Why Lawyers Should Prioritize Business Development and Marketing in 2024 and Beyond

Simply being a great lawyer is not enough to be successful as a lawyer today. The modern lawyer must be a multifaceted professional, combining sharp legal expertise with savvy business development and strategic marketing acumen.

Whether you’re a partner or an associate, understanding and implementing effective marketing strategies is vital. It’s not just about attracting clients; it’s about building a robust personal brand, establishing a solid reputation and nurturing a network of valuable connections and referral sources.

In this blog post, I will explore essential tactics and innovative strategies that lawyers can employ to distinguish themselves, enhance their market position and build a sustainable and thriving practice in the legal industry.

BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT AND MARKETING IN 2024 AND BEYOND FOR ASSOCIATES

For associates, learning how to master the art of business development and marketing early on is not just advantageous—it’s imperative. As you lay the foundation of your legal career, it’s crucial to pair your growing legal expertise with robust business development strategies and marketing acumen. These tips are designed to help you effectively build your brand, establish enduring professional relationships and position yourself as a subject matter expert – all of which are important as you embark on your legal career.

  1. Build Relationships Early: Start networking as soon as you enter the field. Attend industry seminars, join legal forums, trade associations and alumni groups, and stay active on Linkedin. Cultivate relationships not just with potential clients but also with mentors and peers. The connections you make early can become your most valuable assets.
  2. Develop a Niche: Specialize in an area of law that interests you. This specialization will help you stand out and attract specific clients. In addition, becoming an authority in a particular legal area can lead to more targeted and effective marketing opportunities.
  3. Mentorship and Learning: Seek mentors such as partners at the firm who your admire who can guide you in understanding the nuances of legal marketing and client relationship management. Learn from their experiences and insights. Being proactive in seeking knowledge and advice will accelerate your growth and confidence in navigating the complex world of legal marketing.
  4. Utilize Technology: Embrace legal tech solutions for efficiency and better client engagement. Understand and leverage social media and content marketing to enhance your online presence. Being tech-savvy can significantly increase your visibility and appeal to a broader client base.
  5. Consistent Personal Branding: Develop and maintain a consistent personal brand across all platforms. Your brand should reflect your professional values, expertise and the unique solutions you provide. A strong, consistent brand will make you memorable and help you stand out in a crowded market.
  6. Pro Bono and Community Service: Engage in pro bono work or community service related to your field. This not only will help you broaden you network but it will also contribute to your personal development, experience, commitment and compassion—qualities that are highly attractive to potential clients and employers.
  7. Feedback and Adaptability: Seek feedback regularly from peers, mentors and clients and be willing to adapt your strategies accordingly. The legal market is continually evolving, and so should your approach to business development and marketing.

BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT AND MARKETING IN 2024 AND BEYOND FOR PARTNERS

As partners, your role extends beyond legal practice to shaping the firm’s strategic direction and business success. With extensive experience and a comprehensive network, you are in a prime position to influence growth and innovation. Here are some practical, impactful ways you can leverage your position to drive business development and market yourself and your firm effectively in an ever-evolving industry.

  1. Lead by Example: Encourage a culture of business development within the firm. Demonstrate your commitment by actively engaging in networking, speaking engagements and thought leadership. Your involvement sets a precedent and motivates junior lawyers to emulate these practices.
  2. Leverage Your Network: Your years in practice have earned you a vast and valuable network. Utilize your established connections for referrals, collaborations and strategic partnerships. Your reputation and relationships can significantly amplify business opportunities and open new doors for the firm.
  3. Innovate and Adapt: Stay abreast of the latest marketing trends, especially in digital marketing, and adapt them to fit the legal industry. Embrace new technologies and platforms to reach wider audiences and offer innovative solutions. Your willingness to innovate signifies a forward-thinking firm that’s prepared for future challenges.
  4. Strategic Client Relationship Management: Deepen relationships with key clients by providing bespoke, value-added services and regular engagement. Use your insights and experiences to anticipate their needs and offer solutions before they arise. Strong client relationships often lead to retention and referrals.
  5. Invest in Talent and Mentorship: Identify and nurture the next generation of lawyers in your firm. Provide mentorship and invest in their business development skills. Their growth will contribute to the firm’s legacy and ensure a steady stream of innovative leaders.
  6. Thought Leadership: Regularly publish articles, speak at industry events and participate in discussions that showcase your expertise and the firm’s capabilities. Thought leadership not only enhances your personal brand but also elevates the firm’s profile.
  7. Evaluate and Refine: Regularly assess the effectiveness of your business development and marketing strategies. Be open to refining approaches based on outcomes and industry changes. A flexible, results-oriented approach ensures that the firm stays competitive and relevant.

HOW TO OVERCOME DISCOMFORT IN MARKETING

You may find the marketing aspect of law somewhat out of your comfort zone. Overcoming this discomfort is crucial for personal growth and the firm’s success. Here are some strategies to ease into effective marketing and business development.

  1. Training and Workshops: Invest time in business development and marketing workshops tailored for lawyers. These workshops can provide valuable insights into the latest trends and techniques, making the process more approachable and less daunting.
  2. Start Small: If the thought of large networking events is overwhelming, begin with more manageable one-on-one meetings or small group gatherings. As you build confidence, gradually increase the size and scope of your engagements.
  3. Collaborate with Peers: Partner with colleagues on marketing initiatives. Collaborating can divide the workload, play to each person’s strengths and make the process more enjoyable and less intimidating.
  4. Mentorship and Coaching: Seek a mentor or coach who has successfully integrated marketing into their legal practice. Learning from their experiences and insights can demystify the process and provide practical steps to follow.
  5. Set Realistic Goals: Establish clear, achievable goals for your marketing efforts. Small victories can significantly boost your confidence and motivate you to tackle more ambitious projects.
  6. Reflect on Successes: Keep track of your progress and take the time to celebrate successes, no matter how small. Reflecting on positive outcomes can reinforce the value of your marketing efforts and diminish discomfort over time.
  7. Leverage Personal Interests: Incorporate your hobbies or interests into your networking and marketing strategies. Connecting over shared interests can make interactions more natural and less forced.
  8. Understand Your Audience: Spend time understanding the needs and preferences of your target audience. Tailoring your approach to what they find engaging can make your efforts feel more genuine and less like a chore.By incorporating these strategies into your routine, you can gradually overcome discomfort with marketing, turning it into a natural and rewarding extension of your professional activities. As you become more comfortable, your ability to effectively market yourself and your firm will undoubtedly grow, resulting in greater business success.

CONCLUSION

For lawyers at any stage, embracing business development and marketing is not an option but a necessity. It’s about building a personal brand, expanding your network and ensuring a steady stream of work. Marketing and business development are powerful tools that can significantly transform a lawyer’s career trajectory. By actively engaging in these practices, lawyers can:

  1. Enhance Visibility: Establishing a strong personal brand makes you more recognizable in the legal community, leading to increased trust and a higher likelihood of referrals.
  2. Expand Client Base: Effective marketing strategies attract a broader client base, including more lucrative and high-profile cases.
  3. Build a Reputation: Consistent business development efforts help in building a reputation as an expert in specific legal fields, making you the go-to lawyer for those particular matters.
  4. Foster Relationships: Through networking, lawyers can foster long-term relationships, not just with potential clients but also with other professionals who can provide referrals.

Key Takeaways

  1. It’s Never Too Early or Late: Whether you’re a junior lawyer or a seasoned partner, now is the right time to start focusing on business development and marketing.
  2. Consistency is Key: Regularly engage in networking, personal branding and strategic marketing efforts.
  3. Adapt and Evolve: Stay updated with the latest marketing trends and adapt them to your practice.
  4. Seek Support: If marketing doesn’t come naturally, seek training or collaborate with colleagues to ease into the practice.
  5. Measure Success: Keep track of your efforts and adjust your strategies based on what works best for you and your practice.

Episode 2: The Importance of Data in Legal Business and Legal Marketing with Laura Leopard of Leopard Solutions [PODCAST]

Rachel and Jessica speak with Laura Leopard, the Founder and CEO of Leopard Solutions: a service that provides law firms with data to improve hiring and marketing for the business of law.

Be sure to take the Women Leaving Law Survey HERE and sign-up for the Women Leaving Law webinar on June 2, 2022 to hear the results of their survey.

We’ve included a transcript of our conversation below, transcribed by artificial intelligence. The transcript has been lightly edited for style, clarity, and readability.

INTRO  00:00

Well, hello, and welcome to Legal News Reach the official podcast for the National Law Review. Stay tuned for a discussion on the latest trends, illegal marketing, SEO, law firm best practices, and more.

Rachel  00:15

My name is Rachel,

Jessica  00:16

And my name is Jessica.

Rachel  00:18

And we’re the co-hosts for the podcast. Today we’re speaking with Laura Leopard Founder and CEO of Leopard Solutions. Laura, would you like to tell our listeners a little bit about yourself and your organization?

Laura Leopard  00:28

Of course, of course, we are a legal intelligence company that monitors law firms and attorneys. And we have been doing it for nearly 20 years. And we have grown from a simple attorney list to a detailed current and historical account of attorneys and their movements. And of course, we now offer competitive and business intelligence for law firms and the market in general. And I have been at the helm for nearly 20 years.

Rachel  01:02

We’re excited to get your insight into some of those more data-driven trends here in the industry. So the first thing that we want to focus on is the importance of data and legal marketing and legal business. One of the things that I hear pretty often is that law firms are data-rich and information poor. So can you explain a little bit about why that is and how law firms can solve for that problem?

Laura Leopard  01:26

Well, I think that was more generally true in the past. But today, many law firms are correcting that issue, because they’re hiring intelligence professionals to come in and help them mind and understand their own data. The other side of the coin is gathering external data on their competitors so that they can benchmark their own shortcomings and successes properly. And that’s where we come in. We measure law firms across the board, and we deliver those benchmarks that they need. Well, several years ago now, we had prepared a detailed report on a law firm and the top 200, about their ROI on lateral hiring and entry-level hiring. And we showed it to you know, prospective law firm. And we offered to write one for their firm, and then also a list of their competitors, you know, of their choice. And their response was, “this is very interesting, but I’m not sure what we could do with it.” And it just proved to me at that time that firms and leopard both needed to do a better job of explaining the value of the data, and how it could be used. So we developed firm scape, which is our competitive intelligence platform. And it’s filled with great data. And people were very excited to see it. But then again, only people who could readily understand what it offered, really benefited from it in really meaningful ways. So when we wrote our Business Intelligence platform, we wanted to just carefully lay out what everything meant, in clear, concise terms, so that meaningful measurement would be readily understood. You know, everyone gets very excited about data. You know, “big data, big data, data-data-data.” But not everybody understands the application of that data, what that data could mean. And that’s where we have hoped to sort of democratize data in a sense of laying it out in a way that anybody can understand it, not just data people.

Rachel  03:36

Yeah, I think just being empowered to look at it is also really great. Because I think some people can get a little intimidated by data like, “Oh, it’s just a lot of numbers,” like what the numbers mean. So one of the trends that we’ve seen, and that we’ve talked about recently is women leaving the legal industry and what that means for the profession. We published a Q&A that you did with Stefanie Marrone, about this topic. We’ve had her on the podcast before; I was curious if you could dive into this trend and talk about why this is happening and how law firms can respond to it?

Laura Leopard  04:07

So we did a survey, and it’s still in progress. We’ve had about 170 responses so far. And I have to tell you, it was incredibly depressing to read the comments and the answers that they had about why they left their top 200 law firm. And a lot of it was much of what you might suspect, you know, lack of opportunity, lack of mentorship, a feeling of not being included, you know, in the group and just really lack of opportunity stood out, you know, a great deal. So we decided, well, we can’t just we can’t just, you know, do a report. We’re gonna do a presentation in May about this at the Art conference. We really wanted to dig in deeper. So we’ve been doing interviews with women who have succeeded in the top 200 Who are partners at their firm, and they’re leading women’s initiatives, and they’re doing some really great things. And we’re learning a lot in the whole process, I didn’t want to just say, here’s a big problem, you should fix it. It’s like, Here are ideas about how you can fix it. And here are examples of where those ideas are actually succeeding in top 200 law firms. But I think the really important thing that we took away after reading a lot of this was these same problems exist for attorneys who are also underrepresented, and from who are ethnically diverse. And there are also, you know, white men at the firms that have issues because they have a family members who is ill, and they have to step away. And there’s lots of there’s, there’s lots of problems here. But there are ways to fix them. And that’s what we’re working on. Right now. We are doing some great interviews, we’re coming away with some really positive ideas. And we have some firms that are really doing some great work. And we want to share that with everyone. This is not a problem that cannot be fixed. This is a problem that can be fixed, if one wishes to fix it, and everyone is determined to see it through. And for us, it’s really important to talk about this topic, we are a woman-owned business. I’m a woman entrepreneur, we have all experienced, you know, sexism, we have all experienced some lack of opportunity in our lives. And this is really important for us to start this conversation again, or remind people this conversation needs to be ongoing and continuing. So after our presentation, we’re going to we’re going to do a webinar at leopard, we’re going to invite some great folks to speak at that webinar, we’re also going to do a full white paper. But this is one of one of something that’s really, really important to us. And I really hope it can open a lot of eyes and help move the needle to helping women succeed in those top 200 firms and in law in general.

Rachel  07:13

We talked on the show before about how COVID has sort of given people the opportunity to make change that their law firm their ongoing, I think, you know, we did speak in the past year about how COVID did push women out of the workplace. But like, I think moving forward past that and not using that as like an excuse to go back to the way things were and to make long-lasting change, I think is really important. So I was curious if you could share maybe some of the solutions that you know, law firms could implement to help remedy this problem, or if that’s something that will come later with with your white paper and after your presentation?

Laura Leopard  07:48

You know, having a strong mentorship program is really important. And you can have assigned mentors, but you also have those sort of like those volunteer mentors on the side. And not just not just women mentoring women, but men also being mentors to women. The same problem exists for those who are ethnically diverse, if you have a program in place, or everyone is assigned a mentor, then you’re you’re going to help them overcome that hurdle, flex time paternity and maternity leave and not just saying we offer maternity leave, but by saying we encourage you to take maternity leave, right? If as many men took maternity leave, as women take maternity leave, it sort of removes that stigma from a woman having to take that time off, there are some really concrete things that can be done that can make a huge difference. And, you know, the women did not just leave these firms due to COVID. They left because it became untenable to stay for many different reasons. And a lot of it had to do with flexibility on the job, right? Yes, they were. Some of them were home with children. But a lot of people that answered this survey didn’t have children at home. But this entire pandemic caused people to think differently about their lives and their situations. Women are not alone in feeling this way. Right. So there are lots of young people now that are coming, you know, coming into law firms that are saying, I don’t I don’t want to work 80 hours a week. I like being home. I like having time to myself, that’s important to me. And the pandemic showed a lot of people how important that other part of your life is, right? It’s it’s a big bargain to make when you say I’m gonna work this hard for this long and I’m gonna make partner but some of the people that responded to our survey says, here’s here’s a here’s a newsflash when you make partner, that doesn’t get any better. If anything, it gets worse. worse, there are more responsibilities on top of you, you have to continue to work those crazy hours. And you have to do business development and you have administrative duties. And and and so if you are questioning, you know if this is the lifestyle for you. And I actually did have someone say that. So if you really care about having a lifestyle with your family and friends that may be this, this choice isn’t for you, I’m gonna flip it back on its head and say, Do you really want well rounded, happy, well adjusted people working for you, somebody that’s working 80 hours a week is not going to fit that bill, right? Because that’s all they do. That’s their single focus. And they’re going to burn out, and they’re going to leave you just when you need them. So taking a more holistic view, and saying, you know, and this was this was a quote, I had a partner say, I was told when I, you know asked for flex time, my partner said, I would rather have you at 50% of your normal time than many of the people that work for me at 100%. Because you do the job that I need you to do. It’s it’s time that law firms start thinking about the future, things never stay exactly the same, right? The whole hierarchy of law firms that we know now was created, what 100 years ago, when men were the only people that were lawyers, and they had wives and housekeepers and stuff at all. Right? That’s not the world we live in anymore. And we’re also beginning to question, you know, all the young people coming up are questioning everything. They’re questioning authority, they’re questioning why they have to do this and why they have to do that. And when they say, this isn’t a life, that’s for me, I don’t want to be partner. What does it do to that old model? You know, you’re there, there’s going to have to be an inflection point where they start to think about what is going to happen at their firm five years from now 10 years from now, when this generational divide, you know, really takes place. And here’s another newsflash. According to our data for the last three years ago, I think entry level hiring coming out of law school was about 5050 men and women, then the women edged out the minute, then the women rose again, there are far more women in college and far more women in law school than there are men, and they are outnumbering men being hired on that entry level position. But if those women don’t stay, and if those women leave, because you are asking, you’re creating an untenable situation for them, what’s going to happen to your partner track, then what is going to happen to that wealth of knowledge that that person brought to your firm, and she’s gonna walk away with, there’s, there’s going to be a reckoning in the industry, because times have changed, and people have changed. And it’s going to be interesting to see how it plays out. But we can see by looking in the data that they’re, they’re going to be, there’s going to be some shockwaves. And as we start, at the Women’s seminar, we’re going to be, you know, measuring all kinds of exit data and comparing it, you know, one against the other. But it’s time that firms really start to have more of a forward view about what kind of law firm they’re going to be 10 years from now, because that’s really going to impact one thing they care about most. And that’s their bottom line.

Rachel  13:46

What has been the impact that you’ve seen, like this, this lack of information?

Laura Leopard  13:54

I think we all can say, you know, pretty clearly, if you are not using data to make decisions, you’re gonna pay a price for it. You know, data improves decision making, and it can help you predict, you know, competition stresses, and then by tracking industry trends, you can begin to predict future moves a little more successfully. Of course, you have to be, you have to have really, really good data, right? If you’re using bad or incomplete data to make decisions, you might as well not use it at all. So, data quality has been very central to our business. Our data is checked and rechecked and continually updated in order to offer the best possible dataset. But I think data itself should be demystified you know, to a certain extent, by making it clear why a particular dataset matters, right? firms should care about employee turnover because it costs their bottom line and I’m not just talking about a few dollars here and there. I’m talking about Millions of dollars. And firms should care about where their competitors are opening new offices because it shows possible opportunity that they didn’t see, firms should care about who their competitors hire, to see where their next focus will be. And perhaps they should look there as well. Are, is there a competitor building up a practice that competes directly with them in their city? Are they looking at your people to possibly, you know, recruit out of them? Lack of data and insight just leaves a firm operating blindly, just by their instincts and granted, instincts are great, but they can go horribly wrong. If you look in our growth decline report now, which kind of shows that winners and losers by you know, headcount, you will see firms in the bottom of that tear that you never would have guessed would be there just a few years ago, those other firms saw an opportunity that the others didn’t, and they seized it. So data can really make or break, you know, your company, relying on your gut and anecdotal data that people bring you. It’s just not effective. I, you know, law firms love to call around and ask a recruiter. So what’s hot right now? Or what’s what’s going on right now, this was one of my favorite stories. They they talked to a recruiter, the recruiter said, Oh, the Chicago market is so hot right now. It is so hot. It’s just on fire. And I look back and I looked at our data and and like, it’s, no, it’s not, there isn’t more movement, there isn’t more job openings, that one recruiter happened to be a lot busier in Chicago than anybody else. So all of that anecdotal data like that is meaningless when you can compare that against really hard, true facts. And that’s what they really need to start doing.

Jessica  17:00

Without giving away the “secret sauce” if you will, the metrics that these firms are using for hiring specifically is that, you know, the number of job openings, like you said. I mean, what are what would you say are maybe 1-2-3 of the big numbers they’re paying attention to with hiring specifically?

Laura Leopard  17:16

Well, you know, on our platform, one of one of everyone’s favorite, you know, reports is, is that growth decline report so they can see who is who is growing quickly, and adding a lot of people to their firm. You also can see firms who who are in churn, right, they lost 100 people, they hired 100, people, and firms will use that report to find firms that it might be easier to pry people away from, right. So if you have a firm, that’s negative 15, in headcount, and people are exiting that firm like crazy, well, you have an opportunity to go pick up those people there. You also can look at our lateral reports. And you can see where the hot markets are, you can slice and dice it by practice area by specialty, you know, by far by all different kinds of metrics. You even can look at, you know, gender movement, and those who are ethnically diverse, there’s lots of different ways to look at it, but it gives you a good market view. And of course, we do have, we have a job program where we are looking at over 1000 law firms every day in real time. And I’ll tell you, you know, when the pandemic happened, we normally had like six to 7000 jobs and our job program. During the pandemic, I think in like July of 2020, that number went down to about 3000. And most of them, I don’t think were really real openings. Anyway, there were openings, they just sort of left on their website. And now we have over 12,000, approaching 13,000 openings in a program. So that will just tell you the velocity, they also can. And our job program is great for CIA too, because you can go in and see how what your competitors are looking for how they’re framing that position, like right now, we know everyone’s looking for corporate m&a people, right? How are they framing that job? How can you make yours look more attractive? What can you do to you know, sort of get an edge in that market. And there’s lots of other reports that we have that can help them gain advantage. But those are probably, you know, the top the top three, just seeing what’s going on in the market.

Jessica  19:31

With all the changes in the legal industry, I think there’s a huge focus right now, not only in just data and the services you guys offer, but also diversity in the workplace. So I would love to know–I know you mentioned a little bit of it, but being able to see you said gender maybe changes are hiring, how to make it attractive to certain diverse populations of people so that you know, the law firms represent their communities, if you will. Could you explain a little bit more of that? I would love to definitely learn more.

Laura Leopard  20:00

For years, we had been asked to have diversity information in our database. But we just thought it would be incredibly hard, we weren’t sure how we wanted to do it, it was it’s it, you know, having that kind of information in the database is a little risky. To a certain extent, you have to be really careful and really think things through. Then the summer of George Floyd happened, we were in the middle of a pandemic, things were kind of crazy. But when that happened, we all you know, on our, our, you know, our little community of folks at leopard said, we have to do something, we have to do something. So we put all of our heads together. And we said, well, here’s how we might do it. And we knew about the Mansfield rule and, you know, diversity lab who are great folks. And we knew how they handled their data. And they really, were asking for data, they really wanted law firms to be able to go in and find people that were diverse in order to bring them into the hiring game. So we took a page out of their playbook, and we said, Okay, if we put diversity in our database, we’re only going to show it to people who we think are going to use it correctly. So if a law firm is a member of the Mansfield rule, they get the diversity data, we don’t charge an extra penny for any of this, we spent months doing research on every single person in the US in our database, to see if they might be ethnically diverse. And what we did was we, we went on a probability score. So if we look at where they’re from languages, they speak committees that they belong to, like we sort of look at all of their data points, then we can come back and say, Okay, we think there was a high probability, this person could be ethnically diverse. If you are a member of the Mansfield rule, you can access and you can view those attorneys. If you’re not, then you can sign the leper diversity pledge. And with that, you are promising to use that data in the correct way, which is to include not exclude, and to really look at these people, you know, in order to bring them in front of the hiring committee of a law firm, in order to move that needle. We also put safeguards in the database in place, so that those people could never be excluded from a search, they could only be included, you can only see them when you want to find them. And we did the same thing for gender. So we moved because there were other gender issues that we wanted to recognize and acknowledge. So you have a high probability of being gender diverse or low probability of being gender diverse. So now, because because we took those steps, we are also able to report on diversity, and every single law firm in our system. And that means if you are a diverse candidate, you’re going to you’re going to be able to know, you know, or a recruiter can show you or the law firm can show you what their diversity score is, in comparison to the other law firms that they may be considering. Everyone. Everyone gets a score, everyone sees you know, how well they’re doing or how poor they’re doing. And law firms can use this in their conversations with people that they want to bring in. And let them know that they are growing diversity within their firm, you can see it in the growth decline report, you can see who’s growing in ethnic diversity numbers, who’s growing in women numbers, it’s all right there for the world to see. And we use the same scoring across the board for every firm. So it’s so it’s all equal. But that was an incredibly important thing for us to do. We spent months with, you know, all hands on deck, getting this data in, and it’s something that we continue to work on all the time. You know, there are people that we have as, as we consider sort of, we don’t have enough information to go either way. Well, we continually go back to see if there’s more information that’s available about that attorney, so we can label them properly, high or low. But being able to do that also led us fold in diversity into our leopard law firm index. So we decided that the normal way that firms are assigned, you know, a grade of excellence, where those scores coming from a once a year list, you know, are really not helpful in today’s fast paced world. We have always seen firms go out of business in the top 200 of emerging they, you know, they go away, they go under, and we wanted something that was real time that would go up as the firm was improving and if the firm Um, you know, hit a bad patch than their score would also show that we have firms in the leopard top 250 that are not in the top 200. We have, we also have firms that are in the top 200 that are not in the leopard top 250 Because our scoring scoring methods are very different. And they’re really database and one of those data points is a diversity number, how well are they doing with diversity. So it is become a part of everything that we do in almost every single report. And in our last leopard law firm index, how well a firm is doing on ethnic diversity is incredibly important. And we wanted to show that by using it as many as many different ways as possible.

Jessica  25:49

I think it’s great to have so many different options of metrics, because I think casting that wide net, as far as what you’re able to keep track of for your firm, allows you to pick up any alarm bells of things that maybe aren’t going as well, like you said of, you know, growth, maybe it’s going down in this area or what have you. So I’m curious to know what some of those alarm bells would be or like red flags in the data that maybe law firms should pay attention to or could affect their business model and moving forward for their growth?

Laura Leopard  26:22

Well, I think all those items that are in that, you know, law firm index, and the score that we give because of it. So we look at metrics that really don’t change over time in the in the sense that we do look at only one little tiny piece of the financial puzzle, which is the revenue per lawyer, but it’s scored over a five year period, because that is really there just to show Oh, it’s going up, oh, it’s going down. So that is available there, and part of that index, but we also use items, the growth decline and attorney headcount, we use the average attorney tenure increases or decreases in that RPL, as I just mentioned, and the ROI, the success and lateral recruitment, and the success and entry-level recruitment. And for the index, we only look at it in the prior 12 months. Because if you are having problems retaining people, the first year they join that firm, we see that we think that is a red flag of something going on at the firm, which is why it’s in the index, we also look at promotions to partner and we look at ethnic diversity within the firm. And one reason that we do that is that companies have said over and over again, they care about ethnic diversity, and they want to work with firms that have a good ethnic diversity number, if that’s true, and if they hold their feet to the fire, then that really must be in the index. And there are other items that we’re looking to fold into that index. But those are the ones that help give that score. There are so many other things, that ROI that I talked about, like in the index, we look at the past 12 months, but you can go back and look, look three years ago, how well did you do in your hiring three years ago? How well did you do that the year before that, because we’re talking about millions of dollars that these firms are losing because they only have a 70% retention of people that they just hired two years ago. And and that is a huge red flag that they really must pay attention to. So then the question is, you know, where’s my problem? Right? So we wrote a report in the in the BI Suite, that really helps you break it down? Is it a practice area issue? Is it a particular office that has an issue, and you can benchmark your firm against your competing firms? I think sometimes when people say, Oh, we have a 80 80% retention rate, that’s pretty good. Well, it’s good until you compare it against some of your competitors who have a much higher number. And it’s also good until you realize exactly how much that attrition is costing your firm, millions and millions of dollars. You know, I’ve also I once had a recruiter and a law firm say, they really didn’t mind the attrition because it was sort of job security for them. Because they kept busy. But really, job security for them is not just it’s making sure you have a successful hire. It’s making sure that those people are happy and they’re getting what they need, is looking to see, you know who might be on the cusp of leaving. We have something in our attorney database called the probability The move, right? So we’re looking at people that have moved in the past and similar circumstances and JD, your range, practice area and all that good stuff. So you can run it on your own firm. And you can see who has a very high probability at your firm that allows you to play defense with those people and help to see if they’re getting what they need, are they happy? Do they need to look at some new kind of schedule? Are they unhappy in their practice area, and they’re not getting an opportunity to change it, there’s a lot, a lot of things that firms can do, if they start to use that data to help see where they might have a problem. And we’ve written many reports that could help them do that, again, again, even with the law firm index, it’s not about calling out oh, this is the big winner, this is the big loser, it’s like, you might have a problem. And we’re gonna help you find where your problem is, because this report will show you where you are, you know, far beneath your competitors, this is an area that you have to look at. And that’s what it’s there for is to really help them do better. And we can show them the metrics that say, this is where you should begin looking.

Rachel  31:15

We’d spoke a little bit about at the beginning of our conversation, how law firms are starting to really start to adopt this technology to integrate more data and things like that into their business. I was curious to get your thoughts on how the legal industry has changed over the course of your career in terms of how this technology has been adopted? Have you seen like a paradigm shift in the past couple of years? Or how has that been?

Laura Leopard  31:37

They certainly have changed, but it hasn’t been a change overnight, you know, law firms, both now. And then they use several different kinds of technology for several different purposes. And, you know, data was housed in silos, you know, with multiple programs used by multiple people. And today, you see firms hiring technology teams, to better integrate and manage that data. So that’s a step in the right direction. You know, I have seen firms that have very little data about their own firm, and about, you know, their own alumni. And they’re beginning to recognize that, that puts them at a disadvantage, right. So that recognition is a huge step, and getting the task of just getting all the data in a proper form, and then the right system, that’s a really big undertaking, and only the largest firms can really, you know, kind of take those steps and hiring that technology department, you know, lucky for others, we can kind of step in and provide that market data that CEI intelligence for them. And even for the firms that have, you know, their own CI department, they still need data on their competing firms to use to create that proper analysis and benchmarking. And that’s where we step in to fill that bill. But technology has been getting much, much better in in many law firms, but not all law firms, there will always be some that are sort of lagging behind.

Rachel  33:11

I wonder, you know, when is going to be the point where these people who are lagging behind will start to realize that, you know, if if you don’t change, then you die, essentially, you know, it’s because eventually just not going to be able to keep up with everyone else around you. So I think one of the technologies that in addition to data that we’ve been hearing about is the use of artificial intelligence in you know, recruiting and and other operations. I was wondering if you could speak a little bit about like your experience in using artificial intelligence and recruiting and things like that, and how it can improve those processes.

Laura Leopard  33:46

We have a product that uses AI, that sort of analyzes a possible merger, right, so it can produce possible candidates. And then when you select one, we use all of the data from all the past mergers that we’ve seen in our database, to really say, Well, this is how we think this merger would go based on attrition rates. And then we highlight all the risks points, you know, of that particular acquisition or merger. And that’s, that’s in the BI Suite. An AI for hiring is kind of tricky. So while it sounds like you know, oh, we’re going to use AI and it’s going to eliminate bias. The problem is there will be inherent bias baked in, depending upon the data set that AI is based on. And the legal industry has historically been predominantly white and male for decades. So an AI hiring system based on that data set is going to have bias unless you work to overcome it. If you’re parsing resumes and cover letters is going to need to be trained on you know, being neutral on titles and verbiage. And you know, was key words. Now we like to look at data patterns, which can prove to be, you know, maybe even more helpful than that kind of AI. You know, there’s different processes that firms do almost without thinking, you know, firms do a lot of institutional hiring. And we can show that in data and tell that story. And these are the types of data patterns that you know, I would like to see kind of shake up that hiring model, the one that, you know, may not be serving the firm as well as they thought. But an AI for hiring has always been tricky. And we’ve, we’ve explored some of this ourselves. And then at the same time, we said, Well, wait a minute, it could very well be that the best person at the firm, the one that succeeds the most is always going to be that white male partner that came on 30 years ago. So this is something that we’re working on. And we’re working to see how we could eliminate bias in that kind of report. But it’s, it’s a tricky thing. And it’s I know, a lot of companies outside of law firms have used it. And there have been a lot of issues with using AI in that process. So it’s something you have to watch very closely.

Rachel  36:17

Yeah, I think there’s this misconception that AI is just like, you know, it’s not a person. So how can it you know, make these questionable decisions. But the problem is that, like a person has to build the AI. And it has to be based off of, you know, it has to learn these things from something else. So I can see how that would be a slippery slope. So with that in mind, like do you see…Or I guess, like what technologies do you see changing these processes moving forward? What do you expect the role of technology will be like, in the future?

Laura Leopard  36:49

There are many, there are many hiring issues. And we are working now on a really cool piece of technology. To help with one of those, you know, I talked to I talked to a lot of law firm people who have to do a lot of work, before the hiring partner sits down with the candidate. Because so often that hire can be blown if that hiring partner doesn’t know what to say that I care. So much about lateral hiring is about convincing that person to join your firm. And competition right now is at an all-time high. So what sets your firm apart? You know, why would this top-notch corporate m&a attorney, choose your firm over the five others that he’s looking at, you really have to tell them and you can’t just say, Oh, we’re a great firm with great people and a great culture, you really have to say, how your firm has, you know, grown over your competitors. Let’s say you’re interviewing a woman who’s an IP associate and wants to make partner, well let her know how many women IP partners you have in your firm in relation to her current firm. And if that number isn’t as great, maybe the percentage of growth is great, right? Just convince them that your firm is the best choice by using data to confirm that back. There are always good stories that can be told with data. And we are trying to help firms uncover those and help that hiring partner convey those really positive things. And right now, you can do that. But you’d have to run several reports. And then you’d have to write the analysis and then hand it to the to the hiring partner. So we are developing a tool called the Coach’s Corner, that’s going to do just that. And it’s going to analyze the firm that seeking to hire against the firm with the attorney currently works. And it’s going to map out all the positives that we have in the data for your firm. And that is a really important part of the conversation. Right now the competition is so tight, and it’s so everything is moving so quickly, that they all need, you know, as as much help as they can to paint their firm in the right light if they’re gonna get that higher. So there’s a lot of power on the job seeker right now, especially in certain practice areas and in certain areas of the country. And they want to make sure that they’re making the right choice. All that there’s a lot of strange decisions going on out there. There’s, there’s a race for, you know, who’s getting paid the most. But if you’re all paying the most, how do you decide between one and the other, you have to look at all of that other data to say overall, our firm would be the better choice for you because of a B, C, D, and E. And that’s what we’re trying to do is give them the data for all of those points. So you may see people making decisions based on all of those metrics, and all of those things that that firm offers, as opposed to just monetary decisions, right? Am I going to be happy where I go? Am I going to be able to live the kind of life that I want to leave, all of that’s going to happen and that those firms that are doing that are going to change the dynamic of the rest. So it’s not all about starting salary, and it’s not all about the PPP. There’s a lot more in the mix now. And there may be a reshuffling of firms, as some firms begin to realize they need to change how they do business in order to have, you know, people that stay with them and people who want to join them.

Rachel  40:48

There will be an interesting thing to watch here in the coming years, especially as your company continues to roll out these new tools.

Laura Leopard  40:54

As a group as a women working in law firms, as men working in law firms, we have to look and demand and ask for that change to happen.

Rachel  41:04

Excellent. Well, that’s why we’re so excited to have you on as a guest today to get these ideas and these topics out there! So special. Thanks to you, Laura, for joining us today. We really appreciate it.

OUTRO  41:19

Thank you for listening to The National Law Review’s Legal News Reach podcast. Be sure to follow us on Apple podcasts, Spotify, wherever you get your podcasts for more episodes for the latest legal news. interested in publishing and advertising with us visit WWW dot NAT law review.com. We’ll be back soon with our next episode.

Copyright ©2022 National Law Forum, LLC
For more episodes of Legal News Reach, please visit the podcast page.

10 Law Firm Newsletter Ideas to Attract Clients

How to Start and Grow a Newsletter for a Law Firm

Email marketing often gets a bad rap. After all, we all know the annoyance of getting spam and promotional emails. Much of this content just ends up deep in our inbox. The same can happen to newsletters… especially boring ones.

Don’t let your law firm email newsletter fall to this fate. In this guide, I’ll talk about how to start a successful newsletter and use it to attract clients.

Plus, you’ll get 10 content ideas for creating an engaging newsletter.

Why start a newsletter?

A study conducted by Law Technology Today found that 86% of law firms fail to collect an email address when they acquire a new lead. Starting an email newsletter is one way to prioritize growing your email list and taking down information to nurture users into potential clients.

With this in mind, an email newsletter is about more than just sending a generic email every month; instead, it can be an effective tool for drumming up new business for your law firm. It also gives you a medium through which you can share firm news, build trust with your subscribers, and establish your law firm’s brand.

Benefits of starting a law firm newsletter

Email newsletter marketing offers many benefits to your law firm. Beyond simply sending updates to your email list, an email newsletter can bring the following perks:

  • Connection – A law firm newsletter builds connection with your new and potential clients by telling them more about your firm and offering a way for subscribers to respond directly to your email.
  • Traffic – An effective newsletter can work to drive more users to your website and social media pages.
  • Sales – Newsletters offer a convenient way for subscribers to reach out to your firm, increasing the likelihood that they will turn into new clients.
  • Community – Sending a consistent newsletter can help drive users to your social media accounts, therefore growing your community and visibility on social.
  • Reputation Management – Email provides an avenue for you to build rapport with your audience, get ahead of bad PR, and ultimately build trust in your firm.

How to write a law firm email newsletter

Before you sit down and start typing away at your newsletter, you’ll want to understand the fundamentals of what it takes to write and market a great newsletter. Here’s how to get started.

Define your target audience

Generalism is the killer of many marketing campaigns. If you don’t define your target audience – that is, the interests and persona of the people you are trying to reach – you risk offering the wrong type of content to the wrong audience. And disjointed messaging won’t bring the client-generating results that you want.

Instead, you’ll want to brainstorm a few factors to ensure you are writing for your ideal audience. These factors include:

  • What types of legal services your audience is interested in
  • What legal issues they are struggling with most
  • What questions they’re likely to have about the legal process
  • What their goals are when it comes to hiring a lawyer
  • What interests they have in understanding law, the legal system, etc.

If you’ve been in your field for a while, you’ll likely have an idea of how to answer these questions. If you’re more green, you can always ask your network, social media followers, and existing clients some of these questions to better understand their interests.

Grow your email list

Of course, before you can see results from an email newsletter you’ll need an audience to send it to! Now, building an email list organically takes time, but it’s worth it to build a list of subscribers who are actually interested in your content.

Never buy email subscribers, as these will likely be dead accounts or otherwise users who will never work with you. Instead, invest in blogging and website marketing in order to grow your community organically.

Here are some tips for growing your law firm email list:

  1. Embed a signup form on your website in order to capture users’ contact information (at the very least, their email address and name)
  2. Publish helpful blog content to drive organic search engine traffic and traffic from social media
  3. Offer downloadable content – like PDFs, infographics, guides, etc. – behind a sign-up wall to encourage users to subscribe
  4. Use email marketing software like Mailchimp to add email list signup forms to various pages or articles on your website
  5. Offer value with impactful content. If you’re able to demonstrate that you are an authority in your industry, people will be excited to subscribe for future updates

Plan your content

With your target audience in mind, you can begin to plan your newsletter content. I highly recommend choosing a “theme” and then building out a newsletter based on that theme.

For example, one month you may decide to talk about common mistakes people make in hiring a lawyer. So, you write four newsletters over the course of the month – each one addressing a different ‘mistake’ people make and how to avoid it.

You can use a notebook, Google Doc, or spreadsheet to plan your content and keep organized. Try to plan at least a month in advance so you are prepared with content ideas ahead of time. You can even write your content and schedule the delivery weeks or months out.

Write your newsletter

Whether you consider yourself a good writer or not, drafting a great email newsletter is relatively simple. There are just a few tips to keep in mind to help you produce engaging content every time:

  • Write an eye-catching subject line. Rather than simply say “newsletter”, you can include the actual subject of your email (e.g. ‘Don’t make this mistake…) to entice subscribers to click
  • Make it “scannable”. Instead of typing a long wall of text, break your email content into shorter paragraphs, sentences, or bulleted lists. This makes it easier for readers to ‘scan’ your content and find the content they are interested in.
  • ‘Close the loop’. This is a concept I got from an email copywriter. Open your email with a ‘hook’ – could be a tip, a question, or an intro to a story – and then resolve the hook at the end of your email. For example, you could open with “Many clients make a huge mistake in hiring a lawyer…” and then at the end of the email you say “Don’t want to make that mistake? Here’s how to avoid it…”. This keeps readers interested from start to finish.
  • Add a link. Include links to related blog posts, social media posts, videos, etc. to drive traffic to your other channels.
  • Include a call to action. Either encourage readers to respond to a question (e.g. “What do you think about…?”), contact you directly (e.g. “Respond now to schedule a consultation”), or visit your other platforms (e.g. “Visit our website to learn more about…”).

Use an email platform

Email marketing software like Mailchimp and ConvertKit makes it easy to write, format, schedule, and deliver your newsletter content. There’s no need to create a long CC chain to your subscribers and send your email manually. These tools allow you to send your newsletter to an entire list, schedule the delivery date, add media, and more.

Preview and test your newsletter

It’s always a good idea to preview your newsletter to check if you made any mistakes. Further, send yourself a test email to make sure there are no delivery issues. You can then also see how your newsletter looks on different devices and decide if you need to change up your content.

Send it out

Once your email template is complete, give it a final once-over for any selling issues or mistakes. When you’ve double-checked your content, you’re ready to send it to your email list.

Track results

Most email marketing tools will also provide analytics regarding your email open rate, subscriber growth, or unsubscribe rate. These metrics will help you determine the success of your newsletter and make adjustments over time. For example, if you see that your open rate is low, that may mean you need more engaging subject lines. Or, if there have been a lot of unsubscribes, this may mean users aren’t enjoying your content.

Try these creative law firm newsletter ideas

Now, the funnest part of publishing an email newsletter is the amount of creativity there is in thinking up content ideas. I strongly encourage you to be adventurous with your newsletter and not be afraid of veering from the same old script.

Here are some creative law firm newsletter ideas for you to consider:

1. Topic series

Produce a series of newsletters that cover a primary topic. For example, you can commit the month of November to talk about “DUI FYIs”, in which you reveal helpful tips in addressing a DUI over a series of emails. This approach gets subscribers looking forward to your upcoming emails and makes it easier for you to plan your content.

2. Q&A

The legal process can be super confusing for clients and the general public. With this idea, you can address a single question and answer via email over the course of the campaign. Again, this can encourage users to look forward to your upcoming Q&A sessions.

3. Interviews

Know an industry expert who has a perspective to share? Highlight this individual and provide value to your audience by including an interview in your newsletter. You can do this several times in your email marketing strategy. And, it can get subscribers to ask questions to your email campaign, which is great for deliverability and engagement.

4. Email course

Some topics warrant a deeper explanation. For subscribers wanting to learn more about the legal process or a particular topic, you can offer a multi-step email course. They will have to open each email to get new nuggets of information and to complete the course.

5. Videos

It’s no secret that today’s users love video content. Including videos in your emails is a good way to improve open rates and direct users to your video (typically, your YouTube channel or website). Be sure to include “Video:” in your email subject line to encourage subscribers to one your email.

6. Templates

Many email marketing platforms offer professional-looking email templates you can use so you don’t have to design your newsletter from scratch. A great-looking email could encourage users to engage with your content. Typically, these templates include social media icons as well, which can direct more traffic to these platforms. You can update colors, fonts, logos, images, and more.

7. ‘Get to know me’

When new subscribers join your newsletter, they may not know much about you. A “Get to know me” email can help introduce them to you, your interests, and your approach to law. Keep it fun by sharing interesting facts about yourself, likes and dislikes, hobbies, or whatever you think will be exciting to your audience.

8. Meet the team

Similarly, you can run a “Meet the team” series to introduce your entire staff to your list. This is a great way to build trust and provide that added human connection. If you have a large staff, consider breaking this out into several emails for even more content.

9. Storytime

Email subscribers love a good story. Now, while you don’t want to share any confidential information about your cases, you could share lessons learned from the industry, funny office stories, or a personal life story. You can even slowly tell the story over a course of emails to keep readers interested.

10. In the news

We’ve all come across hot news stories where celebrities land themselves in legal trouble or a large company is going under. Turn trending topics into legal lessons, offer your own unique spin, and make the legal process more relatable to your readers. We are all talking about these pop culture stories anyway, might as well use it for great email content!

Email newsletters build connection with your audience

An email newsletter is one of the best ways to build trust and connection with potential and existing clients. Remember, subscribers care less about “marketing content” and more about the value your firm can provide, the stories you tell, and how you can help them navigate their legal woes.

So, keep things fun and interesting with creative email content. Try different media, switch up topics, and, above all, stay consistent so you nurture a strong, engaged audience.

Copyright 2022 © Hennessey Digital

Article By Jason Hennessey with Hennessey Digital.

For more articles about law firm management, please visit the NLR Business of Law section.

13 Types of Law Firm Content Marketing That Really Work

If you are unsure about where to focus your law firm’s content marketing efforts, realize that there is more to this marketing strategy than just writing articles. Great content talks to the people that will consume your legal services and also to the search engines to support SEO.  But content has many shapes and sizes so lawyers often wonder what options are appropriate for them.  This article covers 13 types of content that any lawyer or law firm regardless of their practice area can add to their law firm’s marketing strategy.

Law Firm Blog Posts

Blog posts are one of the easiest ways to start creating content and getting your law firm’s name out there. You truly just need to sit down, write about what you know and what you are passionate about, and publish it. Of course, you want to make sure your content is attractive to your target audience, so use your market research to craft posts that are easily understood by and interesting to your audience. Marketing savvy law firm owners develop a theme to their blogs so after one year of producing content, they can stitch the material together in e-book or white paper format.

Infographics

Infographics are a powerful tool for lawyers and law firms to reach their target audience. Research indicates that people remember 65% of the information they see in a visual format, compared to just 10% of what they hear. Some attorneys shy away from creating infographics, but there are many online design tools to make it quick and easy to produce this type of original content for your law firm. Infographics can live on your website and even be repurposed in your firm’s social media presence or collateral materials. They are a great way of explaining steps in the legal process or even the interpretation of complicated laws.

Podcasts

This type of content requires lots of planning and time, but it can pay off in spades. Creating your own podcast that answers legal questions or explains complex legal concepts in fun, easy-to-digest ways allow you to reach a massive audience of potential clients with interest in your area of practice. Podcasts are a great idea for attorneys that have clients with similar issues. For a family law attorney this might include child custody issues or post-decree matters.  A business attorney might have clients facing issues related to corporate formation or the hiring of vendors. Having a practice area-centered podcast with episodes that focus on issues that potential clients commonly struggle with will help you attract a greater audience of listeners.

Video Marketing

Videos showcase your personality, highlight what unique traits you bring to the table, and create a connection with potential clients. Integrate search terms into your video headline and description to bring in even more traffic to your website. YouTube is the “second largest search engine behind Google,” making it a great platform for uploading and sharing your law firm’s videos. These videos can be focused on the same frequently asked questions that you would answer in written format on your website. They can also be a case study or even a client testimonial.

Guest Posts

Publishing your content on other websites expands your network, strengthens your own website’s search engine optimization, and helps build your law firm’s brand—you have a lot to gain from just one post. You can publish on other legal blogs, magazines, and local publications. Guest posting is an easy way to credential your practice through bylines and repurposable written content.

Newsletters

Whether you publish monthly or quarterly, do not give up on your law firm’s newsletter. While some people have eschewed their newsletters for more modern forms of content, you leave out a significant part of your client base when you do so. For maximum effect, stick to a strict publication schedule that allows you to share valuable, relevant information—do not just send out a newsletter for the sake of it. Depending on your needs, you could do an e-mail newsletter, a print newsletter, or both. The biggest challenge for law firms and newsletters is staying on schedule and determining in advance what to say. Marketing savvy law firms develop an editorial calendar for their newsletters one year in advance, so they are never scrambling to publish the newsletter.

White Papers

Driven by data and statistics, white papers look at a specific issue within your practice area and dig deep into the information surrounding it. The information provided in a white paper also provides a path forward for solving the proposed issue. Law firms can successfully produce their own white paper content and keep it on their website to connect with potential clients. But be sure to use the help of a graphic designer if you intend to create a white paper for your law firm. Their creative eye will help make your content stand out to readers.

Curated Content

Sharing resources with website visitors and clients shows that you genuinely care about their wellbeing, not just getting them to become paying clients. You might create listicles that link out to useful resources and guides. These work great for consumer-facing practices that serve populations that might need guidance outside of their legal matter. For instance, a plaintiff personal injury attorney could publish ideas on mental health and wellbeing after being treated for a serious car accident. Your goal in using curated content is to be a central hub for the information your audience could need to know about your practice area and how it affects their lives.

Testimonials

Satisfied clients are often the best form of advertising. If potential clients see that you have successfully solved the problem they now face, they have substantial motivation to reach out to you. Testimonials and reviews can be collected and curated to be their own page on your law firm website. However, ensure that you are working within the laws and ethics that regulate law firm and lawyer advertising as this can be a sticky area of law firm marketing.

E-Books

Compared to print books, e-books require almost no financial output and are incredibly easy to share. Some attorneys use electronic books as a vehicle to provide in-depth guides for clients interested in their legal services, while others repurpose blog content into an e-book for easy reading. You can also write an e-book and use it as a lead magnet—for example, a construction defect attorney might give a copy of “7 Things You Need to Know Before Buying a Newly Built Home” to those who sign up for their e-mail list.

LinkedIn Articles

One type of content that is often underutilized is LinkedIn content. When you write an info-rich LinkedIn article and share it with your network, they can share it with their network. Your reach can multiply quickly with just one piece of well-written content. This is an excellent strategy for expanding your professional network, increasing the likelihood of client referrals and brand recognition.

Tutorials

Guides and tutorials offer detailed step-by-step instructions on specific tasks, which is content that consumers can use right away. The topics you cover depend on your audience and area of practice, so you could start by finding out what struggles your target market has and what legal issues you can immediately alleviate. For example, a family law attorney might write a how-to guide on gathering financial documents and other paperwork for easy analysis of assets during a divorce. A business law attorney could do a screencast of how to register a business in their state and set up tax filing.

Lectures and Speaking Engagements

When you establish yourself as a leader among your peers, you are in an excellent position to gain acceptance as an expert among potential clients. You can host CLE events and dig deep into a topic relevant to your area of practice, serve as a speaker at legal conferences, and share your expertise at other industry events. Be sure to share any video content of your speaking engagements on your website. If your speech is later transcribed, it becomes another content source that could bring in clients and contacts.

For modern law firms, content is a key component in their marketing and business development strategy. Everything on this list of content types will funnel traffic back to your law firm’s website. By integrating different types of content into your marketing plans and on your website, you can reach clients from all walks of life while establishing your position within your practice area.

© 2022 Denver Legal Marketing LLC
For more articles about law firm management, visit the NLR Business of Law section.

Political Action Committee & Personal Political Contributions Become the Next Reputational Challenge for Law Firms & Their Clients

Aesop perhaps said it best: “You are known by the company you keep.” It appears many organizations are learning the true meaning of that phrase in the wake of the Republican vote against certification of the Electoral College results and the January 6 U.S. Capitol riots.

In a mere week’s time, corporate giants including Marriott International, Dow, JPMorgan, American Express, Nike, Google, Facebook and Microsoft have publicly declared they are pausing contributions from their political action committees (PACS). They are joined by a growing chorus that contains some of the world’s most well-known brands. While most of these organizations have targeted the members of Congress who voted against certification, many are making larger declarations, including Charles Schwab, which announced it is shutting down its PAC and donating the money to charity and to historically Black colleges and universities.

Since the first PAC was established in 1943 by the Congress of Industrial Organizations after Congress prohibited unions from donating directly to political candidates, PACs have been a strategic tool to help law firms, corporations, banks, unions, trade associations and others achieve strategic business objectives affected by the laws and regulations that govern – or hinder – their growth. Corporate PACs, at companies like those listed above, rely on voluntary contributions from employees – and that is likely one of the reasons the decisions announced this past week came so swiftly. It is challenging to keep employees motivated – or to keep them at all – if they suddenly find that their own values are diametrically opposed to those held by the organization they work for.

For an example of how employee values can shape corporate decision making, read this piece we wrote when household goods retailer Wayfair ran into an employee buzz saw after it was discovered the company was supplying bedroom furniture to a federal detention center in Texas. Note too, this story describing the pullback by law firms including Porter Wright and Jones Day after colleagues in the firms raised concerns about their work on the 2020 election challenges.

Aside from employee pushback, the values of other stakeholders that organizations prize no doubt factored into the decisions regarding PAC contributions as well. Those important audiences include customers and clients, investors, suppliers and even the communities in which these organizations operate. Here, social media’s power to harness and broadcast stakeholder outrage are important factors for the PAC distribution committee to consider.

No doubt some of the PAC decisions also were colored by the fact that PAC contributions are now relatively easy to uncover. The Center for Responsive Politics, for instance, hosts a website that makes it easy to discover, by year, how much individual organizations have donated to which parties and to which House and Senate candidates or incumbents. Access to comparable information at the state level varies, but likely will move toward more transparency given recent events. All the above is true, as well, for individuals making political contributions, apart from their PAC contributions. A quick visit to www.fec.gov/data/ opens a page with a simple enter-a-name-here search box and within seconds, one can see campaign donations made by co-workers, friends, competitors, spouses, children, extended relatives and celebrities. Similar easy-to-search databases are available at the state level and most counties across the country.

Combine this access to information with social media’s role as the global town crier and it’s naïve at best to assume no one will notice an individual or PAC’s significant contribution to a recipient of note – especially one with a highly controversial position on high profile issues or a questionable voting record.

While there are many reasons why an individual or organization might decide to support a specific lawmaker, those reasons may not be as readily apparent to stakeholders (including employees), the media or the public.  If yours is not one of the many organizations that have publicly announced that they are withdrawing some or all of their PAC support, now would be a good time to get ready to explain why you’ve supported the individuals you have, and what your path going forward may be. Here are some messages to consider:

  • How does this recipient’s voting record and position align with your organization’s mission and values? How have your contributions helped your organization grow and thrive so it can better serve its stakeholders?
  • If your organization has a strong commitment to corporate social responsibility, how do these contributions support that work?
  • If there are other reasons you support this individual, what are they?
  • If there are reasons why you no longer support this individual, what prompted you to end your support?

In a similar manner, if your organization took a public position in support of hot-button issues like Black Lives Matter and #MeToo, but your political contributions speak otherwise, how will you address that discrepancy (which is likely to be defined by others as hypocrisy)?

If your organization stands behind its record of political support, be prepared to defend that record with transparency and honesty.  And, be prepared to do so before media and social media seize the advantage they have in galvanizing opinion quickly. While your PAC – or the personal checks you’ve written – may be only one small portion of your organization’s government affairs program, these days, it’s the one everyone seems to be talking about.


The views and opinions expressed in posting are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views or position of the National Law Review, the National Law Forum LLC  or any of its affiliates.  

© 2020 Hennes Communications. All rights reserved.


Crisis Management – Your Law Firm or Bar Association’s Reputation is Its Largest Uninsured Asset

Partnership splits, sexual misconduct, data theft, management transitions, accusations of mal- and misfeasance, mergers & acquisitions and layoffs are just a few of the situations today’s managing partners and executive directors face.

It’s been said that a bar association or law firm’s reputation is its largest uninsured asset – an asset that can be seriously damaged with an ineffective crisis response.

Traditional media leap on stories like those listed above.  And with the presence today of social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, not to mention a 24/7 media environment, the reputation you’ve built up with years of good work can be shattered in an instant.

Today, your brand can face a significant reputational challenge in the time it takes to bang out a feverish 140-character tweet. When it comes to social media, in particular, law firm and bar leaders no longer have the luxury of gathering around a table to discuss strategy. There’s simply no time.

Effective Crisis Response Is More Than An Emergency Plan

Often, law firms and bar associations will dutifully create an operational crisis plan, but lack a concomitant crisis communications strategy. So, what should your organization do?

The heart of crisis communications planning focuses on preparing for the most significant, gut-wrenching threats – both operational and reputational – that might affect your firm. To identify those threats, a “Vulnerabilities Audit” with top management (managing partner, CEO, CIO, CFO, CMO, GC, H.R.) will enable your team to assess the risks the firm faces, both in terms of their likelihood and the severity of the consequences they might have on the firm’s reputation or operations. The second part of the plan focuses on how your organization will communicate about those threats.

Having a crisis communication plan is an excellent first step.  But a plan is no good gathering dust on a shelf.  Many organizations next do crisis/media training to make certain they have trained executives who understand the needs and demands of today’s media, enabling the firm to deliver its messages clearly and with credibility.

The most-prepared organizations also do tabletop drills to test the plan and put their staff through the rigors of real-time crisis simulation, thereby improving the chances of responding effectively when the real thing hits.

Organizations that want to stay ahead of the curve also keep a sharp ear to the rail with a comprehensive monitoring program that closely watches news content delivery platforms — print, broadcast, web, mobile and social. And many progressive organizations have third-party crisis counsel audit their current plan as it evolves, to make certain there are no chinks in their armor.

What’s The Payback?

From a reputational perspective, how your firm or bar association communicates during a crisis will likely be just as important as how the incident is managed operationally.  Good planning and training will mean:

  • A more coordinated, consistent and authentic communications response.
  • Improved communications with internal and external key stakeholders.
  • Improved communications with legacy media and social media resulting in more accurate coverage.
  • Better coordination among crisis team members, less redundancy and reduced stress.
  • Enhanced ability to maintain normal operations while simultaneously managing the crisis event.
  • Reduced damage to the organization’s reputation, with the possibility it may even be enhanced.

Your response to a crisis event must be rapid, strategic and authentic.  Especially in today’s media landscape, where news breaks first on social media, “managing the message” is a necessary skill set for law firm and bar association executives (and not necessarily one of the skill sets that got you into the C-Suite).

When your organization’s reputation is on the line, so is your bottom line. Strategic crisis management and crisis communications planning is your brand’s most effective insurance policy.


© 2020 Hennes Communications. All rights reserved.

For more on managing law firm reputation see the National Law Review Law Office Management section.

Building a Successful Law Firm—Without an Office

Rent is one of the largest expenses for law firms, sometimes taking up as much as 10 percent of their gross revenue. Too, it’s not uncommon for workers in large cities to have hour-plus commutes to their offices. The majority of today’s clients are more interested in efficiency and reasonable prices than how glamorous their lawyer’s office is. As a result, firms are choosing another way to work: virtual offices.

Marcia Watson Wasserman, Founder and President of Comprehensive Management Solutions, Inc., serves as a consulting COO for boutique and mid-sized law firms, helping numerous lawyers develop and sustain virtual offices. She joined the Law Firm Marketing Catalyst podcast to share her expertise and advice for lawyers considering moving toward virtual work.

Know who you’re working with

With a virtual office, you can’t pop into a colleague’s office or bump into them in the hallway. You won’t see what they’re doing on a daily basis, so you need to trust that they share the same goals, work ethic and commitment to firm culture as you. Marcia finds that people who have worked together at a brick-and-mortar firm before going virtual tend to work best, because an in-person relationship and sense of trust is already established. If you’re going virtual, find colleagues you already know personally, or at the very least, spend plenty of in-person time with them before committing to anything.

Understand your tech tools

 It’s impossible to have a virtual firm without the help of cloud-based technology tools. To have a successful virtual firm, everyone must be an expert on those tools. Law firms are notorious for buying software, then failing to learn how to use it—that won’t fly with a virtual firm. You need remote systems and procedures that streamline your practice and benefit your clients, and everyone must be comfortable using them. At a minimum, you’ll have to invest both money and training time in document management software, video conferencing software, client portals for paying bills, collaboration tools and, of course, encryption and data security tools.

Cultivate communication

How to delegate work, how to offer feedback, how to manage work among teams, when and how to have meetings—these questions are equally important at virtual or brick-and-mortar firms. But at virtual firms, it becomes even more critical that you discuss them openly and have communications systems in place. When communication is only happening by email, it can easily break down. Video conferencing, phone calls and planned communication are the antidote to this problem. Virtual connection also needs to be backed up with in-person events like retreats and social gatherings, at least annually. Maintaining communication at a virtual firm isn’t just important for client work, it’s also crucial to maintain firm culture.

Working from home sounds great, but it’s not for everyone. Some people get lonely working remotely. Others get distracted or they lack the motivation to work if they’re not in an office. Just like lawyers, support staff must have the right personality and skillset to work virtually. Another element to consider with support staff is wage and hour law in your location. Most support staff are non-exempt, and you have to consider supervision, insurance and the myriad of issues that arise when you have staff working remotely. Management issues don’t go away when support staff is out of sight.

Take advantage of time to network

Virtual work doesn’t mean staying home staring at your computer all day. The majority of work might be done from your home office, but networking can still happen in person. Join organizations, go to meetings and attend events to stay connected to your profession and your colleagues. Virtual work also offers more flexibility to meet with clients and attend events important to their industry. You’ll get to know your clients at a deeper level, which they’ll appreciate, and it will get you out of your work-from-home routine—a win for everyone.

If you can’t go fully virtual, start small

Not every firm is suited to virtual work, but many firms can use some of its elements to their advantage. Especially in large cities, more firms are using co-working spaces or opening small satellite offices that are more convenient for lawyers to get to. With more attorneys working outside of the main office a few days a week, the next logical step for some firms is to encourage office sharing. It’s a huge cultural shift for partners to share an office, but it can offer tremendous space and cost savings, and this concept typically doesn’t faze young associates.


© 2020 Berbay Marketing & Public Relations

For more on running a law firm, see the National Law Review Law Office Management section.

IMS Insights Podcast: Episode 9- Rudhir Krishtel On Mindfulness And Wellness For Attorneys Amid COVID-19

In this episode, Rudhir Krishtel joins us to share guidance on mindfulness and wellness for attorneys. He also provides tips and strategies to help with adjustments for those balancing the intense demands of a legal career during the uncertainties of the COVID-19 pandemic.

In his lawyer days, Rudhir practiced law for fifteen years as a federal clerk, patent litigation partner at Fish & Richardson, and later as senior patent counsel at Apple.

Today, he is a certified Co-Active Coach and facilitator, focusing on workplace wellness and intensity for law firms and attorneys. Many lawyers struggle with stress and lack of purpose in their practice. As a former lawyer, Rudhir coaches clients and hosts workshops to identify the issues that hold lawyers back from advancing in their career with clarity and fulfillment.

His work during his lawyer days led Rudhir to train as a yoga teacher through the Baptiste Institute and on mindfulness meditation through Warrior One. He also a Professional Certified Coach through the Coaches Training Institute & International Coaching Federation, and uses this training along with his experience as a practitioner to deliver much-needed support for the legal community. Details on Rudhir’s consulting and mindfulness workshops for attorneys can be found at www.krishtel.com.

Transcript

Teresa Barber: Rudhir, hello, thank you. I really appreciate you joining us today. Could you tell me just a little bit for our listeners… Tell us a little bit about your background as an attorney and a little bit about your consulting practice.

Rudhir Krishtel: Yeah, Teresa, thank you so much, and thanks IMS for having me here. I was practicing law for 15 years. I started at my practice as a federal clerk. I was ultimately a partner at Fish & Richardson in their patent litigation team in the DC office. Then for the last five years of my practice, I was senior in-house counsel at Apple out here in the Bay area where I moved to seven, eight years ago.

Rudhir: After 15 years of practice, I started to notice… What I started to see were cycles of behavior in the practice over 15 years, just ways that we all behave at work that I felt like were somewhat compromising to our practice. I started to notice that we accept that stress is a part, a natural part, of our work life. We wouldn’t get paid as lawyers at the rates that we charge, and we wouldn’t be able to do the work that we do if it wasn’t something that was challenging or stressful, so I totally understood that.

Rudhir: But there’s this interesting relationship where work caused stress, but then stress actually started to impact the quality of our relationships and ultimately the work product. It is this weird cycle where work causes stress but then stress impacts the work. I think everyone just accepted that as the norm, and I felt like this was a dialogue that we needed to have and a cycle in the system that we needed to improve.

Rudhir: It’s when I decided to leave the practice. Three years back I left the practice. I retrained first as a mindfulness instructor and yoga instructor. And not wanting lawyers on their yoga mats all the time, I ultimately trained as an executive coach. Now, I coach attorneys. I have a coaching business that’s Krishtel Coaching. I coach attorneys in their practice one on one, and we identify some of the most challenging aspects of your practice and try to move them out of the way so that attorneys have a more fulfilling practice. I also host workshops. I visit law firms and legal departments and host dialogue on ways that we can start shifting our culture, build a greater resilience, incorporate emotional intelligence and mindfulness practices. I also host online coaching programs and webinars on these topics.

Rudhir: The consulting and the coaching practice has evolved over the last many years. I’ve now coached over 100 attorneys, managing partners at law firms, general counsel at companies, a wide range of attorneys on really how they can be better for themselves and others in their practice and really trying to shift and improve our culture in the legal workplace.

Teresa: Rudhir, it sounds like you identified the need while you were in the boiling pan yourself and didn’t really see anyone meeting those needs. As you’ve worked now for a number of years with clients, especially at big law firms and at corporations in house, what have you seen as the return on it? It sounds like you also had a theory that if we start to apply this, it’s not only going to improve quality of life and wellness and balance, but will also impact work product. I would be interested in some antidotes from clients you’ve worked with so far.

Rudhir: Teresa, what you said first is what I want to tap into a little bit, which is what I did notice during my time at Apple. You make this switch from a partner in law firm to go in house, and we think about it as sort of this greener pasture switch, attorneys going in house. What I notice is I got more senior in the practice. With every level up, growing of the team, salary bump, promotion, whatever it was, every time the further I got up, the lonelier I felt.

Rudhir: It’s very interesting that here we are achieving this so-called dream, and yet I felt somewhat more isolated, and I’m a pretty social person. I’m the person at Fish that was head of recruiting for our office. I’m definitely the person that planned all of the March Madness pools and getting everybody back together outside of work. I’m that person. For me to feel somewhat isolated was really fascinating, to be naturally connected and connecting and yet feel lonely at the same time was a very odd experience.

Rudhir: But I felt it more and more as I got more senior. I started to realize, “Well, if I’m experiencing this, how many other people are experiencing this?” There’s this unique thing that happens in legal practices that we are shrouded in confidentiality and in adversity in this adversarial experience. There’s a lack of trust that we have oftentimes with our colleagues. The thing that’s most challenging for me at work, I’m not sure I’d be comfortable talking to my colleagues about, whether it be a difficulty with a technical issue or a difficulty with building business or a challenge with how I’m managing my team. Sometimes we’re not comfortable being necessarily open about that with our colleagues just because of the legal work environment.

Rudhir: I started to notice this, and I realized I’m so senior in this practice I wish I had my own set of advisors. I’m at this point where I’m generating enough revenue. I’m generating enough revenue for myself that small businesses generate. We’re in the hundreds of thousands now. Some lawyers are in the low seven figures in terms of their business generation and their income. Yet, I don’t know who my closest advisors necessarily are that I just deeply trust.

Teresa: Right.

Rudhir: I started realizing, “Well, if I’m having that issue, there must be other attorneys that are having this issue.” And it becomes even that much more compounded with intersectionality. Now we’re talking about women that might be having these challenges, attorneys of color that might be having these challenges, really everybody. When I started to notice this, I thought, “Here’s a space that I feel like we need someone to step into.” That’s the decision that I made. It’s very interesting. I work with a wide range of clients, and to sort of address your second question, the second part of your question, is it’s just been deeply valuable this work for the clients that I’ve worked with, and it shows up in many ways.

Rudhir: People don’t often think about connecting with… Well, let me say that differently, Teresa. When we have somebody in our corner that is willing to champion us, that is willing to hear us out, that is willing to co-strategize with us, that is sort of a peer in the practice and that has real confidentiality, so much is possible. I’ve sort of seen that with my clients. I’ve seen a lot of growth and evolution on people having much better relationships with their teams, managing their groups in healthier ways, finding ways to solve problems with some of the challenges they face in their teams, interacting with people in a healthier way, becoming that much more adapt at generating business and for people that are looking for some sort of a transition and feeling stuck really having place where they can start to dialogue and strategize and brainstorm on that, and we come up with just incredible directional shifts for people in their life and their business. This practice I feel like has been a huge benefit to the clients that I work with.

Teresa: You touched on something that was interesting to you a minute ago, Rudhir. You were talking about this feeling of isolation, social isolation. We’re talking today and it’s later in March 2020. Back on December 31, 2019, the World Health Organization first identified an epidemic in China. Today, we’re looking at shelter in place orders not only around the San Francisco Bay area but throughout that entire state possibly with more coming in other markets and many people now working in a brand new environment, work from home environment where those lines between family and work are blurred a little bit.

Teresa: Looking at the 2019 novel Coronavirus pandemic, this is unprecedented territory, with you and your work with clients, what are you seeing right now?

Rudhir: It’s very interesting because I tend to think that lawyers as I mentioned despite us working with each other and connecting tend to have somewhat more of a natural isolation and loneliness already. This is just me saying this. There have actually been studies. The ABA has put out studies. There are psychologists that have put out studies that identify and indicate that lawyers have less sort of a lower social tendency than others than most.

Rudhir: And so at a time when we’re now even doubling down on the isolation, I’ve seen a lot of challenge. I see lawyers that are expressing concerns over a lot of things. Here we have a group of people that are natural problem solvers, lawyers are natural problem solvers. We are always thinking ahead. As we think ahead, we’re thinking ahead to how long is this going to last. There’s an uncertainty.

Teresa: Right.

Rudhir: We’re thinking to how is this going to impact my business? For in-house attorneys the business that they’re in and corporation that they’re in, but for outside counsel attorneys, how is this affecting my business development and business generation? What does this mean for my income? What does this mean for my team? What might this mean for the health of my family and the people around me? What might this mean for others? There’s just a lot of concern layered on top of a business and a practice that already has us sort of in a position where we’re “constantly putting out fires.”

Rudhir: I think that what I’m seeing is a higher level of anxiety in some than what might usually be the case. I think when anxiety comes up, we are not at our best self. We are not behaving in a way that is sort of rooted in our best self. We’re being reactive. We are thinking about we’re in sort of a flight or fight mode. We’re thinking about ways that we can run and save things or we’re thinking about ways that we can sort of fix things right away. I think there’s a deep discomfort that’s happening in this moment.

Teresa: With the questions that you’re seeing from clients right now, I know you’ve set up a webinar right now. You’re providing some guidance to people who are looking for it. What can people do right now? With the sense of what do I have control over, there is so much certainty. What are you telling people right now?

Rudhir: Yeah. I set up a free webinar Wednesdays mornings at 9:00 a.m. Pacific, noon Eastern on mindfulness tools for managing uncertainty. I find that mindfulness practices, resilience practices, emotional intelligence practices are very much relevant in this time. I think that even just paying attention to the news has me at a slightly higher level of anxiety. I’m waking up a bit more tired than usual this week. It’s just very interesting. Not much has changed because we work from home my wife and I, and so for us to practice social distancing and kind of put a barrier around our house is actually not too different than what we’re usually doing.

Teresa: Right.

Rudhir: I’m slightly more on edge and slightly more tired. These practices of mindfulness and resilience and emotional intelligence, I think, are just really valuable in this moment. I’ve started to offer them out on a weekly webinar, just simple tools. For example, you asked what might be something that we can do. Lawyers, we tend to be very head heavy. I didn’t even understand what that meant a few years ago because I didn’t know what the difference was between that and anything else.

Rudhir: We tend to be thinking people. We’re valued for our knowledge. People want us for our advice, and we want to offer our advice. We’re problem solving. We always respect and value the attorney that “knows more.” So much of our work is in our head. Settling the body and settling ourselves in these times actually happens in the body. What percentage of our livelihood is our mind physically, and what percentage is our body? That’s an interesting question to ask. So much of us is our body. In fact, most, if not all of us, is our body.

Rudhir: One of the first tools that we talked about in this webinar was a body scan technique. A body scan is a meditation technique that allows us to just pay attention to what else is happening right now in our body. There’s just a lot of information there. Lawyers are great at gathering information. We’re incredible at intake. I think in this moment one of the tools is just actually take intake for yourself. We’re always asking someone else, “So what’s your problem? What happened? Who are the people involved?” Et cetera. The questions that I offer are, “What’s happening in my body right now? What’s happening in my breath? What am I noticing in my chest? Is it tighter? What am I noticing in my stomach? Am I at unease? Are my feet grounded? What happens? What’s the difference between grounding my feet versus sitting them elsewhere? What’s the quality of my breath? What’s my body temperature?”

Rudhir: I think when we scan our bodies… And on my website I have mindfulness audio recordings and guided meditations, and these are available all over the place. There’s apps like Calm and Insight Timer and Headspace. UCLA has an incredible meditation center, and they have some great guided meditations. I offer a few on my website at Krishtel.com. Basically, what we’re inviting people to do is actually just pay attention to what’s happening for them in a moment.

Rudhir: This isn’t something that we need to do all day. A body scan meditation can be 10 minutes of your day, five minutes of your day. Pay attention to your breath. Even right now is one of those podcasts, Teresa, if you just sort of take a breath and pay attention to what’s going on in your lungs and what’s going on in your throat and just breathe. You just notice sort of a different quality show up. We kind of exist in this on edge slightly underlying nervosa, and it’s normalized in our practice. I think we can in this moment because it’s even exacerbated, it’s slightly more acute because of all the information coming in and everything that’s changing, I think is an incredible time to pay attention to breath, pay attention to body and just what’s going on for us.

Teresa: That’s really helping in hearing you talk about almost an inventory of awareness. Rudhir, for those, wellness has been a buzzword that’s been around and gaining increasing traction and attention in recent years. Can you break down mindfulness for those that may not be familiar with that term and just help us understand when we say mindfulness, when you say mindfulness, what do you mean?

Rudhir: I’d love to. I’d start by actually just saying that when I started regularly meditating, it was the beginning of an incredible shift in my life both professionally and personally. It’s for those who are exploring meditation and dabbling, the commitment to a practice of 20 minutes a day, 20 minutes twice a day or even 10 minutes a day of mindfulness practices I think can be the beginning of a huge evolution and even revolution in your life in terms of how you feel and just fulfillment.

Rudhir: When I was at Apple about a year or two in, I started a daily practice of 20 minutes twice a day of meditating. I’ll tell you a little bit more about what is mindfulness and different ways of practicing. Just to kind of get people in tune with the benefits, I started practicing, and so much changing. Three months of regular practice, I committed to 20 minutes twice a day, and I did it because actually I paid for a class. When you pay for a class for some reason, it’s just like a gym membership. Something happens, and you’re like, “All right, I’m paying the money. I’m going to make a commitment.”

Rudhir: I make the commitment of 20 minutes twice a day. I’m a coffee drinker. It’s not the morning coffee. It’s the 2:00 p.m. coffee for all my friends at Fish and Apple. At 2:00 p.m. it was clockwork. I’d come around the halls and say, “All right, let’s just go get coffee.” I noticed after two or three months of practicing… It’s not like it has an alarm set, it’s just at that time of the day you start feeling a little bit tired. My morning energy is I’m ready to go. Around 2:00 p.m. it starts to wither.

Rudhir: I started to notice three weeks had gone by and I hadn’t asked anyone for coffee. I’m an engineer by trade. Trained as an electrical engineer, studied, became an IP attorney, so I need a logical underpinning for a mental practice. At least I did at that time. I don’t anymore. I’m all in now. But back then I sort of needed some evidence. The evidence was just clear. I have so much more energy that I don’t need coffee. I don’t drink coffee from 7:00 a.m. until midnight, and I’m just fully functioning.

Rudhir: I couldn’t believe the shift that happened for me in that moment that I was getting a physical benefit to a mental practice. That’s when I decided I was all in. I started to have healthier interactions professionally. I started to notice that things were slowing down. People talk about time is going by fast. That’s not a thing for me anymore. Time actually does not go by fast. I started to worry less about all the things that were coming and about what was happening. I just started to feel more present.

Rudhir: There’s so much energy there. The energy is because… And this is for the people that are just looking for the logic. If your mind is moving less, and it’s sort of moving at a less rapid pace, it’s triggering less emotions. If you think about when you pay attention to what your thoughts are in a two minute period, “What am I going to eat for lunch?” It’s the basic thoughts. “What am I doing this week? What’s my schedule? What am I going to eat for lunch? What’s for dinner? What’s happening with that meeting?”

Rudhir: Each of those thoughts… And you notice in a two minute period they just keep spinning. Each of those thoughts may trigger and may bring out an emotion. When emotions come up in our body that is a moment where your energy starts to get drained because an emotion can trigger you to hunch your shoulders, and you don’t even realize. It may start reducing… slowing down your breath. You don’t even know. When that email comes in from that challenging client or from that colleague, you sort of hold your breath.

Rudhir: Those little moments add up in the course of the day. In our jobs you can work from 8:00 a.m. until midnight, not leave your desk, and feel like you ran a marathon that day. Mindfulness and meditation practices start to slow that down. They start to slow down the rapidity of the thoughts. They start to readjust how reactive you are to these things. They relax your body in these moments when you might naturally be tense or stressed. You’re gaining back 5% to 10% energy.

Rudhir: There’s this book Ten Percent Happier. I relate to almost everything that’s in that book because you really are. Ten percent more energy in this moment can be huge. How much more energy do you have at the end of the day for your colleagues, your clients, your family? You just have so much more energy. Just 10% can make such a difference. You were asking about what is mindfulness, but before I go into that, I’m curious if any questions are coming up for you based on what I’m saying?

Teresa: Well, I’m just anticipating questions. I think seeing the email come in or thinking about the email, it’s not saying that email is not important or that client’s need isn’t important, it’s putting it into a place where we’re not maybe as reactive to it, where it’s kind of processed in a way that is a little more centered. Right?

Rudhir: Yeah. This is a great dovetail into what is mindfulness because I think there’s a lot there. When I think about mindfulness you’ll see a range of definitions. But I consider if we’re paying attention to ourselves, our thoughts, our emotions and our body, and noticing what’s happening with those things, without judgment. And the without judgment piece is actually really important because oftentimes what’s happening for us we might think is wrong or something’s not great about it or amazing about it. Mindfulness is actually just let’s just pay attention to what’s happening.

Rudhir: I talked about this body scan technique as sort of one way which is paying attention to what’s happening with your feet and your legs and your stomach and your lungs and your shoulders. When that email comes in as an example. We all know that email, that alert, that case alert. That colleague, that person we don’t like, all of it. It happens at least 10 times a day. Ten times a day, 20 times a day, 100 times a day you tense up when that message comes in, and just sort of noticing what’s happening in your body in that moment rather than necessarily solving the email. Because our first reaction is what am I going to say? You might notice the quality of your breath in that moment that you’re actually not breathing. It’s fascinating just taking a deep breath in that moment rather than reacting right away and just noticing what happens to your body that it settles.

Rudhir: Noticing what happens to your shoulders, they tighten up, that you sort of take a forward learning approach, that you might get uneasy in your stomach. All these things are happening. As we pay attention to that, when we’re responding to that email from that place, it’s actually fight or flight. We’re responding from a place of fight or flight. Fight or flight is sort of an old… It’s an old system. It comes from an old brain of ours. It’s the amygdala. It’s an old brain. It’s a lizard brain that we have. It basically really comes from this era and this time of evolutionarily when we were sort of fighting bears and lions. You’re sort of out in the wild and you’re worried about fight or flight. Either I attack this thing that’s in front of me or I’ve got to leave.

Teresa: Base survival.

Rudhir: It’s survival. Yeah. By and large in our legal office, outside of that scary partner in the corner, there’s no bears around. There’s no tigers. For us to be experiencing fight or flight as much as we do in the course of our day is really a ratio that it happens versus the actual need is way out of proportion. The other thing is that creativity, centeredness, true leadership, aren’t happening when we’re in fight or flight. We’re not coming from a collected and a gathered place. We’re coming from a reactive place.

Rudhir: When we write a brief in a case, we don’t write a react, we write a response. I use these two words differently. There’s reacting, and there’s responding. I think responding comes from a place when we gather data and information, we use our wise lawyer selves, we are using wisdom, and we are responding in a gathered and a collected way. We’re reviewing. We’re able to come back to people from a centered place. That’s what we want in our briefing. That’s what we want in our responses to our colleagues, in our communications. We end up feeling in a reactive place, and so it’s fight or flight. It’s like, “If they say something, I can defend myself,” or “I’m going to avoid this email for a few hours because I’m nervous about what’s going to happen.”

Rudhir: So all these things come up. But when we take a breath we notice what’s happening in our shoulders, we notice what’s happening in ourselves, we notice the thinking and the nervousness that might be happening in our head. Maybe we can respond in a healthier way. Maybe we can slow down some of that movement and gain some energy back.

Teresa: Interesting using the word creativity. We’re in a transformative moment. Whether it’s a temporary transformation or whether we’re going to see lasting effects. We have the White House signing the Defense Production Act. Many people working from home. I’m sure for many there’s a lot of scary elements to what we’re seeing with the public health crisis around COVID-19. You and I we’ve had some earlier conversations about possibilities out there, but what do you see, Rudhir, right now as possible in this moment?

Rudhir: We have to be very thoughtful about many people whose health is being compromised in this moment, and we have to really be thoughtful about many people whose lives have shifted and are challenged by access to resources and hourly workers and wage workers whose jobs are being eliminated in the short term. There’s a lot of challenge and compromise that’s happening at this moment. We want to make sure that we keep our awareness on that.

Teresa: Right.

Rudhir: I actually feel like interestingly enough a lot is possible in this moment. I think there are new ways that we’ll be able to connect with people and we’ll be testing out. For example, this webinar that I’m doing or the greater number of video calls and group calls that I’m having online where people are finding healthier ways to interact. I actually think it’s an incredible time to call that colleague or that contact that you haven’t been in touch with for a while and just say, “Hey, how are you doing?” And just get on the phone or get on a video call and just listen and be with somebody and connect in a way that you might not have otherwise.

Rudhir: I do feel like people might have a little bit more time now, and if you think it’s a time where, for example, business development dies down, I think actually it’s the exact opposite. People are looking to connect in this moment, so fill that void. Finding new ways to connect right now, to reach out, to interact, to connect with your families and yourselves, I think that’s huge in this moment.

Rudhir: I think time alone can be an incredible time for coming up with new solutions and to be creative. I think about Isaac Newton came up with some of his most valuable theories, the roots of calculus, and the basic understandings that we have on gravity, some of the most critical theories that he came up with were during the Plague when he had to leave Cambridge and isolate during that moment.

Rudhir: Social distancing, this isn’t the first era of social distancing. This has been going on with every pandemic that we’ve experienced in the history of time. Even in that moment he came up with some of the most valuable scientific principles and mathematic principles that we lean on today. There’s this huge opportunity in this moment to be creative, to think about what’s possible.

Rudhir: And as lawyers we are in this service industry, and so there’s this incredible opportunity to think about what are the new ways and the different ways in which we can serve others and add value? When we are reactive and in fight or flight, we aren’t thinking from that place. We’re wondering how to protect ourselves or wondering how… what’s going to happen to us. But when we start slowing down and rooting in, we remember that there’s so much possible in this moment for all of us, so many systems that we can build to serve our clients and to support our colleagues.

Rudhir: I’m going to be offering team building webinars in the next few weeks. Here’s an opportunity. Your entire team is isolated. How do we stay connected in this moment? So maybe we jump on an hour and a half Zoom call, and we actually do a team building exercise, facilitated exercise, in this moment. For me, I just feel like so much is possible, and it’s time to really start thinking about creative ways that we can connect with others, which we all need as humans and in our professions, and so what are the ways that we can do that now?

Teresa: That’s really interesting. We’ve been hearing talk about… We’ve all been hearing the guidelines around social distancing, but moving to the term physical distancing to recognize that we need… We still as humans we still need a little bit of that connectivity that you’re talking about. Interesting. Rudhir, some of the resources we’ve been monitoring and sharing with our clients have been resources you have been sharing with broader audiences. Can you talk to us about what’s out there right now? What resources are there? You’ve really been pouring a lot of your focus to provide some guidance and help right now in the recent days and weeks. What’s out there right now? What are you working on, and what could you suggest as resources for people?
Rudhir: Well, we mentioned it once already, but I’m doing this weekly webinar on mindfulness tools for handling uncertainty, and I’m doing this every Wednesday morning through my relationship on the co-chair of the wellness committee for the National Asian Pacific American Bar Association. We’re doing a similar webinar on Thursdays every week right now, myself and a mentor of mine, Angela O., are doing this webinar every week for that community.
Rudhir: I’m talking with the Association of Corporate Counsel on putting out a webinar on what tools we can use to manage the challenge. There’s a couple of bar associations that I’m working with on how we can exhibit our leadership in this moment. How can we show leadership in this moment of challenge and difficulty? From my perspective, there’s a lot of offering that’s happening in this moment, and I think what’s really beautiful and really nice about the community is actually seeing all the things that are being offered up in this moment and ways that we can support each other.

Rudhir: I think it’s a great time to pay attention and listen and get online and see what’s being offered by others. There’s a lot of opportunities to interact in workshops and dialogues and ways to connect from home right now that I think people should be tapping into. I think it’s also just a time to connect for people that have the luxury of doing that with family in their home or even with nature. There’s no restriction on necessarily going out in some areas and actually just taking a walk and connecting in that way.

Rudhir: I do workshops on building resilience. Part of those dialogues we talk about, “What’s restorative for you?” What’s restorative for you? The answers that people typically come up with are things that are just very accessible to us even in this moment, which is time with my family and my friends, connecting with my pets, eating a really good meal, watching a good show, taking a walk in nature. All of these things people find restorative are by and large free and still very accessible to us in this moment.

Rudhir: This might just be a nice healthy hibernating moment for all of us. I think that another thing is this is actually a great opportunity for skills building. I work with a range of clients. For some of them, presentations and stand up are something that they like working on. There’s nothing stopping people from being at home and recording a presentation and seeing how they are. When we start thinking about what’s possible in this moment, I feel like there is so much opportunity.

Teresa: One of the other areas, we were discussing earlier, Rudhir, related to the new work at home scenario. Looking at the normal heavy workload that an attorney deals with, at least having that separation between work and home, without being blurred now, which not the case for you necessarily. You’re accustomed to it. What guidance are you providing right now for how to handle that new blurred line and how to handle what is really a novel situation for many professionals and especially for attorneys?

Rudhir: I think that it’s very interesting seeing this transition that people are making to being at home. Luckily, I’ve been working at home for a few years now, and so this transition wasn’t so difficult. I definitely feel like there are things that we can do to make this that much more comfortable. First, I think for people that don’t work from home a lot, it’s actually setting up a comfortable situation for sitting.

Rudhir: Some people might think this is the time to just work at the dining table or in that uncomfortable chair, but we might be here for a while. Maybe it’s time to get a nicer chair, a nicer desk at home. Maybe it’s time to invest in that, a standup desk or something, a chair that’s got good support for you. So actually just sit in a place that’s comfortable and not necessarily in the thing that you might default to when you do a little bit of work from home.

Rudhir: Second, I think that things that are really helpful are really when we’re working from home the boundaries really start to fade between work and home literally. There’s really no boundary anymore. You might have this urge to almost work all the time. There’s really no limit to it. I think there’s this mentality around clocking in and clocking out that I think can be a really welcome shift in this moment.
Rudhir: If you’re putting in certain hours, actually when does the pen go down? When does the laptop get shut? What are the few hours during the day where you’re actually just doing the thing that you need to do to take care of yourself or center? For some people, they’re not commuting anymore. They use that commute time as the period to transition from work to home. Create that transition period for yourself. Sit for five or ten minutes and do nothing and allow the mind to settle and shift. Let’s not just use all of our time now or fill all of that time with work because doing that along with all the information that’s coming in and the way that the world is changing can really start draining you further.

Rudhir: I think healthy boundaries with work right now are imperative and actually maybe just creating some mental shifts. When I go down to the living room, when I’m in my next room, that’s when I put the laptop… The laptop stays in this area of the house. I don’t let it carry everywhere. Just trying to think about physical and mental barriers that you can start to create between work and home even when you’re in one place so that it’s not all bleeding together. We work effectively when we are restored. We need to reenergize. So think about the things that reenergize you and try to build in systems at home that allow you to keep that energy.

Teresa: That’s helpful. Rudhir, you mentioned one mentor a few minutes ago in our conversation. Can you talk to me about any mentors that you’ve had throughout your career who’ve especially shaped your thinking, shaped your own career?

Rudhir: There’s so many. It’s a difficult question. I remember when you emailed me in advance about some of the things you might ask, I said let’s do this at the end. I was hoping it wouldn’t even get to these. I have so many mentors. There’s so many people that have been valuable. In the work that I do I always feel like I stand on the shoulders of so many people that came before, and so there’s just so many experiences that I have that are learning.

Rudhir: I think the place to start is that I just feel like every opportunity and every interaction is a moment of learning. I feel like I’m learning from people all the time. Mentors is a really higher elevated state for somebody I feel to hold that space. I learned so much from my clients. I learned so much on calls like this. I learned so much from every interaction. I think the first thing that comes to me is actually just not losing sight of the learning opportunities in every interaction. What can you learn about this person across from you and the rich experience that they have? What value might you be able to get in that possibility of that conversation?

Rudhir: The person that made this entire next chapter of my life that much more possible for me was my wife. When I was in my last few years at Apple, I started to feel this itch, and it was… I’m not sure, but I can’t say that I’m as happy as I’d like to be in my life professionally. I think there’s something else. I don’t know exactly what I want to do. I’d sort of come home every few days with this dialogue with her.

Rudhir: I’d sort of talk about different things that I want to do. I’d tell her, I’d say, “You know, I think I need a month or two off. I need a month or two off. I’m going to ask my manager and team if I can combine my four weeks of vacation with one other month off. It could be unpaid. I don’t care. I just need a couple of months to sit.” She said, “You don’t need two months. You need a year.”

Rudhir: I just thought, ” A year?” Apple doesn’t have a year long sabbatical program. How are we going to do that? She said, “I’m giving you a year.” She said, “For one year you don’t need to do a thing. You don’t have to generate any income. You don’t have to do anything around the house. You don’t have to do anything for a year, and whatever you do after that I don’t care. But for one year just take a break.”

Rudhir: I have never had that kind of permission before or just being met by somebody that was saying, “Look, you’re good as you are. You don’t need to do anything.” I think that that’s amazing. I just felt like to get that type of support from somebody… My wife runs a nonprofit. My mind was, “How are we going to manage the finances and everything?” She’s like, “We’ll budget. We’ll plan the way that organizations plan when they go through a transition.”

Rudhir: So we made the plan. As soon as the plan came into place, and I saw that it was possible, everything that was happening was leading to signs of leaving and taking this time off. I think she has a way of thinking and a being that’s very different from what I’m used to in my environment. It’s very refreshing. She really values people taking the time to restore because we don’t know what’s possible. She’s really at the sort of root of this transition, which is allowing me the time and space to think and see some of the challenges in our workplace.

Rudhir: What I did during that time off is I just wrote a lot and investigated and understood a lot about our work, and that’s what allowed me to see this opportunity for stepping into this whole new career path for me. When I think about people that I look up to or I look to, I think about right now in this moment of my life I think about my wife first.

Teresa: Rudhir, that’s really wonderful to hear you say it, and I appreciate you sharing too on such a personal level that story.

Rudhir: Well, I just want to offer that in this moment I feel like we’re experiencing challenging times. I feel like we’re part of an amazing profession that can actually offer a lot. If anyone could use any support or has any questions, please feel free to reach out. My website is Krishtel.com. My email is simple. It’s my first name Rudhir@Krishtel.com, and I’m sure you’ll be providing it, Teresa.

Rudhir: But feel free to reach out in this moment because I just feel like it’s an incredible opportunity for making sure that all of us are feeling good in a way that allows us to support our community in the way that lawyers do. We are very important center, I feel like fabric, of the world. I feel like we are really the center of a lot of leadership in the world. I feel like we’re in this position to offer a lot, and for anyone that needs support through that process I just welcome people to reach out and connect.

Teresa: Thank you, Rudhir. It’s been really wonderful speaking with you learning more about what you’ve been doing. We’ve enjoyed seeing it and really are happy to be able to share it with our audience too. We will be in touch for sure. We’ll definitely have your resources available on the podcast.

Rudhir: All right. Fantastic. Thank you, Teresa. Talk soon.

Teresa: Thanks, Rudhir. You too. Bye-bye.

Rudhir: Bye.

 

 


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What Should You Do About D&I Efforts During a Pandemic? Exactly What You Were Doing Before

The tremendous economic uncertainty emerging in the wake of COVID-19 is forcing law firm leaders to contend with challenges they’ve never faced before. People are scared, and for good reason. Given the enormous financial pressure firms feel, it’s understandable that leaders may opt to push diversity and inclusion efforts to the back burner for a while — or is it?

Let’s review what we know about the business case for creating more diverse firms.

In other words, improving law firm diversity is an imperative for any firm hoping to compete in the marketplace. That was true before the pandemic, and it’s still true today, despite how much more difficult it may be to achieve this goal.

Here’s the good news: expensive, outward-facing diversity and inclusion initiatives that are more about marketing than substance probably are not the best use of constrained law firm resources. Instead, firm leaders should consider simple, effective interventions that will protect the progress they have made in elevating more women and minority attorneys to power, and make it possible for that work to continue:

Help women and minority partners build their profiles remotely. Now that all in-person avenues to developing business are closed, firms are thinking strategically about how their attorneys should move those efforts online. But top-down orders to “leverage LinkedIn” or “keep up with your contacts virtually” are not useful to attorneys who didn’t have robust “old boy” networks to begin with. Online networking is a skill, just like other business development techniques. If your firm was providing coaching support to high-potential attorneys to help them with business development in the real world, that same support is needed now for new kinds of marketing efforts. Attorneys are going to need tutorials that walk them through best practices and provide support by phone or email. Marketing departments can create these resources or contract outside support to do this training work. Then they must oversee the execution to ensure attorneys stay part of the online conversation in their target industries. Is it possible to assign marketing department staff to this task, particular those who typically staff events and may have extra capacity?

Keep the content coming. Social media profiles are only as strong as the content attorneys have to share there. We know that implicit bias can make it more difficult for women and minority attorneys to demonstrate their subject-matter expertise and be considered for the same opportunities as less experienced white men. This makes thought leadership articles and opportunities to be featured as an “expert source” in key media outlets all the more important for building these attorneys’ reputation with prospects. When putting your firm’s experts forward on webinars, thought leadership articles and media pitches, consider who’s being included — and who’s not. If the faces of your firm’s most important expertise are all white men, you’re sending the message that your other attorneys are somehow less qualified to lead in a crisis.

Bear equity in mind when handling award nominations. The earliest and most chaotic weeks of the COVID crisis happened to coincide with an already busy time on many legal marketers’ calendars: award season. Nominations for “rising star” and other programs are typically due in spring, and gathering client testimonials, case examples and other supporting materials can be time consuming and logistically challenging under normal circumstances. And we know that the required effort (which of course comes on top of keeping up with billable work), combined with the often-gendered tendency to be more reticent about self-promotion, means that award nominees can be less than representative of a firm’s diversity anyway. This year, women bearing the brunt of new childcare and homeschooling responsibilities, along with those who care for extended family members, had even less bandwidth and energy to put themselves forward for industry honors. What can your team do to ensure that your award nominees reflect the true diversity of your emerging lawyers, rather than an oversampling of those privileged enough to have more spare time on their hands?

Make evaluations more transparent and consider what “fairness” means right now. In addition to thinking about the intersection of inclusion and business development, firm leaders will need to consider how to evaluate the work attorneys do under these extraordinary circumstances. Obviously it would not be fair to hold attorneys to the standards for billable hours that they would during a normal year, but what should revised standards look like? As noted, women are taking on a greater share of the childcare, homeschooling and household duties under lockdown, which makes it more difficult for them to bill the same number of hours or develop as much new business as men. How can you make sure they won’t be penalized for this when it comes time to make decisions about compensation and promotion? Questions about how to fairly and holistically evaluate attorneys’ work long predate the current crisis, and they are going to become more urgent in the months to come. The current system continues to reward white men above other demographic groups. It’s time for reform.

No question this is a frightening time for firm leaders, and they will want to focus their limited attention on what matters most for the survival of the firm. That shortlist should include a continued commitment to diversity and inclusion. The business case is clear, and hard-won gains for women and minorities are hanging in the balance.


© 2020 Page2 Communications. All rights reserved.

For more on continuing normal business operations amid COVID-19, see the National Law Review Coronavirus News section.

What Is the CARES Act and How Can It Help Legal Professionals?

On March 27, Congress passed the 2020 Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act (CARES) to mitigate the negative economic impact of COVID-19. The CARES Act provides small businesses and individuals with extended unemployment insurance benefits, loans for paycheck protection, refundable tax credit, and business tax provisions. Attorneys who own their own practice can take advantage of the 2020 CARES Act to protect their business and employees during the economic downturn brought on by COVID-19.

How the CARES Act Applies to Lawyers

The CARES Act could alleviate the negative economic impact of COVID-19 on your law firm while the entire world waits for what’s next.

The CARES Act helps law practices with:

  • Paycheck protection program (PPP): completely forgivable loan to cover payroll costs
  • Employee retention credit
  • 2020 Payroll tax deferment
  • Economic injury disaster loan emergency advance (EIDL)

Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) for Attorneys, Legal Administrators, and Staff

For more detail, please refer to the PPP FAQs published by the Treasury Department on Wednesday, April 8, 2020.

Coverage for Payroll Costs

  • Salary, wages, commissions, or tips
  • Employee benefits including costs for vacation, parental, family, medical, or sick leave
  • Allowance for separation or dismissal
  • Payments required for the provisions of group health care benefits including insurance premiums
  • Retirement benefits
  • State and local taxes assessed on compensation

For more detail, please refer to the Tax Foundation’s summary of the SBA Paycheck Protection Program in the CARES Act.

Coverage for Sole Proprietor or Independent Contractor

  • Wages, commissions, income or net earnings from self-employment, capped at $100,000 on an annualized basis for each employee
  • Extends duration of benefits from 26 weeks (available in most states) to 39 weeks
  • Provides an additional $600 per week in benefits for first four months

For more detail, please refer to the summary from the law firm Rudman Winchell.

Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) Loan Forgiveness

Applications are already in play. While there is a lot of money available, it is not unlimited. Apply as quickly as possible.

  • You use the money strictly for allowed expenses
  • 75% of the loan amount is spent on payroll costs
  • You maintain your entire full-time staff until June 30
  • Rehire fired or laid-off employees quickly
  • Caps payment at $100,000 per person
  • You do not cut employees wages more than 25% for any employee who made less than $100,000 in 2019
  • For whatever amount is not covered, PPP loans have a 1% interest rate and payments are deferred six months with interest during the deferment.  The loan must be fully repaid in two years.

For more detail, please refer to the Small Business Administration’s Docket No. SBA-2020-0015.

Employee Retention Credit

You may qualify for a refundable payroll tax credit for 50% of wages if:

  • your law practice was fully or partially suspended due to COVID-19 related shut-down orders.
  • you lost more than 50% in gross receipts compared to last year’s same-quarter performance.

Payroll Tax Deferment

To further lower expenses at your law firm, you may defer your share of payroll taxes and split the deferred payments over the next two years, with half due by Dec. 31, 2021, and the other half due by Dec. 31, 2022.

Economic Injury Disaster Loan Emergency Advance (EIDL)

If you are a sole proprietor, you may be eligible for a EIDL loan of up to $2 million, repayable over 30 years at 3.75% interest rates for small businesses and 2.75% for most private non-profits under the EIDL. Payments are deferred for the first year, but interest accrues during that time.

  • You’ll have to put up collateral for loans over $25,000 and a personal guarantee for loans exceeding $200,00.
  • If you qualify for an EIDL, you can use the money for any business expense (with a few exclusions).
  • Under the same provision, small business owners may be eligible for a one-time grant of up to $10,000 that you won’t have to pay back.

For more detail, please refer to the U.S. Small Business Administration’s “Economic Injury Disaster Loan Emergency Advance” overview page.

What Happens If You Enroll for PPP and EIDL?

If you decide to enroll for both the EIDL and PPP, the amount of the EIDL grant will be subtracted from the PPP amount eligible for forgiveness. In other words, you’ll ultimately wind up paying it back.

The 2020 CARES Act Can Help Your Law Firm

Law firms are uniquely poised to understand the full extent of the CARES Act and its protections. With the financial boost from the CARES Act, attorneys are more likely to retain talent and be ready to hit the ground running when court activity ramps up again.

CARES Act 2020 Resources

 

© Copyright 2020 PracticePanther
ARTICLE BY Reece Guida at PracticePanther.
For more on the CARES Act, see the National Law Review Coronavirus News section.