CounseltoCounsel Blog

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.

The results of my wholly unscientific reader’s poll are in and they confirm what I had suspected.  Lawyers are mildly optimistic about the demand for legal services going into Fall 2010.  This seems to exceed the overall confidence of the public at large in the economy at large.  Perhaps that is because lawyers are needed when things are happening (either getting better or getting worse.)

Overall, modestly good news for lawyers?  Seem like that is the zeitgeist in the legal profession right now.  Just don’t use my survey results to prove that in court!

Drafting a partnership agreement is a key component of starting a legal practice – keeping it updated, however, is one housekeeping item that often falls by the wayside at busy firms. Whether gaining or losing a partner, attorneys need to put the parties’ expectations in writing.  Failing to do so can place the law firm at risk of losing control over its current revenues or worse, can lead to the collapse of the firm.

Discrepancies in one partnership agreement resulted in a legal battle in the following case:  the law firm Chadbourne & Parke sued a former partner over a fee awarded in a matter involving trusts for descendants of department store magnate Marshall Field.  The former partner, a veteran trusts and estates lawyer who left Chadbourne in 2000 to join another firm, had continued to provide legal services to the client after leaving the firm and claimed entitlement to a portion of the fee awarded by the court after he departed the firm.  While his original partnership agreement would have required him to split the fees if he were still at the firm, the agreement was silent on arrangements with former partners.

Another recent case highlights the importance of updating a firm’s partnership agreement, particularly where its terms contain precise requirements regarding who the firm must maintain as partners in order to continue functioning as a business.   The widow of a firm’s founding partner was able to force the firm’s dissolution following the partner’s death because the partnership agreement had not been updated to reflect the interests of additional partners who joined the firm after the agreement was drafted.

Law firms and the attorneys responsible for updating partnership agreements should keep the items below in mind in order to help reduce risk:

• Partnership agreements should be reviewed at least annually in addition to every time there is a substantial change in the firm’s normal order of business (e.g., new partners added, merger, etc.).  Think of a partnership agreement as a fluid document requiring periodic review and updating similar to a will.  Key “life events” in your firm will trigger the need to review the terms of your partnership agreement much like a marriage, divorce or having children prompts the review and possible update of a will.
• With the trend in downsizing, firms may be restructuring their staffs.  These changes in operating structure or responsibilities can open firms up to risk if they are not careful to consider how these changes impact their partnership agreements and revise the terms accordingly.  The partnership agreement in many ways is not unlike an operating manual for the firm.
• In particular, firms that have created a dedicated committee to handle management decisions may want to consider management liability insurance which can provide financial protection for those individuals in the event of a lawsuit or other dispute which could become costly to defend

This post by Jim Rhyner, worldwide lawyers professional liability insurance product manager, Chubb Group of Insurance Companies, is one of a continuing series of guest posts on CounseltoCounsel. Special thanks to Jim for his continued contributions.

Please click here to vote in my wholly unscientific poll.

I have been experimenting with voice recognition software since 1997 when I first launched my own consulting firm.  I was pretty accustomed to doing a lot of my writing with a Dictaphone; but now that I was out on my own, I was eager to control my costs and a secretary was just not in the budget.

My early experience with Dragon NaturallySpeaking was pretty good (I believe I came in at Version 3 or 4), though not quite good enough to justify sticking with it.   Over the next 10 years, I would upgrade to the next version each time hoping that accuracy would finally reach an acceptable level.   But each time, I stopped using the product within a few months of installing the upgrade.   I finally gave up at version 8.

Fortunately for Nuance, the current owner of Dragon, I finally succumbed to their incessant advertising and I have purchased Version 11 (having skipped versions nine and 10).  If my experience in the first 15 minutes is indicative of what it will be like to use this upgrade, I am very excited.   the number of recognition errors being made is minuscule.  I have found the Holy Grail – I will be dramatically increasing my typing speed in the coming months.  I’m just hoping that this post is not premature. But this time I think I have found the real deal.

In the past year, there has been a lot written about alternative fee agreements (including my own article in Lawyers Weekly).  More predictability is clearly what corporate counsel want and AFA’s are one path to reach this objective.

But once the clock stops running, how do law firms ensure that their bottom line is not negatively impacted?

The answer, of course, is that law firms must learn to do what virtually every other business does every day:  law firms must find ways to control expenses.

There are a variety of ways that private law firms can accomplish this.  At this week’s ILTA conference in Las Vegas, for example, KM guru David Hobbie is speaking about the role that knowledge management can play in bringing down legal costs.

But there is also a role for technology more generally (KM actually relies a lot on technology so there is some overlap here).  And Legal Process Outsourcing is another ingredient that can make AFA’s profitable.  More generally, in order for AFA’s to work, lawyers must learn to better manage and appropriately staff their matters.

Most private practice attorneys that I speak to are at least thinking about AFA’s and many are experimenting with them on certain matters.  While the billable hour still reigns, there are clear indications that the use of AFA’s is growing.   Change comes slowly to lawyers.  But those who figure out how to adapt to this new way of doing business will have happy clients, happier associates and less pressure to bill more hours each year.

That was the topic of discussion in the Legal Marketing Group on LinkedIn .  The general consensus is that having issue focused websites is probably a good thing because the audience who visits an issue specific site is more targeted (i.e. they are specifically interested in that particular subject matter).  As long as the substantive material on each website doesn’t repeat excessively from site to site (Google will punish that because it thinks someone is trying to game search engines), having multiple sites may help you better segment your target markets.  In short, it is probably a more effective method of law firm marketing.

If you think about it, this makes a lot of sense.  If someone is interested in finding a lawyer who has a lot of experience handling medical malpractice claims, won’t that individual pay a lot more attention if they go to a site that has articles only on medical malpractice?  Doesn’t the presence of information about real estate development, sexual harassment, tax issues that arise in venture capital filings, etc., only dilute the marketing message to that particular individual?

Of course, the desire to produce highly focused marketing pieces must be weighed against the expense of creating customized sites.  But it is definitely an area for law firms to explore.

When looking for lawyers with a particular area of expertise, in-house counsel are increasingly turning to Google and a robust on-line presence to validate referrals.

That is not to say that directories have ceased to have any relevance.  You still want to be listed in Martindale, Best Lawyers and any published lists of top experts in your particular field.  In fact most directories and lists are available on-line as well.  Your presence on lists may even impact your Google rankings.

The message, though, is that law firm marketing requires a much more comprehensive approach.  Social media needs to be part of the overall equation.

Yes