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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

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

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

Last week, the LMA NJ chapter once again piggybacked on to what the NY chapter was doing, and hosted a lunch where we Skyped into a panel presentation focusing on whether law firms should help promote individual attorneys (or just focus on the firm brand as a whole). The panelists included Robert Algeri, the co-founder of Great Jakes, which is listed in his bio as "a marketing communications firm that develops next-generation websites for mid-size and large law firms." 

We also had Andrea Crews, the Director of Marketing and Business Development for Levenfeld Pearlstein, a mid-size midwestern firm, and Jasmine Trillos-Decarie, the Director of Marketing and Business Development at Foley Hoag. 

Continue Reading Should Law Firms Help Promote Individual Attorneys? An LMA Recap

Last week, I attended the LMANJ city group’s session on "Teachable Moments from Dewey," a presentation taking place in New York that we were remotely accessing. Our speakers were Bruce MacEwen, founder and President of Adam Smith, Esq and Sara Randazzo, a reporter with American Lawyer. 

While I’ve been watching the Dewey coverage with interest, I haven’t gotten as involved as some in the details, so it was a fascinating presentation. Bruce said that it’s been a topic of near obsession among his readers for the last few months – he started writing an analysis of this in March. 

As Bruce and Sara spoke, I took notes all over the handouts that we’d been given, so I’ll try to make sense of them here! Continue Reading Teachable Moments from Dewey – An LMANJ Recap

Now, as I mentioned in my summary of the GC Panel at the LMA Conference this year, Jeff Carr says he’s banned the word "alternative," because there should be nothing alternative about alternative fees.

But, for the sake of this recap, we’re going to use it, as that’s what the session focused on.  Tim Corcoran shared with us the salient points from the alternative fees session that he attended at LMA (and often speaks on himself). 

  • Most law firms are reactive when it comes to offering alternative fees because they’re concerned that they’re dilutive to profits. But the firms that have figured this out and are acting proactively are seeing business development opportunities and more work. 
     
  • There’s a correlation between value and charging – lawyers need to understand this. 

Continue Reading Are you Thinking…Alternatively?

There were so many good tidbits that came out of our LMA New Jersey meeting last week! Amy Adams shared her comments on the session she attended about mentoring associates in business development.

Amy’s comments were particularly helpful, because she’s speaking from the perspective of an in-house marketer, so she’s implementing the advice from the Annual Meeting in her daily activities. Using a phrase from the SMORS session, Amy said she’s deploying a pilot program for mentoring – she’s identified a couple of partners who work well with associates, and using the formula of one partner to four associates. Continue Reading Mentoring Associates in Business Development

One of the other sessions that we covered during our LMA recap was about using video. There aren’t many law firms doing it right now (or doing it well, for that matter), and is it really just another fad?

Tim Corcoran says no – video is on the rise, not just on your PCs, but…

I’ve been so excited that the LMA has formed a NJ city group of the NY chapter, and it’s been wonderful to connect in person with other legal marketing colleagues outside of the Annual Conference. Last night, we met up again to re-cap the LMA conference for those in the group that hadn’t been able to attend.  I added my experiences, but was able to learn a lot from Wilentz’s Amy Adams and Corcoran Consulting Group’s Tim Corcoran, who shared about sessions that I had missed. 

One of the sessions that Amy re-capped was taken from the pre-conference SMORS session – Smart Marketing on (Limited) Resources. She focused mostly on the presentation on managing your workload and gave us some valuable tips: 

  • Understand your firm’s culture – this can take time. 
  • Know who the influencers at your firm are – even the discontented ones (especially the discontented ones).
  • Identify where you can delegate your workflow, even outside of the marketing department. 
  • Put in face-time with your clients – email is not always sufficient. 
  • Use the words "pilot program" to launch something new – attorneys are more comfortable if it sounds like the firm won’t be overly invested. 
  • Use checklists and shared calendar reminders to communicate what you’re doing to the partners. 
  • Uncover the true motivation behind why a partner wants to do something to find out where your time is best spent. 

Continue Reading SMORS – They’re Not Just for Campfires Anymore