Robert Ingalls - Law Pods

Louis Goodman / Robert Ingalls - Transcript

[00:00:03] Louis Goodman: Welcome to Love Thy Lawyer, where we talk with attorneys about their lives and careers. I'm your host, Louis Goodman. Today we welcome Robert Ingalls to the podcast. Mr. Ingalls is a recovering attorney speaker and the founder of LawPods, a podcast marketing agency for law firms. He considers himself one of the luckiest people alive.

I met him just as an elevator door was closing on my arm. And if that were not enough, perhaps most impressive is that Robert Ingalls is a longboard skateboarder with an extensive collection of decks. Robert Ingalls, welcome to Love Thy Lawyer. 

[00:00:50] Robert Ingalls: Hey, I appreciate it. That was an excellent intro too, and that was a funny happenstance of meeting in the elevator. Just the way we met and then it was like, you see law on my shirt, and you're like, are you a lawyer? I was like, I am a lawyer, 

[00:01:02] Louis Goodman: And you saw Love Thy Lawyer on my conference badge and went, oh, are you a lawyer? 

[00:01:08] Robert Ingalls: Right. It's nice. There's not that many lawyers at a podcast convention. 

[00:01:13] Louis Goodman: Right. And just to bring everybody up to speed, Robert and I met at the Pod Fest conference in, I guess it was January, earlier this year.

It was just a phenomenal conference with wonderful people. Robert and I met there and we said, Hey, I've gotta get you on my podcast. And so here he is. And so again, thank you so much for being here. Where are you speaking to us from right now? 

[00:01:39] Robert Ingalls: I am in Raleigh, North Carolina. 

[00:01:41] Louis Goodman: Can you tell us a little bit about the type of business, the type of work that you do right now?

[00:01:48] Robert Ingalls: Yeah. We create marketing podcasts for law firms. So if a law firm wants a podcast but doesn't really understand the ins and the outs of it. All the angles, how to put it together, how to get it out in the world, how to market it. We do that. They do the talking, we do the rest. And the most important thing for us is how can we make it easy for our clients to have a quality podcast that is covering the goals that they wanna cover with it?

[00:02:14] Louis Goodman: Well, I wish I'd met you five years ago. I love doing the podcast. And so for any lawyers out there who wanna do a podcast, you know. Whether you get into it through LawPods or someplace else, I strongly encourage it. It's a lot of fun and a good thing to do. 

[00:02:30] Robert Ingalls: Yeah. I tell people, be careful because that's how it started for me.

It started playing around in my spare bedroom and then in my law office at night, I started a podcast at my law office and within two years the office was done. I was like, I'm never gonna do this anymore. And you know, over a period of time it turned into my full-time career. 

[00:02:52] Louis Goodman: Where are you from originally?

[00:02:55] Robert Ingalls: So I grew up in, right outside a little town called Washington, North Carolina. They are very proud of the fact that it is the first, the original Washington in the United States. It has about 12,000 people in it. Cute, quaint little town on the river. Then I did, I spent 13 years in Charlotte. That's where I practiced law, that's where I met my wife and started a family. And then we moved to Raleigh almost four years ago to be a little bit closer to family, but still be in a proper city. 

[00:03:23] Louis Goodman: Where'd you go to college? 

[00:03:25] Robert Ingalls: I went to East Carolina University, go Pirates. 

[00:03:29] Louis Goodman: And when you graduated from East Carolina, you ultimately went to law school. Did you go straight through or did you take some time off between college and law school? 

[00:03:38] Robert Ingalls: So I took some time off, but not 

[00:03:40] Louis Goodman: What did you do? 

[00:03:41] Robert Ingalls: Between college and law school? I took it off. I took time. I took about maybe four years off in the middle of undergrad. 

[00:03:47] Louis Goodman: Okay. 

[00:03:47] Robert Ingalls: I was having a little too much fun. I took a little time off and then went back to college when I was 25 and then finished in two and a half years and went directly to law school. 

[00:03:59] Louis Goodman: So you went back to college and you ultimately went to law school. Where'd you go to school in for law? 

[00:04:05] Robert Ingalls: I went Charlotte School of Law. 

[00:04:07] Louis Goodman: Now, when you graduated from law school, can you talk a little bit about working in law itself as an attorney?

[00:04:17] Robert Ingalls: Yeah. When I got to law school, I immediately, I mean, within the first couple weeks I was like, I mean, it just, it did not speak to me. It was so much harder than. I don't know, just anything I'd done at that point in my life really wasn't that hard. I was kind of skating by, just kind of skating by on baked in intelligence and taking sprints when I needed to.

And man, everybody at law school was intelligent and driven. Yeah. And that was humbling, very humbling. Everybody was really motivated, and so that was challenging. But I just kept thinking, okay, I'm gonna get through this. I don't, you know, I'm gonna lean in, I'm gonna get through this and it's gonna be better on the other side.

This is the toll I have to pay to get where I want to go. And then I got into practice and I started doing it and it was cool. You know, there was that initial feeling of, I've made it, I'm wearing the suit, I'm standing up in court, I'm doing the thing I've always wanted to do. Like, how cool is this? But man, that wears off quick.

[00:05:20] Louis Goodman: What sort of practice was it? 

[00:05:21] Robert Ingalls: I started in criminal defense. That's what I went to school for. 

[00:05:23] Louis Goodman: Oh, okay. Yeah. 

[00:05:24] Robert Ingalls: Like that was, that was my dream. That was what I wanted to do. And I did enjoy it to a degree, but it was a lot more emotionally trying than I could have ever expected. 

[00:05:38] Louis Goodman: Yeah. 

[00:05:38] Robert Ingalls: I helped a lot of really good people out of tough situations. I helped people who I truly believe were not guilty. I helped people who had done some silly things and found themselves in some bad situations, but they were good people. 

[00:05:53] Louis Goodman: Yeah. 

[00:05:53] Robert Ingalls: But that, it felt like that was such a slim majority of what I did. I felt like every day I was the villain in somebody's movie, and that was not something I was prepared for.

And it was very hard on me to have those feelings because on any given day, somebody's mad at me. It's the victim whose boyfriend or husband has a allegedly done something to her. It's her family. It's the DA, it's the judge on a given day. And sometimes if I'm, you know, if I'm lucky, my client's not mad at me too, right? 

[00:06:32] Louis Goodman: Right. 

[00:06:33] Robert Ingalls: And yeah, 

[00:06:35] Louis Goodman: I do criminal defense, so I understand completely, you know. 

[00:06:39] Robert Ingalls: You're working, you're working with the DA, you're all working together against me. And, and I get it. I know, I mean, I understand it, but it was, it was so challenging to feel like that. And I found myself, I was on the appointed list.

I was in private practice, but most of my work came from the appointed list. And I found myself in domestic violence court a lot. And that, I mean, I think that's the thing that ultimately did me in. Was meeting these men and seeing the terrible things that they had been engaged in. Seeing these images, having to then try these cases, and what I felt like, I felt like I was, my job frequently was to undermine the credibility of people who had been victimized by my client.

And somebody has to do this job and I'm glad there are people like you still doing it. It's necessary. It's one of the most important things that jobs that can be done is especially in these moments in time where we worry about governmental overreach, the lawyers are even more important, but it wasn't for me.

It was tearing me up. People would say you have to compartmentalize, you have to leave that at the office. I don't have that. Not, I didn't come equipped with that software, to leave it at the office. Everything that I do in my life goes everywhere I go, it's all here. And so I was having trouble sleeping at night.

I, my mental health was suffering. I didn't really understand that at the time because I, I didn't have words for it. We didn't, I just didn't grow up in a place where you talked about that. Other, you know, other people had mental health problems and that's fine. You know, the subtext was those people are weak and they need to get their shit together.

But in hindsight, once I got out of practice and started thinking about my life differently and found a therapist, I realized I was in really rough shape and kind of barely holding on and just kept, kept trudging forward, though. It took years for me to realize like, I can't keep doing this because it didn't seem like an option.

You know, to go to college. You go to law school, you do all this, like the sunk cost felt real. I just felt like, how could I not continue to do this? It's like what? 

[00:09:05] Louis Goodman: How did you come to transition from doing the, you know, classic criminal defense attorney job to the podcasting, the LawPods business? Can you kinda walk us through that?

[00:09:24] Robert Ingalls: Yeah, I mean I think it started with getting out of criminal defense. That was step one was kind of realizing, okay, I can make some kind of change. I did not leave the law at all, but I decided not to do criminal defense anymore, and it really happened in a day. I just had a, I had a client who I just met, and not to provide too many details, but he had a very young girlfriend who was now pregnant with their third child, and he had just done some pretty awful stuff to her. And then he looked me right in the eye and he said, man, you know how it is sometimes she just got a real disrespectful mouth and I just couldn't take it. That was just a straw that broke the camel's back.

I just couldn't take it anymore. I was like, I can't be this guy. And I called my paralegal and I said, I don't know what you have to do to get us off that list, but please do it today. I don't want another client. I can't. And from there, I went back to my office and I said, okay, how am I gonna keep making money?

And I started doing general civil cases and those were okay. It allowed me to go to court sometimes, which I enjoyed. But it was really right after I got married that it all kind of came to a head because when we got married we thought like very naive. It was like, maybe we'll have kids like maybe, right?

Well, maybe. I mean, my wife had just turned 36 and I was about to turn 35 when we got married, and she realized within a couple of months it just kind of hit her, oh, we don't have time for maybe like it had it now. And she realized it and she was right. And so she came to me and she's like, I think we should start having babies right this second.

That hit me really hard because I just hadn't contemplated all of what that, I just hadn't thought that was like future guy's problem. And then in a moment I realized like somebody could live here next year and I have to be like one of their primary mentors. I have to be financially responsible. And that's a big part of my story is I wasn't making any money.

All the money I was making, I wasn't keeping almost any of it. 'cause I just hadn't figured out how to run a business. And so I was just pretty broke. I mean, I was able to pay the bills I had at the moment, but I couldn't pay bills for daycare and all the other things like, it was that really, that hit me really, really hard.

I just didn't know what to do. I was like, I'm gonna lose it. So I go into the Books app and I search money, and I find this book by Dave Ramsey and I start listening to it. It was a good book. It got my head around money in a certain way that I hadn't thought of it before.

And then he had another book called Entree Leadership, just Leadership for people who were running their own businesses and things. And I listened to that one. And at the end of that book, he says, I have this podcast called Entree Leadership. You can go listen to it here. I'd never listened to a podcast.

This is September, 2015. And so I opened up the podcast app on my phone that I'd never used before, and there was this show called Awesome Office and it was just office leadership, things like that. And I was like, sure, I'll listen to that. And the first guest on the podcast was Tom Bilyeu, founder of Quest Nutrition.

And man, there is it, there's very few moments in your life that you can look at as being defining. I know where I was when I was listening to this podcast. I listened to this podcast and he is introducing me to things that just, I mean, they were just like little light bulbs going off in my head and they changed the course of my life.

The biggest thing that he introduced me to was the concept of mindset. That really, it doesn't matter where you've been or what you did, like in any moment, you can decide who you wanna be. You can take actions in accordance with that. And that had never occurred to me before. It had never occurred to me that I actually could be anything I wanted to, not what I thought could make money or what I thought other people wanted me to do, but I could look at my curiosities and just do it.

I had no idea what that was, but I just, it was almost like he had. Given me license to explore and the idea of mindset of, have you ever read the book Mindset by Carol Dweck? 

[00:14:09] Louis Goodman: I have not. 

[00:14:10] Robert Ingalls: It's a wonderful book and the idea is there's the fixed mindset that thinks this is who I am. I am the person I am, and I'm not good at math, and that's just who I am.

Instead of thinking with a growth mindset of I can, ultimately, I can do whatever I want if I'm willing to put in the time and energy, right? I don't take my failures personally. I look at what I can learn from them, and I was a classic fixed mindset person and I'm learning about this concept and I, it just made me so hungry to start looking for more.

Within 30 days of listening to that podcast, I owned a thousand dollars worth of podcast gear. This microphone that I'm talking into right now, go big or go home. And I just started tooling around with it because what struck me when I listened to that podcast was these two guys had a conversation at some point in time, and I happened to cross it.

It was really valuable for me, and I thought, wow, what a powerful, incredible medium that, I wanna be a part of this. I have something to say. And it took a couple years for me to start thinking, okay, maybe I could do this for someone else. Because I mean, I think that was mindset too. Like who am I?

Who am I? The guy that went to school for criminal justice, practiced law, never took a business class, never took a marketing class, never took a communications class, never used a microphone before. Like who am I to go into this area and try to hold myself out as an expert, right? 

[00:15:48] Louis Goodman: Can you talk a little bit about what you do specifically with LawPods? I mean, you've discussed it generally, but if, let's say, I have a law firm and let's say I do criminal defense and I want to have a podcast and I want to talk about some concepts in criminal defense. If I come to you, how do you help me do that? 

[00:16:14] Robert Ingalls: The way I tell people to think about it is, think about it like an audio blog because one of the first things people say to me when they're contemplating a new marketing medium, they think, why would anybody listen to a lawyer's podcast?

And I say, well, they wouldn't until, until the bad thing happens. Until something happens where they have questions and they want to find answers, because that's why we create content to start with. That's why we write those blogs. So when people land on our website, they understand, Hey, I've been in this position.

I've stood up in court and handled this exact case a thousand times. Here is what you're likely feeling. Here is what's gonna happen next. Here are some things you need to be thinking about before you do anything else. And we take those ideas and we turn them into audio content. We know what people wanna know because they've asked it to us in every consult, and we've seen it on our SEO report.

We know what they wanna know. So we're creating episodes that speak directly to those questions. And that way when the bad thing happens, they land on our website, they land on our social media. They're able to see the answers to their questions. They get to hear us discuss those. They get to know us like us, trust us a little bit, and that way we're getting past that friction point for them to pick up the phone because once they pick up the phone and set the appointment, they're ours to lose.

It's all of that time between the moment they find us. And what do they do then? Because that is what the content does, is it keeps them from hitting that back button and moving on to the next person. It gets them to feel a little, okay, this is my person. They get to know your personality a little, maybe even your sense of humor.

This is the person I wanna go on this journey with. 

[00:18:07] Louis Goodman: What do you think's the best advice you've ever received, and what advice would you give to a young person just starting out in a legal career? And you could answer that one way or the other. Either the first part, the second part of both.

[00:18:24] Robert Ingalls: No, I like, I like both of 'em. I'll pull from another quote I've heard before. It's, if you find yourself going through hell or if you're going through hell, keep going. Because that has probably been the life skill that has been the most fruitful for me. Is, don't worry about where you are right this second. Don't worry about how bad it is.

Keep moving, keep moving forward. And you may find out in a year of moving forward that you are going in the wrong direction. That's fine. You learned something from it. You picked up experience, you picked up knowledge. If nothing else, you learn that that's the wrong direction. And it's when you sit down and sit on your hands and do nothing, that is where you find trouble because you don't learn anything from that.

You know, people love to say, oh, you got lucky. Yeah, a bunch of times. But you know what? Luck never once found me when I was sitting on the couch. It never knocked on my door and gave me anything. I was out somewhere and I intersected with luck, and that's how luck works and so just keep moving forward.

I've heard that in so many different versions. It's just go do the thing.

[00:19:43] Louis Goodman: I was just gonna shift gears here a little bit and ask you what sort of things do you like doing recreationally and do you do things recreationally with your family? What do you do when you're getting your mind off of law and podcasting and law podcasting and that sort of thing?

[00:19:58] Robert Ingalls: I mean, I will say no matter what I'm doing, I'm usually thinking about the business. I think that's just the business owner's dilemma. But I like it. I enjoy it. But you said it early on, one of my favorite things in the world is skateboarding. I do longboard skateboarding. I picked it up right when COVID started.

I bought a board off Facebook Marketplace like two weeks after COVID started. And it was the way that I just dealt with everything that was going on around us, but it was also how I socialized for that period of time, because me and some guys I knew we would go out and just ride these skateboards and we were all a bunch of old guys.

And I think the oldest guy in our group was in his early sixties and he was the best among us. And at least once a week we would go out for a few hours and skate, and then I'd skate in my neighborhood and I just, man, I fell in love with it. I loved it so much. And I hadn't skateboarded since I was maybe 12 years old.

And if you were to look in my storage closet down there, I've got a whole wall with, I think I have 11 boards hanging from it right now of various sizes. And I love it so much. I've gotten my older daughter into it. Now she's starting to skateboard with me.

[00:21:10] Louis Goodman: I have a couple other questions for you here. Let's say you came into some real money, you know, three or four billion dollars. What, if anything, would you do differently in your life? 

[00:21:23] Robert Ingalls: Hmm. I love that question, and not just because I'm buying time by saying it. I really love it for myself because right this moment, I mean, yeah, I mean, if I've got that kind of money, I'm gonna make a few changes.

I'm going to, I'm gonna buy the car I want because why not? I could never spend all that money. I'm gonna get involved in some really cool charities that I am really would be really passionate about with that kind of cash. Like I definitely, that would be the most important thing I think I could do with, with some serious money like that would be to get involved in human rights projects.

And when I think about having billions of dollars, it's, I haven't earned those billions, and so it's not really that, try to put the right words to it. I love what I have right now because I've earned every single piece of it. 

[00:22:23] Louis Goodman: Is this why you feel you're one of the luckiest people alive? 

[00:22:29] Robert Ingalls: It is. I don't think. I know, I know that a lot of people don't get to wake up in the morning and think that they have everything. I know they don't.

A lot of people have to go to jobs that they hate and do things they don't enjoy, and I don't have to do that. I mean, not that every day is a paradise. I have a lot of stress. I mean, running a business is hard, but I don't, if you said you can do anything you want for your job tomorrow, I'm gonna come right back to this desk.

I love this. I love that this thing didn't exist and now it does because of all of my blood, sweat, tears, and just raw belief. 

[00:23:13] Louis Goodman: Let's say you had a magic wand. There was one thing in the world that you could change the marketing world, the podcasting world, the law world, the world in general. What would you wanna change with that magic wand?

[00:23:24] Robert Ingalls: I would make people more compassionate for each other. That is the thing that I think would make the world so much better is if people, they stopped looking at other people as, as others, and started thinking of all of us as we're on this planet together. I heard the most beautiful idea recently of, every hundred years or so the world is completely wiped clean and nobody that was here a hundred years ago is left. It's a whole new group of people. And every time you go outside, everyone you see, that's somebody who's taken the ride with you. These are your people. And thinking about it like that was so beautiful to me.

Like, we're all gonna be gone in a pretty short period of time. Like this is the people we get to take the ride with. Like, take care of these people. Be nice to these people. Don't other these people. We have some compassion for each other. 

[00:24:19] Louis Goodman: Let's say you had a Super Bowl ad, you know, someone gave you 60 seconds on the Super Bowl.

[00:24:24] Robert Ingalls: Oh man. 

[00:24:24] Louis Goodman: Say whatever you want to this huge audience of millions of people. What would you wanna say? 

[00:24:32] Robert Ingalls: Super Bowl ad man, that's a excellent question. I've never even contemplated it because as a marketer, I feel like I should have a good answer for this because I mean, that would be the dream is to be able to create a marketing piece for the largest marketing stage ever.

I would absolutely do a commercial on fatherhood, on being a good dad and what that looks like and how can I put an ad together that would impact fathers to kind of snap out of it and think, what can I do today? What are the little things I can start doing today to be a better father, to show up for my kids? So when they're going through the world, they feel like dad's there for them. 

[00:25:22] Louis Goodman: If somebody wants to get in touch with Robert Ingalls or LawPods or Robert Ingalls at LawPods. What's the best way to do that? 

[00:25:34] Robert Ingalls: Yeah, I thought a lot about this as a marketer too. You type LawPods anywhere, LawPods.com, LawPods, username, and almost any place you go, you're gonna find us.

So, but you can also, you can find me on LinkedIn, which is weird to say because if you'd have told me 10 years ago, that would be my primary social networking platform, I'd have said you're crazy. But I'm always happy to connect on there. And then if you want to get up with me directly, just robert@LawPods.com, I am always happy to chat.

But if you just have questions, I'm always happy to help because the success of podcasting anywhere is the success of podcasting everywhere. 

[00:26:09] Louis Goodman: And I assume we can just Google LawPods and we'll come up with it. 

[00:26:14] Robert Ingalls: You're absolutely gonna come up with it. 

[00:26:16] Louis Goodman: Robert, is there anything that you wanna talk about that we haven't discussed before we wrap up? Anything at all that you'd like to say? 

[00:26:24] Robert Ingalls: Man, we've gone in a lot of really good directions. I'll say that I love what you're doing here. It speaks so much to me as somebody who got a microphone in their face and just couldn't get enough of it, couldn't stop doing it. I know what it takes to show up and do your job, and then to also on the side, sit down, have this studio together, have these conversations, take the time and energy to do the production on them, to get them out to the people so the people can listen to them.

So I really appreciate, I just appreciate you being part of this space because I love it so dearly. I love to see lawyers involved in it and then just making the space for these other lawyers to come on and have these conversations. 

[00:27:05] Louis Goodman: Robert Ingalls of LawPods. Thank you so much for joining me today on the Love Thy Lawyer podcast. It's been a pleasure to talk to you. 

[00:27:13] Robert Ingalls: Thank you.

[00:27:16] Louis Goodman: That's it for today's episode of Love Thy Lawyer. If you enjoyed listening, please share it with a friend and follow the podcast. If you have comments or suggestions, send me an email. Take a look at our website at lovethylawyer.com where you can find all of our episodes, transcripts, photographs, and information.

Thanks to my guests and to Joel Katz for music, Brian Matheson for technical support, Paul Robert for social media, and Tracy Harvey. I'm Louis Goodman.

[00:27:54] Robert Ingalls: Oh, great. Okay. I thought it was like messing up again. I was just, tell me, I'm just testing my signal to make sure there's nothing wrong with it. Oh man. You might be stumping me here. Let me, what's the best answer you've gotten to that question.