Mastering Family Law Strategy: A Conversation with Dmitriy Borshchak

Viktoria Altman (00:01)
Hey guys, welcome back to the Law Firm Accelerator. Today with me, have Dmitriy Borshchak, and yes, I can pronounce that correctly. Dmitriy is located in Columbus, Ohio, and he is a family practice lawyer. Dmitri, welcome to the podcast. I’m so glad to have you here. Can you talk a little bit about yourself?

Dmitriy Borshchak (00:18)
Thank you. Well, thank you.

Glad to be here. Like Victoria said, my name is Dmitriy Borshchak. I am located in Columbus, Ohio. Although we do work all around Ohio, we primarily are in the Columbus metro area and we do some work around Columbus as well. We primarily focus on domestic relations and family law. So to any beginner who doesn’t know what that is in Ohio, that encompasses things like divorce, custody matters, standard mutual restraining orders, restraining orders in general, civil stalking protection orders, child support issues, relocation issues, post-decree, you know, for instance, if two couples divorced five years ago and one wants to move to another state, but they have two children and they want to take the children, the other side does not. So we deal with everything and anything that relates to the family unit.

Whether it’s schooling, whether it’s custody, whether it’s a division of a couple who have their own business, all of that is kind of encapsulated in the family law sphere.

Viktoria Altman (01:31)
Makes sense, kind of complicated and involved. Certainly, anytime you deal with children, things get complicated. And I know you’ve, we’ve talked about this a little bit before starting the show. You’ve transitioned from a career in medicine to law. Can you talk a little bit about how that happened?

Dmitriy Borshchak (01:40)
Yeah.

Yeah, so I immigrated to the United States when I was about six, seven, five, six, seven years old with my mom. And ever since we came to this country, my mom, you know, has been a lot of pressure on me. Specifically, I’m either going to be a lawyer or a doctor. And it happens to be that my grandma, she’s not with us anymore, but she was a doctor as well. And she pushed my mom, that is pushed for me to go to the doctor.

And so I pursued that. I took courses even before I got to college post-secondary classes where I got my feet wet, you could say, in the medical field.

And then I went to my undergrad at Ohio University and my first two years I was pre-med and there was just one night where I was studying for a physiology midterm, I believe. And I passed out. Was, believe it or not, studying so hard that I could pass out, woke up in the hospital, and I was dehydrated. And that was kind of like the moment for me that this is not it. Over the next few weeks,

This was not that this is relevant, but this is when OU Ohio University was doing Quarters and not semesters. So you had three quarters and I remember this was the winter quarter and Once that happened. I took the exam and three weeks later I met with my advisor and we pivoted to advocacy and political science I wanted to Go to what I wanted to do to be a lawyer.

One of the major reasons I wanted to go into the legal field is not to get too personal, but when my mom had to relocate from Lviv, Ukraine, she had to get my dad’s permission. And that was a whole saga. And we had this advocate who I believe was a lawyer and she was, she championed the whole process for us. My mom was very afraid and she helped us out.

And we came here and I remember her clearly. I don’t remember her name, but I remember her. It was a she. And she did some tremendous work. Ever since then, I knew I wanted to be an attorney, but it wasn’t until I kind of went through the motions of what my mom’s wishes were. And this is kind of like an Eastern European thing. You’ve got to follow your parents’ wishes. But I gave that a shot and realized that’s not what I wanted to do.

And then that event happened when I passed out and then I switched and I never looked back.

Viktoria Altman (04:28)
It’s certainly a part of the immigrant experience, I would say. I have friends who are from Southeast Asia, from Asia, and they all have very similar stories. You know, it’s not just us. I’m also originally from Eastern Europe, but it’s not just us. I think anybody who comes here, just really has these big dreams for their kids. And sometimes they project their kind of aspirations to us.

Dmitriy Borshchak (04:31)
Yeah.

Viktoria Altman (04:52)
But you are in now and it sounds like you enjoy it. Why did you pick the field of family law?

Dmitriy Borshchak (04:59)
So that’s another, there’s another story to it. I graduated from law school in 2016 and started in 2013 law school three years. For the majority of my law school career, I worked for the Franklin County Prosecutor’s Office in the felony division. So we were handling the top-level felony cases.

From armed robbery to special victims unit, something that you would watch on TV, special victims unit, gang unit, gang violence, kind of the worst of the worst criminals in Franklin County, Columbus. Ironically, in 2016, there was a big election, as everyone can remember. As you can also imagine, prosecutors are also governed by politics and we had one of the lead prosecutors, Ron O ‘Brien, who was the prosecutor for Franklin County, his right-hand woman came to all the law clerks and interns because I was still in law school at this time, I’m not a lawyer yet, and she indicated to us, hey, you know, we think he’s gonna lose the election, you never know, I highly recommend all of you to apply everywhere else.

For all of you who are not lawyers or in law school or didn’t go through this, you know, wherever you clerk during your law school career, some of you, at least part of you, want to stay there and that’s, you know, where you want to go. And ironically at that time, I was kind of done with criminal. There were some cases that, you know, there’s this one case that I was doing discovery for the prosecutor, and after reading…

The case, I knew I did not want to ever do criminal again, and it’s probably too graphic for this podcast, so I won’t share that case. But after doing that case in my head, I already had my mind made up that I didn’t want to be in the criminal law field, whether it is on the prosecution or the defense, I didn’t want to be part of any of it. And then, you know, that happened where the right-hand woman came to us, told us to go interview somewhere else.

So I reached out to some law firms and this woman, this attorney, Amy Weiss, she is like a gladiator in this space. She’s been practicing for 25, 30 years. She had an opening and she had said, you know, you get the job. We like your experience. I’m at the prosecutor’s office. Come on board. So I came on board and I, you know, I hit the ground running and Family law, it’s the most dynamic and the most, what’s the right word I’m looking for? It encompasses every area of the law. So, you know, at the beginning of the podcast, I talked about, you know, in a divorce, you can have a case where the husband and the wife have a business together. Well, that includes business law. If we have to divide, if that business owns real estate, you have real estate law. So really, why I fell in love with family law is because it encompasses everything from social security, from real estate to secure transactions, which is a very huge subsect of a saw, to employment law. It has everything in it. A lot of people may say, no, it’s not that complicated. It’s a lot simpler than that. But it’s intriguing. And one of the biggest features of it that I like that I didn’t so like with criminal law is that you have an immediate impact. You have an immediate impact on someone’s life, whether it’s at the beginning of the case, or towards the end of the case. You know this case is going to be resolved one way or another, and it’s going to have an immediate impact.

Whereas if with criminal, you help with one criminal, there’s another one that replaces him or her and the victims, it’s always innocent people. I give a lot of credit to criminal defense and prosecutions for handling this, the kind of stuff that they deal with cannot be that good for your mental health. So family law, I just fell in love with it because it touches upon every other area of law. And you can leverage that to have an immediate impact on someone’s life.

Viktoria Altman (09:43)
It’s interesting, I speak to criminal lawyers all the time and a lot of them will say, God, I give credit to anybody who does children and custody and alimony. So I think it’s just a question of finding what fits your personality best, you know? Because some of you guys, I speak to you and you know, there was one person I interviewed who handles sexual abuse cases in personal injury court and I just, I was like, that is so hard. And she’s like, yeah, it is so hard.

Dmitriy Borshchak (09:53)
Yeah.

Right. Right.

Viktoria Altman (10:13)
But I love it. It’s just a question of personality. So thank you for sharing that. So to kind of switch our way into marketing more, you are a family lawyer. And can you talk to me a little bit about who your ideal client is? Who is the person you try to market to?

Dmitriy Borshchak (10:23)
Okay.

So my ideal client is somebody, know, it’s kind of, doesn’t sound good when you say somebody who’s looking through a divorce. My ideal client, cause you know, we’ve had clients that I’ve helped stay in the marriage, as crazy as that sounds. Out of like a hundred percent of all clientele, I would say five to 10 % happen to be individuals who don’t want to get divorced.

And because Ohio, like many, many, other jurisdictions, I’m not sure if any jurisdictions are at fault state. What that means in Ohio, is you don’t need to prove somebody did anything wrong to get divorced. You’re just incompatible. But I’ve helped individuals who did not want to get divorced. We’ve helped them.

By applying some strategy to make the other side think twice about separating. I don’t know if that sounds good or bad, but that’s just the reality. My perfect client is an individual who is prepared, likes to follow strategy, somebody who is somewhere between the 90 to $500,000 net worth. I do have an associates. We’re accepting of all clients.

The ones that I specifically, you know, kind of undertake individually, those clients are, tend to be between the hundred thousand to the five, a hundred thousand income level. It’s somebody who is not necessarily thinking about divorcing tomorrow, but it could be. I like the kind of more methodical individuals who are planners. You know, I don’t know if this is going to be a question or not, but, the cases that go the best in my opinion and my experience have been those individuals who plan and who are more proactive than reactive. So I know I may have kind of deviated from your question you’re asking about the ideal client. From a financial standpoint, they would have a decent financial cushion. And that is not only because I want to be paid.

However, having a financial cushion allows you to be flexible and it allows you to be creative with resolutions. Know, some clients that I have are CEOs or owners of these very big, not big, but startups, for example, who don’t have, you know, millions of dollars in cash, but they have stock because they’ve been working on it. You know, and that’s how they’re compensated through their stock options.

And for example, in those situations, if we don’t have any cash to play around with, you know, the other side may not want some stock that may or may not materialize. So somebody who’s a planner, somebody who does have, you know, a financial cushion that we can play around with as far as quick and easy resolution. I look at all of these cases as, like a chessboard. Not that it’s a, it’s a game, but more of a you have to be methodical because domestic relations, it’s family law. Okay. So there’s a lot of feelings. People are willing to go to the end of the earth for their children. Okay. Imagine that kind of, that mindset. And if something, if the court, the other spouse, the other parent, anybody, you know, infringes on their constitutional right to parent their child, they have a huge reaction and they want to attack.

So it gets emotional and the reason I’m bringing that up is it gets pricey Okay, because as you know lawyers unlike maybe personal injury lawyers, we’re on an hourly basis So for us to handle your problems, we’ve got to give you attention so You know my ideal client is somebody who is a planner that we can plan to avoid all the dramatic events the dramatic exits them so so we can both sides.

Can come out feeling good about the result.

Viktoria Altman (14:58)
So that makes a lot of sense and I already know that you’ve done a lot of marketing research because half the time when I ask this question people start telling me about the kind of client they enjoy working with personality-wise and I know right away that they are maybe just starting on their marketing journey, right? Because knowing your ideal client is step one. I’m working on the book right now and the very first step is to understand who your ideal client is, and what demand graphic.

Dmitriy Borshchak (00:00)
So here’s.

Viktoria Altman (00:02)
So it does sound like you have some experience with marketing. Do you want to share a little bit about your experience?

Dmitriy Borshchak (00:08)
So yes, I will share some. Let me just say this. I’m a lawyer, but even being a lawyer, can tell you marketing is the most important section of my business. As crazy as that sounds. In my opinion, and again, I’m just a lawyer, but marketing is the most important sector of any business. You could be in the bakery business. You could be in the business of selling burgers. I look at McDonald’s.

They have pioneered and are the trailblazers of marketing. You see those arches, you know exactly where you’re going. So marketing is the most important sect, period, full stop. And because I went on my own very, very early in my career, I had to learn that on my own through trial and error, from using things that are

Free to things that are paid from direct leads to SEO to pay per click to direct leads to you know blogs to video and to Google so you know I when I first started I had a company in California they’re called what are they called

Scorpion Scorpion something scorpion. It was a marketing company and They sold me a website and said hey, here’s your website. It’s gonna be great And it’s gonna be beautiful and it was beautiful, but it didn’t have traffic. Okay. Well, we need to do all this and that on that as well did all that, and then Everything stopped. It wasn’t very very good. So I had to go to a new company.

Viktoria Altman (01:39)
Yeah.

Dmitriy Borshchak (02:01)
This company was trying to sell me a new website, even though I already had one. But they’re like, no, the reason you didn’t get any traffic is because of the website. Okay. Went with this one. Found out that was a heist. It was, you know, it was more of a salesman approach. They try to sell you a product that wasn’t going to meet your bottom line. So, from 2017 to today, I’ve gone through many, many.

Marketing companies who offer you these things and You know, I would be very wary about who you contract with and who you engage for marketing services and Make sure that you understand exactly what you are getting for what you are paying for I remember one of the companies You know, there was some sort of clause in the contract where the website is there if you ever leave them That was a learning experience

You know, you have your search engine optimization, which is tied to your kind of ranking and index with Google. Google is the behemoth, right? Google is where everybody searches for anything. So, you my marketing journey has been long and it has been very expensive. And I’ve learned a lot.

And, you know, although I always preach, it’s always best. My mom has always told me, to learn from other people’s mistakes. Okay. I couldn’t necessarily do that because, you know, they, could tell you with certainty, they didn’t teach us anything in law school about marketing, nothing at all. And it would have been important to learn that. So this has been an up and down.

Campaign since 2017 from picking various companies to do your website then you have another you know company who may be doing your LSAs your legal services ads from Google, you know, you have your ROI What brings in your revenue, you know what I found, you know through my own experience You may want to focus on what brings in revenue versus having a very flashy website.

You need eyeballs to get to that website. Having that great website is not enough. You can have the prettiest website, but if anybody visits it, how are you going to get any kind of conversion? So marketing is not easy. It is extremely important and it takes time.

Viktoria Altman (04:37)
Thank

So thank you for sharing that. Few issues to address there. There are some websites or some, excuse me, providers that use their custom system. So Scorpion, whom you brought up, FindLaw, if you choose to work with them, and some people certainly choose to and do great at it, just keep in mind that the technology you’re using is theirs. So should you ever wish to leave them, you…

Have to redesign the website. You have no choice because they own the technology. And so it sounds like that’s what happens. In my industry, we are completely unregulated. So imagine if, in your industry, anybody could become a lawyer. Anybody could go to family court and represent anybody. And you just talked about how extraordinarily important marketing is for small businesses. So we have this.

Dmitriy Borshchak (05:32)
Number one, would say.

Viktoria Altman (05:34)
I agree, I’m a marketer though, so maybe I’m prejudiced. But so we have this extraordinarily important thing we all have to do and there are no regulations whatsoever. Anybody can say they are anything, they can pretend to be anything, they can promise you anything. And the only legal recourse you have is, you know, taking them to court and how many people are going to do that. So there are some rules and I usually share those when folks are struggling with marketing agencies for marketing agencies.

The best agencies I know do not ask for you to sign a contract. And the reason why is because they do not need a contract. For instance, we don’t ask for contracts because we know for a fact our clients will not leave. And if ever clients want to leave, be my guest. Try to, know, good luck finding something better. So the good agencies I know both have worked with very large lawyers and also very small attorneys.

You know, don’t do contracts. The other thing to keep in mind is that when you are hiring an agency, you should always talk to folks who are in your specific area of practice and ask them about their experience. And can you hear me okay by the way? Okay. If you are, you know, talking to

Dmitriy Borshchak (06:46)
Yeah? Yeah.

Viktoria Altman (06:53)
An agency and they say we do great for our clients.

Great, let me talk to three family lawyers in, know, maybe it’s your area, maybe it’s not your area, but let me talk to three family lawyers and I want their experience. And when you talk to them, you ask them, if the agency’s available and everything. They promise, to start digging. You know what I mean? How long have you been with them? What is your ROI? Et cetera, et cetera. Now they may not know their ROI, not everybody keeps track of their ROI, but they’re gonna know if it makes sense for them to stick with these people, right? And if they’ve been with the agency for three months, if they’ve been with the agency for three years, you know, that says a lot, right?

If they’ve been with the agents for three years, something must be happening. The other thing for you to keep in mind is you have a long sales cycle. When you mention your ideal client, you mention the person who likes to do research. That means they are not going to be a person who goes online, looks at the first Google ad, and then hires you. They’re going to be a person who digs. And they’re going to look at your website. They’re going to look at your Ava profile. They’re going to read your Google reviews. They’re probably going to visit your social media.

the ideal client is somebody who is going to want good SEO, want decent social media, and want to understand who you are before they hire you. Because if they are that much about planning, they’re certainly not going to call the first divorce lawyer. It’s not like a DUI where they literally might call the first guy they see. So those are things to keep in mind for you when you work with agencies. Are you working with an agency right now?

Dmitriy Borshchak (08:13)
Right.

Right.

Viktoria Altman (08:23)
And if so, how did you find them and what are some of the green flags you were looking for?

Dmitriy Borshchak (08:28)
So I am

So right now, I am, I would say he’s an agency. It’s this guy named Brian. And ironically, I think he, I don’t remember how exactly we found each other, but I think he was in a podcast as well. And I had a meeting with him and he came off extremely genuine. And,

He was genuine about what he was doing and what he can and cannot help with. And he was really sincere to the extent of, you know, this is what this is going to do. He was very honest when it came to like, you can spend so much money on this, you know, to make your website pretty. You can have this video on your front page where people are so mesmerized by it and it’s going to cost you this. And he’s like,

I think what you need to be focusing on is your ranking on Google in terms of your local maps.

And at the time I was working with somebody else on the website stuff and he’s like, let me take over your Google Maps. And he did and he crushed it and he crushed it. And I’m like, okay, why don’t you do some of the website stuff? And then he started doing the website stuff. We were doing some blogs here and there. But what we came to learn is that wasn’t necessarily what was driving.

You know, the traffic to the law firm, it was the reviews that we were getting from everybody. We were getting so many different reviews and we were leveraging, you know, other clients’ experiences to get new clients. And so I’ve been with him. There was another company in between that we did search engine optimization and this company, like many others in, in the past.

We’re talking about the importance of backlinks and having all these different backlinks. And I went with this guy fast forward, and come to find out some of these backlinks were very bad. They were like going to some websites in London about medical procedures. They were driving traffic, but they were not very good backlinks. So at one point or another, we just completely shut that off and stop doing all of that, like drive everything to the website, organic work.

And just we’re only right now as we sit here today we’re only doing your LSA’s the map pack and you know I have I’m just putting some blogs on the website but we’re not doing anything more than that we’re it you know I’m about to start doing some directory stuff I’ve been I’ve been

Recognized as a super lawyer for I think four or five years in a row. I think it’s four. So at this point, we’re going to get on their directory. But besides that, that’s all that I’m doing right now.

Viktoria Altman (11:28)
Okay, so a couple of things to address there. There are two sides to the Google algorithm. The first side will look at your Google My Business profile. And your Google My Business profile is about 60 % reliant on reviews. Now, an agency doesn’t do much for that, right? This is your work. So if you have current clients who are leaving you reviews, you’re doing most of the work to drive people to your Google.

Business profile. I am working on a right now and one of my slides says, if you can get a lot of reviews and you are doing well, you don’t need me. And that’s what it is. If you are doing all the reviews, then you’re doing all the work and you do not need me. If you’re paying an agency to manage your Google business profile and you’re doing all the work, then you don’t need him either.

Dmitriy Borshchak (12:16)
That’s what he said.

Viktoria Altman (12:28)
Because you’re doing all the work.

Having said that, you have a long sales cycle. Your ideal client is going to do research. Just having your GMB is likely not going to catch all those clients. You likely do want a great website. I don’t mean great in terms of looks. Of course, it has to be attractive, that’s the minimum. But you want a good website that explains to your ideal client that you are an authority in the field, quote, expert, quote, specialist, not really, but an

Authority, somebody who really understands their problem and understands and has solutions for their problem. And so if you’re not hitting both, you’re not going to maximize your potential. But if you’re paying somebody to manage your GMB and you’re already doing all the reviews, you’re doing all the hard work. There is not a whole lot more they could do for you besides that. It’s the website where you really could use the additional kind of oomph if that makes sense.

Dmitriy Borshchak (13:30)
Yeah, think, well, he even told me, like, you don’t need to do all these pump-out 500 word blogs and articles. And he manages, from my understanding, he’s managing my LSAs.

Along with managing the GMB stuff. I wouldn’t know where to go or what to do with this GMB stuff. So, no, I agree with you there. And ironically, he’s the one who did tell me, you know, we had this conversation maybe a year and a half ago. Back then, that was one of the big things that kind of drew me to his sincerity was you don’t need to be paying me $3,000 a month to manage your website. You don’t need that. This is what you need.

And we’ll be doing that and that’s kind of what we’ve been doing this whole time.

Viktoria Altman (14:24)
Right, so if it’s working, you know, we have a rule if it’s not broken don’t fix it But do keep in mind that when we talk about five hundred dollars five hundred word blog posts Those are irrelevant. Those don’t don’t do anything for you If you truly want to be seen as an authority in the field of divorce law You’re going to need way longer blog posts and you’re going to need way better information. I have a client in Chicago Who doesn’t like to get reviews. Doesn’t work don’t bother with that.

He’s the number one lawyer in Chicago. Why? Because we have he’s the one who creates the articles. I have a client in New York City who is ranking in the top three consistently and compared to his competitors who have 260 reviews he has 25. And he ranks in number three, one, two, or three consistently because he’s got really good blog posts. So and good pages of course and lots of other stuff we do. But so there are many ways to pet a cat, skin a cat.

But do keep in mind that reviews are probably taking care of most of your GMP work. So that’s, you’re already doing that. So I appreciate this discussion because there are not a whole lot of people I talk to who only rely on their GMP. Most people want to rely on both the website and the GMP. So this way you’re kind of diversifying the traffic.

Dmitriy Borshchak (15:23)
Right.

I’ve had such a roller coaster of experience with…

I mean, I’ve been through, I think maybe four, five, six companies and, you know, they, they, and some of your bigger agencies, they will say whatever is needed to be said to get your business. And then, you know, and when they get your business, they’re going to say things like, well, we need to wait six months. Then you get to that six-month mark and they’re like, well,

We need to wait another six months. And then after that six months, a year passes and you’re like, well, we’re in the same place we were. Well, we need to pivot. And then we pivot. And by that time, you’ve already wasted so much money and time. You know, there’s two sides to a coin. It’s just my experience so far.

Viktoria Altman (16:36)
You know, sometimes when I speak with new clients or just on a podcast, I feel like I’m dealing with people who have spousal battery syndrome because it gets to the point where you just don’t know who to trust. And you’re just, you’ve been hurt so many times by so many of these people that you’re like, you know, like it’s, very hard. get it. It’s very, very hard to.

Dmitriy Borshchak (16:44)
Yeah, for sure.

Viktoria Altman (16:57)
To separate the weed from the shaft, right? That’s the American expression. And I appreciate you sharing your experience. And I’m sorry that you’ve been dealing with folks like that. I always joke with lawyers. Imagine if personal injury lawyers didn’t need any licensing. Imagine what would be happening in the industry if that was the case. And that’s what it is. We are totally.

Dmitriy Borshchak (17:07)
yeah. It’s OK.

Viktoria Altman (17:20)
It’s only a question of like conscientiousness and intelligence in terms of who you work with and how hard they work for you because it’s hard to supervise too. So let’s move on to the next question. So your firm emphasizes a personalized approach. Is there a way you address that in your marketing communication? It sounds like an important part of your sort of the way you do business.

Dmitriy Borshchak (17:43)
So I don’t know if we currently market that personalized approach. We may be. I mean, I could tell you that.

With all of our clients, I mean, we have a firm policy is, clients don’t go more than 48 hours, which is on the higher end without hearing from one of the attorneys. We have a team here and although there are leads, there’s an attorney lead on a certain case, my expectation of our team is that we all know what’s going on in every case. And if somebody is not available, we have somebody who steps in.

Clients also receive a cell phone number which is there for emergencies or things of that nature. But to answer your question, I don’t necessarily think we market that personalized approach. We just deliver that approach once you are a member of the firm, a member as a client. And I think our reviews speak to that end as well. So I would, you know, that could be a marketing aspect.

Viktoria Altman (18:54)
Yeah, so it’s important to make sure you incorporate that. And it might not be even, you know, I know you’ve been burned by website things. It might be on your social media. It might be in, you know, if you’re hosting a webinar, you must try and incorporate that because for you, especially if you’re looking for high-income folks, they’re going to be looking for something very personalized rather than, you know, very like, you know, copied, you know, copied approach that kind of goes to everybody.

So, speaking of your ideal clients, what is the best way for you to reach them? And it might not be digital, it might be something else. What would you find is the best way for you?

Dmitriy Borshchak (19:32)
just right. It’s been referrals for the past year, a year and a half. It’s been referrals. It’s other like I have, I mean, some of my biggest, biggest cases. And when I say biggest, I’m talking about, you know, maybe the highest assets that we’re dividing or the highest things at stake as far as money. You know, some of my biggest cases have come from a referral in other cities. Like I’ve had one of my biggest clients drive up.

From Cincinnati, Ohio, which is about an hour and 45 away from here to hire me because people in Cincinnati referred me. How those people heard from me, I don’t know. Same thing, I’m from Cleveland and I’ve had people call me to have me represent them in Cleveland, which I don’t like to do because it’s two hours away, but it’s because I’ve been referrals. People talk and know, professionals talk and

That’s kind of, can’t say how that has come out to be other than results. I think people have just heard about the result and the approach. I’m very methodical as far as these cases go. When I meet with a client and we’re talking about how we’re going to approach a case, we don’t look at it just step A instead of B. We talk about steps A, B, C, D, and E, and F is at the end. We talk about what that looks like, what’s going to happen.

If the other side does this in response to our proposition, what if they say this? What if they say this? What if they do that? So we’re, kind of very methodical and I think that part, you can’t market. Maybe you can, but that’s where the referrals have come in. People, their CPAs have recommended me there, you know, probate. I get a lot of referrals from probate attorneys who set up wills and trusts.

Those individuals send clients to me but you know That that’s kind of the main source other than the direct sources that we’re getting.

Viktoria Altman (21:41)
You know, I read in a book about marketing that the best type of marketing is doing. And I think you are kind of finding that out. Good, a good job is the best kind of marketing that there is. Also get a lot of, ironically, I get a lot of my, most of my clients come from referrals, even though I’m a marketer. But I think that’s all kind of goes into the same, it’s still marketing.

Dmitriy Borshchak (21:48)
I

Viktoria Altman (22:06)
So do you, kind of wrapping up here, what do you think is the next coming for practice of family law in Ohio? Are there any trends you are seeing, maybe with digital or law?

Dmitriy Borshchak (22:15)
So there is a bill, if you’re looking for local recent events, there’s a bill in Ohio right now that’s been kind of stuck in committee somewhere for the past year and a half, two years about.

To kind of change the presumption of shared parenting. So in Ohio right now, whoever wants to have shared parenting, which is synonymous with joint custody, okay? The burden is on the proponent the plaintiff or the defendant, whoever wants shared parenting. The burden is on them to prove that shared parenting is in the best interest of the minor children, okay? And what is kind of in committee right now,

that the Ohio State Bar Association is against this. But what the current bill, does is it changes that to where shared parenting is presumed to be the best. And the person who doesn’t want shared parenting, the burden is on them to prove that shared parenting is not in the best interest of the minor children. And right now, states like West Virginia, have adopted that they have that.

To where where to prove that joint custody is not in the best interest of a minor child or children. So that’s something that’s recently going through as a kind of a recent law change. I don’t know if it’s gonna become law, but when you’re talking about recent trends, that’s, I am not, let me tell you what’s not a trend, what I thought was going to be a trend.

Two years, a year and a half ago, COVID was the biggest deal in the world and the biggest deal in our courtrooms. I mean, ever since COVID, our entire life has kind of transformed. We have hearings on Zoom, just like you and I are talking. And I had a theory, like this whole thing with the vaccine, and that’s going to be such a huge issue for parents. Ironically or not, that has not been.

That has not been a big issue. It was kind of very big at the very beginning, like the very beginning of 2021, but it has not been an issue. And I’m a little shocked by it that it hasn’t been an issue. It kind of disappeared. Nobody’s talking about it. That’s like a term in the shared parenting plan. If two people are going to be joint custodians, they have to agree on how you make medical decisions. And

I had believed that that was going to be a big sticking point for everyone. But come to realize, rarely if ever that comes up.

Viktoria Altman (24:55)
you

Yeah, interesting. You’re right. I haven’t even given that any thought, but it did seem like it would be this huge issue that would be contentious everywhere and boom, just gone. Well, at least that’s one less thing for us to fight over, So how do you envision the future of your law office? Are you looking to grow? Are you looking to stay where you are? What is it that you what is it that you’re looking to do in the future?

Dmitriy Borshchak (25:13)
Right. Yeah.

Interestingly, you asked me that this morning I met with our interior designer. We’re moving to a new office two floors up in the next two to three months. So we are expanding to our office upstairs. We are looking to grow, know, kind of more so looking to meet the demand. The demand’s a little bit higher right now than the actual supply. So that’s what we’re doing. I envision…

I don’t want to say a lot more cases to lead your listeners to believe that there’s a lot more conflict out there. But it’s, it’s, you know, it’s the same level of individuals. Many people, what I’m seeing now is a lot of people who stuck through COVID or stuck through that period, you know, for the children and are now kind of coming out of it and wanting to separate. You know, I have a very con…

Kind of very contentious case right now that the parties were kind of both working from home which led to them realizing that they don’t like each other. And they stuck through it and now they want to get divorced. So we are expanding, are, good things are happening. So it looks like everything is going in the right direction as far as business goes. And we are ready to service more.

More clients in the future, our new space is 3,500 square feet. It’s very nice and we’re trying to make it as warm as possible.

Viktoria Altman (26:56)
Well, it certainly sounds like you’re doing well and making your mother proud. Awesome. Thank you so much, Mitri. Thank you for joining us. Do you have any last words of wisdom for our listeners?

Dmitriy Borshchak (27:00)
Yes.

Yeah.

So I kind of said it earlier, and I’m not just saying this because Victoria asked me to be on her podcast. Marketing is most, important if you are going on your own or whether you’re, you know, starting your own after practicing for 10 or 15 years, marketing is the most important part of your business because you could be the most experienced. Nobody will know that unless you are indexed or the customer knows that.

I also would tell anybody who is starting on their own to use a lot of the no-cost sort of free resources that you have, such as Google, and Google My Business. It’s a, it’s a free chart. It’s a free, you know, resource. Of course, you could pay somebody to manage it like I am right now, but at one point, I wasn’t paying anybody and I was managing it. So it just really depends on where you are in your law firm.

Cycle depending on how much you know cash you have to invest into your business It’s it’s very It’s incumbent upon you to kind of think about what your end goal and where you are and what resources you have You also don’t want to overburden yourself with too many leads. So Doing things slowly, but correctly is highly recommended.

Viktoria Altman (28:32)
That’s awesome. Thank you so much for your words of wisdom, Dmitri. It was great having you on the show. Stick around and we’re going to finish uploading.

Dmitriy Borshchak (28:37)
Great talking.