Michael Liner runs a 95-person disability law practice serving over 10,000 clients nationwide. Last year, leads from TikTok alone generated more than $2 million in revenue for the firm.
The firm spends nothing on advertising. No paid search. No lead buying. The entire client acquisition model runs on organic content: educational videos that answer the questions his prospective clients are already asking.
During our most recent check-in with the Digital Deep Dive community, Michael didn't just talk about how this works. He opened his phone and built a video from scratch while the group watched: from initial idea to posted content in under seven minutes. That live demonstration is the core of what made this session valuable, and the section of the recording most worth revisiting.
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Michael was direct about what matters and what doesn't. "I don't care about how many followers and views I have," he said. "Here's what I care about as a business owner: how many people are watching that, picking up the phone, and calling my office?"
TikTok pays him between $10,000 and $15,000 per month based on views. He donates all of it to charity. For him, monetizing his videos isn’t the point. His purpose is two-fold: the opportunity to share valuable legal advice with people who need it at scale, and the $2 million in annual revenue from clients who found his firm through his content.
Michael was keen to point out that his success wasn’t an anomaly. He illustrated the flexibility of his approach by telling the group about his friend Matt, an employment defense attorney. Matt's practice is narrow: he represents car dealerships and restaurants in his region, businesses doing $10-50 million in annual revenue. It’s a niche audience far more similar to the types of prospects accounting firms are typically marketing toward.
Matt followed Michael's approach. Within two months, three car dealerships had retained him—each traced back to an employee who had seen his content online.
"These social media platforms push your content to the people who are most likely to see it," Michael explained. "You've got to ignore the number of views. You don't know who that person is that's viewing it. TikTok, Instagram, YouTube Shorts—they're listening to what you're saying, and they're giving it to the people who want to see it."
The most common objection Michael hears: my industry is too boring for social media.
His response is his own track record. Before TikTok, he spent years on YouTube making videos about Social Security disability paperwork. Not strategy. Not inspiration. Paperwork.
"The first videos are me walking people through, question by question, the forms that they need to have filled out in their case," he said.
Today, those videos have tens of thousands of views each and continue to drive new business.
The lesson isn't that disability law is secretly exciting. It's that people searching for specific help will watch content that provides it, regardless of production value or entertainment factor.
Michael also addressed the assumption that TikTok skews too young for professional services. His analytics tell a different story:
"More than 60% of the people watching me are over the age of 50 years old," he said. "TikTok is pushing the dancing stuff and the music videos to the teenagers, but they're pushing me to the older people because they know that my services are most likely to intersect with them."
The platform finds the audience. You provide the substance.
Rather than describe his video creation process, Michael demonstrated it, building and posting a video live while walking through each step. The whole thing took roughly seven minutes.
Here's how it works:
That morning, Michael had met with an organization that helps injured workers return to employment. They asked whether their clients should disclose disability status to potential employers.
"I thought, I don't think I've ever shot a video on that before," Michael said. "But I'm sure people watching my channel would love to know."
That's the raw material: a real question from a real interaction. Client-facing professionals have these types of interactions all day, every day, and for Michael, they serve as the foundation of all of his ideas.
Michael opened ChatGPT on his phone. He's built a custom project specifically for TikTok scripts, so the model already knows his format preferences.
He spoke his prompt directly into his phone:
"I want you to help me come up with a script for a video. I want to answer the question for my TikTok followers of should they tell an employer that they are receiving Social Security disability benefits or that they are applying for Social Security disability benefits. Here's the answer that I would give somebody who asked me that..."
He provided his perspective in plain language. ChatGPT returned a teleprompter-ready script in about 15 seconds.
Michael uses a free teleprompter app. He copied the script from ChatGPT and pasted it into the app.
He recorded the video in a single take, reading the script he’d just developed from his Teleprompter app. No retakes, no elaborate setup. iPhone, AirPods for audio, teleprompter scrolling on screen.
The video ran just over a minute.
Michael doesn’t make any elaborate edits to his video or work with professionals. All he does is trim the last couple of seconds so the video ends cleanly instead of trailing off.
Before posting, Michael heads back to ChatGPT:
"Give me 10 headers, 50 characters or less, with a captivating title. And give me a caption that's three sentences in length."
He selected his favorite header ("Should you tell a job that you're on disability?"), opened TikTok, uploaded the video, added auto-generated captions, and hit post.
One of the clearest shifts in digital marketing over the past few years is this: people follow people, not logos. Firm brand pages struggle to gain traction on social platforms. Individual professionals building their own presence don't.
Michael's approach reflects this reality.
"I'm not out here as Liner Legal. I'm out here as Michael Liner."
Today, algorithms favor individual creators over brand accounts. Audiences engage with faces and voices, not corporate messaging. A firm's TikTok page posting the same content as its leaders will underperform by a wide margin.
Michael sees clear benefits in firms having several leaders be visible on social media. It’s an approach he’s passionate about and is replicating with other leaders in his own firm. For an accounting firm, the path forward is clear: encouraging segment and/or practice leaders to commit to establishing their own brand.
Michael posts two to four times per day. Every day. Seven days a week. He did note that his success could be replicated with a smaller commitment, but he emphasized consistency in posting above all else.
Even with several videos a day, his results were anything but immediate.
"It took me months of social media rejection where they had me capped at getting like 200 views on things before something slipped through the cracks," he said. "And then one video maybe got 10,000 views—which, by the way, that's lower than my floor is now."
The growth curve is exponential, not linear. He estimates it took three to four months to reach 1,000 followers. Another three to four months to reach 5,000. Then acceleration, and eventually, viral breakthroughs that add thousands of followers from a single video.
The pattern holds for everyone he's coached. The failure mode is always the same: giving up after early videos underperform.
"The difference between succeeding and failing at any marketing channel is this," Michael said. "Everybody knows that they should be on social media. But then when you actually go ahead and you post a video on TikTok and it gets 50 views, you're not going to post again tomorrow because you felt rejected by those 50 views."
His advice is blunt: stop planning, start posting––and stay committed to it.
For those ready to start, Michael offered a practical checklist:
Michael has built client acquisition infrastructure that runs without advertising spend. The components are straightforward:
For firms still dependent on referrals and paid leads, this approach presents an alternative worth investing in. The firms that figure this out and get the consistent buy-in they need from their practice leaders will have a structural marketing advantage: a true client acquisition moat that competitors will struggle to catch up to. .
The question for firm leaders: who at your firm is willing to pick up their phone and start?
This session was hosted for members of our Digital Deep Dive community: a curated group of CGOs, CMOs, and growth leaders from Top 500 firms. The 2026 Digital Deep Dive Summit is March 12-13 in Chicago, limited to 50 participants.