Amy Campbell's Web Log

Attorney Business Plan Worksheet

Amy Campbell — Mon, 12 May 2008 19:17:43 +0000

Two legal services business development pros, Beth Cuzzone and Catherine MacDonagh, authors of the book, The Law Firm Associate’s Guide to Personal Marketing and Selling Skills, offer up a free chapter and this valuable PDF planning tool: Individual Lawyer’s Business Plan Worksheet.

You can access both over at Legal Marketing Reader. The permalink for the article and download is: Attention Associates: How To Create Your Personal Sales and Marketing Plan. For more on Cuzzone and MacDonagh, see the Legal Sales and Service Organization web site.

Boston Blogger Meetup

Amy Campbell — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 12:45:56 +0000

Boston bloggers gathered last night to welcome to town Kevin O’Keefe, the Godfather of Law Blogging. Kevin is the president and founder of the attorney blogging platform Lexblog, Inc. He’s here in Boston to present at LMA New England’s luncheon program on Social Networking for Law Firms. The call to “meetup” went out 2 days before via e-mail and Linkedin’s Legal Blogging group, then people just showed up — that’s how it works!

Pictured left to right: Leanna Hamill, author of Massachusetts Estate Planning and Elder Law blog; yours truly; Kevin O’Keefe; and Bob Ambrogi of Law.com’s Legal Blog Watch.

Sales and Marketing Lessons from the NBA?

Amy Campbell — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 20:37:32 +0000

Rich Gotham, president of the Boston Celtics, will be a keynote speaker at the Legal Sales and Service Organization’s (LSSO) 2008 RainDance Conference in Boston, May 6-8, at the Hilton Boston Logan Airport Hotel. He will describe how a sales-driven organization has gone from ‘worst to first’ among its professional peers.

LSSO’s RainDance Conference is aimed at senior leaders in law firms and legal departments and features a faculty of sales and service experts help attendees develop competitive, effective sales, service and process improvement strategies and tactics. For a full conference schedule and registration information, go to www.legalsales.org.

A Digest of Legal Services Trends for 2008 (updated)

Amy Campbell — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 02:03:28 +0000

I’m noticing a lot of hits to this blog for queries related to “legal services trends for 2008,” because of these two previous posts:

Summary of Law Firm Marketing Trends, 30 Years After Bates v. Arizona

Legal Services Trends 2007-2008

So, for the convenience of others, I offer below links to a collection of other trend articles and posts that I’ve recently run across. If you have other links to add, please leave a comment and I will keep expanding the list. While they don’t all paint a rosy picture, I hope you find them helpful in bringing you up to speed or providing perspective on market trends.

Added 2/18: Hildebrandt 2008 Client Advisory - highlights trends in 2007, and those it believes will impact the market in 2008.

Survey: Corporate Lawsuits, Use of Outside Counsel Trending Downward - New England In-House

Hot Legal Jobs for 2008 - Robert Half Legal

What’s Hot and What’s Not in the Legal Profession - Robert Denney via ABA LPM

Doom and Gloom for the Legal Profession - It’s Coming - Gerry Riskin

Get Ready for the Recession - Larry Bodine

The Legal Profession Has Entered a Recession - Larry Bodine

Law Firm Marketing Technology Trends - ABA Law Practice

Am Law 200 Managing Partners Issue Fog Advisory for 2008

Law Firms Getting “Cuddly”?

Amy Campbell — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 15:55:51 +0000

Just a quick pointer to this article found on the New York Times most e-mailed articles list in case you missed it: Who’s Cuddly Now? Law Firms. It covers trends in flex-time, the billable hour, and work/lifestyle at law firms large and small.

More on Law Firm Merger Name Games

Amy Campbell — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 23:51:29 +0000

Lisa Van Der Pool of the Boston Business Journal adds to the discussion of law firm naming and branding with this article in the January 11-17, 2008 issue: The legal name game. Says the article, “brand awareness is a top concern for any company going through a merger, but for law firms that merge, coming up with an acceptable moniker can be particularly tricky.”

It reveals some of the thinking and ego-checking that went on behind the scenes in the naming of WilmerHale and K&L Gates — two law firms using short “street” names for branding purposes, while retaining the longer, official name. The outcome is evidence that marketers are making headway in the area of traditionally difficult-to-brand and multiple name law firm entities. Witness:

K&L Gates for Kirpatrick & Lockhart Preston Gates Ellis LLP
WilmerHale for Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr LLP

See previous posts/articles on this topic:

Name Games Loom Large in Mergers
LOL! Law Firm Names

MySpace for Lawyers?

Amy Campbell — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 18:54:22 +0000

With all the talk about social networks, law firm marketers and attorneys are wondering, “Should I have a MySpace page?” Such was a flurry of activity on the Legal Marketing Association List-serv this past week where most legal marketers poo-pooed sites like Facebook and MySpace as they were mostly for ‘kids’, but opined that perhaps Linkedin might be useful as it has a more ‘business crowd.’ Currently, I’m not an active user of these systems (as blogging is my drug of choice), and I don’t expect that lawyers and law firms will start jumping in in droves, simply because as an industry they tend to be new-technology-adverse (see earlier post Lawyers Slow to Embrace Blogs ABA Survey Says).

However, and this is a huge however, I do believe that social networks can and will be an important part of internet life and business going forward and we should all become more familiar with them. Law students and young lawyers and marketers are already using them, so the train is coming. (Whether social networks remain distinct services or integrate themselves into our holistic web experience is another question to ponder.) Sure, there are the potential horror stories when folks sign up for and use technology that they don’t really fully understand.

Since law firm clients are just now starting to ask seriously about the benefits of blogging, I don’t predict a fast adoption of social networks by this same crowd. But if you want to be on the leading edge, now is the time to dip your toe into the social network waters and at least learn and evaluate. And if you see a way to use a new technology as a way to differentiate your brand, leverage your content, or improve and increase releationships and awareness — I say, go for it!

There has been plenty written on the subject of social networking including Kevin O’Keefe’s Social Networking Sites: Will they work for lawyers and other professionals?

Here are some others…
MySpace Helps Attorneys Find Clients

Facebook Grows Up

Linked in or Left Out: ‘Supercharge’ Your Interactions Through Social Networking

Online Social Networking for Lawyers — Online Networking for Fun and Profit

I’d love to hear others’ views and experiences on the topic. Please feel free to comment.

Non-Lawyers Bring Innovation to the Table. Really.

Amy Campbell — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 15:32:01 +0000

I received an e-mail from Patrick McKenna, a long-time professional services consultant with Edge International, kindly informing me of his most recent blog post (dated December 30, 2007) titled, The ABA, Shamefully Does Not Practice Diversity. In it he criticizes the December issue of the ABA Journal for its cover story, “The Blawg 100: The Best Web Sites By Lawyers.”

States McKenna,

“I cannot believe the shameful audacity of the ABA Journal to rate web sites for lawyers . . . by including only those written by lawyers. For those who long suspected that the legal profession, unique amongst professions for categorizing people as either being lawyers or non-lawyers, really doesn’t understand or support diversity, you now have the proof.”

He provides several examples of excellent blogs for lawyers written by non-lawyers including those by:

Then just yesterday, I read a very interesting article in the New York Times that offers an explanation as to how this type of isolated thinking happens. In Innovative Minds Don’t Think Alike, Janet Rae-Dupree, describes this phenomenon as a “curse of knowledge.”

“…once you’ve become an expert in a particular subject, it’s hard to imagine not knowing what you do. Your conversations with others in the field are peppered with catch phrases and jargon that are foreign to the uninitiated. When it’s time to accomplish a task — open a store, build a house, buy new cash registers, sell insurance — those in the know get it done the way it has always been done, stifling innovation as they barrel along the well-worn path.”

The article offers anecdotal and scientific support for bringing people with different skill sets — even (gasp) outsiders — to the table. It also introduces a groovy, new bit of jargon you can toss around — “zero-gravity thinkers.” Click here to read the full article on nytimes.com — it’s worth the 5 minutes.

What’s the Value of Martindale in a Google-centric World?

Amy Campbell — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 15:30:09 +0000

Clients have been asking a lot recently about what other firms are doing regarding Martindale-Hubbell listings. The cost seems steep to most firms especially when you compare the click-throughs that come from the directory to those coming from other sources around the net. Most firms I’ve talked to are considering or have already cut back on the listings.

Gina Passarella of the Legal Intelligencer has an article that examines this topic in depth, Martindale-Hubbell Faces Challenges, and that cites an informal survey of Philadelphia law firms finding

“more firms than not said they were either eliminating or scaling back their use of Martindale-Hubbell’s listing services… [but that] pulling away from such a time-honored tradition wasn’t always an easy decision.”

At the same time, recently at the LMA New England Annual Conference in Boston, firm representatives chimed out support for Martindale in one session on web sites, saying that they could point to their web server stats showing Martindale as a top referral source. I have not had similar evidence for firm sites that I manage.

Server stats may be a useful bit of data to add to your decision making. I’m interested to hear what your firm’s experience is regarding Martindale referrals, and whether you are considering cutting back.

Please leave a comment.

Oh, and have a Merry Christmas!

What Your Client Won’t Tell You… But This Guy Just Did

Amy Campbell — Sun, 02 Dec 2007 20:54:26 +0000

One of the most valuable blogs for law firm business development — that I would recommend to attorneys as well as marketers — is InHouse Rants (with the tagline, “The frustrated in-house lawyer blog”) as it provides a glimpse into the mind and business of an in-house counsel, and it often provides advice to those trying to win the company’s business.

The latest post (which I found via Legal Marketing Reader) is titled, How To Get Legal Business - Part 1. It states in explicit detail how law firms can win new business. It has something to do with the phrase, “Know my business,” but this blogger really means it, and he tells you just what you need to do in fairly specific detail. Valuable stuff. Read it here, and then stay tuned for the sequel implied by the “Part 1″ in the headline.

Related posts:

Chief Legal Officers Speak

What Drives Corporate Counsel in their Relationship with Outside Counsel