The Legal Marketing Center Blog

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. On the flip side, Lisa Landy, an attorney at Akerman Senterfitt, says that “leveraging 1-2 premier industry and trade associations has been central to growing her practice by leaps and bounds” in this highly informative article.

I started thinking about this because right now I’m in the process of putting together a seminar for potential referral sources about the state of the law in my practice area. I’m going to be partnering with two other professionals who target similar referral sources as me to do this. As I started to gather my list of people to invite, I started with the local bar association and noticed that there are lots of committees of attorneys who practice in areas that are completely different from me, and who would be fabulous referral sources.

So, in keeping with the advice given by Lisa Landy and Susan Cartier Liebel, I’m going to start working on getting involved with groups of people who can refer me business, but who would not compete with me on a professional level.