Laura O’Bryan
MyVirtual.Lawyer is a client-centered, online law firm model designed to meet the legal needs of today’s legal consumers - currently in Arkansas, Alabama and Texas. We help clients gain access to quality legal services disrupting the idea of traditional practice and offering an alternative client and attorney experience. MVL’s ... Learn MoreDescription
Laura O’Bryan is revolutionizing a lot in the legal industry with her company MyVirtual.Lawyer. They’re changing the way lawyers meet their clients, work with them, and even how they bill for their work.
Unbundled legal services (aka limited scope representation) isn’t a new idea, but in the age of COVID-19, many attornies and law firms are looking at how they do business and looking for a change. In this episode of our bi-weekly ask the experts interview series, Mark Homer sits down to talk with Laura O’Bryan about all things virtual. From flat fee legal services and publishing your pricing on your website, all the way to the biggest challenges of running a virtual law firm.
Legal marketing looks different when you’re building a firm from scratch, and when that firm is entirely virtual it poses some interesting challenges. Laura and her team at MyVirtual.Lawyer have made a name for themselves in a huge way over the past few years. They’ve even been recognized by the American Legal Technology Awards (americanlegaltechnology.com) for being one of the most groundbreaking law firms in the nation. Like, Follow, Comment, & Subscribe! GNGF TV
Laura’s take on flat fee lawyering wasn’t always met with open arms, she opens up about some of her clients’ initial pushback. Virtual meeting was a sticking point for some clients before COVID-19 lockdowns restricted law firms across the country. Laura was ahead of the curve when it came to moving online and her use of technology allowed her to lower fees and never miss a beat.
Mark discusses her approach to client acquisition and how social media should factor into your firm’s marketing efforts.
Show Notes
Transcript
– Thanks for joining us. This is our extended interview with Laura O’Bryan of My Virtual.Lawyer. The first part of this video is from our GNGF Live, which happens every other Wednesday over on our Facebook page. The second part here is this bonus extended interview, where we dive into the biggest challenges with client acquisition for a virtual law firm, and much more. If you already saw the live I’ll put a timestamp to the exclusive extended interview below. And be sure to like and subscribe to follow along with our great conversations on legal marketing and the business side of running a law firm. And to watch this video on the platform of your choice you can find everywhere we stream at gngf.tv. Welcome to GNGF Live your bi weekly ask the experts about all things law marketing and business growth. I’m Mark Homer, author of online law practice strategies and founder of Get Noticed Get Found. Since we focus a lot around the business side of growing and running your law firm on GNGF Live. I’m really excited to have today’s guest Laura O’Bryan to give you a different model that you may wanna consider for your law firm. Laura is the co founder of My Virtual.Lawyer. I’m excited to talk to her about virtual law firms and unbundled legal services and more. So as always, be sure to like and subscribe to our page, not just our video, so you get updated when our next episode goes live. Of course, it never hurts for you to help us with the YouTube and Facebook algorithm, and smash that like button on the video, too. We’ve got moderators in the chat, so please ask questions and interact while we’re premiering. And if you’re not watching along with us during the premiere, we always monitor the comments and we’ll reach out to our guests to get answers on any follow up questions you have. That’s because we love you all, and we love getting to meet you online and in person. So you can find a list of our upcoming events and anywhere where we’ll be speaking on our website at gngf.com slash events. And weeks when we’re not streaming interviews, we drop a video as part of our GNGF tip series. These are in depth videos focusing on one topic at a time, check them out on our YouTube page or at gngf.tv. You can watch our latest video after this interview of course, at that link in the chat. Check them out, like I said, we drop a new GNGF tips video every other Friday. Okay, let’s get to the interview. Laura, thanks for joining us today.
– Thanks for having me.
– So, it’s interesting ’cause you have a virtual law firm, but you also have something that helps people with, figuring out how to go virtual with your law firm. Tell me a little bit about your background, so we can, people can understand the kind of two areas we’ll talk about today.
– Absolutely, it’s something that it’s sometimes difficult to explain, but I’ll break it down pretty easily, hopefully for everyone. We are a virtual law firm, 100% virtual, have been since the inception of the law firm in 2015. So our law firm has been around for about five and a half years now. And we run virtual and we run 100% limited scope representation, which a lot of people even attorneys are unfamiliar with, which I kind of find fascinating having to explain limited scope representation to attorneys, but it’s a way to deliver services to our clients. And that’s how we feel about the virtual law firm, as well as the way we deliver services to our clients. And so a couple of years ago, maybe three 2018, we had been getting a lot of national kind of presence, and started having attorneys ask us about how to be like us. So we, we’ve founded an LLC, that’s a separate offering. So basically, what it is, is a brand offering of My Virtual.Lawyer, MVL for attorneys. So with that company, we have licensee attorneys that model themselves after the model that we have in Arkansas, or our law firm that’s been in existence for five and a half years. And we also offer things like courses, we have one that’s launching in next week for how to build a virtual law firm, it’s actually not launching it’s just a new, it’s just the second round of it. We’ve launched it for the first time in March. And then we do consultations, things like that. So it’s the law firm that we’ve had for five and a half years. And we’ve built this, you know, really successful law firm model. And then we have the offerings for attorneys on the other side.
– All right because I’ve seen you speak about this for a while, before you had I guess My Virtual.Lawyer and talk about it and podcasts and stuff, right? So one of the things that was fascinating, I think you were very early on talking about flat fee lawyers and flat fee lawyering. So tell us a bit about your experience with flat fee lawyering ’cause you’ve been doing it a while now. And I think your a good example is somebody who has kind of gone and figure things out, but also have had to talk and explain it to a lot of people because it’s so I mean, especially years ago was like a foreign concept, but now I think people are still having a long time, wrapping their head around, like, how would I ever do a flat fee?
– Flat fee, that’s also a new thing for attorneys and we pride ourselves at MVL for being kind of forward thinking, thinking about what our clients and our customers, we kind of think of them as consumers instead of clients, sometimes it’s what our clients and consumers want, and so we figured out a way to do it. It’s also better for the attorney. if anybody listening has ever done the billable hour, it is a nightmare to try to do it. And I’ve been out of law school for 18 years now, which is crazy to me. But I graduated from law school in 2002. And that’s just how you did it. And that’s how most of our profession is run, it’s kind of we’re a very old school protectionist industry, the legal industry, and we do things the way that we were taught to do things, and that one of those includes the billable hour. Flat fee, it is, we still keep track of kind of the general time that we do with things and the way that we base our flat fee, and it’s an it’s a moving target, I’ll say that up front, and I’ll talk about that more in just a second. But the way that we base our flat fee is the average of what we know, the time is gonna be spent on it. With a reduction in price, because we heavily utilize technology, and automation and things like that in order to draft your documents. So there’s a little bit of a discount on a regular flat fee. But we practice things in the virtual world that I have a business partner, Brooke Moore, who actually started the law firm in 2015, I joined her in 2017. And the way it kind of function is, we only do things that we did in full representation, brick and mortar practice. So we know that it takes about average, this amount of time to do like, for example, an uncontested divorce, or to draft an operating agreement or whatever it might be. And so it’s really based on that time that we know average, it’s going to cost us in our mental work product, basically. And we publish our, we even publish our flat fees on our website. And I know that’s very taboo for a lot of people, but it’s to be transparency is one of the key things that we talk about with our law firm. And to us that’s included in that is to say, hey, if you need an adoption, this is how much it’s gonna cost you. And I said, it’s a moving target, we’ve changed our prices, a few different times since I joined the law firm, almost three years ago. And there’s nothing wrong with that, if you decide that this, this particular service is gonna cost $2,000, you might spend less time on one adoption and more time on a different one, a different one that kind of averages out there. But the real advantage is that I’m not having to go and fill out those blue time sheets. First of all, I own my own law firm, so I don’t have to fill them out anyway. But those time sheets that, given the system and generate the invoices and all that fun stuff. I just remember being miserable trying to do the point six hours. And if people really thought about it, I think that they would like the idea of the flat fee, it just is a little bit harder for people to kind of understand that they don’t have to do that billable hour, because the type of law firm that we are, and that most of the people that we talked to are, you’re looking at small and solo law firms. It’s not like you’re gonna collect that hourly rate anyway, for the most part, it’s really hard that law firms are largely collection agencies. And the nice thing about a flat fee again, is that the client doesn’t get the surprise bills, and so you’re more likely to collect everything and five and a half years of us being a law firm, We’ve had zero outstanding balances from clients. We’ve collected 100% of our fees. And a lot of that, I think has to do with the fact that we have flat fees, and that we also offer payment plans for those flat fees.
– And they know what they’re getting into. Like your consumer, as you call them, the consumer knows what the price is gonna be when they’re getting into this, right.
– Exactly.
– So it’s not like, well, it could be around a 5,000. But sometimes, the divorces go up to like 10 or 15,000, so we’re not sure. And we had a I think Dan Lerian on a conversation not too long ago, maybe a few weeks back or whatever. And he was talking about, what drives him crazy that with a billable model, people have these high billable rates, but they never end up charging that, they always like either like cut some hours out or whatever kind of feel, it get down to a price that they think is really the right price, versus doing all that sounds like you did all that work upfront, and just said, Well, here’s the right price, right? So that’s.
– Yeah, that’s exactly right.
– Yeah, I it’s I think it’s fascinating that What is accepted as practice is almost just like old habits versus like, what’s the right idea, right? So I love hearing, we’re coming at it from a different way and being successful, I mean, you’re having great experience with it, I mean, zero collections it’s awesome. So, being a virtual law firm, you guys are meeting with clients in the way that most people have a meeting with clients during the coronavirus right. Well, all virtually. But do you ever get pushback from clients, the meeting only virtually or not getting to meet in person. No, it’s kind of interesting, ’cause we are kind of talking during the Coronavirus time, we didn’t have to actually change our workflow at all. So 100% of our workflow stayed the same. Our marketing changed a little bit, just because it’s kind of a different era that we’re in right now. And, but as far as actually working with our clients, nothing really changed. So what we do is people set an appointment, potential clients set an appointment with us, and that call is largely for us to vet them as clients, not so much for them to interview us, it’s for us to say, here’s what we do, here’s how we do it, are you comfortable with that? And so very rarely do we have people who feel uncomfortable about not meeting their attorney in person. Sometimes that’s really with the estate planning side of things. We do practice estate planning, as well as family law and business law, and the estate planning clients sometimes. That’s the only kind of, sometimes, I can’t believe I’m not gonna come to your office, I’m like do you really want to? Or do you really wanna drive downtown, pay for parking and all that fun stuff, which is what a lot of people do, ’cause most law firms are usually centered in urban areas, even in the more rural parts of the country, you’re still gonna have a law office in town as opposed to out wherever the client may live. So, occasionally we get those people, it’s either that I can explain and they’re fine, or I refer them out to somebody else. But as far as people who actually hire us, we have a pretty high conversion rate for consultations to converting them to clients. And I’ve never once gotten pushback from them, because I’ve set that expectation, that’s the biggest thing that attorneys I think do wrong is not setting proper expectations for their clients. And so that’s why that initial call or video chat, depending on what their preferences, is largely about us, vetting them and setting the expectation of this is how it’s gonna work with me. It’s why we’re probably a little bit less expensive than, the brick and mortar places. And that’s, and we have an even on our website, we actually have a whole chart of where your money goes, when you hire us versus someone else. And there’s zero costs for a brick and mortar space, which that is usually people’s largest or second largest expense.
– Different channels of expense, yeah.
– Exactly is whatever their rent is or their lease is for the, you know, the particular brick and mortar space. So, that was a long answer to say, no, not really.
– Yeah, well, it’s as you were saying it, it was interesting, ’cause it reminded me that the clear legal trends report in the 2019, where it kind of went through, here’s all the things consumers are looking for, and in helping select a lawyer, right? And, as you’re going through it, they talked about like, being able to get to know the lawyer, like you said, through the website, we talk about these things, we have graphics that kind of say, here’s how the pricing works. So even knowing the price, knowing the process, right, you said here’s what it’s like to work with us is a big part of your consultation call. So, like, you’ve gone through all the things that people are saying they want to know about lawyer, ’cause actually in that list was not, I wanna meet my lawyer in person, right? So like, it’s actually fascinating, like you actually are hitting all the things people want. So it doesn’t really matter where they meet you. So that’s interesting. And you have a high conversion rate from that, but at the same time, I assume the people that aren’t gonna convert, maybe aren’t converting, not because they don’t think you’re good at what you do, but it’s because you’ve explained this is our process. And they’re like, okay, that’s cool, I just don’t want that process, right?
– It’s either that or I’ve decided that they’re not, they’re not a fit for us.
– Right.
– Because they do have to have the ability to follow instructions and access the internet, all that fun stuff. So it’s probably more often that I turned down the client, the potential client than it is the reverse, and it’s, if it is the reverse, if it’s somebody saying, this isn’t gonna work for me, it’s just because they haven’t grasped that yet. And a lot of that has to do with demographic too. It’s one of our taglines for our law firm, is that we meet our clients where they are, not where we want them to be. And a lot of that goes with that clear terms of report that we’re talking about. People want to know how much their attorney is gonna cost, they wanna know what the process is, they wanna know what the timeline is, all of that stuff. And so the transparency that we have is, we think we think we’re very transparent with our clients. And you’re exactly right, it’s, you got to find them where they want you to be, as opposed to what our industry has told us for years and years and years, is acceptable.
– That they have to do, right, right. So I’m gonna switch gears real quick, and I wanna come back to consumers and acquisition and that kind of stuff, ’cause anything that’s fascinating at the marketing side of it. But I wanna make sure we cover like what is limited scope representation for those who are maybe still, like new to it, or hazy on it?
– Yeah, that limited scope representation is kind of what it sounds like. So you’re limiting the type of work that you’re doing for the client, and two succinct things, as opposed to I’m your attorney, you hire me, just let me do what I do, and I’ll tell you about it later, I’ll send you a bill later. And it’s from start to finish. So even with our family law, people, I talk about that a little bit more usually, because it’s more different with our estate planning and our business law clients. Those are already people who practice that area, whether you know it or not, you’re already doing limited scope representation, because they’re hiring you for a specific task, and you’re producing that document or giving that advice. And so it’s just that our engagement contract looks very different because we list out the specific things that we’re doing for them, as opposed to a I’m just your attorney for this amount of dollars per hour. So with our family law clients, that’s where it looks quite different. We choose on our limited scope world, we choose not to go to court with people, so we do pro se assistance litigation with our family law clients. And so what what I do, I handle the divorces, and family law issues that are law firm. My business partner does the business law portion of things, that’s her wheelhouse, and I’m the touchy feely gal so not that she’s not, I’m just it’s, the divorce stuff is a little bit more in my wheelhouse and it’s, I’m giving you advice, I’m helping you talk to your spouse, but I’m getting you to an uncontested divorce place. Not everything starts out uncontested, but almost everything ends up uncontested, because they’re usually settlement agreements and that kind of thing anyway. Very few divorce cases go to judge for the judge to decide. It’s a small percentage anyway. And so the limited scope representation in that litigation world, it’s I’m providing you with these documents, I’m your advisor, I help you with negotiation tactics with your spouse, and then we’re done. And my representation does not include a court appearance, it doesn’t include talking to opposing counsel, those types of things. ‘Cause those are the things when I did full representation, divorces, those are the things that drained me. So this way I can still practice law, do what I like, and not have to worry about the things that I hated and took a lot of energy from me.
– Right, and what’s interesting is that, I think that, that is fascinating for people to, to actually come to that realization of like, what you really like to do, and go find a way to do that, right. There’s a lot of lawyers, I think that haven’t figured that out. But at the same time, there are also lawyers that may enjoy the things that other people don’t, like it’s not like everybody likes the same thing, right. There’s somebody who love the contentiousness and the litigation and all that kind of stuff right. So that, let them have that right. And you can focus on this so that’s great. So I wanted a bunch more questions. But one more question, because I think we’re gonna run out of time here in a second. But how did the Coronavirus lockdown, like would come off Coronavirus? How did that affect your business and your law firm? ‘Cause it obviously affected a lot of people and a lot of changes happen really fast, but being virtual I’m curious already, what was some of the the effects you had?
– It honestly, we didn’t have any change in how we function as a business as a law firm. The biggest change was that our, potential clients consultations went down because people were being either furloughed or they couldn’t work because they were not essential employees, whatever it might have been. Whatever state you live in, if you had stay at home orders, or stay safer at home. People were just really nervous about you not having enough money basically to buy the toilet paper hoards and the Clorox bleach hordes and all that fun stuff. So our volume went down, and that was a big deal for us because our largest overhead is our marketing actually. And because we’re a virtual law firm, our overhead for pretty much everything else is very low, our overhead as our software, and our marketing. And the marketing, we had to really changed the tone of our marketing, for both the consumer side for the potential clients for the law firm and also for the attorney side, we had to really kind of pivot, it’s one of our favorite words at MVL is pivots. And we really had to pivot and kind of nudge this towards the law firm, the MVL for attorneys offering, we had to kind of nudge towards, hey, you’re being forced to do this now, so why not talk to us about it?
– Right, it’s kind of debt. And then for the consumer, it was, hey, we understand, so we offered free consultations for the whole month of April, we’re more flexible on our payment plans, you know, that kind of thing. So it you know, it was a little bit different, like, kind of all the commercials that are out there that are like we understand, we’re all in this together kind of thing so.
– So and I wanna dive into, I wanna dive in, if you can stick around with me for a little bit, ’cause I wanna, we have to wrap up our Facebook portion of the show here. But if you could stick around, I wanted to dive into like, customer acquisition, more into that, ’cause I think that’s fascinating with people moving virtual, how do they think about customer acquisition. And then you also talked about litigation a little bit, I wanna understand litigation on a limited scope, how that kind of works a little bit more. So, if you stick around for a few minutes, well, we could post that on Friday to our YouTube channel.
– Absolutely, I’d love to stay.
– Awesome, all right. Hang on one second, we’ll be right back.
– So thanks for joining us today. Be sure to like and subscribe to our page. So you’ll get notified when our next episode goes live. We’re gonna keep going here in the GNGF Studios, so be sure to check out the extended interview with Laura that will drop on Friday. We’re gonna dive into some of the biggest challenges with client acquisition for a virtual law firm. Thanks for sticking with us, Laura.
– Absolutely.
– So before I dive into the marketing, which I could spend a lot of time, ’cause we as an agency do that all the time, but tell me a little bit more about litigation services on a limited scope basis.
– Absolutely, and not everybody does it the exact same way that we do it for our litigation services. We, in this country, it’s not just specific to our state, in this country, there are a ton of pro se litigants. People either don’t understand that there might be alternative offerings out there, other than like the super expensive, $400 an hour attorney, or your other choice, Legal Aid, but we have become this DIY society. And so people going online and googling things for like divorce and wills, and that kind of thing. What they’re getting is a lesser service, obviously, even with things like that have attorneys in the background, you’re still not getting that one on one contact, you’re not getting something drafted for you, getting that form basically. So with limited scope representation, what we are at our law firm, is kind of the medium, the middleman that people can choose between a DIY form filling out on their own, and the expensive hourly rate attorney, who’s for representation. So with that litigation piece, we have decided that what we’re gonna do is the transactional parts of litigation, meaning document prep, instructions. So we give them details. So for divorces, for example, I have my consultation, I draft the initial filing documents, I give them detailed instructions on how to file, where to file, how much it’s gonna cost, ’cause they pay for that themselves. If service is required, if the spouse isn’t gonna find a waiver, that type of thing, they get detailed instructions. But they do all the administrative work themselves, that’s a big thing that we talk about is that we do the legal work, we use our legal brains for the legal work. And then our clients do the administrative work that really is just following instructions. So service either hiring a process server or, whatever it might be, and we take it over. so far as to we don’t go to court with people as well. So pro se litigants are very common in domestic relations cases, for example, that’s the only litigation piece that we really do. And I don’t care where you live pro se litigants are in pretty much every courthouse because they don’t understand that there’s another option out there to get divorced or to not pay a bunch of money. Even in Arkansas, the average divorce is $17,000 per person. And that’s just crazy to me. So we’re not a rich state, and so granted, that means that you got some skewed way up here but it’s a viable option for a lot of people that are not being touched by the bigger law firms and the hourly rate law firms because they can’t afford the, $5,000 retainer, plus the billable hour, even if you’re doing flat fee, we’re just kind of that option in there. And the litigation piece is pro se assistance for the transactional pieces that require a legal brain. I do know some other attorneys that do limited scope representation. One specifically in family law in the northeast, who he does go to court, a court with you. But each separate event is a separate.
– Okay.
– Fee agreement. So if there’s a hearing, then they have to sign a contract for that he goes to court for that. If there is like a final hearing, then that’s a separate contract, that’s you know. So it just kind of depends on how you wanna piece it out, for us, we’ve decided that we don’t wanna do anything with the court, or opposing counsel, mostly opposing counsel that we have a problem with, not wanting to be a part of that. Plus, it also keeps our fees down for our clients because our time interaction with them is less. I’m not having to bill hours for travel time to court, whatever it might be talking to opposing counsel, or negotiating, setting up court dates, all that stuff. So the fees are lower for the clients as well. And you mentioned that technology was a big piece that you guys have used to help lower your fees, and lower like the time you have to spend on a case like, so what are some examples there that you are taking advantage of?
– Absolutely, so the first thing that we save time on, and therefore we can charge a lower fee for, is just the engagement part itself. And when it comes to if somebody decides to hire us, it’s an automated system within our client rock software that sends up the fee agreement, sets up the payment plan or sends up the invoice for full payment for whatever the service is. And then it pushes over to our practice management software, where I have automatic setup for a client portal, ’cause the client portal is how we 100% communicate with our clients. And in that client portal, it sends out the intake questions for whatever the matter is that I have been hired for, whether that’s strapped in an operating agreement, or doing a divorce, whatever it might be, that intake we’ve actually spent the time you said earlier and it’s very appropriate for this as well. You spend the time up front to do the work, and then you get the benefits later. And that’s what we’ve done, we’ve set up the automation for our, kind of form type documents. So a complaint for a divorce is a complaint for divorce, is a complaint for divorce. Same thing about, we don’t do automation as much with our business services, but with our estate planning, you know, it’s a power of attorney, it’s a power attorney, that kind of thing. And so we have the intake questions that our clients, we send it to our clients electronically, they fill it out, we’ve already coded and mapped into our Word document, so that I can click a button after they finish that intake, I can click a button to apply the intake to a form that’s been coded with the mapping, and then it spits out a document for me to go, then go back and look at and tweak and review, if I have to add in legal language that is unique to that particular situation, which there there always is. But the fact that I’m not having to go in and change things, and or have a paralegal or secretary, add in names and phone numbers, and all that kind of stuff. So we heavily utilize client rock and practice panther are the two services that we use for that automation feature, both with the engagement process, and then the drafting of the documents process.
– Awesome, and then, and I love the fact that you’re like, yeah, we save a lot of time and money and effort there, and we reduce our fees because of that. So obviously there’s the benefit of implementing all this stuff and increasing your margins a little bit, but the fact that you’re actually returning it to make that flat fee model work across the board, I think it’s awesome. So let’s get to the marketing side, ’cause you mentioned client acquisition and things changing and stuff. What are some of the challenges with client acquisition when you’re a virtual law firm?
– I think a lot of is that you have to be willing to be out there. Because as a virtual practice, people do wanna know who they’re hiring. And so when you’re not meeting with them in person, so that they can shake your hand, and which nobody’s shaking hands anymore. But so they can shake your hand and, stare in your eyes, and, get a sense of your personality. People wanna feel comfortable with whoever they’re giving a lot of money to help them with a, usually not a fun situation. Not a whole lot of people go to lawyers, ’cause they’re happy.
– Correct.
– So it’s some kind of situation that they wanna trust you. So you got to be willing, as a virtual law firm to be out there on social media a lot. So that’s, it’s a longer game on social media, but we’ve been doing social media for five and a half years at our law firm.
– Right.
– We’ve been doing Facebook Lives for two years now probably, and it’s just, that’s probably the most unique challenge is that you’re closing is different. So closing that case during the consultation is very different, because they already know you, most of the time. We also have videos on our website, that’s huge.
– Yeah, I was gonna mention that, I noticed you videos all over your website.
– Yeah, to us, I mean, that’s huge because we want our, our potential clients to be able to know us as humans, and see our faces and hear our voice, and why we do what we do. And so you know, we try to direct people to the website, that’s where our booking calendar is, as well. We do have a one 800 number but, that’s just ’cause some people still like to call. So I’m not one of those people, but we’ve got a chat bot on our website, all that kind of stuff. But videos and Facebook and all that stuff, Google My Business, all that stuff is key to have your face there. One of the things that our marketing firm has told us about specifically about the course that we launched in March on how to build a virtual law firm, one of the one of the metrics that they checked to see was what types of images did better, performed better, when you know with the marketing leading up to the course launch and 100%, the marketing pieces that had Brooks in my faces on there did better. And it’s just because again that that personal interaction nobody wants to buy a virtual law firm course from somebody if they’ve never seen them. So that was, I will say that was a little bit more of a struggle for me than it was for Brooke, Brooke’s a big social media person, and I’ve never really been, I’m a little bit more private. I had somebody in the bathroom, I went to the Ruth Bader Ginsburg speech in Little Rock, Arkansas when she was in town. I don’t even know what year it is, last year. I think it was last year. And somebody in the bathroom recognized me, and said my full name that’s a little bit surprising for me. But I think that’s the biggest thing is that people need to embrace being out there, and possibly being recognized in the bathroom. So at least it was the women’s room, but.
– Yeah I think that the whole like what we call like know, like and trust factor, you’ve probably heard that before. Like with in professional services, you know lawyers obviously being a very high bar for that doctors and stuff right? So that know, like and trust, you really wanna like, know, like and trust the person you’re gonna be hiring. And so in the ability to have like videos and social media kind of stuff, you’ve already done a lot of that work. So we’ve got, we’re good? Right, sorry, I just heard a beep and I was making sure, it’s what we do here on these shows. So but I think the social media component is great. One interesting thing is, you’re not just getting a lot of people then I guess who are searching for like divorce lawyer near me as much as you’re getting people that have seen or found, because of your presence or your face is already out there in social media and stuff. So, also probably leads that higher conversion rate or better consultation calls and stuff. So, but you’re right, I mean, it is a long game, and it’s definitely a slow build on social media. But we’ve got a client who jokes that, he’ll go into restaurants, he does like a tip of the day thing. So he’ll get his phone out and just do like, what his tip of the day is. And he’ll walk into a restaurant people be like, like, hey, what’s the tip of the day? And they address him right by his name, and everything he has no idea who this person is. And but he goes like it took a year to get there, but suddenly, like now he’s everywhere so that’s great. So what, so social media has been big on for the law firm but also for the My Virtual.Lawyer, is that.
– Yes so we do, we have separate social media. We largely are on Facebook, that’s just been the demographic choice that we’ve made. We do have an Instagram as well that they kind of feed into the Facebook posts feed into the Instagram, but I believe that’s right. Sometimes I misspeak because we pay people to do that, to do that work for us. But with our Facebook, we actually have kind of a brand main MVL page. And then we have sub pages underneath because we are, the Arkansas was the original licensee model basically, is we’re the ones who’ve been doing this for five and half years. But we do have other attorneys and other states in that, so they get sub pages of the MVL brand page, including the O’Bryan and more, which is our Arkansas law firm, that is a sub page of the My Virtual.Lawyer brand page. So we do specific social media on the law firm page, but we also get the benefit of everything flowing down from the MVL brand page. And you’d be surprised it’s actually not that different, the marketing to the two different audiences is not totally different. Because we don’t push services as much as we talk about what’s happening in the world, and who we are like what’s going on with us that kind of thing. With our Facebook Lives, we do Facebook Lives every week, and those are on like the law firm page, the brand page doesn’t funnel down that video to the law firm page, or maybe it does actually, I haven’t even gone to look at it recently. But so for some things, we target it just for this or this, but it is largely, somebody wants to know you, I can talk about the course that we have going on all day long, but if they don’t like my face, or they don’t trust that I’m being honest and real, and all that stuff, that makes a big difference. So I don’t know if that answered your question completely, probably or maybe too much.
– Yeah and that was great. That was great. And I didn’t realize so it’s the My Virtual.Lawyer, and then there’s some pages for each, like, law firm that would come on and kind of be part of that, licensee, okay. Awesome, so, why I wanna make sure we give everybody the opportunity to, reach out and find more information. So where can people learn more about My Virtual.Lawyer as well as maybe following on social media, your Facebook Live, yourself,
– We try to make it really easy. And because we have a dot in our name, then everything is My Virtual.Lawyer. So our website is My Virtual.Lawyer, and you can go there and look for my bio, Brooks bio, we have a whole separate path for attorneys if they wanna look at the different, offerings that we have with courses and consultations and things like that. Our social media is also My Virtual.Lawyer. So our Instagram is also My Virtual.Lawyer. So we’re pretty much everywhere with My Virtual.Lawyer. For if anybody wants to kind of look and see how we function as a law firm, see what examples they can pick up, it’s you can go to My Virtual.Lawyer page and look for locations, but it’s also just My Virtual.Lawyer, A-R-K, ARK, for Arkansas is our O’Bryan and more page and that’s the one that has a little bit more on it than our licensee pages, because they can choose or not choose to do marketing on their Facebook page, because they all have their own law firms as well. So a lot of times they’re doing their marketing on their own law firm page. But that’s the way that you can go, and our email addresses are on there, you can reach out to either Brooke or myself, kind of see a little bit more about how we function. We’ve got videos on there for attorneys to look at, and for consumers to look at. So it’s all just My Virtual.Lawyer.
– Awesome, well, thanks again for joining us today. I mean, I look forward to a post Coronavirus world, where we can actually see each other in person at a future conference again, one of the legal industry conferences out there, and look forward to seeing you and Brook, and thanks again for joining us.
– Thank you so much for having me.
– Hey, what’s up, I’m Josh. Thanks so much for joining us. If you feel like you learned something today, think of how beneficial it would be to chat with myself or another one of our marketing consultants one on one. Go ahead and visit our website to schedule your free consultation. It only takes a minute.