Courting Your Clients: The Essential Guide to Legal Marketing

BOCA RATON, Fla. — Legal marketing is a key ingredient for an attorney’s success in today’s competitive legal environment, but it is rarely taught in law school. The art of rainmaking - how to attract and retain clients - remains a mystery to many lawyers at all levels of their legal career.

Now a new legal marketing book, “Courting Your Clients: The Essential Guide to Legal Marketing,” provides a practical guide to creating and implementing a successful legal business development strategy. Written by legal marketing consultant Margaret Grisdela, President of Legal Expert Connections, the book reveals how to get speaking engagements, publishing opportunities, press coverage, and other proven techniques that build an attorney’s visibility and reputation as an expert in their field.

“Courting Your Clients is written for attorneys, legal marketers, law firm administrators, managing partners, practice group leaders and sole practitioners,” said author Margaret Grisdela. “The book contains a sample lawyer marketing plan, attorney marketing checklists, and the top ten legal marketing mistakes to avoid.”

CLIENT Rainmaking[R], a methodology introduced in the book, creates a strategic step-by-step approach to lawyer business development. Readers will learn how to make effective use of networking, referrals, community relations, legal directories, Internet marketing, and search engine optimization (SEO).

An entire chapter is devoted to client retention, since most new business comes from current clients. Attorneys will discover how to up-sell, cross-sell and measure client satisfaction.

Three key concepts in this legal marketing book include: 1) the importance of focus; 2) educating prospects as a way to build a reputation; and 3) never stop marketing.

“Courting Your Clients” (ISBN 978-0-9795674-0-7) can be ordered online at www.legalexpertconnections.com.

EDITORS: For review copies or interview requests, please contact the author.

About Legal Expert Connections, Inc.

Legal Expert Connections specializes in marketing and business development exclusively in the legal and litigation support markets. Founded by legal marketing consultant Margaret Grisdela, the firm’s services include legal business development seminars, attorney marketing plans, rainmaking programs (arranging speaking engagements and publishing opportunities), law firm brochures, expert witness marketing, direct mail, web site development and more. The firm’s web site is www.legalexpertconnections.com and lawyer marketing blog is www.rainmakingclub.com.

Popularity: 35% [?]

Waiting to open a solo practice until you know where all your work will come from is like waiting to have children until you know where all the money (or time) will come from: You’re likely to wait forever. Each of those life-changing opportunities requires a certain amount of faith. However, the chances of long-term success as a solo increase by utilizing the wide range of tools available to bring work into your shop.

COURT APPOINTMENTS

Courts appoint lawyers to handle not only criminal cases but also family, juvenile, probate and bankruptcy matters. The qualifications for court appointment to criminal cases vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, but most lawyers will qualify for misdemeanor appointments immediately.

Handling several such cases a week, even for only a few hundred dollars each, a new solo can sustain an office while word gets out about his or her practice. Trying misdemeanors diligently for a few months, along with sitting second chair in some felony trials, will generally qualify a lawyer for felony appointments if he or she is inclined to build a criminal practice.

Criminal appointments also frequently lead to civil cases. The client who is happy with how his lawyer handled his minor drug possession charge might call the next month about a close family member injured by a drunk driver who is well insured.

ADVERTISING

Mark Twain wrote in “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court” that “any a small thing has been made large by the right kind of advertising.” Advertising works, and snobs forgo it at their economic peril. This is especially true for solo practitioners, who can’t devote as much time to networking and business development as rainmakers at larger firms. The most common venues for lawyer advertising include telephone books, television and, more recently, the Internet.

In my experience, telephone book advertisements are the most productive form of lawyer advertising. More than half of my clients tell me they found me through my phone book ad.

The most common reason solos don’t advertise in the phone book is the expense. A half-page ad in the primary telephone directory of a major Texas city can cost $15,000 to $25,000. Moreover, some directories have an aggravating practice of raising advertising rates on ads each year unless the buyer increases his or her ad’s size — and thus its cost. However, such ads can produce five to 10 times their cost in billings.

Lawyers who decide to advertise in the telephone book should avoid the temptation to scrimp on design. Many lawyers spend tens of thousands of dollars on ads only to take the directory up on its offer for a free design. Don’t fall into this trap; You get what you pay for. An architect’s fee for a well-designed building project is often about 7 to 10 percent of the project’s cost. Similar figures make sense for a well-designed ad. Professional help with their image can be especially important for solo practitioners, who must combat the stereotype that they are amateurs or part-time lawyers.

Television ads are the most maligned form of lawyer advertising, often for good reason. However, they can be nearly as effective as phone book ads. TV ads also have the advantage of timeliness. A telephone book ad runs all the time, and the buyer pays for it all the time, regardless of whether the lawyer is in a position to take on new clients. In contrast, once an attorney pays for the production of a television ad, he or she can run it whenever there is a need to generate calls. This can generate more bang for the buck for solos, whose smaller caseloads generally have less flexibility than those of multilawyer firms.

Internet ads and listings are the wave of the future. Ten years ago, they were largely a novelty relied upon by lawyers more for prestige than profit. That is changing as Internet access reaches the great majority of indoor work spaces and homes of every economic level.

Just as some younger people are abandoning telephone land lines in their homes in favor of cell phones, some foresee the day when online directories replace hard-copy phone directories. That day isn’t here yet, but Web site ads and listings with Internet directories certainly complement traditional ads.

Internet listings with prominent directories often cost less than $100 per month, a fraction of the cost of a telephone book ad. After an initial development investment of a few thousand dollars, Web sites can cost as little as $100 per year to host.

REFERRALS

Solo practitioners sometimes feel like it’s them against the world, but they are best served by viewing the world as full of people who can help their practices by steering unanticipated business their way. Some of the most important sources of referrals include former firms, especially those looking to refer prized clients with specialized matters to competent counsel who can be trusted not to poach clients; referral services run by local bar associations or state bars; other lawyers, such as those with whom the solo might share an office suite, co-counsel or even opposing counsel in prior cases; former clients; and family members and friends.

The first case I accepted as a solo was an earnest-money dispute involving my older son’s soccer coach. Who could have foreseen that or written it into a business plan?

One of the greatest selling points a solo has to offer is personal attention. When a solo practitioner receives a referral, the referring person knows who’s going to do the work, and it’s not some faceless associate. For that reason, view work done for referrals as another form of advertising. Undertake it with an extra measure of diligence. Word of a job well done will likely find its way back to the person who did the referring, and that increases the prospects for more referrals down the line.

Paul Schorn is an employment law solo with offices in Lockhart and Austin, Texas. His e-mail address is paul@schornlaw.com.

Popularity: 36% [?]

I think one of the best attributes of using wordpress for your blog is the inherent SEO properties that can easily be harnessed with a few tweaks.  One of the first things I noticed about this site in particular was that the Title tags on every single page were identical.  There’s lots of good content on this site but none of it was really optimized to be found in the search engines, which to me is the holy grail of internet marketing.  It’s not only free organic targeted traffic, but it also converts into leads, clients, sales and revenue the best.

One of the most important things you can do is optimize your URL’s and Titles.  Always use permalinks so every blog post will appear in the URL itself: http://lawfirmblogging.com/index.php/2006/10/19/are-law-firm-blogs-advertising/  < -- "Are law firm blogs advertising" is IN the URL string

You also want the Titles of the posts to appear in the Titles of your page. This is paramount. With a few lines of code you can rearrange your titles to be powerful and search engine optimized:

< ###title>< ?php wp_title(' '); ?>< ?php if(wp_title(' ', false)) { echo ' &middot###; '; } ?>Law Firm Blog dot com< ###/title>

Now, instead of every page having the same title:

“lawfirmingblogging.com Helping law firms market on the web”.  

They now show: 

“Blog Post Title” :: Law Firm Blogging :: Legal Blog marketing

That single little tweak will probably TRIPLE the traffic to this site.  You will also notice that I used “Law Firm Blogging” instead of “lawfirmblogging.com”. Unless you’re a huge brand that needs to show off your domain, you should always seperate your keywords to be the first attribute in the title tag.  A search engine spider DOES see the difference.  In fact within a few hours of changing that tag I saw a jump in the serps (search engine ranking pages).  As a test, by also rearranging the existing secondary title keyword “helping law firms market on the web” to “Legal Blawg Marketing” I was able to get the top 2 rankings in less than 24 hours!

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=legal+blawg+marketing&btnG=Search

Today I changed it to a more competitive phrase “legal Blog Marketing”, as soon as the search engines index the new title tag changes, it should start ranking for those keywords. Fortunately this site has a decent keyword rich domain, it has “Law”, Firm” and “blogging” in it which makes things much easier.  Now, if you’re a drunk driving attorney in Miami but your domain is JWSwisserPLLC.com you won’t get any bonus points for your domain.  This makes it all the more important to have your title tags in order, in this case they should be “Miami DUI attorney JW Swisser”, there is absolutely no reason to have the domain name in the titles.  On all blog post articles, titles should read something like this: “New Dade County DUI laws draining bank accounts :: Miami DUI attorney JW Swisser”.

By tweaking the URL’s and Titles to show the prominent keywords of each page to the search engines, the traffic and visibility increases you can acheive are amazing.  You’ve spent all the time writing informative content, why not give yourself every opportunity to let people find it?

Popularity: 13% [?]

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.

Popularity: 14% [?]

Recently I’ve been posting a lot on law firm marketing, which I love. But in doing so, I’ve been neglecting one of the main reasons I created this site in the first place: Helping attorneys and law firms promote their blogs and sites (the site is called LawFirmBlogging.com after all).

So this morning, I’d like to share my “blogging toolkit.”

I. Blogging Software:
There are two main kinds of blogging software: User hosted and Developer Hosted.

A. User Hosted: These are programs that users put on their own servers. If you’ve got a web host and you want control over your own data, you can install user hosted blogging software yourself. Here are a few examples:

• b2evolution
• Drupal
• Movable Type
• TextPattern
• WordPress

What I Use: WordPress
I’ve tried nearly every user-hosted blogging software I could find when I started out, and I’ve found WordPress to be the best for what I’m doing. WordPress is easy to install, it’s free, and there are thousands of add-ons, plugins and themes to extend the software.

B. Developer Hosted: These are blogging programs that are hosted elsewhere. If you’re new to blogging, or if you do not want to install and maintain software yourself, developer-hosted blogging software may be the way to go. Developer hosted software is mostly template-based. Though some features can be customized, you can’t get “under the hood” to tweak some of the design or functionality features.

The one big drawback to developer hosted blogging software (to me, at least) is that your data resides on someone else’s server. So, if the service breaks or if there is some kind of glitch, all of your posts could be lost. I doubt that a service like Blogger would disappear, but if it did, you’d be out of luck.

Here are some of the more popular developer hosted blogging services:

• Blogger
• LiveJournal
• TypePad
• LexBlog

What I’ve Used: Blogger
This was the first blogging software I used when I started. It’s free, it’s very easy, and I really think Blogger is a great way to start if you’re not sure blogging is for you. But the layout of your blog is somewhat restricted. Don’t get me wrong; some legal bloggers have made beautiful designs using blogger’s templates (Denise Howell’s Bag and Baggage immediately comes to mind). But in my experience, Blogger’s limitations make it intolerable for tinkerers. And I am a tinkerer.

II. Statistics
Like blogging software, there are mainly two kinds of statistical software: user hosted and developer hosted.

A. User Hosted: User-hosted stats software sits on the web server and, in most cases, reads the server’s access logs. How does this work?

Each time someone visits one of your pages, they send a request. When you go to LawFirmBlogging.com, you are basically saying: “Get me everything that is tied to the index.php page.” That includes each image and file. Every file you request from the site is logged to a file, in this case it is called access_log.

Log File Analysis Software looks at the access_log file, processes the data, and spits out pretty looking graphs and stats.

What I Use: AwStats
Here are some of the reports AwStats provides:
* Number of visits, and number of unique visitors,
* Visits duration and last visits,
* Days of week and rush hours (pages, hits, KB for each hour and day of week),
* Domains/countries of hosts visitors (pages, hits, KB, 269 domains/countries detected, GeoIp detection),
* Hosts list, last visits and unresolved IP addresses list,
* Most viewed, entry and exit pages,
* OS used
* Browsers used (pages, hits, KB for each browser, each version
* Search engines, keyphrases and keywords used to find your site

B. Developer Hosted: With developer hosted statistical software, you put a piece of code on your page, and when someone visits the page, the code sends data to the developer’s servers.

What I Use: Google Analytics

III. Promotion
If you’re like me, you want people to read your blog. Makes sense, right? To get people reading your blog, they’ve got to find it somehow. Though getting a very high Google ranking would be ideal, there’s little you can do to make that happen immediately. So let’s focus on the promotion techniques you can get immediate benefit from.

A. Technorati: Technorati is a blog search engine. It’s a “real-time” search engine that keeps track of blog posts.

But, in order for your blog posts to be included in Technorati, you’ve got to let Technorati know when you’ve posted a new entry. There are a few ways to do this. The easiest way is to set up a technorati account. It’s free and easy. Once you set up an account, you’ll get a piece of code to add to your pages. That’s it. You’re done.

You can also “ping” technorati. This is a manual way to inform technorati of your posts in case your blogging software doesn’t allow you to embed technorati code.

B. Blawg.org: Blawg.org is a directory of legal blogs. If you have a legal blog, you can submit your site to Blawg.org for inclusion.

C. Getting Links: One of the best sources of traffic is having other sites link to you. I will talk about linking strategies further in future posts. Find other relevant sites and link to them. Then ask the site owner to link to you.

D. Comment: I cannot understate the importance of leaving comments on other people’s blogs. It lets people know that you’re reading their work and that you find it interesting. It also lets other bloggers know that you exist. If someone comments on my blog posts, I will check out their blog. Always.

When readers see comments, if they like what they’re reading, they’ll often visit the comment author’s website.

Summary: These are just a few methods and tools I use on a daily basis when blogging. I hope you find this overview useful in your blogging adventures. If you’ve got any questions, or if you’d like more detail on any of these items, just leave a comment. I’ll get back to you (and of course, I’ll check out your site).

Popularity: 14% [?]

I. Introduction
I’ve mentioned Squidoo before, but this time I’d like to go into a little bit of detail.

I think of Squidoo as a publicly available list of bookmarks from experts on a subject. Sure, it’s much more than that, but that’s the idea.

Squidoo’s main idea is: “Everyone’s an expert at something.” So the idea is to have “experts” create “lenses”, which are dynamic pages that use RSS to link to relevant sites and articles. The lenses are then categorized by keyword and ranked.

For example, I have a lens called Law Firm Blogging by Nathan Burke (yes, it is a very clever name). When I set up the lens, I chose the following keywords for categorization purposes: attorney, blog, marketing, blawg, and legal.

Since I started early with Squidoo, my ranking is particularly high within the law-related keywords. Right now, here’s what you see under the attorney tag:

So at least I have some company there. But when you go to the “blawg” keyword, this is all you see:

And while I enjoy being atop the ratings right now, it is lonely there. So, I’m inviting some competition from fellow bloggers. Here’s a little primer on how to get started with Squidoo.

II. Creating a Lens

1. Registration- To get started, you need to create an account. To do this, simply go here, and fill in your account details. Once you have registered, you need to…..

2. Create Your Bio- Enter some text about yourself in the form field:

3. Choose how you want to get paid- Squidoo puts Google AdWords ads on your lens, and you can choose what you want to do with your cash (if you generate any, of course):

4. Create a lens URL- You now create a lens URL, which is http://www.squidoo.com/lensname
On mine, I used http://www.squidoo.com/lawfirmblog

5. Give Your Lens a Title- Come up with your lense’s title.

6. Pick a main category for your lens- Here is the list of main categories:

7. Add Your Tags (Five Required)- Add the keywords you want associated with your lens. I listed mine above. I’d really like some company in the blawg, attorney, and legal category, so I’d suggest you add those. Since I blog about blogging, I’m fairly limited when it comes to tags. For legal bloggers, I’d suggest adding tags that relate to your subject. For instance, if your blog is about Intellectual Property, I’d add that.

8. Should everyone see your lens?- If your lens is going to be “family and office safe”, say yes.

9. Your lens is created- Now your lens is created. Time to add content to it.

a. Link List Module- This is basically the same thing as a blogroll.
b. RSS Module- This is where you can add an RSS feed, which will be published on the lens.
c. Text Module- You can add any text you’d like here
d. Google Maps- You can enter an address, and a Google Map will be published.
e. Money Makers- I chose Amazon here, and you can either let Amazon pick what displays, or you can choose your own entries.

10. Introduction- This is where you can enter and edit your lense’s description, and upload a photo of yourself if you’d like.

When you’re done, click “Publish”. Now you’re done.

Popularity: 17% [?]