LJN Newsletters

Law firms are increasingly looking beyond the legal industry to hire Chief Marketing Officers and other management level officers who have broad experience in the corporate sector. The problem is that no matter how talented a person, if they cannot successfully assimilate into a law firm culture it will never work. Firms must examine their hiring process more so than ever to be sure that the candidates they evaluate will actually be able to succeed in the legal industry. Personality testing is increasingly being used to screen candidates to make sure they can successfully make the transition before the job is offered to them.

Every once in a while you come across a book that is literally makes you smile ... fun, thought provoking ... but not too thought provoking. It becomes something akin to reading a light romantic comedy. I had the pleasure of reading 365 Marketing Meditations while riding on a train to Philadelphia and honestly, by the time I arrived I was smiling for a variety of reasons.

After a rigorous selection process, a law firm has finally selected and hired a media-relations consultant to assist the marketing director and work with the partners on obtaining favorable press coverage that will support the firm's business development efforts. What should the marketing director expect next, in terms of the process for getting started?

Librarians who have begun to work relatively recently in law firms probably never have participated in a "shifting party" or in any similar event. That's because the nature of the law firm library ' and thus the librarian's role ' has undergone revolutionary change over the years. There still are books, at least some books, in today's law firm libraries, but Internet connections and CD-ROMs often seem to be just as prevalent and, perhaps, are actually even more important.

We have some exciting things going on at Marketing The Law Firm. First of all, and you may have noticed this last month, we have expanded each issue to 12 pages which gives all of our readers more content. It also gives budding and authors an opportunity to take pen to paper or fingers to keyboard and write an article for MLF.

Public relations or not. If you are a reader of The New York Times, you may have noticed that when journalists quote an attorney for a particular piece, it seems that the quote comes from an expert in a firm outside of New York. What's going on? I will admit that for many years New York law firms shied away from being quoted at all, feeling perhaps that they were above it all and that their clients, for the most part high profile Fortune 500 corporations and large banking institutions would scowl at their outside counsel garnering attention. Now it seems that these firms have been relegated to the occasional quote while the regional/national firms have embraced the media and are truly "out there.

The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia decided that a contestant on the TV game show "Wheel of Fortune" was barred by a release he signed from pursuing a negligent conduct claim against the show's producer over alleged injuries he sustained during taping. But the court also ruled that the contestant could proceed with his claims of reckless or intentional conduct.

The Supreme Court of South Carolina ruled that the president of the Nevada-based Legends In Concert owed no fiduciary duty to a corporation formed by an entrepreneur to raise the capital needed to produce a Legends musical in Myrtle Beach.