BluShark Digital 0:00
Welcome to the SEO Insider with your host, Seth Price, Founder of BluShark, taking you inside the world of legal marketing and all things digital.
Seth Price 0:11
Welcome everybody. We’re thrilled to have you back. We have a very special guest today, somebody who I’ve been looking forward to speaking to for a long time. Jeff Hughes from Sterling Law Group. Welcome Jeff.
Jeff Hughes 0:21
Well, thank you, Seth, its great to be here.
Seth Price 0:23
So it sounds like, although we have not spent much time together, we’ve had, ironically, pretty similar journeys in a number of facets, in that we’ve both built law firms, scaled them in, outside of the PI space, in the B to C space, which is unusual, and then leverage digital marketing to to make that happen.
Jeff Hughes 0:45
I’ve been following you, Seth, and looking up to you for quite a few years, so I think you predate me by about 10 years when we started our practice, and I heard about you through a networking market- marketing Group, and been watching you ever since. So it’s fun to get a chance to spend time with you here.
Seth Price 1:02
Well, for those who you know, people I guess, who follow this podcast, know my story, but tell us a little bit about yours.
Jeff Hughes 1:08
Yeah, so I started Sterling lawyers with a partner, Tony Carl, a non lawyer. We did that 10 years ago, and at first we focused on anything we could get because we were good at digital so Tony is a kind of a master of digital marketing, especially in the legal space. And we just had clients coming in from everywhere, every type of practice. And then about a year and a half in, really, we’re not very good. This kind of sucks. We need to focus, because we were doing everything. So we cut our firm in half, from, we grew in our first 18 months. We grew to eight lawyers.
Seth Price 1:41
And what type of law was coming in?
Jeff Hughes 1:43
Yeah, family law was about half of it, criminal was a big chunk of it a little PI, a little estate planning, liquor licensing, whatever, whatever people wanted.
Seth Price 1:53
And what geographies?
Jeff Hughes 1:55
We’re all in Wisconsin. So 100% in Wisconsin at that time. And so that was our where we were, where we started at. And about 18 months in, we met with a consultant down in, Lee Rosen, actually down in Florida, and-
Seth Price 2:09
Love Lee.
Jeff Hughes 2:10
Yeah, he’s, he really had a big impact on our early, early days. So we cut our firm in half, focus on family law, focus on 100% fixed fee. And now we’re about 26 or 27 lawyers. We’re in two states, and having a great time.
Seth Price 2:25
That’s awesome. It’s funny. So Lee, I met along my journey. I went to a Lee day when he used to do those, $1,000, you got a day of Lee with 6,7,8, people in a room. And I always joke with him, I love him. I find him inspirational. I’m glad that you followed his path. I sort of lovingly ignored much of the way he was he was preaching, but I found it fascinating, and stayed in touch. And just find him to be an inspiration. He breaks that stuff down the, he was way ahead of the curve on virtual, he was way ahead of curve on flat fee, and has done a lot of really cool things that you know now that he’s sort of living as a nomad. Current generation providers know him as well, but really influential guy in the B to C, non pi space.
Jeff Hughes 3:15
Yeah, he’s really impacted our firm. We’ve learned a lot from him, watching him over the years.
Seth Price 3:20
That’s, that’s awesome. So So you niche down to family, and talk, talk to me a little bit about so you, so you retooled, you’re now family. And did you, you know, one of the things that you mentioned, which is sort of outside of the marketing world, but it’s sort, I guess it is the marketing world, but rather than you’ve continuously created, followed the Lee Rosen model of the fixed fee over the hourly?
Jeff Hughes 3:48
Well, yeah, we, we’re 100% fixed fee. So Lee introduced that to us. We liked it and it, we started it right away. This is like 2016 and Seth, it took us five to six years to figure it out, and it was painful, painful, painful to figure it out. Selling it was hard. Practicing it was harder. Everything was different. We’ve got it dialed in right now so it works really well in our practice, and we really like it. It makes our attorneys really efficient, and we’ve got a pretty large team that supports them. So we can, we can really handle volume, and we can handle it pretty fast. So and clients, frankly, love it.
Seth Price 4:24
What is your ratio of family lawyers to staff?
Jeff Hughes 4:29
We have 20, like I said, 26-27 lawyers and a total of 75 staff. So take out the 20, so about one lawyer for every two support staff and that includes intake. That includes everything
Seth Price 4:41
Understood. So break it down. I mean, we’re talking like Jay and I have a Law Firm Blueprint Podcast, which is actually, you know, we’ll have to get you there at some point, because this is, to me, fascinating in the sense of how you set it up. Have you split between domestic and international?
Jeff Hughes 4:58
Yeah, we have a 31 of those are international. So, I mean, so 75 minus the 25 so this is easy math here. That brings it down to 50. 30, of those 50 are international, all in the Philippines,
Seth Price 5:11
Gotcha. And it’s funny, I could never make the Philippines work the way I wanted to. I’ve a handful of Philippines, but I paid a little bit more for Latin America. I just wasn’t as smart as you guys.
Jeff Hughes 5:21
We’ve tried Latin America, and it hasn’t, the opposite. It hasn’t worked as well for us. So I think it has a lot to do with just the the the type of person you get in the very beginning that’s able to work with you and grow with you. And so that, we found someone right away who helped us scale from zero, from one hire, up to 12, pretty quickly, she was really networked, and so it just kind of mushroom from there. Now we we go there once or twice a year, and we put on events and, you know, weekend getaways for our team, and they’re really integrated into our into our practice.
Seth Price 5:54
That’s tremendous. Are they in a facility, or are they all at their?
Jeff Hughes 5:57
They’re all scattered about yeah, 100%-
Seth Price 5:59
So you bring them to Manila or wherever you’re –
Jeff Hughes 6:01
Yeah, I mean, there’s, it’s so inexpensive to get them all on an island at a resort somewhere. We’re talking 40 bucks a night for a room, in a decent place. So it’s pretty –
Seth Price 6:11
That’s awesome. You know, as I say, every once in a while we have a handful of rock stars, it’s been harder, in some of the other practice groups. You know, it also depends what you want and what you’re willing to, you know, what’s there. As we, as we talk about that, what percentage of staff, you know, something I’ve struggled with myself, so I’ve created a family law practice. It’s the third largest, you know, we started with criminal, and built an 8 figure criminal practice, probably similar in 25 lawyers, and that’s all, a lot of flat fee. PI has started to jam, and we’re, for the first time ever, this year, gonna have PI match the rest of the firm, not repeat it, necessarily, but for the first time. You know, as the rest of the firm’s gotten too close to multi eight figures, PI will do it. But family has been sort of one of those areas that I’ve seen you and others out there have great success with scaling. Have not been bold enough to go the flat fee route, but, but you know, to me, it has been sort of the the the sort of thing that I’m grasping for it, always, always trying to figure out how to do it and systemetize it well. One of the things that I’ve noticed as I’ve started, you don’t do billable hours. So maybe it’s a moot question, but leveraging the non attorneys towards the work product. In your case, it’s a flat fee, so if anything, it would make you more profitable. Leveraging. Is that part of the secret to the success is that once you get rid of the billable hour, who’s doing the work matters less, and you can leverage the non attorneys more heavily?
Jeff Hughes 6:32
Correct. Yeah, you can, exactly. So we, we take parts of every case and kind of farm it out to more specialists within the firm that’ll work on that. So that works really well for us.
Seth Price 7:57
Is this sort of things like discovery review and things like that.
Jeff Hughes 8:00
Yeah, we don’t do, we don’t do as much discoveries you might imagine, but it’s more like preparing the financial disclosure statement. We have a team that just does nothing but E-filing and one and basically shuffles documents around and gets documents to clients and follows up with them and that sort of thing. We have onshore paralegals primarily, so we’ve got, they’re really talented, kind of a higher level than we have legal assistants that report up to them, and they’re they’re offshore, they’re in the Philippines and and that’s how they divide up the labor for these types of cases.
Seth Price 8:30
That’s awesome, as you’ve gone through that pain of figuring out fixed fees. Has that been, you know, what? What did you learn along the way? I mean, again, you, I, didn’t feel like I, well being it was a side hustle, so I never felt the bandwidth to be able to figure that out. But what are the lessons learned for people out there who might be interested in trying that?
Jeff Hughes 8:49
Okay, so I’ve spent probably $75 million dollars, but I’m learning what I’m about to share with you. Okay, the the most difficult thing in fixed fee is learning how to sell it, because it’s a whole different type of sale, and it requires some more sophistication than selling hourly. Clients understand hourly, but go to the hourly attorney and there’s like, a five grand for the retainer, and then when I deplete it, then you got to reimburse me and that sort of thing, or fill it back up. So with us, we’re going to the client saying, oh, Mr. Client, you need to pay, you know, $9,500 for the first, let’s call it five months of your case, and then it could be X another $9,500 plus another for a trial. So those are much bigger numbers. So helping the client understand that you get fee certainty, you know, you you get to know exactly where your money’s going. You get unlimited communication. You’re never worried about a bill and all that sort of stuff. That’s a different type of sales. So if you can figure that out, then you’re, then you could do fixed fee. Now the second part of it, delivering on fixed fee is changing a, your mindset from being a more of a let the case come to you, more of a passive approach to managing case files. To being very active, because now we have to push the cases, because the client is watching us, and we need to make sure we put all the work in we can to resolve their case, and that first chunk of time, the five months, or whatever our our fee agreement calls for. So it’s those two things have to be done now that requires a total different mindset among your lawyers. You know, we struggled. We would go out and recruit these really amazing lawyers, name brand, great reputations in the community, and they would not do well with us. Frankly, it’s a low success rate for those folks. Even though they’re great attorneys and they’re very successful elsewhere, they just weren’t in our system. Our most successful attorneys have been kind of like, you know, for us, kind of, the avatar is 38 year old female who was a paralegal, worked her way through night Law School. Is hungry, and after it, and open to learn, like, I will hire her every day, just like on site, like resume, you’re hired. Sort of, it’s been that successful for us, so that, those things it took us a while to learn and figure out. Early on we triggered. We had a trigger, sort of mechanism. So whenever a case got to a certain point in the in the in the, in the the court system, then it would go to the next stage. And that did not work well, especially once COVID hit. And then everything got extended and we were working for free for months during COVID, it was absolutely miserable. So it’s those two things, learning how to sell it, and being really, really proactive and moving the cases along for you to be successful in fixed fee.
Seth Price 8:49
Does the economics change at all of what a, or the economics of a case? This is fascinating to me. I spoke to Lee Rosen years ago. You know, in theory, somebody could work their way through litigation using the flat fee formula. But do you see more things resolve? Because all of a sudden the firm’s interest is getting stuff resolved, whereas, if you look at family lawyers in general, many of whom go into it like the contentious nature of that sector, that you’re seeing people that are incentivized to string something out as long as there’s money there, versus, let’s get this wrapped up as quickly as possible.
Jeff Hughes 11:33
Yeah. Well, the cynic in me finds that to be absolutely true. With with hourly lawyers, that’s just the name. They’re certainly not. The vast majority of them are as honest as the day is long. I totally believe that. But there are some cult there are some real scoundrels in that mix, right, who do just churn files and get people fighting, and they they just relish that. So we do bump into a very small amount of that. But in our in our practice, we have three stages in every one of our divorce cases, kind of like your uncontested, contested, lightly, and then you have a trial stage. Less than 4% of our cases get to the trial stage. So we resolve them way before that, and when we’re aligned with our client and our interest, meaning we want the follow up, we want to do as little work as possible in that first five months to resolve the case, as does the client they want it resolved. So when you line up like that, it allows for you to be more creative in finding efficiencies and resolving the cases quicker. But yeah, we do bump into the occasional lawyer who just is going to turn the file be non responsive, that’s usually the biggest part of it, or just find ways to argue right, things to argue over that are really inconsequential to the actual case.
Seth Price 13:19
Awesome. So let’s pivot for a second. We talked sort of about the sausage making. You know, you tell like you, you like I, you know, dug deep on digital. Begin with, tell me about your journey there. How did, how did you? How did you start? How did you, how did you build this out?
Jeff Hughes 13:33
So I started selling DISH Network Satellite as a side hustle at my first firm, okay, I was an affiliate marketer, and ended up getting a retail license from DISH Network, and left my law practice, and we were spending 500 – 600,000 a month, and all on paid search. So when you’re doing that, you, you get really sharp elbows. You learn how to like, be fine tune every little piece of it, because you get 1% better, and you just made five grand more, right? Sort of the thinking on it. So I did that. And asDISH started to decline with the rise of streaming and Netflix and so forth, it’s when, like, yeah, I need to pivot and find something else. And I went back to my first love, so to speak, and said, I can go into that space. I can compete. I can now compete with competition in digital. I knew that, that was like, real easy going into that, so that was the thesis for starting the firm. So we put it all together. And I don’t know if I’ve ever told you this Seth, but I actually heard from Perry Marshall, your name, and I reached out to you. You didn’t know me. This is 10-11, years ago, and we had like, a 30 or 40 minute conversation, and because you were growing, you’re, you’re one of the few attorneys 11 years ago growing your firm through digital primarily. And I’m like, we’re gonna copy that. And he gave me your name, we I reached out, you responded and gave me some good pointers, but we were 100% focused on digital. Always have been, and it’s still our main bread and butter today. So digital is what we built the firm on.
Seth Price 13:34
So, so, just so funny a couple of things. One, didn’t know Perry Marshall knew who I was, so that’s kind of a cool compliment. And secondly, when you hear a story like that, you never know. It’s like somebody didn’t take the time to speak to you versus you connect. So I’m glad that I did right by you when –
Jeff Hughes 15:19
Yeah, you did –
Seth Price 15:20
Called, that’s awesome. So, you know, for you, so I, like for me, my journey was, when I started, it was, you know, possibly a decade before this, I ended up with a bunch of what today would be called micro sites. I didn’t know what a micro site was, because I was, me and my geeking out team. We would build each one as if they were their own site. And really built, you know, a presence and DC, Maryland, Virginia sort of connected. But my feeling was, people will resonate the best with somebody who’s close to them that can solve their problem. So I ended up with this whole family. Still have a whole family of websites, depending if something is DC, Maryland, Virginia, over time that’s been consolidated, but a separate presence for criminal versus family versus personal injury, the idea being that if you want, if you want a divorce, you don’t really care that they do everything else. There’s some people that want a power regional firm that’s likely not the person coming for a flat fee, the person coming there is like, do you do divorce law? And will you solve my problem? That was my thesis, and built out all of these websites, even pre Google My Business, which has become more and more important. We’ll talk about it in a minute. But you know, so I was, you know, in one sense, people that come to me today, the idea of one website for multiple geographies and one website for multiple practice areas is not so foreign, and that’s probably a best practice by Google standards. You know, having just the happenstance to have started this at a point when the top line URL meant so much the, the, that I ended up with this whole, you know, smorgasbord of sites. So when you, when you launched 10 years ago or so, you know, how did you view this? You know, for me, I actually would, stuff was easy enough outside of PI, stuff was non competitive enough that I could compete against myself. And that was another reason for these micro sites, because I might end up with three to four options out of the top five results.
Jeff Hughes 17:30
Yeah, so our like, so like you said, I was 10 years behind you, and I think it was right toward the end of that whole microsite thinking and how Google was kind of running their algorithm, and so we didn’t do as much of that, but we did something a little different, though we, like I said, we were full service, and then once we went from full service down to just family, our rankings shot through the roof, because now we’re really focused. So that was, that was one thing we did a year and a half into it. Another thing is my partner, Tony, and he’s the guy who runs the secret sauce for this. He had a lot of PBNs. You know what PBNs are? They’re basically other high ranking-
Seth Price 18:07
So for those that don’t know, this is a series of websites that you control to manipulate your own sites which are against Google guidelines. However, they work until they don’t work.
Jeff Hughes 18:18
Yeah, that was years ago. I don’t, I’m quite-
Seth Price 18:20
No, no I’m just expaining for anybody listening.
Jeff Hughes 18:22
Yeah, but they were really, really helpful. I mean, those we had all kinds of one time, we bought a site that was run by, owned by a college. We had an edu website, and they just let it lapse. We picked it up and we, it was like for their actual, like, bakery in their college. And we had the site for like five years. So those are really high value ranks. And then they realized they didn’t have their site anymore, because we kept it current. We kept it up to date, made it look real, like it was their actual website.
Seth Price 18:48
Just had a couple links to your stuff out there.
Jeff Hughes 18:50
Yeah, like one or two links on there because we put their updated pricing. We put it all on there because we wanted it to stay. And they never noticed it, like they didn’t pay attention to who was doing on their site. So we did a lot of that, but where we really took off.
Seth Price 19:02
I love that, that’s tremendous, with the price, prolly better than they were.
Jeff Hughes 19:06
Yeah, we were that. I don’t know what they thought, but we got a finally, got an email from and said, hey, we know you guys are running our site. Thank you, but canwe have it back. I’m like sure. You know we didn’t fight them on it.
Seth Price 19:16
Did you make them a trade. Can you, would you mind leaving a special thank you page for the history of what we’ve done.
Jeff Hughes 19:21
I don’t know what we did. I can’t remember that far back, but it was, it was pretty funny when that happened. One of the things we did, it was kind of like, it was, was brand new back then. Was really understanding the power of the map listings. And so we about a year and a half in, we started adding other offices that were legit offices. We started off originally, they were kind of like, what’s that?
Seth Price 19:43
Regis?
Jeff Hughes 19:44
Yeah, the Regis stuff. We did a fair amount of that, and then Google started disfavoring that, and so we went and just started leasing our own office space, putting up all of our own signage, like everything, the whole deal they can make it into a legit office. And that was a major strategy for us. And today, our map listings are 36 to 40% of our traffic comes in from our map so we’ve got five.
Seth Price 20:06
How many offices are you at this point?
Jeff Hughes 20:09
In terms of locations that were met, that are map listed? We’ve got to be in the high 20s right now, and they’re very –
Seth Price 20:17
Wisconsin. What’s your second market?
Jeff Hughes 20:20
Illinois. Yeah. So we go as far south as Naperville, you know, if you know Chicagoland area, that’s about as far south. We go north here to Green Bay and then west to Madison. That’s kind of our our scope, footprint.
Seth Price 20:31
Awesome. So talk to us about the Google, you know, that build out. So for me, I was starting, you know, one of the things that’s funny, I was watching Tim Stanley, one of my favorite, you know, geniuses in the space. He did a pod, he did a webinar the other day, and he was talking about the, you know, the practitioner profile versus the firm profile. So early on, we did a lot more with practitioner profiles, because you get more bites at the apple. And one of the things that happened, obviously, is it becomes sensitive when somebody sensitive when somebody leaves your firm, they like, hey, I want my name. Like well contracts says- but as we, more especially the family space, we’ve moved to towards brand, talk to me a little bit about that and the evolution of the Google business profile.
Jeff Hughes 21:18
Yeah, we do every, most of our attorneys that have been here for any length of time have their own website, and we do, you know, we’ll map list that too, and we’ll-
Seth Price 21:27
So you do, you compete against yourself as well as –
Jeff Hughes 21:30
Yeah, so, like-
Seth Price 21:31
Because some of these markets, you know, it’s not, I assume it’s not with your knowledge. You know your brand is going to do well no matter what, right you have a great you know, presumably, if you even without the bakery, I’m sure you’re still doing fine. And then you have, you know, and then you, so, basically you build them, but you are building essentially micro sites for each lawyer along the way?
Jeff Hughes 21:52
Yeah, because we want to, I just want to pump them up too. We want to give them credibility, so that that helps them, it helps us. And we’ll have those kind of, will sit underneath our main site, you know, because depending on what, and if you search their name, they’ll sit above it, obviously. So we definitely utilize those. And we have run into those issues too, whenever, whenever one of the attorneys leaves. How to handle that particular issue?
Seth Price 22:14
Well let me ask aquestion. So first, there’s that issue, right? That we could talk about that another day. But what about the idea, like the sort of the Google restriction. I’m curious how you overcome this? You have x number of offices? Do you put the practitioner profile attached to that other website at a different address or the same address?
Jeff Hughes 22:34
Seth, I don’t know.
Seth Price 22:35
The reason I this up, good question. We could talk, we can kick this can down the road is that there is, you know, the Google local algorithm suppresses, generally, two listings at the same address. And so there’s benefits to it. And it may be that it’s not your primary, you have the website, so you’re getting the organic reach without a separate address. It’s unlikely both will get shown. Just curious.
Jeff Hughes 23:00
To me, I do know that we do not double serve on the same address because that we will get penalized for doing that. We have found.
Seth Price 23:07
Because, just to be clear, it’s not a penalty. Only one will show, you could do that, just not efficient. If that makes sense.
Jeff Hughes 23:15
It’s not efficient. That’s probably the better way to say it. And we we also want the one with the most um testimonials showing too, right? We want that to be the one that shows there. So I know that we have done that, and I know also in our map listings, we have been very fastidious, because every one of those listings, the address has to be exactly the same. No matter where you put in all the directories, it needs to be verbatim, like there’s a space or a dot, or a south or south spelled out. You’ve got to do all of that to like a high degree.
Seth Price 23:43
And Jeff, as a guy who lived that for many years. The only good news is that, of late, the Google, you know, of the last period of time, the Google algorithm, has been less fastidious on that. So the good news is, you have it right, so it’s there, but just so you, of all, of all the issues you, like as AI has come in over the last, you know, two, three years, Google, more and more knows what’s there. You still don’t want to confuse Google. I’m not saying you want to have stuff all over the place, but it used to be I would lose my, you know, proverbial s-h-i-t, if it was like, sweet versus the abbreviation for suite. Avenue versus stuff and like we thankfully are at a point for good or bad, there’s other, you know, AI’s brought other challenges. But the good news is that you can sleep a little bit better if it’s not perfect anymore.
Jeff Hughes 24:32
Okay, well, I didn’t know that, just learned something, that’s great.
Seth Price 24:37
So okay, so you’ve built you built this out the final leg of this sort of interesting thing that we the world, that you and I both live in, is intake, right? So you have all these phone numbers, you have all this marketing, whether it be organic, whether it be local, etc. Talk to me a little bit about how do you handle the influx of these calls, and the beginning of the process of taking someone who thinks they’re hiring a regular lawyer and bring them to the point where they’re about to hire the the Sterling, flat fee firm.
Jeff Hughes 25:05
Yeah, so we handle it in a pretty, it’s a pretty sophisticated way. So our intake, to us, is a highly, highly important part of the the firm. Okay, so everything starts with our, I was the call first, right? But the intake is the first contact with a human so on our intake team, we have a pretty deep bench, meaning we don’t want to miss calls, so we kind of quote over hire for that. We have a blend of folks that live here in the US and a blend of folks that live in the Philippines. We use dozens, if not hundreds, of different phone numbers to track through call tracking metrics. CTM as well, is the service that we use for that tracking, attribution everywhere we possibly can. Plus, we’re asking the client when they’re calling, How’d you hear about us? That sort of thing, and we’re logging it in our CRM. We use Salesforce for our CRM.
Seth Price 25:53
So do we. We’re one of the other crazy firms that use the Salesforce.
Jeff Hughes 25:56
Yeah, there’s only a few of us. I know Dave Johnson out in Colorado uses it too, but it’s not many, and there’s another turning Arizona that does, so there’s a couple of us that use it. So we’ve highly customized this over the last 10 years, or nine years or so that we’ve used it, and it’s gotten pretty sophisticated, and we’ve got really good visibility to our data. So the the intake, their job is to obviously screen out and set the appointment, we charge for a consult. It’s 250 a consult. We also have four non lawyer sales people who take about half of our total of our consults, and just as of the last probably two months, they’ve consistently outperformed our lawyers after about two years of, you know, tinkering with us to get this to work.
Seth Price 26:37
So these are not attorney sales – non attorney sales people?
Jeff Hughes 26:41
Yeah, non attorney sales people. So they’re not on the intake team, though, so the intake will take them and they’ll pass them, to they’ll set the appointment with the client.
Seth Price 26:48
So are you doing paid consultations? Free consultations?
Jeff Hughes 26:52
Paid
Seth Price 26:52
Paid consultations.
Jeff Hughes 26:53
Its $100 for the non lawyer. We call them CLAs, consult legal assistant, so it’ll be 100 bucks for them, or 250 to meet with a lawyer and so, and I don’t know if they give the clients an option, as much as it’s just like where you want to, it’s more of a scheduling issue, like when you want to be scheduled, and then that determines who they meet with. That’s probably a big part of it. So that, that’s our intake team. We’ve got, I don’t know, 13, 12 or 13 people on our intake team. Total.
Seth Price 27:22
Awesome. Very, very cool. So, basically, so and, so you’re doing those calls, talk to me. There’s something that we’ve been, you know, we’re later to the game. We’ve in the PI side, it’s easy to use paralegals versus lawyers, you know, follow state laws as far as when a lawyer is required or not, on the, one, on the fee for service side, it’s much more challenging. And we are sort of, you know, there are training groups, there are affinity groups that push the non attorney salesperson very hard. And to me, it has never been, you know, it is, I see firms that do it very well. I also see those firms devastated because it’s so hard to train that if that person leaves, it becomes a risk factor for the firm almost. You know, in a smaller situation, what is, what is your process? It sounds like you like, once you get it and you sort of say, hey, it’s sales, and it’s great when it’s a JD, but it’s even better if it’s somebody who can sell really, really well. What? What do you, you know, you know, how are you screening to find those people, and how are you training them to make it so they’re competitive?
Jeff Hughes 28:31
Yeah, that’s a great question. So I think we’ve hired probably 10 CLAS, and we’re down to four right now. Now we haven’t had,we haven’t had 10 at one time, but we’ve had to work through them. So the training is a very long sales, it’s a very long training process. This isn’t a three week deal. It takes a long time to learn the nuances, because you can’t give advice, but you got to give hope, right? Enough, hope and belief that you’ll, that the client will actually fund. So that’s really difficult on the training side of it, and the way we found the most success in hiring them was looking nationally. In the US here, we search nationally, nationally. We search in smaller markets. We offer a really good compensation package and the work from home options with a whole lot of requirements around what your background and your internet and all that’s going to look like and feel like, how you present on camera. We do an initial screening with them, then we make them do, like a full video of them.
Seth Price 28:32
These are non lawyers you’re talking about.
Jeff Hughes 28:37
These are the non lawyers. Yeah, the non lawyer people.
Seth Price 28:42
What are you finding? You getting guys who are sales people? Or you find out-
Jeff Hughes 28:53
Yeah, we are looking for hardcore sales people that love sales.
Seth Price 29:43
Which is also tough. I’ve seen this from the BluShark side, because I have a sales team there, and we’ve recruited a lot for it. I’m very blessed. I think we have a an amazing business development group, which is not cutthroat towards each other. These are people that help each other work collaboratively. But in the sales world, it is. Is that’s few and far between, that generally, the culture that works within a sales team may not comport with the culture you’ve created within the law firm, wondering if you, if you’ve seen that as you’ve tried to build that out.
Jeff Hughes 30:12
What we’ve done is we’ve assigned a CLA to each of our main offices, and so they sit in with the lawyers and all the lawyers meetings and they’re, they’re incentivized for the overall success of their particular branch. So there’s a lot of collaboration between the legal team and the CLAS. We don’t have any, any, any competition this between the CLAS.
Seth Price 30:33
No, but it’s it the same skill set that can make you amazing at sales doesn’t necessarily make you warm and fuzzy in the, in the office.
Jeff Hughes 30:44
Yeah, well, we try to fire people because of that frankly-
Seth Price 30:48
That’s I’m getting at, yeah, for people listening to this like it is. People talk about it and it sounds like, oh, yeah, I’ll just hire a non attorney salesperson. And the balance between somebody who gets you, makes sure you’re not going to get disbarred, is good at sales. Is not going to piss off everybody in the office. It’s a hustle.
Jeff Hughes 31:10
It’s tough. And if you do it, I have one caution, if you do it, you got to be prepared to fire your top performer over and over, because that will happen. Your top performer usually gets a prima donna attitude a lot of times, and they piss everyone off. And they do some, they start giving advice. You catch them giving advice once, and that’s like, you’re out of there. You can’t, you can’t have that. And we record all of our calls, and we, we audit them with AI. Now you can, like-
Seth Price 31:33
Which, which program you use for, for that?
Jeff Hughes 31:37
Like, well, we use just the off the shelf stuff. I mean-
Seth Price 31:42
Every day there’s a new sales program, like sales-
Jeff Hughes 31:46
Like cynthian analysis and stuff like that.
Seth Price 31:48
Yeah, I actually wanted to start one myself, and never got around to it. Now, everybody’s done it, but they’re basically, they can look at tone. They can look at all, like, if you use otter for your own like, if otter was following this call, it would tell us all our talking points. If we had follow ups, it would have it? You know, some of these new sales AI tools are just amazing in that they can grade. I was always a person who’s like, poo-pooed the listening to recorder calls way before video and Gary Falkowitz, one of my gurus in the in the intake space, particularly the PI area, was like gotta listen to recorded calls, and it finally started to and it was shocking, because even in the old days, if you walked around the office and listened to people speaking, you only heard one side of the conversation. And I still remember the woman who was going, uh-huh, uh-huh, and at the other end of the call, somebody bawling their eyes out. They just lost their whole family. And it was that disconnect. So, you know, obviously we want to listen to them. I mean, part of it is for, you know, for us, it’s having leadership within intake, within sales, to listen to those recorded calls and to be grading them on a regular basis. Because the only way you can find out is somebody whose numbers are amazing doing things that you don’t want to see done.
Jeff Hughes 33:00
Yeah, we’re not as sophisticated on that yet, but what we do is we do record it, and then we run it through for their talk ratios, how much are they talking versus listening? That’s important. And we audit them. We have, like, not only our manager that does that, but we also have someone in the in the Philippines, who that’s their job is just to put scores together for sales calls.
Seth Price 33:19
Awesome. And so I know it’s a work in progress, but right now, you’re saying that your close rate is higher for your non attorneys and your attorney sales people.
Jeff Hughes 33:30
Yeah, for the first time, we’ve been doing this for two years now, and we just crossed that threshold, its been really rewarding. Yeah, it’s taken a long time. I mean, its a long hall.
Seth Price 33:40
You haven’t cracked the International nut, this is all domestic?
Jeff Hughes 33:42
Yeah, all domestic, yeah. We don’t-
Seth Price 33:44
How do you incentivize the non attorney sales people?
Jeff Hughes 33:49
Oh, man, they get a pretty good salary, and then they they get, I don’t know exactly how, because it’s changed so much Seth, and I don’t have that much-
Seth Price 33:58
No but-
Jeff Hughes 33:59
I’m not that close to the team. We found a success ratio. There’s something, firm success. It’s success for them, and it’s tied to it.
Seth Price 34:07
But on an individual or firm wide level?
Jeff Hughes 34:10
On a team wide basis.
Seth Price 34:12
Team wide basis, you know, for me, you know one of the things about sales, as humans in general, this is true for sales or not sales. If you incentivize something, you’ll get it whether you like it or not. And so you just got to be careful about where you incentivize. You know, if it’s if it’s signings, and they’re bringing in people that don’t really buy into your philosophy of fixed fees, but they know how to sign the case where they’re awful people that mean it’s, a family, like in family law, in real estate, they say it’s the deals you don’t do that make your money, not the deals you do, I would argue, and whether it’s a marketing company or whether it’s a law firm, keeping those people out that are really toxic as clients, protecting your staff. And it’s one of those areas that I know it’s a fine balance, because in one sense, you don’t want them thinking. You want them signing everything, but if they’re massive red flags and they’re only incentivized on one side. So if it’s the revenue for a client versus getting to sign that first retainer, you may, they may see bigger picture if if incentivized properly, and it’s tough, because, as I mentioned, like anything you incentivize will happen. You just got to be careful what you are incentivizing.
Jeff Hughes 35:18
Yeah, a couple thoughts. I agree, if you gotta align incentives, and that takes a lot of trial and error to get it right, to tweak it in right. You got to be careful for fee sharing, right? You can’t, you can’t,
Seth Price 35:27
Oh, not a percentage of that, obviously.
Jeff Hughes 35:29
Yeah, and you got to be careful about that. But probably even at least more common than that is these CLAS are bringing in cases, and they’re passing them to the lawyers, and there’s got to be trust there, because the lawyer doesn’t want to be given a dog case, or, you know, a creepy client, or a really bad case that shouldn’t even be filed because, you know, they don’t have a case, or whatever. So getting all that right is what’s taken us so long, that pass off. Because the agents want to sell everything right. The CLAs want to sell everything, but we don’t want everything, and getting them to, like, have the judgment on the call to make that decision. That takes some time to do that. And there’s a fair amount of like, Let me hold on. Let me talk to a lawyer and make sure that we can help you sort of stuff. And, you know, follow ups that in order to get this, get the deal done.
Seth Price 36:13
Let me sort of conclude here. So one of the things that have evolved a lot on the, particularly in the PI space is we have gone beyond just digital. I’ve always been a digital only. I created an agency for god sakes because, you know, you’ve, you havedigital clients. Like, have you gone beyond digital when it comes to marketing? And how has that affected the digital?
Jeff Hughes 36:32
The answer that is, unfortunately, no. We have, just in the last month, have started relaunching our content marketing, which is still digital, I get that, but it’s little different than pay per click and programmatic and and, you know, all the stuff we’ve been doing, we don’t do any branding in terms of billboards or anything. No paper. It’s all digital. And we know that we’re probably over relying on it, but it’s been so profitable and has worked so well for us that it’s just kind of like a drug.
Seth Price 37:00
Look, and be fair, outside of PI, we have not but because of the PI part of the firm, we’ve now started to do much offline because, and it’s really interesting to see those things come together. And again, it’s not, you know, you’re in relative, you have a lot, many of your markets are not major markets where digital does everything you could possibly need. But it’s just fascinating. We signed a deal on the personal injury side with the Washington Commanders, where we are the official Personal Injury partner of it, or the other resident, the official part, you know, official law firm, partner of the Commanders, and the just, the, the tie ins. And again, this is particularly expensive tie in, but the tie ins and starting to watch some of that come together is fascinating. You know, I think that as you go down the food chain, and I say that with love, because it’s a thanks to God, it’s a protected space, because you wouldn’t have, you know, what you have if there was the top business lawyers in the country all fighting for Wisconsin family law, but the idea that the offline work you know, really, you know, as somebody who has it with, looking at it from the digital agency point of view, and seeing how people make buying decisions, that it’s been fascinating to see that people that who were TV advertisers or billboard people, very few people sit there and then pick up the phone and call the number on the Billboard or from the TV. Everything is being filtered back through the web. Some of it’s direct traffic, and that’s one way to attribute it, right? If there’s somebody searching for your firm, different than somebody looking for family lawyer. But it’s fascinating to see that in the search results, that, as you know, we’ve seen Google favor brand in the search results, not as big a factor for you, but I see this where TV advertisers in PI have an advantage over non TV advertisers, that as brand becomes more significant. It’s fascinating that the top of funnel, so to speak, has affected it. So whereas a paid social campaign, digital, but not the traditional SEO PPC, while it may not generate a ton of direct response, and the direct response you get may not be the cases you want. That that overall arching piece has paid dividends. Again, if I’m in your shoes, I’m not sure I go there, because, you know what? I might just go to a third state or double down in new markets within the states I’m in. But it’s just fascinating to see. You know the fact that much of the offline advertising is now collapsing back through digital, and that the, that the leveraging, what used to be we do so well with TV. We don’t need to worry about digital has now been, well, I’m gonna do TV. I’m not giving that up because I love it. But if I don’t have digital figured out, I’m giving up money because theres a hole my bucket.
Jeff Hughes 39:57
Yeah, yeah, that’s how we’ve analyzed it. And. I do believe that if we got into offline stuff, it would lower overall cost, but it would take us about two to three years to get there. So it’s something we keep talking about. We’ve never, never executed on it.
Seth Price 40:11
Well, Jeff, this is this has been awesome. Thank you so much for your time. I can’t wait to cross paths again, hopefully sooner rather than later.
Jeff Hughes 40:17
Yeah. Thank you, Seth and good, good seeing you again.
Seth Price 40:20
See you soon. Thank you so much everybody.
Awesome. They’ll chop this up. We may, I may even try to get this as a if I need a filler on the law firm blueprint, because this was almost more law firm than was the marketing side. Yeah,
Jeff Hughes 40:35
I listen to your offer movement stuff every so often. So when you when you got a guess on that, like the intake guys, or something like that. I’ve listened to all those,
Seth Price 40:43
by the way, yeah, those were awesome this summer. Yeah, you know. And it’s interesting. It’s a very different, as you saw, very different for the PI focused ones and the non pi focused ones, yeah, yeah, yeah. Because intake means something different on PI, it’s one call close, whereas for the for rest of us, it’s one call, appointment set. Yeah, yeah. And I guess here you an intermediate where there’s a small sale, but it’s not do your when a Philip, what’s the close ratio for the consultation Philippines versus
Jeff Hughes 41:17
domestic? Um, it’s comparable when it comes. So the close for them is setting the appointment our best, our number one performers in the Philippines, and they get the credit card, yeah, credit card, everything.
Seth Price 41:29
That’s awesome. And that’s what it felt. But how long has that kind
Jeff Hughes 41:33
of been with you? Um, she’s been with us a year and a half or so. Well, that’s it. But the intake people, yeah, the intake people are, they’re that’s a revolving door. They don’t stick around that long. They burn out pretty quick. We find so we don’t have long termers there. I mean, the longest one there is maybe there two years or billions right now. Yeah,
Seth Price 41:49
I think I can’t, but we are. We are figuring it out. But we’ve we went international for our first line of defense, January of 21 at this point of the non pi intake, we’re about 90, 95% Latin America on that first first tranche, and it’s been fascinating. But because of that, I think we’ve kept longer, longer tenure, like with management, with good management and training that that we’ve we’ve started to cut down on some because my original model was recent college grads who would work two years and burn out and go to law school, but when Law School fell out of favor, I just wasn’t getting the quality. Yeah, interesting, awesome, very cool. Catch up soon.
Jeff Hughes 42:39
All right. Take care.
BluShark Digital 42:40
Bye, bye. Thank you for tuning in to the SEO insider with Seth price. Be sure to check back next week for fresh insights into building your brand’s online presence. Episodes are available to stream directly on BluShark Digital’s website. Beth.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
