Jay Ruane  00:07

Hello, hello, and welcome to this edition of the Law Firm Blueprint. I’m one of your hosts, Jay Ruane, and with me, as always, is my man Seth Price down there at the home office. Seth, you’ve got so many offices, I wouldn’t know where to begin. But then you need those GBPs, so Price Benowitz is all over the place. I’m doing the same thing — in fact, I’m looking to open an office in the fourth quarter, and that’s actually what we’re going to talk about to jump off. It’s the fourth quarter already. We’re coming in to end the year strong. So what do you have going on in the fourth quarter?

 

Seth Price  00:38

It’s funny, because we talk a lot about the marketing-operations intersection, and the thing I keep seeing over and over again is that intersection between intake and marketing. We spend all this time and energy trying to get the phones to ring, and look, things have gotten tougher. Paid search has gotten more expensive. LSAs are death by a thousand cuts, right? They’re going to charge you regardless of how you answer the phones.

 

Jay Ruane  01:04

Yeah, I had an LSA issue. It’s September, and I have to re-upload my malpractice documentation. I have to do that in September because I got approved once, and I had it on my calendar for September 1, and I haven’t done that yet.

 

Seth Price  01:23

So we got that. But to me, what I am seeing is that as stuff gets more and more challenging, the money spent on marketing — we don’t have the luxury of just not knowing. If it’s LSAs, they used to refer to them as God’s gift to lawyers. Less so now. They’re still positive, but more and more expensive. And if you are not being super circumspect and tying your intake into the marketing, you’re just leaving money on the table — and in competitive markets, that’s the margin.

 

Jay Ruane  02:06

Yeah, it’s interesting to me. You need to be paying attention to those LSA calls, matching them to the clients who retained, looking to see if those calls came in and they didn’t retain, to determine your true ROI. There are so many people I know who are like, “Oh well, I signed up five LSA clients this week.” I’m like, right, but you got 20 calls, you got charged for 20 calls, they didn’t convert. Your LSAs are underwater. I’ve seen people that are underwater, or at best a one-to-one return.

 

Seth Price  02:37

Look, we personally look at price point. I can look at one month in Virginia and it’s weird — weird things happen. There was a section for criminal that we had running with a particular paid campaign, and we were getting PI cases, which are very precious. It blows your mind. So tying those together, I think, is extraordinarily important — and being okay with turning something off that should be working, and trying to follow the data. Sometimes you turn it off, and a few months later you might try it again. But if something isn’t making money — and there’s a last piece to that, which is true less in criminal but very true in PI — you sign up X number of cases, great, but what is the breakage rate? How many are still with you in 30 or 60 or 90 days, whatever window you’re looking at? And I’d argue in criminal, let’s look at it similarly. You have people who sign up, give a verbal yes, maybe a down payment — but are they breaking? Is it a case that turns upside down? You’re putting this money in, you’re assuming a full case value for ROI, but are you actually getting the full money?

 

Jay Ruane  03:55

That’s huge, especially in the criminal context or the family law context, because you could quote a fee, and they stop paying after seven payments when they were supposed to make ten, and you didn’t collect, you didn’t necessarily chase it, the file was closed, and you just walked away from it. That could be eating up all of your profit.

 

Seth Price  04:16

Right, and it’s statistically significant — who cares what happens once, but I’m seeing this over and over again, that the money you’re spending really shows up once you tie those two together. I’m seeing examples of this in two different family—

 

Jay Ruane  04:39

—law ways. Okay, but here’s the problem, Seth. I have all of my clients, I have to oversee the marketing, I have to do one-on-ones with my employees. At what point do I have the time or energy to put into analyzing whether I’m actually getting a return?

 

Seth Price  04:57

Assuming — look, assuming you’re at the point where you have an intake head—

 

Jay Ruane  05:01

Right.

 

Seth Price  05:02

—that person needs to be speaking to your marketing. You’re not involved in it directly, they can bring you the home run. I’m working with somebody right now who’s saying, “Hey, of these five campaigns, three we stay with, one we should increase the budget on, and one we should cut.” That’s the level I want you at, because if you can get there, great — and if you don’t have an intake person, you’re playing that role yourself. But I’ll give you an example: family law should be a no-brainer. Say you have an LSA and hypothetically it’s $3,000 per case signed—

 

Jay Ruane  05:41

Okay.

 

Seth Price  05:41

—which is what we’re seeing in some criminal markets. And if the average fee you have is $5,500, that’s not a great place to be — $3K against $5,500 is not great at all. But in family law, you can go higher. We have one family lawyer who averages $15,000 per case, but I have another guy at $4,000. So my attitude is, you know what, the $4,000 guy is going to have to eat off of organic, but I’m willing to invest more in the person who’s able to monetize — because not all lawyers are created equal, and if you have lawyers who are able to generate more per case, you can invest more in bringing them cases. It was kind of shocking, because if you amortized it between the two, it would show — why am I bringing paid search to somebody ending a case at an average of $4,000 versus the guy at $15,000?

 

Jay Ruane  06:42

Yeah, no, absolutely. That’s the thing — as firm owners, I think we need to find the time, and it’s difficult, it’s challenging. You’re out of running a caseload, I’m out of running a caseload now. It took me a lot longer than it took you, because I still liked being in the weeds to some extent.

 

Seth Price  07:06

And to be fair to those who are new to the show, you thought it was part of your marketing.

 

Jay Ruane  07:11

And I think it was — I still will stand by that, just being out, being seen. But—

 

Seth Price  07:19

The question is: if you took that time and put it toward buying paid ads instead, how many cases would come in versus now?

 

Jay Ruane  07:26

And get my haircuts, get a nice fresh cut. Is this—

 

Seth Price  07:29

Number four or five this month?

 

Jay Ruane  07:31

This is only number three. This is only number three for this month.

 

Seth Price  07:35

Do you pay for a full fresh haircut each time, or do you get the touch-up rate if you go that often?

 

Jay Ruane  07:40

Well, if you’ve seen one of my favorite movies, My Blue Heaven — I’m like Steve Martin in My Blue Heaven. Vinny… what was his name… Vincent, oh God, I can’t remember it. But his philosophy was, it’s not tipping, it’s over-tipping. So I will pay for a full haircut even if I’m just getting a touch-up.

 

Seth Price  08:01

Or do you pay for the touch-up and then tip like crazy?

 

Jay Ruane  08:05

Yeah, basically that.

 

Seth Price  08:07

It’s just money. Got you. So, fourth quarter’s coming — what are you excited about, and what are you nervous about?

 

Jay Ruane  08:14

Excited about a couple of things. I’ve got an article coming out in the journal for the National [Association of] Criminal Defense Lawyers, all about my concept of a “cut month,” where you spend an actual month going through everything. I know a lot of people did it during COVID, but if you actually go in and cut things that are redundant or not used anymore — we find at least $10,000 to $15,000 a year in our cut months, and sometimes more. I’m actually in a position where I think I may be able to cut something like $75,000 this year, based on services we can get another way, cheaper, that we’re not fully using and don’t necessarily need.

 

Seth Price  09:04

Give us examples of things that we’ve—

 

Jay Ruane  09:05

We’ve gotten — we are licensing an AI tool for reviewing videos of DUI stops, because about 50% of our practice is DUI. There’s a market leader out there, and we pay for licenses for all of our lawyers. Well, I’ve got my in-house technologist now, and using Gemini — which can watch videos, and since it’s secure enough — we’ve actually developed a way to do that internally for pennies on the dollar of API usage. Using Gemini to watch our videos and give us transcripts and timestamps, what would have been thousands of dollars in licensing is now just native API usage in Gemini and Claude between the two. It took some effort to put together, but we’re keeping it in-house and saving significant money. And that’s one of multiple things — we’re also going to get rid of DocuSign.

 

Seth Price  10:26

Really?

 

Jay Ruane  10:26

Yeah, we’re going to Documenso — it’s an open-source product for digital signatures that has an API — and we’re going to go from a full envelope price down to seven cents an envelope.

 

Seth Price  10:26

I wish it worked with Salesforce. That would be great.

 

Jay Ruane  10:31

As long as it’s got an API, Salesforce can probably tap into it.

 

Seth Price  10:34

Docu—

 

Jay Ruane  10:35

Documenso. And we’ve already established it. The other cool thing we’ve done is develop our own software — not an AI tool, actual software — to help our lawyers turn out offer and options letters, sort of like how demand letters are done in the PI space. We’re doing something similar, and that’s going to free up time. So our cut month isn’t just cutting money and finding savings, it’s saving time too. We’ll have a whole bunch of things to talk about as we wrap up the end of the year, because my cut month is always November, going into the end of the year — and I think I’ll be ahead of myself this year, and happy about that.

 

Seth Price  11:14

And that’s partly why intake talking to marketing matters — if you could cut X percent of marketing spend—

 

Jay Ruane  11:26

Right, exactly. Actually, I’ll tell you something I haven’t told you yet — I’ve been heavily into YouTube pre-roll ads for about three years now.

 

Seth Price  11:36

Yeah, we’ve talked about this over time.

 

Jay Ruane  11:37

We’ve talked about it — at one point we were spending about $15,000 a month on that, which over the course of a year is real money.

 

Seth Price  11:46

And was it working?

 

Jay Ruane  11:48

I shut them off on September 1, and we’ve seen nothing change with our intake flow.

 

Seth Price  11:53

Reminds me of the old days with Avvo. Remember that?

 

Jay Ruane  11:55

Yeah. So I’m going to let it run — I’m monitoring it daily, talking to intake, talking to marketing. I’m shepherding this project, I’m the one out in front of it.

 

Seth Price  12:09

It’s so tough, because brand is worth so much. At the same time — is it brand being built to monetize, or is it marketing that fails and you just don’t want to acknowledge it fails, so you call it something else? We have a lot of listeners here with smaller firms, and we talk about brand — obviously there’s a juggernaut out there in the PI space that everybody knows about. But outside of that, when you’re a smaller firm and you talk about putting a banner on the wall at the Little League game or whatever — my question is, can you realistically, responsibly build brand when you’re a smaller firm? I’ll put that to you.

 

Jay Ruane  12:54

Well, I think you can, but it has to be at a much smaller scale.

 

Seth Price  12:59

What does that mean, though?

 

Jay Ruane  13:00

The brand could be: you’re the local PI lawyer in your town that everybody knows.

 

Seth Price  13:08

No, I understand, but what is it — is it—

 

Jay Ruane  13:11

You do that offline, and you do that online too — as in putting up the thing at the Little League.

 

Seth Price  13:20

But you say that, but there’s a difference. How do you become that? Is the thing on the wall at Little League really it? Is it targeting?

 

Jay Ruane  13:28

I think you use some really sharp geo-targeting on digital. You can drive into it on both Meta and YouTube.

 

Seth Price  13:43

But can you? It’s one thing if you’re the guy glad-handing, “who’s the ticket, the DUI guy” — you stand out, you do bold stuff at legal conventions, I know you’ve done that before. But can you, even with the money you’re spending, compete with somebody who’s multi-channel across a substantial statewide budget? Where does that play out? Is there a piece, or does it really have to be relationship-based? When you say brand, is that brand to other lawyers versus brand to the public? Can you really become known publicly for DUI work, or are we kidding ourselves, and we need to be thinking about search for that instead? But brand when it comes to the referral business among lawyers — that’s a B2B brand, and LinkedIn and other techniques are very reasonable ways to touch a lot of people. You could make a list of the 100 lawyers in your area and connect with them on LinkedIn so your content reaches them. As few friends as they may have, some of that will come back to you. I’m amazed right now, talking about brand, at the power of LinkedIn. I just got back from the holidays, and two things stuck out to me: LinkedIn — the power of it in the world I play in — and TV, which Price Benowitz started this year, about a year in now, and it’s amazing. It’s hit or miss, because I pulled the plug so I don’t even see my own ads — they’re all digital and I’m not playing that game. But on broadcast, you are seen, you’re out there, whether or not you can differentiate yourself from others. So the real question is: when you talk about brand, Jay Ruane, and there’s the offline piece — how much of that is truly reaching the public, and how much of it is really the B2B game?

 

Jay Ruane  15:45

That’s a really good question. In my greater footprint — my entire state, or the counties I serve, since we’re Connecticut, we’re small, so I’ll say the entire state — I think my brand is marketed toward lawyers.

 

Seth Price  16:03

Which means it’s a B2B play — which is a great play.

 

Jay Ruane  16:06

And because my thought is, those lawyers get calls they want to send to me, and it goes the distance. I actually recently re-engaged my podcast — I have a weekly Connecticut Case Law Podcast. Anybody listening can look it up on any podcasting platform. It’s entirely scripted, voiced, and edited by AI — I don’t do anything other than set it up, and every week it goes out. It has a small audience — since July it’s gotten about 1,000 downloads, so it’s not huge — but I’m marketing it to other lawyers in Connecticut on LinkedIn, and I’m getting more subscribers every week.

 

Seth Price  16:55

But what’s the quality — is it decent?

 

Jay Ruane  16:56

The quality is amazing, it’s fantastic — it sounds just like me.

 

Seth Price  17:01

No, no, I don’t mean that — I mean the substance.

 

Jay Ruane  17:03

The substance is good. I had a judge call me up and say, “I can’t believe this is AI, this is amazing, I love your podcast. I look forward to my drive home every Friday, because I know it’ll take me 30 minutes to get home, and I get 20-30 minutes of listening to all the cases, and I’m done — I don’t have to think about it.” Now, this judge is a friend, but still, they called me up out of the blue. I didn’t ping the judge about it.

 

Seth Price  17:30

I’ll put that in the category of — look, the concept is the same. If we took the “J. Ruane offline playbook” and looked at it item by item — how much of that makes us feel good versus actually move the needle? I’ll use the banner on the Little League wall — it’s nice, some eyeballs see it, you’re there all the time — versus something more targeted with a repeat player. I’m in a networking group right now, sort of like a professional-services BNI, and I’m a little down on it, there’s not enough traction. Again, history gets written by whoever wins — you get one good referral and you’re happy. But how much of this should be scaled versus glad-handing? It’s tough.

 

Jay Ruane  18:14

But here’s the thing — with my B2B brand play statewide, I can target other lawyers, because a lawyer may not know me but may have heard who I am, or has friends who know who I am. But if I’m trying to build brand locally, I can do it in my hometown, but I couldn’t do it in the next town over, because I’m not there.

 

Seth Price  18:41

You could, though — I’ll challenge you on that. Why couldn’t you do it in the next town over? You could. It’s just more money.

 

Jay Ruane  18:47

It’s more money, but I’m not in that community — part of the brand build is being in it.

 

Seth Price  18:55

Right — then that’s personal brand.

 

Jay Ruane  18:58

Okay, so here — you’re Mr. Digital Marketing. Here’s what I suggest we do: let’s run a test. Pick a community somewhere in the United States, throw up a Meta ad, throw up a YouTube ad, put $1,000 into it, and see if you get calls in a community you have no ties to. I don’t think you will, because it also has to be people saying, “Oh yeah, I know Seth.”

 

Seth Price  19:30

But then it’s a pure B2B play — it’s no longer what you’re describing.

 

Jay Ruane  19:34

Seth, maybe I’m not explaining it right. What I’m saying is, I think if you’re going to try to build brand locally, you need to be in that community and actually do stuff. You can throw up a Little League sign, and you can get people to call you. But the reality is, if you’re not connected to the community, you can advertise in it, but you might as well just be advertising digitally and generally.

 

Seth Price  20:03

I’m not sure I fully buy that. We’ve seen the big PI player who’s nowhere near a place he’s bought his way into — he’s got a sign in Fenway Park, and he’s a guy in Orlando. I literally had a buddy of mine — a college admin type up at a big Boston university — who had a potential case, and he would only go to the brand he’d seen over and over again. So look, brand works at its highest level. I think the question is, we think a lot of ourselves — so if the honest answer is just “the people Jay Ruane has personally touched at the barber shop or the courthouse”—

 

Jay Ruane  20:47

—and the people they touch. That’s the thing I’m saying — and I can’t get that in a community 50 miles away. That’s just the way it goes.

 

[Short pause in recording]

 

Seth Price  21:09

We’re going — okay.

 

Jay Ruane  21:10

But the reality is, I think you can do it, but the majority of our audience, the majority of lawyers, aren’t trying to be, let’s call him, John Morgan. There are a lot of lawyers who—

 

Seth Price  21:24

No, no — what I’m saying is it’s just a matter of resources. You get your best ROI — I’ve always said this, I saw it back in the early days — within 10 miles of your office is your best ROI. It means less now, because nobody’s driving to your office the way they used to. On the other hand, there has to be enough case volume to be interesting. If it’s just your little town, there’s only so much that’s going to be there. It’s great from a stage perspective, but it’s not making you enough money to be interesting.

 

Jay Ruane  21:53

Right, and I mean, that’s the thing — we talk about it being therapeutic, but I think the reality is, in any situation, you need some self-reflection, and you need to decide what you want to be when you grow up.

 

Seth Price  22:08

Yes. And—

 

Jay Ruane  22:10

A lot of lawyers will look at something and say, “I want that,” because somebody else has it, not because they truly want it.

 

Seth Price  22:19

But things happen over time — you’ve seen that, right? There are moments in your 50s where you want to work less than you were working.

 

Jay Ruane  22:28

Sure.

 

Seth Price  22:29

And if you’re not set up for that, then you’re stuck. So it’s easy to say, “Hey—”

 

Jay Ruane  22:34

So this will tie into a LinkedIn post — speaking of LinkedIn, I posted this week about a lawyer who’s called me now three times over two years, saying, “I really want to bear down, I need to build systems for my office.” I say, okay, here’s a playbook — I can come in and do a lunch-and-learn with your people, what do you want to do? Then I don’t hear from them again, and nine months later I get a call: “Hey, I’m looking to find what resources I can have, I think I need to build some systems, I want to start marketing more.” I’m like, okay, here’s what you need to do — do this, this, and this, then give me a call. I ran them on Ahrefs and they’re at something like a .07 DR, and I ran their Google Business Profile and it’s still for their old firm name and old address.

 

Seth Price  23:27

That’s nonsense.

 

Jay Ruane  23:28

So I said, “Hey, these are the five critical things you need to do — get those done, then give me a call.” Then radio silence again for nine, ten months. Twelve months pass. “Hey, I’m really interested in doing this.” I’m like, really? Because you haven’t done any of it.

 

Seth Price  23:47

Look, actions speak louder than words — we both get these calls.

 

Jay Ruane  23:50

Or inaction speaks louder.

 

Seth Price  23:52

Understood. So, going forward, what do you tell this person?

 

Jay Ruane  23:54

I just stop taking the calls.

 

Seth Price  23:56

Yeah — I take calls from a lot of people, I’m amazed. I talk to people who’ve built amazing firms, and they say, “You took a call from me 15 years ago,” and I always appreciate that, so generally that’s my M.O. But I’ve also gotten to a point where I say, “This is just bothering me, I can’t deal with this anymore.”

 

Jay Ruane  24:15

Well, how do you handle it — you just don’t answer?

 

Seth Price  24:19

I ignore LinkedIn messages I used to respond to.

 

Jay Ruane  24:23

I’m saying this person is calling my cell phone.

 

Seth Price  24:25

Yeah — sometimes you just have to let it go to voicemail.

 

Jay Ruane  24:30

Okay, I think I’m going to have to, because I’m at a point where I’m like, you know, you don’t really want this, because if you did, you’d have done something in three years. I’m giving you the same advice I gave you three years ago, and you haven’t done a thing about it, and it’s getting frustrating. I posted about it on LinkedIn, got a lot of good responses, and I bring it up here because I want to see somebody succeed.

 

Seth Price  24:59

Of course. But you also have limited personal time—

 

Jay Ruane  25:02

Right.

 

Seth Price  25:02

—and there’s a piece where you want to stay in it because the relationship is being fostered, and maybe someday you buy the firm.

 

Jay Ruane  25:10

Not this firm — three Google reviews, the wrong address, no.

 

Seth Price  25:14

No, or bring them on for something else, anyway. But okay — fourth quarter.

 

Jay Ruane  25:18

And I wouldn’t, because these people have an inflated sense of their own value.

 

Seth Price  25:24

Exactly, that’s why. Look, part of this is time. I’ll land the plane with that — fourth quarter, you’re making the cuts monetarily, and some of it has to be about time too. I was at a coaching program the other day, and they were talking about delegating — I now send as many of the inquiry calls to different people as I can, and don’t even take the calls myself at this point, and let them vet it. I get pushback on this, because I’ve had my intake team vet 20 different AI voice groups, and I’ve yet to find one I can really commit to. They all say it’s great for overnight calls, but you’re not testing against what you lose compared to a human. I don’t know if you want to talk about that now or next week.

 

Jay Ruane  26:04

No, we can talk about it briefly. We’ve been using an AI answering service for a while now — pretty new in the space — and I believed in it, and I still believe in it to some extent. But I am recommitting to getting back to humans in my firm as a differentiator, and as a way to charge more and deliver a higher level of service, while utilizing offshore talent. I can have an offshore person doing data entry overnight, and also answering my phones for that once-a-week 3 a.m. call.

 

Seth Price  26:44

The question is: with AI voice, like I always say, if you really suck, God bless, it’ll help you. But if you don’t really suck, the human is going to be better.

 

Jay Ruane  26:54

Yes, I love that. That’s the way to go.

 

Seth Price  26:58

We can leave it there for this week — how’s that?

 

Jay Ruane  27:00

All right, folks, that’s going to do it for us here on the Law Firm Blueprint. I am Jay Ruane, and he is Seth Price, and thank you for being with us. You can take us on the go anywhere by subscribing to and following the Law Firm Blueprint podcast. And I’ll challenge you, the audience: take a moment, go to our show, and give us a five-star review — we need a few more, it helps get the word out. And of course, you can catch us live on LinkedIn, and live in our Facebook group called the Law Firm Blueprint, every Thursday, 3 p.m. Eastern, 12 p.m. Pacific. I am Jay Ruane, and he is Seth Price, and we are the Law Firm Blueprint. Bye for now.