My first trial was in law school, in Alaska, as an intern. Not long after, I tried a case back home in Massachusetts, still in law school - then eleven more in Rhode Island under the student practice rule, at the Licht Judicial Complex in Providence. Around the same time, I also interned at the Seattle public defender's office - no trials there, just a close look at how a full-time indigent-defense system runs at volume. As a newly licensed lawyer, I moved to Virginia Beach, January 1996 to October 1997, and tried more than 200 bench trials in that first year alone - 300-plus over the full stint - in the General District Courts there, a volume the system was built for, not a personal record. Then I moved back to Massachusetts and stayed 21 years. Four states, five stops, and a habit of comparing systems that never really turned off.
Start with the audit → Email Russell See ServicesMost lawyers learn one system deeply. Comparing four teaches you something else entirely: which parts of winning are universal, and which parts are local.
When you've tried the same kind of case under four different sets of rules, you stop confusing "how it's done here" with "how it has to be done."
That's the whole game in marketing. What wins in Metro Boston doesn't automatically win on Cape Cod, in New Hampshire, or in Michigan. Google rewards different signals in different markets, intake expectations differ, and the competition looks nothing alike. A consultant who has only ever worked one market gives you that market's habits. A consultant trained to compare systems gives you the underlying pattern.
I've told the Nirvana-at-Hampshire-College story elsewhere on this site. Here's the other half of it. I saw the Beastie Boys at Rocky Point Park, Jane's Addiction opening for the Ramones at the Living Room in Providence in September 1988, Nirvana at Club Babyhead in 1991, and Verbal Assault - Newport's own - during law school. Small rooms, close enough to watch exactly how a band earned a crowd that hadn't decided about them yet. Then in 1997 I saw KISS in Virginia, back in full makeup: a completely different kind of show. Nothing was being discovered that night. It was spectacle, engineered for scale, staged to the last detail, and it worked precisely because they knew what show they were putting on and for whom.
And sometimes it's the same band in two different rooms that teaches you the most. GWAR at Green Street Station - a tiny Jamaica Plain club - is a different show than GWAR at the Channel. Same songs, same costumes, but the act has to be recalibrated to the size of the room, and you can watch them do it.
I didn't only learn this from the audience, either. Headlining a show at the Middle East Upstairs is a different job than opening for Ween at the Middle East Downstairs - same building, one floor apart. Headlining a small room, the crowd is already yours and the job is not to lose them. Opening in the bigger room, nobody came for you, and you have thirty minutes to change that. Every law firm's marketing is in one of those two positions, and the first thing I figure out is which one.
Our ideal show was the small one: fifty fans who loved us, plus some of the other bands' fans who hated us - and the hate was part of the product. I juggled. I ate fire. Some nights we served fish sticks to the crowd, in tuxedos - and thirty years later the tomato sauce still hasn't come out of the white one. Some commitments to the bit are permanent. Watching people get mad at your band made the night better for the people who came for you. Most firms are terrified of that math, and it costs them. Marketing that's specific enough to be loved by your exact client will leave some people cold, and that's not a bug. Nobody who saw the fish sticks ever forgot the band - and a firm nobody would ever object to is a firm nobody remembers.
The club show and the arena show are both real. The mistake is running one when the room calls for the other - and law firms make that mistake in their marketing constantly.
A two-lawyer firm in Central Mass trying to market like a statewide billboard operation is playing arena rock to an empty club. A dominant regional firm coasting on word of mouth while competitors build AI visibility is playing an acoustic set in a stadium. Reading which show your market calls for - that's the same pattern recognition, whether you built it in four state courtrooms or a few hundred rock clubs. I happened to build it in both.
Four jurisdictions, four different fights - and each one maps directly onto a marketing problem law firms face today.
My very first trial, ever, during a law school internship - a thin judiciary covering enormous, remote venues, where the physical geography sets the rules more than any rulebook does. It's also the only state where a defendant in a serious criminal case can tell the judge he wants to go fishing for six months, and the judge says fine. It only took one case there to see how differently a market can run.
The marketing lesson: every market has local rules that look absurd from the outside and are non-negotiable from the inside. Advice that ignores them fails, no matter how good it sounded.
Where the volume started: 11 cases tried while still in law school, under the student practice rule, at the Licht Judicial Complex in Providence - not long after my one case back home in Massachusetts. A small, dense bar where every judge and opposing counsel knows every lawyer's history - reputation inside a tight community moved outcomes as much as argument did.
The marketing lesson: how reviews, referrals, and standing compound in a small market - and how fast they cut the other way.
January 1996 to October 1997, my first stretch as a licensed lawyer: General District Court ran on a de novo system, where a bench trial cost you almost nothing to take, because losing wasn't final. Appeal it, and you got a brand-new trial in Circuit Court, as if the first one never happened. That's how 200-plus bench trials fit into that first year alone, and 300-plus over the full stint - the system itself was built for volume.
The marketing lesson: a cheap, low-stakes way to test something fast beats one expensive bet every time. Run the inexpensive version first, and save the real budget for what survives it.
My relationship with Massachusetts courts didn't start with the 21-year run everyone associates with me - it started with one case, tried while I was still in law school, years before Virginia. When I came back as a licensed lawyer, I stayed: 2001 to 2022, in every district court in the state that existed during that time. Dense procedural rules, aggressive motion practice, and no two courthouses that ran quite the same way.
The marketing lesson: every courthouse is its own local market. Winning statewide means winning town by town - which is exactly how local SEO actually works.
For criminal defense lawyers who want marketing guidance grounded in real courtroom experience across real jurisdictions - not one market's habits sold as universal truth.
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