I run every interview myself.

How I ended up making video for law firms

I decided at twelve that I was going to have a video company. For my bar mitzvah my grandmother bought me a Mac, for one reason, so I could put Final Cut on it and learn to edit at a level that would let me take real jobs. I have been paying my own way since.

Years later, married with a baby at home, the business was not working. I was trying to get out of doing only nonprofit work and into the corporate world, and I was chasing anything that moved. Dental offices, mostly. I cold called them all day, every day, for months. When that stopped producing anything I printed brochures and went out knocking on doors instead.

One afternoon I had done about ten offices and taken a hard rejection at the last one. I was in my 05 Camry, sitting in a left turn lane on a busy road, waiting to turn into a CVS parking lot. An F-150 came at me from behind doing close to fifty, I would guess. It happened that fast. It slammed into my car and spun me a full 180 into the other side of the road. The airbags never deployed and my face went into the steering wheel. The driver had just come out of the courthouse from a case of his own.

People came out of the buildings around us. I went to the hospital in an ambulance and, thank G-d, I was fine, but the whiplash kept me on the couch for weeks and I could barely turn my neck.

A day or two after I got the car back, the body shop that had repaired it burned to the ground with every car they were working on still inside. Mine had already come home. I have never been able to read that as nothing. That car was meant to stay with me.

That is where I was, lying there unable to move and unable to pay my bills, when a legal marketing company called. They wanted Benchmark to be their primary preferred video partner for their law firm clients. We started brainstorming that week, and our first law firm shoot came not long after.

The man who made that call is still one of the closest business relationships I have, and I give him the credit for the entire legal side of this company.

That was 2021. We passed the five year mark this year, and by now it is dozens of firms nationwide.

I still drive that Camry. My wife has opinions about it. It reminds me of the version of me who was door knocking, and of every month the numbers did not work, and of the fact that the call that changed everything came while I was still flat on that couch. When something looks lost now, that car is the argument that it usually is not.

Where the name comes from

Commercials is the premium word for what we make, and it matches how we work. The service is white glove, and we wanted the name to say so before anyone reads a line of copy. We also do a fair amount of genuine commercial work and we intend to keep that door wide open.

A benchmark is the number a company is trying to reach. That is the whole job. We help companies, and now law firms, reach their benchmarks through strategic video.

What recovery taught me

Those first years of law firm work were white-labeled through marketing companies. Standard brand story videos, well made, much like everyone else’s.

Then our public work shifted to recovery. I have personal connections to people who have struggled with addiction and mental health, and I wanted to make a difference there.

That work changed how I think about video permanently, because the ask was so much harder. You are trying to persuade someone in active addiction to get on a plane and travel to a facility in another state. Often they have already been to a facility. Often it did not work, and the experience was bad. Nothing about your video is going to be believed on credentials.

What worked was a specific order. Make the person feel understood. Only then can they trust you. Only once they trust you can they believe things might actually turn out differently, and only then will they act.

We have had people watch a video and travel across the country to a facility because of it. That is not a claim I make lightly, and it is the reason I trust the structure.

Why it transfers to personal injury law

Someone looking for a personal injury attorney is in the opposite position. It is usually their first time, and they are hoping to find the right firm rather than dreading another wrong one. But the human part is identical. They are frightened, they are out of their depth, and they are deciding on feel.

What is actually happening in that room

It looks like a conversation. It is a series of deliberate moves.

I start easy and chip away. The vulnerable questions, the ones that are hard to answer, do not come until I can feel that the person is fully with me. My crew knows not to interrupt me during that stretch for any reason, because breaking it costs an hour.

People tell me afterwards that it felt like a therapy room. Part of that is that I am genuinely curious and I say so. Part of it is eye contact, nodding, making it completely fine to fumble an answer and start again. And part of it is that I am two or three questions ahead the whole time, steering toward the thing we actually need.

The line I use most

Attorneys often start out sounding like they are delivering a keynote, trying to match some other attorney’s video. So I tell them the truth. I can make almost anyone sound like a polished speaker. My editors are very good and the tools are very good. What I cannot do is make it sound later like it came from your heart. So do not perform. Just tell me what you actually think.

That usually settles people immediately, including the ones who arrived certain they would be terrible on camera.

I have interviewed people who are genuinely famous and it does not change how I run the room. Everyone has something on their plate, everyone is trying to get somewhere, and I think people can tell when you actually see them that way.