Welcome to ILN-terviews, a series of profiles of ILN member firm attorneys, designed to give a unique insight into the lawyers who make up our Network.

LSL1.jpeg Our first interview subject was an easy choice – Lowell Lifschultz is the head of the Corporate & Securities department at Epstein, Becker & Green. Twenty-one years ago, he founded the International Lawyers Network, and has since served as its Chairman before recently stepping down at the 2009 Annual Meeting in San Francisco. As Chairman and Founder, Lowell is the backbone and lifeblood of the organization and has molded it to become not only a distinguished group of professionals, but also a close-knit group that feels more like a family.

In one sentence, how would you describe your practice?
It’s a corporate business practice.

Who would be your typical client?
There is no typical client, but mostly middle market companies, venture capital firms, or a small public company.

What would you like clients and potential clients to know about you?
That we will always first work to understand the business problem we need to get resolved. And be able to translate the resolution to that problem back to the client.

What has been your most challenging case? Why?
It’s my job to focus on my clients’ interests and understand what the other party is trying to accomplish. The most difficult situation arises when the lawyers and/or person across the table doesn’t understand what’s in their own best interest.

What has been your proudest moment as a lawyer?
Whenever we have successfully represented any company that performs a public good.

What do you do when you’re not practicing law?
Have fun with children and grandchildren, sports, reading, other businesses, and certainly spending time with my wife of 41 years.

What would surprise people most about you?
My wife would say that I’m not quite as easygoing as I sometimes appear.

What has been your most memorable ILN experience?
There is no single event – it is the relationships and friendships built up over twenty years of contact; family and friends, all knowing each other from different backgrounds, different continents, and different places.

What career would you have chosen if you weren’t a lawyer?
If I had the talent, professional basketball.

If a movie were made of your life, who would you want to play you?
Who else but Gregory Peck?

How would you like to be remembered?
For a long time.

In Part I of this two-part series, I introduced my thoughts on the first half of the Ten Golden Rules’ webinar – “Thought Leaders Forum – What’s Next in Internet Marketing.” Presenters on the panel included Ten Golden Rules CEO, Jay Berkowitz, semantics expert and Bintro.com CEO, Richard Stanton, Facebook Goddess and Relationship Marketing Specialist, Mari Smith, Biz Web Coach, Jim Kukral, iClarity Founder, Maria Harrison, PeoplePond Founder, David McInnis, and author Rohit Bhargava. The following is Part II of my thoughts on the session:

5) Maria Harrison: Video is changing online advertising. In November of 2008, there were 12.7 million views of videos on YouTube, up a third from the same period in the previous year. The current use of video is mainly for entertainment, but this focus is changing as Generation X catches up. The reason this has taken so long is broadband access, but now that this is becoming less of an issue, video is becoming more important and useful. Maria noted that successful video advertisers will look to engage their audience, instead of interrupting their experience, so users will see things like in-page ads and self-service ad platforms, such as Google Video. She cautioned that return on investment is still key.

** Legal industry takeaway: With such strict advertising rules, I don’t think there will be too many law firms using online video for advertising purposes. However, there may be opportunities for educational videos produced by law firms. Firms should also think about innovative ways to introduce the use of online video, similar to Holland & Hart’s use of video on in their five-minute television shows featuring innovative clients, which aired on Frontier Airline’s Wild Blue Yonder network and online in 2007.

Continue Reading Thought Leaders Forum – What’s Next in Internet Marketing Part II

Last week, I had the pleasure of attending the Ten Golden Rules’ webinar – Thought Leaders Forum – What’s Next in Internet Marketing. Presenters on the panel included Ten Golden Rules CEO, Jay Berkowitz, semantics expert and Bintro.com CEO, Richard Stanton, Facebook Goddess and Relationship Marketing Specialist, Mari Smith, Biz Web Coach, Jim Kukral, iClarity Founder, Maria Harrison, PeoplePond Founder, David McInnis, and author Rohit Bhargava. In a fast-paced webinar, chock-full of valuable information, I was able to glean a number of tips from these passionate industry experts, which can be of use in the legal industry. Following is Part 1 of 2 of my thoughts on this session.

1) Jay Berkowitz: The internet is becoming a place of microcommunications, where we get our news in bits and bytes. Jay used Twitter as a great example of this, a place where people can get sound bites of what other people and companies are saying. He gave us his three “E’s” for using Twitter:

  • “Educate:” Use Twitter to teach people something, both by providing valuable content and re-tweeting (essentially re-broadcasting another Twitter user’s tweet to your own Twitter followers) useful information.
  • “Entertain:” Jay used @the_real_shaq as an example of someone who effectively entertains his audience through his tweets, which keeps them interested and increases his number of followers.
  • “Engage:” Reply to tweets you find interesting or thought-provoking and listen to what other Twitter users are saying. Jay mentioned @ChrisBrogan as a great example of someone who engages on Twitter.

** Legal industry takeaway: Twitter can be used to educate current and potential clients about your law firm or legal service, with links to relevant articles, comments on changes to laws or high profile cases, and retweets of valuable information from your colleagues in the field. Letting your personality come through on Twitter and engaging others helps to build your network. For more of my thoughts on Twitter, take a look at my post, “To Tweet or Not to Tweet: Why Lawyers Should Pay Attention to Twitter.”

Continue Reading Thought Leaders forum – What’s Next in Internet Marketing Part I

One of the hottest topics up for discussion at last week’s Legal Marketing Association’s Annual Meeting was social networking. From Twitter to Facebook, blogging and tweeting, it almost sounds like a foreign language to the uninitiated. The LMA even warranted its very own hashtag (#LMA) on Twitter to keep track of all the comments flowing through the twitterstream. My own affinity for social networking brought me to Friday’s breakout session, “Emergence & Benefit of Social Networking for Legal Professionals,” led by John Lipsey, LexisNexis Martindale-Hubbell’s Vice President of Corporate Counsel Services. The session turned out to be a broader look at social networking than some of the attendees would have liked, but a number of valuable points could still be gleaned. If you’d prefer to read my comments in tweet form, my tweets from the session follow this post.

Social networks involve reputation management: In a Web 2.0 world, you lose control over your own messaging, so a shift is necessary from attempting to control the message to managing your reputation and that of your firm. Because everyone has a voice on the internet, you never know where your next opportunity, or public relations crisis, will come from. As recent incidents have shown, what you say online can affect your career and is not easily erased. Similarly, what others say about your and your firm online can also impact your reputation. The key here is understanding that whether or not your are participating in social networks, the conversation is happening. So getting involved in social networking allows you some control over what is being said about you and your firm, and the ability to react to what others are saying. To monitor the conversation about you and your firm, John suggested setting up Google alerts for your name, your firm’s name, and considering extending these to specialized practice areas to keep abreast of what online chatter might be affecting your reputation.

Continue Reading LMA Session Recap: Emergence & Benefit of Social Networking for Legal Professionals

On April 2nd, I attended the Legal Marketing Association’s breakout session, “Going Green: What You and Your Firm Can Do to Help Save the Planet.” Initially, I was not scheduled to attend this session, but I was recruited by Alvidas Jasin, the Director of Business Development at Thompson Hine and the program’s presenter. I was not sorry that he’d dragged me into the session, because what followed was an informative, entertaining look at how law firms and individuals can “go green.”

Alvidas first determined by a show of hands that three people in the audience had an internally branded green program at their firms, with two of these also branding externally. To start, he gave the group some motivation for “going green,” based on Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. Explaining that the earth’s average temperature is 59 degrees, compared with -67 on Mars, 333 on Mercury, and 855 on Venus, Alvidas said that the higher temperatures of the other planets can be attributed to their proximity to the sun, but also the density of the planet’s atmosphere. In terms of the earth, as carbon dioxide concentrations grow, the atmostphere becomes more dense and traps radiation that was previously able to escape. Because of this, 22 of the hottest years on record have occurred during the last 25 years. Though warming and cooling trends are not uncommon, they normally occur over millions of years, not 50 years. Scientists feel that because of the latest warming trend, there will likely be no snow or ice on the North Pole as soon as 2013 – only four years. On the South Pole, there is 1 1/2 miles of snow and ice, but the increase in temperature is causing chunks of this snow and ice to break off, crash into the ocean and raise sea levels.

Contributing to the increasing levels of CO2 is that 75% of electricity comes from fossil fuel plants and there has been an overall increase in the earth’s population. It took 162,000 years to reach 1 billion people on earth. In the following 2000 years, this grew to 6.5 billion people. At this rate, there will be 9.1 billion people on the planet by 2050, when we are struggling to find adequate resources already. In terms of CO2 output, the United States is twice as bad as the next worst offenders, Russia.

Continue Reading It’s not easy being green: LMA looks at what you and your firm can do to help save the planet

It’s that time of year again – time to head to the Legal Marketing Association’s Annual Conference. This year’s theme “Change…Now What?” is particularly appropriate for the challenges that we’re all facing in the current economy. According to Peter Vieth’s article in Virginia Lawyers Weekly, “the slump in the economy has led to the increased use of social media” and we at the ILN have found that social media is a valuable way to support our members with almost no financial investment. Just last Friday, we learned that a referral we received and facilitated through Twitter had resulted in a very happy referree and a file for our member firm in the UAE. To continue to learn how to best leverage social media tools, I’ll be attending LMA sessions focusing on social media, along with a few others, and then tweeting and posting recaps. You can follow along on what other LMA attendees are saying about the conference on Twitter as well.

Taking a page from LMA member Heather Milligan’s blog, here’s a list of the breakout sessions I’ll be attending:

Thursday
– Conference Sponsorship Trends: 2008
– Thought Leadership: The New Frontier of Strategic Marketing

Friday
– Emergence & Benefit of Social Networking for Legal Professionals
– Legal Transformation Study – Your 20/20 Vision of the Future

I’ll also be attending speeches by keynote speakers James Carville & Mary Matalin, and featured speakers Peter Sheahan and Arianna Huffington, in addition to networking with some of the best minds in the legal marketing community.

Of particular note for ILN members, on Thursday, the LMA will hold their annual Your Honor Awards. This year, our ILNBriefs cartoons are nominated as a finalist in the Internal Communications Category, so stay tuned for the results of the awards ceremony!

Last week, Tanya Prinz, a legal marketer on Twitter, wondered whether an attorney’s time is better spent on current client development than on exploring social media. With thirty to forty percent of law firms blocking social networking sites, it’s a question I was interested in exploring further. First, I posted it to my Twitter followers. The general consensus is one I support as well, that you can and should do both. Professional Marketing Advisor, Nancy Myrland said “If you believe in marketing, then both.” She later commented that “as time goes by & usage grows, we WILL be spending time with current clients when we spend time on Social Media.” Lawyer and Vice President of Exemplar Law Partners, Steven Shapiro agreed, saying “are the two mutually exclusive? You can do customer development through social media.”

Relationship building and communication are key to successful business development, both in terms of working with current clients and attracting new ones. Social networking is simply another tool that can be used to build and maintain relationships. While it will never replace face to face contact, social media, such as Twitter, is worth exploring for lawyers. But why?

– People hire lawyers they know and like: Social networking is another way for lawyers to show clients and potential clients who they are and to highlight their professional accomplishments in a way that is accessible. Along these lines, as Bob Ambrogi comments in his “Tweet 16” on why lawyers should use Twitter, social media allows you to:

“Mold your image: Those who post regularly to Twitter provide others a glimpse of their daily lives. That glimpse can help shape your public image. Do your posts paint you as a high-powered professional — now writing an appellate brief, now preparing for a deposition — or as a trivia-obsessed slacker, now breaking for lunch, now off for drinks? By thinking before you post, you can shape how others see you.”

Posting on a site like Twitter, or making your professional background transparent on LinkedIn, can make you approachable to clients and potential clients, making them more comfortable coming to you when they need help solving a problem.

Continue Reading To Tweet or Not to Tweet? Why Lawyers Should Pay Attention to Twitter

Last week, I read a post commenting on the “End of the Billable Hour,” which has become a hotter topic in the legal industry in the current economic situation and in light of Evan R. Chesler’s comments in the New York Times. In his post, Tim Marman discusses the idea that the billable hour “rewards inefficiency” and says that he hopes the trend towards flat rate billing will continue. With the current climate and initiatives like the Association of Corporate Counsel’s Value Challenge, it seems reasonable that the conversations about this will only continue.

While I agree with Tim’s comments, I don’t believe flat rates can be arranged for anything other than commodity work, and there are other alternative fee arrangements that can and should be made. During a webinar arranged for our members last Wednesday, Jim Hassett of LegalBizDev mentioned a few besides flat rate billing, including negotiated rates and hybrids, such as hourly rates plus success fees, capped fees with a safety valve, and value-adjusted hourly billing. It seems that it might be easier for mid-size and smaller firms to adjust to offering these types of arrangements than it will be for Big Law.