Episode #47 of the Personal Injury Marketing Minute features Andrea Staub and Zachary Campbell of Metzger Wickersham personal injury law firm in Pennsylvania. We discuss their experience with local community involvement. A few of the ways they participate in the community include donating to the local food bank, working with charities, providing a scholarship to local high schools, car seat checkups and speaking at colleges. The firm provides paid time off for employees to participate in community events. Visit Metzger Wickersham online at: https://www.mwke.com/. See all episodes or subscribe to the Personal Injury Marketing Minute here: https://optimizemyfirm.com/podcasts/. Transcription coming soon.

In Personal Injury Marketing Minute Podcast #46, Lindsey Busfield makes the case for embracing the things which make you unique. This episode was inspired by The Good Doctor episode "The Good Lawyer" Season 6, Episode 16, "The Good Lawyer" which aired in March 2023. We hope "The Good Lawyer" becomes a successful ABC TV series soon! We'll be watching! See all episodes or subscribe to the Personal Injury Marketing Minute here: https://optimizemyfirm.com/podcasts/.   Transcript: Welcome to the Personal Injury Marketing Minute where we quickly cover the hot topics in the legal marketing world. The mark of a good movie or TV show is that it leaves you thinking, questioning what you know about life and finding connections to add value to your personal reality. I just finished watching the latest episode of The Good Doctor that aired on March 13th. The episode was called The Good Lawyer. Naturally, I watched through a different lens than some viewers due to my daily interactions with lawyers. As such, there is some skepticism about the timeline and likelihood of the events taking place. Setting aside those details with a nod to creative license, I found something relatable in the show’s message that is worth sharing with you: You’re weird. Some people won’t like you. And that’s OK. Without giving away too many spoilers, the episode centers around a legal issue that arose after Dr. Shaun Murphy amputates a man’s hand while trying to save his life after an accident. The victim sues Dr. Murphy, claiming that the amputation wasn’t medically necessary. Dr. Murphy turns to a young lawyer, Joni DeGroot who has obsessive compulsive disorder (or OCD). Joni is characterized by her compulsive ticks and rituals, namely tapping on things three times, covering spaces with plastic wrap, changing clothing, and other rituals that are initially dismissed by her colleagues as being weird, distracting, debilitating, and just plain unlikable. As such, she is forced to be hidden away in a closet and pigeonholed as a good researcher and walking database, but told that she could never be a good lawyer because of her idiosyncratic behaviors. Upon initial thought, yeah – those rituals could be incredibly debilitating in a jury trial. When you need a jury to like you and your client, it would be distracting to have to tap on thing or be caught off guard by unexpected noises. The jury might be so distracted by your behaviors that they get sidetracked and miss your point. At least, that was the line that she had bought into and accepted as her fate resulting from her neurodivergence. But what she realizes, and what we all need to realize is that we all have problems. We all make people feel uncomfortable – especially in the legal industry where we deal with uncomfortable topics on a daily basis. But if we spend too much emotional energy worrying about whether people like us, we would never get anything done. Now, that doesn’t mean to go out and be a total ass. But embrace your quirks. You are weird. You think differently than others – at least, I hope you do. If I need to hire a lawyer, I want the weirdo who can look at a situation with a different perspective and find the creative solution that someone else would miss. With that weirdness, you are going to have hits and misses. Some people won’t understand your way of thinking. Some people won’t like your bow tie. Some people might focus more on your height, weight, stutter, or other factor that you are insecure of. But more likely than not, you are giving that personal difference way more thought than anyone else would. Some people just won’t like you because they don’t get you. But that is OK. Your quirks are more likely than not what makes you a good lawyer. Just as Joni’s OCD came with some behavioral ticks, it also gave her incredible attention to detail and a unique perspective that ultimately – spoiler alert – leads to her being recognized as a ...

Branden Race D.C. specializes in helping chiropractors increase their revenue by implementing telehealth into their personal injury practice. In this podcast we discuss how personal injury lawyers can make connections with chiropractors, and how to optimize those relationships for everyone’s benefit. We will cover: 1) How can personal injury attorneys make new connections with chiropractors 2) How can personal injury attorneys best use medical bills to optimize case values 3) How can personal injury attorneys and chiropractors work together to make sure clients stick to treatment plans (telehealth) 4) How can personal injury attorneys keep positive relationships going with chiropractors 5) What ethical hurdles to personal injury attorneys need to avoid when maintaining relationships with chiropractors Branden Race on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brandenrace/ Branden Race's email: branden@ virtualpipractice.com See all episodes or subscribe to the Personal Injury Marketing Minute here: https://optimizemyfirm.com/podcasts/. Transcription coming soon.

Episode #44 of the Personal Injury Marketing Minute tackles leadership struggles in times of crisis. From pandemics to recessions, business leaders in the legal industry have needed to step up their game in order to keep their firms thriving. In this podcast, Brandon Henderson discusses: 1) Challenges that the pandemic and recession have posed for law firms 2) How to seize business opportunities in times of crisis 3) Embracing reflection on business processes 4) The role of leadership and employee morale and productivity 5) The importance of gratitude For more information on Brandon Henderson and his legal team, visit https://www.teamhmwwins.com/. See all episodes or subscribe to the Personal Injury Marketing Minute here: https://optimizemyfirm.com/podcasts/. Transcript coming soon

Episode #43 of the Personal Injury Marketing Minute features Trademark Attorney Alex Toporek and we discuss trademarking attorney's slogans. In this podcast, you will learn: What is a trademark? Does a trademark prevent others from using my slogan? What can be trademarked? Can attorneys use other attorney's slogans? Should attorneys trademark their firm's slogan? Need a Trademark for your Law Firm? Visit Alex online here: https://toporeklaw.com/. See all episodes or subscribe to the Personal Injury Marketing Minute here: https://optimizemyfirm.com/podcasts/. Transcription: About Alex Toporek: Lindsey: Well, tell us a little bit about yourself. Alex: Sure. My name's Alex Toporek and I'm out of Charleston, South Carolina. I've got an office here and I've been practicing for a little over 10 years now, and I've done a few different areas of the law, but the last few years I've kind of settled into helping small businesses with trademark registration and federal trademark registration, and it's been going pretty well. So that's been my focus, like I said, the last couple years and going forward. How is a Trademark Different From a Copyright? Lindsey: That's great. So you know the ins and outs of all things trademark, and I want to get really basic because not everybody understands what a trademark is, what a trademark does, whether or not they need one. And so you've got copyrights, you've got trademarks. So what is a trademark and how is it different from a copyright? Alex: Sure. And yeah, that's a question I get a lot as well. So copyright protection deals more with content. So the actual, if you write a book, the actual wording, the language you use in the book, or if you're producing a video, writing a song, things like that, that's where copyright protection comes in. Trademarks are a little different and the registration process is a little more technical than registering for a copyright and trademarks protect essentially, I think the best way to explain it is brand identifiers that are unique to your business and that you're using to distinguish and identify the goods and services that you provide. So that can be a brand name, it can be a slogan, it can be a logo, even in some, and these are a little more rare, but even sounds and jingles and things like that, that those potentially could be ripe for trademark protection. If I Trademark My Slogan, Does It Prevent Others From Using It? Lindsey: And going back into the history of trademark, there's the term trademark itself where you are literally marking your trade or your brand. And so if I'm understanding that correctly, anything that sets you apart, your brand apart from other similar brands would be the mark that you're putting on your particular trade. And so going back to the question of the slogan, if I trademark my slogan, does it prevent others from using it? Alex: So trademark, if you go through the proper steps to get through the whole federal trademark registration process, what that does is it gives you the exclusive rights to use that more within your class of goods or services that you provide. It does require, if you want to really police that and you should, you do have to have some sort of monitoring and effect so that you can see if other people are using that and maybe keep tabs on the trademark database as well to see if anyone else attempts to register something similar. But I guess in basic terms, the idea is it does give you exclusive rights over that trademark. What Lawyers Can and Cannot Trademark: Lindsey: And going beyond that is an interesting question where what is eligible for trademark and what isn't? Because as a law firm, I could go and try to register the trademark of lawyer or Philadelphia lawyer and that would, of course, not be eligible for trademark. But can you explain a little bit as to what you can and can't trademark? Alex: And I think it's,

Episode #42 of the Personal Injury Marketing Minute features Aryeh Elbaz of accessiBe. In this podcast, Aryeh explains why your law firm's website needs to be ADA compliant and how to easily accomplish that. You will learn what ADA and WCAG are, if law firm websites need to be ADA compliant or not, lawsuits, common issues websites have and more about accessiBe's AI solution / widget. Sign up for accessiBe here: https://accessiBe.com/. See all episodes or subscribe to the Personal Injury Marketing Minute here: https://optimizemyfirm.com/podcasts/. Transcript coming soon.

Anne has reported stories from the streets of Chicago to Vietnam, Romania, the Vatican, and Latin America and interviewed six American presidents including Carter, the Bushes, Clinton, and Obama.  Gigi has interviewed A-list celebrities like Robert Redford and worked with dozens more.  She has also met with top politicians including then-President-Elect Bill Clinton. Anne and Gigi have trained hundreds of newsmakers including many top lawyers, elected officials,  government spokespeople, CEO’s and business executives, university presidents, non-profit leaders, doctors, law enforcement leaders, municipalities, trade organizations, unions, authors, professional athletes, and celebrity spokespeople. They have extensive experience coaching law firms as they address the most stressful situations where the camera is rolling. They have prepared clients for political debates, high-level interviews, news conferences, network television shows, corporate presentations, town hall meetings, and speaking to the media in crisis situations where it is imperative to communicate well. In this podcast, Anne and Gigi explain: Why personal injury lawyers need to be on camera How to be confident and collected on camera How to control the interview and keep your narrative on target Visit Anne & Gigi online here at Legal Communication Strategies: https://www.legalcommunicationstrategies.com/. See all episodes or subscribe to the Personal Injury Marketing Minute here: https://optimizemyfirm.com/podcasts/. Transcript: Lindsey: Welcome to the Personal Injury Marketing Minute, where we quickly cover the hot topics in the legal marketing world. I'm your host, Lindsey Busfield. As a personal injury lawyer, when you hear the term media training, you might initially think this only applies to the big lawyers who spend time talking to the press about high-profile cases. While media training is absolutely essential for those lawyers, it's also essential for any lawyer who ever talks to anyone ever. So pretty much every lawyer. Whether you are talking to the press or making a YouTube video or recording a podcast, you are given the opportunity to either showcase your strengths or you have a risk of damaging your reputation. While 50 years ago, a bad interview got buried in the digital age, the footage lives forever, so you must get it right the first time. Anne Kavanagh and Gigi Lubin are media training experts who work with personal injury lawyers. They have extensive experience coaching law firms and their clients as they address the most stressful situations where the camera is rolling. Thank you so much for joining us. The Importance of the Soundbite Anne: Thank you for having us, we appreciate it. Lindsey: Well, tell us a little bit more about yourself and your background. Anne: Well, I was... Well first of all, both Gigi and I are graduates of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern. We were a year apart, so we weren't there at the same time, but we did have many of the same professors and some of the same experiences. I went on and worked for almost 30 years as a television reporter, most of those years in Chicago. And I left about 11 years ago, and I launched this firm MediaPros 24/7, because I saw a lot of good people who didn't come across well in their interviews just because they needed a little training, a few skills, a few tweaks, and I thought, well, maybe there's an opening for me. As it turned out, I would say 75% of my clients at least ended up being attorneys and most of them well-known personal injury attorneys in Chicago. Some of them I had known through the years covering stories with them. And when I left, they reached out to me. In fact, it was funny, one attorney who was well known in Chicago, I did a story with her and her clients, and the story turned out very well for her case and helped prompt some very nice settlements, but she could not speak in a sound bite.

How Do You Create Raving Fans? Joining us today is Chris Earley, a Personal Injury Lawyer in Massachusetts who is a magnet for raving fans. When it comes to marketing, there is simply no better lead than a referral. Why? Because people who don’t know you don’t trust you. But a prospective client will trust someone they can relate to you’re your former clients. But it isn’t enough to have a handful of 5-star reviews that you begged and pleaded for through mass, repetitive emails. Everyone has that. In this podcast, Chris answers some of these questions: You are the master at creating raving fans. What is a raving fan? Why is it important to develop these kinds of relationships? Your attitude towards generating raving fans goes beyond simply having good reviews. You start with the person first and how you can help them. Can you expand on that a bit? How do you go about developing the raving fan relationship? How much time do you spend developing these relationships? How do you get your raving fans to leave reviews or send referral cases? What are some ways that you keep in touch with your raving fans after their case closes? What percentage of your client leads are referral based? Do you find it is easier to connect with a client who comes from a referral v one who comes from a cold call? Why do you think other lawyers might struggle with this initially and how can they overcome it? Visit the Earley Law Group online here https://www.chrisearley.com/ and be sure to check out their extended family of raving fans here: https://www.chrisearley.com/client-testimonials.html. See all episodes or subscribe to the Personal Injury Marketing Minute here: https://optimizemyfirm.com/podcasts/. Transcript: Lindsey: Welcome to the Personal Injury Marketing Minute, where we quickly cover the hot topics in the legal marketing world. I'm your host, Lindsey Busfield. When it comes to marketing, there is simply no better lead than a referral. Why? Because people who don't know you don't necessarily trust you. But a perspective client will trust somebody they can relate to, i.e., your former clients, but it isn't enough to have a handful of five-star reviews that you begged and pleaded for through mass repetitive emails. Everyone has that. What you need are raving fans who can't wait to tell their friends, family, and random strangers how great you are and how much money you got them. You want the kind of fan who hears someone just say the word car accident from across the room, they drop everything and sing your praises. You want an army of walking billboards. Joining us today is Chris Earley, a personal injury lawyer in Massachusetts who is a magnet for raving fans. Thank you so much for joining us today. Chris: Thank you, Lindsey. It's my pleasure. Thank you so much. Lindsey: Well, you are the master at creating raving fans. So let's start by telling me a little bit about what is a raving fan. Chris: I am hyper focused and dialed in on doing the best job that me and my team can do to make our clients happy. I feel that clients, when it comes to lawyers, don't ask for a lot. I don't think the standard is so high that that does make them happy. But if you can over-deliver, if you can really impress them, they more times than not will become a raving fan. The more you dial in on customer service, holding their hand through the process from start to finish, from intake to end of the case, they remember how you made them feel. We'll get into that about relationships. It's not just a transactional attorney-client, cold relationship, it's a warm, human relationship. That I try to humanize the relationship. I try to make clients feel really welcome. We call it here, our extended family. It's not just group of clients, it's an extended family of people who trust us to handle their case. We take that very seriously and we really do focus on doing everything we possibly can,

Welcome to the Personal Injury Marketing Minute where we quickly cover the hot topics in the legal marketing world. I’m your host, Lindsey Busfield.As I mentioned in an earlier podcast – All About Backlinks for Law Firms – law firms who show up on the first page of Google have typically all purchased links. As I also mentioned, it is officially against Google’s guidelines to purchase backlinks, but lawyers do it anyway and it has helped substantially…until now.On December 14th 2022, Google rolled out their December 2022 Link Spam update. This is Google’s biggest fight yet against inorganic link building. They are using an AI-based spam prevention system called SpamBrain to identify sites that sell inorganic links and discredit the link’s power. While it will not actively penalize sites that buy and sell links, it will nullify the credit from any unnatural links.It will take about two weeks to fully roll out, but I anticipate that you will begin to see the results of this launch within the next month. Let’s say your law firm is on page 1 of Google’s search results, but only because you bought a bunch of links from spammy websites – more likely, your SEO company bought a ton of dime-a-dozen links in an effort to quickly boost you to the top. This update will make is so that those links never existed. It won’t actively penalize your website, but it will discredit all of those links and your site will likely slip in the search rankings. However, many of your competitors will also be impacted by this update, so they will fall in the rankings as well. On the other hand, if you have great links from real sites – like news sites and credible publications with strong journalistic standards, you will get the added bonus of gaining more traction over those who tried to take shortcuts. If you have more questions about this update or how to keep the traction you have built for your site, feel free to contact me at optimizemyfirm.com

Personal Injury Marketing Minute #38 features Paul Stutler, the founder of Theo. In this podcast, Paul explains Theo, a settlement risk analysis tool that uses data to calculate the potential outcomes of settlement offers. In this podcast, you will learn: How Paul identified the need for Theo Theo's process What exactly does the Theo method tell us? Information needed to provide assessment Check out Theo here: https://www.theo-law.com/. See all episodes or subscribe to the Personal Injury Marketing Minute here: https://optimizemyfirm.com/podcasts/.