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.

This post is the first in a series.

For nearly 10 years I’ve worked with companies that sell products and services to lawyers. In that time, I’ve spoken with many executives that decided they either couldn’t afford outside marketing/business development assistance or they knew enough to continue tackling their marketing challenges internally.

Early in our conversations, when discussing their goals, they most often cited a desire to build their revenues to a size that would allow them to attract acquisition partners, or they wanted to increase profitability. And yet today, most of those DIY companies continue to struggle to grow or survive. They do so without a plan, and often market by the ‘seat of their pants’.

So, here are 3 reasons why DIY doesn’t work in the legal industry:

1. You lack objectivity

Let’s face it. For many legal entrepreneurs, your product or service isn’t just your business, it’s your baby. You’ve developed it because of a void you identified in the market…and if it works for you, it must be good for others. But successfully marketing and building a business takes more than good ideas and passion. It requires the ability to evaluate market forces with neutrality

2. You’ve become your own focus group

You’re the expert; nobody knows your product/service as well as you. Time and again, I’ve encountered companies that are so convinced of the benefits of their product/service that they fail to listen to their market. Plus, in an ever-changing communications landscape you may not be connecting with your prospects using the channels they prefer. Successful companies find a way to involve their customers and their prospects in both their product development and their communications.

3. Your personal preferences

An early mentor taught me that the only personal preferences that ever matter are those of your customers and prospects, not your personal preferences. Everything from messaging, to marketing channels, to imagery, to the use of color and type style must be geared to your buyer persona(s). Take yourself out of the equation and put yourself into the shoes of your prospects. Will your marketing appeal to them?

To summarize, DIY marketing won’t work if you’re too close to your business. You’re the expert at what you do, but can you honestly stay abreast of all the changes to the marketing mix? And can you afford to take your own advice?

In all of the years that I’ve worked in the legal industry, I’ve repeatedly heard how slow business is in December. While nobody likes a party or down-time more than me, I’ve found December presents a few unique opportunities:

1. Take Advantage of the Impulse Buy – If your product or service is appropriate for impulse buyers, develop an offer that takes advantage of end of year-end tax spending. Small firms often look to increase deductions at this time of the year. Create a special offer that expires before December 31^st and send it to all of your unconverted leads. You just might be surprised at the uptick in sales.

2. Its Not Too Late to Plan – If you’ve been too busy to worry about a ‘plan’ for next year, now’s the perfect time. With the activity slowdown, this is an excellent opportunity to get some quiet, thinking time. Start big, with your overall goals, and ask yourself this question “what does success in 2011 look like?” Once you’ve got that answer, start breaking it down into the pieces and the timing. Whether you’re starting with revenue, users, clients, or income per customer/client, identify the goal and then work backwards to incorporate milestones and build your plan. Write it down…if the plan exists only in your head, the chances of success are significantly reduced.

3. Learn Something New/Do Something New – Social marketing is more than just buzz. Failure to incorporate a social strategy into your marketing program is certain to result in a negative impact on your business in 2011. But where to start? A website update, a blog, SEO, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are all viable options. Pick one…they each have their own strengths…and commit to it. Incorporate it into your plan and set aside some time to learn the benefits and figure out how to make it work for you. There’s a wealth of information (much of it free) online to help you get started.

At this point it isn’t what you do that’s important…it’s doing something! Use your ‘down-time’ wisely and when next December 2011 comes around, you’ll appreciate the results. That’s how I’m planning to spend my December slow-down.

Planning for LegalTech New York is in full swing at many companies. The 2011 event promises to kick-off a year full of innovation as the legal industry continues to grapple with changes to its business model.

Practice efficiency, alternative billing, and cloud computing are just a few of the topics on the table. New technology companies are teeing up their product launches and long-time industry leaders are revisiting their offerings to assure they remain competitive. Where do you fit in?

Something for everyone
With 50% of the attendees representing small and mid-sized firms, and the balance large and mega firms, there’s plenty of attendees for everyone. Small and mid-sized firms are receiving more attention from companies that just a couple of years ago were chasing large law firms or corporate legal department clients.

Will you be ready?
Every year, I hear a handful of exhibitors complain that LegalTech is too expensive and they just didn’t get enough value from their participation. Inevitably some of them drop out and don’t return. Almost without exception, they are the companies that show up, set up their booths and wait for an onslaught of new business…that’s their mistake. Like any marketing effort worth doing, planning needs to go beyond designing and shipping your booth and ordering ‘chotchkies’. The most successful companies start at the end…defining success. They ask themselves:

• At the end of the show, how will we quantify our success (i.e. # of new prospects, # of meetings, client meetings, new business partnership opportunities, etc.)?
• What pre-show activities do we need to undertake to assure success? Plan your outreach to accomplish your goals…don’t expect LegalTech to do all of your work for you.
• What’s our post-show plan? Know before you board the plane exactly how you’ll follow-through on your new business opportunities.

There’s no better time than now to start working on LegalTech 2011
If you haven’t started your LegalTech 2011 planning, or you haven’t committed to your space yet, there’s no time like today! January 31^st will be here sooner than you think.

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.

In the last couple of weeks I’ve been thinking about how few organizations really commit to or trust their marketing efforts. Regardless of the size of the organization, marketing typically comprises a significant portion of the budget, but it is not well understood or respected by other members of the organization.

If I had a dime for every time I’ve heard a sales executive lament that marketing “isn’t particularly helpful’, or a financial manager complaining about marketing expenses, I’d have retired to a sandy beach (with a case of Zinfandel)  a long time ago. At the same time, marketers complain that we’re misunderstood and nobody appreciates what we’re doing.

Marketing departments and budgets are usually the first areas cut during difficult economies or sales slowdowns, and they often take the blame when revenue expectations fall short. In order to succeed in the long term, marketing needs to be unified with every other department within the organization.

So how do we align marketing with sales, business development, finance, and even customer support? We find out what they need and support them. It couldn’t be easier! Treat the departments within the company as valued clients and partners and before you know it, they’ll be your allies and advocates.

One of my first challenges after being hired at Law.com, was to identify and then support the best revenue opportunities. After evaluating several products, I determined that Online CLE offered significant short and long term revenue potential. The problem was, Online CLE wasn’t selling and in an effort to reduce expenses, the product was on the chopping block. Not to be deterred, I worked with the manager of the department, corporate executives, and the financial managers and convinced them to test a different approach to how we packaged our CLE products. With everyone’s buy-in and a small test budget we set out to repackage CLE and market the new offering. Our first test returned such a positive result that everyone quickly got onboard and we were able to efficiently scale-up the offering.

Every day, we marketers write content for our organizations preaching how the company listens to its customers, it’s time we take that message to heart and take our own advice.

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.

Last week I wrote about legal vendors and the need to start changing the negative connotation within the legal vertical. An email from Brad Blickstein, of the Blickstein Group, made me stop and reflect on how we (vendors) need to take responsibility, and become part of the solution. Here’s what Brad had to say:

“… your blog entry on “vendors” …got me thinking. I think a major part of the problem is that “vendors” use salespeople while consultants and law firms let their professionals sell their services. This leads the clients to feel more like they are being “sold to” as opposed to “advised,” and that assumes that the salespeople are acting professionally and smartly. (You and I both know that’s not always the case.) I think if you’re going to hire a sales force who are separate from the folks actually providing services – and I’m not sure there’s a choice – you are going to deal with some fallout. Clients do not get 5 calls in an hour from people they’ve never met at various consulting firms saying, “I’ll be in Chicago on the 23rd, can I stop by your office?”

Much has been written and spoken about ‘Consultative Selling”. Interestingly, BusinessDictionary.com offers the following definition:

“Personal selling in which a salesperson plays the role of a consultant. He or she first assists the buyer in identifying his or her needs, and then suggesting products that satisfy those needs.”

At first blush, this is a rather cynical definition, but it makes sense. Playing a role or acting like a consultant interested in the buyer/prospect’s needs is an insult. While I’m not implying that every, or even most, salespeople are uncaring product shills, we need to re-examine our sales and communications strategies.
As Vendors we need to start by taking stock of our sales strategies. Are we:

• Too focused on short term results?
• Building long-term trusted relationships, or renting rolodexes and role playing?
• Communicating our value propositions to the proper market, or taking the shotgun approach?

These economic times are difficult for everyone. Long-term success will only be realized through the hard work and patience required to build open and honest relationships.

If we’re going to change the negative view of vendors in the legal industry, we need to make the first changes.

The definition of vendor – one that sells something*, is not a negative implication. Let’s face it, we all sell something! Legal Vendor is a broad category and I would argue one that includes consultants. Consultants are selling their services and expertise, but they’re still selling. And lawyers/law firms are selling whether they like to think so or not. If you’re not selling, you’re probably about to fail.

For over 18 years I have worked for or with legal vendors. In the early 1990’s we were often called on to educate audiences about the benefits of technology or conduct product ‘shoot-outs’, and then seemingly overnight vendors got a bad name in the legal industry. We were viewed as the bad-guys or hucksters. The how’s and why’s of how we got here are worth examining, but they’re probably not as important as what we do to change relationships between customers and providers.

How can we find a way to swing the pendulum back and should we even try?

I believe we must work together to create partnerships that are mutually beneficial. Every vendor needs to take an honest look at what they promise and how they deliver on those promises. How is it possible that every company is the ‘industry-leading’ or ‘insert your rhetoric here’? Attorneys and the other professionals working in law firms are a cynical bunch, they’ve been burned, their expectations haven’t been met, and they’re tired of the rhetoric…it’s time to deliver.

Can law firm clients and prospects be turned around to think more positively about legal vendors? I think so. When legal providers wake up and realize that their primary competition is internal and not external, they’ve taken to first step to success. Ask the hard questions:

» How can we meet expectations?
» Are we delivering on our promises?
» What can we do to improve?

The legal profession is dynamic and the changes we’ve seen over the past 24 months are enormous. Now is the perfect time for vendors to engage with clients and prospects to forge truly meaningful partnerships. If we start now, we can begin to change how we are perceived.

*”vendor.” Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of Law. Merriam-Webster, Inc. 14 Jul. 2010. <Dictionary.com http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/vendor>.