¶ Defining and Attracting Avatar Clients
Hello , my friends , and welcome to a Friday Not-So-Solo episode of Life Beyond the Briefs . My name is Brian Glass . I'm a personal injury lawyer in Fairfax , virginia , and I help lawyers build practices that break out of mediocrity and allow them to live lives of their own design .
And today's episode is a conversation with my dad about how we describe and define for ourselves in our law firm what the avatar client is . And knowing who your avatar client is allows you to hone in your marketing , hone in your intake and sales and get better and better and better at building the kind of practice that serves clients that you like .
That's right . Even if you have the type of practice like I do , which to the outside world looks like you will take anybody who was in a bad crash last Tuesday , you could still design the practice that attracts the type of clients that you want . For me , that's people that have health insurance . It's people that have high earning jobs .
It's people that have good auto insurance coverage .
Right , because you can have a great crash from a large dollar figure perspective , but if you don't insurance coverage , right , because you can have a great crash from a large dollar figure perspective , but if you don't have coverage and they don't have the ability to get care , well then that's a problem , and so defining for your practice , who the ideal client you
want walking through the door is critically important so that you're attracting the kinds of clients that you want to serve . It seems really , really basic , but most lawyers have put no work into this whatsoever .
One last thing before we dive into today's episode is you may have already noticed , if you're a regular listener , that we have begun to release new episodes , again in 2025 , of the interview podcast , which come out on Tuesday . So this Tuesday , last Tuesday , the episode with Preston Schmidly , who's been doing my social media videos , came out .
Preston and I talk about how to build trust through the use of video in your law firm in 2025 . And then I've got a series of lawyers coming up in all kinds of different practice areas . So , no matter what your practice area is , there's somebody that you can learn from Rick Martin , who's an IP lawyer in Indiana .
Ruby Powers , an immigration lawyer , who actually moved to Dubai immediately after starting her immigration law firm in Texas . That's a wild story . Jason Epstein , who's an injury lawyer out in Seattle .
Greg DuPont , who's a wealth planning Greg has an estate planning practice and also a financial advisory practice , zach Ashby , who's a family lawyer in the Pacific Northwest .
And then I got a special episode with my buddy , adam Rawson , who comes on for a second time first second time guest on the show and Adam comes back to coach me through some of the growing pains that we're having in our law firm because he's already been there and done that .
So there's something in these upcoming episodes for everybody , and the best way to make sure that you don't miss any of these episodes is to hit the subscribe button . That'll make sure these get pushed out to your iPhone or however .
It is that you listen to podcasts and you are alerted every Tuesday when an interview podcast comes out and every Friday when one of these solo episode comes out . All right , thank you for listening and on with the show .
Today we're talking about avatar clients , so you can tell people that have been around us and people that speak like us , because when you say avatar clients , some of them seem to understand what you're saying and some of them think you're talking about a movie . So let's start there . What is an avatar ?
client . I like to describe it as who would excite you to see them walking through your door right or getting on a Zoom call for an initial conference . It's looking back . For most of us , it's looking back at what kind of clients have we liked working with , have we made money with ?
Has the team liked working with and just going out and getting more of them ?
And it's more narrow than who is your best or who is your most valuable client . So for a long time I used to say that my avatar client is a professional parent of children who got run over by a drunk FedEx driver right , and that's a type of case , but it's not really an avatar client .
So give us more about what that is that we're trying to get people to develop , so that their marketing can speak to the person and not the circumstances that they find themselves in .
Yeah . So first , it's really important to do this and the instinct when we're young lawyers or we're building practices like everybody's my client , everybody that has for us a personal injury case is my client .
So I really do think and I want you to know that this is possible is that , looking back , go back and look at the last 12 to 24 months if you've been in practice that long and most of our members have and go down your client list and say to yourself who did I really like working for ? And talk to your team and then ask yourself , like why is that ?
What was it about that client or even the particular case situation that brought energy to me . Again , what we want , the reason that we're doing this , is because you know , as Brian and I know , like marketing is so broad and there's so many different things that you could do with your marketing .
The more that I'm talking to you and you are my ideal client the more I talk to you in my marketing , the more of you I am going to get with my marketing and the more of the client we don't want is going to be repelled by what we write the client we don't want is going to be repelled by what we write .
Well , and of course , the flip side of that is you can go down your client list from the last 12 to 24 months and circle your five to 10 worst clients and then start itemizing what it was about those clients that you disliked , that made your skin crawl when they called or that made your staff dread their emails , and then just apply a negative analysis to
that right , come up with all the characteristics that they had that you didn't like , and then just apply a negative analysis to that right .
Come up with all the characteristics that they had that you didn't like and then just put not in front of that or whatever the reverse of that , and that's another way that you can back into who are the best fits for my law firm .
You know , and real quickly , because we talked about this in other videos and other materials . But you know , niching down your practice at the end of the day is the way to riches . And I know I hear you when you say but my town is small . You know I have to do a broad range .
We have just seen in 20 years of running GLM that this simply is not true . Like the lawyers , no matter how big the town is , no matter what the practice area , is the lawyer that understands what niche he wants , what types of case you want , and then who is the best client for him . He or she is going to be happier and is going to be more successful .
All right , so let's just talk for a few minutes about how if we can identify this , by the way , we'll talk at the end . But we've got some worksheets and I think it serves you well to spend some time for me , yellow pad and paper writing the answers to some of these questions down about who you want to see walking through the door .
But now let's say we do it . Let's say we have this exercise , we've got our avatar client developed . How do we now translate that into marketing ? And one of the places , and one of the things I think we like to start with is what are they asking ? What is the problem they're trying to solve ?
What is the conversation in their own head when they have something legal happen to them and now they get the idea that it's legal ? They may try to self-solve , they may be looking for a lawyer , but what's the conversation running through their head ?
And it usually has not solved my legal problem right . So for me , in a personal injury practice , the problem that most people are trying to solve is usually not settle my case right . It's usually how do I get more medical care if I don't have health insurance ? How do I get the adjuster to stop calling me ?
How do I properly evaluate my case , which is a component of how do I settle it , but it's often not . How do I go to trial and get the most amount of money ? Or it's not only how do I go to trial or settle my case and get the most amount of money .
And so an exercise that you might consider doing once you've got your list of your five to ten greatest clients is just going to those folks and asking them what problem did you we have ? What problem did you have when you came to us ? What did we help you solve ?
What were you afraid was going to happen if we didn't solve it , and what was your dream result when you came to us ? And I think that you'll find that there is a trend among those great clients of yours where they're identifying things that we as lawyers are not even thinking about .
And now that lets you tailor your marketing and your message to talk to the fears and the dreams of your clients , and not only to the results and to the tactical things that you're doing in your law firm .
Ultimately , you'll incorporate all of that into the scripts that your intake and sales team are using to get clients .
You know , brian , in a long-term disability space , a lot of our clients come to us because their claim has been denied and they're really pissed because when an insurance company denies your claim , they're saying you and your doctors are stupid , they don't know what they're talking about , and so they come with that emotional , visceral feeling that my story hasn't been
told . And so , for example , if you look at a lot of the Bengals Law of Marketing , it is about and our brand is about helping the sick and the injured tell their stories to skeptical insurance companies . So that's how we've turned the highest frustration of some of these people into a marketing message .
The other thing to do is and you're really good at this is like all right , where are these people looking for somebody like us ? So let's talk about both , I think the human , the referral side , and then the big thing is the digital marketing side .
Yeah . So one of the things that we learned last year is we got really good at figuring out where our cases had come from .
Is not only do 60% to 65% of our cases come from human being referrals right , first heard our name from another lawyer or a neighbor or a doctor or maybe somebody at their church but 80% of our money , 80% of the dollars in revenue that came into the law firm came from referrals from other human beings .
And so you have to be thinking about well , seo is important and digital PPC and social media is important , because your referral sources are going to check you out there .
You have to be thinking first about who else has my pool of clients , and so why don't you talk about what we've done in the long-term disability space to figure out who else is talking to high earners who have these progressive diseases ?
¶ Refining Avatar Client Profiles
Well , sure . So for most of our clients , they'll have this so long-term disability . They're sick or injured , they can't do their job . Well , many of them will have a Social Security claim . Many of them will have been injured in their workplace a workers' compensation claim .
So those are two places we've made a very deliberate effort to go to , that is , to Social Security and workers' compensation lawyers and say , hey , we think you might have some of our clients . We can help you maximize the benefits that you're getting for them and also maximize the benefits that we're getting for them because you have them .
The other place that we have gone and had great success with is going to in the world of high wage earners .
There's a lot of gurus who teach financial planning for doctors , and so we've gotten in front of one or two of those financial gurus and saying , hey , you're high wage earning doctors that you're teaching how to buy disability , how to buy life insurance , how to buy a practice .
Right , they need someone that can help them , advise them if they have a disability claim , and so we've gotten into that space .
So it's carefully looking around at all of the other sort of providers in your potential client's life who you could be talking to and at the end of the day we're always trying to figure out with those providers how do we add value to them first ? It's not just like hey refer stuff to me , how do we add value to them first ?
Let me give you , outside of our two practice areas , an example that I think might be really helpful to people . So if I were running an estate planning or a tax planning practice , one of the things I would be doing is collecting all the documents in my client's life and I'd be mining those documents for other local referral sources .
So I might get your tax return and figure out who your CPA is Do you even have a CPA ? I might get the deed to your house and figure out who'd done the title and who your realtor was , and I might get your life insurance documents and your disability insurance documents and figure out who your broker is .
And now this lets me go to those people and say I'm representing one of your clients . Here's the problem that we're helping them solve . I'm just wondering whether you have anybody else who I could solve that problem for . But here's the next level of that .
The next time somebody comes through your office and is missing , one of those people doesn't have a CPA , doesn't have a broker . Now we're going to that person and saying I have a client who has a problem that you can solve , and so I don't know what it is in your particular area and you probably can figure that out .
But what documents can you collect that will bring the network to you in a way that now you can go out and bring people back to referral sources , because there's the law of reciprocity which says that if I bring you one client now , next time you have somebody who's in need of a lawyer , you're going to be thinking of me .
Now let's loop this back to the subject of the call , this video which is now defining your avatar client and think about this so the better that your referral sources know you and who you are looking for and know the story and the problems you're trying to solve , the better they're going to be able to be to A be on the lookout for someone they could refer
to , but also the better they're going to be able to be to tell that referral source hey , ben is a guy you really have to talk to . Brian knows all the answers to this type of situation that you have , because we expect all of our referral sources to know our story , to understand our practice areas in the law . They don't .
The simpler , more memorable that we can make that for our referral sources , the more likely it is they're going to be able to tell our story in a way that what do we want to have happen ? We just want to have that potential client pick up the phone and give us a call or at least go on our website and check us out .
And the way to do that is by storytelling , right ? So nobody remembers what it is that you do . If you're an estate planner or a family lawyer or a criminal defense lawyer , you know you could tell your friends over and over and over again what your niche is , but they forget about it .
But if you come home with a story about something that happened in traffic court , that day , or a story about the divorce mediation that you're handling now , those people you've fixed in their mind what it is you do because you've told them a story about somebody else's progress through the legal system .
And it works just the same way with these other centers of influence . And so , as best we can , we're going to be anonymizing , maybe changing the names , the genders , some of the professions of our clients and telling those stories to our referral sources .
Now the next thing when you have an avatar or an ideal client profile , it's really going to help in your communications with that client once they become a client .
So when you are so , for example , for our practice , we want people who will respect us , who will take our advice , who you know , won't be fighting us on every settlement recommendation , and so when and that's part of our profile and that's part of the profile that our team is looking for to make sure we don't let people in the door who probably aren't going
to accept our not to accept , but they have to listen to our recommendations . So , being very clear on that again , this is how we can be able to tell that client that's coming in the door . This is how it works around here and this is our processes and our systems .
All right , so let's just talk about for a few minutes how often even we have gone back to look at our sort of marketing profile , our marketing ideas , and redefined or refined our avatar client profile . Let's talk about how we do that .
Yeah . So we go back through about once a quarter through the EOS system and with our implementer who comes in and we go through our VTO Vision Traction Organizer and look at our demographics , psychographics and geographics of our clients . So obviously , for the auto accident space , it's somebody who is in a crash in Virginia , right .
But more importantly than that , like my avatar client is somebody who's got a good auto insurance policy , somebody who has health insurance , because those cases are easy to get them access to care easier to often settle the case at the end because most of the money has most of the medical bills have already been paid .
But also we're looking , you know , from a psychographic standpoint , at people who are going to be easy to work with .
So how do you identify that ?
So one of the ways that we make sure that the clients that Brian and I are working with are easy to deal with is we have really high filters and we empower our team to really do great screening and to bring to our attention hey Ben , you might just want to think twice about signing this client because they've been disrespectful to the team .
So this really kind of leans into team culture and firm culture and internal branding , but it's been really important for us to take a really strong stand in favor of our team members when anyone rears their head and self-identifies himself as kind of a bad person to hang out with .
Well , and this is all . It's team culture , right . So it's number one , having training in the team that they can stand up and they can tell you these things when the client is a problem . But even earlier in the client journey than that , empowering your receptionist or your intake person to tell you , to put into the notes , this person was pushy .
This person didn't want to tell me any of the story and only wants to speak to the lawyer . Now , there may be good reasons for that . In your practice area .
In my practice area , there's almost no good reason to not tell my team when and where the crash happened , because you need to deliver that only to a lawyer and those little touch points that we often don't spend enough time with our staff telling them . It's okay .
And I want you to put these things in so that I have context when I go into the first phone call or the first email exchange with this client for the way that they treated the staff from the get-go .
So now here's the marketing exercise , and up at the membership site is going to be some worksheets . If you haven't done this exercise before , do it you as the lawyer , but then also do it with your team and then , once you've crafted again who would I like to see walking through the door ? Go back and look at the marketing materials you have now .
For example , we just did this exercise in the firm is going back and looking at the website and marketing , really removing all of the pieces that seemed interesting to us at the time but weren't really designed to attract our avatar client .
You've got a funny story about the spanking blog , like years ago when we had a criminal defense lawyer here , yeah , so I mean , the long and short of that story is don't write articles where you don't want to attract the client .
So for a while , one of the big drivers of traffic to our website , at least from Southwest Virginia , was this article about how hard can I spank my child before it's child abuse . And this is at a time where Google would show you the long-tail keyword that people had used to get to that part of your site . So that was really interesting .
But to your point about those types of articles , we had lots and lots of articles for why slip and fall cases are hard . What is contributory negligence ? What does it mean if my case was dismissed ? They were all smart they were all legally correct and they were all smart articles , but they were attracting people to whom we would have said no .
Right In Virginia , with contributory negligence , we don't take slip and fall cases . If you're looking at why my case was dismissed , it's too late for me to help you .
And so , while that traffic was helpful for our Google juice , or however you want to term that it was not driving phone calls and it was wasting our staff's time because the people who were on the phone were people who had problems that we couldn't or didn't want to try to solve .
And here's what we've learned from our advisors who teach us about digital marketing and Google and YouTube and Facebook , and all that is that what those companies are trying to do , like it or not , is to try to really figure out what business you're actually in .
And so the more you feed , for example , your website with information that really can confuse Google if that's such a thing then the harder it's going to be to use website as a way to get avatar client .
Take the other side of that coin the more your content , your internet content whether it's again , whether it's videos on YouTube or your social media or whatever the more it's really refined and defined down to I'm talking to you because you're a good client , someone I would like to represent and would make money with then the more YouTube and Google are going to
send that type of client to your website . Again , I don't know how that all works and it sounds kind of magic to me , but I believe that it's true because we've heard over and over again in our mastermind groups and from different advisors from different firms that this is true .
Let's talk about where those clients are hanging out , for people that are creating content either on social media or on YouTube .
So , like if I had an estate planning firm , I probably wouldn't be on TikTok , unless I was talking to this generation of like 35 to 45 year olds who are kind of still on TikTok about problems that their parents have to try to drive them there .
If I had a business organization firm , I definitely would be creating content on LinkedIn and so just be thinking about is there a match between my message and where I'm putting my message ?
And don't forget about print . I mean , we're big on print newsletters . We make sure that our clients , past clients and our friends get our print newsletter .
You , as a member , get the journal , which is a big , important piece of great legal marketing , in part because I know that you , the busy lawyer , are not spending all of your day just scrolling websites and watching YouTube videos . You need something that you can hold , touch , feel , mark up and it's all a part of the plan .
And again , when Brian and I and the team write articles , we're writing for you , whoever I just pointed to in that camera .
We are trying to write that article as though we were speaking to you , because we have a very clear definition of who the avatar member is for great legal marketing and we stop ourselves when we find ourselves trying to write for something that really is outside of the parameters of the folks that we're trying to get to join the tribe , to be a part with you
and it is okay and good to put up walls around your practice and say here's who I am not for .
In fact , the more that you do that and the more that you can incorporate that both into your marketing process and into your sales process , it can be scary at first to say I'm not the estate planner for people who have less than a million dollars or less than five million dollars .
Right , because it may cut down on the number of calls that you're getting , but your hourly rate will go up .
Right , and in the long run , the more that you are for a certain class of clients , the less you're going to be for another one , and so the person who's shopping , the person with $5 million and above , is looking for a different kind of experience than the person with less than $1 million in their estate .
And the mistake that many lawyers make is because they're fearful that they're ever going to get another client , which is like almost impossible is to broaden that ideal client definition .
And the bigger mistake is to go outside of that ideal client definition because it looks like there's money on the table , and over and over again we've seen that that's the one thing that causes the most stress , the most problems with clients , the most problems with the bar , the most problems with malpractice cases is when lawyers step outside their alleyway , really
step outside their box
¶ Mastering Avatar Client Attraction
. So what we want you to do is be confident Again . Get on these calls , because we're happy to help walk individual lawyers and law firms through this process .
We want to give you the courage to really define for yourself who is and who is not , who I want to see walking through the door , and I tell you that over time this is going to be the largest driver of ROI for your practice , of anything else . You do Like being really clear about this .
Hey guys , just really quick before we go . If you're not already a member of the Great Legal Marketing Tribe , what are you waiting for ?
I want to let you know that inside our membership website we have many more modules just like this and worksheets on this module in particular , so that you can define your avatar client , because once you've done that , it will help you dial in your marketing , help you attract more clients , it'll help you dial in your intake and sales and convert more clients and
I promise you you will make more money in your law firm . So the best way to become a member of the Great Legal Marketing Tribe is to go to theglmtribecom , read all about it or send me an email at brian at greatlegalmarketingcom . Let's have a conversation about whether this would be a great fit for your practice .