Thanks to guest bloggers Amy Knapp and Aileen Hinsch, Knapp Marketing, for providing a framework to repurpose all that hard work you put into your Chambers submissions.

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Being tasked with preparing a firm’s Chambers submissions is not considered the plum job in a law firm marketing department.  First, the responsible party must convince umpteen busy attorneys to reflect on the past year, cull their most significant matters and summarize the content and importance of those matters into several paragraphs.  Then the legal marketer must translate the matters into English. Because Chambers requires fresh matters, we don’t have the luxury of a four-month deadline to do the thinking, summarizing and sending:  it’s more like 4 weeks.

Then comes the sprint to the finish line – get all of those submissions in good order and submitted by the deadline.  The final challenge is finding out who did and didn’t get in, and trying to explain a decision you had no hand in, but ended up with all of the responsibility for.

If you have this job, then I have good news for you – you have got something no one else inside of a modern law firm today has:  everything the firm needs to effectively position and cross sell their services across practice areas, industries and basically, the whole firm.  You are likely one of the only people at the firm who has this broad understanding of what each group has been working on.

Our advice is to take the long view:  Consider the types of work that the matters reflect – including industries, legal issues, trends, etc. – and make a note of them. Use this process of reducing and summarizing your matters to develop a stronger understanding of the practice group and, in particular, what types of matters the group considers to be the strongest.

Your observations and analysis, based on what you observe from Chambers can be used the following ways:

1. Individual Attorney Bios

  • Abbreviate the Chambers matter descriptions to 3 sentences each and bullet 3 to 4 significant matters below the text on the attorney’s bio page.
  • If you see a trend or a prevailing type of expertise from one attorney’s matters, rewrite the lead for their bio and tie that lead to current events or business issues in the news that exemplify that trend.

2. Practice Descriptions

  • Freshen the matter references within the text of the PAD, or conclude the PAD with brief summaries of significant matters, as suggested above with bios.
  • Look for commonalities within the significant matters that the firm has handled over the past year.  Is there a particular industry or business problem that the firm seems particularly adept at serving or solving?  Tell that story in a generic but very relevant case study or two.

3. Credentialing Opportunities

  • Everyone loves a story or a case study.  Any one of the resolved Chambers matters, sufficiently disguised if necessary, would provide the basis for an instructive and engaging story.  Your attorneys might well be moving too fast to think it though, so write up brief titles and descriptions of potential articles that come to you from the matter descriptions, along with suggested media outlets who would publish them or blogs who would welcome the guest blog post.
  • Look for themes or trends within the matters of one particular attorney.  Draw out the insight, lesson or area of law that attorney seems to have focused on in the past year and suggest the title and content of an industry or ABA conference presentation that could be supported by the individual matters.

4. Cross-selling

  • Now is the time to sit back and think about all of the matters you have reviewed in the past several months.  Think about the clients and their positions and interests.  Without exception, every one one of you who prepared the Chambers submission are in possession of valuable cross-selling knowledge.  No one else knows about them because no one else has had to spend the time learning everything you have.  I don’t know what those synergies are, but I know for sure they are there.  See if you can find them and share them with the right person.

5. Further your own career!

  • You are in the enviable position of owning and understanding all of this data!  Who else in the firm could possibly devote this much time and energy to understanding what so many other attorneys are doing?  Much less understanding the significance and ‘ins and outs’ of the matters they consider noteworthy.  Don’t waste this opportunity.  If none of the suggestions above sound like they fit the culture of your firm then prepare a memo and send it to your immediate supervisor, your CMO, Director of Marketing, Managing Partner or your Practice Group Leader (as appropriate — be politically savvy).    Share your observations and ideas.  Be the person who is looking at the big picture — that’s what law firms need and respond to!

Thank you to guest blogger Dave Bruns, Director of Client Service, Farella Braun + Martel, for providing his insights into “When do you ask for the business?”

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Maybe the simplest but toughest question a lawyer will ever ask, “How do I get your business?” The Legal Marketing Association Listserve was ablaze with this topic recently.

The original post proffered a comment from a “marketing executive seated in a plane next to a lawyer” (sounds like the introduction to a bad joke). The seatmate told this lawyer that the right time to ask for work is at the outset of a meeting. According to the seatmate, this approach maintains the appropriate focus for the meeting – as if business executives will take a meeting without a defined purpose.

Sparked by the airplane-seated marketing executive’s comments, I, along with several prominent business development consultants and in-house professionals, chimed in. Virtually everyone suggested that asking for work is not appropriate at the beginning of a meeting. Several, including myself, suggested that asking for work is never appropriate until work is actually on the table. Let me explain …

Buying legal services for most corporate clients is a very sensitive exercise. Each time an in-house counsel makes a selection, they are putting their bonus and job on the line. Pressuring an in-house counsel is inappropriate, and they won’t select a lawyer that pressures them to buy. High pressure sales, often referred to as one-off sales, may be appropriate for a stick of gum or even a car purchase, when a long-term relationship is not essential to the purchaser’s success. However, the purchase of legal services requires a deep, trusting relationship and, in many cases, a clearly defined scope of work, approach and budget.

In graduate school, I studied the seven stages of the buying process (awareness, knowledge, consideration, engagement, satisfaction, loyalty and advocacy). If a lawyer jumps into “the ask” at the awareness stage, the potential client has not yet developed the trust required and will say “no” or, worse, show the attorney the door and stop responding to email and phone communications. If the lawyer takes the time and uses successful, proven marketing levers to move their prospect through the buying process, learning about their business, culture, approach, etc., when they reach the consideration phase (i.e., work is on the table and the lawyer is considered capable to handle it), it’s appropriate to offer a pricing proposal or potential scope of work for a project. Ideally, the lawyer can skip the proposal stage because the client asks for an engagement letter.

I counsel my lawyers to focus their energy on surfacing work and demonstrating that they can assist or one of their partners can assist. This takes time, and in many cases, the buying cycle for a lawyer can be six to 12 months – or more. The time period can be reduced with better questions, frequent touches and by ensuring lawyers fill their funnel/pipeline with actual buyers of the work that the lawyer wants at the fee they want to charge. Third parties can also speed people through the buying process; however, everyone, regardless of what they’re buying, needs to start at awareness and end at engagement – hopefully moving further into satisfaction and the advocacy stage.

As a business development consultant to lawyers, I ask them, “when aren’t you in a pitch meeting?” After a lawyer understands that everything they do for a client is part of the pitch for the first or next piece of work, they quickly realize the first action in the business development process is not asking for the work. I was not privy to the conversation with the seatmate, but I am sure I would have pushed back on his suggestion to jump to “the ask” because it is always better to stage “the ask” in a manner that ensures the answer will be “yes.” Until that time, “the ask” is inappropriate and could even harm a budding relationship.

I read this morning that 40% of all social media accounts are held by spammers.

Cue ominous music … or Monty Python skits.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_eYSuPKP3Y

Humor aside, what is the average Facebook or Pinterest user supposed to do with this information?

First of all. let’s put the statistic into perspective. According to Symantec, in 1990 90% of all e-mail was spam. By 2011 it was down to 69%.

And I’ve read that 40-90% of all mail delivered by the USPS is junk mail.

So while 40% of user accounts being held by spammers does seem high, it is expected. And no matter what the companies do to prevent it, I do promise, it will continue to rise with the medium’s popularity.

So what’s a user to do?

Just like the idea of avoiding the use of e-mail or the USPS are not viable solutions, the avoidance of using social media to avoid the spam is not a viable solution either.

Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest are all fighting the spammers (talk about job security), but we need to do our part as well.

The US Army has shared great steps on protecting yourself on Facebook (it’s all about your security settings).

  1. Friends only
  2. Less Sharing
  3. Personal Protection
  4. App Remover
  5. Limited Access
  6. Don’t Take it Personal
  7. Stealth Mode
  8. Good Networking
  9. Don’t Become a Target

Virtuoso has steps to protect you on Twitter.

  1. Never ever ever open a link in a tweet (mention) or a direct message from someone you don’t know.
  2. Never believe that someone has written an awful blog post about you or that their friend has posted a terrible photo of you on line. They haven’t!
  3. Never login to your Twitter account unless it says https://twitter.com or http://twitter.com in the URL
  4. Change your password regularly and use a complex combination of words and numbers.
  5. Report and block spam users
  6. Follow @safety and @spam to keep up to date with recent trends in spam attacks on Twitter.

(please click through to both posts for details)

LinkedIn spam is, first of all, about the malware, so don’t click on anything from anyone you don’t know. And protecting LinkedIn Groups from spam means more moderator administration and care, but group members need to do their part and REPORT the spam.

We’ll never get rid of spam. When it only came in the mail, it was just annoying and something with which to line the bird cages. But in its digital form, digitally it can cause great personal and professional harm to personal reputations, professional brands, computer hardware, bank accounts, software systems, etc.

We can, however, minimize the risk, by using common sense, employing security filters, and resisting the urge to click.

All the chat these days around the water cooler is about how the LA Kings are heading to the Stanley Cup finals (hey, I’m in Los Angeles). Oh, and how the Facebook IPO has fizzled.

A lot of people want to point to the poor performance of the IPO launch to say, “See, this Facebookie thing is just a fad.”

But don’t delete those Facebook pages and profiles just yet.

No matter what the naysayers say, Facebook is not just a fad.

Take a look at Facebook’s most recent statistics:

  • 901 million monthly active users at the end of March 2012.
  • Approximately 80% of our monthly active users are outside the U.S. and Canada.
  • 526 million daily active users on average in March 2012.
  • 488 million monthly active users who used Facebook mobile products in March 2012, and more than 500 million mobile monthly active users as of April 20, 2012.
  • During March 2012, on average 398 million users were active with Facebook on at least six out of the last seven days.
  • More than 125 billion friend connections on Facebook at the end of March 2012.
  • On average more than 300 million photos uploaded to Facebook per day in the three months ended March 31, 2012.
  • An average of 3.2 billion Likes and Comments generated by Facebook users per day during the first quarter of 2012.
  • More than 42 million Pages with ten or more Likes at the end of March 2012.
  • Facebook is available in more than 70 languages.

Until we see the USERS fleeing Facebook, there is something there there.

Until we see the BRANDS fleeing Facebook, there is something there there.

In fact, one trend I am intently following is how the brands, large and small, are no longer promoting their company URLs in print, television and radio advertising. They are, however, pushing consumers to their Facebook pages.

Why? I am going on the supposition that a person cannot interact with a Website. They can, however, interact with a Facebook page.

You cannot deny that Facebook has fundamentally shifted how the world and its people communicate with one another. Now that the genie is out of the bottle, it’s not going back.

When a user comments, likes or shares a Facebook page or post, it is shared on the user’s personal wall. The users are, in essence, providing that page (the brand) a referral or a tacit approval.

For instance, when I clicked “like” and provided a comment for Hamburger Mary’s Legendary Bingo Night (oh, this is NOT your grandmother’s church bingo night), that was shared on my wall, and my 600 or so friends could see that too.

Now, instead of just me and the Sports Dude going to play drag queen bingo this Sunday night, we have a table of ten going.

That’s money in the bank for Hamburger Mary’s and the charitable organization of the night. And it was free.

Which is the problem for Facebook. They need to turn that valuable activity into cold, hard cash.

Wall Street might not understand how to monetize Facebook (yet), but it will happen.

All I am saying is that before you write off Facebook and social media, give it some time. Social media is still a new medium. After all, Zuckerberg is ONLY 28-years old.

If the brands continue to flock to Facebook for the value they find in their pages, then Facebook needs to sell access to that.

I assure you, paying several hundred or thousands of dollars to run a Facebook page is NOTHING for these brands. Just think how much we used to pay for yellow and white page advertising.

Once those brilliant marketing majors figure out how to measure the ROI of Facebook advertising and user activity for the brands, then Facebook will be able to package that into a product to sell for itself. (Which, by the way, I think will focus around page interaction rather than straight click-throughs of the banner ads).

And before I close this out with a brilliant, and perhaps witty recap, I just want to point out that while the press made a huge to do over GM dropping their Facebook advertising, they seemed to downplay that just two days later GM dropped their Super Bowl ads as well. I have a feeling this strategy has more to do with the health of GM’s stock price than Facebook’s.

So what does all of this mean to law firms and the legal industry?

It’s a trend to follow. And definitely one NOT to ignore.

Personally, I NEVER look to other law firms for trends to follow. I look to the brands, and then see how I can interpret what they are doing for the legal services industry as a whole, and my firm specifically. Some trends interpret easily, and others are more nuanced.

However, considering that our firms are representing these companies, these brands, it is important for us to understand their business models, how those are changing, and how they are now conducting business in a socially connected world.

I just checked my calendar and, yup, it really is 2012.

Other than the earth coming to an end later this year, it’s about fricken time you got a website.

There just aren’t any good excuses out there.

Yeah, I’m talking to you solo and small firms out there.

And this is especially true for those of you who represent consumers – family law, divorces, child custody, employment matters, trusts & estates. I’d add personal injury, DUI and immigration to the list, but those folks are marketing machines.

Seriously. If you Google yourself or your firm, what do you find? If the answer is NOTHING, than you are LOSING business every day, and you don’t even know it.

Case in point:

Continue Reading Get a fricken website already

Seriously, I have not planned on these blog posts for the past couple weeks being focused on customer/client service, but that appears to be what’s in front of me. My assistant just brought in my mail, fanning herself and laughing. And here’s why:

I swear, I am not making this up. I get SEVEN of everything from ALM. There are three addressed to Heather Milligan. Two addressed to Heather Morse Milligan. One addressed to Heather Leigh Morse (wow, got my middle name in there). And one to Heather Morse. I’m sure the sports dude is taking offense that there aren’t a couple in there addressed to Heather Morse-Geller. I have tried to correct this. I really have. But rather than removing me from a mailing list, it’s turning into “Trouble with Tribbles.” trouble-with-tribbles Come on, you guys. You have to have a CRM data steward there. Someone’s gotta be able to fix this.

While at the Legal Marketing Association’s annual conference last month I made my way through the exhibit hall and checked out all the great prizes that could be won. As a sitting member of the board of directors, it is our policy to not participate in the drawings, so I was really just window shopping. My buddy Jeff Reade from Cole Valley Software (CRM) always has these great giant Pez dispensers. And this year he had an ELVIS one. Which was PERFECT! My oldest daughter is off to London and Paris this summer with her aunt, so I am taking the younger one to Nashville to visit grandma (talk about “I’ll take door number two, Monty.”).  I am trying to make it as special as possible, so we’re also going to head over to Memphis and visit Elvis at Graceland. While my daughter’s taste in music is limited to Lady Gaga, Taylor Swift and Big Time Rush (luckily no Bieber in our household), she does know Elvis. Maybe it’s the way he died, or the Cirque du Soleil show we saw in Vegas, but she’s really excited about our trip. While I was bummed I couldn’t throw my card in and participate in the drawing for Jeff’s ELVIS dispenser, he told me where he got it, and I promptly forgot all about it until today. Guess what came in the mail?? ELVIS. I am so excited. I immediately sent an email to Jeff thanking him, and then came running here. THIS IS GOOD CLIENT SERVICE. It does exist, Virginia. My expectations were completely exceeded. And I’m not even a client of Jeff’s. I am, however, an influencer, and a referral source, along with being a friend. For those of you selling services and products, it’s these little things that make us remember you. This was much more than a touch-point. You have added to my child’s happiness, and to her memories. That is HUGE! So, once again, thank you, thank you, Jeff, for remembering us. You WOWED me. You really did.

On Tuesday night I blogged here about an incident with my NOOK and my feeling that I, a loyal customer, wasn’t being taken care of by Barnes and Noble.

I got into a war of words with some loyal customers on Facebook who felt I should be satisfied with the offer I was being made by some mid-level managers (who were all very nice, by the way).

These managers were offering me the best “deal” that they were authorized to make. Which is fine.

But it wasn’t enough for me.

James Kane, whom you know I respect immensely from my post Why do some people stay, and some people leave?, talks about the difference between loyal and satisfied customers.

  • Loyalty is not a brand. It’s not about rewards programs. You cannot bribe someone to love you.
  • Loyalty is not about satisfaction. Dogs are loyal. Cats are satisfied.
  • Relationships with our clients is satisfaction. They are transactional. We do something, they pay us, and they are satisfied. They owe us NOTHING.
  • Satisfaction is a mood.
  • Loyalty is a behavior.
  • Satisfaction is the past. What you did for me yesterday.
  • Loyalty is about the future. What I will do for you tomorrow.

Loyal customers will promote you and sell your products for you. Satisfied customers will use your products because they don’t have a choice.

Sunday afternoon I was a loyal customer of NOOK.

By Tuesday evening I was a POd customer who might have been lost for good.

After speaking with Danielle in the Corporate Customer Relations Department this morning, who has resolved my issues with my NOOK 100%, I am back up to a “satisfied” customer.

So how does Barnes and Nobel return me to the loyal customer who has encouraged her immediate family to purchase,  or personally purchased for them, SIX different NOOK products in the past 18 months (2 NOOK first generation, 1 NOOK Simple Touch and 3 NOOK colors)?

Simple answer: I don’t know. I guess we’ll see how things go over the course of the next few months.

However, we’re off to a good start.

My new NOOK has already shipped, and I cannot wait to read the new Hunger Games book my daughter is lending me. Hopefully I’ll be finished with it in time for my new Sookie Stackhouse guilty pleasure coming out on May 1.

Either way, summertime reading is upon us, which is why I purchased my NOOK in the first place. For the e-ink. You can’t read from an iPad outdoors by the pool or at the beach.

ETA: please click here to expand the post and read my comment on how Danielle in Corporate Customer Service saved the day.

I am so mad at Barnes and Noble’s NOOK that I am writing a blog post about it.

I have a 1st Edition WiFi NOOK. I spent $189 or so on it about 20 months ago. I love it.

Well, loved it.

Even though I have my iPad I still love my NOOK. I use it out by the pool and on the beach. It’s lighter than my iPad, so makes for easier reading in bed.

In fact, I’ve been so loyal that I have since bought each kid a NOOK (NOOK Simple Touch and NOOK Color), and I just got my dad a NOOK Color for his 75th birthday.

I urged my nephew to get a NOOK so we can share our passion for history. I pushed my sister-in-law to get a NOOK over the Kindle so we can share our passion for Sookie Stackhouse.

No doubt about it, we’re a NOOK family.

It’s been great. Up until last night.

My daughter just lent me Book 3 in The Hunger Games series. I went to download it and was notified of an update. Took a few minutes for the update and then I was asked to register it. And then …

NOTHING

As in error code c7850.

As in my NOOK is now a paper weight.

As in for $35 I can purchase another NOOK 1st edition since they have a few lying around the warehouse.

Hey, if I dropped my NOOK in the pool, or spilled my coffee on it, or stepped on it, I’d have no problems buying a new one. I just paid $8o to replace the glass on my iPhone (don’t ask).

But I didn’t do anything to my NOOK other than turn on my device and accept the update.

And then I spent 1.5 hours with technical support tonight trying to find out what was wrong.

I’ll tell you one thing, what IS wrong is that Barnes and Noble HAD an extremely LOYAL customer, and now has an extremely dissatisfied one.

In the “olden” days a dissatisfied customer would share with about 10 people. Well, in the age of social media, I’ve already shared with my 2812 Twitter follwers, my nearly 1000 fans and friends on Facebook, and now here as well.

So what does this have to do with legal marketing? Not much. But it’s my blog.

What this really has to do with is the danger of poor (okay, shitty) customer service in the age of social media.

When you have a customer go from loyal to POd in a matter of minutes, you need to get in there and solve that problem ASAP.

While I was on the phone with George I*******, Digital Manager, I was already posting on the NOOK Facebook page and Twitter feeds about my experience. I was Googling to see if I was alone (hmmmmm, according to this, looks like the same thing happened with the last big update).

You HAVE to have a process in place that allows for a decision maker to make a decision when things are going south.

When you have a customer letting you know that she’s flaming up your Twitter and Facebook pages, it’s time to send her over to the “do what you have to do to make her happy” team.

If Barnes and Noble had chosen to eat $35 dollars tonight, I promise you, you’d have a completely different blog post, and they’d have a continued loyal customer.

But they didn’t.

Edited to add – looks like this post got picked up by White Whine, with no link to the resolution post. Here’s my follow up on how Barnes & Noble resolved the issue: Okay. I’m Satisfied.

Everybody needs a birthday hat!
I’m back from a short vacation and, looking at some online blogging I’m being looped in on, I missed a few things. And, guess what? I don’t care. I checked out of legal marketing and checked into being a mom and a wife, and, well, a me. I celebrated. I enjoyed. I didn’t think about you. We went to Disneyland for my birthday, the movies (Mirror Mirror), a play (Mamma Mia!), dinner and a show (Jeff Dunham) with Nat Slavin and Cheryl Bame, and drag-queen bingo. We made hot breakfasts, were on the go-go-go, and even stayed home in our PJs one day. Sure I checked e-mails, and responded to a couple, but the out of office message said it all.

I’ll take care of all non-urgent matters upon my return to the office on April 4th.

It took me all day yesterday to go through my in box and handle the urgent matters. I’m starting to work on my non urgent items. And, at some point, I’ll flip through my reader and see what I missed. It’s good to check out of work and your professional world, and check into your personal existence now and again, even if only for a few days. In fact, it’s a definite necessity in life. I enjoyed it so much, I might do it again this weekend.