EP 291 - Kyle Hebenstreit - Marketing for the Modern Law Firm: Trends, Tools, and Tactics

Ultimately, what you need to be thinking about is who are the people who are currently walking down the sidewalk today who might be my client tomorrow. What are their habits and how do I position my firm in front of them in a way that's favorable and trusting, And how's that going to get them to be more likely to hire me when the time comes, if it comes to need an attorney. So being very human. Focused is going to be a good source of truth for anybody in navigating what it will be an increasingly evolving lanscape.

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 Kyle Keevan Street, who is the CEO of PMP, which is Practice Made Perfect. Kyle, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you for having me, Eric, I appreciate. It absolutely so I'd love to dive right into the marketing stuff, but can you give our audience a little bit of a history on who you are, your background, and how you became the CEO of PMP. Yeah, my pleasure. So I started my career in the film and entertainment industry.

I went to University of Southern California for undergrad and studied film and business there and then subsequently worked at a couple different companies and production companies. But the lion's share my time was at a company called sky Dance Media, which is a film co financing and production company. Now they're much larger, actually they're in the process of acquiring Paramount. Nevertheless, we were at.

A growth phase at skuy Dance, and that sparked my interest in entrepreneurship because we were still a small company and growing and I found that interesting and wanted to pursue that. I thought the best way to do that would be to go to business school and formalize some of my skills in training, and then ultimately work as a management consultant with Deloitte Consulting, where I did a lot of again like media work, a lot of mergers and acquisitions and growth strategy projects for large fortune five hundred companies.

But the nagging itch to pursue entrepreneurship was still there, and I found an opportunity to partner with an investment firm based out of Chicago that acquires great small to medium sized businesses that are approaching their next phase of growth, and I identified PMP as a great company and acquired it with these partners in early twenty twenty two and have been operating as the CEO for the last two and a half years now. PMP has been around since the early two thousands and it was actually founded by John Morgan of Morgan and Morgan and really started as a lead referral network and evolved into being an advertising agency for personally in law firms round two thousand and seven.

As Morgan and Morgan grew and became competitive with some of our clients, that created some friction and his business partner was also looking for an opportunity outside of PMP, and that presented an opportunity for them to sell PMP, and we overlapped and they handed off the business for its next phase of growth. And we've got a great team in place and our goals to really invest in the infrastructure and identify unique opportunities for PMP and pmp's clients and hopefully continue to grow over the long term.

Yeah, that's a great history. And you know, having a trained eye working as a consultant at Deloitte, you know, there must have been something really attractive for you to go from Deloitte over to you know, being the CEO of this company. What were the factors that you saw that made it so enticing for you? Sure?

Well, first of all, you know, I did a lot in terms of advertising strategy when I was a consultant. I grew up in a family of lawyers. My dad as an attorney and had his own practice for his entire career, and my mom just retired from a federal bankruptcy court as a judge back in June, and she was a judge for thirty years of her career. My sister is a former prosecutor.

And so, you know, I felt like I understand and still do feel like I understand sort of the client base that is law firms and sort of small to medium sized law firms, which is different than you know, large corporate or white shoe law firms. So that was sort of thing one is I felt I understand the shape of clients. I felt like I understood the shape of the services. YPMP specifically, I thought was an attractive company.

You know, they they've been smart about how they invested in their advertising strategies and smart about how they invested in providing digital services and website services for clients. They had and still do have a long tenure of clients, so a very loyal client base I had grown with the clients. I also like the notion of providing marketing services to personal injury and consumer law firms in general. It's not their core competency as lawyers, but it is something that is somewhat the lifeblood of their business because it's typically a non recurring relationship that they have with their clients, and there's a heavy need and emphasis on continuing to identify potential new clients to support and represent, and so from kind of like a macroeconomic perspective, marketing and marketing partners sit in an important part of the value chain of the life cycle of a case, and I think that that is interesting for us as a business.

And I also think that there's a long way to go for law firms, which is, you know, it's highly fragmented. There are a lot of potential law. Firm clients across the country, and there's a lot of way to go in terms of adopting technologies and ways of doing things that maybe have seen success in other industries. And I think that allows us to have a vision for where we could build our company to sort of stay ahead of the curve on behalf of our clients.

And that presents some opportunity at PMP as well. So let's dive into that. You know, you've been in this so long, You've seen a lot of changes in marketing and how law firms do client development, can you? And I'd really love to focus mostly on, you know, what present day is, but leading up to that, what are some of the biggest changes that you've seen that our challenges or new opportunities for law firms.

Sure, when I talk about this, I usually point out sort of three macro trends that I think heavily impact our part of the market. One is increasing amount of competition, Two is platform diversification, and three is increasing professionalization kind of brought on by the increase of institutional capital, particularly in the planiff's firm market. And by those. Things, I mean roughly, and I'm going to exaggerate, just like for the purposes of conversation.

There's obviously nuance to this, but if you were a plaintiff's firm in sort of the early aughts or early teens, even there was a lot of low hanging fruit. There wasn't a tremendous amount of competition from an advertising standpoint. The model hadn't quite been proven or sort of socialized in a way that was acceptable to sort of your traditional law firm. I think the market saw the success of a lot of those law firms who were on TV advertising or doing billboard advertising, and success breeds competition.

So over time you've seen more people entering the market looking to share in some of the success that some of the law firms who are relatively early movers I would call them, and sort of the aughts and the teens, and giving them a little bit more run for their money. At the same time, platform diversification is something that's evolved, and so instead of just being in first you know, the Yellow Pages and then maybe on broadcast TV and billboards, you've got you know, websites and SEO and paid search and paid social media, programmatic advertising, connected TV or streaming.

You know, there's a proliferation of platforms where people consume media, and as a result, there's a proliferation of platforms where you can place advertising dollars to reach those people, and the equation has gotten a lot more complex as a result. Lastly, I would say sort of the professionalization brought on by institutional capitalists. You're starting to see because of the sort of ABS model in Arizona that allows for non lawyer ownership of law firms, some other sort of shifts in the marketplace that allow for private equity firms Headgephone, et cetera to participate in the legal market.

Those investment firms typically are looking for a level of professionalization and operations and a level of competition that the legal market wasn't previously set up for, and I think that brings sort of different demands in terms of how you treat your law firm as a business to stay relevant and competitive. So that's a long winded way I guess of saying that you know, things have gotten more competitive, the market's gotten more complex, and there's sort of a new entrant of type of participant in the form of institutional players that sort of places greater pressure on law firms to evolve in a certain way to be successful and sustain that success over the long term.

Yeah. I kind of got into the industry right around the time when the yellow pages were going away, But I still worked with a lot of lawyers who would see their rep once a year, pay their twenty thirty forty grand and that was it. And with all the changes that you just described, there's so much more need for involvement from the law firm. And I think, at least the way I see it, you've got an old guard that's not used to that model.

You know, they might have even practiced before you were legally allowed to advertise. Then it became, like you said, billboards, yellow pages. So I guess my question to you is, if you're a law firm that is looking to get more clients through marketing in your specific geography, what type of plan do you want to put together for them, Because, like you said, there is so much fractionalization of where you can put those marketing dollars. Do you have kind of a one size fits all or specific starting points that you then grow into something bigger.

Yeah, that's a great question. So what we do is, you know, we build custom plans for our clients across you know, website and SEO through you know, digital advertising and what you would consider traditional advertising. Sometimes it's the holistic plan. Sometimes it's a la carte because you know, they might leverage a different vendor for a different sort of slice of their overall marketing mix.

But suffice to say, we think about this as a holistic marketing uh plan, and we we execute against that based on the needs of the particular client, their objectives, local market dynamics, and frankly, like size of budget. What we've done is we've learned a lot because we've served a variety of different types of law firm clients and different markets. There are certain characteristics that sort of define what strategy makes the most sense. And we've got a couple of like starting playbooks based on inputs, and that's again like sort of how competitive is the market, how long has this firm been in market, what are the objectives of the firm, things of that nature.

We take that information and then we sort of leverage the playbook and then we personalize it to that firm, and then we sort of act vate a campaign where there's a test and learn period to make sure that the personalized campaign is actually truly optimized for that firm, a firm that might just be starting out, that doesn't have a huge budget that really just like wants maybe it's a solo practitioner or a solo with a couple of attorneys on staff. They don't need a tremendous volume of cases.

They just want to sort of stays busy and augment the referral and sort of word of mouth business they have, and that's sort of the lifestyle that they're looking for. That plan is going to. Look a lot more like, well, you need a website, maybe some content and some light SEO and maybe some local services ads and perhaps pay per click. But that's going to help sort of create an.

Engine for you online where you're going to start augmenting your reach beyond your core word of mouth or referral base and start to be meeting clients through those mechanisms over time. So that's a sort of much smaller and contained plan. Conversely, there might be a firm that's been in market for twenty years, been advertising twenty years, as you know, twenty attorneys and you know, many more support staff and internal intake services and a lot of overhead to maintain that firm needs to continue to effectively keep the engine going and you know, maintain brand awareness, but also drive a lot of performance and conversion based tactics to make sure they're driving the case type and case volume that they need to continue to either sustain and grow their practice.

And that looks like a completely different plan that's going to probably be touching most of the relevant platforms within the media mix that you'd see in the personal injury space, from sort of offline media and online media and you know, organic website SEO traffic. So we try to take those inputs. Identify that archetypes they fit from the client profiles and strategies that we believe and know work based on our experience, and then we personalize it through sort of the onboarding process, and then we optimize it as we're live in the campaign.

One of the most difficult parts of being a marketer in this world is, you know, what I call the valley of doubt. Whereas you someone's excited to work with you, they want to get going. There's there's different types of mediums that you can use, but almost nothing is instantaneous. You know, LSAs and maybe some paid search, but what are how do you set expectations for your clients, because as you mentioned, there's it's so much more competition these days than it used to be.

So if you're working with someone who might be, you know, behind the eight ball and needs to catch up, what type of conversations do you have with them, and do you have a starting point that you like to to say, Hey, here's where we need to start, and here's your expectations, because you're not going to get phone calls tomorrow just because you started today. Yeah, Fortunately for us, I think a lot of folks have heard that narrative previously. And what I find is when we speak to new clients, they come with the expectation that there's going to be a bit.

Of a ramp or build. Yeah. That said, sometimes people are impatient and everyone wants to be seeing results sooner rather than later, and greater results. So what we sort of say is, you know, we are trusted advisors.

We have a lot of experience in the market. We've been doing this for a long time. We know and we have strong beliefs on what works and what doesn't work. We have benchmark abilities across clients, so we can pressure test what's happening in one market versus another.

So that kind of intelligence allows us to be even smarter about advising our clients. But at the end of the day, our clients are the decision makers. We're not the decision makers on their behalf. So we'll give a really strong, intellectually honest recommendation on what we believe is going to be best to meet their objectives, but it just may.

Not be what they want to do or they have time to do. So we try to first set expectations on how we work with one another, and we ultimately serve the client. Because we are in professional services business, it's not really our way or the highway. We just want to make them aware of what the reality looks like from our perspective, and then we can execute against a plan that we sort of collaborate with.

Respect to setting expectations. In terms of results, there's a lot of pressure to say, you know, you spend this amount of money and you'll get this many cases, and there's certainly you know, pay per lead lead gen companies out there, and you know, I think there's economic benefit to law firms pursuing those, but there's also a lot of risk involved in those. I tend to think our model is more sustainable for the law firm. If you're investing in your brand and you're front facing image to the market, that's an asset that builds over time, and ultimately what you're going to be doing is driving more cost efficient and more predictable cases in the future.

So if you really want to do it well, you need to take a long view and you need to allocate your time and your investment dollars over a multi year view to build the version of your firm that you want to see. And we can extrapolate and provide case studies of what we believe the case volume and case type will be based on comparable firms, and that's how we sort of build conviction. But we will never promise specific results to a client because there is so much noise in the market, even though there's a strong temptation from a sales perspective to say you will get this.

You know, that's what people want to hear. But you know, we tell people the truth, even if it's not necessarily what they want to hear. So that's more or. Less how we how we treat the ambiguity of those conversations, and how we set our expectations and if.

We were to separate these two different types of marketing one output in you know, just that we'll call it traditional for now, which would be SEO PPC LSA's that's one bucket. You need some involvement, but not a ton of involvement from the law firm. If you go to the social media and especially the TV side of things, I think you really need more buy and involvement from the law firm. Is that a go no go for you?

Meaning that one of the partners has to become the face and you know, be willing to do commercials and be willing to do social media ads. How does that look in these conversations? And if you find someone who doesn't want to do that, it just eliminates one of the mediums. No, I love that.

That's a great question. And when we talk about being advisors versus decision makers, a lot of times that comes down to sort of like creative direction and not just like channel strategy or media mix. And you know, I have a point of view and our team all have a collective point of view on like creative approaches that seem to resonate and work. Messaging that resonates and works.

However, it's not our face up on the billboard. It's not our firm. So these decisions from a marketing standpoint, it's not made sort of like an academic chamber like you might have in like a larger corporation. It's made based on that, but ultimately it's a person's business and their likeness that they're representing.

And these are folks that walk around their local community being recognized, and they want to be perceived a way that's consistent with their personal preference, not necessarily in a way that is going to optimize the number and type of cases that they want. So it's it's a push and pull between like what we see as effective versus what our clients feel comfortable with. There's also the consideration of like what our clients have the capacity to create. So authenticity is a key part of entertainment media in any format.

And if you've got an attorney who is, you know, molecularly designed a certain way and you want them to show up on camera a completely different way, it's going to be inauthentic and not work. So there's like a variety of different considerations that goes into what's the right creative direction. You know, if a if a client does not want to be on camera but wants the success or is not necessarily great on camera, or wants the success of a video based advertising campaign. We work with spokespeople who represent themselves as attorneys, and that's a good solution, and so that's sort of how we manage it.

Occasionally, we'll, you know, have another attorney within the firm sort of be the face of the firm. We advise that we want that person to be an equity partner in the firm, so they're not building up their own brand credibility and potentially opening up a law firm elsewhere. So there's other considerations to that effect, but in general, it's it's a not necessarily a one size fits all approach, and there's sort of serious marketing that we've seen work really well. There's also marketing narratives with a little bit more levity that might be less loyally, but that also work well, and so it's it's a con some sort of evolution.

I will say that I believe that one of the consequences of an increasingly competitive market leads us to need to think about creative differently. Because what happens is all of these firms are focusing on the same sort of share of voice, and you need to differentiate not just from your channel strategy, but in terms of your creative and if it's just sort of the same, similar, off the shelf type of creative, you're going to be drowned out by other competitors in the market who are popping more.

Also, creative is different based on TV versus TikTok and the audience that consumes those. So you really want to have a clear brand identity and then you activate that brand identity in a consistent way, but on different platforms through different tactics. Yeah, I find myself having this conversation with lawyers all the time. Is you know, they say, and rightfully, so, look all I want is cases, and I just say it's it's not as simple as that or as easy as it used to be.

Every law firm is its own brand, and usually there's at least one person that needs to be the face of that brand. And hiring an attorney, whether it's personal injury or bankruptcy or famulaw, this is such a personal decision that for someone to hire somebody that might be one of the most difficult things they've gone through in their life based on you know, a sentence in a Google ad isn't reasonable anymore. People are used to creating these relationships, you know, before they you know, make such a decision.

So if you're an attorney out there, I think you really need to understand that. Whether it's you the owner or one of your partners, somebody really should pick up that mantle and run with it because you need to be able to compete on a branding perspective within your own market. I want to shift a little bit because i'd love to get your take on, you know, the latest trend of AI and how that can be used in law firms in a beneficial way, and maybe even some things to avoid, you know, if you see some common mistakes that people are using.

Yeah. Sure, so in terms of law firm operations, my perspective is that we're seeing a lot of AI tools pop up, and typically they're solving a part of the process, whether it's like document review, a certain type of document review, doing a certain type of job, document creation, things of that nature, Like it depends, We're seeing a lot of kind of individualized tools doing one job to be done. I think there's going to be a temptation over time to sort of tie all these AI tools into one sort of holistic you know, enterprise AI practice management system for law firms, But for now it's still a little bit of a one off basis, and the efficacy of any given tool is really sort of I guess in the eyes of the user, but they're not all sort of built the same way, So I guess one area is like, be cautious of the quality of a tool you're really signing up for and understand what you're getting yourself into, because you don't want to spend too much time going down.

The road with a tool that's not going to be effective for the needs of your firm. I think from a marketing perspective, what we tend to see and how AI has incorporated to what we do and how we engage with our clients. One is, you know, content writing on site for SEO, you know, we take the point of view we use AI as a tool to augment our human content writers who are in house, and so maybe it's for idea generation or a bit of a first draft, or if we want to have a summary for Google Business or elsewhere, we might use AI to draft to you know, take a blog that we've written and create a summary.

So we use it as a tool to sort of augment what our team does. But there's always a meaningful amount of human intervention involved, and that's our point of view. I think someone can make a completely honest argument for AI doing the entire job with like very minimal human intervention. We believe that that's just a little bit risky in terms of quality and how it might show up in terms of Google results, because at least from a quality standpoint, there's always a little bit of a risk and liability with respect to lawyers being in compliance with bar regulations, and you don't want to have AI write some sort of statement that is not necessarily provable and it is potentially voting liability onto your clients.

And so that's how we have largely incorporated it. We've also incorporated it into our development and design process for websites to enhance and expedite the process for building and designing our websites. We've also used it to build sort of internal chatbots. So you know, there's various preferences almost like brand books for our clients, and you know how they like to show up in terms of content and voice and things of that nature.

So we've started building internal chatbots that are sort of bespoke to certain clients, so we can ask what the right approach would be for a given client, and we can institutionalize that knowledge and an AI chatbot tool. One thing that we're kind. Of figuring out, and maybe you would have a perspective on this, is like how certainly Google's AI overview is affecting search traffic to our client's websites. Like we've seen traffic decline in all transparency due to no other factor than Google's changing its AI overview.

And when you think about it from a user experience, it's very likely that someone would be googling some sort of search term and be satisfied with what they're reading on the search page and not necessarily immediately clicking through to seek services. And does that disrupt the typical, you know, potential client journey that they would go through. Maybe, but you know, we're still sort of in the process of running experiments to truly form a smart opinion on that. But that's an area that we are trying to keep an eye on.

In addition to that, I mean, there's just provably like search habits of people not using Google at all and using other AI tools like chat GBT as an example, to resolve questions or queries that they. Might normally go to Google for. So those impacts we're seeing effect search quite a bit. And then the last area of AI outside of like marketing or the internal law firm operations is really sort of with respect to intake.

Intake is not necessarily something we currently provide, but it is something that we interact with quite a bit because it's a part of the funnel from marketing and website to actually a converted case. And you see various applications of AI, whether it's with chatbots or otherwise. I think that it's going to be some time before truly like voice activated AI is managing call in a way that people would trust. But that feels like the direction that that would go over the longer term.

But that's not necessarily something that I believe is in the near term, just based on human demand and preference. So those are some of the areas that we run up against AI as a topic and how we think about it. But we're constantly having conversations and we've got our ongoing team's channel for the whole company where people will put interesting articles or they'll will do like AI competitions for creating a song just to kind of get people thinking about it and like practicing that muscle because it's going to be part of our life.

It's just figuring out the right way to introduce it over time. Yeah, one of the address one of the key points that you just made, which was really the disruption with Google Search. I agree the AI results that Google has, then there's the chat sheapts, and then the development of LSA's. You know, So for anybody who do and know what an LSA is, it's basically like Google AdWords, except for they show up on top of those and you pay per lead as opposed to per click.

And I think it's been obvious that that's really where Google's trying to drive the services industry is to their lssas, which is very, very disruptive to traffic clicks all that. So I think you're onto something there. And I also feel like we're in this evolving, hyper evolving stage right now where the new landscape that's going to be the next several years hasn't completely settled yet, so it's really being open to different ideas in marketing and not being not being adverse to trying something that might fail with at least a budget that you're able to risk, because if you just continue to do what worked five years ago, you might go the way of Blockbuster video.

And you know, we're just about at the end of our time here, and I feel like you've got a ton of inform maation that you could share. So I guess as my last question, I would just leave it open ended. Is there anything that you would want our listeners to have as a takeaway from this conversation when considering increasing either coming up to speed with their competition their local market, or they're already doing well and they want to do better. How some type of an interaction with you could help them to achieve that.

Yeah. Absolutely, I think like two things come to mind. One is sort of audience focus and the other is treating your law firm like a business. And so I will start with treating your law firm like a business.

The temptation historically has been that you know, law firm and practice of law is sort of a learned profession and as sacred and in many ways it is, and you know, our justice system obviously is what allows our sort of democracy to run effectively, and I believe in that. However, you know a by product. Of doing that well as a lawyer, as you're running a successful small and medium sized business, which is a different competency. Many lawyers are able to make that adjustment.

Well, most in my experience are not, because it's a different way of allowing your mind to work. You're good at one thing, the things required to grow and manage your business require different. Competencies that you don't have. And I am a firm believer in outsourcing what's not your core competency as a business.

We have an outsourced it firm because we don't have you know it expertise on staff. So I think that law firms need to sort of come to terms with the fact that in order to stay competitive, they need to think about their law firm like a business, not just as like a member of the community, anymore like it might have been where word of mouth and reputation would have allowed you to build. A strong practice. But don't like to hear that, but it's true, and I would encourage folks to strongly consider outsourcing variety of their services that are not core to the practice of law and serving their clients.

That's what they're really good at, and they should leverage the expertise of outsourced providers of elsewhere to get better results, but also to manage overhead and de risk the operations of managing a law firm. So that is sort of area one. Area two is being audience focused. I think that's a north star in any advertising, but particularly here, and when we talk about evolution of platforms, ultimately, whether it's Google or Chat, GPT or you know, you know, fill in the blank.

I mean, whether it's broadcast TV or streaming on Hulu, it's ultimately about informing and influencing the behaviors of people who are in need of a service. And so if you put yourself empathetically in the shoes of those people and how they engage in their day to day life and their physical world, that's going to help you and that's going to help inform the strategy of how to best represent your firm in front of them. So it's easy to get lost in sort of the machinations of what's going on with AI and consolidation of website providers in the market and all this stuff.

Ultimately, what you need to be thinking about is like, who are the people who are currently walking down the sidewalk today who might be my client tomorrow. What are their habits and how do I position my firm in front of them in a way that's favorable and trusting, And how's that going to get them to be more likely to hire me when the time comes, if it comes to. Need an attorney. So being very human focused is going to be a good source of truth for anybody in navigating what it will be an increasingly evolving landscape.

Well, Kyle, thanks for your time today. This is the first time that I've ever met you, although I've known of Practice made Perfect for a long time end of you. So I'm glad we got the chance to have this conversation. Anything that you'd like to point somebody towards that we can leave in the show notes.

Obviously you're website any books that you've written, or any conferences that you want to tell people about that you're going to be at. So we'll be speaking at the National Trial Lawyer's Summit in Miami in January, so if anybody is there, I would love to connect in person, and we'll be at a variety of conferences throughout twenty twenty five. I have not written any. Books, but you can find a lot of really rich content on the nature of law firm marketing and and other things that affect small to medium size law firms on our website at pmpmg dot com.

And if anybody is interested in learning more about PMP or just you know, chatting, you can email me at Kyle at pmp mg dot com. Thanks, Kyle, really appreciate your time today. All right, thank you, Eric, This is great, appreciate it. Thanks for listening to the Legal Mastermind podcast presented by market my market.

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