If you have what we call, “hurry sickness,” that state of being in which you are always rushing, always pressed for time and always at risk of arriving late – even to important meetings, resolve to make 2012 the year in which you take control of your time.

It can be done. As we point out in our book, Time Management for Attorneys: A Lawyer’s Guide to Decreasing Stress, Eliminating Interruptions and Getting Home on Time, you may never be able to control 100% of your time, but with a little planning and a lot of self-awareness, you can make the kind of choices that will allow you to slow the pace down. It’s worth a try. Read More….

As marketing advisors, one question we constantly grapple with is this: how can time-starved law¬yers become efficient, but still effective marketers? Driven to distrac¬tion by constant interruptions, difficult staffing issues and demanding clients, most attorneys don’t take the time — to do what it takes.

Yet, many of our attorney clients are very good at market¬ing when placed in the right situations. It’s getting them there that’s the problem. Making phone calls with con¬tacts often involves a lot of phone tag, calendaring client development events takes time, planning the basic logistics of marketing is distracting.

As a rule, attorneys aren’t very good at the planning and logistics behind their marketing plan. Yet this phase is essential – without someone to initiate and organize these steps, most market¬ing efforts will never get off the ground.

If you aren’t successful in setting up lunches, dinners and meetings with referral sources, your client development efforts aren’t going to be very strategic. If you’re not meeting with the right people, then you’re relying on nothing more than happenstance to promote your practice. Happenstance will take you only so far. We advise our clients to take a more proactive approach.
Large firms can rely upon marketing directors to deal with client development. But what does the small firm practitioner do? Read More….

In the rapidly changing world of Social Media Marketing, we at Atticus struggle with the proper stance to take when advising attorneys on the best and most effective marketing strategies: should we advise clients to invest large amounts of time creating and maintaining a Firm Facebook page? Is it really a good idea to create a profile on AVVO when the ethics rules have not caught up with the issue of on-line testimonials? Will other professionals really trust those they meet on LinkedIn and actually send referrals?

Anecdotal evidence abounds.

We hear stories of great connections made through SMM almost weekly, but what evidence do we really have that attorneys are gaining new clients through their on-line efforts? New clients are the only outcomes that count when determining whether or not a marketing strategy is truly successful.

Brand awareness is nice, name recognition is important and connecting with pithy commentary is fun — but does it all translate in to more clients coming through the door? Read More….

One of the most effective things you can do to impact your referral marketing is to create and use a Top Twenty list. The Top Twenty list refers to those referral sources that are the most active and send you your highest quality business. This group can be made up of people in your social and family networks, your colleagues, clients, and other professionals. To qualify for the list, they must send you good clients more frequently than the rest of your referral sources.

Many of you already have all of your referral sources listed in your Rolodex, address book or computer database. From here it’s very easy to create your own Top Twenty list.

Assess which of your referral sources fit the qualifications and then gather them into one separate list with their contact information. Once the list is made you can create a shortcut to it on your desktop for easy access, transfer all the names and numbers into your cell phone for effortless calling, or print out the list and keep it under your phone at the office. Putting it where you can access it easily means you are more likely to use it.

You may not have a full roster of people yet if you are just beginning to develop new clients, but don’t worry. The idea behind putting them all on one list allows you to see how many you have and reminds you that you need to add more names.

To add more names you must go where your referral sources go. If other lawyers are your best referral sources, go to bar meetings and make it a point to meet new people. Then develop these new relationships over time.

The best marketers regard the people in their Top Twenty list as friends and make a serious effort to sustain and deepen the relationships. The people that make up your Top Twenty List deserve to be recognized as a big part of your marketing plan and treated as such. To be effective in your dealings with them, you must continue to nurture the relationships and build on whatever level of trust and rapport that exists between you.

Learning how to develop and maintain a successful Top Twenty List is just one of the 21 Marketing Assets discussed in our book, How Good Attorneys Become Great Rainmakers: A Breakthrough Referral Marketing Process. In this book, which is based on our live Rainmakers program, we discuss the 21 Marketing Assets and 5 habits you must acquire on your way to mastering the process of rainmaking.

Many of the top-producing attorneys we work with meet at the end of each year with their partners and teams to check the health of their marketing efforts, discuss threats and trends in their market and analyze the usefulness of their marketing strategies. The legal landscape is not static. Referral sources dry up, die or move away; you are joined by a new partner; legislation changes the services you provide; you take on a newsworthy case or you decide to launch a new practice area. These are just a few of the many changes that can occur over the course of a year in your firm. It pays to briefly stop and take a look backwards to see if a course correction is needed for the future.

A long time Atticus client in the Midwest, working with his wife and partner, heads up a rapidly growing tax assessment firm. In spite of a crushing schedule, he understands the power of stopping once a year, gathering up his team and talking about what worked and what didn’t in the last year. It was particularly important to do this last year because the firm tried a couple of new marketing strategies. So they held a retreat focused entirely on assessing the results of their new client development activities. Read More….

In their new book, marketing experts Tim Tobin and Lisa Braziel suggest that the activity generated by social media sites is analogous to a giant, ongoing 24-hour cocktail party. In fact, the name of their book neatly sums up their philosophy: Social Media Marketing Is A Cocktail Party: Why You Already Know the Rules of Social Media Marketing.

They encourage readers to believe that social media sites like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter create an ongoing cyber party that you can step into and out of at will. While there’s no question that social media marketing offers another avenue to market yourself and build relationships with clients, referral sources and experts in your field – the cocktail party analogy seems like a stretch.

Or does it? Let’s take a closer look. Read More….

You’re a good attorney. And, up until this point, you’ve done a great job of developing the mindset and perspective of a good attorney. But now, it’s time to start learning to think like a great Rainmaker. You have what it takes—but you must learn how to apply it strategically. It’s important that you make a habit out of educating yourself about marketing at every opportunity.

It’s important to continually “sharpen the saw” when it comes to your marketing skills. The term “sharpening the saw” comes from an old story, and I’ll share it with you now, because I believe that rainmakers can learn a lot from it. Read More….

If you want to learn how successful people became successful, look at their habits. Habits consistently adhered to are the secret underpinnings of a thriving practice. The successful rainmaker, for example, routinely thanks referral sources for the clients they send. If they fail to send a thank you card or express their gratitude upon receiving a referral, it would bother them the same way that failing to brush their teeth would bother them.

What can you do to become a successful rainmaker? Read More….

Today, I’m going to share something that might surprise you.

If you have dealt with Atticus in the past and have heard us discuss client development, you may have heard us mention something called the Top Twenty list. The Top Twenty list refers to those referral sources that are the most active and send you your highest quality business. This group can be made up of people in your social and family networks, your colleagues, clients, and other professionals. To qualify for the list, they must send you good clients more frequently than the rest of your referral sources.

Many of you already have all of your referral sources listed in your Rolodex, address book or computer database.

Here’s the surprising fact: it’s very easy to create your own Top Twenty list. Read More….

How much time do you spend working on your marketing efforts? Thirty minutes? One hour? Under five minutes?

Many of you have told me that one of your most difficult marketing obstacles is the element of time. Finding the time to make lunch appointments, follow-up with phone calls, or send thank you notes. Much of marketing requires an investment of time on the part of the attorney. Larger firms can rely upon marketing directors to deal with client development, but small firm practitioners have to be more creative.

Here’s a suggestion for small firm practitioners that can cut your time in half: use a Marketing Assistant. This is a person who can devote time each week to your firm’s marketing efforts, including: Read More….