Speaker 1: (00:04)
Great, thank you ladies. Great job. Up next is the… What is up? The arts and science of mass tort marketing and here’s Steve Nober approaching now. Steve almost needs no introduction. He’s been in this industry for over a decade. He sort of works with all firms almost, large and small, including ours. He does a great job of marketing, he’s got over 400 employees. I could go on and on. I can’t say enough good things about the guy.
Speaker 1: (00:37)
But basically, I’ll read part of his bio here. His expertise covers a full spectrum of legal marketing from offline, online, social media marketing to telemarketing, intake, contracting services, and medical record retrieval and review. As I said, employing over 400 people at CAMG, they’ve got a big booth set up in the exhibit hall. They basically can handle everybody’s needs from A to Z. So Steve, why don’t you take it away?
Steve Nober: (01:09)
Thank you. Thank you, appreciate it. Thanks [inaudible 00:01:11]. Can you guys hear me okay? Perfect. I sort of walk and talk, so I think this is more centered to the room. I’ll hang out over here, if that’s all right. So thank you guys, happy to be here. So happy MTNV is back and we’re all here to enjoy a couple days together. I’m going to start this with a quick video, just to set the tone of what I want to talk about.
Video: (01:28)
Using this equation, we have from left to right here, I’m projecting that you need to win at least 99 games in order make it to the postseason. We need to score at least 814 runs in order to win those games and allow no more than 645 [inaudible 00:01:55].
Video: (02:01)
What’s this?
Video: (02:01)
This is the code that I’ve written for our year to year projections. This is building in all the intelligence that we have to project players.
Video: (02:09)
Okay.
Video: (02:11)
It’s about getting things down to one number, using stats the way we read them, we’ll find value in players that nobody else can see. People are overlooked for a variety of biased reasons and perceived flaws. Age, appearance, personality. Bill James in mathematics cut straight through that. Billy, of the 20,000 notable players for us to consider, I believe that there’s a championship team of 25 people that we could afford because everyone else in baseball undervalues them. Like an island of misfit toys.
Video: (03:00)
Billy, this is Chad Bradford. He’s a relief pitcher. He is one of the most undervalued players in baseball. His defect is that he throws funny. Nobody in the big leagues cares about him because he looks funny. This guy could be not just the best pitcher in our bullpen, but one of the most effective relief pictures in all baseball. This guy should cost $3 million dollars a year, we can get him for $237,000.
Steve Nober: (03:20)
The movie is Moneyball. If you guys haven’t seen it, great movie, and I’m a big Dodger fan. If anybody caught the game last night, I thought this would be appropriate, given it’s baseball season for the Dodgers.
Steve Nober: (03:52)
So why show this clip? I’ll tell you, for those that know me, we talk about Moneyball, we talk about metrics and data. This is really relevant to what we’re going to talk about today in mass tort marketing, the whole idea of Moneyball is using data metrics to make decisions and sometimes decisions that no one else understands, right? To be competitive and find opportunities. And so the question often is, does that relate to marketing? And I would argue it does because it’s all about probability. And so probability is interesting because with jury selection and I’ve given this example years ago at MTMP, but if you go into jury selection before a trial, can you imagine waiving your rights to jury selection, telling the judge, we’re good.
Steve Nober: (04:36)
You guys, you pick who you want. Right? And how many in the room would do that and you guys say, there’s no way, right? You guys are all thinking, there’s not a chance, right? Well, why not? It doesn’t guarantee you the outcome, but it does improve your probability so much that you laugh at the thought of waiving that right. So it’s interesting, but I don’t know how much time you really spend thinking about the depth of that. It’s really, it’s about probability and it’s not a guarantee, but does raise it up. So it’s ridiculous to not do it. Well, I would argue advertising, it’s exactly the same thing. So there are things we can do to improve probability. So the results of the marketing are better in your local market, national, mass torts, single event, doesn’t matter. It’s all about sometimes data, metrics, and decisions.
Steve Nober: (05:18)
So I’m going to go through some of that today and give you some examples. And so we think it absolutely is relevant to advertising. Direct response marketing, if you’re familiar with that term, right, by definition just means measuring something in your response to make decisions, right? Having some kind of call to action, right? And all the mass tort ads you guys see, there’s definitely a call to action. It could be a TV ad, a phone number, it could be a website, fill out a form, but there’s a measurable metric that you can take. So that’s direct response marketing. And so my background is, I used to run a very large infomercial media buying agency in the US, the biggest one in the country that buys the time on TV for all those wacky marketers that you see, P90X, the workout program, Proactive, all those things.
Steve Nober: (06:05)
Anyways, so that’s the only way, those guys are dealing in pennies. They really need their marketing to work, down to the nickel or they shouldn’t rebuy it because they’ll run out of money. It won’t work. And so they would never buy marketing without measuring everything every day. And so it’s the fortune 500 companies. It’s the direct response marketers. They all do the same thing. We introduced that, I don’t know, 12 or 13 years ago to this industry, which is, just arguing, there’s no difference. We’re measuring metrics. We should be smart about it together. And that’s how we’re going to help drive your case costs down. And so I’ll give you just quick background, because you’re going to hear me speak for 45 minutes. In the eighties and nineties, I had a computer business, I sold it to a public company. I’m giving the very fast version.
Steve Nober: (06:46)
2000-2005, I ran and built a chat based call center with a technology that we sold to a company called Nuance, who since sold it to Microsoft. And then 2005-2020, I ran this large media buying agency, not 2005, 2005-2010, and then started CMG about 12 or 13 years ago. And so the marketing all came in after the year 2000. And just as a side note personally, I, not anymore, but I was a long distance runner for a long time, running marathons, and ultra marathons, and an iron man. And now I just do it helps me think and come up with ideas that we can bring to industry. I don’t know if you guys do things to give you time to really have your own moment, but that for me. Now I’m too injured. My wife says she’ll divorce me if I have one more surgery.
Steve Nober: (07:38)
And so I’m done with that. Our business is six divisions and a seventh one I’ll talk about in a little bit, but basically we’re a full service agency, right? We started in TV. And so a lot of folks know us as the TV marketers 12 or 13 years ago. And since we’ve added digital SEO, SCM. And so we’re probably one of the largest digital agencies as well. And for us, it’s interesting, because with mass torts, you’re talking about injuries and different target audiences. So not just one marketing method might work for all things. It won’t always just be digital. It might not always be TV, or radio, geo targeting, outdoor billboards. It depends on a whole bunch of variables. And so we built vertically, not just marketing and the creative, but then we realized we have to help law firms answer calls, right?
Steve Nober: (08:28)
Because they weren’t sometimes set up to answer mass tort calls that are coming in nationally and they’d put them on hold, they’d abandon the calls, they’d get to a voicemail. And then we’d have clients call us since say, we’re not going to, we don’t want to work with you anymore because the campaign was terrible. And we’d say, really we’d listen to some of the phone calls that were recorded and we’d realize we need to help introduce best practices. And so we did that with call center, we did it with contracting. So even if the calls get answered and qualified, the whole idea of getting the contracts out, and getting them back, and getting med record forms, that’s a whole piece of work that that often is different nationally than law firms are doing in your local markets. So we started a contract services group and now, even today, that’s secondary services, getting that long form questionnaire, it’s going to be important if you guys are out talking to vendor is about getting cases.
Steve Nober: (09:16)
You still have to get that long form questionnaire filled out and you have to get the med record forms. And so if you’re buying contracts, you’re going to get a fee agreement signed. You’re not going to have that secondary service. You got to think about if you’re staffed to do it. Or if that’s something you want to outsource. We have whole phone technology with phone numbers, thousands of numbers and routing. We bought a med records business years ago in Pensacola, Florida. And so we vertically integrated so we can help offer services and control best practices for each division. And so radio TV, like I said, we’re sort of agnostic, whatever works best. And that’s literally every week, whatever works best. With mass torts, it’s all over the board.
Steve Nober: (09:53)
And so our business is mass torts. It’s single event litigation. We’re very big with firms all over the country doing auto, medmal, nursing home, family law, you name it. A lot of times when disasters strike, we’re in those markets very quickly. For those of you, you might know there’s an oil spill in Southern California that just happened last week, we’re already out helping firms get injured victims, businesses that are going to get suffered from the lack of business from the oil spill for probably a long time. Fires in California. So whatever happens, something in the country, we’re usually called to go try and figure out the best way to reach that target audience very quickly. And so environmental litigations, we do, like I said, water contaminations, hurricanes, we have a very big asbestos business. So lung cancers and mesothelioma and exposure, we really have figured out that business over time. And sex abuse, which is an interesting litigation for those of you who have thought about that in your markets, because if you’re following, there are more and more states that are pulling back the statute of limitations, right?
Steve Nober: (10:56)
They’re just ridiculous in most states. I mean just ridiculous. And so thankfully Colorado’s the next one that’s going to do it at the beginning of the year. California’s already done it, right? New York did it. And I think they did their three years, it’s over. New Jersey is still open. So I think more and more states for the next decade, right, or two, are going to roll back their statutes and allow victims that are older, right, that are way past what the statutes are, they’re going to allow them to go back and do something. So it’s an interesting litigation for you to be looking at in your local market and even partner with firms that are really expert at it on a national basis.
Steve Nober: (11:30)
And so really it’s a full spectrum media, right? I think it’s important. It’s just whatever works best. So I want to talk to you about some innovations. We were busy during COVID and I’ll just talk about a few and how they relate to mass torts. So before I do, I always just mention ethics. We were on a panel this morning and half the panel was to talk about ethics. We have a very good client who’s a firm that many of you might know really well, super credible litigating firm, one of the top in the industry, just a great firm, and they got served a suit a couple weeks ago, a lawsuit claiming a dozen different violations of marketing, calling, making claims and misrepresentations on the digital ads, conversion call centers, making outbound calls that didn’t comply to the TCPA rules.
Steve Nober: (12:14)
It’s a whole bunch of violations and it lists like five or six call center and conversion centers. And my client sent me the filing and said, was this us? Because they use us for marketing, but I think they obviously, they also use other firms, as well. And so I’m in a panic and I’m looking at it, and I see all the names of all these conversion centers. I’m like, I have no idea who these guys are. I’ve never heard of any of them. So I emailed the client back. I said, it is not us, we self originate. What that means is we control the beginning of the messaging, the ad that ran the disclosures, all the ethics that are involved, all the way to, to signing the cases.
Steve Nober: (12:55)
Right? And so my point is, there are a lot of marketing companies. I think the ones here are probably not doing that. There’s really good companies here, but all the new marketing firms that are blasting plaintiff firms like crazy and offering prices that don’t make sense, they’re using aggregators and outsourcing to vendors that they have no idea how they’re getting cases for lower prices. And the law firms are going to end up being part of it, like my client was a couple weeks ago. And so I just think everyone should be careful with the marketing partners. You work with, make sure you understand the origination, the disclosures, just everything you can, that you’ve seen the agreement, you’ve seen the creative. It’s like buyer beware, right? So depending upon how you like to get cases, media buying, or buying cases or doing media buying services to get cases from your local market or national. There’s ups and downs to both that can be talked about.
Steve Nober: (13:51)
So check out your marketing, right? A little checklist, just really make sure, don’t just jump at a good price please, because you don’t want to end up like this guy. So I need the slide still. I don’t think the slide will ever be dated. So we created, I went about a year and a half ago, and got what I think are the three best ethics lawyers in the country to put a white paper together for us on the leading issues regarding law firms dealing with lead generators like us, and what to look for and what the issues could be, and even pointing out all sorts of state rules and examples of violations. It’s really, really a great white paper and we’ve updated it every quarter since we started it. So it’s this living document. You can go to our website, you can go to our booth and we have them, or request it.
Steve Nober: (14:40)
But I highly recommend, sign up for it on our website so you can get it every time we update it, every quarter. And then we also, on our website, created a database of the advertising rules of every state in the country. And we update it in real time, if your rules change at all. So we wanted it to be a good reference for just all the rules, you can easily find them from every state in the country. And so let me jump into assessing your local market. I don’t know if you’ve seen this, but I love doing this sometimes because it’s really interesting for your market. So we take, these are the top DMAs, right? So I didn’t use everybody, all the attendees, but basically they’re from everywhere in the country, right? So we took the top markets, top biggest cities in the country and we said, based on the population of that city divided by the legal spending, so we can track legal spending in every market, what’s the spend per person?
Steve Nober: (15:28)
So just very simple calculation, total dollar spent, divided by population, to get a spend per person. Because I think what that does is, that gives you a way to compare every market in the country and how your city compares to everything else on how crazy the legal marketing is, right? Digital, offline, TV, it’s all of it combined. And so you’ll see here, Savannah at $18 is the highest. I can tell you the average is $5 to $6 per person. That’s the average in the country. So 18 is, all the cities that made this list are probably places you go that you’re absolutely barraged with legal ads everywhere. It’s just good to know, right?
Steve Nober: (16:09)
It’s important to know if you’re in a market, or you’re in the other markets, which is here’s the underspending DMAs in the country, and you guys can get this later. I think they have it in the book and they’ll send out these presentations after the conference or we can just send this to you. So if you want, just send us a note and we’ll send you this. And so you’ll see it’s as low as 69 cents, right? So if you’re looking for different offices, do you want to relocate or open up in a new market? This is interesting to look at, how does this spend compare? And so I’ll move on, but it’s just so, again, the average is $5 to $6. These are just interesting numbers on the averages. We can go a lot more into the data, but I don’t have time today.
Steve Nober: (16:47)
And then I used Bart Morris, and he’s usually here, so if he’s in the room, sorry, Bart, but he’s usually here, but I’m just using him as an example. If you’re not looking at this in your local markets, you should, and we were happy to supply it for you. There’s no cost to it, which is just a competitive look at your market, right? Who’s spending what? And usually, with Morgan these days, right? And half your markets, there’s a dominant spender or someone else that’s spending five, or six, or eight times as much as anybody, right? If I ask you to raise hands, it’d probably be almost everyone here has that as their situation, right, in their markets. And so this is interesting because you can just look at who’s spending how much, you can look at what stations, right? So you want to know what are they on, what are they not on? You can look at, how does it break down by day part, how much money are they putting into daytime, evening, late night?
Steve Nober: (17:34)
And so it’s interesting. And you can even look at searches in your market, are they by phone? Are they on the computer? Are they, what else is there? Computers, tablets or mobile devices. Again, what key words? So if you’re looking to how to compete in your market, right, and reduce your costs, you’re going to go get mass tort cases or your single event cases. This is just, for me, I feel like it’s really good to look at and it’s easy to get, if you haven’t looked at it. So what does next year going to look like, right? It’s an interesting time of year to ask this question. What’s the balance of your local single event?
Steve Nober: (18:08)
What are you going to do with mass torts? I think it’s great, there’s a record amount of new firms that have not been to an MTMP that are here this year. It’s amazing. It just shows you the interest level, right? And mass torts is expanding quickly. So I would guess there’s more and more firms that are going to put more energy, resources, money into the left side of that, the mass tort side. And so it’s hard to figure out, it’s actually impossible, right? To figure out how to spend your money, to be perfect. And I say that not just in mass torts, but in your single event too, how much to put where, right? How often to change it. It’s an impossible, I think tasked perfect, because there’s too many options. And so I know everybody struggles with that, each month, you all have your formulas that you’re using that work for you, right?
Steve Nober: (18:54)
And so there’s a lot of channels, which one do you get the best ROI? Where’s there best branding for your firm? What’s the diminishing returns. So all these are variables, right, and then you’re trying to perfect it, and it’s almost impossible. And so I would just argue that if you introduce more tracking and analysis into your activity, all the way from what you’re spending, to the response, whether it’s digital or telephones, to what qualified, to what you signed, to back to originating, where did it come from that you signed, and not just tracking it, but actually do something about it. If I ask a room, how many track, like what comes in each week, each month, most of the rooms like, oh yeah, we track it, we absolutely do in our law firm, we have a great system, we track it all.
Steve Nober: (19:36)
Which is great, because you should. But then I ask the question, so how fast do you make changes from the data you’re tracking? And usually that’s where it’s less people responding, because it’s hard to do that, right? If you’re doing your marketing and internally at your own firm, it’s not easy to be that quick and flexible. And so that’s the difference of reducing your costs and being the most efficient you can in your marketing, it’s just tracking and getting the right data points and then making decisions quickly. So here’s some mass torts everybody likes to see. So what do we see quarter to quarter? This is just by popularity. This is not what we think are the best torts, this is really just objective data. And so this is what our last two quarters look like.
Steve Nober: (20:21)
Right? Number one is Paraquat and the comments in green are the movement from the previous quarter. So Paraquat move from number two to number one. So Paraquat’s absolutely on a trend right now as the most popular mass tort that we’re working on. Lung cancer, meso. Again, we do a fair amount. So for us, that shows up, was number one, number two, we do a lot of it all over the country. Hernia mesh, CPAP, Zantac. Those are also by the way, Paraquat, the case costs, we see them starting to rise. I don’t think it’s because the holidays or the end of Q4. I just think it’s popularity. It’s not an inexpensive litigation to go get cases already. And so we’re seeing pricing move. After this conference, there might be even more marketing. So it’s just something to think about.
Steve Nober: (21:06)
It’s a great litigation, but just watch the costs, and if someone’s talking to you about pricing, they need to predict even how it’s going to look over the next few weeks or months, if you’re going to get into that litigation. Hernia mesh, CPAP, Zantac, a lot more popular. And so you’ll see the rest of them on there. And so let me go through it. So the cycle of a mass tort, early emerging, mid stage, late, different firms have different investment philosophies, right? So you might want to get an early where the costs are less, but the risks are higher because litigation is brand new. Some like to say, what are the late, more mature ones? That’s the only ones we want to get into. There might be a shorter timeframe between it’s settling or there being some kind of ROI, and we can talk to you about those.
Steve Nober: (21:51)
And so that’s just something to consider. A lot of people come to us and say, is it too late to get cases? And my answer usually is if, it’s only too late, if there’s a settlement, right, and there’s a file date that you cannot file after, then it’s too late. And until then, it’s more of a question about costs. And so that’s the decision, is the cost higher than you think it’s worth to invest in that litigation. And when you have the cases, co-counsel, I tell you, it’s never been more important than what we’ve seen happen this last year with Roundup as an example, and even talc, that the firm you pick to co-counsel with is more important than ever before. And that’s because of the range in values that we saw Roundup get settled by different firms, right, there used to be a global MDL, there still is.
Steve Nober: (22:42)
But I think we’re seeing a lot more settlements that are more boutique by firm, by docket, by inventory. And so I think it’s never been more important to take that into consideration in who you’re going to co-counsel with, which is why Levin Pap and Mike came here. Talk about a great firm to do that with, those guys showed everybody what you can do with litigations like Roundup. All the litigations they’re involved in, but it’s a super important, more critical than ever decision I would argue. And so there’s two ways to acquire cases and I’ll wrap this up quickly, but really media buying versus buying cases, and there’s pros and cons to both, you’re going to hear about firms that want to sell you cases. And you’ll talk to firms like us, we do both, but we do a lot more media buying than we do selling.
Steve Nober: (23:28)
And so I’ll tell you that, in the buying cases, there are marketing companies that want to take a backend fee and I’ll tell you, you’re going to end up, if most of you in the room are going to get cases and then find a partner, you’re already going to split that up in some percentage, right? Call it 50, 50, whatever it ends up being. And so I just think that to acquire cases, and have to pay your marketing company a piece of that, just dilutes your equity by a lot. And the cost of that at the end of the day is actually significant. There are plenty of really good marketing companies. You can get cases at a cost that makes sense without paying a backend fee. And so I just think it’s important.
Steve Nober: (24:04)
The math, I do the math on this, it’s probably hard to read, but a case that costs you a thousand bucks to get ends up really costing you, I think almost nine or 10 grand, if it settles and it does okay. And so it’s a big difference. It’s a lot of money. It’s not a lot of money today, but it’s a lot that you’re giving up. And so the pros of buying cases, you get a fixed price. Some people like to know, I want this price. That’s what it’s going to be. I want a hundred of them, right? The cons are what I talked about earlier, there’s referral fees, but there’s no transparency to the origination. So go back to what I talked about earlier and the risks of how was the marketing conducted? How were the cases aggregated?
Steve Nober: (24:45)
How did get signed? All of that is this monstrous little black hole, this question, and not to say a lot of firms selling cases aren’t doing it right, but it opens up that question. And so I would just go back to my slide that says, ask more questions, make sure you really see all those different pieces before you go by cases. So you understand how they’re getting originated. And there’s also what I call cherry picking, which is if I had a hundred cases and I can sell a few firms them, how do I decide who gets which ones? And so that always like gives me a stomachache because I don’t want to have to decide who gets which ones. And so our media buying service doesn’t do that. Right? We set up a campaign, the calls get answered, qualified sign, for one firm.
Steve Nober: (25:23)
There’s no one picking and choosing who gets which ones, it’s all very transparent. And so I’m a fan of media buying, but the market these last few years, have really introduced more firms selling cases. So we do both. It just depends on the appetite and how a firm is comfortable getting cases. I would tell you explore both. Media buying, you’re going to see what the real price is. I think your ethics risks are reduced because of the origination issues. And there’s a little more flexibility on criteria. So depending on what the partner you pick, you might find they have a unique criteria or one that’s more stringent than others. And so when you get cases, you have to make sure that those cases actually follow the criteria of the co-counsel partner you’re going to work with. Right? That’s super important.
Steve Nober: (26:08)
And so there’s three differences with your local market. For those of you that haven’t done a lot of national or even local mass tort marketing, you’re here to figure out what you want to do and how to do it. There’s some really big differences that you might not be used to. And one is, even the national versus local, right? Most of these mass torts we’re talking about, your co-counsel partners can take cases from anywhere in the country. And so if you say, yeah, but I just want to get them from my market. Maybe you put some ads in your rotation and you get them in your local market, which I’m a big fan of, but if you want to go get a hundred cases, or 200, or spend $300 grand or a hundred grand, or you really want to get some cases, there’s nothing better than the efficiencies of national marketing than in a local market.
Steve Nober: (26:50)
So your costs to get cases are going to be less. Almost just 99 times out of a hundred, it’s very predictable. It’s just going to be a lot less. And so that’s something to think about when you hear people talking about national versus local, it really depends on what your co-counsel partner wants to do. My guess is they’re going to say they can come in from just about anywhere in the country. There might be a handful of states that have statutes or laws. They don’t want to get them from, I call those no no states, but those are easy to weed out with marketing as a response comes in. And then the brand. So everyone I’m guessing as a firm, you work hard at your brand in your local market. Believe it or not, when you do a national ad, the brand, and we’ve tested this a million times, it’s just mind boggling to me.
Steve Nober: (27:32)
But if your firm is not well known nationally, and there are some firms that are really known nationally, right? Where having the name on the ad national would actually carry a lot of weight, but that’s really the exception. Most, it’s not going to help your results. In fact, it might even not help the results, but raise the cost, because someone sees an ad with with your brand on it, they don’t know who you are. And so we test both. We really go by whatever the firm wants, if they don’t care, we just keep it fairly generic, but very compliant. And so it’s something to think about if you’re in your local market, your brand matters, we know that. If in national, it’s just funny, people respond to ads that often don’t say what law firm, they just talk about the injury, the litigation, what you should do, and a response.
Steve Nober: (28:15)
And so it’s unexplainable to me because I think people really would connect more with a brand, but there’s not a lot of law firms that are getting master cases that have national brand. And so that’s just something to think about, if you’re going to go out and do a national campaign, you might say, hey, I want my brand on there, I want people to search me out and look me up at Google and that branding’s going to start and there’s value to that, so it’s something to think about. And then handling and contracting, you heard me talk earlier, answering calls and doing the contracting on a national mass tort different than the intake you’ve built on your local single event business. It just is. And it’s going to come in in odd hours of the day and the night.
Steve Nober: (28:53)
And so I would just tell you it’s worth, it’s really not expensive, but it’s worth looking at, how can you bring in best practices, so those calls get handled to the right way? We set up a abuse center, we call it our victim abuse call center, victim intake center. And that is, a couple years ago, so we do a lot of sex abuse litigation, and we realized the average agent shouldn’t really be answering calls from a sex abuse responder who’s been a victim. And so we have a call center now that has agents with at least five or six years of experience in abuse training before they ever get on the phone, and firms all over the country, they use that, and they send us those calls just to help do the screening, and make it appropriate in answering, and helping sort of do that first intake for the law firm.
Steve Nober: (29:39)
And so the handling and contracting matters, asbestos and lung cancer, same thing. So you don’t want to put them on hold. You don’t want to let them go to a voicemail. It just won’t convert, timing for mass torts is critical on being able to answer and help that person calling very quickly, at least vet out, do they seem like they’re qualified? What do you want to do next steps? And try and get some kind of fee agreement in front of them.
Steve Nober: (30:00)
So I think I’m out of time. So I’m going to end it on this note. I have a lot more slides, but I’m going to end it here and thank you guys. I hope this was helpful. There’s a lot more to talk about, so come find us. We’re here for a couple days and we have a big data book we publish called the LMI. I’ll just leave you with that. Every mass tort that you hear people talk about, we publish a ton of data about the tor, the response, the calls, the demographics, we update it every month. It’s called the legal marketing index. Come by our booth and get it. There’s some over there on the table as well. And thank you guys very much.
Speaker 5: (30:32)
Steve Nober, Steve Nober. Thanks, man. I want to tell you one more thing about Steve that you need to know. He talked about branding. He says, why is it that some people can put their name on a national ad and it means something? Steve has started, because I asked him to start, a PR firm. And let me tell you what this is about, okay, you’re going to be able to talk to him, he’s a vendor over here, you’ll go into details. We have worked with almost every major national PR firm there is. And none of them, none of them get it where it comes to lawyer issues. So I want you to file something away. You’re getting ready to move into an area that’s different from the cat that’s having, spending time with auto cases, or comp or whatever it is.
Speaker 5: (31:22)
And you’re getting ready to move into an area where a newspaper is dysfunctional as the corporate media has become, hold that over here, they’ve become dysfunctional because they’ve fired their reporters. Investigative journalism doesn’t exist anymore. They’re owned by the major corporations. They respond to major corporations. They don’t really care who you are. They don’t even like lawyers. They’re always going to, always going to vote on the side of their advertisers. Now back to branding. What if you’re handling a case like, well, any of these things that you’ve just heard, what if you’re handling a case like Paraquat and you are in your hometown and you know more about Paraquat than anybody. And Steve’s job is to let that newspaper know that you are the person, you’re the expert talking about Paraquat. So all of a sudden you may have your auto practice, you may have your comp practice, but you’re in the newspaper looking like a giant killer because you’re taking on two of the largest corporations on the globe and you’re the person.
Speaker 5: (32:36)
You’re the go-to person for Paraquat. Let me tell you the next one. What if you’re doing Zelgen, which I recommend you do, what you want to be the expert in that area. It’s up to him to get you in front of the reporters. You can’t call the publisher of a newspaper and say, hey, I got a really hot story. There’s a lot of problems. Look, I did national media for almost 20 years, MSNBC, CNN, Fox News, I was a liberal commentator. There would be times, when in the middle of the, I’m in the small count, 10, 9, 8, 7, pap, change your story because they didn’t want me talking about Bear Corporation. Bear had called them in between the tease and when I’m getting ready to go on, to talk about Bear and a product that’s killing people. Merck.
Speaker 5: (33:27)
It doesn’t make any difference who it is. Advertisers control the media. It’s his job to get you through that wall to where, in your hometown, you are becoming the person to go to, all right? And it’s going to matter in how you brand, you can’t do that with auto cases, everybody’s doing auto cases. Why are they going to call you about an auto cases? But they’re going to call you about something like hernia mesh, because the hospitals are, are seeing hernia mesh left and right, they’re going to call you about something like CPAC, because everybody’s using a CPAC machine. It’s his job to make sure he breaks through that for you.
Speaker 5: (34:12)
The only way you’re going to brand yourself is to do something extraordinary. Now your story might appear in a local newspaper, but if he does his job, he spins it into SEO, the SEO world, where you’re talking about Paraquat and when a Google search is made, you’re there. I promise you, you can search every product we’re going to be talking about in this program, and my firm will be somewhere in the top three on SEO every time. Why? Because we understand the branding. We understand how branding works. You have got to understand that, and Steve, you’re going to have to help him understand that. Because you’re moving into an area now that, it is perfect for you to brand. Okay? Now we’re out of time, but I want to tell you this. I, yes, Steve. Thank you.
