Thursday, April 22, 2010 at 7:00AM Larry Bodine's article "How to Make Networking Events Work for You" at the Law Marketing Blog provides a primer on law firm marketing through networking:
Networking in Marketing Wednesday, April 29, 2009 at 9:00AM 
Two of the questions I am asked most frequently from lawyers starting new firms are:
Recent articles by two of the smarties in law practice management, Dennis Kennedy and Lee Rosen, showcase thoughtful answers to these questions.
Dennis, in his ABA Journal article Teaming Up, Starting Anew, advises new law firms to use technology to cut costs.
[Sidebar, this reminded me of the scene in Moonstruck where Cosmo the plumber explains why he favors only copper pipe:
There are three kinds of pipe. There's aluminum, which is garbage. There's bronze, which is pretty good, unless something goes wrong. And something always goes wrong. Then, there's copper, which is the only pipe I use. It costs money. It costs money because it saves money.
Perhaps admitting that I know the movie Moonstruck by heart is not the high water mark for my testosterone level...]
But I digress.
Dennis goes on to advise that new law practices be technologically prepared to:
He also includes a handy 7 point checklist of items to consider at the end of the article. Make sure to head over and check the article out.
Different but equally sound advice comes from Lee Rosen, author of the family law practice management blog Divorce Discourse. Lee, ever the marketer, says:
"The first thing to do, the very first thing, is not to buy something, it’s to sell something. Find a person that needs what you’re offering and get them to buy it."
Lee also offers great guidance on how the new family lawyer can find his/her first client:
It's a good read for new family lawyers, and, come to think of it, new lawyers in any practice area.
There you have it: technology tips, marketing advice and a quote from a girlie movie.
My work here is done.
Hardware, Networking, Software, Start Up in Marketing, Technology Wednesday, April 22, 2009 at 11:13AM LinkedIn has reached the tipping point for lawyers.
More and more lawyers sign up for it every day and recognize that it is low hanging fruit in the world of online networking. It's free, easy to use and safely professional in demeanor. Like most things in life, though, the people who get the most out of the service are the ones who put the most in.
In that vein, here are 3 easy ways to get more out of LinkedIn:
1. Check the LinkedIn inbox regularly.
One of my chief complaints about LinkedIn is that the notifications from the inbox are not as dependable as they ought to be. I have received several messages in my LinkedIn inbox that were never delivered to my email inbox. I verified that they were not caught in my overactive spam filter, either. These emails just did not come through, much to my later embarrassment.
I've learned over time that I just need to double check the LinkedIn inbox manually once or twice a week. It's not a big problem, and is probably beneficial as it keeps me more active in the site, but it is another inbox I've had to incorporate into my organizational system.
2. Send your Wordpress blog posts to your LinkedIn profile.
LinkedIn has incorporated some cool applications to help users get more functionality out of the site, and one of the easiest is to send your blog posts to your profile via the Wordpress application. You spend time writing the content and you spend more time maintaining your network on LinkedIn, why not put the two together? I have recently switched blogging platforms from Wordpress to Squarespace, so I have to (unfortunately) disable this application for myself. If you are blogging on Wordpress, though, this is a winner.
It probably goes without saying that you should only add your professional blog to your LinkedIn profile. If you maintain a personal blog where you rant about religion, politics, your boss and the world in general, you might just want to keep that one to yourself.
3. Use the RSS feed attached for network updates
The home page of your LinkedIn account has a rolling update of what your contacts have been up to. It says who has added contacts, who has made a recommendation, and other adjustments your contacts have made to their LinkedIn profiles. There is, at the top of this screen, an RSS button.
I'm an avid RSS fan and I am far more likely to read the items that end up in my RSS reader than I am to read the home page of LinkedIn. Having all of the updates go to my reader allows me to bypass the homepage when I am in LinkedIn and know that I can quickly scan all of the updates in my RSS reader at my convenience. I normally catch one or two updates that are useful each month, so the benefit significantly outweighs the 10 to 15 minutes a month I spend reviewing that feed.
LinkedIn, Networking, Social Networking in Marketing, Technology Monday, February 2, 2009 at 10:15AM Hi, my name is Erik and I am a practice management advisor.
Hi, my name is Erik and I am the Director of the Center for Practice Management of the North Carolina Bar Association.
Hi, my name is Erik and I help lawyers and law firms become more profitable by using technology, marketing and management innovations.
Which of those three introductions helps a stranger learn and remember what I do the best? The first details what my career is called to people in world of bar associations. The second explains what my title and organization are called. The third says who I help, what I help them do, and how. I'd vote for the third.
Now let's try it for your job:
Hi, my name is Jill and I am a lawyer.
Hi, my name is Jill and I am an associate at Smith & Jones.
Hi, my name is Jill and I help people who are getting divorced handle child custody, child support, property division and alimony issues.
Successfully developing business for your practice (whether you are a solo practitioner or a first year associate in 2000 lawyer mega firm) depends on people knowing who you are, what you do and who you do it for. The most basic step in getting people to know those things is the elevator pitch. An elevator pitch, as you probably know, is a a brief description of who you are, what you do and who you do it for compressed down into a soundbite small enough to be delivered on an elevator ride.
You use your elevator pitch when you are meeting someone for the first time in a work setting. The more clearly and concisely and memorably you convey your pitch the more likely the hearer is to remember it after your conversation ends. There is a lot conventional wisdom that says an elevator pitch should be somewhere between 30 seconds and a minute. Personally, if I asked someone what they did for a living and they responded with a one minute monologue, I would spend the last 45 seconds of that time plotting my escape.
It's important that your elevator pitch convey the right information, but it's also important that it not be annoying. It's not helpful if your new contact only remembers you because you were irritating and talked about yourself too much.
My suggestion is to prepare your elevator pitch in two parts -- a short, initial explanation (5 to 10 seconds) and a second more detailed explanation that you can use after you have asked the hearer what he or she does. Imagine you are meeting someone for the first time at a networking event:
New guy: Hey, I'm Bill. What do you do for a living?
You: Hi, my name is Jill and I help people who are getting divorced handle child custody, child support, property division and alimony issues. In particular I concentrate on litigation, and with even more particularity I handle high net worth equitable distribution actions where the determination at trial concerning a defined benefit plan division needs to be appealed. I've been working in high net worth equitable distribution actions where the determinations at trial...
New guy: zzzzzzzz Now, picture it this way:
New guy: Hey, I'm Bill, what do you do for a living?
You: Hi, my name is Jill and I help people who are getting divorced handle child custody, child support, property division and alimony issues. What do you do, Bill?
New guy: I help venture stage life sciences companies with general corporate issues, usually before they have hired an in-house general counsel. Where do you work?
You: I work at Smith & Jones. Most of my practice focuses on high net worth equitable ...
Creating your elevator pitch in two parts allows you to work with the normal rhythms of human conversation and still convey all of the important information about who you are, what you do and how you do it. Ultimately, while you want people to remember all that information about you and your practice, it is just important that they like you. Go ahead and revamp your elevator pitch and put it to use today. It is never too early to start working on business development but it can quickly become too late.
Networking in Marketing Monday, September 22, 2008 at 12:52PM If your marketing efforts are fizzling, you might start by asking your friends, coworkers and loved ones to tell you if you are approachable. (If they are afraid to answer, you may assume the answer is "no".)
I talk to a lot of lawyers about marketing their practice and I often quote the advice that I first heard from John Jantsch over at the Duct Tape Marketing Blog, which to paraphrase, is that marketing a law practice is about getting people to "know you, like you and trust you."
Many lawyers, if they even think about marketing their practice at all, focus only on the first one -- getting people to know them. But knowing without liking and trusting is notoriety, which is not particularly helpful to the cause of marketing. Unless you happen to be a gangster rapper.
Leaving aside the somewhat thorny issue of earning trust, I want to spend just a moment on the issue of being liked. Here's everything you need to know on the subject: Building a practice is more like high school than college.
It's true. Remember high school, when new wave rock ruled the airwaves and your haircut looked like this? (Dating myself a little here.) Revision: remember high school, when grunge rock ruled the airwaves and your haircut looked like this? (Apparently, it is dead musician day on Law Practice Matters -- does anybody know if that the guy from Flock of Seagulls is dead?)
Anyway, back to high school. Remember how much you cared about being liked? Well, welcome back to high school. To make matters worse, it was hard enough for most of us to be well-liked then, and that was before law school which ain't exactly three years of Dale Carnegie.
So what's a lawyer -- one who cares about marketing her practice -- to do? Focus on improving something you can control: your approachability.
Stop scowling all the time and complaining about clients and telling family members that their arguments lack binding precedent. Focus on opening up a little and being a bit less frightening. I'm not saying you have to go cry on Oprah or anything, just come down off of DefCon 1 once in a while.
But what if you've forgotten how to be nice? What if law school and law practice have permanently excised that faculty from your repertoire? There are some good resources out there to help you remember how to get back in touch with your approachable side.
Rohit Bhargava, author of "Personality Not Included" and the Influential Marketing Blog, posted recently on approachability and included a neat little video of a kid selling stuff in India and showing better marketing skills than most of us do in our practices. If you're really far gone and need serious approachability remediation, check out Scott Ginsberg, author of a bunch of books on approachability and the blog Hello, My Name is BLOG. Be more approachable and watch your marketing efforts bloom.
Gotta go, time for 4th period French.
Networking in Marketing 