be the legal marketer that we know and love today?

Ron: Thank you. After graduating college and parting ways with the band, one of my first jobs right out of school was with New York Life and then First Investors, where I thought I was going down the financial services path. I got my life, accident, and health licenses, Series 63, and was studying for the 7.

By the way, it is all sales. When you are working with people and building a book of business to sell any of those products, you have to sell and market yourself. Being in a band is also a lot of sales to promote yourself and sell tickets so venues invite you back because you bring a good draw. I have always had that in me.

After my first stint at Xerox, back when they invested heavily in training their sales executives, you did not just get thrown into a territory and tossed to the wolves. They trained you to make sure you were able to offer the products and services they provided. I was selling into the public sector.

I moved on from there and found myself at Thomson Reuters within their FindLaw division, well over a decade ago. That is where I really got into the marketing part with lawyers. I had five years under my belt with sales, and then I jumped into marketing, selling marketing and advertising to lawyers. Ever since that point, I truly enjoyed it. I became obsessed with the challenge of connecting individuals going through some of the roughest moments of their lives with service professionals who can help them get through it.

It is not a product people necessarily go after. Most people try to avoid lawyers throughout most of their lives, except when you are buying a home or doing estate planning. But the challenge of creating awareness and demand for something most people try to avoid is something I really enjoyed. Since that initial opportunity to work with lawyers and law firms, I kept a pulse on it and here we are today.

I moved on. I worked at a smaller boutique legal marketing agency. My company has been incorporated for eight or nine years, and we just rebranded, renamed, and relaunched in January of 2024. Here we are today.

Nick: That is awesome. I find it so strange because I grew up, and I talk about this often, my grandmother was a paralegal, I think when she turned 20. When my dad and his younger sister were very young, she became a paralegal. She worked at a firm for a specific lawyer, and he decided that he wanted to go out on his own. He went to my grandmother and said, “I am only going out on my own if you come and run the whole operation.” I will not date my grandmother. It was a long time ago, because she still runs his personal injury firm in Brooklyn.

When I grew up, everything that happened, she would always tell us, “This bicycle accident happened and this person is recovering money,” or “This car crash happened,” and she would bring her clients to our Hanukkah parties and things like that because she had a really good relationship with them.

Then I entered this world, the legal profession. I am obviously not a lawyer. I do not really participate in lawyer marketing outside of speaking to our customers. I never knew how non-litigious people are and that people do not understand that they have recourse in a lot of things that are going on.

I will give you a good example. I always thought that if you go bankrupt, you have no money, and they foreclose on your house, you are just screwed. It is not really true. You have legal options. You have recourse. I thought if you get in a car accident, the insurance company just sends you a check and then you pay for your car and move on. That is just not the case.

So I always find the perspective interesting about demand generation versus demand capture. Is there an opportunity? Do you even know you are sitting on a case that could compensate you for a difficult thing you are going through? What has been your experience that way? How important is it as a legal marketer to help people understand that they actually do have a case, even if they are not cognizant of it?

Ron: It requires a lot of educating the market and letting them know they might actually have a case. Individuals might not, for example, when you are talking about SEO, search for “catastrophic injury lawyer.” Most people are not going to search that. Or we have wrongful death pages on personal injury sites. The layperson does not necessarily know what wrongful death means.

To take your example, bankruptcy. What chapter should I file? What do I need to do? If you are in college with an apartment, you think about landlord-tenant cases. They are not switching out a refrigerator or dishwasher that is broken, or if you are in a city and have rodents running around, you want a refund on your rent. What do you need to do? What is your recourse? What action can you take?

Depending on the type of advertising or marketing you are doing, it requires you to be very informational and educational to let people know what options are at their disposal if they were potentially injured due to someone else’s negligence, or if a relationship is breaking down and you want to part ways with your spouse. There are concerns about seeing your children, what happens financially, and how you distribute assets.

Through legal marketing and content marketing, whether it is blogs, articles, practice area pages, or landing pages, it is our job to ensure the consumer is educated and also knows how the lawyer can help. We want to make sure those individuals are as qualified as possible and that there is a tight fit with the ideal client profile.

That is very different from consumer product goods. We are Strava buddies. You do CrossFit. We go to the gym, lift weights, run, or bike. If you want new sneakers, you have worn sneakers your whole life. You know which ones are comfortable and offer more support. You might jump on YouTube and go down a rabbit hole to find the best gear. People have that experience and have purchased sneakers multiple times. They have not engaged lawyers for legal services nearly as frequently. So there is a lot of education required to let people know they have recourse.

Nick: I love that answer. I saw something that old-school SEO has come really far back around. Especially in my space. I am a B2B company. It was like, how useful are blogs in educating lawyers that they need phone answering? So we tried to do more high-impact stuff, but it has come so far back around that the way people search is, we should be writing blogs to educate people on specific things that are changing in the market.

There are so many aspects of law firm marketing that I do not think people realize, because most of the attorneys I have spoken to over the years who need marketing help, I was looking through, you get Snapchat memories. Are you on Snapchat?

Ron: I am not, but I get the Facebook memories about posts from years past.

Nick: I like Snapchat. My friends are on Snapchat, and it pulls from your camera roll sometimes. I had a screenshot that made me happy. It was a conversation with a woman who contacted me. She said, “I have all these different websites. I do not know who is putting up these websites.” She needed help to assess what was going on with her marketing. She kept saying over and over, SEO, SEO, SEO. “My SEO is bad. My SEO is this.” People get hooked on the term SEO.

I think it might be a side effect of SEO companies trying to sell SEO to lawyers for the last 20 years. So that is what people focus on. But an entire marketing strategy is really necessary, especially for law firms looking to do demand capture like we are talking about. Can you tell me more about how you teach or consult with law firms on the importance of a fully structured plan, not just SEO, and what that looks like?

Ron: Even with a financial portfolio, you do not want all your eggs in one basket. You need diversification to protect your investments, hedge against riskier bets, and make sure you have your blue chips, staples, and dividend stocks. You have a 401(k). There are a lot of components to a financial portfolio to protect and grow.

It is similar with a marketing investment. SEO and brand are long-term plays that you continually invest in as digital assets you own. Then you have other channels that are more short-term investments that will bring in leads or visibility much quicker than it would take to develop backlinks, generate PR, produce content, and get it out there. Things like paid search and paid social.

I do not want a law firm to put all their eggs in the SEO basket. Yes, there are individuals who will go to an LLM, do a conversational query, and then go to search to validate or do additional research. But SEO is only one piece of the puzzle. If you look at a Google page right now, you have Local Services Ads, Google Ads, AI Overviews and AI mode, your map pack with Google Business Profile listings, and then all the way down at the bottom you have traditional organic listings. If you are only invested in one of those channels, you will not get the at-bats from the others because you are not even in the game.

And that is just digital and search. There is out of home, network, cable, TV, bus wraps, streaming. There are so many areas where law firms can promote themselves. It is about identifying which ones put you in front of your audience at the right time so you can capture demand. That is easier for some than others and depends on your competitive landscape and investment level. There is a slew of things to consider when figuring out where to push your chips.

Diversification matters. If you relied on the tried and true for so long and never tested other channels, and that tried and true falls out from under you, you are in a precarious situation.

Nick: I like your financial planning analogy. It made me think there is a specific reason, and this is a good argument for lawyers not to control all their own marketing. A few years ago GameStop was a really hot stock. Everybody was shorting GameStop. I bought some. I watched it go up, bought more, watched it go up. Then one day I was on the Reddit thread. They stopped it, shut it down, and I lost all my GameStop money.

After that, I got a person who manages all my investments, and I am not allowed to touch them. He consults me and asks me questions, but by and large, because I know nothing and will make GameStop decisions with my financial future, I do not touch it.

I think where we are headed is finding the right strategies for your law firm. How do you figure that out? It is different for everybody. Are you a new firm? Are you established? What is your history? What are your goals? How do you sit down with a law firm and diagnose which baskets to put eggs in? What does that conversation sound like?

Ron: It is just like your conversation with your financial advisor, who asks, what are your goals? What other assets do you have? Do you plan on having children? Are you going to purchase a home or stay where you are? What type of debt do you have?

Similar to you, I pay a financial advisor because I will pay a professional to do the things I am not an expert in. Whenever I jump on a call with a lawyer, a law firm, or someone serving the legal community, those are the conversations we have. What do you want to achieve? What is your goal? Do you have a benchmark? What is your expectation? How much are you looking to invest? What is your risk threshold? What have you tried? Have you tried the GameStop approach? Or have you only invested in your 401(k), the S&P, or dividend stocks?

The similarities between a financial portfolio and your marketing efforts are tightly knit. You can look at them in a very similar fashion.

If someone is in a saturated, highly competitive market and they are not capitalized enough to put the dollars they need into a particular channel, specifically paid search or Local Services Ads, and their Google Business Profile is not where it needs to be to compete in the local pack, we look at other options. What can you do from a local grassroots, community-involvement perspective? Maybe there is an opportunity to develop personal branding on LinkedIn where our relationship has flourished over the past couple of years. Make the relationship deeper, share referrals, engage with one another.

If you can look at the market a little differently, or at least talk with someone who can because they have the experience, you will make better investment decisions. There are a lot of factors that go into the ultimate recommendation. If we get answers to those questions, I can help navigate the murky vendor landscape to identify the right partner to bring you the success you are looking for. Then you have someone fighting in your corner so you do not make a mistake.

Nick: One of the things I get excited about, and you probably feel this way too, is every day I come into work as a B2B marketer. I understand legal marketing because I have to understand my clientele and the prospects I work with. A lot of the principles apply.

However, I will not affect as much change if I go to my local town street fair and start telling everyone I work for Answering Legal. I am the marketing guy here. That will not affect things at scale. But when I go to those street fairs, I get excited when there is a tent for a local business, like a lawyer or an accounting firm. I went to one recently for my buddy who has a math tutoring studio.

I am walking down the street fair thinking, that is such a good idea. That person is giving out frisbees. My friend is giving out folders for homework, and the kind of corny stuff you give out, but he is engaging with the community. I am pointing this out to my wife, who says, “You are obsessed. You need to chill.”

I was fortunate that Gee posted something about doing that, and I finally had an outlet for this information because my wife is tired of hearing it. I like that in your plan you reconcile for that. It is daunting to invest in marketing when you see huge law firms. You go outside and there is a Morgan and Morgan billboard in your neighborhood and you think, how do I compete with that? That guy is on track to make 900 million or 1.1 billion this year in revenue. I do not know the profit margins. We diagnose those things. I will look at what my competitors are doing and say, I need to do that, and I get caught up in it.

Is that where marketing goes off the rails for law firms? When do people reach out to you? Before they start something? When they want to check something? Usually I assume they are unhappy with the state of things. What do you see that makes you think, you are trying to copy that and this will go off the rails?

Ron: A couple of ways to answer. First is David versus Goliath. Morgan and Morgan or a national firm comes into your market. They come to play with heavy TV and paid search. They have thousands of reviews. They are trying to dominate and see whether the market is viable. Many firms recognize they cannot play that game because they cannot outspend them. Those firms lean into community involvement and local grassroots marketing. Not that they will not invest in SEO or paid search, but they will not spend multiple six figures on paid search and multimillion-dollar TV spots. That is one kind of competitive obsession.

Then there are competitors in your market within a couple million of your annual revenue, maybe the same firm size. I have seen firms get tunnel vision over what that competitor is doing, which channels they have chosen, and what campaigns they are running. It is valid to have a pulse on competitors so you can find gaps to capitalize on. But running your strategy as a copycat is a problem. They have already developed the creative, run the ad, looked at the data, and optimized. Now they are on their next iteration while you are copying their first version. They are far ahead. You can beg, borrow, and steal, but you have to make it your own. You might not be trying to build the same kind of firm.

I am fortunate to see the insides of many firms, especially at Reuters. I could understand where they invest and how successful they are. A lot of these firms, as you alluded to earlier, are not even profitable. Or they are churning clients. You can see it in their Google Business Profile or Facebook reviews. They get terrible reviews. They do not have the infrastructure or resources to handle the volume they are marketing for. They are investing in poor first impressions at scale. You do not want to replicate that.

Take a balanced approach. Understand the firm you are trying to build. Look at your competitive landscape. Tie your business goals and objectives to the marketing strategy. Then deploy tactics that will produce the results you want. Collect the data, pull the levers, optimize, and run again.

Nick: I love David and Goliath. I got into it. I read the Malcolm Gladwell version recently. My wife has a bunch of Malcolm Gladwell books and told me to read them. “Am I a dog that you should come to me with sticks.” That is how you slay Goliath. You rely on your non-obvious advantages. What sets you apart.

I want to talk about a hot topic on LinkedIn. It makes me happy it is a hot topic because it is something I have worked to address for years. It is cool to watch people get involved and spread awareness. To me, intake, regardless of how good your marketing is or how good you are as a lawyer, is the thing that ultimately decides if your business is successful. It is exactly like what you said. If you are paying for poor first impressions at scale, you can look really good. You can buy the number one spot on Google Ads. You can optimize. LSAs are kind of a crapshoot, but for the most part, you can be up there. You can sponsor your Google Business Profile now. There is an ad in Google Business Profile. It is crazy out there. You can spend your way into poor first impressions at scale. I am going to steal that line.

But marketers are interested in intake. How you work with firms. How can you build the systems that make intake a differentiator instead of a liability?

Ron: First, I wish I remembered who shared this. It was on LinkedIn, and it had to be an agency. If we find it, we will give credit. It was a screenshot of the map pack where a firm had an ad placement and single-digit reviews. The competitors showing in the three-pack had hundreds, like three or four hundred reviews. And you have this paid ad placement with five stars but a total review count in single digits. I do not think that ad is going to work. You are going to pay for that click, and you have three or four other options that are 4.8 and above with hundreds of reviews. Maybe it is a crapshoot. You have a one in four shot to generate that click. But that is where you need to be more thoughtful and strategic about where you push your paid search dollars.

On intake and ensuring you have the resources, processes, and technology in place, it is the same thing. You have to offer incredible service so you get referrals, build brand loyalty, and get brand advocates to say your name, share it with friends, family, and colleagues. Those non-service professional referrals are captured at the lowest acquisition cost, so make sure you do what you can so they bring in more business.

With your marketing dollars, make sure your call tracking is in place, that source attribution data is pushed into your CRM, and that you collect qualitative and quantitative data. Understand where you generated awareness and which channel captured the demand so you can balance both and make more data-backed decisions.

I do not sell any of that technology. We help clients set up and configure CallRail, and if they need a basic native integration into HubSpot to get their source data, sure. But for full builds and implementations, we bring in partners. We try to bring in the best the market has to offer so they can get the infrastructure in place, capture the data we need, and make smarter investments.

Nick: You took me back to my actual origin, aside from my short stints in my dad’s Wise potato chip warehouse from ages twelve to sixteen. My first job, unpaid, was an internship on a political campaign for Suffolk County Executive. I am ambitious, so I am a kid working on this campaign doing everything they ask me to do. I am knocking on doors, handing out flyers, making phone calls.

They asked if I wanted to be a team leader or something I got promoted to. They brought team leaders into a meeting to teach more about campaign tactics. I learned a couple of things. Number one, how to make people very angry by calling them at home. Number two, a principle that campaigns run called Get Out the Vote.

Get Out the Vote is a mundane thing that everybody gets charged up about. It seems pointless. What we would do is find people who had engaged with us in a positive way and remind them when and where the election was happening. We would ask the most simple questions. Do you know how you are getting there? Do you know what time you are going? We would confirm every little detail to make sure the person would vote for our candidate on the correct day and time, for a number of reasons. Competitors will run suppression, send people the wrong day, and confuse people.

What I learned was the same thing applies to intake and the entire client experience. You will not get a positive review most of the time unless you ask for it. You will not get the person to sign the agreement and pay unless you follow up and ask them to sign and send money. It seems simple.

We see this all day. Someone will post, “This agency got 150 leads for this law firm and none converted.” We look and see they did not send out the agreement, did not follow up, did not do this or that. It seems simple. I know you get involved in the process. How do you diagnose that? How do you figure out where it is falling off, and how do you get where you want to go?

Ron: If it is very manual and there are no checks and balances or technology supporting it, or at minimum standard operating procedures, based on my experience things are slipping through the cracks. There have been instances where a law firm will emphatically tell us, “We do not miss calls. We have an answering service.” I will not go too far down this route, but when you put in dynamic call-tracking software to see whether phones are actually picked up, you find that 10 to 20 percent of calls are missed.

Or you uncover, unfortunately, a situation where an agency was given an email address for form submissions, and those forms were being sent to an address that was not monitored. This stuff happens. It is not always malicious. Mistakes are made. But if you are not dotting i’s and crossing t’s and giving partners the correct information they need to make you successful, balls will be dropped.

First thing, if they do not have tools in place, we recommend at least baseline call tracking so we can use it as a poor man’s CRM to start qualifying inbound leads, see which channels they come from, and put tracking numbers on local, social, organic, LSAs, and so on. Then we collect the data. After we collect the data, we bring it to them. Here is the information. We have no coverage when intake goes to lunch. We miss a percentage of calls between noon and 1 p.m., or after hours. The forms that get submitted are not being called back the next morning. We need to put someone on that.

Use technology to identify where the leaky funnel exists. For tasks, I believe every business should leverage some sort of CRM. Even the most basic free version lets you create contacts, associate them with deals or opportunities, and create tasks to remind people to follow up so we do not forget. Everyone is busy. Technology improves productivity and efficiency and helps you offer the service as intended.

Nick: One more question before I let you go. Something that shocked me and that I am still learning about is lawyers who go out on their own. It is like, I practice law. With other companies, it is easier to identify at the B2B level because there is a logo. You follow the logo. The company has a slogan and differentiators. How do lawyers do that? How do lawyers brand themselves? How do you build brand as a law firm?

Ron: The distinction is most individuals will work with a person, a lawyer, who then works at a law firm. Yes, you can have a logo, tagline, and slogan. Messaging and positioning within legal is often neglected. At the individual level, that is why you see the influx of legal professionals and lawyers flocking to LinkedIn. Since the pandemic, people have been sharing perspectives, stories, experiences, and expertise.

I do not look at LinkedIn as a lead gen platform, and I do not think lawyers should either. They can develop relationships with attorneys in different practice areas for referrals, sure. But when you are trying to let people know who you are, what you do, how you do it, and why you might be better than alternatives, it is marketing 101. You have to develop know, like, and trust. If people do not know you, they will not call you. If they do not like you, they will call someone else. If they do not trust you, they likely will not hire you.

Through content, whether market copy or blogs, and going full circle, maybe video, people can see us speaking. Most LinkedIn content is text-based. Diversify. Share videos, clip them, put them on YouTube or Reels or LinkedIn, and on your website. There are many ways.

When you are trying to build that brand, put yourself where your audience spends time. This is where your ideal client invests attention. You have an opportunity to take up a small part of their mind. When they think, I got into an accident, I am hurt, the car is totaled, they remember Mike or Bob or Mary sharing stories about helping someone in a similar position. It is not always perfect, but if you do it enough, you will get mindshare and hopefully get those calls in the future.

Nick: That was very interesting. I promised I would not hold you up and I almost kept that promise. If any of our listeners were inspired today and wanted to hear more from you or the Legal Phoenix team, which they should, because you have the unbiased approach to marketing where you are not trying to sell them anything, you are just trying to point people in the right direction, what is the best way to contact you and what are they going to get?

Ron: Check out legalphoenix.com. I am on LinkedIn trying to share whatever I know. I do not know it all, but I will share what I know on that platform. We also host a monthly webinar. I am unsure when this will drop, but those are usually in the third or fourth week of the month. If you want longer-form content that goes beyond what I share on LinkedIn, head over to the website and subscribe to the Legal Phoenix newsletter.

Nick: I read that newsletter. Is it weekly?

Ron: I am trying, Nick. I am trying to increase the frequency as much as I can. There are only so many hours in the day. I am trying to get it out a little more.

Nick: It is a good one. I unsubscribe from a lot of newsletters, but I keep that one, and I appreciate it. I hope you take that as the compliment I mean it to be. Ron, thank you so much for joining us today.

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 legalphoenix.com, Ron’s contact information, his LinkedIn profile, and the upcoming webinar, which I will make sure to put the correct one up there. We will see you next time, everyone.