Law Marketing Monitor - law firm Internet marketing | law firm SEO | lawyer website marketing | technology for attorneys

I think most solos and small business owners feel the same pain.  You've got more things to do than time to do them.  Sometimes it's almost paralyzing.  Projects and to-do lists grow to the point that work either becomes inefficient, sloppy, or worse yet important projects or tasks get ignored completely.

It doesn't have to be this way though.  By learning how to break projects into smaller and smaller pieces you will be able to bite off small chunks at a time.  Your productivity and motivation will increase and you'll find work loads that used to seem insurmountable can be handled with less anxiety. 

Take the story of Joe Simpson, a mountain climber with a severely broken leg that made it back down from a mountain top by setting small goals along the way:

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Law firm testimonials are becoming much more important to effective law firm seo. As search engines and the web become more and more local and social, client ratings, reviews, and testimonials play an increasingly important role in terms of building visibility online. But how can legal professionals increase the quality and quantity of online reviews?

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As the legal services climate continues to undergo rapid changes, now more than ever, is the time for lawyers to be thinking about the future. In his Law Practice Tips Blog, Jim Calloway talks the future of lawyering:

While doing my annual review of the year in law office management and technology, my focus kept returning to the numerous predictions of challenging change ahead for lawyers. Some of these trends are already apparent and others are coming into focus. For my column in the December 2010 Oklahoma Bar Journal, I decided to discuss some of these trends and provide some resources to lawyers as they contemplate the future. I hope you appreciate my column titled Reviewing 2010 Should Make Lawyers Think About the Future. Download Calloway Reviewing 2010 and the Future

Here are a couple highlights:

• There are a host of negative pressures on the legal market.
• Fred Ury predicts that within a decade, there will likely be 10 percent to 40 percent fewer lawyers than there are today.
• Lawyers and law students must take charge of their careers and become entrepreneurs.

While I do believe that legal professionals will have to evolve to survive this new future, I don't believe that the outlook for legal services professionals is as bleak as some have contended.

As it always is with any business, the key to lawyers' success in the future comes down to their ability to adapt, change, and evolve. Those that are unable to adapt to their new environment, will perish. It's simple natural selection. On the other hand, legal professionals that are adapting to the future, including adoption of law practice management, networking, and marketing technologies will survive. In fact, due to the nature of many of these technologies, it is likely that costs associated with accessing these tools is likely to be much lower than it has historically.

While there are several unique aspects to practicing law and running a legal practice, too many legal professionals still fail to accept that law firms are businesses. This is not to diminish the important function that lawyers serve our society. However, this is a capitalist society (or at least quasi-capitalist) and in order to be a viable profession, legal professionals must look at themselves as business people.

I'm a huge fan of defense. I always find myself cheering for teams that play great defense. I draft defensive players in my fantasy football league much earlier than I probably should. My favorite college football player is Charles Woodson. And so, in the spirit of great defense, I want to discuss playing professional reputation defense online.

I was recently contacted by a fellow law firm web visibility consultant who had a client with a problem. She, an attorney, had represented a woman in a divorce proceeding. For whatever reason (presumably sour grapes), her client's husband decided to launch an online attack. He set up a free google site and opened an adwords account. He targeted her name and ran an ad saying something to the effect of before you hire so and so, read my story. On his site he explained why this attorney was so terrible.

Now you might be thinking, hey this is great publicity for her. If her client's adversary despises her so much, she must be doing something right. In any case, the site said some less than flattering things about this attorney and so she went to her web strategist to talk about some ways that she could diminish the impact of the ad. Here were a couple ideas:

• Run a counter ad pushing his ad down.
• Complain to Google to remove the ad.

Needless to say, each of these methods isn't without limitation. In fact, in my experience, getting Google to remove an ad is a painstaking process that takes a long time, if you they are willing to do it at all.

But Adwords ads aren't the only reputation defense problem that legal professionals may face online. As attorney Lee Rosen points out in Can You Get a Bad Review Removed from Google?, review sites, including Google Places, can present reputational issues for attorneys as well:

Let’s say a former client trashes you on your Google Places page. The client rips you a new one and tears you from limb to limb. Can you get Google to remove the review? What if it isn’t your client, but instead it’s your client’s spouse? Can you get Google to remove that review? Google says it “reserves the right to remove reviews that include any of the following:

 

Inappropriate content

We want to provide a clean and positive user experience for all users. We may remove reviews that contain or link to unlawful content, or content that violates our Google Places content policy. We may also remove reviews that include plagiarism or are copied from other sites.

Advertising and spam

Nobody likes spam and it can only make its author look bad. Don’t use reviews for advertising or post the same or similar reviews across multiple places. Obviously, don’t post fake reviews intended to boost or lower ratings.

Off-topic Reviews

Reviews should describe your personal, first hand experience with a specific place. Please do not post reviews based on someone else’s experience, or that are not about the specific place you are reviewing. Reviews are not a forum for personal attacks, rants or crusades. Please also do not use reviews to report incorrect information about a place — use the Report a problem link for that place instead.

Conflict of interest

Reviews are only valuable when they are honest and unbiased. Even if well-intentioned, a conflict of interest can undermine the trust in a review. In addition, we do not accept reviews written for money or other incentives. Please also do not post reviews on behalf of others or misrepresent your identity or affiliation with the place you are reviewing.

From these guidelines, I would agree with Mr. Rosen that it seems that you may be able to get adversarial reviews removed. On the other hand, guidelines don't always equate to action.

For example, we recently had a client who had received spam reviews that had been posted on several other attorney place pages as well. We submitted our request to have the spam removed. After several weeks, the review was finally taken down.

As these issues become more an more prevalent, I have no doubt that review sites will become more active in addressing them.

Marketing a law firm is difficult.  You work hard to build relationships and provide good service so you get word of mouth referrals.  You attend networking events and seminars.  You pour money, time, and resources into your web presence and blog so that people with legal issues reach out to contact you.  You finally hit a tipping point where you get the phone ringing and........no one is there to answer.

Perhaps you were in court.  Maybe you were consulting with another client.  The call might have come in after hours.  Any way you slice it, expecting a potential client to leave a voicemail in the age of your competitor being one click away is not the best strategy.

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I stumbled upon an interesting post on the Psychology Today blog.  The post was an excerpt from an interview with Lynn Parker the author of The Reluctant Entrepreneur.  In the post, the interviewer asks what the difference is between a reluctant entrepreneur and a typical entrepreneur.  Lynn explains:

There's a mind-set in most entrepreneurs that growth is good, money is the only measure of success, and the goal is to go public or sell the company. The reluctant entrepreneur usually has the mind-set that sustainability is good, money is one of several measures (happy work life, balanced home life, good for employees, good for the community are the others) of success, and there may not be an exit strategy or way to sell the business at the end. It's really a difference between areas of focus: one focus is on a business as the engine of money, and the other is on business as the engine of satisfaction and a balanced life. Neither is good or bad, just each group brings really different motivations to the game of business.

I thought this was an interesting distinction that has relevancy for lawyers establishing a law firm.  Defining what you are and what you want your firm to be has important implications on your firm's marketing plan.

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I came across this post at Positive Psychology News called Why Riches are not Equivalent to Happiness.  The post discusses the relationship between money and happiness.  In the article, Timothy So writes:

To further elaborate on why the riches are not equivalent to happiness, I adopt the approach used by Daniel Kahneman, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, of looking at happiness as moment-to-moment experience instead of general well-being or flourishing. When we break down happiness into moment-to-moment experience, riches do not necessarily make people happier.

Ed Diener and others argue that happiness is not having what you want, but wanting what you have. Psychologist Jeff Larsen and Amie McKibban ran experiments to test this concept. People who had more of what they wanted tended to be happier than those who had less, but this effect was mediated by appreciation and gratitude. Simply possessing something is not the key. Happiness comes from appreciating what you have.

Seems to me that happiness is an appreciation of the journey we take as opposed to simply the end result.  I believe that finding happiness in your marketing is a key to having success with it.

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I would venture to guess that the majority of attorneys out there aren't trying to sell their services based on price.  Your goal shouldn't be to offer the cheapest services in town for a number of good reasons.  However, an issue lawyers face is that most people don't have a good sense of what quality legal services cost.  This can lead to sticker shock and lost clients when you discuss your fees with prospects.  For this reason, lawyers need to understand the art of price conditioning.

So what exactly is price conditioning?

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