In this extra long special episode, Seth and Jay talk with Mark Britton, founder of Avvo, and talk about how Avvo came to be, and what insights Mark has for the future of law practice post Covid and beyond.
Hey welcome, welcome, welcome to another edition, the Thursday, July 23 edition of Maximum Growth live. Jay Ruane here with my good friend Seth over there. Say hi, Seth, how you doing today?
Doing great. Very excited for today’s show.
Yeah, I’ve been looking forward to the show all week, I’ve been doing my research, getting my notes ready, getting some questions ready, Seth, tell us who we have on the show today, let everybody know who’s coming on.
We got Mark Britton. And for those of you who don’t know, he’s the guy who founded Avvo, although it was a game changer. People have been playing around in this space, including myself trying to figure out how you could bring legal information and directories and reviews how you could bring all of that together for consumers to help them basically navigate the legal world. And this guy with a travel online experience, took the, he took the legal world by storm. And we’re going to like, I’d love to find out what was going through his mind. People were saying you can’t do this, and you shouldn’t do this. And lawyers shouldn’t participate. It was highly, highly controversial when it launched. And even until a couple of years ago, South Carolina was telling people, lawyers, you can’t be playing here. So this guy changed the legal landscape for sure. And can’t wait to see his insights.
Yeah, you know, it really it blows my mind when you think about it. I mean, I know I cut my teeth. You know, 20, 21 years ago, when I started doing things. And I got so much pushback from the lawyers in my community saying, oh, you know, no one needs to see a website, why are you giving out information? Why are you engaging with people online? And this guy is doing it at a national scale. And really, he was able to tap into something right, he tapped into something that the legal consumer wanted, that lawyers had never really considered that you know what maybe the consumer might be right in saying, listen, I want to know what people say about you. I want to know, answers to simple questions. So I can judge if I want to hire you. And I think it’s just mind blowing to think that, you know, he was able to take this platform, iterate it’s scale tremendously, and really give the legal consumer something that they wanted. And it’s really changed how all of us sort of approach our marketing, both online and off. So I’m really, really excited about what we have going uh, going on today. I think it’s going to be a phenomenal, phenomenal interview.
Awesome. Yeah, no, I mean, everything from the, you know, consumer perspective to lawyers to lawyer-nomics. The fact that they had a conference that was for many years, the destination, pre their, their sale to internet brands, that was where we went… You and I got to know each other over the years at that conference. And it was just fascinating how this one organization really became the sort of flagship of the b2c legal world for many, many years.
Yeah, you know, it’s really, it’s really a sort of a case study in how to take an idea when other people say, it’s crazy. And it’s not going to work in an industry, and actually just say, No, we’re going to keep going. And so I’m sure we have some questions about that. And I don’t really want to waste any time, because I think this interview is gonna go long, you know, we have a tendency to go long. So why don’t we bring on Mark right now we can get him into this conversation. And we can start talking about all things Avvo, and what he sees as the future because I think, you know, someone with his type of experience, and his type of sort of broad, you know, overview of the legal consumer and the legal consuming industry out there. I think he can add a lot to the conversation. What do you say?
Absolutely bring him in. Awesome.
So I’m going to bring him in right now. Give me one second. And here we go.
Mark, so excited to have you here today. This is awesome. It’s an honor to have you and I would love to get your insights and just the what you must have gone through building Avvo, I remember going to a DC bar event, it takes a lot to get you to a DC bar event, but I’m at a DC bar event and you’re there. And there are more naysayers telling you that you can’t do what you’re trying to do. Walk me through the early days. How did you get the gumption to create this game changing product?
Wow. Well, there’s a lot in there. And let me start by saying just thanks for having me. I think there are… I was always very interested in meeting entrepreneurial lawyers and Seth we connected very early at that bar meeting I believe, and honestly, I I was forgetting exactly where we met. But that’s the first time that you and I connected face to face was at that meeting, correct? Okay, well, anyway, so thank you, thank you for having me on and doing everything you’re doing. Because, you know, helping lawyers, just just having a conversation about how lawyers drive their practice how, I mean, you have so many lawyers out there. And this is one thing that I saw, you have these lawyers who, they, they have such big brains, and they can contribute so much. But they weren’t necessarily taught a lot of business skills. And so having someone whether it was Avvo, from 12, 14 years ago, or groups like this, that are getting together to talk about best practices, that’s super important. But when you talk about gumption, I mean, it’s not it was the need that drove this, it was the need on both the consumer side, and I’ll be very transparent, it was it was more the need on the consumer side that drove this. Because as I saw all the numbers, in law, it looked…so so go back, if you think about I really started my career in the internet, with travel. And back in the 90s, people were doing all of their travel online, excuse me offline, and they were doing it through travel agents, and it was super inefficient. So once we.. so I started out as general counsel at Expedia, and became ultimately was the number two at Expedia by the time I left, and I had gone through this process of really understanding the consumers path and travel. And so being an ex lawyer, and then having seen a lot of the business elements, I said to myself, Well, God, the arc here, for the travel consumer looks very similar to the legal consumer. And can we do some.. can we bring some of the same goodness. So I think that’s where the first spark was in creating just an Expedia like experience, but in researching and communicating with lawyers, in order to kind of book your legal trip, if you will, not to be too light hearted about it. Because it’s often dealing with pretty serious issues. But okay, so on the consumer side, a lot of consumers are lost, don’t know how to go about it very offline. And as a consequence, they just weren’t using lawyers. And that’s where it kicks in for lawyers is, so you know, I, I’ve spent my entire career I mean.. to this day, whether it’s my wife, or my uncle’s a judge, and they’re all these people in my life, I’m just surrounded by lawyers. And I knew so many lawyers that had big brains, and, and just all of this desire, right, and all this just audacity, if you will, to go out and succeed, both for their clients and themselves. But they didn’t have the muscle memory, no one taught that to them. And so, you know, the big push for Avvo was okay, if we can teach them more about the legal consumer, and how that operates, and how they can acquire those consumers, then we can help a lot of these lawyers succeed, we can, we can have all boats rise by having these…giving these lawyers a platform to where they can communicate better with the legal consumer, and convert them to clients. And so.. and then the client gets helped. And it’s just this virtuous circle that goes round and round.
I mean, one of the genius parts, I mean, you were on one side, battling regulation, you and Josh, and your whole team had to figure out how to navigate one world. And it seemed that around the time that this was rising, lawyers, were finally getting the idea that yeah, I got to be here, that this is a place I need to be. Whereas a generation before I was working with US law, you couldn’t convince a lawyer to get online at all, the timing was big, when you did that, I thought that some of the smartest things that were done was creating the user generated content that really created community because there were a lot of other law firm directories out there, there were the resources, but Avvo, you know, quickly leapfrogged everybody else, talk to us about some of the things that you found that, you know, you think helped drive that community and, and built Avvo to what it became?
Sure. So just going back to your DC bar question for a second because it plays into the how we built Avvo. So you know, you talk about that there were a lot of lawyers that needed help and and kind of implied in your question was this idea that there are a lot of lawyers that that wanted to grasp onto this, and that’s absolutely correct. But the regulators and, and in any bar, there are a number of curmudgeons, which I call them and they tend to be the old school lawyers and they exist today. And through really bullying the bar, they are going to make sure that the legal profession moves forward as slowly as possible. And that’s because a lot of these lawyers already have, like installed client bases, they already have successful practices, or they’re just technophobic. They’re, they’re afraid of technology. But just about anything innovative we tried to do an Avvo, there was a group of people that were going to the bar and saying this is horrible, this is going to undermine the profession. And that’s what you saw in DC that first time is, if you go back to the early, let’s call it early 2000s. So we launched Avvo in 2007. You know, this is pre iPhone, Yellow pages was still the largest referral source for legal cases. And, or at least it was the largest advertising platform. I mean, I think word of mouth and relationships was and will always be the greatest referral source. But that was, you know, it was just a different little, it was less a less technological time, a less internet time, if you will. And so as the Internet came on, in advertising, with the internet, etc, it was very frightening for a lot of people. And so when we launched, the fear of the unknown kicked in for the curmudgeons in the bars, etc. But to your point, there is a huge set, and I will include you in this set. There was a huge set of people who said, I, I embrace this new technology, and I know that I can communicate with and help my customers more if you give me the tool. So what are the tools just give me tools help me. And so I think we’re we really built a brand for lawyers in our community, and you’re talking, you know, 350,000 lawyers were using marketing using Avvo as a marketing platform at the end, by the time I left, Avvo is still very big and rolling along. But by the time that I left, we you know, we had this reputation and almost this this social contract, this relationship with these lawyers to say, we’re going to help you from the time that you actually go out and attempt to interact with somebody, all the way back to the time that you actually land them as a client, we’re going to give you better tools. And so one of the tools, which was slightly antithetical for the legal profession at that time, was giving away free content. So lawyers, one of the problems we had is all the lawyers just said, listen, if I’m going to lift a finger, if I’m going to lift a pen, not even a keyboard, probably, but if I’m going to lift a pen, I want to get paid for it. And, what we had to coach them on. and I think one of the ways we’ve really changed the industry is we’ve said no, think of how you build any relationship. You don’t.. you know, it’s so much of.. I often joke that so much of business development is what you learned dating in high school. They’re just very simple, blunt force relationship skills.
That doesn’t bode well for me. I didn’t date much in high school.
Okay, college, whenever you started dating and using those almost (inaudible) type of dating skills. But you know, it’s so simple and that, like if you’re going to build a relationship with someone, and a long term relationship, you start by building trust. And so much of that trust is just very simple communication. And if you look at the entire Avvo system, it was about building trust, with the consumer, letting the lawyer.. like we provided the marketplace, but we were there to provide trust or tools so that the lawyer could drive this beginning of a trustful relationship. And so the the thing that exploded Avvo, so the Avvo rating was always front and center. But really what exploded for Avvo was the q&a. When we put that q&a forum out there, not only did the lawyers and again, that early entrepreneurial lawyer said, well, this is interesting, I have a free platform to put this out there, and I can build up my online profile, I can build up my reputation, but then the consumer demand around us. And again, the curmudgeon said, oh, you’re just giving away work for free, and you’re you’re taking down the billable hour and you’re demeaning the profession. But instead what happened is all these people came in and started relationships with these lawyers. And because the lawyer gave them classic, what’s called inbound marketing where you, you, you you build a trustful relationship you show them or you don’t tell them on a billboard, you show them that you have expertise and that you care and that they can trust you, that drives a relationship to where they hire you. And so, to this day, within Avvo, it is this massive, massive q&a, where lawyers and consumers are interacting, and it’s all driven, as you pointed out, Seth, by that by that user, the lawyer generated user content.
And what’s interesting, because as you were coming of age, so to speak, the blogger community was exploding. And the bloggers wrote about what they thought was interesting. This was the first time where consumers had input as to what they wanted the answers for, which I think was that that intersection was just genius. Because again, now it seems obvious, but at the time, it just wasn’t being done.
Yeah, I think one place that we.. where we were smart, where I can pat our whole team on the back. Again, we came out of Expedia, we came out of the travel business that went through the online explosion, 5 to 10 years earlier. I started working with Expedia in 1998, actually became their general counsel in 1999. So we did and it was exploding, then that was web 1.0. But yeah, the the one of the big learnings from Expedia was that you, you understand what the consumer wants before you build the product. And there’s a lot of smart ways and not necessarily expensive ways that you can do consumer research. Now, early Expedia was was within Microsoft. Right. So I started at Microsoft, when I started at Expedia. So we had a lot of research resources. But you know, the simple question of, of intake, interviews, exit interviews, those sorts of things that lawyers can do, you can find out a lot. And now with all the online tools, you can understand how they’re searching, etc. But where we were fairly revolutionary is we said, hold on, hold on, we’re not going to build a product that lawyers want. And this is going to look very different, because we’re going to go out and ask consumers how they’re lost and how they want their lawyers to act. And that’s that that was the beginning of Avvo and why it it exploded with consumers, because whether they felt it or not, maybe the most web savvy consumer said, oh, they built this for me. But everybody else just said, jod, this feels good. And it’s because they knew it was being built for them. Rather than just this crappy lead gen, let me trick you into hiring a lawyer, which is not again, how any relationship is built, listening to the consumer. And there’s, I won’t go on and on about this, but I can. But there’s a huge lesson in there. I mean, that can be taken all the way down to that solo practitioner, that really understanding who your target audience is, and how you speak to them is a critical part of marketing your practice.
You know, I’m gonna pivot for a second because you know, all of us sort of came together online. But then you said, “Hey, let’s take this offline,” and lawyer-nomics was born, which for many, many years, was a definitive legal go to conference. Jay and I got to know each other at that over the years. You know, and that first conference, I still think goes down as one of the greatest legal conferences ever, where you had people from inside.
You’ve always said that.
(Inaudible) Google and Bing, it was just crazy. One of the things what I’d love to sort of know as we talk to our audience, and think about things that lawyers can use for growth, you’ve, you’ve met lawyers through through this era, you had a you had a website, you’ve had a sales machine. What have you seen are the distinctions between the lawyers that are sort of spinning wheels that are coming up with excuses and curmudgeons versus the ones that really, you know, have have scaled and, and build successful practices? Have you noticed anything over the years? Sort of, from from all that different experience?
Oh, man, I mean, that’s, that’s three hours of conversation, I think, because there’s so much but let me see if I can prioritize some of it. So without overdoing this point. So first of all, that consumer centricity. So this isn’t a huge surprise, because I’ve spoken all over the nation for years on this but, great, so lawyers don’t always appreciate it, that they are a b2c. So business to consumer business. If you’re a b2c business, you need to first understand, like consumer marketing principles, and a huge part of that is again, identifying the target audience and figuring out but a framework of messaging for them. That brings up maybe the the, a bigger issue. So one thing that always fascinated me is lawyers are so good at building, I think a lot of success if you say I’m at point A, and I’d like to get to point B, which is my objective. I think of it as train tracks, right. And even in law, I think in law school, and by the way, Seth and I went to the same law school, but I think I’m quite a bit older than Seth, I can’t remember what what year you graduated Seth, but we did not know each other then. And, but in law school, I believe it was in torts. And it was this idea that in order to put together your argument, you’re closing the track and getting it along a straight line. And so lawyers, a lot of lawyers go, Oh, that makes total sense. So as I build my argument, I build the track. When it comes to business processes, lawyers don’t think in tracks at all. And they, the reality is, you have you’re at point A, and you’re trying to get a customer from point A to an objective, which is hiring you. And they just ad hoc, have all these systems that don’t line up. And I’m not saying these need to be online systems. I’m not saying they need to be offline systems, they’re just the systems that work for you. And so you don’t have a lot of lawyers that sit back and say, Okay, what is what is my process for getting a customer from point A to point B, and that that’s why like, why all these commercial websites are kicking your butt, lawyer, is because they build a process from A to B, that gets the customer along the track very smoothly, do you do the same? So really entrepreneurial lawyers, what I loved about them, and yes, a lot of them were leveraging technology. But they would say, okay, when I acquire a client here, then they do this, then they do this, then they do this. And they actually maybe another, another visualization of that track is a funnel. And they would run them down the track or run them down the funnel, to a point where they could usually get them on the phone and close them or have someone within their firm close them. And so entrepreneurial lawyers, I just consistently are very good at taking the same systematic pieces that drive their practice, and applying that to their business processes. So I think another big one is technology. So the the phobia around technology for so many lawyers… so I think there’s a macro phobia in business and business practices, because again, we didn’t go to business school, and we’re not teaching any of those principles in law school. But when it comes to technology, specifically, I think it is driven at the highest levels by the Supreme Courts and the bars. And they’re just promoting this idea that there, there’s a chance that you’re going to use a tool wrong. And that is going to be the end of your practice. And it just can’t be like, in order for technology to succeed, so much … or your practice to succeed, so much of it has to be about experimentation, like I want to plug in these different pieces and test whether they work for me and work for my customers. So there’s a requirement there that you spend a lot of time understanding from acquiring the customer to bringing them in and onboarding them to the actual what I call the art or manufacturing line of building the brief for the transactional documents to actually porting this to the end user, whether it’s a judge or opposing counsel or counsel on the other side of the transaction. You need to be intentional, and you know, be building a system with technology that kind of has these handoffs the whole way. And lawyers oftentimes will just say, listen, because I’m so fearful of.. I’m not going to learn how the technology works at each step of the track, or each part of the funnel, because it just feels too overwhelming. And really successful lawyers have said now, I know that there are you know, I know there are tools for acquisition. And often they’ll start with the middle they’ll say I know there’s the equivalent of a CRM platform and I’ll bet you a lot of people who hear this don’t even know what a customer relationship management platform is, but they’ll say there’s some sort of core platform where I’m going to interact with my customers, and I’m going to have a track that goes out and acquires and brings them into this. And then I’m going to have a track that communicates with them regularly. And then I’m going to have tools for my manufacturing line, and then tools for my communication to the other side or to the end user. And it’s, it’s heavily technology driven, with all sorts of auto reminders and auto notifications, and auto communication, auto interaction that the best firms are using. And so that’s kind of those are kind of the three big chunks that I think we should cover here, where it’s the, you know, that business understanding in general, and within that, really understanding that running a b2c business and thinking about how that end user flows into it and what they want need, and then how they build the track and have technology support that track. That’s how super successful entrepreneurial lawyers tend to operate. And by the way, just being totally upfront, I saw the most entrepreneurial lawyers in the kind of solo to small, who didn’t feel weighed down by a big executive committee or a bunch of infighting among partners, because lawyers just love to disagree with each other. And they can just go try this stuff out and build it for themselves, experiment and figure out what works for them.
Yeah, ironic. Jay, I’d love you to jump in because Jay is sort of the thought leader that many of us turn to both on systems and on experimentation. Nobody’s better at documenting systems as well as testing crazy, wacky ideas that some of which come out to be big.
Yeah, some of them come out to be big, and some of them fall terribly. But that’s just what it’s all about.
Exactly. I mean, Jay, not to interrupt you. But that is one thing we got to get out of the legal world is this fear of failure, like businesses fail, business ideas, within a company failed daily. They create train wrecks daily. And you got to be comfortable with that.
So Mark, one of the things that you just talked about, and I think it’s important for our viewers and listeners to understand is that, you know, coming from the travel space, I have a feeling, I don’t know this, but I’m sure you can fill me in, that there was a budget for focusing on the user experience. And from the when you were with Avvo, the user experience both on the consumer side and on the lawyer side, seem to be heavily invested in, because it was very easy to claim my profile to update my profile. And then to engage with people. One of the biggest challenges for lawyers I have found is that they’ll hang a shingle, and yet they won’t have ever purchased legal services themselves, or their type of legal services that they sell. So can you talk to me a little bit about how the, the investment in user experience can really help drive a practice or a business forward?
Sure, so these are two of those elements that I.. it actually touches on every element that I just talked about.. so you’re asking a b2c, you’re actually asking a business question, Jay, a thoughtful business question. And it involves the acquisition and the track of actually, first interacting with that customer first touch, and how you actually bring them in. And often that’s technology supported. Anytime you’re talking about a user interface, you’re probably thinking you’re thinking technology, but not necessarily. I mean, I think an admin picking up the phone. That’s a user interface. Yeah. So let’s, let’s just talk about how companies like Expedia and Avvo think about design or user interfaces or user experience. So there’s a fantastic book, that’s, it’s it’s aging out, but it drove a lot of thinking early on within the entire tech industry. And it was called, don’t make me think. And it was kind of it for years, it was the UX Bible. And that’s user experience, bible and design Bible. And it’s, again, I don’t know if it’s been updated, but it was big 10 years ago. But still, the premise is so important. And it’s this idea, that with, when you first touch that consumer and bring them along a track or down a funnel, the more that you make them think, the more that you’re failing. And so what lawyers love to make things complicated because we’ve been taught as lawyers that if we make it complicated, we get paid more. And that’s why we, we use words that other people don’t use. we wear clothing that other people don’t wear, we have processes that people don’t understand. Because that allows us to extract higher rents, it allows us to charge more money, because not anyone can just go do it. And so that was a fabulous model for 150 years. Okay, I’ll give you to, well, if we go back to England, like to infinity, but you know, the, one of the one of the things that the web has driven is this idea that anything is accessible at my fingertips. And it’s easy to why do they think it’s easy, it’s because there’s been tremendous research into how the customer thinks, what they want, and then there’s a design team behind that, that makes sure that they build a path that gives them exactly what they want. And they make it…they don’t make them think. So. For lawyers. You know, I’ve so often said to them, like, how hard is it for someone to hire you. And this is, you know, you’ll have consultants that come in, and they’re mystery shoppers or whatever, there’s, there’s value in that. But what you need is a, a smart business person that you trust deeply, probably within your firm. And the good news is you have more and more business savvy people being hired, whether that’s lawyers or people that are MBA types, into firms that are helping them think through how they get from end to end. But you need someone within that firm who is saying, okay, these are our tracks, these are our processes. And we cannot if, if, if we are having at any point in that funnel, or around any part of the track people getting stuck, we need to fix it immediately. Because we’re making them think, and that’s, again, it’s a much longer, it’s a three hour conversation unto itself. But it is that premise that I that that the lawyers have to operate better on.
That’s ironic Deloitte is now for big law, just announcing its own consulting services along those lines.. over last 24 hours. One of the things I’d love to get your thoughts on, I always find that I learned a lot from missteps. What were some of the things that you tried that didn’t work, lessons learned along the journey, that might that might resonate? Were there things that you thought would resonate either with the public or with lawyers, where it turned out that wasn’t the case, and something that we might be able to get some takeaways from?
Well, boy, you know, so I Avvo was a 12 year journey. And so it’s kind of like asking which one of the 100,000 didn’t work. I mean, and this, so it’s really important for lawyers to understand, I think that they envision that there is a type of person. And this comes back to me all the time, like people will say, oh, you ran Avvo. So you kind of do it perfectly all the time. It’s like, oh, no, we we only kept the good stuff. And we, we made so many mistakes along the way. But I will tell you, you know, I’m not sure I, one of our big misses. This is probably my greatest professional failure, and it surely was within Avvo. But this is..it doesn’t go directly to your question, but it sticks out so dramatically, then I’ll…you telling me if this is not interesting. But we launched something called Avvo legal services. And this was fixed price, fixed scope, legal services. And it was this simple. We one place in our track where we saw a lot of people getting hung up, as they were saying, I don’t know what lawyers do. And all I know is that they’re expensive. So I’m not hiring. So I’m gonna come in, I’m going to take some free, you know, q&a, what have you. But um, but I don’t, I don’t hire lawyers. And what lawyers still don’t appreciate is that’s over half of the US population that thinks that way. I hate lawyers. I don’t know what they do. I just know they’re expensive, I’m not hiring them. And so we said, well, we can fix that. We’ll tell them what it costs and what the lawyer does. And we’ll break it into chunks of where you can have a $40 phone call, or these fixed price services. I’m just telling you, it’s everything that the consumer wants and you had these lawyers that were on it immediately and building just tremendous momentum by building relationships through those $40 phone calls or the packages because they would know that they could upsell them to other legal services over time, as long as they built the relationship. And that was the whole idea. So we absolutely got it right with the customer. We absolutely got it right with the lawyer… where we didn’t get it right was with the curmudgeons. And.. I to this day, it is fascinating to me, how quickly they went to the bars and asked for non binding advisory opinions in order to freeze the market. And what that I think the the irony of it is, if you look like where people should be fearful are the legal zooms of the world where they’re going around lawyers, like Legal Zoom has now added on this idea where they do some referring to lawyers, but we’re talking about hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue that doesn’t involve lawyers at all. And that’s because they’re building b2c products for consumers that are really basic entry level super easy. But but my miscalculation there was how aggressively the curmudgeons would try to put something like this to bed because they just didn’t understand it. And you know that whether we’d like to talk about it or not, we have a monopoly in legal and monopolies are not inherently bad. And I can see all sorts of arguments to why the lawyer monopoly could provide tremendous benefit. But monopolies are bad when they stifle innovation. And when they’re not moving as quickly as the consumer, or as other industries, like if it’s moving slowly monolithically, um, that is where monopolies get bad, and that’s why we tend to break them up. I am very concerned about the legal profession where we can.. where you take someone who is.. they just..they’re technophobic, or they have that installed base, and they say, Listen, I don’t totally understand this. And because of this, I don’t like it. And therefore I’m going to bully the bar. And I’m going to get this non binding advisory opinion. And that freezes everybody from testing and possibly making a few mistakes, because they’re so frightened by this advisory opinion, that everyone just stays in place. And that is where we’re failing as a profession is for everybody that’s kind of forced to stay in place, even the most entrepreneurial lawyers. So it’s not exactly how you asked it. But really, that is, that is something that didn’t work. But what is so necessary to expand the market. I’m not talking about, like taking high end legal services and replacing or high margin legal services and replacing them with low end Legal Services. I’m talking about actually taking a market that is on the transactional side, probably a $500 million market and turning it into a billion. You know, it may be a trillion dollar market, I don’t know. But something massive.
You know, when you were building it, you we talked about challenges. One of the thoughts I’d love you to just talk about was the business model itself selling to attorneys, because we’re on the other side of this as buyers and whether we build our websites, were we use PPC, whether we were using Avvo. Talk to us a little bit about what you learned during that evolution of trying to figure out how to monetize the traffic that Avvo was so good at getting.
Well, yeah, I mean, there’s a science, right. I mean, there is, again, it’s systematic. And so it is… Okay, so, so think about the size of this market, and I actually just misspoke right, it’s not a $500 million market, it’s a $500 billion market. Because the.. just on the transactional side. And, and again, you have a lot of estimations and it doesn’t matter. The numbers are just gargantuan. Okay. And and so there are a lot of people out there that would like to hire lawyers. And anytime you’re measuring anything in hundreds of billions of dollars. There’s just.. there’s so much money flowing through the pipe, right? So what you’re doing is you’re going out and you’re kind of fishing. Try not to use too many metaphors and analogies here right? But you’re fishing for conversations. And as you go out and fish for those conversations, then as you think about your, your, your different tracks, and we talked about figuring out where, you know, the tracks don’t work, and I’m totally mixing metaphors. But the the, there is a there is a process that goes all the way back to this, this idea of the themes we’ve already talked about: So understanding the consumer, and then how do we convert them? How do we get.. turn them into a client and close those tracks the whole way? Okay, so as we go out, and we do our fishing, well, how do we do that? Like, how do we even know where they are? Well, the first is, again, understanding your target audience who, what is the best type of case for you? What is the best type of customer? Who are the customers that turn into the longest term customers who drive the..will drive the highest margin in an existing case, and will drive long term value for you? Those are the types of questions that you would ask. Because you have a lot of lawyers and say, well, I’ll take anybody, but that’s not true. And so who do you want? And where are they hanging out? And a big part of where they’re hanging out, is on the web. Okay, so let’s just stay web specific, because you’re asking about how Avvo did it. So in our system, what we did, there used to be much greater access at that time, to keyword data, and understanding what Google used to be much more transparent around what people were searching for. So for us, we would go fishing in those places where we saw two things. The highest volume of queries, and within that system, often, you know, it’s not just like, personal injury lawyer, it it, it kind of started out that way. But over time, the queries, you’re looking at the association of a number of queries where it’s personal injury lawyer, plus the state, plus a car being involved or plus a truck, then there are all these elements as you get to understand what type of customers are most desired by the lawyers and are in the greatest need. But we would figure out from those keywords, who were doing the greatest searches. And then we would also look at the associated value of those searches, because we would want to know which lawyers were willing to pay… like if a lawyer is paying 65 bucks a click for, and I think all of your listeners understand the CPC terminology. So, so if they, at that time, they were paying 65 bucks a click for Austin DUI, it doesn’t necessarily mean that’s efficiently priced. But it shows us that there is an inefficiency within the market there that needs help, whether it’s on a consumer side or lawyer side, and that’s probably the lawyer side, because that’s way too high. So we would look at those two things, and that’s marrying the… we would understand what the consumers were looking for, and what, where the lawyers were having problems. And we would see where those two overlap. And that’s where we would put a lot of our efforts into making things easier across those types of customers and those types of lawyers. Okay. So you know, your lawyers today, there are still still all sorts of tools, and all sorts of practices for understanding which consumers are driving. So first of all, your target audience, and then where they’re hanging out, we can have more of that conversation here. But let me let me jump to the next part of the science. And that is, so okay, we’ve gone fishing, we go out, we’ve been pretty smart about about bringing some of them in, and then they land. Now, again, a lot of lawyers don’t appreciate how important this landing is, once you get that fish in the boat. And it’s just as important for in Avvo. That when they land, they can’t be confused. They can’t kind of wonder where they are. And so in the Avvo world, it was understanding where people landed, and how quickly they left that page. So we would look for those pages where we were seeing a lot of people come in and land and then leaving quickly. And we would say wait a second. Okay. So this page was… we set.. we set up our train tracks to say, this page is is for this type of consumer coming in and landing here and they’re telling us that it’s not for them, they’re just they’re out of there. We say okay, that’s a problem. So you’d have the team go in and play with the content. To understand whether we were landing them on the wrong type of content, or something we were doing on that page was confusing to them. And again, I think a lot of lawyers are looking for the silver bullet. But no, this is where like the manual labor comes in, of actually looking at these pages. And yes, there are tools for this. But it really comes down to somebody sitting down with individual, your, your biggest, most important pages or locations where people are landing. And this can even be picking up the phone. Right? So if you’re pushing somebody to a phone or an intake form, whatever it is, and and people are abandoning, then you have a problem. And that’s that conversion piece that a lot of lawyers are just like… I don’t know, I don’t really understand these systems. So I don’t know, just, you know, Steve, or Janet, you just you talk to him. And I don’t know, they didn’t convert whatever, we’ll do better next time, or we’ll, they just, they’re not even thinking like that. So we were very scientific and understanding the target audience going out and figuring out where they were, building our systems to pull them into a specific page and making sure that that page took them through a very smooth process, to getting to the point of a buy button, which was actually reaching out and trying to contact a lawyer. That’s what the buy button was for us. And very similarly, for everybody watching this, the buy button is then picking up the phone, talking to someone within your office, and then ultimately, you helping them understand your value proposition and closing them.
Jay, we’re getting getting late here. But any, any final questions?
So I just Mark, you know, you’ve really done a lot in the legal community over the last, you know, 15 years, where do you see the interaction of legal service providers and legal service consumers merging in the next decade or so? Where do you think lawyers should be paying attention as things, you know, change? And technology seems to be rapidly advancing to allow for that engagement? What should our listeners what should they be looking out for as they move forward?
Okay, let’s try some higher level stuff and maybe get into some specific stuff. Very high level. So I touched on the lawyer monopoly, it is a monopoly. And that’s okay. But if, if the monopoly does not become more consumer centric, I think the worry or the challenge is that you’re going to have more types of systems, whether they’re websites or alternative types of service providers, they’re going to actually erode the lawyers position like… you’re going to have people work around lawyers, if they’re not providing simple systems that that don’t make them think. And so I know, that’s macro. And that’s hard for an individual lawyer to say, well, what am I going to do about that? Well, I do think that you can work within your bars to be a counter voice to a lot of the curmudgeons or the executive directors that are afraid of the curmudgeons to help them understand that, you know, we as a profession need to do better. Within that I don’t think a lot of lawyers appreciate how many people with money aren’t using lawyers. And I think a lot of times it gets framed as an access to justice issue to where they’re like, oh, you know, that’s those people couldn’t pay me anyway. And and, you know, that’s not going to help power my business. But I would start first in saying that I believe wholeheartedly that we do need to provide broader access to justice and we do need to help people who can’t pay us, and and we as a profession could do a much better job of making our systems simple at the at the industrial, at the professional, at the bar level, and which is allowing more systems and more experimentation so that we can broaden the market to them. But even if we cut out that access to justice piece and say, just as people who like… we’re talking about people who make 85,000 and more, like they’re not using lawyers, half of them are not using lawyers so we could expand the entire market by 100%. If we were if we were building products that understood them and for them, and and as a professional, we’re just we’re not. We’re kind of stuck in…we love to think we’re rolling as a profession but I’m here to tell you we’re stuck in first gear. So that’s kind of the macro. I think on the on the more micro where things are trending. So I would have said this before Coronavirus, but the acceleration is real and that is mobile, and so, so computing systems, computing platforms, heavily driven through a mobile device. So I used to, in a lot of my speeches to judges, I guess, this showed up in speeches to lawyers as well. But I used to hold up an iPhone. And it had four people. And I used to say this is the court of the future. And lawyers are just, I mean, judges would go crazy and be like that, you know, you can’t I have to be there in the courtroom, I have to see the litigant, I have to see the witness. And I would just kind of look at that picture and think of, I think, through the phone, you can see them, and I would ask anybody watching this, like, if you think you’ve learned less from me, or, or understand me less, because you watch this through a video, let me know. But the point is, you haven’t. And so any part that we’ve talked about, any part of the switch, or any part of the manufacturing line, or just from point A to point B, it is going to need to be driven by a platform that you can measure things. And I think it’s anchored by a CRM that has acquisition tools, that helps you land the customer and interact with the customer, I think platforms that let you engage in the art of law, that actually help you machines, helping you build your brief or your your transactional documents or whatever it is, and and then ultimately getting to the judge or the other side platforms that communicate going that way as well. So there’s a platform where it’s all technologically piece to piece to piece to piece woven together, so all the tracks hang together. That, that is kind of the base that will sit there. And then the idea that the, any of that needs to be done in person, not any, that every part of that needs to be done in person, is going to go away very quickly. So I’m a big believer that for solos and smalls, they will not need offices in the next 10 years, they will need meeting places. They won’t need offices, they can they can do this today, by the way, but I’m just talking about how the profession evolves. They won’t need offices, the customers won’t expect offices, they will have more customers that they meet, land, engage in their art, through that platform with the customer without ever meeting them in person. Without ever having a physical interaction with that person. They will, they will do so much of it. And everything you think about as a lawyer in how you present and how you don’t make people think, needs to be within this size. Okay, so how do I how do I structure anything? How do I, how do my, any piece of technology that is viewed by the consumer, you have to make sure it works in that size. And it actually needs to work in about that size, because you’re going to be talking to a lot of people like this. But that is the big move to where it is going to be more technology, more platform more mobile, more not corporeal, not in person. And that’s (inaudible) going. And if we… let me just give you the last piece of this, not to sound too ominous. But every one of those pieces can be done predominantly by machines. Okay, so the fear that will come in for a lot of lawyers is like, well, I got, you know, like, machines can’t be running the legal profession. I’m not talking about that happening today. But every piece of that switch can predominantly all those switches can be predominantly run by machines. And a lot of it can be automated and driven by machine learning. The only place that lawyers truly are going to add value is by bringing in personal relationships, trust and purpose. There’s judgment, like the machines, it’ll be a long time before the machines can get there on true situational judgment. So if we don’t allow technology and embrace technology and allow for some mistakes, to understand how we as lawyers can build in the technology and be so efficient that we figure out our appropriate place at the top of the artful pyramid to provide value to the customer, then others are going to do it for us and that’s going to be the erosion of the profession. I’m talking about the next 20 years. I’m not talking about the next 20 months, but we need to get working on it now.
That was awesome. And I gotta say, on a personal level, I feel that my business journey through Price Benowitz, and then starting Blushark, it was Avvo sort of saying, yes, this could be done, you were pushing the envelope. And that was sort of an inspiration for many of us scaling our firms, because it was the same basic techniques that were saying, hey, if this is… this can be done nationally, let’s take those same consumer centric techniques and leverage them and scale them in our own shops.
Yeah, I mean, on a lot of this, just take, take the website you love the most. And figure out how those… like why do you love it, just write down why you love it. And you’ll find that you can bring a lot of that love to your own websites and practice and your own train tracks and system.
Absolutely. Well, thank you so much. I cant wait to see the next chapter. And, you know, excited to see where you, where you go next.
Thanks so much. Both of you. Keep up the great work as I started with, it’s so important that we have people like you, groups like yours, that are getting together and sharing these ideas, because we don’t move forward as a profession, unless we’re taking this type of action. So thank you. Be well.
Thank you so much Mark, I appreciate it. Wow Seth, that was just…that was just mind blowing, you know, all the good stuff that we got there. It just, it was really great. And I think a couple of things that our audience needs to help us with down below. If you can comment, and let us know if you’re viewing this on desktop. Or if you’re viewing it on mobile, really interesting how Mark was talking about the future is mobile. And you know, we all think that already. But I’d really love to know what our audience is doing, if they’re consuming this on mobile, or if they’re consuming this on desktop. So please comment below for that. And then one of the other things that I think you and I both have talked about offline, is about how innovation really drives things. It made me think of Steven Levkoff, and his new gavel initiative, where he’s bringing small claims coaching to a client base down in Georgia that will gain access, and he’s really tapped into something great there. And so I think that’s something that other people should look towards ways that they can innovate. And just boy, this this whole interview, I’m going to go back and and listen to the recording again, because there’s so many nuggets that we can pull up. What do you think of Seth?
Absolutely, its great, I mean, to watch marks journey, and being part of each step, you know, whether it be, you know, first person to really push reviews, user generated content, lawyer-nomics, where a bunch of us got together pre-max law that was the pre-max law was was thrown by them. So to me, it was a little sentimental. And as I mentioned, sad because the new company while good at making money, not quite as good a community, and we need to find and cherish the fact that we have our tribe here and make sure that we continue to grow and push that innovation.
Yeah, I think that’s one of the benefits of the Maximum Growth Live community, the maximum lawyer community, you know, is is that sense of community and how we can all help each other achieve our dreams. So with that, we’ve got over once again, but definitely worth the extra time this week. I’m Jay Ruane. That’s Seth Price, thank you so much for being with us. And we’ll see you next Thursday for another edition of Maximum Growth Live. Bye for now. Thanks, folks.
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