It happens to the best of us, and it happened to me last week. I f***ed up at work and it pissed a partner off big time. He was right to be pissed, because I f***ed up. My first instinct was to deflect the blame and project it onto him (Too sensitive?? Doesn’t understand the finesse of what I was attempting to achieve??). What it comes down to is this:

I f***ed up.

My customer was NOT happy with the services I provided.

That is all on me, and me alone.

So, what to do if at first you f*** up?

  1. Don’t go into hiding.
  2. Address it immediately.
  3. Take responsibility.
  4. Sincerely apologize.
  5. Lay out how it will NOT happen again.
  6. One more apology.

I get it. When lawyers get mad, they get loud and it can be intimidating. But you need to dig in your heels and listen (as long as it is not abusive). You need to understand how you not only didn’t meet expectations, you did the exact opposite. You have lost their trust. Lawyers are skeptical folks. Once you f*** up big time, they NEVER forget. So how do you fix it?

  1. Resolve the initial issue to their satisfaction.
  2. Once you have apologized, you need to go back and knock one out of the ball park for the same partner.
  3. Show them that you are a professional and ready to move on.
  4. And, no matter what, make it a one-time mistake only.

While they might never really forget the mistake you made, at least your last impression will be a good one.

OK. I play the G+ game, but that’s really what it is. A game which I’ll explain below.

I ran across this story, Facebook Gets Pluses From Google’s Mounting Minuses, via my Google Reader (which I can no longer share with you) today.

I have to admit, I didn’t read the article too carefully once I saw this graphic:

I’m not surprised. Google+ sucks. But, damn it, I was posting links to our firm’s G+ page earlier today.

Why??

SEARCH.

We play the G+ game because of search, and that’s it.

So, don’t worry that the G+ emperor has no users. It has something better. The +1 button. Which can help bump you to that coveted page 1 of search results.

And if you like this, please +1 using the handy, nifty button below (happy smile, with a wink).

Well, I had no idea that Google has saved every search I’ve made since 2008 when I got my first GMail account.

With their new privacy changes coming up, now is the time to go in and delete your history:

How to delete your Google Browsing History before new policy

Follow the steps below:
  1. Go to the google homepage and sign into your account
  2. Click the dropdown menu next to your name in the upper-right hand corner of your screen
  3. Click accounts settings
  4. Find the “Services section”
  5. Under “Services” there is a sub-section that reads “View, enable, disable web history.” Click the link next to it that reads: “Go to Web History.”
  6. Click on “Remove all Web History”
When you click on “Remove all Web History,” a message appears that says ” Web History is Paused.” What this means is that while Google will continue gathering and storing information about your web history it will make alldata anonymous, that is, Google will not associate your Web History information with your online accounts and will therefore be unable to send you customized search results.
Google’s ability to gather personalized information about you by assigning data to your Gmail and YouTube accounts will remain “Paused” till you click “Resume.”

What do the Ewings, Top Chef and the Legal Marketing Association (LMA) all have in common?? DALLAS!!! Woo hoo. I just booked my flights for the LMA Annual Conference to be held in Dallas (ok, Grapevine), Texas, March 15-16, 2012. I’m looking forward to seeing friends and colleagues, along with the programming and networking events (including LMA’s Night Out, followed by the Akina Night-Cap event). If you haven’t done so, save the conference search #LMA12 over at Twitter to follow along, AND don’t forget to introduce yourself to the on-line crowd there. Many of us will be live tweeting from the conference for those who cannot attend, or cannot be in two sessions at once. LMA also has the official conference group on LinkedIn, so start connecting with your peers now. In fact, I just RSVPd to my first event on Tuesday night hosted by Siteimprove. It’s open to all us early-birds. So go register at their LinkedIn event page. Have you seen the Texan Station there??? When they say they have the largest TV screen, they mean it. Perfect for MARCH MADNESS!!! And the smoked brisket was to die for!

Hot guys NOT included
I arrive on Monday night as we have an LMA board meeting on Tuesday, so I’ll definitely be attending the pre-conference programs (still can’t decide which. QuickStart, SMORS or the CMO Summit) and the post-conference session: Achieving Measurable Lead Generation, Increased Brand Awareness and Business Development through Social Media. And for those asking, why, yes, I will happily deliver Girl Scout Cookies! Just place your order via Twitter or leave a message in the comments below. I do advise everyone to wear your flats and comfy shoes; it is a Gaylord Property after all. And I would definitely download the App for the hotel as it contains a much needed property map. And, for those of you too young to remember DALLAS … the Kardashians have NOTHING on the Ewings. Lucky for us, there’s a whole new generation of Ewings on their way to the small screen. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wl8wPLEqKA&feature=fvsr]

Legal marketers will throw the phrase “touch point” around and while we understand what it means and why they are important. I wonder about the lawyers out there? Touch points are those little or big interactions you have with clients, potential clients, referral sources, etc. Depending on the relationship, and the legal marketer speaking, it can take upwards of 12 touch points to convert a prospect into a client. Touch points can be phone calls, having coffee, sending an e-mail with a note and a link to an interesting article, an invitation to a firm event, taking a prospect or client to a sporting event, an in-house CLE program, etc. I think most lawyers (and most people) give up after the second or third touch point:

  1. I met the person
  2. I followed up with an e-mail inviting him or her to connect on LinkedIn
  3. I invited the prospect to the firm dinner at X industry event

So, why haven’t they given me their business? Moving on. Don’t give up. You’re still in the wooing stage and some prospects play harder to get than others. The prospective client needs to get to know you , like you, and trust you. Once you have achieved that, you then need to be top-of-mind when a new case or matter presents itself. THAT is what touch points will do for you. They will provide you the platform to build a relationship, and then stay top-of-mind. Touch points do not have to be huge, they just need to be regular and authentic. I had a situation come up this morning and, after thinking about it, I realized that while I could easily and quickly handle it, it would make a great touch point for the attorneys involved. I would urge you, my lawyerly friends, to not let a touch point pass you by. What do I mean by that? Don’t have your secretary or the marketing hack do for you what you can easily do for yourself:

  • Pick up the phone and make the follow up calls yourself to the upcoming firm event.
  • If you’re a member of a LinkedIn Group (and join some if you are not), you should be adding the links to your latest and greatest blog post, not the marketing director.
  • Add the personal note on the firm holiday card, or, better yet, create your own.
  • Don’t wait for your client to discover the firm’s blog … send a personal email and invite.
  • Post to the firm’s blog or website about your latest win, and let your client know why the win/decision is of importance to them.

Basically, it comes down to this, why give someone else brownie points with the client, when you could be collecting them for yourself? (The small print: results will vary, and not every prospect will convert into a client)

Patience is not a common trait of the legal marketer.

An “inside” joke amongst us is that the code of the attorney is “HURRY. HURRY. HURRY.” Followed by “WAIT. WAIT. WAIT.” And then, “NOW!!”

I wrote here about how patience is a virtue for the legal marketer. How it takes about 18-months to go from an idea to buy-in within a law firm.

The idea of waiting for cultural changes to occur takes more patience then trying to figure out how many licks it takes to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop.

My friend Jillion Weisberg from HubbardOne summed it up this way:

I’ve been watching you marketing people for a long time, and the problem is that you get to a new job and you have some great projects to implement. Once they are completed, you get bored and you start itching for the next great opportunity.

Considering the average tenure of a senior legal marketer is 2.5 years, I’ve been at my firm for a lifetime. It will be five years at the end of the summer.

In the past few months I’ve started to see signs of cultural shifts amongst our partners, and now as a firm as a whole.

The conversations are changing. The focus is shifting. The questions of “How?” and “Why?” are taking on a different meaning.

It’s an exciting time at my firm, and I am so grateful for Jillion’s admonishment.

My advice to my peers: Don’t leave before the miracle happens.

It is standard legal marketing advice to counsel attorneys to go after the low hanging fruit.

The low hanging fruit can be doing more of the same work for a current client, or seeing if a similar client has similar legal needs.

However, somewhere down the line, the low hanging fruit dries up.

Perhaps a new law or regulation has changed the legal landscape. Or the issues at hand have slowly been resolved or the work is now commoditized. The economy is a frequent villain leaving many practices to boom or die.

One of my partners recently commented on this in a Los Angeles Daily Journal article Amid Health Reform, Trial Bar Adjusts.

So what’s a lawyer with too many hours on their hands to do?

My advice? You either need to take a jump to the left, or a step to the right.

A Jump to the Left

Taking a jump to the left entails looking beyond your firm’s current services provided to clients. If your currently represent your clients doing X, is there opportunity out there to represent them doing Y? With Y being a whole new practice area.

Identifying and building a new practice area in a firm can take years. You need to seed and grow a whole new orchard here. In addition, there might be egos to sooth and cultural hurdles to over come.

Individual attorneys might need additional education (an LL.M.). A legal specialty certification might be provided by your state. Or several hours of CLE training might be enough to bring you up to speed on the legal issues, but you need time to build the experience and expertise.

I would counsel attorneys to:

  • join the local and national bar associations associated with the practice area;
  • identify, join and participate in the trade and industry associations;
  • subscribe to many of the legal blogs (lists can be explored and subscribed to here, here and here);
  • build a new networks of potential clients, referral sources and influencers;
  • plug into the social networks via LinkedIn groups, Twitter hashtags, etc.

I find that this is a great opportunity for junior partners looking to build their own practice and client base. They are currently being fed work, and can use their extra hours for the education, marketing and branding in their new practice area of interest.

A Step to the Right

A step to the right is less time consuming. It’s basically looking at how you can take your current skill set and relationships and realign them slightly to a new set of variables.

For instance, if you spent a lot of time defending clients in a specific type of medical device litigation, you can easily forecast where upcoming litigation might be coming in the same industry.

If a new piece of legislation is moving its way through the state or federal system, how will that impact your clients’ businesses (Sarbannes-Oxley, anyone?).

How will the elections and redistricting change the political landscape in your state? Could legislation that has been stalled clear its way through to a vote? Will this help or hurt your client base?

I had a corporate partner at a prior firm who’s schtick was to have three industries going at all times. One was hot. One was waining. One was on the rise. He wasn’t reinventing who he was, only reinterpreting his experience for a different audience of potential clients.

Once again, you are not reinventing your practice, but redefining how what you currently do is THE relevant experience your (potential) clients need to solve X business problem.

Conclusion

Whichever path you choose, please be advised that there is work to be done. The marketing director can be your partner, but you will have to take on the challenge as well.

Whatever you choose to do, you cannot rest on your laurels of having done great work in the past, and expect the new work to come to you.

You need to be proactive, learn your stuff, become the trusted adviser your clients seek, create and promote your brand.

In other words, you need to seed your fields and tend to your orchard so that you have a new crop of fruit to pick.

Whether you take a jump to the left, or a step to the right, just don’t put your hands on your hips. You’re not doing the Time Warp here.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fi4K9Cus0_g]

Guest post by Noble McIntyre, senior partner and owner of McIntyre Law.

Word of mouth is the original mode of advertising, and it still works today. You may not believe it in this time of television, radio, and especially the Internet. But the success of my firm is a testament to the power of word of mouth.

The thing is, relying on word of mouth doesn’t mean you sit back, wait, and hope people talk about your business to send more clients your way. You can start the conversation. You have to. No one else has as vested an interest in the success of your firm as you do.

In order to forgo traditional advertising, the way I have, you need to get people talking about your business. One way to do that is by giving back to the community.

Let’s be clear. I’m not saying publicity for your firm is the only reason to get involved in your community. Publicity is never a good enough reason to take on a cause. In fact, just the opposite is true. But by getting involved, you can support causes close to your heart—and the hearts of your partners and staff—and gain exposure for your business at the same time. It’s a win-win.

Community involvement is an integral part of my firm, and my staff not only knows how important it is to me, but also shares my commitment. It’s through this commitment that we’ve created a couple of unique ways to give back to our community. Maybe our successes will give you some ideas about how to do the same, and get that conversation going.

November 2011 marked the second occasion of our Annual Day of Kindness, in which we partnered with other firms in our area to form the non-profit group Lawyers Against Hunger. We set a goal to raise $50,000 that we would use to provide Thanksgiving dinner for Oklahoma families in need. By mid-October, we had raised more than $60,000, demonstrating how much this cause resonated with our community.

On November 17, over a period of about two hours, my staff and I, along with local attorneys, firefighters, and Air Force service members, distributed Thanksgiving turkey dinners to more than 4,200 Oklahomans. This was about 1,200 more meals than we gave out in 2010. A local news crew came out to film the story and talk to us. Many of the people who came out that day told us they’d heard about it by word of mouth. It was extremely gratifying to be able to help so many people, and we hope to help many more this November.

Helping the community doesn’t always require your physical presence, or even a lot of time out of your day.

In early 2011, we had an infographic produced that presents distracted driving statistics and information in an easy-to-understand, engaging medium. It was created using information our firm gathered, as well as data compiled from state and national agencies like the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration. We decided to produce this infographic because of the alarming number of cases we’re seeing that involve distracted drivers, and we wanted to help raise public awareness about the dangers.

The distracted driving infographic is now available on our firm’s Web site with coding that can be copied and pasted for people to share on their own sites. We included social media sharing tools to make it easy to distribute on social networks such as Twitter and Facebook. This is pretty standard, but we decided to take it a step further.

We contacted several schools around Oklahoma and offered to provide posters of the infographic to them free of charge. Many of them took us up on it, and they now display the infographic in classrooms where it can reach one of the most important demographics affected by distracted driving—teenagers. If the information we provided saves even one teen’s life because they decide not to text and drive, then we’ve reached our goal.

In addition, we sent the infographic to the Oklahoma Department of Public Safety and to the state’s METRO Transit Office in order to reach an even wider audience.

We’ve already had requests from other organizations for their own copies of the poster, which we’re happy to provide.

Again, if just one person heeds the warnings on the infographic about how dangerous distracted driving is, we feel it’s more than worth the expense of having had the infographic produced, printed, and distributed.

And every time someone looks at the infographic or the poster, they see it was produced by McIntyre Law. It’s an unobtrusive way to market the firm, by letting the information be the focus of the project, and taking a back seat to the main goal, which is informing and helping the public.

That’s really the key.

When you focus on getting involved in your community, or embarking on a project to improve public welfare, the exposure for your firm naturally follows. The more you try to forcibly market your firm, the more people will see you as just another lawyer. Do something truly outstanding, and you’ll truly stand out.

Oh, those kids over at the Florida Bar Association are kicking it up again.

My friend (and guest blogger) Gail Lamarche just posted this link over on the Legal Marketing Association‘s member listserv, The Florida Bar Guidelines for Networking Sites (updated as of January 10, 2012).

Before we all start to panic, go read the actual guidelines.

As I have said many times, what you do IRL (in real life) needs to apply online, and that’s what I’m seeing here:

Florida is simply attempting to extend their (overly restrictive, in my opinion) current rules to the social platform.

However, I’m no lawyer, so this is not advice. Just the opinion from the marketing hack.

I think my colleague Igor Ilyinsky said it best, “Be careful who you friend – as they can report you to the (state) bar.”

In other words, you can do it, just don’t be a jerk, piss someone off, and get reported.

Seriously. When was the last time a corporate attorney was reported to the state bar for sending out an email?

So, yes, Virginia, you can have a Facebook page, and you don’t have to include a disclaimer:

Pages of individual lawyers on social networking sites that are used solely for social purposes, to maintain social contact with family and close friends, are not subject to the lawyer advertising rules.

Don’t spam people on LinkedIn:

Invitations sent directly from a social media site via instant messaging to a third party to view or link to the lawyer’s page on an unsolicited basis are solicitations in violation of Rule 4-7.4(a), unless the recipient is the lawyer’s current client, former client, relative, or is another lawyer. Any invitations to view the page sent via e-mail must comply with the direct e-mail rules if they are sent to persons who are not current clients, former clients, relatives, other lawyers, or persons who have requested information from the lawyer. Direct e-mail must comply with the general advertising regulations set forth in Rule 4-7.2 as well as additional requirements set forth in Rule 4-7.6(c). Information on complying with the direct e-mail rules is available in the Handbook on Lawyer Advertising and Solicitation and in the Direct E-Mail Quick Reference Checklist on the Florida Bar website.

Watch those testimonials:

Although lawyers are responsible for all content that the lawyers post on their own pages, a lawyer is not responsible for information posted on the lawyer’s page by a third party, unless the lawyer prompts the third party to post the information or the lawyer uses the third party to circumvent the lawyer advertising rules. If a third party posts information on the lawyer’s page about the lawyer’s services that does not comply with the lawyer advertising rules, the lawyer must remove the information from the lawyer’s page.

If they follow you on Twitter, they are signing up to receive what you send:

Lawyers who post information to Twitter whose postings are generally accessible are subject to the lawyer advertising regulations set forth in Rule 4-7.2 as above. A lawyer may post information via Twitter and may restrict access to the posts to the lawyer’s followers, who are persons who have specifically signed up to receive posts from that lawyer. If access to a lawyer’s Twitter postings is restricted to the followers of the particular lawyer, the information posted there is information at the request of a prospective client and is not subject to the lawyer advertising rules under Rule 4-7.1(h).

Keep it simple and you don’t have to report it:

Finally, the Standing Committee on Advertising is of the opinion that a page on a networking site is sufficiently similar to a website of a lawyer or law firm that pages on networking sites are not required to be filed with The Florida Bar for review.

And, in the words of Wendy L. Patrick, don’t engage in false or predatory friending. Use your manners, and common sense.

Now, I obviously cut and pasted information that I wanted to highlight from the Florida Bar Association. There’s more to read, so go read it, here.

As a marketing director, I do encourage every attorney to connect on LinkedIn with people they meet. You’ve MET them already. It’s okay.

If you speak at a conference, and they give you their business card, send a request to connect on LinkedIn (Jim, it was great meeting you at the ABC conference earlier this week. Next time you’re in L.A. make sure to give me a call. I’d love to grab a cup of coffee with you).

If you attend a conference, and hear great speakers, connect with them on LinkedIn (Mr. Smith. I heard you speak at the ABC conference this week and really enjoyed what you had to say on XYZ. I’d like to add you to my LinkedIn connections).

My marketing advice is simple: Conduct yourself online as you would in the real world. Be authentic. Be polite. Don’t spam. Don’t be a jerk. Don’t engage in predatory friending.

Image via Legal Juice.