We recently sat down with Quinn McCartney, who leads content and social strategy at Lawyers for Justice, an employment law firm based in Glendale, California. In the span of a year, the firm has tripled the number of states it practices in and doubled the size of its marketing team. Quinn came up through law firm video marketing before joining the firm full-time, and he had a lot to say about branding, hiring, email, vendors, and where AI actually fits into a law practice. Here are the takeaways worth stealing.
Branding is for the day you’re not needed yet
Quinn draws a clean line between branding and lead generation. Branding, as he defines it, is “instilling the idea and reputation of your firm in people’s heads whether or not they need an attorney right now.” The goal isn’t applause today — it’s being the first name that comes to mind a year from now, when someone actually needs help.
That’s also the logic behind giving different platforms different jobs. Lawyers for Justice used to run the same content across every channel — what Quinn calls “peanut butter spreading.” Once they built LinkedIn-specific content aimed at hiring prospects and referral partners instead of consumers, LinkedIn engagement doubled the previous year’s total in five months. The lesson: know who’s actually on each platform and stop assuming one piece of content should work everywhere.
Every market has its own channel mix — and that’s fine
Not every practice area should chase the same playbook. Quinn pointed out that probate and employment cases tend to do well on paid social because the buying decision is more emotional and impulsive, while something like estate planning — a once-in-a-lifetime purchase for most people — leans harder on search intent and direct mail, where targeting can get very specific by household. The takeaway isn’t “do more social” or “do more search.” It’s matching the channel to how your specific client actually shops for a lawyer.
A commodity business needs a differentiator, not just more marketing
Quinn’s framing here is worth sitting with: to an outsider, one attorney can look identical to the next — like rice from three different vendors. The only way to break that perception is through messaging that actually shows the difference, whether that’s years in practice, dollars recovered, response time, or win rate. Without a stated differentiator, a firm is just competing on who shows up first or spends the most.
This is exactly how the “Non-Stuffy Attorneys” brand got built. It didn’t come from a branding exercise — it came from reading over a thousand five-star and one-star Google reviews and noticing a pattern: clients wanted an attorney who was relatable and explained things in plain language, not legal jargon. That single insight became a tagline, a trademark, and — by Quinn’s account — the single biggest driver of the firm’s growth from a garage startup to $5 million in revenue in five years.
Position the client as the hero, not the firm
Quinn is a big proponent of the StoryBrand framework: customers see themselves as the hero of their own story, and a brand that talks about how great it is will always underperform a brand that talks about the client’s problem and positions itself as the guide. For an employment firm, that means messaging isn’t “we’re the strongest law firm” — it’s “you’re a hard worker who’s been wronged, and you need someone in your corner to fight for what you’re owed.” Interestingly, Quinn noted that this isn’t a framework only book-readers stumble into — several people on his team independently arrived at the same “guide, not hero” instinct without ever reading the book. The principle tends to reveal itself once you actually listen to your clients.
Email marketing is underrated because the setup cost is so low
Quinn’s biggest change to the firm’s email program was simple: give every email a single, specific objective — “Are you underpaid? Find out now” instead of a generic monthly roundup. He also runs consistent subject-line split tests, sending two versions to a small slice of the list and rolling the winner out to the rest. A 1% lift in open rate might sound trivial, but on a list of 10,000, that’s 100 additional people seeing the message — from a change that takes minutes to set up.
He also flagged a common mistake: treating every email like a first-contact email. New subscribers are hottest right after they opt in, so that’s where a tight welcome sequence earns its keep. After that, a monthly cadence is usually enough — legal services aren’t a weekly-purchase category, and over-emailing just trains people to ignore you.
Vendors will cherry-pick their wins — so learn to read your own numbers
Quinn’s clearest warning for smaller firms: vendors report highlights, not full pictures. If overall website clicks dropped this month but keyword rankings improved, guess which number shows up in the report. His advice is blunt — learn to pull your own metrics so you can verify what a vendor tells you, rather than staying locked into an underperforming relationship because you can’t independently check the work.
On contract length, his rule of thumb is that it should match how long it takes to know if the work is any good. SEO needs months to show results, so a six-month-plus minimum makes sense there. A social media tool or a piece of software should be tested before a firm commits to a year, since you’ll often know within weeks whether it’s a fit.
Hiring creative people: portfolio over resume, trial over interview
Quinn’s hiring process skips the resume almost entirely in favor of a portfolio and a trial project — actual work samples, followed by pointed questions to figure out whether a candidate actually led the work or just touched it. He also treats creative judgment as the harder thing to coach: legal knowledge can be taught, but a flat, uninspired idea generator is a much tougher fix. His rule for managing a creative team once it’s hired: give them as little structure as possible, but no less — clear brand guardrails, then room to experiment inside them.
Where AI actually helps in a law practice
The most concrete example from the conversation: the firm faced a complex probate question, and a general-purpose AI tool gave an answer that “kind of made sense” but turned out to be wrong after the team spent hours researching it manually. Quinn then loaded the actual Florida statutes into a source-grounded tool (Google’s NotebookLM) and got the correct answer in seconds — because the tool was restricted to the uploaded source material rather than pulling from anywhere.
The firm now uses the same approach during estate-planning signings: rather than a paralegal walking a client through a 130-page document set section by section, the documents are summarized in advance, cutting two-hour signings down to about thirty minutes. Quinn’s framing is the right way to think about AI in a firm: use it to eliminate busy work and free staff up for more client-facing time, not to replace judgment on a legal question. General-purpose AI tools tend to be agreeable by default, so any use for review or fact-checking needs an explicit instruction to critique — not just confirm.
The through-line
Almost every point Quinn made comes back to the same idea: know your specific audience well enough to be genuinely useful to them, then get honest, verifiable data about whether what you’re doing is working. Branding, channel selection, email cadence, vendor contracts, hiring, and AI tools are all just different levers for the same goal — and the firms winning right now are the ones willing to look at their own numbers instead of assuming.
The views shared in this conversation are those of the guest and do not represent the official position of Lawyers for Justice.