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A few months ago, I was contacted about SmartLaw.

SmartLaw is the idea that there are three keys to a law firm’s success – their clients, their culture and the intelligent use of technology (this is per HighQ, a technology company who provides enterprise collaboration, file sharing & content publishing solutions to leading law firms, corporate legal teams, and banks). About SmartLaw, they said:

It’s no longer news that the business of law is changing. Business structures, billing models, and even client expectations are very different than they were just a few short years ago.

The way firms compete and who they compete with; the staff they employ, or choose to outsource, and where in the world they’re located; and the importance of business analytics and big data are all relatively new concerns in law.

No matter where your firm is at now, SmartLaw is about mastering the fundamentals to make sure you stay competitive in the future.”

We know that the business of law has been, and is changing – though there’s still some disagreement about whether there’s total “disruption” or just a gradual shift. But either way, most of us can agree that things are different today than they were 10 years ago. Even five years ago.  Continue Reading Are You Ready for the Future of Legal Services?

photo-1430462773665-fd261133b47fWhether you’re a law firm marketer or a lawyer who is writing, tweeting, posting to LinkedIn, or sharing content in another way, your primary goal is to remain relevant and valuable to your audience.

To do that, you’re constantly checking to ensure that what you’re authoring and sharing resonates with them – you review, you refine, you revise.

During that process, it is also extremely useful to look to what others are doing, both inside and outside the industry, to get inspiration for your own content marketing. It can be easy to discard what those outside of legal are doing as not “relevant” because you think the legal industry is too specialized. And while it IS special in its own way (as are all professions, by the way), it’s up to us to take what others are doing and translate that into useful lessons for our own use.

One of my favorite content marketing authors, Neil Patel, authored an excellent look at what eight of the world’s best brands are doing in their content marketing, and we’ll spend the next few weeks looking at some of them, and the lessons we can take for the legal industry. Your first impression may be to dismiss this as soon as you heard the word “brands,” but we’ll be looking at high-end companies like Rolex, and professional services firms like Farmers Insurance, so I think we can all agree that there are translatable lessons to be gained from them.  Continue Reading Imitation (in Content Marketing) is the Sincerest Form of Flattery

photo-1460400408855-36abd76648b9Now that it’s starting to be the dog days of summer, and many of you are out on vacation (me included – I wrote this post in advance!), it can be easy to let your content slide a little bit. “Nothing is going on,” “Everyone is away,” “I’m too busy,” “I don’t feel like it” – do any of those excuses sound familiar to you?

But the warm weather is no reason to let your content slide. If you stick to your editorial calendar, not only will you continue the momentum that you’ve started this year with strong, substantive work, but you’ll also stand out in a sea of people who are letting their content slack in the summer.

But it doesn’t mean that you always have to be coming up with something new and fresh – sometimes, you can revisit some of your old content, freshen that up a little bit, and repackage it in a way that doesn’t require you to invest too much time away from the pool or the beach, but still maximizes your efforts. Let’s look at two ways you can liven up old content this summer.  Continue Reading Two Ways to Liven Up Old Content

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July/August 2016

The ILN is proud to announce our latest firm of the month, PlasBossinade advocaten notarissen – Groningen, the Netherlands!

PlasBossinade is a full service law firm and one of the leading legal service providers in the Northern Netherlands. The firm looks after legal matters for a number of large scale and smaller enterprises, public authorities, institutions and private persons in the Northern Netherlands and beyond.

The firm consists of over 30 lawyers, among which are also tax lawyers. PlasBossinade has 11 partners, each of whom has vast experience in his or her field of specialty. PlasBossinade also provides services by civil law notaries (in a separate legal entity, PlasBossinade Notarissen N.V.).

All in all, the interests of the clients of PlasBossinade are taken care of, not only from a legal perspective, but also from a tax and commercial perspective. At PlasBossinade, quality and thoroughness is combined with a practical and pragmatic approach. PlasBossinade provides clear, strategic and creative advice with a realistic view of the possibilities, risks and costs. The slogan of PlasBossinade is: THE LINK BETWEEN LAW AND REALITY.

The services of PlasBossinade reach beyond the borders of The Netherlands. Many of their clients also do business abroad or are otherwise dealing with jurisdictions of other countries.

Although PlasBossinade has joined the ILN recently, they have been able to assist various ILN colleagues representing multinational companies, mainly in relation to their affiliates in the Netherlands (restructuring, acquisition, or divestiture), employment matters and tax matters. An example of a successful referral is that PlasBossinade (Stefan Mak) was involved at the request of Danish member DAHL (Björn Wittrup), Copenhagen office, in rendering its opinion on factoring activities to be undertaken in The Netherlands by a Danish bank. The concept (and risk) of double assignment of accounts receivable proved to be a complex subject for which various systems of law provide different solutions. This is what makes the cooperation with members of ILN rewarding. In its turn, PlasBossinade has experienced very satisfying assistance from ILN colleagues – for example, Fladgate (Charles Wander and colleagues) in the UK and EXPLegal (Antonello Corrado) in Italy regarding some complex matters for Dutch clients abroad.

Ambassadors at PlasBossinade and More…

Full descriptions of PlasBossinade’s services, expertise, and lawyer profiles are available on their ILN profile.

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Jan Leo de Hoop
Email: dehoop@plasbossinade.nl
Telephone: +31 (0)50 521 43 93
Practice Groups: Corporate, commercial, international trade

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Peter Hoekstra
Email: hoekstra@plasbossinade.nl
Telephone: +31 (0)50 521 43 93
Practice Groups: Corporate, commercial, competition

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Stefan Mak
Email: mak@plasbossinade.nl
Telephone: +31 (0)50 521 43 73
Practice Groups: Corporate, commercial, finance

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Leen Hooites
Email: hooites@plasbossinade.nl
Telephone: +31 (0)50 521 43 51
Practice Groups: Taxation, financing, restructuring

ILN Executive Director, Alan Griffiths says…

“PlasBossinade is a leading firm in the ILN, with smart, talented lawyers, and we are proud to recognize them as our Firm of the Month for July/August. “

photo-1458724338480-79bc7a8352e4If you produce content – for example, you write a blog, author articles, post tweets, create videos, write LinkedIn posts, etc. – you’ve probably heard or read at some point that it’s a good idea to connect with “influencers” in your industry to extend the reach of your content. “Influencers” are those who are perceived as leaders within your industry, and as such, have the power to affect what others are reading, watching, and talking about. In talking about what’s called “influencer marketing,” Andrea Lehr of the Content Marketing Institute tells us that

Influencers work hard to cultivate relationships and maintain their position as a leader within their niche. Partnering with influencers in your industry helps get your message in front of the right audience and accelerates conversions.”

Sounds great, right?

But how do you figure out who those influencers are?

In her article, Lehr talks about two pieces of advice, and a note of caution, to help you to identify the influencers in your area of expertise. She and her team focused on marketing when they undertook this exercise, but it will work for your area of expertise as well – note that where you focus will be impacted by what your content marketing goals are. So, for example, if your goal is to reach more clients and potential clients, then you’ll want to focus on the client profile when looking for influencers – if you’re a corporate lawyer who helps entrepreneurs, your influencers will be found among the entrepreneur community, not other corporate lawyers. But if your goal is to become a respected thought leader among corporate lawyers who help entrepreneurs, then your influencers will be found among other corporate lawyers. The more specific your goals are, the easier it will be to define your potential influencer pool. Continue Reading Two Tips for Identifying Influencers in Your Niche

photo-1429962714451-bb934ecdc4ecFor the last two weeks, we’ve look at four different ways to bring a WOW factor to your content marketing – in the first post, we focused on content, while in the second post, we looked at email marketing. In today’s post, we’re going to wrap up our WOW series, and look at two final action steps you should be taking when it comes to your content marketing, and these focus on your audiences. We talk about audience a lot here on Zen, and especially about checking in with them, ensuring that the content that you’re delivering is the content that they want. These are two different audience angles/tactics to consider taking. Continue Reading Two Steps to WOW Your Content Audience

13332904_10154279719942792_2649109038483551548_nLet’s face it: networking can be hard. Unless you’re someone who thrives on meeting other people (and many of us don’t, including yours truly), networking is something that we consider to be a chore, albeit a necessary one.

So why not pair it with something that you already like doing?

For example, I’ve been a runner on and off for about the last seven years – mostly off (you may remember when I mentioned that running is like content marketing). Over the past year, I’ve really committed to it, and even ran my first half marathon in April. As I’ve posted about my runs on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, I’ve found a community of runners among my existing network – including of my own lawyers. It turns out that quite a few of my lawyers are runners themselves. Continue Reading Networking Tip: Find Your Niche

photo-1460804198264-011ca89eaa43Last week, we talked about two steps to bring the WOW factor back to your content marketing. Continuing with that theme, and the post that inspired it, we’re going to look at two more actions that those of us producing content for law firms should be taking to make sure that we’re wow-ing with our email content.

Step One: Give More Attention to Your Client Alerts

In his post, Pulizzi says:

Give more time and attention to your newsletter. Is it truly amazing or is it something your customers consider ‘salesy’ or spam? Of all the subscription options we have with our customers, including all social channels, email is where we have the most control over messaging.”

While he’s talking about newsletters (and you can certainly apply this advice to any newsletters you’re producing as well), I’d like to concentrate on the client alert, as it’s something that continues to get attention. Why is that?  Continue Reading Two Steps to Bring the WOW Factor To Your Email Marketing

photo-1463453091185-61582044d556Taped to my computer monitor, I have a set of photobooth photos from last years LMA New England conference, which include the conference theme: “What’s Your WOW Factor?” As much as I enjoy seeing the photos of my friends and I from the conference, the theme itself is a constant reminder to be asking myself that question as I undertake my daily tasks – “What’s my WOW Factor today?”

In today’s post, I want to look at two steps that law firms should be taking right now in their content marketing (as part of a series of posts), thanks to this piece from the Content Marketing Institute by Joe Pulizzi. These steps, and the ones that follow, have me thinking about that very idea – what’s our “wow” factor when it comes to content marketing – because in the end, that’s what it’s really all about. The thing that makes our audiences sit up and take notice of what we’re putting out for their consumption.

Pulizzi sets up his post by saying that these action steps are reminders to keep us on track in our content marketing – and I love that idea. We can easily get bogged down in the day to day nitty gritty that we lose sight of the forest for the trees. So action steps such as these are a way to pause, take stock, and ensure that what we’re doing with our content is effective and valuable, so that we’re getting the most for our efforts. And in a time and in an industry where we don’t want to waste any efforts, that’s essential.  Continue Reading Two Steps to Bring Back the WOW Factor To Your Content

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June/July 2016

The ILN is proud to announce our latest firm of the month, Michel LLP – Berlin, Germany!

PARTNERING WITH YOUR INTERESTS.

Located in the heart of Berlin, Michel LLP has been a genuine alternative to large and impersonal law firms since 2001. People who come to them seeking advice and help profit from their broad expertise and highly qualified legal work. At the same time, they feel that they are in good hands. They attach great importance to personal support for every single client. Continue Reading ILN Firm of the Month – Michel LLP, Berlin, Germany!