hi I’m Stephen Moore the owner and founder of MLT digital for the past 15 years or so we have worked with law firms all over the world helping them to become more successful as a business we specialise in digital marketing and we use a combination of online marketing expertise legal experience and technological understanding to help our Law Firm clients succeed what I’m hoping to do with this podcast and what the objective is to help you understand how you can improve your firm how you can end up with the firm of your dreams and we’re planning on doing this by having discussions with people that we’ve worked with people who’ve developed and grown their own firms people who’ve deployed software to  great success in terms of their Law Firm growth and others all with a primary objective of helping you make your Law Firm more successful I hope you enjoy this series we’ve tried to do it in a very profession but laidback fashion a conversational style it’s not going to be hugely serious but hopefully it’s going to be useful it’s so one of the things that we end up you know speaking to lawyers about is you know trying to help them understand how they can make their law firms more successful initially we would speak about digital marketing and online marketing and how we can generate them business online but that doesn’t really get to the nub of the matter the nub of the matter is how can I build the law firm of my dreams how can I make my firm successful to such an extent that I can take time off as and when I want it that I understand what the kpis are in terms of usability resource maximisation how to get the most out of your staff how to get the most out of the technology that you pay for all of these things are in are subject to ongoing change particularly in the environment that we live in now technology is changing all the time artificial intelligence is beginning to make a bigger play but the thing is that having a business and running a Law Firm this doesn’t day and age doesn’t need to be stressful you know running your own business should also be fun it should be interesting and it should involve you being able to maximise technology and Innovation to build the lifestyle that you want what we’re planning and doing with this conversation with a guest that we meet is short circuiting your development and short circuiting your path to get there the thing that I’ve learned from podcasts over the years which I’m hoping to bring to this one is that inevitably you will face situations which have been faced by others before the temptation is to build yourself or bury yourself into a hole where you’re thinking I’m not really sure how to get out of that but what people are very keen to do is to share their knowledge with you to help you so that you can listen to the podcast episode that’s most relevant to the problem or the issue that you are facing at that time and find the answers when I first started doing this type of work I actually qualified as a solicitor and decided that the internet was my way out of that that being said I have enjoyed working with law firms helping them grow for many many years when we first started selling them the notion that we could generate them Business Online many didn’t believe us and suddenly there was a change for them there was a change they could see how they could develop business in different ways and ideally you know business development should have a broad marketing mix once you have that Catalyst and the Catalyst for growth suddenly the motivation returns the enthusiasm comes back and you know you’re looking at your future and think well actually no we can achieve that we can be like them and with the conversations that we have we’re going to speak to the people who actually have done that for their firms and they’re going to explain their methodology behind that now I think back to when I first became a lawyer I was already a bit anxious about it I was thinking to myself I’m not sure this is going to be the career for me and I remember leaving the flat that I was living in with my then girlfriend is now my wife and I pulled my tie up to my neck up above my neck like it was a noose and I remember Mary saying to me I’m not sure this is going to go well and at that time I was heavily into wind surfing and water sports to a certain extent and the one thing that you can’t do is wind surf in the dark so when I first started working in this Law Firm I thought to myself I don’t know if I can handle this I don’t know if I can handle being in an office like this or similar to this Monday to Friday for the next 40 years or so and the internet really was just at the very early stages of becoming a commercial tool in fact the firm where I worked in the internet was pointed out as being a computer in the corner of the library sort of worrying and chirping but very early on I understood that this internet was going to bring us the flexibility that I so much desired I set up my first online business when I was a trainee in 2000 it was an online negotiation platform that actually in terms of the way at which it delivered was very well executed however it was far too advanced for its time I found myself back in the law firm and then I started my own business working as a bridge between partners and their it team because there seemed to be a bit of a disconnect there the IT team you know huge amounts of skills and knowledge and were able to extrapolate and extract information from systems that were very early stage but the listers weren’t exactly sure what they were asking for so I started to act as a as a bridge between them before doing a degree in it I then developed an online case law Reporting System I worked in litigation technology projects for some of the big the biggest litigation projects in at that time in Scotland I became a case map certified trainer I had built a whole load of applications for LA firms and worked with them on maximising the value of their case management systems because in the vast majority of time they were maybe using 10% of them in round about 2008 at the time of the recession I was approached by an old friend from uni when I say I was an old friend he was a mature student when I started at Uni and he seemed a lot a lot older than me it turned out he was maybe 22 when I was 17 and he asked me if I could help his firm with their search engine optimisation with their website development I said to them I’m not really that interested in working with other firms I do that on projects for myself and I I knew how to do it all he then said to me oh we’re paying this other agency 650 a month and I thought quite skint I’ll do that so shortly after we took on the project we rebuilt his website we did all the online optimisation we did the search engine optimisation we made it a much more conversion oriented design which means we were encouraging the user to do what we wanted them to do and shortly after we turned the site on I saw all the enquiries flooding in through the back end that was my light bulb moment I realised that what he was looking for wasn’t search engine optimisation it wasn’t online marketing what it was new business and which law firm didn’t want that I then spent a number of months traveling about meeting seeing Law Firm Partners people I had contact with and I would have a discussion with them and the discussion would go generally along the lines of how much money are you currently making from your website to which the partner would often reply I’ve absolutely no idea and I would say well do you think you’re generating anything and they’d say I’ve got no idea and I would say well okay tell me for your particular case type what’s your average fee value and they say what do you mean I say well you know how much do you charge a client typically and they would say well maybe for a road traffic prosecution this was in 2008 remember this road traffic prosecution may be about £500 so I would say Okay and if you were to get 10 enquiries how many would you convert they would say well maybe about three so I’d say okay so if you got 10 enquiries of this type and you converted three then you could generate £1,500 of fee income and they’d say yeah and I said well I think I can generate you 10 enquiries for £650 a month so you’re already quids in and they’d sort of look at me and think well I’m not that sure I believe you and I say but and then I would say to them well actually I think I could generate you 50 enquiries a month and at which point they’d either their eyes rolled back in their head or they wouldn’t quite believe me or they’d be ready to shake my hand there and then and from that point onwards we have grown MLT digital to probably be one of the most leading and well known providers for online business generation services for the legal sector we generate millions of pounds worth of new business for law firms all over the world and with this podcast what we’re really wanting to do is explore how that forms part over the overall Law Firm success mix We Want Your Law Firm to be more successful and our key Mission with this podcast is that this forms part of your learning and knowledge and helps to take you there so terms of the type of guest that we’d like to speak to and that we’re planning on getting in we’re looking at speaking to chairman of law firms managing partners are very successful law firms big and small so that you can learn from them about the techniques or the approaches that they found to be of most value for them we’re wanting to bring in people in the online marketing space or the digital marketing space who can advise you as to how best you can deploy marketing to grow your Law Firm similarly technology suppliers we’re not looking at it being salesy it’s all about straightforward helpful advice that’s going to act as a shortcut to you achieving the next milestone for your business now I’ve got my first guest here Bella the problem with Bella slightly has been my first guest is that she’s a great listener but she isn’t a great talker Bella how did you make your Law Firm so successful.