Marketing in the Age of AI — Lawyerist Invasion!

Episode Notes

Transcript

Conrad Saam:

Welcome to Lunch Hour Legal Marketing. I’m Conrad Saam from Mockingbird and I for the second year in a row am keeping up with last year’s new news resolutions.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And I am Gyi Tsakalakis from AttorneySync and I have been eating a lot of roasted beets recently.

Conrad Saam:

Roasted beets, huh? So are you eating roasted beets when you were watching March Madness? Is that part of it?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

No. I don’t know what came onto this roasted beets thing, but apparently they’re really good for you and so I’ve incorporated them into my diet.

Conrad Saam:

All right. Do you have a questionably legal, but great for building comradery? March Madness Pool going on? Gyi,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I’m in a couple of March Madness pools. In fact, our company typically does one, but I don’t know if that invitation’s gone out yet. So unless we get one,

Conrad Saam:

Yeah, get cracking

Gyi Tsakalakis:

The next couple hours. We’re not going to get one. But how about

Conrad Saam:

You? Do you, well, I sent you one to ours, but you didn’t reply,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

So

Conrad Saam:

You did? No, I believe so. I’m sorry. When did you send this? I’m sure your assistant’s assistant is on it. Maybe it went to my spam with the rest of your emails to me. Wow. Who’s your pick? Do you have Michigan on top? Of course you got Michigan on

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Top. And a couple of them I do because I’m the ultimate Michigan homer, and if Michigan’s on, they can beat anybody. They’re winners of the Big 10 tournaments, which was a surprise to me. They’re streaky though. They can play with anybody and they can lose to anybody.

Conrad Saam:

Okay,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

How about you? Who do you like?

Conrad Saam:

I’ve got Michigan Duke at the end, and I picked Duke at the end.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Duke’s going to be tough out. Yeah,

Conrad Saam:

My brother went to business school at Duke and I went to business school at Michigan, so it was the perfect final for me if we can make it happen.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Very nice. Conrad, what else are we talking about today?

Conrad Saam:

Alright, we are covering the news as usual, and then we’re going to do a play of AI and marketing, our conversation with the Lawyers podcast

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Music,

Announcer:

And welcome to Lunch Hour Legal Marketing, teaching you how to promote market and make Fat Stack for your legal practice here on Legal Talk Network.

Conrad Saam:

Alright everybody, welcome to Lunch Hour Legal Marketing. Let’s hit the news.

Alright, dear listeners, key and I had a great argument when we were setting up this segment because there’s really not a lot of news to talk about, and I tried to throw a bunch of things in there that Gyi rightly said, we’re not material to our listeners and not actionable. So we’ve cut them because they were garbage. However, we did bring m and a news to you in the past. Google has just made its largest acquisition ever in a cybersecurity firm, and that was a privately held cybersecurity firm, and that is a pretty fine payday. Gyi, what else is going on in the very quiet world of legal marketing news?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Oh, what else was going on here? Joy brought to our attention that there were some interesting data anomalies going on in search console, particularly around the term lawyer. You said you saw that across the board. I saw it in some of our data.

Conrad Saam:

So it’s a data out of Google Search Console and it is an increase in clicks, click to rate because there’s no commensurate increase in impressions. And we saw this, we ran all of our clients, we saw this fairly dramatically across 72% of our clients frequently in the PI world, and often including things around location as well as branded terms. And so we saw it quite significantly. What do you think this means? Gyi?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, it could mean a lot of things as we talked, and we’re going to turn this into a segment, which we said we weren’t going to do, but here we are,

Conrad Saam:

Very short segment, nons segment, really quick.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

My initial reaction is, is that it’s either some kind of data anomaly related to bots or tools or some kind of something, some manipulation, or there’s something changed at least in some of these SERPs that this data is reporting on that would cause some kind of increased click-through rate. But looking at the SERPs, the corresponding SERPs of some of these, it doesn’t look like much has changed there. So I tend to think of it as either anomaly or tool manipulation. It could be some kind of massive CTR manipulation scheme, massive bot, right? Massive bot,

Conrad Saam:

Which would be fascinating in the spirit of giving you actionable insight and information and things that you can actually use. The only thing I can give you on this one is if your agency all of a sudden is claiming that they’re doing a much better job and they’re using Google Search Console, click through data to prove that to you. I would be a little suspicious. Okay, Gyi, next time we record, you are going to be in Chicago with your good friends at ABA Tech Show and I am going to be down in Las Vegas at Mass Torts made Perfect. What are you talking about at Tech Show?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

The future of legal SEO Beyond keywords and backlinks. Tanner Jones of ConsultWebs, and I’ll be talking about that. And then we’re also talking about holding marketing investments accountable. That will be multi-channel attribution and having conversations about how to hold that money and time that you spend on marketing accountable. So if you’re in Chicago and you’re a Lunch Hour Legal Marketing listener, please say same with if you’re at MTMP, say hello to Conrad,

Conrad Saam:

Come find me at MTMP. Yeah, what

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Are you talking about?

Conrad Saam:

I often recycle some of my talks or at least update existing things. I’ve got a brand new deck, brand new data, all new. So I’m going to do this at pilama later in April, I think the end of April and early May. And I’m also doing an Mt MP at the beginning of May, and this is 15 graphs. Digital marketing agencies don’t want you to see the dirty underhanded side of what we do, and I imagine they go

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Down to the right.

Conrad Saam:

Well, it depends what you’re looking at. That’s the whole point. Lots of things go up into the right and it doesn’t make a damn difference. You already know this.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And then you and I will be doing a website tear down at InfoTrack’s Legal Up virtual conference.

Conrad Saam:

So if you are attending Legal Up and you would like, Gyi and me to rip apart your digital marketing efforts, ping us and we’ll set you up for a thorough audit in public.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Or you can submit your competitor. We’re happy to tear down your competitors if you’re not brave enough to have your own torn apart. And then maybe you

Conrad Saam:

Mean if you think your competitor is doing a bunch of shady crap and you want us to publicly expose that, is that what you’re suggesting? Gyi,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

No. They’re doing something awesome and you want to try to understand reverse engineer what they’re doing.

Conrad Saam:

Great. I like your positivity there. And the punchline on that will be, Gyi, and I’ll tell you that you don’t have the same assets and therefore you shouldn’t just copy exactly what they’re doing because it’s not going to work for you.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And now let’s take a quick break and we’re back with our conversation with Zack Glazer from Lawyerist, big fans of lawyers, always been big fans of lawyers, find them on YouTube, Spotify, apple Podcasts, all the places. Conrad, what did you, Zack and I talk about?

Conrad Saam:

Well, I think this is a really important conversation and I’m glad to bring it to this audience as well. So many times people think about AI as being content generation, and we’ve gone from just copy and we’re now doing video content images, et cetera, and that’s always kind of been the focus of the digital marketing crowds conversation. But you’re completely missing the point because AI is so much more than that and there’s a lot of intelligence that goes into what you can get out of ai. And so our focus deliberately was not on content creation regardless of medium, but really what can we do with AI beyond content creation? And it’s awesome. Stay tuned. Here we go.

Zack Glaser:

Gyi, Conrad, thanks for being with me. I’m Zack, the host of the Lawyers podcast. Let’s jump into this thing. We’re talking AI and marketing guys, As is everyone else.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Everybody thinks it’s like you’re doing it, but as a replacement, I don’t have to do it anymore. And this is something that Connor and I are always talking about is people interpret this promise of AI as, oh, great, I don’t have to write anything anymore. And it’s a huge liability because if I can’t tell if you’re using AI and I can’t tell, I guess so be it, but guess what most of us can tell and it’s the opposite of marketing because everybody else is doing it. You’re not standing out, you’re not telling your own stories, there’s no authenticity to it, and it becomes much more of a liability. And the funny thing for me is this is no different than when people were buying human written content at scale. It’s the same problem. It’s not very good.

Zack Glaser:

That’s a good point of I don’t want to get somebody that doesn’t know anything about my area of practice to just write what would essentially kind of be random blog posts for me.

Conrad Saam:

Yeah, I mean, the blog posts are a great example. FindLaw sold blog posts for years and years. I dunno how many tens of thousands of inane blog posts that they wrote,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Did they sponsor this podcast?

Conrad Saam:

Oh yeah, they do not. Sorry. Okay, good.

Zack Glaser:

They do not. And they probably really won’t after this, but yeah,

Conrad Saam:

No, no, that’s the problem. We kind of towards sponsorships who weren’t sponsors. We never be careful. We need a list of people we shouldn’t mention. No, but we think about, I remember when chat g BT came out, it was very much a copy focused, and by copy, I mean written content, a copy focused experience. Gyi’s, right now we can generate a whole bunch of words and a whole bunch of page count, which may or may not do well from an SEO perspective, but it is no longer a competitive advantage. You used to have a really strong backlink profile and a really large website, and you could start by large I mean page count perspective, you could start winning those long tail keywords and that was a strategy that lived around for a very long time. The cost of developing content at this point in time, mundane and in or accurate has really, really fundamentally dropped. So that is no longer a distinguishing characteristic for me. The interesting what’s happening tomorrow, it’s actually happening today, but what’s really happening tomorrow is we’ve spent a lot of time with lawyers building video content and genuine, not the kind of overproduced hype videos, but this is me talking about why St. Patrick’s Day is important in my little town and I’m at the Irish restaurant kind of Thing.

Conrad Saam:

I love that stuff that can now be done with AI and that is happening. It is very real and it is very difficult to distinguish that

Gyi Tsakalakis:

As long as we can’t tell,

Conrad Saam:

As long as you can’t tell. But there’s so much stuff out there that looks very, very real. You’ve seen this. If you have a Facebook account, it’s not right. And we’ve got deep fakes, and this is a very real thing, and I want to move off of the content, not that interesting, but how does human behavior change now that we no longer have any faith in the content that we are consuming? Is that actually genuine? Is it AI generated that will become fascinating? That’s a fundamental shift in user behavior that will have an impact on how lawyers market their firms.

Zack Glaser:

Yeah, because it gets into authenticity.

Conrad Saam:

Yeah. So GIS take is the authenticity of this is so, so important. So a couple of things happen behind that. One, you have to have a voice and a perspective, and it has to be about you. Doesn’t mean you can’t train. You should spend as much time training AI on your voice, maybe more time training AI on your voice than anything else.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And again, to your point, you can build your own, I guess it’s still a GPT even if it’s doing video. So it’s different modality. So you train your GPT, it’s your voice. Maybe you share some of your personal experiences in there so that you’re getting this video that’s you talking about how important St. Patrick’s Day and this restaurant is to your local community. If you do all that, how much time did it really save you? If you’re actually telling the story about your local community and the history of this restaurant and all these times that you went there as a kid and yada, yada, yada, why don’t you just record that? Did you really need AI for that?

Conrad Saam:

So I look at this, doing it this at scale, let’s say I’m

Gyi Tsakalakis:

What’s the scale version? The scale version is not going to sound like that, right? Does the scale version tell all the nuances of your childhood story and trips to the restaurant?

Conrad Saam:

I

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Used to get emotional when Soandso used to come and serve you. Your Irish food.

Conrad Saam:

To your point, my ability to fake authenticity and the background of every single restaurant doing it as video content that is indistinguishable from actually shooting it. That is a fundamental shift.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Another issue for you, another issue for you. Let’s say that you didn’t actually go to this restaurant, now you got mislead and misleading. This is my

Conrad Saam:

Point. This is exactly my point. Point.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

You’re not follow the rules of professional conduct. You’re a big dirty

Conrad Saam:

Liar. Oh, see, Gyi always comes back to ethics. And because I didn’t go to law school and I’m just a marketer, I have no ethics. We, but here’s my point. If you have to rely on the ethics argument, I’m not, I think

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Ultimately I think that the GPT is going to get really good at faking it.

Conrad Saam:

Yes,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

It already is.

Conrad Saam:

It’s already really good.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

However, because we’re all going to come to the table, assuming everybody’s faking is dead internet theory, people are going to be like, if you can stand out, if you can find ways to create content that distinguishes you from the generic, that’s the stuff that will stick with people. It’s just going to raise theBar on what’s becomes authentic. I’m not saying you, man. Look, we know that people are faking it. Now I know that I’m probably interacting on LinkedIn with not probably, I’m interacting with AI generated posts on LinkedIn a hundred percent.

Zack Glaser:

Yeah.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Sometimes I don’t know. A lot of times I do and I play along. And again, my whole thing is though, is that even people I know when I know that they’re doing that, I’m less inclined to subscribe, engage, talk, because I know it’s a bot.

Zack Glaser:

You’re getting at something. There is what is our end goal of this thing every time? Ai, what’s the end of whatever you put out from a marketing standpoint, if artificial intelligence can help you get the end goal, which is like, and subscribe, get somebody to call you. We still need to track these numbers, but if I’m using AI and just throwing a bunch of stuff at the wall to see what’ll stick and it’s not moving up any of my marketing KPIs and it’s worthless,

Conrad Saam:

I don’t disagree with that. I take exception with the assumption that it’s not moving your KPIs.

Zack Glaser:

If it is moving the KPIs, then that’s great. If AI created content is making people call me, even if it’s unauthentic, which I think the argument is that it’s not going to necessarily, but if it’s getting people to call me and it’s getting people in my door, then it’s good for me.

Conrad Saam:

And we know this is happening because we are talking to law firms who are getting clients from chat GPT from Aios. That is a thing that is happening, and this is a ton of it right

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Now. This is a great distinction though because, and this is what I was going to also suggest. If societally we start accepting that there’s a certain context of content that we’re going to receive knowing that it’s ai, it’s not trying to trick us, And That goes away, you’re not going to chat GPT thinking I’m talking to the lawyer. Yeah, that’s right. The issue is3 the deception. When you feel like you’re being deceived, you don’t like it. Now if I’ve got a chatbot on my website that says, Hey, I’m Gyik Bot, and I answer some questions, maybe I do some scheduling stuff. No one feels misled by that. If I post on LinkedIn intending that this is coming from me and it feels fake, that’s the part people don’t like. They don’t like feeling deceived by

Conrad Saam:

It.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Agree.

Conrad Saam:

I just feel like that is a let’s from application. Yeah, yeah. Let’s move on from content, right?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah. I thought we weren’t going to talk about content.

Conrad Saam:

We’re not going to talk about content. The content portion of this. We’re 30 minutes and talking about content, damnit the whole thing’s

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Content

Zack Glaser:

At the tone, we will stop talking about content. But I think that segues into, we’re talking about somebody going into chat, GPT and making searches. We’re talking about people interacting with the internet differently. How is consumer behavior? How do we as lawyers who are trying to get our website seen and our website visited and our phone’s ringing, how do we adjust what we’re doing in marketing to account for that?

Conrad Saam:

Conrad, what do you got? Sorry for being a bad guest, but I’ll do this twice. I’m taking Umbridge with your assumption. You

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Take that out of every podcast we do.

Conrad Saam:

I love it. I love it. But it’s just me and you. Usually I can be an asshole to you. Now I’m an asshole as a guest to our host, I think you need, in your mind, not you, but the listenership needs to realize that our objective is not to get people to our website because you are swimming against the tide of the economics of what make platforms go round.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

What do you mean by that, Conrad?

Conrad Saam:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Expand please. LinkedIn makes $0 as soon as you go to someone’s website. And we’ve seen this with engagement. So you throw a link into your post in LinkedIn and all of a sudden you get much less distribution. And so we play all these stupid games about LinkedIn, the comments below, right? Yeah. So we know this. We’ve known this for years. It just makes sense. I think we need to think about the way different platforms connect to a law firm, and that is not necessarily, not always, but not necessarily through a direct click to the site, which shows all the traditional marketing attribution, UTM parameters, CallRail, all that stuff becomes really, really difficult. So we get hazier about what’s actually working because we’re losing the granularity that you can get that we had 10 years ago when I knew where every single click to my website came from, and I knew that 99% of the phone calls came into my law firm, were from my website. That is gone, and that toothpaste is not going back in the tube.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

So I’m going to hit this answer in a slightly different light. So you answered very literally, and I agree with you completely the question of clicking through the websites, but if we’re going to zoom out a little bit and say, well, how is this stuff impacting consumer behavior from a law firm’s perspective in terms of awareness and affinity and searches for lawyers and that kind of thing? Well, of course it’s dramatically impacting that because we’re already seeing chat, GPT and perplexity and these other technologies showing up in qualitative attribution data. And what we mean by that is that when you ask someone, how did you hear about us? Or who do we thank for referring us? They say, see, right in the cm it says chat, GPT. And so my big things here are, and we could spend a whole talking about how the LMS work and the flux and the data sources and all this kind of stuff.

Here’s my short version. It’s not that much different than what we’ve historically done. Maybe you reprioritize directories, maybe you do some research in what are the source sites that the GPT is using for their response to a prompt and prioritize appearing in those or making sure information’s accurate in those. But the truth is, it’s kind of a fool’s err because of the flux. But the thing that’s most important to me is the impact on the way that the consumers are engaging with the technology. See, historically, we think of search, we think of keywords and people type a keyword in. This is totally different. This is conversational. And so optimizing around keywords or optimizing around queries is really, again, a fool’s err. And it’s really understanding, and this is still true even in historical marketing things, who your audience is, what are the issues they’re dealing with? What questions are they likely to type into one of these prompts? All the different follow up kind of questions that they might have. What are the refinements on their queries? And making sure that what you’re publishing in the world is responsive to those questions.

Zack Glaser:

So are we losing this kind of time period? And please don’t make fun of me too much if I’m way behind. We losing this time period where we could really track where we got that minutiae. We got that granular stuff. But in my mind, that granular stuff wasn’t necessarily, it was there. We looked at it, we used it. We might even use it to drive what we’re doing. But really what we need to be doing is what y’all are saying anyway, which is the actual marketing, speaking to people appropriately, trying to figure out where people are coming from. I’ve seen a lot of people where they’ll spend on Google ads because they can track it when in reality they get their stuff from referrals, but they just never ask who referred you. It’s easier. It’s lazier to go look at that Google Analytics.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, and it’s in the agencies and the marketing to say that everything’s coming from Google Pay per click, or if they’re an SEO person organic search. And I know Conrad’s got a lot of thoughts, and he’s building up for a crescendo here. The one thing that I will say though, in terms of the quantitative data is look, there are still legal services, consumer journeys that are very linear search, click call hire that exists.

And for those journeys, you should hold those dollars accountable for those linear paths. The issue is not that everything is totally gone. Now, in the context of GPTs, yes, there is no GPT analytics. You’re not going to get the actual data. However, there are plenty of companies that are working on modeling the same way that a lot of places model for rank tracking what businesses show up for relevant prompt responses in GPTs. And so that’s an indirect measurement or assessment of whether or not you’re appearing. Now, we had a long way to go on that or not. That’s actually a reliable data source in the long term is still TBD, because again, what I see is this, the flux is the problem. The personalization is the problem. Remember when you’re logged into these GPTs, it’s remembering your interactions with them. And so for example, if I say, give me a list of the best SEO companies for lawyers and attorneys. Sync’s not on that list, and I say, Hey, this list should include attorneys sync. Guess what happens? Every time I do that from now on, I see attorneys sync show up in the results when I’m logged in.

Conrad Saam:

So for those of you who are GE clients and he’s convinced you that he’s doing a great job, well,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

It might not show up for them. It might not show up for them.

Conrad Saam:

No, no, no. But here’s the tactic. Here’s shitty agents, sorry. Gyi would not do this. Here’s shitty agency. Here’s a way to make it look like you’re doing a good job. Go teach your clients to train the chat of the world to recognize their firm, show their sites, and convince your clients that is representative of what is showing up in the rest of the world.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

But how different is that than just being like, why don’t you search for your firm name from your firm office

Conrad Saam:

For your non-brand,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

From your

Conrad Saam:

Firm office. This is why Gyi, and I have no friends, because

Gyi Tsakalakis:

This is why Conrad to pay to speak. Now

Conrad Saam:

I have to pay to speak and I have a larger litigation budget than most firms. Most. No, but this is the problem. So it’s very easy. These types of shenanigans exist and it’s very easy to convince people that that’s how it works. And to give these kind of false positive success. It’s no different from SEO. It’s no different from the people who are taking credit for brand queries and paper clicking and passing them off as family lawyer, Des Moines, Iowa. It’s no different than people running GBP and taking credit for the billboards that are driving phone calls. This is the same key’s point, and I can’t, well, we should move off of this, but the direct response stuff, pay-per-click, LSA, some SEO, where you don’t have a starting point, you don’t have a law firm. You’re doing research, you’re going to make a purchase today, or at least make the inquiry today, that still represents a massive portion of the market. 60, 70, 80% of the market looks like that depending on the firm Gyi’s giving me, depending on the firm,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I would say, depending on the audience, but yes,

Conrad Saam:

But I mean, there are plenty of firms. You don’t have to have a brand to generate business from the internet. A hundred percent.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah, you

Conrad Saam:

Don’t.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

But it certainly

Conrad Saam:

Helps. It helps. It helps, and it makes the economics better. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. We’ve talked about this ad nauseum, the AI thing is interesting. It’s fascinating. It’s a direction, it’s a change, blah, blah, blah. If you want to dominate your market a go take, reassess your ambitions unless you have a massive, massive budget. Because to dominate your market, you need to play in very expensive, high volume direct response channels. You have to do that, right?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah.

Conrad Saam:

I love the AI thing. I love the change. I love the direction, I love these pontifications, but let’s not kid ourselves that a huge portion of the market still goes through these trackable, direct response things. Alright, go grab a cheeseburger and when you come back, we’ll have more about the future of AI beyond content.

Zack Glaser:

Let’s talk about though, what is it your clientele is interested in? What’s their path? Are they looking at local service pac? Are they searching for people on maps or going to chat GPT? And you guys said something before we got on about thinking about AI and marketing in a different way and using AI to help you with that, to help you with that client journey. Kind of like doing what I would consider the meat and potatoes of what you need to do for your marketing.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

So to me, this is where AI really thrives is deploying AI against your firm’s data. And so whether that’s client data intake, data acquisition data marketing data, the AI is really good at identifying patterns and insights that we are not as good at, especially at scale. CallRail Conrad and I talk about CallRail all the time. CallRail can provide you insights about the questions, the issues that your audience is facing that can inform you in a way that can help for content creation, but can also help you identify media buying efficiencies. So my biggest thing of all of this, especially if you’re talking about media buying in general, is if you are not telling the machines, which of the exposure awareness ads that they’re showing to their audience are actually turning into qualified consultations and clients for you, you are wasting your time and money because that is where the machines really shine and you’re going to create so much waste. We still see this all the time, whether it’s like they’re optimizing media to basic conversion, pixel firing, and there’s just way too much noise in there. And I think that’s a place where people don’t really realize that that AI is actually doing that, but deploying AI on firm data, I think that’s the place that it really changes everything.

Conrad Saam:

I think the key to this is, unfortunately, you have to have enough data to make sense of the data.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And

Conrad Saam:

What that means is if you are a low volume firm, if you are a solo, you can’t detect a pattern.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I think that’s true for media management, but it’s still a problem at really small numbers. You’re not going to get statistically significant mathematical insights and analysis, but even just clumping frequently asked questions together and just seeing stuff like that,

I think the AI can help with that. Even deploying it against cr, I mean, look, data scarcity is a thing. There’s no question about it, but I think sometimes we think about, okay, to get to 99% or 90% statistically significant insights and analysis, that’s a huge problem for small law firms. That’s one of the advantages of working with a partner who actually has access to a larger set of data. When you’re taking data from different sources and you’re cleaning it up and you’re marrying that data, especially when you’re talking front end marketing data with backend CRM data, there’s still a data scarcity issue, but oftentimes you can aggregate enough to give the AI something to chew on. But anyway, that’s my point of view. Conrad, go,

Conrad Saam:

No, I mean the analysis that AI can do, I think that’s where this gets interesting. The content development stuff is cute, problematic, and it’s not a game changer because everyone else has access to it. Being able to analyze your data and figure out, you talked about your audience. Who is your audience? Why do we connect? You can use AI to do that. One of the best things that a high volume firm can do is do lead scoring. Is this a good lead or is a bad lead and my great leads are going to go to my best closers and my best attorneys and my shitty leads are going to go to the worst ones. And that is an instant way to make more money without doing any more investment in marketing, right?

You can use AI to do lead scoring. We talk about this all the way, we have not said intake management yet, Gyi, so we’re going to say that you can use AI to score the quality of your intake staff at the individual call level. Now you can pinpoint things where they’ve made a mistake or where they’ve done really well. You can have AI make that happen, and now you can become a better manager because you’re sifting through a week’s worth of phone calls and finding the three best ones and the three worst ones, and now we have something to talk about on Monday morning when we’re going to do a better job this week, right?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yep. Again, this audience identification stuff, because I think sometimes it gets lost and we get so stuck in the ways we’ve always done it, but say you’re a PI firm, you’re doing more of vehicle accidents. Think about taking the last 10 years of crash data from your state police websites, public data you can get, and marrying that with demographic information across the state and marrying that with maybe your average position for your Google business profile, thinking about opening new offices. To me, those kind of cases are the ways that AI just beats us because think about what we would do. We can take that stuff, we can put it in a spreadsheet, we can do pivot tables, we can try to mash it up. AI is going to crush us in that context.

Zack Glaser:

I like that because it gets out of, that’s something more than what people would normally do. A regular sort of firm isn’t going to go and start to analyze those things because really, they wouldn’t create the pivot tables. They just wouldn’t do it.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Right? They’re going to be a spreadsheet.

Zack Glaser:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I didn’t learn math. That’s not what I wanted to do.

Conrad Saam:

But those are the firms that in the last three or four years, the firms that figured out the spreadsheet really used that type of data and the analysis on that data. Those are the firms that are winning today, and it wasn’t AI generated. It was data nerds and MBAs and analytical people, but those were the firms that I will say the last four years, maybe even five years, those were the firms that are now at the forefront. I’ll use one example that Gyi and I, we sat on a stage with Top Dog. They went from nothing to a massive franchise model based on spreadsheets. How can we take that skill and put it in more people’s hands, and then this becomes another race to get smarter, but the getting smarter with AI and having AI do the getting smarter part for you, that’s magic.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah, I think that’s a really good point. This is where this is really transformational is that it democratizes access to research, data analysis. I mean, we’re seeing in the context of coding, you don’t have to have all of those different skills in order to take advantage of what the AI can do for your business, and really, we’re talking about marketing where marketing people, but across the board operationally, service delivery, audience identification, all this stuff.

Zack Glaser:

I think one of the important things that’s kind of coming out of what y’all are saying here, and we can kind of take it all the way back even to trying to figure out where my leads came from, and you’re saying if you have, essentially if you have one UTM that you put on every link that you have out there, yeah, you’re figuring out that something came from the internet, but you’re not figuring out where it came specifically, and artificial intelligence can help us get into that. It’s the value of the data, of the granular data, and I know a lot of attorneys who they don’t track this information because they don’t see the value in tracking this information. Where did you come from? Who referred you? I don’t see the value in that because I just know that Pete down the street refers some stuff to me. We have lower volume, and so I don’t need to track it. Well, it seems like if you start tracking, you can use this. Gyi, Conrad, y’all came up with a ton of different ways to use just the data about my company, about my clients, my potential clients, the world around me to make informed decisions about my company and my marketing, and so yeah, it makes that data capture more important.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

A hundred percent, and because we’ve heard those stories too, and I’ll tell you some other common ones for listeners who maybe these stories will resonate if they’re ruling your eyes, but all this data stuff, I can’t tell you how many times someone makes a strategic decision in their firm about investing in nurturing a referral relationship or buying media or where to open an office that is based on nothing. It’s just based on what you just said. It’s like a gut instinct and over and over again, we see just poor decisions made based on gut instincts, and again, we talk about this on the podcast all the time. You’re the go-to person in your community. You’re not trying to grow your firm. You’re happy. Maybe you’re towards the end of your career. You can have a very successful law practice without any of this stuff. I will say this, you are playing with your hands tied behind your back because once you see it, you can’t unsee it. Once you see the impact of that, your gut instinct was so vastly wrong and you were about to go invest a bunch of time and money doing things that actually doesn’t have any value for really anything, that’s when you’re like, okay, I can never go back. I’ve got to capture this data. I’ve got to get it cleaned. I’ve got to deploy it on my business.

Conrad Saam:

The ability to do analysis at this point in time, that is the differentiator between the firms that are winning today and they’ve been doing this for three or four or five years, and the ones that aren’t AI is just going to make that a little bit easier. You were talking, Zack about attribution modeling. Gyi and I talk all the time about dual source attribution modeling. There’s the direct response stuff, which is the linear pay-per-click and LSA and some SEO stuff, and then there’s all the other stuff, all the other things, and because it is all the other things, and it is often many things to an individual client, I called you because of these 27 different reasons, using AI to capture 27 reasons and knowing that and putting that all together and understanding a map that these 27 different touch points were actually all effective. That’s amazing.

Zack Glaser:

You’re absolutely right. Sometimes you have those moments where it’s like the glass breaks and you’re like, holy crap. Yeah. Capturing multi-source attribution actually means something if you can start to, I can’t look at it, look at a spreadsheet and go, oh, shit, there’s a pattern there, but I could operationalize artificial intelligence to potentially find a pattern or find something that looks a lot like a pattern to that. Even if I have 12 potential sources. How did you find out about me? Well, your podcast, your website, your book, all of those things. Okay, great. Those are all helpful information, and I had never thought of that, the value to that now,

Conrad Saam:

And it’s hard to do that, and then it’s hard to do the analysis behind it because it’s super, super messy, and one of the things that Gyi and I have talked about is this isn’t less attribution modeling. It’s more we need to solve this question with more attribution modeling, and this is the difference between spreadsheets and ai. In a spreadsheet, you have to came from one of these seven different things, or maybe it was three of these seven different things, but I’m already defining the things are, because if I don’t define what the things are, I can’t draw a pretty graph because I’m an MBA, and that’s how we validate whether or not you should keep spending money with your agency, right? Things don’t slot into those seven different options or 10 different options or whatever it might be. It is a whole Penelope of things that you might not even think about, and that’s where you can go from definitive but flawed spreadsheets to comprehensive, messy, but much more accurate understanding through ai. That’s the fundamental shift in what can now be analyzed,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And lemme give you another one. There’s another whole issue here, which is garbage and garbage out, but you have clean data that you’re working with and you’re including firm financial data. Imagine the power of being able to be like, Hey, give me my most profitable referral sources over the last 36 months, just like that. You Don’t need a spreadsheet, you don’t need to do formulas, you don’t need to do VLOOKUPs. You can converse with your data. It’s unbelievable.

Zack Glaser:

Yeah, and like you’re saying, we’re talking about capturing things in multi-line text fields, for lack of better way of really saying it, as opposed to even multi-choice fields, because we’re not limiting what people are saying because quite honestly, we might find that people found out about us from a totally, totally different place than what we thought. I found out the other day that we have a video embedded on some outdoor magazine website. It’s Marshall LTI teaching people to tie his shoes. It goes gangbusters on YouTube. I never would’ve thought of that. Never would’ve thought that somebody would’ve seen that.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I’m going to give you a very relevance to this podcast conversation. My CRM the other day, someone’s like, I’ve been listening to Gyi since he used to write for Lawyerist, and the quantitative attribution in the CRM said, Google CPC, because they searched on my name, got a branded ad, clicked on the ad, and then filled out the open field text box on our website, and again, I would’ve never made that connection. I would’ve been like, someone’s got my name somehow, but would’ve never known that. It’s from that.

Zack Glaser:

There’s a lot of stuff in here, a lot of little points that I think would’ve piqued a lot of people’s interests. What would you guys, though, in this world of artificial intelligence searching and creation, whatnot, what would you say to somebody today that they could take away for their marketing

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Stand out? I mean, that’s why I’m like, I’m not a huge French file, but the more things change, the more they stay the same. Legal services consumers change, their behavior changes the platforms, changes how they research and consume information changes, but at the end of the day, marketing is still about standing out and finding ways for more people to know about you and more importantly, and trust you and whatever you can do, whether that’s producing a video, whether you’re doing with AI or not, whether it’s writing, whether it’s podcasting, whether it’s attending local community events, doing more things that get your name in front of people a way that they trust, and that’s what you should spend most of your time doing.

Conrad Saam:

Okay.

I’ll give you digitally tactical elements to think about in order to get included in some of those AO overviews, right? So super, super tactical. I believe. This goes back to a very old concept from Google called Authorship. It was reinforced by this concept called eat. Both of those things are kind of annoying, but I would go back and research how authorship happened, and the key to authorship was tying content to an individual or an individual firm through a web of connections, so LinkedIn, Facebook, all tied to this piece of content that’s tied to this website that’s tied to this individual person. That’s kind of the authorship, and it’s the foundation of what Google called eat, so I would dig deep into that. The other component to this, and Gyi teased this earlier but never told the punchline, is the directories. I think AI has saved the directories because they’ve become that much more relevant, and I would continue to think about directories that you play in and having a presence there, and Gyi’s going to disagree. I saw him pull his microphone closer to him, so he’s going to last word this.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I’m not going to disagree. I think that’s right. I still think tactically, I think it’s worth researching. We talked about this on our podcast the other day. You have to be a part of the training data to show up in any of these things. It is the same thing as showing up in Google if you’re not there, if Google doesn’t have pages and video content, and if social platforms don’t have content, that’s the fuel, and so however you’re creating that stuff, you’ve got to be, I think it’s worthwhile to be a little bit mindful about the message, which you’re talking about, where you’re publishing, but at the end of the day, for so many lawyers, because I know a lot of lawyers, they’re like, I practice in law. I don’t have time for all this AI stuff. What should I be doing to survive the future?

And I would carve out a little bit of time every single day to put something into the world that differentiates you, that talks about what you’re interested in, your community that’s supporting the local community. Even if you’re a local community lawyer, that’s the stuff that’s still going to win the day, because when the next person sees that, forget about clicks, forget about likes, forget about all that stuff, you’re going to stick in their brain, and that’s the most important place to be because that’s what they’re going to use when they are like, who do I know that can help me through this difficult life legal situation that I’m in?

Zack Glaser:

Love it. Love it. Well, Gyi, Conrad, I really appreciate y’all sharing your advice and thoughts on all of this, and if anybody wants to, like I’ve said a couple of times, because I go to Lunch Hour Legal Marketing to watch videos and learn things, if anybody wants to learn more, they can always go to y’all’s YouTube channel, the podcast places that people get them, and it’s Lunch Hour Legal Marketing. Guys, thanks for being with me,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Zack. Thanks so much. It was a pleasure. Pleasure. Thanks, and thanks so much for listening to this episode of Lunch Hour Legal Marketing. Please do go check out Lawyers podcast and some of the other episodes there, especially the ones on marketing. Thanks as always. Until next time, Ian Conrad saying Farewell.

Announcer:

Thank you for listening to Lunch Hour Legal Marketing. If you’d like more information about what you heard today, please visit legal talk network.com, subscribe via Apple Podcasts and RSS, follow Legal Talk Network on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Edit, edit, post, edit, because I can’t remember, and where is it?

Conrad Saam:

What are you talking about? I’m going to use more words while I think about what I’m talking about.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yep. Edit. Edit. I can’t find it still. Oh, there it is.

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