“It’s human nature to stick with traditional beliefs long after they outlast any conceivable utility.” – Jim Pinkerton

If we weren’t already doing it this way, is this the way we would start?

That’s the naïve question. You should be asking it (even if the answer turns out to be “yes”).

Career Path

There’s no doubt that the job market is dismal, especially for attorneys.  I read a stat several months ago about there being one job for every 100 attorneys that are looking for jobs.

But when did “law practice” come to mean “job?”  Why are so many young attorneys becoming solo practitioners only because they can’t find work?

I admit that this one never made sense to me.  I never wanted to work for anyone else.

During the last few years of my big firm practice, I worked for a fantastic law firm.  I liked the people I worked with and the type of work I was doing.  Clients were coming in and partnership was not far around the corner.

Still, I felt like I was trading the hours of my life away. I knew that if I stayed on this path, when I reached the end of my working years, I would either (a) look back in longing at the important things I missed because I was at work or (b) be so unwilling to face this truth that I deceive myself that I had made the right choice.

Neither of these options appealed to me.

So I quit.

But so many attorneys seem unable to think like this.  They are begging at the feet of big law firms for jobs that don’t exist. They never consider that the “job security” offered by these positions is an illusion at best.  They are so invested in the system that they can’t see anything else.

But what if there was no job-dependent employment model?  What would these attorneys do?

They would recognize that they have a valuable skill and find ways to offer it in exchange for payment.

They would learn basic marketing/networking skills or form partnerships with those who do.

They would hustle and make it work.

Pricing Models

Ask yourself: Does it really make sense to break your life down into incremental 1/10 hour slots and sell those to people who aren’t interested in buying your time as much as buying results?

As both a lawyer and a human being, you are a consumer as well as a service provider.  Put yourself in the client’s shoes.  Do you want to pay for hours of your accountant’s time?  Or would you prefer to pay for a specified result?  Your clients feel the same way.

I implemented value-based pricing models at my firm in areas where they weren’t commonly used.  And I had the infrastructure in place long before the value pricing movement gathered the momentum that it has.  And the response was overwhelmingly positive.  It just makes sense.

So if others weren’t already using hourly billing, is this how you would structure your pricing model? Or are you selling the wrong thing?

Client Communication

My generation has seen the rise of communication models that have already eclipsed all of society’s prior advancements.  The legal profession has been slow to react, both at bar level (a hopelessly outdated attorney advertising paradigm, for example) and the way in which attorney structure client intake and communication.

Pretend there’s a blank slate.  How would you structure client communications?  Does it make sense for clients to set appointments and travel to your office for an item that could be handled efficiently via e-mail or a secure client interface to your website?

Or do we do things this way just because that’s how they’ve always been done?

Others?

So there’s three areas of the top of my head in 15 minutes or less.  Help me expand the list.  In what other ways are attorneys sticking with outdated models that have outlived their usefulness?  Let me know in the comments below.

I don’t like to change plans.  I believe inability to stick to your goals is usually a character flaw.  My plan was two posts per week, so my sense of self-discipline is screaming that, come hell or high water, I need to stick to two posts a week.

But that I can see that blind adherence to that schedule will be counter-productive.  Like anyone, I only have so many hours in a day.   There have been changes in circumstances over the past few months that will limit my time next quarter.

• I am about to start a huge link-building project that will be time-intensive.  I need to clear my schedule to make room for this work.
• Over the past few months, I have been able to acquire a number of niche legal blogs with great link profiles.  I need to do something with them. I am not sure what direction to take these blogs, but I don’t want to waste them.
• I need to finish out my list of free link opportunities for subscribers to my newsletter.
• I am learning to code.  I can build sites in CSS and html. I can get around the WordPress platform and develop within the Genesis framework.  I can even hack together an SEO tool every now and then to suit my needs.  But I have never learned a full programming language.  It’s time to start (I actually started several weeks ago).

I am super-excited about each of these projects.  I’m also (still) excited about this blog, though.  So the plan for the next quarter is to cut my posting here down to once per week.  I’ll reevaluate and the end of the quarter and decide where to go from there.

I’ve also decided to stop with New Year’s resolutions. I’ve made and kept a number of them, but many seemed like Pyrrhic victories.  A year is just too long to forecast in advance.  From now on, I plan to switch to quarterly resolutions, which I hope will be more manageable.

I would also like to be sure that I’m writing to your needs. Is there anything you would like to see covered here over the next quarter?  If so, send me an e-mail or reply below and I’ll try to get to it.

I fell into SEO in the early 2000s while moonlighting for a small family business as I finished by law degree.  We were looking for ways to wean the business off of paid leads.  My job was to learn how to generate our own leads using our own website.  This was before the blogging boom, so my resources were limited to online articles what I could find at the bookstore.  After doing a bit of research, I built a hideous website with Microsoft Frontpage.  I then read Search Engine Optimization for Dummies (at the time, the only book at Barnes & Noble on the topic) and applied what I learned.  Within several months, we outranked all of our lead generation sources and were completely self-sustaining.  (If only it were still so easy!)

This first brush with SEO taught me that success in internet marketing was achievable and that small businesses can leverage SEO to compete with much larger competitors. When I decided to start my own law firm several years later, I built the firm around what is now called inbound marketing (the buzzword hadn’t been coined yet).  My little one-man-firm website did pretty well.  I quickly outranked my local competitors, including those who had outsourced their law firm SEO to some of the big players in the industry.  After several months of concentrated SEO, my site had outgrown my geographic area, outranking many national websites for competitive keywords.

Of course, high rankings are only half of the equation.  To succeed, I needed to convert my visitors into paying clients.  After a bit of trial and error, I finally decided to spend time learning the basic principles of conversion rate optimization (CRO).  This science-based approach gave me a framework to further refine my internet marketing strategy.  It also taught me the most important lesson about using a firm website for lead generation:  the success of a law firm website cannot be measured by aesthetics or even by traffic, but only by how successful the site is in leading visitors to take specific actions.

Although my site did well, I was spending more time on internet marketing than I was practicing law.  Recognizing that I couldn’t be both a full-time SEO and a full-time lawyer, I looked for ways to outsource my internet marketing.  My first attempts at outsourcing taught me two things:

1. The vast majority of so-called SEO consultants prey on attorneys’ ignorance. The current SEO marketplace is overcrowded with clueless shysters who overcharge for outdated SEO tactics.  Offers abound for social bookmarking, forum spam, junk links from unrelated websites.  Very few SEOs that I spoke with knew how to rank a site in a competitive niche or to convert the traffic to paying clients.  There is no telling how much money I would have thrown away if I didn’t already have an SEO background.
2. The best SEO consultants are either doing SEO for their own sites or are too expensive for most law firms.   SEO is time-consuming, big money is involved, and the sharpest talent gravitates toward the highest fees.  The best consultants are either in-house or outside the budget of most small and medium law firms. 

My goal for this blog is to fill this gap for small and medium-sized law firms.  My experience has proven that the web is a great leveler among firms.  A smaller firm with a focused niche can outdo much larger firms with more resources.  It all comes down to knowing how to drive traffic (SEO) and convert that traffic into paying clients (CRO).

I hope to keep this blog authentic, transparent, and, above all, practical.  After spending a few months toward the end of 2011 getting the technical stuff in place and stockpiling a few posts, I’m ready to get started.  My goal for 2012 is to publish at least twice a week, on Tuesdays and Thursdays.  Feel free to subscribe to my feed and make use of the comments.