Law Firm 4.0 Blog

Lawyers (and everyone else), ask yourself: Am I my resume?

With yet another high profile resume-fake (Scott Thompson, who was ousted as Yahoo! CEO after four months among accusations that he lied on his resume about having a computer science degree) I am compelled to write this blog post about telling the truth on your website and other biographies.

Whether you call it biography, bio, profile, CV, vita or work history, this document should never have an ounce of fiction on it.  No fudging on capabilities and experience, board and community service, education (years, your major, the institutions you attended) . . . simply, don’t say you did something if you didn’t do it.

I read an article in the Dallas Morning News yesterday about a new book by author James Donovan, “The Blood of Heroes,” with the subtitle, “The 13-day struggle for the Alamo and the sacrifice that forced a nation.”  Apparently, the Alamo stories that we were taught in K-12 history classes were not true.  Davy Crockett was not executed by Mexican hero/despot Santa Anna, and the storied Alamo battle didn’t last 15-minutes, but more like 45 minutes or longer.  You might wonder what this has to do with lawyer biographies?

Donovan's Dallas Morning News article started:

“Everyone knows that Davy Crockett was executed after the battle of the Alamo by Santa Anna.  Except he wasn’t.”

Donovan, a Dallas author, writes:

“Crockett’s death, and the duration of the Alamo battle, are two examples of how historical events often become encrusted with myth, legend and error, deliberate or not. Particularly before the invention of electronic recording devices around the turn of the 20th century, history was more pliable, especially for those with an agenda — or simply to make a good story even better.”

I love the phrase, “…history was more pliable, especially for those with an agenda – or simply to make a good story even better.”  We do this all the time in conversation, subconsciously believing that facts should never get in the way of a good story.

He concludes his article:

“History, like life, may be messy, awkward and embarrassing on occasion, but that’s because it’s about people, and none of us is perfect. Without respect for historical truth, we compromise our ability to grow and improve both as individuals and as a society.”

Too many lawyer resumes include every line of what the person has ever done, spoken or written.  Bios should follow the governing clothes-closet management rule:  Don’t put one new clothing article in your closet without eliminating something old.

Without such stewardship, the result of this year-after-year layering of data, whether online or on paper, is that your memory fades and you no longer remember if it was true.  If there was an error or omission 20 years ago, chances are you are still carrying it forward – simply because you aren’t looking at it that carefully, you can’t remember, and you assume it must be true because it used to be true. And it’s about you, so what’s the big deal?

My company, Content Pilot, is preparing to conduct our fifth research study, “2012 AmLaw 100 Websites: Ten Foundational Best Practices,” where we analyze the websites of America’s top 100 law firms based on gross revenue. The 4^th Foundational Best Practice is lawyer biographies.  I’ll write more about the foundational attributes of a “best practices” lawyer resume in another post, but the glaring problem we see is that too many senior partners don’t care about their bios.  This opens doors, however, for those partners who do care – by comparison, who stand out as relevant, current and subject matter experts in their fields.  After all, that’s the goal of your website (and other online sources, such as LinkedIn) biography – come across well enough that you are short-listed for a particular matter.  Then it’s your job to get chosen as “the one.”

When your bio is riddled with old information – or worse, lies (a strong word, I know) about what you’ve done – everything else that is accurate is questioned.  Don’t risk the reputation damage by being “too busy” to update your resume when your marketing team requests it.

The musical, “A Chorus Line” starts with an energetic number, “I Hope I Get It,” where the auditioning dancers start competing against each other for a job in the chorus.  In unison they sing,

“God, I hope I get it. I hope I get it.  How many boys, how many girls?  Look at all the people, at all the people” . . . Then one dancer sings, “I really need this job, please god I need this job, I’ve got to get this job!”

As it continues, it segues into a lone male dancer singing,

“Who am I anyway? Am I my resume? That is a picture of a person I don't know. What does he want from me? What should I try to be? So many faces all around, and here we go. I need this job, oh God, I need this show.” 

So, ask the question:  Am I my resume?  Take a fresh and critical look at every claim you make – the three-prong test against which your assertion should be judged is:  1) Is it truthful? 2) Is it current? (If it’s not, buyers of legal services may not care about it.) And, 3) Is it relevant? (If it’s not, buyers of legal services won’t care about it.)

Do the leaders of your law firm use social media? Employees trust leaders who do.

By now, most law firms have inked social media policies, yet leaders' fears are still cresting at the thought of firm employees' fingers running amok and damaging the firms' reputations in some way. It seems this trepidation is a one-way street, however, as BRANDfog's 2012 Social Media and Leadership Survey found.

BRANDfog surveyed hundreds of employees in companies ranging in size from start-ups to Fortune 500 behemoths asking about company executives and their use of social media to communicate with them and the rest of the world. 81% said that CEOs who use social media are "better equipped" than their peers to lead companies in this contemporary business environment. This included "communicating values and shaping corporate reputation."

82% said they were more likely or much more likely to trust a CEO and other top executives who use social media. And 78% said that they'd prefer to work for a company whose leaders regularly use social media.

Most respondents agreed that social media significantly aids leaders' engagement with key stakeholders:

1. 89.3% said executives can better communicate with customers
2. 84.7% believed that it improves communication with employees
3. 66.3% said executives should use it to communicate with investors
4. 71% said executive engagement in social media enhances your brand.

But you can't fix a company environment that's broken, they said. Only 45% believed that you can improve bad company morale via C-suite social media use.

Erik Sass of the MediaPost Blog The Social Graf notes: "All this makes interesting reading when juxtaposed with actual rates of social media engagement among CEOs and top execs. According to figures cited by BRANDfog, while 61% of Fortune 500 brands use Twitter to engage with customers, just 2.5% of Fortune 500 CEOs are actively using Twitter."

What can law firm leaders take from this? Employees want more communication from you - not just staff, but your lawyers, too. There is a readily available platform you can use to post your musings, and to show how you understand today's world of business communication. I know you have a lot to say -- roll up your sleeves and plan your communication strategy for the next 12 months. Choose the social media forum that makes the most sense for you - LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook or a blog - and commit to it.

Your firm's clients will be listening, too. And they will finally have a chance to know why you have been chosen to lead your firm.

Brilliant strategy and brilliant execution - are they strange bedfellows?

The CMO Network on LinkedIn has an interesting discussion sparked by the question: What is your opinion on Execution trumps Strategy?...Do you agree?... This is both a rapid and rabid-responding group, and those who have come down hard on the side of strategy (as they slap-slap the faces of the proletariat executioners), suggest that execution won't ever distinguish you if the strategy isn't sound. Fair enough.

As someone who has built a career around designing and executing strategies in the legal industry, I can't imagine execution without the clear, guiding light of strategy. When it comes to technology implementations (websites, experience databases, proposal centers, CRM tools), the reason that these initiatives are under-serving their firm stakeholders is that there is no strategy driving the execution. I wrote about this a few blog posts ago, while quoting Richard Hsu from King & Spalding.

Every initiative worth investing in demands strategy at the outset. If you can't clearly articulate what it is, then don't start your execution - you aren't ready. It will fail. What does failure look like? Scope that can't be defined, budgets that increase at all phases, expectations that won't be met, timelines that extend months or years beyond the original launch date, and dissatisfaction that runs up and down the organization. I have seen this failure side-swipe many careers.

I have also seen "strategy" kill law firms because the firms were ill-advised (i.e., the wrong strategy for the firm) or because the firms didn't have the commitment to execute (i.e., invest in the right people to do the job).

The first law firm for which I served as marketing director from 1987-1992 hired one of the industry's largest legal management firms to develop a strategic plan. More than a million dollars later (in 1991-92 dollars), the firm was completely ill-prepared to survive the recession of the early nineties. How the planners could have missed the economic and competitive indicators pointing to the financial collapse of the real estate and banking industries was astonishing to all of us. I never heard what the strategy was supposed to be because I moved on, but the firm failed two years later.

I also believe that one of the most strategic things marketers and IT professionals can do is brilliantly execute. That's where the results live. I have seen both teams wanting to be defined by how strategic they are, believing that the roll-up-the-sleeves parts of the job are too "blue collar" and that they are somehow a lower-class stepchild of strategy.

Designing a successful execution team is highly strategic. Too often we hire people to fill job openings comprised of job task lists, frequently without fully understanding how their daily work will support broader strategy, or how it will fit into the execution assembly line. The hIring of key law firm positions is often handled so far outside the executive office (and thus removed from firm strategy and goals), firms end up with well-intentioned people who have no idea what they should be doing. They are given orders by supervisors who are also too far removed from the strategic core of the firm. These new hires are doomed to be unhappy because their execution may never measure up. How can it? It isn't supporting strategy.

This goes for the hiring of young associates in corporate law firms as well. They are given discrete tasks to complete without a full understanding of what the client hopes to achieve. What opportunity is driving this research? What problem are we hoping to solve? What horizon issue are we hoping to get out in front of? I think, perhaps naively, that attrition among the young associates would lessen if they understood that the work they were doing was tied to a client's bigger goal or purpose. They could feel a part of something, as opposed to churning hours day after day.

The term "strange bedfellows" was first used in Shakespeare's The Tempest, when, according to Wikipedia, Trinculo crawls under the cloak of a man he believes to be dead to shelter himself from a storm, saying, "Alas, the storm is come again! My best way is to creep under his gaberdine; there is no other shelter hereabouts: misery acquaints a man with strange bed-fellows."

Strange bedfellows is defined as "a strange alliance, often formed between parites who would normally be enemies who have come together for a common, often urgent cause." I posit that brilliant strategy and brilliant execution should be so intertwined that they can't be separated. There should be no choice of one over the other. They are inextricably linked and both fundamentally essential to the success that we want to achieve.

 

Your vote and opinion really matter to me! Deadline to vote: Friday, March 30

I am proud to announce that my company, Content Pilot, has been included in the first-ever National Law Journal list of legal vendors for 2012. We have worked hard to be a part of this important national list - and we'll work even harder to stay on it.

https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/NLJBest2012

If you think highly of us, we would be honored if you would take a moment to vote for us in the following categories:

#27 - Who offers the best LEGAL MARKETING AND BRANDING SERVICES?

#28 - Who offers the best LAW FIRM WEBSITE DESIGN SERVICES?

#60 - Who offers the best LAW FIRM PROPOSAL AUTOMATION & EXPERIENCE MANAGEMENT SOLUTION?

If the numbers don't correspond to these noted here, worry not (they may vary by the position you note in your entry) - please look for the text titles as displayed above.

The deadline is this Friday, March 30. Thank you VERY much!! Deborah

Content Pilot's "Velocity" wins IAC Awards - Best Legal Mobile Application

NEWS RELEASE - March 26, 2012

THE 2012 INTERNET ADVERTISING COMPETITION AWARDS (iAC) HONORS CONTENT PILOT'S "VELOCITY"

The first mobile app to drive sales in the legal industry wins "Best Legal Mobile Application"

Dallas, Texas -- Content Pilot LLC announced today that Velocity™, the first mobile application that drives sales for lawyers and other professionals in professional services firms, won “Best Legal Mobile Application” in the 2012 Internet Advertising Competition Awards. The Internet Advertising Competition (IAC) Awards are produced by the Web Marketing Association to “honor excellence in online advertising, recognize the individuals and organizations responsible, and showcase the best in award winning Internet advertising.” In 2011, more than 86 industries were represented in the competition.

Law firms using Velocity have the clear advantage of their lawyers being able to search on their iPhone, BlackBerry, iPad or other mobile device at critical moments in business development discussions. The app intuitively organizes and pulls lawyers’ experience, client, team and other information so lawyers will never again miss critical business development opportunities.

“We are ecstatic that Velocity is getting this broad industry recognition. It cuts through barriers to success that lawyers have in sales and cross-selling, and it is ahead of the curve in terms of where smart phone and tablet technology is headed.” explains Deborah McMurray, CEO and Strategy Architect for Content Pilot and a former law firm chief marketing officer.

The IAC Awards were formally announced today.

About Velocity:

Velocity is patent pending, and is powered by Content Pilot, an industry leader that provides business development and marketing technologies to professional services firms, including proposal
centers, websites, experience databases and more.

About Content Pilot:

Content Pilot LLC (www.contentpilot.net) is a Dallas-headquartered marketing strategy and
technology company launched in 2006 that serves leading law firms and other professional services firms across the U.S. For more information about Velocity: Contact Deborah McMurray at
214.351.9690 or 972.897.4921 by phone or email at mcmurray@contentpilot.net.

The Elephant in the Room: Marketing Technology Trends you can't Afford to Ignore

That's the title of our ILTA/LMA panel at the Legal Marketing Association's pre-conference CMO session tomorrow. (This is the first formal joint venture between LMA and ILTA - the first of many, I hope.) Starting at 11 CT, Kate Cain, the new Director of Market Intelligence at Sidley, will kick off our session as moderator. Panelists are Joe Calve, CMO at Morrison & Foerster; Mark Greene, Chief Business Development Officer at Waller; Bob Robertson, Chief Marketing Officer at Greenberg Traurig; and me.

We had attendees complete a two-minute survey in advance of our session so we could tailor our remarks to their interests. The hottest button issues of this CMO audience are: CRM, experience databases and proposal centers, websites and social media. And we are covering all these topics, sharing trends, then discussing our real-world experiences to make the planning, process and implementations successful. All of us have a business focus - a use-case focus, rather than climbing into the features of the technology tools. We all believe this is where success begins.

If you are interested in receiving a copy of our handouts after tomorrow, please email me at mcmurray@contentpilot.net.

I hope to see you at the conference! (If you are at LMA, please stop by the Content Pilot booth - #316 - and say hi.)

SMU Law School Law Practice Management Class 2012 - What's on their minds?

Last week I taught Southern Methodist University's Law Practice Management class - for the third year in a row. In 2011, the students were mostly 2Ls, but this year, there was an equal mix of 4Es (evening students who have fulltime jobs during the day), second and third years. They are in this class not to learn about the practice of law, but to study the business of law. (Read last year's blog post about this class.)

This course was created and is taught by Mark Shank, partner in the litigation boutique, Gruber Hurst Johansen Hail Shank.

Like last year, I kicked off my presentation, "Marketing on the Internet", by asking two questions:

1. When you think of starting your careers in a year or two, what is the biggest opportunity that you see the Internet can bring you?
2. What is your greatest fear when you think about the Internet and your career?

We discussed the students' answers before I continued with the Ten Foundational Best Practices of law firm websites, and the increasingly far-reaching world of serious social media. I've written about both on this blog.

Because these students are covering the "real world" aspects of running a law practice, they will be much better prepared than their classmates who don't understand the complexities of law firm profitability, client relationship management, service delivery, business development - and yes, the opportunities and risks associated with marketing on the Internet.

Here is how the students answered the first question (I am using their names with their permission - and you can find them all on LinkedIn if you want to get better acquainted with them):

1. Steven Strobl (a 4E entrepreneur): The biggest opportunity that the Internet can bring . . . is the ability to easily, cheaply communicate at a global level. The Internet is the ultimate symbol of services globalization. More people are connected every year, making it one of the easiest ways to increase your clientele on a global scale.
2. Brett Talley: The Internet is an easy way to connect with clients and provide info about your law firm. The problem is that a lot of firms use web pages in much the same way, and they often all look the same to prospective clients. So, the way the Internet is being utilized currently provides an opportunity to do something different - to stand out.
3. Laura Fenstad (2L): Biggest opportunity that I see are websites that rank law firms and give people a chance to blog about their experiences.
4. Emily Benbrook: Online client reviews of the work attorneys have previously provided for them. Yelp, Google Reviews, etc.
5. J. Brooks Durham (2L): You can learn about your new employer and learn how to advance in that practice area by learning about the career path of the partners and senior associates. Often there is information available online that you cannot get from them face-to-face.
6. Chase Crosby: Access to a wider consumer base, which (while it presents a greater set of challenges) also offers a greater chance of success. And actually making a substantial difference in society.
7. Scott I. Hooker: It gives me the opportunity to target the niche I wish to develop. In my case, estate, business and tax planning. Over the long-term, if I can carve out such a niche, it gives me a chance to target that niche as a prominent practitioner in it.
8. Thuy Nguyen: Exposure to an audience outside your immediate network.
9. Justin Wilson (2L): I'd like to use the Internet as a means for educating legal clients to the process my trial animation business will use to revolutionize the way animations are used as demonstrative evidence - through cinematic techniques like motion-capture.
10. Sarah Russell (2L): Advertising/publishing, quick access to information. many forums for communication.
11. Cade Jobe (3L): Social media - from jobs to contacts to customer service. I don't trust a company that doesn't have a website and it's getting that way with social media.
12. Clarence Wilson (3L): Marketing and branding to a global market.
13. Chase Potter: The plethora of information it provides me.
14. Greg McAllister (an alumnus of this class from two years ago, and now an associate at Gruber Hurst Johansen Hail & Shank): Social media - passive marketing, but opportunities to be active, plus SEO opportunities. Build your brand on your law firm's website.

Unlike some lawyers who have been practicing for a few years (although it's not entirely a function of age or generation), these guys get the enormous potential of the digital assets available.

Here are some of their fears:

1. Steven: Over-regulation or excessive government control. SOPA/PIPA are good recent examples. Further, depersonalization of legal services concerns me. Everyone interacts screen-to-screen more than face-to-face these days. This can reduce the drive to engage in more meaningful ways (more meaningful than "I need XYZ, please respond.")
2. Brett: Easier for clients to contact you via email, leads to them to expect more communication and quicker responses.
3. Laura: Losing a trial and having a reputation ruined.
4. Emily: Software or websites providing legal advice or services for clients - and thus stripping business from attorneys.
5. Brooks: New employer may lie on the website, so you think you are taking a job at one firm and end up at a completely different firm. And ending up on WSJ Blog bad writing examples.
6. Chase: Because of the easy access, how do you "brand" yourself in a manner that is both unique/specialized and valuable to a wide consumer base. The fear is in finding that optimal mix when it seems as though the Internet has grown the number of competitors.
7. Scott: Probably the biggest fear is the Internet's permanence, especially regarding disgruntled clients or other negatives. It's also the challenge of establishing a reputation at all online as one builds a practice.
8. Thuy: The possibility that you can't congtrol what someone else will post about you on the Internet and the irreparable damage it could cause to your reputation.
9. Justin: I fear potential clients won't find my site in a Google search (not being on the first page in a Google search).
10. Sarah: Things I don't want out there getting published (particularly quotes being taken out of context).
11. Cade: Making a mistake and it being published on the web.
12. Clarence: Damage control.
13. Chase: The plethora of information it provides clients or potential clients.
14. Greg: Missed opportunities. Failure to take advantage of it all.

As natural as it is for these students to "live" online, they have most of the same fears that practicing lawyers have. Last year, the big fear of these students was "privacy," and I cautioned them about posting things on Facebook (or anywhere) that could embarrass them or someone close to them later. Strangely, this year it didn't come up, although reputational risk was mentioned several times.

Advice to all law firms with established summer recruiting programs: Ensure that your summer clerks understand the opportunities and the perils of maintaining an active digitial presence. Feel free to download a copy of my SMU Law School presentation.

And Good Luck to the 2012 Law Practice Management class. See you on LinkedIn!

What is the dollar cost of directory referrals to your law firm website? And are the visitors worth it?

Senior marketers have been questioning the value of Martindale-Hubbell listings with increasingly loud and passionate voices. For AmLaw 100 and 200 firms, the cost ranges from a bare-bones listing in the $20,000-40,000 range to a comprehensive contract that costs well into the six-figures. And many firms have eliminated it altogether, saying “Enough is enough.” In fact, in a meeting in Houston last Friday, an AmLaw 200 executive director said, "nearly everyone on my ALA listserve across the country have dropped Martindale."

Martindale costs serious money, and it’s no wonder that the skepticism of marketers about return on investment is mounting. Martindale has never done a good job of aligning its offerings with the changing face of legal marketing and business development – especially for large firms. (As an aside, it recently eliminated the most popular and successful large firm program, Counsel to Counsel, because, I was told, Martindale executives are "focused on small law." More on this development in another post.)

Interestingly, when Chambers and Partners fully entered the U.S. market with its directory last decade, it had credibility out of the box. (According to its website, Chambers has been researching the U.S. legal market since 1999, but the U.S. directory followed later.) Because of Chambers’ solid methodology, numerous interviews with buyers of legal services about lawyers, practice groups and law firms that started in the U.K. in 1989, senior marketers and law firm management of U.S.-headquartered global firms approved the Chambers’ expenditures (and enormous investments of time each year by the marketing team - time commitments that are amebically growing) – almost without a second thought.

Last month, I participated in an American Lawyer Media webinar moderated by Elizabeth Lampert about the value of surveys, directories and rankings, which included speakers from Chambers, Best Lawyers and Morrison & Foerster. My part in the webinar was to give the corporate counsel perspective, and answer the question, “Do corporate counsel pay attention to these rankings and use the directories?”

In our world of business, we understand the rules of supply and demand. When there is market and client demand, it’s good to increase the supply of services to meet that demand. It’s a simple maxim. We now have a supply of 150 to 450 (or more) annual law firm surveys and rankings. Mine isn’t a perfect list (on the low end of that range), but I counted 38 experience or practice-based rankings, 17 lawyer rankings and directories, and 90 surveys sponsored by magazines, publications, the NLJ, ALA, ABA, NALP, Corporate Board Member and many other organizations.

What demand suggested that we needed this blizzard of statistics? A need by clients for more information? More transparency? Or do they actually cloud the true picture of a firm?

Of these 150-plus rankings and surveys, I am told by marketers that Amlaw 100-200 firms respond to an average of 25-50 requests each year. These include surveys measuring substantive experience like the Thomson League Tables and American Lawyer, feel-good surveys such as Best Places to Work and Working Mother magazine type submissions – practice and lawyer elevating ones, such as Chambers, Best Lawyers and SuperLawyers – and that is just scratching the surface.

What good are they to the law firm? At the Marketing Partner Forum last month in Miami, one leading consultant posed to the audience, “What’s the ROI on this investment of money and time on all these surveys and rankings?”

And I ask:

• Do they boost the reputation of the firm in the eyes of clients?
• Do they attract new business from prospects?
• Do they grow revenue or increase profits?

Firms typically have two diverging approaches to the individual lawyer rankings: “We will build a campaign around it and ensure that as many lawyers as possible are noticed and ranked.” Or, “Hell no – it’s frivolous and not worth the paper they’re written on.”

Most firms fall in the middle – choosing those that best elevate core practices and boost the reputations of top lawyers.

Can anyone reading this post claim that the Martindale, Chambers and other surveys and rankings have driven new clients to your firm? Or that a prospect chose your firm over another one because you had a top ranking and they didn’t? (Please post a comment if you have such a story to tell.) Note that I am not including the Thomson League Tables reporting here - I think buyers of legal services of those financial transactions do pay attention to those lists.

Ask yourself this: Do your clients and prospects read your website press releases about your 40+ lawyers ranked in this directory or that? Your website analytics will reveal how often those pages have been visited and you may be able to tell how long your visitors lingered on those pages.

How far is the divide between what lawyers want when it comes to rankings - and what buyers of legal services care about?

I first asked the questions of corporate counsel in 2007, when I interviewed more than 60 counsel in global companies around the world about how they use law firm websites. I specifically asked whether they use Martindale, Chambers and other rankings in evaluating outside counsel.

Then I asked “Do you notice law firm posts about rankings on their websites?”

In the 2007 survey, corporate counsel were using Martindale occasionally to evaluate firms and find new ones in new cities or regions where they hadn’t done business before, but no respondents said they used Chambers to find or evaluate counsel. Since 2007, conversations and interviews have suggested that after these in-house lawyers have created their short list of lawyers or firms, they may validate the referrals or seek supplemental information from Martindale and Chambers, in particular. But they also seek it from the law firm website, a Google search and LinkedIn.

In the last four years, I have had three-dozen or more discussions with corporate counsel about how they use law firm websites and what they notice on the home pages, lawyer bios and practice pages. Chambers is getting noticed only incrementally more and no one has ever mentioned Best Lawyers.

Sutherland, Asbill & Brennan LLP wanted to test the referral traffic from these three directories to their website so the marketers could make smarter investment decisions – Sutherland wanted to know, are these directories producing any tangible return? Andrea Christman, Director of Communications, ran a calculation (that she calls “unscientific,” but in my view, it’s directionally correct) of the total cost of the directory listings divided by the number of visitors referred during calendar year 2011. This resulted in a cost per website visitor (or RFI - Referrals from Investment - instead of ROI). Then she determined the cost for each ten seconds that visitors spend on the Sutherland site based on how many total minutes they stayed on the site.

I have always said that Martindale is consistently a high referrer of qualified traffic to law firm websites – even AmLaw 100-200 firms. Read my January 4, 2010 blog post called, “The Efficacy of Martindale.com as a Referrer to your Website.”

Christman found this to be true. Martindale’s per visitor cost to the firm was $12 and the cost per ten seconds of page-viewing cost the firm 52 cents.

The per visitor cost of Best Lawyers and Best Law Firms was $61 and $5.00 per ten seconds.

And the per visitor cost of Chambers was $538 and $17 per ten seconds.

Interestingly, the Martindale visitor stayed on Sutherland.com 2.8 times longer than the Google-referred visitor, and the Chambers-referred visitor spent almost 5 times longer on the site than Google.

Sutherland now has one more metric on which to evaluate its directory investments beyond what corporate counsel have said in interviews.

Any ROI calculation should be weighed against the political and cultural preferences of your partners, your reputation management goals and other factors that have nothing to do with ROI. But if you want to answer the simple question, “What are we getting for our investment of money and time?” – You now have one way of getting to a simple answer.

Mobile apps or mobile websites: What's a law firm to do??

When my company, Content Pilot, last conducted the AmLaw 100 Websites: Ten Foundational Best Practices research in Q2-3 2010, there were only four of the country's largest law firms that had mobile apps.  A few more had mobile websites, which were typically poorly designed, bare-bones renditions of their big site.  (Learn more about the Ten Foundational Best Practices by keyword searching on this blog.)

We will conduct the research again this summer, and I expect we'll see more of both.  (More on our upcoming research study and the findings about mobility and the other Foundational Best Practices later.)

Jakob Nielsen, the Internet expert on usability, writes in today's Alertbox: 

"Mobile apps currently have better usability than mobile sites, but forthcoming changes will eventually make a mobile site the superior strategy."

On its face, this is great news for law firms, which don't have the multi-million dollar Internet marketing budgets like major corporations.  The skeletal apps that we first saw from law firms had budgets estimated at $30,000 - 75,000.  I wonder if those firms think they got their money's worth - other than being among the first to bring "cool" to market.  As app development and expectations for user experience have matured, that cost is going higher and higher.  Remember, one app doesn't fit all devices - if you want your app to reach everyone, you need to design it for iPhones, Androids, BlackBerrys, and all forms of tablets (iPad, Kindle Fire, Samsung, etc.). 

If your law firm has an actual application that it wants to push to buyers of legal services, design an app.  If you simply want visitors to have a great experience with your website on a mobile device, then design a highly usable mobile website.

Nielsen says that today, apps perform better in usability testing:

"As of this writing, there's no contest: ship mobile apps if you can afford it. Our usability studies with mobile devices clearly show that users perform better with apps than with mobile sites. (Mobile sites have higher measured usability than desktop sites when used on a phone, but mobile apps score even higher.)

The empirical data is really all you need to know. It's a fact that apps beat mobile sites in testing."

Nielsen continues though, and says:

"In the future, the cost-benefit tradeoff for apps vs. mobile sites will change.

Although I just said that computers will become 100 times more powerful, this doesn't necessarily mean that the iPhone 14 will be 100 times faster than the iPhone 4S. It's more likely that hardware advances will be split between speed and other mobile priorities, especially battery lifetime. So, a future phone might be only 10 times faster (but will be thinner, lighter, and able to run much longer between charges), whereas download times will be cut by a factor 57.

The expense of mobile apps will increase because there will be more platforms to develop for. At a minimum, you'll have to support Android, iOS, and Windows Phone. Furthermore, many of these platforms will likely fork into multiple subplatforms that require different apps for a decent user experience."

Jakob Nielsen advocates up to three mobile websites for optimal usability - one each for Smart Phones, mid-sized tablets and for larger tablets.

"It's only realistic to expect even further UI diversity in the future. This will make it extremely expensive to ship mobile apps.

In contrast, mobile sites will retain some cross-platform capabilities, so you won't need as many different designs. High-end sites will need 3 mobile designs to target phones, mid-sized tablets (like Kindle Fire), and big tablets. Using ideas like responsive design will let you adapt each of these site versions to a range of screen sizes and capabilities. The same basic UI design will work for both a 6.8-inch tablet and a 7.5-inch tablet if you simply shrink or stretch things a bit. (A 5-inch phone would require a different design, with fewer features and abbreviated content.)"

So - today, my advice to law firms that want to optimize access of their websites and can afford to invest in mobility is to design the best mobile website for the highest used devices.  According to the website analytics that we follow, iPhones and iPads are still a low percentage of visitors to law firm websites.  But those visitors have steadily increased, and we believe this traffic will grow exponentially.  So - design mobile sites for Smart Phones and large tablets.

For law firms that don't have Internet mobility locked into your budget, then ensure that your current website is "mobile friendly."  Every website launched today should, at a minimum, be designed for easy access on a mobile device.

A final piece of advice about mobile website design:  Don't let a developer take your current desktop site and simply scale it back.  Those sites are typically ugly, don't perform well or deliver what visitors want, and developers are not invested in what buyers of legal services are looking for from your firm.  Hire a designer who understands buyer behavior and the plusses and minuses of website mobility and user experience.

 

Experience Management - It's been elevated to mission critical.

I have had more than a dozen conversations with AmLaw 100 and 200 firm leaders starting in Q4 2011 and continuing through January 2012.  They identified cross-selling and revenue growth as their top priorities for 2012.

As resolved as they are about that, they also admitted that they aren’t entirely sure how to increase cross-selling success.  After all, lawyers have tried cross-selling since my first in-house legal marketing position in 1987 (and likely before then) – and at its most successful, it has had tepid results.

We all understand the obstacles to cross-selling.  A well-conceived experience database can’t fix all of them, but done right, it can fix these two age-old complaints:  “I can’t cross-sell, because I don’t know what my partners do.”  Or, they say, “I don’t trust the data.”

One more thing on the minds of managing partners that causes them to lose sleep at night: How can they fully integrate the lateral partners they’ve hired over the last year (read: so they can be profitable as quickly as possible)?  In 2011, we saw 60 law firm mergers, up 54% over 2010.  Every one of the partners who changed firms brought Excel spreadsheets and other documents filled with matters they’ve done, hoping their deals and cases would quickly be incorporated into the new law firm’s experience coffers.  This past January, in less than a two-week period of time, five U.S. mergers were announced.  If we keep up this pace, we’ll have more than 130 mergers this year (source: Altman Weil).

In the short lifetime of these experience management tools, they have gone from being an IT-only project, then they moved to the knowledge management team, then on to the marketing/business development department – and now, to the law firm’s executive office. We hope this means that the project teams will get the resources (people, time, technology) to do them right.

Results from the ILTA Experience Management Survey

To prepare for a January 31, 2012 International Legal Technology Association (ILTA) webinar on experience databases (It’s worth listening to the recording of the entire webinar on the ILTA website - with Lisa Simon and Kathrine Cain, it was excellent. ), we conducted a short survey.  We wanted to know:

• Where are firms in their experience database life cycle? Of 48 respondents, 29% were in the implementation stage, 23% were in each of the planning or maintenance phases, 17% were upgrading/replacing their systems, and 8% were still at the very beginning – thinking about it.
• Will they build it or buy one from an outside vendor? 53% said “Buy” and 45% said, “Build.”  The “Buy” group noted primarily two companies as their vendor, Hubbard One and Content Pilot each received seven votes, two other companies were mentioned once or twice, and several said they were still investigating options or “unsure.”
• With what systems will they integrate?  “Financial” had 70% of the responses, with conflicts and records receiving 23% and 30% respectively. “Other” received a high percentage of responses, and included systems such as CRM, website, ERM, proposal tools, document management systems and HR databases.
• Who is the content owner of your experience database?  Marketing and business development were the two largest groups, scoring 77% and 40% respectively. The IT department only received 4% of the votes and knowledge management (KM) received 6%.

Is this a big firm only initiative?  It doesn’t have to be, but 63% of the respondents were in firms 350 lawyers and larger.  37% were in firms 50 to 349 lawyers.

Your Tool is only as Good as the Content

Given the promotion of experience management from back-office-tactical to strategic, what’s the best way to ensure the trusted nature of your content?  One over-arching answer is to start your planning in the right place.  (That sounds like an over-simplification, but we regularly see firms with messes on their hands because of no strategic understanding of the project and its objectives, and ultimately poor planning, start to launch.) Whether a brand new system, a refresh or upgrade, or just adding new practices – start with these questions:

1. What data gathering processes and workflow already exist? 
2. What data are already accessible in documents or other databases? How clean is it?
3. Who will input new matters and how often?
4. How many fields per matter are too many – and therefore a barrier to entry and use?
5. Post-launch, how much lawyer time will be required for each new matter?
6. Who is the ultimate owner of the database and who will ensure the ongoing efficacy of the data?

Knowing the answers to these questions before you start building the tools is imperative to your successful launch and the ongoing vibrancy of your system.  The answers will dictate your strategy and the choices you make.  After launch, it’s often too late.

I can't stress enough that successful technology implementations are equally about people, process and technologies.  Often in experience database projects, strategy is missing entirely, and people and process get short shrift. 

What’s Next?

Given that it’s taken us a good 10-20 years to get where we are today, what’s next?  All the lawyers and marketers to whom I’ve spoken about this agree that for cross-selling success to improve, lawyers must learn to strike while the iron is hot.  Meaning, when lawyers are with clients and prospects at a conference, at lunch or having a drink, or riding together in a cab and the prospect asks, “Do you have anyone who does XYZ in the software industry?” – the lawyer must be able to facilitate a relevant conversation around that topic.  Right then and there. 

Waiting 24-48 hours for responses to the in-office email, “Does anyone handle XYZ in the software industry?” is not going to grow firm revenue.  The opportunity is long-gone.

Therefore, trusted mobility is next.  Look for a mobile app that integrates with your experience database and that is instantly accessible on your Smart Phone or tablet.  Clients and prospects think this is cool; consequently lawyers will think it’s cool, too.  Learn more about Content Pilot’s mobile app, Velocity™.

I also predict greater investment in these tools by law firms (in people, processes and technologies), and that there will be increased pressure from the top rung of leadership for lawyers to use them.  Hopefully daily.