One of the initiatives we undertake here at the ILN is marketing partnerships, where we arrange for an in-kind trade of services for various events in the legal industry. When the events are fairly local to me, I’ll go in person to "woman" the table with our materials, answer any questions that might arise, and also sit in on the sessions. 

Last week, I was fortunate enough to participate in two such events. The first of these was American Lawyer Media’s Cross Border M&A Forum – right up our alley, since much of the work that happens in the ILN is cross-border. 

I’ll re-cap a couple of the sessions, along with those from the following day’s conference, ALM’s Cross-Border Litigation Forum. 

 
 

Continue Reading ALM’s Cross Border M&A Forum

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. For our latest interview, we chose ILN member, Charles Wander of our member firm Fladgate LLP in London, England.  

In one sentence, how would you describe your practice?
Advising businesses and their management on strategic and governance issues, as well as their day to day concerns.

Who would be your typical client?
I’ve enjoyed 35 years of not having a typical client. My clients have ranged from institutions such as insurance companies, to entrepreneurs setting up new ventures.

What would you like clients and potential clients to know about you?
That I will work quickly and relentlessly to assist them and to help them achieve their aims.

What has been your most challenging case?
I wouldn’t want to choose one in particular! The challenge is always to achieve what my client wants and needs.

What has been your proudest moment as a lawyer?
There may be an element of the recency effect, but I am proud to have been chosen to lead the firm where I started my law training 35 years ago.

What do you do when you’re not practicing law?
I read voraciously, fiction and non-fiction, and am a news junkie. A little tennis (it gets worse) and even less golf (ditto).

What would surprise people most about you?
Choose from two: I have a (lapsed) pilot’s licence. Before I started my law studies I worked for a bookmakers (as in horses) and trained as a "settler" (the person who calculates the winnings).

What has been your most memorable ILN experience?
Early days, but the Irish band in Lisbon was pretty memorable.

What career would you have chosen if you weren’t a lawyer?
Probably advertising. I interned at an ad agency one summer, and was tempted.

If a movie were made of your life, who would you want to play you?
James Caan (the hair used to be the same).

How would you like to be remembered?
Fondly.

As the remnants of Hurricane Isaac are sweeping through my little town today (just a big thunderstorm, fortunately!), my mind is on blogging. So let’s jump into the second half of LexBlog’s Blogging Best Practices for Lawyers webinar! (Check out the first half here)

Effective Editorial Content

The next topic that Colin and Helen covered was effective editorial content. Colin said that he looks over every post that comes through the LexBlog network, and as he does, he’s looking for people who write like people. So often, bloggers just take their firm’s legal alerts and put them on their blog – but it would be more effective to add some personality instead, because it makes the posts more readable. 

Continue Reading Blogging Best Practices for Lawyers – A LexBlog Webinar Recap Part II

I’m full of the recaps lately, and I promise I’ve got some more original commentary coming up for you all as we get into fall. I’ve mentioned before that I love September, and the feeling of a fresh start that it gives me. For that reason, now is as good a time as ever to take a look at what you’re doing in your blogging – to see what’s been successful for you and what you can tweak. 

With that in mind, I bring you some excellent tips from LexBlog’s own Colin O’Keefe and Helen Pitlick – and I don’t say that just because they so kindly mentioned this blog. It was a great refresher for me, and whether you’re just thinking about getting into blogging, or you’ve been at it for a while, you’ll find something of value in their comments. Since there are a lot of great tips here, and I want  you to think about them a bit, I’m splitting this into two posts – the next one will follow after the holiday weekend here in the States.

Continue Reading Blogging Best Practices for Lawyers – A LexBlog Webinar Recap Part I

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

ILN members are working together all the time, and sometimes they pick their noses up from the grindstone to share one of their successes with me. Here’s a story about an excellent collaboration among ILN firms in Sweden, Italy, Liechtenstein and Switzerland. 

In 2010, Thomas Ekenberg and Johan Sund of Ekenberg & Andersson Advokatbyra, Sweden, were retained by an Italian-American client requesting legal advice regarding an investment in Stockholm – namely, the purchase of an apartment and the opening of an art gallery. The origin of the client’s financial resources, which were necessary to proceed with the investment, consisted of an inheritance of considerable value – his portion amounted to around 80 million Euros worth of real estate and other assets – received from his mother in 2002, and originating from the client family’s prominent involvement in the Italian real estate business as far back as the 1930s.

The client claimed that he had been prevented from being fully aware of the majority of the information concerning the Italian patrimony, and from having any direct control of the interests of his assets. As a matter of fact, since his mother’s passing, the client’s interests had been deceitfully managed by his elder brother.

 

Continue Reading ILN Members in Sweden, Italy, Liechtenstein & Switzerland Collaborate

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

In our final post of the series, we’ll cover the implications of the SCOTUS decision on health care industry sectors, including providers and service providers. 

Providers – Hospitals

Lynn suggested that the panelists start with the hospital industry first. Mark said that he thinks this is a segmented analysis also. For those systems that have already resolved to take steps to deal with value-based purchasing and accountable care environments with their governmental and commercial customers, the SCOTUS decision is likely to be seen as affirming the activities of their boards to date and their initial efforts. For individual hospitals that have not yet designed a strategic plan with value-based purchasing and other accountable-based assumptions baked into that plan, the decision is likely to propel them to get to work in designing such a plan. 

Continue Reading SCOTUS Decision on the PPACA – Implications for Healthcare Industry Sectors Part II

Yesterday, we talked about the impact of the election on the PPACA, as well as the implications of the PPACA for employers. Today, we’ll delve into the implications for healthcare industry sectors with our final post in the series. 

Lynn kicked it off by saying that before we go into each sector individually, she wanted to make an introductory comment. There are people who have asked why did the stock market reach bullish about healthcare stocks following the decision, but then not bullish about it, and whether anything can be read into this. Lynn said that whenever she reads these kinds of articles, she has to laugh, because each company is in their own relationship with entitlement programs and private health insurance, and they have different starting points and are in different states. 

She said there is the number one issue – what she calls the "elephant in the room" – which is whether the penalty is strong enough to get people to buy health insurance, in which case, you’ll have a different set of winners and losers, versus whether the penalty does not. Will employers drop people into the exchange, or will they stay self-funded and keep the insurance that they have? 

Continue Reading SCOTUS Decision on the PPACA – Implications for Healthcare Industry Sectors Part I