That is not as silly a question as it may first appear. The success of your legal marketing efforts may very well depend on who you know, and being able to remember who (or is that whom) you actually know can be very important. Your Roladex is not sufficient anymore.
Tom Baldwin, chief knowledge officer at Sheppard, Mullin, Richter & Hampton in L.A., has a great article that appears in Legal Technology (a product of Law.com). Basically, he is telling us about “mining” tools that will search your emails for your contacts – people you might have forgotten you know. That’s never happened to me. Yeah, right.
The mining sources he mentions include LinkedIn (which I joined a couple of years ago, but honestly haven’t taken advantage of), Spoke , Branch-IT, and Contact Networks. There are privacy issues that you might need to consider, so take a look at Tom’s article.
He also mentions a couple of data sources for company information that you might find helpful in your lawyer marketing efforts. They include Firm 360, a West product (sorry, couldn’t find a link to it on their site) and Market Intelligence from Lexis/Nexis).