From Litigator to Mediator: How to Build a Successful Neutral Practice with Scott Zucker on the Practice Playbook Podcast #557

When someone asks AI to recommend a professional with your expertise, does your name come up? More and more, attorneys looking for a mediator for a complex commercial dispute, business owners searching for an arbitrator, and potential clients trying to find the right lawyer are turning to ChatGPT for answers. And if your name doesn’t come up, what can you do about it? Susan Guthrie welcomes Erica Glessing, an expert in SEO and Generative Engine Optimization, or GEO. Erica helps professionals get discovered not just through Google, but through AI platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity. Together, they explore a major shift in how clients and referral sources find lawyers, mediators, arbitrators, and other professionals. They also look at why the work you have done to build your reputation may not be enough to make sure you are found in this new world. Erica shares practical strategies for making your expertise more visible to AI. These range from telling stories instead of making “I’m the best” claims to sitting down with your favorite AI tool and teaching it what you want to be known for. The good news is that you may have more influence than you realize. That goes for whether AI recommends you, and also for the kinds of clients, cases, and referrals it connects with you. What You'll Learn

You can be an excellent professional, mediator, or lawyer and still struggle to build a successful practice. It may be one of the most frustrating truths about these professions, because knowing how to carry out your craft and knowing how to build a business around it are two entirely different skill sets. That is why we are tackling the questions heard most often from practitioners about what might actually be missing and why they are struggling so much. Joining Susan Guthrie on this week's episode of The Practice Playbook Practice is Natalie Armstrong Motin. She has helped mediators, arbitrators, and other dispute resolution professionals build and market their practices for over three decades, and draws on her new book, Build Your Mediation Practice: The Complete Marketing and Business Development Guide for Mediators and Arbitrators, to walk through them. Where do the cases come from? Do I really need a niche? How do I market myself without feeling like I'm selling myself? Why am I doing all the things and still not getting traction? And when the phone rings or the email lands, now what? If these questions have been coming to mind, then this episode has the answers. This conversation is much more than marketing. It explores why building a practice requires a fundamental shift in mindset, why trying to be everything to everyone may be costing you business, and why becoming known isn't about constantly talking about yourself. Whether you're building your first mediation practice, transitioning from another professional career, or wondering why an established practice isn't growing the way you want it to, there's something here for everyone. What You'll Learn

Growth is not always the next right move. Sometimes more clients or more visibility are not what you are actually looking for. In fact, perhaps you'd actually want less of them. When a practice feels off, the instinct is often to reach for more marketing, more referrals, or more revenue. But growth is not automatically repair. If what a practice needs is some repair, growth only multiplies what is already there, and more clients will not fix an unclear scope, underpricing, or a practice that runs on reaction instead of design. In this episode of The Practice Playbook Podcast, Susan Guthrie asks listeners to imagine their current practice with twice as much demand, and to notice whether that feels like energy or dread. Drawing on her own years in a litigation practice and her work with colleagues, she explores why so many professionals who ask for marketing help really need a practice assessment and redesign first, why marketing can open the door but cannot change what happens after it opens, and why AI can speed up pieces of a workflow but will never fix its design. In This Episode Susan discusses:

Your fees are not just how you get paid. They may be quietly building the practice you are trying to escape. Every fee structure creates consequences. Hourly billing, flat fees, subscriptions, packages, phased fees, and hybrid models do more than determine revenue. They shape client expectations, boundaries, scope, workload, value perception, risk, and sustainability. That means the real pricing question is not simply, “What should I charge?” The better question is: What kind of practice does this pricing model create? In this episode of The Practice Playbook Podcast, Susan Guthrie looks at pricing as one of the most powerful design choices in a professional practice. She explores what underpricing may be building, why hourly billing can reward inefficiency and punish expertise, how AI is weakening the link between time and value, and why alternative fee models only work when the service design underneath them is clear. This episode draws from Susan’s work in The Flat Fee Playbook, The Business Plan Playbook, Second Edition, and her upcoming ABA book, FUTURE PROOF: Designing a Legal or ADR Practice for the AI Era. Together, they point to one essential truth: pricing is never just pricing. It is part of the practice you are building. In This Episode Susan discusses:

"That's the way we've always done it" might be the most expensive phrase in your practice, even when you never say it out loud. Susan Guthrie explores the practice rules professionals follow without ever consciously choosing them, from availability and referrals to pricing, customization, and the very definition of success. The last two episodes of The Practice Playbook Podcast explored whether your practice is working for everyone but you and what your calendar reveals about your business model. This week, Susan goes one layer deeper into the patterns shaping practices that were never consciously chosen, but simply inherited. Using a relatable (and timely) suitcase story as the through line, Susan walks through five areas where inherited rules quietly take over: availability, referrals, pricing, customization, and success. The message isn't that inherited rules are wrong. It's that they deserve to be examined, kept, revised, or released, so the practice you're building is the one you actually intended. What You'll Learn