WiseGuys Digital Marketing- Kansas City

Owner

We are business growth experts! With Two National Bestselling books, featured in FOX, NBC, MarketWatch, and many more. Also, a 2021, 2022, and 2023 Kansas City Chamber of Commerce Small Business Superstar. Located in the heart of downtown Kansas City, we pride ourselves on getting the best return on investment for our clients!

Services We Offer!
- Website Design and Creation
- Search Engine Optimization
- Local Search Engine Optimization
- Social Media Management and Marketing
- Paid Search
- Content Creation
- Reputation Management
- Google My Business
- Facebook Marketing
- Google Ads
- Local Service Ads
- Digital Marketing Consulting

We look forward to meeting you and growing your business.

Cooper Saunders

SB Legal

- Not guilty jury verdicts in cases involving aggravated burglary, cocaine distribution, sexual assault, aggravated assault, and domestic violence
- Won dismissals and acquittals in dozens of criminal cases
- Over 180 Google reviews with 4.7-star average rating
- Formerly Sharifi & Baron

Criminal Defense Lawyer | Founder

Exodus Immigration Law

Co-Founder

Criminal Defense Referrals

- "Josh has the great ability to breakdown key steps that has helped his career take giant leaps forward. If you are a new criminal defense attorney or someone who is simply trying to change their business for the better, this book should be one of your first reads." (Amazon review from Daniel Garner)

- "I read Joshua's book in a matter of a couple of hours. It was excellent, so much so that I had trouble putting it down. Joshua gives a number of practical tips to increase referrals, but more importantly he effectively makes the point that if you intentionally and genuinely care for others, they will return the favor. Highly recommend." (Amazon review from S. Lee Gray)

Author

The Business of Criminal Law

- Over 70 Amazon reviews, 4.4 average score
- "An excellent guide to building an outstanding private criminal defense practice" (reader Chase Crucil)

Ensign College

- Teaching Criminal Law and Procedure
- Formerly LDS Business College

Adjunct Faculty

Salt Lake City Prosecutor's Office

- Lead prosecutor in multiple jury trials and dozens of bench trials
- Reported Opinion: Salt Lake City v. Bryner, 2009 UT App 62

Assistant City Prosecutor

Wrona Law Firm

- Formerly Wrona Law Offices
- Represented multi-million dollar corporations in construction and corporate litigation
- Conducted discovery and motions practice

Associate Attorney

For over fifteen years, I've defended hundreds of clients and earned millions in fees for criminal defense cases.

I was getting great results for my clients including not-guilty jury verdicts in cases of

 - cocaine distribution
 - child abuse
 - sexual assault
 - domestic violence, and 
 - aggravated robbery.

Then in 2020 Covid hit.

The courts were closed. I was forced to shut off my Google ads at a time that I was spending $30,000 or more per month on those ads.

Overnight, I had to switch from an ads-based business to a referral-based business. I had no idea if I could keep my law practice afloat long enough to make the transition.

It was a difficult change, but the results have been phenomenal.

My results:

→ Profit margins grew from 25% to 60%.
→ Google reviews increased from 70 to over 220 (and counting) with a 4.8 average.
→ My stress levels dropped because my case-load became more manageable.

THE BUSINESS OF CRIMINAL LAW NEWSLETTER

If you want to learn more about how I did this, you can subscribe to The Business of Criminal Law newsletter. My mission is to help criminal defense lawyers build law practices that they love.

https://businessofcriminallaw.substack.com/

Joshua Baron

A few years ago, a lawyer friend told me he had to pull an all-nighter for a motion. I said: "I would never do that." He looked at me like I was crazy.

I told him - there's nothing I can do at 3am that's useful to anyone. My brain shuts off around 7pm. By 9pm I'm doing like two minutes of actual work every hour. It just doesn't work for me.

He worked until 5am that night. Got back in at 8. Got it done.

It got me thinking about why.

I think sometimes we pull all-nighters as a signal to ourselves. Like look how hard I'm working. Look how committed I am. And maybe that's useful for some people. But when I look back at the times I've actually worked late, it's almost never that productive.

My wife is different. She works 16 hours a day. Doesn't stop. Doesn't have vices. She's incredibly productive. I used to compare myself to her and think I was lazy.

But I just work differently.

On a separate note, there's this thing called Parkinson's Law - tasks tend to fill the time you give them. If you give yourself 40 minutes to clear your email, it takes about 40 minutes. Give yourself two hours, it takes two hours.

And that's how I work. If I give my practice 40 hours a week, it fills 40 hours. If I gave it 60, it would fill 60. The work expands to fit whatever container I give it.

So why give it 60?

I never work weekends. Never work holidays. Almost never work past 6pm. The only exceptions in the last few years were when I was physically in trial waiting for a jury, and once for an appeal deadline. That's it.

And it's not some big act of discipline. The thing I've realized is that work is never done. There's always more I could do. Always. If you tell yourself "I won't stop until it's finished" - it's never finished.

So you have to just decide when to stop. And then stop.



Get weekly proven strategies for finding 100 criminal defense clients per year without advertising. Subscribe to 'The Business of Criminal Law' newsletter.

👆🏼Click "visit my website" at the top of this post.

Utah Criminal Defense Attorney | Author of The Business of Criminal Law | 270+ 5-star reviews

I had to end a contractor relationship.

I'm not great with confrontation, so I was dreading it for weeks.

When I finally brought it up, he said: "Thank goodness."

Here's what happened. We'd been working together for a while. I really liked this person. But the project had kind of run its course. We were paying him a lot of money and I wasn't sure it was valuable anymore.

I didn't want to offend him. I didn't want to hurt him. So I kept putting it off.

Finally I texted: "Hey, do you have time for a 10 minute call?"

Turns out, he'd been thinking the exact same thing. He knew it needed to be over.

When he saw my text, he was relieved.

The thing I thought was going to feel like cold water in his face was something he already knew. He was just waiting for someone to say it.

I've noticed this pattern with a lot of difficult conversations I've avoided. The other person usually knows something needs to change. They're not blindsided. They're waiting.

And a lot of times, the conversation ends up being a huge relief — for both of us. Sometimes it even brings us closer. There's something about naming the thing that clears the air.

I still hate these conversations. I still put them off longer than I should. But I've learned that the version in my head is almost always worse than the real one.

The actual conversation is usually fine.



Get weekly proven strategies for finding 100 criminal defense clients per year without advertising. Subscribe to 'The Business of Criminal Law' newsletter.

👆🏼Click "visit my website" at the top of this post.

I used to think I was bad at managing people. Then I realized: maybe I just don't want to manage people? Those are two very different problems.

At one point we had 11 or 12 employees. All of them reported to me. And I wasn't managing them.

I'd plan my week. I'd block off time for check-ins, training, one-on-ones. And then client issues would come up. Case stuff would come up. And I'd always prioritize that case work over managing a team member.

For a long time I was really frustrated with myself. I kept trying to psych myself into it. You've got to manage these people! You've got to do better!

Eventually I stopped judging and started getting curious.

The way I was spending my time was telling me something about how I wanted to spend my time. I just didn't want to do it.

11 people is way too many for most people to manage. And especially for me. I think I can manage two people pretty effectively. More than that, it's hard.

So we downsized. 

Now we're a small team. Four people. Two direct reports. And I actually manage them. Not perfectly, but I do it.

The thing I kept missing was that my calendar was giving me information. I just didn't want to hear it. I wanted to believe I could be the guy who runs a big team, manages 11 people, scales the thing up.

But every week, my actual behavior was telling me: that's not who you are. It was a signal that I needed to pay attention to.

I'm not saying everyone should downsize. Maybe you actually do want to manage a big team and you just need better systems.

But for me, the answer was to admit I didn't want what I thought I wanted.

That's an uncomfortable thing to realize about yourself. But it's a lot more useful than beating yourself up for years.

---

Get weekly proven strategies for finding 100 criminal defense clients per year without advertising. Subscribe to 'The Business of Criminal Law' newsletter.

👆🏼Click "visit my website" at the top of this post.

Remember the "old school" version of discovery. For me, it was a law school job suing an insurance group. My summer consisted of two people, a lot of caffeine, and 30 bankers' boxes of loose, unorganized paper. We spent months pulling out every sheet and manually logging what we found.

Fast forward to a recent federal fraud case. This time, the "boxes" were digital, specifically a hard drive containing 5 terabytes of data.

In the past, even with OCR (Optical Character Recognition), just getting oriented within an index that large would have taken me hours. Instead, I tried a different approach. I plugged the data into Gemini and asked it to find every document mentioning a specific name.

The results?
- 5 terabytes analyzed in about 15 minutes.
- It pinpointed 5 critical documents totaling only 10 pages out of thousands of files.
- I cross-referenced the index, and the AI hadn't missed a single thing.

I’ve been a bit of an AI skeptic. I still think it is often a "dumb intern" when it comes to actual legal writing. But for a "glorified find and replace" on a massive scale, it's getting better.

It did not replace my job; it replaced hours of mindless digging that usually keep us from doing the actual legal heavy lifting.

What’s your take? Are you using AI for discovery, or are you still sticking to the "bankers' box" mindset?


I recently spoke to Antoine Screve about AI use in my practice. Here's a link to the episode:

Open article: Processing Client Documents, Is AI an Industrial Revolution or an Internet Revolution: Josh Attorney at SB Legal by open.spotify.com

Processing Client Documents, Is AI an Industrial Revolution or an Internet Revolution: Josh Attorney at SB Legal

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The Battle

Cooper Saunders

Joshua Baron

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance ScoreJoshua Baron's LinkedIn Performance

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taplio

The Battle

Cooper Saunders

Joshua Baron

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Joshua Baron's LinkedIn Performance

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

Performance ScoreJoshua Baron's LinkedIn Performance