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Law Firm Marketing in 2026: The Predictions No One Wants to Hear · The Jon and Marc Podcast

0:00
Yeah, I'm going to say something that's probably not going to sit
0:02
well with a lot of people. Oh great, you never do that.
0:05
The days of agencies focusing on single disciplines is going to
0:11
be. Gone.
0:12
The term I want to use is AI fatigue on the consumer level.
0:15
I think a key to success is bringing more human element into
0:20
the customer service side of the business.
0:37
Welcome back to the John and Mark podcast.
0:40
We are live in Orlando and today I have my special guest, the
0:44
Oracle John Robinson. The Oracle.
0:47
Yes, it's a new. I've been called a lot of things
0:49
in my life, but Oracle is not one of them.
0:51
And today will probably be the last day because today we are
0:53
doing the 2026 predictions. We have a laundry list to get
0:58
through. I think we have at least eight
0:59
items to go through. So John, first big prediction
1:03
we're going to be making is a big shift from traditional TV
1:07
spends into streaming and social.
1:10
I think this is a trend that's been happening for a while, but
1:13
2026 is probably the year that the pendulum swings in the other
1:18
direction and remnant budget gets spent on traditional TV.
1:22
There's just too many eyeballs that are shifting away from
1:25
watching regular TV. Like I I don't know many people
1:28
who still have a traditional TV package.
1:30
Maybe cable. I use YouTube TV.
1:32
What do you? Use YouTube TV.
1:34
It's not worth spending the money if the eyeballs aren't
1:36
there. And that's what it's all about,
1:38
is where people going. How are people consuming
1:41
content? And then how do you get your
1:42
message in front of those people?
1:44
And TV, Traditional TV at least. Just not the way anymore.
1:47
Not saying traditional TV is going away, but we are
1:50
predicting a larger shift in those massive budgets moving
1:54
away from TV into those different channels which is
1:58
streaming and social O. Part of the reason I redict this
2:01
is happening because not only are the eyeballs moving, but the
2:05
technology from a streaming perspective is just getting so
2:08
much better. And the personalization and the
2:10
targeting you're able to do with either streaming and social
2:14
platforms now is you're able to get your ads directly in front
2:17
of the audiences and households you want and not waste any
2:20
marketing dollars on showing your commercial to anyone you
2:23
don't want. With linear TV is you just
2:25
you're buying a commercial spot and whoever sees it, sees it.
2:29
That's a really good point, right?
2:30
People have been making, law firms specifically have been
2:33
making their media buying decisions based around showing
2:37
their ad when they think people would be watching, right?
2:41
So you're buying a placement. There are people who are
2:43
injured, they're home from work, they're sitting at home.
2:46
Maybe they're watching like the judge shows or they're watching
2:49
game shows. And that's traditionally like
2:51
where advertising dollars would go in the middle of the day.
2:54
But you're also getting a large portion of your audience that is
2:58
just not injured and just at home and they're watching these
3:01
shows. If instead you could target
3:03
individuals based on certain criteria, well, now all of a
3:07
sudden it doesn't matter when you're actually showing those
3:09
ads yes, that's the power, right?
3:12
So traditionally people watching, you know, price is
3:15
right, you're going to pay hundreds of dollars for those
3:17
spots and you're hoping a percentage of those people wind
3:20
up being part of your target audience versus taking the same
3:22
budget or even less budget and targeting just the people that
3:25
you want to target. Whether it's geographically,
3:27
whether it's demographically, regardless of when that ad
3:30
actually winds up showing, it's definitely a mindset shift.
3:32
Talk to a lot of firm partners about this shift.
3:35
And I've heard in 2025 that there is a 20 to 30% shift of
3:40
marketing budget from traditional TV over to
3:42
streaming. I think in 2026, like I said,
3:45
that's when the pendulum really swings in the other direction.
3:47
I think over 50% of marketing budgets by the end of the year
3:51
are going to be moving from traditional TV into either
3:54
connected TV streaming or YouTube social, right?
3:59
It's just wherever those eyeballs are, where you could
4:01
target people through all these different mechanisms.
4:04
Yeah, and part of the prediction too is people actually watch TV
4:07
differently now, so all across different devices.
4:10
Hold on for a second. Right before we sat down, you
4:12
said, hey, John, I was looking at our analytics of our podcast.
4:15
What'd you tell me? 33% of people watch our YouTube
4:19
content on their TV's. Which is amazing to me.
4:22
I'm thinking like when I listen to a podcast, I'm listening in
4:24
my car or I'm working and I'm watching it on my computer and
4:27
listening to it. I'm not thinking people are
4:30
actually watching us on TV right now.
4:32
If you're watching us on TV right now, put something in the
4:34
comments, let us know because I want to know who's actually
4:36
watching us on TV. That is an interesting thing,
4:39
but I digress, right? It's a whole different way to
4:42
consume content now. Same box, right?
4:44
It's a big screen, it's hanging on your wall.
4:47
But what people are actually getting through that is very,
4:50
very different. Used to be you screw in the
4:52
coaxial cable and you play with your rabbit ears and you get
4:54
what comes to your TV. Now it's much more controlled.
4:57
Yeah, and the way that people watch TV not only from the
5:00
devices is different, but it's actually proven that the younger
5:03
generation, what they do is they turn stuff on streaming and then
5:06
they get to pull their phone up and are on their phone while it
5:09
plays. Yep.
5:10
So you're getting like half attention on both and you need
5:12
to be serving on both. That second screen effect is a
5:15
real thing. Also, people just walk out of
5:17
the room, right? Like there are impressions being
5:21
served, and you think that they're being served to people
5:23
who are actually watching them. I mean, this isn't necessarily a
5:25
positive for streaming, but it's the same effect that you're
5:28
having with traditional TV, right?
5:29
It's on, it's in the background. You know, you may think you're
5:32
getting like a view through conversion because someone saw
5:35
your ad, that the reality is that it's muddied.
5:37
So you just got to be careful with this stuff.
5:39
You got to work with people who actually know how these things
5:41
work. The tracking, regardless of what
5:43
anyone tells you, the tracking for this, while better than
5:46
traditional TV, is not great, right?
5:49
Multi device tracking, not great.
5:52
Second screen tracking, not great.
5:53
Inevitably, you're pulling up your phone to contact a law
5:56
firm, or you're pulling up your computer.
5:58
But the ad was seen potentially on another platform, on watching
6:02
Netflix, on your iPad or on your TV.
6:04
Definitely a great strategy to win top of mind marketing.
6:07
Last click attribution is a little tough on it sometimes.
6:09
Yeah, it's not going to be the last click who's putting unique
6:12
phone numbers on all their different streaming ads.
6:14
It's like it doesn't make sense. And then like realistically, how
6:18
law firms can tackle this, why I think it's important is where
6:20
TV, like you said, you can, you're buying ad space where you
6:23
think people might be now moving forward.
6:26
If you just take your docket like hey, the past a year or
6:28
two, pull all my cases that we've signed, give me their zip
6:32
codes, the demographics, their ages and take that information.
6:35
Just load it into the demand side provider and you can just
6:39
serve your ads to exactly those people that live in those zip
6:41
codes. That it'll identify all the
6:43
households that have some that lives in that household, which
6:46
devices they have, and they'll show your ads to that exact
6:49
match of people that match your target demographics of your
6:51
existing client base. You could do that on Facebook.
6:54
Exactly what I said, yes, streaming and social.
6:56
It's like you can use those exact same tactics on different
6:59
platforms. To achieve that, now the
7:01
platforms themselves are evolving, right?
7:03
Meta has been like the £500 gorilla in this space, which
7:07
seeing a surge in TikTok. Yep, right.
7:09
And then there's advertising and other social platforms too.
7:11
Depending on where you are in the country, what demographic
7:14
you're trying to reach, these niche social platforms may be
7:17
good avenues for you as well. But message here is 2026.
7:21
This is where the shift from traditional media really pushes
7:24
into programmatic TV, radio, moving more towards streaming,
7:28
social, you know, even platforms like Spotify.
7:31
I think this is addiction 1B. Huge shift away from traditional
7:35
radio into Spotify advertising and podcast advertising.
7:39
So you can either advertise directly on the streaming
7:41
platforms like Spotify or I haven't seen a lot of lawyers do
7:45
it yet, but I think it's a good strategy.
7:47
Going to 2026 and I predict this is going to happen more and
7:49
more. Is buying AD space just like
7:52
Athletic Greens does on podcasts that are very popular?
7:56
Again, it's all about where the eyeballs are right?
7:59
And unlike traditional media where you are guessing you're
8:02
relying on like Nielsen to kind of give you directional guidance
8:06
on like what people are watching or listening to.
8:08
You actually have real data, right?
8:09
If you're buying a placement on a podcast, you can ask that
8:13
podcast host exactly how many people are watching each
8:16
episode. You can ask them for the
8:17
demographics. We look in Spotify, in an Apple
8:19
podcast, we could tell the ages, the genders, the jobs, the
8:23
locations of whoever's watching our podcast.
8:26
And so could anyone else that you may be advertising with.
8:28
So definitely something that people should be thinking about
8:31
heavily in 2026 if you haven't already.
8:34
That's going to be a controversial one.
8:35
I'm interested to see what people think about that in the
8:37
comments. If you're enjoying this episode
8:39
of the John and Mark podcast, make sure you subscribe to us on
8:42
YouTube or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
8:44
We're also on social media. We'll see you there all.
8:47
Right prediction #2 Yep, we hear a lot about AI.
8:52
I think 2026 is the year of anti AI with a lot of push backs from
8:56
the consumer level. I was reading a post on LinkedIn
9:00
from Darren Shaw. So he's a local SEO expert, he
9:03
owns White Spark and he said something to be kind of, and
9:07
don't misquote me, Darren here, but something akin to I called a
9:12
local business and I got an AI bot that answered and I hung up
9:16
immediately. That is becoming more and more
9:19
commonplace as people are able to recognize that I'm not
9:21
talking to an actual human. It's just like when you're
9:24
you're chatting on a website and it's like, you know, it's not a
9:28
real person. You say support or chat or
9:31
operator, right? Or when you call up and you're
9:33
getting like an IVR and you just on a pound zero to get to a
9:36
human. Like people want to talk to
9:38
people. There's a place for AI, but this
9:41
mass adoption in all aspects of customer service, I think the
9:45
line is going to be drawn and people are going to say no.
9:48
When I call your business and I'm expecting a human, I want a
9:52
human. The term I want to use is AI
9:54
fatigue on the consumer level. I think a key to success is
9:58
bringing more human element into the customer service side of the
10:01
business and using AI for other stuff, but there will be a lot
10:04
of pushback on that side. In 2026, I think we're going to
10:07
see a clear delineation between most people who just use AI as
10:12
part of their life and then AI as a skill set, right?
10:16
Where people are actually able to use AI in a sophisticated
10:19
way, where they have workflows that are potentially using
10:22
multiple AI tools, where they've refined their processes.
10:26
And this could be at a law firm, it could be marketers, any
10:28
business in general. Like there's a very big
10:30
difference between US going to our video team and saying we
10:34
wanna create a video that has these different AI elements and
10:37
we get a very fine polished product and it takes a while to
10:41
get something that's great versus me just going to VO in
10:44
Gemini and saying make me a video of someone doing this.
10:47
Yeah, I've seen those videos. They're horrible.
10:48
Right, go on, Sora. Yeah, and you just scroll
10:51
through and it's just garbage after garbage.
10:53
It's like our MTMP images we made.
10:55
Yeah, questionable. Yeah, yeah.
10:57
All right. I love that one, right, Us
10:59
taking the selfie and it's got the photo of us taking the
11:02
selfie. Like it doesn't even make
11:03
logical sense. So, you know, we're not
11:05
necessarily dealing with people with like 10 fingers on one hand
11:08
anymore, right? It's gotten better than that.
11:10
But there is going to be in 2026 a very clear line of people who
11:15
have expertise in using AI and just the rest of the populace.
11:19
I agree. And I think there's a dangerous
11:20
game that's being played where maybe law firms think, hey, we
11:24
need to use AI, we're going to be left behind.
11:26
But aren't well equipped from a personnel or skill set
11:28
perspective to properly implement it.
11:30
And they're going to do more harm to themselves and to their
11:33
potential clients moving forward.
11:35
All right, that's prediction number two.
11:37
Number three, we believe Gemini is going to overtake ChatGPT.
11:42
At the beginning of 25, ChatGPT had almost 90% of the market
11:47
share in LLM tools. We're now at the beginning of
11:49
2026. That has eroded.
11:52
Estimates put it somewhere between 60 and 80% of the market
11:55
share. Now, there's two main reasons
11:57
for this. One is because there's been a
11:59
lot more tools that have come out more specialized, right?
12:02
People use clod for coatings. They're not always going to
12:04
ChatGPT, but the real zinger here is Google.
12:08
And we've been saying this for a year, that even though open AI,
12:12
ChatGPT kind of we're at the forefront of a lot of this AI
12:15
revolution, Google will win. Gemini's adoption has continued
12:19
to increase. It is surging in market share,
12:22
is not surpassed ChatGPT at all. But our prediction by the end of
12:25
2026 is that Gemini will surpass ChatGPT in terms of market
12:30
share. And we'll see similar to what
12:31
happened with search where initially you had Alta Vista and
12:34
Yahoo that were the original search kings and then Google.
12:38
Kings Yahoo crushed for forever. It just eventually Google
12:42
overtook it. And once they overtake, they
12:44
never look back. So yesterday, Google's market
12:47
cap hit $4 trillion. Insane.
12:50
Google's not going anywhere. They're not succumbing to Sam
12:52
Altman. Google will win.
12:54
That's the prediction for 2020. 6 I agree with that, the AI wars
12:59
are based on computing power and the access of information to
13:02
compute to build better models, and Google has both of those
13:06
things available to it as part of its infrastructure and they
13:09
have almost an unlimited amount of money.
13:10
So what does this mean to you? If you believe in this
13:13
prediction like I do, is if you're building infrastructure,
13:16
maybe start building it with Gemini instead of Chappa GBT so
13:19
down the road you don't have to change it.
13:21
Maybe our audience doesn't know this, but the future of Search
13:25
is powered by Gemini. AI Overviews.
13:28
Those are powered by Gemini. Your Siri answer will be powered
13:31
by. Gemini yes, Apple signing a deal
13:35
for Gemini to power Siri in the next iteration like Google will
13:39
win. Instead of Google paying for or
13:41
In addition to Google paying for monopolistic rights to be the
13:45
default search engine on iPhones, now they're also paying
13:49
to have Gemini be part of Apple Siri platform.
13:52
So Google will win. That's the prediction Agreed.
13:55
All right. The next one we want to get into
13:57
is a topic that has three prongs to it, but we're going to call
14:00
it consolidation in the marketplace, especially in the
14:03
legal marketplace. So first, we are predicting A
14:06
consolidation from the law firm side where we predict many law
14:11
firms consolidating individual ones into bigger conglomerates,
14:15
some mergers, some acquisitions. We see a lot of this happening.
14:19
We predict a lot of this happening in 2026.
14:22
This has been happening throughout 25 private equity
14:25
investment into law firms with the advent of alternative
14:28
business structures in Arizona, it's made it's mark and we're
14:32
seeing a consolidation of firms for a variety of different
14:35
reasons. You've got law firm partners who
14:38
maybe didn't have a succession plan.
14:40
Yeah, and I. Just want to catch.
14:41
Out right, you're seeing law firms want to join a bigger
14:45
entity so they don't have to worry about back of house
14:48
operations. Someone to look at who's doing
14:50
this the right way, let go in Canada, the way that they are
14:55
setting up their MSO by being a back of house operations but
14:59
still letting the firm's kind of operate semi independently on
15:03
the front end. I think that's probably the
15:04
right way to do this. There are other iterations of
15:07
this as well where private equity is coming in and
15:09
acquiring multiple law firms and then merging them into one.
15:13
A lot of different ways that this is happening, but it will
15:16
continue to accelerate in 2026. It's not going away, right?
15:19
There's no reason for it to go away.
15:21
The legal marketplace, if you're afraid of competition and you're
15:25
afraid of high acquisition costs, stay away from legal.
15:28
But that's not something that private equity is afraid of
15:30
because they can overpower that with a lot of money, correct?
15:33
A lot of marketing dollars, a lot of brand visibility.
15:37
That could definitely help in a market where everybody's
15:41
fighting for cases and overall, just generally the acquisition
15:45
cost continues to rise across the marketplace.
15:48
I think there's going to be an impact felt this year from that
15:52
happening for firms that did not go with private equity.
15:56
That is going to be a challenge in a local market.
15:59
When you've got huge 7-8 figure investments in law firms that
16:03
are now just blowing their brand out of the water and you're
16:07
sitting there still trying to get a few cases here and there.
16:10
That's where there's going to be a problem.
16:11
And I don't know how that's necessarily going to impact
16:13
those firms. Are they going to have to try
16:15
and find someone to acquire them?
16:16
Are they going to have to go and maybe merge on a smaller scale
16:19
with another firm? Yeah, it's interesting because
16:21
we're seeing consolidation, you know, in local areas like with
16:25
the competitors consolidating, you know a high volume firm with
16:27
like a litigation trap. We're seeing the consolidation.
16:30
We're seeing consolidation across state lines, Yep, to
16:33
increase the overall impact area.
16:34
So we first see this happening a lot more in 2026, and I'm
16:39
interested to see the impact not only from the law firm side on
16:42
the consolidation theme. We are predicting on the legal
16:45
tech side of the house, a huge consolidation.
16:48
Over the past two years, there's been a boom of tech.
16:51
The AI boom has made 1000 different tools here and there.
16:55
A lot of these tools are either going to die off, get acquired,
16:58
or start consolidating into more holistic suites instead of too
17:02
many niche solutions here. We're going through a similar
17:06
cycle is what happened in the SAS space, right, maybe a decade
17:11
or so ago, where you've got all these point solutions coming up
17:14
and they just wind up getting acquired.
17:16
Yeah, it's like. There's intake boom, then
17:18
there's a case management stuff, then those all can come by.
17:20
Now there's an AI boom and it's like consumers want a simpler
17:23
solution instead of having to tie everything together.
17:25
But. In legal tech, like in all
17:28
software, there's a lot of investment from either VCs or
17:31
private equity, some type of institutional investment.
17:34
They wanna see a return. Yes, right.
17:36
So they're putting money into these businesses to see them
17:39
grow and grow aggressively. And then at some point there has
17:41
to be an exit. Yes.
17:43
So consolidation is one way that that happens and I think we're
17:46
gonna see some more of that this year.
17:47
And then to finalize the consolidation theme, it started
17:51
happening at the end of 2025. We heard the news. 2026 is also,
17:56
I believe, the year of the legal marketing agency consolidation.
18:00
Yeah, not a topic everyone really wants to talk about.
18:03
Agencies in the legal marketing space have been getting acquired
18:06
left and right. We could talk about some of the
18:08
specifics. Do we want to talk about the
18:10
specifics? We'll start there.
18:11
Do you think it's going to happen?
18:13
I think it's going to. Happen it is.
18:14
Happening. It is happening.
18:15
It's our prediction. There aren't many left.
18:20
It's like firms like ours, right?
18:23
We talked to the other people who run the shops.
18:26
Yeah, for those who don't know, all the agency owners talk to
18:28
each other on a pretty consistent basis besides the
18:30
ones that aren't nice to each other and you know who you are.
18:32
But we all chit chat behind closed doors and are mostly very
18:36
friendly. We knew about a lot of these
18:37
acquisitions happening before they were publicly announced.
18:40
We also receive a lot of the phone calls when law firms find
18:45
out that their agency has been acquired and then their
18:49
operations are being offshored or they're dealing with a
18:53
significant reduction in communication, or they're told
18:56
that their project manager or account manager, there's going
18:58
to be no layoffs. And then all of a sudden next
19:00
week their account manager is laid off.
19:02
I don't foresee it slowing down. And the ones that are left, I
19:05
think going to be the ones that are more successful here.
19:07
This is sort of potentially sort of the inverse of what we were
19:10
talking about with the law firms.
19:11
The ones that are getting consolidated, are getting more
19:14
money behind them, are able to grow.
19:15
I think in the agency space, what's happening with all this
19:18
investment is you're seeing the agencies actually dilute their
19:22
offering and what once was a great agency is now run with
19:28
institutional dollars with the mindset of how do I squeeze as
19:30
much value out of my investment as possible.
19:32
And that could be offshoring. It could be it.
19:34
Maybe you're going to get 2 less pages of content.
19:37
Maybe you're going to your link building efforts are going to
19:39
just be a little bit more diluted.
19:40
Maybe development is going to get pushed to a different team
19:43
and they're just going to try and extract value.
19:45
We're not calling out any particular person here, just
19:47
general. These are the themes of things
19:49
we see happen. And the fact of the matter is,
19:51
for example, anyone who owned that agency has sold it.
19:54
Good for them, they made a bunch of money but like they still
19:56
want to do great work for you but they no longer are in charge
19:59
and someone else pulls the strings which usually leads to
20:02
the decline in quality. Yeah.
20:03
I mean, our, our audience here is law firm owners or law firm
20:06
marketers, and you're the ones that are dealing with the
20:09
fallout of what happens when your agency winds up getting,
20:12
yeah, acquired, consolidated. It's not always a great
20:15
situation, and sometimes it. Sometimes it works out good, it
20:18
works. Sometimes it works out well.
20:19
Yeah, that's the prediction, right?
20:20
We're talking about predictions. The prediction is this will
20:23
continue throughout 2026. I think this is actually a good
20:27
transition into some of our other marketing topics.
20:30
Yes, pivoting away from consolidation prediction #5 the
20:34
death of vanity metrics. Should have died a long time
20:37
ago, yeah. It was on its deathbed, but.
20:40
Looking at traffic as a metric of success, it's not, right?
20:44
Like we could put a blog post that just generate a bunch of
20:47
traffic for something that's largely irrelevant.
20:49
But just traffic as a whole is diminishing from traditional
20:54
organic search, right? AI doesn't necessarily drive
20:57
direct traffic, so the traffic that you are getting is more
21:00
valuable. You can't look at traffic
21:01
anymore, but it's not just traffic.
21:03
Impressions are crazy now. Impressions.
21:05
Because there's so many different SERP features, there
21:08
was a big spike in impressions. A couple weeks ago, because AI
21:11
overview started featuring map packs, clicks weren't
21:14
increasing, but now you're seeing brands show up in the map
21:17
pack in the AI overview and those count as impressions too.
21:20
The biggest vanity metric going away.
21:22
I mean, it hasn't been a vanity metric, it's been a leading
21:25
indicator, but it, it really is becoming a challenge to use
21:28
rankings as a measuring stick of success because of
21:32
personalization. Yes, that is something that I
21:35
think law firm owners have to come to terms with.
21:37
We've had many tough conversations with managing
21:40
partners at firms who want to understand where they should be
21:44
looking. Now that rankings aren't that
21:46
measuring stick, there isn't a clear answer.
21:48
I will tell you something you should not be doing is looking
21:51
at these AI tools that are trying to gauge your visibility
21:55
within AI platforms. That is not a reliable
21:58
replacement for rankings because AI is extremely personalized.
22:03
Everyone's results are different.
22:04
Where you physically search changes your results.
22:06
What you've searched in the past changes your results.
22:09
You can't use those tools. Rankings traffic won't matter.
22:13
By the end of 2026. We don't know what Google search
22:16
are going to look like, but they definitely aren't going to look
22:18
like they're looking today. Well, John, if rankings and
22:21
traffic aren't important, what are important?
22:25
We run an agency. Cases, cases, cases.
22:27
Leads and cases. Baby leads and cases.
22:29
All that matters is cases. Your attribution is.
22:32
We've been beating the attribution drum for years about
22:35
wanting to make sure that you know where every single lead
22:37
comes from. That is just going away.
22:39
Well, you still want to know where it's coming from, but it's
22:41
not exactly how it got there, if that makes any sense.
22:44
Yes, that makes a ton of sense, Mark.
22:47
You just don't know anymore, right?
22:49
You may wind up getting a lead through your map pack, or a lead
22:53
through branded paid search, or a lead through your LS AS, but
22:56
that's not where they found you. If you start cutting off all of
23:00
the top of funnel awareness, all of a sudden you're not getting
23:03
those bottom of funnel things that are actually tracked.
23:05
So yes, you can still track last touch attribution for the most
23:08
part, but it's the funnel has changed.
23:11
That goes into our prediction number 62026 is the year of
23:15
holistic full funnel marketing in the legal space.
23:17
Yeah, I'm going to say something that's probably not going to sit
23:19
well with a lot of people. Oh great, you never do that.
23:23
The days of agencies focusing on single disciplines is going to
23:29
be gone. So we have traditionally run an
23:32
SEO agency for years. We've said what what are John
23:35
and Mark good at? What is our team good at?
23:36
It's SEO. We are still really great at
23:39
SEO, but when it comes to generating cases for firms, what
23:43
matters is generating those cases, not investing more in
23:47
something that may not be what you need to be investing in.
23:50
So you need to think about where your marketing dollars are going
23:54
in a dynamic way. Setting a fixed budget for TVA,
23:59
fixed budget for paid social, a fixed budget for all these
24:04
different things is not necessarily how you have to go
24:07
about this because the game is changing on a regular basis
24:12
constantly and you have to take advantage of those
24:14
opportunities. SEO has become brand marketing.
24:18
So people use all the acronyms like GEOAIOAEO doesn't matter.
24:23
SEO is optimizing for visibility online in organic ways, which
24:29
includes AI, which includes SEO, which includes visibility on
24:34
other people's media platforms, on their podcasts, on news
24:39
websites. Yep.
24:39
It's just visibility, right? Visibility optimization.
24:43
The challenge here is going to be for firms that have agencies
24:47
that do different specific things.
24:49
Those agencies may not be giving you the full story about where
24:54
you should be investing. Yep, that's the challenge is if
24:57
you have a social media agency and it turns out that social
25:00
media does not work for your firm because of your firms
25:02
personalities or because you don't invest in video content or
25:06
whatever the reason, your social agency is still going to tell
25:08
you to invest in social as opposed to taking a step back
25:11
and thinking holistically, right?
25:13
That's the prediction. Marketing is becoming holistic
25:15
in 2026. You need to think holistically.
25:18
Your marketing strategies need to be dynamic and you need to
25:20
stick and move and constantly change what you're doing to
25:23
react to the market. Yep.
25:24
I think that's going to be a big shift that people need to adjust
25:28
their internal teams for, adjust their agencies they work with
25:31
for. Because I've seen the shift for
25:34
the past couple of years before people had like a vein.
25:37
They're like TV's my thing and I'm just the more money I put in
25:39
TV the better. But I think single channel
25:41
tactics are going away and it's holistic.
25:44
What is our our overall strategy to build brand awareness, drive
25:49
those leads to us and then convert them effectively once
25:52
they land on any of our digital properties?
25:53
Yeah. And it's not to say that any of
25:55
the individual disciplines are going away.
25:56
They're just changing and changing quickly.
25:59
The days of being like, hey I just want to spend 50 grand and
26:03
get my cases from 1 channel from paper click and that's it.
26:06
And do no brand marketing or no other marketing or I think is
26:10
going away. Which leads to our prediction.
26:13
Prediction #7. Transparency.
26:15
Transparency. This is the year of transparency
26:18
pivoting off of #6 lead generators.
26:22
We all know the challenges with lead generators.
26:24
Yeah. So not not specifically just
26:26
lead generators legally from a bar standpoint, from a
26:30
regulation standpoint and from a consumer standpoint, people are
26:33
demanding transparency of who is marketing to them and who
26:37
they're reaching out to. And it is going to cause major
26:40
ripples and changes in the market in 2026.
26:42
Yeah, we saw it start beginning of this year with SB-37 in
26:46
California, right. So California, obviously one of
26:48
the largest states in the country, is demanding now
26:53
enforcing that there is transparency on all legal
26:56
marketing. So that's social media ads,
26:58
that's on your landing pages on your website.
27:01
In order to market in California, you have to very
27:03
clearly state what firm you're marketing for in California.
27:07
That's really hard to do. If you're a lead generator and
27:09
you're taking leads in and then you're selling them to a bunch
27:12
of different firms, you can't do that.
27:14
Transparency, while I believe people want it more and more
27:17
from a consumer standpoint, it's going to be enforced now, right?
27:20
I don't think, like, California isn't going to be the only state
27:23
that's going to be enforcing regulations like this.
27:25
We've seen it happen on a national level with, you know,
27:28
the TCPA changes that wound up almost getting put forward last
27:31
year and then getting rolled back.
27:32
But we'll probably see this roll out to other states as well,
27:35
where transparency won't just be demanded, it will be required.
27:38
Moving into #8 I'm going to call this prediction the rise of the
27:43
influencer lawyer. Lawyers brands will become more
27:47
influencer like in their demeanor.
27:49
They'll be more advertising about their lifestyle, become
27:54
way more popular on social media, and that is the brand
27:57
that they'll be pushing forward. We see people blowing up today
27:59
already on YouTube. I have a podcast coming up we're
28:02
trying to schedule with Mike Raffy of The Georgia Lawyer on
28:05
YouTube. He's blown up on TikTok and
28:07
YouTube. There's a ton of these people,
28:09
and I predict that there'll be a lot of influencer lawyers kind
28:12
of 2026. People want to do business with
28:15
people they know, they like and they trust.
28:18
And if you as a lawyer or in someone's pocket, you're in
28:22
their social media feed, they know you intimately.
28:25
They like you because you're talking about things like Hunter
28:28
Garnett. Watch that episode if you
28:29
haven't seen it. Like he is a great example of
28:32
the influencer lawyer. He talks to his people in his
28:35
market. He knows his demographic.
28:37
People you trust, right? If you are being transparent.
28:41
Again, right, Theme of 2026. You're being transparent if
28:44
you're being real. If you're not being fake, you're
28:46
being authentic. People will trust you.
28:49
They'll want to do business with you.
28:50
They'll know you. They'll like you.
28:51
They'll trust you. That was our 2026 predictions,
28:54
probably Part 1. We might do this again.
28:56
If you have predictions that you want to make, please put them in
28:58
our comments below and we'll respond.
29:00
Or we might even do a response video to you All's predictions.
29:04
Thank you for tuning in. Don't forget to like and
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subscribe. John, send us out.
29:07
There you have it. We'll see you soon.
29:09
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