The power of stick-to-itiveness in marketing! Guests: Mark Robins and Stuart Rudner

Lots of lawyers and other professionals give marketing a try. Once, twice, three times. But they get distracted, discouraged or busy and never really hit their stride. When marketing comes to a halt, you're not just walking away from inquiries, exposure and media. There's also the hidden cost of lost opportunities to build confidence, engage with community and maybe even have a little fun along the way. 

If any of this feels familiar, you'll enjoy this podcast. Stuart and Mark share stories about overcoming obstacles on the way to marketing success, from their own experience. Stick-to-itiveness seems to be one of the real winners here, even in the face of serious doubt or significant change.

To learn more about Mark, please go to LawyerLocate.ca.
 
To learn more about Stuart please go to rudnerlaw.ca.

You're listening to Get in the Driver’s Seat! We’re telling stories about leadership moments in small to mid-sized professional practices. I’m your host, Sandra Bekhor, Practice Management Coach for lawyers, architects, consultants and other professionals at Bekhor Management.

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the podcast. This is Get in the driver's seat. We're telling stories about leadership moments in professional practice. I'm your host, Sandra Bekhor, Practice Management Coach at Bekhor Management. So for this episode, I have two guests. I'm excited to introduce Stuart Rudner and Mark Robins. Stuart is the founder of Rudner Law. He is the author of ‘You're Fired’, just cause for dismissal in Canada, and has contributed to several other texts. He comments frequently in the media on employment law matters, moderates several blogs and hosts a monthly online show ‘Fire Away’. Stuart has been named one of Canada's top Legal Social Media Influencers, among other awards.

Mark leads LegalTube.ca and Digital eMspace.ca. His focus on propelling online marketing has facilitated the growth of diverse businesses, including law firms. With a mission rooted in innovation, Mark strives to enhance the accessibility and delivery of legal resources, leveraging platforms like legaltube.ca, to demystify legal knowledge for Canadians. Welcome. So the two of you have known each other for many years. So I'd love to have you each tell a fun fact about the other. Mark, do you want to kick it off? 

Sure. I'll jump in. Yes, I've known Stuart… the last time we tried to establish it was over 20 years now. You mentioned that Stuart has a monthly show called ‘Fire Away’, which is produced by my company. And the fun fact about Stuart was seven years ago when we started it at his old location in Markham, in his boardroom. He was very, very nervous to begin with, but once the camera went on, he was a natural, and he continues to just amaze me with his skills as a host for podcasting. So that's my fun fact about Stuart. He just came to being a podcaster and a host quite naturally.

Wow. Thanks, Mark. That means a lot. I appreciate you saying that. What I was thinking is that, you know, we have known each other a very long time, and we've been working together, I guess it's a bit over seven years, because we started when I started Rudner Law. But you are someone that I think of as a friend, and I have a lot of respect for you, and I always appreciate your advice. And what I was going to say, picking up on our pre show discussion about hockey, is that you are very knowledgeable and very reasonable in all aspects of life other than NHL hockey, where you wear some rose colored glasses and seem to have some unrealistic views of things, but, and I suspect you will say the exact same thing about me. 

Touche.

Hilarious! And I got pulled into that hockey discussion. My friends would be like, what? How did that happen? Okay, so today we're talking about setting up good marketing habits in a law practice to get past those stops and starts that typically derail marketing success, or to overcome total avoidance, which can also be problematic. So when I started my business 19 years ago, I would meet with lawyers, and, you know, talk about websites and branding, and they'd be like, what a website? No, it's too much. We don't need that. But I think we're past that now. And you know, lawyers, they don't just wait for the business to come in these days, they know they need to do some marketing, at the very least, to nurture referrals. But they're not taught to do this in law school still, and so there's a learning curve, and that requires resilience, stick-to-itiveness and open mindedness to you know, even just get started. So let's talk about some of the ways that lawyers can get out of their own way when it comes to marketing success. And I just wanted to ask Stuart if you could kick this off with your own personal experience of this. You know when, when you've run into these issues yourself or with your team?

Yeah, it's a great question, and you're right. We're certainly not taught any of this in law school, I was very lucky. I started off at a big firm, and there are a couple of senior lawyers in the firm who explained to me the way life works, and that unless you want to be an associate beholden to a partner for the rest of your career, you've got to get out there and build a profile and start having clients and referral sources. So they got me started. And, you know, we can talk a bit about this more if we have time. You know, back then, it was writing articles that were actually printed and going and speaking, you know, in person at conferences, which I'm actually excited to say. I'm doing an in person one this week, but for the most part, that's, you know, not the norm anymore. But I've seen so many lawyers who, you know, they're well, the biggest challenge I've seen, and Mark has certainly seen a lot more than I have. In this regard, it's just people scared to start. So many lawyers think that everything they do has to be perfect. So when I started getting into social media, and I got into at the time, Twitter is probably the biggest one. And then LinkedIn. Lawyers were terrified. What if I tweet the wrong thing? What if I don't say it right? What if? And so, and, you know, there's a lot of podcasts I listen to, and one of the repeated themes these days is that perfect is the enemy of done. And it's so true. So I know so many lawyers who would talk and talk and talk about getting into social media or any kind of other kind of marketing, frankly, but they never did, because they would draft the same tweet 12 times and never hit send. So that's probably the biggest thing I've seen people do. And then the second biggest, which you mentioned already, is stick to itiveness. People, you know they'll tweet a few times. They'll get on LinkedIn. Now, I didn't really see any results from that, so they stop, or they just get really busy, and they don't get back to it for three months. And I think we all know that, in order to be successful, especially in social media, you got to be consistent. So there's a lot more, but I don't want to talk forever. So those are the two biggest things I've seen, or two biggest mistakes I've seen people make. 

Well, can I ask just a follow up question on that? So for yourself, we know that these things don't just hit success right away. So how did you face any kind of you know, failures, or not even failures, just maybe, you know, things not going as fast as you wanted it to.

Yeah, I mean, I think that's again, I'll credit some of the lawyers who gave me advice, you know, they cautioned me that this is not an overnight plan. It is a very long process. You're building a profile. And so I often had lawyers say, Well, you know, you're writing for, you know, Canadian Employment Law Today. Does that bring any business? And I would usually say I'm not really sure yet. But I am building a profile by writing for them and speaking at HRPA events and speaking at Bar Association events. And over time, the work and the referrals definitely came in. But I think part of the challenge was especially as a young lawyer in a big firm, you know, there are very substantial expectations about billable time, and I also had a young family at the time. I didn't have a lot of time. That was probably the biggest challenge. But I invested the time because I knew it was worthwhile, and I definitely think it's paid off. So, you know, I haven't had a lot of setbacks when it comes to the marketing side. I think it's generally gone really well. But the biggest challenge was just doing it properly, which means investing the time.

That's awesome. It's like a clarity of why you're doing it that keeps you motivated to continue. 

Yeah, and I'll add one thing, and I'll let Mark it get a word in. You've also got to have fun doing it, right? I mean, I had a lot of people who, you know, the number of times I had people say to me, Oh, I really got to start doing that. And I always say, like, Well, only do it if you enjoy it, right? I mean, there's lots of different ways that you can market and, I mean, some of this is a bit more old school, but, you know, somewhere is like to take clients out for golf or go to a hockey game or for lunch. Whatever it is you like do. Something you enjoy, because I think it's going to be pretty obvious if you're doing it just because you feel like you have to do it. You've also got to let your personality come through. And I think I've gotten better at that over the years. I think early on, I was kind of scared to be too informal. Now I don't care as much. I'm happy to be myself and be informal. And I gotta say our newest associate, David Gelles, who, like all of our associates, they have to contribute to our blogs. He's done a series of Taylor Swift themed blog posts. And I gotta say, he's even within, what has it been now, he joined our firm in January, so it's not even a year. He's really come into his own, where the first few were really tentative and really formal, and now he's having fun with it, and it comes through really, really clearly. So I think that's another really important point, is, do invest the time, but, but make sure that you're actually enjoying it too.

Amazing. I read one of those articles, and it did come through. He tied it together really nicely. Mark, what have you observed? 

So I come at it from a different perspective than a lawyer. We're not lawyers, we're legal marketers. And by way of history, which should help to show you how things have evolved over the last 24 years. So lawyerlocate.ca was created by our founder and president Natalie Waddell. She literally had gone through a divorce experience, and one of the things that really stuck with her was the inability to find a lawyer. You can't go talk to your family because you don't want them necessarily to know. You can't go talk to your friends because you know which friend is with which spouse. The only other option in Ontario was the Law Society's legal referral service, which was, to be frank, not the greatest in the world. And she created LawyerLocate. And it was literally a year after the Law Society (then the Law. Society of Upper Canada) had removed the restrictions for advertising. Prior to that, you could only advertise in Yellow Pages. That was it. You couldn't have billboards. You couldn't do commercials. You know, we've all seen the buffalo Personal Injury Lawyer commercials forever. So this was an avenue for lawyers to be able to expose themselves on the internet without having to have the big investment of a website. And what we found in the first years was the pushback was huge, and the pushback from lawyers, particularly Ontario, they wanted no part of it, we were just wasting their time. I get all my referrals from, you know, former clients and all that. And because I had a background of 30 years as a private investigator, I had a lot of understanding of what goes on in law offices and what the dynamics are. So we worked very hard with lawyers to educate them. And that's what we discovered, was, you've touched on it earlier, and it's been a pet kind of talking point for me. I've said it many times that law schools do a disservice to their students when they hand them out that graduation certificate - that they didn't require them to have a minor in business. And I still bang that drum loud to say it's a mistake that the law schools are doing in Canada, by not enforcing a minor in business, because so many lawyers, in my experience, come out all gung ho, and they have the same attitude, whether they're young, middle aged, oh, I'll hang my shingle and they will come. Well, guess what? It doesn't work that way. The reality is, the practice of law in Canada is the most highly competitive profession there is. There's nothing that comes close to how competitive lawyers and law firms are. So we've always taken the position of education is how we're going to grow our business. So the more I can teach lawyers. And a perfect example is, is your guest, Stuart. When we got involved with Stuart seven years ago, it started off as a relationship to build his website because he had gone on his own practice. So we worked with Stuart to build out his website and to get everything so we felt comfortable with it, and then we evolved. I think Stuart was a guest on one of the other shows that I was doing from another family law lawyer, and Stuart was a guest, and he started to ask me questions about that. So we sat down, and we met, and we decided, between the two of us at the time that maybe a monthly online streaming show would be just the thing for him. And as I said earlier in my introduction, tongue in cheek, Stuart took to it like a fish in water. I mean, I to this day, I've never had any other client that was as smooth and as comfortable in front of the microphone, in front of the camera, to do a hosting of a show that he'd never done before in his life. So these types of evolutions are coming now more and more and more where you guys talked about blogging, excuse me today, I'm of the legal marketing opinion and Sandra, you and I had this conversation when you were a guest on my show, I'm still of the opinion that video is replacing the written word, whether we like it or not and whether we want to talk about it on an SEO dynamic - meaning are my are my marketing efforts giving me the results in Google search results, because that's the foundation of all marketing today online, and right now, video is starting to outweigh written content with Google's algorithms, because they have a vested interest. They own YouTube. They see what's going on. And so that's a new twist that I'm finding as a legal marketer it’s challenging to try to get lawyers to understand that video is a very important aspect of your online presence.

So, you know, I feel like we talked about this, but I'm going to ask the question anyway. For you, Stuart, can you fill in the blanks a little bit about when you noticed sort of what Mark's talking about, which is when you hit your stride, when you felt you started to shake off those, you know, uncomfortable feelings, and you knew that you knew what you were doing.

Yeah, it's an interesting question. I'm still not sure I know what I'm doing, but a little bit more, a little better at faking it these days. But no, kidding aside. I mean, yeah, when I started writing articles for the Bar Association and for Human Resource associations or speaking, one of my first speaking engagements was the Law Society's six minute employment lawyer, and I was very fortunate to be asked to speak there, but it was really a who is who of the employment law world and me, and that was incredibly intimidating. And I was terrified when I'd read an article that someone would pick up on a mistake, and I would research everything to make sure I hadn't missed a thing before I did it. But the difference between that and what I was describing earlier is I did eventually submit. But then I think, and I couldn't tell you exactly when, but there came a point where I was comfortable going to speak in front of an audience, and I was comfortable writing something relatively quickly and submitting it. And, you know, I spoke at a conference last week, and my assistant said, or asked me if I'd been nervous, and I said, I honestly no, like I really enjoy being in front of a group and speaking and even being, you know, on the media, I've been interviewed on CTV and CBC and various other media. I don't get nervous anymore. So I guess you know, that was the point. It was when I wasn't nervous to do it, and I didn't feel like I had to spend hours and hours researching and making sure it was perfect. And I was kind of lucky that did happen fairly quickly. Although, Mark, I appreciate everything you're saying, I still don't feel like I'm great at hosting the monthly show. I still feel like I'm still not as confident there as I feel like I could be. So I appreciate your words.

You know, I'm going to share a little story of my own that I'm relating to what you're saying, Stuart, because I do a lot of speaking too, and including this podcast, which was new for me when I started, it's like, oh I feel like doing a podcast. I didn't know anything about how to do it, right? So all of us are learning as we go right? We, you know, have the marketing foundation, but there's all these new things happening. But for me, there was a sea change in the speaking. So I used to be really nervous. I still liked it, but I would get anxiety before getting on stage, right? And I'd get on big stages with hundreds of people. This anxiety just didn't go away as much as I practiced. So I joined Toastmasters. Even as a seasoned speaker, I joined Toastmasters. I was there for a couple of years. Became president of my club, and by the end of the two years, which saw us into COVID, by the way, that was weird. By the end of that period, I learned something, and it was like, Okay, this one thing was worth the whole two years. It's not about me. When I get up on stage, it's not about me, it's about the audience. So these are busy people. They came, they showed up. They want something. They're here because they need something. They're trying to solve a problem, or they're trying to figure something out, or they want to go after their dreams. My job is to help them. After that, I wasn’t nervous again.

Oh, I'm going to take that advice. That's actually really great.

Thanks. So, Mark, can you jump in on that, you know, the seeing this idea of, like, hitting your stride, you know, have you observed this with others, with other clients, who, at one point, they went from, you know, a little discomfort, or trying different things, and maybe some things worked, and some things didn't work so well, but then you noticed they got it. Have you noticed that with anyone? 

Yeah, we've had several clients that on different levels took a while to get through that curve. You know, I refer to Stuart. There's other lawyers that we've worked with. An example, I would say, is a family law lawyer that we worked with in Markham. We were handling his website. We were handling all his social media management, and then eventually he decided he was doing a Rogers cable show that was called ask Andrew. And I had watched a couple of times, so I had sent him some emails, some suggestions, and he, I guess, had a falling out with the people that were helping him to market that aspect of his practice and came to us. And so it went from, we all know what a Rogers cable show looks like, the, you know, they traditionally try to look like a studio show, and very formal and very, you know, stiff, as I would call it. And when I got involved with ‘Fire Away’, I said to him, I said, Look, what you need to do is forget the Rogers set. Forget that you're doing that. I want you to dress casually. I don't want you wearing a tie. I don't want you stiff with studio lighting and all that. And I want you to be yourself. Well, that was very, very challenging for this lawyer, because this lawyer had spent his whole life presenting himself. Everything had to be perfect, and he had to dress the right way. The tie had to be perfect, and he had to speak. And the first two shows I did with him, he insisted on having a teleprompter. The hardest challenge I had was to get him to… I literally came out for the third show. So I was living in Kitchener. He was in Markham, so I came to his office for the third show, and I deliberately sabotaged the teleprompter. I said, Well, we got no time. You've got to jump in. We're going to have to go do it, and you, you'll be fine. And ever since then, he got it, the switch went off, and he understood that what I was trying to tell him was what people want today on video, whether it's YouTube, whatever your platform is, they don't want to see CBC News at Six. They want to see you talk normally. They want to see you like he made a couple of flubs. He says, Well, you're gonna edit that out. I said, No, I'm not. It's staying in because that's going to get people's interest. They'll be more interested in watching you if you're, especially as a lawyer, if you show that you're human. So we've had lots of other stories before. The video aspect I know, part of when I first met Stuart was I had started doing something, and I borrowed it from an American influencer, Kevin O'Keefe of Lex blog. But he would, when he traveled around different cities, he would put a message to everybody on social media that he'd host a beer for bloggers. So I told him, when I went to one of them, when he was in Toronto, and I said, I'm stealing that he's, oh, go ahead, go ahead. And that was one of the first times I met Stuart. Was I had hosted a beer for bloggers. I think it was around the Law Society's solo and small practice seminars and show. I think that's what it was. And it was a great way to meet people, meet lawyers, people, my potential clients, in a relaxed atmosphere that wasn't a sales pitch, right? And because I wasn't a blogger, even back then, I was always opposed to it, but I understood the need for lawyers in particular to write. And so, you know, with the blogging, anecdotally, I have another client who is in a higher end estate law and he does love to write. We do his blogs, and he's got like 5 million annotations in each post that he puts in there, and it's just like, I can't read it. I just I go to sleep. But I've often said to him, I said, Charles, do you honestly think there's a client of yours that understands what you're saying. It doesn't matter. I know what I'm saying, and that's the way it has to be, okay. So you win some and you learn to sidestep some. 

At the end of the day, the client's always right, I guess. But yeah, it's a bit of waste of money, though. Like, part of the reason why I like working with you and your team, Mark is you guys give us great advice. It may not always be what I thought, but you know, that's the same way clients retain us for our advice. We retain you for your advice. So makes sense to follow it?

Well, I appreciate that. It's just let me touch back on that, Stuart, because I do remember a conversation you and I had. I believe it was the website build. And I may be wrong. You could correct me, but there was some conflict back and forth with one of my staff and you and a couple of your staff about something to do with the website. And I think I finally said, I'm going to call Stuart, and everybody's Oh no, I said, I'm going to. So I remember I called you, and I said, Stuart, and it's the same type of thing. I said, Stuart, I don't pretend to be an employment law lawyer. Don't you pretend to be a legal marketer. And I remember from that point forward, everything changed. There was less pushbacks right from you and your staff. And I remember too the day that you were going through the photos. And it was back and forth, back and forth. I think I sent you an email. I said, Stuart, pick the photo for the staff. You write the checks.

It's funny. I don't remember that first conversation, but I'm not surprised we had it. And yeah, so if I hadn't thought of that on my own, which I probably hadn't, I'm glad you made the point, because it's a really important one. Thank you.

Well, really, what you're talking about is being real, right? 

Exactly, yeah.

And it's funny Mark, because when I started my podcast for the first, I don't know, five, six episodes, I would do that editing, you know, I'd watch the whole thing and, like, try and take out all the things that I wasn't, you know, that's not perfect. And then I decided, after six episode, I’m not doing this anymore. We get what we get. And it's a real conversation. 

Yeah, yeah. I know. I mean, the podcasts I watch and listen to, I do more viewing than audio. I got to have my music on in the car, not listen to podcasts, but I'll watch podcasts a lot during the week, and that’s a part of what I'm looking for is, if it's so kind of pat and stiff, I'm clicking off it pretty fast, even if it's a topic I'm interested in, because I just know I want it and like you said, keeping it real, being real. And in the legal community, especially in this company, there's still a lot of mystique that's associated with lawyers from lay people that don't interact with lawyers on a regular basis, don't understand that they're just normal people. This is their job, and part of my mission when I'm acting for my clients in the legal community is to demystify their practice and to demystify who they are. Right? The days when we started LawyerLocate, the days of the big law firm, we saw the writing on the wall, were going the way of the dodo. So there's not nearly as many huge law firms in Canada, as there was 20 years ago. The trend, of course, is small boutique similar to Stuart and sole practitioners that will come together and have an LLC. So what we've tried to say is the days of you hiring McCarthy Tétrault and you go meet with some senior partner, only to find out some clerk who's getting $20 an hour is basically doing all the work, those days are gone. You know, I owe CEOs that if they walk into a lawyer's office to retain a lawyer, they're going to look at Stuart and say, You're the guy that's going to work for me, not your associate. Is that correct? And that's what they're looking for. Because in the past, as we all know, Stuart, you worked for one of the bigger law firms. You know how that particular game is played. And you know, I'm not saying anybody's being dishonest by doing that, but the expectation of the general public is, oh, I can't have this big name lawyer work for me. When the truth of is other than rates and fees, you can have any lawyer you want, and it's more about finding the lawyer. You know, when we do referrals, our referrals go out to more than one lawyer in that geographic area, in that area of law. And I tell the public what this does for you, You're going to get more than one lawyer calling you. You can find the lawyer that's the right fit, financially and, more importantly, emotionally. And people would be surprised how emotional any type of legal situation is, whether it's a negative thing, whether it's a, you know, an employment law issue, and you've been fired and you don't know what to do, and now all of a sudden, you're in some type of legal situation with family law. We all know that the stress that comes with that that that type of client, so it is important and that we try to market our lawyers or and lawyers shouldn't learn to just market, not only what they do, but their personality. Who are you? You know, don't just go on a podcast and talk about your law practice. Talk about hockey, talk about, like Stuart says, the things that interest you outside of your job, that's the stuff that you need to put out there for clients to say, Oh, well, this guy is much more interesting. I think I'll want to book him a consultation with you.

I'll just jump on that, because I think that's huge. And obviously, you know, we've had these conversations, Mark, and you've influenced me a lot, but yeah, and people are more educated now. I mean, look, the internet is a great equalizer in many ways. So people are now more savvy, and I think many people are more comfortable contacting a lawyer, but a lot of people still are not, and they think of lawyers as being intimidating. But if they can go on my website and see videos of me talking and hopefully I come across as relatively friendly and engaging, it's going to be a lot easier, and they're going to be a lot more likely to contact me or my firm than someone at a big firm where all I see is a stuffy photo, probably from 20 years ago. So that's really important to be, to be yourself. And I have to say, I've been really flattered over the years. I still often receive emails from people who say I've been reading your articles for years, and I just want to drop you a note and thank you, because they're very educational, but they're also very easy to read and entertaining. And I get those a lot, and I love them. They always put a smile on my face. And actually, I'll tell you one of my favourite stories, partially, just because everything we talk about seems to have to come back to hockey in some way. Mark, I don't know if I ever told you this story, but it was really funny. This is going back, oh, probably about 15 years ago now, so I was still a relatively young lawyer, probably five or six years out, and I got one of those emails and was, you know, thanking me for the articles I written and how helpful they were. And I got to the bottom and it was signed Director of Human Resources Edmonton Oilers Hockey Club. And I had not been putting it out there that I was an Oilers fan. I didn't think anybody knew that, but I read that. And so my first thought was, Okay, which of my friends is messing with me? This can't be real. And I even knew which friend it would be, because one of my friends is into IT, and could probably spoof someone's email address. So I remember calling him and cross examining him long enough that it wasn't him. So it took me about two days to work up the nerve to respond and thank her for the email, and then say, you know, by the way, I've been an Oilers fan for, you know, the better part of my life now and that actually has resulted in a friendship that's now lasted about 15 years, and I've gone to Edmonton and met with her, and she actually arranged for me to meet with the general manager of the team and a whole bunch of other people. So it was great. But all of that came about because of articles and other things that I've been doing which people liked. So it had a bit of an unanticipated benefit.

What a beautiful story. And both of you know my spouse, Garry wise, who's also lawyer. He's also a blogger, and was with you guys in the blogger days, the beer blog events. And he always talks about the powerful unintended consequences. So you know when you when you start out these marketing programs? And like you were saying, Stuart, the lawyers were asking you, because there was a lot of pressure for billables, is this turning into clients? And you're like, I'm not sure yet, but I'm going to keep going. I know what I'm doing. I'm focusing on these channels. And the truth is, you don't really know what's going to come back to you. But sometimes what comes back to you is a little different from what you expected, but still great. So we've got these systems we're talking about. You know that work, but the truth is, the world changes. We've all gone through so many big changes recently, right? The pandemic, and now everyone's doing things online, book meetings online. Mark, you've alluded to the fact about, you know, are the blogs still worth it? I don't know, Stuart, you still write. You're saying people still read them, and videos are growing so lawyers need to learn how to get comfortable with video. We have new social media sites cropping up. So there's always something new. And I even noticed Stuart on your website, you had texting. And I'm like, well, that's new too, right? Offering that as an option for clients to reach out by text. Well, and then the people change. So you have people leave your firm, people join your firm, people get promoted, and they're part of your marketing plan. So there's all these changes. So I just wanted to ask Stuart kick us off with how do you handle that? How do you keep going with your marketing despite all the changes, or maybe with all the changes?

Yeah, I mean, I guess I'm lucky in a sense, that I'm one of those people who always is attracted by whatever shiny new object exists at the time. And if anything, my wife and my office administrator are two separate people, by the way, know me well enough to control me and hold me back from just jumping into every new platform or technology. But I'm always open to it, and they always look like fun. And like you said, you know, I remember reading somewhere that, you know, people are now texting a lot more than emailing, so make it easier for people to contact you, let them text the firm. So we do that, and it's been quite helpful. But even in the context of marketing and social media, I mean, you know, Mark, when you and I started in 2017 we certainly weren't talking about Instagram and definitely not talking about Tiktok. But you know, and over the years, we've every now and then I will reach out to you guys and say, Do you think we should get into this? Or you'll reach out to me and say, We think you should try that. And we've experimented with both, and I've recorded some tiktoks and had some fun employment law tiktoks, and I did one recently where I tried Oreo flavored Coke Zero for the first time, and did a video on that. But it gets back to what I was saying earlier, right? I'm having fun with it. I'm enjoying the new technologies. And the only thing that kind of depresses me a bit is I'm now not the expert, and I've either got to go to my kids to get them to explain it to me. My daughter recently told me that, hey, you got a comment on one of your tiktoks. Instead of just putting in a text response, you can take that, create a new video, embed the question, and do a video response to it. So she taught me how to do that, or even within my firm, I'm not the expert. I'll look at you know, Nadia Zaman, who is tremendous at building a profile and has a great social media presence, and she's, you know, the one who understands current social media way better than I do. But my point is, you know, none of this is going to be static, and it's going to keep changing. And unless, unless you're prepared to just go with the flow to some extent, and try things, then eventually you're going to stagnate, and some things work and some things don't. I mean, I was one of those people who had a Google Plus account, and we thought that was going to be a huge social media by Google. How could it fail? And yet, here we are. So you just got to try things and see what works and what you enjoy?

I forgot about that. And there was another. There was a video platform we were all excited about, and now I forgot the name. Where you could do these kinds of interviews? It was built for that. Can't believe I forgot the name.

I know what you're talking about too, because I was really an early adopter into that, and then soon as it got kind of going, it died. 

Yeah, and it was so great. 

Yeah, yeah, it was. But picking up on your question on embracing change. So our example at LawyerLocate is a little dramatic. So we touched on COVID. Yes, we were impacted greatly by COVID LawyerLocate probably lost just shy of 50% of its membership because lawyers, particularly in Ontario, took so long to adapt to online courts and zoom and all that. So there a lot of the law practices basically stood still. They couldn't do their work, so they cut their advertising, their marketing budget. So we lost that also during that period of time. Natalie Waddell rebuilt the LawyerLocate website from the ground up. It took two years to finish it, and it was just completely changed because we knew that we had to do something different. You know, it had been 20 odd years of the same type of platform, same process. We had to change the look. We had to change the field. We had to add now, if you go to a lawyer, locate profile, if the member utilizes it, everything is available to them, frankly. They wouldn't need a website. That’s it. The profile pages are that robust now. But the other thing that we noticed that changed as a result of COVID. So part of LawyerLocate services. You can go to the website, the directory, you can search it, you can look at the profiles, you can contact lawyers, or you can hit a button says, Get me a free referral. A form comes up briefly to describe your legal matter. Then we process it out to lawyers in the geographic area, the area of law you're looking for. What we noticed happened post COVID Is the referral request dropped dramatically, the searches and the unique visitors went up. So we did a bunch of research on it, and Natalie did a lot more. And we discovered that what changed with COVID was, well, people had 8, 10, 12 hours a day sitting in front of their computer with nothing better to do. So now they know how to use the internet. They know how to use Google. Before COVID, a lot of people say, my kids on the computer. I don't do that, you know? I'll ask my kid, how do I find this? How do I find that? Oh, give me the Yellow Pages. Now we have a more internet savvy general public than we had pre COVID. Is that going to translate to a good thing from a legal marketing perspective? It all depends on how you approach it, in my opinion. It can be easy to go down a road that's not going to benefit you, and you're not going to grow your business. If you make the effort to understand your client and make the effort to understand the Internet and what that means, you can mold and continually change. You know, Stuart is a great example. Like you said, we've been doing Fire Away for seven years, last year or this, this current year, we decided to change the format. We decide to change how it looks visually. We decided to change the intro and the outro because you get too stale. If it's the same old, same old, and somebody comes on the show that had watched it last year goes, Oh, well, that's different. So change is good. Embracing change, I think, as a life philosophy, certainly mine has always been embrace change. You know, hiding from it or resisting it or pushing back, I think ultimately dooms you.

I love that you brought up the small changes. Because when we think about change, we think about, oh, throw it all out, start over. It's not working, but no, sometimes it just needs a tweak. Right? If you look at big brands, that's what they do. You know, you're talking about Coke, Stuart and, right? Like, if we look at Coke's history, year after year. You know, they will tweak their logo, or they will tweak their packaging, but they don't just completely change it. 

Yeah, that's a really good point

So Mark. Can you tell us a little bit about what you expect? You know, what's next? Like, what are the trends down the pipeline, either in marketing or in the marketplace, people are talking about AI. 

That's a great question, and I think I'd be remiss if I didn't say, obviously, one of the biggest changes that's coming, and it's here, is artificial intelligence, from a legal marketing perspective, it's huge because it's a huge time saver for us as creators. It's a great idea generator for those times where you just hit the wall and you can't get the brain going on. How am I going to approach this challenge of marketing for this particular firm or this company? Because we don't just do law, we do, you know, all areas of business. I think that's a big one. I think it's got some people very scared, and it's got other people embracing it. I like to think that at LawyerLocate and LegalTube.ca and Digital eMspace.ca that we're embracing AI. We use, for example, on our shows, and even with Stuart’s shows. So Stuart’s show can run from a half hour to 45 minutes on average. So that will go out on YouTube, on his YouTube channel, it'll be embedded on his website. But then we take an AI called Opus AI, we'll put that half hour show into Opus, and within three minutes, we have up to 30, less than 60 second clips, ranked, so it will rank them by percentages. And why is this one ranked higher than the next one? It has a nice little paragraph explaining the keywords that are in there. So for us to do that before AI, you're talking about over a week's worth of work to try and get that done. So it makes a big difference.

Well, and it's interesting the way you're describing it, because I think that lines up with my philosophy about using AI, which is, you need to know how to use it. It's not just about, you know, delegate it to the to the robot. You know, use it for what it's good at. So if it's going to spit back some ideas at you, well then, you know, you use your creativity and your human resources to come up with something cool that the robot couldn't do, and then maybe the robot gets you out of your block.

Yeah, I'll jump in because I like, I think I'm also, not surprisingly, a big believer in using AI, because it's the current shiny new object. I think it's great and it has tremendous potential, but you got to use it very, very cautiously. And I actually had a really interesting experience about a month ago now, where I was writing a blog post, and there was a case I wanted to talk about, and I wanted to talk about the big picture. What does this case mean? What are the implications for employers, for employees? And I had a really good idea of that. In my mind, what I find tedious about writing blog posts or anything else is you got to dig through the case to find some of those key facts, you know, how old was the employee? How long were they employed, you know, et cetera, et cetera. So I figured, I'll use AI for that. What was interesting is I put this, put the case into chat GPT, and asked it to write a summary for me. And it did a phenomenal job of summarizing the facts and explaining the legal analysis. It got the outcome of the case completely wrong. You know, 180 degrees wrong. And then what was fascinating is, just for fun, I then put the same instructions and the same input into Microsoft Copilot, and it actually didn't do as great a job summarizing the facts. It was a bit more awkward, but it got the decision right. So that was fun, but more importantly, my point is, yeah, you should be using AI, but you've got to use it very, very carefully, because if I hadn't double checked that, then I would have written a blog post that was completely wrong.

Just to weigh in briefly on that one too. And Stuart, you know, we've given this advice to you, and we do it to everybody. I do encourage the use of AI, but I also do it on two sides. One, the cautionary tale is Google is getting very smart at identifying AI content, and they do punish you for AI content on your search results. So I always tell everybody, use the AI, take the draft, but then go in and make changes. Make it more you. It can be as simple as changing one paragraph. It be as simple as changing a couple sentences. That A gets you around the Google dislike of AI content and B it gets you posting more personal content, not just something that's generated by ChatGPT or any of the other literally 1000s of writing AI platforms that are out there. So I think that's an important thing to bear in mind. It's the same as you know, I wouldn't script Fire Away for the same reason is that you it's just not going to do as well. Never mind the Google factor to it. But one other thing I want to touch on, and it impacts more on my business because we're a national company, is the changes that Google made that anybody that has a national online presence does not like, and that is the local search. So now on LawyerLocate if you're searching for a lawyer in Edmonton and LawyerLocate’s offices, then were in Kitchener, google would spew out the results with LawyerLocate in Edmonton, lawyers that were members of our service. Today, we get more search results in Alberta because our offices are in Alberta than we get in Ontario. And it used to be the other way around. And this is all based on this local search dynamic. So Google thinks that, oh, it's better if we just give results from where you are. Now, we have not found a way around this yet. We've had suggestions of getting satellite offices, or those little rentals, just literally renting an address and a sign on the wall, because Google insists, if you're going to do this that you have to submit a picture of your satellite office. It's, just to me, it's ridiculous. It goes back to, I've never been a big fan of how Google gets to flex. I've often wondered why we regulate everything in this world, but we don't regulate the one business that could kill everybody's business at the snap of a finger. A quick anecdotal story about that 23 years ago, so it would be the second year that LawyerLocate was operating. I was still in private investigation. I was helping out Natalie with her marketing and her sales. Somebody had made a mistake on something we were doing with the website, and it was an innocent error, and Google found out about it and removed us from search results. So for six months you could type LawyerLocate.ca, into Google, and nothing would come back. There'd be zero, and it was only by the grace of the good Lord above or whatever you believe in that Natalie, because one thing you'll all know, there are no phone numbers to Google. No you realize that there is no phone number to Google. So Natalie somehow found the phone number for  A Senior VP at Google, and she phoned him, and he, luckily, took the call, and she explained the situation, that we were a new startup company, and we'd hired this person, and they made a mistake. We don't know if it was on purpose or whatever, and this is why we, we kind of broke the rules of Google. Fortunately, the guy listened to her and was sympathetic and turned us back on the next day. But that could have been the end of LawyerLocate.ca and that's the power that I don't think any company should have. That's to me, I've Stuart knows this on an anecdotal side, I'm always Google, No, thanks. You're sending me a Google Doc? Really, you couldn't find anything else, Stuart? 

We can fight about that when we're done fighting about hockey, I guess. Yeah, there you go. By the way, every single time you say Google, my google assistant on my phone, the ears perk up so they want to hear what you say. 

That's funny. I don't have that problem with my apple pods.

Stuart, you want to add anything about trends or, you know, things to look out for?

I don't think I have much to add there. And I think obviously, as Mark said, AI is huge, and I think we all should be using it, but using it wisely. And to Mark's point, you know, I will use AI to do a first draft of something, and then I'll go in and and make it my own, or I'll go the other way sometimes, and I do this more for emails. Actually, I'll often draft an email and then ask AI to either make it friendlier or make it less friendly, or whatever the case may be. But I think it also can be great for social media in particular, to get ideas. And I know people will type in things like give me 10 blog ideas for an employment lawyer or something like that. So you can use it just for brainstorming. Other than AI, yeah, I don't know that I have anything else specific to add.

That's awesome. And I love the examples and the passion about all of this. What a great discussion. Thank you. Thank you both so much for your time and for your insights.

Thanks. Sorry, Mark. Go ahead.

I just said thank you so much for the invite. It's a real pleasure, and I really enjoyed this. It was a lot of fun.

I will agree with Mark, that was a lot of fun. So thank you and Mark, I think you were the one who suggested adding me to the discussions. I appreciate that. It has been a lot of fun and hopefully a useful discussion, but definitely an enjoyable one to your point, to your earlier point. Stuart, do the things you enjoy.

Exactly this, this I could do all day.

And I do think this is valuable content for our listeners and to our listeners to learn more about Mark please go to lawyerlocate.ca and to learn more about Stuart, please go to Rudnerlaw.ca. You've been listening to Get in the driver's seat, stories about leadership moments in professional practice. I'm your host, Sandra Bekhor, Practice Management Coach at Bekhor Management. Take care everybody.