Legal Marketing Blog

Those lawyers who are serious about marketing and business development need to throw away their iPhone and stop with that social media stuff, and get back to basics.

Okay, now that I have your attention, and before you “Baker Act” me (here in Florida people suspected of having mental problems can be incarcerated by the courts for up to 72 hours for a mental examination based on the recommendation of certain officials. And, I ain’t saying which officials. So, forget it.)

But, I digress.

The fact is that Renee Berman, a Connecticut sole practitioner, makes a pretty good case in an article on Law.com’s Small Firm Business for returning to the days of yesteryear for marketing your practice. As she puts it:

“The goal of marketing is to keep yourself and your business in the forefront of the minds of potential clients and peers so that they think of you and only you when they need an attorney to retain or refer a matter…”

She goes on to point out:

“Technology has weakened the building and maintaining of relationships. Face-to-face meetings, phone calls and handwritten notes are slowly fading, and the quickest (and unknowingly least effective) approach is becoming the norm. Making eye contact while you explain to your client the consequences of his conduct is always more effective than an e-mail where tone cannot be determined and often is misinterpreted. Likewise, when you communicate solely through your keypad, important relationships wane and you fail to make new connections -- not just contacts, but rather lasting connections.”

So there you have it. Step back from all this modern technology and methods, so you can market your practice the old fashion way with face-to-face contact.

Just kidding!

Obviously, Renee and I are not really suggesting that you don’t use the modern, technological forms of marketing, BUT don’t rely on them to the exclusion of the basic, personal, face-to-face methods of old.

Your practice will benefit from reading her article, and taking the advice to heart.

When speaking to partners, associates and law students on face to face socializing for business, I've been an advocate for Face to face contact. It's not an either/or situation; its a both/and. We need to connect and communicate both offline and online with our clients, co-workers and friends.

Full Disclosure: I'm the author of Face To Face: How to Reclaim the Personal Touch in a Digital World and was pleased to received your blog in a Google alert.

Thanks for the press! In this technology infused society, its easy to forget that sometimes the simplest efforts are the most effective. A lot of small firm practitioners struggle to keep up with the latest and greatest and spend a lot of money doing so. Save yourself some money... pick up a phone, attend a networking meeting, look somebody in the eye and see how great an impact those simple efforts can have on your business.

I disagree. Although technology has lessened face to face contact, it has allowed us to reach so many potential clients that in the past were not possible to meet. It has also made data access, communication and research far faster. I still send handwritten notes, but you're right, I was about to Baker Act you...

As a professional services firm, accounting, we regularly participate in, and teach, face to face networking.

In the recent past, we have begun to incorporate Linkedin.

We still strongly value the relationships with our power partners, such as attorneys, bankers and insurance professionals that have come about because we meet face to face.

Today, you cannot focus in one area. You must have multiple spokes on the wheel that complement each other.

I'm not saying face to face networking is the only way you should be marketing. of course, the social networking sites and your own firm website are valuable tools to market; however, i think some attorneys are only using technology to market now and that could actually harm their efforts. lets face it, the client that comes to you by referral from a close friend already has a vested interest in you and your services. the client that searches online does not have that same vested interest and those are the clients that tend to be the "problem clients".

When it comes to using all the new technologies for communication and "staying connected", it's important to keep perspective that technology is a means and not an end.

Thinks of it this way, you don't make phone calls for the sake of making a call (admittedly, i know some people that arguably do this).

The bottom line is that these technologies aren't the relationship, they're the means to cultivate, nurture, and grow the relationship. But the relationship is entirely separate.