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Inside Out: Why You Need to Seek Referrals from Non-Lawyers, Too

Psssttt . . . I’ve got something I need to tell you: You don’t have to network only with other lawyers.  I know this is a problem for a lot of you, which is why I bring it up.  I just want to help.  And, I get it: it’s so much easier to just talk with other lawyers.  They feel your pain.  They speak your language — Latin.  But, relying on referrals from other lawyers is the most dangerous game.

Why?  Good question.  It’s because other lawyers have the ‘nuclear option’: They can nullify any referral they would have sent you by taking it for themselves.  Think about it: If you’re relying on, say, plumbers for referrals, they’re not going to be like, ‘Hey, I’m just going to go ahead and probate this estate myself.’  They need a lawyer to refer a legal case to.  But, for lawyers, almost regardless of specialization, they can snatch any case back.  A patent lawyer could take a probate case if she needed to, or wanted to.

What that means is that you can do everything right, in terms of finding the right referral partners, with the right complementary practice areas, and do everything you can, also, to smooth the referral process, and to send bulk candies to your lawyer referral sources afterwards — and yet, all that does not guarantee that the attorney you want to receive referrals from is going to actually send you those referrals.  If they’ve hit a revenue trough, maybe they keep that case, in order to stem the tide without having to dip into a line of credit or ease their short-term concern.  Maybe they end up liking that particular practice area, or view it as more viable than they previously thought, and the whole thing starts to snowball, and they hire an associate to handle the personal injury cases they used to send your way.  The point is: they can, the plumber can’t.

So, as an attorney practicing in a competitive environment (that’s you), it’s imperative that you (pl.) diversify your referral network, in order to decrease an overhanging reliance on attorney-to-attorney referrals.  Go forth, then, and meet non-attorney referral sources.  Just like there are complementary practice areas, there are complementary business types out there for you to receive referrals from and to send referrals to.  So, do the legwork to find out where those opportunities lie.  If you need to conduct some preliminary research on the topics, MeetUp.com is a great way to find business-specific interest groups (as well as personal interest groups), that you may never have heard of, or even thought about, before.

Get out of your comfort zone, and you shall be rewarded.

. . . Like, literally, with more money, stemming from further assured referral avenues.

Marketing, Messaging

Short Tail Cat: How Modern Lawyers Find Referrals

Referral marketing ain’t dead; but, I do have some bad news: it’s becoming a less successful method for building a law practice, where it was traditionally the absolute best way to launch and maintain a law firm.  And, the reason for this is that consumers, especially millennials, are far more comfortable seeking out referrals for service providers online.  In other words, new school law firm clients don’t require a personal recommendation — or, probably more importantly for purposes of this discussion, an in-person recommendation.  And, that’s a big problem for attorneys who rely on traditional referral marketing, which is based almost entirely on the need for in-person recommendations.

Attorneys (and, it’s still the majority of attorneys) who have built their entire book of business on personal referrals meet one person at a cocktail party and tie to that relationship the fervent hope that that one person will meet another person at another cocktail party, and will then remember that prior conversation, and then make a recommendation.  That still happens, don’t get me wrong: it just happens less and less often.  These days, consumers searching for lawyers probably don’t know another lawyer who can make a referral to a colleague, and they’re also far more likely to perform due diligence on their own, rather than wait for an opportune time to get a recommendation from a heretofore unknown person, at some late date.  The modern consumer is not as patient as the traditional consumer; and, frankly, it’s far easier to do your own research online than to go try and find somebody who can recommend somebody else.  That’s a lot of degrees of separation for a person who can just watch the latest episode of Game of Thrones by asking their Smart TV to put it on for them.

So, as a modern lawyer seeking out referrals, you can’t any longer just rely on word of mouth, because even those outlying consumers who want a personal recommendation from another human being will fact check that recommendation online, just to make sure they’re not missing out on any dispositive information.  What does that mean for you, referral marketing attorney in this day and age?  Well, you just have to be sensitive as to where modern consumers are going to look for or make choices about particular service providers, and make sure that you control the narrative in those spaces.  Since even those consumers who have a referral in hand are going to Google you, you need to know what shows up when your name is Googled; and, if you don’t already know, you need to control that vanity search, in that only information that you want populating populates.  Part of controlling that narrative is making sure that your directory profiles and social media landing pages are completed; not only will this drive more compelling search results, it will also cover for those consumers who perform ‘in-app’ searches for service providers, by going to social media and other applications directly, without ever making it to a Google search.

The truth about modern referral marketing is that, even for those consumers who are willing to take a personal referral, the modus operandi is trust but verify — whereas, previously, the verification process was either bypassed, or not as robust as the internet has allowed it to become.  In short, law firms leaning on referral marketing now cannot ignore the requirement of a robust and targeted online presence.

Marketing, Messaging

Long Tail Cat: How Modern Consumers Find Law Firms

Modern consumers are different from old school consumers, in part because they access information about service providers via different methods than have traditionally been used.  And, even those methods are changing rapidly.  It was only fairly recently, for example, that mobile searches overtook the searches from traditional hardware, that had previously dominated the market.

So, for law firms that want to compete, in what remains a highly competitive market, it’s essential to understand how consumers find you, to access your services.  The more you know about that, the more calculating, exacting and effective your marketing becomes.  So, that begs the question: How do modern consumers find law firms?

At a very basic level, there are two ways that consumers find lawyers: (1) because they’ve been referred to someone whose name they now know (and fewer and fewer millennials receive personal recommendations for lawyers — they’re more apt to look online first) or (2) via an online search for a legal topic.

If the consumer already knows who you are (if they’ve been referred to you) they’re likely to execute a Google search.  So, you’ve got to own the ‘vanity search’ for your name.  If you don’t know what the first page of Google looks like when someone searches for you name, try it yourself.  I guarantee you will be surprised by the results.  When you are, you’ll know what work you need to do to beef up your personalized online presence.  When does your website come up in search?  What about directory profiles?  Do your social media profiles appear?  Are there websites containing information about you that you do not control?  To what extent is any of that information negative?  What portion of the information does not relate to you or your business at all?  Now, at least, you’ll have an idea of what you need to tidy up, so that you’re putting your best foot forward in terms of the first things that your leads learn about you, or confirm about you.  But, keep in mind that consumers are not only searching via Google.  With the rise in smartphone usage, lots of consumers are now performing what are called in-app searches, which means that they never get to Google at all.  Instead, they’re going directly to a particular app on their phone, and starting their search there.  So, you need to also make sure that, not just the links to, but your actual social media profiles themselves, are locked and loaded — because that may be the only glimpse a consumer gets into who you are, and what you do.

When consumers don’t know who you are (where there’s been no referral), they’re then searching based on a specific need they have, for which they require guidance (yours, hopefully), and a guide (you, hopefully).  A number of those searches are done using keywords, like ‘real estate lawyer new york’ or ‘personal injury law las vegas’, which big players will spend big dollars optimizing for — but, maybe that’s not you.  If it isn’t, you can build out your marketing strategy in a different way.  Consider that many consumers search for legal services by asking questions, like ‘If I have to sell my house how do i find a lawyer for that’ or ‘i was hurt in a car accident, what do I do now’.  It’s, of course, more difficult to find keyword combinations to fit that search type, especially because lay consumers are not going to be searching for things like ‘tort law indianapolis’.  The way that you can optimize for these ‘long tail’ searches, then, is by utilizing content market.  So, if you write a blog post that reads ‘How to Find the Right Lawyer When You Need to Sell Your House’ or you create and publish a short video titled  ‘What to do When You’re Hurt in a Car Accident’ — and, if you can widely distribute those content pieces online, across social channels and via backlinks — you can generate significant traction in search for short dollars.  Think of the top 10 questions that your clients ask you, and create content pieces around those topics, then publish and share them.  If you can do that, you’re replacing, or supplementing, a traditional SEO spend, with relevant content driven by elbow grease.  Optimize for long-tail search to save money, and show up in places your competitors least suspect you to be.  And, that starts with building an aggressive content marketing engine.

Then, when it comes to your revenue, you won’t be the one who’s a long tail cat in a room full of rocking chairs — your competitors will be.

Marketing, Messaging

It Won’t Take Too Long, It’ll Just Take Money: Selling Value

That’s a line from a song by the great (and extremely tall) Alan Jackson.  It’s worth a listen, as it’s a discussion between a mechanic and a songwriter about the relative values of their services, based on a consideration of need.

Most lawyers charge by the hour; they don’t charge based on the value, or perceived value, of their service.  But, all hours are not created equal.  And, all lawyers don’t maintain the same competency level.  And, all law firms don’t execute on customer service the same way.  If you can tell me that your call to a state administrative agency to inquire about a particular record is worth the same as another fifteen minutes spent managing a tense deposition, then your notion of value is off — even if your client’s isn’t.  It’s just not true that every hour is worth the same amount of money; yet, that’s the antiquated notion that most lawyers still abide by when setting rates.  But, the market knows better than that; and, your clients know better than that.  The lawyers who figure that out do a better job wringing revenue from their law firms, because they know when they can leverage a need, and when they shouldn’t.  In many ways, it’s a more honest way to run a business; and, there is additional cache drawn from a client’s knowledge that you, too, know what’s really important — and what isn’t.

Of course, most lawyers (and legal ethics investigators, too) like the simplicity of the billable hour.  But, clients of law firms view that model as a money pit for their hard-earned cash.  The reason you bill on value, then, is partly because your clients will appreciate that, but also because it helps you to practice at the top of your law license, and to ultimately earn more, just by dint of focusing on the most important, highest value work.  There is no better way to encourage efficiency and delegation at a law firm than by enacting a value billing model.

My good friend Alan Klevan tells the following story of an engineer who comes into a nuclear power plant where a meltdown is impending.  He calmly walks in, turns a screw, and walks out.  The management team then gets a bill for $1000, and complains to the engineer: ‘You were here for two minutes!  This is outrageous!’  But, the engineer says, ‘Right.  It was $5 to turn the screw; and, it was $995 to know which screw to turn.’

Getting at value is essential for all business owners; and, lawyers are starting to come around on how to build value into their law practice pricing.  And, step one is often dropping the billable hour model.

Analytics, Marketing, Messaging, Technology

.Org: How to Use Scheduling Tools So Your Content Marketing Efforts Don’t Kill You

The hardest thing about developing a great content marketing program isn’t even writing the content — it’s about publishing the content.  It’s not super difficult to add a new blog post to your website, sure . . . But what about adding your content to various social media channels?  Writing something, especially recording something, is easy — the challenge is then going ahead and posting it your YouTube channels (personal and professional), your Facebook pages (personal and professional), your Twitter accounts (personal and professional), your LinkedIn accounts (personal and professional) . . . Heck, maybe you’ve even got an Instagram account — or, maybe you call it ‘Insta’, like I think the cool kids do.  In any event, it’s a lot to navigate, and a lot of time to spend, especially when the payoff is not immediate, but builds up only over time.

Saving yourself from social media hell, while still effectively managing your law practice is not easy.  But, like many things in life, it comes down to one thing: organization.

There are at least a few things you can do to make sure that your marketing game is strong on social media and that won’t break the bank, or your soul.  (The assumption here is that you’re already competent in creating the content.)

Firstly, choose and use a social media marketing management platform.  You want to use one software through which you can access and post to all your accounts on a schedule.  Free or near-free systems like Hootsuite, Buffer, RavenTools and Tweetdeck will allow you to publish and schedule social media posts across different platforms automatically — even when (actually, especially when) you’re not around to do it.  This means that you can post to social media without falling down some ill-defined social media rabbit hole that you spend two hours with.  And, most of these systems track links and can provide basic post analytics.

Secondly, decide upon a publication schedule.  We all know that the more you can publish, the more traction you’ll get online.  But, It helps to maintain a regular schedule for doing so.  That not only means that you will be more likely to post on a recurring basis, but it also means that you can do it in the same time frame, all the time.  If you started posting your new blog or podcast at 2 pm every Thursday afternoon,  people will begin to expect that, and to look forward to it.  Just don’t stop doing it . . .

Finally, choose a time for when you schedule all your social media posting.  I’m a Sunday night guy myself.  That means you can schedule your entire slate of social media posts for the whole week while watching Game or Thrones.  Then, your only obligation, if you choose to accept it, is to check in here and there throughout the week, in order to engage with your followers.

There’s nothing quite like talking to someone, and having them ask: ‘Wait, did you just tweet something?  How??’

It’s breathtaking.

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