The Legal Marketing Center Blog

Successful Rainmakers and legal marketers are not born, they are taught.  That’s why you are reading this - to learn how you can develop the characteristics and traits that are necessary to turn a you as a lawyer into a marketing maven who will earn more money, with better clients.

The characteristics that follow do not stand alone.  They are not isolated - if you are missing one of the characteristics, you are missing them all.  If you develop one of them, you develop them all.  To develop these personality traits, you must work on yourself from within, and for some of you, this will involve a complete shift in your fundamental thinking.  You must stop thinking of yourself as merely a competent lawyer, and start thinking in terms of how you project yourself to others.  You must realize that every interaction you have with other people is a potential marketing opportunity.

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Lawyer Marketing - isn’t that an oxymoron? What does that mean, anyway? Lawyer marketing is nothing more than finding ways to tell other people, either potential clients or potential referral sources, about you and your law practice so that someday either they, or someone they know, will need your legal expertise.

Here are five simple things that you can do NOW to help in your legal marketing efforts: [Read more →]

There is an interesting post today from Ben Glass entitled “Warning: Blogging Doesn’t Work”. I have to say, I completely agree with Ben’s sentiment that lots of attorneys are complaining that “Blogging doesn’t work,” although the complaints I hear most frequently are:

1. I don’t have enough time to blog
2. I’m too old to figure out that technology
3. I don’t need to advertise
4. I get enough referrals
5. I’m already advertising in other media
6. I already have a website

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I pride myself in being a great legal marketer, but if there is one thing that I have been bad at over the years, it’s becoming involved in my local bar associations. In my heart, I’ve always felt that getting involved with the bar association wasn’t a waste of time, but it wasn’t going to bring me a lot of clients. And I’ll be honest, I never joined my local Chamber of Commerce either.

Whether I should have or not, I’ve always felt a little guilty about these “failures” on my part as a legal marketer. Turns out, my gut feeling might not have been that far off. Susan Cartier Liebel, auther of the Build a Solo Law Practice Blog, agrees with me that lawyers shouldn’t join bar associations just to get clients. [Read more →]

Last week JD Supra went live. According to Steve Matthews, this is a new website that is “dedicated helping lawyers & law firms share legal documents, forms, pleadings, judgements, research, and other professional support materials.” Not only that, but it is also a tremendous marketing tool for solos and large firm lawyers alike.

JD Supra is unique in that it allows lawyers to link their marketing efforts back to substantive work product. Others that have blogged about the site are Jason the Content Librarian, Connie Crosby, Bonnie Shucha, Doug Cornelius, and many others.

I’ve read lots of positive things about JD Supra, but have yet to give it my shining endorsement. However, I have put together a profile, and plan on starting to use JD Supra in the coming weeks and months. I’m also going to list them on my own Blogroll.

I recommend that my readers do the same!

The Little Black Book on Law Firm Marketing and Business Development provides, in 138 easy-to-read pages, practical marketing information and real life examples that you can immediately put to use in your own law firm. The book is co-authored by Paula Black and John Remsen, who draw from their own experiences as respected authorities in the field of legal marketing to write this insightful and helpful guide to law firm marketing.

The authors immediately point out that the key to law firm marketing begins with differentiating yourself from your competitors, and maintaining consistency in your marketing efforts. The book follows up with a series of chapters that showcase how to develop a marketing plan that works for your firm, how to develop better client relations and find new opportunities for growth, and finally, how to develop marketing materials that are consistent and make the most of your marketing budget.

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I had lunch today with a partner at Zimmerman, Kiser & Sutcliffe in Orlando.  She asked me a simple question that intrigued me - “What one thing could I do NOW to really help my marketing?”

After thinking about the question for a moment, and asking her a little more about her practice (she does primarily workers comp defense), I came up with an answer.  I told her to take her many years of experience as an attorney and put that information into a small booklet called “10 Things Your Company can do to help Minimize Your Worker’s Comp claims”.  It would only cost her some time to put this together - she could even delegate the work to an associate who has shown initiative.

Once the booklet is done, she could get it published (probably for less than $1,000), and then send a copy to each of her clients.  What a terrific marketing piece this would be!  Even better than sending one to each of her clients would be making a personal visit to each client, ask them about the service her firm is providing them, ask if there is any other legal service her firm could be providing, treat the client to lunch/dinner, and then personally deliver the booklet.

When speaking with this partner, it came out that the firm had several clients that had only hired ZKS to handle their workers comp claims.  An entirely different firm was handling their other legal work!

So, if you are looking to invigorate your legal marketing quickly - write a booklet, visit your clients, ask them what else you can do for them, and personally deliver the booklet.  The great thing about this idea?  You could do a different booklet for each of your practice areas and deliver it the same way.  Then you really would be a full service law firm!

I just came across an excellent article by John Jantsch, author of Duct Tape Marketing, regarding how to motivate referral sources to refer you business. It’s funny how intuitively I have followed most of the advice given by John in my everyday practice. That’s the great thing about legal marketing and what makes it so easy - the ideas that I give in this blog and on my website are so basic and easy to implement. The problem is that the majority of attorneys either can’t find the time to implement these ideas, or don’t know how to.

Here is a brief summary of the main points that John brings up in his article:

1. You need to change the focus of your referral marketing from what “they” can do for “you” to what “you” can do for “them”. Incidentally, I discuss this idea in depth in my legal marketing site when I discuss that you must get referral sources to “know you, like you, and trust you.” How are they ever going to do that if all you bring to the table is a request for them to send you business.
2. Send a letter to 25 of your top referral sources. Include a form in this mailing that asks your referral source to explain, in their words, exactly how you can introduce them to your clients. What an amazing idea - easy to implement and will pay tremendous dividends for your law practice.
3. Interview your referral sources about their practices and what they can offer your clients. You can turn this into a monthly teleseminar, podcast (as I have done here) or CD that you can provide as a service to your clients.

Seth Godin will be releasing his new book, Meatball Sundae, within the next two weeks. For any attorney who follows The Legal Marketing Center, you know that I really like Seth’s books. Just two days ago I finished reading Unleashing the Ideavirus - and have used a number of his ideas in promoting The Legal Marketing Center, this blog, and my Listserv.

Seth gave an interview to the guys at Wordtracker (another invaluable resource for lawyers looking to optimize their webpages) just the other day. Some of the things he talked about were:

1. How spreading ideas through an ideavirus can work for anyone (including lawyers);
2. The problem with newspapers in this country, and why they will be out of the print business in 10 years;
3. His new book “Meatball Sundae”, which is about the collision between old ways of advertising and new ways; and,
4. The key to getting better rankings with the search engines - great content

Right now, I am considering a big move in my law firm - one from time-based billing to value-based billing.  What is value-based billing?  It is taking into account the client’s goals and expectations, providing them with a clear picture and strategy for how you will help them reach their goals, and billing yourself out accordingly.

The Greatest American Lawyer does a great job discussing the Value-based billing model here.  Another law firm that discusses the topic is Traverse Legal.

Value-based billing provides enormous benefits for clients - they can budget their legal bill, they don’t have to be scared of what their bill will be on a monthly basis, they know that their attorney will have an incentive to think outside the box to reach the best possible outcome for their clients, and they will receive much more “value” for their dollar in terms of results.

Anyway, these are all great reasons to switch to value-based billing, but here is another…  When you lose two months of billing entries and have to redo them - billing is much easier with value-based billing!  Ok, this is a bit of a rant, but a technician who was working on a glitch with my practice management software yesterday inadvertently deleted two months worth of transactions.  Yes, I have “hard-copy” back-ups, so we can recreate the information.  But it will take some time.  With value-billing - wouldn’t take nearly as much time.

Incidentally, I’ve implemented daily back-ups of our case management software to prevent this from happening again!