Hey, it can’t be all legal marketing all the time! An annual tradition growing up at my house during Halloween was Mad Monster Party with Boris Karloff and Phyllis Diller. Doesn’t get any cheesier than this!
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Our friends over at The Lawyerist have a great post today courtesy of Allison Shields – 7 Simple Online Mistakes Lawyers Make.
I’ll add one more, which I think is the most important:
The world of business has changed, and it is continuing to evolve. The rules are no longer set, and, in fact, they will most likely remain fluid year after year. Having a listing in X-directory is no longer a marketing campaign, and you shouldn’t be spending $37,000 to do it, because that’s what you’ve done year after year. Now is the time to throw out that marketing plan formula that you never really looked at anyway, and see how you can modernize your marketing and business development efforts, taking advantage of the new tools that are readily available to you.
As if the readers of The Legal Watercooler needed another reason to participate in social media and social networking:
Google Social Search should be available to everyone by the end of today.
Your friends and contacts are a key part of your life online. Most people on the web today make social connections and publish web content in many different ways, including blogs, status updates and tweets. This translates to a public social web of content that has special relevance to each person. Unfortunately, that information isn’t always very easy to find in one simple place. That’s why today we’re rolling out a new experiment on Google Labs called Google Social Search that helps you find more relevant public content from your broader social circle. It should be available for everyone to try by the end of the day, so be sure to check back.
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If you don’t have the time or inclination to watch the short video, when someone in your network searches a topic, say Legal Marketing, what you post in your social networks will show up at the bottom of the search results.
If you’re an attorney, this can and SHOULD include key legal terms, concepts, court rulings, etc.
So if you haven’t done so yet:
1. Set up a Google Gmail account. This is your passport to all things Google.
2. Under Settings (top right tab), create a Google Profile (here’s mine).
3. Under “Add Links” include your public accounts (Twitter, LinkedIn, Blog, Facebook company page, Google Reader, etc).
In the comments section of Rainmaking CAN be a learned trait, Lee Keller King refers to the wisdom of Master Yoda. Here you go …
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According to this article in the Wharton School’s Knowledge@Wharton periodical, it’s crowded enough to need some consolidation. The specific spaces such as Martindale Hubbell Connected or Legal OnRamp may not be at risk (yet?), but the large networks are certainly encroaching on each other in a way that suggests that some may need to merge in order to preserve their feature development, community density and critical mass. Whether the business model is advertising to eyeballs or transmutation to a paid membership, the larger the number, the greater the revenue potential.
One such example, for me, is LinkedIn.com and its ilk. Naymz.com and Plaxo.com are two places for professional and contact data where I have profiles, but for which I am only intermittently attentive. I get occasional messages from each, folks looking at my profile or looking to make a connection, but I do not employ either for that purpose. Naymz.com messages me that my profile has been viewed, but then requires a paid membership for me to access any information on the viewer. Plaxo.com lags behind LinkedIn.com in feature development, although its early online address book iteration was the first to allow Outlook contacts to be uploaded “automatically” from the outlook.adb file. If LinkedIn needed either the reputation rating feature or the developers and contacts base, I wouldn’t weep over the consolidation of either of these. In fact, I am looking for ways to avoid posting and maintaining multiple profiles. Social network management sites, take notice.
The Wharton article is instructive in its examination of potential in the online social media space, for which they see a lot of expansion. But, as Google has demonstrated and was confirmed in the recent Facebook-FriendFeed acquisition, the need for intellectual capital and feature expansion may lead to some near term grabs that will consolidate the online social space further. The niche potential is not well defined for smaller communities, but the battle lines are clear in the fight for mass use.
Are there any sites you or your firm/lawyers are using that you wish would disappear into another platform? How do you manage multiple profiles?
In the comments section of yesterday’s post, Law Firm Rainmakers: The New Untouchables, Toby Brown wrote: I recall seeing numerous articles in the last downturn about how the lawyer personality is opposite of what you need for sales. I don’t have a current reference to one of these articles, but the basic theme was: people drawn to the law (self selected) are introverts who fear risk. This means your untouchables class is indeed an elite one. From experience, even with business development coaching, many of these lawyers will never enter this class. These people love to create lists of people to call and do research to prepare (and eliminate risk), but picking up the phone scares them to death. Although I agree with your conclusions – they better try. The article Toby refers to is Herding Cats: The Lawyer Personality Revealed by Dr. Larry Richard. In his report, which I referenced here and here, Dr. Richard finds that:
“Lawyers are thinkers,” Richard says. “[Consider] what a lawyer does–thinking, analyzing documents, editing and writing.” According to Richard’s research, low sociability scorers are less inclined to enjoy interaction with others” and “may prefer to spend more time with information.”
So, the question is: “How do you take a lawyer who is introverted, skeptical and autonomous and create a rainmaker??” As I told a partner just this week: Fake it. Then I read the following passage in my morning meditation book, which I thought completely appropriate for this conversation:
– Ramana Maharshi Mind is consciousness which has put on limitations. You are originally unlimited and perfect. Later you take on limitations and become the mind. Much of our daily behavior is conditioned by forces deep below the conscious level of our minds. This means we are limited to a conditioned, automatic way of thinking and responding to the events of life around us. When such a conditioned behavior is strong, we think of it as a fixed part of the personality. Othello is jealous, Hamlet indecisive, Macbeth ambitious; that, we say, is their nature. To many biologists, this is something that is built into our very genes. I do not agree. Jealousy, vacillation, competition, and the rest are not permanent mental furniture; they are a process. A mental trait is a thought repeated over and over a thousand times, leading to words repeated a thousand times, resulting in action repeated a thousand times. At the beginning it is only a burgeoning habit of thought; you do not necessarily act on it. But once it becomes rigid, it dictates behavior. It is possible, through the practice of meditation and the other disciplines, to go against these conditioned ways of thinking and actually change ourselves from the inside out. The Thought for the Day is today’s entry from Eknath Easwaran’s Words to Live By. (Copyright 1999 and 2005 by The Blue Mountain Center of Meditation.)
Many of the negative messages swirling around in our minds are of our own making. We have picked them up growing up in our homes, in school, from society. We are truly limited only by our minds and what we tell ourselves. Toby says that the lawyers “better try” when it comes to rainmaking. I say forget “trying” and, in the words of Nike, Just Do It! Don’t let the limitations of your mind hold you back. Drop the “I don’t like to …” or “I don’t know how to …” mentality. Because I bet you like to eat well, live where you live, drive the car that you drive, and vacation where you like to vacation (not to mention afford those little rugrats running around in your life). All of that takes money and right now this is your career. Own it! It won’t be easy in the beginning, but over time you can let go of the negative messages and “habit(s) of thought” that you tell yourself, and recondition the “ways of thinking and actually change [yourself] … from the inside out.”
I don’t know why this isn’t intuitive, but, if you bring in new business to a law firm, or you are identified as having the ability to bring in new business, your job will be, for the most part, safe in this economy.
The Wall Street Journal Law Blog discusses this in Do Law Firm Associates Fear Rainmaking? The blog quotes Thomas L. Friedman’s New York Times Op-Ed, The New Untouchables:
A Washington lawyer friend recently told me about layoffs at his firm. I asked him who was getting axed. He said it was interesting: lawyers who were used to just showing up and having work handed to them were the first to go because with the bursting of the credit bubble, that flow of work just isn’t there. But those who have the ability to imagine new services, new opportunities and new ways to recruit work were being retained. They are the new untouchables.
However, I find that the following paragraph in the original article, omitted in the WSJ post, incredibly on point:
That is the key to understanding our full education challenge today. Those who are waiting for this recession to end so someone can again hand them work could have a long wait. Those with the imagination to make themselves untouchables — to invent smarter ways to do old jobs, energy-saving ways to provide new services, new ways to attract old customers or new ways to combine existing technologies — will thrive. Therefore, we not only need a higher percentage of our kids graduating from high school and college — more education — but we need more of them with the right education.
Did you catch this line? “Those who are waiting for this recession to end so someone can again hand them work could have a long wait.”
When the economic downturn, recession, depression is over, it will NOT be business as usual.
In addition to the right education mentioned above, I will add, more importantly, the need for the right TRAINING as well. I have discussed here, here and here the need for law schools to better identify and promote business skills, which include the ability to make rain.
I’m not talking necessarily talking books of business in the millions of dollars, but enough so that each attorney is able to feed themselves, and I am not talking “eat what you kill” compensation systems. Moving forward, service partners will only be in demand when times are flush, and the business is over-flowing. But their jobs will always be on the line.
At prior firms I have seen specific rainmaker/service partner relationships that work well, when times are good. But, once a practice slows down due to the loss of the service partner to retirement or another firm, for instance, or the slowing of the economy that most firms have felt these past couple years, who is the first attorney to be shown the door? The rainmaker. No. The attorney with the capability to make rain? Not right away. Or the service partner?? Ding, ding, ding, ding.
I know that a lot of lawyers went to law school to be lawyers, and not necessarily businessmen and women, or, worse yet, salespersons.
However, the practice of law has evolved dramatically over the 11-plus years that I have been in legal marketing. The institutional clients, who were passed down from senior partner to junior partner, the bread and butter of the firm for the past 75 years or more, no longer exist nor can they be depended upon for new and sustainable business. In addition, as firms have grown over the years, they have become multi-million, hundreds of million, or BILLION dollar businesses, and are now managed that way.
I also know that the skills necessary to make it to the top of your class in law school are not necessarily the skills that are needed to prepare you for a career as a legal rainmaker. And, unfortunately, most firms expect you to develop and learn these skills intuitively, and do not provide business development training and coaching as a part of their culture.
The WSJ Blog concluded with this:
So what about rainmaking — or “client development” in the more antiseptic law-firm parlance — is so risky? We’re not entirely sure. But here’s a thought: Bringing in business — at least in its rawest form — involves a bit of gladhanding and salesmanship, which, yes, isn’t always going to work. So the risk is that such efforts will fail, something that lots of lawyers just don’t have the stomach for.
Wow. How depressing.
I’m not going to leave you hanging there. We’re about solutions at The Legal Watercooler. So here are three things you can do today:
1. Personally invest in coaching & business development training
If your firm won’t pay for coaching or training, pay for it yourself. You’re still making a pretty good salary. And considering you’ve already invested tens of thousands into your education, what’s a couple thousand more? There are a wide range of companies and consultants who offer training and/or coaching in every market in the United States. You can expect to spend a minimum of $200 a month for coaching, and $2500-$5000 for business development training, which might or might not include one-on-one follow-up coaching.
2. Take advantage of your firm’s marketing department, or local Legal Marketing Association.
If your firm has a marketing department, make use of their time. Take a marketer to lunch and pick their brain for things you can do to enhance your practice … and do them.
If your firm doesn’t have a marketing department, check out your local Legal Marketing Association and attend some of their monthly meetings. We’re a friendly bunch and pretty helpful. Make contact with the local chapter president, and have them introduce you around the meeting. There are also numerous legal marketing blogs you can follow.
3. Take a rainmaker to lunch.
Identify the rainmakers in your firm and take each one to lunch. Ask them how they built their practices. I promise that each one has a style all their own and you will pick up new and useful information that will help you build your legal practice.
If this is not feasible, look to your law school alumni association. Who amongst your locally practicing alum has a prominent or successful practice? Call them up and ask to take them to lunch. Prey on their ego. The worst thing they can do is say no.
Making rain for MOST lawyers is not intuitive or instinctual, so don’t feel bad if it doesn’t feel natural, but the skills can be learned if you avail yourselves of the resources … and the resources are out there. You just have to invest your time, and perhaps your money.
When it comes to microblogging a common “complaint” is “why would anyone care what I am eating?”
We don’t care what you’re eating … we care about what you’re thinking.
A lot of what I’m thinking about is what I’m reading today. A lot of what I read comes to me via my Google Reader. Or I blog about it. And I try to share a lot of this on Twitter, but not everything.
So, to aid you in knowing what I’m thinking, I have added my Google Reader Shared Items to The Legal Watercooler.
In the right tool bar, scroll down and you will now see “What I’m Reading“:
Click on the “View All” and you will have a feed of the most recent blog posts I have read and decided to share. You can subscribe to my Reader feed, add it to your Reader … or just bookmark and browse whenever you’re bored.
You can share too!
I 
have also added an “Add This” widget to both the sidebar, and to each individual post to make it easy for you to share The Legal Watercooler posts that you enjoy.
If social media is truly about how we discover, receive and disseminate information, then I believe it is all together best for me to be as transparent in regards to what I’m reading and thinking.
But I’m also interested in knowing what you are reading and thinking. If you’d like to share your Reader Feed with me and your fellow Coolerites, please add a link to the comments section.
(I’m going to take my own advice and blog my response rather than send an e-mail, especially to a closed network.)
I know that everyone loves the Fulbright Litigation Trends Survey, and I do too. Lots of great information in there. But there are points, such as companies choosing litigation over arbitration, 55% to 32%, with 13% having no preference (page 21) that did not ring true for me, especially from what I’m hearing from general counsel and litigators.
Please note: I am no Ann Lee Gibson or Dr. Mark Greene, I don’t even pretend to play a CI professional at my work. However, my skeptical alert always goes up on studies like this. So what is written below is coming from a lay-person’s reading of the study.
Respondents’ Headquarters Locations (page 7)
4% – West
5% – Atlantic
6% – California (hmmmm. I thought we were in the west)
8% – South
11% – East Coast/New England
12% – Other U.K. (12%)
14% – Midwest
15% – London
26% – TEXAS
Wow. 26% of the respondents are from Texas! I know Texas is a big state, but should they be allocated 26% of the respondent pool?? Won’t that skew the results in favor of Texas’ economy, Texas’ laws and Texas’s business culture? Having worked at a few AmLaw 200 firms, I don’t see any of those firm’s footprints here.
In reality, the study is skewed towards Fulbright’s client base, as it should be. This is a study that has the most relevance to Fulbright and they are kind enough to share it with all of us.
So, please, before extrapolating the entire study to the entire industry, or to your firm, read the numbers. Use the study as a jumping off point for exploring what’s going on in your industry, your marketplace, and your client practice.