With most law books focusing on black-letter law, we saw a need for more practical information. We began publishing “voice of experience” titles filled with practice tips and custom forms, and steadily grew our active booklist to over 100 titles across 7 specialties:

• Bankruptcy
• Criminal
• Employment
• Estate planning
• Family
• Personal injury
• Social Security disability

Most law firm websites at the time contained little educational content, so we began providing sites loaded with explanatory content and forms from our law books.

The content libraries were large, with hundreds of pages of step-by-step procedures, custom forms, and checklists – all aimed at consumers seeking to learn more about their legal issues.

While many law firms began with a heavy focus on referrals, as they became busier they neglected their referral networks. So we launched a service that:

• Strengthened existing referral relationships with gifts and personal notes
• Kept lawyers memorable and referrable with past clients using an engaging, specialty-specific monthly newsletter
• Helped expand networks by scheduling phone appointments with local professionals interested in discussing a referral relationship. We have made more than 900 introductions.

When Covid moved meetings to Zoom and broadcast locations to homes, we saw an opportunity to lower the cost of video marketing with remote shoots.

Our affordable and convenient approach became widely accepted, and we have shot, edited, and posted thousands of marketing videos for lawyers.

Lawyers began embracing social media marketing, so our video marketing followed and we began posting our remotely-shot videos on Instagram and Facebook, later adding TikTok, YouTube, and LinkedIn.

To help lawyers learn about social media and other new marketing techniques, our president Kara Prior began interviewing successful attorney-marketers on her GrowWithKara show. She has interviewed over 100 law firm owners about their marketing.

Always pressed for time, lawyers were having difficulty showing up for their monthly video shoots. Avatars had become realistic enough that we began to substitute them for live shoots. This no-shoot option opened the social media marketing door to the many lawyers who had neither the time nor the interest in regularly appearing in front of a camera.

But using social media to build their brands was not sufficient for many lawyers, so we began experimenting with generating leads from social media and quickly learned that we could obtain a regular flow of local prospects using a variety of techniques. Our subscribers loved the addition.

Recognizing that the dozens of lawyers we were sending leads to also needed help handling those leads, we began:

• Qualifying those leads using questions tailored to each law firm
• Conducting intake audits to make sure that the law firms were effectively handling both the leads we supplied and the other ones they received
• Supplying lead follow-up materials to ensure that initially unresponsive leads were not abandoned too quickly
• Creating custom books and other lead magnets to help law firms grow and maintain their email lists
• Developed custom marketing dashboards so law firm owners knew in real time where their leads were coming from and how much they cost
• Offering 1:1 monthly guidance to share the techniques of successful attorney-marketers and help law firms increase their marketing’s effectiveness