Welcome to the Mind Over Law Podcast where we break the traditional rules of practicing law. Our focus is helping you first to become a better, happier person, which in turn will make you a better, happier lawyer both in and out of the courtroom. We will combine mindset and energy practices grounded in ancient wisdom along with cutting edge neuroscience give you those skills. Plus I'll have deep conversations with some of the most thoughtful leaders that will share their life stories, their leadership journeys and their legal practice wisdom.
I'm Lexlee Overton and my promise is that each episode will offer practical insights and strategies to empower your law practice, your leadership skills and most of all, your personal well being. Join me and I promise you'll become a better you lawyer and and leader. Welcome back to the Mind Over Law Podcast where we journey into the heart of purposeful leadership and peak performance. I'm Lexlee Overton and I am thrilled to welcome today's guest who really embodies an entrepreneurial spirit and a passion for helping lawyers to grow.
Kevin Daisy Kevin is an award winning founder and CMO of Array Digital, which is a powerhouse agency specializing exclusive exclusively and digital marketing for law firms. And since launching his first company at 23, he's built multiple seven figure ventures. He has a huge team of professionals that he's now leading to leverage his mastery of branding and SEO and content for legal leaders. He's also the host of an inspiring podcast called the Managing Partners Podcast and he just shows up today and gives us all kind of great tips and wisdom about not only marketing strategy but how to show up and lead in a different way.
Kevin, I'm so excited to have you here today. Welcome.
Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited.
I want to jump right in with a question. We know that you and Array Digital is really exclusively focused on law firms. What made you do that?
I took a little time to figure that out doing marketing since I was in my young twenties on my own. I think I started my business when I was 23. I just fell into having a law firm client or two, although I just helped anyone in the local area with marketing, but I had that experience. So when we were looking at niche and we knew we had a niche, we knew we had the focus to really to start to grow and we looked at lawyers and medical practices and home service companies and things like that.
And I think the big thing was there was two things. One, the lawyers that I knew and worked with just how passionate they were about helping their clients, which I think is different than the public thought of lawyers.
That's true.
And also I think the challenge legal marketing, legal SEO is probably the most competitive space to be in. So I think we thought that that would challenge us, push us. And there's not much room for folks that just cut corners or they're just trying to make a buck. You really have to dial it in and be good at what you do.
Yeah, I think it's wonderful that you specialize and it is a certain niche to learn. And just talking when you're talking about that you in this area, you can't fake it. I will say, and that even as a prior law firm owner, I think a lot of lawyers feel really burned by marketing agencies that promise the world and they just don't deliver. And I see sometimes my clients get these reports and they're like their eyes are glazed over and they're like, I don't even know what any of this means.
I just care if the phone rings. How can law firm owners cut through some of the smoke and mirrors and actually measure whether they're marking dollars or bringing in a real return on investment?
Sure. Okay. A few things I would say. One, as a law firm owner, don't be afraid of marketing.
Like, you need to educate yourself, learn a little bit to know what things are, understand what's good data and things like that. Don't just be like, I don't want to understand any of that. As the owner, you shouldn't have to deal with executing the marketing, but it's going to help you if you have at least some ideas and educate yourself. The other main thing I'll say if you're talking to agencies, is kind of look at what they're doing and their sales process.
Just look at the sales process. If they are quick to throw you a package and pricing, if they're quick to offer solutions without any research, a lot of questions and developing a strategy. It doesn't have to be the finalized strategy, but a strategy for your specific firm. Your firm's different, you have a different brand, you're in a different market than every client they have.
So there's definitely not a one size fits all. And there's history. Your firm could be brand new, so there's challenges with that. Your firm could be in the market for 10 or 15 years.
That comes with its own baggage and challenges and some pros. But you really have to do an analysis for each individual firm, their website, their domain, and say, okay, based on your situation, here's a strategy that'll work for you. And then there's the budget, of course. But if they're not doing those extra steps, it shouldn't be a one meeting and I have a price.
There's more business questions to ask that should be asked so they can figure out too as a law firm, how sophisticated are you as a business owner? What does your intake system look like? If we get you more leads, are you going to actually grow or is it just going to make more problems? So I think you need to find an agency that gets all that, it can pull that all together and then again put together a strategy that's going to actually move the needle.
Yeah, when you talk about that, they should educate themselves. And so I know because I think that what you'll hear is as well. I've read some things but it all seems like a lot to absorb. Is there something that you would point them to that might be a good resource or resources that you're like.
If you could just take this in as the basics, you would have a bit better idea of what you're looking at.
Sure. I would say there's plenty of groups out there. So depending on what kind of lawyer is, it doesn't matter. There are resources out there.
So there's mastermind groups, there's coaching groups, even a Facebook groups of law firm owners that discuss things and share things. But there's groups like how to manage a small law firm. There's eight figure firm. I have a mastermind of a small group of owners.
But there's a lot of resources out there that can help with bringing in some of these kinds of resources. Whether it's a fractional CMO that's temporary to help you with these things or it's training or going to conferences, there's always breakout rooms and sessions on social media and SEO and all those things. So as you're one of these conferences, if you are, there's usually going to be learning sessions and opportunities to soak up that information. And then of course if you can, if you internally can bring in a marketer internally.
Our best clients have internal marketers that early liaisons for us and they have to do their part. They have to work on the brand and things that we don't do. But those are great folks to have internally that again can help explain and teach the law firm owners what we're actually doing and what they should be looking for. And they those marketers should have a pulse on if they brought in the right agency or not and might have multiple agency partners, traditional tv, radio, digital.
So yeah, there's a lot of resources out there. I just think what works best for you. Again, some of these groups offer. You're paid to be in these groups but they offer specific programs for marketing and things like that.
Yeah, I think it's a really good idea if you don't think you can afford a in person marketer that you can look into a fractional cmo. Like you said, it's a good option. Unfortunately, a lot of law firms that start out on their own entrepreneurs this are wearing every hat because of the ability and the funds to divide but also because they are so used to doing that. But they don't realize that every single part of what they're of a business, the core parts, the marketing is one really key functions.
Sales is a key function. Like you said with intake and then your operations, which a lot of lawyers are good at. Right. Which is the representation of their clients but also includes how do you manage your team and your systems and your workflows.
And then you have finance and admin and if you are weak in any one of those four, you're going to suffer because they're all equally important for success. You might be really great at representing people, but if you don't get good at marketing or have someone that can advise you, then you won't have anybody to actually represent. It's just as important as the representation part.
Yeah. The faster you can delegate and get out of the roles that you're not good at.
Exactly right. And we're not meant to be good at everything. It's like it's being in the space that not only do you have the knowledge and the skill set to excel at, but also the thing that you love the most. And I don't love marketing.
It's not my thing. Right. And I'm not very good at it. So it's.
I have someone else that does that for me and when I own the law firm, same thing. And it was really key to success. So I think that's important that you can talk about. There are other alternatives that you don't have to do at all.
I know that you've done some talks. I've listened to some of the things that you've done. You have your own podcast and we're going to link that to the show. You've talked about the rise of AI and law firm marketing.
There's all kinds of discussion about what AI is doing on all kinds of levels. Not just in helping lawyers and representation, but helping lawyers and intake. I'm seeing some really amazing things that are happening like Even in that area. What do you think is a misuse of AI that law firms should avoid?
Because there could be a temptation to be like, oh, I can just get AI to tell me this or to write this or so what are you seeing? That is something that should be a red flag. I think AI has wonderful capabilities for all kinds of things. But have you seen anything that is like a misstep?
Yeah, I would say there's such good application for AI across the board. There's a lot of topics about that going out the door, especially on my podcast, because everyone's interested in that. How can they use it? I think as far as relates to me too is with marketing.
One big mess up I see is automating your content or using AI, strictly straight AI for your content. So this could be your website pages or your blogs or some of your social content. What right now with the rise of AI and the disruption of it, Google and these other platforms, they're looking for the best answer to give a potential client. So if you're looking for a lawyer, you're looking for help for a lawyer or a question, it's really looking for now that unique information that doesn't exist online yet, which means if you were to talk about a particular case or your background or your experience or your thoughts on something and that's unique, that's what some of these platforms are looking for.
That's what AI is looking for, it's what Google's looking for. And so if you just cut all the corners and just say AI, write my blog, write this, write that, you're losing your voice, you're losing that opportunity. Now within AI, you can layer in all these kinds of cool things, make it sound like me and all that, so that there's ways that you can go about it. And I would say you can still pull that off as long as you do it right.
And you're building out your chat CPT to really capture your voice, I would say make sure it's double checked, edited, don't use anything out the gate, just straight AI. You see the little, the little hyphen things and all the text that I throws in there. Yeah, you can say, hey, don't do that. So to stand out in the today's marketplace, it has to be unique and it has to be you that is unique, your brand.
So I would just say just if you're going to put something on social that's meant to get people's views, that means they're reading it. So you want to make sure that it's conveying your brand and your message so that they know who you are in the market. So I just destruct that I would avoid for sure.
Yeah. Okay, great. What about if you could tell and now that you have a lot of experience working specifically with law firms, if you could tell them one part that they should automate in their marketing or sales system, what would it be?
I would say this is kind of like a double edged sword, I guess I would say automate a lot of their content marketing in a way that makes sense, in a way that represents their brand. Because unfortunately what works right now that probably has worked for a long time is some degree. Again with AI and Google like wanting to rank you or show you, it does come down to some degree of how much noise you can create. Right.
So blogs, social media, anything that's in Reddit, LinkedIn, any kind of news websites that might be talking about you and your brand. So you're talking about pr, traditional pr, digital pr. So it's just there's all these places that AI and Google search and again I'm specific to those channels or social. Right.
So Facebook, Instagram, sell, indexable and searchable LinkedIn. I know me and you are both big on LinkedIn to some degree. It's quantity. Right.
So how do you get quantity with quality and scale that AI I think can definitely help. And again, if it's controlled and it's on brand message and it's unique. If you could capture a lawyer for an hour. We do this here, we interview our lawyers so that we can use all those sound bites and clips in the content we're going to write.
And we have their unique voice and words that they use that we can inject into the content to make it their own, even though they didn't go write any of it. So I would say today you just have to make more noise. Obscurity is your problem and people not finding you as your problem.
Yeah, yeah. I think it is important when you talk about that it needs to be unique and you and I glad that you talk about like interviewing lawyers and recording it that way. I believe that people want to buy from people that they know and trust and social media is just a, it's just such an amazing platform that if you're willing to put yourself out there that can create that just by having some consistencies and presence and the lawyer themselves.
Yeah. With AI you're going to, as you see more content that's just produced and it's not really them or fake kind of avatars people will lean in the future, I believe, more into the unique people that are putting themselves out there, that stand out. And the AI stuff's just going to become something that. Okay, I'm not interested in that anymore.
Yeah, can you tell us? We're always looking for tips. So what are like one to two marketing strategies that you're surprised that you see that law firms just overlook? Look, that could be simple, that could have a real high return on investment.
Yeah. So I have three thin and these. Again, little do is what I do. We're a SEO search AI company, if you will.
People always go, Kevin, what's the secret? What's the tip? What's the new cool thing? And when I look at their stuff and have a conversation with them, it's like, how about we, we go back to the basics here.
So brand how important brand is. And short. You can't shortcut that. Like, that takes time, it takes energy, it takes strategy that you stick to for a long time.
And that comes with planning and running a good business and being successful enough to be able to stay on that brand track. Right. Because if you're scrambling, you're going all over the place, then it's going to be hard to stay on that. So brand is super important.
If you were to pay for ppc, pay per click, a recognized brand, PPC is, performs well. They recognize the brand, they don't skip the ads. They click on it. You can get some good roi.
No brands, no recognition or authority. You pay a lot of money. Most people skip the ads. When they do click, you pay more and then they have no trust.
So it's less likely to actually convert. But ppc, you would think, is a quick click, quick call. That's just not necessarily how it's going to work. Your brand will pull all those things up.
It rises all ships. And the other one would be conversion rate. Automation is a big one.
So that's how much that is.
So let's just say for your website, you, Kevin, send a thousand people to my website every month. Right now I have zero. Okay, great. If there's areas on your website that are not optimized and you're not checking those over time, then the more people I send there, there's more likely polls.
Right. There's people that are not converting and we don't know why, but a lot of people just make a website. They put a bunch of content on a page to rank for SEO or whatever. But is it actually converting the customer that comes there?
And if you got one out Of a thousand, how do we make it 10 out of a thousand and then 100 out of a thousand? So conversion rate automation is constantly looking at the customers or the client's behavior and what's on the page and what's lacking in the buyer's journey. If you're to buy a product or a car, what do you need to make that decision? Is it reviews, settlements, case wins, pictures or video, the attorneys, or all of the above.
But what is lacking and what would move that number up so you can make adjustments, ab test, things like that? So that's conversion rate automation, something you should constantly be doing. And the other one is again, back to the business client journey. If you built your law firm so that every single client that signed up was a five star review and referral, partner, a referral, and you had a thousand clients over the course of a year, or 100 clients over the course of your whatever, how would that change your business if you could increase those referrals?
So you got to map that out, right? Client journey, what does that mean? There's a lot of things that go into that, but you're starting with the end in mind. When Lex Lee becomes a client of mine, she will leave me a five star review, she will refer me business.
And how do we make sure that happens to best our ability? Of course you can't guarantee that, but that's how you need to be thinking. I think those are big opportunities that a lot of law firms miss.
That is some great tips. Let me go bigger picture on you here. You're an entrepreneur. You've had multiple seven figure ventures in your lifetime that you talk about your first business at 23.
I know that you employ a large team of professionals that help you guys to do a great job. And you have the managing partners podcast. Now you're running a mastermind for lawyers. I know a lot of that comes from the passion of what you do and you talking about learning about lawyers and a lot of them really have passion for what they do.
But besides, besides passion, how is it that if you could give us a couple of tips, because we're always looking for ways that we can be living life more fully. And I hear people say this to me, so I'm going to ask you the same question. How is it that you get all that done and balance all of that? Because also I know you have a family and so there's all these different ways that our energy, our space, our time can be pulled.
What are some of your tips on that?
Yeah, I feel like I'm always underwater sometimes. But get up early. Number one, if you don't get up early, I feel, like, anxious and like I missed out on something and I have fomo. Like, I'm always late for the party, want to be everywhere.
And if someone invites me to something, I want to be able to show up, which is a curse sometimes. So if you don't get up early, and it took me a while to. I used to be the midnight guy. Websites till 1 or 2 in the morning with my team and.
Right.
I had to change that. Having kids obviously forces you to do that a little bit.
Yeah.
But I'd say get up early. It's something about the peace of the morning to get stuff done, to plan, make a power list, work out, and then have a quiet moment where you can have a coffee or whatever and nothing's happening. Your email's not blowing up, the phone's not ringing yet, there's no meetings yet. So I think that's super important.
I even Saturday, Sunday, even if I stay up late, I wake up early. Just naturally at this point.
Yeah, morning is my time. I'm a 4am girl, and people think I'm crazy. I can get so much more done. But more importantly, I can set my state at that time in the morning when you talk about that quiet time that, like, really sets your focus.
But I'm curious. I want to hear about this power list. What is that?
So the power list, this is something my business partner and me started doing. I fell off of it for a little while. I'm back to it. The power list.
It can vary, but just three things. Number one, number two, number three, priorities that you have to get done today. And this is not a task list of all your stuff. It's three things that you.
Absolutely. Before the day ends, I don't care if it's 11:59pm that you are committing yourself to doing. And so while you might have 20 meetings and all this other stuff, they have to be things that are going to move the needle for either your quarterly goals or your personal or professional goals. And so if you get those three things done, the rest of the crap that's gonna flood into your day is more okay.
Because those things are gonna happen. People are gonna put stuff on your calendar. And my business partner is like, just a beast about this. He will kill himself to get those three things done and not have them roll over to the next day.
But if you do this every single day, it really adds up. And it's things that are going to you're gonna see really big impact in your business and your personal life, for sure.
Yeah. That's really powerful. It's all about intention. And so being an.
I think one of the things I say to people is, how do you do all that? I'm very intentional. Right. I'm disciplined with where my energy and my time goes.
And so that's a really great intentional discipline tool that you just gave. I like that.
Yeah. It also makes it more. You can look at the whole day and go, holy crap, that's a lot of stuff. But if you just said, hey, there's three things that I must do.
Yes.
And again, they might not be that hard. They might just do it. It may be like, hey, it might be. I got to record this podcast.
Gotta make time for that. That's thousand. That's ten thousand dollar work, right?
Yeah. And I like that it's tied to personal or professional goals. I like to think about is this moving that forward in some way or also I use all these as a. Just as a filter for myself.
How am I spending my time and energy? Is it in alignment with one of my values, one of my core values, that I want to move forward in some way as a way to look at that too? And people just forget that. So it's an interesting way to see a different way of doing it.
We always end with three questions and one you might have just answered, which is tell us one practice that you do that helps you to be a healthier, happier person. Do you have something else besides a power list and getting up early?
Working out?
Yeah.
Working out, I think is something that I've been doing for quite a few years now. And it's easy to fall out of and it's harder to get back every time. So I would say it's one of those things where you're like, I don't. I just don't want.
I don't want to get up. I just want to sit here and have coffee. I don't want to go to the gym. So it's something that I think is always for.
It's a season like I got where I'm like, every day, five days a week. And then there's moments where I'm like, okay, I'm just gonna. I'm not gonna go today. I'm just gonna chill.
Just having that consistent, okay, I'm going to work out, I'm going to do something. Whether it's a walk or whatever, just making that part of your life. And somewhere in every single week, you're working out, go on vacation. Actually, I work out probably more often when I go on vacation because I feel like obligated to do it.
But it was. You're going to the gym. Like, yeah, half hour. Go to the gym and we can go do whatever the heck we want.
Feels like you accomplished something and now you can go relax.
It sets the momentum or if you do it at the end of the day, it's a great way to shift. It's a great way to shift anxiety is to work it out too. So that's really great. Okay.
One thing that you're excited about right.
Now, I got my questions here. I wrote down my culture. Really just we've done a lot, been through a lot, we've grown a lot. We've had setbacks, we've had all these things.
But I think which is every business and it's not going to change. It's going to continue to be ups and downs, problems and change. And I think that's what's the most cool with where we're at is all my team, I got over 50 people. We're all on that same page and very transparent and open and that there's more change coming.
A lot of it. And that we put a survey out to my Anonymous to all my staff and we had all hands meeting and we could see the survey like live. And it was like, hey, we're in marketing digital thoughts about AI. Is AI going to.
Are you worried AI is going to take your job? And the other answers were like, heck, no. I'm excited about AI. We're going to leverage it and use it.
And I forgot what the other one was, but my business partner was really thinking a lot of our younger people, newer people were going to lean into. I'm worried. Not one person.
That's awesome.
So, yeah, I'm excited about where we are because I think if you got a good culture, you can get through anything and you're going to find a way to win.
And it sounds like you have team members who are willing to learn and to adapt, which is just two very important qualities to have. So it's great.
Yeah, you want them looking for those opportunities and bringing them to you, not sitting back and going, what are they going to make me do next?
You don't want that proactive solution, focused. All right.
Because they see opportunity. That's our thing here. We're growing so that we can create unlimited opportunity. If we're not growing.
I can't give you more, I can't pay you more. I can't give you people to manage. I can't do nothing.
I think that's really great. So when you put it back to our growth, helps me to help you grow. One of the things I do with my teams that I work with, but also do it with my own team is I know all of their five year goals. I know every team member's five year goals.
And the reason why I do that is because I want to make sure that I'm growing a space for them. That those can happen.
Huge. Yeah, that's huge. If they think the owner's making more money and that's why we're growing.
Yeah.
Then you got a bad culture and you're setting the wrong message for sure.
Exactly. That's right. Because we know that the factors research shows us people do not stay because of money. People are looking for a lot more and that's how you keep retention of your great A players.
Yeah. So that's awesome. And then our final question, because we're always looking at ways to do differently. What's one rule you would tell lawyers to break?
That might be a traditional rule of how we've seen lawyers show up and practice law.
Yeah, I would say I'm excited to know a lot of lawyers that break this all the time. But across the board, across prospects that I talk to and I think lawyers just, they need to be themselves if they want to stand out and they want to have any kind of authority or their brand to be special to them, which it should be, the leader, the owner, whoever that is, they're the ones that you know are going to set that and be the ones that people want to follow or work with or work for. So be yourself. And so if that's a little quirky or not or is frowned upon across other lawyers, you're just casual or the way you dress or the way you're curious, whatever it might be.
But the lawyers I know that just show up and be themselves. And no matter what that is, versus trying to be like, I gotta act like a lawyer, look like a lawyer. They're all the most successful ones I know. And in today's, today's market, you again, people want to work with people they like and trust.
If you're showing up and putting a face on, then it's kind of hard to believe that.
Yeah. And people know it. People know when they see truth and often.
And then yeah, if you have marketing company or marketing people, they have so much more they can work with. If you're some unique or you got some quirk about you or something. Lean into something that you like. I got.
There's one lawyer I know, he carves pipes, like these crazy wood pipes and he wears Hawaiian shirts and the guy's just awesome. He saw, he rolls right? And he's the nicest guy. Everyone likes him.
So yeah, I would say just break the mold. A lot of lawyers are doing it, but there's still a lot of lawyers, I know that, that show up like a lawyer you would think from 10 or 20 years ago. Stuffy.
Yeah. Awesome. Thanks so much for being here and giving us all your wisdom. It's really a great conversation.
I appreciate you having me on the show. Happy to share any time. And there's so much. Always the COVID But get out there and do your thing.
Be yourself.
Yes. Thank you. And we're going to link to your podcast so that lawyers have access to that too. Such great information that you have there and some awesome guests.
Love what you're doing. Thank you for being here with us.
Thank you so much. Appreciate it.
Thanks for listening to today's episode of Mind Over Law. We hope that you're walking away inspired and ready to embrace your life and law practice in a more holistic, healthier, happier way. Don't forget to hit subscribe and let us know what you think. Leaving a review helps us to spread the word to others.
Be sure to follow us on socials for all the behind the scenes fun and sneak peeks of upcoming episodes. Until next time, remember, with intention, anything is possible.
