Building a Preeminent Law Firm: Insights from Ken Hardison

Host: Alex Valencia, WDW

Guest: Ken Hardison, PILMMA

 

Alex Valencia, legal marketer and owner of We Do Web, interviews Ken Hardison about his new book, “Under Promise and Over Deliver.” During this free webinar, legal marketing authority Ken Hardison gives the details on:

• How a powerful unique selling proposition (USP) can transform your law firm
• 3 phases of marketing that your law firm MUST consider in its marketing strategy
• The importance of the Doctrine of Preeminence and why it’s critical to your law firm’s success
• The key to hiring the right people
• The 3 most cost-effective marketing tactics Ken presently uses at his law firm

Ken is opening up his vaults on what he learned while building his leading law firm in North Carolina, Hardison and Cochran. Make sure you sign up for his upcoming Fort Worth Summit from July 16-18. 

Transcript: 

 

Alex Valencia:

Good afternoon. Thank you all for showing up to our webinar How to Build the Preeminent Law Firm in Your Market. Just want to make sure that we have all technical difficulties out of the way. So can everyone hear me? If you can’t, please write something in the chat box. I’m excited about our show today. We have Ken Hardison, who’s a great friend of mine, also a mentor. So I’ll tell you a little bit more about him, and I’m excited to ask him questions about his book which was going off the shelves at Lawyernomics about a month ago when we were there. So please feel free to ask any questions. I think we want to make this as interactive as possible. I’ll ask my questions and then I’m sure Ken’s going to leave some time for questions on his end. But in the meantime, if you can hear me, Ken, if you want to test, make sure they can hear you too, that’d be great.

Ken Hardison:

Testing one, two, three. Testing. Can you hear me? Nope.

Alex Valencia:

Yep, I can hear you.

Ken Hardison:

Hold on. Testing. There it is. Nope. Testing?

Alex Valencia:

Yep, I can hear you. I think we’re good.

Ken Hardison:

Okay.

Alex Valencia:

We’re still waiting for a couple people to come through.

Ken Hardison:

Okay, good.

Alex Valencia:

Sounds great on there, and thank you so much for responding. Okay, so let me just make an introduction. If some of you do not know Ken Hardison, Ken Hardison practiced injury and disability law for over 32 years and built one of the largest personal injury law firms in the state of North Carolina. You can see more about him on www.lawyernc.com and what he did to help build his law firm. In addition, Ken also has a small social security firm called Carolina Disability Lawyers, in Myrtle Beach. Ken attributes this success to his persistence and willingness to try new things, especially in marketing. I’ve been following Ken for years, and I know he’s great at marketing his law firm, marketing PILMMA, he does a great job with that. So Ken has proven his success with his firm. In 2007, he decided to share his knowledge with other lawyers. This eventually led to the creation of PILMMA, which is the Personal Injury Lawyers Marketing & Management Association, that we might touch on a little further.

But if you haven’t registered yet, the conference is starting in mid-July, in Fort Worth, Texas. So PILMMA is the only legal marketing and management association exclusively for injury and disability lawyers. Ken is a native of Dunn, North Carolina, and he graduated cum laude from Campbell University in ’79, and from Norman Adrian Wiggins School of Law in 1982. Ken was chosen as Glazer-Kennedy’s Insiders Circle Diamond Coaching Contest winner for 2010. That’s a big deal. I don’t know if you follow Glazer-Kennedy, but it’s something you should definitely look into. Ken’s cutting-edge submission focused on the promotion of PILMMA’s Marketing and Management Summits. His breakthrough [inaudible 00:03:24] marketing technique promoting PILMMA’s Fall 2010 Summit at the Wynn in Las Vegas more than doubled the summit’s attendance that year. He is also the author of the book we’re going to be talking today about, which I’m super excited about, “Under Promise and Over-Deliver,” and numerous articles in books on marketing and managing injury and disability practices. It doesn’t stop there. You can go into different law practices, the marketing and management techniques that can help you with truly any business, but most importantly any type of law firm.

His most recent book, “Systematic Marketing: How To Grow Your Firm Without Losing Your Mind” is due out in July. So make sure we look out for that. I’m sure we’ll have him on for an interview. It’s become Ken’s mission to teach lawyers how to market, manage and grow their practice, and that exactly what he’s going to do with PILMMA, and now recently released lawpracticeadvisor.com. Make sure you check it out. So Ken, man, I’m stoked to have you on. You and I have done a lot together within the past few years, so I’m excited to continue that growth. But I’m sure the followers, and our friends, and clients that are on this webinar are super stoked to have you on and ask any questions that they might have. So with that said, let’s go ahead and get started. Tell me a little bit about the book so they learn what they might find inside the book, and then I’ll go into my questions. Well, I guess the lead off question is what made you write the book? What was the reason for writing this book?

Ken Hardison:

Well, first off, I want to thank you. Those that’ll stay with us, I’m going to offer this book for free. I’m even going to pay the shipping and handling, so want to stay to the end to get that information. There’s no strings attached, that’s giving back. So why’d I write this book? I’ve written several books, but people kept saying, “There’s got to be a secret sauce, or there’s got to be something. What really got you to just really build a large firm, a successful firm?” You always think just about marketing, and that has got a large part of it, but it’s so much more. I kind of got down to it and I said, “You know what? I’ve always tried to underpromise and overdeliver to my clients, to my vendors, to my staff.” So that’s why I came up with the book.

Also talking about preeminent, I’ve had the pleasure… You talked about Glazer-Kennedy. One of my mentors is Dan Kennedy who is a marketing genius, also Jay Abraham, who, if you don’t know you should know. He really preaches this preeminence doctrine, which is, “Everything you do is for the betterment of your customers or your clients,” whatever it might be, whoever’s paying you the money, making the purchase, whatever. And so I thought about it, and I thought about marketing and how you could break it down, and the whole client service, and just how you pick people to hire people, and how to use set goals and different things like that. So just kind of lay it all out in this book. I mean, is it all there? No, but a big part of it is. It’s kind of interesting. I tell a lot of stories. People like stories. So I guess some real life stories of things, the really good things and some really bad things, that I faced, some mistakes I made too. Yeah, that’s why I did it.

Alex Valencia:

Excellent. Do you want to tell us a little bit more about the book before I jump in on all my questions about it?

Ken Hardison:

I think it’s a good read. It’s about 160 pages. It’s pretty easy reading. I’ve actually analyzed marketing into three phases, before representation, during representation and after representation. We’ll talk about that later.

Alex Valencia:

Okay.

Ken Hardison:

But that’s basically it.

Alex Valencia:

So in the book, you talk about working on your business versus in your business. Can you break that down and explain that further?

Ken Hardison:

Okay. It’s 1996, I read a book called “The E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber.” Pretty much, it had nothing… Well, it did have something to do with marketing, but it really had more to do with management and systems. It kind of changed my life, all about working on your business, which means working on your law firm, not just in your law firm. Because if you’re working 80-hour weeks and making really good money, but you got no life, you’re really just a glorified employee, but you’re the last one that gets paid. What I found is that the more time I spent working on my business, creating the systems, working on the marketing management, I spent less hours, and I was making more money. Now it’s not for everybody. If that’s all you want to do is just practice law, then probably, you got to find somebody like that, or either you just need to go work for somebody. But if you got to own your own firm, unless you got a partner that’s going to play that role, you probably ought to be working for somebody else, to be honest with you.

You’re going to work 80 hours a week, and you’re going to be the last one to get paid, and that’s no fun. So the key to it is to figure out how much your time is worth, and you can do that by figuring out how much you make a year and dividing that by 40 hours, which should be what you’re working. And then unless it’s something you just love to do, you need to figure out how to outsource it if you can get it done cheaper. If you’re worth $150 or $200 an hour, and you’re over here making copies or doing something you could pay somebody $25 or $50 an hour, why are you doing it? Unless you love to do it. Now if it’s something you have a passion for… There’s still some things I do that I could hire people to do, but I really enjoy doing certain things, and so I do them. But unless you just got get pure joy from it, you need to think that that way.

Alex Valencia:

Excellent. So you mentioned systems. Why are systems so important?

Ken Hardison:

If you want to have any scalability or any growth and not be held hostage by your employees, you need systems, processes and procedures, tasks. Here’s the deal, I always preach that there was nobody irreplaceable. The reason that was is because I had processes and procedures for everything in the firm. So if somebody just walked out, or got mad with me, or I got mad with them, or whatever, they weren’t doing their job, I could fire, which goes to another saying of mine or way, I guess philosophy, “I like to hire real slow but I like to fire real fast.” That’s not the way I always was. The first 12, 14 years, I was just the opposite. I hired really knee-jerk, “Well, I got to get somebody to fill this place. We got all this work to do,” and then when it came to firing somebody, I always say, “Oh, I can’t afford to lose them. What am I going to do? It’ll take so long to train somebody. They got so much intellectual property, so much knowledge.” That was just a terrible way to run a business.

And so after reading that book, I got manuals on client service, I got manuals on how to handle a case from start to finish. I got processes on how to do intakes all the way to opening files, closing files. We’ve got checklists. We use case management systems that have individual tasks, and we run reports. Now you can have screens on your computer, on your desktop, where you can manage by that. You still have to put the human touch in it. I mean, now I like to manage by walking around, talking to people, seeing what they’re doing. But I can tell whether something’s not running right by the reports, and then using benchmarks, like I know that when a person gets released from an accident that I want a demand sent out in 30 days. So I got a report on that, and if it’s not, then I want to know why. If I got one person that just constantly is always 10, 20, 30, 40 days behind, and I got this other person here that’s getting them out 28 days, then I know I got a problem. It’s not the process, it’s the person.

I didn’t train them right, or they just don’t have the ability, and they got to go back to training, or we got to find them what I call “a new seat on the bus.” So it’s so important because you don’t want to be held hostage by someone, and anything can happen to that person. Their spouse could be moved because of another job, they could die, they could get sick. And then you got key personnel. I mean I always tell people, with key personnel, like your office manager or your partner, you should have a contingency plan if something happens to them. You should already have it worked out in your head what you’re going to do so that you’re not making-

Alex Valencia:

Excuse me.

Ken Hardison:

… knee-jerk reactions. But that’s why I think systems are so important because it’s going to make you more efficient. You’re not to hold until your employees and your staff. It’s easier to manage when you got systems and benchmarks and everything. It’s just so much easier to measure and be more efficient.

Alex Valencia:

Exactly. I agree. What’s a USP?

Ken Hardison:

Unique Selling Proposition. Basically, it is what differentiates you from all the other lawyers or other businesses in your market. Because the nuance to most lawyers, people really don’t care about you. They want to know what’s in it for them. What you got to do is get into the people’s mind and answer these two questions, “Why do I need a lawyer?” But better yet, “Why should I choose your firm over all these other guys I see on TV, Yellow Pages, Facebook ads? Why You? What makes you stand out? What makes you unique that I should raise my hand and even check into using you?” It’s hard. In this book, I actually go through and a lawyer said, “But that’s hard. We all do the same thing.” Well, we all do the same thing but we might do it a little bit different or add bonuses, and it can be a thing, too, like in our firms we only, we always offer books.

We have… I don’t know if I have it around with me, I don’t think I do. But so we give away a book, “The Ultimate Guide to Winning Your Social Security Disability Case.” So it kind of stands us out. There’s nobody else in this market that’s got a book. Other thing I’ve done is offer a 30-day client service satisfaction guarantee, that may not guarantee we’re going to win the case. It means that if they don’t like us or don’t like the way we’re handling their case, they can fire us and get their file the first 30 days. No attorney fees, no cost. That’s easier to do with contingency firms, I would agree. But I think there’s other ways you could do it and do the same thing because that’s what we call a risk reversal. It’s like picking out a doctor or dentist or something for a very important thing in your life.

If you never used that person before, you’re trying to figure out, “Is this the right fit? I’m going to pay them a lot of money and not be able to get out of it. I got to sign a contract,” which in reality, anybody can get out of a lawyer’s contract. It’s not enforceable. We can get quantum merit, but that’s it, and good luck with that. I’ve done that over the years and it’s a pain in the butt. What happens is you’ll get a lot of the fence sitters that were thinking about hiring but we aren’t quite sure. It’ll make them go say, “What have I got to lose?” I do it for PILMMA. Every bit we do, any memberships, I offer my money back guaranteed because I want them to have value. I practice the preeminence doctrine, remember that things for the betterment of my clients or the betterment of my members. If I’m not given ten times the value of what I’m charging, then I probably shouldn’t be able to charge you.

That’s a different way of thinking. But I think that is a key to my success is I do overdeliver. I just think it’s the way to do business. It’s worked for me all these years and that’s why I think it’s important. I know I’ve kind of digressed off the USP, but in the book, I actually tell you [inaudible 00:17:15] got some exercises you can go through to actually create your own USP because most lawyers don’t. They say the same thing as everybody else, “Free consultation. We care. We’re tough,” all that kind of stuff. People hear it over and over and say, “They all sound the same.” So you got to pop out with something that differentiates you. Remember Domino’s Pizza before they became just Domino’s now. Their big deal, how they got to the top of the ladder wasn’t because they had the best tasting pizza. Papa John’s is gone with that—natural ingredients, that’s their USP. But Domino’s was fresh, piping-hot pizzas in 30 minutes or less. Of course they had to quit that too because of us lawyers. We sued a lot of people for wrecks.

But before we started suing them, that set them aside from everybody else in the market, and that was through USP. That’s what made them unique out of all the 10 million. Now there’s pizza joints on every corner. It don’t take much. I mean, what does it cost? You got to go buy an oven and then some ingredients. You fix a pizza for about two bucks and you sell it for 10. I mean, it’s a great margin business, and there’s a lot of competition. I mean, you think there’s a lot of lawyers out there, try to get in the pizza business. It’s a tough business. So they come up with something that was to set them apart. Papa John’s guy used to work for them, and he knew that was important. So he come up with the natural, best-tasting ingredients, da da da da. That’s why it’s so important to have a USP in any business, whatever it might be.

Alex Valencia:

Awesome. So touching on marketing giants like Dominoes and Papa John’s, in the book and earlier in the call, you talked about the three phases of marketing. Could you explain those phases a little further?

Ken Hardison:

Yeah. So I got to thinking about it. If I was going to break it down, start talking about a law firm, marketing or any business, there’s so many tactics, so many different things you could do. I mean, I think at the old law firm, I think they were doing 42 different things to market the practice. Down here, I’m probably doing 21 things. So how do you keep them all categorized, systematized? And so I kind of broke it down into before representation: this is all the stuff you do before representing, like TV, Yellow Pages, Facebook, ASCO, blogs, getting people’s attention to where people are needing lawyers and get them to raise their hand. That’s what 100%, 99% of… Well, all the lawyers that market, that’s what they do. If they market it all, they all work on that phase.

But then the next phase is, once you get them into your office, and this is where about I’d say 50% of the lawyers forget about it, they get them in and then they kind of… They do the job, but they’re still not really marketing to these people and building what I call a relationship. I call that a lot of relationship marketing and doing the preeminence doctrine for everything I do. At our firm, we always made it sure that a client got contacted either every 45 days. We had systems for that, and we got a checklist, and it marked off. We had made that part of the deal for your quarterly bonuses. If you didn’t have a 90% contact rate, you didn’t get your bonus, no matter how much money your division or your lawyer produced. If he and his staff didn’t have 90%, 95%, I can’t remember, contact of contacting your present clients every 45 days, then they didn’t get their bonus. We do spot checks to make sure that they won’t fudge and just said they did and they didn’t.

Other things you can be doing is it’s just giving really good… And I talk about the book, how to create client loyalty because the cheapest marketing is, if you can become their trusted legal advisor, then my gosh, you don’t have to spend any more money trying to get this person to come back to you or to refer you somebody. Some lawyers say, “I see people call them about other things, I don’t do this. Don’t bother me! But I think that’s the wrong way to go. I think that it is you want them to call you because, number one, what if it’s a multimillion-dollar case and they say, “Well, I don’t think you’d do this kind of stuff, so I’m going to go call this other guy”? That’s a referral you missed.

The deal is if you are considered their trusted legal advisor, if I got a legal problem, I take the call because they trust me and they know if I can’t help them, I’m going to send them to somebody that can. And then by doing this, I create these relationships with these lawyers I’m sending cases to and having systems built in where they’ll call them, let them know I sent the person or sending them a card or email confirming I did it. They get to know that I’m helping them, and then they’re going to, in turn, not all of them, but 50% of them, are going to send me cases and stuff that I do. All that whole deal while you’re representing a person and after you’re representing them is very, very important. And then treating them, I stole this from Jeffrey Gitomer, I call it “the Grandma Test,” whereas my staff, I tell them when they talk to somebody on the phone, a client or whoever, put grandma at the end of the sentence. If you wouldn’t talk to your grandma like that, then don’t talk to my clients like that.

I also believe that the way you treat your staff is the way your staff’s going to treat your clients. So I try to treat my staff with… I try to put grandma into that, I’m nice to them. I mean, I got rules and I’m stern, but I still try to treat them as professionals and manage them. I just wrote an article about agreements, not try to manage the person. “You agree that this is your job. These are the deadlines and you’ve got to have it done. Can we agree that you’re going to do that?” “Yes.” And then when they don’t, they’ve broken the agreement, so we got to fix it. They’ve got to figure out a way to fix it, or they got to go.

So the last phase is after representation. This is where 90% of lawyers just lose it. They forget all about it. So this is where you use newsletters, create client advisory boards, have past client appreciation days, and still keep sending birthday cards, all this stuff. I talk about it in my book. I came out here to Myrtle Beach five years ago. I sold my firm out and started this other firm about two years ago. But when I got down here, I had plumbing problems. I called this plumber, went online, didn’t know anybody. Went online, liked his ad, liked the reviews. He came and did a great job and did give me a fair price. I thanked him, and he gave me his business card. Six months later, I’m having another problem. The hot water heater goes out. I can’t for the God of me remember that guy’s name. I remember what he looked like, I remember the color of his truck, but I do not remember the name of his company.

I tried to again online, I just couldn’t remember, so I got this other company. They come out, they do a great job, they give me a reasonable price, but this guy does something different. He leaves me a little magnet, he throws it on the hot order heater. He says, “If you ever need, any trouble, call me 24/7. This is my number. And then about two months later, I got a newsletter from him about his business and things, his employees, things that were going on in his life. I get one about every three or four months.

So about a year later, I’m having septic tank problems and I call him, but guess what I do, I remember his name and I said, “I can’t find the newsletter, but I know he’s got the magnet in here.” I go in there, I get it. Bam. So both of them were really good plumbers, both of them did a great job, and both of them charged me reasonable prices. But the marketer, the guy that marketed to me after he finished my job is the guy that got my repeat business. I know it’s a plumber, but it’s no different from a lawyer or any other type of business. So it makes sense that you market to the people after they leave the firm.

Alex Valencia:

Yeah, that makes complete sense. It’s definitely great advice on the three marketing tips. You touched a little bit on the doctrine of preeminence.

Ken Hardison:

I’m off webcam. I’m sorry.

Alex Valencia:

You had touched a little bit on the doctrine of preeminence. Why is that so important?

Ken Hardison:

Because that’s what really is going to get you to business. If you become their trusted legal advisor, then that’s what’s going to get you their business forever. It’s like I said before, and I won’t belabor it, but I mean that’s the example. You want them, they got a legal problem to call you.

Alex Valencia:

In your book you talk about the ten tips of creating client loyalty, and it seems like you touched on that a little bit with some of your marketing tactics. Are there any specifics on those ten tips that you might want to share?

Ken Hardison:

I mean, they got “the Grandma Test,” it’s the golden rule. Treat people the way you want to be treated. I’m going to give away the book at the end of this deal so they can just read it. But it’s stuff that’s kind of tried and proven. I don’t want to belabor the point since we’re running out of time.

Alex Valencia:

Okay, so we’ll move on. You and I have known each other for years, and I know this is tried and true. You talk about surrounding yourself with the right people to achieve success. Can you elaborate? I mean, obviously one of those is Dan Kennedy, Jay Abraham. Any others you want to share or what you’ve gotten out of it?

Ken Hardison:

Yeah. Really what I mean by that is, everybody’s got strengths and everybody’s got weaknesses. I’m a really great idea guy. I’m really not a great implementer. I’m a great leader. I’m a so-so manager. When it comes to technology, I’m terrible. So what I try to do is, instead of trying to make those weaknesses grow better, I try to leverage my strengths. So I have a lot to do with trying new ideas, and I get other people to implement them. When it comes to technology, I get a idea, but I don’t know how to get it done. So I go get somebody that’s a lot smarter than I am, and I don’t let my ego get in the way. I try to get people that are smarter than me in certain areas that I’m probably weak in and pay them and then empower them and let them take it to the next level for me, of course with me managing it. So that’s the idea, it’s to not let your ego get in the way.

Alex Valencia:

Excellent. So we have a good handful of attorneys on staff, and I know LeVan talks about this all the time, I think it’s important to learn about hiring the right people. What’s a tip you could give us? It’s probably in the book, and we’re running out of time. So what’s a quick tip you could give us on hiring the right people for your law firm?

Ken Hardison:

Test them. You got different tests out there, but test them, and then no matter what they tell you, test them.

Alex Valencia:

Excuse me.

Ken Hardison:

Don’t go by the interview alone because some people are professional interviewers, and they can tell you what you want to hear. They go research you, and then they know what your philosophy is, your values, and then they want to mirror that and suck up to you and, “Oh, man. I love this person.” I’ve been fooled before. So now I use these tests. I use Jay Henderson Real Talent Hiring. There’s another guy there named John Bean. Both of them are very good. I would say when you get it down to two or three people and you can’t make up your mind, do the test. That would be my number one deal, and-

Alex Valencia:

Is that Jay Henderson’s test?

Ken Hardison:

Yes. I’ve been using it for about 12 years now.

Alex Valencia:

I’ve taken that test myself.

Ken Hardison:

Oh, I have, too.

Alex Valencia:

Great. Yeah, it’s a great test. Yeah, we do a lot of testing for our staff and writers as well, which allows us to build the systems we have. So before we go, three tips. What are the three most cost-effective marketing tactics that you presently use in your Social Security law firm or used in your last law firm that they could take away with? And then I’ll tell everyone how to get a copy of the book and how to reach out to Ken.

Ken Hardison:

Okay. Number one would be newsletters. Number two would be the books because we put them out in doctor’s offices. We’ve got a infomercial now that we’ve been using. It is just killing it. I did one infomercial, it cost me $200, I got 130 requests for the book. And then I got a whole sequence where I’m drip campaigning them, and I’m getting cases with not a lot of money. And then the website, doing SEO and things like that. So that’s the top three.

Alex Valencia:

Great. Well, Ken, if you can see down your screen, it looks like you can go to www.underpromisebook.com to get a copy of the book. If you want to reach out to Ken personally, Ken, how can they reach you?

Ken Hardison:

They can do it ken@pilmma.org and that’s, K-E-N-@-P-I-L-M-M-A-.-O-R-G.

Alex Valencia:

And then, I’m going to be sending a copy of the webinar and the link in an email in a couple days so you’ll be able to get that. So the information will be on there. But make sure you download the book. It’s awesome. Ken, thank you again for attending and presenting on the We Do Web Content webinar series. We look forward to having you again. Again, if you haven’t registered or checked out PILMMA for the Fort Worth Summit coming up on July 15th through the 17th… Or 15th of the 18th?

Ken Hardison:

16th through the 18th.

Alex Valencia:

16th through the 18th, check it out now. Also, make sure you check out new projects Ken is working on called lawpracticeadvisor.com, which is an awesome resource for all types of law firms with marketing and management solutions. It’s probably the lowest cost, most effective program you could get on board now. Make sure you check it out. They’re going to be monthly modules of Ken doing marketing work, and Ken LeVan doing management work. So that’s www.lawpracticeadvisor.com and again, www.pilmma.org. Make sure you check those two out. Again, thank you all for attending. Have a great week. Let me know if you have any questions. I don’t see any questions come up now. We’ll give you another minute or so. If not, we’ll go ahead and end the call. If you have any questions by email, please feel free to reach out to us. We’re here to help.

Ken Hardison:

Thank you so much for having me.

Alex Valencia:

Yeah, thank you so much, Ken.

Ken Hardison:

I appreciate it.

Alex Valencia:

Have a great day, sir.

Ken Hardison:

All right, take care.

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