Looking Back to the Future?

My friend Jordan Furlong writes a great post titled These are the Days of Miracle and Wonder about lessons we can learn from Obama's win.  The great takeaway:

Twenty years ago, our parents would never have believed it. Twenty years from now, our children will take it for granted.

What amazing thing can you do TODAY in your practice that was unfathomable in 1988 but will be commonplace in 2028?  Get to it!

Ten Rules of Legal Technology

For your consideration:  Ten "Rules" of Legal Technology.  Not many are new, and very few apply only to lawyers, but these are a few more nuggets I'm pulling out of previous posts to fill out my portfolio of speeches I've got "in the can."  Enjoy:

1. Since the first PC, legal tech companies have been promising to helplawyers capture more time.  Capturing time isn't the problem, chargingfor it is.

2.  It is more important to get better at working with people than it is to get better working with technology.

3.  You should never have a bigger monitor or more comfortable chair than your secretaries do.

4.  Never brag about implementing technology in your firm that your clients have been using for a decade.

5.  The single piece of technology all lawyers should learn to use betteris their keyboard. 

6.  Sophisticated clients don't demand sophisticated technology, they demand sophisticated lawyers.  They assume the technology is part of the package.

7.  Social Media isn't technology.  It's your Rotary Meeting on steroids -- though there are less lawyers in the room and the clients are better.

8.  Want to invest in an inexpensive communication technology guaranteed toimprove your thinking skills and increase collaboration with clients?Buy a whiteboard for your office.

9.  Belt, meet suspenders: One backup solution is never enough.

10.  The only technology ROI that matters is your clients' return on their investment in you.

Bonus Rule:  The one piece of technology your clients wish you'd get better at using is the telephone.  Call them back!

Also, check out Ten Rules About Hourly Billing and Ten New Rules of Legal Marketing.  If you'd like to hire me to speak, head over to LexThink.

Meet Your Future Clients

The other day, I suggested in my Ten New Rules of Legal Marketing that:

9.  Your future clients have been living their entire lives onlineand will expect the same from you.  If you’re invisible on the web, youwon’t exist to them.

Now, I've stumbled across this article from Adweek titled Generation Watch Out that explains better than I ever could what I meant:

Today's young talent represents not-able cultural shifts: They'redigital, message savvy, global and green. (Listen to the Flobots'"Handlebars" and you'll get the picture.) They mark fundamentalchanges from previous grads entering the industry. They're moreassociative, culturally networked, nimble and intuitive. Whilethey're more cynical than cohorts past, they're also more apt tocall BS or volunteer for environmental or political causes. Theyare easy in their gay-or-straight, vegetarian-or-meat,tatted-or-not choices. F-bombs are tossed around like Frisbees.These kids run hard, adapt easily....

It's the shortcut generation. That toolbar up top is forold-timers; these guys learned to Cmd-Option-Shift-A in middleschool because it was cool, not necessary. Desktops areinstitutional holdovers. Everyone has a set of on-the-go tools:camera, laptop, videocam, hard drive, cool bag to tote it all.They're experts early on, manhandling Final Cut or Flash withintuitive authority. They're Idea 2.0, the mashup generation andone with confluence, that place beyond convergence where the oldsloughs off and the new quickly gets morphed into the cultural DNA.

All this makes them, at their best, unbelievably creative andproductive. On the other hand, they also think they have all theanswers. Morley Safer wrote recently of this generation'sentitlement issues: They've grown up with everyone as winners, withinspired birthday parties and planned events, with middle-classprivilege and opportunities at every camp, academy andtake-your-kid-to-work experience. They expect careers, not jobs.And they expect to have their names—very soon—in an annual or thismag. Hell, they know their blog on a good day might get moreeyeballs than the trades.

Get to know them. Understand them.  Because love 'em or hate 'em, they're not just your children, they're your future clients, employees and partners.  Learn to serve them or they'll serve themselves.

Want to avoid your clients?

OK, I'm not advocating this, but if you've got just a minute and don't want to talk to that client who goes on and on and on ..., try Slydial.  The free service promises to to connect you DIRECTLY to a person's mobile voicemail.   They don't answer, but get your message, and you can go back to being productive. 

Asking for your help.

Below is an email I received from Doug Sorocco, fellow legal blogger and great friend.  Please take time to read it and help if you can.

Howdy everyone!

As many of you know, I have spina bifida and have been a strong advocate on behalf of all those affected with this disability as well as the 65 million U.S. women of child bearing age.  As you are probably aware, all women of childbearing age should be taking a multivitamin that contains folic acid in order to increase the odds that a child will not be born with spina bifida.  I was honored to be the Chairman of the Spina Bifida Association of America the past number of years and I am now a member of the Board of the International Federation for Hydrocephalus and Spina Bifida in Brussels.

Along with our time and energy, Kristen and I are both financial supporters of the Spina Bifida Association.  I have also been fortunate that my firm, Dunlap Codding, has supported my work these past 12 years and given tens of thousands of dollars in financial and in-kind donations.  We all believe in the mission of the organization and the work that it does.

I am now asking your financial support as well.

In conjunction with the Association's Roast of Stephen Colbert of the "Colbert Report", we are raising additional funds through donations and car raffle tickets.  The car being raffled this year is a Hybrid Lexus RX 400H – the winner will be able to drive in style, comfort and fuel economy.

I promise you – the Spina Bifida Association is an amazing steward of the funds we raise and the impact we are having in the world is at least 10x the actual size of our organization.  You have my word that the funds raised will be well used.  If you are interested in learning more about what we do - I invite you to go to http://www.sbaa.org

I – and all those affected by spina bifida – need your financial generosity and support at this point in time.

If you can buy a raffle ticket, please fill out the attached form.  Buy two tickets and you get a $25 price break!  Only 2500 tickets will be sold – so your odds of winning are great.

If you are in the DC area, please purchase tickets to the Roast – it should be the event of the year in Washington, D.C.  I can only imagine what members of Congress and The White House, given an open microphone, will say to Stephen Colbert!  The tables will be turned.  The link to purchase tickets is: http://tr.im/sbacolbertroast

If you cannot attend the Roast, you can still make a donation and support the work of the SBA.  I am extremely grateful for any contribution you can make and anything you can give, no matter the amount, will make a difference.

The link for Roast tickets and donations is:  http://tr.im/sbacolbertroast

One last request – please forward this email and attachment to at least ten people in your email address book.  The last time I requested your assistance in writing to Congress, I was overwhelmed with the number of people who responded.  It was astounding, frankly, and I believe that we must have gotten 15-20 more replies than the number of people I emailed.  So – forwarding this email will not take a lot of time, but the impact of forwarding the email is immeasurable.

Kristen and I thank you for your financial generosity and time.  Most importantly, we thank you for your incredible support of the work I have been doing on behalf of the SBA.  Together, we have truly made a difference in the lives of millions of people throughout the United States.

Kristen, Karl and I wish you, and your family, the very best for the holidays,

Douglas

Thanks!
 

Ten Rules About Hourly Billing

After the great response I got to yesterday's Ten New Rules of Legal Marketing post, I've decided to share a few more "Rules" of Hourly Billing I've culled from my blog and my speeches.  Enjoy!

1.  Ask your clients what they buy from you.  If it isn’t time, stop selling it!

2.  Imagine a world where your clients know each month how much your bill will be so they could plan for it.  They do.

3.  If you don’t agree on fees at the beginning of a case, you’ll be begging for them at the end of it.

4.  Sophisticated clients who insist on hourly billing do so because they’re smarter than you are, not because they want you to be paid fairly.

5.  When you bill by the hour, your once-in-a-lifetime flash of brilliant insight that saves your client millions of dollars has the same contribution to your bottom line as the six minutes you just spent opening the mail.

6.  Businesses succeed when their people work better.  Law firms succeed when their people work longer.  Your clients understand this -- and resent you for it.

7.  Every time your clients jokingly ask you, “Are you going to charge me for this?” they aren’t joking -- and they’ll check next month’s bill to be sure.

8.  The hardest thing to measure is talent.  The easiest thing to measure is time.  The two have absolutely no relationship to one another.  Your law firm measures talent, right?

9.  Would you shop at a store where the cost of your purchase isn’t set until after you’ve agreed to buy it? You ask your clients to.

10.  There are 1440 minutes each day.  How many did you make matter?  How many did you bill for?  Were they the same minutes?  Didn't think so.

If you'd like to get more ideas like these in real time, follow me on Twitter.

Touch Your Audience with These Touchy-Feely Tips

Here's a must-read post from Laura Bergells with six "touchy-feely" tips that will help when you rehearse your next presentation (you do practice, right?). 

If you ever give presentations to clients, to peers or to juries, you need to be thinking about these practice ideas.  My favorite:

Record your presentation without video. Then, listen to it without watchingthe slides. I like putting my audio on my portable mp3 player -- andtaking a walk. While listening to myself on the ellipse machine at thegym last week, I found an area of my presentation that dragged sodismally, I barely registered a heartbeat while chugging along at ahigh incline! I went back to the office for a rewrite and added morepowerful visuals. Listening to "audio only" helps you spot pace andpitch problems -- but it also helps you later recall the words andinflections that work well.

Ten New Rules of Legal Marketing

Legal Marketing has changed.  It used to be enough to keep an ad in the yellow pages and belong to the Rotary Club.  Not anymore.  Times are tough, so I present to you Ten "New" Rules of Legal Marketing.  Let me know what you think.

1.  "My lawyer can beat up your lawyer" isn't a marketing strategy.  "My lawyer will call me back before yours will" is.

2.  Google tells me there are 337,000 "Full Service Law Firms” out there.  Which one was yours again?

3.  Unless the person who founded your firm 100 years ago is still alive and practicing law, he's completely irrelevant to every client who's thinking of hiring you.

4.  Market to a "want" not to a "need."  By the time your clients realize they "need" you, it's often too late -- for them and for you.

5.  Your “keep great clients happy” budget should exceed your “try to get new clients” budget by at least 3:1.

6.  Thanksgiving cards say you're thankful for your clients' business.  Christmas cards say you're just like everybody else.

7.  Having the scales of justice on your business card says you're a lawyer -- an old, stodgy, unimaginative, do-what-everyone-else-has-done-for-fifty-years lawyer.  Same is true for your yellow pages ad.

8.  Speaking of yellow pages, don’t abdicate your marketing strategy to their salespeople.  They don’t know marketing.  They only know how to sell you a bigger ad each year.

9.  Your future clients have been living their entire lives online and will expect the same from you.  If you’re invisible on the web, you won’t exist to them.

10.  The single best marketing strategy in the world is to find your best clients and ask them, "How do I get more clients like you?"

Look for ten more rules next month.  For hundreds of legal marketing ideas, check out my Marketing Category on this blog.  And if you want to get these in real time, follow me on Twitter.

Co-Op Your Small Team

If you're looking for a solution to keep your small team on track, you should check out Co-Op, a lightweight, super-intuitive way to know what everyone in your team is working on right now.  It is a bit like Twitter meets your time sheet, and looks very cool.  Here's a screenshot:

Pretending to Act Brilliantly

My friend Jim Canterucci interviewed me for his Personal Brilliance Podcast.  He'll be posting portions of the interviews throughout this month and I encourage you to check it out. I'm not sure how much brilliance there is in my interview, but I always enjoy talking with Jim and I think you'll find some interesting things in there. 

I'd also encourage you to check out the rest of the podcasts.  I'm working though them right now, and I've got to say, so far all of them have been worth a listen!

Hello from Idaho

Picture of the season's first snow in Sun Valley, Idaho.

I just returned from Idaho, where I facilitated an Idea Market for Boise-area entrepreneurs (more on that in a future post), gave a speech to the fine lawyers at Hawley Troxell Ennis & Hawley and spoke about Innovation for Real Lawyers at the Idaho Bar's annual meeting.* 

I'll post my slides next week, along with some pretty cool thinking that came out of the Idea Market.  I'm going to be in Minneapolis, New York, Boston, Atlanta and London in the next two months.  I'd love to meet you when I make it to your city. 

Stay tuned.

*Big thanks go to friend Steve Nipper, Travis Franklin and the Idaho Bar Association for taking such good care of me while I was there!

The Value of a Free Consultation is What You Charge For It

Again from Yes! 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive:  Don't give away anything for "free" because the "the value of an item declines when it is offered as a gift." 

So, instead of offering in your Yellow Pages ad (you're still doing those?) a "Free Consultation," try offering a "$250.00 case analysis at no cost to you."  Your clients will value your continuing services more highly, and they'll feel like they've already gotten something of value from you to begin with -- making them more likely to reciprocate and hire you to take their case.

Pack a house with nervous clients?

Your clients are worried about their financial futures more than ever.  If you do divorce, estate planning, real estate or corporate work, you should be preparing a seminar NOW on the impact of the current situation on your clients. 

Make it "invitation only" and give each client the ability to bring another person.  Make it two hours or less.  Have a handout with the "Top 7 Things You Need to Know Now" or something similar.  Give each attendee at least three copies.  Encourage them to share it with people like them.

Tell it like it is.  Don't sell.  Your clients (and their hand-picked referrals) will appreciate the information, and look to you as their advisor in times of need.

If Operators are Busy ..

I've just started Yes! 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive by Noah J. Goldstein, Steve J. Martin and Robert B. Cialdini, and can already give it my highest recommendation.  It offers fifty short lessons (2-4 pages each) on persuasiveness, along with the empirical evidence to back them.

One quick lesson from the first chapter in the book:  Simply by changing an infomercial's call to action from "Operators are waiting, please call now," to, "If operators are busy, please call again," resulted in a huge increase in products purchased. 

Why?  Instead of people imagining a room full of operators waiting by silent telephones, infomercial viewers imagined those same operators going from call to call without a break, and assumed "if the phone lines are busy, then other people like me who are also watching this infomercial are calling, too."

Very interesting stuff.  A highly recommended book!

Looking for the Ugly in Potential Clients

Kevin Kelly writes another insightful essay on The Technium titled "Looking for Ugly."  Using FAA reporting on aircraft maintenance as his main example, he suggests that when we don't penalize minor infractions (the FAA encourages penalty-free reporting of minor safety errors), we reduce major ones.  Put another way, to avoid major catastrophe, it is important to encourage people to look for and report "the ugly:"

Looking for ugly is a great way to describe a precursor-based error detection system. You are not really searching for failure as much as signs failure will begin. These are less like errors and more like deviations. Offcenter in an unhealthy way. 

I think he's right on.  When evaluating new clients, for example, keep track of those things that don't "feel quite right."  It could be something as simple as the fact that they rescheduled three times, showed up late for an appointment, or "forgot" their retainer check.  While many of those prospects will turn into great clients, the handful of them that don't probably have a lot of those little things in common. 

The more you pay attention to those "little things" as they enter your head (as opposed to using your 20/20 hindsight once the relationship has gone sour) the more likely you'll get better at choosing great clients -- and avoiding the "ugly" ones.

The Perfect Law Firm Retreat: Let Your Clients Set the Agenda

So you're working on the agenda for your firm's next retreat?  You've got the standard bases covered:

Message from the Chairperson?  Check.
Firm financials?  Check.
Important legal decisions?  Check.
Practice-group breakouts?  Check.
Rainmaking training?
Golf?  Check.

Client concerns?  Huh?

You've asked your clients what they'd like you to talk about, haven't you?  You should.  And I'm not just talking about mastering their new billing requirements.  I'm suggesting you should poll your most important clients and ask them what they'd like you to cover at your next retreat. 

You might be surprised at what they'd like you to learn -- and they'll be surprised you cared enough to do so.

Want to Buy a Law Firm Brand?

I came across IncSpring yesterday.  It is a marketplace where designers can sell (and companies can buy) "ready-made brands."  If is a pretty neat concept, and you get to deal directly with the designer.  Not a lot of "legal" brands yet, but if you're a Texas Lawyer, you can do a lot worse than Lone Star Law:

The Perfect Law Firm Retreat: Leave the Lawyers at Home

If you are serious about making your firm better, next time you are thinking about a law firm retreat, stop.  Cancel (or postpone) your lawyer's retreat and spend your money on a staff retreat instead. 

Here are seven reasons you should consider a staff retreat this year:

1.  Your staff know how your firm works better than you do.  You know how your firm is supposed to work.  They know how it actually works.  They observe,  notice and understand the little things that you may overlook.  Unlocking their creativity will give you dozens (if not hundreds) of practical ideas to make your firm work better.

2.  Your staff doesn't know what your lawyers know, but they know what your lawyers should know.  If you wanted to improve the efficiency of your firms lawyers by training them to do one thing better, what would it be? You might think a seminar on "rainmaking" will improve your firm's bottom line.  The staff might suggest "copier training" instead -- and they'd probably be right.

3.  Your staff knows how to save you money.  Every single person on your staff has at least three ways to save you $100 each month.  Whether you want to reduce your overhead or prioritize your technology spending, your staff will give you better ideas than your attorneys will.

4.  Your clients don't act like clients around your staff.  When "on the clock," your clients act like clients.  When talking to your receptionist, secretary or paralegal, your clients act like people.  Your staff know better than you what your clients hate about your firm.  Ask them nicely and they'll tell you.

5.  Your staff are your best source for competitive intelligence.  Want to know what your competitors are up to?  Ask your staff.  They talk with their peers at other firms, and they know what's happening in your slice of the legal market.  They also know (probably before you) when and why your clients won't pay their bills.

6.  Your staff can help you say no.  Your staff know which clients don't deserve your firm's work, and which ones you should fire.  They also know the least talented and productive members of your firm, but we'll leave that topic for another day.

7.  Your staff is cheap.  Well, not really "cheap," but compared to the hourly billing rates for a day of the firm's attorneys' time, a day-long staff retreat is a bargain. The staff probably doesn't expect four days in Maui, either.

The most important reason to do a staff retreat, however, is that your staff will feel great knowing you value their ideas.  The single most effective way to engage youremployees and make them feel good about working for you is to listen tothem -- and asking them to help your firm solve its most pressing challengesis a tremendous way to do it.

One important key:  whether you hire LexThink or someone else, you absolutely should not facilitate this one by yourself.  Keep lawyers out of the room if you want your staff to speak freely.  You'll be rewarded with their candor.

And when they get back to the office, make sure they each have their own set of business cards.  If you value them, there's no better way to show it, than by allowing them to be ambassadors for your firm.

Amazon Prime Time

I'm not sure how many people I've told about Amazon Prime, Amazon's $79.00 per year "Membership" that gets you free second-day shipping on everything Amazon sells (as opposed to stuff Amazon sells for other people), and $3.99 an item next-day shipping when you absolutely, positively have to have it overnight.

The shipping deal is pretty sweet, but the best part is the amount of time I DON'T spend in Target, Barnes and Noble, OfficeMax, etc.  I keep a list of things I use again and again on a shopping list at Amazon, and when I need to replenish my supplies I click "order" and a package arrives at my door in two days.

Here's the thing:  If you like the idea of Amazon Prime AND want to help me make a little dough, sign up with this link.  I get $12.00 through the end of October for each referral.  If you'd rather not send me some grocery money (who am I kidding, I'll probably spend it on books and gadgets), go straight to the non-referral link (here) and sign up anyway.  I like Prime that much.

Mediation 2.0 The Wisdom of Crowds?

Mediators and family lawyers out there, check out where your practice area may be headed: 

Crowd-sourced dispute resolution (without the resolution part, yet).  It is called  SideTaker, and promises to "let the world decide who's at fault."  Here's how it works (according to the site):

Step One:  Add your side and tell lover.
Step Two:  Lover adds their side.
Step Three:  People vote and comment.

Everything is anonymous.  Questions, responses and comments range from funny to sad.  If you want to see a way Web 2.0 can impact your practice, check it out.