I’ve noticed that a lot of lawyers are suffering from information overload in all the advice about what to focus on when building a practice. Clarifying basic concepts is a good place to start. And truthfully, it’s also a relief to simplify some of the jargon.

Here’s a guide to the four concepts that most lawyers and firms need to consider.

Who you are: your identity and brand

The attributes that describe who you are and what you have to offer are grounded in the concepts of identity and brand. Lawyers often feel anxious about marketing because so much of . . . [more]

What distinguishes a licensed, practising lawyer from another unlicensed legal professional?

Many will say that the answer is trust. The lawyer has duties and obligations to their client pursuant to a professional code of ethics and the profession’s regulatory scheme. A regulated lawyer has professional liability insurance coverage (mandatory in Canada) and is also “covered” for theft by their local compensation fund.

Clients can rely on those structures to protect them from lawyer’s mistakes, misdeeds and misappropriations. They can place their trust in their lawyer, and failing that, the lawyer’s regulator, liability insurer and compensation fund.

I was reminded of . . . [more]

A few months ago I questioned whether there was any worth in a lawyer paying for an enhanced profile on legal lists.

I got a call recently that topped that concept.

The call was from a publisher in England. They started off by talking about their publication read by thousands of CEOs around the world. And an upcoming edition that was going to feature a global CEO survey on social media risk from a major accounting firm. They did their best to promote this as a high profile publication.

Then they said they wanted to do a companion article to . . . [more]

♫ Only made me more focused, only wrote more potent..♫

Lyrics and music by Kanye West, Aldrin Davis, recorded by Kanye West.

Milton Wedman Zwicker or just “Milt” as he liked to be known, was the retired managing partner of Zwicker Evans & Lewis, an Ontario law firm. His law practice was restricted to business and commercial law and estate planning. He was the author of many articles and books on the subject of law firm management, and he was a past member of the editorial board of Law Practice Management magazine (as it then was known) published by the . . . [more]

You may already have been peppered with these—I’m not the person most tightly in the loop—but I thought you’d like to see what one of the big firms is doing by way of compliance with Canada’s Anti-Spam legislation. This arrived by email, allowing for an email reply. And there’s also a companion version on the Blakes website: . . . [more]

Commiserating on the demise of giant Canadian law firm Heenan Blaikie in a Letter to the Editor to The Globe and Mail of February 7, 2014, retired lawyer Stephen Barker took issue with referring to the legal profession as the “law industry.” He adds that most “industries” have low standards of public service. 

This is not new news. The law industry, is in fact, an industry; every industry has its own peculiarities.

More importantly, every industry is subject to the laws of economics (laws of supply and demand, market cycles), competition (and competitiveness), and the 4-stage marketing cycle. The fourth . . . [more]

We haven’t mentioned this previously, and I only just discovered it this weekend: “Making Rain“, the business development practice management coaching video column from Canadian Lawyer Magazine, hosted by certified executive coach Debra Forman of Pinstripe Coaching. Started in March 2010, these brief monthly videos give practical advice on business development for lawyers.

In the latest episode, Forman provides twelve resolutions for the coming year (one for each month). This series is a worth a look.

The full series is available from the Canadian Lawyer video listing. . . . [more]

Behold the legal bombshell: 500-lawyer national firm Heenan Blaikie may be folding, or at the very least re-structuring as early as next week, according to The National Post and The Globe and Mail. It’s like the opening line of Adele’s booming Skyfall theme: “This is the end….” 

At Heenan Blaikie, Initial Public Offering (IPO) work, although lucrative, was down 80 per cent in 2013 from 2012, according to The National Post. The theory was faulty and the assumptions were flawed: firms can grow bigger and take marketshare away from other firms. In marketing, any category (law services, . . . [more]

Why is it still so common to see a panel predominantly made up of middle-aged white male lawyers on the dais at a legal conference or CPD session? I noted this again at a legal conference I attended last week. Of course, there were exceptions – the panel of women in corporate counsel positions and the Aboriginal law panel, for example – but shouldn’t a gender balanced, diverse panel of speakers now be the rule, rather than the exception?

These questions have been roiling about my mind since last fall, when I read the numerous, thoughtful comments to my Slaw . . . [more]

Last week consulting firms Above the Law and Good2BSocial released their joint Social Law Firm Index ranking the Am Law 50 law firms’ social media presence. Ranking was compiled in terms of:

• Reach – “total number of unique people who had an opportunity to see the firm’s content.”
• Engagement – “actual interaction with the firm’s content via social media.”
• Owned media – “An assessment of the firm’s own site (including microsites) based on, among other things, the proportion of non-promotional content, frequency of updates, and shareability of content.”

Access to the Index is free, but you will need to . . . [more]

Spending time at a law school allowed me to see something very disturbing; law students are actively and deliberately told by law schools to expunge all social media activity.

The clear message to students is: Do Not Have Any Web-Presence Whatsoever.

Given this message, it’s no wonder that most Canadian lawyers view social media with fear and take no part in it. It also explains the shocked looks when I asked my class to create Twitter and LinkedIn accounts – then use them for class participation. Oh the horror!

Imagine if I had asked them to create blogs!

In my . . . [more]

This week I’ll be attending the Manitoba Bar Association’s annual Midwinter Conference in Winnipeg. The conference provides lawyers with the full 12 hours of mandatory continuing professional development (MCPD), including 1.5 hours that meet the Ethics, Professionalism and Practice Management requirement, but that’s not why I attend.

In this age of webinars, online courses and individualized learning, I look forward to being in a learning environment with other lawyers, one that invariably includes time allotted for discussion and questions. Often I find I’ll learn as much from the feedback from other participants as I have from the formal presentations. . . . [more]