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The Effective Lawyer teaches ambitious trial lawyers how to grow their skills and create a prosperous law firm. Using lessons learned by accomplished attorneys from around the country, we discuss lessons learned through their trials and tribulations. Our discussions cover a vast range of topics sought out by attorneys looking for advice, from depositions to how to market your law firm.
The show is hosted by Jack Zinda, Founder and Senior Trial Lawyer at Zinda Law Group. In less than 15 years, Jack and his team have grown Zinda Law Group from 3 attorneys to over 30, spanning several states and handling a variety of personal injury cases from gas explosions to truck accidents.
Jack and his guests share their knowledge and skills that they’ve acquired through the process of building one of the most successful plaintiff’s law firms in the country.
In each show we cover a new topic that an ambitious attorney would want to better understand, while providing practical skills to improve their legal practice.
For more information, visit https://www.zdfirm.com/the-effective-lawyer
00:00
Speaker 1
Welcome to the Effective Lawyer, a podcast for ambitious attorneys who want to improve their practice. My name is Jack Zinda and I'll be your host. Hey everyone, Jack Zinda here with the Effective Lawyer podcast. Today I'm going to talk about managing your online reputation. This is really critical for anyone that has a small business or is an attorney. And I know this can be the bane of a lot of lawyers existence. And what are we talking about? We're talking about things like Google reviews, Yelp reviews, different websites that represent you to the world. And the first thing to know is what sort of impact can this have on your practice? Well, it can make the difference between you being considered an amazing world class lawyer and you being considered a horrible lawyer that doesn't ever get a phone call.
01:01
Speaker 1
And you need to understand that what it looks like online is reality to the rest of the world. So the first thing you need to do is understand that this matters. It is really important and it's almost more important that you don't get it wrong than you get it right. And by that I mean if you are at least neutral it's not going to hurt you. But if you're negative, you could be looking up and getting no business and not understand why. So the first thing I want to tell you is what are the areas you should be looking at when you're considering your online reputation? Okay, there's some prominence, prominent areas where people can either leave reviews or describes your law firm. The first is one that most people know and that's Google. Right. Then there's also Yelp.
01:44
Speaker 1
Then there's a website called Abbo which is a legal directory for lawyers that people leave reviews on. And then there might be something like Yahoo or Bing or other legal sites like the State Bar of Texas. So first you want to make the list of all the different areas where people might find you. You can also Google search personal injury lawyer with your city and see what pops up for people. Okay. You can also put in a Google search for your name or your law firm business to identify other places it might be listed. Now start there. Okay. And then you need to see, do you have any damage control that you need to do? I'll tell you all a quick story that happened to me a few years ago. I've always been obsessed with us having positive reviews online.
02:31
Speaker 1
Our law firm doesn't do any advertising on TV or billboards typically. And so our reputation is really critical for us getting cases in the door. Sometimes we'll get a referral and they'll look us up, see how we're doing. And I noticed that we had this bad review on Google and it didn't have any commentary and it gave us a one star. And then I noticed the same reviewer left us another bad review at another location. I was like, this is weird. And it was hurting our score, you know, pulling it down. And then I clicked on the user's name and they had left 15 bad reviews for personal injury law firms in Austin and one five star review to one personal injury law firm in Austin, which told me of course who it was.
03:15
Speaker 1
So a buddy of mine who was president of the local trailer association at the time drafted a letter and got like 10 other lawyers to sign in it, you know, threatening ethical sanctions against a guy who didn't take it down. And of course he got all them removed, said he was a mishap, his marketing team went haywire. He didn't know why it had happened, but he saw the value in it and I knew how much it could hurt us. So step one, I've identified where the bad reviews or good reviews could be okay. Step two, I need to figure out how I'm going to handle either getting additional reviews or getting rid of bad reviews.
03:51
Speaker 1
At a baseline, you want to make sure that you at least have, you know, five to 10 reviews at a critical spot where you're going to be seen quite often. Even if you don't do a lot of online advertising, you need to have enough positive reviews on there where if someone looks you up, they can see that you are a good lawyer that is honest and ethical if you're just starting your own practice. I used to get a lot of reviews from people I did free legal work for. So say a potential client called in, maybe they only needed help with property damage. I would walk them through all the steps, send them free forms. I said I'll ask you return is if you leave a positive review. If this was helpful.
04:24
Speaker 1
And I probably got 10 or 20 reviews that way my first year of practice. But you need to be intentional about it and make sure it's part of your process. If you get a bad review, you want to make sure that is the highest priority to try to get it removed if it violates your term, the terms of service of whoever it involves in, or that you bury it to the next page. Having done this since 2008 is when I open the practice and we have a 95.7% client satisfaction rate. And that's from internal surveys of clients on every single case. We still get bad reviews. It's mostly from people. We didn't take the case. I've gotten them from defendants in cases. I've gotten them from, you know, apparel that didn't work out. But you're going to get better reason. Just accept it.
05:12
Speaker 1
Don't try to change. You're not going to change the world. You're going to get a bad review. It's how you deal with it when it happens. Number two is you want to make sure you reply to it in a professional manner. Do not say anything that is confidential. So like if Ms. Smith said, hey, you never called me back on my truck accident case and you are rude to me and I had a million dollar case, don't pop off and say, Ms. Smith, your case was garbage. In fact, you were at fault for it. You ran the red light. That is a surefire way to get a bar complaint and you're going to lose that complaint. Okay, you might reply with, hey, I'm sorry to hear about your experience.
05:48
Speaker 1
If you wouldn't mind, please call me at this phone number so we can talk about and see how I can, you know, make this right or something along those lines. Obviously that person's probably not going to call you back, but it's to show the rest of the world that you're a nice, reasonable person. Another practice tip is you can set up alerts. So you get these and you want to set up a dedicated email address that all things like this come to your firm so you can track them as they're coming in and either assign a legal assistant, a paralegal, or a marketing person to be in charge of tracking those things as they're happening.
06:20
Speaker 1
If you'd like a copy of any of the things you heard about here today, or to set up a time to talk about one of our team members about a case, please go to Zendalaw IO and we have amazing resources, downloads, guides and you can set up a time to talk to us if you want to talk about how we handle things or any case in particular. Okay, so I figured talked about what we should track now. We talked about what to do with bad reviews. Now let's talk about how to get good reviews and what your process should be for that. Number one, do good work. Do good work and you will have people more willing to leave you good reviews. If you do bad work, it's very difficult to get positive reviews. Number two, have a great relationship with your clients.
07:13
Speaker 1
This, I know this. All this stuff may sound a little asinine or like, oh, yeah, of course that's what you do. But I don't think a lot of attorneys understand that these things are connected. So you do great work having a great relationship. You can do great work and have a bad relationship with your client. Okay, then number three, make sure you make the ask. All right, so there's a couple ways you can go about asking a client for a review. One is you have your legal assistant have a form email they sent out two months after the case is over, and it just gets sent out, and then it goes to their spam. And maybe one out of every 200 clients will reply back and actually do the review. That's one way.
07:50
Speaker 1
And as you can tell from my sarcasm, that way probably won't work. The better approach is when the case is over, sit down with the client, say, listen, Steve, it has been an honor to work with you on your case. You know, I really enjoy what I do, and I really love that I get to work with clients like you. And I hope we've been able to give you a good outcome that you're. You're happy with. And like, oh, yes, thank you so much. I can't believe how great of work you did for the case. And say, hey, I've got a personal favor I'd like to ask for you. It would mean a lot to me if you'd be willing to leave a review on this website here, and I'll send you a link to it.
08:26
Speaker 1
You know, my law firm works a lot through reputation, word of mouth, and it would mean a lot to me if you. You'd leave just a few kind words. You know, you don't have to if you don't feel comfortable. And then the client says, of course I'd be willing to do that. That, that's no problem whatsoever. And then you ask your paralegal to follow up and see if they did it and remind them if. If they did not. That has a really high success rate. When I see attorneys not able to get reviews, it's because they're. They're either delegating out to someone that doesn't know the client, or they're not making that. Ask a couple other practice tips. You know, sometimes attorneys do a great job. They have a great relationship with the client, but the client thinks they didn't do any work.
09:01
Speaker 1
They said, what all? I paid you all this money and you didn't do anything. You know, you got my case done for a hundred thousand dollars in three weeks, and I only had $100 offer before. You must have Just like sent a letter and nothing went into it. Make sure, explain to the client all of the things you did. Back when we had paper files, I would actually have my team bring out all of the file onto the table when the client would come in for their check and say, listen, here's your file, you know, you feel free, we can make you a copy of it. What would you like to do with it? But you can do the same thing digitally. Say, hey, you know, as you recall, when you came to us, you only had been offered $300 on your case.
09:34
Speaker 1
And at that point, we did an investigation, we did an open records request, we got the crash report, we got photos of the vehicles, we talked to these three witnesses. Then we decided to file the lawsuit. We got the records, and I'm walking through all the things we did to remind them of what went into their file so they don't think it was just waving a magic wand and the money just appeared. Okay, so we talked about one way and how to get good reviews, a process to set up. Now you want to make sure you're tracking these things and you can either use a software program to track reviews, or you can train one of your team members to check them at least once a month to see what reviews came in, good or bad.
10:13
Speaker 1
And then you want to set some goals and targets for how many reviews you want to get every month. We typically shoot for two reviews for every or one review for every two resolved cases. And that gives us a way to project out how many reviews we think we will get over time. This is an area that I see a lot of attorneys, especially been practicing a while, not pay attention to. I, I've seen at least six lawyers this year where I went to their, looked them up and I know they're amazing attorneys. They've gotten incredible outcomes, but they have three reviews and two of them are bad. You know, they're an ex client that's upset about something and they don't even know it. And they're probably, why is no one calling me? Why is no one picking up the phone?
10:51
Speaker 1
But it'll be really valuable to your practice in your cases. And you know, you never know what's going to come in from that stuff as well. If you have any more questions on how to do this, how to set it up, the tactics tips, we're happy to share. You know, Rising Tide raises all ships, so please reach out and until next time, thanks. Thanks for listening today's episode of the Effective Lawyer. You can learn more about our team and find other episodes of our podcast at zindalaw.com as always, we'd appreciate that you subscribe, rate and review the pod. Thanks.