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

The No. 1 reason people visit the Internet is to see a video, according to new research. Adapting to this change, the popular LawMarketing Portal website today becomes the all-video LawMarketing Channel at www.LawMarketing.com.

The LawMarketing Portal has been a free news and information site about marketing and business development in the legal profession for 15 years.  It has carried hundreds of articles by marketing experts since it was founded.

We’re switching to an all-video format because when people have a problem, they just want someone to tell them the answer in three minutes. That’s exactly what we’re giving our visitors.

The LawMarketing Channel is a place where legal professionals can start their day.

It features the last five posts from the LawMarketing Blog, hosted on the LexBlog Network. "The Channel blends the best in social media. Brief educational videos which have proven to be very popular among legal professions as well innovative and engaging blogging," said lawyer Kevin O'Keefe, CEO & Publisher of LexBlog. "Well done on Bodine's part."

Invited experts, volunteers and I will post news, commentary and insight in the main video, “Today's Legal Sales & Marketing Bulletin.” Initial videos will include “The Secrets of Rainmakers,” “How Lawyers can Sell Like a Doctor,” “Surviving the Recession With Business Development.”

“The LawMarketing Channel will be a top destination online for legal marketers and business developers,” said Ari Kaplan, Principal of Ari Kaplan Advisors in New York City and author of The Transformation of Professional Services: Creating Innovative Practices in a Digital Marketplace.  “It was a great site before, and now it’s even better.”

All of the detailed articles, job descriptions, consultant and job opening listings and checklists remain online and can be found using the “Search” box.  Visitors can still sign up to be Premium Members and post event, job listing or consultant listings.  Readers can subscribe to the site via RSS feed and are invited to submit a video for publication. Advertisers are invited to check out the Rate Card.

Pew Internet Research found that the #1 activity on the internet is to view a video – see http://bit.ly/hossIP. YouTube videos were viewed 700 trillion times in 2010.

Client teams are for "superstar" clients who are billed many hours consistently and "fast track" clients who are billed many hours, but not regularly, according to David Freeman, author of the CMO Playbook audio training programs and Jason Maeder, a product manager for LexisNexis InterAction. They spoke recently at a conference in New York.

Don't focus on the small clients who don't account for many hours or the "acorns" who appear to be small clients that may become tomorrow's Microsoft (they won't). Maeder advised lawyers to focus on the clients that generate most of the firm's revenue. 

Client teams are actually a client service initiative. Freeman identified the five pillars of client service:

1.    Clients want lawyers to deeply know their business. Visit their facility, work site and conferences. Use the information you gain to ask clients good questions.Know their business.

2.    Be highly  responsive. Most lawyers already consider themselves to be responsive, but they’re not. Clients may want information on paper, email, 24-hour turnaround or 1-hour turnaround. The best response is based on what clients want.

3.    Add value. Value is more than completing the assignment. It’s the little something extra that you blow clients away with. Make yourself indispensable to the client.

4.    Be proactive. Law is a reactive profession, but clients want lawyers to anticipate their needs, and advise them before an issue becomes a major legal problem. Identify 4-5 legal issues the clients will face in the coming year.

5.    Manage the relationship. Ask clients what they’d like you to do and not to do.

He also suggested the following service tactics: 

• Annual planning and feedback session. Find out where the client is going to go and find issues that may have gone to another law firm.
• On-site visits to clients including a “Lunch and Learn” at the client’s office.
• Business leads. Help the client make money. 80% of lawyers give 12 referrals a month, and receive 12. On the other hand, 20% of lawyers give 50 referrals a month and get 50 referrals a month. Giving out referrals will bring you business.
• Join clients for their internal planning sessions. You can find out the skeletons in the closets, find out the opportunities and become a trusted adviser.
• Audits and review of documents. Only takes an hour, so offer it for free. It gives the lawyers to find other legal issues.
• Loan a lawyer. This is called secondment, and permits the loaned lawyer to find out information about the client.
• Send articles, newsletters, alerts and updates.
• Social events. Make them family friendly. One lawyer rented out a movie theater to see the latest “Harry Potter” movie, and invited clients and their children. It was a huge success.

You have to be crazy to go to law school nowadays.  Consider these statistics:

• Number of law students who graduate annually: 45,000
• Decrease in the size of the legal profession since 2007:  7.8%
• Typical starting salary, if you can actually get a job at a law firm: $40,000+
• Average law school debt: $100,000
• Increase in the number of students taking the LSAT since 2007: 20.5%
• Increase in the number of law schools in the last ten years: 9%

Top 10 occupations where there are job openings now:

1. Medical, dental, and public health
2. Management, administration, clerical, and office services
3. Engineering and architecture
4. Trades and labor
5. Accounting budget and finance
6. Biological sciences
7. Procurement and purchasing agent
8. Social science, psychology, and welfare
9. Information technology
10. Safety, health, and physical and resource protection

Typical jobs that law grads wind up in:

• Legislative staffers
• Regulatory policy-makers
• Arbitrators
• Mediators
• Not-for-profit organizations
• Consulting firms
• Waiters and waitresses

That's right, it's "Appy" new year.  As in iPhone app. This is the latest in the clever law firm marketing initiatives of the Valorem Law Group, an innovative law firm in Chicago that offers value billing.

There's a misleading headline in today's New York Times: "Blogs Wane as the Young Drift to Sites Like Twitter."

The real story is that middle aged people, who run businesses, law firms and consulting firms, are reading blogs more than ever. Buried deep in the article is: "While the younger generation is losing interest in blogging, people approaching middle age and older are sticking with it. Among 34-to-45-year-olds who use the Internet, the percentage who blog increased six points, to 16 percent, in 2010 from two years earlier, the Pew survey found. Blogging by 46-to-55-year-olds increased five percentage points, to 11 percent, while blogging among 65-to-73-year-olds rose two percentage points, to 8 percent."

Further more, traffic to blogging platforms like Blogger rose 9% in December 2010 to 323 million unique visitors globally.  Wordpress, "mostly for serious bloggers, not the younger novices who are defecting to social networking," has seen no decline in traffic.

I for one can attest that traffic to this blog is at an all-time high. Since the LawMarketing Blog was launched in 2003, some 700,000 visitors have arrived her to read approximately 1,400 posts.

Please see here for more reviews.

Client analysis is a four-part suite of client retention tools from LexisNexis Redwood Analytics.  Law firm marketing professionals at nearly 100 law firms are using it to mine their clients' historical billings, speed up business development and identify cross-selling opportunities.

The cool part of Client Analysis is that the software will sort clients into target growth, high value or low opportunity categories, as the sample chart below shows. It quickly identifies clients at risk and clients whose billings are decreasing. Early users include Waller Lansden, Haynes & Boone and Baker Botts.

The in-depth analytical reports extract data from finance, and time and billing data which marketing previously had no access to and boils them down into manageable lists, such as number of hours worked for a client, number of new matters and number of partners involved with the client. It's a snap to produce a Top 100 client list and filter it many different ways. 

The four primary reporting tools include:

• Profiles: Using the profiles tool, marketers can classify clients based on historical performance and rank them from high performers to those at risk. In addition, LexisNexis atVantage, a competitive intelligence tool, can also be woven into the analysis to determine competitors’ wallet share of a client’s business.
• Self-Service Analysis: Marketers can build customized lists organized and sorted by a variety of basic filters including reports by client, by partner or practice group. 
• Cross-Sell Analysis: This reveals which practice areas are billing work to a client and at what wallet share compared to other practice groups. At the same time, firms can look at practice group performance by billable hours per partner, work delivered to other practice groups, , and wallet share percentages for the group at large.
• Trend Analysis: This takes historical data, compares it against client revenue annually, quarterly or over a rolling 12-month period. A chart view of the data depicts cross-sell percentages, types of new matters, numbers of partners working on specific lines of business, and more.

• Quadrant 1— These are superstar clients. These are clients that deliver the largest amount of work with the most consistency.
• Quadrant 2—Clients that deliver large amounts of work, but less consistently. The software can whittle down a 100-client list into the best prospects for lawyers to use business development techniques to move these clients into Quadrant 1.
• Quadrant 3—Clients that deliver less work but on a consistent basis. Lawyers need to visit these clients, learn their business issues and identify how they can be solved with legal services.
• Quadrant 4—Clients that deliver less work on a less consistent basis

Have you ever wished you could jump into an online meeting from anywhere? Or start meetings instantly? Now you can. No need to download software or wait five minutes for a meeting to start. Open your browser and with one click you’re in a Zipcast meeting.

Slideshare, which lets users share PowerPoint and Keynote files on the web, is launching Zipcast web meetings, a simple, fast and social web conferencing system, where the experience is entirely browser-based.

What’s different about Zipcast?

1. No downloads for anyone.
2. Works on any modern browser.
3. Everyone gets a personalized meeting room – if you have a SlideShare login, you already have one at http://www.slideshare.net/USERNAME/meeting.
4. Zipcast meetings are interactive and social and take place entirely within a browser window. Unlike other online meeting systems, no clunky screen takeover is required – you can keep other browser tabs open.
5. You can see the video (and hear audio) of the presenter who is also driving the slides. Everyone can chat.
6. Every public presentation on SlideShare now has a Zipcast button – meaning you can start a quick meeting with any presentation on SlideShare. You don’t need to upload to SlideShare to start a meeting.
7. There is no limit to meeting size. You can meet with one person or 5000 of your best friends.
8. You can invite people to a Zipcast by giving them the meeting room URL via IM, email, Facebook, or Twitter.
9. A public Zipcast can go viral – you can share chats can be shared on Twitter or Facebook, which will cause other people to join in.
10. Activity from all public Zipcasts gets aggregated into an activity feed here - keep a watch for interesting upcoming Zipcasts.

The pricing is simple – every SlideShare user has access to Zipcast for free for conducting public meetings. All Pro users get additional functionality like (a) ad removal, (b) private, password-protected meetings accessible only to people invited by the host and (c) audio conferencing.

Zipcast is going to be a in Beta for the next few months. What that means is that we will be watching how you use it, and listening to what to what you think of it. Since this is the first version of Zipcast, we expect to make a lot of changes and improvements as we go forwards. You can also expect changes to the pricing as we understand how people are using Zipcast better.

You've seen the scanner codes on supermarket items, airline tickets and computer gear.  They are bar codes, which contain computer coded information. When read by a scanner or smart phone, the code will produce information like product reviews, in-store availability and price comparisons.

I talked to a chief marketing officer in New York, and his firm is going to put them on the back of their business cards.

This will allow a person with an iPhone or Droid smart phone to take a picture of the code, using an app like Google Goggles.  This will launch a program to create a v-card, so that the person getting the card can instantly save the information on the business card to their Outlook contacts. The bar code can also contain information about the lawyer's practice area, bio and firm.

This technological advance hopefully will mean the end to glossy, printed brochures. No longer will a lawyer tote the expensive brochures and inserts to a potential client, who will have to find a storage place for the (often) oddly-shaped brochure. Instead, the recipient will just read the scanner code with their PDA.

It reminds me of the old days when people with Palm Pilots could beam their business cards to each other. This is just as cool and as much fun.

I see law firms breaking their arms, patting themselves on the back for getting into the latest ranking: the BTI 2011 Super Duper All-Star Excellent Attorney List of Best Lawyers. Is this effective marketing or self-aggrandizement? What do clients think when law firms congratulate themselves? Does self-praise impress anyone?

Fish & Richardson IP Litigators, John Gartman and Gregory Madera ...BTI Consulting Group, a leading Boston-based market research firm, interviewed over 300 corporate counsel at large and Fortune 1000 companies to determine ...  Marketwire

Foley Lardner LLP > Foley Recognized For 10 Years Of Bti Client ...Linex Legal Foley & Lardner LLP announced today that the BTI Consulting Group (Wellesley, Massachusetts) has recognized the firm as one of only eight law firms with a ...  

Weil, Gotshal Manges >Weil's Newborn, Rich recognized for ...Linex Legal Weil, Gotshal & Manges partners Steven Newborn and R. Bruce Rich have been recognized by BTI Consulting Group in its 2011 BTI Client All-Stars as lawyers ...  

Kirkland Ellis > In-House Attys Point to 8 Firms for Top ServiceThe 2011 BTI Client Service All-Stars report from The BTI Consulting Group Inc. (Wellesley, Mass.) lists 318 attorneys nominated by in-house counsel for ...  Linex Legal

Ulmer & Berne's Joseph Castrodale Recognized as National Leader in ...... has been named among a select group of lawyers nationally as part of BTI Consulting's 2011 Client Service All-Star list. Each year, BTI announces its ...  Business Wire

Shelby Grubbs and Jimmy Daniel Named 2011 BTI Client Service All-StarsThe BTI Consulting Group is a leading provider of strategic market research to law firms. Over the last 10 years, they have interviewed more than 2800 ...   Citybizlist

Four Attorneys Dubbed Client Service All-Stars - Kutak Rock LLP ...BTI Consulting Group (BTI) has named four Kutak Rock attorneys to its list of Client Service All-Stars for 2011. The four are Joseph Fuller in the ...  www.kutakrock.com/index.cfm?fuseaction...id...site...BTI Consulting Group Names Two McDermott Partners as “BTI Client Service All-Stars”. CHICAGO (January 29, 2010) — McDermott Will & Emery LLP is pleased to ... www.mwe.com/.../ca12d3a1-f638-46a9-8527-3d95db55f77d.cfm

Kim Walker Named 2011 BTI Client Service All-Star ...This year's BTIClient Service All-StarTeam were identified by their keen...TheBTI ConsultingGroup is a leading provider of strategic market...including more than 15 industries to identify theAll-Star list.... www.faegre.com/1285 

Check out the website of the Collora law firm, a very smart 23-lawyer firm in Boston. In big red letters they ask a visitor, "Why Choose Us?" 

Website Content Consultant John O. Cunningham of Natick, MA, wrote virtually all of the content based on interviews with partners, associates and even staff

They say:"We encourage you to click on and browse through the following links pertinent to the question: Why Choose Us?

• Referring Attorneys
   
• Clients/Industries
   
• What Others Say About Us  
   
• Attorney Training & Development
   
• Technology & Knowledge Management
   
• Budgets and Fees
   
• The ACC Value Challenge
   
• Our Service Pledge
   
• Our Methods
   
• Value Proposition - 10 Reasons to Choose Collora LLP
   

I'll bet they get chosen more for litigation, employment and healthcare advocacy than their competitors.

I am enjoying getting calls from marketing students 3,000 away.  They are calling like crazy right now because their assignment is due today.

I knew something was up when I got the second call from a student from Hawaii. She was one of many callers with questions about advertising on the LawMarketing Portal, a website I've operated for 15 years. Some of them couldn't find the rate card (you must click on "About Us" to find it) and others wanted to know the cost per click.

At this point I started asking questions.

It turns out that Raphael Boritzer -- whom I've never met -- is the teacher of an online course "Marketing 400," which students at the University of Hawaii must take to earn an applied business and information technology degree. 

Here is the setup he gave his students: "As an Advertising Director for a direct marketing firm specializing in the legal industry, you are charged with putting together an online advertising purchase. The purpose for the ad is to get law firms to use your company for mailing services to potential clients. You are going to consider advertising on LawMarketing.com, and use hypothetical results to practice advertising metrics commonly used by online advertisers."

"First, visit LawMarketing’s rate card at the address below and answer the following: http://www.lawmarketing.com/pages/advertising.asp?PageTextID=18

1. How many visitors does the LawMarketing home page get in a month?
2. How many people receive the LawMarketing e-mail newsletter?

3. What is the size in pixels for a banner ad (see ad standards at Interactive Advertising Bureau to understand pixel sizes: www.iab.net) and the cost for this ad on the home page?

4. What is a text ad in LawMarketing e-mail newsletter and what is its cost?

5. What is the CPM for each of these ads?

6. Which is a better buy? Why?

7. ...and so on...

I want to make sure the students all get "A" grades, so I happily give them the answers -- and have also put them online.

When I worked as the marketing director at an AmLaw 100 law firm, the marketing partner was skeptical of hiring lateral partners to add new business.  "Easy on, easy off," was his viewpoint. New research now backs him up: lateral partner hiring fails frequently as a business development technique.

Almost half of lateral partner hires leave the firm they join within five years, and up to a third leave after three, according to new research by Motive Legal Consulting in the UK.

The statistics show that a significantly high proportion of the partners that US firms hired -- for the core areas of ­corporate and finance -- leave shortly afterward. US firms lost 42 per cent of their 2007 corporate hires by the end of 2010.

The research is based on 1,944 partner moves that took place between 1 September 2005 and 31 July 2010.

Revolving door

The results were striking. Within three years of joining, a third of all partners had moved on. And after five years that jumped to 44 per cent.

Compared to UK law firms, US law firms were the poorer ­performers. Over five years US firms in London took on 540 partners. In certain core areas, such as finance, 45 per cent of these partners had left their firms by July 2010.

Take a shorter time frame and the results are just as startling. Of all the partners hired into US firms in ­London from the start of 2006 to the end of 2008, a total of 330, 36 per cent had left by the end of 2010. At UK firms over the same period, 27 per cent (221 partners) had moved on by last year.

The immense cost of hiring alone should be a warning as to the ­importance of these figures. One ­senior HR director estimates that the average cost per hire at his firm is £150,000. On those numbers, that 36 per cent translates into £17.8m worth of wasted effort.

For more information, please see here.

Smart lawyers turn their bios into a marketing magnet that generates leads, as opposed to a mere resume or a CV, which recites only your education and experience. The trick is to turn a feature of yourself into a benefit to the client. In other words, if you've done a particular activity, you need to answer the question, "So what?" If a client knows you've done something, how does that benefit them?

A "feature" is what something has, like a car with four doors or a new improved formula. A "benefit" is what it does for clients: "This car has four doors to accommodate growing families."

For example, consider a hardware-store drill. You look on the box and it tells you the volts and amps and RPMs, but what you're really buying is a hole. If you're buying lipstick, it can have a fancy formula, but what women are buying is something that makes them more attractive. And the same thing with pants. If it's got Lycra panels, what you want is to look ten pounds thinner.

Benefits bring new business

This analysis applies directly to lawyer bios. Benefits are what will generate leads for you; they are going to turn your bio into something that's going to make people call you. If you're trying to reach businesses that want to retain you for legal services, they are looking for business benefits. They want to:

• Make more money
• Keep more money
• Save time
• Cut costs
• Reduce risk
• Importantly, they want you to make them look good

If a CEO client has a troublesome issue that he must present to the Board of Directors, you can work with the CEO to put a good spin on it; you've just saved the CEO's job and made him look good. Or, if its litigation and you're working with the CEO, you want the company to look good to the shareholders. Those are the sort of benefits that clients are looking for.

If you look at a lot of attorneys' bios, you'll find few there are not a lot of distinctions or differences between them. Many partner bios begin with "Mr. Jones is a senior shareholder and is chair of the firm's corporate practice group. He has 25 years experience." So what? These are features.

Let's revise it to say....

For the rest of the story please visit http://bit.ly/6575G

I saw Bingham's airport display at LaGuardia airport. It was cool to see a law firm advertising right next to SAP, IBM and Accenture.

When I read the story below from ReadWriteWeb, I realized that clients and prospects will be viewing law firm websites and blogs on a 2-inch screen, not a 21-inch monitor:

Smartphone manufacturers shipped 100.9 million devices in the fourth quarter of 2010, while PC manufacturers shipped 92.1 million units worldwide. Or, more simply put, smartphones just outsold PCs for the first time ever.

The number of smartphones sold in Q4 2010 was up 87.2% from the 53.9 million sold in Q4 2009. For the year, vendors shipped 302.6 million smartphones - an increase of 74.4% from the 173.5 million in 2009.

PC sales were up in Q4, too, but just barely. From Q4 2009 to Q4 2010, the increase was only 5.5%. When looking at the yearly totals, however, PCs were still king. Manufacturers shipped 346.2 million units during 2010, compared with the 302.6 million mentioned above from smartphone makers.

Nokia was still the top manufacturer during 2010, with 28.3 million units shipped in Q4. Apple was number two for the quarter, at 16.2 million, followed by RIM (14.6 million), Samsung (9.7 million) then HTC (8.6 million).

Nokia benefited both from the 5 million units combined of its Symbian3 phones - the N8, C7 and C601 - but most of its sales came from older devices.

Meanwhile, Apple gained ground thanks to increased volume in the Asia/Pacific region and specifically, Japan. It has also continued to make inroads in the enterprise market.

RIM is still popular in North America, especially its BlackBerry Torch and BlackBerry Curve 3G devices, but its driving growth actually came from outside North America. RIM posted nearly identical year-over-year growth for both the quarter and for 2010.

Both Samsung and HTC benefited from their diverse portfolios, which, of course, include Android. According to Ramon Llama, senior analyst in IDC's Mobile Phone Technology and Trends team, "Android continues to gain by leaps and bounds, helping to drive the smartphone market, It has become the cornerstone of multiple vendors' smartphone strategies, and has quickly become a challenger to market leader Symbian."

One thing I learned at the racetrack is to bet on the fast ponies.  Law firms should do the same, doing everything they can online to support their rainmakers.  Now a Newark, NJ, law firm has transformed their rainmaker bios into customized websites.

You've seen the typical law firm bio: name, rank, law school attended. They include a boring photo and endless list of rankings, honors and admissions. "We have introduced an entirely new approach. It employs a next generation web-marketing paradigm that is designed specifically for mid- and large-sized law firms," said Robert Algeri of Great Jakes, a web-centric marketing firm in New York, which created the website.

Essentially, the idea is to create an online repository about each rainmaker, as McManimon & Scotland did. Matthew Jessup's bio shows tab for his CV, expertise, articles and presentations, case studies, Twitter, his blog and what he does out of the office.

The beauty is that each lawyer bio can be customized. For example, lawyer Jong Sook Nee has a bio with an "extracurricular" tab, showing her riding a huge motorcycle.

Research shows that 60% of lawyers are willing to develop new business, but they just don't know how.  In our webinar tomorrow, Barry Schneider and I will cover the 8 Steps to Develop Your Marketing Plan:

1. Focus on your ideal prospective clients
2. Define your personal value proposition
3. Market to your best existing clients
4. Market yourself inside your own firm
5. Co-market with high power professional allies
6. Build your network with a purpose
7. Ask for introductions
8. Build your professional reputation

The program is "Crafting Your Personal Marketing Plan for 2011," which will be presented tomorrow, Wednesday February 9 at 1-2:15 PM Eastern time.  Please see here to register now.

The steps may seem obvious, but they are not easy to carry out. Barry and I will elaborate with examples and practical steps for lawyers to take. At the end of the program, attendees will be able to act like a rainmaker immediately.

This is our all-time most popular program, and we've presented it at the beginning of the last several years.  Early in the year is a logical time to focus on a person business development plan. The end of the year is when you reap the benefits, revenue and clients.

The registration fee is $300. Gather with others in your office...any number can attend in the room where you connect to the site and the call — at the same low price.

Smart law firms are starting to produce high-quality, polished videos to market their firms. Check out the excellent videos produced by Adam L. Stock, Director of Marketing & Business Development at Allen Matkins Leck Gamble Mallory & Natsis in San Francisco. 

The #1 Activity on the Internet is To View a Video, according to Pew Internet Research. When online, watching a video is the favorite activity of most adults -- an important point for law firm marketers to know.

The Allen Matkins videos feature high production values, practical tips, interviews with professors, a voiceover by a former TV news reporter, animated captions, and panning graphics a la documentary producer Ken Burns. 

• Say-on-pay: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30SfoYcKGls
• Stormwater permits: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8NHKNB5ho_Q
• Video press release: California Commercial Real Estate Sees Turning Point by 2013: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tb-SPyvvFxU

Video legal alert: Video Alert: New California Refrigeration Regulations
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVKY6qNzlEc&feature=related

Video blog entry: Fairness Hearings: A Faster, Cheaper Alternative To Federal Registration
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Kh3xcsBrus&feature=related

and my favorite:
Guide Dogs for the Blind - Allen Matkins Diversity & Community Involvement (see the cute Labrador below)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Djhoim3hNTw

From the Wisconsin Law Journal: An online bio is not a resume. It's good to personalize a lawyer bio, but not to overload it with everything one has ever done. As with any advertising, the goal is to have people get in touch, so fill your bio with information that will prompt a phone call. 

Joshua M. Koch is a real Boy Scout. The civil litigator at Arndt, Buswell & Thorn in Sparta highlights his Eagle Scout award in his online firm biography. Koch also advertises his love of hunting and fishing, personal tidbits which often prove useful in connecting with clients, especially in northern Wisconsin.

“Sharing similar stories kind of breaks the ice and makes things more palatable for people who can come in pretty nervous,” said the 2009 law school graduate.

For attorneys like Koch, who lack a laundry list of professional accomplishments on their firm bio to impress clients, personal information can be a suitable substitute.

But as resumes — personal and professional — grow, so too can the temptation to overload online bios with accolades and accomplishments.

In his experience crafting online attorney biographies, legal marketing consultant Larry Bodine said brevity is best. “A bad bio will cost you business,” he said. “If yours is 17 pages long instead of 17 words, clients and general counsel are going to say forget it.”

For the rest of the story, please see the LawMarketing Portal at http://bit.ly/fQXBjf