Sam Mollaei: Virtual Law Firms and Google Reviews – Personal Injury Marketing Minute #33

Sam Mollaei, Esq. is a legal disruptor. He pioneered the Virtual Law Firm model, building 3 multi-million dollar virtual law firms in less than 5 years.

As a lawyer he has generated over 12,000 clients online and gathered over 3,000 5.0 star Google reviews.

Sam has also helped thousands of lawyers around the world create their own profitable virtual law firm through his multi-million dollar online academy, Legal Funnel.

He’s on a mission to liberate stressed and overwhelmed lawyers and lead them to wealth and freedom by building a virtual law firm.

Get Virtual Law Firm Secrets Here: https://a.co/d/arVaC5i

Learn More About Legal Funnel Here: https://legalfunnel.com

Join Lawyer Facebook Group Here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/legalfunnel

 

See all episodes or subscribe to the Personal Injury Marketing Minute here: https://optimizemyfirm.com/podcasts/.

Transcript:

Lindsey:

Welcome to the Personal Injury Marketing Minute, where we quickly cover the hot topics in the legal marketing world. I’m your host, Lindsay Busfield. As we have talked about before, reviews matter. They matter for your LSA account. They matter for your chances of showing up on Google’s local listings. They also matter for client conversions. It can be tempting to look at the law firms with hundreds of reviews and think that you could never get those, or tell yourself that they must have paid for them to get that many reviews.

Lindsey:

A lot of times, you’re right. Many people do pay to get reviews. However, it is scammy, and Google tends to flag them. You’re also right that it can be challenging, nay impossible, if you aren’t doing it right. But what if you were to receive the magic words to unlock positive reviews from your clients? The words aren’t “Abracadabra”, but Sam Mollaei is going to share them with you. Sam is the founder of seven, yes, seven law firms, and author of Virtual Law Firm Secrets. He has mastered the art of generating reviews and is going to share just how you can do it. Thank you so much for joining us, Sam.

Sam:

Thank you so much, Lindsey. I’m super excited to share these secret sauces with your audience.

Lindsey:

Excellent. Tell us a little bit about your legal journey, your law firms, and how you have mastered automating them.

Sam:

Sure. I started my law firm seven years ago. At the time, I had no mentor, no formal education on business side of generating clients online, so I went on a self-education journey, reading a lot of books and watching a lot of YouTube videos. My epiphany came when I read Tim Ferris’ 4-Hour Workweek book that exposed me to three key principles. First, the virtual business model. Second, automation, having a business that runs on its own. The third part’s scalable. That’s just using a lot of online tools in a lot of ways to be able to grow quickly without me necessarily doing more work. At that point, I made a promise to myself. I’m like, this is so amazing. From now on, any business decision I make for my law firm has to align with those three key principles.

Sam:

It had to be virtual, so I wasn’t tied to any physical time or location. It had to be somehow automated, so it would take me out of the process. It had to be scalable. It had to be able to grow quickly, but not me necessarily doing one-to-one interactions. Fast forward, I was able to apply all those concepts to my first law firm. I was able to replicate it over and over. Now, I’ve been able to successfully apply it to three of my law firms that I’ve grown to multimillion dollars that are actively running and fully automated and running on their own. Now for the past two and a half years, I’ve been on a journey to pass on these things that I’m currently doing for my own law firms, passing on to other lawyers and show how it is possible to run a law firm that’s very non-traditional, that’s very virtual. It gives you the freedom to be able to basically run it your way and not in a very systematic “You have to do it this way.”

Lindsey:

That’s awesome. That is fantastic that you were able to find the right mentor to give you the foundation to use to make your law firm successful, and so kind of you to share, as you say, the secret sauce to help other law firms succeed in the same way in having lots of success bringing on great clients, but also being able to free up time for themselves and their lives and be able to live the lifestyle they want while still helping out their clients in a meaningful way. But since we are focusing on reviews, just how many reviews do you have?

Sam:

3,200 Google reviews as of the time that I’m recording this. Anyone who doesn’t believe me, just go google Mollaei Law, my last name, Law. I started this law firm about seven years ago, but let me share with you my story, how I got here. About five years ago, I basically, out of nowhere, I got a one-star review. I looked up the person’s name and I couldn’t tell who it was. It wasn’t a client. I looked at all my leads in my email inbox and I couldn’t even find the person, somebody named that name. I started looking like, okay, this was probably most likely a competitor, still to this day, I don’t know who it was, and basically started looking around, “How can I get rid of this review?” I realized that there’s no way to get rid of this negative review, and I realized a good defense is good offense.

Sam:

I went on the offensive to try to collect as many reviews as I could. At that point, I had a little dilemma. Where do I collect my reviews? I noticed all my competitors and all the people that were lawyers at the time were collecting reviews on Avvo, on Facebook, on Trustpilot and all these third party platforms. I realize these platforms are third party websites that rely on Google to get their traffic. What happens if Google decides to release a thing called Google My Business and they want to be the main place where businesses will be instead of Avvo? I had this foresight. I’m like, you know what? I’m going to collect my reviews on Google because that’s going to be by far the most important. Google is going to use that for your SEO.

Sam:

Most likely will probably use it for Google ads, which they did, and they started using it for Google local servers ads [inaudible 00:04:56]. I started collecting a lot of Google reviews. I made a promise to myself. I’m going to create a system to be able to automate it. Luckily, there was a little concept that I learned about, micro commitment, that I learned about link building, which I’m sure your company does. I took that idea and applied it to collecting reviews, which has proven to be very fruitful. Now for this law firm, I had 7,000 clients, and about 40% of those clients leave me reviews, which now amounts to 3,200 Google reviews.

Lindsey:

That is fantastic. What a great statistic that you’re able to generate so many reviews from your clients. I know that many of our listeners here would love to be able to get half of their clients, assuming that they are satisfied with their services, but to be able to get that many clients to actually commit to leaving reviews and following through on that. And so, this is clearly a priority for you. Why do you think it’s so important to generate reviews?

Sam:

With online these days, because it’s… Online allows people to be able to look up anybody, so that makes it very easy to be able to create a law firm. Now, there’s a lot more law firms than there were before. At the same time, you need to have a way to differentiate yourself from the next person. There’s no bigger factor than reviews that builds up trust. That’s literally the only… Usually, the biggest difference between you and someone else is how much trust other people have put in you. People, when they’re trying to decide whether they should hire you, they rely on other people’s decision to help them make them decide.

Sam:

I realized that was a very big trust factor and a big conversion factor to turning more leads into clients. The way that I see it is that reviews is the last part of your client generation system in your law firm. That the more clients you get, the more reviews you get. The more reviews you get, the more clients you get. It’s basically like a positive feedback loop. You need to make sure that it’s all feeding each other. If you have the last part, then again, it will have that positive feedback loop for you to get more clients.

Lindsey:

Absolutely, I 100% agree. When you have all of these law firms competing against each other online, everybody can say that they’re the best law firm, especially saturated markets where you have, “I’m the best law firm in Los Angeles” and you have the super lawyers badges. It’s so confusing for clients, but nothing is going to be a more genuine testimony to your services than somebody who has already been helped by your firm and has had a positive experience. A lot of people do share those experiences on Google. You mentioned Avvo, but does it matter whether people are leaving reviews on Google versus Yelp versus, as you said, Avvo? Why focus on Google?

Sam:

Totally, yeah. I think it probably will be, I would assume, eight to 10 times more effective to gather reviews on Google long term than collecting anywhere else. It is a mistake to collect reviews on Avvo. If it has worked for you up to this point, great. But again, everything is about having the future in mind. Google is dominant. They own the entire web. Yeah, definitely collect, if you are going to collect reviews, definitely on Google. I’m 100% certain.

Lindsey:

Right. Don’t even give them the option to leave their review on Yelp. Just 100% direct their efforts to Google.

Sam:

Correct. Correct. Don’t give options. And then, a lot of people also try to… There’s these review tools that just collect reviews. You don’t need to pay for that. Hopefully, I’ll be able to provide some actual how-tos about how you can set it up yourself without any specific, particular tools just for a review collection system.

Lindsey:

Great. We’ll jump into that in just a minute, but let’s start out with some of the challenges that lawyers have when they’re trying to get reviews. I know that a lot of lawyers who are listening in are thinking to themselves, “You must be putting so many hours and having a full team behind you to get this many reviews.” But as you said, everything that you do is automated as much as it can be, but why do so many lawyers struggle with getting reviews in the first place?

Sam:

Because it’s not… A lot of times, when something doesn’t get done, damage usually falls on you. This is definitely one of those tasks, those little repetitive and tedious tasks, which you should not be doing as a law firm owner. This is something to definitely to give to, ideally, a virtual assistant or your employee. All you need is to [inaudible 00:09:29] the system and then have them be in charge of it and be able to track their results.

Lindsey:

Yeah, for sure. This is definitely not something that the lead lawyer should be trying to take on themselves. It’s a waste of their time that they could be spending with other clients and servicing them. And so, where do you start then if you want to start getting more reviews?

Sam:

I’ll be sharing this exact system that I’ve been able to use from day one to be able to collect 3,200 Google reviews. What I do is I use an email tool that’s used instead of Gmail. For anybody who’s on Gmail, not on Gmail, you’re on Outlook or things like that, this works best on Gmail. It’s a tool called Mixmax, M-I-X-M-A-X, which is a tool that goes inside of your Gmail inbox that allows you to send templates and sequences inside of your emails so that the sequences can automatically send follow-up email. Even if somebody emails you, you have to attach the sequence and be able to follow up with them. I was able to create two specific review sequences. The first one is called review one sequence. The reason why this script that I’m about to share with you works is because your… What most people do when they ask for reviews, they say, “Hey, thank you so much for being our client”, whatever, some positive words, and they’re like, “Can you leave your review?” And then, they provide the link.

Sam:

Then, I found out that doesn’t work as well as getting people to take an easy small action first before you get them to actually click on the link to leave a review. The way that I do it is I get my clients to pre-commit to say, “Yes, I will leave a review” before you send them a link. I’ll share the exact script. If you’re listening to this, try to write it down. If not, come back and try to write it down. Here’s this. The first word is personalized, so I’ll just say, “John, I’d like to ask you for a favor. Would you please mind taking a few moments to write a review for me? Your comment will help others know what to expect when they’re looking for the service I offer.” Here’s the call to action. This is the magic sauce. “May I please send you a link to leave a review if that’s okay with you?” I end it with that. I’m just asking a question. “Can you leave me a review?”

Sam:

First, get that “Yes.” And then once they say yes, then you say, “Great, thank you so much. Here’s the link. I really appreciate you doing this. I’ll be sure to return the favor when you need assistance in the future.” Get that yes, then send them a link. It sounds very subtle. You’re like, what’s the point? But I promise you, if you just do that, make that change, that will give you at least a 40 to 60% boost in getting more reviews. That’s the first part, the script.

Sam:

The second part of this which I mentioned earlier is I create two Mixmax sequences. One is for the ask. “Hey, do you mind if I send you a link to the review? Hey, I just want to check in with you. Do you mind if you leave me a review?” And then once they say yes, then review two sequence goes out, “Great, thank you so much. Here’s the link. I just want to follow-up with you. Here’s the link. Thank you so much.” By setting that up, this specific script on the automation, again, you’ll able to collect reviews from at least 40% of your clients. This hasn’t just worked for me. I’ve been able to share this for the past two or three years, and anybody who implements this right away comes and tells me, “Sam, this worked amazing. Now, I got to a hundred reviews, which I’ve been trying to get to for a couple of years. Thank you so much. This works.”

Sam:

I don’t want anybody just listening to this and you’re like “Great, Sam, [inaudible 00:12:54].” No, this is for you to be able to implement for yourself. I encourage you to go back 90 seconds earlier, write down that thing. If you’re on Gmail, install Mixmax, create those sequences, or actually, hopefully, Lindsey, I’ll provide you a link for people to go to a Google Doc that has all this documented for them with all instructions. Give it to a VA or your employees and say, “Hey, go set this up for me.”

Lindsey:

Absolutely. We’ll include the link to that in the additional information on our podcast on our website. That’s great insight. When you’re able to get a micro commitment, as you say, from your clients to say, instead of saying, “Yes, let’s jump into leaving a great five-star 140 character review”, it’s a much smaller step to say, “Yes, I will leave you a review.” And then, they’re already in review mindset to be able to go and leave you that great review as a follow-up. How soon after the case closes do you send out the first sequence?

Sam:

The minute of. The minute of.

Lindsey:

Okay, so immediately after.

Sam:

Yeah, not the hour of. Obviously, the day of. I realized this too, and there’s been so many times this is proven correct to me, this idea of that minute. Every minute and every hour that you wait, especially every day that you wait, literally, dramatically, reduces your chance of actually people following through and getting it. I actually just internally had to deal with this with an employee [inaudible 00:14:19] law firms, “Hey, do this, do this.” Now, she went back after a month or two trying to do this, and she totally flopped. This only works with time urgency behind it. Yes, same hour, same minute, as soon as you get the good results.

Lindsey:

Absolutely. Time is of the essence with that. But what if they didn’t have a good experience?

Sam:

Then you don’t ask. You don’t have to ask for a review.

Lindsey:

Okay.

Sam:

Obviously, there’s filtering ways. This is just one way. Obviously, you want to do your best and provide the best support. Red flag if you’re scared of asking for multiple clients a month [inaudible 00:14:57], then let’s work on that. But sometimes, let’s be frank here, there are some people that no matter… They won’t be happy no matter what. That’s just reality. For those people, nobody said, [inaudible 00:15:13]. I don’t know, I don’t think there’s any requirement to do that. Yeah. Be smart about it.

Lindsey:

Right. Make sure that you have that set up in your process. Maybe instead of asking for review, ask for feedback that you can use internally to help better your process for future clients.

Sam:

Yes, there you go.

Lindsey:

There you go. That way, they at least feel heard, but not necessarily heard on a global web stage. That’s all helpful. Those are great techniques. This is just one of the techniques that you lay out in your book, Virtual Law Firm Secrets. What are some other topics that the book covers?

Sam:

A lot. A lot of ideas. Essentially, the gist of it is how to… The subtitle of the book is, “How To Run Your Law Firm So It Doesn’t Run You”, because I realized when I was teaching these concepts to lawyers, I was teaching lawyers how to get clients, how to do this and all that stuff, and one’s like, “Yeah, that’s great. I’m too busy.” I’m like, okay, how can I be able to change the curriculum or talk more, share more, about freeing up lawyers from their law firms? I realize it’s more about the systems and processes and hiring virtual assistance that’s more impactful. It addresses those exact things that I just mentioned. Systems, processes, building out your dream team, virtual assistance, all that stuff. If you ever wanted to, again, free yourself up from your law firm, those are the concepts you’re going to get.

Lindsey:

Where can attorneys pick up a copy of your book?

Sam:

Just go on amazon.com. Search for Virtual Law Firm or Virtual Law Firm Secrets. You’ll find it on Amazon, and soon coming to YouTube, Facebook, Google, [inaudible 00:16:44], Gmail, everywhere. It will be spread. It will find you, but yeah, you should go grab it because this knowledge right now is not shared. I made it a point that anything that I share is new. It’s all innovative ideas. Just the review thing is literally just one of those things. Grab it before the market catches onto these things because over time, people are going to understand why a virtual law firm model is better and how to set up these automations to, again, be able to get more clients, serve clients, and be more successful. Definitely get ahead of the curve.

Lindsey:

That’s great. Thank you so much, Sam. This has been very informative. I’m hoping that our listeners are able to go out and get lots of reviews and know that they actually can do this without having to pay thousands of dollars for cheap spammy reviews. Their team can take care of this in-house. Thank you so much for joining us today. It’s been a pleasure.

Sam:

Appreciate it, Lindsey.