Most legal marketing agencies are staffed by 24-year-olds running generic playbooks. Most ops consultants have never sat through a partner meeting. Counselcraft is different — and that difference is the entire point.
Bob spent 20 years building marketing engines for law firms — paid media, SEO, content, attribution. He kept watching firms hire him to drive more leads, then watching those leads die in broken intake processes. The marketing was working. The firm couldn't catch what the marketing produced.
Jim spent the same two decades on the operations side, eventually as COO of a multi-office DWI defense practice. He saw the opposite problem: firms with airtight ops and dashboards and SOPs, but a marketing channel that hadn't been re-thought since 2015. The operation was ready. The pipeline wasn't there.
Counselcraft is the agency that should have existed all along: growth and operations, built and operated together, by two people who already know where the failure points are because they've spent careers fixing them — separately. Now, together, in one engagement.
The fastest way to break a law firm— founding observation
is to give it more leads than it can process.
We don't sub out the work. The people you meet are the people doing it. Bob owns demand. Jim owns delivery. The seam between them is where most agencies break — and where Counselcraft was specifically designed to be strongest.
Twenty years working with law firms as both an employee and a consultant. Bob has personally led growth marketing for firms across DWI defense, personal injury, family law, financial services, and aesthetics — covering the full mechanism of paid media, SEO, content production, and attribution.
He operates multiple brands in the AI & marketing space — BobClary.com (consulting), Dyntyx (AI workflow automation across multiple verticals), and Vortigen (AI-SEO and answer-engine authority). The result is a working knowledge of which AI capabilities actually move signed cases for law firms versus which are demos dressed up as products. Counselcraft is where that thesis becomes an offering.
Jim is the sitting Chief Operating Officer at Tom Anelli & Associates — one of the most established DWI defense practices in New York, operating across multiple offices and serving thousands of clients. The kind of firm where intake runs 24/7, conflict checks can't wait, and a missed handoff is a missed retainer.
Jim is the creator of OpsEdge, the operational systems framework that turns growing firms into ones that can actually scale without the founding partners being the system. Process architecture, KPI dashboards, automation, fractional COO — built from inside a real, growing law firm rather than from a consulting deck. When Jim recommends a system, he has run that system. That's rare in this space.
Impressions, clicks, "engaged sessions" — none of those pay associate salaries. Every dashboard we build, every campaign we run, terminates in signed retainers and case value. If we can't tie a dollar of spend to a dollar of revenue, we don't ship it.
The legal industry doesn't need the loudest AI demos — it needs AI that respects privilege, citations, conflict checks, and ethics rules. We architect for governance from day one. No black boxes. Every AI decision is auditable. Every agent has a human escalation path.
We don't ship "strategy decks" and disappear. We don't hand off to a junior account manager. Bob and Jim are operators — the engagement is built around us actually building the thing, then operating it alongside the firm until it's running cleanly.
We turn down work outside legal. The reason is simple: nothing dilutes expertise faster than splitting attention across industries. Every system, every framework, every AI workflow we build is tuned for the specific economics, regulations, and rhythms of how law firms actually run.
We won't quote you a "package" before we understand what's actually broken. Every engagement starts with a paid diagnostic. If the right answer for you is to hire one of three other people in our network, we'll tell you. Trust compounds; the firm that doesn't fit today refers two firms next year.
The systems we install belong to the firm. We document everything, train your team, and build toward a state where you no longer need us in the chair every week. The Fractional COO engagement is meant to taper, not balloon. Vendors who design for permanent dependency are not partners.
Most engagements start with a 60-minute call and a paid diagnostic. The diagnostic credits toward implementation if you decide to move forward. No commitment beyond that.