Dateline: Galilee, Israel

I’m sitting outside of my hotel room here in Northern Israel. Looking into the distance, I am told, is the Golan Heights. The Golan Heights borders Lebanon and we will be traveling close to the Syrian border tomorrow. The amazing thing about this Country is its size.

You can drive from the North end of Israel to the Southern end of Israel in 6 hours. About 335 miles in length. That’s it. Yet for some reason, this little sliver of arid land is one of the most contested pieces of land in the world.

Here’s what’s so amazing. Its’ size doesn’t matter. It’s a tiny country, yet it is perceived to be a very powerful one.

What does this have to do with lawyer marketing?

Glad you asked.

The answer is…Everything.

There are some large law firms that boast of their size. They boast they have the ability to  handle every type of law. They claim huge diversity in their staff. That’s their unique selling proposition.

When you ask a solo or an attorney in a small law firm, they’re able to say that they give personal attention and they know your case inside and out. Being small can be a huge advantage. You just have to be perceived as having the power of a big firm. With today’s technology you can.

What’s the best tool you can use TODAY to convey to your potential clients that you have knowledge and power? Come on…you know what I’m going to say. The answer is…VIDEO!

Creating an entire video library not only distinguishes you from all of your competitors and larger firms, but showcases your expertise. Really smart lawyers who use video stand out from the crowd; as long as the video is done correctly and strategically.

Being “small” means you can get video content online almost immediately. How many large law firms do you know can shoot 50 videos in a one-day video shoot and then edit, optimize and upload those videos online?

That’s the power of being small. Savor it.

Dateline: Galillee, Northern Israel

I’m in Israel as I write this and learned that Starbucks failed here in the only democratic country in the Middle East. Why did Starbucks fail here? Because they didn’t understand the cultural differences between people in Israel and in the United States.

For one thing, apparently Israeli’s don’t like drinking their coffee from paper cups, or so I heard. Another reason is that most Israeli’s want to have food with their coffee. Starbucks didn’t have any real food to offer. I’m sure there are other reasons, but the take-away point I learned was that before you can form a lasting and trusting relationship, you have to understand your consumers and potential clients.

How well do you understand their cultural differences?

Do they live in the same town as you? Do they have the same background as you? Are they from a different country?

When lawyers try to market themselves they often try to ‘put information out there’ that they think people want. However, unless you know and understand your potential client, you may be putting the wrong information out there.

That could be difference of getting a client or not. Take the time to truly understand their problems and where they come from. Understand their family dynamic and you will have an insight into what goes on every day. Importantly, you’ll understand them. Even more importantly, they’ll realize that you understand them.

This cat has nothing to do with today's blog post

Lawyers often tell me that the best source for referrals are either current or past clients. Yet when I ask them what they are doing to get to know their clients and to stay in touch with their former clients, they often get a distant glaze in their eyes as if there was a disconnect between what I asked them and what they should answer.

We all know that getting a referral from a trusted source is worth its weight in gold. When a new client comes in from a trusted source who has vouched for us and said only good things about us, that’s a powerful way to generate new business.

What do you think you can do to get to know your existing and former clients even better to improve your referral rate?

One of the easiest things is to pick up the phone and call each of your clients on a regular basis. Before you send me comments telling me how impossible that is because of the large volume of clients you have, I want you to understand why keeping that personal relationship going throughout the litigation and afterward is so important.

As lawyers, we offer services to help our clients who have legal problems. The reason why a potential client chooses us instead of a competitor is often because they like us and trust us. How cool would it be if you went the extra step to make your client feel extra special? How impressed will your client be if youdid something over and above what they expected?

Here is a perfect example. If you have a same-day surgical procedure and then go home after a few hours, how cool is it when the doctor calls you late at night to find out how you are feeling? You certainly didn’t expect the doctor to call you late at night. That example is just one way to make someone feel special. There are countless others.

Make the effort to take a personal interest in each one of your clients. Show them you care and that you know all the details of their file better than they do. Then, take an interest in them and their family. That will make all the difference.

How Many Lawyers Do You Know Own a Yacht Like This?

You advertise, right?
You use TV, radio, newspaper ads, display ads, classified ads. You hold seminars and you develop a large referral base. Yet for some reason, you struggle to get those large, high value cases? Why is that?

Many times I have been in the lawyers lounge in Court and hear attorneys complaining. What’s their complaint? “If only I had a few million-dollar cases, then I would be on easy street.” Then they conveniently point to very successful law firms who appear to get these multimillion dollar cases out of thin air and look upon them with jealousy.

If only they learned to figure out why those cases are attracted to those particular law firms like flies on a flytrap.

The obvious answer is that they are excellent attorneys who get excellent results. Success always breeds more success. Lawyers in the community recognize and reward lawyers who have extraordinary success. However, a consumer searching for an attorney may not have access to the same information about which lawyers are so successful.

Think about it. Why are those lawyers so successful, and others are not? If you had a file cabinet full of high-value multimillion dollar cases, I’m sure that you would be able to generate significant legal fees and achieve remarkable success simply by applying your knowledge and skill to the cases you handle.

Many attorneys fail to recognize that the marketing they are currently doing do not specifically target those high-value cases. Instead, they choose to use a shotgun approach and target all types of cases and their specialty. To give you a perfect example, imagine a personal injury attorney who markets himself as an accident lawyer who handles all types of accidents including slip and fall cases, dog bite cases, property damage cases, product liability cases, car accident cases, etc. That type of marketing simply dilutes your message.

A TV ad often doesn’t focus on one type of case (unless it’s a pharmaceutical case involving a medication that was taken off the market, or asbestos). A Yellow Pages ad all too often fails to target high-value cases, and instead adopts the one-size-fits-all approach.

When I ask attorneys why they aren’t getting those high-value cases, their answers revert to those marketing methods of successful firms.

However, there is a way that you can market to those high target and high-value clients and consumers. There is a way that you can craft and create a message that is highly-targeted and focuses only on those individual high-value cases. I won’t keep you in suspense any longer… the way to do that is by using education-based video to market your targeted message.

What does that mean? It means that you can create a series of videos addressed to your most profitable and highly targeted potential client. It means that you can provide information to people who may ultimately have a high-value case. There is no other form of attorney advertising that allows you to do as with video.

Video has the best return on your investment. Create a video once, put it up online and have it watched it 10 times or 100,000 times. The cost to have it watched one time or one million times is the same: NOTHING. You can’t say that about any other form of attorney advertising.

Mindset:

When you create a specific marketing message on video, that message is available for your ideal client who is actively searching for that information. That is totally different than typical attorney advertising which basically shouts out to the world that you have a service that a consumer may need at some point in the future. That shift in mindset is significant. Lawyers who fail to recognize how significant it is will clearly lose the ability to properly focus on their ideal client and high-value cases.

To learn more about how video can help improve your bottom line and target those high-value cases, I encourage you to call me for a free 30 minute phone consultation at 516-487-8207, where you will also receive a free copy of my book “How really smart lawyers are using video on the web to get more clients.” I look forward to your call.

Lawyers Video Studio Top Secret Success Kit

In today’s blog post I want to introduce you to my secret weapon when I create attorney video. There is no video production company in the country that has this top-secret attorney video success kit. You cannot buy it. You cannot create it. Nor will you find this kit anywhere else. The only way you would even get a hint of what is contained within this kit is if you are a member of my Total Online Video Success Program for Lawyers.

Even then, lawyers who create video with me in the Lawyers Video Studio are not permitted to see what is inside the aluminum and titanium, heavy-duty case. They do however get the benefit of what is contained within it, but they do not have access to it. When I return from a video shoot, this case gets locked into a vault under special lock and key and only comes out for video shoots.

Be on the lookout for upcoming photographs of me carrying my top-secret video success kit on location, shooting video.
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Learn what one really smart attorney had to say about my Total Online Video Success Program. Click below.

Not the parking zone, not the end zone; I’m talking about “the zone.”

The zone is where you get this clarity and recognize you need to do something different to help market your practice. I was on the phone on a conference call with an attorney in Florida. A mutual friend of ours wanted to introduce me to  let them know about attorney video and how it’s so useful to market their law practice. This attorney told me that he and his firm do absolutely no advertising at all. No yellow pages, no TV ads, no display ads, no billboards, no radio campaign, no classifieds, nada, nothing.

Instead, they get all of their cases by word of mouth referrals. What amazed me is that it didn’t sound like he and his firm were interested in pursuing other sources of revenue through the use of social media or video marketing for attorneys.  Rather, they had to turn away a good portion of the cases they were sent because they had so much work.

That’s a great position to be in, and one that every attorney and law firm would envy. Although the attorney recognized how useful and beneficial creating video is, it sounded as if his firm was totally content to continue getting cases the way they always have.

Most attorneys are constantly looking for new ways to market themselves and to stand out from the crowd.

Since most of this lawyer’s cases came from attorney referrals, he paid lawyers a portion of the attorney fee, in accordance with his State’s ethical rules. That meant that he was giving up a sizable chunk of money to each referring attorney. I asked him if he’d like a revenue stream where he’d have clients calling his office directly and if he took those cases, there would be no referral fee.

Know what the attorney said?

“We have enough cases and we’re very selective in what we take. Although what you are suggesting is interesting, we have to turn away 90% of the cases we look at, and those are still good cases.”

That’s a really great position to be in. Yet, I couldn’t help but think that as good as this law firm was, they couldn’t see the forest for the trees. They were so focused on a great referral base (as every lawyer should be doing) that they were excluding other key sources of revenue. Which income stream was I referring to? Video marketing for lawyers.

If nothing else, my conversation produced an introduction to a great lawyer and insight into the mind of a law firm resistant to change.

Traditional types of attorney advertising

When I first started to practice law I worked for a defense firm handling PI and medical malpractice cases on Wall Street in NYC. They also handled the occasional plaintiff’s case. There was a ‘feeling’ back then that attorneys that needed to advertise where ‘those kind of lawyers’ and generally looked down upon.

‘Those’ lawyers took cases that appeared to come from volume practices rather than quality cases. In other words, they took anything that walked in the door. ‘Those’ lawyers advertised. The traditional law firms relied on word-of-mouth advertising and didn’t need to debase themselves with an awful yellow pages ad that was not far from the plumbing ads. (I am sure that some lawyers felt the PI attorneys who advertised probably qualified to be connected to those plumbing ads).

In any event, I continued to wonder how the different law firms generated the calls to their office. I learned they came from word-of-mouth referrals; from defense attorneys who had opposed those same lawyers in court; from advertising in the yellow pages, in the local newspaper, classifieds, radio and TV.

I remember overhearing a conversation in the lawyer’s lounge in court one day. One lawyer was telling the other about a great new source of business. It was with a TV advertising outfit that had 6 lawyers in the same geographic area. Every call that came in rotated with the next attorney. I was intrigued. The lawyer he was talking to was from a traditional PI firm, and his reply said it all. “You advertise?” he stated with a tone that told you he disapproved.

When I went into practice on my own in 2002, I had taken all of my files with me and that kept me busy for quite a while. However, as my cases resolved, I became more and more concerned about where new business would be coming from. I was fearful that I’d be spending more time staring at my phone wishing it would ring. That’s when I realized I had to do something that would generate calls to my office.

What did I do? The same thing that most attorneys in my business did. Copied everyone else. I assumed that if firms were using the yellow pages, it must be working. I assumed that if lawyers were advertising on TV it must be working. Same for display ads in newspapers. Ah, I wish I knew then what I know now.

I took out a full page yellow pages ad. My ad was on page nine of the full page lawyer ads. It didn’t occur to me that a consumer would call all the other 8 lawyers ahead of me before ever calling me. The yellow pages rep didn’t fill me in on that little fact. That ad came with a bonus ad in a small local yellow pages. Big whoop. The ad cost me $25,000 for the year. Oh yeah; I let the yellow pages people design my ad. Wow, was I naive.

The rep’s pitch was “You just need one good PI case to pay for your ad, then the rest is gravy.” I got suckered in. The following year, the pitch was “Now you just need some color, or maybe a white background. Then we can put you into another major book and throw in some bonuses too.” I should have thrown her out, but hey, that one case paid for the ad and now I expected the next year’s ad to be even better.

What I learned was that lawyers who were taking out two full pages, known as double-truck ads were paying anywhere from $25,000 to $50,000 per year for their ads, depending on which books they were in. Then lawyers decided that double full page ads were not enough and went to FOUR full page ads. Who could keep up? Not me. I went looking for better ways to ‘advertise’ my legal services.

I tried TV ads, display ads and classifieds; all with mixed success. I was a solo attorney looking to stand out from the crowd. This just wasn’t cutting it. Yes, these efforts would make the phone ring occasionally, but not consistently. That’s when I came upon a few incredible people that changed the way I look at and approach attorney advertising.

The first was a guy name David Frey. He’s the author of the Small Business Marketing Bible. I had never bought an information marketing product before then and was hesitant to do so. I took the plunge and soon after received a looseleaf binder filled to the brim with content. When I went on vacation I was so fascinated by a concept he called education-based marketing that I read his book twice while on vacation. I took notes; underlined whole passages; highlighted others. I created a plan and when I returned, took action and began using David’s ideas to market myself.

He opened my eyes to something new and exciting. Nobody I knew was using the techniques he was talking about. At the same time, I came across a legal marketing guy named Trey Ryder. Trey also believed in education-based marketing and his marketing concepts fit right into David Frey’s. This was unbelievable stuff I was reading about.

Around that same time I came across a guy with a fascinating attorney website. He designed it like no other attorney website I had ever seen. It was educational. It had useful information on it. I was amazed. I called him up to talk and he was eager to talk and explain how he was using his website to attract potential clients. I was hooked. The attorney’s name? Ben Glass. Ben has since turned attorney marketing on its’ head by creating a powerful program called Great Legal Marketing based on the concepts he was learning and teaching other attorneys when I first met him years ago.

What was so amazing was that these people were not using traditional forms of attorney advertising. This was MARKETING through the process of educating. It was at that time that I started to create video to distinguish myself. I then got this crazy idea that if I combined this new video thing with education based video, it would set me apart from all my colleagues.

Guess what? It has. In fact, I got so good at creating educational video messages to market my law practice that people call me from all over the country and thank me for providing this information. Ironically, I don’t provide any legal advice in my videos.

After years of figuring out what works on video and what doesn’t, I decided I could help other lawyers market themselves the same way. Hence, the birth of the Lawyers Video Studio. This isn’t advertising. It’s using video to educate your viewer. As a byproduct of providing information, your viewer sees how knowledgeable you are. That’s not advertising; it’s marketing.

When lawyers hear how I help other lawyers create video, they always ask how I do it. Then they ask how I can do it for them. I have never encountered any attorney who mocked the type of video we create in the lawyers video studio. Why not? Because our videos don’t advertise like ‘those other lawyers’. We educate and that makes all the difference.

I congratulate you for having the desire to create your own attorney video. However, having the desire and implementing it, are two totally different things.

Before running out to purchase all your video equipment and signing up for video editing classes and reading all those books (including mine, “How Really Smart Lawyers Are Using Video On The Web To Get More Clients“) to start creating video, ask yourself these questions:

1. Do you have the time to figure out what content to create in your video?
2. Do you have the time to set up your equipment?
3. Do you have the time to learn about all the proper settings for your video camera, your audio settings and your lighting equipment?
4. Do you have the time to learn to take the video footage off your camera and put it onto your computer?
5. Are you willing to become a video editor and learn how to properly edit your videos by including graphics, color correction, audio correction, turning your lengthy, rambling dissertation into a concise format that viewers actually want to watch?
6. Do you have the time and desire to learn about all the settings necessary to create crystal-clear video and put it in a format is compatible with the video sharing sites?
7. Do you have the inclination to upload your video to the major video sharing sites?
8. Do you have the desire and the time to optimize each video for the search engines so that your content can be found?
9. Do you know what will compel an online viewer to become a caller?
10. Do you know how to create a compelling headline that will get an online viewer to want to click on your video?
11. Do you know what will compel your viewers to watch your video in its entirety?
12. Do you know what words will compel a viewer to call you instead of your competitors?
13. Do you know how to distinguish yourself on video?
14. Do you know why most attorney videos are never watched?
15. If they are watched, do you know why most of them are not watched till the end?
16. Once you’ve created your educational video, do you know how to promote your video without sounding like you are selling yourself?
17. Do you have the time, desire and inclination to create at least five new videos per month?
18. Do you realize that to get a finished 2-3 minute video, it can take you from one to three hours to edit? If you create five new videos, do you have 5 to 15 extra hours per month to spare just to edit and upload your videos?

If you have the desire and time to learn how to do all these things, then I congratulate you. I encourage everyone who has this desire to learn how to do it. However, 99% of all attorneys that I talk with simply tell me “Gerry, do me a favor, I don’t want to learn how to do any of this. I just want to practice law; and that’s what I’m good at. You are the video expert. I want you to do everything for me.”

I am always reminded of the e-mail I received from Frank Kern a few months ago. Frank Kern is the biggest Internet marketer in the world. He explained very simply that the day he decided he was not a videographer and a video editor was the day that he made millions of dollars. Why? Because he was never good at creating video on his own. He had no clue how to sell stuff using the videos that he personally created by himself. The day he hired a video production company to create all his videos, he said that allowed him to make millions of dollars by focusing on what he did best, which was selling stuff online. He left the technical expertise to the video guys who had lots of video experience.

I agree with him 100%. Stick to what you do best. Let an experienced video team handle it all for you.

I’ll give you an idea of what you get with my total video program. But first, keep in mind that I do not accept an attorney just because they want to pay me. Lawyers must complete a detailed questionaire confirming their desire to create educational video; that they understand how useful and beneficial educational video is, among other things that we need to know. If you are accepted into our exclusive program, you need to know that:

• We create a custom video channel for you that becomes part of your website;
• Before ever pressing the ‘record’ button, you and I have a mastermind strategy session that maps out your content for your video shoot;
• We shoot 6 months worth of video in ONE day!
• Before leaving your office at the end of your video shoot, we hand you the equipment that we just used to shoot your video, including the hi-definition video camera, the wireless microphone and the professional soft box lights. Importantly, we show you how to use them see you repeat this process over and over again.
• Shortly after your video shoot, your first eight videos are edited and sent to me for approval. If approved, they are uploaded to your website and the video sharing sites;
• Then, every month, five new videos are edited and uploaded to your website and the video sharing sites;
• Here’s the best part- you don’t have to do anything to make all this happen!

Learning how to create video can be as simple as taking your flip cam, shooting a two minute video and then plugging the USB connector into your computer and directly uploading it to YouTube. That is the most convenient and fastest way to make sure that your videos will rarely be watched. On the other hand, if you really want to spend the time to learn how to create great video, it will take you about eight months to a year to become really proficient doing it. However, be prepared to spend 3 to 4 hours a night practicing and making tons of mistakes. How I know this? Because I did it all on my own. There was nobody around to show me how to do it.

If you really want to see what you can do with attorney video, I invite you to watch this 58 second video that explains just one way I use video to market my law practice.

If you want to learn more about creating attorney video, then I encourage you to explore my blog here. If you have questions, I encourage you to pick up the phone and call me at 516-487-8207 or by e-mail at Gerry@lawyersvideostudio.com.

Thanks for taking the time to read my blog, and have a great day!

You think you have the guts to create attorney video?

You think it’s simply a matter of standing in front of the camera and pushing the red record button? You think it’s as easy as pressing the ‘upload’ button directly to YouTube without editing? It might look easy when the professionals do it but I guarantee you that unless you have the desire, the time and inclination to learn how to do it really well, it’s not easy.

Admittedly, it has become much easier to find video equipment that is convenient and simple to use. We even have push-button video publishing which allows you to take your flip camera and immediately upload your content directly to YouTube without even editing it. Although it’s convenient, if you are attempting to create good quality educational video to market yourself online, I will tell you right now that that is not the way to accomplish it.

Your online viewers tend to be relatively sophisticated and they’ve come to expect good quality video as a standard. If your video disappoints them in any way from the outset, you can be sure they will click away, never to return.

How do I know this? Because I see it every day. I receive calls every day from online viewers who call me asking me to help solve their legal problems after they have watched my videos. I have spoken to them and asked them about other videos they watch online in order to make that decision to pick up the phone and call me. I have also become an avid marketing student of online advertising.

If you have the guts to stand in front of a potential client and explain the law to them, you have what it takes to create great attorney video.

Traditionally, attorneys have shied away from things they are not familiar with or were too technical. One of the big hurdles for creating quality video was the expense associated with getting a camera crew into your office or you going to a video studio to shoot your formal and often pretentious message.

A viewing public searching online for an attorney to solve their problem does not want to see stuck-up attorneys talking about themselves. Instead, they want answers, and they want them now. While I always advocate never giving legal advice in your videos, there’s plenty of other content to discuss that will show off your expertise.

Most video production companies that create attorney video are quite proficient at creating good quality video. However, none of them have an experienced medical malpractice trial lawyer as their video producer. If you haven’t read my blog post titled

20 Questions You MUST Ask When Choosing a Video Production Company

I highly recommend reading that when choosing which video company you should hire to create your lawyer video.

Most attorneys don’t want to be involved in the nitty-gritty of learning all the technical details of how the equipment works and how to get the video compressed and edited and up online. Instead, they simply tell me “Gerry, just get this done for me so I can go back and do what I do best; which is practice law.”

Lawyers who join my total online video solution learn how simple, fun and easy it is to create video to market themselves online. There’s nothing technical to learn. We do it all for you. All  you have to do is show up and start talking.

The real question is not whether you have the guts to get onto video. The real question is whether you have the insight to recognize how powerful video is and how powerful video will be in the future.

All the big Internet companies including Google, Cisco and YouTube strongly believe that video content will represent 80 to 85% of all content within the next three years. That is an incredible statistic. If you are not creating video today just think how far behind you will be two or three years from now.

Do you remember when websites were used by attorneys as static business cards because we didn’t know what to put online? Finally lawyers realized that they could use them to promote themselves beyond the standard attorney directory listing that everybody else was using.

Consumers and potential clients expect you to have a dynamic website now. If you don’t, online viewers seriously question whether you have what it takes to be technologically up-to-date to handle their matter. With video becoming the standard method of providing online content, lawyers who fail to create video content will become less relevant as your colleagues and competitors pass you by.

Want to learn how to use video to market your law practice today? Spend the next 58 seconds watching this video to learn more.

Best regards, and thanks for taking the time to read my blog.

YOUR TRAIN IS LEAVING THE STATION

1. Your potential clients expect you to be on video,
2. Consumers searching for an attorney want to see you and know who they are calling when they pick up the phone,
3. Viewers want to hear you and see that you sound intelligent,
4. Your consumers want to see where you work,
5. Online viewers want to see that you are an expert in your field of law,
6. Viewers who are searching for an attorney online want to know if they can trust you. Video allows you to generate and earn their trust,
7. Creating educational video is the best return on investment of any form of attorney marketing,
8. Within the next three years, Google and Cisco predict that 80 to 85% of all online content will be video. If you don’t start getting onto video now, you’ll be way behind the 8-ball and you may never be able to compete online with your colleagues and competitors,
9. Lawyers who have started creating educational and informational video messages are way ahead of the game since the search engines love fresh new video content,
10. Creating a series of videos allows you to systematize your content so that you don’t have to repeat yourself hundreds and thousands of times a week.

Lawyers need to embrace video. Don’t get left behind.

Want to learn how to use video to market your law practice today? Spend the next 58 seconds watching this video to learn more.

Thanks for taking the time to read my blog! Let me know if you have any questions about creating video with the only experienced medical malpractice trial lawyer who is also a veteran video producer. Call me at 516-487-8207 or send me an email to: Gerry@lawyersvideostudio.com. I welcome your call or email.