Marketing During Wartime
October 06, 2003
Periods of crisis tend to bring out the best and worst in people. From an institutional standpoint, this is one time when cooler heads need to prevail and stricter attention needs to be paid to the image your firm conveys to the outside world.On the other hand, some law firm marketers also view this period as a time of opportunity for reinforcing client relationships and building business in specialty areas.Gauge The Effect On Long-Term Strategic Plans And Implementation'I'm not familiar with any near-term impact of this war on any law firm's marketing programs,' Norm Rubenstein, partner of DC-based Zeughauser Group, says. 'Nothing has been canceled.'
Eight Keys to Mastering Visual Aids
October 06, 2003
'When the eyes say one thing, and the tongue another, a practiced man relies on the language of the first.' ' Ralph Waldo EmersonA powerful visual aid will set images floating in the minds of your listeners and leave a lasting impression far more effectively than words alone. Nonetheless, lawyers often fail to capitalize on the power of visual aids for a variety of reasons: they often design complex, intricate visual aids that clarify very little and often merely confound the audience; they fumble around during the presentation and create awkward pauses because they failed to practice their presentations using the visual aids; they do not position themselves and the visual aid for maximum impact because they are unfamiliar with the layout of the room; and they fail to carefully plan when and how they will use the visual aid to accentuate the message.
On the job
October 06, 2003
Legal Services Industry Still Offering Marketing Job OpportunitiesBy Russell LawsonWith this article, Marketing the Law Firm launches a regular column…
Ask the coach
October 06, 2003
Q: Our internal newsletter is not well received or widely read. It contains recent wins and case developments, lawyer speaking engagements and articles, and other recent events of note. How can I make it more popular?A: There are only four reasons that people don't read your newsletter: 1) they don't know about it; 2) they don't receive it; 3) the content doesn't interest them or is poorly written; 4) they don't care about the firm at all; they're just collecting a paycheck. You should be able to take care of the first two without too much difficulty; No. 4 can only be fixed by a good recruiter.
SWOT It Out
October 06, 2003
Take a glance at any general business publication these days and chances are you'll come across the term 'SWOT Analysis,'referring to your Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. Although SWOT is used ubiquitously in the business world, it's not often heard in law firms. Despite the fact that many accomplished attorneys react with blank stares when asked about it, SWOT can be one of the most powerful ways for lawyers and their marketing staff to create an effective strategic business development plan. What is SWOT?
Ensuring CRM Success
October 06, 2003
In an article entitled What's Hot and What's Not in Law Practice, which appeared in the December issue of Marketing the Law Firm, CRM (customer relations management) was listed as the second 'hottest' technology in the 'Marketing Strategies & Tactics' section. The comment that followed was, '[b]ut there's a lot more involved than just having the right software: It must be used.'
A Question Of Copyright
October 06, 2003
When a lawyer writes an article for a journal, newspaper, legal newsletter or other kind of collective work, the publisher typically asks the lawyer/author to assign the copyright in the article to the publisher. On occasion, the lawyer, or his or her firm, will insist that the lawyer retain the copyright in the article and instead will offer the publisher only a one-time license to publish the article. If this gap cannot be closed, the publisher will lose an article that would have benefited its readers (and its subscriber base) while the lawyer/author will lose a valuable marketing opportunity to reach potential new clients. Fortunately, when both sides understand the nature of what they are seeking and what they are giving and getting, and when both sides refuse to stand on ceremony, the copyright question should not be a bar to publication.
PRACTICE TIP
October 05, 2003
Recently a business associate of mine recorded a TV tech spot called 'Death of the Floppy.' When my friend told me the title of his program we laughed, but we started to talk about how far we have come in the type of removable media storage products that are now available to consumers.
The New Wave of Concept Search Tools
October 05, 2003
Although the concept of concept searching has been around for at least 2,000 years in philosophical circles and was first realized in the software world in the 1970s, it is making big news in today's electronic discovery and automated litigation support world. Over the past year, a series of vendors have introduced software solutions they claim can take us far beyond the results we get using tools built around searching full text or coding data using key words, strings of text and Boolean search algorithms. Whether it is through mimicking the thought processes of high-level aquatic mammals, developing libraries of semantically and geographically related words and terms or displaying documents as masses of dots within sprays of bubbles, these software programs, we are told, are the automated litigation support equivalent to Big Blue, the computerized chess champion.
BITS & BYTES
October 05, 2003
Payne Consulting of Seattle has announced the release of Metadata Assistant for Microsoft Excel, which cleans out hidden information from Excel documents. Following the positive response for Metadata Assistant for Word, this new software extends the same functionality to Excel files, which have even more hidden data than Word files.
