2022 Legal Marketing Trends for Law Firm Success

Lawyers get into law to practice, not to focus on administrative tasks or marketing. However, running a law firm is much more than practicing law – it’s running a business. If law firms want to stay in business, they need to put effort into keeping abreast with legal marketing trends to attract new clients and keep the firm growing and profitable.

According to recent research, 57 percent of clients look for a lawyer on their own, and many use the internet to search for firms. In addition, 66 percent of solo lawyers do their own marketing, while 46 percent of law firms have a budget for marketing.

The global market size of the legal services industry is projected to grow over $900 billion by 2025, so it’s primed for innovation and evolution. Law firms need to stay current on legal trends and invest in marketing to be part of this massive industry growth.

Here are the top legal marketing trends for 2022:

  1. Setting SMART Goals

  2. Creating a Brand

  3. Running an SEO Campaign

  4. Embrace Content Marketing

  5. Explore Video Marketing

  6. Focus on the Right Social Media Platforms

  7. Post Reviews from Clients

  8. Showcase Case Studies

  9. Create an Email Marketing Campaign

  10. Use Automation to Track Legal Marketing Trends

  1. Setting SMART Goals

No strategy is worthwhile without goals. SMART goals are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound goals that ensure marketing results match their intent. Setting goals allows marketers to see what’s working and what isn’t to refine and reconsider the strategy.

For example, a goal to “generate new clients” doesn’t fit the SMART goals framework. Instead, the goal should be to increase the number of client leads generated per month from 15 to 30 as a result of the newsletter. This should be achieved in six months.

Each goal should be aligned with a purpose, or what the law firm is hoping to achieve. Here are some examples of general marketing goals:

  • Brand awareness

  • Lead generation

  • Client acquisition

  • Increased customer value

  1. Creating a Brand

Branding isn’t limited to retail corporations – law firms need a brand, too. A brand helps a law firm attract the right type of client and grow.

Creating a brand is a long process, but it starts with thinking about the mission and vision of the firm, the core values of the firm, and the unique value proposition (what separates the law firm from its competitors?).

  1. Running an SEO Campaign

Search engine optimization (SEO) is vital to any marketing plan in 2022. Competition is fiercer than ever, so law firms need to stand out and gain a ranking on the first page of the search engine results to drive traffic to the firm website.

Law firms should use tactics like content marketing, strong keyword research, optimized images, intuitive website structure, and a fast and secure web hosting platform to improve SEO.

  1. Embrace Content Marketing

Content marketing is essential for a law firm from both an SEO and a general marketing perspective. Valuable content turns a law firm into a thought leader in the industry or practice area, bringing clients back when they need a solution to a problem.

It’s important for firms to create in-depth, original content that addresses common questions for the target audience. A good place for firms to start is with a legal blog that addresses topics such as frequently asked questions from clients.

  1. Explore Video Marketing

Video marketing is sweeping the marketing world, and it has plenty of value for law firms. Consumers are more likely to listen to a message in video format than written format since people like to skim. Using a video gets the message across and serves to humanize the law firm’s brand.

Videos come in many shapes and forms, including animated explainer videos that break down complex legalese, spokesperson videos with a partner answering frequently asked questions, and client testimonials to showcase how the firm helps people. These videos can be used on the firm’s website, emails, or social media accounts like YouTube and Facebook.

  1. Focus on the Right Social Media Platforms

Plenty of law firms use social media platforms, but not all are created equal. It can be challenging to maintain accounts on every social media platform, so it’s best for law firms to select the platforms that have the most prospective clientele.

Once law firms focus on the ideal social media platforms, they can observe how clients and other law firms interact and increase engagement with followers. Over time, the presence on social media will grow.

  1. Post Reviews from Clients

Client reviews go a long way in helping law firms attract new clients and earn a higher search engine ranking. If a law firm doesn’t have a lot of reviews, it’s important to prompt clients to leave a review on social media, Google, or the website.

If getting reviews is a challenge, law firms can create incentives for staff to ask for reviews and how it can impact the firm. The firm can also offer incentives to clients. Keep in mind that video reviews or testimonials can go a long way in increasing credibility for a firm.

  1. Showcase Case Studies

Case studies are in-depth and demonstrate expertise and success for clients. Law firms should have a page with current, comprehensive case studies that highlight successful case outcomes. If it’s well organized, clients can find case studies that are similar to their case and gain more confidence in selecting a firm.

  1. Create an Email Marketing Campaign

Despite social media and other communications, email marketing is an incredible outbound marketing technique that’s still important in 2022. Nearly 60 percent of marketers say that email delivers the highest ROI, no matter the industry.

Sending out targeted, value-packed emails can help a law firm build credibility, convert new leads, and attract new and repeat customers. Once the email list is built, law firms can segment the list according to the stage of the customer journey, location, practice area, and more to create highly targeted email messaging.

  1. Use Automation to Manage Legal Marketing Trends

The legal industry is traditional, but legal practice management software is the way modern firms get ahead. Legal management software, like PracticePanther, helps law firms in a variety of lucrative business operations including streamlining billing and invoicing managing client communications and tracking time. With the burden of marketing tasks, having legal practice management software allows law firms to automate many day-to-day tasks, freeing time to focus on marketing efforts. It also offers automation for some marketing efforts, such as custom tags to track lead sources or assigning marketing tasks through workflows to ensure you’re never missing a lead.

© Copyright 2022 PracticePanther

Article By PracticePanther

For more articles on legal marketing, visit the NLR Law Office Management.

In-House Counsel’s Role in Bridging the Generation ‘We’ Gap

A new generation of tech savvy, social justice-focused and environmentally aware employee stakeholders are creating recruitment, retention and other employment challenges. Unlike their predecessors, the “Generation We” cohort of employees (which loosely encompasses Gens Y and Z and even the new “Alphas”) tend to view employment as experimental rather than a long-term commitment. Managing employees with a transactional approach to work and who demand purpose-driven employment creates significant human capital risk. Corporate counsel can play a key role in managing and mitigating that risk, not only in response to the growing ESG disclosure and regulation trends, but as part of the need to design future-proof legal frameworks for the workplace.

The Framework for Generation-Conscious Policies

Good compliance practice begins with a forward-looking framework for employment policies. The pandemic has razed traditional office life and if the prediction that 37% of office desks will remain empty in 2022 comes true, the technology supporting remote work and the policies governing it are mission critical. Generation We embraces technology as a life tool, not just a work tool.  The primacy of technology requires a second look at policies that regulate it. Examples of leading-edge policies include those addressing AI infrastructure in the workplace (as applied to, for example, applicant tracking systems) and policies addressing anti-bias in technology. Social media and communication policies also demand a generationally-aware review.  These policies, which are needed for brand protection and communication consistency, may need modernization in light of the platforms Generation We inhabit. One of legal’s (many) jobs is to construct that compliance framework. This may mean more than an annual review of human resources policies which is tough enough in this frenetic environment. But that policy review should include second look at all employment policies to ensure they are generationally adept, consistent with technology changes, and meet what the new workforce demands.

Who Participates and How

The Zoom room may have been new at the pandemic’s inception, but is mundane now. In-person teams have been displaced by fully remote or hybrid collaboration and a host of legal issues the virtual world creates. Some employment policies may not account for virtual world inclusiveness or rules of engagement. Microaggressions could be amplified in the virtual environment as employees who feel left out may lack the typical platforms to make those feeling known – resulting in the public broadcast of employment disputes or job abandonment. It is hard to pick up on social cues from an inch square web-box. It may even be harder to identify when someone feels sidelined because of gender, race or other underrepresented status. Legal should play a role in championing people on the sidelines. This means empowering managers to shut down grandstanders who grab the virtual floor. It also means taking note of those who don’t virtually raise their hands, and ensuring that all employees are heard. Rules of engagement regarding the use of video (all on? all off?) and the discouragement of side-chats and other digital unpleasantness not only express inclusiveness but role models best practices. Generation We demands inclusiveness in their work and personal lives; they are unforgiving of employers who lack sensitivity to these issues and are quick to publicize their contrary views.

Learning, not Training

Mandatory training may not speak to socially aware employees who reject stereotypical gender roles and labels and embrace racial justice. Employers cannot legally abandon statutorily-mandated training, but they can modernize it. Structured meetings with a core educational focus is meaningful because it imparts information and drives behavior. Counsel should consider helping their human resource partners to update traditional training to reflect learning about unconscious bias. Similarly, new subjects like mindfulness, wellness, mental health issues and how the workplace impacts people might also be included in learning tools.  Are the corporation’s core messages embedded in the training or is it is an off-the-shelf program lacking relevance to the business? Training is an important part of counsel’s compliance obligations but incorporating the corporation’s core mission into that programming in a customized way is an effective learning tool. Corporate counsel plays a key role in driving change in these learning systems and these changes could positively mitigate human capital and business risk.

Performance with Purpose

Corporate counsel’s role is becoming less transactional (get the deal done) and more transformational (recruiting and retaining the workforce and implementing the ceaseless legal developments that have altered how we work). Performance in this context may be more than returning value to shareholders or a fulfilling a non-profit’s philanthropic aim. Performance may instead encompass achieving a group aim.  The Great Resignation anecdotally informs us that Generation We is in search of meaning and personal growth, and not always money (though they are keenly interested in equitable compensation). Purpose-driven organizations can lead to a sense of community.  Because community is important to this generation, the identification and amplification of the corporate mission becomes even more important. A recently released Goldman Sachs Asset management report concludes that a growing percentage of youngers workers are already planning to retire earlier than their predecessors. If that movement is real, retaining the next generation of workers becomes even more important.

Generation We is driving the primacy of the employee stakeholder and underlies the addition of the “E” to ESG. This generation fearlessly exercises their workplace voice and are quick to abandon work when a business cannot articulate or veers off a cohesive a mission. Counsel can play a key role in bridging the intergenerational divide. That role and its impact begins with the compliance framework being built in a manner that adapts to the ever-growing expectations of the next generation of the workforce.

©1994-2022 Mintz, Levin, Cohn, Ferris, Glovsky and Popeo, P.C. All Rights Reserved.

Article By Jennifer B. Rubin of Mintz

For more articles on Generation We, visit the NLR labor section.

Legal News Roundup December 2021: Firm Inclusion & Diversity Efforts, Hiring & More

Happy new year! Read on for the latest law firm hiring, pro bono and innovation news:

Ropes and Gray announced the opening of their 12th location in Los Angeles in 2022, which will focus initially on the healthcare and equity & asset management industries. Attorneys Howard GlazerTorrey McClaryRanee Adipat and Leslie Thornton will assist in opening the new office, as they look to expand their reach in the Southern California market.

Ropes and Gray also added Brandon Howald to their new Los Angeles team. Mr. Howald brings 22 years of private equity experience to the practice.

“Opening an office in Los Angeles is a really exciting move for Ropes & Gray. Southern California is a market where we have been active for many years. We already have a robust and growing roster of clients in a region with a vibrant private equity and asset management business, as well as strong California health care, life sciences, M&A, and technology practices. We have been very strategic in establishing a presence where our clients needed us, from Asia to London to Chicago to the West Coast. That same vision propels us into Los Angeles—and Howard Glazer, Torrey McClary and Brandon Howald have the industry expertise, entrepreneurial drive and Southern California roots to help lead us,” said Ropes & Gray’s chair, Julie Jones.

“We are opening in Los Angeles with a powerful platform: a roster of market leading clients, established partners with deep ties to Los Angeles like Brandon Howald, Howard Glazer, Torrey McClary and our powerful global network—all with the high bar of excellence clients come to expect from Ropes & Gray,” said the firm’s managing partner, David Djaha.

Real estate and general practice attorney Carmen I. Pagan has joined Romer Debbas LLP as Partner and the head of their Agency Lending Practice. Ms. Pagan specializes in commercial lending issues, senior and student housing through Freddie Mac Seller/Servicer and Capital Markets Execution programs, cross-collateralization loans and more.

Recently, Hofstra University School of Law, named alumna Ms. Pagan asan “Outstanding Woman in Law”  which acknowledges women who made inspiring contributions to the legal profession. Ms. Pagan is committed to the advancement of women’s issues in the workplace and diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) efforts.

McDermott Will & Emery announced three new additions to their Intellectual Property practice. The new additions are:

“McDermott continues to make incredible strides toward advancing our remarkable IP practice into an industry powerhouse. Simon and Jason bring significant life sciences patent litigation strength to our bench in New York, and Mac’s experience with Japanese technology and life science companies is unmatched. These three bring a lot of fire with them, and they will be incredible additions to our global IP team,” said William Gaede, Chair of McDermott’s Global IP practice.

Sheppard, Mullin, Richter & Hampton announced the addition of Ms. Lauren Strickroth as a partner in their Orange County office. Ms. Strickroth specializes in fiduciary litigation, business disputes, private wealth disputes and litigation involving estates and trusts matters. Ms. Strickroth also serves as general counsel for private businesses.

“Sheppard Mullin’s private wealth and fiduciary litigation team constitutes one of the premier practices in the U.S. We are confident Lauren will help expand our impressive record of success in the courtroom that has kept us at the top echelon of this niche field of trial attorneys throughout the U.S. and worldwide,” said Private Wealth and Fiduciary Litigation Practice Group Leader Adam Streisand.

“Over the last few years, our Private Wealth and Fiduciary Litigation practice has grown and their ongoing involvement in some of the most high-profile estate disputes is a testament to their outstanding reputation and expertise. We’re thrilled that Lauren is joining us,” said Sheppard Mullin’s vice chairman Jon Newby.

Legal Industry Awards and Recognition

Who’s Who Legal – Environment named Lynn L. Bergeson  as a leading legal practitioner in North America for the 17th time. Further, she was named a top lawyer in chemicals, manufacturing, nanotechnology, and pharmaceuticals industry groups by Super Lawyers for the 15th time. Ms. Bergeson, an experienced attorney in environmental, chemical, and nanotechnological law, is presently a Managing Partner at Bergeson & Campbell, P.C., as well as President of The Acta Group , Bergeson & Campbell’s scientific and regulatory consulting arm.

As noted in the recognition by Who’s Who Legal, “Lynn Bergeson is renowned as ‘an excellent lawyer, particularly in chemical matters’. Her in-depth knowledge of risk assessment and liability management receives further applause.”

Simultaneously, Bergeson & Campbell, P.C.  received National and Metropolitan Tier 1 rankings for Environmental Law and Environmental Litigation in U.S. News and World Report’s 2022 Best Law Firms. As of this recognition, the firm has held these rankings for a full decade.

Chicago Lawyer Magazine named Antonio M. Romanucci, Founding Partner at Romanucci & Blandin, LLC, their 2021 Person of the Year. The award is given to honor a notable newsmaker, trendsetter or legal leader in the preceding year. Mr. Romanucci, a long-time civil rights lawyer, most notably represented the family of George Floyd in the civil lawsuit against the City of Minneapolis and four police officers.

“There is no question that this honor is a capstone for my career as a trial attorney,” said Mr. Romanucci. “It’s so hard to believe how far my life has come since my days as a Cook County Public Defender to now one of the founding partners at a nearly 25-year-old Romanucci & Blandin. It’s a testament to the will and fortitude my law partner, Stephan Blandin, and I have always had to make sure the client comes first.”

“The banner headline for Antonio Romanucci this year is the historic $27 million settlement the George Floyd legal team secured,” said John McNally, Managing Editor at Chicago Lawyer Magazine. “It’s a major dollar figure for a case that struck nerves – many that continued to be frayed to this very day – throughout the United States. But where one could be despondent, Romanucci is hopeful. He has to be, otherwise what’s the point? So in addition to his heavy workload at Romanucci & Blandin, he’s barnstorming the country speaking to lawyers, law students and others who can make a difference in the quest for justice.”

Henry Talavera, a Shareholder at Polsinelli PC, received a Lifetime Achievement Award as part of Texas Lawyer’s 2021 Texas Legal Excellence Awards. A member of the firm’s Dallas office and the vice chair of the Employee Benefits and Executive Compensation PracticeMr. Talavera is well-experienced in the fields of employment law and tax law, and has represented clients before the Internal Revenue Service, the U.S. Department of Labor, and the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation.

Brian Bullard, Managing Partner of Polsinelli’s Dallas office, notes the significance of this award: “For the last eight years at Polsinelli and throughout his career, Henry has played a vital role in the legal community, not only providing needed counsel to his wide range of clients but serving as an advocate for diversity in the profession and beyond. This Lifetime Achievement honor recognizes just how vital his contributions have been for the past three decades, and all of us at Polsinelli look forward to witnessing and supporting his continued accomplishments going forward.”

Firm Inclusion & Diversity Efforts

Much joined the Law Firm Antiracism Alliance (LFAA), which aims to use the law as a vehicle for change to help oppressed and underserved communities. Much previously represented the LFAA in filing an amicus brief in the Supreme Court about an issue involving Jim Crow measures used to disenfranchise Black jurors.

“We’re proud to join the nearly 300 Alliance firms working together to address systemic racism in the law. It’s our privilege and our responsibility to continue working for the rights of marginalized people,” said Steve Blonder, who led the recent work with LFAA and also serves as chair of the firm’s social responsibility initiative,  Much Community.

The LFAA works to create systemic change and racial equity in the law.

Kimya S.P. Johnson joined Jackson Lewis as its new chief diversity, equity and inclusion officer (CDEIO) and principal. She will work with firm leadership, key stakeholders, and practice group leaders to expand, manage and oversee firmwide DEI initiatives and lead a team to execute a comprehensive, strategic DEI plan.

Ms. Johnson will also serve as a member of Jackson Lewis’ Corporate Diversity Counseling group, advising companies on diversity assessments and action plans.  She has over 20 years of experience as an employment attorney, and supports employers in their efforts to provide legally-compliant, effective and organizationally-integrative DEI plans. Ms. Johnson previously served as the chair of the Diversity & Inclusion practice group at Ogletree Deakins.

“With Kimya at the helm of our strategic DEI efforts, we will strengthen our inclusive culture that values the contributions of every employee and continues to emphasize the importance of having a workforce that reflects the various communities in which we work,” said Firm Chair Kevin G. Lauri. “In addition, I believe all within Jackson Lewis and beyond will recognize we are intentional and committed to doing what it takes to move our leadership, our firm, and our profession forward in this vital area. We are thrilled to add Kimya to the team.”

“Fostering DEI is a critical component of Jackson Lewis’ culture, and the CDEIO role will collaborate with all departments and functions to advance DEI as a firm value,” said Firm Managing Principal Samantha Hoffman. “Kimya has a track record of creating meaningful enhancements for law firms. She is known as an innovator and has already contributed excellent ideas to build on the success of our DEI strategy. We are so pleased to have her on board.”

Before her career as an attorney, Ms. Johnson worked as a public elementary school teacher in South Bronx, New York and served as campaign manager for a candidate for U.S. Congress.

Dinsmore received Best in Class for diversity in the legal profession by Crain’s Cleveland Business in its issue recognizing seven “notable businesses championing diversity and inclusion.”

“Everyone has a customer in the business world, and the customer population is becoming more diverse,” partner Richik Sarkar told Crain’s. “Look around your company. If everyone seems the same, especially in leadership, you’ll have a problem serving your customer, and if you don’t take steps to understand your customers, you’ll face failure sooner rather than later.”

Dinsmore previously earned the Mansfield Rule 4.0 Certification Plus for the 2021 iteration of the diverse leadership hiring initiative. The firm also partnered with Procter & Gamble and the Ohio Innocence Project at Cincinnati Law to create a fellowship for a diverse recent law school graduate to gain experience in civil rights litigation and policy-making.

The firm’s Pre-Law Minority Program also helps students of color at four Kentucky universities.

Copyright ©2021 National Law Forum, LLC

Article By Hanna Taylor, Chandler Ford and Rachel Popa

For more articles on legal marketing, visit the NLRLaw Office Management section.

Hiring and Marketing in the Legal Industry with Roy Sexton of Clark Hill Law and Legal Marketing Association [PODCAST]

Thor’s hammer, “Mjollnir!” Attorneys with dogs! Superman t-shirts! Roy Sexton leads a lively discussion about how the little quirks make your law firm more attractive to new hires, current staff, and the audience of your marketing efforts. He shares his career anecdotes and Clark Hill Law‘s recent branding revamp while being frank about the need for a new type of law firm culture. Learn more about the Legal Marketing Association here.

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  00:02

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

 

Rachel & Jessica  00:15

I’m Rachel. And I’m Jessica. We’re the Co-Hosts for The National Law Review’s Legal News Reach podcast.

 

Rachel  00:22

In this episode, we’re excited to talk to Roy Sexton, Director of Marketing for Clark Hill, about hiring and legal marketing. Roy would you like to introduce yourself?

 

Roy Sexton  00:30

Sure, I think you’re gonna regret having me as a guest. But I’m Roy Sexton, Director of Marketing. I’m also an active volunteer with the Legal Marketing Association, recently named President-elect for 2022, and President in 2023. Again, probably something they will live to regret. But I’m very honored to have been tapped in that way.

 

Rachel  00:50

Congratulations. As I mentioned earlier, one of the topics that we really want to dive into here is hiring and marketing trends in the legal industry, I think there’s been a lot of interesting hiring and sort of labor/employment topics to come out out of the pandemic.  In particular, specifically, how it’s getting harder to hire people, you know, retaining people that we do have, and just how COVID maybe long term will affect labor in this country and employment and hiring and all those things. In terms of the difficulty that midsize firms are finding it hard to hire lawyers on their legal staff. Is that a trend that you’re seeing? And if so, like, how can offices really remedy that issue?

 

Roy Sexton 01:30

Yeah, obviously it’s a trend we’re seeing in the industry. But fortunately, we’re not seeing it at Clark Hill. I had a recent opening in our team. And it’s for an events role. So presumably there are a lot of people out there that in the event space that we’re looking so I’m not going to put you know, you got to think about what, again, each submarket of the hiring market, right, and what’s influencing that, but in this case, we had like 85 applicants all pretty strong. And when I’ve had positions posted before I get me like 2030. So again, it’s an event so that’s probably driving that as well. I think we as a firm have really pushed culture, we launched our new brand in May. And my boss Susan Hearn, who’s a genius and wonderful because performance reviews are coming up soon. I love you. She, you know, she had the wisdom with our chief HR officer Kathy Sullivan, to say, when we launched that brand, let’s take the values that we usually keep for internal purposes and make them the spotlight on the brand. So we push that hard. And we did a lot of video asset creation about the firm generally the culture we are because we knew our clients and prospects would say that’s a nice place. Those seem like good people, I want to work with them. And I think we now that our second phase of the brand launch, launched about a week or so ago was a talent brand specifically. And we have Kathy with a video that’s gotten like 60,000 views on our social media so far, talking about, “these are our values, we believe in them.” And at Clark Hill, everyone has an equal footing. I mean, I think we know law firms struggle with that kind of upstairs-downstairs thing. If you’re not an attorney. Well, you’re just you’re dispensable and you don’t be treated with the same level of respect. I think clerk Hill has tried to intentionally take a different tack in that regard. And the attorneys are there with us. I mean, it’s not like we’re trying to sell them on an idea that they themselves don’t believe. They are there already. So we’ve fortuitously pulled from the culture, we already had clerk Hill has grown through acquisition. So we had a lot of different regions that came together to be Clark Hill. And it was important for us to go forward or the brand that told the firm story, elevated, everyone, and said, “I’m part of a bigger family here.” And I think, knock-on-wood, our recruiting efforts have benefited from that kind of message. So you know, I don’t want to, you know, spoil the secret sauce. But for those firms that are facing that conundrum, everyone always says, Oh, we’ve got a great culture. Well, show it, demonstrate it, use video, use photos. This is my home, I’m in the basement. My husband sent me down here 19 months ago, and I haven’t come back. But you know, we in the early days of pandemic, I had my dog here beside me the whole time and my social media person, Tommy said, Hey, let’s do a four-legged coworkers campaign. And we did and we got so much response from that we were posting dogs not and you’re like oh, and Facebook, right? I think LinkedIn. Interestingly, a year later, LinkedIn now has dogs of LinkedIn. Have you noticed this? They promoting that and I’m like they stole our idea. After we went through about six weeks to this one person in the firm said, should we be doing that? That doesn’t really seem like something we should be promoting. I said Well, too late. It’s over. It’s said to people, this is who we are. We’re human beings. We do good work showing our humanity does not detract from our ability to do good work. It enhances it. And I think that’s what the pandemic has hopefully shown people that are willing to listen.

 

Rachel  04:47

I mean I dunno about Jess, but I’m all for more dog photos in general.

 

Jessica  04:52

Yes. Spoiled pets!

 

Roy Sexton 04:54

I also benefit as a manager from previous experience. I worked in healthcare for a decade and that’s fraught with its own challenges in the healthcare system I worked at had a Leadership Academy and I took every class I could and I loved it. And it was very much about, listen to your team, help them succeed. Find you have a job description, you have the talent, but find the path for them. So they see they have a career and potential. One of my early management memories is I had taken over marketing at this healthcare system, and they had an outboard Remember, you’re too young to remember those. It was like, it was a whiteboard, and it had little magnets or like I’m in, I’m out. And I had an exceptionally talented person who did our radio show all this stuff. She loved working from home, this is about 15 years ago. And I said, Fine, you can work from the moon, I don’t care. If you’re doing good work. I don’t care. Now look where we are. Well, she would always like to write on the board. I am working from home. So a colleague came in, who managed the quality and accreditation and was that kind of busy body of the of the health system. And she looked at that in whiteboard. And she kind of made a mental note and walked away. And later she goes, Roy, I got a call on the hotline. Do you have people working from home? I’m like, Maureen, you did not get a call on the hotline, you saw that board. So what I did is I walked out of my office and I said, “Hey, Barb, does this come off the wall?” And I ripped the whiteboard off the wall, I said, Yep, comes off the wall. So I solved for the problem a little differently. Lisa continued to work from home, I’m sure it was in violation of some policies and processes, but she was doing good work. And to change that, because someone was being a busybody in the organization was going to hurt the outcomes of the organization. You know, I’m not advocating people ignore the rules of their organization, don’t get me wrong, but understand your talent in what they need. And if they shine in a certain environment, let them be there. And don’t worry about what time they’d showed up. And because they’re gonna give you more than you ever expected, but if you manage for style and time and what they were, and when they showed up and how many hours they were in, they’re only going to give you that they’re not going to give you any more.

 

Rachel  06:59

I think that level of trust is really important. I think when they feel they can be trusted to sort of do that in their own way. And yeah, in the way that makes them work better. I think that’s something I hope many industries learn from this pandemic.

 

Roy Sexton 07:15

I don’t want to seem ageist, I do think we have generational issues. And it depends on your leadership and what they’re comfortable with. We are used to our cell phones and zoom in all these different ways that I can, you know, for 15 years now, I basically could do my job remotely, wherever and whatever I was doing, because there are those tools. So their assumption is, we all know what we know, they assume nobody’s doing anything because you’re not here in a suit and tie. No, it’s a little harder for a manager. But it’s so much more rewarding to focus on the outcomes. So you learn your talent, you learn their limitations, you help them fly, you don’t overly critique them until they’re ready. You can calibrate but let people get the foundation, let them be safe, folks who want to be here in a suit and tie if that’s what you want, you come in, but don’t expect that of everybody. You have to focus on the individual. And if they have talent, where are they going to shine the best, and it’s a job. And I appreciate that I work in a culture that has its rules, they follow the protocols, they ask you to commit to well, what are you doing to create a culture that people want to be part of, and it’s going to solve itself?

 

Rachel  08:23

You touched on this a little earlier in terms of bringing people into new roles, training them. And we touched a little bit on hiring, one of the things that we wanted to ask you about is what are your thoughts on hiring professional staff with like no experience in the legal industry, and what are the advantages and the disadvantages of that?

 

Roy Sexton 08:41

I think people get very linear and they’re like, Well, you only have these criteria, you don’t qualify for this. You don’t have to talk to the universe of people, some people just aren’t the right fit, but look at their personalities as much as the background they have. And I think you gain a lot. Somebody should at least have lawyers in their family. If you’re going to work for a law firm, you got to fit the personality is unique. Doctors have a unique challenge in that they love risk, but they love data. So if you’re working in marketing with doctors go in with enough data that they see you. You did some scientific method of this. Yeah, sure. Okay. Great. With lawyers, I went to I went in with data, because that’s what I knew from healthcare, oh, I barely left the room alive, because all they saw was risk and possibility. They want to avoid risk. You know, there’s some things you learn about the culture quickly, that that’s the only thing I would say if you’re going to hire somebody. And you have a very difficult law firm culture, a very demanding group of attorneys, you might want to grab somebody who’s at least worked with lawyers in some aspects. I don’t need to know the nuance of what the litigator is doing. But I need to know why it’s important, what audience you’re trying to reach. And then trust me to figure out the channels, the mechanisms and all that to do and sometimes attorneys jump into that they want to tie your hands and say I want to sponsor this rodeo because I’m going to get all this stuff out. I’m like, That’s a stupid idea, I can’t say that, I have to say, well, they could do that. Or you could do this, I don’t think you need to have a law firm background, at least for roles like mine. I hate it when people say it’s not rocket science, what we do is difficult, let’s not minimize that it is as hard as rocket science. Because it’s people, it’s relationships, and you never know what you’re getting when you walk in the door with somebody. But if you have some emotional intelligence, you have the chops to communicate to right, you understand the digital channels that are available to us. And you have the sensitivity to appreciate. This very busy person who has an attorney is very stressed out, and they’re not mad at you, they just don’t know what you’re talking about. And you have to have the patience and the calm and the kindness to understand what’s important to them, you can work very well. So that’s kind of what I look for when I’m interviewing people. I don’t get hung up on if they’ve worked in a law firm before. But if I feel like they’re a bad culture fit, and they haven’t worked in a law firm, and they don’t have the skills, and I said to somebody yesterday, you don’t want to work in a law firm, you’ve worked in retail, most other places don’t do it.

 

Rachel  11:07

That focus on interpersonal skills is something that I think, in the past has been undervalued. Yeah, sort of going off of what you said earlier, in terms of you know, you’re in college, you had an arts degree, I mean, think just my both have parts degrees, in some sense. And I also have a partner that has a STEM degree. And you know, there’s sort of like this dichotomy of like, those very hard math and science skills like, yeah, aren’t always what you need to succeed, a lot of times it is learning how to talk to people and form relationships and things like that.

 

Jessica  11:36

So when we think about the increasing conflation of a firm, like their operations that are changing- your cultural changes, what do you see as the role of a marketing professional in the market that exists now?

 

Roy Sexton 11:51

I think we’re in a unique opportunity, and a really strong one, you know, people, people fixate on the AI as an abstraction versus something that just needs to be the reality. When you think about the AI, or when you think about wellness or any of these topics, that confluence of law firms are struggling, we need to fix our culture, we need to have representation, we need to have legitimate, you know, put people in leadership roles that look like us on this call, you know, there are people of color there, you know, so people see themselves in the leadership ranks, and they’ll stick around. So if you make that change, now take the victory lap for marketing, tell people about it don’t don’t suddenly get shy. I’m celebrating a leader who’s creating great change. I’m celebrating young people who are being seen, their friends and family are like, wow, that’s a neat organization. And, again, you have to see that larger, you know, Disney, Apple, those companies do a good job of creating an environment you want to be part of, if you can steal some of that, as a law firm, don’t get so focused on I want a case tell everybody I won that case, it’s going to get me business. Okay, maybe. But if they see what kind of organization it is the culture change that’s happening, the fact that good work is coming out of that organization, then you’re going to attract talent, you’re going to attract customers, you’re going to have a sustainable model. And I do think sometimes people are just so linear in their thinking they miss that that broader storytelling, opportunity. So you know, I think we’re in a unique place. I also think the other side of the coin, I’m going to get real, technical, we have so much data available to us right now. We have so many tools. It is a marketer’s dream right now that we have to work with, we don’t have to go to outside agencies, sorry, service providers to do stuff. Use data in that way, again, to drive change in the culture to drive engagement. And these digital channels, you’re, you’re using them beautifully. I mean, I really, when I saw Jennifer Scholler, at ALM, she was overwhelmed with the response that has come from your platform. In recent months. This is it’s off the charts, because you got good content, you’re reaching people, you’re putting it out there in smart and clever ways. And you have a following. And people then gravitate, you know, they gravitate to where there’s a following, so.

 

Jessica  14:10

I’m so glad you mentioned how the legal industry does have the weird, high walls around it. Sometimes I think there’s such a particular hierarchy in a law firm in general. So the fact that you know, we all know people want to connect with people. So if you keep just having these tall walls of legality, I guess. Preventing people from wanting to connect with you. That’s why I mean, over and over. If we beat anything into this podcast, it’s that people want to know a law firm. They want to know the people. That makes them want to go to you in the first place.

 

Roy Sexton 14:47

I switched my LinkedIn picture the other day and I switched it back but I had one of me and a Superman t-shirt. Somebody took me I loved it. And I got so much great response to that but I got some people inside from like, Do you think that’s really the professional look you want to be going for and I second-guessed myself, I changed the picture. And then I resented myself for it, finding those moments of authenticity. That’s what people respond to. And I think we get so worried in law firms are rife with this law firms want to be first to be second, like, they don’t wanna be the first one to do anything, in case it’s too risky. But they want to be right there at second, we’ll be the first, no one’s paying that much attention anyway, you’re not going to, you’re not going to ruin your organization, anybody who comes at you with a phrase, you need to be taken seriously run away from them, because they’re worried about the wrong, none of us need to be taken seriously. We need to do good work, we need to be accessible, we need to have fun and enjoy the lives that we’re living. And those people who say those things to you, they’re nervous themselves, they want to be out of their own shell.

 

Jessica  15:46

It’s just that old environment, like what you’re saying about employees, you know, there are the ones who want to wear the suit and come in, and that’s fine. But that’s because that’s who they are. Yeah, and you should be okay with that, if that’s what you want to do. You know, but also the same has to go for people who want to work remote, and yeah, have Thor’s hammer behind them. You know what I mean? Like, I just feel like, I’m hiring the attorney that posts dog photos. That’s something I can connect with. And yeah, I think that attorneys in particular, so before this, I was a paralegal for a couple of years. So I’ve worked around attorneys a lot. And I think the, it’s that competition with each other, you know, you got to be the best you got to put up your Super Lawyers because people won’t take you seriously. I don’t know why that idea persists.

 

Roy Sexton 16:32

So I realize it come into a room. And it’s easy for me to say I don’t need to worry about being taken seriously, because I have the latitude to have Thor’s hammer behind me. And it’s colorful, somebody else who’s coming maybe and nobody knows I’m gay unless I tell him but I tell everybody, I have the latitude to be a little more myself. And I appreciate that some of what I’m saying may not work for people who have been in marginalized groups or who have felt, I’m speaking to two women. And so I’m going to mansplain back to you the experience you’ve had my husband, I were talking about this last night, he had a colleague who posted something about I’m part of this women’s group, and I’m so grateful for their support. And my husband’s kind of manager who literally does not see gender color. He just sees talent. He’s a wonderful human being in that regard. He goes, does that do people really need those groups still, I go, honey, you’re different than everybody else. A lot of women have had to go through hell. We saw it in the “Me Too” movement, things that we never knew or heard about. It happened behind closed doors, slights that happen, the marginalization that happened. So I realize there is an element sometimes if I wear the outfit everybody else is wearing, it gives me entree to then be myself, try to help us try to break down that need in an environment. If you knew the hurdles you had to overcome to get into your role, break them down for other people don’t let that continue. Because it’s unnecessary.

 

Jessica  17:57

I want to know because I’m sure law firms now with all these changes are getting so…not frightened- that might be too strong of a word, but they’re very cautious about things in general, you know, the risk, the risk management part of that is definitely a little bit. But when it comes to how you’re doing things with marketing, you know, how are you using like numbers to show that the work you’re doing is effective? You know, how are you doing that to reassure firms that yeah, you know, the necessity of it.

 

Roy Sexton 18:32

So we use Power BI as a sort of a baseline, we’re doing a lot of analysis through what we use sprout for social media. I’m not I’m not advertising to these people. I’m just saying that’s what we use. We’re working with ALM right now sorry, on some direct advertising. And and, and that’s giving us that ability to target and figure out who we’re reaching when we’re reaching and how we’re reaching them. Were really, with the new launch of the new website and brand, we stepped up our SEO, and we’re working with a partner there that isn’t just doing the SEO for us. They’re teaching our team how to do it correctly. So we have a monthly report that we send out to the firm, that’s more anecdotal. But he always take those laps, put yourself back in front of the firm going, here’s everything that happened this month, half of them read it, we get some nasty grams too long, didn’t read fonts too small, that kind of stuff. But mostly they’re like, we’re here. And now on a weekly basis, we send another digest, like, here’s how many alerts went out. Here’s how many events. So those are your kind of leading indicators that people go, there’s some kinetics happening and social media is really helpful that way.

 

Rachel  19:31

For our next topic, we want to focus in more on what Clark Hill has been doing in recent months, like you mentioned specifically earlier that the firm, create a new brand and focused on you know, the sort of value in the culture-aspects of it. How did that process go and what can law firms learn from?

 

Roy Sexton 19:48

The pandemic served us well, it gave us more time. We had a very aggressive timeline that I don’t know that we would have hit before. It gave us more months to dig in, and really what we had done in the development of brand- we worked with One North on the brand and the website. And we had a lot of listening and learning outposts. That was important to me. And it was important to my boss. And so we had a survey of everybody in the firm, not just attorneys, and we got like an 80% response rate with like, a shortlist of questions. What do you think the brand is? What do you hear that? You know, because we were bringing a culture together too. And then we went externally, we did client interviews, what do you think of the brand? What do we do? Well, what don’t we do, we baked all that together. So we did the discovery piece of it to then move to well, What messages do we think are a reflection of who we are, and then what’s our stretch to what we want to be, and we took the time to go through that process. And then we landed on a brand, we then with the pandemic, we had the moment to step back and go, Okay, we didn’t think we’re gonna be able to go through all the content on the website like we wanted to, we do. So let’s use the Education own moment here. Rather than just marketing, go rewrite everything and put it up. We use this as an educational opportunity with our BD folks and everybody to divvy up all the bios, we had a new structure to it, we had a headline, we did that intentionally, like let’s create a structure that forces a rewrite of the BIOS. So then we had the time to do a bio project. And Alex, France and Tommy on our team, they, they set it all up, they put a video together, we went to each business unit said, This is what we’re trying to do, the voice we’re trying to capture. We got pushback, we got people that didn’t want to do it for mostly though people. And the attorneys themselves took a swing at it. We use the development of the brand and the website very collaboratively, we delegated everybody got some time in it. We worked with all the operational areas in the brain lunch, we had an extensive process. Cheryl Kravitz helped us with a timeline of HR, you’re doing this, it you’re doing this, it’s not just only marketing things, everybody gets a piece of this. And at the end of it, we had a celebration, everybody got a swag box, we wanted to make sure everybody wherever they were got a box of new branded stuff, we had a wonderful video that tells studios put together of who we are telling our story. I’m an opportunist, and I’m cheap. So I’m like, we want to do a video that will work internally. And then I can slice it up and put it externally people didn’t understand what the hell I was talking about until we did it. They were like, well, this is for we want to talk about internal things. They go no, no, just inspire people. We can have some framing stuff from our leaders, but just inspire people. And then we’ll have that out in the world. We had like 370,000 views of that video, when all was said and done. It was thrilling. And we told our story, but we took time to have everybody feel like they were part of it. So when we launched the brand, not many people had seen it. But they felt like they were part of it when they saw it. And that made all the difference with all the other random stuff that comes our way on a daily basis to do this correctly, and make it launch where you don’t have 1,000 knives in your back. Give yourself two years and really open up the process where you can have people feel like they were part of it.

 

Rachel  22:51

Yeah, I think what you’re saying how the pandemic helps move things along is not uncommon. In terms of like the interviews we’ve done so far. I think a lot of law firms have said that the pandemic really pushed them to make these changes. And these changes were something that were in the pipeline for a while, and they just forced to move forward with them because they didn’t have any other choice. So that’s sort of that sort of leads into my next question here, when you were doing this and doing this branding and all this other stuff, and you launched it, you know, what has really been the response that

 

Roy Sexton 23:25

It was overwhelming. They were minor hiccups. And what I love about my boss is just a Roy, just take a pause, it’s fine, don’t don’t catastrophize it’s gonna be fine. Just We’ll get through it. It’s not a big deal. So sometimes you gotta listen on the things that don’t matter, really like the font of that email, and give. And then you have the big win. And by God, everybody loved the stuff that mattered the brand, they were so hungry for it. They had felt included, we done enough lead up to it, they knew it was coming, they loved the look, they felt elevated, that’s what you want with a brand. They felt like the brand that they’d had and inherited. And again, these were four or five different separate firms that have come together, Clark Hill inherited an old Clark Hill brand that even Clark Hills unlike anymore, seven felt like they needed new clothes for school. They so you gave them something fresh. And the video that was embedded with all these faces from all over the country, again, my boss’s wisdom, because I was like, well, let’s just have two or three people. Let’s make this easy. And she was No, no, Roy, we got to figure out how to get to six different locations and have a lot of people interviewed. She was right. Because people saw themselves in the story. And the response we got internally was exactly what we wanted. People quieted down. Their obsession was signage and all this stuff that they were driving us all crazy because they were like, Oh, you have this in hand. It gave us the credibility and all the other things to like, Oh, you guys actually know what you’re doing? Yeah, we do. And then the external response was, like I said with the video itself had 300 I think 375,000 views and the response from people outside the firm, because lawyers will never tell you that they’ll tell you when someone Outside the firm is teasing us. But they don’t tell you when they hear the good stuff. But I know they did. I know they heard from people outside going, Wow, you guys woke up, you’re doing interesting stuff. And and that’s what we wanted. You know we’re having a record year again, many law firms are having a record year again. So I can’t chalk it up to the brand and the website necessarily, but I feel like we landed a market and brand message just when we needed it at the right time to galvanize the organization to help us move forward. With strong leadership. Our CEO has been there every step of the way and supportive he was part of the brand launch, she has reinforced the things we needed him too. He’s challenged us when we needed to be challenged. My boss has seen the long game. I’ve had an incredible team of people whenever Anderson, she I feel like I’m giving an Oscar speech came in under budget way under budget, and on time, which is unheard of, and I’m very proud of that

 

Rachel  25:51

We spoke a little earlier was the importance of diversity and creating diverse teams. Can you speak a little bit about you know, what Clark Hill has done to do that, and like why it’s important?

 

Roy Sexton 26:01

Part of the DNA of the organization, our Texas offices that came online a couple years ago, Strassburger, they had a really robust program, they called it bold thrive and pride. I think we’re sort of evolving. I think affinity groups are important, but sometimes they almost think they also do some disservice. It’s like, I feel this way, sometimes all you gay people get together and go do stuff and talk and it’s like, Well, okay, but we need to, we need to demonstrate to everyone else, we have value. But those are that we brought those in and again made them part of this launch that we had attorney leaders now, not just in Texas, but across the country who are driving those efforts. Pride is obviously for our LGBTQ community. Thrive is for people of color. And then bold is our women’s initiative. But somewhat, they’re all a bit inwardly focused, because you’re trying to provide talent, tools, resources, and commiseration to people who are in those groups that work for the firm. But we’ve also started to extend that out to say, well, what are the programmatic offerings we can provide to demonstrate we’re committed to this, the education pieces, it’s, it’s gonna sound like small potatoes, but it was a big impact. Alex France on my team, she looked at the calendar and all of the events that are important both as recognition months, as well as the holidays, based on faith and culture and all those things. And so we have a an intentional message that goes on, we have an editorial calendar against that. And we’ve also used as an engagement strategy with our HR folks. So for, for example, Asian Asian American Pacific Islanders month, we had Alex and glory pack who was with us at the time, they put together little placards, we put on our social media with a story or a video component with people in their own words. And again, we didn’t live in it to attorneys, it’s paralegals, it was office managers, it was legal assistants, anybody who was in that category, or felt strongly about that and wanted to had something to offer, we made sure we were telling their stories on our digital channels. And then we circulated that internally. Now that all feels a little window dressing, you know, to get to the substantive issues our leadership team is actively looking at, how are we recruiting? Who are we putting in what roles how are we promoting and actively assessing that data to say, you know, are we using the Mansfield rubric, we don’t have enough hear or in some cases, we’ve actually been pleasantly surprised, because I think you always feel like you’re not doing enough. And then you look at some of it, and you’re like, Oh, we’re actually we’ve been more intentionally we even realized. So Linda Watson, who’s one of our attorneys has been leading that effort with HR, and they’re relatively early in that journey. But you know, they’re taking it quite seriously. When I was in health care, we went, we did something called the Malcolm Baldrige assessment, which is a quality piece, and some people do it just to win the award, we did it to actually improve. And Clarksville is doing that same thing with Mansfield, it’s like, of course, we want the recognition. But we want to use the criteria to get better. And I’m thrilled to see that, you know, I’m not involved in it other than this communication stuff I talk about, but what I’m seeing the firm do, I’m really pleased about. So

 

Rachel  29:03

I think it’s just great to highlight those things on this podcast, I think being able to learn from what others have done and be able to apply it to actually helps make change.

 

Roy Sexton 29:12

Well, and that’s why I’ve always loved being part of LMA. I mean, I don’t know if the attorneys know this. But when we all get together we tell everybody what we’re doing. Right? Don’t do that. Well, it’s there’s what you do, and there’s how you do it. So it’s it’s always good to see what other people are doing. Because then you can take that idea and build on it. And then they can build on your idea and you just get better. You know, there’s always live in abundance, not scarcity. And so you’re right, look at what other people are doing. go think about that. We should do some of that. But let’s do it our way. Let’s take the idea and do it in our style. And then you’re not stealing from anybody so

 

Rachel  29:47

Excellent. So yeah, we’ve had a great conversation with you today. Right. We really appreciate you joining us. A special thanks to Roy Sexton from Clark Hill for joining us today.

 

Roy Sexton

Thank you for having me.


For more articles on the legal industry, visit the NLR Law Office Management section.

9 Tips for Better Email Management for Lawyers

Email management for lawyers and professionals across most industries is a constant uphill battle. In fact, the average professional spends 28 percent of the workday reading and answering emails, according to McKinsey. A lawyer has to pay special attention to their inbox because they often receive lucrative client and business information. However, they’re also overloaded with industry updates, bar association newsletters, and civic engagement emails.

For a professional who bills by the hour, sifting through hundreds of emails is not only time-consuming but unprofitable. Email can also be a distraction and inhibit effective time management.

Here are some practical tips for email management for lawyers.

  1. Take Advantage of Email Management Features and Shortcuts
  2. Use Filters to Keep Inboxes Organized
  3. Schedule Email Correspondence
  4. Priotize Emails
  5. Switch Internal Communication to Other Platforms
  6. Clear the Clutter
  7. Unsubscribe to Miscellaneous Emails
  8. Disable Social Media Notifications
  9. Embrace Legal Technology Solutions

1. Take Advantage of Email Management Features and Shortcuts

Email platforms have tons of features and shortcuts to make work more efficient and improve email management for lawyers. Unfortunately, most people don’t take the time to learn about them and use them to their fullest.

For example, Gmail has a feature that allows you to mute conversations in groups and keep them from popping up at the top of the inbox each time someone contributes. Gmail also offers task management and reporting tools to maximize efficiency.

2. Use Filters to Keep Inboxes Organized

Lawyers’ inboxes become cluttered from questions and correspondence from non-clients. For example, law firms may have an inefficient onboarding process that leads new team members to direct questions to anyone available, including lawyers.

The best way to address this is for law firms to put rules in place to ensure that emails go to the appropriate recipients – in the onboarding example, that would be the onboarding team. Inboxes can also be sorted using separate folders and filters, such as clients, bar association, and so on, to make it easy to identify high-priority emails.

3. Schedule Email Correspondence

Email provides a tempting distraction for lawyers. While waiting for an important email reply for a case, a lawyer may compulsively check email to see if it came through. That leaves them open to other distractions, such as the industry newsletter with a provocative subject line. Before they know it, hours have passed and most of it was spent scrolling the inbox.

Lawyers should designate a few times throughout the day that are for checking the inbox and responding to emails. These times can be first thing in the morning, before or after lunch, or before leaving for the day. The timing doesn’t matter as much as keeping the schedule consistent and sticking to the rule of only checking email during those scheduled periods.

4. Prioritize Emails

Email prioritization is a simple way to manage an overflowing inbox. Lawyers should divide emails into sections for emails that require follow-up, emails that can wait, and emails to archive.

Follow-up emails are emails that need responses in a timely fashion, such as client emails. These are the most important emails in an inbox and should have priority. Emails that can wait may include emails that need further work or research before a response, such as internal emails from management teams. Email archives should only have emails that are finished and require no further communication but may need to be referenced later.

5. Switch Internal Communication to Other Platforms

Inboxes can become cluttered from internal communications, which isn’t ideal for anyone at the firm. If possible, law firms should switch internal communications from email to other communication tools, such as chat tools or document review software.

This not only keeps email inboxes focused on crucial client or business correspondence, but ensures that the law firm has streamlined communication to keep everyone on the same page.

6. Clear the Clutter

Most people, not just lawyers, have a fear of hitting the “delete” button. Everyone convinces themselves that they’ll need that email in the future and it should be saved, but that just leads to an overloaded inbox that mixes important emails with internet junk mail.

Like anyone else, lawyers have emails that have been lying unattended in the inbox for months or even years. In all likelihood, the sender has forgotten about the email, yet the recipient holds onto it “just in case.”

The practical choice is for lawyers to sort through the inbox and delete any email that’s been sitting for ages, all with the intent of responding or following up someday. Any emails that are undecided can go in the archives, so they’re around if needed, but don’t take up space in the inbox.

7. Unsubscribe to Miscellaneous Emails

Lawyers get spam emails, too. If left unchecked, spam email can overtake an inbox with irrelevant promotions. Lawyers may subscribe to an email list deliberately, then no longer need the information, or accidentally while searching for information in a rush.

Ideally, lawyers will only subscribe to email lists they want to receive information from. It doesn’t always go that way, however, so lawyers should set aside time each month or every few months to identify emails that go unopened and hit the “unsubscribe” button.

8. Disable Social Media Email Notifications

Social media is a distraction in and of itself, especially with email notifications. Inboxes can become overloaded with social media notifications for every like, comment, or share, leading lawyers to not only check their inboxes but sign on to social media accounts.

None of these notifications is important to a lawyer’s workday. Many law firms have social media teams, but if they don’t, it’s more efficient to schedule time in the day or week for social media engagement and leave the rest of the time focused on priority emails.

Lawyers should log in to each social media account and deactivate email notifications, as well as any other platform that has email app notifications. This could rid an inbox of thousands of emails each month.

9. Embrace Legal Technology Solutions

Law may be a traditional industry, but legal technology options have incredible benefits for streamlining efficiency and maximizing productivity at law firms – including email.

Several tools are available to sync with email and assist with inbox management, such as solutions that integrate with Microsoft Outlook, Gmail, and MailChimp to sync emails, view contact information, and create tasks.

Make Email Management for Lawyers Simple

Email can be a significant distraction and time waste for lawyers and law firms, but many technology tools are available to help. PracticePanther helps lawyers stay on track with automation tools and relevant app integrations to prioritize client emails, create new contacts, and manage tasks to keep your practice organized.

© Copyright 2021 PracticePanther

Article By PracticePanther

For more articles on legal technology, visit the NLRLaw Office Management section.

Content Management & Technical SEO with John McDougall [PODCAST]

Skeptical of your marketing efforts and wonder if all that work is really worth it? Rachel and Jessica get some great background on SEO from John McDougall, President of McDougall Interactive. Spoiler alert: good SEO practices can catapult your business to the next level.

Read on below for a transcribed version of our conversation, created by AI. The transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and readability.

INTRO  00:02

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

Rachel  00:15

I’m Rachel, the Editorial Manager for the National Law Review.

Jessica  00:18

And I’m Jessica, a web content specialist for the National Law Review. And we’re the co-hosts for Legal News Reach.

Rachel  00:25

In this episode, we’re excited to talk to John McDougall, president of McDougall Interactive. John, would you like to introduce yourself to our listeners?

John McDougall  00:32

Yeah, sure. So welcome, everyone, and appreciate the opportunity to talk to you guys today. And I started in 95 at my father’s ad agency selling websites. So I kind of fell in love with it early on and have been doing SEO ever since. So now, I just started a class called Talk Marketing. In addition to the agency, McDougall Interactive, we do coaching and teaching.

Rachel  01:18

Excellent, we’re excited to get your perspective on SEO. So just sort of moving into our first topic here, with how much Google’s has changed, and how much people’s habits with, you know, searching tends to change, why is it so hard to do SEO now?

John McDougall  01:34

Oh, it’s just so much to do. I mean, it’s like you need a small army to do it, you need organizational skills, and early SEO, you could just fly around and go to some conferences and do some, you know, pull it off yourself. I don’t know, somewhere in the 90s, I made a hearing aid website over a weekend I did the logo, design, the website, built it and hand coded in HTML, wrote the pages for different brands of hearing aids, and launched it over the weekend. And then it was ranking and Yahoo, like number one for hearing aids, and then a company bought my client. And then I started working for that company. So it was that easy, almost back in the day. And now, I mean, my God, we’ll get into it more as we go here. But there are just 1000 different things that can influence your SEO.

Rachel  02:23

So moving more into legal industry specifics, is there a different approach for different types of law firms? So personal injury, or maybe more business-oriented law firms in terms of like website marketing?

John McDougall  02:37

I don’t have to sell a personal injury attorney on the idea of SEO, right, they’re there, they know that their customers are out there searching, you know, if you get bit by a dog or injured by a dangerous drug or medical device, you don’t necessarily even want to ask someone for a referral, if it’s embarrassing. Or if you’re in a rush, or you know, whatever it is. So you’re going to search Google, it’s a no brainer. On the other side, with business lawyers, there are some very big companies that, you know, business attorneys will say they’re just not going to search Google for me. And that may be true, but later they tell you, but if they do search for this certain niche kind of thing, I’d like my thought leadership content to be there at the top of Google. So ironically, I think that sometimes having good content that search optimized is maybe not as important as the obvious thing with personal injury, like I said, but pretty close to similar importance, right? So if it’s intellectual property, or international law, different things that are really important, if you’re going to impress the General Counsel, or some really high level people, they might want to see that you’re in search, not just in conversations with them and, and even if it’s not so much, they’re searching Google, when they get to your site, there should be an active, either a blog on your site, or separate off site blogs on niche topics that really just show highlight your thought leadership. So my argument would be if you if you have to do that anyway, because you want to show your thought leadership, at least put some effort into a fast loading website, good title and meta tags, consistent content, if weekly, if not, at least monthly. So some of the same things that you would tell a personal injury lawyer really do apply to business lawyers just at a slightly less exaggerated pace. You might not go out and do link building or like you probably will do PR but maybe not PR for link building like you would with personal injury potentially. A lot of spreading your thought leadership content should involve good quality content that is optimized for the internet. You know that a lot of that is his research some of its or social media. But, you know, so a lot of the same rules apply at different levels of exaggeration,

Rachel  05:10

Right. And so once lawyers really get their feet into creating this really great content and optimizing SEO, how do they then keep up with all the changes that Google makes to its algorithm?

John McDougall  05:23

They have to either hire an agency who keeps up with it, or to help them and spoon feed what’s most important to them? That would be one way. The other way, if they’re going to be more do it yourselfers or the marketing department wants to keep up. I just have to keep reading things like search engine land Search Engine Journal, you know, HubSpot blog, things like that, you’re going to really need to keep up. And an agency has the benefit of testing across lots of sites. So for as an example, in 2012, I had 27 clients or something like that. And Google Penguin hit, which was an algorithm, Google designed to discredit low quality links. One day, I was looking at my ranks, and I said, Geez, this doesn’t look good. Something’s going on here. And I asked a guy that was a subcontractor of mine, he said, No, I’m not seeing anything unusual. He’s like, wait a minute, let me call you back. He goes and looks at his rankings across, he had hundreds of clients, he had a lower price point and the strategy of more clients, and he said, Oh, crap, we’re seeing like, significant drops consistently across all clients, it turned out that Google had just dropped the bomb of Google Penguin on people. And I think, later, they maybe regretted it, I’d like to think that they went too fast with it. So, you know, by having multiple clients, and asking a subcontractor to read lots of clients, we were able to see that this is not a made up trend. This is not my imagination, you know, this is how we’re keeping up with trends is networking with peers. And then of course, it broke within hours or days on search engine, journal, and Search Engine Land and things. But we were we were seeing it in multiple clients’ data. So if you’re a law firm, you have one site, just be aware of that, that, you know, you should be looking to others that have multiple clients are certainly at least the top, you know, SEO media magazine sites online, and you so that you can see what the trends are.

John McDougall  07:35

I think an editorial calendar is key. At the National Law Review, you have huge amounts of content, but you need to think like a magazine/ And if you don’t, you won’t be consistent. So that’s at the heart of it. And then find ways to either the attorneys involved, or the agency involved with the attorneys to generate content around topics. And we can get into that more in a minute.

Jessica  08:13

We were going to ask you about each social media type, mostly because so many law firms now are realizing if they didn’t before, which they probably didn’t. But I think law firms and clients in general are realizing we can make the internet and like social media work for us. And they’re paying attention to what those numbers mean now. So I want to know, you know, I want to tack each type that we’re seeing more common output with so like podcasts. How does that help with SEO?

John McDougall  08:42

Yeah. And so I would tie that again, back into the last question, because I think it’s critical that people understand that you can do s SEO driven content through podcasting, and video, if you’re not using transcripts, for your podcasts in your videos, you just probably not getting as much mileage as you could. And a lot of people will make like a show note for your podcast. And that’s good, you know, a little couple paragraphs or something in this episode, you’ll see this in some bullet points. But in addition to that, having the transcript as an option, you can even make it so it can disappear and appear on the page. So the search engines can still read it. But having content with attorneys that are thought leaders isn’t always easy to get with having them write, you know, some of them are going to be rock stars they’re going to write, some of them just aren’t. And you might have categories that well, the intellectual property lawyer is writing just fine. But the international law or whatever law is the person’s amazing speaker but a terrible writer are just lazy or just doesn’t have time to write whatever it is. If you want SEO and consistent content, you can just do shorter ones, because every minute of podcasting, we get 130 words, even a 10 minute, say 12 minute podcast, you can get like 1500 words, that’s a really robust, deep piece of content. And the attorneys just talking, you know, they do that all the time, they’re good at it. So if your marketing team handles that, and just knocks those out to be consistent, you got to let go a little bit. And maybe occasionally do the half hour, the hour podcast, you’re gonna get a lot of consistent content, then you can turn some of that into short YouTube videos, or do remote YouTube videos, or in person YouTube videos that are like a minute, two minutes, you know, what is this particular law? You know, What is Brexit, even, you know, cover some of the things that if you’re a search engine algorithm, it’s going to be good to see on your website that you dispute, you know, ask the question, like, What is Brexit? Maybe somebody on their into Amazon Alexa, or Google Home is like, hey, Alexa, What is Brexit? So if you’re going to cover all of the gamuts of the way people are asking questions, you’re going to need lots of content. And if you’re waiting around for, you know, attorneys to write that aren’t necessarily writers. Sometimes it works great.

Jessica  12:12

It’s really interesting that you mentioned podcasting and combining video with that, because that’s what we are doing. But it’s also like having the transcript for a podcast episode is the web content accessibility guideline that you’re supposed to have on a website, you’re usually supposed to have to be ADA compliant. Yeah. So it’s it to know it helps SEO is always good. So I’m sure would tell people listening to this, that, hey, that extra work actually does help you and you know, the people who need to access your site.

John McDougall  12:45

Yeah. So exactly like all this just for SEO, it’s a big pain in the butt. All of your content should have an alternative version, even an image should have as you hover over it an alt tag. And that was true in the 90s, and I think it’s part of the future of SEO and it’s been there and you really can’t ignore it anymore.

Jessica  13:55

I think the pandemic especially made that very loud realization for so many people, not just the compliance part of a website, also, just with this SEO, all these numbers and tactics you have to use now on your site, because that’s where people are going. I mean, when the pandemic happened, you weren’t going into a place you were going to their site. So how has SEO changed? Besides like those couple of things? Are there any other characteristics you’ve noticed since the past year? So

John McDougall  14:25

I’d say the competition level is huge because of the pandemic. My father who had the ad agency, sent me an article six months or a year ago, the Wall Street Journal said that essentially the Mad Men era is done, exacerbated by  SEO and Google ads. More and more important, I think podcast ads have taken over more than radio ads after the pandemic. It’s like the nail in the coffin. Now, most of advertising is controlled by the big Google, Facebook, Amazon for products, right? Because Amazon’s basically a search engine for the products. So those three alone, I mean, Google’s top five company and, you know, the old control that ad agencies had is basically gone. The Wall Street Journal saying basically, advertising is controlled by digital now. And what does that mean? That means there’s a crazy amount of competition. So if you’re doing SEO, like I was a long time ago, the hearing aids just cram it into the title and meta tags. And throughout the page, you’re done. You know, that’s not the case anymore. Now, type in something like Phone X, hearing aids or series, Siemens hearing aids online or something, and then see the page that ranks what is there, and it’s probably, you know, God knows how many SEO agencies have helped hearing aid companies make like the ultimate page, the ultimate guide to hearing aids, you know, this, like 10,000 word article? That’s, that’s a big change. And, you know, we can go in more into some of the specifics. But that’s more broadly, what I think is changed as competition is up, and it’s not going away anytime soon. I mean, what are you guys seeing with SEO? Overall? Are you seeing big changes? Or it’s harder than ever? What are you seeing?

Rachel  16:43

I would say, probably one of the biggest things that we’ve seen make an impact in terms of like our clients content, when we see things do particularly well, it’s that they have, you know, really great keywords. So, you know, headers posed as questions, the articles are long, so they have like about 1200 words. Timeliness also seems to be a big contributing factor to content success. So if it comes to us, you know, around noon, rather than like, 5pm, on a Friday, those articles tend to do way better than ones that are short, you know, that don’t have like, you know, really great bullet points, really great formatting. I think in terms of people who are looking to sort of do well on our website, and things like that, it’s important to make your content really great for search engines. So you know, and also really readable for people. Yeah, so having really great headers, you know, thinking about what people who want to find your expertise, like what are they want to know about, and including that in your headers and things like that.

Jessica  17:53

Definitely, that content competition is huge. Now, I mean, we already get a lot of content just because we have so many clients that we want to, you know, put out their information. You know, if we have a Supreme Court decision, that’s huge. I mean, we’ll get like multiple pieces on the same thing. And it’s kind of a game of like, who the slightest difference in formatting or word choices, keyword choices can really like make some articles do really well, as far as viewership just staying on the page and not bouncing versus other pages that for some reason, even on the same topic, maybe you just didn’t quite do the same level, you know, not as many views.

John McDougall  18:32

Historically, SEO people like myself will be more focused on the backlinks than on the social shares. Sometimes one helps the other. So one of my best case studies, we wrote an article for a bank, and it got on to NerdWallet. NerdWallet interviewed us to link to the content. But it was all started with just sharing it on Twitter and Facebook. So we were we were sharing the content. We were doing social media, but we weren’t holding our breath for to do that much except hoping we would get some people to link to the content. And we got backlinks from NerdWallet, which is like a massive financial website with a huge amount of credibility. Another one was lobsters, we ranked number two in Google for the single word lobsters. And I wrote an article because I have lobster traps and do fishing and things. And so I wrote an article 100 Fun Facts About lobsters and it got shared by the Huffington Post and a bunch of places no, suddenly, this little restaurant near me got hundreds of 1000s of views on a, you know, a silly page about lobsters with some historic photos and, you know, these crazy facts. Sometimes we’ll use social media to get links, you know, just getting the visibility out there and I agree that you know, if you can get it out there faster, you’re more likely to get all that to happen.  And you can look at your top pages and look by top pages by social shares and top pages by backlinks. So I would just recommend to the audience and you guys, if you’re not doing it, check out where you rank in search. Are you like number four, or five, or God forbid, number six, because Top Five is where I forget, it’s like 67% of the eyeballs go, used to be want to be top 10 In Google. Now, really, top five is key. And a number one, of course, gets, you know, a huge amount of the lion’s share of eyeballs and clicks, you get a lot of leads, do you think from social media? Or is that part of the process?

Rachel  20:53

The vast majority of our traffic does come from SEO and from Google. But we definitely see a connection between the social outreach that we do we have a pretty robust social media strategy and process where we try to, you know, use certain hashtags that are relevant, and also tagging specific people who we think would find the content to be specifically interesting to them. Social is definitely a big part of it. But it’s sort of like the larger picture of it’s just one of the things that we do, I think SEO is more important, but I think social kind of can tie in SEO in a way that the relevant people are finding it on a different channel

John McDougall  21:32

One of the things I speak to and I’ve done this with Jennifer, actually on a webinar is the seven main factors of SEO that I believe people need to think about, like technical SEO, which is a really a booming trend right now, a fast loading website is going to rank way better than a slow loading website. Because even if you do everything right, SEO wise, if it’s slow loading, Google is not going to give you as good a ranking. Number one is technical SEO – you can’t have too many broken links, no duplicate titles, and meta descriptions all over the place. And it’s not like it used to be, but it’s still on page SEO, and then content, fresh content, blogging, content, depth of content is important. And then off page SEO, or what we call link building, which is essentially PR. You need to get media sites or even small blogs, to link to you and link to individual pages. And then number four is user signals, and user experience. And then user signals are more like if you search Google for, you know, personal injury lawyer Boston. Seven is branding. So instead of just doing SEO, law firms should really be building a brand that’s known for something. And you guys are known in at least if you look at your backlinks and your social shares, again, Brexit, I think it was constitutional amendments, you guys get a lot of backlinks for that. So build your brand and be known for something and then have some content that you really stand out for. That is more the future of SEO is you can’t just do SEO, ironically, you need to be part of a brand.

Jessica  24:08

The purpose of SEO and those tactics are good for people, because I think it makes the content more relevant. I think it makes things on the internet more valuable to people who need it. You know, everybody goes on the internet for information now. And now companies and websites are forced to make sure that they’re actually valuable. They’re not just filled with links for no reason and, you know, short little things that aren’t going to help someone so I think yeah, I don’t know if everybody agrees with that. But I think it actually makes it better for the audience that’s reading it and going to your site anyway. Personally, I think it’s good

John McDougall  24:42

 Google is better at enforcing those things now. So that was sort of the goal always with the Internet. But because we could just game the system, you know, certainly low end SEO companies back in the day, just get crappy links build stupid pages that meant nothing. Those tactics should be dead. Unfortunately, it’s like, wow, no, it’s so hard. Like you didn’t have to go that far. Take some of those TV dollars or, or print dollars or event dollars. And actually, whether you pay agencies or do it internally, really train up and do it right. There’s a lot of proven workflows for this stuff. You just have to trust the three of us and other people doing this stuff, are people we’re not just making stuff up, you know, where we’re doing all those things we just discussed, and it takes time, each one of them. Add snippets to the site, you know, go into figure out Google Analytics for you know, use Google Search Console every week, you know, use SEMRush to use a draft. All this stuff is more time consuming now, but I like it. I think it’s more developed. It’s, you know, you have to be more aggressive. It’s not as easy. I mean, there’s certainly a lot to do. So. That’s the good news is, there’s stuff to do that does work if you keep at it. But yeah, if you’re not consistent, it’s never going to work. You get those social shares and even sometimes backlinks from very relevant partners or related people and Google can’t miss that, you know. So yeah, it’s all a win win. Yeah, I could go off way off on that one. But sounds like you guys are really doing the right thing with it and repurposing that content.

Rachel  26:32

Yeah. It’s been a lot of fun. And we’ve had a great conversation with you, John, thank you so much for joining us.

Copyright ©2021 National Law Forum, LLC

For more articles on legal marketing, visit the NLRLaw Office Management section.

11 Ways to Tap into the Legal Market’s Greenfield

A survey conducted in 2019 determined that nearly 80% of Americans with a legal issue didn’t hire a lawyer to handle it. When you consider that over 50% of people in the US claim to have had a legal issue at some point over the last two years, you’re looking at a considerable amount of potential clients. In other words, there is an enormous array of people who need lawyers who simply aren’t hiring one.

The secret to tapping into this greenfield dormant legal market is knowing the reasons behind their aversion to lawyers. By understanding the reasons behind people’s hesitancy to pay for legal services, you can attempt to better appeal to them, and tap into a huge pool of potential clients.

Why People Are Hesitant To Hire Lawyers:

!Price

The first and most obvious reason why people are hesitant to hire a lawyer is the price tag attached to them. Considering the majority of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck, it’s not surprising that paying between $100 and $400 an hour for a lawyer (or more) is a stretch for their wallets.

Even “simple” legal cases can cost thousands of dollars, and more complex ones can be financially detrimental for a cash-strapped client. Although many lawyers are starting to move towards a flat-fee pricing system that delivers an upfront summary of costs rather than wondering how much your case will all add up, a lot of people still aren’t biting.

It’s time for lawyers to start asking themselves how they can transform the way they deliver and price their legal services to tap into this untapped world of would-be clients.

!Lack of Transparency

Ever heard the joke, “what’s the difference between a vacuum cleaner and a lawyer riding a motorcycle?” — “The vacuum cleaner has the dirtbag on the inside.” This is just one of the many zingers out there about lawyers. It’s no secret that many swindling lawyers have made it hard for the honest ones in the profession. Now, lawyers have to defend themselves against lousy reputations for lack of transparency about their prices.

That’s why it’s incredibly important that you lay out your pricing system from day one. Be clear about your prices, and you’ll save you and your client a world of trouble later on.

!Bad Past Experiences

Another frequent reason for the untapped legal market not hiring lawyers is because many people have had bad experiences with a lawyer in the past. Surprisingly, people’s biggest reason for a negative experience is often because they felt their lawyers were very bad at communication. Believe it or not, a positive client experience doesn’t always come down to their lawyer winning their case or not. Clients often just want to be informed on their case and answered in a timely manner when they have a question.

That means there are people out there thrilled with their lawyers and their lawyers didn’t even give them the best possible outcome on their case. Ultimately, what people want is a positive client journey. Yet, without a systematic method in place, it can be hard to deliver the kind of service that people want.

The only way to convince people that not all lawyers are bad is to get things started on the right foot. Using legal client intake software is the only way to respond quickly when you’re handling multiple cases at a time. Workflow automation for law firms makes your clients feel connected to you from the first moment they reach out. Legal client intake software allows you to set up trigger-based emails that automatically send a message out based on an action of your choosing. The end result is satisfied clients who feel as if they’re your only client.

©2021 — Lawmatics

Article by Sarah Bottorff with Lawmatics.
For more articles about the legal market, visit the NLR Business of Law section.

Top Storytelling Techniques Lawyers Need to Use in Their Marketing

In the past, marketing and advertising strategies were all about showing your ideal clients why your law firm was the one to choose. Every ad and marketing plan was focused on framing the law firm or the attorney as the hero of the story: “Let us step in and save the day!”

The problem is, your clients do not need a hero. They are the hero of their story. And law firms and attorneys across the country are only beginning to see how storytelling is going to be an integral part of their content marketing and digital marketing strategies going forward.

It’s all about relating to your ideal client and giving them the information that they really need to make decisions that work best for their family. It sounds a lot more complicated than it is. But there are several techniques that you can use to make sure that your marketing is telling compelling stories that are going to guide your ideal client to the decision that your law firm is the one that is going to help them achieve their goal.

Tip 1: Focus on Making Your Client the Hero

One of the biggest mistakes law firms are making in their marketing strategies is making themselves the hero at the expense of what the client really needs. Traditional marketing has told law firms to sell their accomplishments and achievements. Listing reason after we reason for why this law firm was the right one for that particular client. Are you bored? So is your client. And chances are, if your readers are bored, they are not going to convert into clients.

With that in mind, you need to tell stories in a way that grabs their attention and helps them see that they are the hero in their story. Instead of talking about all of your law firm’s achievements, you should be relating to your clients. What services are you providing to them that allow them to fix their legal issues and come out on top?

Leading with a firm first approach isn’t likely to be successful in today’s age. These days, your clients know that they are the hero, and they are not going to choose a law firm that they feel like they have to compete with.

Tip 2: Frame Yourself as the Guide

You still need to be able to explain to your clients in all of your different marketing strategies why your law firm is better than the competition. But you can do this in a way that does not come across as you are showing off or attempting to put the spotlight on your law firm’s biggest case results, settlements, victories, and achievements.

Instead, you should frame yourself as the guide. This is the concept of the Storybrand by Donald Miller, where the service provider is the guide who helps the client (the hero) find a solution to fix their problem. Make sure that your marketing materials are framed in a way that sets your law firm up to be the guide that will help the hero solve their problem.

Tip 3: Solve Your Ideal Client’s Pain Points

It sounds easy. Writing content and developing marketing materials that make you the guide and the reader the hero. Check. If only it were that easy. Unfortunately, developing these types of storybranded materials can be challenging. There is a fine line between showcasing the benefits of working with your firm and showing the reader how you can solve their problems. Many law firms miss the mark, and it costs them clients.

If you want to get it right, make sure you start off by thinking about the biggest pain points your client is experiencing with their legal issue. How high are their costs? Are they experiencing substantial economic and non-economic losses? Are they at risk for going to prison? Do they have complex legal issues they do not understand? These questions become more and more specific depending on the type of practice area you are in and the type of content materials that you are developing. By addressing your ideal client pain points, you can show them how your law firm will provide them with the tools they need to fix their legal issues.

Make sure to keep your content short and to the point across the board. Most readers do not have the time, patience, or inclination to read more than one or two lines. The first line should describe their pain point. The second line should describe how your solution fixes their problem. If you do it right, that is all you will need to get your prospective client to pick up the phone or fill out your website’s contact form.

Start Storytelling With Your Law Firm’s Marketing Strategies

Storytelling and storybranding are the future for law for content marketing. Gone are the days where clients chose law firms based on their achievements and successes. All lawyers are successful in the eyes of a potential client, figuratively speaking. What your clients care about is how you are going to help them solve their issue. They couldn’t care less what college you graduated from, what your Avvo rating is, or all of that volunteer work you put in while you were working for the County Clerk’s office.

You can still use these credentials and accomplishments as benefits that you provide to clients in need. But you need to be sure to do so in a way that still frames the client as the hero. How specifically does your accomplishment help them help themselves?

You need to be very careful to produce content that answers this question carefully. If you miss the mark and make yourself a hero, you have probably lost a potential client. But, if you can clearly answer this question and provide your prospective clients with the information they are looking for, at a glance, you are more likely to generate the leads you hoped to see online.

© 2021 Denver Legal Marketing LLC

For more articles on legal marketing, visit the NLR Law Office Management section

Social Media, Content Management & Networking with Stefanie Marrone [PODCAST]

The pandemic forced the legal industry to rely on social media. So, where do you start? Rachel and Jessica discuss the best practices with Stefanie Marrone, Founder and CEO of Stefanie Marrone Consulting/The Social Media Butterfly. Be sure to also check out her “Women Who Wow” series.

Read on below for a transcript of our conversation, transcribed by AI:

Rachel

In this episode, we’re excited to talk to Stefanie Marrone, founder and CEO of Stephanie Marrone Consulting and the Social Media Butterfly. Stefanie, would you like to introduce yourself to our listeners?

Stefanie

Yeah, sure. Thanks, guys for having me on. I’m Stephanie Marrone. I have worked with law firms and at law firms for over 20 years . And then about two years ago, I went and started my own business where I’m a consultant to law firms and other companies in the legal industry. And I help them with everything under the sun marketing related and then also with a focus on social media. And I live in New York with my two French bulldog puppies, who will definitely make an appearance today, as I warned you guys before we started recording.

Rachel

Great, we’re excited to get more of your insights here on social media and content creation. So one of the main topics that we want to focus on today, and it’s been sort of a through line in our whole first season here is sort of trends in the legal industry and adjusting to COVID-19. So I was wondering if you could start off by talking a little bit about the trends you’re currently seeing in the legal market today.

Stefanie

What they’re talking about the entire world right now is  the great resignation. There are lots of people leaving their jobs and going to work other places where there is more flexibility, where there’s more work life balance, and that has created a huge problem for law firms of every single size. So I guess it’s a lot of different things, right, the industry was forced to innovate as a result of COVID. They were innovating when it came to how they did business with their clients, and technology became front and center. The work was sort of stagnant for a little bit, and people are nervous to hire, but now they’re back in full swing. And they’re having a lot of trouble. I’m actually working with a number of law firms on recruiting marketing strategies, for the first time in a very long time. Again, because it’s a candidates market, there’s so much content out there. But then they saw it as an opportunity later on. Any lawyer who said I’m just going to take my clients to golf or go out to dinner, or you’re still going to have trouble doing that, because a lot of people are not ready. It’s basically we’re in a new frontier we are talking about the last two years have been like pivoting every single thing you thought you knew and that you were doing, you had to like make a sharp, right, and then a sharp left right afterward, and you went off the grid because the GPS didn’t even have those roads on the map. Right. So it’s been a crazy time over the last 18 months and firms that don’t get it are behind the times. Any firm is requiring you to go back to the office every day is going to have a really tough time getting their people to be excited about working.

Rachel

Right. And yeah, I think one of the interesting things that we’ve heard so far in doing these interviews is the COVID-19 pandemic was like a catalyst to get law firms to change and do a lot of the things that people probably wanted for a really long time, specifically remote work, probably a better work life balance, things like that. You mentioned briefly like working with law firms to come up with sort of recruiting marketing. What does that look like? Like how are firms trying to differentiate themselves and really stand out compared to others right now.

Stefanie

My very first job in legal marketing was working at always Rifkind, Wharton and Garrison and my job was to start their alumni relations program and to help them with recruiting marketing, one of the programs we did was to interview lawyers and find out why we’re getting a candidate in the door, but we’re not closing the deal, or they’re choosing another firm. And what we found was it was a lot of things, it was behavioral issues in terms of interviewing, it was making the candidates feel important. It was the way they were selling the firm, so to speak, you know, communicating what it’s like to work here, full circle. 20 years later. Now I’m getting asked by law firms to help them do exactly what I did 20 years ago, which was to help them tell the story of their firm why of recruits to join the firm, how to promote their wins without sounding too boastful, which is something I tell people all the time you know, you don’t want to put all of your awards everywhere. Candidates don’t care about that. They don’t care about the work. They care about the mentoring, they care about the work life balance, and not everybody wants to make partner anymore. The other one is millennials, I learned so much from millennials. Because I, I grew up in a different generation and their needs and wants are different. So one of the things I’m doing is looking at the materials on the website crafting language that speaks to recruits directly instead of legalese. One of the things I’m working on is like a Glassdoor strategy for one firm, where, you know, we’re saying that listen, employees now have a voice, you can’t just treat everyone poorly and expect that no one’s gonna find out about it, we have checks and balances now, and people are more empowered than they’ve ever been before. So making sure you know, your Glassdoor is okay. And that, you know, it’s not just Glassdoor, there’s obviously Indeed there’s Chambers and there’s other places, but making sure that you’re putting your best foot forward everywhere, and that you’re thinking strategically about how to market yourself to these different audiences. And so I hope that helps, but it’s not enough to have that great name on the door anymore. If people know you to not be a great place to work or not have a great culture, you’re going to have to work harder to get those people to either want to come work for you or stay. Because a lot of firms are losing a lot of their lawyers right now, in this great resignation time and they’re going to where the grass is greener. The firms have to actually spend time retaining their talent. And that’s another thing that I work on in terms of helping them come up with strategies for development for associates and development for other people who may be in danger of leaving. It’s a whole new world, guys.

Rachel

Right. And I think that’s really interesting. You bring up sites like Glassdoor, and Indeed because, like, if you are in the job market, you’re looking to apply a place that already has terrible reviews, that’s people getting turned away before they even apply.

Stefanie

Gone are the days when all that was out there was what the what the firm was saying about themselves or the organization. But now, you have to actually stand by what you say you are, you have to be that kind of place. People only write reviews when they’re really, really happy or really, really, really angry. I work on our alumni relations programs, which is like that full lifecycle of an associate from the time, you know, from recruiting to the time they’re there to then they leave. And so many law firms don’t have a very strong alumni relations program, or they don’t think about it, even people who they’ve  let go or ask to find another job, it doesn’t always work out, it’s okay. But don’t exclude them from the Alumni Program, include them, you want them to be part of the community, you never know who’s going to be a potential recruit of client return to you or bad mouth you out there. So you know, we want to leave people with a feeling of respect even when it doesn’t work out.

Rachel

Right. And that sort of plays into what I want to ask next is sort of like that overarching idea of a firm’s marketing efforts, like their branding, things like that, and how that’s been sort of impacted by COVID 19. So how can attorneys and firms really keep up with their marketing during this time? Like, how can they launch like these, you know, efforts to build their alumni relations and things like that?

Stefanie

Yeah, so one of the things I was seeing in the beginning when COVID had just hit was every firm was doing the exact same thing. They launched a Coronavirus Resource Center, I think I actually counted, it was like 30, something law firms had the exact same name for their resource section. And most of them were using the same stock images. It was that, you know, red and black photo of the COVID cell structure. And they would put that on their website, and then all their materials. And all that did was scare the crap out of everybody. Right? So and you see that same image online as well. So I was just say, I was saying to firms, like, differentiate yourself, be different. Be pivot, be understanding, be empathetic to your clients, and your recruits. And anybody who’s out there, let’s not rely on email. I don’t know about you guys. But I never used Zoom before COVID and I grew up in a law firm environment. And tech was not necessarily always like yet the front and center. So it required us to all adapt and innovate. And there were a lot of people who fought it tooth and nail, but still did it. So I guess my  thought was that COVID change everything. It forced us to be more human. I think we shed a lot of the formalities. I think we needed to innovate, we were forced to do it. I think the firms that are still putting out content without thinking that habits have changed. We’re on our mobile devices more, and law firms have to pivot to that. If you’re not using LinkedIn, you’re way behind the times and you need to use it now. So social is such a big part of your strategy as a lawyer and then also as a firm. One thing that happened a lot During COVID, where people were doing webinars, and they realized that they didn’t necessarily have to give CLE credit or be accredited to do it, the people just wanted to get together and learn about different issues. So I see firms doing that, and I’m so happy they’re doing it, but I don’t see them maximizing their webinars. So they’ll do a webinar one, they won’t take the recording from the webinar, and then have that transcribed and then it becomes a client alert, or, you know, an article that they can place in a third party publication. They don’t use it for social media posts. It’s what I call one and done and they it just goes into like, disappears into thin air. So I guess I still see law firms need help in terms of maximizing their content assets and using them more efficiently and more effectively.

And I think, you know, it’s sort of like work smarter, not harder. Why not repurpose it, you know, make your content work harder and smarter for you is something I literally say once a day.

Jess

Yeah, so you sort of touched upon just how much COVID has changed everything. And you spoke a little bit about webinars, and that was a way for people to sort of stay connected. Are there any other ways that attorneys and law firms in general can build their brands of business as well?  Social distancing is still on people’s minds.

Stefanie

LinkedIn is so important. I think for the majority of lawyers and law firms, it’s going to be LinkedIn where 750 plus million people gather for Business Networking and Information. So if you’re not on LinkedIn, you should get on LinkedIn, you should build a strong profile. The profile should have keywords that describe what you do, how you do, and for whom you do it. So I say there are three building blocks of LinkedIn. One is your profile. So get that completely done and optimize the bio, don’t put like Mr. Smith is, blah, blah, blah, and don’t brag about all your awards. Number two are your connections, a lot of people just sit and wait for people to come to them and connect with them. And it’s a two way street. So you should be actively thinking about who you know, from different walks of life from your path, the more people in your network, the stronger your network will be for when you want to do number three, which is post content. And that’s where I find most lawyers fall short, they don’t know what to do or how to do it. And it makes a huge difference. There’s only 1% of people globally using LinkedIn who actively create content. So there’s a huge opportunity. And lawyers aren’t, in my opinion taking advantage of it, or when they do they sound just like everybody else. So I want to encourage them to do more of that. And if they don’t know what to share, they could go to their company page and share from there, there are a lot of lawyers in the world to anything you can do to remain top of mind with touch points that are useful, that are authentic, and that are, you know, meaningful is important. So that’s why content helps. So I tell people all the time, you know, they’ll ask me, you know, how do I get better ranked in Google? And how do I build my brand? Start writing. You guys know this because of what you guys do. But most people don’t follow your blog, you have to push out the content to people, most people don’t follow your client alerts. This is why we have social media, email marketing, content, syndicators, like what you guys do, and a whole host of other tools that most lawyers don’t realize, like what’s going on behind the scenes. So you can write a great piece of content. But if you don’t promote it effectively and efficiently, it doesn’t matter, no one will see it. You know, if you’re thinking about going back to quote unquote, normal, you’re thinking about it all wrong. Firms, like get that and use content and use webinars. And then, of course, meet with your clients in person. There’s no substitution for that. But this world is not going back to the way it was we will be using social we will be using content marketing more. And I hope that lawyers realize that and firms realize it and then firms do more to promote those things and encourage their people to do those things.

Jess

So you’ve got all this experience in the legal industry, so many years trying to get people all the tools they need with social media content. Can you tell me about Women Who Wow, and why you started that?

Stefanie

So Women Who Wow is a group that I started, it’s actually just supposed to be for women’s history month in March 2020. And I started it before the pandemic and then the pandemic happened, I kept getting recommendations for other women and the series took on a life of its own and so, Women Who Wow became an ongoing series featuring women mostly in the legal industry, giving their ideas and their thoughts and advice on their careers and how they’ve gotten to where they are advice that they would give their younger selves. You know, I really felt like there was a void in the industry for something like this. I thought we needed something where women could spotlighted and celebrated without expecting anything in return. I have over 100 people so far profiled, and it keeps going. And then that sort of started, you know, from the series, then we created events, and they’re all free. And they are various events, learning from women. So it’s various different advice from career advice, to even just kind of finding more balance in your life. And everyone and anyone is welcome. And so it’s been great to build community at a time when I felt so isolated. I think no matter where you are in your career, there’s something for you. It’s just a great way to network. I love this series. And it’s meant a lot to me to find community and to support other women.

Jess

And I think that’s so great, because the legal industry on its head seems to be more maybe male dominated as an industry. So bringing women together for different professional topics, I think could be really beneficial. Is that similar to why you started it? Like kind of your thinking behind it?

Stefanie

Yeah, absolutely. So when you work at a law firm, there’s a lot of class differentials, right. There’s staff, people like me, the marketing person, and then there’s the attorneys. And very often there are benefits given to the attorneys that aren’t necessarily always given to the staff, and there still is a hierarchy at law firms. I also know that there’s a lot of disparity between women in law making partner than men, it is harder for women to make law of make partner from the day they step into the door of a law firm, they are automatically at a disadvantage. And research backs me up. I spoke on a panel on this recently. And essentially, it’s for a number of reasons. They’re not part of the old boys club, there are more men, and it is harder for women to adjust it to balance everything because the sometimes very often the onus of childcare and all that stuff, falls on women. And so they wind up leaving, they don’t make partner they go and they go in house to go to smaller firms, or they leave the industry entirely completely sort of like discouraged by what happened. And so, yes, and my idea was that women can learn so much from each other. So in terms of like talking about, you know, how you find balance, or how you’ve made it work, or to not be so hard on yourself, or what are your success tips. That is what I wanted people to be able to share with each other.

Jess

And I think that was perfect timing on your part, building a community like that, when that pandemic started, we were already feeling very isolated. And then, you know, I’m sure there are, you know, just like women and other groups of people probably always have that sense of slight isolation in like an industry that they work in. So I like that that’s, you know, why brought them together and showcased a lot of people who have knowledge to share, what would you say to people who maybe don’t have that support, or would like that same support?

Stefanie

So I would say build a community, right? So I was missing it, I needed it, I created it. And I wanted to learn from these women. Join the Women Who Wow, it’s open to everybody. It’s free. Like I said, and I would say, you know, if you’re at a firm, surround yourself with people, either in person or online, who are supporters and your cheerleaders and find a mentor, and sometimes it’s not organic, sometimes you need to go actively find one. Sometimes it’s not just one mentor. Sometimes it’s multiple people who provide advice to you in different areas, but they’re people love to give advice. They love to be asked of like, what would you do in this situation? Or tell me about your career? I think a lot of people are afraid to ask for things, ask for advice, ask for help. Don’t be afraid to admit that maybe there are some times where you get in your own way or you need help. And I think I would just say we are all works in progress, and we need to be just a little kinder to ourselves, too.

Rachel

That’s a really great sort of segue into our next topic, which is social media and content strategy. We spoke a little bit about LinkedIn. And we definitely think you know, lawyers should be on that platform. How can lawyers really use LinkedIn to their benefit?

Stefanie

I went over the three fundamentals before in terms of profile connections and then utilization of the platform, which is where most people fall flat. The other thing I see people do is promote themselves on social. I’m seeing all these Super Lawyers rankings being posted. And they literally start the same way. I’m honored to be ranked, or I’m humbled to be ranked, or even worse, I’m honored and humbled to be ranked. It doesn’t make you sound honored or humbled when you write it like that. And so I tell people think about it differently. Tell a story. Why did you become a lawyer? Why did you join your firm? Who helped you on these matters? How did you get to where you are, flip it around, thank your clients, thank the team that was in the office making those copies that got that deal done. It’s all about being humble. People like to celebrate your successes, but they don’t want you to sound like you’re patting yourself too hard on the back. So it’s just telling a story. And I tell people show versus tell with everything. One of my other big pet peeves is if I write an article, or I have a client alert, the lawyers will often publish it or share it without any introductory text. And that is like the worst thing you can do on social because you’re basically letting other people try to figure it out. And it doesn’t rank well with your SEO which LinkedIn has SEO too, by the way. So I tell people write a synopsis. In the beginning, tell people why you wrote this, why it’s interesting. And, you know, I’m sure you guys understand this. But so many lawyers don’t necessarily get to the point right off the bat or in the first couple lines. And that is key on LinkedIn. Because what LinkedIn does in the newsfeed is only show you the first two or three lines of a post. So if you don’t capture anyone’s attention in that time period, they’re going to keep moving along the scroll. And so the whole goal of social is to stop the scroll. And if you don’t have good content, and you don’t have good imagery, they’ll keep scrolling. And I guess the other thing I would say is most lawyers don’t think about LinkedIn, they think I don’t have time for it, I don’t need it. I’m good at what I do I have business. Well, here’s the thing, your business could dry up tomorrow, your competitors are on LinkedIn, I tell people all the time, you know, do it because you see other people do it because you want to be part of it, and it is effective for them. The other thing is that you can use it for business development. So I call this low hanging fruit. But it’s the sections on LinkedIn, where was the notification section, it tells me about people’s birthdays, which sounds trivial, but actually, it’s a touch point to get back in touch with someone and can open up a dialog. I’ve seen this time and time again. So birthdays, work anniversaries and new jobs. People don’t usually send emails anymore, when they get a new job, it’s up to you to do the due diligence to find out where they’ve gone. And that’s a great reason to guys, today, I got three notifications just today on people getting new jobs. So I would send a congratulatory note. And LinkedIn makes it so easy, you just have to hit a button, right. So these are touch points that enable you to get back in the realm of thinking with certain people. And I think it’s I’ve seen it lead to new business. And I’ve seen people bring in business, I love my personal business comes from my presence on LinkedIn, helping others without the expectation of anything in return, posting content, and learning the tools, the algorithm of LinkedIn, how to use hashtags effectively, when to post and all of those things. So if a lawyer doesn’t think it’s worth their while, I can show them five examples of how it could be worth their while. And it’s certainly not the only thing they should be doing. Just like they shouldn’t be relying on spreading articles or taking their clients for a golf game. It’s part of the overall multi disciplinary marketing strategy today have a lawyer and a law firm that is necessary to build your brand and your business.

Rachel

Right. And that sort of ties into another thing I was hoping to sort of get your thoughts on. We’ve spoken about LinkedIn, but Twitter and Facebook are also pretty big social media platforms, how can lawyers and firms use those platforms more effectively?

Stefanie

Lawyers have a lot of trouble with Twitter, and Facebook and Instagram. And it’s not easy to build your brand on any of these platforms. A lot of us post our personal stuff on Facebook, and if there’s a way that you can tie personal and professional together, do it. If you worked on a real estate deal, take a picture of the building and say, you know, I’m so proud to live in this city or to have worked on this deal means a lot I’ve walked by this building a million times Never did I think I would actually work on this. So I always tell people be alert that everybody and anybody can be a potential client or source of new business for employees. So on Facebook, I would say just don’t sound boastful. It’s not the place to post Super Lawyers. I don’t think you should ever post that stuff personally, but but other people would disagree with me. And then on Twitter, so Twitter moves a mile a minute. To be successful on Twitter, you need to post multiple times a day. And if you’re not going to do that, then don’t bother. But you could use Twitter as a news aggregator which I see a lot of people will do so follow the accounts of your competitor law firms. Follow  other lawyers and use ideas that you get from what they’re writing.

To inspire you follow industry publications as well, trade show conferences that are happening, obviously, the major news outlets because news is broken on Twitter, I get a lot of my news from just scrolling on Twitter, the lawyers can use it that way. Lawyers can also use Twitter to build relationships with reporters, and congratulate them on things they’ve written and retweet them and stay in touch with them. I recommend you have two Instagram profiles, one personal that is private, and one Instagram that is for work. You will not be successful on Instagram if you don’t understand how to use the different types of content, and hashtags. That’s it. So there’s reels and IGTV and regular posts and stories. If you don’t know what this means, you should not post it. I would tell law firms and lawyers to claim your name so at least you have the domain but don’t post in places also where your clients aren’t. Go where your clients are. You don’t have to be on TikTok, please actually don’t go on TikTok, if you’re a lawyer, in my opinion.  You don’t need to be on every platform, go where your clients are focused first. And you have to alter the message for the medium. You can’t post the same image on Instagram, you have to make it a square and you have to change the text and you have to use the app side differently. And if this doesn’t make sense to you, that means you are not ready to do that. It’s a jungle.  I would tell you to just go where your clients are. And don’t feel pressured to be on every platform.

Rachel

Yeah, one of the other sort of overarching themes of our podcast season is like just like there’s no one size fits all solution, you have to be adaptable. And remember, the word of the entire 18 months is pivot, right? You have to pivot, sort of like rounding out a discussion on social media, what strategies have really been your tried and true?

Stefanie

Yeah, so here’s the thing, I never thought I would start my own business and you never know where your life is going to go. And I always worked in house at law firms, and I was always posting on social. Build your brand long before you ever think you need it. I was able to do consulting with law firms very easily because I had the presence on social. My advice is to start using social to post even if you feel like oh, no one cares what I have to say. Why not you? Yes, they do. Certain people will. You won’t be everyone’s cup of tea. And I’ll say, you know, the more successful you get at it, the more naysayers you have/ I talk about Mean Girls quite a bit in the Women Who Wow program because we come across those at all stages of our lives, we just forget about them.  When people are like that, it’s usually because something in you brings out something in them that makes them feel inadequate or insecure, or they’re jealous about something. So keep going. There’s no easy way to download every single LinkedIn post you’ve ever written, especially since like the dawn of time, you can download your articles, so like the long form ones, and you can download your contacts, but you can’t do it with the posts. And so I keep an Excel spreadsheet of all of my posts, and I reuse that. So don’t reinvent the wheel every time – you can reuse your content.

No one remembers, there’s no way to spam anybody on LinkedIn. And even if they saw it, it’s reinforcement then. So that’s been another key to my success. And then the other one is helping others. It’s propping up others. It’s promoting others. It’s when I see somebody doing something great promoting and mentioning them on social. So for every three posts I do about something of mine, I’m promoting someone else. And that’s Women who Wow, for me, it’s putting the spotlight on other people. That’s how you build really great relationships on social and then people want to do good things for you because you’re helping them. So all of these have been part of my strategy, but it’s sort of evolved over the years and by the way, my posts sometimes tank completely. And I’ll tell you, it gets discouraging, but you just keep going, you show up, you try different things, you keep posting. You look at what worked and what didn’t, you look at the time of day, the analytics, all those things and then just be open to pivoting again.  It’s not about the number of likes you get on a post. If I’ve helped five people, that’s great. I don’t need 1000 likes on a post. it’s nice when things do go viral – the things by the way that have gone viral for me are when I post about a challenge.

Rachel

That was a great conversation. Thanks again for joining us, Stefanie. We really appreciate it.

Stefanie

Thank you guys for having me.

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