156: Scaling Law Firms with AI, YouTube, and Smart Marketing with Fractional CMO Carl Downey

What do you consider to be a guiding

principle for firms that do well and firms that don't do well?

What are the firms that seem to have more success than firms of

a similar size? What are some of the traits that you look for, or

you recommend for these companies?

I'd say it's a due diligence in knowing your

numbers first off, and Second off, having a fearlessness to

market because you know your numbers. So if you know your

cost per lead, you know your average case value, you know

your cost per wanted lead and your cost per sign up, you're

comfortable making a marketing investment, because you know

your average case value, right? So if you spend $10,000 and your

average case values exceed that with with a number of cases, and

you can hit that, then you can make an informed marketing

decision. But it does come down to fearlessness, because

everything doesn't have direct attribution source tracking,

right? So you don't always know that your new client came from a

particular marketing source. So you got to be willing to try

things, and you have to be aggressive, so that the days of

generating all your business through former client referrals

and local business referrals and attorney referrals. It's a hard

road to just stay on that path now, because people have so many

ways to find out about your business.

Well, good morning, good afternoon, good

evening, whatever time this podcast or recording or video,

YouTube, wherever you're watching whatever time this

finds you welcome to the 10 golden rules of internet

marketing for law firms. Podcast. I'm Jay Berkowitz,

we've got a great guest today. Carl Downey, quick commercial,

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without further. ADO. Carl Downey, welcome to the 10 golden

rules podcast.

Thank you, Jay. Happy to be here.

Carl and I met, I guess, at a couple legal

conferences, and he's at all the right places we seem to hang

out. And the company is called complete law marketing, and he

is a fractional law firm, CMO. And so this will hopefully be a

great perspective where we look in from the outside in as the

marketing agency for a lot of law firms, and Carl's in there

helping them in a fractional role as a CMO. But Carl, why

don't you tell us first a little bit about your journey and how

you ended up here.

I've been working in marketing and advertising for

over 25 years, I started my career in the financial industry

working in direct mail marketing and then transitioned into

digital marketing and real estate and law firm marketing. I

came to work for a company called LexisNexis Martindale

Hubble and worked in the Martindale Hubble arm for about

eight years, doing digital marketing with firms across the

country. I was a great experience for me. Eventually,

that portfolio got sold, and the field reps from from Martindale

Hubble were all given severance packages, moved on, so all of us

kind of transitioned into different agencies, roles,

responsibilities, a lot of spin offs happened. And as I found my

way through that transition, I realized that I had a lot of

great relationships with my law firm clients, which drove my

success, and I didn't always have agencies or companies that

provided the best products or services that I was trying to

position as a sales responsibility, but I could

always manage that with just having good relationships. So I

came to the conclusion that I didn't need a product offering

to help my clients, what I really just needed to do was to

get into their business and work closely with them as a chief

marketing officer, to help them find the value in what they get.

So I started complete law marketing in 2017 and I haven't

looked back. Ever since, it's just been a great run of helping

clients and finding new clients to help and let them get to

their goals and successes and wins.

That's great. Congratulations. And I think one

of the things that's evolved in the business world is the

fractional roles, because we all used to be stuck in a box in a

paradigm that was, hey, if you hired someone, they worked in

your office, and they had a salary, and that was it. And if

you could afford a chief marketing officer, you could

afford a chief marketing officer, we just didn't even

conceive of the fractional. And so over the years, maybe one of

the first fractional was we needed a COO, a chief operating

officer, and it just popped in my head, like, oh, maybe I could

get someone part time, and I posted a fractional role on

LinkedIn, got a ton of great resumes, hired someone amazing.

She tackled some huge problems for our company, and just

getting us on a new operating system, a new software, our

project management software, writing a bunch of our standard

operating procedures and systematizing things, which

we've done years before, but they all needed to be updated.

So the fractional role is something I would highly

consider, highly recommend for firms to consider. And now we

have several people fractional like our fractional marketing

person just moved full time. And a lot of times, if you get the

right fit, you move that to full time. We just hired a fractional

integrator in the Eos operating system. So I'm a big fan.

Yeah. I guess realistically, the CMO, a lot of

firms I work with is the managing partner, right? They

have a lot of hats they're wearing, and they're not

necessarily the best at all of them. I mean, some that I meet,

they should be spending all their time on marketing, and

that's the right place for them. They should get somebody to do

fractional for the other stuff. But a lot of times they need

somebody like me. And a big benefit of having a fractional

responsibility is that they work with other firms, and they see a

lot of other products, services, solutions that could be deployed

and implemented across that firm's operation to make them

more successful. Right? So that that is a big benefit, and then

also, you don't need a full time employee to do cheap Marketing

Officer responsibilities in a lot of firms, either. So I think

that it's a sweet spot that a lot of firms can take advantage

of and have a lot of success.

You made a great point about sitting in too many

seats, and there's a great book called E Myth. And E Myth is not

the electronic myth. It's an old, 35 year old book about the

entrepreneurs myth, and it's one of the first books I read when I

started my business. We often talk about it here on this

podcast. And one of the first chapters, it recommends that you

make an organizational chart. And even if you're the sole

employee at the company, you put yourself in all the boxes. And I

think for many of us, we're still in too many boxes. And

we've recently started doing the EOS operating system, and one of

the EOS has you create an accountability chart, and you

figure out, you take all the people out so nobody has a job

anymore in the accountability chart, and you define the roles.

What roles does the company need? And then you start fitting

people in. I'm the visionary for our company, and the visionary

in EOS partners with the integrator. And it's like the

classic CEO who's not involved in directly in the day to day

operations, and the integrator works with all the department

heads to run the day to day operations. Like you said, some

partners in law firms should be in the marketing seat. Many

shouldn't be. Some should be in the marketing seat, and then

they should make sure that they get out of those seats. So,

like, I've gotten out of finance recently, I mentioned we just

hired a full time marketing person. The problem is, you do a

disservice to those seats. Like, if you're in five or six seats,

there's no way you can do all that, do the work and supervise

the product as well. So Amen.

I agree. Those are good books. I have a lot of

clients on the Eos platform, so red traction and fireproof, and

certainly good operating systems for law firms to work

with. Yeah, we're loving it. And by the way, if

you haven't looked into EOS that, we've done a couple great

webinars on Eos, and we interviewed Mike Morris, who

wrote the book fireproof. So you can find great content on EOS.

I'd highly recommend it. And by the way, for those founders of

businesses, I always say, Don't read traction first. It's a

mistake everybody makes. There's a better book for the visionary,

for the founder of the firm. It's called Get a grip. I keep

it right here beside my trusty podcast. US, Mike and get a

grip, is told in a story format, and it's easier for the

visionary to digest. So I'll be my next purchase, yeah, and

especially if you have one of those law firm CEOs and these

guys need a system. And he's tried to read traction most of

the visionaries, most of us read traction a couple times, couple

chapters, and we just couldn't get through it, because it's

really the operating system. It's the details for the

integrator. But it's gotta be simplified for those of us who

are the visionaries. It's gotta be told in a parable story

format that's very easy to digest. Then that goes on.

I read that book on a flight from Baltimore to Utah,

yeah, and I love the book, and I was trying to meet with the

first firm that I hired me that uses the EOS system. But from my

position, I could see it in a way that I guess I could have

excitement around the way that it built everything out, and

then reading fireproof set it up for law firms.

Yeah, if you can read traction, cover to cover,

you could potentially be an integrator. Look, a lot of us

could be visionaries and integrators. And then there's a

separate role called implementer, who's a third party

that comes in for your quarterly meetings and helps you run EOS.

And a lot of successful executives could do all three

jobs, but in your company, day to day, you got to pick one of

the three. Yeah, I got it good. Let's talk a little bit about

marketing. What are the issues the law firms are dealing with,

and what are some of the solutions y'all are

recommending?

Well, I mean, the biggest trend right now in

digital is all centered around AI, right? So Google's changing

the way it's presenting its results. People are talking

about, how much longer are we going to use Google, which is a

crazy thought, and how can you get yourself found more in AI

results and the use of video as a tool to get found more

consistently, YouTube, I feel like, has almost moved up higher

in interest for visibility than Google. I know the same company,

but YouTube has evolved, at least on the conference circuit

as a main topic, right? Yeah, of how to get results so that in

the digital space, that's the most influential element that

I'm seeing, and we're working towards driving performance with

billboards are still out there, radio, TV, connected,

advertising, social media are all just as potent and powerful

as they ever were. So depends on what your appetite is for a

marketing budget for how you're going to attack market

penetration now,

yeah, the big guys can do it all. Oh Say amen

to everything you said. And the one piece that I would add, I

don't feel like Google is being replaced. I feel like Google has

taken a very significant defensive stance. And in my

opinion, what they're doing is they're showing those AI search

results. They call them AI overviews, like a chat GPT

response. They're showing them right at the top of the page,

particularly in the early searches, when someone's just

like, do I need a lawyer for a car accident? Why do I have this

red rash on my skin, or whatever my thought is, that they're

aggressively positioning those AI answers at the very top of

Google so that people retrain, and they don't go to chat GPT.

And so people realize, oh, I can get a really good AI answer from

Google. I don't need to go to chat GPT or perplexity or one of

the other llms. So my personal theory is that relatively soon,

within six months, Google's going to start showing Pay Per

Click ads aligned with those AI answers. So right now, you're

typically seeing the AI Google's AI overviews. They're giving you

a chat GPT style answer at the top of the page, and then they

show links to three other websites, where the websites

they use to compile that answer, and they're showing their

homework. And chat GPT is now too. So you can get links to

your site from those LLM responses, large language model

AI responses. But My personal theory is, you know, Google's

once they have feel like everybody's retrained, they feel

like they can use Google, they can get AI answers from Google,

then they're going to start showing paid ads in those on the

right hand side there, and they have to, because there's two $50

billion a year of revenue at stake. But yeah, the second

thing you said, I totally agree with, and that is YouTube seems

to be coming to some very significant prominence. And if

you look at the top traffic websites, of course, Google's

still number one. One by far, but YouTube's number two by far.

Google owns both products, and so you combine the two, and

Google's like, way, way, way out of the market. Still chat, GPT

is like, in position 21 or something, way behind. I see

YouTube like my personal use, I feel like they've done a great

job in making the YouTube experience kind of like Tiktok

or Instagram, where you start seeing the content you want to

see. And so it's very, very fluid and very pleasurable to

spend some time on YouTube. And it's my go to if I have five

minutes because my wife takes a phone call or something, we're

watching TV, I go to YouTube. Now if you're younger, I'm sure

you go to Snapchat or Tiktok or something. But I think that's

part of why we're seeing a lot of trend towards YouTube and

video,

yeah, and I just say, like with Google, that

what's happening is right in line with what they've always

done. They built something that was designed to have a great

user experience, and that's how they captured market share, so

they delivered the most relevant results. That was always the

goal in organic with ads, with the map. So now what's more

important for user experience and more relevant is an AI

answer, so you make a choice to go there instead of going to

chat GPT, which is the evolution of zero click marketing, right?

So now I do a search, and I don't need to go to any website

off of Google. I can get my answer right there. It's just a

matter of is, does that have the depth of information that I

really need, or am I going to click through one of the links?

And I think in the legal space, it's going to hit the surface,

but there's going to be a lot of opportunity to press through a

link and go to a website to get the right answers and the

details that you want. So Google will find a way to monetize it.

Yeah, you get the answer, but you don't get a

lawyer. Eventually you have to go to a lawyer site to hire a

lawyer, but definitely that that first search is being answered

by Google. I agree.

If I'm looking for something involved, I do like

the chat GPT experience of starting my research there,

giving it a little more detail, it's great if I can just talk to

my phone and tell it what I want, and it spits out whatever

plan of action I want from it. That's within reason. I love it,

and that is a threat to Google. Yeah,

no, it's definitely a changing world. And

our challenge, your challenges, as the marketing expert, our

challenges, the marketing or digital partner is guiding our

clients through, and we believe that the cases are still out

there, but the Google traffic's down a little bit, and I feel

like those AI answers are you use the term zero click, and

what Google means by that is, if you go ask a question like, do I

need a lawyer if I Have a car accident? And then Google gives

you like seven things to do after a car accident, explains

when you do need a lawyer when you don't need a lawyer. And so

if you're just doing your initial research, Google

answered that question previously, Google would have

shown you four different websites that have blogs called,

do I need a lawyer after a car accident? And we would have had

a chance to get those people on a free consult, but I still feel

like the cases are out there, and so you, I think correctly

said, we have a requirement on us now to do more on YouTube,

more on social media, be very effective and consistent with

the firm's branding community activities, because people are

still going to find lawyers, but there's going to going to be

fewer opportunities on that first initial search.

Yeah, and there's a new thing you look at more

closely now impressions and queries, right? You want to see

that trending up before you could look at trends on just

general how much traffic going into my website, but now you got

you got to pay attention to the other ones and try to grow those

too, because you might not get the click.

Hey. The good news for you and I is someone's

got to dig deep on the stuff and figure it out, and we can really

be an asset to the firms. When we do that, I always like to ask

a business question for folks like yourself and myself,

because we get to look into these firms from 30,000 feet,

and we get to see across many firms, as you mentioned, what do

you consider to be a guiding principle for firms that do well

and firms that don't do well? What are the firms that seem to

have more success than firms of a similar size? What are some of

the traits that you look for, or you recommend for these

companies?

I'd say it's a due diligence in knowing your

numbers, first off, and Second off, having a fearlessness to

market, because you know your numbers. So if you know your

cost per. Lead. You know your average case value. You know

your cost per wanted lead and your cost per sign up. You're

comfortable making a marketing investment because you know your

average case value, right. So if you spend $10,000 and your

average case values exceed that with with a number of cases, and

you can hit that, then you can make an informed marketing

decision. But it does come down to fearlessness, because

everything doesn't have direct attribution source tracking,

right? So you don't always know that your new client came from a

particular marketing source. So you got to be willing to try

things, and you have to be aggressive so that the days of

generating all your business through former client referrals

and local business referrals and attorney referrals, it's a hard

road to just stay on that path now, because people have so many

ways To find out about your business. So my favorite clients

are the ones that are fearless. I just launched a new practice

in Maryland, here with a estate planning firm and two female

attorneys that spun off from another firm that is established

and substantial, we launched a website and SEO campaign that is

a significant investment for an estate planning firm to get

started with, but they jumped on it, and they really worked in

the details of how that content was going to be driven and how

their business plan was executed within that and it was, it's a

great website, and it's exciting to see. And they opened their

doors a month earlier, and we thought they were gonna we had

to pick the right office location to get them started in,

to build their base. And that was a research project that was

very fulfilling. And they got that rolling. And then finally,

now it's we want cases now. What can we do now? We need them now.

So we started the networking and the local campaign building, but

we also initiated a pay per click campaign just to get it

off and running. So for an estate planning firm, in my

experience, they're not going to be a lot of times those

attorneys aren't going to be as aggressive as you'd think they

would. And the fearlessness with these two attorneys and their

willingness to jump out there and get after the marketing

piece of it, like on day one. I love that. And of course I would

as a marketing person, but I know it's going to pay off for

them.

I really like that line of thinking,

fearlessness with respect to marketing, with the numbers in

mind, and I think if we call it testing, but clearly you gotta

be fearless about jumping into some things. And you said, if

you know your numbers, if you know, okay, if we get a phone

call and it costs $200 we're going to convert one in 10. Our

cost per case is $2,000 and our revenue per case is $10,000 and

we can cash flow that case acquisition cost of $2,000 then

you should be fearless. And if the agency recommends, hey, we

just uncovered a new lead gen strategy. Or when the Google

Local Service ads came along, and we recommend it to folks to

jump in, the people who jumped in day one, they took advantage

of two 300 leads the first month or two, the people who jumped in

six or eight months later found that there was already 50 or 100

people certified, verified, or what Google calls screen for

lawyers. And the market was tougher. So that fearlessness is

definitely an asset, and fearlessness combined with an

understanding of what whether it's working or not.

Yeah, that's a common denominator across my

most successful firms. 100%

that's great. You do the whole marketing

consulting. We've had some great conversations. We did a

rainmaker webinar. Charlie Mann shared his $500,000 referral

playbook. What do you recommend for building those

relationships, the referral relationships with

professionals, with other attorneys. Do you do work with

your attorneys on the ground, what I call the ground game, or

the grassroots marketing?

Yeah. I mean, or the established firm, they

should be getting referrals from the local businesses if we're

looking at the Personal Injury front, the doctors in the area,

orthopedics, physical therapy, chiropractor, collision centers,

tow trucks, any business that you can align with dealing with

an injury or an auto accident, the firms I've seen have great

success have had a local marketing person, local

marketing coordinator, and part of their responsibility was to

go out and develop those relationships and form those

businesses on what the firm offers, and they're held.

Accountable to being in front of a number of businesses a week,

and we track referrals from them with that effort, you can drive

a volume of cases that easily pay for that staff member, and

you can have that staff member working in other

responsibilities besides that networking. They can be handling

social media. They can be helping different departments

with creating ads. There's lots of functionality for them, and

you can hire a relatively young person in that role, and they're

going to thrive and move on. I equate it a little bit to like

the pharmaceutical model, where they go around and they make

office visits, but that's not their only responsibility, but I

love that, and when it's deployed effectively, it's a

home run.

Yeah, we love it, too. Nothing like a referral. I

mean, referrals generally convert for, I'm sure, for you,

for me, for and for the attorneys, at a much higher rate

than even website inquiries or anything we can do on the

internet. What's one simple step you recommend every law firm

take for marketing in 2025

the main focus right now is on in house content

creation, so nobody can tell it or say it or write it like the

attorneys at the office, right? So a lot of agencies try to take

that they do. They take that off their plate so that they can

deliver a volume of content in the Internet content game that

has been in place. Content is king, but now it's kind of like

relationship building. So I look at the attorney, I look at the

office, I look at the client, and I say, what are you

passionate about? What's most interesting to you? What do you

want to talk about in your field? And I try to get them

rolling with that. Just write a blog for me with the estate

planning firm. I said, Look, you got some downtime. We're trying

to get some clients. There's so much to inform people about. Can

you start writing blogs for me? Yes, these girls wrote 20 blogs

in three weeks, and then we took those blogs and we created

scripts to start creating videos. But if you can get

started talking about what you're passionate about in your

practice, or having people in your practice talk about what

they're passionate about, it's a huge opportunity for you to

build useful content, stuff people want to read.

Yeah, I love that next level of going to video.

We've used a similar thing, and we've basically asked the

attorneys to answer questions on video. Back to the car accident.

What do I do if I get hit by an Uber who's going to pay for my

medical repairs if I get hit by an uninsured motorist? And

answering those questions on video works on a number of ways.

It's great content. Like you said, the search engines love

it. We talked earlier about the AI Question and Answer SEO so

you can be positioned to come up with those AI answers or the

chat GPT answers, if you help Google or chat GPT answer

question, and then the best result is people actually go to

your website, go to your YouTube channel, watch your videos and

say, Oh, this guy gets it. Or these women from this estate

playing firm. They really, I jive with them, and it's almost

like your interview, and they come in ready to go. I love

getting them to do blogs, but with the guidance we give is

answer questions. What questions do your prospects ask all the

time? What questions do you get at the switchboard? What

questions do you get in your intake department? Answer those

questions. So I love that one. Yeah, we're, at the time, famous

for the regular listeners of the podcast. These are our quick one

liners at the end, and we've had great marketers and great

business professionals answer these questions through the

years. So you know Carl, you get to join that famous list and

tell us what apps or techniques do you use for personal

productivity?

I go through a process every morning called the

Miracle Morning. You might have heard of the book by Hal Elrod,

but I start all my days that way, and it gets me focused and

ready to perform the miracle morning as a process of

meditation. Affirmations, well, he calls it savers. The silence

is meditation. Affirmations, Visualization, exercise, reading

and writing or journaling, right? At first it was hard the

meditation piece. I don't do it for extended periods of time,

but I do take five minutes every day and breathe and meditate and

focus, right? And then I have some affirmations that are just

things you say. Out what you're going to get out of your day in

your life. And it's the same thing every day. I love it, and

then I visualize. I play a lot of golf, so I'll spend some time

listening to classical music and visualizing what I'm going to

get accomplished in my business, where I want that to take me in

my life, like what vacation it is, whatever, what my family's

going to experience. And then how straight am I going to hit

that golf ball and chip it onto the green and put it in the

hole? I'll even go through, if I'm playing that day, I'll go

through 18 holes on the course in my mind. So I love that part,

the reading part of it. And I've been up and down with this over

the years. I think I started doing it in 2020 during covid,

but I got away from it, and then I got back to it. That reading

part of it I'll read for 20 minutes every morning, and it

keeps me on point to inform myself. So I'm into business

books, mostly right now. If that loses its interest level because

it maybe it gets redundant. I'll switch to fiction, or I'll do

something else. There's a meditations book that I'm

reading by Marcus Aurelius right now that is great just to read a

couple of his ideas every morning, but reading really

important part of the day and then the journaling as I really

enjoy that sometimes I learned about what I read

The Great answer and you skipped ahead to the

next one best business books. What is on your reading list

these days?

I just read a book called The 12 week year, and I

think it's got a lot of Eos principles in it, how you work

off of driving performance within the

quarter? Yep, is very quarterly,

yeah, but I like the 12 week year. It sets you up

to build your whole game plan, goals and strategies around that

12 weeks, and reward yourself at the end of the 12 weeks. I think

back to my sales career, how much better I always did in q4

or in q1 when there was a big incentive at the end of it,

right? But really, if you can operate like that every every

three months, you can be in a position to be a big win every

time.

So I like that book. I like that I haven't read

the morning miracle or the 12 week year. So thank you for

adding to my list. Normally, we're in sync on these podcasts,

and I've read the books, but thank you for filling one in

next question. So you're sitting there and you got a minute to

spare before the next meeting and a blog or a podcast or a

webinar. Hits your stream. What's your go to? Which one do

you stop everything open, read or listen to?

So I subscribe to a daily newsletter. It's called

the hustle. It's a hub spot media product, but it always has

interesting stories and useful business information and trends,

and it's very well written, and it will put me on to a podcast

idea or some other thing, and it's just something I take 10

minutes to review and read the interesting components of every

Morning.

That's great. I love that HubSpot. I listened to

a couple of the HubSpot podcasts, matter of fact, have

for over 10 years. So they put out great, great content,

content. So thanks for sharing. You're welcome. Who's your NFL

or sports team?

I'm in Baltimore, Baltimore, Orioles. Baltimore

Ravens, those are my team season ticket holder for the Orioles,

and great seeing the Ravens in the Super Bowl.

Yeah, they keep building that defense and doing

enough on offense, so you got a shot every year. And last couple

questions, what's a great introduction for you. Who do you

want to meet from a business perspective,

fearless law firms, right? Law firms that are

looking to grow and improve in what they're doing, and they

recognize that they could do better with the right emphasis

on their marketing. So the fractional cmo role is an

investment in the business, right? So you gotta, you gotta

have a confidence in hiring somebody like that to take it on

and then be fearless after that, because with this is going to

come recommendations to make investments in your

business. Yeah, I love that you've put a stake in

the ground. And if, if I meet a fearless law firm who really

needs that cmo role, where can, like, I get in touch with you.

My website is complete lawmarketing.com and

all the information is on there for how to reach me, but it's

just Carl with a C at complete lawmarketing.com love to hear

from. Anybody that's interested.

Awesome. Carl, thanks for the time today. It

was lots of fun.

Thanks, Jay