Category: Law Office Management

Serve Up a Strategic Marketing Approach

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Here it is more than halfway through the year and a lot of you who began 2014 committed to changing your marketing approach now realize “wow, nothing has changed.”

Below are ten steps to be more strategic in this year’s marketing planning:

1. Having good intentions in January is not the same as making marketing a priority.In other words, you jotted down some ideas, threw them in a drawer and went about your business. Marketing is often an afterthought.  If you do not make building and growing your practice a priority by scheduling it into your daily calendar and then “live and breathe” the concepts, how do you expect progress to be made, by you and other team members?

2. Develop cash flow budgets and projections are imperative so that you would have something to measure progress by. Businesses run with numbers. Law firms are no different. When creating a marketing plan, be as specific as possible. Set concrete goals as such as below:

  • Increase employment law cases by privately-held businesses cases by 15%
  • Acquire at least one new client each quarter with billings of at least $90k per quarter.
  • Increase revenue per existing top five clients by 20 percent

3. Creating metrics to measure the success or failure of your plans and activities against projections developed in number 2 is an ideal way to track your marketing initiatives by results achieved. Items such as response rates, average new billings per new clients, average billings from repeat work of existing clients…etc.  Do you have any written metrics and do you constantly monitor them? If not, this is a critical component for measuring success.

4. Assemble the right team.  Get the right people “on the bus and the wrong people” off the bus.  If your firm is full of worker bees, you will be challenged to produce marketing results.  However, if you support and empower those lawyers who are motivated to become a producer, a rainmaker, you are more likely to have a stronger marketing focus and better marketing results.

5. Retain professional training.While many lawyers “think” they know what to do, and they may, most do not know “how” to engage in high impact business development endeavors successfully. Effectively marketing and promoting a law practice ain’t what it used to be. Gone are the days when deals are just a handshake away and a matter of spending the afternoon on the golf course.

Seeking outside support to fully learn, from soup to nuts, the sales process, how to efficiently fill your pipeline AND persistently track your sales (i.e. new client engagements) are things that do not materialize from amorphous. Retain a professional trainer/coach and you will never go back.

6. Set a clear and powerful direction.  It is a powerful exercise to have regular meetings with your team to cultivate a marketing culture within a firm and to outline the marketing expectations.  Team meetings can serve multiple purposes of parlaying business opportunities, sharing knowledge, and achieving positive marketing results.

7. Turn up the focus dial. Most likely, if you do not focus like a laser on identifying targeted clients, markets and niche areas of practice, you will likely become discouraged and ease up on your marketing commitment. Thus, it is imperative to narrow down exact targets so you know who you are looking for. An example of this for a construction litigation practice may be commercial developers on the East Coast with revenues between $50-150 million a year. That description will narrow the companies you are looking for and are simple to find with basic online market research.

8. Assemble the marketing tools. Having the right tools is essential to ensuring you derive the most out of your marketing strategies. Tools are no longer limited to printed brochures, email and promotional items. Video, social media networking, SMS texting, webinars, podcasts, and creative interactive websites can also be highly effective, depending upon your marketing goals and objectives. The increase in marketing tools equates to greater options in your toolbox. It also means that selecting the right tools is more important than ever.

9.Invest in the right things.  Decadent offices, random acts of lunch, and token “shotgun” expenditures in the name of marketing do not attract new clients. Invest instead in strengthening relationships with key clients, communicating to existing clients and prospective clients how you are improving their businesses and/or personal lives.

10. Action, Action, Action. One of themost impactful ways you can be more strategic in your marketing planning is simply to execute on the plan. Marketing must be an integral part of your business, not a “set it and forget it” aspect of your business. In order to ensure that your marketing plan succeeds, you must be actively engaged in working that plan.

The means by which to instill a more strategic approach to your marketing are vast. Reiterating my mantra that marketing success comes with “consistent, persistent massive amounts of action over a prolonged period of time”, all the strategic marketing spokes (Internet marketing; communications program; reputation management, etc.) must be moving forward at the same concurrently. Anything less and the wheels just spin.

Article By:

Kimberly Alford Rice
Of:
KLA Marketing Associates

10 Insights You Want to Gain from Your Social Media Monitoring

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If you are participating in social media for your law firm, you should also be monitoring whether or not your time investment is paying dividends.

Social Media Insight

You should be creating Google Alerts or searching on Social Mention for the name of your law firm and the names of your attorneys at least once a month.  Create alerts for the areas of law you practice as well.  The social media blog site Buffer recommends you keep these 10 insights in mind when reviewing your results:

Sentiment — Are mentions generally position, neutral or negative?

Questions — Look for questions people may have that you can provide the answers to in your social media posts or blogs.

Feedback — If you see feedback on Avvo or Yelp or some other site that directly affects your firm, you need to listen and respond appropriately.

Links — keep track of who is retweeting or reposting your content and keep track of who is linking back to you.

Pain points — absorb what people are talking about online that is of concern to them and use that information to inform your future posts.

Content — this is where your alerts for your practice area come in handy.  Use these to mine for topics of interest to your target market.

Trends — recent court decisions or trending news in your practice area should be included in your posts so it is clear you are on top of all the trends.

Media — journalists spend a lot of time online so pay attention to the areas they are covering that might provide you with an opportunity to reach out as a spokesperson on those subjects.

Influencers — are there certain individuals who keep popping up in your feeds?  They may be someone it would be advantageous for you to know as an industry influencer.

Advocates — monitoring is a great way to find and recognize those people who are talking positively about you online.

Article By:

Stephen Fairley
Of:
The Rainmaker Institute

Making These 3 Errors in WordPress Makes Your Law Firm’s Blog Less Effective

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Here are three common WordPress mistakes that will make your legal website less effective than it should be:

  1. Posting content that is not unique, engaging or well designed. Unstructured information, filler materials and overly general articles do not motivate a user to interact with the site. Your goal should be to create content that users want to share or bookmark or research further by following your in-text links.
  2. Getting caught up in finding the perfect WP template and design. Many inexperienced website authors expend all their energy before even considering content development. A lot of sites use generic content that reads like it was added as an afterthought. It is hard to schedule time to generate good content but when most people say, “Oh, I’ll come back to improve that later,” they never do.
  3. Failing to design each page for its intended purpose. Out-of-the-box WordPress themes use similar forms and sidebars on every page. It is important for the design (as well as the content) to serve the page’s purpose.
Article By:

Tanner Jones
Of:
Consultwebs.com, Inc.

Tips for Growing Your Fan Base on Facebook

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One of the biggest challenges for anyone seeking to have a large social media following is growing your audience to a healthy level.  Sometimes it almost feels like we’re back in grade school, looking for other kids to like us!

Inbound marketing firm Hubspot has a number of informative presentations on Facebook marketing, but this quick slide guide with five tips on how to grow your audience is particularly useful since it visually walks you through the steps you need to take on your Facebook page to reap the rewards from each tip:

One of the biggest challenges for anyone seeking to have a large social media following is growing your audience to a healthy level.  Sometimes it almost feels like we’re back in grade school, looking for other kids to like us!

Inbound marketing firm Hubspot has a number of informative presentations on Facebook marketing, but this quick slide guide with five tips on how to grow your audience is particularly useful since it visually walks you through the steps you need to take on your Facebook page to reap the rewards from each tip:

5 Quick Tips For Growing Your Facebook Audience from HubSpot

Article By:

Stephen Fairley
Of:
The Rainmaker Institute

Social Media Ethical Guidelines: What Lawyers Need to Know

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Don’t let your online activities land you on the bar discipline docket.

The New York State Bar Association’s Commercial and Federal Litigation Section has published a set of Social Media Ethics Guidelines that provide useful guidance for all lawyers (not just New Yorkers) on the use of social media.  While the Guidelines set forth a broad outline for dealing with social media, lawyers will still need to think hard about their particular situations.  Below are some of the guidelines that lawyers and law firms should keep in mind.

Social Media, Tweet, Share, Chat, Like, Friend, News, Photo

On-Line Advice:  What should you do if a Facebook friend posts a legal question?  Answer it?  Have you created an attorney-client relationship?  Do you owe a duty to all of your friend’s Facebook friends who will see that advice and possibly rely on it?  The New York Guidelines suggest that you should keep any reply broad and general.  “A lawyer may provide general answers to legal questions asked on social media.  A lawyer, however, cannot provide specific legal advice on a social media network because a lawyer’s responsive communications may be found to have created an attorney-client relationship and legal advice also may impermissibly disclose information protected by the attorney-client privilege.”  (Guideline 2.A).  Great social media advice, but the Guidelines do not say when a “general answer” becomes “specific advice.”  A good rule of thumb would be – if the request is specific and includes specific information about your friend’s situation – do not answer the question on Facebook.

Advertising: The Guidelines also say that if you use your social media profile primarily for your law business – think LinkedIn – it is subject to the rules governing attorney advertising and solicitation.  (Guideline 1.A).  When using Twitter to market your practice, the Commentary to the Guidelines says that you may “utilize commonly recognized abbreviations for information that is required in attorney advertisements.”  The Guidelines thus suggest that you will need to devote some of your 140 characters to complying with advertising rules, but they don’t say exactly what content would make for a compliant Tweet.

New York’s Rule of Professional Conduct 7.1(f) requires all lawyer advertising to say “attorney advertising.”  Presumably, then, attorneys can say “Att’y Ad” or something similar in their Tweets.  The Massachusetts Rules of Professional Conduct do not require “Attorney advertising” but do require that any advertising “include the name of the lawyer, group of lawyers, or firm responsible for its content.”  Mass. R. Prof. C. 7.2(d).  Thus, Massachusetts lawyers may have a few extra characters in their advertising Tweets than New York lawyers, though they should Tweet under their own names – not a clever screen name.

That said, the Massachusetts rules could still raise compliance issues for lawyers who use social media – particularly concerning Rule 7.3 which governs solicitation of professional employment.  For example, the Office of Bar Counsel has previously advised that “bulletin boards, which display information in cyberspace and allow people to post and respond to messages, … do not involve real-time, live interaction between lawyers and prospective clients” and are thus in-bounds for lawyers to advertise and solicit clients.  On the other hand, “solicitation through … interactive computer-accessed chat rooms is prohibited as in-person solicitation” where the chat rooms “offer conversation that is live, interactive and conducted in real-time or near real-time.”  On this rationale, a lawyer who finds herself in a “real-time” Twitter or Facebook conversation could unwittingly breach Rule 7.3(d) (prohibiting “in person” solicitation).

Among the other useful tips from the New York Guidelines:

  • If someone posts a statement to your social media profile that does not comply with advertising guidelines, you may have an obligation to remove the post. (Guideline 1.C);
  • “A lawyer may view the public portion of a person’s social media profile or public posts even if such person is represented by another lawyer,” including in situations where the person’s account tracks the identities of the viewers. (Guideline 3.A);
  • A lawyer may request permission to view the restricted portion of an unrepresented person’s social media website or profile. However, the lawyer must use her full name and an accurate profile, and she may not create a different or false profile in order to mask her identity.”  (Guideline 3.B);
  • The situation is different if the person is represented.  “A lawyer shall not contact a represented person to seek to review the restricted portion of the person’s social media profile unless an express authorization has been furnished by such person.”  (Guideline 3.C);
  • You can advise a client to “take down” a post, although the client may have an obligation to preserve the information removed. (Guideline 4.A).

The Guidelines are not universal, however, and the drafters caution that there are numerous conflicting opinions and rules around the United States.  For example, a recent New Hampshire ethics opinion has a different take on Guideline 3.B, finding that a lawyer must disclose her involvement in a matter when sending a “friend” request to an unrepresented witness to view restricted portions of the witness’ profile.  “[S]ending a Facebook friend request in-name-only constitutes a misrepresentation by omission, given that the witness might not immediately associate the lawyer’s name with his or her purpose and that, were the witness to make that association, the witness would in all likelihood deny the request.”  N.H. Bar Ass’n Ethics Advisory Comm., Op. 2012-13/05.

As you incorporate social media into your practice, you must research the law, understand the capabilities of the social media platforms you use, and carefully consider your online activities in connection with the Rules of Professional Conduct.  In Massachusetts, if in doubt, you could contact the Office of Bar Counsel’s ethics hotline and ask.  The hotline is available between 2 and 4 p.m. Monday, Wednesday and Fridays at (617) 728-8750. Ultimately, your best defense against stepping into a social media ethics landmine is to stop and think before you click.

Article By:

Thomas W. Kirchofer
Of:
Sherin and Lodgen LLP

The Right Way To Get Free Publicity

Great Legal Marketing

 

There’s a saying that goes “any publicity is good publicity,” and while I’m not so sure about that, I do know that positive publicity can do wonders for your law firm. But do you know what’s even better than positive publicity? FREE positive publicity.  That’s right, you can get great publicity that won’t cost you a single penny and I’m going to tell you how:

  • Contact your local TV news station.  Email, fax, or call your local news station and introduce yourself. Tell them who you are and what you do, and don’t forget to mention what you specialize in. Tell them that you are available if they ever need an expert to speak on a legal topic, especially in your niche.  Do this once a month until they contact you to be interviewed. If you do a good job, they’ll keep coming back to you and your face will continue to be broadcast on local television for free.
  • Notify different mediums of the media.  Once you’ve been interviewed on TV, let your local radio stations and newspapers know. They will see you as a leading expert in your field and they will follow you and want to ask you to interview with them.  This way, you can recycle interviews and information without being redundant.
  • Clip and recycle.  Once you have been interviewed on TV a few times, you’ll want to compile all of your interviews into one video that you can share online and use on you website to show potential clients that you are the leading expert in your field. With an easy editing software, you can clip the highlights of all your interviews and recycle them into one powerful, credibility-building video.
  • Testimonials.  If you host an event or seminar, bring a cameraman along with you.  After the event, have your cameraman politely ask attendees if he can interview them about their experience. If you’re a great lawyer, then I’ll bet you can host a great event, so you know that everyone who agrees to do an interview will do nothing but rave about you and the knowledge you possess. Take these testimonials and upload them to YouTube, your website, and social media so everyone can see how awesome you are.
  • Be educational.  The best way to show that you are a credible expert in your field is to prove it rather than just advertise it. In order to prove this, you need to be the source of information for all questions and topics in your field of law. So, you should blog, write articles, make videos, and even publish books on your wealth of information that you have about your practice area(s). When you hand someone a book that you authored instead of a flimsy advertisement with your face on it, you are creating great publicity and credibility for yourself and your firm.
Article By:

Ben Glass
Of:
Great Legal Marketing, Inc.

One week until the LMA P3 Conference, June 12-13 in Chicago

The National Law Review is pleased to bring you information about the LMA P3 Conference to be held in Chicago June 12-13, 2014.

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When

Thursday – Friday, June 12-13, 2014

Where

Hyatt Chicago Magnificent Mile
633 N. Saint Clair St.
Chicago, IL 60611

Dig deeper into project management, pricing and process improvement.

The 2013 LMA P3 Conference set the bar high with fantastic breakout sessions, partner presentations and networking opportunities, but this year’s conference looks even more promising.

Join us for P3 – The Practice Innovation Conference, where pricing, project management, and practice innovation experts will discuss the use of various tactics to explore solutions to real issues face by law firms today.

This execution-focused conference will have attendees roll up their sleeves and collectively work out solutions. Click here to view the full conference schedule.

There is still time to register! Register now!

2 more weeks until LMA P3 – Practice Innovation Conference, June 12-13, Chicago, IL

The National Law Review is pleased to bring you information about the LMA P3 Conference to be held in Chicago June 12-13, 2014.

LMA_P3_WB250x250_Frame2

 

When

Thursday – Friday, June 12-13, 2014

Where

Hyatt Chicago Magnificent Mile
633 N. Saint Clair St.
Chicago, IL 60611

Dig deeper into project management, pricing and process improvement.

The 2013 LMA P3 Conference set the bar high with fantastic breakout sessions, partner presentations and networking opportunities, but this year’s conference looks even more promising.

Join us for P3 – The Practice Innovation Conference, where pricing, project management, and practice innovation experts will discuss the use of various tactics to explore solutions to real issues face by law firms today.

This execution-focused conference will have attendees roll up their sleeves and collectively work out solutions. Click here to view the full conference schedule.

There is still time to register! Register now!

Getting Lawyers Up to Speed: The Basics for Understanding ITIL®

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As more clients use ITIL®—a standard for best practices in providing IT services—IT lawyers who are unfamiliar with the standard should familiarize themselves with its basic principles. This is particularly important as clients are integrating ITIL terminology and best practices (or modified versions thereof) into their service delivery and support best practices as well as the structure and substantive provisions of their IT outsourcing and services contracts.

Most IT professionals are well versed in ITIL and its framework. They will introduce the concepts into statements of work and related documents with the expectation that their lawyers and sourcing professionals understand the basics well enough to identify issues and requirements and negotiate in a meaningful way.

With this in mind, it is time for IT lawyers and sourcing professionals to get up to speed. Below are some of the basics to get started:

  • ITIL—which stands for the “Information Technology Infrastructure Library”—is a set of best practice publications for IT service management that are designed to provide guidance on the provision of quality IT services and the processes and functions used to support them.
  • ITIL was created by the UK government almost 20 years ago and is being adopted widely as the standard for best practice in the provision of IT services. The current version of ITIL is known as the ITIL 2011 edition.
  • The ITIL framework is designed to cover the full lifecycle of IT and is organized around five lifecycle stages:
    1. Service strategy
    2. Service design
    3. Service transition
    4. Service operation
    5. Continual service improvement
  • Each lifecycle stage, in turn, has associated common processes. For example, processes under the “service design” stage include:
    1. Design coordination
    2. Service catalogue management
    3. Service level management
    4. Availability management
    5. Capacity management
    6. IT service continuity management
    7. Information security management systems
    8. Supplier management
  • The ITIL glossary defines each of the lifecycle stages and each of the covered processes.

ITIL® is a registered trademark of AXELOS Limited.

Article By:

Barbara Murphy Melby
Of:
Morgan, Lewis & Bockius LLP

May 28th – NAWL Pipeline to Equity Partnership Program, Chicago

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The National Association of Women Lawyers (NAWL) and Chicago’s Coalition of Women’s Initiatives in Law are joining forces to help usher the next generation of women law firm leaders into place with a program entitled Pipeline to Equity Partnership (P2P).  The program will be held at Loyola University Law School from 11:30 AM to 5:00 PM, followed by a networking reception.   P2P is aimed at women on the brink of equity partnership, in either a one-tier or two-tier law firm system.  This is the third presentation of NAWL’s P2P program nationwide, and its first time in Chicago.

The P2P program is an attempt to move the dial on the numbers of women in law firm leadership by offering a forum to identify and discuss challenges women face as they reach for the top.

The P2P program will begin with a luncheon presentation from Andrea (“Andie”) Kramer, a partner at McDermott Will & Emery.  Andie Kramer is well known as a longtime motivating force in the effort to both advance more women to leadership roles and equity partnership in law firms and to ensure that women are fairly compensated along the way.  She is a founding member of McDermott’s Diversity Committee, and chair of the Gender Diversity Sub-committee.   Andie previously served on both the Firm’s Management and Compensation Committees.

The P2P program will continue with facilitated roundtable group discussion of multiple issue-based scenarios that women face in their journey towards equity partnership.  Discussion will focus on real world experiences such as the departure of a young partner’s sponsor, the loss of previous opportunities for business pitches, handling ethical issues that used to be handled by superiors, the reluctance of a new partner’s colleague to address a client conflict, flexibility and perception of work ethic, or perhaps the overloading of a new partner with uncredited firm administration.

The scenarios will be familiar to attendees and presenters, and will offer an opportunity for both a unique, peer-to-peer discussion and the counsel and perspective of a resource panel of distinguished women law firm leaders, who will offer their counsel and advice.  The panel consisting of law firm leaders, managing partners, and general counsel includes Susie L. Lees, Executive Vice President, General Counsel & Secretary of Allstate Insurance Company, Jennifer A. Kennedy, Managing Partner of Chicago office, Locke Lord LLP, Amy B. Manning, Managing Partner of Chicago office, McGuireWoods LLP, and Angelea Ulum, Co-Chair, Partnership Promotion Committee, Mayer Brown LLP.  The panel will be moderated by Margo O’Donnell, President of the Coalition of Women’s Initiatives in Law and Shareholder at Vedder Price, and Maureen M. Reid, President of Maureen M. Reid, LLC and a co-founder of the P2P program.The resource panel will offer advice for handling the scenarios discussed in the roundtables and will answer attendees’ questions about navigating the way to equity partnership.

Program participants will leave the program with a much better sense of what roadblocks may exist on the path to equity partnership and how to overcome them.  Those interested in registering for the P2P Program can get all of the information and register at http://www.nawl.org/p/cm/ld/&fid=168.