Fractional is kind of, it's become of this

buzzword in the last couple years, but at its essence, it

really means part time. So it just, it means you were getting

a high level of experience and and input into your firm without

the full time price tag. So fractional, I think, is great.

What I've seen in a lot of law firms is they've gone the route

of maybe they hire a CFO or an integrator COO, those two roles

are fairly interchangeable, but then they try to also assign

them HR in marketing and operations. And so you're trying

to get one person who does all the things in this full time

role, but fractional gives these smaller firms the ability to go

out and get subject matter expertise and really good

strategy and critical thinking and different areas of

Well, good morning, good afternoon, good

expertise.

evening. Welcome to the 10 Golden Rules of Internet

Marketing for Law Firms podcast. Great guest today, Rachel

Steininger, and we're going to get right to Rachel after one

short commercial for tgr live. And if you haven't heard of it

before, tgr live is our live event. It's an annual event.

We're doing, technically the fourth event, but it's the third

consecutive year we took a little break there during that

small global medical crisis, and we are rocking. We have some

amazing guests, and I guess this is like the formal announcement.

Stacy brown Randall teaches us how to get referrals without

even asking. She's an awesome keynote. She's going to be

great. My friend Steve Gersten is incredible, and he's got a

great presentation called four ways to make millions from your

case. And he's got five different multi million dollar

law firms. So he's amazing to learn from Rob Levine, another

multi million dollar law firm, and he's going to share his

operation secrets around intake and process. He's amazing. March

15 and 16th. Information available. 10 golden rules

emails are going out in the next couple of weeks. We have early

bird pricing. Rate. The hotel's amazing. The opal grand right on

the ocean in Delray Beach fork, Florida, march 15 and 16th,

it'll be beautiful. Guaranteed weather at that time of year,

there's no guarantee with the weather, right? Rachel, anyways,

thank you for indulging me. Rachel, welcome to the 10 golden

rules of internet marketing for law firms podcast. Thank you,

Jay. I'm excited to be here. Why don't you do the introduction

and tell us a little bit your background and your firm?

work as a fractional COO, and what that

means is I step into businesses, particularly in the legal and

professional services space, and I help take over those things

that the business owner usually has a Coulda, Woulda, Shoulda

list, like, I wish I could get to these things or know that I

can run my firm more smoothly. But really they want to

concentrate on practicing law and business development. They

don't want to spend their time figuring out how to make this

business run more effectively. And so I step into that role

where I'm really serving as a strategic advisor, but also

doing project management. So it's not just about telling you

what to do, like you'd experience in coaching. And as

I'll share, I've been a coach, so I do understand what that is,

but I'm also stepping in and saying, Okay, I'll talk to the

vendors, I'll find the right software, I'll help manage the

implementation projects. And I think for a lot of business

owners, is I've heard from some of them, I don't want any more

homework, and that no homework approach or minimal homework

approach, really just involving them when, let's just make sure

that this is helping achieve your goals. The things that

we're working on,

what you do. There was that commercial a few

years ago with the easy button. Yes, it's law firms. You're the

easy button. It

is the easy button. And so when law firms

are ready to graduate from, hey, we've got this pulled together.

We're making enough money to, hey, I think we could scale this

thing. Or I'm ready for a little more freedom, or I'm ready to

hire some more people, that's where there's sort of a point of

chaos. I see it often around about eight to 10 total

headcount, it starts to need some more structured support and

strategic support. So that's where I come in. And I have an

investment background, so I spent the first 18 years of my

career in the investment world, which means I'm always thinking

about not just, is this efficient, but is it effective?

Are we getting ROI and thinking about the client experience as

part of it? How did you pivot to legal? So I would say part of it

is I spent a lot of time in the lawyer's office when I was in my

investment world. So I am I led the client relationship team for

large financial institutions. So we're talking 100 million to

several billion dollar relationships, highly regulated.

So I know what the difference is, when somebody mistyped

something, that's a negative sign instead of a positive sign.

Had that happen once we had to cut a check for $250,000 so you

know, the reputational risk, the regulatory risk, I understand

all that, and to do that right in the investment world, that

meant sitting down in the General Counsel's Office and

saying, where's my line. And. How can I maximize the amount of

return for the risk that we're taking on regulatory risk being

one of those. So a lot of familiarity with lawyers, a lot

of contract reviews, a lot of regulatory document reviews, in

my background, and then also, having had some personal

experience with lawyers, I find them to be very good problem

solvers and very good partners. And in terms of working out what

the best path forward is. So it was a very natural fit. And when

I started my business and coaching, one of my first

clients was a family law office, and that led to another attorney

and another attorney and another attorney.

So that's great, and you're very highly

recommended in the lawyer community. So that's where we

met. So one of the things is we're all getting more

comfortable with fractional what it means, how it works, and

there's so many more fractional employees available, fractional

experts available. We have a fractional integrator. We run

the EOS operating system, and our integrator is fractional. He

works with about three companies and solves takes on one or two

big problems for us every month or two, and it works great. We

have a slightly fractional marketing director because she's

teaching a couple university courses. And again, it works

great. She just has to remind us, like, don't schedule me from

three to five on Tuesdays, because I'm actually sitting in

front of my class. And other than that, she's awesome. So

what does fractional mean, and how do your your clients

understand it, or or your prospects? How do you explain

it?

Yeah, I mean, fractional is kind of it's

become of this buzz word in the last couple years, but at its

essence, it really means part time. So it just it means you

were getting a high level of experience and and input into

your firm without the full time price tag. So fractional, I

think, is great. What I've seen in a lot of law firms is they've

gone the route of maybe they hire a CFO or an integrator COO,

those two roles are fairly interchangeable, but then they

try to also assign them HR and marketing and operations, and so

you're trying to get one person who does all the things in this

full time role, but fractional gives these smaller firms the

ability to go out and get subject matter expertise and

really good strategy and critical thinking and different

areas of expertise. I can dabble in CFO. I have finance degrees.

I can dabble in that, but you really you want me better as the

integrator COO or client operations, because that's where

my expertise is. But somebody else might be really good at the

CFO part and HR, I think, is a specialty too. Marketing is a

specialty, as we know. So fractional is just an advantage

to people to be able to get that expertise without the full time

price tag? Yeah, I

guess that's the way I look at it. Like I might

hire a part time data entry clerk, yes, if I'm hiring

someone who's going to essentially be my chief

operating officer, and first of all, it's not a full time job.

Second of all, I want the 300,000 $400,000 salaried

person, but I don't, I can't justify $300,000 and it's not a

full time job, but I get that level of expertise for that

eight to 10 hours a week, and it works out great, yeah,

and that's the advantage, I think of

fractional and then, you know, it also means that for the firm,

though you're also layering and maybe some other kind of

support. So a lot of firms I work with, I really look for

somebody who's already hired an office manager or an

administrative assistant, because what I'm not doing, and

this is, you know, important to the conversation, is, I'm not

coming in and doing the day to day tasks. We're really looking

at, what are those strategic projects that need to be moved

forward. You mentioned EOS. If you have rocks for the quarter

that require some level of involvement that's not, you

know, you don't have the bandwidth or the skill set to do

on your plate. It's great to hand that off to the appropriate

fractional but it's not so much who's answering phones, who is

reordering the printer paper, keeping up with the day to day

tasks. And so that's, I think, the other thing to distinguish

these fractional executives that can come in. So your CFO will

still need a bookkeeper. They're not going to do the bookkeeping

too, unless they have a team to support doing that.

That's a great one. We touched on EOS and

operating systems, and I know your operating system flexible.

Why don't you describe the operating systems and how you

feel they work for law firms and how important they're, yeah,

I mean, I think what's most important and

you can use Eos, you can use another I have coached my

clients through one that I call the acceleration engine. But

what's most important to it is that you have a clear set of

goals that are going to drive you forward. There is this

tendency towards shiny object syndrome, or just adding on all

the things. I'm a very impatient person. I would love for

everything to be done yesterday, right? So we load up too much,

and then we penalize ourselves, or punish ourselves when we

don't get it all done. And what an operating system, I think, at

its the first level, does is it really hard. Is the focus of the

firm, so we can't do everything at once. And I try to advise my

clients that no to something does not mean no forever. It

just means No, not right now, there are other things that are

going to move the needle on the outcomes that we're looking for

faster or more effectively than potentially something else on

the list, and we can always get to those things later. We're

kind of trying to tip over the biggest domino first, and that

starts the chain reaction of growth. So that's, I think,

number one with a operating system and then, and that's what

you would call an Eos, your rocks. You might call them your

OKRs and other systems, or just priorities, like whatever you

want to call them for your your next quarter. And sometimes when

a firm is in rapid growth, I try and get them down to like, what

are we doing in the next six weeks? Like, we don't even need

to think three months ahead, because things are changing so

rapidly. And then the other aspect of that is the day to day

accountability towards that it's very easy to set those goals and

then forget about them and the noise of the day to day. Every

business has that. But let's know, we know that lawyers have

that, especially if you're in something like employment law. I

work with a couple employment lawyers, and yeah, the things

that come out of nowhere, and you got to drop everything to

deal with that one thing right there and then. So having a

method for keeping that front and center, those non day to day

priorities. And then finally, what do you do on the back end

to make sure you're iterating, improving, documenting and

putting those things into long term processes. That is an ever

evolving process. Nothing is ever really perfect and nothing

is ever really static in business. So how do we have a

process for understanding that we're going to be in a state of

continuous improvement, and that's what allows us to, as I

like to say, stack and scale.

We both talk a lot about AI in our

presentations. You did an AI presentation in our networking

group the other day. One thing that I'm sensing in the last six

months is AI has definitely upset the apple cart, the

marketing world. It's definitely changing things. And if it

hasn't changed your practice area in law, it will in the next

six months, because so many people are integrating AI into

their operations. And it definitely changes the way

things get done. And it definitely changes pricing

structures. It changes staffing structures. So if it's changing

the marketplace, if we can agree, that's if you haven't

felt the Rumble in the Jungle for the last six months, it's

coming in the next six months. What would you say are a few of

the things that you're dealing with with firms in this changing

environment?

You know, I would say that one of the things

I've noticed is a lot of people are asking about how to use AI,

but they've missed some of the things they could have done

before. AI is not new. It's the, you know, the LLM. So these

language models generative AI, like chat, GPT, that is new. And

I think that has inspired a lot of firms to say, hey, we can

actually replace out some of the human components of what we do,

or we can augment the skill sets of our attorneys to move

forward. And so that's great, but there are a lot of things

that I've noticed that businesses have missed. From a

just data integrity standpoint, having one system talk to

another system, and the more that you have that, the better

and more ready you are for AI, I know you had the founder of

Yvonne here, and they talked about how their tool can look

into different pieces of the process, which means the AI can

learn better and can be become more effective. So I'm seeing a

little bit of businesses asking for AI, but actually really

fundamentally, just needing some of the automations and some of

the pre chat GPT versions of AI. AI has been around since the

1950s so it's not new by any stretch. It's just it's come to

this new point, and it's evolution, which means we're

evolving. And then I would also just say, as I'm looking at

these firms, I've done full speeches on this, so I could

probably go off on a number of different tangents, but I would

just say, from a lawyer's perspective, right, where we're

worried about data integrity, that might be some of the hold

backs. 90% this is industry, like across industries, so not

just lawyers, but 90% of employees are using their

personal chat, GPT accounts to do work. So if you are not

adopting it, even if you aren't ready for whatever the big

growth plan is with AI, you also need to look at it from a risk

perspective. And I know lawyers care about the risk side. So how

do we look at where you're going to funnel people's use of AI?

Because I don't think it's fair for us to think humans are going

to stop being humans. We want to use the technology. It's fun to

use. There's a lot of reasons why it feels very productive.

It's not always productive according to the data, but 90%

of employees, so

at a very minimum, get the $20 pay.

Yes, pay for it on your data, and what you

need is the $200

professional product. Yeah. And then I. Any

client files in there or anything

like that. Yes. And then I would also say,

I think there's a lot of lawyers who are trying to use AI to

become a better lawyer. And what I would say is, let's become

better at getting rid of the things you're not so good at,

because you are still going to be a better critical thinker

than chat GBT. If you're in chat GBT, or any of these models.

Sometimes you're typing in there, you're like, You are

worse than the worst employee that I have. Other times, it's

great. So I mean, our ability to use agentic AI, I mean, I'm sure

you're using that on a marketing front, right? Some of that is

incredible. But that doesn't mean I'm using it to become a

better lawyer or a better COO, or a better marketer, I'm more

using it to get rid of all the stuff that stops me from doing

that.

I was like to give the description too,

because people are less familiar than you and I. Agentic. Ai

basically means the AI is like an agent, or it's three or four

jobs, and you're giving it three or four jobs to do. So one job

could be go out and grab all my finances and put them in the P

and L, do first draft of that, go out and do the keyword

research every day, and do our competitive keyword research and

compile a report on how we're doing on our SEO every day. So

things that you used to do manually, you can assign AI

agents to do for you. Yeah. And I you're using it as well,

yeah. And I think it's this combination of

automations, if you were to use something like Zapier or make or

now n 8n with a little bit of thinking in there from Ai,

that's where it goes from a pure automation, which is a bunch of

if then statements, to agentic AI. And what I simplify it for

people is when you're thinking about any process, whether it's

using AI or not, you're always looking to achieve a certain

outcome. So if we think about this as just a three step

process, and a lot of this is based on like habit formation,

like BJ Fox, tiny habits, it's very similar to this, right?

We've got an outcome we want, which is the new good habit, or

the work outcome, and then we have a trigger that starts that,

and then we have actions in between. And in the case of

agentic, AI, the outcome is not to have AI. The outcome is to

get your PNL to convert leads at a better rate, to make sure that

when you get to intake call, you're talking to qualified

leads. But the action is somebody lands on your website

and starts chat with the chat bot, or submits a form or

something, triggers it, and then we have actions. And both the

trigger and the actions can be aI related, but the outcome is

still the outcome, and that's what's important about the

process and the strategy behind it.

You were also explaining to me earlier that

when you start with clients, a lot of times, it's not about the

playbook. First. You're starting by doing some research and

finding out some foundational things around like software,

data. You want to talk about that process?

Yeah, so Well, I think taking it kind of

up a level, what I want to understand about each of my

clients is not just where they want to go. I look at I call it

the three eyes, or beyond SMART goals. So we have our smart

goals, like, I want to go from a million to 3 million, or three

to 5 million, or there's some other metrics that we're looking

at. But then we also want to look at what is the identity of

the firm. So who do we want to be in the marketplace? What do

we want people saying about us? Who are our clients, who are our

peers, who are our employees, so that culture brand, kind of

wrapping that all up into one so important, yeah, and then what's

the individual goal? So what do I want as a managing partner or

as an owner to achieve out of all of this? And for some, it

might be more thought leadership. For some, it's just

get this admin off my plate right now. So it's, it's

varying, right, depending on your time of life, or what your

exit plans are, or anything like that. So I always want to

understand all three of those for each of my clients, and so

we'll spend a lot of time in this context mode. And the

desire for a lot of clients is, let's just jump in and let's

just get it done. But as I try to describe to them, I don't

want to take you on a road trip to Minneapolis when you want to

go to Albuquerque. We're trying to get you in the right

direction. And as you know, you could have two personal injury

firms, and one wants to go gangbusters and just really,

really grow. And you've got another who's like, I just

really want to serve clients well and have good quality of

life, and three years later, they might change their minds,

because their life has shifted. But we want to understand all of

that, so I want to take people on the right road trip.

I got two of the three. You got identity. We're

spending a lot of time with firms figuring out who you are

and what your market position is. Yes, particularly with

Morgan, Morgan, coming into so many markets, you've got to

figure out who you are and make sure that you're super

consistent in every point of communication. And it also helps

you with your firm, right? If you want to be the guys who care

about your community, and that's your marketing position, that's

awesome. Let's make sure we line up one community. Event each

month. So the first one identity, the second one is your

individual goals. What was the third eye

indicators? So things like KPIs, your key

performance indicators, or your smart goals. So all three of

those, like thinking about a Venn diagram, but you're right.

Like, when brand is so important and you see it as a marketer,

you could say, and a lot of lawyers will just say, you guys

have kind of boring brands. We're like, we're honest, we're

ethical. It's like, well, that's kind of a pay to play value.

What makes you you, and as we're developing processes, especially

in the client operations, we have, I would say, not only the

ability, but the obligation to fulfill on whatever that brand's

promise was inside of the marketing. So we want to do a

good job get the lawyer part right, but we also want to

deliver on the brand part. So I need to understand that when I'm

developing processes, because that might mean we insert people

somewhere, where in another firm, we might insert AI or an

automation, or we might be more careful about how we're

inserting AI, because we care about what the brand feel is to

it, and then the individual part really comes in, where some

owners, some managing partners, are like, I just want to be a

managing partner. And so we can structure the delegation and the

assignment of that process around their goals, versus

another one who says, I really just want to practice law, and

that's another way we structure it. So honing it

up and taking it back when I have an initial

conversation with a prospect, so many firms don't know the key

numbers they need to know. Yes, like, how many leads you get?

Oh, I don't know what's your conversion rate. Oh, we convert

95% of the cases we want? No, that's not real, because that's

not the number I'm looking for. How many cases do you sign in a

month? And some people don't even know the average, like,

they'll tell you how many cases are sitting in their to do list.

Yeah, and what's the value of each case? So we want to get to

what's the cost per case that you're targeting based on the

value per case. And those are my marketing numbers that I want to

know, but so many firms you know couldn't even tell you exactly

their revenue and their increase in revenue on a long basis. What

are some of the key numbers that firms need to know

first, I would say starting with your

marketing numbers is a very good place to start when a firm is

struggling to grow. Very often, the first place to look is on

the marketing side, because, as we know, cash is king. So if you

don't have enough numbers flowing in as leads, we can't

even test marketing strategies or brand or things like that. So

all those marketing numbers that you just mentioned are really

key when it flows into the client operation side. We're

looking at the length of time that it takes overall to service

an account. And different practices in law are going to

have very different numbers. But we're also looking at, then

breaking down that process, I think, the intake process. And I

know you guys work a lot with your clients around the intake

process, so that's one of the most definable pieces of the

client operation process or the client journey. And if we can

get that right, we're really solidifying, especially in those

first moments after somebody commits to working with the

firm, really solidifying that trust that they've put there to

say, Hey, I'm going to hire you, and now we're delivering on

that. And having seen many different client experiences

over the years, I can tell you that if you screw up in those

first couple days, you really, really do a lot to to ruin the

trust with a client. So we want to get that right, but we're

also looking at, how fast does it go? How quickly do we get the

information do we need? How smooth is it? And then maybe

we're looking at the more drawn out part, like in family law or

even an injury, where we're kind of waiting for things to happen.

It's sometimes it feels like, hurry up and wait. And so we're

looking again at different different stats there. So that's

very dependent upon the firm. But you know, how do we maximize

the lifetime value of a client? How do we make sure we're

getting referrals, looking at the churn rate if you're on some

kind of retainer model or subscription fees, kind of the

alternative pricing for lawyers, I've had a lot of experience in

that area, and we want to look at not just how many new leads

are coming in, but how many are rolling off. Because you could

have a it might not actually be a bad thing to roll off clients,

right? It means we've settled their cases, but it can also be

a hit to revenue when suddenly see a whole bunch of, let's say,

family law cases settle and roll off your books, and now you've

got to go

out and drum up some more business. So the

world's a little upset, I say the apple carts upset. Yeah.

What's the number one thing firms need to do today?

Number one thing, wow, that's like a big

question, Jay, number one thing they need to do, I would

actually ask managing partner just to step back and pause,

because there is just so much hype out there, and ask the one

question, where do I really want to go? I think it's where do I

want to go? What do I want? What do I need, and what am I willing

to do to get there? And. Very few of us take time to pause,

even for an hour, and just let those thoughts come through. I

think having a really clear picture of what you need and

then utilizing the resources around you, I would steer clear

of any fractional any agency, any real, trusted partner, if

they're not allowing you to explore how to put that then

into the tactics. But if we are running blinds, funny story

played blind man's take once in high school, which, in

retrospect, super dumb idea. But like, ran straight into a wall.

Right? If you blindfold yourself, you're going to run

into a wall. You're not going to run where you want to run. So

like, let's take the blinders off and let's actually think

about where

we want to go when your clients are successful

working with you as a fractional coo. What are the top couple

things that they should hand off to someone else?

Oh, I mean, the things that I see managing

partners holding on to, I think the biggest thing to start

handing off is anything that is low value. Right as we look at

I'm not the first person to say this, but if you look at things

that you don't like doing, you're not good at doing, and

are low value tasks, those need to either be eliminated, or they

need to go somewhere else. And what I love about this economy,

in addition to AI, we have so many resources to go and find

labor like you don't have to have somebody in your office for

every single one of these tasks. I understand the desire to work

in office, but I also see, think there's just so many ways to get

these low value tasks

off your plate. Great. Well, we made it to the

end, which is not the end, but it's the time that I love when I

ask you the quick one liners. Okay, so tell me about any apps

or techniques you use for personal productivity.

So there are two apps I probably couldn't

live without. Calendly is one and recommendation there don't

just have one calendar like really utilize the tool. And the

other one is a tool called superhuman, which helps me

organize my inbox. It fits in with Outlook and Google

workspace, so you can use it with either, and it's the only

thing that keeps me at Inbox Zero and keeps me organized. I

love

it. Well, I love Calendly, so I'll check out

superhuman. Yes, I love it. Do you have a personal fitness or

wellness routine?

My fitness routine needs some improvement

right now, but I am a big journaler, so I will do the

brain dump try to get the mess out of my head and make sense of

it. So just finding ways to take care of myself and that toolbox

is pretty important to me. What

do you recommend? Is the best business books?

Oh, I read so many of them. I've been really

listening to a lot of like I've been listening to and reading a

lot of Cal Newport lately. You know, slow productivity, deep

work. I think that's very important in this environment.

But, yeah, I read a lot of different

books. What blogs, podcasts or youtubes.

When they hit your feed. Just pause the other podcast and you

immediately listen to

Yeah, so I I've mentioned Cal Newport

already. I really like his podcast. I love listening to the

hormozi, especially Layla hormozi. I think Alex gets a lot

of attention, and it's great, but Leila is such a good

operator and really understands the people and process and just

how you fit it all together. I really enjoy her YouTube videos.

Who's your NFL team? I don't watch the NFL, but I am a

college football fan. I went to Notre Dame, so go. Irish people

can love or hate me for that, but, yeah,

good one. Well, that, hey, that one comes with

some passion. Yeah, great introduction for you, when we

meet someone who's in what kind of state do we think of Rachel?

I

would say it's that person who's getting

to the point of chaos, like I said, it's somewhere around

eight to 10 employees, but it might be higher than that, and

somebody who's really looking to figure out how to scale this in

a way that they care about the client experience as well as

their own experience. So I look for people who care about the

people in their life, whether that's the clients or the

employees.

And if you're just passing eight or 10 people

and you're in chaos, where can people get in touch with you?

Yeah,

I'm available on LinkedIn at Rachel

Steininger, so just all one word, you can also check out my

website, upward acceleration.com and if you go to upward

acceleration.com. Forward slash tgr. You can sign up for my

weekly newsletter. So each week, you get some insights on how to

better structure your business and some fun personal stories in

there.

Too awesome. Rachel, we'll send that over,

and we'll put that in the show notes too. So all right, you're

watching on YouTube or listening on iTunes. You can find that

down below. Rachel, this was lots of fun. Thanks for joining

us on The tgr podcast. Thank

you, Jay. I'm so happy to be here, and I

appreciate that opportunity to talk to you and your guests.