Legal Marketing Blog

Lawyers do not have to do all the marketing and business development by themselves. They can and should involve their staff as much as practicable.

Early in my in-house marketing career I got as many non-marketing staff as possible to help with marketing, since I had no departmental staff to speak of. I cajoled and otherwise drafted as many as I could, including our librarian (research and as a source of firm data), paralegal (newsletters – design and drafting), receptionist (mailings), copy room (organizing, copying and binding proposals), to name a few. It sure made my job easier and I was more effective by not trying to do it alone.

I continue to be amazed how few law firms engage their non-marketing staff in the firm's business development efforts. Actually, if you think about it, your staff is already involved in your firm’s marketing whether you want them to be or not; and whether it is in the firm’s best interests or not. If the staff has contact with clients, prospects and referral sources, which certainly receptionists, secretaries and paralegals do, they can help or hurt the firm’s reputation by how they relate to outside contacts. If the secretary is rude with any contact (god forbid a client) or the receptionist blows off a caller (hint: pet peeve to follow) by sending him/her directly into voicemail without another word, for example, such contact (or lack thereof) can be very damaging. Even how staff members act in public can reflect poorly on the firm, believe it or not.

So it behooves law firms to provide staff with some marketing training, or at least guidance on how they should behave toward those they encounter in their role with the firm.

Moreover, the staff can play a greater role than simply treating clients and prospects well, and behaving in public. They can, if instructed and then empowered by their lawyers, actively contribute to the firm's marketing efforts. A few simple suggestions on how non-marketing staff might get involved include:

• Tracking Google alerts for info about specific clients and others,
• Remembering important client facts and dates (anniversaries, birthdays, graduations, etc.),
• Scheduling marketing activities for their lawyer(s),
• Keeping mailing lists up to date, and
• Suggesting regular interaction with their Outlook contacts.

If you respect your staff, encourage them to be an integral part of the team, and reward them for taking a bigger role in the firm’s success, you may just find that they can add considerable value to the firm, beyond their regular duties. 

It should be patently obvious that when a client or prospect has a legal matter that needs to be addressed, you would want them to think of sending the work to you . If you are not the first lawyer or law firm they think of, you have some work to do.

Ric Willmot has a post in his Weekly Wisdom series on LinkedIn’s Legal Marketing Group that sets out five tips on “Staying front of mind” with clients and prospects. They are: (with my comments in parenthesis)

1. Understand your prospects and clients. (The best way to do that is to visit or at least talk with them by telephone off the clock regarding their plans, problem issues within their company and industry. A goal is to find out what makes them tick and what keeps them up at night. You can’t understand the client or prospects if you don't spend time getting to know them better, as well as their problems, interests and business.);
2. Provide value when you do touch base. (When you talk to the clients, prospects and referral sources give them something of value. It could be some insight or knowledge that will help them personally or with their business goals. It might be a referral or just information that brings greater value to the relationship. Don’t make the call about you or how you can gain from it.);
3. Expand their knowledge of you. (This does not mean bragging about your capabilities or your achievements, but you do want them to know more about who you and what you stand for. Tell stories about your life, interests and dreams. Yes, they do need to know about your capabilities, but that should not come across as selling.);
4. Bring diversity to the way you make contact. (This is a good idea and, quite frankly, one I hadn't given much thought to before. One contact might be by email, another by telephone, or a handwritten note passing along an article or press clippings, or whatever. Other times it might involve a lunch or invitation to a cultural or sporting event.); and
5. Build relationships rather than continuously attempting to sell. (This one and 2. above are pretty similar in my mind. Rather than sell yourself, try to figure out a way to help them first. It’s the old “give to get” reasoning where you try to help the other person first, before trying to get something from them.)

All of these tips involve building a meaningful and value-filled relationship. With the right kind of relationship, you will find that you will stay top of mind and get more legal matters from clients, referral sources and prospects as a result. 

It is always a good idea for lawyers to focus on raising their visibility to attract clients directly and via referrals. Amy Campbell’s Web Log recently suggested three steps to increase fame and fortune this year that should help in developing business. They include:

1. Writing more. Whether that is with more articles, blogging, or just increasing meaningful content on your website, the important thing is to make it relevant and interesting to your clients and prospective clients. Also, Campbell suggests considering “video, audio, presentations, lists and more;”
2. Socializing more online. Share your content utilizing social media, such as LinkedIn and Facebook at least once a week. And don’t hesitate to share and comment on other content you encounter on social media; and
3. More face-to-face meetings. This I particularly like, because there is a tendency among some lawyers to concentrate too much on electronic networking vs. the old fashion (and trusted) way IMHO. So, don’t forget to pick up the phone, invite a client or referral source to lunch or dinner, or just for coffee.

Not sure how much fame and fortune will result directly in 2012, but it certainly will raise your profile, and that should result in more business for you and your law firm sooner rather than later. 

If you don’t know, you are failing at marketing!

As is the case when I get “blogger's block” I’ll look at some trusty book or two for ideas, as I did today since my RSS feeds aren’t inspiring me. Well, one of my trusty-ist is Richard Levick’s and Larry Smith’s 365 Marketing Meditations: Daily Lessons For Marketing & Communications Professionals, which is available on Amazon. Their meditation for today is:

“What keeps your clients up at night? This is the bullseye of marketing. If you don’t know the answer, you are not marketing. You’re just busy.”

There really isn’t much to add to that succinct statement, except it means that you are not talking or listening to your clients. And that is bad marketing!

I know that many lawyers are turned off, if not terrified by the concept of networking. The idea of walking into a room full of strangers and striking up a conversation is truly worse than a root canal. I can’t say that I’m overly comfortable with networking myself.

However, I found an article entitled “Bad Networking Ain’t Networking” by John Snyder on Attorney at Work to be quite helpful. When Synder left BigLaw for a solo practice, he was told “you’ve got to network.” His response to that in the article raises two excellent points:

• Don’t go to networking events to get business. Rather look at it as opportunities to make new friends; and
• Think of ways to help those you meet.

He sums it up beautifully: “So here is how I would amend that ‘you gotta network’ edict. It’s not about networking – it’s about being a friendly, generous and helpful person…(and those are) the qualities that clients or potential referral sources seek in a lawyer.”

So, attend networking events with the idea of making friends, not networking.  The results may surprise you.

Obviously, pricing is an important part of marketing your legal services. There is no question that price sensitivity is real; and that clients, particularly in these economic times, are feeling the pressure to minimize legal costs.

Some argue that the cost of legal services should be driven solely by what the client is willing to pay. That unfortunately is only part of the pricing equation. On Attorney at Work last week, there is an article that provides excellent insight into value pricing by Toby Brown, the Director of Pricing for Vinson & Elkins. His proposition is that there are three critical bits of information that a law firm should determine prior to pricing a particular piece of legal work.

1. Understand the clients price sensitivities. Clearly one size (or fee) does not fit all situations. As Brown points out, a given piece of legal work may have a high value for one client, and lower value for another. I would agree with him that "the only effective way to understand the client's value priorities is to have a direct conversation with them." The client is the only one that will know what the particular legal issue(s) means to them, or about the internal pressure they are under to reduce legal costs;
2. Know what your costs (better still, your desired profit margins) are. Some would contend that it doesn't matter what your costs are. The only thing that matters is what a client is willing to pay. That is total baloney. If law firms price their services under that reasoning, without knowing what their costs are, they won't be in business very long. It may be correct that a client simply will not hire you for the fee you quote, but if you don't know what your costs and profit margins are, you won't how much you will gain or lose by taking the work. There may be good reasons for taking some work at a loss, and there are firms that do that to get their foot in the door for future work. But, without knowledge of your costs, you cannot make an intelligent decision as to whether to take the work or walk away; and
3. Do some risk and reward analysis utilizing project management techniques. After you understand what a client's price point is, what your costs are, and what your margin needs to be, the firm should then do some "risk and reward" analysis using project management tools that include risk assessment, understanding the scope of the work (what’s included, what’s not), the client’s goals, and a client communication plan for starters. As Brown says, “[T]he main point here is that the decision to take the risk and make the investment should be made with knowledge and awareness…”

The bottom line is that pricing should not only match the client’s value proposition, but the firm’s value proposition as well. A firm can’t “just accept the clients’ definitions of price and value absent your own costs and risks,” according to Brown. Concur in spades!

One of the key issues involved with Legal Project Management (LPM) is “assigning tasks and managing the team.” An integral part of that involves pulling your team together as early in the process to explain the goals and objectives, and plan the tasks involved in an assignment. [For more on the 8 key issues in LPM visit my colleague Jim Hassett’s web site LegalBizDev.com and blog at LegalBusinessDevelopment.com].

What is the point?, you may ask. One of the benefits of LPM is that it can do wonders in avoiding the “vague assignment” problem in law firms. Bill Melater, who is the resident Dis-Associate on Attorney at Work had an entertaining piece last month about his vague assignment experience.

He was summoned to a partner’s office and told to “breakdown” a file. Without further explanation, he really didn’t understand what he was suppose to do with this task that was thrown at him with a three-hour deadline. Worse, the partner promptly went into the “Do Not Disturb” mode by closing the door and turning off his phone. That behavior may not be a problem for the partner billing by the hour (although clients’ attitudes are rapidly changing on that topic), but I can assure you that it is a BIG problem for a firm on a fixed fee. That behavior is a money loser!

First, Melater wasted time trying to figure out what to do and most likely didn’t get it right through no fault of his. Time wasted is a guaranteed profit killer, especially with fixed fee work. But, even with hourly billing the invoice may need be reduced (written down) or a portion written off due to the client’s refusal to pay for the excessive time spent on a file review – which BTW is the client’s way of imposing their own version of an alternative fee. See my post “Has the Hourly Billing Model Become An AFA?”

Project management is not only real in the world of industry and thus to many clients, but in the law world’s “new normal” it can and will drive law firms to be more efficient eventually. If your firm is not ready for legal project management, partners at least ought to understand the need to reduce write-downs and write-offs by being more thorough, and efficiently assigning work to younger lawyers. With clients demanding more efficiency, the more efficient a law firm becomes, the more successful they will be at getting more business.

With the crush of year-end and the busyness of the holidays, I decided to post an encore of a holiday post I did in 2007 on reaching out and touching clients and referral sources by telephone during the holidays.  Personal attention is better than (but not to the exclusion of) holiday cards. Here it is:

December 18, 2007  
Comments / Questions (0)

Work Your Network During the Holidays

It’s a good idea to touch base with contacts within your network during the holidays. It’s even better than sending holiday cards. Pick up the phone and reach out to everyone you know (okay, if you are THAT popular, not everyone) and wish them a happy holiday season. It especially makes sense to at least speak to every referral source and client, including those you haven’t done work for lately or received a recent referral.

And talking about networking, I thought I would call your attention to a post I did in December 2005 entitled “Ignore Your Friends At the ‘Business’ Holiday Party.”  The premise of that post was that you can get together with your friends anytime, so use business-related holiday parties as productive networking and business development opportunities that you can cultivate further in 2008. If interested in reading more of my thoughts on that subject, give that post a look.

Again, Happy Holiday(ing) Everyone!

It's not too late to select and ship gifts to clients, referral sources, friends and family. In past years, i.e., in 2005, 2006,  2007, and 2008, I posted suggestions on gifts for the holidays. Okay, so I procrastinated the last couple of years. Bad me, but I’ve decided to mend my ways for 2011.

Many suggestions made in earlier years are still good ones, and some of the same ideas are suggested this year, such as thebillablehour.com (which has added items to their original watch collection). Some of my favorites this year include:

• Gas power blender from tailgatorzone.com;
• Whiskey Stones from teroforma.com that replace ice cubes and won’t dilute your cocktail (not so crazy, huh);
• Solar powered bikini (you may not want to go in the water in this one) from (I don’t have a clue); 
• USB Desktop Aquarium, with calendar, time, date and low powered air pump (I wonder what happens when your PC goes into sleep mode) by X-Treme Geek; and
• LawTunes.com album "Yule Hear From Our Lawyers," with catchy tunes like "Legal Holiday," Bluebook Christmas," and "Second Seat Santa."

For more, see A Lawyer’s Gift Guide by Dan Pinnington and Reid Trautz, and Tech Toys for the Holidays 2011 by Jim Calloway and Sharon Nelson.

Happy Shopping!!

In a couple of posts back in 2009, I talked about the importance of a personal brand, as well as its relation to the firm’s brand. Both are important, but the personal brand is more critical since clients hire lawyers in most cases, not the law firm.

In this month’s issue of Law Practice Today, personal branding was the theme, and one article by Jonathan Fitzgarrald caught my attention because it also addressed the interrelationship between the two. Specifically, how a bad personal brand can impact the firm’s. And, if taken a step further, could have an affect on one’s employment longevity. As someone wrote recently in a somewhat different context, but apropos, “you might want to buy a new pair of shoes, because there’s pavement in your future.”

Fitzgarrald suggested some “brand builders” that might help with yours:

• Take your appearance seriously. You may think you can dazzle potential clients with your brain power alone, but not so if the prospect is hung up on how you look;
• Keep your message “simple and concise,” (starting with a fine-tuned elevator speech) that conveys how you will “add value to the prospect’s business;”
• Relate to your listener in a personal way by bringing your personality to the table (not just a dry “lifeless” recitation of your background) and listen more;
• Focus on providing great client service. Remember that maintaining existing client relationships (or defensive marketing) is just as important as developing new business (with some practice area exceptions, of course). So, spend non-billable time adding value to your client service; and
• Monitor your brand by seeking feedback from clients and referral sources (e.g., how would they describe you to a stranger), and yes, even from your support staff and peers.

Obviously, your personal brand is very important to your success. It can also impact your relationship with your firm, particularly if they are out of sync.