Attorney Jon Groth joins host Marilyn Jenkins on Law Marketing Zone to share how he grew his practice from a one-man operation to a thriving Wisconsin-based firm with a team across multiple countries.
In this episode, Jon opens up about the mindset shift that helped him build a law firm before it even existed—laying the groundwork for growth long before the first hire.
He shares why working on your firm is more powerful than just working in it, how he approached branding and marketing early on, and the pivotal decisions that helped him scale.
From team-building to tech tools, Jon offers practical insights for attorneys and legal professionals looking to grow with intention.
Perfect for solo practitioners, legal marketers, and firm owners at any stage of growth.
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Transcript:
Welcome to the Leadership in Law podcast with host Marilyn Jenkins cut through the noise, get actionable insights and inspiring stories delivered straight to your ears. Your ultimate podcast for navigating the ever-changing world of law firm ownership. In each episode, we dive deep into the critical topics that matter most to you from unlocking explosive growth to building a thriving team. We connect you with successful firm leaders and industry experts who share their proven strategies and hard wand wisdom. So whether you’re a seasoned leader or just starting your journey as a law firm owner, the Leadership in Law podcast is here to equip you with the knowledge and tools you need to build a successful and fulfilling legal practice.
Welcome to another episode of the Leadership in Law Podcast. I’m your host, Marilyn Jenkins. Please join me in welcoming my guest, Jon Groth, to the show today. Jon is originally from Milwaukee and a Marquette Law School graduate. He has practiced personal injury law in Wisconsin since 2000, As the founder of Groth Law Firm, he has handled a wide range of cases with compassion and expertise. Recognized as a super lawyer, rising star, and life member of the multi-million dollar advocates forum, Jon is a trusted name in the field. Beyond his practice, Jon teaches personal injury law, volunteers in his community, and enjoys outdoor activities with his wife and three children. His firm is known for delivering exceptional results in client care. I’m excited to have you here, Jon. Welcome. Well, thank you. I like being called a marquee lawyer, so you can call me a marquee lawyer or say that I’m from Marquette Law.
Either one is fine. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Also, yes, I know, that was, I don’t know why our brain went there. It’s so funny. You know, marquee, it’s, you know, it’s unusual to say sometimes, but only during basketball season is when you really see Marquette. Other than that, unless you’re studying the history of the Midwest, is when you talk about Father Marquette. But anyway, I apologize. Oh, no worries. Also, you guys are good basketball. I grew up ACC, so… Oh, sure. Yeah. Yeah. The big basketball, big East, the big East basketball.
Yeah. Nice. So talk about your leadership journey. Tell us a little bit about your journey and how it started. Oh boy, where do I begin? How far back and how much time do we have? So I, if you want to have like some takeaways, I guess, for, you know, younger attorneys or people who are Looking to branch out or start their own practice, I guess, you know, in general my leadership journey began as an associate at a firm. You know, working on cases and working for someone else where I wasn’t in charge, I was an employee, but what I really had to do was have that. Maybe it’s a mindset shift where I was looking at my personal practice as, or, or my practice there as my own personal practice. And how could I learn from others and, you know, go to conferences and look at, you know, other law firms and what they’re teaching for, you know, leadership in their practice. As how he would relate to me as just an associate. And I then created a firm within a firm, really in my own mind. So I would hopefully be able to. Sell myself to my bosses and say, hey, I’m somebody that you want to keep here for the long term, or I’m somebody that you want to give a raise to in the short term, or, you know, in the short term, give a bonus to, you know, so. I was looking at it that way, as being really a leader when I wasn’t a leader in the in the firm. And then ultimately, When I branched out and started my own practice in 2000, March, let’s see, just in a few weeks will be the 15th anniversary of Groth Law Firm. So in March of 2010, I started Groth Law Firm and then just been a wild ride since then, you know, being a leader of one, you know, I had my office was in the basement. It was a block wall that I was looking at. I had a computer, a printer, and, you know, a cell phone, and that was about it. I had my kids and dog that were jumping and running and whatever above me. So you’re hitting the mute button, trying to sound professional. So others couldn’t hear what was going on. I had offices that I would share with other attorneys so I could appear professional that I had an actual brick and mortar and then eventually, you know, went from there to having one, two, you know, three, four, how many more employees to now, you know, thirty or so employees and employees in multiple states and then VAs that are across the world. Wow, that’s fantastic. So I love that you knew you wanted more and so you changed your mindset even while you were an employee for another firm. That’s amazing. I love the way that you changed your mindset in that you presented yourself within that firm as opposed to and the growth there. That’s really great advice for people. Did you hire a coach at any point to help you with that or is it something that you went, you know what, light bulb mama, I need to do this for myself. Yeah, and that’s a great question. Gosh, when did I hire my first coach? I have had multiple and it’s been, boy, that’s a fantastic question. Who gave me that idea? I don’t know who gave me that idea. It was probably going back to, well, here, let me answer it differently. I’ve always been, you know, a big fan of, you know, what, what some people call a lifelong learner. You know, I’m curious. I have a curious mind. I like. Trying to figure things out every morning. I’m listening to a different podcast about different things from the Wall Street Journal to, you know, Joe Rogan or anything. Cause it’s just, it’s just very interesting to me. So I, I’m certain that at one of these conferences that you go to and lawyers love conferences, there’s lots of conferences, a lot of vendors love conferences too. So at one of these conferences, I’m sure that there was a breakout session about, you know, mastermind groups. And that’s when I probably got the bug to get a, to get a coach. And I did have a business coach. Years ago, it was a local person. I then have kind of gone back and forth to having virtual coaches to in-person coaches. And now I’m back to the in-person coach where I have someone who comes to my office. About every week and we sit down in my conference room and talk about the business of Groth Law Firm and looking at the numbers like it is a business and you know, and that’s really. What changed the trajectory of our firm, you know, the difference of working in the firm versus working on the firm. I think that’s everything from Dell computers to Taco Bell to, you know, law firms across the world. If you’re working in or working on, you can really have a difference in how that business scales. I agree. I believe in, you know, blocking off some non- negotiable time to work on your business is incredibly important, important. Obviously you’ve grown to multiple locations and like you say with thirty plus employees it makes, you know, you have to be a different type of leader than you were when you had one location. So I, I’m a big proponent for, for coaches as well. I think it just, and I was talking to my coach the other day and he said his average client, and it seems to be an industry average, stays with him about three years. And then, you know, the move to someone that’s the next step up. So it’s classic that you would have multiple coaches and of course a mastermind so that you can hear other people and get ideas and that sort of thing. That’s something I really enjoy working with. You’re always getting new ideas and better ideas so you can better serve your clients from that. Yeah. It’s fantastic. And it’s nice to have a mastermind or even go out of your field, you know, talk to people who, you know, right now it’s fascinating for me to talk to people who are in the HVAC industry, you know, or in, in the dental industry, just because they’re the latest. Beneficiaries, some might call them victims of private equity, you know, and that’s coming to legal, you know, it’s coming to the law in, you know, the next, well, it’s here now in Arizona, certainly, but. It’s going to be more widespread in the next few years. So if I want Groth Law Firm to be around and five ten twenty years, you need to take a serious look at how private equity and hedge funds and such have affected the dental industry and the HVAC industry. So you really got to look at those kind of groups, you know, and look outside of your particular practice area. Try to read the writing on the wall. Exactly. And in your firm, you actually do a lot with social media. And how do you use social media to reach your clients? The reason I ask, it’s so difficult to get a lot of attorneys to do social media, especially any video type thing. They just kind of shy away from it. Can you tell me how you guys use it? You know, I think it’s fun, but maybe that’s just me. How do we use it? We use it as a manner in which to force us to have consistent content created to serve up to the master of search, which is Google, right? What does Google like? Google likes Google. More content that people are going to look at that are going to drive them back to Google. So by doing social media, it forces us to create content that we can then put on our Google business profile page or put on our website to link to, you know, different places. So Google will recognize that, hey, this is just. This is a live site, just not some stagnant site. You know, going back to maybe a bit back in the day, if you’re looking at bounce rate or if you’re looking at the, yeah, your time on site or your page load speed or things like that. If it’s a site that is an old site and it’s, it’s only made for a desktop, it’s not made for phone or what have you, those are things that you had to take into account. I mean, because you wanted to do that because Google said that was important. So, go ahead. Today, I think Google says it’s important that you have content that is fresh and content that people are going to take a couple seconds to look at and that just forces us to recognize that social media is important. I love that you say that because I do a lot of teaching on your Google business profile and it’s so important. And when you think about Google, they are the number one search engine because of engagement. They give their visitors what they want. So they will reward you by doing the same thing with your Google business profile. So that’s, that’s incredible. And what types of content do you find, has, makes an impact for you guys? Boy, one of the most viewed pieces, I’ll say, I mean, it’s me standing on a rock fishing. All right. I don’t know why, and talking about fishing rules, even though I’m a personal injury car crash lawyer, but talking about- Well, it makes you approachable. It makes you- And people are commenting, you know, oh, hey, I, you know, one comment was, I drove past that fishing hole last week and he’s still there. You know, just goofy things that people are commenting about. But, you know, those kind of things are, are that don’t have really anything to do with personal injury, you know, there is some tangential relationship to the law, but it just, you know, me on a rock casting was one of our bigger ones. There’s another one, you know, reactions. Reactions are always huge. I mean, there is a big water park in Wisconsin called Wisconsin Dells. And there’s this particular ride that kind of whips you around and throws you out and people get pretty banged up and bruised. And we had a reaction to that because I’ve had a number of cases against that water park. That one got a good, you know, certainly, I don’t know if we’re over a half million, but there was hundreds of thousands of views on that one. So, you know, things like that are probably the biggest hitters. And then you just have some that are just unusual that you wouldn’t expect that you get some traction of me talking about some particular speeding law or something like that. And it’s just kind of random what the algorithm is going to spit out there. And that makes a lot of sense. I mean, that’s the one thing that we try to get our attorneys to do is it’s the no like and trust factor. So yeah, okay, you’re fishing, but then you’re talking about a speeding law. So you’re making yourself approachable and people do business with people they know, like, and trust. And I think the most, you know, everyday Joe feels like attorneys are not approachable. So you’re breaking that barrier. That’s fantastic. Now, seeing how you’re doing that to keep in touch and reach out to clients and make sure that people know you and will come to you. How does the, how could social media posts from a consumer impact a personal injury case? To say, I’m one of your clients, what would you suggest? How is it going to, my social media going to impact my case? I tell them don’t. Right away. Don’t put things on social media because to be brutally honest, you know, we all know that social media is somewhat fake, right? You’re going to put forward your best foot, you know, put your best foot forward. You’re going to for example, college students, they may have a post about how awesome the past week was and they went to all these parties or did all these things. Well I would hope and I know that those college students are studying, but they’re not putting posts about studying. Cause that’s not exciting. So if you look at the college student, you’re like, oh, all they do is party all the time. Well, okay. Well, we know they’re, hopefully we know he’s my college student. I hope my college student is studying too. You know, so, but the reality is that there’s a mix of, you know, studying and partying. The same thing goes with after a crash. You don’t see the non-exciting video of the person getting their, you know, leg bandaged. You see a week later the video of, you know, them walking to a concert to go see Dave Matthews band or what have you know, because that’s what they want to put forward that. Okay, I can do this. I’m strong and rightfully so. I, I’ve gotten through this, this wreck and I’m going to see my, you know, see my favorite band. Well, the problem is insurance companies don’t care. They’re going to use that. Every way they can to say, well, you’re not that badly injured, even though you have a broken leg or you have restrictions from a doctor. Because you didn’t want to lose that $100, you know, ticket to go see Dave Matthews band. You went and you suffered through, maybe you had to took it, or sorry, you had to take an extra Tylenol. To get in a pain level that you could go see the band, but you didn’t put that on social media either. I would rather you not put anything on social media after a crash because by putting things on social media you’re giving ammunition to the insurance company. To really dictate the narrative and it takes it away from you. It has you play defense as opposed to you talking about what the truth is. Because then you have to start explaining away what you did and why you did it. So in general, if anybody’s listening to this podcast who is involved in a car crash, don’t post anything. Wait until you talk to a lawyer. Just before you push send, just have that second to hesitate and then hopefully don’t do it. It’s just not going to help you out. Yeah, I mean, anything you put up or online can be spun any, any different way against you. And then we have to also realize that social media is the highlight reel. It’s not real life, you know, but if you post something that can be construed by an insurance company, it will be. That’s definitely true. So that’s great advice. Just don’t post.
Right. Let’s jump over to your podcast. You use a podcast to help build your authority in your practice area. So how is that going for you? When did you start your podcast? Boy, that’s a great question. Certainly it’s been well over a year. I should really know exactly how many months or years it’s been, but it, it’s been a while. So, I know that a few years ago we were asked to be a guest on various podcasts, and I hate to get down this road, but we purchased a practice and we have a practice area that’s kind of unusual. It’s a vaccine injury practice. So as you can imagine, during COVID, That went bonkers because everybody wanted to talk about vaccine injuries. So because of that, we were on certainly a lot of news stations across the Midwest and internationally. And that turned into getting on podcasts. And then we have had our own podcast. So if you talk about when we started it. It’s gotta be years upon years, you know, certainly going back to the heart of the pandemic. I enjoy it. I think it’s fun. I think it’s natural for a trial lawyer. To want to tell stories and talk to others. And that’s just what we do, you know, so I enjoy that time sitting down with somebody and talking like this, because I think it’s, it’s not only good for us to share stories with each other. I think it’s also a good practice for lawyers to be able to communicate with others and, and with all kinds of people. So, you know, I’ve talked to other business owners on our podcast. I’ve talked to our staff, I, we’ve had a couple times where we’ve had just our law clerks come and ask lawyer questions and it can be any question from what do I do with a speeding ticket to, you know, why is the G on your logo that G, you know, those kinds of things. So it’s fun. I like it. Hopefully others enjoy it. I think ultimately you want to know the reason I do it. It goes back to marketing and it goes back to SEO. And you, when you have those words, that you can transcribe and put them on your website. The Google web crawlers are going to find those words and there hopefully will be content rich SEO words that they’ll appreciate and direct more people to your website. Fantastic. I had, I guessed it on a lot of podcasts as well and one of the recent published ones went out, the host actually took the transcript An AI summary of the podcast and published it, first time I’ve ever seen this happen, published it as an article on LinkedIn. And I’m like, huh, I hadn’t thought of that. Yeah. Talk about traction. You know, articles on LinkedIn get great SEO. And I don’t know if you posted on Medium as well, but I’m like, Great idea. I’m going to write that down and steal that idea. That’s a great idea. And, and I think it was, I think it was Descript. I’m not sure, but it was, but yeah, the full transcript and, but at the very top was the AI summary. And the show notes and the train script. So it was long, but it was, I thought that was a great idea. So very interesting. Yeah, it’s a great idea. But yeah, I love the podcast. I love guesting and I love having guests on the podcast. I learned from so many people and I hope that the listeners can learn things as well. Speaking of that, what would you think, what would you like the biggest takeaway for our listeners to take from today’s show? Boy, going back to the very beginning of when we started talking, certainly you have to be a lifelong learner and understand that things are changing so rapidly. That you’re never going to know it all, but at least be aware of what’s happening. So if it’s, if your way of learning is you’re reading a paper every day, if your way of learning is listening to a podcast every day or You know, trying to, you know, read a book a week, a book a month, you know, things like that. I think it’s important that there’s so many things on YouTube or even, you know, TikTok or LinkedIn or such. That can help you understand what’s out there in your given industry. I think that’s, that’s just really important. You know, if you want to be somebody who, well, if you’re competitive, you want to be somebody who is a leader. You want to be somebody who kind of moves the needle. I think that’s there’s a direct correlation between how much information you consume and where you are on that leadership scale. Well said, very well said. I agree with the, my coach calls it a teachable spirit. And then we enter as open-handed, like you said. So being able to share knowledge and grow from your peers, that’s extremely well said. Thank you so much. And Jon, in case our listeners want to connect with you or reach out to you, where is the best place to reach you? Oh boy, grothlawfirm.com is pretty easy to get me. G-R-O-T-H lawfirm.com. We’re, our headquarters are in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. There’s a couple other Groths out there. I think, they pronounce it “Groth”, but, they’re wrong. I’m right. The grothlawfirm.com. We’re on LinkedIn. We’re on TikToK. We’re on Instagram. If you are looking for us, It’s pretty easy to find us. Yeah, probably that way. I think our social media handle is just simply Groth Law Firm. Very cool. Thank you so much. This has been a great conversation. I’ve really enjoyed having you today. And thank you so much for your time. I appreciate you being on the show. Well, thanks for having me. I had a, I had a ball. Hopefully we can have you back on ours. That was perfect. Perfect. Thanks for joining me today for this episode. As we wrap up, I’d love for you to do two things. First, subscribe to this podcast so you don’t miss an episode. And if you find value here, I’d love it if you would rate it and review it. that really does make a difference in helping other people to discover this podcast second you can connect with me on LinkedIn to keep up with what I’m currently learning and thinking about and if you’re ready to take the next step with a digital strategist to help you grow your law firm, I’d be honored to help you. Just go to lawmarketingzone.com to book a call with me. Stay tuned for our next episode next week. Until then, as always, thanks for listening to Leadership in Law podcast, and be sure to subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts so you don’t miss the next episode. Thanks for joining us on another episode of the Leadership in Law podcast. Remember, you’re not alone on this journey. There’s a whole community of law firm owners out there facing similar challenges and striving for the same success. Head over to our website at lawmarketingzone.com. From there, connect with other listeners, access valuable resources, and stay up to date on the latest episodes. Don’t forget to subscribe and leave us a review on your favorite podcast platform. Until next time, keep leading with vision and keep growing your firm.