From about April to November, many of the more well-known ranking and awards organizations release their lists of accolades and recognitions for the year. At the same time, applications and submission packets are due for consideration for the following year. In fact, if you’re part of a larger law firm, your marketing folks are likely working right now on gathering the necessary materials for tens if not hundreds of these awards and rankings submissions. For many of these programs, it’s a huge amount of work.

I’m frequently asked whether these rankings and recognitions are important to clients.

I’d love to know the definitive answer myself. (A legal marketing professional I follow on LinkedIn posted a poll last week asking buyers of legal services to weigh in on how much stock they put in awards and recognitions, and I’m waiting for the results.)

I don’t remember the first time I heard the adage: “When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras.”

The saying is ascribed to Dr. Theodore Woodward, who is said to have coined the phrase in the 1940s as a handy way to describe how physicians should look for common causes for patients' symptoms, rather than rarer diagnoses.

In other words, expect the ordinary not the extraordinary.

Whether you're a new lawyer, a mid-career attorney, or a seasoned legal practitioner, your bio should be a dynamic and evolving reflection of your practice—past, present and future—and an essential tool for attracting clients, partners and opportunities.

Have you been seeing some new faces in the halls of your law firm recently? It’s the time of the year when new classes of lawyers, fresh from law school or clerkships, are joining their first law firms. My team and I just recently finished up a project drafting bios for 20 newly minted lawyers. We’ve also been working on a number of bios for lateral hires—more senior associates and partners, most coming from other firms, although a few returning to private practice after serving as in-house counsel.

Understanding the potential benefits, drawbacks and risks is important to the implementation of any technology, and critical in the context of using AI in legal marketing. Having a comprehensive strategy for integrating AI-enabled technology into your existing processes can help address some of the downsides and mitigate some of the risks. AI holds exciting possibilities for legal marketing and business development, as long as it is used cautiously and with an understanding of its benefits, limitations, and risks.

It’s that time of year again!

Elf on the Shelf has made his creep-tastic appearance in homes and all over social media. In-person holiday parties seem to back in fashion. Law firms are deep in budget season. (Sorry to bring the Scrooge energy here.)

Budget season is a stressful time for firms, lawyers and marketing professionals. As always, the prognosticators are prognosticating, and the forecasters are forecasting. And the predictions for 2024 are all over the place.

We’re hearing a lot about the “r” word these days. Economic pundits are talking about the wobbly global economy, and some legal services marketing prognosticators have been predicting that a recession (yes, I said it) will result in increased competition and a shrinking pool of legal spending as well as hiring freezes and layoffs, particularly in Big Law. Other commentators are pointing out that certain practices — litigation, bankruptcy, privacy and data security, intellectual property, tax and employment-related practices — and certain regions of the country are less likely to be impacted than transactional practices.

From my perspective, whether you’re slightly worried, braced for negative impact, cautiously optimistic or ready to take advantage of the opportunities 2023 has to offer (my recommended course of action), one important action you can take right now is to raise your profile in the marketplace.

Thought leadership has been a much bandied-about and ballyhooed term for law firms long before 2020, but the COVID-19 pandemic supercharged it.

Last year was a long and challenging slog, and I think most of us were hoping that we could leave a lot of the nasty behind when we ripped the old 2020 calendar off the wall and stuck a shiny new 2021 one up in its place. I’m hoping we could toss a few overused phrases from 2020 in the trash too. I’m sure you have your list, but here are a few of the buzzwords I’m tired of hearing:

Unprecedented times. New normal. Fake news. Thought leadership.

Last week was a “hair on fire” kind of content week for some of my clients and for me. My project list included finishing up bios for a client’s integration of more than 20 laterals and the opening of a new office; finalizing presentation materials for a three-hour workshop one client was giving and CLE materials for a conference where another was speaking; editing the articles for the next issue of a monthly, multi-article newsletter; and polishing a video script so the design team could get started on the graphics on schedule.

Midafternoon one day, another project dropped into my inbox: a client alert reporting on regulatory rulemaking just announced by a federal agency. The client was adamant that the alert be sent out by the end of the day, and emailed me and the rest of the team repeatedly asking for updates and requesting priority treatment from the proofers and marketing team members tasked with formatting and publishing the alert.

Why the rush treatment?

She wanted hers to be the first alert in clients’ inboxes.

In my last article, I explained the essential elements of an effective content program, including well-defined content pillars, the right mix of content, and alignment with your business development objective.

I also noted that different types of content work better for different stages of the buyer’s journey (which is often where the confusion around being able to get clients directly from a blog/alert/speaking engagement/email occurs), and I teased a deeper look at mapping your content into that journey.

Let’s buckle up and take that trip! (Caution: more road metaphors ahead.)

“The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.” — Content Marketing

Over the past few weeks, I’ve heard a few statements about content marketing, including:

Content marketing is dead.

We’re not getting clients from our blog/alert/article/video, so why bother?

We need content to send to the contacts on our mailing list to get them to hire us.

These statements, and the many more I hear and read, result from some myths and misunderstandings about how content marketing works.

Let’s start by dispelling the big myth: Content marketing is not dead.

But it has evolved — and it’s more challenging than ever to “win” at content marketing.