Practical Tools for Law Firms to Expand their Clientele and Mindshare

I’ve been asked recently to present to law firms on practical ways to improve their online presence, and combine this with traditional relationship building methods.   The result is this presentation, which describes specifically how to polish a LinkedIn individual or company profile, obtain speaking opportunities and be quoted in articles with minimal effort, and use surveys and low-key events that allow industry executives (who are your potential clients) to mingle.

The steps require between 1/2 hour and 2 hours a week for your partners who emphasize business development. The range depends on whether you want to be simply “credible” in your online presence, or “facilitative” in blending networking and outreach with online activities, as shown on my slide about the efforts & results continuum from “Simply Present” to “Online Leader.”

For those attorneys and practices that still are challenged to find time to build their presence and relationships, consulting services like my Vital Access make it easy and cost-effective to draft content and research speaking/article/outreach partners, while leaving the final sign-off and interpersonal communications to you.

The slides can be viewed here (the fonts in the original ppt are better aligned):

Social Networks Get Industry-Specific (Again)

The original concept of a social network, or any online community, was to bring together individuals with a common interest or background for discussion, enjoyment and business. After a while, social network sites – LinkedIn, MySpace, Facebook, XING, etc – realized that they could maximize profit by offering one site, or platform, on which lots of interest groups could create their own connections and discussion areas.

Long tail web sites win, end of story? Not quite.

Industry social networks are (re)emerging in force. They’re driven by:

1. The clutter people are experiencing on sites like LinkedIn. Your own home page is now populated with ads, promotions for add-on applications, groups/chats with mixed value and mainly self-marketing, and updates about scores of people you may have linked to (but don’t want to know when they link to someone else, and you haven’t bothered turning off this feature).  I’m personally in the midst of spring-cleaning all the add-ons that LinkedIn and Facebook have spawned on my screen.
2. The fact that many professionals are more comfortable with an industry-backed approach than a open-to-the-public platform. Several law firms have indicated concern about connecting with colleagues on LinkedIn because it might give away information about client relationships, though they don’t have a specific regulation of issue to point to.  Doctors who are colleagues of mine have rarely tried the online networks and don’t see much potential for business from them.
3. Finally, industry-specific platforms have the ability to offer much more value through structured interactions. For example, consumer product designs can jointly suggest ideas for a product design in a CAD/CAM type of model, and green technology engineers can share plans and spreadsheets in ways that can be duplicated or compared across projects.

Here are fast-growing examples of industry specific networks in law, technology, medicine and green technology/sustainability.

For Lawyers:

• Martindale, the Lexis/Nexis database of law firms and attorneys has quietly launched a Connected platform for its members (read an early review). A corporate attorney who is refreshing and expanding her business contacts tells me that the power of Martindale is that practically every lawyer is already listed in the system – you can easily learn the whereabouts of law school alum or colleagues from a prior practice, and connect.  In comparison, for my work with trademark lawyer, only 20% of her contacts are already in LinkedIn and we both feel it’s intrusive to tell other colleagues to join LI just for the sake of connecting.
• Martindale’s venture compares with other, startup firm-driven social networks for lawyers. Legal Onramp features a repository of legal ‘shareware’ documents and a carefully selected list of bloggers/forum hosts on topics like intellectual property, instead of the free-for-all on public social networks that breeds creativity but also a lot of useless promotion. Then there’s the JD Supra platform for sharing and collaborating on legal documents.

For Doctors:

• Sermo is a highly popular platform, originally created for doctors to share questions and recommendations for patient care.  So far it’s more about the many forums on individual topics and cases than about networking with colleagues per se, but the fast and informal interactions seem to be creating new bonds between specialists in the same field who don’t already know each other. And Sermo is beginning to generate revenue polling doctors for the benefit of drug investors and others. The time seems ripe for doctors to band together not only on medical practice issues, but on changes to national healthcare policy as well.

For the green sector – clean energy/environmental sustainability

• 2degrees is an active network whose name is a play on (a) the need to prevent the earth’s temperature from rising more than 2 degrees celsius to prevent catastrophe and (b) a friend-of-a-friend in a social network.  2degrees seems to be effective at bringing together professionals from a diverse set of businesses and scientific/NGO domains to popularize solutions to the world’s environmental challenges.

These cases suggest that both larger organizations like Lexis Nexis and startups can achieve momentum building industry-specific social networks.  They become much more sticky when the interactions go beyond mere connecting and text discussions to what I call “transactional social networks”, where the business process or workflow of an industry is re-invented to be performed in parallel by larger groups. This is akin to the Open Source movement in technology of the early 2000′s, in which one of my consulting clients CollabNet created a white label platform for other companies to build their cross-company, software developer networks.

Another industry ripe for semi-open social networks is institutional finance – among private equity and VC investors, high net worth individuals, investment research users, and others.

More on clean energy and financial networks in coming posts…

How Lawyers Can Grow Billings Using Online Networks and Internet Marketing

I’ve been engaged lately in several projects for attorneys and law firms, with the objective of expanding their business clientele through an online presence. Consider it “LinkedIn and Beyond for Lawyers.” An online presence — in social networks, blogs, webinars — has become more acceptable, even expected, for attorneys in the last few years.

• LinkedIn, the largest networking site for professionals across industries, has over 750,000 lawyers and legal services providers with profiles.
• The American Bar Association site lists over 5,000 ‘blawgs by lawyers.
• Specialized communities are sprouting. LegalOnRamp is an online network exclusively for corporate general counsel to interact with each other and law firms; featuring more-than-cursory articles, a wiki to freely publish documents, survey results and industry data; and an active Ask the Expert section.

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Where’s the benefit? The most common question for those starting to focus online is: “What do I get out of it? I created a LinkedIn profile but haven’t gotten any inquiries.” Of course, your results vary with effort. Consider a few common objectives:

• You want to maintain contact with affiliates and other lawyers that will refer business to you. In this case, a profile for each professional, inserting the bios from your web site, is a good start on LinkedIn. Once these are published, you can request connections to your colleagues already on LinkedIn. Xing is a comparable social network emphasizing Europe and Asia and Plaxo is another recommended service with 40m subscribers, in which you receive updates about colleagues’ change of contact information. You can also publish quick thoughts or new to all your colleagues on these sites, which will complement regular emails and holiday cards. This assumes you have a solid electronic contact database. For this, Microsoft Outlook is a good start, with Microsoft Business Contact Manager or Avidian’s Prophet to enable contact sharing in a midsize firm, or Salesforce for a larger, multi-office practice (see this LinkedIn Question & Answer Chat about the best contact manager for a small to mid-sized firm). Creating your LinkedIn presence can take less than an hour in this minimal approach, with cleaning up your contact database being the major task. However, the result is that people who know and appreciate you will find you more easily, not that new prospects will seek your counsel.
• You want prospective clients that are evaluating your practice to find a solid web presence. Here, you’ll want to polish your professionals’ LinkedIn profiles to include a bio written in an approachable first person. Change the standard “Ms. Doe is a patent lawyer representing firms of all sizes…” to include specialties (“I have worked extensively with both manufacturing and non-manufacturing technology entities, such as universities and the NIH“) and benefits (“I… help clients execute on strategies to leverage the value of their IP“). Then, add at least 20 links/connections to clients and colleagues; a photo and a vanity LinkedIn URL with your name, and have several clients publish short testimonials for your work (which you can propose in draft form and have them revise). This may take a few hours but puts you into the realm of credible online presence, beyond your web site.
• You want prospects you’ve met to keep you in mind. For this case, minimally consider a quarterly e-newsletter with updates on law in their industry, and your publicly-known cases. One effective approach is to orient your content by industry of your client, rather than by legal domain — which few lawyers seem to do. A pharmaceutical client, a telecommunications company and an e-commerce startup use different language to refer to their intellectual property needs — one speaks of protecting an new product pipeline, another defending its technology and the third seeing a competitor copy their online brand. For them, it’s insufficient to state on LinkedIn that “I serve all industries” and leave it at that, or to write about patent /trademark activity across multiple industries. Free or for-fee webinars, or local lunches work well, as does joint presentations with complimentary service providers, such as a local private equity fund or networking association.
• You want to solicit new business interest through your online presence. This is where substantial time is needed, because so many lawyers are attempting the same thing. Only a few per domain of expertise can break through the clutter, so you’ll want to strive for the frequency and depth of content that only one or two other firms can match when you search Google. You can accomplish this by writing white papers that help clients, or being the most frequent and insightful blog on a particular topic such as food and drug law, as well as a public speaker. Also, consider creative and even bold offers, such as Clock Tower Law’s offer of a free trademark registration for a startup. And combine online initiatives with local business development, such soliciting speaking engagements. One of my clients and I are working with a cost-effective outsourced service to find and monitor industry events for speaking opportunities, and having an executive assistant at the law firm propose the practice leader as a speaker.

Finally, be aware of how others are writing about you on the web. ZoomInfo compiles career biographies of anyone who has had a professional profile published on the web. Two lawyers I tracked shared first and last names (their middle name differed), but very different track records and some information had been confused between them by the automated system. You can fix this by claiming ownership about your data and correcting it. A site such as Vault.com lets prospective employees write about their experience with your firm. One firm I was tracking had a strong presence on Google, ranking 5th when I searched for “NY intellectual property law firm.”  Yet on Vault, the first comment to appear was from a paralegal job candidate who wrote “If you [even] speak English, they will hire you,”  and another candidate said “the place is in shambles.” Not an attractive situation!

In sum, it takes little effort to get online and stay in touch with those who appreciate your reputation. Actually building your reputation online takes more time, but there are intermediate steps that allow you and your firm to match your business development goals with time availability.

For more thoughts, see the powerpoint I’ve posted below about how law firms can grow their revenues with Web 2.0 technologies. This is an update of a presentation I made a little while ago to the New York County Lawyers Association.

How Lawyers Can Grow Billings Using Online Networks and Internet Marketing

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