Law Firm Marketing Consultant : Larry Bodine Law Marketing Blog : Law firm marketing, legal marketing, attorney marketing, business development, sales training, practice development, training, marketing consultant, legal consultant, individual lawyer coaching, business development, client team, practice development, business development, law firm coach

There are only 24 hours left to register for the LIVE webinar:
How the Marketing Partner of the Year Doubled His Firm's Revenues

Don't miss hearing how Mark A. Long, the Marketing Partner at Schwabe, Williamson & Wyatt doubled his firm's revenues:

WEBINAR DATE: Thursday May 8, 2008 (tomorrow)
10 AM Pacific time
11 AM Mountain time
Noon Central time
1 PM Eastern Time

Click here now to sign up for this LIVE web seminar to learn how your firm can apply his lucrative methods.

We'll focus on the 4 steps he took that boosted revenue for his 175-lawyer firm in Portland:

1. Success-building compensation system. Building on concepts used by others but tailoring it to work at their firm, Mark has led a process where "we print money," according to firm president David Bartz.
2. Strategic Marketing Unit (SMU) program. Instead of marketing solely by practice groups or individuals, the firm has voluntary groups that focus on an industry, a client, or an area of practice.
3. Marketing Pyramid presentation. You'll hear and see the actual "Marketing Pyramid" presentation he gives internally to train his firm's attorneys in developing new business. 
4. Giving the Marketing Director a free hand.  Schwabe recently created a Strategic Marketing Communications Plan, and gave the marketing director freedom to create it and trusted her decisions.  "The result has been an amazing growth in new business acquisition and client retention," said Karen T. Kervin, Director of Client Relations & Marketing.

"Mark has led us in transformational initiatives which have increased the quality of service to our clients, leading our clients to hire us for a broader range of work and for increased levels of work while raising our reputation so new clients, in new areas, have hired us," says firm President David F. Bartz, Jr.

Attend this live webinar with moderators Larry Bodine, Esq. and Michael G. Cummings, and learn about the firm's key revenue-generating initiatives:

Click here to see Mark A. Long's detailed bio. Click here to see the detailed program description.

• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

The ABA Journal and the website Out-Law.com by the UK firm Pinsent Masons won the 2008 People’s Voice Webby Award in the Law category, it was announced today.

Described by the New York Times as the "the Internet's highest honor," the Webby Awards are administered by the International Academy of Digital Arts & Sciences, and received almost 10,000 entries this year.

“It’s enormously gratifying that thousands of our readers took the time to show their support for the site,” said Edward A. Adams, the Journal’s editor and publisher. The site features legal news updated continuously every business day, a directory of more than 1,800 legal blogs, and archives of the magazine.

The IT and e-commerce legal advice site Out-Law.com, states it "has 8,000 pages of free legal news and guidance, mostly on IT and e-commerce issues. These issues can affect any organisation, and OUT-LAW is as much for those in a software start-up as it is for the compliance team at a bank. If and when you need further advice, we hope you'll choose Pinsent Masons, the law firm behind OUT-LAW.COM."

To see all the winners, visit http://www.webbyawards.com/webbys/current.php?season=12.

At the June 10 ceremony in Manhattan honoring the winners, Stephen Colbert will receive the Person of the Year award and Black Eyed Peas member will.i.am will receive the Artist of the Year award. The Webby Awards famously limit acceptance speeches to just five words. In recent years, they’ve included Al Gore (”Please don’t recount this vote”), the Beastie Boys (”Can anyone fix my computer?”), and Prince (”Everything you think is true”).

• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

Jill Konrath, Contributing Editor of RainToday.com has an excellent free e-book you can download called "Can LinkedIn Increase Your Sales?"  Just visit her website and click to download this 14-page ebook now.

The answer is "yes" -- LinkedIn works great in business development -- so long as you use it.  As I discussed in my article on the front page of Law Technology News, "Social Networking: Crowded But Silent," thousands of lawyers have created profiles on LinkedIn but haven't gotten any business from it.  The reason is that they don't know how to do it.

Jill offers three great tips:

1. Focus on connecting. Anytime you receive a business card from its owner, you then "know" this person. While not everyone is a valuable link, search for that person on LinkedIn right away. Because you have their email, you can send them an invitation to connect.
   
2. Increase your visibility. Don't simply add people to your network. Ask or answer questions on LinkedIn. Make sure your public profile is complete. But most of all, recommend people in your network and ask them to recommend you! Anytime you do any of the above, LinkedIn posts updates online or in weekly updates to everyone in your network.
   
3. Make LinkedIn your homepage. Whenever I open my browser, I can immediately review my "LinkedIn Home Page" which shows what others in my network are doing and who they're connecting with.
   

I have used LinkedIn to help a colleague find a new job, to connect with 250+ people, to ask questions about what to pay a marketing director, and to give and get introductions to people I want to know. 

If you want to get new business from LinkedIn, be sure to attend the Webinar "Getting New Business from Online Social Networks" that Kevin O'Keefe and I will present Thursday, May 15, 2008 from 12 - 2 PM EST.

• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

One thing that brings out the competitive nature of CMOs and marketers everywhere is the desire to score high on the numerous law firm rankings that are published.   Being named No. 1 as a corporate dealmaker or litigation firm is a huge marketing coup -- even making the top 10 of rankings like the AmLaw 100 are sought-after goals.

On the other hand, marketers must grind through the laborious chore of compiling information for directories, some of which are created simply to sell advertising.

You can tune in to an all-star webinar on Tuesday, May 6, 2008 (that's tomorrow) starting at Noon EDT "Blood, Sweat & Tiers: Who are the winners and losers in the battle for lawyer rankings?" They'll cover the proliferation of legal guides, directories, listings, and rankings that marketers must deal with.

Brought to you by WestLegalEdcenter, the cast includes:

• Fiona Boxall, Managing Editor, Chambers & Partners
• Joseph Calve, Chief Marketing Officer, Proskauer Rose LLP
• Deborah McMurray, CEO, Content Pilot
• William White, Publisher, SuperLawyers
• Jonathan Asperger, Principal, Asperger Partners LLC

Click here to get your seat at Blood, Sweat & Tiers:  Who are the winners and losers in the battle for lawyer rankings?

This no-holds-barred discussion will answer:

• Which, if any, of the rankings have value, and why?
• What do buyers of legal services really think about rankings?
• Does the proliferation of legal guides and directories bring clarity to process of selecting outside lawyers, or muddy the waters?
• How can lawyers and their firms get the rankings they deserve and, once received, leverage them in the marketplace?

West LegalEdcenter is an online source for continuing legal education (CLE) programs and business-oriented legal courses for large firms and corporations to solo practitioners and paralegals.

• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

The US economy lost fewer jobs than expected and unemployment nudged up.  “It strongly argues that this downturn will be mild and short- lived,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Economy.com. “As long as businesses hold the line on their layoffs, the economy will weaken, but it won’t unravel.”

This is especially true for law firms that represent energy companies, specifically oil companies.  In recent weeks:

• BP reported that its profit increased 63%, to $7.62 billion.
• ConocoPhillips posted a 37% percent increase in profit, to $4.37 billion.
• Royal Dutch Shell net income in the first three months of the year rose 25%, to $9.08 billion.
• Exxon reported its net income rose by 17% to $10.9 billion.
• Chevron said first-quarter profit rose 9.5 %, to $5.17 billion
• A huge underwater oil field discovered late last year has the potential to transform Brazil into a sizable exporter and win it a seat at the table of the world’s oil cartel.

And for law firms, there's even more good news: the companies have all sorts of difficulties that require the hiring of lawyers:

• They are in an increasingly difficult business environment, marked by rising costs, tightening access to oil fields, and declining profits for refineries.
• Truckers and drivers are angry at the oil companies, so much so that the price of gasoline has become an issue in the presidential campaign.
• They may face windfall profits taxes and end to subsidies.
• There is a drop in oil production due to international contracts, under which oil companies must give a larger share of the oil they produce back to the host governments as prices rise.
• Exploration and production costs have doubled in recent years.
• In refining, profit margins have dropped as refiners were unable to pass through all the price increases in crude oil prices.
• Oil executives have been called before Congress to defend their profits in the last two years.

It's time to stop focusing on real estate, construction, banks, mortgage companies and airlines. Go where the money is: energy, steel, industrial metals, coal companies and railroads. See the 10 Best Performing Industries on MarketWatch.com.

• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

I am offering the following suite of 5 domain names for sale:

1. LAWMARKETINGINSTITUTE.NET
2. LAWMARKETINGINSTITUTE.INFO
3. LAWMARKETINGINSTITUTE.COM
4. LAWMARKETINGINSTITUTE.BIZ
5. LAWMARKETINGINSTITUTE.ORG

I'll accept $10,000 or the best offer.  Serious inquiries only.

• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks

In an article titled, "Chief Marketing Officers Are Dropping Off at Some Law Firms," (subscription required) the Philadelphia Legal Intelligencer is reporting:

• Stephen D. Barrett will be leaving Drinker Biddle, but has yet to provide an exact date of departure.  He joined Drinker as its CMO in September 2005 and has been commuting from his Boston home to Philadelphia each week. He would spend the week in the city and travel back to Massachusetts for the weekend.

   

• Since January 2008, Duane Morris has seen the departure of its senior marketing manager, Holly Lentz Kleeman, and its senior director of marketing/CRM manager, Pat Purdy now works for Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman in New York.

   

• Mark P. Trice, announced in August 2007 that he would be leaving the firm to move to become Chief Marketing Officer at vcfo, a financial consulting and administrative infrastructure support services company in Austin, TX.

   

• Blain Banick started at Ballard Spahr in October 2004 as the firm's CMO. He left the firm in the fall of 2007 to take a similar position at Dallas-based Haynes & Boone.

   

• Morgan Lewis lost its director of communications, Paul Webb, and decided to do away with the position.

• Print
• Comments (2)
• Trackbacks

Bruce Marcus has a great article about the economic downturn. I love his analogy:

"An economy is an hydraulic system – a closed system in which pressure at one end translates into pressure elsewhere in the system. In other words, nothing happens in an economy without reactions elsewhere in the system. In economics, there’s the added element of fear. Fear of the known and fear of the unknown, which is the worst kind, and adds to the pressure."

Here's his advice for lawyers and accountants:

Are there defensive measures to be taken? Yes (except maybe for those lawyers and accountants invested in mortgage backed securities). The answer lies in firm management. And do it now – before the deluge hits your firm.

• First, reassess the situation. Check your client list for potential weak companies. Weak companies that may be caught up in the economic downturn become slow payers, and then no payers. Either increase collection methods, or be prepared to let them go and cut your losses.
• Second, check your firm. You don’t want to give up real talent, but in today’s climate, you don’t want to carry staff (including partners) who aren’t carrying their share of the load.
• Third, think productivity. Review all your management processes, from partnership agreements to cash flow management to marketing.  Make sure your electronics are up-to-date, and are really saving you money. Look for potential return on perks and club memberships.  Preserve capital as best you can. And take your banker to lunch – you may need him or her.
• Fourth, look to your marketing. It’s not an expense, its an investment. If you use it wisely, and give the marketing professionals a chance, sound marketing may give you the best return on your investment.
• Fifth, pay closer attention to the industries your major clients are in. That’s where the early warning signs will be.

And finally, the economy really is like an hydraulic system, which means that anything that happens at one end will eventually get to you. Pay attention  and avoid surprises. You may come out ahead of the economy, whether it’s a recession, depression, or phase of the moon.

• Print
• Comments (2)
• Trackbacks

Kevin O'Keefe reports that LinkedIn, the largest and most popular professional social network, has detailed firm profiles on each of the largest law firms in the country.

Here's Kevin's of the LinkedIn law firm profiles for AmLaw's top 20 largest firms with the number of their LinkedIn members in just my LinkedIn network. Click on the firm's name to see their LinkedIn profile.

• Skadden Arps: 478 LinkedIn members in my LinkedIn network
• Latham & Watkins: 500+ LinkedIn members
• Baker & McKenzie: 500+ LinkedIn members
• Jones Day: 500+ LinkedIn members
• Sidley Austin: 330 LinkedIn membersk
• White & Case: 337 LinkedIn members
• Kirkland & Ellis: 500+ LinkedIn members
• Mayer Brown: 215 LinkedIn members
• Weil, Gotshal & Manges: 316 LinkedIn members
• Greenberg Traurig: 470 LinkedIn members
• DLA Piper: 500+ LinkedIn members
• Morgan, Lewis & Bockius: 429 LinkedIn members
• Sullivan & Cromwell: 239 LinkedIn members
• Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr: 203 LinkedIn members
• O'Melveny & Meyers: 302 LinkedIn members
• McDermott Will & Emery: 307 LinkedIn members
• Shearman & Sterling: 257 LinkedIn members
• Paul Hastings: 334 LinkedIn members
• Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton: 183 LinkedIn members
• Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher: 271 LinkedIn members

• Print
• Comments (2)
• Trackbacks