Law firms should know what their clients (and potential clients) are up to. That’s a given. But how can a small firm with no budget for a product to do this follow their clients in the news?

How about RSS? And a small, obscure site called Google News.

I wrote a script that automates much of what I’m about to describe. But since most people reading this blog do not have their own web server or FTP and write access, I’ll give some of the more “manual” details here.

1. RSS Reader: Fire up your favorite RSS reader. I use Bloglines, as it’s free, easy, and it has a very intuitive layout.

2. Go to Google News: Let’s use Snapple as an example. I have a Snapple Iced Tea in front of me, so that’s what I’m going to use here. Let’s pretend I’m a law firm. Actually, let’s pretend I’m a marketing manager at a law firm, as I can’t be an entire law firm myself.

Anyway, Snapple is one of my clients. My firm does some work for them, but we’d like to do more. So I’m going to set up an alert that lets me keep track of what Snapple is up to.

Google News Home Page

Step One: Enter the word Snapple in the news box. Click “Search News”

Here’s what I get:

Step Two: The initial search gives me news sorted by relevance. That helps, but since I want to be able to see the results chronologically, I want to click the link in the upper right that says “Sort by date”.

So now I have what I want. News about my client, sorted by date. But I don’t want to go to Google News every day and search for every one of my clients. That would take much too long.

Step Three: Get the results as an RSS feed.

In the lower left hand corner of the page, you’ll see this:

Copy the link for “RSS”.
Step Four: Add it to your RSS reader.

With Bloglines open, I click “Add” and add the URL to my subscription list. That’s it!

Now, when I’m in Bloglines, I see:

So, every day when I look at my news feeds, I can keep track of what my client is up to. Why is this so great?

• I can see if Snapple is doing anything that could result in work for my firm.
• The next time I talk with the client I will bring up what I’ve seen in the news.

If you worked for Snapple and you were talking with an attorney, how would you feel if the attorney was up-to-date with all the happenings at your company? Would you think “Wow. This attorney is really focused on us.”? I know I would.

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