Ever go to a cocktail party or conference reception and there’s “that guy” or “that girl” who monopolizes the conversation talking about work? You’re standing there, stuck. Drink in hand, you scan the room looking for an excuse to make a graceful escape.

I’m friends with “that guy” on Facebook. In fact, I’m friends with a few people like that on Facebook.

After a long day of meetings, formatting brochures, uploading blog posts, and being a legal marketer/therapist, I want to go to my Facebook page for a diversion. See what my friends are up to. Maybe catch an interesting article or two that I might have missed.

What am I finding these days?? My Wall is filled with posts from a few of these “friends.” The majority of posts are links to articles that I had already read through my Google Reader. Good articles, but no original content. I don’t want my Facebook Wall to become a legal marketing Reader. I have the Legal Marketing Reader for that.

Life is not always about work. And neither should social networking. It’s about getting to know you, my dear work colleagues, better.

Now, these are work colleagues I’m ranting about, so I can’t just “unfriend” them. That would be rude.

But Facebook has a solution!! Woo hoo! I’m just hiding all of their posts. I’m also ignoring their suggestions for other groups to join, people to friend, etc. Their credibility with me is gone. I’m blowing these people off and the worst part is: they don’t even know it.

Ok. So why the mini-rant here???

Don’t be “that guy” or “that girl.”

I’m not saying don’t post a lot to Twitter or Facebook. Just don’t be so work serious all the time. Be fun. Be friendly. Be helpful. Share a great blog post you wrote. Share a great article that is a MUST read. Hey, share some pictures from Halloween, or links to a concert you’re attending. Do be AUTHENTIC. Who are you?? Why should I get to know you better?? Why should I like you? Why should I trust you, your suggestions and links?? We’re talking about SOCIAL media and SOCIAL networking. If all you do is throw out links to articles, and requests to attend paid seminars, I’m not going to get to know, like or trust you. Worse yet, I’m going to ignore you by hiding you and your posts. I’ll also avoid you at that next cocktail party or reception.

Before I begin my take on the current incarnation of the Martindale-Hubbell® Peer Review Ratings ™ system and its relationship to Martindale-Hubbell ® Connected, I’d like to make a few things clear:

  1. Anything I am about to say is nothing I haven’t said to Martindale-Hubbell and LexisNexis ® (the parent company) representatives directly, in private conversations, over the past several years.
  2. I have a lot of affection for the Martindale-Hubbell Peer Review Ratings.
  3. I do not want to see this 140 year old brand die.
  4. These are my PERSONAL opinions and in no way shape or form reflect the opinions of my firm’s partnership and individual attorneys, or any guest bloggers of The Legal Watercooler.

In addition, it is NOT my intention, in this post, to address Martindale-Hubbell’s new Peer Review Ratings program, which I promise to address in a later post. Let’s just say that I think it’s a really, really, REALLY bad idea to start everyone off as an AV 5.0 and (potentially) re-review them DOWN over a 10-year period (according to Martindale-Hubbell’s Transformation Timetable).

For many years I have watched Martindale-Hubbell struggle with how to modernize and commoditize their 140-year old directory in a Web 1.0, and now a Web 2.0, world. The current incarnation seems to be based on the desire to have law firms subscribe to and fund Martindale-Hubbell Connected, a service whose end-users are in-house general counsel and private practice attorneys. Law firms will benefit as they will be part of Martindale-Hubbell’s Legal Network, which includes open directories such as www.martindale.com and www.lawyers.com.

From my vantage point, it is clear that Martindale-Hubbell is holding a lawyer’s AV Peer Review Rating hostage to drive “paid profiles in the Martindale-Hubbell directory,” which will give access to the “premium functions” within Martindale Connected, their answer to LinkedIn, Legal OnRamp, and other social networking sites. (Note: I cannot find a listing of what the “premium functions” are online. If someone has a link or a copy, please feel free to add to the comments section).

This is a pretty strong statement and here’s why I stand by it:

1. At the current time, more than half my firm’s partners are AV Peer Review Rated, with no input or effort by our firm.

2. Martindale.com, the directory of lawyers we have known to trust for the past 140 years, has a listing of over one million attorneys. According to their Web site:

Free access to the world’s leading network of legal contacts The centerpiece of the site is the Lawyer Locator, which provides instant access to the entire Martindale-Hubbell Legal Network. Users can search over one million lawyers and law firms in more than 160 countries by a variety of criteria — including name, geographic location, practice area, firm size, languages and more.

3. My lawyers are automatically included in this “leading network of legal contacts” whether or not they are Peer Review Rated. However, if my lawyer is Peer Review Rated I MUST PAY for their rating to show.

I want to make this really clear:

  1. Martindale’s network of lawyers includes hundreds of thousands of lawyers who are not subscribers to their services. I do not have the ratios of who is in the system v. licensed lawyers, but, for the most part, it appears that most corporate/business lawyers are included.
  2. Martindale rates attorneys of their own volition. In fact, Martindale will rate any lawyer; you just have to submit their contact information.
  3. An attorney does not have to be a subscriber to Martindale’s services, or any of the services provided by their parent company, to be rated by Martindale.
  4. However, when it comes to posting the rating information in their free on-line directories, where they are freely including my attorney’s contact information (and where I do not have the option to opt-out) Martindale WILL NOT disclose an attorney’s rating unless a firm pays 1) a full subscription fee to Martindale.com which can cost tens of thousands of dollars for the smallest of firms; or 2) a $59 “administrative fee” to add the AV Peer Review Rating to an individual attorney’s profile.

Oh, by the way, the $59 administrative fee, which has been available for the past two years, will be phased out as of 2010. Their beta test of charging $599 for an individual attorney to personally subscribe (in case their firm chooses not to) is also gone. So, my only option will be to pay for a full subscription to Martindale.com if I want my attorneys’ ratings to show.

In my opinion, this is the equivalent of either 1) pay-to-play; or 2) a ransom demand where my attorneys’ Peer Review Ratings are concerned.

Currently, I can include in my firm’s marketing materials and Web site that my attorneys are AV Peer Review Rated. However, this is a trademark owned by Martindale. For many, many years we were expressly FORBIDDEN to post the AV Peer Review Rating in any printed marketing collateral without a very long disclaimer, and on our Web sites. The ban on posting to Web sites has been lifted, but for how long??

I have about nine more months before I need to make my decision – do I subscribe to Martindale or not? However, I am preparing my 2010 budget right now. I can assure you one thing is certain: I will NOT be increasing my Martindale-Hubbell spend from $2500 to what will most likely be 10 times that amount or more.

And I have a special note to General Counsels or anyone using Martindale.com or Lawyers.com:

If you utilize the AV Peer Review Rating as part of your vetting process when hiring outside counsel, please know that your search results are incomplete, and, worse yet, misleading.

I hope everyone has a happy, happy Halloween!!! I’ll be in the cemetery watching Halloween (the original)!

In the meantime, enjoy a special double feature – Time Warp and Sweet Transvestite.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDCYFshhSkQ&hl=en&fs=1&]

Our friends over at The Lawyerist have a great post today courtesy of Allison Shields – 7 Simple Online Mistakes Lawyers Make.

  1. Using an AOL, Hotmail or Yahoo! Email address (a domain name will cost you $10 per year. Make the investment.)
  2. Not Writing for Real People (drop the legalese lawyers … even your lawyer clients don’t like to read it. Oh, and use bullet points, or numbered lists. People tend to focus on those.)
  3. Focusing your website or blog on YOU rather than your audience (clients should see themselves and their problems in your materials)
  4. Overselling (saw a blog recently … last five posts were all about a seminar they were hosting. Ugh. Where’s the useful information? Show you value and experience in the information that you’re sharing)
  5. Expecting results without participation (Can’t agree more! Goes back to know, like, trust )
  6. Boring, resume-style profile or bio (you don’t have to get crazy here, but my formula is: 1) What do you do? 2) Who do you do it for? 3) What types of problems do you resolve and how?? 4) Write for the business that you want. 5) Write so that the potential client see themselves, sees their problems, and sees that YOU have the solution)
  7. Being invisible online. (If you’re Googled and the search results are zero, do you exist? Can you be trusted?? Better yet, why should anyone call you or hire you?)

I’ll add one more, which I think is the most important:

Viewing the Internet, Web 2.0, social networking and social media as fads and trends that can be ignored.

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.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZqWJxgp-_mU&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&hl=en&feature=player_embedded&fs=1]

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).

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.