Jay: 0:07 

Hello. Welcome to this edition of the Law Firm Blueprint. I’m one of your hosts, Jay. We’re waiting with me as always as my man Seth, price over there, down in the DC, Maryland, Virginia, Timbuktu. Where’s BluShark gonna over Where’s Price Better was going to open next? So you have any expansion plans, you know, just dropping a bomb on you? But, well, you know, it’s funny you say that.

Seth: 0:33 

I mean, one of the things, you know, we were talking offline about, like, what are the trends we’re seeing, where is it local? And I think that I am seeing more and more like, you know, for years, SEO is dead, long live SEO. And it’s not that SEO is dead, but that local has been where the intersection of actual cases is coming from en masse, so that, as you see stuff, and I’ve been talking about this for years, like the money ball concept, once you find a location where you can find talent that has reasonable deal flow, there’s a population with limited competition, you sort of, you know, just hiring a person is not always enough. 

Now, if you have an operation going, you have the marketing great, but if you’re using search, the idea that it’s putting people where the potential businesses and that’s what I’ve been focused on, is thinking about, okay, we, you know, there’s a criminal need in Chicago, because that’s underserved. If we put an office here, and it’s and it’s frustrating from a recruiting point of view, because as we go around the country, we’re looking at somebody right now in, you know, in Knoxville, of all places, the idea is, if you can put people where there’s need that’s going to comport Now the flip side is, you go with, you know, a regional brand like Jay Ruane, and there you’re going to gain some benefit because of that overlying brand. 

But when you’re relying upon search, if you go to a place that’s already stacked with people in Connecticut, it’s gonna be much harder to move in. You could. You still have a very authoritative site, you have some reviews, you’re gonna be there, but the idea that you can pick up business, you know, you know strategically. So to me, it’s not, where am I going to go next? Like I want to be there. I’ve tried places where I looked and I’m like, this is I thought it was good, and you go there, it was stacked and we couldn’t make a move, versus going where you see, see great opportunity.

Jay: 2:32

So let me ask you that, is there sort of like a, like a magic number, a bottom number of reviews that you think that a person needs to have to actually show up in the like, Is it, is you’ll show up in the map pack if you have 10 or 20? Or is it like you can show up if you have one?

Seth: 2:48

Well, you know, it’s not that so much there are two, two factors. 110, is sort of a magic number with Google, right? Like less than 10, more than 10 is the only number that I’ve ever heard that has any significance. But I think what it comes down to is the way we sort of look at markets, and suddenly we got really sophisticated. BluShark was with low, medium, and high competitiveness, and looking at two things. One, what do you know? What does it take to be competitive? If you’re going to have 12 reviews, and there are people with 250, 300 right? You’re just not going to, it’s not going to click the same way, both from a showing point of view and a conversion point of view, right? Right? So you got that. 

The second piece is being honest with yourself about your ability to generate reviews. You know, if you’re a J Ruane juggernaut who talks to everybody and you know, you know your carpet installers leaving your review, the woman who sat there with the table is leaving all of that great got, I got my total delivered the other day, and I got a review out of that guy. You know, I threw him a nice tip, and I got a review Absolutely. So the flip side is, I remember, I was on a call with three middle-aged white guys from, you know, Westchester, and they had 17 reviews amongst two different offices. And I’m like, they’re all married, they all have kids. 

I’m just like, it blew my mind. So I think to assert, you need to look at what’s realistic for you, where you know it is to have the authority of your site, your brand new site, different from if you have a very established site that Google sees as authoritative, and then layering in those locations. But if you’re layering it, if you say, hey, I want to be in Tampa for pi and there are multiple people with four figures of reviews or more, you know, that’s not going to work. And then the question is, can you find some land? You know, it’s like you’re almost like you’re a frontier settler. 

Can you find yourself a plot of land that you’re not going to get attacked on, that you’re going to have a little bit of stability? So you hate the word depends. But it is a, it is a. We look at high, medium low, then what the authority of your site is. And then we look at, is this person even gonna have any shot past performance, no guarantee of future results. But if you, you know, if you’ve been, if you’ve been in business. For 15 years, and you have your reviews, there’s a good chance you’re not going to do 200 in the next three months well.

Jay: 5:07 

And that brings me up, you know, a good point from my understanding is that Google, you know, has been collecting data on us for, you know, decades now. And if you have 40 and you get 200 in three months. They may throttle those and not even post them, because it’s an abnormal correction.

Seth: 5:27 

Obviously, I was going with an extreme, but like I said, don’t spike. You know, if you and, again, we saw this from that glitch a few months back, somebody who did it, who did a spike, they did 100 in like a few day period. Now they did come back. Good news, but it’s very clear, just like you had your issue with the people in an off-site mastermind, you know, it’s very clear that Google sees these patterns and they want it cleaned up. Think about it. 

We’re talking about the fact that their Juggernaut, a traditional SEO business model, is under attack with AI. Their proprietary local adds value that right now, the AI can’t and if it did, it’d be giving you some nonsensical Yelp or Bing. It’s giving you sort of a review, you know, grouping that is not necessarily as impressive for choosing what you want. Like. If you go on Amazon, you see a bunch of items with three and seven reviews, you know, somebody just threw it up there because they’re trying to either match something or game the system. Whereas, if you see something with 10,000 reviews, even if it’s a 4.3 you know that it stood the test of time. Yeah. So I think that Google is fully incentivized right now to protect this territory because this piece of the market is going to be a lot harder for AI to infiltrate.

Jay: 6:46 

Yeah. I’m curious you know how Google responds to AI. I mean, I’ll have full-on conversations with chat GPT on my way home from work. You know, I got a 25-minute commute, and I’ll and I’ll figure out what topic I want to learn about. But then at the end, I’ll always throw in, you know, hey, who’s the best DUI lawyer in Dallas, Texas, you know, who’s the best criminal defense lawyer in Roanoke, Virginia, and I’ll just see who’s coming up. And then I’ll ask, what resources did you use to generate that? 

And they’re pulling from just the they’re pulling from Avo. They’re pulling from directories, right, which we saw Google do for a period of time. Remember when they were first and foremost until people realized they’re not necessarily a great user experience, in which case, right now, they’re just looking for an answer. Over time, they’re going to look for better and better answers. But you know, it’s, it’s, you know, the irony that internet brands bought a fine law and presumably Super Lawyers with it. You know, they now own some of that data, which is all pay-to-play. 

I mean, AVOs, right, pay to play. So what do you do? What are you left with? So Tim Stanley, a really smart guy at Justia, wouldn’t surprise me if they ended up being one of the winners in the space. But you know, to me, you know, we’re, you know, I have seen good success. I don’t know which money is being made, but you can’t if you want to show up in the AI results, that is a doable thing right now. It’s just a moving target. We don’t know where it’s going to be in three months. So where would you invest? Where would you invest? Would you invest in some of these directories?

Seth: 8:20

And I think it’s like, it’s the concept of SEO, right Search Engine Optimization used to be, Hey, I just care about the Google algorithm. Now you’re trying to kick the ChatGPT algorithm or anything else, and you’re just basically looking at where are they pulling from, or what type of format are they looking at. It replaced, essentially the rich snippet of before we they wanted, the rich snippet that was to them, the brass ring. This is the new Rich Snippet, although not nearly as monetizable in my opinion. You know, that’s the downside. 

It’s interesting and it’s good, but is it now, you know, just like when you’re doing radio or TV, is branding, are people going to then call the person that it says there, or is that their research and they’re going back to a Google search for the actual purchasing decision. You know, again, it’s moving, but it’s, you know, definitely keeping an eye on it. But there’s, there’s an entire art to figuring out where they’re pulling from, and that, at the moment, is transparent enough that, you know, it’s not some multi-page secret algorithm or leaked algorithm. Now that Google had, like, it’s, you know, right now, it’s more in its infancy, and we’re able to see, just like you were able to say, Yeah, this is mostly justice or hey, they’re looking for this answer. Let’s give them the answer so that we can be there for this.

Jay: 9:48 

Yeah, one of the things that I did. Recently with chat GPD and ChatGPT, deep research was actually asked to go into the Reddit forums for Connecticut and find out what questions kept coming up in relation to criminal law that weren’t being answered so that we could use that as a format for creating new content. And so it provided me with a spreadsheet of, like, 150 topics that had consistently come up and didn’t have a lot of responses. And we figured that would be a way to sort of create content that people have been asking about over the last three or four years. I think we are limited by time, and I think that’s going to be one of the things that we’re going to focus on in the third and fourth quarter, is creating and it may be niche content, you know, like it may be one or two pages or blog posts or video or something like that. It’s not necessarily going to be a whole content silo, because these are very specific questions, but I think we can answer them and capture those searches.

Seth: 10:55 

I mean, it’s funny to bring it’s Jay is now doing SEO all over again, the way down. Years ago, exactly. I mean, I shit. I can remember. We were just cleaning our store room, and I used to have, and now this is, this is like 22,002 2003 I had a binder for MSN. Actually, they still have it as MSN. Yahoo and hot bot, I think Alta Vista, did you? Oh, definitely, an Alta Vista. You really? I would put in, I would, I would run the same searches in each thing, and then I would print out who was first, and I would try to, like, reverse engineer, why are they ranking higher than me and all that stuff was so, so this, so ironically, this would be a great LinkedIn post. I should remind myself to do this. So I was with a group called US law. This is before Price Benowitz. It was, you know, the early days of the internet. This was started in the late 90s through 2000 and it was basically what became Legal Zoom today. 

It was competing to try to create that. And I was out in Silicon Valley, and we had venture money, and we were, I believe, with Alta Vista to be the homepage of the law button. You know, somebody wanted the law. We did it. And I looked at this deal, and I thought this was nonsense. The amount being paid, there was no way we were going to monetize it. And I was, I sort of bowed out and let this other guy at the company run the deal. Because I’m like, I did not like. I knew enough to know, I didn’t know how to lawyer this. And B, these guys, they’re going to a casino. I think you’re gonna beat the house. And sort of the deal ended up hamstringing the business, so that when the bubble burst in April, 2000 and money stopped flowing. It was, you know, the company became upside down. That was a big part of it. And so the irony that you know that this, so when I look back on that, you know, one of the great things is there were a lot of options, but it was harder to sort of figure out what was going to be successful if you bet on the wrong horse, then you were paying too much money, then, you know, you would be upside down. And that was the end of that. So fascinating times.

Jay: 13:16 

That’s interesting because obviously the idea of something like Legal Zoom, or US law, the idea was solid, the execution, the market timing, that was more than that. I mean, you know, again, you need bandwidth for video, right? It was the same thing with cosmo.com I used to love Cosmo, same in the city and, you know, and you could, you could get what you wanted. I get vitamins and ice cream, my buddy would get a pack of smokes, and it’d be at the apartment in, you know, 20 minutes. And that was great until it flamed out, but now you have UberEATS and DoorDash, which are doing the same thing they just had. The idea was great. The execution needed to be different, right?

Seth: 14:04 

I smile. I probably shouldn’t say this publicly, but a girl that I really liked, I’m talking to her on the phone, she had too much to drink and she dropped her cordless phone. We’re dating ourselves. Yeah, you are told to a place where she couldn’t grab it. I literally fetched her a new phone and a pint of Ben and Jerry’s to continue the conversation. Wow. That was, that was a time, yeah, but look, that’s what it was. It was, you know, at a point where Amazon has come full circle to the point where, you know, a lot of stuff is available on short notice, and more and more. So, you know, look, it was bandwidth. It was the appetite. Lawyers would get into arguments with you. 

Our sales team would call up and say, Do you want to be in our directory and people, nobody’s ever like Dave’s famous. Words before we start the firm, know who’s gonna find their lawyer online. You know, we got 50 lawyers that tell them otherwise. You know, it was, it was a different time. The cost of acquisition. We were advertising on the radio to bring lawyers to advertise online. And it was, you know, again, and bandwidth, bandwidth was a big deal. If you go back to the early days of dating apps. I met my wife on JDate. But, like, there was a period where there weren’t photos, and then there were photos, but not every upload of them, and then there were no, you know, videos were very, very tough to, you know, to that was part of the issue that the fulfillment of legal information or downloading of documents, you know, people didn’t have, you know, you know, you’re that AOL dial-up at one point. So as that evolved, you were able to get more and more value to somebody.

Jay: 15:52 

Well, that brings up the question, what ideas do people in our audience have using AI? You may be using AI agents where the idea is solid, but the ability to execute and the consumer isn’t necessarily ready for it. You know, I think now is an opportunity for some really creative people to sort of establish themselves and push the envelope. And yeah, you may not get it right on the first go-round, but you know, the losses and the ability to code and do things now is so much cheaper than it ever has been before.

Seth: 16:30 

It’s funny because people are saying, I listened to a podcast with Jason Calacanis and his friends, and they were saying that, in one sense, a lot of jobs would be lost with AI. I’m sure they’re right. They were making the point that the ability, the leveling of the playing field, that if you want to create J, 1j, has one of his crazy ideas he now, prior to AI, or what, did have to hire a whole team of coders and get it built out. It would take. Now, in theory, you can self-execute some of your ideas. And that you know, and that as AI, you know, helps building out with coding that you’re going to be able to do things you could never have Fathom before. So that piece is very cool, you know, it’s, it’s, you know, there are pieces that I’m really excited about, efficiencies and things that we’re going to be able to get to. It’s just very hard to wrap your head around, you know, where does that? Where does that end? You know, we’re on the continuum. Are we well?

Jay: 17:34 

And that’s one of the things. I don’t think it ever ends. Type of thing, like one of these, like, these days, if that’s the case, you know, is it a short-term arbitrage, or is this the new normal? Or where? Where are we on that continuum? So it’s not going to end. But are we right here? Are we further down? Like, what’s how much more impactful, and you get the impression of the way it’s changing right now. We have no idea where it’s gonna end. I really, I really don’t, I mean, I, you know, I was talking to some friends, we have been approached to help with some immigration detained detention hearings. And we’re like, Yeah, but these people, they get, you know, they’re in detention, they don’t get access to a phone till two o’clock in the morning, and they have to, so we developed an AI agent they can call into, we’ll ask them questions in their native language, translate it and email it into the lawyer who’s going to be available to do the intake and be able to argue on their behalf. 

And, you know, we couldn’t do that if we had to staff, you know, six or seven different language speakers, 24 hours a day. But we can do it with AI, which is, which is phenomenal. But I want to talk before we go, I want to talk to you about a question that came up. Somebody texted me an old friend, someone I, you know, I haven’t seen in years. And the question was this: they’re hiring, they have a current associate, and the number one candidate is the associate’s fiance for a law job. And I just, I am nervous about that. I want to know what your thoughts are. Because I just, you know, if you’ve got a married couple in your employ, in the same role. I don’t see any different pods that I don’t know. I didn’t get that phone. How long is it?

Seth: 19:28 

Look History is written by the victor. They’re things that you take a shot at. We, you know, we, we brought on a couple at the firm, one is exiting, and that just, if anything brings risk, will the other one, you know, will the other one exit? But I also know that if somebody’s moving to a new city, there are times when that package gets you in the door. I mean, like, it’s a discussion we’ve had on a different show, as far as like, somebody moving from another city comes with a whole bunch of risks. This comes with a bunch of risks. If there are people that work great and don’t have a lot of drama, that’s awesome, but know that you could end up losing two instead of one if things go the wrong direction. You know, given how. 20:30 Hard it is to bring in great talent. I feel that very often, for the small and medium-sized firms that make up our audience, there are times you take a shot at it. It could be your superpower. 

You know, again, you don’t wanna be stupid about it. But you know, if it gets you a year and a half of building your firm in a way that you’re like because, for many of us, this is the frustrating part that we don’t always focus on in recruiting, the reason why people talk about tests and this and that that in the hiring process, and I, again, they won’t remind me, I want to talk, you know, culture index, predictive index, if you have any thoughts on that. But here, it’s not like this person saying, Hey, I have eight people to choose from. Do I take her or not? It’s an opportunity. 

And so to me, when the opportunity knocks, you know, answer the door, I think I would lean towards it. It sort of reminds me of a life moment when I was a baby lawyer, and this guy sat me down in his office and mentored blinds. What do you think about the firm’s nepotism policy? And I’m like, I don’t know, just as long as I get paid each week whatever policies you want. And, you know, he was an equity partner, and he started to date one of the senior attorneys at the firm, and there were questions about whether that was right or not. And you know, to me as a peon, I didn’t care, you know, yeah, there’s a level of risk. You have conflicts of interest issues, and you have to take those seriously. But you know, in general, History is written by the victor.

Jay: 21:51 

It’s interesting. You bring that up. My uncle was with Donovan Leisure at Rockefeller Center for years, and working on a case, met my aunt, who was a paralegal in the DC office. He was working a case and was constantly going down to DC. They started dating, and he was pulled aside by his manager, a managing partner who was in charge of his division, and said, I know you’re on the partnership track, but partners don’t marry for help. You’re now off the partnership track. Bill. Now that you’re engaged to the paralegal down in DC, you’re not gonna, you’re not gonna make a partner here. We don’t want to give the help the opportunity to think that they’re, they can marry me like that.

Seth: 22:16 

This was 1980 the flip, flip side. You know. Look, we saw this. We were old enough to remember the Clarence Thomas hearings. I mean, you know, my, my great uncle married his nurse, you know, like you know they you see, you see this all you know, it is a So here, let’s bring it back to your situation, which is, you know, generally, everything’s fraught with peril. You’re, you’re getting, you’re getting staff, and you’re getting talent who hopefully love it and stay and work, but you also come with risks and what potential, how it’s viewed, like it, you know, where, what’s the reporting line? You know, if you’re large enough to have two different pods, and they’re two different people in the office, we, until this person made an exit from our firm, we had two people that I love, both of them. 

This is one of the, you know, those few exits where you don’t want to lose somebody and look, for all I know he, you know he, they liked it until they didn’t like it. You know what? I mean, like, it’s great, and it’s awesome because you commute together. But at some point, you know, as relationships build and grow and things change, there may be something where somebody says, You know what, I’d rather not see somebody all day, right?

Jay: 23:36 

My thought was, and this, this lawyer who reached out to me is a little older than I am. You know, if these are new people, this is, this is a possible good succession starter. You know, if you bring people into your firm, look to me that that’s taking the next step. The question is, can you live to fight the next day? Forget about, like, 10 years from now. The question Casey Stengel, who said, I don’t care who’s pitching tomorrow, I got to win today’s game type of thing, like, it will figure out tomorrow, tomorrow?

Seth: 24:08 

Yeah, yeah. And so to me, you’re literally who’s pitching today, and if this, if this person is good at middle living relief, you know, that’s not easy to find. And it’s like we there are like and it’s just making sure that you’re not creating other conflicts within the firm, and that that’s always what I’m wary of, is that there’s now a unit or a block, right? Because their allegiance is going to be to each other before the firm if they’re married, right?

Jay: 24:41 

It comes as a block, as it’s everybody’s at some level. But you know, the idea is that it can be viewed. You know, the question I’ve seen, it navigated, well, it’s not navigated. Well, BluShark, but you know, there are times where, and I think if you almost, you know, you talk about all these tests, you also, if you get the biorhythm, these people have decent biorhythms. Okay, maybe I’ll take a shot because it’ll be humans, but it’s the perception of others. And they perceive somebody as getting their favorite, favorite treatment. If this person is coming in the second person, and there’s a bunch of people at that person’s level, are they going to feel that? Those other people are disadvantaged because they don’t have that issue.

Seth: 25:21 

But that just comes down to your culture and how you integrate them and how other people, you know the expectations, I think that you know it’s you just got to be intentional about it.

Jay: 25:31 

Yeah, it can be a huge win, but it also could be a huge disaster, yeah, but that’s the life we’ve chosen, exactly. So cool. So what am I gonna see you? I will see you tomorrow. Close to being able to pull the trigger, I got to reach out to John and see if there was a seat for me. I’ll make it, if I have to, I will. I will, as you know, have ADHD, I’ll just walk around and give you my seat. You can sit. I’ll just paste the room. Yeah, I got to reach out to him later today so we can line that up. But folks, that’s going to do it for us this week on the law firm blueprint. Of course, I am Jay Ruane. He is Seth Price, and we love spending this time with you. You can take us anywhere you need to be, on the go, in your car, sitting at a courthouse, or on the beach, whatever you fancy. By subscribing to the law firm Blueprint podcast. Of course, you can catch us live every week, Thursday, 3 pm Eastern, 12 pm Pacific, on LinkedIn and also live in our Facebook group called the Law Firm Blueprint. Kind of see the branding there, but that’s going to do it for us. Seth, I got nothing else, anything you got?

Seth: 26:55 

No, alright, hopefully, hopefully, you know, I mean, really distraught with my knickerbockers. But, well, the bench, they finally played the bench and got some points at him. So maybe we’ve got a new strategy going into game four, maybe, but 333, in a row, not going to be easy.

Jay: 27:14 

Nothing is easy. Nothing is easy. That’s the one thing that should be the name of the podcast. At some point we should rebrand to Nothing’s Easy that Nothing’s Easy with Seth and Jay, I like that, all right, folks, that’s gonna do it for us. Bye for now. You.