Greatest American Lawyer Blog

Know Your Business and Mind Your Business

The Greatest American Lawyer — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 13:08:30 PDT

It is important to know what kind of law firm you are. If you are a firm that drives business off your reputation and referrals, then those are the people you need to make sure you are attending to. If you get your business off the internet, you need to pay attention to your internet web presence and make sure your search engine rankings do not decrease. If your business model is dependent on getting your initial customers to sign up for a second and third project, then you better make sure you are showing those projects as part of your process.

Every law firm is different. You need to fully understand what kind of law firm you are and make sure you are attending to those things that really count.

Larry Bodine Named Editor-in-Chief of Lawyers.com and Martindale.com

The Greatest American Lawyer — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 12:57:23 PST

Larry Bodine is now the editor-in-chief of two of the largest and most prestigious services and websites in the world, www.lawyer.com and www.martindale.com. I’ve known Larry for many years, as we have both been active bloggers for some time. Lawyers.com has grown tremendously over the years in terms of content and attorney bio databases. If you’re looking to find a lawyer, lawyers.com is a great place to start.

Congratulations to Larry, lawyers.com and martindale.com on their efforts moving forward.

Read the full article.

Top Tech Trends Lawyers Should Keep an Eye On in 2012

The Greatest American Lawyer — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 11:41:49 PST

Monica Goyal at the Law Times News published this article about the top five tech trends lawyers should keep a close eye on in 2012. See her list below:

Goyal, Monica (2012, January). Bits and Bytes: Top 5 tech trends for lawyers in 2012. Law Times

1.    Rocket Lawyer and LegalZoom are said to be entering the British market in 2012. Furthermore, a few notable legal web services have come up in the last year, all positioning themselves to take advantage of the new legal regulatory framework in Britain, including Everyman Legal and Net Lawman.

This undoubtedly represents the start of a wave of new legal technology companies and services that may come to this side of the ocean once they’ve proven themselves in the British market. All of this because of recent changes to the Legal Services Act there. Will the United States follow suit?

2.    Cloud-based software services: Microsoft Word, a staple software for almost everyone, will now be cloud-based with Office 365. This has been a long time coming and it represents a huge shift for those still refusing to get on the cloud. If you haven’t already, you should be asking the question what you need to do to prepare yourself for cloud computing.

3.    Business Analytics: Analytics and accountability go hand in hand for most businesses. Today, there are many tools to allow businesses to measure and then adapt their behaviours in order to improve their bottom line. Take social media, for example.

Customers and clients use social media and you could possibly engage with them there, but how does a company capitalize on this and what kind of return are they realizing on this investment? In 2012, people will be talking less about getting their businesses on social media and more about how to measure the return on investment through analytics.

There are many tools already available that will measure your influence online or your click-through rates on your tweets.

4.    Mobile payments: In 2012, with the emergence of near field communication, you’ll now be able to use your smartphone to make small purchases at stores, restaurants, and even in taxis. It’s totally cool but is it too convenient?

5.    Behavioural advertising: Currently, there are countless technology startups with an advertising revenue business model. To make it work, they go beyond general demographic information and instead use a person’s private online browsing preferences to sell them something.

Ernie the Attorney Provides Great Solo and Small Law Firm Tips. Have You Heard of Ruby Receptionist?

The Greatest American Lawyer — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 05:00:00 PST

Play: Interview with Attorney Earnest Svenson about Digital Workflow CLE - Part 2
(click title to listen)

With: Ernest Svenson

Sponsored by: Greatest American Lawyer

Read Show Transcript

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Enrico:   One of the really interesting curriculum items that I have seen on your website is called "Little Big Firm:   Tips for Small Firm Lawyers".   It is clearly something you are out there teaching in your CLE to lawyers who come to get their CLE credit and learn about technology.   Tell me a little bit about this particular educational track.

Ernie:   Well, it all started with a blog post that I wrote for my Ernie the Attorney blog which I dashed off quickly.   It was something that had been building up for a long time.    It was the idea that as a solo lawyer, practicing commercial litigation and corporate type stuff, that I could do as good a job or better than I could if I was working at a mid- to large-sized firm.   This was all based on my actual experience.

I wanted to do commercial litigation when I got out of law school, so I went to work at a firm in New Orleans that was on a small size.   There were one or two firms in New Orleans that had a good reputation, but they were smaller than the big firms, and whenever I was applying to go work at someplace – and this was, of course, in the heyday when people, if you did well in law school they fought over you, so I had a lot of job offers - most of them were from big firms.   The big firms were always saying, "No, you don't want to go work at that firm. That's a small firm.   We're bigger and we can do all this great stuff. We have lots of important clients.   You should come here."

I didn't want to do that, because I felt that I liked the renegade way that these smaller firms were doing things.   The smaller firms maybe couldn't afford Lexus, but our firm cobbled together and they shared their account with Arthur Andersen so we had access to Lexus even though normally a firm that size wouldn't have it.   The receptionist was really well-trained so if you called them, they paid a lot of attention to what she sounded like on the phone and some of these larger firms didn't.   They'd have the old battle-ax who answered the phone and they thought it was good enough.

The small firm I went to had a Wang computer system which created really good-looking document, but they were the smallest firm in New Orleans that had the system.    The rest of the firms were big.   So they were working really hard to establish this presence and this perception out there that they were good, because they were good.   They had really good lawyers, but it was hard to convince clients that they were really good, unless they came in and worked with them.   Their method was signaling at all levels that we're really good and we pay attention to details.   But all that costs money. It wasn't something you could do unless you were in a firm of at least 20 lawyers.   So when I left the firm after 20 years to go out on my own, I wanted to maintain that same thing.   I felt like I was going to be able to maintain most of it because of a lot of it just depends on the technology. The clients that I wanted didn't care where I worked.   They didn't want me go take out rent in a high-rise building and spend a lot of money.   They didn't care about that. But they would care about what my website looked like.   They would care what my stationery and my pleadings that I filed with the court looked like.   They would care if when they called me whether I had somebody to answer the phone or was I was answering my own phone. They might care about those kinds of things.

So I steadily tried to pick apart those little problems and solve them so that in the end I got to a point where you could come to my office where I was in a co-working space downtown. It was the old large law firm that had once made me an offer.   I was working in the same building but I wasn't paying the same amount of rent. I'm paying a fraction of what it would cost. Instead of my overhead being 50 to 60 percent, my overhead was about 8 percent of my collections. Yet I looked, for all intents and purposes, and acted and functioned like I was in a big firm. Basically, I knew the same things that I knew when I worked with the big firm; I just had to deliver that as a solo lawyer.

That blog post was about that. Then I got invited to speak by the Louisiana Disciplinary Council on their road show. They wanted me to come and talk about that topic because they thought that would be interesting. And I thought, "Great. I'll have a greater presentation." It was extremely well-received. It's one of the top two presentations in terms of people wanting to hear it. When I give the presentation they want to know more and they're very excited because there are a lot of solo and small firm lawyers out there, or lawyers who are at big firms who to leave, who want to figure out how to connect those dots. That's basically what that presentation is all about.

Enrico:   So it sounds like what you've done over the years is sifted through the process of figuring out what really are the things that are important to most clients in terms of appearance. I always say there's form over substance. If you want to pay for form, there are a bunch of suits down the street in a fancy conference room who are going to take $10,000 from you in order to come through the door, and you'll get all kinds of form. But if you want substance, if you want good quality legal work and a return on investment, and an attorney who is going to think about these things, then you're in the right place hiring us.

But there is a certain minimum level of expectation of clients out of their attorneys, especially when you're handling a complex matter. Give me a rundown of what you, in your experience, believe are really the important things that you have to have in place.

Ernie:   I think number one is you have to deliver a good quality product. You have to be a good lawyer and you have to pay attention to the details. That goes without saying and that's not part of my talk but that is obviously the most important thing. That precedes everything.

But assuming you're doing a really good job and you know you're competent, what are the little things that signal to clients, to judges, to opposing counsel, to everybody, that you know what you're doing? For example, the pleadings that you file in court; do those look coherent? Is the typography part of it right? A lot of lawyers say, "Typography? What do I care about typography?" Well, you might not care, but if I showed you two things where one was incorporating typographic principles that apply to legal documents and the other one didn't, you would know right away that one of them is better than the other. You would tend instinctively, whether you acknowledge it to yourself or not, to be ready to receive that one with the better typography as something that you would expect to be higher quality.

There's a book called "Typography for Lawyers" by Matthew Butterick. He has a website and he explains the principles of typography that apply to legal documents. He used to be a design guy and still is, went to law school, saw the problem, and said, "Let me explain to lawyers why they need to do this," because they create professional documents like a book or a magazine. Those are professional documents. Well, so are the things that lawyers file, but lawyers wouldn't pick up a book or a magazine that had the typography principles that they use in their own briefs. They'd say, "My God, this is garbage."

So why don't they do the same thing for their pleadings? The answer is that they don't know what those principles are. Butterick's book and his website say, "Okay. Here's what you need to do." If you do those things and set up your documents, you'll have a template that will work great and your documents will always look great. You'll never have to think about it again because you've set it all up in the beginning.

But if you're unaware that that's something that you should do, you'll just keep doing what all lawyers do, which is copying everything that everybody else is doing, and it's all crap.

Enrico:   Excellent. That's an interesting thing. So definitely your work product has to show competence and professionalism. You also mentioned a receptionist and phone. What are the issues there that lawyers need to be thinking about?

Ernie:   Well, when I started out on my own, my first goal was to just spend as little money as possible. While I also wanted to be as good in terms of my appearance as my old firm, I couldn't really afford or I didn't want to start paying money for things that I didn't need. It would be great to have a receptionist. There were phone-answering services but those weren't that great and they were expensive, so I didn't do that.

After a couple of years a friend of mine said, "Have you heard of this thing called Ruby Receptionists?" I said no. He told me how much it cost. It was $200 a month for 100 minutes. I thought, "That's pricey. I don't want that." He said, "Well, just try it for 30 days for free and see what you think." And I thought, "Well, okay. At least I can test this idea of what it would be like to have a receptionist service and how good would it be, and then I'll cancel it."

I kept the service, and I still keep them because for the $200 a month, which is more than I pay per month for anything other than my malpractice coverage, I have the best receptionist you could possibly ever have. My receptionist, and the service of my receptionist, what my clients experience when they call me, is better than my old firm ever had and that any firm I know of ever has. It's just one of those things that's kind of weird, but that's the way it works. The way it works is big firms, or firms that hire a person and put them there, first of all, they generally don't train them. Firms aren't in the field of saying, "Let me figure out what makes her a good receptionist." They just hire people that are good and hope that they keep working there.

But if the receptionist that's the optimal, best receptionist gets up and goes to the bathroom and is replaced by somebody else, then suddenly the quality of their call-answering has gone down a notch or two. If that receptionist doesn't show up for work because she's sick, and that happens, it's the same thing.

This service, Ruby Receptionists, always answers your phone. Assuming it's not a holiday and assuming it's not after hours, they are going to answer your phone. They have a pool of people that they assign to do this. It's not like the typical reception service that some people are used to. These people are high-touch, really high quality. I can't say enough about how good they are. They are trained to be receptionists the way that the Navy trains the SEALs to attack people.

Everybody that I've recommended this service to has come back and said, "Oh, my God, thank you so much. That is just the most amazing thing in the world." You literally go from having an okay receptionist to now having as good or better, usually better, than any other large firm could ever have.

Enrico:   Wow.

Ernie:   So it's little things like that. But that makes a difference because you're not answering your own phone and you're getting a screening of the calls, because when they call you and say, "I have somebody on the line," they're going to tell you if it's a new client or a judge or somebody who is wanting to know this. If you don't want or need to talk to them, you can say, "I'm in a meeting right now. Tell them I'll call them back later." They don't feel like they've been ignored. They've gotten a human being to answer at least part of there question.

So there are all kinds of things that Ruby Receptionists can do. I think 40 percent of their clientele is now lawyers because this is something that lawyers need. You need to have clients feel like you're there for them, even when you're not, because you can't be there for every client at every moment of the day. You've got to get work done and you don't need to be disrupted.

Enrico:   And your staff doesn't need to be disrupted. I'm looking at the website right now and I'm thinking, "Okay, if we had someone else running the tower and directing traffic, our secretarial staff wouldn't be distracted from doing the things that we really need them to do, which is typing documents, figuring out local rules, e-filing, PACER, and the rest."

Ernie:   Exactly. It's just an amazing service. You can give them a list of commonly-asked questions and they will respond. If it's just something that people tend to ask you all the time, you can say, "Well, here's a list of the answers," and they will answer as though they work at your firm. People can ask how to get there; you can explain to them, "Here's how the parking situation works and here's how you drive," and they'll explain it to people as though they are working in your building.

Enrico:    Wow. Are they 24/7? Are they an answering service as well, or just business hours?

Ernie:   No, they're just business hours. If you sign up for them, you get a toll-free 1-800 number that you can use, but you forward your main line to them so they catch all that traffic.

They're in Portland, Oregon, and I forget what business hours they can be available, but generally speaking, the usual business hours for anybody in the contiguous US. That, and they don't work on holidays. But they're pretty much there all the time. The only time somebody doesn't answer your phone there would be if for some reason the Internet on your line went down or if their system goes down. That's happened once in the past three or so years that I've used them. They immediately emailed me, and everybody else, I'm sure, and said, "We have this problem. We're not sure how quickly it will be repaired, but we just wanted to let you know about it." I got the impression that maybe the phones would be down for half a day or so, which that happened at my big firm, too, so I wasn't shocked or freaked out about that. It was back up in 20 minutes.

So that's the only time I ever had downtime, which is another reason why I think they are better than a receptionist you would have elsewhere. Like I said, if the receptionist takes coffee breaks or is sick, none of that happens with them. The only mission-critical point of failure is if their phone service goes down or if their system goes down. So far, that's not been the case.

Enrico:   All right. I'm looking at the website right now. It's www.callruby.com. A great tip from Ernie the Attorney. Ernie, it was a pleasure having you on today. Have a great week.

Ernie:   Same here. Thanks for having me.

Enrico:   All right. We will see you next time on GAL Radio. Until then, have a great New Year.

Ernie the Attorney Launches New Company Dedicated to Lawyer CLE

The Greatest American Lawyer — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 05:00:00 PST

Play: Interview with Attorney Earnest Svenson about Digital Workflow CLE - Part 1
(click title to listen)

With: Ernest Svenson

Sponsored by: Greatest American Lawyer

Read Show Transcript

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Ernie Svenson: I'm doing great, Enrico. It's great to be here and great to welcome in the New Year with a nice radio podcast.

Enrico: Exactly. You sent out a Facebook post announcing that you're about to embark on something really new for you. You are a licensed attorney; you've been practicing law for how many years?

Ernie: Twenty-two, twenty-three. I lost count. Somewhere in there.

Enrico: A lot of years. Now you and a couple other folks have launched a website, digitalworkflowcle.com, and you are starting this as a start-up business, essentially, with a couple other folks. Tell us what you're doing.

Ernie: Actually, we had started this website, Digital Workflow CLE, about three years ago. It was an outgrowth of something that was happening in the law technology world, namely, that lawyers were trying to figure out technology. Of course, 20 or so years ago when I graduated from law school lawyers didn't have computers and they weren't required to know anything about how to use them.

Over time it seemed that, very quickly for many lawyers, all of a sudden these computers were something that you needed to know something about. You needed to know how to work with people who understood a lot about technology. I think it was by virtue of going to a TECHSHOW, which I think is where I first met you . . .

Enrico: Exactly. ABA TECHSHOW in Chicago.

Ernie: Yeah. When I went there, I realized, "Wait a second. There are all these lawyers and these people who help lawyers understand technology, and they're doing a really good job of speaking. They are really good at explaining all this stuff. Gee, wouldn't it be nice if back in Louisiana where I practice law there was something like this?"

That was really where Digital Workflow CLE, the company and the website, started. I and another lawyer friend of mine decided that we would undertake to bring that flame back to Louisiana since we were trying to figure this stuff out ourselves. We started providing CLE courses usually at the end of the year because that's when lawyers in Louisiana need their credits. It's kind of like the pari-mutuel windows at Churchill Downs right before the horse race goes off. They're scrambling to get in under the wire and get their CLE. So it was easy for us to attract the attention of lawyers who were looking to get just any kind of CLE. But we were really trying to pitch the message. What we were trying to do was to teach lawyers about technology because that's what we knew and we felt was most needed.

Every time we did one of these CLEs we got a lot of great feedback. Lawyers said, "My God, this is really great. We wish you would do this more often. We wish there were more CLEs like this." Then another year would go by and we'd wait until the pari-mutuel windows were about to close and then set up our shop and deliver our message. So the reason that I am changing from practicing law to doing this full-time is that I realize there's a huge demand for this, and the only way for me to meet that demand and do what needs to be done to grow the company is to figure out a way to deliver this information at times other than when lawyers are scrambling to meet their last-minute obligations.

Enrico: The demand for this, Ernie, is endless because lawyers and technology haven't necessarily gone together through the years. As lawyers are billing their hours they tend to focus in on just that. Every once in a while a new little piece of technology finds its way into the office complex, but now everything has changed. A lawyer who doesn't understand how to use technology may not only have some malpractice issues that they're going to be looking at because they're messing something up that they should know about, but they have to compete and figure out how it is that they are going to keep up with their clients.

Ernie: Right. It's a challenge for everybody. It's a challenge for the lawyer who, like me, graduated in the mid '80s and didn't expect to have to know technology. I was a little ahead of the curve because I was messing around with computers, but I was doing that just because I thought they were cool. I didn't really anticipate that it would be something that would take root. I guess I sort of did, but I didn't realize how quickly and how firmly and widespread that root would be.

Most lawyers were just kind of thinking, "Well, I'm not going to use email. I'm not going to use this, I'm not going to use that." Then all of a sudden they have to know how email works, not just so that they can get their email but also because that's a component of e-discovery. If you don't understand how email works, it's very hard to know whether the other side is really giving you what they're supposed to be giving you or how to object if you feel like they haven't.

All of a sudden, seemingly overnight from the perspective of lawyers, you're suddenly required to know all this technology that you didn't expect to have to know. What's the best way to learn this kind of stuff so that you don't drive yourself nuts, but you get the benefits where there are clear benefits? How do you get those as quickly as possible without disrupting your life?

Enrico: Yeah. How many of the people that come to your seminars, Ernie, do you think end up coming away from it motivated to change their business model in some way in order to incorporate a piece of technology which is going to help them compete, help them deliver value, and help them make their lives easier?

Ernie: From what I can tell in the past couple of years, they're all motivated to make the change. It used to be that in the early years I would proselytize and say, "Oh, everybody should be paperless and everybody should pay attention to technology," and a lot of lawyers would say, "Yeah, that's true. I probably should, but I don't really have to and I don't really know how to, and I'm kind of busy. Thank you for the CLE credits and I'll be moving along now."

Now when we do the seminars, or at least for the past couple of years, people are energized. At the end of the seminar they come up and shake our hand profusely and say," My God, this is just the most amazing thing in the world. We really want to do this and we want to be paperless." But the trick, I think, is to stay motivated and to stay connected to that idea that you're going to try to bring all this stuff in and figure it out.

That's where I think the challenge is, both for the people who come to the seminars and for us. For us, we need to figure out a way to deliver a constant stream of information, because it's just too much to come to a seminar that lasts six or seven hours and expect to do a lot of things with all that information. You might pick one or two things and if you're motivated you might press forward and connect the dots to make those things work.

A lot of lawyers really need help connecting the dots, and that means constant reminders or webinars. That's another thing we want to get into. Instead of just doing CLEs that are live, we want to do webinars where we can say, "Okay. You're at your computer, we're at our computer. Now we're literally going to show you how to connect these dots while you're at your computer so that you can follow along and do it."

There's a huge demand for that. It's a latent demand. A lot of people don't know that that's what they want, but if you deliver it and they can figure out how to see it, they'll say, "Oh, okay. That's a much easier way for me to plug in some of these things. My computer, your computer. You show me how to do it, I do it, and now I've actually made it work."

Enrico: Exactly. I see on your website you just completed a CLE in New Orleans, Louisiana, and the topics are Digital Case Management, Acrobat and PDF Tips, Email Efficiency and Practice, Social Networking for Lawyers, Information Gathering, Little Firm, Big Firm, and these types of issues. This is kind of the stuff that a lot of lawyers are having to do every day in any event, such as PDF. It's very practical information in a lot of ways.

Ernie: Definitely. What's interesting is the PDF aspect. I've had a blog called PDF for Lawyers which I started shortly after I started my Ernie the Attorney blog. The PDF for Lawyers blog was really just my effort to take this blog experiment and say, "Okay, let me focus on something that's practical and basic." It was a little niche, but I thought this was something I can deliver some information on.

I've been doing that blog for a long time. In the beginning there weren't that many lawyers that paid attention or knew what all that meant. It grew over time, so now when I give these seminars about PDFs, lawyers are paying attention. Instead of blitzing through the material in an hour because nobody has any questions, suddenly I find that what would have been an hour-long presentation takes me three hours to get through because people have lots of questions, which is good. But I learned from the questions how basic the lack of information is.

Lawyers don't know how to use Acrobat, or a reader for that matter, to search. They don't know how to do bate stamping, they don't know that you can redact, and they don't know how to create bookmarks. There's a lot of stuff to know. The challenge is to just be very patient and spit out a steady stream of bite-sized morsels of information.

That basically means sending out an email once a week. What I tell people is to go to the website and sign up for the email. That way you won't have to figure out how to pull it in or whether we post, or to remember to do anything. You'll just get an email once a week that will contain whatever we posted on the website. Usually it will just be little tips. A lot of them will repeat, but that's okay because you may have forgotten how to do it or you may have forgotten that it was something you should have paid attention to. That's the way for people to learn. Steady, bite-sized, regular delivery of little chunks of information that they can say, "Aha. That's useful. I'm going to do that now."

Enrico: When I give speeches on technology to lawyers, it's always interesting because sometimes I find that their heads are spinning by the time I'm done with them. I always tell them it really is the journey and not the destination. It's not like you're going to know all the things that I know, but in this age you have to keep learning. You have to keep getting another step up the ladder at all times. You don't have to be the best, but if you want to be competitive, you need to keep up the learning curve. You need to keep understanding what the next level is; getting more efficient and being better able to process and work with the data and information that you're trying to analyze. That's really what it is all about.

Ernie: Absolutely. When I first started going to TECHSHOW I would experience this information overload feeling that we all have, the feeling that you're trying to drink a little bit of water from a fire hose. So I tell people when they come to these seminars, "Look, the first step, especially if you're coming to one that's all day, you're not going to process all this information."

The trick really is to just sit back and absorb what it is that you were unaware was possible. A lot of it is just knowing," Wow, there's a way to do something that I didn't know there was a way to do." There's going to be a lot of those different things that you didn't know were possible. Many of them you don't care about or you can't implement right away, so the trick is just to learn what's possible, pick a few things that you really want to be motivated to do, focus on those things, make them work, and then move onto something else. Trying to implement a lot of them at once is crazy. I can't do that and I know you didn't do it that way, either.

Enrico: Nope. It's amazing a couple of years down the line, though, if you keep at it, how far you can come.

Ernie: Yeah, that's how we all did it. Just take one little thing at a time and move forward, and just find the next thing that you think would be useful for you to do. If you do that, in a very short period of time you'll suddenly be in a completely new place. The process of doing that on a regular basis, whether it's once a month or once a week or whatever, suddenly you find yourself having a fluency with this stuff that you didn't have before.

Part of it is just getting comfortable with it and accepting the fact that to some extent you're going to fumble around a little bit, but that's okay. You're not going to break anything. It's software. It's not china in a fine antique store.

Enrico: What's your roll-out plan, Ernie, for digitalworkflowcle.com and your business model? I take it you're going to continue to do CLEs in Louisiana and people pay to go to those. How is it that you're going to expand your business? What's the business model here?

Ernie: Well, we're going to kind of feel our way around. That's one thing. We're not going to commit to one plan that we're not sure how to execute. I've learned a lot about this kind of thing and how the Internet works and how technology works. You can only see a certain way ahead. There's only so far ahead you can see. What we see for the next year is that we'd like to do more seminars and webinars, and also create online videos that people can watch whenever they want to. We want to create more content. We want to create it throughout the year. I guess the main thing to focus on is webinars and live seminars in Louisiana. Well, the webinars can be anywhere, but we can't offer CLE credit anywhere because there's a whole challenge to that which you and I were talking about earlier.

Enrico: Yeah.

Ernie: But to deliver content on a regular basis so that people that we're trying to reach are acclimated to the idea that we're here all year round, we can do webinars, which are great, we can do seminars, and we're going to be putting out more information in the newsletter. We want to focus on building that. On the back end, we want to focus on creating reach so that when we scale out beyond Louisiana and we figure out how to offer credit outside of Louisiana, that people are engaging with what we're doing and we don't have as big of a challenge in trying to reach them by email or whatnot.

I don't know how you've done what you do, but I'm learning that email is definitely a component to how you reach people. The problem with email is there's so much spam out there, so if you suddenly were to magically have the email list of all the lawyers in the US, and I know a large percentage of them want to know this kind of stuff, I can't just email them and say, "Hey, we're over here. We're doing this really cool thing and we're giving away a lot of free information," because the spam filters would catch it.

Enrico: Yep.

Ernie: So the way to communicate to people these days is through social media, engaging them and showing them, "Look, we're over here having a conversation. If you want to join in, you can." That's what I've learned from having a blog and from doing social media; is that it's really the best way to engage people. That's the other component.

That's why we brought in the third member of our team who is not a lawyer, Megan Hargroder. She is a social media expert. She consults with people and shows them how to do this and she's helped me. I know it sounds crazy to some people that you would hire somebody or pay somebody to help you to understand social media, or that I would do that, because some people say, "Well, you have a blog. You know all this stuff." But I don't, because that's not what I do all day long. There are people who do that all day long and they are on top of all the latest little things you need to do or to pay attention to. So it's great to have somebody who knows that stuff to help us figure it out because it's a key component to what we're going to try to do.

Enrico: Excellent. I would encourage everyone to go to digitalworkflowcle.com. On the right-hand side there's contact information, but more importantly, you could subscribe via email to the website or put it in your RSS reader or follow them on Twitter. There are some great blog posts here on all kinds of things that lawyers are interested in, in terms of technology and things that they really need to know.

If you don't have time to go to a CLE, you don't have time to go to a webinar, this is a great web resource for lawyers on all things technology. I love the byline, "Helping lawyers use technology to improve their law practice." That's really what it's all about.

Ernie: Yep.

Enrico: Ernie, thanks for coming today. I really had a great time having you on the show today.

Ernie: Same here. It was great talking to you, Enrico. I hope to see you soon, maybe at TECHSHOW.

Enrico: Yep. We'll see you soon.

Ernie: All right. Take care.

Enrico: Thanks, Ernie.

Ernie: Thanks.

Growing Your Law Firm in 2012

The Greatest American Lawyer — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 05:00:00 PST

Welcome to GAL Radio, brought to you by the Greatest American Lawyer Blog. Changing the way law is practiced through technology, innovation and creativity. Turning the business of law on its head and shaking things up to the betterment of clients, lawyers, law firms and society

Welcome to GAL Radio. My name is Attorney Enrico Schaefer. I’m an internet and technology lawyer, founding partner of the law firm Traverse Legal. We have developed a number of innovative ways to provide client service, to bill clients, to provide flat fee defined deliverable projects with a price guarantee, and a variety of other methodologies all designed to improve the business model of law. We did actually turn the business of law on its head, we shook it up, and we started from scratch doing only those things that made sense from a business point of view. And let’s face it, law firms and lawyers typically are very poor business people. Why? Well, in an hourly business environment, it doesn’t take much creativity or any intelligence to be able to develop a system which spits out hours and bills them back to the client, and, if you’re lucky, that bill gets paid at the end of the month. That does not require any innovation, creativity or foresight.

Play: Growing Your Law Firm in 2012
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With: Enrico Schaefer

Sponsored by: Greatest American Lawyer

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Well, what if in 2012, you were a lawyer that wanted to grow your business and break things up a little bit and push the edges of the envelope. Here are some things I want to tell you about how we have become so successful by turning the business model of law on its head.

The first thing I want to talk about is web marketing. Web marketing is a huge potential draw for you if you are an attorney who specializes in some particular area of law. If you share your expertise by blogging it or using social media to brand yourself as that area of legal specialization, you are going to attract customers because guess what, like all other consumers who are shopping for skis, hats, boots or whatever, legal consumers – consumers of legal services – also use Google in order to research their problem, so they ask Google: “what do I do if I have been the victim of defamation on the internet?” “what do I do if I have been pulled over for a drunk driving in Michigan or California?” They post their question to Google and guess what? Organic search results are returned of people who have drafted blog posts or articles about those issues. If you have posted an article about one of these issues, you put yourself in the running to come back on a Google search and allow that client to find you by your specialization.

The second thing I want to talk to is customer relations. Lawyers are used to bullying their clients. They’re used to providing services that are no different, no better, and no worse than the attorney down the block. Well, what if you wanted to be special? What if you wanted to provide the best customer service of any other lawyer in your town or any other lawyer globally practicing within your area of specialization? There are lots of ways which technology allows us to do better customer service. Obviously, email allows us to return emails and communications faster. We have digital dictation which allows us to, in real time, dictate things and have them turned around within minutes, if not hours. Therefore, technology allows you to do better customer service.

Why don’t you make your case management system available to your clients online so they can see everything that you are doing? Basecamphq.com offers such extranet systems. They are beautiful, simple, cost-effective, and you can allow your clients to see what’s happening in their case day-to-day. That sense of connection and communication with the clients will create a customer service experience beyond anything they have ever felt before with any lawyer or attorney they have worked with previously, guaranteed. As part of your customer intake process, what kind of turnaround are you able to achieve? Can you improve your process of client intake so that their very first experience with you and your law firm is one that impresses them as being responsive and attentive to their needs.

I want to talk about another area. Billing. Clients hate the hourly bill at the end of the month. Have you considered flat fee billing or value billing as part of your business model? Many of the things that you do within your area of specialization as a lawyer are things that you do every day. You know how much time it’s going to take. You know what it’s going to cost to get through a particular stage of a threat letter or some other commoditizable service that you provide. Give them a flat fee bid. Tell them exactly where the project is going to start and where it’s going to end, and allow them to pay up front. You don’t even have to send a bill at the end of the case. They’ve already paid. These are types of things that you can do as a lawyer to set yourself apart, to deliver a better customer experience and to grow your legal practice in 2012.

That’s all for GAL Radio. We’ll see you next time.

Why Are So Few Managing Partners Great Leaders

The Greatest American Lawyer — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 12:19:38 PST

I was lucky. My first law firm was Bowman and Brooke, a niche firm providing automotive product liability defense to the automobile industry. The founder and managing partner of the firm was Richard Bowman. By in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, he was one of the most out-of-the-box and innovative managing partners of any hourly billing firm in the world. Dick Bowman never did anything because it was the way other law firms were doing it. Bowman and Brooke became an innovator and stood out from the crowd in many ways.

I have often wondered why so few law firm managing partners are like Dick Bowman. They seem to inspire nothing except hourly minimums. They innovate little beyond new billing techniques and policies.

In the video below, Simon Sinek talks about how great leaders inspire action at a September 2009 TEDX Talk. He points out that great companies always start with the question "Why?" as they pursue greatness. Think about whether or not you know any managing partners who come to mind as you watch the video…

How to Meet, Sign Up and Obtain Payment from New Clients in Less Than 60 Minutes

The Greatest American Lawyer — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 12:44:20 PST

Welcome to GAL Radio. My name is Attorney Enrico Schaefer, and today we’re going to talk about something that’s really important to lawyers and law firms alike. How do you sign up your clients?

Keep in mind that the industrial age model for signing up clients was to get them on the phone or in a conference room, have a lawyer or lawyers sitting there. Those lawyers would then impress the client that they knew more than the client about some legal issue. Of course, before the internet, the client’s chance of knowing anything about their legal issue was fairly limited.

Play: Trademark a Logo to Protect Your Logo Design from Trademark Infringement
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With: Enrico Schaefer

Sponsored by: Greatest American Lawyer

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After they have impressed the client, then they’ll go ahead and slide that retainer agreement across the table. The client will often take that retainer agreement with them or review the retainer agreement before getting it back in a day or two. Once the agreement is signed, it has to be countersigned by the law firm. And then once all that happens, then the client has to pay a retainer. Typically, that’ll come by check. If all goes well, within a couple of days - in a non-emergency situation - you may or may not have your signed retainer agreement with the client and the actual retainer. Some law firms will actually wait for the check to clear before they start representation of the client.

All of this sounds like nonsense in the internet and technology age. And how many lawyers actually relied on the retainer agreement to protect them from a disgruntled client? And how many of those disgruntled clients actually went to court over the retainer agreement? And the answer is either none or extremely small number of clients. My message is this.

Your retainer agreement doesn’t protect you from much of anything, and isn’t as important as lawyers make it out to be. So here’s a method for actually meeting a new client, talking to them, quoting the project, getting them signed up and getting payment in less than an hour.

At our law firm, we use an extranet system for our entire case management solution. We use Basecamphq.com. So, here’s what happens. A client calls or sends an email. We have a whole process for intake. Today, I spoke to a client on a Digital Millennium Copyright Act take-down issue. That client called, I spoke to them on the phone. There wasn’t a whole lot of need for chit-chat. As soon as I found out that they had a YouTube video take-down request, that they had copyright registration, that there was no fair-use defense, all of which took me about 30-seconds of question and answer, I bid them a project with deliverables such as:

Obtain background documents from the clients including copyright registration, infringing YouTube URL and basic business model information from the client;
Interview the client concerning client goals, risk tolerance and budgets;
Prepare draft DMCA take-down notice and provide to client for review;
Send DMCA take-down notice to YouTube demanding that the video be removed;
Determine whether or not YouTube has taken down the video and bid next projects and potential fees for such.

That’s it! I’ve given them a set of defined deliverables, and I quoted them $600 for that very limited project. All of that took about 5 minutes. I dictated the project to the extranet; the extranet manager uploaded the project, and within 10 minutes after hanging up the phone, the project was up. The client had their login information. Our billing department had already generated an invoice so that they could pay by credit card. The invoice was paid within 30 minutes of the extranet project coming live, and we were in the saddle representing this client within an hour of my conversation with them. They had paid; the project was defined, and we were off and running.

So here’s my message to lawyers and their law firms. Why do you put up barriers which make it more difficult for a client to hire you? I didn’t need a retainer agreement. I quoted them deliverables. There’s a link to the billing policy within the email. And BOOM! Wham! Bam! Thank You Ma’am! We are done! Try and remove barriers to getting a client signed up with you. Try and remove barriers to payment, take credit cards, issue electronic invoices. Get the client signed up so you can do what you’re supposed to be doing. Lawyers need to focus on one thing: client relationships. Create the client relationship, get them in under the tent, show them what a great law firm you are, what a great lawyer you are, how specialized you are at their particular legal problem, and they will come back for another project.

What we have found is of the 220 or so prospects that contact us each month, of the approximate 10-20 who actually hire us on a project for that first time, that the vast majority, well over 60%, hire us for yet another project or a third project or a fourth project. And a high percentage of those actually become lifelong clients.

This is Enrico Schaefer and that’s all for Greatest American Lawyer for today. We will see you next time on GAL Radio. Have a great week.

Just A Few Reasons a Lawyer Should Fire the Client

The Greatest American Lawyer — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 13:38:38 PST

I’m a big fan of Seth Godin’s blog found at sethgodin.typepad.com. Seth talks in this post about an unreasonable customer and the reasons why you should consider firing a customer or, if you happen to be a lawyer or law firm, a client. Here’s his list:

He willfully corrupts your systems at a cost to other customers
Your employees are prevented from doing their best work in the long run
His word of mouth can't be changed or doesn't matter
He distracts you from delighting customers that are reasonable

I also found Seth’s comments about tolerating certain problem clients to be interesting. That list is found here:

You promised you would
She helps you raise your game
Her word of mouth is very powerful
The cost of frequently figuring out which customers to fire is too high compared to the cost of putting up with everyone

I have to say that bad clients typically don’t make for good word-of-mouth marketing for any attorney. If a client is really a pain in the ass, you’re probably good than harm by sending them on their way.

What We Can Learn about Online Reputation Protection from Herman Cain and Joe Paterno

The Greatest American Lawyer — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 07:47:10 PST

Welcome to GAL Radio. Today, we’re talking about reputation management in the internet space. There’s a lot of stuff that goes on on the internet. There are review sites such as Yelp and Google Places. Your Google Places’ page has a place for people to post a review of your services. For lawyers, there is AVVO and a host of other rating services. One thing that has caught my attention the last couple of days is the reputation issues that are being faced by Herman Cain, who, as we all know, is facing any number of accusers on sexual harassment, and Joe Paterno over at Penn State, as a result of his alleged failure to do more when he became aware of an assistant coach’s alleged abuse of a child in the locker room. All of this got me thinking about something that we do at our law firm every single day, which is online defamation/ internet defamation claims and defense on behalf of people who are looking at a Google search result that they don’t like, on the plaintiff’s side, or they have been accused of internet defamation in a defamation threat letter from an attorney.

Play: What We Can Learn about Online Reputation Protection from Herman Cain and Joe Paterno
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With: Enrico Schaefer

Sponsored by: Greatest American Lawyer

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I think that the internet has fundamentally changed the reputation game. Reputation used to be something that was very community oriented. It was something that we worried about on our block and in our town and in our city and in our relevant profession, what other lawyers in town thought of us was potentially important in terms of reputation. What our neighbors think of us is potentially important in terms of reputation. The internet changed that because all of sudden someone could post something online and literally the whole world could see it.

So, if someone posts a false statement of fact about me online, that can be a lifelong problem if I don’t deal with it somehow. If the person who’s posted something online is anonymous, then I’ve got the added challenge of, well, hey! How do I go about identifying this person and figuring out who they are? And, of course, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act provided immunity to providers of web services such as web hosts and the people who run the websites such as Yelp and AVVO from liability for defamation, which, of course, gives me no leverage at all to go to the person who’s running the website and have the defamatory content taken down.

Well, what really has occurred to me and has come home within the last couple of days watching Joe Paterno’s reputation get dragged through the mud, and Herman Cain’s reputation get dragged through the mud is that, really, reputation is becoming more important both offline and online. In a way, Joe Paterno’s problem is pretty predictable, and even if we didn’t have the internet, it would be on the news every night. It would be in the newspaper. It would be a traditional defamation problem. Joe Paterno’s problem is exponentially made more severe by Facebook, by the internet, by the fact that this information is also online, but he would have had the problem anyway, same with Herman Cain. He is an important enough person that the issues that he’s facing would have gained enough traditional press to where lots of people would have been aware of the allegations.

Now, everyone has the same type of problem as Herman Cain and Joe Paterno, right? Because, it used to be if the guy down the block from you, or one attorney in town didn’t think very well of you, then your reputation problem was fairly contained. If that person down the block posted on the web, and now everyone that you potentially deal with in life can do a Google search and see what that person is saying about you, and if it happens to be false statements of fact, have this permanency of a Google search result on the web, now, you’ve got a hug problem. So, in a way, we are all Joe Paterno and Herman Cain now, where our reputations as attorneys can turn on a dime. The importance of protecting your reputation as a result has never been as important as it is today. The importance of protecting your reputation as an asset for lawyers, doctors and everyone else has become critical. And whereas before we used to, as attorneys, worry about reputation, I think now we need to worry about it at a much higher level. So, the decisions that you, as a lawyer or as a law firm, make every day should be driven by the importance of reputation, and the knowledge and understanding that if you let your reputation get away from you, and it starts to run across the internet, that you may be forever impacted.

That’s all for GAL Radio today. Go ahead and post our comments below on the importance of online reputation for lawyers and law firms in today’s internet-connected world, and we will see you next time.

In the Internet and Technology Age, Isn’t it Time for Lawyers to Stand Up?

The Greatest American Lawyer — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 11:15:05 PDT

Don’t get me wrong. I love technology. And I adore the internet. As a lawyer specializing in internet law and technology issues, it is hard for me to complain about anything related to technology. Our law firm thrives on the growth and innovation that is occurring online.

After six years of working on a laptop from my kneeling chair, the last 18 months on a MacBook Pro, I’ve had enough. I am done. No more. I’ve always believed that my kneeling chair was way better than a regular chair because it properly aligns the spine and puts the weight down through your thighs where it should be when you’re sitting. But the days of kneeling are done. For the last four days, I have been working on top of a Banker’s Box, and standing in front of my MacBook Pro and dual screen. Thus far, it’s been awesome. In fact, I’m awaiting delivery of my Anderlyn Desk, which will sit on top of my desk to take the place of my cardboard Banker’s Box. Here are the things that I’ve noticed and currently love about standing up while I work:

I’m standing up! Being in a chair has always made me feel a little bit like a caged animal. I hate anything that is limiting, mentally, emotionally and physically (Well, I might let my wife tie me to the bed if she was ever so inclined). Standing up gives you range of motion, keeps you moving and keeps you active.
You feel more engaged with your work. Because there is a lot more motion involved, the brain is more active and able to flip from item to item.
Did you ever see the movie WALL-E? You know, the movie where all the people end up on a spaceship in motorized chairs that they never have to get out of? It’s kind of what the technology age feels like. People are strapped to their computers and can do more and more without ever getting up. Sitting is not only bad for you physically because you have to lean over your keyboard, but it means you aren’t doing anything. Standing up is exercise. Don’t believe me? Try doing it for an 8-hour day and see how your legs feel when you wake up the next morning.
I love to pace. When I’m dictating or talking on the phone, my brain is active as I move from side to side. With my Plantronics headset, I can move of approximately four feet around my computer as I dictate to my computer (as I’m doing now). When I pick up a call, I can pace as well without having to get up.

I’ll let you know how things progress. But thus far, I could not happier and more liberated with my stand-up desk and my new found freedom. Do you stand up? Let me know how it’s going for you.

When Selecting an Attorney, Does Geography Count Anymore?

The Greatest American Lawyer — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 10:32:58 PDT

I was recently interviewed by The Northern Express Magazine who did an article titled “Internet Law.” One of the interesting quotes that found its way into the article is as follows:

“It used to be that clients felt secure having an attorney who lived down the block,” Schaefer says. “Now, they feel secure having an attorney who’s written an article about their problem, no matter where he or she is from... The reality is that clients want answers, not lawyer-speak or disclaimers. They want business solutions and to real advice about how to proceed.”

Rereading the article got me thinking. How important should geography be to clients in the internet era? Even if you have an issue which going to wind up in a local courthouse, our clients better off finding the best attorney for the job rather than an attorney who happens to be local? And if it’s a matter that doesn’t require you to be in court, aren’t you better off simply finding the best attorney in the country to handle your issue?

No doubt, some issues which involve state law require expertise in that area of state law. But the barriers to regional, statewide and federal practice continue to dissolve in the internet era.

I can’t get around this simple fact. If I’m a client and I have a specific legal issue, I want the lawyer who wrote an article on my specific issue to handle my case. I don’t care where they’re located or how far away they may be. I go into that attorney-client relationship knowing that my lawyer has already handled my issue before and is enough of an expert to write an article or blog post about it.

What do you think?

State Bar Associations Continue to Lead from Behind

The Greatest American Lawyer — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 10:56:42 PDT

The Virginia State Bar Association took aim at a Richmond, Virginia Attorney engaged in the nefarious pursuit of “blogging.” An article concerning the decision is posted here. The Virginia State Bar Association’s misconduct charge can be viewed here.

As usual, my take on this is as follows. State bar associations, by and large, continue to operate under the premise that it is much better for prospective clients and consumers of legal services to have no information related to lawyers or the legal problem faced as existed before the internet. There are a lot of vested interests within legal circles who simply don’t want lawyers to have to compete with other lawyers for business. There are many lawyers who do not want clients to have any information concerning alternatives or their legal issues. Bar associations continue to push back against lawyers who share information online as some sort of “illicit advertising” when the reality is exactly the opposite.

Before the internet, clients were ripe for abuse by lawyers because of the complete lack of information and lack of real-world competition (clients were lucky to know a single person who knew a lawyer). Before the internet, a client could not review dozens of potential law firms to handle their matter. Some clients want their stories told so that other people can benefit. Because blogging upsets the system under which bar associations and lawyers have existed for decades, there is this sort of inevitable pushback.

When will bar associations embrace the web rather than try and impede it?

Growing a Law Firm in Tough Economic Times

The Greatest American Lawyer — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 07:27:53 PDT

Lawyers and law firms are not exempt from the economic downturn. When the economy is chugging along, companies regularly look to enhance their business model. Clients have no problem hiring attorneys to do things which are important, but not critical. While a trademark registration with the USPTO is important, the cost of a lawyer opinion letter on availability, legal fees for trademark registration and a filing fee to the USPTO can run about $1,600. It is a discretionary spend. Unless you get sued as a defendant in litigation, you typically have a choice as to whether or not to spend money on legal services.

In order to overcome the economic disincentives to spending money on important legal items, which are not otherwise critical or mandatory, lawyers need to continue to differentiate their legal service offerings. There are lots of ways to do this. Innovative billing techniques, payment schedules, improved customer or client service, transparency or perhaps the most important item, is to make sure that you do not charge the client to learn about their problems. Lawyers who charge for miscellaneous phone calls to or from their client are creating a huge disincentive for that client to contact the attorney.

Internet Law Article by the Northern Express

The Greatest American Lawyer — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 11:10:19 PDT

I’m an internet lawyer by trade who loves to blog about innovative business models for law. I was recently interviewed by the Northern Express on a variety of different issues ranging from the technical aspects of internet law, what it means to be an internet lawyer as well as how I ended up in Traverse City, Michigan founding the law firm called Traverse Legal, PLC.

I’ve been blogging for over seven years about the law, use of technology by lawyers and alternative billing arrangements with clients. This article is a great summary of how I got started and where I am today. You can read the article on "Internet Law" at the Northern Express.

Integrating Video into Small Business Marketing

The Greatest American Lawyer — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 09:10:49 PDT

Lawyers and law firms rarely put the attention necessary into their web site. Web sites require work and technical knowledge. Too many attorneys are intimidated by web marketing because it requires near constant attention.

One new tool which would help any lawyer create an effective marketing video in less than five minutes is found at www.youtube.com/searchstories. The creation tool can be found at Google Search Stories Video Creator.

We have integrated Search Stories into two of our marketing landing pages:

You Need an Internet Defamation Lawyer Who Understands Defamation Law & the Web
The Best Defense against a Bogus Claim of Defamation, Libel or Slander? Our Lawyers Can Help.

The YouTube videos for each marketing campaign within our niche of internet and web defamation are located below. Note that they not only were created in less than five minutes, but are compelling. The music and production which is “baked in” to the search story creator by YouTube creates a very strong “call to action.”

From Big Law to Solo to Success: One Lawyer's Path to the Perfect Law Firm

The Greatest American Lawyer — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 12:13:04 PDT

In this three part interview, Internet Law Attorney Enrico Schaefer discusses his journey from success to living in his car to recreating the practice of law. In this interview (note: there are three separate YouTube videos as you scroll down the transcript):

How to create a startup law firm based on business principles which make sense.
Following your passion rather than following the money.
What it means to be an internet lawyer in a technology age.
Common legal issues arising on the interent such as cybersquatting, trademark infringement and internet defamation.
You can live anywhere and practice law everywhere.
The business and practice of law can be as brilliantly creative as any other type of business once you stop focusing on billing hours.

Tara Kachaturoff: Hello, my name is Tara Kachaturoff, and I’m the host of Michigan Entrepreneur, where we feature businesses from startup to stellar. Today, we have a special guest, Enrico Schaefer, who is the managing partner from Traverse Legal all the way from Traverse City.

Enrico Schaefer: Good morning. All the way from Traverse City, Michigan.

Tara Kachaturoff: Welcome to the program. I’m really excited to have you on the program today because you are an attorney, you’re a managing partner at Traverse Legal, and we’re going to talk about what you do in your law firm and also talk about some specialty items that have to do with the law and the internet. But before we get started into that, why don’t you tell us a little bit about who you are and how you got from down here in Michigan, in southeastern Michigan, up to Traverse City?

Enrico Schaefer: Sure, it’s been a long road, I’ll tell you that, but I’m sure happy to be where I am today. I was born and raised in Detroit. My Father is an attorney. Older brother always knew he wanted to be an attorney. It’s the one thing I always knew from my earliest memory is that I did not want to be an attorney.

Tara Kachaturoff: Really!?, and somehow you made it there?

Enrico Schaefer: Somehow. That’s the gift that God gave me, and I ran with it. Nevertheless, I was down in Detroit, practiced in Detroit until I was 30 and met a girl who was heading up north after school was out in June, followed her up, and never came back. So, I’m very happy to be in Traverse City Michigan, and I have been up there now for about 12-13 years.

Tara Kachaturoff: I read a lot of people envy you. I kind of do. What a wonderful place to live and work. It’s so beautiful. It’s fantastic.

Enrico Schaefer: It is really special because when your friends and acquaintances come up to visit you, they do envy you. And it’s not because of the house you live in, or the money you make. It’s because of where you live.

Tara Kachaturoff: The water and the beauty and the thing is that you have global practice, yet you’re in Traverse City, which is wonderful.

Enrico Schaefer: It is and I always say I get to go home to paradise. If I was in New York or Detroit or anywhere else, I’d still have to come home when I was done in LA or Miami or where have you, but I get to take that little extra puddle jump up to Traverse City and up at paradise.

Tara Kachaturoff: And they probably have a pretty good airport. I’ve seen it. They have a lot of planes going in and out of there. It’s busy.

Enrico Schaefer: They do. And it’s a brand-new airport and Traverse City, through the entire economic downturn, has continued to grow and become more diverse but a lot of the automotive folks who were laid off all had cabins and cottages up north and a percentage of them decided, you know what? I’m just going to go up north. And there is a tremendous entrepreneurial spirit up there. No one wakes up in the morning to work for GM or Ford. They get up to think of something - an idea - and to run with it and to create it. And so, the entire town is really filled with entrepreneurs.

Tara Kachaturoff: That’s fantastic. I should have made the show up there.

Enrico Schaefer: Come on up anytime.

Tara Kachaturoff: I know. I know. Let’s take a step back. What did you study as an undergrad and what was it that made you go down this path of law? I always like to understand how people went there, because you said, you weren’t interested in law.

Enrico Schaefer: Sure. I went to Albion College, and I had way too much fun, as many people do in college. And so, as I got into my third senior semester, I called my dad. I said, I graduate this semester. And he said, well, you can go to grad school, you can get a job, or, then he introduced the concept of, or you could go to law school. I never had really thought about it, and I didn’t want to get a job. I knew that, so, law school it was, and as much as I struggled at Albion to focus, I excelled in law school, earned straight A’s and won every award there was to win.

Tara Kachaturoff: Fantastic.

Enrico Schaefer: Perhaps more awards than any single student had ever won in the 100 + year history of the school. So, for some reason, it’s the way I was raised, and it just came out of me at that point in my life, and I started into practicing law doing different things; automotive/product liability defense, mass tort class action in asbestos. And when I did the mass tort in asbestos at age 30, I hit a birthday that just made me rethink my entire life. How’d I get here, because I got good grades in law school? And so I quit everything and moved into my car and drifted around the country for awhile to kind of figure out what I wanted to do.

Tara Kachaturoff: And this was at 30.

Enrico Schaefer: This is at 30. And then by the age of, say, 38 or so, I had my second child, and my wife had a friend who said, hey!, I think he could get a job down in Traverse City practicing law, and I got back into the practice of law after doing some internet and technology startups. And then I blended those two things together…

Tara Kachaturoff: Interesting.

Enrico Schaefer: ….and worked for a traditional law firm for a few years up there and decided that there was a better way, a more innovative way to practice law, and really recreated the business of law from the ground up on the single premise of what makes sense? Not, how did they do it yesterday?

Tara Kachaturoff: For the past 200-300 thousand years.

Enrico Schaefer: Exactly.

Tara Kachaturoff: You know, what I find so interesting is that you took a break and you did some other things and really, you know, you just didn’t get caught up in the day-to-day and then just let another decade or two flow by.

Enrico Schaefer: Right.

Tara Kachaturoff: You stopped and reassessed yourself and got real in touch with yourself about what you wanted to do next.

Enrico Schaefer: Yeah, I followed my path. I mean, what we do in our law firm is idea protection. And they say we’re becoming an idea economy, and I see that every single day.

Tara Kachaturoff: Interesting, because I was going to say we’re information economy, but you took it, we’re an idea economy. How did you get into intellectual property law, by the way? Why did you go that route as opposed, you know, you started into some other areas, product liability and tort, how did you go down that path?

Enrico Schaefer: Sure. So, when I was living in Salt Lake City on my personal journey, I had a friend who somehow tracked me down and said, hey, I have a friend who owns a company that’s involved in a big intellectual property trademark dispute case in Boston in federal court. And the big law firm had basically bled them dry up through the preliminary injunction hearing, so they had no more money and they needed someone to represent them. And so, I said, sure, that sounds good. I came back to Michigan and met my, now, wife and did that case for five years and ended up loving intellectual property law, and loving the power of an idea and helping protect those ideas for companies.

Tara Kachaturoff: It’s such, I mean, that’s my favorite area of law that I’ve noticed for myself when I’m studying. It’s fascinating because ideas should be shared freely, but we also have the idea of commerce and the economy and value, and those have to be worked in it to, and the idea of fairness and for some people who believe everything should be free, it’s kind of a balancing act, because we have a whole part of society that thinks nothing should be protected, but they don’t understand the protection of ideas is what creates innovation, otherwise, nobody would innovate anything if they didn’t feel like it profit from it.

Enrico Schaefer: Absolutely, you hit the nail on the head. You’ve just described, in a nutshell, exactly what intellectual property law is and the tension between those two ideas of, there is no original idea, everything is shared. It’s derived from something that you saw before, and then innovated on top of, and if it’s unique enough of an innovation on something that already existed, then you potentially can protect that idea from others using it by patent. If it’s a brand, you’re going to protect the brand so that no one else can pawn off on your brand. If it’s a copyright and original work of authorship, whether it’s a book or a painting, you know, we have to protect these people because how else would an author ever get paid if they couldn’t protect their book from copying? Or, an artist, or what have you. So, there is this healthy tension between the fact that everything is borrowed, to some extent, and importance of sharing versus we have to be able to monetize our unique ideas in order for commerce to work.

Tara Kachaturoff: Now with the kind of work that you do, because it’s intellectual property and trademarks and patents and such, that type of litigation is going fall under the jurisdiction of the federal courts. So, you spend what? Ninety-five percent of your time dealing in the federal court structure?

Enrico Schaefer: Absolutely, so, almost everything that we do, there are some exceptions, domains…

Tara Kachaturoff: Do you miss the other stuff?

Enrico Schaefer: No, federal court is just such a nice place to be most the time. The judges are tough, but you know you’re going to get the attention of two well-paid law clerks that did well in law school. You’re going to get the attention of a judge whose docket is not so crazy that they’re dealing with 80 motions on a Friday morning, as happens in state courts. So, it’s really a pleasure to practice in federal court and it’s just one of the benefits of the business model that I chose is that that’s where I get to live most days.

Tara Kachaturoff: And you actually like getting up in the morning and going to work.

Enrico Schaefer: I love getting in my kneeling chair in the morning, in paradise.

Tara Kachaturoff: When we talk about your law firm, and the structure of your law firm, I know you have some very unique things that you’re doing that is not done like the traditional law firm that we think of. Why don’t we talk a little bit about what’s different at Traverse Legal, because that, to me, is fascinating, because I also have a radio show on law called Teach Me Law, and I love the whole, I love everything about law. I don’t even work in law, but I love it.

Enrico Schaefer: Sure.

Tara Kachaturoff: But the one thing I do see is it harkens back to the days of billing people, like in public accounting, I was a CPA. Well, we billed in 15-minute increments and attorneys bleed them by every six minutes. But you don’t do it that way at your firm, you’re different. Why?

Enrico Schaefer: Well, first off, we’re different from other law firms in most every way.

Tara Kachaturoff: That’s a great thing. That’s a beautiful thing.

Enrico Schaefer: It is.

Tara Kachaturoff: Let’s go over some of those ways that you’re different.

Enrico Schaefer: Sure...and so, one of the ways is that we have very innovative billing models. So, when I was doing internet and technology company – I was a general counsel of an internet and technology company in Boulder – we would project bid. And so, one of the thoughts I had this why can’t I project bid the law.

Tara Kachaturoff: Fixed price.

Enrico Schaefer: Fixed price. So I tell you exactly what your deliverables are going to be, I tell you exactly what your deliverables are going to be, I tell you exactly what it’s going to cost. And just that one little thing, is really interesting in many ways. Number one, it gives the business owner an exact list of the things that they’re going to get, and it allows them to make a business decision on return on investment. Does this make sense? Yes. Now, we always say we convert 5-10 times more people into clients because we give certainty to the business owner on what the deliverables are and what the cost is makes it real easy for them to say, yeah, that makes perfect sense, let’s do that. And so, we always take risk with the client. In litigation matters where there is an hourly billing component, we always blend that with a component that puts us in the same position of incentives as the client. So, that’s one way.

We use virtual law clerks. We are very high-tech. We’re one of the most high-tech law firms in the world. And so, we basically bring our clients into our entire case management system. They see everything that happening on their case every single day. We have virtual law clerks that work from around the country on these projects, but because it’s all extranet based, there’s no difference than if they were sitting in the office next door. So, we’re very customer service oriented. We’re very business oriented. We’re very solution oriented. We do litigation when we have to but we know that, typically, is not going to be in the best interest of a client if we can find another solution that gets them where they need to be more quickly and more cost-effectively. So, we’ve got the technology side of our business, and we’ve got the service of our business and both operate in a model that allows us to wake up in the morning and say, not, that I have to bill eight hours, but I’ve got to get these three things done for the client that I promised. And it’s amazing how much you can achieve if you’re shooting for that kind of target, as opposed to an hourly billing time sheet at the end of the day.

Tara Kachaturoff: Yeah, the whole perspective and focus is very, very different. When you talk about using some of the virtual folks that you use, do you have a flexible workforce, then, and can bring certain specialty people in to work on certain things and then, you find people like that within your system.

Enrico Schaefer: Exactly. Many law firms have a fixed staff of attorneys and paralegals, etc. And so, they have to keep those people busy, they have to. And if there is a lot of busy work that goes on at law firms that is unnecessary but keeps the law firms going. We are able to staff up and staff down as needed on a project basis. The virtual law clerks, for instance, who work for us, they love it because they can do that work from home or, god forbid, sitting in class at law school, and get things done and so, it really allows us a lot of flexibility in terms of customer service and deliverables.

Tara Kachaturoff: Now, do you ever bring interns in? Like physical interns?

Enrico Schaefer: We do. In fact, the very first virtual law clerk I had is Brian A. Hall. He became a summer law clerk and then became a partner at our firm right out of law school. He was that good. But he had proven himself as virtual over a three year period. I knew exactly what I was getting with him, and he’s really one of the best attorneys I’ve ever practiced with.

Tara Kachaturoff: Is he a virtual partner or is he physically in the office.

Enrico Schaefer: He is physically in the office. So, we have six attorneys in our office, we have offices in LA, in Austin and we continue to expand.

Tara Kachaturoff: that’s amazing. That’s amazing. Now, the work that you do many times involves something that of a global nature. You’d have to what, register trademarks in different countries and such and get be very big depending on what the business needs are. Do you have to travel a lot? Do you travel around the world? What’s your schedule like?

Enrico Schaefer: My schedule is that I protect my summers as much as I possibly can so I can continue to stay in paradise during the summer. Our six weeks of paradise up in Traverse City and Glen Arbor, but we do travel all over the world and we represent clients in almost all 50 states and 23 different countries. So, one of the largest 5-star resort hotel chains in Latin America, for instance, is a very good client of ours. So, we spend a lot of time in Latin America. We travel and we get it done virtually when we can, but there are certain things you really need to be there, and so, probably two out of every four weeks not in the summer and on the road. I should have anticipated that as part of my business plan, but I didn’t know it was going to work when we tried to be a global law firm out of little Traverse City, Michigan

Tara Kachaturoff: That’s amazing. But with the help of technology, it’s just like you can be anywhere, which is like I have with my business. I’m a completely virtual business.

Enrico Schaefer: Exactly. And the clients feel closer to us than they do their traditional law firm down the street because we use technology to collaborate, and share, and be transparent to them.

Tara Kachaturoff: So, you’re using some sort of a project management thing, kind of like a basecamp, but for law.

Enrico Schaefer: Sure. Exactly.

Tara Kachaturoff: Is it a custom package that you had designed for your firm?

Enrico Schaefer: It’s a customized package of basecamp.

Tara Kachaturoff: Oh, ok.

Enrico Schaefer: You know, basecamp’s beautiful because of its simplicity. And one of the things that was interesting back seven years ago was whether or not – you know, technology’s always been there – the issue is end-users. Are the ready to actually adopt and use technology. So, basecamp there’s nothing really too crazy, innovative about it, but what happened with basecamp is the end-users were all of a sudden, ready. It’s surprising. I think in all of our years – seven years – we’ve only had one client that didn’t use the case management system. Everyone else, they are in there just about every day. Uploading information, sharing ideas, most lawyers will sign up the client and you keep them at bay. And the client’s view is, I don’t want to call my lawyer because I don’t want to get a bill for $100 for a fifteen minute phone call, so, we never charge for communication between us and our clients. Never charge for phone calls, these types of things. And the reason why is, if I don’t know what my client’s problems are, how am I going to bid a project. And, yet, all the incentives, the entire business model of law, is so backwards, it’s so completely backwards when viewed against what would normally be a capitalistic standard. Capitalism. But lawyers aren’t supposed to advertise and it’s frowned upon to advertise. Well, the consequence of that is consumers have no idea that there’s something different than an hourly billing model out there. And as consumers start to become more aware and the internet allows them to research one firm against another. This awareness drives our business because all of a sudden you have consumer’s who are looking for a flat fee law firm who are going to tell them exactly what they’re going to get and exactly what it’s going to cost

Tara Kachaturoff: I love it. And I really, you know you have to wonder, and you know there’s lots of damage because of this, because people didn’t want to communicate with the attorney because of the fee. But things weren’t communicated, so, they missed out on opportunities, lost cases, whatever. Who knows what didn’t happen because they were thinking in the back of their head, oh, my gosh! I’m not going to be able to afford this. If I tell them or have a discussion about something or if they would have had the discussion, it would have come out in inquiring. I mean, it’s sad. It’s terrible.

Enrico Schaefer: Exactly. It comes out two ways. Quality and decision making. So, if you want the highest quality result on your project, then having continuous collaboration with your attorney is critical. And the other thing is that at some point, the client is going to have to make a decision. Well, how educated are they about the various legal points that are in play. And, as these emails come into their inbox every day on the research analysis, and the thought analysis that goes into their project, they’re learning. They’re learning about their problem. And then they can make that decision at the end of the day in an educated fashion.

Tara Kachaturoff: Ok. And there’s another big point that you’ve made. The thing with most law firms, they don’t want to educate you. They don’t want you to have any knowledge of the law because they want you to be completely dependent on them. And then, you’re completely controlled by them. It’s just so different. You’re building real relationships with your clients. You’re actually collaborative, and that word does not actual fit with law in the traditional sense.

Enrico Schaefer: We’re helping entrepreneurs and ideas grow. So we are in business…some days I don’t know if we’re a law firm, if we’re business consultants or a technology company. We’re all three of those things but what we do is we essentially partner up with our clients to help get them up the ladder to the next level. And that’s the best part of the job, being a part of a company that’s gone from an idea to seven figure revenue. That’s a great day.

Tara Kachaturoff: I think what, you know, putting all this together, and of course, I have never worked with your law firm, but you’re like a cool law firm. And nobody would ever put those words together. Cool law firm.

Enrico Schaefer: One of our marketing messages is that, and we’ve done this just for fun, but we’ll send out little placards to the other – we don’t do a lot of business in Traverse City, we don’t try – we’ll send out placards that say, Traverse City’s coolest lawyers. So when we do a big party or what have you, we’ll put up a banner Traverse City’s coolest lawyers. We think of ourselves as unique and out of the box.

Tara Kachaturoff: And see, I came up with that on my own. I didn’t know that. But see, just from understanding your firm and how you do things. Very, very unique, it’s almost like you should be in Silicon Valley. What are you doing in Traverse?

Enrico Schaefer: Well, we actually have been talking about our next office and Silicon Valley is on the list. We have clients in Silicon Valley.

Tara Kachaturoff: I’ll internship there. I want to do an Internship in IP anyway.

Enrico Schaefer: We’re fighting over who gets to go live in Silicon Valley, in San Fran Valley.

Tara Kachaturoff: That will be great. That’d be great. I know we only have a few minutes left, but I want to talk a little bit about intellectual property law, which is vast, but let’s talk a little bit about domain names because I know that’s really important to a lot of entrepreneurs, and gosh, we could do ten shows on that, but, you know, domain names are property to people. Can you talk about some of the risks or things that can come up with an entrepreneur as it pertains to their domain name? I know that’s pretty vast but can you talk a little bit about that?

Enrico Schaefer: Sure. The big risks are…the big risks are someone registers the domain. The registrant of that domain is the owner of the domain. If it’s a business partner and that business partner leaves, guess what? If your business is based on your website and you’re in a fight with that business partner, they’re going to take the domain. Secure your domain. The next thing you need to understand is that trademarks and domains go together. There is a special statute called the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act that essentially says, under trademark law, domain names are typically marks that have special protection. So, you can’t just register any domain name, if you have to make sure that no one else is using something similar within your market segment, because we’ve had clients who’ve been in very successful businesses for a couple years and some mega-corporation swoops in and says, sorry, that’s too similar to what we’re already doing, you need to shut down. And the decision is to simply walk away from that successful business because the thought of having to start from scratch on a new domain name is very troubling. And the third is you really need to protect your rights. I f you get a domain name that’s got trademark value that is your brand, that is your company name or product name/service name, you need to protect it because if you don’t, you could lose your trademark rights, and in today’s world where every mom and pop shop on every corner has got a website and is therefore, global, there’s a shortage of words available for brands that don’t have some trademark issues. And this ACPA, This Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act says that if you infringe someone else’s trademark by registering a domain name that’s too similar, you could be liable for up to $100, 000 plus attorney’s fees. It’s a big number.

Tara Kachaturoff: That is a big number

Enrico Schaefer: So, you’ve got to be very careful about which brand you pick and what domain name you register and build your business upon.

Tara Kachaturoff: But people really don’t have the capacity, the resources to figure out if they’re doing something wrong, they’re just registering them like mad. My girlfriend owns almost 580 domains.

Enrico Schaefer: Godaddy let me register it, what do you mean there is a problem?

Tara Kachaturoff: Right.

Enrico Schaefer: Well, when you registered it, you said in your user agreement and terms of service, you said you were not infringing anyone else’s trademark. Of course, no one reads those clickwrap agreements, but…

Tara Kachaturoff: Yeah, just click the box. If somebody has a domain name that’s similar to yours and you’ve been using yours for a while in commerce, what rights do you have?

Enrico Schaefer: First, the trademark law is first to use in commerce. So, the moment you begin using your mark, which may be reflected in your domain name, in commerce, visible to consumers, you have common law trademark rights. Ok. And whoever’s first to use that brand in commerce within a market segment, typically wins any trademark dispute. Now, you should always think about registering your trademarks because that gives you additional leverage against infringers but you don’t have to. The moment you start in business under a brand that identifies you as the source of goods or services, you have common law trademark rights. First one wins.

Tara Kachaturoff: So, if they’re using a lot of your domain name that’s similar, you can ask them to cease and desist?

Enrico Schaefer: Yes.

Tara Kachaturoff: Send them a letter…

Enrico Schaefer: Ask them to transfer the domain and if they’re amenable, you could give them a transition period to get into a different domain and in protecting your domain is really critical. ICANN, who controls all of the domain names, is about to roll out unlimited TLDs, which is the .com, .net, .org, so that it could really be .dot anything, .car, .weather, .birmingham, .bloomfield, etc. anyone who wants to be a registry, they can and pick their own extension. Well, that means that there is going to be an even bigger traffic jam on the web on trademark issues.

Tara Kachaturoff: Because, you know, we were just looking at the domain name piece and not the ending and so that’s going to become even more complex, correct?

Enrico Schaefer: It is because if it’s Microsoft.com but all of a sudden there are 100-200 more extensions, someone could say I’m going to register micro-soft.software., if that extension gets rolled out. So, protecting your intellectual property, protecting your ideas in the internet space is extremely challenging, and that’s been the growth of our business is we specialize in internet company and technology company representation and online brand protection, licensing of intellectual property, online defamation is huge reputation on the internet is crazy and so these are all boom areas and we’re in the middle of all of it.

Tara Kachaturoff: And you know one thing you know because I publish articles online as do many of my colleagues, the stealing online was just scraping of our content and putting it on other sites, no attribution, there’s really nothing we can do, correct? I mean, there’s nothing you can do to track down all these places, I mean, it’s just, it’s….

Enrico Schaefer: The scraping issue is tough. But, yes, you can send letters. There are companies that’ll send, en masse, letters on all scraping, fully automated, and asking them to take down the content. You can go to host, the company that’s actually hosting the website and they will oftentimes respect copyrights and take down websites that infringe. The real question is whether it is worth spending the money to do that.

Tara Kachaturoff: And it never is. But protecting your domain name would be important, to spend the money there.

Enrico Schaefer: Yes.

Tara Kachaturoff: So, we only have a minute left. This has gone by so quickly and I could talk to you for days on these various topics because they’re such interesting to me, but what’s your advice to entrepreneurs? You’ve done it all. You’ve been the entrepreneur on the corporate side, your own business, you’ve got the attorney thing going, and you got Traverse Legal, the coolest lawyers in Traverse City, maybe in America.

Enrico Schaefer: Maybe in America.

Tara Kachaturoff: What’s your advice to entrepreneurs?

Enrico Schaefer: Since we represent entrepreneurs, it is always the same answer for me on that question, which is, the number one differentiator for success is perseverance. The ideas that come into my office are very difficult to sort out by, oh yeah, that one’s going to hit, and that one’s not. Because the real factor is who’s bringing that idea into my office, and how hard are they going to work at it, and when those first ten hurdles hit them, are they going to have the perseverance to get over those hurdles?

Tara Kachaturoff: Well, that’s great advice, perseverance. Thank you so much Enrico Schaefer, managing partner at Traverse Legal. I hope we could talk to you again in the future.

Enrico Schaefer: I hope so too. Thank you.

Tara Kachaturoff: If you’d like more information about our program, please visit us at www.michiganentrepreneurtv.com. Please join me again in the future when I interview another enterprising entrepreneur. Until then, wishing you the best of business.

What does it mean to be a Solution Minded Attorney?

The Greatest American Lawyer — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 12:01:44 PDT

Every attorney sees themselves different. In the litigation arena, there are those attorneys who simply fight to the death, contest every issue and whose fundamental purpose is to destroy everything in their path. There are other lawyers who take a completely different approach. They are solution minded. Their goal is to protect their client’s rights and achieve their client’s goals in the most cost-effective way possible.

It is really easy for “aggressive” lawyers to drive endless bills to their clients by engaging in “letter war” tactics and other heavy-handed strategies. These lawyers don’t discriminate much between clients. They simply fit everyone into the “aggressive lawyer” business model.

More solution minded lawyers try to identify the client’s goals and then work towards solutions and compromises which meet those goals. While it is sometimes necessary to aggressively assert a client’s right, that is not necessarily the default position.

As a litigation attorney, I get to make choices each day about what type of approach works best for a particular client on a particular matter. I always have to remind myself to step outside the classic threat letter, analyze threat letter response, reply to response to threat letter approach. Sometimes, just picking up the phone is the right answer for everyone involved.

Denise Howell, Evan Brown, Enrico Schaefer and Ashley Packard on "This Week in Law"

The Greatest American Lawyer — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 09:20:04 PDT

A big thanks to Denise Howell who invited me to participate on her popular "This Week in Law" netcast televised on Twit.tv. In this weeks episode titled "Little Orphan Schweddy Balls," the panel of internet and technology attorneys (and Ashley Packard,Ph.D., Professor of Communications and Digital Media Studies at University of Houston) discuss a cornucopia of legal issues from copyright trolling, social media law and a variety of other issues.

Hosts:

Denise Howell: is an appellate, intellectual property, and technology lawyer, an internet blogger and columnist, and podcast host.

Evan Brown: is a technology and intellectual property law lawyer, as well as a blogger. on his blog "Internet Cases - a blog about law and technolgy," Evan shares his thoughts on internet issues related to copyright, trademarks, DMCA, open source, pivacy, and a host of other web related issues.

Guests:

Ashley Packard, Ph.D.: is a Professor of Communications and Digital Media Studies at University of Houston. Her courses include Digital Media Law & Ethics Seminar, Media Law, Communication Ethics and Mass Media & Society.

Enrico Schaefer: is Founder of Traverse Legal, PLC. Enrico is a seasoned trial attorney practicing in areas such as internet and domain law, cybersquatting, technology and intellectual property, UDRP and IP licensing, trademark and related matters.

Keyword Domain Name for Lawyers: Internet Lawyer Parking Page?

The Greatest American Lawyer — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 05:47:34 PDT

Many lawyers use the internet for marketing. From Blogs to Facebook, Twitter and Google+, the debate over whether lawyers should market online ended long ago. Virtually, every law firm now does so. Many law firms register their firm name as the domain name. But domain names which match the search query in Google still get a healthy bump.

Check these Google search results for the phrase “internet lawyer.” Note that the third result is www.internetlawyer.com, which is a parking page at Google.

Of course, if you are really looking for an internet lawyer, we recommend our own law firm, Traverse Legal, PLC.

So what can law firms do in order to increase their web presence on important keywords for their practice? I’m certainly not suggesting that you go out and register every important keyword combination as a domain name. Our firm picked approximately 100 important keyword combinations and launched WordPress blogs on each. We continue to grow those particular web properties with content. An example of one such page can be found at www.internet-lawyer-usa.com.