What if you really could learn how to practice law in law school?

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Two law professors have come up with an admittedly radical proposal, designed to help law students learn real world lawyering skills before they graduate: law schools that operate their own law firm.

The idea is akin to what doctors do by working in teaching hospitals. You get hands-on experience working on real cases for real clients, under the supervision of real attorneys. What’s radical about that?

Clearly, law students need the experience of working with real clients, and maybe I’m missing something, but how is this idea better than working as a law clerk while you’re in school? Instead, why not simply mandate so many hours of clerking experience during law school, and possibly after, as a condition precedent to issuing a license?

Everyone knows that law schools do a poor job of preparing graduates for the actual practice of law. I’m willing to hear more about the law school firm idea but right now, I say let law schools teach theory and law firms teach practice.

A comment to the ABA Journal’s post about this story sums it up best: “For 70 years, law schools have “trained” lawyers how to be not ready-for-prime-time. What makes you think THEY know how to practice law. More ivory tower fantasy.”

What do you think? Is this a good idea?

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Social media marketing for attorneys in a nutshell

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This morning, I was reading an interview with Phil Libin, CEO of Evernote, which as you know is my favorite application. I’m not the only one who loves Evernote; they’re adding one million users a month, without advertising.

The company’s growth comes in large part from its enthusiastic user-base sharing their love of the product with their friends and colleagues. Libin said,

“The job of getting someone who’s [sic] never heard of Evernote to use it for the first time is the job of our existing users. The job of our marketing department is to help our existing users do that job.”

He’s talking about social media marketing, of course, also known as referrals.

It struck me that this is the essence of social media marketing for attorneys. Social media platforms are just another conduit for customers (clients) to recommend products (services) to others. Obvious? Sure. Then why do so few get the referrals they want?

The key to success in social media isn’t how many likes or followers or friends one has. Those numbers are important, of course, but far more important is “passion”.

I didn’t just recommend Evernote, I raved about it. Well, my version of raving. I wasn’t over the top, mad with emotion (the California Bar frowns on that, I think) but I hope you could hear the enthusiasm in my voice, my love for a product that has truly changed my life.

I don’t know how many readers of this blog or my social media posts and tweets will go to the Evernote web site and try it but I do know that Evernote doesn’t pay me a nickel for sending them. Social media marketing works and it’s free.

There’s another point I want to make but Libin made it for me:

“. . .we started measuring stuff and found that users who had been referred to Evernote by a friend were much more valuable to us than users who had stumbled across us by themselves. . . .”

Bingo.

Referred clients are better clients. They are pre-sold on you, more likely to pay their bills on time, and less likely to complain about something you did or did not do. Best of all, referred clients are themselves more likely to refer other clients.

If you want more referrals, do something your clients can get passionate about.

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