Buying professional services is really challenging, and that is actually a secret weapon for the people who are able to generate the right kinds of attention. 20 years ago, I tore my meniscus and I needed to get my knee scoped, and I looked at a bunch of different doctors who are going to be able to do the surgery for me. And let me tell you, I read everything about them. Where they went to school, I saw some videos about what they do. I talked to people that worked with all of them as patients. And you know what? I can’t tell the difference. I can’t tell the difference from one knee surgeon to the next. They’re all the same to me because when you’re talking about buying professional services, there’s sort of a veil of not really understanding what’s on the other side of it. And it’s the same thing for lawyers.

I like to think that I’m good at what I do. I like to think that there’s clients that appreciate what I do. There’s some clients who think that I might be the best at what I do, but realistically, there’s probably a lot of lawyers out there who do design and construction law who are probably every bit as competent as I am in terms of what it is that I do. And I don’t think that if I was just to try to compete on that basis by itself, it would make it easy for somebody that’s trying to differentiate between me and these other people and to say Jeremy’s the guy that I want to hire. And so then that is actually wonderful because I don’t want to compete on those grounds. I differentiate myself from a lot of my competition in that I get the right kind of attention.

I like to think that these videos that I create, they tend to humanize me. They tend to show people that I’m not fly by night. I’m not doing this out of the basement of my house. I’ve got some staying power. If you watch these videos, I put my foot in my mouth and I misspeak and that’s okay. I’m not shooting for perfection. I’m a person. I’m a real person. And I think that this is something that makes people tend to know, like, and trust you, and it breaks down barriers. And so I have an unfair advantage over a lot of my competition who are at least as good as I am, and I’m sure that some of them are better than I am, but the people who are out there trying to buy legal services, it’s a real challenge, and that works very much to my favor.

And so being the best in your market, I don’t know that that’s really what you need to do in order to be successful. I think that you need to be different. And I think that you need to be relatable. And I think that you need to understand that if somebody hires you over the competition, they’re probably not going to have any great level of confidence the day after they sign your engagement agreement that they made the right choice because it is just inherently challenging to buy professional services. And so I think that if you lean into this and you figure out ways to get the right kind of attention, you can take advantage of how hard it is to buy professional services, hard it is to buy legal services and to turn that into an advantage for you.