How to Stand Out from the Crowd

The language is clear: 'An advertisement or solicitation shall not depict the use of a courtroom or courthouse.' While using a courthouse in an ad for your law firm may be a clich' ' and fail to set you apart from the competition ' it hardly seems intuitive that doing so would violate advertising guidelines. That will be the case in New York, if a proposed rule goes into effect this month. Across the country, advertising rules continue to evolve, so pinpointing how to best spend your marketing dollars can be challenging.

'Firms should start with the marketing strategies that have the potential to give the highest return on investment, that are the least expensive, easy to measure, give them great marketing penetration and that they have some knowledge in implementing,' says Nader Anise of Boca Raton, FL-based legal marketing consultancy Nader Anise Lawyer Marketing. These strategies include focusing on a niche, enhancing visibility, leveraging your online presence, cultivating a referral network, being patient and measuring the return.

To maximize a marketing budget, concentration is key. Along those lines, identifying her niche was so important to Kathleen Hopkins that she and the co-founders of Seattle-based Real Property Law Group decided against using any individual names when establishing the firm 5 years ago. Instead, they opted for a firm designation that described their practice. 'We market who we are by our firm name,' she says of the five lawyers at the firm ' adding that ethics rules in Washington prohibit lawyers from describing themselves as specialists in a particular practice area. Real Property Law Group, which only handles large commercial real estate transactions, also has partners who target their marketing at commercial real estate brokers and who are members of the local Business and Owners Management Association. Partner Stephen Day is an architect who serves as a member of Seattle's historic preservation board, which promotes his historic rehabilitation tax credit practice.

While being an architect has its advantages, being a former postal worker has created a thriving niche practice for William Brawner of Ventura, CA. His 5-year-old firm represents federal employees in disputes with the government, and 70% to 75% of Brawner's clients are with the U.S. Postal Service. His Web site, www.federaladvocate.com, is his sole form of marketing because his legal work is so specialized.

'[Prospective clients] come looking for me,' he says. 'More people find me than I can possibly represent.'

Enhance Your Visibility

Because most lawyers do not have Brawner's luck, they are exploring other ways to enhance their visibility. For example, in your time of need, Goldstein & McGowan will be your 'lawyer friend indeed.' That is, at least, what the advertisement on New York City talk radio station WWRL 1600 AM tells anyone who is listening.

'I use the advertising to boost my name recognition in the event someone refers a client to me,' says Steven Goldstein, founding partner of the two-lawyer personal injury and criminal defense firm, which does not have a Web site.' They may say, 'Oh yeah, I've heard their ads on the radio,” he notes. From its investment of $1000 per month for the ads, Goldstein says the firm has received some name recognition as well as five cases per year in the last 3 years ' two of which he says are cases involving exposure to lead paint that could potentially settle for $400,000 each.

Like Goldstein, Stacey Gray has some creative ideas about marketing, and they include panel discussions on hot topics.

'If you line up a stellar panel, people are going to come to hear those panels and you,' says Gray, a periodic CourtTV commentator and the founder of a 7-year-old, three-attorney employment and commercial litigation boutique in Manhattan. In January, she hosted 100 people for 'A Call to Action: Diversity Includes Retaining Minority and Women-Owned Law Firms' at the Sheraton New York Hotel & Towers in midtown Manhattan. Her panelists included: Joaquin Carbonell, general counsel of Cingular; Jason Brown, in-house counsel at Pepsi Americas; and Andrea Clark, in-house employment counsel at American Airlines. 'I have made back the time I put in four- or five-fold,' Gray says of the extensive amount of lost billable time that she invested.

Associates should participate in business development activities and be encouraged to contribute to the firm's visibility. 'If associates are to be successful at a small firm, they need to learn how to develop business,' says Wendy Werner of Werner Associates, a career and organization development firm in St. Louis.

Mining the Internet

Small firms should develop a focused program to target potential referral sources, advises Sally Schmidt, president of St. Paul, MN-based Schmidt Marketing Inc. To do so, more practitioners are turning to the Internet and finding success by taking calculated steps to promote their practices.

If your firm doesn't have a Web site, or is in the planning stage, you should be careful to select a domain name wisely. If you're thinking, 'who doesn't have a Web site?', even today it would be wrong to assume that all small firms have a presence on the Web. In the 2006 Legal Technology Survey Report by the American Bar Association Legal Technology Re-source Center, of the 276 firms with two to nine lawyers surveyed, only 65% indicated that their firm had a Web site. Among the 200 firms of 10 to 49 attorneys surveyed, the percentage of firms with a Web site rose to 92% ' notably still short of 100%.

While there are many options, selecting the best-fitting Web address can provide visitors with a sense of your practice before they visit your site. When Angelo Paparelli founded Paparelli & Partners, a 15-lawyer corporate immigration boutique with offices in New York City and Irvine, CA, he chose not to use his last name as the URL because most people misspell it. Instead of taking the risk of traffic going to http://www.papparazzi.com/, he opted for the more creative designation of http://www.entertheusa.com/. 'Everyone remembers it pretty easily, and it often evokes a wry smile or even a chuckle,' says Paparelli.

But if your firm is already established on the Web, it may be time to evaluate whether you are getting the most out of your Web site. For instance, Philadel-phia lawyer Lenard Cohen had a generic Web site for 5 years that promoted his workers' compensation and personal injury practice at a cost of $500 per month. The problem was, he received little, if any, traffic.

In 2004, Cohen enlisted the help of Jason Lisi, a former tax lawyer and founder of 7-year-old Legal Internet Solutions, Inc. that helps law firms maximize their exposure online. Since redesigning his site 2 years ago, Cohen says that he has received 30 to 50 new cases per year, one of which just settled for $70,000.

Cohen spends $500 per month on the services of Legal Internet Solutions, which optimizes his site to produce better results on Internet search engines and manage his pay-per-click advertising campaign through Google, Yahoo, Kanoodle and others. Those campaigns cost him an additional $2500 per month. Cohen's fee of $24,000 from a recently settled case almost pays for an entire annual campaign.

Firms considering an Internet marketing campaign similar to the one Cohen has implemented should start with a trial and track results, says Barbara Lewis of Beverly Hills-based Centurion Consulting Group, which provides a range of law firm management guidance. For example, every 2 weeks, Lisi and his team monitor Cohen's pay-per-click campaign and modify the search terms to increase the traffic from the most effective sources.

Lisi also suggests that law firms consider a campaign of reciprocal linking. For example, if you are a bankruptcy practitioner, your firm's Web site should be linked to other credible bankruptcy-related sites because the links will generally increase your Google PageRank ' a calculation that Google makes to determine the relative importance of Web pages. The higher your rank, the greater the assumption is that your site is an authority in the field.

From his experience, Cohen recommends that when designing a Web site, firms should include an option for current news that is updated regularly to encourage the search engine spiders to continuously visit your site. He also suggests including a contact form because 'almost 99% of the people do not call ' they fill out that form,' he says.

Leav & Steinberg, a four-lawyer personal injury firm based in New York City, has seen similar success in the 4 years that it has used the Lawinfo.com referral search engine. The firm spends $7500 per year for prominent placement on queries for wrongful death, medical malpractice and automobile accident lawyers in Brooklyn and the Bronx. In response, partner Edward Steinberg says that the firm usually receives six to 10 calls per month, which ultimately yields six to 10 new cases per year.

Whether the firm takes the case or not, the lawyers follow up with callers every 6 months, if they remain unrepresented, and send each a holiday card. Steinberg says that the Lawinfo.com campaign yields $96,000 to $160,000 in total fees per year.

Consultant Lewis also suggests that firms research the results of other attorneys by asking non-competing attorneys about their level of satisfaction with various techniques. 'Marketing is no longer a black hole that money goes into and no one knows what the results are,' Lewis says, adding that, depending on the circumstance, elaborate client relationship management software isn't required. Firms can track client originations in Excel or in QuickBooks.

Consider Blogging

A blog is only effective if people can find it, so the same principles of selecting a name apply. For instance, Paparelli incorporated his signature creativity in selecting the name of his firm's blog ' http://www.nationofimmigrators.com/. He describes the site as a platform to discuss the dysfunctional nature of the federal government with respect to immigration. 'I try to write thoughtful pieces that are more in-depth than quick blurbs, fired off daily, with a hyperlink to another article,' he says.

While Paparelli's blog is used more for legislative advocacy than for brand enhancement and business generation, LexBlog founder Kevin O'Keefe notes, 'small and medium-sized firms are realizing substantial returns from their blogs.' Those that are, however, are reluctant to share their success. 'The big issue with blogs is that the lawyers who are having success are the last to shout from the rooftops about it, because of the competitive landscape,' adds O'Keefe, whose company de-signs and maintains blogs for attorneys at more than 100 firms.

It's All Relative

Levels of success vary, so you need to periodically evaluate whether your efforts are bearing fruit. Rob Powley, co-founder of Powley & Gibson in lower Manhattan, a boutique that assists corporations, individuals and organizations in all areas of intellectual property, entertainment law and art, spends $3000 to be listed in Martindale-Hubbell, but does not know of any new business that resulted from that listing. On the other hand, Stacey Gray spends about $1900 for her Martindale listing and credits it with 11 new matters in the past 7 months, based on feedback from new clients.

In the end, to help set marketing priorities, consultants recommend that lawyers remain ' or become ' diligent in tracking the ways in which their clients find them. At the same time, they should recognize that a certain amount of trial and error is inevitable.

The language is clear: 'An advertisement or solicitation shall not depict the use of a courtroom or courthouse.' While using a courthouse in an ad for your law firm may be a clich' ' and fail to set you apart from the competition ' it hardly seems intuitive that doing so would violate advertising guidelines. That will be the case in New York, if a proposed rule goes into effect this month. Across the country, advertising rules continue to evolve, so pinpointing how to best spend your marketing dollars can be challenging.

'Firms should start with the marketing strategies that have the potential to give the highest return on investment, that are the least expensive, easy to measure, give them great marketing penetration and that they have some knowledge in implementing,' says Nader Anise of Boca Raton, FL-based legal marketing consultancy Nader Anise Lawyer Marketing. These strategies include focusing on a niche, enhancing visibility, leveraging your online presence, cultivating a referral network, being patient and measuring the return.

To maximize a marketing budget, concentration is key. Along those lines, identifying her niche was so important to Kathleen Hopkins that she and the co-founders of Seattle-based Real Property Law Group decided against using any individual names when establishing the firm 5 years ago. Instead, they opted for a firm designation that described their practice. 'We market who we are by our firm name,' she says of the five lawyers at the firm ' adding that ethics rules in Washington prohibit lawyers from describing themselves as specialists in a particular practice area. Real Property Law Group, which only handles large commercial real estate transactions, also has partners who target their marketing at commercial real estate brokers and who are members of the local Business and Owners Management Association. Partner Stephen Day is an architect who serves as a member of Seattle's historic preservation board, which promotes his historic rehabilitation tax credit practice.

While being an architect has its advantages, being a former postal worker has created a thriving niche practice for William Brawner of Ventura, CA. His 5-year-old firm represents federal employees in disputes with the government, and 70% to 75% of Brawner's clients are with the U.S. Postal Service. His Web site, www.federaladvocate.com, is his sole form of marketing because his legal work is so specialized.

'[Prospective clients] come looking for me,' he says. 'More people find me than I can possibly represent.'

Enhance Your Visibility

Because most lawyers do not have Brawner's luck, they are exploring other ways to enhance their visibility. For example, in your time of need, Goldstein & McGowan will be your 'lawyer friend indeed.' That is, at least, what the advertisement on New York City talk radio station WWRL 1600 AM tells anyone who is listening.

'I use the advertising to boost my name recognition in the event someone refers a client to me,' says Steven Goldstein, founding partner of the two-lawyer personal injury and criminal defense firm, which does not have a Web site.' They may say, 'Oh yeah, I've heard their ads on the radio,” he notes. From its investment of $1000 per month for the ads, Goldstein says the firm has received some name recognition as well as five cases per year in the last 3 years ' two of which he says are cases involving exposure to lead paint that could potentially settle for $400,000 each.

Like Goldstein, Stacey Gray has some creative ideas about marketing, and they include panel discussions on hot topics.

'If you line up a stellar panel, people are going to come to hear those panels and you,' says Gray, a periodic CourtTV commentator and the founder of a 7-year-old, three-attorney employment and commercial litigation boutique in Manhattan. In January, she hosted 100 people for 'A Call to Action: Diversity Includes Retaining Minority and Women-Owned Law Firms' at the Sheraton New York Hotel & Towers in midtown Manhattan. Her panelists included: Joaquin Carbonell, general counsel of Cingular; Jason Brown, in-house counsel at Pepsi Americas; and Andrea Clark, in-house employment counsel at American Airlines. 'I have made back the time I put in four- or five-fold,' Gray says of the extensive amount of lost billable time that she invested.

Associates should participate in business development activities and be encouraged to contribute to the firm's visibility. 'If associates are to be successful at a small firm, they need to learn how to develop business,' says Wendy Werner of Werner Associates, a career and organization development firm in St. Louis.

Mining the Internet

Small firms should develop a focused program to target potential referral sources, advises Sally Schmidt, president of St. Paul, MN-based Schmidt Marketing Inc. To do so, more practitioners are turning to the Internet and finding success by taking calculated steps to promote their practices.

If your firm doesn't have a Web site, or is in the planning stage, you should be careful to select a domain name wisely. If you're thinking, 'who doesn't have a Web site?', even today it would be wrong to assume that all small firms have a presence on the Web. In the 2006 Legal Technology Survey Report by the American Bar Association Legal Technology Re-source Center, of the 276 firms with two to nine lawyers surveyed, only 65% indicated that their firm had a Web site. Among the 200 firms of 10 to 49 attorneys surveyed, the percentage of firms with a Web site rose to 92% ' notably still short of 100%.

While there are many options, selecting the best-fitting Web address can provide visitors with a sense of your practice before they visit your site. When Angelo Paparelli founded Paparelli & Partners, a 15-lawyer corporate immigration boutique with offices in New York City and Irvine, CA, he chose not to use his last name as the URL because most people misspell it. Instead of taking the risk of traffic going to http://www.papparazzi.com/, he opted for the more creative designation of http://www.entertheusa.com/. 'Everyone remembers it pretty easily, and it often evokes a wry smile or even a chuckle,' says Paparelli.

But if your firm is already established on the Web, it may be time to evaluate whether you are getting the most out of your Web site. For instance, Philadel-phia lawyer Lenard Cohen had a generic Web site for 5 years that promoted his workers' compensation and personal injury practice at a cost of $500 per month. The problem was, he received little, if any, traffic.

In 2004, Cohen enlisted the help of Jason Lisi, a former tax lawyer and founder of 7-year-old Legal Internet Solutions, Inc. that helps law firms maximize their exposure online. Since redesigning his site 2 years ago, Cohen says that he has received 30 to 50 new cases per year, one of which just settled for $70,000.

Cohen spends $500 per month on the services of Legal Internet Solutions, which optimizes his site to produce better results on Internet search engines and manage his pay-per-click advertising campaign through Google, Yahoo, Kanoodle and others. Those campaigns cost him an additional $2500 per month. Cohen's fee of $24,000 from a recently settled case almost pays for an entire annual campaign.

Firms considering an Internet marketing campaign similar to the one Cohen has implemented should start with a trial and track results, says Barbara Lewis of Beverly Hills-based Centurion Consulting Group, which provides a range of law firm management guidance. For example, every 2 weeks, Lisi and his team monitor Cohen's pay-per-click campaign and modify the search terms to increase the traffic from the most effective sources.

Lisi also suggests that law firms consider a campaign of reciprocal linking. For example, if you are a bankruptcy practitioner, your firm's Web site should be linked to other credible bankruptcy-related sites because the links will generally increase your Google PageRank ' a calculation that Google makes to determine the relative importance of Web pages. The higher your rank, the greater the assumption is that your site is an authority in the field.

From his experience, Cohen recommends that when designing a Web site, firms should include an option for current news that is updated regularly to encourage the search engine spiders to continuously visit your site. He also suggests including a contact form because 'almost 99% of the people do not call ' they fill out that form,' he says.

Leav & Steinberg, a four-lawyer personal injury firm based in New York City, has seen similar success in the 4 years that it has used the Lawinfo.com referral search engine. The firm spends $7500 per year for prominent placement on queries for wrongful death, medical malpractice and automobile accident lawyers in Brooklyn and the Bronx. In response, partner Edward Steinberg says that the firm usually receives six to 10 calls per month, which ultimately yields six to 10 new cases per year.

Whether the firm takes the case or not, the lawyers follow up with callers every 6 months, if they remain unrepresented, and send each a holiday card. Steinberg says that the Lawinfo.com campaign yields $96,000 to $160,000 in total fees per year.

Consultant Lewis also suggests that firms research the results of other attorneys by asking non-competing attorneys about their level of satisfaction with various techniques. 'Marketing is no longer a black hole that money goes into and no one knows what the results are,' Lewis says, adding that, depending on the circumstance, elaborate client relationship management software isn't required. Firms can track client originations in Excel or in QuickBooks.

Consider Blogging

A blog is only effective if people can find it, so the same principles of selecting a name apply. For instance, Paparelli incorporated his signature creativity in selecting the name of his firm's blog ' http://www.nationofimmigrators.com/. He describes the site as a platform to discuss the dysfunctional nature of the federal government with respect to immigration. 'I try to write thoughtful pieces that are more in-depth than quick blurbs, fired off daily, with a hyperlink to another article,' he says.

While Paparelli's blog is used more for legislative advocacy than for brand enhancement and business generation, LexBlog founder Kevin O'Keefe notes, 'small and medium-sized firms are realizing substantial returns from their blogs.' Those that are, however, are reluctant to share their success. 'The big issue with blogs is that the lawyers who are having success are the last to shout from the rooftops about it, because of the competitive landscape,' adds O'Keefe, whose company de-signs and maintains blogs for attorneys at more than 100 firms.

It's All Relative

Levels of success vary, so you need to periodically evaluate whether your efforts are bearing fruit. Rob Powley, co-founder of Powley & Gibson in lower Manhattan, a boutique that assists corporations, individuals and organizations in all areas of intellectual property, entertainment law and art, spends $3000 to be listed in Martindale-Hubbell, but does not know of any new business that resulted from that listing. On the other hand, Stacey Gray spends about $1900 for her Martindale listing and credits it with 11 new matters in the past 7 months, based on feedback from new clients.

In the end, to help set marketing priorities, consultants recommend that lawyers remain ' or become ' diligent in tracking the ways in which their clients find them. At the same time, they should recognize that a certain amount of trial and error is inevitable.