If you aren’t better, be different

February 16, 2017 by
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I often talk about the value of showing prospective clients how you are “better or different” than other lawyers who do what you do. In The Attorney Marketing Formula, I show you how to do that, and how to construct your “Unique Selling Proposition” (U.S.P.)

Writer James Clear did a post recently with another take on this subject. He calls it, “Layering Your Skills,” and quotes Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, for explaining how someone who isn’t markedly better than their competition can stand out by being different:

“Everyone has at least a few areas in which they could be in the top 25% with some effort. In my case, I can draw better than most people, but I’m hardly an artist. And I’m not any funnier than the average standup comedian who never makes it big, but I’m funnier than most people. The magic is that few people can draw well and write jokes. It’s the combination of the two that makes what I do so rare. And when you add in my business background, suddenly I had a topic that few cartoonists could hope to understand without living it.”

As you consider your strengths, don’t ignore those that aren’t obviously relevant to the practice of law. Include your undergraduate fields of study, businesses and industries you’ve worked in, sports you play or avidly follow, your hobbies and other outside interests. They can also help you stand out, especially in many niche markets.

I’m not the best chess player in the world but I am better than most people. Even if I wasn’t, if I was practicing today I could use my knowledge of the game to relate to and attract other chess players. I could appeal to tournament directors, coaches, and vendors. I could attract the attention of bloggers, editors, and meeting planners who cater to those markets.

I could become one of the best-known lawyers in the chess world, without being the best chess player or the best lawyer.

What are you good at and how could you combine that skill with other skills to show the world how you are different?

Show the world how you are better or different

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Filed Under: Marketing legal services Tagged With:

Focus and grow rich

February 15, 2017 by
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If you can remember getting interest on your savings account (if you can remember savings accounts), you recall that compound interest, as opposed to simple interest, allowed you to earn a bigger return because you earned interest on the interest.

Compounding gave you more bang for your savings buck.

The same principle applies to investments you make in your marketing.

One reason I preach the value of targeting niche markets is that by targeting small(er) niche markets, instead of “all” markets or “no” markets, your money, time, and energy compounds.

You get bigger results with less effort.

Instead of getting one new client when you deliver a presentation, for example, you might get five new clients because the people in that niche not only see your presentation, they also see your ads or read your articles or hear your name mentioned by one or more colleagues or friends.

Each instance of “you” in a niche market has a greater impact.

If you want to get more bang for your marketing buck, concentrate your efforts and dollars in smaller markets, especially where people know each other and word of mouth is strong.

In addition, group your “shots” by publishing more articles or running more ads in one or two publications (in the same week or month) instead of multiple publications. Publish a weekly or daily newsletter instead of a monthly newsletter.

You can expand your reach later, after you have saturated and dominated one publication (ads, articles), one organization (speaking, networking), or one niche market.

Most lawyers use a shotgun approach to marketing. Their message is weaker because they try to appeal to everyone. Their message is diluted, if not drowned out, by a sea of messages from other lawyers. They waste time and money and make a smaller impact by spreading their time and money too thin.

If you want to get more results (clients, referrals, traffic, subscribers, publicity, etc.), focus your message, your time, and your dollars in smaller markets, and let the magic of compounding go to work for you.

How to choose the right niche markets for your practice: click here

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Filed Under: Marketing legal services Tagged With: ,

If Felix Ungar ran your law practice

February 14, 2017 by
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The Odd Couple’s  Felix Ungar was a neurotic perfectionist neat freak who fussed and bothered about everything. His roommate Oscar was a slob. The two loved each other (friends) but drove each other crazy.

If Felix ran your practice, some good things would happen. Every document would be checked and rechecked before it was filed or mailed. Every document would be backed up (“in triplicate”). Every piece of software and equipment would be up to date. Your desktop would be tidy and dusted, and so would the desktop on your computer.

Your firm would operate efficiently. But eventually, Felix would drive you and your staff crazy, not just with the fussing and tidying but with continual changes in management, operations, and marketing.

Continually changing your forms or procedures, for example, requires continual re-training. There would be daily memos and weekly meetings where the latest micro changes were rolled out.

The employee handbook doesn’t need to be updated every week. The bookcases don’t need to be dusted every day.

Continual changes to your website layout, checklists, forms, intake and file-closing procedures can confuse and frustrate your staff and clients.

You don’t want your practice run by Oscar Madison, of course. He would tolerate too much clutter and disorder. Software would be updated “whenever”. Too many things would slip through the cracks.

You need to try new things and keep old things in working order. But just as the law looks to the reasonable man standard, so should you in the management of your practice.

Felix and Oscar were both well-meaning but neither could have been considered reasonable.

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Filed Under: Law office management

When someone asks, “What do you do?” hand them one of these

February 13, 2017 by
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I read an article recently that said that brochures are obsolete. I admit, they’ve never been one of my favorite marketing tools but they have always had their place.

They still do.

There is value in having something you can hand out to a client or prospect, telling them what you do and how to contact you. You can put brochures on the counter in your waiting room, in your new client kit, hand them out when you meet someone at a networking event, or put them in the mail with a cover letter when someone asks you to send them some information.

And, because fewer and fewer attorneys use a paper brochure, or do anything on paper, your brochure gives you an easy way to stand out.

And an easy way to be remembered.

A web page is only a click away from being forgotten. A paper brochure in a desk drawer provides prospective clients another way to find you when they discover that they need legal help.

A brochure, by itself, probably won’t bring in much business. They are usually staid and devoid of emotion or stories. They “tell” the world what you do, unlike a report or ebook which “shows” them, or a sales letter which “sells” them. But used in conjunction with other marketing collateral, brochures can be a valuable addition to your marketing mix.

After you have put together an effective website and written one or more reports to use as handouts and lead magnets, consider adding a simple brochure to your marketing toolkit.

Here are some common types of brochures to consider:

  • Capabilities brochure (aka “firm brochure): This describes your practice areas, services offered, and your ability to deliver results. It details your background and experience, awards and distinctions, and other elements that demonstrate your ability to get the job done. A firm brochure also describes your target market, languages spoken, office hours, and contact information.
  • Service brochure: This brochure is dedicated to one of your practice areas, one of your services, or perhaps a group of related services. It too describes your capabilities but provides more information, examples, and details about your services, packages, fees and costs and the like.
  • Problem/solution brochure: This brochure provides information about a legal need or problem common to your target market and presents available solutions, which of course include your services.

Most brochures present much of the information with bullet points more than narrative text. They provide an overview or the big picture. Make sure you point to your website where the reader can get more information.

Brochures needn’t be fancy or expensive. You don’t need full-color graphics, photos, or glossy paper. Your brochure can be all text, with black ink on a heavier weight paper or colored card stock.

On the other hand, a professionally designed and printed brochure does lend a degree of class to your practice. It tells the world that you are serious about what you do and that you do it successfully.

Brochures are by no means obsolete or ineffective. They don’t do a complete selling job on their own, but they can help.

Before you create a brochure, make sure your website is doing its job 

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Filed Under: Marketing legal services Tagged With:

Still crazy after all these years

February 10, 2017 by
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It’s difficult being intelligent and having opinions about important things. You see evil people with terrible ideas and you want to vanquish them. You see stupid people with power and you want to cry.

If you say anything, those people point an ugly finger at you and convict you of the same offenses of which they are guilty.

It’ll drive you crazy if you let it.

Don’t let it.

Don’t pick fights you can’t win. Don’t take on everyone or every issue. In fact, unless your work or the safety of your family demands it, your default response should be to keep quiet and walk away.

Does that mean putting your head in the sand and ignoring most of the noise? Yes. That’s exactly what it means.

Unless you were hired for the job, don’t waste social capital, don’t risk losing business. Let those who were hired to fix the problem do their job. Support them, but don’t make yourself a spokesperson.

You can’t fix stupid. Evil has always existed and always will. Yes, there will be times when good conscious demands that you speak out or take action. To fight with every ounce of your strength.

But those times are rare.

You have to get good at compartmentalizing. Put things in a lock box in your brain and don’t open that box. Train yourself to smile and change the subject.

It’s okay to compare notes with your like-minded spouse or best friend; with everyone else, just don’t go there.

That goes double for social media.

Keep busy with work. Focus on building, not tearing down, on love not hate. And have faith that everything will eventually be okay. Because it surely will.

Need more business? Start here

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Filed Under: Personal development

Why you shouldn’t hire a marketing manager for your firm

February 9, 2017 by
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Wouldn’t it be nice to turn over all of your marketing to someone else? Put a marketing manager in charge of your marketing? Let them take care of bringing in the business so you can concentrate on the legal work?

That may sound good but it would be a mistake. Marketing professional services cannot be delegated. Clients may write their checks to your firm but it is you they are hiring.

Nobody can build relationships with clients and prospects and referral sources like you can. Nobody can speak or network for you. Nobody can make the case for hiring you like you can.

So forget the idea of hiring others to do your marketing.

On the other hand, you can (and should) delegate many marketing support activities.

Have others do most of the leg work, organizing, research, editing, website updating, confirmation emails and phone calls, event planning, slide-making, and other activities that support your marketing.

Under your guidance and supervision.

You need to be involved and make the big decisions. You need to put your imprimatur on every ad, every article, and every email. You need to be in charge of your marketing.

Because clients hire you, not your firm.

Marketing assistants can help. Outside consultants and agencies can help. But you are the marketing manager for your practice.

Marketing starts with the right strategies. Start here

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Filed Under: Law office management, Marketing legal services

How much detail do you have in your lawyer referral database?

February 8, 2017 by
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I got a call from an old friend the other day. She was injured and wanted to know if I could help her find an attorney. I live in California, she’s in Virginia, but fortunately, I knew some attorneys near her.

I emailed an attorney friend in her city and asked if he could help. He replied, “I can find you the right person. Let me know the nature of the claim: medical malpractice? Vehicular collision? Police shooting? Premises liability? There are different lawyers who would be best, depending on the cause.”

I wrote back, gave him more details, and he provided me with two names and phone numbers which I passed along to my injured friend.

If she is able to hire an attorney through this referral:

  1. My friend will get the help she needs from a lawyer who is right for the job
  2. The attorney who takes the case will have a new client
  3. My attorney friend gets the credit for making the referral, and
  4. I get the satisfaction of helping put this together.

I knew my friend was well-connected. He is a great lawyer and a consummate marketer. What I didn’t know is how much he knows about the lawyers on his list.

Knowing what the lawyers on your list do best allows you to be a better matchmaker. That increases the odds of a successful referral and saves everyone a lot of time.

There’s a lesson here, aside from the obvious one that lawyers should keep a list of other lawyers to whom they can refer. It is the value of taking the time to get to know more about them—what they do best, what kinds of cases or clients they prefer, which ones they won’t take—because as you learn this information about them, you prompt them to learn the same information about you.

In your lawyer database, don’t stop with just practice areas. Dig. Ask questions. Get a description of their ideal client. And then give them yours.

Learn more about getting referrals from other lawyers

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Filed Under: Referral sources, Referrals

You may not like this idea but you may love the results

February 7, 2017 by
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You want your practice to stand out in the crowd. You like the idea of free publicity. The idea of “going viral” appeals to you. You’d love to bring in a lot of new business.

Here’s an idea for a promotion that could help you accomplish all of the above.

Step one: find a “safe” charity or charitable cause

Choose a safe charity or cause to align with. Something that would appeal to your target market.

“Safe” means the organization is the real deal. Most of their revenue goes to causes, not overhead. There are no scandals. No political overtones to what they do.

It’s probably best to go with something small and local. You’ll be able meet with the people who run things, which can lead to additional marketing opportunities for you (e.g., networking, referrals, speaking).

Step two: choose one of your services you can give away free

(Yeah, that’s the part you may not like; but it could lead to results you’ll love).

This free service should be a “leader” or entry-level service, for new clients. For example, a simple Will package, incorporation, or an employee handbook review. If you bill by the hour, it could be a six-hour bundle.

Obviously, you’ll want to offer a service that is likely to appeal to the kinds of clients you target.

Make it as valuable and attractive as possible. Remember, the end game is to get publicity and traffic and new clients. The bigger you go, the more likely it is that your offer will accomplish this.

If you go really big, however, you may want to limit the number of “packages” that are available.

Step three: “Pay what you want—it’s for charity”

Promote your offer with a theme that new clients can pay what they want for the services and that 100% of the proceeds go to [name] charity.

Tell them the value of the package, or a suggested minimum donation.

For added punch, tie the promotion to a specific project the charity is running, e.g., the homeless shelter fund. And put a time limit on it.

Some clients may “cheat” and pay only a few dollars. But most people are honest and will do the right thing, if for no other reason than to help the charity.

Advertise and promote your offer as broadly as possible. Send out a press release. Email all of your lists and contacts and all of the bloggers and writers in your niche. Ask the charity to promote it in their newsletters, website, and bulletins. Ask them to ask their major donors and supporters to do the same.

You should get some favorable publicity from this. Traffic to your website and sign-ups for your newsletter. Meet some new referral sources connected with the charity. And get some new clients.

If all goes well, the next time you do this, you can partner up with other lawyers, other professionals, and other businesses, each of whom will promote this to their contacts, generating more goodness for all of you.

Leverage is the key to earning more without working more. Here’s the formula

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Filed Under: Marketing legal services, Publicity Tagged With:

It ain’t over ’til it’s over

February 6, 2017 by
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At half-time, I thought, if Atlanta can score 21 points in the first half, New England can do the same in the second half, and win. That’s the way The Pats have to look at it. There’s a lot of game left.

Yeah, I’m so smart I turned off the game early in the fourth quarter and missed the comeback of the century.

I thought it was over. No time left. Too big a deficit. But it wasn’t over. Because it wasn’t over until it was over.

So, is that it? Is the lesson to never give up, no matter what? Keep fighting no matter how bad things look?

Yes.

The game isn’t over, the election isn’t over, the trial isn’t over until its over (and you’ve exhausted all appeals).

Never give up. Never give in.

Now, it’s easy to give up when nobody is watching. All those projects you’ve started but never completed, all those goals that were quietly swept under the rug. When you’re the only one who knows, giving up is no big deal.

So if you want to win, make sure lots of people know.

There are those who say we should never share our goals or plans with others, that we should keep them to ourselves. Telling others, they say, puts too much pressure on you to perform and causes you to mess up.

But it is precisely that kind of pressure that leads to great victories.

When hundreds of millions of people are watching you, cheering you, counting on you, that’s when you do the impossible.

Go public with your plans. Share your goals. Be accountable. Take the chance that you will mess up. Because in this way, you will summon all that you have and accomplish things you might otherwise never accomplish.

There’s a related lesson, one that Atlanta missed, and that is assuming you’ve won before you’ve won. The Falcons took the win for granted and blew it. As Lost in Space’s Dr. Smith would put it, “Oh the pain”.

Never give up, and never celebrate before all the beans are counted. Because it ain’t over ’til it’s over.

What’s your goal? How many referrals are you going to get this month?

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Filed Under: success

Extreme vetting of lawyers

February 3, 2017 by
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I got an email from a lawyer who had a bad experience with a referral to another lawyer who mishandled the case (and the client). She’s feeling gun shy now about giving referrals and wants to know what she might do to vet lawyers before sending them any business.

First, let me point out that most lawyers do a decent job most of the time so there is no need to panic or stop referring because one lawyer messed up. It happens, we deal with it, and we move on.

In choosing lawyers to whom you will refer, do what you might do if you were going to hire them yourself. Start with obvious due diligence measures: check with the bar for discipline and complaints, search online to dig up any dirt, review their web site(s) and examine their experience and other qualifications.

Make sure they have sufficient staff to handle the job and carry E and O insurance.

You might give them extra points for expert certification, serving as an arbitrator or judge pro tem, teaching CLE, bar association committees, awards, and so on.

In addition, you may want to

  • Talk to other lawyers who know them, including opposing counsel and judges who have seen them in action
  • Read articles they have written and articles that were written about them. Get a sense of their world view, processes, communication skills, and personality.
  • Run a credit check and/or a background check if there’s a lot at stake or your Spidey-sense is telling you there’s something wrong

If you’re still not sure, have a chat with them. Tell them you want to make sure they’re the right lawyer for the job. Anyone who is qualified should respect that.

You might ask them to fill out a questionnaire, something like the ones E and O carriers use, where they are asked to disclose their calendaring and conflict checking systems and other safeguards and to disclose any malpractice lawsuits against them. Check with your carrier because some require this information as a prerequisite to defending a claim against you for a negligent referral.

While you’re at it, consider whether your client will be comfortable with the lawyer’s personality and style. Not every competent lawyer is a good match for every client.

Start by referring small matters, so you can see how they handle them and how they treat the client. Stay involved with the case, not to micro-manage it but as a second pair of eyes on behalf of the client. They are still your client, after all. Check in with them regularly, to see how things are progressing and to look for signs of trouble. Make sure they know to contact you if they have any questions or concerns.

Bottom line: do your homework but don’t let a bad experience with one lawyer unduly color your judgment in choosing others.

Get more referrals from other lawyers

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Filed Under: Referral sources, Referrals Tagged With:
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