Client surveys

May 20, 2025 by
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Lawyers ask questions to diagnose clients’ problems and prescribe effective solutions. We question witnesses and other parties to learn what they know and how they can help or hurt our case. We hire experts and ask for information and advice to help us better manage our cases. 

Questions are the cornerstone of legal work. But they can be much more. 

Asking questions—through surveys, questionnaires, interviews, and even just conversations—can dramatically improve a lawyer’s marketing and practice management.

What can you ask? Here are a few ideas:

  • Ask prospective clients how they found you and what they heard or read. Did they see an ad? Where? What caught their attention? Were they referred by another client or another professional? What were they told that inspired them to make an appointment? 
  • Ask new clients how they were treated at their first appointment. What stood out about what they saw and were told? Was everything explained to their satisfaction? Did they understand fees, costs, and other terms? What did they like best? What could you improve?
  • Ask existing clients what groups they belong to, to help you identify where you might advertise, network, write articles, or speak. 
  • Ask your subscribers (newsletter, blog, social media) which topics they’d like you to write about.
  • Ask clients if they know about your other services. “Did you know we also do X?”
  • Ask everyone if they might anyone (at work, in their neighborhood) who might like a free copy of your new report or a link to your video. 
  • Ask all clients about their industry or market, business or practice, to “get to know them better” (to create more effective marketing collateral and offers). 
  • Ask all clients if they would recommend you to others and what they would tell them. This could lead to reviews, testimonials, referrals, and ideas for improving your services or your marketing message.
  • In conversation, when you learn a client or contact knows someone you’d like to meet, ask if they would introduce you. 

You can pass out questionnaires at presentations. You can conduct “exit surveys” at the end of cases. You can add “getting to know you” questionnaires in your “new client kits”.

And you can ask clients for feedback or information about themselves or their business any time you meet. 

Questions like these can not only help you create more effective content and marketing messages, they can help you strengthen relationships with your clients and contacts because they really will help you get to know them better.

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Filed Under: Client relations, Content creation, Increase your income, Law office management, Marketing legal services

Good enough is good enough 

May 6, 2025 by
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To do a good job for your clients, you don’t need to get amazing verdicts, write award-winning briefs, or win accolades for your oratory skills. You don’t need to be the best lawyer in town. You need to deliver excellent results and keep your clients happy. 

And good enough is (usually) good enough. 

The same is true for your marketing. 

Let’s use “content marketing” as an example. 

As you know, content (articles, newsletters, videos, seminars, etc.) can attract prospects, build authority, and show prospects and referral sources what you’ve done for other clients. It is very effective at showing the world what you know and how you help your clients. 

You can build a thriving practice with content marketing. 

But if you’re like many attorneys, you don’t create a lot of content because it takes time to do it well and time isn’t something you have in abundance. 

The truth is, you can create good content in less time than you might imagine. 

The simplest way to do that (other than outsourcing) is to lower your standards a bit. Just like your services, good enough is good enough. 

That means you don’t need to research and write scholarly journals or publish pages and pages of information. You can make a statement or observation, ask a question, tell an interesting story, and call it a day. A few paragraphs are enough. 

It also means that you can repeat yourself.

Take something you said a few months ago and say it again. Because there are always new people joining your list or reading your article or post that weren’t around a few months ago, and because many of the people who were around before didn’t read what you wrote, or won’t remember it. 

You can also repeat your message with different stories or take-aways, because many readers and followers previously didn’t have the problem you’re writing about and didn’t pay much attention. Now they do have that problem and will hang on your every word.  

You also don’t have to be original. You can write what other lawyers write about because few people follow or subscribe to more than one or two lawyers. 

Finally, the quality and quantity of your content isn’t nearly as important as the consistency with which you deliver it. 

To successfully market your practice with content marketing, you don’t need to write brilliant prose or a lot of it. You just need to show up regularly in the mailboxes of your target market, and thus remind them that you are still available to help them.

Doing that once a week is (more than) good enough.

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Filed Under: Content creation, Marketing legal services

Help me help you

February 11, 2025 by
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A client tells you what they want, but what they want isn’t necessarily what they need. 

They tell you they want surgery to repair their medical problem and need money to pay for it. What they need is a second opinion, more options other than surgery, and if there are no other options, only then money to pay for the surgery. 

The client tells you they want a divorce. What they need is information and advice about separation, support, custody, counseling, and a path to reconciliation. 

What the client (says) they want isn’t necessarily what they need. They may not know their options, fully understand them, or appreciate their significance. 

The best lawyers educate their clients and help them understand their options, and why the course of action their lawyer is recommending is their best choice. 

When you educate your clients, 

  • The client can get what they want AND what they need
  • The lawyer ends up with a satisfied client, or at least a client who makes an informed decision and doesn’t blame the lawyer for a negative outcome
  • The lawyer’s reputation for knowledge, understanding and patience grows, attracting more clients

Educating your clients is a big part of the job. You can (and should) start doing that job before anyone hires you.

Teach the marketplace about the basics in newsletters, blog posts, seminars, or videos. They will still need to hire you to get your advice about their specific situation. 

If you do a good job of educating them, they will. 

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Filed Under: Communication, Content creation

Wouldn’t you like to know? 

February 6, 2025 by
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Curiosity is one of the most powerful marketing strategies there is. Prospective clients want information about the law, their risks, potential costs, their options, and the best way to handle their situation. That’s why they find your website, watch your presentation, or contact you. 

Many lawyers provide that information.

They write detailed articles, liberally post FAQs, and answer as many questions as possible, thinking the more information they provide, the more likely prospective clients will be to take the next step. 

Unfortunately, it often does the opposite. Too much information often is too much information.

You should provide a basic level of information, so they can see what’s at stake and that you have the knowledge and experience to help them, but anything you do beyond that can hurt your marketing efforts. 

Marketing should ignite curiosity, not satisfy it. Tell prospective clients enough to inspire them to call or email or make an appointment, but not so much that they don’t have to. 

And don’t do what many lawyers do: tell prospective clients next to nothing. 

We’ve all seen attorney websites and ads that are merely a list of services or practice areas. That’s not enough. 

Give prospective clients enough information, examples, and stories to inspire them to take that next step.  

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Filed Under: Content creation, Marketing legal services

Attraction marketing

January 30, 2025 by
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It’s better to have prospective clients find you and contact you rather than the other way around. When clients come to you, they’ve seen or heard something they like about you, which makes your job much easier. 

It’s called inbound or “attraction” marketing. It’s good for your bank account and your ego.  

The most successful attorneys and firms use it to attract clients and cases, subscribers and followers, and inquiries from professionals, meeting holders, publishers, and content creators seeking to connect. 

The most successful attorneys attract business by making themselves attractive. 

My blog is one example. 

Lawyers are attracted to my blog for marketing tips and resources and then contact me to hire me, or forward my posts to their colleagues and business contacts who do the same. I don’t have to do any advertising or “outbound” marketing to accomplish this; clients et al. come to me. 

There’s nothing wrong with “outbound” marketing. Do it if you want to or need to. There’s nothing wrong with advertising, networking, speaking, and other marketing strategies, many of which I use from time to time. But there’s nothing better than inbound marketing.

Inbound marketing brings you more clients with less expense and effort. Those clients are often more “qualified” to hire you, having heard or read some of your wisdom, or being tacitly vetted by the clients or professionals who refer you. 

It’s a more effective and profitable way to bring in good clients. 

Good clients prefer it, too. 

They prefer to find you via a referral from someone they trust, by finding your blog or article or video or by hearing you interviewed by a professional or other influential person on their blog or channel. 

There are many ways to find new clients, but it’s almost always better to have them find you.

How to get maximum referrals

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Filed Under: Content creation, Marketing legal services, Referrals

How to never run out of ideas for your blog or newsletter

November 15, 2024 by
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If you’re like me (and I’m sure you are), the writing is easy. The hard part is figuring out what to write about. 

What do your readers want to know? What do they need to hear? What will they find interesting or useful? 

If you create content, you need ideas. Lots of them. And you should start working on compiling a big list you can tap into when you need to write something and don’t have a topic. 

A great way to get ideas is to steal them from other content creators. Or, if you prefer, “borrow” them because ideas don’t belong to anyone. 

So, borrow ideas from other lawyers (in your field or in a complementary field). Borrow ideas from consultants, accountants, financial experts, business owners, and other smart or interesting people.

Borrow ideas from newsletters or blogs that target readers in your clients’ industries or local markets. 

Borrow ideas from anything you see or hear that catches your attention and might be good to share with your clients and subscribers. 

When you find a blog that has something you might use someday, bookmark it. If they have a newsletter, subscribe to it, so their posts wind up in your inbox. 

A few good newsletters or blogs might give you enough ideas to last for months or years. 

(NB: You might want to set up another email address for that purpose). 

Then, use those ideas to create your own content when you need it and are late for court or need more sleep or can’t think of anything to say.  

Grab someone’s article or post, summarize what they said and tell your readers why you agree or disagree. Or write about the same subject with your own examples or stories or reasoning. 

Or just use their article or email as a prompt and write whatever comes to mind. 

Because you don’t want to be late to court. 

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Filed Under: Blogging, Content creation, Newsletters

Nothing to write about? 

October 1, 2024 by
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You promised yourself you would write an article or blog post or newsletter, record a video, or prepare a talk for your networking group, but you don’t know what to write about.

Don’t panic. And don’t force it. Skip the day and try again tomorrow. 

Tomorrow, you might

  • Republish something you wrote a year or two ago; yes, you can do that. Most of your readers won’t remember (or care). And you have new subscribers or audience who haven’t heard that story before.
  • Cut up that old 1200-word article and publish one of your points, perhaps 300 words, and call it a day.
  • Rewrite that older piece. Update the law, use different examples or arguments, add a new story, change the headline, and you’re good to go. 

Great. Immediate problem solved. For the future, here are some options:

  • Consider allowing (or soliciting) guest posts from other lawyers or experts. Or asking a colleague to co-author an article with you.
  • Ask your readers to submit questions they would like you to answer.  
  • Collect articles by other lawyers and experts that might interest your readers and use those articles to spark ideas for your next post. I do that all the time; can you tell?
  • Set up an idea file. Anything you think about, wonder about, hear about… throw it in this file and dig through that file when you’re looking for ideas. 
  • Document your days: jot down a few lines about interesting or difficult clients or cases, opposing counsel, problems you solved, or people you meet, because it’s all fodder for your next post. 

You can write about anything. And you should because it will make things a lot easier for you and more interesting for your readers.

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Filed Under: Blogging, Content creation, Newsletters, Public Speaking

Writing non-fiction without an outline? 

September 9, 2024 by
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Whether you’re writing an article or blog post, a memo to your client or your file, a brief or a demand letter, outlining before you write is almost always recommended. 

It helps you include all the key points, put them in an effective order, and save time with the actual writing because you’ve thought about what to say before you say it. 

Outlining is your friend. Especially for longer or complicated pieces that contain a lot of information. 

But sometimes, outlining slows down the process of getting words on paper, and leads to a less interesting, more formulaic piece of writing. That’s okay for most of the writing lawyers do. We don’t need to be creative; we need to relate what happened (or will happen), what we think and recommend, and convey our thoughts succinctly. 

And that’s usually what we do. 

But if you’ve ever struggled to construct an outline, found yourself repeatedly re-organizing and re-writing it instead of getting on with the writing, as have I, you might want to try something many fiction writers do. 

It’s called “Pantsing” and means “writing by the seat of your pants,” that is, writing (a story) without deciding what to write in advance. 

No outline. Or much of one. 

Pantsers start with a general idea of what they want to happen in their story, and usually not much more. They know what their main characters are like, what they want and how they might get that, but often only a few paragraphs which serve as a place to start. 

They write and see where the story takes them. They let the story surprise them as much as they hope it will surprise their readers. 

Pantsers say their writing is fresher this way, because they “hear” the story as they write it. They say it’s more enjoyable to write this way, unconstrained by the rigidity of a detailed outline. 

Authors who write this way say they love the freedom and spontaneity this gives them. Authors who are committed outliners say that writing without an outline, without a net as someone put it, scares the heck out of them and they couldn’t do it. 

What about non-fiction? Could lawyers write with little more than a general idea and a few points to cover? 

I do this all the time with short pieces. What you’re reading now is an example. 

I didn’t plan to write about pantsing today and yet here we are. This is where the writing led me.

Writing by the seat of your pants is liberating. I have no plans to make pantsing my primary modus operandi, however. Outlining will continue to be my jam. 

On the other hand, for my current work-in-progress, a full length non-fiction book, I’ve completed a lot of the outline, but I’m experimenting with pantsing some chapters and parts thereof. After all, a chapter is really a collection of short essays. 

I don’t know how successful I’ll be, but I’m confident it will help me finish the first draft. 

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Filed Under: Content creation, Writing

Originally is overrated

August 22, 2024 by
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For creating content—blog posts, articles, videos, presentations, or anything else meant to inform or inspire your readers and followers, the writing is the easy part. 

What to write is the challenge. 

You don’t want to write what everyone else writes about, or say the same things, so you stay away from certain subjects or points of view, hoping to find something unique and borderline amazing. 

But this is unnecessary. 

Most of your readers and listeners aren’t reading or listening to others in your niche and if they are, they’re not reading or listening too carefully. 

But even if you write something nearly identical to what others write, your article will still be different.

Because you are different. 

Your experience, cases and clients, stories, opinions, and writing style might be similar, but they aren’t the same. 

So, relax. You don’t have to create original content. 

In fact, I’ll go out on a limb and say that it is usually better not to. It’s usually better to write about the same things others in your space are writing about. The existence of their articles and posts and videos shows that there is a “market” for those ideas. 

People read those posts and they will read yours.

Knowing this should not only encourage you to let go of whatever might hold you back from creating (enough) content, it gives you a simple way to find all the ideas you will ever need. 

Here’s the plan.

Once or twice a month, browse through the list of blogs and newsletters or channels you follow, whether lawyers, industry experts, or other creators who inspire you, and bookmark several posts you can use as fodder to create your own. 

I do it. Sometimes, I get the “perfect” subject to use for my next article or post. Sometimes, I get nothing and those posts go back into the slush pile or get deleted to make room for something new. 

And sometimes, I zero in on a small part of something someone said and I’ll say something about that. 

In a few minutes, I have my subject. I’ll add a headline or title and my new post is almost nothing like the original. 

If you aren’t doing this now, try it. Nobody owns ideas. Besides, they are only a prompt. A place to start. And when you’re crazy busy cranking out billable work, a place to start is your best friend. 

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Filed Under: Blogging, Content creation, Newsletters

A simple formula for attracting more clients

August 9, 2024 by
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If you want to attract more clients, your job is simple. Share some of your knowledge, the benefits and solutions you provide, the way you do what you do, and how to get in touch with you, and put this where prospective clients will see or hear it. 

Online, you can do that by writing articles, a blog, a newsletter, videos, or via advertising or social media. 

Offline, you can do this via presentations, networking, speaking, advertising or direct mail. 

Disseminate it wherever your ideal clients live, work, or “hang out”. 

What are you good at? What benefits and solutions do you provide? Share this with people who need or want your help. 

You can also share this with your clients and referrals sources so they can share it with their clients and friends. 

As people discover you and read or watch or listen to your message, if they like what they see or hear, they will ask for more information and eventually hire you.

That’s how you attract clients. 

But it takes time. Time for your audience to discover you, get to know, like and trust you, and decide to take the next step. 

So keep showing them what you do and how you help your clients. Keep showing them your passion for your work. Keep telling them the benefits and solutions you offer. 

And invite them to contact you to get more information or ask about their situation. 

And they will. 

The Attorney Marketing Formula

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Filed Under: Content creation, Marketing legal services
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