EP 287 - Mike Mellor - From Chaos to Clarity: Fixing Law Firm Marketing

Attorneys are notorious for a shining new quarter approach. You know, You'll have a conversation they'll say, hey, you know what, You're right, I need to focus on these specific folks in this fast fashion world. Okay, great, all right, everything else just becomes noise, right, But then thirty minutes later that oh, hey, I just got an offer to speak. It's like, okay, is that aligned with with what you're doing?

We just had this conversation, you know, And so getting them to just focus it makes their life easier, not harder. You're listening to the Legal Mastermind podcast presented by Market My Market with your hosts Eric Bersano, Ryan Klein, and Chase Williams, the go to podcast for learning from the experts and the legal community about effective ways to grow and manage your law firm. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Legal Mastermind podcast. Today, my guest is Mike.

Miller, who is the president and founder of seven four to two Advisors. Mike, Welcome to the podcast. Thanks so much for having me, Eric, I appreciate it, sure well. I always like to start off with a brief history of who we're chatting with today, so the listeners kind of understand where you're coming from and your experience.

So with that, could you kind of give us a little bit of background on yourself. Sure? Sure. So spent over two decades in professional services marketing essentially never never been sold, never sold a widget, but always sort of sold people were in products thereof.

And yes, started my career in finance for Brown Brothers in Deutsch asset management and went over to the Big four for a hot minute, which was a blast. Worked on a big deal team over there, basically flying into random cities and sleeping in conference rooms and then putting putting teams together to win new business. And I moved over to legal about thirteen years ago and progressively sort of swimming downstream. Had been in an am love fifty one hundred and two hundred firms and uh, you know, recently, as as you noted, just launched a new consultancy primarily focused on that small and mid size firm.

And essentially what I'm trying to do is solve three problems. First, one is that we see that the buying cycles completely changed. You know, folks are fifty seven percent of way through the process, the buying process. Uh, you know, when they buy legal or other B t B services and you know, and and attorneys are historically not great at you know, kind of keeping their bios up today, making sure that they got their best foot forward digitally, you know, and how they reach out on LinkedIn, that's you know, how we've connected, and you know, that's kind of the new the new normal is that that that that's you know, and when you're not around your your your digital footprint is your business card, and so you know, really working with attorneys of all shapes and sizes to help them do that.

The second second issue is that whenever you're doing a pitch or proposal or capabilities document or even an awards submission, it seems like constantly reinventing the wheel. And that's happened upstream. It even happened at my KPMG days where you know, we were doing we were doing deals and doing you know, working on cases or you know, other projects, and we didn't have that information at our fingertips. And you know, that's often the difference between winning and losing.

You know, you don't have your experience out there and you find out a week later someone was on vacation and they did the exact same deal and you're like, oh, man, I wish we had that, So really putting in those systems in place to just help people to access the great work that the firm has done. And thirdly, with that, it's really that we've got that data. It exists somewhere. It might be in a matter intake, it might be in an invoicing system, but it's not really centralized.

So how do we how are we putting those those projects together? Obviously I do a lot of you know CMO uh sort of you know, fractional CMO work and coaching for for attorneys, and you have a few of them. But you know, I really realized there was a big market void in legal with those particular issues, and so I'm really excited to take that and really excited to be here. So thanks, yeah, well thanks for the background.

You know, it's a running theme and hopefully the audience doesn't continue to be insulted. But the running theme is attorneys are great at being attorneys, but not always at running a business. So apologize to all the lawyers out there, but that's really you know, one of the reasons for this podcast is just to help educate and offer some resources that can help with that because you went to school to be lawyers and not to run businesses. But if you find yourself running a law firm, I think, you know, a skill set like yours is very helpful.

You know. One of the things when you're going over your history and your bio, you know, the data driven was something that I saw over and over. You know, can you give us some examples of you know, the type of data that you like as an input and then what we would see on the other end of that as an output. Sure.

I like to aggregate data into what I call the three eyes of data. You have your individual data, which is, hey, you know, somebody came. They you know, I invited them to a webinar, I invited them to an event. What has that individual person done?

Jenny Smith, she comes, she opens up and you know, an invite, she registers for an event, she forces a client alert to somebody. You know, perhaps we kind of align up her hip address so we can start to see that Jenny, you know, may may have gone to JD. Supra and looked at a particular article, or you know, maybe maybe we tie her in now and now we see that she's going to our real estate practice. Okay, what are we doing with that information?

You know, that can help inform something like, uh, you know, hey, she fords it to a bunch of her fashion designer friends and it's an immigration alert, and you know, all of a sudden you're looking and saying, hey, you know what, it is true that this implication of recent EU US immigration aspect is really affecting those people. Can we pivot and instantly maybe maybe do a very specific webinar just focused on that particular audience. You have industry data, which is something like maybe a Bloomberg Law where you could look on and say, hey, who's doing Pfizer's securities litigation work?

You know, is that spread out? If Scattin's doing all of it, you know, maybe that's not such an easy sort of acorn to pull off a pull out, but you know, if they're spread that workout in trademark litigation for example, hey maybe there's an opportunity here. We see that they've used this firm, but that's really doesn't seem to make sense because they're maybe a smaller market cap and they're using a SCATIN and paying you know, twenty five hundred bucks an hour, So helping that to inform that.

And then the third one I use is really internal data, which is really about correlations. So we're seeing that eighty percent of our fashion clients come in from trademark for a trademark matter, and then typically they'll go and we'll use them in corporate Okay, well we're using these twenty percent of these other twenty percent of fashion companies, we aren't doing their trademark work for Hey, let's let's try to put together strategies that can help andfur al that. So I like to kind of focus those on those three different areas.

And obviously the holy grail is when you can combine those three and whoever is listening, if they could ever put together some sort of technology to make that happen, I think they'd be on an island somewhere. So one of the bigger pieces, obviously and growing or a law firm, would be, you know, the marketing side of things. Can you talk a little bit to how you've seen that landscape change over the last several years, and do you have any tips of And I know not all law firms are the same, so you know, you might have one tip for this size law firm or for this practice area, but kind of what you see out there of how things have changed.

You know, I feel like they've changed slowly over the last twenty years, but over the last five years they've changed rapidly. So it's it's everything's been compressed these last five years and lots of different options. That's a wonderful and so that I couldn't agree more. It's definitely an exciting time to be here.

You know, I think that you know, historically, you know, law has been sort of viewed as this craft, right, much like the medical profession. Things were done on handshakes. Folks didn't they thought marketing was very uncouth and sort of ambulance chasy, and you know that that was sort of it. But you had some innovative firms that started I think, yeah, that's sort of a one component of it.

And then you had the laterals and so a lateral now goes and they take all the clients, and everyone thought that, hey, this was an institutional client. And then you see that other firms are doing things, and attorneys being risk averse, you know, they kind of feel like they now have permission to go do that now that other their competitors are doing it. So you're seeing a lot of kind of keeping up with the joneses, I think, and now to your point, over the last five years, I've seen firms just kind of completely drop the old school model.

You're looking at some of these firms who were remote only who are you know, really investing in you know, you're seeing salespeople who are you know, non lawyers and they hate that term, but you know, folks who really specialize and like you said, went to school for this and you know, really have both the theory and the practical components to to really drive revenue. So you know, I think you're seeing a lot of a lot of focus and in that sort of permission, I think that folks who are very tight with their clients, nobody's talking to them, especially somebody who's not a lawyer, and a little bit of a chicken egg scenario.

But you're seeing, you know, personally, you know, I started kind of bringing in new business with my firm and thankfully they were accepting and encouraging of that, and you know, you start to see, hey, you know what this person can really add value. You know, they kind of see in a much different way. They're not so myopic. Maybe they see the forest a little bit more and can really connect dots and start to pull people together.

So that's been that's been really exciting. And you know, and so my my business has really been focused on the smaller and mid sized firms. You know, those big amlov firms, they've got pricing teams and proposal teams, and you know, you're seeing these mid sizes who are competing. Obviously they're a little more palatable price point, but obviously the sophistication is there, especially in the in the bigger markets.

And then you're seeing a bunch of folks who you know, maybe spin off. You know, Celendian Gays are great example of folks spinning off very top tier you know, two thousand dollars plus you know about the company sort of litigation they go out. They don't have that overhead. Or you know, a regional firm who's you know, growing and you know, really competes in the market, they don't have that overhead.

And so my point is sort of you don't necessarily need to have these bells and whistles. You don't need a million dollar salesforce CRM, especially if you're not even inputting. Uh, you know, some of the lunches that you're going to and things like that. So, but you do need a system of some sort, whether that's an Excel and aggregating experience and being able to sort of tag and sort that information.

Well, we're you know, that doesn't have to be super expensive, but you do need a system in order to compete because those Amlov fifty m, one hundred folks have these things that their fingertips. They got dedicated teams, they got analysts embedded within the practice groups. So you've got to have your ducks in a row. And I think that that's a real market void and a real opportunity for some of these firms to start slaying glass.

So that's a good point. So if you're if we're talking specifically to the firms that you would focus on much would be the small to medium, what would you say some of their advantages are, like, you know, we all know the cy A model of Okay, I'm hiring an AMLOV firm because I'm not going to get fired for that, you know, deal with average What would you say are some of the advantages that they need to tout to maybe peel some of that business away from those firms. Yeah, you know, I think it's it's about you know.

One of the things I talk about is that you know, a restaurateur, for example, doesn't care that Eric forms the company, Mike does the labor and employment and Jenny does. They want to go back to cooking. And so the folks that can really align and think that way and think by industries, I think are the ones who are going to win the day. You know, if you're a securities lawyer, you know you're doing deals for sprinkler companies and for biotechs and for fashion companies.

It's pretty hard. I would basically call it impossible for you to be an expert in you know, all of these different industries. And so how are you looking around the corner, How are you seeing what's best in class? How are you you know, staying abreast of all of these things.

I'd argue that it's pretty hard to do that. And so these firms that are aligning by industries and putting together these cross disciplinary teams and feeding each other, you know, and sometimes that's the comp model. And so you're seeing some of these other firms who you know, may you know, keep one one tier or two tiers, or they're incentivizing the behaviors they want to see they're uh, you know, not necessarily putting in the figurehead rain maker as the group head. You know, you'll see that a lot in the AMLA fifty firms, where you know, it's the person who is the most successful, who's the practice group leader.

Okay, well is that person the best leader? Probably not? And so you know, how are you kind of you can set up structures that are intentionally, that are intentional in order to be more collaborative. And you know, I just think you've got to be really intentional in doing that.

And if you're not so sort of wetted in your ways that I think a lot of these sort of older and larger firms are, and you're more nimble, I think you can you know, very easily when win the day. I think also, you know, using LinkedIn, using social media. You know, again some of the other points that I had set around making sure that you got systems in place. Two, uh, to keep your bio up to date.

You know, people go on they used to get two or three names, and they would call these people and want to scat and want to pull ice. And you know, they come in and they give their dog and Pony show. You'd ask them about what they've done, and they would deliver that. Today it's you know, you might get five names and you're going and you're googling those five people, and you know, if I'm a fashion designer and I don't see any fashion deals on this person's I'm not going to call them, right, I'm gonna call it the three people who did, and then they'll come in and do the dog and Pony show.

So it's really tough to sort of measure that. You know, how many times you're out of the game before you know even though you're in it. And so I think that the firms who are very intentional and process and systems driven and data driven are going to be the ones that are you be stealing and competing with some of those top fronts. Yeah, I think that's all great advice.

I mean, we talk to lawyers all the time about keeping those things up to date. You know, one of the things I'll jokingly say to somebody, you know who gets a ton of referrals, says, oh, that's great, how many referrals are you going to get next month? And obviously it's a question that they can't answer, you know, that's that's that they're relying on someone else to control their own business. And I think some of the things that you bring are getting a little bit more predictability into that or at least a higher either a higher close rate or a higher amount of the referrals you do get that actually reach out.

Because if somebody looks at your LinkedIn profile or your website or whatever, Google yourself and whatever shows up in the top three, if that's not really dialed in and present you, well, you may never get that referral call. What's new do you think? You know? Besides LinkedIn?

Is there anything else that you're seeing? You mentioned social media? Are there some specific tactics you've seen that are successful? You know, I think it's about really just planning.

You know, attorneys are notorious for a shining new quarter approach. You know, you'll have a conversation they'll say, you know what, you're right, I need to focus on these specific folks in this you know, fast fashion world. Okay, great, right, everything else just becomes noise. Right, But then thirty minutes later that oh hey, I just got an offer to speak It's like, okay, is that aligned with with what you're doing?

We just we just had this conversation, you know, and so getting them to just focus it makes their life easier, not harder. And so, you know, folks just they want to be the jack of all trades when you're the jack of all trades and the master of none. And so it's standing for something. And I think once you kind of put that in play, everything else falls out of that.

What's the volunteer work you're doing. It should be aligned maybe with clothing and helping, and it's really about sort of that integrated brand. And you know, when you get that, you're speaking at these events, you're writing on these particular topics, you're owning particular topics. As you talked about Google, you know, And it's funny you say that, because I have one of my exercises is what's the topic you want to put in Google?

Where your name is first, second or three? And it might be, you know, it's not best attorney in New York like slow down there, but you know, could it be you know, fundraising for fashion companies attorney? You know that that's gettable, and so everything you're doing needs to perpetuate that in order for you to to to raise up those ranks you know where our joke is the best place to bury a body is on page two of Google and see you nobody ever, nobody ever hits more right. You're going to get those ten things and you just assume those are the ten best.

So it's really about that sort of holistic digital footprint, having everything really tie in together so that you know, it doesn't look like you can't really understand this person because they're speaking on fashion. You go down there and then they're working on you know, some patents, you know, sign patent and you're like, what's going on here? So but it's all it all comes around planning and planning your work and working your plan. And I think that you know, attorneys are starting to buy into that and realize, hey, you know what, I need to be more cost effective with my time.

That's going to help increase my realization. It's going to give me a much better chance of winning. You know, instead of having a five percent chance of winning twenty matters, you've got a forty percent chance of winning three matters, and so I'll take those those chances all day. Now.

One of the things that you mentioned, which I'm curious to hear your thoughts on is you believe that CRM systems are unnecessary for ninety percent of firms. What do you mean by that? Yeah, you know again it comes to you know, the risk a version. I think you know that you kind of talked about, well, you know this firm has salesforce.

We need salesforce, and it's like, okay, do you know what salesforce does? Well it's a CRM. Okay, well what does it do? CRM kind of stuff?

You know, you can get a gramiling list together and you know, no, that's not you know, you look, you go in you know, before I came into legal, much more compliance and adherence to h to the CRMs. You know, if you wanted to get reimbursed because you know I took you and your prospect out for lunch, you know, you put that you and put that that information in there. And I think that law firms historically, information is power, right, and so attorneys don't want to socialize that information because that's their leverage for end of your bonuses, that's their leverage for hey, you know, give me another point in the partnership or I'm jumping ship or whatever that is.

And so if you're not going to input that information in It's silly that you would pay for that. It's like buying a Ferrari and putting it in first gear. So you know, there are other ways to do that. You know, things like you know the old Glavit and you know Tree today is you know, looking at some of that metadata.

You know they're they're engaging relationship strengths. They're you know, showing who knows who around the firm based off email and sort of meta traffic without reading and evening emails and stuff. You know, those types of things for firms. You know, I think it's about understanding what you're using it for before you pick the product, and you know it.

Don't let perfect be the enemy of good. You know, people are you know, hey, I have to have foundation or in tap or or else. You know, it's you know, there's plenty of other things out there. They don't need to be all lost specific, but it comes from really understanding what what are you going to require the attorneys to do and you know, if they are going to be inputting every time they're going to a meeting, or you know, you are turning on those sort of spigots so that these things are automating and looking at people's calendars.

Then great, by all means, go for a salesforce or you know, one of these sort of you know, high bells and whistles. But I find that, you know, again, probably overraty percent of the cases, folks are paying for these really important features and then not rolling any of it out. And so it's I stand by that. Yeah, well, I've seen personally, you know, at several different companies, if you don't have one hundred percent buy in of everybody to use it, and if it's not a top down it's garbage in, garbage out.

You know, if only half the team uses it, or if half the team uses one hundred percent of it and the other half only uses half of it because they just don't have time to input it or they don't understand how to use the tool. Right, the information that all the power that you're paying for is completely wasted because you can't compare where you're at with law Firm May and Law Firm B because Law for May everything was put in and Law Firm BE only half the information was put in.

So yeah, that does make sense. I feel like there's there's enough tools out there. Everybody's got to have the basic information that they can track and they should have, you know, which we can touch on now. You know, KPIs, is that something that you strongly recommend for for law firms and for individual partners who are responsible for bringing business.

In absolutely, just just to before we jump, you know, there's you actually raise a great point about the CRM that you know, it's almost better to have no compliance or one hundred percent compliance, because if you have compliance, you think you have a story and your story is wrong. So right, but before uh yeah, but but back to the KPIs. Yeah, you know, I uh another perhaps unpopular opinion, but as you can see, I'm chock full of speaking my mind here is that you know, so many folks they get this analysis paralysis.

They'll have data analysts, they'll be tracking fifteen things and then not doing anything about them. And you know, what's the point of spending all this time and resource to oh, hey, we've got you know this many forwards? Okay, well how are you trying to get more forwards? Well?

I don't know, and we're not doing anything. It was like, okay, well then why why do we even care about tracking forwards? Then? So I try to you know, start small you know, that's that's really the best advice I can ever give for being in a law firms.

To start small, get a pilot. Maybe it's with a person, maybe it's with a group, maybe it's with an initiative, and prove prove metal it's a chicken age scenario that you know, attorneys want to see that's something successful before they do it. But of course, if you never try anything, then you'll never have those metrics. So kind of starting small, just picking a couple of things, optimize and know its let's ab test.

Let's see, you know what what opens more? Is it this type of title and subject line? Is it this type of title or subject line? Okay, great, we've kind of figured out the formula on subjects.

Great, okay, now let's move to a different KPI. Now let's move to something else and eventually, you know, maybe building a dashboard and eventually, you know, maybe sort of moving these things up to sort of prescriptive advice that you can be giving to folks, but it doesn't have to be be done overnight, and in many cases it's not going to be because you're always going to have these uh, sort of reticent risk averse folks. Who want to see who want to see it happen. But you you really hit it on the head with it being a top down approach.

There's no other way, you know. We can sit there and leave the horses to water and we can prove value. Hey, you know, we did it with the small art lag group, and this thing is completely taken off and without without it coming from the top down, without it being practiced more effectively, you know, because sometimes you'll see it coming from the top down, but then the top's not doing it, and that's there's no better way to sort of start to kill an initiative than someone's yelling for you to do it and they're not doing it themselves.

So you've got to kind of figure out those things and build champions. And it comes down to change management. Change, man. It is everything.

You can have the theories, you can have everything, but you don't have process in place and buy it from the top, you're not going to get anywhere. Yeah, And I would assume the people you're most interested in talking to or you know who this message would resonate the most is someone who's kind of stuck and they're considering change. You know, because you do have people who are are just very resistant to change. You know, we've already always done it this way because we've always done it this way, and that's their answer.

So to that person who's like, wow, this sounds interesting, what would what do some of the first steps look like? So if I, you know, call you up and I say, hey, I need some help, I need some advice, what are some of the first things that you look at? You know, what does that first week look like? Because I think most people out there don't understand their blind spots, which is why they're blind spots.

So just hearing about a couple of the common ones, I'm going to go, oh, that does sound. Like my firm. You know, maybe maybe I'll give Mike a call. Yeah, yeah, So you know, the first thing is is to sort of look backwards to look forward, you know, always telling people before we sit down, I'd love for you to go back, gather all the all the matters you've done, whether that's the past firm, present firm.

Sort of, we can start to group those into different industries or types, and then we'll walk through you know how you got those clients. So we start to see some emerging themes. Hey, you know what I was really successful when I was doing it this way and kind of deviated it over here because maybe there was some political issue or some potential hurdle or whatever it is. Let's look back and be authentic with yourself.

You know. I think a lot of folks they because it's such a mentor culture. Hey, well, you know, Don used to go and speak all the time, so I'm going to go speak all the time. Well, you hate speaking, so you know, let's let's let's sort of you know, have it sort of figure out in your world.

But the first thing I always do is, let's look backwards. Let's build that. Let's make sure that everything is on your site, and that can help spawn different conversations. You know.

I also ask people to give me the spread of you know, what you're doing right now. Maybe it's sixty percent of you're a real estate person, maybe sixty percent leasing, you know, thirty percent development work, and ten percent of the time in litigation. Right, what do you want to do? Oh?

I love the development stuff and I hate these two things. Okay, why are you going to the ICSC, which is the you know, shopping centers and that's all about leasing? Why why are you going to that event. Oh, I guess I never thought about it, because you've got to look at, you know, what you want to be doing, and everything you need to do needs to feed that.

So you know, you put a plan together that you know, sort of encapsulates the things that you've done successfully in the past and looks to where you want to be going forward. And once you can kind of figure that out, everything else, like I said, becomes noise. And so people think it's a lot harder, and it's it's again a lot of easier. So those are the first two things I typically do.

I really try to get an audit of what folks are doing digitally, and sometimes it's a lot of coaching people not knowing sort of what to do and just walking them through that. Sometimes it's it's, you know, very close hand holding, and sometimes it's sort of more strategy. When I'm looking at at departments or firms, those will change. Typically it's a lot of again, a lot of data.

I'm looking at a lot of internal data, looking at different correlations. Hey, did you know that you know the outside of you know, folks who are our corporate clients. Our second biggest work we're doing is in TNE or it is in bankruptcy or whatever that is, and sort of uncovering those different things and helping to sort of put teams together can help to be really successful. So typically it's sort of doing an audit of what's worked historically and trying to replicate and scale those things.

Great well, Mike, we really appreciate you spending some time with us today, you know, helping to educate some of the listeners on what it is that you do and focus on if someone's looking to get a hold of you, best resources for them to look you up. I assume one's got to be LinkedIn yep. Absolutely, I'm always posting seven forty two advisors dot com. It's also where we are housed, and you're happy to share any checklists and you know, different articles that we've developed here.

And really appreciate you taking the time. Thanks for listening to the Legal Mastermind podcast, presented by Market my Market. You can check out additional episodes and recaps at Legalmastermind podcast dot com.