The Business of Law: Marketing Tactics Every Lawyer Needs to Know

[00:00:00.00] – Viktoria Altman
Hey, guys. Welcome to the Law Firm Accelerator Summit. Today with me, I have, and I’m going to try to pronounce this properly, Rayeed Wendt Ibtesam. Hopefully, I got that correctly. Rayeed is an attorney with an experience in civil litigation, family law, and Criminal Defense. Rayeed, could you tell us a little bit about yourself where you practice and what you do?

[00:00:23.13] – Rayeed Wendt Ibtesam
Yeah, absolutely. Glad to be on your podcast, Victoria. So Our practice is out of Minneapolis, Minnesota. Then our primary practice areas are family law. You have your divorce cases, child custody cases, child support, and child protection type cases. We also have an employment law practice, which is mostly like wrongful termination cases wage theft cases, or severance package negotiation cases. We also do some civil litigation cases. Those are primarily disputes involving insurance companies and defamation-type cases. So that’s the main areas of practice. We have been in business for a few years now. We’re just lucky to be in this area of practice that we are and excited to continue serving our clients in the best way possible.

[00:01:23.21] – Viktoria Altman
Awesome. Thank you. How did you start your own practice? You were very young. We talked about this last time and you got off to a very quick start. How did you do that?

[00:01:34.25] – Rayeed Wendt Ibtesam
Yes, I had my start in family law, specifically. I was in a position where I could scope out what the prospects were in family law. In other words, what demands clients had as it pertains to divorces, custody, and child support matters. I had a job in the past where it allowed me to get an idea of what the potential in the market was. And so I thought there was a need for attorneys that can fit in, that could essentially serve a demand for family law services that I think was not adequately met. So that gave me an idea, an opportunity as well to dive into family law. So that’s how I started. I also have prior experience working at other law firms in the downtown Minneapolis area. I’m doing civil litigation work. So I brought that along with me just because I have had experience in that. Before that, when I started my own law firm, I brought that on with me as well as an additional practice area. There you go.

[00:02:42.03] – Viktoria Altman
That makes sense. Thank you for sharing that. You started a practice in family law, and what have some of your biggest challenges been in starting this practice? How did you overcome them?

[00:02:56.22] – Rayeed Wendt Ibtesam
Probably some of the biggest challenges I had to face in our family law practice is essentially, number one, finding the right family law clients that we could serve in the best way possible. We want to make sure that the services that we are providing are for the people that can benefit the most from those services. We really had to figure out a system of swooping out clients that were best positioned to receive our services and for whom we could make the most and highest return on their investment and provide them the best services. I think in short, basically finding the right set of clients that need our services and we could provide the best services for them. The way that we filter out and try to find the exact client that is ideal for us is essentially we have to make sure we market to the clients so that we can provide the best set of services. We try to make sure that we have an avatar of basically what the ideal client looks like, and what set of facts they have, and we market to those clients so that we set ourselves up in a situation where it is more likely than otherwise that they will find us and we would be able to do a consultation and then hopefully they can retain our services so that can assist them in the life situation that they’re facing.

[00:04:34.13] – Rayeed Wendt Ibtesam
That’s probably the biggest one that we had to face and what we have been in place. We’ve been doing this to address that particular issue.

[00:04:41.27] – Viktoria Altman
That’s a really great place for an attorney to start. Creating an ideal client profile is something a lot of folks really struggle with. I also think attorneys tend to come at it from the viewpoint of what case they want to get. From a marketing perspective, what’s important for us is to understand the demographics of the person. For instance, you could tell me, just to give you an example, I’m looking for a complex contested divorce case with high-network individuals. While that sounds like a really good client for you, for, in order for me to be able to market to that person, I need to understand, how old are they. Is there a specific gender that you might be going after? Sometimes maybe after men or women. Are they living in a specific zip code? What is the income level? What are their interests? For instance, you might say, the majority of my best clients went to an Ivy League school. We could go after people who like Harvard, MIT, and all that stuff. It’s important to have that ideal client profile and also to be able to communicate it to your marketing person. Let me ask you a question.

[00:05:50.14] – Viktoria Altman
What is your ideal client profile right now?

[00:05:54.11] – Rayeed Wendt Ibtesam
I’ll start with our family law ideal client profile. Ideally, we would want to have someone that they may have a homestead, a marital home that would be part of the asset division, that would be part of the divorce that we’re handling for them. They would also have maybe one or two minor kids that would comprise the child custody and parenting portion of a divorce. They may also have some bank Savings that need to be divided, a checking account that needs to be divided, some motor vehicles, and maybe a retirement account that needs to be divided as well. Those are, I think, some of the criteria on our characteristics that we would be looking at to see if they make up our ideal client profile when deciding if that’s someone that we want to market to. That’s our profile, an avatar profile for family law clients. Then when it comes to employment, we ideally want to see someone who is an employee as opposed to an independent contractor, someone that have been not paid a considerable amount of overtime wages because that adds up the final dollar amount that we can ask for from the employer. We want to have that.

[00:07:18.25] – Rayeed Wendt Ibtesam
If it’s a management position, that’s one criterion that we look for an employee as well. That’s the major characteristics that we seek in an ideal client.

[00:07:29.26] – Viktoria Altman
Now, that makes a lot of sense, and it sounds like you’ve really given this a lot of thought, Rayeeden, and I appreciate it. This is a podcast about marketing, so we’re always going to default to marketing. When you go after this ideal client, what have you found the best path to get to this ideal client?

[00:07:49.24] – Rayeed Wendt Ibtesam
There are a couple of ways that we can get to the ideal client. One is cultivating a good networking system where we cultivate a relationship with other attorneys that we know just being a lawyer in Minneapolis, people that we have in our network,, and our overall network of people that we know. We want to cultivate a relationship with other attorneys who can possibly refer us clients that they think are a good fit for us. We want to let them know what our ideal avatar is so that they can then do some pre-filtering for us, make sure that some of that criterion that I mentioned is set, and then they make the referral over to us. That’s, I think, one ideal way that we want to market clients. Otherwise, we also want to work with the lead generation websites where they would send us certain leads and it would be on us to vet the client to make sure that this is someone that has a situation or a set of facts that we can help them with. Oftentimes, these leads would comprise information such as the number of kids they have, occupation title, income information, and whether they have a house or not.

[00:08:58.10] – Rayeed Wendt Ibtesam
A lot of that information would be provided in the leads. And so that provides our intake team with a set of facts that they can qualify clients or not. So that’s another way that we also work with different bar associations and let them know what we’re seeking for so they can provide us clients that are ideal good fits for us. So, yeah, those are some of the main ways that we’re seeking out the ideal client.

[00:09:21.25] – Viktoria Altman
Yeah, so that’s great. Referrals are going to always be the best source of ideal clients. If you can have a wide referral network, those are going to convert the easiest, of course, because they already trust you, right? Because they were usually referred by somebody you trust. Recently, I had a podcast interview with an attorney who suggested having a newsletter that doesn’t go to ideal clients, but that goes to referral sources. I thought that was such a brilliant idea, and I think I need to start working on this newsletter. You could, of course, also send it to clients, but I think the point is to also send it to referral sources and keep top of mind there. 100%.

[00:10:00.04] – Rayeed Wendt Ibtesam
Yeah, I think it’s a relationship that needs to be nurtured, refer relationships. I think sending out newsletters is one great way to nurture them. Sending out handwritten notes is a very nice way to have a personal touch to people. They’ll put something in the mail every few months so that they can open their mail and see something. Then they remember you and you’re always on top of their mind. Should a prospective ideal client come up, you’re the first one in line that they’ll send it to. Sending email blasts is probably another great way just to let them know what’s going on in your firm so that they are updated. And again, you stay on top of their mind so that they’ll send stuff over to you. Or I guess even just general one-on-one interaction, taking them out for dinner every few months, having a group of people that you rely on as referrals, taking them out for a night out just so you cultivate that human relationship with them. So I think it’s a process that you intentionally have to provide time and attention to nurture.

[00:10:58.24] – Viktoria Altman
Yes, that’s certainly It’s very true because I do think that sometimes we forget to nurture those B2B relationships and really focus on the B2C relationships. I know one agency that is a major agency in my field that will send you multiple gifts if they’re trying to get you to sign with them. Now, I feel like that’s a little extra for them. They’ll send you flowers and chocolate, all kinds of things. I don’t do that. I feel like the clients should know I’m great without that, but I could see the benefit. You do a lot of networking, and it sounds like that’s working well for you. Now, how about digital marketing? What digital marketing strategy do you use? Now, you mentioned you using lead generation. Lead generation, from the folks I talk to, seems to have either very positive or very negative effects. A lot of folks say We get a lead, and 12 other lawyers got it, and it’s not really a good lead anyway. But I bet it a lot depends on how you pursue it. Talk to me about how you’ve managed to make it successful for you.

[00:12:05.02] – Rayeed Wendt Ibtesam
Yeah, you hit the nail on the head, exactly. I think success from lead generation websites depends a lot on how you actually interact with the client. I can only explain and speak on what I do. I do I’m going to say it as a caveat. I can only speak from my personal experience. I think to have success on lead generation websites, there needs to be proper systems and procedures established on how a lead needs to be handled from the minute that you get that lead until the time that you close that lead, by which I mean they become a retained client. They’re the Pager Retainer. They’ve signed the agreement, so you’re the attorney. There needs to be a step-by-step system that every one that is part of the process that you’re from knows and enforces and is held accountable for following the steps. I think it’s important, number one, to have a good pre-consultation procedure set in place. When you get that lead, I think it’s a good idea to make sure that, number one, you should call them as soon as possible. The longer you wait, the less chance that the lead will go cold and you will lose out on an opportunity to serve someone.

[00:13:16.26] – Rayeed Wendt Ibtesam
Ideally, you want to get them within an hour or two of the lead coming in, and you want to call them, and you want to have first contact with them. Time is of the essence. That’s one thing. You want to call them. If you don’t get a hold of them, leave a voicemail, leave a text message, or send an email as well, so that at least they know that you, your law firm, reached out to them so that they can then have a text or an email to get back with you at that time. That’s one important thing. The second thing is once you have made contact with them, it’s important to make sure that you stay in contact with them until the time you actually have a consultation with an attorney with them. So you want to send them information about your law firm, what work you have done in the past, maybe about the reviews that other people in similar situations as them have benefited from your services. So you develop trust between your law firm and them so that they know that they have made the right decision to allocate some time in their day to speak with you and you build up to the consultation.

[00:14:18.21] – Rayeed Wendt Ibtesam
You want to stay in touch with them, at least maybe make one or two other contacts for the time you make first contact, the time you have a consultation. A lot depends on the consultation, I would say. I think it’s very important to really understand the need of why the client needs an attorney. I think a sale or any consultation is, at the end of the day, an emotional process. You have to connect with the client on an emotional level so that you understand what’s there. What is the real reason why they really need an attorney? Maybe it’s because they haven’t seen their son or daughter in six months. Maybe they’re worried they’re going to lose their house. What does that mean? They’re going to be homeless. They don’t have a place for the next tech that they’re building up on. Really think about their pain and what their fears are. Really understand that and address that. Find a solution and get them to buy that solution from you. See that they understand the value of the solution that you’re going to be providing to them. To understand their concerns, really get to know their facts, and take the time to do it.

[00:15:19.14] – Rayeed Wendt Ibtesam
I don’t think it’s a good idea to rush with clients because then they feel like you’re not really hearing them, and it’s not a good way to differentiate yourself. So understand them, provide a solution to them,, and then see what you can do for them. If they’re able to close then and there, great. Close, I would say, get hired at that time. Otherwise, I would say stay in touch after the consultation as well. Make sure someone in your office does the post-consultation follow-ups so that if there’s anything that we can do to serve them, there’s any way that we can help them after the consultation, provide all of that, share your direct dial number, share your email address so that if they have any concerns, they can reach out to and be that person that they can to and trust that you will serve them and get them through this difficult process they’re going through. I think if you have a system laid out like that, it should help in being able to get clients out of lead generation websites.

[00:16:13.01] – Viktoria Altman
That’s a brilliant system. I appreciate your sharing. I could tell that you either studied marketing or you have a natural affinity for marketing because you’re going through all the steps that we learn in marketing. You’re having multiple touchpoints with every potential client. You’re responding to them right away. In fact, I actually started a separate company because I wanted to use it for myself, to give myself a way to have multiple touchpoints via voicemails, emails, and texts with my potential clients. I figured if I could use it, probably have small businesses. As soon as you get the call, respond in some way, whether it’s an email or you could do an automated system like mine where it’s a text message and an email, and maybe even a to try to get an appointment booked with a link. If you have the resources to do the call yourself, that’s great. A lot of folks get really busy, and the lawyers don’t always have the time to call themselves, but having something from the law office is very helpful. Then continue to follow up, and make sure that once you do get in touch with them, you listen and you actually care about their problem.

[00:17:21.28] – Viktoria Altman
We create a solution for a problem, but the only way for us to create a solution is to figure out what the problem is first. Then, of course, staying in touch with them afterward. That takes a big level of organization and prioritizing your marketing setup. That’s something that attorneys struggle with. Let me ask you, how do you prioritize that? How did you make that system, being a lawyer, being a practicing attorney?

[00:17:46.26] – Rayeed Wendt Ibtesam
I’ve spoken with some amazing people who have been great mentors to me. I guess the good fortune and luck to be able to have as mentors and people that I can talk to I’ve built successful law firms, and I talk with them to see what has worked for them and figure out what I can take from their success and implement that in our system. So number one, yes, having good mentors. That’s one thing. I think you should talk with people who have built successful law practices and see what’s working with them and just dig their brain a little bit and see what worked for them and then think about how you can replicate all that success. Number two, I would say, I don’t think there’s any one size fits all for everyone. What worked for someone else doesn’t necessarily work in the same way for you because everyone’s business is different. But yeah, trial and error. Try something. If it doesn’t work, tweak it, and make changes as needed. Do something, track it. That’s very important to see the results, that your duty results that you’re getting from whatever system that you’ve laid out, that you’re getting the result that you’re hoping to do.
If not, then figure out what has gone wrong, where is the hole in the bucket, and take steps to rectify that. So, yeah, those are the main things. I would say as far as getting the system laid out, I know the attorneys have a lot of work on their plate, but I think if your goal is to help the clients that can best be helped by your services, then I think you just have to be intentionally taking some time out of your day to study the process by how clients are choosing attorneys Please, figure out a system, implement it, track it, and tweak it as necessary. You just have to make the time to do it because I think it has an enormous impact on your firm as well as the people that are choosing you as their attorneys. I think you owe it to everyone to just make the time in the day to do that.

[00:19:46.09] – Viktoria Altman
Yeah, I think you hit the nail right on the head there because attorneys, if you’re running your own law firm, you’re not just running a practice that does law, you’re also running a business. You’re running a small business, which means you have limited resources, and without a process, chances are you’re not going to become successful. If you want to run your own law firm, it’s very different than just wanting to be a lawyer. Certainly, you have to make the time to make the process, to set it up, to tweak it, as you said. Having said that, I’m originally from Russia more than 30 years ago, and we have a saying in Russian, A smart person learns from other people’s mistakes. Have you encountered in your own personal experience or in somebody else’s experience, some bad marketing tactics, something that you know for a fact did not work for you or did not work for a mentor or a friend?

[00:20:38.08] – Rayeed Wendt Ibtesam
Something that I have seen that did not work for other people? Is that your question? Yes. I can think of an example where people have had mixed success or faith in taking a certain marketing course. I think the biggest glaring example that I could think of is probably paper clicks, specifically on web browsers. I think I have heard, I guess, a mixed bag of stories from people where for some people it has really not worked out because they were just getting the wrong type of clients that were completely in a different… The clients that they were getting were not even looking for an attorney whatsoever. They might be looking for a completely different business, and somehow they get subjected to that client, that person’s business, and they call them. I think the paper clicks could be a risky technique for some people, at least from my understanding, because the leads that you’re getting, and the people that are actually clicking on your link may not be the best clients for you. Then you’re spending a lot of money on those leads, and you may be paying a receptionist or intake person to vet all these clients, and they’re spending hours on just all these calls that really don’t add anything to the bottom line, and you’re still paying them for their time.

[00:22:07.01] – Rayeed Wendt Ibtesam
It’s a loss of multiple levels. I’ve seen people have bad experiences with pay-per-click. That being said, I’ve heard good stories about that as well. Maybe there’s a way to actually hack the system and make a reaping out of it. But I know it could be challenging for a lot of people.

[00:22:25.02] – Viktoria Altman
A couple of things to address there. The very first thing to remember is Google is a full-profit machine.

[00:22:31.04] – Rayeed Wendt Ibtesam
Sorry, one more time?

[00:22:32.04] – Viktoria Altman
Google is a full-profit… Can you hear me okay?

[00:22:36.02] – Rayeed Wendt Ibtesam
Now I can. Okay.

[00:22:37.21] – Viktoria Altman
Google is a full-profit company.

[00:22:40.05] – Rayeed Wendt Ibtesam
Good? Yes.

[00:22:42.21] – Viktoria Altman
So they actually designed their ad system to be profitable for you as much as for themselves. And the reason why is because if you don’t find it profitable, you will stop using it. That makes sense, right? However, there is a very big caveat there. You have to understand how the system works in order to be able to use it properly. There are not a lot of folks out there who understand how to properly set up Google Ads. Unfortunately, what you have is a lot of people who can initiate Google Ads but don’t actually know how to do proper targeting, proper demographics, proper interest, or even so much as something as simple as proper keywords. What happens is you can go through tens of thousands of dollars in Google Ads very quickly if you don’t know what you’re doing. This, it’s gone. A lot of folks don’t understand how to take advantage of the system that Google has set up, which they want you to make money. Otherwise, you will stop paying them. It’s just pure incompetence. Having said that, when you start Google Ads, it will take the algorithm about three months to understand what you’re trying to do because That’s the way Google designed it.

[00:24:01.21] – Viktoria Altman
It’s a very sophisticated algorithm. It’s actually designed to be very profitable, but it will take about three months to actually start seeing clicks. However, sometimes you can do everything right, and you might still not be able to convert. Your ideal client might simply not be the person who’s clicking on Google Ads. Great example. A business-to-business lawyand and er, a friend of mine, set up corporatons, and asked me if they should go after Google Ads. After doing a little research, what I found is that His target clients, who are basically startups, are asking for referrals. They’re not going to go on Google. They’re not going to say, Best startup lawyer near me. You know what I mean? They click. Some people will, but those are not going to be his ideal clients. I said, With your ideal clientele, there’s really no point to it, and it would just be a waste of money. For family law, it certainly can be profitable, again, with those caveats. If you have somebody who knows what they’re doing, if you give it the time, if you have it sent to the right A lot of people who don’t know what they’re doing, what they’ll do is they’ll send it to your website.

[00:25:04.26] – Viktoria Altman
They’ll send a click to your website, right? No, never. You should never go with an agency that just sends a click to your website. You should have separate landing pages that are only being used for ads. Those landing pages should constantly be A/B split-tested. I make a little change on this page and I leave this one as it was, and then I see which one gets my client more calls, and which one has a better click-through rate. We constantly iterate it better and better because Google gives us so much data when it comes to clicks. Again, they want us to spend the money. So Google gives us so much data that if you take that data and you just hone in on what’s working, and if you’re doing it for one client and you’re doing it for another client, you’re doing it for a third client, and you understand, let’s say, spreading reviews throughout the page increases your conversion rate by 5%, then I could take it and I could do it for my 10th client without having to try it because I already know it works. But it takes time, it takes expertise. It’s everything else in the world.

[00:26:01.05] – Viktoria Altman
It takes time to learn. It’s almost like going to law school for marketing. Not quite, but… So that’s ads, and I hope you find that helpful. It’s certainly a strategy you could look into, but just be very careful with whom you trust with that credit card.

[00:26:14.27] – Rayeed Wendt Ibtesam
Thank you so much, Victoria. I really appreciate it. This is what I love about my conversation with experts in the things that you’re saying right now. I don’t know that becaus,, at the end of the day, I’m not a marketing professional. So I really appreciate it. I think It’s very valuable knowledge that you’re sharing and shows the work caliber award that you can do. So thank you.

[00:26:37.07] – Viktoria Altman
My pleasure. And that’s what I’m here for. And that’s why I also love interviewing you guys because I am constantly getting new ideas from attorneys of things I haven’t even thought to do. And I can take that and I can put it into my work. So it works really well both ways. Let’s get back to your law firm. Now, what are some interesting developments that are happening in your field in Minneapolis at this moment?

[00:27:01.27] – Rayeed Wendt Ibtesam
In particular to Family law or any of the other practices.

[00:27:06.16] – Viktoria Altman
Usually, there is an interesting case or some developments.

[00:27:09.14] – Rayeed Wendt Ibtesam
Yeah. I’ll give one example. Recently, there has been a change in the law regarding spousal support. Previously, there was no cut-and-dry way of figuring out how much spousal support a person would entitled to in a particular case. There’s a whole bunch of factors that you could look at, but it’s still a weighing process where different factors weigh in at different levels. Another day, the fact finder or the judge would have to decide how much follow-up support, if any, a particular client is entitled to. There was a little bit of a lack of specificity to some degree. Recently, there has been a change where now, depending on the number of years that a person has been married or been in a marriage, they are entitled to a certain number of… Spousal support for a certain number of years, essentially. If you have been married for a certain number of years, let’s say 10 or 15 or 20 years in a marriage, now the law is moving in a direction where there would be a presumption that you would be entitled to at least a certain number of years of spouse support post-divorce. That’s new because in the past, again, it was based a lot on a bunch of different factors that the judge would have to decide.

[00:28:40.25] – Rayeed Wendt Ibtesam
Every judge is different and they can decide. You can get five years of spouse 10 years of spousal support, 10 years of support, 10 years of support, or you get zero years of support. It was very not uniform in that way. It depends on the judge and the facts. But now I think there’s some specificity that’s coming in the area where if you have been married for a certain number of years, you have a stronger claim on getting spousal support for a particular number of years. Which I think that’s specificity. That’s wonderful. Lawyers love specificity as much as possible. At the end of the day, it also helps our clients because they have some degree, a higher degree of certainty in their chances or their likelihood of getting spousal support. That’s important. I think a lot of our clients, have invested many years of their lives in a marriage, sacrificing their school education, education, and professional life for the sake of raising their family. I think there are lots of deserving cases of spousal support. I think this new development is in the right direction because it does assist people and makes it more likely for people to get spousal support assistance from the other spouse to help with their daily expenses post-divorce.

[00:29:50.26] – Viktoria Altman
This is interesting, and I bet you didn’t think of this as a marketing opportunity. But anytime you have a change in the law that makes things definitive and you can create a calculator for it, a very good idea would be to create a calculator to program it and add it to your website with a lead magnet. You’re providing a resource to the internet on how to calculate approximately your spousal support. You route those people to your money page for spousal support lawyer money page, high converting page for spousal support lawyer, whether that be by adding a calculator or adding a separate page It depends on the research there. But that’s something that with our friend ChatGPT is relatively easy to do now. As long as you can put it in Excel, we can code it pretty easily. Add it to your website, I’ve had a lot of success with creating calculators, not specific ones, but different ones for DWI lawyers and jail sentences and things like that. That’s an opportunity to utilize in your marketing. Anybody else who is listening out there, if you have an in-law like that, something that becomes calculable that wasn’t, bring it to the market and you will benefit.

[00:31:06.03] – Viktoria Altman
I do have a client with a calculator for child support, and that works very well for him.

[00:31:12.14] – Rayeed Wendt Ibtesam
That’s fascinating. I love it. I think that’s a great way to capitalize on this development in the law, to add that as another added feature to the website. So then hopefully it provides service to the client and uses it as a marketing tactic. You said the ChatGPT, can help in coding this calculator.

[00:31:34.03] – Viktoria Altman
Yeah. I use AI pretty extensively now for myself to code how I analyze my client’s website. What I do is every month I have something called monthly goals. I look at every single site, I see where our rankings are, where our rankings should be, and where the client priorities are. I have a very complex Google spreadsheet that I have been using for years. I was able to program most of it into scripts where it’s now run automatically. In fact, there are multiple people who work on this, of course. One of the people last month went, I thought I was doing something wrong because it was so fast. I was like, No, that’s the beauty of AI. So yes, you can program. Now, unless you’re a programmer, you probably still need the help of an agency to help you put it on the website. But it’s less expensive than it used to be the code by hand, so it’s more accessible to everybody. Yes, you can go to ChatGPT, you could say, Could you help me program this calculator? It will even tell you how to write it in code and everything. Remember, it’s a language processing model, and programming is just a language.

[00:32:42.15] – Rayeed Wendt Ibtesam
Fascinating. Loving. Something to think about for sure.

[00:32:45.23] – Viktoria Altman
There you go. Okay. What’s next for your law firm? Where are you looking to go? Where are you looking to grow?

[00:32:54.07] – Rayeed Wendt Ibtesam
It’s a great question. Well, the overarching main goal is to try to help as many people as we possibly can. That’s always the final end goal for our firm, to provide our services to the highest number of people that we can, who can benefit from our expertise. I think we’re going to invest in both establishing and fine-tuning our processes at our firms which would allow us to get our message across to a wider range of people and serve a larger group of people. That includes processes in both marketing, fine-tuning our processes to stay in touch, making multiple contacts with clients, consultations, fine-tuning our processes in how our legal services are rendered, so exactly how the attorneys are doing day-to-day work on a file, making sure that files are processed and clients are helped in the most efficient, effective manner that is possible. Really just try to make a large impact on our clientele base. In general, just try to come up, brainstorm different ideas, and processes, and fine-tune them, see what works, and improve them. If it doesn’t work, make it work so that we can get our message across to the highest group of people. That’s probably it.

[00:34:15.20] – Viktoria Altman
I love it. That’s all. Just have the maximum number of clients.

[00:34:21.13] – Rayeed Wendt Ibtesam
Yeah, I think we want to make sure that- I was being sarcastic, by the way.

[00:34:24.05] – Viktoria Altman
That seems like a lot.

[00:34:25.02] – Rayeed Wendt Ibtesam
Yeah, you’re right. Absolutely. Just try to get the message across to see what the most number of that we can help and be able to service the maximum number of people.

[00:34:35.11] – Viktoria Altman
Great. Thank you so much for coming to the show. Do you have any last words of wisdom for anybody who might be listening out there and starting their own firm or working on starting their own firm?

[00:34:46.09] – Rayeed Wendt Ibtesam
Yeah. I would say scope out the market, see what the demand is out there, and make sure that you understand what the needs are for the people that are your geographic area. Make sure you have a set of services that you can provide better than anyone else in your geography. Make sure you fully do your homework before you dive in and start up the shop. I think that’s very important because a lot of people start their own law firm without doing the adequate homework needed to be successful in their line of work. I would say do your homework. Then again, I think Try out different things, and see what works for you. Do not be afraid of taking some time or making a monetary investment or trying out something that you haven’t done before, and then see if it works. If it doesn’t, then you can keep it leave it, or changes it as you want. I think the more important thing is just not to be fearful of taking new initiatives. I think a lot of lawyers are very… I think lawyers in general are pretty pragmatic people and they’re very risk-averse. They don’t like to invest in new stuff if they’re not absolutely certain that it’s going to yield a wonderful 20 times ROI.

[00:36:04.25] – Rayeed Wendt Ibtesam
But real life is really not that like. In real life you have to work with uncertainty You’re not going to know everything at the outset. But don’t be fearful of change, fearful of new things. Try it out. If it works, then it works. If it doesn’t, then change it, keep it or leave it. It’s probably my last two cents.

[00:36:20.10] – Viktoria Altman
I love it. Yeah, take a risk, take the jump. Be careful, but still take the risk because you can’t lose, but you can’t win if you don’t take the risk. Yeah. All right. Thank you so much for coming to the show. I really appreciate it. Guys, stick around. Thank.