This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognizing you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful. Read our Privacy Policy<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Forward Push Law Firm Marketing was founded in 2011 to solve what Founder Marc Apple calls the invisible excellence problem: skilled attorneys losing cases to inferior competitors who simply had better marketing. Before that, he spent years in senior marketing leadership at CBS Radio and Clear Channel, then founded a startup in San Francisco built […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-165899","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-legal_matters"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/165899","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=165899"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/165899\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=165899"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=165899"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=165899"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
MA: <\/strong>Forward Push runs lean by design, with a leadership team that works alongside a handful of employees who are specialists in a specific marketing tactic.<\/p>\n What separates us is that we don\u2019t sell pieces. Most firms hire a website vendor, an SEO agency, an ads manager, and a video crew, and then wonder why none of it compounds.<\/p>\n We built 12 services and four AI components to run as one system instead: the content library feeds the video, the ads drive traffic to a site built to capture it, and every visitor who doesn\u2019t convert gets followed up with automatically.<\/p>\n We only work with law firms doing $500,000 or more a year, and everything ties back to one number: signed cases, not clicks or impressions.<\/p>\n AALM: <\/strong>How has your company changed the most in the last 15 years? What\u2019s stayed steady?<\/p>\n MA: <\/strong>What has changed is nearly everything about how a client finds a lawyer. It used to be referrals, the yellow pages, and showing up at the right bar association lunch.<\/p>\n Today a potential client is overwhelmed with more information than ever, and increasingly they\u2019re asking AI directly who to call before they ever open a search engine.<\/p>\n What\u2019s stayed steady is our focus on measuring ourselves by whether a client\u2019s phone actually rings with the right kind of case, not by a report full of impressions.<\/p>\n Underneath every new tool, the fundamentals haven\u2019t moved. A potential client still has to trust you before they call, and that trust still gets built through proof: real client outcomes, a real reputation, real visibility, not empty claims. The tactics for earning that trust have changed. The requirement hasn\u2019t.<\/p>\n AALM: <\/strong>How have you stayed ahead of industry upheaval? Where\u2019s your attention focused?<\/p>\n MA: <\/strong>My belief is that I must stay a student of the industry, permanently. I\u2019m in masterminds with people running businesses in totally different industries, not just legal marketing, because I have found I can learn what they are doing and apply it here.<\/p>\n I go to conferences. I test things constantly instead of assuming what worked last week still works. And I ask why a lot: why a tactic worked, why a client responded the way they did, instead of just copying the result and hoping it holds somewhere else.<\/p>\n Where my attention actually goes is making sure we stay a people-first organization while we take AI seriously for what it\u2019s actually good at, and honest about what it isn\u2019t. AI can produce content and answer a phone at 2am. It can\u2019t build the kind of trust that gets someone to pick up the phone in the first place. That\u2019s still people. Our job is knowing exactly where that line sits and not pretending otherwise.<\/p>\n AALM: <\/strong>Looking ahead, what are your main focuses for clients? What\u2019s shaping your outlook?<\/p>\n MA: <\/strong>We\u2019re focused on a couple of things right now. First, closing the loop between marketing activity and actual signed cases and second, our proprietary system that handles a lot of the research and content production that used to take days, which lets us move faster for clients without cutting corners.<\/p>\n What\u2019s shaping my outlook is pretty simple: the way a potential client finds a lawyer is splitting in two. Half of that decision still happens the old way, reputation, referral, a name someone remembers. The other half is starting to happen inside a conversation with an AI platform, before a human ever gets involved.<\/p>\n Firms that build real visibility into that AI-driven half of the decision now are going to own a position their competitors spend years trying to catch up to later, the same way firms that took Google seriously in 2012 had a decade-long head start on the ones who waited. The firms that wait for it to feel proven are the ones we\u2019ll be talking about as case studies of what not to do.<\/p>\n AALM: <\/strong>Can you tell us about Case Gravity?<\/p>\n MA: <\/strong>Case Gravity is the system we built to solve one problem: most law firm marketing is a pile of disconnected tactics with no way to tell what\u2019s actually producing business. It has four parts that work together.<\/p>\n Counsel Twin AI creates video using the attorney\u2019s actual face and voice, so a firm can show up on camera consistently without pulling a lawyer out of billable work every week.<\/p>\n First Chair AI answers and qualifies calls after hours, so a firm stops losing cases simply because nobody picked up at 9pm.<\/p>\n Sidebar AI engages people who land on the website but don\u2019t reach out right away.<\/p>\n Engage First brings back the visitors who left without converting.<\/p>\n We offer it in three tiers, Foundation, Authority, and Legacy, with ad spend kept separate so a firm always knows exactly what they\u2019re paying for and why.<\/p>\n The whole system is built around one constraint: less than 24 minutes of the attorney\u2019s time per month. Attorneys practice law. We make sure the right people find them.<\/p>\n AALM: <\/strong>Can you share a best first step for law firm leaders looking to grow their firm (beyond hiring your agency)?<\/p>\n MA: <\/strong>Before anything else, look at your own numbers honestly. Most firm owners can tell you their win rate in the courtroom, but they can\u2019t tell you how many calls came in last month, how many turned into signed cases, or where those calls actually came from.<\/p>\n That\u2019s the first step, and it costs nothing. Start tracking it yourself, even in a spreadsheet. Once you can see the gap between what\u2019s coming in and what\u2019s turning into business, you know exactly where the problem actually is instead of guessing.<\/p>\n A lot of firm owners assume their problem is visibility. Sometimes it is. Just as often it\u2019s intake, or follow-up, or a website that doesn\u2019t do anything once someone lands on it. You can\u2019t fix what you haven\u2019t measured.<\/p>\n AALM: <\/strong>Can you tell us about one or two of your best client case studies.<\/p>\n MA: <\/strong>Two come to mind. Pete Chambers runs a family law practice in Atlanta with a specific niche: divorce cases where addiction is a factor. That kind of specificity needed precision, not a generic template. We built positioning and content around exactly that situation.<\/p>\n Over half of the firm\u2019s new visitors now find them through organic search, meaning they do not need to invest as much in ads as they once did. They\u2019ve became a recognized resource in Atlanta for addiction-related divorce and recently won the Best of Buckhead award.<\/p>\n The other is Sammy Kim, a bilingual tax controversy attorney based in Virginia. We built a sustained content strategy around the exact questions her clients ask: IRS notices, penalty abatement, foreign compliance, crypto tax issues. Her name now surfaces when people ask ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini for an IRS attorney, and her client list includes individuals from across the country. The best part is her clients arrive at their consultation already having validated her through her Counsel Twin AI videos and her social media before they ever call.<\/p>\n AALM: <\/strong>You\u2019ve written best-selling legal marketing books. What compelled you to write them? Are you working on any new projects?<\/p>\n MA: <\/strong>I\u2019m proud to say that both \u201cThe Legal Marketing Playbook: Proven Strategies to Attract, Engage, and Retain Clients\u201d and \u201cToo Busy to Market? The AI Playbook for Lawyers\u201d are number one Amazon bestsellers in the legal marketing category and are featured titles in the State Bar of Georgia library.<\/p>\n I wrote them because I got tired of watching good attorneys get bad advice. Most of what passes for legal marketing guidance is outdated or sold by someone with a product to move. I wanted something an attorney could trust and act on without a sales pitch attached to every page.<\/p>\n I\u2019m working on a new series now, one book per practice area instead of one general playbook. Family law, personal injury, tax, immigration, each has its own version of the invisible excellence problem, and a generic answer doesn\u2019t serve any of them well. I haven\u2019t landed on the exact list of topics yet.<\/p>\n If anyone reading this wants a copy of either book email me and I\u2019ll get one to you.<\/p>\n AALM: <\/strong>Anything else you\u2019d like to add?<\/p>\n MA: <\/strong>Success is a duty, not a goal. That\u2019s the idea underneath everything at Forward Push. Marketing shouldn\u2019t be a random activity. It should create compounding authority, real trust, and outcomes a firm can actually measure.<\/p>\n If a firm takes our advice and their result isn\u2019t there, that\u2019s not a case of a failed aspiration. It\u2019s an obligation that we haven\u2019t met. Yet.<\/p>\n The post Marc Apple: Solving the Invisible Excellence Problem<\/a> appeared first on Attorney at Law Magazine<\/a>.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/attorneyatlawmagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/09\/black@0.5x.png\" "\\"\\"")
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