CounseltoCounsel has twice been named to the Blawg100, the top 100 blogs by lawyers, for lawyers (as determined by the editors of the ABA Journal).  This year, the ABA is asking for blog readers to nominate their favorite blogs for the 2010 Blawg100.  If you like what you read in this space, please show your support by clicking here and indicating what you like about the blog.  Thanks in advance!  DEADLINE is OCTOBER 1st.

I had lunch the other day with a partner of a small law firm.  I have always considered this individual to be a bankruptcy lawyer;  but as we got caught up, he described himself as someone who does real estate and corporate finance.   I then discovered that back in the 1990s, he used to describe himself a commercial litigator.

Was he lacking in focus?  Was his marketing message weak?

Many of the clients that I coach have difficulty in choosing a marketing focus.   The common fear that I encounter is the fear of missing opportunities; the mistaken belief is that if you don’t say everything you do, you may miss the chance to serve someone who has a problem that you can solve.

But as I’ve said before in this space, when it comes to marketing, less is more.

While it is true that less is more, this does not mean that your marketing message must remain fixed over time.   As the economy shifts and as the law evolves, lawyers need to be able to shift as well.  What may be a hot specialty today may no longer be needed tomorrow.  This will be true throughout your career and it is particularly true right now as we weather the effects of the Great Recession.

Coupled with the need to be nimble over time is the need to recognize that finding the right way to describe your services may involve some trial and error.   In other words, in order to maximize your marketing effectiveness, you may need to test market a few phrases before you settle on one that works.

Political strategists and marketing  consultants understand this.   The words you choose to describe what you do can have a great impact on how you are perceived and whether you will be remembered (e.g. why do you think that Republicans now refer to the Estate Tax as the “Death Tax”.)

The goal, of course is to deliver a focused message about what you do (i.e. one that makes you memorable and differentiates you from other lawyers).  When you find a message that works, stick with it.  Repetition is essential in marketing.   But be aware of the need to evolve as the law and the marketplace for legal services evolves.  Otherwise, you may find yourself trying to sell buggy whips to consumers who want hybrid cars.

My latest guest post on the MassLOMAP blog.

I just finished reading the book Switch:  How to Change Things When Change Is Hard.  It’s a quick read and a great addition to the library of anyone who is trying to make personal or organizational change.   I have already been incorporating some of the key principles into my coaching practice.

The authors, Chip and Dan Heath, provide a great roadmap for initiating change whether it is personal (e.g. losing weight), professional (e.g. making the shift from associate who does the work to partner who generates the work) or organizational (e.g. getting attorneys at a law firm to increase their effectiveness at cross-selling).  They focus on addressing both the emotional and rational parts of our brains (described in the book as “the elephant” and “the rider”) and offer lots of practical examples of how to take the first steps to stay motivated.

Not yet!  At least that is the conclusion in a new report entitled The State of Law Firm E-Mail Marketing.  According to an e-mail I received from Josh Fruchter:

As you may be aware, law firms are heavy users of email marketing. But until now, legal marketers had no industry benchmarks to consult to measure how their email marketing campaigns were performing against their peers. Indeed, clients regularly ask us, “What’s a good open rate for a law firm email newsletter?” “A good clickthrough rate?” “A bad bounce rate?”

To address those kinds of questions, we’ve published “The State of Law Firm Email Marketing: Benchmarks, Trends, and Best Practices” – a free report that documents benchmarks for five key metrics (e.g., open rates, clickthrough rates) for law firm email marketing campaigns based on campaigns aggregating 6,896,610 emails distributed by our top 25 law firm clients during four consecutive 6-month periods running from July 1, 2008 through June 30, 2010.

While some commentators have been predicting the death of e-mail with the rise of social media, e-newsletters still provide a good way for lawyers and law firms to distribute their content to existing and prospective clients. Obviously, it is more challenging to get the attention of busy professionals who have overloaded inboxes, but many law firms are still doing this with relative success. The report provides some good benchmarks to measure your own success. It is a useful and free resource for anyone who is tasked with circulating content to a law firm’s mailing list.

My latest article on the importance of mixing marketing with relationship building.  Both are important to your career and both are essential if you want to sell your services as a lawyer.

The Jewish New Year, Rosh HaShana, starts this evening at sundown.  On this happy occasion, it is time for all of us to reflect upon the last 12 months and think about our accomplishments and our shortcomings.   Even if you are not Jewish, September is a good time to set some new goals.  People are back from summer vacation and schools are back in session.  It really is like a new year for everyone.

If things don’t work out, you’ll have the chance to do it all over in January when the regular New Year arrives.

But that’s the great thing about being Jewish.   You get two bites at the apple!  Two chances each year for redemption;  two chance to make a fresh start!   And if you also happen to be Chinese (liking Chinese food doesn’t count), you get a third chance at the Chinese New Year.

No matter when you celebrate the New Year, though, take advantage of this opportunity.  There is no day like today to begin to reinvent yourself.   All you have to do is change your mind set.  Think about what you want to do differently in your professional and personal life (ramp up your marketing program, explore new practice areas, work less, spend more time with your kids, volunteer more often, get more exercise)    Then get to it.   No matter how many times a year you celebrate the New Year or simply take the time to reflect, it’s never too soon to change course in your life.

Change, of course, isn’t always easy, especially for lawyers.  So let me also take this opportunity to put in a plug for hiring a coach to help you sort out your new goals and hold you accountable.

These are my thoughts on this eve of Rosh HaShana. And now, back to my list of ways I want to improve myself in the coming 12 months!

Several weeks ago, I had coffee with the General Counsel of a midsized company. We were talking about career satisfaction, and the subject of salary came up.  I asked her if she was satisfied with her compensation and almost immediately she replied “I need to make more money.”

I asked her how much she was earning and suffice it to say that at least with respect to base compensation, this individual could be doing a lot worse.

Next I asked her a series of questions about the flexibility of her workplace, the amount of travel she was expected to do, the variety of work she is exposed to and how much she likes her colleagues.  By all these measures, this is an attorney who has a high level of job satisfaction.

My advice to her was to do some networking with other in-house counsel who seem to have “better paying jobs”. Basically, I suggested that she go out and get some perspective.  Maybe she could build her base and find a company that would give her a larger bonus and possibly some equity.  But would the trade-off be worthwhile?

Sometimes, our career satisfaction is lowered by the belief that others are being paid more to do the same work.  While you may conclude that this is in fact the case, do some networking and find out how things may differ with respect to the intangibles.  In the end, you may conclude that could be earning more, but you may also  surprise yourself to learn that there are trade-offs that would come with this increased salary and maybe staying put is really your best option.

I spent part of August trying to get a better handle on search engine optimization.   I’ve been trying for a while to decide whether law firms can really benefit from spending time (or money) on SEO.  Intuitively, it makes sense that an individual might use Google to find a divorce or personal injury lawyer.  But it makes less sense (at least to me), that more sophisticated consumers of legal services would randomly search for a lawyer to review employment agreements or handle the sale of a business.

I am aware that even a sophisticated buyer may sometimes turn to Google when shopping for professional services.  For example, an experienced marketing director of a well regarded firm recently found me by googling the phrase “law firm marketing coach” (or something similar).   Despite the fact that he is very well connected in his community, he chose to find what he needed on-line rather than asking his network for referrals.

I was thinking that this must be a bit of a fluke.  But then I read this post in an on-line discussion on LinkedIn:

Having spent 10 years in-house doing SEO at a business law firm, I can say with full confidence that it brings in institutional clients. I can’t give the actual number of files, but of those we did get via SEO, the ratio was about 30% corporate clients vs 70% individuals. We identified these at file opening in the accounting system, via referral source, coming from the client opening form. So we were reliant on the clients saying ‘google’ in their conversation with lawyers, and reliant on lawyers giving credit…

Corporate SEO is also a bit different than positioning commodity legal services. For example, a business lawyer that’s found by a local reporter via the search engines. That could be an SEO home run; and just as valuable as the DUI lawyer who gets 25 calls or website intakes, with only 6 turning into actual files.  Posted by Steve Matthews

So at least one pundit things that SEO is worth the effort even for business law firms.  SEO can increase the likelihood that reporters will use you as a source and in some instances, that can be worth alot.

What has been will be again,
what has been done will be done again;
there is nothing new under the sun…Ecclesiastes

Alternative Fee Agreements have been getting a lot of attention in the legal profession as of late.  The Zeitgeist, at least in corporate counsel circles, is that the billable hour is finally being challenged in a meaningful way.  What is implied in all these discussions is that AFA’s are a wholly new way of doing business.

In truth, lawyers in certain practice areas (particularly those serving consumers) have always operated at least in part using fixed fees (e.g. for drafting a will, for conducting a real estate closing, for filing an immigration application).  What is allegedly new is the notion of business clients paying their lawyers on a fixed fee basis to handle more complex transactions or litigation matters.

But today, I was speaking with a member of my squash club who has been doing private equity deals for over two decades.   He informed me that he has been compensating large law firms by the deal since the early 1990s.  A nd these are deals which can generate several hundred thousand dollars in legal fees.

So maybe it is more accurate to say that widespread use of non-hourly billing for lawyers who represent business clients and institutions is still limited, but it is a growing trend. While this may seem like semantics, isn’t it really more than that?  The objections that lawyers make when fixed fee arrangements are suggested have not only been addressed, but these arrangements have already worked successfully for a long time.