Larry Bodine Law Marketing Blog : Law firm marketing, legal editor, legal marketing, attorney marketing, business development, marketing consultant, legal consultant, business development

Lawyers need to send "status obvious" gifts to clients, according to Kathryn E. Brown of The Write Word LLC.  If you send cheap monogrammed  gifts like hats or T-shirts, they can wind up in a charity thrift shop priced at 25 cents.  There's nothing worse than seeing a homeless guy wearing your law firm baseball cap.

"Gifts aren't worth giving if they aren't useful as well as impressive. In addition, gifts are sometimes better received if the tokens of appreciation aren't branded with a logo or name of any kind, which sends a message of selflessness," she writes.

Here's her top 10 list of best client Christmas gifts:

1. The Open-Top Tote by Lands' End
2. L.L. Bean's Weekend Blanket
3. A sophisticated Levenger fountain pen
4. Neiman Marcus chocolate chip cookies
5. The Greenbrier's fruitcake, made by real pastry chefs
6. An autographed cookbook by famous caterer Ina Garten of the Food Network's popular show, "Barefoot Contessa."
7. Dylan Lauren's Candy Bar of New York City (she is the daughter of fashion designer Ralph Lauren), available at Saks Fifth Avenue
8. Red Envelope Asian money tree in a sculptural pot
9. Vera Bradley  leather MP3 cases
10. Tiffany robin's egg blue Swiss movement clock.

Meanwhile, head out to that thrift shop and buy your cheap merchandise back!

Darryl W. Cross is now the Senior Vice President of Business Development for Concep, the global marketing technology and services provider with offices in London, New York and Sydney.  Concep offers marketing and technology services through offices in London, New York and Sydney.

The company works with professional organizations in the financial, professional, and business services sectors, as well as membership organizations and marketing agencies to help them build, manage and deliver digital communication programs. For additional information, visit www.concepglobal.com.

Darryl was formerly Director, Strategy and Competitive Intelligence, for LexisNexis.  A sought-after speaker and author, he is an expert in competitive intelligence and client relationship management. In his work he collects and shares best practices with hundreds of the nation’s leading law firms, and provides business analysis to help them grow. He was the Chief Marketing Officer and member of the Executive Committee of a law firm based in Cleveland, OH. During his tenure, he was awarded the Marketing Partner Forum’s Excellence in Marketing Award.

ALM Research is keeping their third annual Law Firm Business Development Practices Survey open for two more weeks.  If you want to be part of this industry benchmarking survey, go right now to  http://vovici.com/wsb.dll/s/6f62g2bee0?paction=resume&index=0

All information collected about individual law firms will be kept completely confidential, and will be used only for the purpose of developing benchmarks and analyzing trends.  If you take the survey online, you can start, stop and go back to where you left off.

To see the 2006 executive summary in a PDF, click here.

This year's survey covers the same points regarding budgets, staffing, resources, etc., in order to follow the organizational and operational trends, according to Margaret Daisley, Research & Surveys Consultant for ALM Research.

New in this year's survey are sections on strategies for business development: clients surveys and interviews; client service teams, sales training for lawyers, and the RFP process. The survey also probes into the ways partners and associates are rewarded (and punished) for their business development activities.

Don't miss your chance to take the survey and get the executive summary of all the key trends in law firm business development efforts.

Martindale-Hubbell now offers a way to beef up a law firm listing in their directory with anonymous client testimonials.

An ad in PM Forum's Professional Marketing magazine about the service refers to a description on martindale.com.

"LexisNexis® Martindale-Hubbell® Client Review provides in-house counsel and other sophisticated buyers of legal services with client recommendations of a law firm's client service, quality of legal representation, and value for money. Client Reviews also include recommendations by practice area, geography, and industry."

If a firm gets a single bad review, it can choose to delete all the reviews from the firm's profile on martindale.com.  It's all-or-nothing: either all the reviews are published, or none.

If the firm decides to publish all the reviews, Martindale will issue a press release, mention it in their e-newsletter to 25,000 in-house counsel, send announcements to any 10 corporate counsel, and give it featured status in a Top 10 list of newly reviewed law firms on martindale.com.

The price is right: "There is no charge for early adopter firms to participate in Client Review."

Topping the charts as the largest firm is DLA Piper with 3,623 attorneys, displacing Baker & McKenzie with 3,335 attorneys from the top perch, which it had occupied for nearly 30 years. What's even more amazing, DLA Piper did not even enter the top 25 until five years ago, but through mergers and expansions, reached the top two by 2005.

A total of 128,213 attorneys worked at those firms this year, compared with last year's attorney census of 121,423.

• The number of women attorneys reported by law firms also showed a brisk uptick. In 2007, women attorneys equaled 41,558 of the attorneys among NLJ 250, a 6.6 percent increase. Last year, 38,998 of the attorneys were women. The average number of women partners among NLJ 250 in 2007 was 39.3
• Day Pitney, the 400-attorney Connecticut law firm, grew 59.4 percent through mergers.
• Thelen Reid & Priest with 600 lawyers, grew by 59 percent through mergers.
• Drinker Biddle & Reath's grew 44.3 percent by merging with Chicago's Gardner Carton & Douglas. The firm now has 658 lawyers in 12 offices.
• Kirkpatrick & Lockhart Nicholson Graham grew by 41.2 percent by merging with Seattle-based Preston Gates & Ellis to form a 1,381-attorney firm.

Leonard, Street and Deinard realized $7.5 million in fee receipts growth over a two-year period, based on a $150,000 program investment – including coaching fees, outside training fees, events and sales incentives, according to Chief Marketing Officer Jill S. Weber.  The firm’s “Fast Forward” program participants also achieved an average fee receipts growth rate six times higher than their peer group.

The 180-lawyer firm based in Minnesotra introduced an innovative program in 2004 designed to help a pilot group of 20 attorneys generate an additional $500,000 in revenue each over two years. Former firm president Lowell Noteboom developed the idea for the program as a means to generate an additional $10 million in revenue through a breakthrough strategy. Initially conceived as the “top 20 attorney program,” he proposed that the firm provide additional business development support to 20 attorneys with the business development skills and potential to generate an additional $500,000 in revenue each.

The Fast Forward® program offers several unique program elements that differentiate it from other training and coaching services on the market. Fast Forward offers:

• An integrated program, incorporating individual business plans, one-on-one coaching, large-group training classes and mentoring into a cohesive approach.
• Methods of establishing measurable benchmarks, including qualitative and quantitative measures, to evaluate participant success.
• Established investment parameters, outlining expectations for participants in terms of revenue generation and participation.
• Sales incentive awards, providing additional incentive for participants to achieve revenue goals.
• A packaged program with a brand identity, to create a “buzz” within the firm and make participants feel part of a special initiative.

For the rest of the story visit the LawMarketing Portal.

Order your copy today:

Brought to you by the band that gave us the classic albums "Merry Lexmas From The Lawtunes," "Legal Holidaze," and "The Lawyer's Holiday Humor Album," the new LawTunes CD is a broader take on the law, lawyers, and legal practice through ten original rock-and-roll tunes in an album not limited by content or style to any particular season. It even includes a few "love songs," although expressed in the language of an attorney.

Premised as a "live" concert at "Blackacre," the legendary parcel of land so often referenced in eternally-painful law school examination questions and scholarly legal treatises/articles, the new album includes:

"(She's An) Electronic Discovery”

There's probably no "hotter" topic in the law today than the review and production in litigation of e-mail and other electronic documents. But that context and its developing terminology (including data accessibility, preservation, spoliation, retention policies,

metadata, embedded images, the recent Federal Rules of Civil Procedure amendments, and the leading Zubulake line of cases) are appropriated with gusto to tell the tale of a lawyer falling in virtual love.

"Lawyers' Blood Is Typo"

A lawyer is called upon after-hours (assuming there is such a thing anymore) to provide guidance to a "client" seeking a reliable life partner, and explains why he is qualified to do so.

"Della Street"

A tribute to the most famous of legal secretaries, in a style appropriate to when "Perry Mason" first aired.

"LawMan"

A hard-pounding and blunt explanation of exactly what it is that lawyers do.

"Orderin' In"

The pleasures of working late and eating at your desk. To the extent there are any, this song extols them.

"Cadillac Cab"

The big-city law firm/corporate perk with double-edges, as detailed herein.

"Little Bluebook"

A lawyer frustrated in love desperately seeks guidance from the legal citation style manual, invoking a generous helping of the jargon of that treatise.

"Livin' Life In Six Minutes"

A new acoustic version of a popular Lawtunes song lamenting the reduction of legal practice (and life) to billing increments of tenths of an hour.

"Everywhere There Is A Client"

As close to an anthem for lawyers as there is, explaining some of why lawyers do what they do.

"Santa's G.C."

Well, old habits die hard. The album concludes with this whimsical tale about a lawyer who goes in-house to become General Counsel at Santa, Inc.

Order your copy today

Lazy law firms can now avoid the bother of writing, building an audience and risks of creating their own blogs, while getting some of the benefits of reaching potential clients.  That's what the global law firm Clifford Chance did when it sponsored the Conflict of Laws .Net blog.

In a statement, the 3,800-lawyer UK-based firm said, "Clifford Chance has considerable expertise and experience advising on complex conflict of laws issues, and recognises that CONFLICT OF LAWS .NET provides an invaluable resource in this area.

"The expansion of the global economy and regulation at a European and international level have increased the importance of private international law... This site plays a significant role in keeping lawyers appraised of new developments and offers a forum for exchange of ideas between practising and academic lawyers in countries whose systems of private international law share common objectives..."

Blog editor and lawyer Martin B. George is, of course, very pleased to have one of the world's leading law firms backing his blog. Neither party has revealed how much money the sponsorship cost, but it can't be more than a year's worth of banner ads.  The blog has a Google PageRank of 5, so I'm guessing the sponsorship cost $10,000 US or less.

Blogger Steve Matthews thinks it could become a trend. But I don't think so (with no disrespect to Steve). Law firms will be leery of sponsoring a blog they have no control over. Besides, it's low-impact marketing -- it's like running an advertisement next to an article in a magazine, when you could have written the article instead.

Following are the most popular legal blogs, according to Blawgsearch.com.  Pick the blog that fits your marketing goals, call the blogger and find out how much he wants for an exclusive sponsorship:

1. Above the Law
2. New York Supreme Court Criminal Term...
3. The Indiana Law Blog (it's soliciting supporters)
4. Sex Offender Issues
5. Wall Street Journal Law Blog
6. Class Action Defense Blog (written by Jeffer Mangels Butler & Marmaro, but I'll bet they'll listen to an offer).
7. Lethal Injection
8. How Appealing written by lawyer Howard Bashman.
9. Biztop News on advertising law.
10. New York Times DealBook

Law firm hourly rates have been going up since 2006 and the time to raise fees is now, according to data in a new survey of in-house lawyers. The survey reveals that it is safe for law firms to increase their rates by 5.3% up to 6% on hourly rates for their corporate clients.

The survey is full of good news for law firms. It was conducted by the Association of Corporate Counsel and Serengeti Law, the #1 ranked system for matter management and e-billing, based in Bellevue, WA. Named the “2007 ACC/Serengeti Managing Outside Counsel Survey Report,” it was the biggest survey of its kind with responses from 263 corporate law departments.  

In-house corporate counsel are expecting a rate increase of 5.3% on average:

“For 2006, the average change in outside counsel hourly rates was an increase of 6.0%, higher than last year's increase of 5.2% (compared with increases of 5.7% in 2004, 5.0% in 2003, 5.4% in 2002 and 6.3% in 2001). The percentage increases in hourly rates have headed back up to levels higher than the past five years. As in past years, in-house counsel were unrealistically optimistic about their ability to keep a lid on increases in hourly rates, with the actual increase (6.0%) exceeding last year’s prediction (4.8%). The average hourly rate increase predicted for 2007 (5.3%) is higher than last year’s prediction (4.8%), but lower than this past year’s actual increase (6.0%).”

For the full story visit the LawMarketing Portal at www.LawMarketing.com.

Pamela Roberts, Esq., a partner at Nelson Mullins Riley & Scarborough, has cracked the code to becoming a rainmaker: get active in a big national organization, focus on public service and let the referrals come in.  Her story illustrates how any lawyer can do the same; and her questions at the end of the article can stimulate your own success story.

She is no ordinary lawyer. Roberts is the Chair of the ABA Commission on Women in the Profession, a prominent national position that gives her frequent exposure on the wide range of issues facing women lawyers.  And she does it while being a mother of four, wife of another partner in her firm and full-time business litigator at a 400-lawyer firm.

Only 17% of women lawyers are equity partners, and most firms have just a lone woman rainmaker – statistics that Roberts finds distressing.  “Becoming a rainmaker always been somewhat challenging.  It’s so much more challenging for a woman,” she said.

But she herself is active in four local charities, which brought her referrals. She is a regular public speaker before audiences of clients, and she attends trade association meetings in the industries of her clients.

How does she do it all?  “I gave up on sleep,” she joked.  “Seriously, my husband and I made the decision that by having two people working full time, we have to pay for nannies and support help.”  Help is essential, especially when one of your kids is on two traveling soccer teams.

And so is focus. Roberts pursues activities and passions where she can build relationships.  For her it’s been the American Bar Association, where she began more than a decade ago by working her way up the Litigation Section.  Her husband gave her an early demonstration of networking.

“I was attending an ABA Litigation section meeting...   For the rest of her story visit Originate at http://www.pbdi.org/originate/.

Those puppy-loving marketers at Womble Carlyle are about to roll out a new animated advertising campaign featuring their lovable mascot, Winston the Bulldog.

Click on this link http://tinyurl.com/3bqkl8 and view animated ads with a theme that revolves around the firm’s history of seeking innovative solutions to help clients succeed and a tagline that supports that theme: Innovators at Law.

Winston the bulldog has become a metaphor for the Womble Carlyle law firm since he was introduced in the firm's first ad campaign in 1996.

Kudos to the folks at WCSR for successfully building a recognizable and memorable brand.

"Perpetual origination credit is one of the destructive practices that continue despite the advice of management experts," writes Tom Collins on the morepartnerincome blog. "Continuing origination credit bestows territorial ownership.  It puts a fence with a non-trespassing sign around a client or a reference source. Doing that impedes business development by getting in the way of cross-selling and team selling."

I totally agree.  Yet a survey of 170 midrange law firms by Juris shows that an astonishing 81% of law firms have no sunsent on origination credit.

"It spells double trouble if the rainmaker has settled into a rocking chair mode, living off of his or her prior accomplishments. It is not unlike the practice of assigning an exclusive territory to a salesperson or dealer in the commercial world.  Exclusivity can work if the salesperson is aggressive and effective, but territory sales results go down the tubes if the salesperson becomes ineffective," Tom writes.

In the law firm world, attorneys are accountable for their results as lawyers and not as salespeople.  It becomes a royalty, a source of continuing income that is not related to the current work effort or contribution of the attorney.  The worst part is that others in the firm, who could expand the business relationship or expand the scope of a referring source do not do so—first because of the “hands off message” conveyed by the perpetual origination credit and second, because of the “nothing in it for me” mentality that such a practice fosters.

“The reward for “bringing in business” needs to be temporary. The most important change needed to continually drive new business is that origination credit should expire with the case or matter, or for a continuing portfolio sale, it should expire after 12 or 24 months.  Origination credit should be viewed more as a “bonus” than a way to build a compensation annuity. 

Pamela J. Roberts, Esq. discloses in the November issue of Originate how she brought in the business for her firm, and built a thriving practice. Her story illustrates how other women lawyers can do the same, according to my case study. And her thirteen questions at the end of the article can stimulate your own success story.

Pamela Roberts, Esq., a partner at Nelson Mullins Riley & Scarborough, has cracked the code to becoming a rainmaker: get active in a big national organization, focus on public service and let the referrals come in.  Her story illustrates how any lawyer can do the same; and her questions at the end of the article can stimulate your own success story.

She is no ordinary lawyer. Roberts is the Chair of the ABA Commission on Women in the Profession, a prominent national position that gives her frequent exposure on the wide range of issues facing women lawyers.  And she does it while being a mother of four, wife of another partner in her firm and full-time business litigator at a 400-lawyer firm.

Only 17% of women lawyers are equity partners, and most firms have just a lone woman rainmaker – statistics that Roberts finds distressing.  “Becoming a rainmaker always been somewhat challenging.  It’s so much more challenging for a woman,” she said.

But she herself is active in four local charities, which brought her referrals. She is a regular public speaker before audiences of clients, and she attends trade association meetings in the industries of her clients.

How does she do it all?  “I gave up on sleep,” she joked.  “Seriously, my husband and I made the decision that by having two people working full time, we have to pay for nannies and support help.”  Help is essential, especially when one of your kids is on two traveling soccer teams.

Getting Business from the Bar

And so is focus. Roberts pursues activities and passions where she can build relationships.  For her it’s been the American Bar Association, where she began more than a decade ago by working her way up the Litigation Section.  Her husband gave her an early demonstration of networking.

“I was attending an ABA Litigation section meeting...   For the rest of her story visit Originate at http://www.pbdi.org/originate/.

Kevin O'Keefe

"But if these large law firms, and their web site providers truly understood how to harness RSS, they'd be using blogs to disseminate their content," O'Keefe writes. Here are his reasons he identifies:

1. Content on a website is much less likely than blog content to appear high in search engine results when relevant searches are performed by in-house counsel, execs, the media, and other interested parties.
2. Website content must be promoted. Word of a blog with valuable content spreads across the Internet by virtue of news sites and other blogs citing the content.
3. Website content is generally seen only by existing clients. Blogs, akin to an online magazine on a niche subject, are read by clients of other firms, lawyers at other firms, the media, and other bloggers.
4. Over 20% of senior execs in this country read one business blog a week and the number is growing. How many execs read law firm articles?
5. Measure of influence is quickly becoming of critical importance for web content by places like Google Blog Search. Influence is determined in large part by being cited by other blogs and news sites with RSS feeds. Law firm articles will not be cited.
6. Innovative companies, large law firm's targeted clients see blogs as innovative. Law firm articles/alerts, whether including an RSS or not, are looked at as more of the same. 'All law firms do that.'

I joined the Chicago Bar Association, which asked me to record a couple of podcasts on how to get more clients and make more money.  They are as follows.  Click the link to hear them.

Peter Darling observes in the Business Development blog that "if you go to a hot school, you will get a much better job out of the gate, if "better" means big firm, big city, high salary. However, you will also have a harder time, I think, learning to market yourself."

Good law schools make for bad legal marketing, he says.  I'll go further: ALL law schools are useless when it comes to legal marketing.

I joined in the research supporting the article, "91% of Lawyers Unhappy about Lack of Marketing Training in Law School."  The article states, "The only conclusion we can draw is that after law school, most lawyers, to use a Nixon-era phrase, are left twisting slowly in the wind. Some have been fortunate to find marketing mentors after graduation, and 61% have taken a post-graduate course or training session in marketing. Nevertheless,

• 41% don't get good marketing results, don't know how to market or don't bother to do any marketing at all.
• 37% manage to just generate enough business for themselves.
• Only 22% of respondents consider themselves rainmakers."

Event at elite schools, Darling says, when students are ejected out into big firms, first of all, they often have no idea how the "soft" part of a career functions -- interpersonal relationships, strategy, networking, etc. They're not used to being treated as cogs in a much bigger machine. And finally, they have absolutely no idea of how to market themselves, or, fatally, why it matters.

They've always done well. They've always made it to the next step through sheer performance. But as I've written many times, the real world, the marketplace in which they function, is not that way at all. It's chaotic, and requires skills -- like selling, and networking -- that they've never needed. The result can be trouble."

I've given up on the law schools.  Their response to marketing training has always been lame, and it won't change.  Lawyers are better off doing what the rainmakers do: getting business development training or coaching once they're in practice.

I asked Mina N. Sirkin, a California Certified Specialist in the areas of Estate Planning, Probate and Trust Law, how an estate planning lawyer can get more business from wealthy individuals and business clients. 

She offered great advice on her Law Firm Marketing & Management Systems blog:

If an estate planning attorney is looking for wealthy clients, he or she must connect to other attorneys who have wealthy or high net worth clients who don't do estate planning.   Good matches for estate planning attorneys are family lawyers, business lawyers and best of all, real estate litigation lawyers.   

A lawyer looking for business clients who may have estate planning needs has to be connected to CPAs and Brokers.  A high net worth person who has just completed a high-end real estate sale or business sale is a very good prospect for estate planning.   Those who know about those business deals are business brokers, real estate brokers and CPAs.

All attorneys, but especially Certified Specialists can generally take advantage of the three top basis methods of marketing. 

1. Contact with other practitioners or general practitioners through email or other media and keep your name in front of them.
2. Give seminars for other attorneys and other professionals and introduce them to what you do and share the recent case law with them.
3. Community involvement.   If you are not a "people person" and don't particularly enjoy marketing in the above three ways, you may want to try Internet marketing in sites most visited by wealthy individuals.

For the full post visit http://lawmarketingsystems.typepad.com/my_weblog/2007/11/top-three-marke.html.

This year's "MLF 50" -- the Top 50 Law Firms in Marketing and Communications as ranked by Marketing the Firm newsletter -- is topped by Proskauer Rose.  "This Year, It's All About 'Street Cred' and the Creation of Programs That 'Rock,'" said Editor Elizabeth Anne Tursi.

The other top winners were:

• Number Two: Goodwin Procter
• Number Three: Duane Morris
• Number Four: Ropes & Gray
• Number Five: Thompson Hine

Here's a snippet about Proskauer Rose:

Under the leadership of Chief Marketing Officer Joseph Calve, who joined the firm in October 2005, Proskauer Rose ranks number one on this year’s list. While the firm has always been considered a “powerhouse” of talent, it has truly become a different firm and that’s because of Calve and his team of marketing, business development and communications professionals who have taken it to the “next level.”

The Business Development Department has built tremendous credibility within a very short time. It’s not surprising that this team is heavily engaged in strategy at all levels, including:

• Individual business planning;
• Lateral acquisitions (more than 40 partners in two years);
• Geographic expansion (London and Brazil in 2007; Asia in the works);
• Practice Group Protocol — this is designed to drive strategic planning discipline across the firm;
• Long-term strategic planning
• Annual business and marketing planning.

Proskauer faced the same difficulties as other firms in measuring the impact of what it did and why it did it, but under Joe Calve and with the support of the firm’s leadership, it has made great strides. For example, the firm spends large sums on sponsorships and events, but until last year, it tracked nothing. Now, the firm systematically gathers specific objectives from partners on the front end and conducts extensive debriefing sessions on the back end, capturing and deploying the info and issuing it to improve what they do and to make resource allocation decisions.

The firm also tracks every pitch and RFP and reports that information to the firm’s leadership in a weekly pitch report, constantly doubling back to track results. The firm also has a system for tracking impact of media efforts. This level of disciplined tracking requires time and diligence, but it’s worth the effort as Proskauer is seeing steady improvement in the effectiveness of its efforts. One measure of the success of its tracing is the firm’s willingness to continue investing heavily in business development — almost doubling the size of the staff and more than tripling marketing spending, which had been well below industry standards and not where it should have been.

Currently, Proskauer’s marketing staff stands at 42 people, with personnel spread across six offices.