And what I recognized is one I really enjoyed helping people and just figuring out how to help them solve very specific challenges that they were facing in their businesses and or avoid stepping on the landmines that I'd stepped on over the years as I was building my own businesses, and also realize that along the way, the most valuable thing that I built was my personal and professional network, and I was extending it for free every single day.

Welcome to the 10 Golden Rules of internet marketing for law firms podcast, featuring the latest strategies and techniques to drive traffic to your website and convert that traffic into clients. Now, here's the founder and CEO of 10 golden rules, Jay Berkowitz.

Well, good morning. Good afternoon, and good evening. Welcome to the 10 Golden Rules of internet marketing for law firms podcast. Got a great guest today. Before I run into introduce you to Kevin Chern I want to tell you a little bit about tgr live. We're doing our live event, April 25 and 26th in Boca Raton, it's going to be awesome. We've got really an amazing lineup of speakers. I'm so pleased that basically everybody I seen speak at a great conference who did a great presentation, I asked them and they all said yes, we got some sponsors we're getting we're getting the rooms filled at the hotel. So definitely go to 10, Golden rules.com or the link in the show notes and check out 10 Golden Rules live, we're going to be covering artificial intelligence. We've got some of the top AI experts for law firms. We've got marketing some of the top social media experts niche law, Dave Thomas, from law Tigers is coming anyways, don't miss it. DGR live April 25 and 26th. With that, Kevin Chern is my guest today is companies called sanguine strategic advisors. And he's one of the best people in the world at getting law firm solutions for all kinds of different things. We mostly work with him on getting leads high quality leads for our clients. He also has great solutions, like call centers and all kinds of things. And I'll let Kevin tell you a little bit more about the company. But first, Kevin, tell us a little bit about your background. You're a recovering attorney, and you've built a tremendous leads company for yourself and then evolved into this lead leads consulting business, but why don't you tell us your story? Yeah,

you're really a pioneer in that right?

I guess you'd call me that. Some people call me crazy. But you know, is challenging at the time. But in hindsight is rewarding, because we really got to make an impact and opening up internet marketing to the legal industry in a way that I think expanded access to legal services to consumers who now had another avenue to get educated. Remember, law firms need an incentive to go ahead and put content and information out into the universe and educate consumers. It's for the purpose of marketing to them and attracting business. And so when you open up lead gen two law firms, obviously given very strong incentive to go out and proliferate information about the availability of legal services. So we built a bunch of

work getting so hard for law firms, like was it just like a snobbery from the top firms that they didn't want the upstarts targeting clients or? Well,

Was it Jacoby Myers, who were the first advertisers who fought the California Bar and went to the Supreme Court?

So, you know, I saw Jacoby and Meyers were nominated to the legal advertising Hall of Fame at the Golden gavel awards at National Trial Lawyers, because of that pioneering work, they didn't advertising. So I'm going to start a movement here that you should be considered for nomination one day, um, it's probably gonna take about 10 years, Kevin, till it's like, you know, the mean, and the whole, you know, lawyer advertising online category, it's like classy, you know, considered like historical ineptitudes. Classic. Great to start your nomination. Okay.

I appreciate that. Hopefully, it's not a post humous award.

Exactly. You look young and energetic. Yeah. It'll be fine. So you've evolved from, you know, you built your own law firm you wanted leads for your law firm, then you got great at generating leads, and then you, you know, fought the good fight with the Bar Association's and built a national network of folks who are taking advantage of these leads, right.

Awesome. And then how did it evolve into your current company where you're really just connecting law firms with resources? You're not? You haven't built the resources yourself?

I always tell tell people how I met Kevin and it was the it was like the first month of COVID shutdown. And like, if you all remember back, it was like this was the shutdown shutdown where we were all even afraid to open our door like nevermind leave our house and, and get in our car. And nobody was driving into each other. There was no car accidents because no one was on the roads for at least the first month until we started desperately looking for toilet paper. And then we had to go on our cars again. Right. But you know, that first month, one of my clients, you know, it was Jeff McDonald in Richmond, Virginia and they're like you We signed like 30 new cases, I'm like, how did you sign 30 new cases? They're like, Oh, it was saying wean or something. And I'm like, What's the saying wean? And I was like, trying to figure out? Where did 30 cases come from the middle of the shutdown, the next month? Like, you know, oh, yeah, we signed like 35 cases, you know, it was still pretty much shut down. And I'm like, you know, everybody else is really hurting all across the country. And you guys signed 35 new cases, you got to introduce me to the saying sanguine. No. And then by then they could pronounce it correctly. So I got on with Kevin. And he explained that, and there's attorneys are always frustrated with leads, because most lead providers, including like the big, the big networks, like the find laws, and not picking on anyone they have, you know, they'll typically, if someone calls out a lead form on those sites, they'll send it to three or even 10, attorneys. And so generally, there's frustration with the lead sources you pay for these leads. And if you find out they've already hired an attorney, that went to 10 other attorneys, but one of the things that I've really recommend to my clients, and Kevin's now probably worked with 20, or 30 of our clients, is that the leads that Kevin provides are unique to that law firm, that doesn't mean that someone didn't go out on the internet, and sign up for another service. But that all your services will only sell the lead to the attorney. So a little bit about how in

The other way I find that works really well is some of the competitive markets like we've clients in New York and Florida, and Texas, and California, like the cost for the best click on Pay Per Click on Google is like $300, for a car wreck attorney near me, a search done on a cell phone and a call coming on that cell phone. Right? The challenge with that is like, and I always explained to people, you've got to tell Google, you need three, I want three of those Day, a day. So three times 300,000, a day of doing rough math, and 30 days is $30,000, in most small firms can't wrap their head around spending 30,000 on Google. And then by the way, if that works, here's what works generally looks like. It means you might breakeven to spend $30,000, you might get, you know, if you're lucky, like 15 cases. So it's like, very, very expensive. $1,500 a case, and you might break even, you know, a lot of those are soft tissue cases. And then what you're trying to do is get one or two big cases every month or every quarter, that pays for the whole investment. So you've got to break even at like $30,000 a month to try and get a couple of big cases. And so what I love about the lead sources that you provide to our clients is a lot of that a lot of the spend like they're they're spending a lot of money like two, three $4 million on Google. And what that allows their algorithms the Google algorithms to do is really maximize against those best keyword terms, and use the term arbitrage before so your leads, lead providers actually spending like $4 million, and then they're, they're dividing those leads up all across the country. And they're, you know, they're selling a lead for round number $200. But it costs 150. So or it may cost them 190. There's making $10. So

are some of the other categories that are most popular for you that you're helping folks? I mentioned call centers, but you tell me what else? Yeah.

So you know, digital marketing agencies, you know, everybody, we say what are the challenges, challenges with growth, right, that's a big area of assistance. But we're also helping firms identify ways to expand the value of their average case by finding solutions in the marketplace that are working really well. Increasing average case value, because you can attack you can attack growth in scale on a couple of different ways. Right? One, you can go out and get different marketing sources, right. Which sometimes requires you spending more money on a per case acquisition costs. While you can either take more of your profit margin and dedicated to buying leads or buying media, or what you can do is you can expand your profit margin by raising the average value of your case. How do you do that? Well, for instance, we have a provider that will do neuro psych evaluations on to uncover traumatic brain injury when an initial investigation or an initial ER visit didn't uncover it. Now, if you go ahead and have that TBR, that neuro psych evaluation before you send the initial demand letter to the adjuster, now they're setting their reserves on that case, much higher once they sit those reserves going in and trying to get the adjuster to modify those reserves is exceedingly difficult may stretch the settlement time and out several more months, and may impair your ability to get a much higher value. So working with third party providers that can help you enhance the value of your cases, guess what a few more profit margin, you can afford a higher cap cost of acquisition. And He who controls the supply by being able to spend more money per lead is going to control the marketplace. If I can afford to pay the most for every single case. I can take a bigger market share of the gains that are

great. Got a little time pressure here. So I want to get into my some of my favorite questions. Sure. This is normally my last question, but I'm for you. It's got to come first. So I know you're a big white sox guy, right?

Cubs cubs

story? I'm sorry. Oh. And also, you know, I'm a hockey guy. So you've got a great young superstar in Chicago named Connor but art Yeah, in color. And what's the buzzing? Oh, there's

a ton of buzz. I actually got a quite a few games every year. And he's just a lot of fun to watch. And, you know, it just is just recently, Patrick Kane was here for his return to Chicago. Right? Yeah. Chelios just had his his jersey retired. So yeah, great time to be a sports fan in Chicago. I go and you know, the Cubs there's a lot a lot of youth and a lot of exciting players and I'm a lifelong diehard Cubs fan and grew up in the 70s here in Chicago listen to watching the cops on GN and and hearing Jack Brickhouse announced the game. So

awesome. The question I always love to ask people, what apps are you using? Or what personal productivity tools? Are you? Can you share with us? Yeah,

you know, I will tell you that I am an avid Chet GPT. User. But I think more than out

of us, give us a couple examples.

I mean, I just my favorite use nowadays is actually real language formula creation for Google Sheets and Excel, Excel spreadsheets. So rather than me, you know, not like a guru in Excel, right? I know how to write a basic formula. But sometimes I, you know, use if then statements are what are called nested if then statements, which use multiple cells as variables. So we have to say, if this cell says this, and that cell says this, then this third cell should give you a particular result or multiply to other cells, right? Using Chet GPT, I can go in there in real time in real language, and I say, if so a one has a one or two. And so B six as a three or four, then cell C, C seven should reflect this, and I can say, write a formula that will execute this for me. So rather than me having to go back through like five or six times trying to figure out how to write the correct, excellent formula, or how to create a pivot table, or how to create a graph, I can actually go right into Chet GPT, and write it out in real language, what I want, and will actually write the entire formula for me. That's awesome.

I love that one. Yeah. So if you're young Kevin, and your young attorney, and you're starting out today, what would you recommend to your young self?

Um, you know, I think, like, if you have the right intellect, in Drive, right, and passion for what you're doing. I'm a believer that you can be successful in whatever you set out to do. I encourage people to be very thoughtful, not jump at the first opportunity. But really think about how doing what they're anticipating doing from from a career standpoint, is going to impact their happiness. Like I said, Too many times I would start businesses. And because I was hard working, and I persevered in the face of adversity, I was able to find a way to make the business successful. But it didn't always translate into me really enjoying what I was doing. And so I guess my biggest piece of advice is, try and be intentional and purposeful, in designing your career path to, you know, to create happiness and satisfaction in your personal life.

You mentioned that exercise you went through where you sort of you were at a transition point, a pivot point in your life, and you said, you know, here's the things I want, I know that one of the beauties of your business is that you don't, you know, like you said, you don't have a product you don't have, you know, you have some staff, but you don't, you're not running a law firm. And part of that was intention. So you could travel so that you didn't have to worry about a big payroll, and you were held just all

to do with that is did you use a book? Or did you use a consultant? Or how did you? Or what's just experience to say, hey, look, I'm gonna craft my life based on the forehead.

No, it really was just, it was a product of just my you know, we're all a product of the collection of our prior experiences, as they say. And it really was just a product of realizing the mistake that I had made before, which was coming up with the idea and executing it before I thought about what the impact of the business model was going to have on me six months from now or a year from now or two years from now, right? So it's about being a little bit more thoughtful and trying to look out a little bit further to see where the business is going to bring you but most importantly, it's understanding as you're going in and before you're developing your business. What you want your life to be and setting that definition most goalposts and being very disciplined about not doing things within the business that will violate or fall outside of those goalposts.

Congrats, that's awesome. Do you have a couple of best business books that you'd recommend?

Are there any blogs, podcasts or YouTube that you subscribe to that are your go to is

I like medium. It's a subscription based one, it's about $5 a month, but it provides a lot of really current information and a very breadth of articles about AI and current technology trends. And, and I really find that it's applicable across a lot of different industries. Whether you're a lawyer or an you're in a different industry, it makes for great daily reading. There's always a couple of nuggets in there.

Great. Last question. Where can people get in touch with you?

The best way to reach me is to email me my email is Kevin ke vi n at sanguine sa n g u i n e s a strategic advisors.com

Same as the ssa.com Yep. And you

can also find me and linkedin@linkedin.com forward slash Kevin Dasher.

Awesome. Well, thanks for doing this. Hope the Cubs have a great spring training and and season and hope the Hawks do great except for when they're playing my Winnipeg Jets.

Oh, I was just at the game the other night so I'm for you guys beat us in overtime. Hey, thanks for having me to speak with you. Great.

Thank you for listening to the 10 Golden Rules of internet marketing for law firms podcast. Please send questions and comments to podcast at 10 Golden rules.com That is podcast at t e n Golden rules.com