Transcript

Gianni Avalos: You want to stay true to yourself. I think that the best way to grow a following is to speak to who you are and try to grasp that attention, the attention of those people.

Voiceover: You’re listening to the Texas Family Law Insiders podcast, your source for the latest news and trends in family law in the state of Texas. Now here’s your host, Attorney Holly Draper.

Holly Draper: Today I’m excited to welcome Gianni Avalos to the Texas Family Law Insiders podcast. Gianni is the owner of Avalos Family Trial Attorneys with offices in Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio. Gianni has a combined social media following of 640,000 on her single mom attorney pages on TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook. As a single mother herself, Gianni has found her niche advocating for other single moms. Thanks so much for joining me today.

Gianni: Thank you for having me. I’m fangirling right now. We’ve always listened to your podcast, so I’m super excited to be on.

Holly: Well, Gianni and I have kind of gotten to know each other a little bit over the last year or two, working with the same coach, so I’ve really enjoyed watching your journey and thought it would be really fun to have you on to talk about something that you are really great at with social media marketing. But let’s start backing up a little bit, and why don’t you just tell everyone a little bit about your background.

Gianni: Yeah, well, I’m from a small town outside of Fort Worth Texas, Granbury. So when I first started my practice, that was my home base. Hood County. But I went to South Texas College of Law in Houston, and then following that, I started my own practice. And I have a staff of around 10 plus people right now, but we continue growing, and I’m excited to see what 2025 will bring.

Holly: So I know that your brand is based on single mom attorney, which is all of your socials. Can you tell us a little bit about your personal background and how you came to be the single mom attorney?

Gianni: Yeah. So when I first started on TikTok, I posted a video in October of 2021, I believe, and it was basically just this, like highlight reel of my journey studying for the bar exam with my newborn in my last year of law school. It was during the pandemic, and I had the opportunity to start going to school remote and it was kind of perfect timing because that’s when I found out that I was pregnant, and so I moved back in with my parents in Granbury.

Finished law school there, and just started documenting the journey. But I didn’t post it until the day that I found out my bar results, which, thank God I passed the first round. And a lot of moms found that to be very inspiring that a single mom got through the bar exam studying with her newborn. And so naturally, my following just started to become single moms, and they started watching me look for jobs, interview for jobs.

It wasn’t my intention to start my own practice immediately after getting my bar results. I fully intended on working for another firm, but that’s not the way that it went. And so they’ve just been following my journey since then, and it’s become a really great platform and resource that my firm uses now to market our services for.

Holly: So I think that’s really a courageous thing to do, to hang your own shingle, fresh out of law school and without having worked for anyone else before that. So can you talk about what that was like to start your own practice, hang your own shingle? I know a lot of people do that. A lot of people are too scared to do that. What was it like for you?

Gianni: So I think it’s about starting with a very high emphasis of quality control. So it wasn’t my I mean when I first started, I was handling an amount of cases that I knew were reasonable for me. I didn’t have an overhead to sustain. It was literally just me taking a few cases out of my parent’s closet that had a desk in it. That’s how it went. And I had amazing mentors. I still do.

Prior to law school, I worked as a paralegal for an incredible attorney, and while she was in Plano, I think now she’s in McKinney, but Camille Borg and so I owe a lot to her that she taught me so much before I went to law school. And so that’s how I got my feet wet with family law. But I agree that it is a bold endeavor.

I think that it’s really good to obviously go out and get experience at another firm before start hanging your own shingle. I definitely wouldn’t recommend it to everybody. It’s just kind of the way the circumstances fell for me. But like I said, I’m really thankful that I have great mentors, and believe it or not, you have always been one of my mentors, and you’ve taught me so much. I would listen to your podcast every morning when I was driving.

Anywhere I was going while I was like, just, feeding my baby, the Holly Draper Texas Family Law Insiders podcast was always playing in my room, so I learned so much. But, I think it’s about, yes, it’s a bold decision, but it’s also about looking for the answers when you don’t have them. And that’s what we do as attorneys every day.

Holly: I love to hear that my podcast was part of your journey. Because as we’re sitting here filming this on Zoom, and you’re just talking into a void, essentially, we’re just talking to each other, and you have no idea where it ends up reaching or who it might end up influencing. So that makes me so happy. I love hearing that So you started out in your parent’s house just taking a few cases, and now you have 10 people on your team. What has it been, like, two or three years?

Gianni: Yeah, I started my practice in February of 2022. It’s kind of funny, because the day after my bar card came in, I was sitting in a local my local courts, CPS court, and I was just observing. I knew I kind of wanted to get back into family law, but I wasn’t 100% sure. And I owe so much of my career to Judge Barkley, who was my local CPS judge at that time, because, interestingly enough, the day that I was sitting in his court was the day that a local attorney had her license suspended. So that attorney was carrying around 14 to 15 cases.

Court-appointed CPS cases, so he was looking to an attorney in the area to appoint those to. So I quickly did the CLE requirements that were necessary to get on his court-appointed list. And he put me in touch with another attorney there, Lori Casper and Hood County, that she was my mentor through it all, as well. Handling CPS cases.

So CPS will always have a very like special place in my heart, because that’s where I started in my practice, doing family law. And it kept the lights on. It doesn’t pay much when you’re on those court-appointed lists, but it was very nice to have that stream of income. Now we’ve grown to about 10 employees, and it’s just to me, it’s less about capitalizing on everything that we can, and more about making sure that if we’re going to be taking in these cases, that each of our attorneys has a caseload that is manageable. So that’s what we look for in our firm.

Holly: How many attorneys do you currently have, including you?

Gianni: Including me, it’s five of us.

Holly: That is awesome. So one thing I’m really intrigued about your practice is the ability to have offices or practices in different parts of Texas. What made you decide to do that, and how do you make that happen?

Gianni: Okay, that’s a good question, so a huge part of that is having the social media following. I don’t think that this business structure of having virtual offices and taking clients in different parts of Texas wouldn’t work for everybody if it wasn’t for the social media. And the reason I say that is because when people call into our office to book a consultation, we’re very fortunate to have already gained a lot of their trust before they sign up before they consult with us.

So we don’t have people calling in saying, well, I need to meet with the attorney in person before I decide to sign up with your firm. They already know who they’re calling to, and now they’re very willing and open to just even consult with my attorneys and never even speak to me, which is great. So it works. They’d never asked to meet us in person. I mean, they do seldomly, but it’s very rare.

And they understand that by having virtual offices, it keeps our overhead low, which means that we can provide a little bit more grace when it comes to our hourly rates to them, because we do understand that we are marketing and catering to the demographic of single moms. So that’s a very attractive incentive for them whenever they sign up for our firm. So it’s kind of like a mutual understanding.

Holly: That’s an interesting point about, the demographic and lower rates and things like that. And a lot of the instinct of a business owner or somebody that is trying to bring in business is probably, I need those high dollar divorces. I need this certain demographic of clientele. But there are a lot of people out there who need legal services, and if you find the right way to do it, you can offer a little bit lower cost and a little bit more reasonable price point to people who truly need it and still be really successful.

Gianni: 100%. And I definitely appreciate you recognizing that. Because The math has to math. No matter if you’re in a nonprofit, no matter if you are handling lower income individuals in a for-profit business, or if you are handling those high assets divorces with people that have a little bit of larger budgets for their divorce. But we have found a way to do it, and it’s worked so far.

But yeah, I mean, I think that we handle a little bit of everything. I would say that the majority of our clients, though, are those single moms who are looking for a payment structure that better suits their needs. When we consult with them, by no means are we telling them that our services are going to be quote, unquote cheap.

But we do let them know that we make every effort to make the hourly rates more affordable for them, and so that they’re of the understanding when they sign up. And we also offer a payment plan structure that allows them to pay into their case, not slower than what their case is progressing. So we’ve implemented a lot of systems to afford people that financial grace when they need it.

Holly: I see questions related to payment plans a lot, and most attorneys won’t do it under the philosophy of, once somebody is done with their case, they’re going to quit paying me, and they have this huge balance. Do you find that that’s the case? And if not, how do you think you have prevented that from being the case?

Gian: So we call it a security deposit. Other attorneys call it an evergreen retainer. And so the idea here is that they always keep their security deposit at a specific amount. It could be $3500, it could be $5000 just depending on how contested the case is. On top of the security deposit, we require an excess payment.

So this totals to their initial investment with the firm. So if we say, okay, your case is a little bit higher contested, we’re going to require a security deposit of $5000 plus the $2500 excess payment. That’ll total to around $7500 so they’re of the understanding that $2500 of that is going to be applied to their initial invoices. The other $5000 is going to be reserved as quote-unquote the security deposit.

What we tell them is that when they need a payment plan, they look to the security deposit as insurance. So if they say, oh, I have an invoice that is higher than what I anticipated, they can submit a form with our firm that will get sent to our billing department that they’ll review it and look for upcoming settings and see if the payment plan that this person is requesting is manageable and still going to work for the firm.

And so sometimes it’ll be like, well, I have an invoice that’s $1500 because maybe they went to court recently. They’ll take $750 out of their deposit. They’ll pay the other $750 when it’s due. So when we say a payment plan, we don’t say, you can just keep paying us after this case is closed, because I 100% agree that that’s probably not going to be the best strategy.

Once people have their final work product, their decree, they’re not going to be as incentivized, right, to continue paying. So it’s about having them, like creating a system of discipline for them. So if, by having them pay and reserve that money as their security deposit, it lets them know this is here for your rainy days.

We hold it in trust for you. And then towards the end of the case, we can start applying it towards their final invoices, once that becomes appropriate, and then whatever remains is refundable to them. But yeah, that’s how we do that. And you know, every once in a while we will get those cases where maybe we under-quoted the security deposit a little bit.

And so that’s just the way it ends up working. And it’s too late to get a withdrawal from the court. So I’m not going to lie and say that it’s a perfect system, because it’s not, but I will say that once we implemented this system, our collected billables have been significantly higher. So it’s been great.

Holly: That’s really interesting. That’s not something that I’ve ever done, but we certainly have people that get in the red because we don’t have that.

Gianni: Well, I will add that, instead of doing monthly invoicing, we do weekly. It provides a lot more financial transparency to the moms and so, I mean, as family law attorneys, we all know that we’re going to be billing for the correspondence, and if they catch on to the fact, I mean, we tell them in the contract, and we tell them in the consultation. An hour phone call is going to be billed at an hour phone call.

But you know, once they’re in the case, sometimes things that we said before went in one ear and out the other. So if they see that on their bill one week, then they’re a little bit more cognizant of it the next week when they’re participating in our services. So having that weekly billing, it is an extra chore for us on the back end, but it does provide more financial transparency.

And we’re able to catch on to the client’s ability to continue keeping us as their attorney. So if they’re still, if they’re already struggling to pay those initial invoices after that trust excess is exhausted and their payment method on file is declining, then that’s when we have a conversation with them.

But that’s also why we require the trust excess, because the last thing that we want to do is sign up to a case, and yeah, maybe they have the $3,500 to pay into their security deposit, but we don’t want payments declining on the first week, and then now we’re put in a bind of, well, we’ve already filed our answer into this case, and we don’t want to be withdrawing immediately after. It’s a disservice to everybody.

So that’s why we implement that strategy, that on top of the security deposit, they need to pay the trust excess. And it’s been working out really great. When I first started, I did the traditional here’s the retainer that you have to pay. Here are the monthly invoices.

But it can get very challenging when you’re not doing those weekly invoices. In my opinion, if you don’t have people who can pay very large retainers at the onset of the case, then it’s very easy to lose sight of, oh, this person only has this much money left in their trust.

Voiceover: This episode of the Texas Family Law Insiders podcast is sponsored by the Draper Law Firm. Providing family law appellate representation across Texas. For more information, visit draper.com or call 469-715-6801.

Holly: Yeah, we do the weekly billing as well. And it’s mind-blowing to me that anyone is still continuing to do monthly billing. That just seems like a nightmare. Okay, so moving into our main topic of discussion today, which is social media marketing. And I know, I’ve always felt like I was really good at social media, but I mean good at social media in a very different way than you are.

I do a lot of social networking with people on Facebook, but that’s really different than having followers that are not people that you know, or people that you’re interacting with. People who are just following you. So I think we all, all of us, at least, who are maybe a little older than you, can learn a lot from you about how to best make use of social media. So you told us a little bit about kind of how you got your start, but tell us about the evolution of single mom attorney, and just generally what you do on those platforms.

Gianni: So to summarize it, when I first started doing it, I didn’t intend on starting a family firm. It was just kind of something that built itself through the inspiring video. So I like to categorize my content into three categories. It’s either educational, inspirational, or entertainment. And so what I tell people is that just because you’re going to start social media doesn’t mean that you need to be on TikTok doing funny dances, and going that route.

It just depends how you want to, what kind of content you want to put out. The evolution of single mom attorneys started by me doing day in the lifes. Just saying day in the life of a single mom attorney. And then that’s how it kind of blew up from there. People liked following the journey, but then naturally, because I had a lot of single mom followers, and they saw that were following an attorney, they started asking me questions about divorce, child support, custody, specifically.

And so I started picking up some clients in the Dallas Fort Worth and Houston area, even when I was living in Hood County, just because the videos weren’t necessarily trending in my small town. And if I’m being honest, I didn’t even really want anyone in my small town to know about it, because it’s just a lot more traditional there. And but once they did, they all came to love me as the young attorney on TikTok.

And so I have a lot of love for my local county attorneys in Hood County, but yeah, so then we started growing in the Houston, Dallas area, and I just kept making my videos. But what I love the most about being single mom attorney on social media is that I am speaking to one demographic, and that’s where the whole niche marketing idea came in.

I think it was, it’s risky when you venture into it, if you’re going to do it, you need to be certain that that’s what you want to move forward with because otherwise you like, let’s say, for example, I wanted to start out a single mom attorney, and then just all of a sudden switch to just, not being single mom attorney, and speaking to everybody, they’re always going to remember me as that, right?

So if you’re going to venture into niche marketing, you want to make sure that what you want to move forward with. But it’s been great for us, and I think that it really provides a personal touch for the followers and the people that are viewing, and we still have a lot of dads that I think that you are an influencer, and that’s the way I see you, because you may not be speaking to the lay people with your podcast you know, but you are speaking to all of us, who, in turn, speak to the lay people through our social media followings.

And so with that, I love the idea of providing free access to legal education and the ways that we can as attorneys ethically. But I think that we need to see more of that. Whether it’s through a podcast, whether it’s through social media, whether it’s through writing articles, people need that free access.

And just because they have access to the legal education and the ins and outs of family law doesn’t mean that they’re still going to be able to go in there representing themselves. But you know, people will DM me and they’ll say, hey, you know I watched your video, and it really helped me go into court understanding like how it was going to go and what was going to be said, and I recognized some of the terminology. So that’s how we present ourselves on social media. We do educational content, and it’s been really great.

Holly: So you first posted, 2022 was your first post, right?

Gianni: 2021 in October was the first viral video. Yeah.

Holly: Okay, so from whenever you started, how long did it take to kind of get a following?

Gianni: I think my situation is a little bit more unique in that when I first posted my video, I got like 10,000 followers overnight. I think it was 8,000 if I’m being specific, overnight on TikTok. And this is where I won’t get too preachy on y’all, but it’s a big part of my story. When I was studying for the bar exam, I told God that if he helped me pass the bar, then I would tell the world it was because of him, and I will forever attribute that first viral video to that promise I made.

Because when I go back and I look at that video when I look at the poor lighting and the text overlay and the clips, it’s everything that I would not post today, knowing what I know about what goes viral. So I think that I mean it just, it was a unique circumstance that I got 8,000 followers overnight posting that first TikTok. But you know, I think over time, maybe at that time, TikTokk, it’s not what it is today. It’s definitely changed.

The algorithm has changed. But I was gaining maybe at least 1,000 every two days for the longest time because I was staying consistent with it and posting. But after a while, I realized that I had to put a little bit more work into it. Whenever I started to cross-post on Facebook and Instagram. The platforms like you can cross-cross post, but you have different demographics on each of them.

Holly: So would you say TikTok is your favorite?

Gianni: I would say it used to be. Right now, Instagram is definitely my favorite, because I see a lot of the growth trends on Instagram right now that I used to see on TikTok. But what I do love about TikTok is live, going live. And I love that my original followers still follow me on there, and maybe they haven’t found me on Instagram yet, but Instagram’s my favorite.

Holly: So you mentioned something about now you know a lot more about what goes viral.

Gianni: Yeah.

Holly: So what does it take? What do you think makes something go viral?

Gianni: Okay, so knowing who you’re speaking to, I see content from other firms that they have such good like, what they’re saying is, is so good. But you have to realize that people’s attention spans are very short these days. So you want to start out with the hook, you know, and then you want to keep your video to about 60 seconds, which is very challenging for us as practitioners, while we’re like, speaking about something.

But then we want to say, but then there’s an exception to this, and then there’s an exception to this, and then there’s an exception to that, and this doesn’t always happen, and then we start going on this tangent, right? But when we view social media, we have to view it as like that is just what is going to get people’s attention?

That’s going to be the initial interest before they book the consultation with you. So it’s not about giving them everything. It’s about, you know, just keeping your videos a little bit more concise. It’s not the time to be saying at the very end, and if you want more information, call 817-30 whatever.

Because if they really like your video, they will go and they will to your profile and find that information in your bio. When I notice this is just what I’ve noticed for what happens on my videos. I don’t know if it’s the same trend on other people’s algorithms, but the videos that include like the text overlay with people’s addresses, emails, phone numbers, all the things like, they don’t necessarily hit the algorithm as much.

Even if you put it in the caption, which is sometimes why you’ll see people putting in the caption, you know, consultation link in bio. But when they write out bio, they’re writing it as B, exclamation point zero, because sometimes the algorithm will reject that. They’ll say, you know, this is like salesy. They’re trying to, you know, it’s just not organic content in a way.

But, um, just keep your videos concise. Make sure that you have good lighting. And I think just speak to the layperson. Speak to, the same way that we do in consultations. And I think that everybody has their own personality style as attorneys, and you don’t want to deviate from that at all. You want to be who you are because that’s who they’re going to be booking with.

But one of the things that has become somewhat of not a challenge for me, but something that I’m conscious of is that, because my social media does not only entail my professional educational content, it includes funny memes. It includes my day in the lifes. It would be a little bit superficial of me to only post my educational videos with like my lawyer tone, and doing that route right, and then not staying true to who I am, which is why, when I’m posting my educational content, I’ll be like, okay, hey, mommy’s, you know.

And you know, if you’re baby daddy, this, this, and that, because that’s how I speak to my followers when I’m doing my day in the lifes, and when I’m posting my funny memes. And would I ever go into court saying, baby daddy, absolutely not. It’s noncustodial parent.

But I mean, it grabs their attention because they’re like, well, hold on, this is an attorney that she gets us like she gets what we’re going through as single moms, and she gets it because she is a single mom. And like I said, you want to stay true to yourself. I think that the best way to grow a following is to speak to who you are and try to grasp that attention. The attention of those people.

Holly: So do you do all of your social media and your editing and your planning and all that on your own?

Gianni: Oh my gosh, Holly, it is so hard. But yes, I do. It is a full-time job, and I did, at one point, hire a marketing agency to help me with, like the more professional footage, like the little slowmos, the longer educational content videos that I wanted done with a more professional camera, but I realized that that was more of a luxury than it was a need.

So those videos were not going any more viral than the ones that I just filmed with my iPhone in my car. I think that if you have the intriguing content, it doesn’t really matter. I mean, it does matter to an extent, but not as much of how you film it and who you get to help you with that. But I will say that there are things that you want to look for when you’re editing your videos.

You don’t want to, and maybe I’ll get into that in a minute. But to summarize that, you don’t want to, when you’re talking about making a 60-second video of educational content, you want to splice where you are saying filler words where there’s silence. And you know, that’s how you can maintain people’s attention when you’re posting, whenever they’re watching your videos.

So if you find that challenging, or if that’s just not something that you have time to do during the day, because when I first started doing it, it used to take me at least half an hour to edit. Now it just takes me about five to 10 minutes of my evening to do it. But you would want to get some help to help you with those videos. Otherwise, if you are able to do it on your own, there is nothing wrong with just doing it all on your own with an iPhone. I mean, those videos can go more viral than the ones that you have with professional camera footage.

Holly: You mentioned before three categories of content. Educational, what were the other two?

Gianni: Inspirational and entertaining.

Holly: Okay, so do you plan out your content and have a certain percentage or is it, do you just kind of wing it?

Gianni: I just kind of wing it, to be honest. The entertaining is kind of when I’m like, okay, I just need to post something, and I’ll just post this funny meme that’s relatable to moms. And that’s more of my lazier content. If I’m being honest with you, I can make that on cap cut and never even show my face doing that.

The inspirational content takes a little bit longer, so I’m only going to post that whenever I have the time to compile those videos and say the story, and do the whole thing right. But then the educational content is what I like to do more consistently, unless, if I, if you look at my content, and sometimes there hasn’t been an educational video as of recently, it’s because my time is consumed in the cases and managing the firm and all of that.

But I don’t plan out the videos or the content calendar, as some people call it, in advance. I probably should. I think that that would be nice. But I realized that I get a little bit too excited, like when I make a video and I’m just like, I just want to post this today. I just want to post it now. So I don’t think I would have the discipline to be like, let me plan this, film it, and then post it next Friday. I don’t think I could do that.

Holly: So are you posting the same videos on all three platforms? Or is that something that you’re doing different between them?

Gianni: So, yes, but when you do this, you want to be careful in that you don’t just want to post a video on TikTok, download it, and then post it on Instagram. You want to make sure that the TikTok watermark is not on the video anymore before posting on Instagram, before posting on Facebook.

Because that’ll also be rejected in the algorithm a lot of the times on those other platforms like Instagram and Facebook and vice versa. And so in the in the same respect, you don’t want to film a video on Instagram with an Instagram filter and then post it on TikTok, because then TikTok will recognize that that’s an unfamiliar filter and reject it.

That’s what’s happened in my experience, right? But yes, I do cross-post all of my video content. My photo content, I mean, that’ll just stay true to what it is on Instagram and sometimes Facebook, but the videos will get cross-posted.

Holly: So when you’re editing and stuff, are you editing in TikTok or using some sort of other editing software?

Gianni: I used to use Splice, but that just became more complicated than helpful in the end, and so now I just edit on TikTok.

Holly: Then how do you get rid of that watermark?

Gianni: Okay. So before, I used to have a special app that did it, but now TikTok has the feature of downloading the video. It’s on the right menu panel before you post it. So you can download it before you post it, and then it’ll when you download it, it’ll include all of your text overlay. It’ll include your edits. It’ll include the audio that you put on there.

And so now you don’t need that separate app. The separate app, the way that used to work is that I would have to copy the link on TikTok after it was posted, and then it would recognize it in the app, and then you could save it without the watermark.

So if sometimes you have that, if you’re more into posting reels, but you want to start cross-posting into TikTok, then you can, there’s a separate app that you can use to get rid of the Instagram watermark before you post on TikTok. So it’s just about getting a little bit more creative with it. But I’m glad that TikTok now has the feature that you can just download it without the watermark.

Holly: But if you’ve already posted, it’s too late?

Gianni: Correct. Yes, correct, but I will add that now, TikTok also has the feature that after you’ve posted it, it gives you a grace period of being able to go back in and edit it. So if you’re like, oh, I forgot to download it, you can go back in.

Holly: So I am still trying to figure out TikTok because I have a page for my dogs on TikTok, and then I have my business page for TikTok, and there’s so much time and energy and thought that goes into what is getting posted on the business page, and it might get like 200 views. And then I create something really fast of my dog doing something ridiculous, and it gets 2000 views in 30 minutes. So I don’t quite have the business piece of that. I’ll figure it out yet, but maybe that’s something I can work on in 2025.

Gianni: I love that!

Holly: So let’s see kind of along the same lines, but not we’ve talked a little bit about how your marketing is to a specific niche. Can you talk a little bit about why you chose to niche, and if you’ve ever had any regrets about that, or do you think it works really well? Would you recommend it?

Gianni: I think it works well because I would say around 97, 98% of our business comes from social media. And so it’s easy for me, because it’s such a necessity in our business, it feels effortless to me to go on and just talk to single moms on social media. I don’t have any regrets about that. But I read a book while I was waiting on my bar exam results.

It’s called The Game Changing Attorney, and it spoke about niching down in your practice. And I think that that was a huge inspiration for me. They talk about the whole concept of, if you’re talking to everybody, you’re not really talking to anyone, right? And so it’s another way of just grabbing people’s attention with their limited attention span when they’re going through their for you page.

But, yeah, I enjoy it. I think that it’s been interesting to see the negative comments as well, because not everybody is going to be team single mom. There’s a lot of negative connotations with that. They sometimes kind of see it as like, oh, they just are trying to take money from dads, like the child support and, you know, X, Y, and Z.

People have their own opinions about that, but the people who have really been following me, especially when the dads come on and hire us, they say, I don’t understand why dads get insulted by your content. Because truly, if you are a present and involved father, that’s just participating in their obligation to pay child support.

And I’m not saying that dad is always the noncustodial but just gender normative roles, you get the idea, then they shouldn’t be in any way offended by the content. And so that’s why I have this funny saying on my Instagram I think it is, that says, like, only deadbeats get offended here. Because it’s true. Otherwise present fathers, they appreciate the content because it’s just as informative and educational for them as well.

Holly: So do you take a lot of heat through social media? I think that maybe keeps some people from posting too much or getting too personal, or whatever, because they don’t have a thick enough skin.

Gianni: Yeah, you have to have very thick skin if you’re going to start posting on social media, especially if you’re going to niche down because you’re going to be controversial when you’re taking a side. You’re not going to speak to everybody, and people are going to let you know their opinions about it, and that can come off as negative. I think I’m just used to it by this point. I think I am. I think that I see the the success and what we’ve done, and the way I see it is those comments are just that person’s opinion.

It doesn’t affect my day-to-day. It doesn’t keep me up at night. I think I’m just more concerned about if, if I ever have a day where I see single moms not agreeing with our content for whatever reason, then that’s when I would be like, okay, let me reevaluate this video that I posted. But otherwise, I mean, I don’t get offended by it anymore. Before it did used to kind of bother me but not anymore.

Holly: Do you get a lot of engagement on all your posts?

Gianni: I do because when I post, I post with the idea of, is this going to start a conversation in the comments? Because when you have comments, that’s when it’s going to go viral. You’re getting engagement on the videos, and so that’s going to get pushed in the algorithm. I don’t like to post things that, I mean very seldomly like, but I really don’t like to post things that only speak to me or my specific situation. It’s mainly like, if I’m going to be talking about a dad that is under-claiming income off for child support calculations, I’m going to keep it brief and specific to that. And then that way people will go in and comment on their experiences with that issue.

Holly: Well, we’re just about out of time. But one question I like to ask everyone who comes on the podcast is, if you could give one piece of advice to young family lawyers, what would it be?

Gianni: Oh, this is so full circle, because I’ve taken the advice of everybody that’s been on this podcast. And I am a young lawyer who takes all of y’all’s advice. But one piece of advice that I would give to other family law attorneys is to just be yourself if you’re going to be on social media, and don’t overthink it. Everybody has their own personalities, and what I tell people is, my law firm is definitely not the law firm for everybody.

The content doesn’t speak to everybody, but in the same way, you guys have firms that speak to those clients that my firm doesn’t. And so stay true to who you are and who you service, and always be authentic on social media. That’ll land you the most engagement.

Holly: Perfect. So I know we’ve already told everyone where they can find you on TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram @singlemomattorney. But where else can our listeners go if they want to learn more about you?

Gianni: Avalosfamilytrial.com, is where you can read about my team and a little bit more about our firm.

Holly: Awesome. Well, thank you so much for joining us today. For our listeners, if you enjoyed this podcast, please take a second to leave us a review and subscribe to enjoy future episodes.

Voiceover: The Texas Family Law Insiders podcast is sponsored by The Draper Law Firm. We help people navigate divorce and child custody cases and handle family law appellate matters. For more information, visit our website at www.draperfirm.com.