My recent post on holiday greeting cards elicited a comment from Bruce Brightwell, an attorney who sends his list a magnetized refrigerator calendar. “People love the calendars, and I am in front of them for the whole year,” he said.
This is smart marketing. A practical gift that keeps your name and contact information in front of clients and prospects that is inexpensive and effective.
Calendars are a great year end gift. What can you do the rest of the year?
Do a search for “advertising specialties” or “ad specs”. That’s what they are called in the trade. You will find a mind numbing array of possible items you can offer:
- Pens
- Key chains
- Calendars (wall, refrigerator, desk, wallet)
- T-shirts
- Baseball caps
- Book bags
- Book ends
- Paper weights
- Coffee mugs
- Thermoses
- Book bags
- Mouse pads
- Business card cases
- Book marks
I like pens. You can get them in bulk for under .25 cents, and nice ones for under a dollar. People use pens and carry them, and if they lose one, someone else will pick it up.
I also like note pads. They are very inexpensive (any printer can make them for you) and you can get them in different sizes. Real estate agents send them pre-printed with lines for a grocery list. This is good for consumers. For businesses, I like a 4 by 5 1/2 size that can sit on a desk or next to a phone. While taking notes, your prospect looks at your name and smiling face at the top of the pad, draws a mustache and eye glasses and darkens your teeth. It’s a note pad and a game!
A disadvantage of note pads is that once they have been used, they’re gone. But this gives you an opportunity to get in front of clients and prospects several times a year to replenish their stock.
In choosing an item, keep in mind the amount of room available for printing. A pen has very limited space; a calendar has much more. More space lets you include an “advertising” message: your practice areas and/or an offer, e.g., “‘Free Report: How to save 20 to 50% on legal fees this year’ at www.mywebsite.com”.
You can, of course, have more than one gift item. You could mail everyone a calendar at year end, give coffee mugs to visitors to your office, and give a more expensive item (e.g., Polo shirt) to new clients.
Have you used ad specs to market your practice? Did it bring you new business?
Can you imagine a world without lawyers? I’ll bet Amanda Knox can’t.
Lawyers are routinely vilified. Epithets abound. We are the subject of the cruelest jokes.
And yet, where do people turn when they are in trouble? Whom do they go to for advice when they want to protect their rights? Who defends the indefensible?
Amanda Knox was just released from an Italian prison after a four year nightmare. Without lawyers, she would still be languishing in her cell.
Without lawyers fighting the good fight, our rights, our entire way of life, would devolve and anarchy would ensue. We must never forget how important we are, not just to the individuals we serve, but to the society we live in.
In Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Dick the Butcher says, “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers”. This is often quoted as a denouncement of lawyers but it is a misreading. Dick was referring to ways a rebellion in the planning might be successful. He recognized that to succeed, they must get rid of those who know and enforce a system of laws. It is, in a roundabout way, an endorsement of lawyers.
Lawyers, be proud of what you do. Defend not just your clients but your profession. Educate your clients and your friends about what you do, but also why it matters.
But don’t stop there. When you see a colleague behaving in a way that belies the dignity of our profession, call him on it. Counsel him. And, if necessary, report him.
Be a champion of the high standards our oath demands and exemplify those standards in your words and deeds. Our profession must police itself. The alternative is a Bar that does it for us, but too often, they go too far.
In a victory for common sense, a Florida court just struck down as vague one of its Bar Association’s limits on lawyer advertising. A bar association should enact rules of professional conduct that define standards of behavior and it should provide redress for the most egregious transgressions of those standards. But when a bar association imposes vague, arbitrary, and unreasonable standards upon its members, as Florida has long been criticized for doing, it says to the world, “We don’t trust our members and neither should you.”
Bar associations can improve the image of lawyers not by policing them more but by trusting them more.