Introduction  

You are 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. This week, we’re excited to welcome Robert Algeri. Robert is the co-founder of Great Jakes, a leading web-centric marketing firm specializing in brand and website design for law firms. With over 25 years of experience, he’s dedicated to helping large and mid sized law firms stand out from their competitors and build a stronger, more effective online presence at Great Jakes. Robert personally oversees client engagements, ensuring the company consistently exceeds expectations. He’s also an accomplished speaker, regularly sharing his expertise at webinars, forums and industry conferences. Without further ado, let’s get started. Let’s jump right in and welcome our host, Joe Giovannoli, the founder and CEO of 9Sail.

Joe Giovannoli  

Robert, thanks for joining me today. 

Robert Algeri
Ah, it’s my pleasure. Thank you for having me. 

Joe Giovannoli

Yeah, really excited to dive in here, but before we do, I’d love for you to just give us a quick little background on yourself and on Great Jakes.

Robert Algeri  

Well, my name is Robert Algeri, I’m a partner at Great Jakes. Great Jakes is a brand design and website development agency that works exclusively with law firms. Most of our clients are typically 100 to over 1000 attorneys and all in North America.

Joe Giovannoli  

Awesome. That’s great. Cool. Yeah. So this kind of actually lends itself well to the topic that we’re going to talk about today, right? That there’s riches and niches. When we were talking on our prep call, that term came up, and you know, first and foremost, you have practiced what you preached, right? You’re so niche focused, you have such a bull’s eye approach to the types of firms that you’re looking to work with. What led you to that?

Robert Algeri  

So my business partner is my brother, and we originally had another business. We were a company that was kind of like an early version of YouTube, and we had great success, this was during the dot com boom, and we were able to sell that company. And during that process, we had a whole bunch of lawyers, and we got to meet these professionals. After we sold this company, we said, “All right, you know, what are we going to do?” And we got some inquiries from law firms about, “hey, can you help us with our website?” That led to us working with law firms. And it was really a very interesting thing. But originally, we didn’t always work with law firms. We had other clients as well, and we had pharmaceutical clients. We worked with Pfizer and Sanofi Pasteur, and we had all these tech companies, and we had other professional services. We had lots of accounting firms, and law firms were in the mix. And at one point I just remember getting so frustrated with law firms, because there was always, every time we went into a meeting, there would be some old partner in the back saying, why do we even need a website? And it was like, What am I even doing here? Right? And so anyway, so we kind of almost gave up on law firms, but around 2008 there was a financial crisis, and it changed the kind of dynamics of the business world. And one of the things that happened at that point that personally hit us was we went, I was invited to pitch a project for a financial firm, for a firm that I knew pretty well. I knew the owners, and after the meeting, they called up and said, Hey, we really love you, but we can’t hire you. And the reason why is because there’s another agency that knows exactly what we do, and they only work with financial firms just like us, and it just feels like the right move to go with them. We said, wow, wow. That makes a lot of sense. And so that was the catalyst, that was the impetus for us to really rethink our business. So between 2008 and 2009 what we decided was we were going to pick one vertical, we were going to pick a niche, and we were going to completely dedicate ourselves to that niche, and then we were going to position ourselves in that niche as the best and smartest agency out there. And we were challenged, though, to pick the niche. I mean, we were doing great work with pharmaceuticals, and we were doing great work with tech companies and so on, so forth. And it surprised us when we finally boiled it down. It surprised us that we ended up with law firms. And the reason why we ended up with law firms was because we had ideas, we had solutions, and we understood where they were coming from, because we had been there as clients, and we knew them. We knew lawyers. We knew them. We knew a lot of them. And so we had some insight. I mean, my own family members are lawyers. And so we decided to focus here, and it was one of the best business decisions that we ever made. It completely clarified everything that we were doing. So no longer were we trying to be a dozen things to a different, dozen different audiences. We had one audience. It was very clear who that audience was, that meant we could have one marketing message, not a dozen. And the solutions that we offered, all of a sudden, became much more focused. And so what this allowed us to do was, and still today, is it allows us to walk into a law firm engagement with solutions in hand. We know probably more about their needs than they may know oftentimes, because we’re doing this for dozens and dozens of law firms just like them, yeah? So we’re coming in with tons of experience, but also insights. We’re looking around the corner that they don’t see it, because this is all we do, yeah? And that’s a kind of value that doesn’t come from a generalist.

Joe Giovannoli  

I love that I have a very similar origin story, right? You know, starting out full service and really niching down we did it though, where we were full service agency, all industry agnostic, and we niched down at both our services and our client base within a six month period, which was a wild story that I’m gonna, I’ve been asked to record a separate episode about so I’m going to.

Robert Algeri  

We should compare notes. It was the hardest thing that we ever did.

Joe Giovannoli  

Right. So, but, but there’s a, there’s such a comparison here to to law firms, right? You know, for those, those listening, I’m sure there’s a couple of different camps that people are coming out of, but for most marketers, they’re like, Wow, focusing on one thing that would be a dream, right? Like, you know, you’re at a multi practice law firm, maybe you have 30 different practice groups, and, you know, a couple hundred attorneys, and you know, you’re a lot of times running around like a chicken with your head cut off, right? Because you’re having to deal with so much and so, yeah, you know, your agency has been really good at designing websites around firm capabilities and spotlighting what the firm’s capabilities are, right? And so, yeah, what? Again, there’s a really good comparison to what you decided to do versus maybe what some law firms could benefit from. What is your methodology around helping a law firm to determine where it is that they want to be playing, right, what sandbox they want to play in?

Robert Algeri  

Well, let’s start with most law firms. Most sizable law firms are complex beasts. You know, they serve dozens of industries, offering hundreds of services spanning multiple locations, and this makes it really hard for a firm to identify their unique characteristics. They just do lots of different things. And so it also means that it’s extremely difficult for them to craft a tagline or any kind of memorable messaging. So other industries, other businesses that do a single thing you can craft a memorable message. But that’s not often the case for law firms. So one of the things that you know we are proponents of– and here’s the big tip for today– if you’re such that type of firm, consider abandoning the dream of a universally agreed upon tagline. You know, there was a marketing expert a long time ago that told the firm that it was absolutely necessary that they have a tagline. But I’m here to give those firms permission to consider alternative solutions. And there are alternative solutions. The first thing I would suggest is consider something called silent positioning. And silent positioning, you know, it sounds complex, it sounds marketing jargony, but it’s simply communicating the firm’s unique value propositions without relying on explicit taglines or headlines. It’s about expressing the firm’s identity through design and imagery and carefully curated content. And you know, some firms are doing this really well. Skadden is an example. You can go to their site and you won’t see big headlines or, you know, taglines or anything like that. Instead, they’re using some really great imagery to tell their story about how they are leaders in global commerce and reinforcing that superior position they have in the marketplace. I don’t want to say this is easy, but it’s certainly a lot easier to do this than coming up with a tagline that takes months to conjure up, and then, turns out, doesn’t really help, or does the opposite of helping the firm. So I would say that’s a place to start. The success rate of having a universally agreed upon tagline, or, you know, messaging on the homepage isn’t great for sizable law firms. So I would say, start there, acknowledge that, and then consider what it is where the firm’s unique characteristics are, what are its core competencies? Does it have specific areas of focus? And if it does, then let’s call those out. Ideally, the firm can identify three, maybe six, areas of focus that are unique to the firm, or that tell the story of the firm. And it could be an industry focus, it could be a practice focus, but what we want to do is call them out, and ideally you want to drive people right from the home page to those sections. Because what we’re trying to do here is control the client journey. Somebody’s coming in on the home page, word that they have an issue they think that you may be able to solve or help them with that issue. We need to make clear that this is an area where you have great knowledge, right? So, you know, it could be corporate law. Could be, you know, litigation. What we want to do is drive them to a section of the site that tells more about what it is that the firm does in those areas, and then we want to use that landing place as a starting point for their journey, so that they can say, “Oh, here’s the exact practice I need,” or “here’s the case study that helps me understand where this expertise about the experience the firm has.” But what we want to do is structure the client journey right from the beginning, and not tell them everything that the firm does, but give them what they need. So this is in contrast to what a lot of law firms do.

Joe Giovannoli  

Right, because it’s because it’s hard, it’s hard for them to, it’s hard for them to break away from that for some of maybe the internal bureaucracy, you know, factors of 25 partners at the firm, and each partner thinks that their practice should be the most important one of the firm, right? So we understand, right? And we hear it day in and day out. We understand, for the listeners, we understand that pain point. We understand that. We understand you have a lot of people pulling you in a lot of different directions. Sorry, Robert, I wanted to jump in and say that because it’s definitely something you and I have lots of conversations about. It’s like, we get, we get that pain, we understand it, right? But that doesn’t mean that, because you have that pain, that this isn’t the solution, right? This, this, what you’re explaining here, it is the solution, right? 

Robert Algeri  

Yeah. And I’m saying, like, we can go to most law firm websites right now, go to their services section, their practice areas, and see dozens and dozens and dozens of options. It’s mind numbing, and that’s the kind of thing that adds stress to the visitor. That’s a very unstructured client journey through the website, and what we want to do is structure that visited journey so that they aren’t overwhelmed by hundreds of options. We want to say, hey, if you’ve got to focus, if you have a need and it is exempt organizations and private clients, great. We want to drive you to more information, and we want to show you the related practices and some case studies and client stories and articles that are related to that to help give you the information you need without losing you along the way. So yeah, so I would say it’s okay. You don’t need a tagline. We can there’s alternative solutions out there. One’s called silent positioning. But what we’re also saying is number two, structure the client journey and focus on core services. You know, highlighting core practice areas. If you can showcase three to six services that can focus attention on the firm’s greatest strengths, you are way ahead of their competition, because most law firms aren’t doing this. And then there’s a third thing. And I would say, hey, you know, just because the firm hasn’t put explicit messaging on the home page and the firm of a tagline doesn’t mean that you should abandon the idea of explicit messaging. The bios and those individual practices are what those areas could be used for, because it’s there that you can make explicit statements about what it is. There’s three things that should be communicated in a practice, or, even more importantly, in a bio, and that is what you do, who you serve, and what makes you better. Or different than another attorney that does similar work. 

Joe Giovannoli  

Yeah, I agree. I agree with you on that wholeheartedly. And there’s something else that you said that I think I want to, I want to just dissect just a bit more, right, which is that when you say that they’re you’re not, they don’t need a tagline, right? I agree. But what you’re not saying because I’ve worked with you long enough. Like, what you’re not saying is that the firm doesn’t need brand, you know, brand elements and brand voice, right? Like, the firm needs those things. Because when you pick your three to six practices or areas of expertise, and we’re actually seeing a lot of firms do now, is pick, pick industry focuses, right? So, you know, maybe they’re focused on the financial sector, the hospitality sector and the creatives, the agency sector, right? Like those are the three areas that they’re focused on who the firm is. Has to be carried over to all of those pages and all of those elements. But you’re not going to spend time building out little brands among each one of your practice groups, you have one brand that you’re carrying those elements into your core focus.

Robert Algeri  

Right. There is a firm-wide brand, and we can’t ignore it. Matter of fact, we need to reinforce it. But here’s the challenge, you know, and this is the unique challenge that law firms have in creating a distinctive website. Most law firms desire to be perceived similarly. You know that they’re smart, that they’re experts, that they’re trustworthy, they’re experienced. And what we’re saying is, yes, of course, you’re those things. You’re a law firm. However, if you want to create a website or brand look that truly sets the firm apart, that distinguishes it from competition, then the firm has to identify its unique characteristic, and that could be something like growth. It could be the collegial team approach. It could be geography, it could be experience, it could be industry focus, it could be special methodology. It could be some unique insights, but it has to be something, and that is your brand. You need to identify those things. And most law firms, you know, they’re leading on that we’re smart and experienced messaging, that every law firm has. What we’re saying is okay, yeah, but you know what? That’s not enough, right? You got to dig deeper, yeah, and that’s what, that’s what branding is. And related to this, I want to say that identifying that core, unique characteristics of the firm, those characteristics, they don’t have to be flashy, right? It doesn’t have to be something that takes months to figure out. It just needs to be true.

Joe Giovannoli  

Needs to be true, but it needs to be unique, right? So, and I want to give an example. We have a client, and I love this. This one of their, one of their core values, right? Or, or, I think it would be considered probably more a brand promise, but they have a, they have a brand promise, which is follow up with them before they follow up with you, right, okay. And the managing partner, the co-managing partners, and all of the equity partners in the business scream that from the rooftops, and it is trained from day one into their attorneys, right? And it doesn’t matter the size, right? What’s, what is one thing that is really important to you that most law firms fail at? In their case, it’s our attorneys, our staff is going to follow up with you before you follow up with them. We’re not going to send something over the fence and just wait to hear from you and hope that you saw our email, right? Like we’re going to make sure that we push this agenda through, unless you tell us to back off for a minute so you can have some time. Great. But we’re going to make sure that you’re never in a place where we sent it, it went into the ether, right? And I think that’s one of the important things that a lot of law firms right now are, I think we’re we’re in a an era of change in law firms, and I’m seeing it regularly. I’m seeing firms that are investing in culture. They’re investing in understanding core values. I agree with you. These things don’t need to take forever, but they need to be unique, right? 

Robert Algeri  

They need to be, they need to be identified, and they need to be unique. And there’s something else, and this is, I love this firm. This is what a brand promise is. This is fantastic. But here’s where law firms drop the ball because claims of expertise or promises made like that. They can fall flat without substantiation. You’ve got to be, you can’t just say you’re the best at something. You can’t just say we are really experienced, or we have this special methodology. I need to see it. You need to put on that website examples of that methodology or that experience, or those stories. Something needs to be communicated to make the case that you’re better and different from the next firm that’s making a similar claim. And that needs to happen at a firm wide level, and it also most definitely needs to happen at the practice and bio level. And you know that goes back to what we were talking about before, which is like: there’s three things that need to be communicated, what you do, who you serve, and the last thing is substantiation. What makes you better? Prove it to me. Don’t just tell me, prove to me. Make the case for what it is that you do and why you’re better than the next attorney that’s making a similar claim. Yeah, that’s what the bio is there for. This is where the meat of the website should be because we’ve taken them through this client journey, they are convinced they’ve got them into the core service, you know, we’ve identified the service that they’re interested in. We’ve gotten them to the right people. Here’s where we can make the case on those bios practice areas, that there is indeed something special that the firm has, that they can solve the problems, right, that you may have.

Joe Giovannoli  

Yeah, well, and I think it’s what’s also something you just said it’s really important, is that, because of the age of search, right, where you know, somebody can go and they can search for a specific topic or whatever, they’re not everybody’s entering through the Home page, right? So going back to what you’re saying about, you know, silent, silent messaging, right? Yeah. So going back to that, you need to make sure that that theme carries over to pretty much every page that you have. And it’s not like where you have to detail everything you do on every page, the essence of the core values and the brand promises that you’re making to your clients or prospective clients, needs to carry over in everything that you do, because if they come in on a pay on a on a bio page, or if they come in on a practice page, they need to be able to get a flavor for who the firm is, without needing to click too far in, right? You pretty much have, you have two to three, you have five seconds maybe, but you have two to three pages maximum of a user’s time before they if they don’t get what they need, or it’s hard for them to find they’re leaving, right? That’s a fact. It’s undisputed. You can go look up all of the research in the world that’s out there about user experience. Google literally put an extra E on EAT. So now it’s EEAT and the first word is experience, right? And that that is so it’s so incredibly important for these, for anybody, anybody that’s listening, if you’re endeavoring on a new website build, or you’re trying to figure out ways to make your firm better, your multi practice firm better, a very easy way to to do it is to start, start from start, from the beginning. Who are we, and what are the things that we promise? And then how do we carry that over? I want to mention one other thing, Robert, that you said, which I think we can riff on a little bit, right? So every, every firm that’s out there that you have 20 practices, 10 practices, you know, 100 practices. I don’t even know if there’s 100 practices out there, but if you have 100 practices easily, there is, there is always, there’s always a boutique firm out there or a single practice firm out there doing what you do. Yeah. Start looking at your practices as their own operating businesses. Not all marketing tools are going to work for every single practice group. Not all strategies are going to be the same, right? Yeah, so, and I know from the way that you, that your sites operate, right, that you, you very much design with this in mind, right? 

Robert Algeri  

That is exactly, that is a core premise of our design approach. So we crafted this thing called the attorney microsite, and it applies to practice areas as well, and it basically does exactly what you just mentioned, which is it treats every bio and every practice like its own small boutique. Because each of those boutiques, each of those practices, will need to position themselves a little bit differently, depending on the market they’re targeting, so even though they all need to fit seamlessly under the same firm wide brand, we need to give those practices and those attorneys enough flexibility in their bios and practice areas where they can communicate their unique message. And that might mean for some practices, you know, long lists of representative matters that may make sense. Another practice may need detailed pages about community activities they’re doing, or the golf outings that they sponsor, or something else. I mean, you may have an attorney who’s involved in politics, they may want to pull that information out into a separate page to make it clear that they are very in tune with their community. Yes, so we, you’re absolutely right. We’ve got to treat each of these like small little boutiques on their own, because they do each have unique messages that they need to communicate, but also because they are competing with all sorts of firms. So a large firm may not just be competing with another large firm anymore. There’s a boutique that does exactly what that practice does. They’re competing against that boutique as well. This tool, this practice area of microsite, this attorney bio microsite feature that. We incorporate into all our client sites, kind of levels the playing field for the larger firms.

Joe Giovannoli  

Yes. And this is, and this is the one thing. This is the one thing that is overlooked so much, because we go into firms all the time that have 20 practices and they say, Oh, these are our competitors, right? And it’s all the other 20 practice firms out there, yeah, and there is so much proof that I mentioned the firm a little bit earlier that has the follow up with them before they follow up with you. You know, they’re, they’re a 20 attorney firm, right? And they have three practices at the firm that they all actually work together, right? Like they’re all, you know, it’s one cohesive thing. So they’re a nice boutique firm. And I have exact instances where they have one client that they vetted some bigger firms and they vetted a boutique firm, and they went with the boutique firm because they felt like they’re getting more attention and whatnot. Your practices at multi practice firms, your practices are their own, should be, should be looked at and treated as boutique firms within the brand.

Robert Algeri  

Exactly, and this really goes back to right where we start the conversation, which is like, you know, there’s riches and niches. Understanding that you need to identify those unique characteristics at a firm wide level, but also at the practice area level, is so important. And the websites need to support this. They need to the brand needs to carry through, but also the technology needs to be there to support this, because that one size fits all approach that made sense a decade ago to let’s say, a bio or practice area just doesn’t make sense now. It doesn’t allow them to communicate those things effectively that we talked about what they do and who they serve and what makes them better, and that what makes them better has gotten more challenging, because you can’t just say it. We’ve got to prove it, and proving it means teasing case studies and blog posts and pulling in information like experience. And this is, this is tough. This is, it’s complex, but that’s okay. 

Joe Giovannoli  

Let me break this down into a super simple example. And then we’re at the top of the episode. So I want to, you know, one last question for you. But let me break this into a simple example. A lot of corporate firms, business firms out there, you know this, this is a matter of the size, but they, a lot of times, what we’ll see is they will have– because it’s a natural fit– they’ll have an estate planning side of the firm. And, you know, they all say the same thing, we want to work with high net worth individuals. We want to work with business owners, etc, etc, right? Because it’s a natural fit for, you know, a corporate law firm or a business law firm that is working with business owners. Cool. Let me give you a very clear example of why those two practices can be actually looked at and treated completely differently. On your estate planning side, maybe you’re going to run a webinar, or maybe you have a podcast, right, that you are talking about topics that are very, very timely and interesting for the business owner market that you’re trying to hit. Well, yeah, when somebody gets to that page, you know, throughout the page, there should be examples of or recommendations of top episodes or top webinars or an upcoming webinar that they can register for. Whereas on the corporate law side, you know that you’re gonna, you’re gonna probably have articles or links out to the top five questions that you regularly get, or the top five things that you are helping businesses with, day in and day out. You’re going to be giving them resources to go look at and sure, maybe you have a webinar, maybe you have a podcast, but that market is going to be more consuming their content through, likely, through reading quick articles, than they are going to be, you know, signing up for and sitting through an entire webinar, right? 

Robert Algeri  

So I’ll take this a step farther. On that trust and estates side, they’re dealing with people. They’re dealing with this. This is a personal thing that means that they’re going to be connecting with individuals. Those bios may even want to include real, detailed personal information. We’ve had very, very, very accomplished trust and estates attorneys create pages on their bios that included pictures of them on safaris or diving with sharks, and what they were saying in those images was, we’re just like you, rich person. We do things that you do and we understand your world. One section of their bio communicated more than many of the rest of the all the other dozen pages that were there because it was really easy for somebody to scan that and go, Uh huh, yep, that’s me. That’s what I do.

Joe Giovannoli  

Yeah, that’s awesome. 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. Robert, this has been incredible. I think we definitely have a part two that we can record at a later date, because I think there’s some other topics. But let’s simplify this. Let’s simplify this for the audience. Take, you know, 30 seconds. What would be the if we were to boil this down to one tip, one thing that you can leave people with, that they should bring back to their firm today and and they can implement. What would be that one thing you would tell somebody to do right now.

Robert Algeri  

I would say, consider your bios and your practice areas as the place where you can make explicit statements about the person and about that practice that identify what they do and who they serve, and then double down in those areas and substantiate those claims of expertise with case studies, articles, news items, blog posts, webinars, anything that’s going to help make the case for what it is that that attorney does and why they’re better than someone else that does something similar. Because there’s lots of attorneys out there, we’ve got to make yours stand out, and content is going to help do that, and structuring it in the bio is an absolute necessity. Awesome.

Joe Giovannoli  

Robert, thank you so much. And for our listeners, thank you for tuning in. Tune in next week for another great episode. Have a good one.

Outro

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 podcasts. You’ve been listening to Tip of the Law.