The Lawmatics Blog

What is your role at Lawmatics, and what does your job entail?

I am the in-house Product Trainer for all of our teams. The majority of my day is spent building our onboarding training and specialized training for each team's needs. I work closely with each team to identify areas of opportunity for improvement. With that being said, I am also a sales engineer. I provide our future customers with information on how our software can fill gaps in their intake process, and facilitate a better case journey for their clients.

How did you end up working for Lawmatics?

I graduated from California State University San Marcos during the pandemic. Job offerings during that time were scarce so I was constantly searching for new opportunities on LinkedIn. After finding the Lawmatics customer success position posting on LinkedIn, I enjoyed the interview process. Once on board, I knew Lawmatics was a place I could see myself growing as a leader and professional. I officially joined Lawmatics at the beginning of 2022.

What’s the best part of your job?

The best part of my job is watching everyone on our team begin to understand the platform more and more as time goes by. I believe I have the privilege of working with each and every team and really understanding the ins and outs of our users (customers) journey. There is nothing like watching a new hire or coworker start to understand how our product really does make the intake process for firms a lot smoother and seamless. The phrase I hear most often is “Wow, this software really is amazing!” The phrase is common in-house and when speaking with existing customers/users! It is hard to get much better than that!

What challenges have you faced or opportunities you’ve uncovered working remotely during COVID-19?

I believe all of the challenges I faced during the Pandemic all became huge opportunities. The first challenge of working remotely was time management. I make work objectives priorities, and can really get wrapped up in getting everything done with very little breaks to no breaks at all. Therefore, I found myself doing great work, but missing the human interaction with others and feeling tired from constantly working. I learned short breaks were important and allowed me to work better. My second challenge, as with many others, was human connection. Working remotely can make everything feel transactional, which is how I uncovered an opportunity to make genuine interactions even through zoom or google calls. When working in person or remotely, it is important to not get sidetracked by ONLY completing objectives. The conversations I have with coworkers over zoom or slack can be just as meaningful as conversations in person. Our ability to build connections has limits, but the limits don’t have to stop us from trying to build meaningful connections when it is hard.

Where are you originally from, and how did you end up in San Diego?

I am originally from Rockingham, North Carolina and Buckeye, West Virginia. I moved to San Diego for college and don’t think I will be moving away any time soon.

What do you like to do when you aren’t working?

When I am not working, I spend a lot of my time being active or creative. I really enjoy spending time in nature and the gym. Surfing, hiking, running, swimming, and playing sports have either always been a part of my life or are hobbies I’ve picked up recently. The creative part of me presents itself in so many different ways. I love photography and videography. There is something extremely beautiful about telling a story with a photo that makes me smile. On the other hand, I love to capture a story that is going on around me and edit the video from an experience perspective.

What is a fun fact most people may not know about you?

When you meet me or see me, you would never guess I am a pretty decent surfer. Don’t let the Jordan’s fool you, I really can surf.

Tell us about one of your craziest SFW experiences?

I was selected as one of the players to play against the Harlem Globetrotters. We had a NBA player on our team, Bimbo Coles. It was the craziest experience I ever had on the basketball court. It is literally impossible to guard any of them.

What is the one thing you can’t live without and why?

I can’t live without Jesus, because I understand what he has done for me.

Do you have a favorite saying, quote, or personal mantra and if so, what is it and why?

“Your intention is not what sticks with people, what people will never forget is how you made them feel” I love this quote, because it challenges me to truly listen, and not just listen to respond. Sometimes listening and not responding can be really hard, because it is extremely hard to not always have the last word.

Can you walk us through your "Aha" moment - the moment when you realized how powerful the Lawmatics platform is for lawyers and law firms?

Honestly, I have “Aha” moments all the time. I think every time I am on a sales call or customer success call and the firm says “oh, wow your software can do that too, this is great” it’s another Aha moment. Whether it be an automation feature, document feature, or integration, it all just solidifies the power of our platform for each firm’s unique needs.

Based on your experience, what words of wisdom or advice do you have for legal professionals looking to help their law firms win more business, impress clients, and be more efficient?

If I were to say one thing, it would be this: Automating a response to your client or matter is not taking the personalization away from your interactions with them. I believe it does the exact opposite, because more than likely they will still have questions and call you to get those answers. Now instead of having to complete several tasks, send an email, and be on the phone, you can actually take the time you need to provide the client with all of your attention to answer their questions. There is nothing better than being able to breathe because while you know you are busy, you are not in a hurried state of mind.

Recently, Lawmatics founder and CEO Matt Spiegel joined the Law + Finance Podcast to discuss the legal tech landscape. Learn more about the founding of Lawmatics, how new features come about, and how the needs of law firms are changing. Read the transcript below, or watch the full conversation above.

Podcast transcript

Terrell Turner

Hi, I'm Terrell Turner, the host of the Law and Finance Show, and today we have another great guest on. Now, the reason why I'm excited about this guest is because many law firms that I have talked to, ones that we do bookkeeping for, and helping them with CFO services, are really trying to figure out how do you really keep a good handle on the CRM part of your business? Just managing that pipeline, all of the data, and the insights that you need to get to make sure that you're growing your firm, and you're on top of that sales funnel, and the front end of your firm. And there's so much more value that you can get when you are using the right tool. So, today we're going to be interviewing Matt Spiegel from Lawmatics, and we're going to be talking about some amazing things that they're doing, weigh his history with being a lawyer, helping build out some of the world's most successful law technology solutions, so stay tuned for today's episode. So, without further ado, let me bring on Matt. Matt, welcome to the show. How are you?

Matt Spiegel

I'm doing well, Terrell. How are you?

Terrell Turner

I am great. I am great. Matt, now a lot of lawyers that I've talked to are, they're familiar with Lawmatics, and I've heard great things. Like I said, literally as you, and I were talking right before this, I was working with a lawyer onboarding, and they were telling me about how much they love Lawmatics. So people may be familiar with Lawmatics, but they may not be as familiar with Matt. So can you tell us a little bit about your background?

Matt Spiegel

Yes. So happy to give you some color there. So, I'm a lawyer, I still have my license. I think my parents would be very upset if they spent all this money on my legal education, and then I didn't at least keep my license, even though I don't practice anymore. So I do maintain my license. So I still technically am a lawyer, but I practiced for five years. And then long story short, I ended up starting the company called MyCase, which is most of your listeners, if they're in the legal tech, they are in the legal world. They probably know what MyCase is. So I started that company back in 2010, and I sold the company, I stayed with the company until 2015. Obviously, MyCase today, especially kind of coupled with a lot of your listeners who are interested in finance, and how it intertwines with the world of law, MyCase is now owned by LawPay. LawPay bought MyCase about, I don't know, a couple months ago.So, it's very much one of the biggest legal tech companies in the world. And so now in 2017, so I took some time off doing some other things unrelated to law, or legal tech. And then in 2017 I decided that the law firm world, the legal world, was very much missing a critical part of business management. A lot of tools had been built to help us manage our cases and to help us make sure that we get paid. That's good. But no tools had really been developed to help us run our business, and nurture our clients, and create better customer experiences. And so that's why I ended up starting Lawmatics at the end of 2017.

Terrell Turner

Awesome. Now, one other questions I'm curious about, because you hear a lot of people talk about, they went through law school, become a lawyer. You don't often hear the storyline of, you know what? I started developing legal technology. So where did that kind of come into play for you?

Matt Spiegel

I mean, I think most people in legal tech have a similar story in the sense that I scratched my own itch. So I experienced a problem. I mean, MyCase, most people don't really know, but MyCase was started as just a simple client portal. That's all MyCase was. It was not a practice management tool. It didn't do time, and billing, or all the other bells and whistles that it does now. It was very simply a tool to just share data with your client. And this was because I had a client complaint. I had a bar complaint from a client about my communication, just basically that I didn't call them back quick enough. I didn't return their calls.Even though I did, it wasn't on their time. And so I thought to myself, "This was really silly, there should be an easier way to communicate these things to my client." And doing so with technology was really the only way and there was nothing out there to do that. And so that's, ultimately, how MyCase was born. So, I think this idea of experiencing a problem, and going out, and determining that there was nothing in the market to solve that problem for me, just going out, and building a solution myself, that's ultimately how it went.

Terrell Turner

Awesome. I wonder for when it came down to Lawmatics, I mean creating another technology solution to solve a problem that not only you experienced, but probably thousands of other lawyers when it came down to that, doing the research on, hey, first, let me see if there's something else that's out there. About how many different options of different tech solutions did you end up looking at before you came to the conclusion, "Hey, you know what? No one does what I need it to do?"

Matt Spiegel

Well, luckily, I knew, right? Because I had been in this space for a long time. So, I think I had an advantage in that building MyCase. I kind of knew everything that was out on the market. I knew what solutions were there. I knew what problems were being solved and what problems hadn't been addressed yet. I also had an idea for what problems were on the horizon. Lawmatics, kind of take a step back. Lawmatics would not be possible if lawyers weren't starting to think about their law firms as more than a law firm. If they weren't thinking about their firms as businesses, then Lawmatics wouldn't make sense, because Lawmatics is a tool that helps you think about the business of your law firm, and the things that make up a good business, not just practicing law. And so if you rewind 10, 12 years ago, the legal space was not there.They were not thinking about their law firms like businesses. They were just thinking about them like law firms. They were just focusing on being a lawyer. But in 2014, 2015 when I was still with MyCase, we started to see that sentiment shift a little bit. We started to see a little kernel of this idea, this concept, of thinking about your firm as more than a law firm, and thinking about it like a business. And so now fast forward two more years, your 2017, and now that environment has really started to change, and this idea of running it like a business was starting to become much more mainstream. And so that made a tool like Lawmatics very valuable.

Terrell Turner

One of the things that, it makes me wonder, because I see a lot of parallels between how lawyers think about law firms, and even when I talk to other accountants. I mean it's just where a similar journey of, for the longest accountants did not think of the firm as I'm running a business. It's just like, "Hey, I'm just practicing accounting." I wonder, from your perspective, did you see anything that started to trigger people to open their eyes to, hey, I'm not just practicing law, I'm actually running a business that happens to practice law?

Matt Spiegel

Yeah, in my opinion, what we saw was a shift to smaller law firms, and competition. So what I think you saw was you saw lawyers, you saw a lot of lawyers leaving big firms, and going to start their own firm, become a solo lawyer, hang their shingle. Then so you now have the market flooded with more small law firms. And all those small law firms are like, "All right, we need to go and advertise. We need to go get business." So when you have more firms, you're just naturally going to have more competition to get clients. And when you have more competition, now you need to do more things than just practice law. You've got to do things you're not necessarily used to doing in order to earn that business.You have to go and get it. It's not just going to come to you before. If you're in Cleveland, Ohio, and there's 10 law firms, business is going to just come to you, you're going to have plenty. But if you're in Cleveland, Ohio and there's a thousand law firms, business is not just going to come to you. You got to fight for it. And so I think that's what happened. And that forced lawyers to start to think about things beyond just practicing law. They had to think about how to wow their customer, how to go and market, how to attract them, and then how to close them, right? They got to sell.

Terrell Turner

Gotcha. I would guess probably similar to accountants, that became a new skill that they had to learn. Now, as they're kind of learning that new skill, I mean, then having a tool that helps them kind of understand, "Hey, where is this client in that journey? Or how is that working?" How did you find creating a tool in a way where the learning curve for using Lawmatics isn't so high that they get discouraged, because they're having to learn sales, and they got to learn how to use the tool to help them. How did you approach that where it's like, "Hey, how are we going to make this learning curve for this tool?"

Matt Spiegel

That's a tricky question. I don't know that we've done that well yet. I think we're still learning. I think, well, you make the assumption that we're good at that. Maybe we're not. No, I mean, we're always getting better at that, but I think that is the tricky thing. But I think what's what we've done, one way that we approach that is, look, we've been doing this for a long time. We've worked with thousands of law firms at Lawmatics and have worked with tens of thousands of law firms at MyCase. So, we've got a lot of experience at this company now. And so when we sit down with a new customer who's like, "All right, I've never used a CRM. I've never thought about my customer journey, I've never thought about different touch points and how to nurture them. And I've never thought about when someone's case is over, how I want to continue to communicate with them for the first year, or the first five years, or every year on their birthday. I've never thought about that."So, this is a big ask of them. And so the beauty is we do know some best practices we can help. And so our approach is to actually really push them in a direction, and help them with best practices so that they're not just doing it all from scratch, and they're not relying on themselves. This is not something where they're on an island just trying to figure out what processes to implement on their own. We really want to be a partner for them, and share our experiences, couple that with what they do, and see if we can actually improve their whole process, and experience.

Terrell Turner

Awesome. Now, I'm curious for, as you develop new features, or there are different things that have come out with Lawmatics, have there been any features that you introduced that you may have been surprised how well people gravitated to it, or how well it actually connected with the pain points that the clients were experiencing?

Matt Spiegel

I think so. And I think what I would say more that I was surprised about is I think I've been surprised at how deep we ended up having to go on certain features, that I thought would be good enough at a surface level. So, a good example of that is when we first launched Lawmatics, we knew that something that was going to be very important was going to be e-signatures, right? So, being able to, as part of an intake process, it's obviously very important that you send out your fee agreement, and that they sign it, and now they're signing up with your law firm. So we needed to support those e-signatures, but we thought that, "Look, this could be pretty basic." They have their document in there, we can just give them a little word editor, and they can create their document, they can slap a signature on it, and it's going to be good.We now have this massive document assembly platform that allows you to create PDF forms, and use Microsoft Word documents, and create really robust online, almost like Google Docs. And we have conditional logic, so you can have these documents that are based upon data in your system, and merge it all in there, and it's pretty robust. And I would've never thought at the beginning that would've been a direction that we would've gone down. It seemed we would've just needed something really basic. So, I'm always fascinated with how we create what we call an MVP, for a product. It's called minimum viable product, the minimum amount that you can do for a feature to deliver value to your customer. And I'm always surprised at where we start. So where are we release an MVP, and then where that feature ends up after. And so it's always really fascinating to see.

Terrell Turner

Awesome. I gotcha. Now, I guess also thinking is, were there any features that when you first worked on that MVP version of that feature, where in your mind you were like, this is going to be the feature that really knocks it out the part, but then when you released it, you got the actual customer feedback like, "Oh, they're not as excited about this as I was."

Matt Spiegel

So, that happens all the time. That happens way more than the other side. It's way more often that we release something that we're like, "This is going to change the world." And then it's like nobody uses it. I feel like that's almost everything. And honestly, I think that that happens with almost every feature. It's like, because what's funny about law firms, and I think it's also CPAs, we actually look at law firms, and CPAs interchangeably, and we actually suspect that Lawmatics will be available for CPAs at some point down the road, because we just see it as such a similar vertical.But what I find really interesting is everyone thinks that lawyers are technologically challenged, and they're very slow to adopt technology, but you would be shocked because if that was the case, then giving them something really, really simple would be enough. But that's never how it is. You always give them an inch, and then they want a mile. And so we always release a feature that's super basic, and it's never good enough, because then they need this, and they need that, and they need this, and they need that. And so the product just has to evolve so quickly around it. And I mean that's what keeps it fun and exciting, but it's pretty funny sometimes.

Terrell Turner

It's probably pretty interesting. I mean, when you think about, you guys are helping your clients do a better job of managing the client, their client experience, but on the same hand, I mean you got to manage your own client experience about introducing those new features. Building a product that you're focused on how we help them improve their client experience, do you find that you also have to take a step back? Or do you guys have a client success team, or happiness team that's devoted to how are you improving your client's experience?

Matt Spiegel

So, we always have to think about that from our perspective, and this is where I'm glad that there are law firms that are starting to think about client experience, and client success. From my perspective as a software company, it's all I think about. And we have a massive team of customer success agents who are helping our customers, which are obviously law firms, day in, and day out. And it's a part, we view it as a competitive advantage. If we have a good customer service team, then we are better than a competitor potentially. But what's also interesting is that we will actually use Lawmatics in our own company to do things that law firms would use Lawmatics for. So, we don't just build Lawmatics, but we actually use it for ourselves because of how powerful it is. But we also use Salesforce, and we also use some other marketing automation platforms, which are designed for companies like us.Lawmatics is not designed for a big tech company. Lawmatics is designed for law firms. So we are very open with the fact that, yeah, we have a CRM, but it's not designed for us, so we're not going to use it for everything. We're going to use Salesforce, right? Because it's designed for us. But Salesforce is not designed for a law firm. It's going to be really terrible for a law firm, not to mention very expensive. So, it's really an interesting experience for us having this type of a platform as our product, and how when we use it, when we don't use it, and how we take experiences from the products that we do use, and translate that into our product that we offer to our customers.

Terrell Turner

Awesome. Now, when you mentioned about MyCase, MyCase bought, and purchase Lawmatics. From that purchase, what have you seen has been some of the synergies that's come from the combination of those two companies?

Matt Spiegel

You mean MyCase? LawPay bought MyCase, right?

Terrell Turner

Yes, yes.

Matt Spiegel

So, what's interesting there is that a big part of MyCase business, which people don't necessarily realize is payments. So, MyCase as a practice management platform, they obviously charge a monthly fee, and they can do all your time tracking and they help you do all your invoicing, but then they also have a huge part of their business called MyCase payments. So, that all the lawyers are running credit card payments, they're sending out their invoices, and the clients are paying the invoices, and MyCase is taking a portion of that processing revenue. That's natural, but they're processing an insane amount of money, a huge amount of money. It would make your head spin. So it's a big revenue source. So now you have a company like LawPay, which all they do is provide credit card processing to law firms buying that company because MyCase, a huge part of what they do are payments.So, there's a lot of synergies there. It's been a really interesting experience to sit on the outside and watch what is happening over there. I think the whole legal industry, the legal industry, as a whole, is really kind of sitting back and waiting to see what happens with that marriage. I don't know that, in my opinion, it was a little unexpected, and I think it's going to be interesting to see how that relationship plays out and where it goes. I mean, I think for the first time in a lot of years MyCase has shown some signs of life. For a while it was pretty stagnant, and now it's cool to see it moving along. From my perspective, obviously, I will always be tied to that. That's my legacy. Lawmatics is a great company, and will probably be bigger than MyCase one day, hopefully, but MyCase was my first, and so always going to kind of be remembered for that. So I do want to see it be really successful. So it's interesting to see what's happening with it.

Terrell Turner

And I'm curious for yourself now with focusing on building out Lawmatics, as you look and see what other players in legal technology are doing. One of the things that I've seen in the accounting world is vertical integration becomes a common strategy for a lot of your tech stack, or tech companies in the accounting space is when you look at Lawmatics, do you see other kind of legal technologies trying to make a vertical move into the CRM space?

Matt Spiegel

So, we don't see it that much, right? We have great relationships and integrations with most of the other legal tech companies out there, the big ones, the ones that do practice management, the companies like Cleo, and Practice Panther, and File Vine, and Rocket Matter, and Smokeball, all these companies that really have dominated the space, and we integrate with them. And so what a CRM does is so fundamentally different than what most other software in legal tech does. And it's very hard for them to just sort of say, "Oh, we want to do CRM stuff now, so we're going to go ahead and develop that." It would be a very unnatural transition. So we don't really see it. There are less than a handful of competitors out there, and most of them have actually been purchased by other companies already. And so that has of removed them from the market as a whole, and has made them very specific to the solutions that they're partnered with. So we feel like we're really the only solution out there that does what we do, and does it without any real ties to any other company.

Terrell Turner

Awesome. I love it. I love it. So a couple things before we wrap up. One of the things that I always love to hear from the founder of the company is when you think about the solution that you provide, when people are asking, "Hey, what's the pain point that you guys are addressing?" In your own words, how do you usually explain that to, "Hey, here's the pain point that Lawmatics is addressing, and here's why our customers are happy with what we provide."

Matt Spiegel

So first of all, Lawmatics, I think delivers on what I call the holy grail of value to a law firm, and CPAs act the same way. But if you're a provider of services or a product to a law firm or a CPA firm, I think that there's only two real value propositions that you can deliver, right? One, you can save time, because time is money. We bill by the hour, we're expensive. So, if I save you time, that's valuable to me. And the second thing is you can bring me more business, but those are really, the only two value props. Save me time, and bring me more business. Now, most legal software out there is designed to save you time, and then you have marketing agencies, which are designed to bring you more business, but there are very few companies that can actually deliver on both value propositions.Lawmatics helps you do that. So Lawmatics saves you an in incre... The average law firm saves 20 hours a week. It sounds crazy, but they save 20 hours a week combined, because usually we're at law firms with four or five, six lawyers, or more. We're going to save 20 hours a week, which is insane. But because of what we do, we are going to actually help you get more business with nurture campaigns helping you develop referral business, and then helping you convert more of the leads that you're getting into clients. So, that's the value prop. But at the end of the day, I think where we really help lawyers is the way we do this is by helping them deliver a better customer experience. That's what it's all about to us, is we look at the journey that a client goes through with a law firm, and we try to help a law firm delight that customer at every step of the journey.

Terrell Turner

Awesome. I mean, that's an amazing point of reference for, I guess, for all the lawyers that are listening. I mean, let's say if you charge $200 an hour as your billable, I mean, if you're saving 20 hours. I mean the tool more than pays for itself.

Matt Spiegel

Yes, very much so.

Terrell Turner

So, I mean, if people are interested in finding out more about Lawmatics, and learning more about the great things, where should they look for you guys online?

Matt Spiegel

So, very easy. Just head over to Lawmatics.com. That's where you can go, and you can check things out. You can get a demo there, see a little bit about what we do. That's great. Also, I'm always around. I love hearing from lawyers. I love getting random questions. It could have nothing to do with Lawmatics, I get asked about all kinds of stuff. MyCase is fair game law. Lawmatics is fair game. Being a lawyer is fair game. If you want to talk golf, that's fair game. So anybody can always email me matt@lawmatics.com. I get emails all the time. I'm super, super responsive. I truly do love it. It also helps me. You have no idea how many random conversations get started, and they end up turning into something that helps me grow, or helps me learn what we might need to do differently at Lawmatics. So please feel free to reach out.

Terrell Turner

Awesome. Awesome. Well, before we wrap up, one final question, if you're thinking about all the experiences you've had from MyCase to Lawmatics to being the lawyer yourself, and just growing a business, if you had to share one piece of advice for lawyers who are trying to manage, and grow a law firm, what would be that piece of advice you would want to share with them?

Matt Spiegel

I would tell them to worry less about being a good lawyer, and worry more about providing good customer service. Think about your law firm like Trader Joe's thinks about their customer service, or Amazon thinks about their customer service or Nordstrom for that matter. You go back to those places, not because they sell something that other people don't, but it's because you have a great experience when you shop with them, or when you go to their stores, or when you buy things from them. Make it the same at your law firm.

Terrell Turner

Awesome. I love it. Well, Matt, thank you so much for coming on. Thank you for being an amazing guest, and taking some time out to help us understand the value, and the benefits that Lawmatics has, and then just also your advice, and your wisdom on building a successful business. It's been a pleasure having you.

Matt Spiegel

Yeah, thank you, Terrell. I appreciate it.

Terrell Turner

If you're looking for ideas on how to manage and grow a profitable law firm, this Facebook group is perfect for you, because every week we are featuring conversations with successful lawyers, and businesses related to law firms on tips, ideas, and technology that are helping many people grow, and manage a profitable law firm. So, if you're looking for great tips and ideas, you definitely want to click the link below so you can join the conversation, and be part of the Law Firm's and Finance Facebook group.

Growing your law practice isn’t easy, but it doesn’t need to be an uphill battle. Marketing, technology, and operations can work seamlessly together to provide a best-in-class experience for prospects, clients, and attorneys alike. Leveraging these proven systems will allow you to increase your law firm's revenue while decreasing your caseload simultaneously.In this webinar, Lawmatics founder and CEO Matt Spiegel welcomed David Crum and Brent Harkins, co-founders of Cardinal Concepts, an agency that provides marketing services for law firms across the United States. Some of the key points they discussed:

• Turning basic marketing best practices into a sophisticated client acquisition strategy
• Building a technology stack that converts more leads and automates internal tasks
• The staffing and processes needed to become a market leader
• How to assess new business opportunities to expand your practice

Webinar slide deck

As of 2021, approximately 40% of lawyers in the United States were made up of females. Although this is a significant increase from 70 years ago when only 3% of lawyers were women, the latest statistics show that men are still the dominating gender amongst legal professionals. Yet, regardless of the majority of lawyers being comprised of men, women have undeniably played a substantial role in the legal industry, and have made some of the most impressive and trailblazing lawyers in history.

These iconic female lawyers' impact on shaping the world we live in now is evident, as statistics show that more and more women are attending law school than ever before in history.

Here are six badass, glass-ceiling-shattering, won’t-take-no-for-an-answer female lawyers in history who changed the world as we know it.

1Hillary Rodham Clinton

You know her as many things— from former first lady of the United States, to former United States Senator, to former US presidential candidate. She has unarguably one of the most impressive political resumes of any woman in history. Hillary graduated from Yale school as one of only 27 women in her class. Yet rather than pursuing a job in a big firm, she turned towards advocacy, working for the Children's Defense Fund. Her public service led to the historical legislation that would require quality education for students with disabilities who up until then were not offered equal education. After her marriage to Bill Clinton and during his years as governor of Arkansas, she continued to run a highly successful law practice and was deemed one of the nation’s 100 most influential lawyerstwice by the National Law Journal.

2Ruth Bader Ginsburg

From a modest working-class neighborhood in Brooklyn to one of the most influential women in a male-dominated field, not only was she the second female ever to join the U.S. Supreme Court, but also the first Jewish woman. When she started law school at Harvard as only one of 8 women in a class of 500, she was already a mother. Yet despite the challenge of balancing motherhood with law school, she persisted. Not only did she persevere, but she also graduated first joint in her class. She went on to become one of the few female law professors at Rutgers Law School as well as Columbia Law school, which was unprecedented at the time. Yet despite her outstanding career, she continued to encounter discrimination as a female. As such, she fought vehemently for gender equality and served as director of the Women’s Rights Project of the ACLU. In 1980 she was asked by President Jimmy Carter to join the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, where she remained until she was appointed to the U.S. Supreme court in 1993. During her time as a U.S. Supreme Court justice, she was a powerful voice on gender equality, workers' rights, and civil rights.

3Michelle Obama

Beyond being one of the significant female role models in American history as the first African American first lady in United States history, she also graduated Harvard Law School. She specialized in intellectual property law at Sidley & Austin where she met her future husband Barack Obama. Her persuasiveness and adept speaking skills played a prominent role in her husband’s campaign as he was elected the 44th president of the United States in 2008.Throughout her tenure as First Lady, she launched the Let’s Move campaign, a program dedicated to ending obesity among the young generation. She initiated more nutritious food options in schools as well as greater access to healthful food in underprivileged communities. She also actively encouraged students to continue their education beyond high school by visiting schools across the nation.

4“Judge Judy” Judith Sheindlin

Before you knew her as “Judge Judy” on daytime television, she was Judith Sheindlin, and she was the only woman in her graduating law school class in 1965. She passed the bar the same year and managed to run a private practice as well as raise two children. In the early 1970’s “Judy” was a prosecuting attorney for New York City’s family court and later a judge in the Bronx family court. Her workload was substantial, and as such she quickly earned a reputation as a “no nonsense” “give it to me straight” approach to handling her large caseload.Her candid and straight to the point delivery caught the eye of TV executives looking for a new incarnation of the popular show The People’s Court. Judge Sheindlin handled small claims cases on the tv show, and was an instant success. After 25 seasons on television, Judge Judy is now a household name in America. As one of the most trailblazing female lawyers in history, she would later go on to say that she didn’t judge her cases based on particular laws but based them on “good old common sense.”

5Loretta Lynch

As the daughter of a librarian and minister, she spent a large portion of her childhood watching court proceedings. Loretta’s early interest in court proceedings came from her grandfather who would tell her impassioned stories of how he helped people escape persecution under Jim Crow segregation laws. “I realized the power the law had over your life and how important it was that the people who wield that power look at each situation with a sense of fairness and evenhandedness,” Loretta said. She graduated from Harvard Law School, and went on to be the first African-American woman in history to become an Attorney General. She served two tenures as attorney general under Bill Clinton’s presidency as well as Barack Obama’s. Between her two tenures she aided in prosecuting crimes commited during the Rwanda genocide. She also played an important role in the prosecution against Brooklyn police offers who brutally beat and sexually assaulted Abner Louima, an immigrant from Haiti. With her help, the two officers were sentenced to 30 years in prison.

6Arabella Mansfield

If there is one female lawyer who paved the way in American legal history, it’s Arabella Mansfield. In 1869, despite only males being permitted to take the Iowa state bar exam, she passed with flying colors. Following passing the bar, Iowa lifted its female restriction and she was officially the first female lawyer in U.S. history. Despite passing the bar, however, she didn’t pursue a degree as a lawyer but as an educator and activist. Throughout her career she fought passionately for the women’s suffrage movement, although she passed away several years before suffrage was officially achieved.Her accomplishments and important role in shaping the legal industry as we know it today makes her one of the most groundbreaking female lawyers in history.

Success as a female attorney: rising to the challenge

If there’s one main takeaway from this group of iconic female legal pioneers it’s that women aren’t just equal to their male counterparts, they can downright outshine them. It all comes down to perseverance, and the right tools, and it’s possible to rise to just about any challenge.While women may no longer be required to fight for their right to practice law, they’re still the minority and gender biases are still a reality in any industry but particularly the legal one.In the male dominated industry of law women have to work even harder to rise to the gender-specific challenges like wage gaps, harassment, and work life balance. Lawmatics is the #1 all in one law practice software that can streamline your law firm and help you rise to the challenge. By filling in the operation gaps thanks to powerful automations, you can focus your attention on what matters most at your law firm— your client relationships. Whether you’re a solo practice or a larger firm, Lawmatics will guarantee to make your firm more efficient and profitable with one easy to use cloud based software. Are you ready to see how Lawmatics can put your firm on auto pilot and keep your clients engaged every step of the way? Schedule a demo today!

The legal industry is in the midst of a rapidly changing technology landscape. Until relatively recently, lawyers have lacked software solutions built specifically for the unique needs of their industry, including nuanced timekeeping, billing, document security, and data collection. Lawmatics CEO Matt Spiegel recently joined the podcast Everything Except the Law to share how legal-specific software like Lawmatics can address two critical issues for legal businesses: saving time and acquiring more business.

Save time

The most direct way to save time is to have a legal software that can do your work for you. Automations save so much time that they’ve essentially become mandatory for a modern law firm. An average firm that uses Lawmatics saves 15 to 20 hours a week because they automate tedious tasks like appointment confirmations.

Increase business

In addition to saving time, automations increase your capacity beyond what you could ever do with human power alone. Take this example from Matt’s experience as a criminal defense attorney in California: you represent a client who is charged with a DUI. That client has potential to become repeat business because they want the DUI expunged from their record after California’s three year waiting period. It wouldn’t be practical for you to manually track such a timeline, stay in contact, and maintain necessary records for all of your clients with that kind of repeat potential. An automation system like Lawmatics does all that work for you. It can even automatically email that client to let them know they’ve become eligible for expungement. A CRM system like Lawmatics provides all kinds of data, like insights into how maximizing your capacity to handle repeat business increases the ratio of revenue to your client acquisition cost. You can define key progress indicators (KPI) that are relevant to your firm’s business model, and make sure you’re spending your money in the most effective way possible: what types of cases provide the most revenue, what types of cases cost the most to acquire, what marketing efforts provide the most bang for your buck. Those KPIs are essential in making strategic decisions for optimizing your firm’s business.

Key takeaway

Legal tech platforms like Lawmatics are a necessity for managing the back-end, administrative functions of your firm. They’re also necessary for creating a great experience for your clients. An automated follow-up system won’t increase repeat business if your clients have a bad experience the first time around. A CRM as powerful as Lawmatics can make each client feel like they’re your only client. Instantly confirm appointments with personalized automated emails and SMS messages. Stay top of mind with newsletters. Provide comprehensive and easily digestible billing statements. Analyze your marketing performance with detailed analytics and KPIs.If you don’t use a system like Lawmatics yet, a new era of success for your firm is still waiting. Get started by booking a free Lawmatics demo today.

Podcast transcript

Matt Spiegel

What Lawmatics does and what I think any law firm needs to have this day and age is an automation platform, right? Is automating things that are mundane, the processes that happen all the time. I got to be honest, Nick, it's crazy to me the amount of time that our customers are saving. I had no idea. Our average law firm, which has like three to five lawyers in it, right? They're saving a total of 15 to 20 hours per week.

Nick Werker

That's insane.

Matt Spiegel

Over 50% of the firms were saving that kind of a time. So automation is mandatory now.

Nick Werker

Hey everyone, welcome back to Answering Legal's Everything Except the Law Podcast. As always, I am your host, Nick Werker. If this is your first time tuning in, this is the podcast where we share expert advice on all the parts of running a law firm that attorneys weren't exactly trained for back in law school. Now in this episode, we're going to be taking a closer look at Lawmatics, one of the most popular CRM platforms for lawyers for good reason. If your practice is looking to boost its efficiency, client engagement, and number of new prospects overall, you're definitely going to want to stick around and learn more about Lawmatics. Luckily for us providing us all the details on Lawmatics today will be the platform's founder and CEO, Matt Spiegel. Matt, thank you so much for joining us today.

Matt Spiegel

Yeah, likewise Nick. Very excited to chat with you.

Nick Werker

Yeah, been looking forward to this. So can you tell our audience a little bit about Lawmatics, how the platform originally came to be? Where'd you come from?

Matt Spiegel

Yeah, good question. I guess, and the background is relevant to the discussion, but I'm a lawyer, so I cut my teeth at a big law firm and then started my own law firm. And ultimately the idea for Lawmatics or the concept of Lawmatics really came from research that we were doing at my previous company. So my previous company, which I founded out of my own law firm is My Case. So one of the biggest practice management companies out there still. I started that company in 2010 and I left the company in 2015. And so it was really, at My Case, we were dealing with thousands and thousands of law firms and doing a lot of research and trying to understand not necessarily what lawyers needed or what problems they needed to solve now, but how were they thinking, right? What was top of mind for them when it comes to their business?And really at that moment we saw the kernel of an idea and that idea was that lawyers were starting to think about their law firms as businesses and not just law firms. But this was not a mainstream idea yet. This was just sort of, like I said, it was a kernel. And this was in 2014. So then we fast forward to 2017 when I was looking to come back into the legal tech world and I just thought that the market was now ready. I thought that this idea that started as, in its infancy in 2014 was now picking up steam. And lawyers were really starting to think about their business and not just the law firm. And so we started Lawmatics really as a tool to help you focus on the business of your law firm and not on the practice of law or the management of the cases.

Nick Werker

So I'm personally curious, what was it like to... What made you... I know you said that you saw the evolution, because I agree with you, I remember that timeline in 2017 kind of being, I would say the turning point that I remember that lawyers were ready to take on technology and really build up their firms as a business. But what made you come back and what was it like leaving My Case?

Matt Spiegel

Well, so I left My Case in 2015 and then I went and just messed around for a while. I did things that were very unrelated to tech, and I guess I thought that that's what I wanted to do. I actually just took on as CEO, running a consumer electronics company, I guess is the best way to describe it. It was kind of like Nest, right? The camera product, it was like that. So it was a hardware and a software company and I thought that was what I wanted and it was just really hard and not for me. So what drove me back to legal was really just, it was time for me to start my own business again, my own startup. And I just realized that this was a space that I knew very, very well and it just kind of drew me back.And so I think that was one of the problems I had with being in the consumer tech space. I'm a consumer, but I don't know, that doesn't make me an expert. It doesn't put me in that space necessarily. And I wasn't necessarily as passionate about it. And I think the passion is really important. And so coming back into legal tech was kind of an easy transition for me, but I think I felt very strongly that, and you probably can sympathize with this, as entrepreneurs or I guess business owners in the tech world, we use tools to help us run.... We live die by tools to help us run our business. We live and die by CRM tools or business analytics tools, business intelligence tools, things like Salesforce or HubSpot or whatever dashboarding software we use. And that's been the way that we've run our businesses for 20 years.But legal wasn't quite there, but now you saw that legal was wanting to go that route and we're like, "Wait a second, they don't have these tools that we've used forever." And so it seemed just very natural to just take the best of the tools that we use and try to put it into a platform that an industry that has been technologically slow could actually use.

Nick Werker

So I couldn't agree with you more and that's why, so I want to talk about specifically Lawmatics. So you leave in 2015, you come back in 2017. I'm sure that at the reentry point in 2017, because I remember trying to get integrated with a bunch of the platforms that were around and they didn't... I could have used them. And that doesn't say much for running a law firm because I don't run a law firm. I run a pretty big corporation. So I want to ask why do lawyers need a platform like Lawmatics and why is it so important for them to invest in a quality CRM? Because it's not one of those things that is so prevalent that everybody knows which one to get and how to customize it for themselves. What is it specifically that lawyers need that Lawmatics can address?

Matt Spiegel

Well, so this is a really good, I think this is just a good holistic discussion, right? Because one, the tools to do this, you and I just talked about how we've been using tools like this for 20 years. Well, there's no reason why a lawyer couldn't use the same tool. So these tools have been around forever. It kind of highlights the fact that lawyers need software that is built for them. It's a professional service industry like legal, I think just needs products that are tailored to their way of being, right? To their processes to... They have nuanced time being, tracking your time billing. Those are important things.Signing documents, maintaining the security of documents, gathering large pieces of information, collecting data from a particular client. There's unique things that a professional service industry like legal needs. And so you look at, well, why haven't lawyers just adopted other software out there? Well, the reason is because those softwares haven't been tailored to their needs. And this is the same for any software. Forget, just forget CRM, forget Lawmatics. It's anything, right? There's a reason why lawyers use My Case or Cleo and not Fresh Books or some general platform that is designed to do invoicing, right? It's because they need things, they need trust accounting, they need certain things that are more specific to the legal world. And so every lawyer should want a software that helps them measure their business and engage their contacts, their leads and their contacts more.One thing that's really critical to remember I think, is that it's about 75% of all law firms business comes from referrals. And that's not just other lawyers, it's your own clients. So what I see, I'm sure you see the same thing, but what I see in working with so many law firms, the lowest hanging fruit, the part that lawyers are screwing up the most, is they're sitting on this gold mine of business. They've got thousands of clients that they've helped in the past and then they're not doing [inaudible 00:10:10] to engage them once their matter's over. That matters over and they're like, "All right, see ya." Right? Five years later when that person knows somebody who needs a lawyer for the same practice area, it's been five years, maybe they remember you, maybe they don't. You haven't been nurturing them, you haven't been making sure that you stay top of mind. There's so much missed opportunity. And you can't do that without software. You can't do a good job of that nurturing without software.

Nick Werker

It's not like you and me, where we get one customer and the customer stays for whatever. I think my average customer stays for two years, right? I don't really have to live and die by referrals because my customers aren't just one off things. I build a relationship with each individual customer. So it is funny to hear that you're sitting... It's funny to hear how law firms have to run differently as a business, but how it's all the same principles. If you could automate this process, you'd make so much more money just by simply nurturing the clients that you already have and telling them, Hey, when you run into a friend or a colleague or a coworker or so on and so forth in the future who needs my help don't hesitate to send them to me. And you can automate that. You can automate that by emailing them, by keeping in contact, by engaging them, by educating them. The possibilities are endless.I do want to talk about... I hate to say that the past few years have been chaotic, but I don't want to say chaotic. I want to say the past few years we've seen a great amount of change and really a shift in the mindset of law firms in their willingness to adopt software and technology for their firms. But from the source, I want to hear what type of feedback have you gotten from users of your software during this time? What are users and what are lawyers saying about Lawmatics? What have they been able to accomplish over the last few years?

Matt Spiegel

Well, first of all, I think that at least now in the legal industry, because look, I've been in the legal tech industry since late 2009. So I've been with it through thick and thin. And we started with My Case in the days when it was me, it was Jack at Cleo, it was Larry at Rocket Matter. And we were just sort of getting this whole cloud thing going. They even started it before we came along. And now at least the idea of the cloud and even practice management in the cloud is table stakes. People are okay with that. By being okay with that it's like they've accepted all other types of platforms. And so it's nice we're not having to educate people on this is why you need to use web based software anymore. We've kind of crossed that chasm. So that's very helpful because when I was starting My Case, it was not that we had to educate the whole community on, "Hey, it's okay, it's safe to use the cloud. In fact, it's safer to use the cloud than whatever it is that you're using currently."So we don't have that problem anymore. But what we've heard, really what we've heard through the last, for the few years, during the pandemic obviously, I think that's also been a good push for law firms. They almost had to use technology. If they didn't use technology before, they almost were forced to just by nature of the circumstances and by nature of what their clients now wanted of them. And what I mean is maybe they didn't want to use Zoom because they were afraid of it, right? Now they're forced to. So we've seen that forcing of technology on top of the idea that it's okay to use technology now being very commonplace. So that part of it I think has been great and wonderful for the industry as a whole.For us, what we're really seeing and what people tell us about using a software like Lawmatics, which is actually pretty incredible, it's two things. There are two value props. And actually, I'll take a step back here because it's important and I think, curious if you'll agree with me on this one. I think there are two value props as a service provider that you can deliver to a law firm. And it's really only two. You're either going to save that law firm time, which is going to... Time is money, or you're going to get them more business some way. But at the end of the day, that's really kind of it, those are only really kind of the two value props that you can provide. It's the very rare company that provides both. You guys actually interestingly, you guys probably provide both, right?

Nick Werker

Yeah. I don't want to be that guy and say that, but...

Matt Spiegel

No. But you do because you're obviously saving them a ton of time by taking phone calls off the table, letting someone else handle that. But you're also then answering the call and you're situated in a way that you're going to help them convert and get that lead, that potential new client connected quicker and hopefully a higher percentage close. Right?

Nick Werker

Yeah. And we don't generate new business. We don't help them make more money, but we do help them capitalize on the opportunities that their marketing...

Matt Spiegel

That's exactly...

Nick Werker

And goodwill have already generated.

Matt Spiegel

Yeah, that's exactly right. Lawmatics delivers on the same two value props in the same way. The amount of time... So what Lawmatics does, and what I think any law firm needs to have this day and age is an automation platform, is automating things that are mundane, the processes that happen all the time. I got to be honest, Nick, it's crazy to me the amount of time that our customers are saving. I had no idea. I actually thought that it would be the other way around, that our bigger value prop would be all the new business that we're getting because of our conversion, the intake process. We're going to help you convert more leads and we're going to nurture your past clients and that's going to bring in heaps of business. And that's true, that happens. But what's astounding is the amount of time we are looking at, we surveyed our users and our average law firm, which has three to five lawyers in it, they're saving a total of 15 to 20 hours per week.

Nick Werker

That's insane.

Matt Spiegel

And I was completely floored. And so we double checked all the data because I thought that there was, people were just clicking the wrong thing. But it was over 50% of the firms were saving that kind of a time. So automation is mandatory now. And the best example I give to tie some of the stuff we were talking about earlier together, and I ask this question all the time is, "Okay," so I have a room of lawyers and I say, "All right, who has more than 500 past clients?" Everybody raises their hand. I say, "Awesome. How many of you are communicating with all of them on their birthday?"And then all of the hands go down, right? Because how the hell are you going to do that? How are you going to send an email to every one of... You have 2000 past clients. How are you going to send an email to them on their birthday? Well, you can do it with an automation platform. It just does it for you, right? It's such an easy concept to kind of understand. And if you don't understand how sending an email to your past clients on their birthday can help you get business, then I'm not sure that we can really help you. It should be pretty easy to understand how valuable that could be.

Nick Werker

I like the idea that, because I don't do that. I don't email clients on their birthday, but I do have other automations that happen when clients reach certain milestones or.

Matt Spiegel

Yeah, exactly.

Nick Werker

It's just automated. So...

Matt Spiegel

I used to do criminal defense, and in California, when you get a misdemeanor, you can get it expunged from your record in three years. So if I get a DUI, I can't wait for that three year mark because I really want to get that thing expunged, right? That's huge. You need a lawyer's help to get it expunged. And as a criminal offense lawyer, I would charge 1,500 bucks to do an expungement, right? Here's the problem. How am I going to remember when everyone needs their expungement? I'm going to set a little calendar date three years out, and I'm going to look at my... "Oh, it's time to contact this." No, but how awesome would it have been when I was practicing criminal defense if I already have their conviction date, I'm keeping track of it in my software. So how awesome would it be if just two years and nine months after their conviction date, it just automatically sent the person an email saying, "Hey, guess what, come back. It's time to do your expungement." It would've been a printing press. I would've just been printing money.

Nick Werker

And how much money do you save on lead generation? Because you've already converted that person as a customer. They're already comfortable working with you. You don't have to go out and find new expungements. You already have pending expungements. That's your...

Matt Spiegel

That's exactly right. And it's value. So this brings us to a discussion, which I'd love to have with you, and you'll probably like it too, I guess. But the other big thing about a software Lawmatics and we haven't talked about yet is metrics, KPIs. I believe truly that if you cannot measure a marketing source that you are spending money on, then you shouldn't do it. And it might be working really well for you and taking it off the table might kill your business, but if you can't measure what's working, you shouldn't do it at all. Right? And so to come back to one of the most important metrics, I think is acquisition cost. These are things, you and me, Nick, we know that like the back of our hand, we live and die by CAC, customer acquisition cost. But lawyers don't even know what that is, but they should.If your average revenue from a customer, from a client at a law firm is 2,500 bucks, but you're spending $5,000 to get that client in marketing, well that doesn't work. So to come back to this example where it's like, all right, let's say you spent $500 to get that DUI client and you made $5,000 from them for the case. Well now if you go get another $1,500 from them, that just increases the ratio of your cost of acquisition to the revenue side, which is really, really good, big metric to pay attention to. But these metrics, these KPIs are so critical. We're trying to introduce these business defining metrics to law firms that they typically don't measure.

Nick Werker

We will be right back after this short ad.Speaker 3:When a client calls, they're really looking for immediate service. Because we have Answering Legal and we're able to see every client message and we're able to contact our clients immediately. My name is Margo Gannes and I'm a partner at Gannes and Musico. We started using Answering Legal because we were unable to answer all of our phone calls. Answering Legal has allowed my firm to get hired on numerous clients that we never would have. We get messages throughout the night and on the weekends, sometimes we're in court or we're dealing with other clients. And because of Answering Legal, my partner and I are able to address any client concerns or any new clients immediately. And it's really increased our business. Answering Legal has allowed us to service our clients in a way that their needs are met and their phone calls are answered, and we're able to spend more time doing the things that are necessary for our clients.

Nick Werker

I want to pose a question to you because I have a feeling that the answer is yes, and it seems like from what I know about Lawmatics, that the KPIs are really strong, but the insights that you can glean from the KPIs are really strong. I want to do this with a story because this is a true story. So about a week ago, a very, very, very close friend of mine called me up and he's like, "Hey, you do marketing, right?" And I said, "Yes, I do marketing." And he said, "Well, I'm trying to find another income stream..." In so many words, this guy used to be a high end waiter, he has a day job, but he just wants to make more money for his family, he needs more money. He's like, "I've been writing freelancing online, but that's not really sustainable. And I'm looking to do... I do SAT tutoring and I can do tutoring virtually, and I'm really good at it."And so I'm talking to him about, I was like, "Yeah, I could. I'll do it for you, man. I'll set up your website, I'll set up a calendar, they can book, I'll host it. Don't even worry about it. I'll do the whole thing." And he's like, "Oh, but what about Google? Can I spend money on Google? I have a friend who spends money on Google." And I was like "Off the top of my head, I don't know if each of those clicks that we would generate for you is going to be more or less or profitable for you based on what you try. I know nothing about your business. I can't tell you if you're going to make more money than it's going to cost me to bring you a client. On the flip side is I can't even tell you what it would cost in any space on what it would would cost you, nor the amount of time that it would take either you or me to generate an ad or..."So I want to know, because I think that this is kind of true, is lawyers have different types of cases that might take a certain amount of time. So the return on spend or the revenue that you might make versus the amount of time that it takes you to complete that case could be different. And each different medium has a different cost. So is there a way to cross reference all of that and see where I should be spending more money here to get this type of criminal defense case, and I should be spending more money over here to get this type of criminal defense case, because this one might take me a little bit more time, but the spend on this platform is way lower. So can you optimize where you should spend-

Matt Spiegel

Absolutely.

Nick Werker

... Your money on?

Matt Spiegel

Absolutely. Again, this is where... And we can geek out over metrics and stuff, but my view is you need to be able to slice and dice. You need to be able to slice and dice your data however you want. I view it as you need to be able to ask whatever question you want of your data. So if I want to ask that question, which is like, "Okay, which type of criminal defense case is more valuable to my business?" You should be able to ask that question of your data and get an answer. And I think that's pretty fundamental. I mean, well, most fundamental would be just general source tracking. I'm spending this much money on an AdWords campaign and this is the ROI that I'm getting. But being able to slice and dice that ROI and analyze the revenue that you're generating from a particular matter, a particular type of case, and how much time you're spending on it, these are all things that you should be able to look at in many different ways.

Nick Werker

Yeah, you're right. I just geeked out and tried to ask you a complicated question because I get excited about... Because I have that... I can do that. I can find a certain type of law firm that I get from this certain type of ad and they only use... Obviously I want people to use more minutes, but I find a certain... I can only find, say I charge by the minute, I can find bigger customers in one place, but I find a lot more smaller customers in another place. And what's more valuable to me and how much does it cost to obtain each one? And where should I be doing that? So I just get nerdy.

Matt Spiegel

I mean I'll be like... I mean, you should see our data. I'll be like, "Hey listen, I want to know what... Is a lead more valuable if it comes from Google after 4:00 PM on a full moon."

Nick Werker

Yep.

Matt Spiegel

Right? I mean, we'll get crazy with our data.

Nick Werker

I run into that problem a lot too, where I'm like, "Am I overthinking this? Am I putting too much? Is it just random?" There's no trend for the full moon, but I want to know.

Matt Spiegel

It's really, to me it's all about, you do have to be a little careful, I think is good advice to share with law firms. It's like you want to make sure that you have some statistical relevancy. So if you're looking at a particular data set and you're trying to drill down into numbers and your sample set is two cases or something, it might not be statistically relevant. So you want to make sure you have enough sample set that you're getting data to make a decision off of, right?

Nick Werker

Totally. Don't change your entire strategy because you've got one big whale or... You know what I'm saying? And don't quit before the miracle happens too.

Matt Spiegel

That's exactly right.

Nick Werker

You have to give yourself, I would say, ample opportunity in order to and sample size, what's statistically relevant for my stats people out there in order to make decisions. But I want to talk about clients because I think we sort of give lawyers in the past six to 12 months, a lot of people are like, "Oh, lawyers are doing so good. They've caught up, they took on the technology, they did this." But I give more credit to the law firms that have become what I'll call client centric. And what I think is becoming a term now. How have the expectations of legal clients evolved in the recent years and why might law firms need a platform like Lawmatics in order to meet those expectations?

Matt Spiegel

So look, this is my bread and butter. This is what, when I go around and talk to bar associations, this is what I talk about. It's about thinking about customer service. I think customer service can outweigh performance in the courtroom or results in matters. It's just as simple as that. And so you need to take a look at the customer experience, the service that you provide. I call it the path to delightenment, which is looking at this client journey and trying to figure out every step of the journey, what opportunities do I have to delight my client or my potential client? And that's starts from the very get go. When they call, do you answer right away?It's as simple as that. And it goes all the way through how you communicate with them, how you make them feel. You got to remember something. And almost everybody who's listening to this, and almost every one of our customers and probably every one of your customers, Nick, they do a certain type of law. It's going to be personal injury, it's going to be bankruptcy, it's going to be criminal defense, it's going to be estate planning, it's going to be family law, it's going to be immigration. That's like majority of it. The case that you are representing them on, this is the most important thing happening in their life.

Nick Werker

That's right.

Matt Spiegel

Categorically. To you, it's just another matter. Put yourself in their shoes. This is the most important thing happening in their life. How do you think they want to be treated? Put yourself in their shoes and think about it that way. And it will change the way you think about customer experience, customer service and what you do at your firm I think.

Nick Werker

I love that synopsis. And at the risk of being chastised by my friends and colleagues and my family members, I'm a very anecdotal person. I like to tell stories. I play a lot of slow pitch softball. Because that's what I'm capable of, not no shame to my slow pitch guys out there.

Matt Spiegel

I love it.

Nick Werker

But I've always worked under the assumption that it's really easy to market a good product. And over the years people will compliment me, "Oh, you're doing a great job marketing this, that." And I'm like, "Nah, dude. It's so easy to market a good product." It's because we have a good product and it's not necessarily the truth. In essence, all that I offer is a call center. And yes, my people really, I do believe in my people. And that's my point is that the people who run this organization top to bottom are superior. And that's what customer service is it's a person to person connection. So when I play softball, they have these bats are made out of this crazy material. You hit the ball and it makes the ball go farther. And if you can get an extra 20, 30 feet out of a hit that turns a ball, that somebody catches into a home run. So you want to maximize the amount of feet that you can hit a ball. And there are bat companies out there that make the best bats on the market.

Matt Spiegel

And there are people that will pop a top off that bat and shave it so that you get even more...

Nick Werker

Oh, they'll shave it. Oh, that's dangerous. But these companies, there's one specific, I'm not going to name them because I don't want to be sued because I don't know if they'll come after me. This is a small podcast, but I'm not going to do that. They make the best bat on the market and they have the worst customer service of anybody I've... Like, it's almost as bad as airplane like airlines, right? Well, you're calling them up and be like, "Hey, my bat it cracked, it did this, it did that." So on and so forth. And they tell you, "Sell it." Right? "We're not going to replace it, try to get the money." They're insane. So yeah, they might have a great product, but if their customer service is terrible, I'm not going to buy, even if I get the extra... I don't care how good of a lawyer you are, if somebody calls you up and you say, "I'm the best, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." No, you're a jerk, right?

Matt Spiegel

Totally.

Nick Werker

Your customer service sucks. I can't get ahold of you. I don't know what to expect. I'm not going to hire you, right? Because I have a level of expectation that I need you to meet. So you summarize that beautifully. I want to ask you, because I think most lawyers have a general idea of the benefits that they get from a CRM like yours. Not totally the automation and the analytics, but I think we've covered that. I do want to ask you, are there any under the radar features that Lawmatics provides that attorneys should be aware of?

Matt Spiegel

I think... Well, it's hard because it depends on the firm. I think that email marketing is under the radar to a lot of firms, even though it shouldn't be, right? And Lawmatics provides all that, email campaigns, newsletters, all that kind of action is handled inside of Lawmatics. So while it's not under the radar to us, it may be under the radar to a lot of law firms out there. Lawmatics now offers some time and billing components. So we've kind of gone down that road a little bit. It's certainly not nearly as robust as My Case or a Cleo is, but to a lot of law firms out there, it's plenty. And it actually just allows you to live in Lawmatics for the entire life cycle, which is a pretty cool thing.

Nick Werker

Well, and the more data that you can collect inside of Lawmatics, the more robust that your insights can be, right?

Matt Spiegel

That's exactly right.

Nick Werker

You need an email, but it's all right there. You can cross reference that with the whole entire life cycle of a lead, to a customer, to a returning customer.

Matt Spiegel

And just the fact that we're an automation platform and we have this beautiful automation engine means that anything we do, we can plug into that engine, which means things like time and billing and a lot of other things, document management, all that stuff can just be automated.

Nick Werker

So I'm going to selfishly ask you for a sneak peek. Is there anything that you can tell us about platform development? Something coming out, maybe?

Matt Spiegel

We are this week, so I'm not sure when this is going to go, but this week or next week we're going to launch a feature that seems small, but it's maybe one of the biggest features we can launch in a while, which is we're giving... So Lawmatics has booking platform built in, so you can send out a link and people can book meetings with you. We're now going to have the ability to tie that to a required payment. So if you want to charge for a consultation, which so many people are doing now, you could limit it so that they can't actually reserve that appointment until they've made a payment. And that all goes through our platform. It's automated and it's really fantastic. So that's one that we're really excited about.Another one that we're in the process of releasing right now... So email is a really tricky thing. Lawmatics is ESP, it's an email service provider. Getting email delivered, man, it keeps me up at night. It's not... When you have thousands of law firms and they're all sending... I mean we're sending millions and millions of emails every month. Making sure that that gets delivered is really hard. One way that we can solve that though is by sending email through someone's own outbox. Not the mass emails. That's going to get you black...We don't want to get you blacklisted. So we don't want to all of a sudden have 5,000 emails go from your outbox in Google. But the critical emails in Lawmatics like sending out an invoice or sending out a document that needs to be signed or sending out a form that needs to be filled out or a booking link, very easy to send those directly through your outbox. So now you're not even... You worry not about sending through Lawmatics IP, the IP address and spam issues or anything like that. It's literally you sit down at your computer and hit compose. It goes through your own outbox.

Nick Werker

Interesting.

Matt Spiegel

This is a really big feature and we actually will be releasing the feature for mass campaigns. What we do in that situation is we throttle it. So we only send one email every 30 seconds. So it could take a while, but at least you know that you're going to have no issues with deliverability. So this is, these are the things that we think of sometimes. It's not a super sexy feature that actually makes the most impact.

Nick Werker

Totally understand. I'm excited for that. I like the idea of throttling because I need email throttling, so I don't know how, but I'm going to hit you up for help. So instead of asking like, "Oh, why should lawyers... Where should they go to get, to check out Lawmatics?" For anybody who's listening to this, who's interested in trying Lawmatics, can you sort of explain the process of getting started using the platform?

Matt Spiegel

So this is an area that we care a lot about. So we put a lot of effort into onboarding. So when you come onto Lawmatics, the thing is it's a Ferrari, right? But not everybody knows how to drive a stick shift in a Ferrari. So we will really walk through and we will help you think about your processes and help you develop the automations that you really want. It would be unfair of us to sit a lawyer down and say like, "Hey, just go do email marketing." Not going to know what to do. So we really help and an onboarding process for us can, it takes 30 to 45 days. We really spend time working with you and making sure that you're going to be set up for success on the platform.

Nick Werker

Love it. Matt, I would like to thank you so much for joining me on the show today. Really appreciate you being here.

Matt Spiegel

Yeah, Nick, thank you so much for having me. It's good to talk one on one, but I look forward to being on more panels with you too like we've done in the past.

Nick Werker

Yeah, same here. So for anybody who's listening, we hope you enjoyed this conversation. We will be back with another episode of Everything Except the Law soon. Be sure to check out previous episodes on the show on Apple Podcast, Spotify, Anchor, the Answering Legal YouTube channel. Links to everything covered in today's conversation can be found in the description of this episode, including the link to get started with Lawmatics. We hope to see you next time everyone.

One of the most significant challenges attorneys and law firms across all practice areas face is finding and retaining new clients. To make it even more challenging, law firms have declined in demand over the last decade, according to a recent Georgetown Law report. While litigation and bankruptcy experienced positive growth during that period, the need for tax and patent lawyers grew stagnant.What are you doing to make your law firm stand out from the competition? Publicizing your firm doesn’t have to break the bank. You can even do it yourself. DIY public relations saves time and money and increases authenticity because you’re speaking in your own voice, not through a paid representative. Media companies are constantly seeking fresh content. Pitch someone a story – or write one yourself.

Content distribution: what it is and how to do it

Content distribution is the process of sharing, publishing, and promoting your law firm’s content through various media formats and online channels. Content distribution is broken down into three basic categories:

1Owned content

Owned content is distributed to web properties that you control, such as your company blog, social media sites, or email newsletters. Whether you utilize your own website's blog or a hosted platform, it's easy to create, format, and publish short- and long-form articles under your brand's name for your audience to read and share. Creating a list of prospect emails can be an efficient way to circulate content to your target market. For example, when you include a subscription link on your website, blog, and social media posts or offer an incentive – a free e-book download or digital coupon in exchange for an email address – you encourage people to sign up to receive your content straight to their inbox (and you obtain their contact information). You can also distribute content automatically with email marketing software that eliminates arduous and ineffective marketing tasks like preparing email lists, sending generic messages, and manually scheduling events.

2Earned content

Earned content distribution occurs when third parties, such as media outlets or blogs, distribute your content. A social media share, such as a retweet on Twitter or repost on Instagram from another user, is also considered earned content. Sites like Reddit and Quora are highly active forums for internet users seeking information about various topics. By contributing to these forums as an attorney, you can provide valuable answers to simple questions asked by your target audience, which could establish you as an authority without seeming overly promotional.

3Paid content

Paid content commonly comes in the form of cost-per-click (CPC) models, where a business pays a specific dollar amount every time someone clicks through the content. Another type of paid content is sponsored or native content, where a brand pays to place an article that emulates the look and feel of the publisher's existing content. In the legal industry, the tried-and-tested channels include:

• JD Supra. The content marketing service offered by JD Supra is a great way to distribute your content to its readers, which includes in-house counsel, reporters, editors, and more. In addition, more than 35,000 attorneys from some of the world’s leading firms contribute content through the platform’s email digests and social media feed.
• Taboola. A content discovery platform, Taboola can support your firm by reaching prospective clients through dedicated channels and websites they currently follow. Claiming to be the “reverse of search engine results,” Taboola attempts to curate valuable content for users based on their unique interests and preferences – and the platform’s sophisticated algorithms.
• Social media. Although owned and earned content on social media reaches significant audiences, paid or promoted posts on platforms like Facebook can be an excellent opportunity for content distribution. These popular platforms have collected a lot of data on its users, and marketers can use that to their advantage to target the best leads. For example, posts sponsored by Facebook can be particularly effective due to the platform’s enormous user base. However, other widely used platforms, including Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Snapchat offer sponsored post options.

You can also distribute your content through earned or paid content syndication. Although it might sound complex, syndication means publishing content that has already been featured on your website to a third-party platform. If done correctly, syndication can help you establish yourself as a thought leader, attract more leads for your firm, and move your practice ahead of the competition. The goal: to get more followers by distributing your content to a larger audience. Syndicating your content on LinkedIn, Quora, and Medium is free, and there are many valid reasons to utilize these and other no-cost platforms:

• LinkedIn is the preferred social media platform for lawyers and other professionals.
• Quora has more than 300 million monthly active users seeking answers to their questions.
• Medium distributes the stories you publish to your followers, as well as millions of others who are following relevant topics.

However, depending on who is following you on these platforms, there is no guarantee that you’ll get significant exposure. However, the following paid syndication services/platforms reach out to media outlets and help distribute your content to millions of readers:

• Newswire – a public relations and media distribution platform featuring a press release distribution service that can help you write, publish, and share important news about your law firm with your target audience. Newswire’s distribution service includes the following:
  • Digital. This service provides exposure across major media outlets, including Fox, NBC, and Digital Journal, and can help you quickly improve brand awareness.
  • Digital Plus. Geared toward companies and individuals who want to build their online presence, this service can help improve your search engine results, drive more online traffic, and expand your visibility.
  • State. With this service, you can gain exposure across local, regional, and state media outlets, which is helpful when you target your publicity efforts to a specific region.
  • National. If nationwide exposure is your goal, you can distribute your content across the country with Newswire’s national press release distribution service, which shares content through national television, radio, newspapers, and magazines.
  • International. When you choose the Newswire international service, you will have the ability to distribute your law firm’s press releases around the world.
• Cision PRWeb – owned by Cision, a software company that focuses on offering cloud-based public relations solutions to companies, Cision PRWeb is a press release distribution service that promises greater online reach, improved visibility in search rankings, and coverage from prominent journalists and bloggers.

No matter what kind of content you're creating, never distribute it blindly. A law firm’s content marketing efforts must be well-planned, well-executed, and well-measured to succeed. Do your research and choose the content distribution platform that best aligns with your firm’s goals and your target market’s online consumption habits.

How to leverage your small or medium-size status to promote your firm

One major misconception is that the best lawyers work for big law firms. However, talent is spread throughout the legal industry, and competent lawyers at big firms often go out on their own and open their own small or medium-sized legal practices. In addition, many consumers prefer smaller firms over large ones, perhaps because they sometimes charge less, might offer more personalized service, and may put less pressure on their lawyers to increase their billable hours. In recent years, many consumers have consciously decided to “shop small” and support their local business community. According to a recent Nielsen study, 12 percent of consumers worldwide said they exclusively buy from small or medium-sized businesses, and 26 percent of global consumers purchase from small companies whenever convenient. To capitalize on unintentional and exclusive small buyers, small and medium-sized firms should consider targeting consumers who prefer to shop at small businesses. Here are some strategies:

Be informative

Lawyers are uniquely positioned to provide helpful information to potential clients. Being highly educated and experienced in specialized areas, lawyers are qualified to provide insight on issues that affect many individuals and bring an element of trust and authority that people respect.

Use HARO (Help a Reporter Out)

HARO is a free online service that links content creators to expert sources. When you sign up on HARO, you can receive daily emails describing the articles journalists are currently working on and the types of sources they are looking for. If you spot a topic that falls within your expertise, you can send your pitch to the journalist for consideration.

Become a thought leader

Thought leadership involves marketing informational, valuable content that will build credibility for individuals or leaders within a law firm. The goal of thought leadership is to become recognized as an expert within your area of law (although lawyers are not usually allowed to call themselves experts). Instead, you want to be seen as the go-to attorney in your area or region. Therefore, thought leadership is most effective when lawyers position themselves as a resource for valuable advice related to their area of expertise so that when someone is looking for the type of services you provide, they will contact you first.

Be newsworthy

Captivating stories engage audiences. Media coverage can expose your firm to a broad public audience, including your next clients. Although it can be challenging to get media organizations to listen to what you have to say, being newsworthy should be the foundation of any law firm’s public relations strategy. In addition, news organizations want to share new and noteworthy information with the public. Although finding ways to share topical information can be challenging, it often carries more long-term opportunities for your firm.

Emphasize your value

Marketing to clients already interested in retaining your services gets you on the right track. However, that doesn’t mean prospects will automatically flock to your firm – you still need to prove to them why your firm is worth hiring. To demonstrate why your firm is the best option, you must determine your value proposition – what makes your practice unique in its respective market – and find ways to distance yourself from the competition.

Promote without being self-serving

While making headlines can help increase your exposure to potential clients, you should consider how you’ll be received. There is a fine line between providing valuable information and being seen as selfish and opportunistic. Try to share content based on your goals, is cause-specific, and doesn’t offer much shameless self-promotion.

Target the right audience

A successful lawyer understands who their audience is and knows how to reach them. While many believe anyone can be a customer, targeting the appropriate audience will yield superior results. Instead of focusing on the number of prospects you reach, focus on the quality of the client. To do this, you must learn where your target audience gathers online and, in your community, and use that information to determine where and how you will spend your time.

Stay involved in your community

Becoming involved with your local community offers opportunities to meet neighbors, forge relationships, generate loyal customers, and boost business. One way to get involved is to sponsor local groups, e.g., a local recreational sports team, or host community events (educational activities for children). Doing so can significantly increase brand recognition, get your name out there, and help attract more attention to your law firm.

Use multi-channel engagement

Give clients many ways to get to know your firm and its services by creating and maintaining a solid presence on social media. In addition, create a website or blog where customers can obtain more information about your firm and reach out to ask questions. The more online presence you have, the easier it will be for customers to find you organically.Don’t underestimate the power of referrals. Keep your clients happy, and they’ll share their experiences with others, allowing you to reach, persuade, and convert new clients.

Nurture existing customers with email marketing

While obtaining new customers is vital, it’s just as critical to nurture relationships with current clients to help ensure that they remain loyal to your firm. Automated email marketing can effectively maintain these relationships through personalized, scheduled, and targeted emails that streamline follow-ups and help move leads from one stage to the next.

Looking for efficient ways to promote your firm? Lawmatics can help

Automate your law practice to drive growth in your business while staying focused on your clients. With Lawmatics, you can automate your intake process and create, schedule, and send automated client communications to keep everyone in the know. Improve your organization, work more efficiently, and account for every detail from intake to happy client. To find out more about how our cloud-based software for lawyers can help you win clients, request a demo today.