LJN Newsletters

1. Understand that building a client base is a key factor in determining your success as an attorney. The hard fact is (although it was not taught us in…

If there is one thing that everyone in your law firm marketing department can agree upon, it is the importance of cultivating and maintaining relationships with editors and reporters. Your team has likely recognized this basic point for years, as have the marketing departments of your competitors. It is just as probable, though, that one (or both) of you have seen these efforts stagnate, as happens all too regularly. You lose track of the fundamentals. In what manner, then, can your firm begin to refresh its efforts, and keep ahead of the Jones, Jones & Jones LLP's? What creative methods can you implement that will make a reporter think of your firm and your attorneys first?

Professional services practitioners ' be they lawyers, doctors, accountants, financial planners, or even insurance agents ' all have one thing in common: They need clients in order to provide their services.
But how much time studying about building a career? Attracting clients to the firm? Establishing relationships? Exactly; not much! Nonetheless, recognizing that you need training and getting good training are not necessarily one in the same

The foundation of marketing is branding. Although branding drives most attorneys crazy because brands resist logical definitions, your firm's brand is an essential element of marketing legal services. In essence, brands are an array of impressions and beliefs that surround your firm, and create expectations about the kind of attorneys the firm has and the work it performs. Since brands create an emotional connection between attorneys and their clients, your brand can be considered your firm's personality.

In the past, when lawyers at Duane Morris L.L.P. decided that they wanted to hold an executive briefing for clients, they would ask their colleagues to provide the names and addresses of the people they thought should be invited to the event. The process took weeks and was often incomplete. Now, though, the firm has streamlined the process through its use of "client relationship management" (CRM) software.

Each calendar year, attorneys with private law firms are charged with the unique challenge of creating and realizing a target number of billable hours. In a quieter moment, perhaps late at night, we ask ourselves: "Where will this work come from?"
Searching for, qualifying, and closing new or additional business is as important to building a successful practice as your numbers this year for annual hours worked, billed and realized. So, how do we do that?

I don't have time to network." "There's no way I can spend time at all the events people tell me I should go to." Does this ring true for you? If so, consider this: Networking doesn't just happen when you take time out of your busy schedule to appear at an official "networking" event. In fact, networking can happen anytime, anywhere. Every minute you're around other human beings is a chance to network. Self-made billionaires are known for their tendency to network everywhere and all the time ' on the golf course, but also at the doctor's office, at the health club, or on a plane.

For years one of the major distinctions separating Westlaw from LexisNexis was West's headnote integration. Well, this gap in the capabilities of the two major legal research providers has apparently been closed with Lexis' recent announcement that its Shepard's Reports citation tool is now completely integrated with LexisNexis Headnotes. This integration of LexisNexis Headnotes into Shepard's will permit faster and more effective validations as well as "looping" Shepard's into the research process via Headnotes.