Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome to The Relay, the legal show for personal injury law firm owners, presented by Lexamica, the number one attorney referral network. I'm your host, Gabriel Stiritz. Today we're joined by Nate Skinner, Chief Marketing Officer at 8am, formerly AffiniPay, fresh off of a major rebrand and expansion into new professional service markets. Nate brings 25 years of experience from Oracle, Salesforce, and Infido, and was named by Business Insider as one of the top 20 most important executives shaping the future of marketing technology.
We're discussing what the rebrand means for law firms and the future of legal technology.
What I'm very excited about is to get the inside look at how this came about from Nate, someone who deeply understands the power of a brand. We know that this is so important to you in your law firms and in our industry. And we have a really cool opportunity here to see behind the curtain for a huge rebrand that is very relevant to services that you use. So when the leading payment processor in legal announces a major rebrand, that's a signal worth paying attention to. Today we're going to unpack what 8am's expansion means for law firms. What stays the same, what changes and how you should think about technology partnerships going forward. Nate, welcome to the show.
[00:01:08] Speaker B: Thanks for having me, Gabriel. Really great to be here.
[00:01:11] Speaker A: First of all, 8am, this is all new for us. We've got a conference coming up. We've got the rebrand. You're coming in. You're making waves. Everybody's heard of Infinipay Forever, Law Pay, My Case, Case Peer. What's. What's going on? Why you. You launched with a big splash in industry that really doesn't do rebrands.
[00:01:29] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, it's a great question. You know, we found some interesting. Well, let me pause and say you don't just do this just to do it right. People that are not in marketing, a lot of my friends and my network, especially as I got to talk to customers and prospects through this journey.
People think of brand. Everything from brand is just fonts and color to brand as logo. You know, what it looks like on paper, on a mark, but that none of those are correct. I mean, yes, brand is those things, but it's so much more. It's how you, how you show up for your customers. It's your purpose, your vision, your mission. And brand is what brings that to life. And so I would first say we don't take things like that lightly. In that vein, Gabriel, one of the things we did was a lot of homework and research to understand was this necessary? Is, is this something we need to do?
And fascinating insight that we came away from. This is going back to, you know, end of 24.
We did some customer and market research and found very few of the customers of the, the products. You just named my case LawPay, case peer, especially for the personal injury space. They know those company names like they know those product names. LawPay is the industry leading payments platform, Case Peer, a leading personal injury solution for practice management. They did not know very often, more often than I was. I was, I had no idea as I came into this job last September. So September 24th, those folks that are loyal, passionate customers of ours and partners of ours did not know about our parent company, Affinipay. And it was really interesting. Like we'd go to conferences, TLTF or one of the large legal conferences. And if you said, I work at Infinite Pay, people didn't know who you were. I'll tell a quick story just because this is exactly the point here in one particular personal moment. I do volunteer work for Leukemia and Lymphoma Society in Atlanta, where I live. And the lead on the. So basically the way this works is LLS finds volunteers to run fundraising programs throughout the year. There's a very large one in Atlanta called Light the Night. Okay. The LLS team found me, introduced me to the professional executive they had leading the private industry, the private sector's efforts to raise money for Light the Night. He happens to be a partner at one of the largest law firms in Atlanta called Morris, Manning and Martin.
I meet him, his name's Wyatt. We have lunch together early on in the process. And he says, so tell me about affinipe. And I said, well, do you know Law Pay? I was like, oh, yeah, we're customers. He did not know that Affinipe was the parent.
So that was just an anecdotal moment of like, this is why this matters. We want to be able to tell our customers an integrated story. We want to talk about all that we can do for them, not just functional capability like payments or practice management or timekeeping or expense management. We want to be able to show up as a partner for everything, to run your business as a law firm. And the name 8am gives us that ability to recast the company in that light.
[00:04:33] Speaker A: Fascinating.
So, yeah, so curious. So you, you see that there's value in having a unified brand. So this is a conversation that, you know, I've, I've, I've heard many times, is like, do you have very specific Brands that serve specific segments or customers, or do you. Do you create one global one? So what's the value driver of saying, because like, everyone knows lapay, people know My case, it's huge. It's all over. What's the value to you and having all of that mentally associated now in a single brand name?
[00:05:05] Speaker B: Well, yeah, I mean, the answer is it takes what you just said and makes sure people know that they're together. So 8am takes something that's fragmented, like Law Pay, in my case, that people don't even know. Like our customers do not know that those products come from the same company.
And so we have a Law Pay customer that does not know they could actually manage their practice with Case Peer or My Case casepear for your personal injury. So we wanted to take something that's fragmented and largely separate and create one name, one promise, one experience that every customer can understand.
And so we, you know, we want my case and LawPay to be recognized because they are right. LawPay is the leading payments platform for legal professionals in the United States.
We don't want to throw that away. In fact, we haven't thrown away, as you see, our launch of our brand, it's 8am Law Pay. 8am My case for a reason.
But what we wanted to do was connect them to each other because our customers weren't aware many times that, yeah, you're a Law Pay customer, but you could also, we can also help you with this. Some of the things that casepeer could do, or you're a case peer or my case customer, you could be running your payments on our, on our payments platform. They. They just didn't know. And so it's a disservice to our customers to not show up with everything we've got that can help them. And that's part of the reason the brand is such a unifying moment for us.
[00:06:21] Speaker A: Yeah, you're not. So it's interesting because in some ways you're not reacting branding. You're adding to your brand a unifying element across it. Because if people don't know that my AffiniPay is a company, then, oh, well, I know Law Pair. No, My Case, you're really creating this new layer that brings them together. Rather than saying, hey, we're going to discard the old brand, you're bringing in a new thing that ties it together. Which is interesting because one of the big things that's happening across personal injury right now is that you have law firms that are buying each other. So you'll get, you know a big law firm over here in Texas. They want to expand to Louisiana. They don't bring their brand in. They're actually bringing, they're, they'll, you know, they buy out another law firm and then they maintain that brand. And then similar to what you're talking about, there's no connectivity between the two. And some, you know, some law firms have bought multiple other firms and so they are exactly, barely exactly you're talking about there's no parent brand associated with it. How do you think about like when you go into this, you've got these parallel brands that are operating head. How do you navigate like you decided not to rebrand everything as 8am with various functionalities. You kept core brands and then you established a new one. Like how did you, how is that the end result of, of the process?
[00:07:35] Speaker B: Yeah, it was a, it's a great point. I mean one of the things because we finna pay the parent company acquired my case back in 2022. We had the payments, this is a 20 year old company. And so over those 20 years we had grown and evolved. The legal payments platform had acquired the acquisition of my case for example.
So we could have done it back then and we chose not to. And so to answer your question, part of the confusion we created was because we did not bring them together.
We have to this day customers out there probably in your audience that own law pay that do not realize that my case is from the same company.
And that is both a bad business outcome for us because we don't have the opportunity to show up with more to offer.
But it's also kind of dysfunctional for the customer because now they got to go figure out how to stitch other vendors stuff together and buying point solutions when they could get a platform from one provider. And so I think to answer your question and oh by the way, there's a very specific answer to that I think is good for your audience to know. We did research on brand, not just our new name but the quality of the brands we have my case law pay case period docket wise for legal professionals.
We, we needed to understand is there high recall with our audience for those names. And we did that market research and determined that there indeed was. So where my case and LawPay were very high in recall case pair as well. Like if I said to you, hey Gabriel, what software do you think of when I say personal injury practice management?
Out of a hundred attorneys, personal injury attorneys, you asked that, you know, 80 of those hundred would say case peer or my case if you ask them what's a payments platform for legal professionals, almost all of them, like 95% or 95 out of a hundred would say law pay, but none of them, literally almost zero, said affinipay, which was the name of the company that was holding these various brands together.
[00:09:31] Speaker A: And so, so, so you're retaining so essentially saying like, there's a lot of value in the brands, like there's brand equity, like it has actual like monetary value to hold onto those.
But you can't, people aren't connecting the dots. So you're a multi brand, you have multiple brand assets and you need a way to tie them in together. I mean, is that primarily like a cross sell, upsell opportunity or is that more of a. Like we just have customers that are confused and they think that these are separate companies and why are they, why am I working with both of them?
[00:10:02] Speaker B: Yeah, it's both. I mean, it's, it's an opportunity for us to show up more completely for our customers and it's an opportunity for the customers that we already have to understand.
You know, what, what is brand? At the end of the day, it's about trust. Right? You don't buy things in our consumer lives, you and I both know, like you buy shoes from brands, you know, you don't buy some shoes like you never heard of. It's just, that's a brand thing. And so by bringing them together, you show up as a, you know, I've been a Lafayette customer for 10 years and you have this other solution I could be using. I didn't know that. That's, that's a trust thing. And so bringing them together a recognizes the value of each of them independently. That's why we, we didn't like throw out my case or lawpate or case peers name. There's. That would never help our customers. What we instead did was say they're related to each other, they're from the same company. A company that you come to trust over 20 years of existence. And all we did was put more energy into the parent name and, you know, Affinity was a great name when we were just a payments company. But we're much more than that now and we have been for the last couple of years. So it was time to show up more completely for, for our customers.
[00:11:11] Speaker A: Yeah, very cool. Going way back, I'd love to hear like, you've been in the marketing forever. How did you learn?
What is your philosophy on branding and what, what are the influences that you draw from? If I said, how do you Go build a brand. How do you do a rebrand? Like, what are you drawing on when you're thinking about that?
[00:11:31] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, for, for one, it's really three core elements, I think, Gabriel. One is first. The first element is do you understand the power of brand when it's done properly? So what does great look like versus that? Right.
And one of the early recalls, because your comment about. I've been in this forever, it feels like forever for sure.
When I was, my first software job was at a no name software company, 28 employees in Littleton, Colorado back in 1999. I was an inside sales rep. When I would call prospective customers. People who had dropped by a booth or downloaded a white paper in the early days of downloading things or bought our cd to that time, they wouldn't all call me back. They didn't know who I was or why they should bother right now. There were big, larger, meaningful market leaders in the space we were in and those people did get called back. So Fast forward to 2009. For the first time in my, at that time, 10 year software career, I joined a software company that had a very solid brand and reputation for customer centricity and trust, which was Salesforce.
All of a sudden at Salesforce, I was a product marketer for the first time. Before that, I was always in sales and building, you know, a book of business. When I called people, they call me back and that was, I was like, huh, that's interesting. I mean it seems obvious, but people recognize your name, they call you back, right? And so that was like fundamental. Number one is brand has long tail implications. And the strength of brand matters. Not necessarily always today, but it will someday. And you have to invest in it now, not later.
The second implication is that brand is more than just as a.
[00:13:19] Speaker A: Sorry, I'm just, just to call that. I mean that's, that's huge, right? Like long tail, like the long term implications of brand are absolutely massive. I think that's something that it's really hard for a lot of business owners to justify. There's the tyranny of the urgent, like I just got to do, do, do, do, do versus like okay, I need to make this investment on something that has a time horizon of years.
Have you ever had like, and I know you've largely been involved in brand, but like for someone who's on the fence, who's like, man, is now the right time to invest in my brand? Like, what, what would you say to a law firm owner? Because a lot of them are listeners have Brands, and some of them don't, though, and they're buying leads and they're taking inbound referrals, and they. Nobody knows their name. Like, what, what would get you off the couch and say, now is the day to start my brand?
[00:14:01] Speaker B: Yeah, well, I'd actually change, say yesterday was the day to start, not, not today. It's like, we always make the mistake. We do this later instead of early, and that's a mistake. I would say if you think you're getting good inbound requests from customers and you haven't invested in brand, the question is, what happens if you did?
Because the thing about brand is next year's customers are responding to the brand work you're doing this year. This is like a very simple framework, but at any point, so you would.
[00:14:30] Speaker A: Say, just as a general rule of thumb, it's like 12 months. Like whatever I'm doing on a brand perspective, I should expect 12 months for that to kick in.
[00:14:39] Speaker B: Well, it's. And the, and it rolls right. So, like, the work you're doing now, you can expect to have an impact in, in 12 months. The work you're doing in three months will have an impact from that moment 12 months forward. So it's, it's, it's the long tail, it's not the here and the now. You know, having someone in your office calling, you know, potential clients or potential new customers and hoping they know who you are as opposed to hanging up the phone because they've never heard of you. By investing in brand today, next year, that phone call is going to go different because they're gonna. Like, I've seen that billboard. I understand those guys, like, look, for this audience, it's about trust, right? I mean, if you're in the personal injury space or you're a law firm, whether it's a single, a solo, or a larger one, your customers are betting that you're going to get them the best possible outcome. And that whether that's for themselves or for their family or for their firm, and that is rooted in trust. If they don't trust that you can do that better than others, they're not going to call you. Well, then how do you create that trust if you don't know who these people are? That's brand.
[00:15:40] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, no, that, that's helpful. I think that it can be very intimidating to, to move from the organic brand that I've created, whatever that looks like, family, friends, community, professional networks, to that first, I'm going to take money out of my checkbook and go spend that money on brand, I think that's really scary. And, and because I mean it took me in my professional journey a long time to see okay, this thing, the chances of it succeeding are base are a hundred percent. But also it's never going to happen on day one. So I just think that's an important thing to drill down into. So you were saying you were at the no name software company, you moved to Salesforce and all of a sudden the name means something. That's, that's an aha moment for you. That's so cool.
[00:16:20] Speaker B: Yeah. And, and just to be clear, they invested a lot of money in Brandt. Like they, they had caricatures and they had a tagline and you know, they were. And then you ask yourself this. Now this is 2009. Your audience may not know the landscape of Salesforce competitive system but at that time Microsoft, Oracle and SAP were the big behemoths in the space and Salesforce was the ankle biting up and comer. But Brand helped them compete and punch way beyond their weight class because they showed up with a story and a trust that they created with their customers that these other behemoths were not doing. And so I want to add one other thing though to your comment because you said, you know, write a check today for Brand. It doesn't have to be quite that stark.
[00:17:02] Speaker A: Right.
[00:17:03] Speaker B: You can start your brand journey as a firm with just your vision and your mission. Like what is when? I mean, and I don't mean to oversimplify but honestly it's like our vision at 8am Our vision is powering a world where professionals thrive. Now that sounds like fluffy. Maybe to people who aren't familiar with the work that goes into something like this. But we worked as an exec team and with our customers and our partners on every one of those words. We wanted our vision to be something bigger than what we're currently doing. It lays down the future. It says we're going to be where you're going to be.
Our mission is empowering our professionals with the most trusted innovative technology that we deliver in a world class outcomes for their clients and customers. Meaning when you bet on 8am you're betting on technology that helps you deliver for your clients. We took a ton of time to tease those words together, remove fluff and nonsense and focus in on because the vision is who we are and why we exist. And a mission is what we do, how we do it. Right.
Your audience can take just, just take a minute, take an hour, take a month to play with those two Concepts.
And that can be the work you do because then you can have a tagline comes naturally out of that. Your billboard comes naturally out of that. The way you talk to customers and your, the way your emails are signed or the letterhead you use, these things can be consistent. And consistency is brand.
You know, there is a reason that the golden arches don't change into the golden arcs, right? I mean, they are what they are for a reason. It's recognition, it's mental recall. And so consistency is key. And I would just say brand investment doesn't have to be a big check you write. In fact, I'd start with the basics and the fundamentals and then think about the check writing later.
[00:18:54] Speaker A: Yeah, no, that's a, that's a really good call out. Cause I think I was, I was thinking more about spending on your first like external marketing campaign. But you're right. Like you really should have your brand figured out before you're spending money on the getting that reach out to other people. You gotta know who you are before you're spending money to promote that.
[00:19:10] Speaker B: I mean that, that's such a good one. Gabriel, we, we just went through this. You know, our rebrand project took us the better part of nine months. I mean, in hindsight it was more like a couple of years. But it was broken into two parts because we paused it for a while and then came back to it.
And, and, and that's a good thing because we got it even better. But that comment's a really important one because what are you going to write in the ad if you haven't nailed who you are and who you're for and why you exist? In other words, what differentiates you, you know, Gabriel, LLP or llc. And you're a two person, three person, five person firm. What makes your firm different and better than others?
That it has to be something about your character that's about your company, which is about your brand. And so before you write a check for a billboard or an ad placement or some, you know, some other kind of investment you make in a market from the marketing side, you have to nail who you are and who you're for. Otherwise. What are you saying?
[00:20:06] Speaker A: Yeah, which leads me to a question that I'd love to know from you. And I'm going to say this in the harshest way possible, but Affinity is a really generic brand name. And I mean, you know, you're, you know, it's gone now, so who cares? But you know, Affinity just doesn't really say a lot of anything. So how do you, as you're, as you're rebranding, as you're creating brand and narrative, like people remember stories, like specific compelling ones. How do you create a brand for something that's, you know, it's got multiple sub brands, it's got, you know, you got billions of billion dollar company that has multiple holdings. How do you create a memorable brand in the face of what I would assume is a lot of pressure to end up with something that's generic because you're just like, you've got all these stakeholders and different constituents. Like how do you navigate that? How do you drive through? Because brand is, is one thing, right? Brand is never 10 things. That's not a brand, That's a list of items. That's a word cloud.
[00:20:57] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. Look, the answer is it's a lot of research, right? We did a lot of user and customers testing and it started with vision and mission. I mentioned that, like who do we want, who are we and why are we here? Regardless of name, take the name off the top. Who are we and why are we here? That, that needs to be defined. Regardless of name, color, logo, just who are you and why do you exist? Once you do that, then you start to play with that, with customers. You know, if what I would tell your, your audience, ask the last 10 customers who you successfully worked with through their, their engagement with you, what was it about your firm, why you. That will inform your vision and mission. And then it starts to become okay, who do we want to be for the future?
And for us, it was like the name 8am represents a new day. Our customers were telling us, look, in my profession as a legal professional, every day is an opportunity to go win. Every day is an opportunity to win a case or find a new case or onboard a customer every day. For immigration attorneys and docket wise customers, every day is a new chance to get that family the visa they need or that person who's relocating to that other country the visas they need. It's represented this new beginning every day.
They also kept on telling us this was all research we did. Our customers kept saying, the one thing I can't buy or earn is time.
And so how can you help me get more time? Because I'm busy practicing law. I don't have a lot of time for the business of law, bookkeeping, time tracking, expense management, all the stuff that we can help them with getting paid. Right. And so when you take those things together, the new beginning, the promise of action, the promise of a partner that can help me navigate complex Situations, you know, compliance and all those things.
Ultimately, then it landed on the name 8am and our brand story. That's the work that your firms want to do too. What makes you unique and what do you want to pull through as the common thread? I see billboards all the time in the personal injury space. And you can, if you tease them. As a marketer, I read them with scrutiny because I'm trying to understand that the essence of what this person's saying, they do differently.
Sometimes it's, I'll get you the biggest check.
Sometimes it's, I'm gonna get you everything you deserve. Which is not about the money. It's more about, you know, respect for your family and yourself and the situation. But the nuance is definitely there. People have taken the time. Now, unfortunately, I think there's a lot of ad agency, marketing agency type folks out there that would love to extract money from your audience. And you don't have to do that. Take the time to do it yourself. Ask five or ten customers, why us? Why now? And see what they say. You'll be surprised. The problem? Telling you your brand story only because you asked.
[00:23:46] Speaker A: Yeah. Or they're going to tell you how bad you are and then you go fix that and then go get a good brand.
Because your brand can be. Your brand can be a negative. Well, Nate, look, we could go on for a long time. I really appreciate you taking time to chat about this. Obviously, you're an expert in the space. You've got the conference coming up. I would say if you're a lawyer and you want to know more about brand, I'm. You should reach out to Nate or Nate's team. I mean, he. He really is one of the top guys in the space and super fun to have a chance to chat with you. Nate, obviously, at Lexi Amica, we're here building our brand from scratch. And I can tell you personally that I've been to 80 conferences over the past two years, and for the first two thirds of those, we didn't get boost traffic. Where you're there, you're out there, you're shaking hands. It's all about outbound, outbound, outbound. Even in the past couple of months, people are coming up saying, hey, I know you, I've seen you somewhere. And it's like, wow, that took a long time to even build enough brand to get that. But you're right. Like, it's a long term investment that once you start to build that trust and people are walking up and saying, hey, I know you, that's like, the greatest feeling in the world. So I can personally attest to the power of the brand and why you should do that long term value creation. So, Nate, thank you so much for being on the show, and congrats on the big rebrand.
[00:24:58] Speaker B: Yeah, thank you so much. And I'll see you at Kaleidoscope in September in Austin.
[00:25:02] Speaker A: Abs. Absolutely. Thanks. Bye.
[00:25:04] Speaker B: Bye.
