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From Worst to First: Sales and Marketing Lessons from the Boston Celtics

celts.jpgIn his article, Building a Winner, available at www.legalsales.org, John O. Cunningham provides a rundown of what law firms can learn from the marketing and sales efforts of the Boston Celtics.

Rich Gotham, president of the Celtics, was a featured speaker recently at the LSSO Raindance Conference, where he detailed many of the ways the Celtics “turned it around” — from having the worst record in the NBA to having the best record, sell-out crowds and the number one selling NBA logo — using a focused sales approach.

In the article, Cunningham relays a story by Gotham (who is a former president of a Boston high-tech company) about his having an epiphany regarding how to revamp the ailing franchise. “You don’t win to sell tickets; you sell tickets to win.”

Gotham led a cultural shift in thinking for the franchise, focusing on the mantra that “you need a great marketing effort most when you are losing and the team is down.” He also preached that “success is not the result of one thing, but comes from paying attention to a thousand little things”…

Some of the 10 lessons for law firms described at length in the article are:

1. Selling – moving from a 4-person sales team to a 35-person sales organization
2. Pricing and Metrics – adopting sophisticated regression analysis
3. Alternative Fee Arrangements – 240 different price points
4. Doing Customer Surveys – who buys, who doesn’t and why
5. Public Relations – a conscious effort to be visible during their
darkest hours

For more, download the full article at: http://www.legalsales.org/features/

Posted in Law Firm Marketing, Marketing

LinkedIn for Lawyers on the Rise?

Kevin O’Keefe over at Real Lawyers Have Blogs, has more to say on the topic of lawyers and social media — mostly that lawyers use of LinkedIn is becoming an avalanche… check it out.

Related post: MySpace for Lawyers?

Posted in Law Firm Marketing, New Media / Internet

Celebrating Teamwork ala Celtics

celebrate_teamwork1.jpg

Not that this town “needed” a parade, but getting one in a particular shade of Green was especially inspiring and gratifying to anyone who believes that true teamwork trumps a loose collection of individual talent.

See related post: Sales and Marketing Lessons of Boston Celtics

Posted in General

Tips for Law Firm Change Agents

The latest article on Legal Marketing Reader by John O. Cunningham is Law Firm Change Agents: Do You Have What It Takes? In it he summarizes a presentation by organizational change expert Jake Julia given at the recent Legal Sales and Service Organization conference in Boston. One great tip for creating change in law firms:

“Start with small, focused changes because they are often most successful and have the quickest impact. You can sometimes make bigger changes as well if you start small with a pilot program and share the test results with others.”

For more tips, see the full article.

Posted in Law Firm Marketing

Things That Make You Go, Hmm…

I just read this post over on Charles Green’s Trust Matters (a blog I keep up with via Legal Marketing Reader):

Hey! Your Company Just Turned Into a Supply Chain!

Green describes how to rethink the way we do business, which is changing from happening within the big firm (top down management), to happening between companies (outsourced partners). It’s no longer a world of competition, but one of collaboration.

I enjoy little gems like this that can present a complex concept in such simple terms. Read this post, then consider how you might apply supply chain sourcing to legal services or whatever business you’re in. Thanks Charles!

Posted in General, Law Firm Marketing, Marketing

The Best Stuff Is Worth Repeating

Below are links to some of the best advice I have posted on this blog. As mentioned on the About page, I am a curious student of law firm marketing, and what I learn out there, I share here on this blog. Well, after a while on this beat, the same themes and best advice have repeated themselves over and over. The links below are shortcuts to some of the standard wisdom. While the dates and stats may have changed a bit, the basic advice can still be taken to heart.

What Your Client Won’t Tell You… But This Guy Just Did

Law Firm Client Satisfaction Down, Hiring on the Rise

What Drives Corporate Counsel in Their Relationship with Outside Counsel?

Business Development Pipeline Is “The Missing Link” of Law Firm Marketing

Lawyers Slow To Embrace Blogs ABA Survey Says

Want Business? Survey Says: Pick Up the Phone

Law Firm Marketers’ Favorite Business Books

Lawyers, Wake Up and Smell the Coffee!

Posted in Law Firm Marketing

Attorney Business Plan Worksheet

Two legal services business development pros, Beth Cuzzone and Catherine MacDonagh, authors of the book, The Law Firm Associate’s Guide to Personal Marketing and Selling Skills, offer up a free chapter and this valuable PDF planning tool: Individual Lawyer’s Business Plan Worksheet.

You can access both over at Legal Marketing Reader. The permalink for the article and download is: Attention Associates: How To Create Your Personal Sales and Marketing Plan. For more on Cuzzone and MacDonagh, see the Legal Sales and Service Organization web site.

Posted in Books, Law Firm Marketing

Boston Blogger Meetup

Boston bloggers gathered last night to welcome to town Kevin O’Keefe, the Godfather of Law Blogging. Kevin is the president and founder of the attorney blogging platform Lexblog, Inc. He’s here in Boston to present at LMA New England’s luncheon program on Social Networking for Law Firms. The call to “meetup” went out 2 days before via e-mail and Linkedin’s Legal Blogging group, then people just showed up — that’s how it works!

Boston Bloggers Meetup

Pictured left to right: Leanna Hamill, author of Massachusetts Estate Planning and Elder Law blog; yours truly; Kevin O’Keefe; and Bob Ambrogi of Law.com’s Legal Blog Watch.

Posted in Law Firm Marketing, New Media / Internet

Sales and Marketing Lessons from the NBA?

Rich Gotham, president of the Boston Celtics, will be a keynote speaker at the Legal Sales and Service Organization’s (LSSO) 2008 RainDance Conference in Boston, May 6-8, at the Hilton Boston Logan Airport Hotel. He will describe how a sales-driven organization has gone from ‘worst to first’ among its professional peers.

LSSO’s RainDance Conference is aimed at senior leaders in law firms and legal departments and features a faculty of sales and service experts help attendees develop competitive, effective sales, service and process improvement strategies and tactics. For a full conference schedule and registration information, go to www.legalsales.org.

See related post: Sales and Marketing Lessons from the Boston Celtics

Posted in Law Firm Marketing

A Digest of Legal Services Trends for 2008 (updated)

I’m noticing a lot of hits to this blog for queries related to “legal services trends for 2008,” because of these two previous posts:

Summary of Law Firm Marketing Trends, 30 Years After Bates v. Arizona

Legal Services Trends 2007-2008

So, for the convenience of others, I offer below links to a collection of other trend articles and posts that I’ve recently run across. If you have other links to add, please leave a comment and I will keep expanding the list. While they don’t all paint a rosy picture, I hope you find them helpful in bringing you up to speed or providing perspective on market trends.

Added 2/18: Hildebrandt 2008 Client Advisoryhighlights trends in 2007, and those it believes will impact the market in 2008.

Survey: Corporate Lawsuits, Use of Outside Counsel Trending Downward – New England In-House

Hot Legal Jobs for 2008 – Robert Half Legal

What’s Hot and What’s Not in the Legal Profession – Robert Denney via ABA LPM

Doom and Gloom for the Legal Profession – It’s Coming – Gerry Riskin

Get Ready for the Recession – Larry Bodine

The Legal Profession Has Entered a Recession – Larry Bodine

Law Firm Marketing Technology Trends – ABA Law Practice

Am Law 200 Managing Partners Issue Fog Advisory for 2008

Posted in Law Firm Marketing

Law Firms Getting “Cuddly”?

Just a quick pointer to this article found on the New York Times most e-mailed articles list in case you missed it: Who’s Cuddly Now? Law Firms. It covers trends in flex-time, the billable hour, and work/lifestyle at law firms large and small.

Posted in Law Firm Marketing

More on Law Firm Merger Name Games

Lisa Van Der Pool of the Boston Business Journal adds to the discussion of law firm naming and branding with this article in the January 11-17, 2008 issue: The legal name game. Says the article, “brand awareness is a top concern for any company going through a merger, but for law firms that merge, coming up with an acceptable moniker can be particularly tricky.”

It reveals some of the thinking and ego-checking that went on behind the scenes in the naming of WilmerHale and K&L Gates — two law firms using short “street” names for branding purposes, while retaining the longer, official name. The outcome is evidence that marketers are making headway in the area of traditionally difficult-to-brand and multiple name law firm entities. Witness:

K&L Gates for Kirpatrick & Lockhart Preston Gates Ellis LLP
WilmerHale for Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr LLP

See previous posts/articles on this topic:

Name Games Loom Large in Mergers
LOL! Law Firm Names

Posted in Law Firm Marketing

MySpace for Lawyers?

With all the talk about social networks, law firm marketers and attorneys are wondering, “Should I have a MySpace page?” Such was a flurry of activity on the Legal Marketing Association List-serv this past week where most legal marketers poo-pooed sites like Facebook and MySpace as they were mostly for ‘kids’, but opined that perhaps Linkedin might be useful as it has a more ‘business crowd.’ Currently, I’m not an active user of these systems (as blogging is my drug of choice), and I don’t expect that lawyers and law firms will start jumping in in droves, simply because as an industry they tend to be new-technology-adverse (see earlier post Lawyers Slow to Embrace Blogs ABA Survey Says).

However, and this is a huge however, I do believe that social networks can and will be an important part of internet life and business going forward and we should all become more familiar with them. Law students and young lawyers and marketers are already using them, so the train is coming. (Whether social networks remain distinct services or integrate themselves into our holistic web experience is another question to ponder.) Sure, there are the potential horror stories when folks sign up for and use technology that they don’t really fully understand.

Since law firm clients are just now starting to ask seriously about the benefits of blogging, I don’t predict a fast adoption of social networks by this same crowd. But if you want to be on the leading edge, now is the time to dip your toe into the social network waters and at least learn and evaluate. And if you see a way to use a new technology as a way to differentiate your brand, leverage your content, or improve and increase releationships and awareness — I say, go for it!

There has been plenty written on the subject of social networking including Kevin O’Keefe’s Social Networking Sites: Will they work for lawyers and other professionals?

Here are some others…
MySpace Helps Attorneys Find Clients

Facebook Grows Up

Linked in or Left Out: ‘Supercharge’ Your Interactions Through Social Networking

Online Social Networking for Lawyers — Online Networking for Fun and Profit

I’d love to hear others’ views and experiences on the topic. Please feel free to comment.

Posted in Law Firm Marketing, New Media / Internet

Non-Lawyers Bring Innovation to the Table. Really.

I received an e-mail from Patrick McKenna, a long-time professional services consultant with Edge International, kindly informing me of his most recent blog post (dated December 30, 2007) titled, The ABA, Shamefully Does Not Practice Diversity. In it he criticizes the December issue of the ABA Journal for its cover story, “The Blawg 100: The Best Web Sites By Lawyers.”

States McKenna,

“I cannot believe the shameful audacity of the ABA Journal to rate web sites for lawyers . . . by including only those written by lawyers. For those who long suspected that the legal profession, unique amongst professions for categorizing people as either being lawyers or non-lawyers, really doesn’t understand or support diversity, you now have the proof.”

He provides several examples of excellent blogs for lawyers written by non-lawyers including those by:

Then just yesterday, I read a very interesting article in the New York Times that offers an explanation as to how this type of isolated thinking happens. In Innovative Minds Don’t Think Alike, Janet Rae-Dupree, describes this phenomenon as a “curse of knowledge.”

“…once you’ve become an expert in a particular subject, it’s hard to imagine not knowing what you do. Your conversations with others in the field are peppered with catch phrases and jargon that are foreign to the uninitiated. When it’s time to accomplish a task — open a store, build a house, buy new cash registers, sell insurance — those in the know get it done the way it has always been done, stifling innovation as they barrel along the well-worn path.”

The article offers anecdotal and scientific support for bringing people with different skill sets — even (gasp) outsiders — to the table. It also introduces a groovy, new bit of jargon you can toss around — “zero-gravity thinkers.” Click here to read the full article on nytimes.com — it’s worth the 5 minutes.

Posted in Law Firm Marketing, Marketing

What’s the Value of Martindale in a Google-centric World?

Clients have been asking a lot recently about what other firms are doing regarding Martindale-Hubbell listings. The cost seems steep to most firms especially when you compare the click-throughs that come from the directory to those coming from other sources around the net. Most firms I’ve talked to are considering or have already cut back on the listings.

Gina Passarella of the Legal Intelligencer has an article that examines this topic in depth, Martindale-Hubbell Faces Challenges, and that cites an informal survey of Philadelphia law firms finding

“more firms than not said they were either eliminating or scaling back their use of Martindale-Hubbell’s listing services… [but that] pulling away from such a time-honored tradition wasn’t always an easy decision.”

At the same time, recently at the LMA New England Annual Conference in Boston, firm representatives chimed out support for Martindale in one session on web sites, saying that they could point to their web server stats showing Martindale as a top referral source. I have not had similar evidence for firm sites that I manage.

Server stats may be a useful bit of data to add to your decision making. I’m interested to hear what your firm’s experience is regarding Martindale referrals, and whether you are considering cutting back.

Please leave a comment.

Oh, and have a Merry Christmas!

Posted in Law Firm Marketing, New Media / Internet

What Your Client Won’t Tell You… But This Guy Just Did

One of the most valuable blogs for law firm business development — that I would recommend to attorneys as well as marketers — is InHouse Rants (with the tagline, “The frustrated in-house lawyer blog”) as it provides a glimpse into the mind and business of an in-house counsel, and it often provides advice to those trying to win the company’s business.

The latest post (which I found via Legal Marketing Reader) is titled, How To Get Legal Business – Part 1. It states in explicit detail how law firms can win new business. It has something to do with the phrase, “Know my business,” but this blogger really means it, and he tells you just what you need to do in fairly specific detail. Valuable stuff. Read it here, and then stay tuned for the sequel implied by the “Part 1” in the headline.

Related posts:

Chief Legal Officers Speak

What Drives Corporate Counsel in their Relationship with Outside Counsel

Posted in Law Firm Marketing

More on Legal Services Outlook for 2008

David Bario, in The American Lawyer, writes more on the legal services market forecast for 2008 in Am Law 200 Managing Partners Issue Fog Advisory for 2008.

“This year… a substantial number of firm leaders admit to being uneasy about the future. More than a quarter reported that they were uncertain about their firm’s prospects next year, and a few said they felt downright pessimistic. What’s going on?”

Click through to the Law.com article to find out…

See also: Legal Services Trends 2007-2008

Posted in Law Firm Marketing

Legal Services Trends 2007-2008

Here’s my first post from my notes on this week’s Legal Marketing Association – New England Conference in Boston.

Legal Spending Is Slowing
“Large companies are starting to pull back on some of the money spent on outside counsel,” said Marcie Shunk of BTI Consulting who presented research on the trends and projections for the legal services industry. While the total dollars large companies are spending on legal is increasing, the rate of spending is slowing. According to a BTI study, “outside counsel spending—which nearly doubled in the past 5 years is slowing. BTI’s projected market growth for 2008 (6.1%) will barely cover rate increases.”

Convergence Is Back
While the number of primary law firms used by large business has remained constant over the past 5 years, the number of secondary core law firms used is decreasing. A BTI projection for 2008-2010 for the Boston area is that companies will trim secondary firms used (on average) from 10 firms in 2007 to just 8.

Client Satisfaction Still Shows Room for Improvement
The silver lining in all of this is that customer satisfaction numbers still suggest that firms that can truly please the client have a real shot of gaining business. According to BTI’s Shunk, only 35 percent of clients nationally would recommend their primary law firm. (Fifty-three percent of clients in Boston would recommended their primary law firm.)

Top Satisfaction Activities
According to a chart presented by BTI graphing the 30 largest law firms’ by growth (clients increasing spending) and profitability (profits per attorney), those firms with the most success (scoring high in both categories), most often demonstrated these top satisfaction activities:

  • Understand client’s business
  • Client focus
  • Value for the dollar
  • Commitment to help

Note: When looking at the Boston market (measuring market share gains and profits per attorney), firms that made the Venn diagram’s sweet spot were:

  • Ropes & Gray
  • Goodwin Procter
  • Choate.

BTI publishes an annual Client Service Top 30 Law Firms that includes both large and small firms. You can see the full list on their web site at: bticonsulting.com.

Top Legal Services Goals and Priorities (Boston Market)

  1. Achieve and maintain compliance
  2. Create IP strategy
  3. Control legal costs
  4. Pro-actively mitigate risk

For more of the latest posts and news items on law firm marketing and business development topics, visit Legal Marketing Reader.

Posted in Law Firm Marketing

One Law Firm’s Success Story

Sheri Qualters of The National Law Journal has a piece on Law.com’s Small Firm Business pages that nicely profiles Peabody Arnold’s success in downsizing and subsequent repositioning with a strict focus on defense work, primarily for insurance companies. Check it out here: A Boston Firm Thinks Smaller, Then Scores Big.

Posted in Law Firm Marketing

Lawyers, Wake Up and Smell the Coffee!

coffee.jpgAs I was rereading my post (below) on law firm marketing trends, it struck me that bullet number 2 (De-equitization is happening to lawyers who don’t have books of business), makes law firm marketing and business development relevant to all lawyers — all on its own.

More on the de-equitization trend from the quoted article by Stacy West Clark:

“De-equitization is a fact of life for lawyers who are not bringing in business. Lawyers who relied on just being good lawyers and not being rainmakers are losing their equity positions in their firms. The moral of the story is you have to have a book of business.”

Wake up and smell the coffee! Read the post, read the article, and if you’re awake now I recommend a couple other related articles over at my site Legal Marketing Reader, by John O. Cunningham, namely:

The 10 Habits of Highly Successful Law Firms

Market or Die: A Message to Managing Partners

I’m going back to my first cup of coffee now. Have a good day!

Posted in Law Firm Marketing