How Alia Khan Built a High-Volume Bankruptcy Practice Through TikTok & Authentic Branding

Viktoria Altman: Hey guys. Welcome to the Law Firm Accelerator. Today with us, we have Alia Khan, who is an attorney focusing in bankruptcy law. Alia, welcome to the show. Do you want to introduce yourself?

Alia Khan: So my name is Alia Kahn. I’m a bankruptcy attorney throughout California. I practice in Northern California, Central California, and Southern California. I’ve been a practicing attorney now for almost 18 years.

Viktoria Altman: Amazing. So Alia, I am very excited to speak with you, but before we get into the TikTok thing, where I know you found a lot of success. I see you’ve been practicing law since 2007 and you have a calling to bankruptcy law. Talk to me about why you decided to practice this kind of law.

Alia Khan: So when I first started out, as an attorney, I started out doing court appointed work. I was in court often dealing with large amounts of cases and clients. And then over time, one of my best friends who’s also an attorney told me, Hey, why don’t you try taking on bankruptcy cases?

And I thought, oh, I don’t know how to do that. I just started slowly posting on Craigslist. I put a very low level website out there, and I had a paralegal friend that also was doing bankruptcies, and she referred clients to me who wanted attorneys, and she helped me with that.

Slowly, I started taking on clients and I realized that bankruptcy is very document intensive. It’s very transactional, and not litigious. It’s not very adversarial. You’re not in the trenches for a year. So I started small. I had a few cases a year, and then started dedicating more time, resources, and money to building out my website, advertising, networking.

And so it finally started becoming a true law practice or a true law firm.

Viktoria Altman: So you talk a lot about how bankruptcy is nothing to be ashamed of, and I know there’s a lot of shame out there with people who maybe are afraid to seek help. Can you talk a little bit about this perspective?

Alia Khan: Yes. Here’s the problem with people who are in debt. They don’t feel like bankruptcy is an option. They either try to pay it down. But that’s almost impossible for most people because they don’t make enough money to pay their rent, pay their food, pay their utilities, and pay down $40,000 worth of debt. And they think of bankruptcy as an extremely embarrassing type of thing to do, and they are really ashamed about it.

So even getting them to ask family or friends for a referral is almost impossible. They start Googling, get information off of chatGPT, or get information just in general off of Google and they get a lot of misinformation.

And so the entire time, they’re still very ashamed about it. The people who are truly ashamed are the people who have these professional type of jobs. For example, I represented an accountant just the other day and he spent most of the consultation apologizing for all of his credit card debt or explaining that his wife had a medical illness and he was the primary breadwinner and she couldn’t work and they have these children and things just got too much. It was information that they liked to get out during the consultation. But really, myself and my paralegals essentially have to say, stop. We don’t care, nor do we judge why you’re in debt. And the trustees and the judges who are looking at your case do not really care either. Nobody is going through your credit card statements or anything like that. You’re in debt. You have to come up with a solution, and bankruptcy is a good solution for you.

So I think once they get past the shame of embarrassment of it all and see how truly, easy it is to get through it, they just know that bankruptcy is the right decision for them.

Viktoria Altman: It almost sounds like they’re very responsible people because if somebody wasn’t responsible, they wouldn’t feel so guilty about doing this. It sounds like they’re trying to do the right thing as much as they possibly can.

Alia Khan: Absolutely Viktoria. It is such a myth that people are unemployed on government benefits, taking advantage of the system when they file for bankruptcy. 99% of my clients have jobs. They have pay stubs. Some of them have two or three jobs, and living in California is extremely expensive.

Your rent at the bottom is $2,000 a month. Mortgages sometimes are almost $4,000 a month. That doesn’t count childcare, gas, groceries, living expenses, all of those things that accumulate over time. So it’s a great resolution for people to get rid of their debt in a few months and just move on with their life.

And what I tell people is this is your way to build wealth for yourself and your family. Once you file for bankruptcy and you get rid of all of your junk, unsecured debt, and you’re living off of your paycheck, you can put more money into your 401k.

You can put some money into an emergency savings account. You can put some money in an account for your children. You can finally breathe and that is the benefit of bankruptcy.

Viktoria Altman: Makes a lot of sense. So you are running your own firm and it sounds like initially maybe you had some trouble with marketing because it sounds like these people are afraid to seek help. How did you approach that to begin with?

Alia Khan: So when I first started out, I just put a website out and then I started going to networking groups, and I also paid for ads. I did Google ads, Yelp ads, and a few Facebook ads when Facebook was a little bit more popular.Then I would just tell people, Hey, I’m a bankruptcy attorney, refer your family or friends to me.

But it kind of goes back to what I was saying before. Being in debt and financial hardship is a secret people carry and they’re not walking around telling their friends, Hey, I have $50,000 worth of debt. I can’t pay my bills this month. So I didn’t really get a bunch of referrals to keep my practice afloat.

So I did a lot of SEO management. I did ads on Google, I did ads on Yelp. I participated in many networking groups, and I did that for years, and it worked. It was slow. I did about 20 to 40 cases per year just with that type of strategy. I can delve into what my kind of stats are now, but I’ll wait for the next question.

Viktoria Altman: So you tried a lot of things and then you discovered TikTok. So did you get started in TikTok or did you start on Instagram or YouTube? What was your first social media?

Alia Khan: For social media, I would just post on Facebook, and then I would cross post to Instagram. Prior to the pandemic, I would post a lot of graphics, so it wasn’t very much video. And I think back then, maybe five or six years ago, graphics were much more popular where I would post a Canva graphic that had facts about bankruptcy or information about me.

And then I realized that videos are much more powerful. For years, starting from junior high, high school, college, I was a public speaker. I was on the debate team. I did my master’s degree in communications and debate. In law school, I did mock trial. So I knew that I was able to speak to people in an articulate fashion, and I wasn’t shy in front of the camera or to talk to other people.

So in 2023, I started slowly posting on TikTok and it blew up completely. I started taking on cases in Southern California when I was only taking on cases in Northern California. My paralegal and I have been together since 2018. It was just myself and her for years. I had to hire new staff because it got so busy.

So in terms of TikTok, I was posting on Instagram and I was posting on Facebook. That really wasn’t that lucrative. And then I just started posting on TikTok and I just started making videos in my office. Then I was getting a lot of calls and emails, and I grew my following very organically.

So since 2023, when I first started, I had seven followers and I’m pretty sure those followers were bots or a friend from work. Now I’m almost at 60,000 followers and it’s 2025, and I grew it very organically. I never bought followers. I did not do any advertising on TikTok at all. I just posted two to three videos a day of me speaking. As more and more people saw my videos, they were asking more questions, and then I would spend most of my time answering their questions, and I believe that for TikTok, they like that.

They like when creators answer questions and it, I guess, helps the algorithm. I don’t exactly know what it does, but I realize that when I answer people’s questions, other people see it and I get more views that way.

I didn’t realize that there were that many people on TikTok, and I also didn’t think that people are going to trust an attorney on TikTok. I didn’t really think that people are going to pay an attorney they saw on TikTok, but there’s so many checks and balances, right?

I have a dedicated website. I have a phone number, I have an email. I actually do have a physical office, but everything is done remotely now and they still get that personalized experience when they call, when they email, they get one of my paralegals speaking to them, and then they also get to have a consultation with me and my paralegals essentially hold their hand through the entire process.

So they’re not ever getting this huge law firm that is looking at them as a number or just shuffling them through the system. They are getting a very personalized experience Not to be such a bragger, but my reviews do speak for themselves. I have Google and Yelp reviews.

They’re extremely specific to the customer service they experienced with my office. Everything that I tell them in the TikTok videos and everything that my staff tells them about what to expect about the bankruptcy process, it happens. And so I feel like they get a very good experience from our office and they get their resolution that they want.

And one of the main things I love about bankruptcy is. it’s not adversarial, it’s not litigious and it’s short. The moment they pay us, we do their petition. They then have a court hearing, and then a couple of months later, the case is closed. From start to finish, it’s a three month process.

There’s no fighting with other counsel. There’s no long drawn out delays. It’s not like other areas of law where you don’t get resolution right away. For example, family law, personal injury law, any type of civil law, criminal law, it’s very long. Bankruptcy in and out, three months, and you get rid of your debt if the debt is eligible to be wiped out.

Viktoria Altman: Excellent. Thank you. That’s actually really interesting stuff. So first can you mention your TikTok handle and also follow up question, what kind of posts did you start with and what kind of posts do you think do best and what is your recipe for the most successful posts? If you don’t mind sharing that.

Alia Khan: Of course. So my handle for TikTok, Instagram, YouTube shorts, and YouTube in general is @thebankruptcyqueen and it’s my only account. It’s very important that you see that it says my only account and that I practice in California. The types of posts I started out with were me just sitting in my office chair talking about specific bankruptcy topics.

So there’s, let’s just say 30 topics related to bankruptcy, and I would just go through them. What is Chapter 7? What is Chapter 13? Does it repair your credit? What are the effects of bankruptcy? Pros and cons? I did get views on those, and then consumers out there would start asking questions, and so then I answered those questions and that also got me a lot more engagement and more views.

So number one, I did standalone videos. Number two, I answered questions people would ask. And number three, which my social media manager handles, she would take videos of me drinking coffee or sitting at my desk typing or playing with my kids or going on a hike. Just regular activities that people do.

And then she would put some sort of music to it and put text or content over it where people could learn about bankruptcy facts. So those are the three things that I’ve done. I don’t do anything funny. I don’t do a lot of the skits that people do on TikTok. I truly just stick to talking about this specific area of law and answering questions.

So it’s a true educational forum. The advice that I would give to somebody just starting out and not really that excited about making videos is that you just have to start. Don’t overcomplicate it. Don’t think it has to be really beautiful. ‘Cause if you start looking at other videos out there, you’re going to become intimidated.

There’s so much professionalism that they put into these videos, and it looks so aesthetically pleasing that you can’t do that off the bat. You really just need to put your phone, get a nice light and start talking about your area of law and just start posting. And I think people out there have a need for this type of law.

Fascinating. So a couple of questions to follow up. When you say answering questions, you are answering them in text, right? Or are you taking the best questions and making the video out of those?

The latter. So for example, within TikTok, they’ll ask a question, you click on the video, and then you click on the question, and TikTok allows you to answer the question within the app. And so the actual question is a bubble on the TikTok video, and then you say what you want about that question and then it just automatically posts and you can put captions and things like that on it.

So that’s really what I do now. But prior, when I didn’t have anybody asking questions, I would just make videos and then I would just post it and they were like a minute or two long. Then at the bottom I would put some hashtags and some explanation of what I had said.

Viktoria Altman: Great. And so talk to me a little bit about social media manager. I know I’ve spoken to quite a few folks here on the show who went to an agency to do their social media management. I’m personally not a fan of that approach because I think a social media manager is somebody who should be next you and in the office, know you and know how you approach life, how you approach the law. What are your thoughts on this? How did you hire a social media manager?

Alia Khan: So I absolutely agree with you. I never went through a marketing agency that said, Hey, this is a social media manager. I did not want somebody who just was going to give me some sort of formulaic type of management. I wanted someone who knew about bankruptcy.

So my social media manager actually is a former client. She saw me on TikTok. She was one of my first bankruptcy clients who hired me off of TikTok, when I had probably a hundred followers.

So after her case was done, we remained chatty. I would say I don’t really ever keep a relationship going with a client at all. Once their case is done, they just move on with their life. But she was cool. She was funny. And so after her case was finished, I texted her and said, Hey, can we talk about something personal?

And so I said, how would you feel about helping me with Instagram and TikTok? I am posting, but I just don’t have the time to constantly be dealing with the questions and a lot of the graphics and just the technology of it all. And so I said, Hey, put together a little package.

Let’s see what we can do. She is so trustworthy. She and I are friends and she really cares about what I’m trying to do, and she also follows other attorneys and makes comparisons to what I’m doing. For example, she’ll say, Hey, try to copy this attorney and their vibe or she’ll say, Hey, you have much more personality than that person out there.

It’s not necessarily even bankruptcy attorneys, it’s just attorneys out there. And I don’t think there’s that many bankruptcy attorneys on TikTok anyway, but I’ve noticed there are much more now than before, from all over the United States. So I don’t use a big firm, I just use one individual person, and she and I worked very well together.

Viktoria Altman: Yeah, that’s a great way to do it. Now, is she a full-time person? Did she go to special training? How did you guys get up and running? Or is this something she just knew how to do?

Alia Khan: She knew how to do it because she had her own small business that she had been growing on social media. I gave her access to my TikTok and Instagram, and she started watching what other people do to build their following as an attorney. Then she just started taking standalone videos of me and she started putting text on it.

Two times a year we get together and make fresh videos, where she needed much more content. As of now, it’s working pretty well. I don’t know what will happen if I get so much larger and my clientele is so much bigger. If I want to really make some truly professional videos with a videographic company or not.

But for now, TikTok is really where I get most of my business from. So I put a lot of my efforts in that. When I make comparisons to Instagram,I post the exact same videos on Instagram and I don’t get much traction at all.

Viktoria Altman: Yeah, I understand the algorithms are very different, with Instagram, really giving a heavy preference to very large influencers, whereas TikTok, I guess it’s more socialized, right? So everybody kind of has a chance.

Alia Khan: Yes, and I do post on YouTube and YouTube shorts. I have advertisements both on YouTube and Facebook. Those are actually very cheap. They’re not expensive at all to run. And we always ask every client who calls, where did you find me? I would say about 15-20% find me on Google, YouTube, Facebook ads and in general, just an SEO search. And then the other 80% find me on TikTok.

Viktoria Altman: Interesting. Sounds like TikTok really became sort of your unexpected moneymaking strategy. But there is a question I love to ask because everybody’s got a story. Tell me about a marketing strategy that really didn’t work for you, and what was the lessons you’ve learned from it?

Alia Khan: The marketing strategy that did not work for me. There’s twofold. Yelp did not work for me. I have actually tried advertising with them many times and it’s very unclear in my mind whether there was an ROI attached to it. Yelp is so powerful, right? People write reviews on Yelp and sometimes you think, Hey, maybe I’ll move to the top or they’ll get rid of negative reviews or all of the non recommended reviews. I always think they can put me in a competitor’s section. But all in all, I couldn’t figure out what the ROI was, and they’re very expensive.

The other marketing strategy that did not work for me, and I really hate to say this is going to networking groups. I was going to a lot of face-to-face networking groups, so this was pre-pandemic. I would go to BNI, I would go to LeTip. In the cities that were around me I would join networking groups where you have to meet with people for coffee or for lunch, and they were supposed to be your referral partners. So for example, I would meet with an accountant, a real estate person, or any person out in the world who had a job or a business. But for all the time I spent doing that I would say it brought me one client a year. Bankruptcy is a high volume practice. You need to blast out to a bunch of people, and only now do I realize that. I actually truly thought face-to-face networking, being part of networking groups was the way to go.

Networking with other lawyers on a regular basis was the way to go. It is, but I don’t think you get that high volume. I think you have to be out there on Google, online, and on social media if you want heavy influx of clients. And that’s what I’ve realized. I don’t know if it’s right or wrong for other attorneys, but I don’t put too much labor into face-to-face networking anymore.

‘Cause I don’t think bankruptcy is set up like that. You just need people out there coming through the door and you want to resolve their issue and have them move on.

Viktoria Altman: I have bankruptcy clients and I tend to agree with you. I think it’s a value practice. SEO works really, really well for them, right? Because you don’t want to necessarily ask your neighbor for a bankruptcy lawyer. So if you’re ranking well on Google, on ChatGPT, or all of the AI, that helps a lot.

I would say face-to-face networking, unless you are networking with financial planners or accountants, maybe somebody who has that sort of inroads. It’s probably not going to be a good ROI. Sounds like you spend a lot of time on it.

Alia Khan: Well, you’re gonna get one or two clients out of it, but it’s not going to keep your practice afloat.

Viktoria Altman: Right.And you have a big opportunity cost there. Speaking of opportunity cost, you’re a mom of two as well. I’m also a mother of two. Talk to me about balance. I love to ask this question because everybody finds their own.

Alia Khan: Yes. So my balance is I wake up before them. For many years I went to the gym very early in the morning, and then I would hop on my laptop and deal with emails. I still do that. I don’t necessarily go to the gym as often as I should, but I do wake up before my children. And I clear out my inbox. I deal with any issues that have come up. My paralegal likes to work late into the night, and so when I wake up in the morning, I see all her emails, and I deal with those types of things.

Lately I’ve been actually practicing a little bit more self care where I have been asking a colleague of mine to help me out in any court appointed work that gets assigned to me. So I’m not actually commuting to court. And that gives me time to focus on my practice, focus on marketing, and also just be a little bit more out in the sun.

And maybe dealing with myself a little bit more, and I’ve noticed that putting away electronics before bed has helped me get a better night’s sleep. But it is very difficult when you are a person who is used to working all the time.

I am constantly checking emails. I reply to them and my clients get responses from me or my staff very quickly. So maybe putting a little bit more of a boundary on that would be helpful. But I do think that the way I juggle it all is just I have a calendar and I’m really, really Type A about it.

Like everything is in my calendar.

Viktoria Altman: So you balance it by working really, really hard. Got it.

Alia Khan: Exactly. I don’t know how other people balance it. My kids probably are sick of me. They’re probably like, oh, you’re always on your phone. I put all of their activities, all of their school requirements in my calendar, along with my cases, along with what’s due. So I see what’s happening day to day, week to week. And, my husband, he doesn’t carry the mental load.

I just task him with things.

Viktoria Altman: Of course, naturally.

So I know you’re a big fan of crime novels, and I’m a huge reader, and I was going to ask you, what is your favorite nonfiction book, but it sounds like you prefer fiction books.

So talk to me about your favorite authors.

Alia Khan: Yes. So I essentially buy all of my books off of thrift books and they’re just used books. And some authors I really like are Kate White, Allen Eskens. Geez, there’s so many out there. I like psychological thrillers. I like murder mysteries. I like family dramas. I watch a ton of true crime shows to the point where I think is this causing me anxiety?

Am I gonna be a victim of a crime anytime soon? So I like to read a lot, but you probably have the same issue. It’s hard to sit down and read. It’s not anything you can multitask with. So when I’m in the kitchen and I’m cleaning or cooking or doing domestic chores, I have my shows on or a podcast on.

But reading actually requires you to sit down and just concentrate on that. I do love reading. I’ve loved reading since I was a kid. And it reminded me when you asked me that I really need to make more time for it.

Viktoria Altman: Yeah, finding time for it is hard. I usually read before going to bed. This way I’m not looking at my phone as well.

Alia Khan: Yes. I need to do that more often.

Viktoria Altman: Yeah, this way you turn your phone off. I use my Kindle, but you can have a real book as well.

Okay, so before we wrap up, talk to me about what’s next for you? What are your next goals, projects? What directions are you excited to take your firm in?

Alia Khan: So my next two projects, I would say, is increasing revenue for the following year. For example, like I said, pre TikTok, I did about 20 to 40 cases a year, and now post TikTok, I did so far for the, up until this year, 103 cases for the year, and that may not be a lot to a huge law firm but it’s a lot to me because I’m essentially functioning as a mom and pop law firm. It’s me and two staff and that’s it.

And so my goal is to increase that amount of cases and just continue to post more on TikTok. My other goal is to build up my YouTube page. Currently, I have less than 500 subscribers on there, but I wanna dedicate some time to either making longer form videos or focusing on better videos for YouTube shorts, because I think that the way society is, they’re on their phone and they’re scrolling so quickly and you have to accommodate that type of viewer and that type of consumer. People aren’t trying to watch long videos.

So increasing revenue, increasing the amount of cases, but still being true to giving the best service I can to people out there. And number two is getting my YouTube shorts and YouTube a little bit better.

Viktoria Altman: So you have a really good opportunity with AI search. Before when we did SEO search engine optimization, it was all about keywords, right? So we would look at creating articles for different keywords. With AI, it’s much smarter than old style SEO, and it’s all about the brand.

So if you have a powerful brand such as The Bankruptcy Queen, and people are searching for you, AI says, well, that person must be well known for this thing, and it gives you extra credit in what’s called EEAT algorithm. And EEAT stands for expertise, experience, authority, and trustworthiness. So if you wanted to grow your practice and take advantage of it, by optimizing your site for SEO, you could. Because of your brand awareness, you could much more easily start coming up with ChatGPT, on Google search,or Google AI, which is of course, where everything is going, right?

The old style search is going away and it’s all commentary AI. So you have really good opportunities. In fact, I speak about branding to my clients every single day. It’s all about getting your name out there, getting people to search for you. The more they’re searching for you, the more they will find you. Soif you’re looking to grow, I would say that’s one thing you might wanna take a look at as well.

Alia Khan: Okay. That’s a great suggestion. And that’s what I was thinking. More AI, more social media.I even thought about putting a billboard up to basically have more brand awareness.

Hey, you can find me as the bankruptcy queen and here’s a billboard as well. So it puts two together, but these things become expensive, right? So it depends how much you wanna spend.

Viktoria Altman: So with a billboard, it’s very hard to track your ROI. And so when my clients tell me things like, I wanna put up a billboard. My suggestion is, let’s do it, but only if you know that we cannot track this because people’s Googling for you and then you coming up better in searches is not an attribution I can make.

I can tell you how many people are visiting your website from X, Y, Z, but I can’t tell you that they saw you on a billboard. And so what happens with bankruptcy lawyers too, is a lot of times folks need a lot of touches, right? They will see you maybe on TikTok and maybe they search and maybe they talk to ChatGPT and they’re finally like, okay, you know what?

And maybe if you had a Pixel installed, a Facebook Pixel, a Google Pixel,you could also put some ads in front of them. So they see you, and then finally they’re like, you know what things have gotten bad enough that I need help. And who am I gonna call this person that I’ve seen in six different places? Of course, right?

Because familiarity makes them more comfortable with you. And so it’s all about many touches for a bankruptcy attorney whereas for a criminal lawyer, a lot of it is just like, okay, I need a criminal lawyer now.

This is the person I need.

Alia Khan: Yes. And I think for bankruptcy, people spend a lot of time thinking about it. They don’t automatically call. Criminal lawyers, hey, I got a DUI, my court date’s coming up. I need a lawyer asap. Bankruptcy is, it could take them months to pick up the phone and call me.

Viktoria Altman: So it’s a very long sales cycle. You need many touches. You need to stay top of mind and it’s all about branding. But in terms of cost of branding, what you are doing, first of all, it’s the best kind of ROI. Because you’re not paying for a huge billboard.

You’re not putting hundreds of thousands of dollars here, and you have this great brand. And so you wanna reinforce that brand in multiple ways with directories, for instance, with again, doing SEO making sure that your brand is prominently included in your website, et cetera. So those are all things you do in a lot of things, right? AndI congratulate you on your success. It was fascinating to me to learn about this because I’ve had many clients ask me about TikTok, and my answer is, I’m not an expert on TikTok, but I would love to learn.

Alia Khan: Yeah. Well, thank you so much, Victoria. I appreciate it.

Viktoria Altman: Alia, thank you so much for coming on the show. I really appreciate you. Is there any last words of wisdom you may wanna share with bankruptcy attorneys out there who are looking to where you are?

Alia Khan: If you feel shy or nervous or don’t feel like you’re very comfortable speaking to people or on a camera, just put that aside. Bankruptcy attorneys have lots of knowledge to share. People are desperate for information about their financial troubles. Just start posting. Don’t worry about if you look perfect.

Don’t worry about if you sound perfect, they will start engaging with you because you are giving information that they want.

Viktoria Altman: Just start posting. I love it. Thank you so much. Thanks for joining us today, guys.