Quick Announce

Interview conducted by Adrian Dayton, author of the “Marketing Strategy and The Law” blog at.  Based in Amherst, NY, he can be reached at 801.414.7675 and atdayton@gmail.com.

Larry Bodine, Esq. of Glen Ellyn, (Chicago) IL, is a business developer with 18 years experience who helps exclusively law firms attract and keep more clients.  He conducts business development training through Apollo Business Development. He can be reached at 630.942.0977 and LBodine@LawMarketing.com.

  

Adrian Dayton:  I understand you just got back from a business development training session with a law firm.  Before you do training, most likely you do some type of evaluation.  You evaluate the firm’s marketing plan.  What type of questions do you ask when evaluating their plan?

Larry Bodine:  Ordinarily, I’ll begin by asking if they have a marketing plan. 

Adrian Dayton:  That’s not always a given, right?

Larry Bodine:  Right.  Far and away, most law firms do not have marketing plans.  They might have an approach in mind that the management committee has, but it’s something that’s just residing in their heads and it’s not written down.  What I’ll do is try to collect the key elements that would go into a marketing plan.  A lot of it is financial data and client information. 

• I want to see what the trend line is on the firm revenues; are they going up?  If they’re calling me, it’s typically because they’re going down. 
• I’ll inquire into which practices areas are the moneymakers.  That’s always a sensitive question, but I’ll ask them to rank their areas of service in terms of how much profit they generate.  Frequently that will be the first time anyone has asked for a report like that from a lot of the firms I deal with. 
• I’ll look over their top hundred clients and try to sort them into industries.  The idea is to try to get a picture of the pipelines of revenue; where is the revenue coming into the firm. Rather than to build new pipelines, my approach has always been, let’s take the areas where you’re making a lot of money and increase those. 

Adrian Dayton:  Yes, build on your basic strength, basically.  It’s interesting, you said to me that they’re usually sensitive when you ask them which are the most profitable practice areas, and it’s another example of how law firms aren’t really comfortable with running themselves like a business.  Any other business, you’re going have spreadsheets and be tracking profitability of every sector, but law firms are more resistant to that. 

Larry Bodine:  It’s more personalized in a law firm.  Law firms are partnerships, so they’re really reluctant to create a spreadsheet that shows that the insurance defense practice is making less money than the litigation practice — because it just creates a lot of hurt feelings.  My approach is not necessarily to publicize this information within the firm, but work with management and say, “You should really focus on litigation as a marketing emphasis because that’s where you’re making your money.”  If there’s an area where you’re not making money, you don’t necessarily discontinue it unless it’s losing money, but we just won’t focus on it.  That’s really the essence of marketing: focus. 

Measuring return on investment

Adrian Dayton:  How do you recommend that firms track their return on investment when it comes to putting money into marketing and effort into marketing? 

Larry Bodine:  Planning to measure ROI is step one when you begin a marketing initiative.  Before you undertake it, you have to ask is there going to be any way that you know that it worked.  If you can’t measure it, then you shouldn’t do it.  For instance, something that is measureable might be an event where you invite a number of clients and prospective clients.  You’ll know what your out of pocket costs are.  What you want to do after that is for the following 90 days, identify any files that were generated indirectly or directly from that event, and then project forward what the annual billings will be, and you can show a return on investment. 

Adrian Dayton:  For years law firms have basically just thrown the money at these marketing initiatives without looking for measureable ROI in a lot of cases.  I think with the current state of the economy, the savvy business directors of the firms are demanding more, they’re demanding a better return on the investment. 

Larry Bodine:  I think that’s only smart.  It’s a good way to run a business, and it’s a good way for a marketing director to keep his or her job, to be able to say that “we obtained the following ROI for a particular initiative.”  My favorite example is at Dykema, a 400-lawyer firm that’s got 10 offices mainly in the Midwest. They decided to do industry marketing.  They picked four industries, and gave themselves a goal of increasing files and from current clients as well as new files from new clients.  They were able to say, “We spent about a $160,000 and we got $6 million in return, so this was definitely worth doing.”

Adrian Dayton:  That’s an interesting way to think of it, to say, “We’re going to focus on industries, on a few specific niche industries, and then we can measure because we’ll see exactly how many files we get from those industries.”

Larry Bodine:  Precisely.  To my way of thinking, it’s really the most logical approach as you look over the client list.  If you find that you have a preponderance of, or a number of clients in, the trucking industry — it makes sense to not only cross-sell all of those clients in the trucking industry and make sure that your serving them in every way that you possibly can.  You can go into Hoovers or any of the other online databases and create for yourself a list of other companies within that industry.  Basically, that’s your target list.  You should start writing articles about the trucking industry; the lawyers should start giving talks about the trucking industry, and they should join trucking industry associations.  If they’re going to do advertising, it should appear in only trucking industry publications.  That’s a really effective approach.

For lawyers it’s a little counter-intuitive to look at things by the industry because they look at things by practice group.  I could draw up a list of three trucking companies that the firm represents and their response will be, “Oh no, we do insurance defense for this one, this other one is a corporate client, that’s an estate planning client.”  They’ll proceed to tell me how these are all clients of particular practices but that’s not how clients think.

Clients don’t see themselves as a customer of practice group. They see themselves as a member of an industry.  The idea is you penetrate members of an industry because they’re all going to talk among themselves, and if you do good work, they’re going to recommend you. 

Adrian Dayton:  It seems like if there’s that focus, it’s going to make cross-selling within the practice a lot easier too. 

Larry Bodine:  That’s right.  What the clients want more than anything is an attorney who is familiar with their business and knows who the players are in their industry and can talk the terms of art of a particular industry.  Otherwise they really have no way to judge the quality of an attorney.  They can look over an attorney’s resume, and they have no way to tell if they’re looking at a lawyer that’s better than some other lawyer.  The one thing they will understand is if someone walks in and starts speaking the industry language, knows the issues of the company and the industry, and knows the other players in the field. 

Online social media

Adrian Dayton:  I’m curious what you think of the new technology, social media in particular.  How is that affecting law firms and the way they can market their services?

Larry Bodine:  Savvy law firms are strongly embracing social media.  For instance LinkedIn has become the de facto online directory of professionals worldwide.  As of June 2009, some 850,000 lawyers have created profiles on LinkedIn.  That’s just really smart.  Another example is blogging.  I don’t think there’s any more than 3,000 or 4,000 attorney blogs in the country, and this is based on information from blawgsearch.com. It’s an excellent time to start a blog.  Blogs are an excellent medium to generate inquiries, to establish and demonstrate expertise, and to get calls from the media. 

Adrian Dayton:  Certainly.  The other curious thing about that statistic is that generally lawyers are really phenomenal bloggers.  They’re good at writing interesting content in a more informal way, and it’s really enjoyable for most of the attorneys that do it. 

Larry Bodine:  Not all of them are that comfortable with blogging.  Some will think that if I write a blog, I’ll have to write a law review article.  You always need to explain that, no, just write a paragraph and a link to somewhere else.  Set up a bunch of Google alerts and follow other bloggers so that you have a full stockpile of material.   Their typical concern is how will I keep this thing going?  What if I’m in the middle of a trial and six weeks go by and I haven’t put up a post?  If that’s the situation, then you need to make friends with a corporate lawyer who is going to be in the office all the time or an associate who can keep the blog going. 

I find that I never have any trouble finding material for my own blog, the LawMarketing Blog.  Typically, before I go on a business trip, I’ll write five days worth of blog posts in advance and I can schedule them so that they appear that one comes out on Monday, one comes out on Tuesday, and for all intents and purposes, it appears that I’m posting every single day. 

Adrian Dayton:  That’s a great idea.  You said for the attorneys, find a couple of partners in crime, a couple of people to help with your blog, and it can be the blog of the three of you.  A number of successful blogs are organized that way. 

Larry Bodine:  Yes.  The other thing is that the lawyers should pick an area that really fascinates them.  For example, I went to a very conservative law firm and talked to one of the partners who said he was going to start a new blog.  I thought it would be something on article nine of the UCC, and he showed me the printout for a blog on mixed martial arts — cage fighting.  When I looked at it I thought:  This is brilliant, this is focused, it’s narrow.  It’s entertainment law, essentially.  There’s going to be all kinds of issues and cases to report, and of course it was something that this otherwise mild-mannered guy in a white shirt and a red tie just had a real deep and abiding interest in.  He had no worries that he was going to have enough material for it. 

Adrian Dayton:  Think about how great that is.  This attorney, who ordinarily wouldn’t be expanding his network, suddenly has this creative entertaining law blog about mixed martial arts, and he’s going explode his zone of influence to other like-minded people who eventually may or may not want to hire him. 

Larry Bodine:  The thing that you’re doing is that you’re putting yourself at the hub of the spokes in a wheel.  You want to put yourself in the middle so that if you’re giving an opinion on a topic like say mixed martial arts – because it involves broadcasters, venues, promoters, the fighters and all sorts of vendors, such as cage builders.  It’s just like any other entertainment industry or entertainment business.  They’re going to have all the same issues.  It’s just that the kind of entertainment that he picked is different. 

That’s what you must do in a blog, is pick out something that’s unique, some niche that hasn’t been blogged to death.  I warned him that he was going to get calls from reporters, not just about the fact that he was from a conservative firm and picked mixed martial arts as his topic.  Suppose any reporter does an article on mixed martial arts, they’re going to do a Google search or a Google blog search, and they’re going to find his blog and call him up.  He will be the de facto expert in the field. 

Adrian Dayton:  Most firms don’t really have any general strategy when it comes to online marketing and social media.  I’m curious, what kind of recommendations would you make to large or medium sized firms to dip their toe in the water and start getting involved with social media? 

Caveats

Larry Bodine:  You’re going to have to develop some guidelines and disclaimers that reading the blog doesn’t form an attorney-client relationship.  The bloggers have to know that they can’t give legal advice; however, they can comment on current news and opinion.  I’ve talked to a number of marketers who said that their latest assignment was coming up with a policy on social media.  You have all of these independent thinking lawyers out there writing posts and sometimes the firm owner will want to make it clear that this individual is speaking on his own and not on behalf of a firm.  In other cases it’s like, “No, this is a firm blog and we want everybody to connect the firm to the blog.”

Adrian Dayton:  It seems like the head guys of these firms don’t really understand social media; they don’t understand blogging.  What they’re thinking is:  We have to create a list of do-not-do all of these things, rather than saying, “Hey, let’s figure out a strategy to harness the power of these tools in a way to build our practice, and then we’ll make sure that we’re safe as well, we’ll make sure that we’re not stepping on any toes or crossing any lines.” 

Larry Bodine:  Right.  Their view is: let’s identify the risk and prevent against the downside, and then if there happens to be an upside, that’s great.  Whatever happens, we don’t want to get sued, we don’t want to violate an ethics rule, and we don’t want to create any sort of adverse publicity.  Lawyers are trained to look for the dangers and with something new, there’s always some danger that something could go wrong. 

Twitter

Adrian Dayton:  Shifting gears a little bit because you’ve got a lot of press and your well-known for your article “Twitter Not Effective for Law Firm Marketing,” and over the past weeks there’s been a lot of talk about that.  I’m curious if you’ve softened any on that stance. 

Larry Bodine:  Twitter definitely has a role in society, and you can certainly see that by the protests in Tehran in the summer of 2009.  I think Twitter is an excellent medium if you’re going to organize a protest. 

However, when you get to the world of law firm marketing, I noticed that there was a high noise to signal ratio on Twitter.  In the nine months that I have had a Twitter account, I somehow managed to collect 800+ followers, which isn’t much, but I did so without any effort at all. Then I started to see some damning statistics about Twitter.  Only one out of ten people that are on Twitter actually do 90 percent of the posts.  Also, something like 90 percent of users are all dead accounts. 

Adrian Dayton:  Larry, think about a university class.  How many students actually raise their hand and comment, right?  Or even when you present at seminars.  What percentage, even if you have a small group, participate?  You have a lot of passive viewers, and I don’t think that’s any different than what’s going on in the real world, is it? 

Larry Bodine:  True.  Except that 60 percent of Twitter users drop out after using it for a month and never return, so it would be as if you joined a club and you went back to the second meeting and 60 percent of the people were gone. 

Adrian Dayton:  I guess the other way to look at that is if you speak to a group of a hundred people and 60 percent sign up for your next seminar, that’s a pretty good close rate, right? 

Larry Bodine:  You have to do a balancing test.  Of all of the social media that are out there, you’re going to have a much higher return on investment with blogs, having a LinkedIn account or joining Legal OnRamp – rather than spending time with Twitter.  People in the legal profession are not quick to adopt unproven or brand new online social medium.  I have to tell you the truth, when I go to law firms and I ask people how many lawyers have a LinkedIn account and all of the younger people raise their hands. All of the older people who are running the firm ask, “What’s LinkedIn?”

Adrian Dayton:  I get what you’re getting at.  Maybe Twitter is about five steps ahead of where these attorneys need to go right away. 

Larry Bodine:  Yes. 

Adrian Dayton:  I can see that point, and that’s well taken. 

Larry Bodine:  If I am advising a firm and they don’t have a blog, that’s where I recommend that the firm should start.  Then I look the lawyers up on LinkedIn and see how many of them have profiles and then tell them, “You all have to set up a profile by tomorrow because I’m going send you an invitation to connect with me.”  Once you’re on LinkedIn, you can’t stop at having a profile.  Just like a car in the garage, it’s no good if it just sits there; you have go somewhere with it.  You have to join a group, participate in a discussion, ask and answer questions and make something of it.  That’s the point where I see the profession is right now.  Something such as Twitter — I just don’t think the profession is ready for it. 

A look into the future

Adrian Dayton:  That’s your final word on that, and I think we’ll see what’s going to happen.  As for whether Twitter is around in four or five years, who knows?  I just want to ask you: What’s your prediction over the next ten years?  What’s the legal marketplace going to look like ten years from now?  

Larry Bodine:  I think we’ve seen the decline of the high leverage pyramid structured law firm where you’ve got two or three associates per partner — just because clients want a partner, they don’t want an associate.  The firms that seem to be doing a lot better are the ones that are predominantly partners.  They will have a few associates who are brought on with a full expectation that they’re going to make partner. 

The other thing I think you’re going to see is law firms wise up and not wrap themselves entirely around a single industry like all the Wall Street law firms did with financial services.  When financial services tanked, all of a sudden you saw big layoffs on Wall Street.  Or insurance defense — once the insurance companies become clients, the rates start to get pressed down and it becomes a nonprofitable practice.  It doesn’t make sense to wrap yourself around one industry because then your fate is inexorability attached to that industry.  I also think we’re going to see a lot more virtual law firms. 

Adrian Dayton:  That’s a prediction we’ve heard here before, and I think that’s true.

Larry Bodine:  My favorite example is of a virtual firm is the XDL law firm, which does patent litigation, and it exists primarily on the web.  It’s a collection of litigators all across the country in different law firms.  If you have a matter to litigate in Texas or in Boston, or in Richmond, Virginia, they have a lawyer there with lots of trial experience who can handle the matter.  They lawyers just decided to go to market together as a virtual law firm. 

Adrian Dayton:  I think those are some very insightful predictions.  It’s been great having you on the program today, Larry, and we really hope we can have you back again. 

Larry Bodine:  Thanks very much, I appreciate the invitation.  It was a treat for me to talk with you.