Last fall, Amy wrote a post about impending changes to the Chambers submission process; Changes Afoot for Lawyer’s Favorite Listing. Law firm marketers (including myself, who was in-house at the time), let Chambers know that moving to a two-deadline schedule was not welcomed. They heard us, and decided not to proceed with the change, but to continue with rolling deadlines based on state and practice area.

Last week, I called Laura Mills, Chambers’ USA Editor, to find out about key dates and any updates to the research schedule that we should be aware of, and the highlights are below. I provided more details in a memo that I sent to Knapp Marketing’s contact list, and if you’d like a copy, please email me at aileen@knappmarketing.com.

Initial Rankings Notification: Chambers plans to email firm contacts to alert them that the initial ranking information (attorneys and practice groups – no bands) is ready for viewing via each firm’s administrative page this week, as early as February 22^nd.

Band Notification: Chambers will alert firms to the specific bands in which attorneys and practices ranked at least two weeks before the June 8th launch, possibly sooner.

2013 Research Schedule: Instead of running a nine-month research schedule, Chambers is condensing it into six months, with submissions due June 1 – November 1 and research running from July – December 2012. The first round of submissions for the 2013 Guide will be due on June 1. The schedule will be posted in mid-late March.

Possible Change to References: To avoid reference fatigue, Chambers has a policy whereby they will only contact the same reference once in a six to eight month period. Sometimes, this means that a firm’s reference won’t be contacted because another firm provided the same reference months earlier. Chambers is considering some changes to how they collect references from law firms, which would be geared towards avoiding this situation. I’ll be sure to post the details should the change occur.

I recently left an AmLaw 100 firm where I overhauled their rankings program and significantly increased their rankings in Chambers and other directories. I’ll be monitoring comments to this post and am happy to answer any questions you have.

In a December 23, 2011 Wall Street Journal article on the use of social media by attorneys, law firms and lawyers took it on the chin.  In the first few sentences, they were dubbed “geezers” “risk-averse” and “hidebound”.  That was before paragraph two.

The WSJ took their cue from a National Law Journal article by my co-author Adrian Dayton, but Adrian’s far from the only commentator knocking how law firms don’t “interact” on social media and how they are subsequently “missing out” on the promise of social media.

As the New York Times noted in an article this Sunday, “[Twitter] is a meritocracy; if you’re interesting, you get followed.”

Given the drubbing they get about it, I wonder if law firm brands blast out only self-serving messages because they don’t understand how to do anything else.

What really constitutes being both “interesting” and “professional” on Twitter, in LinkedIn Posts or in Facebook Updates?

First, people tweet, not brands.  In the best of all possible worlds, the person who tweets for your firm is a high-level attorney authorized to speak for the firm, reasonably talented in business development, and aware of the huge potential of social media.

Law firm leaders can tweet for their firms.  People who do social media do not need to be in their twenties.  It is not new fangled.  It is the written word, distilled and brief, capable of conveying personality, emotion, intellectual rigor and critical information.  The mechanics are simple, so technical facility is not an excuse.

If your firm tweeter can’t be an attorney, at least let your tweeter have a name.  If need be, the avatar will be the firm logo, but the description can say “I’m John Smith tweeting on behalf of Begly, Jones and Snyder, a Philadelphia-based insurance and financial services law firm.”

Then John must be given the latitude to behave like a human, not like a fax machine  spewing out news releases.  Obviously, John is someone who you trust to speak for the firm in one of the most public forums available to human beings ever (social media).

Second, ‘giving’ more than you seek to ‘get’ is the essence of success in all human relationships and in social media.  The formula I use when training attorneys is that 30% of their posts can draw attention to their own or their firm’s accomplishments, and 70% should be providing value and interaction to their followers without direct benefit to themselves or the firm.

To reiterate: only 30% of the tweets that you put out from your law firm twitter account should contain firm announcements or links to your attorney’s stuff or invitations to your firm events.  The other 70% consist of:

1.  Retweets of interesting, relevant legal industry articles that have been posted by those you follow.  (This means that you have to make an effort to follow interesting legal industry commentators.)

2.  Responses to people you follow who say interesting or provocative things.  For a social media presence, your response to this cannot be “we are a law firm and can’t speak to people.”

3.  Tweeting out links to articles that you think are interesting (not written by your own firm) along with some insight or commentary that would interest your followers.

4.  Conversations with someone that you know or someone you’d like to know because they are interesting on Twitter.  Use the @ reply and speak to them.  They will speak back – you have a conversation.

There are lawyers and law firms who do Twitter and social media well, including @MarkWasserman1, the managing partner of Sutherland who tweets for himself as the firm’s leader.

Do you know of any law firms who do a good job interacting on social media?  If so, please share in comments; I want to follow them!

It’s January, and from your new-found perch on the StairMaster, you are reading a gazillion articles and blog posts about the 10 ways to succeed in business in the New Year.  Some read like self-help books while others reiterate the life-affirming value of writing a marketing plan.

But eventually it all sounds like the adults on a Charlie Brown cartoon special. Those Charlie Brown characters can’t hear the adults because the adults aren’t clued in to their real concerns.

Whether 2012 brings another recession or simply a year of no growth, law firms and their leaders will consider anything but more profit a failure come December.   The question is:  how should we approach this year to feel like we won when it’s over?

In the recent slow-to-no-growth market years, law firms have managed to eek out small amounts of growth by screwing down the expenses tighter than a drum, de-equitizing less productive partners, curtailing 1^st year associate hiring, paring the marketing department to a fair-thee-well, and merging like mad in the hopes that bigger will be better/safer/more profitable.   Not a lot of options left there.

So here are 10 4 steps that I believe will make you feel like a winner on come next New Year’s:

1.  Stop thinking in 12-month increments and plan for the longer-term success of your firm.  

The numbers on December 31 are primarily important because of the nature of your compensation system – they don’t say much about the future of your firm, its unique culture, the good work you do for clients, the life satisfaction you and your partners experience by working together or the meaning of life.  Law firm compensation models have driven law firm business practices for too long.  This is the year to get over it – and to share those modified expectations with your partners in a clear communication right up front.

2.  Be honest – and proactive – about firm needs that have been festering for years. 

If there is a slower animal on this planet than a law firm in decision-making mode, I have not seen it.  Businesses that succeed in down economy acknowledge the elephant in the room, cut through the politics and take decisive action to address their needs.

- Need a stronger firm culture of business development?  Invest in training and coaching.

- Would you be more stable with a broader platform from which to provide more services to existing clients?  Invest in finding the right merger partner.

-  Would your corporate client base grow if you could accurately provide fixed fee pricing?  Invest in the knowledge management and PM training.

- Is your own office in another metropolitan area no brainer?  Start planning now to sock away some money at the end of the year so the firm can ultimately afford it.

3.  Take personal responsibility for doing everything you can in the area of business development.

I am in exactly the same boat as every attorney I work with and coach.  If I don’t succeed in business development, I don’t support my family.  I can confidently say that none of us do everything we know we should to develop business.  Some years you may feel you do 70% of what you should, and some years, you probably feel you’ve only done 30%.  This should be the year to pull up your socks and do all that you know you should.  And if you need support or direction, now would be the time to speak up, not in June, when five months of opportunity have passed you by.

4.  Look like you’ve gone off the deep end. 

Share with your partners and co-workers how lucky and blessed you have been and continue to be.  Enjoy your culture.  Realize how interesting and rewarding it is to work with intelligent people.  Savor each time you use your skills to help some person or company.  Express appreciation.

And then in 2012, sleep well at night.

If you don’t know who Peter Shankman is, I can still guarantee you that you want to see him make a presentation.  He’s the Robin Williams of business on the web – maintaining a frenetic, highly articulate verbal pace fueled by can after can of Diet Coke.    The founder of Help A Reporter Out (HARO), Shankman is a renowned thought leader and entrepreneur in the web and social media space.

At Hildebrandt’s Social Media Conference last month, Shankman entertained and educated 90 lawyers and legal marketers with his four rules of social engagement.  I doubt he developed this presentation just for the legal profession, but he could have – it hit on many of the areas the legal profession is struggling to learn.

1.  Transparency.  Screwing up is a given on the world wide web.  The question isn’t ‘if’ – it’s how big.  And the answer is pretty simple: acknowledge and apologize.  (Event Co-chair Jasmine Decarie mentioned the Nixon Peabody video of Youtube fame which perfectly illustrates this principle.) Social media can make unintended problems huge; transparency wins the day every single time (as in: that was a mistake – we’ll do it better next time).

2.  Relevance.  Fifty years ago the average age of the nightly news viewer was 26;  today the average age of the nightly news viewer is…dead.  And no one venue has replaced the evening news.    There is no one way to get your news now – everybody has their own favorite way of getting information.  In order to deliver your message properly, you have to know how your audience likes to get theirs and there is only one way to do that:  You have to ask them!  Engage with your audience, ask them what they want and how they want it, or they will go somewhere else.    How often do law firms do that rather than firing of yet another verbose email alert?  Which brings us to…

3.  Brevity.  The average attention span of an audience today is 2.7 seconds.  We are asked for our attention 18,000 times a day.  140 characters is a text message or a tweet, and 98% of the world has received a text message.  If you have only 140 characters to reach your audience, then you had better learn to write.  Bad writing is killing America and bad writing will kill your firm.   Bad writing is the root of bad marketing.  All we have in a 2.7 second world is good writing.  [Note that Shankman began by defining good writing as brevity.]

4.  Be Top-of-Mind.  On average, we only talk to 5% of the people in our network.    Shankman recommends that we all go onto our networks (Facebook or LinkedIn, or whatever) and look for the people we haven’t spoken to in six months.  Either write on their wall or unfriend them.  Because being top-of-mind is not about numbers.  It’s about engagement.  Social media has given us the great power of self-promotion under the guise of helping.  Put it to work!

Peter Shankman can be found on Twitter @petershankman, on his blog at Shankman.com and through his social media consultancy The Geek Factory.

If you are a staff person at a law firm, I can virtually guarantee that your lawyers want to be listed in Chambers.  And based on a presentation by the editors in DC last Friday, making that happen isn’t getting any easier.

Catherine McGregor and US Editor Laura Mills spoke to an overly packed house at the Army Navy Club in DC, and to my surprise, attorneys outnumbered marketing people by a healthy factor.  I couldn’t help thinking that the lost billable hours in that room equaled the GDP of a small Caribbean nation.

The editors gave us the usual spiel – get your submissions in on time, take the time to explain why the cases you list are important to the practice area, and did you know that we will sell you the results of our interviews (Chambers Confidential)?

Then they happened to mention that next year’s submission deadlines will be significantly earlier – late May and July 2 – and that there will be only two deadlines.  Unfortunately, that first deadline will fall before this year’s book is published, but they will remedy that timing issue by 2013.

More significantly, they are going to de-emphasize ‘peer review’ and start doing independent interviews of clients, eliciting general GC feedback on lawyers, rather than just speaking to the clients we submit.

Catherine emphasized to me in a conversation that Chambers is urged by clients to maintain the exclusivity of the listings.  “They want to be sure that everyone isn’t listed, that this is in fact this year’s cream of the crop,” she said.

My takeaways from this were:

(1) Chambers wants to remove any way we have of gaming the system through recommendations by friends (although of course none of us would do that);

(2) Chambers is seeking to make the listing more exclusive; and

(3) Who is listed is more likely to change from year to year.

Finally, the efforts by Chambers to conduct independent (in person) interviews of GCs of large corporations could have the effect of making it harder for smaller law firms who serve the entrepreneurial middle market to be listed.    I hope not, but I could see that as an unintended result.

One legal marketer asked a question that many of were thinking – do we really have to fill out an extensive submission, or can we just submit client names?  I personally have a client who does this and their managing partner and firm have been listed for years.  Not surprisingly, Laura Mills recommended against it because she pointed out that it makes your submission less strong compared to those who went the extra mile.  If only out of caution, I’d agree.

This past year, we prepared a submission for a client who had not been previously listed, and our submission dotted every “I”, crossed every “t” and did every single little thing that Chambers asked for.  The attorney got listed, and a Chambers editor mentioned it was the best submission she’d ever seen.  Might be a coincidence, but now I’m trained!

If Chambers meant what they said last Friday in DC, then I think that we had all better submit a Pulitzer-worthy submissions to ensure our lawyers stay in the running.

The other day, I realized that one of my most social media savvy clients thought that all web clicks (AKA web visitors) were created equal – that web statistics are just a numbers game. Based on the numbers, he said that LinkedIn was not particularly important to his firm’s online business development campaign, except as a way for potential clients to message him, if necessary.

I was amazed because I thought the inequality of clicks was self evident. Yes, there are 250 weekly clickthroughs from Google and about 20 from LinkedIn. Given the 90% bounce rate, guess which clicks are better? [see below for explanation of bounce rate]

The LinkedIn clicks are driven by the firm attorneys posting links to blog posts and firm articles to their profiles. Their collective network is clicking on those links and visiting the blog. Every one of those clicks is an existing client, potential client, referral source or attorney colleague. In other words, all 20 of the LinkedIn clicks are people we are trying to reach.

I mean no disrespect to Google, because this same client landed a seven-figure client through a Google search. Still, that 90% bounce rate is from people who came to the client’s site and visited only one page. Perhaps they read the whole blog article and then left, but many of them were no doubt unqualified, mistaken clickthroughs from people who aren’t potential clients of this firm and aren’t interested in their content. Those “bounces” are most likely generated by Google, not by LinkedIn.

Next let’s look at the 30% of “unattributed” blog or web visits that show up on most of our stats every month. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) specialists (i.e. people who know a lot more than me) theorize that this 30% that can’t be measured is really just links that were typed into the search bar or shared the old fashioned way – via email.

Given the recent obsession in law firms for ROI, we tend to obsess about what can be “measured” and we tend to ignore that 30% of unattributed clicks. But one-third of our clicks shouldn’t be disregarded, particularly if those clicks are potentially coming from people who were specifically sent a link by someone who thought they might be interested.

What can we do with this information?

First, don’t be so focused on ROI that you only gravitate to the large numbers on your web stats. It’s a quality game, not a numbers game.

Second, do not become so enamored of social media that you forget the obvious. If you write an article, put it into the body of an email, come up with a decent subject line and send it out to your contact list. An email comes with the magic Forward button and that can ultimately account for a substantial number of your clickthroughs and readers.

* Bounce rate indicates the number of people who visit your website from another site like Google and then leave after having visited only that one landing page. Your bounce rate can be a very good measure of the quality of your clicks because we assume that visitors who click through to different pages were interested visitors who could be potential clients.

“The legal market is not growing, so our approach to marketing has to be a cannibalistic one. The best way to hang onto your client is to get as many hooks into the organization as possible. That means you had better learn to cross-sell,” according to Jim Staples, CMO of Cozen O’Connor, speaking to an audience of 90 legal marketers in Washington, DC on September 16th, 2011.

“If you have one hook into a client, you are at an 80% risk of losing them. If you have two hooks, that risk goes down to 60%. If you have five different practice groups engaged with a client (five hooks) then no one else has a chance,” he asserted. “Lawyers look at cross-selling differently when you put it that way. It’s not about sharing – it’s about protecting your own turf.”

The LMA Capital Chapter in DC had their annual fall half-day program last Friday and we were lucky enough to hear a panel of three well-known Chief Marketing Officers share their experiences inside and outside of the legal industry.

Shawn Adams of Gardere based in Dallas has been in legal marketing for three years. When asked what surprised him most about legal marketing, he pointed out that the panel only had an hour, which was probably insufficient to answer the question.

One of Shawn’s successful attorney coaching strategies involves combating the “Seymour” personality type. In an attempt to postpone decisions or action,  decisionmakers often request more and more information. Shawn recommends the KISS approach to the Seymour attitude – keep it simple and don’t provide large amounts of information.

The panel’s moderator, Aleisha Gravit, CMO of Akin Gump, came to legal marketing from the oil business in Texas and Colorado. Aleisha also emphasized the importance of cross-selling over letting a rainmaker be content with one slice of the pie. She was surprised to have three clients respond to an informal survey where she asked them the size of their overall legal budget. By sharing the results with the firm relationship partners, she was able to impress upon them just how small a piece of the overall business the firm actually had.

“That’s the kind of powerful information that opens attorney minds to the power of cross-selling and a team approach to development,” she said.

Panelists recommended that attendees read and reread Selling the Invisible, A Field Guide to Modern Marketing; Outliers, The Story of Success and Selling to VITO the Very Important Top Officer: Get to the Top. Get to the Point. Get to the Sale.

I was pleased to be mentioned in the National Law Journal last week by social media columnist Adrian Dayton! Full disclosure – Adrian is also my friend and co-author of our upcoming book from Ark Group Publishing about developing business using Linkedin and Blogs.

I was mentioned “Five Linkedin Tips that Lawyer’s Don’t Know” and it contained some great ideas that we would all benefit from. Adrian and I agree that there was one suggestion that I should clarify for those of you who might be thinking of trying it..

Adrian suggested that we update our Outlook contacts on a regular basis by re-uploading them into LinkedIn – presumably to catch the new ones who weren’t there when we opened our LinkedIn account a couple of years ago. While keeping your LinkedIn Contacts current is critical to your successful networking, uploading that Outlook CSV file a second time could be problematic.

If you did upload your outlook contacts a first time, the rest of this article is for you. If you never really dumped your Outlook contacts into LinkedIn in the first place – jump down to the footnote at the bottom and I’ll convince you to do so.

If you re-upload your Outlook contacts, LinkedIn will not tell you which ones are already your contacts, and it will not let you know who didn’t respond to your invite. You have to manually figure this out – which can be like using the hunt-n-peck typing method to write a book – tedious! To add insult to injury, you have a lifetime maximum of 3,000 LinkedIn invitations to use, and uploading your outlook contacts twice (and duplicating lots of them) could use 1/2 or 2/3 of those invitations. Three thousand sounds like a lot now, but I can almost guarantee that it won’t in 3 years…

Hopefully LinkedIn will fix this problem, but for how, you have to manually cross-reference your new Outlook list (in a CSV file) with the Sent folder of your Linkedin Inbox [Inbox > Sent]. Dunno ‘bout you, but I have 247 pages, with 15 per page. Not happening.

My best advice is to keep up with your contacts by ALWAYS sending out Linkedin invites after events, conferences, etc. My second best advice is to pour a glass of wine one evening and page through your Outlook contacts noting who is a newish contact who might not have made it to your Linkedin list. Note them down and head to Linkedin to add them.

Last piece of advice: If you are customizing your invitations the way you should be, stick with one glass.

Footnote: If you never actually uploaded your Outlook contacts into LinkedIn because you were worried about not being able to control the process once it started – get over it and upload the list. I promise that LinkedIn will allow you to choose who gets an invite before it actually sends them – each name has a check box. You are still in the driver’s seat, even after you upload the CSV file. And your LinkedIn strategy is only as strong as your network. Here are the directions for the procedure.
Good luck!

For the first time, at the LMA 2011 annual conference several weeks ago, I heard a convincing argument that sales people and lawyers have something in common:  “both are high producing individual contributors.”  As opposed to team players, presumably.

This quote was courtesy of Kelvin Chin, Sales Director at Womble Carlyle who was one of three senior business development professionals to speak on how to develop a sales culture at a law firm.

Even as part of a panel of like-minded business development professionals, Womble stands out as a culture unusually accepting of the term “sales” and everything that goes with it.   Since most attorneys I know would rather swallow a powdered wig than say that they engage in sales, it’s no surprise that the other two firms represented on the panel – Nixon Peabody and Perkins Coie –  stick to euphemisms like business development and lead generation.

The panel’s shared best practices had a lot to do with making smart choices before any new coaching or training program gets off the ground.  Getting off the on the right foot can mean success in the long term and that includes:

-  Work with a coalition of the willing;

-  Be sure to FIRST get management’s buy-in that the ‘coalition of the willing’ is who you’ll focus on, rather than those who have been stagnant for years or who just haven’t been living up to expectations;

- Make certain that the program is championed by a well-respected equity partner (equity partners are more rare these days and they carry more cache).

- Identify those who seem to ‘get’ the concept of business development but don’t have the skills yet (read:  no remedial cases).

-  The ideal demographic is senior associates and young or newly minted partners.

-  When you launch a coaching or training program, think carefully about who is invited to apply, then select those who make the best case for their own success.

These tips certainly make sense from my experience — what would you add to these?

Donna Seyle, a friend and lawyer I met on Twitter, visited my new blog yesterday and direct messaged me a very insightful question.  “With all the arguments regarding “to blog versus not to blog”, why have you decided to take up the sport?”

I think the real question should be – given my first hand experience with how powerful blogging can be for one’s reputation, what on earth took me so long?  And I can only admit to a great fear of commitment.  I am a woman who sobbed her way into a wedding ceremony that ended in one of the happiest marriages on record (my own), simply for fear of commitment.

I might not have been blogging for myself for the past several years, but I have helped several clients use blogs to amazing (yes, really) success, and I know the rules.  OK – maybe just one rule.  A blog is like a child:  feed it regularly and constantly or it dies.  You can’t be all into it for a few months and then take a hiatus.  If you do so, poof!  There went your hard work and good will.  Why would I add another high maintenance item to my life (sorry, husband and son)?

Why indeed.  As an active marketing professional, I simply cannot imagine any action that I can take that has the potential to provide the rewards that blogging can and does.  To name a few:  credentialing, personal growth, visibility beyond my strong and weak ties, an instant “get to know you” for potential new clients; a hub for my network and community, an intimate forum in which to share my insights and learning.

As an illustration of this, I will blog a case study soon of a client of mine and how their top-quality blogs helped literally put them on the map despite the fact they were a new, small, boutique law firm in a tough legal climate.

But you don’t have to wait for that – take a look at the blogs of the friends who commented on my last blog post.  Chances are you already read their blogs.  I know I do.  Cordell Parvin, of Cordell Parvin Blog, Jordan Furlong of Law21, Tom Matte of The Matte Pad, Jonathan Groner, editor of Crime In the Suites (my client’s blog), Adrian Dayton and Bob Ambrogi.  I also have seen how the blogs of, Jayne Navarre, Heather Morse, Larry Bodine, Pam Woldow and Kevin O’Keefe (among many others) have showcased their expertise and enhanced their reputations.

If you blog, how do you feel about the results versus the effort?  And if you don’t blog – why not?  Do you think it’s the right choice?