for

Subscribe to for via RSS

Yesterday, we went through the basics of setting up an account and profile on LinkedIn.  Today, we’re going to look much more in-depth at the LinkedIn profile and get ourselves to 100% profile completeness (or just about)!

You may be wondering why you need to bother with completing your profile – isn’t the bare minimum enough?

Well, according to LinkedIn, "Users with complete profiles are 40 times more likely to receive opportunities through LinkedIn."  Your profile becomes complete when you have:

  • Your current position
  • Two past positions
  • Your education
  • Your profile summary
  • A profile photo
  • Your specialties
  • At least three recommendations

Continue Reading LinkedIn Tutorials – How to Set up a Profile Part II

Here on Zen, I talk a lot about why I love social media, and how I think it can be useful to lawyers and law firms.  Now that I’ve got you all convinced, I realize that not everyone knows how or where to start.  I’ve talked about some of the basic principles of using these tools – engage, don’t broadcast; give yourself a small window of time to use them each day, etc – but not the how-to of using them.  So I’m going to be doing a series of social media tutorials over the next several weeks to get you started, and I’m beginning with LinkedIn.

To me, LinkedIn is the most useful social media platform for lawyers, if for no other reason than it’s considered the most professional.  Because of that, most of your clients will be there, so you should be too.  

Here’s a quick note – there is a LOT of information in this post, but don’t be alarmed. It will take you less time to complete your profile than it will to read through this post!

Continue Reading LinkedIn Tutorials – How to Set up a Profile Part I

Last week’s post covered the questions of what the panelists discussing social media are doing at their firms, and the challenges they’ve faced.  This week’s looks at their social media policies and the effect of the approval process in blogging. 

Social Media Policies

We next covered the question of social media policies, and whether firms are looking only at what their attorneys and staff are doing professionally, or also at their personal social networking habits.Continue Reading Social Media – What Are Mid-Sized Firms Doing?

Following my LinkedIn presentation at our Annual Meeting, we had a panel discussion about what some of our law firms are doing with social media.  I was joined by Charles Wander of Fladgate LLP in London, David Ellenhorn of Ogden Murphy Wallace, PLLC in Seattle, and Bill Holder of Clark Wilson LLP in Vancouver.

Because we had a rather in-depth discussion which I think raises some interesting points and questions I’d like to get your feedback on, I’ll be breaking the post up into two – part one focuses on the social media activities that the firms represented on the panel are engaging in, and some of the challenges they’ve been faced with. Continue Reading Social Media – What Are Mid-Sized Firms Doing? Activities & Challenges

For this week’s Ask Friday! we welcome guest poster, Cordell Parvin.  I’ve gotten to know Cordell through Twitter, and have been fortunate to see the excellent advice he has for lawyers through webinars and his upcoming video coaching series.  

According to his website, "Cordell Parvin has practiced law for more than 36 years. He has developed a highly successful national construction law practice. During his career, Cordell has been a rainmaker and taught, mentored and coached young lawyers on their careers, work-life balance and rainmaking. Cordell also has been a Practice Group Leader and worked with other Practice Groups helping them to develop their business plans and strategies."

Today’s Ask Friday! question is "What separates super achievers from achievers?"  Huge thanks to Cordell for guest posting this week! 

"A few weeks ago I spoke to a group of first year lawyers during their orientation. As I neared completion of my presentation I asked for questions. One young lawyer asked a thought provoking question: “What is the difference between lawyers who are superstars compared to lawyers who are stars?”

"In my career I have been blessed to work with some really outstanding lawyers. I have also had the opportunity to witness differences between the super achieving lawyers and those successful lawyers who do not reach that status. Here’s my take on the differences.

Continue Reading Ask Friday! Superstars Edition by Cordell Parvin

I’ve spent the last two days talking about how to make improvements to your LinkedIn profile, and getting the most out of your LinkedIn home page.  Today, I want to cover LinkedIn Groups.

On LinkedIn, there are groups for everything, from business networking to animal lovers.  Groups are an excellent way to connect with people outside of your immediate network in areas where you share an interest.

I’m going to focus on the ILN’s group, because I’m the moderator and have the most familiarity with it, but most of this advice can be applicable to any business networking group for lawyers. During my presentation, I started with the "why" – why should the lawyers in the room have any interest in joining the ILN Group on LinkedIn? Continue Reading LinkedIn – Making the Most out of Groups

Yesterday, I talked about what improvements you  might want to make to your LinkedIn profile to get the best results from it.  Today, I’ll talk about the home page screen and why it’s useful to be logging in to LinkedIn periodically – I have LinkedIn set to open as one of the tabs on my browser, so every morning, I open Outlook and Chrome, go through my emails, and check on my browser tabs.  This includes taking a quick look (no more than five minutes) at my LinkedIn home page screen.  Lawyers, I know you’re busy, but if you make this part of your morning routine, you’ll only have to spend a few minutes looking at LinkedIn, you’ll stay up to date on what your network is doing, and you won’t have to try to remember to visit LinkedIn.

There are four things I find of particular importance on your home page screen (which looks like this):

Continue Reading “Hitting the (Other) Links to Develop Your Rainmaking Game – Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About LinkedIn” – Part II

If you read my posts regularly, you’ll know that I have a passion for social media.  I don’t think it’s the be all and end all of business development tools, of course, but I do have a fondness for it and an interest in sharing that fondness with my attorneys.

So I jumped at the chance to present a more in-depth look at LinkedIn to our group at the 2011 23rd ILN Annual Meeting on Saturday morning.  I wanted to stick to what I thought were the most relevant points about LinkedIn, and what would give our attorneys the greatest impact – and for me, there was no greater joy than sitting with one of our attorneys during the subsequent breakout session and helping him fill out his profile, as he repeated back to me snippets of what I’d said. 

Last week, I mentioned a few best practices for LinkedIn, but I’d like to add in a bit more about our session in Lisbon.

Continue Reading “Hitting the (Other) Links to Develop Your Rainmaking Game – Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About LinkedIn”