Rainmaker Lawyer Consulting was founded by native New Yorker Dave Lorenzo.
Its mission is to help New York Lawyers with law firm marketing, strategy, practice management and productivity improvement.
The firm works exclusively with attorneys. This allows us to focus on the unique challenges lawyers face in the New York Market. We bring Ivy League Expertise with a New York Attitude to your law firm's business development process.
Why should someone choose to work with you rather than any other lawyer?
Experience? Lots of people have experience.
Education? All lawyers are educated.
Proximity? You’re close to where they live? Would you choose a heart surgeon because you sat next to him on the subway?
Reputation? A little better than the others but still not enough.
If you want to attract clients as a lawyer in New York you must find a way to stand out from the crowd. You must be clearly different from everyone else who does what you do. Until you master that, you don’t have a solid marketing plan.
If you are a lawyer in New York and you have given any thought to law firm marketing, now is the time to act on it.
Good marketing begins with a good law firm marketing plan. This is the time of year to get your law firm marketing plan in place for 2011. In that plan you should include:
The percentage of clients that will come from referral sources.
The percentage of clients that will come from advertising.
The percentage of clients that will come from networking.
The percentage of clients that will come from your website.
You get the idea. You should also break down your forecast for monthly revenue and profit.
Once you have all those numbers put in place you should next layer in tactics that describe how you will achieve those goals.
What will all of that give you? Piece of mind. Remember: Marketing is the key to living a better life. You will know what you need to do to achieve the goals you want achieve.
Welcome to the the very first edition of our Friday video series. This week our video is titled: “How to Get Clients as a Lawyer”. In this video, law firm marketing expert Dave Lorenzo describes just three of the many ways to get clients as a lawyer.
If you want to learn how to market your law firm beyond search engine optimization and the Internet, watch this video.
I highly encourage you to watch this video titled: How to get clients as a lawyer.
How to get clients as a lawyer, three ways:
Pick a Niche
Concentrating all of your marketing efforts in a specific niche will allow you to grow you law firm and dominate your marketing. When you focus your marketing efforts on a specific group of people (or businesses) you will become well know very quickly. Once you are known, you must then follow the tips below to convert that fame into business.
Differentiate Your Law Firm From Every Other
In the video Dave offers three ways to differentiate your law firm from everyone else who does what you do:
Level of service: Do you provide some form of service that otehr lawyers will not? For example: Are you a business transactional lawyer who will got your your clients location to do your work?
How you acquire clients, your marketing: You can differentiate your law firm through your marketing. This can be done by incorporating your personality into your marketing material. People work with and hire individual lawyers. They do not hire big brands. The more personality you can add to your marketing, the better off you will be.
Your guarantee: You cannot guarantee results but you can guarantee service levels. You can guarantee delivery dates of work product. You can guarantee return call times. Think of some things you can guarantee and use them to differentiate your law firm.
Educate your Clients
Dave gives us five things we should do when we educate our clients. He says we should:
1). Help them understand the problem they are facing
2). Let them see the solution
3). Help them understand what a good lawyer looks like
4). Help them understand why they need to solve this problem today
Follow these three steps and work at executing them perfectly. If you do, you will have truly mastered the art of how to get clients as a lawyer.
The value in law firm marketing extends well beyond providing lawyers with more money. Becoming proficient at law firm marketing also leads to better quality of life. This is made possible in a couple of different ways:
First: You attract better clients. You quantity of clients will increase but the quality of your clients will also increase. This means that you can be more selective and, in fact, turn some clients away. This means more money from working on less matters. Which leaves you with more free time.
Second: You will be better able to prioritize your time. If clients are coming to you prep-screened and pre-qualified, you will not have to waste your time dealing with clients who cannot afford your services. This is a huge benefit most of the old fashioned marketers do not discuss.
Third: You will be happier. You will actually look forward to coming to work each day. This will not only make you more productive it will also increase your creativity.
Law firm marketing is not only great for helping you make more money, it is also great for improving your life.
There are lots of companies out there that claim to be law firm marketing experts but are just search engine optimization specialists. While search engine optimization (SEO) is an important part of law firm marketing, it should be just one component in an overall marketing strategy. SEO in fact, is just a small piece of your Internet strategy and (if you are a savvy law firm marketing expert) the Internet is just one small component of a larger overall focused law firm marketing plan.
Here is an example of a conservative Internet Marketing Strategy for a law firm:
Create a static home page with opt-in box for free report and other offer for educational information. This is not just a great idea, it is probably one of the most important things you can do with your website. You must make at least two offers of free information to people who visit. You do this to establish a relationship with them. You also do this to get their contact information so you can follow up.
Blog – At least one article should be posted each week (three is better). Writing articles and posting them on your blog is important. This will help visitors to your website become familiar with your thinking. It also helps you establish credibility. Blogging is also a great way to have the search engines visit your website more often.
Unique article submitted – At least three each month. You should submit an article (one you did not use on your own website) to article directories. The concept behind this process is that people will begin to use your article on their websites and link back to your website. This helps enhance your credibility and it will help give your website better standing in the search engines.
Engage in dialogue with other people who blog. This is helpful in building relationships. Providing genuine feedback on an article or a blog post is a great way to start a relationship.
Search Engine Optimization: Work on making your page the top ranked page for the key search phrases in your industry. This can be done using many of them methods listed above. You can also hire someone to do research on popular directories and submit your website to them. In addition, internet press releases are helpful in increasing your standing with the search engines.
As you can see, the SEO offered as law firm marketing is only on piece of a larger internet marketing plan. When you think about investing your law firm marketing budget, think about it from the standpoint of getting the best clients for your investment. Many times that investment will not be on Search Engine Optimization.
There are lots of people who claim to be legal marketing experts giving advice on the Internet. The one thing these people have in common is that the are failures at legal marketing themselves. That’s right. These so called experts are in fact lawyers who no longer practice or they practice law on a part time basis.
What does that tell you?
It tells me that these people could not cut it as full time lawyers. If they were great lawyers, with thriving law firms, why would they move on to become law firm marketing experts? They wouldn’t.
I want to welcome those of you who are just discovering this blog. One of the things that makes this website different is the tone and freshness of the content. This is not a free consultation. But it is a wake up call on legal marketing. We are not going to pull any punches. If you do not enjoy that kind of dialogue, you can move on to something else.
This is not a place for people who couldn’t cut it in the real world. This is a place for ideas. This is advice on business strategy, marketing, practice management and productivity improvement from someone who has build a few big businesses.
We do not suffer fools here and we do not like people who pretend to be lawyers just to take their money.
Attorney marketing should dramatically improve your positioning. This means you should become a recognized expert in your community. As an expert, you should be well compensated. This means that when someone comes to you for insight or ideas, they should pay you. This includes an initial consultation.
Eliminate the Free Consultation
No attorney should ever offer a free consultation. Here are a few reasons why:
Your Time is Valuable: Many attorneys go broke offering free consultations. This is because they offer them to everyone and the people take the information the attorney provides and they either 1). Handle the matter themselves or 2). Use that information to find another lawyer.
If you are going to serve as a tool for the client (either to do your job or to shop around) you should be compensated.
When You Give Advice You Take a Risk: Whether you are paid or not you take a risk every time you give out advice. If you are going to incur liability, you should definitely be compensated.
Perception is Reality: People believe they get what they pay for. If you want people to value your services you have to charge them something for it. They will have more respect for you and they will treat your advice as valuable.
Eliminate Shoppers: It is almost impossible to eliminate price shoppers from your law firm. You can however strongly deter them from visiting you. You do this by charging a consultation fee. someone who is cheap enough to shop around for legal advice will probably not pay a fee for an initial consultation.
Your Fee Can Be an Attorney Marketing Advantage: This is a hidden benefit from charging a consulting fee. You can take the money you receive from the fees and use it for additional marketing. This gives you a bigger marketing budget as well as an opportunity to think about marketing every time someone pays the fee.
These are only a handful of reasons to charge a consultation fee. There are probably at least a dozen more. I strongly encourage you to focus on this good idea and take the opportunity to evaluate this area in your own law firm.
One important aspect of legal marketing is the ability to write. Being able to write, and write in a way that can help you relate to your clients is a great skill to master.
When I sit down to write a marketing document I need to have a clear head and be completely focused on the task at hand. For me this becomes more and more difficult as the day wears on. I find that I am much more able to focus and create quality content when it is early in the day.
Adjust Your Schedule Accordingly
It is for this reason that I adjust my schedule to handle all of my writing tasks early in the day. That allows me to use the time I have available for maximum focus to do the tasks that require it.
Take a look at your schedule and ask yourself when you are best able to handle the tasks you have set out before you. Adjust your schedule to work with the tasks that need the most focus when you are at your peak.
When you have your schedule in front of you, ask yourself when you get your best ideas and you will be able to give your best effort toward your legal marketing.
Seth Godin has a great list of reasons why ideas go viral. Among his list of twenty are a couple of my favorites:
I spread your idea because:
#6: Because it’s funny and laughing alone is no fun
#15: Because I care about someone and this idea will make them happier or healthier
#20: Because I am in awe of your art and the only way I can repay you is to share that art with others.
Number 20 certainly applies to Seth. This is great stuff. Here are some ways we can apply this to law firm marketing:
Take a great idea and make it better and share it with your clients and prospective clients
Take a great idea and comment on it in the local media
Spread a great idea in your next talk or speech
Offer to implement a great idea for a client (or multiple clients)
Adapt your great idea for use in a new setting or industry
Law firm marketing innovation is not always about coming up with the new idea. More often it is about adapting the new idea to the clients current situation.
