Law Firm Management

WHY NOT COLLABORATE? An often successful but often overlooked attorney marketing strategy to increase visibility and bring in new clients is to collaborate with other businesses. Small businesses and consultants do this almost as a necessity when pitching clients who require services beyond the scope of their own capabilities. For example, if your firm holds a specialty in employment law, why not try teaming up with human resources organizations and/or professionals for certain projects, such'

How can you serve your community ' and frequently, your firm ' without hurting your own firm's budget and community relations? You can say yes too often and dissipate your budget and your firm's time and energy, but how do you say no without seeming to be coldhearted and indifferent to community or charitable needs?

Any way you look at it, e-communication gives you and your firm exposure in an existing or potential client market. Unlike other communication delivery methods, e-communication is the one place a law firm can actually see specific results ' from who received the communication, to whether that person actually viewed the e-mail or forwarded it on to someone else.

Big changes bring big challenges for marketing. The current generation of legal marketer is experienced in serving clients who want more. Now we have to create a service that provides more with less. What can we rely on to help us do this? Our brand.

The author's firm recently teamed with Akina Corp. to roll out a training program that builds on this broader view of business development. This article briefly describes the program, and highlights feedback they have received.

There's been a lot of talk about leadership, especially inside the ranks of women who aspire to hold powerful positions within law firms. This article is not aimed at those women, but how leadership outside the confines of one's practice can take center stage in attaining the personal satisfaction that often leads to a successful career.

Perhaps the most troubling decision for any partnership's management committee is the determination to force partners from the partnership. This article examines what law firms can do to assist their partners as they show them the door.

Every election campaign produces, among other things, media myths and bad language. During the elections of the last decade, the language was infected by a new myth called spin control. The phrase, which broke a speed record in becoming a clich' after the 1988 election, implies that a good media relations practitioner can control the nature and texture of a story in the press ' can put the right spin on it to get the journalist to tell it the spinner's way.