How This Attorney Graduated Law School at 41 and Built His Practice from Scratch

An Interview with Social Security Disability Attorney Burke Barclay

Burke Barclay never planned on becoming a lawyer.

He owned a home building business but had to start over during the 2008 recession. He was broke and needed to restart his professional life.

So at 37 years old he decided

to go to law school.

After graduating, Burke decided to open his practice in his home state of Texas, focusing on Social Security Disability cases.

He knew he needed to advertise and find a way to bring in clients. He felt like he had enough SEO knowledge to get started. In hindsight, he acknowledges he probably did more damage than good. He also didn’t have enough money to pay for a website, so he built it himself and says, "It was awful. But at least I was on the internet."

He took a $1,000 graduation gift from a family friend and went to Martindale-Nolo. He worked with them for years, focused on lead generation. But it became very expensive. He only had a 10% retention rate on the leads he received. He describes Martindale-Nolo as "a place to start, but not a place to stay."

He also tried Google AdWords, but didn't sign any clients from that effort.

After his father passed away, Burke shut down his practice to run the family cement business. After 2 years, he restarted his firm and had to dedicate a large budget to reacquire clients.

He says when Convert It reached out, it was a nice change of pace.

His retention rate is around 60-70% (compared to just 10% with Martindale-Nolo).

Burke notes that Convert It's leads are different - these prospects are making the effort to pick up the phone and call him. "It's rare that I have a bad phone call, really."

Burke is signing an average of 10 clients every month. This keeps him and his one employee, Shannon, very busy.

In fact, he and Shannon decided to scale back on their other advertising strategies because they receive so many clients from Convert It.

They've even had to rearrange their daily schedules to accommodate the influx of calls they tend to receive in the afternoon.

Before he became a client, Burke spent 25% of his time working on marketing. Now?

"I put zero effort into my marketing campaign because Convert It does it for me."

Burke describes working with Convert It as more of "a feeling of a partnership than anybody else I've done business with."

He says he has "zero complaints. I'm really happy for the money I spend with you. It's a lot of bang for the buck."

His advice to attorneys just starting out? "Being an attorney is no different than any other profession. At the end of the day, it's still a business. Treat it like a business. You just gotta want it. You gotta want it and be willing to do whatever it takes."

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