To that end, we would like your input.

In the next week or so, we will post a short survey, along with an incentive to help us fill unmet needs of the legal community.

Long-term Legal Marketing

Planning Is Wrong

There are dinosaurs still walking the earth disguised as legal marketing consultants.

They do extensive interviews with law firms. They have lawyers fill out marketing plans, client acquisition plans, sales meeting plans, contingency plans and sometimes even plans to make more plans.

These consultants take your plans, and make plans of their own. They repackage your words, using your own touch-points, to sell you something that you may or may not need for a price that’s anywhere from outrageous to “get the f— out of here!” What is their trick? They throw in some buzzwords and dizzy you with theories and “industry speak.”

A legal marketing plan is a mistake

Why? Because you don’t know what you don’t know. You can’t plan for what you can’t conceive of.

How can you make a sane plan to promote your law firm based on guesses? You can't, so stop planning and start placing "little bets."

Let’s put it another way. If a consultant had the answers, would he/she be a consultant? If he/she could predict the rapidly changing technologies, algorithms and consumer behaviors as they adapt to rapidly evolving products, do you think they would be spending a lot of time trying to sell you on a marketing plan.

Just because it looks good on paper, and they can bundle it up and make it look great in a .pdf does not mean it’s good, it works, or you need it. I’ve reviewed dozens of marketing plans from SEO companies for fellow lawyers over the past several years, and found inconsistencies, misstatements and even outright lies in every single one.

But, you ask, doesn’t it make sense to make a careful plan because marketing is so expensive? (I know, I know… we all know lawyers who have been burned by the yellow pages or trapped in multi-year internet marketing agreements with hidden 90-day advance notice of cancellation provisions).

You only need to plan if you accept the dominant paradigm that marketing investments have to be big, long term, or both.

Remember This: You only need to plan and study when making large or long-term investments. If any marketing vehicle, consultant, company or whatever wants you to commit to more than 1-month’s worth of service, then GTFOOD (get the f— out of there)!

Legal marketing and technology are two sides to the same coin. You can’t run a technology company without the expectation of evolution. I’m currently building a Legal Marketing Platform that I know will be the best system out there period, at any price. And I plan to charge a price that will guarantee an extremely high ROI. But, as the CEO and founder of my second legal marketing tech business, I have no way of knowing for sure how other technologies — with which our platform interacts and on which it depends — will evolve over the next six months, let alone long enough to justify asking a customer to commit to a year or more of service.

The beauty and strength of the internet is that no matter how established any business is, it must constantly prove itself. It must perform, deliver and evolve, or go extinct.

If you are an attorney serious about getting ahead, then throw out your long-term planning, fire your consultants, and start making “little bets” on marketing practices and technologies. If you don’t know what I mean by that, check out a new book by Peter Sims, called “Little Bets” which will be published next week. I read the advance proof, and it’s got some great fodder for attorneys, both from a marketing perspective, and also for trial prep. Highly recommend!

Instead of pretending you know the answers, start asking a series of small questions. These questions, or experiments, can be in the form of actions (post to your blog, comment on somebody’s blog, use Twitter, Facebook or whatever), and they can be in the form of investments (experiment with $100 worth of Google Adwords, set up a WordPress blog, subscribe to a monthly marketing service). Don’t commit to anything that costs more than $1,000, or requires more than one month’s committment.

Only you can discover which investments and actions produce the best ROI for your legal marketing, so stop planning and start doing, a little at a time.

Integrity in personal injury attorney marketing.

Injured clients are often needy and not in the best position to make the best decisions. For this reason, there is a lot of predatory marketing by less than ethical law firms. The main challenge for an ethical and reputable personal injury or medical malpractice law firm is to distinguish their practice from the bottom feeders and the ambulance chasers.

Personal Injury Practice Marketing Solution

There are many methods and technologies for doing this, and some are more effective than others.

As important as the choice of platform/technology, is what you say and how you say it. Slogans and animal mascots are not longer effective for the vast majority of the literate public, and most of the established platforms that are out there are antiquated, and stocked with too many lawyers saying the same boring thing with slightly different wording and fonts.

Our aim is to help great personal injury lawyers set themselves and their practices up for success by placing them beyond the tired old catchphrases.

Our law marketing product, LawLytics, will help small and medium sized law firms reach the best and most legitimate personal injury, negligence and medical malpractice clients.

For Lawyers
Community Is The New Marketing

Smart lawyers realize that the decision to hire them is stressful, and, depending on the case and the stakes, may be the single biggest bet of that client’s life. Sophisticated clients know that hiring the right lawyer can drastically sway the odds in their favor, but hire the wrong lawyer and the consequences can devastate the rest of their lives.

Community-building is the most efficient form of law-practice building.

There is nothing that a lawyer can say to give a would-be client ultimate confidence in his or her decision. But there are many things that law firms can do to stack the deck in their favor and create a bond of trust early on.

Most lawyers think of marketing and advertising as the same thing. In many ways they are, and although both terms are in common usage today, I argue that both concepts are outdated.

In a local legal environment, if all lawyers market and advertise and do nothing else, then the lawyer with the best overall advertising should have the best flow of business.

The Third Element

There is, however, a third element that is much more powerful than simply delivering a one-way message about you and your firm. It’s creating a community into which you weave yourself and your firm as a trusted expert and advisor.

Sites like avvo.com and yelp have helped the legal profession take a big step forward towards community. Unlike advertising, on review sites like these, professionals can’t directly control the messages about them. While bar associations have historically been ineffective at weeding out predatory practitioners and incompetents, the online community is not.

The Times Have Changed

Until recently, maintaining a good reputation required little more than having a “decent” web presence and burying negative reviews (using a practice commonly referred to as “reputation management”). I submit that the above is no longer enough to survive and thrive online. In fact, it’s only a beginning.

Your potential clients want to know you and trust you before they ever see you in person and shake your hand. They know that you can say anything about yourself that you want on websites that you control, and they are right to be skeptical about the lies that lawyers commit, or information they omit, when their web presence is the equivalent of a one-way megaphone.

Your potential clients what to read what you write. They want to understand you. Not only must they be sure that you know what you are doing, but they also must be sure that they like you as a person on some level. They want to see how you treat people. They want to hear you argue and defend a position. They want to feel your passion. And if they don’t feel all this, then no matter how many visitors your website attracts (or how much traffic you buy), they will not take the most important step of reaching out and making contact with you.

How do you create community? There are a number of ways, but as a start, you must be a part of one.

Find like-minded practitioners and start engaging them in public conversations and debate. You might limit your practice to San Francsico, for example, and this is great because it leaves you with a huge pool of other lawyers with which to form your community.

Who Is Your Legal Community?

Legal Marketing Doesn't Have To Be Painful

Every law firm that is outside of the geographic area where you practice is a potential collaborator and community member. Every law firm in your local area that doesn’t compete for the same clients in the same practice specialties is also a potential community member.

Once you have formed your community, you need to start talking, sharing and commenting. You, the lawyer, must take an active role in this. While most attorneys think of advertising and marketing as something that they outsource to professionals, community building is different. To successfully grow your practice you need not possess any technical skills beyond being able to type or dictate in English. Here are the basic steps to successful community building once you have located your network:

1. Write interesting stuff. Which requires point number 2, which is;
2. Read what other lawyers are saying. Understand them. Engage them. You are not in a bubble, and you must read/listen more than you write/talk.

These are the basics. In the coming months, we will be unveiling our LawLytics application, which will make building a top-quality legal community easy, intuitive and fun. For more information on how LawLytics will change the way lawyers think and talk about their practices, and to receive infrequent updates, use the box to the right to subscribe to our newsletter, and check back often.

When they need a doctor, they see one. When their tooth aches they go to the dentist. When they can’t reach the pepper at the dinner table, they ask somebody to pass it. But there is one thing that very few lawyers ask for, business help.

Law schools and the academics who run them don’t teach business skills. Professors, cloistered from the outside economic pressures  and the realities of the market are often oblivious to need.

Business skills for lawyers used to be a lot simpler. In the old days, firms could be built around a solid local reputation. Social skills were truly the best business skills. Oh, how many lawyers long for those simpler days. But those days are gone, and law firms who deny it may never know why their business is afflicted.

Lawyers have to decide what "trade" to master, because the vastness of today's technological and business options allow no human being to be a master of all trades, and in today's fast-paced tech/business environment, "jacks of all trades" get, as Mr. Miyagi said "squish just like grape." (Photo by basykes)

Lawyers have enough to juggle just keeping up with the law and managing their cases and clients. From a purely professional/academic standpoint, it is logical that tending their business is subordinate.

When it comes to business and marketing options, some lawyers suffer from analysis-paralysis

So why do so few lawyers ask for help managing and marketing their business? Is it pride? Is it ignorance? Perhaps for some, but for the vast majority I have a different theory. I think lawyers are simply overwhelmed by choices and this paralyzes their ability to decide at all.

Business and marketing skills are easy to learn. Much easier than legal skills. And they can be fun too. Trust me, I spent over a decade as a trial attorney. I love business and marketing. It’s what I was born to do. And although I was an outstanding trial lawyer and won many difficult cases, business is in my DNA.

If you are a lawyer, I believe the path to success is to decide which role you want (practicing lawyer or firm manager), and stick to it. And find somebody with complimentary talents to advise you about (and perhaps do for you) the things that don’t come naturally or get you excited.

How to find the right business consultant for your law practice

When looking for the right law firm business and marketing consultant, don't be afraid to ask hard questions and demand proof of track record, references and results. (Photo by somegeekintn)

I strongly believe that some consultants have much to offer, while others can hurt or even kill your business. Here’s what I look for when engaging advisers and consultants for my business, and the questions I ask:

1. Is this a person that I like and get along with? (the answer must be “yes” or go no further);
2. Does this person inspire me? (that’s the most important part of a consultant’s job);
3. Does he/she understand my goals and have a sense of where my current roadblocks are?
4. Does is the person’s claims of knowledge consistent with their background?
5. Do they have current references that you can talk with?
6. Are they trying to lock you into a long-term contract (anything more than a month and I would bail immediately).

I’d like to hear from lawyers who have used business and marketing consultants. Please post your experiences in the comments.

Photo Credits: basykes, somegeekintn

Many potential family law clients don’t have the luxury of asking a friend or a family member for a referral as they explore their options, so they turn to advertising sources to locate help and advice.

Our law marketing product, LawLytics, will help small and medium sized law firms reach the domestic relations client base they want most… the afluent.

Why Sorting Is Wrong For Professionals?

Young Children Make Sense Of The World By Sorting (Photo by CarbonNYC)

Pre-school children like to sort things. It helps them order their world, even if their “order” looks like a mess to the untrained eye of a “rational adult.”

Educated professionals such as lawyers, doctors, dentists and accountants do the same thing. They like to sort their personal lives into one box, their professional skills and training into another, their core business into another, and their marketing into yet another.

It’s easy to forget that, as a professional, you are also the “product” that you and your firm sells.

Let’s use the legal profession as a example.

I can overlook a lot in the personality department when it comes to hiring a lawyer. In fact, I may want somebody who I would never be friends with to represent me in court. Sometimes it’s great to have a combative, competitive, abrasive and loud voice professionally advocating for you, but that doesn’t mean that I want to have that person over for dinner, or let my son play at their house. I know that person is going to get heard, and is going to speak up for what I’m paying her to represent.

On the other hand, when my lawyer represents me in court, she brings with her all of the baggage that is know about her in public. If I’m on trial, you can bet that every member of my jury will not only Google me and the case, but will also research my lawyer. Thanks to social media and our endless and non-strategic exhibitionism, the jury will now likely know about my lawyer’s dirty laundry as well.

There is an old adage amongst trial lawyers that juries decide cases on whim and tangents… sometimes the lawyer with the best shoes wins. I’m not kidding. It happens. The reason for this is, I believe, that jurors are looking to take sides. They are looking for something to love about one lawyer, and something to hate about the other. There are very few trials where jurors have favorable opinions of both lawyers post-verdict.

The modern day equivalent of a lawyer’s shoes is his or her collective internet history. And fact or fiction, every piece of data online about a lawyer is weighed and contributes (if only subconsciously) to a juror’s opinion.

Lawyers’ New Media Warnings (read like Miranda rights): You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say, do, post, blog or otherwise spew online can and will be used against you and your clients. You have a right to moderate your own public behavior, and to realize that even when you are sitting in your den in your PJ’s, you are in public.

Bob Parsons Shoots An Elephant

GoDaddy CEO Bob Parsons (Photo by runnr_az)

Look what happens when a highly visible public figure, such as GoDaddy CEO Bob Parsons does something that creates a negative gut-level reaction. The young man featured in this video is not alone. In fact, a poll by CNBC asking “would you register a domain with GoDaddy after its elephant-shooting controversy? is trending towards “NO” by a 2-to-1 margin at the time I’m writing this.

In the domain world, GoDaddy is the elephant in the room, and while they are not likely to lose major market share, much smaller competitor Namecheap.com has used Parsons’ missteps to snap up some of GoDaddy’s business. Meanwhile, Mr. Parsons is unapologetic, and has released this video showing the problem he helped solve. Most of Parsons’ critics appear to be well-fed Americans. As right as he might be, the damage is done.

While Parsons’ can value the rightness of what he did (both the elephant hunt and his defense thereof) and feel okay about losing potentially millions of dollars in revenue, the average professional service firm could never absorb such a blow.

Little League Can Be BIG Trouble

My son plays t-ball. While I usually forget the video camera, I usually manage to shoot some video using my iPhone, and then I post that video (presumably in private) for my friends and family to see and comment on. Facebook has entered nearly every middle-class American parent into a perpetual content of “look how cute my kid is.”

Keep yourself above the fray, and limit the hot air that escapes your mouth (Photo by tourist_on_earth)

It’s amazing what even the limited video on my iPhone 3GS picks up. In fact, I’ve had to edit or censure embarrassing things done or said by other adults at t-ball that inadvertently get captured while 5 year olds are running around trying to figure out where 3rd base is.

My point is this – even if you are not a blogger or tweeter, and even if you are the one person left not of Facebook, your missteps and slips of the tongue in public have a good chance of ending up neatly indexed and available for mass consumption.

As a professional, don’t give your competitors fodder to leverage your actions outside of business against your business. Lawyers, don’t give jurors a reason to hate you for cussing at the t-ball coach or shooting a mole in your yard.

Which brings me full circle…

You Cant Sort This One Out

As a professional, your public life and your private life are essentially one and the same. How you conduct yourself every hour or every day is part of your ongoing marketing campaign. You can no longer depend on static images that you control to tell the public who you are.

The public and the technology now create the dialogue, and the only part of your comprehensive marketing campaign that you can truly control is you.

Photo Credits: tourist_on_earth, runnr_az, CarbonNY

No matter how strong your evidence, and how compelling your witnesses, if you don’t open well, your jury will sleep through your case. A good opening catches their attention and makes them hungry for more.

If blogging is how you pleasure yourself in private, then you can ignore what I’m about to say. If you want a return on your online sweat equity, then lets talk about what goes on top: your blog title.

In a trial, your audience is captive. Jurors can’t leave.

The Problem With DUI Blogging

Nobody is ever summoned to your website.

To get them there you need to come up with a more effective title than the thousands of other lawyers vying for readers’ attention-span in a fringe and boring subject.

To make matters worse, an army of bottom-feeder scam artists have figured out that drunk driving related keywords are very valuable. They know that if they can do a better job than you at attracting clicks, you will pay them up to $50 per click for their traffic.

The Numbers Don’t Lie

As a DUI lawyer, you are in a special niche that defies the “laws of gravity” that apply to most other online vertical markets.

You need relatively few visitors to make an article profitable. If an hour’s worth of careful writing gets you one new client, how much is that hour worth? If you convert one out of every 100 readers into a client, you would spend anywhere from $500 – $5,000 for those 100 visitors if you buy traffic (depending on your geographic market).

A = # of readers to get 1 client

B = average cost per click of targeted keyword

C = cost per client acquisition

N = what an hour of your time is worth

A x B = C

So…

If C > N… then it’s worth your time to write well.

There are very few things that have a higher return for a DUI practice than well written articles with titles that compel a look.

Writing good titles is easier than you might think, but for most attorneys it involves getting out of your “lawyer brain.”

Check The Legalese At The Door

Nobody except a first-year law student is impressed with words that appear only in Black’s Law Dictionary. Use a big word where a small one works and you will lose clicks.

The formula is simple.

An on-topic teaser that makes the reader want to find out more.

Hold something important back in your title. According to Tim Ferriss in his post “Blogging by Numbers: How to Create Headlines That Get Retweeted,” you never give readers the whole story in the title if you want as many of them as possible to visit the article.

Never Cite A Case In Your Title

Ok, almost never. Realize that most non-lawyers do not care about case names. You might get excited about Melendez-Diaz v. Massachuestts, but your target audience (assuming you want more clients rather than to impress your NCDD friends) doesn’t. Your readers want to know if a prosecutor can really make them look guilty using a chemical test report without an expert to explain it. They want to know how you can help them.

Which article title would you click on if you were a UPS driver accused of a DUI?

1. “Melendez-Diaz v. Massachusetts and DUI Confrontation Rights”
2. “Can a piece of paper convict you of drunk driving?”

Never Present A Legal Conclusion In Your Title

If your title says “A prosecutor can use a blood test report against you in court,” your target reader will feel defeated before clicking on your article. If you can say it all in a title, use Twitter. If there is more to the story than you can convey in 140 characters, then craft an article.

Do Something Different

Before you write your article, do a search engine query. Look at what other bloggers and lawyers are writing about the topic, and look at the titles they use. Then do something completely different.

There are thousands of articles and millions or results about x-number of ways to beat or challenge a DUI. Take the opposite approach, as I did in a tongue-in-cheek post entitled “Lose Your DUI Case – 5 Fail Safe Ways To Fail.” There are so many articles that present a laundry list of arcane references to textbook defenses. These are great as a checklist so a newbie lawyer doesn’t miss the obvious, but the details will either go directly over most defendants’ heads, or they will start obsessing about them, and make your life a living hell with tangents that don’t apply to their case.

The title of my article gives my readers a digestible number of things to consider (never use more than 7 unless you are counting sheep). It gives easy to understand advice (I’m sure you’ll post comments if you think the advice is bad).

You are the professional. Your target audience needs to know that you can be trusted. They need to know how not to sabotage their own case. And then they need to get out of your way so you can help them. Why add an additional layer of complexity to your job by providing minutia if your post succeeds and they do hire you?