From spinning records as a college DJ to commanding courtrooms as a powerhouse attorney, Jill Bollwerk's journey defies conventional career paths. In this captivating episode of "World of Marketing," host Tom Foster uncovers how a chance conversation with a law professor altered the trajectory of Jill's life forever. With refreshing candor, she reveals the moments that tested her resolve—juggling pregnancy with bar exams, facing repeated defeats as a new attorney, and making the leap to start her own firm with no clients. As Jill shares the unexpected turning points that shaped her 33-year career, listeners will discover the unconventional marketing strategies that helped her build a thriving practice despite overwhelming competition. This conversation isn't just about legal success—it's a masterclass in resilience from a woman who refused to be defined by setbacks.
Tom: Hello everyone and welcome to the World of Marketing where I, Tom Foster, talk with legal leaders about yes, you guessed it, marketing, mindset, and the growth of law firm businesses. This episode is brought to you by Foster Web Marketing. Since the internet was born, Foster has been the premier provider of customized websites, SEO, video, and strategic solutions for elite law firms. Our unparalleled web technology and systems set the gold standard in the industry, catering exclusively to discerning clientele who demand the best.
We are in a series centered on trailblazing women transforming their industries, featuring candid conversations with dynamic women who share their journeys, challenges, and innovative strategies for success. Whether you're an aspiring marketer or an established leader, this podcast will be a resource for inspiration, empowerment, and expert tips from some of the brightest women in their fields.
I'm thrilled to introduce my friend, guest, and client Jill Bollwerk, founder of her own litigation firm with over 33 years of experience. Jill has built her practice from the ground up, starting without money or clients, and has navigated significant changes this year and for a while now. Join us as we delve into her inspiring journey, discuss the importance of resilience, and learn how she balances her professional life with spoiling her grandkids in her personal life. So let's dive in.
That was pretty good. My team wrote that for me, so that's excellent.
Jill: I love it. Thank you, that's great.
Tom: So Jill, thank you so much for agreeing to do the podcast. I know you're busy. How are you? You just told me right before we started recording that you just got signed up two cases from the internet, the website, your website and Google, and good ones so that's keeping you busy.
Jill: Yes.
Tom: So first of all, tell us a little bit about you. Tell us where you're at right now first of all.
Jill: I'm in my office in Sunset Hills, Missouri, which is a suburb of St. Louis, Missouri.
Tom: And what areas of law do you practice in?
Jill: I'm a general personal injury litigator, mostly car accidents, truck accidents, motorcycle accidents, and I also practice workers compensation, and I'm also a certified mediator.
Tom: That's a lot of stuff.
Jill: It is a lot of stuff.
Tom: Now do you have a team that helps you or are you just like all by your lonesome doing all that stuff?
Jill: No, I have an associate, Andy Pickler, and then I have a paralegal and an office manager, and we each have our role in every case and it seems to work like a well-oiled machine, at least so far.
Tom: For sure, that's what you've proven - 33 years, right? And you've been through a lot.
Jill: Yes, that's for sure.
Tom: And on your... so Andy, you guys have a little podcast yourself, don't you? You have a little thing that you guys are doing?
Jill: Yeah, we started doing this - well, we'll get into the story - but when Andy and I kind of broke away and started doing our own thing, we wanted to do more, letting people see who we were. So we started this little "Coffee with the Counselors." It's like a five to seven minute little conversation we have about some simple topic, and people seem to love it. We put it on Facebook and Google My Business.
Tom: Well, you guys help us put it where it is, but you guys put it together and that's great. I just wanted to bring that up to people that that resource is available and it's fun to watch.
Jill: It is fun. It's fun to make "Coffee with the Counselors." Check it out! We're starting to get mugs from people asking us to feature them on our podcast, so we've been getting mugs from other firms.
Tom: Foster Web here's Kersi Bomm, and Kers Bomm, they sent my buddy Chris, they sent one, and I got another one from Spencer Eisener.
Jill: Wow!
Tom: And I'll be using that on the next one.
Jill: Well, I hope you get more because of this - like everybody send Jill your mugs! It's fun. The podcast is like just a little five to seven minutes. We just talk about a topic and we don't script it, we just start talking and we're kind of quirky people, so hopefully people like the quirk. I don't know.
Tom: That's funny. I guess I'm kind of quirky too. That's why we get along so well!
Jill: Yep.
Tom: Okay, so you've been doing this for 33 years. Half of those years you've been with me, we've been together and you've entrusted me with your digital marketing and we kind of do it all for you. But let's back it up to how you got started. So let's tell everybody your origin story, Jill.
Jill: Okay, so how far back?
Tom: Start like, you know, coming out of law school. Why did you become a lawyer? Like that's what I would like to know - why did you become a lawyer?
Jill: So it was interesting. It wasn't what I planned to do growing up. I was the first person in my family to even graduate from college. My parents - my dad was a railroad engineer and my mom raised us and was a secretary, and they worked really hard to put us into really good Catholic high schools because I'm in St. Louis and everybody goes to private Catholic girl or boy high schools.
Tom: What school did you go to?
Jill: I went to Cor Jesu Academy, which is known as the brainiac school.
Tom: Okay.
Jill: And it really - I mean, let me tell you, I went to that school and came out and went to college and went "This is so easy, this is so simple." So they really had us prepared for college, that's great. And I was into theater and public speaking and all the things that probably go into making a good trial lawyer, but I wanted to be the next Jane Pauley, which for the younger people, that's a big broadcaster back in the 70s and 80s. I wanted to be her, so I went to college to study broadcasting.
Tom: Wow, interesting!
Jill: Went to SIU, Southern Illinois University Carbondale, which was one of the best broadcasting schools in the country.
Tom: Do you know that school?
Jill: No, but you're giving me a great idea for you. You're giving me a great idea.
Tom: Oh, you guys always have ideas! Okay...
Jill: So then I go there and I get involved in the radio station and the news station, and I'm a disc jockey spinning all kinds of crazy stuff, enjoying it...
Tom: Video footage of that time? Video footage?
Jill: No, no pictures.
Tom: Do you have pictures?
Jill: Well, there is a picture from the college newspaper I could probably dig up with my headset and I'm spinning a record.
Tom: Spinning a record, yeah!
Jill: And also if you got the cassette, if you've got any of that original material, you being a DJ, that would be cool too.
Jill: Oh my God, and some of the commercials I made... it's funny. So anyway, I did that and quickly realized I wasn't going to be able to make a living doing that because you can't just get out of school and go to NBC. You have to start off in Carbondale, Illinois at $3.35 an hour, which is what the minimum wage was back in 19-blah-blah-blah.
So I really kind of felt like an obligation to my family to do something. I just felt like God gave me this brain and I needed to do something worthy. Well, no, don't get me wrong - DJs are super smart people. They have to do a lot and they have to multitask while they're on the air. But I just kind of felt like I was called to do something that I could use my brain to help other people, and I kind of felt like I wasn't going to do that.
So I had kind of switched my focus from the on-camera, on-air personality to the business side of broadcasting and started and changed my core classes to business. I had to take a business law class - it was a broadcast and business law class - and I loved studying. I just loved studying the law. And we had to get up a couple of times and argue, I don't even remember what it was we had to argue, and the professor was an attorney. I went up to him and I said, "I really love your class," and he said, "You would be a great trial lawyer. You ought to think about that." And I said, "I never thought about that."
So he kind of counseled me and said, you know, I was graduating like a semester early, I was graduating in December after three and a half years because I had all this college credit from school, and he said, "Why don't you take a job in a law office for a trial lawyer and see what you think?"
So I did. I was a really good secretary because back then we all had to learn how to be secretaries. I could do shorthand, I could do all the things.
Tom: How old were you right then?
Jill: 22.
Tom: Wow, okay, 21-22. You figured all this out by the time you're 22!
Jill: Well, I mean, I hadn't figured it out. So I went to work full-time at a law office and I just got so lucky. I ended up in the law office of the best trial attorney in the state at the time.
Tom: But you weren't in - you hadn't gone to law school yet, right?
Jill: No, I hadn't even - I was still deciding whether I wanted to go to law school.
Tom: Got it.
Jill: So I took this job kind of as a "do I want to do this?" And I did it through a temp agency.
Tom: Like they send it, was it a temp agency?
Jill: Might have been an employment agency.
Tom: Either way, you took a risk.
Jill: I took a risk. I went to this - I saw him start trying cases off the bat. His name was Don Summers, God rest his soul. He's been dead for quite some time, but he had throat cancer and was still trying cases with a flask of water next to him. He would just drink the water through the trial and people would look like, "Is that man drinking on the job?" And we would have to explain, "You need to tell the jury that's water in there."
But anyway, he was this absolutely incredible trial attorney, and he moved me to tears a couple of times when I watched him. And that's when I was like, "I got to do this. This is what I'm supposed to be doing."
So I took the LSAT and I loved my job so much that I decided to go to night school so I could still work full-time for him. So I started working full-time, I started law school, was working full-time.
Tom: You did law school at night school?
Jill: I started off that way, yes.
Tom: Okay.
Jill: So for the first year and a half I did that, and I went in the summer. And night school is kind of funny - they say you go to school part-time, instead of taking 15 hours I took 12, but I worked 40 hours. So it was kind of a very difficult time. At that age maybe I could have done it when I was older, but at that age when all my friends are still out having a great time and I'm literally working in the law from 8:00am to 2:00 in the morning because I'm studying when I get home. But I did it, I did it for a year and a half.
Tom: Good for you!
Jill: And then I just decided I need to get done with law school. I don't want to be in school for four years. So I took a part-time job which was 30 hours a week. It's funny that you feel like you did something wrong because you didn't party with your friends. Man, you chose the right path! You put your nose down and did what you had to do to become who you are now.
Jill: Well, yeah, I did. I did, so... I love this. My journey was kind of funny. So then I switched gears and I end up working part-time, well almost full-time, for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, which is our local newspaper. I worked all day Friday - I worked like one day a week, like half a day, and then I worked all day Friday. On Friday it was when you took all the classified ads for Sunday, and then on Sunday I worked in the office for four hours taking obituaries. So I wrote obituaries.
Tom: Oh my goodness!
Jill: Yeah, the things you do when you have to pay for your own school.
Tom: But I bet you that helps you now.
Jill: Oh sure it does. I mean, it definitely - all those experiences...
Tom: Doing those different things and all of them were just you reaching out, like exploring what you wanted to do for yourself, and it's very cool. Your journey, as I said, keep going please.
Jill: And then so then, well, my husband Andy and I had been dating for quite some time and we weren't seeing each other at all because I would get home from class at 10 at night, he'd have to go to bed for work. So we just decided we were going to get married. Let's just get married while you're in school, we can kind of live off of his income, which was poultry, but we lived on his income, which allowed me to take this part-time job and to get done.
So I get finished with law school and I take my first job as an associate at a personal injury firm of a gentleman that I kind of knew. We had just been married for about a year at the time, and he asked me, "When do you think you're going to have a family?" - which is something of course you can't ask a job applicant anymore, but back in the 80s you could ask that question.
Tom: You ask anything back then, you ask any question you want!
Jill: And I said, "Oh my gosh, oh probably five years" - and two weeks later I had to go in and tell them, "You know, I said five years - how about now?" So the first four years of my practice, I was pregnant pretty much the whole time.
Tom: Wow. So I know a lot of women lawyers go - they practice for a while...
Jill: Practice law while you were pregnant, pretty much?
Jill: Yeah, in fact, I took both the Illinois and the Missouri bar exam seven weeks pregnant each time.
Tom: Wow.
Jill: Yeah, one of them wasn't very pretty.
Tom: How old are your kids?
Jill: My daughter is 32 and my son is 31, just turned 31.
Tom: Same as my kids.
Jill: Yeah?
Tom: Yeah, I have five. I have 32, 34, 30, 31, 30, 16, and 12. And you got that big gap.
Jill: Yeah, yeah. We opted for more... well, I...
Tom: You got grandkids too.
Jill: I do, I have two grandkids, two little girls. They're so much fun.
Tom: How old are they?
Jill: The one's going to be four and the other one just turned, well, she's a year and a half. So fun, they are a blast.
Tom: I got two girls that are local to me that are five - Mickey and Stella is two - and then I've got a grandson out in California with my oldest daughter.
Jill: I can't imagine - I can't imagine being far away. That's got to be hard.
Tom: I know, that's rough, but I get to see him a couple of times a year.
Jill: That's good.
Tom: That's good, that's good. All right, so back to... okay, so you're law, pregnant, working for this other law firm... I can't believe this story, man! Like, I didn't know this part of it. I knew you had a big story, but anyway...
Jill: Yeah, it's been - it was a bumpy - it was bumpy but great. I mean, it shows your determination and your tenacity.
Tom: That's one thing I've got, that's for sure.
Jill: For sure, that is for sure. It was so funny because Court TV was like the new thing when I was on maternity leave with both kids, and I laughed because all these murder trials and shows are on. I'm like, oh, I watched that! Our first trial, I watched OJ, I think, the first child, and I watched Menendez brothers the other way around. That's what I did during maternity leave - as I watched those trials live.
Tom: When Court TV actually showed live trials, right. I remember that.
Jill: But I had two maternity leaves with that first employer, and I came back from the second one and he basically was like, "I can't afford to pay you anymore." So I went to work for another phenomenal trial attorney. His name was Ted Hoffman and he's also deceased, but he was just absolutely fantastic trial attorney.
My job for him was to handle all of his workers compensation cases and also to take all of the cases he didn't want to try. So I got to try a lot of cases - didn't win a one because they weren't good cases. I appreciated and admired him and loved what I learned from him, but I really kind of was getting tired of getting my butt kicked all the time on cases I didn't believe in. The cases were usually cases where somebody that he took the case because he knew them and he didn't want to turn away a referral source, and so I would go in and I would be embarrassed sometimes.
So, one case I tried against this other woman attorney - it was the only time I ever handled a case against another woman - and she was fantastic. Her name was Robbie Toof, and she worked in-house for an insurance company called United States Fidelity and Guarantee Company, which is long gone. We tried a case against each other and I lost, of course, like I did everything else there. She came up to me after the trial and she said what a great job I did and they're looking to hire somebody to handle their workers comp and to do a lot of their jury trial work - was I interested?
I thought, I don't know if I can work for an insurance company, but I'll give it a try. So I went ahead and took the job. It was better pay, better benefits, and it was actually a really - this insurance company had a local presence. So I actually got to know all the adjusters, they listened to me, I really felt like I was doing a good job because I was getting good cases settled with people and I was fighting bad cases.
So then I started winning all the time.
Tom: That's cool! Went from losing...
Jill: Yeah, but I was winning as a defense lawyer.
Tom: Looking back, interesting.
Jill: But the cases that I was winning were not good cases. They were cases that if I was the insured, I would have tried it too.
So I did that and I really enjoyed it, and I really loved learning from a woman attorney. She was such a great trial lawyer. Then as insurance companies do, it got bought out. It got bought out by another insurance company which has been bought out two times since then.
Tom: How long did you do that?
Jill: I only did it for about two and a half years. So I did five years as a plaintiff's lawyer, then two and a half or three years as a defense lawyer. It got bought out.
Tom: How old were you when you were doing that?
Jill: 32-33 or something like that.
Tom: Okay, early 30s.
Jill: It got bought out, they kept me but they demoted me, gave me twice as many cases, and the adjusters didn't listen to me. I was like, "Nope, this is - I can't do this, this is - I'm not going to rip off people, I'm just not going to do that."
So I went home and told my husband and he's like, "We'll figure it out, we'll figure it out." And I said, "You know what? I don't want to be bouncing around. I don't want to be the person that bounces around. I've had bad luck in staying in one place." And this is back when you didn't bounce around. Now you bounce around - these young people bounce around every two years, but back then you didn't do that.
Tom: I remember these days, yeah.
Jill: So I said, "I really think I could do this on my own. I mean, I've seen both sides of the litigation process. I just don't have any clients."
So I was sitting on my driveway with my neighbors, and my neighbors down the street were also lawyers. I was telling them about it and the one neighbor said to me, "Jill, I got a proposition for you." I said, "What's that?" He says, "I have my own firm and it's a construction litigation - they represent construction companies." And he said, "I need help. Why don't you come work for me as a contract lawyer and build your practice while you're making some money working for me?"
And basically, so I did. I went in and I learned some construction litigation, which wasn't my cup of tea, but it definitely was trial work. And he worked for the same two or three companies. So I did that and I would get paid hourly on whatever I billed, and then on the flip side I was starting to market. I think that's maybe when I read Ben Glass's first thing that he put out about legal marketing.
Tom: How did you come by that book?
Jill: It's kind of funny because the internet wasn't - not everybody had the internet back then.
Tom: This was 2000... this was 2009?
Jill: No, this is way before that. This is way before then. This is probably still the late 90s.
Tom: Wow, yeah. Okay, the late 90s.
Jill: Maybe it was later, but it had to be - like that book went out like 2007.
Tom: Okay, that makes sense.
Jill: But I think I read something about legal marketing and I wrote letters to everybody I knew telling them what I was doing. I did a little three-page website through WordPress or whatever it was back then. I mean, it was "here's my picture and here's my email address" and it was very basic.
Tom: Basic, right, right.
Jill: But nobody had one yet. Like I was one of the first legal websites in town, and I was getting a lot of calls from people that were out of state that were looking for somebody in Missouri. Like truck drivers - I got some truck drivers that were driving through and had an accident in Missouri but don't know who to call, so they got on the internet and found me.
And then it just kind of - I got to the point where I had enough cases and I wasn't really working on my friend's cases anymore because I was too busy. That's when I took the plunge and started my own firm in 2001.
Tom: Okay, so ask me questions. So okay, did you start your firm with a partner or on your own? When did you get your partner?
Jill: So I started on my own and I shared space with a friend of mine. My mom, who had retired, became my legal secretary and she worked - they lived across the street from us, my mom and dad, and my kids were in early grade school at the time. So she would come over to my house and work in my basement while I was at the office, and I would give her my dictation and she'd work on it. Then I'd come home at night and I'd sign it, and she babysat my kids after school. So my kids would get off the bus and my mom was at my house working.
And then I needed a full-time person. Mom didn't want to do that and I got a paralegal. Then around 2003 I convinced a friend of mine to come in practice with me, so that's when I had my first partner, Dan Ryan.
Tom: And what year was that?
Jill: It was 2003. And then we bought a little building together in Kirkwood, Missouri, which is a suburb of St. Louis, in 2005. He was more products liability - he did a lot of the bigger cases, and I did all the workers comp and the car crashes and stuff like that.
Then in 2009 we brought in another friend of ours, Phil Tatlow, and we became Bollwerk, Ryan, and Tatlow in 2009. So that was transition number three for me.
Tom: Transition three, and then Dan left in 2012?
Jill: So that was transition four. We became Bollwerk and Tatlow.
Tom: That's right. And I remember that transition because you came on with us in 2009.
Jill: Yeah, so I was Bollwerk and Ryan when we came on.
Tom: And we did all the videos and everything was with Dan Ryan. And then Phil and I were partners until 2024, till this year. And you know, we're at that age where you decide whether you're going to keep growing or whether you're going to go towards the sunset, and we each were kind of going in different directions. He's still one of my dearest friends and we still talk all the time, but it was just time to do our own things.
Tom: But that happens. You were together for what, 10 years?
Jill: Actually 15. He joined us in 2009, so that's a long time.
Tom: So, and you know, wish him the best and he's doing great. I talked to him on Friday.
Jill: That's wonderful.
Tom: Wow, I love this story and I'm sure that everybody was just as transfixed as me. Now you're just telling the story, but you tell it so well. That's obviously your - you know how to tell the story. And what a story! I mean, all of the things that you did - you were confronted with and you just kept going, you just kept digging, you just kept driving.
It's a wonderful testament, and that's why this is great. You're my first "Women in Power" guest, and so like you really are a powerful woman. So congratulations to you, Jill.
Jill: Great, I love - I love being back on my own. I mean, I'm not on my own by myself, but I'm my own - the owner of the firm. And although I always loved having partners because it's somebody to collaborate with, I love making decisions about things like this.
Like I was always a lot of pull on spending money on marketing. As soon as I was on my own, I called your office and said, "I'm ready to take the plunge and let you guys do whatever you got to do" - which was actually necessary because I changed my firm name, changed, sold the building, changed the firm name, and the web presence just dropped off because of that. So I really needed you guys to help me get back on the radar.
Tom: Well, that's a significant change that affects Google. And yeah, we jumped on it and you redesigned the website so that it was for you, and it looks fantastic. Everybody should check it out.
Jill: Love it.
Tom: Yeah, it's a great website and it gets tons of visits. I haven't checked recently, but it's getting more and more. You just said you signed up two cases that you got from the web just recently, right?
Jill: Just yesterday, yeah. It was interesting because we would get a lot - my partner Phil did ERISA litigation, which is a very tiny niche.
Tom: Very niche-y, very niche. Ben Glass does that and did that.
Jill: That's how very niche-y.
Tom: I actually built the first ERISA intranet for ERISA lawyers through Ben Glass. We did that website for them years ago, so I had a bunch of ERISA lawyers as clients back then.
Jill: Well, those are - we got a lot of business for the ERISA because there's not that many people. What I do, there's so much competition and it's so much more difficult. So I've gotten a lot of great cases over the years from the website, and I was hoping to get more because my practice is mostly referral-based.
Tom: Sure.
Jill: And most of it, a good percentage of it is from other lawyers. So, you know, you either spend money giving part of your fee to somebody else, or you spend money marketing. I wanted to kind of do both, and hopefully it's working. It seems to be working. It takes a while and you got to be patient.
Tom: And the other thing too is a lot of your traffic are those people that were referred by other lawyers, because everybody's going to go to your website. A lawyer will say, "You should check out Jill Bollwerk." What are they going to do? They're going to go to your website.
Jill: Usually through their phone, you know, pretty quick. They might even do it while they're sitting there in the office.
Tom: Or you know, later on, but generally it'll be on their phone or their laptop that they'll look you up and check you out before they - and they'll still call, or they'll chat, or they'll contact you through a contact form. Those people that you got those two cases, did they call in?
Jill: Called, they both called.
Tom: That's great. Did they say, have you been really good about asking them like what did you search for?
Jill: Yes.
Tom: That's so great. You got to be able to track that stuff because you got to know what's working and what's not working. You got to constantly review your marketing to make sure that you're spending your dollars wisely and you're doing the right thing. And you got to work with somebody that you can trust.
It's a back and forth thing, and I told Jill when we first got on before I hit record how thankful I was for her all these years allowing us to help her with her marketing. It's such a sensitive thing that you need to do, and it's great that you recognize that you need to do marketing and you need to do even more of it. I've got a lot of great ideas for you that I'm going to share with you after this show that we're about to close up.
But is there any message that you'd like to send to the listeners that are listening to the show, Jill? What do you talk to other people - you talk about what books they like or what books they read?
Jill: Yeah, and I was thinking about - you were going to ask me that, so I had to think about what book I've read that's really made a difference in just my wellbeing as a lawyer. I went - I did mindset coaching with, if you've heard of Sari Delot?
Tom: No.
Jill: Okay, well she's a jury consultant and she has mindset coaches. My mindset coach was a lady named Saya Gutierrez, and she recommended Shirzad Chamine's "Positive Intelligence." She even signed me up to do his web-based classes.
Honestly, that's the perseverance and how do you say - I don't even know how to say it, but I do recognize that I have persevered through a lot. I try to remind myself that when things feel like "Oh my God, this is never going to get better, these cases are never going to come, I lose every case..."
Tom: You've been like, "Oh yeah, clients..." You know, you've been so... yeah, yeah, all what we all get that stinking thinking.
Jill: And it was about taking - it was about the concept of your Sage versus your Saboteur, and how to make your Saboteur - how to look at everything that happens as a gift or opportunity. So looking at bad things that happen in the practice of law - losing a case, getting in an argument with another attorney, all of that - if you stop and you just stop yourself and think, "How can I turn this into a gift or opportunity?" Almost everything you can.
I mean, there are certain things that you're never going to look at as a gift - you know, death and something like that - but in the practice of law, even when you lose a case, you've gained a lot of wisdom. Even if you lose a client, you've gained a lot of wisdom, or you might have made room for a different client that you didn't have time for before.
And as a woman, I mean, we do have challenges sometimes being - I don't want to say respected because that's not the word, but sometimes being taken seriously. Sometimes we have to be careful - we can't be too loud or too in-your-face, but you have to assert yourself.
Tom: We have to assert ourselves, yeah.
Jill: So I feel like, especially to women, don't give up because there's always - anything that happens to you, even if you get disrespected or you get treated differently because you're a woman, you'll be able to figure that out. You'll be able to figure that out and help somebody else.
I belong to a lot of women's organizations. When I first started practicing law, I didn't because I worked for men, and I just didn't think - I didn't think, "Oh, it's probably not a good idea to belong to all these women's organizations to kind of alienate ourselves." But I've come to find out the more women's organizations I belong to, the more I've been able to get help from other women and help other women when these kinds of things happen - you know, when you just feel like the judge was talking to everybody but me, or I gave a great idea and nobody responded.
Tom: Mastermind, the power of the Mastermind, right? The Mastermind group and getting coaches. I totally agree with you 100%. And you know, I'm glad that you brought it up. I wanted to ask you a question - do you, are you an introvert or an extrovert?
Jill: Well, you - I think I was a huge extrovert. Everybody thinks I am, right? But I do have a level of anxiety with what others think of me. So I do sometimes - I mean, we all have a little bit of social anxiety, but sometimes I have more than I probably should have. It's way better now that I'm older.
Tom: Sure, yeah. Now I don't really care what people think of me like I did when I was younger.
Jill: But I mean, there are - I would say mostly an extrovert, but I do have... For instance, I swim for exercise, and I love that time with nobody around me with my head underwater.
Tom: How often do you swim?
Jill: I swim three to four days a week. I don't swim more than that because it hurts my arms too much if I swim too much.
Tom: Wow. You know, when you get older you can't do the same thing with one body part over and over again or you just break it down. That's interesting. That's great. Good for you, good for you that you do that. What else do you do for fun?
Jill: Well, the grandkids are a lot of fun. I have a lot of fun with the grandkids.
Tom: Right.
Jill: And then my husband and I like to travel, but we usually travel - I have a son who's an actor in New York, and we tend to travel around to his shows or take my daughter and her kids to see him somewhere. Well, not the kids because they can't see the shows yet, but we just kind of travel around wherever he's doing a show and we really enjoy that.
Tom: How neat is that? Your son's an actor - how cool is that?
Jill: That's neat, good for him. That's yeah.
Tom: And we're both very much into music in my family too, so we like to go to a lot of concerts. So mostly surrounding music and physical activity. I just would be lost if I didn't...
Tom: How do you fit it all in? How do you fit it all in?
Jill: I swim at 5:30, so me and all the crazy people that get up super early...
Tom: Like you do, I know, yeah.
Jill: Actually, you know, when your kids are gone and you're an empty nester, you have a lot of time.
Tom: But you didn't, I mean, when you're running around like a maniac with them for years, and then all of a sudden you come home at night and you're like, "Now what?" Nobody's ordering you around, nobody's demanding anything of you.
Tom: So, okay, so you get up at 5:30 and go swimming, then what time do you head into work?
Jill: So I get up about 5:00, and then I get done... I usually get to work between 8:00 and 8:30. It takes a while to get this put together, you know?
Tom: Yeah, well, you do such a wonderful job. Those of you that can't see this, it's just great. She has her glasses, matches her dress, she looks fantastic. So like, totally, you could get a broadcaster job like this, Jill.
Jill: Well, I've always thought I wanted to be on Court TV. I would be so good on Court TV. But then they stopped showing trials, and that is the end of that.
Tom: Well, that's what I - I got some ideas around that that we're going to talk about. Okay, so we talked about books. Are there any other mentors or that you would suggest for people?
Jill: You mean lawyer-wise, or like if I'm a woman of power lawyer like yourself, what are some masterminds or what are some books I should read besides what was that one?
Tom: Positive Intelligence is the one by Shirzad Chamine.
Jill: There's a book called "Trial by Woman," which is a great book. It's geared towards plaintiff's lawyers, but I think any female lawyer can get a lot out of it. It's written by Courtney Rowley.
Tom: Great.
Jill: I really like that book. It really puts a lot of just being a woman lawyer into perspective. There's a whole bunch of books. I mean, I read everything. I read every book that comes out.
Tom: I don't know how you have the time to do it all, and I think that everybody is listening is like, "How does she do all of this?" You've got quite a full life. Well done.
Jill: I do. I'm very happy, love my life, very fortunate.
Tom: In the morning when I get up and I think, "Wow, I'm lucky to have life."
And thank you so much for spending this 45 minutes with me and our guests at the World of Marketing, Jill. I love talking to winners, and you definitely are a winner. You've been through a lot, and thank you so much for being a loyal client and a great client of ours for all these 15 years. Look forward to the future and all the changes that we have that are coming out so fast, right? We have to adjust to, and glad that you're along for the ride. Thank you again for joining this podcast.
Jill: Thank you for having me. It was an honor being the first Woman of Power.
Tom: All right. Okay everybody, it's been Jill and Tom on the World of Marketing. I will see you all soon. Have a great day!
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