Aaron Street
Aaron Street is the Publisher of Lawyerist Media, LLC, the leading site on legal marketing, practice management, and technology. He is also the publisher of Lawyerist's sister publication the legal humor site Bitter Lawyer.
Aaron is an attorney and entrepreneur in Minneapolis. He works with tech start-ups to help them grow strategically.
Aaron's prior work includes executive leadership roles in a number of growth-oriented start-ups, including a robotics research park, an innovation management consulting company, and an e-commerce business.
Aaron also has over a decade of experience in leading political and public policy work.
He has worked in private practice as an election lawyer, as a strategy consultant for WestLaw and FindLaw, as a professional law firm admissions consultant, and as Executive Director of a legal think tank.
Aaron earned his B.A., Phi Beta Kappa, in political science and his J.D., cum laude, from the University of Minnesota. While in college, Aaron had the opportunity to intern in the United States Senate, the Office of Governor Jesse Ventura, and the White House. During law school, he served on the University of Minnesota Law School's admissions committee.
He currently serves as a Trustee of the Hennepin County Bar Foundation. He previously served as a Commissioner of the Minneapolis Charter Commission, as a gubernatorial appointee to the Minnesota Higher Education Services Council, and as a Board Member of both Minnesota YMCA Youth in Government and the Minneapolis FBI Citizens Academy Alumni Association. He has held numerous leadership roles in local, state, and federal election campaigns.
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We are really excited to let you know about a project we have been thinking about and working on for a long time.
Today we are launching Lawyerist Sites, a new service to design and host great law firm websites and blogs.
It’s Time You Had a Better Website
If you’ve been paying attention, Sam has been focusing a lot of energy lately on criticizing the current state of a lot of law firm websites and law blogs.
The truth is that a lot of law firm websites and blogs are terrible—either they have bad design, are out of date, or they don’t understand how to write great content for readers.
It’s time to change that.
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Law school career services offices at many schools are currently failing to serve their students.
After my post “Applying to Law School? Please Reconsider!,” Lawyerist Contributor Randall Ryder made the comment:
“. . . If you want to go to law school, and really want to practice law, an opportunity will present itself––or you can make an opportunity for yourself. It’s tougher in this economy, but it is still doable, you just need to work hard at it. If you are not willing to work hard, you are in [the] wrong profession.”
Randall is right. Not only can the law be a rewarding profession, the current economy actually creates opportunities for savvy lawyers to have more fulfilling and lucrative careers, with the right kind of planning. The problem is that a large number of law school career services offices spend little time focusing on creating career-savvy legal professionals.
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Think you want to apply to law school? It might be time to rethink your application decision. While law school admissions are at an all-time high, law jobs are disappearing. Maybe forever.
Signs of a law school application bubble
The concurrent trends of increasing legal education cost, decreasing legal employment, and strong debt insulation are setting the law school market up for a crash.
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Regular Lawyerist readers know how much we love our ScanSnap s1500 scanners. I have been running Lawyerist from a paperless office for many months now.
Yesterday I went to scan a business expense reimbursement receipt and the ScanSnap Manager software crashed on me. I rebooted the computer, but it crashed again.
Thankfully, I was able to fix my problem in under 5 minutes. Apparently there is a conflict with the old ScanSnap Manager driver software and Windows 7. The Fujitsu website has a quick and free ScanSnap Manager software upgrade available which will get you back to scanning in no time.
Too many law firm web pages are designed like business cards or thick brochures. They often either have too little information (just a single page with the firm name and contact information) or are loaded with it (paragraph after paragraph listing specialties, experience, and biographical details). The designers of these sites think to themselves: “I want my clients to know this about me.” But this type of web design fails the single most important concept in online marketing.
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If you have occasional trouble collecting from clients, you might want to consider experimenting by tapping their emotions with your next invoice.
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A variety of recent studies show that employees’ skills are regularly underutilized. By tapping some of these currently-unknown skills, law firms can find new opportunities for business development, cost savings, and added profitability.
For instance, you might—unknowingly—have an associate who could help with online marketing during slow times, or a secretary with a great idea for how to improve your client service.
How can you find out what additional ideas and skills may be lurking in your office?
Consider these five tips to discover hidden talents in your law firm:
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Dan Pink, a non-practicing attorney and former speechwriter for Vice President Al Gore, just spent the past couple of years studying the science of employee motivation. He is about to publish a new book on the topic, which you can pre-order on Amazon: Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us.
Pink demonstrates that traditional thinking about employee motivation is all wrong. He draws three major conclusions about how to rethink the concept of motivation:
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In tough economic times, many lawyers have a tendency to accept all the prospective clients who come in the door. The problem with this approach is that a small percentage of prospective clients will end up taking up a lot of your time while paying you little. You know who these people are, but sometimes you don’t listen to your gut when considering your representation of them.
By developing your ability to weed out low-quality prospective clients, you can free up your time (and energy) to focus on marketing to and serving your favorite clients, which is likely to make you happier, more productive, and more profitable. Keep Reading ⇒
The new Apple iPhone 3G S is certainly the gadget of the moment. With a new operating system, faster processor, and video capabilities, like a lot of folks, I wanted to upgrade. One problem, however, was frequent concern about the upgrade price. Many tech blogs were reporting it would cost as much as $500 to upgrade to the 3GS. I just got one for under $15. Here is how I did it:
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