Yesterday, we began our recap of the Contract Lawyers & Outsourcing webinar with Tim Corcoran and Kevin Colangelo. Today, we continue the discussion. 

Who is Doing this Successfully, and How?

Tim said that one of the challenges he’s heard from law firms about outsourcing is that their work is unique, their firm is unique, and as such, their work is hard to routinize and find a common way to deliver the services. So he asked Kevin to comment on how others who have done this have found that there are practices that can be improved through this approach – and not just the low-end, simple document reviews, but some high end work as well. 

Kevin said that they analyze the tasks going on within a law firm, legal department our sourcing department to see what can be disaggregated. Those that they’ve been able to disaggregate, they rebuild in a very process-heavy, documented environment. This extends outside of just outsourcing – firms can understand both how they get their work done and improve the way they’re doing it with the people that they’re using. This blends into not only the way that clients want their firms to do the work, but also how the firm itself wants to be operating. Continue Reading ILN Webinar Series – Contract Lawyers & Outsourcing Part II

After sharing all of their valuable content with us, Kevin and Lee were happy to answer some questions from the audience. 

What’s the correlation of a strong brand with online lead generation? 

Lee clarified the essence of the question as being "how is your brand going to impact your lead generation and online presence?" Kevin said that he wanted to say that larger brands would have more impact, but he wasn’t sure that this was true. He used Coca Cola as an example, saying that if they didn’t form the right strategy online with the people who want to drink Coca Cola, they’re not going to go anywhere. 

In a lot of ways, the internet is the great equalizer (I say this to my attorneys all the time). If you take the time to craft a good strategy, understand what makes you unique, and demonstrate what your value is, you’re going to be effective and your brand will become stronger. You may even develop a stronger brand as an upstart than an old traditional company. Continue Reading Blogging for Clients: How Online Relationships Lead to Real-World Clients (A Re-cap) Part III

On Tuesday, we jumped into the first half of Kevin McKeown and Lee Frederiksen’s webinar on Blogging for Clients. Today, we’re looking at the second half! 

Developing your Strategy and Tools

Lee said that when you look at online marketing at a macro level, there’s not one technique that says "this is the one to use." There are a whole bunch of techniques. So how do these fit together – how do you make sense out of this about what you need to do, and when you need to do it? 

He showed us a slide with the content marketing model, which shows how the various techniques fit together. It was a series of steps, with escalating levels of interaction and trust with the client – it goes from the point where they’ve never heard of you all the way to they’re a client. Lee said that marketers may look at this as their marketing funnel, and business developers as their pipeline. Continue Reading Blogging for Clients: How Online Relationships Lead to Real-World Clients (A Re-cap) Part II

Recently, I had the chance to sit in on a webinar with Kevin McKeown of LexBlog and Lee Frederiksen of Hinge Marketing, as they discussed the topic of blogging for clients, focusing on how online relationships can lead to real-world clients. 

Since this is a meaty topic, I’ll be breaking this up into multiple posts.

The speakers started by letting us know what the planned to cover in the webinar: 

  • The economic case for online marketing
  • How trust is developed online
  • Developing your strategy and tools
  • Implementing your plan

Continue Reading Blogging for Clients: How Online Relationships Lead to Real-World Clients (A Re-cap) Part I

The ILN has offered a webinar series to our members for the past two years, and in 2010, we’re offering a three-part series on social networking.  Wednesday kicked off our first webinar in the series, "Social Networking Strategy & Blogging," with Kevin O’Keefe of LexBlog.  

After a short introduction from ILN’s Executive Director, Alan Griffiths, Kevin treated the audience to an overview of social networking strategy and blogging.  He shared his experience with getting involved with the internet and what it has meant for him, in order to give the audience some context for the presentation and the benefit of his experience.

The bulk of Kevin’s presentation focused on how lawyers can be successful using social networking tools and why good lawyers tend to gravitate towards using these types of tools.  He began by talking about how few people trust advertising – only 14% – and most law firms on the internet are advertising with their websites.  

He added that a website is necessary for law firms as one point of contact, but said that it doesn’t do much for the firm’s word of mouth reputation.  He likened it to bringing potential clients to see a billboard and expecting that to encourage them to hire their law firm.  For this reason, Kevin said that using social networking tools to drive traffic to the firm’s website is not an effective use of the tools.  Continue Reading Webinar Re-cap: Social Networking Strategy & Blogging with Kevin O’Keefe, LexBlog

This afternoon, I had the good fortune to sit in on a webinar put on by Kevin O’Keefe & LexBlog, focused on getting back to basics. The topic was on networking through the internet  (I’ll post the link to the recording when it’s up on Kevin’s blog) and since I’ve seen Kevin speak before, I knew the audience was in for some valuable information, which I’d like to pass along to you.

Since we’ve already talked about why social media should matter to lawyers, the next step is to talk about "well, here I am, now what?" Kevin did a great job of addressing that question and more in his webinar and focusing on the concepts that mean the difference between success and failure.

He started by talking about advertising, and that’s something we’ve gotten a lot of requests from our members about. Without fail, every six months or so, I’ll get an email or see someone in person who says "shouldn’t we be advertising as a Network?" As a marketer, I love advertising – I watch tv for the commercials, enjoy a really snappy, slick print ad, and even like to see how some television commercials translate to radio.  

But for our group, it’s not the right fit – to do it successfully would require a major campaign and lots of money, which is generally what I tell our attorneys. But now I can also tell them this – Kevin said that only 14% of people trust advertising. He reasoned that the percentage who trust lawyer advertising is even lower, and said that essentially, websites are advertising too.Continue Reading Getting Back to Basics: Networking Through the Internet – A Webinar from Kevin O’Keefe