Quality Law Firm Marketing Means Quality of Life
Law firm marketing is usually not something that is given priority. This is precisely the reason lawyers fail at marketing. If you want to be certain that your time is well spent on any activity, you should always give your best effort. Marketing is no different.
How many times have you attended a networking even only to briefly shake the hands of people you know, have a drink and leave early?
How many times have you thought about posting something to your blog only to put it off because you were too tired and though you could get to it tomorrow?
When seeing something another lawyer implemented, have you ever thought to yourself: “That’s a great way to attract clients, I could do that.” Yet you failed to give it another thought…
All of these responses are perfectly normal. But that is the problem. Normal actions get normal results. And normal means average. And the average attorney is terrible at law firm marketing.
If you want to take control of your destiny you must become adept at attracting the right kind of client. This means you must become adept a law firm marketing.
When I say “adept” I mean you must approach it with urgency and purpose. In other words, you must have marketing intensity. Even if you only have twenty minutes per day to work on marketing, those must be twenty focused, powerful minutes.
Here are three examples of marketing intensity in action:
Blog Articles: Each blog article should be meaningful to the reader. Do not post an article just to say that you posted an article. Do not write something just to add more keywords to your website. You should provide so much valuable content in your blog articles that readers will be impressed with your depth of knowledge and advice.
Speaking Engagements: You should speak on topics that the audience will find interesting and informative. You should offer follow-up information to the audience. You should include a call to action to allow the audience to become a part of your email and newsletter lists.
Direct Mail: Do not just mail one letter, one time. All mailing should be conducted in three letter sequences (at minimum). Most people need to hear a message at least seven times before they are receptive to it. If you want to get through to your target audience, repetition is key.
This article should serve as motivation. If you are going to do some law firm marketing, you owe it to yourself to do it correctly. Put together an action plan that includes law firm marketing and then TAKE ACTION. Give it 100% and you will be surprised and amazed by the results.
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Do you feel like you need to offer a free consultation?
Isn’t that part of law firm marketing 101?
No it is not. In fact, it is terrible law firm marketing.
Free advice is worth what you pay for it.
If you want to do anything for free, have an administrative assistant or an associate interview the prospective client to see if they qualify to work with you.
Yes. I know. Your competitors all offer free consultations. They all sit with clients for an hour at a time and listen to their tale of woe. They empathize and then, if they are lucky, the client signs up with them.
Did they teach that in law school? Was the class called; “How to be a doormat?”
The lawyers I work with do not give free consultations. They realize the value of their time and they demand clients respect it.
This is one of the easiest changes to make in your law firm yet it gives so many attorneys anguish. I am not sure why. Maybe it is insecurity or maybe it is fear of the competition.
If you do none of the other things I recommend on this website, at least start charging for consultations.
And so that you know that I remain congruent with my own advice: I charge $1,500 for a consultation. But that payment can be applied to any subsequent work we do together.
Few people waste my time. But you don’t have to be a law firm marketing expert to have people respect your time.
If you want people to respect you, you must respect yourself. That starts with respecting your most valuable resource, your time.
Law Firm Marketing Plan Starts With Client Selection
Most attorneys do not link their law firm to their lifestyle so linking their law firm marketing to their overall life design is not even in the realm of possibility.
Before I start sounding like someone you would see on Oprah, let me explain what I am getting at:
Your work should enable you to live the kind of life you want. For example: If you want to spend every Friday with your kids, then you should come up with a plan to be able to take Friday’s off. If you only want to work on certain types of matters you should come up with a plan to source only the kinds of clients who have the type of work you are seeking.
If this sounds a bit far-fetched to you, you are too close to the situation to be objective.
Take a deep breath and think about why you started your own practice (or why you assumed your current role) in the first place.
You work to live you do not live to work.
Here is how law firm marketing can help you achieve your goal of developing a practice that will fulfill your lifestyle needs:
Law firm marketing is a broad term for the systems you put in place to attract and retain clients. As with any system, if you put garbage in, you get garbage out. If you put nothing in, you get nothing out.
The first step in developing a law firm marketing system that will help enable you to build a fulfilling law practice is to decide who your ideal client is.
Once you have targeted the ideal client, you can then lay out the necessary steps to attract and retain the ideal client.
And herein lies the problem.
Most attorneys never get beyond this step. Most lawyers cannot decide who their ideal client is, or should be.
Take a few minutes right now and think about the clients you have worked with over the last few years. Who were ideal? What qualities did they possess? What type of matters did they bring you? What made those matters better than others you have worked on?
Answering these questions is step one in reshaping your law firm. You need to know who to target before you develop a law firm marketing plan to attract them.
Law Firm Marketing is Your First Step Toward Freedom
Sometimes success can be overwhelming.
Many of the lawyers who implement my recommendations find themselves inundated with new clients inside of a year. This success leads to additional recommendations that are much harder to follow.
Meaning: I instruct busy attorneys to hire associates to take care of most of their clients (do the legal work) and simultaneously to increase the fees they charge clients who work directly with them. The associates should bill at a lower rate than the partner - who presumably has significantly greater experience, skills, knowledge and some kind of unique ability.
A good portion of my clients resist acting on this advice. This resistance stems from two specific fears:
1). Attorneys fear they will lose the clients they currently have and
2). They fear appearing different when compared to everyone else who does what they do.
Both of these fears inhibit the growth of the law firm. Both are as deadly as a bullet fired from a gun.
Here’s why:
Raising fees for new clients may result in a decrease in volume. The clients who choose not to pay your fee do not appreciate the value of working with you. They do not want the guidance and support of a true expert. Rest assured new and better clients will fill the vacuum created by the absence of these shortsighted individuals.
Appearing different is what marketing is all about. Your difference is a competitive advantage.
Most attorneys are sheep marching silently and compliantly into the slaughterhouse of the fee-cutting-client. If you provide more value, and you present that value in a unique way, you stand out from the flock. Not only do you avoid slaughter, but you establish ownership of your own flock. And if you are smart, you harvest wool from your sheep multiple times instead of slaughtering them once.
But this is old news. You have heard this from me before.
Yet you did not take action.
I realized something important a couple of years ago. I was speaking at an event and I was passionately advocating that attorneys raise their fees and fire problem clients. After I was finished with my speech, an attorney came up to me and informed me that she wanted to do everything I described. She wanted to attract valuable clients for life and she wanted to charge premium fees and she wanted to have an exclusive practice with fewer, more valuable clients.
But she didn’t know where to start.
She did not know what the first steps were or how to take them.
That was my fault. I had not been clear about specifically how to make this change in your law firm and develop the practice you deserve.
So I made a change. I did something I had never done before.
I took the information I use to help my clients get started and I packaged it into a system that not only shows you what to do but how to do it. I felt like this was my responsibility. I wanted to give you a cost effective way to get off to a fast start in building the law firm you truly deserve.
This is the exact system, with the exact recommendations that I follow. It works. In fact, I guarantee that it will work for you.
If you want to take a look at it, you can find it by clicking on this Legal Marketing Fast Start link.
Why does this fast start system work?
Because it allows you to make small, incremental changes to your law firm marketing each day. You move at your own pace.
Of course the faster you act, the more clients you attract.
If you seriously want to improve the quality of the clients you attract and you want to grow your law practice and you want to develop the kind of law firm you deserve, you need to take action.
What are you going to do today to take your practice to the next level?
Take that first step now. I want to help, but it really is up to you.
Please note that the reason I want you to visit http://LegalMarketingFastStart.com now is because the investment in this system will increase dramatically in a couple of weeks. If you have ever thought about making a quantum leap in your law practice, now is the time.
The True Key to Success with Lawyer Marketing
You might be surprised to find out the true key to success with lawyer marketing is not some fancy technique you learn from a wise old man. It is not some skill learned at a seminar or at a retreat. It is not even a new media that has burst on to the scene and captivated hundreds of millions of users.
The true key to success with lawyer marketing is persistence.
That’s right.
Persistence can get you all the clients you will ever need. Here are three examples:
Writing
If you like to write and you are good at writing you can create an endless flow of clients by personally syndicating your writing. This means that you develop your own newsletter and send it out to your audience regularly. If you do this consistently for six months and you are persistent about growing your list of subscribers, you will develop business. The key is to stick with it.
Speaking
It does not matter if you are a great speaker or a terrible speaker you can develop business by speaking. Even speaking to local civic groups can be beneficial. The key to success in getting business from speaking is to be persistent in follow-up after the speaking event. If you continuously stay in the face of people you have spoken to, you will source clients.
Networking
People must know you like you and trust you before they will refer business to you. Developing this type of relationship requires persistence. You must get in front of these people over and over again before they will put their trust in you. If you can manage to do this, referrals will come.
There is no quality more valuable in lawyer marketing than persistence. If you want to build a growing and sustainable law firm you must be persistent in your efforts.
Legal Marketing and the Danger of Not Doing Your Homework
Few people worry about the facts anymore. Not just in legal marketing but in life. Case in point: Just the other day I was flabbergasted when I heard someone I respect say:
“I don’t understand what the big deal about this oil rig explosion is. There are thousands of them out there. One blows up and the media goes crazy.”
I guess my friend didn’t realize that enough oil was spewing from that hole in the sea floor to equal the Exxon Valdez disaster EVERY FOUR DAYS.
I am trying to make the point that most people leap to a conclusion without knowing the facts.
This is just as true in legal marketing as it is anywhere else. I see lawyers investing in billboards, bus stop benches and TV ads without giving any thought to how they will measure the success of those media.
They sign long term website contracts without doing any homework on exactly what they are purchasing. They take advice from people who claim to be experts without ever checking out their credentials.
Do a little homework. Take a little time and look into things before you give up the hard earned bucks. Legal marketing is an investment. As the commercial says, invest wisely.
Marketing and The Three Kinds of Law Firms
About half of the lawyers in the United States have some form of ownership interest in their law firm. Both by choice and by chance they find themselves in the position of starting a business, attracting clients and providing a service. While some of these folks are better suited for business ownership than others, all of them are filled with hope for the future.
In the past few years I have personally met with or spoken with over 1,000 of these lawyers. Each of them has some degree of fear of the unknown, each of them has some level of confidence in their ability to practice law and each of them still has hope for their future earning potential. Where they differ is in their reasons for being a law firm owner. Some became law firm owners by chance some became law firm owners out of necessity and some became law firm owners out of pure ambition.
When we first meet I ask them what kind of a law firm they want to build. This question puzzles most lawyers. It is akin to asking: “Where do you see yourself in five years?” Most people don’t have a clue. They have not given any thought to next month, so looking out five years is something that makes them uncomfortable.
Since this question requires some thought, and since answering it is a healthy exercise for anyone who owns a law firm, I have prepared a brief summary of the three types of law firms for you. Read through them. Reflect upon them and decide which best fits the plans you have for your future.
The Temporary Law Firm
This is where your law firm serves as a transitional vehicle at various points during your career. You may have been laid off from a job in a big law firm and you want to find another job in a big law firm. Since those jobs take time to find, you set up a legal entity and you help the people you know with legal work.
These lawyers spend about 75% of their time looking for their next job. While they focus their attention on the few matters they actually handle, they never focus the direction of their practice (because it is just temporary). This leads to a great deal of uncertainty and frustration.
If this is you, I encourage you to dedicate yourself to building a book of business. Even a small roster of clients will help you land a job at a large firm. It is easier for a firm to make the decision to hire you if you come with clients who will fund your salary. Once you make the decision to focus on this task with 100% of your effort, you will be amazed at how things seem to come together. No matter what you decide to do in the long run, having a book of business is helpful and necessary.
The Lifestyle Law Firm
Starting a law firm is a great way to control your own destiny. Many lawyers go out on their own because they want to live life on their terms. They love the law and they love helping clients but they also love spending time with their family. Income is important to the lawyers who start a Lifestyle Law Firm but it is a means to an end.
A Lifestyle Law Firm is usually focused on one or two tightly defined market niches. This allows the lawyer to command a fee premium because of his experience. Generally there are less than ten people working in this type of law firm. It will often have a family feel to it and compensation for everyone is, in some way, tied to the financial performance of the firm.
Lawyers in a Lifestyle Law Firm can spend as little as 20-30 percent of their time on business development and still do well (depending upon their practice area). Most of the attorneys who build this kind of law firm live well and enjoy what they do.
I work with lawyers who want a Lifestyle Law Firm to make their vision a reality. We carefully review their goals and we develop a plan that allows them to grow at a comfortable pace. Business and personal goals are often intertwined as this is important to the lawyers who build Lifestyle Law Firms.
The Enterprise
This is a law firm for the attorney who is highly ambitious, aggressive and has a desire to build something that will last beyond his lifetime. This is going to be a full blown business with employees, administrative issues and management challenges. The lawyer who builds an Enterprise is going to spend 80-90 percent of his time on business development and management. At some point practicing law will not be an option.
The greatest benefit of creating an Enterprise is wealth accumulation. Just like creating any other business, a big law business can enrich the owner and eventually be sold. I caution anyone who wants to undertake this challenge that it takes a special type of person to lead this charge. Few people come through the development of an Enterprise with their lives, health and family in the same form as when they made the decision to begin this task. Building this type of law firm requires time, energy and dedication.
I help lawyers who build Enterprise practices by focusing them on controlled growth. We put a plan in place and we aggressively attack each challenge while minimizing the drama that can often accompany the growth of a large firm.
Start by Making a Decision
You will notice that no matter which kind of law firm you decide to develop it all begins with a decision. You must decide what you want from your law firm. You can use your law practice to get a job, to have a great life or to build something bigger than you. But first you must make a decision to get going.
If you need help deciding which option is right for you or if you know what you want and you need help getting it, call my office. We understand the business of law and we help lawyers make it work for them.
Add Attorney Marketing to Your Daily Routine
Most of us have a ritual we perform to get our day started. We have a cup of coffee, read the paper, exercise and then get dressed for the day. If you want to be successful at attorney marketing you must add it to your daily ritual. It needs to become ingrained in your routine.
Sitting down to write an article for your blog each day requires only 20 minutes. Writing a hand written note to someone you met with last week requires about 2 minutes. Making a phone call to leave a message for someone requires about 45 seconds. All of these things qualify as attorney marketing and they help your law firm grow. Yet you keep using the excuse that you have no time. Why?
Here is how simple adding attorney marketing to your daily routine can be: Wake up. Exercise. Have breakfast. Write a blog article no more than 500 words. Shower and get dressed. That is not difficult.
The hardest part is getting started. After about two weeks it will become a habit. After a month the writing will seem easier. After a few months you won’t even realize you are doing anything different.
Here are a few things you can do to begin to integrate attorney marketing into your daily routine:
1). Decide what you are going to write about (on your blog, in an article you are pitching to a reporter, etc.) in advance. Make a list of several topics. This will stimulate the process when you write.
2). Wake up, drink your coffee and write a draft of your article. Set the article down for a few minutes.
3). Write a hand written note to someone you met with last week.
4). Make a phone call (leave a message) to a referral source to set up a lunch meeting for later in the month.
5). Finalize your article and post it to your blog or email it to the person you are pitching it to.
Those are five simple things that will take you about an hour to do (maybe a little longer when you are first starting). That’s integrating attorney marketing into your daily routine. Any reason why you can do something similar is just an excuse.
We all find time for the things that are important to us. Isn’t it time marketing became important to you?
Marketing for Attorneys: Powerful Positioning Techniques
A few days ago I posted a video about legal marketing and positioning on my other blog. It was intended to be a reminder that you control the perception you clients have of you. When I think about marketing for attorneys the first thing I think about is positioning. Simply put, positioning is the perception the client has of you.
Here are a few ways to position yourself in the mind of your clients:
Never Take Walk-ins
Think about the kind of person that just shows up somewhere and expects you to see him. Is this going to be a high value client? Is this someone who respects your time? Even barbershops require an appointment (well, the good ones do). Taking walk-ins makes you look desperate.
Charge a Consultation Fee
Do not let people waste your time. People respect what they pay for. People will assign the value to your time that you assign to it. You need to tell them what your time is worth. If the client hires you after the consultation, you can credit the consultation fee toward the engagement investment.
Never Negotiate the Cost of Your Services
Your work costs what you say it costs. You must have integrity in your fee structure. People haggle at an auction. They can have a good attorney or they can have a bad attorney. The decision is theirs. Why should you accommodate them by charging what lesser attorneys charge? Are you going to represent them less zealously if they pay less? Never negotiate fees.
These are just three ways to influence the perception your client has of you. You should structure your marketing so that even the smallest items positively influence the client’s perception. This is what marketing for attorneys is all about.
Who Are the People Around You?
Have you ever wondered why some people always achieve excellence in everything they do? We have all come across people who, no matter what life throws at them, always seem to succeed. Sure they take some lumps from time to time. Yes, they have an occasional setback. But ultimately, they are winners.
There are many things you can do to elevate your performance as an attorney. There are literally dozens of things you can do to help advance your career or grow your law practice. There is one thing that may just be more important than all others. There is one thing that truly separates the good from the great.
That one thing is the people who surround you. I’m talking about the people who you allow into your life both personally and professionally. I’m not talking about your family. You don’t get to pick them. I am talking about your friends and business associates. If you want to fulfill your potential both as an attorney and as a person, you need to surround yourself with people who are better, smarter, and quicker than you.
Reverse Peer Pressure
Peer pressure is that thing our parents always warned us about. As an attorney looking to grow a law firm, surrounding yourself with peers who are smart, aggressive, ethical lawyers is a great way to stimulate your personal growth.
Surrounding yourself with successful business people gives you a competitive advantage. It opens your eyes to new ideas beyond the paradigm of the legal world. It keeps you focused on what is working in the world of your clients. It makes you sharp and keeps you on the cutting edge.
Each of us is judged by the company we keep. I am not talking about perception. I am talking about something real. Something more important. Your growth and the growth of your law firm. Look at any attorney whose law firm has stopped growing and you will find that they are surrounded by stagnant people.
Avoid Feeding Your Own Ego
It’s human nature. We all want to be the smartest, most successful person in the room. But that kind of thinking is a recipe for failure. I would rather be the dumbest person in a room full of geniuses than be a genius in a room full of dummies.
Go out and make a list of the successful people you know but have not interacted with in a while (if ever). Pursue them like a high school girl pursues a matinee idol. Establish a relationship with them and learn as much as you can.
Things that do not grow (intellectually or physically) begin to die. Said another way…
The day you stop learning is the day you stop earning…
Surround yourself with excellence and you will shape your destiny.
