How the ‘Curse of Expertise’ Could Be Losing Money for Your Law Firm

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Episode Transcript

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Hey, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of the Law Firm Growth Podcast. So in this episode, I wanted to get down and dirty on a super common challenge that we see with attorneys that can really mess you up, from everything ranging from marketing all the way down to the intake and consultation process. And that is what’s referred to as the curse of expertise. So, just to clarify this isn’t anything that you get from opening a forbidden tomb or a sarcophagus or anything like that. It’s a bonafide and extremely well-studied cognitive bias that’s found in psychology. And some of the experiments are really interesting. I just love the design of some of these, and I’m going to take you through one of them right now, just to show you what we’re talking about.

So this experiment was for two partners. One of them would tap the rhythm of a song and the other would have to guess what the melody is. This is actually a really fun one to try with, you know, your partner or your kids. If you want to see what this effect is like later tonight or something like that, but I’m going to try it on you right now. So here we go. Try to guess what song this is. (Jan taps rhythm).

Alright. Did you guess what it was? I guarantee you’ve heard the song many times over the last year. And here it goes, “Oh, say, can you see ?” And then you get the idea. And I really have to apologize for my awful singing just now. But anyway, despite that being a song that everyone listening to this podcast has definitely heard at some point in their life, there’s almost zero chance that you actually guessed that. And unsurprisingly, that seemed to be the findings of most of these experiments that have been run. So, it’s really, really hard to guess that, and you’ll probably find unless that, you or your kids or your partner is like a musical savant of some sort, it’s almost impossible to guess.

But what I really like about this experiment is that it’s a perfect metaphor for a lot of things in life. When you have context, it’s extremely easy to know what’s going on. And without it, sometimes it’s impossible. And the curse of expertise is not being able to realize how impossible it is to figure out what is evident to you at the context that you have.

So the application to the legal consultation process is pretty easy to imagine, right? By default, most people speak at the level that they think at. And the curse of expertise in this case, will have you talking about concepts that are built on things that you take for granted, whether you know it or not.

So just like the melody in your head that you’re tapping out, you’re packing hundreds of hours of law school and case experience, life experience, into the statements that you’re making. Right. So you’ve essentially taken the information and chunked up so that you’re able to have a higher-level conversation.

And it’s possible that without explanation, that they’re going to have no idea what you’re talking about. And a lot of times people ask the question, “Why do so many consultations end with, ‘I have to think about it'”? And you know, one of many reasons is that, you know, if you’re not taking this into consideration, you’ve just taken their brain absolutely through the wringer. And this also extends to marketing as well, especially when people have a high degree of specialization. So when you’re specialized in a certain form of practice, as opposed to just being a family lawyer or something like that.

There’s an example that comes to mind that comes from way back in the day. And we haven’t run an immigration campaign in years, but this is one of the examples that came to mind that’s totally along these lines. So we had an attorney that was running immigration campaigns in the New York City area, and we were running this on Google AdWords. So the terms that we were targeting ranged from more general terms like “immigration lawyer”, but we also were targeted the specific visas and their colloquial terms. Right.

So the thing is there’s a lot more money to be made from getting hired to help a wealthy person apply for an EB-5 visa with investment than there is to have helped somebody apply for a green card or, you know, God forbid, an asylum case. And not to say that’s not important work to do, but for the most part, I mean, I want to say for the most part, but for the client, we were working with it, wasn’t what they were looking for.

So when we’re running all these different keywords, we found that the keyword “EB-5 visa” got almost zero search volume, zero clicks, and almost zero calls. In comparison, the term investor visa got a lot more. Why is that the case? Because EB-5 is a term that lawyers use, not people that are looking to hire lawyers, generally speaking.

And one of the very, very interesting things that I’d like to add is that there were some people that came from the keyword “EB-5 visa”, but the type of conversations that they were having were almost always price shopping or somebody who had hired an attorney previously and was looking to jump ship at that point because guess who had told them what the word EB-5 meant? It was another attorney.

So speaking at the level of attorneys is actually really bad for attracting clients in a lot of instances. That’s just one example, but one I think that comes to mind. So I’d actually go so far as to say that the stuff that impresses other attorneys is actually more often than not going to distance you from the average consumer. And, you know, that’s totally alright, if you’re looking to build a practice that’s entirely based on referrals from other attorneys. But if you’re pursuing a more retail strategy going direct to the market, you absolutely need to take this into consideration.

So there’s another concept in psychology that I kind of want to introduce at this point that relates to this. And this is the concept of processing fluency. So processing fluency is literally the amount of effort that it takes your brain to process information, whether that’s visual, auditory, video, smell, you name it. Right? So if you see a lot of the trends in the stuff like app design and user experience, you’ll see like the biggest companies in the world like Google and Facebook are trending towards a very simple, very flat design.

And the reason for that, and a lot of split testing goes into this, but overall it’s because it’s easier for the brain to process, which means there’s less friction on the experience to the end-user. Because at the end of the day, your brain hates doing work. It doesn’t make you a lazy person. It’s true for all of us.

And there are parallels for this in pretty much every domain, you know, pop music is popular for the most part, because it’s easy to process, right? When you hook somebody up to a brain scan, you see dopamine being released when you’re listening to pop music, because your brain anticipates the next note and predictably it’s usually there. In contrast, a lot of people become anxious when they listen to jazz music because it’s really unpredictable, right?

I mean, jazz is absolutely a beautiful art that takes some time to appreciate, but it’s the same thing with more popular art as well. Like things that are easy to understand are usually more popular and we’re all bringing this full circle is going down to the written and spoken word.

And this is something that has been around for years in the marketing space. Direct response copywriters have been split testing written words since the late 1800s with direct mail. And it’s a known fact that simple language sells, beyond the point of discussion. The best copywriters in the world generally recommend writing at no higher than a seventh-grade level. And it’s even better if you can get it down to a fifth-grade level or a fourth-grade level, believe it or not. Now, I know a lot of you might be thinking, won’t this be turning off my sophisticated clients? Don’t those people want to hear the flowery language that proves that I’m an expert and all that stuff.

And the data generally points to no. One of the biggest direct mail industries to this day is actually financial services. And even with, you know, super sophisticated high net worth clients, simple copy ends up winning because of that principle of processing fluency. A sophisticated person may understand what you’re talking about, but in the process of doing that, it’s going to make their brain work, which it doesn’t like.

And if this is down to getting somebody to read a headline or, you know, anything outside of a one-to-one conversation, you’re going to be adding friction to the process, which means I’m just going to keep scrolling on my Facebook feed. I’m going to go to the next listing on Google. I’m going to go to the next listing on Avvo.

So if you can convey the same information, using simple words, short sentences, short clauses, that sort of stuff, you can communicate the same thing while making it easy for their brain to process. And ironically, this is often a lot harder to do when you’re writing or you’re speaking. And there’s actually this, this old quote that I love, I thought it was actually Mark Twain, but I believe it was, oh, I looked this up for the podcast is actually Blaise Pascal, go figure. But he said, “I’m sorry, I wrote you such a long letter. I didn’t have the time to write you a short one.” Which I find interesting. But anyway, if you can pull this off basically, and take a complex concept and speak simply about it, not only are you going to be more persuasive to the high-end customer, but you’re also going to bring in people who may not have that level of fluency.

And I can guarantee you that those people have money too, both, in the collective and also as individuals. Not everyone who’s sophisticated spends their time reading or listening to talk radio or, you know, even has English as a first language. And those people, they have a lot of money in a lot of instances, right? So it’s worth pursuing those people as well.

And then one kind of last phenomenon, I haven’t really seen this study anywhere, but just something I’ve seen in a lot of personal experiences. Basically just a negative reaction to people using really high-level vocabulary. Right. And I wish I had a cool name for this, but just to put it super bluntly, some people get really pissed off when you’re using $10 words.

So to use a personal example, I’m always trying to avoid using technical language whenever I possibly can. And it’s kind of hard sometimes for me to do that. And it’s funny, even after trying this for years and years to make myelf, or tried to not use technical language, some people say, “man, that was really technical.” (Jan laughs).

So it happens to everyone, but you know, I’ve lost people in conversation. I see people losing others in conversation all the time when they make things more complex. And the way that I think this happens to be perceived in the realm of marketing is, and you guys probably have some experience with this, having consumed marketing podcasts is that there’s a type of person that comes off as trying to blind people with science.

Right? And I think it really comes off as self-serving and kind of implies on some level, you can never understand this because you’re not as smart as me. And that’s not everyone that’s gonna interpret like that, but enough people interpret it like that where it’s not worth doing. And I also do think that there is a type of person that uses big words to feel like they’re important, to feel like they’re better than other people. And if that isn’t you, I would recommend not using the $10 words, because there’s a chance that people might mistake you for one of those people. And at the end of the day, it’s just not going to lead you to be very likable and people want to do business with people they find likable.

So to wrap it all up in the end, being lawyerly and using a lot of really high-level language is just generally not going to be as effective and will also actually make you less likable, whether it’s conscious for the person telling you this, or it’s unconscious. And I want to wrap this podcast up with one last thing on the topic, and that is in the realm of choosing creative in general.

And one of the things that we used to deal with all the time was these really, I mean, I Wouldnt call them battles, but not fun to have conversations over intangibles. Like, okay, should we use this photo or do you guys like that photo? Or even, you know, headlines, ad copy, that kind of thing. It’s all subjective at the end of the day. Right? And one of the things that we would hear all the time was “I know my client,” but at the end of the day, if you’ve taken anything from the last 10 minutes or however long we’ve been talking for, is that you are not your client. And because of the curse of knowledge, you’re actually at a slight disadvantage to a random Joe off the street when it comes to guessing what your client wants, because of the curse of knowledge.

And I don’t want you to feel like your hands are tied knowing this, but you know, basically there’s another way. Right? And that’s by testing creative. So if you have an idea and somebody on your team has another idea, or heck, if you have a few ideas and you don’t know which one to go with, then you can always test it.

And this goes for images, copy, headlines or whatever. Always remember that you can test it. I love Mad Men as much as the next guy, but at the end of the day, it’s not really about the big pitch of the boardroom, that battle of personalities and the force of will and all that stuff to get your idea across anymore. At the end of the day, it’s better to know what clients actually will vote with. Watch people’s feet, don’t watch their lips. And you can always run a test on Facebook, Google, or whatever, and just kind of see what people are doing actually. Don’t guess just see what people actually do. So anyways, that’s probably a subject for another podcast, but I hope you enjoyed this one. And remember to keep it simple for your sake and for your client’s sake.

So I’ll see you next time. Tuesday on another episode of the Law Firm Growth Podcast.

Thank you for listening to the Law Firm Growth Podcast for show notes, free resources and more head on over to case fuel.com/podcast. Looking forward to catching up on the next episode.