Dear General Counsel,

You are not imagining it. Every single law firm you have ever given a dollar to is sending you a Coronavirus client alert, most likely daily. Every single law firm has also set up a COVID-19 Resource Center (<<< that one links to my firm’s).

I agree, I’m seeing a lot of undifferentiated, repetitive, lacking in value, general content. Basically, there’s a lot of crap out there.

Problem is, you need some of that information, and no single law firm is going to give you all that you need for the simple truth that one size fits one, and marketing is about the one to many.

I need your help here. You are going to have to decide which law firms (might not be yours) are providing relevant content and figure out what is the most meaningful way for that content to be delivered to you.

Separate the wheat from the chaff

As a legal marketing professional, I’m going to give you a few tips to manage the information coming your way so you can find what you need and ignore or unsubscribe from the rest:

  1. Set up your Outlook Rules to send all law firm alerts to a specific folder that you can check at your leisure. If we’re doing our job right, the alerts are coming from a specific address like “newsletter@lawfirm.com,” even if it looks like it’s coming from your attorney contact.
  2. Take control of your preferences with your law firms. Because of CCPA you should be able to manage your account and what you get. You can now subscribe or unsubscribe from the content you don’t want. Check the bottom of the alert, there should be a link to “manage preferences.” If not, try the unsubscribe button and see if you are given the choice to subscribe/unsubscribe from certain alerts.
Don’t want email clutter, think social media
  1. Twitter allows you to create lists. Create a list of your favorite law firms and/or lawyers. I do the same with the different legal news sources. As all alerts will be posted separately, you can now scroll along and find what you want. I manage my lists through Tweetdeck so I can easily find the content I want through columns.
  2. Still too much, add a #hashtag to narrow down the content. You can track these hashtags via Tweetdeck as well.
  3. On LinkedIn you can Follow your law firms, this way their content will make its way into your feed. They are using hashtags as well, so hopefully your can find the content that you need easily.
Don’t want emails? No social? There’s an App (okay, a company) for that
  • Check out JD Supra, Lexblog, Manzama, and Lexology for their curated law firm blog/alert content. Anyone can subscribe to JD Supra and Lexblog, and Manzama and Lexology feed newsletters, like ACC.
Why won’t my lawyer call me?

I know one of your biggest complaints is that your lawyers are not calling you. So here’s a bit of insight.

Read Dr. Larry Richard‘s article, Herding Cats: The Lawyer Personality Revealed. I’ll wait …

Lawyers, especially those in private practice, are more introverted than the general public. They have less resilience and are incredibly risk adverse. Everything they have been taught from law school through practicing law is about precedence. And then there are the litigators who have been trained to never ask a question to which they don’t already know the answer. (disclaimer: this is a generalized statement based on a general population and does not apply to individuals)

I’m not shocked that they haven’t called. I’m just amazed at those who push through their internal monologue and do it anyway.

That’s why marketing (one to many) is more comfortable for many of them. My job is to work with them to do this in a meaningful way.

My promise to you

As the legal marketing professional for my firm, I promise to do my best to ensure:

  • that the alerts we send will tell you WHY you need to open up and read the alert, not just WHAT you are about to read;
  • we will deliver the content in a way that is easy to discern and visually captivating so you can find it amongst the clutter;
  • if there is nothing meaningful for us to say about a recently issued guidance we’ll just add it to our COVID-19 Resource Center with the links;
  • we differentiate our content by narrowing our focus into specific areas that we believe will be of most interest to our clients and readers (seriously, NO ONE can go through the CARES Act in a single alert or 60 minute webinar);
  • if you submit or ask us a question during a webinar, and we can’t answer it online, we’ll get you the answer offline (whether you’re a client or not);
  • our analytics are reviewed for every alert we send so that we know from YOU what YOU want to read (not just what we want to write on), and continue to focus on the topics YOU find most meaningful.
I get it. I’m getting a ton of alerts too.

Just decide how best YOU want to receive your content, follow the firm in only one place so you don’t get duplicate alerts from the same firm, unsubscribe from the content your don’t find helpful, and please, please, please don’t hesitate to provide feedback to your firm’s marketing or business development professionals.