My mother is a sweet homemaker who bakes a [soul-affirming] pie nearly every day.  She quilts up a storm, has the cleanest house you have ever seen, and in general runs a pretty tight ship.  This apple-cheeked grandma also has a good many tart responses for those who, in her estimation, don’t choose to exercise the good sense that God gave them.

I learned, often on the edge of Mom’s tongue, the principles that are critical to my daily work with lawyers and law firms.  If the managers at Dewey Leboeuf counted her among their kitchen cabinet, they probably wouldn’t be where they are today.   Here’s what I can hear her saying:

 If it seems to good to be true, it is. 

If you have read any of the press surrounding Dewey’s demise, then you know we’re going to reference huge guaranteed salaries for laterals now.  In retrospect it seems so obviously dangerous, so filled with hubris and a lack of caution that anyone who hears about it is tempted to bang their forehead on the keyboard.  And yet, a whole lot of extremely intelligent people, perhaps blinded by the dream of riches or just hopes that this will work out for them because they are unbeatable, let it happen.    The wishful thinking aspect of such a policy would seem blatantly obvious to almost any one you would meet in the street, much less highly educated and experienced attorneys who manage the risk of corporate America on a daily basis.

 Wanting it to be so does not make it so. 

 One of the first times I interviewed a lateral candidate, I left that interview confounded.  Had the managing partner and several practice leaders really met him?  When I asked, they said, “What do you mean?  Harvard! Top 10%!  AmLaw 25 firm!  Minority!” 

They evidently met his resume but didn’t see much about the person in front of them.   On paper this person was amazing; IRL, not so much.   And with no job to preserve or axe to grind I gave them the obvious answer:  It wasn’t his current firm’s fault he didn’t have business – he probably wouldn’t have any at our firm either.

I don’t mean to imply that the laterals at Dewey were bad picks.  I’m just saying that managers who are blinded — by great credentials or dreams of an ideal future or admiration for their own agenda – often don’t make prudent business decisions.

If ‘everyone’ jumped off the roof, would you do it too?

Merger mania has it that one simply can’t “compete in the global marketplace” with out being a bazillion attorneys.  So, firms merge repeatedly until a bazillion attorneys who don’t know each other or share the traditional bonds of partnership are all vying for the biggest share of a burgeoning pot.  And when the going gets rough, these partners don’t know or support each other.  They have no idea how to pull together, or take one for the team, or be patient for a year or two to get over what may have been a bad decision.  Instead, they take their toys and bargain their way into the next lucrative hotelling arrangement.

There are other options that allow venerable firms to preserve their cultures and values and keep strong internal relationships.  Just because ‘everybody’ is doing it does not mean it’s best or necessary or even professionally satisfying and rewarding.

At least, that’s what my mom told me.

There’s been a lot of buzz in the blogosphere lately about the importance of attorney web bios, so my team and I figured that maybe a blog post from people who actually write attorney bios might be in order.  :)

We don’t have a cottage industry of attorney bios going on over here, but we produce between 5 and 25 bios a month and about half that many practice group descriptions.  We shy away from producing bios for mega firms, so we’re writing for 4 or more firms a year, and each of those firms has their own style and content preferences.

Great Jakes’ research indicates that some 56% of law firm website traffic is to attorney bios. Our monitoring of client stats shows it to be less than that, but it’s still twice the traffic to any other page, including the home page of a firm’s website. Any way you cut it, bios are a law firm’s online living room.

So what should a bio be?  In a word: robust. We start bio writing by confirming that the web design will provide a well-rounded picture of the attorney, showcasing their matters, articles, speeches, civic and industry accomplishments, etc. But the text portion of the bio is still the holy grail that conveys the soul of lawyer: Who is this professional and why do I care to know him or her?

In terms of identifying text style, we send the client three to four different styles, varying from dead ahead and dry to an option centered on direct quotes and focused on the passion and legal interests of the attorney. (I’m not of the school that believes adding a sentence with number of kids, sport of choice and type of pet makes a bio “personal”.)

Weirdly to me, many firms choose dry and dead ahead. They are intimidated or put off by a bio that conveys too much passion, personality or verve. But, happily, not all feel that way, and so we conduct phone interviews, pull quotes and try to recreate, on paper, the person we have met.

Done well, this can be startling.  I was asked to interview a potential lateral from a DC area firm several weeks ago and so I looked up his current bio.  I had almost never come upon a random attorney bio that conveyed such a vivid sense of who the person was. Someday I want to find out who wrote that bio and shake their hand (or hire them).

If bios are so important and that fact is universally acknowledged by every blogger with a soapbox, then why are bios so rarely done well?  I think there are two reasons.

First, doing this well does not jibe with doing this quickly and cheaply. We stick with small or mid-sized firms for these projects because even though the total dollar number can be a mouthful, it is still a fathomable investment. Translate that into a 600-attorney firm, and the law firm is instantly thinking “volume discount”. We, meanwhile, are thinking “writer fatigue.” This is not one of those commodities that gets cheaper (or better) by the gross. Every unit still has to be produced with the same talent, creativity, sensitivity and thought.

The second reason has its origins deep in the attorney psyche. After many years of business development training and coaching, attorneys are still slow to accept and internalize the real way that clients make hiring decisions. Attorneys are stuck on the idea that clients make decisions like credential-computation machines — he with the most qualifications wins! Sorry. The person that the client (1) Knows, (2) Likes and (3) Trusts, in that order, gets the job. So why wouldn’t the purpose of a bio be to make one known, likable and trustworthy? Why not forgo the boring litany of credentials and relegate them to the sidebar? After all, if someone is reading the bio, they probably think you are smart enough (which is all that is necessary). Now let’s let them know why they should want to work with you.

I am a fan of the Great Jakes attorney microsites, which allow for robust attorney information, but I remain an old-fashioned girl who thinks that the power of the pen still prevails and your bio is your way of recreating your value proposition for the world to see. A well-reasoned, engaging prose bio is still your best marketing tool on today’s all-important Internet.

Now that Chambers & Partners has released its research schedule, it’s time to get down to business, particularly for all those submissions with a looming June 1 deadline.

Chambers hasn’t yet required that firms use their template, but it seems that they would like us to, so this year I will forgo my carefully designed firm-branded templates and use theirs. But while the structure of the submission will be the same for all firms, it’s what is on the inside that matters. With that in mind, here are a few key factors to consider in putting together your Chambers submission.

1. Lawyers not currently ranked that Chambers should consider for ranking in the next edition – This section guides Chambers’ researchers to attorneys who have had a strong year. I have worked with many practice leaders who hesitate to cut people from this list for fear of hurting feelings…or political missteps. That is a mistake. Try to steer your attorneys towards tightening up this section. I recommend including 3-4 partners and 1-2 associates for whom you are also listing related work and client references.

2. What is your firm best known for in this practice area? – As Chambers requests, avoid clichés here…industry jargon, legal buzzwords, etc. Oftentimes, you’ll need to write this section just for Chambers, as RFP and website language is not the same style that works best here. This is your chance to make your group stand out, so use short, succinct sentences and bullet points that will catch the researcher’s attention.

3. Matters – If you are fortunate enough to work with attorneys who will write the matter descriptions or if you have a matter database, be sure to edit the content as appropriate for the submission. Oftentimes, they will be written in a straightforward, legally accurate style that needs to be polished and freshened up a bit for the Chambers researcher who is reading thousands of these descriptions. While 2-3 paragraphs are acceptable, aim for brevity and clarity. And don’t hesitate to be crystal clear about the significance of a matter, i.e., ”This case was significant because…”

4. References - While not technically part of the submission, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention references. When I spoke with Laura Mills to the Law Firm Media Professionals group in March, she mentioned that quantity is important when trying to get attorneys ranked. You can lighten up on references for attorneys who are consistently ranked, but stack the decks in favor of others who you would like to have ranked and who have the matters to support a ranking.

What elements of a Chambers submission do you have questions about?

All my life, the quickest way to awaken my inner skeptic has been to tell me how absolutely wonderful something is. I’m quick to poke holes and speculate on who’s paying you for the endorsement.  (And I work for lawyers.  Hmmm.)

Enter LMA 2012 in Grapevine Texas – the Gaylord Texan to be precise, but never mind the [oh so] underwhelming venue.   Over 1000 legal marketers gathered outside of Dallas for 2-3 days last week to deepen their knowledge of industry trends and techniques and trade ideas with other professionals.

A bit of an introvert, I am never the first one to sign up for a 1000 person conference, but, for the 4^th year in a row, there I was.   And as per usual, I enjoyed the heck out of it.

High points included:

1. The crazy jam-packed Branding Session moderated by (full disclosure: my co-author) Adrian Dayton exploring the branding of individual attorneys versus the branding of the firm.  These things are often ‘standing room only” but not this one.  The seats filled up, then the aisles with people sitting on the floor, then every bit of wall space with standing spectators.  Finally the concerned LMA staffers stopped people from peeking in.  Atypically for these events, no one left, so the temperature in the room escalated while the presenters – Robert Aligeri from Great Jakes, Joe Calve from MoFo, Aden Dauchess from Womble Carlysle and Peter Winzig of Weltman, Weinberg & Reis – entertained the audience.  There was so much educational content distributed in that session and a palpable sense of excitement from presenters and audience.
2. I heard that the Wednesday CMO-only sessions were GREAT, but I obeyed the rules and stayed in the hallway.  There were good reports on the SMORS session on how to earn a seat at the table put on by DC marketers Marguerite Downey and Tammy Mangan.  I say that our CMOs have more than earned a seat at the table; it’s time the lawyers invited them to sit down already.  More on this by Adrian Dayton in his weekly NLJ column this week.
3. Is it valid to say that this was an opportunity for a rare, extended chat?  Because it was so excellent to have the time to really talk with industry thought leaders like Adrian Lurssen at JD Supra, Kevin O’Keefe of LexBlog and Elonide Semmes of Right Hat.
4. DC scores!  Our own Felice Wagner (Sutherland, Asbill & Brennan) was inducted into the LMA Hall of Fame, and Sutherland won Best of Show in the Your Honor Awards.  Go Sutherland!  (full disclosure – a client)
5. I met some absolutely awesome younger marketers who were clearly tomorrow’s innovators and CMOs.  In my job, I just don’t get the opportunity to interact with younger legal marketers enough, and my impression of them is that they are incredibly savvy in both business development and social media.  Several of these young women could step into my company right this minute and be an incredible business development coaches and social media strategists.  Do their firms know what they’ve got?  I hope so…

Did you attend LMA National this year?  If so, what was your experience?  If not – why not?  Are you coming next year to Vegas?  I’m betting on record attendance!

With 845 million monthly active users and 483 million daily active users on average at the end of December 2011, law firms cannot afford to ignore the impact that Facebook can have on their business development efforts.

The key to having a Facebook page for your firm is being prepared to use it as an interactive tool.

A few years ago, firms started created Facebook pages without a clear purpose; mostly to use as a recruiting tool. Now firms are finding the power of using Facebook for marketing efforts. One such firm, the Canadian firm MBM Intellectual Property LLP, has found success in using their Facebook page as a marketing tool and other firms can do the same. We spoke with Samantha Collier, who is the page’s administrator, about MBM’s success.

Getting noticed

After completing a branding campaign, MBM published an issue of their quarterly newsletter that focused on the rebranding and they included a link to their different social media sites. Just by including a link to their Facebook page, without even asking people to “like” the page, the firm received over 600 “likes” in just a few days. What does this mean? Those 600 fans will receive MBM’s updates in their Facebook stream. MBM is judicious about their posting – just 3 or 4 times per week – but they are nonetheless getting their message out regularly to an important audience.

Getting interactive

Think of a firm’s Facebook page as its interactive news page. All of the alerts, articles, press releases and event updates that firms post to the “News” pages of their websites can be posted to Facebook. But rather than get a Lexology report of how many people read an article, firms can interact with people on Facebook about the article and begin creating the key factor in developing new business – relationships.

MBM has seen the benefits of Facebook relationship building first-hand, with recommendations that were posted to the page.

Getting started

Firms have a lot of concerns when it comes to creating Facebook pages, but the sheer numbers make it hard – and unwise – to stay on the sidelines. For better or worse, the line between personal and professional is getting erased. Professionals check their email via mobile devices 24/7 and our online life has no definite beginning or end. Facebook offers the opportunity to reach decision-makers where they live and play. It’s time to judiciously and thoughtfully join them!

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.