There is not marketing as usual right now. There are no conferences, no cocktail hours, no lunch-and-learns. And I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know. So what kind of marketing can we do to stay top-of-mind with clients (and hopeful/potential clients) during a pandemic? I have a couple of ideas. Staying Top-of-Mind with Clients Starts with Sharing Information You may think that all the panel counsel who work with your corporate and insurance clients have inundated them with webinars and memos about how COVID-19 is affecting or may affect their businesses. About the insurance coverage questions, claims issues,...
I continued to be impressed (and not in a good way) with lawyers who fail to prioritize effective and timely communication with clients. They are so busy with the seeming urgency of managing their caseloads that they aren’t doing the important work of maintaining their relationships with their clients. When clients feel neglected, even if the reality is that you are competently doing their work, they’re eventually going to either start openly looking for another lawyer or be receptive to someone else’s advances. And make no mistake, there are always other lawyers waiting to move in on your clients. Timely...
Earlier this year, I did an interview with Karin Conroy of Conroy Creative Solutions about why lawyers should be doing content marketing. We talked about content marketing and its importance to lawyers from a 20,000-foot perspective. So I’ve asked Karin to come back on the blog to get a little more granular and specific about how good content writing makes your website more effective. We both believe that a good website is client-oriented and causes the reader to burn as few mental calories as possible. Good Content Writing Makes Your Website More Effective Does the content on your website keep...
When I launched my new book, Stop Putting Out Fires a couple of weeks ago, I ran a giveaway in which I gave out free copies of my first book, Building a Better Law Practice. Doing this cost me time, money, and arguably, may have cost me sales from people who had purchased Stop Putting Out Fires and may have later bought Building a Better Law Practice, but instead I gave it to them for free. So what is the upside of giving work away for free? Maybe I’ve instilled more loyalty among my readers. Perhaps I have built up...
A friend of mine named Oliver recently told me a story about getting stiffed by a client. This is a problem common to many lawyers when they either don’t get a retainer or don’t collect a large enough retainer before starting to work for a new client. Because of the prevalence of this issue, Oliver and others who heard the story asked me to share it. Getting stiffed by a client is likely to happen to all of us at some point, but this is just a reminder to do what you can to minimize that possibility. Here’s Oliver’s story:...
During a recent conversation with a partner at a law firm, he said to me, “I was never the kind of associate that anyone said, ‘We can’t lose that guy.'” In fact, most associates never have that said about about them. Most associates are pretty replaceable, even good associates. Good associates deliver solid work-product, meet their billable requirements, and don’t make waves. But there are thousands, even tens of thousands of young lawyers who can do those things. So what do you have to do to become non-expendable, or at least the closest thing to it in the legal industry?...
This is an excerpt from my new book, Level Up Your Law Practice, that will come out in May 2020. Stay tuned for more details. You can follow me here by subscribing below, on Twitter, or on LinkedIn. How do you think it would be received if the first time you met someone you planted a kiss right on their mouth and began to assume that you were in a dating relationship? Likely not very well. Why then do we treat business relationships any different? A Story about Courting and Business Relationships About a year ago I was at an...
Lawyers should be doing content marketing as a means of providing value and building up trust equity with clients/potential clients, as well as exhibiting your expertise. If you’re not engaging in content marketing to enable clients to find you and so you can answer their questions, here’s a primer about what content marketing is, what’s it’s not, and how to do it well. What is content marketing? Maybe you’ve heard of content marketing before, and maybe you have’t. So for the sake of making sure we are speaking a common language, I want to provide a definition. The Content Marketing...
Professor Jennifer Romig (of Emory University School of Law and the blog Listen Like a Lawyer), Jaymi Rodgers (of Brotherhood Mutual Insurance), and I presented a panel discussion at CLM Southeast in Atlanta on the importance of listening, communication, and collaboration in managing claims. Here is the blurb about our presentation: Jennifer Romig (Emory University Law School) will present information on the HURIER listening framework and moderate a discussion among the other panelists about how listening and collaboration affect the attorney-client relationship, case/claim management, and achieving each party’s goals and objectives for both specific cases and overall claims handling. There...
If you can’t keep your clients happy, you aren’t going to keep your clients. When your clients are corporations who have lawyers all over the country handling their business, those clients know exactly what they want, and how and when they want it. You and I need to know those things as well so we can be compliant and make their jobs easier. Outside counsel have the difficult job of managing the litigation and other assignments from in-house counsel. And as important as getting good results is, communicating with in-house counsel is no less so. From where I sit, there...
