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- [00:00]
Tyson Mutrix
This spring, we're taking the Maximum Lawyer Mastermind to Maui. The perfect setting to reset, refocus and recharge. April is a pivotal time to assess your law firm's progress and fine tune your strategies to ensure 2025 is a year of unparalleled growth. Our Maui Mastermind is designed to help you identify opportunities, overcome challenges, and take bold steps forward. This today event blends high impact business training with transformative hot seats. On day one, you'll gain insights and tools to propel your firm's success, while day two is dedicated to Mastermind hot seats where you'll receive personalized advice and strategies tailored to your goals. You'll leave Maui with a clear, actionable plan and the confidence to implement it immediately. Don't miss this opportunity to Mastermind with us in paradise on April 10th and 11th. To learn more about this event and grab your ticket, head to maxlawevents.com.
- [00:55]
Vitus Chakotis
This is maximum Lawyer with your host, Tyson Mutrix.
- [01:05]
Becca Eberhardt
Welcome back to the Maximum Lawyer podcast. I'm Becca Eberhardt, CEO at Maximum Lawyer, and today we have Vitus and Steve from Rise Up Media with us. And Rise Up Media is Maximum Lawyer's recommended partner for all things digital marketing and SEO. And today we're going to talk about client intake, first impressions and reputation management. So, Vitus or Steve, for anyone who is new to the Maximum Lawyer community, why don't you start by introducing yourselves the company and tell us a bit more about how you help law firms.
- [01:36]
Vitus Chakotis
Okay. My name is Vitis Chakotis. We both work for Rise Up Media. We are a digital marketing company. We help law firms do everything from website design, SEO, social media. We do Google AdWords with pay per click and local service ads. So as Becca said, we do everything digital and we help firms with some of those things or all of those things, depending on their needs.
- [01:59]
Steve Williams
Yeah, I'm Steve Williams. I've been working with lawyers for 25 years in SEO, specifically everything Vita said. We're proud sponsors of Maximum Lawyer and happy to be here.
- [02:11]
Becca Eberhardt
Awesome. All right, let's jump right into it. So the first topic that we were going to touch on today is intake, and I think we should just start with the painful part. So from your experience, what are the most common mistakes that you see law firms make with client intake?
- [02:27]
Vitus Chakotis
Steve, you want to take this one?
- [02:29]
Steve Williams
Yeah, I think. I think we work with a lot of solo law firms. The biggest issue is not answering your phone, obviously. And there's a lot of solo firms out there that spend a lot of money in Marketing. And they're in trial. Criminal, criminal law especially. They're in trial. They're, they're in court, they can't get to the phone. And their response to us is, well, we call them back as soon as we get out of court. Well, the problem with that today, nobody leaves a message. You know, it's a different environment today. By the time you call somebody back after a three hour courtroom, they've either A, hired somebody else or B, moved on. So in the scheme of things, if you think about the person calling a law firm, they have a problem or a need right now, it's an immediate need. Nobody calls a law firm unless they have to. Right? It's not like, hey, I'm thinking about committing a crime, I might need your services next week. So not answering the phone. I think there are stats out there that if you don't return a phone call within three minutes, there's a 75% chance they've hired somebody else. Vitus, I'll let you pick up on that.
- [03:30]
Vitus Chakotis
So there's answering the phone, which is really important. I think another area where a lot of firms don't have the proper tools in place is either a chat feature on their website or an after hours answering service. And the reason that that's important is, and again, different practice areas, different scenarios. But like I'll take personal injury or criminal, which typically has a little bit of urgency to what happened. Hey, someone just got injured in a car wreck. Hey, somebody just got arrested, they're in jail. Family law, you know, typically unless it's some kind of custody issue where, you know, there's urgency for whatever reason. But in those two types of examples, we work with law firms like, yeah, I work nine to five, you know, I'll take calls on the weekends. But you know, to Steve's point, if I can't get ahold of you, I'm hanging up, I'm calling somebody else. And I'll tell a quick story from a personal injury standpoint which really opened the eyes of a law firm where they didn't have any answering service after hours. And they got a call late Friday night from somebody that had a pretty catastrophic. Somebody died in a car wreck. In fact, there might have been multiple deaths. And so we'll call it a good case for a personal injury firm. And you know, they come in Monday morning, somebody's listening to the voice messages and they're like, oh, hey, we better call this guy back. Sounds like a good one. And you know, we hired somebody Friday night. In other words, you didn't answer, you didn't get an intake through a website chat or any way for us to contact you other than voice message. Surprisingly, they actually left a voice message. I would argue most people don't today. They hang up. It ended up being like a seven figure case they missed out on because you're spending money on marketing, you're spending money on referrals and all these things coming to you. So these people come to you, they knock on your door and no one's home. So that's the huge mistake where you do all the work, you spend all the money to get the people to come in. And then it's like fishing. You know, the fish is on the line, you're about to pull it in and you cut the line. You know, we'll let it, maybe it'll come back next week. It doesn't work that way. So there are lots of tools. Again, whether it's just a chat feature on your website where if somebody wants to engage there, there's ways to do that, there's ways that you can set up text messages to go through, but voice answering services, critical. If somebody's calling you after hours or on a weekend, you want to make sure that if somebody's calling you, somebody's talking to them or engaging with them. And just so people know the way that works that can be set up with the companies that if it's something that's a certain type of case or it's something that's, you know, important, they can be texted, hey, this, this just came in. You should reach out to them. So it's having coverage when you're not available or your office is closed. So there's a lot of companies that offer these types of services. We have certain ones that we recommend. A lot of maximum lawyer clients actually use them. But the point is it's inexpensive really compared to losing that business. And it's really a must have that you have to have coverage at all times. So I think that's really important.
- [06:32]
Steve Williams
You know, I want to add to that on the chat service. There are some chat services out there. I mean, the technology has come a long way. So there are chat services out there that actually monitor your phone calls. If you miss a call at your office, there are chat features out there that will catch that and call the person who called the office back or send a text message immediately saying, hey, we saw. And maybe they let it ring three times and they hung up. Well, those chat services out there now with the technology to send an email within Five seconds, say, hey, we saw you called the law firm of so and so, Jack Smith. We saw that you missed her call. Can we reconnect you? And they have about a 40 to 50% reconnection rate with these. With these people either hung up or the secretary is on the phone, didn't get to them in time. So the technology's come a long way. There's really no excuse for a law firm not to answer the phone. It's just. It's incredible to me that the amount of. We track calls, we use CallRail, Everybody uses CallRail. The amount of calls that go in unanswered at some of the law firms that we work with is. It's very surprising to me, you know, because people are paying for marketing. These phone calls cost you money every time the phone rings. It's extremely important to answer the phone today because nobody, like Vitus said, nobody's making a second call to you or leaving a message.
- [07:50]
Vitus Chakotis
And if I can add to that as well, there's. For those of you that most of you probably know what they are, but Google has a program called Local Service Ads, which are the photos that appear in a search result. Those are pay per call programs where you are paying Google to put you up to receive a phone call. If you're in that program and you're getting calls and you don't answer those calls, Google will actually remove you from that program because their whole point is they expect people to answer the phone. So it's multiple aspects of where this comes into play. And to Steve's point, we use CallRail and we go through these very frequently with our clients. And we're like, well, you missed 30 calls last week. You know, that that's probably not good. You know, like. And bluntly, some of the times the attorneys are like, what? Like, how'd that happen? So it's an education in a lot of ways. And I do understand a lot of firms, they don't know what to do. I know those questions actually come up within the Maximum Lawyer forum. You know, like, hey, does anybody have a good service? Or, hey, I've tried this one. They weren't very good. Can you have an alternative? So the answers are out there. You really just have to ask the.
- [08:55]
Steve Williams
Other part to this is actual person. The person at the firm answering the phone is the second. It's the second most important part of your law firm because it's actually the first human communication you have with the law firm. The first impression is obviously your website and what they see about you. On Google. I'll go into that a little bit later. It never ceases to amaze us the way that some people answer the phone. If they think law firm, you know, they're not professional. No, the lawyer doesn't see people. You'll have to talk to me and I'll get. There's a way to answer a phone and be presentable because you're the, you're the first line, the first access they have to a law firm. They're basing their first judgment impression of the law firm based on a person that answers the phone. There's been a lot of times that we sit with lawyers who have five, six, seven lawyers and you have two partners. We're sitting with the partners and they listen to the calls. They say, well, we're not getting any business and we'll play some of the calls for them. And it's not to get the person answering the phone in trouble. It's an education process and a training opportunity to have training with the person answering the phone on how to be more personable, more professional and just a true representation of who you want your law firm to be.
- [10:05]
Vitus Chakotis
Yeah. And let me add again, sort of like some real life examples to that. So one, Steve and I sometimes use the CallRail recordings as an opportunity for some coaching because it's really not meant to like, you know, get somebody in trouble. They don't know what they don't know. Right. But typically the person who answers the phone or talks to the client, their job should be one thing, which is basically get an appointment scheduled or engage with the client. Not just sit there and chat about stuff and okay, well call us back if you're interested. I mean that's, hey, we have an opening tomorrow at 3. Does that work for you? The lawyer can see you such and such. And to Steve's point, some of them, we've listened to calls. The lawyer doesn't have any openings until May. Does that work for you? And they're like, hell no. You know, like, so those sorts of things. But, but even more so, it's under making sure that the staff understands what is a really, really important call versus one that might be like, hey, we'll call them back or we can engage. And I'll give you another real life example that came with this sort of coaching element. I sat in with one of my clients. We were listening to phone calls I'd listened to ahead. I said, you guys really need to hear this one. And what it was, it was somebody that literally just got hit by a Drunk driver was in the ER because they were severely injured with, you know, broken bones and all these sorts of injuries, and is calling on their cell phone from the hospital saying, I need an attorney. And without going into all my. All the detail was like, hang on a second, please, let me see if I can get someone to talk to you. Like, two minutes goes by, and then there's no one here right now that can talk to you, but I'd be happy to take them. And anyway, so at the end of the day, the firm called the person back because they had a cell phone and they saved the case. But the attorney heard that call, was in the room with me, and basically said, excuse me. I mean, I'm not saying you went and ripped him a new one. But the point is, it's like if you have someone calling from the er that is not a, hey, I can't find anybody to talk to you. You know? So again, set expectations with your staff, because a lot of times the attorneys, they're off doing their lawyer thing. They're not listening to how the receptionist answering the phone. They're just assuming it' done well. And a lot of times it is, but a lot of times it isn't. And that's where the opportunity to make sure, because it's the same thing. Somebody's calling you. What is their first impression? What is their first engagement? And if it's not polite, if it's not, hey, I can help you, or you called the right place, because he does these cases all the time. It's that person's job to convince them you called the right people, and let's get you on the schedule.
- [12:40]
Steve Williams
In other words, sell the firm. Oh, my God, I'm so sorry that happened to you. We have done. I want to. I might be biased, but attorney Smith is one of the best at this, and we need to get you on his calendar. It's kind of selling the firm, or at least speaking about the experience that that firm has in these matters. And it makes the personal. If you've been charged with something or you've been hurt, you don't know what's happening. You're scared. And then put somebody on the other end of the phone, make them at ease.
- [13:07]
Vitus Chakotis
Yeah.
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Steve Williams
Like they feel like the law firm, this law firm really cares about me. They're making it personal. It gives that person a feeling of, okay, this is the law firm for me. This is who I to hire.
- [13:16]
Vitus Chakotis
And to that point, most people aren't calling a lawyer all the time. This might be the first Time that they're calling and somebody, something bad happens. So they're adrenaline, they're scared, they're all these things. And, and it's, it's really important that you engage and say, hey, oh my God. You know, my, my husband just got arrested. He's in jail for the. Okay, you know what? It's okay. It's going to be okay. We handle this kind of stuff all the time. You know, let's take some, you know, like calm the situation and, and that put that person at ease, which basically creates a relationship, you know, versus. Well, I'll just get his information and we'll call you back. Whenever he's back in the, you know, she's like, well that didn't help. I'm calling the next guy. So all of these things together really help solidify the work that is done to get these people to engage with you in the first place. And the last thing you want to do is get all that stuff happening and then you drop the ball because you don't answer the phone or you don't have somebody that can engage with them on your behalf and don't put.
- [14:10]
Steve Williams
Them on hold for more than 15 seconds. We listen to so many calls where it's, it's a nine minute call and people get put on hold. It goes 30 seconds, 45 seconds, a minute, a minute and a half and all of a sudden click, they just hang up. So limit the amount of time that.
- [14:27]
Vitus Chakotis
Somebody'S on hold and, and we've all done that. For every customer service or whoever we're calling, there's a threshold of I'm not waiting on hold more than less than a minute, I'm gone.
- [14:38]
Steve Williams
Like, like we said, it's a training opportunity for your staff, right? It's like, hey, don't put them on hold. If you can't find somebody, get back on the phone in 15 minutes or 15 seconds and say, hey, I'm looking for somebody. Can you please bear with me? It's just training your staff on how to, how to understand who's on the other end of the phone.
- [14:54]
Vitus Chakotis
I got, I got one other thing which is gonna sound funny, but it does matter. Figure out what your hold music is because there is some of this hold stuff is so bad that people will hang up just because they don't want to listen to that. That God awful noise you have going on is hold music, right? So a lot of firms don't even know they have, you know, like it's set on auto or something like that. So just simple things. Like make sure that it's not something that's going to make people want to hang up on you because it's, It's. We've all experienced it. I see you nodding, Becca.
- [15:29]
Steve Williams
Right.
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Vitus Chakotis
It's just like, God, who chose this garbage? Right?
- [15:32]
Becca Eberhardt
So anyway, no, I completely agree with that. That makes me laugh. One of the things that really gets me is, I mean, it's 2025 now, right? And I will be on hold listening to music that's like staticky or like, doesn't even sound clear. So it's not even that. The music itself, like the style of. It's horrible. But like, the quality. I can listen to bad music that's a good quality over, like, good music that's bad quality.
- [15:57]
Tyson Mutrix
Yes, exactly.
- [15:58]
Steve Williams
AM radio.
- [15:59]
Becca Eberhardt
I really like that tip. That's fantastic. So many great recommendations around intake. That was fantastic. Okay, Anything else before we roll into the first impressions?
- [16:09]
Vitus Chakotis
No, I think in a nutshell, make sure that anytime someone is potentially reaching out, you have somebody to engage. And again, we see these all the time. The missed calls, the missed opportunities. Those are clients that potentially could have been that big case or, you know, just the volume you're looking for. They were literally looking for someone and you weren't there. And that's. In this day and age. There's. There's too many tools to make sure that doesn't happen for that to be a regular occurrence.
- [16:36]
Steve Williams
One more thing. Obviously have your receptionist or somebody in your office responsible for checking the email once an hour. Your intake from the contact form on your website. Anyway, that sends the firm an email should be responded to within an hour and.
- [16:50]
Vitus Chakotis
And so on. On that note, like for example, the people we set up our intake forms off the website to usually hit two or three different people at a law firm. So the lawyer themselves, maybe his assistant, maybe even receptionist. So if somebody's not available because it's the same thing, somebody sends you an email, maybe you have more than three minutes, but you sure as hell don't have 24 hours to get back to them because they're looking for a response. And it can be like, hey, we got your email. We'll get back to you shortly or by the end of the day. But some sort of engagement is really important.
- [17:19]
Steve Williams
And we get it because 90%, not 90, I'd say 50% of the emails law firms get spammed. Somebody wanted to sell them marketing, somebody wanted to sell them something else. Cleaning services, we get it. But there are little nuggets of gold in between those. Those emails that Cases will. These people will go somewhere else if they don't hear back in a reasonable. A reasonable amount of time.
- [17:41]
Becca Eberhardt
Absolutely. All right, let's pivot into first impressions. Why are they so critical? And we can even start by talking about some of the mistakes that you see people make as well.
- [17:52]
Steve Williams
It's funny. I've never talked to a law firm in 25 years. I've never talked to the law firm. Didn't say that. The number one. His number one business comes from referrals. 90%. It's usually between 90 and 95% of his business.
- [18:06]
Vitus Chakotis
Oh, and don't forget, Steve, I close 100% of my referrals.
- [18:10]
Steve Williams
Yeah, I close 100% of my Referrals. Well, this is 20, 25. People know what I do for a living that I, that I'm. That I'm friends with. When LinkedIn or social media, I get requests about, hey, do you know a dylr you in Ohio, in Columbus, Ohio? I personally will give three names because, hey, I don't want the person I give the referral to to say, that guy's correct, that lawyer's no good. I'll say, no, I gave you three names or I don't want to be attorney. That said, no, I gave him three names. He chose you after having a conversation with you. Right. So referrals now are given twos and threes. It's that simple. The first impression that you have of you, of your law firm is your website. 90 or 90% of the time, 85% of the time, it's not. When you're going to meet somebody, nobody walks to your office, knocks on the door and say, hey, I got arrested last night. I need a lawyer. Very few people. So the first impression is definitely your website. Whether you want to market and do SEO and try to get new business from the Internet, it's not important. What's important is what is the first thing people see about your law firm? Does it tell a story of what you do, how you do it, how many years experience you have? Here's an easy way to contact me. These are the type of cases that we've worked with in the past. That's the number one thing. It drives us crazy because the amount of lawyers it is 20, 25. And the amount of lawyers out there who have not Googled themselves is crazy to me. We work with new law firms every week. We'll do a lot of research on a lawyer whose background, where he went to school, what he practices, what law firms he's been with. So we'll do a simple Google search and the amount of lawyers who got sanctioned by the bar in 1997, that that article still shows up. Number four, when you Google his name in the city he lives in is crazy to me. If somebody's referring a case to you and somebody Googles your name and you have something negative about you or your law firm on the first page of Google, it's so easy to get that pushed down to the second page.
- [20:11]
Vitus Chakotis
And nobody, nobody goes to page two.
- [20:14]
Steve Williams
That's the. That's the number one control. Control what people see about you and your law firm on the first page. Control the first page of Google. That's probably the number one recommendation I can give anybody because it's free, it's easy, and it doesn't take a lot of time to push that negativity down the page, too.
- [20:31]
Vitus Chakotis
And to kind of add to that, you know, I tell people, like, look, they're going to look at your website before they ever meet you, before they ever walk into your office. Do you feel comfortable that your first impression is saying, hey, go to my website. And boy, sometimes you kind of get this. God, yeah, you know, not.
- [20:48]
Steve Williams
Really.
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Vitus Chakotis
Well, then that's a problem, because you can't control that. You know, you want that to be like, hey, you know what? I love my website. It tells you everything you need to know about who we work with, what we do, how we can help you. That's a great place to start. But if you have that, sort of like, man, I really hope they don't go to my website. It's old, it's outdated, haven't put a new blog post up in seven years. All of these things are first impressions, right? So it's really important that not only does it represent what you do, but it also explains sort of what differentiates you from whoever else they might be looking at. Another thing that we don't personally do for clients, but we get this question a lot, is having some videos on the website. And I say that from an aspect of videos about what you do. Not a, you know, a sky shot of the skyline of your city and you walking from the courthouse. The B roll stuff is, you know, looks good, but it doesn't sell you, really. I'll give you an example of. I think what most people can relate to is that whoever your favorite celebrity is, and I'm not. I'm not saying you would go bother somebody, but let's assume you saw your favorite actor or actress at coffee somewhere and you felt compelled to walk up to him and be like, oh my God, you're my favorite. You know, I loved you in this movie. And you feel like you almost know them because you've seen them in their movies or the TV shows. They don't know you from Adam. You're just a stranger. Hopefully they're nice to you and say, oh, gosh, I really appreciate it. But the point is, you feel comfortable even calling them probably by their first name because you've seen the movies, you feel like you know who they are. I've had lawyers tell me the same experience where someone walks into their office and they're talking to them like they've already met them, because they did through their videos. They watch them talk about the problem that they have on a video and therefore that's why they're probably in there in the first place. So they walk in and they already feel like they have a relationship established. So that's something that can be a big differentiator for law firms is to. And you don't need some fancy, you know, video production company to do that. You know, an iPhone today and a short one minute video about what you do for people can be very compelling. So that's again, what can you do to differentiate yourself and tell somebody why you're a good choice versus anybody else that they might be looking at is something that is really helpful.
- [23:03]
Steve Williams
Yeah, I'll add to Vitus. I've always asked every attorney that has a dated website if the client of your lifetime is on the other end of the phone and asks you what your web address is. And then they go to your website, does it really, truly display your core competencies as a lawyer to that person? And every lawyer should ask themselves, hey, what shows up on the first page when I Google myself or my law firm and control that? And what, what type of impression does my website give to the public or the person thinking about hiring me? And then the third thing is, is a person answering my phone truly selling my business? Those are the three basic things. And forget everything else. You can make your phone ring all the time. You know, you, you can have all the marketing in the world, but if you don't cover those three things, it can be costing you a lot more money than you think.
- [23:53]
Vitus Chakotis
Yeah. And let's segue that into a little bit about what people see. And this can get into reviews as well. Okay. Google reviews. Reviews matter. There's no way to look any other way at it. It affects how you can appear in the maps, the Google my business. It can affect on your performance in LSAs. I find it funny. Sometimes people freak out because they got one bad review and they think it's the end of the world. And I would argue, you know, it really doesn't matter. Just get some new ones and push it down. You know, honestly, if I see somebody that's got 500 reviews and they're all five stars, I'm kind of calling BS on that. Like, you know, nobody had a bad experience. You know, like, come on. But those matter. In response specifically to the Google reviews, if your last review is three years ago, that's not good either. So we constantly tell people to have a process of getting reviews, and there's tools that you can use can actually sort of automate that for you. Because we know that chasing them and saying, hey, did you get a chance to leave? No one wants to do that. They're busy doing things. But reviews are important. And I don't care if it's family, criminal, personal injury, there's ways to do it. And if you take a look at the firms that are typically at the top of the GMBs and stuff, they have hundreds and hundreds of reviews versus the three that you might have. Right. So that's really important. But again, just from the Google results, I'll tell you another actual story. This is going back a ways, but there was an attorney that was in court here in North Carolina, and I guess he was bored in court. And while he's sitting there listening to whatever the arguments are, whatever, behind his newspaper, he had a Maxim magazine, which is, you know, basically like a, you know, bikinis, whatever. It's not really pornography, but nonetheless. Right. And the judge apparently saw him being distracted and called him out on it. Caught him with this, you know, magazine, and you Googled his name. Guess what was the first thing that got, you know, judge put somebody in the corner here for reading pornography in his courtroom, or whatever the term. And shockingly, seven years later, that was still the number one result. His number one job should have been to make sure you put things in there to make sure that story's on page two or three. Because all it takes is one negative story like that or one negative. You know, this person was sanctioned by the bar for this, that you're done, they're going to somebody else. So these days, there's enough things that you can do to displace that entire first page with good things. In fact, I would tell you the top 10 things on the first page of Google, if you Google yourself or the law firm, should be all positive. I don't care if it's a Yelp review, I don't care if it's a profile on Best lawyers of America. Your website should be the number one result. But that for the top 10 things are fully controllable by anybody to make sure that nothing negative is infiltrating that first, that first page.
- [26:44]
Steve Williams
Hence the reason the importance of social media. Social media will shut because Facebook gets billions of views every single day. LinkedIn gets billions of views, millions of views every day. Instagram, you don't have to be active or overly active on social media, but you should have a social media page because those, those websites, the Facebooks and the Instagrams and the LinkedIns, those websites are so powerful that when you put your name and link your, your website to those, to that entity, that, that, that URL, it's going to push the negative stuff down. You know, the, the secret is the more times you can get, you can set up a free profile with the chamber of commerce, your law school, some of these legal directories offer a free profile anywhere. You can do a free profile and input your URL to your law firm, to your website. It's a backlink. And backlinks are important for SEO. If you're ever trying, if you're, if you're trying to build your SEO and you're trying to build organic search, the more backlinks you put to your URL, the better you go make your URL will perform. So an attorney can spend 15 minutes a week and fill out four free profiles on hundreds of different sites and a, push the negative stuff down and B, get backlinks to their, to their URL.
- [28:02]
Becca Eberhardt
Okay, I have a question on that. So you're saying that just by filling out a new profile like that, it's automatically going to come, you know, up to the first page and that's just how that works. Or is.
- [28:13]
Vitus Chakotis
No. Okay, so basically a couple things. There's two benefits there. Okay, so creating a profile on Better Business Bureau or Edu, whatever by putting in the law firm's website there, that creates a inbound link. Okay, so that has sort of back end value to your website's performance because it's an authoritative link to your website. So that's one purpose, doesn't mean that that's going to show up in the top 10 results of Google. You're typically going to get like a Facebook result, maybe the best lawyers of America, some other Justia directory type things. But the number one thing I will tell you, if you Google yourself, the number one thing that should show up is your law firm, not your LinkedIn, not some other profile, yellow pages. If you're getting something other than your actual website to be the first result, you got a problem because that's website 101.
- [29:05]
Steve Williams
And Google incognito to make sure, go to Incognito because Google will read your cookies and your search history.
- [29:13]
Vitus Chakotis
Okay, so for those that don't know what Incognito is, you can open up a browser window in the menu on the right and search. It's basically locked, allowing you to search without your search history being used to run up that search. And it's sort of a clean search versus utilizing the history of what you've looked at before and looked at your own website.
- [29:31]
Becca Eberhardt
So isn't that what we use when we buy flights? Does anyone else do that?
- [29:35]
Vitus Chakotis
Yes. Yes. Because if you search for something, then Google knows you're searching for it, you'll get higher prices. It's total bs.
- [29:42]
Steve Williams
That's.
- [29:43]
Vitus Chakotis
Yeah.
- [29:43]
Becca Eberhardt
So that's what I use it for. Yes.
- [29:45]
Vitus Chakotis
Tips and tricks on travel on here too. Becca. Here we go.
- [29:48]
Steve Williams
Maximum travel.
- [29:49]
Becca Eberhardt
That's exactly right. Okay, perfect. All right. Anything else on that though?
- [29:53]
Steve Williams
No.
- [29:53]
Vitus Chakotis
I mean, you know, as far as what we do, we get questions about this all the time. So what we offer to, obviously we work with a lot of maximum lawyer clients, but to anybody that wants someone to take a deep dive and see where their gaps are or have advice about, you know, companies they can use for, whether it's a chat thing or a phone thing or obviously, you know, how to get your website to perform. We offer free, no obligation consultations. We'll be happy to take a look at everything you're doing, give you the good, the bad, the ugly. Our approach, and you know this, Becca, from all of our time together is that, you know, we're here to help and if we can help you, great. If you just want to ask us questions, we're not going to chase you, we're not going to harass you. But we find that most people are very typically, there's something that we open their eyes to that they haven't seen or heard before or they didn't know was a problem. We have a very hands off approach. We offer, you know, free, no obligation, look under the hood and be happy to share that with anybody that would like us to do that.
- [30:49]
Steve Williams
The other, the other thing we offer is we have a lot of connections with other law firms that have the same issues that you have. Is kind of what you all do. Maximum lawyer. That We've helped law firms that come to us and say, hey, I have this specific issue. We'll connect them with one of our clients who had the exact same issue so they can work it out, so they can get ideas on how to fix the problems they have.
- [31:09]
Vitus Chakotis
And let me actually add to that, because this is also not necessarily a value out of Rise up specifically. But Steve and I have both been doing this for over 25 years in the legal industry, and we know that lawyers get solicited daily, weekly, daily, maybe hourly, for services. Right? Oh, you should buy this. You'll be the only firm we work with. I mean, name your sales pitch right now, most of them, I'm gonna say are just whatever. There's some that have some value and some don't. But a lot of firms can't tell the difference because the slick guy selling it sounded like he's gonna make me really special, right? So to Steve's point of like, we have a lot of clients, and I promise you that whatever somebody's trying to sell you, we know someone that's already tried it. So the same way that people ask questions within your Facebook forum, like, has anyone gotten experience with this? Or does anyone know if you're considering spending money on something, signing a contract on something, hey, should I buy this Best Lawyers of America thing? Does that have any value? Feel free to ask us that again. We'll give you our free, unsolicited opinion. But again, I guarantee you somebody that we work with has already paid for that. And we'll give you, you know, the feedback of what, whether it's good or not. So we offer that as well.
- [32:20]
Steve Williams
We know how to read reports for like, legal directories, all legal directories. We have our clients that we, we actually recommend keeping them if they're working. We'll go into, and dig into the analytics and say, you know what, you're only paying this for this. This is actually really worth it. You're actually getting good value here. Where there, there have been times when we look and say, you know, your, your paying 10 times more than what you would pay per click for a pay per click ad on Google or Yahoo or Bing. So it's probably not worth, if anybody wants us to look at that, we're more than happy to do that. We're not trying to make any cancel anything or whatever, but we'll give you good advice on what's working and what's good. You know, what's going to give you a good cost per click for any kind of directory or Whatever.
- [33:01]
Vitus Chakotis
And to segue on top of that, a lot of these analytic reports are vague on purpose.
- [33:06]
Steve Williams
Yeah.
- [33:06]
Vitus Chakotis
Where they just throw everything into a big bucket and say, this is what you're getting from everything. And whereas, like, no, your line items specifically paying for things, what's each individual item giving you from a performance standpoint? And a lot of firms, they don't either have been told how to analyze that individually or don't know how or whatever. So we're more than happy to dig into the specificity of what you're paying for and if it's worth keeping or not.
- [33:34]
Steve Williams
If you're with a marketing company and you are doing legal, you're spending money on like legal directories or another forum of advertising. Have your marketing company that tracks your phone calls put special numbers attached to each individual legal directory listing or any other marketing. That way you get a true. You get your own results that are unbiased because as white as said, some of these directories, they, they, they're very vague. And the way they kind of lump things together. This will give you an actual. How many people are actually calling me or clicking into my website through this listing.
- [34:10]
Becca Eberhardt
Yeah, that's really good. All right, if our listeners do want to reach out to you, where should they go?
- [34:15]
Vitus Chakotis
You can email us or text us or call us. I don't know if you're going to be able to put our stuff at the bottom of this. As far as contact information, we can.
- [34:22]
Becca Eberhardt
Absolutely put that in the show notes. Yes.
- [34:24]
Vitus Chakotis
Okay. So again, feel free to Steve and I work on all of these accounts together so you can reach out to either one of us. But again, leave us a message, send us an. Send us a text. We're. We're very responsive and be happy to help you.
- [34:36]
Steve Williams
And we're not. We're not harassing at all whatsoever. We promise. We're not sending you 300 emails.
- [34:41]
Becca Eberhardt
Awesome. Thank you so much, guys.
- [34:42]
Steve Williams
Thanks for having us, Becca.
- [34:43]
Vitus Chakotis
Yeah, thanks for having us, Becca.
- [34:45]
Becca Eberhardt
All right, thank you, guys.