Nicole Barnett

Building a successful law firm is great, but what is the motivation behind it

Chris Dreyer

Sometimes building a brand is as simple as understanding what you really care about – and folding that into your business.

Nicole Barnett

And what do you want your life to look like?

Chris Dreyer

You’re listening to Personal Injury Mastermind, where we give you the tools you need to take your personal injury practice to the next level. Case Barnett Law takes caring for their clients to a whole new level. Their chief operating officer, Nicole Barnett is also a certified integrative health practitioner who helps clients wherever she can. She is also the driving force behind the eight-figure growth she has enjoyed with her husband and co-founder, Case. We get into letting go of fear and hiring for growth, how they financed cases in the early days, having complete faith in yourself, her recently launched ‘done for you’ content membership – Law Prophet and how business models should influence your firm’s strategy I’m your host, Chris Dreyer, founder and CEO of Rankings.io. We help elite personal injury attorneys dominate first page rankings with search engine optimization. Being at the forefront of marketing is all about understanding people. So let’s get to know our guest. Here’s Nicole Bernett, Co-founder and COO at Case Barnett Law.

Nicole Barnett

I always say pursue that, which is you and I live that mantra. And I think that it’s probably the number one reason for my success. I was an art major. Studied graphic design, visual communications, photography, fine art major. Got out of college, lived abroad. I lived in Europe, Japan, and then I graduated and essentially ended up right back in grad school to get my teaching credential. And everyone’s like, why didn’t you just study that instead of doing art and then going back to school and I was like, I wanted to do art. So I went to, grad school worked at a finance firm to pay for grad school and then started teaching fourth grade. And I met my husband. We were set up on a blind date when I was teaching and he was a lawyer. So coming from an art background, I was like I don’t think I could date a lawyer. Like we’re so different. And He is the reason I ended up in legal. We started collaborating, not on, even business building, but I was using art in trial with him and we had so much fun. And then it snowballed from there he’s a trial guide. Like he doesn’t do the business stuff. He doesn’t care about marketing. So I just got my hands in and. Ended up building our firm that way

Chris Dreyer

You guys have, you’ve built an eight figure firm from the ground up and you are the ops person. So typically when we do like these personal assessments, disc and predictive index and things like that, The creatives don’t lend themselves, don’t do the ops and the processes of it. I’ve heard that you love the processes. Have you ever done the dis personality assessments? Do you know, have you done those?

Nicole Barnett

I think my main thing is I’m a visionary. , but I think that’s why it’s so important that I had pursued all of those interests of mine because my skillset, when I was teaching, that was the birthplace of systems and procedures for me, it was like, I am overseeing a machine, I’ve got 35 kids. I have all of the parents, I have all of the topics the subjects were covering and I would spend the first three weeks of every school year training my team, my students, training them on my procedures and then implementing them and it’s like that experience. Showed me my love for systems. And even when I was in graduate school, working at that finance firm, I was hired as the secretary right out of college. And my boss was making so much money and he had no idea of his pipeline. He wasn’t tracking anything. And so I just created a role for myself. I think it naturally came to me. when people talk about that 1%, those crazy people who are like aggressively pursuing things, that’s me. Like I am just constantly needing to build and create. And I love learning and I love different things.

Chris Dreyer

That’s incredible. And what we refer to that in the hiring space is the unicorn that we’re all looking to hire those that can do everything. So I wanna break this down and, many of the personal injury attorneys listening, they’re trying to grow their firm. They’re trying to hit this big milestone this eight figure milestone, so are there some key moments that, that you can think of that really helped you to get to that level?

Nicole Barnett

I think the reason we’re so successful is my skillset, right? That very specific skillset that I have. And then my husband’s skillset, he was a public defender. He got thrown in, I think he was working at the PDs office for five days and he did his first trial. And he put in the time to learn how to litigate a case, how to go to trial. He now has 18 years of trial experience. when we started our firm, we were very much allowing things to happen organically. We saw it as a long term plan. Of course you want success, but I think so many people want to of skip the things that need to happen and it takes time and it, and those skill sets, I Learning trial as a PD was huge, but also building a network of professionals and other attorneys that is the most valuable thing. I think for my husband that came out of that experience. And it’s a combination of things that lead to your success. But I think having a solid skill set. And then also finding a partner like, my husband just wants to do trials. if you aren’t gonna do marketing or you’re not gonna manage your team, you have to then hire out those people. And I think that was a huge milestone for us, It’s scary when you’re a hundred percent contingency fee. To spend money. Like the first few years you aren’t making money cases take, 12, 18, 24 months to close out. And I remember getting to the moment of feeling like so scared to invest in people and overhead. And once you release that and start spending money, it takes money to make money. You have to trust that you’re investing. They’re not just expenses. You’re investing, paying for good people to be on your team, paying experts to do their thing. I think that’s huge and it seems obvious, but I think so many attorneys wear too many hats And that’s where I think, knowing your numbers, having your pipeline, understanding how to project, when things are gonna close, allows you to make those choices in an informed manner where you could say all, look, it’s always a risk at a PI firm. PI lawyers are notoriously they’re risk takers, right? They are brave. And what they do is it requires some courageousness. So you have to also take that into all areas of the business.

Chris Dreyer

Nicole explains how they financed their early cases.

Nicole Barnett

We went all in. We sold our house. We took all of the money from that, rented a house invested in the law firm. And that was combined with. Case my husband did a civil trial. So he was still doing criminal. because of his trial experience. An insurance defense firm had these two cases on the side. They brought it to my husband and they’re like, you’re a trial guy. Will you do this? he would fall asleep with these like brain injury textbooks on his face. And he took both of those cases to trial his first two civil trials, one, we got a verdict of 4.3 and one was 3.8 million. And so we didn’t get to keep that whole fee because someone referred it to us. There were all these people involved that had messed the case up, but we got enough when we sold our house, we took both of those settlement attorneys fees. And we started the law firm. I think that you, if you wanna do it right, you do have to have money, you have to fund the cases while you’re not making money.

Chris Dreyer

What a belief in yourself, in yourselves, in it’s the epitome of burn the ships behind you or whatever that saying is right of going on.

Nicole Barnett

And we had a one year old and I had just gotten pregnant with our second kid

Chris Dreyer

What an incredible, wow. Congrats. That’s amazing. Yeah. Just such belief. your firm is focused. This is a kind of a different phrase and I just wanted you to break it down. You call it holistic lawyering. So what is that, what role does that play in your firm?

Nicole Barnett

Yes. going, just back to who we are using our unique life experiences and letting those things inform the way that we practice law. with holistic lawyering, we are low volume. my dream is to have 10 new cases a year, we take catastrophic injury cases. So we are dealing with people who are their lives will never be the same physically, emotionally, mentally. So I actually had some personal experiences. My son had some health issues I got into holistic healing. And then I actually got COVID two weeks before the pandemic started. We thought I was gonna die. I was bedridden for five months, sick for 18 months. No one could help me. Western med was like, we don’t know. They thought I had like cancer or something. It couldn’t be COVID. It turns out there’s this thing called long COVID. That is a very real thing. So during that process, I enrolled in a program to become an integrative health practitioner. Certified. I did it from bed. I was really sick and I healed myself. And as I was learning, I was thinking this could help people with brain injuries. This could help people who are in wheelchairs. And so we really tried to start incorporating that into how we lawyer. We wanna help people mentally, emotionally. Yes. Obviously we want their lawsuit to go well, but at the end of the day, the first six, seven years, it’s you give them this big check and you feel like, I don’t know how much it does. It does help financially. But if there are all these other things that are still there, that they haven’t dealt with processing. It’s not our job. We’re not their therapist, but if I have that knowledge and I can just say, Hey, here’s some different things that help with these physical symptoms, we’re gonna do it.

Chris Dreyer

What you’re doing with the holistic approach and like actually caring about their health and physical wellbeing is like really caring. And I know you do that because cause you do care. Yeah. And it’s like the epitome of doing something without expecting anything in return. But I gotta imagine that more reviews, more referrals occur from that.

Nicole Barnett

Yeah. And it’s just like I always feel like everyone overcomplicates marketing and building a brand, and it really is as simple as just listening to those things that you care about and incorporating them in your business. And if you don’t have things that you care about, I feel like you gotta get out and live life. You have to figure out. What you care about beyond work. It’s such an American mindset to just be like work. I’ve lived abroad. I’ve traveled to 35 countries. And it’s always fascinating to me in America. The first thing people ask you is what do you do for a living? And in other countries, it never comes up. And I think as an American, if you aren’t. Looking outside of work. It’s very hard to build a powerful brand because in order to differentiate yourself, especially as an attorney, everyone, it’s so competitive, there’s so many good lawyers and everyone’s saying the same thing and doing the same thing. And it’s if you don’t have something that makes you different, you can’t build a brand. You just can’t.

Chris Dreyer

I think that’s such a great piece of advice. you have to have something compelling to use you versus someone else. Not only have you done the medical pursued this license on your own when you’re in the bed you have these different experiences as a teacher and, the, the director of operations for the firm, you decided it wasn’t enough. You’re like, Hey, let me do social media too. And so you have a unique approach to social media. So let’s talk about Law Prophet. What makes Law Prophet unique?

Nicole Barnett

So Law Prophet, actually, I also launched from my bed when I had long COVID. but Law Prophet is essentially a done for you. Content creation, membership for lawyers in private practice.And I actually, hadn’t been posting on our firm’s social media page for many years. We didn’t need to, we did a lot of direct response marketing. We’ve never paid for advertising ever in nine years. And then when I was in bed and COVID, and everyone was on social media. And I started looking around at what everyone was doing. And I was like, I’m gonna start posting. And I started posting and we started getting more referrals instantly from people who already have known us. And you would assume they know you and remember you, but they don’t. And so I was like, okay, this is easy. It’s like social media is our Rolodex. It has all of our. Friends, family, other attorneys, people it’s like essentially calling them every day and being like, Hey, remember what I do send me that kind of case. It’s that simple. So I started doing it and then I was sick. So I tried to hire people to help me. And I would hire social media management company or like a marketing company. And. Horrendous because if you don’t understand the legal space, if you haven’t built a law firm, ran a law firm, sat through trials, sat in depositions, sat in intake meetings with clients who have been injured. It’s very hard to create content for a lawyer. So I was like, okay, I’m just gonna do this myself. Started doing it. Attorneys started calling us. Who’s doing your social media, Nicole. Its oh Nicole, can you help me? No, I can’t help you. I have no time. So I just said. I will. I remember this one attorney was like, I need a Nicole Barnett. Like he told my husband you’re so lucky I need a Nicole. And I was like I’ll just make myself available to you in a membership form where I’m essentially delivering this content to you monthly. I think the most valuable part of my membership is that I’ve created a training portal for an attorney’s assistant. Everything I do is a system, so it should take one or two hours a week And the exact point is that maybe someone knows marketing, but they don’t know the legal space or maybe they know the legal. But they don’t know marketing, or maybe they don’t know either one of those things. So it’s giving them the actual content, the product the graphic design, the prewritten captions, all of that. But then there’s a training module where I’m literally teaching someone exactly how to do it. So it’s teaching them marketing, which obviously if you’re a lawyer and you have someone doing. That goes far beyond social media, because there’s, they’re applying these things on your website. They’re applying them in your email campaigns. It really is something that could become a full-time position once that person’s trained as you’re making more money. So I just created it out of necessity, but also out of my passions and it solves a problem in the legal space. I tried so hard to get people to help me. Not because I can’t do it myself. I just. Didn’t have time and I was sick, but it’s crazy how hard it is for lawyers, which is why you see them trying to do it themselves. And it just doesn’t work and they shouldn’t be spending their time doing it either.

Chris Dreyer

And there’s a couple things that, that you said that I think really need to highlight here is the first, the difference between like lead generation and direct response versus demand generation and creating demand. That’s the key thing for social that I see is it’s an awareness, right? You have these connections, you had these members and it’s, you’re bringing awareness back to yourself. And I think that’s. Challenge is it’s so hard to when you’re looking at like attribution, it’s really murky on the social side.

Nicole Barnett

Yep. And that’s why if you’re just looking oh, on my Google analytics, I didn’t get a goal conversion from Instagram. That’s flawed rather. That is very flawed. Yes. there are attorneys that are spending millions of dollars a year on social media and that’s fine, but it’s I think it goes back to knowing yourself and it’s what kind of firm you wanna create. And do you wanna be an influencer who does the high volume and then refers that out for a fee? our model is literally the polar opposite of that. It’s like we want more high quality, less volume. if you’re now in a wheelchair, because you were in an accident and you have been paralyzed, you’re probably gonna go to people you already know and be like, do you know any attorneys? It’s a very serious situation and you need to know. Have a personal connection to someone you’re being referred to. It’s such a huge life decision. And so I think all of our really good cases are always referred to us either by past clients, current clients, other attorneys, that’s how it works for us. And I think there’s a lot of noise in the legal space of what lawyers should be doing. And it drives me crazy because I feel like lawyers already have way too much on their plates and to be telling them to do these things that are impossible. It makes me mad because it’s not real and it’s not true and it’s not gonna work.

Chris Dreyer

It’s funny. I just had this argument not argument. I say friendly conversation with my director of marketing because I get bombarded by the Grant Cardones the Gary Vader Chucks. That’s like telling you to post 30 times a day. So I’m like, Hey, Randy, my director of marketing, he’s listening. He’s gonna love this. I’m like, we need to post at least 20 times a day on Instagram, not one. And he is no, we’re not, let me explain why. And I think it’s so easy to be distracted by like Gary V and that, that’s his thing. That’s how he stood up and was different. And and the legal vertical’s so different than general interest and motivation and things like.

Nicole Barnett

You can’t compare that to other brands that are not lawyers. And even within the PI niche, you also have a lot of different ways to run a firm and a lot of different business models. And I actually created a product it’s called Build Your Legal Brand and it’s a bundle, but I have this hundred page workbook for lawyers to go through. And it’s it’s like these exercises that are going to make you think and really think about what do you wanna be doing with your life? Building a successful law firm is great, but what is the motivation behind it and why, and what do you want your life to look like? And it’s fine. And you know what some of these legal influencer. They’re really funny. And some of them, I think really enjoy creating content and that’s wonderful for them. But if you’re like one of these more old school attorneys, like my husband, he’s a trial guy. And there’s no way. First of all, he doesn’t wanna do it. and it’s not his personality when I see’s trying to be someone they’re not because someone told them to it’s so cringy. And if our clients saw my husband doing that, our demographic they’re generally more sophisticated. They generally lean a little older. They would be mortified. It’s that’s not what they wanna see my husband doing. There’s different approaches, like account based marketing and like peers and things like that in terms of the, upstream and the litigating, the big cases versus the downstream, like super volume ah, I got a little thunder better. I’m gonna totally, and I think somewhere is also. I’ve heard some lawyers say on podcasts, like I’m getting all of my cases through social media and it’s free. And it’s first of all, your time is not free. I know you’re spending hours, but also it’s again, there’s no right or wrong answer. The attorney who was saying that his business model is attorney referrals, not client referrals. He is a very B2B. And he’s funny and he’s charismatic and he’s great. Now that’s a rare person to find, right? So for him, that works. he’s also doing speaking engagements all the time. With Instagram it’s is it coming from social media or was it that in person event? I that’s why I view social media as that Rolodex, that kind of holds every, all of your contacts. And then it’s your job to just show up consistently reminding those people, the types of cases to send you now, if you’re entertaining other attorneys, absolutely content creation, funny things. Just pure entertainment is wonderful for us. Again, like we actually have clients on our page who, by the way, texted my husband a few days ago after we posted a real, but it was a real about him talking about changing law and she texted my husband and said, I’m so proud to have you as my lawyer’s like someone like that. That’s the kind of stuff they wanna see. And so you just have to do that work again, just going back to who you are, what you care about and the business you wanna build. And like some of these pre lit volume firms are crushing it. They have a whole different business model.

Chris Dreyer

And it’s something that’s not talked about. Cuz we talk about these extremes of oh this is working for me or, oh, this is working for my firm, but we don’t talk about the type of law firm. What’s just some general advice on, those that don’t have a lot of time that can at least do something to kinda start their Instagram presence, so to speak?

Nicole Barnett

I think they have to get someone to help them and it doesn’t need to be a hire. Like they don’t need to hire a full time person. And I’ve heard a lot of marketing people be like, oh, you’re secretary cannot do this for you. You need to get a marketing person. No, that’s not true. If they have a system and someone’s training them. literally, if someone can read and follow directions, they can help them with my system. If your secretary has time, if you have an intern, whatever a teenager, if you’ve got a kid who’s old enough, it’s just get someone to help you. Because as an attorney, you should not be messing around with that stuff. but essentially in the Marketing Assistant Module, I created a way for that assistant to interact with the attorney where the attorney can literally spend 15 minutes or less. So let’s say you have 20 feed posts that I’ve given to you for the month. That’s one component of the membership I’m training that person. Well, on 18 of these. You don’t need to bother the lawyer. This is where, how you do it. This is where you grab the content from. This is how you post these 18 posts. These two they need the attorney’s input because you do want their unique voice and they have their own expertise that needs to be explained. So I essentially took a PowerPoint, create a loom video, explaining that one template, dropped it in with a little prompt. So there’s a PowerPoint with maybe two or three slides, assistant emails that to the attorney. Attorney watches. My video takes two minutes to type something out or even record themselves and give it back to their assistant. And it’s just using these types of systems to get it done. I have our social media for our law firm planned out through January 1st. Right now I do it twice a year because we travel. We spend six months of the year. We’re going, we’re building a house in Europe right now and we’re getting our citizenship and we’re all over the place. And it’s. I’m not this person. Who’s yay. Social media is my favorite thing. Like I actually, maybe don’t like it that much, which is why I created this thing. So that it’s necessary. You have to do it, but you can do it in a way. My husband doesn’t even know how to log into his Instagram account. He’s hopeless. So I know that it can be done and it doesn’t need to be this looming huge thing. It’s not effective. It’s not necessary for lawyers. It’s just not.
Yeah, and this is gonna be fun because we’re gonna have Case on, and we’re gonna talk about trials. We’re gonna talk about this dynamic and I’m also glad that you explained that process because when I hear, courses or training, I’m thinking, oh man, This is gonna take me a year to get through, and you’re like, Hey, and there’s an art form to make it into a simplified process and a loom video of that sounds way more compelling to me than having to take this course. It’s gonna take a year of my life to get through.So in the membership, you get feed posts, which are the things on the grid, the kind of static posts, stories, templates reals prompt. A practice area article. So I have five different practice areas. Of course, one of them is personal injury and it’s a lead magnet. So I also provide a lead magnet every month. Pre-written caption stars, hashtags. Literally everything’s done. And the assistant essentially needs to just go to the lawyer’s website, go to if they have YouTube videos, I teach them how to pull the content. so when I say training, I think hundred tasks that this person can do for a lawyer. And then I took each task and I said, this is how you do it. So it’s not training of that’s why I made the company because I had, I belong to mastermind groups for attorney marketing, and it’s a lot of talking. And I’m like, no, one’s helping anyone execute it. Lawyers are getting all these things, all these ideas, but you have to sit down and do it. There’s built in marketing strategy. They will learn marketing by listening to me speak about why things are important. But my thing is get it done. Just get it done.

Chris Dreyer

Action. The execution, the consistency, and yes, there’s so much to that. do you train on engagement and how to like, comment and answer questions and build. The engagement side. And then also, do you have a thought process around like putting ads behind it or are you just purely organic? What’s your thoughts on those two components?

Nicole Barnett

That’s a good question because I’ve been thinking of dabbling in some. Ads for a law firm, really just for like experimental purposes. So I can talk to lawyers about it. We’ve never done it, I have a feeling and I suspect that it would not bring us the types of cases that we want, but maybe if you want more of a high volume it’ll work. So I’m gonna, I’m going to experiment. I think in the next few weeks engagement, I always say. Lawyers law firm pages, not super exciting, just not, nobody cares, maybe other lawyers care, but it’s not oh yeah, this is really I wanna comment and like it and share it. And that’s fine. And I think that’s where lawyers need to adjust the expectation of like how many likes and how many followers who cares. Who cares if you’re getting referred cases. And this is a long term play. I have a perfect example. We were on a camping trip and we get a phone call from this old school criminal defense attorney. Like he’s been practicing for decades and he had a case to refer us and he is I’d ask you how you’re doing, but I know you’re crushing it because I see you all over social media. I didn’t know, he followed our page. He’s never commented. He’s never liked. I didn’t even know he was on social media and he remembered us because of social media. And that’s where you say it’s very hard,to pull back to knowing something comes from Instagram, which is why it’s a long termplay. People don’t always need a lawyer and the type of content I think, responding to comments and DMS look unless you’re viral and you’re, you have millions of followers. You’re not gonna be getting a ton of engagement and that’s okay, but this person who’s doing your posting for you. They can they’ll have access to your account. And all they have to do is write thanks or, send a link. It’s very easy.

Chris Dreyer

No, one’s gonna be getting thousands of people unless you’re going the influencer route. And then you need to hire someone. Full time to be doing those things. I’m on social quite a bit, in my spare time. And I don’t comment a lot, I don’t hit the like either, but I’m there. And it’s like,

Nicole Barnett

You, that’s 99% of people and that’s so important. I never comment. I never like stuff. and it’s not nice, right? Like I should be these people when I appreciate their content, I should be letting them know this is great, but I think most of us don’t, we’re busy. We’re scrolling. And that’s, that’s the other reason why my membership was created. It’s like this kind of quick content has a short shelf light, right? When you see people spending thousands of dollars on video and all these things, it’s people are giving you a half a second of their time. You need to just consistently be producing in a way that’s sustainable and scalable, and that you can maintain over the course of time because you, if you just go all in on all this expensive video and all this time, you’re not gonna do it. People give you this much, but it’s enough. It’s like I said, it’s you’re calling them every day being like, Hey, remember me? Remember me? Remember me? I’m still here. Oh. And then maybe after two years, they’re like, oh, their neighbor gets in an accident. But I think for PI lawyers, it’s also important for them to be specifically talking about their are sub practice areas, right? We all assume, oh my, my neighbor knows I’m a PI person. What does that mean? What specific types of personal premises liability? What does that mean? People don’t know what that means. Give them examples. And so my membership forces the content to hit on these things. You’re gonna inspire. You’re gonna educate, you’re gonna position yourself as the expert social proof and we cycle through those big content buckets to make sure. You’re constantly showing those things, but it’s just like that for a long time until someone needs you. And it’s that simple.

Chris Dreyer

I love the radical candor. And I think that’s so important to hit those other practice areas. Cause you’re right. there’s many sub areas that the lay person, the common individuals, not in legal vertical, aren’t gonna be aware about, nicole, this has been awesome. So What’s next for Nicole Barnett and where can people get in touch with you?

Nicole Barnett

Well, of course you can find me on social media at Law Prophet. I think that’s the easiest way, but I have lawprophet.com also has some information on our products and what’s next? we’re actually building out a portal for our own law firm with our processes is I call it the hit list. And we use it for our own firm. Everything is systematized. Everything has a process and we have the idea to film it and essentially make it available for other PI lawyers. I’m always adding to the course, the membership always just. Building growing and again, trusting life and trusting, pursuing those things that have been placed inside of me by whatever being you wanna call it. And, We could talk again in a few months and see what has happened.

Chris Dreyer

When trying to hit that 8-figure mark – some things will just take time. But growing with your values helps make sure you get there the right way. Even when it comes to social media – consider the kind of firm you want to become. The strategy should reflect those goals. No matter what, your content should inspire, educate, position you as the expert, and provide social proof. I’d like to thank Nicole Barnett from Case Barnett Law for sharing her story with us, and I hope you gained some valuable insights from the conversation. You’ve been listening to Personal Injury Mastermind. I’m Chris Dreyer. If you liked this episode, leave us a review. We love to hear from our listeners. I’ll catch you on next week’s PIMM with another incredible guest and all the strategies you need to master personal injury marketing.