Episode Summary
In this episode, Carl sits down with Terry Lyons, one of New Jersey’s most innovative family law attorneys, to deconstruct the playbook she used to grow her firm from a solo practice funded by a home mortgage into a multi-million dollar, nationally recognized enterprise.
Terry shares the counterintuitive strategies that became the engine of her growth, from being the first firm in the state to launch a mobile app to creating unique staff titles like “Captain of First Impressions” to redefine the client experience. She provides a masterclass in how to reject the commoditization of “sludge marketing” by focusing on centers of influence, understanding the deep psychology of a client’s needs, and building a powerful, values-driven firm culture.
This is a candid conversation about the mindset required to be a true entrepreneur in the legal field, the importance of embracing authenticity, and why the humanization of law is not just a “feel-good” concept, but an essential strategy for survival and dominance in the age of AI.
Full Transcript
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(Carl Taylor): Now here’s your host, Carl Taylor.
Hi Terry, thank you so much for joining my podcast today. How you doing?
(Terry Lyons): I am doing great. Thanks for having me.
(Carl Taylor): So you and I kind of go way back, in a sense, in that when I was a law clerk in Somerset County, New Jersey, 16 years ago, you were kind of like one of the up and coming young, younger attorneys, like building a firm at that moment in time, right?
(Terry Lyons): We were both, yeah, we were both babies on our respective professions. You were a baby law clerk, and I was a baby entrepreneur. And we both grew up. Now, look at us.
(Carl Taylor): Now we’re grown-ups, yeah. Now I’m turning 42 next week. What happened?
(Terry Lyons): You look great, though, Carl.
(Carl Taylor): Likewise. So I wanted to get into how you’ve kind of built your firm, because I’ve been able to take sort of like a view of it over the years, right? I mean, in terms of, I practiced in Somerset/Hunterdon County for so long, and I watched you build a firm from, I think in the beginning was you and maybe an associate or two. And now I look on your website, and I’m like, I see a lot of familiar names, which I’m happy to see, but I got like, 20-some names there. And you’re branching out beyond family law, it looks like. So I want to just kind of get into that, how you’ve been able to grow your practice over the last, what I’d say would be 20-21 years since you opened it.
(Terry Lyons): Yeah. So, I mean, just to give the 60-second recap, when I started my law firm, I took out a mortgage against my home. My wife co-signed that mortgage. Obviously, although we weren’t married back then—we weren’t allowed to be under federal law—so she actually had less protection by agreeing to sign a mortgage against our home. I took out money from my home, and I paid myself $125 a week, gross of taxes, for three years. Fast forward to today, I run a multi-million dollar law firm with clients all over the world, over 40 employees, just chosen by Inc. Magazine as one of the fastest-growing companies in America, and NJBIZ number two best places to work. So between the beginning and now, a lot of successes, a lot of mistakes, and a lot of lore along the way.
(Carl Taylor): And you can’t separate the two, right? Because I think in the law, you have to make these mistakes to grow. And I think one of the reasons I wanted to speak with you, specifically, Terry, was, you’ve been an innovator, and I think we’re a field that sometimes is afraid of innovation. I mean, you were, I think the first family law firm in New Jersey that created an app for your business. I mean, I can’t think of anyone else who did it before. You might have been the first in the country, for all I know, but definitely in New Jersey, which is where I’ve practiced, and where you practice, I don’t think anyone else had an app. Can you kind of go into how you created an app back when… everybody has an app now, I guess not everybody, but you know, everyone knows what an app is. But back then, nobody even knew what an app really was.
(Terry Lyons): Yeah, we’re past the app now, because the app is old news. We’re in the post-app era. We’re in AI now. We are. So it’s interesting you say, you know, you have to make those mistakes to learn. It’s called the “practice of law” for a reason. The best litigators will admit that they’re great litigators because of a failed argument they made in the past. And I think while many lawyers, and particularly I think litigators, maybe not so much transactional, but I think while many lawyers may be willing to take risks in arguments or positions on behalf of clients, the average attorney is not as inclined to have that same mindset in business.
And the law is a business. If we are not profitable, if we as attorneys believe that we are good lawyers and we deliver good products on behalf of clients, then we have a duty to do everything in our power to steal as many clients from the marketplace as we can.
So particularly our app. And this was, I forget how long ago, but no one else had apps, and it wound up on the front page of the Law Journal and all these other things. And there were judges and people coming up to me, “Oh my God, Taylor, you have an app for divorce lawyers, what are you nuts?” And the development and the procreation and the pushing of that app was critical for three key reasons.
One, it pushed us, as business people, to uncomfortable places, and anyone who wants to scale, grow or build an enterprise better become comfortable in the uncomfortable very quickly.
The second thing it did was create buzz in the legal world, in our general profession, right? Judges coming up to me, you as a young lawyer, “Wow, look what they did.” And anytime a lawyer’s… you know, one of the prime criteria of a lawyer being successful is his or her reputation among the bar. So when you’re getting judges or lawyers coming up to you and giving you accolades and asking you questions, it helped our reputation.
And the third thing that it did, more so than client usage, we leveraged it as a tool for centers of influence who would see it as a resource and then send us clients. I will give you an example. Now, a lot of this is data-driven. A lot of this is understanding human behavior. 80% of marriage counseling fails. It’s sad, it’s true, and there’s a lot of reasons for that, not because of the fault of marriage counseling, but because a lot of times people start too late. Whatever the reason is, statistically, 80% of marriage counseling fails. So I could spend every day of my life asking for individual divorces, or I could spend every day of my life bringing value to the mental health community, because then for every marriage counselor and therapist that knows, likes, and trusts us, I’m getting six to 10 referrals by year.
And so one of the things that we embedded into our app was interactive value that helped not just the clients but the center of influence. So for example, interactive value for the clients: child support guidelines, snap a picture of financial documents and they instantly get sent to your lawyer. Great. How about for the center of influences? Knowing when and how there’s an obligation to report child abuse. How about a link to instantly be connected to every single domestic violence shelter across the entire state of New Jersey? Now I have mental health professionals that are like, “Oh my God. Now next time something comes up, I can look at this.” I really didn’t care how many clients downloaded it. And to this day, I don’t even know how many people ever downloaded it, but I know enough did, and I know it got a buzz that we became the sphere of influence. We now are the trusted people for those professionals. So that’s just one example of thinking outside the box, getting outside your comfort zone, and thinking about the situation from a holistic marketplace perspective.
(Carl Taylor): It’s interesting because one of the things that I really believe is that attorneys have become over-commoditized in this marketplace. We tend to be focused on our clients, but then we outsource a lot of our marketing to third parties. A lot of them, I call them “sludge marketers,” where essentially they’ll take your website, they’ll create the same website as every other lawyer, and what it says to the marketplace is, “Oh, well, every lawyer is essentially the same. I’m just going to choose based on who gives the free consult, who’s cheaper per hour.” And to your point, if you show authority through creative thinking, through putting yourself out there, through differentiation for yourself and your law firm, that’s how you really bring in human referral sources, and I believe now also AI referral sources.
My belief is that Google Search was very good in its time, but it was very keyword-stuffing, very meta tag. It really wasn’t that sophisticated. But AI thinks more like the way a human does. If I look up, “Who should I hire for a divorce in Somerville, New Jersey,” your name is probably going to come up in a lot of these AI searches, because you are somebody who’s out there who has a philosophy about your business and has not just been making noise, you’re making an impact. So a long, rambling way of saying, why do you think attorneys are so bad at marketing ourselves, at choosing who should market us, and why are we so afraid of differentiation, like you’ve proven through your app and in so many other ways?
(Terry Lyons): Let me work this backwards. Objection, multi-part question!
(Carl Taylor): That’s right. Objection, counsel, compound question.
(Terry Lyons): Compound. I’m gonna work backwards. And I’d actually like to punctuate a point that you made. AI is here. It’s not going away. I’ll do you one better. Instead of writing AI code for “who’s a good divorce lawyer,” forget about that, because now I’m competing with 1,000 other lawyers that are also writing that same AI code. How about instead embedding questions into your blogs that one of your clients would ask at 2 a.m.? For example, one of our top landing pages, we get all the data, is, “Can I put a GPS on my husband’s car?” Right? That’s a question that someone’s going to put into AI that instinctively is the need before they even know they need a lawyer.
(Carl Taylor): And I would encourage people when using AI, don’t use it like everyone else. Figure out how everyone else uses it, and then figure the step that precursors that. So that’s my say, Terry, is: don’t write with AI, write for AI. Everyone else is writing with AI. I think you have to write for AI. And that’s exactly what you’re talking about. It is more sophisticated than just saying “we do this kind of law.”
(Terry Lyons): It’s thinking about what are the 40-50 pain points and questions that somebody would have.
(Carl Taylor): And also what I call is the virtuous circle, which is that the more the higher your reputation is in the eyes of AI, just like with human referral sources, the more likely they are to trust your resources. And the better your resources, the more likely they are to think that you have a high reputation. So it’s like a virtuous circle. And that’s what you’ve been able to accomplish with your practice, I would say. You’re well-positioned, I think, even better positioned than any other firm, maybe because you haven’t been farming out things to bland commodification. You’ve actually been out there differentiating yourself for years before it became even cool to do or necessary with AI.
(Terry Lyons): Well, listen, we do farm out some of it. But what I encourage all lawyers to do is be the visionary. Be the visionary. And so getting to the second… what was the first part of your question? The former part. Why do we as lawyers typically not think this way?
(Carl Taylor): Yeah.
(Terry Lyons): Two reasons. One, there is a pre-selection process of those humans that typically go to law school, and they tend to be more argumentative, more advocacy-based. And when humans go to law school, precedent and statutory conformity are drilled into us. So when you have humans that are predisposed to advocacy and being argumentative, and then you compound that with being