In today’s TechnoLawyer BlawgWorld post, the editors point to an article appearing in the Arizona Republic that details how a pair of Phoenix personal injury lawyers are using tablet devices to improve communication with their clients.

Improving client communication, from telephone and email messaging to document collaboration to invoicing and bill payment, have long been topics of discussion by attorneys and legal vendors alike. For more than 25 years practice management vendors have heralded their products as a solution. Claims such as ‘having all of your client’s information at your fingertips…’ had been made ad nauseum, but having the information is not the same as using it. And now finally, attorneys are beginning to appreciate the necessity of good client service.

iPad and smartphone applications are making the transition from traditional computing to mobile computing fairly seamless. As legal technology product and service providers, we need to take a hard look at our offerings and determine how we can help our legal clients become part of the ‘communication revolution’.

On a separate and personal note, I’m glad to be back to blogging after a long silence. For those of you that sent your condolences, I want to thank you for your support following the death of my father. He was truly a role model and source of inspiration for me. These have been dark days and it has been much harder for me to focus on business than I ever expected. The good news is I’m excited to be back.

This is the second post in this series. The previous post can be found here.

If you’ve got plenty of time on your hands to develop and implement your marketing strategy, this information doesn’t apply to you. But, in my experience most company executives and entrepreneurs suffer from a common malady…there’s only 24 hours in a day.

How does this limitation negatively impact your DIY marketing?

1. You’re not leveraging your resources

Building and managing a successful business is about leveraging resources. Many executives make the mistake of thinking that their college Marketing 101 course qualifies them to do the strategic analysis necessary to properly position their offerings. Or worse, they hire a low-cost recent graduate with no real-world or legal specific experience.

Marketing can become a revolving door. Executives hire a marketing person, expecting them to know their product and service offerings and ‘hit the ground running’. Most often the honeymoon period ends early and the company is back to square one. Marketing to the legal vertical is different. Using a legal marketing specialist to validate strategies and positioning and help create a logical plan is a wise investment in your business.

2. You can only handle so many #1 priorities

Most executives I meet are flooded with multiple priorities. They’re wearing lots of hats, filling several roles, and let’s face it; they haven’t got the time to dedicate to developing, implementing, and analyzing a successful strategy and plan.

Marketing planning is an intensive discipline. I personally recommend to my clients that they ‘start at the end’. By determining upfront what they want to accomplish over a given period, we are able to develop strategies and plans to reach their goals. Having specific goals allows us and them to monitor progress.

3. Your marketing becomes reactive rather than strategic

It’s easy to get sidetracked with marketing:

• Sales are off and you need to do something to fix it now
• A call comes in to sponsor a new event
• Your competitor is speaking on a panel or exhibiting at a conference
and you need to be there too

Now you’re reacting. Instead of developing a strategy, creating a plan, implementing the plan, and measuring the results, you’re all over the place. You need help filtering the noise and figuring out what actually fits into your overall strategy.

To be successful at DIY marketing you need to make it a priority, find the time to dedicate to marketing, and have the expertise and discipline to create and follow a strategic plan. If you can’t make these commitments, you’ll be hard-pressed to succeed in fulfilling your goals.

The 2010 ILTA Conference “Strategic Unity” kicked off last night with its typical relaxed excitement. The replacement venue, the new Aria hotel in Las Vegas, is enormous and it seems they’ve left no stone unturned in accommodating the ILTA organization. Despite outside temperatures well in excess of 100°, attendees and exhibitors enjoyed the cool indoor atmosphere at the opening reception.

Peggy Weschler, Program Director, was beaming as she informed me that final registration exceeded 1,100 attendees, a 37% increase over last year’s conference! Kudos to the staff of ILTA for pulling this great event together so quickly, following the tragic floods in Nashville less than four months ago. It’s great to have ILTA back on the West Coast (almost).

A Time for Change

While this year’s conference moves forward with ILTA’s historic peer groups, one of the biggest changes at ILTA is the restructuring of the peer organization. Recently announced, ILTA is moving away from its vendor specific peer groups and embracing topical categories. The new categories are:

Desktop and Application Services
Communications Technologies
Emerging Technologies
Enterprise Content Management
Financial Management
Knowledge Management
Law Department
Litigation and Practice Support
Professional Services
Risk and Records Management
Server Operations and Security
User Support Services

The Board of ILTA and their Strategic Relationship Liaisons really got this right! The new peer groups are topically aligned with the issues facing law firms, legal departments, and law practices. A quick glance at any of these categories reveals that the restructuring team has thought of just about everything.

The new structure should benefit members and vendors alike. Long time vendor-based peer groups will be replaced, evening the playing field for competitors in their categories. Going forward it will be interesting to observe how these new groups are accepted by the membership and vendor sponsors.

An article appearing on Corporate Counsel’s website this week caught my attention. Titled Disconnect Between Legal and IT Getting Worse, Survey Finds, the author Thomas Huddleston Jr. comments on research recently released by Recommind. The survey indicates a growing rift between in-house legal and the IT department in large corporations…specifically as it applies to eDiscovery.

The survey of corporate IT personnel indicated that only 26% considered eDiscovery a high priority, while 43% of the same respondents believe eDiscovery is a high priority for the legal department. But when it comes to buying authority, 78% of the respondents indicated IT was significantly involved in their organization’s eDiscovery purchase decisions, while just 32% of the respondents answered that the legal department was significantly involved. Only 28% of the organizations responding have a litigation support manager, and nearly 23% of the respondents report that IT and legal departments never meet to discuss eDiscovery.

In this year’s survey the percentage of respondents describing the relationship between IT and legal as ‘good’ or ‘very good’ has dropped from 67% to 54%. As I thought about this phenomenon, it occurred to me that the economy and staffing reductions may be at the heart of this issue. Corporate America has not been immune to cost-cutting efforts. Everyone is being asked to do more with less. Is it possible that in the process these important relationships are suffering? Going forward, how will this growing disconnect impact the ability of IT and legal to effectively and efficiently do their work? And, how does it affect the companies that provide technology products and services?

Increasingly, the Corporate market has emerged as the target of many eDiscovery vendors. It’s almost impossible to find an eDiscovery company that isn’t targeting corporate customers. Understanding the psychographics of the decision making and influencing process is critical not only to sales teams but to those developing strategic plans and budgets.

In 1992 after a seven-year career as a litigation paralegal, I decided to move into the world of marketing and selling to lawyers. I knew instinctively that my time “in the trenches” would serve me well as I went to work developing messaging and selling technology software to lawyers.

Having spent three months on a law school campus earning my paralegal certificate, I saw first-hand how law students were converted into lawyers. What I didn’t realize until I entered my new career was how many of the same factors that go into legal training influences the way lawyers buy legal products and services.

Why is the legal vertical so challenging?

1. Law School Creates Lawyers – Like medical school, the competitiveness and demand on law students fundamentally changes their personalities. From LSATs to applications, the competition starts before the first day of class. Drop-out/failing rates and class ranking struggles pervade the psyches of students forcing them to focus inward and manage their time selfishly. The better the school, the higher the class ranking, the better the job at graduation (especially in a tough job market). That competitiveness continues into the firm environment.

2. Law Firms have a Different Business Model – A carry-over from the law school mentality, law firms are a bastion of individuality and competitiveness. Rather than pulling together, law firms are made up of pockets (practice groups) that invariably distrust each other. David Maister’s article Are Law Firms Manageable? first published in The American Lawyer, addresses the issues of distrust and competitiveness, and how they impact firm values.

3. Competition is the Name of the Game – The law school process encourages critical thinking and teaches students to advocate every side of an argument. There is no right or wrong, only winning and losing arguments. Three years of arguing in law school, and it’s no wonder lawyers challenge every claim a vendor makes. As consumers, they question ‘the biggest’ and ‘the best’ and they are risk adverse. Few lawyers want to risk trying something new for fear of making a mistake and suffering the scorn of their peers…in short, they’re not early adopters by nature.

My first position after leaving the law firm was as Vice President of Sales and Marketing for a legal technology company that developed and marketed case/practice management software. From the onset, we knew we had to overcome aging Luddite managing attorneys, and reasoned that within a few short years, younger more technologically inclined lawyers would move into decision-making positions and advocate for more technology. Along with our competition, we truly believed that as younger, more tech-savvy attorneys worked their way up the ranks, they would embrace productivity enhancing technology, and by the new millennium, every attorney would use practice management software.

And yet even today, only 33% of attorneys use case/practice management (according to the 2010 “Perfect Practice® – Legal Technology Institute Case, Matter, and Practice Management System Software Study” conducted by The University of Florida Law’s Legal Technology Institute, link unavailable at this writing).

What we failed to understand at the time was that the demands placed on young attorneys to perform require them to narrowly focus on the issues at hand. Most young attorneys enter the practice of law in subservient roles and are required to use whatever technology their firms use. Their goals are limited to getting the job done, and as they mature and move through the ranks, they remain focused on getting the job done, and not on how to do the job better.

This is not to say that lawyers will never embrace technology fully. It is to say that there are factors unique to the legal industry that impact buyer behavior. As sellers of legal products and services, we need to hone-in on the specific buying characteristics of this unique market of buyers and craft messages to address their needs and the drivers that most influence them.