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Best Law Firm Logos

Developing a law firm identity is usually one of the first steps newly minted lawyers approach when starting their firms. A few months ago, this post on Designing a Logo developed into a controversial discussion about the importance of law firm logos. My position is that developing brands and logos are important, not as important as the reputation that they are representing, but visuals that support and reinforce that reputation as well as a key part of an overall marketing strategy. (more…)

 

Best Law Firm Websites 2019

Take a look at the winners of Lawyerist’s 2019 Best Law Firm Websites competition. See someone you know? Send them congratulations. Think we’re missing someone great? Head over to the main page, and nominate them for the next Best Law Firm Websites contest.

1. Counter Tax

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This magnificent website from Counter, the Canadian tax dispute and litigation powerhouse, is screaming fast, boasts loads of useful content (including some nifty and super-useful interactive tools), was designed for broad accessibility, and features a crisp call to action. Their logo and brand are on point, the value proposition is vivid, and they’re transparent(ish) about pricing. To top it off, we adore the “Meet the Team” page and its accessible, human bios.

We would never recommend that you copy anything, but you could hardly do better than to take cues from this website when you build your next one.

2. Custis Law, P.C.

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First of all, the sparks emanating from the weld he’s making? Next level. Subtle, eye-catching, and sophisticated, Custis doesn’t try to do too much with its animation, satisfied instead to “just” quickly draw your eye and flame your imagination. You find a clear call to action (“How Can I Help?”), a compelling headshot, some great differentiators, and helpful tiles to describe the kinds of problems the firm can help its clients solve.

The blog is brand-spanking new—with only two posts and some cliché stock photography—and runs the risk of future neglect. This site is the slowest to load among our winners and has some accessibility errors we would like to see sorted out. On the whole, though, this website is excellent.

3. Stevens Virgin

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What do you do with a headshot? Pretty much this. This team put strong images front-and-center to anchor a clean, bold design for a clean, bold value proposition. The hero image rotates through the firm’s roster of lawyers on every visit, and we love that they’re all showing a little personality in those sly smirks. Nothing is left disordered: fonts are well integrated, images are on-brand, and even the “More” in the top navigation hides some miscellany to keep visitors focused on the most important things.

Lost in the tidiness, perhaps, is a lack of a clear call to action and somewhat clandestine contact information. But those persnickety observations aside, this is a brilliant site.

4. BeerAttorney.com

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BeerAttorney.com is technically a microsite (or brand) of the also-delightful DrummLaw. That’s part of its appeal in our view. We often talk about building a site that puts your ideal client’s experience first, and this site leaves nothing in doubt on that front. Still, a microsite on its own is no special thing. This microsite is.

The bios are delicious. The clarity about the legal services they offer—particularly when viewed through the lens of a new brewery—is useful, cheeky, and well-written. Plus, they offer cool tools to highlight why they’re such a great fit: the “Pro Beerno” section, an e-commerce trademark filing website (“beertrademark.com”), subscription pricing, and a productized trademark watch service.

Even the blog is tasty, with on-brand images, clear titles, approachable copy, and useful content. As with all blogs, this one runs the risk of being relegated to the dustbin without some care and feeding. It launched with five posts but has been quiet since. Not a deal-breaker, but definitely something to keep an eye on.

5. Struble, P.A.

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This site from Struble, P.A., a consumer-side insurance firm in Florida, highlights some subtle and progressive design elements we love. The animation during loading is eye-catching and nicely implemented without bogging down the overall page speed. The large firm logo looks great, and we love the animation that fades it from prominence as you scroll.

The bios themselves leave some readability and intrigue to be desired, but they do incorporate some nifty vertical text, nice icons, useful colorization, and complimentary font choices throughout. This site also features crystal clear calls to action, helpful example cases, and compelling testimonials that aren’t overcooked.

If we were to nitpick, we’d say the copywriting is a bit uninspired and dense, favors the antiquated two-spaces-after-a-period gambit, and can cover topics of uncertain value to the firm’s likely readership. The blog is useful when updated, but is published only sporadically.

6. Bevilacqua PLLC

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This is a great all-around site, and we love how the color scheme from the firm’s logo features prominently throughout the design. We’re also suckers for a good trademarked tagline (“Accelerating results for entrepreneurs”), grand fonts highlighting the firm’s service offerings, and lazy-loading testimonials that sound genuinely complimentary.

The call to action could undoubtedly benefit from more prominence, but the site leaves no real doubt about how to contact the firm. We also like that they offer different options for how readers can learn more about the firm’s services and lawyers by way of newsletter, blog, or a nice downloadable brochure.

It looks like the firm’s blogging habit comes in fits and starts, but the content is spot-on when it is updated. They’ve also chosen to use white space to nice effect. We didn’t fall in love with the team biographies, which felt dense and impersonal, and the site has its share of accessibility errors that we’d love to see fixed.

7. Counsel for Creators

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This Los Angeles-based law firm is laser-focused on its target market, which we relish. They broadcast their purpose to the universe (“to reinvent the law firm experience for creative businesses of all sizes”), and offer a discrete list of services that they’ve carefully described in approachable detail. The firm obviously designed its services pages with its future clients in mind, and they incorporate online scheduling to great effect throughout the site. They use sharp fonts and images that play well together and appeal to the eye.

We love how they’ve sprinkled some fun throughout the site, and they’re unafraid to deploy creative media to stay on brand and approachable, including some “fun facts,” an ebook, and useful blog architecture to help users find what they’re actually looking for. We also love the “Creators’ Legal Program,” an affordable subscription-based set of resources, tools, and services.

8. Laureti & Associates, A.P.C.

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This site kind of snuck up on us. Clearly, there is a lot to like. It features clean fonts, a bold color scheme, and nice use of video in the header and elsewhere. We also love that it shows some personality and non-law interests, and we’ll be damned if Tony Laureti isn’t having a great time practicing law. He’s smiling, engaged, and energized. We want to meet Tony Laureti in person (Seriously. Tony, if you’re reading this, let’s talk!).

Our initial impression, though, was moderately less enthusiastic. The site seemingly falls into some old-school customs to which we ordinarily find ourselves allergic: Themis and her scales of justice, the lawyer’s “ego wall,” and a gratuitous shot of some business cards and a gold-plated name plaque. It also has more than its share of accessibility errors, slow-ish page load times, and possibly-over-the-top video demonstrating very earnest work, very fascinated clients, and very agreeable team members, all of which might just be a bit too saccharine for some. And we’re definitely not sure about the “associates” featured in the firm’s name (what with the apparent lack of associates and all).

If all of this sounds overly critical, we don’t mean it to be. This website takes the trappings of “old” law and reimagines them in a delightful way. The firm is explicitly mission-driven, uses video and other media to show Tony’s personality (and happy clients), and makes it easy for interested clients to contact the firm and get comfortable with why they should. The blog is useful (if a bit scattershot) and the Case Results, Reviews & Testimonials, and Legal Resources sections are useful and clear. As we said, this one snuck up on us. Well played.

9. Protass Law PLLC

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One nice thing about “dark mode” design is that it serves as a great canvas for strategic pops of color. Harlan Protass’s law firm deploys light blue bursts and bright yellow highlight to draw you into a site that might otherwise seem a bit bland. Instead, the firm quickly trains your eyes to focus on the most important bits (“Contact Harlan,” anyone?) and nicely balances the dark, white space, and copy.

This is a powerful site. It features rocket-fast load times, helpful and compelling differentiators, and impressive testimonials throughout. The case results page is really well done (which is particularly important for direct-to-consumer practice areas like criminal law), and the Press & Publications section is a nice blend of mostly-tasteful #humblebrag self-promotion and broader commentary. The self-promotion here seems fairly well balanced and isn’t mere puffery; Mr. Protass has published (or been featured) on Slate.com, HuffPost, CNN, and The Wall Street Journal (among others).

This website’s SEO is a bit weak, and we don’t love “hamburger” navigation when viewing sites on our desktop, but these aren’t deal-breakers, particularly because users know and understand hamburger navigation, leaving the overall user experience untarnished.

10. JLongtin Law

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We just love this simple Squarespace site from JLongtin Law, a criminal defense firm in Denver. (In the interest of full disclosure, Jennifer Longtin attended LabCon and is a Lawyerist Lab member). While it is unclear to us whether this is a do-it-yourself site or one created by a professional, we love that you could do it if you needed to.

Light on bells, whistles, or adornments, this site just oozes personality and warmth. The staff bios are short on personal embellishments (except for Ms. Cherpes’ totally relatable love for brunch, mountains, and seasons), but they are long on offering comfort, credibility, and expertise. The orange-meets-grayscale vibe is an alluring one, too.

The comprehensive services offerings include flat-fee pricing, the firm’s “CARe program”—which they have aimed at making headway on the sticky problem of the affordability of quality legal services—and highlights the firm’s dedication to representing the homeless, among other things. Like the rest of the site, the “Firm Events” section is simple, clear, and useful.

This site isn’t intended to “win” at everything. It is just a very basic, beautifully-designed, well-implemented, client-focused website from a turnkey website provider. If you’re looking for inspiration for your new website without worrying about breaking the bank, this is it.

 

3 Best VPN Providers for Lawyers

Going incognito isn’t good enough. Your internet service provider (ISP), system administrators, and Google, or whoever makes your browser, can still view your browsing activity, even while in incognito mode, whether you’re at home or using public Wi-Fi at your favorite coffee shop. One way you can protect your data and network activity is through a virtual private network, or VPN.

Basically, a virtual private network routes your internet traffic though an encrypted, private server owned by the VPN provider, which hides your online activity from everyone else. While it isn’t completely anonymous, it is an excellent baseline computer security solution to use in conjunction with ad blockers, a password manager, and multi-factor authentication.

We’ve talked about VPNs before on Lawyerist, but here are the 3 best VPNs for lawyers to use in 2019.

3 Best VPNs for Lawyers

Private Internet Access

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Private Internet Access, or PIA, is a VPN with lots of features and a strong stance on privacy. It uses VPN tunneling with multi-layered security to provide ad- and malware-free private browsing sessions. You can connect up to 5 devices simultaneously with one account and PIA does not keep session logs of your activity. PIA is available for Windows, MacOS, iOS, Android, and Linux. Monthly pricing is $6.95/mo and goes down to $2.91/month for its 2-year plan. You can even pay that in crypto if you want.

NordVPN

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NordVPN has over 5,000 servers spread throughout the world and has a strict no-logs policy, which means none of your private data is tracked or collected. You can connect up to 6 devices with a single account. If you’re having difficulty with setting anything up, NordVPN has an award-winning support team to help you through any issues. It’s available for Windows, MacOS, iOS, Android, and Linux. Monthly pricing is $11.95/month and goes down to $2.99/month for its 3-year plan.

Encrypt.me

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Encrypt.me is an easy-to-use and minimalist VPN available for Windows, MacOS, iOS, and Android. It offers basic VPN functionality only. Encrypt.me does log your sessions, but it encrypts your network connection and cloaks your IP address. One account allows you to use Encrypt.me with as many devices as you like for individuals. Pricing is $9.99/month or $99.99/year. If you’re not sure if you’ll like it, Encrypt.me offers a 14-day free trial.

A Few Pointers on VPNs

Opera and Tor Browsers

If you’re not into purchasing or dealing with a VPN, there are two browser options that provide online anonymity.

Opera web browser is free and comes with a VPN and ad-blocker installed with the browser. It’s based on the open source code from Chrome, so it’ll have some of the same functionality as Chrome. To use it, simply download Opera and turn the VPN or ad-blocker on under “Preferences.”

Tor, aka The Onion Router, is another free browser. While it doesn’t have a VPN included, it’s built to provide complete anonymity. It works by bouncing your connection around a distributed network to prevent your network activity and physical location from being monitored. It’s a bit slow because of the bouncing around, but it is more private than other browsers.

Privacy

If you’re keen on privacy, be sure to review the terms of service for any VPN you’re interested in purchasing. This will go over what data the company collects, if any, and what it will do with that data. You should also be aware of where the company is based, what with data retention laws and all.

Changing Your IP Location

While most VPNs do offer the ability to change your IP location so you can appear like you’re browsing from Singapore while you’re really in El Paso, if you’re doing this to get around region-locked content—like to watch Dutch Netflix—it may not always work. Many companies, like Netflix, are trying to ban VPN servers from accessing their sites, though this is an uphill battle.

Another thing to keep in mind is that if you appear to be browsing from Singapore with your VPN, it’s because the server your encrypted connection is routing through actually is in Singapore. The further away you’re routing your connection, the slower it may be.

Is Your VPN Working?

You can see if your VPN is leaking your IP address and other data by visiting ipleak.net. If the IP and geolocation shows your actual location, either your VPN isn’t turned on, it isn’t working, or it isn’t secure.

 

Inbox Zero for Lawyers

Inbox Zero takes the core principles of the Getting Things Done personal productivity system and adapts it for email management. As in GTD, Inbox Zero emphasizes that inboxes—especially email inboxes—are meant to be emptied, not used for long-term storage.

If you allow things to pile up in your inboxes—physical or virtual—they become a constant reminder of all the stuff you think you have to do. Besides being a distraction, a bursting email inbox is a pretty ineffective way to figure out what you ought to be working on.

When it comes to email, you should empty your inbox regularly by sorting its contents into action-oriented folders and ruthlessly archiving or deleting anything you don’t need to see again.

Inbox Zero is the brainchild of Merlin Mann, who adapted the Getting Things Done system to email. He did not entirely invent the concept, though. Well, before I ever heard of Merlin Mann or Inbox Zero, there was a Time Matters white paper, of all things, recommending much the same system. If you haven’t seen it before, you should watch his “Inbox Zero” talk at Google here:

It’s a one-hour video, but you should make time for it. Inbox Zero, like GTD, is basically “advanced common sense.” When you watch Mann’s presentation, it will probably click for you, and you might even get excited about sorting your email.

The video is all you need to learn the system, but Mann’s posts about Inbox Zero are available on his website, 43 Folders.

The basic idea is to create four folders for your email.

  • Do Now
  • Later
  • Waiting
  • To Read

At least once a day, sort everything in your email inbox into those folders. Don’t open an email without sorting it into a folder. While you are at it, ruthlessly archive or delete anything you don’t need to keep staring at when you open your email.

Mann uses different labels—Delegate, Respond, Defer, Do—but they amount to basically the same thing. I use Do Now in place of Do and Respond since I don’t see a good reason to separate them. I use Do Later in place of Defer since it is a more helpful label to me. Waiting contains messages I have delegated to someone else, along with messages for which I am waiting on a response. To Read contains messages I need to read or consider carefully before I can act on them or archive them.

Processing Your Inbox

Inbox Zero is about figuring out what you have to do and sorting the rest into useful places. You don’t have to explicitly follow Merlin Mann’s framework, but it is a useful starting point. After years of practicing Inbox Zero, here is the most efficient way I have found to process an email inbox.

First, Archive and Delete

Whenever you check your email or switch to Outlook or Gmail (or whatever you use for email), process it before you do anything else. Start by archiving and deleting. Archiving or deleting is the most important part of processing your email inbox.

The majority of most email is unimportant, and there is no reason to save it. So start by deleting everything you can.

Anything that you need or want to hold onto, but that you don’t have to act on, you can archive. In Outlook or any other mail software, just create an Archive folder and move thing there when you are done with them. In Gmail, just use the Archive button.

If you want to use a folder for each client or matter, you can. You can do this, but I think sorting into multiple archive folders is a waste of time. If you need something from your archives, it is easier to search for it. Periodically or when you close a file, just search for all the names and email addresses linked to the file, and convert everything to a PDF you can save to the file.

Regardless, if you do create client folders, they are still part of your archives. So are folders like Bills & Receipts or Save (G Suite lets you set an auto-delete timeline. For example, you can automatically delete all messages older than 10 years. You can also exempt a label (Save, for example) from auto-deletion, which is why I have a Save folder.)

Process the Rest

Once you have archived and deleted everything you can, start processing the rest.

If anything that’s left looks like something you can do immediately in less than two minutes or so, like a quick reply or forwarding with a note, go ahead and do it. Just get it out of the way. Apart from this two-minute drill, focus on sorting emails into your Do Now, (The Do Now folder is for anything you can start working on immediately, even if you are not going to.) LaterWaiting, and To Read folders. Don’t do anything else now.

Getting Started with Inbox Zero

Let’s say Merlin Mann and I have convinced you that Inbox Zero is worthwhile. Right now, you probably have hundreds or thousands of messages sitting in your inbox. Here is how to get from thousands of messages to zero messages right now, and any time you open up your email only to find hundreds or thousands of messages.

If you are like most people, you probably have a few things in your inbox that represent things you can do now, a few things in progress, and a lot of other stuff. You could sift through all that other stuff and file it all carefully, but I don’t recommend it.

This first time we get to Inbox Zero, do things backward. Find all the emails that represent something you could do now, later, that you need to read, or that you are waiting on, and file those. Now that you have everything you actually need to keep track of filed away where you won’t lose it, do a quick Ctrl+A (or Cmd+A for Mac users), and archive everything else.

You’re done. If you want to go through your archive later, go ahead. But don’t waste time sifting slowly through everything. Get to Inbox Zero as quickly as possible, and make it your daily (at least) discipline from now on.

Here’s a Shortcut

If Inbox Zero sounds good in theory but you are too busy to spend time learning a full-on system for managing your email, here is a simple way to get your email under control that you can start doing as soon as you are finished reading this page.

To get your email under control, you don’t need to read books, watch a video, buy anything, download anything, or get a new app. All you have to do is start using something that is already built into your email.

One Simple Rule

Star/flag a message if you have to do something with it.

Seriously, that’s it. Take a few minutes right now to go through your inbox, select every message that represents something you have to do, and add a star or flag to them, depending on your email provider (they are effectively the same thing, but Gmail, for example, uses stars, while Outlook and Mail.app call them flags).

To add a star/flag, you can click on the icon in the message list or while viewing the message, or you can just use a keyboard shortcut:

  • Gmail: S (If this does not work the first time you try, you need to turn keyboard shortcuts turned on. To do this, just go to Settings and make sure the radio button next to Keyboard shortcuts on is selected. If you have to select it, scroll down and click the Save Changes button.)
  • Outlook and Outlook.com: INSERT
  • Mail.app: Cmd+Shift+L

When you are done, you can archive everything left in your inbox if you want to. But even if you leave everything in your inbox, you can improve your productivity.

Your Email To-Do List

Now go to your Starred or Flagged folder/label. From now on, that will be your to-do list. Check things off by removing the star or flag.

Going forward, don’t look at new emails in your inbox any longer than it takes to act on them immediately in about two minutes or less, or apply a flag or star. Your inbox is not your to-do list; only flagged or starred emails represent to-dos.

Even if you do not keep any other to-do lists, the to-do list in your email app can help keep you on track. In fact, you can use email as your to-do list for everything if you email tasks to yourself. (If your to-do list gets unmanageable this way, look into Getting Things Done. It may take some time to learn the system, but you will save so much time after you learn GTD that it is totally worthwhile.) Emailing tasks to yourself is an easy way to add a task to your to-do list from your phone, too.

Isn’t working from a list a lot easier than looking at everything that has been building up in your inbox for weeks, months, or years?

 

Most Important Tasks (MITs) for Lawyers

If the idea of learning a full-blown productivity system like Getting Things Done is keeping you from being more productive, Most Important Tasks (MITs) may be for you. It is a simple daily practice that requires nothing more than reading this pretty-short page. The best part: it will instantly make you more productive every day, starting now.

Most Important Tasks is a simple idea that (I think) was first outlined on the Zen Habits blog. Here is the gist of it: at the beginning of each day, sit down and write down the two or three things you must do that day. No matter what else you do that day, get those things done.

Three seems like a small number, but if you strive to accomplish at least three things, you will have done something besides just putting out fires. And working from a short list of MITs is a lot easier than working from the huge lists you probably have in your practice management software or your GTD system. Keeping it manageable helps you be more productive.

You can write down more than three things—I have five today. But make sure you can realistically complete all the tasks during your day. Don’t add “Draft motion for summary judgment.” if you haven’t even started it yet and it isn’t due for a week. That’s probably not a must-do-today task, and it is too big a task for one day, anyway. Try something like “Draft statement of facts for MSJ.” instead.

If you prefer, you can put together your Most Important Tasks the night before. Spend a few minutes looking at your inboxes, reviewing your tasks, and checking your calendar. Then write down your MITs for the next day. Doing it at night may help you sleep easier because you have already done your planning for the next day.

If you finish all your MITs, you are obviously not done for the day, but you should feel better knowing you have already had a fairly productive day. So if you finish, go back to your to-do lists or inbox and pick another task or three to try to complete before you are finished for the day.

You can even do MITs for the weekend, although I let my kids help with that. So things like “Go to the Pumphouse Creamery for ice cream.” and “Build a fairy house.” usually end up on our weekend MITs.

You can write down your MITs on whatever you want. I usually use a little notebook or index card, but a work plan works well, too. Just put them on something you will carry with you throughout the day, and that you can keep visible while you work.

Setting aside a few minutes every day to put your MITs down on paper will make you more productive. And knowing what’s most important every day will probably lower your stress level a bit, too.

 

What You Need to Know About Marketing KPIs

Maybe your law firm is paying an internal employee or an outside firm or consultant to maximize your online marketing strategy and tactics. Maybe you have a sophisticated strategy involving SEO, social media, Google AdWords, email marketing, and more. But how do you know your digital strategy is working? Without turning to key performance indicators (KPIs) to quantify your efforts, you have no way of knowing. These critical metrics let you rate your campaign’s performance, tweak it as needed, and improve your strategy as you go. Without them, you may “feel” like inquiry emails or calls for consultations have increased, but your observations are far less reliable than real data.

What You Need to Know About Marketing KPIs

Before you decide which metrics to track, decide what goals your marketing campaign should meet. How does each performance indicator relate to that goal? How long will you track the metric? A week? A month? An entire quarter? Each campaign and situation is unique. For example, it’s impossible to track year-over-year sales if your law firm just opened. Still, law firms might draw from a common set of metrics regardless of the campaign type or their practice area.

If you don’t already have a content marketing strategy for your law firm, now is a good time to start.

Organic Traffic

Organic traffic refers to users that find and visit your website through a search engine. As you undoubtedly know, Google is the dominant player in organic search. Search engine optimization strategies let you target potential clients who are already looking for your services on Google and elsewhere. Careful tactics help you acquire leads efficiently and cost-effectively, and your law firm can use free online tools like Google Analytics to measure your organic traffic volume.

Google Analytics lets you see how people find your website. Do they come from search engines? Where do they land? How long do they stay? If you choose to monitor these metrics and realize that clients rarely find your site through organic search, consider how you can improve your site’s inbound content marketing. Google—and the rest of the search engines—value useful, relevant, readable, and unique content. Improve your content and you’ll improve your standing on the search engine results pages.

Leads

The whole purpose of driving people to your website is to encourage them to contact your law firm for a service consultation. Generally speaking, the more leads your website generates, the more conversions you enjoy. If you’re doing it right, the more conversations you get, the more clients you’ll engage. Track the leads your marketing efforts generate by capturing names, phone numbers, and email addresses.

Ideally, you would also take time to define what a quality lead looks like at your law firm so that you can use this for marketing KPIs. Who is your ideal client? What do they want when they find your website? Do they just want contact information to call you immediately? Or do they want to spend some time on the site looking around, getting to “know” you, and exploring your experience before deciding whether they’ll reach out? If your display ads generate plenty of traffic (but an abundance of irrelevant leads), your campaign is underperforming (and probably dramatically). You might reevaluate that campaign to improve the quality of leads it generates, which would, in turn, increase the likelihood that you’ll turn those quality leads into profitable clients.

Conversion Rates

Eventually, you’ll probably realize that tracking where all those leads come from (organic search, referrals, social media, email marketing, etc.) is a somewhat empty metric without more context. That is, how did they ultimately reached you and how often did they convert into profitable clients?  That’s why it’s important to calculate your “conversion rate.” If your website generates gaggles of visitors but only sees a few convert into real leads, your website may be failing you in the conversion department. So how can you tweak your website design and content to turn more fly-by visitors into potential clients? It may require fresh website content that’s more engaging and relevant, a reimagined site navigation to help potential customers to find what they’re looking for, and work to ensure your marketing campaigns target the right demographics. You may also toy around with improving (then testing) your calls to action. And you might consider lead-to-client ratios and conversion rates for the landing pages you use.

Sales

Sales are one of the most critical performance metrics. Every business should track sales revenue. Analyze your sales and incoming revenue thoroughly and decide which marketing efforts increase your sales. That will prepare you to invest more resources into effective campaigns, tweak the marginal ones in an effort to improve them, and eliminate the duds altogether.

Acquisition Costs

So, your new marketing campaigns have increased leads, conversions, and sales? Hurray! Celebrate, then get back to work. You still have one crucial KPI to measure: how much did it cost your law firm to acquire those new clients? Calculate your marketing campaign’s return on investment (ROI) by dividing all campaign expenses by the number of clients you acquired during the designated time frame.

Because “average profit per client” ranges from firm to firm, the range of acquisition costs per client varies wildly. Ideally, the overall cost you pay to acquire a customer remains on the low side while the value you generate from each client continues to grow over time. For starters, shoot for a 3:1 value-to-cost ratio. That is, make sure your cost of customer acquisition is—at most—about 33% of the total lifetime value you expect to generate from your new client. See how this is beneficial for marketing KPIs? You need to know your starting point and your goal.

If your customer acquisition cost is prohibitively high, or if you notice it creeping up over time, reevaluate your marketing and sales efforts. Are your costs increasing? Or is your overall client acquisition rate declining? It may be a good time to check your online client reviews and request feedback from clients.

The universe of KPIs you can track is nearly limitless. But don’t get lost in data and spreadsheets without connecting metrics to your actual business. If the Average Visit Duration on your website increases dramatically but fails to improve lead generation or sales, you can conclude that the metric isn’t very useful. It’s just noise. Stop paying attention. Law firms misstep when they invest time, money, and energy into defining, tracking, and improving metrics that don’t convert (yeah, I’m looking at you, Facebook Likes). The most important KPIs lead to profits or other returns that you hold dear, like customer satisfaction. That’s why we recommend tracking marketing KPIS like organic traffic, leads, conversion rates, sales, acquisition costs, and customer satisfaction.

Getting Support With Your Law Firm Marketing KPIs

Inside Lawyerist Lab we work with small firm lawyers growing their firms with a strategic marketing approach. From our courses to our community calls and working with a marketing coach, you can get your plan back on track.

Set up a meeting today to discuss your marketing KPIs and how our Lawyerist Lab program can help you.

 

How to Promote a Unique Value Proposition to Your Clients

In theory, every business should promote a unique value proposition to its targeted customers. Harvard Business School defines “unique value proposition” as “the kind of value a company will create for its customers.”

Does the concept hold for law firms? In my view, the answer is obvious: lawyers may need unique marketing strategies to market to clients, but they can follow models long proven in other industries. A law firm can (and should) market itself just like other businesses.

Before you can market your law firm, you need to learn to promote a unique value proposition to your clients.

Laying the Groundwork to Promote a Unique Value Proposition

First, you’ll need to establish some groundwork. Regardless of the marketing strategies you ultimately choose, set this foundation in place first. It’ll make your marketing efforts exponentially more likely to yield positive returns.

Establish these factors first before you start promoting:

Vision

How do you view the future of your law firm? When you identify your vision, you can define your marketing position. Clarity about your vision lets you home in on your Unique Value Proposition.

Values

What are your core values? What truly matters to you? List those qualities that most matter to you and share them on your website. When you have identified your core values, you can start selling them. Talk about them throughout your promotional content.

Unique Value Proposition

Enter the unique value proposition (or unique selling proposition). The whole point of marketing, really, is, first, to capture your promise that you’ll deliver something valuable to your clients, and, second, to share that committment with as many likely buyers as you can. So, what is your promise? How do you promote a unique value proposition?

To come up with your UVP, think about the market you want to serve. You’ll need to identify your market before you can start promoting your law firm. Here are a few ways to determine your UVP:

Once you have gone through this exercise, you’ll be well on your way to defining your UVP. And when you’ve got some clarity about your UVP, you can finally start marketing your law firm and your unique way of delivering legal services.

Your Competitive Advantage on Display

Be clear about why your potential clients should hire you instead of some other lawyer. Clearly explain how you’re poised to meet their specific needs. Make sure your marketing materials speak directly to their pain points.

Catering Your Marketing to Your Niche

What types of clients do you serve? Effective marketing demands that your content speaks directly to them (and potential clients that look like them). Most people seeking legal advice are shockingly unfamiliar about how the legal system touches their lives. In many practice areas, then, you can safely assume that they know little to nothing when they come searching for you. The good news is that you’ve got a compelling opportunity to educate them. Imagine the questions that are floating around in their heads. Then answer those questions on your website.

Every client and every case will be unique, of course. And as you slowly acquire successes and experiences handling a particular set of legal problems, you will establish yourself as an expert. Working on cases in a consistent niche leaves you with a long list of accomplishments, and sharing that hard-earned expertise is critically important in showing your potential clients why you’re a good fit for them.

Creating and Displaying Your Brand Experience

Your brand is the unique combination of voice, vision, and visuals that your law firm uses in its marketing materials and elsewhere. Make sure your brand is clear and transparent. You help your clients feel at ease when they know what to expect from working with you.

To be sure, developing your brand, articulating your niche, and defining your unique value proposition require up-front work. You’ll need to dedicate tangible mental assets to brainstorming and creating this core of your law firm’s foundation. But it will pay off for years to come. Once you craft your own Unique Value Proposition, developing and implementing marketing strategies that promote a unique value proposition will fall into place and be much more likely to return valuable results.

LawPay Integrates with QuickBooks Online

We take your feedback very seriously. From day one, we’ve designed LawPay specifically for lawyers, with your needs and unique business requirements in mind. So, when you told us you wanted an integration with QuickBooks Online, we listened.

What does this mean for you? You can now reconcile LawPay payments in QuickBooks Online, making it even easier for you to manage your firm’s cash flow.

Check out our quick checklist for steps you’ll need to take to import your transactions into your QuickBooks Online account.

 

How Lawyers Work: Jason Beahm, DJ Extraordinaire & Criminal Defense Attorney

In this week’s edition of How Lawyers Work, we hear from Jason Beahm. Jason is a San Francisco-based criminal defense attorney whose practice areas include DUI’s, traffic, personal injury and criminal cases. 

You can find Jason on Twitter and LinkedIn. 

What’s your elevator pitch?

I am a trial lawyer whose practice emphasizes protecting talented nightlife professionals, venue owners, and artists.

What apps or tools are essential to your daily workflow?

Everything I do begins with my iPhone. Over time I use it more and all other devices less. That means that I use a lot of applications, such as Gmail, Dropbox, and Clio. These applications allow me to stay in touch with my clients and colleagues, no matter where I am.

What does your workspace look like?

Either a desk or an airplane tray. I travel frequently for clients and events, so I am very comfortable working from just about anywhere. Some of my favorite workspaces are at hotels and airports. When it comes to the office, we are a paperless office, which means, we still have lots of paper. That being said, we make a concentrated effort to scan and save everything that can possibly be stored online and get rid of paper.
For some reason, ever since I was a kid, I have had a strange love for office supplies and things like scanners and printers. My favorite gizmos at the office are the Dymo label printer and Fujitsu ScanSnap. I never get tired of seeing the documents speed through the ScanSnap like magic, or the thrill of seeing the name of a new client being printed on a label. Pure thrills.

How do you keep track of your calendars and deadlines?

Google Calendar. It’s simple, it works, everyone knows how to use it and it links with everything. I have it linked with Clio as well, since Clio has a calendar built in, with a sync feature. Of course, my amazing executive assistant is a huge help as well. Since everyone works differently, discuss how lawyers work with all new team members so they can get in line with your expectations.

What is your coffee service setup?

Right now we are serving bicycle coffee made with a Chemex pot. It’s simple and makes great coffee. If I am the first one into the office, I make it. Otherwise, a member of my team always has coffee on hand, as well as a variety of teas, sparkling water, and juices.

How do you or your team approach problems?

First, we seek to understand them and then we solve them. Every client is different and every situation is different, so it is crucial to always take a fresh approach. We want to learn from the past but never become so mechanical that we lose the ability to see what makes each case compelling and unique. The goal is to understand the client and the case so well that we arrive at the winning argument, and achieve our client’s objectives. When your team knows how lawyers work it makes it easier for them to meet expectations.

What is one thing that you listen to, read, or watch that everyone should?

The Daily (New York Times Podcast). The quality of this podcast is just so amazing. The Daily does an amazing job of taking you through the big stories of the day, in a patient way. It avoids the typical for/against format where a bunch of talking heads scream at each other. Instead, they bring in an expert and ask them compelling questions. It’s often the first thing that I listen to as I start my workday.

What is your favorite local place to network or work solo?

I love working solo at the office, from the comfort of my office chair. I also love working at Node, a tech community just down the street that puts on amazing events and has been a great source of business and inspiration.

What are three things you do without fail every day?

Laugh, go for a walk and listen to music. Laughter feels amazing and is basically the opposite of sadness. Walking is good for you and it’s a great time to listen to music. I could live a million lifetimes and there would still not be enough time to explore how much fantastic music is out there. How amazing is that? Rarely does a day go by that I don’t get to carve out a walk and listen to some music. Life is too short not to.

Who else would you like to see answer these questions?

Cameron Bowman.

 

Rethinking Law-Firm Productivity Measurement for the Post Billable Hour Era

The traditional definition of “productivity” in law firms is seriously messed up. A few days before I sat down to write this piece, Joshua Lenon of Clio made the case much better than I could in a brief tweet storm on Twitter.

The [2018 Report on the State of the Legal Market by Georgetown Law School and Thomson Reuters Peer Monitor] defines “law firm productivity” as “the number of billable hours worked by lawyers divided by the total number of lawyers.” Productivity in business is units of output divided by unit of inputs. Peer Monitor seems to think that lawyers’ hours are outputs, and the number of people working are the inputs.

Ask any client what they purchased from a law firm. I would be shocked if any client responded that they purchased the production of lawyers churning time. Clients purchase value, certainty, and guidance. That may be a merger agreement, securities documentation, litigation labor. Clients purchase outcomes, not hours.

This definition of productivity…wrongly assumes law firm partners are the end customers in the legal profession, and not our clients. Lawyers, your value to clients is not what you bill. Your productivity should not be measured in hours, but in outcomes.

I have some additional thoughts about how we got to this point—and why we probably won’t, unfortunately, be leaving it anytime soon.

The Peer Monitor-style definition of “productivity” in law firms is clearly inane. Suppose I take ten hours to complete a task as a first-year lawyer. By the time I reach my second year, I’ve gotten better at my job, and I can do the task in five hours. By any traditional measure, I’ve doubled my productivity. By a law firm’s measure, I’ve reduced it by half. That can’t be right. So what’s going on here?

The problem is that in traditional definitions of productivity—units of output divided by units of input—the units of output are the same for both seller and buyer. The seller produces planks of lumber, and the customer buys planks of lumber and takes them home. Same with heads of lettuce, iPhones, whatever. The seller’s output and the customer’s outcome are pretty much identical.

Clients, as Joshua Lenon says, consider the outcomes they achieve to be the “output” of the law firms they hire. The firms, however, consider their “output” to be not client outcomes, but the effort produced to generate those outcomes. A law firm doesn’t charge clients for accomplishing a task, it charges them for the number of hours it took their lawyers to do that task.

Law firms aren’t doing this to be evil or obtuse. They’re doing it because they’re using lawyer hours as a proxy for client outcomes. And clients have felt obliged to accept that state of affairs because clients and law firms can’t work together if they believe that “output” means two different things. They would then be working towards two different goals. So what has traditionally occurred in the legal market is that clients have accepted the law firm’s proxy substitution of lawyer hours for client outcome: They’ve effectively agreed, by signing a check, that the law firm’s output is its effort.

The client might feel like saying, “I’m not paying you for your time, I’m paying you to create a shareholders’ agreement.” The law firm (implicitly) says, “We don’t know how much to charge you for a shareholders’ agreement because we don’t know its value, and, frankly, neither do you. So we’re going to use the hours our lawyers spent to produce that agreement as a substitute measure of its value. Our effort generated your outcome; for business purposes, we deem that our effort is your outcome.”

Many clients, reasonably enough, want to change that. They want to be charged on the basis of the value of the task that the law firm has performed for them, not the law firm’s hourly proxy. They believe that if law firms did this, the firms would no longer consider a reduction in hours to be a reduction in productivity; firms would welcome increased efficiency and fewer hours because lawyers would be making money based on client outcome, not lawyer effort. It’s a win-win, right?

Here’s the problem: The law firm doesn’t know what its services are worth to its clients. In most cases, neither does the client. I don’t want to rehash the whole debate over value pricing versus market pricing, but unless client and law firm can agree on the value of the firm’s service to the client and set a fixed price, then law firms will continue to use hours as a proxy for value, and they will not adopt the business world’s definition of productivity.

Law firms sell hours. That’s what they track, record, and place on their bills, and that’s what clients pay them for, even if they’d rather not. Law firms use hours as a proxy measure for client outcomes, and clients accept this because they implicitly recognize that they need a shared understanding of outcomes and most of them don’t have a better one to offer.

Using billable hours as a proxy for client value is stupid. But it’s also quicker, more understandable, and more convenient than any other system yet proposed, and that’s why we’re still using it.

 

Case Study: Greg Siskind, Immigration Lawyer and Bike Nerd

In this week’s edition of How Lawyers Work, we talked to Greg Siskind, founding partner of Siskind Susser, PC, an immigration law firm. In 1994, he created the first immigration law website in the world. He currently serves as a member of the Board of Governors of the American Immigration Lawyers Association.

You can follow Greg on LinkedIn and Twitter.

What apps or tools are essential to your daily workflow?

I use a combination of apps each day that help me keep things together. Here’s a quick list of the most important:

  1. Dropbox is my central repository for documents, photos, etc.
  2. Evernote for all my notes, scans, business cards
  3. Office 365 for email, word processing, Teams (for interoffice texting)
  4. LastPass password manager
  5. BlueDot (immigration law case management system)
  6. Worldox (repository for work and client documents)
  7. Sharefile for a secure document sharing portal for clients
  8. Neota Logic for building apps for internal practice management and client services
  9. Just started using Notes Plus on my iPad with an Apple Pencil to take meeting notes.
  10. Constant Contact for much of our mass communications
  11. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn of course

What does your workspace look like?

  • Two computers – Dell XPS with Windows 10 and an iMac – two monitors and shared keyboard and shared mouse (each toggle between computers).
  • Brother HL-2270 printer
  • Fujitsu Scansnap S510
  • Ringcentral phone system with Plantronics phone and wireless headset

How do you keep track of your calendars/deadlines?

Outlook 365 calendaring + Wunderlist. My firm uses BlueDot, an immigration case management system, for client deadline management.

What’s your coffee service setup? (Other beverages are fine, of course, but you should really be serving coffee!)

Coffee is our #1 retention tool :-) ! We have a Douwe Egbert C-60 Coffee Machine, a very high-end product that I found many years ago in a Delta Skyclub and decided that something like that would make life happier for me and for everyone else.

What is one thing that you listen to/read/watch that everyone should?

I listen to a lot of podcasts on my bike commute each day. Tops are the Kennedy Mighell Report, Lawyerist, the Bugle, Stuff You Missed in History Class, This American Life. I do podcasts in the morning and audio books on my way home.

As for reading, the ABA’s Law Practice Magazine is excellent.

What’s your favorite local place to network or work solo?

I have a wonderful little coffee place called the Kitchenette that is in the middle of Shelby Farms in Memphis, one of the country’s top urban parks (though it’s 4500 acres so it’s more like a state park that happens to be in the middle of a major city). The place is on my bike route to work so I’ll often stop there and work before or after I’m in the real office.

What are three things you do without fail every day?

Exercise (almost always biking, but swimming, running and indoor workouts for rainy days). Here’s a graphic that sums up (literally) my cycling for the last six years.

Try to meditate most days. From a work perspective, I try and do some writing every day. I’ve had a couple of book projects over the last few years have been completed and now am working on something new. I also will write articles and shorter posts for social media on most days when I’m not doing longer form writing.

Who else would you like to see answer these questions?

Patrick Fuller at Neota Logic.

 

How to Calculate Client Acquisition Cost

Measurements and metrics are important at every step of the firm workflow, even during client development. Other than the unique ethical advertising considerations applicable to lawyers, we can borrow from small business development practices and technology. In the second of this five-part series on key performance indicators (KPIs), we’ll examine the calculations for client acquisition cost (CAC) to answer the question of how much is spent before the client’s matter begins.

Using the figures below, the IP firm has spent almost three thousand dollars attracting one client in the month of January. Whether that result is good or bad depends on the potential revenue from the matter. However, the IP firm has set a target of $250 per client, so being over ten times the target requires further analysis.

In addition, the $2,950 CAC result is a problem if the revenue from the client does not significantly exceed that $3,000 to allow the firm to make a profit. In other words, the firm may spend more to acquire and deliver services than the revenue they will see from the case. This will negatively impact the firm’s bottom line profits.

Looking at January’s costs for client acquisition, the IP firm spent $450 on advertising, sales, and marketing costs as reported by the accounting system. For the same month, the attorneys tracked the non-billable time spent with potential clients in free one-hour consultations. Those ten hours, at an average of $250 per hour, result in $2500 of time spent on client development and must be included in the CAC.

Some might challenge those hours by saying that the attorneys and associates are not being paid a salary of $250 for those ten hours. However, the attorneys are not able to bill for those hours, and therefore the true opportunity lost or cost is $2500, not the salary earned.

Results like this bring up questions around process and the use of technology. For example, this IP firm could use a questionnaire, like Traklight’s product for IP, to gather information or triage clients at a fraction of the cost of an attorney hour. Further, the firm could provide thirty-minute consultations to only those clients with IP legal needs and consider charging a reduced rate for those meetings. Not only would that improve the conversion rate by pre-qualifying clients, but the CAC would be significantly reduced.

KPIs are truly the starting point for streamlining your practice and improving your bottom line and it is important to consider measures that directly impact the firm’s cash balance.

If you would like assistance figuring out how to calculate your CAC and see the other KPIs in this series, here’s a free spreadsheet to get you started.

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Threat Modeling for Lawyers

https://lawyeristvideo.wistia.com/medias/l4038x1l38?embedType=async&videoFoam=true&videoWidth=640

Clients trust their lawyers with secrets. Depending on what kind of law you practice, those client confidences may be benign. Or they may be your clients’ darkest secrets that could land them in jail.

OPSEC stands for “operations security.” It’s the practice of identifying important information and taking thorough measures to protect it.

In the past, secrets usually stayed in lawyers’ heads or in paper files in a locked office. With the digitization of much of our lives, they’ve moved into our computers, our pockets, and the cloud. This is tremendously convenient, of course, but it also has risks. This series of posts aims to help protect your clients’ secrets—first by thinking through the threats, and then by securing your information with some of the best tools available today.

What’s Your Threat Model?

Before you rush to change your behavior, you first need to understand who your potential adversaries are, and then evaluate how much of a threat they each pose. Security professionals call this your threat model.

What Are You Protecting?

While thinking about your threat model, think first about what you are protecting. For lawyers, that’s client secrets and work product. This encompasses many things, including:

  • Your email (and copies of your emails are probably in the cloud, on your PC, and on your phone),
  • Your client files, including those on your server or in your practice management software, and the papers strewn across your desk.
  • Any other recorded communications with your clients.

Yes, opsec includes more than just digital security. You still need to lock the door to your office to prevent thieves getting to your secrets the old-fashioned way.

Start by making a list of all the accounts and locations that might contain client secrets or work product.

Who Are You Protecting Against?

Depending on your practice area and clients—and now, your evaluation of smoke signals coming from the Trump transition team—your opponents could include opposing counsel, opposing parties, random hackers, the Chinese government, Russian organized cybercrime gangs, foreign intelligence agencies, or the federal government.

How Likely is Each Threat?

Not all of these represent the same magnitude of threat, of course. Most US lawyers wouldn’t hack their opposing counsel (although a few astoundingly unethical ones will). This means that simpler measures will likely suffice. But if you’re suing a Russian state-owned gas company, or if you represent a high-level politician, you’ll want to worry more about advanced adversaries, and you should take different precautions.

To learn more about threat modeling, read the section devoted to it in the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Surveillance Self-Defense guide.

The Ethics Angle

Of course, legal ethics rules require lawyers to keep client secrets confidential. The ABA Model Rules specifically mention the duty to prevent unauthorized access. Model Rule 1.6(c) says:

A lawyer shall make reasonable efforts to prevent the inadvertent or unauthorized disclosure of, or unauthorized access to, information relating to the representation of a client.

Despite some efforts toward giving this requirement more teeth, what’s “reasonable” has never been very clear. No matter what your rules say, what’s very clear is that if your client gets screwed because you got hacked, you’re going to have a bad time.

If you think through your threat model and use the tools in the next few posts, you’ll be doing way better than most lawyers. And if you need some help getting started on setting up a threat model, download our free template to help you assess your risks.

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Yelp for Lawyers

No matter how your next potential client learns about you, they are likely to look you up online. And what they find (or don’t find) will play some role in their decision to contact or hire you.

Most people will turn to Google to look you up, which makes search results part of the first impression you make. And search results probably mean Yelp.

Yelp Is Likely to Rank Highly In a Search for Your Name

If you perform a search for your name or your firm’s name, Yelp will probably appear prominently in the results. Here’s an example for a search on Levinson and Stefani:

Google lawyer search with yelp result

As you can see, the firm’s Yelp listing appears second only to the firm’s website.

Google also recently introduced reviews from the web to their local knowledge panels, and that includes Yelp reviews. Here’s an example from a desktop search:

levinson-stefani-google-search-yelp

Here’s that same search on a mobile device:

ls

That’s some serious screen real estate. Clearly, Yelp is likely to play a role in the initial impressions formed by potential clients.

Due to its prominence, Yelp is also likely to be one of the first places that unhappy clients (and others) go to log their complaints. Therefore, monitoring and managing your Yelp listing can also play a role in reputation management defense.

Yelp May Rank for Searches Relevant to Your Practice

In addition to searches on your name, Yelp tends to rank prominently for geographically specific legal queries:

Google search results for los angeles personal injury reviews

This makes Yelp useful for earning attention from searchers who don’t yet know your name.

Yelp Is a Player in the Local Search Ecosystem

Search engines rely on other sites for data on local businesses. They use this data as part of their algorithmic soup in displaying which law firms appear in local search results.

Put simply, making sure that your firm’s name, address, phone, and other relevant information is complete and accurate across the web plays a role in whether your firm will show up in relevant local search results. (If you’re new to local search, head over to Moz’s Local Learning Center.)

How to Use Yelp at Your Law Firm

Before we dive into what to do with Yelp, it’s worth noting that there are a variety of ethical considerations relating to a lawyer’s use of Yelp. Some of the most obvious examples include:

  • Confidentiality of client information.
  • False or misleading communications about a lawyer or a lawyer’s services.
  • Limitations on advertising.
  • Communication of fields of practice and specialization.

With regard to those issues, and at the risk of stating the obvious:

  • Don’t reveal client confidences.
  • Don’t lie or mislead (including paying for fake reviews).
  • Don’t claim you are a specialist when you’re not.

Admittedly, the ethics issues can be nuanced. So if you are unsure, check with your bar or an experienced ethics attorney.

Finally, you may conclude that using Yelp is more headache than it is worth. Unfortunately, whether or not you appear in Yelp may be outside of your control. For example, Yelp doesn’t remove business pages, even on request. Therefore, if you are already in Yelp, at the very least you ought to regularly monitor your listing.

Claim Your Law Firm’s Page

The first step in taking control on Yelp is finding and claiming your firm’s business page. If Yelp can’t find your firm, you may want to add your business here. Be particularly careful to list your name (firm name), address, and local phone number. The consistency of these is critical to ranking in local search results. If your firm has multiple office locations, be sure to claim each additional location page.

Yelp Business Owners Dashboard

Once you’ve claimed your business page, you can access your business dashboard. This is one way to measure the impact your Yelp listing is having on your client development efforts.

Summary Yelp for Business Owners

The dashboard provides activity information for your business listing including:

  • User views. A measure of how many times your page was accessed or viewed on Yelp’s website, mobile website, and mobile apps.
  • Activity feed. Activities such as phone calls, website clicks, and directions that originate from someone accessing Yelp.
  • Customer leads. Including check-ins, mobile calls, and messages to you.
  • Revenue estimate. A very loose estimate the impact of Yelp users on your business’s revenue.

In addition to Yelp’s dashboard, you should also track referral traffic from Yelp to your firm’s website in Google Analytics.

referral-traffic-analytics-yelp

By configuring goal conversions, you can also track potential client inquiries on your site (such as phone calls and form fills) that can be attributed back to Yelp.

Yelp Ads

In addition to organic listings, Yelp is also an advertising platform—that’s how it makes money.

Like many other legal advertising options, the performance of Yelp ad campaigns can vary wildly. Juris Digital’s Casey Meraz (@CaseyMeraz) has written-up a useful review of Yelp advertising.

If you’re considering paying for Yelp ads, here are some questions you should answer:

  • Does Yelp appear prominently for a variety of searches related to my practice?
  • Are my firm’s listings/ads competitive (i.e. more positive reviews, competitive offers, etc.).
  • Are the type of clients I want using search engines and Yelp to find and hire lawyers like me?

If you answered these questions in the affirmative and are inclined to give Yelp ads a try, set specific performance targets in advance. Monitor your campaign carefully. If, after several months, you don’t realize a positive return on ad spend (ROAS) in the form of profitable client fees, stop wasting your money.

Page Upgrades

In addition to advertising, Yelp offers business owners a variety of ways to enhance their pages:

  • Remove competitors’ ads from your page.
  • Choose which order photos show on your page.
  • Add a call to action button.

Of course these all cost money. The relative value of these primarily depends on how significant a role Yelp plays in your client development. In other words, if many of your potential clients find you through Yelp, it probably makes sense to remove competitor ads from your page. Again, this is going to vary widely from one firm to the next.

Deals and Gift Certificates

Yelp allows you to offer these, but I’m not big on deals and gift certificates for lawyers. In my experience, they tend to attract the wrong attention. Depending how they’re structured, they also may not pass ethical muster. I do know of some lawyers who have had success with offering deals or coupons, but not on Yelp.

Yelp Content Guidelines and Your Law Firm

Yelp has a variety of guidelines for contributing content. Perhaps most notably, Yelp strongly discourages businesses from soliciting Yelp reviews. However you may feel about this policy, you shouldn’t publicly request reviews for your Yelp page. If you do, you put yourself at risk of Yelp taking action on your page, including filtering your reviews. Further, depending on your state’s rules, how you encourage clients to leave reviews may also have ethical implications. Hopefully this is obvious, but you should never offer compensation in exchange for reviews or review your own firm (that includes having employees review your firm).

For better and worse, Yelp is likely to play some role in how potential clients form an opinion about you and your practice. At a minimum, you should pay attention to what is being said about you there. For those of you looking to marshal evidence of your good reputation, Yelp should probably be on your short list.

 

The Cornell Note Taking Method for Meetings

Taking notes by hand is better than typing your notes on a computer. Handwriting forces you to slow down and focus on what is important. This greatly increases comprehension.

That is where the Cornell Method comes in. The Cornell Method has you separate your notes into a note-taking portion, key points, and a summary. It is ideal for lawyers.

I didn’t pursue the Cornell Method as some sort of lifehack or magic productivity enhancer. I stumbled upon it because I wanted some really nice legal pads. Well before law school, I’d developed a completely unnecessary fondness for the Levenger catalog, which carried within its pages nice pens, some lap desks, and some legal pads that cost approximately five times any other legal pad I’d ever seen. The catalog waxed rhapsodically about the weight of the paper and the smooth as silk feel you’d have written on it with your fountain pen, but never explained the weird huge margin at the left-hand side. I figured I’d live with that, and plunked down $25 in 2001 dollars for a five-pack. That large left-hand margin turned out to be my introduction to the Cornell Method, and I have been a devotee and an evangelist ever since.

Setting Up the Cornell Method

To arrange your notes in Cornell fashion, take your standard legal pad and draw a thick vertical line down the left-hand side of the paper, approximately 2-3 inches from the side of the page. Then draw a horizontal line all the way across the paper about two inches from the bottom of the page. You will end up with something like this:

cornelllined

You can also design one online and print it, or you can purchase Levenger pads optimized for the Cornell Method.

There. You are all done getting ready to take notes Cornell-style.

The Structure of the Cornell Method

Dividing your paper gives you three sections:

  1. The largest section is for note-taking.
  2. The left-hand margin is your key points and key questions section.
  3. The bottom is your summary.

Opinions differ wildly on what should happen with your notes section.

Some people—particularly those that recommend it as a college study tool—subscribe to an elaborate set of rules about recording, reciting, reflecting, and reviewing. You probably do not need to go that deep. However, there is one principle that should guide you if you’re going to take notes using the Cornell Method: write less, not more.

If you have gotten used to taking notes on a laptop, you are already guilty of writing down too much. Treat your notes section like an outline. Shoot for key points, not a verbatim transcript. Think of that section as an outline you will return to later, after your lecture or meeting or motion hearing has finished.

The left-hand margin is your cue and recall section. When you are using Cornell as an academic note-taking method, the cue functions as a memorization and comprehension tool. You should be able to cover up your notes section, and answer any questions you posed to yourself in the cue section. You probably are not going to need to do that with your notes. Depending on what you are taking notes for, this section can contain a series of questions, a roundup of notable points, or to get all business-speak, action items. You should be able to throw your entire notes section away and walk out of your meeting, hearing, or lecture with the key ideas intact. If you are the kind of person who likes to distill your oral arguments down to one notecard, this will seem pretty familiar.

The summary at the bottom is exactly what you would expect: a quick summary of the notes on that page. Internet nerds differ on whether you should do that right when you are done taking notes or after you have reviewed them. I tend to summarize right away, but your mileage may vary.

How the Cornell Method Works For Me

It is not an exaggeration to say the Cornell Method helps me in every note-taking situation I have in my professional life.

In meetings, I use it to easily call out follow-up items by dumping them in the cue section. This can be anything from a statute I need to look up to a call I need to return. Pulling those to-do items and reminders out of the main text of the notes really highlights them. Every time I fall in love with a new type of notebook that does not have the Cornell margin, I go back to trying to just circle, underline, or highlight my follow up items and two things happen:

  1. My notes look like an utter mess
  2. I can’t easily find the things I want to do just by glancing at the page.

Pulling your next steps/to-dos/action items over into the left-hand column also works well if you like to reduce your notes to an actual to-do list you put on an index card, in a computer file, or a fancy Getting Things Done tickler file.

That left-hand column is now functionally your list of next actions. In meeting situations, the summary usually ends up being nothing but the date, time, purpose, and attendees of the meeting. This gives me a way to file my notes easily.

When I am listening to someone else talk for any length of time, whether an opponent in court or speaker at a CLE, being forced to organize my notes Cornell-style on the fly means I am actively engaged. If I do not take handwritten notes, my mind drifts, and suddenly I’ve missed everything. Here, I use the notes section to force me into keeping a cohesive outline, even if the speaker wanders around a bit (as lawyers often do).

The arena in which I’ve definitely found the Cornell method most helpful is in organizing my own teaching notes. The notes section covers the main points of my lecture in an outline and forces me to stay on task. The recall section is my dumping ground for everything I can’t deal with in my notes without things getting messy. Questions I plan on asking appear there, linked to whichever part of the lecture they’re related to. Reminders to myself also go there when I’m re-reading notes before getting up to speak. Notes on sources, if I need to mention those, go in the side margin as well.

With that wide Cornell margin, my teaching notes last three or four semesters instead of one. This is because I’m able to use that recall section to highlight key changes I want to make next time I present the material. Finally, the summary functions like the tagging function in Evernote. It contains the week of the semester the lecture occurs, the name of the class, the major topics I’m covering that week, and a page number. This way, when I have shuffled and reshuffled the pages while speaking, I can easily put them back together again when I’m done (or let’s be honest, mid-lecture).

If you are hopelessly disorganized like me, but wish you were an organized person hacking your own tendencies towards chaos, you really can’t go wrong with taking your notes by hand using the Cornell Method to force you into a specific but flexible note-taking framework. All my notes—meeting notes, lecture notes, deposition notes—look and function the same, which means I always know where to put information when I am writing, and I always know how to find information when I’m reviewing later.

The Cornell Method is the only productivity tool that has stuck with me for more than a year, and I am never giving it up.

Originally published 2014-07-18. Last updated 2016-09-05.

 

Fix Microsoft Word Formatting Instantly with 3 Shortcut Keys

Your document formatting is all fouled up. And you’re on a tight deadline. Here are three shortcut keys to fix Microsoft Word formatting instantly. You’ll want to keep these handy, like on a sticky note stuck to the side of your monitor.

  • CTRL-SPACE removes character-level formatting (fonts, italics/bold, font size, etc.) but leaves paragraph formatting (indents, line spacing, etc.) intact.
  • CTRL-Q does the opposite, leaving fonts and other character formatting intact but returns any paragraph-level formatting to match the Normal Style of your current document (however Normal is defined in that particular document’s Styles).
  • CTRL-SHIFT-N  returns the selected text to Normal formatting, both character-level and paragraph-level.

Just select the offending text with your mouse or keyboard, then pick the appropriate shortcut key. If you’re not used to using shortcut keys, this means holding down either/both the Control key (found in the lower-left and lower-right part of your keyboard) and/or the Shift key (found directly above the Control key), then pressing the letter or other character it’s paired with.

Cut-and-paste causes most common formatting snafus, so learn how to paste text without messing up your document. If it’s too late for that, here are more ways to fix Microsoft Word formatting.

 

3 Steps to Measuring Content Marketing ROI

Content marketing is a lower-cost method of reaching prospective clients. As with every other marketing effort you pursue, you must know how your efforts impact your law firm’s bottom line. This three-step primer will give you the information and the tools necessary to measure the ROI of your content marketing campaigns.

Step 1: Prioritize Your Goals

In a previous post, I wrote about the importance of creating and following a strategic content marketing plan.

Once you identify your goals, you must then prioritize them. This will help you measure success on a piece-by-piece and total production basis.

Step 2: Identify the Metrics Tied to Your Goals

The most common metrics that marketers track fall into one of seven categories.

Consumption Metrics

Consumption metrics involve tracking how your prospective clients interact with your content. These metrics include:

  • Page views. This is the total number of pages viewed by individuals who visit your website. This allows you to see which pages are getting the highest and lowest amounts of traffic. You can plan adjustments to your content or even your overarching strategy depending on what gets the most views.
  • Unique users. This is the total number of individuals who visit your website. This helps you understand your audience size and will give you a better understanding of how many pages each visitor views.
  • Clicks. How many of your followers are clicking through links in emails and ads to visit your website? You’ll know if you track clicks or click-through rates. Typically, the higher the rate, the greater relevance your content has with your audience. If you aren’t seeing good click-through rates, you will want to adjust your copy or rethink your approach.
  • Email open rates. Open rates will help you understand whether your email list members are viewing the emails you send. For the legal industry, the average open rate is 22.68%. If your open rates fall well below that average, you will want to revisit how often you are sending your emails, as well as work on making your subject lines more engaging.
  • Downloads. If you offer a free resource on your website, such as an eBook, white paper or how-to guide, you will want to track total downloads. You can do this by tracking email sign-ups or, better yet, by tracking how many users visit the resource itself. If you aren’t seeing many content downloads, review the copy that leads to the download, the actual download process, and the piece itself to see what you can change to make it more enticing.

If your consumption rates are low across the board, review your social sharing processes to ensure you are effectively spreading the word about your content. Also revisit your search engine optimization practices.

Sharing Metrics

Social media sharing is an integral part of law firm marketing strategies. Here are a couple metrics that you should pay close attention to in the social realm:

  • Total shares per piece. From shares to retweets to likes and much more, social media is the area to focus on if you care about spreading the word about your content.
  • Total email forwards. Another sharing metric to keep an eye on is how often your email subscribers forward your emails.

Both of these metrics enable you to see the scope of your brand’s exposure. They also provide insight into which pieces of copy are most relevant to your prospective clients; the higher the shares, the greater the relevancy.

Engagement Metrics

How well is your content engaging with your prospective and current clientele? You’ll know the answer to that question by tracking these focused metrics:

  • Time spent reading. Reader engagement with your content matters! This Time To Read (TTR) or Average Time on Page metric helps you see how much time your prospects spend viewing your copy. Comparing this metric to the total number of views helps you understand what type of content gains and keeps your client’s interest.
  • Sessions. Once you know your total number of sessions, you can determine how long each prospective client spends on your site and how many pages each prospect averages during those sessions. Together, these numbers can provide insight into how engaging your copy is and how easy your site is to navigate.
  • Comments, shares, and likes. Track the number of shares, comments, reactions, and other types of engagement with your social media posts, blog posts, and emails.

Low engagement rates can indicate problems with your content. Check your copy to determine if it needs slight rewording for greater effect. It is also possible your copy is not interesting to your audience.

Retention Metrics

Once you have engaged your prospects, you want to keep them on board until you can convert them to clients. Track the following retention metrics to see how well you are performing here:

  • Total number of subscribers. This is the total number of individuals you have signed up for email marketing. You can track success of your content by watching which pieces lead to list growth. This number shows you how many loyal followers you may have and how vast of an audience you have with regard to brand ambassadors.
  • Total followers. From your Google+ circles to your Facebook followers, you should keep track of how many people are actively following you on social media. With these numbers, you can track how large of a base you can reach with your posts. And using analytics tools can help you identify when to post and how often to post to reach prospective clients.
  • Total returning visitors. This percentage helps you understand if your content efforts entice individuals to revisit your blog or website. Use this rate and related engagement metrics to determine what caused each visitor to return and what steps you can take to convert those individuals to clients.
  • Bounce rate. This tells you the total percentage of single-page website visits. Review pages that have high bounce rates to see if there is a way to update the copy to better meet client expectations or direct them onto another relevant on your website.
  • Opt-out rate. This is an email marketing metric that helps you understand how many individuals unsubscribe or opt-out of your email list. When compared to your new sign-up rate, you can learn whether you are on the right track or if you need to take steps to improve your email tactics.

Lead Metrics

This is where we start to fully realize the ROI of content marketing. While we could address multiple metrics here, there are two that stand out:

  • Total leads received. How many form submissions are you receiving? How many phone calls? Tying unique forms to each individual content piece (e.g., eBook, website, landing page) will give you a more focused understanding of which pieces are converting more prospective clients to leads.
  • Cost per lead. Once you know which pieces are converting, and which ones aren’t, you can tie those back to total leads to give you the cost-per-lead metric.

Together, these rates allow you to identify content you should focus on producing in the future to gain the most leads.

Sales Metrics

We’ve come to the crux of what most attorneys care about—how much revenue does your firm receive based on your content marketing efforts? These two metrics will tell you what you need to know:

  • Total new clients. Part of your intake process should include a “how did you find us” question. Was it your website? Was it a post you shared on LinkedIn? Was it a free form download?
  • Cost per client. Once you know how many clients you received based on your content efforts, you will be able to compare total client numbers to total content costs to determine your actual cost per client.

Identifying these metrics will help you understand which content marketing efforts are working to convert prospective clients into actual clients.

Cost Goals and Metrics

Knowing leads and sales are great, but those numbers do not mean much unless you can compare them against total costs of your marketing efforts:

  • Costs per marketing piece. Remember to include all costs, including time to produce, distribute, and promote.
  • Overall costs. This is the full sum of monies spent on content marketing.

Tying these metrics together with your lead and sales metrics will help you better budget for future content marketing efforts.

Step 3: Top Tools to Use for Measuring Content Marketing ROI

Numerous tools exist to help you track one or all of the metrics laid out above. Instead of providing you with an exhaustive list, I have compiled my top choices based on cost, capabilities, and ease of use.

Website Analytics Program: Google Analytics

If you do not yet have Google Analytics installed on your website, get it. Right now. It’s a free analytics program that is incredibly robust. It offers insight into most of the metrics laid out above. With Google Analytics, you can track almost everything a visitor clicks and views on your website.

Social Medial Listening: Mention or Sysomos

To best shape the messaging around your firm, remain aware of what others are saying about you online. Use Mention or Sysomos to stay up-to-date and involved in conversations that mention you, your partners, or your firm.

Social Media Management: Hootsuite

Most social media management tools provide you with the ability to shorten your URLs. They also enable you to track more in-depth social sharing metrics. I am particularly impressed with the reports you can access by using the free version of Hootsuite, which includes reports on clicks per day and the most popular clicks. For deeper analysis on Hootsuite, Buffer, or any other social media management platform, you will need to upgrade to a paid plan.

Email Marketing Software: MailChimp or AWeber

A myriad of email marketing software programs exist, most of which come with a basic free account. Others have low-cost options for small firms. All of them offer higher-cost opportunities for when your lists grow.

All-in-One Marketing Software: Hubspot or Marketo

For attorneys who prefer to have an all-in-one solution, I would recommend looking into a marketing platform that offers email marketing, social media management, lead management, and robust analytics. These systems all come at a price, some much heftier than others. Programs that I have heard are successful for a law firm include Hubspot and Marketo.

Happy Measuring!

The ROI of content marketing means something different depending on your priorities. No matter your goals, my hope is that this primer helps you gain a better understanding of how your content marketing ties into your business objectives and affects your bottom line. Keep an eye on your metrics and use the results to adjust your efforts accordingly.

We offer a customized marketing ROI tracker for our Lawyerist Lab members that allows them to track their content marketing spend in terms of money and time. It’s a great way to track your efforts against your goals.

Curious to learn more and to get started with your tracking? Find out more about Lawyerist Lab.

 

Legal Software Bill of Rights

As a legal software customer, you have a right to demand a few things from the companies with which you do business. Information, for one thing. Like the price, and like security measures.

You have a right to try software before you buy it. And you have a right to get your data out. And you have a right not to get jerked around during onboarding.

Here’s what you should expect from your software vendors.

The price of legal software shall be published.

In order to buy software, first you have to know what it costs. If there is no price posted on the website, it’s a sure sign that the company lacks confidence in its product and relies instead on a hard-sell approach to convince you that it’s worth the price.

The price of software should be posted on the website, and it should be easy to understand. No small firm should have to schedule a demo or speak with a salesperson just to find out how much software costs.

And while we’re on the subject, regressive pricing sucks. Software companies that offer volume discounts probably aren’t going to care much about their smaller customers. Look for software that offers the same rate regardless of the number of users.

There shall be a free trial, which shall be easy to get started.

You cannot know for sure whether software will work for you until you try it. And trying new software should be a pretty simple endeavor. Download and install. Sign up and start using. Or just click to use a dummy account online.

Sure, some companies feel the need to give you a 30-day money-back guarantee or demand your credit card to get your trial started (and they will automatically start billing you if you don’t cancel before your trial expires). These kinds of “trials” are kind of petty, but they’ll do.

However the trial works, you should be able to try software for at least 10 days (although a full billing cycle is ideal) before you buy.

If software requires onboarding, onboarding should not cost extra.

Some software legitimately requires a team of technicians to install and configure. And some software is so complicated (but still, somehow, useful) that it requires training to use it effectively. If that’s true for your software, the onboarding cost should be on the pricing page along with an explanation for why it is necessary.

But there is at least one legal software vendor that requires you to pay for someone to remotely log into your computer to download the install file and double-click it, and then point at all the buttons and menu options and tell you what they do. And there is at least one CRM vendor that requires everyone to pay for training whether or not they already know how to use the software or are comfortable exploring it on their own.

No company should get to charge you for that kind of thing.

Security measures shall be clearly described.

How is client data encrypted, and when? (Before, during, and after transmission? At rest?) Which encryption technologies are employed?

How does the company control access to encryption keys and client data?

Where is client data stored? How often is it backed up, and can customers access those backups to restore data?

Do any third parties have access to client data? If the company is using a third party for hosting (e.g., Amazon), how does it ensure the third party it cannot access client data? Speaking of Amazon, which many cloud software vendors use to host data, if the answer to any of the above is “Amazon takes care of it,” which of Amazon’s many security options has the company elected to employ?

Is the software HIPAA compliant? Does it conform to any other recognized standards (Like the Legal Cloud Computing Association Security Standardshint hint)?

Does the company use a third-party security auditor?

Nobody should have to dig through hidden pages on the website or speak to a sales representative (who probably doesn’t even know) for this information.

It must be possible to export data in a useful format.

The client owns the file, which means you must be able to return the file to the client. You may need to take your clients’ files with you when you change firms. Or you may need to give the file to an ethics investigator someday. Or you may just want or need an archive of the file for other reasons.

One way or another, it should be possible to export data in a useful format. It may be complicated or clunky, but it should be an option.

 

Avoid the All-in-One Printer, Scanner, Copier, and Fax Machine

Lawyers often choose all-in-one solutions when buying hardware and software, probably because it feels cost-effective to get a bunch of things bundled into one package. But when it comes to scanners, printers, and copiers, it is better to buy dedicated machines. You can be more productive with a ScanSnap and a good laser printer than you can be with a typical all-in-one machine.

First, you probably do not need a scanner, printer, copier, and fax machine. You probably just need a scanner and printer.

Copying is just scanning and printing without bothering to save the document in between. That is fine if you do not have digital files. But you should be scanning everything anyway. It will save time in the long run if you just scan documents and save them to your computer. Then you can print as many copies as you need, whenever you need to.

Fax machines, however, are not worth having any longer. Use an electronic fax service like HelloFax and you’ll never miss having a fax machine (or the cost of paper, supplies, and an extra phone line).

Those unnecessary functions are just bloatware. They add more things to the hardware that can break, and they add stuff you don’t need to to the software you use to operate the combo unit. What you’re left with is an okay printer and a not-very-good scanner.

If you are serious about going paperless — and it is hard to imagine why you wouldn’t be — you need a serious, dedicated document scanner. And while it’s all well and good to shop around, in the end there’s only one you should buy: the Fujitsu ScanSnap iX500. Once you use it, you’ll understand why your brilliant plan to save money with a printer/scanner/copier/fax machine is so misguided. It just isn’t very good at scanning, which is what you will be doing with it most of the time.

As for the printer, nearly any good laser printer will do — until you are trying to print out four copies of all your exhibits the night before a deposition or trial. Then you will wish you spent the money on a good laser printer. Any good workgroup printer will do; just don’t rely on a cheap laser printer unless you’ll never need to print large batches of documents quickly.

If you really want a copier, just get a copier. All-in-one machines aren’t really copiers, after all. They just scan and print without saving. Most document scanners have a “copy” mode that works the same way in tandem with your printer. Or just go to a FedEx Office store the very few times you will need one. (In fact, I cannot remember needing to make copies for any reason since I went paperless.)

The only real advantage to an all-in-one machine is the price. A good scanner and a good printer will probably add up to $800–1,000. You can get a laser all-in-one for under $200, and a decent one is still under $400. The problem is that even a good multi-function is still just an okay printer and a substandard document scanner. If you spend a bit more to get the right tools for the job, you will save a ton of time and aggravation in the long run.

Stay away from all-in-ones.

Originally published on 04-20-2011. Last updated on 08-19-15.

 

Every Legal App For Android

There are plenty of Android apps for lawyers including apps for case management, billing, trial preparation, and legal research. This list includes every legal app for Android that we could find in the Google Play store.

There are just a few exceptions. This does not include apps that are dead links in the Google Play store. Apps that are mobile versions of legal publications aren’t here either unless they aggregate content in an unusually useful way. Additionally, the Google Play store has a large number of applications that just repackage freely available content such as codes and statutes. Those are not here unless they provide some sort of added value like the ability to annotate.

The table below is searchable, and you can sort by each column. Use the comments to let us know if we missed an app.

[table id=8 /]

Originally published 2014-06-24. Last updated 2015-08-06.

 

Every Legal App for iPhone and iPad

iOS apps for lawyers abound, whether for case management, billing, or trial preparation. This page has every legal app for iOS that we could find in the App Store.

There are just a few exceptions. This does not include apps that have not been updated since 2011 and have few or no reviews in the App Store. Apps that are simply mobile versions of a legal publication aren’t here, either, since the app doesn’t do anything over and above the website. Finally, the App Store is full of applications that simply repackage freely available content, such as the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. Unless an app added some significant extras (such as the ability to annotate or cross reference) to that type of content, it’s not here.

The table below is searchable, and you can sort by each column. Use the comments to let us know if we missed an app.

[table id=7 /]

Originally published 2014-06-16. Last updated 2015-07-20.