120: Attorney, Law-Di-Gras host, founder of Justice HQ and Attorney Share: meet lawyer-entrepreneur Robert Simon

You can't start spending marketing dollars to take that volume unless your house is in order, like you have to have systems in place. You have to be have intake ready, to have customer service to answer those calls. We've leaned into recently building out our pre litigation department a lot, and having relying on after hours people overseas that are really good, that are closer to be able to get on the phone with people, because sometimes you're in an arms race, if you're doing SEO or pay per click, or LSA, the Google stuff, because people are literally going down the list. It's not like they reached out to you specifically through your brand. Those ones have a much higher conversion. That's I do a lot of this content, putting it everywhere, publishing our my book that I wrote, all those other things that's way more sticky, but if you're in that competitive race, you have to have efficiency on the back end, and then you have to have customer service.

Welcome to the 10 golden rules of internet marketing for law firms podcast featuring the latest strategies and techniques to drive traffic to your website and convert that traffic into clients. Now here's the founder and CEO of 10 golden rules. Jay Berkowitz,

good morning, good afternoon, good evening, whatever time this podcast finds you, welcome to the 10 golden rules of internet marketing for law firms. Podcast. Super famous guest today, Robert Simon, from the Bob Simon law firm, and he's got a lot of things going on, so we're going to learn a lot of stuff today. I just want to take two minutes to tell you all about tgr live. We've got some great new speakers announced. This is our live event that we host. It's called business strategies, growth strategies for law firms. March, 10 and 11th, 2025, in beautiful Delray Beach, Florida. If you don't know Delray, it's right in between West Palm Beach and Fort Lauderdale, just adjacent to our head office here in Boca Raton, Florida. So it'll be beautiful. It's right on the beach at the opal Grand Hotel. Got some amazing speakers. Mike Morris, from the famous Detroit law firm, has confirmed, and he's also going to speak on our EOS panel. And Mike was one of the first guys featured in the book traction, and one of the most famous EOS case studies practitioners we just confirmed. Charlie Mann, he's going to do his $500,000 referral playbook. Jeff Hampton is an attorney with 16 million YouTube views. Ben Glass is going to be there. So super excited. We're nailing down the entire agenda, and, oh, by the way, if you wanted to speak on the agenda, it's kind of full, so don't bug me. Anyways, amazing Bob to have you here today. Welcome to the 10 golden rules of internet marketing for law firms podcast.

Thank you for having me, brother. I'm on the other coast, though. I'm on the Left Coast, as they say,

pick up planes. You can come on out. We'd love to have you anyways. Well, let's start with the firm and how you got started and built the firm up. And then we'll talk about some of your amazing additional products.

Yeah. I mean, so I live in Manhattan Beach, California, Los Angeles, started a firm with just me 2009 and then added my brother 2010 to form the Simon Law Group, otherwise known as the Justice team. We We rebranded that so it's a marketing play which we could probably talk about why we did those things. We now have 27 lawyers, several locations, California, Arizona, Texas. Also founded a company called justice HQ, which is a membership community of high level lawyers you have to apply to get in. Lot of interesting things going on there. We started in 2020 and then we started our case marketplace, which always been a big vision of mine, Attorney share founded that launched it came on a closed beta just may of 2024 I think now we already have over 2000 lawyers that are on attorney share already. And you know, it's been kind of having a mediocre rise. So I'm just very happy to like now be in this position to help people on a massive scale. I love

it, and I want to drill down on all of those, and you didn't mention ladigra. So tell us, and there is a huge amount of buzz this year for ladigra conflicted with my personal mastermind, or agency mastermind, so I couldn't be there. But, you know, tell tell us about ladigra.

Yeah, we put on an annual conference called Lottie gras. I also have a media network called the Justice team network, which has a few shows on it, including one of my bourbon approved, but lot of stuff going on. As you said, Lottie raw, we wanted to it's a community driven conference, like we wanted to make it more about networking, personal growth, medical, legal education, and then with really good technologists there, and then really fun entertainment, music festival style at night. So this past year, we had musical guests were en vogue, CeeLo Green, Nick Carter, the Backstreet Boys. The year before that, we had ice cube and flow rider. The year before that, we had Snoop Dogg and rev Ron. The year before that, we've had Nelly. I love it, yeah, and it just like, you know, we make it fun for folks and like, encourage everybody, make it easy to contact everybody. This year we did almost all workshops. You know? It was. On track was media marketing. One was business operations, one was personal health and development. One was AI technology. One was trial skills. So we had people that I think, who were the best teachers around, that just offered to be instructors and work with people, individually, on their on their issues. I thought that was great. You know, I was wanted to like, I like the small group stuff, rather than people talking down to you. And we started that conference years ago, because I was always frustrated on leadership of all these, like Trial Lawyer groups, and every year we're hearing from the same people about the same topics, always in like, a stale conference room. I was like, man, we gotta shake this up, because there's a lot of young lawyers out there and technologists and vendors that know what they're talking about. So you know what, let's give them the opportunity to make it fun. And that's how we started it.

And you call it ladigra. I was assumed it was in New Orleans, but it was in South California,

SoCal, but we originally had it right around Mardi Gras. We literally originally called it la Chela, and I got an immediate cease and desist from AEG who owns watch or Coachella? Yeah, cool.

All right. Well, so let's, let's spend a minute more on the law firm. You know, who's a great referral for you? What kind of cases do you all help with? And you know, you've won a bunch of awards, trial lawyer of the year. Congratulations. So obviously, you guys are good referral. But what kind of cases you're looking for?

Yeah, we're almost all referral based on the lawyers giving us, you know, looks at their cases to help. We try a lot, a of disc injury cases. I've actually trial guides is publishing a book that I wrote end of this year on trying disc injury cases, and kind of the methodology that we've used to get seven and eight figure results on like, repetitive nature, and these are just run of the mill car crash cases, moderate to light impact, all the similar defenses. We do a lot of those. We have an entire team that does all product liability and, like, weird cases, you know, I've tried a bunch of those. I love those type of, you know, get in the weeds, figure stuff out, cases, lot of wrongful death cases, ride share stuff, but all personal injury, we might take a one off here and there on something else, an occasional sex abuse case, but that's our bread and butter. You know, we're privileged enough to be in the courtroom all the time. We have one trial currently going on at Texas, and every week we're answering ready for a new one. So we have a really good team of trial lawyers and litigation lawyers to kind of team up to get the, you know, get the ball across the end zone. How

did you get into other states like, you know, you write the bar in one state. How did that evolve?

So it evolved. We first opened up in Texas, outside of California. One of my partners, Evan Garcia, is from Texas, from Houston, was spending a lot, large amount of time there. And between California's on the trial team, we started to get a lot of cases in California or in Texas, and started to get a lot of referrals there. So it started to make sense for us to open up an office there. So I'm like, Yeah, I'm licensed. There a few other lawyers. So it's like, we, you know, we had a bucket of business and it works. I mean, other lawyers are looking to us to reset the bar on like these cases that we like trying. Then we in Arizona, we had a really good opportunity. One of my partners, Travis Davis, moved out there full time. I had tried a few cases out there on pro hawk. I'm not licensed there yet, but hopefully it will be soon, and we start having good success. So when we opened that office, I mean, almost just a year ago, we have, like, a crazy amount of files and referrals already, because, you know, again, our mission is to litigate and try a lot of these so, and I think Arizona is very ripe to have a powder keg of really good verdicts, and I think we're already starting to see it, and there are some fantastic trial lawyers there already. So that's kind of what we're bringing also is like justice, HQ there as well, where we have a really good group of Arizona lawyers that are now collaborating, working together, even though they have their separate firms, making sure everybody's set up for massive success, so that we can all be in sync when we're trying all these cases. Yeah, so we're really proud about that, and I don't know if we'll be in another state, but, you know, I'd like to get back to my hometown in Pittsburgh again, Pennsylvania, but we shall see.

I love it. Hit that. So you touched on justice. HQ, you called it a membership community. How does it work? What's the benefits? And,

yeah, so, like, I was one of the great something that if it was around when I started my practice, it'd be a no brainer. It's a it's a community based technology platform, which, if you're a member, you it's a few $100 monthly pay. I wanted to create something where you get your your masterminds without paying 1000s of dollars, and have the best lawyers across the country involved in it. You can create your own adventure within it. So we have big slack communities in there, so people can go in and talk and and do things that way. We have a media platform. We have on demand education for for people that are creating their own content. We do a lot of workshops. We have a new software coming out January one where people can, you know, you can build your own community. So if I'm going to do a lot of disc injury workshops, a lot of you know. Guerrilla tactics, marketing and media, a lot of stuff that I do teach everybody that. But you have a lot of lawyers and organization that are great at the business of law, like you mentioned, the fireproof team EOS. Like there's some of our members that do that. They love teaching all these other new firms those types of skills. So they'll have their own platform within it. You have the ability to put it, to set up your own events, and then we have a bunch of vendor partners that come in that can then raise their hand to say, I want to sponsor. I want to be part of this. So it just makes it really easy for for lawyers to concentrate on what they want to do and to kind of build their following. You know, we help with branding, getting speaking opportunities. And it's all about creating that that culture and community, and everybody has to apply to get in. We have a not only good lawyer, but good human policy, and we have a healthy, I think we're almost 50% women, which we're very proud of, a lot of women minority owned firms. We have a no crooks, no creeps policy, because we also have, as part of the membership, you can have access to office space. So we currently have physical locations in Southern California, but on the new community software, we're gonna have, like an Airbnb for lawyers, where other members can offer their office space on the platform. So if I'm in Birmingham, really cool New York, yeah, it again. It helps everybody, because we're opening up all our offices to it. I know a lot of other lawyers as well, because for me, it's great when the lawyers are in there with our lawyers just talk and shop, right? Or if you need to really go in to take a deposition or be the client, it allows lawyers that don't have all the capital that other big firms have to really set up shop wherever that they like, and then to be in that atmosphere of collaboration. Because when I started my practice, it was like me, I hired my little brother was my first hire, and he just got out of college, and we were just sharing a small office with a copier. We had no resources outside of that, like we had a listserv you could ping. But problem with listservs is there might be some idiot has no idea what they're talking about that responds to you, right? Yeah, and I love it human. I

love it. And the firm's really a family affair. So you talked about your little brother, your twin brother and your parents are involved. Tell us a little bit about how that went down and and how it operates.

Yeah. So when I mean, I was like to do the, like, the customer facing stuff, I call it trying the cases, doing business development. My twin brother loves doing management operations. He's now the managing partner of a large firm. My little brother, Brandon, seven years younger than us, he manages one of the litigation teams, has a big team underneath him. My dad, who's an ex truck driver, 37 years of driving, safe driving with UPS, as he will tell us, all, works there. My mom works there. They're in different offices, even though everybody's remote because they they have been divorced since then or not before they started working there, let's say in the early 20 teens. But my dad's new wife works there. Her daughter works there. There's probably some other family members I'm not thinking of. But then on my

on the God bless, God bless. I don't know how you do. Then on

the community, the community, tech, yeah, companies, just HQ and attorney share. My sis, both my sisters are there, and one of my brother in laws.

Wow. Yeah, that's amazing. Give me the best part of it and the worst part of it. I mean, the

best part of it is, is running with family that you have complete trust in, and then being able to be absolutely real with them. You know, with if you're a tight family. You can fight one day, be good the next and keep it real. There's no pulled punches, there's no sensitivity stuff. I mean, I grew up one of five siblings with one bathroom. I mean, you can imagine how that went,

right? So you, you guys definitely had to learn how to work together.

You definitely did, and super efficient, too. I mean, the worst thing about it, the worst thing about it is it's also family can bleed over to personal stuff, like, if there's a major disagreement on on something that can come to a head, but you like, it's either really good or really bad. I hear some horror stories of people being in, you know, family business, ours has been amazing. But I think there's a huge trust factor. I think that just kind of how we grew up, like my brother, who manages the firm, like I don't even log into the bank accounts. I have no idea. He just tells me when to take money, or what's going on, or what I need to do. And I love it, but I trust him. I mean, he could be embezzling millions. I have no idea if you're Brad, if you're listening, does

trust? Love it. And so, you know, we're recording this few days before Thanksgiving. It'll come out after Thanksgiving. But you know, how's Thanksgiving looking? Is everyone getting along this week? Yeah. So we all

go to one of my brother's houses. Everybody gets together, and we do the normal eat, watch football, a lot of food ball sleep in the middle of one of the football games because you ate so much food. We always have this one thing. We make a cheese ball every year, and everybody brings their own. And, yeah, a lot of a lot of lactose going on in that house. No, but it's fine. I love Thanksgiving because it's like, it really slows down. There's no Thursday, Friday. It's always a Thursday. You know, Friday is going to be slow. Kids. All out of school. I got three little girls, 742, to be with their cousins. They're already talking about having sleepovers with their cousins and playing Minecraft and stuff like, right? But it's nice. Like,

who's your team? Well, my team, NFL team, yeah, dude, the

Pittsburgh Steelers. Oh, yeah, of course. I

grew up in Pittsburgh. I

mean, I could show you all the ink to prove it. Like I got some old Steelers logos on here,

I read a book about Rocky blyer, amazing story, right? Went to Vietnam, lost part of his foot. The Steelers kept him on payroll for a year till he recovered, and then he became part of their Super Bowls, right? So I was a big Steelers fan as a kid. I grew up in Canada, but one of my teams, I enjoyed having a few teams. Yeah,

we had a disappointing loss last night. It's depending what year when this airs, but the Steelers have started off red hot and yeah,

they're being always in it. Yeah, it's 2024 if anyone's listening, sometime in the future, hopefully when

you're listening, it'll be the Pittsburgh Steeler world champions of the Super Bowl February, 2025

attorney, share so that they've associated with justice. HQ, but it's a different product. Yeah, there's

sister orgs. I mean, we founded them both, and I'm chairman of both of those companies. It is a more a true marketplace for lawyers, and we wanted to create something where both lawyers, whether you're referring a case in or CO counseling or picking up a case that everybody wins, because the mission critical is to find the lawyer the best case you have for them. So like the client calls you. If it's not your specialty, you can easily find the best one across the nation, because you can sort by geographic practice areas. That handles all practice areas we've set up now automations and integrations with all the major case management platforms, so people can now get a lot of intake directly into their system. They can then push the case directly to their from attorney share fields match case gets put in several lawyers will reach and raise their hand and says, I want to work on it. You get to decide your fee share. Our software will track the deal of it, save your fee share agreement and make it very organized. And if people already have an existing referral network. We built this because it broke for like for us, before this came along, we're getting sent so many cases from other lawyers from different case management platforms or Dropbox or regular PDFs, and it takes a while to digest that information. And then if you do agree to take the case, then you got to put it somewhere and save it, and then you can do your fee share agreement. We just want to put that all in one place. And also, why not have multiple people look at the case at the same time to see who you want to be your best referral partner for it. We made it so that you can bring in your own referral networks that you currently work with and automations to get right of first refusal. We call them waterfall, so people can send, like a personal entry case to me in California if I don't respond or not within enough time, or say no, it goes to their number two, their number three, and they can even default to go to the giant public marketplace. So what we've been finding is that, like a lot of lawyers that are really good, they don't have marketing budgets, are picking up a lot of cases, and we don't charge a cut of the fees. It's free to join, it's free to put in cases. It's free to send cases where you know where they're going. We charge just 300 bucks if you pick a case up off the public marketplace, and that's only if you sign it. So if a lawyer says, I want to work with you, you say, okay, you've vetted for a few weeks. You say, Well, this isn't viable. It costs you nothing. So we try to keep that lead gen down so low for, you know, the specialized lawyers and make it easy to find, you know, like, it's like opening up your Rolodex across the nation of the best of the best, now that we have 2000 lawyers on there, you know, I'm impressed. I just go in and, like, search the state and like, Oh my God. We had like, 30 lawyers from Illinois, and I saw like three big hitters that I know, I was like, Man, this is really special.

Congratulations. Is there case studies on

there? These are partnering on cases. This is all B to B. Law firms use it. So, yeah, if somebody calls you with a client or sends it into your case management software, you could push it directly in, or you could private invite people. People people send me a lot of private invite cases for or stuff that they know that we're good at, and then we just kind of review it, decide if we're going to work on it, and then and goes our fee share agreement. And now, by the end of this year, we'll have the ability to track the status of the case, so that both sides kind of have some transparency on what's going on with their referral, or the same one that got the case can report back on what's going on with it. Another pain point that we always had was just updating co counsel with everything that's going on. So yeah, it just makes it really easy for lawyers that are really good at marketing to send off the cases that their overflow or out of jurisdiction stuff, and also track the stuff with their current referral partners. Now, on the other end, it helps. It's helped a lot of lawyers start their own firms since we've been open because of, like, you know, I've gotten a handful of cases from attorney Sharon. It's really making a difference in my practice.

Yeah, I know you've coached a lot of young lawyers starting out. Talk a little bit about, you know, your passion for that mentorship and, you know, maybe some tips for the young lawyers and getting started.

Yeah. I mean, just remember, any lawyer that's out there, like, you. Reach out to folks. You can DM them, anybody that you want to aspire to be like, or somebody thinks a good lawyer where you want to be. I think you'd be shocked how often people actually get back to you, you know, because everybody's been in that place. You know, we're all here to help. And I think that the plaintiff's bar is a very unique group of lawyers across the nation that are very helpful and willing to mentor. You know, it works for like when I started my practice, I would refer cases to other big law firms, and lawyers that I wanted to work with, split the fee, and then I got to experience how they ran cases, try cases with them. And was the best learning experience ever, and the client got a better result. And now where the other side of my firm, where they always bring us in on on those cases, do the exact same thing, and that's and that's mentorship, right? But I think anybody coming out right now, I think it's easier than ever to start your firm. You just have to be very, very conscious of doing it with the intentions that you want, like if you start your firm, specialize in something that you want to do, make it known to folks that that's what you want to do and how to contact you and put out content, which is free to do with your iPhone, that that's what you love to do, educate people on it. So we want people to automatically think disc injured like, for me, you know, spine surgery lawyer call Bob Simon like that's his niche, right? That's what you want to be able to do if you want to pick, you know, 99 cent store banana slip and fall guy, that's up to you, right? Put, pick something that you're passionate about and that you can market yourself pretty relatively free. We develop, you know, products like attorney share, so people can get their case started off of there and be able to go in that marketplace and grab those types of things. But the rest is about cultivating your network of relationships. So just HQ is one other masterminds or others, local bar orgs or another. You can set up a lot of referral trees just from people you want to law school with people in your cultural orgs, people that are in these other organizations. But you gotta, you gotta hustle. You gotta network. Now, look, if you got a if you got a butt, look like a bucket load of money. It's a different conversation, like you can go to a market agency and they can help you build out your SEO, your website, pump in cases you could do with their with whatever you want. But most lawyers I know are not set up that way. So as you go, as you know, low cost as you can, you don't need an office, virtual office. Work From Home like clients don't care. They'd rather see you in their living room than in some fancy conference room, and then just make really good relationships. I like doing national conferences and national relationships, because if I'm the only California guy in the room, you know, guess who's going to get all those referrals? Same thing. If you're in other masterminds, if you're the only person doing what you do, or if you're in, like, even a Breakfast Club and you're the only lawyer there, you know, embrace it. I'm sure.

You know Ben Glass from Great Legal Marketing. He was recently on the podcast, and he I asked him that question about starting out, and he said, You know, one of the first things I do starting out again is I get a group of lawyers together and I'd buy the pizza, you know, because we don't, don't have big money for a mastermind, but mastermind, and personally, I've had huge amount of success with my agency mastermind I talked about a minute ago. Talk to me about getting started with a sort of micro mastermind, and then maybe talk about some of the bigger masterminds and the benefits you see in Lars participating.

Yeah. I mean, it's all about, are you going to be able to put in the time and effort to whatever you get into like, I'm a member of this organization called YPO Young Presidents Organization. It's a lot of stuff going on, but if you leverage those networks, it's massive. Same thing we developed justice HQ, so it's a so people for a few 100 bucks can get all of those things and make those relationships some of the bigger masterminds, and I've been invited to many of them. I was just never comfortable with asking for paying 1000s of dollars a month for what we routinely give out for free, you know, it's just, yes, you can get something of it, if you but I don't know that's a struggle for me. Because, you know, coming up with a bootstrap budget when I started my firm, it's like I didn't have enough money to do that. Now, if you grow into it, look, if you have a seat at the table with with all these folks that are just super high level, and that's the only time you can get them in the room, you know, so be it that has massive power local bar or your local plaintiff's bar. You should belong to all of those. You should be active in their networking, active in their list serves. But when you say getting, like, a small group of people together. I mean, that really works. Yeah, I have a group of folks that we sit down every 30 days together, and just for three hours, we shut off the phones, and we just talk about what's going on in our lives, going on in business, and it's super helpful. But, yeah, you gotta put yourself in those circles and force yourself in. I mean, who's to say you shouldn't be part of this small group, like, Who's Who should say that, right? Just your fear that says you don't think you'd be included.

And by the way, if you haven't been included, create it. And that was part of Ben's message. And you know, really being at the center of the group is incredibly powerful. Like, I recently created a group that we get a bunch of folks. Together, who all do business with law firms. And there's 100 of us now, and we get together just once a month, on a zoom, and then at the at the national conferences, and we're all just referring business to each other and coaching each other on issues. And it really is fantastic. And and then my mastermind, I recently asked we do a hot seat, basically, we're together for a day. Everybody's on the hot seat for 15 or 20 minutes, and you got to bring a topic, and then everybody coaches you on it. And you know, I've done things around finance and hiring and sales. This time I asked them, you know, how do we make tgr live, our live event? How do we make it super interactive and super fun? And I came up with a couple great ideas. So I'll be tapping you too. It sounds like lot of grass got that figured out. And maybe I also have to explain how I book Snoop Dogg, yeah, Jade at a conference in New York, and it was the best DJ I've ever seen. Yeah,

lot of girl we had him. I knew his manager, so we're able to make something happen. But I ended up getting stuck on stage behind him. Had the biggest second hand high that I've ever had. Very funny, though his security won't let me down like this is my event, no, but like this year at Lauder 2025 the vision this year is to have other people, because we're big on communities, having other people bring their communities into ladigra, so what you just said is a perfect example is I'd love to have other people bring all of their masterminds to La DeGraw, and either you have a closed session, invite other people in, so that you have that opportunity to then have massive networking together, so all the masterminds outside networking, and then have the music festival afterwards,

the day over, the day before, exactly, I want

to be looking the whole conference, because you know how often, like You just said, you do your meetings adjacent to these national conferences, but people have conference burnout. There's, like, all these things going on. Look, you go to a million conferences, like, I'd like to be the one where it's, like the annual retreat for every mastermind or high level group. So that's that's the vision for 2025 let's see if we can pull together.

That's fun. I love it. Tell us a little bit about the bourbon of proof talk show, your podcast. How did that get started? And what are you trying to do on the show?

Yeah. So I started doing podcasts, like early 20 teens with the justice team podcast, just giving out free, like, legal education and, like, we just did it for fun to start. And then it started catching a lot of attention, a lot of law students listening to it. Early lawyers, you were getting a lot of cases from it. You know, the ROI is huge. And people don't realize, if you get a couple of cases a month from just you being an educator in the space or being seen, it's massive. So whenever COVID hit, we had a little bit of slowdown. I wasn't trying as many cases. We launched justice HQ that year, and then my marketing director at the time, she was like, I mean, I love burbic, but my dad brothers who drink it all the time, whiskey. And she's like, You should just do a show about it, but do it like, like that hot ones, episodes where you just drink more and more and get drunker and ask questions. Like, this sounds like, right up my alley. So we decided to do it like, highly produced. We started, you know, shooting like, four or five episodes. You know, real producer, high level cameras sound great, editing, high level production. And then people started lining up to want to be guests on the show, like we still it's crazy how many people want to get on so it started being like a mini networking thing for me. So people that I wanted to be in the room with, I would just say, Hey, do you want to be on the show? And then I'd hear their story be inspired by them, share bourbon with them, some of my best friends I met on the show that day that I stay in contact with. That's great. We did right after COVID had ended, we did a bourbon approved tour, because this show caught a lot of attention, where we just took 200 lawyers out on the trail in Kentucky, 10 different shuttles, 10 different like, MCLE is going on 10 different topics, and everybody went to their different distilleries, ended up at Buffalo Trace at the end. But, yeah, but it's a perfect example. Do something that you like to do, that you're passionate about, and it's also like, part of my brand. Now people send me whiskey. Like, every other day I had to make a whiskey room for it, but it's fun, like, and I do a lot of business with lawyers because of this bourbon connection. Have

you met my friend Andre regard? I know who he is very well, and I know that Kentucky and he's got a bourbon, yeah, no.

But then what I do with it? I mean, I tell people all the time is, you know, we put it everywhere. YouTube, you know, Spotify, Apple, all those other things. But then I have people that just cut these up into shorts all day, and they put them everywhere, YouTube, Instagram, tag all the people, and then I retarget everybody. So I'm specifically targeting groups of lawyers, because that's who I want to help. So I say I always see people at conferences like, oh my god, Bob Simon, I love your stuff. I see all of it. I was like, That's intentional, bro, but it works. Man. Like it, yeah, great job. That was one of the best things our marketing director told me to do. And it really, no, we consciously have to sit down, like, mid December, I'm going to film like eight episodes in two days. We do them in clusters, so it's a lot of drinking, and I don't, I don't cheat it.

So eight episodes and lots of, lots of. Bourbon shots that comes up. I didn't get the email. We should have had a shot today. Oh, man, it is Friday afternoon. For those nobody will know that. I'm not afraid

to have breakfast bourbon. We usually start those shows like 9930

Yeah, got it. So one more serious question before we get to the one liners. One of the questions that I I've sort of come up with over the years is I see a lot of firm and there's one in my annual planning webinar, which is it's coming up in December. You can find one on our tube channel on how to write your business plan for the year for a law firm. And I have an example where one firm gets about 5000 people a month to their website. Another firm gets about 5000 people a month to their website. Firm A signs 80 clients a month. Firm B signs 20 clients a month, and a lot of it has to do with the way the law firm operates. Like one of them is a well oiled machine. They get great results. They get back to their clients. They have great Google reviews, a lot of those calls and website visits or referrals. The other firm is in constant discombobulation. Their Google stars is like under three five, 3.5 out of five. Their constant turnover. Can't answer the phone, you know, all the classic mistakes. So what are some of the strategies that you would recommend to firms? What's the difference between that well oiled machine of a law firm and the guys who can't get out of their own way. I mean, you

just have to be in touch with it. If you're ready. You can't start spending marketing dollars to take that volume unless your house is in order. Like you have to have systems in place. You have to be have intake ready, to have customer service to answer those calls. We've leaned into recently, building out our pre litigation department a lot, and having relying on after hours people overseas that are really good, that are closer to people, get on the phone with people, because sometimes you're in an arms race, if you're doing SEO or pay per click, or LSA, the Google stuff, because people are literally going down the list. It's not like they reached out to you specifically through your brand. Those ones have a much higher conversion. That's I do a lot of this content, putting it everywhere, publishing our my book that I wrote, all those other things that's way more sticky. But if you're in that competitive race, you have to have efficiency on the back end, and then you have to have customer service. I mean, if somebody picks up the phone, this person likes they trust them, they follow up. Doesn't have to be a lawyer. They can say, I'm gonna get the lawyer on the line set this time. I think it makes a big difference. And you have to have those systems where it saves all the calls that are coming in. Those calls have to be like organized. You should opt and say that you're being recorded so you remember everything that you're doing. And those should automatically go into your case management system, your CRM, wherever you're storing all that data. So it's there, because remember those clients coming in as another marketing opportunities later, even if you don't sign them, even if you refer them. And that's why we built the integrations with all the big case management platforms, so that if you don't take that case, it's outside your specialty or too low value is you can refer it into attorney share. So what we've been seeing a lot of firms do, including us, is we have, we've created these Click Funnels for practice areas we don't do, and in jurisdictions we don't do and are able to send it directly through our CRM, push a button and send it to attorney, share and track it. So now we're converting more cases that we're not even taking, but we're still getting a percentage of the fee. You know, where states allow things like that, and I've seen a lot of sophisticated firms start to do that, because it just opens up your net. Like I don't take med mal cases or nursing abuse cases, but we know the best that do, and we're getting a lot of good referral checks from from making that connection and helping that lawyer find or that client find their best lawyer,

from having your ducks in a row. I love it. Yeah, all right. Well, we're here the one liners. So here's the easy part. Just give us quick answers. What are apps or techniques you use for personal productivity. Obviously, you got a lot going on.

Yeah. So I'm a big outlook guy. I'm a big Task Rabbit guy. I'm a big Asana guy. Like, I like to be tasked up. I like to have wake up in the morning and see all the stuff that I need to do. I'm a big planner. So, like, I have, if you walk into my garage, I literally have a big board that has the next five months, and it shows all the big stuff that we're doing, within the family, within my companies, within travel, and all those other things, trials that I have coming up. It's all right there. I think, I mean, you should, you could tie everything to your iPhone. My thing is, you should be able to run your firm from this, like, like, full stop. I mean, I get a lot of prompts of stuff that I have coming up that we use our case management system keeps me I get wake up in the morning and has all the tasks that have been assigned to me. And I have our, like, I even have our media team assigning me tasks and like stuff outside for the biz dev stuff. I'm a big task rapid guy, you know, that's probably the one that keeps me most grounded and like, day to day stuff.

What's Task Rabbit is? Is a website where you can get people to do tasks. No, that's

just a phrase that I call it. I'm just a Tasker. I like, I like people giving me an order of what I need to accomplish that day. Sometimes I'll do it as simple as like, and I take a lot of notes tonight, as I'll just write down on my like, one. Notes to myself on WhatsApp that then I'll convert it to, like, calendar reminders. For me, it's, I think that's pretty so I know some people use some other stuff

and to do lists or OneNote or whatever, but just organize your stuff. And do you have a, like, a va who's sending those tasks, or that's like the marketing people that probably your twin brother who runs the firm? Yeah,

yeah, Brad that runs the firm. It's like different people. People are shocked that I don't have an EA. I actually am interviewing one, because I probably should have it, but I'm so like to keep track of all my own stuff. It's probably a good idea. So

have you read Dan Martel's book? Buy back your time. No, that's a great read. And there's a whole chapter on VA, and I just got my full time VA, I'll give Elizabeth a shout out. So Elizabeth, if you're hearing this, thank you. You made my life a lot better. But that's a good that's a really good read. It seems to be super hot right now too. Dan Martell, buy back your time. Do you have a personal wellness and fitness routine?

I have a tonal at my house. I work out at home. I don't go to a gym because I think it's inefficient for time and a lot of other reasons. I do what's called EMS training, electro muscular stimulation training once a week, where they hook you up suits and, yeah, it works all these other areas your body. And I've seen that be awesome. That's cool. I've done hard. Yeah, it's hard to be in a routine when you got three little kids and schedules. And my our schedules, I'm as consistent as I take the kids to school every morning, if I'm in town, my wife and I pick them up from school. They're different times spend some time with them, so I just have some set times. So that's my turn off time, at least for a little bit. Able to do those things. I'm big on preventative health these days. I go to this place called the boon Heart Clinic in Denver. A lot of other trial lawyers go there to do a lot of preventative heart stuff, stress test, a lot of imaging, a lot of I do my blood probably every four months, you know, kind of get ahead of the curve even, you know, completely healthy. I want to make sure that, you know, I'm a healthy 100 for my kids, right? So, very big into that stuff. And also because I drink almost every single day, and I make sure I get my liver panels done and make sure everything's cool,

do preventative wellness, and I have a bourbon balance, balance. Best business books. Oh,

I think Zero to One is still a really good book. There's one that's called just one thing. I think it's called, I go look and see what I have up on my on my shelf. I like Jack Newton's client centered law firm. I got that there. I got you can't teach hungry by John Morgan, one of the first like, law books that I wrote read back in the day. I just find it harder and harder to like, find time to read because all this other stuff that's going on, I listen to some podcasts here and there when I'm sucking traffic.

That's the next one. Blogs, podcasts, YouTube, what hits your feed and then you cancel everything else and listen to that. So

I'm a big fan and friend of Jefferson Fisher. I love all his content, and I've known Jefferson for years before he exploded. He's a great human I just like the stuff that he says and does and I I implement it. I listen to my friends podcasts like tip the scale by Brio Monroy. He's a friend of mine. I like the guests she has on I like learning about them. I like how I built this, the one on NPR. Always been a big fan of how I like to hear how stories, stories from actual humans that build it and their struggles. That's what I that's kind of what I like to listen to. There's this one show podcast called greeking out that my kids love, that we listen in the car, and they actually very well done. And it's like these old Greek stories that they tell in a funny way, and it keeps my kids engaged and quiet the car. So I probably listen to, like, 10 seasons of that

cool never heard of that one. I'll check it out. Last thing, I think we touched on this a little bit. But what's a great introduction for you? Someone sending a case the spine injuries? Anything else?

No, I mean, like, I actually like to mentor a lot of firms. A lot of people I get reached out in my DM. You know, I'm very active on socials, especially Instagram, and daily, somebody reaches out for like, Hey, can we have a 15 minute call? We never met, and I almost always do it, or people want to start their firm. Let me give you some ideas, because I think it's special for everybody. Depends on where they are in their journey, what they want to do. I really like doing that stuff. And I really like workshopping, like these disc injury cases, because I could see a path to win most all of them and some of it are not good. I'll tell people, these are ones you should not be involved with, and why? Yeah, that's it. Man, like and complicated. I do a lot of really complicated, disputed liability cases because I think they're fun,

cool. And last question, Where can people get in touch with you? AB,

to Planet fun. Bob, Instagram, it's the easiest way to swear.

Perfect. Well, Bob, thank you so much for doing this. This was great.

Thank you, brother. Appreciate you.

Thank you for listening to the 10 golden rules of internet marketing for law firms. Podcast, please send questions and comments to podcast at 10 golden rules.com that is podcast at t e n golden rules.com you.