Legal Marketing -- by Larry Bodine

New Location of Blog

This blog is now continued at

http://blog.larrybodine.com

Sachnoff Hits Home Run With Annual Review

Chicago's Sachnoff & Weaver just published its always-superb annual review.  Copies of 10 years of reviews are viewable online.  The impressive 47-page, 2005 glossy brochure recounts 21 major client stories, followed by bullet points of other cases in the same practice area. (Click on the picture at the right to see it full-size.) The review by the 140-lawyer Chicago firm hits the mark in several ways:

• Client testimonials are interspersed with the success stories.  For example, Earl Mankin, President of Geneva International Corporation, is quoted saying "What I value most about my relationship with Sachnoff's attorneys is the deep interest they've taken in my business." Illustrated with oil-painting pictures, the review also quotes clients Debra Koenig, CEO of VICORP Restaurants, Joel Solomon, GC of Corus Bank, Mark Rogers, Corporate Counsel of Insight Enterprises ("I knew that Sachnoff was a definite keeper"), Jill Murphy, Associate GC of Aegon USA ("Sachnoff has the depth of talent you'd expect from a large, multi-office organization") and Noel Elfant, GC of Zebra Technologies Corp.  Wow -- it doesn't get better than this.
• "Happy Talk" is kept to a minimum.  The intro page from the CEO and President is restrained to one page and runs an amazingly concise 244 words.  This is a model for law firms everywhere!
• The headline also summarizes the success story, which is the zenith of succinctness.
• Color pictures jump off the page, enlivening the stories about battles over wheat beer and copper mining.
• The annual report can serve as the firm brochure.  There's just no need to say anything else.

Kudos, once again, to marketing wizard Dean Harakas, the firm's Vice President-Client Services and Strategic Planning.

Law Firm Sued over Out-of-Date Web site

It finally happened: a law firm has been sued for failing to update their Web site.

Robert Murphy, an attorney who used to practice with Del Sole & Del Sole in New Haven, sued his former employer for failing for nearly a year to remove his name from their Web site after he left, according to news articles.

Murphy started his own firm, Berlin Law Offices, in Berlin, CT, and asked his former employer to remove his name.  They didn't respond and kept his name online.  Murphy sued, charging that having his name on the Del Sole site was confusing to prospective clients and directed them away from his new solo practice.

"Although it might be a pain for law firms to keep their Web sites up to date, they absolutely need to do so if outdated content is confusing or deceiving consumers," said lawyer Henry Jacobs, who represents Murphy and specializes in Internet law.

Law firm Web sites are the single most effective marketing tool

Law firm Web sites are the single most effective marketing tool employed by corporate, transactional and defense firms, according to a just-released national survey by Alyn-Weiss & Associates, Inc. of Denver, CO

Robert A. Weiss, President of Alyn-Weiss & Associates made the announcement on the LawMarketing Listserv. The survey also revealed a growing number of business law firms employ formalized search engine marketing to obtain case inquiries from the Internet.

For the past 20 years, every national survey of business and defense firms had ranked seminars and presentations/speeches as the most effective business development tactic a business and commercial litigation law firm could employ. However, the 2006 reveals that 82 percent of the 119 responding firms had “received work directly or by referral during the past 24 months,” from their Web site. That’s up from 51 percent of firms in 2004 -- a huge leap reflecting the power and pervasiveness of the Internet on traditional legal services purchase patterns.  No firm reported using search engine marketing techniques in the 2004 survey, but 20 percent said they did in 2006.

"Follow-up calls to firms confirmed that most of the 20 percent of responding firms who had employed formal search engine marketing techniques -- key phrase optimization, geotargeting and click-through campaigns -- had received a steady flow of case inquiries," said Weiss.

• Seminars and presentations slipped to second on the list of most effective marketing tactics. Fifty-five percent of firms reported receiving work directly or by referral from those efforts, which is down from 77 percent in 2004.
• Trade and community group participation came in third with 47 percent of firms, the same as in 2004, reporting they obtained work that way.

Participating firms filled out detailed questionnaires concerning their marketing efforts and expenses.  The questionnaires were developed with input from a panel of law firm marketing directors and legal administrators. Returns were received from December 2005 to January 2006.

Add a Karate Chop for a Showstopper Presentation

It was the end of a long program on sales at the ALA convention in Montreal. Then Alvidas Jasin – Director of Business Development for Thomson Hine, with 370 lawyers in Cleveland and 7 other offices, brought the audience to their feet with a karate chop -- literally.

He handed out sections of half-inch thick pine to about 100 audience members, young and old, strong and feeble. "You are going to go back to your firm and tell them you can break a board with your bare hand," he said. The stunt was to demonstrate how to overcome obstacles: don't focus on the obstruction, instead look past it to see the solution.

Attendees were shown a PowerPoint slide on how to make a fist properly, how to position your feet, and how to make the "hammer strike."

Similarly, he told the audience to whack the boards with their fists, yell out "Kia!" and aim for a point two inches beneath the board. Each person picked a partner to kneel and hold the board firmly. After a few practice swings, the room yelled "Kia!" and boards everywhere split in two.

As an emergency service person stood in the back of the room -- just in case -- each person switched places and let their partners shatter their board. It was a real confidence builder and it didn't hurt at all.

Jasin, whose career includes Ernst & Young, KPMG and CBIZ, has been staging this stunt at conference all over the country. It really jazzes up a presentation, and hammers his point home.

A University is Actually Offering a Lawyer Marketing Course

I remember when I graduated from law school -- I had a deep knowledge of appellate court opinions, but no practical skills at all.  They don't teach how to file a motion or how to build a practice.  But here's some good news:

The University of Miami has launched a certificate program of "Marketing For Lawyers: Developing and Maintaining Client Relationships" beginning this month.  Tom Kane of Sarasota, FL, will be the lead instructor for this course offering what will be quarterly course. 

It will be run out of the Division of Continuing and Professional Education, and specifically the Office of Professional Advancement of the University of Miami. 

The initial course (limited to 20 participants) will be:  May 18-20, 2006.

Course topics include:

• Tools and techniques of marketing
• Effective marketing strategies
• Short-term marketing winners
• Ethical considerations
• Law firm Web site and Internet presence
• Building lasting client relationships
• Marketing planning workshop - participants will leave the course with a working draft of a marketing plan developed for immediate implementation.

Why Your Strategy Isn't Executed

Does your firm have a marketing strategy?  If so, you're pretty rare.  And if you do, it probably isn't being carried out, according to Michael E. Nagel, VP of the Balanced Scorecard Collaborative in Lincoln, MA. "Only 10% of all strategies ever get executed," he said at the Association of Legal Administrators conference in Montreal.

Here's why:

·        95% of the typical workforce does not understand the strategy.

·        60% of organizations do not link budgets to strategy.

·        70% of organizations do not link middle management incentives to strategy.

·        85% of executive teams spend less than one hour per month discussing strategy.

However, many companies have figured out the solution, including DuPont, Mobil, GTE, Canon, Siemens, Chrysler, BMW, Mellon Bank, Ricoh and Hilton.

1. Start at the top: mobilize change through executive leadership.

2. Translate change into operational terms: set targets and measure progress.

3. Align IT, HR, the finance department and the management committee to support the strategy.

4. Motivate the workforce to make strategy everybody's job.

5. Govern to make strategy a continual process, hold strategic review meetings, review performance based on supporting the strategy, put a budget behind the strategy and share the results.

I have to admit, it all sounded good, and if I were the Czar of the firm, I could issue an edict to make it so.  Or else I could hire a platoon of consultants, get everybody to read the books they wrote and get the firm leaders to understand their incredibly complex charts like this one here.

But that's for firms with a bigger budget than mine.