Speaker 1: Now, this isn't very safe. Whoa. Yes. It's been three years since the Business Insider article was published, and the thing now has been viewed over 100,000 times, which is amazing to me. One of the questions I get all the time about law practice management is about clients. Just this past Friday, I went out to lunch with Daniel, a 2L from Southwestern, very cool dude, and he asked me, as a lawyer, how do you get clients? Well, first, it's important to recognize what you don't need to do. Do you need to make a cheesy commercial like this? Brian Wilson, Texas law hawk. Brian Wilson, the Texas law hawk. Do you need to advertise in newspapers, magazines, or billboards like this? No. Do you need to have a super fancy office like this? Or this? Or this? Okay. If you're not supposed to do any of those things, what should you do to get clients? And why would you want to listen to me? My name's Brannigan. Four and a half years ago, I started my own law firm right out of law school. Since that time, my office has received thousands of phone calls from potential clients trying to get me to be their lawyer. How did I do that? I didn't do anything special or unique. I followed the same formula and the same process that lawyers have been following for decades, and I'm going to share that with you. I look like I'm 19 years old. If I can get that many clients, so can you. I'm not 19, by the way. I'm 32. 31. If you're a partner at a law firm and you want your associates to start bringing in clients just like you do, send them this video. I need some paper. Old Discovery. Big picture. There are six different sources of clients. The first three are different types of referrals. The next three deal with advertising, SEO, and the internet. The best source of clients, the most effective source of clients, the most immediate source of clients are referrals. Don't kid yourself. Don't reinvent the wheel. It works. Number one, referrals from family, friends, church, etc. Step one, educate your non-lawyer friends about what area of law that you do when appropriate in social situations. For example, when somebody asks me what kind of law I practice, I say, I'm an employment lawyer. Generally, their eyes glaze over because they don't know what that means. That's when I say, if your boss ever touches your butt, that's when you call me. Instantly, they understand what kind of law I do. Step two, realize that friendships are a two-way street. For example, if they're a salesman, buy their product. If their kid's having a birthday party, buy a super cool gift. Take them out to dinner. Treat them nice. You need to make emotional investments in your friendships now, and they will reward you with referrals later. Step three, after you've done all that, that's when it's appropriate to ask your non-lawyer friends for referrals. Number two, referrals from other lawyers. It's probable that this is where most of your clients will come from, especially if you practice in a niche. Step one, make friends. Networking is a terrible word. Throw it out. You're not connecting computers together. You're making friends. The key to getting referrals from other lawyers is becoming friends with other lawyers. You especially want to become friends with lawyers who don't practice your area of law. Step two, if your jurisdiction permits, pay a reasonable referral fee. This will give an economic incentive to other lawyers to refer cases to you. Referrals from clients. This will happen naturally if you do a good job for your clients, but when I say good job, I don't even mean do a good legal job. It goes without saying that you should be doing an excellent legal job for your clients, but I've heard too many stories where lawyers did a good job, but their clients hated them because they didn't return their phone calls. They didn't respond to emails timely. They didn't manage their expectations. Legal disputes are really scary to non-lawyers, and you have to walk alongside them throughout the process, hold their hand, explain what's going to happen next, and manage their expectations like a pro. If you do that right, they will sing your praises forever. Two final thoughts on referrals in general. Look, this is a long-term, continuous process. You can't just invest in one relationship one time and expect them to send you clients for life. That's not how it works because that's not how relationships work. The most important thing I'm going to tell you though is this. Getting referrals has nothing to do with your legal skill or aptitude. It has everything to do with your interpersonal skills and just being a human being. So be a good friend and plenty of referrals will come your way. I want to go talk to my buddy Jason. Jason is a family lawyer here in Irvine, and he started his own practice maybe six months ago. The reason why I want to talk to him is that first year after you launch your firm is by far the most stressful because you're trying to get your case list and your client list up to critical mass. Anyway, I think he's going to have the perfect perspective for this video.

Speaker 2: Jason, thanks for being in my cheesy video. Happy to do it. So you've got a bunch of clients already and you're six months in, so tell me your method.

Speaker 3: I have like a three-part method that I use. The first part is referrals, referrals, referrals, referrals. I specialize in family law, so what I do is I focus on people who don't do family law. What I did is I contacted every attorney I've ever met and I take them out to lunch. Let me give you personal injury clients and you send me family law clients. If they view you as a competitor, they're not going to send you clients. They're going to take the clients for themselves. It's a numbers game. If you think about it, if you contact 50 attorneys that you know and they give you one client a year, that's four clients a month. The second thing I do is you have to make your current clients happy, and that's a great source of business. Happy clients create more clients, so that's number two. Number three is having a good online presence. Clients will want to verify you to see that you're legitimate. They'll want to look at your website.

Speaker 1: And I'll interject there, Jason's got a super clean, elegant, excellent website, perfect for family law. I'll put a link below so you can see his website. Thanks for meeting with me. Pleasure. Big picture for the internet. The internet is used in two main ways by lawyers. The first is a verification tool. Just about every single business on the planet has a website, and because of that fact, potential clients will judge you if you don't have a website. So get a website. But it doesn't need to be anything flashy or fancy or super high tech. That just upsets potential clients. It should be simple, clean, and convey your practice area very, very clearly. Again, Jason's got a great example of that, so check out his website. The second is as a lead generation tool. If you want to utilize the internet's power this way, you have to be practicing in a consumer area of law, namely, other areas of law don't generate potential clients online. For example, corporate and business litigation. Business owners and in-house counsel don't look up prospective lawyers online. They ask other business owners and in-house counsel for referrals. Number four, advertising on the internet. Google AdWords and Facebook are effective, and they can be very economical because you can set the amount of money that you spend each day, but the less amount of money that you spend, the less number of leads that you'll get. Google AdWords is more effective than Facebook simply because it's displaying your advertisement in response to a search or query, whereas Facebook is simply displaying your advertisement in somebody's feed. In my opinion, Avvo, Finelaw, Yelp, Super Lawyers, and similar sites are not very effective as lead generation tools, and they're very expensive. But it's sometimes okay to have basic profiles on those sites so that potential clients can verify that you're legit. Number five, search engine optimization. I'm getting high from all these markers. People think SEO is a magical unicorn. It's not, and I have three reasons why I don't recommend it to most lawyers or law firms. First, for every reputable SEO agency out there, there are 50 black hat ones that will overcharge and underperform. Not only is it impossible for a non-SEO expert to distinguish between the two, but I take the rules of professional responsibility regarding advertising very seriously. And the most important thing that an SEO expert is going to do is put written words on your website. Well, they're not lawyers, they don't know the law, and for them to put written words on the website is very scary to me. And it's very time consuming to go back and forth with an SEO person to figure out what can and cannot be said. Second, to do SEO right, you're going to be spending at least $5,000 a month. Third, assuming that you hire a reputable SEO agency and you're paying a fair price, it's going to take about a year before you see any results from search engine optimization. That's why most lawyers forego SEO and go straight to Google AdWords or Facebook advertisements because they get immediate results. I personally do play the SEO game because I'm in a consumer area of law and recreationally, I love to learn about SEO, but most lawyers don't have time to read books like that. And finally, number six, mass media advertising. I don't think radio, television, or non-legal magazines are effective forums for attorney marketing, but lawyers seem to be doing that stuff all the time, so I assume they're seeing some type of ROI. So if anybody knows of some data out there on point, please send it to me because I like learning new things too. Okay, that's it. That's all I got for you. Go out and crush it. Oh, I'm tired of talking.