Sam Glover has been writing about law practice technology, management, marketing, and other stuff on Lawyerist since 2007. He consults on appeals and motion practice in his solo practice. When he isn't blogging or lawyering, Sam drinks espresso and plays with fountain pens.
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This is the text of the talk I gave this afternoon at the Lawyernomics marketing conference in sunny Las Vegas.
A lot of lawyers have blogs. A lot of those blogs suck.
I suppose I am partly to blame for this. For years, I told every lawyer who would listen that he or she ought to start a blog. I explained that a blog was a great way to get clients in the door, as if that would magically happen if you started posting something on your blog every few days. I neglected to explain how to write a blog that doesn’t suck.
The AmLaw 100 is an annual report on BigLaw financial performance, and the just-released 2013 AmLaw 100 it shows what American Lawyer calls “modest gains” across the top 100 firms, although that cuts two ways. Profitability was up from last year for the top 50 firms, but profits actually dropped for the bottom half. And at least one analyst says that up to 20% — that’s 20 of the country’s biggest firms — are “badly weakened” and approaching the failure point.
Most of all, this is their big plan to raise the firm’s visibility? I suppose it’s working, if you want to be known as four guys who have a Facebook page where they post pictures of their Hawaiian shirts. I will say this for them: they look pretty genuine.
But yeah, somebody remind the Daily Herald to check in with the firm in 6 months to see if they have gotten any meaningful results from all this fluff. If they managed to build a practice on a Facebook page, that really would be news.
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I’m getting excited for my trip to Las Vegas on Thursday for Lawyernomics. Mostly I’m excited because it’s 20 degrees in Minneapolis and it’s been snowing for three weeks. From LXBN, here is a sneak peek at what I will be talking about on Friday in my presentation, “Why Your Blog Sucks, and What To Do About It.”
LexThink.1′s emcee, Matt Homann, just put up all of the 6-minute presentations from this year’s LexThink.1. I’ve updated my post on LexThink.1 with all the videos. If you weren’t there, it’s worth checking them out.
We love that you read what’s new on Lawyerist.com, but there are other great places to have running conversations about law practice. Here are some of the other places we tend to hang out.
SoloSmallTech, a Google+ community for discussing technology, and other casual geekchat. (The name comes from Lawyerist’s original name.) This is also where we host our Google+ Hangouts. If you like to talk about your gadgets or you are obsessed with productivity systems, you will be right at home.
Blawgging, another Google+ community for law bloggers. Membership in this community is restricted to actual law bloggers. If you are one, come on in!
Lawyerist.com on LinkedIn. Our LinkedIn group is for general law practice discussion. We keep out the self-promotional posts that tend to proliferate on LinkedIn, and we generally expand on the topics we raise on Lawyerist’s front page.
The LAB, our forum. Just click over from the header to browse the LAB, where you can publish your own posts or pick the brains of other Lawyerist readers. We regularly highlight the best posts in the forum on the front page of Lawyerist.
The Panasonic KV-S1026C is a throwback to a simpler time when all scanners were beige and manufacturers were not yet expected to focus on things like user experience.
You can see where this review is going.
The KV-S1026C does, in fact, scan things, but I cannot think of a single reason to recommend it to you. It is not a bad scanner. It is just unremarkable.
One commenter in particular (an appellate lawyer, natch) kept stubbornly insisting that it made sense to have his blog on his law firm website because he ranked #1 on Google for his target search terms. (If I had a dollar … )
Today, we’re going to do the first in what will hopefully be a regular Friday afternoon coffee break. At 2pm Central, come join us for a Google+ Hangout to talk about technology, productivity, and blogging with me, Ernie Svenson, Adriana Linares, and anyone else who drops by. We can only have 10 people on video at once, but any number of people can stop by to watch and comment.
Grab some coffee and fire up your webcam if you want to be seen, or stop in to watch and chat anyway if you don’t want to show your face.
The ABA’s annual TechShow conference is awesome and you should go. Sure, I was a littlebitcritical of it this year, but I guess, after three years of going to TechShow, some of the shine has worn off. But it is still a conference I look forward to all year, and I plan to keep going back, as long as our budget allows for it.
