Conference/Webinar Session Re-caps

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Another of my all-time favorite conference sessions at LMA is always the client panel.  For me, the panel always makes the investment in the conference worth it, because I can impart what I learn from the GCs there to my lawyers, to help them to understand their own clients better, and that adds value for everyone. 

This year’s client panel didn’t disappoint. It focused on best practices for building and maintaining your law firm’s relationship with in-house counsel and featured Megan Belcher, the VP and Chief Employment Counsel for ConAgra, Kevin Schubert, the Associate General Counsel, Transactions for LV Sands Corporation, Simon Manoucherian, the Assistance General Counsel/Director of Litigation GRIFOLS, and Karen Cottle, Senior Counsel for Sidley Austin and former in-house counsel. The panel was moderated by Inside Counsel magazine. 

The panelists said that they would discuss the role of social media for general counsel, the challenges that they see over the next five years, and the change in inside/outside counsel relationships since 2008.  Since the economic downturn, GCs have changed the way that they evaluate outside counsel, and the process by which trust is built. 

Continue Reading General Counsel Panel: Separate from the Pack – a Recap Part I

So if you’ve been hiding under a rock instead of reading my blog posts, you may not already know that my favorite session from LMA13 was "Delivering Happiness: Fresh Ideas for Service-Driven Brands Deploying Social Media Tactics, Seeking ROI" with Graham Kahr, Social Scientist for Zappos and Jayne Navarre of Law Gravity LLC. 

Rather than a typical session, Jayne and Graham let us know right away that it would be different when they introduced themselves in the third person. Their session took on the tone of more of a conversation, which also included those of us in the audience. 

They began their conversation by saying that they wouldn’t be talking about social media per se, but really focusing instead on creating experiences for clients (which is something we could all identify with). Graham said that Zappos doesn’t push their own brand stories – they want their customers to tell the brand story for them.Continue Reading “Delivering Happiness” – A Zappos Session Recap

A lesson I learned several years ago that has been invaluable to me is that of "identify, don’t compare." When you compare, you’re looking to match your situation exactly to that of someone else’s – and when we do that, we’re always going to come up different (and that can paralyze us).

But when we identify, we’re looking for those elements that run through a situation that are the same as ours – and this gives us the inspiration to keep moving forward, instead of giving up because we think we’ll never be the same. That lesson comes in handy when I’m sitting in a session like the Zappos one from the LMA Annual Conference.  Although it’s easy to try to compare Zappos to legal marketing and come up lacking because they’re a consumer-driven business, when I identify instead, I find many parallels which allow me to take the lessons that Graham was sharing with us and apply them to my own situation.Continue Reading Identify, Don’t Compare – Lessons from Zappos for the Legal Industry

Last week, we had the pleasure of welcoming my friend, Gina Rubel, of Furia Rubel, as our webinar presenter for the ILN’s marketing group. Gina had a fabulous presentation dedicated to the topic of integrated approaches to law firm marketing and public relations, and the attendees agreed that it was excellent. 

I won’t do my usual lengthy recap here, because Gina will be using some of the same insights in her upcoming panel presentation at the LMA’s 2013 Annual Conference (and I’m attending her session, so I’ll recap it then).  But I do want to give all of you a taste of what’s to come, to encourage everyone who’ll be at LMA13 to see Gina’s panel at 11am on Tuesday, April 9th. (ILN members and marketers can email me directly for a copy of the presentation)

Gina noted early in the presentation that when marketing a law firm, there are several fundamental questions to answer, regardless of the size of the firm – these surround topics such as goals, audience, messaging, tactics and ROI. Continue Reading Integrated Approaches to Law Firm Marketing & Public Relations

The Legal Marketing Association‘s Social Media Special Interest Group is at it again – this afternoon, they brought members an excellent webinar focused on combating internal politics – how to sell social media to your lawyers. 

Featured on the panel were moderator and LMA SIG leader, Gail Lamarche, of Henderson Franklin, an employment law attorney and social media maven from her firm, Suzanne Boy, and legal marketing expert, Jill Rako with Ohio-based Bricker & Eckler. 

Since these webinars are an LMA member benefit, I’m not going to delve as deeply into the recap as I traditionally would, but I do want to hit the highlights! Continue Reading Combating the Internal Politics – How to Sell Social Media to Your Lawyers

It’s been a festival of webinars over here lately, so I’ve got one more recap for you this year! Yesterday, we hosted Jaimie Field, esq. of Marketing Field, who presented on the in-house marketers’ guide to motivating your attorneys to rainmaking success. 

Jaimie kicked off by saying that the short version of her presentation is that you can’t motivate them. It’s not possible to motivate someone else – they have to motivate themselves. But what the in-house marketers or marketing partners CAN do is to provide the attorneys at their firm with the tools they need to help them to motivate themselves to rainmaking success. 

While Jaimie didn’t address specific tactics, she did identify what attorneys need from their in-house marketers in terms of their marketing genius and motivating prowess. Continue Reading ILN Marketing Webinar: In-House Marketers’ Guide to Motivating Attorneys to Rainmaking Success

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

Last week, we had the final session in our Business of Law Series, on the topic of contract lawyers and outsourcing. This time, Tim Corcoran brought in a co-presenter, Kevin Colangelo of Yuson & Irvine. 

Tim began with a few minutes to recap some of the topics we’d discussed in the first two webinars, so that the audience could understand the main drivers behind these changes.  For those full recaps, please take a look at Legal Project Management Part I and Part II and Alternative Fee Arrangements Part I and Part II. 

Outsourcing – Love it or Hate it? 

Following this, he jumped into a discussion with Kevin about outsourcing. He began by saying that outsourcing is not a popular topic with law firms, but from a corporation standpoint, they already outsource their legal needs to their legal departments, who, in turn, outsource it to their law firm, so they’re very comfortable with it. Continue Reading ILN Webinar Series – Contract Lawyers & Outsourcing Part I

Yesterday, we began with the first part of Tim Corcoran’s webinar on the strategic role of alternative fee arrangements. After Tim’s elephant analogy, he gave the attendees a short economics lesson. Using a graph with two parallel arrows, Tim said that essentially, we charge a rate that is higher than our cost to deliver. Price needs to be higher than the cost, and profit is derived from the difference between the cost and the price. 

But law firms do a poor job of calculating costs – other than their overhead and real estate, they don’t know the cost of the delivery of their legal services. 

So the challenge is, as we saw in the recent downturn when there was downward price pressure, because we haven’t fundamentally changed our delivery costs, our profit turns to loss. In the first part of the webinar, Tim had talked about the inevitable movement from premium and strategic to commodity, meaning that clients will pay less for something over time. That’s what we’re seeing – clients are refusing to pay for work that they believe doesn’t have the same value it once had, but law firms who have not adapted their cost structure for this are experiencing loss. Continue Reading ILN Webinar Series – Alternative Fee Arrangements Part II