In this Trial Lawyer Nation podcast, Michael Cowen sits down with author of The Game Changing Attorney – How to Land the BEST CASES, STAND OUT from Your Competition, and Become the OBVIOUS CHOICE IN YOUR MARKET, and legal marketing expert, Michael Mogill, for a discussion on how he’s helping law firms drive meaningful results. Mogill and his team at CRISP Video produce videos for attorneys across the country in order to help them differentiate themselves and stand out from their competition. Which, in short, means they do everything from filming videos and editing to running ads and driving leads for their attorney-only clientele. Essentially, everything from start to finish in the legal video marketing space.
Mogill’s beginnings started when his family immigrated from Europe when he was 4 years old. They didn’t speak English and basically came with just $500 in savings. And while he’s always been entrepreneurial, having started a web company at age 13 writing HTML out of his house, he actually studied to be a doctor, took the MCAT to get into med school, but wasn’t sure if that was the path for him despite the pressures of his Jewish family. So, he took a year off and got a job first washing dishes at a dive bar and then washing lab equipment at the CDC. In the meantime, he bought a camera that he figured would just be a hobby and perhaps a good life skill to have. Then, in 2008, he started a video company, called CRISP, again with outside pressures of people telling him it wouldn’t work and if it did, he’d never be able to compete with the big agencies. This was also a time when YouTube was just starting to take off and videos were nowhere close to as accessible as they are today. Mogill explains that it wasn’t the simplest sell back then, nor was it easy (recounting 21 failures before the company really got off the ground); citing that his big breakthrough finally came to him through the hostess at a Texas Roadhouse at a time when he didn’t even have enough money for next month’s rent. The story he tells of his rise from rock bottom is one you simply have to hear to believe. Spoiler alert: He’s made it pretty big in the video production space having worked with companies like Coca-Cola and Red Bull. His shift to work 100% with attorneys and law firms wasn’t necessarily expected or even planned at the outset, and also came from unlikely beginnings paired with the drive to succeed.
Digging right in, Cowen asks Mogill the big question, as in millions of dollars big, of how can solo and small firms compete with their marketing (video or otherwise) and not get lost in the noise of the big firms that have $5M+ marketing budgets? And while Mogill boils it down to simply differentiating yourself, his insights on the content being produced in order to create an emotional connection with potential clients, versus joining the “we’ll fight for you” crowd, are thoughtful and CRISP (pardon the pun). Mogill uses Ben Glass’s video as a great example where his video talks more about the children that he has adopted in order to create a connection, with the viewer with little information about his firm. Which may seem to counterproductive when trying to promote a law firm, but to Mogill’s point, it’s much more effective to draw people in, using emotions and feelings they can relate to instead of a laundry list of the services your firm can provide. That “why” behind an attorney’s journey into wanting to practice laws also helps to create a sense of authenticity as well as to humanize each firm.
Mogill talks about the state of legal marketing along with the saturation of many firms focusing on the aspect, that it is all about the money and boasting about the size of cases won. He notes how today’s society wants to work with companies who go beyond the money and care about individuals,