Brian Glass: 00:00:00

Yeah, and so we help lawyers who are in that million dollar above space. I call it self actualized, like, figure out what it is that you actually want to do. What would make you happy to wake up on Monday morning and show up at work? And then, how do we build a practice that serves that so it really is not a one size fits all program or, you know, set of steps that you have to take. It's, it's kind of individualized coaching, helping you figure out what actually excites you to do. And then, how can we build a firm that supports that for you?

IMFLF Intro: 00:00:37

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,

Jay Berkowitz: 00:01:02

well, good morning, good afternoon, good evening. Welcome to the 10 golden rules of internet marketing for law firms podcast, and we got a great one today. Mr. Brian glass is not only a personal injury attorney, he's also runs one of the great conferences in this industry called Great Legal Marketing does all this with his dad, so it's an amazing family story too. Brian, welcome to the 10 golden rules podcast.

Brian Glass: 00:01:28

Jay, thank you for having me, and I'm excited to share the stage with you once again in October at our summit in Phoenix this year.

Jay Berkowitz: 00:01:36

Yeah. I mean, why don't we get right into that so nobody misses it, because this is going to be coming out, I know four or five weeks ahead of Great Legal Marketing. You move the event around this year, we're in Phoenix. What's the exact dates? October 3 through the fifth? October 3, where's the best place for people to find out about it?

Brian Glass: 00:01:56

Yeah, if you go to GLM summit.com you can find a little bit of an agenda summary of what we're doing. I mean, really, it's for the solo a small law firm owner who's trying to figure out how to compete with the big spenders in their market.

Jay Berkowitz: 00:02:11

And I've been to a couple GLM summits. I've spoken, and I'll be speaking again this year, really looking forward to it. It's what I think one of the most family, sort of heart based conferences there is, if not the most Why is it so warm and and people just love it and come back again and again, there is something

Brian Glass: 00:02:34

that's a little bit different. And I you know what, Jay whether it's the stuff coming off the stage or the attendees, I mean, I think our message is broadly that you are operating a law firm so that you can live a great life, right, so that you can make enough money to go back and serve your family without taking, you know, 70 hours a week and having to go work for that law firm. And so we really try to educate lawyers on how to build the kind of practices that serve their family and serve their lives, rather than the other way around. And I think that that attracts largely law firm owners, and not we don't get a lot of associates. We don't, you know, lawyers will bring their marketing directors, but because of that, we have attracted that type of owner that is looking for the practice that serves their family, and for that reason, like the conversations in the hallway, they just tend to be a little bit different than they are at most major marketing conferences. The other piece of that is because we're attracting primarily owners and really not associates, it's just not that big of a conference. And so you can, with dedicated effort, you can meet everybody in the room over the course of those three days.

Jay Berkowitz: 00:03:46

Yeah, so great conference. We've been a couple times. Think we were in Nashville, we were in Orlando, and this year in Scottsdale. So tell us a little bit about the content we can expect this year.

Brian Glass: 00:03:57

So we have a ton of digital marketers coming, yourself included,

Jay Berkowitz: 00:04:02

oh no.

Brian Glass: 00:04:05

So there's I like to be the only one. Because this is because this is what everybody always thinks that they want, right? Because if you can, if you come to a conference, you can walk away with three to five actionable things, whether it's tweaking your Google My Business Profile, or it's doing something like you teach and figuring out how to use one piece of content in seven different ways, or upping your SEO game a little bit like those things tend to be the big draw, and those are the things that people ask for year in and year out. Where I think we differentiate is that we spend a lot more time on mindset than any other conference. So we have Lee miltier, who's a millionaire mindset secrets coach and speaker, who's going to be there giving the keynote address. She was a long time Glazer Kennedy coach in their insider circle. She's going to be speaking on day two. And then, of course, we have plenty of breakout. So if you are building a law firm and you're looking for you know, what are the mistakes that people make when they get into partnership agreements? Um Ed Alexander and Jonathan Hawkins, who are in our mastermind group, are going to be co presenting on that. Kellum parks, who's a member of one of our programs, is going to be presenting on how to integrate technology into your firm, how to how to build the better firm. And then we're putting together a workshop for women lawyers, because we don't think that that exists, how to be a badass female trial lawyer, run a great firm, have influence in your community, and still get home in time for dinner with the rest of the family. So love it. So all of that's going to be and that's the first time that we put together that session. That's still a little bit in the works, but we think that's missing from most of these conference communities.

Jay Berkowitz: 00:05:49

Yeah, what a great, great, great topic, and what a great lineup. And of course, I'm going to be presenting. I like to call it the glam awards, but I think technically it's called the Golden awards. And what we do is you guys give us all of the mastermind members and all of the the registered members, and we go through about 23 different criteria on their websites, their marketing, how many keywords they come up for, how they perform in Google Maps, how they come up in the local service ads, we how their website performs, how they answer the phone, like we actually look at almost everything relative to marketing, intake and performance the website, and we create a gold, silver and bronze winner of the glam awards. So that is one of my favorite presentations to do every year, because not only do we go through the each of these, these component parts of of a great website, but we show you why certain websites got rated so high and why they have so many keywords, and what they did right, and why they perform in the local service ads, and all the things you need to do to come up and win yourself a glam award next year. So I love doing that presentation, but my team doesn't love it so much, because it's a lot of work. A lot of work. Yeah, I've been going through 23 different items on about 100 websites and grabbing screenshots. So, so that's a

Brian Glass: 00:07:14

that's a wonderful presentation every year. And Jay, what I remember from last year's presentation is that the commonality between the three winners were that they were firms that always brought their marketing directors to the conference with them and to our mastermind meetings. And the third one is going to escape me, but I know injured worker, law firm in Richmond was one recipient, Tim Selmer, also, law firm in Iowa was another. And I cannot remember who the third was, but the commonality is, these are law firm owners who didn't just go by themselves, which is really hard to do, because you walk out of these conferences with tons of ideas, and then you have to translate them back to your team that's back home. These are people that always bring their marketing directors with them, so that you have at least two sets of eyes and ears in the room for all of the great ideas. Well, it's

Jay Berkowitz: 00:08:04

probably partially figurative and partially actual, right, that if the person's in the room, but also a, you have to have a marketing director. And B, you have to invest enough and make it a senior enough role that you invest in bringing them to a conference, buying another hotel, hotel room, another recommendation. But, yeah, clearly, you know that kind of commitment to marketing, and you know, it's not inconsistent with what we see amongst our clients. You know, our clients who perform the best on their side, who sign the most clients, they do have that kind of commitment to the role, and it's not always, you know, called Marketing Director. Sometimes it's, you know, a general manager or an office manager, but it's someone who spends like, at least 50% of their time on marketing stuff. And for us, they facilitate a lot of the things we're trying to do, right? Like, if we say, hey, you know, be really great to, you know, talk to your intake folks and coach them, and go through the following principles. Like we listen to a lot of calls, and there's a lot of basic principles that they're not following. And if somebody's cares enough about the role, takes that advice, goes, goes through the 15, coaches them on a consistent basis. Obviously, the results are there. So you gotta have someone in that role taking the good advice from from us and from other people on stage and from other people in the mastermind, you know, Tony Robbins says, success leaves clues. There's lots of clues out there and how to do this stuff, right?

Brian Glass: 00:09:35

I think I said that actually is just after, just after your presentation, success leaves clues. Look, here's the people with their marketing director. Marketing directors, yeah, and I think that's a place where many law firm owners under invest in their firm is kind of the ancillary people who are not revenue generating because they're not lawyers, and so we don't think of them as revenue generating, but the doers, because you have a finite amount of time that you. Can spend working on your law firm and listening to phone calls and then coaching on the phone calls, but if you can find somebody else who's aligned with your vision, and it does take a certain amount of coaching them up for them to be able to execute what you want them to, but then if you can translate to them, Okay, now here's how you interface with the intake team. Here's how you talk to our vendors and our technology and our marketing partners, right? So that the people in your firm don't have to do everything, and certainly, so that you don't have to be the one that's doing everything

Jay Berkowitz: 00:10:31

exactly. And, yeah, it's a big win, right? Success leaves clues. Follow the clues. So look, let's pivot a little bit and talk a little bit about you. We skipped all of that part, but you know, Brian is an attorney, also very involved in this event and a great presenter. He spoke at our tgr live event in April, and did a great job. We'll talk about that content in a minute, but tell us a little bit about your story and how you got to where you at? Yeah, sure. So

Brian Glass: 00:11:02

geez, now I've been practicing for 16 years. I graduated law school in 2008 I like to say, into the teeth of the Great Recession. I was part of that class of students that you know went to law school promised the $160,000 salary as long as you graduate. And man, that didn't happen. So I got out and I worked for a general practice firm for about four months. I could never get used to billing time. And then I switched over and started doing auto accident injury work, kind of in, like January of 2009 and my although I was in the same city as my dad, like my goal was to go out and, number one, make my own friends, my own way of doing things and my own reputation, before I ever considered joining him. So I practiced at what you might call a competitor firm for about 11 years.

Jay Berkowitz: 00:11:49

And then in, well, that wasn't just finding your own way

Brian Glass: 00:11:54

well, because there's a timing thing that that has to happen too, right? And then so in, in 2019 three things really happened. Ben was moving into a larger office space. My firm, I think, we lost a legal assistant or something, and we elected not to move into a larger office space, and we renewed the least where we were. And then my wife had a really hard third childbirth, and was in ICU for a while. My son was in the NICU for a while, and so all of those things happening kind of at the same time. Was like, Well, if you don't, if you don't jump and practice with him now, like you might not ever get the opportunity to. So in 2019 I left the firm where I was, I came over to work for him, and we've been working on growing the auto practice ever since. So we do two things. I do the auto accident side, broadly, you would call it a personal injury practice, but in Virginia, because of contributory negligence, rules like slip and falls aren't really a thing, and we don't have much of an appetite for medical malpractice cases because they're so expensive to prosecute and because there's a cap. So I'm running an auto accident practice with a couple of dog bites, and then my dad is running at an ERISA Long Term Disability appeals practice, which is all federal based written work. For the most part, it's not actually trial work. He did that earlier in his career, but but isn't in front of juries anymore. So that's where we are. We have five lawyers now. We have 18 US based team members and five virtual assistants in the Philippines, and just try to be a little bit better every single week.

Jay Berkowitz: 00:13:28

By the way, Dad has been glass. We left that part out. Yeah, an absolute legend, and you know, one of the most respected people in the legal and legal marketing and legal mastermind industry. He he actually was scheduled to be on one of our webinars and had a heart attack, but I understand he's doing great, so

Brian Glass: 00:13:50

he actually didn't have a heart attack. He had, he had a calcium score blood work that was off the charts high, and they chased down test after test after test. He had no symptoms, but he had enough of a blockage that he needed to have triple bypass surgery. So, yeah, which? And the recovery is much recovery curve is much easier, right? Easier in air quotes, I guess, if you haven't had a heart attack, so who's fortunate not to have one? But he was kind of walking, he was walking around with 85 90% blockages. So which is, which is back to my like, if I don't do it now, you might not ever get the opportunity. So I'm glad that I left in 2019 and came over

Jay Berkowitz: 00:14:32

here. But I guess the important part of his recovery is he refereeing soccer. He's

Brian Glass: 00:14:37

he was did a tournament this weekend. Awesome.

Jay Berkowitz: 00:14:42

He's running around like a like a kid on those stuff. So I always like to ask this question, everybody knows the Simon Sinek TED talk, what is your why? What's your why? Because that you guys are really I love a lot of a lot of your content. And on stage, and a lot of your your LinkedIn posts and whatnot. And as a firm, you guys are running Eos, like you guys are really sort of mission based, and, you know, motivational and business based, what? What really gets you up in the morning and makes your day week and month.

Brian Glass: 00:15:15

So yes, we're running Eos, and our core focus is to build a business where people can thrive. And we struggled with this in the first six months that we were running us, which is Entrepreneurial Operating systems based on the book traction. And one of the things that you do is you set a core focus, like, why are we in business? And most law firms personal injury law firms would say something like justice or defending the little guy, or getting money from insurance companies, and that's what we do, but it's not really why we do it. So you know, I think both Ben and I are in business to help people build better lives for ourselves, for our family, for our team, and then ultimately, if you take care of yourself and your team, then the clients are going to be really, really well taken care of. So that is our Why is to be an inspirational and motivational and really help people, especially the young people that come work for us, build careers that they feel passionate about serving our clients.

Jay Berkowitz: 00:16:20

I love it when you get EOS right. I'm always jealous of everybody else's core values.

Brian Glass: 00:16:26

Have you gotten EOS wrong?

Jay Berkowitz: 00:16:30

No, you know, we so we've told our EOS story. We had an EOS webinar. We did self implementation for a couple years. You know, I really didn't want, you're supposed to do it once you have 10 people. So we had, you know, 14 or 16 at the start of this year. And you really need a management layer, I think, to do it right like so we waited to do it, you know, full fledged implementation with a rock star implementer, Gerardo escalana. So we were doing it since January. It's August of 2024, if you're listening to this, some point in the future. So we're eight months into it, and I think we're doing it. It's been phenomenal for our business. But I just mean, you guys seem to do it, right? And there's another law firm, and I love their their core values, so I'm a little jealous.

Brian Glass: 00:17:19

Yeah. I mean, eight months in, listen, you're in the hard part, right? Because you're probably figuring out that some people aren't the right fit. You're probably recognizing you don't have nearly as many systems as you thought you did. So I sympathize with you. It does get easier. 1824, 30 months in now, our issues list is fairly small on a week to week basis. But then, you know, we get in the room with our implementer on a quarterly or at an annual meeting, and it swells. It's like, all of a sudden we have all of these issues in the business that we weren't even thinking about. Sometimes there are opportunities, right? It's like, okay, maybe we don't actually have problems to solve right now, but like, what's the next thing that we could do and how and for us, it's been really important to have that dedicated time set aside with, you know, with an implementer who sometimes is just a mediator or a conversation facilitator, that having somebody who's outside your business come in and help you, I'm sure that you've noticed leaps and bounds and differences between the way that it was operating when you were self implementing, and the way that it is now that you have Gerardo.

Jay Berkowitz: 00:18:29

Oh, yeah, no. I mean, it's highly recommended. And if y'all want a good starter on Eos, find the podcast, or, even better, the webinar on our YouTube channel on 10 golden rules YouTube channel. We had we had Mike Morris, who I'm sure you know is also wrote a book called fireproof about his EOS journey. He was one of Gino Wickman, who wrote traction. He was one of his first clients, and now has a $200 million plus law firm. We had Gerardo Escalona, and we had a third EOS implement on a great session. Talk about your journey, like I guess you did a little bit maybe the last four or five years. So you, you joined the family firm out of the last four or five years. And I assume wife and child are are in good shape. Everybody's

Brian Glass: 00:19:17

good now. And in fact, I convinced my wife to quit her it HR company about two years ago now, and come and join us. So she's running our human resources now, which the goal was for that to be a part time job. It's really not been a part time job, because we've kind of constantly been hiring now. But you know, my my goal, so we were talking before I got on. I actually haven't been in a courtroom. I don't think in almost two years, I tried a case in 2022 I got a $4.3 million verdict against a drunk driver. It was the largest auto accident case in Virginia that year. Awesome. Um, actually it was. It was right down the. Hallway from the Johnny Depp trial before that, before that trial got popular. So we started on the exact same day, and I said to the jury, hey, good news, bad news, like, good news, you're not going to be here for eight weeks. I'm going to get you out in about three days. Bad news, the players in in this story are not nearly as good looking as the players down the hallway, but I think the time trade off is is good for you. And so I was really excited, because the first case that I tried since covid, my team was all, we're gonna go watch Brian. I'm looking over my shoulder, and they're disappearing. Well, then I found out they were sneaking down the hallway to watch watch parts in Johnny's trial. So that was the last case that I've tried, and my role now is evolving a little bit. I'm mentoring our younger lawyers. I'm focused really on, how do we take a case that's worth $100,000 and make it worth 150 or $200,000 and how can I do that in a way that I don't have to be involved in the day to day, right? We're talking about zoom depositions. Like, if I never have to sit in on another deposition and defend it, I would be very happy. Um, but there is a little bit of a pull, like I would like to get back in a courtroom and try some more cases with somebody's help at some point. Um, but all of that is balanced up by I've got three little boys playing soccer and baseball. So I've structured my life so I can leave at four o'clock Monday through Friday during the spring and the fall, so I can go coach those teams, right? Because that's what I want to do right now. I'm not interested in, you know, working till eight o'clock that you're ready for trial the next day, that may come back. But for right now, I want to be out on a field with the kids.

Jay Berkowitz: 00:21:42

So you've made some great decisions. I always like this question, are there any pivots or changes you made in your career or business that are lessons that a young attorney could apply early on in their career?

Brian Glass: 00:21:56

Pivots are changes that I made in my career. I didn't pivot all I mean, I left the general practice firm pretty quickly. So that would be one. Is like, if you are unhappy and you aren't feeling like your job is serving you, there are plenty of jobs out there that would be one the other would be as soon as you're able get into rooms with people that are doing things bigger and better and faster than you are, and not necessarily only illegal, right? There's plenty of other masterminds in addition to ours or in in the broader community, but what you realize when you spend a lot of time with people that appear to be more successful than you is that they're not any smarter and they're not any better capitalized, and they're not any you know, more hardworking than you are, and so that really opens up the possibilities of what you might be able to achieve in your life, because with your specific set of tools and your skill set, you can achieve the same things. It's just that many of us have never been in the room with people that are that successful to go that's just a normal guy, right? Or I'm smarter than him, or I'm harder working than him, and so I would say, like, as a young lawyer, maybe it's not a paid mastermind, but you can organize this in your office. You can organize your own network of people that you invite over, and you buy a pizza for, you know, once a month, right? And we just talk about different ideas that we have about marketing, or different ideas you have about cases, and because you're the one who's organizing, because you're the hub of all this activity. Now you've elevated your status in the community, and you get to pick and choose who's in the room.

Jay Berkowitz: 00:23:49

Yeah, the mastermind is so powerful, as a matter of fact, that was the the webinar we did. There's another webinar on masterminds that dad was supposed to be. That's right, that's the one. But it is. It is on tape, and we got some real rock stars. But talk to me. You all lead masterminds, and I mean, man, our my mastermind in the agency business has been revolutionary. We've like tripled our business since we joined on the right mastermind and joined about four, four to five years ago. Talk about you all's mastermind and some of the successes that some of the attorneys have had,

Brian Glass: 00:24:28

sure so Adam Rawson subbed in for Ben on that mastermind zoom webinar that you did, and Adam was one of the great successes. Adam started just he and his cell phone criminal defense firm down in South Florida. And now I want to say Adam is doing, you know, almost eight figures in revenue with, I think, five or six or seven attorneys and a whole back office staff. He's, he's an amazing success. He's, he was with us for for many, many years, and then has moved on. Our niche really tends to be small firms that are doing. Somewhere between 500,000 and $5 million in revenue, and we are really best at taking somebody that's doing less than a million dollars in revenue and helping them get over that hump, because that's really the space where now you can hire out some you can hire out some of the work, so that you can focus only on your highest leverage things, and so that you can free up a little bit of your time. So we operate two groups. We operate the hero mastermind group and the icon group. The hero group is generally, firms are doing less than a million dollars in revenue. Generally, there's less than seven employees. Generally, the lawyers still doing almost all, if not all of the work. And then in the icon group, the opposite is true. It's over a million in revenue. It's a larger team the lawyers out of the day to day of some of the legal, or is trying to get out of the day to day of some of the legal and is focused on, how do I bring up the next generation of leaders within my law firm so that I can continue to grow like scale has kind of become a buzzword in in law firm, coaching like, oh, we should scale like you have to do it in a way that it's actually serving the purpose that you want to serve. If your goal is to go in and try cases and serve the client forever, scale is probably not something that you actually want, right? And so we help lawyers who are in that million dollar and above space, I call it self actualize, like figure out what it is that you actually want to do. What would make you happy to wake up on Monday morning and show up at work? And then how do we build a practice that serves that? So it really is not a one size fits all program, or, you know, set of steps that you have to take. It's it's kind of individualized coaching, helping you figure out what actually excites you to do, and then how can we build a firm that supports that for you?

Jay Berkowitz: 00:26:50

Another great case study. And I don't know when this podcast comes out, but either the show before this or the show after this is our webinar with Stephen Goldstein, another great hero, icon, success story. And we're part of the success story because the title of the of the webinar is how a small law firm signed 62 new clients, you know, and absolutely blew up in size. So Steven's a great story of someone who's done great with the mastermind, yeah, and with tangled rules

Brian Glass: 00:27:28

well, and I know you were instrumental in that, because I you know he said at one point he had to turn off the LSAS because there were too many calls coming through. So that had to be

Jay Berkowitz: 00:27:36

all the attorney who signed 62 cases he's

Brian Glass: 00:27:41

built incredible practice with one lawyer. A lot of his the work is outsourced to demand writers. And then this is the part that's a little strange to everywhere else in the country. In New York, they have this thing called per diem lawyers who will go and like, take a deposition. It's more than go and set your case for trial. They'll like, take the deposition for you, write the summary and give it back to you. And so Steve has has managed scale without employees, aside from his couple of paralegals, he's built an incredible practice.

Jay Berkowitz: 00:28:18

Great story. Yeah. The what I love about my mastermind is, is two parts. You know, part one is there's obviously a leader of the mastermind, and yourself and your dad are are, I guess, among the leaders. And then the other thing is that the group is so powerful. You know, you're in a room with 10 or 15 of your peers. I don't know what size you guys have, But Jen, most, groups are. So I'm in a group of multi, seven figure agencies, and these guys, this is really one of the smartest rooms I've ever been in in my entire career. Very, very bright young guys and a few women who built these incredibly successful agencies. And almost any question you have a room can answer the question. And also, like so many things you haven't thought of, they show you best practices, like things we're doing with hiring. And a couple people in the room were on EOS. Before we were on Eos, we just got a phenomenal accounting program from Greg Crabtree. Wrote a book called simple numbers and exceptional accounting, like the best accounting conceptual stuff and practical stuff I've ever seen. So talk about a little bit about how the masterminds actually function and work. Yeah,

Brian Glass: 00:29:33

so I love that you said it's the stuff that you're not thinking about, right? Because those are the major problems that get solved. Is it's it's rarely that and this happens. So let me back up. So our format is a quarterly meetings and then calls on the months in between the quarterly meetings, and when you come to a quarterly meeting, you have about 45 minutes where you're on the hot seat and you the expectation is you come with a resource to share with everybody. Company with something that's working in your firm that you can share, and then with a problem to be solved, right? Sometimes it's hiring, often it's what's an appropriate compensation scheme for this employee. A lot of times it's marketing. And so that problem actually usually gets solved pretty quickly. And then we're on to the problems you didn't even know that you had, like, if I implement this compensation scheme, here's the things that might fall out after this. I had our marketing director, Lauren in, on in on one shortly after, she joined us, and she walked out of the room. I said, What do you think? She said, Well, that felt like it was psychotherapy for lawyers. So yeah, that's, that's about right, right? Because a lot of this comes back to, I can give you a lot of advice on what I would do, but I don't know that it's right for you. So you've got to tell me, actually, what kind of a practice Do you want to build? And if you've never been in a room where somebody's asked you that question, most people haven't even thought about it. So that's that's kind of the power of it is getting, number one, answers to your questions, but number two, figuring out, what are the things I'm not even thinking about that these 10 or 15 other successful people can save me from, you know, the 18 month learning curve after making a hiring mistake, or after getting in with the wrong CPA or or the wrong case management software or something like that.

Jay Berkowitz: 00:31:27

Yeah. So such a powerful tool. So again, if you haven't joined a mastermind, and you're just starting out, like Brian said, you know, create your own mastermind. It can be a small group that meets for drinks once a month, or meets for pizza once a month, and then eventually you want to join a professional group like the heroes or the icons I promised early on. So let's not forget you presented some great content at our live event called tgr live. As a matter of fact, I hold here in my hands the contract where the I have, I have to sign a big contract for our event, which is, as soon as I sign it's going to be March 10 and 11th of next year, live event. And you were kind enough to come and share some expertise around what I call guerla marketing, my friend Dave Thomas at law tigers, they call ground game, talk to us about some of those strategies that you shared with our group. Yeah.

Brian Glass: 00:32:24

So guerla marketing, it's interesting being on a digital marketers Podcast. I'm talking about guerrilla marketing, because this is how small law firms compete with the people that can outspend you on PPC and on LSA. So I'm in Northern Virginia. We don't, we don't have mega firms here, but you have some big spenders like Seth price is right in my backyard, right? Seth runs blue shark, so, yeah, well, but Dave outranks us everywhere. The GMB outranks us everywhere, right? Yeah, and so you, you've got to get to a place where, where you've built some marketing assets in house, and your greatest marketing assets of referral source, right? Somebody that can send you a case, hopefully multiple cases, hopefully case after case after case. And a lot of lawyers look around and think about, how can I generate referrals from other lawyers, and there's a role for that, but I think a referral from other lawyers often your most expensive case acquisition cost, because you're paying them a third of the fee. And now the flip side of that is they do tend to be your largest cases, right? And so especially if you've set yourself up as a catastrophic injury lawyer or as a trucking lawyer, and you're getting, you know, substantially larger than average cases. Yeah, you're happy to pay that third feedback. But really what I talked about a year about them was, how do we cultivate and turn medical providers, specifically chiropractors, into referral sources by us? And the problem with that relationship is usually that they want it to be a one to one thing, like, you send me a case, I'll send you a case, right? And if you're not doing a lot of digital marketing, and you don't have an influx of people that don't have doctors already, it's very hard to do that. So we developed a program to to get around that, really, by looking for what are the problems that these people have that I can actually solve speed to payment, right? We're very my team is really good at getting medical records, getting demands out, getting cases settled. So we get people paid faster than most firms do. We're very transparent on the fee and on any reductions at the end of a case, because the frustrations that many chiropractors have is that the lawyer you know, tells them they have to take a one, 1/3 or one half reduction, but this never show them why, right? And so just by identifying those pain points, we're able to cultivate five or 10 referral sources within our community who are going to. Send me one case a month. And really, like, if you own the five mile radius around your office, and you're getting five to 10 cases referred to you a month, the digital marketing that you're doing is a great supplement to that, but this is the stuff that can get you off the ground. So early in my career, what I was doing Jay, when I didn't have any budget at all, because I was just an associate, I didn't have any influence over what can we spend and where can we spend it. Anytime I settle the case with a chiropractor, I hand delivered the check so that they could put, put a name with the face, and so that I could make that connection with them. And that resulted in a bunch of referral relationships. And so just thinking about, what can you do differently that makes the relationship a little bit better and adds value to somebody else's life. Is a way to generate these organic, you know, $0 cost cases,

Jay Berkowitz: 00:35:52

fantastic. I love it. And the ground game is such an important part of what all of us do. I mean, I wrote a presentation last week for my one of my networking groups called the five year overnight success story. It talked about all the things we've done in building relationships with people like yourself and building you know, speaking on stage in our podcast and our webinar, and within one week, I got four great referrals from all kinds of different sources. One person was on our webinar, one person was on our podcast, one person came from a networking relationship, and one person came from a client. So once you build up those networks, they they give with an awesome amount of regularity, which

Brian Glass: 00:36:39

is not to say that you can ignore or should ignore digital right? You still need to have a functional website. You still need to have some social media presence. You definitely need to Google My Business presence, because people, especially in the younger cohort, they're looking at those things for trust, clues that you're not a lunatic, right? And they're probably not only getting one name as a referral source. So they're looking and they're comparing you, 123, against somebody else. But the big benefit of having those referral sources is that now you don't have to compete for the largest ad spend, and you don't have to compete for the number one spot when somebody looks up Injury Lawyer near me, right? You've just brought in the base of people that might come into your world. And then the other part about that is the people that have found you online and don't know you at all. You're a commodity to them, right? So you can't get on the phone. You can't have somebody from your team do an intake immediately. What happens? They hit a phone tree and they don't leave a message and they're on to the next lawyer. So being, uh, somebody who's referred to you, it broadens and it lengthens the amount of time that you have to get back to them. And for somebody who's operating a solo or a small law firm, you often need that grace period where somebody will wait and hear from you, because they've heard that you're a great lawyer, and you're showing up differently than you know, just the first he was the first person I found on Google.

Jay Berkowitz: 00:38:05

You made the point like we're on a digital marketing podcast. So tell me a little bit about what strategies have worked for you guys and what you all do with your digital marketing. So

Brian Glass: 00:38:17

I try to be, I try to create this omnipresent impression, right where, if you look for me, we're everywhere. So we've started creating YouTube videos recently, and we split our channel. We had a Bengalis law channel that was probably 15 years old, and it was absolutely everything it was. You know, how do you evaluate a car crash case? It was videos of depositions. It was sometimes Ben Ben's videos of bad parents at soccer matches. So it was very confusing. Well, we split it into a personal injury page and a long term disability page, and now we're going through our highest performing blogs and creating short form content that'll go on there. Then we're taking that content, you know, three to seven minute to 12 minute videos. We're chopping it up with the use of AI, with methods that I heard, I think, from Jason Melton at your at your conference, using Opus Pro to create digital shorts that'll go on YouTube, shorts, Instagram reels and Tiktok and and then we're having our VA in the Philippines, edit the videos, but also like scrape all of our Google reviews and create graphics in Canva that we can put on Instagram and things like that. I just you know, if somebody is looking at your social media, and the only thing that they can find is last year's Fourth of July post, right? It's a waste of space. So all of this stuff is out there. There's now cheap labor across the world that can put it together for you in a formatted way. And yes, you can build a content calendar. You can make it complicated. I. But while you're doing that, you can have somebody go and scrape, like our 50 best Google reviews and make the graphics so that they're ready for the strategy when you're ready to implement the strategy. So now we have a whole backlog of all of this stuff that we've created, case results, Google reviews, staff profiles, all that stuff is kind of waiting to be plugged into the calendar. Love it. And I think I got that from you, cascading content from you, like, oh, cascading

Jay Berkowitz: 00:40:26

content everywhere. Yeah. The simple concept is, you know, whether you start with a video or you start with a blog post or you start with a, you know, accident handbook. You know, the 17 things to do after a car accident, you want to cascade that everywhere. So the video goes on YouTube. The video goes in a blog, embedded as a video in a blog, goes on your Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn. When we do it, it goes on my personal Facebook, Twitter Linkedin, and the company, Facebook, Twitter Linkedin, post it on Google Maps, and it's very, very simple for an intern, or we sometimes call them a twin turn a Twitter intern, young person, or a young, you know, journalism student who can take all one piece of content, that one blogger, that one video that you originated, and cascade it like a river cascades down a waterfall into all your socials. So look, we you and I could probably do six hours of this.

Brian Glass: 00:41:22

We're going to later this week on my podcast,

Jay Berkowitz: 00:41:25

right? But we could go, Yeah, this way. So if you want to hear my side of the story, we'll do it on Brian's podcast, but we could seriously spend a lot more time and go deeper on Eos, deeper on masterminds, deeper on marketing, because you're such a wealth of knowledge. But we've come to the end where we have the quick one liner. So now we need you to be on your toes. So I've done this for a million years. What are some apps or techniques you use for personal productivity? I

Brian Glass: 00:41:52

don't use any apps for personal productivity. The things that are really helpful to me are, have a passion planner, a real like word, not word, paper and ink planner that I put my goals for the week into. I have a Fathom recorder that records our zoom calls, and then my EA in the Philippines has turned me on to notion, which we're using now for weekly and monthly task management. But I don't know productivity apps that's that's really not my space.

Jay Berkowitz: 00:42:25

Sounds like you got some super productivity there, by the way. Fathom is awesome. When we logged on, Brian and I both had our Fathom app, and I use Fathom in all my meetings. It has a video recording and a audio transcription of everything that was said. But the best thing about the Fathom, AI, it sums up the conversation really, really well. You know, it's got four or five bullets of next steps and who's to do what. And it's fantastic because in most of my meetings now I don't have to have anyone else in the meeting, and then my VA or my sales development manager can just hop in the Fathom and get a quick take on what was concluded from the meeting. Next one liner, best business books.

Brian Glass: 00:43:10

Best Business Book, vivid vision. You know, I talk a lot about creating the kind of life and the kind of firm that you actually want to have. Vivid vision. Was by Cameron Harold. Incredibly impactful for me. I'm working now on my second one, which I hope to have done by the end of this week. Awesome. Your second, vivid vision. Yeah. So, so every three years you're supposed to recraft it right? And the idea is, you know, you you under. Let's see What's the expression you underestimate what you can do in a or overestimate what you can do in a year, underestimate what you can do in 10 but three is kind of the sweet spot, because the not a lot is going to change in your life circumstance in three years. So yeah, that's I'm working on number two coming up.

Jay Berkowitz: 00:43:56

All right, I'll check it out. I just finished simple numbers, so I need my next up. But I do have a stack of about 30 blogs, podcasts and youtubes. Which ones do you subscribe to that? When it hits your feed, you immediately switch over to that podcast. So I don't, I don't really do YouTube.

Brian Glass: 00:44:13

I don't consume video podcasts hardly at all. But I'll tell you what's on, what's on my Spotify the all in podcast, money wise, which is a spin off from my first million, which is also an incredible show. What else do I like? Yeah, I'll give you those three my first million, money wise

Jay Berkowitz: 00:44:39

and all in who's your NFL or sports team?

Brian Glass: 00:44:46

JMU Dukes.

Jay Berkowitz: 00:44:48

Love it and what's a great introduction for you.

Brian Glass: 00:44:53

So who should I be introduced to? Yeah, yeah. I mean, I love to talk to people that are three to 10 years. Behind me on the lawyer journey. So that's like as the lawyer who is maybe a junior partner or senior associate somewhere, who's thinking about what's the next stage right? Because they have young kids, and they're trying to balance their life. They don't know, should I go start my own firm? Should I try to become an equity owner here? And they're searching for that balance and hitting that spot around like 35 where you're like, What am I doing with my life? I love talking to people like that.

Jay Berkowitz: 00:45:27

So if you're a person like that, where can they get in touch with

Brian Glass: 00:45:31

you? Best is on LinkedIn. Just Brian glass,

Jay Berkowitz: 00:45:35

awesome, Brian. I loved it. This was a great conversation to be continued.

Brian Glass: 00:45:39

Thank you, Jay.

IMFLF Intro: 00:45:43

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 you