Legal Marketing Mastery: Insights on Building a Successful Digital Agency

Hello, everyone. Today, we have with us, Casey Miraz, founder at Juris Digital, a leading law marketing firm. Casey is an Amazon best-selling SEO author and an international speaker at venues like SMX, Big Digital, Searchcon, and ABA Tech Show. He has been in SEO since 2002. Casey, welcome to E-Coffee with Experts.

Thank you so much. It’s so good to be here. I appreciate the invite.

Casey, Casey, you’ve built a remarkable career in legal marketing. But before we dive deep into legal marketing and SEO, it would be great if you could tell us a little bit more about your personal journey. More than anything, I would also want to understand how Casey was as a growing child, were there any early signs that pointed towards your future path?

Yeah, great question. I appreciate you asking a little bit about my background. I guess from an entrepreneurial standpoint, I have always been a little bit of an entrepreneur, maybe selling a paper that I would print on my home computer when I was 10 or 12 years old, and then starting my first real business around the age of 15, selling paintball supplies, and then getting into technology from there, computer repair and whatnot, where I started my computer repair company. I’ve had a lot of different entrepreneurial ventures over the years, but it’s the computer the technical side that really got me into marketing and specifically SEO. I come from a technical marketing background because I was into hardware and software, and that segued into building websites. That’s what started my journey. I think I remember I have an epiphany of when I first had inklings of SEO, and that’s probably around the year 2000 when I was building a website for a client, but I didn’t know how to build it particularly well from the ground up. I was I’m using Dreamweaver and stuff at the time and some basic HTML. My thought was, what I’m going to do is I’m going to download this website, make changes to the content, and just upload it on my test server and play around with it until I have something that I can deliver to a client.

I did that, and then not long after that, a week or two later, I got a call, and the website that I borrowed on my test server was indexed by Google, mistakenly, and outranking this national rental office company. So needless to say, they were unhappy about that, and then the light bulb went off. Wait a second. They’re getting all these calls from this thing that I didn’t even mean to do. Let’s go down this route further.

You, congratulations on your new podcast, The Family Law podcast. But just curious, why Family Law?

Yeah, sure. So we at yours Digital help a lot of law firms struggle with marketing, right? And digital marketing is something that every attorney needs help with. What we wanted to do is really just niche in further because there’s a lot of noise in just any type of marketing. When I first started legal marketing, it was us, and there was maybe 10 or so other agencies. Now, there’s probably hundreds. We just wanted to cut through that noise a little bit more and really focus on what we found our best clients were.

Is that an official announcement that jurisDigital is now only focused on family law going forward?

Not at this moment, but it is a big piece of our marketing, especially for the next year as we’re looking at it. We just want to see, hey, how does vertical expertise go if we go even deeper? That’s a question that we’ve never really answered for ourselves. It’s something that we want to play around with.

Yeah, there are some players in the industry who have niche down, not only the legal niche. There are some people that are doing only personal injury, but there are also people that are even nicheing it down further to only personal injury SEO or things like that. All the best for that.

Yeah, thank you. A lot of our expertise is in the most competitive markets, like with personal injury. But again, we looked at our PnL essentially and said, Hey, these are the clients that seem to be a good fit for us, so let’s dive deeper and clarify the message for them. Makes sense.

The 80/20 rule.

Exactly.

Perfect. In those early days at Judith Digital, what were some of the biggest challenges you faced in convincing law firms about the power of marketing? Because when you started, even now, for law firms, online marketing, a lot of people are doing it. A lot of law firms are investing more into it. But still, if I compare it across industries, billboards and TV is still a big piece of law firm marketing and SEO is there. It’s not still as big as other industries. So I’m imagining when you started, Judith’s Digital At that time, it would have been much more harder or maybe not. It would be great if you could give us a little bit of idea about that.

We really started working with law firms, or at least me personally, around 2007, 2008. Back then, I was working with an attorney who had the idea like, Hey, I want to show up online. I want to rank more. But they were spending a million dollars a year on yellow pages, and that’s where all of their cases were coming from. The idea at that time from his sense was that, Hey, if we shift this online, can we get more exposure, compete a little bit less? Because also in the phone books at that time, you’re talking there might be 20 pages of personal injury lawyers. And so even there it was hard to stand out. And with my expertise and background, we got together and started shifting that budget to online. And to be clear, for me, I think marketing is a stool. I think SEO should be one of the legs of the stool, but it shouldn’t be your whole and your only marketing, right? Whether networking or whatever else you’re doing. It shouldn’t be everything because there is an inherent risk with SEO, too, and that is that if you put all of your eggs in one basket and you give that to Google, and then Google says your website’s unhelpful one day, that obviously puts you in a bad position.

Just that caveat there, that’s always been my advice, but we did go all in on internet marketing in that case. We started seeing those results and people started copying us. Other firms noticed. It’s better now, I would say, because we talk to attorneys every single day that have now started and been engaged in digital marketing. But now there’s a different theme, and that is we talk to so many that have gone into it but actually don’t have trust in it. They don’t believe in it. They’ve been burned by shady agencies or unrealistic promises. Probably like you, get a thousand cold emails a day saying, I’m giving you X, Y, Z, or you don’t pay, or whatever. There’s a lot of shady marketing going on right now. I think I’m seeing a little bit of distrust with that. And inherently, that hasn’t been a problem for us, at least for Jury’s Digital, because we always have tried to grow our company by sharing great information, sharing tips and tactics and tricks, and showing what we know what works. And Because we really believe in educating people and going against that grain. I think that’s just… It’s less of a problem now because people are trying to do their homework.

They’re trying to get educated. Nobody wants to waste money. It’s getting better in that sense. But also at the same time, there’s a lot of shady people out there.

I totally agree. I think the education style marketing, I think even today, I think works the best. Even in your case, I do have published some books, and I know a lot of other marketing firms that are using education, whether it’s publishing books or trainings and podcasts as a really good marketing strategy. I think the same thing applies to law firms as well, because law is a niche where I won’t just go to Google and whatever comes basically on top, just call them and hire them as my lawyer. I want to understand more about them and do my research. Every channel plays its picture, whether it’s the brand building, the PR, the SEO, or the content overall.

Yeah, you’re absolutely right. You need to stand out. The markets are very crowded and you need to really set yourself apart.

You’re also an investor in legal tech companies. What are some trends and innovations that you’re most excited about?

I’m really excited about AI right now, to be honest. There’s a lot of different potential use cases. I see a lot of that coming into legal tech right now. That’s, I think, where a lot of law firms are actually getting the adoption right now. It used to be, I was talking to actually one of my friends this weekend who was an attorney, and he was scared because he’s a great an attorney, but he always thought his biggest skill as an attorney was being able to do these unique searches and find case law to support what he was looking for. He would dive deep. Now, that’s going to be simplified quite a bit through these models that are trained on all the case law, where you can do searches and find things that are just related with using natural language. I think there’s a lot of efficiency to be gained in legal as well as far as AI goes. The bad side of AI right now, I think, is people using it to be lazy. Maybe the uses for marketers right now, it’s a very low barrier to entry people creating whole articles off of a single prompt, for example, in ChatGPT or Claude.

And of course, that result is not great. And it might even, from a marketing perspective, show some short term success. But what happens with that, too, like Google is pretty good at, in the long run, catching people that are taking shortcuts. And what we’re seeing is like, Hey, We’re seeing these sites that are implementing that, seeing some quick wins, but the same stuff that you saw back in my Panda days. It’s not any content. It’s just we’re copying and pasting and then you get hit. Basically, I’m really bullish about AI. I think it’s going to be very good. I think that there’s a place for it that everybody should be using it today, but they shouldn’t use it the lazy way. It’s a tool like a pocket knife. You have to use it in a way that’s going to make what you produce better and always aim towards producing exceptional work, and then you’re going to be really strong. But if you’re taking the lazy way, it’s not going to help you.

No, absolutely. If there are things that we can find out, you sometimes read these big pieces of content and you directly understand it’s AI. Ai has its own style, there are its own signatures. Then even cases where one website suddenly has 200 pages in one day and stuff like that. When we can find it out, Google algorithm is smart enough to find it out. Absolutely correct. Totally bang on. Talking about AI, how you at jurisdigital, again, I understand you’ll be doing a lot of things with AI and testing it out, but what is one of your most recent or your favorite use cases of AI at Juice Digital?

Yeah, so I think if you have a clearly defined process and all those steps, then you can really utilize AI to make it more efficient. For one, just basic things about making things more efficient. We integrate it into calls now, right? If we’re using Screaming Frog and Crawling websites, maybe there’s something we need to know. What’s the intent of this page? We’re not using a tool like Semrush or Ahrefs to do that. We’ll just use ChatGPT to put in our custom prompt and say, This is the output that I want as we’re crawling. Well, that’s a big one. Replot is a big one for me right now, too. Creating custom AI tools and apps that we can use to increase our efficiencies through an actual language. I’m not a coder, I’m not a developer, really. And so being able to create applications on the fly. And then also using Claude, for example, to come up with desktop-based applications, whether I’m using Swift and XCode. And again, I’m not a programmer. I’ve literally never created anything from a software perspective that I haven’t paid developers for until this year. That’s one of it. Then even more recently, I was just explaining to somebody here today that a use case, I think, for learning, and we could see a big opportunity for training our staff is ChatGPT’s new advanced voice, where you can have a real-time conversation with it.

Really dive in. When you’re training these with your company data and people can search it and find those answers and ask a question in a way that makes sense for them and reach that conclusion, it is so powerful. Then going back to your question, we’re ultimately developing our own tools because at the end of the day, I don’t see why my business can’t run like McDonald’s. I have to say that in a bad way, but really a lot of what we do can from the front-end, the back-end of running the entire business, can software that is powered by smart minds who are creating that strategy. Because just to go deeper down the rabbit hole, I think the implementation of SEO, like changing title tags and things like that, is going towards the commodity. It’s going to be commoditized. But the strategies and the brains and the thoughts that we need behind that to create these great strategies and refine them, we just need to put that information in front of the right people so they can access it with the right tools and execute what they need.

Absolutely. Absolutely. Talking about that, I’m loving the scripts of ChatGPT and the ability to create custom GPT so much. When we’re looking at websites and we are trying to look at their anchor clouds and trying to look at the anchor strategy and stuff like that, earlier, it would take a lot of time, but now you create scripts and you get all of that data quicker. Like I said, it’s more about using it as a tool rather than just trying to use the same output and just copy-pasting it.

Yeah, and I think another opportunity there, too, is one of the ways that I use it is I’ll scrape search results, I’ll take pictures of all the websites, we’ll use vision, but I’ll have all the screenshots so I can look at them and say, Okay, these people are ranking better, but also, let’s look at this, who’s clarifying their message? Who would I actually click on or who am I going to bounce from? What we’re finding is people ranking number one may actually not be the ones getting the business because in a lot of cases, these websites are so technical SEO-heavy that they miss the most important part, which is they’re confusing the user. Just being able to visualize that and see all of that at once just by typing in a keyword is just a simple use case, but huge.

One cool thing I did with ChatGPT lately was… We also do non-english, and obviously a non-english is not something which I understand. But we had this client for the German content. It looked like the client was doing a lot of… Requesting a lot of edits in one of our writers from Germany. Again, I was dependent on the writer. The best I could do was change the writer, try somebody else. But how would I understand which writer is still in line with the client? Basically, what I did was I created a custom GPD, put all of the edits that the client had done in the last five articles of that writer, and then I pared it with some fresh articles from the client, their website, and then told it, Okay, fine. Give me an editor which tells me about the style, about blah, blah, blah, blah, blah the writer you’ve changed now is the best and stuff like that. I don’t understand German. It was a fun moment within our team. If you use it smartly… Again, I thought it was dangerous as well. I was able to wet a writer for German content, which I don’t understand, but at the same time it was cool as well.

Yeah. No, that’s awesome. That’s really the future and something that we are working on internally as well. That’s custom GPT is not only on client preferences. Hey, they approved all these pieces of content, but not these, but also that client history and that database and carrying all that knowledge in a way that can be easily referenced, easily linked, if you are using it to enhance content creation. There’s so many benefits to be gained there if you take advantage of it. The only caveat there is a little bit of a hallucination still. That’s my biggest beef with AI chat bots right now. But you pay attention to that and make those changes. Nothing’s perfect. The human isn’t perfect behind a chat bot anyway.

Absolutely. Absolutely. Casey, tell us your favorite client story. I’m sure there are many, but any which comes to the top of your mind.

My favorite what type of story?

Client story.

Client story. Yeah, that’s a good question. I think one of my favorite client stories is I worked with a lot of personal injury firms over the years, and I’ve worked with a lot of them that maybe or not so kind or easy to work with. And so obviously, we hopefully parted ways with most of those clients whenever that happened. But being able to work with a client that actually just when My first client that fully trusted me and was like, Hey, just go with this. You do it. Let’s just focus on those outcomes. And he basically just gave us the budget to run with it. And with that, and given my entrepreneurial and progressive background, we were able to grow from 1-16 locations in a very competitive market for personal injury, and really just make sure that the phone kept ringing. Working with nice clients and working with clients to trust you was the first eye-opening thing for me outside of when I first got started working with clients that instead were saying, Hey, this is how you should do it. But of course, then at that time, we were working with clients who they should be focusing on law, we should be focusing on the marketing, and we should be staying in our lanes a little bit.

Casey, tell us, what does your SEO process look like at Jewish Digital? I know this is very vague or a broad question, but mainly I’m talking about creating copies for the money pages, more like a content SEO strategy.

Basically, when we take on a client in a practice area, we have a formula that we know what works, and that’s level one. Level one is we’re going to create all these pages. If you handle these practice areas, we’re going to create all of these subpages because We really want to reinforce the topical authority there. We have a plan that we basically execute. We’re going to get these links that we can, these directories, and we build out the site in a certain way. Then we revisit that and we apply story brand. Now, most clients that we work with, we try to take a story brand approach where we help them clarify their message and really not just approach their SEO as SEO only. We want these pages to convert. We’ll refine that and build that out as we’re doing it. But then after we have that base layer in and we’ve done their initial optimization, a lot of it from then, after that comes down to content velocity, content reoptimization, and then finding topics. I have a different philosophy than some on that where, yes, of course, we’re using the same tools as everybody else, whether that be Search Console or HRAS or Semrush.

We’re using that data, but we’re also, in a lot of cases, with client permission where it’s legal, we’re allowed to, we record and transcribe all the calls and questions that front intake staff get. We We use those to guide our content strategy, even if there’s not a necessary huge search volume behind them. What we find is that really helps us to get one Z, two Zs, because especially, again, talking about personal injury or high value Networth divorce. One case is worth a lot of money. If you are able to put your best foot forward and get in front and answer that question and be that authority when people are searching in their biggest time of need, you’re going to get that business. We use that to constantly refine our data. We can also anonymize that across different firms that are in the same practice area in different areas. Ultimately, I hope to build the ultimate topical authority map that says, Hey, if you have a $4 billion budget, we can build this. If you have a $3,000 budget, that’s fine. You can take this piece here and it’s still going to help you.

No, absolutely. I think you’re absolutely correct because I think one thing, it’s more about also proactive versus reactive. What I believe, even Even from an SEO standpoint, if, let’s say, your website has reached a certain DR, which is comparable to the competitors, which means you have that authority, if you’re creating a good piece of content, it will rank. Now, when we are doing normal keyword research, and again, we have to do that because that’s the money keywords and what you have to. But once you have got the basics done and you have a strong base, you look at Google Trends, you look at keywords and all of those tools, but they will just give you data of what’s there. People are searching stuff like that. But if you’re doing this approach where you’re actually recording the conversations with the client, it might give you some content ideas which actually people need and are not there in all those researches you have done through the tools. Sometimes you might be the first one to give that content to your clients. If your content is there, you might end up winning that business, like you said.

Yeah, absolutely. That’s how you’re different because that’s the problem, I think, in general, and why I think a lot of law firms see poor results is they will engage with the company, they will just execute a boilerplate plan, but it’s only targeting the head key where it’s car accident lawyer, slip and fall lawyer, dog bite lawyer, whatever in that city, which is exactly what everybody else is doing. It’s just not enough. You have to go deeper, you got to go wider.

No, I understand. Absolutely. Talking about link building, and again, I understand it’s a topic when everyone has their own strategy and thought process. But how do you look at link building now for your clients?

We go against the green a little bit now. I used to be really heavy into link building, and I’ve tried everything over the years, so no hiding that. We’ve always tried to take an ethical approach, though, too, as well. What we found in our current belief in 2024 is thatlink building is still important, but it’s less important than it has been. We are really more focused on quality of links than the quantity, which has always been the case, but more so now than ever, because here’s the thing. A lot of people go out and get guest posts, but all the guest post providers, you probably get the emails, too. They’re selling you the same websites that everybody else is selling you, and you just plug those into a tool and you can say, Hey, wait, this site got slapped. It’s not even getting any organic traffic or this page you’re going to get me to link on is an indexed, and that obviously doesn’t help you either. What we do to go for the authority metric is we try to focus on more of the PR side. We have two site ways that we do that.

One way is creating a data-driven study. So using data or statistics in a market with the highest net-worth divorces, most of them have to divorce cases, things like that. Building out something that not only is data-driven, but it’s also beautiful and hopefully interactive. Another way that AI tools make a big difference right now, it’s easier to build a settlement calculator, You can do it in one second now than using a plugin or coding that manually. Then we pitch that to local news organizations or people that might find that interesting. We also find that over time, we’ll earn its own links. Again, these are things that typically are not copied by competitors, at least not on the same level as buying the same guest post. But also interviews are still a big portion of what we do. Meaning we used to all use Hara. Everybody would do that. Now that shifted because it’s gone. But to quote it in other websites, and maybe you’re paying for a subscription to do that now, but you’re probably getting higher quality placements. People think about links in the context of, what’s that going to do to my authority? We have clients that reach to us every day.

I need 10 links a month. When you ask them why, a lot of times they’re like, for SEO rankings. Okay, but will these links help you? What we find is they don’t really know the true answer. My answer to that is it definitely, obviously, If it’s from a high-authority website, I believe that contains a lot of value. But the higher value is what if that shows up in front of your clients that are looking to hire you? You’re going to get business from that. There’s a business outcome that’s driven from that. That’s the mindset that we approach all of our own marketing from. It’s like, how much money are you going to make by hiring us? How many cases are you going to sign? How much revenue is for each one of those cases? We just bring that back all the way and say, Hey, is what we’re doing valuable for your business, or are we just trying to appease Google today? Absolutely.

This is a question a lot of entrepreneurs and agency owners that are starting off ask us, how do you price your services?

Yeah, good question. For us, it’s based on a few things, but again, going back to that value metric for us, the way that I prefer to price these days are, what is your goal? You tell me and you say, Okay, my goal is to sign 20 cases a month. Okay, cool. Where are you located? I’m located in Los Angeles. Okay, that’s going to be a lot more competitive. So what we do is we have a formula and we look at the number of firms that they’re competing against in that area, what the predicted search volumes are, and then we forecast a model and we say, Okay, we know that you need 10,000 visits at a 10% contact rate and then a 30% conversion rate to reach that goal that you’re looking for. And we walk that back. So to get that, we need to do this based on your existing traffic, which is a thousand visits a month to here in 6 months or 12 months, this is what we have to do, this is how much it costs. Now, that answer is going to be different if you’re in the middle of Nebraska. That’s why competition and marketplace a big key into that.

Kethe, again, you have been doing this for a long time, and even as a child, you have a very beautiful journey. You kept on learning entrepreneurship business right from the early days and obviously implemented that in your life, but still was there. If you had to pick one of your turning point learnings, if I may call it, what would that one biggest lesson be? Which you feel was the turning mind?

It depends. You want it in the context of SEO or the context of business, because I have a lot of lessons learned the hard way.

Let’s go business.

Yeah. So business for me, there’s a lot of them. I’ll rattle off a few. One is you We talked about learning. Learning is core to what I do. If you’re leading a team of people, the minute you stop learning is the minute you stop becoming a leader. I think it’s important for you to push forward and to help provide this stuff for your team and motivate them. But also from an entrepreneurship, the biggest lesson I’ve probably ever learned versus when I started off to where I am now is I started off as a practitioner. I came from doing SEO, and I still like doing SEO, and that’s a problem. The problem that results that is that I’m in the weeds and I’m doing things where really the only thing that I should be doing is delegating and saying, I need competent team members or competent vendors to be able to execute this and deliver what we need, which is this exceptional result. Trusting and delegation. Like your time is the most valuable thing that you have. It’s the only thing you can’t buy back. People sometimes think you’re a superhero if you can do a million things in one day.

But it’s not because of just me, it’s because of my ability to delegate and the powerful team that I have behind me, which leads me into point three, is if you’re building a company, your clients are going to get the best results if you’re keeping your people happy. If your people are happy, they’re going to bring their best to work every day. They’re going to give it their best. They’re going to push forward. That’s something that we really try to cultivate internally in our culture, something that I would have never even thought of unless it came forefront to us. We built something now where people love coming to work, they love helping us out, and those results show, and that creates momentum, which is something that excites me. I’m really never excited about just the status quo. It’s grow or die. Not like saying, Oh, you got to double business overnight because we want to do it the right way, and we want to have exceptional results every step of the way. But there’s something to be said about the momentum. You have to carry it on. Otherwise, you just feel like you’re dying a bit inside.

You have to go on. I think culture is very important. We implemented traction, the EOS, a lot of that within the agency. But when we were doing traction, we realized we also need to do a separate thing on culture. Then we read that the book Culture. I forgot the author, but what I’m trying to say is culture is so much important. You might have the right processes in place and the systems in place, but if you don’t have a culture, and then you’re not hiring culture-first people. It’s very difficult to scale and be successful.

Yeah, you’re absolutely right. I have a ton of lessons to still learn on the leadership and culture side things. But I am happy that we’ve been able to build such a great culture that keeps people engaged and motivated and happy. I acquired another digital marketing agency, a legal digital marketing agency a few years back. That was the first thing that I noticed was the culture clash right away, which is something nobody tells you when they’re teaching you about buying and selling businesses and things like that. But it was so important. It started to mark a major transformation for us and a positive one, and something that we’re continually learning and enhancing and growing on.

Perfect. What next for Casey Mirage?

What next? Right now, I am very excited about building Jury’s Digital. If I’m painting this brush 10 years out, I actually still want to be in here because to me, one thing I noticed is I did take a couple of years back, semi-retired, pretty young, and I got bored. I need to be doing something. I need to be pushing. Right now, legal marketing and legal tech is what my background is in. It’s something I’m excited about bullish about more so than ever. So for me, I want to continue growing jurisprudential. I want to continue to acquire other agencies. I want to make us more efficient. And really, I want to make us the best. I don’t want to be the best kept secret because that’s the problem is sometimes you think you’re bigger than you are, and you realize, Oh, wait, nobody knows about you. I want to be the firm that law firms turn to when they’re looking to sign more of their highest value cases.

I understand. Casey, it was great having you, but before I let you go, I like playing a quick rapid fire round of 3-5 questions, if you’re up for it.

Let’s do it.

All right. Texting or talking?

I’m a texter. I love short and easy communication like that.

You actually type it or you’re more of a voice to text person?

I will most of the time dictate, yeah, even Siri or whatever.

I met an accident a few months back, so I had fractured my back, so I was on the bed for two months. It was okay for the first four days, five days, because I was in pain, painkillers. But then on the fifth day, I’m like, Dude, what do I do without a laptop? I don’t want to be out of the day-to-day things and stuff. That made me a pro in voice to text on my phone, even on my laptop. I can use the MacBook voice to text much better than texting now.

Yeah. Now, actually, what’s funny is the ChatGPT app, that is… Siri misunderstands me quite often or mistypes, but if I’m using the ChatGPT app to dictate, that one’s perfect. Perfect.

Last Google search, if you remember, what was your last Google search?

I did a lot of Google searches today, but I don’t actually remember. But yeah, nothing comes to mind. Trying a complete blank. Probably something related to SEO.

Fair enough. If a movie was made on you, what genre would it Definitely an action movie.

Totally an action star at heart. Not in real life, but just kidding. Yeah, I know. Good question.

Favorite holiday destination?

Probably that’s a tricky one because I travel a lot and there’s a lot of places I’ll add up equally. But right now, it’s actually Maui.

Okay. Favorite book?

Also a lot of those, but favorite is a big one. I think from an entrepreneurial standpoint, going back to that, I think the E-Math revisited was something that set me up. Actually, I’m going to back that answer up because I think the most transformational book for me was actually the 4-hour Work Week when I decided, Hey, I actually don’t need to work 40 hours or more a week. I can do a lot and a lot less. Sometimes I need to remember that. I’m saying that to myself as well as you. All right.

Perfect. Casey, thank you so much for your time. It was fun having you. I wish you and jurisdigital all the best, and hopefully, we’ll catch you again for another episode soon.

Sounds good. Thank you so much. I really appreciate you taking the time. It was a pleasure being here today.