In this episode of Law Firm Accelerator, we talk with Jennifer J. Riley, a family law attorney from Pennsylvania, who shares her insights on growing a law firm, building a strong team, and effective marketing strategies. Jennifer emphasizes the importance of defining an ideal client and aligning marketing efforts to attract them. She discusses her experiences with different marketing tactics, from leveraging SEO and retargeting to engaging in community involvement. Jennifer also shares the challenges she faced during rapid growth and the lessons learned in maintaining a focused and client-centric approach. She highlights her unique hiring process, prioritizing values like empathy and kindness, to ensure that her team aligns with the firm's mission and provides the highest level of service to clients.
Trying too many marketing tactics at once can dilute efforts, it's better to stay focused on what works.
- Jennifer J. Riley
Owner / Managing Attorney Law Offices of Jennifer J. Riley
Takeaways
Viktoria Altman (00:01)
Hey guys, welcome to the Law Firm Accelerator. Today, we have Jennifer Riley from Pennsylvania and Jennifer does family law. I’m very excited to have a chat with you today. Thank you for joining us. Jennifer, could you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about your practice?
Jennifer (00:13)
My pleasure. Thank you for having me on. My name is Jennifer Riley. I have a family law firm outside Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. We practice exclusively family law, all areas of family law divorce, and prenuptial agreements into estate planning. Over the past 12 years that I’ve worked with this firm, I did have a position in a law firm prior, but in the 12 years I’ve been with my practice, we’ve grown and we now have four attorneys about to hire our fifth. And all of us focus on the area of family law. So it’s exciting to be on here and I thank you for the opportunity because as we grow the firm, we learn more and more about marketing every day.
Viktoria Altman (01:04)
That’s amazing, Jennifer. So you’ve been able to grow pretty big with, said you’ve done your marketing so far, and that’s quite an achievement. You must have done a lot of research because you might be one of the very few people I’ve ever spoken to who’s done their marketing to grow to that size.
Jennifer (01:11)
we have. How about that? Well, I appreciate that. Thanks for telling me that.
We did a lot of research and we also market from our hearts. And that may sound kind of esoteric, but that’s truly how we grew the firm. Marketing for what matters, what we know our clients need what our clients report to us they need, and things that matter to us as lawyers as well. So that’s been, I think, the key to our success in terms of marketing.
Viktoria Altman (01:53)
So you say it sounds esoteric, but it’s extremely accurate. Understanding who your client is, genuinely caring for that client, and then finding your client where they happen to hang out online is everything. So this takes us to my first question, who is your ideal client?
Jennifer (02:10)
That’s right.
You know, it’s really hard in family law because we have clients that are struggling emotionally and we have clients that are at the place in the process where they’re its freedom. So we have a really broad range in terms of the emotional placement where our clients are. So it’s hard to say an ideal client because there are times that it’s ideal for us to be able to help someone find the freedom point and pull from the kind of dark places that a lot of our clients are at when they come to our firm. But it’s also so invigorating to work with the clients who are already at the place where their freedom is what they’re searching for. So I think identifying an ideal client in family law is a bit tough because we meet them where they’re at in their journey through the divorce process.
And I think that’s also what makes divorce law a bit harder, a bit more difficult on divorce lawyers is that we do meet our clients where they’re at and we need to be equipped to handle the different stages of the divorce process and the grief process. So I think in terms of an ideal client, if I had to kind of identify one, it would be someone willing to get through that journey. Someone willing to say this is very difficult, but we’re going to get through it together and being incentivized even if in a dark place, or invigorated to get to that freedom point.
Viktoria Altman (03:47)
Right, so that makes a lot of sense from your perspective as an attorney. From my perspective as a marketer, when we talk about an ideal client, we generally have a profile of, say, sometimes gender, sometimes not. Sometimes you want to go after one gender, sometimes not. You have a profile of their age. For instance, somebody who gets divorced in the mid-40s is going to be very different from somebody who goes through a great divorce, somebody in the mid-60s, for instance.
Jennifer (04:15)
Absolutely.
Viktoria Altman (04:17)
We might have specific zip codes we’re targeting. We might have even sometimes some of my clients share with me a specific employee, employer, you know when there’s one big employer in an area and those are the people they want. And so what I often do is I encourage my clients before they start working with me to create that ideal client profile because then we could do certain things when we create their marketing. For instance, the website, if we’re targeting females, clients we might have more you know traditionally feminine colors or we might have very neutral colors if we’re targeting both genders. If we’re targeting older folks we’ll have a lot more content on great divorce. If we’re targeting specific zip codes then we can push ads to people in those zip codes right but all of that has to be kind of formulated before I come on board because this way we don’t waste time or money going after clients you don’t want or maybe clients not that you don’t want but not your sort of ideal target market.
Jennifer (05:23)
So that’s so interesting because what we grew that I love what you said about knowing who that client is and targeting there because when we grew, one of the reasons we grew is that there are so many different types of clients in family law and then so many different types of practitioners that we were able to market to specific groups for specific attorneys at our office as well.
And so it did help our growth because we had lawyers at different places in their lives who could meet their clients in different ways. And so you’re right. Knowing who that is and being able to service that client was the second part. That led to our growth so that we had the people on board to broaden that market a bit, but still have our ideal clients’ results.
Viktoria Altman (06:14)
Makes perfect sense. So for you, you would have multiple ideal client profiles. And then once we have those profiles, for instance, if we’d say we were working together and you reach out to me and you say, Viktoria, the CMS lawyer, you know like more additional work, then I know what kind of blog posts, for instance, to write to attract his ideal client. And I know exactly how to retarget them on Facebook because I’m retargeting people who live in a specific zip code, right? Not everybody. So having that sort of, it’s almost like a map towards, you know, the way you want it laid out. But yes, it can be a little bit challenging when you have multiple ideal clients, and then you have to make sure that the design is very neutral that you’re not emphasizing any specific gender, you’re not even sometimes you’re not emphasizing any specific location like the general practice pages, which you might be doing in specific blog posts that are targeting, you know, specific practice areas. So yeah, but, you know, it would be helpful and it makes a lot of sense what you shared as well. Thank you.
Jennifer (07:11)
Well, I appreciate the insights too, and you’re right, because it does constrain what we do in some of our marketing. And I hadn’t thought of it like that, because we feel like have a broader audience. But you’re right, we’re constraining a lot of what we do.
Viktoria Altman (07:34)
Yeah, well, you know, your job is to be a great lawyer and my job is to be a great marketer. So that’s why we all have our jobs. Okay. So that’s a great little discussion. I love that. Okay. So talk to me a little bit about what specific types of marketing you’ve done that have been very successful for you. Are you doing social media? Are you doing blog posting? Are you doing community events? What are you doing?
Jennifer (07:38)
So the answer is yes and no to all of the above, which is interesting and not a great place to be in. And so I love that I have an opportunity to talk about this with someone who can direct us better too, because we’ve done a little bit of everything. And for a while, social media was really helpful to us. And then it crashed a bit for us in terms of our results. We were using Facebook but they had changed the way they targeted the audience. And so for our type of field, you do want a targeted audience. know, the happily married newlywed does not want to see ads for a divorce firm. So we pulled back on social media. We did blog posts and we got a lot of feedback from that. But then that took a lot of work for our lawyers. So that kind of fizzled. I would say one of the marketing mistakes we made over the last few years we dabbled in all kinds of different areas and we didn’t focus on anything, well, except for one thing. We didn’t really focus on anything as the key path, and that was an issue for us, and we saw the result from that as well.
The one consistent area from the time I opened the firm till now are community events and being in the community. And during COVID that shifted, of course. And so that was another big marketing issue we had because we focused so heavily on being in the community that when you couldn’t be in the community, it also was a new era in our law firm. Hence why we dabbled in so many different areas. We were used to being out there volunteering, and working with groups that matter to us. I encourage my lawyers in their free time to do things that they love because nothing’s better marketing than connecting with people through their hearts through the things that matter to them. So the answer is our base has always been the community. When that shifted during COVID we dabbled across the board and the dabbling was not, I do not advise it to anyone listening to this today, dabbling does not lead us and did not lead our firm anyway to the kind of bright path that we wanted in terms of our ideal client and our happiness level.
Viktoria Altman (10:29)
Okay, perfect sense and you’re 100 % right. So one of the reasons why I suggest setting up an ideal understanding of your ideal clients in your case is you can go to them and you can say, hey, where do you hang out? Or you can ask the people who come to your firm, how did you find us? And then you can just do more of that, right?
For family law, social media can be very iffy. And you pointed it out exactly. It’s because you’re going to end up targeting a whole bunch of people who don’t want any divorce lawyer stuff on their timeline. So I have like eight or nine divorce lawyers. working with a couple of them in New York City, big areas you know, any agency you work with should be able to guide you to what has worked historically for family law attorneys in the past. Number one has and will continue to be search engine optimization. And here’s why. Your best client is going to be kind of sophisticated. They’re going to do a little bit of research. They’re going to read, then they’re going to visit your social media, and then they’re going to watch a video before they even reach out to you.
if you are doing let’s say something like ads that’s a more impulse buy right like somebody who is let’s say a criminal lawyer ads work well for them because the person’s like my god I need a lawyer right and then they get an ad and you know that might work very very well but for divorce generally people who are the best clients are going to take some time to figure their stuff out before they do anything and so you want like a great website filled with helpful information because they’re going to visit over and over and then and they may have a, know, they’re just gonna do research and those are gonna be your best clients because those are gonna be clients who have like some success in life because they have high impulse control, right? So they’re coming into those divorces with assets essentially. Social media can be helpful in something we call retargeting. I’m not sure if you’re familiar with the concept. And what that means is somebody visited your blog, they read your blog and then they maybe see you on Facebook, but not random they’ve never seen you before but they’ve already been on the website and now they see you on Facebook. You gotta test it. You gotta test it and you gotta test it with not too much money because in some markets it works and in some markets, it doesn’t.
Jennifer (12:58)
Okay.
Viktoria Altman (13:00)
We call it split A -B testing, right? So, you know, track your ROI there. But yes, dabbling doesn’t generally work. The other thing you could try to do is see which of your competitors are getting your ideal client and then see what they’re doing. I did look at some competitors in your area. I think some of them are already doing search engine optimization. I didn’t see a whole lot of it, I didn’t see the Facebook pixel on their website, so I don’t think they’re doing retargeting. But I’m sure it’s up to doing ads as well.
So ads are worth trying too. It also depends on the market a little bit, but I do think the best for a longer sales cycle, which you have the best one is going to be, you know, yeah. And then the other nice thing for somebody like that is to do some YouTube videos with explanations of who you are, and what you do, and you come across as very warm. And so having a video that has that can be very helpful because these people are doing their research. They’re going to watch the video, you know, especially the best ones. So
Jennifer (13:39)
Interesting.
Viktoria Altman (14:00)
So there you go. Yeah, my pleasure. I love this stuff. So you were featured in Forbes. That’s pretty cool. Can you talk a little bit about that? Forbes is Forbes.
Jennifer (14:00)
Thank you. But it was very exciting. It was very exciting.
It was in the middle of our real growth spurt. We had been consistently growing, in 21, 22, beginning of 23, was a, it was unprecedented for us, the growth rate. And so yes, I ended up in Forbes and it was very exciting, very validating for all the hard work. I think as a business owner, when you know, as you’re building a practice, you’re building a business, it’s just nonstop work and anyone I’m sure you know very well, what it takes to do that? And so it was very, it was wonderful to be there. Thank you.
Viktoria Altman (14:51)
That’s so cool. So you said you were growing at an unprecedented rate. Can you talk to me a little bit about it? I’d love to know what you attribute the growth to. How did the growth work out? What are the lessons? Talk to me about it.
Jennifer (15:04)
So it’s so interesting because as you talk about the ideal client, I think what I’m about to tell you in terms of growth links a bit to the fact that we had been dabbling a little. What did happen over the growth is we not only kind of attattractingfferent types of clients, but we were in the process of also restructuring what the practice of family law looked like and what our firm was like through the pandemic.
Family lawyers, I think almost everywhere were extremely busy in the initial aftermath and even now from the pandemic. And what I attributed our growth to is that we were already set up with the technology to work remotely. We had everything in place that most other firms, including much larger firms, were struggling to accommodate. We were a smaller team, but we never missed the beat. There wasn’t a day we could not be available to our clients. Our phones, our technology, our computers, everything was ready to take us as if nothing had happened. So that had a lot to do with our growth. We were there for our clients during their most difficult times. We were providing free consultations to people who were stuck in their cars trying to get away from their spouses during the pandemic. We never missed a beat. We were there for everyone through that time.
Viktoria Altman (16:25)
That’s terrible.
Jennifer (16:32)
And I do think that that is the biggest reason we grew so quickly because we did not have even a week where we were not available for anyone and clients came to us because they couldn’t reach their lawyers, they couldn’t get prompt responses. We also tried hard to communicate to the community through podcasts radio shows or our publications, letting everyone know about the changes in the court system. We tried to stay as active as we could in the community when we wouldn’t be there physically. But what happened is because we were there, because we were able to continue to service everyone who called us, it also meant now I’m thinking as I have this talk with you, we were no longer servicing our ideal clients. We were servicing anyone who needed us and we weren’t as selective because we wanted to help everyone and it overwhelmed us. So we had so much business that we had to hire quickly and then when we hired quickly, we weren’t hiring the ideal associate either. So they weren’t following our mission and our branding. That period lasted about a year and a half when I was trying to train the associates to have an apassionate approach to family law, to be tough litigators when the circumstances warrant that, while also running a full family law practice and also being a practicing attorney. So the growth happened to us instead of our orchestrating it.
And there is a tipping point in growth. And I’m learning that now as a lesson after, there is a point where you can grow too quickly. And frankly, that’s how we started looking for marketing agencies and marketing assistants because we tipped. We tipped a little too fast and needed to pull back and restructure again. The growth was exhilarating and we learned so much from it. But now we’re pulling back and getting much more, I’ll say detail-oriented on how the firm is approaching the next steps. So when you mentioned ideal clients, my mind is thinking this explains a lot of what happened.
Viktoria Altman (18:46)
Yeah, I love how incredibly, well, you seem like such a great business person. seem very, very self-aware and able to fix mistakes and kind of catch and think, I love that approach. I strive to be the same way, you know, and yeah, growth, if growth happens to you, there’s certainly a lot to be said for compassion and wanting to help everybody.
Jennifer (18:58)
Thank you.
Viktoria Altman (19:13)
And now that you know that this kind of thing could happen, maybe create the right kind of networking opportunities where you can refer those cases that are not perfect for you. I’m sure you’ve already been working on that and having a system for referrals set up so that you can focus on serving the clients who write for your firm. And then yes, hiring is always key. So before I expand, before I go out, like you, have a very, very specific client that I work with there tends to be a small lawyer, know, kind of one, two, five people and, you know, a certain type of approach to law.
I like to work with very good lawyers because they make my life so much easier. But like you, I will also go in and I will hire before I even go on a sales call because I know that once I start those sales goals, I better be ready like this to ramp it up and deliver all the product, you know, all the service that I promised. So I always prefer to hire first and hiring can take a while because you have to hire somebody who is aligned with you intellectually, and emotionally.
Jennifer (20:15)
That’s right.
Viktoria Altman (20:24)
Professionally in every single way with your company and your company’s goals and you know so commend you for learning that lesson and kind of doing that very quickly. You know there are worse things to look there are always worse ways to learn a lesson than by growing very quickly.
Jennifer (20:29)
That’s right. Thank you. We learned it the hard way, but thank you. It’s a good problem to have and it was a good lesson to learn, you’re right.
Viktoria Altman (20:48)
Exactly. I was going to ask you about the fact that you have a very compassionate approach to how you develop this brand identity. But I feel like that would be a silly question now after talking to you because I could see that you are an extremely compassionate person. And so I think all you did was translate your personality to your brand. But I am curious to find out when you hire, how do you make sure that the lawyers you are hiring have that same kind of feel as you do? And what is your step-by-step process to do that?
Jennifer (21:23)
So I love this question so much because my answer, everyone will say, is unorthodox when I talk to other law firm owners. We hire based on kindness. And I will tell you that during our growth, I hired someone else to handle hiring because I could not keep up with the HR aspect. And so it was what we thought was the right approach instead of my doing it myself that that was such a bad idea because no matter how wonderful your HR person is, they’re making one of the biggest decisions you make in a law firm. And I did not realize that until after because when you hire on a resume or whether someone was on law review, it looks wonderful. The candidate could potentially be amazing and many of ours were, but they did not have the same, I’ll say mission-driven approach to their practice. And so we’re reverting to only hiring our associates at this point. We do have someone who handles HR, but I handle hiring. And what I look for is kindness. I look for what their experiences in life have been that will allow them to connect to other people. Because in family law, we connect to people. We have to understand what they’re going through. It’s very difficult. My associates face this when they’re 25 years old and talking to a 60-year-old client you cannot comprehend the weight of a 40-year marriage ending. How do we ensure that that brand-new associate can connect to that person? And so what we do is in the interview process, we’re looking at their personal life experiences that led them to family law. Is it a passion for family law or are they just looking for an associate position? We are not looking for a candidate who just needs a job. We’re looking for someone that says to us, my parents
divorced, my brother divorced, I saw what it did to families, I want to help children. When we hear that, we know someone is mission-driven in their work.
My philosophy is anyone who graduates law school can handle the stress and is brilliant. You just can’t go through a rigorous program like that and not be a qualified candidate. But to be kind, to be compassionate, to be genuinely driven to help families, to help individuals, that’s not something you learn in law school. You can’t learn it in law school. It has to come from within. That’s what we look for. Everything else is trainable. Everything else is trainable, but that isn’t.
Viktoria Altman (24:02)
I think that’s such a unique way to hire and it also makes a lot of sense. I hire similarly. would say though, and you’ve mentioned before we started that you only look into really hiring one more associate and you’re done with your growth. I’d love to discuss that. But I would say when it comes to HR if you can hire somebody with enough experience and the same kind of outlook on hiring, that could be helpful as well. Sometimes it’s you know, because the HR person is the first person that they see in the company. The HR person must be sort of very, very aligned with you on your values as well. But I don’t know if you need to hire more because we just spoke about this and I find it fascinating. You might be the first lawyer who has ever told me, I don’t want to grow anymore. No, you’re not the first. I’ve heard this a couple of times. But tell me, are you deciding that you would like to keep your firm a little bit larger than where you are?
What is the impetus for this decision?
Jennifer (25:08)
So this has been kind of a life searching, looking for myself, looking within for me, what happened when we grew, and as a law firm owner.
That sweet spot is where we’re still so connected as a team that we feel that I don’t want to say like the family, the work-family idea, but we feel that tight-knit connection to each other. And when we get too big, we lose that. We fracture. And I saw that happen and I will admit that I did not know how to kind of fix those fractures as we grew. And when you start to fracture like that when you have divisions,
You do have not different personalities, but different kinds of goals in your practice. The clients feel that. They feel the discontent or they feel a kind of separate sensation from the team overall. It was really important to me to maintain that close feel, which we did lose over the growth. Now we’re back to a size just about where I want to remain, one more lawyer, but our clients now report everyone I to is so wonderful. From the moment of the phone call till the end of my case, everyone was on the same page. I felt so guided. That feedback is letting us know that the size we’re at is the right size. Whereas when we started to grow, we started to hear who’s handling this, you or your associate, who’s my paralegal, who am I supposed to call for billing? We lost that continuity for the client’s experience and that came from losing that close-knit feel that our group had and it’s changed.
And that’s why I love the growth, it’s exciting, but it’s not the right client experience and it’s not the compassionate approach that I opened the firm promising and that I’m realizing we lost when we grew too big.
Viktoria Altman (27:03)
That makes a lot of sense. know, in the end, as a business person, you have to be able to sleep well and be happy. And if you found something that makes you happy and delivers a solid product to your clients, delivers, you know, fair wages to your employees, then what more can you ask for than all those things, you know, and a good life, you know? So congratulations on finding that. think a lot of folks struggle with it, but I have spoken to a few folks who like being the size where they are and they’re very very happy and they’re able to pick their clients well. So you have a book on high-tech viewers for low-budget cases. That’s an interesting title. Are you using AI? Tell me what the book is about.
Jennifer (27:53)
So it was for the article for the American Bar Association. it was a few years ago before AI, at least before our use of AI anyway. It was geared to help clients get some of the answers they need in the investigation process, especially in litigation, without spending a lot of money. Because family law is so expensive. Our procedures are such that the lawyer’s involvement in the process just exponentially increases the cost. So self-help is important for clients and also for lawyers who maybe aren’t of a size that they can hire experts and take the steps that they may need to do to find missing money or hidden money. So that was initially how I started on the technology path. Now I’m actually about to give a presentation for the Pennsylvania Bar Association on the use of AI, both in terms of law firm management and personal management executive management, as well as how it can help us in the practice of law. It’s so new, and I think so many of us are necessarily putting a hand up, like, wait, what is this going to do to our practice? What does this do to the legitimacy of our work? And that concern is there. But there are so many tools now that can shortcut the administrative side of what we do as lawyers to return us to more of an intellectual look at the analysis and how we can apply the law, we can apply all of these developments to help our clients on a cost-effective basis. I think over the next few years we’re going to see, of course, su, ch, a transition in this practice, but it’s also one of the things that worries us the most about marketing because it’s a world so new to us that we know already we are not keeping up with it. So I would love to know what are you suggesting for lawyers now as we kind of encounter this brand new world that we’re in.
Viktoria Altman (29:58)
Great question. And I would love to get back more to what you were talking about because I love that interest that is interesting. And I apologize. I said book. I meant to say article. So when it comes to marketing, we’re able to remove some automated tasks from my employees. But you have to be very careful because AI likes to make things up.
And I’ll tell you a story about when Chan GPT first came out. had and sometimes, usually, we write articles for our attorneys, but sometimes they write articles for us. And I had an attorney who’s never written anything for us, send me like five articles in a row, and they had all these cases in there. And I sent it to my writers and I was like, just make sure that this is good. And she responds with like, no, boss, all those cases are made up.
Viktoria Altman (30:50)
So I emailed the lawyer, I’m like, hey, so did you check any of those cases? And he gets back to me like 30 seconds, like, don’t publish it.
And so I think it’s the perfect example of the wrong use of AI, right? AI is great for repetitive tasks. We do use it when we do, let’s say, an outline. But when we are creating an article, for instance, every single fact, line by line, has to be confirmed. And I ask for a citation for every single fact in the article.
Jennifer (31:33)
That’s fantastic.
Viktoria Altman (31:34)
Because what happens is, I’ll give you another little scenario. One of my girls found a mention of second-degree homicide in New Jersey on a very large website. That law does not exist in New Jersey.
Jennifer (31:54)
Wow.
Viktoria Altman (31:57)
And yeah, and that’s not the first time that happened. We found several times on a very large website a mention of a specific law that does not exist in that state. I don’t know if it was second-degree homicide or second-degree manslaughter. It was one of those. But anyway, didn’t exist and the lawyer thought it was very, very funny when we sent it to him. Those weren’t exactly the words he used.
Jennifer (32:08)
Unbelievable.
Viktoria Altman (32:23)
So when we are using it for marketing, we are using things like to generate, let’s say, AI videos based on our text that the lawyer has read through and approved, right? So AI can do that very quickly. would have taken us, you know, 45 minutes before to do it. Now we can do it in five. You know, we can generate an outline that can incorporate all of these different aspects of the law into the blog post or the page and then check everything. And then we still send it to the attorney because the attorney has to check things as well. After all, we’re not lawyers.
Jennifer (32:52)
Exactly.
Viktoria Altman (32:54)
They generally don’t find legal mistakes but once in a while it can happen because we have the sources online are wrong so you know we’re using those because we’re using you know secondary and primary sources. So that’s how we use it. I would say there are a lot of folks out there who I can see now who are publishing things without checking them and I don’t know how the bar is going to deal with it but I would say be very careful with that stuff.
Jennifer (33:03)
Of course.
Viktoria Altman (33:24)
because we’re coming across it more and more and I think there are some marketing agencies out there who may not be as devoted to the facts who may not be doing as much checking, and may not be as particular. And so as an attorney, right, you are of course, very responsible for their work. So you have to be very, very, very careful with that stuff. So that’s from my perspective, but I would love to hear how are you using AI. What are you doing?
Jennifer (33:57)
So we will not use it in the practice of law. And I probably frustrate my team a bit with that. But I’m staying away from that in the practice because we’re not ready for that. We’ve tested out a few of the programs where it will help with drafting, except it doesn’t help with drafting. And we see that maybe for a layperson drafting a legal document, feels like it’s an accomplished program, but it’s not. And so we won’t even incorporate that into our basic documents here at the firm. But we are using it to streamline some of our processes. And that’s been critical because when we grew, we realized our processes needed to be streamlined and redeveloped. And that takes a lot of time. And so to have that type of administrative time, it’s very difficult. We can now plug the information into AI to help us synthesize that into a format for processing that allows our team to so for instance, you mentioned outlines. It’s a great example. We can provide our paralegals. Here’s a summary of what steps you need to take when you file a document. It creates those outlines. Of course, we humans check it first, especially since we have my lead paralegal who’s grown with me over the last 10 years. She is helping to take all of these processes and turn them into easy checklists for our team. So that’s how we’re using AI down the administrative tasks, the day-to-day as you said, and then using them to help make people more efficient so they can have time to practice law again. There’s so much administrative work in the practice of law that stripping that from them helps us return to that intellectual part and that client connection as well. And to that end, it’s been quite helpful. Sometimes laughably so, sometimes it you know we’re laughing to it what it summarizes, but it gives us a head start and helps us make more progress.
Viktoria Altman (35:58)
Yeah, yeah, it’s exactly right. It’s the lower-level tasks it’s great at. And when it comes to genuine human intellectualism and creativity, it’s not ever close. And you know what, we enjoy doing those tasks anyway, right? We like doing the complicated stuff. It’s the simple stuff that gets boring. So, you know, it’s a tool. It’s a tool and it’s not gonna replace. I don’t think it’s gonna replace us for a while. Maybe eventually, but. Yeah.
Jennifer (36:06)
That’s right. If it does, it’ll be a different world. It really will be because to get through the divorce process and the same with marketing, we have to trust you completely to work with someone in marketing. Clients have to trust us completely to guide them through divorce. When you strip that personal feel away from things, that formulaic way of handling things, it can’t be comforting. It can’t provide the assurances we need that will help you through a divorce or that you’ll help us grow and stabilize.
Viktoria Altman (36:32)
Yeah. Well, that’s one of the reasons why sometimes sometimes, and I’m glad you haven’t had that. We’ve had clients on the show who’ve had not the best experience with the marketing agency. And so one of the red flags that I always say is to make sure you understand who is going to be doing your strategy, who is going to be doing the technical work of thinking about the organization, the structure of the marketing campaigns. And if that’s left to AI.
Viktoria Altman (37:20)
Run. Just get out of there. You need a human to do that higher-level thinking. You do. And I have a ton of tools that I use, but let me tell you something. In the end, every month I sit down and I look at those rankings and I look at the competition, look what’s happening and it’s priceless. There is nothing that can compare to the fact that I’m looking at it I’m reading it and I’m seeing the data. Okay, so this has been an awesome discussion. I would love to hear what is piece of advice would you give to somebody who maybe has a brand new family law firm or maybe thinking of opening one.
Jennifer (37:58)
So I think knowing you will need help along the way and not hiring, is the most important piece of advice I can offer because when you open up a practice, a lot of people are kind of driven by fear. What if I don’t get clients? What if I don’t make money? I think it’s really important not to work from a position of scarcity because you will need help and recognize that you need help and then know that you have to generate the business to that happens because otherwise the happiness factor is missing and that’s critical. That happiness factor is going to guide you to guide your clients and without that, the world feels that. So now you need help, know you’re going to have to generate the business to hire people because you just will and then generate that business. Don’t think of it from a position of I will never have a client, how will I generate? Just know you need to go out there and make the clients happen.
Knowing that gives you that impetus to jump out and meet people and connect with people and be yourself knowing that this is how you’re going to build your practice build your client base and build balance in the development of your firm. That’s the advice I give to anyone thinking of going out on their own.
Viktoria Altman (39:18)
That is great advice, Jennifer. Thank you so much for coming to the show. I appreciate it. This has been a fascinating discussion. Do you have any last words of wisdom for our listeners?
Jennifer (39:21)
Been a pleasure. I want to thank you for having me on because I also want to say marketing is such a key reason that a law firm can make it through difficult times like a pandemic, an economic change, or staffing changes. Marketing cannot be underappreciated. And I know a lot of people are concerned about budgeting with marketing. We, I just want to say, find somebody, find someone that can help you because marketing is what keeps you going and times you get a little tougher. So thanks so much for having me on and for this great discussion. I loved it. Thank you.
Viktoria Altman (40:03)
My pleasure. Thank you so much, Jennifer, stick around so we can finish this upload.
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