Monday

Why LinkedIn Should Matter to You: Using Social Media

For the new generation of lawyers and law firms, using social media will be a key part of their marketing strategy. That is particularly true of LinkedIn since it caters to professionals.

The Legal Intelligencer has posted a short, less than 5 minute, introductory video to the use of social media that marketer Gina Rubel presented at a seminar. Nicely done, it gives you a brief overview of LinkedIn and other social media.

It's well worth the watch. You can view it here: http://www.law.com/jsp/pa/PubArticlePA.jsp?id=1202461733777&src=EMC-Email&et=editorial&bu=The%20Legal%20Intelligencer&pt=TLI%20AM%20Legal%20Alert&cn=TLI_AM_LegalAlert_20100621&kw=Why%20LinkedIn%20Matters%20for%20Law%20Firms

One click back in the url will take you to a list of other informative videos that are worth a look, each on different topics. While the site is heavy on the home town lawyer scene of Pennsylvania, it has lots of articles and posts that apply to the legal industry in general. It's "Today's Headlines" feed is one of my regular subscriptions and the entire site is worth a look-see.

Ms. Rubel is right to tout the advantages of LinkedIn and other social media. Learning to use it well is the one great advantage that young lawyers and upstart law firms have in the ever-competitive legal services industry.

Ron Burdge
Helping lawyers build their success since 1978.

Sunday

11 Ways to Avoid Being a Workaholic

Yesterday we talked about where Father's Day came from, with a big thanks to Ernest Oriente for the feed on that.

Today reminded us that too many long work days prevent too many fathers from appreciating what they are blessed with every day, so we're going to suggest all you fathers out there take a look at these 11 Creative Ways to Avoid Becoming a Workaholic from Tammy Strobel of Rowdy Kittens.

She's got some very good pointers on why you shouldn't work constantly, even when you think you need to. It's very easy to think that the task at hand, any job task, is a crisis that needs all your attention at the moment. The reality is, we suspect, that every crisis is only a crisis because someone else says so.

It's never too late to get ahold of your life and slow down to enjoy the joys that exist around you. Today's a good day for that. Tammy Strobel's article can help you get a grip on every day so we heartily recommend it to all you workaholics out there.

Friday

Where Father's Day Comes From


The post below is with our thanks to Ernest Oriente, a long time friend and mentor and coach, for this reminder on where the day came from, on which we honor our fathers.

The idea for an official Father's Day celebration came to a married daughter, seated in a church in Spokane, Washington, attentive to a Sunday sermon on Mother's Day in 1910-two years after the first Mother's Day observance in West Virginia.

The daughter was Mrs. Sonora Smart Dodd. During the sermon, which extolled maternal sacrifices made for children, Mrs. Dodd realized that in her own family it had been her father, William Jackson Smart, a Civil War veteran, who had sacrificed-raising herself and five sons alone, following the early death of his wife in childbirth. For Mrs. Dodd, the hardships her father had endured on their eastern Washington farm called to mind the unsung feats of fathers everywhere.

Her proposed local Father's Day celebration received strong support from the town's ministers and members of the Spokane YMCA. The date suggested for the festivities, June 5th, Mrs. Dodd's father's birthdays were three weeks away-had to be moved back to the nineteenth when ministers claimed they need extra time to prepare sermons on such a new subject as Father.

Newspapers across the country, already endorsing the need for a national Mother's Day, carried stories about the unique Spokane observance. Interest in Father's Day increased. Among the first notables to support Mrs. Dodd's idea nationally was the orator and political leader William Jennings Bryan, who also backed Mother's Day. Believing that fathers must not be slighted, he wrote to Mrs. Dodd, "too much emphasis cannot be placed upon the relation between parent and child."

Father's Day, however, was not so quickly accepted as Mother's Day.

Members of the all-male Congress felt that a move to proclaim the day official might be interpreted as a self-congratulatory pat on the back.

In 1916, President Woodrow Wilson and his family personally observed the day. And in 1924, President Calvin Coolidge recommended that states, if they wished, should hold their own Father's Day observances. He wrote to the nation's governors that "the widespread observance of this occasion is calculated to establish more intimate relations between fathers and their children, and also to impress upon fathers the full measure of their obligations."

Many people attempted to secure official recognition for Father's Day. One of the most notable efforts was made in 1957, by Senator Margaret Chase Smith, who wrote forcefully to Congress that "Either we honor both our parents, mother and father, or let us desist from honoring either one. But to single out just one of our two parents and omit the other is the most grievous insult imaginable."

Eventually, in 1972-sixty-two years after it was proposed-Father's Day was permanently established by President Richard Nixon.

Historians seeking an ancient precedent for an official Father's Day observance have come up with only one: The Romans, every February, honored fathers-but only those deceased.

In America today, Father's Day is the fifth-largest card-sending occasion, with about 85 million greeting cards exchanged. Don't forget to send a card and make a call. Every day matters, but especially this day.

Thursday

Resources for Lawyer Entrepreneurs

Being your own boss can be tough. But there are resources that can help you run your law practice and here are a few, alphabetically listed.

American Marketing Association, www.marketingpower.com. Marketing seminars, advertising tips, and free online resources.

Attorney Fee Survey Data, www.consumerlaw.org/feesurvey. Find out what attorney fee hourly rates are in your area, along with other data, and you can participate in the current fee survey too.

Benefits Link, www.benefitslink.com. Info and resources about the laws and regulations governing employee benefits. Educational seminars too.

Business Plan Center, www.businessplans.org. Sample business plans for all sorts of businesses, as well as software and guidelines for your business.

Club E, www.clubenetwork.com. Podcasts, interviews, and forums. And it's free. Plus, there's info on live local meetings.

Entrepreneur, www.entrepreneur.com. Guides, tips, articles, columns from experts for every type of business.

Entrepreneur Connect, www.econnect.entrepreneur.com. An online community of business owners who post questions, discuss answers, and share business experiences.

Independent Community Bankers of America, www.icba.org. Sometimes a local community bank is easier for an entrepreneur to work with than those large, multistate banks with Wall Street boards to report to. Here, you can find a smaller, local bank near you.

Score, www.score.org. A non profit organization whose members use their decades of experience to help new entrepreneurs (and any business person) with mentoring and counseling on business issues and problems.

Small Business Administration, www.sba.gov. Yes, it's the government. But they've got tons of info, business tools, plus grants and loans, lots of business tips, and links to Small Business Development Centers nationwide. And, since it's the government, it's free too.

Strategy Stew, www.strategystew.com. Practical marketing strategies for small business. Perhaps technically a blog and not a website, it's still got great ideas and lots of fun to read.

There are other resources that you may be able to dig up, but this list covers the basic resources that any lawyer entrepreneur should check out when you are looking for free help with the business side of your law practice.

Friday

Chicago Seminar Links May 2010

The following are links to articles discussed or used at the Chicago & Columbus Seminar Series in May 2010 on Consumer Law Issues. This list is in no particular order at all. Each link is followed by a description of the document found at the link. Also, you will need to cut and paste the link to your web browser (the links are not "active" from this list for security reasons). Should you find any link not working for you, please contact the author, Ron@TheLawCoach.com, and the article can be sent directly to you. This link list will be deleted on or after May 30, 2010.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6160661/A%20FORM%20Corr%20Atty%20Fin%20Settlement%20Only%20032509.pdf

This is the link to the form letter advising financiers of a settlement offer being made under the FTC Holder Rule.


http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6160661/FTC%20Rule%20Explained.pdf

This is the link to the citation and definitions applicable for the FTC Holder Rule.


http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6160661/2%20Running%20a%20Successful%20Practice.pdf

This is the link to the article on Running a Successful Law Practice.


http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6160661/8%20How%20to%20Strengthen%20Your%20Claim%20for%20Atty%20Fees%20041610.pdf

This is the link to the article on How to Strengthen Your Claim for Attorney Fees in a fee shifting case.


http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6160661/Practicing%20Six%20Sigma%20Consumer%20Law%20to%20Achieve%20Better%20Fee%20Awards.pdf

This is a link to the article on efficiencies in law practice.


http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6160661/1%20FORM%20I%20dont%20believe%20that%20you%20and%20I%20have%20dealt%20with%20each%20other%20before%20Clause%20072107.pdf

This is a link to the clauses of the first settlement letter to a new defense attorney that has no experience with you firm and who you want to warn that the settlement offers in your fee shifting practice is not handled like a personal injury practice.


http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6160661/1%20FORM%20Ron%27s%20Timeslip%20Revised%20011110.pdf

This link is to a standard all-inclusive time slip form for law office use.


http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6160661/A%20FORM%20Startup%20Time%20Sheet.pdf

This link is for the time lip form used at case start up in a law office, to record on one form all start up activities.


http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6160661/PROCESS%20How%20to%20Write%20a%20Letter%20to%20a%20Client%20041408.pdf

This link is to an article on How to Write a Letter to a Client, intended for new lawyers but useful tips for more established lawyers too.


http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6160661/The%20Spartan%20and%20the%20Trial%20Lawyer.pdf

This link is to an article on the value to a trial attorney of never giving up, even in the face of a strong defense.


http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6160661/US%20Consumer%20Law%20Attorney%20Fee%20Survey%202008-9%202nd%20Ed%203.pdf

Link to the latest version of the national US Consumer Law Attorney Fee Survey report, including more detail and data than is found in the regional reports that are separately published on the NCLC website.

Dropbox is Cool Tool for Syncing Docs on Multiple Computers

If you have a file on your desktop that you want to be able to work on from your laptop, or you want to be able to review from your smartphone, what do you do? Print it off and take it with you? That is just so 1990's. Well, there's an app for that, of course. It's called Dropbox and it works simply and beautifully.

The last few weeks we've been working on some presentation materials for some seminars coming up. Sometimes working at home, sometimes at the office, and sometimes while waiting for a court session to start. And every time, we were working on the same document and didn't need to update the copies that were stored on different devices or computers. That's what Dropbox does.

Dropbox is an internet service that has only one job. It will synchronize the contents of a single folder on multiple computers so that the contents of that folder are always the same. If you save a file in the Dropbox at work, it will show up on every other computer where you have installed Dropbox.

And if you left your laptop at home, you can use any laptop to access your Dropbox over the internet. Of course, there's an iphone app for it too.

The service is free and has a moderate cost above 2GB. But 2GB will hold a lot of documents, powerpoints, spreadsheets, etc. Folks, if you move around a lot and need to have portable docs with you that are up to date, this is one perfect way to do it.

Ron Burdge
Helping Lawyers Helping Their Clients, Since 1978

List of Social Networking Sites for Lawyers


While the jury is still out, so to speak, on the actual value of social networking for lawyers on professional sites, it is still something to consider and may have considerable value for networking and referrals. To help you understand the possibilities and investigate the issue on your own, here are some of the more popular social networking sites for attorneys.

If you launch into the social networking arena, remember the golden rule: keep work social networking focused on work and stay away from the personal stuff. Also, it's a good idea to check out some of the pages already posted on these sites by other law firms before setting up your own.

http://www.facebook.com/ is widely used by everyone who isn't a lawyer and some lawyers too. The formal is personal but can easily be turned into a professional page and has with it lots of options for privacy.

http://www.lawlink.com/ is common for information sharing and networking among attorneys. You can apply or be invited to join so there is some "vetting" of the authenticity of the participants. You can find legal news, some groups, ads, and forums. Document sharing is big here.

http://www.legalonramp.com/ touts itself as focused on collaboration, but then that's what underlies all social networking sites anyway. The difference here, though, is that LegalOnRamp requires it. For instance, just to get in the door you have to specifiy what knowledge you would like to share with others in the LegalOnRamp community. Some news and blog posts are visible to nonmembers so you do have the chance to build your reputation, but that is more of a side benefit to this site because its real focus is on developing relationships between attorneys.

http://www.linkedin.com/ is the most common social network site for legal professionals. Huge amounts of lawyers on members. It's easy to create a profile and to connect with others. Odds are that at least half of the lawyers in every big city are members here and you probably will recognize names right away. If you join anything, at least join this one.

www.Martindale.com/join.aspx is the "Martindale-Hubbell Connected" networking site and its purpose is obviously both for networking with other atttorneys and creating visibility for potential clients. The company has been around for what seems like forever, so their credability is well established. They offer an easy format with lots of optional additional "add-on's" like blogs, forums, groups, directories, Q&A, and more.

http://www.twitter.com/ does have lots of business and law firm members but their mainstream is the lay public. Still there are law firms, law libraries, government officials, and lots of business leaders on the service. It requires more of a committment to "tweet" your short messages on various topics and using it for promotional purposes of specific legal services, one at a time perhaps, may be its best use for the legal profession.

More and more attorneys are using social networking as a tool for marketing themselves and their practice so maybe it's time for you to get started or to expand too. Before starting, think about what you want to do carefully. Create a cohesive networking presence that you "tweak" to fit each networking site's best capabilities and its target audience. And check your law firm's Social Networking Policy as well as your state's ethics rules for guidance.

Ron Burdge
Helping attorneys help their clients, since 1978.

Wednesday

Social Media Policies Made Easy


If your firm has a policies and procedures manual, good. That puts you ahead of a lot of other law firms. But, does it also cover employee use of internet social media?

Less than a third of US employers have one, so odds are your firm is overlooking it too. But your firm needs it to protect itself and to protect your people. Mashable has a good explanation of why you may need a law firm social media policy, click here.

With all the social network sites out there, it's almost impossible to prevent an employee's workplace from being linked up with the employee's identity, even if the employee tries hard to never let it happen. There are steps the firm can take to minimize the problem.

There's a free resource you can tap to quickly and easily create a social media policy for your firm, one that fits exactly what you want. It's quick. It's easy. And best of all, right now it's free.

Do you want your employees to refer back to the firm when they are tweeting, etc? Well, they might be and you might never know it. And do you want to require them to keep it social and not discuss work activities or personnel? There's a policy for that.

Business lawyer David Canton and his friends at rTraction have created an internet web site where you can answer a few quick questions and, presto, you've got a Social Media Policy for your firm. You can even email it to yourself for quick and easy firm distribution or to cut and paste it into your manual at work.

PolicyTool.net generates custom corporate social media policies based on your answers to questions online. In just a few minutes, you're done. We strongly recommend you give it a try.

Helping attorneys practice law profitably, since 1978.

Monday

"Terms of Use" Page Can Protect Your Web Site Content

We continue to be surprised by the number of lawyers who don't take the simplest of steps to protect the content of their web sites from being plagiarized and outright stolen. And it is so easy to protect yourself.


If you spend dozens (or hundreds) of hours and thousands of dollars creating content for your web site, why not take a few minutes and protect it? Gordon & Doner learned the value of a little self-protection when they found an impersonator had copies their entire website and claimed it as their own, which can lead to your clients going elsewhere for legal help without them or you even knowing it.

Just adding a small "copyright by [insert your name here]" won't do you much good. You need a "Terms of Use" page on your website, with clear links to it from every page on your site.

Consider this page a sort of contract between you and your website visitor which states what the visitor can and can not do if they are going to use your website. While some writers fill them up with legalese, others take the plain and straight forward approach. Do what works for you, but do it.

The terms restrict how the website visitor can use your website in every sense, but perhaps its greatest value is now rooted in the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, a federal law that lets you use your terms of use to act offensively by either prosecuting individuals for wrongdoing that comes from a violation of the terms or to seek civil penalties or remedies for legal injuries from what actually amounts to a breach of contract.

But don't use just any old boilerplate language. You can find lots of examples online (Google lists 192 million returns for "terms of use sample"), but then write your own terms of use contract to fit your particular site and the risks or uses that are relevant to it.

To be enforceable, the terms of use must be easily seen and understood. That means conspicuous and clearly written to state conduct that is and is not authorized. While you may not legally be required to put a link on all your website pages, at least one court has said that the terms of use are adequately communicated to your website visitor if the terms can be accessed from all the pages. Not sure? Then put a link everywhere.

Oh, and if you suspect someone has copied your content or used your site data or content in violation of your terms of use contract, then act on it. Like any other contract, if you are lazy about enforcement in the face of a knowing violation, it can amount to a waiver.

The Terms of Use page on your web site can protect your site content from being stolen. But it's up to you to make sure of it everyday. How? You can, of course, always run a search using a few specific phrases that come from your site content and then carefully look at the pages that show up.

If you've never done it, you'll very likely be surprised at how much of your content has already been "adapted" to someone else's web site use. If you can prove it's your's then ask them to take down the plagiarized content. If they dispute that they got it from you, your techie can probably do some forensic work on the web site host computer and tell you if they visited your site. It could well be worth it.

Ron Burdge
Helping lawyers improve their business since 1978.
To read the Burdge Law Office sites' Terms of Use page, click here.

Sunday

7 Tips to solidify your law firm finances

We're continuing our series on how to improve your business. Today we'll talk about 7 things you should do to solidify your financial status. The good news is that if you made it through 2009 then the odds are your business will survive. Now that the recession is starting to ease up, the objective should be to make sure your business gets as healthy as possible, as fast as possible. Here's some tips.

1. Cut costs and add to efficiency. Yes, I know you did that. Now keep doing it.Look at your current suppliers and see if you are getting the best deals possible in the marketplace. Examine your routine practices again and see if the are adding to your profitability or are they just one more step someone has to accomplish without really adding a profit to your bottom line. And take another look (maybe for the first time?) at off shore opportunities for specific and routine task accomplishments that can be done cheaper and maybe more efficiently.

2. Take advantage of ready cash chances. If you have an intake staff that screens your cases or does other preliminary "prep" work on a file, consider incentivizing the workload so your people get the new cases in faster and more efficiently. Look at where your most profitable work is and market that area of your practice more aggressively. For paying cases, don't just charge interest for late payment but offer a reduction for early payment of legal services. And use slow time as an opportunity to provide current clients with more timely updates on the status of their files.

3. Reframe your budget. You do have one, right? Well go over it again to refine your cash flow and bills-to-pay projections. You've got a bad year's worth of numbers now so you should have a better idea of what to expect for both income and expenses as the marketplace picks up. And if you are looking at your numbers monthly, then start looking biweekly. Use slow times as a chance to better understand and know your numbers for rebounding and continuing profitability.

4. Watch client credit. If you don't get paid in advance, then you are advancing credit to your clients in the form of your time expended. So, watch your credit closely. give your best service to those clients who pay the bill promptly and without dispute. They matter to your next paycheck more than any others do. And be careful what new clients you take on. Just as last year was no time to take on a heavy load of long-term contingency cases, this year is not yet the time to stop worrying about paying clients either.

5. Rethink your practice areas and fee structures. If you took on a new practice area last year to help your cash flow, now is the time to look at the numbers that resulted and decide if it worked or if you need to do something else. And look at your hourly rates in your different areas of practice. One of the best ways to increase your income is to simply make a slight increase in your hourly rates. Another way is to shift some of your conventionally overhead costs into client paying costs. Rethink what you can do to advance menu selling in your practice too.

6. Keep managing your money tightly. Now that your general account is a little healthier, don't splurge. This is not the time to loosen your grip. Use "just in time" buying practices for your supplies and external services from third parties. And don't let client bills get behind. Times are still tight for everybody so some clients will still prolong payment of their legal bills. When it happens to you, stop working. Don't throw good billable time after an uncollectable client.

7. Get rid of unprofitable assets, including people if necessary. Chances are you already have looked at this aspect during the last year. Well, keep looking. If your law practice is to survive and prosper, you have to make sure your people remain productive and work cost-effectively. The economy isn't great yet and it may be months (some say years) before it gets there again. This continues to be the time to let go of unproductive or unprofitable or inefficient hard and soft assets. If an area of law isn't in your "core" practice, then consider dumping it.

Things are a little better than they were 6 months ago and, for some, maybe even a year ago. But this is no time to forget the hard lessons learned in the last year. Now is the time to begin to profit from them.

Ron Burdge
Helping lawyers understand the business of law, since 1978.

Thursday

Have You Googled Yourself Lately?

Well, you should. And you should do it regularly. Not only do you want to know what is being said out there on the internet about you, but you want to make sure there are no "fake" web sites set up to steal your info and your clients.

That's what one law firm discovered recently.

Gordon & Doner, a Palm Beach Gardens personal injury law firm, discovered that virtually their entire web site at www.fortheinjured.com had been copied and reposted on GoDaddy.com by an unknown person, choicefully changing certain key contact data but not hardly anything else. If you didn't know better, you'd think it was them.

And that was the problem. If you were an injured client in search of the law firm, which one would you trust to be the right one? Likely, you'd give up and go somewhere else.

The fake site supposedly was for maslinassociates.com, a purported law firm in Manchester, England, and was copied wholesale right down to minor phrasing. But names were changed and dollar signs were changed to pounds and the law firm's home city was changed.

The site was up about a month before GoDaddy removed it after the Gordon law firm sued them and "John Doe", the unknown web site copycat culprit, for copyright infringement and everything else a good lawyer can think of, and for good reason. GoDaddy isn't talking. And who knows who John Doe really was. And who knows how much damage was done before it was discovered.

Don't let this happen to you. So how do you protect yourself?

First, search your name and web site phrases periodically to see if your content or your entire site is being used without permission. It also keeps you aware of what others are saying about you. Actually, you can set up a Google Alert that will email you whenever your requested search terms are used and that makes it even easier. How to use Google Alert is explained here: http://www.google.com/alerts

Next. post a copyright notice on every page of your web site. Let there be no misunderstanding about the matter.

Finally, you should also post a "Terms of Use" page that is linked to every page on your website, like this one here: http://www.ohiolemonlaw.com/terms_of_use.html. This is just one example but there are plenty of samples to work with on the internet.

The point is that you want to say you own the site content and you don't allow anyone else to use it without permission and that using your site is an agreement that the site visitor won't do that. Of course, being lawyers, we'll dress up the language into lots more, but that's the basics.
And while you are at it, why not post a disclaimer too. One that says there is no attorney-client relationship except on the stated terms that you will agree to, such as a retainer, etc. It's just good common sense.

Oh, and those Florida lawyers at Gordon & Doner, can you guess how they found out about the fake website that had copied their own site? One of the partners googled his name.

Protect yourself and your property. It's something we lawyers often tell our clients. Don't forget to say it to yourself once in awhile too.

Sunday

Success from Failure

We're continuing our series on improving law office profitability. Today we're looking at the psychology of failure and its relationship to success. Heady sounding stuff, I know, but worthwhile thinking about.

First, a definition or two.

Failure isn't always failure. Sometimes it's just not having as much success as one thought would occur. In marketing your law practice, it's often hard to tell what approach is going to work best. And when it doesn't bear fruit quickly (after all, humans are getting to be a very iimpatient specie), we tend to view the effort as a failure and move on to the next marketing idea. Maybe that's a mistake.

It could be that the "fruit" of that marketing effort just takes more time than we'd like and what we are really looking for is a quicker result. It could also be that it wasn't a failure at all, we just didn't see the success we expected.

There's a great article on this idea of making success out of screw-ups and it just came out. It's in the January 2010 online issue of Wired magazine and, although it's pretty long and filled with lots of neuroscientific stuff. Still, it's worth the time to read all the way to the end. It's here at this link and it's called "Accept Defeat: The Neuroscience of Screwing Up."

It examines how scientists conduct experiments and come up with what at first glance seems to be a failure, a strange result, one that doesn't make any sense at all in view of what they thought would be the result.

That sometimes happens to lawyers too. And not just in their marketing efforts. The point is, however, that the unexpected result may not be a screw up at all. Sometimes there is much more to it than that. And sometimes you have to think outside of the box to see what the result really is.

And that can mean that maybe you should have been thinking outside of the box in the first place, in order to get the result you were after. So, when your next advertising idea comes up, your next marketing thought, take it outside of the box first, before you implement it, and see what it looks like in a different light.

Wierd advertising can work. Unusual marketing ideas can sometimes bear that "fruit" faster and better than the conventional approach to just running more ads on television or radio or in the paper.

As an example of using non-traditional approaches to marketing, there's a personal injury law firm in Ohio that sponsors a county fair (I don't even know how you get to do that), whose lawyers put in time at the local food bank, and whose partners cook at the annual Thanksgiving Day dinner put on by a long-standing charity. The have their usual "lawyer ads" too, but those extra efforts put the firm's name and its lawyers' faces out there in the public constantly too. That's smart marketing.

So the next time you question whether or not the result of your marketing was what you planned for or expected, try to ignore the reactionary thought and question the result more thoughtfully, Maybe the result was not a failure at all. Maybe it was just a different kind of success.

So, maybe you should accept defeat and look at the neuroscience of screwing up as an opportunity to find the success that exists in the screw up. It's probably there someplace.

Ron Burdge
Helping lawyers find success since 1978.

Thursday

iPhone vs All the Rest of Them Comparison Chart

FutureLawyer just posted a link to a great chart that compares the iPhone vs the Droid vs the Palm Pre vs Nexus One here: http://futurelawyer.typepad.com/futurelawyer/2010/01/nexus-one-vs-iphone-3gs-vs-droid-vs-pre-decisions-decisions.html

15 different aspects are covered. Everything from camera megapixel sizes to the cost of phone plans for each.

If you don't know which one to get, this chart can definitely help you decide.

We're back from the holiday break and next time we'll return to our series on things you can do to improve your law practice economics.

Ron Burdge
Helping lawyers help clients, since 1978.

Thursday

Importance of Your Web Site's Fold

Do it above the fold.

We're continuing our series on things you can do to improve your law practice economics. Today, the topic is getting more clients from your web site and specifically the importance of the fold.

Marketers call the fold of your web site the top part of your web site page that shows on the screen. It's much like what they call the "fold" for a newspaper: that part of the page that you see when the paper lays in its normal flat folded position on a table. That's important because most often the only thing that a lot of consumers see is what is "above the fold."

So, if you want to catch the reader's attention, you have to do it above the fold. If a consumer has to scroll down to read content, they won't do it unless you have grabbed their attention above the fold.

Second lesson? Make sure that on every page of your website your contact info appears above the fold too.

Web site visitors are notoriously impatient and sometimes a bit lazy. You have to make it very easy for them to contact you. You may be the right attorney for the job, but if they can't quickly and easily figure out how to reach you, by phone or email or whatever, they'll click on down the road to someone else.

So, do it above the fold. And do it lots of ways.

That means put your toll free phone number up there. Put a contact us link. Put a box for them to fill in info to send you, but keep it short. Put your email address there. Heck, put your regular (toll) phone number there too if you want. Just put lots of "point blank" ways for the visitor to see how to reach you. Make it quick. Make it easy. That way you can make a conversion of a visitor to a client. And it'll help your business too.

Wednesday

Dragon Dictation for the iPhone is Here

Breaking News ... Dragon has just released an iPhone version of its famous dictation software and just days later (like yesterday) they updated it.

The reviews for it are pouring in and everyone seems to love it. If you use Dragon Dictation on your pc, and you've got an iPhone, this is the app to get.

Not only is Dragon a terrific program with a great track record for excellent dictation/interpretation from voice-to-type, but the iPhone app is FREE. How long it lasts for free no one can tell, so get to the iTunes Store and do a search for "Dragon Dictation" and download it right away.

A quick look-see indicates this is not a crippled, half-baked version, either. For instance if it has trouble with a name spelling, it'll check your contact names for a correction. We'll find out more and write a review of our own in the near future.

But for now folks, this is one app that'll be on the "top 10 app" list for every busy dictating lawyer.

Ron Burdge
Helping lawyers do business, since 1978.

7 Killer Methods for Marketing Without Money + # 8


We're continuing our series on things you can do to improve your law practice economics. Today, the topic is getting more clients with marketing and specifically what we think is the #1 web site for terrific marketing tips and ideas --- and it's unusually entertaining too.

The #1 unconventional marketing tv show isn't on tv at all. It's on the web and you can watch it there or download the podcast. In fact, if you don't watch it regularly, you are missing out on great ideas and tons of tips that are free every single week. I subscribe to the iTunes podcast so it downloads automatically whenever I hook up my iPhone. Then on the drive to court (or anywhere else), I plug in the iPhone and start listening to the podcasts.

But these podcasts are so good that I invariably end up watching them at my desk on their website too and making notes on the tips I get out of it for future implementation.

The podcast is called "Help, My Business Sucks" and the web site is http://www.helpmybusiness.com/. Now I like to think my business doesn't quite suck, but with a url name like that, and all the terrific ideas and content on the site, it's no wonder that it gets lots of attention.

Hosted by the admittedly unconventional, but vastly entertaining and lively, Andrew Lock, I heartily recommend that every business person (he calls them entrepreneurs) subscribe to the podcast for easy listening and viewing. But don't forget to visit the website, where you'll find even more info regularly posted and just as regularly updated.

Lock is, quite simply, the single most effective guru in marketing today. And he's fun to listen to.

The site is loaded with tons of valuable content that can kick start your marketing effort or really zoom it up, depending on where you are in the marketing process. There's so much on the site that I can't cover it all here, so you just have to trust me and head over there to see for yourself.

For instance, yesterday I downloaded his publication "7 Killer Methods for Marketing Without Money." It was free, so how could I go wrong? Dig around on the site and you'll find it too, but don't forget to sign up for his free tv show updates, so you don't miss anything.

So, how good were his 7 Killer Methods for Marketing? Well when I read through Andrew's 7 Killer Methods, I smiled when I suddenly realized that they were some of the very things that I was already doing. I just didn't view them as marketing methods but, as Andrew says, "marketing is everything and everything is marketing."

I can vouch for the accuracy of his 7 Killer Methods. They work, folks.

He is dead on with these methods and, best of all, they are free. All it takes is a little of your time and if you do it every day, it will definitely help your business get more clients.

But for lawyers, I'd add this tip as Killer Method #8 to Andrew's list: get on http://www.avvo.com/ and regularly answer the public questions posted there. It's a great way to show your expertiese to the very people who are looking for legal advice. You can even write articles (for both potential clients and potential referring attorneys) and publish them on the Avvo site. Also, you can limit yourself to answering questions just in your geographical area so you can get maximum impact and value for your time.

Okay, so the point is we can all use a little marketing help from time to time and Andrew Lock is one of the best resources out there. If you want to hear the best tips every single week, this is the web site you want to go to and the podcast you want to listen to so you don't waste your time or your money. http://www.helpmybusiness.com/ does just that. And it'll help your business too.

Ron Burdge
Helping attorneys help clients, every day.

Saturday

Knowing the Cost of Clicks on PPC

We're continuing our series on things you can do to improve your law practice economics. Today, the topic is getting more clients and pay per click, or "PPC" as it's sometimes called. The key idea here is how to find out what the web traffic is for particular key words and what they cost so you don't waste your money. There's a web site that will give you that and a lot more and it's free.

There are lots of marketing ideas out there and PPC is one of them. That's where you use one of the search engines own marketing programs to set up a PPC ad. It's really reasy to do and the best part is it's free. At least it is until the clicking starts.

You've seen these PPC ads along the top and side of the screen whenever you have run a search on one of the major web search pages. The ad costs you only when someone clicks on it to activate the hyperlink to your web site. If you use the right key words, the theory is that your ad will show up on the side of search results for those key words.

There's lots of ways to spiff it so that your target viewer is much more narrow, but what we are going to talk about today is a nifty web site that you can use to see what the actual traffic is for some of those key word phrases and what the costs are. Keyword Spy is a terrific site that'll do the job.

It allows you to plug in your key word phrase and pick a country and then it'll return to you the stats for that phrase and others like it. You can quickly see just how many people are running searches and using that key word phrase and the others that are like it. Best part? They also tell you the current cost per click (called "CPC") too.

Let's take, for instance, "Lemon Law." As of this writing, there are 35 PPC advertisers using that phrase and the CPC is $18.27 and in the US there are 201,000 searches using that phrase each month.

Another great thing about KeywordSpy is that they show you, graphically, the last ten months of stats too.

Even better, with one click you can get the background info on those 35 PPC advertisers who are using the Lemon Law phrase. With that info you can see a screenshot of their website, domain name, their PPC budget in CPC terms, the number of PPC keywords their site uses and the number of perceived PPC competitors along with even more info. It's a gold mine for marketers trying to figure out the most cost effective way of using their internet PPC dollars.

With another click you can actually read the PPC ads and get an idea of the "return on investment" of the wording, which KeywordSpy calculates for you. Another click gives you the related keywords. Or misspelled keywords. And there's lots more.

And it's all free.

You can get even more results if you register for their "lifetime free trial."

Okay, so the point is that if you want to try out some pay per click advertising, this is the first web site you need to go to so you don't waste your money. www.KeywordSpy.co.uk.

Next time, we'll talk about what I think is the single most entertaining, and effective, guru on marketing. He's remarkable.

Ron Burdge
Helping lawyers make a living. Since 1978.

Thursday

How Do I Improve My Business? Step One to Improving Your Business.

Okay. So the economy is tanked and your phone has stopped ringing. How do you improve your business?

How do you get the phones to start ringing again? How do you get your business back to normal? How do you survive the downturn so you can keep helping consumers solve their problems in the future? After all, Consumer Law attorneys depend on consumer clients for their livelihood.

When people find themselves in financial distress, it's common for them to "hunker down" and conserve everything they can. They don't take risks they can avoid. They don't spend money they don't have to. And they get afraid of anything that they even fear can cost them money too.

For many people, that means their fear takes over. That's when they decide to put up with harassment and aggravation that, at any other time, would cause them to get angry and call a lawyer for help. Instead, afraid of unknown legal costs they are afraid they can't handle, they don't ask for help. They put up with it because they feel like they don't have any other choice right now.

Until the economy gets better, "right now" turns into tomorrow. Then, next week. Then next month. Next thing you know, it's next year. And they still aren't sure. That's understandable. But it doesn't help you make payroll.

We've been working on some ideas for you to consider ... things that can help. The first one sounds corny but it is so very true. It is, simply, to have faith.

If you're like many Consumer Law practitioners, you are struggling right now. And so are most of your clients. As hard as times are right now, and they are hard, they will pass. These times will ease up, both for you and all of us. And for our clients too, both current clients and those who have yet to call us for help.

The work that Consumer Law attorneys do, doesn't go away. It goes up and down, but it doesn't go away. New clients will call for help. How do we know? Simple. Because the people who violate the laws never really stop doing what they do. Even when they clean up their act and violate the law less often, or even if not at all, others will take their place.

What changes, in keeping with the economy of the times, is the willingness of consumers to put up with it. When personal economic security is less at risk, then the insult of unfair and deceptive conduct by a merchant is more intensely felt --- and tolerated less.

In short, consumers are more willing to find out what their rights are and less tolerant of the abuse that is heaped upon them.

So as the economy picks up, your business will pick up too. And that is true no matter all the other peripheral issues you are dealing with.

So, in tough times the first thing for a Consumer Law attorney to keep mind is that no matter how hard each day may be, have faith that each day after that will get better. It's not just a corny thing our parents said when we were kids (although they did), it's something that is true.


Now, of course there are some not-so-corny things to be doing ... but that's for next time and the days that follow. We'll talk about that next time.

Sunday

Are you practicing law in a bad economy?


Think you practice in the state with the worst economy? Think again.

Everyone seems to know that California is in the biggest economic trouble, with an economy in the dumpster, high unemployment, and no easy way to fix any of it. That makes practicing law in California tougher than practically anywhere. What may surprise many attorneys is not California at all. It’s the other states that are so very close to their own economic abyss. And that abyss can kill a law office's bottom line.

After all, when people can't afford a lawyer, people don't hire a lawyer. When that happens, they lose, the lawyer loses --- and so does the legal system itself because it never has the chance to give people their day in court. The economy in general affects the economy of lawyers specifically.

There’s a new study out that has looked at the economy of all 50 states and ranked them.

The PEW Charitable Trusts has crunched state numbers for more than a decade, with a goal of making state governments stronger in order to improve the services we all get for our tax dollars. Part of that includes reporting on the bad times and, as we all know, we are now in a blockbuster bad time.

They looked at numerous factors to come up with a scorecard for each state: foreclosures, budget gaps, loss of revenue, unemployment, how easy or hard it is for each state to raise its taxes in order to cover shortfalls, etc. All of those things affect the ability of consumers to afford legal representation.

With a “30" score being the worst and a lower score being better, here’s the “top 10" of the worst state economies, in order: California, Arizona, Rhode Island, Michigan, Oregon, Nevada, Florida, New Jersey, Illinois, and Wisconsin.

Wyoming, Nebraska and Iowa scored the best. So if that's where you practice law, don't move your practice.

So where does your state fit? Ohio is almost the center of the list while Georgia’s budget gap put it just a hair behind the auto belt states of Michigan-Wisconsin-Illinois by one point.

The worst ten states account for nearly a third of the US population and economy, which is why those states in particular matter to all of us.

What the study shows is just how much farther the US economy has to go, although there are bright spots of how hard some states are trying. Wyoming, for instance, had a 19.7% drop in revenue but managed to come with 2% of balancing its budget.

Law firms will get through this as the economy starts to get better and better, but if history has shown anything, it’ll be a longer road than anyone wants it to be.