You know that professional reputations can be made and maintained by what you write. But if you’ve ever struggled to write a blog post or a legal commentary or a presentation to the local Chamber of Commerce, you know it isn’t as easy as it sounds. Sometimes, just getting the opening sentence gets you going.

In my last column, I said that if you haven’t captured your readers in your opening sentence, you can kiss them goodbye. So what makes a good opening sentence? Let’s look at 10 good ways and 10 more very well-used—but not good—ways.

A question

I . . . [more]

Social Media Camp is the national conference on social media that attracts international speakers and attendees. At this year’s event, virtually all presenters agreed that images and video are taking over the internet. What do they mean by this? Consider the following:

• YouTube is now the second largest search engine – just behind Google – and may soon surpass it. (Don’t feel badly for Google as they own YouTube).
• Google is now building four-story data centre buildings to house the servers required to support increased data space needed on the cloud for things like images and video. These guys plan

Much of the current discourse and activity in our industry seems to be focused on evolving approaches to fees and pricing, budgeting, project management, better leverage of technology, and insourcing/near-shoring/outsourcing. While these are critically important aspects of modernizing law firm service delivery models, is our focus on value – discretely defined as the monetary worth of something – distracting us from thinking about value in a more holistic or integrated way?

I offer some data points based on my own recent experiences. Earlier this month, I attended a client panel discussion featuring four senior-level in-house lawyers representing different segments of . . . [more]

The possibility of optimism, Seth Godin explains…

“Is the glass half full or half empty?

The pessimist sees what’s present today and can only imagine eventual decline. The glass is already half empty and its only going to get worse.

The optimist understands that there’s a difference between today and tomorrow. The glass is half full, with room for more. The vision is based on possibility, the future tense, not the present one.

Pessimists have trouble making room for possibility, and thus possibility has trouble finding room for pessimists.

As soon as we realize that there is a difference between

Boring but important fact: law firm clients of all types – sophisticated, unsophisticated, big, small (and everywhere in between) increasingly use the Internet to research, vet, and select their lawyers. This is not news. But what is noteworthy is that online ratings & reviews of lawyers generated by the public are becoming a more predominant part of the overall picture of your firm that prospective clients see when they look you up online. You may want to address that.

Ratings are not new either. I’m old enough to remember when Martindale-Hubbell’s highly coveted AV ratings were doled out in giant-book . . . [more]

A funny thing happens when lawyers set out to write articles or blog posts. Even though they’re told the required number of words, they write twice that number. Ironically, the worst offenders are those who refuse to read long email messages—or indeed anything longer than a page.

Brevity is not only the soul of wit, it’s also very effective in communication. Whether you’re summarizing your argument before a judge or writing a blog post about why it’s important to have a will, keep it short! One of McCaffery’s Maxims is that half as long is probably twice as good.

I . . . [more]

Often when someone takes over a new position where they are responsible for, dare I say it, the sales funnel, one of their goals is to predict revenue. Most firms try to predict revenue, albeit with different levels of success. Some firms use a backlogs or potentials method for proposal tracking, others ask the professionals to maintain a rolling 12 month projection, and others may simply set a target hoping for the best. One thing is for sure, targeting revenue in professional services is different than for products but a level of predictability is still required.

Companies that sell widgets . . . [more]

I wasn’t planning on writing about best practices in client seminars this month, but two bits of disparate information made me reconsider. First, BTI’s research summarized in the April 6 Mad Clientist blog indicates that the largest 30 firms in the world are diverting budget from general audience events, seminars and webinars to fund strategic, highly-targeted client development initiatives. These initiatives can and should include customized programming for clients. [1] Second, a legal marketing colleague shared a somewhat surprising client seminar planning experience: on the eve of the seminar, very little lawyer-side preparation had been done, despite his cajoling, stalking . . . [more]

Almost every time I sit down with a law firm for the first time, someone around the table asks me what “really works” when it comes to legal marketing. Is it Google AdWords? Blogging? This new “content marketing” stuff someone’s heard about? Maybe marketing to our referral sources instead of directly to clients. What about social media – is there anything to that? Videos – do we really need those? Or maybe we should focus on our annual client event and do that up on a larger scale?

Fair questions all. And I can almost hear the plaintive longing in . . . [more]

Picture this. You finally get together with a classmate, having rescheduled three times. He opens the conversation with: “So, how are things, busy?” You run your fingers through your hair and tell him you can’t remember when you had a weekend off, you missed your kid’s concert, yada, yada, yada, and you end with “yeah, I’m crazy busy.”

Was his question just idle chitchat—or could he now be thinking that maybe he shouldn’t refer a plum piece of work to you?

Or picture it this way. You schedule a lunch with a classmate because you want to explore the possibility . . . [more]

If you have ever had the un-enviable job of re-building a corporate intranet you will know where I am coming from. Corporate intranets tend to be a mass repository of just about everything, from everyone that your firm has ever produced. Intranets unintentionally become dumping grounds that are never cleaned up. Of course much of the content was important at some point, so how do you turn a vast wasteland of information into something usable, friendly and fit within your culture? It starts with a rethink.

There are many articles about how to get the project started, approved, launched, etc. . . . [more]

Complacency is a dangerous force. It blinds us to possible threats and keeps us from pursuing opportunities. It lulls us to sleep…and by the time we wake up, it may be too late.

And let’s face it; it can be easy to become complacent. If your practice is running smoothly, if you’re making enough to pay the bills, and if you know there are clients with cases in your pipeline…it’s easy to let your guard down.

But when that happens, you’re in danger. And let me tell you something…there’s NEVER any good reason to become complacent. There are always opportunities . . . [more]