Make More Rain : marketing, productivity

Planning Helps Law Firms Weather A Bad Economy

Admin — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 08:00:00 GMT

Although the housing market has grabbed headlines recently as the credit issues continue to unravel, the indicators have been present for several years. The businesses who planned for this are now in a better position to adjust and prosper while other businesses close their doors.

Law firms aren't insulated to market downturns. The New York firm Thacher Proffitt & Wood "informed around 50 associates that their futures at the firm were uncertain because of the collapse of the market for mortgage-backed securities, an area where the firm had had a leading practice." New York Lawyer, 11/28/2007. CitiBank and Hildebrandt released a Client Advisory predicting the "perfect storm" of indicators hurting the legal industry.

It doesn't have to be this way. The firm can retain talent even when the marketplace shifts by planning not just for economic good times but for bad times as well. How?

Retain Earnings
Rather than distribute every dollar of profit, project into the future and if indicators suggest that there may be a drop in business in a particular practice area, allocate additional funds to maintain your marketing budget and talent retention.

Prepare for the upswing
Have associates hit the road with partners to build and maintain relationships in the industry. If your client survives the poor economy it will come back stronger. Cement those relationships while mentoring associates so that when the market comes back, your firm has already done the legwork to expand the business.

Transfer Knowledge
Forms are gold, especially in document-driven industries making up transactional practices. Have associates review all firm forms against available case law and take the opportunity to build a solid foundation of accurate and up-to-date forms. Offer an incentive to create "products" representing reproducible work.

Help with the overflow
Just because one industry is hurting that doesn’t mean other areas of the firm aren’t thriving. Give associates an opportunity to absorb work from the more active areas of law. In fact, a firm recently did this when Dechert, LLP, initially layed off 13 associates, then changed its mind and re-assigned them to other practice areas.

Some associates won't have the sufficient motivation to change. That is fine. Keep the ones who do.

Morepartnerincome.com is sponsored by Juris®. For information about Juris products and services for increasing law firm performance and partner income contact Juris National Sales Center:

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Marketing Advice for Lawyers During Economic Down Cycles

Admin — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 08:00:00 GMT

I had a chance to catch up with John Remsen, Jr. last week and asked him about the economic outlook for law firms in 2008. Like many, he believes we are in the midst of an economic down cycle that will affect how law firms perform in 2008.

In spite of the downturn, Remsen says that certain practices like bankruptcy, litigation and employment will do quite well. Other areas won’t be so lucky. He explained that law firms that are heavily dependent on cyclical industries like real estate should be prepared to ride the waves of the economic cycle. For example, a firm that does lots of commercial real estate transaction work can position itself as “workout specialists” during the down cycle.

Some advice from Remsen during a slowing economy:

Partners need to push work down to associates so they free up time for marketing and business development. Most compensation systems tend to reward the opposite behavior.
With this time, they should go visit top clients to thank them for their business, and learn about their issues and concerns.
Invite clients into the firm to discuss industry trends and opportunities.
Resist the temptation to cut marketing expenses. Most of your competitors are cutting back so you have a chance to stand out and solidify your position as the economy improves.
Make sure that marketing and business development activities sustain themselves consistently, in both good times and bad.

At the end of the day it is about relationships, says Remsen. He advises firms to take advantage of the down cycle to invest in relationships. In so doing, you position your firm to take off as the economy improves….as it eventually will.

John Remsen, Jr. is the founder of The Remsen Group, which in partnership with LexisNexis and others host the Managing Partner Forum. John has recently co-authored a book, The Little Black Book on Law Firm Marketing that can be purchased by clicking here.

Morepartnerincome.com is sponsored by Juris®. For information about Juris products and services for increasing law firm performance and partner income contact Juris National Sales Center:

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Managing Partners' Little Black Book on Marketing

Admin — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 08:00:00 GMT

Paula Black knows graphic design. John Remsen, Jr. knows marketing. The author of The Little Black Book on Law Firm Branding and Positioning has teamed up with Remsen to create The Little Black Book on Law Firm Marketing and Business Development.

The layout of the book has the trademark of a graphic artist - plenty of variation of font, paper type and thickness. This is no dry business book!

The content is, of course, what matters. The book takes a mixture of survey findings, anecdotes from several managing partners representing mid-sized firms, and a simple formula for marketing success:

Build a plan;
invest in the plan;
implement the plan;
measure the results.

John Remsen founded The Remsen Group in 1997 to help bring effective and cost-efficient marketing and business development programs to commercial law firms of all types and sizes. The Remsen Group provides services ranging from developing firm-wide marketing plans to helping firms plan firm retreats. The Remsen Group also organizes and presents the managing partner forum.

For more information or to purchase the book, click here.

Morepartnerincome.com is sponsored by Juris®. For information about Juris products and services for increasing law firm performance and partner income contact Juris National Sales Center:

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Limited Law Firm Budget Produces a Winning Strategy

Admin — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 19:26:52 GMT

Ross Fishman is a smart marketing guy. I have mentioned him in several prior posts (for example, the posts Marketing 101 and Getting Agreement to Change).

Writing for the FrontLines section of the December issue of the Law Practice, Ross again demonstrates that there is magic in applied Marketing 101. Working with a 20-lawyer law firm in Salinas, California, Fishman turned a marketing problem into a winning business strategy. The problem was a limited marketing budget. Ross’ solution was to narrow the firm's marketing efforts to a single industry. In this case, the farming industry, which just happened to be the dominate industry for the area. All of the local law firms handled some agricultural clients, but no one had ever targeted the industry. With Fishman’s guidance, the Salina law firm did. Fishman turned a limited marketing budget into a winning business strategy—targeting a narrowly defined delimited market with a strategy to dominate it. For more on the benefits of such a strategy, see the prior post Importance of Market Position for Law Firms.

I don’t want to steal all of Fishman’s thunder. You can read the case study starting on page 8 of the December issue of Law Practice.

Morepartnerincome.com is sponsored by Juris®. For information about Juris products and services for increasing law firm performance and partner income contact Juris National Sales Center:

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What it Takes to Grow Law Firm Clients

Admin — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 17:30:58 GMT

Globetrotting JD Hull answers the question, How do you get high-end clients? Of course, there is always more to anything than a simple “Do These Things” list. JD knows that; so he titled his post Dumbing it all down: getting high-end clients. Morepartnerincome cannot help but try to dumb it down even more.

What does it take? JD calls it timing. We call it luck that you have cultivated and prepared for. The ground work requires establishing credibility, developing relationships, concentrating on just a few areas that you are really good at, doing your homework, keeping up with industry and prospect issues and major events, and finally, it takes stick-to-itiveness or persistence.

Larry Bodine, who hosts his Law Marketing Blog, points to a recent post by Dan Markovitz on the Timeback Management blog. Markovitz says getting new clients starts by learning to delegate work. You need to cut down your billable hours and increase the time you spend on marketing. To do that, partners have to delegate early, often and effectively.

I’m struck by how often a casual contact leads to new business for a law firm. It can come from the person you are seated next to on a long plane flight or the attendee you meet at a conference while on a break from presentations. But it doesn’t happen by accident. It happens when you are prepared for that unplanned meeting. You always have business cards. You always have your elevator speech ready. You are always interested in those you meet. You are always helpful. You always ask questions. You always listen. You tend to put yourself in positions where the kinds of prospects you want tend to be.

Morepartnerincome.com is sponsored by Juris®. For information about Juris products and services for increasing law firm performance and partner income contact Juris National Sales Center:

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Secret of Successful Law Firm Marketing

Admin — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 17:43:59 GMT

“Peter Drucker has often pointed out that the purpose of a company is to create a customer. Few professionals have yet grasped that concept, which is the reason why marketing is so difficult for them.”

The preceding sentence is a quote from Bruce Marcus that I found while reading an exchange between Marcus and one of the authors of the book Marketing Professional Services. Marcus. a practicing marketing consultant, explains that since law firms have no traditions in marketing, developing an effective marketing strategy requires teaching the legal professionals marketing. That task has to be individualized for each firm. As Marcus puts it:

“I believe that in marketing a professional firm, there are four basic points that should be addressed, and included in developing a distinctive functional strategy for each firm…
Know your market. Not merely demographics, but its needs and wants, relevant to the service you offer.
Know your firm. Not merely as an organization, but its structure to meet the needs of the market it seeks to serve
Know your tools. These are the tools and devices of marketing – the press release, the brochure, the seminar, etc. They are tools, and not the marketing program itself.
Manage your tools. Use the tools as communications devices to project your understanding and ability to serve the needs of your market”.

Marketing professional services is different than marketing a product, and thus one cannot simply apply the academic marketing principles that were developed around manufacturing. Marcus pointed out the following important differences:

If I sell you a product, the product stays, and I go. If I sell you a service, I stay.
There may be a thousand people behind the manufacture and distribution of a product. The product is the interface between the customer and the people who make it. The interface between the law or accounting firm and the client is the accountant or lawyer who performs the service.
Marketing for a manufacturer involves the marketing department. The rest of the people in the company are not specifically involved in the marketing process itself. While professional marketers can build and run programs, no professional services marketing program can be run without the active participation of the professionals involved.
But there is a serious cultural problem. With no tradition of marketing in the professions, lawyers and accountants, mature in their professions but without marketing training, must be taught to be marketers – or more realistically – marketing adjuncts. Before any marketing program can be successful, there must be a behavior modification of sorts, and a marketing culture must be engendered. This is the secret of successful professional services marketing.

Morepartnerincome.com is sponsored by Juris®. For information about Juris products and services for increasing law firm performance and partner income contact Juris National Sales Center:

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Dual Payoff of Attorney Business Cards

Admin — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 17:53:00 GMT

If you know a top sales person, there is one thing you can count on. They are never without business cards. Yet as Ed Poll observed on LawBiz®Blog, a lot of lawyers still don’t get it!

To illustrate the marketing role of the business card, The October ABA Journal included an article titled “50 Ways to Market Your Practice” by Margaret Graham Tebo. Over a fourth of the 50 ways involved the attorney’s business card. Just think about that for a minute. Over one fourth of all the ways that Ms Tebo could think of to market a practice involved getting your business card in the hands of prospective clients or the hands of people who influence prospects.

Test your firm’s partners and associates. When you encounter each away from their desk, ask for their card.

Have you and other attorneys learned the art of Making The Recipient of Your Card Feel Special as suggested on Michelle Golden’s blog Golden Practices. Like most things, presenting your business card takes practice, and through practice you can develop a habit that will pay off throughout your career. As beneficial as it is to get your card in the hands of potential clients and influencers, there is another valuable payoff. People to whom you present your card are obligated to give you theirs. Those cards represent a constant source of additions to your contact management software. See the prior post Staying in Touch Is the Key to Rainmaking.

You can find tips on business protocol including Business Card Etiquette on the web site for Protocol Professionals, Inc.

Morepartnerincome.com is sponsored by Juris®. For information about Juris products and services for increasing law firm performance and partner income contact Juris National Sales Center:

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Starting Point for an Effective Law Firm Marketing Plan

Admin — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 17:31:48 GMT

Sales and marketing guru John Boyens talks about the five “Ps”:

1. Position

2. Placement

3. Products

4. Pricing

5. Promotion

These five items serve as the core or foundation of an effective marketing strategy. Once you and other firm partners have agreed on your five Ps, the next essential step is to communicate them, not once, but continuously and frequently to every member of the firm—from frequently reminding partners to hammer the message home to even your mailroom employees.

Position: Identify your unique value proposition. What is it that your law firm does better than anyone else?

Placement: What narrowly defined market (type, geography, etc.) do you want to target your services to and who (by position or title) are the decision makers within those prospects that make the decisions to use or not use your services?

Products: What are the core services that you want to lead with?

Pricing: Agree on your pricing philosophy strategy for penetrating or gaining market share in target markets.

Promotion: Develop your marketing and promotional strategy for achieving your marketing goals.

Morepartnerincome.com is sponsored by Juris®. For information about Juris products and services for increasing law firm performance and partner income contact Juris National Sales Center:

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Positioning Considerations for the Law Firm

Admin — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 17:34:29 GMT

As you start planning for the coming year, one of the first things you need to review is how you want your firm to be thought of by clients and prospects:

The experts—“the people who wrote the book”
Bright, creative people
Technologically savvy
Friendly, easy to work with
Understands your business
Cost conscious
Expensive, but who you go to when it’s “bet the farm” time
The “No Surprises” Firm—tells you upfront what it will cost and what you will get
Young and aggressive
Seasoned and Proven
Politically connected
Knows the turf
Low price provider
Delivers on Time—when speed and deadlines count

Now, put yourself in a client’s or prospect’s shoes and look critically at your firm. Do you walk the walk? Does your appearance and your actions support how your want your firm to be viewed? Examine everything—every point of visual or actual contact by anyone and everything associated with the firm— business cards, office appearance, phone handling, staff dress, audio visual, web site, blog, etc.

If effectively marketed, any of the above listed value propositions can be successful. Your value proposition must speak reality. Just saying it doesn't make it true. Your marketing must aim at clients benefited by that value proposition. While you can’t make a silk purse out of a pig’s ear, you can sell a lot of pig skin if you position it correctly.

Morepartnerincome.com is sponsored by Juris®. For information about Juris products and services for increasing law firm performance and partner income contact Juris National Sales Center:

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Marketing Blog for Law Firms

Admin — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 17:16:00 GMT

If you don’t subscribe to The Legal Marketing Blog by Tom Kane, you should. Tom regularly posts practical tips and checklists for increasing marketing effectiveness.

In addition to sharing his own experience with readers, he makes sure that his readers are taking note of significant contributions by others on the subject. That is the case with his post Spend a Few Minutes Each Day on Business Development. Noting the work of Terrie Wheeler published in the Law Practice Today, he posts a checklist of suggestions for an attorney’s daily business development efforts.

Morepartnerincome.com is sponsored by Juris®. For information about Juris products and services for increasing law firm performance and partner income contact Juris National Sales Center:

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Marketing 101 for Law Firms

Admin — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 17:48:27 GMT

There are two things I remember from my Marketing 101 college days. First is to turn your competitor’s “strength” into a weakness. Who can forget the Avis “We try harder” campaign that turned the Hertz leadership position into a weakness and conversely turned Avis’ second place position into strength? Nowadays, Hertz has turned the table on low cost car rental companies with their campaign “Who do you think we are, Hertz?”

The second thing I can remember is my professor using the Hershey's candy bar story to bring home the importance of advertising. When I was young and someone was going the store, you frequently heard the following conversation:

“Bring back a candy bar”. “Sure, with or without?"

You see, back then there was only one candy bar that came to mind—Hershey's, in two variations, plain or with almonds. Hershey's market share was so dominant that, according to my professor, the company decided that it could discontinue media advertising and put the savings in the company’s coffers. It only took one generational shift, a surprisingly short period, for the Hershey’s bar to become the candy of old people. It wasn’t cool. The Hershey’s bar is still around and it is still one of the best candy bars you can buy. But when was the last time you had a Hershey’s bar—plain or with nuts?

Both of the above points, turning competitors’ strengths into weaknesses and the importance of advertising, are brought home in the article “What Really Works” by Ross Fishman (www.rossfishmanmarketing.com) in the September 2007 issue of the ABA’s Law Practice magazine. He notes that most lawyers score poorly when it comes to responsiveness in returning calls. The best of them usually have a standard of “we return your call within 24 hours”. I know a lot of firms who brag about their 24-hour call return standard. They promote it as a strength! Fishman helped turn that strength into a weakness for his Chicago client with the Laner Muchin Challenge. The firm delivered expensive looking hour glasses to prospects and challenged them to call their labor and employment lawyer and then to call Laner Muchin with the same message to see who calls back before two turns of the hourglass ran out.

Firms that had been pitching 24-hour turnaround looked pretty weak next to Laner Muchin’s quick response. I really would have liked the Laner Muchin messages to have been “returned within the hour.” But the promotion, as is, was effective, once again illustrating the disconnect between what law firms think is quality service and what their clients really want.

Morepartnerincome.com is sponsored by Juris®. For information about Juris products and services for increasing law firm performance and partner income contact Juris National Sales Center:

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New Service to Increase Big Business Access to Law Firms

Admin — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 17:32:19 GMT

Midrange firms have the price and service quality advantage over big law but don’t have the access to Fortune 1000 companies. If OnRamp is successful, that is about to change for participating law firms.

The idea behind OnRamp is to create a space for corporate legal consumers to go to find answers to frequently asked questions on very specific topics. The answers on the site are contributed by participating law firms with deep knowledge and expertise in the topics.

The new on-line community will level the playing field. It will not matter if you are solo, a 20-attorney firm, or a firm with 1000 attorneys. The prospect discovers your law firm. Your posted answers establish your credibility. The two of you are likely to do business.

The internet has already increased the accessibility of midrange firms for the corporate buyer. A select number of firms have used blogs to establish national and even global credibility in specialized areas. Corporate buyers increasingly turn to the Web to search for (or to validate the fit of) a law firm experienced in particular matters.

OnRamp is another avenue for the small and midrange law firm to catch the eye of corporate legal departments. It has the advantage of being a central depository of answers to which corporate counsel can go first in their search to match a law firm to a particular matter or style of matters.

My understanding is that Legal OnRamp is the brainchild of Mark Chandler, the General Counsel of Cisco Systems. It is new and not fully operational but is currently accepting content from participating law firms. To become one, you have to first contact the OnRamp team and earn an invitation to participate.

Morepartnerincome.com is sponsored by Juris®. For information about Juris products and services for increasing law firm performance and partner income contact Juris National Sales Center:

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If Not Mandatory Retirement for Law Firm Partners, Then What?

Admin — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 17:33:56 GMT

On August 15, the American Bar Association’s House of Delegates voted to encourage law firms to abandon mandatory retirement policies. The resolution traveled under two flags, the anti- age discrimination flag and the “graying of the bar” flag.

With regard to the discrimination issue, Law.Com noted that “The issue of mandatory retirement has received particular attention because of a lawsuit pending against Sidley Austin. Law firms are anticipating a decision from the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois in Chicago in an action filed by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission on behalf of about 30 former partners against Sidley Austin over whether its alleged retirement policy violated age discrimination laws.”

My guess is that this issue’s place on the agenda is due to the increased number of delegates and partners in general that are nearing mandatory retirement age.

From the standpoint of midrange size law firms, the big issue is continuity. For midrange law firms to have a life beyond that of their current partners, there must be an orderly hand-off from one generation to the other. Mandatory retirement is one method of forcing that hand-off. It isn’t necessarily the best, but those in power are often reluctant to give it up.

In an earlier post titled Continuity or How Law Firms Acquire a Life of Their Own, I suggested alternative strategies assuring the hand-off between generations. Without an orderly handoff a law firm fades away or just survives for at least one more generation through an ugly or quiet revolution. We old guys leave one way or another. It needs to be through a win/win arrangement. Continuity planning is most important to the entrenched partners. Without planning for the handoff to the next generation, it is the entrenched partners and their heirs who lose the value of the legal service business they built (or improved) during their tenure.

Morepartnerincome.com is sponsored by Juris®. For information about Juris products and services for increasing law firm performance and partner income contact Juris National Sales Center:

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Law Practice Business Model

Admin — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 17:25:20 GMT

It is time to revisit the heart of this blog, the Law Practice Business Model that David Maister laid out in 1984 as a mathematical expression:

The masthead of David Maister’s blog is Passion, People and Principles. That banner is an appropriate reminder that people, not numbers, drive law firm performance. The financial metrics in Maister’s formula are determined by the passion and principles of the people in the firm. Unfortunately, you can have passion and principles and still fail. You can fail if you don’t pay attention to the numbers. You can fail if people are pulling in different directions without a common sense of direction. That is where leadership comes in. The role of the law firm leader is to get everyone moving in the same direction. Numbers, including those in the Law Practice Business Model are the vehicle for expressing goals and measuring progress. Great law firm leaders understand the numbers. They know what their people do best. They plan, they set goals, they measure performance and they hold people accountable.

Over the next couple of weeks morepartnerincome.com will revisit and update previous posts addressing the key performance indicators for the law firm, including

Price
Productivity or Utilization
Leverage
Realizations
Margin

I often add to any discussion of Maister’s formula that it doesn’t tell the whole story. There are other financial metrics that are important indicators of financial health. In the coming weeks I will cover some of the more important ones, including measures of unbilled fees and billed but uncollected fees.

The chart below illustrates Maister’s law firm model in a more traditional financial statement format.

Changing any of the key performance indicators—utilization (average billed hours per attorney), blended rate (the weighted average rate at which those hours are billed), realization (the percent of the amount billed that the firm actually collects), and margin (the percent of collected dollars left over after payment of all expenses including compensation to equity partners)—alters the average income per partner. Click on the graphic above to download an Excel spreadsheet and see the effect of changing one or more of the performance indicators. Substitute your own numbers for those in the sample worksheet and calculate the increase in income you can expect by improving performance in any of the five variables in Maister’s formula—price, productivity, leverage, realization and margin.

Morepartnerincome.com is sponsored by Juris®. For information about Juris products and services for increasing law firm performance and partner income contact Juris National Sales Center: 877/377-3740, e-mail info@juris.com or go to www.Juris.com.

Law Firm Leadership Takes Trust and Ability

Admin — Fri, 17 Aug 2007 18:02:00 GMT

If decisions aren’t being made easily without distraction, then the firm doesn’t have effective leaders. Firms are made up of partners, but if they have not placed their trust in others to make decisions, they are just sharing office space and overhead. Without trusted leaders, the sum will never be greater than the parts.

I would argue that it is the ability to decide that distinguishes the "C" level executive. They understand the law firm. They understand the numbers and what their people do best. But they also have the ability to efficiently assess the circumstances and analyze the issues and then make decisions. They don’t have to be right all the time, but they do shoulder the consequences of their decisions.

Morepartnerincome.com is sponsored by Juris®. For information about Juris products and services for increasing law firm performance and partner income contact Juris National Sales Center:

877/377-3740, e-mail info@juris.com or go to www.Juris.com.