Inside a Dual-Market Law Practice: Steven Wallace on Bankruptcy Trends and Smart Legal Marketing

Viktoria Altman: Please welcome Steven Wallace to the podcast. Steven is an attorney with a practice in real estate business law and bankruptcy, and he is based in both South Florida and Texas. Steven, welcome to the show. Would you like to tell us a little bit about yourself and your practice?

Steven Wallace: Thank you very much, Victoria.

I’ll tell you a little bit of how I fell into these different areas. When I was in law school, I worked for a solo practitioner in bankruptcy law. She taught me chapter seven bankruptcy, chapter 13 bankruptcy, all aspects of consumer bankruptcy. I really didn’t utilize that until after I, when we dealt with the recession in 2008.

Historically, I’ve had more of an investor institutional practice, both on the corporate security side as well as the real estate side, but then I saw a lot of my clients were losing their personal residences, their investment properties. They’re commercial properties as a result of the subprime disaster.

So a lot of those investor clients became bankruptcy clients. So it was a natural progression, and I have a good economy practice and a bad economy practice, and so I’m positioned for the different turns in the market. The only thing that was challenging was during COVID because it was an imperfect storm.

We had people that, businesses that were losing their businesses, but then the government was bailing them out. So that’s the one thing. So the bankruptcy practice was halted because there was a lot of forbearances and modifications granted to a lot of homeowners and business owners. And then that was, and then that really pretty much stood firm until the end of last year.

Now we are seeing a great uptick in our bankruptcy practice.

Viktoria Altman: Wow. That’s fascinating. I love that you have a bad economy and a good economy practice. That is a brilliant way to run a business. So I assume you are in the bad economy practice now. Is that correct?

Steven Wallace: It’s interesting what we’re seeing and just pointed in the market.

We’re seeing actually last year from basically the end of 23 until mid last year, our real estate practice was halted just because of there was a class action settlement between. The realtor association and the government, and a lot of it took basically a year for agents to figure out how to properly disclose transactions.

So it, it has affected adversely a lot of residential real estate agents and it trickled into commercial. We’re seeing an uptick in both of those right now, especially in Dallas and in Texas as a whole. We’re seeing quite an uptick in consumer and business bankruptcies because a lot of large employers, ’cause in, especially in Dallas and in Houston, that’s the corporate headquarters for a lot of multinational companies and different sectors in the market with the tariffs.

And then also now we’re at war and there’s a lot of international conflict that’s given companies. We’ll say the quote unquote excuse is to lay people off. So we’re seeing a lot of people that are struggling, especially in taxes.

Viktoria Altman: Fascinating. So you are sort of a, a leading indicator for the market. So if I wanna know how the economy is going, I should contact Steven Wallace,

Steven Wallace: but Sure. We’re Dallas bankruptcy attorneys, the bankruptcy attorney. If you wanna search us as bankruptcy attorney near me. But we noticed that we kind of are on the ground before a lot of the government agencies. I know how people are struggling right now, unfortunately.

Viktoria Altman: So you cover a lot of ground and before this we did a quick call where we got to know each other.

You mentioned to me that you have been successful because you are such a creative person as a fellow, ADHD here. I know all about that. Talk to me about how you are spending the marketing dollars right now. You mentioned they’re not huge, but you making them work. What does creative marketing look like for you?

Steven Wallace: I mean, there’s a couple different ways of approaching it. There was a good book about 15 or 20 years ago, Gorilla Marketing. And it goes into different industries. Historically, attorneys are not great out of the box marketers being a small firm, but I have a lot of clients that compete against a lot of large firms, especially when I’m dealing on my corporate and my commercial real estate transactions.

So really what I try to be as a thought leader, I do a lot of posting on LinkedIn and social media. I do Instagram as well as Facebook. Just posts on my own. And the one thing that’s a fine line is you wanna be an infopreneur. You don’t wanna be someone that is just shamelessly plugging yourself. So I wanna provide knowledge to my LinkedIn connections, like we’re talking about economic indicators, how the market’s doing in particular sectors.

I’m just providing knowledge. I’m not doing shameless. Oh, hire Steven Wallace. He’s the best bankruptcy attorney in Dallas, the best bankruptcy attorney in Boca Raton, the best bankruptcy attorney in Miami. That’s not what I do. I just, by my knowledge you say, wow, Steven Wallace, he really knows what he’s talking about. If I have an issue, I wanna talk to him.

That’s a very long-term marketing strategy. And you saw a couple of things that there are interesting. So LinkedIn, I found it has been spammed out.

Oh, totally. A couple years ago I found it a lot more useful than it is now. Now I don’t even look at my inbox because every AI bot is attacking me and hitting me up with messages.

Viktoria Altman: Yeah, it’s especially the fact that now you can use AI to write posts that look reasonable and good. It’s become just impossible to read it. And you can always tell when somebody wrote it with a bot because you can see all the EM dashes. All over the place for some reason, but love the dashes. But you mentioned you still continue to use it and you still find that it brings some value.

Steven Wallace: It does. You can quickly siphon through who really wants to make a connection and who doesn’t. Historically, LinkedIn is for people looking for jobs, and it’s never been something that I’ve done. I’ve gotten solicited on multiple occasions by larger firms looking to pick me up because they see my posts and they see my value, but.

I’ve made some really good connections. I’ve gotten, um, a good amount of referrals through LinkedIn, especially on some larger commercial transactions from out-of-state brokers looking to sell properties in Florida or in Texas.

Viktoria Altman: Interesting. That’s something to keep in mind, especially if you’re doing B2B, LinkedIn, is still helpful. Is there anything else you feel that you’ve done that may be unusual and doesn’t cost a lot?

Steven Wallace: I do a podcast called Attorneys Are Human too. We’re on Apple and Spotify and wherever you get your podcasts, and we’ve had quite a loyal following. We’re gonna be starting our sixth season soon and my paralegal and I started, it’s just ’cause we were isolated and bored during COVID.

We’re always fine tuning it, but a lot of people listen to it. We do talk legal issues, we talk business, we talk bankruptcy issues. We talk real estate issues, but it’s more of an entertainment style podcast. Certainly you and your listeners that have a listen ’cause it’s pretty interesting and it’s funny and at the very least it’s entertaining.

And a lot of my colleagues are like, I had no idea when you told me about your podcast, I didn’t expect what I listened to ’cause it was entertaining.

Viktoria Altman: So since we were on podcast question, do you use that to get yourself seen more by AI? Because there’s methods to make sure that AI considers you an expert If you have a podcast.

Steven Wallace: We’ve done that to a degree. What we’ve done even more is our blog posts. That’s one of my free marketing tools where we’ve gotten picked up a lot as an expert.

Viktoria Altman: Yeah. If you can create original content, that’s a content marketing team, like my own can’t create. Like they can create very good blog posts, we can’t write from the viewpoint of an attorney.

So if you are coming in and you’re citing specific cases and case law and things that we can do because we simply don’t have that experience, and that could be really helpful. For AI to sort of mark you as an expert and once AI marks you as an expert in that field, when there is a questionnaire I can’t answer, they will send the user to you.

So that helps a lot.

Steven Wallace: I got through the Dallas Bar Association. I wrote a bankruptcy article that’s coming out next month on the Dallas commercial real estate scene, and as a result of how Chapter 11 bankruptcy can help you through the issues,

Viktoria Altman: that’s also great.

Steven Wallace: The Dallas Bar Association. Is one of the most respected and largest volunteer bar associations in the country.

Viktoria Altman: Did you approach them or did they approach you? How did that work?

Steven Wallace: I’m on the bankruptcy and commercial law committee, and they asked us to come up with some article topics and I gave them that article topic and they selected me. I am very active in the Palm Beach County and the Broward County Bar Associations in South Florida.

I’ve presented probably 10 CLEs in the last five years in person and on Zoom. Then bankruptcy business law, and real estate law. I actually just did a CLE on how you can use AI to assist you in your transactional law practice.

Viktoria Altman: So did you come up with it, how does it work with CLE? Do you come up with a CLE topic and then approach them or do they give you a list of topics that they’re interested in covering?

Steven Wallace: We always create it. I’m on the committee in Palm Beach County for the Bar Association. I’m on the bankruptcy law committee, the real estate law committee, and the transactional law committee, and we always are collaborative and we pitch different topics and then they assign us or we volunteer to present different topic.

I may not consider myself the most outgoing person, but I really enjoy teaching and presenting and being, as I mentioned earlier, an infopreneur.

Viktoria Altman: Interesting. I like that word, infopreneur. But you talk to me a little bit about LSAs as well, and LSAs are a separate topic. I know some people love them and some people hate them.

Talk to me about how you can make them work.

Steven Wallace: I love it. I think it’s really grown our practice a lot when we were going to enter into the Dallas market. My practice is competing at certain months exceeding the revenue of my practice in South Florida, which I’ve been based since 2002. When I was a young lawyer out of law school, I was recruited to go to Dallas and I worked at a large firm in Dallas about 25 years ago. So I know that market very well, but I love LSAs. I think they’re great when you first start. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s a garbage in, garbage out scenario. You’d have to determine the practice areas that you’re not dealing with. A lot of tire kickers, you’re dealing with people that are looking to hire people, and sometimes you don’t get the best leads, and when you fight Google on it, you usually lose unless it’s a total spam.

But I like it. I, and I’ve had good success with it, and it’s something that we can do in-house.

Viktoria Altman: So with LSA, which stands for Local Service Ads, not everybody out there uses them yet. And so how it works is you generally set it up for yourself as a lawyer. You set up practice areas and then you set up a budget and there’s not that much more you can do with them.

Is that correct?

Steven Wallace: It’s pretty straightforward. You don’t have to be a tech guru or anything of that nature. You have to have patience, and you just also have to have the capacity because the phone rings a lot and you have to train your staff properly, or if you’re the attorney in smaller office to answer them yourself.

One of the things that I pride myself on is I’m a closer. I’ve been doing this long enough to know if somebody just calling to get information and they’re not looking to hire an attorney, or they’re looking for free advice, or they don’t even know what they’re looking for. I’m pretty good at taking a call, listening to what they have to say, screen them and then either work towards a close or just provide them the information and tell them.

If they’re not in a position to hire me at this point, and again, not to disrespect them, just to get them off the phone because all attorneys get paid on their time. There’s only 24 hours in the day, and you don’t want to waste your time on clients that aren’t looking to hire you. So it’s a challenge that a lot of smaller firms or mid-size firms struggle with on a daily basis.

Viktoria Altman: Do you have any tips for how to set up? I know I have some clients who set them up for themselves and not get any kind of calls. Is there anything you could do to optimize them?

Steven Wallace: I don’t think there really is. It’s just a matter of knowing what the practice areas are. I’m gonna give you an example.

When I first started, I hit in all of my practice areas and I hit real estate in all of the things, and I found that the clients that are calling for real estate advice are not necessarily the clients that fit into my practice mode. I would get a lot of landlord tenant issues or things that weren’t profitable for our firm.

So I pretty much limited the LSAs for my firm to commercial real estate bankruptcy and mergers and acquisitions. ’cause those are the kinds of things that I’m looking for because if I just stuck on business, it would be like, I have a client that’s not paying me $500. It’s just a matter of you have to have some experience and figure out what areas of your practice are profitable and learn how it fits in the LSA.

But there’s not really a way to optimize, there’s no secret sauce like you would do on the Google ads.

Viktoria Altman: Yeah. Part of the issues that people have with LSAs, is the competition, so there’s not a lot of business lawyers who um, participate in LSAs, but on the other hand, there is a ton of personal injury lawyers and criminal lawyers, not so much in New York.

What’s like an average lead for a good business lead in Dallas, would you say?

Steven Wallace: I don’t have such a high budget, so I maybe get like one a week if that. Um, but I think it’s 350 or 5, it’s high.

Viktoria Altman: Oh, wow. That is high, because that’s personal injury rates right there.

Steven Wallace: No, I know because I think in Dallas there’s a lot of business.

So in Florida, the LSA race for bankruptcy are pretty high. They’re like around like between 200 to 250 Then Dallas, it’s a lot less.

Viktoria Altman: Mm-hmm.

Steven Wallace: So I get a lot more value for my money in Dallas. Hopefully Google’s not changing this.

Viktoria Altman: It’s a question of competition. They will make it as expensive as they can if people, they won’t are bidding for it.

So it’s just a question of bidders.

Steven Wallace: I put guardrails on, I don’t give them the maximum lead because they would use my entire budget for a week on one lead. So I say this is the cap. So that’s definitely something that I would advise people that are doing it in-house is C, what you wanna spend per lead.

’cause that’s what I do to get the maximum number of leads a week.

Viktoria Altman: So you have two areas where you practice. South Florida and Texas. Now, why those and how did you decide to go into two such disparate areas?

Steven Wallace: I’m licensed in both of those areas, which you have to be, theoretically. I go back and forth between the two markets.

My primary residence is in South Florida, but I’m in Dallas multiple times a month. Also, just so you’re aware, we use South Florida broadly because I practice in southeast Florida and Southwest. I have an office at Fort Myers also. And I know Fort Myers very well. What I would recommend is if you’re going into a particular area.

You need to understand the market. I’m a business and a a real estate and a bankruptcy lawyer, so I need to understand where people are, where they’re from, the different markets, the blue collar areas, the white collar areas. Where does commerce go? I lived in Dallas for two years and it’s changed dramatically since when I lived there, but I know the area hasn’t changed that dramatically, where I don’t know where things are and where to focus.

My marketing, we are expanding into Houston. I know that market relatively well. ’cause Texas, the major armor centers are Dallas, Houston, and Austin. I don’t know Austin at all, so that’s why I haven’t branched into their,

Viktoria Altman: How many lawyers do you have to cover all these areas?

Steven Wallace: We have three lawyers, and then we also have a staff of three as well.

One of the things that I pride myself on is that I provide the personal touch. I speak to every client and I try to participate. Every meeting of the creditors that we have for the bankruptcies. One of the benefits which has made the ability to expand into multiple geographic areas since COVID is the courts have really adopted remote hearings and remote practice.

All of the meeting of the creditors are on Zoom, or a lot of the courts allow you to appear telephonically or remotely on whatever. Platform that they use. One of the good things that came outta COVID is it’s made our practices a lot more efficient and reliance on remote technology.

Viktoria Altman: As a business owner myself, I talk to every client because clients hire me for the strategy.

Also, I travel and I go to conferences. How do you manage what you move to your folks and what you keep on your own plate? Because that’s something a lot of lawyers struggle with.

Steven Wallace: It is a struggle with the residential real estate component and the consumer bankruptcy component. The initial document preparation I can pass on to my staff and then I just review everything.

No bankruptcy case is filed without my review and approval

and

Steven Wallace: sign off on, we have the clients physically sign it as well.

Viktoria Altman: That makes a lot of sense.

Steven Wallace: Intricate details like contract negotiation and stuff like, that’s not really something that staff does. It’s more of an attorney role and a lot of sophisticated stuff that falls on my plate.

Viktoria Altman: I hear you. Same here. Talk to me about a marketing strategy that you execute that did not work out well for you. What is the lessons you learned?

Steven Wallace: Over the years, I’ve spent a good amount of money for SEO and on a couple of occasions in Google Ads, and I really have not gotten return at all, or maybe very little return.

I think a lot of lawyers spend a lot of money in marketing, especially in the certain pressures that are extremely competitive, like personal injury, criminal defense, bankruptcy is very competitive. Also on the consumer side. There’s a lot of money that’s being spent, and depending upon either level or the size of the firm, I don’t know if there’s a much return on the investment.

So I haven’t had a lot of success in SEO or Google ads, local services ads. I’ve had a good amount of success.

Viktoria Altman: SEO is funny, right? Because most business lawyers or business clients will not go online and say, recommend me a best business lawyer next to me. A lot of them will ask for referral, right? But some of course will go online and they will Google, and that’s the clients you end up fighting through LSAs.

The reason why you’re probably not getting a lot of people from SEO is because it is unique. Your practice area is somewhat unique and it’s hard short SEO to understand. We haven’t had any trouble ranking bankruptcies, but if you’re trying to rank bankruptcy for business client. There may just not be a lot of people looking for that because they are generally asking for referrals, but bankruptcy personally is not very difficult to write as far as I know.

You know, you just have to do the work part of it. The problem is that we’re just in the unregulated industry, so a lot of folks are just coming in, let’s try something. Then they try something. Yeah, they try something else. In the meanwhile, you are spending a lot of money, right? So in my book I joke about the best way to prescreen an agency is to ask, can you give me three clients?

Who are in the same practice area as me and spend the same amount as me. If they cannot do that, then generally you would be the test bunny, and you don’t wanna be the test bunny if you’re spending your own money, right? In terms of ads, ads can be a little tricky. You have to set it up correctly.

Generally, I find for personal bankruptcy, you actually have much better ROI On SEO. They ads can work, but they can work as a supplement later. I appreciate you sharing the tips with me. What is next for you? You mentioned Houston. What other expansion plans do you have?

Steven Wallace: Right now we’re rolling out Houston, April 1st.

The other two expansion areas, probably next year we’re looking at Tampa, Orlando or possibly Jacksonville, and that will cap all of our expansion.

Viktoria Altman: Are you opening physical offices and creating Google business profiles?

Steven Wallace: We do. I am licensed in New York also, but New York is kind of a distant one. Yeah,

Viktoria Altman: New York is competitive too, but it’s fun working here.

All right. Thank you so much, Steven. I appreciate your time. Is there any last words of wisdom for the attorneys out there who might be thinking of venturing out on their own?

Steven Wallace: I tell everybody, because I have a lot of friends that work at very large firms. That’s historically where I’ve come from and no disrespect to ’em.

It’s a matter of courage. and Belief in yourself. Because I’ve come to the realization that I’m just not the kind of lawyer that can work in those large firms because it’s too constricting for me. Maybe it’s a gift and a curse. You have to believe in yourself. It’s exciting and scary that I eat what I kill literally and figuratively.

There are some weeks where there is a little bit of anxiety related to how are we going to self sustain ourselves, and there’s other weeks when I have home runs and so. I enjoy the rush and I enjoy the anxiety related to it. The one thing I know for a fact is that I believe in myself and I know that I’m gonna be successful and continue to be successful.

And I’m kind of building a legacy for my children. I have younger children and I’m hoping that one of them will continue. The Wallace law name. I keep telling them each day we’re in the car. When I pick ’em up from school, I’m like, we’re building this for you. I know you’re getting annoyed when I’m taking a call, when I pick you up or where you want to go do something, and I have to work, but I’m building something here, creating generational wealth and a legacy for my family.

Viktoria Altman: Sometimes I talk to people and they ask me, what is it? How do I become an entrepreneur? I told them, if you have to ask the question, don’t, because the only reason I’m entrepreneur is because I am unfit to do anything else. Like, because you almost have to be a little bit crazy and you really can’t be the kind of person who follows instructions very well because if you follow instructions and you listen too much to what other people say, it’s gonna be very hard to succeed.

Steven Wallace: What I’ve worked in large firms, they don’t understand me because my level of work is at the top. But I don’t necessarily work like everybody else does inside of a larger organization.

Viktoria Altman: Yeah. Agreed. Thank you so much for coming, Steven. I appreciate having you on. Guys, stick around.