Category Archives: Marketing

How to compete on price

One of the oldest pieces of marketing advice in the legal profession is: “Don’t compete on price.” Wiser heads than mine constantly warn lawyers not to cut their prices to match what other sellers are providing, that engaging in a price war for legal services is as potentially ruinous as getting involved in a land [...]
Also posted in Competition | 9 Comments

The lamp and the laser

When you set up a home office, as I’ve recently been doing, you begin to notice lighting in a way you hadn’t before. It quickly becomes apparent that fixed overhead lights and large floor lamps, no matter how bright they might be, don’t illuminate desks and laptops very well. For close-range work, helping you navigate [...]
Also posted in Big Firms, Solo & Small Firm | 5 Comments

Trust and the marketing department

Timothy Corcoran’s excellent and essential new blog tracks and expands upon a provocative article at the AmLaw Daily called “How essential is a CMO?” As many large firms scale back their marketing spending or lose their Chief Marketing Officers, Tim finds both lawyers and marketers can share some blame. I was especially drawn to this [...]
Also posted in Management | 3 Comments

Figuring out Twitter

I’ve been on Twitter for a little more than six months now, and in that time, I’ve assembled a loose collection of reasons not to follow people. As a general rule,  I won’t follow your Twitter feed if: your Twitter account doesn’t show your name or link to a web page you’ve been on Twitter for more [...]
Also posted in Publishing | 17 Comments

Deconstructing prestige

I’m currently taking part in an intriguing conversation at Legal OnRamp about the reasons why GCs hire prestigious, big-name law firms. A recurring theme in the discussion is that in-house lawyers often default to using big, well-known (and often highly inefficient) firms because of the protection these firms’ prestige affords to corporate counsel. Just as [...]
Also posted in Big Firms | 1 Comment

Branding, blogging and the attention economy

Every online community loves a meta-conversation, a discussion about the community itself, and the blawgosphere is no exception. But even by those standards, the explosion of posts ignited by a law.com article on women law bloggers was remarkable for its strength and immediacy. Published yesterday, the article posited a relative absence of women blawggers (rather ironically, [...]
Also posted in Diversity, Technology | 7 Comments

The future of law firm branding

My semi-monthly column is up and running at Slaw. As always, I recommend you go read it there, because I guarantee you’ll find other very cool stuff at Canada’s best legal blog. If you haven’t visited lately, you might not know that Slaw has added great new bloggers like Dave Bilinsky, David Canton, David Fraser, [...]
Also posted in Big Firms | 2 Comments

We are all solos

Law firms ask a lot from their lawyers: work hard for long hours, respond immediately to clients and colleagues, accept and promote the firm’s culture, support overall firm profitability, and so forth. But law firms give a lot back, too: steady income and predictable bonuses, centralized resources, shared overhead costs, exposure to clients, and general [...]
Also posted in Solo & Small Firm | 6 Comments

A few good lawsuits

I’ve glimpsed the future of legal marketing, but WhoCanISue.com isn’t it. A new website that has generated a remarkable amount of publicity for a concept that’s not exactly groundbreaking, WhoCanISue.com allows would-be litigants to share the basic outlines of their potential legal claim with an online system, without divulging confidential information. The site will then [...]
Posted in Marketing | 2 Comments

The new brand landscape for law firms

I received a package the other day from a prominent law firm announcing a rebranding, which seemed to consist of a shorter name and a clever new logo. There didn’t seem to be anything otherwise new or different about the firm, so the brochure went straight into the blue box. But I was reminded of [...]
Also posted in Billing, Clients | Leave a comment

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