Legally Speaking – Legal Recruiter Blog

From the small town solo practitioner to the top national players, every law firm must get involved in marketing at some level in order to obtain and retain clients. The quality of work a firm does can maintain clients and become a source of referrals but in order to reach and garner potential clients, a certain marketing strategy must be implemented in order to achieve the firm’s goals.

Lawyers practice law. Marketers offer a service or product. Marketers and lawyers have very different backgrounds, personality types, and career expectations. Lawyers and marketers need to accommodate their differences and play to each other’s strengths in order to have a successful relationship. And so it becomes necessary for a law firm to entrust its marketing to either an outside firm or an in-house department dedicated to the promotion of their business.

Who you have marketing your services will greatly impact the success of the plan. If you entrust this task to a team with whom you do not have a relationship built on respect and clear communication, the goals will never be achieved. Broad, undefined goals will hinder the marketer’s success. An agent that is misinformed or makes assumptions about the firm’s record will sabotage the outcome of the marketing plan. This lack of clarity often results in an “us vs. them” environment, a culture that can range from tolerant to uninterested to hostile when lawyers relate to their marketing professionals.

There are key factors to consider when preparing your marketing plan. Here are just a few:

Know your business development staff and give them clear goals and expectations.

Most marketers recognize that lawyers must feel comfortable with the marketer’s style and approach to create a productive working relationship. Most marketers offer a reasonably substantial sample product and will also provide a free initial consultation. This information can help you determine whether you would like to work with a particular marketer.

Once you have chosen someone to represent you, it is the law firm’s responsibility to determine priorities, with the advice of their marketing professionals. Attorneys must learn how to delegate certain parts of the marketing plan, whether it’s sending out letters, making follow up phone calls after a seminar, sending out your monthly newsletter, or building your law firm website. Your job as an attorney is to do two things: bring in new clients and bill them for your services. Everything else should be delegated or outsourced.

It is critical you establish the priorities of your marketing plan and are willing to delegate important tasks to your key people or representative. Your relationship with a marketing executive will only be successful if they have a clear understanding of what you expect of them versus what they can reasonably deliver.

Focus on important, achievable actions that will result in satisfying clients and attracting prospects. Identify the areas of business, the specific partners, and the aspects of a marketing plan that will have the greatest impact. Recognize those practices, events, or even cities that have high potential for an expanded market.

The Right Support Can Do Wonders For Success

A well-formed and balanced team can bring about the best results in any situation. The right support may include a partner or partners whose enthusiasm and openness to the marketer’s ideas can serve as a liaison and create a nurturing relationship with the firm. Often the most senior partner is not necessarily the right person to be involved with the firm’s marketing but a partner who holds a clear understanding of the marketing goal is the best choice. A candid approach with each other will attain the right balance of experience and personnel, resulting in a common goal.

Trust & Respect Your Marketing Team!

Trust is developed and must be mutual. In order to delegate your law firm’s marketing plan you must have someone you can allocate to and you must trust them. You must believe the person entrusted with marketing has your best interests at heart and is competent. They must believe you will support their decisions and will not try to undermine their authority to make progress.

Perhaps choosing a marketing consultant who is either a practicing attorney or who formerly practiced will help gain that trust. Another possibility is to choose a consultant with considerable experience working with attorneys. Why is this important? As many of us know, most bars heavily regulate lawyer advertising, imposing all sorts of rules, so it can be essential for your marketing agent to be aware of ethics issues or at a minimum, be sensitive to them. By contrast, a marketer with no background in the law or with lawyers could recommend a marketing campaign that revolves around an ethically prohibited practice.

It is much more likely that business development staff will be respected if the expectations of the firm’s marketers are clear. If lawyers don’t know whether the marketing personnel at the firm are to perform a strategic role, a sales role, or something else, marketers may find themselves shut out of important decisions or avoided by the lawyers. Success comes when marketers and lawyers communicate clearly and with mutual respect.

Last But Certainly Not Least, Your Budget…

Ideas abound but funding is not always available for those ideas. The marketing budget is one expense that many law firms will consider reducing, or eliminating entirely, in the time of cutbacks. But studies have shown that this is the wrong move. When the economy is tight, it’s important to look at each marketing activity in terms of value and return on investment. Focus the majority of your firm’s marketing budget on investments that have low risk and high reward. If you have money left in the budget afterward, you can use it to test other marketing activities.

So whether your firm is large or small, survival rests on the basic principles of providing quality work and getting the word out there about your firm. With the assistance of a trusted, qualified marketing team the opportunities to expand your firm’s service are boundless.

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Nancy Grimes has over twenty years’ experience serving the legal industry. Clients include international, national, regional, local and independent law firms and attorneys. “Counsel to Counsel” is updated weekly. Have a question you’d like answered? Email it to ncgrimes@grimeslegal.com.

September 8, 2009

With the advent of the Internet, cell phones, wireless email devices and portable music players, many of us wear as a badge of honor our ability to multitask. But not so fast – a recent study by Stanford researchers concludes the opposite of what we might think: those of us who frequently are inundated with multiple sources of electronic information do not pay as close attention, control memory, or move from one task to another as well people who tend to complete one function or task at a time.

As part of the study, titled “Neural Predictors Of Moment-To-Moment Fluctuations In Cognitive Flexibility,” the researchers conducted several identical experiments on two groups – people who generally multitask and people who usually do not.

The groups were shown images of certain types of rectangles in one experiment, and they were told to ignore certain blue rectangles while determining the positions of red rectangles across image frames. In this experiment, it was the non-multitasking group that performed better than the multitasking group.

In yet another experiment, the non-multitasking group once more performed better than the multitasking group in picking out repeat instances of alphabetical letters appearing in sequences.

In one more experiment, the non-multitasking group again outperformed the multitasking group when it came to following instructions to focus on certain letters or numbers when shown images of letters and numbers at the same time.

Intuition may lead people to think that a multitasking population would do better at these juggling experiments than a non-multitasking group, because they supposedly are used to and generally handle multiple streams of information. But science disagrees.

At the end of the day, it appears from the Stanford study that people who multitask are less able to focus and have trouble ignoring irrelevant information. Indeed, they appear to be easily pulled away from what is important and right in front of them.

So, the next time you plan on moving back and forth between emails, text messages, Facebook, cell phone calls, television, work assignments, home projects, personal interactions, and driving a car, please consider tackling just one of these tasks at a time.

Of course, your author certainly can learn this lesson, but he was only interrupted by two phone calls while writing this piece – it could have been worse!

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Eric Sinrod is a partner in the San Francisco office of Duane Morris LLP (http://www.duanemorris.com) where he focuses on litigation matters of various types, including information technology and intellectual property disputes. His Web site is http://www.sinrodlaw.com and he can be reached at ejsinrod@duanemorris.com. To receive a weekly email link to Mr. Sinrod’s columns, please send an email to him with Subscribe in the Subject line.

This column is prepared and published for informational purposes only and should not be construed as legal advice. The views expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the author’s law firm or its individual partners.

While lateral associate hiring has generally slowed in this rough economy and in-house opportunities have become scarce, lateral partners are finding themselves in a favorable position to make a move.  Many firms have increased their efforts to hire partners in the practice areas that are proving to be profitable: intellectual property, bankruptcy, employee benefits, tax and litigation.  But just how do you initiate the change and make it a success?  It’s not as hard as one may think if you use the right tools and resources.

Often our first inclination is to network with friends or colleagues.  Be careful when calling on friends!  It may be true that a friend is always there when you need them, but in the case of calling on a friend at another firm, be mindful of the circumstances involved.  Know their status and position at the firm so his/her influence or recommendation doesn’t backfire on you.  When talking money, it is never wise to discuss compensation with friends and co-workers.  If your friend offers to counsel you on compensation negotiations, politely refuse the offer and handle it yourself.  No need for hard feelings or misguided counsel once they realize you are parleying for higher comp than theirs. 

Remember that you will have to decide if issues with the firm or negotiating with the firm are worth risking the friendship.  Sometimes it’s best to keep your allies at a distance and make your own opportunities.

So instead of relying on friends, why not trust the professionals?  This is your career we’re talking about!  You are a valuable asset and should be presented in that light.  An experienced, talented recruiter who knows the market, firm reputations and the right contacts can open doors for you that would never be accessible on your own.  You will know you are in good hands when your recruiter guides you through the entire process – from presenting firms to you that are a good fit both financially and culturally, to working on a business plan, completing questionnaires, and most of all assisting in the negotiation of your compensation and bonuses.  A recruiter that personally knows the hiring partners and recruitment coordinators can provide invaluable insight to a multitude of factors that can affect you including financial performance and stability, management style, and reputation.

Recruiters and headhunters can provide a smooth path to finding your new firm; however, it is important that you make the initial move.  Don’t just wait for them to find you!  You have to be assertive enough to initiate the first contact if you are ready for the change.  You have to do your own due diligence on firms that will best suit your practice and clients.  Being educated on the market, firm styles, and what each has to offer the other is working smart.  Often a headhunter is searching for someone to fill a specific slot within one particular firm.  That may not be the optimum position for you.

The key to a winning relationship with an experienced legal recruiter is to work as a team.  Be open to options you may not have considered.  Be sure your agent has quality information about as many firms and opportunities as possible.  Likewise, present firms that you have researched to the recruiter.  A seasoned recruiter can give you insight to a firm’s historical financial information; compensation arrangement; sources of capital; client base, as well as other issues. Additionally, you must consider the firm’s culture – will you be happy in that environment?  The way you are treated at your firm affects how successfully you practice law.  With the right support you can become an essential and vital team member.  If the firm is open to your associates joining you in your move and there are opportunities for them to make partner, it shows that they are interested in their strength and longevity.  Your recruiter may have already placed attorneys at a specific firm and can share previous experiences that demonstrate the firm’s culture.

And then of course there are issues of how to handle the process itself.  It may be years since you have had to prepare a resume or answer questions in an interview.  Your legal recruiter can advise you how to judiciously provide information to a firm you are in discussions with, what a partner can tell his or her clients about a possible move, and what to expect once you give your notice.  Counteroffers often lure a partner back because it is easier than the change but do counteroffers ever really prove to be beneficial to the partner? Your recruiter can provide guidance on these questions – rely on them to pilot you through the process step by step.

Be flexible and open to new ideas.  Listen and be patient.  Honest, open communication between you and your recruiter will result in more than just one opportunity knocking at your door!  Work smart with your recruiter to find your new firm and as a result, you, your clients and your new employer all reap the benefits.

Nancy Grimes has over twenty years’ experience serving the legal industry.  Clients include international, national, regional, local and independent law firms and attorneys.  “Counsel to Counsel” is updated weekly.  Have a question you’d like answered?  Email it to ncgrimes@grimeslegal.com.