Joe Giovannoli  

You’re listening to the Tip of the Law podcast, where legal insights meet practical advice. In each episode, we bring you stories, insights and tips straight from the legal industry’s brightest minds. I’m your host, Joe Giovannoli, founder and CEO of 9Sail, and joining me today is Mike Mellor, founder and president of 742advisors. With over 20 years of experience in law firm marketing and business development, Mike has helped generate significant new business and streamline operations for firms. As the former Chief Marketing and Business Development Officer at Pryor Cashman, Mike led the firm-wide marketing strategy and managed both internal and external teams. His efforts contributed to the firm’s consistent revenue growth and enhanced its market position. Mike also initiated successful business development programs and drove improvements in brand visibility and digital engagement. At 742advisors, Mike dedicates his expertise to helping small- to mid-sized law firms improve their online presence, streamline pitch processes and break down information silos to uncover new opportunities. His hands-on approach includes optimizing CRM systems, developing experience databases and building firm wide consensus to address these key issues. Without further ado. Let’s get started.

Mike, thanks for joining me today. Appreciate you taking the time.

Mike Mellor  

Appreciate you having me, Joe.

Joe Giovannoli  

Yeah, absolutely. I’m excited to dive in here, you know. So we’ve been talking a lot about leaked revenue, and I’d love to talk about why you’re passionate about solving that problem for law firms. Can you tell, can you tell me a little bit about what, what made that so interesting to you?

Mike Mellor  

Yeah, you know, this opportunity for me, you know, after having left my old firm, was, you know, a real opportunity to assess what’s the biggest value I can bring to law firms. You know, I think historically, you know, firms are looking to make more money– they typically use, you know, that one lever right? Let’s dial up the hourly rates. And, you know, looking inside a little marketing department, you know, all the things that are done, there’s just a lot of ripe opportunity there for folks to be a little more strategic, not just in terms of choosing their tech stack, but in terms of organizational structures. You know, for example, coming into organizations that may not have an experience management system whatsoever. So you know, they’re sending around firm-wide emails. We call them “pardon the interruption” emails. And you know this goes out to 200, 300 people, you know, you think about people who are focused in a zone, and all of a sudden they’re getting emails and going back and forth, reply all occasionally. And you just think about the amount of time times 100 lawyers times 200 lawyers times staff. You add that in folks just continually recreating the wheel. When pitches or submissions come in, that information exists somewhere. So streamlining that process increases realization rates, reduces leakage and also reduces turnover. You know, the staff is continuing to reinvent the wheel and do things we just did this last week. There’s got to be a better way. So, yeah, the business I’m launching is really focused on, you know, three of those key issues that all pretty much pertain to revenue leakage.

Joe Giovannoli  

Yeah, and I never, until I had met you, had never heard the term revenue leakage. And I really like that, because it’s so true. Like that, these, you know, firms, it– pick a business. But let’s talk about law firms here. Law firms have so much opportunity to grab additional revenue or to win, you know, business that they’re just pitching currently. And you know, they’re always reinventing the wheel. So I guess you know. And you said data disorganization, you know, what are some of the common challenges around data? Or what, what types of data do firms typically have challenges with keeping organized? What was your experience?

Mike Mellor  

Yeah. So, you know, kind of break that into three different buckets. And so the first one is, you know, the buying cycle has changed. Folks are 57% of the way through the process– legal and other B to B buyers, according to Gartner, 57% of the way through the process before they pick up the phone and contact somebody. So I think before you would have a, you know, you’re tapping into your networks. You’re maybe, you know, looking things up, generally, you’ve got a pretty decent sense– maybe you’ve got a buddy who’s a GC over somewhere else, and you get three names. You used to call them, they would come in and they would tell you every everything, and, you know, you’d have the conversations around the dog and pony show. And that’s just not the case anymore. You might get four or five names, and you’re going to, you’re gonna, first thing you’re gonna do is Google them. And so it’s really tough to quantify the amount. You know, you might have done a $500 million deal, but you didn’t put it on your website, you didn’t put it on your bio, you didn’t put any news about it. Well, you know, I go in there and I’m looking at Joe, and I’m looking at Jenny over, you know, across the street, and, you know, Jenny puts a $300 million deal on her pitch. And I don’t, I’m not going to call you to see if you’re missing things. So, you know, setting that system up, you know, obviously can improve win rates. That’s a tough one to quantify. 

The second is, you know, we talked a little bit about, you know, just the sales or the pitch and proposal process, submissions process, you know, when you’re continually barking up trees and bothering partners and, you know, bringing associates in. You know, just think about that amount of leakage you’ve got. You know, partners are up to 200 over $2,000 an hour. Now. You know, associates are 600, 700 bucks. I mean, obviously that depends on the region, it depends on, you know, the type of firm. But you know, if you just sort of average that out, you get 100 pitches or submissions you’re doing a year, and folks are spending an hour to three hours on it, and you got staff spending a bunch of time, you know, we little back of the napkin math, that’s, you know, between 350 and $450,000 a year, and that’s every year. And you know, that’s sort of difficult to quantify if you’re not tracking, Hey, what is our win rate? Have we aggregated all of our information around the firm? Sitting down with partners in the beginning, and it’s a Herculean effort, for sure, but well worth, well worth the squeeze there. And you know, aligned with that is, maybe this data does exist. You put it in and you open a new matter. You might say, Hey, this is Project Sunshine. It’s a confidential matter. Can you at least click that it’s an M & A deal that it’s a follow up later in 60 days, because then you’re invoicing that, you got information there. How are you bringing all that information together? Marketing might hear a little bit about it, but tying that together seems like a really easy way to make things happen. So setting these systems up, I talk a lot about with my teams, about us sort of needing to be perfect, because you’ve got firms and partners who are all over the place, and they’re really busy people among the busiest people of any industry. And so how do you you know when they tell us something, whether that’s a finance department, whether that’s your practice managers, whatever that is, how are we, you know, opening our lines of communication, creating new avenues so that you know this information is just sort of getting centralized in a cohesive and organized way. 

Joe Giovannoli  

So, yeah, you said something super powerful. And that– you said a lot of powerful things, but you won, specifically the 350 to $450,000 if you take all of that time and add it up, you know, in my– the way my marketing brain works is, I say, well, what does it typically cost a firm, which most of these firms probably won’t have the answer to this, but what does it typically cost a firm to acquire a new client, and if you took that sunk cost and put it into acquiring new clients, how many new clients would that be, right? And what revenue would that be into what multiple? Did you just take that 300, $450,000 and to what multiple, did you just add that to the top line and somewhat of the bottom line of the firm’s revenue, right?

Mike Mellor  

No, that’s, that is exactly right. And you know, it doesn’t even quantify, or attempt to quantify a little bit to your point, the customization opportunities, you know, if you’re, if you’re sitting around and you’re knocking on doors and running up to the 42nd floor and running down here, and you heard a little something around this, and you’re asking for reports from finance, not only are you wasting time, but that time could be spent on looking at 10 Ks, looking in and having an organization to say, hey, you know what? What are the other fashion clients that we have worked with? How did they come into the firm? Oh, you know, they typically come in through trademark work, or they typically come in through immigration work we do for the designers, or they typically come in from doing venture deals we’re doing with our athletes, whatever the case is. And so it’s really tough to put a number on that, but every firm I’ve been to, you’re seeing that just ability to really improve the experience management, the knowledge management function. 

And, you know, the big firms, you know, have groups dedicated to it, and the smaller firms probably don’t have a KM person, may not have practice management people. And you know, like, you know, we had talked about before, it’s, it doesn’t have to be a foundation you’re buying. It doesn’t have to be some massively expensive investment. And you know, to that point, you know, are, are these technologies? Are they perfect? Are they one size fits all? Probably not. So, you know, there’s a lot of opportunity there, because you could look and you say, Oh, well, you know, we have interaction, or, you know, we have this other thing. Well, we’re not using it for events. Well, why do we have it? Can we have an ERM sort of enterprise signature scraping, you know, essentially, contact aggregator, list aggregator, visa vis a traditional CRM. If we’re not going to input stuff, we’re just buying a Ferrari, and we keep getting it in first gear. So I think there’s a lot of novel opportunities that you could probably reallocate the funds that you’re spending more effectively. Free up with $100,000 here, you know, free up $100,000 here, all of a sudden you’ve got a dedicated BD person, or you’ve got a new social media manager, or you’ve got, you know, 100 grand and back in everyone’s pocket, whatever the case may be, it’s just, you know, found that there’s, you know, a lot of sort of juice there, you know, and through no fault, really, of anyone’s it’s just, hey, culturally, we’re not committed to this. We’re not buying into this. We’re not incentivizing this. Great, that’s fine, you know, that’s, that’s the partnership’s call. But at the end of the day, let’s make, let’s be really smart and optimize our spend. And that’s, that’s really what, 742 and you know what I’m really trying to do.

Joe Giovannoli  

That’s awesome, yeah, you know. And as you were talking, you and I are both big hockey fans. So a great kind of analogy just popped into my head, which was, you know, it’s like if you had your star, star forward, you know, who’s, who’s scoring, you know, 100 goals a season, or whatever the number is, right? But they put 100 points up a season. And you tell them before every shift, they have to tie their own skate, and they have to tie the guy skate next to them before they hop out on the ice, right? Like you are just wasting time and energy, their energy, and you’re shifting their focus away. And it’s so true of of when, every time they’re putting a pitch together, your attorneys are putting a pitch together, and they’re recreating the wheel, and they have to think about who to go to and where to go, like that, that precious time is not focused on winning, winning the opportunity, right? Or, you know, they could be spending a little bit of time researching the prospect into the individual at the company, a little bit better, to get to know things about them that might help them to create a relationship or to establish, you know, some similarities. You know, the things that help people to know, like and trust, because, you know, and we’ll talk about AI at the end, because I have some questions for you. But we’re not in this age where, you know, computers are making decisions, right, like this is still human to human, you know, interaction. And we need to make sure that the attorneys– that whoever it is that’s pitching a client is spending an ample amount of time, you know, getting to know things about the clients can help them to win, you know? And essentially, it sounds like you’re helping firms to find money, is what I’m hearing, right? It’s like, this is money that you have, this is money that you’re wasting, and we’re going to help you to make this easier to find money. Did I summarize that well? 

Mike Mellor  

That’s exactly right, you know, we ended up actually getting rid of a CRM and to your point, you know, said, Hey, you know, let’s build a culture around one that people are really doing front end research and really, you know, getting wiser and making sure that we’re all kind of staying in lanes and investing in some technology that is going to be providing reporting in advance of meetings. Because, you know, if people aren’t inputting events, why are we buying that system? Let’s switch systems to one that’s, you know, going to keep all of our contacts really up to date automatically. It’s automatically going to give that reporting just in time for folks. And you know, those opportunities, you know, while most of them are, you know, are sort of, sort of quantifiable, as we talk here, you know, sort of bringing it back to some of the stuff you do, and I’m– so around the SEO process, you know, it’s like, it’s like spending, you know, $10,000 on making some amazing video or writing some amazing white paper, you know, for SEO purposes, and then not thinking about different ways to augment that and flip that into, you know, the sort of right ones published everywhere, known opportunity that, you know, hey, we spent all this money. Why aren’t we, you know, packaging this up in 10 different ways, why aren’t we pulling out little nuggets and creating, you know, maybe it’s an hour interview with us and we create a little social media one pager. Maybe there’s a little video cut that we could do, and just, you know, being creative around the efforts that you’re doing and making sure you’re optimizing them, yeah, sort of throughout, throughout the cycle. So yeah, to find anything.

Joe Giovannoli  

Yeah, definitely, you know. And when you– another thing you just said that really resonated about, like, leaked revenue. What about if a rainmaker at the firm gets tired of doing this, right? Like, tired of constantly having to rethink things. Or, you know, have to, you know, coordinate with the marketing team on the same thing over and over and over again, right? Like they just want to go hunt, right? Like, that’s, that’s what they do really well, is they just want to go hunt. And if somebody another firm approaches them and says, Hey, we take care of all this for you. We have this system. We do that. We do this. It’s all systematized. Like, we’re gonna pay you the same or more money. Like, what’s keeping them at the firm, right, if they’re frustrated about this process? Like, think about the top 5% of you know rainmakers at your firm, is this stopping them from being able to do their work well, and stopping them from being able to go get another 10% of revenue for the firm, you know, and bring it in right? Like, there’s just so many implications to this. And as we’re talking, it’s, it’s like, almost like Pandora’s Box.

Mike Mellor  

Yeah, yeah, yeah, you know, we, I sort of focused on the staff turnover, but, you know, that’s a, it’s an incredibly valid point. You know, what we have to do is create frictionless experiences, not just for our clients and our prospects. And thinking about how, you know, when they come into the website, are we making it easy for them to find stuff? But you know, to your point, from a partner and from our internal clients perspective, you know, how do we make this as easy as possible for folks? You know, I call it the two goal posts of data. One is that you know, every client, every attorney, needs to open a matter so they can start billing it, and everyone needs to bill decline. And so during that time, when they open a new matter, are we asking for those pieces of information? They’re already there. They already have to open. Are there ways that we can automate that, where they put in Bank of America, and it’s automatically financial services. And so these things are all sort of coded into, really, maybe we’re asking for one piece of information that we didn’t get before. And then, you know, when they go to invoice, they may be telling billing, they may be putting that in. Do we have that system that’s, you know, we’ve already got those two places that they’re going to input information. Let’s make it really easy and frictionless for them. So, you know, that’s often a great place to kind of look at those sort of listening posts, or, you know, sort of forks in the road, and get your information there. So it’s, you know, not too much additional onus on either the admins or the partnership or associates or whoever’s opening the matter, yeah.

Joe Giovannoli  

So what size firms do you think that level of sophistication makes sense for? Right? So we have a wide range of folks that listen to this podcast, and, you know, I can, I can almost hear some of the folks at smaller firms saying, like, we don’t need that. There’s no way we need, we need that at our size. So when, in your experience, at what point does having some of these systems in place make sense?

Mike Mellor  

Yeah, you know. And I originally kind of thought of this. I was thinking about, and I guess the Am Law only goes to 200, the NLJ is sort of a 500 right? But, you know, if you kind of took that 150 to 500 maybe, thinking about lawyer size, it is maybe 50 to 350 you know. Hey, we used to operate everyone, really kind of knew everyone, we sat down every Friday for breakfast, you know. And there’s 30, 40 partners, or attorneys are now up. It’s getting a little, it’s getting a little bigger. We’re not quite at that “Let’s invest in a foundation, let’s have, you know, pricing specialists,” but you’re sort of early in that maturity process. And so typically, I found it’s sort of that 50 to 250, maybe 300 attorneys. But it’s really about sort of your tech maturity. I think that if you’ve got sort of dashboards up and running you’re using that you have a single source of truth. That’s probably not where 742 is going to add a bunch of value for you. It’s really going to be, hey, you know what? We did it before, it worked for us. And again, it doesn’t have to be this investment. It can be, you know, in an Excel spreadsheet, you’re putting 1800 matters, coding these things in different ways. 

Typically, what I like to look at is sort of the results if I’ve got, if I’m doing something, and it’s Hey, give me all the, you know, fashion companies that we do trademark work for on the West Coast, you know. And there ends up being 40 or 50 sort of outputs. I then try to think of different ways to split that, because ultimately you want 10 to 15 really relevant matters. And so, you know, when I when you sort of put your outputs in and you’re getting 200, you got to do a better job of breaking that maybe, maybe by 10. And so that’s sort of how it gets iterative. And I think a lot of firms will get just sort of analysis paralysis, I guess, would be the right way to say it, and say, hey, you know what? This is just kind of too much effort, but, you know, you can, you can do these things pretty easily, and they can help inform decisions and help inform investments. So, and we started tracking, you know, maybe you can track your win rates. All of a sudden, you’re up 18, 19% which is historically what we’ve seen, that you know, you’re getting almost a 20% bump in win rates, and then, you know, all of a sudden it’s Hey, you know what people are, people are tuning in, you know? And it also speaks to the fact that things don’t get really done if you’re asking them to be created from scratch. So at least to have seven or eight matters, their attorneys are much more likely to respond just sort of psychologically and give you, hey, you’re missing these two things. So, you know, you can use data from all sources. You know, interestingly, sometimes that data is external. You know, we’re seeing, you know, setting up Google Alerts that, you know, maybe it’s the client, or maybe it’s, you know, Law 360 who tracks down and looks at a docket and sees that. You know, are there different ways? How are you getting perfect? So when you’re commenting, they’re like, Oh, I didn’t even tell you about that. I’m sorry. I figured I thought it was confidential, but apparently the client announced it. So setting up these different methods and systems that just make us as smart as possible, try to sort of have the attorneys really augmenting what what we do. You know, obviously, I think that some of the more mature firms, you know, might have these triggers set up where, if a deal, if a matter, hits 45 grand or 50 grand, whatever their trigger is, you know, marketing gets a ping there and says, Hey, you know, this has hit some sort of threshold, you know, kind of follow up with us for more. So setting up those systems, they’re really going to be customized by burn, by an appetite, by maturity, the cultural lens is really everything in firms, yeah. 

Joe Giovannoli  

50 to 350 you was a good– I totally, that was the exact number– I had 300 so 350, you put a little bit more there, but that was the exact number in my head that I had. And you know, that last little tidbit you just said about, you know, marketing getting pinged when something, when a matter, hits a certain threshold. It boggles my mind that that is not just common practice at any size firm, that it’s not common practice that that happens right, because I think of it from some of the work that we do, right, where I have to constantly have the conversation with marketing teams and managing partners that SEO, content creation, PR, it’s visibility. It’s getting the horse to the water, but we cannot make them drink. The most we can do is entice them to make the, pick up the phone or fill out a form, right? But it’s on the internal team to land the deal. And once they do land the deal, then it’s about, you know, keeping marketing in the loop so they can understand what really, what really worked, right? So let’s just say, for instance, SEO generates an opportunity for a firm that they land and, you know, it becomes a $200,000 client. Well, marketing, in most, most cases, and in my experience, going all the way up to several hundred attorney firms, marketing never gets notified of what that is. And when they ask for financial data around clients, client growth, new clients this year, they’re typically stonewalled, right? Yep, not in all firms, some CMOs have have that level of access, but I’ve seen more times than not, where the CMO gets completely stonewalled, and where they might be able to get total revenue numbers for by practice, for each year, but they can never get a breakdown. So it’s just really interesting how the 50 to 350 how much marketing automation, marketing, you know, systems, can influence the growth of the firm, but how little marketing still gets access to that information? Was that your experience being in house, did you struggle to get a lot of that buy in from financial, you know, stakeholders and that kind of stuff?

Mike Mellor  

Yeah, no, absolutely, you know, I think that there’s, you know, it’s not, it’s not necessarily the systems and they and the personnel always to blame. You know, I think that there are some real cultural, sort of industry wide, you know, historically, been a craft, you know, and things were done on handshakes. And, you know, if you don’t need to know– everything’s really on a need to know basis. And so a lot of folks are, I don’t want to tell you about what’s going on. And you know, you don’t have to give us specifics, right? You don’t have to tell us, you know, really, client confidentiality notwithstanding, you know. And I think that’s the big difference between you know that, and maybe a consultant, you know, I worked at KPMG before I came into legal and, you know, probably less, really close to the vest, and super guarded from that. Obviously, everybody’s really important with client confidentiality, but these things are going to be internal and convincing folks we’re using this internally. We’ll get your approval every time that this goes out, we’ve got mechanisms for that, and sort of earning that, earning that trust, you know, is really important. So I think that there’s just a lot of cultural differences. Folks don’t really want to share this information, but everyone wants the output, right? Everyone, you know, then it’s their turn, and they say, oh, you know, well, there’s got to be other stuff we’ve done. It’s like we need to, as a firm, make these decisions that we’re going to share these things. I think you’re seeing, you know, folks and firms who are a little more progressive in their sharing, understanding that, you know, this is, this is a business. We’ve got to know what we do, and we’ve got to set guardrails up. We’ve got to set systems up to make that happen. You know, there’s nothing more frustrating than, you know, sending something out and, and you know, one of your attorneys was, you know, deep in a case in London, or they were on vacation, and they come back and they’re like, oh, sorry, I just saw this. I’ve done, you know, 10 of these, you know, pitches. And you’re like, Oh my gosh. We just sent this now last week, and you know, but there’s also a lot of risk that could be, you know, potential there, if you’re not, you know, sharing that you’re chasing some opportunity, you could be pitching Bank of America in LA, and someone’s pitching Bank of America in Miami, and, you know, you didn’t happen. And that is a little egg on the face for sure. So, you know, it’s not just about revenue, gaining revenue, but it’s also a reputational damage, potentially. You know, in addition to all the other things we talked about.

Joe Giovannoli  

Yeah, that’s probably a whole nother topic, and maybe we do a part two episode, because I think it is my belief that, you know. If a firm is pitching the same client that happens to be national or, you know, in some cases, global, and they’re pitching them in multiple markets, there’s a little bit of, how does the client or potential client not recognize the fact, or, Why are they not centralizing how they go through a process, right? So there is a little bit of, while, yes, there’s some egg on the face. It’s also a head scratcher of like, well, how does Bank of America not know that they’re looking for legal counsel in multiple jurisdictions? You know what I mean? Yeah, so that’s probably a whole nother topic, and I’d love to, I’d love to dive into that another time. Do you have go-to– any one or two go-to technologies or platforms that you really like, that can help firms that are, you know, even if they want to stick their toe in the water with something like this, do you have go to technologies that you typically like to, you know, look at or entertain when working with a law firm? 

Mike Mellor  

Yeah, I mean, you know, I think one of the key, one of the key ones is CRM, you know, really understanding the user requirements and being candid with yourself around what are we really doing? Are we going to be incentivizing folks? Are we going to say, hey, no one’s going to get reimbursed for dinners, unless these events are, you know, in our CRM, no one’s going to be getting you know, how hard is that line in the sand. In many cases, firms are kind of letting it, letting the partners and the associates sort of do, do their thing as it were, and kind of have their own style and be very entrepreneurial and and that’s well and good, you know, that’s that’s completely up to the to the ECs and, you know, to the managing partners to make that decision. But you know, if you’re going to make that decision, then why are you buying something that’s main value is, you know, being able to organize and sort these events and tie into, you know, Outlook calendars and tie into email metadata and those types of things to organize and create relationship scoring. And, you know, at the end of the day, we’re finding that, you know, if we’re not automating this stuff and we’re taking off the attorney’s plates, it’s not really being done. So I think the key is just being kind of candid with yourself and looking at that, you know, we’re seeing a lot of, a lot of play with Nexa these days. Seems like a lot of folks are looking at that. You know, there’s some other, you know, as a big fan of Guava back in the day, and you know, Todd Miller’s coming back out with that tree AI, which I think is a really neat program. Just, just looked at that the other day. But, you know, you’re seeing, seeing a lot of the kind of your standard players, you know, getting, getting their arms around this, you know, into Apple, their cloud, and, you know, kind of their other historic programs. You know, the bar is definitely getting up. You know, experience management, I keep coming back to all the time. So, you know, it’s really going to depend on the firm, on their appetite. You know, again, I think that a lot of firms let perfect be the enemy of good. And, you know, getting something out there, and, you know, just maybe it starts, and it’s only got sort of five cuts. It’s, you know, who’s the partner, client, number, matter, number, client, name, description and date, right? You know, maybe you just start there and slowly being able to codify these things and build systems. And, you know, it’s, it’s like anything that I do in law firms. I find it starting small, getting a pilot, getting past that original aversion of change law firms that you know change is bad, right? We’re building the precedent, you know, and has it been proven in the past? And it’s a little bit of a chicken egg scenario, that it’s tough to prove it in your firm if you haven’t done it, but you can’t do it if you haven’t, you know. So, yeah, just building those things. Maybe it’s by a particular practice area, having that practice area shy, being able to showcase those quick wins, seeing that one practice area start to win more than the rest of them. Well, you know that perks everyone’s ears up, playing to the competitive nature of attorneys around the firm, is often a great way to get things started. You just need a couple of folks who are into it, who see the value, who trust you get wins for them, communicate them well, and then you can scale.

Joe Giovannoli  

You just hit another major topic, which could be literally another episode is all about, yeah, not, not all, not all practice areas or practice groups are created equal at law firms in terms of marketing, from a marketing perspective, right? Like we commonly come up with firms that have 20 to 30 practice groups, and they want a one size fits all marketing approach to them when we especially when we talk about SEO, and it’s like, hey, out of your 20, here’s the six to seven that we think that SEO is really going to have impactful value for, and it’s actually going to move the needle noticeably. And you know, if we focus on the rest of them as well, like we’re really reducing the amount of time we can spend on the ones that are going to actually generate. And I think that that’s so true for technology purposes too. There are going to be practices that the way, just the way that they can and do win business. It’s not– the technology is not going to be helpful to them. If anything, it might just add more wasteful time on their plate, because there’s, they’re, you know, messing around with something that you know, a ton of follow ups aren’t necessarily required for this. Or, you know, for whatever reason, the inputs there aren’t the inputs that you’re doing in other practices don’t make sense for that other practice group. So, you know, I think firms, they like the easy one size fits all, like they want to buy something and use it firm wide, rather than looking at each one of their practice groups as an operating business. Right? As its own individual operating business. Because, why not? Right? You know the plaintiff side practices at firms. You know, we’re working with a lot of firms that are B to B and B to C. You know, they have both, you know, plaintiff side and business, business to business in the same firm. You know, the plaintiff firms have very different needs and very different things that they are going to be doing. You know, then the corporate practices that they should very much, very much be sending, you know, tickler notifications to, you know, prospect, prospective new clients, or ideal fit, you know, prospects that they would really like to be working with, like it just, they’re just very different. And so that one size fits all technology thought process is just so outdated, but firms are so eager to try to find that one size fits all, always, at least that’s been my experience. 

Mike Mellor  

No, that’s exactly, you know, the things that successful technologies have in common is that they’re removing that onus, off the attorney, somehow, right? You know, you’re, you’re buying technology to do, oh, well, input this just, you know, keep put like, no, no. That’s the opposite of what we’re trying to do. I get that we want to be more organized, but we need to free up attorney time so they can bill– their best and highest value is billing. And, you know, I look at my teams and we’re on salary, and what can we do that kind of takes that off and keeps those realization rates pumping. Are we incentivizing the admins more effectively? Are we getting them in contests? You know, how are we? It takes a village here, right? And so, the but, but, you know, you kind of ask about those technologies, and it comes down to who’s making it easier and and, you know, taking time and giving that time back to attorneys. That’s, that’s whatever you think sort of revolves around, when you look at how those successful businesses right to you, to your point about tying the hockey skates, keep that person on the ice and keep them scoring goals, right? Yep, let us. Let us take the rest of the stuff so they can do what they do. That’s why we pay them big bucks. Let them get out and be on the power play.

Joe Giovannoli  

Yeah, absolutely. So we’re going to take a quick break here. We just wanted to take a moment to acknowledge our sponsor for the Tip of the Law podcast, 9Sail. 9Sail is a law firm-focused digital marketing agency specializing in providing lead generation and awareness building services such as SEO, paid search, content creation and Digital Public Relations. Grow your firm with 9Sail. 

So Mike, we’re coming up to the top of the episode. I want to give you, you know, a couple minutes here. Just tell us, really, what your 742 advisors tell. Tell me what, what really makes you guys special, what makes you great, and what are the things that excite you? What types of projects really excite you that you can get involved in with law firms?

Mike Mellor  

Yeah, yeah. You know, it’s always been trying to really be the consultant who’s, who’s not really the consultant. You know, I’ve spent a lot of time, you know, in professional service firms more than two decades, the last 13 or 14 in legal and, you know, kind of see, see how the sausage is made, right? Experienced all of those issues now coming in and sort of providing a power back point deck that’s going to provide some sort of formula For, hey, you gotta do it. But, you know, really being in there, rolled sleeves up, and, you know, kind of mucking it, mucking it out right, going down and fixing bounce rates and dupes and, you know, just doing that work, not sort of providing prescriptive advice on how to do that work. So that’s really what it is is sort of mixing that pragmatic, sort of practical approach. Hey, this stuff needs to get done. Let’s not just sort of show you how well, let’s get in there and do it for you. You know, I’ve been on that other side my entire career, and, you know, getting somebody who’s just going to kind of grab the ball and run with it and check in as needed. And, you know, kind of, kind of let them loose in there and and, you know, fix the processes, interview the people, figure out where they’re spending their time. Can we, can we fit our solutions within their current process and build a unique process around that? So, you know, again, it’s a frictionless environment. 

There’s a great book called Nudge, and I absolutely love it. And essentially talks about, you know, folks are almost like water, you know, you have a 401 K, they took half the people and they gave them the 401 K, said, here’s the login. All you gotta do is log in. You can, you can turn it off if you want. They found that a majority of people didn’t turn it off. And then they took the other half of the people and they said, We’re not going to put one in a 401 K, we’re not going. Automatically have you invest. All you have to do is go and log in and turn it on, and you can get our 5% match. They found the same number of people just didn’t do it either way. Yeah, so, and that was a significant amount of coin there. And, you know, you’re, you know, 100% match, up to 5% you know, that’s, that’s money right there. And, you know, folks just, they don’t have time to do things. So how do you kind of figure systems within theirs. And that’s, that’s really what we’re all about. It’s not sort of pie in the sky, sort of utopian ways. It’s, hey, let’s take an honest look at what our firm is and what we’re doing, and what we’re willing to incentivize and what we’re willing to let things be the status quo. That’s just, that’s the reality that sometimes you’re not going to get people to change. And so how do you set up systems within that structure? And so that’s really our experience, my experience, I guess it’s a one man show. So the boots on the ground experience is in kind of, you know, directly and personally facilitating those changes, I think is going to bring a lot of value to my mid size and smaller clients.

Joe Giovannoli  

Awesome. Well, Mike, thanks for joining me, and really glad to have you as a partner of 9Sail and as a friend. And I’m looking forward to episode two with you to talk about the other topics that we could have spent an hour on each so thank you so much for taking the time, man. And you know, like I said, Look, really looking forward to the future here.

Mike Mellor  

Yeah, thanks so much. Love what you guys are doing. So keep it up.

Joe Giovannoli  

Thanks. Appreciate it. Thank you all for tuning in, and we look forward to seeing you on the next episode. Take care. Thank you for tuning in to Tip of the Law podcast hosted by Joe Giovannoli. If you’ve enjoyed today’s episode, be sure to subscribe to Tip of the Law and leave us a comment wherever you listen to your favorite podcast you’ve been listening to Tip of the Law.